The Zap Gun

  And look what it got me. An automatic old-time hand-weapon pointed, in the service of the technical aspects of bodily safety, at the roof instead of my abdominal cavity.

  But that man was right. Kaminsky was telling me the truth, not blustering or engaging in hysteria. If Lilo and I fail, we will be destroyed. The blocs will then turn elsewhere for assistance. The heavy burden will fall on Jack Lanferman and his engineers, most especially Pete Freid—and God help them if they can’t do it either, because if so then they will follow Lilo and me into the grave.

  Grave, he thought, you were once asked where your victory is. I can point it out for you. It is here. Me.

  As he hailed a passing hopper car he realized suddenly, And I didn’t even get what I went into that building for; I couldn’t wangle a clear pic of Lilo.

  In that, too, Kaminsky had been correct. Lars Powderdry would have to wait until the meeting at Fairfax. He would not go in prepared.

  FOURTEEN

  Late that night, as he lay sleeping in his New York conapt, they came.

  “She’s all right now, Mr. Lars. So do you want to throw your clothes on? We’ll pack the rest for you and send it later. We’ll go directly up to the roof. Our ship is there.” The leader of the FBI men or CIA men or God knew what kind of men, anyhow professionals and accustomed to being awake and at their duties at this time of night, began, to Lars’ incredulity, to rummage in his dresser drawers and closets, gathering his clothes in an efficient, silent, machine-at-work encirclement, they were all around him, doing what they had been sent for. He stood in sleepy, animal-irritable, benumbed bewilderment.

  But out of this, full wakefulness at last came, and he padded to the bathroom.

  As he washed his face, one of the police in the other room said to him casually, “They’ve got three up, now.”

  “Three,” he said, moronically, confronting his sleep-squeezed, wrinkled face in the mirror. His hair hung like dry seaweed over his forehead and he automatically reached for a comb.

  “Three satellites. And this third one is different, or so the tracking-stations say.”

  Lars said, “Hedgehog?”

  “No, just different. It’s not a monitoring rig. It’s not gathering info. The first two were; now maybe they’ve done their job.”

  “They’ve proved,” Lars said, “by being able to remain up there, that we can’t bring them down.” No mass of sophisticated equipment jammed into the two sats was necessary to establish that; they might as well be hollow.

  The police wore commonplace gray-eminence style cloaks and looked, with their close-shaven heads, like excessively ascetic monks. They ascended to the roof of the conapt building. The man on Lars’ right, rather ruddy of complexion, said, “We understand you visited the Soviet Embassy this afternoon.”

  “That’s right,” Lars said.

  “That writ you have—”

  “It just forbids them to accost me,” he said. “I can accost them. They don’t have a writ.”

  The policeman said, “Any luck?”

  That did stump him. He pondered in silence, unable to answer. Did the query mean that these FBI or CIA people knew why he had gone to Kaminsky? At last, as they crossed the roof-field to the parked government ship, of a familiar, pursuit-class, great-cruising-range style, Lars said, “Well, he made his point. If you call that ‘luck.’”

  The ship rose. New York rapidly fell behind; they were out over the Atlantic. Lights, the habitations of man far below, dwindled and were lost to sight. Lars, peering back, felt an anxious, perhaps even neurotic regret; he experienced a sense of acute, pervasive loss. A loss which could never be compensated for, throughout all eternity.

  “How are you going to act?” asked the policeman at the controls.

  “I will give the absolute, total, entire, exhaustive, holistic, unconditional impression,” Lars said, “that I am being candid, naïve, open, honest, truthful, prolix, verbose—”

  Sharply the policeman said, “You stupid bastard—our lives are at stake!”

  Lars said somberly, “You’re a cog.”

  The policeman—both policemen, in fact—nodded.

  “Then you know,” Lars said, “that I can provide you with a gadget, a plowshare component of a sixty-stage guidance-system, which will light your cigars and make up new Mozart string quartets as background while another gadget, a plowshared component from some other multiplex item, serves you your food, even chews it for you and if necessary spits any and all seeds out, into a gadget—”

  “I can see,” one of the two police said to his companions, “why they hate these weapons fashion designers so goddam much. They’re fairies.”

