Dial O for O.R.G.Y.

“Some what?” Rifle interrupted.

“Computer⁸ . That’s what they told me. Don’t look at me. I don’t get it any more than you do. But that’s what they said. Meanwhile, they’re sendin’ a ’copter for us. Same place we was brought in. We’re s’posed to take ’em back to Seattle. If the computer turns thumbs down, then the contract is honored. If not, we’re workin’ for carfare.”

“Carfare!” Strangler grumbled.

“I don’t understand,” Rifle brooded. “What’s a computer got to do with anything?”

I could have told him. Obviously the top mafiosi had decided to submit the question of whether Liberty and I were to live or die to the four powers’ supercomputer in South America. Here, our fate would be decided on the basis of demographic growth patterns, necessary hostility outlets, the psychological and sociological needs of ethnic groupings, nuclear probabilities, and a host of other large-scale factors having little to do with our own personal desires for maximum longevity.

It was Russian roulette with a hundred-cartridge clip, ninety-nine percent loaded! And the one-percent chance? It just might depend on Tom Swift! If he had indeed programmed the computer, wouldn’t his personal security be a prime factor of the programming? Didn’t I represent a threat to that security? Wouldn’t the computer therefore be predisposed to remove me from the need for future consideration?

Such thoughts didn’t fill me with confidence. I didn’t much dig having some machine decide if I was going to live or die. Particularly if the machine’s dies were loaded!

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The fact is, generally speaking, I never did get along with machines too well. It’s my fault, I’m sure; maybe a personality defect; or maybe a prejudice I haven’t faced; or maybe an innate sense of my own inferiority to mechanical beings. Whatever the reason, somehow whenever I’m involved with machines, cooperation dissolves and explodes into confrontation.

Washing machines eat the buttons from my shirts, and dryers singe the collars a crumpled brown. Pop-up toasters jam, and when I bend to investigate, they shoot charred missiles into my eyes. Bench lathes hunger for my limbs, drills nibble at the palm of my hand, hammers seek out my thumbs, saws gnash at my fingers, and screwdrivers skid and gash as gash can. Dishwashers pursue me with Niagaras of suds, vacuum cleaners suck up my cufflinks and tie-tacks, garbage disposals gulp down my most treasured possessions. And cars-—- well, cars require a paragraph all their own.

Ignitions ignore my efforts on days when I’m most in a hurry, usually the coldest days of winter. Radiators, on the other hand, always overflow on the hottest day of summer in the middle of an expressway traffic jam. Fan belts snap midway between two garages fifty miles apart, while power-steering belts disintegrate during especially tricky turns, requiring either the exertion of an immediate two-hundred-pound pressure on the steering wheel or an instant decision as to whether to hit a taxi driven by an ex-prizefighter or a truck jockeyed by a karate expert.

Trunks spring shut with the car keys inside them, safety-lock doors do the same -- usually with the keys in the ignition and the motor running; power windows shoot up to guillotine me when I stick my head out to ask for directions; brakes lock going uphill and fail altogether going down; and mufflers loudly give up the ghost as I’m wheeling through a hospital zone patrolled by a cop with a mother who’s convalescing from a gall-bladder operation in a ground-floor ward. Automatic transmissions spring mammoth leaks when the car’s trade-in value is being decided, while carburetors . . .

Ah, carburetors! Quadrojet, synchromesh, spread-bore gizmos with paralytic automatic chokes, and spastic throttles, and butterflies in the tummy! Automobile mechanics hover over them like brain surgeons. They chant litanies to carburetor glory like warlocks exorcising demons. The rare purr of a carburetor working flawlessly is to them as the successful transmutation of lead to gold was to the alchemists of old. Carburetors! How many angels can dance on the head of a cotter pin? When Science has solved the secret of Creation, of Birth, of Life itself, the Mysteries of the Carburetor will still remain!

But past frustrations have made me digress. My point is that I don’t hit it off with machines. Even when the relationship is impersonal, indirect, that’s still true. Which brings us to my experience with computers.

Without going into detail, let me enumerate.

One: my bank’s computer which said I was overdrawn by three hundred eight dollars and thirty-three cents when my own records showed a plus balance of the same amount. Maybe banks don’t make mistakes, but computers do. As it turned out, this one subtracted when it should have added.

Two: the department-store computer which demanded the return of my credit card for nonpayment of the bill. Notification was received on Monday. On Tuesday the computer informed me that because of my excellent record of payments, my credit limit was being extended. On Wednesday the computer sent me a warning that if I didn’t pay my bill, legal action would be taken. On Thursday the computer decided I’d overpaid and informed me that the overpayment was being credited to my account. Friday the computer informed me that because I was in arrears my credit rating was now in jeopardy. Saturday the computer sent me notice of a sale for “preferred customers only.” On Sunday, presumably, the computer rested!

Three: the Con Ed computer that decided that my electric bill for the month was ninety-six dollars and forty-seven cents. This was for a one-room apartment without cooking facilities, electrical appliances, or air-conditioning. Besides, during the month billed, I’d been out of town. When I pointed this out, the reply—presumably dictated by the computer—was that perhaps I’d left the lights on while I was gone. When I said this wasn’t the case and refused to pay the bill, the computer decided to turn off my electricity. Someone must have fed the words “Public Service Commission” into the computer intake, because eventually the lights were turned back on.

Four: the gasoline-company computer which vomited up its entire memory bank just because my fountain pen accidentally punched a hole in the billing card it issued⁹ . It was a human decision to revoke my credit card as punishment for the crime. But the priorities involved were definitely weighted in favor of computer welfare!

Five: the computer which refused to accept payment because the check I sent was for one cent more than the computerized bill rendered. I’d guess that about a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of shared computer time plus a few bucks’ worth of stationery and postage were used up in settling that one. I finally gave in and sent a new check for the correct amount. Hell, I couldn’t afford to be cashiered out of the Diners’ Club. It could have meant slow death by starvation!

With incidents such as these, plus many more too numerous to mention, defining my relationship with computers, is it any wonder I lack faith in them? Is it any wonder I was appalled at the prospect of having one of thern —superbrain though it might be— decide if I was to live or die? Is it any wonder I brooded all through the ’copter flight from Darnell to Seattle?

It was getting on toward dawn when the ’copter landed atop a tall office building in downtown Seattle. Our four captors hustled Liberty and me across the rooftop to the entrance to a stairwell. We descended one flight of stairs and boarded a waiting elevator. It dropped us down to a subbasement.

We were ushered along a narrow hallway between walls of powder-white concrete blocks. At the end was a steel door. We paused here while Knife pushed a buzzer. There was an answering click, and the door swung open. We entered; it closed and locked behind us.

The room was unexpectedly plush. The walls were wood-paneled. Heavy draperies and some really good impressionist lithographs lent them warmth. Hand-crafted glassware glittered on a bar set into the bookshelves. The desk was walnut, large, and kidney-shaped. An executive model pushbutton telephone perched atop

Behind the desk sat a man puffing evenly on a pipe. The tweed suit he wore could have defined an English country squire. He was gray-haired and florid, deepening the impression, and there were smile lines in his square-cut face, creases of good humor and joviality.

“Hello. I’m Gino Goldberg.” He greeted us pleasantly.

The name rang a bell. I knew I’d heard it before. Then I remembered where.

Randy Beaver had mentioned it as one of the trio who used to call Tom Swift and leave numbers for him to call back. “Phoebe Phreeby,” “Bugs Ameche,” “Gino Goldberg”—those were the three names Randy had mentioned. Funny! Figuring one of them might lead me to Tom Swift, I’d been concentrating on finding Phoebe Phreeby. And here I was, without even trying, face to face with Gino Goldberg!

“No need to introduce yourselves,” Goldberg continued. “I know who you are. Indeed, I’ve learned quite a bit about the two of you during the last couple of hours. It’s made me look forward to our having a chat. But first I’m going to step out for a moment while these gentlemen perform certain unpleasant tasks. I apologize for the nature of these tasks, but they are necessary.” He pressed a button, and when the door swung open again, he exited, beckoning to Rifle to follow.

Rifle was gone only a moment. When he returned, the door once again locked behind him. “Take off all your clothes,” he told us.

“Why?” Liberty asked indignantly.

“Do like he says, or I’ll take ’em off for you!” Strangler advanced on her menacingly.

We took off our clothes -- all of them. Knife collected them and tied them in a neat bundle. Then Rifle told us to sit on a couple of straight-backed chairs facing each other and gave the other three explicit instructions as to how Goldberg wanted us tied to them.

Our legs were spread wide apart so that the ankles could be manacled to the rear legs of the straight- backed chairs. Our wrists were handcuffed tightly together behind the chair backs. Strangler looped a pair of cords around our necks and anchored them to the rear rungs under the chair seats. That way if we tried to wriggle free, we’d choke ourselves.

Their task completed, the four hoods exited. A moment later Gino Goldberg returned. They say the essence of good manners in Yorkshire society is taking no cognizance of the other fellow’s inferior station. That was Gino Goldberg’s attitude. He ignored our shackled situation, our nudity, the somewhat gross genital display forced on us by the wide spreading of our manacled limbs. But I was damned if I was going to let his politeness go by without comment.

“What’s the big idea?” I demanded. “Why did you have us stripped? And how come all this Fu Manchu¹⁰ business with chains and handcuffs and ropes around our necks? If you’re going to have us killed, why all the fancy rigmarole?”

“Are you going to have us killed?” Liberty voiced the top-priority question.

“To answer the lady’s question first,” Goldberg said, “I don’t know yet. But I understand your impatience. Let me see if I can find out if a decision has been reached.” He picked up the receiver of the pushbutton phone on the desk and dialed by punching the but- tons. The call went through instantly. “Gino Goldberg here,” he said into the mouthpiece. He listened for a long moment, said, “I’ll call back,” and hung up. “The computer hasn’t replied yet,” he told us.

“I thought it was supposed to be so goddamn fast!" “Evidently the factors it must weigh are complex beyond our comprehension.” Goldberg puffed complacently on his pipe. “I apologize for the imposition of nudity,” he said. “Particularly to you, Miss Dix.”

“Don’t bother. I’m not ashamed of my body.”

“Your clothing had to be removed because of the laundry marks,” Goldberg explained. “It will be disposed of separately. In case the cornputer’s decision is negative, we can’t afford to leave any clues as to your identity.”

“What about fingerprints?” I wondered.

“Measures have been taken to ensure that there won’t be enough of you left to provide any sort of identification—-including fingerprints.”

That was a cheery note! “Just how . . . ?” I left the question hanging.

“An excessive amount of explosives has been planted in this room, as well as in other strategic locations throughout the basement of the building. Enough to destroy the foundation and bring down the building itself. Should the decision go against you, then you two will be here when the explosion occurs. You wil1—- quite literally—be blown to smithereens. There will be nothing left of your persons, and no signs of the shackles holding you.”

“What about these irons and the nooses? Aren’t you overdoing it?”

“Not at all. You see, you’ll be alone here when the explosion occurs. Precautions had to be taken so that you don’t take advantage of the lack of supervision and try to escape.”

“Now, why would we do a thing like that? After all, we want to cooperate,” I told him sarcastically.

“Is it some kind of time bomb then?” Liberty asked.

“No. The bomb will be detonated by me after I leave the building. I shall simply dial the number of this phone”—Goldberg patted the pushbutton executive telephone sitting on the desk—“from a safe distance, of course, and the ring will trigger the explosion.”

“Ingenious. But why go to all that trouble? Why blow up a whole building just to kill us?”

“The building will be blown up anyway. Even if it’s decided that you’re to live. If not, then it’s simply a matter—if you’ll pardon the expression -- of killing two birds with one stone.”

“I don’t suppose you’d like to explain the reason for destroying the building.”

“As a matter of fact, Mr. Victor, my instructions are to do precisely that. As I understand it, time is of the essence to everyone concerned. For that reason, and on the assumption that if you’re allowed to live your continued efforts may work to the benefit of our organization, I’ve been instructed to impart to you certain information that may be of help to you in those efforts.”

“And if I’m not allowed to live?”

“Then the information will be of no use to you, while your knowledge can be of no possible harm to us, since you’ll be dead.”

“Seems fair enough.”

“The hell it does!” Liberty’s naked ebony breasts quivered with indignation.

“Perhaps not.” Gino Goldberg shrugged. He sat back in the swivel chair behind the kidney-shaped desk and puffed his pipe. Calmly he began relating the facts it had been decided I was to be told.

He explained that the organization he represented was not merely concerned with Seattle. It was a nation-wide network with a finger in many mud pies. Gambling was perhaps its largest interest, but it had many others. Gambling, however, was the specific bailiwick of Gino Goldberg.

“This syndicate—-this organization--we’re talking about the Mafia, aren’t we?” I pinned it down.

“We don’t like to define it that way. It’s bad public relations. ‘Mafia’ has such nasty connotations. But I won’t dispute your conclusion, Mr. Victor.”

Gino Goldberg went on to describe some of the technical aspects of the gambling operation, and just why the telephone plays such an important part. There are two major reasons. The first is that the vast majority of bets are phoned in to bookmakers. The second is the need for instant and continual communication between syndicate operations around the country and regional headquarters where points are laid off and odds are established.

Chiefly, two kinds of action are determined by this communication. The first is for sporting events such as baseball, football, basketball, boxing matches, etc. In the early stages of betting—the equivalent of horse racing’s “morning line,” as it were-—the odds and the point breaks are set arbitrarily on the basis of past performance, conditions of players, general popularity, and so forth. But as the bets start coming in, adjustments are made in order to maintain the syndicate’s edge over the action. This requires a constant reevaluation by regional computers as the day progresses. Bets are laid off? in farflung cities to maintain the balance. Fast communications-either by telephone or telegraph—are the one absolutely necessary ingredient to the operation.

The second major area concerns horse bets. Here the timing of communications is even more vital. The results of a race on the East Coast must be made available to gamblers on the West Coast in time for them to place their bets on the next race. Syndicate odds have to be adjusted to stay in line with pari-mutuel odds or the bangtail bettors will squawk. At the same time, quick adjustments have to be made to ensure that the edge isn’t lost. With an average of eight horses in each race, eight races at each track, and perhaps eight tracks running simultaneously around the country, the complexities involved are obvious. Again, communication is the key to controlling the action.

However, vital as it is, telephone communication is also the Achilles’ heel of syndicate gambling operations. It’s the area most vulnerable to detection by police. All the cops have to do is find one horse player and trace the number he calls. If they’re after bigger game than the local bookmaker, they may forgo a raid and tap the bookmaker’s line. Many a cop is on the pad to forestall just such actions, or to supply the tipoff when they’re in the offing.

What it adds up to is that the syndicate is constantly seeking better and more devious ways to improve its communications setup. In the beginning, some of the dodges used were quite simple. One of the earliest of these was known as a “breadbox.”

The “breadbox” was nothing more than a simple homemade switching device. The syndicate would have a telephone installed in some poor old lady’s digs, giving her a couple of dollars a week to “take their calls.” But the phone would never ring, which is where the “breadbox” came in. Gamblers who dialed the number would have their calls rerouted by the “breadbox,” and the phone would be answered in the bookie parlor. If the cops traced the number and staged a raid, all they’d find would be the innocent old lady and a dead phone.

However, as the syndicate operations grew, so did their need for more complicated telephone devices. They began courting Ma Bell technicians. Soon, in all the major cities, one or two switching-station employees were on the take. All they had to do was rearrange a few relays here and there, and the syndicate had the access to the long-lines it needed to keep the action under its thumb. Also, local bettors dialing the syndicate number might be routed through a whole complex of tandems without being aware of it, in order to make it more difficult to trace their calls.

Most recently, according to Gino Goldberg, the syndicate had become interested in ways of increasing its gambling profits by millions of dollars a year. Telephone communications were their single biggest operational expense, larger even than payoffs to the police. If a way could be found to function without that expense, the benefits would be immense. The possibility led them straight to the world of phone phreaks.

“It was my assignment,” Gino Goldberg told us. “We knew vaguely about M.F.-ers and how the phone phreaks were using them to outwit Ma Bell. What we were looking for was one that would suit our particular needs. We wanted to be able to hold long-distance lines open for hours at a time and to set up conference calls to a central national headquarters. We figured that if we put in a computer, we could stabilize all the action around the country and increase our edge by a half, maybe even a whole percentage point. That would mean perhaps an extra million a week right there. As you can see, Mr. Victor, there was more involved than just cutting our phone bills. We even envisioned toll-free calls from bettors—we’d mute them at the bookmaker’s end—as a way of encouraging more business. My job was to find just the right device and to arrange to have it mass-produced for us.”

“And that led you to Tom Swift,” I guessed. “That’s what all your calls to him were about.”

“Not at first. Swift came later. Our first contact was with a phone phreak known as ‘Bugs Ameche.’ He claimed to have just the device we needed. He asked for a ten-thousand-dollar advance to put it into production for us. We gave it to him.”

“What happened?”

“It turned out that Ameche didn’t have the device himself. I don’t think he actually intended to cheat us. In my judgment he would have been too afraid to do that. He simply knew that Swift had the device and overestimated his ability to persuade Swift to part with it. Generally, you see, phone phreaks trade off information and technical discoveries quite freely. But in this case, Swift balked at revealing the secrets of his invention to Ameche. Finally Ameche had no choice but to apprise me of the situation. That’s when I began calling Swift directly.”

“What happened to Ameche?”

“Nothing yet. But his prognosis, I’m afraid, is negative. He tried to ingratiate himself with us by informing us of the device perfected by Phoebe Phreeby. However, he’s a free spender, and confesses himself unable to return the ten thousand dollars we advanced him. It wouldn’t be good business for us to let Mr. Ameche go unpunished.”

“You still haven’t explained why you’re blowing up this building,” I remembered.

“It has to do with our inability to obtain Phoebe Phreeby’s device in time to forestall certain police actions here in Seattle. You see, Mr. Victor, our informant on the police-department gambling squad told us a short while back that one of our bookmaking establishments was under wiretap surveillance. A raid was being postponed because the police were hopeful that the tap would uncover the location of the syndicate’s area head- quarters. We are sitting in those headquarters at the moment, Mr. Victor. If we’d obtained the Phreeby M.F.-er, it would have enabled us to mislead the wiretap and to successfully conceal this location. Now, according to our police informant, it’s too late for that. Our equipment is spread out over this entire subbasement. It would be too costly, and there isn’t time to move it. Therefore, we must destroy it.”

