Whatever Goes Up

by Troy Conway

  Somebody yelled, “Go up and give her a hand!”

  A dozen voices shouted happily. Up came the girls, closely followed by the lab men. By this time, the body stocking was around her hips. The redhead was bending forward, hissing down at me to stop being so clumsy.

  I eyeballed her dangling white breasts and red nipples that were shaking and jouncing to my movements. Seeing how lovely her upper structure was only made me more determined to sec what the rest of her was like. I used both hands to grab the thin blue rayon and tug it down past her hips, along her somewhat plump white thighs, to her knees.

  Now I could see the shaven mound of her privacy. That she could not cover, since both her hands were too busy holding onto her gravity belt. She was goggling down at me with her big blue eyes, and her breasts were still doing their fleshy dance while her body sought to fight me.

  “What are you doing?” she gasped. “You idiot, you’re taking my clothes off! Let go. you’ve got me stark naked!”

  “Yeah,” I breathed. “Sorry about that, honey.”

  I yanked the rest of the body stocking loose and let it fall slowly groundward. Now I turned my controls and lifted upward, kissing her left thigh all the way up to her hip. My tongue came out to lave her skin.

  She moaned, quivering. Like her boss, Doctor Howard, she had been a long time without loving. I opened my mouth, I fastened soft moist lips on her femininity.

  We hung suspended in the air while I made oral love to her. She gasped and shook and went all gooey on me. Her pallid hips bucked wildly to my caresses.

  The others could see what was going on as they ascended. They were oddly silent, only the burning eyes in their upturned faces betraying the realization that they too could go a little of this sort of thing.

  My redhead was tightening her belt about her naked middle so that the soft flesh bulged above and below the leather. Then her hands slid down to my head, pressing it deeper to her as her thighs widened slowly. At the same time she threw herself backwards so that we began to rotate slowly, forming an aerial acrobatic act of acts.

  I was removing my own clothes, sliding down my slacks and shorts, tossing my shirt to the winds, so to speak. My right arm slid upward to clasp her belt and use it as a lever to pull myself upward.

  Now I dared to risk a glance about me.

  The huge Quonset hut was filled with boys and girls happily stripping one another of their garments. I had set them a fine example, making them realize what they had been missing all these long months they had been working so hard for Doctor Howard.

  The air space below their slowly gyrating bodies was filling with body stockings and jockey shorts, lab smocks and trousers dropping groundward until it looked like a surrealistic wash day, without clothes lines. A beefy blonde girl was yelping as she reached across to a male technician who was floating past her. Her fingers grabbed him by his handle and drew him toward her.

  Two brunettes were sandwiching a grinning man between their nude bodies, squirming happily on his nudity, fore and aft. An angelic blonde had wrapped her bare legs about the hips of a baby-faced young scientist and was busily engaged in pumping pleasure into both their bodies. I stabbed upward and into my redhead. She moaned and lay back, floating in the air as though in free-fall. We could not drop, the belts held us suspended in the air and lazily turning over and over as our bodies writhed and twisted where they were joined. It was weird and wild, it was a tri-dimensional turn-on, it was way-out and way-up living graphics.

  All about us, other male and female bodies were united and slowly revolving, so that one moment the man was on top, then he was on the bottom, then both man and women were on their sides, lazily drifting. One couple had even assumed the soixante-neuf posture, with her calves hanging past his shoulders, her long blonde hair streaming down between his thighs.

  Below me, I heard someone yell.

  I peered past the redhead’s pale, freckled shoulder down at Beatrice Howard, who was struggling in the arms of the overheated guard. She was trying to battle him, her sweater was half off and hanging by a couple of woolen threads from a bared arm. Her brassiere was jumping around as if trying to throw her breasts out into the open. With her left hand she was trying to slap the guard, since her right hand was too busy hanging onto the skirt he was fighting to pull down.

  Her plight suggested that Bea was a little out of her depth in this levitation love-in. She certainly seemed to be refusing the attentions of the guard. But my plan called for the guard to be busy, too, in this aerial aphrodisia.

