Last Licks

by Troy Conway

  There were other men on deck, all of them in the black swimsuits. They had no scuba gear, just the rubberoid garments to withstand the chill of the cold Aegean waters. The man with the revolver aimed at mc lifted his left foot and kicked out at me.

  The kick never landed. I grabbed his foot, twisted it, sent him crashing off balance down on the deck planks. I dove off the deck toward the snub-nosed Belgian Bulldog he had dropped. I got my hand on it, hit the deck and bounced as I tried to turn around in mid-leap.

  One of the mermen was coming for me, fast.

  I aimed off the cuff. I triggered the Bulldog.

  The merman died in mid-air, a lead pellet in his brain. The others came for me in a body, guns out and aiming. I would have died there, if it had not been for Georges Fortescu.

  “NO, no,” he shouted. “I want him alive!”

  I had forgotten Fleur, who had been spreadeagled on the deck when I pulled out of her. She had sensed what was happening, she had slithered around behind me—for protection, I thought at the time—and now she hurled herself at me, grabbing my right forearm and biting deep into my gun wrist with her white teeth.

  The pain was sharp, numbing it. At this moment I couldn’t have shot my cuffs. I yelped and tried to swing her away.

  “Idiot,” she panted. “I’m saving your life!”

  I felt something hit the back of my head. I fell forward, out cold, into a blackness shot with red lights. I swam around in that blackness for a time, then my head cleared and I opened my eyes.

  I was looking at a pair of bare feet. Girl feet, attached to girl ankles and shapely girl calves. I stared up at dimpled knees. The knees bent and the rest of the girl came down toward me.

  It was Angelique. Her face was twisted in a grotesque mask of pained sympathy below the fall of brown hair that tumbled to her bare shoulders. There were traces of tears on her cheeks.

  “Are you all right?” she whispered.

  “I guess so. What about yourself?”

  Her face crumpled up and I think she would have cried if I hadn’t caught her hand and squeezed it, saying, “Don’t give them the satisfaction, honey.”

  She drew a deep breath and nodded. I took advantage of the nod to scan the rest of her body below her chin. For a recent virgin, she was stacked mighty well. Her round breasts with their rather large nipples quivered only slightly to her movements, while her soft white belly made attractive creases in her kneeling posture.

  I put my hand to the back of my head. No, no blood. I tried to sit up and Angelique helped me, gripping my left wrist and getting to her feet, pulling me upward. I swayed a little, I leaned against her, standing on the Athena’s deck.

  She felt good to the touch, her body was soft, cushioning. Against my will, my manhood told me it liked her too. She felt it grow against her thigh, but when I expected her to draw away thinking I was just another beast-man set on ravishing her, she surprised me by making a crooning sound deep in her throat.

  “There, there. It’ll be all right,” she breathed.

  “Poor kid,” I whispered. “I should be the one comforting you. That was a hell of an experience you had tonight. Still hurt?”

  She nodded her long brown hair against my chest. I told her. “If I had some medicine, I could take care of you. What’s going on here anyhow?”

  I looked around the deck. Angelique and I were alone for the moment. The rest of them—guests and the invading mermen—were at the starboard rail, looking out across the moonlit waters of the Aegean. There was a motor humming, faintly off to one side.

  “They’re sending a tender to pick us all up,” Angelique murmured.

  “Prisoners of S.E.L.L.,” I nodded.

  “Hein? What’s sell?”

  “Tell you later, honey. Just for now, let me relax.”

  She giggled suddenly, moving her thigh against my clamoring manhood. “You must move away from me. Otherwise, you will never relax.”

  I grinned down at her, delighted to see that she was not shrinking away from me, as any recently raped virgin might be expected to do. I drew her a few steps backward into the darker shadows and turned her so her front faced mine.

  Angelique gasped then, and pulled free. Her dark eyes under their long lashes questioned me.

