by Troy Conway
“Okay, have it your own way. But don’t say I didn’t warn you when a battalion of PUF stormtroopers busts in on your little meeting at Colon?”
He bolted upright in his seat. “What do you know about Colon?”
“Why not ask Su Wig? She’s the one who told me.”
His eyes narrowed. “She couldn’t have told you, Damon, because I never told her.” He swallowed hard. “Now what do you know?”
I suddenly remembered the transmitter in my hip pocket, and the thought occurred to me that it might not be a bad idea to put out conversation on the airwaves, where Walrus-moustache’s radio man might intercept it. Maneuvering my hands behind me on the seat, I flicked on the switch.
“I know a great deal, Douzi,” I said, extra-loud so that the tiny transistor mike would be sure to pick up every word. “I know all about your bombs and how you developed them. I know what you plan to do with them now that they are developed. And I know a lot more. Also, I’m not the only person who knows. The United States government is on to your plans, and they’ve got a regiment of Marines in your country just waiting to pounce on you when I give the word.”
“A regiment of Marines?” gulped Su Wing.
“Yep,” I smirked, playing my part to the hilt, “a regiment of Marines.” Tania, of course, knew that I was bluffing, but her expression said that she’d known about the Marines all along. Douzi and Su Wig were staring at me wide-eyed.
“You see, Su Wing,” I went on, “my country might make a mistake now and then, but it never makes the same mistake twice. We made a mistake in Vietnam when we let you Commie creeps work almost without interference at building the National Liberation Front and its military arm, the Vietcong, into a crack fighting force. So when you started trying the same stunt here in Belgravia with the Peoples’ United Front, we stepped in fast. PUF headquarters had been under surveillance by our intelligence people for more than a year now, and so has CHILLER. We’ve been careful not to let you know about our presence—so careful that we smuggled the Marines across the Republic of Congo border in groups of five and six over a period of eight months. But now we’re here in full force, and we’re all ready to swing into action. Let PUF make one false move, or let Douzi’s nationalist army make one false move, and we step in for the kill.” For emphasis, I flashed a scowl that Chesty Puller would’ve been proud of.
Both Douzi and Su Wing stared at me silently for a moment. Then Su Wing smiled, and her eyes lit up as if she had suddenly been struck with divine inspiration. “You’re bluffing, Damon. Back at the palace you were worried stiff about the PUF attack. That’s why you were on the radio all the time, making those crazy broadcasts to Lin Saong. You wanted to let BELSO know what was happening so that they could take action against PUF before …PUF …stormed …the …palace.” The end of her sentence trailed into near-nothingness and hex expression froze as she realized what a damaging admission she had just made.
Douzi appeared dumbstruck. His eyes had a faraway look, and the comers of his mouth were quivering. Then, very slowly, he pulled himself together. “Radio broadcasts, Su Wing?” he asked quietly and with elaborate sarcasm. “How does it happen that a man whom you brought into my harem solely to entertain the girls was making radio broadcasts.”
“I—it was something I d-didn’t know about,” she stammered. “I—I—I had been led to believe he had come only to entertain the girls. But CH-CHELER had assigned him a spy mission without telling me.”
“Oh?” replied the diminutive dictator, his sarcasm thickening. “And how did it happen that CHILLER, of which you claim to be the commander, took such an action without consulting you?”
“I—I—“ she said. Then the words froze on her lips. She stared straight ahead, and said nothing.
“Pig!” spat Douzi. His tiny arm lashed out, and his fist caught her square in the jaw, knocking her against the dashboard. She righted herself, and the arm lashed out again. The blow landed on her temple, and she staggered against the door window. This time she knew better than to come back for more. While Douzi glared at her, she simply cowered there, her arms crossed across her face protectively, her body shaking with deep sobs.
Douzi glared for a moment more, then turned to me. “I think, Damon,” he said softly, “that you have some explaining to do.”
