“As far as I know it’s the first to be manufactured on Pallas,” Emerson told him, “or will be once it’s finished. It’s simple: straight blowback and double action only. Not counting springs, it’ll only have four moving parts: slide, trigger, trigger bar—this part here—and striker. I knew Pallas doesn’t have the industrial facilities to mass-produce guns or anything else by forging, machining, or casting, and I don’t like ordinary stampings, so I chose lamination. The whole thing can be bolted together with four Allen screws.”
Perhaps attracted by the warmth of the worklight, BCH, the “company cat,” chose that moment to hop up on the bench and begin sniffing at the parts Emerson had there. Osborn took the animal in his arms and stroked its head until it laid its ears back and began to purr. Both humans fell silent for a long moment.
“And by unskilled labor,” Osborn nodded at last, appreciating the boy’s genius all over again. “But straight blowback, Emerson—no breech-locking system, just the inertia of the slide and the power of the recoil spring—that’s an antique method only suited to obsolete pocket-pistol cartridges. You don’t even have a hammer and mainspring to fall back on. You’ll never sell a little popgun like that to Pallatians, especially the deer and elk hunters.”
Emerson laughed and shook his head. “It’s designed to be a fully powered 10 millimeter, Nails—since that seems about the most popular cartridge on this asteroid—with dual recoil springs so powerful that even you couldn’t pull the slide back by hand. But you won’t ever need to. See how the barrel tips up, like a break-action shotgun, so that you can slip the first round into the chamber?”
“Like an old .25 caliber Beretta,” Osborn chuckled. “Well, any patents ever issued on that one ought to have expired by now. Who else did you steal ideas from?”
“Aside from Master Lock, you mean, and Astra, who made full-power straight blowbacks in the twentieth century? I think the trigger bar is my own idea. I think. See how it acts as its own trip-release and disconnector, camming on the frame?”
“And once you have a working model...” Osborn looked thoughtful. He’d acquired his nickname, and built what fortune he could lay claim to, by being the first individual to manufacture anything on Pallas—nails, badly needed by the early colonists, from heavy wire left by the terraformation crews. He gently set BCH down on the floor and began laying the parts out on the bench again the way Emerson had originally arranged them. “...what do you plan on doing with it?”
Emerson grinned, but without the slightest trace of humor. “I’m going to recruit some of that unskilled labor you mentioned and make a lot more just like it.”
Her name, as it had turned out, was Cherry.
And she was much more than just one of the girls at Galena’s. Among other things, she was the second-largest depositor at the First Pallatian Bank of Curringer.
The largest depositor was Aloysius Brody.
The late afternoon sun blasted through the plate-glass window and beat directly on his wool-covered belly and thighs. Emerson felt as uncomfortable as ever in the suit he hadn’t worn since the first day he’d met Cherry, but Nails and Mrs. Singh had insisted it was important. They were with him now, in the office of the president of the bank, sitting across a genuine dark mahogany desk from that esteemed institution’s first and second most important customers.
The banker himself was little more than a master of ceremonies.
“So that’s your business plan, is it?” Brody asked rhetorically. “Well, me boy, it has the virtue of simplicity, and seems to cover the contingencies. Now for the fun part.” He picked up the gleaming silvery object lying in the center of the banker’s desk blotter. “I’ve seen this already, medear, and even fired it several times. There isn’t any safety, and you can’t pull the slide back. I can’t, anyway. Remove the magazine and operate the barrel catch, like this.” The rear of the barrel popped up. “You see, the chamber’s empty.”
“Why, thank you kindly, Aloysius.” The little blond took the pistol, closed the chamber, and sighted it expertly at the shiny round seal of one of the bank president’s certificates of civic virtue on the wall. She then bent down to get her bag from where it lay on the floor beside her chair, extracted an elderly-looking .45 automatic, and, having likewise emptied it, held it beside Emerson’s invention, hefting each, then swapping them in her hands and hefting them again.
