Mission: Earth "Death Quest" (39 page)

Suddenly I realized there was something on me. It was moving to the beat of the music!

Hey, this was too real for a nightmare even if everything WAS black.

I ripped at my eyes. There was something on my eyes!

I tore it off.

TEENIE!

She was sitting astride me!

She stopped rocking back and forth and looked at me with her big eyes. "Now you've spoiled it," she said.

"Spoiled what?" I raved, trying to get her off of me.

She sat there, not budging an inch. "I was keeping our bargain. You said you never wanted to see me again, so I covered up your eyes. Now you've taken it off and broken our agreement."

"How did you get in here?" I raved.

"You left the back door open," she said. "And don't scold. I am NOT playing hooky. I went straight out yesterday and enrolled in the Hong Kong whore's school. I'm doing it night school and days. I got A plus on my first lessons and now I am doing my homework."

"Get off me and get out of here!" I grated.

She clung firmly astride. "I learned some nice things. I never knew you could do so many things with muscles inside and outside. And I knew you would be fascinated at the rapid progress your protege was making. Feel this."

She sat perfectly still, apparently, but inside her there was a gentle stroking feeling.

"That's just one internal muscle moving," she said. "It's the yummy-yum muscle. All the muscles have names. If I set another one opposite it going, you would (bleepulate) and we don't want that so quick. So, pretty good for a street urchin, huh? I can see that you liked it. Right now I'm holding you in the 'whoa-boy' position that prevents a 'too-soon.' Oh, I feel I'm getting somewhere, now. Even my parents will be proud of me."

"Hey, I thought your parents were dead."

"Oh, no. They are doing life in a maximum-security Federal pen. They engineered a presidential-assassination attempt that failed and when they went to prison I

was made a ward of the court. But the judge wouldn't appoint a guardian: he kept me in his chambers so I could handle him with oral testimony and relax him in the middle of difficult cases."

I stared at her. This was an entirely different story of her life than she had told me yesterday. What was I dealing with in this female monster?

"You get out of here," I said, "you broke your bargain!"

"No. You broke it. You're the one who took the cover off your eyes. Don't blame others for your own misdeeds."

"Teenie," I said, "you get off of me, put your clothes back on and get the Hells out of here. And take your (bleeped) Chinese positions and muscles with you!"

"This one, too?" she said.

My hand clutched the side of the bed. Then it began to relax. My fingers straightened out stiffly, quivering.

An errant bee wandered in from the garden, buzzed in circles round and round at the window.

A potted plant began to spin.

The buzz of the bee went up and down in volume.

"This is 'rickshaw boy, chop, chop,'" said Teenie in a strained voice.

The potted plant swung faster. "Now I'll let you!" Teenie cried.

The potted plant exploded.

The bee soared off into the sky but it wasn't its buzz I was hearing. It was the expiring croon of Teenie. She raised her eyes to me triumphantly. "Oh, boy," she said, "now I think even you will agree that I will amount to something when I'm fully educated."

I didn't push her off. I felt too weak.

After a little, she said, "Now kiss me." As her mouth

was on mine, I couldn't avoid it. She raised her head a bit. "No, not like that! Here's a proper kiss. Open your mouth slightly, put it in the Q position. Now take your tongue..."

I groaned as a second potted plant began to spin. Then a third one started to turn. Then a fourth one began to rotate.

The second exploded. The third exploded. The fourth exploded.

I conked out, unconscious.

A long time later, a voice said, "For God's sake! It's five o'clock! And you're still in bed!" It was Adora.

I looked around wildly. The effort made my head feel like it was being hit with an axe. No Teenie. I was -all alone in bed.

"Where is she?" I babbled.

"She's in the other room," said Adora. "Both of them are. One is a blonde, the other a brunette, and they're hot as a forest fire to find out what real sex is. This is no time for you to be having wet dreams when the quarry is in the front room. So tallyho. Let's get after the tail!"

"I can't," I said. "I'm totally exhausted and my head is killing me."

