The Zap Gun Read online

  “Upper gastro-intestinal irritation is the basis of my life,” Pete said. “Especially late Saturday night.”

  Jack said, “I have colonic trouble.”

  “I have a chronic urinary infection,” Lars said. “Bacteria keep forming, in particular if I drink too much orange juice.”

  Sadly, Klug snapped his huge sample-case shut. “Well, Mr. Lanferman,” he said as he walked gradually off sagging with the weight of the loaded case as if the air were slowly leaking out of him, “I appreciate your time.”

  Pete said, “Remember what I said, Klug. Give me something with just one moving part and I’ll—”

  “Thank you very much,” Klug said and, with a sort of vague dignity, turned the corner of the corridor. He was gone.

  “Out of his mind,” Jack said after a pause. “Look what Pete offered him: his time and skill. And I offered him the use of our shops. And he walked off.” Jack shook his head. “I don’t get it. I don’t really understand what makes that guy tick. After all these years.”

  “Are we really loveable?” Pete asked. “I mean seriously; I want to know. Somebody say.”

  The final, irrefutable answer came from Jack Lanferman. “What the hell does it matter?” Jack said.

  ELEVEN

  And yet it did matter, Lars thought as he rode by high-velocity express back from San Francisco to his office in New York. Two principles governed history: the power-inspired and the—what Klug said—the healing principle, idly referred to as “love.”

  Reflexively he examined the late edition ’pape placed considerately before him by the hostess. It had one good big headline:

  New Sat Not Peep-East, says SeRKeb Speculation Planet-Wide as to Origin UN-W NATSEC Asked to Investigate.

  They who had asked, Lars discovered, were a mysterious, dim organization called the “United States Senate.” Spokesman: a transparent shade named President Nathan Schwarzkopf. Like the League of Nations, such bodies perpetuated themselves, even though they had ceased to be even a chowder and marching society.

  And in the USSR, an equally insubstantial entity called the Supreme Soviet had by now yelped nervously for someone to take an interest in the unaccounted-for new satellite, one among over seven hundred, but still a peculiar one.

  “May I have a phone?” Lars asked the ship’s hostess.

  A vidphone was brought to his seat, plugged in. Presently he was talking to the screening sharpy at the switchboard at Festung Washington, D.C.

  “Let me have General Nitz.” He gave his cog-code, all twenty portions of it, verifying it by inserting his thumb into the slot of the vidphone. The miles of strung-together gimmicks analyzed and transmitted his print and, at the switchboard in the subsurface kremlin, the autonomic circuit switched him obediently to the human functionary who stood first in the long progression which acted as a shield between General Nitz and—well, reality.

  The express ship had begun its gliding, slow descent at Wayne Morse Field in New York by the time Lars got through to General Nitz.

  The carrot-shaped face materialized, wide at the top, tapering to a near-point, with horizontal, slubby, deeply countersunk eyes and gray hair that looked—and might well be—gummed in place, being artificial. And then, hooking in a stricture at the trachea, that wonderful insignia-impregnated hard-as-black-iron hoop collar. The medals themselves, awesome to behold, were not immediately visible. They lay below the scanner of the vid-camera.

  “General,” Lars said, “I assume the Board is in session. Shall I come directly there?”

  Sardonically—it was his natural mode of address—General Nitz purred, “Why, Mr. Lars? Tell me why. Had you intended to reach them by floating to the ceiling of the sec-con chamber or having the conference table-rap spirit messages?”

  “‘Them,’” Lars said, disconcerted. “Who do you mean, General?”

  General Nitz rang off without answering.

  The empty screen faced Lars like a vacuity echoing the tone of Nitz’ voice.

  Of course, Lars reflected, in a situation of this magnitude he himself did not count. General Nitz had too much else to worry about.

  Shaken, Lars sat back and endured the rather rough landing of the ship, a hurried landing as if the pilot was eager to get his vessel out of the sky. Now would not be the time to ’coat to Peep-East, he thought drily. They’re probably as nervewracked as UN-W Natsec, if not more so … if it’s true that they didn’t put that satellite up. And evidently we believe them.

  And they, in return, believe us. Thank God we can communicate back and forth to that degree. Undoubtedly both blocs have checked out the small fry: France and Israel and Egypt and the Turks. It’s not any of them either. So it’s no one. Q.E.D.

  On foot he crossed the drafty landing field and hailed an autonomic hopper car.

  “Your destination, sir or madam?” the hopper car inquired as he crawled into it.

