to carry when traveling, or wherever proper food may be
unobtainable. That is for the company; soon we put it on the market, and
make lots of money. But this other, that is my own private work."
Dunmore had come in while Varcek was speaking and had seated himself
beside his wife.
"Don't let him kid you, Colonel," he said. "Anton's just as keen
about that dollar as the rest of us. I don't know what he's cooking
up, up there in the attic, but I'll give ten-to-one we'll be selling
it in twenty-five-cent packages inside a year, and selling plenty of
them.... Oh, and speaking about that dollar; how did you make out with
Gresham and his friends?"
"I didn't. They'd expected to pay about twenty thousand for the
collection; Rivers's offer has them stopped. And even if they could go
over twenty-five, I think Rivers would raise them. He's afraid to let
them get the collection; Pierre Jarrett and Karen Lawrence intended
using their share of it to go into the old-arms business, in competition
with him."
"Uh-huh, that's smart," Dunmore approved. "It's always better to take a
small loss stopping competition than to let it get too big for you. You
save a damn-sight bigger loss later."
"How soon do you think the pistols will be sold?" Gladys asked.
"Oh, in about a month, at the outside," Rand said, continuing to explain
what had to be done first.
"Well, I'm glad of that," Varcek commented. "I never liked those things,
and after what happened ... The sooner they can be sold, the better."
Breakfast finally ended, and Varcek and Dunmore left for the Premix
plant. Rand debated for a moment the wisdom of speaking to Gladys about
the missing pistols, then decided to wait until his suspicions were
better verified. After a few minutes in the gunroom, going over Lane
Fleming's arms-books on the shelf over the workbench without finding any
trace of the book in which he had catalogued his collection, he got his
hat and coat, went down to the garage, and took out his car.
It had stopped raining for the time being; the dingy sky showed broken
spots like bits of bluing on a badly-rusted piece of steel. As he got out
of his car in front of Arnold Rivers's red-brick house, he was wondering
just how he was going to go about what he wanted to do. After all ...
The door of the shop was unlocked, and opened with a slow clanging of the
door-chime, but the interior was dark. All the shades had been pulled,
and the lights were out. For a
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