by Ryder Stacy
Seven
Zhabnov ran down off the platform and brushed past the startled first rank of renegade officers toward the coffin. He bent his flabby body over the face plate and tried to make out the face he saw inside it. And he gasped aloud. “It is Rockson! I knew that the giant mountain man’s presence indicated that his leader, Rockson, had to be nearby. But he’s dead! Remarkable! And sad . . .” Zhabnov stood up and seemed about to shed a tear. “I had so hoped to find and torture Rockson! So sad that he is dead!” His officers stood uneasily, awaiting orders.
“But . . . what a strange coffin . . .” Zhabnov felt along the lid. It was cold, colder by far than the cavern itself. And all those wires, all that electrical cabling feeding into the coffin. Could it be that it was some kind of suspended-animation chamber? Could it be that his luck was great this day? Could it be that Rockson was not dead? Zhabnov swung around and looked at the small band of little men and women that had been rounded up. “Who knows about this box? Who is a physician among these little shits?”
The older elf in the white lab-smock seemed to shuffle a bit on his little red slippers, and Zhabnov smiled. “Ah, yes, you! Come over here! What is this box?”
Lieutenant Zimski pushed the little fellow forward until he was almost touching Zhabnov’s distended stomach. Zhabnov grabbed the man up by his lapels and hoisted him in the air. The physician was feather light. “OK, doctor, spill!”
Twisting the surgeon’s arm, Zhabnov shortly made him reveal the true nature of the device that held the sleeping Doomsday Warrior. And General Zhabnov was fascinated—and pleased. “So,” Zhabnov said, wiping his pudgy fingers over his four o’clock shadow. “So the box is a dream machine? How truly remarkable.”
“What shall we do with this little doctor?” Zimski asked. “Shall we take him out to the truck with the other slaves, or shoot him right here?”
“No! Don’t kill him. I need him to operate this device. A dream machine can become a nightmare machine, I think, with a little rewiring!”
“I won’t do it,” the little, white-smocked man protested. But after Zhabnov’s torture experts applied a device called the “compressor” to the little doctor’s head, he was very willing to cooperate.
The reprogramming of the dream machine began.
Niles Rockson, millionaire man about town, playboy sought after by all the loveliest women in the world, had just finished making love to the sensual, oh-so-desirable Kimetta. Now, as she brushed away at her long, silken, strawberry blond hair at the Louis XIV dressing table mirror, Rockson sat up in his silk bedsheets and stretched. He saw that dawn was breaking over the park. All the little people, those without any real money, were hurrying around to go to their dull little jobs. They were living dull little lives. But not Rockson. No, his life of enjoyment and luxury went on and on, without any such thing as that ugly word work to interfere with his pleasures!
Rockson leaned over and extracted the bottle of Dom Perignon Champagne from its crystal decanter next to the bed. He poured himself another sparkling glass of the bubbly, sipped it slowly. There was a full breakfast, which his butler James had deposited right on the table next to the heart-shaped bed, once Kimetta had slipped into her brocaded dressing gown. Now Rockson put down the champagne and put the silver spoon against the shell of one of the two-minute poached eggs. It was done just perfectly, as always, and so was the toast under the silver lid, still warm and with all the ugly crust cut off of it! And the marmalade! Superb!
When you were rich, young, and handsome, and lucky as well, life just got better and better, didn’t it?
Kimetta came over to the bed. She sat there, her knees tucked under her. She took the silver spoon from his hand and said, “I’ll feed you, darling.” He lay back with his hands under his head on the satin pillows as she spoon fed him the poached eggs.
“You are the best lover, darling, absolutely the best,” she cooed.
“So they all say,” Rockson replied, in a jaded, I-couldn’t-care-less way. He reached over and flicked on the multi-speaker stereo system, and sultry tropical rhythms coursed through the palatial bedroom suite.
After listening to the music a bit—music always turned on Kimetta—she put the breakfast aside, stood up, threw back her long locks and toyed with the ribbon-tie of her gown. “Can we make love again?” she pleaded.
Rockson nodded.