“It’s quite a bit lighter than mine,” she observed, “and a lot shorter. It feels better in my hand. 10 millimeter—won’t that kick pretty hard, Emerson?”
“No harder than that .45 you have there, Cherry.” He resisted the urge to shove a couple of fingers in his shirt collar and wrench it a few inches looser. Neckties, he was certain, must have been invented by the Spanish Inquisition. He wondered whom he had to confess his heresies to in order to get his neck out of this one. “There’s an integral muzzle brake at the end of the barrel, and the middle of the backstrap, in the grip, is spring-loaded to absorb recoil, as well.”
At least Cherry didn’t make him feel nervous, the way some girls did. She smiled her most radiant nonprofessional smile and nodded. “I always knew you were smart, Emerson. I always knew that you’d amount to something big, and here you are. I like this little gun, I like you, and I’m going to invest in both of you.”
Nails grinned broadly at Emerson and gave him a brotherly punch on the shoulder. As he was recovering, Aloysius and Mrs. Singh beamed approvingly at him, as well.
“Now, little lady—” the banker made throat-clearing noises and raised a plump brown hand to advise her from behind his desk “—that’s no basis at all on which to make business decisions. I think it wisest not to be too hasty in this matter. After all, weapons are controversial in many quarters, and their manufacture somewhat questionable, ethically. At least we should begin with a series of market surveys.” ,
He was a plump brown man all around, the boy thought to himself, in his plump brown suit, sitting here on his plump brown bottom behind his plump brown desk in his plump brown bank. At the moment, Emerson couldn’t remember the man’s name and didn’t know where he’d come from—wherever lawyers and bankers and ministers always come from, he guessed, just when everybody else has things arranged the way they like it.
He certainly wasn’t the Pallatian type.
Like me? he asked himself.
Like me, he decided. No matter how many of these little guns he made, he planned to go on carrying the Grizzly which hung heavily next to his right thigh where the braided tie-down bunched his trousers and put a wrinkle across the crease. It’s a new low, he thought, when you’re getting revenge on a three-piece suit.
Cherry frowned. “Now you just hush your mouth up, Glea Thomas,” she insisted. “It’s my money we’re discussing here, and I think a little more respect is called for—for the money, if not for myself.” She smiled sweetly. “Otherwise, I’ll just take it all to another bank—or maybe start one of my own.”
The banker blanched—and hushed. In a community where fractional reserve banking—the lending of more money by a bank than it holds in the form of deposits—was considered an act of criminal fraud, banks often ran out of spare cash of their own and had to court their customers into making loans. His once mighty profession had been reduced to that of financial matchmaker.
Emerson could see Aloysius and Nails each stifling a grin. Both were aware, as was Emerson himself and anyone else in town who frequented Galena’s or the Nimrod, that Thomas would like to have been one of Cherry’s best customers, but that she was too choosy and had declined the offer on several occasions.
Emerson couldn’t afford Cherry professionally, and he’d had too much self-respect over the past year to presume on her charitable hospitality again, although they often enjoyed each other’s chance companionship at Brody’s establishment. She was the only Monopoly player there who beat him regularly.
“I believe I’ll second the lady’s motion,” Brody told them all, taking the gun from Cherry and a
dmiring it all over again. “Cut me in for a third of the action.”
“Make it a quarter, Aloysius, if we’re going equal shares.” Mrs. Singh, being an expatriate American and a bit old-fashioned about such things, was inclined to disapprove of Cherry on principle, owing to her profession, but always warmed to the little blond after a few minutes’ reacquaintance. “One for the young lady, one for you, one for me, and one for Emerson for having invented the damned thing. Don’t get ahead of yourself, there’s enough here for everybody.”
