“Please, my good man, not at luncheon! We shall, with certain self-explicable trepidations, accept your culinary recommendation. Now leave us, if you please.” He eyed the food before us with suspicion, then looked up at me with very much the same expression on his face. “Corporal, I would be interested in hearing your impressions thus far.”
“Um, well, I cannot tell whether these little things on the bread are insects or seeds of some kind. I do not think I am going to eat them.”
Outside, an enormous dark chimpanzee-like animal knuckled past our cafe, gliding on tiny wheels that were somehow attached to its huge feet. One of its massive arms was in a silvery rubber sling. Abruptly, a bright pink balloon blossomed from its mouth, swelled nearly to the diameter of the creature’s head, then collapsed, leaving sticky pink remains across its leathery muzzle. The monster blinked, cleared its eyes, its nostrils, looked around to see whether anyone had witnessed the accident. Then it stuffed the peculiar substance back into its jaws, hitched up its heavy pistol belt, rolled onward on its little wheels.
“No, you dimwit! I refer to our situation—to our experiences—to our putative hosts, their society, their technology. I realize that you are scarcely the trained observer I am, but ... what are your reactions?”
I thought about his question, sipping at the bubbly brown liquid the waiter had brought us. So far, I had been too busy gawking to do very much processing. “Well, sir,” I finally told him, “I do not much care for the cavalier manner in which they shuffle us around. Oh, they are polite enough about it, but just the same the disrespectful way that Geoffrey Couper treated you. About the sidearms, I mean, I could have—”
“Nonsense, my dear boy, nonsense!” He waved a hand negligently. “I understood entirely. Chain of command, et cetera, et cetera. Come to speak of it now, I rather liked his keen, decisive manner. Beneath the facade of sloppy—one might almost say civilian—casuality that we see all around us here, there is a core of steel, a center entirely unembarrassed in the exercise of power. Confidence. Discipline. These combinations do not occur often enough in our military, let me tell you!”
He took a bite of his sandwich, got a very odd expression on his face.
“Lieutenant!” I glanced wildly around. “Never say things like that!”
“Come, Corporal,” he replied around the bite of food, “Have you never entertained the thought yourself?” He gave me a knowing, cynical look.
I kept my eyes on the tabletop. “If I had, sir, I would not voice it out loud. Certainly not in public.” I made a gesture that, for generations in Vespuccian enlisted society, has meant, “The walls have ears”.
“A very wise precaution, Corporal—Whitey. There is something profoundly wonderful about these people, reaching further than bland explanations involving scientific research.” He lowered his head along with his voice until he resembled a Vespuccian carrion-bird. “It is obvious that our expedition—what is left of it—has accidentally stumbled across the cutting edge of a vast, wealthy, expanding empire.”
What I wanted to say was that they did not seem very imperial to me.
“They are ultra-cautious at their frontier, or follow a velvet glove policy in general, but the power is there, mark my word. They make us Vespuccians look like, how do the ranks have it? Like ’tiny turnips’.”
“Lieutenant!” I do not think I had ever been so shocked.
“Hush! I swear that am going to get to the bottom of this. When I do ...”
“Yes, sir?” I was almost afraid to hear what would come next.
“Well, now is scarcely the time for making irrevocable decisions, is it? An opportunity will present itself eventually, Are you with me, Corporal?”
“With you, Lieutenant?”
“All I mean is, are you prepared to follow my leadership in this matter?”
“You are the Lieutenant, I am only a corporal, sir.” Which was as noncommittal an answer as I could think of with a second’s notice. He was either an acute judge of the political realities, or verging on paranoia. It is often difficult to tell, even at the best of times. In either case, it did not sound as though he were all that anxious to return home immediately. Fingering my bruised lip, I agreed with the man mentally that now was not the time for making any irrevocable decisions.
Then I thought of Eleva.
“Whitey?”
Suddenly, right beneath my sandwich-plate, the tabletop lit up to speak my name. I started, coming close to upsetting the Lieutenant’s half-finished drink, then cleared away my empty dishes. I found the image of Owen Rogers, live in three-dimensional color, staring back at me.
“I finally got out of that federated staff meeting! Our little mini-war today made trash of every schedule we had. Thank Lysander’s intransigent shade that armorers don’t make policy. Otherwise. I’d be stuck in there until Rendezvous-after-next. You got any plans right now?”
I looked across at the Lieutenant, chin resting in his palm like one of the statues in Hierarchy Park. He gave me an irritated glance of dismissal, went right back to his thoughts. “No, Owen, apparently not.”
“Well, then,” Rogers said, “follow the edge of the park about a quarter-circumference, to a place called ‘Chuck’s’—I’ll meet you there. Oh yes, and bring your boss along. Got surprises for both of you.”
