The Zap Gun (14 page)

"In school."

"You're telling the truth? You've never been to Wes-bloc?"

"I've never been out of the Soviet Union before," Lilo Topchev said. "In fact most of Peep-East, especially the Sino-dominated regions, are out of bounds to me." Walking lithely to the kitchen of the more or less cog-class luxurious motel suite to get him the can of beer, she gestured suddenly, attracting his attention. She nodded toward the far wall. And then facing him, her back to the wall, she formed with her lips—but did not say aloud—the word bug.

A video-audio system was busily monitoring them. Of course. How could it be otherwise? Here comes the chopper, Lars thought, remembering Orwell's great old classic, 1984. Only in this case we know we're under scrutiny and, at least theoretically, it's by our good friends. We're all friends, now. Except that as Aksel Kaminsky said, and truthfully, if we do not manage to properly jump through the flaming hoop, Lilo and I, our good friends will murder us.

But who can blame them? Orwell missed that point. They might be right and we might be wrong.

She brought him the beer.

"Lots of luck," Lilo said, smiling.

He thought, I'm already in love with you.

Will they kill us, he thought, for that? God help them if so. Because they and their joint civilization, East and West, would not be worth preserving at that price.

"What's this about drugs?" Lilo said. "I heard you talking with the police outside. Was that true or were you just—you know—making their job difficult?"

Lars said, "It's true."

"I couldn't catch the names of the drugs. Even though I had my door open and I was listening."

"Escalatium."

"Oh, no!"

"Conjorizine. I mix them together, grind them—"

"I heard that part. You inject them as a mixture; you really do. I thought you just said that for their benefit." She regarded him with a dignified expression overlaid with amusement. It was not disapproval or shock that she felt, not the moral indignation of the KVB man—who was inevitably simple-minded: that was his nature. With her it was near admiration.

Lars said, "So I can't do a thing until my physician arrives. All I can do—" he seated himself on a black wrought-iron chair—"is drink beer and wait." And look at you.

"I have drugs."

"They said otherwise."

"What they say is as the tunneling of one worm in one dung heap." Turning to the audio-video monitor which she had just now pointed out to him she said, "And that goes for you, Geschenko!"

"Who's that?"

"The KVB surveillance-team Red Army intelligence major who will scan the tape that's being made right now of you and me. Isn't that right, Major?" she said to the concealed monitor."

"You see," she explained to Lars calmly, "I'm a convict."

He stared at her. "You mean you committed a crime, a legal, specified crime, were tried and—"

"Tried and convicted. All as a pseudo—I don't know what to call it. A mechanism; that's it, a mechanism. By which I am legally at this moment, despite all the political, civil guarantees in the Constitution of the USSR, a person absolutely without recourse. I have no remedy whatsoever through the Soviet courts; no lawyer can get me out. I'm not like you. I know about you, Lars, or Mr. Lars. Or Mr. Powderdry, whatever you want to be called. I know how you're set up in Wes-bloc. How I've envied over the years your position, your freedom and independence!"

He said, "You think that I could spit in their eye at any time."

"Yes. I know it. KACH told me; they got it to me, in spite of the dung-heap inhabitants like Geschenko."

Lars said, "KACH lied to you."

She blinked. The dead cigar and the can of beer trembled, Lars said, "They have me right now as much as they've had you."

"Didn't you volunteer to come here to Fairfax?"

"Oh, sure!" He nodded. "In fact I personally talked Marshal Paponovich into the idea. Nobody made me come here; nobody put a pistol to my head. But somebody brought a pistol out of a desk drawer and let me view it, and let me know."

"An FBI man?" Her eyes were enormous, like those of a little child hearing the exploits of the fabulous.

"No, not an FBI man, technically. A friend of the FBI, in this friendly, cooperative world in which we live. It's not important; we don't have to depress ourselves into talking about this. Except that you ought to know that they could have gotten to me any time. And when it mattered they let me know it."

"So," Lilo said thoughtfully, "you haven't been that different. I heard you were a prima donna."

