I stood there for a long time, counting my blessings and wondering, among other things, whether it was worth it. Five women parading through my bed, none of them caring particularly if I enjoyed it or not, all of them thinking of me as their communal male. They say variety is the spice of life-but there's got to be a challenge, too. Five beautiful dolls dropping in according to schedule for what the law sometimes calls "conversation." How long could I keep it up? How long would it be, I wondered, before Tonja's supply of bourbon ran out? What superhuman feats would I be called upon to perform when it did? For that matter, was I man enough to satisfy just Marie, Evelyn, Leslie, Carla and Wanda?
Hearing a noise behind me, I turned-gasped.
Standing in front of me now, her own disconnected reflexes grotesquely imitating the gentle roll of the boat, was Tonja-all six feet, eight inches of her. She stood like a mountain indulging in a mild earthquake. Her breasts, mountains themselves, swayed a few inches from my face. Her hips were equally massive-a man could get lost just thinking about it!
But every bit of this red-haired Nordic goddess was in perfect, ideal proportion....
CHAPTER ONE
The sea was calm and the good ship Motley rode easily; I wished I could make the same statements about myself. By nature I have always been an easygoing, good-natured sort, with an adventurous spirit safely buried under several protective layers of civilization, so I should have had no trouble at all in controlling my emotions, but on this particular day I was anything but calm.
I had just lugged a case of Bourbon up from the hold and put it in the companionway outside Tonja's door when blonde, big-eyed and buxom Marie Hunter stepped dangerously close to me. She was wearing a pair of brief white shorts which set off her flawless sun-bronzed legs and a skimpy blouse, tied under those wonderfully oversized breasts, and the general effect would have unnerved even the most civilized of men. I had to remind myself that it would cost me a thousand bucks if I made a pass at Marie-and completed it. It was a civilized, sensible arrangement, but there's something about salt air that makes a man like me forget, at times, that he's civilized. I fought down the impulse to reach out and explore the uncharted territory under that skimpy blouse.
"Captain," she said huskily, "I've got a problem." She had a problem. Hah!
I tore my eyes from Marie's quivering cleavage and told her crisply, "Take it to Miss Conroy."
"But it's not the kind of problem Evelyn can solve," she purred. "This is your boat, isn't it?"
"Yes," I said.
"I'd like you to look at something in my cabin, Captain," she said.
Having owned the Motley for somewhat less than a month, I was still not quite used to having people call me by my nautical title; it was rather flattering, especially coming from the exquisite lips of a girl such as Marie. I wondered how her husband had ever let her get away-with a package of sex like like that in my bed, I'd have done my damndest to keep her there. But, obviously, there were things about Marie Hunter that I didn't know. Maybe she was just too much woman for him to handle.
"All right," I agreed, and followed close behind the practiced swing of her hips as she led the way. The white shorts were tight, and the muscles which worked under them as she walked worked in such a provocative manner that I suspected that Marie wasn't taking her solemn vow too seriously. If I had had any sense I would have locked myself in my own cabin right then, but there's something about girls with pneumatic hips that makes men like me throw caution to the winds. If we were caught....
But I was letting my imagination run away with me. It was the salt air and the sight of an innocently sexy girl playing hob with my reflexes. I could see now that keeping hands off would put me through a thousand dollars worth of agony. And each of the other five dolls on board was put together just as deliciously as Marie. Damn! A thousand dollars a head.
"It's in here," she said, clicking the cabin door shut behind us.
"What's in here?" I asked.
"The bed." Her blue eyes were big and round and innocent, but I could see a hint of devilish laughter lurking behind them.
"What's wrong with it?" I inquired blankly.
She turned unexpectedly and pressed her 42-D's against my chest. "I think it's lonely," she said.
I pushed her away. "Honey," I said, "a thousand bucks is a thousand bucks."
Marie was not unaware of what that brief physical contact had done to me. She made kissing motions with her mouth and cupped her double delights in her hands. "Don't worry about that, Captain. The thousand is yours," she purred. "Now come to mama."
"Not so fast!" I protested. "I agreed not to touch any of you-that's the idea of this trip. You've sworn off men, remember?"
This time her purr was deadly. "Refuse me, Captain, and I'll scream that you raped me-but do what I want and I'll be quiet as a mouse."
"When you put it that way...." I said.
"Thank you, Captain," she murmured. "As a nautical man, you must know a lot about untying knots."
The knot she was talking about was located just above the center of her invitingly bare midriff. Marie put her hands behind her back and stood saucily while my fingers made quick work of the knot. The next few moments were like the unveiling of a statue, only the statue was composed entirely of warm, living, hungry flesh. I peeled the blouse off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor behind her.
Her head was tilted back, her eyes closed, her lips invitingly half open, so I pulled her to me and covered her mouth with my own. The tip of her tongue flicked experimentally at my lips and her arms went around my neck. My hands traveled down the valley of her spine and found the zipper of her shorts. Her arms and mouth clung to me while her hips made motions which helped me dispose of the shorts. Little hungry moans of pleasure greeted my every touch.
For the next twenty minutes we made sure that the bed wasn't lonely.
"There," she said at last. "I feel much better now. Don't you?"
I was too busy trying to breathe to do more than nod my head feebly. Marie was the most exhausting partner I'd had in over two years.
Suddenly a key turned in the lock and the door was thrown open. Evelyn Conray stood framed in the doorway, her green eyes glinting with angry fire as she surveyed the scene of our recent debauchery.
"Come on in, honey," Marie invited, not bothering even to pull the sheet up. "Although it won't do you any good-the poor dear is exhausted."
CHAPTER TWO
Four days earlier, when Evelyn Conray had walked into the Surfside Bar at Waikiki Beach and inquired about Captain Cook, I could hardily believe my good fortune. She was a dark blonde package of stacked femininity, with green eyes that looked even greener because of her honey-tan. As far as I could see, which included a good view into the snug harbor between her calendar-model breasts, the tan was almost an over-all affair. Her pert, business-like nose and strong, capable mouth indicated that she was used to finding what she looked for.
Luigi, who looked Polynesian until you learned his name, was tending bar that afternoon. "He's a down there, lady," Luigi informed her, inclining his right thumb in my direction.
"That?" she said incredulously. I felt faintly offended. If I hadn't been a hardened sea captain, I'd have been positively hurt. As it was, watching the merchandise jiggle as she clicked towards me on a pair of high heels made up for any injury there might have been to my delicate ego.
"You're...?" she began, still not believeing her eyes.
I smiled recklessly. "I'm Captain Cook," I told her.
There was a trace of amusement in her expression as she looked me over. Her heels brought her to within half an inch of my own 5'9".
"I was expecting a more adventurous type," she said huskily.
I'll admit I'm no Mickey Hargitay, but I'm fairly fast on my feet. And owning a 48-foot seagoing yacht, I had recently discovered, adds to the stature of any man, even a 145-pound ex-accountant like me. I raised a practiced eyebrow and let the ghost of a grin tilt the corners of my mouth as I replied, "Adventure is my middle name."
Green eyes laughed back at me. "I hear you're looking for a crew," she murmured throatily.
Owning a yacht, I also had recently discovered, does not necessarily mean that one can afford to operate it. Just as bearing the family name Cook and residing where he had met his death on a native Polynesian knife did not give me the natural-seagoing talents of my long-departed namesake. But the woman who had given me the yacht had not been bothered by such trival realities.
It was true, I needed a crew to man the thing. I had wanted to sail the South Seas ever since I was old enough to read a Michener novel. I had cut my teeth on Norduff and Hall. While I was going to high school I had hung around yacht basins, doing odd jobs, getting to know the feel of the sea even when there was no deck under my feet. I had taken courses in navigation and seamanship. In an attempt to join the Navy I had lied about my age, but they had turned me down for flat feet and asthma. Bitterly disappointed, I had turned by navigational abilities towards the mundane world of debits and credits, and become an accountant. But my big dream had always been to go to sea.
By the time I was twenty-five I had saved enough money for passage to Hawaii, where I figured to get my sea papers in the Merchant Marine and sign on a freighter bound for Australia, New Zealand, and other fabled points.
But fate had stepped in, in the form of a wealthy young widow who was looking for a mate-in more ways than one. I took one look at her 48-foot craft and decided that was for me, even if I had to marry her to get it. I knew that would be the only way, as I damn well couldn't afford the $30,000 price tag. So I gave up my temporary job as a beach-boy (it's far more interesting than accounting) and moved aboard.
Her name was Zelda Slokin, and her late husband had been the famed movie producer Harry Slokin, so you can see what kind of money she had. She wasn't bad to look at, either, but my main interest was in the boat.
It took Zelda six weeks to figure this out.
We parted friends. As a final gesture, since her husband had died on board and she figured on selling it anyway, she let me have it for what amounted to a token payment, the two-thousand dollars I had left from six years as an accountant. In effect, she practically gave me the yacht, but I like to think it was "for value received," like it said on the transfer papers.
Yes, I needed a crew. But a crew costs money. Even a volunteer crew costs money-you've got to feed 'em. And in my present financial circumstances, the dock charges alone were keeping me broke. I had even taken my old job as beach-boy back again to keep her afloat.
I knew that if I could get the Motley in operation she'd make money as a charter ship. I also knew that I could use her as collateral for a loan to provide operating expenses, but I hated to do it. I didn't want the risk of losing her to a bank in case my charter plans didn't show enough profit to make the payments. As it was, she was mine, free and clear, and I intended to keep her that way. Call it a hunch, call it a premonition if you like, but I had the feeling that if I waited long enough something would come along to make it all possible.
Now, with Evelyn Conray throwing curves at me left and right, and apparently volunteering to act as cabin-girl, I didn't know what to say. Maybe she was another Zelda Slokin.
"It's a big boat," I told her. "And having a woman aboard is not considered good luck."
She batted long eyelashes at me in a most intriguing manner. "I thought you said you were the adventurous type," she mocked.
"I might be persuaded."
Evelyn Conroy smiled. "I hear, Captain, that you're a bit short of operating funds. I can give you a crew of six, and we'll be willing to pay our way."
I considered for a moment. "I'm persuaded," I told her.
Evelyn Conroy, it developed, was boss-lady of a team of six girls who had been awarded their independence on the same sun-drenched Reno, Nevada, day. All of them were in their early twenties, all had figures that Vic Tanny would be proud to advertise, and each of them had sworn a solemn oath never to have anything more to do with men. I understand a lot of new divorcees take that pledge.
They wanted a six-week cruise to "keep them away from temptation," as Evelyn put it.
"What's going to keep me from temptation?" I objected.
She looked at me sharply. "Your word of honor, little man," she said. "And the thousand dollar bonus you'll collect from each of us at the end of the trip if you manage to control your animal impulses." There was a hint of sarcasm in her voice.
I wanted to tell her that I might not be big, but I was capable, but thought better of it. "In that case," I said gallantly, in my best Adventures in Paradise manner, "you have my word."
"Shall we get loaded, then?" she asked.
Marie giggled. "Tonja is already," she said.
"Quiet!" commanded the boss-lady. Then she turned to me. "Captain Cook, would you show us our quarters?"
The Motley is designed to sleep eight-ten in a pinch, but that means turning the saloon into sleeping quarters-and can carry provisions for three months at sea. She's a sleek ship, with twin screws powered by a 280 h.p. marine turbine-the best Harry Slokin's money could buy. I assigned the girls spaces-or, rather, Evelyn Conroy assigned them, two to a cabin, reserving one cabin for myself. After I had formally welcomed five of them aboard-the missing one, Evelyn assured me, would arrive shortly-the girls returned to their hotel for their luggage.
While they were gone, I took the check Evelyn had advanced me and went about provisioning the ship. I felt like a million bucks-for six weeks, Captain Cook would be a real sea captain, my boyhood dream would come true, and this, I was sure, was only a start. With the profit I'd realize from this maiden voyage, I'd be able to finance further cruises-maybe hire an experienced crew and make a good living from charter parties. As an accountant, I'd picked up enough of a business head so that it would be a sound proposition. All I had to do, for six weeks, was to keep my pants buttoned and I'd be six thousand dollars to the good. I walked the decks of the Motley in a rosy cloud of future dreams and plans.
Presently, the five girls returned, in three taxis, with their luggage. All five, as I said before, were beautiful, with individual differences which were even more obvious when they loaded their belongings on board. Leslie Richards, for instance, had two bags and a makeup kit, an economical combination which fit her sleek black page boy hairdo and slim, efficient figure. Leslie had been a top secretary before she married the boss' son, and had a mind like a computing machine. Also like a computing machine, I was to learn, she was as efficient as hell as long as someone else set her course for her.
Then there was Marie Hunter, who burst upon the scene with sixteen hatboxes and assorted other junk entirely in keeping with her physical appearance, a cross between Zsa Zsa Gabor and Jayne Mansfield, with Evelyn West's treasure chest bouncing along in front of her. Marie had exhibited her, ah, personality in the bump-and-grind circuit before marrying one of her wealthier fans. This, I learned, was her third divorce.
Next, calf-eyed and wistful, was a girl named Wanda Brown; the type you want to protect from the world, and wind up protecting from yourself. Enthusiasm for the trip was not her strong suit, but she smiled brightly as I took her two bags and showed her her quarters. "I do hope I won't get seasick," was all she said.
I disliked Carla Shaw immediately. A sexpot with a snappish temper, her first words were a complaint. Everything about her came to a sharp point-her toes, her breasts, her nose and her tongue. From the moment she stepped on board I could smell trouble. Somehow, though, she had managed to seduce a number of millionaires into marriage, and at twenty-three had just shed husband number five. A gal like that must be hell in bed, I thought. It was a trunk and four suitcases for Carla, all of them brand new. She'd probably throw them away when the voyage was over.
Evelyn's luggage, by contrast, fit my idea of what the well-dressed executive takes on a business trip: a small trunk, a pair of suitcases and a feminized B4 bag. Evelyn, I learned later, classified herself as a "brain picker." She had picked up a pair of degrees and a husband whom she discarded after she had picked him clean. "He had nothing more to offer," she shrugged.
Marie, Leslie and Evelyn went ashore to fetch the sixth member of our crew, a girl named Tonja Erick-son, whose luggage was perhaps the most revealing of all.
Ten cases of bourbon and an overnight bag.
It took all three of them to get her out of the taxi; as Tonja a flaming redheaded Amazon, was boiled to the gills. ( Ah, what magnificent gills! Maneuvering her from dock to deck was like trying to land a determined trout. It's not that she objected-on the contrary, she thought the cruise was a wonderful idea, and was singing a sea chanty in Swedish!-it was just that her arms and legs were adrift and in spite of her glorious figure, she weighed about 170 pounds. The four of us finally got her aboard, however, and within half an hour we set sail for the open sea.
Now, three days out at sea, I found myself in a most uncomfortable situation. Evelyn Conroy stepped into the cabin and looked down at Marie and me. "Well!" she sarcasmed, "Aren't you two a pretty pair!"
Goodbye, G-Note, I said to myself.
"Maybe you can do without it, Evelyn," Marie old the boss-lady, "but I needed a man and I got one."
"What happened to your promise?" Evelyn snapped.
"So who'd I hurt?" Marie countered.
"There are six women on this yacht," the other said. "We're all young and healthy, and there's not a virgin among us. What's going to happen when word gets out that you and the Captain were playing games? Do you think that will make for good morale?"
She had a point. The prospect of having six beautiful dolls fighting over my body was intriguing, however.
"I won't tell a soul," Marie smiled. "You don't have to."
"Besides," Marie offered, "there are only five to worry about-Tonja's too drunk to care one way or another."
Evelyn smiled. "Let's hope she stays that way." She looked at me, then at Marie. "Was he any good?" she asked suddenly.
Marie's smile, I am happy to say, was one of the purest contentment.
CHAPTER THREE
I had no idea what was going to happen next, and I didn't particularly care. My dreams of glory, of profit and of eventual fame had dissolved the moment Evelyn Conroy opened the door. Marie, of course, had said the promised thousand dollars was mine, but I had a strong suspicion that the rest of the party wouldn't go along with the gag. They seemed far too serious in their intentions to keep away from men. Marie was probably the only one in the crowd who even came close to being a nympho.
If I had been a more impressive looking male, the type girls flip for, I wouldn't have worried. But when you're five-nine and weigh a skimpy one forty-five, pretending to be Errol Flynn just doesn't come off. I look more like Stan Laurel.
I may have been captain of my ship, but my fate was entirely in the hands of Evelyn Conroy.
The dark blonde boss-lady raised her eyebrows at Marie's contented expression. "Oh, really?" she said. Then she turned her cool green eyes in my direction again. "Captain Cook," she purred, "how do you feel?"
That's a hell of a question to ask a man at a time like this, I thought. "Fine," I said. "A little winded, maybe...."
"Good." She looked thoughtful for a moment.
"Marie, honey, why don't you get your clothes on and go to the galley and fix our Captain a sandwich?"
"Now, Evelyn...." Marie protested.
"The Captain and I would like to have a little talk, wouldn't we, Captain?" she continued smoothly.
"Yes, er, I mean-we would?"
Marie glared at the other woman, but got up anyway. If we had been alone in the room, I would have watched her put her clothes on, but with Evelyn there, too, it didn't seem quite the proper thing to do. I started to reach for my trousers, but Evelyn waved me back.
"Relax, Captain. After all, there's no need to be formal."
At least, I thought in consolation, she hadn't barged in until the action was over. That would have been embarrassing as hell.
It didn't take Marie as long to put the white shorts and the shirt on as it had taken me to get them off her. At Evelyn's suggestion, though, she spent a couple of minutes restoring her hair to normal. "We don't want the other girls to suspect anything," Evelyn observed archily.
Finally, Marie let herself out and closed the door firmly behind her. I looked at Evelyn Conroy. "You want to talk," I prompted.
"Yes," she agreed, sitting down on the opposite bunk. "Yes, I want to ask you a few questions. Have you ever been in love?"
"Once or twice."
"What happened?"
"I sobered up before it was too late."
She pursed her lips, but didn't crack a smile. "I heard how you happened to become owner of the Motley," she said. "Was Zelda Slokin any good in bed?"
"I don't think that's any of your damn business," I told her.
"All right. Let me ask the same question about Marie, then."
"Let me give you the same answer."
She smiled. "I was hoping you'd say that," she said. "Let me put it another way, so you won't be violating any confidences. Do you consider yourself experienced enough to accurately judge whether or not a woman is any good in bed?"
"'Judge not,' " I quoted, " 'lest ye be judged.' "
"A philosopher, as well as a lover," Evelyn observed.
"The two go hand in hand," I said. "But you didn't send Marie away just to discuss philosophy. What's on your mind?"
"I'm not sure, Captain. Maybe I do want to discuss philosophy. How old are you?"
"Twenty-five."
"What do you think of marriage?"
"I've never thought it necessary to the enjoyment of life," I told her.
"But you like to go to bed with girls?"
I laughed. "I'm not the Christmas fairy."
She seemed to unbend a little. "That," she observed wrylly, "was obvious from the moment I met you."
"Thank you." I meant it. "But what are you driving at?"
"As you know, Captain, the six of us made a vow to keep away from men-at least until we'd recovered enough from our last marriages to be able to think sensibly again. It would be defeating our purpose if one of us were to fall in love during this cruise. Do you see what I mean?"
"I think so. So what do you want to do-turn back to Hawaii and find yourself another boat and another boy?"
"I don't know," she admitted. "We'd probably run into the same problem, anyway. One of us-if not Marie, then someone else-would get hungry for sex. With the exception of Leslie, we've all been getting it pretty regularly. She was unfortunate enough to marry a man who thought sex was something you had with prostitutes but not with your wife. But when you're used to it, it's hard to get along without. Especially if you've just gone through the emotional upset of a divorce."
"I follow you. That's why you asked me what you asked me."
She nodded. "Just one more question, Captain."
"Fire away."
"Do you think you could fall in love with any of the girls on this boat?"
