The Zap Gun

31

He held the three tablets of Formophane in his hand and considered the tall, cool glass of tomato juice on the table before him. He tried to suppose—as if one really could—how it would be, swallowing the tablets here and now, as she—the girl in the bedroom, whatever her name was—dressed for the day ahead.

While she dressed, he died. That simple. That simple, anyhow, to the easy scene-fabrication faculty available within the psychopathically-glib human mind.

Lilo paused at the bedroom door, wearing a gray wool skirt and slip, barefoot. She said, "If you do it I won't grieve and hang around forty years waiting for that Time Warpage Generator so I can go back to when you were alive. I want you to be certain of that, Lars, before you do it."

"Okay." He hadn't expected her to. So it made no difference.

Lilo, remaining there at the door, watching him, said, "Or maybe I will."

Her tone, it seemed to him, was not contrived. She was genuinely considering it, how she would feel, what it would be like. "I don't know. I guess it would depend on whether Peep-East takes me back. And if so, what my Me there would be like. If it was like the way they treated me before—" She pondered. "I couldn't stand that and I'd begin to remember how it was here with you. So maybe I would; yes, I think I would start grieving for you, the way you are for her." She looked up at him, alertly. "Consider this aspect before you take those Formophane tablets."

He nodded in agreement; it had to be considered.

"I really have been happy here," Lilo said. "It's been nothing like life was at Bulganingrad. That awful 'classy' apartment I had—you never saw it, but it was ugly. Peep-East is a tasteless world."

She came padding out of the bedroom toward him. "I tell you what. I've changed my mind. If you still want me to I will take charge of the Paris office."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning," Lilo said levelly, "that I will do exactly what I said I wouldn't do. I'll replace her. Not for your sake but for mine, so I don't wind up in an apartment in Bulganingrad again." She hesitated and then said, "So I don't wind up the way you are, sitting there in your pajamas with those tablets in your hand, trying to decide whether you want to wait out the forty years or take care of it right now. You see?"

"I see."

"Self-preservation."

"Yes." He nodded.

"I have that instinct. Don't you? Where is it in you?"

He said, "Gone."

"Gone even if I head the Paris branch?"

Reaching for the glass of tomato juice with one hand he put the three tablets in his mouth with the other, lifted the glass... he shut his eyes, felt the cool, wet rim of the glass against his lips and thought then of the hard, cool can of beer that Lilo Topchev had so long ago presented him that first moment together in Fairfax when they met. When, he thought, she tried to kill me.

"Wait," Lilo said.

He opened his eyes, holding in the three tablets, un-dissolved because they were hard-coated for easier swallowing, on his tongue.

"I have," Lilo said, "a gadget plowshared from item—well, it doesn't matter much which. You've used it before. In fact I found it here in the apartment. Ol' Orville."

"Sure," he said, mumbling because of the tablets. "I know, I remember Ol' Orville. How is Ol' Orville, these days?"

Lilo said, "Ask his advice before you do it"

That seemed reasonable. So carefully he spat out the undissolved tablets and restored them, stickily, to his pajama pocket, sat waiting while Lilo went and got the intricate electronic quondam guidance-system, now turned household amusement and crypto-deity, Ol' Orville. The featureless little head that, and Lilo did not know this, he had last consulted in company with Maren Faine.

She set Ol' Orville before him on the breakfast table.

"Ol' Orville," Lars said, "how in hell are you today?" You who were once weapon-design-sketch number 202, he thought. First called to my attention, in fact, by Maren. You and your fourteen-thousand—or is it sixteen or eighteen?—mi

"I am fine," Ol' Orville replied telepathically.

"Are you the same, the very same Ol' Orville," Lars said, "that Maren Faine—"

"The same, Mr. Lars."

"Are you going to quote Richard Wagner in the original German again to me?" Lars said. "Because if you are, this time it won't be enough."

"That is right," Ol' Orville's thoughts croaked in his brain. "I recognize that. Mr. Lars, do you care to ask me a distinct question?"

"You understand the situation that faces me?"

"Yes."

Lars said, "Tell me what to do."

There was a long pause as the enormous number of superlatively miniaturized components of the original guidance-system of item 202 clacked away. He waited.

"Do you want," Ol' Orville asked him presently, "the elaborated, fully documented answer with all the citations included, the original source-material in Attic Greek, Middle-Low-High German and Latin of the—"

"No," Lars said. "Boil it down."

"One sentence?"

"Or less. If possible."

Ol' Orville answered, "Take this girl, Lilo Topchev, into the bedroom and have sexual intercourse with her."

"Instead of—"

"Instead of poisoning yourself," Ol' Orville said. "And also instead of wasting forty years waiting on something which you had already decided to abandon—and you have ignored this, Mr. Lars—when you went to Fairfax to see Miss Topchev the first time. You had already stopped loving Maren Faine."

There was silence.

"Is that true, Lars?" Lilo asked.

He nodded.

Lilo said. "Ol' Orville is smart."

"Yes," he agreed. He rose to his feet, pushed his chair back, walked toward her.

"You're going to follow its advice?" Lilo said. "But I'm already half-dressed: we have to be at work in forty-five minutes. Both of us. There isn't time."

She laughed happily, however, with immense relief.

"Oh yes," Lars said. And picked her up in his arms, lugged her toward the bedroom. "There's just barely enough time." As he kicked the bedroom door shut after them he said, "And just barely enough is enough."

32

Far below Earth's surface in drab, low-rent conapt 2A in the least-desirable building of the wide ring of substandard housing surrounding Festung Washington, D.C., Surley G. Febbs stood at one end of a rickety table at which sat five didascalic individuals.

Five motley, assorted persons, plus himself. But they had, however, been certified by Univox-50R, the official government computer, as able to represent the authentic, total trend of Wes-bloc buying-habits.

This secret meeting of these six new concomodies was so illegal as to beggar description.

Rapping on the table, Febbs said shrilly, "The meeting will now come to order."

He glanced up and down in a severe fashion, showing them who was in charge. It was he, after all, who had brought them, in the most circumspect ma

Everyone was attentive—but nervous, because God knew the FBI or the CIA or KACH might burst in the door any moment despite the inspired security precautions of their leader, Surley G. Febbs.

"As you know," Febbs said, his arm folded, feet planted wide apart so as to convincingly demonstrate that he was solidly planted here, was not about to be swept away by the hired creeps of any institutional police force, "it is illegal for us six concomodies even to know one another's names. Hence, we shall begin this confabulation by reciting our names." He pointed to the woman seated closest to him.