I could, of course, have told him to go to hell, but the transmitter in my hip pocket was still beaming our conversation through the airwaves—and hopefully into the receiver of one of Walrus-moustache’s men. I wanted to get as much of the story on record as I could.
It was quite a story.
When I first came to Douzi’s palace, I had never dreamed that it would be as simple as it was.
But that was because I was then thinking as a spy rather than as a sexologist.
Then, as I lay in bed one morning bemoaning my inability to break the language barrier with Olga, I had begun thinking as a sexologist, and I had hypothesized that Douzi didn’t have a bomb after all.
The hypothesis was off base, but many of the conclusions which it helped me form about Douzi were deadly accurate.
Now, as we rode in his limousine to a rendezvous in the border village of Colon, I was thinking as both a spy and a sexologist, and every last piece of the crazy puzzle & into place.
“Douzi,” I said, “you made the one fatal mistake that a man of your intelligence and background should never make. You committed the unforgivable sin. You broke the one rule that no successful politician ever breaks.”
He looked at me questioningly. “Which mistake, Damon? Which sin? Which rule?”
I grinned. “There’s an old Yiddish saying that describes it in a nutshell. Translated loosely, it says: you don’t eat in the bathroom.”
His brow furrowed. “I don’t follow you.”
My grin broadened. “Let me put it this way. There’re only two ways a man can successfully mix business and pleasure. The first is to make your business a pleasure, and the second is to make your pleasure a business. The latter is what I’ve done, and it’s worked out just fine. The former is what a lot of other people have done, and that’s worked out h e too. But you, Douzi didn’t do either. You made sex your pleasure and politics your business, and then you tried to mix them. And it just didn’t work”
“It’s been working just fine so far.”
“Apparently, yes. Actually, no. And that’s why your world is now about to topple down around your ears. you’re through, Douzi—finished. And because I’m in a talkative mood, I’ll tell you exactly how your downfall came about.”
I told him—not because I was in a talkative mood, but because I wanted the whole story beamed out over the airwaves. I began with his trip to Europe, and his decision to study psychiatry because he thought it would help him solve his sexual problems. I then went into his return to Belgravia, his assumption of leadership in the country’s independence movement, his election to the Belgravian presidency and his construction of the palace.
I had been just making calculated guesses when I first came up with these thoughts while pursuing the hypothesis that he wasn’t involved in a program of nuclear bomb building. But as I told the story to Douzi, I knew that I wasn’t guessing; I was stating facts. The expression on his face told me that my confidence in my deductions wasn’t at all unjustified.
“After the palace was built,” I continued, extending the implications of the facts to their logical conclusions, and working in the other bits and pieces of information 1 had picked up along the line, “you grew restive. You had stocked your harem with all sorts of native girls and boys, but they weren’t satisfying you sexually. What you wanted was some outside action, some high-quality action, some of the action which you had lusted after but never achieved while you were in Europe. Not that there was anything inferior about the native sexmates you held primer. But to you, Douzi, they seemed inferior, because deep down you’re a racist. Not a racist who says ‘black is best,’ but a racist who says ‘white is best. ’ or ‘yello
w is best’—more precisely, a racist who says ‘anything but black is best.’ In Europe, where you were rejected by white girls whom you desired, you grew to resent your blackness—and you grew to resent your diminutive stature. The fact that these girls rejected you made you want them all the more. And since you couldn’t change your skim pigmentation or your size so that the girls would want you, you rummaged about for a plan which would enable you to make them have to take you as you were.”
He nodded sadly. “Your talent f a psychiatric deduction is extraordinary, Damon. I’ve pondered the matter at great and painful length, and I must confess that I agree with you completely.”
“Non-black girls weren’t the only forbidden fruit you lusted after,” I continued. “You also lusted after the forbidden fruit of world political power. In Europe, you saw firsthand what that power is like. You lived in England and in France. You saw Churchill and deGaulle, Franco, and Hitler. Then you came back to Belgravia and were elected to the presidency of a nation which most people never heard of, let alone respected. You enjoyed almost absolute power here at home, but in the world community you were a cypher. Belgravia had a seat in the United Nations, but its voice was swallowed up among thousands of other voices. You wanted to change all that. You wanted to become another Churchill, another deGaulle. And you knew that the only way you could do it was if Belgravia became as powerful as England and France —Russia, or Red China, or the United States. To become that powerful, Belgravia needed nuclear capabilities.”
