Then, clutching the juice can in one hand, he hoisted himself onto the bed, catching her in a sudden smile. But she was good at the game; her eyes still didn't open.
Carefully, he lay beside her hip, looking at those breasts, those real 3-D female breasts, not in a photograph, but right there in bed with him. Two of them, by Christ. Then, with infinite delicacy, he lifted the can and let some of the orange juice dribble onto her bush. She sighed and a tremor ran through her. He poured a little more, and her legs spread voluptuously and she slowly raised her knees. He was seeing it at last, the outer lips and the cleft revealed as he had always dreamed of it, the halo of reddish fur even more lovely than in his fantasies. He dribbled some more orange juice and leaned over, pushing the snout onto her bush and maneuvering his tongue into the cleft between the lips.
Immediately, she groaned and threw her legs over his shoulders, pulling him deeper down into her crotch. "Teddy," she murmured, "you've come back."
We all live in our fantasy and only endure our reality, he thought philosophically. According to instructions, he began a spiral licking motion, working from the outer lips slowly inward around the inner lips and ending with the clitoris again. She began to heave up and down like the loud-roaring sea, and his excitement grew, as he imagined and participated in her sensations.
Her hands were on the ears of his Teddy Snow Crop f costume and she was pulling him down onto her frantically as she bucked upward, literally fucking his mouth. He began lapping her more rapidly, quite distinctly tasting the musty musky female-in-passion flavor mixed with orange juice.
"Oh, your tongue, your tongue!" she cried. "In me, Teddy, in me."
The midget maneuvered his tongue into her vagina and bobbed his head in imitation fucking motions. Her legs went limp on his back, then tight, then limp again. She's close to coming, he thought rapturously. I'm making a woman come at last. He strained, sticking his tongue farther into her, maddened by the thicker and heavier taste of her and losing the orange juice can entirely in his passion. He got both hands under her and lifted her ass, drawing her pussy up to him, sucking desperately as he plunged his tongue again and again deeper and deeper into her.
"TEDDY SNOW CROP!" she screamed insanely. "FRODO BAGGINSH PETER PAN!!! CHILDHOOD!!!! INNOCENCE!!!! EAT MY PUSSY!!!!" She was coming, gushing like an oil well, all the female juices of her flowing into his mouth, and he nibbled the outer lips with his teeth, eyes tightly closed, riding on her crotch like a man hanging on to the edge of a cliff by his jaw muscles alone, bucking and bouncing with her, swallowing the essence of her womanhood, the elixir, and now after decades and decades of frustration, finally coming, exploding from the sheer lust of her soul communicated to him in every spasm and twitch of her passionate pussy.
He thought two things: Now; they're going to have to clean the Teddy Snow Crop suit.
And: Iwonder if I'm still technically a virgin.
THE RICH ECONOMY
GALACTIC ARCHIVES:
President Hubbard's first step in establishing the RICH Economy was to offer a prize of $50,000 per year to any worker who could design a machine that would replace him or her.
When the primate labor unions raised twenty-three varieties of hell about this plan, Hubbard countered by offering $30,000 a year to all other workers replaced by such a machine. The rank-and-file union people fell into conflict immediately, some accepting this as a fine idea (this group consisting mostly of those earning less than twenty thou per annum), and the leaders still hypnotized by the conditioned and domesticated primate reflex that Employment was Good and Unemployment was Bad.
While the unions squabbled among themselves and ceased to present a united front against the RICH scenario, conservatives mounted a campaign against it on the ground that it was inflationary. Here Hubbard's political genius showed itself. She made no effort to reason with the intellectual conservatives, who were all theologians in disguise. All corporation heads and other alpha males of the right, however, were invited to a series of White House multimedia presentations on how RICH would work for them.
