The Zap Gun

14

Late that night, as he lay sleeping in his New York conapt, they came.

"She's all right now, Mr. Lars. So do you want to throw your clothes on? We'll pack the rest for you and send it later. We'll go directly up to the roof. Our ship is there." The leader of the FBI men or CIA men or God knew what kind of men, anyhow professionals and accustomed to being awake and at their duties at this time of night, began, to Lars' incredulity, to rummage in his dresser drawers and closets, gathering his clothes in an efficient, silent, machine-at-work encirclement, they were all around him, doing what they had been sent for. He stood in sleepy, animal-irritable, benumbed bewilderment.

But out of this, full wakefulness at last came, and he padded to the bathroom.

As he washed his face, one of the police in the other room said to him casually, "They've got three up, now."

"Three," he said, moronically, confronting his sleep-squeezed, wrinkled face in the mirror. His hair hung like dry seaweed over his forehead and he automatically reached for a comb.

"Three satellites. And this third one is different, or so the tracking-stations say."

Lars said, "Hedgehog?"

"No, just different. It's not a monitoring rig. It's not gathering info. The first two were; now maybe they've done their job."

"They've proved," Lars said, "by being able to remain up there, that we can't bring them down." No mass of sophisticated equipment jammed into the two sats was necessary to establish that; they might as well be hollow.

The police wore commonplace gray-eminence style cloaks and looked, with their close-shaven heads, like excessively ascetic monks. They ascended to the roof of the conapt building. The man on Lars' right, rather ruddy of complexion, said, "We understand you visited the Soviet Embassy this afternoon."

"That's right," Lars said.

"That writ you have—"

"It just forbids them to accost me," he said. "I can accost them. They don't have a writ."

The policeman said, "Any luck?"

That did stump him. He pondered in silence, unable to answer. Did the query mean that these FBI or CIA people knew why he had gone to Kaminsky? At last, as they crossed the roof-field to the parked government ship, of a familiar, pursuit-class, great-cruising-range style, Lars said, "Well, he made his point. If you call that 'luck.' "

The ship rose. New York rapidly fell behind; they were out over the Atlantic. Lights, the habitations of man far below, dwindled and were lost to sight. Lars, peering back, felt an anxious, perhaps even neurotic regret; he experienced a sense of acute, pervasive loss. A loss which could never be compensated for, throughout all eternity.

"How are you going to act?" asked the policeman at the controls.

"I will give the absolute, total, entire, exhaustive, holistic, unconditional impression," Lars said, "that I am being candid, naпve, open, honest, truthful, prolix, verbose—"

Sharply the policeman said, "You stupid bastard—our lives are at stake!"

Lars said somberly, "You're a cog."

The policeman—both policemen, in fact—nodded.

"Then you know," Lars said, "that I can provide you with a gadget, a plowshare component of a sixty-stage guidance-system, which will light your cigars and make up new Mozart string quartets as background while another gadget, a plowshared component from some other multiplex item, serves you your food, even chews it for you and if necessary spits any and all seeds out, into a gadget—"

"I can see," one of the two police said to his companions, "why they hate these weapons fashion designers so goddam much. They're fairies."

"No," Lars said. "You're wrong; that's not what ails me. You want to know what ails me? How long before we reach Fairfax?"

"Not long," both policemen said simultaneously.

Lars said, "I'll do my best. What ails me is this. I'm a failure at my work. And that hurts a man; that makes him fearful. But I'm paid, or have been up to now, to be a failure. That's what was wanted."

"You think, Powderdry," the policeman seated beside him said, "that you and this Lilo Topchev can do it? Before they—" he pointed upward, an almost pious gesture, like that of some ancient tiller of the soil, a job who had been burned and then burned again—"drop whatever it is they're setting up their sat-network to make the calculations for? So when they do drop it, it'll hit exactly where they want it? Like for instance, and this is my theory, turning the Pacific to steam and boiling us like a lot of Maine lobsters."

Lars was silent.

"He's not going to say," the policeman at the controls said in a curiously mixed tone. There was anger in his voice but also grief. It was a small-boy sound, and Lars sympathized with it. He must have sounded like this himself, at times.

Lars said, "At the Soviet Embassy they told me, and they meant it, that if Lilo and I came up with nothing or with only the pseudo-weps we've all made our livelihoods off of for decades now, they would kill me and her. And they will—if you don't first."

At the controls the policeman said, calmly, "We will first. Because we'll be closer. But not right away; there'll be a suitable interval."

"Were you ordered to?" Lars asked, with curiosity. "Or is this your own idea?"

No answer.

"You can't both kill me," Lars said, a feeble attempt to be philosophical and flippant. It failed to be the former, and the latter was not appreciated. "Maybe you can," he said, then. "St. Paul says a man can be born again. He can die and return to life. So if a man can be born twice why can't he be assassinated twice?"

"In your case," the policeman beside him said, "it wouldn't be assassination."

He did not elect to specify what it in fact would be. Perhaps, Lars thought, it was unspeakable. He felt the burden of their mingled hatred and fear and yet—their trust. They still had hope, as Kaminsky had. They had paid him for years not to produce a genuinely lethal device and now, with absolute naпvetй, they clung to his skirts, begging, as Kaminsky had begged—and yet with the ugly undercurrent of threat, of murder in case he failed.

He began to understand much that he had never realized about cog society.

Being on the inside, knowing the real scoop, had not eased their lives. Like him, they still suffered. They were not puffed-up, prideful, shot full, as someone had said to him recently, with hubris. Knowing what was really going on made them uneasy—for the same reason that not knowing made the multitude, the pursaps, able to sleep in peace. Too much of a burden, that of maturity, of responsibility, lay on the cogs... even on these nonentities, these two cops, plus their cohorts back at his conapt who were undoubtedly right now stuffing all his cloaks, shirts, shoes and ties and underwear into boxes and suitcases.

And the essence of the burden was this:

They knew, as Lars himself knew, that their destiny lay in the hands of halfwits. It was as simple as that. Halfwits in both East and West, halfwits like Marshal Paponovich and General Nitz... halfwits, he realized, and felt his ears sear and flame red, like himself. It was the sheer mortality of the leadership that frightened the ruling circles. The last "superman," the final Man of Iron, had been Josef Stalin. Since then—puny mortals, job-holders who made deals.

And yet, the alternative was frightfully worse—and they all, including even the pursaps, knew this on some level.

They were seeing, in the form of three alien satellites in their sky, that alternative now.

At the controls the cop said, drawlingly, as if it didn't matter quite so much. "There's Iceland."

Below them the lights of Fairfax glowed.