I looked at her for a long time before answering. Finally I told her, "No, I don't think so. For one thing, you've all got too much money for me to ever feel at ease around you. I realize it's supposed to be just as easy to fall in love with a rich woman as with a poor one, but I don't figure it that way. In a word, I am too proud to be a parasite."
"Cyrano," she said, recognizing the quote. She smiled. "Yes, you're the type of man who would have Cyrano as his hero. You were too honest to lie to Zelda Slokin-you could have had her fortune if you'd played your cards right, you know. But all you wanted was the Motley."
"I've wanted this ship all my life," I admitted.
"All right, Captain Cook, I've got my answer," she said.
Marie chose that moment to return with my sandwich-a gigantic ham on rye. She had thoughtful brought along a bottle of cold beer.
"Thanks," I said.
"Think nothing of it, lover. I always feed my men."
Evelyn arched an eyebrow. "Marie, I think you're needed elsewhere. Why don't you look in on Tom for an hour or so?"
"You're a bitch," Marie said sweetly.
"Darling," retorted Evelyn in tones equally syrup "you should know."
Marie went out and closed the door behind her again.
I concentrated on my beer and sandwich, while Evelyn sat back and watched me. "Want some?" offered, holding out the sandwich.
"You eat it," she said. "You'll need your strength
"And what do you mean by that?"
She smiled and tilted her head back until she was looking at the ceiling. "I get just as hungry as anyone else," she said.
"Oh? What do you mean by that?"
There was a tense silence as she swallowed. I could see that it cost her a large amount of pride to explain but she did it as quietly and as gracefully as possible. "I want to get loved," she said simply, not looking at me. It was not an expression she was accustomed I using.
For the next few minutes the only sounds in the room were those I made eating the sandwich and finishing my beer. Then the scratch and flare of a match as I lighted a cigarette. Evelyn Conroy didn't move a muscle, except to breathe. Her head was back; I couldn't see whether her eyes were open or not. I looked at her for a while, observing how the blouse was stretched tight over those thrusting breasts, noticing the little vein which pulsed in her neck, watching the tension evident in her hips and thighs. I wondered what made a woman who was as competent and as obviously capable as Evelyn Conroy dissolve into an insecure, hesitant little girl when she came to the threshold of a bedding. Among the other women she was downright pushy, but at this moment she was terribly vulnerable. I suspected that the wrong word from me could shatter her completely.
I finished my cigarette and dropped it into the empty beer bottle. Then I lay back on the bunk and pulled the sheet up to my chin. I laced my fingers behind my head and did some staring at the ceiling of my own. Easy, dad, I told myself. She's loaded, just like Marie and all the rest. If you're careful, you'll still collect your six thousand at the end of the cruise. Just play it cool, and take what's offered you. Almost any man on earth would give his right arm to be in your position. Six beautiful, sex-starved females on board a yacht in the middle of the Pacific, and you're the only man around. Two of them already have declared themselves your bed-partners. The first was very good indeed, and the second is just waiting for you to say the word. Maybe all six....
Just say the word. But remember, dad, it's got to be the right word. The wrong word, and you're out six thousand bucks. The wrong word, and you're back in Hawaii, working as a beach-boy to pay the dock charges on the only mistress you really give a hang about, the Motley..........
"You're very beautiful," I said quietly.
The silence after my words seemed deeper, somehow. Then I heard her move, heard her get up from the chair, and I knew she was looking at me. Something warned me that if I looked back it would queer everything. I kept my eyes on the ceiling.
I could hear the rustle of clothing, now. A zipper. Some snaps. The quiet sussuration of her skirt as it slid first against the fabric of her slip and then against her nylons. More sounds, more movement-it was all I could do to keep from turning my head and watching her take her clothes off.
I closed my eyes and waited. In a few moments I felt the sheet being turned back, and the bunk sagged as she put her weight on it. Then I felt her warm nakedness against my own, and I pulled her to me.
"Thank you," she whispered.
Only when our embrace was almost complete did I open my eyes and look up at her face. There was a glitter of excitement in her eyes and I could feel her heart trip-hammering against my chest.
"Thank you, Cyrano," she said, and buried her face in my neck. And then the bed was too small, far too small, to contain the passions generated by our bodies. There were no more words between us-words were hardly necessary for we were communicating in a language which far pre-dated the spoken word. The boss-lady, I discovered, was no slouch when it came to mattress exercises, once she got started. Not as well-endowed as Marie in the mammary department, she still had enough curves in the right places to make a tape-measure contest totally meaningless-and the sort of talent that makes even an ugly wench seem beautifull. But, as noted before, there wasn't an ugly one on board.
When it was over, she called Marie back into the cabin. But first, she very primly and very properly put her clothes back on.
CHAPTER FOUR
I had been in some pretty strange positions in my lifetime, both in and out of bed, but none as unnerving as sitting in that cramped cabin with Marie and Evelyn, as the three of us tried to plot the tack we should take for the rest of the cruise. I knew now what a prostitute must feel when in the presence of . two of her clients, each of whom is aware of her relationship with the other. I was a commodity, something with a price and a known availability. It was an uncomfortable status, especially since it was thus far an unofficial status, but I supposed it was something you would get used to in time. I wondered if what I had heard about whores applied to male whores-that after a while they get so they have no feelings, no passion during the act, no excitement and no satisfaction from their clients. I couldn't help thinking of Evelyn nad Marie as my clients.
"Honey," Evelyn was saying, "we've got to hold a council of war."
"Why don't we just share him between the two of us?" Marie suggested.
"That wouldn't be fair," the other objected.
"That's right," I agreed, thinking of Leslie and Wanda and the Amazon, Tonja-and yes, even of Carla, the one who looked as if the only place she'd be any fun at all would be in bed, "it wouldn't be fair at all."
"You keep out of this," Evelyn told me, having regained her aggressive veneer now that another woman was present. "Either we both quit right now-and I wouldn't like that at all-or we let the others in on it, too."
Marie looked sharply at the boss-lady. "Darling," she said sarcastically, "what happened to your solemn vow?"
"Do you mind," I inquired, "if I answer that question?"
Both girls looked at me expectantly, rather as if they had suddenly discovered they'd bought a talking dog.
"You organized this little safari," I told them, "to keep away from men. Sort of as a mutual protection system. But you didn't really want to avoid men-you just wanted to avoid getting too involved in a rebound romance. You've all got money, you're all recently divorced, so you're fair game for the first virile swindler who comes along. Right?"
"I guess so," Marie said. "I'd never thought of it that way, though."
"Let me ask you, Marie," I said, "did you have any desire or intention to fall in love with me this afternoon?"
"Don't be ridiculous!" she laughed.
"In other words," Evelyn said, "you're saying that we can have sex without starting a new romance, is that it?"
"That's it," I agreed. "What you're really running from is a costly entanglement. But I don't see why you can't satisfy your appetites without getting overly involved with someone like me. As far as you're concerned, you've hired my services for the duration of the cruise. For all practical purposes, I'm nothing but a male wh-"
Marie countered my question with one of her own: "What's in it for you, Captain?"
I grinned. "You people offered me a thousand dollar bonus-originally it was for keeping hands off, but if you want it for keeping hands on, that's okay with me.
Marie frowned. "I can't speak for the rest of the girls, but I like mine once a day. Do you think you're up to it?"
"If I can get some sleep now and then, and eat regularly," I told them. "And it's only for six weeks-it's not like if it were for a lifetime."
"Might even put some flesh on your bones," said Marie, eyeing my underfed frame. Then she realized what she had said and laughed heartily. "I mean some of your own," she amended.
"Look," I said, "you two are great, but will the rest of the Motley crew go along with it?"
"That's what we have to find out," Evelyn said. "Of course, we've got to keep Tonja drunk."
"Why?" I asked, recalling those fabulous queen-sized curves.
"She's a twenty-four carat nympho," Evelyn informed me. "The only way she can keep it under control is to get drunk and stay drunk. Although every man who sees her wants to try, she's never met one who can satisfy her-no man could last that long."
"Well," I suggested, "we might sober her up one day a week...."
"No!" the two of them said in unison.
"We've seen her in action," Marie elaborated.
"Yes," Evelyn continued. "When we first met her we thought her problem was alcoholism, so we took her to the A.A. She sobered up all right-and seduced half the men in the chapter."
"We had to get her drinking again to keep her from making a spectacle of herself," Marie added.
"So you make sure, darling," Evelyn warned, "that we're back in port when her liquor supply runs out."
"I see what you mean," I said. Still, I told myself, I might be the one man she's looking for. Her size didn't bother me-here's where I had the advantage over what I had come to know as the hero-type, the six foot plus with shoulders to match. To them, almost all women are tiny, but to me, most women are either full size or bigger than I am already. Six foot eight inches of Amazonian female was not a new concept to me.
But Tonja could wait, as long as I had Marie and Evelyn and the others. "What about the others?" I asked.
"Yes," Marie echoed. "What about Leslie and Wanda and Carla? If we're going to be democratic about this, they've got to have an equal voice in what we do with the Captain."
"All right," Evelyn agreed. "But we've got to work up some sort of presentation for them. We can't just tell them that we've slept with him and want them to, too."
"No," Marie agreed. "That's too cut and dried. We ought to have a gimmick."
"Written testimonials?" I suggested. "I ought to have a few dozen around here somewhere."
They ignored me.
"There'll be trouble," Marie warned.
"Nothing I can't handle," Evelyn retorted.
"Why don't we settle it now?" I suggested. "Just call everybody together on the afterdeck and fill them in."
Evelyn considered for a minute. "That's what I was about to suggest," she said.
As I reached for my shorts Marie winked at the boss-lady. "By the way," she taunted, "how was he?"
"That's none of your damn business," Evelyn snapped.
I appreciated her discretion.
"I wonder," mused Marie, "which one of them will want to be first?"
I laughed, but Evelyn frowned in concentration. "That's an important point. Who should make that decision?"
"Why don't we leave it up to the Captain?" Marie offered.
I shook my head. "No," I objected. "If I were to take my pick, somebody might interpret it as showing favoritism, and that could lead to jealousy."
"He's right," seconded Evelyn. "If we're going to do it at all, we must avoid petty jealousy."
"Jealousy, schmelousy!" jeered Marie.
"That's fine for you to say," the boss-lady observed. "You were first already."
"Yeah," I said. "If it wasn't for you we wouldn't be in this mess."
"I believe in every woman for herself," Marie stated, half-jocularly.
"Well," Evelyn declared, "from here on in we're all going to share and share alike."
"We may share him," Marie said smugly, "but I can guarantee we won't share him alike."
I took a long time figuring out what she meant by that.
It was still a beautiful afternoon, although the sea itself showed indications of becoming choppy along towards evening. But the Motley was gyro-stabilized, and most things the sea could attempt would have little effect upon our comfort.
Carla, Lesile and Wanda, of course, were curious as to what this mass meeting was all about. I heard one of them-Wanda, the timid one-suggest that perhaps I wanted to give them instructions for abandoning ship in case of an emergency. I smiled, resisting the temptation to tell her that our purpose was abandon, period. Carla theorized that there was to be some change in the duty roster. Leslie refused to guess.
Tonja, of course, was in her cabin, seeking Nirvana in a bottle of bourbon.
Evelyn took a position on the engine hatch, with the rest of us spread out in a crescent before her. I lounged uneasily against the starboard rail, wondering how she would handle the situation. I had no doubt that she would handle it-she was the type of woman who naturally takes command.
Except in bed. But that was another story altogether.
"Girls," she began, "let me go over some familiar territory with you. The purpose of this cruise, to begin with, is to take our minds off our problems, without getting us involved in any rebound romances. Right?"
The four lovelies nodded agreement.
"We decided that a combination of hard work and salt air would be ideal for that purpose. Fortunately, Captain Cook was available with this ship, and he was looking for a crew. It might be a better situation if the Captain were a woman, and then we could get away from all men for six weeks. But he's not."
"What are you trying to say, Evelyn?" Leslie wanted to know. Her accents were precise, her computer-brain was already whirring with the scraps of information given.
"Just this," Evelyn answered. "I might as well put it on the line right now. The Captain agreed to keep to himself on this voyage, and each of us agreed to give him a thousand dollar bonus if he succeeded. I think, under the circumstances, that he's kept up his end of the bargain quite well. But one of us hasn't."
"I don't understand...." stammered Wanda, her large eyes even bigger with naivete.
"One of the women on this ship," Evelyn continued, "has forgotten her promise. It's not the Captain's fault-she threatened to scream rape if he didn't cooperate. And she promised that he'd still get his
"What's she talking about?" Wanda asked Carla. thousand from her if he did what she wanted."
Carla's voice matched her expression as she sneered her answer, "Honey, somebody got it."
"You're goddam right somebody got it!" Marie shouted, jumping to her feet. "And it was me! I'm sick and tired of this waltzing around like this was a ladies' aid society, or a girl scout troop. I was the first to have him and I'm proud of it. The rest of you ladies can flutter around like a bunch of old hens, but I was still the first!"
"Marie! Please!" Evelyn objected.
"I've said my piece," Marie told her, sitting down again.
"This," Evelyn went on, raising her voice a bit, "is what I was afraid would happen. Obviously, we can't continue the cruise under these conditions."
"Why not?" Carla asked.
"It's simply out of the question. We can't be sneaking off to the Captain's cabin all the time...."
"Evelyn," Lesile interrupted, "I have a suggestion. Marie probably isn't the only one who thought she was being deprived of something. She said something about being the first. Was there a second?"
"You're damn right there was!" Marie furnished. "Who was it?"
"I don't think that has any-" Evelyn checked herself. "I was,' 'she answered defensively.
"That could be expected," commented Carla.
Leslie raised her voice. "Please hear me out. I think that all of us, if the circumstances warranted, might be prone to make the same mistake...."
"Or supine," Marie observed archly. There was a titter of appreciation from Carla.
"What I propose is this:" continued Leslie, "that since the Captain seems healthy and, I presume, willing, we share him."
Evelyn Conroy visibly relaxed, now that someone else had made the suggestion she had been nervously leading up to. "Shall we put it to a vote?" she asked quickly.
"Wait!" It was Wanda, in a flurry of panic. "You mean if the vote is yes, we have to sleep with the Captain?"
Evelyn was quick with her answer. "If anyone wants to stick to our original agreement, she may-on an individual basis. Nobody is being forced to do anything. But if you want him, say so and we'll set up a fair schedule."
I was beginning to feel like a bull being offered for service.
"Who's going to make up the schedule?" Carla whined, tossing her head petulantly. "And who's to say what's fair?"
"We'll draw straws," Evelyn told her.
"That seems sensible," put in Lesile, a bit uneasily.
"And fair, too," observed Marie.
"Isn't it thrilling?" burbled Wanda, still not sure whether she wanted to avail herself of my services, but excited over the general idea.
"But you two have already had him once," objected Carla.
"Girls," I said, "you hassel it out between you. I'm going up front. When you get a schedule made out, let me know." I threw them a two-finger salute and strode to the bow of the ship.
I stood there for a long time, counting my blessings and wondering, among other things, whether it was worth it. Five women parading through my bed, none of them caring particularly if I enjoyed it or not, all of them thinking of me as their communal male. They say variety is the spice of life-but there's got to be a challenge, too. Five beautiful dolls dropping in according to schedule for what the law sometimes calls "conversation." How long could I keep it up? How long would it be, I wondered, before Tonja's supply of bourbon ran out? What superhuman feats would I be called upon to perform when it did? For that matter, was I man enough to satisfy just Marie, Evelyn, Leslie, Carla and Wanda?
Hearing a noise behind me, I turned-and gasped.
Standing in front of me now, her own disconnected reflexes grotesquely imitating the gentle roll of the boat, was Tonja-all six feet, eight inches of her. She stood like a mountain indulging in a mild earthquake. Her breasts, mountains themselves, swayed a few inches from my face. Her hips were equally massive-a man could get lost just thinking about it!
But every bit of this red-haired Nordic goddess was in perfect, ideal proportion....
In her left hand was a bourbon bottle.
"Hey, bartender," she mumbled, trying to blink me into focus. "It's empty."
She said it like a pronouncement, blissfully unaware of the double meaning. To me, those two words were quietly terrifying-and a bit of a challenge, too.
CHAPTER FIVE
According to the schedule agreed upon by the five sober females on board, I was slated to entertain them at eight-hour intervals-in short, three a day, The sequence, arrived at by drawing straws, was Carla, Marie, Wanda, Leslie and Evelyn; every five days I would get each of them three times. This schedules, of course, was subject to revision, individual deals, etc, but it was essentially fair.
Tonja wasn't mentioned on it at all. After our brief encounter on deck, she had returned to her cabin to work on the delicate problem of transferring the contents of a case of Bourbon from inside the bottles to inside Tonja. It was a problem, she felt, which could best be tackled alone.
My first shift, as it were, would begin in the hour immediately following dinner. It was a comfort to know that they had decided to indulge me the luxury of not having to perform on an empty stomach. But then I thought it through, and concluded that I might have more stamina with each of them if I had been fed regularly.
"Is that all?" I asked the boss-lady, who was explaining the results of their meeting on the afterdeck.
"Just about. Each of us has the right to seek sexual release with you during our scheduled time-whether or not the individual girl will exercise that right is up to her. Just as the use or prohibition of certain techniques is at her option. Is that clear, or do you want it restated?"
"For god's sake, Evelyn! I'm not an idiot!" I flared, then I laughed. "Did anyone think I'd try to force my pet approaches on her? Rest assured, honey-I know what my function is, and I'll stick to it. If a girl wants to be seduced with soft lights and sweet music, I'll do it that way. If she just wants a quickie, that's what she'll get."
"Then you find this arrangement agreeable?"
"Sure. But I'll need some time to run the boat, and some time to sleep."
Evelyn smiled. "I doubt if many of us will take the full eight hours."
"Then there's no problem. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some work to do if we're going to stay on course. I should be through before it's time to eat."
The sea lived up to its promise, and became choppy with the approach of evening. But unless it developed really big waves, the Motley would ride steady and there would be nothing to worry about. Harry Slokin had seen to it that she was equipped with every automatic device he could possible squeeze on board. In a pinch, of course, she'd need me-no electronic or electromechanical device has yet been made which will replace the hand and mind of a ship's captain in a crisis.
I made my rounds conscientiously-attending to the many necessary details of a well-run ship. As I had predicted, I was finished just before dinner.
The meal was served in the saloon, as it had been on the previous two days. Wanda was our first week's cook and acquitted herself quite well with a deliciously prepared meal. It's a pity that no one paid any attention to it. Even I cannot recall what it consisted of.
For all eyes were on Carla Shaw and me, as the schedule was no secret. Carla chose to ignore the pointed looks, and held herself aloof from the rest. For a while I thought the other members' expressions were of distaste, until I realized that for the most part it was envy! Each one of the other four begrudged Carla her position in line!
Finally Carla pushed her plate forward an inch or so and looked over at me. "Captain?" she said. "Have you finished?"
I nodded, and she stood up. "If you'll excuse us, girls," she said, in friendly yet at the same time mocking tones, "the Captain and I have something to attend to. I'm sure you all understand."
"Have a good time," Marie said, grinning.
Wanda turned beet-red but said nothing.
Evelyn concentrated her attention on her plate, pretending not to hear.
Leslie looked up efficiently and smiled. "We'll see you later, won't we, darling?" she inquired.
Ignoring them, Carla turned to me. "Which one is your cabin, Captain?"
"This way," I said, and offered her my arm. She took it and we departed.
The last words I heard drifting down the companionway before closing the door after us was Marie's: "Evelyn, darling, you will see that I'm awake by two, won't you? I have an appointment at three, sharp, that I wouldn't miss for the world!"
"Bitches!" Carla exclaimed sharply, in the privacy of my cabin. "All of them."
"Most women are, at one time or another," I said.
She turned to me and smiled. "Captain," she said, "they tell me you're supposed to be very good in bed. I need a man like that."