  My companion was too interested in her internal convulsions to notice when I turned down her belt buckle and my twin controls. Our bodies sank slowly through the air, until the action was all over our heads except for the struggle going on between Bea and the guard.

  The man with the leathery face and pale blue eyes had stripped himself naked by this time, and was still trying to do the same thing to Doctor Howard. She was having none of it, she was fighting hard and doing a better job of it than she had against me two days before.

  I caught the guard with one hand, pushed him toward the redhead who was drifting in the air on her back maybe four feet above the ground, a beatific smile on her mouth.

  I unfastened my two belts, buckled them around him and shoved him toward the redhead.

  He caught on fast. His hand whirled the controls; seconds later, he and the girl were spiraling slowly as they went upward into the air.

  Beatrice Howard was sobbing, “Th-this is a-all your f-fault! I’ve never had any trouble with them and now. . . .”

  I said nothing, I just reached for a belt and strapped it about her waist. I grabbed two more for myself. She interrupted me only long enough to gasp, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “They need relaxation, honey,” I told her. “This is the best thing that could have happened to our organization. You needed loving—you know you did, you admitted it the other day when we were in bed together—so what makes you think these kids are any different from us?”

  I was turning her dials, she was lifting upwards into the air. I came after her, just below her high-heeled shoes, getting a look up under her skirts, along her stockinged legs and bare thighs where her garterclasps winked at me.

  I reached up my hands, slid them from her ankles upward as my body rose beneath her. My palms did not have to move, my body did the rising, my twin belts lifting me faster than her single belt lifted her. Over warm thigh-flesh beneath nylon stockings, over her bare thighs to her pantied hips, my hands traveled slowly.

  Beatrice Howard was staring upward at a couple who were performing the somewhat complicated bamboo cleft position, in which the right foot of the female rests on the left shoulder of the male, while her left leg is stretched out horizontally, tight against his right leg. Bea was licking her lips, studying the to and fro play of female hips and male loins.

  Her skirt rose upwards on my forearms as I shoved it out of the way. Her stockinged legs and bare thighs were revealed to the world of the Quonset hut, but everyone else was too busy to pay them any attention. I grabbed her panties, ripped them loose.

  “Yes,” she whispered suddenly, turning her head so she could stare into my face. “Yes, yes. Do me! Do me! I have a fire inside me, Rod. A fire!”

  She lifted her legs. The movement rolled her over in the air until she was on her back. I slipped into position between her thighs. She gave a cry as she felt my priapic splendor entering into her. Her arms came up around me, her heels pressed on the back of my thighs.

  Her hips lifted and rotated. Ecstasy gurgled inside her.

  “Strip me,” she breathed. “Strip me naked while you’re doing me. Let them see what I’ve become through love for you.”

  My hands went around behind her back as my loins stabbed and jarred her where she lived. My fingers fastened on the snaps of her black brassiere. I undid them, I drew the brassiere straps down her arms and threw the twin-cupped garment and her torn sweater toward the floor.
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  We were rotating slowly in the air. She grew aware that her heavy breasts were slipping and sliding around on her chest as her body turned over and over. This added to her sensual delight, for I had already discovered that her breasts were extremely sensitive.

  My hands caught her breasts, held them while they hung floorward, squeezed them as they lay flat on her chest when she turned around onto her back. I pinched her nipples, I swung them back and forth. She throbbed and pulsed around me, she wailed in her throat and jerked her hips frantically.

  My reason told me I must exhaust this woman if I was to have the opportunity to search for some clue as to where to find the Space Travel Limited laboratory. So I concentrated on causing a sexual exhaustion in this woman scientist, of the sort known to the French as avoir du ma, a satiation of the senses which produces complete unconsciousness.

  It took me half an hour.

  When she lay limp in my arms, I dialed us downward. The rest of the levitation love-in was proceeding with all flags flying. The boys and girls were changing partners up there where the painted clouds never moved, devoting themselves to making up for the celibate lives they had been leading.

  I placed the comatose Doctor Howard on the floor.