  “No,” Lars said. “You’re wrong; that’s not what ails me. You want to know what ails me? How long before we reach Fairfax?”

  “Not long,” both policemen said simultaneously.

  Lars said, “I’ll do my best. What ails me is this. I’m a failure at my work. And that hurts a man; that makes him fearful. But I’m paid, or have been up to now, to be a failure. That’s what was wanted.”

  “You think, Powderdry,” the policeman seated beside him said, “that you and this Lilo Topchev can do it? Before they—” he pointed upward, an almost pious gesture, like that of some ancient tiller of the soil, a Job who had been burned and then burned again—“drop whatever it is they’re setting up their sat-net-work to make the calculations for? So when they do drop it, it’ll hit exactly where they want it? Like for instance, and this is my theory, turning the Pacific to steam and boiling us like a lot of Maine lobsters.”

  Lars was silent.

  “He’s not going to say,” the policeman at the controls said in a curiously mixed tone. There was anger in his voice but also grief. It was a small-boy sound, and Lars sympathized with it. He must have sounded like this himself, at times.

  Lars said, “At the Soviet Embassy they told me, and they meant it, that if Lilo and I came up with nothing or with only the pseudo-weps we’ve all made our livelihoods off of for decades now, they would kill me and her. And they will—if you don’t first.”

  At the controls the policeman said, calmly, “We will first. Because we’ll be closer. But not right away; there’ll be a suitable interval.”

  “Were you ordered to?” Lars asked, with curiosity. “Or is this your own idea?”

  No answer.

  “You can’t both kill me,” Lars said, a feeble attempt to be philosophical and flippant. It failed to be the former, and the latter was not appreciated. “Maybe you can,” he said, then. “St. Paul says a man can be born again. He can die and return to life. So if a man can be born twice why can’t he be assassinated twice?”

  “In your case,” the policeman beside him said, “it wouldn’t be assassination.”

  He did not elect to specify what it in fact would be. Perhaps, Lars thought, it was unspeakable. He felt the burden of their mingled hatred and fear and yet—their trust. They still had hope, as Kaminsky had. They had paid him for years not to produce a genuinely lethal device and now, with absolute naïvete, they clung to his skirts, begging, as Kaminsky had begged—and yet with the ugly undercurrent of threat, of murder in case he failed.

  He began to understand much that he had never realized about cog society.

  Being on the inside, knowing the real scoop, had not eased their lives. Like him, they still suffered. They were not puffed-up, prideful, shot full, as someone had said to him recently, with hubris. Knowing what was really going on made them uneasy—for the same reason that not knowing made the multitude, the pursaps, able to sleep in peace. Too much of a burden, that of maturity, of responsibility, lay on the cogs… even on these nonentities, these two cops, plus their cohorts back at his conapt who were undoubtedly right now stuffing all his cloaks, shirts, shoes and ties and underwear into boxes and suitcases.

  And the essence of the burden was this:

  They knew, as Lars himself knew, that their destiny lay in the hands of halfwits. It was as simple a
s that. Halfwits in both East and West, halfwits like Marshal Paponovich and General Nitz … halfwits, he realized, and felt his ears sear and flame red, like himself. It was the sheer mortality of the leadership that frightened the ruling circles. The last “superman,” the final Man of Iron, had been Josef Stalin. Since then—puny mortals, job-holders who made deals.

  And yet, the alternative was frightfully worse—and they all, including even the pursaps, knew this on some level.

  They were seeing, in the form of three alien satellites in their sky, that alternative now.

  At the controls the cop said, drawlingly, as if it didn’t matter quite so much, “There’s Iceland.”

  Below them the lights of Fairfax glowed.

  FIFTEEN

  Lights blazed, creating a golden-white tunnel for him to walk along. The right-to-the-bone wind from the glaciers to the north snapped longingly at him and he walked rapidly, the two police following. They were shivering too, the three of them making for the closest building as fast as possible.

