Image of the Beast and Blown (44 page)

The head was purple, glistening, and the skin was
stretched so tight it seemed about ready to burst. The
blue veins stood out like unmined mineral under the
reddish skin.

Sybil sucked on his testicles a while, one after the
other, while she ran a finger partway up his anus. He
moaned with the delight of the mouth and tongue and
the finger. Then she ran her tongue lightly along the shaft
of his peter, wet his pubic hairs with her tongue, and
took the big head into her lips. Her tongue trembled
on the slit of the glans, and her lips moved noisily with
their sucking. The edges of her teeth brushed against
the tight tender skin.

He blew into her mouth with a writhing of belly
muscles and hips and a feeling of flying apart.

Sybil continued to suck, having swallowed the fluid.
She worked at him, occasionally stopping to murmur en-
dearing words. His dong began to rise again, and when it
was fully rigid, he told her to lie down. He got down
on top of her and eased his prick into the slit until their
pubic hairs were crushing each other. He lay there for
some time, luxuriating in the warmth and the moisture
and the tenderness. Her sphincter muscle squeezed on
his cock, gently working it.

"I'm no superman, you know, Sybil," he said. "Once
or twice a night, and I'm done for, usually. But when I
was at Igescu's that hog of a woman, Grasatchow, put a
suppository up my rectum that acted as an aphrodisiac
and an energy source. And last night they gave me a
drink that had the same effect. Maybe some of that
effect is still with me, which is why I could get a hard-on
so quickly after coming. Or maybe it's just because
I've been so long without you, and you're my aphrodisiac.
Anyway, I love you, and I intend to fuck all day."

"I love you, too," Sybil panted. "Do you want to move
now, Herald?"

He began to thrust, slowly at first and then more
swiftly as he felt the tide in him increasing its forward
swings. He came with a moan at the same time that she
screamed with ecstasy. Tears rolled down her face onto
the pillow.

His speculation that the drug he had taken was still
affecting him was probably true. He lost some rigidity

after the shooting out of his sperm, but he kept his peter
in her, and within a minute or two it was rigid and
apparently ready to tap on new reserves.

However, this time, the gray liquid in him would not
rise so soon. He hammered her for what seemed like
fifteen minutes and though the ecstasy built up, he could
not come. Sybil was having one orgasm after another. Her
eyes were open and her hands were flung out and she
was rolling her head back and forth and groaning and
weeping.

Suddenly, she gave a scream and seemed to fall un-
conscious. He was not worried, since she had behaved
like this frequently. When she had an especially exquisite
orgasm, she would faint.

But the white body beneath him became reddish. The
smooth but wet-slippery skin was covered with hairs as
red as an Irish setter's and as wet as if it had just climbed
out of the water. The face became elongated and snouted,
the long head hairs shrank to a bristle, the eyes shifted
towards the side of the head, the small and delicate ears
became large hairy pointed organs.

The long-fingered well-manicured hands became paws
with blunt hooked nails. The legs on his shoulders be-
came hairy, and a big hard penis was against his body.
It was spurting jism over his belly and down onto his
own cock, which was buried to the hairs in the hairy
anus of the creature.

It was too late for him to stop. He had been just on
the verge of ejaculating as the metamorphosis took place.
Moreover, he had suspected that this thing was not Sybil.
She had been too blasé about the change of shape of
Plugger, too calm about what was happening, and too
eager to fuck him. Sybil might have wanted to fuck him,
but she would have been too afraid of emptying him and
so making their captors angry. This thing should have
been afraid of that, too, and probably had been, but it
could not resist the temptation to get the power and the
glory of the Captain's cock all to herself.

That had been the thing's undoing. It had become over-
whelmed and had lost control. Apparently, it still was not
aware of this.

He exploded inside the red-haired ass of the creature.

The intensity of the orgasm was such that, afterwards, he
felt almost forgiving. Almost but not quite.

Panting, he lay for a while on top of the wet and hairy
body.

Then he got off the bed and seized its neck between his
hands. It was as tall and almost as heavy as he, but it
was terrified. Its brown eyes bulged out as its air was
squeezed off, and its paws flailed.