Lars said, "I am, I'm difficult. I'm undependable. But they can still get out of me what they want. What else matters?"

"I guess nothing else," she said, dutifully.

"What drugs do you take?"

"Formophane."

"It sounds like a new make of one-way mirror." He had never heard of it. "Or a plastic milk carton that opens itself and pours itself on your cereal without spilling a drop."

Lilo said, between gulps, awkward and adolescent, at her can of beer, "Formophane is rare. You don't have it in the West. It's made by a firm in East Germany that descends from some ancient pre-Nazi pharmaceutical cartel. In fact it's made—" She paused. Obviously she was considering whether it was wise to finish. "They make it expressly for me," she said, at last.

There, it was done, she had told him. "The Pavlov Institute at New Moscow made a six-month analysis of my brain-metabolism to see what could be done to—improve it. They came up with this chemical formula and it was Xeroxed and passed on to A. G. Chemie. And A. G. Chemie produces sixty half-grain tablets of Formophane for me a month."

"And it does what?"

Lilo said, carefully, "I don't know."

He felt fear. For her. For what they had done—and could do again any time they wanted. "Don't you notice any effects?" he asked. "Deeper involvement in the trance-state? Longer? Fewer after-effects? You must notice something. Improvement in your sketches—it must be they give it to you to improve your sketches."

Lilo said, "Or to keep me from dying."

The fear inside him became acute. "Why dying? Explain." He kept his voice low, free of affect; it appeared as casual. "Even considering the quasi-epileptoid nature of—"

"I am a very sick person," Lilo said, "Mentally. I have what they call 'depressions.' They're not depressions and they know it; that's why I spent—always will spend—a lot of time at the Pavlov Institute. It's hard to keep me going, Lars. That's the simple fact. It's a day by day proposition, and Formophane helps. I take it. I'm glad to get it—I don't like the 'depressions' or whatever they are. You know what they are?" She leaned toward him urgently. "Want to know?"

"Sure."

"I watched my hand once. It shriveled up and died and became a corpse hand. It rotted away to dust. And then it became all of me; I no longer lived. And then—I lived again. In another way, the life that's to follow. After I die... Say something." She waited.

"Well, that ought to interest the established religious institutions." It was all he could think of, for the moment.

Lilo said, "Do you think, Lars, we, the two of us, can do what they want? Can we come up with what they call a 'zap gun'? You know. A—I hate to say it—a real weapon?"

"Sure."

"From where?"

"From the place we—visit. As if we took psilocybin. Which is related, as you know, to the adrenal hormone epinephrine. But I always have liked to think of it as if we're taking teo-nanacatyl."

"What's that?"

"An Aztec word. It means 'god's flesh.' " He explained. "You know it under the name of its alkaloid. Mescaline."

"Do you and I visit the same place?"

"Probably."

"And it's where, did you say?" She cocked her head, waiting, listening, watching. "You didn't say. You don't know! I know."

"Then tell me."

Lilo said, "I will if you'll take Formophane first." Rising, she disappeared into the other room. When she returned she carried two white tablets, which she held out to him.

For reasons which he did not know—which really frankly did not interest him—he obligingly, without even verbal protest, drank down the two tablets with his beer. The tablets caught in his throat momentarily. They seemed to stick there, and then were past the point from which they could be coughed forth, expelled. The drug was now a part of him. For whatever it foreboded; for whatever claim the chemical could make on his system—he had taken it on trust. And that was that.

Trust, he realized, not in the drug but in Lilo Topchev.

Lilo said, to his jolted surprise, "Anyone who would do that, is—a person who has failed." She seemed sad and yet not disappointed. It was as if his trust had reinforced some deep, instinctual pessimism in her. Or was it something more? The Slavic fatalism?

He had to laugh; he was caricaturizing her. Whereas in fact he knew nothing about her yet, could not at this point decipher her in the least. "You're going to die," Lilo said. "I've been waiting to do this; I'm afraid of you." She smiled. "They always told me that if I ever let them down the KVB hatchet-men operating in Wes-bloc would 'nap you, bring you to Bulganingrad and use you, and I'd be discarded on what they call the 'rubbish-heap of history.' In the old-fashioned way. The way Stalin used."

