Above his desk was a motto suggested ironically 'by a skeptical friend. Dr. Dashwood saw nothing funny about it and adopted it as his own banner:
SCIENCE, PURE SCIENCE, AND DAMNED BE HE
WHO FIRST CRIES "HOLD, TOO MUCH!"
As he settled himself at his desk he observed that Ms. Karrige, his secretary, had already poured his coffee for him. Fine: The girl (femperson, he corrected) was really getting broken to the harness. He whipped out his thermometer and measured the black liquid in the cup: 98.4 degrees. Excellent: She was learning to meet his exacting demands.
Dr. Dashwood could not abide inexactitude or slovenliness in any human activity. "A thing worth doing," he would explain to his subordinates, "is worth doing right." He said this often, and malicious members of the staff said it even more often, when he was out of earshot, with a tone and a facial expression that were caricatures of his own.
With a smile on his lips and a glint in his eye, Frank Dashwood buzzed Ms. Karrige. "What's first for today?" he asked cheerfully.
The Jabberwock was growing: The key was no key…
FUNNY VALENTINE
Megalithic monuments were certainly not places of worship but places of refuge for people fleeing the advance of mud.
–furbish lousewart V, Unsafe Wherever You Go
While Dr. Dashwood was pressing his buzzer in San Francisco, Starhawk was carefully screwing two mountain climber's hooks into a hill across the bay in Oakland. The first rope was wrapped around his waist outside the trousers, ran through a pulley, and came back to his hand. The second rope circled his chest, ran through the second pulley, and was secured to a tree. He began lowering himself down through the redwoods.
At first there was no visibility at ground level, but as he descended the roof of Murphy's house a bit of yard came into view. None of the neighboring houses was visible at all.
Approaching Murphy's roof, Starhawk slowed and then stopped his descent. In midair he turned, every muscle straining, and continued his descent headfirst, legs tightly together, the style of a professional highdiver. A small film of perspiration formed around his lips. He was totally silent.
Twice, redwood branches almost tangled his ropes. He remained totally silent while disengaging.
Finally, he gripped the roof edge with his left hand, let out more slack with his right, and lowered himself until he was looking in the corner of a window upside down. It was the bedroom. Murphy wasn't there. The bed was unmade.
Starhawk raised himself, swung, and descended again to inspect another window. The living room. Murphy was sitting in a red plush chair, his face expressionless. He was listening to music on the stereo. A shotgun leaned against the wall behind him.
Very slowly, Starhawk raised himself again and swung to the next window. In five minutes, totally silent, he was sure that there was nobody in any of the other rooms.
He slowly raised himself again and found a perch in a redwood that commanded a view of the front yard and doorway. He waited.
The music from the stereo drifted up to him. Peggy Lee was singing "My Funny Valentine."
After waiting forty-five minutes, Starhawk descended again. Murphy was no longer in the living room. The shotgun was missing also.
"The fuck?" Starhawk muttered.
He swung carefully over to the bedroom window. The shotgun rested against the wall beside the closet.
Murphy came out of the closet and picked up the shotgun again. Careful man, that Murphy; never go anywhere without your shotgun when you're holding maybe half a million in hot snow.
Murphy looked quite happy now. He looked like the happiest man Starhawk had ever seen.
Starhawk returned to his perch in the redwood tree. Murphy had obviously taken a snort of the coke and was probably feeling like Luke Skywalker heading for the Death Star. Starhawk waited silently. It was good to know where the cocaine was.
A few minutes later a squirrel came along an overhead branch and almost walked over Starhawk's rope. He stopped, frozen: unable to believe that a human being was way up here in the tree.
Starhawk and the squirrel stared at each other, both immobile. Then the squirrel ran.
Starhawk smiled. He went on waiting, quietly.
FIRST MAMMAL-ROBOT DYAD
Dr. Dashwood buzzed Ms. Karrige. "What's first for today?" he asked cheerfully, eager to plunge directly back into the thick of things, as was typical of him on Monday mornings.
"The uh colored gentleman from New York," came the tinny voice on the intercom.
"Send him right in!" Frank said eagerly.
Robert Pearson was dressed in his "dealing with the straight establishment" clothes, which meant that he looked like the black equivalent of a Mafia don moving in on a legit corporation. You had to look twice to realize that he was too resplendent to appear really conservative.
"You really have the um merchandise?" Dr. Dashwood asked.
"I wouldn't waste your time otherwise," Pearson said carefully.
"And it's not flaccid? I can get them in flaccid state'from Johns Hopkins's sex-change department, by the gross. This must be totally erect, and I can't imagine how you managed that…"
Pearson removed a package from his briefcase. "See for yourself," he said.
Dr. Dashwood spent several minutes examining the ghoulish trophy. Pearson sat back and lit up a black Sher-man cigarette. He was wondering just how surprised Dashwood would be if he mentioned his own long-ago Ph.D. or his career as lead guitarist with Clark Kent and his Supermen. He was just another black gangster as far as Dashwood knew or cared.
"It's real," Dr. Dashwood said finally. "A beautiful specimen," he added with total scientific detachment. Then he looked directly at Pearson with unblinking curiosity. "You either have a friend with a truly desperate need for money or an enemy who now knows what it means to rouse your anger," he commented mildly.
The haggling over money began at that point. Pearson left on the noon flight to New York, bearing $10,000, which later found its way to Afghanistan and came back in the form of bricks of pure hashish.
Dr. Dashwood, meanwhile, was in m.o.q.-the multiple-orgasm-quotient laboratory-making certain technical adjustments on the ACE equipment. ACE-for artificial coital equipment-had been devised by the Masters-Johnson team and allowed a plastic imitation penis, containing microphotographic devices, to stimulate the inside of a vagina while obtaining clear photographic evidence of the actual physiological changes occurring therein. Orgasm Research had used the same model in their investigation of m.o.q.-the endeavor to find out precisely how many orgasms a multiply orgasmic woman could actually have without untoward side effects. It was Dashwood's conviction that, the physiological data being already determined, a real penis was more practical now; but a year-long search for the once-famous Cuban Superman had failed to locate the stalwart stud. ("Those bloody puritanical Commies have probably rehabilitated him into more socially useful work," Dashwood concluded mournfully.)
Now at last with the relic of Wildeblood's quantum jump across the gender gap attached to ACE, Dashwood had the ideal scientific instrument to measure m.o.q.
A subject had been obtained via ads placed in underground newspapers throughout the state of California. ("What do Easterners know about fancy fucking?" Dashwood asked, ruling out everybody on the other side of the Rockies. All that part of the country, he firmly believed, was a puritan's heaven and a hedonist's hell.) The ad said bluntly: