I didn’t push her off. I felt too weak.
After a little, she said, “Now kiss me.” As her mouth was on mine, I couldn’t avoid it. She raised her head a bit. “No, not like that! Here’s a proper kiss. Open your mouth slightly, put it in the Q position. Now take your tongue . . .”
I groaned as a second potted plant began to spin. Then a third one started to turn. Then a fourth one began to rotate.
The second exploded. The third exploded. The fourth exploded.
I conked out, unconscious.
A long time later, a voice said, “For God’s sake! It’s five o’clock! And you’re still in bed!” It was Adora.
I looked around wildly. The effort made my head feel like it was being hit with an ax. No Teenie. I was all alone in bed.
“Where is she?” I babbled.
“She’s in the other room,” said Adora. “Both of them are. One is a blonde, the other a brunette, and they’re hot as a forest fire to find out what real sex is. This is no time for you to be having wet dreams when the quarry is in the front room. So tallyho. Let’s get after the tail!”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m totally exhausted and my head is killing me.”
“Oh, that again!” said Adora. She went to a table, stuffed and lit the bong. I searched in vain within me to find energy to object. She came back and put the stem in my mouth. “You want to fool with a bong, then stop fooling with it. By the numbers, six big inhales. One . . . hold it, hold it, hold it. Exhale. Two . . .”
We got through the six. Everything had gone gray and soft. I was floating. Memory was starting to fade. So was the instinct to survive.
“You seem to have developed a taste for music,” said Adora. “Good sign. I’ll go out and play the record you left on the stereo.”
Presently, here it came, booming through the room–Do it, do it, do it!
Adora was there again. She had a pill and a glass. She put the pill in my mouth. I could not object, given the deadly and determined look on her face. “That’s Benzedrine,” she said. “An ordinary upper. Well, don’t just lie there holding it in your mouth, you idiot. The capsule will melt and the stuff is bitter. Chase it down with this.”
The pill was bitter. I gulped the liquid convulsively.
GIN!
A tumbler full of raw gin! And I had it down before I found out!
I was gasping painfully from the assault on my throat. Then flame exploded in my stomach.
Adora’s eyes held that deadly gleam. She said, “Now get out of that bed and go into the front room. And do it, do it, do it!”
I have no memory at all of that evening. She had said they were a blonde and brunette but they might as well have been horses for all I knew of it.
About 3:00 AM, it must have been, I heard a deadly voice. “For Christ’s sake, stop screaming!” It was Adora. She was standing beside the couch where I now slept in the back room. She was a bit tousled from having been asleep.
“They’re after me,” I told her.
“Who’s after you now?”
“The Fates,” I babbled. “They’re standing all around the corners of the room with pills and bongs in their hands.”
“Oh, you’re just seeing multiple. It’s me, standing here, trying to give you a sleeping pill. Quit spouting nonsense and take it.”
I took it but Adora Bey née Pinch was wrong. The Fates were after me, as I shortly was going to find out! With shock!
That very afternoon, I had missed my second opportunity to kill Teenie. And the horror of it is, I didn’t even realize it until much later—fatally MUCH later.
And right then, had I had my wits about me, I might have seen another Fate face grinning at me ghoulishly.
I didn’t even think of Freud and his unerring analysis of dreams. Frankly, I will be candid, that omission was the only mistake I ever made in my entire professional career. Oh, I could weep tears of blood as I recall it now. One should never desert his Gods as I deserted Freud that night. Even two minutes spent on dream analysis would have told me of horrors to come that even now I have difficulty facing.
PART FIFTY-ONE
Chapter 4
Adora awakened me by the simple expedient of kicking me in the stomach. It was morning. I evidently had fallen out of bed. She was standing there, dressed for work.
“Listen, you (bleep),” she said, “you’re sleeping too much. Get up and around and stir yourself. Go for a walk. Get some air. A hell of a looking husband you are. You’re developing prison pallor. Are you listening?”
“Yes,” I said apprehensively, watching her feet at the level of my face. My head felt like a balloon and I was afraid she’d kick it and burst it.
“I woke you up to give you some good news,” she said. “A compulsory attendance staff meeting has been called at Octopus. It’s a lecture on abortion with a live demonstration by some new star of the psychiatric world, Dr. Crobe. He’s just another (bleeping) quack like they all are, but I know it will go on half the night with Rockecenter drooling. Did you know the (bleepard) fired poor Teenie?”
I was watching her feet carefully.
“The rotten ape was giving a personal staff inspection the way he does every month and he spotted she was full of semen. He had her kicked clear down the stairs.”
Something was awry. “That isn’t what she said.”
“Has Teenie been here?”
“She was on the phone,” I lied quickly. There might be something wrong with telling the truth and it’s always safer to prevaricate in such moments.
