The Zap Gun (7 page)

"Not the pure fool," Maren said practically, nodding. "I paid sixty poscreds for you. Go ahead and blab."

She went off to get a cigarillo from the package on the coffee table.

Ol' Orville was chewing over a decision—as if it could decide, rather than, as Maren pointed out, merely select from the data installed in its file-banks. Finally it said, "I know what you want. You face a dilemma. You are in a dilemma, now. But you have never articulated it to yourself, never faced it."

"What in hell is it?" he demanded, baffled.

Ol' Orville said, "Mr. Lars, you have a terrible fear that one day you will enter your New York office, lie down and enter your trance-state, and revive with no sketches to show. In other words, lose your talent." Except for Maren's faintly asthmatic breathing as she smoked her Garcia y Vega cigarillo, the room was silent.

"Gee," Lars said, mollified. He felt like a small, small boy, as if all the years of adulthood had been ripped away. It was an eerie experience.

Because of course this toy, this novelty-gadget which was a perversion of the original Mr. Lars, Incorporated design, was correct. His fear was a near-castration fear. And it never went away.

Ol' Orville was ponderously winding up its statement. "Your conscious quandary as to the spuriousness of your so-called 'weapons' design is an artificial, false issue. It obscures the psychological reality beneath. You know perfectly well, as any sane human would, that there is absolutely no argument for producing genuine weapons, either in Wes-bloc or Peep-East. Mankind was saved from destruction when the two monoliths secretly met at plenipotentiary level in Fairfax, Iceland, in 1992, to agree on the 'plowsharing' principle, then openly in 2002 to ratify the Protocols."

"Enough," Lars said, looking at the object.

Ol' Orville shut up.

Going to the coffee table Lars set the object back down, shakily. "And this amuses the pursaps?" he asked Maren.

Maren said, "They don't ask deep-type questions. They ask it dumb, gag-type questions. Well, well." She eyed him intently. "So all this time all this talk on your part, this moaning and groaning about, 'God. I'm a fraud. I'm perpetrating a hoax on the poor pursaps,' all that hogwash—" she had flushed with indignation—"was just so much gabble."

"Evidently so," Lars agreed, still shaken. "But I didn't know it. I don't see any psychoanalysts—I hate them. They're frauds, too, Siegmund Fraud."

He waited hopefully. She did not laugh.

"Castration fear," she said. "Fear of loss of virility. Lars, you're afraid that because your trance-state sketches are not designs for authentic weapons—you see, darling duck dear? You fear it means that you're impotent."

He did not meet her gaze.

"Waffenlos," he said. "That's a polite euphemism—"

"All euphemisms are polite; that's what it means."

"—for impotency. I'm not a man." He stared at Maren.

"In bed," Maren said, "you're twelve men. Fourteen. Twenty. Just wow." She gazed at him hopefully, to see if that cheered him.

"Thanks," he said. "But the sense of failure remains. Perhaps even Ol' Orville hasn't actually penetrated to the root of the matter. Somehow Peep-East is involved."

Maren said, "Ask Ol' Orville."

Once more picking up the featureless head, Lars said, "What is it about Peep-East that figures in all this, Ol' Orville?"

A pause, while the complex electronic system whirred, and then the gadget responded. "A blurred, distance-shot, glossy. Too blurred to tell you what you wish to know."

At once Lars knew. And tried to eradicate the thought from his mind, because his mistress and co-worker Maren Faine was standing right there by him, picking up his thoughts, in defiance of Western law. Had she gotten it, or had he cut it off in time, buried it back in his unconscious where it belonged?

"Well, well," Maren said thoughtfully. "Lilo Topchev."

He said, fatalistically, "Yep."

"In other words," Maren said, and the magnitude of her intelligence, the reason for giving her a top-level spot in his organization, manifested itself—unfortunately for him, he thought dismally. "In other words, you see the solution to the virility-sterility psycho-sexual weapons-designs dilemma in the most asinine way possible. In a way if you were say nineteen years old—"

"I'll go see a psychiatrist," he said, lamely.

"You want a good clear pic of that goddam miserable little female communist snake?" Maren's voice was sharp with hate, blame, accusation, fury—everything muddled, but distinct enough to carry across the room to him and hit hard; he felt the impact, fully.

