for a point just under his ear.

She connected and a fan of blood sprayed her full in the face.

I grabbed my knife with my left hand as it fell, scrambled to my feet,
and drove the knife at his throat in a round-house swing that happened
to come handiest at the time. The point went through his flesh like
nothing and jarred against his spine with a violence that I hoped would
shock into nervous insensibility the stoutest medulla oblongata and
prevent any dying reprisals on his part.

I got my wish, in large part. He swayed, straightened, dropped his gun,
and fell flat on his back, giving his skull a murderous crack on the
concrete for good measure. He lay there and after a half dozen gushes
the bright blood quit pumping strongly out of his neck.

Then came the part that was like a dying reprisal, though obviously not
being directed by him as of now. And come to think of it, it may have
had its good points.

* * * * *

The girl, who was clearly a most cool-headed cuss, snatched for his gun
where he'd dropped it, to make sure she got it ahead of me. She
snatched, yes--and then jerked back, letting off a sizable squeal of
pain, anger, and surprise.

Where we'd seen his gun hit the concrete there was now a tiny
incandescent puddle. A rill of blood snaked out from the pool around his
head and touched the whitely glowing puddle and a jet of steam sizzled
up.

Somehow the gun had managed to melt itself in the moment of its owner
dying. Well, at any rate that showed it hadn't contained any gunpowder
or ordinary chemical explosives, though I already knew it operated on
other principles from the way it had been used to paralyze me. More to
the point, it showed that the gun's owner was the member of a culture
that believed in taking very complete precautions against its gadgets
falling into the hands of strangers.

But the gun fusing wasn't quite all. As the girl and me shifted our gaze
from the puddle, which was cooling fast and now glowed red like the
blood--as we shifted our gaze back from the puddle to the dead man, we
saw that at three points (points over where you'd expect pockets to be)
his gray clothing had charred in small irregularly shaped patches from
which threads of black smoke were twisting upward.

Just at that moment, so close as to make me jump in spite of years of
learning to absorb shocks stoically--right at my elbow it seemed to (the
girl jumped too, I may say)--a v