  Then I ran for the Quonset hut lobby. The closed door seemed to beckon me. I raced for it. My hand turned the knob, the door was not locked. I walked into a bathroom.

  The old ticker sank like a stone falling through air.

  All my trouble was for nothing!

  But—wait. Hold on, now. There was a door off to one side of the toilet. Maybe that was what I wanted. True, it might be a closet to contain pails and mops for a cleaning lady, but then again—

  I opened the door and sagged against the door jamb. I was looking in at two green metal filing cabinets, a small desk with a chair behind it. There was a lounge chair to one side of the desk and beyond the file cabinets was a clothes tree on which were hung a number of garments. Bull’s-eye!

  I leaped for the desk. It was locked. So were the filing cabinets. I was stark naked, I had no file or bit of celluloid to open the locks. Then it dawned on me. It was just possible that one of the smocks hanging on the clothes tree had a key in its pockets. I found it.

  The desk drawers opened and I ransacked them. Nothing! A few letters, none of which told me anything except that Beatrice Howard did not pay her bills on time. I saw a map, neatly folded over. I drew it out and glanced at it.

  It was a map of the Exuma Cay section of the Bahama Islands. Nothing there to hold my interest, I’d seen a dozen of them. I put the map down on top of the desk and resumed my search. Five minutes later, as I was replacing the letters and other papers in the drawers, I reached for the map. When I touched it, the paper was warm from the rays of the Bahaman sunlight falling on it through the only window in the room.

  I glanced at the map, found my attention caught by a circled dot close by one of the small islands in the chain that runs from Sail Rocks to Hog Cay for almost two hundred miles. The dot and circle had not been there before, when I had looked at the map. Of this I was positive.

  Secret writing? With lemon juice, that appears when the paper is warmed? Sunlight falling on the map had heated it.

  I studied the dot and circle for several seconds. They had been placed to designate an unnamed island not far from Gabber Cay where the Quonset hut stood. I committed the location to memory, then folded the map and—

  The door opened. Laura Ogden stood there, staring at me. Just behind her was Beatrice Howard, whose face seemed carved from red clay in her rage. There was a small automatic in Laura Ogden’s hand.

  “Well,” she smiled coldly. “Well, well, well!”

  Clever dialogue. I smiled weakly, shaking my head. “Something tells me it isn’t so well, Laura.” “You bastard!” screeched Doctor Howard.

  She pushed Laura aside and came for me with fingers spread wide, her red fingernails like talons, arms out in front of her nearly naked body. All she wore was a lab smock, which she had no doubt donned hastily. The smock flapped open to her running, revealing that she wore nothing under it.

  I fended her off, grabbed her wrists and turned her toward Laura and her automatic. I grinned at Laura over the shoulder of the panting woman who fought me with the fury of a trapped tigress. Her bare heels butted my legs, she turned her face to try and bury her teeth in my hand.

  “Better not shoot,” I told Laura. “You’ll kill the boss.” I felt Beatrice Howard sag against me.

  “Do-don’t shoot,” she quavered. “Let him go, Laura.”

  Laura glanced sharply at the lady boss, then shrugged. “Okay, if you say so. But I wouldn’t trust that man if he swore an oath on a mile of Bibles.”

  “I just want out,” I told her. “Go get my slacks and sweater, hon.”

  Laura turned on a heel and went out through the doorway. I said to Doctor Howard, “You’re being smart. You won’t get hurt if you behave yourself.”

  I relaxed my muscles. The woman was not fighting me, she appeared to have surrendered. Nor did she make any effort to stop me as I came around the side of the desk and, pushing her ahead of me, walked into the bathroom. This was my mistake.

  Two men, hiding on either side of the door, jumped me. Beatrice Howard pulled free, shrieking, “Take him alive, take him alive!”

  I felt as if I were already dead, because one of the men bounced a revolver barrel off my skull just as the other rammed a fist into my kidneys. I sagged as my whole body went limp. I started to fall forward.

