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perfectly. Joe
Kivelson or Ramon Llewellyn or whoever was at the controls was doing a
masterly job, but that fell away short of giving me a stable gun platform.
I caught the second target as soon as it bobbed into sight and slammed a shell
at it.
The explosion was half a mile away, but the shell hadn't missed the target by
more than a few yards. Heartened, I fired again, and that shot was simply
dreadful.
"I know what you're doing wrong," Tom said. You're squeezing the trigger."
"Huh?"
I pulled my face out of the sight-mask and looked at him to see if he were
exhibiting any other signs of idiocy. That was like criticizing somebody for
using a fork instead of eating with his fingers.
You're not shooting a pistol," he
continued. "You don't have to hold the gun on the target with the hand you
shoot with.
The mount control, in your other hand, does that. As soon as the cross hairs
touch the target, just grab the trigger as though it was a million sols
getting away from you. Well, sixteen thousand; that's what a monster's worth
now, Murell prices. Jerking won't have the least effect on your hold
whatever."
So that was why I'd had so much trouble making a pistol shot out of Tom, and
why it would take a special act of God to make one out of his father. And that
was why monster-hunters caused so few casualties in barroom shootings around
Port Sandor, outside of bystanders and back-bar mirrors.
I felt like Newton after he'd figured out why the apple bopped him on the
head.
"You mean like this?" I asked innocently, as soon as I had the hairs on the
target again, violating everything I held most sacredly true about shooting.
The shell must have passed within inches of the target; it bobbed over flat
and the weight pulled it up again into the backwave from the shell and it
bobbed like crazy.
"That would have been a dead monster,"
Tom said. "Let's see you do it again."
I didn't; the next shot was terrible.
Overconfidence. I had one more shot, and I
didn't want to use up another clip of the
Javelin's ammo. They cost like crazy, even if they were Army rejects. The sea
current was taking the target farther away every second, but I took my time on
the next one, bringing the horizontal hair level with the bottom of the
inflated target and traversing quickly, grabbing the trigger as soon as the
vertical hair touched it. There was a water-spout, and the target shot
straight up for fifty feet;
the shell must have exploded directly under it. There was a sound of cheering
from the intercom. Tom asked if I wanted to fire another clip. I told him I
thought I had the hang of it now, and screwed a swab onto the ramrod and
opened the breech to clean the gun.
Joe Kivelson grinned at me when I went up to the conning tower.
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"That wasn't bad, Walt," he said. "You never manned a 50-mm before, did you?"
"No, and it's all backward from anything I
ever learned about shooting," I said. "Now, suppose I get a shot at a monster;
where do I
try to hit him?"
"Here, I'll show you." He got a block of
lucite, a foot square on the end by two and a half feet long, out of a closet
under the chart table, in it was a little figure of a Jarvis's sea-monster;
long body tapering to a three-fluked tail, wide horizontal flippers like the
wings of an old pre-contragravity aircraft, and a long neck with a little head
and a wide tusked mouth.
Always get him from in front," he said.
"Aim right here, where his chest makes a kind of V at the base of the neck. A
50-mm will go six or eight feet into him before it explodes, and it'll explode
among his heart and lungs and things. If it goes straight along his body,
it'll open him up and make the cutting-up easier, and it won't spoil much wax.
That's where I always shoot."
"Suppose I get a broadside shot?"
Why, then put your shell right under the flukes at the end of the tail.
That'll turn him and position him for a second shot from in front. But mostly,
you'll get a shot from in front, if the ship's down near the surface.
Monsters will usually try to attack the ship.
They attack anything around their own size that they see," he told me. "But
don't ever make a body shot broadside-to. You'll kill the monster, but you'll
blow about five
thousand sols' worth of wax to Nifflheim doing it."
It had been getting dusky while I had been shooting; it was almost full dark
now, and the Javelin's lights were on. We were making close to Mach 3, headed
east now, and running away from the remaining daylight.
We began running into squalls of rain, and then rain mixed with wet snow. The
underside lights came on, and the lookout below began reporting patches of
sea-spaghetti. Finally, the boat was dropped out and went circling away ahead,
swinging its light back and forth over the water, and radioing back reports.
Spaghetti. Spaghetti with a big school of screwfish working on it.
Funnel-mouths working on the screwfish.
Finally the speaker gave a shrill whistle.
"Monster ho.'" the voice yelled. "About ten points off your port bow. We're
circling over it now."
"Monster ho!" Kivelson yelled into the intercom, in case anybody hadn't heard.
"All hands to killing stations." Then he saw me standing there, wondering what
was going to happen next. "Well, mister, didn't you hear me?" he bellowed.
"Get to your gun!"
Gee! I thought. I'm one of the crew, now.
"Yes sir!" I grabbed the handrail of the ladder and slid down, then raced aft
to the gun turret.
Chapter Nine
MONSTER KILLING
THERE WAS A man in the turret, waiting to help me. He had a clip of five
rounds in the gun, the searchlight on, and the viewscreen tuned to the forward
pickup.
After checking the gun and loading the chamber, I looked in that, and in the
distance, lighted by the boat above and the searchlight of the Javelin, I saw
a long neck with a little head on the end of it weaving about. We were making
straight for it, losing altitude and speed as we went.
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Then the neck dipped under the water and a little later reappeared, coming
straight for the advancing light. The forward gun went off, shaking the ship
with its recoil, and the head ducked under again. There was a spout from the
shell behind it.
I took my eyes from the forward screen and looked out the rear window, ready
to shove my face into the sight-mask. An
instant later, the head and neck reappeared astern of us. I fired, without too
much hope of hitting anything, and then the ship was rising and circling.
As soon as I'd fired, the monster had sounded, headfirst. I fired a second
shot at his tail, in hope of crippling his steering gear, but that was a clean
miss, too, and then the ship was up to about five thousand feet. My helper
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