The Sex Machine

by Troy Conway

  Instead, you will live on, closely guarded, to lead us in our revels every week!”

  “Closely guarded?” I echoed weakly.

  “Professor! Do you realize how many robot women saw you in action today? Remember, they have been programmed to make love, to lust for love as a method of learning state secrets, when we are ready to turn them loose on decadent capitalistic diplomats.

  They will be trying to break down your door to get at you. That is why I must station guards to protect you. You understand, of course?”

  I just gawked at him.

  His eyes touched Lee Chi and hardened. “As for this one, she must be destroyed She actually fainted before you were done with her. She didn’t even last five hours. Girls like Ip Chung and Kai Lai can go on indefinitely.” He was telling me! “Yes, we must destroy her, she is a weakling.”

  I drew a deep breath. “I find her very pleasing. She makes a good companion. She is always eager to serve me. I would appreciate your making an exception in her case. Let her live to wait on me the way she has been doing.”

  Kang Chow hesitated. I added the final convincer. “After all, since she is such a lousy lover-girl, she won’t sap my strength.”

  Fedor Novotny grimed. “He has a point there, Chief.”

  I could hear Lee Chi breathing angrily behind me. I had to put her down a little, but it was only to save her life. I hoped she would understand.

  Kang Chow shrugged. “She can exist for a while, until we see how things turn out. But no other robot women art to see you.” He swung on Lee Chi. “Do you understand me, Lee Chi? You have not been programmed to be jealous, but you are programmed to protect. You shall protect Professor Damon from any other woman, real or robotic.”

  “I understand, Professor,” she said.

  When the door closed on our visitors, she aimed a palm at my face. I ducked and grabbed her arms. She was flushed with rage and insulted femininity.

  “Did you have to add that bit about my not being able to weaken you? Did you? Did you? Just because you’re some sort of fluttering freak doesn’t mean—

  I closed her mouth with a kiss. She moaned and tried to break free but my lips and darting tongue made her remember the pleasures I had given her on the love festival mattress. Her belly slumped into me and she clung tighter.

  “I was only saying it to save your life!” I yelled.

  “I know, I know you were. I’m just a bitch!”

  “Ssssh, ssshhh,’’ I ssshed, wondering if the room was bugged.

  We hunted, but found nothing outside the broken bug under the bed. We sat down on the edge of the bed and made plans. The fact that we were going to be guarded all the time didn’t add to our ability to escape. One thing we had going for us.. I was going to be allowed to live. This meant there was no special hurry to get away.

  For four days, Lee Chi and I led a pleasant, lazy life. We sunbathed. We ate well. We explored the corridors of the Buddhist caves, both the reprocessed ones and the old. We even found a new cave with beautiful paintings in it. If I’d been an archeologist, I would have been thrilled to death.

  Actually I went to Kang Chow all excited by my find. I told him about the wall paintings and asked permission to photograph them for the state. He was delighted at my cooperation. He would furnish all the cameras and films I would need. I said nothing about the guards who had accompanied Lee Chi and me to the painted caves. I figured Kang Chow would think of them himself.

  Next morning when we went out, the guards lazed on benches before the door of my round room. They smiled and shook their heads when I asked if they were coming along.

  “There is no need, Professor. No robot women are allowed in the unexplored sections of the caverns.”

  I said, “Well, you know best.”

  Lee Chi and I ran for the corridor closet where we’d pushed the broken robot. It was probably asking too much to find the robot and the flame-thrower still in the closet, but I was amazed it hadn’t been found yet. When Lee Chi opened the closet door, there they were.

  I grabbed the flame-thrower, turned it on the robot. It made a satisfying mass of flames as I left it in the closet with the door open to create a draft. The closet was wood. So were the walls of the corridors. Before we were a hundred yards away, we could hear those flames eating their way through this comer of the Robot Development Center.

  We ran on, into the office. A robot woman saw us. The flame-thrower took care of her. In seconds the whole office was on fire. I threw open the control system panel, baring the intricate wires inside. I lifted the flame-thrower and gave it a shot of blaze. The wires curled up and died.