"Oh, that again!" said Adora. She went to a table, stuffed and lit the bhong. I searched in vain within me to find energy to object. She came back and put the stem in my mouth. "You want to fool with a bhong, then stop fooling with it. By the numbers, six big inhales. One... hold it, hold it, hold it. Exhale. Two..."

We got through the six. Everything had gone gray and soft. I was floating. Memory was starting to fade. So was the instinct to survive.

"You seem to have developed a taste for music," said

Adora. "Good sign. I'll go out and play the record you left on the stereo."

Presently here it came, booming through the room-Do
it, do it, do it!

Adora was there again. She had a pill and a glass. She put the pill in my mouth. I could not object, given the deadly and determined look on her face. "That's Benzedrine," she said. "An ordinary upper. Well, don't just lie there holding it in your mouth, you idiot. The capsule will melt and the stuff is bitter. Chase it down with this."

The pill
was
bitter. I gulped the liquid convulsively.

GIN!

A tumbler full of raw gin! And I had it down before I found out!

I was gasping painfully from the assault on my throat. Then flame exploded in my stomach.

Adora's eyes held that deadly gleam. She said, "Now get out of that bed and go into the front room. And do it, do it, do it!"

I have no memory at all of that evening. She had said they were a blonde and brunette but they might as well have been horses for all I knew of it.

About 3:00 A. M., it must have been, I heard a deadly voice. "For Christ's sake, stop screaming!" It was Adora. She was standing beside the couch where I now slept in the back room. She was a bit tousled from having been asleep.

"They're after me," I told her.

"Who's after you now?"

"The Fates," I babbled. "They're standing all around the corners of the room with pills and bhongs in their hands."

"Oh, you're just seeing multiple. It's me, standing

here, trying to give you a sleeping pill. Quit spouting nonsense and take it."

I took it but Adora Bey nee Pinch was wrong. The Fates
were
after me, as I shortly was going to find out! With shock!

That very afternoon, I had missed my second opportunity to kill Teenie. And the horror of it is, I didn't even realize it until much later-fatally MUCH later.

And right then, had I had my wits about me, I might have seen another Fate face grinning at me ghoulishly.

I didn't even think of Freud and his unerring analysis of dreams. Frankly, I will be candid, that omission was the only mistake I ever made in my entire professional career. Oh, I could weep tears of blood as I recall it now. One should never desert his Gods as I deserted Freud that night. Even two minutes spent on dream analysis would have told me of horrors to come that even now I have difficulty facing.

Adora awakened me by the simple expedient of kicking me in the stomach. It was morning. I evidently had fallen out of bed. She was standing there, dressed for work.

"Listen, you (bleep)," she said, "you're sleeping too much. Get up and around and stir yourself. Go for a walk. Get some air. A hell of a looking husband you are. You're developing prison pallor. Are you listening?"

"Yes," I said apprehensively, watching her feet at the

level of my face. My head felt like a balloon and I was afraid she'd kick it and burst it.

"I woke you up to give you some good news," she said. "A compulsory attendance staff meeting has been called at Octopus. It's a lecture on abortion with a live demonstration by some new star of the psychiatric world, Dr. Crobe. He's just another (bleeping) quack like they all are, but I know it will go on half the night with Rocke-center drooling. Did you know the (bleepard) fired poor Teenie?"

I was watching her feet carefully.

"The rotten ape was giving a personal staff inspection the way he does every month and he spotted she was full of semen. He had her kicked clear down the stairs."

Something was awry. "That isn't what she said."

"Has Teenie been here?"

"She was on the phone," I lied quickly. There might be something wrong with telling the truth and it's always safer to prevaricate in such moments.

"Well, the Chief of Security was my source and he was right there. He may be a (bleep) but he doesn't lie. The poor kid is so uneducated she didn't even know enough to take a douche after she was here. So there went my plans. But never mind, I'll find other uses for her. Anyway, that's beside the point. One of the girls last night said you looked like a warmed-over corpse. So get out and around and get some air. Then maybe tomorrow night you can put on a better show."

