The Zap Gun

Peter interrupted, in his agitated, husky, urgent voice, "Aw, the hell, you know what I mean. Bull! You never listen. All you do is go to heaven and come back with the word of God, and we're supposed to believe as gospel every stupid thing you write down, like some—" He gestured, tic-like, his big frame shuddering under his blue cotton shirt. "Look at the service you could do humanity if you weren't so lazy."

"What service?"

"You could solve all our problems!" Pete glowered at him. "If they've got weapons designs up there—" He jerked his thumb vaguely toward the ceiling of the office, as if, during his trance-states, Lars literally rose. "Science ought to investigate you. Chrissake, you ought to be at Cal Tech being examined, not ru

"Fairy," Lars said.

"Okay, maybe you're not a fairy. So what? My brother-in-law's a fairy and that's okay with me. A guy can be anything he wants." Pete's voice rose to a shout that boomed and echoed. "As long as it's integrity, it's what he really is and not what he's told to do. You!" His tone was withering, now. "You do what they tell you. They say, Go get us a bunch of primary design-concepts in two-D form, and you do!" He lowered his voice, grunted, rubbed his perspiring upper lip. Then, seating himself, he reached his long arms out, groping for the heap of sketches on Lars' desk.

"These aren't them," Lars said, retaining the sketches.

"These aren't? Then what are they? They look like designs to me." Pete twisted his head, extended his neck, piston-wise, to peer.

Lars said, "From Peep-East. Miss Topchev's." Pete's opposite number in Bulganingrad or New Moscow—the Soviets had two design-engineering firms available, the typical overlapping duplication of a monolithic society—had the task of rendering these to their next step.

"Can I see them?"

Lars passed them to Pete, who put his nose almost against the flat, glossy surfaces, as if suddenly nearsighted. He said nothing for a time as he turned from one to the next, and then he snarled, sat back, hurled the stack of pics onto the desk. Or nearly onto it. The stack fell to the floor.

Pete, stretching, picked them up, respectfully straightened them until they were precisely even, one with the next, and set them down on the desk, demonstrating that he had meant no incivility. "They're terrible," he said.

"No," Lars said. No more so than his own, actually. Pete's loyalty to him, as a person, made a puppet out of Pete's jaws; friendship wagged the big man's tongue, and although Lars appreciated this he preferred to see the record set straight. "They can go into plowshare. She's doing her job." But of course these sketches might not be representative. The Soviets had a notorious reputation for managing to traduce KACH. The planet-wide police agency was fair game for the Soviets' own secret police, the KVB. It had not been discussed at the time Don Packard had produced the sketches, but the fact was just this: the Soviets, onto the presence of a KACH agent at their weapons fashion designs level, probably showed only what they cared to show, and held the rest back. That always had to be assumed.

Or at least he assumed that. What UN-W Natsec did with their KACH-obtained material was something else: he had no knowledge of that. The Board's policy could range from total credulity (although that was hardly likely) to utter cynicism. He, himself, tried to seek out a moderate middle-ground.

Pete said, "And that fuzzy print, that's her. Right?"

"Yes." Lars showed him the blurred glossy.

Again Pete put his nose to the subject of his scrutiny. "You can't tell anything," he decided finally. "And for this, KACH gets money! I could do better just by walking into the Bulganingrad Institute for Defensive Implementation Research Division with a polaroid Land-camera."

"There's no such place," Lars said."

Pete glanced up. "You mean they abolished their bureau? But she's still at her desk."

"It's now under someone else, not Victor Kamow. He disappeared. A lung condition. It's now called—" Lars turned up the memo he had taken from the KACH-man's report. In Peep-East this happened continually: he attached no importance to it—"Minor Protocides, Subdivision Crop-production, Archives. Of Bulganingrad. A branch of Middle Auton-tool Safety Standards Ministry, which is their cover for their non-bacteriological warfare research agencies of every kind. As you know." He bumped heads with Pete, inspecting the fuzzy glossy-print of Lilo Topchev, as if time alone might have brought from the blur a more accessible image.

"What is it," Pete said, "that obsesses you?"

Lars shrugged, "Nothing. Divine discontent maybe." He felt evasive; the engineer from Lanferman Associates was too keen an observer, too capable.

"No, I mean—but first—"

Pete expertly ran his sensitive, long, stained-dark fingers along the underside of Lars' desk, seeking a monitoring device. Finding none immediately at hand he continued. "You're a scared man. Do you still take pills?"

"No."

"You're lying."

Lars nodded. "I'm lying."

"Sleeping bad?"

"Medium."

"If that horse's ass Nitz has got your goat—"

"It's not Nitz. To reshuffle your picturesque language that goat's horse. Nitz has not got my ass. So are you satisfied? Sir?"

Pete said, "They can groom replacements for you for fifty years and not come up with anyone like you. I knew Wade. He was okay but he wasn't in the same league as you. No one is. Especially not that dame in Bulganingrad."

"It's nice of you," Lars began, but Pete cut him savagely off.

"Nice—schnut! Anyhow, that's not it."

"No," Lars agreed. "That's not it and don't insult Lilo Topchev."

Fumbling in his shirt pocket Pete brought out a cheap, drugstore-style cigar. He lit up, puffed its noxious fumes until the office dissolved and reeked. Oblivious, without giving a damn, Pete wheezed the smoke in and out, silent as he pondered.

He had this virtue/defect: anything puzzling, he believed, if worried at long enough, could be elucidated. In any area. Even that of the human psyche. The machine was no more and no less complicated, according to him, than biological organs created by two billions years of evolution.

It was, Lars thought, an almost childishly optimistic view; it dated from the eighteenth century. Pete Freid, for all his manual skills, his engineering genius, was an anachronism. He had the outlook of a bright seventh-grader.

"I've got kids," Pete said, chewing on his cigar, making a bad thing worse. "You need a family."

"Sure," Lars said.

"No, I'm not serious."

"Of course you are. But that doesn't make you right. I know what's bothering me. Look."

Lars touched the code-trips of his locked desk drawer. Responding to his fingertips the drawer at once, cash-register-like, shot open. From it he brought forth his own new sketches, the items which Pete had traveled three thousand miles to see. He passed them over, and felt the pervasive guilt which always accompanied this moment. His ears burned. He could not look directly at Pete. Instead he busied himself with his appointment gimmicks, anything to keep himself from thinking during this moment.

Pete said presently, "These are swell." He carefully initialed each sketch, beneath the official number which the UN-W Natsec bureaucrat had stamped, sealed and signed.

"You're going back to San Francisco," Lars said, "and you're going to whip up a poly-something model, then begin on a working prototype—"

"My boys are," Pete corrected. "I just tell them what to do. You think I get my hands dirty? With poly-something?"

Lars said, "Pete, how the hell long can it go on?"

"Forever," Pete said, promptly. The seventh-grader's combination of naпve optimism and an almost ferociously embittered resignation.