The image faded, vanishing behind its sprinkling of bread crumbs, salt-shakings, those little seed-bug things I had carefully scraped off my food. I glanced at the Lieutenant again, raising inquiring eyebrows.
“Oh, very well, Corporal, by all means! Let us go see what the fellow wants.” He rose. I realized then that Rogers had not mentioned which direction we should turn, leaving the restaurant. I interrupted the waiter who was clearing a table in obvious ill humor. He flapped his dampened cloth, refolded it, then smeared it around the plastic a little.
“It’s atmosphere they want, do they? Antique electric lightbulbs right outa the Fission Age, and dumb, dumb, dumb appliances! Which means I gotta do medieval chores like this one! Too bad those goo-squirtin’ virus didn’t fill this whole place up! What I wouldn’t give for modern, sanitary, self-serving, self-cleaning—what? Chuck’s is it?”
“That would be helpful,” I told him.
“Turn right, and it’s more like a third of the way around.” He snapped the cloth at the floor, folded it again, began to return to his task, then took a good look at my gunbelt with its double burden. “Shucks, Kilroy, don’t look like you need t’do business at that place—but death an’ taxes, the customer’s always right. Or so they tell me.”
Except when he is confused.
Nonetheless, we followed his instructions out around the colored sidewalk, dodging trees, canals, pedestrians, wheeled fish, until we came upon a broad plaza with a fountain in the middle. Imitation sunlight poured down over the scene, several dozen people strolling, standing, talking dangling their feet in the water. The emergency seemed to be over with. I wondered when or if they ever worked for a living.
Strange what you will not notice in unfamiliar surroundings. Now, when I was looking for something specific, I suddenly realized that all the shops lacked an important, commonplace feature. Not a single written word was displayed on any of them. Often there was something that resembled a sign, a simple, more or less self-explaining graphic. Otherwise, there was nothing but empty space where there should have been a company ident, the name of a prop. I filed this with other odd-shaped data: the fact LeeLaLee had known all about Sca, even about Vespucci, without contact with the returning crew from Little Tom. Or how the waiter, after a moment of conspicuous cogitation, suddenly knew whose cuff it was we were eating on, but neither who nor what we were.
Except that we were Kilroys.
Rogers met us at the fountain. “Right over here, gents. Come on in.”
The sign bore the holographic image of an unfamiliar handgun, but did not say “Chuck’s”. The entity behind the counter was an enormous, broad-shouldered powerful-looking being w
ith a dark shaggy pelt, much the same as I had seen a while earlier on tiny foot-wheels. It wore a strange hat, two partial hemispheres of tan canvas, different sizes, the smaller hemisphere atop the larger. Some sort of sun-helmet, I guessed.
“Jambo, B’wana!” he said. “Long time no ungawa! What can I do you for?”
Rogers shook his head tolerantly. “Can the Swahooie, Chuckles. Got a couple of new customers for you. This is Whitey O’Thraight and Enson Sermander, both late of the planet Vespucci. Gentlemen, I give you Charles C. Charles, a valued professional colleague and the hairiest, if not the hugest, gunsmith in the known galaxy. He’s an eccentric genius, in his safari mood just now. Be careful not to step in the usunga.”
Charles accepted the Darrick I unholstered for him, examining it minutely, cocking a huge brown eye at the gun, his huge black fingers surprisingly dexterous. “Vaguely familiar. Looks like an old-fashioned soldering gun. Probably pretty anemic. What is it, about thirty-two caliber?”
“Eight millimeter Darrick,” I told him.
“A thinly-veiled alias in both senses. That’s Dardick, son, with a second D.” He glanced significantly at Rogers. “Something lost in the translation?”
“At a guess,” the praxeologist replied, “two and a half thousand years.”
The gunsmith whistled, shook his head, then got back to business. “Let’s see, now: full length plastic casings, I suppose, triangular in cross—”
“Trochoidal,” I corrected.
“Whatever. Something with a polymeric memory, most likely, for obturation and extraction. Feeds here with a stripper—fourteen, fifteen, maybe sixteen of them. Rotor lifts when you cock the hammer or cycle the trigger, forming two sides of a chamber with the topstrap forming the third. Bang! Next cycle, the empty comes out this little slot, no deposit, no return. An automatic revolver, by Albert, or a revolving automatic. Handy for mystery writers who don’t know the difference.”
I nodded enthusiastically, enjoying the first conversation I had fully understood in days. “Surely you do not have ammunition for it, though.”
“Don’t call me Shirley,” he replied. “And I can order it custom fabricated.”
The giant paused, with that same look of deep thought on his face that the waiter—along with many others we had recently met—had displayed.
“There. I’ll take a few measurements, send them on ahead to the Rendezvous, and they’ll be waiting for us at the mother ship with any luck.”
He thought again. “Will five hundred trounds do you?”
