The Zap Gun

7

After dinner they made for Maren's Paris apartment. He prowled about in the living room, waiting while Maren changed, as Jean Harlow once remarked in an ancient but still potent flick, "into something more comfortable."

Then he happened onto a device resting on a low imitation tarslewood table. It was vaguely familiar and he picked it up, handled it with curiosity. Familiar and yet utterly strange.

The bedroom door was partly open. "What's this?" he called. He could see her dim, underwear-clad form as she traveled back and forth between the bed and closet. "This thing that looks like a human head with no features. The size of a baseball."

Maren called back cheerfully. "That's from 202."

"My sketch?" He stared at the object. Plowshared. This was the product for the retail market derived from the decision of one concomody on the Board. "What's it do?" he asked, finding no switches.

"It amuses."

"How?"

Maren appeared in the doorway briefly, wearing nothing. "Say something to it."

Glancing at her, Lars said, "I'm more amused just looking at you. There's about three pounds you've put on.

"Ask," Maren said, "the Orville a question. Ol' Orville is the rage. People cloister themselves for days with it, doing nothing but asking and getting answers. It replaces religion."

"There is no religion," he said, feeling serious. His experiences with the hyper-dimensional realm had disabused him of any dogmatic or devotional faith. If anyone living was qualified to claim knowledge of the "next world" it was he, and as yet he had discovered no transcendent aspect to it.

Maren said, "Then tell it a joke."

"Can't I just put it back where I found it?"

"You really don't care how they plowshare your items."

"No, that's their business." However, he tried to think of a joke. "What has six eyes," he said, "is headed for entropy, wears a derby hat—"

"Can't you ask it a serious joke?" Maren said. She returned to the bedroom, resumed dressing. "Lars, you're polymorphic perverse."

"Um," he said.

"In the bad sense. The instinct for self-destruction."

"Better that," he answered, "than the instinct to murder." Maybe he could ask Ol' Orville that question. He said to the hard, small sphere in his hand. "Am I making a mistake by feeling sorry for myself? By fighting city hall? By talking with a Soviet official during my coffee break?" He waited; nothing occurred. "By believing," he said, "that it is time that those who claim to be making machines to kill and maim and lay waste ought to have the ethical integrity to really make machines that kill and maim and lay waste instead of machines that constitute an elaborate pretext to finally bring forth a nonentity, a decadent novelty, such as yourself?" Again he waited, but Ol' Orville remained silent.

"It's broken," he called to Maren.

"Give it a second. It's got fourteen thousand minned parts in it; they have to function in sequence."

"You mean the entire guidance system from 202?"

He stared at Ol' Orville with horror. Yes, of course; this sphere was precisely the size and shape of the guidance system of 202. He began thinking of the possibilities. It could solve problems, fed to it orally, rather than on punched or iron oxide tape, to a magnitude of sixty constituents. No wonder it was taking its time to answer him. He had activated a prize assembly.

Probably in no sketch would he exceed this. And now here it was, Ol' Orville, a novelty to fill the vacant time and brains of men and women whose jobs had degenerated into repetitious psychomotor activity on a level that a trained pigeon could better perform. God! His worst expectations were fulfilled!

Lars P., he thought, remembering Kafka's stories and novels, woke up one morning to discover that somehow overnight he had been transformed into a gigantic—what? Cockroach?

"What am I?" he asked Ol' Orville. "Forget my previous queries; just answer that! What have I become?" He squeezed the sphere angrily.

Now dressed in blue-cotton Chinese pajama bottoms, Maren stood at the door of her bedroom observing him as he fought it out with Ol' Orville. "Lars P. woke up one morning to discover that somehow overnight he had been transformed into a—" She broke off, because in the corner of the living room the TV set had said pingggggg. It was turning itself on. A news bulletin was about to be read.

Forgetting Ol' Orville, Lars and she turned to face the TV set. He felt his pulse speed up. News bulletins were almost always bad news.

The TV screen showed a fixed still reading NEWS BULLETIN. The announcer's voice sounded professionally calm: "NASBA, the Wes-bloc space agency at Cheyenne, Wyoming, announced today that a new satellite, presumably launched by Peoples' China or Freedom For Mankind Cuba, is in orbit at an—"

Maren turned the set off. "Some news bulletin."

"The day I'm waiting for," Lars said, "is when a satellite already up launches its own satellite by itself."

"They do that now. Don't you read the 'papes? Don't you read Scientific American? Don't you know anything?" Her scorn was semi-serious, semi-not. "You're an idiot savant, like those cretins who memorize license plates or all the vidphone numbers in the Los Angeles area or the zip-codes for every population center in North America." She returned to the bedroom for the top to her pajamas.

In Lars' hand, forgotten, Ol' Orville stirred and spoke.

