The Zap Gun

30

After the alien slavers from Sirius had withdrawn their satellites—at the end there had been eight satellites orbiting the sky of earth—the life of Lars Powderdry began to sink back into normalcy.

He felt glad.

But very tired, he realized one morning as he woke slowly up in his bed in his New York apartment, and saw beside him the tumble of dark hair which was Lilo Topchev's. Although he was pleased—he liked her, loved her, was happy in a life commingled with hers—he remembered Maren.

And then he was not so pleased.

Sliding from bed he walked from the bedroom and into the kitchen. He poured himself a cup of the perpetually hot and fresh coffee maintained by one small plowshared gadget wired onto the otherwise ordinary stove.

Seated at the table, alone, he drank the coffee and gazed out the window at the high-rise conapt buildings to the north.

It would be interesting, he mused, to know what Maren would have said about our weapon in the Big War, the way in which we caused them to lay off. We made ourselves, unvaluable. Presumably the chitinous citizens of Sirius' planets are still slavers, still posting satellites in other peoples' skies.

But not here.

And UN-W Natsec, plus the cogs of Peep-East in all their finery, were still considering the utility of introducing The Weapon into the Sirius system itself...

I think, he thought, Maren would have been amused.

Sleepily, blinking in perplexity, Lilo, in her pink nightgown, appeared at the kitchen door. "No coffee for me?"

"Sure," he said, rising to get a cup and saucer for her. "Do you know what the English word 'to care' comes from?" he said, as he poured her coffee for her from the obedient gadget wired to the stove.

"No." She seated herself at the table, looked gravely at the ashtray with its moribund remains of yesterday's discarded cigars and winced.

"The Latin word caritas. Which means love or esteem." '

"Well."

"St. Jerome," he said, "used it as a translation of the Greek world agape which means even more."

Lilo drank her coffee, silently.

"Agape," Lars said, standing at the window and looking out at the conapts of New York, "means reverence for life; something on that order. There's no English word. But we still possess the quality."

"Hmm."

"And," he said, "so did the aliens. And that was the handle by which we grabbed and destroyed them."

"Fix an egg."

"Okay." He punched buttons on the stove.

"Can an egg," Lilo said pausing in her coffee-drinking, "think?"

"No."

"Can it feel what you said? Agape?"

"Of course not."

"Then," Lilo said, as she accepted the warm, steaming, sunny-side-up egg from the stove, plate included, "if we're invaded by sentient eggs we'll lose."

"Damn you," he said.

"But you love me. I mean, you don't mind; in the sense that I can be what I am and you don't approve but you let me anyhow. Bacon?"

He punched more buttons, for her bacon and for his own toast, applesauce, tomato juice, jam, hot cereal.

"So," Lilo decided, as the stove gave forth its steady procession of food as instructed, "you don't feel agape for me. If, like you said, agape means caritas and cantos means to care. You wouldn't care, for instance, if I—" She considered. "Suppose," she said, "I decided to go back to Peep-East, instead of running your Paris branch, as you want me to. As you keep urging me to." She added, thoughtfully, "So I'd even more fully replace her."

"That's not why I want you to head the Paris branch."

"Well..." She ate, drank, pondered at length. "Perhaps not, but just now, when I came in here, you were looking out the window and thinking. What if she was still alive. Right?"

He nodded.

"I hope to God," Lilo said, "that you don't blame me for her doing that."

"I don't blame you," he said, his mouth full of hot cereal. "I just don't understand where the past goes when it goes. What happened to Maren Faine? I don't mean what happened that day on the up-ramp when she killed herself with that—" he eradicated a few words which came, savagely, to mind—"that Beretta. I mean. Where is she? Where's she gone?"

"You're not completely awake this morning. Did you wash your face with cold water?"

"I did everything that I'm going to do. I just don't understand it; one day there was a Maren Faine and then there wasn't. And I was in Seattle, walking along. I never saw it happen."

Lilo said, "Part of you saw it. But even if you didn't see it, the fact remains that now there is no Maren Faine."

He put down his cereal spoon. "What do I care? I love you! And I thank God—I find it incredible—that it wasn't you who were killed by that pelfrag cartridge, as I first thought."

"If she had lived, could you have had us both?"

"Sure!"

"No. Impossible. How?"

Lars said, "I would have worked it somehow."

"Her by day, me at night? Or her on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, me on—"

"The human mind," he said, "couldn't possibly be defeated by that situation, if it had the chance. A reasonable chance, without that Beretta and what it did. You know something that old Vincent Klug showed me, when he came back as the old war veteran, so-called, that Ricardo Hastings? It's impossible to go back." He nodded.

"But not yet," Lilo said. "Fifty years from now, maybe."

"I don't care," he said. "I just want to see her."

"And then what?" Lilo asked.

"Then I'd return to my own time."

"And you're going to idle away your life, for fifty years or however long it is, waiting for them to invent that Time Warpage Generator."

"I've had KACH look into it. Somebody's undoubtedly already doing basic research on it. Now that they know it exists. It won't be long."

"Why," Lilo said, "don't you join her?"

At that he glanced up, startled. "I am not kidding," Lilo said. "Don't wait fifty years—"

"More like forty, I calculate."

"That's too long. Good God, you'll be over seventy years old!"

"Okay," he admitted.

"My drug," Lilo said quietly. "You remember; it's lethal to your brain metabolism or some damn thing—anyhow three tablets of it and your vagus nerve would cease and you'd die."

After a pause he said, "That's very true."

"I'm not trying to be cruel. Or vengeful. But—I think it would be smarter, saner, the better choice, to do that, take three tablets of Formophane than to wait forty to fifty years, drag out a life that means absolutely nothing—"

"Let me think it over. Give me a couple of days."

"You see," Lilo said, "not only would you be joining her immediately, without waiting more years than you've lived already, but—you'd be solving your problems the way she solved hers. So you'd have that bond with her, too." She smiled, grimly. Hatingly.

"I'll give you three tablets of Formophane right now," she said, and disappeared into the other room.

He sat at the kitchen table, staring down at his bowl of cooling cereal and then all at once she was back. Holding out something to him.

He reached up, took the tablets from her, dropped them into the shirt-pocket of his pajamas.

"Good," Lilo said. "So that's decided. Now I can go get dressed and ready for the day. I think I'll talk to the Soviet Embassy. What's that man's name? Kerensky?"

"Kaminsky. He's top-dog at the embassy."

"I'll inquire through him if they'll take me back. They have some idiots they're using in Bulganingrad as mediums, but they're no good—according to KACH."

She paused. "But of course it's not the same as it was. It'll never be like that again."