She sighed and slid out of the handmade silk and then came to him again. Naked she slipped under the sheets. Kimetta ran her long, cool fingers through his black-with-a-streak-of-white hair and kissed him furiously. He drew her to him. His shoulder, his neck, his cheek were covered with hot kisses.
She knew his anatomy like a map. Kimetta was like a well-tuned sports car riding down a familiar road. But this morning she was taking the express route to his fulfillment. His hands moved softly, expertly across the sumptuous plush curves of her desirable body. He lingered to cup her very full and ripe breasts, which seemed to swell to his touch. She moaned and her lips slid down his hairy chest.
“Darling,” she moaned, “anything for you. How may I please you, now?” Rockson was just about to say—
And then . . . something went wrong, horribly wrong!
Slowly, ever so slowly, Rockson’s pleasant interlude with Kimetta took an unpleasant turn. The room changed. Gone was the wide window with the beautiful view. It was replaced by a cracked old dusty window with a crooked, yellowed shade pulled almost all the way down to cover it. The Louis XIV dressing table became a wobbly-legged secondhand dinette table with a faded, imitation-wood plastic top. The mirror above it became dirty and clouded with age. Part of its frame was broken. The ceiling above became yellowed, and cracked, and much lower. There were flies stuck onto the crooked shade that half-concealed one bare electric bulb.
And Kimetta pulled away suddenly. She leaned away from the filthy brown encrusted sheets of the squeaky old lumpy daybed and said, “I hafta go to the john.” Her lipstick was smeared, her hair dirty.
“W-what?” he mumbled. He closed his eyes, squeezed them tight. He must be hallucinating, Rockson decided. Yes, that was it, too much champagne. A hallucination. Maybe. But when Rockson opened his eyes again, it was the same. No, it was worse. In addition to the room looking like a hideout for a two-bit gunsel on the run, there was a smell. A god-awful, foul smell, like he was living in a backed-up cesspool. Rockson heard the john flush with an unpleasant gurgle and roar. Was it the damned toilet that smelled so bad? Could lovely sensual Kimetta lay such a—perish the thought!
Rockson reached over and delicately lifted the yellowed shade to peer outside. Gone was the spectacular view of Central Park. Instead—instead—
No it can’t be.
There was a fetid swamp, its dead, rotted trees hung with long strands of Spanish moss-like growth. He let go of the shade and moaned. That foul smell was definitely coming in via the cracks of the window. What a stench—of human excrement and vegetable decay—like the sewers of Paris! What the hell was going on?
Kimetta started back from the bathroom. At least she looked about the same. Beautiful, long, and full. “Kimetta?” he asked, “where are we? What’s going on? Am I dreaming?”
She laughed and said, “Wow! You really tied one on last night didn’t you? Where the hell do you think we are? We’re in your stinking home, that’s where we are!”
She picked up an old dowdy housecoat and slipped it on, buttoning the one button that was still loosely clinging to the moth-eaten cloth. “Come on,” she said, “let’s finish off that bottle of rotgut for breakfast.”
Rockson sat up, trying to pull himself together. Kimetta sat on the side of the bed and lifted a bottle of something purple called Rumple Town off the wooden floor. She placed it to her lips and drank down a slug, then, half choking, passed it to Rockson.
“I must be hallucinating,” he mumbled, pushing the bottle away. “There’s no other explanation. Where’s my penthouse overlooking Central Park? Where’s my great furniture?”
Kimetta nearly fell over laughing, and when she recovered she said, “Good God, loverboy, you can be really funny sometimes, I swear! You snap out of it now. And get your act together. This is your damned little shack, right smack in the middle of an overheated Venusian swamp!”
“Venusian? You mean I’m on the planet Venus?”
“You got it pal,” Kimetta sneered. “This is your life, buddy. You asked for it, you know. You’re the one that wanted to come here and ‘find your fortune’ and all that. And you dragged me along. But you ain’t gonna live off of me no more. You’re gonna work from now on pal. No more freeloading. That’s what the new dictator said. That’s what the law is now!” She took the bottle up again and drained it, letting some wine or whatever it was slip down her chin. Then Kimetta slipped on an old pair of beige slippers and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To get some more wine, you shitface. That is, if the bastard will still advance a bottle based upon us paying him next week.”
