The Zap Gun

Patiently, Maren said, "But still by T.E.T. it's two a.m. Don't call General Nitz; give up. If he had wanted to talk to you he would have called the New York office, not here. He doesn't like you; that's what it is, midnight or midday." She smiled pleasantly.

Lars said, "You're sowing seeds of discontent."

"Truth-telling," she disagreed. "W.t.k.w.y.t.i.?"

"No," he said. "I don't want to know what my trouble is."

"Your trouble—"

"Lay off."

Maren continued. "Your trouble is that you feel uneasy when you have to deal with myths, or as you would put it, lies. So all day long you go around uneasy. But then when someone starts talking the truth you break out in a rash; you get psychosomatically ill from head to toe."

"Hmm."

"The answer," Maren said, "at least from the standpoint of those who have to deal with you, temperamental and mercurial as you are, is to tell you the myth—"

"Oh, shut up. Did Nitz give any details about these new mediums they'd uncovered?"

"Sure. One small boy, fat as Tweedledee, sucking a lollypop, very disagreeable. One middle-aged spinster lady in Nebraska. One—"

"Myths," Lars said. "Told so they seem true."

He strode back up the corridor to Maren's office. A moment later he was unlocking her vidset, dialing Festung Washington, D.C. and the Board's mundane stations.

But as the picture formed he heard a sharp click. The picture minutely—but perceptibly, if you looked closely enough—shrank. And at the same time a red warning light lit up.

The vidset was tapped somewhere along its transmitting cable. And not by a mere coil but by a splice-in. At once he rang off, got to his feet, rejoined Maren, who had let one elevator go by and was serenely waiting for him.

"Your set's tapped."

"I know," Maren said.

"And you haven't called PT&T to come in and remove the lap?"

Maren said graciously, as if talking to someone with severe intellectual limitations, "Look, they know anyhow." A vague-enough reference: they. Either KACH, the disinterested agency, hired by Peep-East, or exten-tensions of Peep-East itself such as its KVB. As she as much as said, it didn't matter. They knew it all anyhow.

Still, it a

Lars said, "I do not object to a monopoly of knowledge by one small class. It doesn't upset me, that there are a few cogs and a lot of pursaps. Every society is really run by an elite."

"So what's the trouble, darling dear?"

"What bothers me," Lars said as the up-elevator came and he and Maren entered it, "is that the elite, in this case, doesn't even bother to guard that knowledge which makes it the elite." There is, he thought, probably a free pamphlet, distributed by UN-West for the asking, filled something like, HOW WE RULE YOU FELLAS AND WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

"You're in authority," Maren reminded him.

Glancing at her he said, "You do keep that telepathic brain-add turned on. Despite Behren's Ordinance."

Maren said, "It cost me fifty mil to get it installed. You think I'm going to set it to the off position, really? Look how it earns its keep. It tells me if you're faithful or off in some conapt with—"

"Read my subconscious, then."

"I have been. Anyhow, why? Who wants to know where you keep the nasty things you don't want to know—"

"Read it anyhow! Read the prognosticating aspects. What I'm going to do, the potential actions still in germinal form."

Maren shook her head. "Such big words and such little ideas."

She giggled at his response. The ship, now on auto-auto, had reached a height above the commute-layer, was on its way out of town. He had reflexively instructed it to vacate Paris... God knew why.

"I'll analyze you, dear duck," she said. "It's really touching, what you're thinking over and over again deep down there in that substandard mind of yours—substandard if you don't count that knob on the frontal lobe that makes you a medium."

He waited to hear only the truth.

Maren said, "Over and over again that little i

7

After di

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 mi

"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.