  Then we were out on the gallery floor and Lee Chi was whirling toward the emergency switch. She threw it down. I watched the steel grilles drop into place over every cave-mouth opening in the cliffs. The robot women, robot guards and all the personnel of Robot Development Center were penned inside their burning tunnels.

  We could hear the fire-alarm bells clanging as we ran down the wooden staircase to the ground. I imagined how the living personnel must be running around inside the Robot Development Center trying to fight those flames. They would not realize they had been trapped inside the caves; not yet, at least. Only when they tried to escape would they find the steel grilles down and locked in place.

  I had destroyed their only way of lifting the bars.

  Well, that was how the fortune cookie flaked.

  If they could stop the flames, they would live. If not—I told myself it was dog eat dog, in the secret agent game. The Red Chinese were out to kill everybody who wasn’t with them. I was stopping them by locking them inside the blazing inferno that was the caves.

  I got in the black Daimler. Lee Chi slid into the suicide seat beside me. I started the engine, and noticed that the gas tank was at full. I backed up. Now we could hear the roar of the flames and the screams of the men trapped inside them. The thought occurred to me that as soon as the heat reached a certain degree, the highly flammable bodies of the robots would catch fire and add their heat to the conflagration.

  My foot shoved down the accelerator.

  The Daimler roared off in a cloud of dust.

  Lee Chi was clasping her knees with her arms, huddled in the seat beside me. She was damn near bursting with excitement and hope. Once she asked, “Do you think we’ll make it? Do you?”

  “I’m still dressed like a Chinaman. We’ve got a chance.”

  I was reckoning without the radios in the Robot Development Center. When Kang Chow saw that they were trapped in the hell of flames, he must have radioed the authorities, explaining what had happened. This is the way I reconstructed it, because after we had gone about eighty miles, we saw a Chinese army helicopter moving across the horizon. Its driver had seen us, and angled its course to intercept us at a roadway junction. I saw a machine gun barrel slide out a door where a soldier sat ready to kill us.

  My hands on the steering wheel laid out a zigzag pattern on the road. The machine gun spat lead at us, and I saw the marks of the bullets in the dirt of the road as they made tiny dust geysers all around us. We were flirting with death every second, with the odds against us.

  Ahead of us I saw water, the river down which the Pai Lu had come from Hong Kong. I drove straight for the water.

  “Get ready to jump!”

  Lee Chi was sobbing in mingled fright and excitement.

  She put her hand on the door-handle and turned her head to watch me. I left the road, hurling the car under some trees, figuring the leafy branches would hide us for a little while.

  The machine gun spat lead at the trees. A couple of spent bullets hit the Daimler and ricocheted off its black surface. I braked the car to a stop. Overhead, the helicopter was whirly- blading off to one side, about to sweep down on us again.

  My hand pushed Lee Chi. “Out!” I yelled.

  We ran below the trees for about two hundred yards. The river lay before us, cool and inviting. We had to wait, though, until the helicopter wa
s finishing its run. Otherwise, we would be seen and the men in the helicopter would know we were in the river.

  Then a river patrol boat would pick us up.

  The chopper craft made another swing over the woods.

  The man with the machine gun must have figured out just about where the car was, from the sound of the ricocheting bullets, if he could hear them pinging over the roar of the whirlybird motor.

  His second burst of bullets zeroed in neatly on the Daimler, they rained off the roof and the hood. Then the helicopter was above us and moving forward to begin its swing back. I figured the gunner was having himself a ball, shooting sitting ducks in that car.

  I got a better idea.

  Bent over, I ran back toward the car. Out of the tonneau I yanked the portable flame-thrower where I’d left it. I got down, hunching myself against the rain of bullets that were coming.

  This was madness; but my brain told me it was the only way. When the chopper craft came overhead and the machine-gunner laid his pattern at the Daimler, I was going to give him a helping hand.