She left and I was very glad to no longer have feet with a kick impulse in them near my head. Belatedly, the corpse remark struck me. Was somebody intending to make me into a corpse?

I was sort of confused. Maybe I had better look at the viewers.

Crobe was busy preparing lecture notes and knives. Heller was just then taking a look all around the horizon from some high place. Nothing in sight-not even a ship. Lords, he must be a long way away.

Krak's was blank.

I felt sort of fixated on the viewers. There was something wrong here. It eluded me. I concentrated very hard. If Heller was far away and still on the viewer and Krak wasn't on the viewer, then Krak had to be further away.... I sort of gave it up. Something was odd.

A bright voice almost made me jump out of my wits. "Those morning programs don't have any good rock groups on them. And you have to get the soap operas in the afternoon to get good sex. So why are you watching TV at this time of day? God, do YOU need education!"

Teenie.

"How the Hells did you get in here?"

"I took your key yesterday. I had it copied. Here's yours back. I'm on my way to school. I can't stay long."

"Good! You wore the hell out of me yesterday."

"Really trained, hey?" she said, grinning like a ghoul. "Shows you what education can do. I'm so glad you liked it. But the reason I stopped by was to tell you I can't be here this afternoon."

"Wonderful. I hope you're leaving for China for a ten-year postgraduate course!"

"No, no. The crash course is not that long. It's only a couple weeks. That's why I have to put in extra time this afternoon. I have an appointment for a special rundown on hygiene and disease control. Special demonstrations."

I flinched. "Disease?" I had specters of suddenly coming down with all kinds of oriental germs. "Look," I said anxiously, "yesterday, before you were here, you

hadn't just done it with a bunch of Chinese men, had you?"

She gave her ponytail a sad tug.
"That
is what is so frustrating. It's not the
old
Chinese method. It's the new,
scientific
Chinese system. They use probes and meters. They set a probe to register just one muscle and put it in you. It's hooked up to a big scope and you watch the scope. Then you have to learn to locate that muscle yourself and when you do, it shows up on the scope. It's like learning to wiggle your ears. Once you find the muscle yourself, you can move it. You get so you can locate and independently move each muscle at will." She sighed. "But there are absolutely dozens of different muscles. It's pretty tedious, sorting them all out with nothing in you but a probe. But look."

Before I could stop her, she opened her coat and pulled her skirt up above her flat, thin belly. She had a single muscle in her stomach moving. "I had a (bleep) of a time finding that one." She sat down and fanned her legs apart and pointed to the inside of her thigh. "But the nerve-impulse exercises are the worst. See the tape mark? They put an electrode on you, one place at a time. It's joined up to a big scope, too. And you learn to send an energy impulse at that exact point and if you master it, it shows up on the scope. You have to get so you can send energy surges through about fifty different places and THEN learn how to block them. After that, it gets a bit more interesting. You have to be able to do it yourself on
another
body."

"Cover yourself up," I said. "I feel terrible."

"What interests me, though," she said as though I had not spoken, "is the daily hour of sexual choreography. Watch!" She leaped up, pulled her coat and skirt up under her armpits and her hips went into a very fast

rotating grind. "That's the
siva-siva.
The Chinese say they taught it to the Tahitians long ago. Isn't it wild? I can just stand here relaxed and rotate like this for hours. It sort of feels good, too. And there's dozens of these." She pve a leap and came down grinding against a chair in a new way.

The bounce and sudden movements to which she was prone made my eyes and head hurt, just watching. "Please leave," I pleaded. "I feel utterly awful!"

She stopped. "Jesus Christ, Inky. Haven't you got any appreciation for art either?" She came over and looked at me, her big eyes a lot too close. She put her hand on my forehead. "Hey, Inky. Have you got a headache?"

"You got the idea," I said.

"And after all that good therapy I gave you, too," she said. "Have you been eating something or drinking something?"