The picture vanished as if it had never existed, and he grew aware again, preternaturally aware of the village of Glay asleep all around him. Silent, peaceful—
yet ugly, he thought, ugly with the ugliness of evil enthroned.
He thought: The right to buy weapons—and his heart swelled into his throat; the tears came to his eyes.
He wiped his vision clear with the back of his hand, thought of Creel's long dead father, and strode on, without shame. Tears were good for an angry man.
The shop was the same, but the hard metal padlock yielded before the tiny, blazing, supernal power of the revolver. One flick of fire; the metal dissolved—and he was inside.
It was dark, too dark to see, but Fara did not turn on the lights immediately. He fumbled across to the window control, turned the windows to darkness vibration, and then clicked on the lights.
He gulped with awful relief. For the machines, his precious tools that he had seen carted away within hours after the bailiff's arrival, were here again, ready for use.
Shaky from the pressure of his emotion, Fara called Creel on the telestat. It took a little while for her to appear; and she was in her dressing robe. When she saw who it was she turned a dead white.
'Fara, oh, Fara, I thought—'
He cut her off grimly: 'Creel, I've been to the weapon shop. I want you to do this: go straight to your mother. I'm here at my shop. I'm
going to stay here day and night until it's settled that I stay I shall
go home later for some food and clothing, but I want you to be gone by then. Is that clear?'
Color was coming back into her lean, handsome face. She said: 'Don't you bother coming home, Fara. I'll do everything necessary. I'll pack all that's needed into the carplane, including a folding bed. We'll sleep in the back room of the shop.'
Morning came palely, but it was ten o'clock before a shadow darkened the open door; and Constable Jor came in. He looked shamefaced:
'I've got an order here for your arrest,' he said.
'Tell those who sent you,' Fara replied deliberately, 'that I resisted arrest—with a gun.'
The deed followed the words with such rapidity that Jor blinked. He stood like that for a moment, a big, sleepy-looking man, staring at that gleaming, magical revolver; then:
'I have a summons here ordering you to appear at the great court of Ferd this afternoon. Will you accept it?'
'Certainly.'
'Then you will be there?'
'I'll send my lawyer,' said Fara. 'Just drop the summons on the floor there. Tell them I took it.'
The weapon shop man had said: 'Do not ridicule by word any legal measure of the Imperial authorities. Simply disobey them.'
Jor went out, and seemed relieved. It took an hour before Mayor Mel Dale came pompously through the door.
'See here, Fara Clark,' he bellowed from the doorway. 'You can't get away with this. This is defiance of the law.'
Fara was silent as His Honor waddled farther into the building. It was puzzling, almost amazing, that Mayor Dale would risk his plump, treasured body. Puzzlement ended as the mayor said in a low voice:
'Good work, Fara; I knew you had it in you. There's dozens of us in Glay behind you, so stick it out. I had to yell at you just now, because there's a crowd outside. Yell back at me, will you? Let's have a real name calling. But, first, a word of warning: the manager of the Automatic Repair Shop is on his way here with his bodyguards, two of them—'
Shakily, Fara watched the mayor go out. The crisis was at hand. He braced himself, thought: 'Let them come, let them—'
It was easier than he had thought—for the men who entered the shop turned pale when they saw the holstered revolver. There was a violence of blustering, nevertheless, that narrowed finally down to:
'Look here,' the man said, 'we've got your note for twelve thousand one hundred credits. You're not going to deny you owe that money.'
'I'll buy it back,' said Fara in a stony voice, 'for exactly half, not a cent more.'
The strong-jawed young man looked at him for a long time. 'We'll take it,' he said finally, curtly.
Fara said: 'I've got the agreement here—'
His first customer was old man Miser Lan Harris. Fara stared at the long-faced oldster with a vast surmise, and his first, amazed comprehension came of how the weapon shop must have settled on Harris' lot—by arrangement.
It was an hour after Harris had gone that Creel's mother stamped into the shop.
She closed the door.
'Well,' she said, 'you did it, eh? Good work. I'm sorry if I seemed rough with you when you came to my place, but we weapon-shop supporters can't afford to take risks for those who are not on our side.
'But never mind that. I've come to take Creel home. The important thing is to return everything to normal as quickly as possible.'
It was over; incredibly it was over. Twice, as he walked home that night, Fara stopped in midstride, and wondered if it had not all been a dream. The air was like wine. The little world of Glay spread before him, green and gracious, a peaceful paradise where time had stood still.
There's no use trying to describe either Unthahorsten or his surroundings, because, for one thing, a good many million years had passed since 1942 Anno Domini, and, for another, Unthahorsten wasn't on Earth, technically speaking. He was doing the equivalent of standing in the equivalent of a laboratory. He was preparing to test his time machine.
Having turned on the power, Unthahorsten suddenly realized that the Box was empty. Which wouldn't do at all. The device needed a control, a three-dimensional solid which would react to the conditions of another age. Otherwise Unthahorsten couldn't tell, on the machine's return, where and when it had been. Whereas a solid in the Box would automatically be subject to the entropy and cosmic ray bombardment of the other era, and Unthahorsten could measure the changes, both qualitative and quantitative, when the machine returned. The Calculators could then get to work and, presently, tell Unthahorsten that the Box had briefly visited 1,000,000 A.D., 1,000
A.D., or 1 A.D., as the case might be.
Not that it mattered, except to Unthahorsten. But he was childish in many respects.
There was little time to waste. The Box was beginning to glow and shiver.
Unthahorsten stared around wildly, fled into the next glossatch, and groped in a storage bin there. He came up with an armful of peculiar-looking stuff. Uh-huh. Some of the discarded toys of his son Snowen, which the boy had brought with him when he had passed over from Earth, after mastering the necessary technique. Well, Snowen needed this junk no longer. He was conditioned, and had put away childish things. Besides, though Unthahorsten's wife kept the toys for sentimental reasons, the experiment was more important.
Unthahorsten left the glossatch and dumped the assortment into the Box, slamming the cover shut just before the warning signal flashed. The Box went away.
The manner of its departure hurt Unthahorsten's eyes.
He waited.
And he waited.
Eventually he gave up and built another time machine, with identical results.
Snowen hadn't been annoyed by the loss of his old toys, nor had Snowen's mother, so Unthahorsten cleaned out the bin and dumped the remainder of his son's childhood relics in the second time machine's Box.