  I waited, hardly breathing.

  The whirlybird swooshed off to the north and west, then came looping around in a big curve, its blades rotating like crazy. Through the spaces between the leaves I could make out the gunner hanging out his door. The barrel tilted my way.

  Bullets rained down on the car, playing out a rat-a-tat-tat on metal. I held my breath, expecting to absorb hot lead myself. My finger hit the controls of the flame-thrower.

  Red fire enveloped the car.

  I whirled and ran.

  The explosion as the gas tank went up caught me fifty feet away. I was picked up and hurled bodily through the air, to land with a thud on forest grass. I rolled over and over.

  My coolie jacket on fire.

  The flames were searing my flesh. They hurt like holy hell.

  I bit my lip against the pain and fought the jacket to get it off. Then hands touched me, ripping and tearing.

  Lee Chi tossed the blazing jacket on the ground. “Stamp on it!” I ordered. “They mustn’t see any flames so far away from the car.”

  She did what I said with her slipped feet.

  The helicopter moved away from the sky. It came back to swoop low. The driver and the machine-gunner must see all those flames. They would think we were inside the car, burning to death. In their minds it would be a just retribution, since we had set fire to the Robot Development Center.

  I watched the chopper craft slide away through the sky to the south, probably to make its report. Then I caught Lee Chi by the hand.

  We ran for the river. We dove in.

  Underwater, we swam as far as we could, then we dared to lift our heads and look around us. The river current was gentle but steady, and most important of all, it was going our way.

  We swam. I wanted to put as much distance between the burned-out Daimler and ourselves as I could. I knew damn well that when the Red Chinese sent soldiers, the soldiers would find our tracks leading into the water.

  By that time, I hoped to be long gone.

  Swimming would not do it. We needed a craft of some sort. We kept our eyes open as we swam, hunting the riverbank for a raft or a boat. No luck. It came dusk and we were still swimming with the current without a boat.

  By night, I figured we could travel by land.

  We got out of the water. It was almost freezing in our wet garments—I still had my coolie pants, while Lee Chi wore both pants and jacket— we stripped naked and trudged along that way, holding our clothes over our arms to help them dry.

  When Lee Chi stumbled and almost fell, I called a halt.

  It was well past midnight. We would sleep the rest of the night and travel by daylight. When I told her that, she just sank down and lay there. I followed suit.

  Next morning we were up at dawn and walking. We put our dried clothes on, so that we might look to be a Chinaman and his wife out for a stroll. The ordinary peasant might take us for that, but I was positive a soldier would stop us and ask questions.

  Toward noon, I halted. My hand caught La Chi, dragged her under a bush. My head nodded toward the river. A brown motorboat was pulled in to the bank. Half a dozen men in the quilt-jacketed uniforms of the Red Chinese soldier clambered out of the boat and set off at a trot along the rod. Lee Chi and I shrank down deeper into the bush. We held our breaths. I was positive we had been spotted.

  The soldiers ran past our hiding place.

  I waited, then looked. One soldier remained seated, beside the boat, dozing. I drew Lee Chi toward me, whispering what I wanted her to do. Me, I slithered through the tall grasses at the river’s edge and let myself down gently into the water, with hardly a single ripple. I swam underwater toward the boat.

  When I poked my head up, I saw Lee Chi standing in front of the soldier, unbottoning her jacket and showing him her big, heavy breasts.

  “This is where I wash my clothes,” she was saying.

  The soldier was standing, his automatic rifle forgotten, his eyes bulging as they took in the swaying, jerking breasts while Lee Chi got out of her coolie jacket.

  She pouted, “I usually wash right where your boat is. Can you move it?”

  He shook his head violently, jabbering at her in Chinese so fast I could not make it out. By this time I was rising from the water, moving forward steadily, slowly.

  My hand went out toward the AK-47.

  Lee Chi put her arms above her head, making her breasts rise up and point their dark nipples at the man. He was goggling at them. He would not have turned away if Mao Tse-tung had called him. He acted as if they were the first female breasts he had even seen.

