It's Getting Harder All The Time

by Troy Conway

  It was a pretty blatant spiel, I realized And I was more than mildly suspicious that Lin Saong would understand exactly what I was trying to accomplish with it. But things were moving too fast for me to bank on a more subtle pitch. And anyway, whether Lin Saong could see through my stratagem or not, there wasn’t too much she could do to stop me. I was on the inside of Douzi’s harem, looking out; she very definitely was on the outside, looking in.

  Content that I wasn’t taking any more chances than I had to, I did another hillbilly tune for the benefit of the radio interception squadron which Walrus-moustache hopefully would already have dispatched to Belgravia. Then I repeated my spiel about why PUF shouldn’t attack Douzi’s palace, signed off and headed back to my room. Dinner, and the subsequent round of sexual shenanigans, were only forty-five minutes away.

  As on the previous evening, dinner went like a charm, as did the social period, as did the bedroom action. This time six of the nine femme physicists visited me for sexual servicing, again including Tania and Olga, the latter of whom again wound up spending the night.

  Still playing my cards close to my vest, I refrained from asking the four other girls any questions which would give away my identity as a spy. But Tania brought me an interesting item of information.

  During the day, it seemed, she had been taken off the project she was working on and assigned to another one, this time as Vera’s collaborator. The implication was that some breakthrough had been made in the development program, a breakthrough which rendered Tania’s previous line of research unnecessary. Evidently the perfection of the super-bomb was now a lot closer to being realized.

  Tania left me at five o’clock that morning and Olga took her place. Because off the language barrier, I couldn’t probe for information about the project at the laboratory. But I did do my usual bang-up sexual job. Olga and I frolicked right up to the last minute of the nine o’clock curfew, and when she left I was sure of one thing. If I ever did figure a way to break the language barrier, here was one girl who’d have plenty of motivation to tell me what I wanted to know.

  But how to break the barrier?

  I had no idea.

  Meanwhile, time was passing quickly.

  And as I thought about the passage of time, I realized that luck really had turned against me.

  The way things were set up, the only hours I could really call my own were those between the time I woke up and the eight o’clock dinner hour.

  To do anything during those hours that would be beneficial to my mission, I had to shake my ever-present tail, Mazimba.

  And if I couldn’t figure out some way to shake him other than walking him into exhaustion, I’d barely have time enough to make my daily broadcast to Lin Saong, let alone to explore any of the other avenue of inquiry that might lead to a solution to the problem.

  Worse yet, now that I thought about it, there really weren’t too many avenues of inquiry to explore.

  There was, of course, the matter of the treasury vault, admission to which had been denied me. Ever since I’d learned of the vault, I’d wanted to try to get a look inside. But even if I did manage to shake loose a few hours to make an attempt at checking the vault, how would I get past Douzi’s guards?

  Another possibility was Superman. As the palace’s longtime stud-in-residence, he might very well have heard something from one or another of the femme physicists which would be valuable to me. But judging from what I’d seen so far, Superman liked me like little boys like castor oil. Could I afford the time I’d need to get on his good side, when the only result of warming up to him might be the discovery that he really hadn’t heard—or hadn’t paid attention to—any of the girl’s comments which might shed light on the bomb development program?

  Then there was the cluster of buildings which served as the girls’ laboratory. If I could get inside, I might see something which to Tania might not necessarily have seemed worth mentioning but which to me might be very significant. But how could I get inside?

  Yes, any way I sliced it, my avenues of inquiry were limited, and there was no guarantee that if I looked down one or more of them I’d find anything even remotely helpful to me.

  What to do?

  The only thing to do, it appeared, was to keep plugging as I had been plugging—to continue beaming my chatter-riddled transmissions to Lin Saong in the hope that one of Walrus-moustache’s boys would intercept them, and to continue working hand-in-hand with Tania in the hope that she might come up with some useful information.

  But both of these were slim hopes, and the more I thought about it, the slimmer they seemed to be.

  Slim-hope-number-one: the radio transmissions.

  All told, only four days had passed since the night back in Port duBeers when Lin Saong informed me that the radioman who had accompanied me to Belgravia was dead. If the radioman had had instructions to report back to Walrus-moustache as soon as he had arrived in Belgravia and to give progress reports at regular intervals thereafter, the death might have been discovered almost immediately and a new man might have been dispatched in short order. Then, if the new man had managed to get set up without running afoul of CHILLER, it was possible—remotely possible—that he’d now be tuned in on my transmissions to Lin Saong and that he’d be relaying what I said back to Walrus-moustache in the States.

  But suppose that the first radioman hadn’t been told to keep in constant touch with Walrus-moustache. Suppose instead that for security reasons—or for whatever reasons spy-types like Walrus-moustache might have—he’d been told not to report in until he had come up with something very concrete. In that case, Walrus-moustache still would not know that the man was dead, and my info-laden transmissions would be a total waste of effort.

  Slim-hope-number-two: Tania’s leads.

