Beauty and the bug

Behind the girl, standing on the top steps of the sliding pond, was another young man, white-pale white— and completely naked. His erect penis—as long as the black man’s, but not as thick—rested on the second step from the top. He wasn’t touching it, but its ivory length was drumming the metal of the step spasmodically. He was kissing the girl’s ears and neck, fondling the bare breast when he could slide her hand away from it, reaching under her to squeeze her derriere.

Her bottom was covered by the black velvet skirt, but his caresses there nevertheless seemed to arouse her. She bent her neck very low and forced her breast tip between her lips. She suckled it so eagerly that soon half of the breast itself vanished into her mouth. At the foot of the slide the black man waved his erect, waiting penis at her invitingly.

Peggy’s raincoat hung open to the waist. As we mounted to the sky, one of her breasts swung out and slapped me across the face. Coming down it settled back into place but its mate repeated the maneuver. Peggy’s breasts were much larger than those of the girl on the sliding pond. They were very soft and very hot as they slapped against my cheeks. The nipples were quite dark and rigid, the aureoles circling them large as half dollars. Inspired by the girl on the slide, I caught one of Peggy’s breasts in my mouth.

Her flesh tasted sweet—very, very sweet. It was like warm marshmallow against the rough surface of my fast-lapping tongue. Her nails dug into the back of my neck, urging me to lick the nipple, the aureole, the breast—to lick and suck and bite.

The brunette on top of the sliding pond had pulled up the skirt of her black velvet dress. The pale young man behind her had both hands under her buttocks now. She wasn’t wearing any panties. The black man at the foot of her slide was looking right up into her quivering vagina. The way his gaze was riveted, he might have been looking deeply enough to count her teeth .

Peggy had pulled her breast from my mouth now and was kissing me. Her mouth was a small oven of flesh, her tongue a probing poker bent on plunging down my throat, her teeth little torture devices to prick my lips and spear my own tongue. One of her arms was locked around my neck so that she wouldn’t lose her perch on my lap on the swing. But her other hand was a fist that kept beating me about the neck and shoulders. The more excited she became, the more her breast flesh seemed virtually to steam with its own heat, the harder she hit and pinched me.

The brunette was going down! Down the sliding pond, I mean. The skirt of her black velvet dress was gathered around her waist. Her one exposed breast zinged through the air like a missile being fired. Her curly black hair was wild in the wind. Her bare bottom was turning red from the friction of the slide. Her mons veneris, covered by a copious triangle of curly black hair, seemed to open wider and wider, like a mouth caught in a powerful yawn, as her descent picked up speed.

Below her, waiting at the bottom of the slide, the black man kept making corrections as to the position and angle of his erect penis. He was doing the aiming; she was out of control. His weapon rose up out of his light-colored pants like some black tower left over from the days of Egypt’s glory, some black obelisk rising up from the sands of the Sahara to pierce the very sky above.

She was about to strike. He moved his pinnacle a quarter-inch to the left. She hit! Right on target! I could hear his grunt clear across the playground. It was followed by the ecstatic trill of her laughter. They began moving slowly, deeply, in concert, a four-legged beast, a double-humped camel, a satyr out of myth attuned to the rutting satisfaction of its own needs. They fucked!

Meanwhile, Peggy had discarded her raincoat altogether. I couldn’t see below her waist because of our position on the swing. But I could feel the hot clutch of the lips of her honey pot as they seized the lump still imprisoned in my trousers.

One of her hands went down to the area. She pulled the zipper. Old Lucifer came leaping out like a bronco who’s been stabled indoors too long and can’t wait to frisk energetically in the open air. Peggy laughed excitedly in my ear. Her tongue darted, flicking some nerve or other there. I felt her nails rasping slightly against the hairy underside of my scrotum.

Over her shoulder, as we rose high in the air again, I saw the young white man careening down the slide. At the bottom the petite French girl was impaled to the hilt atop the black man. They were going at it frantically.

Then the white slider struck. Like the black man before him, he was right on target. Only his target was to the rear of that already engorged by the black cock. He plunged in the rear door to the base of his long, alabaster stem. I heard the French girl’s scream clear across the playground.

She fell forward, atop the black man. His impalement of her wasn’t in danger for even the few brief seconds it took for the three of them to get organized. Nor did the white cock lose its roost as its owner stretched full length atop the fille, his balls bouncing eagerly against the fast-jouncing cheeks of her behind. Twice trapped, she was beside herself with the double sensation, the front-and-rear assault melting her flesh, the forbidden joy of knowing that only the thinnest layer of burning flesh separated the tips of the two men’s organs deep inside her.

Abruptly, Peggy decided to change her position. She braced her feet and stood up on the swing. I was still seated, of course, and she poised facing me, her remarkable crotch on a level with my face.

What made her groin noteworthy, as I mentioned before, was the fact that it was shaved as clean and smooth as the backside of a day-old babe. Also, the plump, round mound in which her nest was set was mounted unusually high up her groin. It was clean-cleft, lips pronounced and vermilion, clitty a deep purple color, oily, projecting, stiff.

As our swing pushed upward, this delicious fruit of her feminity pushed forward into my face. There was the aroma of Chanel Number 5 mixed with a sweet, musky woman-scent. The mound was resilient with a promise of subdued gushiness against the tip of my nose. The netherlips slid against my lips in a feather kiss; they were very warm, and faintly damp; and they managed a clutching pucker which created the suction for our cunnilingus kiss. The clitty on my tongue-tip was oily-sweet, feminine-flavored, hard and thrusting.

Peggy was balanced with her feet on the seat now, maintaining her perch on the swing by holding the top of my head with both hands. In this fashion she also managed to guide my face to where she wanted it, to establish the rhythm her bare glovefinger of love wished from my mouth, to hold and prolong the moments when both our beings seemed concentrated on the contact point between her clitoris and my tongue.

But Peggy didn’t call all the shots. Passion-hungry, I turned my mouth upward and unrolled my tongue full length. I kept it stiff as I probed. I could feel her clitoris quivering down near the base of it while the tip probed the quivering entrance to her womb itself.

In response, the walls of her vagina compressed and squeezed my tongue lovingly. Her thighs, full and sleekly muscled, tightened around my cheeks. The excitingly hairless mound ground down hard against my lips. Now her clitty was like a small penis bent on turning my mouth into the counterpart of a vagina.

I made my lips small and tight, compressed them so that she had to force the clitoris between them. Without having discussed it, we had arrived at a fantasy to play out. She was the rapist forcing her stiff organ into the clenched, tight, resisting vagina of my mouth. It was a strange switch, I know. Perhaps even with strong elements of homosexuality. Still, don’t knock it unless you’ve tried it. Switching sex roles can be fun. And we weren’t the only ones at that playground orgy who were doing it.

On the lazy Susan was a large, bearded man dressed in a see-through blouse and a very short mini-skirt. His legs were sturdy but shapely, and quite hairy. At first the tip of his long, pendulous penis was visible below the hem of the mini. Later, with rigidity, the tool pushed the skirt out in front, giving him the quaint appearance of being pregnant. His chest too was hairy, but squeezed together under the see-through blouse so that he had pronounced, albeit muscular breasts. His lips were painted very red between his moustache and his beard. His thick brown hair was naturally long, and together with pronounced false eyelashes and mascara, it stressed his femininity despite his excessive body hair.

His companion was a very thin woman, slim-hipped, flat-bottomed, and—I think—underdeveloped breast-wise. It was hard to tell about that last. She was wearing one of those net T-shirts that fishermen wear. Under it her breasts had been pulled down and flattened out with Scotch tape. Except for the nipples, which puckered and were dappled, her chest might have been that of a young and hairless male. She had a long face with very high cheekbones and her silver-tipped brown hair was cropped short, accentuating her boyishness still more. She had been wearing tight dungarees, but she had taken them off. She had not been wearing underwear under them. There was a contrivance strapped around the lower part of her body. Made of hard rubber, the main part fit over her crotch and was shaped at right angles like two oversized male sex organs arranged perpendicularly to each other. One part of this dildo stretched the mouth of her vagina and most of its length was buried in there. The other part, now, as I watched, became the instrument of her rape of the bearded, femininely dressed and made-up man.

Still spinning on the adult-sized lazy Susan, she forced him to his hands and knees. In this position his miniskirt rode up over his back and his behind stuck out. It was surprisingly plump, quite muscular, and very, very hairy.

At first she mounted him like he was a horse and she was the rider. In this position, in the make-believe saddle, his pawing at the floor of the lazy Susan and rearing up and down forced the dildo deeper inside her and the sensations the activity brought about seemed to excite her tremendously. She smacked his hairy behind hard and he bucked more violently and she squeezed her thighs around his waist and squeezed the dildo filling her with the muscles of her vagina.

Then she shifted position. She slid down behind him and this time she mounted him like a dog. Her muscles tensed and she plunged the dildo deep into him with all her strength. Of course this also forced it deeper inside herself. Sprawled over him this way, she leaned far forward—like a jockey in the stretch now -- reached underneath, and grabbed his stabbing penis. Each time she plunged the dildo into him, his sphincter reacted and he reared up and his prick jerked wildly. The cheeks of his behind had been forced wide apart now, and he was pushing his ass backward to the impalement of the dildo as eagerly as she was thrusting forward. Before long I saw a copious amount of love cream spurt out from her fist, soiling his mini-skirt, making his penis all but spin in circles with the explosion of its release. Still she stayed on top of him, violating his anus, plunging the dildo into both of them. . . .

Meanwhile, I was still frantically licking and sucking and eating Peggy. Her blonde Afro in the wind, her proud breasts jutting out, her erect figure straining to my oral touch—all made her seem like some Valkyrie being serviced by Odin himself. It was all I could do to restrain myself from burying my teeth in that succulent, hairless nest of hers.

Old Lucifer was standing at attention. Peggy had edged one of her bare feet over so that the toes were under my scrotum. She had very talented toes. They nipped and tickled deliciously as we rose toward the sky and sank back toward the ground. Rising and sinking in this way, titillated by her toes and my tongue, we strove for the fulfillment of our mounting lust.

Over at the foot of the slide now, the joined trio had been joined by a fourth. The French girl was still impaled atop the black man’s impressive weapon. The pale young man was spread out on his knees behind her, his stiff rod buried in the plump cheeks of her behind. She was beside herself with the knowledge of the two male sex organs feeling each other’s presence as they moved deep inside her.

The petite fille was so beside herself that she grabbed a passing man around the knees and tripped him. He fell to a kneeling position in front of her. He was a portly man of middle years. A foolish smile spread over his face as she unzipped his fly and fished out his clarinet. As yet only semi-rigid, it was nonetheless the most impressive of the three with which she was involved. It was a full seven and a half inches long, and of a formidable thickness. From where I was swinging, lining it up between Peggy’s hot thighs now, it looked like a length of stiff rubber hose.

It grew a lot stiffer as the fille licked it from base to tip with her eager tongue. It got longer and thicker as well. Her lips and mouth stretched wide to encompass the girth of the head of it. When he thrust it in even deeper, perhaps a little more than half its length, her eyes popped and her throat worked to keep from gagging on it.

The black man, on his back, was moving up and down convulsively. Even his balls were swallowed up by her hot box as her weight settled on him. Added to that weight was the impetus of the white lad ripping and tearing his violent way into the forbidden territory of her anus. And at the same time, her head was moving back and forth blindly as she licked and sucked the huge cock in her hungry mouth.

The three most erogenous of her bodily orifices were each stuffed with malehood. The black man, his hands spread over both her breasts (the black velvet evening gown was now like a thick tire around her waist and covered nothing else), was pulling her down hard so that she would take the full force of his imminent discharge. The caboose rider was using the momentum of the black man’s action to pin her behind so that his own flow might fill her anal cavity. The portly man, likewise, had been brought to the brink of orgasm by her educated mouth.

There was a quadruple explosion. The black man pumped jizzum into her waiting love-passage. The back-door Romeo overflowed into the rear pantry. The portly man sprayed her throat so that she was choking and gasping. And the girl herself writhed spasmodically as one orgasm followed another, seizing her body, welling up from her clitty, spreading from her sphincter, gushing down with the love-juice that filled her throat.

“Aye! Aye! Aye!” Peggy too was going over the top. The straps of the black garter belt were tangled in my ears. “Aye! Aye! Aye!” Like a mound of vanilla ice cream her shaven hump was sweet and clinging and melting against my tongue. “Aye! Aye! Aye!” She spread her sexuality over my mouth and ground out its release with a mighty clenching of her thighs. “Aye!. . .Aye!. . .Aye! . . .”

Old Lucifer was swollen thick and throbbing with the gathering wellspring of his lust. My scrotum was as heavy as a sack holding twin cannonballs. Hot and hard, I ached for release.

But my Scotch lass, her ardor temporarily quelled, now proceeded to demonstrate her teasing side. She leaped from the swing to the ground and slipped into her black raincoat. I was left to bring the swing to a halt and follow her—in imminent danger of pole vaulting as I alit due to the unsatisfied rigidity of Old Lucifer.

Which is to say that there was the devil to pay and I bloody well meant to see that he got his due! I gamboled after my playful Peggy, my fly still open, my lance at full tilt like a member of the Light Brigade making the charge. Flaunting my lust this way put me right in the swing of things with the other orgiasts sporting in the playground. Such lust, in various stages, was everywhere to be seen.

A Filipino was playing in the sandbox with a plump blonde girl. He was wearing a white dinner jacket, and that’s all he wore. The plumpish girl had on a Baby Doll nightie—the top only-—and her pink behind and the lower part of her groin were visible beneath the fuzzy fringe of the garment. Another girl joined them, a very tall Oriental. She was wearing a fur bikini and expertly snapping a tight-twisted wet towel.

The blonde, up to her ankles in sand, was standing bent over with her hands holding her knees. In this position her derriere jutted out provocatively. The Filipino stood behind her in the sandbox. He held his penis like a rubber hose in one hand. He smacked her back and forth across her behind with it. He also provided a counterpoint with his other hand, smacking her with the open palm — a series of rhythmic, resounding thwacks. The tall Oriental girl in the furred bikini was behind him. Each time he bent to his chastisement of the blonde, she flagellated him. His nut-brown bottom stuck out from under the white dinner jacket like a symmetrical coconut. She raked it with her long, sharp nails, digging deeply each time that he smacked the blonde with his rubber-hose penis. His butt was harshly furrowed and streaked with blood, but he didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary, he seemed ecstatic to be caught in the middle between the mild sadism he was inflicting and the masochism he was enjoying. He held his sex organ in such a way as to impede the flow of blood so that it would stay in a semi-tumescent state. He didn’t want it too stiff to whip the blonde’s fleshy behind with. She had her head craned around so that she could see the blur of his flailing instrument as it bounced off her cheeks; she could also see the Oriental girl’s nails dripping blood as they came away from the Filipino’s writhing bottom.

The lazy Susan wasn’t far from the sandbox and Peggy had jumped onto it as it spun around. She had left me in a preposterously erect position, and I had no intention of letting her get away from me before I’d spent my lust inside her oven. I jumped up on the lazy Susan myself and made my way to her. This involved stepping over a variety of intermingled bodies in various stages of undress and nudity, and in many sorts of unusual positions and involved in many bizarre activities. Mouths sucked at a variety of orifices—small ones centered in penis crowns, larger ones nestling between female thighs, hot ones with sharp tongues, forbidden ones which required (in a sense) going “in” the “out” passageway. Breasts were being squeezed and teased, nipples chucked and sucked, cleavages stroked and poked with fingers and fully erect organs. Penises were being milked and massaged, balls laved and licked, prostates titillated and tickled. The lazy Susan was a merry-go-round of fallatio and flagellation, coupling and cunnilingus, sodomy and sensuality of every description.

Peggy was catching her breath. She lay on her back and looked up at me hotly as I made my way to her. She had allowed the black raincoat to fall open again. Her shaven crotch framed by the garter belt, her long legs in black net stockings, her high breasts with their large pink aureoles and hard red nipples—all her charms were on display and waiting for me. And I was ready for them as my exposed lance still sticking out of my pants attested.

I sprawled over her. Her mouth was hot and sweet, her tongue teasing as I kissed her. Her hand went to my rigid tool. Her breasts swelled against me as she caught her breath, impressed with the readiness of it. Peggy groaned, then stuck her tongue into my ear and licked and murmured a panting litany of suggestive words which I could only half make out because of her Scotch brogue:

“Fu’ … Su’ … Co’ … Pri’... Cunny … Fu’ . . .”

Peggy pulled on my ding-dong and I moved as she indicated. She was sort of reeling me in, pulling me up her body. She stopped when I was kneeling over her with my knees on both sides of her ribs. She was so excited that that blonde Afro of hers was all but standing on end.

She had my dingus right where she wanted it -- deep in the cleft between her breasts. My swollen balls nuzzled there too, snug and warm—-very warm. By clenching her arms at her side, she was forcing her breasts together and then by unclenching them she was allowing those gourd-shaped beauties to fall away from each other. As a result, my stiff piston moved up and down between the perspiration-slicked flesh mounds.

The sight of the raw, red tip of my cock appearing in the cleavage at the top of her breasts seemed to excite Peggy mightily. As it disappeared and reappeared, she moaned low in her throat. Her hands became very busy between her throbbing thighs. Then she moved them to my hips and guided me this way and that to achieve the various sensations that were turning her on so strongly.

She tugged at me until the base of my scrotum was bouncing against the hotly taut nipple of her left breast. She urged me back until she could squeeze the sac between her panting melons. Then she guided me until the long, quivering tip of her right breast had inserted itself between the cheeks of my behind. I could feel it flexing there, probing, growing with the bizarreness of the contact.

All of this, as I’ve indicated, was intoxicating Peggy with the wine of passion. The tip of my penis against her nipples, the squeeze-pinch of my cheeks around one of them, the slippery rolling of my balls between her breasts, the hot thrust of the length of my cock in that tight passage she’d created between her breasts—it all had her beside herself. Just how much was something I determined when I slipped my hand down and reached for that shaven mound so brazenly located above the juncture of her legs.

She was hot and wet and waiting. Her clitty stuck out like a sore thumb—-a thumb, that is, made sensitive by friction. The lips of her vagina made soft, kissing noises as they puckered and unpuckered. Peggy was more than ready!

So was I!

I slung those lovely legs of hers over my shoulders and bent her double. That Scotch arse of hers popped up to form a cushion for me. I swung my weight onto it and slammed my prick hard into her waiting slot.

Ahh-hh-hh!

Such a friendly well it was! My divining rod felt right at home there. It was so damp and warm; the walls of flesh were so clinging. I’d filled it with my male presence to the brim, and there was no mistaking the delighted welcome I’d found there.

I paused for a moment to enjoy the sensation. I didn’t move, just concentrated on the feel of Peggy’s glovefinger of love snugly embracing my “finger” of passion. I even took a few seconds to look around me.

My eyes lit on the trio in the sandbox. One of the Oriental girl’s hands was busy between her own legs now. She was enthusiastically frigging herself. A few drops of the Filipino’s blood still dripped from the nails. With her other hand she was still gouging and scratching his bottom.

This was driving the Filipino into a frenzy. He flayed the heavy, naked rear of the blonde with abandon, his rubber hose of an organ alternating with the thwack of his palm. Her behind was lobster red now. As I watched, her thighs clenched and her whole body shook with what I took to be one of a series of orgasms. This, however, was the one that did it for the Filipino. His prick began to spurt jet after jet of heavy cream over the blonde’s behind. He kept whipping her with it as it squirted. This in turn so excited the Oriental girl that she clawed at his groin from behind and finally came around in front of him and straddled one of his legs (he bent it accommodatingly), riding up and down on it so that she climaxed along with the last of the semen he was spraying over the blonde’s writhing butt.

