by Troy Conway
Her arms went around me, holding me close. She was peaking again, and then again, head flung back, her lips losing their contented smile and twisting in a grotesquerie of pleasure that made it seem as if she were in pain.
I let her savor ecstasy for long moments before I moved her again. “Sit up, my love. We are switching to the upavishta postures.”
“No. Please, no. Just let me lie here,” she protested.
I sat cross-legged in the yogi pose. I caught her wrist and drew her across the rumpled bedcovers. “You sit—so. Upon me. Lock your legs behind my back in the proper padm-asana. Do you understand?”
She was balanced on one knee and a foot on the bed. Her hair spilled down about her shoulders and there were the beginnings of dark rings under her eyes. From my upstanding manhood her eyes glanced at a wall clock.
“It’s almost dawn,” she pointed out.
“Night, day, what’s the difference?”
“You aren’t real,” she murmured.
“I’m real enough. Now you see what I meant back at the Diabolique. I just don’t go down. Come on, come on. I’m still ready for love.”
Zia made a face, rubbing her privacy. “I ache,” she admitted. “Can’t we postpone this for a little while? I need a bath, a shower.”
“Do I win my bet?”
Her eyes turned gleeful. “Tell you what. If you can take a little torture yourself, I’ll say ‘uncle’.”
“What’ve you got in mind?”
The baroness lay down on the coverlets and let her hands slide between my crossed legs. Her fingertips were soft as they caressed my manhood. She inched forward, mouth a little open.
“The gift of love Cleopatra gave to Caesar?”
“Mmmmm—something like that.”
“Wait, then. Let me really enjoy it.”
Her face looked stunned, then angry. She sat up, her breasts scarcely moving in their black and red lace garters. “If you’re trying to insult me, Professor Damon, I don’t——”
“Don’t be so snesitive. All I want is my sexual survival kit.”
Zia hesitated, then laughed, shaking her head. She got off the bed and padded in her nyloned feet—she had kicked off her Pappagallos long ago, and her expensive nylons were tattered, with a dozen runs in each leg—across the room to the bureau where my kit lay. She turned a curious gaze on me.
“Now what?”
“You’ll find a tiny vial inside. Oil of wintergreen.”
She drew out the vial, held it up. “This?”
“Put a drop of that in a glass of water and gargle.”
Thin brown eyebrows arched. “Before I—?”
“Of course, before. This is for my pleasure.”
She shrugged, and went into the bathroom. I heard water running. In a little while I heard the sound of gargling. Then she was coming back toward me, smiling faintly.
“Honestly, you’re the most amazing man I’ve ever met. What does the wintergreen do?”
“Sorry, but I can’t demonstrate that. It’s a man-thing.”
She pushed me flat. “None of this yogi stuff when I perform. I’m a simple creature.” Her palm closed on me and squeezed. Then she was sliding down at right angles to my body, resting her cheek on my belly and removing the sulphur rings one after the other.
Her hand caressed at first. Then she drew me toward her lips, kissing gently. Her tongue came out. When I moaned, Zia giggled.
Moist lips closed upon me. I shuddered. The oil of wintergreen gargle adds a new dimension to this oldest of all love kisses. It bites the flesh; it invigorates it; it stings and soothes; it burns; it becalms. In moments, my entire body was shuddering as if I were having a fit.
Zia went on and on. Her head bobbed, then rested so that her lips and tongue and teeth could take over. She moaned in a kind of masochistic madness. Your true fellatrix has something of the masochist in her. She has the desire to be submissive before the male and demonstrates this side of her psyche by offering to please him without being pleased herself.
Her role then becomes a minor one between the two sexes. She is giving of herself without taking. She shows herself to be not quite the equal of the male master. Whether this applied to the baroness, I did not know; there are many reasons for the act. Every human being ever born has an impulse toward oral eroticism. The impulse may be strong or weak, according to the individual.
She drew her lips away after half an hour, and lay limp. Very faintly I heard her whisper, “Uncle, uncle. I’m beat. I can’t move another muscle. So—uncle! Goddamnit! There! Uncle! Uncle! Uncle!”
