Выбрать главу

 What the devil was happening? I wondered if I was hallucinating. Maybe acute seasickness had flipped me out altogether!

 I needed help. I forced myself to struggle to my feet and headed for the dispensary. The entrance was blocked by the wives of North, East, South, and West. They’d joined hands to form a small circle.

 Inside the circle, Captain Maldemerde was dancing wildly. He was waving a bottle of Dramamine pills over his head. With his other hand, he was pinching nipples as he revolved. Click-click. His uniform lay in a pile at his feet. He was naked.

 “Captain,” I groaned. “Who’s minding the store?”

 “Who cares?” He ducked his head and bit Mrs. East in the crotch. Click-click.

 “The race-—” I reminded him.

 “The hell with it! You only live once!” Click-click.

 He rolled with the sickening motion of the ship and his face disappeared, between Mrs. North’s giant breasts.

 I elbowed my way into the dispensary. Chief Purser Yenta was there, handing out bottles of seasickness pills. “Where’s Dr. Quotabusta?” I asked him.

 He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Quotabusta was sprawled out on a chair there with two girls. One of them had her face buried under his loincloth. The other one was sitting on his face.

 “Have some Dramamine.” Yenta held out a small bottle to me.

 I took it gratefully. “How come you’re not in on the bacchanal?” I asked the Chief Purser.

 “How come you’re not?”

 Good question. “I feel too sick.” I answered it honestly.

 “I’m queasy myself,” Yenta countered.

 “The pills don’t help you?”

 The question seemed to startle the Japanese officer, almost as if it caught him off-guard. His answer, too, seemed strangely abrupt. “No. They don’t help.” He turned away from me toward two more sufferers who had just entered.

 I left the dispensary and headed down the inside passageway toward the stairway leading down to my cabin. I hate taking pills, and I wanted to wash these down with some Scotch I had stashed there.

 On the stairs, I tripped over somebody. It was Miss Amanda Lowell-Cabot. The old lady appeared to be in agony. “I’m ill,” she moaned. “So ill! I want to die!”

 “Here. Take one of these.” I cradled her head and held a Dramamine pill to her lips. “It’ll make you feel better.”

 “NO!”

 Her scream took me by surprise. Hysterical, I decided. I held her nose and forced her to swallow the ill.

 She started to retch, but didn’t. Her eyes were filled with tears. “Did you get these pills from the Chief Purser?” she wanted to know.

 “Sure. Why?”

 “Sin!” She gagged. “Lewdity!” She tore open the front of her dress, pulled aside her sturdy, old-fashioned brassiere, and exposed a withered breast. “Sully me! ” she panted.

 Nutty as a pecan pie! I decided.

 “Let me help you to your cabin.”

 “Deflower me here!” She hoisted up her dress to display varicose thighs. “It’s wrong! It’s evil! Purity is all!” Miss Amanda Lowell-Cabot pulled the dress down again. “I’m nauseous!” she declared.

 “Everybody is,” I told her. “It’s a rough sea.”

 ‘Tm nauseous from wanting you! You make me nauseous! Take me! Ruin me!” The dress was raised again.

 “I’ve had more complimentary offers.”

 “You think I’m too old?”

 “Well, there is a certain discrepancy in our ages. I Want you to know that I really respect you, but--”

 “Have you ever had a geriatric experience?”

 “No. Still -”

 “And you’re the man from O.R.G.Y.! How can you claim to be a sex expert with a gap like that in your education?”

 “My research doesn’t always require me to be a participant.”

 “I’m a virgin,” she offered coyly.

 “At your age?” I couldn’t hide my surprise.

 “Yes. Dammit! Now what are you going to do about it?” she demanded.

 “I don’t really think I should do anything about it. Besides, I'm feeling too sick. That’s the truth,” I assured her.

 A cunning look spread over her wrinkled face. “Take a couple of those pills,” she suggested. She giggled sexily.

 I stared at her. Rotten as I felt, a suspicion was beginning to take shape in my mind. Something had turned the old biddy on. And what else could it have been but—-

 “I WANT TO GET LAID!” Miss Amanda Lowell-Cabot screamed suddenly. She dived at me.

 I was caught off balance. I felt myself starting to topple down the stairs. Arms flailing, I grabbed at her for support. The two of us rolled down the staircase together.

 When I picked myself up at the bottom, she was still lying there. Alarmed, I bent over and felt for her heart. It was still beating. But she was out cold.

 Picking her up in my arms, I carried her to her suite. I fished the key to her door out of her handbag and unlocked it. I toted her inside and laid her down on the bed. Then I went over to a bureau, looking for some smelling salts. Miss Amanda seemed the type of old lady who would stock them.

 The first drawer I opened brought me up short. It was neatly stacked with identical small bottles of pills. The labels bore the stamp of the Lascivia dispensary and identified the pills as Dramamine!

 All four drawers in the bureau were packed with Dramamine. Another cabinet turned up an assortment of birth control pills in boxes and bottles of all shapes and sizes. The prescription labels on them virtually added up to a female passenger list. A suitcase was filled with a variety of contraceptive devices for use by both males and females, everything from simple condoms and diaphragms to French ticklers and intrauterine devices.

 In another room of Miss Amanda Lowell-Cabot’s luxury suite, I found four reels of film. They were numbered to indicate the sequence. I held the first reel up to the light. The opening frames confirmed what I’d already guessed. The film was a travelogue of Bali.

 Stacked in a trunk I found boxes of unopened talcum powder containers. Another compartment held a small jar of Vaseline and a large bottle of glue about one-quarter empty. A flat dish showed the remains of a mixture of the two substances.

 A desk drawer contained Xeroxed copies of the hand-printed notes which had circulated among the passengers and crew at the start of the voyage. In the drawer beneath it, I found a thick sheaf of photostats of the dossiers that Yenta had compiled. Various names had been circled with a red crayon, my own among them.

 That clinched it! Mayday and his cohorts had committed the major acts of sabotage—-triggering the “Abandon Ship!” alarm, wrecking the fresh water converter, rigging the compass so the Lascivia would sail into a hurricane, booby-trapping the trampoline, even setting the radio operator up to electrocute himself— but they hadn’t been responsible for the anti-sex campaign which had been plaguing the ship. That mischief had been the work of Miss Amanda Lowell-Cabot!

 I waited until she’d regained consciousness, and then I laid it on her. “The jig,” I told her not too originally, “is up.” I ticked off the evidence.

 The aging harridan wilted. There was no way she could deny it. Nor did she bother to deny that Chief Purser Yenta had been in on it with her from the very beginning. “I bribed him handsomely,” she admitted. “Besides supplying the dossiers, he obtained keys for me to get in and out of various cabins, and he made various major substitutions involving the talcum powder and the Dramamine and—”