“But there’s enough combat equipment on hand to outfit a private army for every man, woman and child on Poictesme!” Conn objected. “Where are we going to sell this?”
“Storisende spaceport. The tramp freighters are buying it for newly colonized planets that haven’t been industrialized yet. They don’t pay much, but it doesn’t cost much to get it out, and I’ve been clearing about three hundred sols a ton on the spaceport docks. That’s not bad, you know.”
Three hundred sols a ton. A lifter went by stacked with cases of M-504 submachine guns. Unloaded, one of them weighed six pounds, and even a used one was worth a hundred sols. Conn started to say something about that, but then they came to the lift and were crowding onto it.
He had been in Kurt Fawzi’s office a few times, always with his father, and he remembered it as a dim, quiet place of genteel conviviality and rambling conversations, with deep, comfortable chairs and many ashtrays. Fawzi’s warehouse and brokerage business, and the airline agency, and the government, such as it was, of Litchfield, combined, made few demands on his time and did not prevent the office from being a favored loafing center for the town’s elders. The lights were bright only over the big table that served, among other things, as a desk, and the walls were almost invisible in the shadows.
As they came down the hallway from the lift, everybody had begun speaking more softly. Voices were never loud or excited in Kurt Fawzi’s office.
Tom Brangwyn went to the table, taking off his belt and holster and laying his pistol aside. The others, crowding into the room, added their weapons to his.
That was something else Conn was seeing with new eyes. It had been five years since he had carried a gun and he was wondering why any of them bothered. A gun was what a boy put on to show that he had reached manhood, and a man carried for the rest of his life out of habit.
Why, there wouldn’t be a shooting a year in Litchfield, if you didn’t count the farm tramps and drifters, who kept to the lower level or camped in the empty buildings at the edge of town. Or maybe that was it; maybe Litchfield was peaceful because everybody was armed. It certainly wasn’t because of anything the Planetary Government at Storisende did to maintain order.
After divesting himself of his gun, Tom Brangwyn took over the bartending, getting out glasses and filling a pitcher of brandy from a keg in the corner.
“Everybody supplied?” Fawzi was asking. “Well, let’s drink to our returned emissary. We’re all anxious to hear what you found out, Conn. Gentlemen, here’s to our friend Conn Maxwell. Welcome home, Conn!”
“Well, it’s wonderful to be back, Mr. Fawzi—”
“No, let’s not have any of this mister foolishness! You’re one of the gang now. And drink up, everybody. We have plenty of brandy, even if we don’t have anything else.”
“You telling us, Kurt?” somebody demanded. One of the distillery company; the name would come back to Conn in a moment. “When this crop gets pressed and fermented—”
“When I start pressing, I don’t know where in Gehenna I’m going to vat the stuff till it ferments,” Colonel Zareff said. “Or why. You won’t be able to handle all of it.”
“Now, now!” Fawzi reproved. “Let’s not start moaning about our troubles. Not the day Conn’s come home. Not when he’s going to tell us how to find the Third Fleet-Army Force Brain.”
“You did find out where the Brain is, didn’t you, Conn?” Brangwyn asked anxiously.
That set half a dozen of them off at once. They had all sat down after the toast; now they were fidgeting in their chairs, leaning forward, looking at Conn fixedly.
“What did you find out, Conn?”
“It’s still here on Poictesme, isn’t it?”
“Did you find out where it is?”
He wanted to tell them in one quick sentence and get it over with. He couldn’t, any more than he could force himself to squeeze the trigger of a pistol he knew would blow up in his hand.
“Wait a minute, gentlemen.” He finished the brandy, and held out the glass to Tom Brangwyn, nodding toward the pitcher. Even the first drink had warmed him and he could feel the constriction easing in his throat and the lump at the pit of his stomach dissolving. “I hope none of you expect me to spread out a map and show you the cross on it, where the Brain is. I can’t. I can’t even give the approximate location of the thing.”
Much of the happy eagerness drained out of the faces around him. Some of them were looking troubled; Colonel Zareff was gnawing the bottom of his mustache, and Judge Ledue’s hand shook as he tried to relight his cigar. Conn stole a quick side-glance at his father; Rodney Maxwell was watching him curiously, as though wondering what he was going to say next.
“But it is still here on Poictesme?” Fawzi questioned. “They didn’t take it away when they evacuated, did they?”
Conn finished his second drink. This time he picked up the pitcher and refilled for himself.
“I’m going to have to do a lot of talking,” he said, “and it’s going to be thirsty work. I’ll have to tell you the whole thing from the beginning, and if you start asking questions at random, you’ll get me mixed up and I’ll miss the important points.”
“By all means!” Judge Ledue told him. “Give it
