The Zap Gun (11 page)

There was silence. General Nitz seemed to be waiting for Lars to say something. So Lars said, "And what did the Soviet Government reply?"

"They replied," General Mike Dowbrowsky said, "that they would be happy to turn over their own tracking-stations' data on the sat, so that our missile could get an exact fit on it. And they have done so. In fact they supplied additional material, spontaneously, as to a warping field which their instruments had detected and ours had not, a distortion surrounding BX-3, kept there evidently for the purpose of misleading a thermotropic missile."

"I thought you sent up a team of robot weapon percept-extensors," Lars said.

After a pause General Nitz said, "If you live to be a hundred, Lars, you will say, to everyone you ever meet, including me, that there was no team of robot percept-extensors sent up. And, that since this is the case, the fabrication that this 'team' was vaporized is the invention of rancid homeopape reporters. Or if that doesn't do it, the deliberate, sensation-mongering invention of that TV personality—what's his name?"

"Lucky Bagman," said Molly Neumann, one of the concomodies.

"That a creature like Bagman would naturally dream it up to keep his audience deluded into believing he has a conduit to Festung W, here." He added, "Which he doesn't. Whether they like it or not."

After a pause Lars said, "What now, general?"

"What now?" General Nitz clapped his hands together before him atop the pile of memoranda, micro-docs, reports, abstracts ribbon-style that covered his share of the great table. "Well, Lars—"

He glanced up, the weary carrot-like face corrupted with utterly unforeseen, unimaginable, feckless amusement.

"As strange as it may sound, Lars, somebody in this room, somebody a bona fide participant of this meeting, actually suggested—you'll laugh—suggested we try to get you to go into one of your song-and-dance acts, you know, with the banjo and blackface, your—" the carrot-like features writhed—"trances. Can you obtain a weapon from hyper-dimensional space, Lars? Honestly, now. Can you get us something to take out BX-3? Now, Lars, please don't pull my leg. Just quietly say no and we won't vote you out of here; we'll just quietly go on and try to think of something else."

Lars said, "No, I can't."

For a moment General Nitz' eyes flickered; it was, possibly but not very probably, compassion.

Whatever it was, it lasted only an instant. Then the sardonic glaze reinstated itself. "Anyhow you're honest, which is what I asked for. Ask for a no answer, get a no answer." He laughed barkingly.

"He could try," a woman named Min Dosker said in an oddly high, lady-like voice.

"Yes," Lars agreed, taking the bit before General Nitz could seize it and run with it. "Let me clarify. I—"

"Don't clarify," General Nitz said slowly. "Please, as a favor to me personally. Mrs. Dosker, Lars, is from SeRKeb. I failed to tell you, but—" He shrugged. "So, in view of that fact, don't treat us to an interminable recitation of how you can operate and what you can and can't do. We're not being entirely candid because of Mrs. Dosker's presence here." To the SeRKeb rep, General Nitz said, "You understand, don't you, Min?"

"I still think," Mrs. Dosker said, "that your weapons medium could try." She rattled her micro-docs irritably.

"What about yours?" General Dowbrowsky demanded. "The Topchev girl?"

"I am informed," Mrs. Dosker said, "that she is—" She hesitated; obviously, she, too, was constrained to be to some extent reticent.

"Dead," General Nitz grated.

"Oh no!" Mrs. Dosker said, and looked horrified, like a Baptist Sunday school teacher shocked by an improper word.

"The strain probably killed her," Nitz said lazily.

"No, Miss Topchev is—in shock. She fully understands the situation, however. She is under sedation at the Pavlov Institute at New Moscow, and for the time being she can't work. But she's not dead."

"When?" one of the concomodies, a male nullity, asked her. "Will she be out of shock soon? Can you predict?"

"Within hours, we hope," Mrs. Dosker said emphatically.

"All right," General Nitz said, in a sudden brisk voice; he rubbed his hands together, grimaced, showing his yellow, irregular, natural teeth. Speaking to Lars he said, "Powderdry, Mr. Lars, Lars, whatever you are—I'm glad you came here. I truly am. I knew you would. People like you can't stand being hung-up on."

