"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 seconds. Then Ronald Black said evenly, "And
what do you conclude, Boles?"
Phil looked at him. "I'd conclude that Norm Vaughn was right about there
having been some fairly intelligent creatures here once. The Geests ran
into them and exterminated them as they usually do. That might have been
a couple of centuries back. Then, thirty-six years ago, one of their
scouts slipped in here without being spotted, found human beings on the
planet, looked around a little and left again."
He took the Geest gun from his pocket, hefted it in his hand. "We have
the evidence here," he said. "We had it all the time and didn't know
it."
Ronald Black said dryly, "We may have the evidence. But we have no
slightest proof at all now that that's what it is."
"I know it," Phil said. "Now Beulah's gone ... well, we couldn't even
prove that William Boles never left the planet, for that matter. There
weren't any records to speak of being kept in the early days." He was
silent a moment. "Supposing," he said, "we went ahead anyway. We hand
the gun in, with the story I just told you--"