The Zap Gun (8 page)

Jack and Pete glanced at each other, then at him expectantly. After all, you never knew; even a sick man might have a good idea now and then. A man made temporarily ill.

"First you show these people like they are now," Lars said. "As mindless, de-brained, reduced to reflex-machines, with maybe the upper ganglia of the spinal column intact, nothing more. That's how they start out. Then the FBI ships spurt the essential quality of humanness back into them. Got it? Have I found a winner?"

Jack giggled. "Funny. You'd, have to call it a Psychic Bestower Gun. But it wouldn't work."

"Why not?" Lars said. "If I were a pursaps I know it would comfort me to see human qualities imparted to debrained wrecks. Wouldn't it comfort you?"

"But see, my friend," Jack pointed out patiently, "what would emerge as a result of the item's action would be a gang of hoodlums."

True. He had forgotten about that.

However, Pete spoke up at this point, and on his side. "But they wouldn't be hoodlums if the tape was run backward because they'd set museums un-on fire, undetonate hospitals, reclothe the nubile bodies of naked young girls, restore the punched-in faces of old men. And just generally bring the dead to life, in a sort of off-hand manner."

Jack said, "It would spoil the pursaps' dinners to watch it." He spoke with finality. With authority.

"What makes pursaps tick?" Lars asked him. Jack Lanferman would know; it was Jack's job to know that. He lived by means of that knowledge.

Without hesitation Jack said, "Love."

"Then why this?" Lars gestured at the screen. Now the FBI was carting off the hulks who had been men, rounding them up like so many stunned steers.

"The pursap," Jack said thoughtfully, in a tone that told Lars that this was no light answer, no frivolity, "is afraid in the back of his mind that weapons like this exist. If we didn't show them, the pursap would believe in their existence anyhow. And he'd be afraid that somehow, for reasons obscure to him, they might be used on him. Maybe he didn't pay his jet-hopper license fee on time. Or maybe he cheated on his income tax. Or maybe—maybe he knows, deep down inside him, that he's not the way God built him originally. That in some way he doesn't quite fathom, he's corrupt."

"Deserves item 278 turned his way," Pete said, nodding.

"But he's wrong," Lars said futilely. "He doesn't deserve anything, anything at all, remotely like 278 or 240 or 210, any of them. He doesn't and they don't." He gestured at the screen.

"But 278 exists," Jack said. "The pursap knows it, and when he sees it used on an uglier life form than him he thinks, Hey. Maybe they passed me by. Maybe because those fellas are so really bad, those Peep-East bastards, 278 isn't going to get pointed at me and I can go to my grave later on, not this year but say fifty years from now. Which means—and this is the crux, Lars—he doesn't have to worry about his own death right now. He can pretend he will never die."

After a pause Pete said somberly, "The only event that really makes him secure, makes him really believe he's going to survive, is to see another person get it in his place. Someone else, Lars, had died for him."

Lars said nothing. What was there to say? It sounded right; both Pete and Jack agreed, and they were professionals: they went about their jobs intentionally, rationally, where he, as Maren had pointed out, was an idiot savant. He had a talent, but nothing—absolutely nothing, did he know. If Pete and Jack said this, then all he could do was nod.

"The only mistake ever made in this area," Jack said presently, "in the field of tearweps, was the mid-twentieth century inanity, insanity, of the universal weapon. The bomb that blew everyone up. That was a real mistake. That went too far. That had to be reversed. So we got tactical weapons. Specialized more and more—especially in the tearwep class, so that not only could they pick out their target but they could get at you emotionally. I go for tearweps; I understand the idea. But localization: that's the essence." He put on, for effect, his clumsy ethnic accent. "You don't got no target, Meester Lars, sir, when you got zap gun which blow up whole world, even though it make lot of plenty fine terror. You got—" He grinned wise-peasantishly. "You got hammer with which you hit yourself over your own head."

The accent and the attempt at humor were gone, as he said, "The H-bomb was a monstrous, paranoid-logic error. The product of a paranoid nut."

"There are not nuts like that alive today," Pete said quietly.

Jack said instantly, "That we know of."

The three of them glanced at one another.

Across the continent, Surley G. Febbs said, "A one-way express first-class window-seat ticket on a 66-G noblowby rocket to Festung Washington, D.C. And snap it up, miss." He carefully laid out a ninety poscred note on the brass surface before the TWA clerk's window.