If possible, this sight excited me even more than I had been. I started to move, my weight resting on Peggy’s haunches. I moved inside her like a corkscrew—not in and out at first, just around and around. It drove her frantic. Under me her crotch jerked this way and that uncontrollably. I reached down with my hand and stroked the cleft between her cheeks. She cried out and her shaven hump bounced against the underside of my cock, urging me to pump up and down inside her so that she might feel the length of my prick caress her innermost flesh surfaces.

While I was doing this, I bent my head and caught the nipple of one of her breasts in my mouth. I rolled it around between my lips and licked it with my tongue. It was too much for Peggy. She screamed and clawed me and took off on the wings of an orgasm which was obviously mindless.

I rode with her, but restrained myself from coming. I was enjoying my power to arouse her and bring her off and arouse her again. My own orgasm, when it came, would be very powerful indeed.

My gaze fell on one of the seesaws not far away. Two naked couples were riding it. One man sat at each end. The women sat on their laps facing them. As the seesaw went up the man would slide hard against her, his penis forced deep inside her by his weight. As it went down, the woman would slide against him, her weight impaling her until she’d swallowed his organs up inside her. The four of them had obviously established a very satisfying rhythm.

The small French girl at the foot of the sliding pond was still impaled and bouncing on the black man’s staff; the pale young man was still buried in her bottom; and the corpulent man was still filling her mouth; all had enjoyed one orgasm; now all were going for seconds. Opposite us on the lazy Susan, the bearded man in the mini-skirt and the thin girl with the dildo were also working their way to a second climax; the double-pronged dildo was deep inside her vagina and his anus was a blur of motion; he reared like a bronco; she bounced like a rodeo rider; soon they would ride off into the sensual sunset together! The Oriental girl, the Filipino, and the blonde were also at it again—-spanking, scratching, flagellating; they were sticky with the fruits of their first go-round; soon they would be stickier.

As for me, the moment was at hand. Long-legged Peggy was kicking like a speared toad; her breasts were flopping from side to side, slick with sweat, nipples blood-filled to bursting; the velvety cushion of her behind, on which my weight rested, was rolling like a frenzied pinball. I was rolling with it, my cock moving inside her like a roto-rooter. Then I changed the rhythm and imposed the will of my own tempo upon her. She half screamed aloud with this new sensation. Her body moved with mine, up and down, deep thrust following deep thrust, slowly, then faster, then slowly, lingeringly again. Our senses savored every millimeter of the flesh in contact. I was drenched in the honey of her repeated orgasms. The muscles of her vagina rippled over the length of my organ like lingers on a flute. I felt myself stretched and pumped and squeezed. In turn I battered at her so hard that my scrotal sac bounced rhythmically against the soft-muscled base of her lust-tunnel. Finally I slammed into her with all my might and my balls were swallowed up. She rose to meet me. We stayed like that, poised, for a long moment. Then, as Peggy relaxed, I released the hot stream of my passion, over-filling her, feeling the excess gush over her thighs and mine. And still I pumped while the lazy Susan turned . . . and turned. . . and turned. . . .

A while later—I don’t know how long—I reminded Peggy that while fun was fun I had really come with her on a “specific mission.” She somehow misinterpreted what I had said to mean that my coming with her had been a “terrific emission.” Straightening that out took a bit more dallying and so more time passed before she agreed to escort me to the dungeons where we would find Manuel, the Lilliputian who would presumably dictate to me the terms of release for Alicia Alvarez, the President’s secret daughter.

The dungeons were something else again. They were on a level below the basement of the lavish mansion on the Ile de la Cité. The foundation was old and slimy with cracks. It leaked and the stone floor and walls were dank with puddles from the River Seine. If I hadn’t been forewarned by Peggy, I might have taken seriously what I found down there. Chains and spikes, racks and an Iron Boot, whips and knouts, delicate instruments for extracting fingernails and gross mechanisms for vaginal enemas and castration -- all in all as grisly a collection of torture devices as I’ve ever seen. They were in use—sort of—but really the people involved were playing at using them, or using them playfully, whichever you prefer.

Manuel, an African Pygmy, was in a rear cell. He wore a leather apron of the kind favored by executioners in sixteenth-century France. Two girls, one black, one white, were spread-eagled and chained to a wall facing him. Manuel was laying it on, lightly but deftly, with a blacksnake whip. Embedded in the tip of the lash was a sharp piece of metal. It left a thin streak of blood wherever it struck.

It would be wrong, however, to imply that the two girls were being beaten against their will. On the contrary, like all those in the dungeons, they were getting their jollies out of the S-M proceedings. True, they writhed and cried out, but from the way their lower bodies pumped and jerked, it was obvious that they were also getting a lot of sexual compensation for the raps they were taking.

Peggy stared at the scene, fascinated. I understood that she was both attracted and repelled by discipline. She stayed behind, in the background, while I walked up to Manuel.

Manuel was very dark-skinned, with uncharacteristic Latin features, flashing black eyes, and the slenderness of a Castilian noble. It looked like a Spanish strain had diffused his Pygmy heritage. He wielded the whip very gracefully, moving on the balls of his feet like a panther, all but choreographing the S-M as he lashed first the black girl, and then the white, and then the black one again.

The black girl (her skin was actually a beautiful shade of dark purple) had very large, full breasts. Each time the whip tip flicked the nipple of one of them, she would jerk her body in such a way that each breast would rotate in turn—the unhit one about half a revolution behind the one that had been punished. Streaks of blood spread out from her brown aureoles like cracks in a window which has been shattered but not broken. The sleek black bush between her supple thighs was likewise flecked with blood; these drops had been spattered there by the lash stroking her hips and belly.

The white girl (auburn-haired, slender, and more muscular than her black counterpart) seemed to have been whipped much harder. Rivulets of red ran between her small breasts and over her belly. After watching a minute I could see why.

“Oh, yes!” she kept moaning to the lithe Pygmy. “Whip me! Let me feel the lash! I’m coming! I’m turned on! More! Harder! I’m coming! I’m coming!”

With this kind of urging, Manuel gave her more than her share of the lash. When the black girl complained of being short-whipped, he would try to even it out until she too was driven to the throes of orgasm. First one, then the other-—and so it went.

Which, as you may imagine, made it kind of hard to divert Manuel’s attention, let alone hold it once diverted. After a few futile throat clearings, “Ahems,” and “Excuse mes,” I just reached out and grabbed his whip arm to attract his attention.

“Manuel,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you.”

“Can’t you see I’m busy?” His voice had an annoying whine to it. It was definitely not the voice on the tape sent by the Lilliputian Liberation Army.

“You wanted to see me,” I started to remind him. I never got to finish the explanation. Before the words were all out, there was the sound of police whistles, several indistinguishable shouts, and a growing clamor above us.

Suddenly the lights went out in the dungeon. For the first time I realized that the lighting had been electric and it occurred to me how out of context it was with the setting. Manuel pulled his arm free of me.

I lit my cigarette lighter. Manuel was unchaining the girls from the dungeon wall. Peggy was hissing in my ear:

“Come wi’ me, mon! It’s no wise to stay here. Follow, now!”

“But I have to talk to Manuel,” I reminded her.

“Will you no stop al-guin’?” Peggy was exasperated. “We no ha’ the time!” she insisted. “Just take my hand an’ come wi’ me.”

I did as she said. Instead of leaving the dungeons we seemed to move more deeply into their recesses. There was more commotion behind us, more police whistles, the sound of running feet, voices crying out, curses, a sudden scream.

Peggy had stopped now and was groping along the damp walls for something. I realized she needed some light to find whatever it was she was seeking. I fished out the cigarette lighter and the flame flared up again.

“It’s a bra’ bricht licht!” Peggy exclaimed happily.

A moment later she located the stone in the wall for which she’d been looking. When she pushed it a section of the wall swung back creakily, revealing a narrow rock passageway on the other side. Water was trickling from the ceiling of this passageway and the puddles on the floor were ankle deep.

We sloshed into them, closing the trick door behind us. None too soon, I judged. The running footsteps behind us were getting very close. And beams from the sort of flashlights used by gendarmes had been on the brink of ferreting us out.

Dully, the footsteps passed, still running on the other side of the trick door. The cops hadn’t spotted our hidden detour. We’d lucked out.

The passageway was longer than I’d thought at first. Mostly we felt our way down it. I didn’t want to use up the fluid in my lighter by keeping it burning all the time.

“How’d you know about this?” I asked Peggy.

“Our host showed it to me the first time I came to one o’ his sprees. The coppers spoilt tha’ one too.”

“Do you know where we are?” I wondered.

“ ’Neath the Seine. Makin’ for the right bank.”

Finally we reached the other end. I lit the lighter again for Peggy and she located a small boulder on a ledge running about chest high on the wall in front of us. I helped her move the rock. There was a small hole behind it. We crawled through and dropped down on the other side.

“Whew!” I gagged. “What a smell!”

Peggy held a handkerchief over her nose and led the way again.

We were up to our asses in something. It took me a moment to realize what it was. “Peggy,” I said, “We’re in the sewer!”

“Hoot, mon! Wha’ di’ you expect? The sparklin’ waters o’ Niagara?”

“Peggy! It’s getting deeper!”

“Aye.”

“Peggy! It’s up to my waist!”

“Aye.”

“It's up to my neck!”

“Aye.”

“It’s up to my mouth! What’ll I do?”

“Breathe through your nose!” she advised.

“It’s up to my nostrils!”

“Mine too, mon!”

“What’ll we do?” I wondered.

“Dinna make waves!”

Remember all those movies about the French Resistance Movement in Paris during World War Two? Remember they were always hiding out in the sewers? Remember how the sewers were supposed to have been a hiding place for the criminals of Paris for hundreds of years? Remember that the word “underworld” came from the fact that these criminals hid out in the maze of sewers?

The one thing never mentioned is the fact that sewers are filled with human excrement and other filth! I don’t blame those characters for robbing and killing! When you’re up to your nostrils in crap, it definitely doesn’t improve your disposition!

“Dinna make waves!” Peggy repeated.

I walked softly and carried a big sniff.

Finally we came to a ledge. I gave Peggy a boost up to it. Then I climbed up beside her. Through a tubular hole in the ceiling I could see the underside of a manhole cover. Together we managed to push it aside. We scrambled out into the welcome fresh air of the street above.

“Wow! You look awful!” I told Peggy, eyeing her in the lamplight.

“ ‘Oh, would some Pow’r the giftie gie us/ to see ourselves as ithers see us!’” she quoted. “Good-bye,” she added.

“Good-bye? What do you mean? Where are you going?”

“Home for a bath. You’d be wise to ha’ one yourself!” she advised me.

“But what about the Lilliputian Liberation Army? What about Alicia Alvarez? What should I tell President Dickson?”

"Wha’ are you ravin’ about, mon?” Peggy did indeed look at me as if she suspected my mind might have been unhinged by our sewer sojourn.

“Aren’t you from the Lilliputian Liberation Army?”

“I am not! I ha’ never even heard o’ the organization.”

“But then why did you pick me out on the staircase in front of Sacre Coeur? How did you know I was the Man from O.R.G.Y.?”

“The mon fro’ where?”

“Why did you pick me?” I demanded.

“You had the look o’ a fellow would appreciate a bonny time,” Peggy told me.

“And that’s all?”

“Did you no enjoy it then?” She sounded miffed.

“I loved it,” I assured. “It was a gas! A ball! Bonny! Particularly the sewer.”

“Good-bye to you then!” Peggy stalked off, her feelings hurt. “An’ good riddance!” she called back over her shoulder.

We had emerged on the right bank of the Seine. She crossed one of the bridges over the river and vanished in the direction of Montparnasse. The street was deserted, and so I strolled over to the Rue de Rivoli in search of a cab. Even though it was getting late, it was a main drag and I figured to catch one there. A cruising taxi pulled up alongside me in answer to my wave. “Mon Dieu!” He had caught a whiff of me through his half-opened window. He gunned his motor and was away before I could even get my hand on the door.

I really was a mess. Two more cabs slowed down enough to look at me and then sped off without stopping. The occasional window-shopping pedestrian still on the Rue de Rivoli gave me a wide berth and made haste to get upwind of me.

There was no choice. I would have to take the subway. I descended into the Metro stop adjacent to the Louvre.

You can see more reproductions of precious art in that kiosk than in most galleries on New York’s Fifty-seventh Street. But with me around, they didn’t get their rightful share of attention. The late-night subway riders waiting for the train to pull in there were soon huddled at the far end of the platform from the artwork and me.

Likewise, when the train came in and I boarded one of the cars, the other passengers made haste to change their seats to get as far away from my ripe aroma and revolting appearance as possible. At the first stop they got out in a body and scrambled back into adjacent cars. From then on I had the Metro car all to myself.

I disembarked at Place de Clichy and walked to the hotel. From the horrified expression on the desk clerk’s face, I could tell he didn’t think my presence in the lobby was doing the establishment’s image much good. It didn’t do the bouquet of the tiny old-fashioned elevator any good either. If they were wise they’d start fumigating right away. That’s what I thought to myself as I disembarked and entered my room. Dickson was waiting there.

“Phew!” he greeted me. “You smell like [expletive deleted]!”

“Like something fished out of The Watergate,” I agreed nastily. I didn’t stop to continue the conversation. I headed straight into the bathroom, stripped off my clothes (they’d have to be burned), and dived under the shower.

A long, long time later I emerged, smelling a great deal better, looking a great deal cleaner, feeling somewhat more like coping. Dickson was waiting for me impatiently. He filled me in on what was happening.

The kidnappers had contacted him again while I was gone. They had seen me leave with Peggy and realized the mistake. Now they wanted me to return to the staircase in front of Sacre Coeur and wait for the right girl to contact me.

“Did you tell them that damn place is crawling with blondes in black raincoats?” I complained to Dickson. But there was no choice. I headed back to Montmartre.

This time she was waiting for me. No sooner had I leaned against the railing than she came up to me. Of all the filles in all the black raincoats going up and down that long flight of stairs, she had to take the prize as the ugliest. So I’m a male chauvinist pig! Sue me! She was fat and sloppy and pimply and bow-legged and flat-chested and cross-eyed. Outside of that, she may have been a very nice woman, kind to dumb animals, considerate of her mother, forgiving of the male establishment. I don’t know. All I know is that to me she was a disaster area.

The girl didn’t look like a Lilliputian. What I mean is, besides her other attributes—or, rather, lack of them—she was, normal sized, not noticeably small. What I couldn’t help wondering about was her involvement with a radical group presumably composed of midgets, pygmies, and dwarfs? And, incidentally, what, any, was the connection between the Lilliputian Liberation Army and ‘Insecticide?’ Between the kidnapping of the President’s secret daughter and the various attempts on his life? Between all these factors and PeePee Rococco, D.O.P.E., the Mafia and/or Heinrich Bussinger?

She handed me a small, solidly wrapped package and left without a word. I wasn’t sorry. Peggy may have been the wrong girl, but she had offered compensations beyond this other lassie’s ken.

I took the package back to the hotel and Dickson. We opened it. There was a tape cassette inside. Mystifyingly enough, one side was labeled THE ARYANS. We slipped the cassette into a player and listened.

The tape began with a drumroll, mounting in intensity until it melded into the sound of thousands of boots marching in a cadence so regular as to be unmistakably a goosestep. Behind the pounding of marchers’ boots a male chorus sang out the opening bars of Deutschland über Alles. The stirring rendition continued behind the voice of the commentator which replaced the thunder of the goosesteps while maintaining the goosestep rhythm.

“The Nazi image took another pounding in Russian, British, and American propaganda this morning in early spring of nineteen forty-five, hitting the lowest point ever known in Buchenwald. Prestige has declined there by ninety-nine point nine percent since nineteen thirty-nine, and this Austrian thinks it’s time to speak up for the Germans as the most genocidal, and possibly the least appreciated Aryans in all the world.

“As long as twenty-five years ago when I first started to research Mein Kampf, I read of Reds on the Volga River and in Kiev. Well, who finally rushed in with men and munitions to help? The Nazis did, that’s who! They have helped stamp out communism in France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia itself! Yet today the hallowed walls of the Führerbunker are under siege, and no foreign land has sent even one ‘observer’ to help.

“Holland, Belgium, and to a lesser extent Denmark and Norway were lifted out of the clutches of inferior races by the Nazis who poured in millions of bullets and suffered other bullets fired in return. None of those countries is today showing even the slightest appreciation of the debt owed to Nazi Germany.

“When the Vichy government was in danger of collapsing in early nineteen forty-four, it was the Germans who propped it up. And their reward was to be spit upon and shot at in the streets of Paris. And I was there; I saw that!

“When village provinces are threatened by communism, it’s Germany that hurries in to help. Lidice, Czechoslovakia, is one of the most moving examples. . . . So far this spring eighty-six Nazi divisions have been flattened by enemy armies. Nobody has helped! “The SS shipped millions upon millions of inferior peoples out of countries threatened with mongrelization. And now newspapers in those countries are writing about the brutal, atrocity-committing Germans.

“Now, I'd like to see just one of those countries that is gloating over the downfall of the Nazi regime build its own gas chambers. Achtung! You schwein! Let’s hear it! Does any country in the world have a setup to equal Auschwitz? Ravensbruck? Treblinka? If so, why don’t they use them? Why do they all use German-made extermination facilities? Why does no other land on earth consider putting a man—or a woman or a child-in a gas chamber?

“You talk about French militarism and you get Waterloo. You talk about English militarism and you get Dunkirk. You talk about United States militarism and you get Pearl Harbor. You talk about German militarism and you find Prussians in Poland, Prague, Paris—not once but several times throughout history and always ready to try again!

“You talk about atrocities and the Nazis put theirs right in the butcher-shop window for everybody to look at. Even our scientists are not to be pursued and hounded. They’ll be right there on the streets of Cape Canaveral. Most of them, unless they fall into the hands of the Russians, will be getting American dollars from NASA and the Pentagon to spend down there³³ .

“‘When the Germans get out of this bind, as they will, who could blame them if they said, ‘The hell with the Reds’ threat to the world! Let somebody else burn the huts! Let somebody else bomb or destroy foreign dams, or set up free fire zones to be napalmed to ashes in air raids!’

“When the armies of Spain, Japan, and Italy needed munitions, it was the Germans who supplied them. ‘When Germany’s Wehrmacht, and the Luftwaffe went kaput, nobody loaned them an old Luger! Not even Mussolini!

“I can name you five thousand times when the Nazis raced to the help of other people threatened by mongrelization and decadent democracy. Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Nazis in trouble? I don’t think there was outside help even during the Normandy invasion.

“Our neighbors have faced it alone. And I’m one Austrian who is damn tired of hearing them kicked around. They’ll come out of this bunker with their Swastika high. And when they do, they’re entitled to thumb their noses at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles.”

(The male chorus behind the commentator faded out softly to the final strains of “Deutschland über Alles” and was smoothly replaced by Kate Smith singing “God Bless America” as a background to the remainder of the commentary.)

“I know America will be one of these. But there are many obedient gook-hating Americans. To the victor belong the Heils!”

The Fred Waring Orchestra and Chorus joined in with Kate Smith³⁴ for a final, rousing chorus of “God Bless America.” The tape concluded with a thunder of goosesteps.

The record was over. Dickson had been visibly moved. Puzzlement, however, slowly replaced admiration on his face. We stared blankly at each other.

What the hell?

Chapter Seven

We played the flip side of the tape cassette. The male voice was immediately familiar. We were in touch with the Lilliputian Liberation Army, the group that claimed to be holding Alicia Alvarez prisoner. He made a short introductory statement, and then we heard Alicia’s voice.

“Pa-pa-pa-resident Dickson, an unbiased study of recent history reveals how deeply you must share in the United States’ responsibility for the downtrodden condition of the little people. . . .”

Dickson looked at me and frowned. Alicia’s tone, even more than her words, no longer sounded like a kidnap victim in fear of her life. On the contrary, the accusatory voice and the rhetoric came across like a dedicated collaborator, rather than an anxious hostage.

