The Sex Machine

by Troy Conway

  To my delight, the Mustang was still there.

  Angela war crying a flood of tears, head bent over the steering wheel. I braked the Camaro and ran for her. At the sound of my voice, her face came up into the winter moonlight.

  “Can you start the car?” I rasped.

  “Oh! You got away! What did——”

  “Never mind the conversation, Let’s get the hell out of here. I’ve got to make a telephone call.”

  She nodded. The Mustang motor purred to life and she backed up onto the road, narrowly missing the Camaro where I’d left it. Then, straightening her wheels, she shot off down the road. She was still sniffling, so I took my handkerchief out of my pocket and wiped her eyes.

  “It’s all right,” I soothed. “It was all a mistake.”

  “I’m not used to violence,” she spluttered.

  “Neither am I,” I lied. “They listened to my arguments by which I convinced them they had the wrong patsy.”

  My arguments had been .38 bullets, but I didn’t tell her that. I wondered about the blonde. She might rouse up the police in short order once she got out of the locked room. If she got out, that is. I doubted it. Somebody would have to go and free her, but it wouldn’t be me.

  Angela Montosores slid the Mustang into the parking lot beside my own car, at the moment a Coup de Ville. The Ashford Arms, where I had my apartment, was a recent addition to the architecture around the university town. It was for reasonably well-to-dos, some of them married, some still bachelors like myself. It cost a lot, but I was making good money at the university, what with my sociology courses and my League for Sexual Dynamics studies, and I had my income as a Coxeman to add to it. So I indulged myself.

  My pad was on the second floor. I opened the blue metal door, flicked on a wall switch, and stood back. Angela Montosores oohed, her dark eyes shining. Ha red-nailed fingers clasped themselves at her-front and her lips fell open.

  “It’s a picture out of Playboy,” she breathed rapturously. “I do like the good things of life,” I admitted.

  There was wall-to-wall cotton shag carpeting in beige, holding metal-framed Van Keppel-Green lounges and chairs, a KLH stereo system, wooden walls rising to a high ceiling, a mahogany bar that separated from the rest of the room the cookerie where I could scramble up some eggs and ham for late night snacks. There were four cushioned stools in front of the bar proper, and a glass shelf display of bottles behind, that opened into the kitchen on the far side. Ferns and cactus in brass pots and barrels added a kind of outdoorsy look to the whole place.

  Angela stalked into my lair like a tigress, letting her hips swing. It was almost as if she was a completely different girl in these posh surrounding. She pulled down her bodice and lifted her skirt, giving me a glimpse of breastflesh and dusky thighmeat.

  She whirled, doing a little pirouette. “I love it. It’s absolutely perfect. I—I think I’m even going to have a drink”

  I carried the packages of food out into the kitchen. Apparently she had forgotten the paella y sangria she was sup posed to cook for me. I dumped the groceries on the chopping block of grained wood that was a part of the kitchen counters, and went back behind the bar.

  I made martinis and served them in frosted glasses just out of the freezing unit of the bar refrigerator. I dropped tiny onions into each one.

  “To the furthering of sexual understanding,” I toasted.

  “Especially mine,” she nodded, eyes glowing.

  I reached for the telephone, but her hand was on mine, holding it still. “Not yet,” she pleaded. “Make your call later. I want to talk first.”

  My shoulders shrugged. Walrus-moustache could wait a bit, I figured. Nobody was going to go barging into the Sheffield Inn. Most folks around these parts knew it was closed for the winter. So I sipped my martini and rested my elbows on the mahogany bar top.

  “The first thing to talk about is getting yourself psyched for sex,” I explained. “All our sexual hang-ups are usually the result of some traumatic experience of the past. In your case, it was a matter of listening too closely to what the good nuns taught you. A saintly life is not for everyone. Some of us aren’t capable of living like saints.

  “The human body makes certain demands on us. For some, those demands are damned difficult to ignore. For the saints, the demand isn’t so great—it’s all a matter of energy and health and hormones, anyhow-40 they can pass up what the great majority of us humans really need.”

