The Zap Gun Read online

  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 in-substantiality 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.

  EIGHT

  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 Ampex 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 s
aid. “It’s goddam completely, as if you could make it. I have an idea. Run the tape backward.”

  Jack and Pete glanced at each other, then at him expectantly. After all, you never knew; even a sick man might have a good idea now and then. A man made temporarily ill.

  “First you show these people like they are now,” Lars said. “As mindless, de-brained, reduced to reflex-machines, with maybe the upper ganglia of the spinal column intact, nothing more. That’s how they start out. Then the FBI ships spurt the essential quality of humanness back into them. Got it? Have I found a winner?”

  Jack giggled. “Funny. You’d have to call it a Psychic Bestower Gun. But it wouldn’t work.”

  “Why not?” Lars said. “If I were a pursap I know it would comfort me to see human qualities imparted to debrained wrecks. Wouldn’t it comfort you?”

  “But see, my friend,” Jack pointed out patiently, “what would emerge as a result of the item’s action would be a gang of hoodlums.”

  True. He had forgotten about that.

  However, Pete spoke up at this point, and on his side. “But they wouldn’t be hoodlums if the tape was run backward because they’d set museums un-on fire, undetonate hospitals, reclothe the nubile bodies of naked young girls, restore the punched-in faces of old men. And just generally bring the dead to life, in a sort of off-hand manner.”

  Jack said, “It would spoil the pursaps’ dinners to watch it.” He spoke with finality. With authority.

  “What makes pursaps tick?” Lars asked him. Jack Lanferman would know; it was Jack’s job to know that. He lived by means of that knowledge.

  Without hesitation Jack said, “Love.”

  “Then why this?” Lars gestured at the screen. Now the FBI was carting off the hulks who had been men, rounding them up like so many stunned steers.

  “The pursap,” Jack said thoughtfully, in a tone that told Lars that this was no light answer, no frivolity, “is afraid in the back of his mind that weapons like this exist. If we didn’t show them, the pursap would believe in their existence anyhow. And he’d be afraid that somehow, for reasons obscure to him, they might be used on him. Maybe he didn’t pay his jet-hopper license fee on time. Or maybe he cheated on his income tax. Or maybe—maybe he knows, deep down inside him, that he’s not the way God built him originally. That in some way he doesn’t quite fathom, he’s corrupt.”

  “Deserves item 278 turned his way,” Pete said, nodding.

  “But he’s wrong,” Lars said futilely. “He doesn’t deserve anything, anything at all, remotely like 278 or 240 or 210, any of them. He doesn’t and they don’t.” He gestured at the screen.

  “But 278 exists,” Jack said. “The pursap knows it, and when he sees it used on an uglier life form than him he thinks, Hey. Maybe they passed me by. Maybe because those fellas are so really bad, those Peep-East bastards, 278 isn’t going to get pointed at me and I can go to my grave later on, not this year but say fifty years from now. Which means—and this is the crux, Lars—he doesn’t have to worry about his own death right now. He can pretend he will never die.”

  After a pause Pete said somberly, “The only event that really makes him secure, makes him really believe he’s going to survive, is to see another person get it in his place. Someone else, Lars, had died for him.”

  Lars said nothing. What was there to say? It sounded right; both Pete and Jack agreed, and they were professionals: they went about their jobs intentionally, rationally, where he, as Maren had pointed out, was an idiot savant. He had a talent, but nothing—absolutely nothing, did he know. If Pete and Jack said this, then all he could do was nod.

  “The only mistake ever made in this area,” Jack said presently, “in the field of tearweps, was the mid-twentieth century inanity, insanity, of the universal weapon. The bomb that blew everyone up. That was a real mistake. That went too far. That had to be reversed. So we got tactical weapons. Specialized more and more —especially in the tearwep class, so that not only could they pick out their target but they could get at you emotionally. I go for tearweps; I understand the idea. But localization: that’s the essence.” He put on, for effect, his clumsy ethnic accent. “You don’t got no target, Meester Lars, sir, when you got zap gun which blow up whole world, even though it make lot of plenty fine terror. You got—” He grinned wise-peasantishly. “You got hammer with which you hit yourself over your own head.”

  The accent and the attempt at humor were gone, as he said, “The H-bomb was a monstrous, paranoid-logic error. The product of a paranoid nut.”

  “There are not nuts like that alive today,” Pete said quietly.

  Jack said instantly, “That we know of.”

  The three of them glanced at one another.

  Across the continent, Surley G. Febbs said, “A one-way express first-class window-seat ticket on a 66-G noblowby rocket to Festung Washington, D.C. And snap it up, miss.” He carefully laid out a ninety poscred note on the brass surface before the TWA clerk’s window.