  It was a good question. He did not feel like going to Mr. Lars, Incorporated. Whatever it was that was going on in the sky dwarfed his commercial activities—dwarfed even the activities of the Board, evidently. He could probably induce the hopper car to take him all the way to Festung Washington, D.C.—which probably, despite General Nitz’ sarcasm, was where he belonged. He was, after all, a bona fide member of the Board and when it sat in formal session he should by rights be present. But—

  I’m not needed, he realized. It was as simple as that.

  “Do you know a good bar?” he asked the hopper car.

  “Yes, sir or madam,” the autonomic circuit of the hopper car answered. “But it is only eleven in the morning. Only a drunk drinks at eleven in the morning.”

  “But I’m scared,” Lars said.

  “Why, sir or madam?”

  Lars said, “Because they’re scared.” My client, he thought. Or employer or whatever the Board is. Their anxiety has gotten down, all the way along the line, until it’s reached to me. In that case I wonder how the pursaps feel, he wondered.

  Is ignorance any help in this situation?

  “Give me a vidphone,” he instructed the car.

  A vidphone slid creakily out, to repose leadenly in his lap, and he dialed Maren, at the Paris branch.

  “You heard?” he said, when her face at last appeared before him in gray miniature. It was not even a color vidphone—the circuit was that archaic.

  Maren said, “I’m glad you called! All kinds of stuff is showing up at the, you know, Greyhound bus station locker at Topeka, out of Geldthaler Gemeinschaft. From them. It’s incredible.”

  “This is not a mistake?” Lars broke in. “They did not put up that new sat?”

  “They swear. They affirm. They beg us to believe. No. In the name of God. Mother. The soil of Russia. You name it. The insane thing is that they, and I’m talking about the most responsible officials, the entire twenty-five men and women on SeRKeb, they’re actually groveling. No dignity, no reserve. Maybe they have unbelievably guilty consciences; I don’t know.” She looked weary; her eyes had lost their glitter.

  “No,” he said. “It’s the Slavic temperament. It’s a manner of address, like their invective. What specially do they propose? Or has that gone directly to the Board and not through us?”

  “Straight to Festung. All the lines are open, lines that are so gucked up with rust that it’s impossible they’d carry a signal, and yet they are. They’re now in use—maybe because everybody at the other end is yelling so loud. Lars, honest to God, one of them actually cried.”

  Lars said, “Under the circumstances it’s easy to understand why Nitz hung up on me.”

  “You talked to him? You actually got through? Listen.” Her voice was controlled by her intensity. “An attempt has already been made to deposit weapons on the alien satellite.”

  “Alien,” he echoed, dazed.

  “And the robot weapons teams vanished. They were protected right up to their scalps, but they’re just not there any more.”

  “Probably returned to hydrogen a
toms,” Lars said.

  “It was our coup,” Maren said. “Lars?”

  “Yes.”

  “That Soviet official who blubbered. It was a Red Army man.”

  “The thing that gets me,” Lars said, “is that all at once I’m on the outside, like Vincent Klug. It’s a really terrible feeling.”

  “You want to do something. And you can’t even blubber.”

  He nodded.

  “Lars,” Maren said, “do you understand? Everyone’s on the outside; the Board, the SeRKeb—they’re on the outside; there is no inside. Not here, anyhow. That’s why I’m already hearing the word ‘alien.’ It’s the worst word I ever heard! We’ve got three planets and seven moons that we can think of as ‘us’ and now all of a sudden—” She clamped her jaws shut morosely.

  “May I tell you something?”

  “Yes.” Maren nodded.

  He said huskily, “My first impulse. Was. To jump.”

  “You’re airborne? In a hopper?”

  He nodded, unable to speak.

  “Okay. Fly here to Paris. So it costs. Pay! Just get here and then you and I together.”

  Lars said, “I’d never make it.” I’d jump somewhere along the way, he realized. And he saw, she realized it, too.

  Levelly, with that great female earth-mother coolness of conduct, that supernatural balance that a woman could draw on when she had to, Maren said, “Now look, Lars. Listen. You’re listening?”

  “Yep.”

  “Land.”

  “Okay.”

  “Who’s your doctor? Outside of Todt?”

  “Got no doctor outside of Todt.”

  “Lawyer?”

  “Bill Sawyer. You know him. That guy with a head like a hardboiled egg. Only the color of lead.”

  Maren said, “Fine. You land at his office. Have him draw up what’s called a writ of mandamus.”

  “I don’t get it.” He felt like a small boy with her again, obedient but confused. Faced by facts beyond his little ability.

