The incubus kneeled beside the woman as though asking her a question. No one on the beach paid attention except Prior. The incubus then moved over casually until he was astride the woman, and still no one noticed and she did not wake. He must have put a small sleep-spell on her; no doubt incubi (and succubi, of course) had dependable ways to keep their subjects passive (except sexually) for the operation. Assuming such magical creatures really existed. Assuming that this was one such. Prior was still alert for some deception, though his disbelief was somewhat shaken. If what he had seen was a trick, it was one hell of an illusion.
Then the incubus brought out a tiny knife—or maybe it was merely a sharp fingernail—and sliced away a portion of her bathing suit, exposing the pudendum. He placed his body so that only Prior could see what was happening. Still, it could be an act, a farce, and the sleight-of-hand could not proceed much farther.
In due course the incubus opened his own apparel and brought out a massive phallic instrument. This was no trick; Prior saw it come erect while the incubus kept hands off. Had he not watched the creature every moment and been certain that no substitution had been made, Prior would not have believed this. Now he was convinced: the hungry female genitals that had sucked in his protoplasm were now aggressive male genitals eager to spew it forth again.
The incubus lowered this boom and brought it to bear on the fatty crevice between the matron's legs. It looked far too big to fit, but slowly he eased it in, pushing, stroking, sliding, jogging. The woman moaned, stirred—but the incubus touched her eyelids with one hand and she did not awaken. In fact, she was smiling. Prior wondered what dreams she might be having, half as phenomenal as the reality.
The tremendous penis hove to like a slow diesel into a tunnel, burying half its column in the tight aperture, then three quarters. Hoo!, Prior thought—that female would be sore tomorrow!
After that he couldn't see the detail because the incubus's thing blocked the view. But the motions of the merging bodies suggested that the rest of the shaft was finding or making its lodging. The woman's heavy torso shook with the impact of full penetration, and she writhed with something resembling ecstasy. Her knees came up and spread farther apart; her hands groped for the point of contact. She had probably never had so much meat inside her at one time before.
Ejaculation! The incubus plunged, withdrew, plunged again. The woman groaned aloud as the piston retreated, then she made a muffled scream as the spasm distended her. Prior was sure this orgasm dwarfed her previous experience—if, indeed, she had experienced orgasm before. That kind usually thought pleasure in sex was unpatriotic.
Meanwhile, beach activity continued. No one wondered what the strange man was doing to the sleeping woman; or maybe they just didn't care. Two girls walked by, glanced across, saw, and went on; it was none of their business. Prior realized that almost anything could happen on a public beach, including screaming rape, and nobody would react.
He glanced down at his own trunks, wherein his scant four inches throbbed with second wind. Certainly he was not one to bring a woman to life like that. There was no way four inches could match eight, except perhaps in endurance.
The incubus let it soak for a moment while an elderly couple walked by, then drew out the gross member. The fit was still so tight that Prior could see flesh stretching. Then the organ snapped out with a pop! that caused a passing child to glance curiously, hoping for bubble-gum. No such luck. The incubus stood up, shook off his flaccid extremity, fed it back into the shorts, and ambled away.
The matron remained as she was—legs spread wide, suit slit open at the crack, hands touching the greased labia. No one noticed except the child, who didn't care. And Prior, who had mixed emotions.
By the time the incubus reached Prior, he was female again. “The bitch had gonorrhea!” the succubus exclaimed, outraged. “Do you want to do it again?"
Prior's renovated erection abruptly died. This creature, by her own admission, was now teeming with activated venereal disease.
“I need another load, since that one was wasted on an ineligible receiver,” she said. “You're handiest, since you put me up to it, though it's bound to be anemic so soon after my last collection. Now I don't mind how I get it—cunt, mouth, hand or whatever—or which form I take it in—male, female, neuter—"
“You mean you can get it as an incubus, too?” Prior was repelled and fascinated, the one feeding the force of the other. “And you have a neuter state?"