“And the rest of the building as well,” I reminded him.

“A necessary red herring.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Gino Goldberg glanced at his watch. “I’ll explain in a moment,” he said. “Right now it’s time to call back and find out what the computer had decided regarding you.”

Liberty sucked in her breath sharply; her naked black bosom inflated with fear. I bit my lip and stared at Gino Goldberg. He picked up the telephone and punched the buttons. He turned his face away from us to speak.

“Goldberg here,” he said into the mouthpiece. There was silence as he listened. Then he hung up the phone and turned back to us. "

His face told the story. The laugh lines were curved downwards. “I’m sorry,” he said.

It was thumbs down!

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Death by computerization! It offended my humanism. And my humanism is a very personalized thing—very personalized indeed!-—particularly when it affects me personally. Call it a quirk. The imminent prospect of dying offended me!

I made my feelings known to Gino Goldberg. Liberty echoed them. But he merely sighed and puffed on his pipe. Like Rockefeller, Eichmann, and Calley, he was only doing his job!

“About blowing up the building . . .” he said.

“The hell with the building!” I said.

The longer he stayed there talking, the longer we stayed alive. It was something to keep in mind. “Yeah. Tell us about the building,” I agreed. “I’m dying to hear.”

Liberty winced at my choice of words.

“In addition to our headquarters being in this subbasement, four of the upper floors are occupied by the offices of one of the most prominent manufacturers of napalm in the country,” Goldberg told us. “Because of this, in recent weeks groups of militant antiwar protesters have been picketing this building daily. Just before the building blows up, a call will be placed from a pay booth to the police. The caller will tell them that the building is about to blow up and that it is the work of the Weathermen. I might add that the destruction will be so complete that there will be nothing to point the finger at the syndicate, nor to indicate our involvement in any way.” Goldberg looked at his watch again. “And now I’m afraid that it’s time for me to leave,” he announced.

He unplugged the receiver mechanism from the telephone and put it on the far side of the kidney-shaped desk. “A necessary precaution,” he informed us. “I wouldn’t want you to try to knock it off the cradle so that I get a busy signal when I call later. We’ve gone to a lot of trouble to arrange for the ring to detonate the explosives.”

“How the hell could we knock it off when we’re chained hand and foot to these chairs? We can’t even move our heads without strangling ourselves,” Liberty remarked bitterly.

“Quite true.” He flipped the switch that rendered the executive phone operable without the receiver. It was one of those gizmos with a pickup amplifier that allowed the user to speak into it from anywhere in the room. Likewise, it had a speaker that magnified the voice of the party on the other end. “All set to receive incoming calls now,” Goldberg informed us cheerfully.

“I’m not taking any calls today,” I decided.

“I’m afraid you have no choice. . . . Let’s see now, where shall I put it?”

“Why does that matter?”

“It probably doesn’t. But just to be on the safe side . . .” Goldberg explained his reasoning. “You see, the most powerful of the bombs is attached right here to the bottom of the phone.” He turned it upside down to show us.

The device attached there was encased in a metal container. It was no larger than a pack of matches.

“Don’t let the size mislead you,” Goldberg told us merrily. “There’s enough high explosive here to disintegrate a Sherman tank. Still, we don’t want any identifiable remnants of you two left. So, to be ab-so-lute-ly sure . . .”

Goldberg pulled over a long coffee table and placed it between us. It was slightly lower than my straining naked thighs. The way Liberty and I had been placed, facing each other, the low table now fit lengthwise between both our spread legs, providing a sort of support for the spillover of our rear ends—and for my genitals as well. Goldberg placed the pushbutton executive phone with its deadly load midway between us on the low table, well out of reach of both of us.

“That should do it,” he proclaimed. He puffed a cloud of smoke from his pipe. “You’ll be hearing from me,” he said as he headed for the steel door.

“Don’t call us; we’ll call you!” Liberty pleaded.

“When?” I asked more practically.

“About forty minutes,” Goldberg told us. “I live in the suburbs. There’s a little roadhouse on the way that stays open twenty-four hours a day. I’ll stop there, have a drink, and make the call.”

“Why not have two drinks?” I suggested. “And then maybe two more for the road. I’ll buy!” I added desperately .

“Sorry, Mr. Victor.” He exited, Death in tweeds, off to arrange the day’s body count. The steel door locked shut behind him.

“Congenial fellow,” I remarked.

“Sure. For a wake!” Liberty reminded me. “What are we going to do?”

That was the question, all right. I thought about it—- hard! And the more I thought, the more it narrowed down to the fact that if there was any chance at all, it depended on somehow getting access to that death-wired pushbutton telephone. If I could just get at it, maybe I could disconnect the detonator mechanism set to go off when it rang.

“Spread your legs,” I told Liberty.

“I’ve met horny men before, but you’re ridiculous! Besides, no choice of mine, but they are spread.”

“Wider. As wide as you can.”

“If you’re trying to check my teeth, why don’t I just open my mouth?” she inquired acidly. But she did as I asked.

It took the pressure off her end of the coffee table. I squeezed my knees together around the edges of the table as tightly as I could and raised them. The table didn’t budge.

I took a deep breath and leaned my head back to get leverage while trying to raise the table with my knees again. The noose cut into my windpipe, and I damn near blacked out from the pressure of the choking. But this time it worked. The phone slid down all the way to my end of the table. When I let go and started to breathe again, it was wedged between my widespread thighs.

“Man!” Liberty exclaimed. “I thought your eyes were going to pop right out of their sockets!”

I wasted five precious minutes trying to raise the phone with my thighs. I thought if I could manipulate it, somehow I might manage to disconnect the explosive mechanism. Just how I was going to accomplish that, I wasn’t sure. Maybe by scraping it on the table. Maybe by going for it with my teeth—-in which case I surely would have strangled to death before I got in nibble number one. I was pretty desperate. But there was no way.

“You’ll never disconnect it like that,” Liberty realized.

“You got any better ideas?”

Now it was her turn to think. “Listen,” she said slowly, “I think maybe I do. You’ve been trying to get at that explosive gizmo. But maybe there’s another way to keep it from going off.”

“Such as?”

“If the line is busy, then the phone can’t ring. Right?”

“Right.”

“And if the phone can’t ring, that gizmo can’t be triggered. Right?”

“Right.”

“Well, then . . .” Liberty sat back, White teeth flashing a smile of relief from her beautiful black countenance.

“Ingenious. But I have one little question.”

“What’s that?”

“How do I arrange for the line to be busy?”

“By pushing the ‘O’ button for ‘Operator.’ And when you get her, you can tell her our predicament and get her to send help.”

“That’s an excellent idea. My compliments.”

“I studied deductive logic in college,” Liberty told me modestly.

“And did it teach you just how a man trussed up the way I am is supposed to push a button?” I inquired.

“I can’t solve all your problems for you,” Liberty told me huffily.

On the face of it, her suggestion seemed just as impractical as my previous plan. Nevertheless, I gave it some thought. There was no way to get at that button with fingers or toes, knees or nose. It was in proximity to only one part of my anatomy. Despondently, I glanced down at my flacid penis resting on the table only an inch or so from the phone’s pushbuttons. Right about then, I’d gladly have swapped it for a pinky finger. Useless damn thing!

Or was it?

Eureka!

My heart beating faster with hope, I studied the distance between its tip and the pushbuttons. Yes! Tumescent, it should definitely reach! I passed this information on to Liberty and explained what I had in mind.

“You sure you’re not being overoptimistic?” she inquired.

That hurt. She of all people should have known better. She’d certainly had ample opportunity to judge for herself when we’d made love back in the woods.

“We’ll see,” I told her stiffly. The stiffness, however, wasn’t matched below the waist.

“I don’t see anything!” Liberty remarked after a couple of minutes.

“I’m trying.”

“Well, try harder.”

“I need inspiration.”

“That’s pretty damn insulting!” she told me hotly. “I’m sitting here mother-naked with my legs spread, and you can’t find inspiration? Why don’t you admit you just can’t cut the mustard?”

“I never had this problem before.”

“That’s what they all say!”

“Well, I can’t help it. It’s been an exhausting night. It’s been hard on my nervous system.”

“Better it should be hard on your you-know-what. I should have expected this,” she sighed. “One of my psych courses in college, they said some degree of impotency is just about universal with white men.”

“That’s a racist remark!”

“Complain to the NAACP.” She shrugged.

“Listen, we can’t afford to argue,” I reminded her. “I’m not just out to prove my manhood. Both our lives are at stake. We’ve got to cooperate.”

“I guess you’re right.” Liberty softened. “But what do you want me to do?”

“Try being seductive instead of antagonistic.”

“I can’t move. How can I be seductive?”

“Talk sexy. Maybe that will help.”

“All right.” She took a deep breath and started talking. Her voice was low, warm, throaty, crooning, filled with sensuality. “Let me tell you about me and Phoebe Phreeby,” she began. “We were more than just friends. I guess I was pretty naive when I went to work in the Darnell Public Library. I’d had experiences with men, but they were pretty limited. I didn’t even know that it was possible for two women to . . .”

Listening hard, my eyes wandered over Liberty’s body as she continued speaking. Her breathing was already quickening with the reminiscence, the firm black flesh of her breasts seeming to ripple as she sucked in air and exhaled. It was warm, and a small trickle of perspiration formed an arrow leading to the deep, dark cleavage of her bosom. As she talked, the high-pointing purple nipples hardened and lengthened, and the perfect red circles around them became perceptibly wider.

“. . . Phoebe Phreeby was one of the most attractive girls I ever met,” Liberty was saying now. “She was tall, like me, and we were pretty much the same size. We used to wear each other’s clothes. Still, there were differences. Her breasts, for instance. They were as large as mine, but they were shaped differently. Pointier, not as round, more like ice-cream cones. And they were more widely separated; you could see the space between; the cleavage wasn’t hidden like mine is. Her nipples were a very light, delicate shade of pink, large and always very soft, even when she got excited. And there were no aureoles around them at all. . . .”

My eyes were on the area below Liberty’s flat belly now. Looking at the triangle of glossy curls, I was remembering how fine and soft-—like fur—-it was to the touch. The manner in which the coffee table was wedged under her bottom had thrust her mons veneris upward prominently. Even normally, the mound was carried high on her groin, plump and cleanly cleft. In this, position the purplish lips were wide apart, the red clitty clearly visible. I could see the moistness beginning to gather there as she described Phoebe Phreeby; I remembered how warm and syrupy it was.

“. . . generally sleeker than my body is. Phoebe was more slim-hipped, her legs longer perhaps, and more tapered. On the other hand, her ass was larger; it stuck out more in back; she couldn’t keep it from bouncing when she moved. Her hair was a glorious shade of red, and she wore it long and loose. Her complexion was that translucent shade of white that only true redheads seem to have; it was the perfect contrast to mine. There was a sprinkling of freckles—hardly noticeable at all —across the bridge of her nose. Her face was heart- shaped, the cheekbones high, the eyes wide, their color either blue or green, depending on what she was wearing, or the lighting, or sometimes just her mood. But most of all, I remember her mouth. . . .”

My own eyes were closed now. I was envisioning Phoebe Phreeby as Liberty recalled her. I was imagining that mouth, with its pronounced red lips, its dewy warmth, its perpetual pout and small, sharp, talented tongue. I was seeing the two girls as they were that first time when Phoebe seduced Liberty.

“. . . I was sleeping over at her apartment,” Liberty said. “We’d had a few drinks before going to bed. I remember Phoebe lent me this white silk nightie, short and semitransparent. Hers was short too, green nylon, and very low-cut. I could feel the heat of her body when she climbed into bed with me. . . .”

I was aware of a growing tumescence as I listened, my eyes still closed. It was our one chance to save ourselves! I thrust the awareness from my mind. I had to concentrate on the scene Liberty’s words were building on the screen behind my eyelids.

“. . . thought it was an accident when Phoebe’s hand pressed down on my breast. But it stayed there. Her fingers caressed my nipples with a light, delicate touch. Of course, then I knew it was no accident. But I’d had those drinks, and it felt so good, and I didn’t really want her to stop. . . .”

Hanging on her words, I watched the screen. Red hair swirled around ivory shoulders, trailing over white skin and aroused black flesh. Phoebe’s pout-mouth went to the pulse at the base of the ebony column of Liberty’s neck. It stayed there a long time. Liberty squirmed. Her nipples grew hard. Purple tips and red aureoles were revealed clearly, straining against the white silk of the nightie.

Phoebe pulled back and hovered over Liberty. The sharp bullets of her breasts spilled out over the top of the low-cut green nightgown she wore. She took one of them in her hand, bent lower, and guided it so that the butter-soft pink nipple moved back and forth over one of Liberty’s long, erect purple breast tips where it distended the white silk.

Liberty gasped. Her body was on fire. Unthinkingly, her arms stretched out and her hands clasped around the back of Phoebe’s neck. She pulled her down so that their breasts were crushed together, nipple to nipple, with only the flimsy white silk between.

Phoebe kissed her on the lips then. At first she was gentle. But soon her darting tongue became quite bold, entwining with Liberty’s, flicking unexpectedly to provide one thrill after another. By the time the kiss was over, both girls were panting.

So was I. But I had to be sure. I needed the absolute maximum length. I couldn’t take a chance on acting prematurely and losing the erection. I kept my eyes shut tight and continued to listen.

“. . . can’t convey how exciting it was. Really, it takes a woman to really know just how and where to touch another woman. And Phoebe had had lots of experience. Plus the fact that it was taboo, which made i1 even more thrilling. It makes me hot just to talk about it. Her hands, her mouth, the heat of her flesh . . .”

Liberty detailed how she’d been carried away by the experience. I envisioned her mouth, opening. greedily, enveloping the conical white breast Phoebe offered. l tasted the soft, sweet pinkness of the nipple with her. I inhaled the perfumed lust musk of the redhead’s burning body. I could see the two of them embracing, pulling apart to doff their nighties, coming together again in a compulsive, convulsive spasm of passion.

Phoebe straddled her, sitting between her legs, pressing the fleshy cheeks of her bottom against the firm blackness of Liberty’s, grinding to establish clitoral contact. Liberty dug her nails into Phoebe’s white buttocks, pulling her closer, and at the same time rising from the hips until their pulsating lower lips were mingling their honeyed wetness.

They strained together in this position for a moment, Liberty’s plump black hips rotating frantically, Phoebe’s head tossing, red hair fanning out behind her, bullet breasts bobbling, low thrill moans whinnying from between her kiss-formed lips. But they couldn’t sustain it. Phoebe fell forward, sprawling over Liberty, and again they embraced and kissed-—mouth to mouth, white breasts stabbing against black, limbs entwined in a passionate tableau of ebony and ivory.

When the kiss was over, Phoebe slid down to the other end of the bed, her flaming curls at Liberty’s feet. She contrived to slip one leg under Liberty and stretch out so that their lower bodies were pressed tightly together with the legs like the blades of two pairs of scissors held axis to axis. Expertly, Phoebe manipulated the cores of their bodies so that Liberty’s clitoris was clutched and pressed against her own.

Phoebe caressed Liberty’s foot and sucked at the toes. Liberty, eyes shut, head tossing, fondled her own breasts in response to the sensations traveling up her body from below. She concentrated on the sensations provided by Phoebe’s hard clitty caressing her own. She felt her toes curl with the thrill of Phoebe’s nibbling. She pressed down hard, wanting to feel the erect, aroused clitoris fluttering inside her.

“. . . It happened for us both at the same time,” Liberty told me. “I never felt anything like it before. It was as if everything inside me exploded. It washed over both of us—-once, twice, three times! It felt like it would go on forever!” Her voice was coming out in gasps now.

I opened my eyes. They focused on Liberty’s upthrust tunnel of love. It was awash with re-created passion. The purplish lips were vibrating like a harp. The red clitty had doubled its size. She was on the verge of orgasm.

I wasn’t too far from it myself. And that, I remembered, would have been fatal. It was much more important to utilize my erection than to relieve it. I forced myself to look away from Liberty, to shut my ears to the groans accompanying her approach to climax, and to concentrate on the pushbutton executive phone clutched between my thighs on the low coffee table in front of me.

I gauged the distance. I prayed for genital muscular control. I willed my penis to action.

It moved! It leaped out! It struck the panel a hair-breadth from the button marked “O” for “Operator”!

“. . . never forget that feeling when I knew I was coming. . . .” Liberty was groaning.

I concentrated. I willed it to lash out again. This time it hit just above the button, still barely missing it!

“. . . and I could feel Phoebe bursting and about to come again herself. . . .” Liberty’s thighs were a blur of ebony motion rubbing against each other.

One more time! I watched Liberty to gain the fullest inspiration for my lust. When I felt it peak, I whipped my erect penis at the pushbutton panel again.

On the button!

The response was instantaneous. The operator’s voice came loud and clear from the speaker, filling the room. “Op-er-a-tor. May yi hel—lup yew?”

“NOW!” Liberty screamed. “NOW-NOW-NOW! I’M COMING!”

The mouthpiece amplifier picked it up. “I beg yaw-er par-don?” the operator responded.

For a minute I couldn’t answer. I’d gone limp with relief-—all of me! Finally I managed the words. “I want the police,” I said.

“Yew can di—al the po-lice di-rect-ly, sir,” the operator informed me. There was a click. She’d disconnected!

The line was dead!

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I do not love thee, Mother Bell!

The reason which I blush to tell.

But this I know—I know quite well—

I do not love thee, Mother Bell!

The line was dead! And so were we. Dead, that is! If our lives depended on my manhood, we were dead! The outlook was decidedly limp. . . .

“What happened?” Liberty had come down to earth.

“The operator hung up,” I told her despondently.

“Well, get her back!”

“I can’t.”

Her eyes followed mine. “I see.” But Lrberty wasn’t about to give up. “Look at me!” she commanded. And keep looking!”

Dully, I focused my eyes on her.

“Look at my mouth!”

