About halfway through, Ian discarded another empty watermelon rind and led his collected girls—there must have been forty of them—back to the Taj Mahal.
It was after midnight when I finally got home. Barb said that she’d join me later, so I went to my bedroom alone. Michelle and Carolyn were there, just as they had been when I’d arrived, two days before.
Only this time I didn’t disappoint them. Actually, I darned near wore them out. They soon got to calling in reinforcements, and I found myself at the center of a one-man orgy.
This new body of mine had just amazing stamina, and before I called it quits and Barb came back, shooing the others out, I figured that I must have done proper justice to eighteen of them, and some of them several times.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Third Wager
I woke up at dawn feeling just great. Maybe it was my new automatic vitamin generator, but if so, they must have given Ian one, too, since I found him in my breakfast room when I got there.
“Good morning, Tom. You slept well?”
“Well, they laid me soundly down. Yourself?”
“Remarkably so.”
The breakfast waitress, who had not been with me last night, had taken to wearing nothing but high heeled shoes and a small apron. I never did meet a man who could get a woman to wear what he wanted, so I didn’t mention it to her. Anyway, there was a part of me that liked it.
She asked me what I wanted.
I said, “Surprise me,” and sat back, wondering what she’d do.
What she did was bring me a spinach and cheese omelet with some kind of white sauce. It wasn’t bad.
When I complimented the food, and the waitress on her choice, she told me that all of the vegetables consumed in the palaces were grown in the gardens surrounding them, and were picked within minutes of being set on the table. Hereabouts, they took the idea of freshness about as far as it could go.
Ian was working on his usual stack of pancakes. That at least hadn’t changed. I was trying to figure out how to broach the subject of how his mind might have been fiddled with, but he sort of signaled that he didn’t want to talk, so I let it be.
After breakfast, he suggested that we take a swim, just the two of us, so we headed for the beach in front of my place.
“What would you say to another wager?” he asked.
“You are a glutton for punishment, my young friend. In Sunday School, didn’t they teach you about the virtues of moderation?”
“Yes, Tom, and long ago I vowed to strive towards those virtues as the noblest of ideals. Yet perforce, I must do my striving in extreme moderation, in order to keep the whole business within the logical bounds of internal consistency. Thus, alas, one moderate deed per week is the best I dare attain. Mainly, at the present, I want my Harley, my Corvette, and my books back.” We reached the beach and started stripping down. Ian seemed to be wearing an extra doodad around his neck along with his usual religious medal, but I didn’t say anything about it.
“Well, certes I would agree with your wager in principle, but do you own anything to put up against your previous foolish losses?” I said as we waded naked into the warm salt water.
“In truth, Tom, not much, but I am minded to bet it all on one figurative toss of the dice.”
“A noble action, my young friend, though again a silly one. Yet faced with such knightly panache, how could I say thee nay?” We were both stroking out into deep water. “Did you have any particular method in mind with which to attain your final impoverishment?”
“I do. I propose that whichever one of us sexually penetrated and ejaculated into the largest number of attractive young ladies last night shall be the owner of all my previous property.”
“Done, my sad young friend, and our present salty wetness is most appropriate, as the ocean waves shall disguise your own salt tears, for you loose. In the early hours before I slept, I may have set a world record with over eighteen of our loveliest maidens being fully pleasured, and that is not counting the two eager bath girls I enjoyed this very morning. I wouldn’t feel too badly about it, though. I mean, sew a black patch on the back of each of your hands if you really must, but I wouldn’t even consider suicide.”
“Only eighteen? Did you know that there was an Ancient Roman general who forcibly took twenty-five virgin captives on the eve of battle, just to get his fighting spirits up for the coming conflict?”
“Did he win the battle?”
“He would have, except that he fell asleep during a counterattack.”
“I feel my leg being pulled,” I said.
“It’s probably just a shark. This isn’t a protected beach. Anyway, we are probably far enough out. One of the things that I have observed about the technology of our hosts…”
“And hostesses.”
“Well, as the lawyers say, the male embraces the female. But as I was saying before your despicably rude interruption, their technology is exactly the same as ours, except for time travel and its various offshoots. No microphone in the modern world could possibly pick up our voices out here, what with the distance and the background noise, so I think it’s safe to talk.”
“It’s as safe as anywhere imaginable, but I wouldn’t call it one hundred percent secure. Their medical technology is way ahead of anything we’ve got, and these new bodies of ours could very well be bugged.”
“It’s not their medical technology. That doctor wasn’t one of the Smoothies. He was one of the Killers, like the military types around here. The Killers aren’t running the show. They are strictly hirelings, mercenaries, if you will.”
“Makes sense, except that if they’re hiring medical and military help, why not espionage agents as well?”
“Okay, you’re right, Tom, but I still think it’s still our best shot.”
“Agreed. I gather that you want to compare notes.” I said as we swam slowly farther out to sea.
“True. Tell me what you’ve learned.”
“First let me tell you what I’m worried about. It’s you. Ever since you got the Zongor-the-Hunk body, you have been acting very strangely. No way would the old Ian have taken the lead at a party, for example.”
“That’s because the old Ian was too afraid of getting accidentally stepped on. You can’t imagine how intimidating it is to be half the size of the rest of the world. I tell you that it is very difficult to assert your individuality when you only come up to other people’s armpits. You spend all of your time worrying about getting a stray elbow in your eye.”
“You were about as tall as Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte and Genghis Khan. They all made out okay.”
“Maybe so. But can you call any one of those guys socially adjusted?”
“Point taken. However, there was also the fact that all of a sudden, you were drinking. Totally out of character. I figure they messed with your brain.”
“Not to the extent that I’ve noticed anything. But about the drinking, that was their doing. I’ve never objected to drinking, you know. In fact, I like the taste of many drinks. What I objected to was getting drunk. I don’t want chemicals in control of my mind or body, and I especially don’t want to look like you do when you’ve drunk yourself into a stupor and lie snoring in the corner of the kitchen. Anyway, I asked the doctor if he could do something to my metabolism so that I wouldn’t be affected by the stuff and he said it was no sweat. I was just testing a new ability last night, that’s all.”
“That’s some relief, even if I don’t snore. Okay. Back to the strange people we find around us.”
I filled him in on what I’d learned, mostly about the many odd ways these people used time travel to replace everything from plumbing to radios. That there were two separate groups of people here from quite separate cultures, and that the Smoothies, at least, considered this a very dangerous place to be.
“Interesting. I’d picked up most of that myself, but it’s good that you confirm my findings. Did you know that all the Smoothies here are college graduates, mostly from American universities? That they all went to our high schools, too, but not to our grade schools? That about half of them have advanced degrees? That they all have two to ten years experience in industry, business, government, or some such?”
“No, I guess I missed all that.” I rolled over and swam a while on my back.