Behind Surley G. Febbs in the line at the TWA ticket-reservations-baggage window a portly, well-cloaked, businessman-type was saying to the individual behind him, "Look at this. Get a load of what's going on overhead behind our backs right this minute. A new satellite in orbit, and by them. Not us." He refolded page one of his morning homeopape, to show.

"Chrissake," the man behind him said dutifully. Naturally Surley G. Febbs, while he waited for his ticket to Festung Washington, D.C. to be validated, listened in. Naturally.

"Wonder if it's a hedgehog," the portly businessman-type said.

"Naw." The individual behind him shook his head vigorously. "We'd object. You suppose a man of General George Nitz' stature would allow that? We'd register an official government protest so fast—"

Turning, Surley Febbs said, " 'Protest?' Are you kidding? Is that the kind of leaders we have? You actually believe what's needed is words? If Peep-East put that satellite up without officially registering the specs with SINK-PA in advance we'll—" he gestured—"Whammo. Down it comes."

He received his ticket and change from the clerk.

Later, in the express jet, first-class accommodation, window seat, he found himself next to the portly, well-cloaked, businessman-type. After a few seconds—the flight in all lasted only fifteen minutes—they resumed their conversation of solemn weight. They were now passing over Colorado and the Rockies could be seen below, briefly, but due to the nobility of their discussion they ignored that great range. It would be there later on, but they might not be. This was urgent.

Febbs said, "Hedgehog or not, every Peep miss is a men."

"Eh?" the portly businessman said.

"Every Peep-East missile is a menace. They're all up to something." Something evil, he said to himself, and glanced at the portly man's 'pape, over his shoulder. "I see it's a type never before seen. God knows what it might contain. Frankly, I think we ought to drop a Garbage-can Banger on New Moscow."

"What's that?"

Condescendingly, because he fully realized that the average man had not done research endlessly at the pub-libe as he had, Febbs said, "It's a missile that wide-cracks in the atmosphere. 'Atmosphere,' from the Sanskrit atmen, 'breath.' The word 'Sanskrit' from samskrta, meaning 'cultivated,' which is from sama, meaning 'equal,' plus kr, 'to do,' and krp, 'form.' In the atmosphere, anyhow, above the popcen—the population center—which it's aimed at. We place the Judas Iscariot IV above New Moscow, set to wide-crack at half a mile, and it rains down minned—miniaturized—h'd, that means homeostatic—"

It was hard to communicate with the ordinary mass man. Nonetheless Febbs did his best to find terms which this portly nonentity—this nont—would comprehend. "They're about the size of gum wrappers. They drift throughout the city, especially into the rings of conapts. You do know what a conapt is, don't you?"

Spluttering, the portly businessman-type said, "I live in one."

Febbs, unperturbed, continued his useful exposition. "They're cam—that is, chameleon; they blend, color-wise, with whatever they land on. So you can't detect them. There they lie, until nightfall, say around ten o'clock at night."

"How do they know when it's ten o'clock? Each has a wristwatch?" The portly businessman's tone was faintly sneering, as if he imagined that somehow Febbs was putting him on.

With massive condescension Febbs said, "By the loss of heat in the atmosphere."

"Oh."

"About ten p.m., when everyone's asleep." Febbs gloated in the thought of this strategic weapon in action, its precision. It was a thin road which this weapon laid, like the gate to salvation: esthetically it was satisfying. You could enjoy knowing about this Garbage-can Banger even without its actually going into operation.

"Okay," the portly man said. "So at ten p.m.—"

"They start," Febbs said. "Each pellet; fully cammed, begins to emit a sound." He watched the portly man's face. Obviously this citizen did not bother to read Wep Weke, the info mag devoted exclusively to pics and articles, and, where possible, true specs, of all weapons, both Wes-bloc and Peep-East—probably by means of a data-collecting agency he had in a vague way heard of named KICH or KUCH or KECH. Febbs had a ten-year file of Wep Weke, complete, with both front and back covers intact; it was priceless. "What kind of sound?"

