“No, you'll see the earth turning.” Liz wasn't about to quit.
“You sound like my teacher.” Dan laughed. “She taught what was in the book, but who says the book was right? Maybe it was one of those waddayacallits-fiction books, that's what I want to say. I mean, it just stands to reason. You can see how little the sun is. and how big the earth is. How could we go around that and not the other way around?”
Instead of walking over to a column and banging her head on it, Liz said, “A mountain looks little cause it’s a long ways off. The sun's a lot farther away than any mountain. Of course it looks small.”
“Ninety-three million miles,” Dan said. “That's what the book said in school, anyhow. But how could there be that many miles? And even if there were, how would anybody know how many there were? You couldn't go all that way yourself. You'd be traveling forever.” And you would run out of air. And you would roast as you got closer to the sun. And a lot of other things. Liz didn't mention any of them. She didn't remember how you went about learning how far it was from the earth to the sun. Since she didn't, she couldn't very well explain it to Dan.
What she did say was, “Well, if they knew that stuff back in the Old Time, chances are they were right about it.”
Dan grunted. “Yeah, I guess that's true,” he said.
Liz had won the argument. Then she wondered if she'd cheated. He was trying to be logical about things, to argue from what he could see. She'd hit him over the head with authority. Wasn't that like the Church coming down on Galileo because he said the earth moved?
The difference, she told herself, was that the Church was wrong and she was right. But the churchmen had thought they were right. And they'd had authority on their side, too.
So she felt pretty rotten when Dan left. But he didn't give her any more trouble about Russians, anyhow. Whether the sun went around the earth or vice versa wouldn't get him so excited.
She hoped.
After practicing like a maniac, Dan could load his matchlock almost fast enough to keep Sergeant Chuck happy. He was no slower than the rest of the new musketeers. Chuck screamed at all of them impartially.
“You have to keep up with the men who've been doing this for years!” the sergeant shouted. “A volley's not a volley if everybody doesn't shoot together. So move, you stupid, clumsy lugs! Move!”
Dan rammed his bullet home and brought the musket up to his shoulder. So did the rest of the new men, all at about the same time-except for one luckless fellow who dropped his ramrod. What Chuck called him would have curdled milk.
'Tm sorry. Sergeant,” the soldier said miserably.
“You do that in the middle of a real battle and you'll be sorry you're dead, you-” Chuck found a few more compliments to pay the luckless musketeer. Then he growled, “Are we ready at last? We'd better be, don't you think? Let's find out. Ready… Aim… Fire!”
Dan pulled the trigger. The match came down on the priming powder in and around the touch-hole. Hiss-Boom!- Kick. He coughed as the smoke went up his nose.
The musketeer just to his left puffed on a cigar. A lot of the men who carried matchlocks smoked either cigars or a pipe. That meant you usually had a hot coal handy if you needed to get your match going again. Dan didn't usually smoke all that often, but he knew a good idea when he saw one.
Chuck walked out to the target and brought it back. He showed the soldiers the punctures their musket halls had made. “Well, you're starting to scare the enemy, even if you don't always hit him.” But he wasn't about to let them think that was good enough. He went out to the far end of the range and set up a new target. “Now let's see how last you can give me another volley. I want everybody ready when I give the command. Go!”
It would have been easier if Chuck hadn't gone on yelling at them while they reloaded. Dan wanted to hate him for that, but found he couldn't. He'd been in battle by now. He knew how much noise and chaos there was. You had to block it all out if you were going to do your job. If you let it rattle you, you endangered yourself and your buddies.
Nobody dropped his ramrod this time. If anyone had, Chuck would have eaten him raw-probably without salt. And the volley went off in a close-packed set of thunderclaps that left Dan 's ears ringing. People who'd used guns a lot also tended to use hearing trumpets. But what could you do?
“Well, you weren't too slow.” Sergeant Chuck said. That was about as much praise as the underofficer ever doled out. He retrieved the target. When he came back, he looked like somebody trying hard not to smile. “Seems like some of those… people would have stopped lead, that's for sure. Now let's see you do it again, so I know it's no fluke.“
Some of the musketeers groaned-but none of the men at whom Chuck was looking directly. He would have blistered them if they'd tried getting away with that. Dan didn't want to fire another volley, either. But he wanted to do the shooting and not get shot if he had to fight some more, so he kept practicing without making any noise.
Several volleys later, the smoke was making tears run down his face from eyes that felt as if they had ground glass in them. “Well, that'll probably do for today,” the underofficer said. He grinned a crooked grin. “If I told you to load for another one, chances are you'd aim it at me. And you might even hit what you were aiming at. I don't think it’s real likely, but I don't want to take the chance, either. So we'll knock off for the day.”
He stood only a few feet from his weary students, not a hundred yards down the range. If they turned their matchlocks on him, he would have more holes than a colander, and he had to know it. But he didn't want to admit, to himself or to the musketeers, that they were getting the hang of it.
