"With this, sir." Cardeen held out his automatic pistol for inspection.
"Oh, I hadn't studied it ... a pellet-projector...."
"Pellet! Do you call a four-seventy-five slug a pellet?"
"Not much of that, really ... it shoots eight times—shoot all eight of them at her. None of them will touch her."
"What? I will not! One of those slugs will go through three women like her, front to back in line."
"I will, then." The pistol leaped into Garlock's hand. "Hold up one hand, Brownie, and catch 'em. Don't let 'em splash—no deformation, so he can recognize his own pellets."
Holding the unfamiliar weapon in a clumsy, highly unorthodox grip—something like a schoolgirl's first attempt—Garlock glanced once at Lola's upraised palm and eight shots roared out as fast as the gases of explosion could operate the mechanism. The pistol's barrel remained rigidly motionless under all the stress of ultra-rapid fire. Lola's slim, deeply-tanned arm did not even quiver under the impact of that storm of heavy bullets against her apparently unsupported hand. No one saw those bullets strike that gently-curved right palm, but everyone saw them drop into her cupped left hand, like drops of water dripping rapidly from the end of an icicle into a bowl.
"Here are your pellets, General Cardeen." Lola handed them to him with a smile.
"Holy—Jumping—Snakes!" the general said, and:
"Wotta torpedo!" came the gangster's envious thought.