Judith Merril - The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7

“I think it’s a gun that can read minds like a gypsy,” I said. Jake still looked bored, so I took the umbrella handle out of the rolltop and waved it at him. He dove off the chair and started rolling for the door.

“You damn fool,” I said, “it won’t go off.” I was reasonably certain it wouldn’t, but I laid it back down by the disk gently anyhow and sat in the chair. I’ve only got the one chair, on the theory that anybody who isn’t bad enough to lie on the table is well enough to stand. Jake edged over and stood like a short-legged bird on a bobwire fence. “It kin whut?” he said.

“It can read minds,” I said. “You were going to bash those bones. The gun knew it and trained square on your head. You remember?”

He remembered. “And those Indians,” I went on. “You remember them? The left side of the head on each of them was blown off.”

I hauled down a roller chart of the human skeleton, first time I’d done that since I don’t know when.

“This up here is the brain,” I said. “We don’t know a hell of a lot about it, but we do know it’s like a whole roomful of telegraphers, sending messages to different parts of the body along the nerves. They’re like the wires. This left hemisphere — right here — sends to the right side of the body. Don’t fret about why, the nerves twist going into the spinal cord.

“Okay. We know, too, that the part of the brain that sends to the arm is right here, in the parietal lobe. Right under the chunk of skull that was shot off on those three Indians.”

“Shaw,” Jake said, perching on the table. The old billy-goat was beginning to get impressed, even if he didn’t have any notion of what I was talking about.

I didn’t have exactly much notion either, but I kept on. “The brain works by a kind of electricity, same kind as in the telegraph batteries at the depot. This gun,” I tapped the umbrella handle and Jake started off again, but caught himself, “has some sort of detector, a galvanic thermometer that senses electrical messages to the nerves.”

From here on in it was pure dark and wild hazard. “Obviously,” I said, “whenever one of those signals goes from this cerebral motor area here in the left hemisphere down to make the weapon hand move, it must be a special signal this gun was built to catch. Just like a lock is made for one particular key.

“And near as I can figure, the gun has to be able to tell when that move coming up is going to be dangerous to the man holding it. Stands to reason if it can tell when a brain’s signaling a hand, it can tell too if that brain is killing-mad. Some people can do that, and most dogs.

“So, if it senses murderous intent and a message to the weapon hand to move, it moves too, and faster.

“It homes on this disk like a magnet right into the hand of the gent that owns it, and aims itself plumb at the place the signal is coming from.” I tapped the chart. “Right here.”

I poked the gunk out of a corncob, packed it and lit up before going on. Jake stared at the umbrella handle like a stuffed owl.

“Now, that fourth skeleton we saw sure as hell isn’t human. He isn’t from anywhere on this green earth, or I miss my guess. Might even have something to do with Crater Lake there, years ago. But we aren’t likely to find out.

“But we do know that he fought three Indians that probably jumped him all at once. And he killed every one of them with this gun before he fell.”

That brought Jake up short.

The Territory is kind of violent generally, and anybody or anything good along that line would be bound to have the sober respect of a ninny like Jake.

I dug up an old glove and used spirit gum to stick in its palm the little disk from the skeleton’s hand. I pulled the glove on my right hand, and stood up with my hand about a foot over the umbrella handle.

“Okay,” I said, “kill me.”

He was so orry-eyed by then he damn near did it just to be obliging. But then the recollection of the night on the mountain, and the three Indians with their heads shot off, sifted through and he shied off. “Hell no,” he hollered, “I seen that thing go before! I ain’t about to get my head blowed to bits!” And he went on.

Well, it took me the best of two hours. I showed him the two studs on the underside that most likely were a safety device. I explained how probably the gun wouldn’t go off unless somebody was holding it with a finger between those studs, which was why it didn’t shoot when it went into the skeleton’s hand that night. I finally got him by telling him if I was right, we’d wire the fourth skeleton together, take it back East and earn a mint of money on the vaudeville stage showing the fastest cadaver in the West.

“Mr. Bones: Faster than Billy the Kid and Twice as Dead,” I said we’d bill it. Jake, he thought that was a lovely idea, and decided to go along.

Fourteen times that eternal jackass raised his right arm at me, while I held my own gloved right hand over the weapon. But he didn’t have any real heart for it, and fourteen times the gun just lay there. Then I got a mite impatient, and kicked him in the kneecap. That fifteenth time he was really trying.

Skinny as he was he’d have driven me clear through the floor, except that umbrella handle jumped into my glove and aimed dead at his forehead, snarling like a cougar. More correctly, the left side of his forehead. If I hadn’t braced my index finger out stiff, that fifteenth time would’ve had him a dead man.

Jake froze like a statue and hung in the air staring at the gun, snarling away in my hand. Finally I pulled the glove off with the gun still stuck to it, and flung it on the desk.

Then Jake gave me the sixteenth, and by the time I got up again he was gone and the gun and glove with him.

Next morning the borax squabble blew up again. What with miners getting stomped I didn’t get to bed for a week, much less have a chance to find out where Jake and that damned weapon had lit out for. By the time I did, it was too late. Jacob Niedelmeier, the ribbon clerk, after seventeen years was on his way to glory as the legendary Dirty Jake.

I got the start of the story from a drifter, name of Hubert Comus. He’d got into kind of a heated discussion in a saloon south a ways that ended with him and this other man going for their hardware. Hubert got his Merwin & Bray.42 out and, being a fool, tried fanning it. Of course it jammed and he laid the heel of his hand open clear to the bone.

‘Twasn’t the hand bothering Hubert though. Like most, the other man missed him clean, but when the barkeep threw them both out Hubert lit sitting on the boardwalk and took a six-inch splinter clear through his corduroys.

While I was working on him he told me about Jake.

A man, it seems, had turned up in a little settlement called Blister, about two days down the line. Nobody noticed him come in, except that he was wearing one glove, a shiny clawhammer coat and Congress gaiters. The general run in the mining camps doesn’t wear Congress gaiters.

He got noticed, though, when he showed up in a barroom wearing a pearl-gray derby with an ostrich plume in the band, and carrying a rolled-up umbrella under his arm. The little devil had stuck the shaft of a regular umbrella in the muzzle of the skeleton’s weapon.

It turned out he’d bought the derby that the storekeeper there had planned to be buried in. Where the ostrich plume came from I never did find out.

“He come right in the swingin’ door an’ stood there,” Hubert said over his shoulder, “lookin’ at the crowd. Purty quick they was all lookin’ right back, I kin tell you. That feather fetched ‘em up sharp. Take it easy back there, will you, Doc? Then Homer Cavanaugh, the one they called Ham Head, he bust out laughing. He laughed so hard he bent over double, and the rest of the boys was just begin-nin’t’ laugh too when the little feller picked up a spitoon and dumped it down Ham Head’s neck.