The Zap Gun (17 page)

And, down the back of his neck, a giant blew a dying breath of terror. The chill of failure froze him as he sat rocking back and forth, on the floor of the motel room, listening to the far-off noise of the girl he had fallen in love with being sick.

Later, they had coffee. He and Lilo Topchev, Dr. Todt and the Red Army officer who was their warden and protector against the insanities within themselves, Red Army Intelligence Major Tibor Apostokagian Geschenko. The four of them drank what Lars Powderdry knew to be a toast to ruin.

Lilo said abruptly, "It's a failure."

"And how," Lars nodded without meeting her gaze.

In a Slavic gesture, Geschenko patted the air, priest-like, with his open hand. "Patience. By the way." He nodded, and an aide approached their circular table with a homeopape—in Cyrillic type. Russian. "An additional alien satellite is up," Geschenko said. "And it is reported that a field of some variety, a warpage of electromagnetic—I don't understand it, being no physicist. But it has affected your city New Orleans."

"Affected how?"

Geschenko shrugged. "Gone? Buried or hidden? Anyhow, communication is cut and sensitive measuring apparatus nearby records a lowering of mass. And an opaque barrier conceals what transpires, a field identified as connected with that of the satellites. Isn't this approximately what we foresaw?" He deliberately slurped his coffee.

"I don't understand," Lars said tightly. And the drum of fear beat and beat inside him.

"Slavers." Geschenko added, "They are not landing. They are I think taking pieces of population, New Orleans first." He shrugged. "We will knock them down, don't worry. In 1941 when the Germans—"

"With a steam donkey-engine?" Lars turned to Lilo. "This is the true, undefiled reason that moved you to try to kill me, isn't it? So we'd never have to arrive at this point, sit here and drink coffee like this!"

Major Geschenko said with psychological acumen, "You give her an easy out, Mr. Lars. That is unhealthy, because she can divest herself further of responsibility." To Lilo he said, "That was not the reason."

"Say it was," Lars said to her.

"Why?"

"Because then I can think you wanted to spare us both even the knowledge of this. It was a form of mercy."

"The unconscious," Lilo said, "has ways of its own."

"No unconscious!" Major Geschenko said emphatically, reciting his doctrine. "That's a myth. Conditioned response; you know that, Miss Topchev. Look, Mr. Lars; there's no merit in what you're trying to do. Miss Topchev is subject to the laws of the Soviet Union."

Lars sighed, and from his pocket he brought out the rolled-up comic book which he had bought at the enormous news-counter at the space terminal. He passed it to Lilo: the Blue Cephalopod Man From Titan and His Astonishing Adventures Among the Fierce Protoplasms of Eight Deadly Moons. She accepted it curiously.

"What is it?" she asked him presently, large-eyed.

"A glimpse," Lars said, "into the outside world. What life would be like for you if you could come with me, leave this man and Peep-East."

"This is what is for sale in Wes-bloc?"

"In West Africa, mostly," he answered. Lilo turned the pages, inspected the lurid and really downright dreadful drawings. Major Geschenko meanwhile stared off into space, lost in gloomy thought; his fine, clear face showed the despair which he had so far kept from his voice. He was, undoubtedly, thinking about the news from New Orleans... as any sane man would. And the major was indubitably sane. He would not be looking at a comic book, Lars realized. But Lilo and I—we are not quite sane, at this point. And for good reason. Considering the magnitude of our spectacular failure.

He asked Lilo, "You notice anything strange about that comic book?"

"Yes." She nodded vigorously. "They've used several of my sketches."

"Yours!" He had noticed only his own weapons sketches. "Let me look again."

She showed him the page. "See? My lobotomy gas." She indicated Major Geschenko. "They conducted tests on political prisoners and showed the results on TV just like this comic strip: it causes the victims to repeat endlessly the last series of instructions arising from the damaged cerebral cortex. The drawist has the Twin-brained Beasts From Io victims of this; he understood what weapon BBA-81D did, so he must have viewed the TV tape made in the Urals. But the tape was only shown last week."

"Last week?" Incredulous, Lars took the comic book back. Obviously it had been printed longer ago than that. It carried last month's date, had sat on the newsstand for perhaps sixty days. All at once to Major Geschenko he said, "Major, may I contact KACH?"