“Then let’s make it a fifth, Mrs. Singh.” Nails leaned in to lay a huge, grimy hand on the banker’s otherwise pristine desk. After insisting that Emerson go home early and put on his suit, he’d come straight from the shop wearing his greasy work clothes. Emerson’s suspicion that it was a deliberate slight was immediately confirmed. “I managed to scrape a little bit of money together at the last minute. No thanks to you,” he added, glaring at the banker.
The banker sighed and rolled his eyes, obviously dissatisfied with the barbaric way these colonials conducted their affairs. Bankers didn’t usually last long on Pallas, Emerson knew. This one was the third in the last year, and probably wouldn’t last another quarter. They’d end up flying him back to one of the poles for transshipment to Earth in a straitjacket. The last one had gone native, quit his job, and was now a lone surveyor somewhere out in the weyers.
Come to think of it, it didn’t sound like a bad life at that.
“Then it’s all settled except for the paperwork,” the banker announced, gamely enough, Emerson conceded. It was the only way the man was going to make money on this deal.
“That’s right,” Nails agreed. “It’s all settled. And now we’re all going to get rich!”
“No,” corrected Cherry, generating a look of extreme pain on the banker’s face. “I’m going to get richer.”
Aloysius laughed and slapped his knees. “Medear, I was about to say exactly the same thing!”
When Emerson and Mrs. Singh arrived back at the boardinghouse that afternoon, ready to prepare a festive dinner for their old friends and new business partners, they found a small inset green light glowing from one of the few items of furniture set against the wall in her living room that was not a bookcase.
“Looks like we got us some mail,” his landlady observed. Like the boy, she was laden down with supplies they’d purchased on their way home. “Why don’t you take a peek, Emerson, while I get these here groceries into the icebox.”
More and more, since Gretchen had left them, Mrs. Singh had treated Emerson like a son. He was the only boarder she’d have asked to take a look at her mail. Emerson set down the bags he was carrying on the coffee table, gratefully removed his necktie and shoved it into a jacket pocket, and began unfastening the tie-down of his gunbelt. His three-piece suit had never been designed for such an accessory, and the weight of the weapon around his waist had grown increasingly uncomfortable throughout the long, unseasonably hot afternoon.
Or perhaps it was just having spent two hours of that afternoon with Cherry—and anticipating another couple of hours with her this evening—whom he was beginning to consider approaching on a personal, rather than professional, basis. Thinking pleasant thoughts of a kind he hadn’t for many months, he went to the elaborately decorated cabinet, half again as tall as he was, and opened the double doors to inspect the output of the printer it contained. It was this device which the present message had sought out and found.
The physical delivery of mail was something of a hit-or-miss proposition on Pallas, as it had become in many places on Earth most people would have regarded as civilized.
Partly this was a consequence of unreliable state monopolies on letter delivery, made worse in recent decades by the gradual collapse of government institutions in general. Partly, however, it was simply a result of technical progress. Three-quarters of the mail sent and received in the twentieth century needn’t have been sent at all, and most of the remaining quarter would have traveled faster and more cheaply—and with a greater guarantee of privacy—electronically.
The message was from Gretchen, the first they’d received since her recorded phone call of more than a year ago. Not knowing precisely what he was feeling—he supposed he should have known that this was inevitable—he tore it from the printer and reluctantly took it to the kitchen. It was from this moment on, he realized many years later, that he first began thinking of Mrs. Singh—because from this moment she’d begun acting that way—as an old woman.
Mr. and Mrs. Gibson Altman, Jr.
are pleased to announce
the birth of their daughter
Gwendolyn Rosalie
Lunchbox Specials
...designed to be dropped into enemy-occupied Allied countries. The idea...originated with the Joint Psychological Committee. The Ordnance Department made up...sketches of a [single-shot] weapon...made of stampings with a...smoothbore barrel made of seamless steel tubing...Guide Lamp Division of General Motors manufactured one million of these pistols by 21 August 1942 at a cost of slightly over $1.71 each.