They were plenty glad to knock off for the day. The sun was sliding down the western sky toward the nuclear glass and rubble of Santa Monica and toward the Pacific beyond it. Supper soon, and then sleep, except for the ones unlucky enough to draw evening sentry duty.
Dan always looked forward to sleep. He did enough on any day of soldiering to leave him tired. Garrisoning Westwood wasn't so bad as the strike through the Sepulveda Pass, though. Then he'd always wanted to curl up and grab what rest he could. He'd always wanted to, and never been able to. He didn't know how much sleep he'd got in that mad dash south. He did know it wasn't enough.
Fowls were roasting on spits above cookfires. Cooks basted them with chilies and cilantro and other spices in olive oil. The delicious smell made Dan 's stomach growl. He could hardly wait till the savory birds got done.
Sergeant Chuck reacted differently. Pointing to the birds, he said. “I wonder whose goose they're cooking.”
“Oh, wow!” Dan groaned. “After a joke like that, Sergeant, it ought to be yours.” You could be rude to a superior as long as you used proper military courtesy when you did it… and as long as you picked your spot with care.
Chuck grinned at Dan. “I've got no shame. How's your girl, and what's she really pulling out of the UCLA library?”
“She's not my girl,” Dan said regretfully. Liz was polite, but he could tell she liked him less than he liked her. He didn't know what he could do about that. So far, he hadn't been able to do anything. Sighing, he went on, “you know what we talked about the last time I was over there?”
“Tell me,” Chuck said.
“You're gonna laugh,” Dan said. The sergeant shook his head and held up his right hand, as if to swear he wouldn't. Thus encouraged, Dan went on, “'Whether the earth really does go around the sun like you learn in school.”
Chuck stared at him, then threw back his head and let loose. He didn't just laugh-he howled. “I'm sorry,” he said at last, not sounding sorry at all. “You go visit a pretty girl, and you talk about that? The moon and the stars and how pretty they are, sure. But the sun and the earth? C'mon, man! You can do better than that.”
“See? I told you you would.” Dull embarrassment made Dan 's ears burn. It also heated his defiance. “And you know what else? It was interesting, too.” So there, he thought.
“Okay, okay. Don't get all uptight about it. I said I was sorry,” Chuck replied. Dan realized you didn't get an apology out of a sergeant every day, not if you were a common soldier. “So what does she think about that? Me, I don't know if the teachers are as smart as they think they are.”
“I'm with you,” Dan said. “If the people in the Old Time were all that smart, would they have let the Fire fall? So they didn't know everything there was to know-you can bet your sweet hippy on that.”
“There you go,” Chuck said. “That sure makes sense to me. How'd Liz like it?”
“Not even a little bit,” Dan answered. “You hear her talk, the earth spins around to make days, and it goes around the sun to make years.”
“You know what?” Sergeant Chuck said as they lined up to get their pieces of chicken or duck or whatever the cook dished out. “The real deal is, so what? I mean, who cares? It doesn't make a penny's worth of difference in your life or mine. It wouldn't matter if the earth was shaped like a.50-caliber bullet. We're just going to see this little bil of it, and that's all.”
“Yeah,” Dan said. Back in the Old Time, you could fly all over the world. Those people might not have been all that smart-must have been human, in other words-but they knew more than their modern descendants. That seemed unfair to Dan. He wondered what Liz thought about it. She knew a lot. Did she miss not knowing even more?
Seven
Luke was a ginger-bearded trader up from Speedro. Liz didn't know whether the Valley soldiers knew he'd come up to deal with her folks. She would have bet against it. Luke had the air of a man who dodged authority whenever he could. And Speedro and the Valley weren't the best of friends anyhow.
“Got me some of the things you said you were looking for,” he said now, puffing on a nasty pipe and sipping from a glass of raw corn whiskey Dad had given him.
Dad had a drink of his own, though he didn't smoke. There was such a thing as taking authenticity too far. Wrecking your lungs crossed the line. “Well, let's have a look,”' he said.
“Sure enough.” Luke had a knapsack on his back and two stout flintlock pistols and a Bowie knife on his belt. Ignoring the guns, he slid off the knapsack. “Don't quite know why you want these, but I found 'em.”
“Oh, come on,” Liz 's father said. “You never ask that question. Maybe I'll make a profit selling them to somebody with more money than sense. Maybe I want 'em for myself, just because of how' far out they are. Long as you make money selling them to me, what's your worry?”
The other trader gave him a crooked grin. “Well, I know how that works, all right. One fellow's trash is another guy's treasure.' The grin grew more crooked yet. “And we're all living in the middle of the trash from the Old Time, and I expect we will be from now till doomsday, or maybe twenty minutes longer.”
“Wouldn't be surprised,” Dad said, and then, “Well, well. How about that?”'