I looked at her mouth. The lips were formed in an “O.” Her tongue reached out full length and laved a wide area including parts of her cheeks, the upper portion of her chin, and her lower and upper lips. The sensual message was clear. . . . Memories, memories . . .

“Now, look at my breasts!”

I did. Slowly, independently, they began to move in small, opposing circles. The red roseates once again widened; the purple nipples extended and twirled. . . . Mammaries, mammaries . . .

“Now, look down below!”

I looked. Her ebony thighs were quivering. The high, juicy mound was moving, the downy black hair covering it rippling like a field of dark wheat in a summer breeze. The purplish lips were actually pursed, contracting and expanding like a valve seeking a piston to draw into itself. Each time they opened, the blood-red polyp of her clitoris moved up and down rhythmically. I stared, entranced, for quite a while. . . .

“Now look at yourself!”

I lowered my eyes to my own groin.

Olé!

Things were looking up again!

I took no chances. I struck—so to speak—while the iron was hot. This time it hit right on target first try.

“Op-er-a-tor. May yi hel-lup yew?”

“Don’t hang up!” I yelled. “Whatever you do, don’t hang up!”

“I beg yaw-er par-don?”

“Just don’t hang up! This is an emergency!”

“I wi-yull con-nect yew with the e-mer-gen-cy sew-per-vi-sor, sir.”

There was a click and then a buzzing. For a horrible moment I thought the line was going to go dead again. But then another voice spoke.

“E-mer-gen-cy sew-per-vi-sor. What is the na-choor of yaw-er e-mer-gen-cy?”

“I can’t maintain an erection,” I confessed.

“I beg yaw-er par-don?”

“A hard-on, dammit! It’s already going down, and our lives depend on it!”

“Listen to him, lady!” Liberty urged.

“It is a-gay-yunst te-le-phone com-pa-ny po-li-cy to al-low the tray-uns-mish-shun of ob-uh-scene lan-goo-age o-er ow-er wi-yurs.”

“Shee-it!” I exploded.

“I wi-yull con-nect yew with the sew-per-vi-sor in char-uge of ob-uh-scene te-le-phone caw-ulls.”

More clicking and buzzing. Then: “Sew-per-vi-sor in char-uge of ob-uh-scene phone caw-ulls. How may we fuck yew?”

“Listen.” I forced myself to calm down. “I’ve got a problem.”

“I wi-yull con-nect yew with the e-mer-gen-cy sew-per-vi-sor.”

“No! Wait! I want to talk to you!”

“Is thi-yus an ob-uh-scene phone call, sir?”

“Screw! Piss! Cunt!” I screamed.

“Balls! Prick! Cocksucker!” Liberty chimed in.

“Tha-yut is bet-ter.” I could hear her breathing heavily. “It is my du-ty to in-form yew tha-yut it is a-gay-yunst the law for un-aw-thor-ized per-son-nel to use ob-uh-scene lan-goo-age o-ver the te-le-phone,” she informed me. “If yew persist, thi-yus caw-ull wi- yull be tra-yussed.”

“Good! Now we’re getting somewhere. Trace the call! Inform the police. They’re the ones I’m trying to call anyway!”

“Yew can di-yal the po-lice di-rect-ly, sir.”

“I can’t dial them directly, dammit! I’m tied hand and foot! I want you to get them for me! Hell, I don’t even know their number.”

“Di-yal faw-er-one-one for in-for-ma-shun. They wi-yull look up the num-ber faw-er yew, sir.”

And——you guessed it!—the line went dead again! I was impotent with despair. And the flaccidity, it seemed, must doom us. However, as before, Liberty came to the rescue.

“When I was a teen-age girl, I was in this movie theater once and this man sat down next to me and put his hand on my knee.” She was speaking urgently, rapidly, but her voice nevertheless managed to be filled with sensuality. “I was in a horny mood that day; I didn’t protest; I didn’t move away; instead, I let my own hand fall into his lap. . . .”

I suddenly realized that Liberty was making it up as she went along. I banished the thought from my mind. I concentrated on making it real.

“. . . He put his arm around my shoulder. I was wearing a low-cut blouse, and his hand dipped right into it. He pushed the bra aside and squeezed my nipples like he was playing marbles. It made me squirm and wriggle; I felt like I was on fire. Where my hand was in his lap, it was rock hard and jumping around like crazy. . . . He put his hand up under my skirt. The honey was flowing, thick and warm. He pulled down my panties. Three fingers . . . I was beside myself. I unzipped his fly. It was immense! . . . He made me sit on his lap, facing him. When he shoved it up inside me, I thought I’d break in two. His fingers were poking my behind, his teeth were biting my breasts hard, and I was sliding up and down on that gigantic thing for dear life. . . .”

She’d done it! Old Peter was standing at attention again! Fair frothing at the mouth, too! Obediently, he punched out four-one-one.

“In-for-ma-shun. May yi hel-lup yew?”

“. . . reaming me with that giant prick and sucking my titties sore and playing with my ass and . . .” Liberty kept right on with her fantasy.

“I wi-yull con-nect yew with the sew-per-vi-sor in char-ruge of ob-uh-scene te-le-phone caw-ulls.”

“No! Hold it! I want Information! I want the police! . . . Psst!” I hissed at Liberty. “You can stop now. I’ve got Information.”

“. . . tongue in my mouth . . . fingers pinching the nipples of my breasts . . .” She was oblivious.

“Di-yal ni-yun-one-one for police headquarters,” Information told me—-and hung up.

“. . . pounding my ass . . . rubbing up my clitty . . . overflowing my vagina. . . .”

My mind clung to the picture Liberty was painting. The erection was sustained. I willed it to spring. Nine!

“. . . hot . . . Wet . . . sucking . . . panting . . . hurting . . . moaning . . .”

One!

“. . . scratching . . . pinching . . . biting . . . ramming . . . clawing . . . slapping . . . squeezing . . . splitting . . .”

One!

“Police Headquarters. Sergeant Padd speaking. Please state your name, address, phone number, and the nature of your business in that order.”

“My name is Steve Victor.” I read off the number of the executive telephone. “There’s a Mafia gambling syndicate and it’s about to blow up. . . .” I knew I was babbling, but I couldn’t help it.

“State your address first.” Sergeant Padd was annoyed. “Then the nature of your business.”

“I don’t have any address. I don’t live in Seattle.”

“No known place of residence. Uh-huh. Well, then, state the address from which you are calling.”

“I don’t know the address here. I’ve never been here before.”

“Look, Mac—the police are here to help you. But we can’t help you if you don’t cooperate with us.”

“Dammit! There’s a bomb about to go off!”

“Where?”

“I told you! I don’t know the address!”

“All right. Calm down. I’ll connect you with the Emergency Bomb Squad,” Sergeant Padd told me.

The wire crackled. . . .

“Emergency Bomb Squad. We are sorry, but all circuits are busy at this time. Your number will be obtained from Headquarters’ switchboard and a member of the Bomb Squad will call you back imme—”

“NO! NO!” I screamed. “DON’T CALL BACK! If you do, you’1l set off the bomb! Whatever you do, DON’T CALL BACK!”

“This is a recording. At the sound of the ‘beep,’ you will be disconnected. However, repeat, you will be called back immedi—”

“NO! PLEASE, NO!” I begged.

Beep!

Go reason with a recording! Again I’d been disconnected; again the line was dead. I looked at the phone sitting there.

Just sitting there waiting for Death to return the call!

CHAPTER NINETEEN

When I was a puberty-ridden kid, I used-to think there was something wrong with me. Then, around the age of sixteen, I stumbled on the works of Dr. Kinsey (a circumstance not unrelated to my subsequently ta ing up O.R.G.Y. as a career), and realized I wasn’t all that unusual. I wasn’t the only male around who reacted to the emotion of fear by sprouting an uncontrollable erection.

With adulthood came more control. Ordinary fear no longer prompted sexual arousal. Only in situations of extreme panic did the syndrome recur.

Now, with the chances of the phone ringing our death knell having doubled, just such an extreme panic seized me. That which in my guilt-tilled teens had been an embarrassment, now promised to be a life-saver. It was abetted by Liberty’s still ongoing litany:

“. . . tongue to tongue . . . breast to chest . . . groin to groin . . . heat to heat . . . flesh to flesh . . . lust to lust . . .”

Long and steel-hard with anxiety, forged by the realization that time was running out, my panic-inflated penis managed one more effort. It sprang to my bidding! Three times—Nine! One! One!

“Police Headquarters. Sergeant Padd speaking. Please state your name . . .”

“This is Steve Victor again!” I yelled into the speaker. “Don’t hang up! And if you do hang up, don’t call back!”

“You were told the Bomb Squad would get back to you,” Sergeant Padd grumbled. “There are certain procedures that have to be followed in police work, you know.”

“I’m sorry! Just don’t hang up! This is an urgent situation!”

“. . . being raped . . . grunting and shoving . . . forcing and loving . . .”

“Sexual assault,” Sergeant Padd deduced. “I’ll connect you with the Vice Squad.”

The speaker snap-crackle-popped. Then a new voice came over it. “Vice Squad. Lieutenant De Sade speaking. State your name, phone number, address, and the nature of the assault you are undergoing—oral, anal, or simple genital -- in that order.”

“. . . forced fellatio . . . cunnilingus . . . sodomy . . .”

“A little slower, please,” Lieutenant de Sade re- quested. “I’m trying to get it all down.”

“. . . tonguing my titties . . . titillating my tush . . . tickling my tickler . . .”

“Just the facts, ma’am. . . .”

“Listen to me!” I shouted over Liberty’s recitation. “We’re being held prisoner by a Mafia gambling syndicate, and any minute now—”

“You want the Gambling Squad. I’ll transfer the call.” Buzz! Grackle! Grunch! Buzz-zz!

“Gambling Squad. Inspector Greeknik speaking. . . . The winner of the third race at Pimlico paid five-sixty to win, four-forty to place, and two-eighty to show. Old Denture ran second, paying . . .”

“. . . genital excitation . . . mammary manipulation . . . vaginal penetration . . .”

“I think you want the Vice Squad,” Inspector Greeknik interrupted the race results to say.

“No I don’t! I want you!”

“Sorry. I can’t tie up this wire,” Inspector Greeknik explained. “The Morning Line from Havre de Grace is due any minute.”

“Listen to me, dammit! I’m talking to you from the headquarters of the Mafia gambling syndicate in downtown Seattle, and—”

“Oh; Is that you, Luigi? I didn’t recognize your voice. But you shouldn’t call me here. You know the heat’s on.”

“For Christ’s sake! They’re trying to kill us!”

“Besides, I don’t have time to talk now, fellah.”

“It’s a matter of life and death!”

“I’ll connect you with the Homicide Division, Luigi.”

Buzz. Buzz-zz. Buzz-zz-zz. Buzz-zz-zz-zz! BANG!

“Homicide Division. Detective Slaughter speaking.” BANG! BANG! “Please state whether this is a perpetrator or a victim speaking.” BANG! BANG! BANG!

“. . . stabbed me to the quick . . . in to the hilt . . . again and again, brutally . . . tearing my flesh . . . a giant dagger plunging deep inside me until I felt I was going to faint . . .”

“A victim. I see.” BANG! BANG!

“What’s that noise in the background?” I wondered.

“Target practice. We always start out the day that way in homicide. The boys stick a picture of Mayor Lindsay up on the wall and shoot away at it.” BANG! BANG! BANG! PING! “Dammit, Buckley, watch it! You just nicked my shield!”

“But Lindsay’s the mayor of New York,” I reminded Detective Slaughter. “That’s clear across the country from Seattle. Why him?”

“Word gets around. Next week we’re putting up a picture of Knapp and his commission. That should really inspire the boys.” BANG! BANG! BANG! “Lis- ten, I ain’t got time to chitchat. What’s your problem? You a murderer or a murderee?”

“Column B. The Mafia’s going to kill us.”

“How?” BANG! BANG! BANG!

“With a bomb.”

“Then you want the Emergency Bomb Squad. I’ll switch you.” BANG! BANG! PING! “Dammit, Rocky! . . .”

“Emergency Bomb Squad. Chief Chicken here.”

“I want to report a bomb.”

“Detonated or un?”

“It could go off any minute.”

“Un. . . . I see. Well, be sure to notify us as soon as it explodes.”

“Wait a minute! Can’t you do something before it explodes?”

“Sorry. That’s not our policy.”

“What do you mean? Why the hell not?”

“Listen,” Chief Chicken explained. “Do you know how much it costs the taxpayers to train a policeman? Not to mention the cost of special training for the Bomb Squad. It’s maybe a twenty-thousand-dollar investment. You think we’re going to jeopardize that investment letting one of our men fool around with some live bomb?”

“But what’s the Bomb Squad for?”

“Well, certainly not to risk our necks foolishly. Don’t you know there’s a shortage of qualified police officers today? Besides, I would never betray the trust my men have in me by ordering one of them to fool around with a live bomb. Those things are dangerous!”

“You’re telling me!”

“So just call back when the thing blows,” Chief Chicken told me.

“There won’t be enough left of me to call back.”

“Well, don’t fret. Somebody will call. They always do. ”

Some consolation! “It’s a helluva way to run a Bomb Squad!” I snarled.

“You got complaints? I’ll give you Sergeant Padd. He’ll tell you how to file with the Complaint Review Board. . . .”

“Sergeant Padd speaking. State your name, address, phone number, and . . .”

“It’s me again,” I interrupted him.

“Victor? Now, you listen to me! You got this whole department in an uproar! Red alerts bouncing around from Vice to Homicide to Gambling to Narcotics to—”

“Narcotics? Why Narcotics?”

“You’re a junkie, Victor!”

“I am not!” I protested. “I’m not a junkie!”

“We’ve had lots of experience around here, Victor. You think We don’t know a junkie when we see one?”

“But you haven’t seen me!” I reminded him.

“Hear one,” Sergeant Padd amended.

“It’s not true! I—”

“. . . thrill upon thrill upon thrill building ecstasy . . . my body on fire . . . mind-blowing, brain-fragmenting lust . . .”

“Not true, hey? And I suppose you didn’t turn on that girl with you! Go on! Deny it!”

“I don’t deny it. I confess! I’m a hophead and a pusher! You name it! I’m guilty! Come and arrest me!” I pleaded. “Please come and arrest me!”

“You’ll just have to wait your turn, Victor! You know how widespread the narcotics problem is in this city? You think you’re the only one? Well, you’re not! Just wait! We’ll get to you. Just Wait your turn!” And Sergeant Padd hung up!

We were right back where we started from! Any second now the phone might ring and blow us to smithereens. And I was so disgusted I was ready to give up and let it!

Not so Liberty Dix! Never say die! That was Liberty! “I’ve always wanted to rape a man . . . to tear off his clothes . . . to force his face between my legs . . . to feel his fear turn to hardness with the licking . . . to twist and pull and bend that hardness while my juices flowed over his slavering jaws. . . .”

Again? A stirring? A hardness? . . . Well, whaddaya know?

“. . . to whip his ass . . . lash his balls . . . beat his meat. . .”

Erect and quivering! . . . Hallelujah!

“. . . pulsing . . . throbbing . . . burning . . . quaking . . . exploding . . . coming . . . COMING . . . COMING!”

Up, up, and away! It sprang! for the pushbuttons! But--

It missed!

I couldn’t help it. The cannon fired! The discharge arched through the air and landed—Splat!—-on the entrance to Liberty’s honeybox. Thus our juices mingled. This time I’d really done it! Old Lucifer was a fallen angel! There was no chance he’d rise again before the telephone sounded the last trumpet!

I’d filled out our death certificate: Cause of Death — Premature Ejaculation.

Premature ejaculation!

What a way to go!

CHAPTER TWENTY

“Premature ejaculation,” Liberty realized. “What a way to come!”

“I’m sorry.” I mumbled the apology.

“The mark of the sexually immature male,” she clucked.

“It doesn’t happen very often. Honest,” I muttered, ashamed.

“Once is enough! Particularly this once! Just look at you!” Liberty was disgusted. “Now it’s really useless.’

I hung my head. . . . Both of them. . . .

“What do we do now?” Liberty sighed.

“We wait.”

“Wait for what? The phone to ring? The place to blow up around us?” Her beautiful black face was wreathed with fear.

As if in answer to her question, there was the sudden sharp sound of steel striking steel. Twice more, and then an ax blade appeared through the locked metal door facing us. It was withdrawn, the ax struck again, the lock collapsed, and the door sprang open.

Immediately the room filled with blue fuzz. From the center of it emerged a young man with long hair and very mod clothes. “Detective Snowpush of the Narcotics Division!” he announced himself. “This is a raid! Nobody leave the room!”

Nobody leave the room? “We’re chained hand and foot,” I pointed out.

“Cool! Very cool!” He wagged his finger under my nose. “But I know all the hypes.”

“I never thought I’d be so happy to see a narc I’d want to kiss him!” Liberty exulted.

“No payoffs, baby!” Detective Snowpush told her. “Now, where’d you stash the shit?”

“What shit?” Liberty was bewildered.

“The grass. Or whatever. Acid. Horse. Snow. Where is it?’

“Listen!” I claimed his attention. “There’s a bomb here! It’s rigged to go off when the phone rings! You’ve got to--”

“Hallucinating.” Detective Snowpush decided. “You two been tripping!”

“No! We—”

“Where’s the sugar?”

“There’s something in the spade chick’s lap,” one of the cops told him.

“Oh, yeah.” Detective Snowpush peered nearsightedly across the room at Liberty. “Looks like snowflakes, all right. Check it out,” he ordered the cop.

The cop went over to Liberty, knelt beside her, and studied the area under suspicion.

“Well?” Detective Snowpush was impatient.

“It ain’t snow,” the cop replied. “And it ain’t LSD neither.”

“What is it, then?”

“You wouldn’t believe it.” The cop stood up and scratched his head. He looked across at me, then back at Liberty, then at me again. “How the hell . . . ?” He walked over to Detective Snowpush and whispered in his ear.

“Are you sure?” Snowpush exclaimed aloud.

The cop nodded.

“Better notify the Vice Squad.”

The cop exited, closing what was left of the door behind him. A moment later it shot open again and a fresh contingent of bluecoats burst into the room, guns drawn. The paunchy man in civvies who seemed to be in charge of them stepped forward.

