Dobbler was fascinated. Guns everywhere, of every shape and form and description, for every taste and wallet. They could be so cheap and so expensive, so demure and so awesome, so ridiculous and so sublime.

He wondered about the men who worshiped them with such ardency, whose lives were bounded by their complexities or liberated by their possibilities.

What was there to see in all this?

Well, passion for order for one thing. So much of gun culture was about parts, units, systems, things fitting together. There were whole institutions that existed merely to sell parts of obsolete weapons. So there was a puzzle aspect to it, a sense of bringing order to chaos.

Power? The damned things were so absolute in their meaning that yes, there had to be the lure of power. But beauty also. Some of them, he was stunned to discover, were strangely beautiful. He especially liked one called a Luger and another called a New Frontier single action.

And freedom, or at least the illusion of it, by the narrowest of definitions. To Dobbler, freedom was essentially intellectual, but he supposed that to someone in a more primal world, it was physical – freedom of movement, freedom from harassment, freedom from being messed around with. Outdoor freedom. And a man who holds a gun in his hand must feel it passionately. No government can rule you absolutely. Yours is always the last option.

And masculinity. Nothing soft and feminine about guns: they were too direct, too brutal. The phallic business so provocative to Freudians didn’t seem to him to be very helpful; if these guns were penises, their purchasers were too self-oblivious to know or care.

And then again: data. To him a gun was just a gun, but to some of these people it was obviously an endless font of information – a history, a set of specifications, an involvement with a company, usually a corporate entity, a connection to certain traditions, a whole hierarchy of meanings that yielded yet more meanings and had to be deciphered like some runic code. To shoot wasn’t enough: there was something almost Borgesian about the labyrinths the damned things conjured in the imagination.

The clock ticked away and the pages fled by and after a bit, he ceased looking at the display ads from the gun wholesale places, but instead, fascinated, looked to smaller fry: the columns and columns of classifieds, where more oblique needs were addressed. It was like The New York Review of Books personal ads, only for guns and their affiliated phenomena, not sex.

REMINTON 25, Rifle in mint. cond, 25-20, 99% original blue, mint bore, wood perfict, SN 26827, 100% unaltered, these little pumps are a joy, only $895

Pre-64, M70 220 SWIFT, Super grade, 98% overall, nice dark wood, factory jeweled bolt body and extractor, exc. bore, $1,595.

LUGER list and price guide, 200 + quality collectors Lugers and accessories for sale on each bi-monthly list. Send $1 for sample or $5 for year subscription.

MILITARY RIFLES OF JAPAN, 1989 Third Edition, $37. Postpaid! SASE for discriptive flyers. At your dealer or Fred Honeycutt, 6731 Pilgrim Way, Palm Frond Village, FLA 33411.

DISCOUNT GUN BOOKS: ALL SHIPPED FREE. Great New Book, Winchester, An American Legend, Wilson, $58.50. Colt Encyclopedia II, Cochran, $58.50. Discount Gun Books, P.O. Box 762, Nescopeck, PA 18635.

It was somewhere in here, lost amid the lists of old guns, new books and reloading components and magazines for pistols that hadn’t been manufactured since World War I that something began to tick in his mind.

They hid deep in the timber, after disappearing down many remote lumber roads. It was a small, one-room hunting cabin, built years ago, a rustic place of logs and wooden roof. Bob swiftly shot three squirrels with a Mini-14, then set about to skin them for the stewpot.

“Is there anything I should be doing?” asked Nick.

“Just don’t get in the way,” said Bob.

“Now I think we should – ”

“Memphis, don’t explain anything to me. All right?”

Nick, fuming and pissed at himself and at Bob, had never known anybody so used to silence and so uninterested in conversation, so hidden behind an impassive face. But it wasn’t the impassivity of relaxation – that was a complete illusion, Nick now saw, like some kind of mask to keep the world away while its owner shrewdly calculated moves two jumps down the line.

“Where are we?” asked Nick.

“Ouachitas,” said Bob. “Nobody’s going to find us here, unless we want them to.”

“Ah,” said Nick. “Um, what are your thoughts on what we do next?”

Bob just went on skinning the squirrels.

“I haven’t figured yet.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking,” said Nick.

“Uh-oh,” said Bob.

“I still think the damned key is Annex B. Now, where is Annex B? Well, it’s got to be in Washington. In fact, everything’s in Washington. I think that’s where we ought to go. We can do some nosing around, maybe get a line on it. Then…”

He had nothing to say after the then.

“Now, don’t you think they might figure that out?” Bob asked.

“Well…” said Nick.

“One thing I know. In a war, you don’t go where they expect you. That earns you a body bag.”

“Well, then…what?”

“We lay up here a few more days, till the buzz dies down. We both need sleep; I’ll kill a deer tomorrow so we’ll eat good. Then I’ll figure something.”

“Look, I have to tell you as a professional criminal investigator of twelve years’ experience, we just aren’t – ”

“Young Mr. Pork Memphis, I am not a fancy government man. I only studied at the University of Vietnam. I don’t know anything about investigating anything. But I do know the key to this damn thing is a rare rifle that has been used at least once in mortal circumstances. And I know its owner is one of the best shots in America and one of the great ballistic technicians, as well as having spent almost forty years in a wheelchair. And I have a funny feeling that he works for this RamDyne. That’s the only card I got, so it’s the card I’m going to play. Now let me think on it. Go for a walk or something. But don’t get lost. I don’t have time to go looking for you.”

Well, maybe I’ll do some thinking too, thought Nick, consigning himself to be the only one to press against the mysteries of Annex B.

Dr. Dobbler licked his lips nervously, swallowed a time or two, and then knocked on the door.

“Yes?”

“Colonel Shreck?”

“Yes, come in, Doctor.”

Dobbler stepped into Shreck’s office, to find Payne and the colonel bent in conversation.

“What is it, Doctor?”

“Ah, I have a – a plan.”

The colonel looked at Dobbler. Russell Isandhlwana used to look at him like that, more with pity than anything else. In some ways Russell and the colonel were the same man. They just took what they wanted. And Dobbler knew that he desperately wanted to please them both.

“All right,” said Shreck, waiting for more.

“Bob is too sharp and suspicious to be taken as we had hoped. He’s always watching. We must beat him on his strength, which is patience. We must put something before him so subtly that not a man in a thousand would notice it. But we must put it there and let him sniff at it and go away, sniff again and go away, reconnoiter and re-reconnoiter, until he has at last satisfied himself that the way is clear. We must nurse him in slowly, never being greedy, draw him in with utmost care and discipline, being as ready as he is to disengage if conditions do not favor us. We must be more patient. Then and only then – ”

Shreck was impatient.