Death Quest Read online

  Miss Pinch grabbed a box of drinking straws. “Now, listen, all of you. You may suspect that Spike and Lover-girl were in on it. But are you ready to believe that everyone in this room is in on it?”

  “Oh, pish, pish,” said Marlene.

  “Nonsense,” said somebody else.

  “That would be impossible as it includes me,” said the one in the top hat.

  “Good,” said Miss Pinch. “Now hear this. Would you be willing to BELIEVE if one of YOU, chosen by chance, reacted this way?”

  They generally thought that that would be a proof. They seemed very uneasy.

  Miss Pinch promptly presented the box. “The short straw gets it!” she said. “Agreed?”

  There were up to forty people in the room, all of them lesbians. They each evidently thought they wouldn’t get it, and amused at the idea of more show and possibly Miss Pinch’s defeat, they began to draw. Each one looked at his/her straw with relief.

  Then the husband in the top hat said, “Oh, no!” He/she had the short straw!

  “Algernon,” said Miss Pinch, “get out of those clothes!”

  He/she didn’t want to so they tore them off en masse. Miss Pinch forced what appeared to be a birth control pill in his/her mouth.

  They dragged the groggy Spike and Lover-girl over against the wall. They threw Algernon, naked, onto the bed where he/she landed with a bounce.

  “Inkswitch!” bawled Miss Pinch. “Get down off that god (bleeped) pillar and get to work!”

  Homosexuality has always turned my stomach. I had avoided looking at Algernon. But a certain glint, when it occurs in Miss Pinch’s eye, commands respect—which is to say, fear. From my perch up on the phallic-symbol column I looked down at the naked body which was being held flat and face up on the bed by willing and boisterous lesbians.

  I saw what was really a brunette woman. They had torn off the breast compressors, and while the bosom was not extraordinary, they were a woman’s breasts. The hips, though a shade narrow, were woman’s hips.

  I got down. Algernon was looking at me with a wild and terror-glazed eye. She was trying to shrink.

  I bent down from the pillar and a whiff of stale cigar smoke made me sneeze. I shook my head. Candy at once understood. She rushed away and came back in a moment with a quart of Spring Violets toilet water and dumped it with a splash on Algernon.

  Still reluctant, I felt my ankle seized by Pinch.

  Down I came with a thud upon the bed.

  The crowd’s faces made a circle above me.

  I got to work.

  Algernon’s face was in gibbering terror.

  A lesbian wife looked round-eyed at the bed.

  A lesbian husband went stiff and then hid his/her eyes.

  Algernon screamed.

  A lesbian with a face like a madonna was turned sideways, praying. I yelled at her, “Shut up! Just because she’s a virgin is no reason you have to invoke the Virgin Mary!”

  “Oh, my God,” a husband said, “Algernon’s out cold!”

  “No, he isn’t!” another cried, peering between shoulders. “She’s coming around!”

  Strings of seashells began to swing.

  Into the miasma of Algernon’s groans, a lesbian husband said, “Hey! Look at that! He likes it!” His voice sounded stunned.

  The seashell chains began to swing wider and wider.

  “Oh, my God!” howled Algernon.

  The whole circle of faces went into shock.

  WHOOSH!

  Algernon screamed deafeningly.

  The top of the clamshell bed crashed down, hiding us.

  The mob was struggling to lift it. They got it halfway up.

  A lesbian, looking through the gap, screamed, “She’s dead!”

  Another cried, “No, no! She’s just out cold!”

  The mob of lesbians was looking at one another, stunned, unbelieving.

  I crawled out of the clamshell slit, wrapping a sheet around myself. They were staring at me with awe.

  Suddenly, the whole bed convulsed.

  “She’s having another one all by herself!” a lesbian cried, round-eyed.

  They looked at one another once more. The room was so quiet you could hear a faucet drip half a mile away.

  Then Miss Pinch leaned into the dark of the half-open bed. She said, “Well, how did you like it, Algernon?”

  The whole bed went into an earthquake convulsion.

  “She did it again!” said a popeyed husband.

  Miss Pinch and Candy were propping the bed fully open. They got it hooked back up.

  There lay Algernon, sheet up to her chin. She had a beautiful, blissful smile upon her face. “Ohhhhhh, Pinchy!” she said. “Wonderful. Wonderful.”

  The whole roomful of people were suddenly wide-eyed and eager. Slavering, in fact.

  Then suddenly Marlene folded up on the floor and had an orgasm of her own.

  Spike was sitting up over by the wall. She said, pleading, “Pinchy, can’t I have it once again?”

  That set off Miss Pinch. She said, “Get out of here, you disbelieving (bleepards).” And waved shooing hands at the crowd.

  A lesbian husband was tearing off her tie and shirt. “But, Pinchy, we do believe you now.”