“I, er ... ” Five hundred cartridges represented real wealth back home.
Rogers stepped in. “Put it on my Survey Service account, Chuck. And make it a thousand trounds. The Corporal here is a bit out of practice.” Looking at me, he shrugged. “I know, ‘There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,’ but occasionally you can find one that’s awful cheap.”
I gulped, unable, at first, to frame a suitable reply. Then: “The Darrick employs a double-base nitro pistol powder, about medium fast-burning. The bullet is ten grams of a cast lead alloy, ten percent tin, ten percent antimony. There is also an over-powder wad, a disc three millimeters thick, made of the same plastic as the casing. The primer—.”
“Gotcha.” The gunsmith winked. “Make yourself t’home while I’m out back.”
He disappeared through a curtain. I wondered whether it laundered him as he passed through it. He looked pretty clean for a gunsmith, I thought, although a bit singed around the edges of his fur, probably from tinkering with plasma-guns. Meanwhile, Rogers thumped a broad finger jovially on the transparent display case he leaned against. Once again I noticed the lack of signs, posters, price tags, all around the shop. It was as if writing had never been invented in this culture.
“What’s your pleasure, Herr Leutnant? We can’t let you go around all socially nekked like that. Pick yourself out a roscoe. It’s on the house—or on the ship, if you prefer. Like I just said, ‘There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch’, but you’ll earn it. You will, too, Whitey.”
The Lieutenant blinked, suspicion wrestling with amazement across his jowled countenance. The walls of the place were lined with racked pistols. There were five more big display counters full of weapons in bewildering variety. Only about a quarter of the machinery visible was immediately recognizable as firearms, the remainder being unfamiliar technology.
Some were obvious projectile-throwers, but with what source of energy? Others apparently emitted some form of pure energy, similar to lasers, or the plasma guns I had seen used to grisly effect on Scavian cavalry. Not a single long-arm—no rifle or shotgun—was visible, however. Like writing, Earthians did not seem to have stumbled across the concept, although they had a couple of unique notions of their own.
One of them seemed to be about color. Vespuccian weaponry tended to be blue-black, occasionally silver, or some combination of the two. Sometimes—very rarely—they were finished in locally appropriate camouflage. Confederate weapons could be any color: bright red, green, orange, bilious yellow, lizard-egg blue, purple, warm tan, or even hot pink.
Apparently private individuals, private companies, were permitted to produce weapons, sell them, even compete with one another at the business. On Vespucci, this highly restricted article of hardware was exclusively created, also stringently distributed, only by official government arsenals, to those whose duty it was to protect the State. Attempts had been made to limit their use to a designated individual, with a special magnet ring or fingerprint recognition, so far without success.
Uncomfortable, the Lieutenant cleared his throat: “I appreciate the gesture, praxeologist, truly I do. However, a sidearm is merely insignia, a badge of authority. It serves no other practical purpose. No one can hit anything with a handgun. Thus, in circumstances where just anyone is free to purchase, possess, to actually carry one of the things ...”
He let the implication go unstated.
Rogers did not: “What you’re saying, then, is that an officer and a gentlebeing might be mistaken for one of the peasants? Okey-dokey, Lieutenant, it’s your life and a free galaxy—will be, anyway—just keep in mind that in the Confederacy such officers as we permit don’t have any flunkies to do their killing for them. You may want to reconsider.”
The Lieutenant’s face began turning that same alarming shade of purple-red as before, the veins standing against on his forehead. He opened his mouth, no doubt to blast Rogers into some netherworld when Charles C. Charles reappeared just in time to prevent the eminent catastrophe.
“Okay, Whitey, here’s your piece. We’ll hold the chamber pressure on the first lot at twenty-five kay, just to be on the safe side, but if you ever feel the need for more power, this weapon’s structural material can be ionically treated—and there are better plastics available.”
He tapped a broad nail on the Darrick—the Dardick’s—upper receiver as he said this. Rogers waggled his eyebrows, rolled his eyes dramatically, as if restraining himself mightily from asking what is the point in gilding some stinkweed that will never be a cactus-blossom.
“Uh, thanks,” I said. “Where ... when can I—”
“Right here, after Rendezvous.” The furry giant stood still for a moment, his attention elsewhere. Then: “Which should be coming up a little ahead of schedule, I think. We got into trouble, and Mama came arunnin’.”
We walked out of the shop just as darkness fell.
It took a moment to recall that we were not outside on a planet’s surface. Occurring overhead was a display like I had seen aboard the Little Tom, although on a vastly grander scale. Soft lights came on across the wooded park, stars glittered down at us for the first time. Two of them swelled, grew into perfect replicas of Tom Lehrer Maru or its small auxiliaries: glowing white inverted bowls, featureless, smoothly-contoured, yet somehow seeming to vibrate with vast pent-up energies.