by Troy Conway
He rose to his feet, slim and immaculately groomed. He ran a hand across his beltline and frowned. “For some years now we biochemists have been experimenting with what might be termed chemical engineering. We have been trying to better the Creator’s own work by improving it We seek to make men over so they can live underwater. Why do we do this, you ask?
“In the year 2000, the world will not be a fit place in which to live. There will be an estimated five billion people living on our planet, and not enough food can be produced to feed them all. So then, where do we go? Not to the planets, because there isn’t any which could be safely colonized in such a short period of time. When then, you ask?
“I say, into the ocean.”
He was walking up and down with crisp, short strides. His right hand moved here and there in the air as if he wielded a baton to beat out the rhythm of his speech.
“ In the ocean. Ach, yes. Have we not already been thinking along such lines? Some years back, two French-men lived thirty feet beneath the surface of the sea in a kind of bathyhouse equipped with beds, stoves, television and electric lights. What they could do—could two hundred million? Maybe. But is there time to build a big enough complex to house them all?”
“I have come up with the answer. I shall adapt mankind to the sea, not the sea to mankind. It is good thinking, ja? You might call this a branch of the cybernetic engineering which has been going on now for more than a decade. In a sense, we are trying to rebuild people to live in a new and completely different—even. antagonistic—environment. Bionics, of course, gives us a hand here, a science in which we seek to imitate nature by studying the eyes of the frog, the ear of the owl, the gill of the fish.
“Ha! The gill of the fish. Could man imitate that, then he could very easily go underwater, build vast cities below the surface of the ocean. He could extract the oxygen his body needs from the water all about him. There would be rest-stations floating on the ocean top, of course. There, men and women could relax and breathe in proper amounts of oxygen which might be denied them by the ocean.
“And hydroponic farming—now being carried out so successfully by crews of nuclear submarines—might become a giant industry. Perhaps we must turn to the oceans to raise food to feed all the people in the world at that time. Farmers who could breathe underwater might well be the answer to the overpopulation problem.”
I cleared my throat. “You make sense, herr doktor.”
“Danke! All biological organisms such as man, beast and fish, are really nothing more than electrical systems reduced to flesh and blood. Eh? Gut! Between man and fish there is only the difference in the manner in which they get the fuel—the oxygen—they need to run their systems. Man gets it from the air, the fish from water. Can we give man the ability of the fish in this regard?”
“You can,” I nodded.
He glowered at me as if I had insulted him. Then I realized he was glowering at himself, not at me, for he said, “Ja, ja. I have done that, but I have made a mistake. A most vital mistake. I have turned these men into—but come!”
He drew me with him toward a large picture window covered by a draw drape. He gasped the pull-cord and yanked.
I was staring into a lounge, part of this tremendous compound of interlocked buildings. I gathered it was a one-way mirror on the other side.
There were only men in the lounge, I realized, though many of them were dressed as women. Transvestites. They were rouged; their bodies were displayed in the most modish dresses; they wore stockings and high heels. A couple of them were even making out with some of the men still dressed in slacks and sports shirts.
“Bah!” snarled the doctor.
“I don’t get it,” I muttered. “How come you go for the gay set when making your mermen? It would seem to me——”
“The gay set? Nein, nein. These men were as masculine as you—before I put my special sea-serum into them. This is the mistake, you see, the drawback that may well end the human race.
“For the sea-serum upset the hormone balance in their bodies, kills off the male hormones, enables female hormones to grow and take over. The result, you see. Every merman is a fairy!”
His laughter was bitter as he drew the drapes closed.
“Poof! There goes my hopes to become a kind of Poseidon, a sea god who has given the human race another dimension in which to dwell. How can those—things—procreate? Oh, I have given it a lot of thought. I have no answer. I am defeated.
“Perhaps!”
He accompanied this last word with an odd look at me. The short hairs on the nape of my neck stood up, and a cold chill rippled down my spine. I lifted both hands.