“Inspector Greeknik, Gambling Squad!” he bellowed. “This is a raid! Everybody up against the wall!”

Up against the wall? “We’re locked to these chairs; we can’t move.” I. called the circumstances to his attention. '

“Do as you’re told, and nobody’ll get hurt!”

“Hey, Greeknik,” Detective Snowpush greeted him. “Put me down for a fin on the nose, Teabiscuit, sixth at Belmont.”

The inspector took out a pad and pencil and made a notation. “ ‘Teabiscuit.’ You’re down,” he told Snowpush.

“Inspector Greeknik!” I babbled. “The telephone! There’s a bomb attached to it! Any minute now it—”

“Not my department,” Greeknik told me brusquely. “Only the Emergency Bomb Squad is authorized to fool around with infernal machines.”

“But –“

“Hey, Greeknik! What’s the Gambling Squad doing here anyway?” Detective Snowpush demanded. “This is a narcotics raid!”

“The hell you say! We’ve had this raid set for weeks,” Inspector Greeknik told him. “Everybody knows that. Hell, it’s been checked out with the commissioner and the godfather.”

“A bomb! A BOMB! A BOMB!”

They ignored me.

“We were here first!” Detective Snowpush stamped his foot. “And we’re not leaving!”

“All right. Just don’t get in our way!” Inspector Greeknik loomed over me. “Where’s Luigi?” he demanded.

“Let’s see those veins!” Detective Snowpush knelt on my other side and squinted at my arms.

“If you don’t do something about that bomb-—”

“Luigi called me from here before, so I know he was here! Now, what did you do with him?”

“Aha!” Snowpush squeezed my arm hard. “A ]unkie!”

I craned my head to look at my arm. It was covered with red welts. “That’s hives,” I explained. “It’s a fear reaction. When I panic, I get hives. And sometimes,” I babbled, “I get an erection.”

“And sometimes you don’t!” Liberty reminded me.

“What are you? Some kind of degenerate?” Inspector Greeknik backed away from me.

“You don’t know the half of it.” Detective Snowpush followed and whispered in his ear. He gestured toward Liberty, and Greeknik stared.

“I don’t believe it!” Greeknik exclaimed. “That’s depraved! . . . And pretty remarkable, too,” he added.

“All these hopheads are perverts,” Snowpush informed him.

“Aren’t you going to deactivate that bomb?” I whined plaintively.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG‘! Rapid fire shot away what was left of the door lock. “Detective Slaughter, Homicide Division!” Two heavy-duty police revolvers smoked from each of his hands. Another platoon of cops ushered him into the room. “Hands up! This is a raid!”

Hands up? “Our wrists are handcuffed behind our backs,” I told him meekly. “We can’t put our hands up.”

“Listen, Slaughter, this is my bust!” Snowpush protested.

“The Gambling Squad has priority!” Greeknik took issue.

“Homicide!” Slaughter insisted. “I outrank both of you.”

“Don’t try to lay that on me!” Snowpush said hotly. “You’re only a detective, same as I am.”

“That’s right, narc. Except for one thing.” Slaughter ended the argument. “I’ve got tenure!”

“If you’re in charge,” I came in quickly, “then do something about the bomb hooked up to the phone!”

“I’m Homicide, mister. That’ll have to wait for the Bomb Squad.”

“Don’t mind him,” Snowpush told Slaughter. “He’s turned on.”

“Where’s Luigi?” Greeknik thundered down at Liberty.

“Hey, Snowpush, that reminds me, you got any shit?” Detective ‘Slaughter asked.

“Sure. A nickel bag enough?”

“Is it any good?”

“Constantinople Gold. Top-grade hash. Confiscated it myself from a pusher fresh from Marseilles.”

“Yeah? Then make it a dime’s worth.”

“What happened to the pusher?” Greeknik wondered.

“He got oft. They couldn’t prove possession.” Snowpush winked. “Not a grain on him; it’s all right here.” He patted his hip.

“Hey, fellas,” I moaned. “The bomb . . .”

“Look at this, Slaughter.” Greeknik pointed at Liberty’s lap. “What do you make of it?”

Slaughter looked. His eyes went from Liberty’s black body to my white body and back to Liberty’s black body again. Then he pronounced judgement: “Mis- cegenation!”

“Racist!” Liberty glared at him.

“I’m from South Seattle.” Slaughter shrugged. He stuck a long finger under my nose. “Where’s the victim’s body?” he demanded.

“Where’s Luigi?”

“Where’s the shit?”

“Hello-hello-hello.” A voluptuous blond girl in hot pants made her entrance. “Did somebody call the Vice Squad?”

“Hi, Lieutenant DeCoi,” Greeknik greeted her. “Where’s De Sade? I thought he handled Vice raids.”

“He had tickets to a whipping. So he sent me instead.” Lieutenant DeCoi oscillated over to me, bent over my bedraggled penis lying on the table, and picked it up delicately between two well-manicured fingers.

“What have we here?” she inquired. “Poor little thing.”

“Up yours!” I snarled.

“An empty threat.” She let it drop.

“There’s why,” Inspector Greeknik told her. “Look at that.” He pointed at Liberty.

“Very nice.” Lieutenant DeCoi appraised Liberty’s naked body. “But I don’t swing that way.”

“He means that.” Detective Snowpush pointed more accurately.

Lieutenant DeCoi squinted. “Why, that’s . . . Yes, it is! I’d know it anywhere!” She fluttered her long eye-lashes at me. “Well, there’s certainly more to you than meets the eye.”

“Say, lieutenant,” Detective Slaughter said, “I hear Mama Macri got some new girls.”

“That’s right. Six virgins from L.A.”

“Come on, now! You couldn’t find six virgins in the whole state of California.”

“The Syndicate snatched a Brownie Patrol for her. But they’re not in the cribs yet. Not until the commissioner gets first pick.”

“Lucky commissioner! And that De Sade’s a lucky dog too. I should have joined the Vice Squad instead of Homicide. All that young stuff. . . .”

“THE BOMB!” Liberty and I shouted the reminder in unison.

Rotten eggs mixed with limburger cheese smeared over a dead skunk on a hot summer day! That was the odor which preceded the newcomer into the room. “Captain Quisling, Subversive Squad!” He sported a crumb-clogged beard, an Indian headband, filthy dungarees, and a torn white T-shirt with a decal of Ché Guevara scowling from its back. “This is a raid!”

“What the hell are you doing here?” Slaughter demanded, holding his nose. '

“Got an anonymous phone tip some radicals are going to blow this place up.” Pustulate pimples partied over the beardless portion of Captain Quisling’s cheeks and forehead.

“That was Gino Goldberg,” I told him. “And the bomb is-—”

Quisling ignored me. “Any more subversives here besides these two?” he asked Slaughter.

“Look under the bed.” Detective Slaughter shrugged.

“Where are the others?” Captain Quisling menaced Liberty. “Who’s behind this? How do you get your money in from Russia? Who’s your Cuban contact? Talk, and maybe we can make a deal. Come on. What have you got to say?” A film of sweat shone on his acne.

“Power to the pimples!” Liberty replied.

“Militant Radlib Commie!” He turned away from her, his feelings hurt. “Say, Greeknik,” he asked. “Who took the fifth at Churchill Downs?”

“Man O’ Gore by six lengths.”

“Out of the money.” Quisling sighed. He strode over to me and raised one foot above my wilted sex organs. The dirty sneaker with steel cleats poised threateningly, ready to stomp. “Where’s the headquarters of the Maday Tribe?” he snarled.

“Hold it!” A stocky man wearing a conservative gray suit and carrying a briefcase pushed his way through the room and up to Captain Quisling. “You should know better than to mishandle a criminal like that!” he ‘said.

“He’s not a criminal. He’s a subversive,” Quisling explained.

“Really? His hair isn’t very long.” He got a whiff of Quisling and averted his nose.

“Of course not. That’s how these radicals operate today. They cut their hair, wear ties, even take white-collar jobs. They’re infiltrating everywhere. That’s what makes them so dangerous.”

“Why are these people naked and chained like this?”

“They’re dope pushers!”

“Bookies!”

“Killers!”

“Sexual deviates!”

“Anarchists!”

“It’s still against police regulations to chain them,” the stocky man pointed out.

“We didn’t chain them,” Detective Snowpush told him.

“Then who did?”

“They probably shackled themselves,” Quisling suggested. “It’s an old Bolshevik trick to get sympathy.”

“Could be,” Snowpush granted. “Anyway, We found them like this.”

“Well, as long as you didn’t chain them, I guess there’s no infraction of the rules. . . . My name is Hartbleed.” He spoke directly to me, identifying himself. “I’m from the Complaint Review Board.”

“Look, Mr. Hartbleed, if you’d just unchain us,” I pleaded, “it might save all our lives. You see, there’s a bomb-—-”

“I don’t have that authority.” Hartbleed cut me short.

“You don’t understand! This bomb is going to -”

“He’s higher than a kite,” Snowpush interjected.

“I was told someone here wished to file a complaint.”

Hartbleed opened his briefcase and shuffled the papers. “Just what is the nature of your dissatisfaction?” he asked me.

“I don’t even know where to start,” I told him wearily.

“Don’t be cynical. Things are not that bad. Police corruption is not nearly as widespread as the sensationalist newspapers would have you believe.”

“The girls have been asking for you, Poopsie.” Lieutenant DeCoi wriggled over and patted Hartbleed on the behind.

“There’s always a couple of rotten apples, but—”

“Here’s that H you ordered.” Detective Snowpush slipped an envelope into Hartbleed’s pocket.

“By and large, policemen are honest and upright-—”

“Mr. Hartbleed, that sure was a nice parley you hit yesterday,” Inspector Greeknik told him.

“Your average officer is incorruptible-—”

“I hear the take in the Fourteenth Precinct dropped under two G’s last week,” Captain Quisling remarked.

“He upholds law and order --”

“You think that’s bad? In the Twelfth it went under fifteen hundred, and that’s including a bonus split from the Mex fence.” Detective Slaughter sighed.

“So you see, there’s altogether too much talk about police corruption by people who don’t have any knowledge whatsoever of the intricacies and hardships of day-to-day police work. Now,” Hartbleed concluded, “do you wish to make a statement?” ‘

“Support Your Local Police -- one way or another!” I snarled.

“If you do wish to make a statement, it is my duty first to inform you of your constitutional rights . . . if I could just remember what they were.”

“Skip it.”

“Say,” Hartbleed addressed the group at large, “any of you remember what his constitutional rights are?”

Everybody looked blank.

“Never mind,” I told him. “It’s not important. What is important is that there’s a bomb--”

“A bomb? What bomb?” A gray-haired man with fruit salad all over his police chief’s uniform entered. “I’m Chief Chicken of the Emergency Bomb Squad,” he introduced himself. “Now, what’s this about a bomb?”

“It’s attached to the telephone,” I told him.

“You the fellow I was talking to before?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a real Nervous Nellie, aren’t you? The way you were blubbering on the phone, I thought sure that thing would have exploded by now.”

“He’s stoned out of his skull,” Detective Snowpush said.

“He is not!” Liberty protested. “There is a bomb!”

“They’re both flying.”

“She’s an agitator!” Captain Quisling pointed out.

“He’s a killer!” Detective Slaughter chimed in.

“A cop-hater, too,” Hartbleed added.

“And a sex criminal,” Lieutenant DeCoi cooed.

“There’s the proof.” She pointed.

“Eight to five he rubbed out Luigi.” Inspector Greeknik laid the odds.

“Where’s the corpus delicti?” A new voice. A gnome-like man carrying a doctor’s bag appeared on the scene.

“Who are you?” Chief Chicken inquired.

“Dr. Ama. City medical examiner. Where’s the corpse?”

“That’s what I’d like to know!” Detective Slaughter complained.

“Poor Luigi!” Inspector Greeknik shook his head sorrowfully. “Scratched at the starting gate.”

“There is no corpse, doctor, sweetie,” Lieutenant DeCoi informed Ama. “But there is evidence of a sexual assault. Come over here and have a look-see.”

Dr. Ama followed her over to Liberty.

“YOO-HOO!” I shouted. “REMEMBER THE BOMB!”

“You certainly are persistent,” Chief Chicken told me.

“The mark of the professional agitator,” Captain Quisling whispered to him.

“Would you please stand to windward,” Chief Chicken requested. “Now, what about this bomb?” he asked me.

“It’s attached to the telephone, dammit!’

Gingerly he picked up the telephone and scrutinized it.

“I don’t know.” Dr. Ama completed his examination of Liberty. “I can’t be sure.”

“You can’t be sure?” Slaughter stared at him in amazement. “Then how come everybody else is sure?”

“What else could it be?” Greeknik wondered.

Whipped cream?

“Oh, wow!” Lieutenant DeCoi clapped her hands. “What are you doing after the explosion, sweetie?”

Whipped cream?

“And I was trying to watch my diet,” Liberty sighed.

Whipped cream? First impotency, then premature ejaculation, and now this. It was the final blow to my manhood. Whipped cream!

“It’s a bomb!” Chief Chicken put the telephone down like it was a hot potato. “It’s a bomb, and it could go off anytime!”

“Well, do something!” I suggested.

“Not me! That thing is live! I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole!”

“Hi, everybody.” A police sergeant wandered into our midst. “What’s going on?”

“Hi, Harold.” Inspector Greeknik greeted him. “Everybody, this is my buddy, Sergeant Ripoff of the Burglary Division. . . . What brings you down here, Harold?”

“There was nobody left at Headquarters. I got lonely.”

“Who’s watching the store?”

“Answering service. . . . What’s happening here?”

“Chief Chicken just discovered a bomb.”

“No shit?”

“I saved a nickel bag for you, sarge,” kindly Detective Snowpush told him.

“That bomb,” I reminded them, “is set to go off when the phone rings.”

“No shit?”

“And the phone may ring any second now,” I explained patiently.

“No shit?”

“Blowing us all to kingdom come!”

“No sh-—-”

The telephone rang!

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

There is no Santa Claus. God is dead. Likewise the new God—Science!

The telephone rang, and nothing happened!

So much for Faith. So much for Cause and Effect. So much for Pragmatism. So much for Science.

“Answer the phone,” Chief Chicken suggested calmly.

Sergeant Ripoff answered the phone. “Hello?”

“Hello. Mother Kelly’s Pizza Parlor?” The voice blared from the phone speaker. “Listen, I want four pies. One with onions and anchovies; one with mozzarella and anchovies, no onions; one with hot sausage and garlic; and one with pepper, chicken fat, and chopped liver.”

“No shit?” Sergeant Ripoff commented. “Chicken fat and chopped liver?”

“No shit. Deliver them to—”

“Ugh!” Sergeant Ripoff shuddered. “You’ve got the wrong number, Mac.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

The speaker clicked and was silent.

Wrong number! “It could have killed us all!” Liberty realized.

“The pizza pies?” Detective Slaughter misunderstood.

“No shit?”

“No. The bomb!” I set them straight. “Why didn’t it go off?”

“The majority of these devices turn out to be defective.” Chief Chicken showed off his expertise. He picked up the executive phone and examined the intricate spaghetti of wires hooked up there.

“You might have mentioned that before,” Liberty told him.

“Well, there’s always those that aren’t duds. I don’t like to commit myself until I know for sure.”

“When do you know for sure? After it explodes?” I inquired.

“Or after it doesn’t. . . . Aha!” Chief Chicken held up the phone so we could see. “Here’s your trouble right here. Somehow these two wires were pulled loose from each other.”

“You must have done that before when you slid the phone down the table with your knees,” Liberty said to me. “If only we’d known! It would have saved an awful lot of worry.”

“Think of the fun we’d have missed.” I was philosophic.

“Yep. These two wires should be connected.” Chief Chicken twisted the two wire ends around each other.

“All fixed,” he announced proudly.

“Well, unfix it before that guy changes his mind about the mozzarella and calls back!” I pleaded.

Chief Chicken set the phone down firmly. “That’s a live bomb!” he informed us. “You don’t catch me fooling around with one of those!”

“Oh, my God!” Liberty found religion.

Her apprehension was catching. “It’s post time,” Inspector Greeknik decided. “Let’s get out of here and take these two down to the station and book them.”

“What’s the charge?” Hartbleed demanded. “You have to have a charge. That’s regulations!”

“Sexual assault,” Lieutenant DeCoi suggested.

“The evidence is questionable,” Dr. Ama reminded her.

“Well, then, indecent exposure.”

That made me a recidivist!

“Illegal possession of drugs.” Detective Snowpush’s choice.

“What drugs?” I asked. “We don’t have any drugs!”

“No?” Snowpush reached behind Liberty’s left ear like a magician and pulled out his rabbit-—-six reefers, four sugar cubes, and a half-filled syringe. “What about these?”

Inspector Greeknik reached behind her right ear and produced a fistful of policy slips. “And these?”

“How about breaking and entering?” Sergeant Ripoff suggested.

“We didn’t break in here. We were forced to come at gunpoint!”

“No shit?”

All this time Detective Slaughter had been deep in thought. Now he spoke. “Attempted murder,” he offered.

“Just who are we supposed to have tried to kill?”

“I don’t know yet.” His brow furrowed. “But I’ll think of someone.”

“How about Luigi?” Inspector Greeknik suggested.

“Yeah. Luigi.” Slaughter brightened up.

“Internal subversion! Threatening the national security! Fomenting revolution! Infiltrating American institutions!” Captain Quisling rattled off.

“What American institutions are we supposed to have infiltrated?” I wondered.

“The Mafia!”

“Phoning in false bomb threats,” Chief Chicken chimed in.

“You said yourself the bomb was live,” I reminded him.

“Planting a live bomb.” He amended the charge.

“Look,” he added nervously, “let’s get the hell out of here and worry about the charge when we get them downtown.”

“Yeah,” Hartbleed agreed as our bonds were removed and we were hustled to our feet and out the door. “You can throw the book at them later.”

Liberty and I were ushered, still nude, into a paddy wagon waiting at the curb. The cop in the van handcuffed us again and told us to sit down on the unpadded benches. As the vehicle lurched away from the curb, he solicitously covered me with a dirty old hunk of canvas that had been lying under the seat. Then he settled back to enjoy the ride on the bench across from us, his eyes riveted on Liberty’s jouncing ebony nudity.

