Then the rest of the Westfield troop were there, circling around to flank the enemy and pumping death. It was a rout--in minutes, the gang had stampeded. Arch leaned on his rifle and felt vomit rising in his throat. Culquhoun clapped his shoulder. "Ye did richt well, laddie," he rumbled. "No bad at all." "What's happening?" groaned Arch. "What's become of the world?" Culquhoun took out his pipe and began tamping it. "Why, a simple shift of the military balance of power," he answered. "Once again we have cheap, easily operated weapons which everyone can own and which are the equal of anything it's practical for a government to use. Last time it was the flintlock musket, right? And we got the American and French Revolutions. This time it's capacitite. "So the Soviet dictatorship is doomed. But we've got a rough time ahead of us, because there are enough unstable elements in our own society to make trouble. Our traditional organizations just aren't prepared to handle them when they're suddenly armed. "We'll learn how fast enough, I imagine. There's going to be order again, if only because the majority of people are decent, hard-working fellows who won't put up with much more of this sort of thing. But there has to be a transition period, and what counts is surviving that." "If I hadn't--Colin, it's enough to make a man believe in demoniac possession." "Nonsense!" snorted the other. "I told you before, if you hadn't invented this stuff, somebody else would have. It wasn't you that made it by the ton, all over the country. It wasn't you that thought up this notion of finishing the Iron Curtain governments--a brilliant scheme, I might add, well worth whatever price we have to pay at home. "But it _is_ you, my boy, who's going to have to get us tooled up to last the transition. Can you do it?" * * * * * Fundamental changes are seldom made consciously. Doubtless the man in the fifth-century Roman street grumbled about all these barbarian immigrants, but he did not visualize the end of an empire. The Lancashire industrialist who fired his craftsmen and installed mechanical looms was simply making a profitable investment. And Westfield, Massachusetts, was only adopting temporary survival measures.