  The rifle was in my hand. I lifted it, put both hands to it, stock and barrel, and drove the butt-plate at the back of his skull. I connected with a sodden thunk!

  His knees bent. He went down knees-first hit the ground and rolled over, looking as if he were dead. I motioned Lee Chi to get into the boat. Then I pushed it out into the river.

  The engine started smoothly.

  I steered the boat downriver and gradually picked up speed. Lee Chi crouched with the AK-47 in her hands. Our eyes were locked on the river waters up ahead of us, as I gunned the boat to full speed. The boat would run out of fuel long before we reached Hong Kong. I knew that. But I also knew that we had to trust to luck and keep going until we were as far from the Robot Development Center as we could get.

  We ran all day and then all night, taking turns staying awake, To my delight, I’d found extra cans of gasoline in the forward hold. We used up all the cam by the second day, but we must have put a couple hundred miles between us and the burned-out Daimler.

  I was hoping that nobody this far downriver would have heard of what had happened to Kang Chow and the others. I was damned surprised that the helicopter hadn’t returned, to tell the truth.

  The motorboat conked out about ten in the morning. There was no more gasoline anywhere. We let the current carry us for a time, then I realized I had to sink the boat. If we stayed in it, we would be spotted sooner or later. Our luck had been holding good so far. The main reason for this, I honestly believe, was that the villagers living on the riverbanks recognized the boat as army property and the Chinese peasantry was none too friendly with the men in the khaki quilt jackets.

  They had learned long ago to mind their own business where the Red Chinese Army was concerned. They minded their business now. It was no affairs of theirs if two nonarmy people wanted to go take a joy-ride in an army boat. They may even have cheered us on, for all I know.

  I sank the boat about noon, listening to the gurgle of the river water as it filled the boat, causing it to settle downward gently. Lee Chi and I swam for the shore.

  We found a sunny spot hidden by some bushes and stripped down. We spread our clothes to dry. We were damn hungry, both of us. The boat had no food provisions for the soldiers who had been in it; maybe they were expected to live off the land, which meant robbing the peasants.

&n
bsp; Where it came to eating and being seen and maybe caught, or not eating and staying free, we made the right decision.

  We patted our shrunken bellies and smiled at each other.

  We slept in the warm sunlight.

  In the dusk of evening we put our dry clothes on and started hiking along the riverbanks. I calculated that roughly speaking we had about three hundred miles to walk Honestly I never really expected to get out of Red China, but I was going to make the attempt.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, Lee Chi and I smelled food. Our dry mouths puckered up, I felt a pain in my middle. The hell with consequences, I told myself. We needed food. We could go no farther without it.

  I still had the AK-47. If need be, I would use it to steal that food. Side by side, we tiptoed forward, until we were on the outskirts of a large garden. There were peach trees growing here and plum trees, and even some ling-chih fungus. I gaped, honestly amazed.

  It was the first time I had ever seen a Chinese love garden.

  The peach tree, the plum blossoms, the fungus, all were symbols of the yang and yin principle. Twin shrines had been set up at opposite ends of the garden, one holding a statute of Shou Lou, the other of his female counterpart, Hsi Wang Mu

  I wished I had a camera. But the flashbulb going off would have alerted the owners of the house that their garden was Wig invaded because hot food offerings had been placed on little tables before each shrine. I had to be satisfied with memorizing the layout of the garden and studying the figures of the two deities so I could duplicate this garden in that wing of the university museum where I placed the collection of erotica I gathered from an corners of the world for my League of Sexual Dynamics.

  Lee Chi crouched before the jade statue of Hsi Wang Mu, eating the food placed on the porcelain plates. I devoured the sweet and sour pork and the egg rolls put before Shou Lou. We swallowed the rice wine and drank the little bowls of water.

  I waved a hand at big-headed old Shou Lou as I climbed over the stone fence. “Thanks, old-timer,” I called softly, and turned to find a giggling Lee she close behind me.