The station house was only about eight blocks away. When we reached it, we were shepherded from the van, down a long hall, and up to a high desk behind which was sitting a police sergeant. At long last. I was face to face with Sergeant Padd.

The arresting officers—the whole motley crew -- vanished through a rear door. Only two patrolmen stayed behind to guard us as Sergeant Padd ran through the procedures. “Print ’em. Mug ’em. Book ’em.” Those were his orders.

He pressed my thumb and fingertips down on an inkpad and then rolled them around on a card he’d prepared. He produced a camera. “Say ‘cheese,’ ” he ordered.

“I need a shave,” I protested.

“If you didn’t, we’d have to wait until you did.” The camera clicked. “Turn your head to the right,” Sergeant Padd instructed.

“That’s my bad side.”

“I noticed. That’s why I picked it.” The camera clicked again. “Now, to list the charges.” Sergeant Padd labored over the form. “Bookmaking . . . possession of drugs with intent to sell . . . sexual assault and indecent exposure . . . suspicion of homicide . . . subversive activities . . . trespassing and suspicion of illegal entry . . . phoning a bomb threat, and/or setting an explosive device. . . . My, you two have been busy little beavers, haven’t you?”

“Considering that we just got into town a couple of hours ago—-” I started to protest.

“Hmm. Crossing the state line with intent to . . .” Sergeant Padd relisted all the charges. “That makes it a federal rap, too,” he explained. “And resisting arrest,” he concluded.

“We didn’t resist arrest.”

Sergeant Padd leaned over his raised desk and casually bounced his billy club off my noggin. “Necessary force had to be used to subdue the prisoner,” he added at the bottom of the form.

The entire procedure was repeated with Liberty. She was also charged with “using racial epithets.” “You’re entitled to make one phone call apiece,” Sergeant Padd informed us when he was finished.

Liberty called the local branch of the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP. I called Charles Putnam’s private number.

“Mr. Victor! Where have you been?” Putnam sounded annoyed.

“It’s a long story. But right now I’m being held at a police station in Seattle. I need some clothes for myself and a girl, and—”

“Clothes? For yourself? And a girl?” Putnam’s voice skidded up the scale. “Mr. Victor! I well know your proclivity for sexual adventures, but with the future of the world at stake, this is hardly the time to--”

“Skip the lecture! I’ve got a lead which may point to Tom Swift! But I can’t follow it unless you get me out of here. And fast!”

“What are the charges?”

I told him.

“Mr. Victor! What is it you wish to be when you grow up? A one-man crime wave?”

I resisted the impulse to swap sarcasms. “Are you going to get me out of here, or aren’t you?” I demanded.

There was a threateningly long pause. “All right,” Putnam said finally. “I’ll arrange it.”

“Good. And don’t forget the clothes.”

“I’ll see to that, too.” Putnam sighed loudly and hung up.

He was as good as his word. An hour later various apparel was delivered to the jail. We dressed and were brought before Sergeant Padd again.

“We’re going to let you go,” he said, his voice filled with amazement, as if he didn’t quite believe it himself. “The commissioner called and got the boys to drop all the charges. You must really have pull!”

“Justice always prevails,” I assured him.

“It damn near didn’t this time,” Sergeant Padd told me. “Chief Chicken gave the commissioner a very rough time. He insisted you phoned in a false bomb threat, and he had witnesses to prove it.”

“Dammit! There really is a bomb there!” It made me angry.

“The commissioner thought there might be. But Chief Chicken very logically pointed out that there hadn’t been any explosion. Finally the commissioner had to pull rank on him.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Liberty interrupted nervously. “Before they change their minds.”

We bid Sergeant Padd good-bye and left. We took a cab to the airport. (Along with the clothes, Putnam had thoughtfully provided some cash.) I bought a ticket on the next flight to El Paso, Texas, the nearest airport to where Phoebe Phreeby, according to Liberty, was work- ing as a librarian.

Liberty walked with me to the ramp where my flight was boarding. I kissed her good-bye. “When this is all over,” I promised, “we’ll get together. I’ll give you a ring. Okay?”

“No. Don’t do that.”

“Why not?” I was hurt.

“Don’t call me.” There was a crooked grin on Liberty’s black face. “I never want to hear another telephone again. Drop me a card instead.”

“I dig.” I grinned back. “I’ll get in touch by tom-tom.”

“No way. Not with your sense of rhythm, white boy. You’re liable to drum up an angry rhino instead.”

“What can I do? I was born washed-out.”

“You’re beginning to look just a little bit blacker. Give it time, okay. Who knows?”

I mounted the ramp. At the top I turned for a last look at Liberty Dix. She blew me a kiss. Yeah! Black is beautiful!

With that thought, I boarded the plane. The “No Smoking” sign was lit. Immediately I had a fierce desire for a cigarette. Funny. I hadn’t thought about smoking all through the ordeal. That’s how it is when you give up a vice. You want it most when you’re somehow reminded you can’t have it.

The jetliner rose over the city. Suddenly there was the sound of a loud explosion. The aircraft shook from nose to tail. I peered out the window.

Either Gino Goldberg had finally managed to get through, or the pizza customer had decided against the anchovies. One square block of downtown Seattle was erupting into rubble. I thumbed my nose at Chief Chicken.

'The bomb had gone off!

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

At the El Paso airport, I rented a car. After consulting a road map, I started for the town of Dry Gulch, on the Mexican border. It was about twenty miles of winding road climbing sun-bleached yellow-red cliffs, bare of vegetation, and then descending into a valley which was dusty, dry, and equally barren. The downward section of the road trailed the sandy riverbed—little more than a waterless ditch-—which had given the place its name.

It was dusk when I reached the library in the center of town. The building was low and sprawling, dirty white and yellow stucco and red adobe brick, styled like a Mexican hacienda, in keeping with its surroundings. The sign over the low archway entrance was missing one of its raised stone letters. It read “DRY GULCH PUB IC LIBRARY.” Remembering the erotic scene Liberty had described, it seemed like a fitting commentary for Phoebe Phreeby.

The announcement Scotch-taped to the glass front door said it was about a half-hour to closing time. Entering, I spotted the librarian’s desk behind a low railing to my right. Seated there was a redheaded girl who fit Liberty’s description of Phoebe Phreeby.

She was wearing a white, low-cut Mexican peasant blouse. A lanyard strung loosely at the base of her throat dipped between the widely separated, high, pointy mounds thrusting against the material of the blouse. It secured a cowboy hat slung between her shoulders in back. The open space under the desk revealed that she was wearing cowboy boots and very tight leather hot pants. Her legs were long, slender, nicely tapered.

Looking up, she caught my under-the-desk appraisal and flushed slightly. Her skin was very fair, and the reddening pointed up the light sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her pert nose. Her eyes seemed to change from an embarrassed green to a questioning blue as they met mine.

I approached her. “Excuse me-—” That was as far as I got.

“Shh!” She held a finger to her lips and then used it to point to a sign on the opposite wall: “No Talking Allowed.”

“I’m a friend of Liberty Dix,” I whispered.

“Shh!” This time the hushing sound came from a small, withered old lady seated at one of the reading tables. She glared at us from behind the book she was reading. The title of the volume was Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Phoebe Phreeby beckoned to me to bend my head. Then she placed the soft pout of her lips against my ear and whispered directly into it. Her breath was very warm. “Are you Steve Victor?” she asked. I nodded.

“Liberty called me about you. She said I could trust you. I hope so.” There was urgency in the quavering hiss of her voice. “I have to trust somebody. Things are getting beyond—”

Phoebe abruptly stopped talking as a short, bulky man dressed in a too-tight brown tweed suit appeared from between the bookshelves. His glance at us was both sharp and suspicious. He edged closer.

“Watch what you say!” Phoebe warned. “He’s a foreign agent. Russian, I think.”

I looked at her skeptically.

“SHH!” He’d overheard her. He pointed at the sign, clucked disapprovingly, and vanished back into the stacks.

“What makes you think that?” I asked Phoebe.

“He offered me a lot of money if I’d give him certain information.”

“Information relating to Tom Swift,” I guessed.

“SHH—HH!” An extremely tall, slender Oriental man wagged a long, pointy finger in our direction. His disapproving frown relaxed as he turned back to the book he was perusing. It was a tome on table-tennis rackets.

“It’s almost closing time,” Phoebe whispered. “Just sit down and wait, and then we’ll be able to talk.”

I took a seat at a nearby table and leafed through a magazine.

The little old lady strode up to the desk and slammed Lady Chatterley’s Lover down in front of Phoebe. “Miz Phreeby,” she announced loudly, “this is a disgusting and immoral book!”

“Shh.” Phoebe tried to quiet her.

“Don’t you shush me, young lady! I tell you this book is pornographic trash designed to appeal to the prurient interest!”

“You don’t have to read it,” Phoebe pointed out.

“I have already read it, and I have been revolted and offended with each disgusting page!”

“Then why did you go on reading? Why didn’t you stop!”

“Because, as a responsible member of this community, it is my self-imposed duty to read works of a questionable nature. Having done so, I am now ordering you to withdraw this filth from the shelves of this library!”

“I don’t have the authority to do that. And you don’t have the authority to order me to do it.”

“Then I shall confiscate it!”

“All right.” Liberty pressed a dater to an ink-pad, stamped a card, and inserted it in the book. “You can confiscate it for two weeks,” she told the old lady. “After that you’ll have to pay three cents a day overtime charges.”

“Humph!” She turned on her heel and started out.

“Don’t forget your matches,” Phoebe called after her.

“Matches?” She turned around, puzzled. “I. don’t smoke. And I don’t allow anyone to smoke in my presence.”

“Not for smoking,” Phoebe told her. “For burning.”

“Burning what?”

“Why not start with ‘A’ for ‘Aristophanes’?” Phoebe suggested.

The old lady snorted and exited in a huff. The lanky Oriental followed her out. A moment later the man Phoebe had identified as a possible Russian agent appeared from the stacks.

He waited at the door until Phoebe came over. Then he whispered something to her and left. She locked the door behind him. When she turned to face me, she was pale with fear.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He warned me not to tell you anything. He said I’d be killed if I did.”

“If you have reason to think he’s a Russian agent, why haven’t you contacted the authorities?” I wondered.

“Because it would mean putting my own neck in a noose.” She sighed. “It’s all so complicated. I-—”

“What the hell?” Suddenly all the lights had gone out.

“An automatic timer,” Phoebe explained. “It turns off all the lights at closing time. Let’s go to the staff room,” she suggested. “There’s a lamp there that isn’t hooked into the timer. Also a hot plate. We can have coffee and talk.”

Walking beside her down the darkened aisle toward the rear of the library, I realized how tall she was, almost as tall as I was myself. I also noticed that she was trembling. I didn’t blame her. I wouldn’t have thought a library could seem so spooky in the dark.

When we reached the back wall, Phoebe paused. There was a window there. It was open.

“I locked that myself not three-quarters of an hour ago.” Although the breeze from the window was balmy and warm, she hugged herself as if suddenly chilled.

I thought of the stocky man in the snug-fitting tweeds and his threat to her. I closed the window and locked it. We continued down the passageway paralleling the rear wall until we came to the door to the staff room.

Phoebe opened it, lit a table lamp, and locked the door behind us. It was a cozy place. There was a couch with end tables and lamps. Across from it were some wall cabinets, a sink, and a long shelf. There was a hot plate, a large coffeepot, and some cups and saucers on the shelf. Phoebe busied herself preparing the coffee. I sat down on the couch.

“This is the staff room. And I”-—Phoebe smiled ruefully——“am the entire staff. It isn’t much, but it’s my only refuge from the local literati.”

“And the Mafia.” I steered the conversation.

“Liberty told you about that? Yes. And the Mafia. They really scared me back in Darnell. Little did I guess that there were worse things than the Mafia closing in on me.”

“Such as?”

“I hardly know where to start.”

“Start with Tom Swift,” I suggested.

“Tom Swift! I wish I’d never known him!” Phoebe was bitter. “He’s the reason everybody and his brother is out to kill me!”

“You were involved with him?”

“Yes.”

“Umm. Intimately?” I asked delicately.

“I suppose that’s true. In a strange sort of way.”

“When did you meet him?”

“I’ve never met him personally. That is, I’ve never actually seen him.”

“But you said you were intimately involved.” I was confused.

“We were.”

“I guess I didn’t make myself clear. I mean sexually involved.”

“So do I.”

“But you’ve never met?” Things weren’t getting any clearer.

“That’s right.”

“A neat trick,” I told her sarcastically.

“The neatest.” Phoebe put the coffee on to boil, sat down next to me on the couch, and proceeded to elaborate. “My first contact with Tom Swift was about a year ago on a toll-free-loop-around in Salt Lake City. You know What a toll-free-loop-around is?”

I looked blank.

Phoebe explained how virtually all telephone exchanges hold open a pair of numbers to be used for testing trunk lines by other exchanges out of their area. The two numbers are hooked up with an open line and are usually the same except for the last digit, which is usually consecutive. Thus the paired test numbers might be nine-five-six-oh-four-oh-four. Any two people, calling from anywhere, by dialing these numbers at the same time, will be connected with each other without charge. The setup is known as a "toll-free-loop-around,” and even amateur phone phreaks have compiled lists of such numbers for exchanges all over the country.

“In those days I had two phones,” Phoebe told me. “And I used to use toll-free-loop-arounds to call myself up.”

“Why?” I asked.

“To talk to myself.”

“What about?”

“You know.” She giggled. “I’d tell myself sexy things. Or maybe read from a spicy book. Things like that. The kick was hearing my own voice in my ear sounding so erotic. The more I listened, the more turned on I’d get and the sexier my voice would sound. It was a gas!”

To each his own!

“Then one night,” Phoebe continued, “there was another voice, a man’s voice, and it was whispering things I’d never even thought about before. It really got to me.”

“Tom Swift?”

“Right. He’d M.F.-ed into this Salt Lake loop-around and listened to me until it got to him. Then he cut into the scene himself. That was how it started. We talked a little and agreed to hook up again on a Memphis loop-around the next night. Pretty soon we were doing it regularly. Oh, those nights! And how the days used to drag until it was time to call!”

“You were long-distance lovers and you never met,” I summed up.

“Were we ever! The things that man could do over a telephone! And the things he taught me! He opened up the whole world of phone tripping to me. He introduced me long-distance to other phreaks and-—”

“Did you . . . umm . . . you know . . . with them, too?”

“Oh, no. I was always faithful to Tom. Even after our affair ended, I never made it phone-wise with anybody else. Only with myself.”

“You mean you went back to auto-eroticism? To calling yourself up?”

“Well, yes, But with a difference. Thanks to Tom, I had the know-how to get real superkicks, to turn myself on around the world.”

“Around the world?”

“Around the world is quite a trip!” Phoebe’s eyes, a smoldering green now, were half-shut, and her breathing was quickening. “Do you know what ‘around the world’ is?”

“I think I do.”

“I mean in phone tripping.”

“I guess not. Tell me,” I requested.

“Did Liberty tell you about my M.F.-er?”

“A little bit.”

“With one exception, it was the most highly developed device of its kind in the World.” Phoebe spoke as if she were describing a particularly well-endowed lover.

“The exception being Tom Swift’s gadget,” I guessed.

“That’s right. And I couldn’t have built it without knowing the things he taught me during our affair. But let me tell you about mine. I could program it right into most any telephone company computer and operate from there.” Phoebe spoke in a low, throaty voice, and her fingertips moved back and forth over one of the high peaks of her thin, white peasant blouse. “It had acoustical coupling capability.” She ran her small, sharp tongue insinuatingly over her full, pouting lips. “And multiple-line-tie performance.” Her slim hips started to writhe slowly. “The frequency accuracy fell within four-hundredths of one percent.” One of her knees rose and fell rhythmically, rubbing one flushed, bare thigh against the other. “And it operated on less than one-hundredth of one-percent variation decibel-wise.” The outline of the cleft mound under her leather hot pants was pulsing visibly. “High-precision op-amps.” she moaned, “designed to function with negligible variation in temperatures from forty-five degrees below zero to one hundred and thirty degrees above. And that’s Centigrade!” Her face was pink and covered with a thin film of perspiration. “Do you know What that means?” she panted.

I confessed that I didn’t.

“It means I didn’t have to rely on toll-free-loop-arounds to get my jollies. I was into the big time! I could stack tandems—five, ten, twenty at a time—all the way around the World!” Her hand crept to her lap and stroked the soft leather over the throbbing mound as she recalled the thrills.

“Stacking tandems. How does that work? What’s the big kick?”

“Oh, you just don’t know!” Phoebe’s voice managed to sound both raunchy and exalted at the same time. “See, I’d use my super M.F.-er to dial into the local exchange, go through the computer, and seize a tandem.” Her eyes were closed now. She was reliving the experience as she described it. “I’d route the tandem into a trunk line to Boston. Beep!” She imitated the sound, bouncing on the couch a little to show how it affected her. “From Boston I’d trip to Nova Scotia. Beep-b-r-r-r-z-z-z-beep!” She palmed both her breasts, her fingers digging into the blouse material to squeeze them hard, conveying the Nova Scotia thrill to me. “Then across the Big Pond by cable to London. Glu-glu-glub-beep!” She raised her knees, the feet on the edge of the couch, and opened and closed her legs. “London to Athens to Algiers to Salisbury, Rhodesia. Beep-buzz-ding-ding-ding-va-va-va-beep!” She raised up off the couch and punctuated the strange sounds with a series of slaps to her plump, brazenly protruding rear end. “From Salisbury to Brazil to Mexico City to Frisco. Beep-cli-cli-cli-click-dub-a-dub-beep!” Her nails clawed their way up and down the length of her body. “Then from Frisco back home. All those tandems piled up! Do you know what that sounds like? Do you know What it feels like? The phone rings. Br-r-r-i-i-ing! You pick it up and you hear all those tandems beeping and buzzing and crackling in the background. All the way around the world! Fantastic! And then you say something into the first phone. Loud! Because the echo is unbelievable. There’s maybe a thirty-second wait. And then you hear your own voice speaking in your ear from the second phone! WOW!” Phoebe was writhing with remembered excitement.

“What would you say to yourself?” I wondered.

