The Best Laid Plans

by Troy Conway

  If Roger-Viollet should see a man wandering around the room with his love-in lady when he was supposed to be crouched with his back against a wall, all hell would break loose. I intended that to happen, but in my own good time. So I walked on eggshells across the floor, expecting at any moment to hear the voice of doom crack out like thunder.

  All this, of course, while Jeannette and I were doing some dirty work at the crossroads of her thighs. I was in this thing up to the hilt, and I kept hammering away. She was slowly going wild with my priapic performance, grunting and crying out, slamming her hips down and up in a steady rhythm.

  I guess the guy at the control switches was too busy looking at what was going on around me to notice my pussycat pilgrim’s progress. There was a couple, as a for-instance who were performing the yumha’ee, where the man squats down and the woman holds him between her widespread thighs, a position not so tiring as some for the male. Another duo were joined in the neza el kous of the Arab. This rainbow arch posture is performed with the woman on her side and the man likewise on his side but with his face toward her back. The female, gripping his ankles, bends his legs to make of his body a living arch.

  Since all these couples were acting under mental controls, I wondered at the identity—and imagination—of the man directing them, as a puppet-master might pull the strings for a Punch and Judy show. In my own case, I realized that the radio stimulator in my head was causing me to perform this el keurchi rite, but the counter-pulsations of the gadget in my tooth enabled me to act independently of it, if I so desired.

  I stepped over squirming bodies and between them. I made slow progress, but the archway was close now. And then, as if the Fates were laughing at me—my radio control gimmick started giving me new orders.

  Kneel down! Take the woman from behind!

  Apparently Jeannette was getting her orders too, because she pulled free of me and turned, dropping to her hands and knees. I dared not disobey those mental commands. The watcher in the booth wanted the fashion of the ram, so the Arabic el kebachi he was going to get. However, I dropped my head so my face would be turned away from the control booth.

  Jeannette was there before me, plump white buttocks quivering. I realized that my face must be visible to the whole world, right about now. My only hope was that having ordered the change of position the director of this voyeuristic velitation would forget about me. Swiftly I moved into position, still trying to hide my face.

  On my knees, my head was bent so far over that my cheek rested on her back. I nudged Jeannette forward. She slid a little on her knees, she advanced her palms along the floor to maintain her balance.

  Had the watcher seen the grenades in my hands? I’d tried to hide them by keeping my fists close to my thighs until the blonde nurse was in position. Then I’d tucked my hands under her belly.

  I wondered if anyone had ever enjoyed sex under more unusual circumstances. For I did enjoy it, even while a part of my mind was going fast enough to break a mental Mach One. My body was hammering away at Jeannette, forcing her to squirm forward toward the doorway to the control room at every delightful thrust. While I pumped sex, I planned strategy.

  The French girl and I were performing the tachik el heub motions of love which added to my thrills. In this, the male member is thrust inside the vaginal passage to the root. It is never withdrawn, the man just keeps hitting the woman with his hips. I had chosen this particular method because I had to cover ground, even while I was covering the blonde nurse, and this boxing-up-of-love motion seemed the only one applicable to my needs.

  I could reach out and touch the archway jamb.

  My hips danced a fandango and Jeannette Lons screamed, hips bucking wildly even as she lost her senses and fell face down on the floor at the foot of the staircase. I knew she was out cold from too much phallic action too fast.

  From my vantage point behind the moaning girl, I could not be seen from the control room. I got to my feet, loosing my hands on the grenades, and went up the stairs two at a time. The door to the control room was ajar.

  I paused to pull the pin out of the grenade in my right hand. I counted five, then my shoulder hit the door and sent it swinging. I paused in the opening, right arm cocked.

  Doctor Yves Roger-Viollet was bending above the control panel, eyes on the window that showed the orgy going on in the chamber below. Doctor Cyrano Matelot was standing beside him. It was Matelot who saw me and shrieked.

  I threw the grenade between them.

