"No, just an ordinary gas gun," Carstairs told him. "But we can be pretty sure his head wasn't taken off by a red hot buzz saw. The others must have orthos." He turned on Phil and grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket. "Look here, clown," he said quietly, "who are those others? You must have known someone was going to break in here tonight. You were counting on that door being open."
"We are a bit like jackals, aren't we?" Phil remarked dreamily.
Carstairs twisted his jacket. "Who were they?"
Phil didn't react, but he did jerk around suddenly when he heard Moe Brimstine say metallically, "Whatcha want, Mack?"
Llewellyn had pulled out the stub of gray robot arm sticking from the wall.
"Quit that," Carstairs ordered curtly, letting go of Phil.
"Take it easy, Carstie old boy," Llewellyn said with a smiling flash of white teeth. "Here's a bit of an odd thing. See where whatever sliced this robot arm cut into the wall beyond? Well, follow back from the cut in a straight line through the slice in the robot arm."
Like the others, Phil followed Llewellyn's directions and saw that the straight line ended in a deep cut in the floor a half dozen feet behind them.
"I don't git it," Buck said. "You mean somebody shot some kind of beam from the next floor under us?"
Llewellyn said, "Hardly. The evidence points to a gun that shoots in opposite directions at the same time. I fancy that if we'd have looked behind us at the head of the stairs, we'd have seen some cuts mirror-imaging those in the mesh."