OPERATION SCRAMBLE
If you think Steve “The Man from O.R.G.Y." Victor
gets into wildly improbable adventures and
weirdly complicated espionage plots-you haven't
seen anything yet.. ..
ls Archie a hero or an anti-hero? Being in his
teens, and with plenty of square edges that
haven’t quite rubbed off yet, he isn’t quite sure
himself. But he has an IQ so high it can hardly
be measured, and he has a talent even greater
than Steve Victor's for getting into trouble!
The furious and funny escapades start when
he falls into a brew of science and alchemy that
only a mad magician could have dreamed up...
and they get more far-out as they go along.
And, of course, there are girls...Ted Mark—type
girls, but with several new twists!
This may be Ted Mark's fastest and funniest book
yet. Don’t just stand there-read it!
THE UNHATCHED
EGGHEAD
TED MARK
1967
CHAPTER ONE
THIS STORY begins with a bang . . .
The blonde removed her bra and panties, stretched out on the bed, and wriggled her hips invitingly. The nervous youth got his legs all tangled up in his pants trying to pull them off over his shoes. Finally he stopped trying, stumbled to the bed, sat down on the edge, and took his shoes off first. He stood up, allowed the trousers to drop to the floor, and tripped out of them. He trembled under the blonde’s compelling stare as he removed his jockey shorts.
“Ooh! Hurry up, lover!” Her voice was husky as she held up her arms to receive him.
The youth fell on top of her, and —
BANG!
It was a pistol shot. It came from the next room. It brought both the youth and the blonde to their feet, startled, passion forgotten, trepidation at the unmistakable sound of the gunshot freezing them for a moment.
The blonde, in keeping with her nature, unfroze first.
“That was a gun being fired,” she said positively. “You’d better go see what happened, Archie.”
Archie? Oh, yeah, meet Archimedes Jones. He’s the hero. He’s a lot of other things, too. Like seventeen years old and six feet tall and a would-be folk singer with a haircut to match. Like also, a genius with a 185 I.Q. and an athlete who came up star quarterback on his prep school team and a very, very wealthy lad to boot. Like a lot of other things besides being a bastard.
A bastard?
Yeah. But an extremely well-adjusted bastard—-in most areas, that is. Oh, Archie has his problems, but his bastardy isn’t one of them. Maybe because he’s a smart bastard, a rich bastard, a young bastard. Anyway, he’s unbugged by being born on the wrong side of the blanket.
That blanket, some eighteen years ago, had been shared by as unlikely a copulating couple as ever conceived in vain disregard of the most elementary principles advocated by Margaret Sanger. The one on top there -- yeah, the one with the spindly shanks and the oversized, balding cranium -- is none other than Albert Stynestein. That's right, one of the three Alberts—Einstein, Schweitzer and Stynestein — one of the three greatest brains of ours or any generation. Yep, Albert Stynestein —- scientist and savant, philosopher and-—might as well face it -- fornicator.
Don’t be scandalized. Man cannot live by E equals mc squared alone. Even a genius needs a little libido release. Even a genius can feel the tug of desire, and Albert Stynestein had felt it as an irresistible yank that night eighteen years ago.
The magnetic pull emanated from Carlotta O’Toole-— that’s right, the one on the bottom. Carlotta and Albert had met at a reception earlier that evening, and, one thing leading to another, here they were. Albert could hardly be blamed for his fall from savant-hood. Carlotta was not the kind of girl even a genius is apt to resist.
She was in her mid-twenties at the time, and already an international sensation as a dancer. Following in the footsteps of Pavlova, Isadora Duncan and—-yes—Mata Hari, Carlotta gave private recitals at fantastic fees for the wealthy and the great. Her performance had been the stellar attraction at the reception in honor of Albert Stynestein. It had charmed him, and meeting her in person after her dance was over had enraptured him even more.
Carlotta’s particular style of beauty often had that effect on men. The sultriness of her Spanish mother and the quick humor and appetite for life of her Irish father had combined in her to form a personality that was truly compelling. She was a tall girl with long black hair and a figure that was both slender and voluptuous. Her body seemed always to move with the fluid grace of a dancer, and her poise was the effortless poise of a woman who has come to accept being stared at with admiration. Of course her I.Q. wasn’t in a league with Stynestein’s, but she was smart enough to remain alluringly quiet when she had nothing to say and to speak sensibly when she did.
Some three months after their casual romp in the erotic hay, Carlotta did find herself with something to say. She placed a long-distance call to Albert Stynestein in Warsaw so that she might say it. Stynestein was called away from an international conference of scientists to hear Carlotta’s words.
“I'm pregnant,” she told him simply.
Stynestein didn’t even ask if she was sure that he was the father. From his one evening with Carlotta, he judged her to be the kind of girl who would not have called him if there was the slightest doubt. And he was right in his judgment. Carlotta wanted nothing from him; she simply felt that it was his right to know about his impending fatherhood.
There had been no lies between them. Carlotta knew that Stynestein was married. She knew that a divorce was out of the question. She also knew that he would feel as she did—that this was a problem that should be discussed between them.
The discussion took place a week later in Genoa. Carlotta was there to give a performance for some very important industrialists who were entertaining a Persian shah with the hope of being granted certain oil leases by him. Stynestein flew down from West Berlin to talk with her
“I don’t want an abortion,” she told him. “I want to have this child. However, I’m not out to flaunt society. I want to have it quietly-—some place in Switzerland, I should think.”
“I will, of course, pay all expenses,” Stynestein insisted.
“And I will gladly let you. I’ve never been able to hold onto the money I’ve earned. I don’t have any now. So I’ll be glad to have you pay the costs.”
“Good. Also, I will contribute to the child’s support after it is born.”
“I’ll appreciate that.” Carlotta was being practical.
“But tell me,” Stynestein wanted to know, “why are you so anxious to have this baby?”
“A child with your intellect and my beauty,” Carlotta said without false modesty. “What woman wouldn’t want to have such a child?”
“Thank you.” Stynestein smiled wryly. “But suppose it has your intellect and my looks?”
“ Plagiarizing epigrams from George Bernard Shaw isn’t worthy of you,” Carlotta told him. “Our child will be a very superior child. It will be a gift to the world. It would be wrong to deprive the world of such a human being."