“You aren’t putting that serum in me, doctor!”
He actually smiled. “Nein, nein. My need for you is in another direction, a happy one, if you are the man I think you. Because, you understand, I have made some new discoveries. By injecting baby mice, I find the individual mouse retains its male characteristics up to and through maturity. You grasp the implications of such a discovery?
“If I could have human babies to inject immediately after birth, these male babies would grow up to be real mermen. They would not be homosexual. They would be all man male.”
“And you need babies,” I murmured.
“Ja, ja! With strong, healthy fathers!”
My mind reeled for a moment. Me—the father of the future human race! Me, Adam. Then I remembered I’d had a vasectomy operation some time back. A vasectomy prevents a human male of mature age from becoming a parent by preventing the Row of male semen through the vas deferens, the duct which carries this fluid from the seminal vesicles.
I decided I would not tell herr doktor this fact. It would cut off my life supply of available females, I was sure. It might also cut off my life, since he might no longer need to keep me alive. So I pretended to be overwhelmed with the notion. The doctor assured me it was no idle brag of his. He was fully capable of doing what he said he could.
“Have not others before me pioneered in this field of biochemistry? In your own United States, scientists have made an android that has a heartbeat, a pulse, and blood pressure. His eyes dilate, his chest moves as he breathes. I advance the study a few steps farther. I take the living body, I administer the proper chemicals that will create a change, I make the true merman.”
I grinned. “And all I have to do is make the babies.”
“Ja ,ja This is not hard work, nein?”
“Well, in one sense it is, doctor,” I replied. He did me the compliment of chuckling at my wit, then became serious again.
“I must tell you a little of this vaccine which——I”
A gunshot sounded. I heard the voices of women yelling. I turned toward the archway into his laboratory, but the doctor was ahead of me. He was running fast, so I ran after him.
We came out into the sunlight on a cement walk and into view of what seemed to be a mob of angry women. They came pouring out of the round auditorium in screaming groups of threes and fours. They were shaking their fists in the air. A couple had knitting needles they were sticking into the mermen racing out ahead of them.
I saw Georges Fortescu go down under half a dozen screeching, scratching females. He was trying to protect himself with upraised arms, crying out that he was not responsible for what had happened.
“Gott in Himmel!” breathed the doctor. “I was afraid of something like this! We have got to shoot them all, all those crazy women.”
This went against the grain. I was staring at a pair of luscious white thighs revealed under a mini-skirt. I saw a women with a torn blouse out of which a pair of ballooning breasts had burst to bobble up and down very provocatively. Another girl had her skirt up above her bare behind to give her greater leg freedom while chasing a fleeing merman.
I couldn’t let the doctor kill all that lovely female flesh.
“Hey, girls,”. I yelled.
A redhead in slacks and sweater lifted her head. She stared at me, then yelled, “There
he is. There’s the bastard!”
“Look,” I yelled, “I’m no——”
The woman wheeled and came for me. I started to turn and run when I saw Fleur Devot in a jersey dress coming up fast on my flank. “Not you,” she called. “They mean the doctor.”
Ernst Bachmann was fleeing for his life. I saw my opportunity. I ran for him, left my feet in a diving tackle. He crashed onto the cement walkway pretty hard. As a matter of fact, I skinned an elbow and a knee myself.
Next moment the women were all around us.
Their red-nailed fingers clawed for the doctor, who tried to shrink under me. I lifted my hands and bellowed.
“Take it easy! What’s all the excitement?”
Half a dozen voices tried to tell me all at once. I gathered that most of these chicks had been brought here for fun and games. They had been promised husbands and a good living. Unfortunately, by the time they got here to become wives or mistresses, as they chose, the sea-serum had changed healthy males into healthy fags who wanted no part of any female.
They had just been briefed on this tragedy by Georges Fortescu, whom I gathered was Ernst Bachmann’s second-in-command. Naturally, since their emotions and their libidos had been raised to explosive levels, they had blown their valves and revolted.
