The Zap Gun Page 2

  Work, at Mr. Lars, Incorporated, had on this day, in this manner, begun. It was, somehow, Lars thought, not encouraging. He was disappointed at the useless pic of Miss Topchev; perhaps that had summoned his mood of pessimism. Or was there more to come?

  He had, at ten a.m. New York time, an appointment with General Nitz’ rep, a colonel named—God, what was his name? Anyhow, at that time Lars would receive the Board’s reaction to the last batch of mockups constructed by Lanferman Associates in San Francisco from earlier Mr. Lars, Incorporated, sketches.

  “Haskins,” Lars said.

  “Pardon?” the KACH-man said.

  “It’s Colonel Haskins. Do you know,” he said meditatively to Henry Morris, “that Nitz has fairly regularly avoided having anything to do with me, lately? Have you noted that puny bit of fact?”

  Morris said, “I note everything, Lars. Yes, it’s in my death-rattle file.” Death-rattle … the fireproof Third-World-War proof, Titanian bolecricket-proof, well-hidden file-cases which were rigged to detonate in the event of Morris’ death. He carried on his person a triggering mechanism sensitive to his heartbeat. Even Lars did not know where the files currently existed; probably in a hollow lacquered ceramic owl made from the guidance-system of item 207 in Morris’ girl-friend’s boy-friend’s bathroom. And they contained all the originals of all the weapons-sketches which had ever emanated from Mr. Lars, Incorporated.

  “What does it mean?” Lars asked.

  “It means,” Morris said, protruding his lower jaw and waggling it, as if expecting it to come off, “that General Nitz despises you.”

  Taken aback, Lars said, “Because of that one sketch? Two-oh-something, that p-thermotropic virus equipped to survive in dead space for a period greater than—”

  “Oh no.” Morris shook his head vigorously. “Because you’re fooling yourself and him. Only he isn’t fooled any more. In contrast to you.”

  “How?”

  Morris said, “I hate to say it in front of all these people.”

  “Go on and say it!” Lars said. But he felt sick. I really fear the Board, he realized. “Client?” Is that what they are to me? Boss; that’s the realistic word. UN-W Natsec groomed me, found me and built me up over the years, to replace Mr. Wade. I was there. I was ready and waiting eagerly when Wade Sokolarian died. And this knowledge that I have of someone else waiting right now, prepared for the day when I suffer cardiac arrest or experience the malfunction, the loss, of some other vital organ, waiting, too, in case I become difficult—

  And, he thought, I am already difficult.

  “Packard,” he said to the KACH-man, “you’re an independent organization. You operate anywhere in the world. Theoretically anyone can employ you.”

  “Theoretically,” Packard agreed. “You mean KACH itself, not me personally. I’m hired.”

  “I thought you wanted to hear why General Nitz despises you,” Henry Morris said.

  “No,” Lars said. “Keep it to yourself.” I’ll hire someone from KACH, a real pro, he decided, to scan UN-W, the whole apparatus if necessary, to find out what they’re really up to regarding me. Especially, he thought, the success to which their next weapons medium has been brought; that’s the crucial region for me to have exact knowledge about.

  I wonder what they’d do, he thought, if they knew that it had so often occurred to me that I always could go over to Peep-East. If they, to insure their own safety, to shore up their absolute position of authority, tried to replace me—

  He tried to imagine the size, shape and color of someone following him, imprinting their own footsteps in his tracks. Child or youth, old woman or plump middle-aged man … Wes-bloc psychiatrists, yoked to the state as servants, undoubtedly could turn up the psionic talent of contacting the Other World, the hyper-dimensional universe that he entered into during his trance-states. Wade had had it Lilo Topchev had it. He had lots of it. So undoubtedly it existed elsewhere. And the longer he stayed in office the longer the Board had to ferret it out.

  “May I say one thing,” Morris said, deferentially.

  “Okay.” He waited, setting himself.

  “General Nitz knew something was wrong when you turned down that honorary colonelcy in the UN-West Armed Forces.”

  Staring at him, Lars said, “But that was a gag! Just a piece of paper.”