"I do my best," I told her.
She nodded and sat down on one of the two bunks in the room. "Well," she said, after a moment, "don't waste time. Take your clothes off, Captain, and let me see if there's any basis for those reports."
I was a little stunned by the abrupt manner of her request-to say the least, it was unexpected. But then I remembered my function, and recalled having seen prostitutes ordered about in much the same tone of voice. Carla lit a cigarette as I began stripping my clothes off. For the first time in my life I felt uncomfortable about going to bed with a woman.
Finally I stood before her in all my natural manly glory, all one hundred forty pounds of me.
"A bit on the scrawny side, aren't you?" was all she said.
Then she crushed her cigarette out.
"But I suppose you'll do," she added.
"I don't generally have complaints," I told her, repressing a smile.
She started to undo a button, then changed her mind.
"Undress me, Captain," she ordered.
Carla's body was compact, almost boyish in construction. Her face, from the front, was very attractive, but a nose which was a trifle too long or came to too sharp a point spoiled her profile. Her skin was velvety soft under my hands; her small, thrusting breasts were conical in shape, tipped with small nipples which also seemed to come to a point. Her waist I could span with my two hands. The silver-blonde hair which she wore piled high on top of her head did not jibe with the reality I found elsewhere. Her hips and her little round fanny were the most feminine features she owned-her legs were good, but not sensational, and her feet, I noticed, were a trifle bony.
As I took her clothes off, she lay back lazily on the bunk, supporting herself on her elbows, watching everything I did through half-closed eyes.
"There," she said, when I had finished. "Now you may begin. I'd like you to kiss me."
I had never before realized how much a man's pleasure is dependent upon the attitude and reactions of the woman he's with, but that time with Carla almost cured me of further desire to bed the opposite sex.
Although I knew that she was trying to reconcile herself to the situation, and the only way she could save face was to berate me, if it hadn't been for my sense of humor and the fact that six thousand dollars was at stake, I would have rebelled sometime in the next five minutes. I had to fight to retain enough interest in the ultimate end of it to be able to go through with it, for the entire time she kept up a running-and often stinging-monologue.
"Captain Cook," she said at one point, "do you have a first name?"
"James," I replied, pausing long enough for the single syllable.
"Don't stop, James," she ordered curtly. "That feels good. Have you ever done this before, quite this way?"
I nodded, concealing my amusement at her apparent opinion that she'd invented something new.
"I thought so. Mmmmm. Mmmmm! Now quickly back to where you were a minute ago-no, not there, you idiot! That's better. Were you born stupid?"
And again, a little later, when she was lying quietly, building to another pleasure plateau:
"You're not much, James, but you've got talent.
You like doing this to me, don't you?" she asked. "Answer me!"
"I like it very much," I murmured, continuing where I left off.
Why do you like it very much, little man?" she taunted.
"Because it feels good," I answered, feeling a bit ridiculous.
"Tell me more," she demanded. "Why does it feel good?"
"Because you're a very exciting, very beautiful woman," I replied, beginning to get the drift.
"That's what I wanted to hear you say," she purred. "Mmmmm. You think I'm beautiful, do you?"
"Very," I said. "And under other circumstances, I could never hope to sleep with a woman like you."
She smiled triumphantly. "Kiss me, then."
For the first time, her arms went out to me and she pulled me to her, her lips seeking my own. When it was over, she looked at me and sneered, "There, now you know what a prostitute has to put up with. Hurry and get it over with before I'm out of the mood!"
For a brief moment, my reflexes took over, blotting out the insults and the derision, transforming the situation to one where she was a woman and I was a man and we were sharing an ultimate pleasure. But the pleasure passed quickly, leaving me spent but far from satisfied.
Carla, however, seemed fully sated. It was a minute before she opened her eyes and looked at me. "You're pretty good, James," she admitted grudgingly, "but six weeks of this could get to be a bore."
"You called the shots," I reminded her.
She glared at me. "How else does a woman get a man to do her any good?"
I smiled, swinging my legs over the edge of the bunk and sitting up. "Honey," I told her, "You've just been sleeping with the wrong men. Cigarette?"
"Light it for me," she said coldly.
"Light it yourself,"-I said, holding the pack out to her.
Frowning, she took the cigarette, placed it between her lips, struck a match and lit it. Then, with great effort she removed it from her mouth and offered it to me.
I accepted it gravely. "Thank you, Carla," I said.
She took a long time lighting one for herself, frowning al the while. Finally she said, "Okay, Captain, I want to take a nap. Wake me up in an hour-and this time you call the shots."
I stood up and walked over to my desk. I looked at the schedule, then back at Carla. "I need some sleep, too, sweetheart. I have another client due here at three. But it looks as if I'll have an opening for you at eleven a.m, day after tomorrow."
She stared at me incredulously. "You sonofabitch!" she spat.
"You look pretty when you're mad. You jiggle all over."
Then the tension broke and we both began to laugh. I realized that it was the first time I'd seen more than a sarcastic smile on her face. I handed her her clothes. And for the first time I got pleasure out of looking at her nakedness, for I knew that on our next encounter she'd be prepared to cater to a few of my whims.
She was half-dressed when she looked teasingly in my direction. "Not now?" she queried.
I shook my head. "Sorry, honey, but three in one day with no sleep is enough. I may have talent but I'm not Superman."
She pouted playfully and finished dressing. On her way to the door she stopped and came over and kissed me. "Thanks," she said.
"My pleasure," I lied.
"I'll make it up to you day after tomorrow."
When she was gone I took a quick shower and went to bed. I was asleep in five minutes.
CHAPTER SIX
I was awake well before three o'clock, but for a long time I just lay in the bunk and looked at the circle of night sky visible through the porthole. There was an almost physical pleasure in being on the Motley, knowing it was my ship and that where it went was strictly up to me. It was a responsibility, to say the least, and I felt the thrill of high adventure I had craved for as long as I could remember. The women on board didn't matter now-they were just a diverting means to an end. They were so many bodies, so many checkbooks to humor and cater to from time to time, but the real reason for everything was the Motley. She was a good ship, a sound ship, and I was sure that wherever the hand of Destiny took me, the Motley and I would go there together.
Her gentle movements under me could never be rivalled by the passionate writhings of even the most exciting girl in the world. This fact I knew with every fibre of my being. Women could come, women could go, but the ship and the sea would endure forever. She was the perfect mistress, and the only one who would ever really count in my life. She didn't care about my size-my spirit and skill and determination were all that mattered to her. She didn't care what I looked like or what I said-the only thing important was what I did, how I used the hand I placed on her wheel, how well I cared for her, what I demanded of her. She would never complain, never become jealous, never fly into a rage. And she would serve me well, for as long as I served her.
I lit a cigarette and listened to the sounds of her, the slap of the waves against her hull, the almost infinitesimal creaking of her timbers as she adjusted to the changing pressures of the sea upon which she rode, haughtily, like the queen she was. I heard movement aboard her, but no complaint from her. Unlike even the most permissive of human paramours, she could never sit in moral judgment upon the actions of her Captain. Regardless of what I chose to do aboard her, she would fulfill her function without the slightest whimper of recrimination. She was the one stabilizing element in my life.
There was a quiet knock on my door.
"Come in," I called. "It's unlocked."
I watched Marie's unmistakable silhouette slip into the cabin and heard the door click shut behind her.
"Are you awake?" she asked.
"Of course I'm awake," I told her. "I knew you'd be coming."
Marie laughed huskily. "That's what I'm here for, Captain."
She moved across the room and sat on the bunk beside me, placing a warm hand on my thigh. "Don't you believe in lights?" she said.
"Let's leave them off for a while," I suggested. "I was looking at the stars out there." I put my arm around her and discovered that she wearing a nightgown but probably nothing more.
"Do you pilot your course by the stars, Captain?"
"I've seen them through a telescope, but I've never cared to look at them through a horoscope."
"You're missing some fun, then."
"Honey, I've got all the fun I'll want for some time right here on board the Motley. I don't need astrology"
There was a considerable silence, then Marie put her arms around my neck and whispered, close to my ear: "You're not mad at me, are you, for the mess I got you into?"
I thought of Carla-I'd got into a mess all right, a neurotic mess. But I answered, "What mess? I don't mind having a harem-what man would?"
Marie laughed. "Captain Cook and his Motley crew," she mused. "I've been thinking about that since this afternoon. We are a motley crew, aren't we?"
"I didn't say that."
"I know you didn't-but I did. Evelyn Conroy and her god complex. She's not happy if she isn't running things. I'll bet she was a bitch in bed, wasn't she?"
"That's one thing I never talk about-professional ethics, you know."
"I suppose sex habits are quite a key to a person's character," she observed.
"Sometimes," I conceded.
"What have you learned about me from mine?" she asked teasingly.
I decided it was time to get on with what we were here for, so I let my hands underscore my words. "Well," I began, "I learned that you've got a good pair of these, and a marvelous that, and very good those...."
"No," she laughed, but she didn't pull away. "I mean about me the real me, deep inside. For instance, why do I want to get made?"
"Probably because you're so good at it," I replied.
"Why, thank you, sir," she said, and her hands began some exploring to match my own. "Only I can't imagine how I got that way."
Her touch was experienced as any I had ever known, and as inflaming to the senses. A few minutes before, Marie had been just one of the many, just another body in the bedroom, but now I realized that all the selfish bitches in the world, like Clara Shaw, for instance, could never dull the pleasure that just one Marie, could give. Our first meeting had been but a preliminary; at this instant, as Marie's quivering, tantalyzing charms thrust themselves at me on every front, I discovered that I was looking forward to six weeks of main events. The rest of the dolls on board could go hang, as long as I could have Marie with any degree of regularity.
"I'll tell you how you got that way," I said. "It's because you're a woman, and you're not ashamed to be all woman."
There was a little moan of pleasure in the darkness, and then she pushed me gently back on the bunk and seemed to hover over me, her female essence engulfing me with its promise of flawless consumation, the quivering of her queen-size delights tracing random patterns on my chest. Her voice was a whisper, but it filled the small cabin:
"In that case, Captain, let me make love to you, and prove to you how much of a woman I am."
For the next hour, she did exactly that.
Trying to describe it would be impossible, unless you were describing it so someone who had received the same fabulous treatment from the same fabulous Marie-or from her sexual twin-sister. If all women were like Marie, there would be no time for business, politics, war and all the other favorite pastimes of the human race, as everybody on earth would spend twenty-four hours a day in bed. We'd probably all starve to death, but what a wonderful time we'd have while we had any strength left at all!
Afterwards, when it was all over, I listened to the pounding of my heart and concentrated my full attention to the elementary problem of pulling air into my lungs. For a long time we lay there side by side, not in an embrace because neither of us had the energy to embrace, but just together. Finally, I found the strength to speak.
"Just one thing puzzles me, Marie," I said, choosing my words with care. "What in hell was wrong with your husband, that he let you get away?"
Marie held her breath for an instant before answering. Then, apparently having made a decision, she answered: "I wanted it seven nights a week. He didn't."
"Obviously, he was an idiot."
She chuckled. "Obviously," she agreed.
Another several minutes passed while we smoked cigarettes in the darkness. Neither of us spoke; Marie seemed reluctant to pursue the topic of her idiot husband, and I sensed that idle conversation would have let the exhilarating feeling of completion trickle away like water down a drain.
It was quite a bit later that she spoke again: "Captain?"
"Yes?"
"I just happened to think-for the next six weeks you're going to know more about the five of us than anyone else ever has before."
"Maybe."
"What do you mean, maybe?"
"Just that. You keep assuming that everyone who comes in here is to talk, like this was the chaplain's office or something. To tell you the truth, I don't even know which end of a TS card to punch."
"A man who knows how to make love like you do doesn't have to know anything else," she said. Her saying things like that was one more good reason to like her.
"You should talk," I said, remembering. "Am I really good?"
"None better. With talent like that you could clean up, if you decided to put it on the market."
Marie fell silent again-or maybe I had unwittingly hit a sore spot. I kept my mouth shut and waited.
"People always do a good job," she said, a minute later, "When they're doing something they enjoy."
"There are two sides to that coin," I replied. "In most cases, people enjoy doing what they can do well."
"I don't care which way it is, Captain. I like sex and I'm glad you think I do it well. I'm proud of it."
"You have a right to be proud of it," I told her.
"Thank you. Incidentally, if anyone wants to know how Marie Hunter is in bed, you have my permission to be truthful."
"I'll remember that," I told her.
Half an hour later, after Marie had gone back to her own bunk in the cabin she shared with Evelyn Conroy, I put on my clothes and went forward to the galley and fixed myself a cup of coffee. As I sat at the table there, brooding over the thick brown liquid, feeling euphoria on all fronts, a door opened at the far end of the corridor. From where I sat I had a good view of all the cabin doors, and the movement caught my eye.
It was Tonja, the nymphomaniac Amazon.
Every gorgeous ounce of her six-foot eight-inches was stark naked!
The Motley rode as steadily as if she had been painted on a clay sea, but Tonja reeled from side to side of the corridor like a drunken sailor. Which, I observed with a private smile, was exactly what she was. How a girl could get so drunk and remain so beautiful is a question I wasn't prepared to answer. It was enough just to enjoy the sight of her. Still, it was almost frightening to observe the competence with which she maneuvered through her own alcoholic fog.
Her mass of thick red hair was tangled and unkempt, and it had been days since she had approached a make-up kit, but these evidences of untidiness could not detract from the overall beauty of her brobdingnagian figure or the near-perfection of her facial structure.
It was obvious that Tonja neither saw me sitting there or cared that I was there, for she gave no sign of recognition.
It was a bit frightening to think what it would be like to have Tonja's efforts aimed at something other than getting to the head!
By the time I had finished with my coffee, Tonja had finished with her task and had returned to her cabin-presumably to attack another bottle of bourbon. I was tempted, for a moment, to join her, but thought better of it, and went out on deck instead.
It was still a beautiful night, with the moon riding high off the horizon amid a black canopy dotted with millions of stars. No city-shine marred the atmosphere, no highways scarred the quiet sea. It was restful, with a gentle breeze off the starboard bow. I chuckled to myself. I had certainly never counted on a six-week "honeymoon" with six brides!
Well, I'd slept with three of them so far. Wistful, calf-eyed Wanda was next on the list. She promised to be as different as each of the others. She certainly wouldn't have Marie's bawdy appreciation or experienced talents. I doubted if a girl who looked so sweet could be capable of Carla's shrewish temper and bitchy capacity for insult. God, I hoped not! Nor would she probably be anything like Evelyn Conroy.
No, Wanda-from what I'd seen of her-would probably be wide-eyed and naive to the hilt. But then I remembered that all of my charges were fresh from the Nevada divorce mill, so it was highly improbable that Wanda would be quite as virginal as she acted. She might surprise me, like Evelyn had. She might have a sexual hang-up that could make my time with her most interesting indeed.
It was a bit of a challenge, trying to figure them out in advance. Maybe, I reasoned, I should just sit back and take what comes my way, neither objecting too much nor praising them too much if they proved to be exceptional. But I had spent too long reacting to situations to suddenly become a stoic. I was too well on the road to being a libertine for that.
A sound on the deck behind me caused me to turn around to see who was there. In the brilliant moonlight I saw a flash of metal spinning towards me, and at the last moment I had sense enough to try to duck.
But my reactions were too slow-something very hard and moving very fast caught me along the side of my head, and the world exploded.
Just before I blacked out completely I was conscious of a distant splash, and then my knees buckled under me and the pain burst inside my head to engulf my entire being.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was eight o'clock when they found me. Evelyn and Marie had breakfasted together and then had gone for a stroll around the ship, and had almost stepped on me. The left side of my head was caked with blood, and I had a hell of a headache, but other than that I seemed to be all right.
Evelyn, who had once taken a nursing course, washed the blood off with the least possible pain, revealing a nasty bruise just above my left ear. Whatever had hit me had gone on into the sea.
"How did it happen?" she asked, obviously concerned.
"I was standing on deck between three and four a.m, and somebody threw something at me. I don't know what it was, but it hit me."
"How do you know it was thrown?" Marie asked.
"I turned around just as it happened. There wasn't anyone within twenty feet of me. I tried to duck, but it was coming too fast."
Marie swore. "Who in hell would want to do a thing like that?" she wanted to know.
I tried to laugh, but it hurt. "Well, at least it must be one of six people."
"Five," Evelyn corrected.
"Six," I said. "Tonja was up and around a few minutes before. I saw her in the corridor."
"Was she sober?"
"No."
"There," Evelyn said, completing the dressing on my head. "It's a bad bruise, but it won't kill you. You'd better take it easy for a day or so, though."
"I've got a date at eleven," I reminded her.
Evelyn smiled. "I think Wanda will forgive you if you don't keep it," she said. "I'll talk to her."
"Thanks."
Marie had been thinking. "Could it have been Wanda? She didn't seem too anxious about sleeping with anybody."
Evelyn shook her head. "That's no motive for attempted murder. It could just as easily been you, or me-we'd already had our turn. One of us could have figured that we'd keep anybody else from having him."
"Thanks, girls," I said, "but I hardly think it was a crime of passion."
"What about Carla?" Marie asked suddenly. "What happened between you and her last night?"
"Sorry," I said. "I don't talk about what transpires during a moment of confidence."
"Jesus!" Marie snorted. "He sounds like a goddam priest!"
"Marie, please-" Evelyn protested, but there was no stopping the fiery blonde.
I realized that Marie was using this as a way to relieve her own tension, and I mentally thanked her for it. Apparently, what we had shared during the wee hours of the morning was just as memorable for her as it was for me, and she was upset over almost losing her chance for a return engagement. There was a rough and ready quality about Marie that I liked very much-I had the feeling that I could trust her farther than anyone else on board.
Her earlier question bothered me. Had anything happened between Carla and me last night that would provide her with a reason for trying to kill me? I didn't think so. Although I had to admit I was a little rough with her when she left. But she had been rougher with me before that. Maybe I'd do well to watch my step around Carla.
"That leaves Leslie," Evelyn said.
"Yeah," agreed Marie.
"What sort of a girl is Leslie?" I inquired.
"Cold." Marie shook her head derisively. "Cold as a fish."
"And very precise," added Evelyn. "She's a perfectionist."
I smiled. "This doesn't look like the work of a perfectionist-unless it was a perfectionist trying not to look like one."
"You mean it could have been Leslie if she was trying to throw someone off the track," Marie said. "That sneaky bitch!"
"Careful, Sherlock," I warned. "Nobody's proved a thing; this is all just talk. One thing I'd like to know is what it was that hit me-that might give a clue to who it was who threw it."
"Did you see it at all?" Marie asked.
I nodded. The action made my head throb painfully. "I saw it," I confirmed. "It was spinning, and it looked like it was metal-or part metal."
"What would I do," Marie wondered aloud, "if I wanted to throw something at you with an idea of killing you? I might not have time to get it back, and I wouldn't be sure it would be lost overboard, so it couldn't very well be anything personal, anything that could be traced to me."
"Hey!" I said. "Maybe you're on the track of something!"
"So what would you do?" Evelyn inquired.
"Simple," Marie replied. "I'd steal it from my roommate-or from the ship."
"From the ship?"
"Sure. Something out of the kitchen, maybe."
"Yes," I agreed. "That would be logical."
Marie was obviously enjoying her role as a detective. "Who," she asked dramatically, "would have access to the kitchen?"
"Wanda," Evelyn supplied. "It's her week to cook."
"But why?" I said. "Why would she want to kill me-assuming that we're right in thinking she's the one who tried?"
Both women shook their heads in puzzzlement.
"Some people," Evelyn said, after a moment, "don't need motives. It's like a compulsion."
"No," I said, "I can't buy that. If Wanda had this sort of a compulsion, she would never have had to go to Vegas in order to get rid of her husband. She'd have bumped him off and waited for the inheritance. I don't think it's Wanda-that's too thin a motive."
