by Paul Kenyon
"That's right," she said. "Mr. Sim turned it off. He can turn it on again."
There were mutterings all around her. The wired people were crowding close, some wailing, some sobbing, some looking angry.
Penelope put on a bright schoolteacher smile. "Why don't we all go find Mr. Sim then?" she said loudly.
"Find Mr. Sim, find Mr. Sim…" The cry went up all around the room.
Wharton stared at her, aghast. "It won't work," he said. "It can't work."
"It'll work, Dan," she said. "We're going to tear this place apart, stone by stone. And there's going to be a mob of hundreds of juiceheads to distract attention."
She headed for the door, followed by two naked men and a man in a hospital gown carrying an automatic weapon. Skytop paused to pick up an iron bar. He hefted it comfortably in his hand. Wharton picked up something that looked like a long skewer.
The four of them stepped into the corridor, the naked juiceheads crowding behind them. People in the corridor stopped and stared. A girl screamed.
There was the sound of running feet. A guard with a shotgun pounded toward them. Penelope raised the Police Python and shot him through the face.
The mob of juiceheads stampeded over the body. They were completely out of hand. They were howling like banshees, boiling down the corridor.
There was the sound of machine gun fire ahead. The juiceheads in the lead started to drop like flies. The others kept going.
"We're in trouble," Pickering shouted, limping along beside her with his automatic rifle. "I've only a dozen rounds left in this thing, and I'll wager you don't have more than two or three rounds left yourself. We can't get past them. And they're making mincemeat out of our vanguard."
There was the dull thwomp of a plastic-bomb explosion. The machine guns paused, then began filing in a new direction. There were more explosions — grenades — and confused shouts.
"Paul! Eric! The girls!" Penelope said. "They got my message."
They followed along in the wake of the naked mob. The machine gunners were lying dead in a nest of tangled metal and rubble. Smoke drifted through the corridor.
A familiar black face was coming up the spiral ramp. It was Paul, dressed in black turtleneck and slacks, an Uzi submachine gun in his hand and a bandolier of grenades slung over his shoulder. Eric was close behind him, carrying a riot gun. Fiona was there, her red hair wrapped in a bandanna, carrying two automatic pistols. She tossed one to the Baroness. It was a Bernadelli VB.
"Thought you'd like a little friend," she called gaily.
"We got your message," Paul grinned. "Thought you'd never call!"
"Where are Yvette and Inga?" Penelope yelled over the din of the mob.
"They've got the downstairs guards pinned down. Say, who are your friends?"
There were extra revolvers for Skytop and Wharton. Skytop hung onto his iron bar. Fiona looked at Wharton's naked middle and said, "Nice going, big boy! I knew I'd see it some day if I waited long enough!" Wharton blushed.
"Sorry, man," Paul said. "If I'd known, I would have brought you a jockstrap."
They searched the corridors, room by room. Most of the staff were completely demoralized. The howling juiceheads were manhandling them, pushing them around, asking if the current could be turned on again.
The guards were another story. Hard-bitten professionals, most of them, they put up a fight whenever the naked army approached. Dozens of the juiceheads went down, their flesh torn by bullets. The Baroness and her group wiped the guards out, street-battle fashion, one by one.
One of them almost got the Baroness as she passed the door to a room that she thought had been searched. It was another wiry Nepalese, stepping out with a knife in his hand. Skytop hurled his iron bar. It caught the Nepalese in the side of his head and cracked his skull.
Once it was Fiona who got into trouble, when her gun jammed while she was facing a black-pajama-clad houseboy with a kitchen knife. He grinned and took a swipe at her. Wharton, running along a few yards behind, closed the gap and pinned the houseboy to the wall with his skewer.
They were getting closer to Mr. Sim's inner sanctum, she could tell. The furnishings and appointments were more voluptuous. There were undulating walls of flesh-colored foam, forests of large cuddly objects meant to be fondled, an enormous pool with a Venetian gondola in it. There was a wall with long blond hair and another covered with rubber nipples. Some of the nipples were oozing various liquids that looked like syrups. Once they crossed a vaulted chamber whose floor was like a huge waterbed. The combined weight of scores of juice-heads ruptured it, and Penelope found herself sloshing along ankle-deep in warm water.
