The Zap Gun (23 page)

Seated at the table, alone, he drank the coffee and gazed out the window at the high-rise conapt buildings to the north.

It would be interesting, he mused, to know what Maren would have said about our weapon in the Big War, the way in which we caused them to lay off. We made ourselves, unvaluable. Presumably the chitinous citizens of Sirius' planets are still slavers, still posting satellites in other peoples' skies.

But not here.

And UN-W Natsec, plus the cogs of Peep-East in all their finery, were still considering the utility of introducing The Weapon into the Sirius system itself...

I think, he thought, Maren would have been amused.

Sleepily, blinking in perplexity, Lilo, in her pink nightgown, appeared at the kitchen door. "No coffee for me?"

"Sure," he said, rising to get a cup and saucer for her. "Do you know what the English word 'to care' comes from?" he said, as he poured her coffee for her from the obedient gadget wired to the stove.

"No." She seated herself at the table, looked gravely at the ashtray with its moribund remains of yesterday's discarded cigars and winced.

"The Latin word caritas. Which means love or esteem." '

"Well."

"St. Jerome," he said, "used it as a translation of the Greek world agape which means even more."

Lilo drank her coffee, silently.

"Agape," Lars said, standing at the window and looking out at the conapts of New York, "means reverence for life; something on that order. There's no English word. But we still possess the quality."

"Hmm."

"And," he said, "so did the aliens. And that was the handle by which we grabbed and destroyed them."

"Fix an egg."

"Okay." He punched buttons on the stove.

"Can an egg," Lilo said pausing in her coffee-drinking, "think?"

"No."

"Can it feel what you said? Agape?"

"Of course not."

"Then," Lilo said, as she accepted the warm, steaming, sunny-side-up egg from the stove, plate included, "if we're invaded by sentient eggs we'll lose."

"Damn you," he said.

"But you love me. I mean, you don't mind; in the sense that I can be what I am and you don't approve but you let me anyhow. Bacon?"

He punched more buttons, for her bacon and for his own toast, applesauce, tomato juice, jam, hot cereal.

"So," Lilo decided, as the stove gave forth its steady procession of food as instructed, "you don't feel agape for me. If, like you said, agape means caritas and cantos means to care. You wouldn't care, for instance, if I—" She considered. "Suppose," she said, "I decided to go back to Peep-East, instead of running your Paris branch, as you want me to. As you keep urging me to." She added, thoughtfully, "So I'd even more fully replace her."

"That's not why I want you to head the Paris branch."

"Well..." She ate, drank, pondered at length. "Perhaps not, but just now, when I came in here, you were looking out the window and thinking. What if she was still alive. Right?"

He nodded.

"I hope to God," Lilo said, "that you don't blame me for her doing that."

"I don't blame you," he said, his mouth full of hot cereal. "I just don't understand where the past goes when it goes. What happened to Maren Faine? I don't mean what happened that day on the up-ramp when she killed herself with that—" he eradicated a few words which came, savagely, to mind—"that Beretta. I mean. Where is she? Where's she gone?"

"You're not completely awake this morning. Did you wash your face with cold water?"

"I did everything that I'm going to do. I just don't understand it; one day there was a Maren Faine and then there wasn't. And I was in Seattle, walking along. I never saw it happen."

Lilo said, "Part of you saw it. But even if you didn't see it, the fact remains that now there is no Maren Faine."

He put down his cereal spoon. "What do I care? I love you! And I thank God—I find it incredible—that it wasn't you who were killed by that pelfrag cartridge, as I first thought."

"If she had lived, could you have had us both?"

"Sure!"

"No. Impossible. How?"

Lars said, "I would have worked it somehow."

"Her by day, me at night? Or her on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, me on—"

"The human mind," he said, "couldn't possibly be defeated by that situation, if it had the chance. A reasonable chance, without that Beretta and what it did. You know something that old Vincent Klug showed me, when he came back as the old war veteran, so-called, that Ricardo Hastings? It's impossible to go back." He nodded.

"But not yet," Lilo said. "Fifty years from now, maybe."

"I don't care," he said. "I just want to see her."

"And then what?" Lilo asked.

"Then I'd return to my own time."

"And you're going to idle away your life, for fifty years or however long it is, waiting for them to invent that Time Warpage Generator."

"I've had KACH look into it. Somebody's undoubtedly already doing basic research on it. Now that they know it exists. It won't be long."

"Why," Lilo said, "don't you join her?"

At that he glanced up, startled. "I am not kidding," Lilo said. "Don't wait fifty years—"

"More like forty, I calculate."

"That's too long. Good God, you'll be over seventy years old!"

"Okay," he admitted.

"My drug," Lilo said quietly. "You remember; it's lethal to your brain metabolism or some damn thing—anyhow three tablets of it and your vagus nerve would cease and you'd die."

After a pause he said, "That's very true."

"I'm not trying to be cruel. Or vengeful. But—I think it would be smarter, saner, the better choice, to do that, take three tablets of Formophane than to wait forty to fifty years, drag out a life that means absolutely nothing—"

"Let me think it over. Give me a couple of days."

"You see," Lilo said, "not only would you be joining her immediately, without waiting more years than you've lived already, but—you'd be solving your problems the way she solved hers. So you'd have that bond with her, too." She smiled, grimly. Hatingly.

"I'll give you three tablets of Formophane right now," she said, and disappeared into the other room.

He sat at the kitchen table, staring down at his bowl of cooling cereal and then all at once she was back. Holding out something to him.

He reached up, took the tablets from her, dropped them into the shirt-pocket of his pajamas.

"Good," Lilo said. "So that's decided. Now I can go get dressed and ready for the day. I think I'll talk to the Soviet Embassy. What's that man's name? Kerensky?"

"Kaminsky. He's top-dog at the embassy."

"I'll inquire through him if they'll take me back. They have some idiots they're using in Bulganingrad as mediums, but they're no good—according to KACH."

She paused. "But of course it's not the same as it was. It'll never be like that again."

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?—minned parts, you poor plowshared freak. Castrated, like me, by the system.

"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."

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."