“We have children. Beautiful children.”
“So where are they?”
“Tom, you can’t expect us to have them here!”
“Well, what’s wrong with here? This is a lovely tropical island, and you people have built a fine little city on it.”
“Because it’s dangerous here!”
With that she ran out of the cabin.
When I got on deck, Ian’s yacht, The Scot’s Revenge, was within shouting distance. It sported a remarkable set of dark scrape marks on its white hull. My girls, still nude, were getting our sails back up, and Ian’s women, seeing mine, promptly adopted the same uniform. Ian was fully clothed while I was wearing a hat because of the sun, and shorts so I’d have some pockets and something to clip my calculator and ‘sword’ to.
I leaned over the side and read the name on my own boat. Written upside down, so I could read it easily looking down from the top, it said The Polish Prince.
Getting on this particular yacht had been simply the natural thing to do. All three were identical, and I just stepped aboard the middle one without noticing any names. They had me again, and somehow I just couldn’t get into relaxing while being raped.
The race wasn’t much of a contest. We did two laps before Ian completed one.
I’d read about the twelve-hour days, no matter what the season, and the rapid sunsets that the tropics boast of, but this was the first time I’d been outside at the right time to see one. It was dusk when we got the boats tied up next to the third yacht, The Teutonic Humorist.
“Hey, some names, huh? I mean, the Scots never got their revenge, Poland doesn’t have a prince and Germans aren’t very funny!”
“Screw it! Tom, just where in the hell did you learn to sail a boat?”
“Well, no place. I never did. I just had the girls sail it.”
“But what about our bet?”
“So what about it? I won.”
“The hell you did! Your girls won!”
“So? It was me and my crew against you and yours. If you don’t have brains enough to delegate a task to the people most competent to do it, well, it’s not my problem.”
“You cheated!”
“Hey! I did not! And I’ll thank you for an IOU on your Harley.”
“Damn it. Okay, Tom. You’ll find a Duo-glide in your goddamn bedroom.”
“Look, not A Duo-glide. Your Duo-glide. Bets have to be meaningful, remember?”
“Yeah, okay. But let’s make it an IOU, then, like you suggested. I wouldn’t want her left here when we leave.”
“Well, you mean if we leave. Calling the Coast Guard is out. You didn’t see that gunboat. Maybe the U.S. Navy could make it through, but there’d be a bigger butcher’s bill than I’d want to be responsible for.”
“I saw lots of gunboats today, Tom, along with jet fighters and helicopters. But should we talk about such things, in front of . . . you know?”
“Hell, does it matter? They’ve got us monitored twelve ways from Friday, anyway.”
“Like you said, it’s a very nice prison. Let’s go check out that subway system.”
“Fine. But we’ve got those doctors’ appointments first.”
“Oh, yeah, Tom. That.”
* * *
The doctor was a nervous, skinny fellow who looked like he’d rather be chain smoking. He fluttered around, asked twenty minutes worth of questions, and was rude about it. Finally had me strip naked and stand in front of this machine.
“Disgusting,” he said from behind a control console. “The things you’ve done to your liver with your debauched drinking are absolutely disgusting! If you really must drink yourself into a stupor four times a day, you really should have had the brains to take vitamin supplements, B and C especially. And your lungs! Good God the ugly things those cigars have done to your lungs! And the radiation damage! . . . Well, that’s at least a decent challenge and not a matter of patching up the holes you’ve shot in your own feet.
“So what else do you want? Your hair back, I suppose. And something done about your blotchy complexion. And that flab! You are carrying ninety pounds of surplus fat. Do you want to get rid of it?”
“Huh? Well, sure, I suppose so, but every time I go on a diet I feel sort of weak.”
“Ok. We’ll beef up your musculature. Anything else? Any chance you’d want to be the size of a normal human being? And that ugly face—you want to join the human race?”
“Look. You leave my face alone, except I want my hair back and the scars gone. As to my height, well, why the hell should I want to be a skinny little runt like you?”
“Glad to see we’re understanding one another, but I’m not a shrink. Now lie down on that bench over there.”
I did so and he started closing this lid over me.
“Hey! You mean you’re going to start right now?”
“Yeah. And you’ll be out of here in five minutes. Now shaddup!”
The lid came down and I went to sleep. Then it went up and I awoke.
“Well, get out of there! You ought to know that what was no time at all for you was four months hard work for me! It would have been a damn sight easier to go back and fuck your mother and start again from scratch. Probably a good deal more ethical, too. Well, get up, asshole! Look at yourself in the mirror!”
I did so, and the guy looking back at me was a Greek statue in living color. I flexed my muscles and they rippled. I had this massive, wedge-shaped body with narrow hips and a flat stomach, without an ounce of fat. My hair was blond and shoulder length and I had a luxurious blond beard, and eyebrows and eyelashes!
“You need a haircut, but keep the beard. It covers some of your face.”
When I finally recovered speech, I said, “Uh, thank you, Doctor. It’s . . . wonderful. You . . . mentioned something about vitamins?”
“Yeah, but I knew you wouldn’t have brains enough to take them so I built in a vitamin generator while I was at it. Consider it another ductless gland. That body will stay like it is. But if you keep on smoking, you’ll be back here in ten years, and next time I won’t be so polite. Now get out of here and send in that gimpy runt of a friend of yours.”
“Look, Doc. I owe you a lot. But I’ve got to say that you’re the most disagreeable person I’ve ever met.”
“True. But I’m also the most competent person you’ve ever met, so I can get away with it. Now get out and send in the runt.”
There was no point in trying on my old clothes, so I just walked out into the anteroom naked. Nobody around there seemed to care much about clothes, anyway.
Ian looked at me and said, “Jeesch! They can do things like that?”
“Some body, huh?”
“Yeah, but nothing like what they’re going to do for me!”
Two minutes later, Ian came out on two good feet. That, and he was about six foot twelve and maybe four inches wider than me at the shoulders.
“Well. You went in to get one foot and you came out with three.”
“What, Tom? Oh. I get it. One foot at the end of my leg and two feet in height. If you’re counting that sort of thing, you’d better make it four, noting the improvement in my privy member.”
“Good God, you’re right! Shit! You could kill somebody with that thing!”
“I did always want to be a lady killer, but not in quite that way, of course. I suppose I’ll have to learn caution.”
“Hey, with both heads! You proceeded foolishly and without the sound advice of your experienced, learned, and wise best friend. They built this world with the little creatures in mind, rather than us people of proper size. Doorways and such are all made to deadly heights! I resolutely urge you to wear a crash helmet until further notice.”
“I’ll learn to duck.”
“Well, they say pain is the best teacher.”
Our old clothes were completely useless, so we were still naked when we joined the girls in the waiting room, looking like a pair of bit players in an Italian gladiator movie. Their reactions ran the full gamut, from Tammy’s ear-to-ear grin through Barb’s pleased smile through Kathy’s blank-faced shock to tiny Ming Po’s unconcealed open-mouthed apprehension. Naturally, they had clothes for us that fit perfectly.
Ian bashed his head fully six times getting to the subway. He had never laughed at me for doing that, so I worked hard so as not to snigger.
There wasn’t much to see in the subway system, just a large room in the basement with two kinds of elevator doors in it. The ones in the middle had two buttons, and were used for going up and down.