I was standing by this time, crowded in by a dozen or more warm, soft girl-bodies. One of the girls was even giving me a rather personal feel, and discovering that I was no merman, by any means.
She announced her findings in a gleeful chortle. “Girls! Look!”
I felt cool air around me. I was really exposed now. The girls all flocked around, fingering and admiring my manhood. They were out of their skulls with excitement, the whole lot of them. Their expectations had been built up so much that their maidenly modesty was a thing of the forgotten past.
“Hold everything!” I roared.
“I’m trying to, honey,” a brunette dish giggled.
“That’s not what I mean. Listen. Listen. Now calm down and let the doctor up. I think he has a plan to announce that will please you all.”
Hands dragged Bachmann off the cement. His face was scratched and bleeding. His scowl told me he considered me a traitor. But he talked fast enough as the women crowded in, threatening to mutilate him.
“Ja, ja! What he says is true. I have been considering your situation, and I have a solution to offer.”
He told them his solution, which was simply that I was going to impregnate them all. Or try to, anyhow. Some voices scoffed that no one man could do that.
“Then we shall go out and capture more men,” Bachmann yelled. “We have the means to do it. We shall send the mermen out and——”
That was a mistake. The girls swarmed in around him, yelling that the mermen would keep the captives for themselves.
I thought fast I said, “I offer a different plan. You shall become Amazon abductors yourselves. You can go raiding the island villages for young, healthy specimens of manhood. How about that?”
They liked it.
“What about the mermen?” glowered a redhead.
“We’ll work something out,” I told her. “Now let’s go back to the auditorium and talk this whole thing over.”
“Not yet. We want guns!” A blonde screeched.
Bachmann had the keys to the ordnance building on him. He was hustled along to that building and forced to open the locked doors. The women helped themselves to Luger automatics and holsters, to Russian AK-50 automatic rifles and bandoliers fat with bullets. They really did look like Amazons when they came out.
“What’s your name, honey?” the redhead asked.
“Rod Damon, lady.”
“Rod?” screeched a Frenchwoman. “Roide in French means penis. And how better could you be named?”
“King Roide!” yelled a blonde.
“King Roide! King Roide!”
They would have lifted me to their shoulders if I had not fought them off. “Look, girls! Let’s be sensible. Let’s go talk this over in the auditorium.”
I walked ahead of them like the king I had been called, but I made myself more modest, much to the dismay of my female followers. I was thinking fast. I had the opportunity to blow this S.E.L.L. setup sky-high and I meant to do it, but my better judgment told me I couldn’t go about it too quickly. After all, I was kind of a prisoner of these oversexed Amazon babes myself-even if they did call me roi roide.
I led the way into the plush-seated auditorium. I dragged Bachmann up on the stage. A dozen women acting as my personal bodyguard came with us.
“Talk fast,” I told Bachmann. “Offer to support them. You really haven’t got any other choice, you know. There’ll be a royal battle here unless you calm them down—the women against the mermen—and when the smoke clears, bang! Your great experiment is over.”
The doctor was shaking in fright, but he could still think, so he nodded his head. He walked to the forefront of the stage and began to explain that his researches had shown that the chemical injections and certain types of radiation would produce true mermen.
The women listened quietly. I could see Celeste Maillot and Ilona Fortescu among them, together with Fleur Devot, who appeared subdued, and Donna Romminet with Barbe Serrelle, both of whom looked a little sick. I almost felt sorry for them. They had come along on this trip for kicks, but the kicks were proving a lot too strong for their stomachs.
“You shall be mothers to the new race of mermen,” Bachmann was saying. “You will live here in luxury, waited upon by servants, with nothing to do but enjoy yourselves and breed babies.”
He made me think of the camps formed by the Nazis to raise boy babies for the Fatherland. I imagine Bachmann was seeing himself as a second Fuhrer. I was going along with his pitch until I could find a way to cut out of this weird wonderland and get safely away to a Coxeman rendezvous with Walrus-moustache, with Bachmann’s laboratory notebooks.