It was uncanny; he blinked as its telepathic verbal response croaked at him, its answer to a question he had already forgotten asking. "Mr. Lars."

"Yes," he said, hypnotized.

Ol' Orville creakily unwound its long-labored-for results. Toy though it was, Ol' Orville was not facile. Too many components had gone into its make-up for it to be merely glib. "Mr. Lars, you have posed an ontological query. The Indo-European linguistic structure involved defeats a fair analysis; would you rephrase your question?"

After a moment of thought he said, "No, I wouldn't."

Ol' Orville was silent and then it responded, "Mr. Lars, you are a forked radish."

For the life of him he did not know whether to laugh. "Shakespeare," he said, speaking to Maren who, now reasonably fully dressed, had joined him, was listening, too. "It's quoting."

"Of course. It relies on its enormous data-bank. What did you expect, a brand-new sonnet? It can only retail what it's been fed. It can only select, not invent." Genuinely puzzled, Maren said, "I honestly think, Lars, that all kidding aside, you really do not have a technical mind and really do not have any intellectual—"

"Be quiet," he said. Ol' Orville had more to offer.

Ol' Orville whined draggingly, like a slowed-down disc, "You also asked, 'What have I become?' You have become an outcast. A wanderer. Homeless. To paraphrase Wagner—"

"Richard Wagner?" Lars asked. "The composer?"

"And dramatist and poet," Ol' Orville reminded him. "In Siegfried, to paraphrase in order to depict your situation. 'Ich hab' nicht Bruder, noch Schwester, Meine Mutter—"

Finishing, Ol' Orville said, "—ken' Ich nicht. Mein Vater—"

Then its assembly received, integrated and accepted Maren's remark; it shifted its electronic gears. "The name 'Mr. Lars' fooled me; I thought it was Norse. Excuse me, Mr. Lars. I mean to say that, like Parsifal, you are Waffenlos, without weapons... in two senses, figurative and literal. You do not actually make weapons, as your firm officially pretends. And you are Wafenlos in another, more vital sense. You are defenseless. Like the young Siegfried, before he slays the dragon, drinks its blood and understands the song of the bird, or, like Parsifal, before he learns his name from the flower maidens, you are innocent. In, perhaps, the bad sense."

"Not the pure fool," Maren said practically, nodding. "I paid sixty poscreds for you. Go ahead and blab."

She went off to get a cigarillo from the package on the coffee table.

Ol' Orville was chewing over a decision—as if it could decide, rather than, as Maren pointed out, merely select from the data installed in its file-banks. Finally it said, "I know what you want. You face a dilemma. You are in a dilemma, now. But you have never articulated it to yourself, never faced it."

"What in hell is it?" he demanded, baffled.

Ol' Orville said, "Mr. Lars, you have a terrible fear that one day you will enter your New York office, lie down and enter your trance-state, and revive with no sketches to show. In other words, lose your talent." Except for Maren's faintly asthmatic breathing as she smoked her Garcia y Vega cigarillo, the room was silent.

"Gee," Lars said, mollified. He felt like a small, small boy, as if all the years of adulthood had been ripped away. It was an eerie experience.

Because of course this toy, this novelty-gadget which was a perversion of the original Mr. Lars, Incorporated design, was correct. His fear was a near-castration fear. And it never went away.

Ol' Orville was ponderously winding up its statement. "Your conscious quandary as to the spuriousness of your so-called 'weapons' design is an artificial, false issue. It obscures the psychological reality beneath. You know perfectly well, as any sane human would, that there is absolutely no argument for producing genuine weapons, either in Wes-bloc or Peep-East. Mankind was saved from destruction when the two monoliths secretly met at plenipotentiary level in Fairfax, Iceland, in 1992, to agree on the 'plowsharing' principle, then openly in 2002 to ratify the Protocols."

"Enough," Lars said, looking at the object.

Ol' Orville shut up.

Going to the coffee table Lars set the object back down, shakily. "And this amuses the pursaps?" he asked Maren.

Maren said, "They don't ask deep-type questions. They ask it dumb, gag-type questions. Well, well." She eyed him intently. "So all this time all this talk on your part, this moaning and groaning about, 'God. I'm a fraud. I'm perpetrating a hoax on the poor pursaps,' all that hogwash—" she had flushed with indignation—"was just so much gabble."

"Evidently so," Lars agreed, still shaken. "But I didn't know it. I don't see any psychoanalysts—I hate them. They're frauds, too, Siegmund Fraud."

He waited hopefully. She did not laugh.

"Castration fear," she said. "Fear of loss of virility. Lars, you're afraid that because your trance-state sketches are not designs for authentic weapons—you see, darling duck dear? You fear it means that you're impotent."

He did not meet her gaze.

