The Best Laid Plans

by Troy Conway

  “You have done well, Professor Damon. Extremely well. Now let us test your tolerance to pain.” There was a chuckle. “We can usually learn the pain tolerance of our candidates before this, one way or the other. Your reactions have been so swift, your understanding of a situation so instant, that you’ve foiled our attempts to learn that tolerance point.”

  I was standing before a yellow door, facing it. The heat that was still in this room from the aftereffects of the blue flame was making me sweat, but I knew that beyond the yellow door there was another obstacle to be faced and overcome.

  The yellow door slid back.

  I moved forward into the room. A sword lay on the floor before me. It was not a regular sword, it was made of leather so that it was half a whip. I bent down, picked it up.

  In my college days, I had been on the fencing team, so I knew an epee from a rapier. The sword I held here was very light to the touch, its leather blade whistling as I swung it.

  A section of the wall swung back. A tall girl built like Juno, fully six-feet-two from the soles of her bare feet to the long black hair that hung down her back, was stepping into the room.

  She carried a sabre; not the thickly bladed sabre of the cavalryman but the thinly bladed sabre of the modern-day fencer, a length of slim metal that could not cut but that could sting with the fury of a thousand scorpion bites when it landed on your flesh.

  The girl would be a master fencer. I could tell that from the confident way she held her blade, from the ease of her manner. Left foot advanced, she came toward me, left hand dangling in the classic manner of the duelist.

  I met her halfway, I parried her first three slashes. I tried to hit her with the leather blade I held, but she was too adroit for me.

  A voice said, “Freeze him.”

  Another voice said, “No, no. We’ve never interfered yet during a test pattern. We couldn’t get an honest score.”

  “But he’s liable to get out of this one too!”

  “Then his score will show it.”

  I was to be left on my own. They weren’t going to radio-control me, the electrodes in my brain were not to be used against me.

  There was no need for that.

  The big black-haired Brunhilda came in at me, blade blurring, bare feet slapping the floor.

  I lifted my blade to parry—

  She was feinting. The sabre swept around my sword, slapping my thigh—and I damn near died.

  Her steel blade was electrified. An electric shock ran through my naked body from my toenails to my topknot. My body jerked uncontrollably. The naked Valkyrie with the sabre laughed gleefully and drew back her sword to belt me again.

  This time, instead of parrying, I leaped into the air. My body was not grounded now, and while the electricity ran through my flesh, it did not hurt.

  For the brief moment I was up there in the air, my opponent was defenseless. I made the leather blade sing as I whipped it right at her bouncing breasts.

  Those big mammaries had been a distraction to me until this moment. Seeing them swing and sway, watching them bounce and bobble as she moved to the attack or leaped back, had sapped my concentration.

  But now!

  She screamed.

  Mouth open, head thrown back, she let out a cry that would have done credit to a wounded banshee. Deep into her soft breastflesh went my leather blade, across each tender nipple until the heavy globes were indented a full inch.

  She forgot her job, the sabre in her hand, and me. She bent over, dropping the sword and putting her hands to her hands to her agonized breasts. I was on the floor by this time, so I stepped to one side and whaled her across the backside.

  I felt sorry for the girl but we were temporary enemies, and it was her or me. I whaled her behind a second time and then as she ran, I brought the leather whip-blade up between her bare thighs.

  Her body bucked and jumped. Her screams raised the hairs on the back of my neck. She drove forward into the wall, a hand covering her crotch, her forearm across her throbbing breasts.

  My dark Brunhilda crouched there, whimpering, bent almost double. Her big black eyes were fastened on my face in piteous appeal.

  “Don’t hit me again. Please! Please! No more.”

  I still held the leather sword. I swung it a couple of times and asked the air, “Well? What about it?”

  “This one is incredible,” somebody said.

  “We’ll have to weaken him for the next trap. Professor Damon!”

  “I hear you,” I muttered, staring at the big girl bent above her purpling breasts, holding them in her palms, crooning to them.