“The LLA has been made aware of certain moneys in your possession,” the tape continued with Alicia speaking. “They know full well how these moneys came into your hands and they also know that these funds were immorally extracted from the people and that they are rightfully the property of the people. . . .”

“[Expletive removed]! She must have told them!” Dickson had gone quite pale.

Told them what? I didn’t ask; it didn’t seem the time to do that. “Do you think they tortured her?” Instead, that was the question I raised.

“Either that, or . . .” Dickson left it unfinished.

Alicia’s voice continued:

“I will not be released until these sums are returned to the people. I am being held as a prisoner of war under the terms of the Geneva Treaty. I have not been mistreated. But the conditions of my release are dependent upon your following the instructions which follow to the letter.”

Her voice came to an abrupt halt. Once again we heard the male voice which had opened the tape:

“President Dickson, you will fly to Geneva, Switzerland, and withdraw one million dollars in cash from the secret bank account you maintain there. . . .”

“[Expletive deleted]! [Expletive removed]! [Unintelligible]! [Characterization omitted]!”, Dickson remarked. “She must have told them!” he muttered angrily. “Only she and I knew! She must have blabbed!”

“From Geneva you will fly to Zurich which, as you know, is the gold capital of the world. You will proceed directly to the Gold Exchange and purchase one million dollars worth of gold at the daily rate of exchange. Allowing for variations in the market, this should buy you approximately three hundred and ninety pounds of gold. The purchase should be made in denominations of two-hundred-fifty-ounce bars. Twenty-five of them. You and your companion will immediately return with the gold to your friend Rococco’s island in the Caribbean. Shortly after you land there you will receive further instructions.”

End of tape.

Dickson did a lot of muttering about blackmail and such, but we followed instructions. We drove to the airport on the outskirts of Paris and boarded the Lear jet which Rococco had put at our disposal. His pilot followed Dickson’s instructions unquestioningly and flew us straight to Geneva. Here I got my first lesson in international finance and it was something of a surprise.

Dickson withdrew the million dollars from the bank in cash.

“Why not a bank draft?” I questioned. “If we’re just going to fly to Zurich and buy a million bucks worth of gold with it, then why take the chance of transporting it in cash?”

The answer was simple. Dickson explained the ins and outs of concealing financial transactions in Swiss banks to me. What it added up to was that by withdrawing the money in cash and later buying the gold with the cash there would be no official record to tie Dickson in with either transaction. (His account in Geneva, of course, was hidden behind a number.)

So we left the Geneva bank with a suitcase stuffed with bills of relatively small denominations. We took the suitcase to the airport where our plane was waiting. It was a nervous trip. But we reached the Gold Exchange in Zurich without incident.

Here things became a little more complicated. Dickson arranged to have the twenty-five gold bars, each weighing a little more than fifteen and a half pounds, delivered to the airport by an armored truck supplied with the cooperation of the Gold Exchange. I watched as the guards transferred the large metal box containing the gold into the storage compartment of the Lear jet.

After the transfer had been made without incident, the plane’s pilot was still bogged down in the red tape of filing his flight plan with the Zurich airport authorities. Dickson boarded the plane and planted himself in front of the storage compartment containing the gold. I stayed outside the plane, gun at the ready inside my shoulder holster³⁵ .

I stationed myself by the entrance to the cabin. Any threat to the gold would have to get past me first. After about ten minutes of standing there, bored, I lit a cigarette.

My hand missed my pocket and the cigarette lighter fell to the ground. I stooped over to retrieve it. As I straightened up, my gaze swept the area under the fuselage of the plane and beyond. Behind the opposite wing, just about where the jet engine was, I spied a small pair of feet above which were the bottoms of lederhosen.

Quietly, I walked around the back of the plane and came up on the figure from behind. It was a Swiss youth, a boy with very red cheeks, about eleven or twelve years old. He was tall for his age, but he still had to stretch to do what he was doing.

What he was doing was drawing a face, in pencil, around the engine exhaust. There was a vague, caricature-style resemblance to Nick Dickson. In particular it was pointed up by the sweep of the ski-slope nose the kid had drawn.

I grabbed the kid. He wasn’t easy to hold. He wriggled like a greased eel.

“Don’t you know graffiti is verboten?” I chided him.

“Let me go!” He was small but wiry, strong.

“I should turn you over to the police.”

“Don’t do that.” The kid started to cry.

“Why did you decide to practice your artwork here?” I was curious.

“To protest U.S. imperialism.”

He looked pretty young to be into left-wing politics. I looked at the drawing again. “How did you know Dickson was on this plane?” I asked the kid.

His jaw dropped open. He didn’t have to say anything. Obviously he hadn’t known that Dickson was on the plane; this was the first he’d heard of it.

Chance? I doubted it. “Who put you up to this?” I demanded.

“They made me promise not to tell.” He was blubbering again.

What the hell, it was only a drawing. And I can’t stand the idea of making a kid cry. I let him go.

In his haste to get away, he dropped the pencil he’d been using. I picked it up. It was a garden-variety Number Four lead pencil. I stuck it in my pocket and returned to my post outside the plane’s cabin door.

A few minutes later the pilot arrived, and he and I boarded the aircraft. Dickson was dozing. I strapped him in and then sat down next to the pilot for the takeoff. He primed the jets and a couple of minutes later we were taxiing down the runway. Then we were in the air and the Lear was practically flying itself.

“What took so long back there?” I asked the pilot idly.

“I ran into an old buddy of mine, an aeronautical engineer. We haven’t seen each other in a long time. We got to talking.”

“A Swiss?”

“No, an American. He’s over here for our government. Working on some aircraft sabotage cases. Or at least some crashes where they suspect there might be sabotage.”

“You mean like that big Swissair liner that went down en route from Bern to New York recently?” I remembered.

“Yeah. Only he’s more interested in a seven-o-seven that almost ditched but didn’t. That’s what he’s over here running tests on. Damned interesting what he’s found out, too.”

“Which was?”

“On the seven-o-seven one of the engines went in flight. Started to disintegrate. At that speed it should have torn the wing off. It almost did, but not until the pilot managed to land the plane. It was sheer luck. One in a million. On a plane the size of ours, not even that. The wing would have gone a lot sooner.”

“What was so damned interesting?” I reminded rm.

“Well, because the wing held, they were able to conduct certain tests to try to determine what caused the engine to go to pieces. And the answer they came up with was embrittlement.”

I looked at him blankly.

“Embrittlement is due to an excess carbide formation,” he said as if that explained everything.

My blank expression didn’t change.

He looked at it and then grinned. “Sorry. I guess you don’t have the technical background to dig it.”

“You’re so right.”

“I’ll try to make it simple. If graphite is heated—say by the running of the engine-—it forms carbide. Excess carbide causes embrittlement—which means just what it sounds like: the metal of the engine becomes brittle. When a jet plane is in the air, traveling at X hundreds of miles per hour, the embrittlement literally results in the engine shaking itself apart, which in turn can cause a plane’s wing to shake itself off the body. Now do you see?”

“Not quite. Where does the graphite come from in the first place?”

“That’s what I asked my friend. And the answer really blew my mind. The graphite came from a lead pencil! That’s what the lead in a pencil is made up of, graphite and clay.”

My brain telegraphed fear to the glands in my armpits and the sweat poured down my ribs. “Any lead pencil?” It was hard getting the words out past the sandpile in my mouth.

“Well, the more carbide, the more deadly the pencil is. A Number Four lead pencil would do the job nicely.”

Nicely!

I fished out the pencil the prepuberty graffiti artist had dropped. It was as I remembered. It was a Number Four lead pencil!

“What would the saboteur do with the lead pencil?” I inquired in a voice like grated peppers marinated in wood alcohol.

“Do with it? Why, write on the surface around the exhaust of the engine, I guess, or maybe draw.”

“Draw?” Jimmy Durante³⁶ with laryngitis. “Like a caricature, maybe?”

“I guess that would do it. Any kind of line drawing around the engine exhaust would do the trick. . . . What’s the matter, Mr. Powers? You look pale.”

Pale!

Before I could answer his question there was a sound from the left wing like a washing machine into which a buzz saw has been tossed while its on its “rinse” cycle. “I think we’ve got bad trouble.” That’s what I thought I said. But the way my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth with the peanut-butter saliva of panic, the words came out jabberwocky.

“Hmm, don’t like the sound of that,” the pilot muttered, not sounding too worried yet. “Better check that engine.”

Modern technology! My mind raced hysterically. The combined genius of Nazi Germany and the U.S. develops a jet engine capable of powering a plane to travel faster than the speed of sound. And any ten-year-old Kilroy with a lead pencil can make it fall apart in flight and crash! Modern technology!

The clatter from the left wing was growing louder. “What the hell?” The pilot’s cool was heating up.

“What the hell?” The echo was Nick Dickson. The cement mixer flogging the left wing had roused him from his snooze.

With a tremendous effort of will, I sprang my tongue loose from the roof of my mouth and started to babble. Disjointed as my words were, I managed to make enough sense to rivet the pilot’s attention. Dickson’s too.

Horror spread over the pilot’s face as he listened to me tell of the lead-pencil caricature of Dickson drawn around the engine exhaust by the boy. “We’re going to crash,” he realized.

Dickson blanched. “Coming to the heart of the question, what will we do?”

“We’ll have to bail out,” the pilot decided. “There are three chutes under the seat in the cabin. Get them out. Strap yourselves into them. Call me when you’ve done that.”

“Will we have enough time?” I asked.

“I’m going to be flying this crate the best I know how to give us the time. But there’s no way of telling. Now move!”

I hurried back to help Dickson. We removed the seat and found the three parachutes. I put one aside for the pilot and started strapping myself into one of the remaining two chutes. The way it worked out, I had my back to Dickson while I was doing this. When I turned around, he was already strapped into his chute. He was holding the third chute, the one I’d put aside for the pilot, and bending over the storage compartment containing the gold.

What was Dickson up to? I had no time to wonder about it. The engine was making such a racket now that the pilot couldn’t hear me call to him. I had to go up front and tap him on the shoulder to get his attention.

He nodded and switched on the automatic pilot. Then he came back into the cabin with me. He indicated that he wanted me to help him remove the emergency-exit door to the pressurized cabin.

It wasn’t easy. The danger was that with the door removed the pressure would shoot us out of the cabin like shells from a cannon. The trick was to scuttle the door panel while holding on to something solid enough to ensure our not following it. And all this had to be done fast because the plane was losing altitude. Also, the whole fuselage was shaking along with the wing now.

Like the pilot, I put my shoulder into it. On the third try the door panel gave. On the next one it went sailing off into space. The only trouble was that I lost my grip on the cabin wall and damn near was ejected after it.

The pilot saved me. He got a grip around one of my legs and pulled me back in. I scrambled to safety head-over-ass, the chute still on my back. I sat up to find myself looking into the mouth of my very own revolver!

Dickson was holding it. He was pointing it indiscriminately at both the pilot and myself. He was standing with his feet wide apart to maintain his balance in the tossing aircraft. Between his legs something bulky loomed. I recognized it as the large metal box containing the twenty-five gold bars. The third chute, the one I’d put aside for the pilot, was strapped to it.

“I would only suggest that in terms of relative values one million dollars in gold takes precedence,” Dickson announced. “Under the circumstances, therefore, it would not be appropriate for me to say anything further on this point. I trust I’ve made myself perfectly clear.” He motioned with the gun. His meaning was indeed “perfectly clear.” He meant for the pilot and me to push the box of gold out the exit we’d created. “Don’t neglect to pull the ripcord,” he re- minded us.

With the gun on us, we had no choice. The pilot and I shoved the gold out of the plane. The pilot pulled the ripcord as we dumped it. A moment later we saw the chute billow open. The gold floated down through a low-hanging cloud and was lost to sight. We turned back to Dickson.

He was already heading for the escape hatch. “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” he announced. He dove for the exit.

His luck turned Watergate. The plane gave a sudden lurch. Dickson’s feet shot out from under him. My pistol, the one he’d lifted from me without my knowing it until it was too late, went flying up in the air.

It was an easy infield fly. The pilot pulled it in almost casually. Then he stuck his foot out and kept Dickson from sliding the rest of the way out the escape hatch. “Take off the chute and give it to me,” he told Dickson.

“Now, it is necessary for us to keep this development, however, in perspective,” Dickson suggested. “I was, after all, the President of the United States.”

“And now you’re the ex-President,” the pilot reminded him.

“I would only suggest that my survival is in the best interests of everybody concerned.”

“Not my best interests!” The pilot was firm. "You should have thought of your survival before you used that third chute for the gold,” he added.

“If it had crashed with the plane, it might have been destroyed,” Dickson pointed out. “And remember what Goldwater³⁷ said: ‘Property values are human values.’ ”

At this point in time the plane gave a horrible shudder from nose to tail.

“Sorry, but much as I’d like to continue our little talk,” the pilot said, “my knowledge of aerodynamics tells me I don’t have the time. Good-bye, Mr. President.” He jumped from the plane.

“Mr. Powers, I must speak very bluntly.” Dickson turned to me. “I am not going to do anything I believe would weaken the Presidency of the United States. Mr. Powers, in the name of long-term statesmanship, I order you to give me your parachute.”

Sorry, ducks. Well, actually, I didn’t put it quite as flippantly as that. But I did let Dickson know I had no intention of sacrificing myself for him.

“Dragging down Dickson drags down America,” he let me know. “Where’s your patriotism?”

“It runs second to my survival instinct.”

“And what about your obligation to me, your employer, as my bodyguard?”

“That runs third.”

“[Expletive deleted]! [Expletive removed]! [Characterization omitted]! [Unintelligible]! [Adjective omitted]! [Expletive removed]!” Dickson lost his temper.

The plane was shaking so hard now that I became afraid it might disintegrate before I had a chance to jump. Still, my goddam humanism got the better of me. I couldn’t just leave him there to die. I guess the truth was that I did feel I had some obligation to him. I wasn’t the first to get sucked in by Dickson that way.

I braced myself in the open hatchway, which wasn’t easy, and faced him. “Come here,” I instructed.

He bounded over like a cooker spaniel. I half expected him to piddle.

“Put your arms around my neck and wrap your legs around my waist,” I ordered.

“Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I am not now and have never been a homosexual. Nor have I ever experienced the slightest desire to relate to my fellow Americans, as I have often said, on my knees rather than on my feet.” The plane underwent a sudden, particularly violent tremor. “Under the circum- stances,” Dickson finished quickly, his words tumbling over one another, “it would not be appropriate for me to say anything further on this point.” He leaped into my arms, wrapping his limbs around me as I’d told him.

His momentum tore my grip from the sides of the hatchway. We plunged into space. The first sensation really was one of having been shot from a cannon. We actually skidded across the sky sideways instead of plummeting straight down.

Still, we started falling soon enough. As we did, Dickson’s knees slid from around my waist and it was only his arms around my neck which were keeping us together. The realization of this panicked him. He tightened his grip. He was choking me.

“You’re choking me!” I saw no reason not to mention it.

“It is not because of a lack of desire to cooperate,” he assured me, gasping. “I realize that there are those who may think that this is simply a way of saving my own life. But the real reason goes far deeper than that.”

His hands around my throat kept me from answering. I pried them loose with my two hands. He dropped with a jerk and the rate of our descent increased suddenly. Hand in hand—each of his in one of mine—we plunged into a low-lying cloud bank.

It was necessary at this point that I pull the ripcord. But the way he was holding my hands I couldn’t get to the metal loop at the front of the parachute harness which would release the chute. The only bright note was that he was sweating profusely and his hands were becoming very slippery. His face—b1ue with five-o’clock-shadow, or fear?—strained up at me.

“Let go of one hand,” I suggested. “I have to pull the ripcord.”

“Which hand?”

“It doesn’t matter. Either one. But hurry. “

“In order to make the decisions that a President must make—”

I cut him short by wrenching my right hand free. He grabbed wildly and obtained a handheld on the waistband of my pants. I jerked the ripcord. The chute strap between my legs snapped up and caught our joined hands in such a way as to force them to separate. Dickson grabbed at the seat of my pants frantically with his newly freed hand.

Now the parachute opened, jerking my body into an upright position. This second jerk also had its effect on Dickson. His full weight tugged at the waistband and seat of my pants. You guessed it. My pants were pulled through the chute straps and down around my knees.

Dickson panicked as he slipped down with the pants. He let go of the seat and flailed wildly to get a grip higher up on my body. But all he succeeded in doing was grabbing the crotch of my jockey shorts and pulling them down.

Suspended by the chute, we floated slowly downward now. My bared genitalia flapped gently in the breeze. The cold Swiss air made my pubic hair stand up and bristle.

Dickson managed to wrap one of his arms around one of my legs. In doing so, he yanked off my pants and underpants completely. Flailing wildly with his other hand, he finally grabbed my balls with it and held on for dear life.

Symbolic, what? My situation brought to mind the predicament of some countries I could mention . . . but I won’t. Nick Dickson had me by the balls! Being Nick Dickson, he squeezed!

That was too much. I did the only thing I could do in that position. I couldn’t quite reach him with my hands because of the parachute harness. So I kicked with my feet.

The maneuver had no effect whatsoever on the Dickson groin-clutch. But it did force his other arm from around my leg. Once again he grabbed frantically. This time he latched onto my penis.

You’d have thought he was a goddam subway straphanger! Unfeeling! That’s what he was! Yessir, nobody could ever accuse Nick Dickson of suffering from an overabundance of sensitivity!

I, however, was sensitive enough for both of us. With Dickson hanging onto my scrotum with one hand and my limp Lucifer with the other, you can bet I was as sensitive a male as ever floated over a Swiss mountainscape. “LET GO!” I screamed.

“Well, I think in response to that request, I should put it in perspective by pointing out that should I let go my very existence might well be forfeit.”

“HOLD ON TO SOMETHING ELSE!”

“The point that I’d like to elaborate on is that there is nothing else onto which I can hold.”

“Why me?” I moaned. “Why my balls? Why my prick?”

“I will not countenance the decline in moral standards to which such language must inevitably lead!”

“Screw you!” I cursed him. “If you want to play with somebody’s privates, go play with yourself!”

But he held on. In the throes of the most excruciating agony, we floated down the side of a Swiss mountain. It was only when we were safely on the ground that Dickson finally let go of my genitals. By then I appreciated the lesson so many Dickson aides had learned: When serving Nick Dickson, keep one hand defensively on your groin at all times!

I struggled to scramble out of the parachute harness. Now, when I needed it, the weight of Nick Dickson wasn’t there to provide ballast. The damn chute pulled me halfway down the mountainside before I was free of it. Then I cupped my stretched and swollen genitals in both hands and, naked from the waist down, bayed at the moon which was just rising over the mountains.

Dickson looked down at me disapprovingly. He was perched on a snow-covered ledge about a hundred feet above me. “Mr. Powers, are you doing something obscene?” he wanted to know. “If so, I order you to stop it immediately!”

I ignored him. I just kept on baying at the moon until the pain subsided. I scooped up snow and applied it to the injured area to make the swelling go down.

Finally, with my genitals reduced to only one and a half times their normal size, I took stock of our situation. We had come down somewhere on the Swiss side of the Jura Mountains, the range that separates Switzerland from France. The Jura isn’t an Alpine range; the peaks are only about half the height of the Alps, but they rise as high as 6500 feet above sea level, which is high enough for year-round snow on some of the slopes and icecaps on the crowns. Also, night had just fallen, which increased the cold.

We weren't dressed for it. Dickson -- dark blue suit with a subdued pinstripe, very pale TV-blue shirt, and conservative blue tie with a subdued blue design—was already showing signs of color coordinating his skin to frost-blue from the cold. As for myself -- turtleneck shirt, undershirt, black shoes and black socks; th-th-that’s all folks!-—I might easily have qualified to star in a stag movie if not for the fact that the cold was now quickly shriveling my once swollen organs.