  The building’s door sealed itself shut after them and warmth surrounded them. They halted, panting, the cops’ faces terribly red now and swollen, not so much from the sudden alterations of atmosphere but from tensions, as if they had feared being caught out there and left.

  Four members of the KVD, the Soviet Secret Police, in old-fashioned pre-cloak, ultra-unfashionable wool suits and narrow, pointed oxfords and knit ties, appeared from nowhere. It was as if they had literally detached themselves, super-science-wise, from the walls of the antechamber in which Lars and the two Wes-bloc United States police stood panting.

  Soundlessly, in a slow, ritualized moment of truth, the Wes-bloc and Soviet secret police exchanged identification. They must have carried, Lars decided, ten pounds of ident-material apiece. The swapping of cards and wallets and cephalic buzz-keys seemed to continue forever.

  And no one said anything. No one of the six so much as looked at any of the others. All attention was fastened fixedly on the ident-elements themselves.

  He walked off, found a hot-chocolate machine, put in a dime and soon had his paper cup; he stood sipping, feeling tired, conscious that his head ached and that he had not bothered to shave. He felt keenly the substandard, inappropriate and just plain rotten-looking sight that he presented. And at this time. In these circumstances.

  When the Wes-bloc police had concluded their swapping of ident-material with their Peep-East counterparts, he said caustically, “I feel like a victim of the Gestapo. Rousted out of bed, unshaved and with my worst clothes, having to face—”

  “You won’t be facing a Reichsgericht,” one of the Peep-East police said, overhearing. His English was a trifle artificial in its precision, learned probably from an audio edutape. Lars thought at once of robots, androids, and machinery in general; it was not a sanguine omen. Such plateau, toneless palaver, he recalled, was often associated with certain subforms of mental illness—in fact with brain-damage in general. Silently he groaned. He knew now what T.S. Eliot meant about the world ending with a whimper instead of a bang. It would end with his inaudible moan of complaint at the mechanical aspect of those who had him—and this was the true nature of his situation, whether he enjoyed facing it or not—in captivity.

  Wes-bloc, for reasons which would of course not be handed down to him to fathom or appreciate, was permitting the encounter with Lilo Topchev to take place under the jurisdiction of the Soviet Union. Perhaps it showed how little hope General Nitz and those in his entourage had that anything of worth might arise out of this.

  “I’m sorry,” Lars said to the Soviet policeman. “I don’t know any German. You’ll have to explain.” Or else take it up with Ol’ Orville, back at the apartment. In that other, lost now, world.

  The officer said, “That’s right, you Amis speak no foreign languages. But you have an office in Paris. How do you manage?”

  “I manage,” Lars said, “by having a mistress who speaks French, as well as Italian and Russian, and is terrific in bed, all of which you can find noted in your folio on me. She heads my Paris office.” He turned to the two United States police who had brought him here. “Are you leaving me?”

  They answered, with absolutely no sign of guilt or concern, “Yes, Mr. Lars.” A Greek chorus of abdication from human, moral responsibility. He was appalled. Suppose the Soviets decided not to return him? Where did Wes-bloc turn for its weapons designs from then on? Assuming of course that the investment of Terra’s atmosphere by the alien satellites was contained …

  But no one really believed it would be.

  That was it. That was what had made him expendable.

  “Come along, Mr. Lars.” The four Soviet KVB men gathered around him and he found himself escorted up a ramp, across a waiting room in which people— normal, individual, private men and women—sat waiting for transportation or for relatives. Uncanny, he thought; like a dream.

  He asked, “Can I stop and buy a magazine at the newsrack?”

  “Certainly.” The four KVB men steered him to the vast display and watched, like sociologists, as he searched for something to read that might please him. The Bible? he thought. Or perhaps I should try the other extreme.

