ou both gone out of your minds?" Jackson demanded.

"No," Celia said. She laughed with a sudden shakiness in her tone,
added, "Though I don't know why we haven't! We've thought of the
possibility that the rest of you might feel it would be better if Phil
and I weren't around any more, Wayne."

"That's nonsense!" Jackson said.

"Maybe. Anyway, don't try it. You wouldn't be doing yourselves a favor
even if it worked. Better listen now."

"Listen to what?" Jackson demanded exasperatedly. "I'm telling you it
will be all right, if we just don't make any mistakes. The only real
pieces of evidence were your duplicator and the original gun. Since
we're rid of those--"

"We're not rid of the gun, Wayne," Phil said. "I still have it. I
haven't dared get rid of it."

"You ... what do you mean?"

"I was with Beulah in the Fort Roye hospital when she died," Phil said.
He added to Ronald Black, "That was two days after the ship brought the
seven of you in."

Black nodded, his eyes alert. "Major Jackson informed me."

"She was very weak, of course, but quite lucid," Phil went on. "She
talked a good deal--reminiscing, and in a rather happy vein. She finally
mentioned the Geest gun, and how Uncle William used to keep us boys ...
Wayne and me ... spell-bound with stories about the Gunderland Battle,
and how he'd picked the gun up there."

Jackson began, "And what does--"

"He didn't get the gun there," Phil said. "Beulah said Uncle William
came in from Earth with the first shipment of settlers and was never off
Roye again in his life."

"He ... then--"

Phil said, "Don't you get it? He found the gun right here on Roye.
Beulah thought it was awfully funny. William was an old fool, she said,
but the best liar she'd ever known. He came in with the thing one day
after he'd been traipsing around the back country, and said it looked
'sort of' like pictures of Geest guns he'd seen, and that he was going
to put the inscription on it and have some fun now and then." Phil took
a deep breath. "Uncle William found it lying in a pile of ashes where
someone had made camp a few days before. He figured it would have been a
planetary speedster some rich sportsmen from Earth had brought in for a
taste of outworld hunting on Roye, and that one of them had dumped the
broken oddball gun into the fire to get rid of it.

"That was thirty-six years ago. Beulah remembered it happened a year
before I was born."

There was silence for some seco