“Oh yes. Oral collection is invariably effective, and of course there's anal. Some men prefer neuters—they're like undeveloped young girls or castrates. Tastes vary. Sometimes we have to bugger the donor to get him to put out. I can show you—"
“I guess I'll donate in the normal fashion,” Prior said quickly. He wasn't anxious to have that eight-inch member stirring up his twitching colon. He was dead set against buggery, anyway.
“I could suck you off,” she said helpfully. “That little marvel of yours makes it easy."
“You'll take it in the pussy or not at all!” he informed her defensively. He didn't normally use lowbrow terms like that, but her condescending attitude was getting to him. “And not here. Come to my car."
She made another moue and followed him over the sand and across the weedy fringe to the parking lot. His dime had run out and there was a ticket on his windshield. He had tarried on the beach longer than originally intended. This ticket was particularly embarrassing, because he was professionally connected to the parking industry and this would look very bad on his record. Like a dentist having a rotten tooth, or a grocery manager confusing the price of beans with that of caviar—though the latter was not hard to do these days, with the prices rising so fast that beans now went for caviar prices. “Shit!” he said, employing the basest expletive he knew, wondering if the succubus would be shocked.
“We supernaturals don't have to eat,” she said equably, “so we seldom have to defecate. But if that sort of thing stimulates you—"
“I meant the meter. It stuck a ticket on my car. That's a dollar fine."
“Oh, I can fix that. We fuck up machines all the time: Let me get my ass on it, here—"
“I'll pay the fine!” he cried as she hoisted her skirt and lifted one shapely leg. There were whistles from a neighboring car. “Leave it alone!"
She shrugged. “It's your dough."
“Just get in the car, why don't you!” Prior was anxious to get away before more of a crowd collected.
He drove her to a private park, certain by this time that he didn't want her at his apartment. She climbed onto the back seat, got on hands and knees, let her breasts dangle low, bared her bottom, and he mounted her from behind and jetted somewhat feebly into her upraised aperture. She was still a luscious hunk of distaff flesh, but he had seen what he had seen, there on the beach, and knew what he knew, and it shook him up quite apart from the VD threat.
Luscious hunk? As his shrinking penis sucked loose, he realized that she had assumed the neuter form: breastless, narrow-hipped, hairless. He felt like a pederast. He didn't like pederasty. “Now you're done; get out,” he said shortly.
Chapter 3—Clap
After he was rid of her he drove home and took a long morose shower, scrubbing his limp penis thoroughly. Then he dried under the air-blast and spilled wine-scented shaving lotion on it from glans to scrotum, hoping the alcohol would burn off any remaining contamination. It stung like hell, but it didn't ease his mind much.
He dialed the number of the city VD clinic and asked for a printout on gonorrhea. He read it completely. This didn't ease his mind, either.
He had to take three happy-pills to get to sleep. And he dreamed ... not happily.
He dreamed that five days had passed and the tip of his penis became inflamed. It was red and tender, at first causing irregular erections, then actual pain. When he urinated there was such intense smarting that he could not tolerate more than a few drops at a time—but there seemed to be gallons in his bladder,
and they had to pour out. Then pus choked the conduit, popping out in grisly lumps when the frothing urine finally blasted its way through. The agony was hellish. There was brown blood in it now.
The pus lasted for three months, causing him to stand at the toilet for half an hour at a time without performing, then soiling his pants when he walked away with bursting bladder. He wet his bed at night, hardly noticing because of the other agony, and his constantly soaked buttocks and scrotum began to feel raw, too. He couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, couldn't work because of the viper's nest of pain in his groin. Then the inflammation began to spread.
It covered his bladder and his kidneys and his rectum, making every facet of elimination a continual torture. It invaded his prostate, his testes, his epididymis, rendering him sterile several times over, the hard way. Then it advanced to his mouth, interfering with eating, and his bones and joints, giving him arthritis. It infiltrated the lining of his body cavity and the valves of his heart. It poisoned his blood. It infected his eyes, making him painfully blind. Finally it penetrated to the membrances lining his spinal cord and the brain itself, and he knew he felt the onset of paralysis and insanity.
