Without waiting for a reply, Dewhurst stepped forward. The “door” quivered about him. It was a hologram rather than a physical panel.
“You know,” Wade said with a puzzled expression as he followed, “I don’t recall mentioning that to you fellows. The lizard hunting, I mean.”
“Don’t believe you did, old man,” said Belgeddes. “That was just before the Long Troubles broke out, when the Prophet’s boys were trying to get you to run guns for them, wasn’t it?”
“That was it, all right,” Wade murmured from the other side of the shimmering curtain. “Not the sort of business a chap wants to dwell on.”
Reed looked at Da Silva. They stepped through, into the gallery, themselves.
A party of K’Chitkans had taken the gallery ahead of Reed’s party. They were still excited, bobbing their heads and chirping to one another in simultaneous cacophony as they waved their down-covered arms. When the humans appeared, the bird-folk bowed formally and exited through the hologram, still gabbling.
“Wouldn’t think they could handle guns meant for men with those short arms,” Da Silva said.
“Needs must when the Devil drives, friend,” Wade said. “I recall firing a Zweilart cavalryman’s gun once, with a curled stock and a bore I could stick my arm down. I was so keyed up under the circumstances that I didn’t feel the recoil, even though it knocked me flat on my fundament I jumped right up and let go with the other barrel.”
“There’s a story there, I shouldn’t wonder,” Reed said, glancing at the ceiling.
The interior of the shooting gallery was almost entirely a holographic construct. An autoserver by the door held a selection of rifles, shotguns, and energy weapons which it provided when a passenger presented his ticket for identification. The “weapons” weren’t real, but they were full weight and the shooter could set them for any desired level of flash, bang and recoil.
“What’s your choice, Wade?” Dewhurst said gleefully. “Don’t believe they’ve got Zweilart hand-cannons here, but a black powder 8-bore ought to be pretty similar, don’t you think?”
The gallery had scores of possible backgrounds. The scenery which the K’Chitkans had chosen was modeled on the veldt of southern Africa with a profusion of life unseen since the 19th-century. Elephants, zebras, and antelope of many varieties paced back and forth in the middle distance, but the score displayed in letters of light above the counter was entirely of lions: 117 of them.
Dewhurst handed the immense double rifle to Wade. “No, no—”Wade said with a gentle smile. A black-maned lion leaped from behind the thornbush an apparent hundred meters away and began bounding toward the men.
“I’m truly sorry,” Wade said, his back to the target, “but I absolutely can’t shoot under these—”
The holographic lion made a final spring and vanished in the air.
“—conditions.”
“Jungle?” Reed offered. He touched the control panel on the counter. Lush foliage of green light replaced the holographic bush. A snake thirty meters long slithered through the air, gliding around treetrunks on its flattened ribcage.
“Or ice cap?” Jungle flashed into a wasteland in which snow-covered blocks alternated with wedges of blue ice, shattered and overturned as the glacier that spawned it broke up in a bay just deep enough not to freeze to the sea floor. A creature humped toward the viewers across the irregular surface. Occasionally it bared yellow tusks.
“‘No’ generally means ‘no’ when Dickie uses the word, fellows,” Belgeddes said. There was enough of an edge in his voice that Reed cleared the display, leaving only a large, circular room with gray walls.
“That wasn’t Earth, was it?” Dewhurst said, blinking toward where the last creature had been before the projectors shut off.
“Bifrost,” Wade said. “A sea devil, though the real ones are usually shot from the air.”
Belgeddes clucked his tongue against his palate. “You got yours on foot, Dickie,” he said.
“I suppose this just isn’t real enough for you, is that it, Wade?” said Da Silva.
“Oh, not that, friend,” the tall old man protested. “Quite the contrary, in fact. It’s far too real. A setting like this and a gun in my hands, well—too many memories, you see. I don’t want to live them again.”