  “Take her!”

  The girl looked up in blind horror. It dawned on me suddenly that she might be a Lesbian, that she hated men, that she reveled in the idea of using that electrified sword against them.

  I felt a surge of cruelty touch my senses. I realized that her bosses knew and appreciated what she was, that this was a way to punish her for having failed them. Ordinarily I am gentle and tender with a female. Now the electrodes in my brain were throbbing, sending out their commands.

  I leaped, catching her wrist, yanking her sideways and along the metal floor. With my free hand, I gripped her flowing black hair, dragging her that way, so that she cried out in her torment.

  Against a wall I flung her so that she sprawled before me, her heavy thighs wide apart. The swollen lips of her femininity must have hurt like hell, but they were my target. I could have fought the radio commands, but I did not dare let the HECATE leaders know about the counter-stimulators hidden in my body.

  I flung myself upon her, ripe for rape.

  My hands caught her breasts, squeezing them tightly. She tried to put up a fight, but there was no spirit left in her. My fingers pained her as the leather swordblade had. She rose up to throw me off, but that only aided my intentions.

  She was a virgin.

  Her mouth opened as she screeched to my penetration, she bucked and writhed beneath me. A moment only was I halted, then I surged forward to this ultimate conquest. She lay limply beneath me, her eyes were squeezed shut and her lips were twisted as if in a cataleptic trance.

  Tears came out from beneath her lashes.

  I was no longer Rod Damon, founder of the League for Sexual Dynamics, I was only a male robot geared to obey whatever hand was sending out those orders to me. My body thrust and drove. I was a remote-controlled maniac, without thought, without reason, only with the animal side of me commanded to function as a male.

  Hate blazed at me from the black eyes below me. Hate whispered to me silently between her twisting lips. I reminded myself that she was under the control of HECATE just as much as Rhea Carson had been and even more than I was. She would have gloried in her triumph had she been able to being me to my knees groveling and begging as she had brought every other candidate with whom she had fought her one-sided duel.

  And yet, none of this mattered to me. Only in some dim corner of my mind did I have these thoughts. All the rest of me was a male monster commanded to do its will on the female of the species.

  And do the will of my master, I did.

  For ten minutes, for half an hour. My flesh was indefatigable. I was a true automaton. I heard voices crying out over the intercom as hidden eyes watched me and marveled. My satyrism was no longer a personal thing, it was a weapon in the hands of HECATE. And HECATE used it to punish this female swordsman for her inability to defeat me.

  When the electrodes stopped sending their commands, I fell away from my inert antagonist. I lay on my back and gulped in air through my open mouth. Slowly sanity came back to me.

  I had performed nobly. I knew that. I had done what HECATE wanted of its initiates, I had been everything I had expected of myself. I waited for some sort of congratulatory message from the intercom. There was none, just the sudden throbbing of the electrodes that told me I had another task waiting for me.

  I got up and walked toward the green door.

  My hand turned the do
orknob and I stepped through into a room filled with a soft white light. There was a big green jewel hanging inches below the ceiling, far out of my reach.

  I studied the green stone. It was a chunk of aquamarine, the largest I had ever seen, although I was vaguely recalling that some years back, a gigantic slab of this greenish stone had been found in Brazil and that it now reposed in a New York City bank. That gem had weighed upwards of fifty pounds.

  The one that hung in the air above my head was nowhere near that big. This one could have weighed ten, maybe fifteen pounds. But I gathered its size was of no importance.

  “Professor Damon,” said a voice.

  “I’m listening.”

  “The aquamarine you see above you. Do you think you can get it down from there? It hangs by magnetic force —two iron plates have been affixed to its sides while powerful electromagnets grip them to keep it motionless.”

  “Anybody got a ladder handy?” I asked.

  “No ladder, nothing but your naked self, Professor. It’s a test of wits, if you want to look at it that way.”

