It's Getting Harder All The Time

by Troy Conway

  “And that, my dear Damon, is what you can expect for as long as you stay here. If any problems arise which you would like to discuss with me personally, request an audience through Mazimba. As I said when we first met, every effort will be made to insure your comfort. All I ask in return is that you continue to satsify my female house guests as you did this afternoon.” He rubbed his hands together, signifying that the speech was over. “Have you any questions?”

  “Only one,” I said weakly. “Where’s my bed?”

  He chuckled sympathetically. “Mazimba will take you there forthwith.” He offered me his hand. “Now, sleep well, Damon. Tomorrow’s another day, and judging from what I’ve seen this afternoon, you’ll have a great many young ladies knocking on your door after dinner.”

  I bade Douzi goodbye, then followed Mazimba through a winding series of corridors to a large room overlooking the garden. The view was magnificent, and so were the furnishings of the mom, but I was too bushed to pay attention to anything but the bed. It was big and soft and comfortable, and I flopped down on it without even bothering to undress. The last thing I heard was Mazimba’s pledge that he would be at my beck and call if I needed him. He vanished into a small anteroom, and I closed my eyes. I went to sleep instantly.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When I woke up it was eleven the following morning. I had Mazimba fetch me a breakfast consisting of the Belgravian version of steak and eggs—elephant steak and duck’s eggs, it turned out to be. Then my swishy eunuch and I took a walking tour of the palace and its grounds.

  The palace was nothing less than sensational. Douzi had duplicated not only the Hunkar Hamami of Muhammad II’s digs in Constantinople but also the First Court, a two story wing where Douzi’s bureaucrats now attended to their paper-shuffling; the Second Court, or Court of the Divan, a three-story wing where the country’s rubberstamp National Assembly held its infrequent sessions; the Third Court, a four-story wing which housed the palace museum, library and treasury; the Fourth Court, a two story wing where higher-ups among Douzi’s lieutenants had their offices; and the various between-wing kiosks, which in Muhammad II’s time had served as repositories for religious relics and which in Douzi’s setup housed various secular art treasures.

  The only areas to which I was denied admittance were the selamlik, or Douzi’s personal living quarters; the haremlik, where the girls lived, and the treasury vault. Since the selamlik and haremlik were on the fourth floor of the main building, I wasn’t too concerned that either might contain a secret passage to an underground hideaway where the bombs might be stored or the girls’ laboratory might be located. But the treasury vault was a different matter. It was located on the ground floor of the Third Court, and could very well have doubled as a passage to some underground chamber. I resolved that I’d find out whatever I could about the vault—and do it as soon as I could.

  The grounds were equally sensational. I had been impressed with them during my initial tour the day before. But then I had been too wrapped up in Su Wing’s charms to notice many of their finer points. Now, doing a walk through with Mazimba, I found that virtually every detail was a copy of the grounds surrounding Topkapi Sarayi in Constantinople.

  I asked Mazimba to take me through the two complexes of smaller buildings located apart from the palace. He was all too pleased to conduct a guided tour of the nearer complex. It was called the Hall of the Eunuchs, and it served as quarters for, in addition to the eunuchs themselves, the palace’s entire complement of service personnel and the members of the Palace Guard. But admission to the farther complex was strictly forbidden, and when I asked Mazimba what the complex contained, he replied that he didn’t know.

  I remembered that in Muhammad II’s palace, the Hall of the Eunuchs was reserved for eunuchs only, and the other complex of buildings housed all the non-eunuch palace underlings. Evidently Douzi had crowded his entire staff into the Hall of the Eunuchs and was using the group of buildings in connection with his bomb project. Did these other buildings contain the girls’ laboratory and/or the bomb storage place? If not, I’d be willing to bet they contained something else very closely tied in with the bomb.

