“Something deeper, yes. But you need the fighting, too. If people still had the guts to fight, we’d have a colony on Mars by now. But they’d sooner sit on their cushions and sew a fine seam. Maybe the world was better when there were weapons and—”
“The W.B.I. still has weapons.”
“Those . . . those popguns?” The girl’s eyes flashed, and she tossed her black hair. “And what do you know about the W.B.I., anyway, you . . . you academician?”
“Nothing, my dear,” the W.B.I.’s most capable agent admitted gently.
“Then shut up!”
They traveled the next half hour in silence. The ship’s windows proffered no view but a sea of clouds. Beneath those clouds, Garrett calculated from his watch, lay the opulence of the reclaimed deserts of the Southwest; a few more minutes and—
He turned again to the girl. Her reaction to lovestonite made it imperative that he keep in touch with her, even if other motives had not contributed their share to his desire. “You live in Sollywood?” he ventured.
“What do you care, you historian?’
“But do you?”
“Of course not!” she snorted. “I live in Novosibirsk and I’m flying out here for a beam test.”
The ship dipped down through the clouds and emerged into rain. Fine drops streaked the window, but far below Garrett could glimpse some of the infinite variety of locations that comprise most of southern California, all dry and aglow with light under their vast domes.
The girl looked out at the rain. “Welcome to California,” she said. “And I hope you drown.”
Gan Garrett detached his identification plaque from its bracelet and placed it in the slot by the imposing entrance to Metropolis Solid Pictures, Inc. The beam filtered through his set of perforations, and the door dilated. No query; the combination must have been set to his perfs as soon as he was hired.
He stepped inside, apparently still in the open air but now out of the rain. Five moving sidewalks started off in different directions from this entrance, and he hesitated, studying the indicator.
A life devoted to all the works of the W.B.I., and especially to the suppression of armslegging, had heightened the rapidity of Garrett’s reflexes. His movements were economical, but automatic and swift. Thus, he now found that he had, almost without knowing it, moved his body a few centimeters to the right and drawn what the black-haired girl had called his “popgun.” Stuck fast in the center of the indicator quivered a knife.
Even Garrett could not repress a slight shudder at the narrow squeak. He whirled about, stooping and weaving as he did so with that skilled technique of his which disconcerted any but the finest marksman. There was not a soul in sight in this open area.
Calmly Garrett plucked and pocketed the knife and chose the proper sidewalk, lire episode in one way had told him nothing. Anywhere but in Sollywood the very existence of a weapon would have had its significance, since the careful manufacturing regulations of the Department of Allocation permit no allotments of material for weapons save those such as Garrett now held in his hand. Even these are carefully controlled, and every one that has ever been manufactured is by now either outworn and destroyed or on the person of a W.B.I. man.
They are not lethal, these “popguns.” They are compressed-gas pistols using carbon dioxide to fire a pellet filled with needlelike crystals of comatin, that most powerful and instantaneous of anaesthetics. They are, as is inevitable in a Devarupian world, purely a defensive weapon.
But the makers of sollies need to give the effect of lethal weapons in their historical epics; and they can secure permission from the Department for Metal to make plausible replicas. The weapons must by strict statute be nonlethal, blunt in the case of swords and daggers, the barrels blocked in the case of firearms; and rendering them lethal is an offense earning a one-way trip. But once the metal allocation has been secured, a desperate man will take his chance on lethalizing a prop weapon. So here the existence of a lethal dagger was no surprise.
He remembered stories of the past in which detectives examined weapons for fingerprints. They would be no help here, either; the criminal who neglected to use paraderm, so much more convenient than gloves, had been unheard-of for a century. The sole use of prints was no longer criminological, but in problems of civilian identification.
Still, he would keep the dagger; as evidence, he told himself, hardly daring admit that there was something consoling about carrying a forbidden weapon. For the one item of significance which the attack had revealed was this: There was a leak somewhere. Someone in Sollywood knew that he was more than a technical adviser. And that in turn meant that the lovestonite problem was quite as important as the secretary had feared.
Garrett fingered the lovestonite plesiosaur. Swizard, that girl had called it.
Sacheverell Breakstone, the great man of Metropolis, received Gan Garrett in person. He did not wear the usual native costume of the district—the slack trousers, the open shirt, and the colorful ascot which dated back to tradition long before the invention of solid pictures. His costume, Garrett realized, went back even further—the woven sheeps wool coat, the cloth headpiece with the rear projection, the leather leg casings. It was a curious anachronistic survival, but it was becoming to the short stock body of S.B., lending him a certain outrageous dignity.
“Welcome to Sollywood, Garrett,” he began. “Hear you’re the great man in your field. Well, we’ll get on. I’m the great man in mine, and we’ll understand each other. And this is going to be beyond any doubt the greatest epic ever beamed even by Metropolis. Even as a personally supervised Breakstone Production. Devarupa will be proud of us from wherever he’s watching. And he’ll be trusting us, trusting me and trusting you to tell
