The Zap Gun

17

There was a man, almost idol-like, graven in the stone-carved clarity of his facial structure. He was bending by Lars, wearing a smart uniform, including a cluster of vari-colored medals.

He said, "He's alive now."

Two medical persons hovered. They wore plain white floor-length smocks. Lars saw institutional, stupendously expensive emergency equipment, great chugging machines with hoses and gauges and self-powered engines, everything in furious operation. The air smelled of ionization—highly positive—and chemicals. He saw a table on which instruments rested, one of which he recognized; it was employed to perform immediate tracheaectasies.

But these Soviet medical people had not had to use it with him. He had come around in time.

The monitor, he realized. Hidden in the wall, grinding continually away its audio and video material. Keeping watch for its own sinister, ulterior purposes. It had witnessed his collapse and because of it help had been summoned, and soon enough to save him.

Getting to the bathroom would not quite have been enough.

To the uniformed, bemedaled, starch-collar and shoulder-boarded Red Army officer he said, "Major Geschenko?"

"Yes, Mr. Lars." The officer had become now, in relief, rubbery and pale. "Your vagus. Something about the medulla and especially the esophagus; I don't properly understand. But it was really exceptionally close, for a minute or two. They would of course at the very last cooled you down and flown you out of here. But—" He gestured.

Lars agreed, "Close. I felt the nearness." He made out Lilo Topchev now. She stood huddled at the far wall, not taking her eyes off him.

Lilo said, "Do you imagine I did it on purpose?"

Her voice was far off and barely audible to him. For a moment he believed it was his imagination and then he realized that she had actually asked that. And he realized the answer. He knew the truth.

But aloud, mostly to protect her, he said, "An accident."

"It was," Lilo said faintly.

"I think we're all aware of that," Major Geschenko said, with a trace of taut irritation. "An allergic reaction."

You believe her? Lars wondered. A man in your business? Or is it that I'm not supposed to know?

No sir, he thought; you couldn't be fooled. You're a professional. And even I can tell an accident from the real thing. This was real. She made a try and then she got afraid because it would have been the end of her, too. She must have understood that when she saw the drug actually begin to work, the violence of the somatic response. She is just not an adult, he thought. She couldn't foresee.

But why? he wondered. Fear that I'd replace her? Or fear of another kind entirely.

A much more rational fear.

He said, speaking to Lilo, "It's the weapon."

"Yes." Rigidly she nodded.

He said, "You thought that it would come. By means of us as they hoped for."

"It would be too much," Lilo said.

He comprehended. "The old days, before the Protocols," he said. "When there was no deal. No hoax. When it was the real thing."

"It was returning," Lilo said in a whisper. "I felt it as soon as I set eyes on you. Together we'd do it and it'd be done and no one could change that. We in our expanded consciousness where they can't go, even with mescaline-psilocybin-Psilocybe mexicana-Stropharia cubensis-d-lysergic acid diethylamide, everything combined; they can't follow us. And they know it."

Angrily, Major Geschenko said to her in a loud voice, almost a shout, "The satellites! Three! Do you hear me? And there's going to be a fourth and a fifth and it's the end of us!"

"All right," she said, with composure. "I hear. You're undoubtedly right." She sounded defeated.

To Lars, Major Geschenko said with bitter, sardonic wrath, "Undoubtedly." He scrutinized Lars, seeking his reaction.

Lars said with difficulty, "You never will have to worry about me or my attitude. She's wrong, emotionally. I see that clearly—why you've always kept her under such surveillance. I understand perfectly. From now on I want Dr. Todt—"

"He'll be here in several minutes," Major Geschenko assured him. "And he'll be with you constantly, so the opportunity for her to try some other psychotic coup to defend herself against imaginary attack won't be even remotely possible. And if you want, in addition one of our own medical officers can—"

"Todt is enough," he said, and sat up.

"I hope you're right," Major Geschenko said. He sounded as if he had grave reservations. "Anyhow we'll defer to your preferences in this matter." To Lilo he said, "You could be arraigned, you know."

She said nothing.

"I want to take the chance," Lars said. "I want to go on working with her. Actually we haven't started. We should, right away; I think the situation insists on it."

Hands shaking, without a word, Lilo Topchev relit her cigar. Ignoring him, staring fixedly at the match in her hand, she puffed gray smoke.

He knew then that he would not trust her for a long, long time. Nor even understand her.

"Tell me," he said to Major Geschenko. "Do you have the authority to ask her to put that cigar out? It makes it hard for me to breathe."

Two plainclothes KVB men at once stepped toward Lilo.

She dropped the burning cigar to the floor, defiantly.

The room was silent as everyone watched her.

"She'll never pick it up," Lars said. "You can wait forever."

A KVB man stooped, picked up the cigar and ground it out in a nearby ashtray.

Lars said, "But I will work with you. Do you follow me?" He watched her intently, trying to guess what she was thinking and feeling, but he saw nothing. Even the professionals around him seemed to see no harbinger. She has eluded us, he thought. We will just have to go ahead on this bad basis. And she has our lives at stake in those childish hands.