—W.H.B. Smith, Book of Pistols and Revolvers
The first hundred “Ngu Departure” semiautomatic pistols were manufactured in a flimsy annex, no more than a shed, hastily thrown up behind Osborn’s Plumbing & Machine Shop.
While Emerson cut stainless plates on a bandsaw and Nails drilled them for the connecting bolts—as well as the crosspins that would hold the parts inside the assembled frames—Aloysius wielded a chambering reamer on the barrel blanks which the two machinists had already cut and turned to the correct outside dimensions.
Cherry, doing the job Nails had interrupted the night Emerson first discussed the idea with him, made certain all components were properly finished.
Mrs. Singh took the completed parts and turned them into pistols.
They all took turns proof- and function-testing the finished product through the back door of the shed, which let out onto nothing but empty prairie behind the town.
Toward the end, when they’d already begun receiving prepaid orders, all the partners stayed up late into the night, laboring to make sure the orders were filled on time. Sometimes Emerson wondered if the profit would cover all the coffee they consumed. The whole process taught him and his friends a great deal that they’d thought they already knew about mass production. As one consequence, a brief interval followed during which the partners actually refused to take anybody else’s money until they all felt they were truly ready.
The second hundred pistols, along with every other weapon Emerson and his little company ever made, were completed six months later in a modest factory building erected—neither by accident nor coincidence—on an unclaimed plot of land just five miles outside the gate of the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project. The consequences of that decision would reverberate for almost a century afterward.
Exactly as Emerson intended.
Although he kept his principal motive to himself at the time, Emerson had already learned something from his many jobs and everything that had happened to him since he’d run away from the Project. Arguing one strangely idle night in the Nimrod—shortly after the first run of pistols had been completed (and sold out within just a few hours of KCUF’s public announcement of their availability)—with those friends of his who’d been willing to take a risk with him against the possibility of a profit (and then added their sweat to his to raise that possibility to a probability), he emphasized the point that the manufacturing business they’d started together was completely dependent on hand assembly.
“Yes,” he replied impatiently to someone’s objection, “I know exactly how far away it is. Didn’t I ride the whole way in the cargo rack of a rollabout where I could count every last corrugation in a road consisting of nothing but washboard? Didn’t I measure every desolate mile—every yard—between there and here? But it’s also where the cheapest available labor on the asteroid happens to be—”
Aloysius laughed heartily. “N
ot to mention ten thousand potential new customers!”
One of their “old” customers chose that moment to pass by their table, drink in hand, patting Aloysius and Emerson on the back by turns and pointing happily to a worn and weather-stained pistol belt hanging on the elk rack at the back of the bar with a brand-new, shiny Ngu Departure pistol resting in its holster.
“There is that,” Emerson acknowledged, once these congratulations were over with. His attention had strayed momentarily to the fans hanging from the ceiling overhead. He’d always liked them for some reason he couldn’t quite get hold of. They’d been imported from Earth, originally. Aloysius had once told him that he’d been required to step down the speed of their motors in order to keep them from blowing drinks off the tables—not to mention his clientele off their chairs—in the low Pallatian gravity. Tonight, looking up at them made him think about his secret boyhood dream of flying over the Rimfence to freedom.
“Steady down now, boys,” advised Cherry. “We’ve got a lot more planning to do before we choose a manufacturing site. In the first place, the good Senator—”
“The good former Senator,” Nails corrected her.
“I’d say the only good Senator is a former Senator,” Mrs. Singh observed smugly. She peered down into her coffee cup and frowned at the reflection she saw there.
Cherry ignored them. “—will never let his people go to work for us. In the second place, even if he did by some miracle, he’d never, ever let them have guns. Sometimes I think that was the whole point of the Project in the first place. And in the third place, how could any of them possibly afford to buy one?”
“I think you had two first places in there somewhere,” Nails told her quietly. Emerson had always privately suspected that he was a little bit afraid of her.
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