"Now? Immediately?"

"Yes," Lars said.

Major Geschenko silently took the comic book from Lars and glanced through it. Then he rose and gestured; an aide stepped into existence and the two men discoursed in Russian.

"He's not asking for a KACH-man for you," Lilo said then. "He's telling the KVB to investigate this comic book firm, where it originates in Ghana." She spoke to Major Geschenko in Russian herself. Lars felt, unhappily, the acute linguistic insularity of the American; Lilo was right. Mark of the province, he said to himself, and he wished to God he knew what they were saying. All three of them kept referring to the comic book and at last Major Geschenko handed it over to his aide.

The aide departed with it, rapidly. The door slammed shut, as if the aide were mad.

"That was mine," Lars said. Not that it counted.

"A KACH-man will come," Lilo said. "But not immediately. Not what you asked for. They will conduct their own investigation and then let you make your try."

Lars said to the powerful Red Army intelligence officer, "I want to be returned to the jurisdiction of the FBI. Now. I insist on it."

"Finish your coffee."

"Something is wrong," Lars said. "Something about that comic book. I could tell by your manner; you discovered or thought something. What was it?" Turning to Lilo he said, "Do you know?"

"They're upset," Lilo said. "They think KACH has been supplying repros to this comic-book firm. That irks them. They don't mind if Wes-bloc has access, but not this; this goes too far."

"I agree," Lars said. But I think there's more, he said to himself. I know there is; I saw too much agitation, here, just now.

"There is a time-factor," Major Geschenko said, presently. He poured himself a fresh cup, but the coffee was utterly cold now.

"The comic-book firm got the sketches too soon?" Lars asked.

"Yes." Major Geschenko nodded.

"Too soon even for KACH?"

"Yes."

Stricken, Lilo said, "I don't believe it."

Major Geschenko glanced at her, briefly and without warmth.

"Not for them," Lilo said. "Surely we couldn't be."

"The final episode in the magazine," Major Geschenko said. "The Blue Whatever-he-is-man devised as a temporary source of power, while imprisoned on a barren asteroid, a steam engine. To act as an agent by which to reactivate the dead transmitter of his half-demolished ship, the normal power supply having been rayed out of existence by the—" he grimaced—"the Pseudonomic Flower-carnivores from Ganymede."

Lars said, "Then we are getting it from them. From the artist of that magazine."

"Perhaps so," Major Geschenko said, nodding very slowly, as if out of the most intense politeness he was willing to consider it—and for that reason only.

"Then no wonder—"

"No wonder," Major Geschenko said, sipping cold coffee, "that you can't perform your function. No wonder there is no weapon when we need it. Must have it. How could there be, from such a source?"

He raised his head, eyed Lars with a peculiarly bitter, accusing pride.

Lars said, "But if we are simply reading some comic artist's mind, how could there be anything?"

"Oh, that artist," Major Geschenko said disdainfully, "he has much talent. An inventive mind. Don't ignore that. He's kept us going a long time, both of us, my friend. East and West."

"This is the worst news—" Lars began.

"But interesting," Major Geschenko said. He glanced from Lars to Lilo. "Pitiful."

"Yes, pitiful," Lars said thickly.

After a pause Lilo said starkly, "You realize what this means. Now they can go directly to him, whoever draws that ghastly, gutterish comic. They don't need us, Lars; not ever again."

Major Geschenko murmured, with caustic but highborn politeness, "Go to him for what, Miss Topchev? What do you think he has? Do you think he's held anything back?"

"There's no more," Lars said. "The man's in business, writing a comic strip. His inventions have been completely spurious all along."

"But all along," Major Geschenko pointed out in his urbane, mild, devastatingly insulting way, "this was exactly proper for the need. Now that is no longer true. The Blue Cephalopod Man cannot fly through space and knock the alien satellites down with his fist. We are not able to call on him—he will not show up. A satire on ourselves has duped us for years. The artist will be amused. Obviously he is a degenerate. That vulgar strip—and I notice it is English-language, the official language of Wes-bloc—shows that."