The chief points in these presentations were that: (1) a machine works twenty-four hours a day, not eight-thereby tripling output immediately; (2) machines do not take sick leave; (3) machines are never late for work; (4) machines do not form unions and constantly ask for higher wages and more fringe benefits; (5) machines do not take vacations; (6) machines do not harbor grudges and foul up production in sneaky, undetectable ways; (7) cybernation was advancing every decade, anyway, despite the opposition of unions, government, and these alpha males; it was better to have huge populations celebrating the reward of $30,000 to $50,000 per year for group cleverness than huge populations suffering the humility of welfare; (8) with production rising due to both cybernation and the space-cities, consumers were needed and a society on welfare was a society of very meager consumers.
The alpha males were still fighting among themselves about whether this was "sound" or not when it squeaked through Congress.
Within a year the first case of the new multi-inventive leisure class appeared. This was a Cherokee Indian named Starhawk, who had been an engine-lathe worker in Tucson. After designing himself out of that job, Starhawk had gone on to learn four other mechanical factory jobs, designed himself out of each, and now had a guaranteed income of $250,000 a year for these feats. He was now devoting himself to painting in the traditional Cherokee style-which was what he had always wanted to do, back in adolescence, before he learned that he had to work for a living.
By 1983 there were over a thousand similar cases. Many had gone on to seek advanced scientific degrees, and some had already migrated to the L5 space-cities. The swarming was beginning.
The majority of the unemployed, living comfortably on $30,000 a year, admittedly spent most of their time drinking booze, smoking weed, engaging in primate sexual acrobatics, and watching wall TV.
When moralists complained that this was a subhuman existence, Hubbard answered, "And what kind of existence did they have doing idiot jobs that machines do better?"
Some of the unemployed were beginning to seek jobs again; after all, $48,000 or $53,000 is better than $30,000. Usually, they found that higher education was required for the jobs that were still available. Many were back in college; adult education, already a fast-growth industry in the 1970s, was now the fastest growing field of all.
Hubbard was ready to launch Stage Two of the RICH Economy.
SATIRE
The dialogues between Frank Hemeroid and Ernest Hemingway grew more turgidly moralistic as the 1970s passed; Marvin was never able to bring himself to approach a sexual partner more alien to his own tormented ego than his right fist. He sublimated.
ERNEST: Fear is in all of us and must be faced. He who hesitates is lost. He who confronts the fear is undefeated forever, even if his body dies.
FRANK: Oh, come off it. The only reason anybody ever does anything "brave" is because he's more afraid of being called a no-good shit for running away.
ERNEST: You pass a thousand heroes on the street every day and never know how well they are carrying their burdens.
FRANK: I know. The woman with the Mongoloid child. The blind man who makes you so uncomfortable. The rape victim pulling herself together and refusing to go mad. The dumb cop with a hernia yet who goes down an alley after a hopped-up thief who is also armed. I'm not blind, myself. You only see their moments of heroism. You don't choose to watch how blow follows blow until heroism becomes meaningless and they all give up, one by one, and join the universal chorus of despair.
ERNEST: I have seen some who never gave up. A pig squeals when he sees the ax coming. A man can look right at the ax all his life and not squeal.
FRANK: The ax falls, anyway, does it not? Isn't your refusal to squeal just a big act, a gigantic lie? It's more honest to squeal with the other swine.
ERNEST: I still decline to admit that men are no more than swine.
FRANK: You are a Romantic, you old f
ool. If you had been honest enough to squeal like the rest of the swine, people would have seen the truth sooner. Every war since your day has been partly your fault, you know. If everybody squealed and ran away, there'd be no wars.
Of course nobody wanted to publish this kind of ranting- although it took Marvin nearly ten years to learn that.
In 1979 he set out grimly to write the worst, most tasteless, most vulgar book possible. He had arrived at that stage of psychological masochism where one must prove one's most pessimistic assumptions are true, for the sheer delight of knowing once and for all that the universe is really a pisspoor proposition all around. "Public taste is a misanthropist's heaven and a humanitarian's hell," he said bitterly. For his hero he elected a monster so monstrous as to be a mockery of all human hope, but one so obscure that he did not possess any of the evil glamour that surrounds a Hitler, a Nixon, or a Jack the Ripper. He picked Vlad Teppis-Vlad the Impaler-a fourteenth-century Hungarian religious fanatic who had executed 100,000 people for differing with his own extremely odd theological notions.