  My tour, all told, consumed four hours. When it was over I was hungry again, so I repaired with Mazimba to the dining room, where I lunched on some suspicious-looking African fish and some even-more-suspicious-looking African vegetables. Then I told my solicitious swish that I planned to spend the rest of the day ambling through the gardens on my own, and that he was free to do what he pleased. He replied respectfully that Douzi had told him to remain with me at all times. I grudgingly accepted his companionship, and set off a-walking again.

  As I walked, I reviewed all the data I had accumulated since I arrived in Belgravia, and tried to piece together a workable plan of action. Falling back on techniques I’d been taught in the U.S. Army, I conducted my review by the numbers.

  Number One: Lin Saong.

  The Girl from CHILLER was unquestionably one of the most formidable foes I’d encountered in all my days as a Coxeman. What made things all the worse was that she wasn’t supposed to be my foe. She was supposed to be my ally.

  According to the original plan, I was supposed to inform her, via a miniature radio transmitter with which she had supplied me, the location of Douzi’s bomb—if and when I found it. Meanwhile, a radioman from The Coxe Foundation was supposed to be monitoring my transmissions so that Walrus-moustache back in the States could keep abreast of developments and swing into action in the event that Red China tried the double-cross which everyone had more or less suspected it would try.

  Now there was no question about the double-cross. Lin Saong had told me about it herself. But the radioman from The Coxe Foundation was dead, and I had no other line of communication with Walrus-moustache.

  If I did locate the bomb before two weeks were up and if I did tell Lin Saong where it was, the Red China-backed Peoples’ United Front would advance on Douzi’s palace and try to dismantle the bomb. If the dismantling job was a success, it’d be a feather in the cap of Communism. And I, as the man who had made the whole thing possible, would be branded a traitor. If the dismantling job was a failure, I—and virtually every other man, woman and precocious child within eighteen skillion miles—would be a dead duck.

  Meanwhile, if I failed to locate the bomb before two weeks were up, PUF would launch a full-scale attack against the Belgravian capital. The bomb then almost inevitably would explode, and when the mushroom cloud had settled, Communism would still have a feather in its cap. Indeed, comrades the world over would worshipfully hail the suicidally brave PUF forces for having stopped Douzi’s nefarious bomb program before it became a threat to everyone on earth, and Red China could bald-facedly claim that it never would have supported PUF had it known that the bomb would be exploded. I, of course, along with every other man, woman and precocious child within eighteen skillion miles, would still be a dead duck.

  Number Two: Douzi’s palace.

  The place was a carbon copy of Muhammad II’s Tokapi Sarayi in sixteenth century Constantinople. It had taken six years to build, and it couldn’t have been constructed for less than twenty or thirty million dollars. Thanks to the nationalized duBeers diamond mines, Belgravia had more than enough money to do the job. But why had Douzi selected Topkapi Sarayi as his model and not, say, Buckingham Palace or the Kremlin. Was it just a matter of personal taste? Or was there more involved?

  Number Three: Douzi himself.

  No question about it, Belgravia’s diminutive dictator was a riddle wrapped up in an enigma.

  Case-in-point: He was the favorite son of Belgravia’s dominant Guwai tribe, and had been educated in the best European schools. But if he had been groomed from child hood for a political career, how did it happen that his selected field of study was not economics or political science or some other discipline which would fit into plans of this sort but rather, of all things, psychiatry? Or if politics hadn’t been his intended future when he went awa
y. to school, how did it happen that he returned to Belgravia in 1959 and very suddenly emerged as a principal force in his nation’s drive for independence?

  Second case-in-point: his ploy with the female physicists. According to the theory which Red China had advanced at the ultra-top-secret conference of nuclear powers at Geneva—and which theory the United States was inclined to accept—Douzi had lured the physicists to Belgravia to lecture at his National University, then had enticed them to stay and work on his nuclear program by offering them the sexual services of Superman.

  Any way you looked at it, it was a brilliant caper—a caper certainly worthy of an Oxford- and Sorbonne-trained headshrinker. But if Douzi’s main concern was getting the nine physicists to develop his bomb, how did it happen that he surrounded their sexual servicing with so many bizarre trappings, like the eunuchs and the pygmy men and girls—trappings which seemed to exist more for his own pleasure than for the pleasure of the physicists themselves?