“Well, the Chief of Security was my source and he was right there. He may be a (bleep) but he doesn’t lie. The poor kid is so uneducated she didn’t even know enough to take a douche after she was here. So there went my plans. But never mind, I’ll find other uses for her. Anyway, that’s beside the point. One of the girls last night said you looked like a warmed-over corpse. So get out and around and get some air. Then maybe tomorrow night you can put on a better show.”
She left and I was very glad to no longer have feet with a kick impulse in them near my head. Belatedly, the corpse remark struck me. Was somebody intending to make me into a corpse?
I was sort of confused. Maybe I had better look at the viewers.
Crobe was busy preparing lecture notes and knives. Heller was just then taking a look all around the horizon from some high place. Nothing in sight—not even a ship. Lords, he must be a long way away.
Krak’s was blank.
I felt sort of fixated on the viewers. There was something wrong here. It eluded me. I concentrated very hard. If Heller was far away and still on the viewer and Krak wasn’t on the viewer, then Krak had to be further away. . . . I sort of gave it up. Something was odd.
A bright voice almost made me jump out of my wits. “Those morning programs don’t have any good rock groups on them. And you have to get the soap operas in the afternoon to get good sex. So why are you watching TV at this time of day? God, do YOU need education!”
Teenie.
“How the Hells did you get in here?”
“I took your key yesterday. I had it copied. Here’s yours back. I’m on my way to school. I can’t stay long.”
“Good! You wore the hell out of me yesterday.”
“Really trained, hey?” she said, grinning like a ghoul. “Shows you what education can do. I’m so glad you liked it. But the reason I stopped by was to tell you I can’t be here this afternoon.”
“Wonderful. I hope you’re leaving for China for a ten-year postgraduate course!”
“No, no. The crash course is not that long. It’s only a couple weeks. That’s why I have to put in extra time this afternoon. I have an appointment for a special rundown on hygiene and disease control. Special demonstrations.”
I flinched. “Disease?” I had specters of suddenly coming down with all kinds of oriental germs. “Look,” I said anxiously, “yesterday, before you were here, you hadn’t just done it with a bunch of Chinese men, had you?”
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She gave her ponytail a sad tug. “That is what is so frustrating. It’s not the old Chinese method. It’s the new, scientific Chinese system. They use probes and meters. They set a probe to register just one muscle and put it in you. It’s hooked up to a big scope and you watch the scope. Then you have to learn to locate that muscle yourself and when you do, it shows up on the scope. It’s like learning to wiggle your ears. Once you find the muscle yourself, you can move it. You get so you can locate and independently move each muscle at will.” She sighed. “But there are absolutely dozens of different muscles. It’s pretty tedious, sorting them all out with nothing in you but a probe. But look.”
Before I could stop her, she opened her coat and pulled her skirt up above her flat, thin belly. She had a single muscle in her stomach moving. “I had a (bleep) of a time finding that one.” She sat down and fanned her legs apart and pointed to the inside of her thigh. “But the nerve-impulse exercises are the worst. See the tape mark? They put an electrode on you, one place at a time. It’s joined up to a big scope, too. And you learn to send an energy impulse at that exact point and if you master it, it shows up on the scope. You have to get so you can send energy surges through about fifty different places and THEN learn how to block them. After that, it gets a bit more interesting. You have to be able to do it yourself on another body.”
“Cover yourself up,” I said. “I feel terrible.”
“What interests me, though,” she said as though I had not spoken, “is the daily hour of sexual choreography. Watch!” She leaped up, pulled her coat and skirt up under her armpits and her hips went into a very fast rotating grind. “That’s the siva-siva. The Chinese say they taught it to the Tahitians long ago. Isn’t it wild? I can just stand here relaxed and rotate like this for hours. It sort of feels good, too. And there’s dozens of these.” She gave a leap and came down grinding against a chair in a new way.
The bounce and sudden movements to which she was prone made my eyes and head hurt, just watching. “Please leave,” I pleaded. “I feel utterly awful!”
She stopped. “Jesus Christ, Inky. Haven’t you got any appreciation for art either?” She came over and looked at me, her big eyes a lot too close. She put her hand on my forehead. “Hey, Inky. Have you got a headache?”
“You got the idea,” I said.
“And after all that good therapy I gave you, too,” she said. “Have you been eating something or drinking something?”
“Gin,” I said with a shudder.
“GIN? With pot? Oh, Jesus Christ, Inky, you need some time on the streets. You NEVER mix alcohol with drugs, you dumb (bleep)! You could kill yourself. And yesterday. Maybe the night before. Did you drink anything?”
“Vodka.”
“Well, Jesus Christ, Inky. No wonder the good old grass didn’t work yesterday. Honest to Pete, Inky, you need a nursemaid.”
“Not you,” I flinched.
