1911

The day after I said I was going to make a pistol, I regretted saying it.

Even with the rifle, I’d had a starting point. I could set it on the table, compare it with guns from the future, find the parts that were inconvenient, and change them. It already had a barrel and a magazine, and Paul Mauser had already made an excellent bolt.

In my previous life, all I’d done was interpret existing designs and cautiously suggest improvements based on simulation results. I’d never decided how something worked or what its dimensions should be from scratch.

I had no experience making a gun from a blank sheet of paper.

I dug through my memories as best I could and drew the side profile of a pistol.

The grip would house a detachable magazine, and a long slide would cover the barrel. When fired, the barrel and slide would move back together a little before unlocking, after which the slide alone would continue rearward. It would extract the casing, cock the hammer, and compress a spring. Then the spring would push the slide forward, picking up the next round from the magazine and feeding it into the chamber.

It was a design I’d seen countless times in games and videos in my previous life.

‘I remember it pretty well, at least.’

Confidently, I began drawing a cross-section.

The problem wasn’t what it looked like.

How far were the barrel and slide supposed to move together?

Was it 3 mm? Or 5 mm? Maybe even more? Where exactly was the link that pulled the rear of the barrel down attached? In my memory, there seemed to be a short link beneath the barrel, with a pin passing through both sides...

The trouble was, I couldn’t remember the size or angle of that hole at all.

I was sure the recoil spring was beneath the barrel, so I drew a long tube under it and put the spring inside. But when I drew the slide in its rearward position over it, the spring guide rod collided with the frame.

In the end, I erased it and drew it again. But this time, there wasn’t enough room for the barrel to drop.

In the third drawing, after yet another round of erasing and redrawing, the top round in the magazine pointed toward the underside of the barrel. It would have to turn almost ninety degrees to enter the chamber.

“Why are you glaring at it like that?”

As I clutched my head and worked on the drawing, Oskar came over to my desk.

“I’m thinking.”

“It looks like you’re scolding the paper.”

I covered my notebook with my arm.

“Don’t look.”

“Yesterday, you said you were making one from scratch.”

“I am.”

He saw the mountain of eraser crumbs on my desk and grinned.

“Looks like it’s going great.”

“Hey, get out.”

After chasing Oskar away, I picked up my pencil again.

I knew the broad outline, but knowing the broad outline wasn’t the same as knowing the answer. Remembering the shape of a bridge didn’t mean I could build one without calculating the load. A pistol, too, had countless numbers hidden between the drawing and the actual machine.

Still, I couldn’t give up.

First, I decided on the external design.

Shorter and lighter than the C96. A magazine inside the grip. Easy to hold with one hand. Most of the barrel concealed inside the slide. Few moving parts exposed on the outside.

Just as I had with the rifle, I wrote down the requirements.

It had to be operable with one hand.

The magazine had to be replaceable as a whole.

It had to use the force of firing to eject the casing and load the next round.

It had to have a slide that could be pulled back by hand.

It must not fire before the slide was fully closed.

It had to fire only one round per trigger pull, even if the trigger was held down.

It must not fire if dropped.

It had to be possible to field-strip it without tools.

Then I drew the positions of the parts again.

I added locking lugs to the rear of the barrel so they would engage with grooves inside the slide. Immediately after firing, the two would move back together. Then, when a pin fixed to the frame caught the link beneath the barrel, the rear of the barrel would drop, disengaging it from the slide.

My memory wasn’t perfect, but the mechanism probably worked roughly like that.

I stacked several sheets of paper and drew the parts separately. I drew the frame on one sheet, the barrel on another, and the slide on a third, then pinned them together and tried moving them.

At first, it seemed plausible.

When I pushed the sheet with the slide drawn on it backward, the barrel moved with it.

A little farther along, the barrel was supposed to drop.

But when I layered the sheets, the rear of the barrel pressed down on the magazine before the link could move. If the real parts had moved like that, they would have crushed the magazine and every round in it.

