“Hold that for a second,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, unexpectedly. “Don’t move. We need to get a fix on those R-points. Just hold still. Good. Great. Good. You still comfortable?”
“I think so.”
“Good. You seem comfortable. Now we need to get a few motion-profiles. This is an entirely new repetitive motion for the real-time tracking system, so you have to bear with us, please. The software is going to teach itself to follow your arm. Okay — first will you go ahead and masturbate slowly, just as you would typically do it perhaps in an early phase.”
“In an early phase …” I mused. “Probably I would change to the tight-fisted grip. And probably I’d squeeze it hard while I pumped it very slowly up and down. Like this.” I parted my legs, so that my feet rested on the curving, culvert-like walls of the magnet’s bore, and pumped. “Ooo, I like to feel the little hole get pulled open when I pump.”
“Great, thanks. Okay.” There was more murmuring among the researchers. I loved being studied. I loved that my simple self-pumping pleasure was going to yield scientific results. Dr. Orowitz-Rudman came back on and said, “Arno, now could you stimulate your penis fast?”
“How fast?”
“As fast as you normally might. We want to be sure we don’t lose the image when you get serious.”
“I understand.” I pounded my cock as if I were shaking a daiquiri in a busy bar, as if I were applauding after a marvelous performance of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, as if I were playing the only maraca in a salsa band. My body bounced and flopped on the vinyl pads.
“Whoa,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman.
“Could you track that?” I asked.
“No way,” she said. “Go slower. Slower.”
“How about that?”
“Nope. Slower. Slower. Slower still. Slower. There! That’s the fastest you can go. Is that going to be fast enough?”
I made a doubtful noise. “That is awfully slow. Isn’t that about how slow I was going when you asked me to demonstrate my slow speed? I really honestly don’t know that I will be able to come going that slow.”
There was some inaudible conferring on their side of the intercom. Then Dr. Orowitz-Rudman said, “Okay, that’s fine, Arno. Not to worry. Give us a second. We’re going to try something different. Just hang on for a moment.”
“On the other hand,” I added in a thoughtful tone. “I guess you don’t need me to come, right? There is no real reason why I need to come for this motion study. How self-centered of me.”
Dr. Orowitz-Rudman’s voice came on. “On the contrary, I think it’s crucial for the success of this preliminary study that you masturbate straight through. You yourself alluded to the reason why just a moment ago. As you approach climax, you will be feeling such pleasure and stroking your penis so fast that you’ll be much more likely to traumatize the nerve-sheath without knowing it.”
“You’re quite right,” I said. “I do have to come.”
“Just give us another second to tune the gate-and-correlate software. You see,” she explained, “we have to be able to stay fixed on precisely the same cross-section of one tiny region in your arm, no matter how fast you move or how you turn, which is no easy task. We do it with the help of an entirely separate optical tracking system. The optical system, by the way, incorporates some hardware that was originally developed by Martin Marietta for one of the Defense Department’s target recognition programs. It does two hundred and fifty compares a second, which is very fast — it should be fast enough for this application.”
“So I wouldn’t be here naked, doing this, if it weren’t for the Department of Defense?” I said. “There you go. Who says military research doesn’t have humanitarian payoffs?”
“Bear with us for just a little longer, Arno,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. I gave my richard a couple of maintenance strokes every fifteen seconds or so. Finally I heard her say, “Okay, we’re set. You may start actual masturbation at any time.”
“Okay, I’m starting,” I said. “I’m back to the Kokomo grip. It doesn’t feel all that great yet — I’m doing it because I know it will feel good very shortly. There is some definite tingling-action in my fingers. I’ll give you a play-by-play. This is great to be allowed to jerk off in a fucking mega-magnet like this. I just know I’m going to be a different person after I come in this big-mama magnet. Focus it right on my big dick. Pardon my language: if you want me to talk while I do it, I’m going to have to talk dirty. You know what it reminds me of? Zardoz. Zardoz is a movie with Sean Connery. These superior beings bring Connery into their ship, and the woman superior being who is in charge of researching him tries to find out what makes his heart beat faster. They project various sexual images on a screen in the spaceship to see how he will react — a pair of breasts being soaped up, for example. His brain-wave levels remain utterly calm and unmoved. And then Connery looks straight at her, at the woman researcher, and instantly the EEG oscilloscopes start hopping and beeping right off the chart. So it’s the superior being who gets him wild. Now, it seems a little implausible to me that the soaped-up breasts would do nothing at all for Connery — they certainly did something for me when I saw this movie back in the seventies. I haven’t seen it since and yet I remember it as the finest footage of soaped-up breasts I’ve ever seen, partly because it was so teasingly quick.”
“Arno — the pain in your arm,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “What is its status?”
“Sorry. I’m experiencing a little more pain just above my wrist, and a cold feeling in my hand. But it hurts good, it’s well worth it. I’m going to shift to the fist-fucking grip. Yeah, there we go. Yeah! To come for you here this evening, I think I’m going to adapt that scene in Zardoz: I’m going to think of a guy who is asked to masturbate inside a huge magnetic tunnel while three women superior beings observe his carpal tunnel. They are interested in determining with scientific certitude whether his masturbation contributes to his nervous inflammation. It almost certainly does, but they want to capture the images of the poor frail nerve leading to his hand getting squeezed and traumatized as he gives himself pleasure. They are trying out some brand-new fancy software that focuses the magnetic field in a new way. This software uses some tricks refined over at CERN, in fact. But this new software has a bug; it has a serious unintended side-effect on this masturbating man. They trim his pubic hair, they dot his dick in a tribal pattern, they shove him in the magnet, and they tell him to start jacking off, and then, as his hand is shuffling smoothly up and down on his penis, some kind of bizarre, anomalous micro-funnel develops in the universal core of time. A chronomaly. Within the magnet, time is sucked in on itself and twisted and compressed in such a way that the man’s nerve — which is where all the analytic strength of the resonating system is focused — his nerve acquires the ability to stop and start time’s progress at will. What happens is: the man’s arm heats up for a second, tingling, as if it’s in a microwave on defrost, and then he discovers that he can put humanity on hold every time he snaps his middle finger. He lets go of his dick and he tries it out. Like this: snap.”