“No, let’s go back and expose that fake,” Gus said, staring hard as the chubby magician forced the five of hearts on the young couple.
“Don’t bother,” Shawn said wearily. “These guys are pros. They’re ready for hecklers.”
“He’s not ready for me.”
“Gus, Gus, Gus,” Shawn sighed. “Didn’t you learn anything from War Games?”
“If you mean not to turn complete control of your nuclear arsenal over to computers on the grounds that they’re more logical and less likely to act out of emotion or error, I had already learned that from Colossus: The Forbin Project,” Gus said. “And if it’s that sentient computers find Ally Sheedy irresistible, Short Circuit is much more believable on that score.”
“I mean the lesson that WOPR has for all of us,” Shawn said. “The only winning move is not to play.”
“I don’t want to play. I want to expose that fraud.”
Shawn sighed. “Look, if I wanted to shoot a bear-”
“Why?” Gus interrupted, his eyes laser focused on the fraud crawling around on the ground.
“Why what?”
“Why would you want to shoot a bear? Remember what happened that time you borrowed Eli Messenger’s BB gun and accidentally winged a squirrel? You were a wreck for weeks.”
“First of all,” Shawn said, “I didn’t ‘accidentally wing’ the squirrel. I tracked it to its lair, waited until I could see the whites of its eyes, and then, reenacting the primordial battle of man against beast-”
“You dropped the gun. It went off and hit another squirrel that was watching you from a branch above,” Gus interrupted. “And even though it was just a flesh wound, you climbed up that tree every day for a week to bring your victim a bowl of Screaming Yellow Zonkers. Which even you have to admit was a strange choice, since of all the sweetened popcorn-based snack foods, Zonkers is the only one that doesn’t contain peanuts.”
“It was a young squirrel, and it might have had an allergy,” Shawn said. “Anyway, I wasn’t actually proposing that we go out in the woods and hunt a grizzly. What I was saying was that if I wanted to shoot a bear-” He broke off, making sure that Gus wasn’t going to interrupt again. Assured that he wouldn’t, Shawn continued. “If I wanted to shoot a bear, I wouldn’t do it in a den full of other bears.”