They grinned at one another. Then Margo noticed the paleontologists, who stood listening in silence, several of them round-eyed with shock. Aw, rats. Here I am doing just what I said I wouldn't do.

Ann, perhaps guessing some of what was happening inside her head, just touched the back of Margo's hand with her fingertips, bringing her back to the reality outside Margo's thoughts. Margo blinked. Ann asked gently, "Have you come to brush up with a lesson? If you did, you'll have to wait a while. Or do you just want to brush up with a stack of targets and whatever you care to shoot?"

Margo nodded. "Thought You'd try a Winchester model 73 first. Malcolms taking us to Denver, so I thought I might as well tackle period rifles. I'll try a model 76 Centennial later."

"just those two?"

Margo let go a genuine, healthy laugh. "And who taught me to carry only the right weapon for the job? This is just this morning's practice session. Tomorrow morning I have a date with handguns of every imaginable design and manufacture, just so long as they were invented before 1885; then Sven gets a crack at me before lunch."

Anne's eyes brightened. ,Oooh, can I come watch? I don't have a class scheduled..."

Margo just rolled her eyes. "I can't stop you. Besides, I might need help crawling out of the gym."

Ann laughed heartily. "Okay, imp. It's a deal." Ann's eyes sparkled with anticipation. "You're head's on straight, kid, even if you were stuck in an uptime college for six months. A college I'm certain does not have a shooting range."

"Are you kidding?" It came out sour as early Minnesota apples, still green and hard as walnuts on the tree. "A shooting range? No way real." That new bit of uptime slang hadn't filtered down to La-La Land yet, given the startlement in Ann's eyes.

"They just outlawed metallic emery boards, for God's sake."

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.