Lady Slings the Booze Read online

  Maybe she’ll find a better lover than me, and leave me…

  She’d already had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lovers, male, female, and otherwise…and found me good enough to propose to, took the very first chance she got, not even waiting for privacy. And who says women choose mates by athletic criteria? No possible marriage partner could be less likely to abandon a good relationship with me for mere hot sex. If it wasn’t a good relationship, that was my fault, not somebody else’s.

  How will I know whose the children are?…

  In the first place, she was professionally competent at managing contraception, proven so over time. In the second place, what the hell did I care? Any child that came out of that beautiful belly would be lovable, worth cherishing and raising, whether it happened to carry my personal congenital deficiencies or not.

  Maybe she’ll bring home some jerk I don’t like. Or some germ that doesn’t like me…

  In the first place, none of her clients would be staying that long. In the second place, they’d all have been prescreened by Lady Sally, who didn’t seem to tolerate jerks in her House. As to health, they’d all be monitored by Doctor Kate. Arethusa was less likely to give me an infection than the average secretary I’d meet in a bar.

  Maybe I’ll have to compete for her attention…

  This argument might possibly have applied…to any of Lady Sally’s artists except Arethusa. There were two of her. And one of her rarely entertained clients, except on the piano.

  All this intellectualizing was fine. What did my ape glands think? I looked at my beloved, and visualized handsome men touching her, making love to her, making her throw back her head and clench her eyes shut and cry out with joy the way she did…come to think of it, it might just as well be beautiful women, who knew more about pleasing another woman than I ever would, driving her wild…Or both…

  I found I was getting an erection.

  “No problem at all,” I assured her. “But it raises an interesting corollary question. I’ve been offered a permanent job here—assuming that the world and I both continue to exist—and I’m thinking seriously of taking it. The trouble with being a private eye is all that goddam privacy. Do you anticipate that being a problem for you?”

  She blinked. “Touché. I never thought about it.”

  “Think about it. There are two of you, and only one of me. And even if there were only one of you, the supply and demand equations are different for men and women. You can make love to a thousand men, and still bring me all you’ve got. My equipment takes a lot longer to reload.”

  “So what? Erections are certainly useful in pleasing a woman, but I’ve never understood why so many people seem to think they’re essential. Sure, they’re flattering—but a man who doesn’t have an erection and still wants to make love to me: now, that’s flattering. Joseph my darling fiancé, if you were a paraplegic, I think you could send me through the roof with your eyelids.”

  As I envisioned that, my erection, too dumb to know it had been insulted, intensified and began to climb. “But are you the jealous type? It’s not a silly question. I’ve known jealous prostitutes. What if you smell some other woman on those eyelids?”

  She grinned. “Ah, but I’m twice the woman she is—no matter who she is. No, really, Joe: the jealous type I am not. I was when I came here, a little, but this place cured me. My first hour in the Bower cured me. I’d love to see you making love with someone else.”

  Up to half mast now.

  “I’ll prove it to you, a little later today. Doctor Kate has this unusual billing policy, you see. She believes in reaping what she sews—and she did quite a lot of sewing on you, even if the evidence is gone. You won’t mind if I watch, will you? I know she won’t. But I promise I won’t be disappointed if you’d rather I didn’t. Well, not too disappointed. I really don’t need to own you, my darling. Just to share my life with you.”

  Something bumped me just below the navel.

  “I’m more concerned about you, love,” she went on. “You’ve only been here a few days—and you come from a macho kind of background—”

  “I come from a background that almost guaranteed I was gonna drink myself to death all alone in the Old Dicks’ Home one day,” I told her. “That sounded romantic to me when I was a kid starting out, but as I get older it sounds less and less attractive. I’m ready for a change.” The words surprised me as they came out, but I knew they were true.

  “Yes, but are your emotions?”

  I started to answer, and hesitated, frowning. “I know what you mean. I rummage around in my head looking for jealousy, and I don’t seem to find any—but it may be different in practice. All I can tell you is, I’m being honest when I say I don’t anticipate a problem. But I admit I could be wrong. I’m willing to gamble if you are.”

