"Frost and Thunder" by Randall Garrett

LawDog pontificates about his favourite short story

We came to the United States at the beginning of the 1980s, and I’m here to tell you — the short stories that came out around the time we showed up seemed designed to convince people not to read.

In High School, the English class textbook was a collection of — IIRC — “award-winning short stories” that were so award-winning that they had to be inflicted upon trapped high-school students.

As I remember, the over-arching theme of that textbook was how bad losing access to abortion was, with a sub-theme of Teh Eebbills of Christianity.

One of the better-written stories involved was about an ambulance driver, only since the Christo-fascists had taken over, his job was to drive around to dead people and revive them — because everyone had to be alive for The Rapture, over-crowding be damned. At the end, his partner commits suicide by locking himself in a sub-zero trunk — death by cell rupture being one of the only deaths that they couldn’t revive.

There was one about a family going to the fair, but since nobody could get an abortion the over-population meant that everything was paid for by putting your thumb on a needle pad. Most of the time nothing happened, but randomly it would deliver a lethal injection. At the end the father is talking to a neighbor who was gobsmacked that the father was paying for everything, instead of letting his children take their fair chance; and the mother — having taken the children to get ice-cream — runs up holding the three red balloons that the father had just won for the children, but no sproglings.

This was an entire thick school textbook of …

… crap. Not the sort of thing to tempt young minds into reading, that was for sure.

Anyhoo, in the midst of this bushwa, I had wandered into a bookstore and picked up one of the “Asimov’s SF Adventure” series — honestly, at that time even that wasn’t a guarantee of having a story that would appeal to teenage LawDog — and when I opened it at random, I found “Frost and Thunder” by Randall Garrett.

Oh. My. God.

It opened with Taylor — the protagonist — packing his custom 1911 pistol for an International Practical Shooting Confederation tournament in Sweden. I knew the name of the gunmaker who customised the pistol … and I was hooked.

Taylor lands in Sweden, meets friends, and sometime during the night is swept back in time to a Sweden of the pre-Viking Age. He meets up with a tribe who were noted for the small hammers they kept to break open nuts, and he uses his 1911 for this task, noting the name of another pistol-smith I knew who made magazines without a base-pad, which would have made cracking the nuts a lot more difficult.

That night the tribe is attacked by non-hammer-carrying monsters — described in a way that suggests they are Neandertals — and a young lass is captured.

Taylor then goes with the tribe, and starts shooting cavemen in the face. At the end of the fight, our red-haired Taylor is hearing tribesmen describing him in the fight, just as he is swept back to his time.

It. Was. GLORIOUS.

Was there pearl-clutching? Nope. Good guys, doing the needful to bad guys.

Was there moral uncertainty? Nope. Those are bad guys. Period.

The only feeling in the entire story was the rage when Taylor found out what happened to the girl.

THIS was the kind of story Young LawDog needed to read. Not thinly-veiled message fiction. Not allegorical fee-fee searching. Good Guys here. Bad Guys there. Good Guys vigorously put the boot to Bad Guys. Bad Guys meet messy end.

And that, dear readers, is why “Frost and Thunder” by Randall Garrett is, and will always be, my favourite short story.

LawDog