The Draw

A kid who can think his gun into his hand. That's the whole terrifying premise, and Jerome Bixby pulls it off with the confidence of a writer who knows he's onto something unusual. Set in the raw American West, this story follows Buck Tarrant's transformation from awkward少年to the fastest draw in the territory overnight, thanks to a telekinetic ability that lets him will his pistol into his grip. Joe Doolin watches it happen, and so does the reader: the slow dawning realization that something supernatural has entered a world of physical skill. When Buck sets his sights on Sheriff Ben Randolph, the story becomes a meditation on what courage actually means. Is it speed? Nerve? Or something that can't be gamed, not even with mind over matter? Bixby wrote this at a time when science fiction was still finding its legs, and he had the nerve to graft psionics onto a Western. The result is a short, sharp tale that uses genre-blending to ask an old question in a new way: what are you really made of, when the power is yours for the taking?