Van Boom, the late-twentieth-century, half Zulu, half Afrikaans, chief engineer, met them. He was a handsome man with a dark bronze skin and curly hair. He stood about six-three and weighed about two hundred and fifty. He had been born in a ditch during The Bloody Years.
He greeted them cordially enough (he liked Sam and tolerated John), but he did not smile as usual.
“It’s ready,” he said, “but I want my objections recorded. It’s a nice toy and makes a lot of noise and looks impressive and will kill a man. But it’s wasteful and inefficient.” “You make it sound like a Congressman,” Sam said.
Van Boom led them into the high doorway of the bamboo building, where a steel handgun lay on a table. Van Boom picked it up. Even in his big hand, the gun was huge. He strode past the others and out into the light of the sun. Sam was exasperated. He had held out his hand for the gun and the fellow had ignored him. If Van Boom intended to demonstrate it outside, why hadn’t he said so in the first place?
“Engineers,” Sam muttered. Then he shrugged. You might as well hit a Missouri mule between the eyes with your pinkie as try to change Van Boom’s ways.
Van Boom held up the gun so that the sunshine twinkled against the silvery gray metal. “This is the Mark I pistol,” he said. “Called so because The Boss invented it.” Sam’s anger melted like ice in a Mississippi River thaw,
“It’s a breech-loading, single-shot, flintlock hand weapon with a rifled barrel and a breakdown action.”
He held the gun in his right hand and said, “You load it so. You press forward the lock switch on the left side of the barrel. This releases the breech lock. You then press down the barrel with the left hand. This action forces the trigger guard into the grip, where the guard acts as a lever to cock the hammer.”
He reached into a bag strapped to his belt and removed a large brown hemispherical object. “This is a bakelite or phenol-formaldehyde-resin bullet, sixty caliber. You press the bullet, so, until it engages the lands of the barrel.”
He removed from his bag a shiny package with black contents.
“This is a charge of black gunpowder wrapped in cellulose nitrate. Some time in the future, we’ll have cordite instead of gunpowder. If we use this gun, that is. Now, I insert the load into the chamber with the primer end first. The primer is a twist of nitrate paper impregnated with gunpowder. Then I lift the barrel with my left hand, thus, locking it into place. The Mark I is now ready to fire. But, for emergency, if the primer does not ignite, you can pour priming powder into the touchhole just forward of the rear sight. In case of misfire, the gun may be cocked with the right thumb. Note that this flash vent on the right side of the action shield protects the shooter’s face.”
A man had brought out a large wooden target and had inserted it in a frame on four legs. The target was about twenty yards away. Van Boom turned toward it, held out the gun, clenched both hands and sighted along the front and rear sights.
“Get behind me, gentlemen,” he said. “The heat of the passage through the air will burn off the surface of the bullet and leave a thin trail of smoke which you may be able to see. The plastic bullet has to be of such large caliber because of its light weight. But this increases the wind resistance. If we decide to use this gun—which I definitely am against—we might increase the caliber to seventy-five in the Mark II. The effective range is about fifty yards, but the accuracy is not good beyond thirty yards and nothing to brag about within that range.”
The flint was in the hammer. When Van Boom would pull the trigger, the hammer would fall and scrape along the filelike surface of the frizzen. The frizzen covered the priming pan and should be knocked forward by the flint, uncovering the primer twist of the powder charge.