  A lesbian wife was down on her knees, hands folded in prayer, “’Fore God, Pinchy, tell us, tell us please, where can we get a MAN?”

  “You can’t have him,” said Pinch with folded arms. “He’s private property, under contract.” She raised her voice and addressed the throng, “Now what do you think of Psychiatric Birth Control, you (bleepards)?”

  “It’s (bleep)!” said Marlene, coming to.

  “From what I’ve seen tonight,” said a lesbian husband, “Psychiatric Birth Control is pure crap.” And she took out a cigar case and threw it violently into the fireplace.

  “But, Pinchy,” said Marlene, “you’ve done us an awful dirty trick. You know (bleeped) well that every unmarried male in the company is a homo. There are no men left!”

  “That (bleeped) Miss Peace has a monopoly on all the elevator boys and she’d ruin our reputations with Rockie if we took those,” said a lesbian wife distractedly.

  “The married men are so slugged up on drugs they’re impotent,” mourned a lesbian husband.

  “We go outside the company, it’s our jobs,” said another.

  “What the HELL are we going to do?” said another.

  “You got to do something,” said the naked Lover-girl from the rug. “After a bang like that I’ll never go back to biting and scratching and calling it sex. No, SIR!”

  They got their heads together. They drifted into the back room, following Pinch.

  I was pretty sleepy, really. Three was not all that heroic but it was just the emotional strain.

  I must have dozed. Suddenly, I woke up. Pinch in a bathrobe was standing there. All the company had gone. Candy had her clothes off but was licking cake plates over by the refreshment bar.

  My apprehension rose when I saw that Pinch was holding something behind her back. In my groggy state I thought of the Greek sacrificial rites. Now that I had publicly performed, was I going to join Uranus in losing my (bleeps)?

  My confidence was not helped a bit when she reached down and jiggled them.

  “Inkswitch,” she said, “I have a surprise for you.”

  I flinched. I did not like surprises from Miss Pinch.

  “How did you like Spike and Lover-girl?” she asked.

  “Surprisingly,” I said.

  “And Algernon?”

  “Once you got rid of her stale cigar smoke, passing, passing.”

  “As good as me and Candy?” she said with a glint in her eye.

  Fear, pure fear, dictated my response. “Nothing to compare!” I cried.

  “Well, that’s just fine, Inkswitch,” and to my relief she let go my (bleeps). “Because, Inkswitch, me and the crowd came to an arrangement. Each night right after work, a couple of those girls are going to drop in for a bang.
They’re all agreed. They will be ladies about it and take their turn.”

  I gulped. I did not like the stern look which was seeping over her face.

  “But, god (bleep) you, Inkswitch, this is not to interfere with what you do to Candy and me all night!”

  She was reaching toward my (bleeps) again. I said hurriedly, “I promise. Oh, Miss Pinch, never think I would fail to live up to my contract. I am a man of honor.”

  “I’m glad of that,” she said. “Because if you aren’t, I’ll cut your (bleeps) off.”

  I knew it!

  And then she smiled. “But it’s not all bad news, Inkswitch. They emptied their purses into this wastebasket. I added five thousand dollars for your great show. You’ve been asking for ten Gs. And here is twelve thousand bucks.”

  I gaped into the wastebasket she held under my nose. It was full of MONEY!

  “Now stop drooling,” Miss Pinch said, “and jump into a shower and get the blood off you while we change the sheets. Candy and I have been saving you for days for this sprint. And we’re god (bleeped) near dying of sex starvation, to say nothing of getting hot as fire from that show tonight!”

  I went into the shower singing.

  TWELVE Gs!

  I could pay my bill to Razza.

  I could buy a hit man.

  COUNTESS KRAK, YOU’RE DEAD!

  PART FORTY-FOUR

  Chapter 1

  I had been told on the phone I could have an appointment with Razza Louseini later in the day, and so I utilized my time in checking up on the target, Countess Krak.

  When I turned on the viewers in the back room, I was a little disoriented at first. I couldn’t quite make out where Krak and Heller were. It was midmorning and all I got was stacks of books and pages going by too fast for me to see what books they were.

  I had to backtrack the recorded strips to find out what they were up to, for I assumed quite rightly that it meant no good for me.

  They were up early and, both dressed in stylish blue running sweat suits, had trotted out of the Empire State Building Fifth Avenue side and had gone north the eight blocks to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. Except for the presence of Heller, or even with it, the Countess Krak’s back would have made a perfect sniper target all the way.

  And now they were in the huge reference room. Heller was sitting at a table. The Countess Krak was working the card catalog and turning in slips and pulling books out of the chute when they came. She was doing strictly gofer work.

  That they were in running suits, even though this was a current style, filled me with alarm. It seemed to indicate too much eagerness for progress and that was something I strictly did not want.