Childe turned, swinging it off its feet, and then dragged
it by its ears to the door. He shouted until the door was
opened and then he shoved the thing out with a kick just
under its long bushy tail. The three who received it looked
shocked.

"That'll be the last trick you play on me!" he shouted.
"Where is my wife? You had better produce Sybil, and
quick, or you'll get nothing out of me anymore! No mat-
ter what you do!"

The thing got off the floor, rubbing its spine with a paw,
and, whined. It said something, but the shape of the
mouth was not appropriate for human speech.

"Kill it!" Childe shouted. "Kill it and prove to me
that you did! And then bring me Sybil, my wife, alive
and well!"

The door was swung inwards and locked. He raged
around the room for a while. Finally, he burst into tears
and wept for a long time. Then he got up and took a
shower and dressed again. Pao and the big Swedish-type
blond, O'Brien, entered.

40

At nine that evening, Forry Ackerman and four Tocs,
including Alys Merrie, set out for their rendezvous. Forry
had had to exercise his imagination to the rupture point
to explain to Wendy why he wasn't going to the monthly
soiree with her and to the host and hostess why he
couldn't make it. He didn't think he satisfied anybody
with his excuses, but certainly they were far more satis-
factory than the truth.

The rain had stopped for several hours after five
o'clock, and some of the clouds overhead thinned out.
Then darkness and lightning had moved back in and
thunder had come. A half hour later, it began raining
savagely.

Every TV channel was filled with news of the damage
done by the floods and the lives lost. The radio seemed
to talk of little else between bursts of rock music. Over
two thousand homes had had to be abandoned. At least
that number were in danger of sliding down a hill or
being floated away. Most of the canyons were closed
even to those who lived in them. The rivulets and brooks
roaring down from the hills had become small rivers and
frightening tidewaters. The Basin and the San Fernando
Valley were sometimes knee-deep in water. Business was
at a standstill; most of the bus lines had quit running.
The governor had finally declared the three counties a
disaster area. Citizens were screaming about flood control,
and an insurance man was gunned down by an enraged
citizen who' had lost his home under an avalanche of mud.

The grocery stores were beginning to run short of
supplies. There was water contamination and a backing
up of the sewers. Despite the almost continuous rains,
fires were numerous, and one fire truck, answering the
twentieth call that day, dropped into a tremendous hole
created by the torrents slamming down from the hills.
No one was drowned, but the truck was lost.

Just before he left, Forry received a call from Wendy.
The party had been called off, even though most of the
guests lived within a few miles of the house where the

monthly party of science-fiction people and normals was
being held. It should have been canceled days before,
but the hostess was unusually stubborn.

He sighed with relief. Telling the lies had burdened
him down, and at the same time he resented the burden.
Why should he worry about breaking an engagement for
a party when the fate of the world depended on what
he and the Tocs did tonight? Nevertheless, he did worry.

Hindarf drove a pickup truck which was several times
in water higher than the wheels. At Sunset and Beverly
Drive, he pulled to the curb. A semi with a big van
came along five minutes later and stopped with a hissing
of air brakes. They got down out of the pickup and
waded through water halfway up their thighs to the van.
They had to hold on to each other to keep from being
swept off their feet by the current. A piece of timber,
which looked as if it had been a post for a billboard,
swept by them. If it had struck a leg, it would have
cracked the bone.

There were twenty others in the van. The back doors
were closed, and the truck pulled away. With its high
body and its power, it should get through water which
would drown out an automobile.

On the way, Hindarf gave them instructions. Appar-
ently, everybody except Forry had heard these before,
but he was making sure that they understood them. The
instructions took about fifteen minutes, and the putting
on of the diving suits, flippers, tanks and goggles about
ten. Forry objected that he had never been scuba diving
but was told that he would be underwater for only a
minute. The main reason they were wearing the suits
was to keep from getting cold while they went through
the water.