"That must be it," Pickering grunted.
They were facing a fifteen-foot round door whose surface seemed to be a rubber diaphragm. It bulged in huge dimpled lobes like a gigantic navel. The juiceheads were dashing themselves against it and bouncing off. They milled around, puzzled and frustrated.
Paul fired a burst into it. The holes closed up. Wharton pierced it with his skewer and tried to rip it laterally. It gave, then closed up again.
There was a howl of frustrated rage behind them. Penelope turned her head and saw one of the juiceheads — the high-jumper — sprinting toward the door. He took a flying leap, straight at the center. His head and shoulders sank deep into the dimple there. He stuck. He wriggled on through. His bare feet were swallowed up, and then the whole door was opening up like an iris. The mob poured through.
They were in an antechamber. It was a fairy-tale world of pink drifting clouds and soft music. A pink carpet of artificial grass rippled underfoot. The walls seemed to be made of misty gauze.
But there was nothing misty about the door at the far end. It was thick, solid, made of gleaming titanium steel, with a lock as big as a dinner plate.
"We going to have to blow that, man!" Paul said. He reached into his pouch for the plastic explosive.
Somebody in the crowd of juiceheads made an outraged noise. It was the frog man. He ran to the door and kicked with his massive, overdeveloped legs. The door flew open.
Mr. Sim was inside, a floating whale in the middle of a circular pool of pink marble. The pool seemed to be filled with honey. He was surrounded by half a dozen naked Chinese girls who cluttered and fled when they saw the mob of juiceheads.
Penelope stepped forward. She must have broken a photo-electric circuit. A steel-barred gate clattered down from the ceiling, sealing off the half of the room that Mr. Sim was in.
"You're too late, Baroness," he said. "I've already taken the ecstasy drug. You won't cheat me of that."
Penelope said, "You're finished, Mr. Sim. We've torn this place apart. We're going to drag you out of there and put an end to this whole rotten muck-hole."
Mr. Sim splashed in the honey. "It will take you at least an hour to burn through those bars. By that time I'll have had the Ultimate Experience. I've been waiting for it all my life. I don't care what happens after that."
Penelope aimed the Colt Python at him. It leaped in her hand.
Mr. Sim laughed. He was undamaged. There was a hairline star suspended in space in front of him.
Bulletproof glass. There was a transparent wall behind the steel bars. Mr. Sim's voice was coming to them through loudspeakers.
"Let me try," Eric said. He fired the riot gun. It made a deafening explosion in the room. More stars appeared in the glass. Mr. Sim splashed in his bath and laughed.
"The drug was perfected yesterday," he said. "The dosage has been calculated precisely for my weight."
While Penelope watched a ripple seemed to wash over Mr. Sim's vast naked body. His face was suffused with delight.
"You poor, poor fools." he said. "Never to feel what I'm beginning to experience now. I'm a genius at pleasure, and this will be my masterpiece. My last masterpiece."
His eyes were shining madly. His little red lips parted in ecstasy. His skin almost visibly began to glow.
A howl of rage went up from the mob of
juiceheads. They began flinging their naked bodies against the bars, heedless of injuries.
"Thermite!" the Baroness shouted. "Get the thermite!"
But she didn't have to. The pretty girl who had been wired to lift barbells ran forward. She grasped two adjacent bars in her hands and strained. The huge muscles in her arms rippled. The biceps stood out like basketballs. She grunted, the sweat pouring down her face. Penelope could see the great cable-like muscles snaking down her back.
Incredibly, the bars began to give. They seemed to flow, and then there was a gap big enough to squeeze through. The girl collapsed, her body torn and ruptured. She pulled herself through the opening, already dying.
The juiceheads crammed themselves through the gap, trampling one another. There were dozens of them, howling like baboons. It was impossible for Penelope or her crew to get past them.
