"Ah, baby," he murmured, hugging Flair as they both finished orgasms and fell off the tension to that wonderful after-sex glow. "I been sleepwalking. Thought I was back in Dallas with my wonderful Mildred." He'd never been in Dallas and never known a "Mildred" but an ad-lib was called for and a quick-thinking showman had to come up with it.
"Mildred, hell," said Flair, eyes flashing as she struggled out from under him. "When I tell my daddy you raped me, you'll go right off this train to jail."
"Pig!" cried Texas Bunny.
George got up and grabbed his shorts. "Sorry…"
The two women were really angry now.
"George Panther, you've ruined yourself," cried Flair. "Look at me, all filled with your stupid seed."
"Pervert!" said Texas.
But George had a sudden brainstorm. "Hey, Flair you were kinda moist when I mounted." He whirled, grabbed Texas and felt in her crotch. Even through her nightie he could feel that her cunt was much too soft and moist. It had seen action sometime in this night.
"Well, well," he grinned. "It looks like you girls have been at each other tonight. Does your daddy know about that, Flair?"
There was a sudden silence in the compartment.
"Just get out of here, George," said Flair after too long a pause.
"Wou'd've thought it? His ex-mistress and his daughter, fucking each other's brains out. Probably been going on for weeks."
Two pillows came flying in his direction as George laughed and retreated in triumph. He'd knocked off both, Maddy and Flair in one night. His train trip was turned from a dismal flop to a sparkling smash hit all in a few hours. There might even be more up ahead! Maddy didn't know she'd been had, and Flair wouldn't dare tell. He'd hit a Babe Ruth banger over the right field fence!
He retrieved his flask and cuddled back happily into his bunk by the still snoring Phil.
"George," he told the flask as if it were himself, "You're the cat's pajamas. Or is it the Panther's pajamas?"
CHAPTER SEVEN
"Pay attention," said Phil.
He was lecturing Vic Singleton, George Panther, Maddy and Flair on endurance swimming in Vic's suite in a Long Beach hotel. The ex-bootlegger was having a hard time learning about this strange world, but with the announcement of the swim contestant to the papers and radio, Phil insisted that Vic as the sponsor ought to know a little about swimming and endurance.
Phil pointed out that many land mammals besides man could swim, and in the case of fire or catastrophe swim well indeed with no prior experience in the water. Sea mammals, of course, did the best. Whales could swim for thousands of miles at good speeds. Seals could swim easily at five miles an hour and reach up to twenty miles an hour if they were chasing their dinners. Porpoises had been known to keep up with modern steamships, while a mammoth sea turtle had been clocked at twenty-two miles per hour. Penguins could easily do ten miles an hour and go up to thirty in short bursts. Some had been found more than a thousand miles from land, quite happy in the desert of the ocean.
Polar bears were great swimmers, well-insulated for their cold water environment and had been clocked at six miles per hour, while a trained human swimmer would be lucky to do three for short bursts.
Tigers and elephants had been found swimming; the only way they could reach certain isolated islands in the South Pacific or near Africa. Monkeys had been taught to swim for the inducement of food thrown upon the water.
Small mammals were likewise capable of good swimming records. Rats had been kept swimming steadily for fourteen hours, as well as woodchucks, chipmunks, skunks and possums in stints of six to eight hours.
"I hope no skunks enter my race," laughed Vic.
"You'll get a few human ones," commented George.
Phil moved on to human swimmers. Slow in speed they could still last for many hours in the water. Most challenging was the English Channel swim, first conquered by Matthew Webb in August of 1875 in the time of twenty-one hours and forty five minutes. It was thirty-six years before anyone was able to successfully swim the channel again. Several other men accomplished it, but Gertrude Ederle's recent swim was not only the first female success, but she set a new time record of fourteen hours and forty minutes, from France to the English coast and won her ticker tape parade, fame and money. The English Channel distance was exactly twenty-two miles.
"But we have a twenty-two mile swim from Avalon to the California coast," said Phil. "And no one has officially done the Catalina straits at all. So the publicity, after the Ederle swim, is going to be enormous. You, Vic, are going to have to know a little something about professional swimming. The newspapers treat such swims as a kind of weird circus anyway, so a little reality coming from you will help the cause."
He then went into some of the factors that made for good endurance swimming. Protection from the cold was important. That's why he thought Maddy had a good chance to win this show, because women's bodies were better insulated than men's, with a fatty layer just under the skin. However, the Catalina water, even in January, should not be a great problem. Buoyancy was a factor. Surprisingly the best endurance swimmers hung low in the water. Surface swimming offered waves and currents to slow the pace. Those who could swim deeper in the water did better, so a neutral or even negative buoyancy was best. The power in swimming came from the arms and muscles in the upper torso, so the arms should not be too long; a compact, symmetrical torso and arms in proportion was best.
Phil didn't believe that legs counted at all in long-distance swimming.
"The motion's wasted in up and down movement," he said. "It's like pumping a bicycle where most of the effort is wasted in up and down motion, maybe ninety percent. I teach my swimmers to use the legs as little as possible or not at all."
The rest was a matter of the individual's physique. Great oxygen intake, rapid sugar conversion for energy, a slow heart rate from good conditioning, plus an iron will to win – these things made up the pattern of a champion endurance swimmer. To this you could add training for the specific event and that was the whole story.
"What about kinds of strokes?" asked George.
"I teach crawl," said Phil. "However, I long ago learned not to force an ideal stroke on a swimmer. There is no ideal stroke, because bodies are different. I once saw a swimmer with a frenzied eighty or ninety strokes a minute, hanging on top of the water and felt sure he was going to drown. He beat all my well-trained students instead."
"I remember that," said Maddy as they all laughed.
"What kind of gear will Maddy need?" asked Vic.
"Not much," said Phil. "Endurance swimming is cheap. Nose clips if she wants, although most don't use 'em. Some ear protection against later infection, perhaps cotton with a little oil to combat water penetration. A cap to cover the ears, certainly. It cuts down heat loss up to twenty percent. Lots of swims are lost by the swimmer getting too cold; it's as simple as that. Goggles for the eyes, yes, in salt water."
"And grease?" asked George, fantasizing the bodies of the girl swimmers glistening sexually.
"Probably," said Phil, "but you have the problem of a thin grease like Vaseline wearing off too quickly and a thick one like lanolin being hard to apply. You only need a millimeter or so. If nothing else it gives a psychological lift. Also it saves the friction points of the body from burns. Hours in the water and your armpits, groin, shoulders and even chin begin to ache pretty badly. But no grease on the face or arms. Grease on the face makes it impossible to keep the eyegoggles sealed, and on the arms gives you a loss of the arm's biting power in the water. Greased arms allow slippage and loss of power.
"Now," he finished, "you already have learned more than ninety percent of your newspaper readers will know about swimmers and swimming for records. Anything the reporters ask beyond that you can turn over to me as technical consultant."