If I’d had any doubts, it was Bachmann’s next words that convinced me. “If there are any dissenters—we shall throw them to the sharks, eh? We shall be the new race, we shall be the gods who created it.”
He was really whipping himself up into a frenzy of Hitlerism. He was seeing himself as the guiding spirit behind the cradles of the future race of mermen. Herr Doktor Bachmann was a human weathervane, able to switch courses at the slightest change in wind direction. Face flushed, he whirled and pointed at me with a quivering finger.
“There stands your leader—your Roi Roide! He shall direct you in your endeavors. He shall be a king bee—this man who shall father all your children. As the queen bee lays the eggs for the hive, so shall your king bee fertilize the ovaries. You yourselves will be Queen Bees, protected, respected, waited upon by slaves!”
He was an inspirational speaker, this Ernst Bachmann. He almost had me cheering. I know the women flipped over the idea of being mothers to a new race of humans. I guess they especially liked the part where they would be waited on somewhat like queen bees when they became pregnant. It was a wild, crazy kind of dream, but he got the women to believe in it.
There were a couple who did not believe. Donna Romminet and Barbe Serrelle were trying to push their way out of the crowd to flee through a doorway. One of the armed Amazons beside me on the stage stepped forward.
“Stop those two! We can’t have them getting out to warn the mermen.” I guess she knew damn well what those two girls were, because she said, “We’ll take a vote right now. All those in favor of being Queen Bees to King Roide raise your hands.”
It looked like a forest of arms below me.
“Those who wish to be sent to safety on some other island or the mainland, raise your hands.”
The two lesbians lifted their arms. So did three other women. My redheaded lieutenant said for them to come with her. She took along half a dozen armed girls to enforce her orders.
“You aren’t going to kill them, are you?” I asked.
“Certainly not. We are going to imprison them for
their own protection,” said the redhead with a ravishing smile.
Bachmann was almost dancing in his glee, rubbing his hands together and nodding. “It is marvelous, the way it is working out. I should have anticipated the women’s reactions. I am a biochemist, however, not a psychiatrist. Ah, and you, my good professor. You were perfection, the way you took over back there—saving my life. I will remember it.”
“What bothers me is the mermen. What’s their reaction going to be? They could throw a monkey wrench into this whole operation.”
I was going along with the doctor because I had an idea in the back of my head. As king of this Amazon island, I would be pretty much the boss. I ought to be able to gather up the notebooks Bachmann kept his scientific findings in and appropriate them. Then all I’d need do would be to find some excuse for sneaking off Thraxos to a safe place.
Everything I had done so far was aimed at this goal. Everything I’d do from now on would have the same objective. So I asked again about the mermen.
Bachmann said, “They have not been aggressive. They seem quite contented with their lot. I have found them very obedient, however. They do what they are told—which is not always a feminine trait, unfortunately.”
“We’ll put it up to them,” I said bluntly.
“What do you mean?”
“They can join us—or die.”
After all, the mermen were S.E.L.L. agents, as was Ernst Bachmann and Georges Fortescu. I turned to the blonde girl at my elbow. She had stepped forward to take the redhead’s place when she had gone off with the protestors against the planned parenthood routine.
“Where is Fortescu, by the way?”
The blonde gave me a dimpled smile. She was a honey-haired sexpot from a nearby island, I learned later, named Stella Marakza.
“He is under guard in an anteroom, your majesty,” she said. “With him are the other men who came ashore from the ship.”
I thought about those other men, Maillot and Eduardo Herrara, Pierre LeMoines and several of the crewmen. I would have liked to free some of the crewmen to give me a hand with the women, but I did not dare. They were all S.E.L.L. agents. I could not trust them. I was not worried too much about Bachmann; I felt I could handle him if the need arose. He was more the scientist than he was the spy. He was concerned first with his sea-serums and radiations, then with his association with the Secret Enemies of Liberty League.