The Zap Gun

11

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 decent 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 atoms," 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.