“I—I don’t understand what’s going on,” Rockson said. “Kimetta, can you come back here,” he pleaded, “I’m having trouble this morning . . . Can you tell me where my poached eggs are?”
“Poached eggs? Oh brother, you really are out of it aren’t you?” She came back, but only to stand over him and sneer. “Now listen buster, it’s one thing to be a failure, a bum, a no good exploiter of women, but it’s another thing to be bonkers. I won’t stay with no creepy flip-out, you know. If the captain’s left the bridge, I’m outta here.”
Rockson got mad now. How could she talk to him like this? He was a millionaire playboy! “Well,” he huffed, throwing aside the dirty sheets and striding over to the closet where his wardrobe of suits should have been—only this closet looked kind of small—“you can very well leave me if you want! There are a hundred women dying to be here with me.” He opened the closet and saw just one checkered sport coat, and a pair of soiled chino pants on a hook.
“Ha!” she laughed. “Maybe you were something back in the old days, but now you’re a bum. No one else will have you, you freeloader! So you want me to leave you, heh? Well, when you pay me back for all the sex, for all the money you ‘borrowed,’ then I’ll leave, and not until then! You think that you can just use me and then tell me to leave? Well, here on Venus there’s laws about stuff like that! Sexual relations are sacred, buster. The man that has me has an obligation.”
“I made no promises—” he started to say.
Kimetta stamped her bare feet. “You led me on! Well, I see I did right to report you! I hope they hang people like you. You—you destroyed my reputation.”
Rockson’s head swam. None of this was right. Something in the champagne was making him hallucinate. Surely that was it.
Kimetta, acting much like an angry tramp, threw things at him. He ducked. She continued to rave, adding, “Well, Mr. Cheapscrew, Mister Bigshot! I certainly don’t want to play bed-doll with the likes of you anymore! I—I hate you!”
She reached onto a torn and faded stuffed chair’s arm, and picked up some clothes. She started to put on a red blouse, and then an oddly shimmering, silver-materialed skirt. All the while, Kimetta kept yammering, giving him an awful headache: “You—you think women are your servants, your fuckin’ concubines!” She spat at him, threw both of the slippers. He blocked the slippers with his arm, as he had the other debris she had hurled at him. They bounced against the headboard of the bed. Kimetta put on her alligator-skin stiletto-heeled pumps, then zipped up her skirt. She reached for the doorknob. But as she did so, there was an immense, insistent pounding at the door. The sound startled Rockson. For some reason he feared that kind of knock. Why? What did it mean?
Kimetta laughed. “Better put something on, buster. You know what that kind of knock means! Get dressed! We gotta open up.”
Rockson whispered, “Hold your horses! Wait a damned minute.” He threw on the chinos and the horrendous checkered sports jacket before she opened the door.
He knew exactly who they were by their uniforms and their shiny, arrogant faces. The Interplanetary Police, Venusian Sector Squad.
“What do you want?” Rock asked.
The fat jowly officer stepped forward, as his pair of assistants leveled guns at Rockson’s gut. “Shut up, you woman abuser,” the officer said. He slapped Rockson in the face.
The blow stung, and Rockson wanted to return it fivefold. But he knew he’d better not. He stood his ground, though. And he asked, “Why did you hit me? What is the meaning of coming here like this?”
Rockson could hardly make himself heard, for Kimetta was screaming. “It’s about time you got him! Take him away! Take the shitface abuser away!”
The corporal—Rockson knew he was a corporal by the number of blue stripes on his gray uniform’s epaulets—smiled. He said, “Ah, the gentleman doesn’t yet know the charges against him? Well, I will tell you: You have committed the crime of playboyism, and the crime of borrowing money from women. And also the crime of putting liquor on a chit and then not paying. All these things are now crimes, effective . . . ,” the corporal looked at his watch, “in two minutes! The freeloading scum of Venus are now subject to ‘transport’ for these crimes. Your criminal acts have been outlawed! Now, will you come peaceably, or should we pain-stun you?”
Rockson retorted, “Wait! Even if there’s some new laws, they’ve just come into use, you say! So, if I don’t do those illegal things anymore, you can’t punish me for what happened before the new laws were passed!”
