Who Goes There?

I’ve covered David Drake before, with his dinosaur time travel novella “Time Safari,” and while I wasn’t a fan of that story it did succeed in making me curious about Drake’s work. Sadly Drake passed away in the interim, and what struck me about people’s reactions to this was that Drake was a pretty uncontroversial figure despite being a pioneering writer of military SF, never mind a heavy contributor to the Baen stable. He was maybe (I’m not sure, truth be told) on the conservative side, but he wasn’t a raging bigot and he didn’t seem to have crackpot theories about the environment or the government or what have you. Reading his introductions to some of his stories, he seemed to like someone who understood the human cost of war from first-hand experience. He took a break from writing at the start of his career to see action in Vietnam and he was candid about how this experience had given him PTSD and how he’d cope with it for decades. We lost a good man with David Drake, that much is certain.

Of course, Drake didn’t just write military SF—far from it. He at least dabbled in nearly everything, and if anything he seemed to think of himself as a horror writer first and foremost, despite that not being what he’s most known for. “The Automatic Rifleman” is a creepy yarn, although less haunted-house horror and more a look into man’s capacity for evil. Because it’s never been anthologized I had basically no clue what it even was going in, but in hindsight I should’ve taken the title (it’s a reference) as a clue. It’s also SF, although how it’s SF is not revealed to us until the very end. I won’t bury the lead here, so I’ll say now I liked this one quite a bit more than “Time Safari,” although as we’ll see, and as Drake will admit freely, he did take some notes from one of the masters of the field.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the Fall 1980 issue of Destinies, which is on the Archive. It’s never been anthologized, but has been reprinted in a few Drake collections, incidentally all being his horror-themed collections. There’s From the Heart of Darkness, Balefires, and then Night & Demons, which from what I can tell is just Balefires but bigger. The latter two (not sure about the first) come with lengthy introductions by Drake for each story. A few stories from these collections are available to read on Baen’s site free of charge, although “The Automatic Rifleman” is not one of them.

Enhancing Image

A trio, Kerr, Davidson, and Penske, arrive at a secluded apartment for a certain man they’re supposed to need for a certain job. Kerr is an idealist, Davidson is a bitch, and Penske is a pessimist. The other party, Coster, is a strange man with an even stranger-looking rifle that’s supposed to be his weapon of choice; their mutual contact didn’t say much about him, but he’s apparently a gifted marksman. The job is simple: assassination. The target is the prime minister of Japan, who is touring the US for the sake of business. (Incidentally this story anticipates the racist tendency in some ’80s SF to depict Japan as a threat to American economic and technological supremacy.) Kerr, the brains behind the operation, has rather vague politics but seems to fall somewhere on the left; certainly his disdain for environmental destriction in the name of business has an anti-capitalist bent. (I think Drake makes a bit too much of a point that Kerr is an “affluent” black American, with a suit and everything.) Whether or not Coster agrees with Kerr’s views doesn’t matter: he’s getting paid to do a job.

On November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald took position in the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, as John F. Kennedy was passing through as part of a motorcade. Oswald fired three shots with a bolt-action rifle, wounding the governor of Texas and killing Kennedy, scoring a shot through the throat plus a headshot. He was a former Marine.

Something sneaky “The Automatic Rifleman” does is that it makes you unsure if anything even fantastical is gonna happen, because for a long while it holds its cards close to its chest and plays out like a realistic crime thriller. There is, however, a creeping sense that something beyond normal human experience might be at work. Penske is the weapons expert of the trio, set to be the second gunman in the assassination in case Coster fumbles, and he can’t figure out what kind of gun Coster’s is supposed to be; it looks like a modified M14 carbine but Penske can’t be sure and Coster’s not telling. At one point he asks Coster how he got the rifle and Coster replies with, “You’d better hope you never learn.” We never do learn exactly how Coster got his rifle, but we can infer he didn’t buy it at a gun store. Certainly Coster doesn’t treat his rifle like how a normal person (with training) would handle a firearm; he basically always has it with him, even when he goes to bed. It could just be that Coster has a screw loose: he does, after all, claim to have killed both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, with this rifle, and he’s implied to be some kind of racist. He makes the trio uneasy, but he’s also an unnaturally good sharpshooter.

On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman killed his wife and mother before taking a sniper rifer to the clock tower of the University of Texas at Austin, killing three people in the campus’s main building before killing another eleven from the clock tower. He kept shooting for an hour and a half before authorities killed him. He was a former Marine.