"Waffenlos," he said. "That's a polite euphemism—"

"All euphemisms are polite; that's what it means."

"—for impotency. I'm not a man." He stared at Maren.

"In bed," Maren said, "you're twelve men. Fourteen. Twenty. Just wow." She gazed at him hopefully, to see if that cheered him.

"Thanks," he said. "But the sense of failure remains. Perhaps even Ol' Orville hasn't actually penetrated to the root of the matter. Somehow Peep-East is involved."

Maren said, "Ask Ol' Orville."

Once more picking up the featureless head, Lars said, "What is it about Peep-East that figures in all this, Ol' Orville?"

A pause, while the complex electronic system whirred, and then the gadget responded. "A blurred, distance-shot, glossy. Too blurred to tell you what you wish to know."

At once Lars knew. And tried to eradicate the thought from his mind, because his mistress and co-worker Maren Faine was standing right there by him, picking up his thoughts, in defiance of Western law. Had she gotten it, or had he cut it off in time, buried it back in his unconscious where it belonged?

"Well, well," Maren said thoughtfully. "Lilo Topchev."

He said, fatalistically, "Yep."

"In other words," Maren said, and the magnitude of her intelligence, the reason for giving her a top-level spot in his organization, manifested itself—unfortunately for him, he thought dismally. "In other words, you see the solution to the virility-sterility psycho-sexual weapons-designs dilemma in the most asinine way possible. In a way if you were say nineteen years old—"

"I'll go see a psychiatrist," he said, lamely.

"You want a good clear pic of that goddam miserable little female communist snake?" Maren's voice was sharp with hate, blame, accusation, fury—everything muddled, but distinct enough to carry across the room to him and hit hard; he felt the impact, fully.

"Yep," he said stoically.

"I'll get one for you. Okay, I will. I mean it. I'll do even better than that; I'll explain to you in simple, short words, the kind you can comprehend, how you can get it, because personally I'd prefer on second thought not to involve myself in something so—" she searched for the word, the good, solid, below-the-belt punch—"so soggy."

"How?"

"First, face this: KACH will never, never get it for you. If they turned over a blurred shot they did it on purpose. They could have gotten a better one."

"You've lost me."

"KACH," Maren said, as if speaking to a child, and one whom she had damn little sympathy with, "is what they like to call disinterested. Strip this of its self-serving nobility and you get at the truth: KACH serves two masters."

"Oh yes," he said, understanding. "Us and Peep-East."

"They have to please everyone and offend no one. They're the Phoenicians of the modern world, the Rothschilds, the Fuggers. From KACH you can contract for espionage services, but—you get a blurred distance-shot of Lilo Topchev." She sighed; it was so easy, and yet it had to be spelled out to him. "Doesn't that remind you of anything, Lars? Think."

At last he said, "The pic Aksel Kaminsky had. Of sketch 265. It was inadequate."

"Oh, darling. You see, you actually see."

"And," he said, carefully keeping himself unrattled, "your theory is that it's policy. They deliver enough to keep both blocs buying, but not enough to offend anyone.

"Right. Now look." She seated herself, puffing agitatedly on her cigarillo. "I love you, Lars; I want to keep you as mine, to fuss over and annoy; I adore annoying you because you're so annoyable. But I'm not greedy. Your psychological weak-links as Ol' Orville said is your fright that you've lost your virility. That makes you like every other male over the age of thirty... you're slowing down just a teeny bit and that scares you, you sense the waning of the life-force. You're good in bed but not quite as good as last week or last month or last year. Your blood, your heart, your—well, anyhow, your body knows it and so your mind knows it. I'll help you."

"Then help. Instead of orating," he said.

"You contact this Aksel Kaminsky."

He glanced up at her. Her expression showed she meant it; she was nodding soberly.

"And," she said, "you say, Ivan—call him Ivan. It annoys them. Then he can call you Joe or Yank, but you don't care. Ivan, you say. You want to know detail about item 265. That is correct, Ivan? Okay, comrade from East; I give you detail and you give me pic of lady weapons fashion designer Miss Topchev. Good pic, in color, maybe even 3-D. Maybe, yes even film sequence so I can run off—with nice sound-track of voice—in evening to fill vacant leisure-hours. And maybe if you have stag-type film sequence of hot pelvis-twitching in which she—"

"You think he'll do it?"

"Yes."

Lars thought, and I head the firm: I employ this woman. Obviously in another year, and me with psychological problems already... but I have the talent, the Psionic ability. So I can stay on top. He felt the insubstantiality of his over-all prowess, however, in confrontation with this woman, his mistress. Now that she had proposed, so quaintly phrased, too, the deal with Kaminsky it all seemed so obvious and yet—insanely, he would never have conjured it up on his own. Incredible!

And it would work.