“By the time the connection was through, I’d be pretty excited. . . . All those tandems stacked up and turning me on! . . . But I’d want to prolong it, so I’d start off easy. Then, thirty seconds later—can you imagine what that’s like?--my own voice murmuring in my ear after traveling around the world! ‘Do you want to be naughty tonight, baby?’ Indescribable!” Phoebe pulled the blouse free from the waistband of the leather hot pants and reached under it with both hands. “ ‘Feel them, baby? Those hands reaching all the way around the world to fondle your soft, hot, panting breasts! Feel them!’ ” The blouse rippled like waves in a high sea as her hands played with her breasts under it. “I’d hear my voice telling me to ‘Kiss those soft, pink nipples,’ and I would.” And she did, pulling her breasts free from the peasant blouse and bending her head to capture the tips, each in turn, between her moistened lips.

I noted that Liberty had described Phoebe’s breasts accurately. They were large, cone-shaped, and widely separated. Although she was obviously quite aroused, the pink nipples remained soft, blending into the white breast flesh with no aureoles to set them off.

“And then,” Phoebe continued, “with all those stacked up tandems beeping and crackling and buzzing, all the way around the world, I’d hear myself saying ‘Suck them hard! Tongue them!’ and ‘Feel your soft belly’ and ‘Stroke your feverish, quivering thighs!’ And my hands would move down . . . down . . .” Now Phoebe opened her belt, unbuttoned the leather hot pants, and reached deep inside them. “Buzz! Crackle! Beep! . . . ‘That’s it! Touch yourself, baby! Feel-that hot, wet, oily, stiff clitty!’ ” The hot pants were down around Phoebe’s ankles now. She’d been wearing no panties underneath them. A triangle of fine, red down pointed to the duel going on between her middle finger and her aroused clitoris. “All the way around the world,” she panted, “the voice of love from Phoebe to Phoebe, saying ‘All the way now! Hard! Thick! Ram it home!’ Three of her fingers disappeared to the third knuckles, and she bounced frantically up and down on the couch.

It was more than I could take. I wrenched my pants and Jockey shorts off with one violent motion. I dived on top of her. My mouth enveloped hers, wide open, my tongue stabbing halfway down her throat. One of my hands spread over a bare breast, soft as butter, pink nipple fluttering like a feather in my palm. My other hand reached down and yanked her hand away. Stiff and hot as a burning poker, filled to bursting, I plunged into the pulsating maw!

I missed. . . .

It was one of those foolish moments. I figured that in my excitement I’d just gauged it wrong. But a second lunge also sliced thin air. Slowly, it percolated that Phoebe wasn’t cooperating.

“What’s the matter?” I demanded.

“No!” she said firmly, both hands guarding the entrance to her still-steaming oven of love.

“Why not?”

“I’m not that kind of a girl.”

I blinked, bewildered.

“It may seem old-fashioned,” she said, “but I simply do not believe that a girl should have premarital relations.”

“You mean you’re a . . . ?”

“A virgin. That’s right.”

“But all that sexy phone-tripping stuff . . .”

“Strictly long distance. No physical contact,” she reminded me primly.

“But Tom Swift . . .”

“I told you, we never even met. And even right now my feelings about him are ambivalent. I hate him for this mess he’s got me in, but like I said before, I can’t bring myself to be unfaithful to him. Not even over the phone, let alone in person.”

“Oh yeah?” Rejected, I was getting mad. “What about you and Liberty?”

“Liberty is a girl. That doesn’t count. But no man is going to touch me until my wedding night.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” I stood up, resigned, and pulled up my pants. “Go on and finish what you were doing,” I told Phoebe. “No point in both of us being frustrated.”

“You spoiled the mood,” she pouted. “It’s hard enough without a phone.”

“ ‘Hard enough,’ ” I observed with a sigh of regret. “But let’s get back to business. What about Tom Swift. Do you know where he is? Do you know what he’s trying to do?”

“I can tell you some things,” Phoebe started to say. She was interrupted by the door being flung open. The Russian stood there with a large Luger in his hand. It was pointed straight at me.

“I warned you to tell this man nothing!” he reminded Phoebe. “Now you have signed his death warrant!”

His finger squeezed the trigger of the Luger. . . .

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The sound of the shot was deafening. It split the silence like an atomic blast. It echoed beyond the opened staff-room door and reverberated through the corridors of the darkened, empty library.

A look of surprise spread over the face of the Russian. He swayed for a moment like a man balancing on a tightrope. Then he pitched forward, a small glob of blood oozing from a neat hole in the center of his back. The Luger slid from his hand, unfired.

“He’s dead.” My voice sounded dazed in my own ears. I still couldn’t quite believe that the sound of the bullet wasn’t the last sound I’d hear in this world.

Soft, padding footsteps—unhurried—-and then another figure was framed in the doorway. “Japanese products are not to be trusted.” The voice was soft, cultured, precise. “I purchased this revolver in Hong Kong. It was manufactured in Nagasaki. There is a warranty. But it does not cover the silencer. Naturally. Those wily Japanese. The silencer, as you have noticed, does not work.”

I recognized the tall, slender Oriental man who had been sitting in the library and reading about table-tennis rackets just before it closed. What do you say to a man who’s just saved your life? A man to whom you’ve not even been properly introduced? Some situations Emily Post doesn’t cover. I improvised. “Thanks,” I told him simply, but with heartfelt sincerity. It was, as things evolved, premature.

“The window!” Phoebe, who had been even more dazed than I, snapped out of it and answered her own unspoken question. She stood clutching her hot pants around her waist, her blouse billowing loosely-—rumpled but decent.

“That was his means of entrance.” The Oriental man nodded to her. “Before you closed it,” he told me.

“And you . . .”

“Also the window,” he admitted. The revolver still dangling casually from one hand, he turned to me. “I wonder if I might impose on you,” he said politely. “I have a bad back.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him, meaning it. The way I felt about him, I would have shed tears over a pimple if it gave him pain.

“A slipped disc,” he explained.

“How awful for you.”

“The perils of athletics,” he sighed.

I clucked sympathetically.

“The result of a particularly strenuous table-tennis match,” he said.

“Threw out your back diving for a long one, I’ll bet.” I nodded understandingly. “It can happen to experts. It’s a dangerous game.”

“No.” He contradicted me. “It was a direct ,blow -- a backhand slice, I believe —from my pal1ner’s paddle. A tricky shot to the third vertebra.”

“Such things happen in the heat of the game.”

“It did not happen in the heat of the game. It happened after the match was over. We lost. As is the custom, we bowed to our opponents, we bowed to each other, congratulations all around on a game well played, and then my partner chastised me for setting him up for a slam by giving the opposition an easy forehand return. I responded with a forehand push that bounced three of his front teeth over the net. In the ensuing volley, he threw sportsmanship to the winds and placed the illegal shot responsible for my slipped disc.”

“Treachery!” I was filled with righteous anger for my newfound Oriental friend.

“Yes,” he agreed. “Table-tennis diplomacy,” he summed up, “can sometimes be very difficult.” He sighed again. “The reason I mention it,” he continued after a short pause, “is that I do have this bad back, which makes it difficult for me to lift things. And so I wonder if I might impose on you to . . .”

“Of course. What is it that you want . . . ?”

He gestured toward the body of the dead Russian. “I would like to dispose of that,” he told me.

“Why not just leave him where he is?” I inquired.

“Littering is against the library rules,” Phoebe interjected. “Even in the staff room.”

“Neatness is next to godliness,” the Oriental man agreed.

I hefted the body over my shoulder and carried it to the door. He stood aside politely to allow me to pass. Phoebe followed, and he brought up the rear.

It was still pitch black in the corridors of the library. “Where do you want him?” I asked, panting under the weight of my burden.

“Put him on the cart with the other unfiled items,”

Phoebe suggested. “Excellent,” he agreed. “And then, if you’ll be good enough to wheel the cart to the rear, I’ll arrange for disposal of the body.”

“You really don’t have to bother,” Phoebe said. “Tomorrow’s the day the central library picks up the mutilated books. I can ship him out with them.”

“Won’t that cause comment?” I wondered.

“Not really. They’ll just assume he’s a researcher who died in harness. It happens frequently, you know. Sometimes the bodies get misfiled, and it’s days before they get gamy enough to be found again.”

But the Oriental had different plans for the body, and for us as well. He had me pull the cart to a halt in the shadows near the window. Someone had opened it again. Four of the shadows detached themselves, and before I could quite grasp what was happening, they had surrounded us. The Oriental flicked on a flashlight. They stood there, obviously waiting to take their orders from him.

As the flashlight beam swept over their faces, my jaw dropped and stayed that way. I recognized them! I’d never expected to see them again. I sure as hell never wanted to see them again. But here they were!

Rifle! Knife! Revolver! And Strangler!

“You’re a mafioso!” I pointed an accusing finger at the Oriental man.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he replied. “I don’t even look Italian.”

Maybe he didn’t know. It seemed impossible, but he had saved my life, and I was quick to give him the benefit of the doubt-—no matter how far-out the doubt might be. “Those guys work for the Mafia,” I hissed to him, whispering.

Rifle overheard me. “Not anymore,” he told me. “The recession, you know. There was an economy cut. They let us go.”

“All four of you?”

“Yes.” He shook his head ruefully. “Not enough tenure.”

“You people ought to unionize,” I suggested.

“We’re trying to make arrangements to talk to Hoffa¹¹ ,” Rifle told me. “But it’s not likely he’ll do anything concrete until after the next elections. He’s in a very sensitive position himself. So, meanwhile, we have to eat. And Mr. Pong has been good enough to take us on temporarily. Piecework, as it were.”

“Mr. Pong?”

“I’m afraid I’ve neglected to introduce myself. “Pingtse Pong is my name.” The Oriental man bowed formally. “How do you do, Mr. Victor, Miss Phreeby.” He bowed again to Phoebe.

“Have you checked their references?” I demanded.

“I’m afraid not. It’s hard to get decent help these days. One can’t be too particular. And hiring is a particular problem for my organization.”

“Just what is your organization?”

Ping-tse Pong thought a moment and then shrugged. Evidently he’d decided there was no point to concealing his affiliation. “The People’s Republic of China,” he told me.

“He’s a Communist!” Phoebe realized. “How can you work for a Communist?” she demanded of Rifle.

“The recession,” he mumbled, looking ashamed.

“We are wasting time,” Mr. Pong decided. “You two”— he pointed at Rifle and Revolver—“take the body out and dispose of it.”

They pulled themselves through the window. Knife and Strangler handed the body up to them. And then they were gone.

“You and I will take the girl out to the car,” Mr. Pong told Knife. “And you,” he told Strangler, wrapping it all up in a neat package, “will kill him”— he pointed at me—“and dispose of his body.”

“You didn’t kill that Russian to save my life,” I realized, pouting at Mr. Pong. “You just did it to get rid of the opposition.”

“You make your point,” he replied, climbing out the window after Knife and Phoebe. “But, after all, it is my game,” he added, vanishing from sight.

“I been waiting a long time for this,” Strangler said, his voice filled with relish. “Turn around and face the wall. Up against it.” He motioned with the gun he was holding.

I did as he said. A second later he came up behind me, and I felt a cord looped expertly around my neck. The garrote tightened, and I saw stars. Then the stars whirled into blackness. . . .

The blackness cleared. I was on the floor. The garrote was still around my neck, but it wasn’t drawn tight anymore. Across from me, Strangler also sprawled on the floor. His eyes stared at me. The rest of his face had been blown away. He was even uglier dead than he had been alive.

Head spinning, I looked up. I focused on Phoebe in the process of crawling back through the window into the library. A smaller figure, holding a revolver, climbed after her. For some crazy reason, my mind bogged down on the window bit. Were doors becoming obsolete in modern society, or what? Even little old ladies were climbing in windows. . . .

That’s who it was with Phoebe, all right. The little old lady who’d been in the library earlier, the one who’d demanded that Phoebe take D. H. Lawrence off the shelves. And the gun she held was still smoking from the shot that had blown off half of Strangler’s head! The sight didn’t seem to bother her.

So much for “prurient interest”!

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“You okay?” Phoebe Wanted to know. I nodded, not sure whether my strangulated throat was yet in shape to let my voice through or not. Then I nodded again, this time toward the old lady. My questions must have been written on my face, because Phoebe answered them.

“She killed all five of them,” Phoebe said.

Ma Barker¹² lives! It was all I could think.

“She got the first two hoods when they came out with the Russian’s body,” Phoebe continued. “She was waiting when Pingtse Pong and the other hood brought me through the window. She shot the hood with the knife first. Right through the heart. We never even heard the shot. A silencer. That was what really got to Pong. She didn’t plug him quite as cleanly, and before he died, he told her how his silencer didn’t work and how impressed he was that hers did. He asked her where she got it, and she said it was a local product. Pong cursed the Japanese and said we should boycott them. His last words were ‘Buy American.’ Then he died, and she hopped right over to the window and drilled the last gangster while he was choking you.”

Wow! I was impressed. “Who is she?” I managed to get the words out hoarsely.

“All I know is she comes here to the library regularly. She and Pong and the Russian were just about the only people who did. I guess she must be some kind of agent like they were. Nobody comes to a library just to read anymore,” Phoebe sighed.

“Are you an agent?” I croaked the question directly at the old lady.

“I’m subbing,” she replied.

“Subbing?”

“Substituting. For my son. He’s with the CIA.” She sounded very proud of her boy.

“Oh.” Now I understood nothing.

“He has a cold. A very bad cold.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“And the only way he’d stay home with the vaporizer was if I promised faithfully to look after things for him. She beamed. “When he was younger and he got colds, I used to deliver his papers for him,” she added.

“I see.”

“He’s very susceptible to colds.”

“Lots of boys are,” Phoebe sympathized.

“It’s because they don’t take simple precautions like wearing their rubbers and avoiding drafts. But when I tell him that, he says I’m nagging. You know how boys are.”

“Even in the CIA?” I couldn’t help wondering.

“CIA men are just little boys who got bigger,” the little old lady insisted. “And they get colds just like other boys do. And then their mothers have to deliver their papers-—or whatever.”

“ ‘Or whatever,’ ” I repeated, remembering the five corpses.

“You won’t tell them back in Washington, will you?” The old lady was anxious. “If you do, they might get angry with poor Henry, and then he’ll be angry with me, and I’ll never be able to get him to stay home and take care of himself when he gets the sniffles.”

“Your secret is safe with me,” I assured her.

“Thank you,” she said cheerily. “Because otherwise I might have to kill you, too.” She thought a moment. “Maybe I should kill you anyway,” she remarked. “The trouble is, I’m not sure -- Henry was sort of groggy from aspirin and all, and he didn’t tell me.”

“That’s an interesting silencer you’ve got on that gun,” I remarked. “Can I look at it a minute‘?”

She handed me the gun. I tucked it snugly in my pocket.

“You tricked me!” she realized. “That’s the thanks I get for saving your life.”

“I guess I just don’t trust people who go around saving my life anymore,” I said, remembering Mr. Pong. “They always seem to end up trying to kill me them- selves.”

“You took advantage of my trust.” She was indignant. “That’s how it is today. People are always taking advantage of old people.”

“It must be the youth culture,” I sympathized.

“Our time will come,” she grumbled. “ ‘Old Power’ will have its day.”

“Of course it will.” Phoebe tried to soothe her. “Senility is beautiful.”

“Right on, daughter!”

I herded Phoebe and the old lady back to the staff room. When we were settled there, I turned to Phoebe. “You were telling me about Tom Swift,” I prodded her.

“In front of her?” Phoebe indicated the old lady. “The CIA . . .” She left it hanging.

I saw what she meant. I stared at the old lady a moment. Then I noticed something. She was wearing a hearing aid. I reached over gently and disconnected it. Problem solved. “It’s okay to talk now,” I told Phoebe.

“I don’t know exactly what you’re after,” she said. She thought about it. “Well, let me start with how Tom introduced me into the phone-phreak in-group,” she suggested finally. “Actually, he made me a part of one of the biggest ripoffs ever pulled on Ma Bell. It was really fantastic, let me tell you. . . .”

“Fantastic” was the word, all right. What Phoebe described sounded like the ravings of a hyper-imaginative science-fiction writer. And yet, later, when it was checked out, it all turned out to be true.

What it added up to was that a group of phone phreaks around the country had “captured” a small exchange in a remote area of the Northwest and held it for six weeks. M.F.-ing via the Telex testing number, they’d “seized” all the tandems and held them open day and night to receive long-distance calls from the growing number of phreaks being clued into what was happening. In effect, it was an ongoing conference call which involved a couple of thousand phreaks over the time it lasted.

Old hands introduced new phreaks into the “conference.” Foreign phreaks from all over the world were relayed into the “conference” by American contacts. Technical information was swapped, data which set up Ma Bell for plucking in a variety of ways by more and more phone trippers.

A rapport sprang up among those involved. Individual pranksters realized that they were members of a group with a potential for collective muscle. The leadership revolved around two experts: Tom Swift and Bugs Ameche.

The “conference” ended when complaints from local people about their inability to make long-distance calls alerted Ma Bell to the fact that all the L.D. lines leading in and out of the exchange were tied up. There was no choice but to shut down the exchange. As Phoebe explained it, the telephone company was at the mercy of its own system. No one exchange code could be made phreak-proof without altering the entire long-distance setup. According to the experts, that would take maybe twenty years and cost billions of dollars.

However, even with the “conference” over, Tom Swift and Bugs Ameche maintained constant contact with some thirty top phone phreaks. A schedule of calls was maintained to keep this elite group in communication with each other. Phone phreaks, generally, are lonely people. Now, for the first time for some of them, they were able to relate to others like themselves. But both Tom and Bugs had more grandiose things in mind than meeting the social needs of the phreaks.

Bugs wanted to organize them into a money-making operation. He figured that if the phreaks cooperated, they could set up a phone service of their own, sell it to people at half the rates Bell charged, and still come out with a tremendous profit. The idea was they’d use their M.F.-ers to get Bell’s equipment to perform the services.

