The Zap Gun

15

Lights blazed, creating a golden-white tunnel for him to walk along. The right-to-the-bone wind from the glaciers to the north snapped longingly at him and he walked rapidly, the two police following. They were shivering too, the three of them making for the closest building as fast as possible.

The building's door sealed itself shut after them and warmth surrounded them. They halted, panting, the cops' faces terribly red now and swollen, not so much from the sudden alterations of atmosphere but from tensions, as if they had feared being caught out there and left.

Four members of the KVD, the Soviet Secret Police, in old-fashioned pre-cloak, ultra-unfashionable wool suits and narrow, pointed oxfords and knit ties, appeared from nowhere. It was as if they had literally detached themselves, super-science-wise, from the walls of the antechamber in which Lars and the two Wes-bloc United States police stood panting.

Soundlessly, in a slow, ritualized moment of truth, the Wes-bloc and Soviet secret police exchanged identification. They must have carried, Lars decided, ten pounds of ident-material apiece. The swapping of cards and wallets and cephalic buzz-keys seemed to continue forever.

And no one said anything. No one of the six so much as looked at any of the others. All attention was fastened fixedly on the ident-elements themselves.

He walked off, found a hot-chocolate machine, put in a dime and soon had his paper cup; he stood sipping, feeling tired, conscious that his head ached and that he had not bothered to shave. He felt keenly the substandard, inappropriate and just plain rotten-looking sight that he presented. And at this time. In these circumstances.

When the Wes-bloc police had concluded their swapping of ident-material with their Peep-East counterparts, he said caustically, "I feel like a victim of the Gestapo. Rousted out of bed, unshaved and with my worst clothes, having to face—"

"You won't be facing a Reichsgericht" one of the Peep-East police said, overhearing. His English was a trifle artificial in its precision, learned probably from an audio edutape. Lars thought at once of robots, androids, and machinery in general; it was not a sanguine omen. Such plateau, toneless palaver, he recalled, was often associated with certain subforms of mental illness—in fact with brain-damage in general. Silently he groaned. He knew now what T.S. Eliot meant about the world ending with a whimper instead of a bang. It would end with his inaudible moan of complaint at the mechanical aspect of those who had him—and this was the true nature of his situation, whether he enjoyed facing it or not—in captivity.

Wes-bloc, for reasons which would of course not be handed down to him to fathom or appreciate, was permitting the encounter with Lilo Topchev to take place under the jurisdiction of the Soviet Union. Perhaps it showed how little hope General Nitz and those in his entourage had that anything of worth might arise out of this.

"I'm sorry," Lars said to the Soviet policeman. "I don't know any German. You'll have to explain." Or else take it up with Ol' Orville, back at the apartment. In that other, lost now, world.

The officers said, "That's right, you Amis speak no foreign languages. But you have an office in Paris. How do you manage?"

"I manage," Lars said, "by having a mistress who speaks French, as well as Italian and Russian, and is terrific in bed, all of which you can find noted in your folio on me. She heads my Paris office." He turned to the two United States police who had brought him here. "Are you leaving me?"

They answered, with absolutely no sign of guilt or concern, "Yes, Mr. Lars." A Greek chorus of abdication from human, moral responsibility. He was appalled. Suppose the Soviets decided not to return him? Where did Wes-bloc turn for its weapons designs from then on? Assuming of course that the investment of Terra's atmosphere by the alien satellites was contained...

But no one really believed it would be.

That was it. That was what had made him expendable.

"Come along, Mr. Lars." The four Soviet KVB men gathered around him and he found himself escorted up a ramp, across a waiting room in which people—normal, individual, private men and women—sat waiting for transportation or for relatives. Uncanny, he thought; like a dream.

He asked, "Can I stop and buy a magazine at the newsrack?"

"Certainly." The four KVB men steered him to the vast display and watched, like sociologists, as he searched for something to read that might please him. The Bible? he thought. Or perhaps I should try the other extreme.

"How about this?" he asked the KVB men, holding up a comic book printed in cheap, lurid colors. "The Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan." As near as he could tell, it was the worst rubbish on sale here at this enormous display counter. With a U.S. coin he paid the automatic clerk, which thanked him in its autonomic, nasal voice.

As the five of them walked on, one of the KVB men asked him, "You normally read such fare, Mr. Lars?" His tone was polite.

Lars said, "I have a complete file back to volume one, number one."

There was no response; just a formal smile.

"It has declined, though," Lars added. "During the last year." He rolled the comic book up, thrust it into his pocket.

Later, as they buzzed above the rooftops of Fairfax in a USSR government military hopper, he unrolled the comic book and pondered it by the dim dome light above his head.