"What if we checked their whereabouts at the time of the murder attempt? That might prove something." Marie's blue eyes sparkled as she made the suggestion.
"Okay, let's start with you," I said. "Where were you between the hours of three and five?"
"That's simple," she grinned. "I was with you, having the time of my life. Don't tell me you've forgotten that!"
"Where did you go after you left me?"
"To my own cabin. I went to bed and stayed in bed till time for breakfast."
"Any witnesses to that story?" I turned to Evelyn.
Evelyn shook her head. "I was asleep when Marie came in."
I turned back to Marie. "How long did it take you to get to sleep?" I asked. "Did you go right to bed?"
Marie nodded. "I was too tired to do anything else. I'll bet I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow."
"From an alibi standpoint," I told them, "it could have been either of you. Marie, you just heard Evelyn tell me that she was asleep when you came in. That means you could have tried to brain me and then slipped into your cabin with Evelyn none the wiser. But Evelyn could just be claiming she was asleep-she could have been waiting for you to come back, and then waited for you to go to sleep before making her move. In that short interval, I had time to have a cup of coffee and watch Tonja trying to navigate the corridor on the way to the head. There was plenty of time for you to get to sleep."
Evelyn pulled herself up to her most school-marm'ish pose. "Are you accusing me of trying to kill you, Captain?"
"Not at all," I said. "I just wanted to prove to anyone who'd listen that at that time in the morning, coming up with a foolproof alibi is impossible. It could have been either one of the two of you-or it could be any of the other four. I've got to have proof, not just this sort of conjecture, before I can do anything."
Marie shook her head. "I don't know where you're going to get it," she said.
Neither did I. One of my six lovely charges was an unsuccessful murderess, which meant she might try it again. But whoever she was, she was clever enough to have covered her tracks pretty thoroughly. I spent most of the next twenty-four hours, when I wasn't sleeping, searching for clues.
And finding nothing.
It was, of course, impossible to keep what had happened a secret. And of course, every last one of them was shocked to find out that someone had tried to kill, their captain. The only good thing about the entire affair was that it didn't materially inconvenience anyone. Wanda had fallen ill and would be out of circulation for a few days, and Leslie apparently hadn't been with a man in so long that one more day wouldn't kill her. Evelyn had been the one who had suggested that I take a day off to recuperate in, so there was no complaint from her. Carla was almost too sweet about it, but she agreed to join the rest of them and postpone her next appointment" one day.
One good thing that the murder attempt accomplished was the removal of sexual tension from the air. When a gaggle of gorgeous girls can concern themselves with important questions such as who tried to kill our man?, petty rivalries based upon who's the best in bed? disappear like drinks at a cocktail party.
It was seven o'clock the following evening when once again a pretty girl accompanied me to my cabin.
This time the girl was Leslie Richards, with her sleek, black page boy hairdo and slim, efficient figure. Leslie was about an inch taller than my 5'9" with her shoes on, but when she kicked them off I could see the top of her head.
No sooner had I closed the cabin door than her shoes were off and she moved hungrily against me.
"Your pleasure, darling," I said, putting my arms around her.
"I trust," she whispered huskily, "that what pleases you will be satisfactory to me. Do whatever you want with me, but do it quickly, please. It's been a long time."
"I don't see how it could have been," I said. "You're much too good looking to have been on the shelf."
"You didn't know my husband," she retorted in an angry whisper. "He wanted me to be a saint-and I was, because that's what I thought he really wanted. I was such a goddam good little saint that he didn't touch me for a year. Now I'm tired of being good." While she talked, her hands were busy peeling off her clothing as quickly as she could. A moment later she was nude, her whole body quivering with impatience to be on with what she had come here for.
"Tell me what to do," she said hungrily, "and I'll do it. Anything. Anything at all. I can be as good at this as any of the sluts Roger played around with-I know I can. All you have to do is tell me what you want done, and I'll do it."
There was something pathetic about her eagerness to please when put in those terms. I had never met a woman who desired more to compete and who was at the same time so ill equipped to do so. Oh, she had all of the physical requirements: a nice pair of breasts, a basically good (if sparse) figure, and an academic knowledge of what to do with it. She had probably read every book on sex and sexual technique ever published, but she was as stiff and as mechanical about it as someone woidd be who had read Arthur Murray's life story but had never been on a dance floor. She seemed to have no aptitude for passion at all.
I was convinced, before the first ten minutes were up, that the passionate responses she was showing me were the responses she had read about and felt she should give me. She was like an audience applauding at the wrong time, or laughing at lines which were never intended to be funny while ignoring the sure-fire boffs. Marie and Evelyn had been right in their estimation of Leslie Richards-making love to her was like making love to an IBM machine, like punching a card.
Before the bout was over, I had to abandon all hope of pleasing her, and concentrated exclusively on gratifying my own semi-aroused passions. When I succeeded, it was physical release and nothing more.
"Was I good?" she asked eagerly, when it was over.
"You were very good," I lied.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The session with Leslie was surprisingly exhausting, considering the almost total lack of pleasure it afforded either of us. I slept soundly until Evelyn's knock at my door awakened me at three in the morning, Groggily, I let her in, and locked the door after her.
"How do you feel?" she asked.
"I'm still asleep," I apologized.
"I mean, do you feel up to it?" There was concern in her voice, which made me feel good. Apparently, there was some hope for Evelyn Conroy after all.
"I'll need your help," I told her. "Anything," she said.
"Okay. Tell me why you came here tonight."
Her eyes were puzzled. "To see you," she said, after a brief hesitation.
"All right. Sit down. Let me get you something to drink."
"Music? Soft lights?"
She shook her head. "Answers, maybe. I have the strangest feeling you've got answers for me."
"I'll do my best. What are the questions?"
"I don't really know. But whatever they are, you can help me answer them. Does that make sense?"
I smiled. "Almost. Shall we play twenty questions in bed?"
She looked at me for a minute. "If you'd like," she said.
"Okay." Neither of us moved.
"I have some information for you," she said.
"Don't tell me you know which one tried to kill me."
She shook her head. "No, not that. But I know what she threw at you."
I raised an eyebrow.
"The fire axe," she said. "Anyway, it's missing."
I sent my memory back to those brief seconds of awareness before it hit me. Yes, a fire axe would have looked like that. Spinning, the handle was what had knocked me cold. I shuddered. I had come within inches of getting my head split open. "That makes sense," I told her.
She shook her head in bafflement. "Why would anyone want to kill you?" she asked.
"I shrugged. "That's one question I'm afraid I don't have an answer for," I told her.
"I don't know any other questions to ask," she said.
I looked closely at her, and saw a softening of her features that had not been there before. Her green eyes looked steadily back at me, with a smile lurking deep within them. Her face was a beautiful mask, as relaxed as she could make it, but I could sense great tension behind it. She had let me see her uncertainty once before, and I had proved myself trustworthy then by revealing it to no one. One of the first principles of success with women, I had learned long ago, is to keep quiet about what happens in bed. Evelyn had pumped me for information about the performances of her fellow passengers, and had learned nothing-I knew she respected by discretion.
I let my eyes leave her face and touch on her body, and I was instantly aware of an increase in the tension vibrating within her.. She, like Marie before her, had come to me wearing a frilly nightgown, but over it she was wearing a form-fitting robe cut along Chinese lines.
I stood up. I, too, was wearing a robe, but not out of modesty. "You're very beautiful," I told her, "and I'm very glad that you decided to join me tonight."
She smiled uncertainly as I sat down beside her. "I wanted to," she said softly.
I put my arm around her shoulders and hugged her quickly, reassuringly. "You won't regret it," I said.
"I can't fight it," she told me.
"Why even try? Unless you think you're falling in love, and you've got better sense than that."
"Much better sense," she assured me.
Very slowly, very quietly, I kissed her. Her lips were motionless under mine. "What's wrong?" I asked.
"Nothing," she said quietly. "Nothing-and everything."
"Riddles?" I asked. I mean."
She shook her head. Not really. I don't know what "Is it?"
"That's a good sign."
"Of course. People who always know what they mean have a hard time learning anything new. It's the people who admit that they don't know who make all the progress."
"Shall we play twenty questions?"
"In bed."
Again, I had the feeling that one wrong word, one unfortnuate action, could send her screaming from the cabin. But, as before, she had come here of her own free will and presumably she wanted to get in bed with me, for better or for worse. Very cautiously, I undid the button at her throat. Evelyn closed her eyes and swallowed. Gently, I kissed the base of her neck, and felt a tremor pass through her body. Quickly, I released the other two buttons and untied the belt at her waist, so the robe fell open. I kissed the cleft between her breasts.
Her arms enfolded me and pressed my head against her breasts. "Love me!" she gasped.
Hurriedly, I helped her out of the robe, and almost tore the nightgown underneath. In a moment we were in bed, and my hands embarked on the grand exploration. With every touch she trembled, and as I cupped my hand around one breast she moaned and bit her lip.
"You're beautiful to look at," I told her, "'and twice as beautiful to touch."
"I never even let my husband do that," she whispered tautly.
"You what?"
"It's the truth. He tried it once and I slapped him."
"Why aren't you slapping me?" I asked bluntly.
She giggled. "Because I don't love you. Nothing you do can be wrong when everything is wrong, can it?"
"Do you want me to stop?"
"No!" she protested.
"Did you love your husband?"
She froze. "You're asking the wrong questions."
"Maybe. Give me the right answers and I won't ask them again," I persisted, moving my hand in a manner I knew to be maddening.
"I thought I loved him," she blurted. "Very much at first. But we grew to detest each other."
"Did you enjoy sex with him?"
"It was always over too quickly."
"How long?"
"A minute-two minutes."
"No preliminaries?"
"He'd kiss me, and then-I don't know why I couldn't respond as I should have."
"He'd kiss you,' I repeated, letting my lips follow the path of my hands. "Here?" I asked.
Evelyn gasped. "No," she admitted. "I'd never let him do a thing like ... ahhh!"
Ten minutes later I paused to let her catch her breath. I had done everything her husband had been denied, and not yet done that which was his only connubial priviledge. Evelyn Conroy had become a mass of quivering, panting woman flesh in that ten minutes, and it panicked her. I held her closely, protectively, as she slowed down and got control of herself.
It seemed like ages later that she was breathing normally again, but the tension was still there, the ultimate release had been withheld. It was obvious that she had never experienced anything quite like this before.
"Oh," she moaned, "I'd heard about things like this, but I didn't believe they were true."
"How do you feel?'
"I'm not finished yet, I hope.
"No," I assured her. "Not by a long shot."
When we were through and lay mutually spent, Evelyn murmured, "I never knew it could be so wonderful. If I had only known-" she caught herself "-if I had only dared try this with my husband...."
"I know," I said. "Maybe when you get back to the States you'll want to look him up."
"Perhaps," she mused. She gave a little sigh of contentment. "But how can I know hell be as good as you?"
"Any man can be a good lover," I told her. "With a little encouragement from his mate."
"I'm glad you thought I was worth teaching," she said. "But I'm going to need a lot more practice."
"We've got five weeks," I reminded her. "At the end of five weeks you should know your way around a bedroom."
"I won't want to leave. What will I do without you?"
"The same things you just did with me, I trust. Only with someone you love I hear it's twice as good."
"Impossible."
"You used to think what we had tonight was impossible," I chided.
"Touche."
"And now, young lady, if you've recovered your strength enough to get back to your own cabin, I'd like to get a couple of hours of sleep before breakfast. I'm not well, you know."
"Please?" she said. "May I stay here with you. It's so comfortable being next to you like this."
"All right," I said. "But promise me that if any part of me gets ideas, ignore them. I do need sleep."
"I'll try," she laughed. It is to her credit that she succeeded.
When daylight came, it was filtered through a heavy fog which gave a ghostly aspect to the Motley. Evelyn awoke first, and was back in her Chinese robe before she gently shook me awake.
"Good morning, Captain. Are you hungry?"
I yawned and stretched till I thought I'd dislocate a shoulder. "Ravenously," I replied.
Cold water on my face woke me up, and a few minutes later we proceeded together to the galley. Wanda was still indisposed in her cabin, claiming seasickness although the ocean was beautifully calm, so Evelyn made coffee. She did it exceedingly well.
While I was working on my number one cup, Evelyn scrambled some eggs and put them in front of me. I had just begun to eat them when Carla stumbled into the galley.
"Good morning!" I said cheerfully.
"Go away," she mumbled. "Don't talk to me." She shuddered inside her robe, and blinked her eyes futilely. "Coffee," she said hopefully.
Evelyn put a steaming cup in front of her, and for about five minutes Carla just looked at it, while her brain made valiant attempts to get out of low gear. At the end of that time, she drank it quickly and held the empty cup out for a refill. "Good morning, James," she said grudgingly.
"It's good to see you awake," I told her.
"Don't count on it," she retorted, grimacing at the rolling fog visible outside. "How long will that be with us?"
"The sun should take care of it in an hour or so, unless there's an overcast, too."
Carla shivered and accepted the second cup of coffee. "I should have stayed in bed," she said sourly.
"Eggs?" asked Evelyn.
Even as she spoke, there was a flash of steel in the air and a solid thunk as a knife buried its tip into the wooden bulkhead, some six inches away from my left ear.
"Oh, damn!" exclaimed a voice.
We all turned towards the newcomer. It was Tonja, framed drunkenly in the doorway, a blanket wrapped carelessly around her oversized curves. She blinked at us and giggled.
Then our expressions of shock must have registered on her as she looked blearily from face to face, for there was sudden confusion in her eyes, and she looked like a little girl who had inadvertantly said something wrong to the minister.
"I heard somebody was playing 'kill the Captain' and I wanted to play, too. Can't I play?"
The weight of the knife had been slowly pulling the blade out of the bulkhead, and it fell with a startling clatter to the deck below.
CHAPTER NINE
"Teach me," said Carla, pressing herself against the inside of my cabin door. I had just locked it, to safeguard our privacy. Carla seemed like a far different girl than the one who had tried to degrade me a few days ago. There was eagerness in her eyes.
"You're sure now that you want me to call the shots?" I asked.
"Honey, if you can show me a better time, your way, than I have been having my way, you can call them any day you like." I had the feeling she meant it.
"That sounds like a challenge," I said.
"I guess it is. What do you want me to do first?"
I looked at her for a minute, considering. Here, if I wanted to take advantage of it, was an opportunity for revenge, a chance to get even with her for our first session. But so much had happened since then that I didn't particularly care to get even. Seeing Carla crawl, reducing her to the status of an animal, somehow didn't appeal to me.
"First," I said slowely, "I want you to tell me something about sex."
Carla smiled. "From what I gather, that's like telling Rembrandt about painting."
"Thanks, honey, but I'm not that good."
"What do you want to know?" she asked.
"How old were you the first time you tried it?"
"Ouch. I was sixteen. I'd rather not talk about it."
"You agreed to let me call the shots," I reminded her.
"All right. It was with the president of our high school debating society. I thought I was in love with him. He thought he was the greatest Casanova on earth. But he was like every other man I ever met-no consideration for me at all. All he was interested in was hanging my scalp on his belt."
"That's a quaint way to put it. How many times did you sleep with him?"
"Twice a week, for about two months. Then I got wise, after I discovered what sort of a reputation I had. I was a little choosy, but still it seemed like I was sleeping with everything in pants. Then my parents sent we away to school. There was a history professor there who looked like a movie star. I decided I wanted him, and I got him. On my terms."
"And what were your terms?"
"I told him I'd report him unless he made love to me the way I wanted him to. The way I made you do it. I had him crawling for a whole semester. At the same time I was dating the captain of the football team at a nearby boys school. It used to infuriate the professor."
"I imagine it did," I observed.
"I married the football captain, and divorced him four months later."
"Why?"
"He wouldn't do it my way."
"Obviously you wouldn't do it his way," I said.
"Christ! He had about as much imagination as a dog!"
"Okay. What happened then?"
"I met a young artist who needed a sponsor. I had a certain amount of influence, and he was willing to do what I wanted for the sake of his career. So I married him."
"What went wrong that time?"
"His career got in the way of things."
"Honey," I said, "you've been cheating yourself.
Was the artist the one you just divorced?"
She shook her head. "I figured if I married again I'd make damn sure I got something out of it other than bad memories. I picked myself a millionaire, and had him roped in three weeks exactly. He'd been so used to having women crawl for him that I caught him off guard. He was a pretty nice guy, too. I might have fallen for him if we'd stayed married longer."
"Why didn't you?"
He got unhappy doing it my way, and there were still hundreds of girls who wanted to do it his way. And about a dozen of them did. When I proved it in court...."
I held up my hand. "I see. Now, Carla, I want you to get something straight. The only thing I own in the world is the Motley. As you can see, I've got all I can handle, so taking care of you is an accommodation, so to speak. Right."
It was as if I'd slapped her face. A moment later she said, quietly, "That's right."
"Now," I continued, "let me tell you something else. You've been cheating yourself of a lot of enjoyment because you've been using sex as a weapon and as an instrument of blackmail. But I'm sure you're capable of enjoying it for itself, as an expression of love, or at least as an expression of mutual regard."
"Those are nice words, but you've got to show me," she said defensively.
I shook my head. "No, honey. You're going to show me. You would never have asked me to call the shots if you weren't convinced there was something wrong with the way you were calling them. Is that true?"
Carla looked at me curiously, but she had to admit I knew what I was talking about. "Okay," she said, "where do we go from here?"
"You tell me. What's the most important thing about sex?"
She thought. Presently she ventured: "Technique?"
"No. But you're close. What does technique grow out of?"
"Is all this theory really necessary? I came here to have you teach me how to enjoy sex."
"No you didn't," I told her. "You came here to learn how to make love."
"Okay," she admitted. "So show me."
"It's not as simple as that. Sex is an expression of emotion between two human beings. It's a flow of feeling, a manifestation of what you think about your partner."
She looked at me skeptically.
"Without the preliminaries," I continued, "you've got nothing more than any other animal in heat."
"Gee!" she exclaimed, in mock amazement.
"You're a nut," I told her, laughing.
"Okay, I'm a nut. I like it that way."
"You're all right, honey. Now how about telling me what's the most important thing about sex?"
"What you think when you're having it?" she guessed.
"That's close enough. Your mental attitude. You've been a selfish little bitch up until now, but don't worry about it. That's curable."
"I'm glad."
"Thought you would be. Because when you're being selfish, you're projecting selfishness, and you get selfishness in return. Project love, and you'll get love back. Project hate, and you get hate in return."
She cocked a beautiful eyebrow at me. "You want me to fall in love with you?" she asked incredulously.
"No. Just try to put my pleasure first, and see what happens."
Carla still looked skeptical.
"Believe me, sweetheart," I told her, "there is at least one other girl on this boat who is everything a man could ever ask for-and all I've got to do is ask for it."
Carla's eyes took on a calculating look. Apparently what she needed was a challenge, and what I had just said did the trick. "Okay, my Captain," she said lazily, "I'm game. Where do we start?"
I nodded towards the bunk, and she took her clothes off on the way.
It turned into a wonderful morning.
The next several days produced nothing much in the way of new clues as to who threw the axe, but they were interesting nonetheless. Carla's reaction to my ministrations was very good-it was as if she had suddenly discovered sex all over again. The technique of catering to her partner's pleasure was paying big dividends for both of us. The only drawback was that she was even less content than before with the schedule which allowed her only three times at bat in five days."
After all, I had Evelyn, Marie, Lesile and Wanda to worry about, too. The first three were fiercely punctual about their boudoir appointments, with Marie (as she was the first to think of it) filling in for any missing members "to keep our Captain on schedule." I had no objections-Marie was still the best bedroom companion of the lot.
Wanda came out of her voluntary seclusion and took her place in line, to the annoyance of Marie.