“Right again, Damon,” he confessed. “I won’t deny it.”
I smiled self-satisfiedly and plunged on. “So there you were with two enormous unfulfilled desires. They tormented your every waking moment, and they haunted your dreams. And then, one day, you got an idea A crazy idea, it seemed at first, then a not-so-crazy idea. It was an idea which you thought would enable you to satisfy both your desires in one fell swoop. You did some research and you decided that you might just be able to pull it off. Then you went ahead with it. Tapping the Belgravian treasury for funds, you hired private detectives to find you some nuclear physicists—not just ordinary nuclear physicists, nuclear physicists who (a) were female, (b) were beautiful, (c) were tinged with sexual scandal of some sort and (d) lived in one or another of the Communist bloc countries. Your plan was to lure these physicists to Belgravia to lecture at your National University, then, once they were here, to entice them into working on your nuclear development program in exchange for the sexual services of Superman, or if that wasn’t enticement enough, in feat of having their scandals exposed for refusing to work for you. What the girls never were told—-and what probably none of them ever expected—was that once they had developed your bomb you intended to keep them prisoner and force them to offer you the same sexual services which Superman had offered them.”
I felt Tania stiffen alongside me. “I can understand how you deduced that he wanted us to work on his nuclear program,” she said. “But how did you know he planned to keep us prisoner after the bomb was developed.”
“At first,” I admitted, “I didn’t. But when I weighed all the factors against Douzi’s personality as I now know it, I could see that there was no other possibility. You see, if he was interested only in developing a bomb, he would have had no reson to recruit only beautiful females for the project. He could have made his job a lot simpler by recruiting males and offering them sexual services or even by recruiting persons of both sexual and setting up harems for the men while Superman was entertaining the girls. But Douzi wanted more than just a bomb. As the saying goes, he wanted to eat in the bathroom. So he limited his recruiting to beautiful girls?—girls he would enjoy sexually himself after their work was done. He said nothing of these plans before the bomb was developed and he made no attempt to have sex with any of the girls, because he was afraid that it might interfere with the project. But now that the bomb has been perfected, he can admit freely what he had in mind.”
Douzi smiled broadly. “I admit it, Damon. But I believe you’ve made something of a grammatical error. Didn’t you just speak of something I ‘had’ in mind, ‘had’ being the past tense. I suggest you change that to the present tense and speak of what I have in mind?”
“Aren’t you forgetting about my Marines?” I reminded him.
He chuckled. “Where are your Marines, Damon?” He made a big production of looking around the car. “I don’t see them anywhere.”
“They’re around,” I said, wishing I could believe it. “They’re just waiting for the word to pounce on you.”
“And who’s going to give them the word, Damon? Surely not you. In case you’ve forgotten, you’re my prisoner. The man who’s sitting across from you has a pistol trained on your head. A few minutes from now, this car will stop at a cabin on the outskirts of the village of Colon. Olga, the chief of my laboratory staff, is waiting there now. In her possession is a compound which was synthesized today in the lab. It’s a compound the discovery of which has solved the riddle of how to develop the super-bomb we’ve been planning. Once I arrive at the cabin, she will demonstrate with a miniature explosion?—an explosion involving sub-microscopic particles ?—that the theory which was worked out in the lab can in fact be applied with actual chemical elements. When this has been accomplished, the formula for the compound will be handed over to my plant in Colon where the actual bombs are being manufactured. I anticipate that it it will take twenty-four hours to complete the first of these bombs by incorporating the compound, and twenty-four hours more to ship it down the river to Port duBeers. There it will be loaded on an airplane, taken out over the South Atlantic, aud dropped. After it has been exploded, my representative at the United Nations will identify Belgravia as the nation which perfected it. He will also reveal that Belgravia now possesses a sufficient store of similar bombs to blow up the entire world?—an assertion which, when he makes it, will be true, since two such bombs, at full strength, will be enough to do the job. Belgravia then will be recognized as a world power, a power which can hold its own with Russia, Red China, the United States and all the others. Now tell me, what use will your Marines be when that happens?”
