The Sex Machine

by Troy Conway

  The silken thing went down below her soft buttocks. I couldn’t follow it down any more without crouching, my hand was at the extreme limit. So I brought it up under her behind slowly, gently, half lifting her until she was feeling my priapic pride jammed against her mons veneris, and my fingers sunk into her buttocks.

  We went on dancing. That is, we stayed in one spot and we moved back and forth. Being the founder of the League for Sexual Dynamics, I realized that my phallus was nudging her rigid clitoris, and that the clitoris, being the seat of all female sexual sensation, was reacting vigorously to that caress.

  Her left arm was tight around my neck, helping her maintain her position. She gave a soft wail and then her hips began to slam back and forth as much as they could. She kept it up for minutes. I was praying the music would not stop. Then she whimpered and sagged against me so that it took all my strength to keep her upright.

  Priscilla Saunders had orgasmed against my phallus. Within her, she was undergoing a climactic series of strange new sensations. I doubted seriously Whether she had ever enjoyed an orgasm before. As the fierce delight of her climax ebbed away, as she regained her senses, so to speak, I had misgivings about her reaction.

  I had no need to worry. When the music stopped, she lifted her flushed face to give me a long, bold look. Then her eyes fell, her hand hunted for mine, and she led the way out of the press of sweating bodies to our table. I signaled our waitress for refills with my free hand.

  “What must you think of me?” she exclaimed under her breath.

  “I think you’d better forgive me, first of all,” I told her, clasping her hand. “It was the press of the crowd, plus the fact that you’re a very attractive woman, that made me lose my head.”

  I took the blame. Hell, I had to remain friends with her until I leamed what that silk thing was; I didn’t want her to get mad at me. Telling her that her female charms caused my little slip in dance etiquette meant I was taking the blame for what had happened. Her conscience could let her off the hook. I caught the glimpse of her gratitude in her bright eyes before she lowered them.

  “It—wasn’t your fault,” she said valiantly. “It was just—just the dance conditions. Yes, that was it.”

  She sounded as if she were justifying her erotic enjoyment to her husband. It would not be a sin if it happened because of external conditions; certainly she had not intended to get a deep sexual thrill when she got up to dance. I cursed the puritanism of our western civilization that could do this to a woman who had so much passion to offer a man. I wondered what her husband was like.

  “Now forget it,” I told her, seeing the waitress approaching. “We’re going to have a good time and we aren’t going to let one incident spoil the evening for us.”

  She gave a little laugh, nodding her head.

  We sipped the coffee and we talked about world affairs. She was surprisingly knowledgeable about the Mideast crisis and other cold war incidents. She explained away my admiration by admitting that as a minister’s wife—with her - husband in Red China—she had very little to do but read newspapers and periodicals like Time and Newsweek. A corner of my mind told me she was a smouldering volcano ready to erupt under the right guidance.

  I would have loved to serve as that guide, but my interest in Priscilla Saunders extended only to what she had sewn to her dress. The thought touched my mind that maybe I was the naive one. She might be a clever spy carrying secret documents to the Mao mob. Maybe there was no husband, maybe she had fed me a pack of clever lies.

  Did I owe it to Walrus-moustache to find out? Or to the Thaddeux X Coxe Foundation? I was not on any specific assignment, but I was an American and if there was any chicanery going on between Red China and a group of American dissidents, I really ought to find out about it.

  I decided I had to get her dress off and examine it.

  “Shall we dame again?” I asked gently.

  She blushed scarlet, and shook her head.

  “But I can’t just take you back to the Hilton. We’ve been cooped up in the plane for such a long time, we both need some excitement. Yes, you too.” I argued as she tried to slide her hand out from under mine. “You’re going to be a long time in Red China”

  I let her think about that as I waved the waitress over for more coffee. We had been nibbling on a sweetcake resembling a tart, made with plump, fresh Shizuoka strawberries.