  The ceiling was twelve feet above the floor, which was carpeted with what seemed to be an oriental rug, laid wall to wall. I am six feet or so tall. This left a good four and a half feet between my extended arm, raised over my head, and the aquamarine. Not being a kangaroo, I couldn’t jump that high.

  Some test of wits!

  I walked around the room, studying the stone. I could make out the iron plates now. They had been painted green to camouflage them. The electromagnets would hold those plates forever, unless I could come up with a way to dislodge the aquamarine.

  It would not need much of a tug to knock it out of the magnetic pull that held it. If I were seven feet tall and could jump like a pro basketball player, I could leap up, slap it with a hand and send it flying.

  I was not seven feet tall. I could not jump like Wilt Chamberlain. But I could use a wall as a springboard.

  I ran for the nearest wall, leaped high. I put my bare feet against the cool plaster and took off from that solid foundation with a leap. I held my hand extended out as far as it would go.

  My straining fingertips went under the aquamarine, missing it by six inches. There wasn’t enough kangaroo blood in me, I guess. Still, I didn’t give up. I kept jumping at that wall and bouncing off it like a rubber ball. I narrowed the six inches to maybe four, but it just wasn’t enough.

  I sat down on the carpet to have a think.

  There were some assets I had: a good, muscular body and a brain that sometimes came through in a pinch when I put pressure on it. I let my eyes roam about the room. I felt convinced the answer to my problem was in here with me. HECATE would play fair in this regard, anyhow. It would supply what I needed.

  Of course! I was sitting on the answer.

  The carpet! All I had to do was roll it and use it like a long arm. It would more than reach up to the stone and knock it out of the magnetic field.

  Nice thinking, Damon! I congratulated myself.

  There was only one thing wrong with my idea. The carpet was glued to the wooden floor below it. I couldn’t so much as lift a half-inch of the stuff. I sat back on my naked rump and thought some more.

  The rug was here for a purpose. HECATE did nothing in this testing maze without a reason. But what the hell good was a rug I couldn’t lift? Think, Damon! Use that gray matter that earned you the rank of professor at a big-time university. The aquamarine, the rug beneath your behind, the stark bare walls.

  They all added up to an answer.

  My rump ached and itched. I moved it to a different position. And then it came to me, the solution to my problem. It was so simple, I began to laugh. I lay back on my spine and let the peals of mirth ring out.

  A voice rasped, “You find it amusing, Professor?”

  “Very,” I managed to gasp when I could.

  On my feet again, I walked to the wall and stared up at that segment of it opposite the aquamarine. Carefully my eyes went over it, and now I could make out the faintest of hairline markings in the plaster. Part of that wall was metal, the grid plate for the electromagnet hidden behind it. Whatever hand had painted the wall this pallid ivory had tinted the grid plate the same color, so it was almost invisible. A masterly job. A man had to stand a certain way to take notice of that plate.

  I turned away from the painted plate. I could reach it with a reasonable jump, I needn’t be seven feet tall to do it. The plate extended down the wall almost within hand-reach.

  Now I moved back and forth over the rug, letting my feet rub its material. I had only my naked body, but the human body is capable of storing and then releasing static electricity. And by moving my feet back and forth over this rug, I could work up a reasonably good amount of it.

  Over the intercom a woman whispered, “He knows!”

  I waited until I practically began to tingle before I made my run. I leaped up off the rug, I flicked my fingertips out toward the grid plate. I could see sparks as my fingernails touched the painted metal.

  The contact stung. My body received a mild electric shock. But the aquamarine came tumbling down to hit the floor and bounce. Apparently HECATE had geared its hidden magnet to shut off at even a minute amount of electricity coming in contact with the grid plate.

  I picked up the aquamarine and held it high.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  There was a little silence. I gathered that somebody had shut off the relay switch that sent sound from the control room down into the maze. They were talking about me up there, they were wondering what in the hell to do about me. I got the notion that they felt I was out-thinking them.

  Hell! I was.