He said, "I don't believe for even one second that you're telling me the truth."

"You don't think you came all the way here just to be assassinated by me."

He nodded.

After a pause Lilo sighed. "You're right."

He sagged with relief; his breathing resumed.

"I am afraid of you," she continued. "They did threaten me, held you over my head perpetually. I got so I hated just thinking about you. And I suppose you are going to die. Everybody else does. Everybody else has in the past up to now. But not from what I just now gave you. That was a brain-metabolism stimulant resembling serotonin; it was exactly what I said and I gave it to you because I'm terribly interested to see its effects on you. You know what I want to do? Try your two drugs along with mine. We won't just combine our talent. We'll combine our metabolic stimulants too and see what we get. Because—" she hesitated childishly, openly somber but excited—"we have to be a success, Lars. We just have to."

He said reassuringly, "We will be."

And then, as he sat there with his beer can in his hand—he was studying it idly, noticing that it was a Danish beer, dark, a very good sort—he felt the drug affect him.

All at once, with a terrible rush like bad fire, it overwhelmed him, and he got stumblingly to his feet, reaching out—the beer can fell, rolled away, its contents staining the rug, dark, ugly, foaming, as if some big animal had been slaughtered helplessly here and its life was draining away. As if, he thought, I have strode into death, despite what she said. God in heaven! I've cut myself open in an effort to—obey.

What am I obeying? he asked. Death can dissemble. It can ask for your hide in hidden words and you think it's something entirely else, a high authority, some quality spiritual and free that you ought to enjoy. That's all you ask; you want to be pleased. And instead—it has you. Not they but it. They would like a lot but they're not ready to ask for that.

However you have given it gratuitously, jumped the gun. They won't like it. Tyranny has its own rate of flow. To run forward toward it prematurely is no more going to be appreciated than if you tried to creep back out, hung back, wandered off, sought to escape in any other way. Than even if, God forbid, you had stood up on your feet and fought.

"What's the matter?" Lilo's voice, distantly.

"Your serotonin," he said with difficulty, "got to me. Wrongly. The alcohol, the beer. Maybe. Can you—tell me." He walked one step, two. "The bathroom."

She guided him, frightened. He could make that out, the flapping batwings, her genuinely fear-stained face as she led him along.

"Don't worry," he said. "I'll—" And then he perished.

The world was gone; he was dead and in a bright, terrible world no man had ever known.

There was a man, almost idol-like, graven in the stone-carved clarity of his facial structure. He was bending by Lars, wearing a smart uniform, including a cluster of vari-colored medals.

He said, "He's alive now."

Two medical persons hovered. They wore plain white floor-length smocks. Lars saw institutional, stupendously expensive emergency equipment, great chugging machines with hoses and gauges and self-powered engines, everything in furious operation. The air smelled of ionization—highly positive—and chemicals. He saw a table on which instruments rested, one of which he recognized; it was employed to perform immediate tracheaectasies.

But these Soviet medical people had not had to use it with him. He had come around in time.

The monitor, he realized. Hidden in the wall, grinding continually away its audio and video material. Keeping watch for its own sinister, ulterior purposes. It had witnessed his collapse and because of it help had been summoned, and soon enough to save him.

Getting to the bathroom would not quite have been enough.

To the uniformed, bemedaled, starch-collar and shoulder-boarded Red Army officer he said, "Major Geschenko?"

"Yes, Mr. Lars." The officer had become now, in relief, rubbery and pale. "Your vagus. Something about the medulla and especially the esophagus; I don't properly understand. But it was really exceptionally close, for a minute or two. They would of course at the very last cooled you down and flown you out of here. But—" He gestured.

Lars agreed, "Close. I felt the nearness." He made out Lilo Topchev now. She stood huddled at the far wall, not taking her eyes off him.

Lilo said, "Do you imagine I did it on purpose?"