  “No,” Morris said. “And you knew better—know better right now. Unconsciously, on an intuitive level. It would have made you legally subject to military jurisdiction.”

  To no one in particular, the KACH-man said. “It’s true. They’ve called up virtually everyone they sent those gratis commissions to. Put them in uniform.” His face had become professionally impassive.

  “God!” Lars felt himself cringe. It had been merely a whim, declining the honorary commission. He had given a gag answer to a gag document. And yet, now, on closer inspection—

  “Am I right?” Henry Morris asked him, scrutinizing him.

  “Yes,” Lars said, after a pause. “I knew it.” He gestured. “Well, the hell with it.” He turned his attention back to the KACH-collected weapons sketches. Anyhow, it was deeper than that; his troubles with UN-W Natsec went back farther and penetrated further than any inane scheme such as honorary commissions which all at once became the basis of mandatory military subjugation. What he objected to lay in an area where written documents did not exist An area, in fact, which he did not care to think about.

  Examining Miss Topchev’s sketches he found himself confronted by this repellent aspect of his work—the lives of all of them, the Board included.

  Here it was. And not by accident. It pervaded each design; he leafed among them and then tossed them back on his desk.

  To the KACH-man he said, “Weapons! Take them back; put them in your envelope.” There was not one weapon among them.

  “As regards the concomodies—” Henry Morris began.

  “What,” Lars said to him, “is a concomody?”

  Morris, taken aback, said, “What do you mean, ‘What is a concomody?’ You know. You sit down with them twice a month.” He gestured in irritation. “You know more about the six concomodies on the Board than anyone else in Wes-bloc. Let’s face it, everything you do is for them.”

  “I’m facing it,” Lars said calmly. He folded his arms, sat back. “But suppose when that TV autonomic interviewer out there asked me whether I was receiving something really spectacular I told it the truth.”

  There was silence and then the KACH-man stirred and said, “That’s why they’d like you in uniform. You wouldn’t be facing any TV cameras. There wouldn’t be any opportunity for something to go wrong.” He left the sketches where they were on Lars’ desk.

  “Maybe it’s already gone wrong,” Morris said, still studying his boss.

  “No,” Lars said, presently. “If it had you’d know.” Where Mr. Lars, Incorporated, stands, he thought, there’d just be a hole. Neat, precise, without a disturbance in the process to the adjoining high-rise structures. And achieved in roughly six seconds.

  “I think you’re nuts,” Morris decided. “You’re sitting here at your desk day after day, looking at Lilo’s sketches, going quietly nuts. Every time you go into a trance a piece of you falls out.” His tone was harsh. “It’s too costly to you. And the upshot will be that one day a TV interviewer will nab you and say, ‘What’s cooking, Mr. Lars, sir?’ and you’ll say something you shouldn’t.” Dr. Todt, Elvira Funt, the KACH-man, all of them watched him with dismay but no one did or said anything. At his desk Lars stonily regarded the far wall and the Utrillo original which Maren Faine had given him at Christmas, 2003.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” Lars said. “Where no pain’s attached.” He nodded to Dr. Todt, who seemed more narrow and priest-like than ever. “I think I’m psychologically ready now, doctor. We can instigate the autism, if you have your gadgets and you know what else set up.” Autism—a noble reference, dignified.

  “I want an EEG first,” Dr. Todt said. “
Just as a safety factor.” He rolled the portable EEG machine forward. The preliminaries to the day’s trance-state in which he lost contact with the given, shared universe, the koinos kosmos, and involvement in that other, mystifying realm, apparently an idios kosmos, a purely private world, began. But a purely private world in which an aisthesis koine, a common Something, dwelt.

  What a way, Lars thought, to earn a living.

  THREE

  Greetings! said the letter, delivered by ’stant mail. You have been selected out of millions of your friends and neighbors.

  You are now a concomody.

  It can’t be, Surley G. Febbs thought as he reread the printed form. It was a meager document, size-wise, with his name and number Xeroxed in. It looked no more serious than a bill from his conapt building’s utility committee asking him to vote on a rate-increase. And yet here it was in his possession, formal evidence which would admit him, incredibly, into Festung, Washington, D.C. and its subsurface kremlin, the most heavily guarded spot in Wes-bloc.