"What kind of person—" Lars began, but General Bronstein, seated on the far side of General Dowbrowsky, shot him a look that made him cease—and God forbid, flush. General Nitz said, "When were you last at Fairfax, Iceland?"

"Six years ago," Lars said.

"Before that?"

"Never."

"You want to go there?"

"I'd go anywhere. I'd go to God. Yes, I'll be glad to go."

"Fine." General Nitz nodded. "She ought to be out of shock by, say, midnight Washington time. Right, Mrs. Dosker?"

"I'm positive," the SeRKeb rep said, her head wobbling up and down like a vast, colorless pumpkin on its thick stalk.

"Ever tried working with another weapons medium?" an akprop—it would be an akprop—man asked Lars.

"No." Happily, he was able to keep his voice steady. "But I'll be pleased to pool my ability and years of experience with Miss Topchev's. As a matter of fact—" He hesitated until he could find a political way of finishing his utterance. "I've speculated for some time that such a merger might be highly profitable for both blocs."

General Nitz said, deliberately offhandedly, "We have this psychiatrist at Wallingford Clinic. There are currently three new proposed weapons media—is that the proper plural? No—who are relatively untested but whom we could draw on." To Lars he said with abrupt bluntness, "You wouldn't like that, Mr. Lars; you wouldn't want that at all. So we'll spare you that. For the time being."

With his right hand General Nitz made a tic-like gesture. At the far end of the chamber, a youthful U.S. commissioned officer bent and clicked on a vidset. Speaking into an in-grafted throat microphone, the officer conferred with persons not present in the room; then, straightening, he pointed to the vidset indicating that now it—whatever it was—could be considered ready.

On the vidset formed a face, a mystifying source of human essence, wavering slightly in indication that the signal was being relayed from a quite distant spot via a satellite.

Pointing at Lars, General Nitz said, "Can our boy put his head together with your girl?"

On the vidscreen the far-distant eyes of the wavering face scrutinized Lars, while at his microphone the young officer translated.

"No," the face on the screen said.

"Why not, Marshal?" Nitz said.

It was the face of Peep-East's highest dignity and holder of power, the Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party as well as Secretary of the SeRKeb. The man on the screen, deciding against the fusion, was the Soviet Marshal of the Red Army, Maxim Paponovich. And that man, overruling every other living person in the world on this matter, said, "We must keep her from the publicity. She is poorly. You know; sick? I regret. It is a shame." And, cat-like, Paponovich, with smoldering eyes, surveyed Lars for his reaction as if reading him out of a well-broken, long known code.

Rising respectfully to his feet, Lars said, "Marshal Paponovich, you're making a dreadful error. Miss Topchev and I can be looked to for redress. Is the Soviet Union opposed to the search for remedy in this bad situation?"

The face, tangibly hating him, continued to confront him from the screen.

"If I'm not permitted to cooperate with Miss Topchev," Lars said, "I will shore up the security of Wes-bloc and call it quits. I'm asking you now to change your mind, for the protection of the billions of people of Peep-East. And I'm prepared to make public the nature of our attempt to compile our separate talents, despite what this formal Board may instruct. I have direct access to infomedia such as the Lucky Bagman interviewers. And your refusal—"

"Yes," Marshal Paponovich said. "Miss Topchev will be at Fairfax, Iceland, within the next twenty-four hours." And the look of his face said: You made us do only what we intended to do. And you have taken all of the responsibility so that if it fails it is on you—So we have won. Thank you.

"Thank you, Marshal," Lars said, and reseated himself. He did not give a damn whether or not he had been skillfully manipulated. What mattered was that within the next twenty-four hours he would meet Lilo Topchev at last.

Because of Miss Topchev's delicate psychological fugue, it was bootless for him to journey to Iceland immediately—so he had time to pursue the project suggested by Maren.

In person, rather than by vidphone, he approached the Soviet Embassy in New York City, entered the rented-at-vast-price modern building and asked the girl at the first desk he saw for Mr. Aksel Kaminsky.

The embassy appeared in a state of frenzy. Confusion dominated, as if the personnel were pulling up stakes or burning files or, at the very least, shifting positions along the tea-table Alice-wise. Someone was getting a clean cup, Lars decided as he watched the USSR officials, big and small, hurry by, and someone else was getting a dirty cup. The brass, no doubt obtained the former. It was the pursap majority who would find themselves reseated in less satisfactory circumstances.