I had heard, as far back as I could remember, all the classic jokes about the Oriental sultans who died early because of overindulgence in women, and the yarn of the incredibly old young man of twenty-two, etc, and I had had some misgivings at the outset over what this rigorous schedule might do to me. I certainly had no desire to be old before my time, or anyhing like that. But I was discovering that there is absolutely no truth to those stories. At the end of those first two weeks, I found that I had never felt better in my life.
The human body is a wondrous thing-as long as there is enough zip in it to get excited, there'll be enough stamina to carry you through. A reasonable amount of sleep and enough food to replace the energy lost in lovemaking, and any man could do the same thing.
Even with Wanda taking her turn at bat....
Wanda was a strange case. On first glance, she looked insecure, helpless, wistful, deserving and-wholesome. To qualify as wholesome I had always thought a girl had to have freckles and thick ankles, but Wanda was cursed with neither of these. Her face was good, her complexion clear-with more dramatic makeup she'd have looked seductive as hell. And her figure would certainly never disqualify her for work as a chorus girl. Her breasts were either thirty-sixes or thirty-eights, and an inspiration to look at, even under the starched white blouses she affected. Her waist was satisfyingly small, her hips both ample and animated. Long, excitingly fleshed legs completed the picture.
I almost forgot: a mane of the thickest, chestnut-colored hair you ever saw gave her the effect of a truly magnificent female animal. But wholesome.
Her first day back in circulation saw her in the seven p.m. slot-a circumstance of scheduling which made her seem to me like an appetizing bit of after-dinner pastry. I was made aware of her return in mid-afternoon, when Marie burst into the pilot-house where I was figuring a slight course-correction.
"Darling," Marie snorted disgustedly, "tonight is no longer ours!"
"Oh?" I responded. "What's wrong?"
"Wanda got over her 'seasickness' and insists on her place on the schedule. I never thought the little slut would go for the idea, but apparently she feels sexy as all hell."
I smiled, remembering an article I had read somewhere to the effect that all women are slaves to their chemical cycles, having two times in each month a "passionate period."
"Well," I observed, "it's about time I had a little variety."
Marie's monosyllabic comment cannot even be printed in such an honest book as this.
I grinned at her. "It's hell to have six horses in your stable and only be able to ride four of them," I kidded her.
"Well," she purred, "I doubt if dear little Wanda will buck you out of the saddle."
"You never know. Those quiet ones...."
Quiet seemed like the right word for Wanda-she'd been quiet as a mouse all during the trip. She was quiet, and a little scared, when she knocked on my door that evening.
"Come in, it's open!" I called.
Hesitantly, the door swung open, and Wanda stepped inside. She was tastefully dressed in a pair of green and black toreodor pants and a frilly, starchy white blouse. Her chestnut hair was combed long and loose, and framed her face most attractively.
"Captain," she said shyly, "is it all right to just talk this time? I feel as if I don't know you at all."
"Sure," I agreed readily, conscious of the month that followed. "Come in-sit down. How do you like the cruise so far?"
"It's-it's very nice," she blurted, finding a seat and tucking her feet primly under her. "Are you really going through with that schedule they set up for you?"
"Why not?" I said easily. "Wanda, I don't know whether you realize this or not, but although men and women differ in a good many ways, in many respects they're pretty much the same. When they frustrate a basic urge, for instance, they grow neurotic and often turn into pretty unpleasant people. But whenever they can satisfy their urges with a minimum of discomfort attached, they show every sign of being healthy and well-adjusted."
Wanda looked at me strangely. "That's an awfully cold way of looking at things, isn't it?"
"Not really," I said, perching on the edge of the bunk and lighting a cigarette. "You see, whenever people have enough regard for each other's hungers to do something about satisfying them, that's a type of love. Now, you and I don't know each other very well, right?"
She nodded.
"And suppose you came to my door and let me know you hadn't had a meal in three days. I'd be a pretty poor human being if I didn't offer you something, wouldn't I?"
"But that's different," she protested.
"Why?"
"Well," she began, "I was alway taught that sex was something you saved for your husband. That's the way I was brought up."
"And you saved it for him?" I asked mildly.
"Yes, I did."
"Then how come you're not married to him any more? Or did you save it so long it got rancid?"
"Captain!" she flared.
"I'm sorry. But it offends me when somebody comes out with this sex-saving business, because it shows me how upside-down the world is. That idea comes from the days before women were supposed to enjoy having sex, when it was a wife's duty to 'submit' to her husband's animal lusts, and when any woman who enjoyed it was branded with a scarlet A on her forehead."
"What do you mean?" Wanda was still stinging over my previous remark.
"I mean that the sexual relationship between a man and a woman can be very beautiful, very gratifying and very wonderful without it having to involve marriage. I mean that the people who teach that sex is bad and sinful and shameful and an unpleasant duty are either sick in the head or incapable of enjoying sexual relations themselves."
"You're attacking a lot of very good people," she said.
"Am I?" I asked. "Oh, I don't doubt that there are a good many sincere people who believe that way. I believe Hitler was sincere, for that matter. And the people who burned Servetus at the stake in Switzerland were sincere as all hell. But being sincere doesn't make them right."
"You're very persuasive," Wanda said. "But no matter how eloquently you say these things, I'll know in my heart that you're wrong. The devil, you know, has a silver tongue."
"You're throwing devils at me now, too?"
"I forgot," she mocked. "You don't believe in devils. People like you never believe in anything."
How, I wondered, do you get through to someone like this? Wanda Brown seemed to have a full arsenal of defenses against reason, logic, common sense and what I considered basic human morality. She had learned all the rationalizations worked out by people who were afraid of being proved wrong-devices like that devil-has-a-silver-tongue business a moment ago.
"What," I asked her, "is the purpose of sex?"
Her answer was a quick one and a pat one. "To perpetuate the human race."
I blinked. "That's it in a nutshell?" I asked.
She nodded.
"Then what is the purpose of marriage?" I persisted.
Wanda smiled. "To give a secure place where you can raise a family."
That's what I was afraid she'd say. I looked again at Wanda Brown, letting my eyes touch lightly on her physical appearance while my mind tried to sum her up. Even though we lived on opposite sides of the fence, there was something about her that I found much to my liking. Maybe it was her intelligence, in spite of the horrible things someone had done to it, filling it with all that hogwash. At least she didn't break up into little pieces over 'embarrassing' questions. If she was capable of listening and following a logical argument, I felt, she might be capable of discarding that load of superstitious nonsense she was carrying around with her. And she'd be a better human being for it.
"You're a very attractive girl, Wanda," I told her.
"Thank you," she said.
"I'd like to go to bed with you," I continued.
She froze, as an expression of contempt came into her eyes. "No thanks," she snapped.
I grinned in my most engaging manner. "I said that for a reason," I told her. "Now let me ask you why you're such an attractive girl?"
There was a wall between us now, and I would have to tear it down brick by brick. "Perhaps," she said icily, "it's because I use the right facial soap."
"No, Wanda. We were talking in terms of divine purpose. And I want to know the divine purpose for your being attractive-for any girl's being attractive, for that matter."
"So I can get a husband and have a decent home and raise children," she said. "And I know this will sound silly to you, but I intend to raise them in the ways of the Lord, to teach them to love God and to be virtuous. Captain Cook, do you know what this ship reminds me of?"
I shook my head.
"It's a floating Sodom and Gemorrah!"
"Can't be," I laughed. "Sodom was full of fairies and Gomorrah was full of Lesbians. And to the best of my knowledge, everybody on this boat is quite normal, with the possible exception of Wanda Brown."
She got up in anger and stormed out of my cabin. Yes, I reflected, there was one hell of a wall between us. It was made from large chunks of superstition cemented togther with too much churchgoing and not enough understanding of what it was all about.
I felt very sorry for Wanda Brown, and for the millions of unfortunate people like her.
CHAPTER TEN
I wondered as I heard her heels clicking angrily down the companionway whether or not Wanda's religious hang-up was powerful enough to make her try to kill me. After all, to her I was the antiChrist. I was a threat to decency and morality all over the world. In some mysterious manner I was probably even a threat to her unborn children, because something I said might free them from the superstitious folderol she so seriously planned to corrupt them with. Somebody who heard what I had to say might learn to enjoy life, or to stop thinking of sex as dirty, or even-heaven forbid!-to be encouraged to ques-ton authority and tradition. The biggest crime in this world is being able to think for yourself.
If she got rid of me she'd be a hero in somebody's eyes. She'd be helping to make the world safe for bigotry and all the other Christian virtues. If she was enough of a nut....
But no, Wanda was an intelligent human being. I felt sure that whatever her sexual beliefs, she could never kid herself into thinking that murder was a way to solve the world's ills. I was sure she was familiar with the commandment that goes Thou shall not kill.
No, Wanda could not have been the one who threw the axe at me. Especially in the light of Tonja's knife-throwing stunt the other day. That had scared the hell out of me. I still wasn't sure whether she was just being playful or if the whole thing wasn't a clever way to cover up the fact that Tonja had tossed the axe, too. I wondered how drunk Tonja actually was.
Then there was Marie to worry about. I could see no possible motive in Marie's case, but if I probed deeply enough I might find a dilry. Marie, I knew, had once been a stripper, taking off her clothes to the tom-tom beat in nightclubs and theaters. I also knew that strippers sometimes-not always-develop the same contempt for men that some prostitutes have, and turn to Lesbian affairs for their only real satisfaction. If Marie had a Lesbian crush on one of the other girls on the ship (Evelyn? I thought suddenly. She certainly acts masculine enough!), she might try to kill me out of jealousy. But that didn't make much sense, either. Marie had been the one to originally seduce me away from my agreed-upon resolve not to touch any of the girls on board, and she was instrumental in getting the sex schedule set up in order to give all the girls a fair share of my time and talents. Instead of suspecting her of attempted murder I should be thanking her for the surprise compliment she had paid me.
Evelyn? This was a mixed-up girl if there was one, but she was coming around to normalcy. Evelyn was the one to whom privacy meant the most, and the only one to whom I had gone out of my way to show that her relationship with me had all the privacy of the confessional. I felt sure that she trusted me, but if I was wrong...? If there was doubt in her mind that I could really keep my mouth shut, would she seriously consider shutting it for me, on a permanent basis? No, Evelyn was too level headed for anything like that.
Carla? I had to bear in mind that the murder attempt had occurred immediately after I had refused Carla her way in bed. Although I wa sure she couldn't try to kill me now, might she have flown into a rage then? It was entirely possible that she had been too forcibly reminded of one of her husbands and of one or more occasions upon which said husbands had refused to have anything to do with her. That might have triggered a traumatic response on her part under which murder would have been the most direct and the most logical action in the world. But would throwing an axe be Carla's way of committing such a murder? I doubted it.
Which left Leslie. As a bedpartner, Leslie would make a good paperhanger. It was pathetic, in a way, because she probably had more academic knowledge-gained from books-than any two others who were there that morning. Yet Leslie was a total dud.
And I suspected that Leslie knew it, and probably could see through my pleasant lie at the end of our time together. But would that be motive enough for attempted murder?
I was no closer to an answer than I had been the day it happened. Yet one of these six sweet, charming, loveable girls had tried to kill me. And the chances were good that she might try to do it again, unless I could find out which one it was and take steps to stop her.
The sea was like a sheet of glass, with hardly a ripple on its surface to betray the seething life it contained, and the air aboard the Motley had that hot, muggy quality which breeds tension and unrest. The girls reacted either with extreme laziness or flaring tempers, while the Motley and I waited for our initiation by the elements. It was just a matter of time before this unnatural calm would erupt into a raging storm. I could see no reason to alarm the girls, so I quietly made my rounds, making sure everything was secure for the coming ordeal.
It was late afternoon when the mugginess lifted and a chill settled over the ocrean. To the west, gathering thunderheads blotted out the sun, ranking themselves like a squad of football players. Far-ranging gulls broke the stillness with raucous cries of alarm as they streaked towards safety. The water turned slate-gray to match the glooming sky overhead.
"What're we in for, Captain?" Marie asked me.
"A big one," I replied tightly.
"I thought so. What can we do to help?"
"Try not to get seasick."
The wind began about an hour before sunset, whipping the tops of the waves into white froth. The sea itself, as if annoyed at this tickling of its skin, grumbled and rolled in protest, tossing the Motley around like a chip of wood. I stationed myself in the pilot-house and tried to keep her nose headed into the storm. The sky took five minutes to change from depressing gray to ominous black.
I ordered everyone to put on mae wests and stay in their cabins. I didn't want a bunch of green landlubbers sliding around the glistening decks and taking that last final plunge into the deep. And for the first time, I wished fervently that I had an experienced crew instead of just a passenger list.
But this was our trial by storm, just for the Motley and me. I gritted my teeth and faced it alone.
Just when the sky opened and drenched us with rain I don't know. It was as if someone had taken a huge handful of the sea and dropped it on us all at once. What with the wind hurling water at us, and the rain reinforcing it, I had to pilot the ship almost by instinct. Each moment brought with it the fear that I had somehow lined us up parallel to one of those onrushing walls of water and we would be swamped. And a moment later there would be that sudden, stomach-wrenching moment of weightlessness as we crested a mammoth wave and fell seaward on the other side.
The Motley creaked and groaned, but her protests were blotted out by the howling of the wind and the crashing of the waters on her decks. But as long as her turbine hummed its song of power, and as long as nothing snapped off her rudder, I felt sure I could see the storm through. My arms ached from fighting the wheel, and I was drenched to the skin as I stood there, but my soul sang-for the Motley and I were one, joined in battle against the elements, joined as only a good ship and her Captain can be.
Once, I thought I heard singing, but the wind whipped the sound away. Again, I thought I saw something moving on decks, but it dissolved into a glistening wall of water. Fatigue, I realized in sudden panic, was taking its toll.
Several minutes later a huge figure lurched into the pilothouse. I blinked at it stupidly before I realized it must be Tonja.
"Need help, Captain?" she shouted.
"You're supposed to be in your cabin!" I shouted back.
"Hard to starboard!" she yelled suddenly, seeing a huge wave bearing down on us from the right.
I spun the wheel and watched as the water-monster loomed threateningly off the starboard bow, and the Motley sidled around to meet it. The wave grew fantastically, curling its crest above us like a huge tongue trying to lick us into oblivion, and for a horrifying moment we were completely buried by tons of crushing, crashing water.
Then, like a cork, the Motley shot to the surface and bobbed there insolently while the attacking wave spent itself harmlessly below.
Tonja stood as if rooted to the spot. I had half expected her to be washed overboard by that one.
"Couldn't have done better myself!" she shouted as she shouldered her way to the wheel. "Here, I'll take this for a few minutes-you'd better look at the engine!"
"What?" I shot at her.
"Doesn't sound right! That's why I came up here!"
"Can you handle her?" I called.
Tonja grinned. "Damn right!" she yelled, and then broke into song. I realized what it was that I had heard snatches of earlier.
All opportunity to argue with her was lost as she spun the Motley's wheel to meet another menacing wall of water. The top of it broke less than fifty feet ahead, baptizing the entire ship but doing no damage. The Motley climbed confidently over the watery hump as Tonja's song filled a momentary quiet.
I fought my way to the hatch leading to the engineroom, clinging to it through two more inundations before I dared open it to go down. I had just battened it firmly when another one hit the ship, sending me flying down the companionway.
Tonja knew what she was talking about: one of the ship's two fuel-injection systems was partially jammed-of course, it had to be the one which was in use at the moment. Dismantling and cleaning would take an hour.
I jumped the safety-interlock and managed to switch operations over to the other system. The turbine protested with an anguished cough and whine, and then responded with gratifying efficiency. The increase in r.p.m. could be felt through the soles of my feet.
I turned and lurched back up the companionway, listening for an opportunity to reopen that hatch. A moment later it came, and I scurried above, battening it firmly behind me.
Getting back to the pilot house took almost every ounce of strength I had left, as the storm had now reached its peak. I felt like a shivering, wet puppy when I finally braced myself in the entryway.
Tonja hadn't seen me, she was too busy fighting the storm, guiding the Motley over those murderous waves. I saw that she had throttled back a notch when I made the change below, and I took my hat off to her foresight. She'd allowed for an extra margin of power, when and if needed.
I must have watched her for five minutes as she wrestled with the wheel. She didn't need any help at all-she knew exactly what to do and the precise moment in which it must be done. And the good ship Motley responded to her touch as if both Tonja and the boat had been launched from the same shipyard.
The storm was over almost as abruptly as it had begun, and it was with a feeling of relief that I stepped forward and took over the wheel.
"Thanks, Tonja!" I shouted, and she grinned.
"My pleasure, Captain!" she shouted back.
"You're welcome up here any time you feel like it," I told her.
She shook her head. "You don't know what that can lead to," she said. "I think I'd rather stay drunk."
With that, she made her way across the glistening decks, spun open a hatch, and disappeared below.
Another week crawled by, with no further attempts on my life. I was becoming quite fond of the schedule, and looked forward to the arrival of each girl. Somehow, I managed to keep the Motley going and to keep track of exactly where in the South Pacific we were. The sea gave us no further trouble at all.
I discovered that in my capacity as male whore, my relationship with each of the four girls who availed themselves of my services was becoming more and more satisfying. A spirit of competition seemed to have blossomed in Marie, causing her to try each time to outdo her previous performances. There was never any question of love between us, but the mu-ual respect and the frequent sharing of sexual joys d generated the sort of friendship which is unusual between'a man and a woman. I wondered why Marie felt such a compelling need to prove herself over and over to me, and finally concluded that by doing so she was proving her essential femininity to herself. Her desire to make love, and to make love better than any other woman around, was so strong that when her own menses arrived it did nothing but intensify her desire to get laid.
"Why don't you take a few days off?" I suggested.
"Go to hell," she grinned. "This cruise is short enough as it is-and I don't want to waste even one day of it. I hope you're not offended by it."
"Honey," I told her, "you couldn't offend me if you tried. We'll just change the techniques a little...."
"That's the way I like to hear you talk, darling," she purred. "The rest of these bitches don't know what they're missing. When I say I want it every day I mean every day. You sure you don't want a permanent job when we get back to civilization?"
We had talked about this before. "You won't have any trouble finding yourself a man for that position," I told her.
"I'll conduct interviews every night until I do," she laughed.
"Marie," I said, switching the subject, "you keep pretty close tabs on what's going on around you-do you have any new ideas about who might be trying to bump me off?"
"Are you still worried about that?"
"Wouldn't you be?"
"I've got more important things on my mind," she whispered huskily, underscoring her words with a teasing caress. "But you can be sure I'm not the one who did it. I'd be a damn fool to cut off my tail to spite my face."
"I hadn't seriously suspected you," I said, accepting the invitation of her body.
Evelyn Conroy, on the other hand, proved that she was still a slave to the old ideas when her personal calendar made itself known. I hadn't realized how deeply ingrained in her was her sense of shame until I asked her why she skipped an appointment. Up until that time, we had been getting better in bed with each encounter, and her inhibitions were disappearing like snow on a warm day.
"At least," I suggested, "you could drop in for a chat."
"I'd rather not," she told me uneasily. "I'm sure Marie will be happy to take my place for a few days."
"If that's the way you want it," I told her. "While you're out of circulation, you might see if you could figure out who was trying to kill me a while back."
"I'll work on it," she promised.
Leslie, apparently, was undersexed to begin with, for she had developed the pattern of giving every other scheduled visit with me to Marie, who appreciated the extra time. I had no complaint, as it was a lot more fun making love to Marie than servicing Leslie. After trying every approach I could think of with her, and getting the same ersatz response, I could understand her ex-husband's disinterest. No matter what I did, Leslie exhibited the wrong signs of passion. Actually, her reactions were no more false than those of a professional prostitute, but the average harlot had it over her even in that department, for Leslie had no talent as an actress and therefore no feeling for faking it convincingly. Throughout it all, I had the feeling that a part of her was standing off to one side and watching the proceedings with a critical eye. Her coolness and matter-of-fact approach were frustrating. And her question, each time, at the end of the session: "Was I good?" It was unnerving. I was tempted to prepare a report card for her, so intense was her eagerness to be considered good at it.
