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Men ducked for cover. Dr. Karloff turned whiter than Alba's gown and fainted dead away.
"Alba!" came a strangled cry from deep within P.T. Bunker. Arms outstretched, he staggered across the
thickly carpeted lounge toward her.
She stood frozen with shock, her eyes registering that Pandro seemed taller, stronger, more urgently virile
than she had seen him in years. He was a naked Greek god, a young Tarzan, an Adonis with a hard-on.
"Alba!" He lurched toward her.
She ran to him. He scooped her up in his mighty arms and staggered off the way he had come, her
virginal white gown trailing after them. Alba nestled her head against her husband's new bulging
pectoralis major and let him carry her back to their private stateroom. He seemed rather clumsy,
uncoordinated, but she was sure that he would learn to control his rebuilt body properly, given time.
Tonight, self-control was the last thing she wanted from him.
Midnight once again.
Everyone aboard seemed to be still in a state of shock over P. T. 's escapade at the start of the evening. In
the main salon little foursomes and couples huddled over tiny cocktail tables, largely ignoring the dance
music of the robot band, still talking about it.
"You can see why he's the top man." Woody was leering drunkenly at three of his cohorts, two of them
women.
"It's a transplant," said the other man. "Must have been."
One of the women shot back, "And all you got was a tummy tuck, Woody."
Scarlet Dean had suffered through dinner with Maryann Quigly, Ted Gunn, and the boorish Jack Drain,
just so she could keep Carl Lewis in her sight. Maryann had consumed food the way a horde of locusts
does, then immediately waddled off to the afterdeck lounge to get ready for the late night snack. Ted had
wisecracked that he could hear her body cast creaking from the pressure she was putting against it.
All through dinner, while Maryann stuffed herself and Drain sneered at everything, Scarlet watched for
an opportunity to intrude on Carl and Lori. They gazed at one another adoringly and hardly noticed the
meal being served to them. Scarlet knew they were not sleeping together, yet they were behaving like a
pair of love-smitten teenagers.
Their romance has gone farther than I thought, she realized. The effects of too much salt air and
moonlight. Well, I'll put an end to that tonight, she told herself, patting the handbag resting in her lap.
One puff of the pheromone spray and he'll never look at another woman again.
The spray had come from the research laboratories of Tarantula Enterprise's biogenetic division in
Stuttgart. It was actually an outgrowth of their genetic warfare work, an attempt to create a weapon that
would selectively incapacitate only the enemy's troops and no one else. Based on an artificial virus that
affected certain nerve pathways into the brain, it had been designed to make its victims fall asleep as long
as they could smell the subliminal odor of their military uniforms. The Stuttgart scientists fondly hoped
that once used on the battlefield, the spray would be so effective that the enemy troops would only wake up
after their captors had stripped them down to their skivvies.
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Alas, it never worked that well. The virus was too specific. In nature, it affected only one individual out of
a hundred or more. And instead of putting a man to sleep, it imprinted unbearable sexual longing in the
victim. Like a love potion of old, it made the victim fall hopelessly for whomever he or she first smelled
after being hit by the spray. The scandal among the volunteer units of the Swabian Rifles led to a dozen
resignations, three suicides, and five homosexual marriages.
Scarlet was going to spray Carl and make certain that the first person he smelled was herself. And after
that, she knew, she would be the only person he would sniff after.
But she had to be very careful to get Carl away from Loriand everyone else-before she spritzed him.
During dinner, Ralph Malzone had presided over a rowdy table of sales people. Afterward, looking
thoroughly wrung out, he had stopped by Lori and Carl's table and the three of them had gone together
into the main lounge.
It had been easy enough for Scarlet to insinuate herself into the threesome, and for the past several hours
the four of them had been drinking, talking, and dancing. The robot dance band was built and costumed to
look like a vague amalgamation of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and other popular groups of the sixties
and seventies. This cruise ship usually catered to retirees who were fixated on the music of their teen
years.
Scarlet kept her drinks long and soft, and noticed that Lori did the same. Good old Ralph never drank
anything but beer; he seemed to have an infinite capacity for it, although he excused himself every hour or
so: "Time to recycle the beer," he would invariably say. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]