  Finally she had him so boxed in with towers of books that she had to stand on tiptoe to see him. She looked intently at his face. He seemed to be puzzled, somewhat stopped. She came around and sat down in a chair beside him.

  She leaned toward his ear. In Voltarian, she whispered, “If you would tell me what you’re trying to do, Jettero, I could help you more.”

  He pulled a huge sheet he was working on out from under a tome on social organizations. “This,” he whispered back, “is a workout of a mathematics we use in combat engineering. It is called ‘Command Isolation Geometry.’ There are certain theorems which, if applied, will tell you the probable location of the command post of an enemy army corps or a city. When you have worked it out, you can then slip in, plant the bombs and—bango—the enemy has no central command post and can be more easily overrun by the Fleet or its Marines or even the Army.”

  “You mean we’re going to blow something up?” said the Countess Krak.

  “No, no. I was just telling you what the mathematics was,” Heller whispered back. “I’ve got this spore project to clean up the atmosphere. I’m just making sure I isolate whoever’s toes it will step on so I won’t be too surprised. The way this planet is organized, apparently, is that if you try to do anything to help it, some special-interest group jumps all over you. They have some crazy idea that chaos is profit. Very short-range think. So I am just making sure that when I start putting spores into the stratosphere and get shot at, I know who’s shooting.”

  “You mean somebody might object to cleaning up the atmosphere?” whispered Krak in surprise.

  “You never know,” said Heller.

  “What a crazy planet!” she muttered.

  “Well, be that as it may,” he whispered, “but I’m getting some crazy answers here. I don’t quite understand it.”

  “Let me help. I may not know your geometry but I’m good at puzzles.”

  He oriented the sheet so she could see it better. “I’m getting a repeating answer,” he whispered. “When you get one of those, it means that your original premise is too narrow. I started out to find out who had connections and communication lines to the subject of cytology—which is an Earth name for our cellology. So I made a test equation over here in the corner of the sheet and, yes, I assumed too narrow a subject to get a reliable answer. Whatever the answer is, it controls and commands more than cytology. Do you follow me?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s like I started out to find a corporal in charge of a squad and then found out that wouldn’t embrace the area, so I found a captain in charge of a company and that wouldn’t embrace the target area, so then I found a colonel in charge of a regiment. This could take forever. I’m nowhere near any real top authority command post.”

  “How are you doing it?”

  “Well, this symbol here is logistic lines like vehicles and supply trucks. And you see its path of emanation and convergence. And this is a symbol of communications. And so on. So if you can get such functions to cross on the plot, you have the command post area.”

  “It looks very pretty and orderly,” whispered the Countess. “And, looking at the lines, it does seem you have convergences.”

  “Too many,” said Heller. “And they always go off to somewhere else. Blast it.” He gave her the sheet. He was really throwing it away, as he now took a big fresh one. “I was doing it for a country. I’m just going to skip a continent and be absurd. I’ll do it for the whole planet.”

  “Why is that absurd, Jettero? I never saw you do anything absurd in all the time I’ve known you.” But she added in a lower mutter, “Except Miss Simmons, of course.”

  “It’s absurd because this planet doesn’t have an emperor. I’ll wind up with Buckingham Palace in England or something.”

  “And then you’ll blow that up and we can leave,” said the Countess Krak with an air of finality.

  He laughed quietly. “What a bloodthirsty wench. I’m not trying to find out who to shoot. I’m just trying to find out who might shoot at me if I put spores in the stratosphere.” He was checking book titles in the towers around him. “Let’s see if I have all the planetary control subjects.” He began to put them down. Government control. Fuel control. Finance control. Health control. Intelligence control. Medical control. Medicine control. Mental services control. Media control. Law-enforcement control. Judicial control. Food control. Air-transport control. Industrial control. Social control. Population volume control. . . . He was checking already-made notes.

  He was back to work drawing in a large ring of symbols of the things named and others. It was hard to follow the symbols and labeling because he was writing very small and very fast.

  He asked her to get him another half a dozen books and he spun through them quickly.

  Shifting ink color to red, he drew a dwindling spiral from the outside to the inside center of his plot. He stopped and gave a short laugh.

  She was sitting beside him again. “It’s very pretty.”

  “And it’s absurd,” said Heller in a low voice. “When you add up all the interlocking points given in just these available books, it says the planet DOES have an emperor, that the emperor has two planetary command posts and TOTAL planetary control. I’m wasting my time.”

  “Where are the command posts
and WHO is the emperor?” said the Countess Krak.

  “I know a nice place to have lunch,” said Heller.

  “No, no, Jettero. Except for certain females, I have never seen you do an absurd thing ever. You are always right on. Tell me.”

  “You’ll laugh. The planet doesn’t have an emperor and its royal palaces are actually just tourist attractions. But I’ll finish it anyway, if you like.”