  Over our third cups, I suggested we visit a Turkish bath. It would give me an opportunity to get her dress off and examine it, I figured. She was warm and probably sweaty after what had happened, she went for the idea in a big way. Now there are Turkish baths and Turkish baths in Tokyo. I had one in mind that a fellow Coxeman had told me about, called Abiko’s. You could take a lady friend there and undress with her in the same cubicle and employ two masseuses to work you over—and even more—adjoining tables in full view of one another.

  Outside on the sidewalk, I hailed a taxi.

  The word Abiko was scrawled in red neon lights on a sign hanging before a doorway in what used to be the Yoshiwara district. I helped Priscilla Saunders from the taxi, paid the driver, and escorted her through the entrance into a lobby where a crystal fountain gurgled splashing waters over a miniature countryside done in terracotta and marble. Underfoot was a thick blue carpet, and ferns and garlands of flowers decorated the walls.

  A young man was seated at a desk set cater-corner in the room. He looked up, smiled and nodded as I said, “My wife and I would like a Turkish bath.”

  I heard Priscilla make a protesting little sound. Maybe she had some idea of what was going to happen because she caught my arm and tugged it.

  “I—I’ve changed my mind, d-dear. I think I’ll settle for a shower in the hotel room.”

  “Oh, come on,” I protested as a real husband might. “You said when we agreed to make this trip that you’d go in for some fun and games. We lead a humdrum enough life as it is, back home in Indiana.”

  Her eyelids flickered. She was getting the message, all right but I had to do it this way; I didn’t want her thinking about the silk object I wanted to look at. Let her think I was ape for her body, it would keep her mind off my real objective. Her puritan training, her years, as an obedient wife, warred with her natural inclinations.

  The puritanism won. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, staring at the carpeting, “but I—I can’t.”

  She turned on a heel and walked out. I looked at the sympathetic clerk, shrugged, and went after her. Chalk one up for the opposition.

  On the sidewalk, I caught up to her, where she was standing with her bead bent, quietly crying. I put an arm about her shoulder, giving her a hug.

  “Forget it,” I said gruffly. “It was a stupid thing to do. I’m sorry. I should have known you wouln’t go for it. On the dance floor.…”

  I hugged her again. “Forget it. Back to the Hilton.”

  In the taxi, she was very quiet. She stared straight ahead, thoughtfully, and from time to time she sighed. If I am any judge of female sighs, she was regretting the lost opportunity to live a little. I began to hope. Maybe I could still get her dress off.

  “I’m hungry,” I said suddenly. “If you’ve really forgiven me, you’ll let me buy you a nightcap and maybe some Welsh rarebit at the hotel grille.”

  She gave me a tiny smile, but shook her head.

  We walked together across the lobby and went up to her room in the elevator. She was on the same floor as I was, three doors away. I took her room key from her fingers and unlocked the door.

  She turned to take back the key as the door opened, but my hand at the small of her back urged her into the darkness. My hand hunted for a light switch, then the little bedroom was bathed in a pinkish light. With the other hand I closed the door behind us.

  Her black eyes blinked at the light, then she said firmly, “Please. You must go. If anyone knew you were in here, my husband would surely hear about it.”

  I started to hand her the key, when my instincts told me
she wanted me to make the play, so that she would have nothing with which to reproach herself. I had set the tone in the coffeeshop, by saying it had been the circumstances that were to blame for the ecstatic enjoyment of our dancing, not she herself.

  Priscilla Saunders was a hypocrite, who wanted the fun without the self-incrimination. If I walked out of her hotel room now, after meekly handing over her’ room key, she would have nothing but contempt for me. And I could not blame her. She wanted me to throw her down on the bed that looked so inviting with its coven, thrown back, but I had to make the play so she could accuse me of what happened—not to the world, but to her own conscience.

  It dawned on me that she was a prime candidate for my book, The Sex Machine, just as Angela Montosores had been.I was not so much interested in making love to her, however, as I was in seeing what she had sewn to the inside of her dress.

  I stepped forward, and my arms went about her middle.