  “How about this?” he asked the KVB men, holding up a comic book printed in cheap, lurid colors. “The Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan.” As near as he could tell, it was the worst rubbish on sale here at this enormous display counter. With a U.S. coin he paid the automatic clerk, which thanked him in its autonomic, nasal voice.

  As the five of them walked on, one of the KVB men asked him, “You normally read such fare, Mr. Lars?” His tone was polite.

  Lars said, “I have a complete file back to volume one, number one.”

  There was no response; just a formal smile.

  “It has declined, though,” Lars added. “During the last year.” He rolled the comic book up, thrust it into his pocket.

  Later, as they buzzed above the rooftops of Fairfax in a USSR government military hopper, he unrolled the comic book and pondered it by the dim dome light above his head.

  He had of course never examined such garbage before. It was interesting. The Blue Cephalopod Man, in a long and much honored tradition, burst buildings, knocked out crooks, disguised himself at both ends of each episode as Jason St. James, a colorless computer-operator. That, too, was standard, for reasons lost in the obscurity of the history of comic book art, but having somehow to do with Jason St. James’ girl friend, Nina Whitecotton, who wrote a gourmet column for the Monrovia Chronicle-Times, a mythical homeopape cranked forth for sale throughout West Africa.

  Miss Whitecotton, interestingly, was a Negro. And so were all the other humans in the comic strip, including the Blue Cephalopod Man himself when he put on mortality as Jason St. James. And the locale was, throughout each episode, “a large metropolitan area somewhere in Ghana.”

  The comic book was aimed at an Afro-Asia audience. By some fluke of the world-wide autonomic distributing mechanism, it had shown up here in Iceland.

  In the second episode the Blue Cephalopod Man temporarily was drained of his abnormal powers by the presence of a meteor of zularium, a rare metal “from the Betelgeuse system.” And the electronic device by which the Blue Cephalopod Man’s sidekick, Harry North, a physics professor at Leopoldville, restored those lost powers, just in time to nab the monsters from “Proxima’s fourth planet, Agakana,” was a construct astonishingly like his own weapons design item 204.

  Strange! Lars continued reading.

  In Episode Three, the terminal section of the comic book, another machine peculiarly familiar to him—he could not precisely place it, however—was brought into play by the cunning assistance of timely Harry North. The Blue Cephalopod Man triumphed again, this time over things from the sixth planet of Orionus. And a good thing, too, because these particular things were an abomination; the artist had outdone himself.

  “You find that interesting?” one of the KVB men inquired.

  I fi
nd, Lars thought, it interesting inasmuch as the writer and/or illustrator has made use of KACH to pirate a few of my most technologically interesting ideas. I wonder if there are grounds for a civil suit.

  However, now was not the time. He put the comic book away.

  The hopper landed on a roof; the engine ceased turning and the door was at once held open for him so that he could disemhopper.

  “This is a motel,” one of the artificially precise of speech KVB men explained to him. “Miss Topchev occupies the entire establishment. We have cleared out the other guests and posted security sentries. You will not be disturbed.”

  “Really? On the level?”

  The KVB man reflected, turning the phrase about in his mind. “You may call for assistance at any time,” he said at last. “And of course for maintenance-service such as sandwiches, coffee, liquor.”

  “Drugs?”

  The KVB man turned his head. Like solemn owls, all four men stared at Lars.

  “I’m on drugs,” Lars explained. “I thought KACH had told you that, God. I take them hourly!”

  “What drugs?” The inquiry was cautious, if not downright drenched with suspicion.

  Lars said, “Escalatium.”

  That did it. Consternation. “But Mr. Lars! Escalatium is brain-toxic! You wouldn’t live six months!”

  “I also take Conjorizine,” Lars said. “It balances the metabolic toxicity. I mix them together, grind them into a powder with a round teaspoon, make the mixture into a water-soluble near precipitate and take it as an injectable—”

  “But, sir, you’d die! From motor-vascular convulsions. Within half an hour.” The four Soviet policemen looked appalled.

  “All I ever got as a side-effect,” Lars said, “was postnasal drip.”