  Angela murmured, “My teaching has always been that to overcome those demands makes for a better person. To give in to them is a sin.”

  “Your church is changing its outlook. Today, if your conscience lets you do this or that without guilt feelings, it’s fine. Or that’s how I interpret the new doctrines. The world is getting more understanding about human—frailties, shall I say?—all the time.”

  Her tongue came out to lick her lips. Her dark eyes stared boldly at me above the rim of her cocktail glass as she drained it.

  I reached to fill her up. Her large red month pursed, blew a kiss at me. The martini was getting to her, it was loosening the checkrein she had on her emotions. She was not drunk, but she was not so uptight either.

  “The trouble is, a lot of men and women in our western society have guilt feeling about sex. Thanks to the ascetic views of the early Christians, and to the grip these hysterical beliefs came to exert on the people of the western world, sex itself is considered to be a sin. You mustn’t take pleasure in it, and if you have any fun while you’re procreating the race, it’s somehow wrong.

  “A kind of hysterical misunderstanding put men like Simon Stylites on high pedestals, removing him and others like him from the world around them. Origenes castrated himself so he wouldn’t be tempted. They were unreal, those men, in the sense that they retired from life while alive, in trying to purge their bodies of their human elements. Augustine, for instance, suggested that nobody should marry, so there would be no men and women in the future, and the end of the world would come so everyone could go to heaven.

  “Poppycock! Sometimes I think our western civilization surrendered itself to madmen. But they’ve left their races on us all. Bluenoses and do-gooders have often banded together to repress everything that’s any fun. They set themselves up as experts who know what is good for us, and what isn’t. They tell us they know what we should look at and what we should read; and they so play on other peoples’ guilt feelings that they get away with it. What gives them that right over the rest of us poor mortals?”

  Angela nodded her head slowly, sipping the martini “And you’ve found the answer to the problem?”

  “I’d like to think so. Mine is a way of thinking, a positive approach to sex. Put away the traumas and psychoses, think naturally, let the body be itself. If the body wants to bed down, let it pick a friendly partner and go do it. It’s good for the inner man. Coue was on the right track, except that he was concerned more with. the well-being of the entire body than with its genital parts.

  “With Coue, people of the Twenties psyched themselves to better health. With my book, they psyche themselves to a better sex life. No more guilt, no more hermits. Life is worth the living, so live it”

  Angela Montosores put her drink down. Very seriously, she slid her right hand behind her back and ran the zipper of her dress down. She smiled at me as she shrugged her shoulders and tugged the bodice downward from her bosom.

  “I want to do this,” she said softly. “I want to be a woman, not just a mass of flesh and hair shaped in the female gender. I want to know what it is to cry out in pleasure, the pleasure I could never have with my own husband.”

  “What about the paella?”

  “Oh, yes. The food. I’ll cook dinner, but first—”

  The bodice fell away from her black lace brassiere that was filled so admirably with her two generous breasts. I saw succulent breastflesh quiver to the movements of her hands and arms; the black cups could not quite contain those heavy globes. She glan
ced down at herself, she nodded her brown hair.

  “I’m shameless,” she said suddenly. “And I’m glad.”

  Her brown eyes lifted to stare at me. “I’ve always dreamed of doing something like this, of stripping myself in front of a man like any—no, I mustn’t say the word whore—like an honest woman, rather. That is the way to think, isn’t it?”

  “You’re making progress, Angela. I’m going to give you a copy of my book and let you browse through it while I go get that food out of the bags and ready for cooking.”

  I handed her a copy of my best seller. I caught her by the elbow and guided her across the thick carpeting to an easy chair. Her dress was still down about her middle. She drew away, put her hands to the dress, and shoved it down.

  She was wearing a black girdle and gun-metal stockings above her high-heeled Pappagallos. And black panties. Her thighs were meaty but shapely, and the dusky flesh looked smooth and creamy above the stockingtops. She straightened proudly, looking me right in the eye.