  The intercom system squawked, then quieted. A voice rasped into life. “You are something of an eye-opener, Professor Damon. We must admit you have passed all our tests with more than a little to spare. Isn’t there anything you can’t do?”

  I figured that was a rhetorical question. I didn’t bother answering it. HECATE was not finished with me. There was more to come.

  “If you will please walk through the orange door, Professor?”

  A section of wall opened. I saw the orange door.

  The orange door opened as I stepped before it. I stared into a large chamber in which the only object was a huge X, a wooden cross set on its ends in the shape of a cross of Saint Andrew. I moved into the room as the green door closed, leaving me alone.

  I waited, but nothing happened.

  Then metal whispered as five doorways opened in the walls. Five naked girls came leaping out, right at me. I whirled to face two of them, who slid to a halt. The other three hurled themselves at me.

  As I turned to face two of these girls, the third one hit the back of my neck with the edge of her hand in a karate blow. I staggered forward. One female grabbed my right arm, another tackled the left. They made their bodies dead weights.

  I sank the fingers of my hands into female flesh, but the girls only grunted and hung on tighter. By this time the remaining three were slamming me with the edges of their hands. I rocked back, I tried to fight them off, but it was as if the electrodes had command of my body. I could only stand there and take it.

  My vision blurred under those blows. I felt numb around my neck, and there was a roaring in my ears.

  I stood there suspended between two girls, swaying slightly, all but out on my feet. Then soft female hands dragged my unresisting body to the Saint Andrew’s cross. I was lifted and held face down against that X by four girls as the third one clicked manacles about my ankles and about my wrists so that I hung suspended there.

  “We are sorry about this change in plans, Hecate-Hero Damon, but your stubborn refusal to be overcome by any of our traps has necessitated a change in plans.

  “Before we turn these girls loose on you, we wish to let you know that you have passed every test with flying colors. Your score is perfect; you have rated higher than any other operative we have.

  “We are proud to accept
you as a member of the team. But first we are determined to learn your threshold of pain endurance, your tolerance to all methods and means of torment. If it helps you any to know you are the first candidate ever to reach this position, be solaced by the information.

  “Go ahead, girls.”

  The girls were drooling to go ahead. They were pretty females, extremely shapely, with all the necessary feminine equipment of firm breasts, handsome legs, lean bellies, dark or light patches of pubic hair that matched their long tresses.

  One of them moved in on me, placing a footstool directly beneath my parted thighs. My male apparatus hung down inches from her face as she sat there. Up came her hands to caress and stroke and fondle. Within seconds that part of me was upstanding and at attention.

  A second girl—a blonde honey—went around behind me and began to spank me with a wooden paddle. The blows did not hurt, at first; they stung my flesh and roused my male desires, but there was no pain. Not until the blonde put down the paddle and reached for a Russian knout. The girl on the footstool had gotten into the act again, she held a small bamboo rod that she kept flicking against me gently, punishing my male apparatus.

  The bamboo stung. It sent stabs of agony throughout my system. My middle arched and swung to avoid those easy blows. I say easy, because if they’d been any harder, they would have injured me permanently. As it was, I began to groan; I couldn’t help it. Harder blows would have made me scream.

  The honey blonde began on my bare backside with the knout. The true Russian knout is a deadly tiling, there are pieces of jagged metal inserted into the knots that dot its cords. This was an imitation, of soft leather specially treated so as not to break the skin.

  There was pain, however, a hell of a lot of pain. I hung there shuddering, biting my lips, moaning softly. Every time the knout hit me, the girl between my thighs would ready her bamboo rod and hit me while the female behind me was coiling her knout for another blow.

  My beating went on and on.

  The other three girls came forward. One girl, a brunette, carried a black leather pouch. She stood before my straining manhood, smiling as she dipped her hand into the pouch. Her cupped palm emerged, holding a heap of powder tinted red, of the type, I assume, with which Hai-men Ch’ing anointed his own organ in the Chinese classic, Chin Ping Mei.