Ann shook her head, eyes dark with sorrow. "It's been lousy uptime for a long time. Why do you think we moved our family to Shangri-La Station?" She shivered at some memory she was unwilling to share, then sighed. "Well, you might as well get started. Use lane four, if you don't mind. I'm going to start the class on basic safety before we move to pistol and rifle types. You know where the keys are, right?"
Five sets of jaws dropped-again.
Margo grinned back. "Yep. I even"-she dropped a wicked wink--know where you hide the pole guns and laser-guided dart guns, never mind the really cool stuff. Hey, is that Browning Automatic Rifle working again? I really liked shooting it before it malfunctioned." She considered pride versus humility in front of this bunch of geeks, and decided on humility-hoping it would be a lesson to them. "And I'm still utterly mortified that I, uh, caused it to malfunction last time I used it, then couldn't figure out how to machine a new part. Is it fixed yet? I did send the money to repair it." She batted pretty lashes and sounded wistful as a half-drowned kitten.
Ann just laughed. "Oh, you're impossible as ever, imp Weepy one second, hell-bound-for-leather the next. Go on and get whatever you need and let me get back to paying customers." Her smile took any possible sting out of the words. But she had not answered Margo's question about the B.A.R. Rats!
Before she left, Margo glanced at the rifles and pistols that had been quietly laid out on the benches while they spoke. Uh-oh. Thought so. Smart-but stupid. Typical academicians. You'd think they'd eventually change.
Margo found the keys right off, then unlocked a largish room built inside the range itself. Made entirely of steel four inches thick in every dimension, with a heavy door whose hingepins were on the inside, it contained firearms of literally every time period from their invention in the 1300s onward. Door still open, she half heard Ann say lightly to her new students, "Why did I ... Margo ... keys? Oh, that's only because ... time scout. Still in ... already very good at her job. Her first scouting adventure ... very dangerous... unstable gate. But she got everybody out but one ... malaria."
Margo squirmed--all 'eighty-sixers knew who'd pulled her bacon out of the fire (literally) on that trip; but she was still young and vain enough to wish she could've seen the expressions on those stuffy academic faces as it registered: a woman time scout. She grinned-then suddenly sucked in air as a horrifying thought sent her belly plummeting groundward.
Oh, damn! She figured she had about three months before those five idiots out there blabbed to every uptime newsie in the business that a woman time scout by the name of Margo Smith was working out of TT-86. She'd be swarmed over by reporters, particularly the tabloid kind. And they were nearly impossible to shake off once they got interested in you.
Now she'd never get any studying done. She abruptly understood her grandfather's uncompromising, lifelong hatred of news reporters. Well, Margo, my girl, just make the best of at and maybe you'll build up a reputation big enough to satisfy even your ego.
She grinned at herself, having learned quite a few things about Margo Smith this day she'd never even guessed existed, and plucked a beautiful Winchester Model 73 .44-40 from the rifle rack, automatically checking to be certain it wasn't loaded. She laid it carefully aside, muzzle pointed away from the open door. She found ammo for a Model 76 Centennial in .45-75 Winchester, remembering vaguely that Ann carried a couple of the rifles in stock. She discovered a beauty of a lever-action Winchester Model 76 Centennial-clearly original-which was very similar to the 73, but beefier and in a more powerful caliber. It, too, was safely unloaded. The Centennial was for serious shooting. She'd have to remember to ask Ann to reserve them for the Denver trip.
The size of the 76 caused Margo to remember Koot van Beek's rifle and that great, horrid Cape Buffalo. That was a barely scabbed over memory, too. She hastily snagged the Centennial, along with a modern cleaning kit with brushes for both rifles. Never, ever again would Margo travel down a gate without the right weapons close at hand.
Putting aside the memory, Margo carted all the items to an empty shooting bench on lane four. Ann glanced up and nodded approvingly, her goggles in one hand, her ear muffs slid down around her neck, in "lecture mode."
"Let me know when you're ready to go `hot,' Margo," she called down the line.
Margo nodded and curiously studied the beginning of the lesson as she prepared to practice. It look from here like the paleontologists were giving Ann a very difficult time.
One of them-Margo's electronic earmuffs picked up conversations from an astonishing distance demanded in a voice that would have frozen lava, "We are not renting and wearing this crap! Why would we possibly need eye and hearing protection? This is supposed"-the word dripped venom-"to be a trial run for our field work. We'll have none of this junk downtime! Will we?"
Margo continued shamelessly eavesdropping-how else did one survive in a cruel world, particularly when one was studying to become a real scout whose job was to overhear and remember just such conversations? Ann was clearly working hard not to shout obscenities in Vietnamese and Gaelic at her recalcitrant pupils.
As Margo's first, lamentable lessons had shown, while Ann could instruct willing students to a high degree of skill, she couldn't instill intelligence. Result?
Some customers refused to listen, went downtime improperly armed and/or trained, and usually came back needing a hospital-or staying downtime in a long pine box.
Time Tours, Inc., of course, liked to keep that kind of publicity to a strict minimum, but the company executives-looking for ever more gate profit-did nothing about requiring weapons or self-defense training before allowing a tourist to go downtime. Lessons with the terminal's pro's were strictly on a voluntary basis.
Maybe she ought to suggest required classes to Bull Morgan. She snorted. He'd no doubt tell her it was a tourist's business to get training, not his, and if they were stupid enough to go downtime without it, they deserved whatever they got. Besides, Bull Morgan would never have such a rule, because La-La Land was a place were folks fought, ignored, and thumbed noses at rules, rather than making new ones.
At any rate, it looked like Ann could use some help corralling this bunch of jerks into listening instead of tossing their academic credentials around like spiked morning stars. She sighed and left everything on her chosen bench, muzzles pointed downrange, then plunged in.
"Hi, guys!" Margo called, friendly-like, baiting her hook with a honeyed voice. Margo smiled sweetly, a dire warning to every person who knew her well, Ann actually winced-then she swept off shooting glasses and protective earmuffs and shook out vibrant hair.
"See these?" She held out the earmuffs, determined to give this her best effort. "These are hearing protectors. On a firing range, you wear them. Period. You can lose most of your hearing mighty fast unless you put hearing protection on before somebody starts target practice."
"How would you know?"
One man she couldn't quite see shot the question in her general direction.
She shrugged. "Because I lost part of my hearing in this ear on a deadly little street in Whitechapel one bitter cold morning in 1888."
Silence reigned.
She didn't add that Malcolm had done the shooting. But the hearing loss, slight as it was, was genuine.
She added, "I lost more when an unstable gate opened up and I fell through it right into The Battle of Orleans. Joan of Arc and some really pissed off English knights and archers and some-er French nobles were taking a beating and hating it. Orleans was a really intense battle. Damn near got myself killed-twice-before I was back safe in the station's infirmary.
"Then some more of my hearing went bye-bye in South Africa, running from sixteenth-century Portuguese traders. I got caught in the middle of a firefight. Some friends of mine who'd figured out I was in trouble had come to help and I got caught between them and a whole, unwashed mass of murderous traders who were really riled up. They'd already decided to burn my assistant and me at the stake."