He had of course never examined such garbage before. It was interesting. The Blue Cephalopod Man, in a long and much honored tradition, burst buildings, knocked out crooks, disguised himself at both ends of each episode as Jason St. James, a colorless computer-operator. That, too, was standard, for reasons lost in the obscurity of the history of comic book art, but having somehow to do with Jason St. James' girl friend, Nina Whitecotton, who wrote a gourmet column for the Monrovia Chronicle-Times, a mythical homeopape cranked forth for sale throughout West Africa.

Miss Whitecotton, interestingly, was a Negro. And so were all the other humans in the comic strip, including the Blue Cephaloped Man himself when he put on mortality as Jason St. James. And the locale was, throughout each episode, "a large metropolitan area somewhere in Ghana."

The comic book was aimed at an Afro-Asia audience. By some fluke of the world-wide autonomic distributing mechanism, it had shown up here in Iceland.

In the second episode the Blue Cephalopod Man temporarily was drained of his abnormal powers by the presence of a meteor of zularium, a rare metal "from the Betelgeuse system." And the electronic device by which the Blue Cephalopod Man's sidekick, Harry North, a physics professor at Leopoldville, restored those lost powers, just in time to nab the monsters from "Proxima's fourth planet, Agakana," was a construct astonishingly like his own weapons design item 204.

Strange! Lars continued reading.

In Episode three, the terminal section of the comic book, another machine peculiarly familiar to him—he could not precisely place it, however—was brought into play by the cunning assistance of timely Harry North. The Blue Cephalopod Man triumphed again, this time over things from the sixth planet of Orionus. And a good thing, too, because these particular things were an abomination; the artist had outdone himself.

"You find that interesting?" one of the KVB men inquired.

I find, Lars thought, it interesting inasmuch as the writer and/or illustrator has made use of KACH to pirate a few of my most technologically interesting ideas. I wonder if there are grounds for a civil suit.

However, now was not the time. He put the comic book away.

The hopper landed on a roof; the engine ceased turning and the door was at once held open for him so that he could disemhopper.

"This is a motel," one of the artificially precise of speech KVB men explained to him. "Miss Topchev occupies the entire establishment. We have cleared out the other guests and posted security sentries. You will not be disturbed."

"Really? On the level?"

The KVB man reflected, turning the phrase about in his mind. "You may call for assistance at any time," he said at last. "And of course for maintenance-service such as sandwiches, coffee, liquor."

"Drugs?"

The KVB man turned his head. Like solemn owls, all four men stared at Lars.

"I'm on drugs," Lars explained. "I thought KACH had told you that, God. I take them hourly!"

"What drugs?" The inquiry was cautious, if not downright drenched with suspicion.

Lars said, "Escalatium."

That did it. Consternation. "But Mr. Lars! Escalatium is brain-toxic! You wouldn't live six months!"

"I also take Conjorizine," Lars said. "It balances the metabolic toxicity. I mix them together, grind them into a powder with a round teaspoon, make the mixture into a water-soluble near precipitate and take it as an injectable—"

"But, sir, you'd die! From motor-vascular convulsions. Within half an hour." The four Soviet policemen looked appalled.

"All I ever got as a side-effect," Lars said, "was postnasal drip."

The four KVB men conferred and then one of them said to Lars, "We will have your Wes-bloc physician, Dr. Todt, flown here. He can supervise your drug-injection procedures. Ourselves, we can't take responsibility. Is this stimulant-combination essential for your trance-state to happen?"

"Yep."

Again they conferred. "Go below," they instructed him, at last. "You will join Miss Topchev—who does not to our knowledge rely on drugs. Stay with her until we can produce Dr. Todt and your two medications."

They glowered at him severely. "You should have told us or brought the drugs and Dr. Todt with you! The Wes-bloc authorities did not inform us." Clearly, they were sincerely angry.

"Okay," Lars said, and started toward the down-ramp.

A moment later, accompanied by one of the KVB men, he stood at the door of Lilo Topchev's motel room.

"I'm scared," he said, aloud.

The KVB man knocked. "Afraid, Mr. Lars, to pit your talent against that of our medium's?" The mocking overtones were enormous.

Lars said, "No, not that." Afraid, he thought, that Lilo will be what Kaminsky had said, a blackened, shriveled, dried-up leather-like stick of bones and skin, like a discarded purse. Consumed, perhaps, by her vocational demands. God knows what she may have been forced to give by her "client." Because they are much harsher on this side of the world... as we have known all along.

In fact, he realized, that might explain why General Nitz wanted our joint efforts as weapons design to take place under the administration of Peep-East, not Wes-bloc authority. Nitz recognizes that more decisive pressures are brought to bear here. He may think that under them I will function better.

