Vall picked up one of the kidnap-story cards and glanced at it.

"I notice there's a fair verbal description of these firearms, and
mention of electric whips," he said. "I'm curious about where they
came from."

"Well, this is how we reconstructed them, Chief's Assistant," one of
the girls said, handing him a couple of sheets of white drawing paper.

The sketches had been done with soft pencil; they bore repeated
erasures and corrections. That of the whip showed a cylindrical
handle, indicated as twelve inches in length and one in diameter,
fitted with a thumb-switch.

"That's definitely Second Level Khiftan," Vall said, handing it back.
"Made of braided copper or silver wire and powered with a little
nuclear-conversion battery in the grip. They heat up to about two
hundred centigrade; produce really painful burns."

"Why, that's beastly!" Dalla exclaimed.

"Anything on the Khiftan Sector is." Skordran Kirv looked at the four
slaves at the tables. "We don't have a really bad case here, now. A
few of these people were lash-burned horribly, though."

Vall was looking at the other sketches. One was a musket, with a wide
butt and a band-fastened stock; the lock-mechanism, vaguely flintlock,
had been dotted in tentatively. The other was a long pistol, similarly
definite in outline and vague in mechanical detail; it was merely a
knob-butted miniature of the musket.