The truck stopped on a steep slope. The doors were
opened and a small ladder let down for Forry while the
others leaped out onto the road. They were parked on
Topanga Canyon just outside the entrance to the road
that ran up to the house of the Ogs. The brown flood
running off it joined the deep current coming down
Topanga. Forry was glad that he wore flippers and a
suit and that the tank gave him more weight to resist
the current. But he did not think that he could carry it
up the hill.

"Sure you can," Hindarf said. "Put on the goggles
and start breathing through the mouthpiece."

"Now?" Forry said.

"Now."

Forry did so, and at the first breath he felt more ener-
getic than at any time in his life since she had been a child.
The air filled his whole body with a strength and a
joie de
vivre
that made him want to sing. This was impossible, of
course, with the piece in his mouth.

Hindarf said, "We may have a hard fight ahead. The
vaporized drug in the breathing system will charge our
bodies. The effect is intense but short-lived."

They walked up the road, their flippers slop-slopping.
They looked like Venusians, Forry thought, what with the
frog feet, the slick black skins of the suits, the humped air
tanks, the goggles, and the big mouthpieces. Some even
carried tridents or fishing spears. The rain fell heavily on
them, and everything was dark and wet, as if they were un-
der the clouds on the nightside of the second planet from
the sun.

Before they came to the turn of the road that would
have placed them in view of those in the house, they
started to climb the hillside. This was steep and muddy,
and they could only get up by grabbing bushes and pulling
themselves up. He appreciated the suit now, since it kept
him from getting wet and muddy. The weight of the
tank seemed negligible, so strong did he feel. His heart
was chugging along at its accustomed pace, which meant
that the extra demand for energy was being taken care of
by the drug in the air system.

After slipping and sliding and hanging on to the bushes,
they crawled out onto the top of the hill. Another hill to
their right hid them from view of those in the house, al-
though Forry did not understand how they could be seen
in the dark.

Hindarf led them around the larger hill and up to a high
brick wall. This was topped by a barbed wire fence about
three feet high. Several Tocs unfolded a ladder, a stile,
really, and put it over the wall and the wire fence. Hindarf
cautioned everybody not to touch the wires, which were
charged with high voltage. One by one, they crawled up
the stile and over the wall and down to the other side.

They were in an orchard which seemed to run several

hundreds of yards north and south from where they stood
and an indeterminate distance west. The stile was taken
down, telescoped, and placed under some bushes. Hindarf
led them through the trees until they came to another slope.
This rose steeply to a low brick wall. There was a flight of
steps made of some stone which glowed red and black in
the light that- Hindarf and others flashed on it.

Forry had been upset by their careless use of this light,
but Hindarf assured him that it was a form of black light.
Forry could see it simply because his goggles had a spe-
cially prepared glass. Hindarf doubted that the Ogs had
anything which could detect this form of illumination.

When they got to the top of the steps, they could see the
black bulk of the house about fifty yards away. It was dark
except for a slit of light. They went on and then were at
the end of a long swimming pool. This was brimming over,
flooding the cement walks, the patio, the yard, and running
down the steps up which they had just climbed.

Hindarf gave Forry his instructions again and then went
down into the pool via the steel ladder. The man assigned
to watch Forry led him into the pool. For a moment,
everything was black, and he had no idea which was up or
down, north or south. Then a light flooded the area
around him, and he could see his guide just ahead of him,
holding the lamp. Hindarf's flippers were visible just ahead
of the globe of illumination.

They swam the 100-feet-long pool underwater as near
the floor as they could get. Forry caught glimpses of strange
figures painted on the cement floor. Griffins, werewolves
metamorphosing from men to beasts, a legless dragon, a
penis-beaked flipper-winged rooster, a devilfish with a
shaven cunt for a mouth, a malignant-faced crab being rid-
den by a nude woman with fish heads for breasts, and
something huge and shadowy and all the more sinister for
being so amorphous.

Then they were at the deep end of the pool, and Hindarf
and his guide were removing a plate from the wall. It
looked like any other section of the wall, but it was thin
and wide and its removal exposed a large dark hole. Hin-
darf swam into it, the guide followed, and Forry, after a
moment's hesitation, and knowing that the honor of Earth
depended upon him, swam through the hole. The tunnel
had been dug out of the earth, of course, but it was walled