Having assessed our circumstances, I started down the mountain. Dickson brought me up short. The gold, he pointed out, had been dropped out of the plane behind us. A good guess was that it had landed somewhere in the foothills near the base of the mountain on the other side. Which added up to our having to climb the mountain and make our descent down the opposing slope.

Three hours later, we still hadn’t reached the top. It was a helluva lot tougher going than either of us had anticipated. The powdery snow slipped away from under our feet. The ice beneath it, combined with the insecure footing of the terrain of the mountain itself, made each step a perilous experiment. And then came the avalanche!

It started with the dropping of an icicle. It was a sharp icicle, pointed as a dagger. It plummeted from somewhere above us and narrowly missed Dickson’s throat.

“Assassination attempt!” he gasped. “[Expletive deleted]!”

“By Mother Nature,” I said, intending it to be reassuring.

If the reassurance didn’t quite succeed, it was because Ma Nature was just beginning her onslaught. The initial icicle must have been a hinge of some sort joining an ice wall to a ledge. Now, slowly, the wall itself began crumbling and panes of ice seemed to be falling out of the sky onto our heads. The first of these were thin as window glass, but as the whole ice-wall structure began to slide the slabs got heavier and heavier. Dickson and I crouched under an overhanging ledge and watched the crack-up.

Now the hurtling ice slabs were mixed with pebbles and rocks. We had to hold our hands in front of our faces to keep from being pelted and slashed by the variety of small missiles being tossed off by the larger pieces. Above us, larger and larger chunks were breaking off the mountain itself.

One of the most terrifying things about an avalanche, we learned, is the noise. It had started out with an occasional light thud. Then the thuds had run together and the sound was like hail on a rooftop. The sound became louder as if the hailstones were becoming larger and larger (which, in a sense, they were). It was like the rumble of distant thunder, then as ear-splitting as the clap of a thunder cloud bursting directly overhead. One such clap quickly followed another, each louder than the one before. Physical pain pierced our eardrums with each impact now.

The ground under our feet shook. Boulders careened through the air, scant inches away from us. A wall of sludge and ice piled up around us on the ledge. Dickson stared at it with blank panic. Any path which might have led upward (or downward, for that matter) from the ledge was obliterated by it.

“I’ve been in tight spots before.” I tried to snap him out of it.

No response.

“Haven’t you?” I prodded him.

Was that a flicker of memory that lit up his heady eyes?

“Haven’t you been in tight spots before?” I pushed.

It worked. It started him talking. At first it was a mishmash, sort of like ]ob listing his past troubles, a half-incoherent mumbling that only slowly began to make sense. When it did, I realized that Dickson was telling me a tale of his own “tight spots.” Pieced together, it went something like this:

One night, shortly before his term as President of the United States was at last aborted, Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson lay awake in his bed at the White House, tossing and turning, unable to relax. After an hour or two of trying to fall asleep and failing, the frustration got to be too much for him. He decided to get up and take a walk.

It was about midnight when, fully dressed, Dickson let himself out of the back door of the Executive Mansion and started walking aimlessly down Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a weekday night and the Washington streets were nearly deserted. He walked aimlessly for what seemed a very long time. Finally he came to the mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

He crossed the mall and walked up the steps of the Memorial. The giant statue towered over him as he stood in front of the pillars framing it. Even Nicholas Dickson couldn’t help but be affected by the sense of presence of the great man which the statue fostered. He was, in fact, overcome by a feeling of awe.

Without knowing quite how he came to be doing it, Dickson found himself talking to Lincoln-—not the statue so much as the man—telling him his troubles, confiding in him man-to-man, President-to-President.

“Let me make one thing perfectly clear, Mr. President,” he confided to the Lincoln statue, “things have never been worse!”

Dickson went on to speak in detail of his accumulating troubles. He spoke of the I.L.L. Affair, and the Buttermilk Fund, and “the Flushers”; and of revelations of the buggings of various friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family; and of the break-in authorized by him into the office of an indicted political opponent’s astrologer to ransack the stargazer’s files for evidence which might prove useful in prosecuting the Zodiac expert’s client; and of income taxes, and Enemies’ lists, and persecutions by the press; and of the possibility of impeachment by the Congress; and of many, many more presidential woes which were besetting -- nay, beleaguering!—him. And at last, with the recital drawing to a close, he came to the latest and most pressing of his travails.

“It’s Nat,” he confided to Lincoln. “My wife, let there be no question about that. Dragging out this [adjective omitted] laundry is dragging down Nat. She’s quite upset. Now I’m not used to that, Mr. Lincoln. This problem of mine with Nat is high on the agenda. Yes, indeed. But I don’t know what the [expletive removed] to do about it. What shall I do about my wife, Nat, Mr. Lincoln?”

Dickson stared up at the silent, brooding statue. He did not, of course, really expect an answer. And at first there was none. Indeed, it was almost supernaturally still.

Then Lincoln spoke. The statue? The ghost of Abraham Lincoln? A Lincolnesque voice inside Dickson’s head?

Dickson wasn’t sure then. He Wasn’t sure now. Probably he never would be sure.

“What shall I do about my wife, Mr. Lincoln?” President Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson had asked.

And the answer came in deep, sepulchral, Lincolnesque tones:

“Take her to the theater!”

By the time Dickson finished relating this experience, the avalanche had subsided. Debris, however, had walled in the ledge so that we could barely make out the moon which was now directly overhead. To attempt to climb higher before daybreak was hopeless. We had no choice but to settle down to spending the rest of the night on the ledge. With the rising sun, hopefully, we’d be able to dismantle the ice wall and continue our trek upward to the crest of the mountain and then down the other side.

It was damned cold, and being bare-bottomed didn’t help. Dickson’s teeth were chattering too, despite the fact that he still had his pants. Add to this the narrowness of the ledge, and if we were going to catch any sleep we had little choice but to snuggle.

Ex-President Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson, I’d like to mention, is not the man I would have picked to snuggle up to. However, I had no choice. And, in fairness, it should also be mentioned that Dickson had qualms of his own.

“I must speak very bluntly,” he told me. “Our position may be good short-range survival tactics, but it could be disastrous long-term politics if it ever came out.”

“My lips are sealed,” I assured him.

“[Expletive removed]!” He was huffy. “I seem to have heard that before!”

There was a long silence, and then Dickson spoke again. “When you talk about this, and you will,” he said, “be kind.”

He wrapped his legs around my naked loins for warmth and we drifted off to sleep.

Morning brought the warmth of the sun. The air was still crisp, but it was no longer quite so cold. The ice wall on the ledge was visibly melting, and Dickson and I helped it along by hammering at it with our hands.

One of the boulders that had rolled down during the avalanche the previous night had gouged out a rough furrow down the side of the mountain, creating a sort of path for us, Climbing toward the top was much easier than it had been before. We reached the peak of the mountain by early afternoon. If I had thought that descending the other side would be easier than the upward climbing had been, I was mistaken. The slope awaiting us now was decidedly more steep and perilous than the one we’d ascended. Dickson was even more dubious about attempting it than I was. Only the prospect of giving up the million dollars in gold made him shelve his fears.

Remember, we had no mountain-climbing gear, no snowshoes, no pitons, no ropes. The closest thing we had to any equipment like that was the harness from the parachute; I’d held onto it after we’d landed and I’d cut the parachute itself loose. I used the straps to secure myself to Dickson-—and vice versa-—mostly vice versa, in fact.

Dickson after all, was a much older man than I was. He was in really good physical shape from constant golf playing and fishing expeditions. Still, he felt the strain more keenly than I did and he also required rests more often.

It was during one of these rests, in the late afternoon, with the sky already greying over as nightfall approached, that I unbuckled the straps holding us together, and left Dickson alone to rest while I continued down the mountainside to scout the terrain ahead of us. I was hoping to find some sort of cave that might shelter us from the elements for the night. What I found instead was an ice-coated rock slippery as a banana peel.

The heel of my left foot hit it first. The ground slid out from under me and the rest of me followed my foot with all the aplomb of a fall guy in a slapstick flic from the Silent Era. I quickly picked up momentum and found myself rolling pellmell down the mountain. I came to rest feet first, lodged up to my thighs in a snowbank.

The snow must have concealed a rock formation. As I hit it I felt something give in my left ankle. It hurt like hell. I couldn’t tell whether it was broken, or just badly sprained. Either way I could feel it swelling up like a balloon despite the natural icepack surrounding it.

“President Dickson!” I yelled for help.

No answer. I repeated my cries for help several times but still there was no reply. Either Dickson couldn’t hear me, or he couldn’t reach me, or he wasn’t willing to try to come to my aid.

I managed to wriggle out of the snowbank. In a sitting position I bent my leg at the knee and tried to examine my ankle. It was hopeless. The thing had swelled up so much that the only way to get my shoe off would be to cut it off with a knife. Also, it hurt like hell.

I tried to crawl back up the way I’d come. Not possible. Even that wriggling activity was agonizing. The stabs of pain shot up my body from the ankle and left me lightheaded.

Also, in my roll down the mountainside, I’d managed to pick up a coating of snow on my naked backside. It wasn’t easy to get it off. It took quite a while and left my fingertips numb.

Even without it, I realized that with my injury forcing me to remain still, I would be in danger of frost-bite once night fell. I’d have to stay awake to fight it. I’d have to force myself to move, no matter how painful, if I felt numbness setting in.

Easier said than done. It didn’t seem too long before I found myself losing the battle to keep my eyelids from falling closed. Each time it happened I’d catch myself, jerk my head violently, and pry the lids open with my fingertips. Then, a few more moments would pass, I’d catch myself nodding again, and the whole process would begin all over again.

It was when I’d jerked myself back to consciousness for perhaps the umpteenth time that I saw the dog. He was, fittingly enough under the circumstances, a Saint Bernard. Not one of your long-haired Saint Bernards descended from those crossed with Newfoundlands during the mid-1800s, but rather a short-haired Saint, purest bred of the breed.

(The reason the Saints had been crossed with the Newfs was that it was thought that if a long-haired Saint was developed it would be better able to stand the cold and therefore more competent for its function of rescuing snowbound people. But in actuality the long hair picked up moisture and iced over, making the long-haired Saints less able to survive the freezing temperatures. The long-hairs were useless as rescue dogs and only the pure-bred short-hairs have been used for that purpose right up to the present day.)

I blinked at the Saint Bernard and refocused my eyes. A male, he was big even for the breed, and must have weighed over two hundred and twenty pounds and stood over thirty inches at the shoulder. Around his neck, I was happy to see, he wore the traditional keg of brandy. I could see him—and the keg—quite clearly against the white snow in the moonlight.

“Here, doggy!” I called to him.

He looked at me. He sniffed. Saint Bernards have one of the most acute senses of smell in the animal kingdom. It is said that in clear weather they can pick up the scent of a snowbound person from as far as thirty miles away! Now this Saint Bernard sniffed again. He was perhaps ten feet away from me. He gave an almost visible shrug and lay down in the snow for all the world as if I wasn’t there.

Maybe he had a cold? Hay fever? Sinusitis? I wondered. Whatever it was, his sniffer seemed out of commission.

“Here, doggy!”

Likewise his hearing, which is also reputed to be supersharp. Nary an ear quivered in response to my call. Nor was his eyesight too keen. He was staring right at me—and through me for all the acknowledgment he made of my presence.

He lay down facing me. He put his head between his paws. Then he somehow managed to slip his paws under the harness holding the keg of brandy. His head ducked out of the harness and now the keg stood upright between his paws. He pulled the cork out with his teeth as adeptly as a skid-row wino with a jug of white lightning. I watched as he threw back his head with the keg held by the mouth between his jaws and gulped a solid belt of Swiss brandy.

I could feel it right down to my freezing bare butt. My iced-over testicles cried out for some of that brandy warmth. My swollen ankle throbbed with the need for its pain-killing qualities.

Resting between gulps, the dog stretched out in front of me with the uncorked keg between his paws. It was too much for me. I turned over on my belly and started crawling toward him. “Nice doggy,” I crooned, remembering that Saint Bernards are renowned for the evenness of their dispositions and intrinsic liking for human beings.

He ignored me until I was almost on top of him. Then, when I reached for the keg of brandy between his paws, he raised his head, bared his teeth savagely, and snarled. I pulled back quickly.

The Saint picked up the keg in his mouth once again and belted the brandy. At this rate there wouldn’t be any left for me. Desperate, I made a wild grab for the keg.

The Saint Bernard countered by jumping to all fours. He got the full muscle power of his giant body between the keg and me. When I tried to duck around him to grab the keg, he jumped as if to bite a chunk out of my throat. I scrambled backward and his full weight came down on my throbbing ankle.

That did it. I saw Swiss stars. Somebody emptied an inkwell inside my head. I dived into the blue-black pool of pain. It was a merciful immersion.

When I regained consciousness, before I opened my eyes, my ears announced that the cold cruel world was back with me. What I heard was a melodious yodel.? Well, why not? Swiss mountains, after all. Why not?

My eyelids fluttered open and I focused on the spot where the dog had been. The canine lush was no longer there. I looked around. He’d vanished. I looked again, and that’s when I saw her!

There, standing on a snowbank in the moonlight, head thrown back and yodeling, stood a young girl with long brunette hair and a figure like Venus. She was wearing snowshoes. That’s all. Just snowshoes!

Chapter Eight

Her name was Bambi. Honest! I’m not making it up. Bambi! That was her name.

I didn’t have to tell her my name. She knew it. Or, rather, she knew the alias under which I was traveling.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you, Mr. Powers,” she told me. “You’re a hard man to find.”

“Not really. Easy as a needle in a snowbank.”

“However did you get so far down the slope?”

“Easy as rolling off a mountain.”

“Isn’t it uncomfortable there, with your bare bottom on a patch of ice?”

“Easy as sitting on a glacier.”

Now it was my turn to make with the questions.

“How did you manage to find me?” I asked.

“Hard work.”

“Did you know that I was hurt?”

“Hard luck.”

“And that damned dog wouldn’t let me have any brandy.”

“Hard case.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The dog. The Saint Bernard. He’s a hard case. Has a drinking problem. Fairly common among Swiss dogs, you know. Maybe it’s the climate.”

“The climate certainly doesn’t seem to bother you.” I stared unabashedly at her nudity. There sure was a lot of it—that is, a lot of her. I certainly did seem to be running into a helluva lot of naked women lately-—and in the damnedest places!

“That’s because I’ve mastered the technique of controlling my body temperature,” Bambi told me. “It’s really very simple. I’ll show you how if you like.”

“Right now wouldn’t be too soon.” I didn’t think I had to tell her that the exposed portion of my anatomy was outfreezing the proverbial brass monkey. (Inadvertently perhaps, but I also seemed to be having trouble keeping my privates covered these days.)

“We don’t have time right now. They’re waiting for us.”

I was about to ask who “they” might be when I saw the Saint Bernard appear behind her. “That canine lush is back again,” I told Bambi.

“What?” She turned around and saw the dog. “Oh, you’re mistaken,” she informed me. “It’s not the same Saint Bemard at all. The other one was a male and this one’s a female. The other one’s a booze hound and this one is a teetotaler. She won’t even carry liquor.”

“No? Then what’s in that cask around her neck?”

“Hot water.”

“Huh?”

“For tea. Or instant coffee. Or cocoa. See that little package attached to the keg? It’s a selection of mixes. There’s even a bouillon cube in it.”

“What’s her name?” I asked idly.

“Bambi.”

“Not your name, her name.”

“That’s her name, too; the same as mine.”

Why not? I looked at Bambi (the Saint Bernard). I looked at Bambi (the naked brunette on snowshoes). The name seemed to suit both of them.

There was an innocence about Bambi (the girl) which seemed to match up with her namesake in the famous story. And there was a warmth about Bambi (the dog) which likewise seemed to be similar to the fictional Bambi. Bambi (the dog had an intrinsic canine innocence, too; while Bambi (the girl) sure did have her share of warmth.

Bambi (the dog) had short hair, white and red, a tight, thick nap covering her body. Bambi (the girl) had long, curly, blue-black hair which fell to the taut, red tips of her breasts. Bambi (the dog) had a deep chest marked by a red blaze framed in white. Bambi (the girl) had Alpine breasts, pink and red from being out-of-doors, high and round, large and full. The body markings of Bambi (the dog) were symmetrical. The bosom of Bambi (the girl) was likewise symmetrical, perfectly matched mounds right down to the twin nipples, each shaped like the head of an extra-large Phillips screwdriver, each standing at attention proudly-probably from the cold. Bambi (the dog) had a long tail which hung straight down, broke at the midway point and arched halfway back up again; it was a very aristocratic tail. Bambi (the girl) had a dimpled bottom, high and haughty, beautifully sculpted and smooth as mountaintop ice; it was a very aristocratic ass. Bambi (the dog) had soft brown eyes, sympatico, melting. Bambi (the girl) had deep brown eyes, gold-flecked, compassionate, and at the same time sexy. Her face (the dog’s) was the somewhat jowly but noble countenance of a dowager true to her breed. Bambi’s face (the girl’s) was Nordic, outdoorsy, healthy; it would have been peasantlike if not for the fact that its shape was basically aquiline, the cheekbones high, the mouth small and the chin determined. Bambi (the dog) was every inch a thoroughbred. Bambi (the naked girl) was every inch a woman—right down to her prominent, curly-haired pubic mound.

But who was Bambi (the girl)? Where had she come from? Why was she naked? How did she know my name? Why had she been looking for me? And who were the “they” she had said were waiting for us?

The answers came out piecemeal. It was a while before I could make them all fit together. When I did, the strange scenario read like this.

Somewhere over the rainbow, in the Jura Mountains, between two of the highest peaks, nestled a valley that was warm, lush, green, and tranquil. At some time way back in prehistory, thousands and thousands of years ago, the nomadic drift had taken a strange turn which resulted in the settling of this valley by religious refugees from—are you ready for this?—Tibet.

One High Lama, whose name has been passed down through history as Lama Tur Nah, accompanied by a small band of followers, fled an early Mongol invasion of the Plateau of Tibet, crossed the Kunlun Mountains into India, and then headed north and west through the vastnesses of pre-Soviet Russia. Before they had even entered Russia, half the group had been lost to the freezing cold and starvation. By the time they crossed the Carpathians into Romania, the group was down to six men and two women—not counting the indestructible Lama Tur Nah. After Hungary and Austria, an avalanche in the Swiss Alps claimed both women and three of the men. Thus only Lama Tur Nah and three male followers reached the edenic valley in the Jura Mountains where summer tranquility reigned year-round in a cradle formed by the bases of peaks perpetually capped with ice.

Here they found a small tribe of simple primitive Swiss natives who lived in thatched huts and subsisted on the nuts and berries that grew in abundance in the fertile valley. The Lama Tur Nah, who in addition to being a religious leader was also a shrewd psychologist, sociologist, and businessman, swapped a chest full of beggarbeads for food, shelter, and four buxom Swiss maidens as wives for himself and the faithful three. Thus began the race of Tibetan Swiss which in- habit the obscure valley in the Jura Mountains to this very day.

This race did not noticeably multiply in numbers over the years. Today the village numbers only slightly over three hundred inhabitants. They call it Läger Shang.

Physically, I would find the inhabitants of Läger Shang to be a magnificent people. Like Bambi (the girl), they were a combination of sturdy Swiss savage and finely honed, aristocratic Tibetan. Also, either as a result of the flukey climate, or perhaps due to the dietary and/or spiritual strictures of the religion strictly imposed on them by the High Lama, all of them were virtually always in superb health. Illness was unknown among them. And if lack of leprosy and such was a miracle (they hadn’t even formed a chapter of either the Heart Fund or Cancer Care), then think of the psychological boon of never knowing the sniffles of the common cold.