  Her eyes were bright. “Joe…shall we test it?”

  “Now, you mean? How? Invite somebody in?”

  “It’s not necessary.”

  “I don’t get you—oh!”

  She nodded. “My other body went on-shift a few hours ago. I’ve been out of rotation for days now, and my clients were starting to miss me. As an experiment, why don’t we lie back down here, while I tell you just what I’m doing…and what is being done to me…at this moment, a few doors away? A sort of blow-by-blow description…”

  AS she meshed her two body-awarenesses, there came a time when she no longer needed to tell me, verbally, what was happening down the hall. I could tell, to a large extent, by her local body’s responses.

  It was a transcendentally strange sensation. Four bodies were having sex…but all the action was being directed by one of us. The one that I had never met. What jealousy? How could he possess my woman?—he didn’t even know that I was in her too as he plunged away; he was sublimely unaware of my existence.

  And as I paid more and closer attention to Arethusa’s body and facial expressions—without the distraction of having to think about what she might like me to do to her next, or how I was “performing”—I knew her ever better, grew ever closer to her, understood her ever more deeply. She had previously displayed a limited ability to read my thoughts during lovemaking; somewhere in there a switch was thrown and I was inside her head. The one down the hall.

  I was—at least in part, like an overlay—a beautiful, highly aroused woman, and an acceptable male was making more than acceptable love to me…

  Like most heterosexual men, I had sometimes wondered what a homosexual experience might be like. Like most heterosexual men, I had occasionally wished to find out. Like most heterosexual men, I had never been able to figure out a way to do so without risking loss of dignity. Now that I found myself, as it were, in the middle of things, I felt the same impulse most heterosexual men would feel. Panic…

  But it faded almost as I felt it. How could I possibly doubt my masculinity? Even as I felt my vagina joyously plundered, my clitoris electrified, my breasts squeezed, a man’s tongue in my mouth, I could feel Arethusa’s vagina embracing my penis, her strong fingers clutching my back, her sweet mouth opening under mine, the lush scent of her in my nostrils. I might not have known how to enjoy being penetrated, being invaded…but she was right there with me, teaching me how, showing me how. For the first time in my life I began to dimly understand just how lucky women are…

  As he spilled into me, Arethusa spilled into me, and I into her, and I knew that jealousy was not going to be a problem in our marriage.

  Sometime in there, the last of my annoyance at Lady Sally leaked out of me. It was nice having my strength back again…

  WE saw Tesla in the cafeteria, eating dinner at a table in the far corner and reading. The eighteen crumpled but snow-white linen napkins he had used to polish his knife and fork before beginning to eat were piled on the table beside him. It was a good thing I’d read about Nikky, or I might have tried to join him at his table, and upset him. He hated company at meals, because it distracted him while he was busy trying to compute the cubic
contents of each bite. You don’t give indigestion to the man who’s going to help you save reality. Not when you’ve just acquired such a compelling reason to love reality as Arethusa…

  But the moment he was done eating, he put his book down and called us over to join him. I glanced at the open book as we reached his table; it seemed to be poetry by somebody named Kranjcevic.

  “Ken, my friend,” he said as he seated Arethusa, “I was talking to Arethusa’s avatar a few hours ago, and she informed me that you and she are affianced. May I offer you my sincere congratulations? You probably believe you know how fortunate you are…but I suspect you are wrong by at least an order of magnitude. You have accomplished something very much like reaching into a chest of splendid jewels and plucking out the Koh-i-noor.”

  “You don’t know the half of it, Nikky,” Arethusa told him. “I was the first eligible woman he laid eyes on in the House.”

  His bushy eyebrows rose. “Remarkable!”

  “The first, and the last,” I added in reflex gallantry.

  She pinched me. “Ken, that lie is not just outrageous, it’s unnecessary. Didn’t we just settle that a while ago?”

  I grinned at her. “You were the first, and you’re going to be the last if I have my way. I didn’t say anything about in between.”

  She twinkled. “That’s better. I like my flattery plausible.”

