Harry Harrison: Deathworld

“Relax and enjoy your food. Probably be months before you’re able to go outside. If at all.”

Jason felt his jaw hanging and closed it with a snap. “Could you possibly tell me why?”

“Of course. You will have to go through the same training course that our children take. It takes them six years. Of course it’s their first six years of life. So you might think that you, as an adult, could learn faster. Then again they have the advantage of heredity. All I can say is you’ll go outside these sealed buildings when you’re ready.”

Brucco had finished eating while he talked, and sat staring at Jason’s bare arms with growing disgust. “The first thing we want to get you is a gun,” he said. “It gives me a sick feeling to see someone without one.”

Of course Brucco wore his own gun continually, even within the sealed buildings.

“Every gun is fitted to its owner and would be useless on anyone else,” Brucco said. “I’ll show you why.” He led Jason to an armory jammed with deadly weapons. “Put your arm in this while I make the adjustments.”

It was a boxlike machine with a pistol grip on the side. Jason clutched the grip and rested his elbow on a metal loop. Brucco fixed pointers that touched his arm, then copied the results from the meters. Reading the figures from his list he selected various components from bins and quickly assembled a power holster and gun. With the holster strapped to his forearm and the gun in his hand, Jason noticed for the first time they were connected by a flexible cable. The gun fitted his hand perfectly.

“This is the secret of the power holster,” Brucco said, tapping the flexible cable. “It is perfectly loose while you are using the weapon. But when you want it returned to the holster — “ Brucco made an adjustment and the cable became a stiff rod that whipped the gun from Jason’s hand and suspended it in midair.

“Then the return.” The rod-cable whirred and snapped the gun back into the holster. “The drawing action is the opposite of this, of course.”

“A great gadget,” Jason said, “but how do I draw? Do I whistle or something for the gun to pop out?”

“No, it is not sonic control,” Brucco answered with a sober face. “It is much more precise than that. Here, take your left hand and grasp an imaginary gun butt. Tense your trigger finger. Do you notice the pattern of the tendons in the wrist? Sensitive actuators touch the tendons in your right wrist. They ignore all patterns except the one that says hand ready to receive gun . After a time the mechanism becomes completely automatic. When you want the gun — it is in your hand. When you don’t — it is in the holster.”

Jason made grasping motions with his right hand, crooked his index finger. There was a sudden, smashing pain against his hand and a loud roar. The gun was in his hand — half the fingers were numb — and smoke curled up from the barrel.

“Of course there are only blank charges in the gun until you learn control. Guns are always loaded. There is no safety. Notice the lack of a trigger guard. That enables you to bend your trigger finger a slight bit more when drawing so the gun will fire the instant it touches your hand.”

It was without a doubt the most murderous weapon Jason had ever handled, as well as being the hardest to manage. Working against the muscle-burning ache of high gravity, he fought to control the devilish device. It had an infuriating way of vanishing into the holster just as he was about to pull the trigger. Even worse was the tendency to leap out before he was quite ready. The gun went to the position where his hand should be. If the fingers weren’t correctly placed, they were crashed aside. Jason only stopped the practice when his entire hand was one livid bruise.

Complete mastery would come with time, but he could already understand why the Pyrrans never removed their guns. It would be like removing a part of your own body. The movement of gun from holster to hand was too fast for him to detect. It was certainly faster than the neural current that shaped the hand into the gun-holding position. For all apparent purposes it was like having a lightning bolt in your fingertip. Point the finger and blamm , there’s the explosion.

Brucco had left Jason to practice alone. When his aching hand could take no more, he stopped and headed back towards his own quarters. Turning a corner he had a quick glimpse of a familiar figure going away from him.

“Meta! Wait for a second — I want to talk to you.”

She turned impatiently as he shuffled up, going as fast as he could in the doubled gravity. Everything about her seemed different from the girl he had known on the ship. Heavy boots came as high as her knees, her figure was lost in bulky coveralls of some metallic fabric. The trim waist was bulged out by a belt of canisters. Her very expression was coldly distant.

“I’ve missed you,” he said. “I hadn’t realized you were in this building.” He reached for her hand but she moved it out of his reach.

“What is it you want?” she asked.

“What is it I want!” he echoed with barely concealed anger. “This is Jason, remember me? We’re friends. It is allowed for friends to talk without ‘wanting’ anything.”

“What happened on the ship has nothing to do with what happens on Pyrrus.” She started forward impatiently as she talked. “I have finished my reconditioning and must return to work. You’ll be staying here in the sealed buildings so I won’t be seeing you.”

“Why don’t you say ‘with the rest of the children’ — that’s what your tone implies? And don’t try walking out, there are some things we have to settle first — “

Jason made the mistake of putting out his hand to stop her. He didn’t really know what happened next. One instant he was standing — the next he sprawled suddenly on the floor. His shoulder was badly bruised, and Meta had vanished down the corridor.

Limping back to his own room he cursed women in general and Meta in particular. Dropping onto his rock-hard bed he tried to remember the reasons that had brought him here in the first place. And weighed them against the perpetual torture of the gravity, the fear-filled dreams it inspired, the automatic contempt of these people for any outsider. He quickly checked the growing tendency to feel sorry for himself. By Pyrran standards he was soft and helpless. If he wanted them to think any better of him, he would have to change a good deal.

He sank into a fatigue-drugged sleep then, that was broken only by the screaming fear of his dreams.

In the morning Jason awoke with a bad headache and the feeling he had never been to sleep. As he took some of the carefully portioned stimulants that Brucco had given him, he wondered again about the combination of factors that filled his sleep with such horror.

“Eat quickly,” Brucco told him when they met in the dining room. “I can no longer spare you time for individual instruction. You will join the regular classes and take the prescribed courses. Only come to me if there is some special problem that the instructors or trainers can’t handle.”

The classes — as Jason should have expected — were composed of stern-faced little children. With their compact bodies and no-nonsense mannerisms they were recognizably Pyrran. But they were still children enough to consider it very funny to have an adult in their classes. Jammed behind one of the tiny desks, the red-faced Jason did not think it was much of a joke.

All resemblance to a normal school ended with the physical form of the classroom. For one thing, every child — no matter how small — packed a gun. And the courses were all involved with survival. The only possible grade in a curriculum like this was one hundred per cent and students stayed with a lesson until they mastered it perfectly. No courses were offered in the normal scholastic subjects. Presumably these were studied after the child graduated survival school and could face the world alone. Which was a logical and cold-hearted way of looking at things. In fact, logical and cold-hearted could describe any Pyrran activity.