Lars said, "Don't blame him if telepathically, in some crazy goddam way, we've been picking up his ideas."

Lilo said, "They won't 'blame' him; they'll just shake him down. They'll pick him up and bring him to the Soviet Union, to the Pavlov Institute, try with all they have available to get out of him what they haven't got out of us. Just in case it might be there." She added, "I'm glad I'm not him." She seemed, in fact, relieved now. Because, as she understood the situation, the pressure was off her, and to her, in her immaturity, that was what mattered.

"If you're so glad," Lars said to her, "at least don't show it. Try to keep it to yourself."

"I'm beginning to think," Lilo said, "that it's exactly what they deserve." She giggled. "It's really funny. I'm sorry for that artist in Southern Ghana, but can't you laugh, Lars?"

"No."

"Then you're as crazy as him." She gestured in Major Geschenko's direction, contemptuously, with a new, spirited superiority.

"Can I make a vidphone call?" Lars asked Major Geschenko.

"I suppose." Geschenko again beckoned to an aide, spoke to him in Russian; Lars found himself being escorted down a hallway to a public vidphone booth.

He dialed Lanferman Associates in San Francisco and asked for Pete Freid.

Pete looked overworked and not in the mood for receiving calls. Seeing who it was, he gave forth a meager gesture of salutation. "What's she like?"

"She's young," Lars said. "Physically attractive, I would say sexy."

"Then your problems are over."

"No," Lars said. "Oddly, my problems aren't over. I have a job I want you to do. Bill me for it. If you can't do it yourself or won't do it—"

"Don't make a speech. Just say what it is."

Lars said, "I want every back issue of The Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan rounded up. A complete file from issue number one, volume one." He added, "It's a 3-D comic book. You know, the lurid kind that wiggles when you took at it. I mean, the girls wiggle—breasts, pelvic area, all there is to wiggle. The monsters salivate."

"Okay." Pete scratched himself a memo. "The Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan. I've seen it, although it's not made for North America. My kids seem to get hold of it anyhow. It's one of the worst, but it's not illegal, not outright pornographic. Like you say, the girls wiggle but at least they don't—"

"Go over every issue," Lars said. "With your best engineers. Thoroughly. List every weapons item employed in all the sequences. Check out which are ours and Peep-East's. Draw up accurate specs, anyhow as accurate as you can, based on the data given in the comic book sequences."

"Okay." Pete nodded. "Well, go ahead."

"Make a third list of all weapons items that are not ours and are not Peep-East's. In other words unknown to us. Maybe there won't be any but maybe there will. Have them, if possible, made into accurate specs; I want mockups and—"

"Did you and Lilo come up with anything?"

"Yes."

"Good."

"It's called a steam engine. Donkey type."

Pete regarded him. "Seriously."

"Seriously."

"They'll massacre you."

"I know that," Lars said.

"Can you get away? Back to Wes-bloc?"

"I can try; I can run. But there's other things that are more important at this moment. Now listen. Job number two, which you will actually do first. Contact KACH."

"Right." Jot-jot.

"Have them investigate all persons responsible for preparing, drawing, making up the dummies, writing the script ideas. In other words, go into the human sources of all the material in the comic book The Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan."

"Will do." Pete scratched away.

"Urgently."

"Urgently." Pete wrote that. "And report to whom?"

"If I'm back in Wes-bloc, to me. If not, then to you. Next job."

"Shoot, Mr. God, sir."

"Vidphone on an emergency line the S.F. branch of the FBI. Tell them to instruct their team here in the field at Fairfax, Iceland, to—" And he stopped, because the screen had gone blank. The set was dead.

"Somewhere along the line the Soviet secret police who had been monitoring the call had pulled the plug.

It was astonishing that they hadn't done so sooner.

He left the booth, stood pondering. Down the corridor waited two KVB men. No other way out.

Yet somewhere in Fairfax the FBI had holed itself up. If he somehow got to them he might be able to—

But they had orders to cooperate with the KVB. They would simply turn him back over to Major Geschenko.

It's still that wonderful world, he thought, in which everyone cooperates—unless you happen to be the sole person who has ceased to cooperate and who would like to get out. Because there is no longer an out; all the roads lead back here.