I patted her hip.
“You were beautiful, baby. Beautiful. Everything I’d hoped you’d be. Now just be something a little more. Start telling me about those mermen.”
She shivered and rose to a sitting position.
“Mind if I put something on? It’s a long story, and it’s chilly now that we aren’t making love.”
She slipped into a chenille robe after stripping off her ruined stockings. Then she plumped out the pillows, putting them near the headboard of her queen-size bed. She lay down with her head on my shoulder, my arm about her, and began to talk.
“About a year ago I met Ernst Bachmann.”
Ernst Bachmann was an East German scientist, a specialist in biochemistry. He was on vacation in Athens. He met the baroness over a cup of cafe Tourkiko at the Grande Bretagne hotel. They felt an instant admiration for each other.
He was a handsome man, tall and physically strong, with a Germanic arrogance that appealed to her feminine instincts in some perverse manner she could not understand. He wined and dined her at Floca’s and at the Papparika; he went swimming with her at Verkiza beach; he danced with her to romantic music at the Galaxy, on the Hilton roof.
He also made love to her. To his precise scientific mind, love-making was merely a matter of indulging the human body, to rid itself of accumulated tensions. Zia von Osterreich taught him that sex could be fun. For two weeks he became a youth again, with her. He was rich, with a family fortune behind him. He had never had a wife nor a mistress, and he begged her to become his mistress.
Zia had been at odds and ends with herself, so she agreed. She traveled to Majorca with him, to Rome, finally to the Greek island of Thraxos in the Aegean Sea Ernst Bachmann had a laboratory compound on Thraxos.
At first she thought he was engaged in studying marine biology. His laboratory was filled with huge glass tanks in which swam all types and manner of fish There were herring and whiting, tunny and sardines, mussels and oysters and crawfish, and, of course, the dolphin. There were even Portuguese men-o’-war and sea horses. Bachmann spent almost all of his time on Thraxos with his tanks and appeared to be most dedicated to his calling.
One night, quite by accident, Zia lost her way in the mazelike compound, and found herself in a room which she had never seen before. There was a large glass tank—and there was a man sleeping in it. The tank was not empty, it was filled with water. The man was breathing the water as does a fish.
She stood rooted to the spot, not quite believing what she saw. She tiptoed closer. By the faint blue light that illumined the room, she could make out the man’s chest, faintly lifting, faintly falling. There was no doubt about it. The man was able to live in water.
Suddenly terrified—she was intelligent enough to understand the political possibilities behind such a discovery—Zia ran from the chamber. Her thoughts were chaotic. She wanted out of this predicament at once. Ernst Bachmann would not hear of it. He enjoyed her sensual skills too much to be rid of her.
The baroness realized she was a prisoner. From being his mistress, she had turned into his sex slave. Though she enjoyed the sex, she knew damn well Bachmann would grow tired of her in time and might then kill her to keep her quiet about his laboratory location.
She had nothing but her body to use as a bribe. Fortunately a strong young fisherman became enamored of her. Her flesh was better than gold, in his judgment, so one stormy night
he took her to the mainland in his dinghy. She spent a week with him, then cabled her bankers in Geneva for funds. She flew to Rome, and lost herself for a while among the masses. Only lately had she dared come out into the open.
Head nestled against my shoulder, she spread her hands. With a rueful smile, she murmured, “You see what it has brought me? A near miss with death.”
“And me,” I added.
She turned her head to kiss my jaw. “Darling! Of course, you.”
I grinned, “I’m not just a good roll in the hay, love. Might be I could get Bachmann off your back.”
She wriggled around so she could look into my eyes. “So? You are not just the playboy professor on a vacation, Hein? You are something else. But what?”
“Let’s just say I have a hobby. I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. No names are necessary. I call him Walrus-moustache. So can you.”
“Where is this Walrus-moustache?”
“Somewhere over the Atlantic, at a guess. He’s flying here from the States. I know he’ll want to meet you. How about it?”