  “I did have a pulse, last time I checked.”

  “Oh my, yes. Nikky, you’ll come to our wedding, won’t you?”

  “I would not miss it for the world, dear lady,” Tesla said gravely.

  “That would be the one acceptable excuse,” I said. “But we’ve got it tentatively scheduled for the day after we save the world. Whenever that is.”

  “That is the second reason I asked you both to join me,” Tesla said. He glanced around and lowered his voice slightly. “That day approaches.”

  For no reason at all I thought: it’s not “adrenaline,” like everybody thinks it is, it’s “adrenalin,” a pharmaceutical trade name for norepinephrine that passed into the language like jello or kleenex. You can even catch doctors with that one. “You’ve got results already, Nikola? Overnight?”

  Again his gaze flicked from side to side. “Yes, but I am reluctant to discuss them here.”

  Just then there was a mild disturbance at a nearby table. Reggie, the aged Brit I’d met on my previous visit to the cafeteria, was being braced by an agitated client. He was also a Brit, and nearly as aged, dressed expensively but in appalling taste; he might as well have been wearing a sign saying RICH QUEER. He had allowed his voice to rise in pitch and volume, and was close to hysteria. “But I mean, dash it all! I’ve lost Bingo and Tuppy and Sippy and Corky and Rocky and Biffy, all the Drones are gone, Aunt Dahlia—even Aunt Agatha, impossible as it seems, turned out to be mortal—I mean to say, old man, you’re simply the only thing left on Earth that I understand.”

  Reggie didn’t seem at all embarrassed; if anything there was compassion in his ancient eyes. “I’m very sorry, sir,” he said gravely. “You know you are welcome to visit me regularly…but you must make your own way in the world now.”

  “But why?”

  “Because, sir, I do not play that scene any more. As the poet Wordsworth said, ‘A Briton, even in love, should be a subject, not a slave!’ I have come to agree.”

  Reggie’s client stood up. “Blast the poet Wordsworth! In fact, damn the man, and his heirs and assigns! No, hang on a minute—wasn’t he the cove who worked that wheeze about a thousand pine tables?”

  “‘And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, and near a thousand tables pined and wanted food,’ yes, sir,” Reggie agreed.

  “Well, there you have the thing in a nutshell!”

  Reggie looked pained. He took a deep breath, and said patiently, “I can only repeat my suggestion that you form a liaison with Master Henry or Mistress Cynthia.”

  The man’s shoulders slumped. “Not the same,” he said. “You only made me surrender one garment at a time. And they won’t let me talk. Oh, very well, I suppose there’s nothing left to say.” He spun on his heel and headed for the door, face contorted with grief.

  Reggie’s face was still impassive…but a single tear was trying to solve the maze of wrinkles that led to his chin. “Goodbye, Bertie,” he said, so softly that I’m sure the guy never heard him.

  No one had been exactly staring, but suddenly the conversations in the room were more animated. “You’re right, Nikola,” I said. “Let’s find someplace more private to talk. I’m open to suggestions.”

  “Let us go to my laboratory,” Tesla said.

  I’d been hoping he’d ask…

  IT was an honor to be in Nikola Tesla’s laboratory. That was about all it was.

  One thing most PIs are notoriously good at: if we’ve spent more than a few seconds in a place, we can give you a fairly detailed description of it, maybe not as poetic as John D. MacDonald could make it, but accurate enough to reconstruct a crime scene for a jury. It’s the part of the job we share with a Zen monk: trying to be aware of everything. They do it to transcend the illusion of consciousness; we do it to not get killed. I’m a little better at it than most PIs.

  Nikola Tesla’s laboratory was a rectangular solid with stuff in it.

  The only thing I recognized was an electric typewriter keyboard, without a typewriter under it. I’d have taken it for a computer terminal, but it wasn’t attached to anything, and it didn’t seem to have any of those funny extra keys they have. And I didn’t see anything around that looked like the brain part of a computer (or anything else I could name). There was a cylinder along its top end that looked like some kind of hinge; I decided maybe that was where the typewriter part attached. On a soft grey pad next to the keyboard was a little widget that looked like an electric guitarist’s foot-switch. It, too, wasn’t attached or wired to anything. The two objects were sitting on…well, it looked sort of like a piece of window glass, blued with age, suspended in mid-air.