  No question about it, the ravishing Russian with the ice blue eyes and the maddeningly beautiful legs had told me a lot. And from where I sat, it looked like she was going to tell me a lot more—as soon as she found out what I wanted to know.

  But would she ever find out?

  And if she did, would she find out soon enough for her findings to be useful to me?

  If a breakthrough had been made in the development program, it might be just a matter of days before Douzi’s bomb was perfected. Meanwhile, Tania’s only sources of information were the other femme physicists, who more than likely didn’t know anything more than she did.

  The exception to the rule was Olga, who might know a great deal more, but according to Tania, Olga was standoffish and very secretive. How could she be persuaded to loosen up?

  Then, too, I had to consider the possibility that Tania wasn’t leveling with me. Maybe she had gone to Douzi or to one of Douzi’s henchmen after our initial confrontation and reported that I was a spy. If so, she might have been told to play along with me, feeding me false or useless information to lull me into a false sense of progress while the bomb development program speeded away in other directions.

  Could I trust her?

  And if I couldn’t, who could I trust?

  As I lay exhausted on my bed after my second night of servicing the babes in the Belgravian harem, I wondered.

  And the more I wondered the more confusing the whole situation became.

  After my welcome-aboard orgy at Douzi’s Hunkar Hamami, I had pondered a number of questions——questions which made this caper one of the wackiest mysteries I’d ever tackled.

  Now I pondered the questions again.

  Question: If Douzi’s main reason for attending to the sexual wants of his nine femme physicists was to keep them happy while they were developing his bomb, how did it happen that he surrounded their sexual servicing with so many bizarre trappings like the eunuchs and the pygmy girls, trappings like the elaborate reconstruction of Muhammad II’s palace, trappings which seemed to exist more for Douzi’s own pleasure than for the pleasure of the girls themselves?

  Question: If Douzi had been groomed from childhood for a political career,
how did it happen that hi selected field of study was psychiatry rather than one of the social sciences which would be of value to him as a head of state? Or, if politics hadn’t been his intended future when he went away to school, how did it happen that he returned to Belgravia in 1959 and very suddenly emerged as a principal force in the nation’s drive for independence?

  Question: Why had he let Su Wing, whom he knew to be a Red Chinese agent, become so intimately involved in the harem’s activities—so involved, in fact, that it was upon her recommendation that he brought me into the harem … me, whom he would have every reason to suspect of being a spy? According to her, he believed that he and his goons had coerced her into becoming a double-agent, but was he gullible enough to accept her pledge of fidelity to his cause without even considering the possiblitity that she might really be a triple agent, still very much on the payroll of the Red Chinese?

  Questions, questions everywhere.

  But how to answer them?

  I let my imagination run loose, and a hypothesis slowly took form.

  At first it seemed ridiculous, but the more I thought about it, the less ridiculous it seemed.

  All along I had operated on the unquestioned assumption that Douzi was in fact working to develop a bomb. And it was because of this assumption that so many of his actions and attitudes had seemed inconsistent.

  But the assumption was based exclusively on a theory advanced by the Red Chinese, who, if my hypothesis was valid, whould have every reason in the world for advancing a phony theory.

  I now put aside the assumption and tried to visualize the situation at the Belgravian palace as I might have visualized it had I replied to Douzi’s classified ad for a super-stud without ever suspecting that a bomb was being developed on the premises. The picture that took form wasn’t nearly as hard to accept, and it permitted me to make a few very interesting guesses about the role of Red China in the whole affair.

  Had I replied to Douzi’s classified ad without suspecting that he was trying to develop a nuclear bomb, my first impression would have been that the pint-sized president of Belgravia was a certified sex nut. And thinking of him as a sex nut rather than as a politician who sought to disrupt the world balance of power, I could very easily understand why he had done much of what he had done.

  He was the favorite son of Belgravia’s dominant Guwai tribe. Consequently he had been packed off to Europe so that he could be educated in the best schools. If my hypothesis was correct, he had been sent not with the hope that he would one day return to lead his country’s drive for independence, but only with the hope that he would make a good life for himself—a life which his tribesmen in Belgravia might themselves never enjoy but a life the enjoyment of which they fervently wished for him.

  So he went to Europe, and he became interested in psychiatry. Why psychiatry? Maybe just because it appealed to him. More likely, for the same reason that many other people become interested in psychiatry—because they think there’s something wrong with them and they want to find out what.

  What was wrong with Douzi? His problem was primarily sexual. He dug homosexual acts and leather fetishism as well as conventional heterosexual relations. He wanted to rid himself of these socially taboo tastes, and he thought psychiatry would help him do so. It didn’t—but it did teach him to live with them, and to take sexual satisfaction in whatever way he could and wherever he could find it.

  But another problem arose; namely, where to find it? Douzi was a Negro, a pygmy and the possessor of underdeveloped genitalia It’s hard enough for a sexual deviate to find desirable partners if he happens to be white, normal-sized and abundantly endowed phallically. If he has going against him everything that Douzi had going against him, forget it.

