The Zap Gun

The Zap Gun Read Online Free PDF

Book: The Zap Gun Read Online Free PDF
Author: Philip K. Dick
Tags: SF
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.
    Lars said, "This morning, before I could get inside the building, here, one of those autonomic TV interviewers from Lucky Bagman's show cornered me. They believe. They actually believe."
    "So they believe. That's what I mean." Pete gestured agitatedly with his cheap cigar. "Don't you get it? Even if you had looked that TV lens right in the eye, so to speak, and you had said calmly and clearly, maybe something like this: 'You think I'm making weapons? You think, that's what I'm bringing back from hyper-space, from that niddy-noddy realm of the supernatural?' "
    "But they need to be protected," Lars said.
    "Against what?"
    "Against anything. Everything. They deserve protection; they think we're doing our job."
    After a pause Pete said, "There's no protection in weapons. Not any more. Not since—you know. 1945. When they wiped out that Jap city."
    "But," Lars said, "the pursaps think there is. There seems to be."
    "And that seems to be what they're getting."
    Lars said, "I think I'm sick. I'm involved in a delusional world. I ought to have been a pursap—without my talent as a medium I would be, I wouldn't know what I know; I wouldn't be on the inside looking out. I'd be one of those fans of Lucky Bagman and his morning TV interview show that accepts what he's told, knows it's true because he saw it on that big screen with all those stereo colors, richer than life. It's fine while I'm actually in the comatose state, in the damn trance; there I'm fully involved. Nothing off in a corner of my mind jeers."
    " 'Jeers.' What do you mean?" Pete eyed him anxiously.
    "Doesn't something inside you jeer?" He was amazed.
    "Hell no!
Read Online Free Pdf

Similar Books

Tanked: TANKED

Cheri Lewis

Pseudo

Samantha Elias

He's So Bad

Z.L. Arkadie

Even Now

Karen Kingsbury

Shadow of the wind

Carlos Ruiz Zafón