There was something about the Smoothies that just naturally made you want to trust them. I liked the Killers, but I trusted the Smoothies.
They had placed some orders for the weapons, and it seemed only natural at the time to fill those orders without question.
* * *
The lecture series went off without a hitch, even though it was the first experience either of us had with public speaking. There was a huge crowd of carefully groomed people there to watch us, and it was strange to think that a few hours before, every one of them had been sitting naked in a bathtub, in absolution for this momentous event of hearing Ian and me talk.
I vaguely recognized a few people in the crowd, and Hasenpfeffer was there in the first row, cheering us on. But mostly it was a sea of eager, but anonymous, faces. As best as I could tell, all of them were Smoothies, with not a Killer in the bunch.
I expected to be nervous, at first anyway, but I never was, and neither was Ian.
Somewhere along the line, we’d both picked up a lot of confidence that neither of us had had when we’d first gotten to Morrow.
“I saw a thing on television, once, about baboons,” Ian said over a boomba of beer, the evening after our first lecture. “The baboon leaders are actually chosen by the females of the pack, or tribe, or whatever you call it with baboons.”
“Let’s see. Wolves come in packs, whales come in pods, quails have coveys, geese have gaggles, and owls belong to parliaments. Nobody ever told me about baboons,” I said.
“No shit? Parliaments? Are you sure?”
“Would I lie?”
“Constantly. Sometimes, I think that you only tell the truth to set me up for your next lie. But I remember now. Baboons belong to troops. The females of the troop select the next leader by giving him all the sex he wants. When this happens, he grows bigger, sleeker, and more powerful. The females groom him a lot, too, and kowtow to him, and before long, he’s strutting and swaggering like a medieval Japanese warlord. All this adds up to making him boss. The other males knuckle under or get beaten up.”
“Are you saying that that’s what’s been happening to us? That all these women decided to make us the leaders, so we became the leaders?”
“I wouldn’t swear as to who made the decision, but it’s a fair bet that the women are playing a prominent part in carrying it out. Or at least, it’s a good working theory, Tom. I observe that we’re both remarkably well groomed, and have been since we first arrived here. Back in Michigan, I never saw you even clean your fingernails, let alone trim, buff, and polish them to the state of perfection that they presently enjoy.”
“You still won’t see me do it. Every morning, a half dozen naked women spend an hour or more on me, scrubbing me down with all of us in a huge tub, then doing my fingernails and my toenails, trimming my hair and my beard and the hair in my ears. They even brush my teeth with a rig like a dentist uses. I get rubbed down and polished up like you wouldn’t believe, except that your crowd of groveling ladies obviously does the same thing to you.”
“True. I resisted it at first. It seemed like an invasion of my person, and sinfully decadent, besides, to have someone else do such private things to my body. But I guess that I’m a decadent bastard at heart, because I don’t resist it any more. The fact is that I enjoy the hell out of it.”
“Yeah, so do I. So much so that I was too embarrassed to talk about it, before this. All this cleanliness, it just doesn’t seem . . . manly, somehow.”
“By the standards of a lower class working man, it isn’t, and that’s the subculture that both of us were brought up in. A working slob can’t help having dirty fingernails, but I’ve gotten a good look at a General Motors vice president, or two, and let me tell you, those guys are well groomed. Not as well groomed as we are, though,” Ian said.
“I’ll bet that they have their women, too. I mean, besides a wife, often a second ‘trophy’ wife at that, they all have a secretary or two, a female chauffeur, a few house maids, and as often as not a few girlfriends. Nothing like what we have, but you see the pattern. The cluster of women around each of them helps make him a leader of men.”
“You’re cutting with a sword, Tom. Then there’s our clothes. Back in Michigan, you had exactly three pairs of pants that fit you, and you never wore one pair, but saved it in case you ever got a hot date. Furthermore, you were almost as poorly equipped when it came to shirts, socks, and underwear.”
“No fair! Do you realize that a man my size had to pay three or four times as much for clothes as you little critters did? And every time you gain a few pounds, you have to go out and buy a whole new set! I tell you that a fat boy ends up spending five times as much for clothes as you Munchkins do, and then we still look shabby despite the expense!”
“Hey, lighten up, Tom! I’m not passing out blame. I’m explaining a situation. There’s no denying that you are dressing well now. Even though we’ve never worn anything but casual clothes around here, I’ll bet it cost at least three thousand dollars, cash money American, to dress each one of us today.”
“Yeah. It was weeks before I found out that the only shirts I have that aren’t made out of silk are made of Egyptian cotton, and every one of them is hand stitched.” I said. “I’ve got three sports jackets in my closet made of vicuna.”
“Shades of the Great Inca. Not only did he keep more women than the three of us put together, he was the only person in his entire empire permitted to wear that precious cloth, vicuna, and he never wore the same garment twice. The Queen of England can’t keep a harem, but she follows the custom of never being seen twice in the same dress to this day. What’s more, I’ll bet that our ladies will never let either of us wear a single article of clothing for more than one day, even though buttons are hand carved out of jade where they aren’t made of precious jewels, or cast in twenty-two carat gold. What’s more, we’ll be doing it for the rest of our lives, and radiating the purest manna in the process.”
“Then what’s going to happen to all of those clothes? Nobody could wear them secondhand. Who could fit into clothes big enough to fit us?” I asked.
“Who wears Queen Elizabeth’s old clothes? I don’t know, either. My advice is don’t worry about it.”
“It seems so damned wasteful.”
“Oh, it is. But it’s all part of the program of making the two of us into great world leaders. In fact, it’s probably one of the cheapest parts.”
“Make that the three of us, since Hasenpfeffer’s doubtless getting the same treatment.”
“Probably. But at least he knows what the hell is going on!” Ian said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Loss of a Friend
We soon found that speaking in public for four hours a day, each, was a lot, so we cut the lectures down to a ten to noon matinee and a two to four afternoon show.
It was yet another revelation. Up until then, I’d thought that the twenty-hour work weeks that most teachers did was sheer government worker style featherbedding, but four hours a day whacked us out, even though we didn’t have to correct any papers or tests.
All the while, Hasenpfeffer was coming by every morning, and being handed each day a more improbable tale of our whereabouts than he got the day before. Sometimes it took Ian and me hours each evening to come up with a new story.
We survived the course, and at the end of the last class, we were each presented with bound galley proofs of a book that somebody had put together from our lectures. This meant that we each had to read the whole thing over one more time, making corrections as needed, and making sure that what this guy had thought he heard was what we had meant to say.
Hasenpfeffer came around to the small party we threw after the last class at my place, celebrating the end of school. It was good to see him again, but somehow, he wasn’t the same.
“Dammit! He was polite to me! To both of us! What the hell is the matter with him, being polite to his best friends?” Ian said, after Jim had “made an appearance” and departed.