  NINE

  Behind Surley G. Febbs in the line at the TWA ticket-reservations-baggage window a portly, well-cloaked, businessman-type was saying to the individual behind him, “Look at this. Get a load of what’s going on over-head behind our backs right this minute. A new satellite in orbit, and by them. Not us.” He refolded page one of his morning homeopape, to show.

  “Chrissake,” the man behind him said dutifully. Naturally Surley G. Febbs, while he waited for his ticket to Festung Washington, D.C. to be validated, listened in. Naturally.

  “Wonder if it’s a hedgehog,” the portly businessman-type said.

  “Naw.” The individual behind him shook his head vigorously. “We’d object. You suppose a man of General George Nitz’ stature would allow that? We’d register an official government protest so fast—”

  Turning, Surley Febbs said, “‘Protest?’ Are you kidding? Is that the kind of leaders we have? You actually believe what’s needed is words? If Peep-East put that satellite up without officially registering the specs with SINK-PA in advance we’ll—” he gestured —“Whammo. Down it comes.”

  He received his ticket and change from the clerk.

  Later, in the express jet, first-class accommodation, window seat, he found himself next to the portly, well-cloaked, businessman-type. After a few seconds —the flight in all lasted only fifteen minutes—they resumed their conversation of solemn weight. They were now passing over Colorado and the Rockies could be seen below, briefly, but due to the nobility of their discussion they ignored that great range. It would be there later on, but they might not be. This was urgent.

  Febbs said, “Hedgehog or not, every Peep miss is a men.”

  “Eh?” the portly businessman said.

  “Every Peep-East missile is a menace. They’re all up to something.” Something evil, he said to himself, and glanced at the portly man’s ’pape, over his shoulder. “I see it’s a type never before seen. God knows what it might contain. Frankly, I think we ought to drop a Garbage-can Banger on New Moscow.”

  “What’s that?”

  Condescendingly, because he fully realized that the average man had not done research endlessly at the pub-libe as he had, Febbs said, “It’s a missile that wide-cracks in the atmosphere. ‘Atmosphere,’ from the Sanskrit atmen, ‘breath.’ The word ’Sanskrit’ from samskrta, meaning ‘cultivated,’ which is from sama, meaning ‘equal,’ plus kr, ‘to do,’ and krp, ‘form.’ In the atmosphere, anyhow, above the popcen—the population center—which it’s aimed at. We place the Judas Iscariot IV above New Moscow, set to wide-crack at half a mile, and it rains down minned—miniaturized —h’d, that means homeostatic—”

  It was hard to communicate with the ordinary mass man. Nonetheless Febbs did his best to find terms which this portly nonentity—this nont—would comprehend. “They’re about the size of gum wrappers. They drift throughout the city, especially into the rings of conapts. You do know what a conapt is, don’t you?”

  Spluttering, the portly businessm
an-type said, “I live in one.”

  Febbs, unperturbed, continued his useful exposition. “They’re cam—that is, chameleon; they blend, color-wise, with whatever they land on. So you can’t detect them. There they lie, until nightfall, say around ten o’clock at night.”

  “How do they know when it’s ten o’clock? Each has a wristwatch?” The portly businessman’s tone was faintly sneering, as if he imagined that somehow Febbs was putting him on.

  With massive condescension Febbs said, “By the loss of heat in the atmosphere.”

  “Oh.”

  “About ten p.m., when everyone’s asleep.” Febbs gloated in the thought of this strategic weapon in action, its precision. It was a thin road which this weapon laid, like the gate to salvation: esthetically it was satisfying. You could enjoy knowing about this Garbage-can Banger even without its actually going into operation.

  “Okay,” the portly man said. “So at ten p.m.—”

  “They start,” Febbs said. “Each pellet, fully cammed, begins to emit a sound.” He watched the portly man’s face. Obviously this citizen did not bother to read Wep Weke, the info mag devoted exclusively to pics and articles, and, where possible, true specs, of all weapons, both Wes-bloc and Peep-East—probably by means of a data-collecting agency he had in a vague way heard of named KICH or KUCH or KECH. Febbs had a ten-year file of Wep Weke, complete, with both front and back covers intact; it was priceless.

  “What kind of sound?”

  “A horrid sneering sound. Buzzing. Like—well, you’d have to hear it yourself. The point is, it keeps you awake. And I don’t mean just a little awake. I mean wide-awake. Once the noise of a Garbage-can Banger gets to you, for example, if a pellet is on the roof of your conapt building, you never sleep again. And four days without sleeping—” He snapped his fingers. “You can’t perform your job. You’re no good to anyone, yourself included.”