The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

off at once. Someone crouched there, machine pistols spraying the room with death. Bullets whistled past me, shattering on the concrete wall, metal shards and paint chips raining down. “No! No!” Bealls screamed from the hallway.
    My forty-one roared and bucked, roared again. The machine gunner was blasted out the door, blood streaming in his wake like crepe-paper ribbons, and slammed into the wall behind. His head met the bricks like a ripe melon dropped on a concrete floor. I pocketed the captured automatic, shifted the revolver to my right. Four slugs left. More company through the door, guns blazing—Bealls was still yelling in the background. I fired—saw things shatter, people fall—and ran for the fire exit, plunging into darkness. Bullets buzzed and pinged behind me. I scrambled down a passageway, feeling dizzy, twisted. Instead of stairs, I found blue sky. I was at the bottom of a freshly excavated hole—like a grave.
    Gunfire puffed the earth around me—a stinging slap numbed my right foot. Green grass and sunshine—I was out and running hard. Flopping prone, I leveled my forty-one on the hole in the ground, then remembered with a curse that the gun was empty. I rolled, groping for the automatic, crawling backward as I fumbled—
    The earth rose with a deafening roar, heaved and buckled, ripped me from the ground. I landed hard but never let the Smith & Wesson go.

V: Over the Rainbow
     

    A sophisticated society doesn’t lack customs, it simply has so many they all cancel out. It may be considered a measure of civilization how long a hypothetical “Man from Mars” can wander around without running afoul of the gendarmes or getting burned at the stake for violating some taboo.
    —Admiral R. A. Heinlein
Conquest of the Bering Straits
     

    After what seemed a long, long time, I sat up on the grass, my insides whirling crazily. I was never really unconscious, just preoccupied. Movie and TV people have the wrong idea about being “knocked out.” Most times a heavy blow simply crushes your skull, and you’re dead. I shook my head and was instantly very sorry. Some explosion! The whole building was gone without a trace.
    I was sitting at the foot of a tall hedge. I tried to focus, but it was like driving tenpenny nails into my brain, so I gave up for a while. All around me through the fuzziness, lumpy green entities swayed gently in a warm breeze. Patches of sunlight, painfully bright, illuminated many gaudily colored figures, their mouths dark O s of surprise or curiosity, but they were far too hazy, miles away down a dark tunnel of pain.
    I simply sat, torn and bleeding, on the warm damp ground, surprised as hell at being alive. After a while, habit took over: I emptied the forty-one, found a speed-loader, restocked the revolver, and holstered it. The automatic went back heavy into my coat pocket. It seemed a pretty fair day’s work.
    I levered myself onto my hands and knees and stayed in that position, panting. Then I rose heavily, aching in every tormented muscle. Bolts of lightning stabbed through my eyeballs, each followed by a wave of nausea and the drumming of dull pain. I staggered, tripping once or twice but staying upright. By the time I reached the nearest park bench, passing out was an attractive prospect.
    I risked another peek. Through my personal haze, the scene was tranquil, bearing no relationship to the meat grinder I’d just been through: a broad emerald lawn and a five-foot hedge stretched endlessly in the distance. On the other side, a corrugated metal shack showed robin’s-egg blue. The air was warm, heavy with the scent of dark earth and growing things, dappled with sunshine and shade amid small groves of enormous trees; benches and sidewalks somehow tinted tones of red, orange, or yellow. My own—not concrete as I’d supposed—was a heavy, resilient rubber, pale lemon in color.
    A hundred yards away, a silvery fountain feathered high into the air. A band played lively