Finally I worked up the nerve to tell her she wasn't good, and hit upon a way to tell her why. "Did you enjoy it?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Do you think you enjoyed it as much as other women do?"
"I think some of them exaggerate," she answered.
"Would you like to enjoy it more?"
She smiled. "I'm not a jungle savage, like some."
"You don't have to be. But you're missing out on a good measure of pleasure, and I think I know why. And I'm afraid I won't be able to show you a much better time-that's the hell of it."
"What's wrong with me?" she asked, directly and to the point.
"Not a thing in the world. Your nature just demands a special type of man, that's all. And when you find him, you've got to participate on three levels at once in order to get the most out of it."
"Three levels?" she repeated. I could see her computer brain ticking off possibilities.
"Mental, physical and emotional. First, you must have no reservations about sex-and your man has to match you in this respect. You must both be willing to try anything which could by any stretch of the imagination be pleasureful."
"Don't we do that now, you and I?"
"Yes, but you're not allowing yourself to enjoy it. You're expecting a simple release from chemical and physical pressures-a draining off of excess steam. I think you're expecting the wrong thing."
"Let me put it this way: have you ever seen or experienced anything really wonderful?"
She thought for a minute. "Not since I was a little girl," she said, "and my father would take me to the zoo."
"Was it the zoo, or the fact that your father took you?" I asked.
Leslie smiled. "I think it was my father. There was a time when everything he did was wonderful."
"He's dead now, isn't he?" I guessed.
Leslie nodded. "For eleven years," she said softly.
"And nothing has ever been wonderful since your father died," I told her.
She smiled wistfully and admitted that I was right.
"Do you think sex is dirty?" I asked.
"Nothing that's a natural function is dirty," she replied.
"There's your trouble-or one of them. You've reduced everything in life to the unromantic status of 'natural function'."
"That's wrong?" she asked.
"Not for a scientist," I said. "But it is for a woman." She laughed.
"Seriously," I continued, "you've got to expect sex to be a wonderful experience, you've got to demand that it be physically wonderful. You've got to demand it of yourself."
"That's a lot of romantic clap-trap," she said.
"Leslie," I said, "you've got to open yourself to the experience or it'll never come to you. Unfortunately, I'm not the man who can give it to you. That's got to be on the third level, too-the emotional level."
"Meaning?" she asked.
"Meaning you've got to fall in love. You've got to find a man whom you can trust completely, and give yourself to him completely. Find that sense of wonder you lost when your father died, and you'll find that even the most 'natural' function in the world is naturally wonderful. For both of you."
"It's a nice theory," she said. "I'll let you know if it works."
"It'll work," I assured her.
Carla, by now, was pure pleasure to go to bed with. I'll admit I had some misgivings about it, as he seemed the most logical choice as a murderess, what with her former ideas on what should take place in the bedroom. But she seemed to have forgotten those domineering traits, and was accepting the give-and-take aspects of the sexual relationship which always make it a mutual pleasure and always take it out of the exploitation class. To me, it has always seemed that the man or woman who fails to give, or try to give, as much pleasure as he gets, is cheating himself even more than he's cheating his sex partner. Teaching this idea to Carla Shaw was one of the high points in my brief career as a "hired man."
Again, there was more to the relationship between Carla and me than could be covered by the bare fact that we slept together three times a week. Friendship and trust always grow out of the skillful sharing of such intimate pleasures.
Wanda Brown, however, was still a maddening enigma. I was convinced that she was trying to convert me to her own peculiar views of life and love and sex and destiny. She had a perfect right to try-after all, I was trying just at hard to convert her to what I considered a sensible, right, just and human viewpoint. Neither of us was prepared to give an inch.
From it all grew a certain amount of respect-at times, that brand of respect generally reserved for a wild animal loose in the street. It was like Voltaire is said to have said-I didn't agree with what she had to say, but I was firmly in favor of her right to say it. Just as long as she afforded me an equal right to try to refute it. The fact that, at times, neither of us was really listening didn't seem to matter.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We had been at sea for a full month, and there had been no further attempt on my life. Wanda was still taking every opportunity to try to convert me, to "save" me from this life of sin, while I met every thrust of hers with a parry of my own; I still had faith that her ability to reason would win out over the denominational dogma she had innocently swallowed before she was old enough to know better. At least, I thought, I had played the game more fairly than the godly-I had never been guilty of trying to talk a five-year-old into becoming a libertine! Evelyn was making all sorts of progress in her guilt-shedding program. Carla was still finding new ways to please herself by pleasing me; the way she figured it, she had a lot of selfishness to make up for, and she was determined to get her self-imposed penance over with before the Motley touched shore again. Tonja, of course, was still gloriously drunk; twice more I had seen her, once long enough to talk to, before the other girls cajoled her back to her bottle (I noticed some worried looks on their faces as their eyes traveled from me to the Amazon and back again, and I remembered Evelyn's comment that every man who sees Tonja wants to try, but no one man could ever satisfy her). Lesile was still plugging along, keeping up two-thirds of her end of the schedule, and still convinced that what she felt was the maximum any woman ever derived from sex; she thought I was a little batty for having suggested that there might be something more, but I had planted the seed, anyway. Marie was having a ball seeing to it that I enjoyed her talents daily; she was convinced that she of all of them she was the only one who could really give me pleasure, and as I refused to talk about the others' abilities in this line, she interpreted my silence as an endorsement of her own view.
"There's only one other woman on this boat," she argued one night, "who can even come close to me in pleasing a man, and that's because she's a goddam freak."
"Marie," I told her, you're drunk."
"Maybe," she allowed. "A little bit. But drunk or sober, I can dance rings around these other bitches, and do it on my back!"
"Marie, honey," I protested, "you know I don't like to see a woman drunk. Why'd you do it when you knew you were coming here later?"
She smiled crookedly at me. "Because it's just two weeks and I'll lose the best damn man a girl ever had."
"Thanks for the compliment," I told her. "Now why don't you run along to bed like a good girl and I'll see you in the morning."
"I got a better idea," she said carefully, trying not to run the words together. "Why don't I run along to bed with you and we can show each other how good we are? Is that an idea or isn't it?"
"Marie...." I said warningly.
Marie was apparently unwilling to let a thought hang in midair, unacknowl-edged. "Hey! Is that an idea or isn't it?"
"Marie, don't you think you'd better...."
"I'm drunk!" she announced happily, having just made the discovery. "And you know what? My twins are drunk, too!"
"Honey," I assured her, "I love you madly, but go lie down before you fall down, okay?"
"You don't beileve me," she accused, in an injured tone of voice. "Here, I'll show you...." So saying, she hooked her fingers in the top of her blouse and ripped, unloosing her 'twins.' They thrust proudly outward, quivering a bit in the chill air. She looked owlishly down at them, counted them carefully, and started swinging her body back and forth. The bulging breasts swung, too-half a beat behind. "Shee?" she said proudly. "Drunk!"
"Marie," I repeated, "go to bed."
"Alone? Just the three of us? There! D'ja see 'em hiccup? I told'ja they were drunk!"
"Marie."
She started singing in a tuneless, wordless monotone and, remembering one of her old burlesque routines, caused her breasts to bob independently of each other, in time with the impromptu lyric. The entire effect was punctuated by unscheduled hiccups.
It was anything but arousing, but Marie apparently thought it was the sexiest thing she had done in weeks. I stepped back with commendable caution I thought, fearful that at any moment she might begirt doing the Twist. I didn't think either one of her twins would fly off in the process; but being hit by them could conceivably cause a nasty bruise.
Marie, however, was already running out of steam. Naturally, her trembling twins were the last parts of her to come to a stop. She looked at me blankly, waiting for her cue.
"You, young lady," I informed her, guiding her out into the companionway, "are going to take a nice cold shower and sober up."
There was a haughty expression on her face as she looked around at me, over her shoulder. "Why?" she inquired brightly.
"Because," I assured her.
Getting the remaining clothes off Marie was an engineering job in itself-every time I'd get one part of her propped up where I wanted her and reached for something else, part number one would collapse. It reminded me of an old Laurel and Hardy routine. Finally, however, she was nude, and a moment later the cold water hit her. It took about three full seconds to shock her into full shivering awareness.
"Gimmeouttahere!" she chattered.
I turned off the shower and helped her step out.
"What's the big idea?" she demanded, her bounteous curves dripping all over the deck.
"You were drunk," I reminded her.
"Forget it, honey-just make love to me."
I took her back to my cabin and finished drying her off. Despite the day-to-day familiarity of her figure and the fact that my hands and my body knew every curve and convolution of her quivering charms, she was as exciting to touch and to look at as she had been the first time, when she had threatened to scream rape if I refused to sleep with her. I had been afraid then that I might lose the promised thousand dollar bonus-but now there was no danger of that, and no motive in bedding her other than the wonderfully healthy fact that I wanted to.
"If you want to save yourself a cold shower in the future," I told her, "just stay sober. I refuse to make love with a drunk."
"I'll remember that," she breathed.
The fire broke out at 4:17 that morning. At first, 116 all we got was a faint odor of something burning, then the belated realization that out here on the ocean no matter what it was it was us!
Marie's petulant, "Don't stop," and my own "Got to!" as I leaped from the bed and dragged on my trousers. About that time Carla (I found this out later, as it was impossible to pick out one voice with any certainty) screamed, "Fire!"
The minute my feet hit the companionway I could tell it was in the engineroom. As I passed their niche. I automatically reached for the axe and extinguisher. The axe, of course, was gone.
It was an oil fire, and had spread in what seemed like two or three minutes over half the engine-room, a space about four by five by eight which housed the turbine, its dual tanks and the costly gear-box which linked it to the twin screws. So far the fire had missed most of the wiring and the rubberwork around the engine itself, but flames were licking relentlessly at the base of the starboard tank.
The heat was so intense my reflexes bounced me back away from the entrance hatch after that one brief, all-encompassing glimpse inside. The extinguisher in my hand was loaded with foam. I played the frothy stuff through the hatch as best I could, trying to hit that starboard tank. There were hissings and poppings inside.
Either a fuel line or the starboard tank had sprung a leak, I reasoned, edging closer. Nothing else could have spilled so much oil on the bulkheads, unless somebody had done it deliberately. But what kind of a nut would commit a mass murder which included his own suicide, just to get rid of me? It had to be an accident, at least until proven otherwise.
The heat was still prohibitive, but I had to get inside and get at those flames. I glanced around and saw Evelyn behind me, her eyes huge in the flickering light. "Bring me a wet towel!" I shouted at her, and she disappeared into her cabin.
Carla came running up with the extinguisher from the galley and headed for the open hatch.
"Stand clear!" I warned, but she ignored me, and for a horrifying moment stood framed against that intense heat, spraying a fine stream of water into the engineroom. There was an angry hiss from the fire as the intense heat vaporized the water, and a sudden whoosh of expanding gases pushed with angry force through the hatch, knocking Carla off her feet and engulfing her in a tongue of flame at the same time.
Evelyn popped into the companionway with the wet towel an instant later. I pointed at Carla, unconscious on the floor-her hair was on fire. Evelyn moved with the quickness that comes from intensive training and smothered the flames before they could do anything more than superficial damage, while I risked another look into the inferno.
The blast had blown out two-thirds of the fire in the engineroom! Quickly, I dragged the extinguisher inside and laid a blanket of foam over the engine and the base of the tank where flames still licked persistently. But before I got it all out, I watched in fascination as a finger of flame caught at the edge of the forward bulkhead and traced an arc up and across, just as neat as if it were following a hand-painted course....
Or as neat as if it were tracing a wild splash which could only have occurred when somebody was standing in the middle of the engineroom distributing a couple of gallons of diesel oil around the place!
Until I saw that, my feeling toward the fire had been one born of self-preservation, the adrenaline-loaded emotions of action aimed at getting the fire out before it destroyed the seven people on the ship or the ship herself. But that loop of oil on the bulkhead couldn't have come from a leaky line or a burst seam in a tank.
The fire was under control now, but as I cleaned up the small flames remaining, a bigger flame grew within me, a flowering flame of white-hot anger at whoever could be evil enough to set such a blaze.
Or sick enough.
I tried to keep it off my face as I stepped out of the engine room. Evelyn, Marie and Carla were the only ones outside. Part of Carla's hair and her eyebrows were gone, but her burns were superficial. She was crying, more from mortification than from pain.
"Where are the rest of them?" I demanded roughly.
"I guess they're in their cabins," Evelyn ventured.
"Let's see!"
Leslie was asleep-or pretending to be. I shook her roughly by the shoulder and she blinked open her eyes. "What's the matter...?" she asked blearily.
"It's okay, hon," I told her. The other bunk was empty. "Who sleeps here?"
"I do," Carla responded, grabbing up a scarf and wrapping it around her head.
Evelyn and Marie shared a cabin together, I knew-so there was just one more place to check.
Tonja was alone, propped up against pillows with a glazed expression on her face. She grinned feebly as we entered the room. "Where's Wanda?" I demanded.
The giantess lifted a hand in an expression of negation.
"Search the ship!" I told the others.
It was ten minutes before we found her, cowering against a mooring post up front, shivering in a chinchilla coat, clutching her Bible to her breast.
When she saw me she straightened somewhat. "There's still time, Captain!" she called. "God is merciful. Let Jesus into your heart while there's still time."
"We've got all the time in the world, Wanda," I told her.
She shook her head. "We're going to blow up, Captain!" she insisted. "God is going to blow up this boat and all the sinners on it. We'll be purified in a blast of holy fire. There's still time to accept Christ as your personal Savior, all of you! Say that you believe! We'll go to Glory together!"
She stood up now, still clutching her Bible tightly in her right hand, and flung her arms up and out, away from her body. The fur coat parted, revealing her nakedness underneath as she shouted: "Everybody sing and be saved! Onward Christian solol-ol-jers, mar-"
I hit her squarely on the point of her chin. I didn't have to hit her twice.
Then I picked her up in my arms and swung around to face the others. "All right," I said. "Show's over. We might as well get back to bed. Evelyn, will you look after her?"
Sure.
Sure.
I kept looking at Wanda as I carried her back to her bunk. Beautiful, intelligent, charming, potentially a pretty fine person. But filthy rotten inside, with a sickness given to her by some high-minded sons-of-bitches who taught her how to create her own hell by seeing sins in others. And all in the name of a man who spent his time on earth preaching love. Jesus Christ himself would have been ashamed of her.
What a goddam waste! I thought. What a goddam stinking waste of a human being!
CHAPTER TWELVE
At Evelyn's suggestion, we tied Wanda to her bunk, and then pulled a blanket over her. "If she was nuts enough to set fire to the boat," Evelyn said, "she's apt to be violent when she wakes up.
I had to agree.
Tonja regarded us through bleary eyes as we tied her roommate's arms and legs to the four corners of her bunk. The big redheaded Amazon looked reproachfully at me, as if she thought it was all my idea because I couldn't get the girl to hold still in bed. She looked genuinely surprised when I didn't climb on.
I sent the rest of them to bed and stayed on with Evelyn in Tonja's and Wanda's cabin. "What are you going to do to her when she wakes up?" Evelyn asked.
"I don't know," I said wearily, shaking my head. "I don't even want to think about it. I need a drink."
Tonja propped herself up on one elbow and held out her current bottle. "Help yourself, mate," she invited drunkenly.
I must have been tired, for I ignored the giant, perfectly sculpted breast which was peeking at me and reached for the bottle. "Siddown an' take a load off your feet," the big redhead continued, enjoying her unexpected role as hostess.
Feet! God, but they hurt! I hadn't really been aware of it before, but all that tramping around above decks in my bare feet had taken its toll. I sat down and lifted one of them up to look at it-and winced. I'd burned hell out of my feet. Now that the rest of me had a chance to relax, the pain in my feet mounted until I had to bite my lip to keep from screaming.
"What's the matter?" Evelyn said quickly, seeing my expression.
"Feet. Burned. Do something about them, please!"
"Drink up," Tonja suggested. "Always helps. You forget it hurts when you drink."
It was the most sensible suggestion I'd heard all evening. I upended the bottle and let about three ounces of the raw bourbon course down my throat. It gagged me, of course, but for a minute or so the pain in my feet paled beside the burning sensation in my throat. When I could speak again I grinned at, Tonja. "Thanks," I whispered hoarsely.
She repossessed the bottle and poured an equal amount down her own lovely throat without even wincing. "When you need it again, holler," she told me, gentling herself back down on the mattress and closing her eyes. "I could stay drunk for a month," she informed me, in the manner of a grand lady boasting of her social accomplishments.
"You have," Evelyn told her curtly.
"Oh, really?" Tonja tried to prop herself up again, without noticeable success. A moment later she was snoring peacefully. I pried the bottle out of her massive left hand and treated myself to another medicinal slug. By this time, Evelyn was dressing my feet and clucking her tongue over the damage done them.
"You stay right where you are, darling," she instructed. "I'll be back in a minute."
The combination of fatigue, pain and bourbon was having its effect. Just before both of my eyes closed, one of Tonja's opened. "You must be quite a man when you're sober," she said.
I dreamed that I had wings on my feet, and was being pursued through a forest by a redheaded Amazon love goddess who wouldn't take no for an answer. She was totally, magnificently, fantastically nude, and she waved a bottle at me, either as a means of luring me to my doom or in preparation for bopping me over the head with it. Alongside me ran a pack of naked little nymphs-one, with silver-blonde fur, insisted on my doing something her way, and wouldn't rest until I ducked off into a little grove with her and did it my way, at which point she jumped into the water and turned into a beautiful white swan. As the swan paddled away, a little black dog ap-think she is, anyway?"
"It's not her fault that her mind is polluted with this salvation crap," I started to say, but Leslie interrupted me.
"You think it's the fault of the church? You think Christianity is to blame for Wanda's trying to kill us all? No. You're just as wrong as she is. She's a nut, and she's using religion as a weapon to bash in the heads of everybody around her-just like some people use sex for the same purpose."
"Okay," I grinned. "I can be wrong, too, I guess."
She put down her book, stood up, and placed her hand on my forehead. "How do you feel?" she asked.
"Fine, I guess. My feet hurt, but the rest of me is ready for action."
She grinned. "You mean that?"
"Honey, you figure out a way to do it so I don't have to move my feet, and you're on."
She bent over and kissed me lightly on the lips. "I will be in a minute," she said. "Just wait until I lock the door."
Something had happened to Leslie, or to me, I wasn't sure just which, since last we'd shared this bunk. She was no longer standing off to one side and watching her own performance. Maybe it was just the fact that she had to be careful not to hurt me, but she seemed to have more genuine concern for my pleasure than she had ever shown in bed before. Suddenly, she was no longer an IBM machine, but a woman. And for the half hour we spent in delicate, semi-frantic gymnastics, she showed all the symptoms of a woman in love. All in all, it was pretty wonderful for both of us-it certainly succeeded in taking my mind off the pain in my feet.
Afterwards, when she was putting her clothes back on, she said to me, "Thank you, Captain. I think I can see a little bit of what you were talking about the other day. I've learned a lot since we left Hawaii."
"So have I, honey," I said. I mean it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I had learned a hell of a lot. When I started out, all I wanted was a way to keep the Motley from getting away from me, and Evelyn's gang of new divorcees had seemed like as good a way as any. But before I really had a chance to know what was going on, Marie had seduced me. And then Evelyn had seduced me. And presto! I was being offered around like a bull at a Farm Bureau meeting.