“And I thought all the time something must be wrong with the Acapulco Gold. Jesus, Inky. You listen to me. You lay off that alcohol. It’s the killer. Stick with pot every time.”
She ran off and rummaged around in the bathroom and came back with two bottles and a glass of liquid. “Vitamin B1. And aspirin.” I was trying to push the glass away. “It’s just water,” she said. “Now be a good boy and open your mouth.” She literally poured the bottle of B1 into my mouth and made me wash it down. Then she gave me two aspirin and made me wash them down. She looked at her watch: it was a new one, Mickey Mouse’s hands pointing the time. “Jesus Christ, I’m going to be late for school if I don’t run the whole way. When I’m gone, fix yourself some strong coffee. And next time, don’t go running down pot! Alcohol! You’re too stupid to live!”
I gave her as hard a scowl as I could manage. “(Bleep)!” I said.
She picked up her purse and went to the door. She stopped. She said, “It’s too bad you’re such a no-good, unappreciative jerk, Inky. You need your diapers changed constantly but who’d bother.”
“Get the Hells out of here!” I screamed. I had missed my third opportunity to kill her! And that would be the last one. I would look back on it with longing from that day on.
PART FIFTY-ONE
Chapter 5
I awoke in the late afternoon.
Amazing! Unless I shook it violently, my head didn’t ache. Incredible as it might seem, that (bleeped) kid had been right about something: it must have been the alcohol!
I got myself some strong coffee and, wonder of wonders, I could think. And thinking brought my attention to the viewers. I uncovered them and turned them on.
Captain Bitts was teaching Heller some card game. They seemed to be in the main salon of the yacht, a room decorated in amber and beige carpets and brass. Poker. Bitts was explaining what hand beat what and Heller was being very attentive. I thought, you better watch it, Captain Bitts, that sneaky Heller will probably take you for a year’s pay if my experience with him held true. But who cared what happened to Captain Bitts?
Crobe was en route to his lecture.
The Countess Krak’s was blank.
I looked back at Heller’s. Through an open door, he could see an empty expanse of sea. I thought to myself, you know, that Raht must really have reformed: there that yacht was, clear down in the Caribbean, and yet Heller was still on the screen. So Raht must be down in the Caribbean, too. And he could tell me exactly where that yacht was in case I wanted to do anything to it.
I got the two-way response radio and buzzed it.
“Yes?” Raht’s voice.
“Where are you?”
“New York office,” he said.
Ah, he had planted the activator-receiver someplace. “When did you get back?”
“I haven’t been gone,” said Raht.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Didn’t you follow that Royal officer (bleepard) down to Atlantic City?”
“Oh, did he go there?” said Raht.
I began to get confused. “He’s out on a yacht. Didn’t you even follow him to Atlantic City? You must be tagging him around. His screen is still live.”
“The 831 Relayer is still off,” said Raht. “Actually, it’s still on the TV antenna of the Empire State Building.”
Unease began to run through me with icy feet. “Look, I had him on the screen clear to Atlantic City so you MUST have been following him. I think you’ve gotten tangled up some way. Maybe a more-than-unusual attack of terminal inefficiency.”
“Well,” said Raht, “I’m not tangled up but I won’t say nobody else is. According to you, the gadget is good for two-hundred-mile range. Atlantic City, straight line, is only about a hundred miles. So he still must be within two hundred miles of you.”
“He is further than that. He’s in the Gulf Stream and that’s clear down in the Caribbean.”
“I beg your pardon, Officer Gris. The Gulf Stream runs between Cuba and Florida, comes all the way up the US coast, runs quite near New Jersey, goes past New York and then crosses the Atlantic to England and goes on back to the Caribbean. So he’s within two hundred miles of New York or he wouldn’t be on your screen.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “There’s something wrong. Your figures must be all out. The woman got on the yacht and went to Atlantic City and went off my screen.”
“Well, you’ve got her electronic box, Officer Gris. I haven’t. Did you drop it or something?”
“Are you inferring I mishandle equipment?”
“Well, if the Royal officer was still on the screen in Atlantic City, then wouldn’t you say the woman should have been? You better check her boxes, Officer Gris. They weren’t mishandled by me when I had charge of them.”
I had had quite enough of his impertinence. I clicked off.
I sat back, rather incensed at his accusations. Then it occurred to me that maybe the activator-receiver of the Countess Krak might have become inoperative. Spurk was not infallible. Maybe if I shook it or kicked it, it would turn on again.
I tried to
remember where I had put it. I went around searching. Dimly I recalled lifting a pillow and putting the box under it. But it wasn’t on the sofa and hadn’t fallen behind it. Then, with a surge of memory I recalled putting it on the top shelf of the closet.
There was a pillow up there. I gave a jump and grabbed its corner. The unit flew off the shelf and hit the floor with a crash.
I picked it up and, by plan, shook it. Nothing rattled. I turned it over.