  But Douzi didn’t forget it. After bouncing around Europe for a while, he returned in 1959 to Belgravia and found the political climate there considerably different from what it had been when he had left. Indeed, there was a movement underway for national independence, and he, as a favorite son newly returned with a prestigious European education, became a leader in the movement. When independence was granted, he drew up a constitution calling for an autocratic government in which he held the reins of power. Then, shortly after he took office, he went to work reconstructing the sixteenth century pleasure palace of Muhammed II where he, the sexually frustrated President Douzi, could cavort to his heart’s content.

  How the femme physicists entered the picture remained a mystery. Maybe Douzi lured them to Belgravia to put them to work on a nuclear project that didn’t involve a bomb. Perhaps he wanted an atomic power plant or some other facility which harnessed nuclear energy for peacetime purposes. Whatever the case, he hadn’t set up the elaborate sexual enterprises of the palace for their benefit; he had set them up for his own benefit.

  Then, somewhere along the line, the Red Chinese learned about his setup and decided to capitalize on it. They exploded a couple of bombs in the South Atlantic—bombs which weren’t as sophistacated as some which Red China previously had exploded, and which therefore might seem to be the handiwork of a newcomer to the ranks of the world’s nuclear powers. The United States, Russia and the rest of the nuclear powers accepted Red China’s theory that these bombs had been exploded by Belgravia, and I was sent to investigate.

  Now, I was investigating, but the bombs I was looking for actually didn’t exit. The whole investigation was a farce, set up by Red China to con the other nuclear powers. I’d be permitted to prowl around Douzi’s palace for a while, reporting to Lin Saong at every step of the way. But Lin Saong would be the only person to receive my reports, and the United States and the other nuclear powers would never learn that what I had discovered was actually nothing.

  Then, when I’d been on the scene long enough to give the Red Chinese con game an air of legitimacy, troops from PUF would attack the palace—perhaps detonating a small atomic device which had been planted there especially for that purpose. Red China could then claim that it had backed the PUF attack because I, a representative of the joint nuclear powers, had disclosed that Belgravia indeed had developed a bomb. The United States might deny that I was working on the case. But Red China would still come out of the whole affair smelling like a rose. More likely than not, they would say that they had been assured that the bombs were not stored on the palace grounds, and that they had therefore backed the PUF attack hoping that the bombs could be discovered after the reins of Belgravia’s government had been wrested from Douzi’s fiendish hands.

  If this was the plan, it would explain why Su Wing enjoyed such freedom at Douzi’s palace and why she had been able to work me into the harem without his raising an eyebrow. Douzi, far too wrapped up in his sexual hijinks to give any serious consideration to the business of espionage, never dreamed that either she a I would be dangerous to his nation’s security. And he wasn’t afraid that either of us would uncover the secret of his bomb, because he didn’t have any bomb that we could uncover the secret of!

  Of course, my little theory wasn’t exactly flawless.

  For one thing, I already had Tania’s word that she and the other femme physicists knew they were working on a bomb. For another, if the only reason Lin Saong had sent me to the palace was to be a pigeon, she hardly would have been likely to give me a radio, the transmissions from which might be intercepted by anyone from the dead radioman’s replacement to Douzi’s own counterintelligence squad in BELSO. For a third, Douzi had been very emphatic in his instructions that I shouldn’t inquire too closely into the femme physicists’ activities or their reasons for being at the palace; if he had nothing to hide, he had nothing to fear.

  But maybe Tania wasn’t leveling with me after all, Maybe she’d been roped in by Lin Saong just as I had. After all, it was Tania who had come to me, not I who had come to her. And while she didn’t say anything about the bomb until I brought the subject up, if she had been in cahoots with Lin Saong she’d have known well in advance that I would bring it up.

  Als
o, Lin Saong might have given me the radio because she never dreamed that Walrus-moustache would send another man to replace the one who had been killed. It would have been a serious mistake on her part, but everyone makes mistakes now and then. Or maybe she wanted my transmissions to be intercepted. Their interception would lend credence to Red China’s claim that Belgravia was developing a bomb. And if the United States later officially denied that I was in Belgravia on a spy mission, Red China could contest the denial, especially if Lin Saong had been recording my messages. Indeed, tapes of my messages would be invaluable to the Red Chinese; the tapes could be edited and altered to say whatever Red China wanted me to say.

  As concerned Douzi’s instructions that I shouldn’t be too curious about the femme physicists’ activities or their reasons for being at the palace, maybe he did have something to hide—not the development of the bomb perhaps, but something else, something which right now I could only guess at. For that matter, maybe the only thing he wanted to hide was the manner in which he had lured the girls away from their homelands.

  Yes, the theory might have had its flaws, but the flaws could be explained.

  And if the explanations weren’t perfectly satisfactory, the fact remained that the no-bomb theory was still a hell of a lot mom feasible than any yes-bomb theory I could think of.

  Or was it more feasible?

  The more I thought about it, the legs convinced I became.

  And the less convinced I became, the more I realized how much I needed additional clues—clues that would help me piece together some of the missing parts in this crazy puzzle that seemed to be getting crazier all the time.