  “I’m psyching myself,” she told me grimly. “Now let me read that damn book of yours.”

  She was almost half drunk. Another martini would have turned her into a giggling goop. Right now she was pleasantly loose, happy to let down her hair, in the figurative sense, by taking off her dress. I thought it was a good lint step. The rest could come a little later on.

  So I left her with my book while I went into the kitchen and unpacked the various meats and arranged the spice cans from my spice rack, and laid .out the carving knives with which to separate the bones and fat from the pork loins. I put the shallow paella pan on the stove but did not turn on the gas. Then I slid a scissors beside the knife with which to cut the shrimp into chunks.

  I took my time, because we were in no hurry. The more she read, the more she would understand my philosophy and its attendant byways. I went back to the bar and mixed another martini. She was curled up in the easy chair, frowning slightly in concentration as she read on. At times she would turn back to study the many plates with which I had illustrated it.

  Once or twice she flushed. Then she would bite her lip and psyche herself to read on. Her thighs were naked and appealing above her stockings, bisected as they were by the girdle garters. Her breasts seemed to be more solid than they had when she’d first slid down her dress. She was lost in a world of her own, but when she heard the spoon stirring my martini in the glass shaker, she looked up and smiled brightly at me.

  “You really know how to get down inside a woman, Rod,” she said thoughtfully. “You understand why it is that some women feel sex is dirty and disgusting. You know this is a wrong feeling, yet you don’t condemn. You help by explaining that this attitude is wrong, that woman does herself more harm by maintaining it than she could ever do by letting herself do the things she unconsciously longs to do.”

  “Are you hinting?”

  She laughed softly, saying, “Maybe I am.”

  “Then be my guest.”

  She drew a deep breath. Her breasts thrust up proudly in the black lace cups that held them. “I may just do that thing, Rod.” Her eyes got a kind of glazed look.

  I nodded, “You do that, Angela. I’ll make my phone call.”

  My hand was interrupted as it reached for the telephone, because the telephone began ringing. My hand continued on its journey, lifting the phone.

  “Professor Damon here.”

  A very cultured voice said, “You are the Professor Damon who wrote The Sex Machine?” When I said I was he, the voice continued. “I am unofficial representative of Red China, Professor—calling you from Havana—to extend an invitation to visit our great country.”

  “Your country does me a great honor, but if you want me to lecture in Red China, let me remind you that your nation already has the greatest population in the world”

  The voice chuckled. “It is not so much an invitation to lecture, Professor—as it is an invitation to perform, to prove your theories with a number of our loveliest Chinese girls.

  “You see, our great leader, Mao Tse-tung, has already affirmed the fact that Chinese womanhood is more than capable of exhausting the love services of any man, no matter what his nationality, all in the service of the holy Mao. It is a sacred duty Chinese women owe the state, to please their men and fulfill their mutual function of reproducing many babies to praise Mao and grow up to take their places in our great country.

  Yeah, hey. I answered, “It is a tremendous honor. I doubt very much if I’m worthy of it.”

  “Your personal safety is guaranteed, Professor. The only thing we cannot guarantee against is—your killing yourself in your vain attempts to prove that a capitalist can make love capably enough to satisfy our Chinese women.”

  There was a sneering challenge in the voice that made the hackles of my priapic pride stand up. No woman in the world can stay with my satyriasis. I have exhausted more than two dozen women of all nationalities at one bedding down, making them cry uncle to my phallic proddings.

  “I have complete trust in my abilities, sir,” I replied frostily. “This talent of mine has been proven beyond doubt. To make such a trip just to prove this sexual superiority of mine once more is out of the question.”

  “Think on it, Professor,” said the voice. “I shall call back.”

  The line went dead. I shrugged, replaced the receiver, and glanced across the room at Angela Montosores. I damn near died. She was standing, swaying from side to side, her arms behind her back unfastening the strap of her black lace bransiere. She smiled at me the way a wanting woman has always smiled at a male.

