How to describe it? Well, think of the Time Machine in the old Rod Taylor movie. Then cross it with one of those pieces of apparatus that they use to train astronauts, kind of like a big gyroscope, where they strap them into the middle and then spin them in two or three different directions all at once to simulate weightlessness, and then add lots of leather straps and strange pieces of knotted rope and a toilet seat and an elephant's tusk and a folding music stand, and you'll probably have a mental picture of what it was like. It had springs, it had levers. From the state of the brasswork and the well-preserved leather, I'd have guessed that it was some kind of an antique.
"You're looking at a true collector's piece," the old guy said to me. "Made in Italy by Vicenzo di Amain in 1875. Restored in Edinburgh by Robert Cotton sometime around 1932. Three previous owners ruined themselves just to have their hands on it for a little while. I picked it up more than twenty years ago from an estate that didn't know its actual value. There have never been more than half a dozen like it in the world, and this is the finest. You might call it a Stradivarius of pleasure devices."
A pleasure device? I looked again.
That knotted rope hung at head-height, and the knots were roughly where the user's eyes would be. The elephant's tusk was engraved with minute calibrations, and it appeared to be on a spring-driven arm. Its pointed tip was just below the opening of the toilet seat, which was equipped with a lap strap.
My idea of pleasure was a can of cold beer and a Clint Eastwood movie on the VCR, preferably in the company of Cheryl the Nurse from the apartment downstairs. She wasn't really a nurse, but if you could catch her in the right mood she'd sometimes dress up as one for you. This machine appeared to have been designed for torture rather than turn-on.
"You ever actually use this thing?" I said.
"Not yet," he said.
"Thanks for the drink, I'm out of here."
But he smiled to show that he wasn't taking me too seriously.
He carefully locked all of the doors behind us and, as we made our way down, he explained something of the background.
He was eighty-three years old (I'd thought he was a wasted-looking seventy; I suppose that for eighty-three, he didn't look so bad). He had inherited a ton of wealth originally made on the railways, had never done a stroke of work in his life, had never married and had no heir. He had one sister, whose family despised and disowned him and had a good chance of getting their hands on everything when he died.
"Leave it to a cats' home," I suggested.
"I wish it were that simple," he said. "And, besides, I can't abide cats."
We went back into the library.
The family rift, he told me, all dated back to the embarrassment of a court case and a brief period of imprisonment back in the early fifties. "But I've lived a blameless life for the past twenty-five years," he insisted. "I was something of a libertine, I admit…"
"A what?"
"A libertine. I existed for pleasure, all kinds of pleasure. As each was sated, the next became more extreme. Some people live out their lifetimes on their yearnings; I could afford to satisfy mine like that" — he snapped his fingers — "and then immediately look beyond. I was a libido with a bottomless bank account, and I was unstoppable."
He sat down in one of the big leather chairs.
"But look at me now," he said. I looked at him. He was old, but he was no Father Christmas. "You can only recharge a battery so many times. Mine died somewhere around 1965."
"What you're basically telling me," I said, "is that you can't get it up anymore."
And it was his turn to color up a little and look away.
I said, "But it hasn't bothered you in twenty-five years."
He shook his head.
"So why the sudden need?"
And it was then that he told me about the arrangements he'd been making.
And I sat down, because this was getting interesting.
The terms of his inheritance had been complicated. The essence was that it was family money and would ever remain so; he could spend all the interest, but the capital was out of his reach. On his death, the river of loot simply diverted to the next family member in succession.
And of course, he had no heir.
This, I suppose, should hardly have been a surprise in the case of someone who'd probably squandered his entire sex life on a succession of circus animals, French loaves, little boys, and various items of gardening equipment. But having seen how reproductive technology had come along in the past few years, he'd made plans. He'd fixed it all up with his lawyers, he'd hired a surrogate mother, and he had one of the most expensive and discreet clinics in town lined up and waiting; they'd handle all the test-tube stuff, and the member of his sister's family would probably chew one another's legs off with the frustration of it all when this infant appeared out of nowhere with the ability to sail through any legal or genetic test that could be put in its way.
There was only this one small obstacle. The clinic, he'd been assuming, would be geared up to handle every small technical detail; but there was one aspect on which his entire plan depended and around which it threatened to fall apart. It was a small matter of a private cubicle and an empty bottle and the clinic's well-thumbed copy of Penthouse.
And from the old battery, not a flicker.
So he'd dug out the device, the ultimate pleasure contraption of another age, and he'd dusted it down and made it ready to perform. If this didn't do it, he reckoned, nothing ever could. He'd been psyching himself up, and he believed that he was nearly ready; all that he needed now was someone who could stick around in case there were any problems and who would then be a dependable courier.
"And you can't send one of the servants?" I said.
"Oh, no," he said, and he seemed shocked at the very idea. "Oh, no."
I told him I wanted to think about it and asked if I could have the five hundred now. He said he'd have his man drive me home and I'd be handed the cash when I got there.
Which is exactly what happened.
There seemed to be nobody else around but me. I knocked on Cheryl the Nurse's door, but she wasn't home. Then I went upstairs and sat in my own place and fiddled around with the wire coat hanger that I've had to use to get a TV signal ever since the antenna broke, but it wouldn't come right. I looked at the mess on the screen and thought, Well, at least you're seeing some kind of snow this Christmas.
And then I went out to the pay phone in the hallway and called the number that the old guy had given me.
"I'll do it," I said.
I had to meet him out at the clinic on the next working day, mainly so that I'd know where it was and to give the staff a chance to get a look at me, since they were the ones who'd be releasing the second half of my money across the counter on receipt of what everybody was coyly calling "the material." It was an expensive-looking place that stood in its own grounds, and there wasn't a single sign anywhere to tell you what it was or what they did there. The reception-area nurses all looked like catwalk models, with outfits to match. They were polite to me and called me "sir."
I didn't kid myself.
The big night came two days later, the one before New Years' Eve. The pay phone rang, and when I got out there and picked it up, I heard him say, "I'd like you to come over as soon as you can, please," and under the politeness I could hear a kind of controlled tension in his voice that told me, Yep, tonight was going to be the night we launched the Shuttle.
The entrance gates were open. I stood under the portico and rang the bell. The old man's driver opened it — only now he was out of uniform and wearing an overcoat, and I supposed that he'd only been waiting for my arrival before he could leave. As I went in through the door, he went out and closed it behind him. We exchanged a nod and I was about to speak, but by then he'd already gone.