“Don’t be surprised,” I said softly, “if they show up before it happens.”
His chuckle blossomed into a full-blown laugh. “I’ll be very surprised, Damon Very surprised.”
The limousine slowed down as we approached the crest of a hill. “Then it turned into a dirt road. A few minutes later, it pulled to a halt in front of a small stone cabin. The guard on the porch snapped to a stiff position of attention The eunuch who had been serving as Douzi’s chauffeur opened the car doors, and lour entire party trooped inside.
The interior of the cabin was one large room. Set up on la table which ran the length of one of the walls was an immense metal contraption that looked like it belonged in a Dr. Frankenstein movie. Next to the contraption was a cluster of vials, tubes, beakers and aluminum boxes. Olga was sitting nearby, flanked by two more armed guards, one of which was her eunuch. Five black-skinned men in business suits sat in animated conversation at a coffee table opposite her.
Everyone rose in deference to Douzi, and the men rushed over to shake his hand. He greeted them warmly then gestured toward me and Tania. “Gentlemen,” he announced, “we have some unexpected visitors. The man is a United States spy, who assures me that his country has a regiment of Marines just waiting to attack us. The girl is one of my physicists, who had the misfortune to be in his company when he was apprehended trying to escape through the palace’s main gate. Dr. Rod Damon and Dr. Tania Pavlofsky, permit me to introduce the chairman and his four associates on Belgravia’s nuclear weapons development committee?—Dr. William Baio, Dr. Samuel Salukka, Dr. Hayden Messavutu Mr. Arthur Grina and Mr. David Hotoso.”
The men muttered surprised greetings to us. Then the chairman, Dr. Baio, stepped forward and nervously cleared his throat. “Forgive us, Mr. President, if we fail to conceal our astonishment, but we had not anticipated that yo
u would invite guests to the proceedings.” If I read the good doctor’s eyes carefully, what he was really saying to Douzi was, What the hell did you bring these geeks here for?
Douzi smiled. “It was not my intention to invite guests, gentlemen. But as I told you in our telephone conversation this afternoon, the compound which has just been discovered appears to be the answer to all our problems. Naturally I am eager to get our program off the ground as soon as possible. That’s why, when I learned of the compound, I didn’t send a formula up here by messenger for routine testing but instead had lovely Olga bring the ingredients here personally. At my command, she will mix the necessary amount, and you will bring it to the test site in the garden. Then I shall watch personally as you detonate the microscopic sample. The miniature blast will herald the beginning of a great new era for us and for our nation.” He turned toward Tania and me, as if he had just remembered that Baio’s comment about us was what set him spieling in the first place. “As for our guests, it is unfortunate that they must be here to share the glorious moment with us. However, they were captured minutes before I had left the palace to come here. A guard from the motor pool, whom Damon earlier had disarmed, stopped them just as they were heading out the main gate in a truck. I would’ve left them back at the palace, but frankly Damon has proved to be quite a tricky fellow. I don’t want to let him out of my sight for one minute until our delegate at the UN has made his speech and I know for sure that Damon can do no further harm to our program.”
“It would seem, sir,” suggested, the ever-diplomatic Baio, “that a man who is so dangerous might more advantageously be killed than held prisoner.”
“Perhaps,” Douzi nodded. “But Damon is quite the clever boy, and I think I can find a useful spot for him in my administration after Belgravia has been granted world recognition.”
Baio’s eyes widened, as did the eyes if the four other committee members, as did Su Wing’s, as did Tania’s, and as especially did mine.