About then he woke up in sweat so copious he could not be certain it wasn't urine, and remembered that gonorrhea was not the worst of the venereal diseases.
It was Monday, the beginning of his four-day working week. Prior was a parking lot surveyor—the reason he had been so put out about being ticketed himself. He used a laser theodolite to resurvey parking lots and make sure their dimensions were within tolerance. Unscrupulous operators—and that meant all of them—tried to shave the size of individual spaces and the access lanes, and could get ugly when called to account. The worse the offense, the uglier they got. Some threatened him, not realizing that one of the spare lenses he carried was in fact a laser pistol. Some offered him money, not realizing that his theodolite was irrevocably bugged; they were soon out of business, and he was permitted to keep the money as a gratuity for his cooperation. He liked getting bribed, except when they used counterfeit bills. Others sent attractive young sexy parking attendants to reason with him in some remarkably convenient bedroom-like office—not realizing that his penis was less than four inches long, erect, and he was sensitive about exposing it before strangers. As his bastard boss well knew; that was why Prior had been hired over more qualified applicants for the position. Some liabilities tended to make men honest...
All week, as he measured and noted and punched out deficiency reports and accepted bribes and fended off solicitous sexpots, his mind was on his penis. It probably required the deficiency report, and no bribe could add two inches to its length, but it was the only one he had. Every time he took a leak he watched for pus and fancied he felt the beginning irritation. And there was irritation—but only because he washed it six times a day now and the tissues were being bleached. In the middle of some intricate measurement the little soldier would stand up, stiff as a metal spike despite its brevity, and he would wonder whether this were the first gonorrheal priapism while he tried to conceal the bulge behind his theodolite.
But nothing happened.
Two weeks later a woman brought her car in to a reserved lot while he was surveying it. He was angry, because the peripheral emanations from the atomic motor interfered with his laser. But before he could formulate some suitably cutting remark, she stepped out. He recognized her: the matron the incubus had serviced on the beach. The gonorrhea trap.
Prior said nothing to her, and she never noticed him. Instead he noted the tag number of her car. When he got home he phoned the registry department and got her name and residence. Then he located her medical file. The information was supposedly confidential, but as a state employee he knew which computer buttons to press.
What he was after, of course, was the truth about her gonorrhea. Had the succubus been trying to scare him out of sheer perversity? She was, after all, a demon, and he had dismissed her impolitely.
DOES SUBJECT HAVE VENEREAL DISEASE? he typed into the appropriate line.
NO, the answer came immediately.
Relief and anger fought for supremacy. The succubus had been lying—if in fact she was a succubus, and not just an idle woman with some devilish tricks up her skirt—and he had fallen for it. There was his anger. But he had no risk of contracting gonorrhea. There was his relief.
But computers were demons in their own fashion, and liked to torpedo unwary querists with partial truths. The files only provided the specific information requested. It was always necessary to countercheck. HAS SUBJECT EVER HAD GONORRHEA?
YES.
Oh-oh. PROVIDE DETAIL ON CASE HISTORY, LAYMAN'S TERMINOLOGY.
It turned out that the woman had had a trial marriage a decade ago (only a decade? She must be younger than she looked.) and had contracted the disease then. She had avoided treatment because of the stigma attached, so the illness had become entrenched. She had thought the hysterectomy would clean it up, but it hadn't, and she remained a carrier.
This was the bitch the incubus had tackled. Prior had then had a second contact with the succubus. He had been exposed, all right.
But the most recent note on the case history said simply: SPONTANEOUS CURE, COMPLETE.
Prior read and reread that note, checking its veracity and date. She had had VD—but somehow in the last two weeks the disease of a decade had aborted without treatment. Why? And since she had still had it when he ran afoul of her, why hadn't he come down with it?