  Then I threw myself flat on the floor. I was vaguely aware of a couple of women to my right who had been staring avidly through the big plate glass window that afforded a clear view into the orgy chamber. I yelled something unintelligible, to warn them.

  The grenade blew up.

  Shock waves hit my body, flat as it was on the floor. A woman screamed and went on screaming. I glanced up, saw the bloody figures of Yves Roger-Viollet and Cyrano Matelot—or what was left of them—scattered across half the room.

  I made a leap for the control panels.

  My hands went out, slammed down on levers and vari-colored buttons. Beneath me, through the control window, I saw all action stop as the men and women, freed of the radio-controlled lust that held them as slaves in its grip, fell apart and sagged to the floor, unmoving.

  I turned my head. The women in here with me were alive and unharmed, though parts of their dresses had been shredded by the explosion. “Get the hell out of here!” I barked. “The police are coming in.”

  They turned and ran, crowding through the doorway, elbowing and clawing one another like demented animals. I felt sympathy for them. Like Margot Metayer and Sabine Bree, they were only bored, frustrated housewives seeking for thrills, thrills that HECATE offered them in return for little favors like spying on their important husbands and reporting back what they learned.

  I was alone with the useless controls.

  And HECATE was as good as dead.

  It would be a mopping-up process now. None of the radio stimulators would work without these master controls. I felt like Abraham Lincoln must have felt after he freed the slaves.

  I was still leaning over the control panels when a policeman appeared in the doorway and told me the Commissioner would see me to congratulate me on my excellent job. The police were rounding up the HECATE men and women, who were babbling and telling everything they knew to the flics. There would be scandals in high places, the officer muttered. He was obviously scandalized himself.

  I followed him down the stairs.

  Fourteen hours later, I was stepping out of the shower in my Plaza-Athénée suite of rooms, reaching for a shaggy towel to dry myself off. I had returned from Dampierre about four in the morning and had slept the good sleep until half an hour ago when I’d waked to take a shower.

  My spirit glowed just as brightly as my skin while I worked the towel. The Commissioner had been lavish in his praise. The men and women in HECATE would be separated from their control gadgets, the French government was going to keep the affair absolutely hush-hush to prevent panic.

  One by one, the operatives of HECATE would be rounded up, if they did not come forward of their own volition. They would be interrogated, their knowledge would be added to the files and information the French police already had in their possession. It would take time to sort out the entire story, to realize how deep and how far the claws of the organization had been extended. But it would be done.

  HECATE itself was as dead as Yves Roger-Viollet and Cyrano Matelot. The control room was being disassembled by electronic experts. The headquarters building would be added to the hospital itself, which was being returned to the administrative control of Doctor Berlet. His daughter Noelle would help him re-establish its once untarnished reputation. Jeannette Lons was going to be named Head Nurse.

  Everything was great with my world. Even Old Walrus-moustache had cabled his kudos on a job well done.

  Just one thing rankled in me. Sure, call it male pride in my manho
od, but I couldn’t get the thought of Margot Metayer out of my head. The fiasco with her in these rooms of my suite had left psychic scars on that pride. So what if HECATE had had me under its controls? I had not performed in true Rod Damon style, and it annoyed the hell out of me.

  I got dressed and went downstairs, hoping she might be sitting in the lobby. No such luck. I walked into the dining room, to fill my empty middle.

  And there she was, in a lowcut cocktail gown, sipping an aperitif. She did not blink as I walked up to her table, pulled back the empty chair, and seated myself. I gestured for the waiter to set a place for me. I had the feeling she was expecting me.

  “You’re my guest,” I told her.

  I also told her over soupe au pistou à la Provence, bouef à la mode with carrots and onions, while finishing up with mousse au chocolat for dessert, and during several cups of steaming coffee exactly what had happened at the villa on Elsinore beach in Denmark. Her eyes were very wide, her lipsticked mouth a little open, as she listened.

  “Two? At once?” she gasped.

  I smiled. “And more than once.”