She was thoughtful, lower lip projecting. At last she shrugged. “Why not? I have nothing to lose but my life. And I’m going to lose that anyhow, unless somebody does something about Ernst.”
I slid down under the covers, drawing her with me.
“Sleep now. Say later.”
I kissed her pouting lips.
The Riviera sunlight woke me by shining through the Venetian blinds into my eyes. I rolled over to shut it out, but a hand came down flat on my exposed flank, driving away the sleepiness.
“Up, lazybones!” Zia shouted gaily. “To the rescue, my brave knight.”
“Yeah, hey,” I mumbled.
I let her drag me out of bed and push me under a cold shower. I woke up good then. I put the warm water on, grabbed a bar of soap, and spent a quarter of an hour at my ablutions. I also shaved.
I ate my petit déjeuner in a sunny breakfast nook with Zia across the table from me in something pink and frilly by Dior. We feasted on curried eggs and sausages, with hot coffee and freshly baked muffins. It was almost like being married.
“Give me an hour,” she promised when we were done.
I phoned the hotel. Walrus-moustache had not arrived.
But as I was braking in front of the Hotel de la Tour, a big black touring car swung into the curb ahead of me. I needed no second look to recognize one of its two passengers as Walrus-moustache. He got out, turned, bowed to me, raked the baroness with his wise eyes, then proceeded on into the hotel lobby, his friend at his elbow.
The friend was introduced to us later as Norman Beltinge, a marine biologist from an eastern university in the United States. He was a lean man, rather tall, with a sprinkling of gray in his pale blonde hair. His blue eyes were calm and emotionless behind black-rimmed glasses.
In the privacy of my room, Zia told her story. As she spoke, Walrus-moustache kept glancing at Beltinge. When Beltinge did not sound off about science fiction hogwash, but seemed very impressed, the chief relaxed.
When the baroness was done, Walrus-moustache asked, “How about it, Norm? Could what her highness says be possible?”
“Oh, yes. Very much so. We’ve made enormous strides in physiology within the past five years. Men have demonstrated that small mammals like a hamster or a mouse can live in water. That is, they can extract the oxygen they need for life from the water itself.”
Walrus-moustache frowned. “How’s that again?”
Inside a membranous cage, a hamster had been lowered into a tank filled with water and fish. The hamster had been able to extract its needed oxygen from the water, since the membranous walls of its little cage had filtered out everything from the water but the oxygen. Though the silicone-rubber membrane had no holes in it, it was porous enough to permit oxygen molecules to seep through into the chamber where the hamster could breathe them.
“It’s a form of osmosis,” Beltinge went on, “which has been common knowledge for some years. But only when the principle was applied to the silicone membrane was a demonstrable technique invented for its marine use.”
The membrane could also be used in space travel, Beltinge pointed out, the better to assist in draining off the water vapor of an astronaut’s perspiration. Walrus-moustache waved an impatient hand.
“Never mind that. Get back to its marine uses,” he muttered.
“It’s been theorized that a membrane for a man could be constructed too, but it woulld have to be at least sixty square feet in size for him to get the oxygen he needs.”
Zia shook her head. “The man I saw had no membrane tank about him.”
Beltinge was bursting with eagerness as he turned to her. “No, no, highness! I am certain your Ernst Bachmann has done more than that. I am explaining how our science has advanced, step by step like a baby learning to walk.
“The membrane is only one facet of the research.”
There was also a liquid that had been discovered, called fluorocarbon, into which a mouse could be totally submerged and still breathe without any membranous material being used at all. The fluorocarbon was literally overloaded with oxygen, which the mouse was able to breathe, since it holds more than thirty times as much oxygen as air itself.
“It is hoped that this liquid can be used to cure deep-sea divers of the bends, which can kill, as you know, when a man comes up through layers of varying pressures in the ocean too suddenly. It’s caused by the compressed nitrogen in the air they breathe from their oxygen tanks, getting into their bloodstreams. Instead of compressed air, if the deep-sea divers breathe in fluorocarbon liquid, it will prevent those bends.”