Health was only one of the boons Läger Shang offered its people. Longevity led the list of others. But I didn’t find that out until after my talk with the High Lama. Right now I was still in the freezing mountains with the sensually irresistible Bambi (the girl) (the naked girl, that is).

Bambi (the dog) had vanished as suddenly as she appeared. Bambi (the girl) was explaining how she’d come to be looking for me. It seems that earlier in the day Bambi (the Saint Bernard) had stumbled on Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson on a ledge higher up the mountain. (The Saint Bernards of the village, the human Bambi explained, had been trained to patrol the adjacent mountains in search of lost travelers.) She had gone back to Läger Shang to fetch human help.

Bambi (the girl) had been among the rescue party when Dickson was found. He told them about me. Two members of the party escorted Dickson back to Läger Shang; the others had fanned out over the mountainside to look for me. Bambi (the girl) had found me.

“How come you aren’t wearing any clothes?” I asked her.

“People in Läger Shang frequently don’t wear clothes,” she assured me.

“Don’t they ever get cold?”

“It is always summer in Läger Shang.”

“Doesn’t it ever rain? Don’t they ever get wet?”

“The answer is no to both questions.” She was serious. Evidently, difficult as it was to believe, it never rained in Läger Shang.

“And when you leave Läger Shang you don’t feel the mountain cold because you’ve mastered the technique of controlling your body temperature,” I remembered.

“That’s right.” She was calm about it. “Of course some of the older people wear robes when they leave the valley. But I’m young and I don’t see any reason to do so. The High Lama has taught us to believe that our bodies are beautiful. So then why should I conceal mine?”

I looked at her body. Yeah. My compliments to the High Lama. It would have been a sin to cover up a body like Bambi’s (the girl’s).

Which was nice to reflect on, but while it was heating me up, it wasn’t getting me warm enough to ignore the fact that my teeth were chattering. We had to make a choice. We could wait there until Bambi (the dog) brought others to help us, others who, presumably, might have an extra robe with which to cover the naked lower half of my body. Or we could try to meet the rescue party halfway. The cold made me vote strongly for the second choice, and Bambi (the girl) agreed.

The problem was my ankle. It was swollen to twice its normal size and no way would it support my weight. Even if it could have, without snowshoes I would soon have been up to my waist in snow trying to cross some of the drifts.

They were treacherous. You couldn’t tell how deep they were just by looking at them. Take a step and the snow might support you; and it might not. Snowshoes were a must.

Snowshoes were the one thing that Bambi (the girl) was wearing. Luckily, she was not only a big girl, she was also a strong one. She picked me up in her arms the way one would a child and started up the mountain.

My shoulder and arms rubbed against her joggling breasts. They were very soft and very warm. The nipples, taut and tapered and flame-red, positively burned against the muscle of my arm. One of her arms was under my knees and the way it supported me my bottom hung down and bounced against the blue-black curls covering her Mound of Venus. They tickled the underside of my scrotum. Every so often, as she had to raise her leg to climb, I would feel the moist lips of her vagina nipping at my dangling rear end. Before long I was beginning to react and Old Lucifer was jabbing rudely toward the night sky.

Bambi (the girl) noticed. “The High Lama says sex is healthy and good,” she remarked. “But sometimes outside Läger Shang the cold alone is enough to snap an icicle.”

The idea alone was enough to make my icicle shrivel up and melt; it might have stayed that way if Bambi (the girl) hadn’t shifted position. Now she slung me over her shoulder, jackknifed, so that my behind stuck up in the air, a weathervane to the icy wind. My flaccid organ curled up under her nose like a snuggly mustache.

That might not have mattered particularly if Bambi (the girl) hadn’t been the talkative type. She chattered on about life in Läger Shang (I gathered it was crime-free, poverty-free, disease-free, and free-lovin ), and every time her lips hit an m, or a p, or a b, an erotic jolt would travel the length of her upper lip to the tip of my asparagus. She mentioned that the High Lama played the Xylophone and the word “Xylophone” was like a vibrator treatment. Finally her consonants had so aroused me that she commented on it.

“I can’t breathe through my nose,” she complained. And once again she shifted position.

This time she carried me piggyback. I wrapped my arms around her neck and my legs around her hips (they were like velvet sofa cushions). She looped each of her arms under each of my legs. In this position, with my naked genitals disappearing in one or another of the spaces or slots or crevices at the juncture of her legs, she continued carrying me up the mountain.

At one point she stopped to catch her breath. She panted. I panted. Bambi (the dog) appeared on a ledge over us.

The Saint Bernard looked down and stared. From her angle, I figured out later, there could be only one activity in which we might be engaged. Bambi (the dog) acted accordingly.

She crouched down and slipped her paws under the harness holding the keg around her neck. When the keg was free she gripped it between her paws and pulled out the cork with her teeth. She then pushed the keg to the edge of the ledge, took another look at me on Bambi’s (the girl’s) back, and proceeded to pour the entire caskful of boiling water all over us! It works, you know. If it’s so cold your popsicle’s frozen, the way mine was, and boiling water is poured over it, the way it was poured over mine, two bodies in motion will come apart, the way ours did. My covictim summed it up:

“Drinking,” the blistering beauty said, “isn’t the only vice that dog disapproves of.”

After applying snow to our bums, we continued on our journey. We followed a tortuous side trail leading toward the top of the mountain. It ended behind an unexpected outcropping of ice rock which concealed a tenuous rope bridge crossing a gorge so deep that the bottom was obscured by clouds of mist. Bambi removed her snowshoes to carry me across.

On the other side of the bridge we followed a steep path that seemed to lead straight down. A complicated series of rocks like interlocking gates could be seen at the bottom of the path, but hid our view of what might lie beyond. Finally we reached these rock gates and passed through them.

Läger Shang!

The chamber of commerce, if it had one, would have gone adjective batty. Sunshine? I mean sunshine! The valley was flooded with it like one of those early Technicolor movies where the color is too rich for reality.

Dwellings made of white marble and roofed with gold nestled in green woods garlanded with multicolored flowers like priceless jewels in the most carefully contrived of settings. A stream wended over the landscape, bubbling cold and clear. At its beginning and end were a series of waterfalls which refracted the sunlight to form a permanent rainbow over Lager Shang. Naked children played in the water and their laughter echoed lightly over the verdant valley. Adults too walked about naked, smiling, unconcerned.

At the far end of the valley fields of grass rippled in the gentle breeze. It wasn’t until later that I realized what kind of grass it was. Grass! That’s what kind of grass it was. Pot! Mary Jane! Marijuana!

Bambi (the girl) carried me directly to the palace of the High Lama. Sunlight filtered surrealist patterns into a long, high-domed chamber. The High Lama was seated in a high chair carved of marble at the far end of the chamber.

There was—how can I describe it?—an aura about him. As Bambi carried me closer to him, I could feel his spirituality almost as though it were a physical force. It overwhelmed me so that now, in retrospect, our meeting comes back to me in disconnected snatches.

First there was the visual impression of him as Bambi set me down on the polished stone floor in front of him. He had a full black beard. There was a hole in the right cheekbone, directly under the eye, into which a diamond had been set. He carried a New York City Police Department service revolver in a holster at his hip. He was playing with a little white mouse in the palm of his hand. A full-grown English sheepdog dozed at his feet. He was a small man, slender but compact, olive-skinned, and he looked a lot like the actor Al Pacino.

“You look a lot like the movie actor Al Pacino,” I told him.

“What you mean, my son,” he told me in a voice that managed to be both unearthly and whiny at the same time, “is that the actor Al Pacino bears a striking resemblance to me. That’s what the fuck you mean, my son.”

“You’re the High Lama?” I couldn’t help it. A note of doubt crept into my voice.

“The twelfth of my line,” he assured me.

“You don’t look like a High Lama.”

“What do I look like, my son?”

“You look Italian. Italian-American. Like an Italian-American hippie.”

“Cool,” he said coolly, noncommittally, dragging on a roach.

“You don’t dress like a High Lama either. Whoever heard of a High Lama wearing a New York City policeman’s jacket with dungarees and sneakers.”

“What then should I wear, my son?”

“White robes, I guess.”

“I’m the High Lama here in Läger Shang, but I’m not quite that high, shmuck!”

“You don’t look old enough to be a High Lama either.”

“How old do you think I am?”

“Thirty-five. Maybe forty.”

“I am one hundred and sixty-three years old.”

“You’re a liar!”

“What is truth?” he spread his hands philosophically. “Shithead!” he added.

“And you don’t talk like a High Lama either.”

“Ahh, fongool!” He shrugged and smiled beneficently.

“You have a New York City accent.”

“You don’t zackly sound like Oxford either, brother.”

“How did you get to be the High Lama?” I wanted to know. “And don’t bother telling me again that you’re the twelfth of your line.”

“You mean I’m not the twelfth of my line?” He dragged on the stick deeply, fatalistically. “All right, then. The truth is nobody else wanted the job. That’s how I got to be High Lama.”

“You ran unopposed?”

“I didn’t even have to run. Like all I did was say I’m your High Lama and everybody in Läger Shang nodded their heads and said, ‘Cool. That’s cool.’ ”

“Nobody objected?”

“Nobody. That’s how it is in a Utopia. Nobody ever gets uptight.”

“What makes Läger Shang a Utopia? Its remoteness? The climate?”

“No, paisan. It’s a Utopia because there is no crime in Läger Shang.”

“How come?”

“No cops, putz!”

“You mean where there’s no police -?”

“That’s right. There’s no payoffs. And where there’s no payoffs, there’s no corruption. And where there’s no corruption, there’s no crime.”

“If that’s so, then how come you wear that pistol?”

“The price of Utopia is eternal vigilance.”

“I don’t think I understand,” I confessed.

“You don’t have to understand. Just enjoy. You dig, bubula? Relax and enjoy. Pretend it’s Miami Beach and comes off your taxes.”

“I hope it’s not as expensive as Miami Beach.”

“Don’t sweat it. Everything’s free. There’s no such thing as money in Läger Shang.”

“If there’s no money, then what do you use for barter?” I wondered.

“There is no barter ’cause there’s no such thing as property here, my son. Nobody owns anything. Everybody owns everything.”

It was a can of worms to me. One, I suspected, where each question I asked would receive the sort of answer which could only lead to another question. Somehow it made me think of Dickson with his oft-stated law-and-order philosophy. I wondered how the anarchy of Läger Shang must be striking him. I inquired of the High Lama about Dickson.

“I believe, my son, that your companion is hanging out at the entry gates waiting for the search party that went out to retrieve his gold.”

“Do you think they’ll be able to find it?”

“Oh, yeah, my son. One of our sentinels watched the parachute with the gold descend. It landed not far from here. It will be recovered in short time.”

“Won’t it be community property then?” I asked. I wondered how Dickson would like that.

“Technically, yeah. But gold has no value in Läger Shang. I don’t think anybody will care if your friend keeps it.”

“Then we’ll be free to take it with us when we leave?”

“Leave? What are you, meshuginah, my son? You can’t leave.”

“What do you mean? Why not?”

“Nobody is ever allowed to leave Läger Shang. If we let people leave when they wanted to, how long do you think it would be before word of our Utopia here reached the outside world?”

“What if it did?” I wanted to know.

“You think we want Läger Shang turned into a retirement community for urban dwellers? You think we want real-estate developers laying out a golf course where we grow our grass? You think we want the American Legion holding its convention here?”

“You really mean we can’t leave? You’re going to hold us prisoner here?”

“Not at all, my son. You’re free to leave whenever you want. But without a guide you will perish before you have gone one day’s journey from Lager Shang. You dig?”

I dug.

The interview with the High Lama was over. He stood up, took a final puff of the roach, pirouetted, and did a farewell entrechat. Bambi (the girl) carried me from the chamber.

She took me to a cottage which it had evidently already been decided I would share with Dickson. He wasn’t there. Bambi (the girl) left and returned with a physician. He examined my ankle and taped it, assuring me that it would be as good as new in a few days.

Bambi (the girl) prepared some food. After I had eaten, she helped me bathe, provided a garment like a long white nightgown for me to wear, and tucked me into bed. “After I go home and cook dinner for my husband, I’ll come back and fuck you,” she told me sweetly. She left.

I was still pleasantly mulling over the prospect of her parting remark when Dickson showed up. He was in a dither. He’d gotten his gold all right, but he’d also just come from the High Lama where he’d received ,the word on the obstacles to leaving.

“That High Lama is un-American. He’s subversive. He’s probably a [adjective omitted] communist!” Dickson was fuming.

“What happened?”

“I told him that if he’d provide us with a guide to get out of here, when I got back to the States I’d make a serious recommendation to President Cadillac that we institute a foreign-aid program for Läger Shang. And do you know what that [expletive deleted] said? Do you know what he said?”

“No. What did he say?”

“’I’m not on the pad, my son!’ That’s what the [characterization omitted] said. ‘I don’t take money!’ You’d have thought I was trying to bribe the [unintelligible]!”

“Weren’t you?”

“I don’t bribe people. If I want people bribed, I have people to bribe people.”

“All right, Mr. President. Don’t get so upset.”

“You’re right.” He calmed down. He took off his shirt and put on a clean shirt-like garment Bambi (the girl) had left. He parted his hair carefully and stood in front of the mirror combing it.

“Going somewhere?” I asked idly.

“I have a date.”

I waited for him to explain.

“With a lady,” he added after a moment.

Now that was out of character for the Dickson I knew. Until now he’d shown no interest in the ladies whatsoever. It made me curious.

“Romance, Mr. President?” I put the question to him boldly.

“Strictly business. I’m going to do my job and I am not going to be diverted by any romantic considerations. It just so happens that this lady has displayed an interest in me and --”

“A romantic interest, Mr. President?” I pushed it.

“[Expletive removed]!, yes. But nonreciprocal no matter how circumstances may dictate my actions. You see, if I handle her from the standpoint of statesmanship, I believe she will consent to guide us out of here.” He smoothed down his nose. He smiled the smile of a crocodile gigolo. He left.

Well, I’ll be damned! I told myself. Could there really be a woman in the world (Nat Dickson presumably excepted) who might look upon Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson as a desirable sex object? The very idea made my head swim with obscenities that were somehow non-erotic.

The arrival of Bambi (the girl ) countered that. Naked as always, not even wearing snowshoes now, she was plenty erotic enough to dispel all thought of Dickson’s cold courting from my mind. Bambi (the dog) was with her.

“Why?” I wanted to know, indicating the Saint Bernard.

“She likes you.”

“If you think I’m going to risk being doused with hot water again—”

“She doesn’t even have her keg with her,” Bambi (the girl) pointed out.

Bambi (the dog) walked over to me and licked my hand.

“See. She really does like you. She wants you to let bygones be bygones.”

What the hell. “All right, doggie.” I patted the huge hound on the head. “If you're willing to be friends, I guess I am.”

The mutt licked my hand and then rubbed against my leg the way a cat does. Downright chummy. Then she reversed the procedure and rubbed against my hand and licked my leg—Working her way up from my foot, poking under the long bed-garment I was wearing.

“Whoops! Heh-heh! That’s far enough, doggie! . . . Stop it, now! . . . What do you think you’re doing? . . . Get your nose out of there! . . . It’s cold! . . . Oh, my! . . . Stop! . . ."

Bambi (the girl) was giggling uncontrollably. “I told you she liked you,” she reminded me, gasping.

“You didn’t tell me how much.” I kept trying unsuccessfully to back off from the dog. “And,” I added a moment later, jumping, “you didn’t tell me what a long tongue she has!”

“If this keeps up, I’m going to get very jealous,” Bambi (the girl) announced.

“I thought she was supposed to be such a moralistic pooch. Doesn’t drink. Pours hot water over copulating couples. What the hell happened to change her this way?” I wondered.

“I guess you just turn her on,” Bambi (the girl) told me.

“Scratch a prude and you’ll find a lecher every time,” I told the doggy hypocrite. It did no good. She was still going for my groin with everything warm, wet, and furry she could bring into play.

Finally Bambi (the girl) managed to lure Bambi (the horny hound) into the other room where she closed the door on her. She continued whining and scratching while Bambi (the girl) and I renewed old acquaintance.

“Did your husband enjoy his dinner?” I asked, making conversation as I urged her over to the bed.

“Oh, yes. I made him Tibetan Swiss steak.”

“What’s that?” I patted her tawny breasts hello.

“Yak dipped in chocolate fondue.”

“Ugh!”

“It’s really very good.” She slid her hand under the bed-garment at the neck and her sharp nails raked my chest, tangling in the hair there, pricking my nipples to hardness. “Oh, by the way, my husband said to tell you that he’ll drop by to say hello to you tomorrow.”

“You mean you told him you were coming here?” My libido suffered a sudden setback.

“Of course.” She was sprawled across me, naked, her arms under the garment from the top, her fingers teasing my navel in a way that made my stomach muscles ripple.

“What excuse did you give him?”

“Excuse?” She nipped the lobe of my ear with sharp teeth. “I didn’t give him any excuse.”

“Why did you tell him you were coming here?”

“To fuck.” She breathed the words tinglingly in my ear.

“Is that door locked?” I inquired.

“No.”

“Maybe we’d better lock it.”

“It has no lock. None of the doors in Läger Shang have locks.”

“But suppose your husband decides to come looking for you?”

“Yes?” Her hand was lower now, disappointed, but coaxing rigidity despite my nervousness.

“Well, won’t he be jealous?”

“No. Why should he be?”

“I mean if he found us making love.”

“Yes? So?” Her full lips were grinding at the base of my neck; she would leave a hickey for sure; blatant evidence.

“I don’t understand,” I confessed.

“It’s very simple.” She was tugging at the bottom of the long bedgown now. “There is no such thing as jealousy in Läger Shang.” She pulled the gown up over my thighs and flopped over me with her head toward my feet. Those Phillips nipples of hers screwed hotly into my bare thighs. “There is no possessiveness, so how could there be jealousy?” Her heavy breasts fanned out over my groin. “To my husband, my going to another man for sex is like my going to a restaurant for something different to eat. It doesn’t mean I don’t like the cooking at home; it simply means I need a little more variety in my menu than home cooking can provide.” One of her breasts flattened out over my penis. The hot, hard nipple moved up and down over the top of the shaft. “Do you understand now?”

“Yeah.” I was quite hard now, and the tickling of that nipple was making my organ dance frantically.

“Then let’s not talk about it anymore,” she suggested. She pushed the bed-garment all the way up over my shoulders and I shrugged it off. “Let’s just have fun.” Her lips, the tongue extending between them, slid down from the base of my neck and over my chest. They fastened on one of my nipples.

As her tongue provided a light sandpaper job, the muscles of my body tightened in response to the exciting sensation. My thigh muscles, my sphincter muscles, my stomach muscles, my groin muscles—all became taut as stretched bows under the ministrations of her hot, damp, sucking mouth, and the explorations of her free-wandering fingers. There was an uninhibited wildness to her mouth and hands that had me tense and writhing at the same time. This was particularly true when her mouth fastened over my navel and her tongue probed it.

Let me not give the wrong idea. I didn’t just passively lie there while the enthusiastic brunette ravaged my body. Far from it. I soon became busy giving as good as I was getting.

I tangled both hands in her long, blue-black hair and pulled her head back so that I could kiss her. Her small, pouty mouth was a funnel pulling in my tongue. Then my tongue wrapped itself around her tongue and that action continued for a long time like two snakes screwing.

During the kiss I found a handhold on her buttocks and pulled her hard against me. It was a firm behind, and very hot. My fingers left white streaks in its pinkness where I clutched. It hobbled, rippling pertly, when my fingertips stroked the cleft between the solid, high cheeks.

Her curly, ink-black pubic hair pressed against the flexed muscle of one of my thighs. The mound it covered was slapping sponge-like against my flesh. The lips of her vagina nipped at my thigh muscle and her clitoris poked against it, bold and red and twanging. The hot fluid lubricating her love-tunnel was already flowing freely over her thighs and mine.