If he hadn't. Maybe his case was taking three weeks to develop the first overt symptom.
Suddenly he had the courage to go to the VD clinic himself for a checkup. The notion that he might not have gonorrhea seemed more compelling reason to go than the notion that he had it—because of that potential stigma. And other factors.
That got him off on a familiarly unpleasant chain of imagination. He would walk into the clinic, where a bunch of big, hairy, full-crotched men would stare at his member and banter their remarks back and forth while Prior stood in the center like the victim of a keep-away game. “Hey, Joe—get a load of this! Less'n four inches and clapped!” “That so? I thought the clap didn't touch anything under the legal limit!” “Mister, you better cut this sort of thing out—” (brandishing a scalpel dangerously near his defenseless penis) “It'll stunt your growth!” “Bring in the mouse you fucked; we'll have to cure it too!” But Prior knew he was as foolish as the matron in this respect. Clinic people didn't really make such crude remarks; they only thought them.
He nerved himself and went in. Everything was quiet and private and clean and deadly serious, to his considerable relief. The clinic tested him and cleared him promptly. The medical attendant didn't even snicker at the size of his penis. Prior was not now, nor had he ever been, a victim of gonorrhea.
So he had lucked out. Ridiculous to have thought himself infected.
But he stayed well clear of the beach.
Chapter 4—Hotbox
Though Prior Gross spent many of his days on the dull job, and his nights either dreaming of sexual exploits (his penis was always double length in dreamland) or worrying about their consequences (suppose one of those dreamland dolls had the syph?), his most persistent remaining concern was inventing. At home he had a device converted from a broken-down laser theodolite and a built-up computer-guided atomic-motor fuel-injection transformer. It was supposed to be a cigarette dispenser, one that would check the approaching mouth, analyze it for taste preference and general capacity, insert an appropriate brand, and light it. When the weed had burned out, the machine would remove the butt, rinse the orifice with a sweet jet of aseptic mouthwash, and insert a new cylinder. In such fashion a person would be able to chain-smoke around the clock without ever being aware of it.
He had been tinkering with the device in spare time for three years, and mechanically it seemed perfect. He would have had it ready in half the time, had the Cancer Clinic approved his application for a research grant. But the execs at
Cancer had been very obtuse about the benefits of the invention. The Heart Clinic had been even worse. One of its execs had even had to call on the services of the Tranquilizer Clinic, before Prior completed his presentation. Strange folk, these Clinic officials. It almost seemed as though they had something against smoking.
Now his device was ready, at least in prototype. But it seemed that hardly anybody smoked anymore. They preferred to absorb their drugs in more convenient ways, such as incense spiked with nicotine, caffeine, speed and pot. Since Prior did not smoke himself—he had a domineering doctor—he had no way to test the machine in the field.
He had built the better mousetrap after the barn door had robbed Peter to—well, however it went, he was out of luck. That was the story of his life.
One night as he pored over his creation, trying to think of a use for it, the succubus came again. She was every bit as shapely as before, but this time was garbed in a slitskirt super décolletage evening special that put her charms into forceful focus. No wonder she got no arguments from the sleeping men she visited on her collection rounds! But Prior wanted no part of her—particularly not the part she offered.
“How did you find out where I live?” he demanded.
“I took down your tag number, of course. I knew your address before you ever got home that night. But this was the first open date I had. There've been a lot of horny men around here recently, and right now the demon ranks are spread pretty thin."
'Well, reopen it. I don't—"
“It's open, lover. Just waiting for your entry.” She hoisted her skirt delicately to show him.
Prior gulped, strongly tempted in spite of himself. “I meant the date. I'm busy."
“You must be. You're hardly horny at all tonight. But at the moment I'm long on female clients and short on males. Just give me a quick fix for the gal in polka-dot who lives down the block, and I'll be on my way.” She hauled up her skirt again and draped herself spread-legged on his bed.