He unstrapped me gently from my bed, and I began unfastening pieces of his capsule pajamas. We disrobed each other, that is, and for now we were thankful — this is perhaps the one time that we were thankful — that NASA had not undertaken the considerable expense of adding a centrifugal device that would have enabled low gravity in the capsules of the Mars mission. Because once I was unstrapped from bed, we were free to wrestle with each other in the capsule, drifting around, colliding with multibillion-dollar computer systems, like the one that monitors life support, likewise the kitchen gear, and then we were up at the ceiling, and we were French-kissing, and I had never quite realized before how that tongue-sucking business was really aphrodisiacal. Soon we were less than partially clad, Captain Jim Rose and Colonel Jed Richards, and we were the warriors of space, and everything about us was lean and hard and murderous, and I had never before seen how glorious it is, the perfect beauty of ambition and self-assurance that is being male, and all I wanted to do, in that moment, yes, was to have his staff in my mouth. At least, that was my first thought, and my second one dealt with my uncertainty about the circumcision issue, because I had never really spent any time with a cock that was uncircumcised, and if Jim’s space arm, as I had begun to call the thing in my head, was uncircumcised, it was going to require some additional effort on my part. I recognize that there are certain tree-hugging types, environmentalists, free-love advocates, children of that long-ago and historically debunked period known as the Summer of Love, who believe that this age-old variety of genital mutilation is somehow problematic, but I figured if I was circumcised, everyone was circumcised, and these thoughts were racing around in me. Would I even know what to do with it, the space arm, if it was uncircumcised? Would I know what to do with it at all? And there were other questions that you would have if you were a man-love neophyte. Would his body be like my body? How hirsute would it be?
And yet my inclinations were outpacing my philosophical and psychological quandaries, because I was drifting between his legs. Happily so. Before I could answer the questions, I had the space arm before me. I spit in my hand, except that this was not such a superlative idea, because, as with most liquids in the capsule, my saliva sort of went spraying around in little balls. “Well, that’s going to be a little complicated,” I muttered, as I tried to catch some of the spit, with which I then began servicing Jim Rose.
The circumcision issue was no issue at all. I just wanted him! And I wanted him however he was, which happened to be unsheathed according to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Much more fascinating to me was the pumping-leg motion and the mild muscular contractions that I was able to bring about in Jim, despite the fact that this was the first time in, well, thirty years that I had been amorous in the presence of another male. Of course, I have snuck the odd peek at my daughter’s sex-education textbooks, and I know that there are particular response curves to masculine sexuality. Muscular contraction is part of it, as well as contraction of the sphincter. My observations indicated that Captain Jim Rose was in the early phase of sexual release with me, Colonel Jed Richards, and that meant he was probably experiencing desire for me, and feelings of warmth and esteem for my person. Because I was feeling the same way, because I was not feeling lonely and doomed for perhaps the first time on the mission, I knew that it was therefore time to go a little further. I was imagining that I would, in fact, put the space arm in my mouth.
“Jed, you’re just like the coeds I used to buttfuck back at the state school,” he said. On any other day, I think it’s fair to say that this would not have been a romantic remark, not of the sort that I was accustomed to. Buttfuck, it’s just an awful word, when you think about it. It’s amazing that anyone could come to love a word so guttural and so unpleasant. But as Jim began huffing and puffing from my exertions, I recognized that something had truly shifted in me, because now the word buttfuck made the sinews in my groin glut with corpuscular activity. I had to have the space arm; it was like some alien life-form that had to be mine.
“Jim, I’m no coed. I’m no little girl in a French maid’s outfit, but I would be if you wanted me to be. I would be whatever you want me to be.” We whispered these enticements. A little hyperbole was no problem. I wanted to say all the words that needed to be said, as I drifted down below him, and the space arm was orbitally injected ever deeper into my mouth and toward my throat. The space arm was behaving like a nasty little Orion-class rocket, moving recklessly around in the atmosphere of my wet, spittle-filled mouth and lips. I gagged a little. I tried to say something, but my mouth was full. I could say nothing. I cupped the rest of his bounteous tackle, and he held the back of my head.
Jim said, “Do you think it’s just the sickness?”
I tried to say, “Do you mean Space Panic?” I wasn’t sure if I was entirely understood. Jim sighed a sigh of romantic anomie, and then he nodded. “Yes. Space Panic.”
I pulled him out and looked up, licking the dainty walnuts of his testes. “I agree with you. It’s not my kind of sport, or at least it was not my kind of sport on Earth, Jim. But, Jim, we aren’t on Earth anymore. Maybe where we are going, this is the norm. Maybe Mars is the planet where the love between men is not only accepted, but is a hallowed and sacred thing. Who are we? Are we now earthlings? Or are we now the forerunners of a brave new class, men who are not afraid of love and power among themselves?” And with that, I introduced a forefinger into his tight, imperturbable anus, and he moaned in a way that revealed some of the more brute varieties of wildlife.
“More,” he said.
“More what?”
“More of you.”
More of me? The balding, formerly paunchy (but now frequently hungry), blue-eyed, and impish guy with vanishing muscle mass? The space arm said yes. The space arm was rich in veins and purply sections, and the head of it resembled a poisonous mushroom of some kind, perhaps the fly amanita, which I was always told to avoid as a youngster. The space arm was cruel and foul, for example in the profusion of pubic hairs that I kept finding stuck against the roof of my mouth, but I recognized, yes, that cruelty was a fair and beautiful thing, and I wanted it. There were no lengths to which I would not go, nothing I would not do. I was the first-ever interplanetary space slut. Or the first, at any rate, to enter the literature.
“Wait,” I said.
He looked stricken. As though I were going to draw a permanent halt to our space explorations! But I had no such intention. Petrolatum was an important product on the Excelsior, because our skin was patchy and flaky for lack of moisture in the pressurized, recirculated air of the cabin. There was even an official supplier of petrolatum to the Mars mission, and as with other licensing firms, I’m discouraged from naming it, though you will find its banner advertising throughout the site. Nor am I allowed to remark that the official sponsor of petrolatum to the Mars mission was about to serve as the lubricant for Uranian delights.
By my bed, on the little overhead shelf where my personal effects were Velcro’d down, was a precious tube of the stuff. I brandished it, as if I already knew how these props of the trade became fetish objects in their own right.