"What's up?" he asked a pimple-faced, awkward young staff-member, who sat rapidly inspecting what appeared to be KACH pics of a non-classified nature.

In idiomatic English the young man piped, "An agreement has been made with UN-W Natsec to use these ground-floor offices as a place of exchange for information." He added in explanation, glad to pause in a job of no creative value, "Of course the real meeting-ground is in Iceland, not here; this is for routine material." His marred face showed the distaste he felt for his abrupt new spate of tasks. Not the alien satellite; that was not what bothered him, this petty clerk in the universe of officialdom. It was the monotonous labors imposed on him by the situation—a situation, Lars reflected, that conceivably might not leave this youth very many more years to suffer through his unrewarding tasks.

The two blocs had mounds of scientific, technical, cultural and political articles passed back and forth like so many Old Maid cards, common property. East and West agreed that it was scarcely worth paying a profession espionage outfit such as KACH or even their own national secret police establishments to sneak out copies of abstracts dealing with soybean curd production in the Tundra-covered regions of the northeastern USSR. The quantity of such non-classified papers within that rubric amounted, daily, to the gool that threatened to burst the sea wall of bureaucracy itself.

"Mr. Lars!"

Lars rose. "Mr. Kaminsky. How are you?"

"Terrible," Kaminsky said. He looked worn, hectic, over-worked, like a retired, once-adequate garage mechanic. "That thing up there. Who are they? You asked yourself that, Mr. Lars?"

"Yes, Mr. Kaminsky," he said patiently. "I've asked myself that."

"Tea?"

"No, thank you."

"Do you know," Kaminsky said, "what your news-medium TV just now said? I caught it in my office; it made that ting-noise it does to attract attention and then shut on." Gray-faced he stumbled on, "Forgive me, Mr. Lars, for bearing grim news, like the Spartan soldier back from the Battle of Thermopylae. But—now second alien satellite in orbit." Lars could think of nothing to say. "Sit in my office," Kaminsky said, leading him through the clutter to a small side room. Kaminsky shut the door and turned to face him. He spoke more slowly, with less of the overtone of an old man's hysteria. "Tea?"

"No, thank you."

"While you waited to see me," Kaminsky said, "they put that second one up. So we know they can put up all they want. Hundreds, if they feel inclined. Our sky. Think. Operating not out around Jupiter or Saturn, at the perimeter where we only keep picket ships and sats but here. They bypassed the easy." He added, "Maybe for them this is easy, too. These two sats were undoubtedly deposited from ships. Dropped out like eggs, not launched and then halted at orbital plane. Nobody saw any ships. No monitors caught anything. Anti-matter alien inter-system vessels. And always we thought—"

"We thought," Lars said, "that sub-epidermal fungi-forms from Titan that knew how to simulate everyday household objects shapewise were our great unTerran adversary. Something that looked like a vase and then when you had your back turned seeped into your dermal wall and migrated to the omentum where it resided until surgically cut out."

"Yes," Kaminsky agreed. "I hated those; I saw one once, not in object-simulation but in cyst form, like you depict. Ready for cobalt-bombardment." He looked physically very sick. "But Mr. Lars, doesn't that tell us? We know the possibilities. I mean rather we know we don't know."

"No percent-extensors have picked up any clues as to the morphology of these—" the only word he had heard so far was alien—"these adversaries," he finished.

Kaminsky said, "Please, Mr. Lars. You and I can take time to talk about easy things. What did you want, sir? Not to hear the bad news. Something else. Anything." He poured himself cold, dark tea.

"I'm to meet with Lilo Topchev in Fairfax as soon as she's psychologically fit. That time back there in the coffee shop you asked me about a component on them—"

"No deal is needed. I forget weapons item. We are not plowsharing now, Mr. Lars. We will never plowshare again."

Lars grunted like an animal.

"Yes," Kaminsky said. "Never again. You and I—not individual you and I but ethnological totalities, East, West—rose from savagery and waste; we were smart; we became buddy-buddies, made deals, you know, hand-clasp on it, our words in the Protocols of '02. We went back to being, what does the Jewish Christian Bible say? Without leaves."