  My arms dragged her soft body up against mine. She cried out softly, and put her palms to my shoulders as if to push me away. There was no strength in her arms. She didn’t want to discourage me too thoroughly; she was just putting up enough of a protest so she could tell herself later that I’d made her give in. Down there where our loins touched, she was hotly alive. She felt the phallic growth of my flesh, and her mons veneris came to meet it, remembering our dance.

  “No,” she whispered. “No, please.”

  Her Voice was sultry. It was not denying me her body, it was just telling me the blame was on my head. Her face was flushed, her black hair had tumbled down a little so that she seemed far more attractive than she had at any time tonight. Her red mouth was a little open, and her lips were full and desirable.

  I put my open lips to hers, felt her mouth give loosely to my kiss. She made tiny noises in her throat as she felt how aroused I was, and how suddenly. Priscilla Saunders knew nothing of my priapism that keeps me everready for a female frolic. She thought it was only because I found her intensely beddable.

  My tongue went into her mouth, found her own moist tongue and caressed it. She began to whimper, her arms came up around my neck in a regular stranglehold. She began bumping her soft hips at me.

  I caught the zipper of that damn dress and ran it down. She tried to pull back from me but my hot palms were on the nakedness of her back between hex brassiere and her panties, and they were more than she could fight. Her belly began to squirm lazily back and forth against me, as her thighs sought to widen and catch me prisoner once more.

  My fingers caught the shoulders of her dress, slid it down her arms. She quivered, waiting, suspended between the realism and the fantasy of her sensual needs. The dress dropped to the upper swells of her breasts, then slid off them. In the black net brassiere she affected, her breasts were big and firm. Their light brown nipples were stiffly erected against large, dark areolas.

  I pushed the dress to her middle and then down over her wide hips. She stepped back obligingly as she let me see her black garterbelt andmarvel of marvels!a pair of black lace bikini panties.

  I grinned at her. Martin must be quite a boy if he likes you to dress in underwear like that!”

  She blushed all over. “He doesn’tknow about it. He’s never seen me in my underwear.”

  I almost forgot about the dress, as it fell to her feet. Her thighs were plumply white above her black nylons. She looked like a color fold-out page of a man’s magazine. The net brassiere was as transparent as the gown the hostess had worn in the coffee shop. So were the bikini panties, that showed off a fluffy mass of hair.

  She was really something without that dress. Her body was soft and curved. She was a real woman despite her puritanistic tendencies. And despite the fact that she was still blushing, she enjoyed my appreciative stare. She had been so long without a man that she was damn near dying.

  I looked down at the dress crumpled on the carpet, I knelt down, told her to lift her legs. I was up close to her, I caught a whiff of perfume and that female scent that told me she was in heat. One after the other she raised those shapely gams and let me draw the dress out from under her.

  I pretended to be surprised when I saw the long pieces of silk stitched to the inside of her dress. “Oh? What’s this?”

  She made a grab for the silk, crying out. I held her off with an arm, kneeling there before her, smiling up at her.

  “Come on, tell me,” I urged playfully.

  “No! I can’t! Please, it’s very important.”

  She came closer so that the warm flesh of her thighs was against my face as she strove to snatch away her dress. I pretended to be off-balance. I let her thighs push me to the floor, so that she was sprawled over me with the vee of her legs at right my mouth.

  I opened my mouth and bit gently into that flesh-fork.

  Nobody had ever been that intimate with her. She screeched and scrambled free of me on hands and knees. She sat on the floor, her legs drawn up under her, and stared at my face with horrified eyes. Priscilla Saunders made a most attractive picture, but I was going to find out what that silken thing was if it killed me.

  I tugged at the threads, snapped them gently so as not to harm the silk itself. To my surprise, I heard her crying softly.

  She had buried her face in her hands, and was weeping a flood. I said uncomfortably, “Oh, stop it. I’m not going to turn you in”

  She lowered her hands, gaping at me in amazement. “Turn me in?”

  “For a spy.” I shook the dress at her. “That’s what this this thing is, isn’t it? Some sort of coded message to the Chinese Reds? You’re no more a missionary’s wife than I am. You’re a secret agent, honey.”