"Yep," he said stoically.

"I'll get one for you. Okay, I will. I mean it. I'll do even better than that; I'll explain to you in simple, short words, the kind you can comprehend, how you can get it, because personally I'd prefer on second thought not to involve myself in something so—" she searched for the word, the good, solid, below-the-belt punch—"so soggy."

"How?"

"First, face this: KACH will never, never get it for you. If they turned over a blurred shot they did it on purpose. They could have gotten a better one."

"You've lost me."

"KACH," Maren said, as if speaking to a child, and one whom she had damn little sympathy with, "is what they like to call disinterested. Strip this of its self-serving nobility and you get at the truth: KACH serves two masters."

"Oh yes," he said, understanding. "Us and Peep-East."

"They have to please everyone and offend no one. They're the Phoenicians of the modern world, the Rothschilds, the Fuggers. From KACH you can contract for espionage services, but—you get a blurred distance-shot of Lilo Topchev." She sighed; it was so easy, and yet it had to be spelled out to him. "Doesn't that remind you of anything, Lars? Think."

At last he said, "The pic Aksel Kaminsky had. Of sketch 265. It was inadequate."

"Oh, darling. You see, you actually see."

"And," he said, carefully keeping himself unrattled, "your theory is that it's policy. They deliver enough to keep both blocs buying, but not enough to offend anyone.

"Right. Now look." She seated herself, puffing agitatedly on her cigarillo. "I love you, Lars; I want to keep you as mine, to fuss over and annoy; I adore annoying you because you're so annoyable. But I'm not greedy. Your psychological weak-links as Ol' Orville said is your fright that you've lost your virility. That makes you like every other male over the age of thirty... you're slowing down just a teeny bit and that scares you, you sense the waning of the life-force. You're good in bed but not quite as good as last week or last month or last year. Your blood, your heart, your—well, anyhow, your body knows it and so your mind knows it. I'll help you."

"Then help. Instead of orating," he said.

"You contact this Aksel Kaminsky."

He glanced up at her. Her expression showed she meant it; she was nodding soberly.

"And," she said, "you say, Ivan—call him Ivan. It annoys them. Then he can call you Joe or Yank, but you don't care. Ivan, you say. You want to know detail about item 265. That is correct, Ivan? Okay, comrade from East; I give you detail and you give me pic of lady weapons fashion designer Miss Topchev. Good pic, in color, maybe even 3-D. Maybe, yes even film sequence so I can run off—with nice sound-track of voice—in evening to fill vacant leisure-hours. And maybe if you have stag-type film sequence of hot pelvis-twitching in which she—"

"You think he'll do it?"

"Yes."

Lars thought, and I head the firm: I employ this woman. Obviously in another year, and me with psychological problems already... but I have the talent, the Psionic ability. So I can stay on top. He felt the insubstantiality of his over-all prowess, however, in confrontation with this woman, his mistress. Now that she had proposed, so quaintly phrased, too, the deal with Kaminsky it all seemed so obvious and yet—insanely, he would never have conjured it up on his own. Incredible!

And it would work.

On Thursday he spent the morning at Lanferman Associates, examining the mockups, prototypes and just plain fakes that the engineers had put together, the artists and draftsmen and poly-something experts and electronics geniuses and clear-cut madmen, the crowd that Jack Lanferman paid, and in a way which always struck Lars as eccentric.

Jack Lanferman never scrutinized the work done for him in exchange. He seemed to believe that if properly rewarded every human being of talent did his best, with no goad, no thrusts or kicks or fires, no interoffice memos, nothing.

And oddly, it appeared true. Because Jack Lanferman did not have to spend his time in his office. He lived almost constantly in one of his sybaritic pleasure-palaces, coming down to Earth only when it was time to view some finished product before its public release.

In this case what had originated as sketch 278 had now passed through all its confirmation stages and had been "test-fired." It was, among and in company with admittedly bizarre compeers, unique. On his own part, Lars Powderdry had never known whether to laugh or weep openly when he contemplated item 278, now termed more ominously—to please the pursaps, who would look upon it by this title only—the Psychic Conservation Beam.