  Third case-in-point: his personal sexual tastes. Judging from what I’d seen so far, he was a walking composite case history from Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. He delighted in humiliating eunuchs, he enjoyed homosexual acts, he was a leather fetishist, he was a voyeur par excellence and he also grooved on straight heterosexual congress. But he evidently had no desire for the physicists themselves. If he did, why did he fail to so much as touch one of them during the orgy in the Hunkar Hamami? And he apparently was equally uninterested in the ceremony. Why was he so interested in Su Wing?

  The more I thought about him, the more questions I had—and the fewer answers.

  Had the harem been set up chiefly for the femme physicists’ benefit or chiefly for his own? If chiefly for their benefit, what use did he plan to put it to when they finished developing his bomb and ceased to be of use to him? If chiefly for his own, why wasn’t he talking greater advantage of the libertine possibilities it offered?

  Why had he let Su Wing become so intimately involved in the harem’s activities? If he was interested in her primarily for sexual reasons, wouldn’t he have hidden her away somewhere where she’d be completely in the dark about the comings and goings of the femme physicists? If he had been interested in her primarily as a double-agent, wouldn’t he have pawned her off on one of his underlings in BELSO?

  Why had he accepted virtually without questions my wholly implausible story about my having defected to Red China and having been assigned to CHILLER on Su Wing’s request? Hadn’t he considered the possibility that I might have been a spy? And if so, why had he given me such free access to the femme physicists? Were my sexual talents so important to him? Couldn’t he just as easily have augmented Superman’s efforts with the efforts of another imported stud recruited via classified ads—or two imported studs, or four, or six, or nine?

  Number Four: Su Wing.

  Of everyone involved in the bomb business, she seemed to be most on-the-level. But was she really as on-the-level as she seemed to be?

  She had played sex games with me in the car under circumstances which might very easily had led to our being detected. And if we had been detected, CHILLER’s goose would have been cooked along with mine.

  If she was a dedicated Communist agent, would she have risked it? And if she wasn’t a dedicated Communist agent. where did she stand? Had she perhaps double-crossed her Red bosses and assumed the role not of a pro-Commie triple-agent but rather that of a pro-Douzi quadruple agent?

  How far could I trust her? Could I trust her at all?

  Number Five: the femme physicists.

  According to the theory which Red China had advanced and the other nuclear powers had accepted, Douzi’s hold on them was mainly sexual. In view of the antisexualism of their Communist homelands, the theory made sense.

  But the girls obviously knew that they would be useful to Douzi only until they developed his bomb. Did they think he would continue to support them, and to arrange for their sexual gratification, once the job had been done?

  Furthermore, they couldn’t fail to realize that having cast their lot with Douzi they’d never be able to return to their homelands again. Would all nine of them—not three, not six, but all nine—accept lifelong exile as the price of a few months, or a few years, or even a lifetime of sexual satisfaction?

  Still on the subject of the femme physicists, how did it happen that Douzi rounded up a bevy of broads who were not only nuclear geniuses but also twenty-four-karat beauties? Wasn’t it kind of odd that there wasn’t a single loser in the bunch? If Douzi had been interested primarily in developing his bomb, would he have limited his recruitment to beautiful girls or would he have obtained the best brains he could get no matter what they looked like? On the other hand, if he had been interested primarily in beauty, how did he manage to assemble a group of brains so fantastic that in a few short months they were able to develop a weapon potentially more formidable than anything in the arsenal of any nuclear power in the world?

  Questions, questions everywhere.

  But how to answer them?

  What to do?

  This much was certain: I had to do something fast.

  Unless I did before thirteen more days passed, the Peoples’ United Front of Belgravia, supplied with Red Chinese airplanes and Red Chinese bombs, would below Douzi’s palace—and me—and, no doubt to their very great surprise, also themselves—right off the map. But where to start?