  “You are either a braggart or——”

  “You’re getting monotonous about that. Tonight I’m here to prove the truth.” I grinned. “Of course, if you’d prefer to wait and talk things over with Sabine or Germaine—”

  It was her turn to be amused. “They would lie, the bitches! If you had done all you claim to have done, they’d lie and say you hadn’t. If you had fizzled out, they’d claim you were a humping Hercules, just to make me jealous. No, no. I much prefer to be the tester myself.”

  Her blue eyes challenged me across the table. I ordered Chivas Regal and toasted her loveliness. “I shall toast you in a different manner, once we’re upstairs,” I announced.

  “Braggart! We shall see.”

  This time as I walked behind Madame Metayer as she walked toward the foyer archway, crowding her girdled buttocks with my loins, I reacted as if I’d been drinking the juices of the thorn apple. Standing close to her soft thigh. I let my epee nudge it. She was coloring faintly, she knew damn well I was up to par. And in the elevator, where once I hadn’t so much as stirred an inch, I was now double-shanked, as the saying has it.

  I caught her hand and moved it until she could play and explore if she wanted. She wanted, all right. Her fingertips measured and then double-checked, to make sure she wasn’t pipe-dreaming.

  She murmured, “It cannot be.”

  I growled, “Braggart, am I?”

  Madame Metayer practically ran down the carpeted hall to my suite door. I unlocked it to let her enter first. I reached to unfasten her zipper, but she beat me to it. She had my zipper down before I knew what was happening.

  “Here,” she panted, moving toward a low hassock and drawing me with her with a hand on the pump handle. Yanking her skirts up to the middle of her pale white thighs so I could see her shapely stockinged legs and her garterclasps, she sat down.

  Margot drew out my manhood. Her face was red with excitement as she saw its size. “A horse is no bigger,” she moaned.

  “The Hindus would call me ashva, or horse-man,” I told her bowed head as she went on examining me. “Twelve fingers long, twelve fingers deep.”

  “What was wrong with you before?” she moaned.

  “I’d just come out of a hospital,” I explained, which was true enough in its way. “It had a debilitating effect on me.

  I knelt down, pushed her skirt back to her hips, ran my mouth and tongue along her left thigh and then the right above her stockingtops. She was moaning, trying to open and close the thighs I was caressing. She was steaming, she was one hot honeyslot, but I was the one in the control seat.

  Her eyes were closed, her lips were pressed together, her head hung backward as I let my lips tell her silently that this was one evening she was never to forget. After a little while she began to tremble uncontrollably.

  There was no need to wait. We had the night before us, but she was actually suffering. I hate to see a pretty woman suffer so I tilted her backward until her buttocks were on the hassock and her head was on the floor and then I took her with a savage fury that was kissing kin to rape.

  Her stockinged legs came up to tighten about my trousered loins; she was fully clothed, so was I. I didn’t get any extra kicks from taking her while we were dressed, it just seemed the thing to do at the time. If I could relieve her intense need, I’d be doing her a favor.

  We settled into the souak el feurdj movement, in which my member slid in and out and right and left in a steady pulsing that I could keep up indefinitely. Under me, Margot Metayer was going crazy, screaming and wailing, clawing at my jacketed shoulders and shuddering into one orgasm after another.

  “Braggart?” I whispered once.

  “No, no, it is all true—if a living dream can be called true.”

  We went on and on, like a mechanical toy conceived in the mind of a giant toymaker. When Margot fainted dead away, I carried her to my bed and undressed her. I stripped out of my own clothes and joined her.

  She woke to the caress of lips upon her nipples. She moaned, writhed her nakedness into mine and cupped the back of my neck with a hand. We kissed a long time.

  “To paraphrase a famous American,” I grinned, “I’ve only just begun to fight.”

  Her happy laughter was my reward as she made room to take me between her thighs. While I let pleasure wash over us, I realized the rankling annoyance in my mind at my radio-controlled failure was a thing of the past. Tonight, I would prove to my satisfaction, and even more to the satisfaction of Margot Metayer, that what had happened between us some time ago was a boo-boo never to be repeated.

  I must admit, she loved the way I proved it.