“‘Course, of course, we have a range in back. Let me get my assistant.” He rang a bell and a boy caine out to watch the store while we went in back. He picked up a red-and-green box of shotgun shells on the way.
The range was in two sections, a little anteroom with a plastic transparent door and a long corridor on the other side of the door with a table at one end and targets at the other. Behind the targets was a sheet of metal that evidently deflected the bullets down into a pool of water.
He loaded the pistol and set it on the table. “Please don’t pick it up until the door’s closed.” He went into the anteroom, closed the door, and picked up a microphone. “Okay. First time, you better hold on to it with both hands.” I did so, raising it up in line with the center target, a square of paper looking about the size of your thumbnail at arm’s length. Doubted I’d even come near it. I pulled the trigger and it went back easily enough, but nothing happened.
“No, no,” he said over the microphone with a tinny giggle. “Authentic Old West styling. You’ve got to pull the hammer back.”
Sure, just like in the flicks. I hauled the hammer back, lined it up again, and squeezed the trigger.
The noise was so loud it made my face sting. The gun bucked up and almost hit me on the forehead. But the three center targets were gone: just tiny tatters of paper drifting in the air.
“I’ll take it.”
He sold me a hip holster, twenty shells, a chest-and-back shield, and a dagger in a boot sheath. I felt more heavily armed than I had in a fighting suit. But no waldos to help me cart it around.
The monorail had two guards for each car. I was beginning to feel that all my heavy artillery was superfluous, until I got off at the Hyattsville station.
Everyone who got off at Hyattsville was either heavily armed or had a bodyguard. The people loitering around the station were all armed. The police carried lasers.
I pushed a “cab call” button, and the readout told me mine would be No. 3856. I asked a policeman and he told me to wait for it down on the street; it would cruise around the block twice.
During the five minutes I waited, I twice heard staccato arguments of gunfire, both of them rather far away. I was glad I’d bought the shield.
Eventually the cab came. It swerved to the curb when I waved at it, the door sliding open as it stopped. Looked as if it worked the same way as the autocabs I remembered. The door stayed open while it checked the thumbprint to verify that I was the one who had called, then slammed shut. It was thick steel. The view through the windows was dim and distorted; probably thick bulletproof plastic. Not quite the same as I remembered.
I had to leaf through a grimy book to find the code for the address of the bar in Hyattsville where I was supposed to meet the dealer. I punched it out and sat back to watch the city go by.
This part of town was mostly residential: grayed-brick warrens built around the middle of the last century competing for space with more modern modular setups and, occasionally, individual houses behind tall brick or concrete walls with jagged broken glass and barbed wire at the top. A few people seemed to be going somewhere, walking very quickly down the sidewalks, hands on weapons. Most of the people I saw were either sitting in doorways, smoking, or loitering around shopfronts in groups of no fewer than six. Everything was dirty and cluttered. The gutters were clotted with garbage, and shoals of waste paper drifted with the wind of the light traffic.
It was understandable, though; street-sweeping was probably a very high-risk profession.
The cab pulled up in front of Tom & Jerry’s Bar and Grill and let me out after I paid 430K. I stepped to the sidewalk with my hand on the shotgun-pistol, but there was nobody around. I hustled into the bar.