  “You know the first think they do to an aviator who’s had to jump from his plane? They make him take another one up right away. Or to a man who’s almost drowned? They make him swim as soon as he recovers. It’s therapeutic treatment, it gives a man back his confidence. I think I ought to prescribe that for you.”

  “I hurt too much,” she whispered.

  “There are ways, “I assured her. “Besides, we can’t go anywhere until that tender gets here.”

  “you are mad!” she exclaimed, but she also giggled.

  I put my hands on her curving hips and drew her slowly forward until she touched me with her lower belly. I did not hurry her, I let her feel the strength of my manhood gently pressing into her. She quivered and her tongue came out to run around her somewhat overlarge red mouth.

  I waited, knowing damn well that her healthy female body would like what it was feeling, and that the sensory excitation she must be experiencing would be as good to her bruised flesh as any ointments I might apply.

  She began to rub herself against me slowly, like a frightened fawn nibbling at a sweetmeat. I just held her hips, I did not urge them forward or back. I let her do what she wanted. I remembered what Ilona Fortescu and I had done in her stateroom. Angelique would not go so far, I was confident. Instead of the tehkfidz, she would be satisfied with the sehhq kelbet el-mes’huq of the Egyptians, which is the rubbing of the male organ against the clitoral bud of the female.

  This method of sexual pleasure is a great favorite in the coffeehouse and inns of North Africa. There, grown men consort in this manner with the little girls who frequent these funduqs in their desire to learn scxual techniques which will prepare them for their future lives as prostuitutes. There is no penetration, there is only the exquisite pleasure of the sustained caress.

  I admit I was not all that altruistic. I was letting the litting the little French maid enjoy herself because I hoped the pleasure she received would make her look more kindly on men in general, and help her forget her recent rape, but I also was getting a bang out of the proceedings myself.

  Her soft hips locked to mine, moving gently and then faster and faster. She was clinging to my arms with her lip. As her movements increased—I was aware of the pressure of her rigid clitoris by this time—She opened both her eyes and parted her lips, gasping.

  “Ooooooh! Ooooooh!” she breathed.

  “You see? Sex is beautiful thing between a man and a women. It is a God-given gift to all human beings.” I felt as if I were on the podium, lecturing a beginner class in my League for Sexual Dynamics. “The trouble is that it’s perverted by some men and some women into something bestial.”

  She was melting against me letting her hardening breasts know the firm musculature of my chest, moving them up and down even as her hips pumped wildly against my manhood. She bucked and she moaned. When she was about to collapse from the delight that swam around her and held her.

  After a time, she stirred. She kissed my chest. She whispered, “I never realized what my body could mean to me. And you taught me.”

  “Now, look.”

  Her soft palm covered my lips. Her eyes stared up at me in utter adoration. I began to think that I had made myself an ally against what was to come.

  “Don’t say anything. Please,” she begged.

  So we stood like that, pressed into each other, while the tender purred closer and voices sounded at the starboard railing. A rope ladder was being lowered. I watched Celeste Maillot throw a tanned bare leg over the rail and begin her descent.

  A merman turned from the rail to look across the deck. Before he could raise an alarm at our absence, I hooked my arm about the little French girl and stepped with her out of the shadows.

&n
bsp; “we’re here.” Called. “I was just a little woozy.”

  Georges Fortescu turned at the sound of my voice. “I’ll want to question you, Damon. Barbadonis, keep your gun on him.”

  The merman named Barbadonis lisped, “I thurely will.”

  I did a doubletake at the big merman. In the moonlight, his body appeared softer, more curved than it should. I trying to get my facts straight. It appeared that these merman went in for homosexuality. UI had to think about that. It might put a new light on what I was going to find on Thraxos.

  Because I was sure we were going to that little island. I had been following our course toward the Dodecanese islands, and I was reasonably certain the Athena was at anchor now some miles off Thraxos. It was almost dawn and there was a hush on the world. I sensed the ghostly presences of ancient ships with their sails spread to catch the wind, bound on some eternal voyage across the wine-dark seas of Homer.

  Angelique pinched me.