Her hands were under me now, scratching hard at my bottom so that my groin rose up in the air to escape. Her mouth darted down quickly and took a long, teasing suck at the head of my joystick. Her swaying breasts streaked over my chest, barely touching, the hot nipples teasing and tickling my chest hair and my own nipples.

I grabbed for her breasts. I was purposely a little rougher than I had to be. I fastened each of my hands around each of them. I squeezed hard, savoring their softness, their vulnerability. I let my palms open and close around those burning, hard nipples the way I envisioned her sheath muscles would soon be opening and closing around my hard, battering cock.

I tossed her over on her back now and let my mouth replace the hand at one of her breasts. I licked, I sucked, I bit. She moaned, she groaned, she tossed, she tried to turn. I got my free hand between her legs now and squeezed the oily, moist thigh flesh on either side of the pulsating lips of her vagina.

“Ach, du lieber!” She bit my shoulder hard.

I slapped her lightly to make her teeth cut loose. Then I licked my way down the length of her Juno-esque body. I trailed a straight line of hot tongue from the cleft of her breasts to her deep, winking navel to the free-flowing gash bisecting her mound. When my tongue touched the hard clitty there, she went ape.

“Voila! Let me feel it!” She grabbed my swollen ramrod with both hands and doubled up, trying to stuff it into her mouth without losing the contact between her throbbing cunt and my lips and tongue.

I helped her. “Soixante neuf!” she gasped. She gulped it eagerly and I felt my hard cock slide over the roof of her mouth and halfway down her throat.

My abdomen was resting lightly on her breasts now and I could feel them rotating under me. Bambi (the girl) had very sensitive mammaries. No matter what else was going on, she had to bring them into play, to press their fullness against hot flesh, to tease those groovy tips so that she could feel the hot hardness of desire there the way a man feels it in his erect penis.

She removed her mouth from around my penis and left it poking the air, red, hard and glistening with her warm saliva. She moved her lips and tongue lower, and assailed my balls. She got first one of them and then the other into her mouth. She licked and sucked them. Then she got them both in her mouth at once and her tongue washed them clean. When she came up for air she grabbed my filled-to-bursting penis with her hand and worked it like a Volkswagen gearshift—left and up, left and down, right and up, right and down, and then into neutral where she rubbed it up and down until it was all I could do to keep from letting go prematurely.

“Maron!” she exclaimed as I responded by tonguing her as far as I could reach.

I had to swallow fast to keep up with the flow of her lust. I turned my mouth into a suction valve and was rewarded by her first climax. Her hands tangled in my hair pressed my head down, my mouth against her pelvic bones so hard that I was afraid I might hurt it. But she was beyond feeling any pain. She just wanted the base of my tongue pressed against her clitoris, the tip of it probing the entrance to her womb rhythmically, my lips sucking the love-fluid from her hard-squeezing vagina. She wanted me to hold that combination of sensations while she twisted and writhed and screamed her release, flying on the wings of her orgasm, wanting it never to end. And when it was over, it turned out not to be over at all.

“Avanti!” she panted. “More! More amore!” And her mouth came down over my hard prick again, her throat opening to receive it, her lips sliding up and down its length eagerly. Then, just as I thought that surely I could hold back no longer, she pulled her mouth away and grabbed my stiff cock with her hand at the base, cutting off the circulation momentarily so that I couldn’t come.

She surprised me then. She jumped on top of me and I thought that finally she was ready to finish it off with a good hot fuck, my cock in her slavering cunt. Instead, she sat on me in such a way that my organ slid up into her anus.

I want to feel it in every hole in my body before you come,” she breathed.

She was facing my feet and I rose up to a sitting position behind her. Obviously she’d done this before. The substitute sheath was slippery clean and the muscles there grabbed me like a vacuum cleaner. I stroked a few times and she tumbled forward so that she was on her hands and knees. I fell with her and now I was mounting her from behind, dog-style. I reached under her and grabbed her breasts for support.

My hands on her dangling tits, even more than my stiff penis in her rear alley, seemed to drive her berserk. Her derriere, high in the air, spun like the blades of a ‘copter in flight. The more I plunged in and out, the more it spun in circles. She was making snorting noises now, and bucking like an animal in heat -- which she decidedly was. It was all I could do to keep my perch and keep slamming it to her without coming. But I wanted to hold off and fire my cannon at the juiciest target of all.

When she had her second orgasm, I didn’t give her too much time to savor it. I flung her on her back and plunged right in. Some times I’m very conventional. I just wanted to make love to her in the most ordinary position, with my penis in the most customary of holes.

I propelled her into a lust-building rhythm. With her legs wrapped around my hips, and her arms around my neck, her breasts were a fast-moving blur of target circles with red centers as her whole body matched the tempo of its movements to mine. We moved in and out, and round and round together, never missing a stroke or a gyration, our consciousness concentrated at our joined cores with mutual orgasm now the only aim of living.

The aim was realized. I may have yelled; I know she screamed. Our bodies rose in the air and hung there, impossibly balanced, while she had her third climax and I pumped so much lust juice into her tight sheath that it overflowed and covered my scrotum and her thighs with the creamy visible evidence of our truly mutual satisfaction.

We were both exhausted. Too tired, even, to talk. We both drifted off to sleep immediately.

Some time later some vague noises half woke me up. Groggy, I realized that Bambi (the dog) had finally succeeded in forcing open the door and was now in the room with us. I felt her furry weight pressing against my naked body as she settled beside me.

Why not? Hell, I was a little chilly on that side anyway. Without giving it another thought, I went back to sleep.

You know how it is when sex has been especially good and you sleep after it? Often you dream about it. That’s how it was for me now. I dreamed of Bambi’s (the girl’s) warm mouth working its magic on my genitals. I dreamed of her hot flesh under mine, of the downy feel of her pubic hair as it pressed against my groin, of the tight, grinding way her vagina encircled me.

And in my sleep, or my half-sleep, I turned toward her and caressed her and she caressed me and, still sleeping, we joined. That is, I thought we joined. But the jolt with which I shot my second load of the night brought me to full wakefulness and the shock of the sudden realization of my mistake.

In my sleep, I had just laid Bambi (the Saint Bernard)!!!

Chapter Nine

Bambi (the dog) was nothing if not grateful. She slobbered all over me with gratitude. It s happened to me before. When it does, you have to take a firm line. You have to resign yourself to coming on like a heel.”

“I’m not looking for any long-term involvements, I told her brutally.

She pressed against me and panted.

“It was fun, but that’s all it was, fun.”

She licked my hand and snuggled closer.

“It wouldn’t be a good idea for you to get too attached to me; I have to be free.”

She nodded her head in understanding, but her tongue hung out pitifully.

“I’m just not a one-woman man—I mean a one-dog man!”

She whined pleadingly.

“It’s no good begging. It’s over.”

She growled.

“And threats will get you nowhere. When a thing is over, it’s over. That’s all.”

She bared her teeth.

“Please. Don’t give me a rough time. Let s part friends.”

She leaped quickly, landing on top of me, her bared fangs at my throat.

“Maybe we could give it another try.’ I weakened.

She nuzzled me affectionately.

“But mind you, I’m not promising anything.”

She nodded and licked my face understandingly.

“Let’s get some sleep and we’ll talk about it in the morning.”

Bambi (the dog) curled up obligingly and soon she was snoring lightly. Bambi (the girl) was snoozing on my other side. Between them, sleep eluded me. I had too many problems keeping me awake.

Would Dickson succeed in finding us a guide to lead the way through the treacherous mountains surrounding Läger Shang? Even if he did, would we survive the journey if we were encumbered by the three-hundred-ninety-pound box of gold bars? And if we did reach civilization, would we be able to resolve the kidnapping of Alicia and the threat of “Insecticide”? Even when I finally did fall asleep, these problems continued to plague my dreams.

The next morning my ankle was a lot better. Bambi (the girl) left early to make breakfast for her husband. Bambi (the dog) was sleeping the deep sleep of the sexually satisfied. Dickson reappeared to tell me of the arrangements he’d made.

The lady he’d been with had agreed to guide us from Läger Shang back to civilization. At this very moment, while we were talking, she had slipped out of Läger Shang to a small village in the Swiss countryside where she was hiring two native Swiss bearers and necessary sleds and toboggans to haul us and the gold over the treacherous mountains. We were to be ready to leave that evening.

We reckoned without Bambi (the dog) and Bambi (the girl). As we started down the winding trail leading to the perilous rope bridge which spanned the gorge which separated Läger Shang from the rest of the world—the only way in or out of the mountain Utopia—we encountered Bambi (the dog). There could be no mistaking the look she shot me. She realized immediately that I was running out on her. She was not about to take the rejection lying down.

Hell hath no fury like a Saint Bernard bitch scorned. She took off at a gallop. A quarter of an hour later she reappeared, blocking our way to the rickety bridge, a shotgun between her teeth.

Versatile as she was, Bambi (the dog) was not quite dextrous enough to aim and fire the weapon. Of course I’m not sure whether she meant to do that, or if she merely intended to threaten me to make me stay with her. In any case, she had brought along Bambi (the girl) to help her stop me from leaving and-presumably-—to wield the shotgun.

Using a shotgun, however, was against the principles of Bambi (the girl). She had accompanied Bambi (the dog) only to prevent violence, not to foment it, So when the dog passed her the shotgun, Bambi (the girl) hurled it over the side of the cliff into the abyss below. She then ordered Bambi (the dog) to return to Läger Shang. To my surprise, albeit reluctantly, the dog did as she was told. Shooting me a mournful look of love-turned-bitter, she vanished around the bend in the trail leading back to her homeland.

Bambi (the girl) also wanted to warn us against trying to leave Läger Shang. “It’s not allowed,” she told us earnestly. “And those few who have tried to leave have perished from the cold, or the avalanche, or the wild beasts of the mountains.”

“What wild beasts? This is Switzerland,” I reminded her.

“The Abominable Snowman!” she whispered.

“He’s in the Himalayas, not the Jura Mountains,” I reminded her.

“So how far is that by jet these days?”

“She’s just trying to delay us,” Dickson said. “She probably sent that [expletive deleted] mutt for help.”

He might have been right. I couldn’t be sure. “All right. Then let’s be on our way,” I told him.

“She goes with us.” All of a sudden there was a knife in Dickson’s hand.

“What for?” I wanted to know.

“As a [adjective omitted] hostage. In case the [expletive removed]-suckers try to stop us.”

I didn’t like it. Not one little bit. Still, he had the knife. And he was close enough to her to use it before I could get it away from him. I made another effort at talking him into letting her go, but it was to no avail. Finally he prodded her with the knife to move down the trail and across the wooden bridge. I had no choice but to follow.

Our “guide” was waiting for us at the small native village. Dickson introduced us. Her name was Dorianne Brey.

“The point that I wish to make,” Dickson said, “is that she is one hundred and eight [expletive removed] years old. Would you believe that?”

“She doesn’t look a day over ninety-eight,” I granted.

It was true. The crone was a bag of brittle old bones and a hank of gray hair held loosely together by a skin like that of a dead goat that’s been left out in the sun too long. Her mouth was toothless, but her rheumy, sunken eyes shone with her infatuation for Dickson. As we used to say wonderingly of those who voted for Dickson for President, there’s no accounting for taste.

The metal box containing the gold bars was strapped onto a toboggan. The two native bearers Dorianne had arranged for carried the toboggan between them. Dorianne led the way down the mountainside. The bearers followed her. Bambi (the girl) was in back of them with Dickson directly behind her with the knife. I brought up the rear.

It was an extremely diffficult climb. In some places the ledge was no more than a few inches wide with the cliff rising straight up on one side of us and a sheer drop of several thousand feet on the other. The bearers had evidently made it before; they seemed quite sure-footed. So did Dorianne and Bambi. Only Dickson was more unsure of himself than I as we leaped from one ledge to another and tried to ignore the chasm below our nervous feet.

At night we made camp in a small cave. The crone, Dorianne, couldn’t do enough to ingratiate herself with Dickson. She was really smitten with him. He, on the other hand, while not loath to use her, responded not at all to her advances and generally treated her like dirt. Still, he gave in to the one thing above all others that she wanted of him.

Dickson gave her his dirty socks!

To each his own. Dorianne Brey’s was sock-sniffling. The old hag crooned and moaned happily to herself as she lay in a corner of the cave with her nose buried in Dickson’s dirty socks.

Across the cave, Bambi and I huddled together. “Do you know why Dorianne agreed to do this?” Bambi asked me.

“Because she’s ape over him,” I answered, indicating Dickson.

“That’s only part of it. She confided the other part of it to me yesterday before she left Läger Shang to get the bearers.”

“She confided it to you?” I looked at Bambi in surprise. “Why you?”

“Dorianne is my great-grandmother,” Bambi told me.

“Well, I guess she’s old enough to be that,” I granted.

“She’s a hundred and eight, but she likes to try to pass for under a hundred.”

“What was it she confided to you?” I wondered.

“Your friend convinced her that if she guided him back to your civilization, he could arrange for her to go to some special place where they would make her young again.”

“You mean like a facelift?”

“I think he gave her the impression that it would be a great deal more than that.”

“Even a facelift costs a lot of money. Did he mention if he was prepared to pay for it?”

“He told her ‘it would be no problem,’ that ‘the money can be raised.’ ”

“Did he say how?”

“He told her to go to New York to an organization called the Policemen’s Benevolent Association. Do you know of such an organization?”

“I know who they are,” I said, puzzled.

“He said they would pay her a reward for telling them the whereabouts of the High Lama. Is that true?”

“Could be,” I said slowly. If the High Lama was who I suspected he was, then the P.B.A. might very well be interested enough in his whereabouts to pay for such information. So might various branches of the Mafia having to do with numbers and drugs. Dickson, I reflected, really was too much.

The next morning we rose early and continued our ascent. Shortly after noon we reached the top of the mountain. We were ready to begin our journey down the opposite slope.

The first leg was to be accomplished by toboggan. There was a wide slope, thickly packed with snow, which descended from the mountaintop as far as the eye could see. Dorianne told us it only reached half-way to the foot of the mountain, but the way it was graded, it would mean a toboggan ride of several miles.

We strapped ourselves into the toboggan. Dorianne knelt in the very front and steered. The two bearers were on their knees in back where they could use their expertise in braking. Dickson was in front of the bearers with the box of gold strapped between his legs. I sat in front of him with my legs spread and Bambi—of necessity, due to the shortness of the toboggan—sat on my lap.

The toboggan took off slowly and easily enough, but before long it had picked up enough momentum to turn the ride into one of those thrill-a-minute chute-the-chute experiences that always seem to leave your stomach a full minute behind the rest of you. The slope, which had looked so smooth and evenly graded from above, turned out to have many unexpected curves, hairpin turns, sheer drops where we sailed through the air and miraculously landed right side up on the next downgrade. We were constantly forced to lean our weight from one side to the other to keep the toboggan from flipping over.

Up front Dorianne Brey was cackling witchlike, wrestling with the steering mechanism, and inhaling deeply from a pair of Dickson's soiled socks. In the back, the bearers were performing like a team of acrobats, leaping on and off the toboggan to provide braking action and balance as it was needed. Dickson, terrified, was screaming hysterically.

Listening to him, I realized that what he was screaming was quite queer. It was as if in his hysteria an old and very bitter hostility was seeking rerelease. It was as if terror had pushed a button and his words were coming out by rote. They were words he had spoken before, and they were aimed at those he considered to be his foremost enemies.

“ ‘I’m going to do my job, and I am not going to be diverted by any criticism from the press -- fair or unfair-—from doing what I think I was elected to do—’” he howled into the wind as the toboggan speeded up to approximately sixty to seventy miles per hour.

Bambi, facing me on my lap, was holding on for dear life. She was wearing a robe—protection against the wind the sled was bucking -- with nothing underneath it. Fear made her body burn against mine. The thrill of the ride seemed to make her passionate as well. She kissed me hard. She ground her hot-tipped breasts against my chest. She strained to press her pelvis against my crotch.

“ ‘I don’t want any press with me!’” Dickson screamed as the toboggan careened into a forty-five degree angle turn.

I slid my hands up under the robe and along the insides of Bambi’s thighs. She worked with both her hands to undo the leggings I was wearing and to free my now throbbing penis. It tingled as her icy fingers drew it forth. My tongue shot halfway down her throat with the sensation.

“‘We have had thirty minutes of this press conference. I have yet to have, for example, one question on the business of the people. . . .’ ”

The toboggan sailed through the air and landed atop a soft bank of loose snow. The speeding runners kicked up a spray around us that was like being caught in a blizzard. I could hear Dickson, but I couldn’t see anything except Bambi seated nose-to-nose on my lap.

Her robe was bunched up around her shoulders. Her breasts were big and naked and pink and she held them out in front of her, leaning back, offering them to me. When I accepted her offer, kissing and licking and sucking them, she squeezed my erection joyfully. The lubricating cream of passion spilled out from her honeybox, making both her thighs and my penis sticky.

“ ‘Network TV reporting . . . vicious . . . sordid . . .outrageous . . .”’

Somewhere behind us the Swiss bearers yodeled as the toboggan plunged into a wild turn that culminated in a grade so sharply angled that it seemed as if we took it upside down. The grade was a slab of sheer ice and up front Dorianne was screeching that she’d lost control of the steering. The toboggan turned like a spinning rocket and somehow—miraculously—landed right side up.

The result was that Bambi had come down solidly impaled on my erect penis. Now she rode up and down on it violently, shouting wordless sounds, yodeling her very own yodel of fast-mounting lust. I was riding with her every bounce of the way, those big, soft breasts of hers with the Phillips nipples slapping my face, her cushiony rear end plowing up and down on my outstretched thighs, her wide, peasant hips twirling with a heat that outfoxed the cold around us, and her cunning sheath rippling over my organ like the fingers of an expert accordionist who knows just how and when and where to push and squeeze and tickle the instrument.

“Even history is replete with [expletive deleted] examples which show the crass, cruel, contemptible callousness of the press!” Dickson was shouting into my ear.

“If there’s one thing I can’t stand,” I shouted back without breaking my rhythm, “it’s somebody talking over my shoulder while I’m trying to screw!”

“If you have to try,” Bambi panted, “We may be in trouble.”

We were in trouble, but not sexually. The trouble was that there was a boulder looming in front of us and there didn’t seem to be any way for Dorianne to steer around it. But our luck held. There was a hole to one side and we just managed to squeeze through without being scraped off the speeding toboggan like jam from a butter knife.

“Do you know what the reporters asked Mrs. Lincoln just after the President was shot while attending the theater?” Dickson howled. “They asked her ‘Aside from anything else, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the show?’ ”

“NOW!” Bambi shrieked. “SHOVE IT TO ME NOW! ALL OF IT!”

“You see what I mean about the necessity to control the press?” Dickson wanted to know.

“HERE IT IS, BABY!” I put it to Bambi with everything I had.

“WE’RE GOING TO CRASH!” Dorianne screamed.

“OH, YES! . . .YES-YES-YES!!!”

I erupted. It came a gusher. Bambi was right with me. We brought the well in together. The tops of our heads flew off as—

The toboggan, completely out of control now, smashed head-on into a snowbank at about ninety mph. Bambi and I were wrenched cruelly apart. I felt myself sailing through the air like a spinning cartwheel. My arms and legs were the spokes, and it wasn’t until I landed on it that it became clear that my head was also one of the spokes.

Or, rather, it became clear after I came back to consciousness. Landing on your head at that speed, merely getting knocked out has to be the epitome of lucky breaks. Others weren’t as lucky as I had been.

When I came to, the snowy vista stretching out before my eyes was dotted with prostrate human forms and pieces of bobsled. I forced myself to stagger over to the two forms closest to me. They turned out to be the Swiss bearers. Both had broken their necks in the accident. Both were dead. They looked like twin red-cheeked turkeys whose necks had been wrung.