Of the six dolls aboard, I had been sleeping rather regularly with four of them. Each was a type within herself-Marie was trying to prove something, probably that she was one hundred percent female and had a craving for hundred percent males. Underneath, I suspected, she was fighting some real or imagined lesbian impulses, but it's a rare woman who doesn't, at one time or another. Evelyn was doing battle with a more destructive sort of a demon, her sense of shame, which had been rather drastically over-developed somewhere along the line-but she was making fantastic progress. When she graduated from "Captain Cook's Course" she'd be a pretty well-adjusted girl. I almost envied her next husband. Carla, I felt, was cured. From a bitch whose only motivation was the sexploitation of her male partners, she had been transformed into a loving, giving, genuine woman. She had learned to share pleasure, and to get pleasure from giving it. It's the most basic principal of sex-cessful human relations ever invented, but an appalling number of people never even know about it. But Carla had it down pat-she'd learned her lesson so well that until the fire I had feared that she might wear me out demonstrating it to me. Leslie was the toughest of all-largely because she was so mechanical about it at the start. But even Leslie had been improved, somehow, and had learned the knack of letting her emotions take over once her intellect had laid the groundwork. I guess there are a lot of eggheads like Leslie in this world-all of them cheating themselves of something wonderful because they're afraid of letting themselves go, afraid of losing intellectual control.
But the real challenges were yet to be met. One of them, Wanda, I felt sure I'd never have the opportunity of getting through to. How do you help a raving maniac who has to be tied to her bed to keep her from destroying herself, you, and everyone in sight? I wasn't even sure that what was wrong with Wanda was a sex problem.
Tonja scared me. She was a hell of a lot of woman, to put it bluntly. And if what the others said about her was true, she was insatiable when sober. But Evelyn's words seemed almost prophetic: "Every man who sees her wants to try." As much as I tried to deny it, I fell into that category, too. She was a hell of a challenge, and I wanted the opportunity to take a crack at it. As I had told Leslie a few minutes ago, I had learned a lot in the past five weeks.
I'd started out with a little experience and a lot of nerve-half the time, I was making up the rules as I went along, with a sort of a happy confidence that peared on the bank and offered to show me the way out of the forest if only I'd put a collar around my neck to match the one around its neck. I told it I didn't want to wear a dog collar and it started barking and frothing at the mouth. In a minute there was so much froth that it covered the surface of the water and I had to pick the little dog up and hold it in my arms to keep it from getting lost in its own froth. And then the goddess with the bottle in her hand stepped up to me and changed into a she-bear, and the only way I could get away was to duck down and run between her legs until I found an old dishpan floating in the middle of the pond and climbed aboard. But there were six dishes already in the dishpan, and I was the only fork. I should have felt right at home but I didn't because the little black bitch kept swimming alongside of me and barking until finally in desperation I stabbed it with the tines of my fork until it died and turned into another beautiful white swan.
I woke up in my bunk with my bandaged feet propped up in front of me and Leslie sitting in a chair by the bedside, reading. There was screaming and cursing and it sounded like praying coming from down the companionway.
"What the hell's going on?" I asked.
Leslie looked up from her book. "Wanda woke up," she said. "You want to go see her?"
I listened for a minute, then asked, "What are they doing to her?"
Leslie smiled. "Not a thing," she shrugged. "Unless Tonja decided that Wanda needed a drink."
I tried to swing my bandaged feet over the side of the bunk and grimaced in pain. "I don't know about her," I said, "but I could sure as hell use one."
"Here," Leslie said, and held out a glass of Tonja's Bourbon.
I drank it down and fetl considerably better. "Where's Evelyn?" I asked.
"She's sleeping. She put in a pretty hard day taking care of the three of you. I've been elected as relief nurse. Carla's going to be okay-she was a little singed, but nothing like what happened to you."
"How's Wanda?" I asked.
Leslie shrugged. "Who cares? She tried to kill us all and burn up your boat in the process. I'd just as soon Tonja'd drown the bitch in Bourbon."
"The kid's sick," I said. "She's not right in the head. Don't punish her for being looney."
Leslie put down her book and looked at me intently. "My dear Captain Cook," she said, "I don't know if you believe in God or not, but I do. And people like Wanda Brown make me ashamed to think that I ever went to church. Who the hell does she most of the things I tried to do would work. Funny thing was, most of them did. Not always in the way I wanted them to, but I felt that I could chalk up four pretty good case histories in my favor.
I'd worked on Wanda, too, at a conversation level. And all I'd succeeded in doing was driving her off the deep end, causing her to flip completely. At least, when she was just mixed up, she was the only one who was really unhappy about it. But under my prompting, because of my needling, she'd tried to take us all to glory in one fell swoop. That error, I felt, rested solely upon my shoulders.
So, for that matter, did the responsibility for getting us back safely to Honolulu. This would require sightings, plotting of course, supervision of ship's activities-all of those duties which require a captain to be on his toes.
And it would be days before I could even stand on my feet!
Fortunately, I'm not a big man. And by constructing a chair-sling, any two of the girls could carry me wherever I had to go. It was in this fashion that we met and solved the problems of navigation and seamanship, and effected the necessary repairs in the engine room. The fire, although a first-class emergency while it was happening, did comparatively little damage. Aside from cleaning up the gooey residue left by the foam, a total of four wires had to be replaced. The good ship Motley had been fortunate indeed.
Each day, I had them carry me in to see how Wanda was making out. Normally, she was a girl who took meticulous care of herself, always presenting the beauty she had in the best possible light. Now, with three days of mindless neglect, she seemed to have aged a good ten years. She looked haggard and ill, although they told me that she had moments of lucidity when she ate well and acted almost sane. As a precautionary measure she was kept lashed to the bunk. It was just one week from the time of the fire that the next emergency arose, and I knew damn well it couldn't have been Wanda who did it, for she was still tied to her bunk.
'Somebody smashed Tonja's remaining bottles of bourbon!
My feet were still tender, but I could walk on the new flesh which covered their soles, so I followed Evelyn down to the hold to survey the damage. Word had spread throughout the ship; there were three other girls waiting for us when we got there. The smell of all that evaporating bourbon was overwhelming.
"Okay," I said. "Who did it?"
"Certainly you don't suspect...." Evelyn began.
"I suspect all of you," I said coldly.
"I'll bet he did it himself," Marie winked, addressing her remarks to no one in particular.
"Thanks, honey," I replied, "but I've got all I can handle right now, without having to service Tonja, too.
"Service!" Marie snorted. "I thought you enjoyed it."
"What are we going to do?" Leslie wanted to know. "You'd better go on an all-oyster diet," Carla suggested.
Evelyn looked at the residue left. "Can't we save some of this?" she asked.
I shook my head. "If there's a pint left, I'll drink it," I told her.
"What are we going to do?" Leslie repeated, her efficient IBM control deserting her.
"How far are we from the nearest port?" Marie asked.
"About ten days," I said.
"It'll take Tonja two or three days to sober up," she said. "Maybe we could tie her down, like Wanda."
"That sounds like fun," I said sarcastically. "I should have tied you all down, and this wouldn't have happened."
"At least," Evelyn put in, "it wasn't another attempt on your life."
"Not directly," I said. "Being loved to death may be a wonderful way to go, but I'd just as soon put it off a few years. Does Tonja know about this?"
Evelyn said no.
"Somebody's got to tell her," I continued. "There's no point in letting her know it was deliberately destroyed, however." I looked around the group. Never had I seen four women look more uncomfortable than the four who faced me then. One of them had broken the bottles-why, I didn't know.
"Who did it?" I said wearily.
Each one of them denied the crime.
"All right," I said. "I'll tell Tonja myself-I'll tell her she simply ran out of booze. In the meantime, somebody's got to clean this mess up, and since no-body'll confess, I suggest that the four of you work on it together."
I turned and went above decks, leaving my four beauties below. I remembered the way my mother used to deal with the family cats when one of them misbehaved: she'd rub all of their noses in it and spank them soundly, whereupon the innocent ones would gang up on the guilty one and there would be no more misbehaving. I wondered where the similarity between women and cats left off....
Facing Tonja with the news that she was out of Bourbon was a job I had no liking for whatsoever, although I had to admit that the prospect of bedding the beauty was an intriguing one. Once she sobered up, I would have no choice but to admit her to my cabin. In spite of the delicious way her figure was put together, she outweighed me by a good thirty pounds, so there was no percentage in trying to deny her her turn at bat. According to her friends, Tonja was insatiable, cursed with the nymphomaniac's inability to find sexual release. But, they said, when she's sober she never stops trying. What a crazy way to die!
Somehow, though, I preferred it to having my head split open with an axe, or to having my skinny self carved up with a kitchen knife.
Well, dad, I told myself, somebody's got to tell her, and stalling won't improve your position one bit. Taking a deep breath, I headed for Tonja's cabin.
The big redhead was asleep, sprawled nakedly in her bunk, a smile of contentment on her gorgeous face. I had a sudden impulse to climb aboard and wake her up "differently" in order to tell her the news, but it is to my credit that I resisted such insanity. Instead, I stood in the center of the small cabin and just looked. Everything about Tonja Eriksson was perfection-on a grand scale. Some giants are put together with peculiar proportions, such as everything to scale except the head, which would be normal or even smaller than normal, giving a pinhead effect. That sort of semi-freak, I knew, could make a good living in a chorus line, as most men go for female pinheads, but Tonja didn't fall into this classification. She was bigger-than-life-size in all departments, truly a heroic figure of a female. In her stocking feet she towered above me like a mighty oak. Her breasts came at my eye-level.
I watched her oversized charms rising and falling as she breathed in her ragged sleep, and wondered what it would be like. Was she built on that heroic scale everywhere? I shuddered. No wonder she'd never been able to find real satisfaction!
But no, I thought, a moment later, size has nothing to do with it-skill and ingenuity are what counts. The past several weeks had proved that I hadn't been shortchanged in that department. My only question now was about the extent of my staying power. ""Lecherous bastard!" came a voice. I turned. Wanda's eyes burned into mine. "Where is everybody?" she demanded. "Below decks," I informed her curtly. "Sinners!" 'she spat. "All of you! You'll rot in hell for this!"
"For what?" I asked, looking at the ropes which held her tightly to the bunk.
"But though you feed me to the wild beasts, my spirit shall triumph in the end. Make my body into a torch to light your banquet hall and I will die with the smile of righteousness on my lips and peace in my heart from everlasting to everlasting, and my soul will ascend to sit on the right hand...."
Nutty as a fruit cake. I felt once more that twinge of pity I had experienced the night of the fire. Wanda was clearly not responsible for her actions. She needed the attention of a qualified psychiatrist the minute we got back to civilization. She could afford it, I knew. All of the girls were fantastically well-off as a result of the settlements they had won in Nevada.
Maybe, I thought, psychiatry could cure Tonja, too.
I turned and walked out of the cabin, and proceeded to the bow of the ship. I wasn't free of my problems, but at least I could breathe some fresh salt air.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Tonja, when she woke up, took it like a trouper. She swung her long legs out of bed, put her finger to her lips in the time-honored sign of quiet and secrecy, and tiptoed across the cabin. With a nail file, she removed a plate from the bulkhead, revealing her secret cache. Underneath, cradled from unexpected shocks by a tangle of wires which belonged to the automatic equipment in the engine house, were three gleaming bottles of bourbon, each one unopened.
Apparently, Tonja had been expecting the day would come when she would either be cut off entirely or have her booze supply drastically curtailed, and she was ready. I had to smile at the drunken logic of hiding it from us and then being so damn proud of her unique hiding place that she had to show it to us.
Three fifths. A little over two day's grace. In a wav, I was disappointed.
The Motley's turbine was a constant throb of power as we headed back towards Hawaii. With the help of favorable currents it might be possible to make close to twenty knots, but that was too much to count on for the entire trip.
Except for periodic inspection trips to check on Wanda's condition and the Bourbon level, I kept pretty close to my room for the next few days. Marie, Evelyn and Carla made life bearable with their amatory visits to my bunk-Leslie's improvement had reached a plateau, but even that was a hundred percent better than the way she started out.
Marie had remained my favorite. Evelyn's sense of shame had dissolved almost completely under my shameless guidance-we now made love with all the lights on, and injected as much variety as possible into the preliminaries. Evelyn was becoming a completely normal and very well adjusted bed partner-for the transformation to be felt in her the rest of her life, we'd have to wait a little longer. It was something she was willing to work at, though.
Carla had successfully shelved her unpleasant brand of selfishness and had learned the higher selfishness of giving pleasure. When she discovered that her own enjoyment was now multiplied many times, she vowed she'd never go back to her old domination techniques. Perhaps it was my imagination, but it seemed that Carla was becoming more confident and less caustic in her dealings with the other girls on board, too.
Leslie, with a more dormant sex drive than the rest, was content to do connubial calesthenics once a week; naturally, Marie insisted on filling the gap for her. Marie appreciated and needed sexual expression more than any of the others, with the possible future exception of Tonja. Together, we tried to guess what Tonja would be like, carrying our best guesses into the realm of physical experimentation until both of us were sore from the exertion.
"I knew another nympho once," Marie told me. "At least, that's what she was told she was, and you are what you think you are. She couldn't find a man who could satisfy her, though, no matter how she tried. Then she turned Lez, and she's had no trouble since."
"I don't believe," I said, "that Tonja would go for that sort of a solution."
"Well," Marie shrugged, "they say it takes a woman to know how to love a woman."
"Oh?" I mocked, cocking an eyebrow and letting my fingers walk lightly across the small of her back. "I suppose you've tried it."
Marie shot me a look of disgust. "Even such a libertine as I has to draw the line somewhere. Did you ever read a book called My First Two Thousand Years of Love?"
"I've heard of it. It's the tale of the wandering Jew, isn't it?"
"Jewess," Marie corrected. "It's the story of Salome. John the Baptist put a curse on her, calling her 'too vile for the grave'-and giving her eternal life. Anyway, in two thousand years she learns everything there is to know about sexual love. I think she's in India, at the Goddess of the Triple Gate, when she comes across the ideal to shoot for."
"And what is it?" I inquired, tracing little figure eights on the smooth, naked flesh of her back.
"Unendurable pleasure indefinitely prolonged."
"Sounds like an impossibility," I said.
"That's the beauty of it," Marie smiled, turning her body so that my wandering hands could explore fresh territory. "The minute it becomes unendurable it has to explode."
"I think I see what you're driving at. You believe all that's wrong with Tonja is that she has a slow fuse, right?"
"Something like that," she replied. "I think she's like a wood fire in a fireplace, and it may take a lot of kindling to get her to burst into flame."
"Either lots of kindling," I said, chuckling, "or a damn hot blowtorch."
We were silent for several moments while my fingertips built little fires of passion within the perfection of Marie's body. She was quivering in several places at once when suddenly she pushed me away.
"Torture," she said.
"What?"
"Torture. That's the key to Tonja."
"Sorry," I said, shaking my head. "I have to draw the line somewhere, too. That's one thing I refuse to do."
Marie laughed. "Silly! I don't mean taking a pair of pliers to her fingernails, or stabbing her with hatpins. I mean you've got to torture her with pleasure, until it becomes unendurable pleasure indefinitely prolonged. You know how I've told you feels like my whole body is an earthquake?"
"Yes."
"Make it a series of earthquakes, each one more violent than the last, until she can't stand it any more."
"And then?"
"Give her the big earthquake-turn her into a volcano and let her erupt. I'm-ahhh!-I'm sure you can-ohh! ahh!-do it," she said, gasping. My hands had recaptured territories they had been working on before. I didn't need a seismograph to know that Marie was experiencing small earthquakes of her own.
Slowly, with the sureness that comes from long practice I turned those initial tremors into full-fledged tremblars, topping them off with a volcanic explosion that rivalled anything Marie and I had ever accomplished before. Just as carefully, I helped her quivering passions float gently down to earth again.
Marie breathed a little sigh of satisfaction. "Tonja needs a man like you," she said.
Evelyn disagreed. "She'll ruin you!" was the ash blonde's prediction. "I don't care how good at it you are-you're not strong enough to last that long. And you're not big enough."
"Thanks," I said wryly.
"I mean it. She's twice your size."
"Then I ought to have twice the fun," I said.
"Men!" she exclaimed disgustedly. "Remember, little man, you've got to be in condition to entertain the rest of us, too."
"A change of pace is as good as a vacation," I told her smugly. "That's all that keeps me in shape now."
Evelyn's green eyes blazed golden. "All right, little man," she said huskily, "let's take a vacation."
It was a good as I had to know it would be.
Carla, on the other hand, inadvertantly gave me a major clue as to how to handle Tonja, without once mentioning her name. As had become the pointy blonde's habit, she came into my cabin at her appointed hour, covered me with kisses, and proceeded to lead me on a delightful tour of eroticism, carrying it to the extreme pretending protest when I began to reciprocate. Only when both of our appetites were fully sated and we were lying together in a mutual glow of consummation did she speak. Even then it was a respectful whisper.
"I wonder how many other girls are privileged to make love this way?" she breathed.
I lazily traced my index finger along the curve of her right breast, earning a little moan of pleasure in response. "A good many Oriental girls," I told her.
"I'll bet they don't get as much fun in return as I do," she murmured.
"Oh, I don't know. I've heard that the Japanese and Chinese are very proud of their ability to make pleasing them a pleasure to their women."
"How about Scandanavians?"
"Norwegians, Swedes or Danes?" I chided. "Swedes, of course."
"I suspect that they're rather basic in their approach. Why?"
"I wonder if you could teach a Swede to act like an Oriental," she said.
"Tell you what," I said. "I'll sleep on that question, and give you an answer later."
A bit of Carla's old cattiness surged to the surface with a wicked laugh. "I'll bet you'll sleep on that Swede, too," she said.
Tonja had a hangover. As she was a big girl, any way you measured her, it was a big hangover. The biggest, the meanest hangover in recorded history. Tonja growled. Tonja snarled. Tonja threw things. Tonja searched the ship from stem to stern for a bit of the hair of the dog that bit her.
And for three days she moaned to herself, wondering how a simple thing like a hangover could be so formidible.
On the fourth day she slept.
And on the fourth day there was a knock at my door.
"Come in, it's unlocked," I called.
The door opened and I was looking at the sharpest, most wicked looking butcher knife I'd ever seen. Holding it was Wanda.
Dear, sweet, psychopathic Wanda.
"Hello," I said, eyeing the knife.
"The angel of the Lord has come," she said stiffly, "to do battle with the Devil. Repent ye and enter into the Kingdom of Heaven," She closed the door behind her with a menacing click.
"Wanda," I said, as warmly as I could manage, "you've recovered."
"The end of the world shall come by fire and the sword," she told me, brandishing the knife.
""Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord'," I quoted back at her, "so put down that knife."
Her eves glittered. "I'm going to kill you, Caotain," she said calmly. "I'm going to kill you in the name of the Lord."
"All right," I said. "I hope you don't mind if I have one last cigarette first." I reached cautiously for my cigarettes, took one from the pack and placed it between my lips. Next, the lighter, just as cautiously. My eves never left hers.
All the time my brain was working furiously as I wondered for a second how she had managed to escape, and then settled down on the serious problem of how I was going to escape. Carefully, I returned the lighter to the bedside table, and drew smoke deeply into my lungs.
"Wouldn't you rather go home where you'll be taken care of?" I asked her. "That's a much better idea than murdering me. We'll take you home to your father and mother, and you'll be safe there."
"My Father's house has many mansions," she said obliquely, starting to walk towards me.
The lit cigarette was poised between my right thumb and middle finger. As she came closer, I moved my wrist, took aim and flicked it into her face. She blinked, without changing expression, and continued her advance, raising the knife menacingly.
I, too, was poised like a coiled spring. As the knife slashed downward I launched myself at her, came up inside the glittering arc of the blade, grabbed her wrist and flipped her tail over teakettle. The knife clattered to the floor.
She snarled like a wild animal and made a grab for the blade, but I managed to kick it out of the way. Her other hand came up and raked painfully across my face.
I knew what I had to do, much as I disliked doing it. I was a symbol of depravity to Wanda, I was the personification of all that was evil to her tortured mind-and as long as she identified herself with God we'd be at war with each other.
But if I could make her as evil in her own eyes as she considered me to be....
