Free The Outpost by Mike Resnick

shoulder. “You pick my last card, my dear.”
    “But I don’t know the rules of the game,” she protested.
    “It doesn’t matter,” O’Grady assured her. “Just reach out and pick one.”
    She shrugged, ran her hand over the cards, and finally picked a deuce of clubs.
    “Thank you, my dear,” said O’Grady. He looked across the table at Max. “Your turn.”
    Max reached out and promptly picked up all four aces and a king.
    “Very impressive,” said O’Grady. “Four bullets.”
    “Let’s see you beat that ,” said Max cockily.
    “I shall endeavor to,” promised O’Grady. “Time to discard and draw now, right?”
    “Go ahead.”
    O’Grady dumped three tens and the deuce, then pulled four cards and built himself a straight flush to the ten.
    “Your turn again, Max,” he said.
    Max stared at his hand, and then at O’Grady’s, and then at his again.
    “ Shit! ” he bellowed.
    “You see?” said O’Grady. “My straight flush beats your four aces, and since all the tens are gone, not only can’t you create a royal flush, but the highest straight flush you can build will be nine-high.”
    “What if I’d started with a straight flush instead of four aces?” asked Max.
    “Same result. You can’t create one that goes any higher than the nine.”
    “Just a minute,” said Hellfire Van Winkle. “Suppose he’d picked four nines. You can’t stand pat, because he can draw four aces or a straight flush to beat your four tens. What do you do then?”
    “Discard three tens and the deuce and build a royal flush,” answered O’Grady. “He can’t match it, because all the tens are gone.” He reached out, picked up the hundred-credit note, folded it in half, and slipped it into a pocket. “An inexpensive lesson, especially considering how often I’m sure each of you is going to use it once you leave the Outpost.” Suddenly he smiled. “Just don’t ever try it in the vicinity of Monte Carlo IV … they don’t have much of a sense of humor about it out that way.”
    “You got any other scams you want to tell us about?” asked Max.
    “Not for a lousy hundred credits,” said O’Grady. He looked over and saw Willie the Bard scribbling away. “Hey, you’d better not be writing all this down!”
    “That’s the Bard,” I said. “He writes everything down.”
    “He writes everything ?” repeated Catastrophe Baker.
    “Yeah,” I said. “He’s our historian. Someday he’ll make you famous.”
    “I already got a little more fame than I can handle,” protested Baker.
    “And I don’t want millions of people reading about what I did on Monte Carlo,” chimed in O’Grady. “I don’t mind telling a handful of people out here at the edge of nowhere, but I don’t want it written up in a book. I might want to use it again sometime.”
    “Not to worry,” said the Bard. “It’ll be twenty, maybe thirty years before I’m ready to publish.”
    “How long have you been working on this masterpiece?” asked Baker.
    “Since Tomahawk opened for business.”
    “And how many pages have you written?”
    “I lost count years ago. But after pruning it down, I’ve kept about four thousand.”
    “You halfway done yet?”
    “Probably not.”
    Baker smiled. “Who’s gonna publish this thing?”
    “That’s not my problem,” answered the Bard with an unconcerned shrug. “My job is to write it.”
    “I never did understand artists.”
    “Hey, we make as much sense as anyone,” put in Little Mike Picasso. “And maybe a little more than most.”
    “Hell, maybe you do,” admitted Baker. “Truth to tell, I’ve only known one real artist.”
    “A painter?” asked Little Mike.
    Baker shook his head. “An opera singer. Ever hear of Melody Duva?”
    “Can’t say that I have.”
    “The Diva Duva,” said Nicodemus Mayflower admiringly. “I’ve seen a couple of her holos. She had a gorgeous voice. Whatever happened to her?”
    “She was the victim of an unhappy collision of art and