  And not as a tourist.

  They found me typical! he said to himself. Just thinking this he felt typical. He felt swell and powerful and slightly drunk, and he had difficulty standing. His legs wobbled and he walked unsteadily across his miniature living room and seated himself on his Ionian fnoolfur (imitation) couch.

  “But I really know why they picked me,” Febbs said aloud. “It’s because I know all about weapons.” An authority; that’s what he was, due to all the hours—six or seven a night, because like everyone else his work had been recently cut from twenty to nineteen hours per week—that he spent scanning edutapes at the Boise, Idaho, main branch of the public library.

  And not only an authority on weapons. He could remember with absolute clarity every fact he had ever learned—as for example on the manufacture of red-stained glass in France during the early thirteenth century. I know the exact part of the Byzantine Empire from which the mosaics of the Roman period which they melted down to form the cherished red glass came, he said to himself, and exulted. It was about time that someone with universal knowledge like himself got on the UN-W Natsec Board instead of the usual morons, the mass pursaps who read nothing but the headlines of the homeopapes and naturally the sports and animated cartoon strips and of course the dirty stuff about sex, and otherwise poisoned their empty minds with toxic, mass-produced garbage which was deliberately produced by the large corporations who really ran things, if you knew the inside story—as for instance I. G. Farben. Not to mention the much bigger electronics, guidance-systems and rocket trusts that evolved later, like A. G. Beimler of Bremen who really owned General Dynamics and I.B.M. and G.E., if you happened to have looked deeply into it. As he had.

  Wait’ll I sit down at the Board across from Commander-in-Chief Supreme UN-West General George Nitz, he said to himself.

  I’ll bet, he thought, I can tell him more facts about the hardware in the, for instance, Metro-gretel homeostatic anti-entrope phase-converter sine-wave oscillator that Boeing is using in their LL-40 peak-velocity interplan rocket than all the so-called “experts” in Festung Washington.

  I mean, I won’t be just replacing the concomody whose time on the Board expired and so I got this form. If I can get those fatheads to listen, I can replace entire bureaus.

  This certainly beat sending letters to the Boise Star-Times ’pape and to Senator Edgewell. Who didn’t even respond with a form-letter any more, he was so, quote, busy. In fact this beat even the halcyon days, seven years ago, when due to the inheritance of a few UN-West gov bonds he had published his own small fact-sheet type of newsletter, which he had ’stant-mailed out at random to people in the vidphone book, plus of course to every government official in Washington. That had—or might well have had, if there weren’t so many lardheads, Commies and bureaucrats in power—altered history … for example in the area of cleaning up the importation of disease-causing protein molecules which regularly rode to Earth on ships returning from the colony planets, and which accounted for the flu that he, Febbs, had contracted in ’99 and really never recovered from—as he had told the health-insurance official at his place of business, the New Era of Cooperative-Financing Savings & Loan Corporation of Boise, where Febbs examined applications for loans with an eye to detecting potential deadbeats.

  In detecting deadbeats he was unmatched. He could look an applicant, especially a Negro, over in less than one microsecond and discern the actual composition of their ethical psychic-structure.

  Which everyone at NECFS&LC knew, including Mr. Rumford, the branch manager. Although due to his egocentric personal ambitions and greed Mr. Rumford had deliberately sabotaged Febbs’ repeated formal requests, over the last twelve years, for a more than routinely stipulated pay raise.

  Now that problem was over. As a concomody he would receive a huge wage. He recalled, and felt momentary embarrassment, that often he had in his letters to Senator Edgewell among many other things complained about the salaries which the six citizens drafted onto the Board as concomodies received.

  So now to the vidphone, to ring up Rumford, who was still at his high-rise conapt probably eating breakfast, and tell him to stuff it.

  Febbs dialed and shortly found himself facing Mr. Rumford who still wore his Hong Kong-made silk bathrobe.