Soft street noises came in through the windows with the beams of sunlight. Zia crossed her nyloned legs, the stockings made a slithering sound for a moment. Walrus-moustache shifted in his chair and scowled.
“All very well—but how can Bachmann accomplish what he’s supposed to have done?”
Beltinge said, “I can only theorize. From what her highness tells me, I shall assume that Bachmann has developed an injectant which when placed inside a human body—perhaps after an operation or two—will permit him to breathe in sea water, extract the needed oxygen from it, then reject everything but the oxygen. Perhaps by silicone membrane gills placed in the throat. I can’t narrow it down much closer than that.”
The chief nodded, “It’s good enough. We know what’s been done, to some extent. Damon fought two men who could breathe under water. He killed them both, but he didn’t drown them. That’s important. They didn’t need diving equipment, scuba gear or oxygen tanks to go about their dirty business.
“I accept the fact. Now I want to know—how come?”
He squirmed about until he was facing me. “Doctor, you’re going to that Greek island, just as soon as I can arrange transportation. You’re going to swipe Bachmann’s notes or notebooks. I want his researches for our own scientists to work on.”
His heavy fist slammed the chair arm. “Damnation! Do you realize what we may have uncovered?”
He paused a moment, heavily tufted eyebrows meeting above his nose. “Do any of you remember what happened in December of 1967? Eh? In Australia?”
I cleared my throat. “Are you talking about the drowning of former Prime Minister Harold Holt? How he was killed by sharks while swimming off Cheviot Beach?”
“I am. But how do you know sharks killed him? His body was never found, though the resources of an entire nation were utilized to find it. Now suppose—I’m just talking, you understand, I’m not accusing anybody—suppose a couple of these mermen lay in wait for him? Eh? Holt was a good friend to the United States. Maybe somebody wanted to get rid of him. Russia? Red China? North Viet Nam? Who knows?”
His face was furrowed in thought. He slapped the chair arm again. “I’m thinking about underwater armies too. Soldiers with weapons ejected from the hatch of half a hundred submarines who can swim underwater to shore, do some mighty important damage, then swim out of s
ight back to their submarines. No scuba equipment to slow them down, just their weapons and whatever else they need to do their job. Eh? How docs that hit you?”
“Below the belt,” I murmured.
He nodded. “It damn well does. Another thing! In January of sixty-eight, the Israelis lost a submarine under mighty mysterirous circumstances in the eastern Mediterranean. The Dakar. It had sixty-nine men aboard it. The same week, the French lost a submarine named the Minerva. Same mysterious circumstances Suppose again that an underwater force of half a dozen mermen attacked each submarine, slapped magnetic mines against its hull—and blew them up.
“Those men wouldn’t need equipment either, to bog them down. They could be damn well naked—excuse me, your highness!—except for flippers on their feet and magnetic mines in their hands. No need to surface, no need to let anybody in this whole wide world know they were there. They swim to their target; they do what they’ve been ordered to do; they disappear—probably back into the submarine that brought them. As far as the world can discover—it was only some freak accident that destroyed the Dakar and the Minerva.”
The hairs were standing up on the back of my neck. I was imagining mermen climbing out of the sea on the beaches of the world, spraying people with machine-gun fire, and then disappearing back into the briny deep. Talk about your terrorists! Or maybe some higher echelon figure in a world government might be fishing, or taking a boat ride. Merman appears. Merman tosses hand grenade. Whoooosh! No more important government figure. The merman would leave no clues behind him, nobody could even hazard a guess at his identity. The government which had dispatched him to kill would be able to turn an innocent face to the world.
I shivered. Zia was trying to scratch a match to light a cigarette and was failing because her hands were shaking so mush. Norman Beltinge was biting his lower lip, looking worried.
“About that transportation,” I said.
Zia got her cigarette going and waved a hand . “I may be able to help their yacht, a big one that cost two million dollars in England to build, is port right now. The Athena, it’s called.”