The Zap Gun

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 a

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 unca

"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 so

"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 i

"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."