Brave New Worlds

his voice was hushed. "Show us her paper, Bill. "
    Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal-company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd.
    "All right, folks," Mr. Summers said. "Let's finish quickly. "
    Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box. Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. "Come on," she said. "Hurry up. "
    Mrs. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said, gasping for breath, "I can't run at all. You'll have to go ahead and I'll catch up with you. "
    The children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.
    Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. "It isn't fair," she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.
    Old Man Warner was saying, "Come on, come on, everyone. " Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.
    "It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

Red Card
    by S. L. Gilbow

    S. L. Gilbow is a relatively new writer, with five stories published to date, four in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and one in my anthology Federations . Gilbow served twenty-six years in the Air Force, and has been on dozens of deployments, and has flown more than 2000 hours as a B-52 navigator. He currently makes his living by teaching English at a public high school in Norfolk, Virginia.

    Everyone knows that James Bond has a "license to kill." As an international spy, he must sometimes fight for his life. But he's a trained government employee, specially selected for Her Majesty's Service. But could you trust just anyone with a license to kill?
    What about your neighbor?

    Or your boss?

    In fact, what if the government gave everybody one free pass to shoot one person, any person , for whatever reason?
    That's the premise of our next story. S. L. Gilbow says that the idea for "Red Card" actually came from a conversation he had with his daughter, Mandy. "One day after a driver cut me off in heavy traffic, I. . . Turned to my daughter and said, ‘Everyone should be allowed to shoot one person without going to prison. ' My daughter thought for a second then turned to me and said, ‘Dad, if that were true you would have been dead a long time ago. '"

    Mr. Gilbow might have lived to write this story. But in the world he's imagined, not everyone is so lucky.

    L ate one April evening, Linda Jackson pulled a revolver from her purse and shot her husband through a large mustard stain in the center of his T-shirt. The official after incident survey concluded that almost all of Merry Valley approved of the shooting. Sixty-four percent of the townspeople even rated her target selection as "excellent. " A few, however, criticized her, pointing out that shooting your husband is "a little too obvious" and "not very creative. "
    Dick Andrews, who had farmed the fertile soil around Merry Valley for over thirty years, believed that Larry Jackson, more than anyone else in town, needed to be killed. "I never liked him much," he wrote in the additional comments section of the incident survey. "He never seemed to have a good word to say about anybody. "
    "Excellent use of a bullet," scrawled Jimmy Blanchard. Born and raised in Merry Valley, he had known Larry for years and had even graduated from high school with him. "Most overbearing person I've ever met. He deserved what he got. I'm just not sure why it took so long."
    Of course, a few people made waves. Jenny Collins seemed appalled. "I can hardly believe it," she wrote. "We used to be much more discerning about who we killed, and we certainly didn't go around flaunting it the way Linda does. " Jenny was the old-fashioned kind.
    Linda would never have called her actions "flaunting it. " Of course she knew what to do after shooting Larry. She had read The Enforcement Handbook from cover to cover six times, poring over it to see if she had missed anything, scrutinizing every nuance. She