Free The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith Page A

comes back, I want a crack at it!”
    “Have to beat me to the draw, kiddo! You see what used to be my front windows?” She gestured menacingly with a huge handgun. “Wish I’d thought to go for their boiler!” Her voice trailed off as she left, muttering to herself.
    “So do I,” he answered under his breath. “Clarissa, is it all right for him to talk … just take it slowly? Who are you? What’s this all about?”
    I tried to clear my vision. The guy looked enough like me to get drafted in my place. “Win Bear … Lieutenant, Denver—used to be a city, sixty miles south. Only it’s gone! Blown to—” I stopped, breathing heavily against withering pain. “I’m, well, from the past—a time traveler!”
    He frowned perplexedly. Nothing was wrong with my vision. I could make out every hair in his bushy, very familiar eyebrows. “Friend, sixty miles south of here, there’s only Saint Charles Town. Been there, oh, 125 years. Nothing but buffalo before that.”
    That queer cold chill I felt had nothing to do with bullet wounds. “But I was born there. That’s where I Labor in the Vineyards, pushing back—” I started wretching, gasping, and sank back, too exhausted to finish.
    This was it. I’d been booby-trapped, blown up, machine-gunned, and on top of it all, run face-first into a garage door. By some circumstance not bearing close examination, I was alive. But evidently some of my marbles hadn’t made the trip with me. I knew this guy: the other Edward Bear. If this wasn’t the future, where the hell was I?
    Lucy came back, her horse pistol shrunken to snubbie proportions. Clarissa gave her a nod. Before I could protest, she shoved the little gun against my neck—“This oughta do the job!”—and pulled the trigger.
    THURSDAY, JULY 9, 1987
     
    The muzzle was still cool on the side of my neck. I turned. “Lucy, how you’ve changed!” Standing over me was a breathtaking peaches-and-cream blonde, perhaps thirty, hazel eyes—when she smiled, the corners crinkled like she meant it—and an ever so slightly upturned nose. She wore a bright-red coverall with a circled white cross embroidered on the left shoulder.
    The wall seemed one huge window opening into a honey-colored meadow and purple columbines. Maybe a mile away an evergreen forest fronted foothills and the ghostly peaks of the Rockies. The illusion was spoiled by a door through the wall and the railed top of a staircase. Television? A beautiful job. I could almost smell the sage.
    The rest of the room contained the bed I was in, a wall-length bookcase beneath a pair of real windows—sunshine, treetops—and one of the ten most gorgeous women in whatever world this was. I took a deep breath, found the pain completely gone, and tried sitting up.
    “Hold on, Lieutenant! You’re not quite ready for that!” The lady dimpled, pushing me back gently. “How do you feel?”
    “I guess I’ll do, at that. Is this a hospital?”
    “You want to get really sick? A hospital, indeed! I almost believe you are a time traveler as you claimed last night.”
    “What else did I say? Hope I had enough sense to make an improper suggestion or two your way.”
    “You’re a ‘Man from the Past,’ from a city that’s never existed. Otherwise you were quite gentlemanly, all things considered.”
    “Too bad. So this is what the subtitles call ‘The Next Morning.’ And you—”
    “Clarissa Olson, Certified Healer— your Healer, if you want.” Dimples again. “Anything else we’ll decide after you’re up and around.”
    “In that case, I think I’ll go on living for a while. When will I be up and around?”
    “Well, you’re healing pretty slowly. You were gradually dying of malnutrition: deficiencies in the nitrilosides, lecithin, ascorbic acid; a dozen degenerative diseases I’ve only read about. But as that clears up, your wounds will knit faster. Day after tomorrow—at least for a brief walkaround?”
    “Where I come from, bullet holes