Penske is the one in the trio who doubts Coster’s skills, so they travel to a farm owned by a contact of theirs that would serve as a firing range. Coster proves to be as good a shot as he claims to be, but he also acts rather strangely around firearms—like he’s not used to being around them, despite never being without his rifle. Afterwards Penske even claims he saw Coster close his eyes shut while firing his rifle, as if jarred by the very use of his weapon. He can’t put his finger on how this is possible, but Penske supposes Coster is not a veteran, or has military training at all, yet is able to hit bottles with pin-point accuracy, even with his eyes closed. It’s like handling the rifle gives him the ability to shoot like a pro, like how the whimpiest person on the planet can be made threatening with a good guard dog. “Or a witch cat,” Penske says rather pointedly. He’s scarily close to being right. Coster is sort of like a foil to Penske, in that they’re both pessimists who think themselves good at what they do, namely killing; yet while Penske is an imperfect but skilled shooter, there is something seriously wrong with Coster. He has a strange philosophy about the nature of man, that man of some kind of werebeast, “part flesh, part metal,” conjoined with his technology.

On April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King in the face with a hunting rifle while the latter stood on the balcony of his motel room. King died about an hour later. Ray was a convicted criminal and was already on the run from authorities when he crossed paths with King in Memphis. He had military training but was apparently a poor soldier, and several sources, including King’s family, doubt he was the shooter.

Have I mentioned this story is dark? Its eeriness has only increased with time, which is partly why I think it’s due to be included in some themed anthology in the future. It’s a story whose potency only heightens as American life becomes more submerged in everyday violence. Assassinations, lynchings, police brutality, white supremacists ramming their cars into crowds of protesters, people bringing guns into schools. We know that, regardless of individual or systemic problems, these are the result of human malice, and Drake knows this too. In his introduction he says “The Automatic Rifleman” is horror, but also escapist, because it posits that man’s evils are not the result of man’s own doing. “The story posits the notion that things are in their present state because some external force is working to make them bad; in other words, the world’s problems are not the result of mankind’s own actions.” It actually reminds me of the movie Sorcerer, and how director William Friedkin said he picked that title because he wanted to evoke the sense that the horrors of human existence are the machinations of some unseen force. The sorcerer is purely metaphorical, and in the case of Friedkin’s movie the sorcerer is capitalism; but the external evil lurking in Drake’s story turns out to be a lot more tangible.

There Be Spoilers Here

It’s the day of the assassination, and Penske and Coster have set up camp while the prime minister is making his way through a parade. The “good” news is Coster’s aim is true, and within seconds the prime minister lies dead or dying, “his spine shattered by two bullets,” while security people surround him in vain. (Reminder that this was published about six months before the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.) The bad news, for our Anti-Heroess™ at least, is that in trying to escape the scene (they were on a high-level floor), Coster takes a serious fall and is unable to get up; and Penske knows carrying Coster would likely result in both of them getting caught. Coster, in self-defence, takes aim at Penske when it becomes clear what’s about to be done, but his rifle refuses to fire—the safety refuses to turn off. We don’t see it, but it’s implied Penske knifes Coster to death, and we can infer this because afterwards he now has the rifle. Have I mentioned this story takes a bleak view of humanity? I hope you didn’t go into this expecting to sympathize with any of the characters. I know Drake said it’s meant to be escapist, but I keep thinking of real-world horrors while reading it. Can’t tell if this counts as good or bad writing.

On July 8, 2022, Tetsuya Yamagami shot former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the chest with a double-barreled shotgun the former had constructed in the comfort of his own home. Abe died five hours later. Yamagami had military training, and a series of family tragedies plus Abe’s cult connections drove him to plot Abe’s murder.

You may be wondering just what is SFnal about this story, and if you’ve been paying attention you probably guessed: the rifle is alive. Specifically the rifle is an alien, descended from “metal creatures who glittered and shifted their forms and raised triumphant cities to the skies.” The rifle is basically a parasite that communicates telepathically with its host, like Sauron’s ring, and Penske has taken Coster’s place as the new Gollum. We learn all this in the last few paragraphs of the story, and for my money I think Drake could’ve done a slightly more convincing job had he opted for fantasy and made the rifle a supernatural thing; but then there weren’t many outlets for short fantasy in 1980. Science fiction it is, then! Drake freely admits to have taken inspiration from Fritz Leiber’s “The Automatic Pistol,” which honestly is a connection I should’ve made from the start given I had read that story. I think I prefer Drake’s rendition, granted that “The Automatic Pistol” was a very early Leiber story and that later Leiber would write more gracefully than Drake. You could call it a sort of remake, but I like to think of it more as a variation on a theme. Leiber wrote his story seemingly in reaction to Chicago gang violence in the ’20s and ’30s while Drake was reacting to shootings and assassinations in the ’60s.

A Step Farther Out

A good story can be similar to an older story, by design, and get away with it if it adds something new to the equation, which I think this does. There’s the Leiber influence, with perhaps some Sturgeon (specifically “Killdozer!”) in there as well, but it’s still very much David Drake’s story. The SFnal element is a little arbitrary, in that it could have just easily been explained in supernatural terms, but as a machine fable in the mode of Kipling it’s still effective. This all raises a question, though: If “The Automatic Rifleman” was a then-modernized riff on “The Automatic Pistol,” then what story would take the same basic premise and apply it to the current era? And has such a story already been written?

See you next time.