Marvin's novel not only justified Vlad, but positively glorifed him; it was full of denunciations of liberalism, permissiveness, and the opponents of capital punishment. It also had the most violent rape scenes Marvin could conjure out of his misogynistic imagination.
Vlad the Barbarian was a blatant incitement to violence, garbed in the most reactionary moralistic prejudices imaginable. It was bought by the first New York publisher to whom it was submitted, for a higher advance than Albert Speer's memoirs or any of the confessionals of the Watergate felons. A movie sale was negotiated even before the book was released, and John Wayne starred as Vlad, looking really sincere every time he explained why murder and rape were the highest human virtues.
Marvin was immediately commissioned to write a sequel, Vlad Victorious.
Actually, because Marvin really was, in his own odd way, a philosopher of sorts, Vlad the Barbarian was not totally bad. In researching it Marvin had stumbled upon the enigma that makes Vlad Teppis somewhat interesting to students of the human mind in general and the ruling-class mind in particular. The mystery was this: Two early, approximately contemporary and seemingly authentic accounts tell one particular story about Vlad, but each tells it differently. There is thus no scientific way of saying which account is true.
The disputed story is that two monks on a journey stopped at Vlad's castle one night and begged shelter from the elements. Vlad set out for them a magnificent banquet and then afterward asked them what the people of Hungary really thought about him. The first monk answered diplomatically and falsely that everybody said Vlad was a stern but just ruler. The second monk boldly told the truth: that everybody said Vlad was a homicidal maniac. Vlad thereupon had one of the monks impaled. The problem is that the first seemingly authentic account says he executed the flattering liar, and the other seemingly authentic account claims he executed the honest monk.
Marvin left this mystery unsolved in his book, and it was, perhaps, one reason that the novel became fashionable even with intellectuals.
Everybody, it appeared, had some intuitive, prelogical feeling about which monk a man of the caliber of Vlad Teppis would impale. Some were quite sure that a dingaling of that sort would kill the one who dared to tell him the truth. Others, however, were just as sure that Vlad would find a special sadistic relish, and a moral justification to boot, in surprising both monks by executing the flatterer.
Arguing about Vlad's choice, as it was soon called, spread from coast to coast.
"What would you do if you were one of the monks?" was a favorite question in these arguments.
"I'd do what the first monk did," Simon Moon said, in an argument with other programmers who worked with the Beast. "I'd tell Vlad he was the very model of a Christian statesman-which, in fact, he was."
"I'd tell the truth," said Markoff Chancy, on a Greyhound bus, "just to prove that little men have big balls."
"I'd lie," Dr. Frank Dashwood admitted at a posh Nob Hill party in San Francisco. "The most dangerous thing in the world is to tell the truth to a government official who is a primitive barbarian, in fourteenth-century Transylvania or twentieth-century America."
Professor Fred ("Fidgets") Digits, who always kept his connection with the Warren Belch Society a secret and, hence, retained academic respectability, finally published a paper in Technology Review analyzing the problem from the perspective of the von Neumann-Morgenstern game theory. The monks, in this context, basically confront a problem in prediction. Each must decide, before speaking, what Vlad's reaction will be: Will he be grateful for an accurate report or angered by it? Every person in an authoritarian situation faces this dilemma daily, and it haunts corporations, armies, and government bureacracies. "It is the classic disinformation situation," Digits concluded, satisfied that he had identified the problem, even if he couldn't solve it.
Others pointed out the similar logic of the notorious "Snafu Principle" proposed by the eccentric businessman Hagbard Celine in his witty, perverse little booklet Never Whistle While You're Pissing. According to the Snafu Principle, accurate, honest communication is possible only between equals, and every power matrix is a disinformation situation.
Since this seems to challenge the very principle of power and leads directly to anarchy, many were sorry that Mad Marvin had ever posed the Vlad Enigma.
STRANGE AEONS
Gestorben ist nicht, was fur ewig ruht, und mit unbekannten Aonen mag sogar der Tod noch sterben.
