y
hand arms of a regulated deadliness be manufactured as the armament
of nations. The ruling had been carefully considered for other
secondary effects, for any nation growing over-centralized and
militaristic was likely to arm its citizens universally for greater
military power by numbers, and then suffer the natural consequences of
having armed their public opinion.

An armed man need not vote to be counted, and once having learned that
lesson, the feeling that an armed man carried his bill of rights in
his pocket made this the first clause of the written and unwritten
constitutions of many suddenly democratic nations. "The right of the
yoemanry to carry arms shall not be abridged." They kept their guns.

And with weapons instantly available to hot tempers, dueling came back
into custom in most places.

All this had little effect on the large calm manufacturing countries
who had run the UN and now ran the FN, but it made easy their decision
that since, in space, policing is almost impossible, the citizens who
venture there must be armed to protect themselves. Thus, in spite of
the continued outcry of a minority of Christian moralists, a holster
pocket was now built into all space suits.

Bryce had grown up in a famine country, an almost unpoliced area, and
weapons had been as familiar to his hands as fingers since he had
passed twelve. And when, as a steel-worker, he had been one of the
first settlers in the foundry towns of the Asteroid Belt, he had found
life no gentler there. But it was all right as far as he was
concerned. He had heard of safer and duller ways to live but had never
wanted them. Life as a moonbased transport manager had been a short
interval of nonviolence, five years of startling calm which he had not
yet grown accustomed to.

The gun fitted into his hand as comfortably as his thumb, or as the
handshake of an old and trusted friend, but it was useless here.
Reluctantly he slipped it back into his pocket and began walking
again. A director of UT couldn't shoot people on intuition.

He had barely stopped for a count of ten, and there was still distance
between them when he had turned, but the follower could be walking
faster now, narrowing the distance between them.

If he had waited and fired, an inspection of the man's pockets could
have confirmed his judgment by the finding of an assassin's illegal
needle gun. That alone might be enough to satisfy the police if he
were still merely a spac