  “Sorry. I was daydreaming,” I muttered. “Maybe it was the blow on the back of the head.”

  The merman smiled at me. And he scowled at Angelique as he waved his revolver, gesturing us to the rail.

  We clambered down into the tender. Me first, because Angelique said she was afraid and wanted me to go first down before her, so in case she fell I could catch her. I took one glance down at the tender, seeing the Fortescus guests all wrapped upin blankets against the crew.

  Then I looked up as Angelique flung a leg over the rail. I kept my eyes on her full white buttocks as they jellied to her descending legs. She was a dish, this little French girl.

  A hand tossed me a blanket. I drew Angelique against me and wrapped the blanket about us both us both. We sat down together on a thwart, crowded up against Donna Rom-minet and her girl friend, both of whom gave us daggerous looks.

  Ilona Fortescu said,”I see our Angelique has found herself a protector.”

  Her husband grinned,”He won’t be a protector for long. He’s prisoner, and we keep prisoners in jail.”

  The tender moved away from the Athena, its sharp prow Cleaving the blue Aegean waters. A handful of crewmen remained on board; I could see them lining the rails, watching us move away.

  Angelique was shivering. I held her nakedness tighter to my own. I felt like shaking myself. I was going into the S.E.L.L. lair without a weapon, without even so much as a shirt to cover me.

  I wondered what was going to happen.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The island of Thraxos was a purple swell in the Greek dawn as the tender moved toward it.Legend said that Helen of Troy had stopped here with Menelaus of Sparta, her husband, on their way home from Troy. There was an ancient roadside shrine high in its hills that gossip claimed she herself had built to the goddess Aphrodite in gratitude for her rescue from the Trojans.

  For more than a thousand years after that, Thraxos had lain in a little back-eddy of Time. Not until the Knights of protect it against the attacks of the Saracens, did it again enter the main stream of give way to overwhelming numbers. They sailed away and never came back.

  Today Thraxos dozes in the sun, almost forgotten by the world. It possesses three towns, the largest being Pelagayos. It is inhabited by fishermen and their families, as are the two smaller towns on the north side of the isle.smacks and a ketch Or two.

  The tender slid into the harbor between two stone moles projecting. Several rows of houses, white against the darker bulk of the small mountain behind them, with red-tilled roofs, were a pleasant sight in the rising sunlight The thought touched me that the harbor and the houses made a disguising façade for whatever S.E.L.L. was doing on Thraxos.

  Two small buses were waiting for the Fortescus and their guests. We moved by ones and twos out of the tender onto worn stone steps half sunken in the harbor water. Angelique would not leave me, she clung to my hand, her troubled face turned up to mine.

  The buses chugged along a dusty road, curving onto the mountainside and bypassing the white stone houses. Here and there a man or a woman paused to stare at us, hands across their foreheads to shield their eyes from the sun. One woman, seated atop a jackass, laden with goods for market, waved a hand and grinned a toothless smile at us.

  Over the mountaintop we went—past the weathered stones of a wayside shrine, possibly the one Helen of Troy had caused to be raised—and down the other side. We could see the dark olive trees in their groves, the fields of white and yellow wildflowers, an occasional farmhouse with its goat corrals. It was a pleasant sight in these early morning hours. I could have enjoyed a vacation here, say, with little Angelique as my companion.

  The sun rose higher in the sky. We were approaching the western shore of the sky. We were approaching the western shore of the island, where a natural bowl had been formed with one side flat and open to the, sea perhaps in some long-forgotten time when Thraxos had been a volcano. A compound of modern buildings loomed ahead of us, tastefully fitted into a background of gnarled olive trees and ever-present flowers; to the west, the vast blue Aegean glittered in the sunlight.

  This was S.E.L.L. headquarters, its laboratories and dormitories, on Thraxos. A wire fence ran all around it, except where it faced the sea. There was one gate, before which our buses braked as Fortescu leaned from his seat behind the driver and waved a hand. The gates, opened and the buses drove through.