“What? Why won’t it drop?”

When I changed the link’s position, the barrel dropped too soon instead.

If the lock disengaged while the pressure in the chamber was still high right after firing, it would be dangerous. I couldn’t calculate the exact pressure or timing, but I knew the chamber had to stay locked until the bullet had left the muzzle.

I moved the paper model around for a long while, then finally set it down on the desk.

‘It moved so smoothly in the videos.’

A real pistol operates so quickly after the trigger is pulled that it’s hard to follow with the eye. But in that brief moment, every part still had to move in the right order.

Lock, fire, recoil, unlock, extract, eject, return, feed a new round, and lock again.

If even one step happened too early or too late, the gun would jam or break.

I tried writing down the dimensions I could remember in my notebook.

Barrel length.

Slide travel.

Magazine angle.

Grip angle.

Spring length.

But when I actually tried to write them down, nothing came to mind. In the end, question marks kept piling up instead of numbers.

‘Who memorizes things like this down to the measurements...’

Even during dinner, the paper slide kept moving in my mind. Mother asked how my lessons had gone that day, but I couldn’t answer.

“Bessie?”

“Yes?”

“How many more times are you planning to drop bread into your soup?”

Only then did I realize that five pieces of bread had fallen into my soup.

Oskar burst out laughing.

“Bessie’s broken because of her pistol.”

“Hey, Oskar. No dessert for you tonight.”

“Why do you get to decide that?”

“Tsk...! If your older sister says not to, then don’t.”

Father looked from one of us to the other, then asked with an intrigued expression,

“Have you finished the pistol drawings?”

I hesitated for a moment.

If this had been the rifle, I would have bluffed and said it was going well. But this time, I didn’t. I’d barely gotten anything done, so there was no point pretending otherwise.

“I’ve only drawn the shape.”

“Then you’ll be able to make it soon.”

“No.”

I set down my fork.

“I can imagine what shape it should be, but I don’t know the measurements needed to make it work.”

Father looked as if he didn’t understand.

“If you know how it moves, can’t you have Mauser work out the numbers?”

He wasn’t wrong.

But if I left everything to Mauser, it wouldn’t feel like a pistol I’d made myself.

“I’ll try making a model first.”

“At the factory?”

“No. For now, out of wood.”

Father looked a little disappointed, but Mother seemed relieved.

“If it’s made of wood, it won’t explode.”

In fact, the pistol in my drawings couldn’t even load a single round, let alone explode, but I kept quiet about that.

The next day, during geometry class, I asked Dr. Schneider how to calculate the movement of interlocking parts.

Dr. Schneider was delighted that I’d finally taken an interest in geometry, but the doctor’s expression changed when the pistol drawing I’d hidden beneath my desk caught the doctor’s eye.

“Is this what you were trying to calculate?”

“I could find out how far each part moves, couldn’t I?”

“You can draw the trajectories. But geometry alone can’t tell you about force, friction, or how the materials deform.”

The doctor redrew the link and pin on the paper as simple lines. The doctor marked with numbers how changing the pin’s position affected when and how far the rear of the barrel dropped.

“First decide what movement you want, then find the shape that will produce it. Don’t start with a shape you’ve settled on in your head and try to force it to move.”

I winced.

Until then, I’d insisted on getting the shape right first because I wanted it to look like a pistol from the future. As the doctor said, I needed to decide when and how far the barrel should drop, then work out the shape of the link.

“Then how do you find the exact forces?”

“You measure and test. Calculations can reduce the number of tests, but they can’t eliminate them.”

After class, I marked several possible pin positions on my paper model. Moving just one pin made the same parts follow completely different paths.

Knowing what the finished product of the future looked like was like knowing the destination. But I still had to find the right way to get there.

That night, I spread out a fresh sheet of paper and started drawing again. But this time, I didn’t draw the whole pistol. I drew only one short line running from the magazine to the chamber.

To make an automatic pistol, I first had to understand where a single round went.

The rest of the gun could come later.