“Notice the flanges on this barrel are little more than bulges. This makes the model ideal for carrying in a shoulder holster under the coat; it can be drawn very swiftly because, when properly attuned, it will leap toward the reaching hand of its owner. At the moment it is attuned to me. Watch while I replace it in its holster and—”
The speed of the draw was absolutely amazing. The old man’s fingers moved; and the gun, four feet away, was in them. There was no blur of movement. It was like the door the night that it had slipped from Fara’s grasp, and slammed noiselessly in Constable Jor’s face. Instai’itaneous!
Fara, who had parted his lips as the old man was explaining, to protest the utter needlessness of illustrating any quality of the weapon except what he had asked for, closed them again. He stared in a brief, dazed fascination; and something of the wonder that was here held his mind and his body. He had seen and handled the guns of soldiers, and they were simply ordinary metal or plastic things that one used clumsily like any other material substance, not like this at all, not possessed of a dazzling life of their own, leaping with an intimate eagerness to assist with all their superb power the will of their master. They— With a start, Fara remembered his purpose. He smiled wryly, and said:
“All this is very interesting. But what about the beam that can fan out?”
The old man said calmly: “At pencil thickness, this beam will pierce any body except certain alloys of lead up to four hundred yards. With proper adjustment of the firing nozzle, you can disintegrate a six-foot object at fifty yards or less. This screw is the adjustor.”
He indicated a tiny device in the muzzle itself. “Turn it to the left to spread the beam, to the right to close it.”
Fara said: “I’ll take the gun. How much is it?”
He saw that the old man was looking at him thoughtfully; the oldster said finally, slowly: “I have previously explained our regulations to you, Mr. Clark. You recall them, of course?” “Eh!” said Fara, and stopped, wide-eyed. It wasn’t that he didn’t remember them. It was simply— “You mean,” he gasped, “those things actually apply. They’re not—”
With a terrible effort, he caught his spinning brain and blurring voice. Tense and cold, he said:
“All I want is a gun that will shoot in self-defense, but which I can turn on myself if I have to or—want to.”
“Oh, suicide!” said the old man. He looked as if a great understanding had suddenly dawned on him. “My dear sir, we have no objection to your killing yourself at any time. That is your personal privilege in a world where privileges grow seanter every year. As for the price of this revolver, it’s four credits.”
“Four crc . . . only four credits!” said Fara.
I-Ic stood, absolutely astounded, his whole mind snatched from its dark purpose. Why, the plastic alone was—and the whole gun with its fine, intricate workmanship—twenty-five credits would have been dirt cheap.
He felt a brief thrill of utter interest; the mystery of the weapon shops suddenly loomed as vast and important as his own black destiny. But the old man was speaking again:
“And now, if you will remove your coat, we can put on the holster—”
Quite automatically, Fara complied. It was vaguely startling to realize that, in a few seconds, he would be walking out of here, equipped for self-murder, and that there was now not a single obstacle to his death.
Curiously, he was disappointed. He couldn’t explain it, but somehow there had been in the back of his mind a hope that these shops might, just might—what?
What indeed? Fara sighed wearily—and grew aware again of the old man’s voice, saying:
“Perhaps you would prefer to step out of our side door. It is less conspicuous than the front.”
There was no resistance in Fara. He was dimly conscious of the man’s fingers on his arm, half guiding him; and then the old man pressed one of several buttons on the wall—so that’s how it was done— and there was the door.
He could see flowers beyond the opening; without a word he walked toward them. He was outside almost before he realized it.
Fara stood for a moment in the neat little pathway, striving to grasp the finality of his situation. But nothing would come except a curious awareness of many men around him; for a long second, his brain was like a log drifting along a stream at night.
Through that darkness grew a consciousness of something wrong; the wrongness was there in the back of his mind, as he turned leftward to go to the front of the weapon store. Vagueness transformed to a shocked, startled sound. For—he was not in GIay, and the weapon shop wasn’t where it had been. In its place— A dozen men brushed past Fara to join a long line of men farther along. But Fara was immune to their presence, their strangeness. I-his whole mind, his whole vision, his very being was concentrating on the section of machine that stood where the weapon shop had been. A machine, oh, a machine— Ilis brain lifted up, up in his effort to grasp the tremendousness of the dull-metaled immensity of what was spread here under a summer sun beneath a sky as blue as a remote southern sea.
The machine towered into the heavens, five great tiers of metal, each a hundred feet high; and the superbly streamlined five hundred feet ended in a peak of light, a gorgeous spire that tilted straight up a sheer two hundred feet farther, and matched the very sun for brightness.
And it was a machine, not a building, because the whole lower tier was alive with shimmering lights, mostly green, but sprinkled colorfully with red and occasionally a blue and yellow. Twice, as Fara watched, green lights directly in front of him flashed unscintillatingly into red.
The second tier was alive with white and red lights, although there were only a fraction as many lights as on the lowest tier. The third section had on its dull-metal surface only blue and yellow lights; they twinkled softly here and there over the vast area.
The fourth tier was a series of signs, That brought the beginning. of comprehension. The whole sign was:
WHITE — BIRTHS
RED — DEATHS
GREEN — LIVING
BLUE — IMMIGRATION TO EARTH
YELLOW — EMIGRATION
The fifth tier was also all sign, finally explaining:
POPULATIONS
SOLAR SYSTEM 19,174,463,747
EARTH 11,193,247,361
MARS 1,097,298,604
VENUS 5,141,053,811
MOONS 1,742,863,971
The numbers changed, even as he looked at them, leaping up and down, shifting below and above what they had first been. People were dying, being born, moving to Mars, to Venus, to the moons of Jupiter, to Earth’s moon, and others coming back again, landing minute by minute in the thousands of spaceports. Life went on in its gigantic fashion—and here was the stupendous record. Here was— “Better get in line,” said a friendly voice beside Fara. “It takes quite a while to put through an individual case, I understand.”
Fara stared at the man. He had the distinct impression of having had senseless words flung at him. “In line?” he started—and stopped himself with a jerk that hurt his throat.
He was moving forward, blindly, ahead of the younger man, thinking a curious jumble about that this must have been how Constable Jor was transported to Mars—when another of the man’s words penetrated.
“Case?” said Fara violently. “Individual case!”
The man, a heavy-faced, blue-eyed young chap of around thirty-. five, looked at him curiously: “You must know why you’re here,” he said. “Surely, you wouldn’t have been sent through here unless you had a problem of some kind that the weapon shop courts will solve for you; there’s no other reason for coming to Information Center.”
Fara walked on because he was in the line now, a fast-moving line that curved him inexorably around the machine; and seemed to be heading him toward a door that led into the interior of the great metal structure. So it was a building as well as a machine.
A problem, he was thinking, why, of course, he had a problem, a hopeless, insoluble, completely tangled problem so deeply rooted in the basic structure of Imperial civilization that the whole world would have to be overturned to make it right.
With a start, he saw that he was at the entrance. And the awed thought came: In seconds he would be committed irrevocably to— what?
Inside was a long, shining corridor, with scores of completely transparent hallways leading off the main corridor. Behind Fara, the young man’s voice said:
“There’s one, practically empty. Let’s go.” Fara walked ahead; and suddenly he was trembling. He had already noticed that at the end of each side hallway were some dozen young women sitting at desks, interviewing men and . . . and, good heavens, was it possible that all this meant— He grew aware that he had stopped in front of one of the girls. She was older than she had looked from a distance, over thirty, but good-looking, alert. She smiled pleasantly, but impersonally, and said: “Your name, please?”