The Zap Gun

"Maybe it's already gone wrong," Morris said, still studying his boss.

"No," Lars said, presently. "If it had you'd know." Where Mr. Lars, Incorporated, stands, he thought, there'd just be a hole. Neat, precise, without a disturbance in the process to the adjoining high-rise structures. And achieved in roughly six seconds.

"I think you're nuts," Morris decided. "You're sitting here at your desk day after day, looking at Lilo's sketches, going quietly nuts. Every time you go into a trance a piece of you falls out." His tone was harsh. "It's too costly to you. And the upshot will be that one day a TV interviewer will nab you and say, 'What's cooking, Mr. Lars, sir?' and you'll say something you shouldn't" Dr. Todt, Elvira Funt, the KACH-man, all of them watched him with dismay but no one did or said anything. At his desk Lars stonily regarded the far wall and the Utrillo original which Maren Faine had given him at Christmas, 2003.

"Let's talk about something else," Lars said. "Where no pain's attached." He nodded to Dr. Todt, who seemed more narrow and priest-like than ever. "I think I'm psychologically ready now, doctor. We can instigate the autism, if you have your gadgets and you know what else set up." Autism—a noble reference, dignified.

"I want an EEG first," Dr. Todt said. "Just as a safety factor." He rolled the portable EEG machine forward. The preliminaries to the day's trance-state in which he lost contact with the given, shared universe, the koinos kosmos, and involvement in that other, mystifying realm, apparently an idios kosmos, a purely private world, began. But a purely private world in which an aisthesis koine, a common Something, dwelt What a way, Lars thought, to earn a living.

3

Greetings! said the letter, delivered by 'stant mail. You have been selected out of millions of your friends and neighbors.

You are now a concomody.

It can't be, Surley G. Febbs thought as he reread the printed form. It was a meager document, size-wise, with his name and number Xeroxed in. It looked no more serious than a bill from his conapt building's utility committee asking him to vote on a rate-increase. And yet here it was in his possession, formal evidence which would admit him, incredibly, into Festung, Washington, D.C. and its subsurface kremlin, the most heavily guarded spot in Wes-bloc.

And not as a tourist.

They found me typical! he said to himself. Just thinking this he felt typical. He felt swell and powerful and slightly drunk, and he had difficulty standing. His legs wobbled and he walked unsteadily across his miniature living room and seated himself on his Ionian fnoolfur (imitation) couch.

"But I really know why they picked me," Febbs said aloud. "It's because I know all about weapons." An authority; that's what he was, due to all the hours—six or seven a night, because like everyone else his work had been recently cut from twenty to nineteen hours per week—that he spent sca

And not only an authority on weapons. He could remember with absolute clarity every fact he had ever learned—as for example on the manufacture of red-stained glass in France during the early thirteenth century. I know the exact part of the Byzantine Empire from which the mosaics of the Roman period which they melted down to form the cherished red glass came, he said to himself, and exulted. It was about time that someone with universal knowledge like himself got on the UN-W Natsec Board instead of the usual morons, the mass pursaps who read nothing but the headlines of the homeopapes and naturally the sports and animated cartoon strips and of course the dirty stuff about sex, and otherwise poisoned their empty minds with toxic, mass-produced garbage which was deliberately produced by the large corporations who really ran things, if you knew the inside story—as for instance I. G. Farben. Not to mention the much bigger electronics, guidance-systems and rocket trusts that evolved later, like A. G. Beimler of Bremen who really owned General Dynamics and I.B.M. and G.E., if you happened to have looked deeply into it. As he had.

Wait'll I sit down at the Board across from Commander-in-chief Supreme UN-West General George Nitz, he said to himself.

I'll bet, he thought, I can tell him more facts about the hardware in the, for instance, Metro-gretel homeostatic anti-entrope phase-converter sine-wave oscillator that Boeing is using in their LL-40 peak-velocity interplan rocket than all the so-called "experts" in Festung Washington.

I mean, I won't be just replacing the concomody whose time on the Board expired and so I got this form. If I can get those fatheads to listen, I can replace entire bureaus.

This certainly beat sending letters to the Boise Star-Times 'pape and to Senator Edgewell. Who didn't even respond with a form-letter any more, he was so, quote, busy. In fact this beat even the halcyon days, seven years ago, when due to the inheritance of a few UN-West gov bonds he had published his own small fact-sheet type of newsletter, which he had 'stant-mailed out at random to people in the vidphone book, plus of course to every government official in Washington. That had—or might well have had, if there weren't so many lardheads, Commies and bureaucrats in power—altered history... for example in the area of cleaning up the importation of disease-causing protein molecules which regularly rode to Earth on ships returning from the colony planets, and which accounted for the flu that he, Febbs, had contracted in '99 and really never recovered from—as he had told the health-insurance official at his place of business, the New Era of Cooperative-Financing Savings & Loan Corporation of Boise, where Febbs examined applications for loans with an eye to detecting potential deadbeats.

In detecting deadbeats he was unmatched. He could look an applicant, especially a Negro, over in less than one microsecond and discern the actual composition of their ethical psychic-structure.

Which everyone at NECFS&LC knew, including Mr. Rumford, the branch manager. Although due to his egocentric personal ambitions and greed Mr. Rumford had deliberately sabotaged Febbs' repeated formal requests, over the last twelve years, for a more than routinely stipulated pay raise.

Now that problem was over. As a concomody he would receive a huge wage. He recalled, and felt momentary embarrassment, that often he had in his letters to Senator Edgewell among many other things complained about the salaries which the six citizens drafted onto the Board as concomodies received.

So now to the vidphone, to ring up Rumford, who was still at his high-rise conapt probably eating breakfast, and tell him to stuff it.

Febbs dialed and shortly found himself facing Mr. Rumford who still wore his Hong Kong-made silk bathrobe.

Taking a deep breath, Surley G. Febbs uttered, "Mr. Rumford, I just wanted to tell you—"

He broke off, intimidated. Old habits die slowly. "I got a notice from the UN-W Natsec people in Washington," he heard his voice declare, thin and unsteady. "So, um, you can g-get someone else t-to do all your d-dirty-type jobs for you. And just in case you're interested, I let around six months ago a really bad apple take out a ten-thousand poscred loan, and he'll n-never pay it back."

He then slammed the receiver down, perspiring, but weak with the wholesome joy that now lodged everywhere inside him.

And I'm not going to tell you who that bad apple is, he said to himself. You can comb the mi

Going into the tiny kitchen of his conapt he quick-unfroze a pack of stewed apricots, his customary breakfast. Seated at the table which extended, plank-like from the wall, he ate and meditated.