  My hands went on lifting the receiver and dialing Walrus-moustache. 1 ran my tongue around my lips as Angela pushed against a thin shoulderstrap. She smiled lazily at me and tugged the black lace downward. Her full white breast bounced a bit, freed of the constricting cup. Her brown areola was as big as a half dollar, and the nipple was rigidly thrusting forward.

  I put the receiver to my ear. Walrus-moustache growled in it. “Must you always call me between the dessert and the brandy? What’s on your mind?”

  I told him about the two goons I had killed. He listened without a word. Then he sighed and muttered wearily, “Damon, I don’t care about your little peccadilloes, as long as I don’t have to clean up after you Just because some blonde number wants to test your priapic powers—as advertised most thoroughly in your book, though inadvertently, I give you that much—there’s no reason to go shooting people.”

  “They would have killed me,” I snapped angrily. “Besides, the gun belonged to them, not to me.”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll send a couple of Foundation agents over there to work with the police. I’ll explain what happened to the district attorney. But the next time—”

  “There’s more, Chief.”

  I told him about the phone call from Havana.

  “Ahhh,” he breathed when I was done. “This does, indeed, become more interesting. You’ve foiled the Red Chinese on a number of occasions, Damon. This may be their way of getting even.”

  “By screwing me to death with their women?”

  “Can you think of a better way to go?”

  He had a point there. Still, since it was my life, I felt like arguing. I pointed out that my caller had admitted he could not guarantee my safety in the trials by which I .was to demonstrate my sexual superiority over Chinese females.

  As I talked, I looked up into the bar mirror that acts as a backing for the mahogany shelves that hold my liquor supplies. Angela Montosores was reflected in the mirror, staring down at her jutting breasts, her hands sliding upward under those protruding globes in a lifting movement. She la the breasts go as her palms brushed her thickened nipples and slid off.

  Her breasts shook like dusky jelly, jiggling and quivering.

  My manhood is a very sympathetic part of me. It responded to the sensual torture of those shaking breasts by swelling with pity. The swell became even more pronounced as Angela caught those protuberant nipples
between her forefingers and thumbs and yanked on them. My boss-man was saying something but I don’t know what. I was too mesmerized by those nipples. They must have been almost an inch long.

  Angela was moaning, biting her lips as aim down at her hands and her quivering breasts. Suddenly she looked up, saw me watching in the mirror. Her moist red mouth curved into a smile.

  Determinedly, I turned away. I mid into the telephone, “What do you want me to do?”

  “Agree to go, nitwit! Do you realize what a golden opportunity you have to get a firsthand look inside the bamboo curtain? No Americans are ever allowed in there. But you’re getting an invitation on a golden platter. Accept it!”

  “Yeah, ad gamble my life I’ll get out with a whole skin.”

  “Professor Damon,” said Walrus-moustache plaintively.

  “Yeah, boss?”

  “That’s an order!” he yelled.

  Two bare arms came around my middle. Inquisitive fingers stroked downward along my trousered thighs. The fingers paused, moved upward, gripped gently, then not so gently. My hip jerked in reflex, and I groaned.

  “It isn’t all that bad,” said the boss-man. “I’m sure your hosts will take you on a couple of sight-seeing tours. Take along a Minox camera and take snapshots. We want to know if the Chinese are building any launching pads with which to hurl nuclear warheads at the Pacific Coast.”

  My zipper rasped. Warm fingers slipped into the opening it left. Then those fingers touched hot flesh. I groaned.

  “Damon, will you stop making those uncouth noises? This is damned important. I was about to discipline you for having written that book. It was a damn fool thing to do, calling attention to yourself that way! But now, maybe it’s not as bad as I thought.”

  Angela Mantosores moved around in front of me, her eyes downcast at what her. dusky hand was holding. Even as Walrus-moustache went on talking, telling me what an idiot I was to have held myself up to world opinion—to possible reaction from some of the spy groups I had confounded in the past—Angela was slipping to her knees before me. Her eyes were glazed as they studied my phallus in its upstanding condition. She leaned forward and pressed her lips to me.