  Everything else in the room was much weirder.

  Tesla (I could call him Nikola, but I couldn’t seem to make myself think of him as Nikola) took some small objects off some larger objects that had flat surfaces on top, and bade us sit. They weren’t chairs, but they agreed to hold our weight. Tesla sat on…climbed into…achieved comfortable equilibrium with something else. “There,” he said, “now we can talk.”

  Confuse a PI and you get a wisecrack. Spenser says it’s in the oath. “Testing,” I said. “By God, you’re right: I can.” It went over like a lead balloon, so I gave it up. “Okay, Nikola—how many and where?”

  He didn’t try to drag it out. “Four each in the United States and the Soviet Union. One in each country that would be in a position to effectively employ a nuclear weapon of its own if it knew the two chief combatants were disarmed. A total of thirty.”

  I blinked a bit at the total—the last I’d heard, there were only supposed to be about a dozen members in The Club—but I let it pass. Catch me questioning Nikola Tesla’s figures. “And you have them all located?”

  He…well, sort of swiveled, both in and on his object, so that the keyboard was convenient to his hands. He did something to the hinge-like gizmo, and it opened up vertically like an upside-down home movie screen, widening somehow at the same time, to a size just a little larger than an open Time magazine and no thicker. As it finished growing it started glowing, blue-white. “Welcome to Macintosh” was written on it in black type. Thanks, I prefer Granny Smiths, I thought, but kept my mouth shut. In a few seconds, the thing changed color and little pictures appeared on it along the right side. He touched the fuzztone foot-switch with his hand, and everything changed again, much faster this time. Now it was a map of the world, two polar projections on black background that looked like live high-resolution video from some spacecraft, except that there were a total of thirty “hot spots” marked with tiny bright red crosses, almost all of them in the Northern Hemisphere. The
four U.S. sites appeared to be Los Angeles, Chicago (or possibly Detroit; I’m vague on middle America), Washington, and New York. The only Soviet site I could name with any confidence was Moscow; another might have been Kiev. But Tesla must know them all.

  “That’s terrific,” I said, feeling real confidence for the first time since I’d understood what we were up against. “That’s a lot more than we knew yesterday. Is there any chance you’ll be able to narrow one of them down closer? That one that seems to be in New York, say? And how soon?”

  Tesla looked startled, then smiled. “Forgive me, Ken. I oscillate between a tendency to treat everyone around me as ignorant children, and a tendency to assume they know everything I do. Observe.” He took hold of the little widget. A small arrow appeared on the screen. He used the widget to nurse it up against one of the tiny red crucifixes, the one in New York, and pushed the switch on the widget. At once the polar projections were gone, replaced by a highly detailed map of Manhattan Island. The tiny red cross was now roughly at Madison Square Garden. I opened my mouth to say something, and Tesla moved the pointer to a little cartoon of a magnifying glass and worked the switch again. Suddenly we were looking down on Penn Station from about fifteen stories above the roof, as if we were in a blimp. Again it looked like live color video—I could see traffic crawling down Seventh and along Thirty-third, and swarms of ants moving like people—but a long thin red hollow rectangle shimmered in and out of existence, running north and south (well, uptown and downtown). A major tributary of Water Tunnel One, by the width of it. Where it crossed Penn Station, it contained a very small solid red rectangular object, which also shimmered. As Tesla had prophesied, a cylindrical gun-type device. A tiny green hollow rectangle nearby on the left was connected to it by a series of thin green lines that doglegged several times on the way.

  “What the hell…excuse me, Nikola. What on earth is that thing?”

  Tesla looked surprised. “An atom bomb,” he explained.

  I said nothing at all for five seconds. Then, very quietly, I said, “I meant, ‘What is that thing there that’s showing me the atom bomb?’”