  Bea came to meet me, lifting a bent leg up from her standing pose before me, bashing her dimpled knee into my face. I had a glimpse of her tanned thigh, her black pubic hair and the lower half of her mounded belly a second before the knee hit. After that, except for the one brief spasm of pain that ran through my flesh on the impact, I didn’t know a damn thing.

  I came to, dripping water.

  Beatrice Howard was standing over my naked body. I was trussed up like a fowl for the cooking, with ropes about my wrists and ankles. There was an empty pail of water in her hands. The water that had been inside the pail was splashed all over me.

  My head shook weakly. My face felt crushed in.

  Laura Ogden was standing beside the doctor, also glaring down at me. She snarled, “Let’s cut his pecker off!” Nice girl, Laura.

  “No,” I managed to get out.

  Beatrice Howard smiled cruelly. “I’d thought of that. I’ve also thought of wiring him to a big spit and cooking him over a fire for a couple of days. But I have a better plan. We’ll kill him in such a way that nobody will ever know what happened to him.”

  The two men who had attacked me were standing behind me. At Bea’s orders, they reached down and yanked me to my feet. Walking on either side of my limp body, they dragged me out of the bathroom and into the little lobby of the Quonset hut.

  They dropped me with a thud on the bare dirt.

  I was aware that the boys and girls who had been enjoying the levitation love-in were getting into their clothes. From their silence, I gathered that they were a pretty subdued bunch. The sudden entry of Laura Ogden had made them see themselves as they had been, I imagine, animals up there in the air, rotating and writhing in their passions.

  One by one, they filed past my naked body, some of them glancing down at me in mute sympathy. A few averted their eyes; maybe they blamed me for the post-coital malaise they were feeling at the moment. I couldn’t have cared less. I had my own private sorrows to put wrinkles in my forehead. To tell the truth, I was scared witless.

  The first plans were to castrate me, to cook me over a fire. But these were no good, according to Doctor Howard. What could be worse than that? I lay there in a puddle of my own nervous sweat and shook like a leaf in a sudden gale.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I woke to the feel of cold steel against my ankles. Somebody had a knife and was slicing into the ropes around my feet, cutting me free. For a brief moment, I thought one of my fellow C
oxe Foundation agents had found me. The hope died damn fast when I heard Beatrice Howard talking.

  “Don’t cut him, I don’t want any marks on him.” Her voice was hard, cold. She added, “It isn’t that I don’t want him hurt—I’d love to torture him for a whole year, after the way he played on my womanhood with his masculinity!—but I don’t want so much as a single drop of blood spilled, so nobody can tie his death in with Space Travel Limited.”

  “They’ll find my body,” I managed to snarl.

  Her laughter rang out. “Oh, no they won’t. Not ever!”

  Callused hands jerked me to my feet. A big man with a florid face and a heavily veined nose from too much elbow-bending at the local bars, tossed me my sports shirt and the slacks I had worn yesterday. I got dressed.

  The man poked a gun in my back. “Walk!” he growled.

  Beatrice Howard had been standing in front of me, hands on her hips, smartly clad in an art nouveau print dress, belted tightly at her middle. She looked as if she were on her way to a cocktail party. She moved back and away from me as I did what the man said, and walked.

  I went out into bright sunlight where I found half a dozen more men, all with revolvers in holsters on their hips, all eyeing me the way a cat does a helpless mouse. I gathered these were the guards who made sure nobody got in or out of places where they were not wanted by Space Travel Limited. The man who had served that purpose yesterday and who had tried to rape Doctor Howard was nowhere around. I wondered, as I stumbled forward, if these guards had done away with him.

  The guards walked with me to a high mound covered with wild grasses. I looked up at the sky, dotted here and there with an errant cloud, but for the most part pale blue and flecked with sunshine. It was too nice a day to die.

  Doctor Howard gestured. One of the guards opened a small handbag he had been holding and brought out two gravity belts. He strapped them about my middle. My wrists were still tied behind my back. Only my legs were free.

  I was a little numb at the moment. My thinking parts were off on strike somewhere. I asked stupidly, “What are those things for?”