Jesus, he said to himself. What a mess!

Major Geschenko helped him up. Everyone in the room tried to assist, thwarting one another in a silent-movie routine that at any other time would have struck Lars as funny. The major led him off to one side where the two of them could talk.

Geschenko said, "You understand why we were able to get to you so soon."

Lars said, "She pointed out the aud and vid receptors."

"And you can see why they were installed."

"I don't care why they were installed."

"She will function," Major Geschenko assured him. "We know her. At least we've done our best to learn enough in order to predict."

"You didn't foresee this, though."

"What we didn't see," Geschenko said, "was that a preparation benign to her brain-metabolism would be toxic to yours. And we're puzzled as to how she knew, unless she was guessing."

"I don't think she was guessing."

"Is there a pre-cog aspect to you mediums?"

"Maybe," Lars said. "Is she ill in the clinical sense?"

"You mean psychologically? No. She's reckless; she's full of hate; she doesn't like us or want to cooperate. But not ill."

"Try letting her go," Lars said.

"Go? Go where?"

"Anywhere. Free her. Walk away from her. Leave her. You don't understand, do you?" It was obvious; he was wasting his time. But he tried just a little further. The man he was addressing was not an idiot, not a fanatic. Geschenko was merely firmly gripped in the paws of his environment. "Do you know what a fugue is?" Lars asked.

"Yes. Flight,"

"Let her run until she's run enough to—" He hesitated.

Mockingly, Geschenko said, with the wisdom of an age not confined to his own, not limited to the Soviet world of his here and now, "To what, Mr. Lars?"

He waited for an answer.

Lars said doggedly, "I want to sit down with her and as soon as possible begin the work she and I have to do. In spite of this. It shouldn't be allowed to cause delay because that would encourage the tendencies in her that act toward dissolving the cooperative effort that we have to initiate. So get everyone else out and let me see my doctor."

Dr. Todt said to Lars, "I'd like to do a multi-phasic on you now."

Putting his hand on Todt's shoulder Lars said, "She and I have to work. We'll run the tests some other time. When I'm back in New York."

" 'De gustibus,' " tall, morose, thin-beaked Dr. Todt said fatalistically, " 'non disputandum est.' I think you're insane. They've got the formula for that poison held back so we can't analyze it. Only God Himself knows what it did to you."

"It didn't kill me and we're going to have to be content with that. Anyhow you keep your eyes open all the time, during our trance-states. And if you have any measuring devices you want to keep hooked up to me—"

"Oh yes. I'll be running an EEG and an EKG continually. But just on you. Not her. They can assume responsibility for her; she's not my patient." Dr. Todt's tone was envenomed. "You know what I think?"

Lars said, "You think I ought to go home."

"The FBI can get you out of—"

"You have the Escalatium and the Conjorizine spansules?"

"Yes, and thank God you're not going to inject. That's the first rational decision you've made." Todt handed him two small bulging envelopes.

"I don't dare inject. They might potentiate that damn poison she gave me." He considered himself warned. It would be a while before he took any more chances with even those drugs whose action he was familiar with. Or imagined he was familiar with.

Walking over to Lilo Topchev he stood confronting her; she returned his gaze with poise.

"Well," he said, by way of an appeasing introduction, "I suppose you could have given me four of those instead of two. It could be worse."

"Oh, hell," she said tragically. "I give up. There's no way out of this idiotic fusion of our minds, is there? I have to cease being an individual, what little they've left me. Wouldn't you be surprised, Mr. Lars, if I put those satellites up there? Through a parapsychological talent no one knows about yet?" She smiled happily. The idea seemed to please her, even if it was a fantasy, patently not true. "Do I scare you by saying that?"

"Nope."

"I'll bet I could scare somebody by saying that. Gosh, if only I had access to the info-media, the way you have. Maybe you could say it for me; you could quote me."

Lars said, "Let's start."

"If you work in unison with me," Lilo Topchev said quietly, "I promise something will happen to you. Don't go on. Please."

"Now," he said. "With Dr. Todt right here."

"Dr. Dead."

"Pardon?" He was taken aback.

"That's right," Dr. Todt said from behind him. "That's what my name means in German. She's perfectly right."

"And I see that," Lilo said, half to herself, in an almost singsong chant "I see death. If we go on."

Dr. Todt held a cup of water toward Lars. "For your medication."

In ritualistic fashion, as before each trance-state, Lars downed one Escalatium and one Conjorizine. Downed rather than injected. The method differed but the results, he hoped, would be the same.

Watching him narrowly, Dr. Todt said, "If Formophane, which is essential to her, is toxic to you, acts to suppress your sympathetic nervous-system, you might ask yourself this. 'How does the structure of my parapsychological talent differ from hers?" Because this is a high order of evidence that it does. Does in fact radically."

"You don't think she and I can function together?"

"Probably not," Dr. Todt said quietly.

"I guess we'll know fairly soon," Lars said.

Lilo Topchev, detaching herself from her place at the far wall, walked toward him and said, "Yes. I guess we will."

Her eyes were bright.