  “The writ of mandamus is to be directed at the Board,” Maren said. “It shall require them to permit you to sit with them in session. That is your goddam legal right, Lars. I mean it. You have a legal, God-given right to walk in there to that conference room down in the kremlin and take your seat and participate in everything that’s decided.”

  “But,” he said hoarsely, “I’ve got nothing to offer them: I have nothing. Nothing!” He appealed to her, gesturing.

  “You’re still entitled to be present,” Maren said. “I’m not worried about that dung-ball in the sky; I’m worried about you.” And, to his astonishment, she began to cry.

  TWELVE

  Three hours later—it had taken his attorney that long to get a judge of the Superior Court to sign the writ—he boarded a pneumatic-tube null-lapse train and shot from New York down the coast to Festung Washington, D. C. The trip took eighty seconds, including braking-time.

  The next he knew he was in downtown Pennsylvania Avenue surface traffic, moving at an abalone’s pace toward the dinky, transcendentally modest above-surface edifice which acted as an entrance to the authentic subsurface kremlin of Festung Washington, D. C.

  At five-thirty p.m. he stood with Dr. Todt before a neat young Air Arm officer, who held a laser rifle, and silently presented his writ.

  It took a little time. The writ had to be read, studied, certified, initialed by a sequence of office-holders left over from Harding’s administration. But at last he found himself with Dr. Todt descending by silent, hydraulic elevator to the subsurface, the very subsurface, levels below.

  With them in the elevator was a captain from the Army, who looked wan and tense. “How’d you make it in here?” the captain asked him; evidently he was a dispatch-runner or some such fool thing. “How’d you get all that security fnug?”

  Lars said, “I lied.”

  There was no more conversation.

  The elevator doors opened; the three of them exited. Lars—with Dr. Todt, who had been silent throughout the entire trip and ordeal of presenting the writ—walked and walked until they reached the last and most elaborate security barrier which sealed off the UN-W Natsec Board, in session within its chambers.

  The weapon which here and now pointed directly at him and Dr. Todt came, he realized with pride, from a design emanating from Mr. Lars, Incorporated. Through a meager slot in the transparent but impenetrable ceiling-to-floor bulkhead he presented all his documents. On the far side a civilian official, grizzled, bent with canny experience, with even wisdom engraved on his raptor-like features, inspected Lars’ ident-papers and the writ. He pondered for an excessive time … but perhaps it was not excessive. Who could say, in a situation like this?

  By means of a wall speaker the ancient, efficient official said. “You may go in, Mr. Powderdry. But the person with you can’t.”

  “My doctor,” Lars said.

  The grizzled old official said, “I don’t care if he’s your mother.” The bulkhead parted, leaving an opening just wide enough for Lars to squeeze through; at once an alarm bell clanged. “You’re armed,” the old official said philosophically and held out his hand. “Let me have it.”

  From his pockets Lars brought every object out for inspection. “No arms,” he said. “Keys, ballpoint pen, coins. See?”

  “Leave everything there.” The old official pointed. Lars saw a window open in the wall. Through it a hard-eyed female clerk was extending a small wire basket.

  Into the basket he dumped the entire contents of his pockets and then, upon instruction, his belt with its metal buckle, and last of all, dreamlike, he thought, his shoes. In his stocking feet he padded on to the big chamber room and, without Dr. Todt, opened the door and entered.

  At the table General Nitz’ chief aide, Mike Dowbrowsky, also a general, but three-star, glanced up at him. Expressionlessly he nodded in greeting and pointed—peremptorily—at a seat vacant beside him. Lars padded over and noiselessly accepted the seat. The discussion continued with no pause, no acknowledgment of his entrance.

  An akprop man—Gene Something—had the floor. He was on his stocking feet, gesticulating and talking in a high-pitched squeak. Lars put on an expression of solemn attention, but in reality he simply felt tired. He was, within himself, resting. He had gotten in. What happened now appeared to him an anticlimax.

  “Here is Mr. Lars,” General Nitz interrupted Gene Something, all at once, startling Lars. He sat up at once, keeping himself from visibly jerking.

  “I got here as quickly as I could,” he said stupidly.

  General Nitz said, “Mr. Lars, we told the Russians that we knew they were lying. That they put BX-3, our code for the new sat, up there. That they had violated section ten of the Plowshare Protocols of 2002. That within one hour, if they did not acknowledge having launched it into its orbit, we intended to release a g-to-a mis and knock it down.”

  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 Mol
ly 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, microdocs, 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?”