The Zap Gun

16

She blinked. The dead cigar and the can of beer trembled, Lars said, "They have me right now as much as they've had you."

"Didn't you volunteer to come here to Fairfax?"

"Oh, sure!" He nodded. "In fact I personally talked Marshal Paponovich into the idea. Nobody made me come here; nobody put a pistol to my head. But somebody brought a pistol out of a desk drawer and let me view it, and let me know."

"An FBI man?" Her eyes were enormous, like those of a little child hearing the exploits of the fabulous.

"No, not an FBI man, technically. A friend of the FBI, in this friendly, cooperative world in which we live. It's not important; we don't have to depress ourselves into talking about this. Except that you ought to know that they could have gotten to me any time. And when it mattered they let me know it."

"So," Lilo said thoughtfully, "you haven't been that different. I heard you were a prima donna."

Lars said, "I am, I'm difficult. I'm undependable. But they can still get out of me what they want. What else matters?"

"I guess nothing else," she said, dutifully.

"What drugs do you take?"

"Formophane."

"It sounds like a new make of one-way mirror." He had never heard of it. "Or a plastic milk carton that opens itself and pours itself on your cereal without spilling a drop."

Lilo said, between gulps, awkward and adolescent, at her can of beer, "Formophane is rare. You don't have it in the West. It's made by a firm in East Germany that descends from some ancient pre-Nazi pharmaceutical cartel. In fact it's made—" She paused. Obviously she was considering whether it was wise to finish. "They make it expressly for me," she said, at last.

There, it was done, she had told him. "The Pavlov Institute at New Moscow made a six-month analysis of my brain-metabolism to see what could be done to—improve it. They came up with this chemical formula and it was Xeroxed and passed on to A. G. Chemie. And A. G. Chemie produces sixty half-grain tablets of Formophane for me a month."

"And it does what?"

Lilo said, carefully, "I don't know."

He felt fear. For her. For what they had done—and could do again any time they wanted. "Don't you notice any effects?" he asked. "Deeper involvement in the trance-state? Longer? Fewer after-effects? You must notice something. Improvement in your sketches—it must be they give it to you to improve your sketches."

Lilo said, "Or to keep me from dying."

The fear inside him became acute. "Why dying? Explain." He kept his voice low, free of affect; it appeared as casual. "Even considering the quasi-epileptoid nature of—"

"I am a very sick person," Lilo said, "Mentally. I have what they call 'depressions.' They're not depressions and they know it; that's why I spent—always will spend—a lot of time at the Pavlov Institute. It's hard to keep me going, Lars. That's the simple fact. It's a day by day proposition, and Formophane helps. I take it. I'm glad to get it—I don't like the 'depressions' or whatever they are. You know what they are?" She leaned toward him urgently. "Want to know?"

"Sure."

"I watched my hand once. It shriveled up and died and became a corpse hand. It rotted away to dust. And then it became all of me; I no longer lived. And then—I lived again. In another way, the life that's to follow. After I die... Say something." She waited.

"Well, that ought to interest the established religious institutions." It was all he could think of, for the moment.

Lilo said, "Do you think, Lars, we, the two of us, can do what they want? Can we come up with what they call a 'zap gun'? You know. A—I hate to say it—a real weapon?"

"Sure."

"From where?"

"From the place we—visit. As if we took psilocybin. Which is related, as you know, to the adrenal hormone epinephrine. But I always have liked to think of it as if we're taking teo-nanacatyl."

"What's that?"

"An Aztec word. It means 'god's flesh.' " He explained. "You know it under the name of its alkaloid. Mescaline."

"Do you and I visit the same place?"

"Probably."

"And it's where, did you say?" She cocked her head, waiting, listening, watching. "You didn't say. You don't know! I know."

"Then tell me."

Lilo said, "I will if you'll take Formophane first." Rising, she disappeared into the other room. When she returned she carried two white tablets, which she held out to him.

For reasons which he did not know—which really frankly did not interest him—he obligingly, without even verbal protest, drank down the two tablets with his beer. The tablets caught in his throat momentarily. They seemed to stick there, and then were past the point from which they could be coughed forth, expelled. The drug was now a part of him. For whatever it foreboded; for whatever claim the chemical could make on his system—he had taken it on trust. And that was that.

Trust, he realized, not in the drug but in Lilo Topchev.

Lilo said, to his jolted surprise, "Anyone who would do that, is—a person who has failed." She seemed sad and yet not disappointed. It was as if his trust had reinforced some deep, instinctual pessimism in her. Or was it something more? The Slavic fatalism?

He had to laugh; he was caricaturizing her. Whereas in fact he knew nothing about her yet, could not at this point decipher her in the least. "You're going to die," Lilo said. "I've been waiting to do this; I'm afraid of you." She smiled. "They always told me that if I ever let them down the KVB hatchet-men operating in Wes-bloc would 'nap you, bring you to Bulganingrad and use you, and I'd be discarded on what they call the 'rubbish-heap of history.' In the old-fashioned way. The way Stalin used."

He said, "I don't believe for even one second that you're telling me the truth."

"You don't think you came all the way here just to be assassinated by me."

He nodded.

After a pause Lilo sighed. "You're right."

He sagged with relief; his breathing resumed.

"I am afraid of you," she continued. "They did threaten me, held you over my head perpetually. I got so I hated just thinking about you. And I suppose you are going to die. Everybody else does. Everybody else has in the past up to now. But not from what I just now gave you. That was a brain-metabolism stimulant resembling serotonin; it was exactly what I said and I gave it to you because I'm terribly interested to see its effects on you. You know what I want to do? Try your two drugs along with mine. We won't just combine our talent. We'll combine our metabolic stimulants too and see what we get. Because—" she hesitated childishly, openly somber but excited—"we have to be a success, Lars. We just have to."

He said reassuringly, "We will be."

And then, as he sat there with his beer can in his hand—he was studying it idly, noticing that it was a Danish beer, dark, a very good sort—he felt the drug affect him.

All at once, with a terrible rush like bad fire, it overwhelmed him, and he got stumblingly to his feet, reaching out—the beer can fell, rolled away, its contents staining the rug, dark, ugly, foaming, as if some big animal had been slaughtered helplessly here and its life was draining away. As if, he thought, I have strode into death, despite what she said. God in heaven! I've cut myself open in an effort to—obey.

What am I obeying? he asked. Death can dissemble. It can ask for your hide in hidden words and you think it's something entirely else, a high authority, some quality spiritual and free that you ought to enjoy. That's all you ask; you want to be pleased. And instead—it has you. Not they but it. They would like a lot but they're not ready to ask for that.

However you have given it gratuitously, jumped the gun. They won't like it. Tyranny has its own rate of flow. To run forward toward it prematurely is no more going to be appreciated than if you tried to creep back out, hung back, wandered off, sought to escape in any other way. Than even if, God forbid, you had stood up on your feet and fought.

"What's the matter?" Lilo's voice, distantly.

"Your serotonin," he said with difficulty, "got to me. Wrongly. The alcohol, the beer. Maybe. Can you—tell me." He walked one step, two. "The bathroom."

She guided him, frightened. He could make that out, the flapping batwings, her genuinely fear-stained face as she led him along.

"Don't worry," he said. "I'll—" And then he perished.

The world was gone; he was dead and in a bright, terrible world no man had ever known.