is."

"Is he drinking much?" I asked.

"Well, he isn't on the wagon, I can tell you that," Dad said. "I'm
beginning to think that he isn't really sober till he's half
plastered."

There might be something to that, I thought. There are all kinds of
weird individualities about human metabolism; for all I knew, alcohol
might actually be a food for Bish. Or he might have built up some kind
of immunity, with antibodies that were themselves harmful if he didn't
have alcohol to neutralize them.

The fugitive from what I couldn't bring myself to call justice proved
to know just a little, but not much, more about engines than I did.
That meant that Tom would still have to take Al Devis's place, and I'd
have to take his with the after 50-mm. So the ship went down to almost
sea surface, and Tom and I went to the stern turret.

The gun I was to handle was an old-model Terran Federation Army
infantry-platoon accompanying gun. The mount, however, was
power-driven, like the mount for a 90-mm contragravity tank gun.
Reconciling the firing mechanism of the former with the elevating and
traversing gear of the latter had produced one of the craziest pieces
of machinery that ever gave an ordnance engineer nightmares. It was a
local job, of course. An ordnance engineer in Port Sandor doesn't
really have to be a raving maniac, but it's a help.

Externally, the firing mechanism consisted of a pistol grip and
trigger, which looked all right to me. The sight was a standard
binocular light-gun sight, with a spongeplastic mask to save the
gunner from a pair of black eyes every time he fired it. The elevating
and traversing gear was combined in one lever on a ball-and-socket
joint. You could move the gun diagonally in any direction in one
motion, but you had to push or pull the opposite way. Something would
go plonk when the trigger was pulled on an empty chamber, so I did
some dry practice at the crests of waves.

"Now, mind," Tom was telling me, "this is a lot different from a
pistol."

"So I notice," I replied. I had also noticed that every time I got the
cross hairs on anything and squeezed the trigger, they were on
something else when the trigger went plonk. "All this gun needs is
another lever, to control the motion of the ship."

"Oh, that only makes it more fun," Tom told me.

Then he loaded in a clip of five rounds, big expensive-looking
cartridges a foot long, with bottle-neck cases and pointed shells.

The targets were r