They ran blindly into the glass. The frog-legged man began kicking, and another man with overdeveloped shoulder muscles hurled himself against the barrier. It gave and they tumbled through in a shower of splintered fragments. Neither seemed to notice their bleeding cuts.
The screaming mob splashed into the pool, clawing and clutching at Mr. Sim.
"Turn us on, turn us on!" they wailed.
Mr. Sim was unaware of his surroundings. He floated, limp and flabby, the smile of ecstasy on his face.
They pummeled and pulled at him. His face was flushed with happiness. Someone pulled out a handful of hair. A thumb somehow got poked into his eye, rupturing the eyeball. The other eye continued to shine with pleasure.
It took only a few minutes. They literally pulled him apart. The pool of honey turned pink. A sticky hand rose from the churning tangle of bodies, clutching a bloody trophy. Penelope turned away, sickened.
The smile had stayed on Mr. Sim's face to the end.
20
"How is her Majesty going to cover it up?" Penelope said.
Pickering lifted his bandaged head off the pillow and stared blandly at her. "Why, there's nothing to cover up," he said. "A respected citizen of Hong Kong, Mr. Petronius Sim, died of natural causes. The funeral will be held tomorrow. The resident aide will send flowers."
She poked a finger at his bare chest and traced a circle. "But those bodies — scores and scores of them. How do you explain them?"
"There's nothing to explain, Penny m'dear. They were illegal refugees from Red China, or shanty dwellers without friends, relatives, or papers, or hired criminals from other countries. They have no official existence here in the Crown Colony."
She nuzzled his cheek. He needed a shave. "I'm curious, Nigel darling. Just how did you dispose of all those bodies? How did you explain the explosions and the mess at the villa?"
"MI6 sent in a special cleanup squad. Same thing your CIA does all the time. They made everything nice and neat for the Hong Kong police. Carted the bodies off in vans and fed them to the sharks in the South China Sea. If a few bodies get washed ashore — well, it happens all the time in this part of the world. They scrubbed away the blood, set a few strategic fires. A suggestion came through from London not to press the investigation too hard."
She rubbed the hard, flat washboard of his stomach. "How long will you be in the hospital?"
"A day or two." He touched the bandage on his head. "Dr. Jolly didn't get inside, thanks to you. Wonder what he'd have found, eh?"
"Does this feel good?"
"Feels marvelous. You're blasted kind to a poor invalid. Nurse won't do this for me."
Her hand moved downward. "I wonder why. After all that work, you deserve a rub."
"I deserve an explanation, too, Baroness. It was peculiar, but the cleanup squad didn't find any samples of Mr. Sim's ecstasy drug, or any chemical formulas. The War Office was awfully anxious to get their hands on it. Thought it might be useful medically — or even be adapted for chemical warfare. What happened to it?"
It was her turn to be bland. "Whatever are you talking about, Nigel?"
"Come on, Baroness! I promise it'll go no further. The Pentagon wants it too, eh?"
"The Pentagon wants it. But they're not going to get it."
"What do you mean?"
"The secret of perfect joy is too dangerous a weapon. I don't think anybody can be trusted with it. Sooner or later there'd be a leak. And then what? An entire world of… of juiceheads?" She shuddered, remembering the hellish exercise chamber at the villa.
"So your crew gathered up all the evidence, eh? What are you going to do with it?"
"Destroy it."
"Good girl. I shan't breathe a word."
"Nigel!" Her hand, under the sheet, massaged his thigh. "What about my identity? I suppose my cover is blown?"
"Not at all. You were never at the villa. And neither was your crew. Whatever happened there had nothing to do with you. And, Baroness, I promise you that I won't mention you in my report to my own superiors. There'll be no file on you at MI6."
"And there'll be no file on you in Washington. The hell with 'em!"
"That's decent of you, my dear. Thanks."
Her hand encountered something long, hard, and feverish. "Why, Nigel! I thought you were supposed to be convalescing!"
"Only from the neck up, m'love." He reached up and fondled her breast affectionately.
"Is the door locked?"
"Yes. And nurse won't be back for an hour or two."