  The logical place was with the nine femme physicists. Before the night was over, a few of them, and possibly more than just a few, would come knocking on my door for sexual servicing. It would be my job to give them the sexual show of shows, because unless I could win them away from Superman and get them to tell me where the bomb was hidden, I didn’t stand a ghost of a chance of warding off the PUF attack on the palace.

  But suppose they didn’t know where the bomb was?

  Or suppose they did know but couldn’t safely tell me because my room was bugges?

  And even if they did safely tell me, how could I get word to Lin Saong while Douzi’s boy, Mazimba, was shadowing mw every step of the way?

  And even if I did get word to Lin Saong, how could I tip off Walrus-moustache about the double-cross?

  And if I didn’t tip off Walrus-moustache, how could I save my neck?

  As a matter of fact, even if I did tip off Walrus-moustache, how could I save my neck?

  Hadn’t he said that once I had left for Belgravia The Coxe Foundation would officially refuse to recognize me?

  Nedded: one plan of action.

  Amendment: needed very desperately, one plan of action.

  Ha! Now to find one!

  As I ambled around Douzi’s palace grounds, I thought hard, but the harder I thought, the farther away I seemed from finding a solution to my dilemma.

  Then suddenly an idea struck me.

  It wasn’t a solution, but with luck it might set me off in the right direction.

  It came to me in a roundabout way.

  As I strolled over the hills and through the dales of Douzi’s grounds, my boy Mazimba complained that I was walking too fast for him. I slowed down, but soon he found it hard to keep up with me even when I was moving at a snail’s pace. The three hundred-plus pounds he was carrying around with him were just too much baggage, and he was plumb tuckered out.

  He had been told, of course, that he was to remain with me at all times. But if I set a more grueling pace than he could possibly maintain, he’d have no choice but to fall by the wayside. And if he fell by the wayside, I’d be able to break away from him long enough to take out my miniature transmitter and dash off a quick message to Lon Saong.

  Not that I had anything to tell her at this stage of the game, but even though I had nothing to tell her, she couldn’t very well stop me from transmitting. And if I transmitted long enough, there was just the slight possibility that my transmissions might eventually catch Walrus-moustache’s ear.

  This match I knew: When the dead radioman failed to report
back to Washington in a day or two, my Coxeman-in-chief would wonder what was amiss.

  And if sufficient time passed, he’d be curious enough to send someone to investigate.

  Unless I missed my guess, the man who’d be sent to investigate would be another radioman, a man who could monitor the transmissions the dead man was supposed to have been monitoring.

  And if I kept my wits about me I might just be able to sneak something into those transmissions which would let my Coxeman friends know what was happening.

  They had said they’d disown me if there were any slip-ups anywhere along the line.

  But if I could manage to hip them to the double-cross that Lin Saong had in mind, they’d have no choice but to play the game my way, because I’d be the only guy who could pull the Free World’s chestnuts out of the fire.

  I was parlaying longshot on top of longshot on top of longshot, but it was the only bet on the board, and I had to gamble on it.

  I started walking faster.

  Mazimba begged me to stop and let him rest, but I just kept on walking.

  He stumbled along after me, puffing like a steam engine.

  Then, after about half a mile, he clutched his belly, dropped to one knee and a mile, he clutched his belly, dropped to one knee and toppled over on his side.

  I knelt beside him. “Don’t worry about a thing, buddy boy,” I said cheerily. “Just go on back to my room and rest. I promise I won’t tell your boss that you fell down on the job.”

  “But—but—” he protested.

  “No buts about it. Either you go back to your room or I walk your legs off. Which’ll it be?”

  “No,” he begged. “Please—”

  “Yes,” I grinned. “There’s no other way.”

  He threw in the towel. “Okay. I go back. But please no tell boss. Please no tell.”

  I assumed him I wouldn’t. Then, to make thing easier for him, I walked back to the room with him.

  He sighed with relief as I closed the door behind us. Then he staggered into the anteroom and flopped down on his bed. A few seconds later he was snoring like an old warhorse.