"I should take you!" complained Thal bitterly. "But you have killed all these men. Their friends and chieftains are honor bound to cut your throat! And you shot Merk, but he ran away, and he will be summoning his friends to come and kill you now! This is shame! This is--" Then he said hopefully: "Your strange weapon! How many men can you fight? If fifty, we may live to ride away. If more, we may even reach Don Loris' castle. How many?" "We'll see what we see," said Hoddan dourly. "But I'd better charge these other pistols. You can come with me, or wait. I haven't killed these men. They're only stunned. They'll come around presently." He went out of the warehouse, carrying the bag which was again loaded with uncharged stun-pistols. He went back to the grid's control room. He pushed it open and entered for the second time. The red-headed man swore and rubbed at his hand. The man who'd smiled unpleasantly lay in a heap on the floor. The second unshaven man jittered visibly at sight of Hoddan. "I'm back," said Hoddan politely, "for more kilowatts." He put his bag conveniently close to the terminals at which his pistols could be recharged. He snapped open a pistol butt and presented it to the electric contacts. "Quaint customs you have here," he said conversationally. "Robbing a newcomer. Resenting his need for a few watts of power that comes free from the sky." The stun-pistol clicked. He snapped the butt shut and opened another, which he placed in contact for charging. "Making him act," he said acidly, "with manners as bad as the local ones. Going at him with knives so he has to be resentful in his turn." The second stun-pistol clicked. He closed it and began to charge a third. He said severely: "Innocent tourists--relatively innocent ones, anyhow--are not likely to be favorably impressed with Darth!" He had the charging process going swiftly now. He began to charge a fourth weapon. "It's particularly bad manners," he added sternly, "to stand there grinding your teeth at me while your friend behind the desk crawls after an old-fashioned chemical gun to shoot me with." He snapped the fourth pistol shut and went after the man who'd dropped down behind a desk. He came upon that man, hopelessly panicked, just as his hands closed on a clumsy gun that was supposed to set off a chemical explosive to propel a metal bullet. "Don't!" said Hoddan severely. "If I have to shoot you at this range, you'll have blisters!" He took the weapon out of the other man's hands. He went back and finished charging the rest of the pistols. He returned most of them to his bag, though he stuck others in his belt and pockets to the point where he looked like the fiction-tape pictures of space pirates. But he knew what space pirates were actually like. He moved to the door. As a last thought, he picked up the bullet-firing weapon.