"We could do a lot in an hour."
"Quite."
She pulled her dress over her head. Pickering helped her undo her bra. She kicked off her shoes and slid under the sheets with him. He was surprised to find her already well oiled and ready to receive him. He rolled over on one hip, facing her, and sheathed himself in her slippery scabbard. They put their arms around each other and began a long, thirsty kiss.
"It feels nice in there." she said. "Like a part of me."
"I wonder what it would have been like if Dr. Jolly had succeeded in wiring us together."
She began a slow, easy motion at her pelvis. A pleasurable warmth began gently to spread down there. "I had a taste of it," she said. "But I like this better."
* * *
Farnsworth exploded. His well-groomed face turned purple. "You what?"
"I destroyed it. Every pill, every experimental compound, all of Dr. Jolly's notes."
The Baroness sat back, relaxed, in the Chippendale armchair. She puffed at the long cigarette holder and smiled sweetly at the man behind the desk.
"Washington wanted that drug! I told you specifically in my transmission! It was a direct order!"
Penelope yawned. "Don't go on so, John darling. Would you really want the Pentagon to have the ultimate drug? They tranquilize us quite enough with their press releases."
Farnsworth glared at her for a long minute. Then, abruptly, he threw back his head and began to laugh. "All right, Penny. But how am I going to explain it to them?"
She got to her feet and started toward the door. "You'll find a way, John. You always do."
* * *
The President's man was in an expansive mood. He came through the steel door, nodded at the members of the Special Group without apologizing for his lateness, and took his place at the head of the table.
"The President is very pleased, gentlemen. Coin smashed a major center of the drug traffic from Southeast Asia. There's already been a noticeable drop in the flow of heroin from the Hong Kong channels. There'll be a press release on it tomorrow."
CIA glared balefully at NSA. "We all read the report from Key," he said. "I'd like to know why his agent failed to bring back a sample of Mr. Sim's ecstasy drug, or at least a chemical formula."
There was a nod of agreement from Defense. "So would I. The research boys were itching to get their hands on it. They've been sulking ever since the President took nerve gas and plague germs away from them. The ecstasy drug might have been adapted into an aerosol. Leave an entire enemy army helpless, grinning like idiots. And no nonsense about the Geneva Convention, either. You wouldn
't be harming them. You'd be doing them a favor."
"Do yourself a favor," the President's man said. They all laughed dutifully at his little joke. "Forget it. The President doesn't care. He's delighted that Coin cleaned up Mr. Sim's organization — and without causing a diplomatic flap with Great Britain."
The man from State smiled eagerly, a puppy dog among wolves. "Britain was delighted too — unofficially, of course. Their MI6 cooperated beautifully with Coin, according to the report. The operation was managed by some nameless agent of theirs — as nameless as Coin." He grinned ingratiatingly at NSA.
The President's man poured himself a glass of water from the carafe. He took a little pillbox from his pocket and smiled apologetically. "Excuse me, gentlemen, time for my medicine. The doctor's afraid my job's giving me an ulcer. I can't imagine why!"
NSA allowed himself a modest joke. He was entitled to it, after the triumph of the report from Key. "Popping pills again? Tsk, tsk! And with your awesome responsibilities! Are you sure that's for your ulcer?"
They all laughed again. The President's man laughed with them, and swallowed his pill.
* * *
"But, Baroness!" Brian's voice over the phone was wistful. "I'm playing in the Superbowl tomorrow."
"What's more important, Brian? That little old Superbowl game? Or me?"
There was a pause at the other end. "I'll be right over."
She let him in twenty minutes later. She was wearing a flowing chiffon gown with a top consisting of two transparent panels that bellied like foresails from neck to waist. His eyes goggled when he saw them.
"Baroness," he groaned. "It's the most important game of the season. Millions of fans are going to be watching me over television. I'll need all my strength."
"You're wrong, Brian. This is the most important game of the season. And I'm going to need all your strength."
He tossed his jacket on a divan. "Well, I suppose I can get through it on bennies." He grinned. "The Superbowl, that is."
