Haendl came back; yes, they were guns. Haendl was carrying one.
"Ours!" he crowed. "That Tropile must've looted our armory at Princeton. By the looks of what's here, I doubt if he left a single round of ammunition. What the hell, they're more use here!"
"But what are we going to do with guns?"
Haendl looked at him with savage amusement. "Shoot."
Citizen Germyn said: "Please, Citizen. Tell me what this is all about."
Haendl sat down next to him on the warm, quivering floor and began fitting cartridges into a clip.
"We're fighting," he explained gleefully. "Tropile did it all. You've been shanghaied and so have all the rest of us. Tropile's alive! He's part of the Pyramid communications network—don't ask me how. But he's there and he has been hauling men and weapons and God knows what all up from Earth—you're on the binary planet now, you know—and we're going to bust things up so the Pyramids will never be able to put them back together again. Understand? Well, it doesn't matter if you don't. All you have to understand is that when I tell you to shoot this gun, you shoot."