  In the distance I saw two men walking, their arms about each other’s waists. They were strolling as women stroll, their was what around here.

  The buses pulled between the buildings, we were ordered out and a small bare room of a long bulding. A merman—I assume he was a merman, though he was dressed in a sport shirt and very tight slacks—brought us clothes to wear. Angelique dropped her side of the blanket right before his eyes, standing naked and unconcerned as she bent for the mini-skirted maid’s uniform which she was to wear.

  “Hey, honey, remember your maidenly modesty.”

  Angelique giggled. “He isn’t interested in me. It’s you he’s looking at.”

  He was, too. I folded more of the blanket around me, saying, “I’m straight, mac.” He shrugged, smiled, and left without a backward glance.

  “Are they all like that?” I wondered.

  Angelique paused with her uniform half over her nudity to shrug. “All the ones I’ve seen. Why?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said thoughtfully. “I hadn’t figured on anything like this It adds a new facet to my problem.”

  The mini-uniform was down about her hips. Her white legs were exquisite in their shapeliness. I started at them as she brought the wide collar of the maid’s outfit down past her tousled brown hair.

  “I don’t’ think there’ll be time,” she giggled, seeing where I looked.

  She was so right. Almost instantly a small loudspeaker tucked into a ceiling corner began to blare.

  “Attention, all guests. You will assemble in five minutes inside the auditorium, which is the round building at the center of the compound. Any merman will give you directions.”

  Angelique pushed her black uniform down past her naked hips, making a face at me. “It begins now.”

  “What begins? How much do you know?” I slapped my forehead with my palm. “Stupid me! You’re a maid, you’ve waited on the Fortescus. You must have heard something of why we’ve come here like this.”

  She was turning her pale back for me to hook her up. I bent and kissed her between her shoulderblades as she said, “I never heard much. A few words, more or less. They’re here with their guests on a kind of holiday. For kicks. There was also something about childbirth, but I can’t remember what.”

  “Childbirth?” I yelped.

  “yes. They want children here, I understand. Why, I do not know.” She squirmed as I kissed down her spine.” Do you hook up all your girl friends this way?”

  “Only the ones with irresistible backs.”

  I did up the fasteners. I had more on my mind than a French girl’s smooth back at the moment. If the mermen were
concerned with childbirth, maybe they were interested in an underwater city, and in women they could alter into mermaids. But I had it all wrong.

  As Angelique and I emerged from our bare little room into a concrete walk, we saw the guests hurrying toward the auditorium. We started off side by side, but a merman intercepted us.

  “You will please come with me,” he told me.

  I blew the girl a kiss. “See you later, honey. Keep your chin up and your legs down.”

  The merman gave a dirty look. In some ways he reminded me of Donna Romminet, who hated men, except that I think this merman hated women. He gestured me ahead of him along a branching walk.

  The walk lead to a red door. The merman opened it and moved back for me to precede him.

  We stepped into a metal chamber fitted out like an operating room. Glass walls surrounded it, forming a narrow corridor which went past it into a larger room that looked like a hotel lounge. A man was seated on a divan, browsing through a newspaper.

  When the merman told me to halt, I did.

  The man put down his paper and smiled at me. In his late fifties, he was tall, with hard Germanic features. The beard were shot with iron-gray. There were creases at the corners of his mouth, and a sleeping bitterness lay deep in his hard blue eyes.

  “Ach, the Amerikaner. Good! I wish to talk with you. Georges Fortescu tells me you are a spy of some sort.”

  “Georges Fortescu is a liar,” I lied.

  The man smiled. He said, “Permit me to introduce myself. I am Herr Doktor Ernst Bachmann. I am a biochemist.”

  I bowed a little. “I’ve heard of you, herr doctor. You’re internationally famous.”

  He smiled with real pleasure. “Ah, you have heard of me? Then you will regard what I am to tell you as the truth, not as the maunderings of some harebrained mad scientist from a Grade-B movie. I am the man responsible for the merman I understand you saw in the water while on the Athena.”