Seated in the small theater somewhere under central California, with Pete Freid on one side of him Jack Lanferman on the other, Lars watched the Am-pex video tape of the Psychic Conservation Beam in "action." Since it was an anti-personnel weapon it could not be used on some obsolete hulking old battleship of a spacecraft floated out from orbit to be blown to bits at a distance of eleven million miles. The target had to be human beings. Along with everyone else, Lars disliked this part.

The Psychic Conservation Beam was being demonstrated as it sucked dry the mentalities of a gang of worthless-looking thugs who had been detected trying to seize control of a small, isolated (in other words, pathetically helpless) colony of Wes-bloc's on Ganymede.

On the screen the bad fellas froze, anticipating the tearwep—the instrument of terror. Rewarding, Lars thought. As a drama it was satisfying: because the bad fellas, up to this moment, had run riot through the colony. Like grotesques painted into existence as old-time movie ads, to be pasted up at the entrances of local neighborhood theaters, the bad fellas had torn the clothing from young girls, beaten old men into indistinct blobs, had set fire drunken-soldierwise to venerable buildings... had done, Lars decided, everything except burn the library at Alexandria with its sixteen thousand priceless irreplaceable scrolls, including four lost-forever tragedies of Sophocles.

"Jack," he said to Lanferman, "couldn't you have set it in ancient Hellenistic Palestine? You know how sentimental the pursaps are about that period."

"I know," Lanferman agreed. "That's when Socrates was put to death."

"Not quite," Lars said. "But that's the general idea. Couldn't you have your androids shown as they laser down Socrates? What a powerful scene that would make. Of course you'd have to supply subtitles or dub in an English voice-track. So the pursaps could hear Socrates' pleas."

Pete murmured, absorbed in watching the video tape, "He didn't plead; he was a stoic."

"Okay," Lars said. "But at least he could look worried."

Now the FBI, using item 278, for the first time in history, as the film took pains to inform its audience via the calm commentary by none other than Lucky Bagman himself, swooped. The bad fellas blanched, groped for their antiquated laser pistols or whatever it was they had—perhaps Frontier Model Colt .44s, Lars thought acidly. Anyhow it was all over for them. And the results would have moved, or in this case melted, a stone.

It was worse than the Fall of the House of Atreus, Lars decided. Blindness, incest, daughters and sisters torn apart by wild beasts... what reality, in the final analysis, was the worst fate that could befall a group of humans? Slow starvation, as in the Nazi concentration camps, accompanied by beatings, impossibly hard work, arbitrary indignities and at last the "shower baths" which were actually Zyklon B hydrogen cyanide gas chambers?

Yet item 278 nonetheless added to mankind's fund of techniques. Tools to injure and degrade. Aristotle on all fours, ridden like a donkey, with a bit between his teeth. Such the pursaps wanted; such was evidently their pleasure. Or was this all a hideous, fundamentally wrong guess?

Wes-bloc, its ruling elite, believed that the people were comforted by this sort of video tape, shown—incredibly—at the dinner hour, or displayed in still form via color pic in the breakfast-time 'pape, to be ingested along with the eggs and toast. The pursaps liked displays of power because they felt powerless themselves. It heartened them to see Item 278 make mincemeat out of a gang of thugs who were beyond the pale. Item 278, from FBI high-muzzle-velocity guns, sped out in the form of thermotropic darts which found their targets—

And Lars looked away.

"Androids," Peter reminded him laconically.

Lars said between his teeth, "They look human to me.

The film, horrid to Lars, clanked on. Now the bad fellas, like husks, like dehydrated skins, deflated bladders, wandered about; they neither saw nor heard. Instead of a satellite or a building or a city being blown up a group of human brains, candle-like, had been blown out.

"I want out," Lars said.

Jack Lanferman looked sympathetic. "Frankly I don't know why you came in here at all. Go out and get a Coke."

"He has to watch," Pete Freid said. "He's taking responsibility."

"All right." Jack nodded reasonably, hunching forward and tapping Lars on the knee to gain his shattered attention. "Look, my friend. It isn't as if 278 will ever be used. It isn't as if—"

"It is as if," Lars said. "It's goddam completely, as if you could make it. I have an idea. Run the tape backward."