  She began to laugh hysterically. I am sure she had never spent a night like this in her life, and it was bound to make her let go of her rigid controls. She laughed and laughed, half sobbing all the time. I began to be afraid she might get really hysterical on me, so I reached out and grabbed her by the long black hair that was half down her bare shoulders.

  I shook h a head back and forth until she yelped at me angrily. Anger was better than hysteria. I let her go.

  “Keep quiet,” I growled. “If you aren’t a .spy, what are you?”

  “A missionary’s wife,” she snapped.

  “And what’s this?” I snapped back.

  “You wouldn’t know,” she sneered.

  So I looked. I got the threads undone and very carefully lifted the length of silk which, as I untangled it, became half a dozen silken scrolls. I spread them out and stared at them disbelievingly.

  “My God!” I whispered. “Do you know what you have here?”

  I would have given an arm and a leg for those scrolls to be mine.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  She nodded quietly.

  “Yes, I know. They belonged to my husband’s father.”

  “These things, these six scrolls are absolutely priceless! They’re the work of Chao Meng Fu, who painted in the last quarter of the thirteenth and first quarter of the fourteenth centuries, during the Y’uan dynasty!

  “These pictures are almost legendary. They show the six postures of the fifth century goddess-queen of the west, Hsi Wang Mu. She took young boys as her lovers so that their Yang essence could give her eternal youthfulness. I’ve read about these six scrolls—but I never believed they existed.

  “It’s like finding half a dozen authenticated paintings by Raphael or Michelangelo, buried away in an attic. It’s a miracle.”

  I was honestly overcome. A collector, if he had the money, might pay half a billion dollars for these scrolls. Or even more. They were without price, being so perfect and so unique. I stared down at them, then raised my eyes to Priscilla Saunders.

  “You’re no spy,” I amended. “You’re a crook.”

  She shook her head, making her long brown hair loosen even more, giving her a wanton look. “No, I’m no crook. Those things really did belong to my father-in-law. They were given to him by my husband’s grandfather, who served in the B
oxer Rebellion as a United States Marine.”

  She told me the story in a low monotone, as if she was ashamed of it, not looking at me, but at her fingers that she interlaced together and wrung from time to time.

  His name was Alfred Saunders. He had run away from the Indiana farm that was his home at the age of nineteen and joined the Marines. He had been in the Pacific theater when the Boxer Rebellion started, and had been ordered with his unit to Taku.

  “I don’t know how much you know about the Boxer rebellion,” she went on. “It began in 1900 when a number of Chinese patriots calling themselves the Boxers, formed together from the peasant class to fight oppression, floods and famine. The dowager empress opposed them at first, but when the Boxers began slaughtering missionaries and their families, she decided to turn them against the foreigners, much as Mao Tse-tung unleashed his Red Guards a few years back against certain elements in his own society.

  “The Europeans took refuge behind the walls of the Peking legation. They had little food but they fought bravely against the attacks of the Boxers aided by the Chinese Imperial troops. Naturally the other nations of the world could not let them be slaughtered. So England, Germany, the United States, France, all sent their crack troops into combat.

  “Those troops landed at Taku, seized the forts and went by rail into the interior, attacked here and there by the Boxers. They weren’t sure just how large a force they were to fight so they delayed getting on to Peking for almost a month.

  “At the request of the Kaiser, the supreme commander of the allied forces was Count Alfred von Waldersee. Under his command, the allies besieged Peking, entered it and defeated the Boxers and the Imperial troops in a number of bloody battles.

  “After the victory, the looting began.”

  She paused to draw breath, staring down at her feet. “There was plenty to be looted. Peking was an art treasure itself in those days, and it held treasures”—her hand gestured casually at the scrolls—”to make the mouth of a collector water.

  “My husband’s grandfather used to say that among the Allies, there were ‘amateur’ co11ectors and ‘serious’ collectors. He had saved the life of a mandarin who was angry at the dowager empress, Tz’u Hsi, for some real or fancied insult. He showed my husband’s grandfather where those scrolls were hidden.”