I slapped her hard across the face, stunning her. Quickly, I ripped the clothes from her body. I threw her on the bunk, face down, and sat on her neck while I tied her wrists behind her back with torn pieces of her own clothing. She fought like a wildcat, but having lain spreadeagled to her bunk for over a week had sapped her strength, and within a short time I had her trussed as securely as I could.
Then, roughly, rudely, but damned efficiently, I made love to her. After all, under all of her saintly psychosis, Wanda was a woman, and a woman's body responds to certain stimuli regardless of the conditions under which those stimuli are inflicted. At first she recoiled from my gentle ministrations, but eventually her nipples hardened and her flesh quivered hungrily as I played with first one erogenous center and then another.
She fought each new sensation, whispering incoherently to herself, but the skill I had been polishing over the past few weeks was slowly transforming her into a lust-hungry female as each erotic nerve was stretched almost to the snapping point. I could feel pressures building within her and screaming for release, passions awakening which she had denied herself for all of her life.
I knew I couldn't simply take her, as a rapist takes his prey-I had to make every atom of her body beg for it until the ultimate consummation would burst throughout her being as a delicious ecstasy.
It took an hour and a half.
And it worked.
As quickly as I could, in my freshly weakened condition, I removed her bonds and massaged the bruised flesh of her wrists and ankles, then threw myself exhaustedly alongside her and kissed her mouth and her eyelids until she smiled at me.
The light of reason was behind her eyes now, and an expression of blissful satisfaction tilted up the corners of her mouth.
"Oh, God," she breathed, squirming closer to me.
"No, honey," I said. "The name is Captain Cook."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There was a loud knocking on the door, a frantic pounding, almost, and a hysterical voice knifing through the paneling:
"Captain! Wanda's loose! Are you in there, Captain? Are you all right? Wanda's loose!"
I pulled Wanda's naked body closer to my own. Her lips brushed my cheek as she murmured, "Am I supposed to be dangerous?"
"Captain! Are you all right?"
"I'm all right!" I called. "What's the matter?"
"Wanda got out of bed and half-killed Evelyn." I recognized the voice as belonging to Carla.
"Everything's okay, honey!" I assured her. "Wanda's in here with me, and everything's under control!"
For a moment there was silence from the other side of the door. Then: "She's in there with you?"
"That's right. It was her turn on the schedule-you don't think she wanted to miss out twice in a row, do you?"
Wanda giggled; Carla muttered "sonofabitch!" and walked on down the corridor. I put my hand on Wanda's hip and she shuddered deliriously against me.
"Do you still want to kill me?" I asked. "Kill you?" She blinked liquid chestnut eyes at me. "You came in here with the meanest looking shiv I've seen in a long time."
"And I tried to kill you with it?"
"That's right."
"I must have been out of my mind." She looked around the cabin, getting her bearings. "Hey! What am I doing in bed with you?"
"You don't remember?"
She shook her head.
"Well, honey, you can get out of bed any time you like."
"No," she purred. "I sort of like it here. You look good without any clothes on, Captain."
"Let me say the same for you," I replied gallantly.
"What did we do in bed?" she asked hesitantly.
"You don't remember that, either?" I smiled.
"No. It's the funniest thing. The last thing I remember was telling you this boat was a floating Sodom and Gomorroh, and you said I was a Lesbian. That's not right, is it? Or did I dream that?"
"Wanda, think hard. Did you ever throw a fire axe at me?"
She frowned. "Yes-I think so. Why would I do a thing like that?"
"Do you remember setting fire to the Motley?"
"I didn't do a thing like that!"
"You did."
"When?"
"A week ago."
She looked at me oddly. "A week ago I was dreaming about going to bed with you, but something kept saying no. I'd have these long daydreams about it, but every time I got near you all I could do about it was talk."
"'Preach' might be a better word," I said gently.
"I always was a pretty good talking about sin and salvation. My grandfather was an evangelist, you know."
"No, I didn't. Did your grandfather ever kill anybody?"
"No-I don't think so," she said. "If he did, he never mentioned it, and he was always talking about the sins of his youth."
"I just thought it might run in the family."
"Killing?" She propped herself up on one elbow and looked at me closely. "Are you serious about my wanting to kill you?"
"You tried to three times that I know of," I said.
"What time is it?" she asked suddenly.
"About two in the afternoon, I guess," I replied, looking around for the clock. It was lying face down on the floor, where it had fallen during our scuffle earlier.
"I don't remember a thing after last night, when we were talking about Sodom and Gomorrah," she said.
"Last night? That was weeks ago!" I exclaimed. "It was? You're kidding!"
"I wish I were. Tell me, Wanda, do you still think I'm a sinner?"
Her grin was quick. "According to my grandfather, we're all sinners," she said.
"That includes you?"
"Why, sure," she said. "Do I look like I'm worried about it or something?"
"Not any more. You had me scared for a while. Why were you afraid to go to bed with me?"
She shrugged, an action which generated a number of fascinating jiggles. "I didn't know that I was," she said.
"You must have been, or you wouldn't have come up with this repent-and-be-saved business."
"No! Did I do that again?"
"You mean you get these spells frequently?"
She shook her head. "Only if I'm in a completely new situation and completely frustrated. When I was a freshman in college and the sorority I wanted to get into turned me down I went on a religious kick. It was a nervous breakdown, I guess."
"But you're okay now?"
She nodded. "You know, it's funny that you should ask why I was afraid to sleep with you, because there has only been one man I was afraid to go to bed with."
"Who was that?"
"My first husband. I was afraid he'd find out I wasn't a virgin. He kept telling me how wonderful it was to find such a sweet and innocent girl, and I just didn't have the heart to tell him I wasn't-so I cooked up a story about falling out of a tree when I was a kid."
"Did he believe you?"
"I didn't have a chance to use it. He was so naive about everything that he didn't really know the difference. He was a virgin. Still is, mentally, I suppose. He thought sex was something married people had to do every now and then because it was expected of them, but he'd much rather play a fast game of checkers."
I laughed. "How'd you come to marry such an oversexed male?" I asked.
"I didn't have any choice," she smiled. "His daddy gave him two million dollars for his twenty-first birthday, and he needed someone to help him spend it."
Her eyes were twin pools of innocense.
"Golddigger," I accused, grinning.
"I generally get what I want," she said, moving suggestively against me. "And now I want you."
"I've got to save my strength for Tonja," I protested.
"You mean she's sober?"
"As a judge." I explained what had happened.
"Okay," she said, when I had finished. "I'll help you conserve your energies. We'll just have a quick one, huh?"
A quick one it was. Wanda left ten minutes later, without bothering to try to collect the remaining shreds of her clothing. Then contented little smile on her face was advertisement enough that she had returned to her senses. I watched her bare behind as it flirted out the door, and I blew her a kiss just before sinking into a deep sleep.
When I awoke, the sun had been down for a long time, and the lights were on in my cabin. The casual sound of a magazine page being turned startled me. I looked across the cramped quarters and saw Tonja sitting on the floor, reading. She wore a lavendar evening gown which set off her red hair and pale complexion beautifully.
She looked lazily across at me. "Hi," she said softly, sort of like Lauren Bacall.
"Hi," I replied, too stunned to be able to think of a witty rejoinder.
"You ready?" she said.
I shook my head. "Me Tarzan," I explained.
"You don't look it," she answered seriously. "But I've heard them say that good thinks come in small packages."
"Is your-ah-headache all gone?" I inquired conversationally, while my eyes catalogued her out-sized charms.
"All gone," she nodded. "And I trust you're in ... good health."
"As well as can be expected," I allowed. There was a pregnant pause which Tonja made no attempt to fill. For a full minute we just looked at each other, and I began to feel as inept as a high school kid on his first date. Finally, I broke the silence with: "I've heard a lot about you, Miss Eriksson."
She smiled. "I imagine you have. I guess there's no point in beating about the bush, is there, Captain?"
"None at all," I agreed.
"Good. Although I wasn't there, when you had your little conference at the beginning of this cruise, the other girls told me about it. I don't know if the few days we have left will be worth a full thousand, but nobody ever called Tonja Eriksson a piker. Have they told you I'm a nympho?"
I blinked at her candid approach. "Yes," I said.
"That's too bad," she said sadly. "But then, maybe you'll work a little harder at it than the others did."
"It's a challenge," I admitted.
She laughed throatily. "I trust you've got your Wheaties handy?"
"Did Wheaties help the others?"
She grinned. "No, I guess not. When do you want to start?"
"Right after breakfast," I told her, throwing back the covers and reaching for my shorts. "If you can wait that long."
"I've waited five weeks," she smiled. "A few more minutes won't hurt. My, you are a little guy, aren't you?"
"I've got a big heart," I explained.
A while back I had assured myself that I had an advantage over the hero-type of male, in that almost every beautiful girl was bigger than I was. But now, as Tonja uncoiled her long legs and stood up, I realized that her immensity, coupled with the fact that she had become a legend in the past five weeks, now made her a towering shadow which loomed over me like the invisible menace in those old Saturday afternoon movie serials. She was like a lust-hungry Alice on a seagoing Wonderland, and I was the White Rabbit, and I wished I had a little bottle tagged "drink me" that I could give her to bring her down to my size. But somebody had smashed all the bottles.
The only consolation I had was that the White Rabbit knew his way around the rabbit hole, while Alice didn't.
Curiously, no one else seemed to be aboard the ship as Tonja and I made our way to the galley. It was as if they had all deserted their Captain in his hour of need, and I was left to face my destiny alone. But at the same time, I was conscious of at least three pairs of eyes surreptitiously watching us as we prepared and then ate a hearty breakfast.
Tonja daintily put away a dozen eggs, a pound of bacon and a loaf of bread, while I wolfed down four slices of French toast and a mug of black coffee. During breakfast we maintained the conversational banality of civilized people; Each of us knew what we were going to do once the meal was over, so there was no point in talking about it.
"Shall we?" I said at last, draining my coffee cup.
"Let's."
I offered her my arm and escorted her back to my cabin.
Had I bitten off more than I could chew? I wondered, as I locked the door behind us and turned to face towering Tonja. Yes, she was a challenge. Maybe, if I was lucky, if I lived through it all, we'd get to know each other afterwards. There was so much of her, every ounce of it excitingly lovely, that I hardly knew where to begin.
"I've looked forward to this for some time," I told her.
She smiled lazily. "I hope you won't be disappointed."
"I hope neither of us will," I added fervently. "May I take your dress?"
"Please," she said softly, turning away from me. I located the zipper at the top of her back and slowly unzipped her. She shrugged magnificently and the lavender gown fell to the floor. With a negligent kick she sent it lofting across the cabin.
There was electricity in the air as my fingers found the hooks and eyes at the back of her brassiere. My hands trembled as they unfastened it, brushing Tonja's silk-soft skin in the process. A moment later all she was wearing was a pair of daintily fringed red silk panties.
With studied casualness she hooked her thumbs in them and inched them down over one of the prettiest derrieres ever to be owned by a woman, regardless of her size. Then she stepped out of them and slowly turned to face me.
My eyes feasted on the perfection of her, the perfect, flawless proportions of her, starting with her feet and working up along her calves, knees, thighs, magnificent hips, waist-an involuntary gasp of pleasure as I viewed her marvelous breasts-and then, further up, gently sloping shoulders, a smooth, youthful neck ... and her face. Her lips were moist and parted, with the tip of a pink tongue barely visible between snow-white teeth; her eyes were slits of smoldering passion; her nostrils flared with anticipation.
I realized with a start that I'd never touched Tonja, except for a moment ago when I had unhooked her bra, and I wondered briefly where it would be best to begin.
There was a half-amused smile on her lins as she looked down at me. "Well?" she whispered huskily.
I reached for her hand, and led her confidently to the bed.
Making love to Tonja was like scaling a mountain-or could have been, if I'd let it. But I knew that many other men had tried to scale the mountain, and had probably thought of her in those exact terms. Although she was big, she was a woman, not a mountain-and as a woman, she had certain things in common with every other woman alive, things in common with the other five girls on board, for that matter.
In a way, she was the sum total of those other five, and when I began to think of her that way, I discovered the key I was looking for. For the first five minutes her reaction to my lovemaking was in character with the smile I had observed on her lips earlier-amused tolerance.
Then, as her reflexes began to resound to my techniques, the amusement was replaced by interest, and at the end of ten minutes she was breathing heavily. I used every trick I had ever learned, finding and stimulating first one area and then another, changing the pace of my attack unexpectedly, until ever part of her was delightfully aware of what was going on.
When half an hour had elapsed, she, like Carla before her, began to reciprocate, to cater to my pleasure. Tonja had been around, that much was obvious, for it took every ounce of willpower I had to refrain from ending the performance right then.
Instead, I led her through uncharted seas of experience, building within her a symphony of sensation, using my hands and my body to play her like an accomplished violinist coaxes the purest of notes from his instrument.
Like Evelyn, she had been taught to be ashamed of the hungers within her, but unlike Evelyn, who had cloaked her cravings in the anonymity of darkness, Tonja had rationalized her perfectly normal desires by blaming them on the disease called nymphomania-but she had taken her own self-created label at face value, and had been forced to accept the symptom of unfulfillment along with it.
At the end of an hour, by praising her body and the sexuality it contained with my hands and my lips and my words, I succeeded in banishing her destructive, guilt-ridden sense of shame and had replaced that emotion with a feeling of pride in her womanhood. She came then to a plateau, as high a state of sexual excitement as she had ever experienced before, and there was uncertainty in her eyes as she saw that I expected more, much more, of her.
Like Marie, she had been afraid of the drives inside her, afraid that a mere man would never be able to satisfy her, afraid that she might make the mistake of turning to another woman for the rapport she fell short of achieving with every man who had ever scaled her mountains, who had ever laid a conquering hand on her magnificent grand tetons, who had ever occupied the gullies and the canyons of her magnificent body. Like Marie, she had engaged in a constant search for a man who was a man, and had found herself playing leapfrog from bed to bed to bed. But now she felt the sense of complete mastery on my part which can come only from piling experience upon experience and profiting from each one of them. The uncertainty was replaced by trust as she sensed that I not only knew where we were going but was familiar with every step of the way.
Almost ninety minutes had gone by, and still the voltages of our respective bodies had not met and melded and discharged in that flash of lightning which is the lover's reward. With an air of controlled abandon I led her deeper into the fecund forest, slashing at prejudices and half-understandings as I went.
Like Wanda, who retreated into neurotic behavior whenever she was sufficiently frustrated. Tonja had discovered alcohol as her sublimation and refuge. But unlike Wanda, who tried to force her sublimation on everyone around her, Tonja had been content to curl up in an alchoholic fog and let the rest of the world make love. But now she was discovering that I expected and demanded of her the same intensity of lovemaking as I myself accomplished, and it turned into a delightful contest to see who could outlove and outlast whom. Which was exactly what I wanted it to be-instead of Tonja challenging me to "show her," she was demanding of herself that she "show me." And she was discovering that as pleasures are given, and pleasures are honestly expected, pleasures happen.
It had been two hours now since we had had breakfast and come back to my cabin, and for almost all of those two hours Tonja had been experiencing new sensations, all of them delightful, some of them astonishing even to her.
But like Leslie, the oversized redhead had never been able to experience the pleasures she had read about. Where Leslie had devoted her intelligence to faking the expected reactions, Tonja was too honest for such self-deceit, and had retreated instead. Now, her senses reeling from my determined onslaught, she reached a point where she was ready to be completely honest with herself, about herself, and for the first time in her life faced the fact that she was a woman and that she had an inalienable right to reach the highest peak of pleasure a woman can attain.
With that realization came renewed abandon on her part, and her every movement under me demanded complete fulfillment. Then, and only then, did I let down the flood-gate, and then together we hurtled towards the brink of sensation, neither of us able or willing to stop the forces we had set in motion. Together we attained the long-awaited, totally-shared explosion of the senses, which reverberated in the cabin and roared in our ears as we began the long fall back to the rocks of reality below.
For a long time afterwards we lay together, too spent to do more than breathe and look at each other, knowing that we had shared something that poets often write about but ordinary mortals seldom achieve.
Finally, Tonja broke the silence with a whispered, "I love you."
I smiled. "Then you love yourself," I said.
"What do you mean?" she grinned.
"You've accepted yourself," I told her. "You've got to love every part of yourself, not only for what you intend to be but for what you are right now, in order to love anything or anyone outside of yourself."
Tonja furrowed her brow and thought that over for a minute. "You sound like a preacher," she chided.
"Maybe I should be," I told her.
"You'd make a hell of a preacher," she said.
"I've been told I make a hell of a lover."
"Um-hmmm," she agreed, remembering the past three hours. "For a little guy, you're a pretty big man."
It was a pleasure embracing her again, and warming myself against the embers of her passion.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
And it was a pleasure watching her as she ran towards the Motley six months later, waving a packet of mail high over her beautiful head. She was dressed in white shorts and a gaily flowered halter, with a ti-leaf lei around her neck. Native and tourist heads turned in admiration as she bounced along the dock.
"It's from Marie!" she exclaimed breathlessly, after she had come aboard.
"Well, woman," I asked, "what does she say?"
"It's addressed to you," she said, handing it to me still sealed. I winked at her and she bent down so I could give her a husbandly kiss.
Tearing open the envelope, I read:
Dear Captain Cook, Just heard about you and Tonja getting married-congratulations! You might be interested in knowing I found me a man, too. His name is Bill, and he's only sensational. He's a photographer and an artist and he wears a red beard and he has an air of competence about him that, believe me, he's entitled to. I think someday we might get married, but right now we're like a couple of fighting cocks sizing each other up. In another year or so we ought to be making plans.
I think it's time for me to confess that I was the one who destroyed your wife's booze that day. Remember, you told me you'd never make love to a drunk? I figured Tonja needed your kind of loving as much as any of the rest of us did. I hope I did the right thing.
Again, my best to both of you.
Love, Marie
I handed the letter to Tonja and watched her as she read it. When she got to the part about the bourbon, she smiled knowingly. Tonja folded the letter and stuffed it back in its envelope.
"Well, darling," she purred, "did she do the right thing?"
"I think so, Mrs. Cook," I told her.
"You need more proof?" she asked playfully.
I took my eyes from her face and looked straight ahead, at where her magnificent breasts were straining against the fabric of her blouse. "At least twice a week, honey," I said.
"That's right," she said wonderingly. "It's been two whole days. Do we have the time today?"
"We've got all afternoon. Our charter party isn't due aboard until six this evening. As far as I can see, everything's shipshape on the Motley."
Tonja smiled and moved her shoulders imperceptibly, which caused her enbloused delights to jiggle invitingly. "Shall we?" she said.
"Why not?" I offered her my arm, and we strolled happily across the deck, into the companionway and to the Captain's cabin. Inside, I carefully locked the door behind us, then reached for my wife.
"Wait," she said. Carefully, she opened a drawer in my desk and added Marie's letter to the stack which contained Leslie's cryptic telegram, "IT WORKED. HOWD YOU LIKE TO HAVE OUR FIRST KID NAMED AFTER YOU?" Wanda's Hollywood-postmarked note which said in part, "I haven't found him yet, but I'm coming close-and often," Evelyn's news that she'd taken a job as a figure model and had lost all of her self-consciousness, and Carla's announcement that she was marrying an ex-Air Force Captain who had served six years in Japan and didn't think any American girl could hold a candle to his former Tokyo playmate ("Boy, did I prove him wrong!").
All of the girls had paid off at the end of the cruise, and with the money and with my newly aquired First Mate (Tonja claimed she wasn't going to let go of a good thing, and she knew as much about boats as I did) I had gone into the charter business, operating out of Honolulu. We catered to both the fishing and the party trade, and from time to time turned the Motley into a floating casino. And when we were alone together, the craft was a floating bedroom in which Tonja and I re-lived that first three hours, each time with new variations, each time with more gusto and more satisfaction than before.
And when every ounce of Tonja is satisfied, we're both happy.
We were deliriously happy when our clients arrived at six o'clock that night.