  Taking a deep breath, Surley G. Febbs uttered, “Mr. Rumford, I just wanted to tell you—”

  He broke off, intimidated. Old habits die slowly. “I got a notice from the UN-W Natsec people in Washington,” he heard his voice declare, thin and unsteady. “So, um, you can g-get someone else t-to do all your d-dirty-type jobs for you. And just in case you’re interested, I let around six months ago a really bad apple take out a ten-thousand poscred loan, and he’ll n-never pay it back.”

  He then slammed the receiver down, perspiring, but weak with the wholesome joy that now lodged everywhere inside him.

  And I’m not going to tell you who that bad apple is, he said to himself. You can comb the minned mass of records on your own time, pay my replacement to do it. Up yours, Mr. Rumford.

  Going into the tiny kitchen of his conapt he quick-unfroze a pack of stewed apricots, his customary breakfast. Seated at the table which extended, plank-like from the wall, he ate and meditated.

  Wait until the Organization hears about this, he reflected. By this he meant the Superior Warriors of Caucasian Ancestry of Idaho and Oregon. Chapter Fifteen. Especially Roman Centurion Skeeter W. Johnstone, who just recently by means of an aa-35 disciplinary edict had demoted Febbs from the rank of Legionnaire Class One to Helot Class Fifty.

  I’ll be hearing from the Organization’s Praetorian Headquarters at Cheyenne, he realized. From Emperor-of-the-Sun Klaus himself! They’ll want to make me an R.C.—and probably kick out Johnstone on his tail.

  There were a lot of others who would get what they deserved now. For instance that thin librarian at the main branch of the Boise publibe who had denied him access to the eight closed cases of microtapes of all the twentieth century pornographic novels. This means your job, he said to himself, and imagined the expression on her dried, wart-like face as she received the news from General Nitz himself.

  As he ate his stewed apricots, he pictured in his mind the great bank of computers at Festung Washington, D.C. as they had examined million after million of file cards and all the data on them, determining who was really typical in his buying habits and who was only faking it, like the Strattons in the conapt across from his who always tried to appear typical but who in no true ontological sense made it.

  I mean, Febbs thought joyfully, I’m Aristotle’s Universal Man, such as society has tried to breed genetically for five thousand years! And Univox-50R at Festung Washington finally recognized it!

  When a weapon-component is at last put before me officially, he thought with grim assurance, I’ll know how to plowshare it, all right. They can count on me. I’ll come up with a dozen ways to plowshare it, and all of them good. Based on my knowledge and skill.

>   What’s odd is that they’d still need the other five concomodies. Maybe they’ll realize that. Maybe instead of giving me only a one-sixth slice they’ll give me all the components. They might as well.

  It would go about like this:

  General Nitz (amazed): Good God, Febbs! You’re completely right This stage one of the Brownian movement-restriction field-induction coil, portable subtype, can be easily plowshared into an inexpensive source to chill beer on excursions lasting over seven hours. Whew! Gollee!

  Febbs: However, I think you’re still missing the basic point, General. If you’ll look more closely at my official abstract on the—

  The vidphone rang, then, interrupting his thoughts; he rose from the breakfast table, hurried to answer it.

  On the screen a middle-aged female Wes-bloc bureaucrat appeared. “Mr. Surley G. Febbs of Conapt Building 300685?”

  “Yes,” he said, nervously.

  “You received your notice by ’stant mail of your induction as concomody to the UN-W Natsec Board as of this following Tuesday.”

  “Yes!”

  “I am calling, Mr. Febbs, to remind you that under no circumstances are you to convey, reveal, expound, announce or otherwise inform any person or organization or info-media or autonomic extension thereof capable of receiving, recording and/or transmitting, communicating and/or telecasting data in any form whatsoever, that you have been legally named by due and official process to the UN-W Natsec Board as Concomody A, as per paragraph III in your written notice, which you are required under penalty of law to read and strictly observe.”

  Surley Febbs, inside himself, fainted dead away. He had failed to read all the way down the notice. Of course the identity of the six concomodies on the Board was a matter of strict secrecy! And already he had told Mr. Rumford.