"A horrid sneering sound. Buzzing. Like—well, you'd have to hear it yourself. The point is, it keeps you awake. And I don't mean just a little awake. I mean wide-awake. Once the noise of a Garbage-can Banger gets to you, for example, if a pellet is on the roof of your conapt building, you never sleep again. And four days without sleeping—" He snapped his fingers. "You can't perform your job. You're no good to anyone, yourself included."

"Fantastic."

"And," Febbs said, "the chances are good that pellets might land and immediately cam in the vicinity of the villa of a SeRKeb member. And that could mean the collapse of the government."

"But," the portly man said, with a trace of worry, "don't they have hardware equally sinister? I mean—"

"Peep-East," Febbs said, "would retaliate. Naturally. Probably they'd try out their Sheep Dip Isolator."

"Oh yeah," the portly businessman said, nodding. "I've read about that. They used it when their colony on Io revolted last year."

"We in the West," Febbs said, "have never smelled the Sheep Dip Isolator's implementing irritant. It's said to defy description."

"I read somewhere that a rat that's died in the wall—"

"Far worse. I admit they have something there. It descends in the form of condensation from a Type VI Julian the Apostate satellite. The drops spatter in an area of say ten square miles. And wherever they land they penetrate inter-mol-wise—intermolecularly—and can't be eradicated, even by Supsolv-x, that new detergent we have. Nothing works."

He spoke calmly, showing that he faced this tearwep without blenching. It was a fact of life, like going regularly to the dentist; Peep-East possessed it, might use it, but even this Sheep Dip Isolator could be matched by something of Wes-bloc's that was more effective.

But he could imagine the Sheep Dip Isolator in Boise, Idaho. The effect on the million citizens of the city. They would awaken to the stench, and it would be inter-mol everywhere, on and in buildings, in sub-supra- and surface-vehicles, autofacs—and the stench would drive one million people out of the city. Boise, Idaho, would become a ghost city, inhabited only by autonomic mechanisms still grinding away uncursed by the possession of noses—and by the smell.

It made you stop and think.

"But they won't use it," Febbs decided, aloud. "Because we could retaliate with, for instance—"

He scanned the fantastically extensive data-collection imbedded in his mind. He could envision a host of retalweps which would make the Sheep Dip Isolator small spuds indeed. "We'd try," he pronounced decisively, as if it were up to him, "the Civic Notification Distorter."

"Chrissake, what's that?"

"The final solution," Febbs said, "in my opinion, in n-e weapons." N-e: that signified the esoteric term, used in Wes-bloc's weapons-circles such as the Board which he now (God in his wisdom be praised!) belonged to, needle-eye. And needle-eyeification was the fundamental direction which weapons had been taking for a near-half-century. It meant, simply, weapons with the most precise effect conceivable. In theory it was possible to imagine a weapon—as yet unbuilt, probably untranced of by Mr. Lars himself, still—that would slay one given individual at a given instant at a given intersection in one particular given city in Peep-East. Or in Wes-bloc, for that matter. Peep-East, Wes-bloc: what difference did it make? The important thing would be the existence of the weapon itself. The perfect weapon.

God, how clearly he could conceive it in his own mind. One would sit down—he would—in a room. Before him, a control panel with dials... and one single button. He would read the dials, note the settings. Time, space, the synchronicity of the dimensional factors would move toward fusion. And Gafne Rostow (that was the everyman name for the average enemy citizen) would walk briskly toward that spot, to arrive at that time. He, Febbs, would press the button and Gafne Rostow would—

Hmm. Would disappear? No, that was to maj. Too magical. Not in accord with the reality-situation. Gafne Rostow, a minor bureaucrat in some temporary, small-budget ministry, of the Soviet Government, someone with a rubber stamp, desk, cramped office—he wouldn't just disappear: he would be converted.

This was the part which made Febbs shiver with relish. He did so now, causing the portly gentleman beside him to withdraw slightly and raise an eyebrow.

"Converted," Febbs said, "into a rug."

The portly businessman stared.

"A rug," Febbs repeated, irritably. "Don't you understand? Or has the Judaeo-Christian tradition impaired your judgment? What kind of patriot are you?"

"I'm a patriot," the portly businessman said defensively.

"With glass eyes," Febbs said. "Natural-simulated. Of course if it didn't have good teeth, regular and white, if there were unsightly fillings or you couldn't get the yellow stain removed, it could be a wall-hanging. Flat." The head could be discarded.