I heard a groan. A figure sat up. It was Dickson. He ignored my shout to him and immediately began to search the terrain for the box of gold bars.

Bambi also stood up. I walked over to her. She was shaken up, but not badly hurt.

The two of us heard a groan from the remaining figure huddled on the snow. We ran over to her. It hadn’t been a groan at all. It had been a moan of ecstasy. Dorianne Brey was lying there oblivious, joyfully inhaling the bouquet of Nick Dickson’s dirty socks.

A shout from Dickson announced that he’d found the gold. He took the socks away from Dorianne long enough to determine that she could lead us the rest of the way back to civilization. We salvaged a piece of the bobsled big enough to haul the box of gold; at least we wouldn’t have to carry it that part of the way Where there was snow on the mountain slope. Within an hour of the accident, we were on our way again.

By nightfall we had run out of snow. There was no cave handy, and so we had to camp out in the open. If not the toughest, then certainly the most strenuous part of our journey lay in front of us the next day. It wasn’t going to be easy wrestling a box of gold weighing three hundred and ninety pounds the rest of the way down that mountain. The terrain before us was still pretty damn rugged.

It turned out to be a lot harder even than we’d anticipated. We’d been on the trail about an hour the next day when we ran into more serious trouble. It started with the sound of a dog-howl from high above us. We all turned and craned our necks. Bambi (the girl) was the first to spot the animal. She pointed. There, silhouetted against the snow on one of the slopes near the top of the mountain, was Bambi (the dog) .

True love? Revenge? There was no telling which it was that had caused her to break loose from Läger Shang and set out after us. But there she was, howling, and angling to lean on one of her haunches so that she might scratch a flea in her ear.

The agitated movement caused a piece of ice to break off the ledge on which she was perched and hurtle downward. The piece of ice struck below the snowline on the mountain and disturbed a few pebbles and started them rolling. The pebbles dislodged a very small rock. The rock bounced off a larger one -- about the size of a bowling ball—and started that one too in motion. The last I saw of Bambi (the dog), she was still perched there scratching and howling. After that the only thing I saw was the landslide descending on us.

It was terrifying. There was no place to hide. We were on a rocky, barren hillside. There was not so much as a niche, let alone a cave, in which we might seek shelter from the hurtling debris of pebbles, rocks, boulders, and slag.

Fear must have really activated Dickson’s adrenal glands and lent him a strength beyond his usual muscular capability. He hefted the three-hundred-ninety-pound box of gold as if it was a sack of feathers and used it as a shield against the flood of missiles raining down on him. I relied more on moving fast to get out of the way of the larger and more dangerous pieces. I did what I could to shield Bambi. She was also very quick on her feet, but nevertheless, before long we were both bleeding from the hail of smaller rocks we hadn’t been able to dodge.

Dorianne Brey, sadly, was past the age of being nimble. The old crone tried to hobble out of the worst of the storm, but her reaction time was slow and her judgment foggy with age. She strayed right into the path of the largest of the onrushing boulders. What was left after it passed over her wouldn’t have served to fill a geriatric thimble.

At last it was over. Bambi and I got busy treating each other’s many cuts and scratches and bruises. Dickson was in better shape, but he insisted on his fair share of the Mercurochrome. Then, as little as there was left of Dorianne Brey, we buried it-along with Dickson’s dirty socks, for sentiment’s sake.

We continued our downward trek, still wrestling with the damnable box of gold. It was twilight when we spied the faint outline of a Swiss village at the base of the mountain. As we came closer, lights began to spring up in the quaint old houses and chalets.

When we came to the outskirts of the village, Bambi (the girl) announced that she was taking her leave of us. “I’m going back to Läger Shang,” she told us. “It’s the simple life for me.”

For a minute I thought Dickson might try to stop her. But then he merely shrugged. There was no reason to force her to stay with us any longer—if, indeed, there ever had been. So he and I continued on to the village alone, carrying the increasingly heavy box of gold between us.

There was an inn. We took two rooms. The gold, naturally, stayed with Dickson. A hot bath and a hot meal, and then Dickson put through a transatlantic call to Rococco on his island in the Caribbean.

Rococco had heard from the kidnappers. The Lilliputian Liberation Army wanted Dickson to bring the gold to a certain palm tree on a certain island in the Caribbean at midnight the following evening. If he failed to comply, it was good-bye Alicia.

Dickson was to come alone except for me. I had to come along to identify the island and the palm tree. How was I supposed to do this? Simple. The kidnappers had also left a personal message from Alicia for me. The message was as follows:

“Bring the gold to the tree where we made love.”

His hand over the mouthpiece, Dickson asked me if the message made any sense to me.

I nodded.

He said a few more words to Rococco and hung up.

“We're not sure that we understand the [unintelligible] instructions,” Dickson said to me.

“I’m pretty sure I do,” I admitted.

“Coming to the heart of the question, which is with regard to our daugh—Oh, [expletive deleted]!--to our secretary’s chastity, are we to understand that you are responsible for depriving her of it?”

“Oh, no!” I assured him. “I certainly wouldn’t say that.”

“Well, we think in response to that question you should put the phrase ‘made love’ in perspective.”

“It’s a code phrase,” I improvised.

“Really? Well, that’s a relief. We surely don’t like to hear ladies using that kind of mother-[expletive deleted] language.”

Not that Dickson’s suspicions were assuaged. Besides worrying about what might have taken place sexwise between me and Alicia, he also must have wondered just how I could know what specific island and what specific palm tree was referred to in the kidnap message. Fortunately, he was kept too busy arranging for a hired car which would take us and the gold to a train which would take us to an airport where a privately chartered plane would fly us to Nassau in time to drive by cab to the place of our appointment on Paradise Island.

We arrived at the base of the tree shortly before midnight. It was a quiet night with the full moon playing hide-and-seek with the clouds. At moments the clearing around the palm was drenched with light. At other moments it hid sullenly in semidarkness.

We waited.

Suddenly, as the light followed its pattern of fading away, there was a noise from somewhere on the other side of the base of the pahn tree. It was a small noise, a scuttle of feet—tiny feet—reorganizing the sand under them. The moon returned and with it we were face to face with the leader of the Lilliputian Liberation Army.

He identified himself, using the title Generalissimo which is how we knew who he was. His last name was “Petit.” Generalissimo Percival Petit—that’s how he introduced himself to us.

The Generalissimo was dressed in full uniform, although unarmed. His regalia was not unlike that of the head usher at the Radio City Music Hall in the days of its glory. Complete with ribbons and medals. Self-awarded? I couldn't be sure, but that was my guess. Also, the Generalissimo was a midget, not much larger than a breadbox.

Behind him, the moon now chose to reveal, was an assorted group of other midgets, dwarfs, and pygmies. These little people, perhaps half a dozen of them, two of them females, were armed to the miniature teeth. Ammo belts crisscrossed tiny chests, repeating rifles and pistols were wielded in businesslike fashion; there were even two spears and a blowpipe. Most of these weapons were leveled with deadly aim at Dickson and myself.

By way of balancing the power, or at least trying to, I pointed the pistol I’d brought along at the head of Generalissimo Petit. He was a gutsy little guy; I’ll say that for him. He absolutely ignored it.

“Have you brought the gold?” the pint-sized commander demanded to know.

“Yeah.” I indicated the box alongside Dickson.

The Generalissimo motioned for two of his wee followers to come forward and get it.

“Hold on!” I came on a lot stronger than I felt with all that artillery pointed my way. “Where’s the girl?”

“The girl?” Generalissimo Petit stayed as calm as an undersized cucumber. “You must have misunderstood. The gold is simply what we expect of you as proof of your good faith. It’s a prediscussion contribution, so to speak. Now that we know that you are serious, we will contact you again regarding our terms for the disposition of the girl.”

“No girl, no gold!” I announced firmly.

From somewhere down in front there was the sound of a couple of safeties being released. I took a step closer to Petit, making it obvious that I was lining up the barrel of my revolver with his right temple. A stalemate was the best I could hope for, and I was going to make damn sure I had nothing but the best.

“[Expletive deleted]!” Dickson’s voice was very shaky a few steps behind rne. He was still alongside the gold. Obviously he recognized that if the Lilliputian soldiers went for it, he’d be one of the first barriers they’d remove.

“How do we even know if the girl is still alive?” I asked the Generalissimo.

“You’ve heard her voice on the tape.”

“You could have killed her after the tape was made.”

“She’s a prisoner of war. We aren’t savages. She’s being treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention.”

“Before you get that gold, we at least want to see her,” I told him. “Otherwise, no deal.”

“Then will you relinquish the gold?”

I turned to Dickson. “How about it?”

“[Expletive deleted]! All right. [Not intelligible]! Under the circumstances, it would not be appropriate for me to say anything further on this point. [Ex- pletive removed] !”

“He means okay,” I translated for Generalissimo Petit. “Now let’s see the girl.”

There was a rustle amongst the small warriors behind him. Then their ranks parted to allow Alicia to appear before us. She looked super in white shorts and a white halter. Also she was wearing paratrooper combat boots and carrying an M-1.

“I thought you were a prisoner,” I greeted her.

“I am.”

“Then how come you’re carrying a gun?”

“It’s my way of showing I sympathize with the cause of the Lilliputian Liberation Army.”

“You sure do treat your prisoners democratically,” I told the Generalissimo sarcastically.

“There are no bullets in the gun. She is merely a trainee. After you meet our demands, she will be given her choice of returning to you, or of joining with us in the fight for Lilliputian freedom.”

I had a hunch he was lying. “Tell her to come closer,” I told him.

“Why?”

“I want to see her close-up to make sure she hasn’t been mistreated.”

The Generalissimo shrugged. He nodded to Alicia. She came into the light, walking up to me—wary.

Not wary enough. My arm shot out fast and my fist caught her square on the jaw. As she fell forward, I grabbed the rifle she’d been holding. The safety was off. I whirled and aimed it at the dwarfs, pygmies, and midgets pointing their weapons at us. Before I could even fire they had scattered and were diving for cover. I pulled the trigger on the gun, firing over their heads. The burst of fire clattered out over the clear- mg.

“Not loaded, huh?” I turned to the Generalissimo.

He didn’t reply. He couldn’t. Dickson was holding him tightly by the throat, our hostage now.

Alicia was back on her feet, jaw swollen, mouth snarling. She was tawny as a tigress, and moved just as lithely. I pointed the pistol at her to cool her down. The rifle was still in my other hand, ready to respond to any trouble from the Lilliputians.

“I don't understand,” Dickson understated.

“She’s in league with them.” I spelled it out for him.

“[Expletive deleted]! She’s not even a [characterization omitted] dwarf. Why the [expletive removed] Would she be in league with them?”

“There is a brotherhood of the downtrodden of the earth which has nothing to do with gender, color, national origin, creed, or size,” Alicia explained for herself dialectically. “You are the common enemy,” she told Dickson.

“But I’m your [adjective omitted] father!” he forgot himself and reminded her.

“Because you once made a drop at the sperm bank?” she jeered at him. “What kind of a father is that? You only did it for political reasons. You exploited me and my mother the same as you exploit the little people.”

“I never stepped on a [expletive removed]-sucking midget in my life!” Dickson protested indignantly. “I never even had one bugged!”

“Being a little people has nothing to do with size,” she told him.

“The hell you say!” Generalissimo Petit interrupted. “The persecution of little people has everything to do with size. My little brother was once picketing the White House when a pet cat jumped from the window ledge of the Oval Ofice and ate him!”

“That wasn’t exactly what I meant,” Alicia tried to soothe him. “I only meant that we’re all Lilliputians when we buck up against the Establishment.”

“Me too, for that matter,” Dickson sighed. “How the [expletive omitted] do you suppose I got to be ex-President?”

“You are the Establishment!” she insisted.

“That’s what you think!”

“Come on!” I interrupted them and motioned with my gun at Alicia. “Let’s get out of here!”

“If you try to leave with the gold,” Generalissimo Petit told me, “my men will shoot you down.”

“The first shot they fire, you get it right between the eyes,” I threatened him.

“That won’t stop them.” He was quite calm about it. “I’m expendable. Comrade Alicia is expendable. If we die for the cause, then we die. I assure you, if you don’t leave the gold, they will shoot.”

For my part, I would have left it. Dickson, on the other hand, wasn’t about to part with a cool million in gold that easily. He was really torn.

It was an impasse. It would have stayed an impasse too, if suddenly there hadn’t been an unexpected intrusion. The intrusion came in the form of a Flit-spray of bullets sweeping the area indiscriminately, seeking out both us and the Lilliputians as targets.

Everybody dived for cover. Generalissimo Petit didn’t quite make it. The little leader went down, hit in the chest.

I dragged him behind the base of the palm tree where Dickson, Alicia, and I were huddled. He’d pulled a really bad one. It was obvious that he wasn’t going to last very long.

“The sonsofbitches betrayed us!” the Generalissirno gasped.

“Who?” I asked, trying in vain to stop the flow of his blood with my handkerchief.

“‘ ‘Insecticide!’ ” he told me. “That’s who set it up for us to grab the girl.”

“I thought she was in on it with you.”

“No. She only decided to come in with us after we snatched her.” He laughed and blood bubbled to his lips. “We convinced her of the righteousness of our cause. Funny . . .”

The bullets were flying thick around us. I dug a hole for myself in the sand beside the dying midget. “Why funny?” I wanted to know.

“Because it was a setup. Midget rights didn’t mean shit.”

“I don’t understand. You mean all those little people out there”— I gestured toward where his “soldiers” were pinned down by whoever was attacking us -- “Weren’t really fighting for equal treatment and all that?”

“Oh, they thought they were. But actually we were being backed by this right-wing outfit to grab the girl.”

I had a sudden realization. “This right-wing out-fit—did they provide the tape you sent us in Paris?”

“The blank tape, yes. Why?”

“Because it wasn’t blank.” I explained to the Generalissimo about “The Aryans” being on the flip side of the tape. “Who was this right-wing outfit anyway?” I Wanted to know then.

“They call themselves ‘D.O.P.E.’ ”

D.O.P.E.! The organization to Destroy Obscenity! Pornography! Erotica!

“Why did you do it?” I asked Generalissimo Petit.

“They showed me how I could lay my hands on one million bucks. That’s why.”

“And that’s why you betrayed your fellow midgets?”

“Contrary to popular opinion, being downtrodden doesn’t make you any more noble than the next guy. I was a small man with big appetites.” He laughed. The blood gushed from his mouth. He died.

He left a helluva lot of unanswered questions behind him. Why had D.O.P.E. set up the kidnapping? Who was “Insecticide”? Why had the Lilliputian Liberation Army been double-crossed?

This was no time to ponder these puzzlers. The bullets were still kicking up the sand around us. They were still pinging off the trunk of the palm tree. Still, we weren’t as badly off as the Lilliputians.

The little people had been pinned down in what was strategically a very bad spot. The cover of the sparse shrubbery of the sand dunes where they had sought refuge was insufficient to protect them from the blizzard of bullets descending on them from the attackers on the higher ground. Also, the attackers still hadn’t shown themselves. They were intermingled with a rather thick copse of trees. So it was almost impossible for the Lilliputians to return the fire with any effectiveness.

Finally the Lilliputians took the only course open to them. They bolted. Three of them, small, childlike corpses, remained behind.

The attackers cautiously emerged from their cover. I was reluctant to shoot at them for fear of drawing their fire in return. They evidently hadn’t pinpointed where we were yet. When they did, we’d be at a big disadvantage. They could fire down on us from cover and we’d have the same problem the Lilliputians had in trying to return their fire effectively.

The moon came up to reveal that there were at least a dozen in the attacking party moving down to the clearing. It revealed something else even more interesting as well. The three men who seemed to be in charge of the others were familiar old-well, I can't exactly call them “friends”-— acquaintances of mine.

I recognized the black Bahamian, the Irishman, and the Cuban I’d first met on the boat when they’d snatched me by mistake, thinking they’d grabbed Alicia. A second later I remembered that these three worked for PeePee Rococco. And they'd vanished at the same time the LLA kidnapped Alicia.

Very—-like they say—interesting! But there was no time to sort out the ramifications in my mind. My hostile Bahamian buddy had spotted us.

“First the dwarfs, and now Snow White!” was his greeting. “Drop your wand, Princess. And tell your cohorts to do the same.”

We had no choice. It would have been suicide to resist. Dickson, Alicia, and I all came out from behind the palm tree with our hands over our heads as per instructions. We left our weapons behind.

“Hello there, me bucko.” The Irishman renewed old acquaintance by shoving his rifle butt into the pit of my stomach.

“Mucho gusto en verle otra vez.” The Cuban goosed me with the machete he was wielding. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

“Good night, sweet Princess!” The Bahamian brought the butt of his pistol down solidly on the top of my skull.

I went out like an overworked Con Ed generator at the height of the air-conditioner season. The inside of my head was as black as Forest Hills on a hundred-degree evening in mid-August. It was still that way when the ache inside my cranium woke me up an intermediate time lapse or so later.

I tried fluttering open my baby-blues. It didn’t help much. It was just as dark with my eyes open as with them closed.

You guessed it. I was playing cat-in-the-sack again. It was my three friends’ favorite game—-konking me on the konk and keeping me in the bag.

Like before, Silly Milly, it was very dark in there. Also like before, there was the sound of a marine engine throbbing under me. Unlike before, this time my captors didn’t see fit to open the sack for a look-see at the prize they’d snatched.

That didn’t happen until after the engine had stopped and I’d heard the unmistakable sound of an anchor plopping into shallow water. Even then, it didn’t happen right away. First I was carried ashore by two men, loaded into what I think was a jeep, and transported some place inland.

Finally the sack was opened and I was allowed to pop out of it. The first thing I saw was the blinding light. When it cleared, I made out the faces of the Cuban, the Irishman, and the Bahamian.

I was dizzy, and that went away more slowly. As it did, I was able to recognize my surroundings. I was in one of the sitting rooms of PeePee Rococco’s house on PeePee Rococco’s island.

Besides my captors, Nick Dickson and Alicia were present. Like myself, they were standing with the sacks that had encompassed them now down around their feet. They looked as dazed as I was.

But Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson got himself together nicely when PeePee Rococco entered the room. “What the [expletive removed] is the meaning of this?” he demanded to know of his oldest and supposedly closest friend.

Rococco smiled the smile of one who no longer has any reason to hide anything.

“He’s ‘Insecticide!’ ” I guessed. None too brilliantly to be sure, for by now it was obvious. But there were other surprises which I still hadn’t even come close to dreaming were in store.

“Is that true, PeePee?” Dickson’s voice was calm, just putting together the facts.

“There’s no reason to deny it anymore.” Rococco owned up.

“You’re behind these [expletive deleted] attempts to assassinate me!” It was an unemotional statement, right down to the deleted expletive.

“No,” Rococco told him. “Our aim isn’t to kill you, just to control you.”

“You speak in the plural,” I noticed. “Who’s behind ‘Insecticide’?”

“I am.”

From the shadows behind Rococco a figure emerged. We all—Alicia, myself, Dickson—did a double-take. It was Heinrich Bussinger!

Dickson was the first to speak. Surprisingly, his remark wasn’t addressed to Bussinger, but to Rococco. “Et tu, PeePee,” he said fatalistically.

“Then die, Dickson!”

There was a sudden, overwhelmingly destructive explosion!

Chapter Ten

It blew out the walls of the room. I followed one of those walls, propelled by the blast, literally lifted off my feet and flung through the air. I landed on the grassy lawn beyond the veranda.

By the time I’d recovered enough to get to my feet, what was left of the room I’d been in was in flames. The fire was quickly spreading to the rest of the house. Other people -- Nat, Pisha and Muley Dickson, Hans und Fritz, Rosalie Forest, Marsha Twitchell, and Dotty Whiskers—were on the grounds, presumably fleeing the burning building.