“There is also a new law making the new laws retroactive!” The captain glared from under bushy black eyebrows. “Now, you will come along. You are under arrest, which means you are guilty, and now you are condemned to transport off-planet!”
“Transport?” Somehow Rockson knew what that meant. And he paled. It meant going to a prison-asteroid. Forever.
Even Kimetta, who had just been so angry at Rockson, had gasped at that sentence. She paled and said, “So harsh . . . can’t you give him one more chance? Even he doesn’t deserve—”
“Silence,” the officer cautioned. “You are the daughter of a man of influence, but I warn you not to interfere!” The fat man pushed Kimetta, and she fell back against the bureau, and her blouse opened to reveal one of her large, firm, and rounded breasts.
As the officer and the men with him gaped, Rockson saw his chance. He made a leap for the window, but as he crashed through the glass, a pain-stun blast shot out of the corporal’s gun, and there was terrible searing pain. And then an utter darkness descended, like a heavy curtain.
Eight
General Mikael Zhabnov sat at the Techno-survivors’ long conference table and ate the tiny buns that his unwilling hosts had prepared. He found the food that the elves—or whatever they were—served up was quite tasty He was careful, however. He made one of them eat a few buns from the big serving dish from time to time. Just to make sure the little people weren’t poisoning him.
As Zhabnov added calories to his already portly body, he watched his technicians working with the white-smocked surgeon Escadrille upon the opened and exposed control panel of Rockson’s dream box. The surgeon had been tortured repeatedly to force his cooperation. And now that the secrets of the amazing dream device—as well as a few of his fingernails and teeth—had been extracted from the little man, the rewiring work was going at a good clip. Rockson’s dream was being turned into a nightmare—an endless nightmare.
“Have you printed out the changes yet?” Zhabnov called over to the technicians at the coffinlike device.
One of his men, Tarlask, stood up, turned, and saluted. “Some of the printout is available for your perusal, excellency.”
“Well then, come on! Give them to me! Let me see the results of the alterations to Rockson’s dream program.”
Zhabnov was disappointed when he was handed the accordion-fold paper from the technicians. It was all symbols, complicated computer jargon. He didn’t have
the slightest idea what it meant. So he put it down and said, “Tarlask, perhaps you will summarize this for me, I don’t have much patience for lengthy reading. I don’t have my reading glasses.”
“Yes excellency!” the thin, gangly technician said, saluting. Then he proceeded to inform the general what the data from the printout meant: “Rockson’s dream has changed from pleasant to most unpleasant. You can clearly see this from the spikes on pages three and seventeen, as you have noticed, have you not?”
“Most definitely,” Zhabnov agreed, though he had no idea what all that mess of lines and arcs meant at all. “Now go on.”
“Yes sir! Well, these wavy lines here show a constancy with the original character in his dream—we believe that the machine has created an ideal woman out of two women in Rockson’s real life—for his enjoyment. That is, before we altered the wiring. Now that dream woman has become a betraying shrew—see these lines of disturbance on pages—”
“Yes, yes,” Zhabnov said impatiently. He wondered how the hell Tarlask could read this stuff. But that’s what he got paid for, wasn’t it? Zhabnov did the planning, took care of the big thinking, the big picture. And Zhabnov’s soldiers and technicians took care of the petty details! “Go on!”
Tarlask folded out more paper. “And on line twelve-oh-seven, you see, the location of the dream in space-time matrix has been moved from the time-place Rockson believes is an idyllic matrix—the late twentieth century in New York City, in a penthouse—to another matrix. Now these wavy and jagged lines combined show that the dream has been altered so that Rockson is now dreaming deeply that he is in a fetid swamp on Venus, and he has been arrested for a crime he didn’t even know was an offense. We have,” the technician’s face grew a bit red, “introduced an arresting officer that is in appearance and behavior much like you, sir. Rockson’s brain patterns contain a very in-depth description of his, er, interpretation of your personality. A most unfavorable one!”
“Yes . . .” Zhabnov beamed, “I see! Rockson is having a nightmare and I am in that nightmare, one of his torturers!”