In other words, Lars thought dully, that I've been holding back all these years. But here, under KVB jurisdiction, under the eyes of the Soviet Union's highest body, the SeRKeb, it will be different.

General Nitz had more faith in Peep-East's capacities to wrest results from its employees than in his own establishment's. What a queer, bewildering, yet somehow true-ringing last little touch. And, Lars realized, I believe it, too. Because it's probably actually the case. The door opened and there stood Lilo Topchev. She wore a black jersey sweater, slacks and sandals, her hair tied back with a ribbon. She looked, was, no more than seventeen or eighteen. Her figure was that of an adolescent just reaching toward maturity. In one hand she held a cigar and held it wrongly, awkwardly, obviously trying to appear grown-up, to impress him and the KVB man.

Lars said huskily, "I'm Lars Powderdry." Smiling, she held out her hand. It was small, smooth, cool, crushable; it was accepted by him gingerly, with the greatest deference. He felt as if by one unfortunate squeeze he could impair it forever. "Hi," she said. The KVB man bumped him bodily inside the room. And the door shut after him, with the KVB man on the other side.

He was alone with Lilo Topchev. The dream had come to pass.

"How about a beer?" she said. He observed when she spoke that her teeth were exceedingly regular, tiny and even. German-woman-like. Nordic, not Slavic.

"You've got a damn good grasp of English," he said. "I wondered how they'd solve the language-barrier." He had anticipated a deft, self-deprecating, but always present, third-person-on-hand translator. "Where'd you learn it?" he asked her.

"In school."

"You're telling the truth? You've never been to Wes-bloc?"

"I've never been out of the Soviet Union before," Lilo Topchev said. "In fact most of Peep-East, especially the Sino-dominated regions, are out of bounds to me." Walking lithely to the kitchen of the more or less cog-class luxurious motel suite to get him the can of beer, she gestured suddenly, attracting his attention. She nodded toward the far wall. And then facing him, her back to the wall, she formed with her lips—but did not say aloud—the word bug.

A video-audio system was busily monitoring them. Of course. How could it be otherwise? Here comes the chopper, Lars thought, remembering Orwell's great old classic, 1984. Only in this case we know we're under scrutiny and, at least theoretically, it's by our good friends. We're all friends, now. Except that as Aksel Kaminsky said, and truthfully, if we do not manage to properly jump through the flaming hoop, Lilo and I, our good friends will murder us.

But who can blame them? Orwell missed that point. They might be right and we might be wrong.

She brought him the beer.

"Lots of luck," Lilo said, smiling.

He thought, I'm already in love with you.

Will they kill us, he thought, for that? God help them if so. Because they and their joint civilization, East and West, would not be worth preserving at that price.

"What's this about drugs?" Lilo said. "I heard you talking with the police outside. Was that true or were you just—you know—making their job difficult?"

Lars said, "It's true."

"I couldn't catch the names of the drugs. Even though I had my door open and I was listening."

"Escalatium."

"Oh, no!"

"Conjorizine. I mix them together, grind them—"

"I heard that part. You inject them as a mixture; you really do. I thought you just said that for their benefit." She regarded him with a dignified expression overlaid with amusement. It was not disapproval or shock that she felt, not the moral indignation of the KVB man—who was inevitably simple-minded: that was his nature. With her it was near admiration.

Lars said, "So I can't do a thing until my physician arrives. All I can do—" he seated himself on a black wrought-iron chair—"is drink beer and wait." And look at you.

"I have drugs."

"They said otherwise."

"What they say is as the tunneling of one worm in one dung heap." Turning to the audio-video monitor which she had just now pointed out to him she said, "And that goes for you, Geschenko!"

"Who's that?"

"The KVB surveillance-team Red Army intelligence major who will scan the tape that's being made right now of you and me. Isn't that right, Major?" she said to the concealed monitor."

"You see," she explained to Lars calmly, "I'm a convict."

He stared at her. "You mean you committed a crime, a legal, specified crime, were tried and—"

"Tried and convicted. All as a pseudo—I don't know what to call it. A mechanism; that's it, a mechanism. By which I am legally at this moment, despite all the political, civil guarantees in the Constitution of the USSR, a person absolutely without recourse. I have no remedy whatsoever through the Soviet courts; no lawyer can get me out. I'm not like you. I know about you, Lars, or Mr. Lars. Or Mr. Powderdry, whatever you want to be called. I know how you're set up in Wes-bloc. How I've envied over the years your position, your freedom and independence!"

He said, "You think that I could spit in their eye at any time."

"Yes. I know it. KACH told me; they got it to me, in spite of the dung-heap inhabitants like Geschenko."

Lars said, "KACH lied to you."