But what about those who had been with me in the room where the explosion had taken place? The first one I spotted was Alicia. She was sitting up on the lawn about fifty feet away from me, staring straight ahead, dazed. I went over to her.

“What happened?” Her eyes were slow to focus on me.

“I’m not sure. There was an explosion -”

“Yes, an explosion. . . .”

“Look, you don’t seem to be hurt,” was my appraisal. “You just sit here and get yourself together. I’m going to see if anybody else got out of there alive.

“All right.” She was docile, still in a state of shock. I started for the burning room where the blast had occurred. Only one of its walls was still standing now, and that one was a sheet of flames. I’d moved only a few feet toward it when I stumbled over a body.

It was lying face down. I knelt beside it. I turned it over. There wasn’t much left of the face; just enough for me to identify the dead man as Rococco’s Irish hood.

Not too far away, I found his Cuban cohort. He was also dead. A piece of window glass had neatly sliced the artery in his throat. From the trail of spurted blood he’d left, he must have bled to death quickly.

The next corpse I found, closer in to the burning building, was that of Heinrich Bussinger himself. The German-American, former U.S. secretary of state, current premier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, had cracked open his skull like a coconut on the rock on which he’d landed after the explosion had propelled him from the room. But was I looking at the remains of a great statesman and diplomat, or of a con man and Wheeler-dealer of global scope? The enigma lived after him.

Half sprawled into what was left of the room itself, I found the Bahamian. Black rage was still written on his dead face; once he’d had guts; he had them no longer; now they were spilled out all over his lap.

More than any of the others I’d found so far, the Bahamian seemed to have taken the full force of the explosion head-on. He’d been standing a little in front of PeePee Rococco, between him and Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson. This seemed to confirm my recollection, which was that somehow the explosion had emanated from Dickson. It also turned out that the Bahamian had provided a little bit of a shield for PeePee Bococco.

I found Rococco a few feet to the side and rear of the Bahamian. His back was broken; he was still alive, but barely. I was afraid to try to move him, or even to touch him for fear of making his condition even worse than it obviously was.

Rococco was conscious, but he wasn’t making much sense. He just kept babbling the same words over and over again: “He self-destructed. . . . He self-destructed. . . . He self-destructed. . . .”

After quickly examining Rococco, I stood up and looked around for help. If his life was going to be saved—a doubtful prospect -- he would need expert help quickly. As far as I knew, the nearest hospital would be in Nassau.

Muley Dickson came running up to me. Her sister, Pisha, and her mother, Nat, were close behind her. “My father!” Muley screamed into my face. “Have you seen my father?”

“I’m afraid he’s dead,” I told her as gently as I could. The truth was that there was nothing but a hole in the floor where Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson had been standing. “He was blown up in the explosion.”

“Oh, no!” Nat Dickson wailed. But she pulled herself together. “As he himself once said, ‘Here lies the noblest Roman of them all. . . .’ ”

“Mother, please! He wasn’t even Italian!” Pisha wailed.

“Help me look for a piece of him.” Muley was the practical one. “Any piece of living flesh.”

“What for?” Pisha stared at her sister uncomprehendingly.

“Or, to paraphrase what he said on another occasion, ‘Alas, poor Swillhouse, I knew him well. . . .’ ”

“We can clone him back to life!” Muley told Pisha.

“We can what?”

Suddenly Rococco came out of his fog just long enough to react. “Clone him!” he chortled. “They're going to try to clone Dickson back to life!” He laughed hysterically.

“ ‘Now he belongs to the ages!’ ” Nat Dickson was still quoting.

“Clone him!” Muley explained impatiently. “If we can find just one piece of daddy’s living flesh, it can be cloned so that they can reconstruct the whole per- son from it.”

“You mean we can bring daddy back to life?” Pisha took hope from her sister.

“Yes. Yes. But hurry. Help me look.”

“’His only regret was that he had but one life to give for his country. . . .’ ”

“Mother, stop that and help us look!”

The three women scrambled over the ashes, seeking a still living piece of the flesh of ex-President Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson from which he might be cloned back to life. Pisha was the first to turn up something. “Is this anything,” she asked, holding up what she’d found.

“I don’t think so.” Muley was dubious. “It doesn’t look like much.”

“It is!” Nat Dickson was positive. “It’s a piece of your father!”

“What piece?” Pisha asked.

“His you-know-what.” Nat Dickson blushed.

“It doesn’t look like much,” Muley repeated.

“What did you say, mummy?” Pisha was confused.

“It’s daddy’s you-know-”

“She means it’s his wee-wee wand,” Muley explained.

“Oh!” Pisha’s face lit up with understanding. “You mean his tinkle-maker!”

My God! I couldn’t help thinking as what was left of Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson waved in the air, there’s no end to the shmuck!

It was at this point in time that things began taking on some semblance of order. Hans und Fritz—one or both of them—had put in a call for help. Now it was starting to arrive.

An eminent surgeon who had a private home on a nearby island came by helicopter. Behind him more medical and nursing help flew in on a hospital plane from Nassau. Floodlights were set up. They focused on PeePee Rococco, the one survivor who was truly in bad shape.

The surgeon decided not to move Rococco until he’d had a chance to examine him more thoroughly. His back was definitely broken, and it was a particularly tricky condition. The surgeon wasn’t sure whether it was broken in two or three different places. In addition, there was evidence of serious internal injuries. The surgeon injected him with a local anesthetic -- which would not render Rococco unconscious since the surgeon wanted him aware enough to be able to respond to questions about his pain-—and stood aside to wait for it to take effect.

That was when Muley Dickson pushed her way through to him. “Doctor,” she said breathlessly, “do you know anything about cloning?”

“I’ve written one of the definitive works on the subject,” the surgeon told her.

“My father is President Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson!” Muley announced to him.

“Don’t blame me,” the surgeon answered. “I'm from Massachusetts.”

“Would you play politics with the Hippocratic Oath?” Muley demanded.

“Ordinarily, no. But in Nick Dickson’s case, I might make an exception.”

“Are you, or are you not, going to fulfill your obligation as a physician and help my father?” Muley put it to him squarely.

“All right, young lady. When you put it that way, I just know you must be bugging this conversation. So I’ll do my duty and help your father. Now where is he?”

“Here.” Muley held up what was left of the penis of Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson.

“What’s that?” the surgeon inquired.

“The only bit of living tissue that’s left of my father.”

“It isn’t much,” the surgeon observed.

“How well I know,” Nat Dickson sobbed in the background.

“It’s all we could find,” Muley said.

“Let me see it.” The surgeon took it from Muley and examined it. After a moment he raised his head and addressed Muley again. “You expect me to clone your father from this?” he asked.

“Can you do it?”

“No, young lady, I cannot. This material is plastic. It’s not flesh, and it never was. It’s plastic.”

“Plastic?” Muley looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“Plastic!” Natalie Dickson sounded as if the solution to a great mystery had suddenly been revealed to her.

“Plastic!” Pisha Dickson was indignant. “That sounds like another one of those baseless accusations the rad-lib press is always making against daddy.”

Behind the group, unnoticed except by me, PeePee Rococco was lying on the ground and laughing up a storm. I asked the surgeon if it was all right if I talked to Rococco. He told me I could have fifteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes was enough. Rococco was aware of his condition, and of the fact that the odds were heavily against his surviving it. He was eager to set the record straight as far as his role in the affairs of President Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson was concerned.

“Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson was a robot!” Rococco told me for openers.

I had a sudden flash memory of the scene on the toboggan when Dickson had been quoting himself about the news media so obsessively. At the time, I had thought it was as if a button had been pushed and his words were coming out by rote. Now Rococco was saying that Dickson had been a robot. If so, maybe something had jammed Dickson’s voicebox switches back there on the hurtling sled.

“I don’t understand," I said truthfully. “When you say he was a robot, do you mean he was always a robot?”

“No, not always.”

“Well then when did he become a robot?”

“He didn’t exactly become one. It was more that he was sort of replaced by one.”

“When did that happen?”

“I’m not sure exactly.” Rococco’s face grimaced with pain.

“Before he was elected President, or after?”

“Somewhere right around then. I just don’t know precisely.”

“Around the beginning of his first term?” I wanted to be sure I understood Rococco rightly.

“I think so. It might have been earlier though . . . or later.”

“When did you become aware that he was a robot?”

“When the scandals started breaking. That’s when Heinrich let me in on it.”

“Heinrich? You mean Bussinger?”

“Yes. He was the one who substituted the robot for the real Dickson. You see, the real Dickson was flipping out. I mean, he was really going off his rocker. On the verge of pushing the button, maybe.”

“ ‘Pushing the button?’ ” I zeroed in on the remark. “Then the substitution must have been rnade after he was elected President.”

“Not necessarily. There’s more than one button.”

“Oh. I thought you meant --!”

“I thought that’s what you thought,” Rococco said. He didn’t seem to be in as much pain now. I suppose the numbness was setting in. “And it might have been the nuclear button. I’m not saying it wasn’t. But it also might have been any one of a number of other buttons which could have pulled the rug out from under some very important companies, or individuals. The truth is, I don’t know. Bussinger didn’t tell me.”

“What happened to the original Dickson?” I wanted to know. “The one who went bananas?”

“I asked Bussinger that, but I never got a straight answer. Sometimes he’d just laugh and say he poisoned himself in the bunker. Other times he’d tell me that Dickson was alive and well in Argentina³⁸ .”

“Let’s get back to the original substitution,” I decided. “Didn’t his family notice the difference? Didn’t his wife notice?”

“No.”

“But he was a robot instead of a man.”

“If you’d known Dickson, you’d understand how they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”

“When Bussinger did tell you about the deception, what was his reason for telling you?”

“He had to go to the Middle East to deal with a crisis. Meanwhile there was another crisis breaking in Washington. He couldn’t be in both places at once. He clued me in so that I could control Dickson during the constantly shifting situation.”

“Why you?”

“I was heavily implicated. Bussinger knew I’d go along and keep my mouth shut. I’d have to protect my interests, which were Dickson’s interests, which were Bussinger’s interests. Nor was it all as selfish as it sounds. We had the good of the country at heart as well. You see, Bussinger feels that the real threat to America today is China. Even back then he was in collusion with the Russians to hold the Chinese threat down. From then until now, all his efforts in control of Nixon were at least partially determined by that end. Also, can you imagine the effect on the faith of the American people in those governing them, on foreign nations with whom we had to deal, on the economy of the country and the world, if it came out that the Chief Executive of the United States was really a robot? Yes, we had the good of the country at heart.”

It never ceased to amaze me how “the good of the country” always seemed to coincide with the interests of the Dickson gang. “Okay. So Bussinger left you in control of Dickson the robot. Then what happened?”

“Dickson threw Don Twitchell to the wolves. Then he issued a public statement. This resulted in Bussinger’s rocketing home.”

“Which statement was that?” I asked.

“The one where he described Hans and Fritz as ‘two of the finest public servants it has been my privilege to know.’ ”

“Why did that alarm Bussinger?”

“Because of Dickson ditching Twitchell and then publicly praising them. You see, that wasn’t the scenario we’d planned. Twitchell wasn’t supposed to be sacrificed. Hans und Fritz were supposed to be the goats. Bussinger realized immediately that our robot wasn’t following orders. Someone had reprogrammed the President in mid-water.”

“Who?”

“It wasn’t hard to figure. Hans and Fritz themselves, of course. One day Hans—or was it Fritz?— had slapped the President on the back a little too hard. The two of them were always patting Dickson on the back and telling him what a great quarterback he was for the team. Anyway, this time the slap was a little too hard, and the President short-circuited. At first Fritz—or Hans, as the case may be-—thought the President was having some sort of seizure. It took them a while to realize the truth of the matter. But when they did, they didn’t waste any time. They immediately reprogrammed him so that he was under their control.”

“What did Bussinger do?”

“What could he do? Bussinger is a pragmatist. He went along with them for the time being. He even went along with that business with the tapes.” Rococco chuckled drily. “Do you know what the four-letter words were that were removed from the tapes?” he asked. He waited for me to shake my head, and then he answered the question: “‘Good work, John Dean!’ ”

“You were ‘Insecticide.’ Right?” I remembered.

“Yes.”

“And you were working for Bussinger.”

“That’s right.”

“Were you working for him when you had your three hoods try to grab Alicia that first time? The time they got me instead?”

“No. That was my own idea. You see, she was complicating things. Hans und Fritz didn’t know she was Dickson’s daughter. They weren’t worried when she got close to Dickson. But I was. I was afraid she’d find out he was a robot and blow the whistle. That could have ruined everything for all of us.”

“And that’s why you cooperated with the Lilliputians snatching her the second time?”

“Right. I wanted her out of the way. I couldn’t risk her continued proximity to Dickson.”

“But then why did you double-cross the LLA in the end? Why that attack at the palm tree where we met to deliver the gold?”

“Because by then we’d found out that the LLA was being backed by D.O.P.E. We didn’t double-cross them. They’d been double-crossing us from the beginning. D.O.P.E. had arranged the whole thing so they could step in and kill Dickson. They were behind the poison attempt and the attempt to kill him with high-powered rifles and the sabotaging of the plane.”

“D.O.P.E.? But why did they want him dead?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Did D.O.P.E. know he was a robot?”

“I doubt it, ” Rococco said. “Someone on this island has been acting for D.O.P.E. right along, but I’ve been unable to find out who it is. Actually, for a long time I thought it was you.”

“Me?” I was surprised.

“Sure. You were an imposter. I knew right away you weren’t Karl Powers.”

“What gave me away?” I wondered.

“You didn’t contact me. The real Karl Powers was supposed to contact ‘Insecticide.’ I was ‘Insecticide,’ ” Rococco reminded me. “When you didn’t contact me, I knew you were a phoney. So I called Algerpulp. He was in on the whole thing with me and Bussinger. When we put our heads together, it was easy to figure that the real Karl Powers had been wasted and you substituted in his place. It didn’t take a helluva lot to find out that you really were Steve Victor. That’s when we realized that Charles Putnam might be involved. And that really scared us.”

“What did you do?”

“We decided that for the time being our interests were the same as those of Hans und Fritz. We had to warn them.”

“And then what happened?”

‘Tm not quite sure. But they had a shortwave input into Dickson. They could reprogram him that way whenever they wanted to. I think they reprogrammed him to self-destruct.”

“But why would they do that?”

“I don’t know,” Rococco admitted. “You’ll have to ask them that.”

“Are you sure Dickson did self-destruct?”

“What else could have caused that explosion?”

Rococco had me there. My head was already aching from trying to make sense out of all the twists and turns of what he’d been telling me.

The surgeon informed me that my time was up. He bent over Rococco and spent a long time examining him. Finally he decided to move him to a caretaker’s cottage which was still standing on the grounds.

As Rococco was being moved, another copter arrived. Charles Putnam was on board. I took him aside and told him everything I’d learned.

“You failed in your assignment, Mr. Victor,” he chided me when I’d finished my account.

“The hell I did!” I was indignant. “You wanted me to find out who ‘Insecticide’ was. Well, I’ve done at.”

“You were also supposed to keep Nicholas Dickson alive.

“He’s as alive as he ever was,” I told him haughtily, “considering that he was a robot.”

“He was a live robot,” Putnam insisted.

There was no point in arguing. I left Putnam to continue his investigations. As for me, I’d had it for the night. What I needed was a hot bath and a bed with cool sheets.

I was out of luck. All the beds and baths had been blown up with the house. With the caretaker’s cottage being used for a hospital, that left me out in the Caribbean cold.

As I was standing there wondering what I was going to do about it, Pisha Dickson came along. There were tears streaming from her eyes and she was clutching a sheaf of typewritten papers in her hands. “I’ve found it!” she announced. “Daddy’s manuscript for the revised book on which he was working. Here it is: Six Crises and a Catastrophe!”

I turned away from her grief and found myself face to face with Alicia Alvarez. She’d gotten over the effects of the explosion. Indeed, she seemed positively bouncy. She’d cleaned herself up as best she could, and although her white shorts and halter were pretty well smudged, her overall appearance was quite crisp considering the circumstances. '

Her long, red hair was neatly brushed. That exotic, Spanish-Indian face of hers had been freshly scrubbed. Her cobalt eyes were sharp—flashing in the light of what was left of the fire. Her tan-gold skin looked particularly alluring in the firelight. Her breasts, her hips, her bottom, her long legs—all seemed vibrantly alive to the tingle of the night air.

I sniffed. She had even put on perfume—sensual, musky perfume!

“Where am I supposed to sleep?” she asked.

“You’re one ahead of me,” I told her. “Where did you find to get cleaned up?”

“There’s a cabana down the beach with a shower. Want me to show you?”

I told her I’d appreciate that. It wasn’t far. She led me to it and waited while I showered and cleaned up my clothes as best I could. The best was lousy. Finally I gave up on them, found a pair of trunks in one of the lockers of the cabana, and tried them on. They were tight, but close enough to my size to do. I kept them on and went out to model them for Alicia.

She was busy with other things. She’d been investigating the refrigcrator in the cabana and had found the makings for martinis. I gulped mine gratefully and she paced me. We slowed up for the second one and sat down on the steps of the cabana.

“Too bad they didn’t leave the chaises longues out,” I observed. “We could have slept on them.”

“They’re locked up in a shed attached to the main house. They were probably all burned up,” Alicia said.

“Still, this is probably the best we’re going to do,” I guessed. “We might as well sleep on the floor here. At least it’ll be dry.”

“No good.”

“Why not?”

“That’s why.” Alicia pointed.

Three or four people—I couldn’t make out their faces in the darkness-were walking toward the cabana. Probably they had the same idea I’d had. “I see what you mean.” I got to my feet. “We wouldn’t exactly have much privacy, would we?”

“Whatever would we want privacy for?” Alicia asked. But she stood up and followed me away from the cabana into the shadows.

“This, for a start.” I took her in my arms and kissed her.

Alicia—in case I’d forgotten—was not a girl who kissed only with her mouth. Oh, she knew how to use her mouth all right-teeth, lips, tongue, all that goes into a sucking, licking, biting kiss technique. But she also put her whole body into it.

A halter full of hot, squirmy breasts assaulted my bare chest. I could feel those hard, long nipples of hers through the material, boring twin holes in my flesh. The length of her bare legs pressed against mine, rubbing and flexing, warm thigh flesh pulsing. And her shorts were swallowed up by her crotch as she socked it to me, the cleft hillock riding high on my already erect cock, the stiff clitty swelling as it moved up and down.

As a kiss, it was a helluva lot more than a preliminary.

The kiss was over, but our mouths still clung together—tantalizing, teasing, titillating-as I backed her over the sand to a palm tree. When I had her against it, I reached under her halter with both hands and grabbed her breasts. She caught her breath and they filled with air. The nipples swelled even more. Her fleshy hips ground against me. She reached behind me, under my trunks, and dug her nails into the cheeks of my behind.

It made me push out. Her thighs separated and closed around the projecting tightness of the bathing trunks I was wearing. I squeezed her breasts under the halter—hard! with both hands! I caught one of the nipples between two fingertips and played with it. I traced the aureole of my other breast with my thumb.

She was trembling with excitement now. She pulled one of her hands out of the back of my trunks and reached behind her. She undid the halter. It fell away from my hands and she shrugged it the rest of the way off.

“Kiss them!” she panted. She held out her breasts to me.

Lord! They were lovely! Big and soft and firm and lovely!

I buried my face between them. Their warmth made my ears ring a little. I kissed and licked and even nibbled the deep cleavage between them.

My tongue had the greatest effect. When I ran it up and down from the pulse at the base of Alicia’s neck, through the cleavage to the deep well of her belly button, she moaned and writhed and had to hold onto me to stay on her feet. The hand in my trunks was between the cheeks now, and I was doing my share of writhing too.