“None other,” he mumbled. He eyed the ceiling fixtures warily.
This reduced the three girls to helpless laughter.
“You’ve been such a bad boy,” Althea scolded. “You haven’t called in weeks.”
“He’s been busy,” Dorce explained, “in the Department of Alien Affairs.”
“Was she better than me?” Althea asked.
“Did she have anything special,” Dorce wanted to know, “down there?”
“Hey,” Nick said, shaking his head. “I don’t want to talk about it.” He looked at Althea and looked away. If he stared too long her face turned into a death mask. He felt a cold sweat on the back of his neck, and suspected that men in black capes were hiding in the shadows, waiting for him.
“Oh come on, don’t be an old stuffy. Did she teach you any—”
“7 said I don’t want to talk about it!”
“Pardon me for breathing.”
“I’m sorry, Althea, it’s the dope. I’m feeling . . . paranoid.”
“You sure are. What you need is three of the best lovers on Sifra Messa to smooth you out. Am I right, Dorce?”
“Absolutely.”
“Aynn?”
The tall girl smiled shyly and nodded.
They commandeered Nick, maneuvered him out of the club house, through the orchid garden and across the rolling lawns to the club “Motel,” a two-story prestressed-concrete cube designed according to Terran tradition.
Inside, the robo-clerk, upon whose face some wit had pasted a paper mustache, took a key off a hook and led them down the hall.
The room he showed them was dominated by a massive satin-sheeted waterbed. The ceiling and walls were mirrored and the floor was covered with Altairan carpetgrass. Among the many toys and conveniences were a sunken whirlpool bath, a cage of fuzzy little lickers, a small fridge of intoxicants and a larger chest of sexual accessories including graduated cock rings, brass ben-was, condoms of every shape and size, ribbed, nibbed, knobbed and nubbled, dildos and vibrators, a stimusonic jacket for those who took too long and an electroanesthetic girdle for those who came too soon.
In minutes the girls were naked and sloshing on the waterbed.
“Nicky,” Althea called, “planning to join us?”
He was gazing out the window, fully clothed. Slowly he turned.
“Huh?”
The waterbed rocked with laughter. What could have been funnier—or more adorable—than this big, strapping young man drugged helpless as a baby?
They pulled him over to the bed and undressed him. At first his penis was as disinterested as the rest of him, but Althea found a pack of Aphro-Deeza pheramone poppers in the fridge and one of them, cracked under his nose, did the trick. While Nick lay there thinking other things, she squatted above him and shimmied down onto his rigid organ, uttering small groans of pleasure. Dorce wedged her head between his legs, taking his balls into her mouth while reaching around to caress Althea’s tummy and pinch her hard nipples. Aynn occupied herself with Dorce’s cunt, and Nick, moved from his lethargy by social convention and the desire for symmetry, began to suck, halfheartedly, on Aynn’s big toe.
Without feeling, without love, which is, in the case of intercourse, content, variations of form are quickly exhausted; hence the boredom, the desperate quest for novelty which earmarked the sexual exploits of Averyville’s young folk, who strove to find in the latter what the former would not yield. And so, twenty-three orgasms later (a total count), ennui crept in and Althea, disregarding Nick’s wishes, again brought up a topic which fascinated her beyond reason.
“What was she like? The alien, I mean. Did she eat living flesh or pop her eyeballs or anything like that?*’
Nick recalled the cool touch of Mali's fingertips the day she healed his wounds, the feel of her pliant beak the night they kissed. He got up and started to dress.
“Don’t leave, Nicky,” they called. “Please don’t go!”
“I must have been crazy,” he muttered, pulling on his tights. “I thought I could come back to this life.... I can’t ever come back.”
“Please stay,” Althea whimpered. “We’ll do anything.”
Her friends echoed the sentiment.
Nick laughed and shook his head. “There’s nothing you can do for me.”
While buttoning his codpiece he remembered Scolpes’ words about assassination in the late twentieth century. What other techniques had been used to gain leverage against powerful police and inaccessible governments?
He had an idea. A funny look came into his eyes and a smile began at the corners of his mouth. At that moment life returned to him; the drug haze lifted from his mind and his perceptions became razor-sharp.
“Anything?”
“Anything!”
“All right, girls,” he said, sitting down at the edge of the bed, “if you really mean it—then I'll show you how I made love to the alien.”
They laughed and clapped their hands in anticipation. Alien sex was the greatest novelty of all.
“But I’m warning you, it’s pretty bizarre. Sure you want to go through with it?”
They did. Unquestionably.
“First you’ll have to get me some props.” Nick rattled off a list.
“A nerve gun?” Althea asked, raising her eyebrows. “What’s that for?”
“You’ll see.”
“I don’t know where I could get a nerve gun this time of night. Anyway, you need a license and—”
“You’re right,” Nick said. “We’d better forget the whole thing.”
“Wait—Daddy keeps one in the night table. I might be able to . .
An hour later they reconvened at the motel. Quiet, retiring Aynn brought her sexual-bondage set, as instructed, a suitcase full of ball gags, handcuffs, leg irons and an assortment of real leather belts for securing the body in a variety of positions.
Dorce wouldn’t say where she had obtained a GE chair at this hour of night, but Nick had a hunch she had stolen it out from under some unfortunate cripple. Petty thievery was one of the girls’ favorite diversions.
And Althea, good old Althea, showed up with the nerve gun. Nick hefted its cool oily weight in his hand and kissed her approvingly on the forehead.
“My folks were asleep,” she confessed. “I tiptoed in and took it.” She laughed. “If Daddy finds out he’ll dock me for a week.”
“Nice going,” Nick said. “Now who wants to be first?”
“Me,” they all shouted, “oh me, Nicky, please, me, me, me.”
“Althea,” Nick said, like a pagan priest picking the sacrificial virgin.
Althea stripped to her underwear, a cross-bra and a culotte of late-twenty-first-century vintage, now considered “erotic antiques.” The black silk was striking against her blond hair. She made herself comfortable in the GE chair while Aynn, the expert on bondage, belted her firmly in place. Slim ankles chained to chair legs, arms pulled back and handcuffed behind, a strap cutting into her small tummy and a ball gag plugging her mouth.
Nick told Aynn and Dorce to wait outside. When they accused him of favoritism, he explained that watching would spoil the surprise. He told them to come back in an hour and, resigned, they trotted off to the snack bar.
Now Nick and Althea were alone. He circled her GE chair, inspecting the bonds. “Pretty snug?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Think you could wriggle out?”
“Unh-unh.”
“I’m sorry I have to do this,” he began, pacing the room. “It’s not like I have anything against you.”
“Huunh?”
He sat down on the bed, very close to her, and continued, looking deep into her eyes.
“I’ve never considered myself a principled person. I always thought that if I found myself in a situation where I had to choose between my beliefs and my personal comfort, comfort would win hands down. But when you think about these things in the abstract, you don’t understand that it’s not a conscious decision; when it really happens, it’s not so much a case of what you want to do as what you have to do.”