At that time there were already college phreaks who were selling their friends long-distance calls at half-price. A phreak in Saigon regularly sold G.I.’s calls home at five dollars a throw and let the customer talk to his family for as long as an hour. But these were isolated ripoffs. Bugs wanted to establish a network, stabilize prices, and actually go into competition with the phone company. He also talked about manufacturing M.F.-ers and selling them in bulk. He thought there might be two or three hundred dollars’ profit per unit.

Tom Swift was against Bugs’s scheme. He wasn’t interested in making money, He wanted to organize the phreaks to take on the biggest technical challenge of all. He wanted to shut down Ma Bell completely.

“Is that really possible?” I asked Phoebe.

“Oh, yes!” She nodded firmly.

“But how?”

“It’s very technical. But given the technology, it’s not really difficult. Half a dozen phone phreaks at strategic points around the country, working in concert, could stack up enough tandems to busy out all the long-lines in the United States. A dozen or so-—maybe less, if they planned it right—-could busy out the large city exchanges, kill off local as well as long-distance service, and stop phone communication cold.”

“That,” I opined, “is a pretty wild scheme.”

“That’s what Bugs thought. He and Tom didn’t agree. Pretty soon the group they’d built up was split into two factions. Most of the blind phreaks stayed with Tom. I tried to keep neutral myself, but actually I thought Bugs was right. Particularly when Tom started in with the computer bit.”

My ears perked up. “The computer bit?”

Phoebe explained how Tom Swift had gone to work for a shared-time computer organization. Such operations sell “big-brain” computer time to other firms. The customer dials directly into the computer. He has a password which is “heard” by the computer as permission to perform certain tasks. The computer is set up so that the main memory bank is sectioned off from each individual program receiver to prevent customers from infiltrating one another’s business.

Once hired, Tom Swift easily cracked the code that enabled him to read each customer’s password. This gave him access to the information storage itself. With what he learned from it, he developed a technique for dialing his way into any shared-time computer from the outside. He was able to busy out all the input circuits, tap a verification tandem, eavesdrop on the passwords and instructions of any customer whose feeder line he’d released, and utilize the multifrequency code he’d cracked to feed the computer false information, tap it for data already stored, or reprogram it at will. Yeah, any computer!

“Including the FBI crime-control computer!” Phoebe added. “Did you know that every major city in the country has a local police computer terminal with direct access to the FBI computer? Tom figured out how to dial through the local terminal into the FBI’s memory banks, tap them, feed them phony data, even reprogram them. I don’t know how far he went with it. But I do know of at least one stunt he actually pulled.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“He fed an imaginary spy case into the FBI computer. He led the FBI step by step from the Soviet Embassy in New York to an underground Black Panther¹³ headquarters in California to a top-secret nuclear-energy project in Alaska. He made it look like the Soviet ambassador and Bobby Seale¹⁴ and Angela Davis¹⁵ and Father Daniel Berrigan¹⁶ and Dr. Spock¹⁷ were all in league to steal atomic secrets. Then, when the FBI was ready to close in on the espionage ring, Tom programmed a mysterious top agent who was supposedly in charge of the whole operation. He fed in data that led agents to a certain window at a certain race track where this Mr. Big could be nailed with the goods. Acting under the computer’s instructions, over a hundred FBI agents descended on a parimutuel window at the designated time.”

“And?”

“They came within a hair of arresting the late J. Edgar Hoover¹⁸ as a Communist spy!”

I savored that irony for a moment. Then: “Do you know where Tom Swift is now?” I asked the crucial question.

“No. But I do know he’s planning to get in touch with Bugs Ameche.”

That surprised me. “How do you know that?”

“Bugs told me.”

“Bugs Ameche told you? You’re in contact with him?”

“Yes. He’s holed up in a brothel not far from here. Across the Mexican border, in Ciudad Juarez. You see, Bugs had to get out of the country because of the Mafia thing. Also, the feds are after him because they think he’s responsible for some of the things Tom is doing. At least, that’s what Bugs thinks.”

“What’s he doing in a brothel?” I wondered.

“They’re legal in Juarez. Bookmaking isn’t. This brothel is a front for a horse parlor. Bugs runs the phone end.”

“How come he thinks Tom Swift will contact him? I thought you said they had a falling out.”

“They did. But Tom tracked Bugs down through some phreaks they both know, and the phreaks passed the word that Tom would call Bugs direct.”

“I guess the next thing is for me to talk to Bugs,” I decided.

Phoebe told me how to locate the brothel where Bugs was holed up. I thanked her and got up to leave.

“I’m coming too!” The little old lady spoke for the first time since I’d cut off her hearing aid.

I ignored her and started for the door.

“I know all the back roads, and I drive like a pistol. If you don’t take me, I’ll only beat you there. And I’ll blow the whistle on you.”

“Just where do you think I’m going?” I challenged her.

The little old lady repeated the address Phoebe had given me.

“You old fraud!” I exploded. “That hearing aid is a phony. You were listening to every word!”

“No such thing!” She was indignant. “I’m stone deaf!”

“Then how . . . ?”

She smiled beatifically. She looked for all the world like Whistler’s favorite mother¹⁹ . And when she spoke, it was pure melted butter, sweet and easy on the tired old gums.

“I read lips,” she said. “I read lips!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The Ciudad Juarez red-light district isn’t the sort of homey place to bring a girl like mother. Anybody’s mother. Even a CIA mother!

Sex, Juarez style, is pretty much youth-oriented. The little old lady couldn’t compete. Not that she didn’t get some offers. She had a certain geriatric appeal that did bring bids from a few obvious Oedipus wrecks. But the prices offered were so low it was insulting.

The name of the whorehouse was “Caesar’s Palace.” It wasn’t hard to find. But it did involve acting out the traditional charade.

You see, Ciudad Juarez is right across the border from El Paso, Texas. A so-called “free bridge” connects the two cities. Once the border was the Rio Grande River, but the course of the river changed, and today the bridge spans a dry bed.

Juarez used to be the quickie-divorce capital of the Western Hemisphere. Quite recently, however, the Mexican government has changed the residency requirements, and U.S. mate-shedders have been forced to seek relief from marriage elsewhere. But this doesn’t seem to have changed the image of Ciudad Juarez in other ways. It’s the prototype of the border town, rivaled only by Tijuana. Its business is sex and drugs. The customs officers at either end of the free bridge don’t noticeably interfere with either enterprise.

On the Mexican side of the free bridge you’re immediately swamped by pimps, prostitutes, and little kids selling everything from French postcards to heroin. The major entrepreneurs are the Juarez cabdrivers. The meter is secondary to them. Their primary source of income is the kickback they receive for steering tourist johns to bed, plus whatever tip the grateful john may supply for getting in and out of the area un-jackrolled.

The hackie-pimps huckster with a two-way pitch. On the one hand, they proclaim the youth and virginity to be found at the particular establishment they’re pushing. On the other, they hiss dire warnings of venereal disease²⁰ and violence awaiting customers sucked in by rivals. All of which is a hype most American tourists never catch on to even after they’ve had their Juarez adventure.

The hype is simple. Sex in Juarez is run by the Mexican government. The one thing they don’t want is trouble with Americans. The red-light district is thick with cops staked out to protect visiting Yankees. Anything and everything to separate the American dollar from its possessor is permissible— except violence. His pocket may be picked in any number of ways, but every precaution is taken to ensure both his safety and his health. You’re a lot more likely to get rolled in Frisco, or to pick up V.D. in New York, than to fall victim to either in Ciudad Juarez.

Nor is that all there is to the hype. Judging from the downtown action, you’d think the town was filled with brothels. But with the government running everything in one way or another, such competition would be self-defeating. The truth is that in all Juarez, there’s only one brothel!

That’s right! It has thirty names, and twenty separate back-street entrances, but the fact is there’s only one. The fierce competition among the hackie-pimps is the biggest hype of all. Each of them will take you by a different route to a different entrance to the same place. Caesar’s Palace has many names, but they’re all Caesar’s Palace. And the competition for your business, the bickering and bartering, is simply the acting out of a traditional charade as old as the city itself.

It was after midnight when we entered Caesar’s Palace. The bar and lounge where the girls circulated who weren’t already occupied was jammed. Most of the customers were American men—young service-men, a few teen-agers, middle-aged-businessman types, the blusterers, the scared, the first-timers, and the experienced. The place was thick with smoke and smelled heavily of perfume and booze.

I led the little old lady up to the bar. Immediately a young Mexican Indian girl sidled up alongside me. Her full breasts were spilling out of the inch-wide straps which constituted the top of her dress. Her bare leg slithered through the slit of her skirt and rubbed up against mine.

“Hello, señor,” she greeted me. “I admire an hombre who does not leave his mother sitting home alone.” She chucked me under the chin. “My name is ‘Elena,’ ” she introduced herself. “You like to come upstairs with me and bring Mama so she sees how well I treat you? I don’t mind. I have great respect for motherhood.”

“No, thanks,” I told her. “I’m looking for a guy named ‘Bugs Ameche.’ ” I untangled my leg from hers. “Do you know where I can find him?”

“I never hear of him.” Elena shrugged.

“If I could speak with the boss a minute,” I suggested.

Phoebe Phreeby had said that if I told the boss of this place that a friend of Phoebe Phreeby’s wanted to see Bugs Ameche, the word would be passed along and Ameche would see me on the strength of her name.

“The boss is upstairs,” Elena told me.

“Thanks.” I started for the bottom of the staircase, the old lady following in my wake.

“You can’t go up there without a girl.” Elena was at my elbow again, nuzzling it with her right breast.

She was right. A giant-sized Mexican, his face impassive, was blocking the entrance to the staircase.

“But I don’t want sex,” I told Elena. “I just want to see the boss.”

“The only way to get upstairs is to take a girl.” She was stubborn.

Dense as I was, it percolated through. “Okay. How much?” I asked her with a sigh.

“Fifteen dollars American.” She beamed at me as I handed her the money. “You won’t be sorry,” she purred.

“I just want to see the boss,” I repeated. “No service required.”

“What about her?” Elena indicated the old lady.

“What about her?”

“It’s fifteen for her, too.”

I was really tempted to try to leave the old lady behind. But I’d seen enough of her to know she wouldn’t take that lying down. A fuss would be time-consuming, and I didn’t want to waste any time. So I forked over another fifteen simoleons to Elena, and we followed her up the stairs.

“You want to see an exhibition?” Elena suggested when we reached the top of the stairs. “Only twenty dollars. Two girls, you know.” She winked. “Sixty-nine separate Spanish ways to make love. Very instructive.”

“I just want to see the boss.”

“Fifteen more dollars, American, I’ll show you a good time like you never dreamed.”

“Just the boss.”

“Ten dollars for a blow-job you’ll never forget. I’m the best in Juarez.”

“The boss.”

Elena’s scowl said she felt rejected and hurt. She led us through several turns of a winding hall and finally drew up in front of a closed door. She knocked, and a voice called out in Spanish that it was all right to enter.

A meticulously groomed Mexican who looked more like a successful international banker than the overseer of a whorehouse stood up politely when we entered. He fetched a chair for the old lady, one for me, nodded to Elena to leave, and then reseated himself behind his modest desk. “How may I be of service?” he inquired. “What is your pleasure? Drugs? Marijuana? Some highly selective pornography?”

“I’m looking for Bugs Ameche,” I told him.

“I know of no one by that name.” Bland innocence.

“If you’ll get word to him that Phoebe Phreeby sent me, it will be all right,” I assured him. “He’ll see me.”

“But I don’t know the gentleman of whom you speak, señor.”

“Maybe you could ask around,” I suggested. “You could start with your local bookmaker.”

Only a slight narrowing of the eyes said I’d touched a vulnerable spot. “Bookmakers, señor? But this is a bordello. There is no gambling here. Gambling is illegal.”

“And illegal gambling is a very complicated matter,” I said soothingly. “Of course, I could ask the American consul to take up the matter of my friend. Or perhaps the immigration officials. But it really would be simpler if you made the inquiries.”

“As you wish, señor.” Smooth. Very smooth. “If you’ll be good enough to wait here while I excuse myself for a moment . . .” He left us.

Inside of less than five minutes he was back. “Elena awaits you outside,” he told us. “I think she may be able to help you in your quest.” Nothing more committal than that.

Elena routed us through the winding hall again. Once more she stopped in front of a closed door. This time produced a key and dangled it under my nose.

“Seven dollars and fifty cents American,” Elena said.

“For what?”

“Rental for a private room.”

“I don’t want to rent a room. I want to-—”

She held up her hand, cutting off my sentence. “What you do in the room, señor”—her gaze went from me to the little old lady and back again, leaving no doubt as to her opinion of what would transpire in the room—- “is your affair. But for privacy, you must pay.”

“What about Bugs Ameche?” I demanded.

“I know nothing.” Elena shrugged. “I was told only to bring you to this room. For which you must pay,” she added. “Seven dollars and fifty cents American.”

What the hell! I forked it over. Last of the big-time spenders. On a Putnam-guaranteed U.S.-government expense account. My apologies to the taxpayers. Elena unlocked the door, and we entered. She handed me the key and left us. A moment later the door opened again and a man entered. He turned the lock behind him.

He was small and thin with a posture like a banana and a complexion like a billiard table. Only not as smooth. His gaunt face was a swamp of pockmarks, pimples, and pustules floating in a bilious green sea of wrinkles.

“Are you Bugs Ameche?” I inquired.

He didn’t answer.

“Phoebe Phreeby sent me,” I reassured him. “I’m a friend.”

“I’m Bugs Ameche.” Snake-eyes watched me suspiciously, not buying easy friendship.

“Bugs Ameche, I’m taking you into custody!”

My jaw dropped. Snake-eyes blinked; suspicion confirmed. It was the little old lady who had spoken. She was sitting there primly, watching us both.

And she was covering us with a Smith & Wesson .38!

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“Listen, Grandma, you could do yourself damage with that thing.” Bugs Ameche started moving toward the little old lady.

“One more step and I’ll shoot,” she told him calmly.

Bugs was smart enough to believe her. He stood still.

“Where did you get the gun?” I asked the old lady, recalling that I’d taken one weapon away from her already that evening.

“I always keep a spare in with my knitting. Loaded,” she was careful to add.

“You people feds?” Bugs inquired.

“CIA,” the old lady told him.

“Her, not me,” I protested. “I really am a friend of Phoebe’s. This is strictly her double-cross.” I turned to the old lady. “What’s the big idea?” I demanded.

“The CIA wants this man,” she replied. “If I bring him in, it will be a feather in Henry’s cap. Henry,” she explained to Bugs, “is my son. He’s home sick with a terrible cold.”

“Vitamin C,” Bugs recommended.

“How do you think you’re going to get him out of here?” I asked her. “You’re in a foreign country. You have no extradition papers. You have no authority.”

“I’ll check with Henry.” She walked over to a table in the corner of the room, picked up a telephone there, and dialed. There was a couple of minutes’ silence, and then: “Henry?” she said into the mouthpiece. “Did you take your temperature, dear? . . . Well, why not? . . . Look, you take it right now, and I’ll wait.” She stood tapping her foot, the gun held steady. “Are you sure?” she said finally. “No, that’s not very high. Still, you’d better take two more aspirin and stay under the covers. . . . As a matter of fact, Henry, I do think that’s exactly what James Bond does when he has a cold. . . . Don’t raise your voice, dear, it will only make your throat feel worse. . . . No, you may not go to Interrogation School tomorrow! . . . I simply will not have you playing around with electric-shock equipment when your hands are all clammy from a fever. It’s not safe! . . . Now, listen, dear, I called to tell you that I’m in Ciudad Juarez at this bordello, and . . . Henry? . . . That’s right, a bordello. . . . Henry? . . . Henry? . . . Henry, now you stop that laughing! . . . The thing is, dear, I’ve captured Bugs Ameche, and I don’t know what -”

“Let me talk to him,” I interrupted her.

She shrugged and handed me the phone.

“Hello, Henry? . . . This is Steve Victor. I work for Charles Putnam. I hate to pull rank on you, Henry, but the fact is— What? . . . Oh, yes, I outrank your mother too! . . . If you’ll call your superiors and have them check with Putnam — Yeah, well, they’ll know who he is! . . . Just say I’m asking for verification of my authority in this matter. . . . When that’s straightened out, Henry, I want you to, do two things for me. I want you to get word through to Putnam to call me back here. And I want you to call back yourself and get your mother off my back.” I gave him the number of the phone. “Stay under the covers,” I told him, “and take care of that cold.” I hung up.

We waited. It was a pretty dull half-hour. Finally the phone rang. It was Putnam. I cut short his questions and told him what I wanted. He said it wouldn’t be easy, but he could do it.

As soon as I hung up, the phone rang a second time. It was Henry. He spoke to his mother.

When the call was completed, she handed me her gun. “Henry says you’re in charge.” She was all good-sporty about it. “Just tell me what to do.”

“Sit down and tend to your knitting,” I told her.

She did exactly that, producing two needles and a ball of yarn from her knitting bag. “A pullover for Henry,” she confided.

I turned to Bugs. “I need your cooperation,” I told him.

“Why should I cooperate with you?” He was still suspicious.

“Look, I just got you off the hook with the feds. I can make that permanent.”

“The feds are the least of my troubles. They got nothing on me. It’s Tom Swift they want. I know if I talk about Swift, they’ll drop those penny-ante phone-phreak charges against me. I don’t need you for that.”

“How about the Mafia?” I asked him. “You know there’s a contract out for you. Hiding out in Mexico won’t stop the hit. Suppose I can square that? Will you cooperate then?”

Bugs turned a little greener at the mention of the Mafia contract. “How can you do that?” he asked, hope mixing with the doubt in his voice.

“Wait and see.”

We didn’t have to wait long. Less than five minutes later the phone rang again. I answered it.

“Hello, Victor?” I recognized Gino Goldberg’s voice.

“You really are a fortunate man,” he greeted me. “I never expected to speak to you alive again.”

“No thanks to you,” I reminded him.

“Don’t hold grudges,” he advised me. “That’s plasma under the bridge. It’s all in the past. Mr. Putnam’s been in touch with the family, and I’ve been instructed to cooperate with you fully. Let me prove it. Put Ameche on the phone.”

I motioned Bugs to come over and held the receiver so we could both hear. “Ameche, you know who this is?”

“Yeah. I recognize your voice, Mr. Goldberg.”

