d. "Doesn't feel right," he
said. "All out of balance."

"Look at the barrel," Johnny said quietly.

Greg looked. There was no hole in the end of the barrel. "This thing's
crazy," he said.

"And then some," Johnny said. "You haven't had this out of the case
since you took it from the pack?"

"Just once," said Tom. "And I put it right back. I hardly looked at it.
Look, maybe it's just a new model Dad got."

"It's no new model. I'm not even sure it's a gun," Johnny said. "Doesn't
_feel_ like a gun."

"What happens when you push the stud here?" Greg asked.

Johnny licked his lips nervously. "Try it," he said.

Greg leveled the thing at the rear wall of the lounge and pressed the
stud. There was a sharp buzzing sound, and a blinding flash of blue
light against the wall. It looked for all the world like the flash of a
live power line shorting out. They squinted at the flash, rubbed their
eyes....

And stared at the wall. Or at what was left of the wall, because most of
the wall was gone. The metal had bellied out in a six-foot hole into the
storage hold beyond....

Johnny Coombs whistled. "This thing did _that_?" he whispered.

"It must have...."

"But there's no gun ever made that could do that." He walked over to the
hole in the wall. "That's half-inch steel plate. There's no way to pack
that kind of energy into a hand gun."

They stared at the innocent-looking weapon in Greg's hand. "Whatever it
is, Dad must have put it in the gun-case."

"Yes, he must have," Johnny said.

"Well, don't you see what that means? _Dad must have found it
somewhere_. Somewhere out here in the Belt ... a gun that no man could
have made...."

He took the weapon, ran his finger along the gleaming barrel. "I
wonder," he said, "what else Dad might have found out there."

* * * * *

Somewhere below them they heard a hatch clang shut, and even deeper in
the ship generator motors began throbbing in a steady even rhythm. In
the silence of the lounge they could hear their own breathing, and
outside a thousand tiny sounds of the ship's activity were audible.

But now they had attention only for the odd-shaped piece of metal in
Greg's hand, and for the hole that gaped in the wall.

"You think that _this_ was what Dad found?" Greg said. "The Big Strike
he told Johnny about?"

"It must be part of it," Tom said.

"But what is it? And where did it come from? It doesn't make sense,"
Greg protested.