–VON JUNZT
As a scientist, Washy Bridge, of course, regarded Von Junzt as a mental case and the Necronomicon as the ravings of a deranged cannabis abuser. Nonetheless, that one gaunt German sentence found in 1971 stuck with him, taunted him, provoked him, eventually goaded him. He began studying the origins of the Frankenstein idea within the Promethean ambience of the Shelley-Byron circle. He researched the early Resuscitation Society. He traveled to Michigan to talk to H. C. E. Coppinger, the far-out physicist who had started the cryonics movement with his astonishing book The Aspects of Immortality. The idea just wouldn't let go of him. In 1974 he even, somewhat shamefacedly, looked into the writings of a strange Providence, Rhode Island, mystic who had written much on the metaphysics of the Necronomicon. Washy found in this man's weird writings a better translation than that of Von Junzt:
That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons even death may die
CONTRA NATURAM
Justin Case, feeling on top of the world and full to the brim with human kindness, gave a lavish tip to the young lady who had assisted him during his Christian Science copulation with Carol Christmas. He went home musing happily on how simple life was really and how easy it was to transcend one's own little problems with a water bed, a cooperative warm-mouthed lady, Christian Science, and a few good snorts of Marvin Gardens's incredible coke.
On Fourteenth Street near Union Square, Justin was stopped by a zombie. The zombie had pale skin, large eyes that never moved, a mouth that didn't smile, and the unmistakable expression of death. "Do you love your neighbor?" the zombie asked.
"Pardon me," Justin said, dodging, "but I…" "It is easy to love your neighbor," the zombie said, dodging with him. "The scientific principles of Christian Love are now known and can be applied by anyone. For one dollar, just one single dollar, you can have a copy of What Religiosophy Means, the book that answers all the questions of philosophy definitely and scientifically." "Please"-Justin shifted again-"I must…" "For My cents," the zombie went on, still with no expression and with eyes unmoving, "you can have The Scientific Cure for Depressions, Economic and Psychological." "Oh, go shit in your hat," Justin growled in Circuit Two territorial language. "Disappear. Get out of my way, you creep."
"This is free," the zombie said, passing him a four-page pamphlet titled "Usura Contra Naturam Est." "There is no need for competition, brother."
Justin looked at the pamphlet when he got home. It was made up of
quotations from Thomas Aquinas, Ezra Pound, B. F. Skinner, and Dr. Horace Naismith, founder of the First Bank of Religiosophy. The quotes from Aquinas and Pound condemned the lending of money at interest. The quotes from Skinner said that people could be conditioned to abandon any habitual behavior and substitute a new behavior. The quotes from Dr. Naismith urged everybody to join the First Bank of Religiosophy, or at least to buy one of his books or pamphlets: "What Religiosophy Means," The Scientific Cure for Depressions, Economic and Psychological, "Jesus Christ's Secret Teachings About Money," and Operant Reinforcement, the Bible Alternative to Satan's International Bankers*
The streets were full of zombies at that time. The Religiosophists were the most robotic; not for nothing had Dr. Horace Naismith, founder of Religiosophy, spent five years studying with B. F. Skinner at Harvard. The Religiosophists had all been operant-conditioned to be tireless proselytizers, and Blake Williams had even invented a mathematical puzzle based on calculating the probability of crossing any American city without being accosted by one of them, which turned out to be harder than the old problem of crossing Dublin without passing a pub.
*Terran Archives 2803; Interest was a charge for the use of the circulating medium (money). Primatologists have found similar money fetishism on hundreds of planets where hominid types evolved; money and barter themselves are typical primate behaviors which can easily be taught to chimpanzees and other anthropoids. In addition to Aquinas, Pound, and Naismith, early Terrestrial philosophers who suggested more human alternatives to this apelike economics included Thomas Edison, Buckminster Fuller, C. H. Douglas, Benjamin Tucker, and several others. Since primate behavior changes only under the impact of new technology (Moon's First Law), the money-and-interest fetish continued until the third stage of the RICH Economy abolished the need for a circulating medium.
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