“Good. Now, listen. You cooperate with Mr. Victor, and the contract’s canceled. You understand? The slate’s clean. But you have to do whatever he requests. Otherwise, it’s a sure hit.”

“I got it, Mr. Goldberg. I’ll play along. And, listen, I’m really sorry about that business with the M.F.-ers. I couldn’t help—”

“It will be forgotten, Ameche. Just do what Mr. Victor wants.” The receiver clicked and went dead.

Bugs Ameche turned to me with a new respect. The ravaged no-man’s-land of his countenance was flushed with appreciation. His willingness to cooperate shone from his beady eyes.

I got right to it. “Has Tom Swift contacted you yet?” I asked him.

“Not yet. But he’s gotten word to me through some phreaks we both know that he’ll call me tonight -- about an hour from now.”

“Do you know why he’s calling you?”

Bugs poked at a pimple under his right ear. “He’s probably going to pull off some really big phone trip, and I’m the only one technically hip enough to dig it. Tom has a pretty big ego, and I’m the only real competition he’s ever had when it comes to phreaking. I guess he wants the kick of lording it over me. Like he has this thing about how being blind makes him superior to phreaks like me who can see.”

“What’s being blind have to do with it?”

“More than half the phone phreaks in the country are blind,” Bugs explained. “Blind kids dig sonics. Lots of them make up for not seeing by getting into sound. A few years back, one of the original blind phone phreaks, a kid, went to a summer camp for the blind. Lots of the kids there were into electronic sound. He introduced them to phone phreaking. It really caught on, and when the kids went home, they passed along the phreaking techniques to other blind kids they went to school with, or knew through various institutes for the blind. That’s how come the majority of phone phreaks in the U.S. today are blind.”

“And Tom Swift thinks that makes them superior?”

“Yeah. He has this crazy theory that blind people generally are superior to people who can see. Also, he thinks phreaks are the elite of the blind -- the natural leadership of the sightless is how Tom puts it. Not being blind, naturally I couldn’t buy that. It was one of the big reasons why we split. And when we did, all of the phreaks who went with Tom were blind.”

“Do you know what he’s been up to since you split?”

“Not really. Tom’s a wild man. Could be anything.” Bugs thought a moment. “Of course, he was getting into computers,” he remembered.

“Did he ever mention a specific computer?”

“Well, there was this gag he pulled with the FBI ‘brain.’ ”

“I know about that. Anything else? Anything even bigger?”

“He hinted about something really big with a computer, something world-shaking. But he was cagey about the specifics.”

“When he calls tonight,” I wondered, “is there any way of tracing the call?”

“Not any conventional way. The cops couldn’t do it. I doubt that even Bell would have the know-how. Not the way Tom stacks tandems!” Bugs mulled it over. “I just might be able to take a crack at it myself,” he decided finally. “Come on along with me.”

The old lady picked up her knitting, and we followed him to the basement of the bordello. Here Bugs unlocked a door, ushered us into a room filled with all sorts of complicated-looking electronics equipment, and locked it behind us. He cleared a bench for us to sit on, then set about performing certain tasks. Bugs explained what he was doing as he worked.

“I’m hooking up this phone to a speaker so that when Tom calls you can hear what he says. . . . Incidentally, Tom has extremely sensitive hearing, so be very quiet. . . . Now, this is a high-sensitivity recording device. I’m plugging into the receiver. It will record all the background noises on the wire and transmit them to this gadget here, which is really a very complicated piece of equipment I developed myself.”

“What does it do?” I asked.

“If it works, it will mute out the sound of Tom’s voice, produce a tape of just the electronic background noises, and then separate out the various sounds so that we’ll have five or six or eight separate tapes in sequence. You dig? On each tape will be the noise of one relay switch connecting a tandem to a long-line. Then it’s a matter of identifying each of the sounds. If he doesn’t get too fancy, I should be able to figure out where he’s calling from within maybe an hour after the call.”

I took it on faith. The technology was beyond me. I watched Bugs finish setting up his equipment, and then we settled back to wait for the phone to ring. And ring it did—-right on schedule.

Bugs answered. “Hello.”

“Hello, Bugs.” Tom Swift’s voice came over the speaker loud and clear. “I’m just calling to blow your mind, old buddy. You know what’s going to happen when I hang up? Operation Silence, that’s what!”

What the hell was “Operation Silence”?

“You worked it out, Tom?” Bugs inquired. “You’re sure?”

“You know me, Bugs. I wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t sure. It’s set. And all blind phreaks, Bugs—the elite! Five mice plus me. That’s all it takes. And Operation Silence is just phase one. After that comes phase two and phase three. It’s going to be a new world for phone phreaks, baby. You could have been in on it, but you missed the boat.”

“I guess I did, Tom.”

“In a way, I’m glad you did, Bugs. It’s purer this way. It takes the blind to really see the way. Your eyes might have led us astray.”

The old lady’s knitting needles clicked loudly in the short silence which followed this.

“Tom, you’re flipping out,” Bugs said finally.

“No such thing. Just wait. You’ll see. Blind is beautifull”

“Phase two is computers,” Bugs guessed. “But what’s phase three, Tom?”

“Today Germany!” Tom Swift chuckled. “Abyssinia, old buddy.” There was a series of clicks. He’d hung up.

And tomorrow the world! I completed the quote to myself. That was phase three!

But I still didn’t understand what phase one— Operation Silence—was. Bugs was working furiously over his equipment, pulling the tapes and setting them up on reels he’d prepared in advance. I waited until he was ready to play them back, and then I raised the question.

“Operation Silence.” Bugs repeated the words after me. “Simple. Tom has blanked out the phone service all over the country.” He picked up the telephone and listened a minute. Then he jiggled the receiver and dialed. Finally he hung it back up. “He’s done it, all right,” he told us. “As of right now, it’s as if Alexander Graham Bell had never existed. There is no telephone service!”

What we have here, I thought to myself in a daze, is a failure to communicate!

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

A monumental failure to communicate! Like Pearl Harbor, VJ Day²¹ , and the moon landing, it was to become one of those times by which people reckon for years afterward. Where were you when JFK was shot? Where were you when the lights went out all over the Eastern Seaboard? And now, where were you when the phones went dead?

Miss Matilda Crotchet, a spinster lady of Kokomo, Indiana, was sitting at home waiting to receive her regular nightly anonymous obscene phone call. The phone never rang. Miss Crotchet’s faith in the indiscriminate lust of men was destroyed. The next day she bought a vibrator.

Snappy Wheeler, a traveling salesman eking out a living in the Wisconsin boondocks, tried to call his wife to tell her he’d be home a day early from his latest selling trip. When he couldn’t reach her, he went home anyway. He walked in on his district manager in bed with his spouse. Snappy Wheeler was subsequently reassigned to the prime Milwaukee territory, and his income has doubled.

Mrs. Minnie Rothfil of Trenton, New Jersey, a widowed Jewish mother with ESP, was unable to get through to her bachelor son. For the first time, Irving Rothfil was able to complete the sex act free of the coitus interruptus of one of his mother’s intuitively timed calls. The girl became pregnant and Irving was forced to marry her. Mrs. Minnie Rothfil went along on the honeymoon.

A doctor in rural Oregon, frustrated in his attempt to phone in a prescription renewal, forgot about it altogether. The result was that Oscar and Myra Dorian were deprived of the hormones by which the doctor had been keeping their marriage in balance. Myra’s voice deepened and she not only sprouted a beard, but also a thick lawn of hair on her chest. Oscar went soprano, suffered a genital inversion, and started wearing Myra’s lingerie. The sex-role changes proved irreversible. Today the Dorians have the most successful marriage in the country.

There were those who responded to the phone hush by fighting back with good old American business initiative. One such was a Chicago call girl named Eva DePenable. She made a deal with a fellow who trained carrier pigeons. So many of these pigeons were released by conventioneers arriving at O’Hare Airport that they became a hazard to low-flying planes. Eva DePenable subsequently faced charges by the Federal Aeronautics Administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department!

All over the country, sexual activities were affected by the phone failure. Straying husbands, unable to call their wives to say they’d been held up by important business meetings, forsook round-heeled secretaries and caught their commuter trains home. Unfaithful wives, kept from setting up motel assignations, sublimated with housecleaning binges. Immobilized bachelors stared blankly at their little black books. Single girls’ hearts leaped wildly at the sound of ringing, only to sink again with the realization that it was merely the timer on the stove giving notice to turn the one lonely lamb chop broiling there. According to a Gallup poll, during the telephone crisis the masturbatory rate across the nation rose by twelve-point-two percent.

Nor was sex the only area of life affected. Orders to liquor stores, bets to bookies, margin-buying calls to stockbrokers, were all frustrated, thereby postponing catastrophe for many an alcoholic, bangtail patsy, and prospective bankrupt. It was a time of relief for those on the sucker lists of phone subscription salesmen, a reprieve to the victims of party-line gossip, and a hiatus to the recipients of telephoned bad news everywhere.

If some of the worst people benefited by the phone blackout, it’s also true that some of the best-meaning folk met with catastrophe. For instance, there was Ernest Heavyweight, a Scoutmaster of Billings, Montana. Ernest faced the emergency by assembling Boy Scout Troop Thirty-one for a demonstration of the feasibility of substituting Indian smoke signals for the defunct phone system. While waving a blanket over a roaring bonfire, he inadvertently set himself on fire. Ernest Heavyweight was immolated to a crisp, and the seventeen horrified boys who witnessed it were disillusioned with scouting ever after.

Less extreme, but still quite sad, was the effect the phone hush had on Mrs. Amy Simple, a Colorado farm wife, and her marriage. For many years Mrs. Simple’s husband had expressed himself to her only by flatulence and eructation, which—translated from the original Agnew—means that instead of talking to her, he farted and belched. To make this noise pollution bearable, Mrs. Simple sought solace each day by calling “Dial-a-Prayer.” Finding herself deprived of this solace, she tried to convey her feelings of inner turmoil to Farmer Simple while he was cavorting with his hogs in the barn. When he responded with his usual gaseous explosion, her customary passivity cracked and she plunged, a pitchfork into his rear end with all her might. This brought forth a sustained hissing sound similar to that of a punctured tire. Farmer Simple has neither eructed nor flatulated from that day to this. And now, alas, there is no communication at all in the Simple household.

Some of the victims of the phone muting later sued the telephone company for damages. Among them was Dr. Cesar E. N. Padaffi, a Detroit obstetrician. He claimed that a patient of his had wasted so much time trying to telephone him to say her labor pains had started that the baby was born in a taxicab en route to the hospital. The cabdriver had delivered it with no trouble at all. But Dr. Padaffi had been forced to split his fee with the hackie, and he was suing Ma Bell to recover the half he’d lost.

Mrs. Dinah Spoyler of Jackson, Mississippi, also sued, claiming she’d been widowed as a result of the interruption in her phone service. When Mrs. Spoyler’s toilet backed up and regurgitated, her husband reached for the plunger, and Mrs. Spoyler—having had certain unpleasant experiences in the past with his do-it-your-self bungling of household repairs—raced to the telephone to call the plumber. She was still frantically trying to dial the dead phone when the late Mr. Spoyler passed her on the way to the basement, various wrenches clanking from his eager hands. Desperately, she kept trying to call. But she abandoned her efforts when she heard loud gurgling sounds from the cellar. She raced toward the sounds, but arrived too late. Mr. Spoyler had opened a valve leading to an outside sewer, causing the main sewer pipe to back up and split at the joint. The flood of offal was almost to the basement ceiling by the time she arrived. Aware that her husband couldn’t swim, she valiantly dived into the foul mess, plunged to the bottom again and again in an effort to save him, but to no avail. Mr. Spoyler perished under the bulk of his neighbors’ defecations. Besides suing for the loss of her husband’s services, Mrs. Spoyler also sought restitution for damages to her olfactory image, claiming that she now bore a permanent odor of organic waste which caused her to be socially ostracized.

Besides lawsuits, the telephone company had other, more immediate problems. For example, in Cedarhurst, Long Island, a suburb of New York City, local teenagers were so enraged at being deprived of their daily three-hour telephone privileges that they staged a demonstration to hang Alexander Graham Bell in effigy, rioted, and burned down the local Bell exchange. There were many similar incidents around the country.

Because of them, and because the phone-company management was sure that the breakdown was the result of espionage by perennially striking employees, the top brass demanded that government officials issue “Shoot to kill!” orders and enforce them against anyone caught tampering with phone-company equipment. Mayor Daley of Chicago and governors Reagan of California and Rockefeller of New York quickly complied with the request. New York City’s Mayor Lindsay responded by criticizing the Rockefeller edict.

Other public figures also commented on the telephone crisis. Hundreds of statements were issued by leaders from all segments of the nation’s society. Among them were the following²² :

“Let me make one thing perfectly clear: Motherhood is sacred! I would be derelict in my duty if I stood by idly and allowed a mother like Ma Bell to be reduced to the status of a second-rate communications power in the world today. I would not hesitate to pledge the entire armed might of this nation—the mightiest armed might of the mightiest armed nation in the history of the world—to the restoration of her former glory, including—let there be no mistake about this!—including whatever rate increases may prove necessary to insure the future security of your telephone company and mine!”-—Richard Milhous Nixon.

“With the phone out, maybe I’ll be able to get some sleep without that nut calling me up in the middle of the night to tell me how to run a down-and-in pattern.” — Don Shula, coach of the Miami Dolphins.

“Mewling, mendacious, militantly macrocephalic megalomaniacs, by mischievously modulating—nay, murderously mutilating!—Ma’s mellifluous mouthpiece machinery, have meticulously and methodically micturated on the mute majority’s magistracy, thereby manufacturing a monody to morality too monstrous to meditate!”-- Spiro T. Agnew.

“This could never have happened in Germany!”—- Wernher Von Braun.

“Without a phone, what is there left to live for?”-— Martha Mitchell.

“Nobody ever calls me -anyway.”-- Hubert Humphrey.

“So I’ll build my own telephone company.”—Aristotle Onassis.

“So few people are worth talking to. . . .”—-Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

“Don’t call me; I'll call you.”—Senator Edward F. Kennedy.

“Now phone booths can be converted into orgone boxes. . . . Try it, you’ll like it!”—J., Author of The Sensuous Woman.

“He’s not asking you; he’s telling you! India is responsible for the phone crisis!”—Dr. Henry Kissinger to a TOP SECRET meeting of presidential advisers, as quoted in Jack Anderson’s column.

"1 wonder who’s Kissinger now?”--Jack Anderson.

“With proper reconditioning, we can learn to do without phones just as we can learn to do without food, water, and sex.”— B. F. Skinner.

“Existentially, it’s a gas!”—Norman Mailer.

“I have positive proof that well-organized, militant revolutionaries are responsible!"’—Richard Kleindienst.

“Here we go again.”—Father Daniel Berrigan.

“I don’t care if there is no telephone service. I still demand an unlisted number!”—Elizabeth Taylor.

“You’d better give it to her.”— Richard Burton.

“There are no immediate plans to take over A.T.&T.” -— A spokesman for a spokesman for a spokesman for Howard Hughes.

“You don’t need a phone to talk to Jesus.”— Oral Roberts.

“I’m embarking on a full-scale investigation of the telephone company aimed at democratizing its monopolistic structure.”— Ralph Nader.

“There will be a full-scale investigation of Ralph Nader."’—-A spokesman for Bell Telephone.

“We will cooperate fully in the full-scale investigation of Ralph Nader.”—A spokesman for General Motors.

“First Penn Central, now Ma Bell! America must find God before it’s too late!”— Billy Graham.

“Remember the Alamo! Remember the Maine! Remember Pearl Harbor! Remember Ma Bell.”— John Wayne.

“Strictly as a private citizen, understand, with no official connection with the government, just as a matter of personal conscience, I’m offering to do a benefit for Ma Bell.”— Bob Hope.

“Telephones suck.”—Abbie Hofiman.

Who says the silence shall endure?

Ma Bell is proud! Ma Bell is pure!

Have faith in her! Faith is the cure!

Our faith shall wash away her pain!

Her wires shall sing in snow and rain!

Who says they shan’t go “hum” again?”

Rod McKuen.

“Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm- mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm . . .” — Allen Ginsberg

While notables issued statements and private citizens adjusted to the phone failure, a variety of American institutions — other utilities, large corporations, labor unions, foundations, universities, etc.— were also affected, and also reacted. The Con Edison management, secretly delighted to be incommunicado, laid off thousands of employees whose sole function had been to lend their ears to telephoned complaints from dissatisfied customers. Con Ed also issued a letter of condolence to Ma Bell.

The New York City Transit Workers’ Union demanded parity with telephone operators being paid for a no-hour day and threatened to shut down the subways if the demand wasn’t met.

Harvard University set up a Department of Viable Alternatives to Telephone Communication and hired the French mime Marcel Marceau²³ to head it. Black students insisted upon and got their own program. They imported a tom-tom expert from Tanganyika to set it up.

The Ford Foundation financed a study on the effects of the phone blackout on starving Appalachian families, most of whom had never been able to afford a telephone. One interviewer was strung up to a telephone pole. The note attached to his body warned sociologists to stay out of Appalachia and let the people starve in peace.

Anaconda Copper, foreseeing that Ma Bell would have to replace certain equipment, raised its prices in defiance of the administration’s wage-price freeze. Bethlehem Steel quickly followed suit. The Steelworkers’ Union, anticipating the effect of the rise in prices, demanded a cost-of-living wage increase. Nixon’s Wage and Price Freeze Board granted the Anaconda and Bethlehem requests and turned thumbs down on the union’s demands, citing “free enterprise” in the first instance and “anti-inflationary measures” in the second.

IBM was hardest hit. With thousands of customers denied phone access to its shared-time computers²⁴ , the corporation’s income nosedived. So did the value of its stock, which, together with the sharp drop A.T.&T. took, sent Wall Street into its worst spin since 1929. The country tottered on the brink of depression.

The situation was saved when the federal government stepped in with subsidies for all major corporations affected by the phone hush. The Secretary of the Treasury went on national television to explain to the American people that this wouldn’t really cost them anything since the money was being diverted from welfare programs, which — as everybody knew anyway — were feeding troughs for the lazy. He added that there was sound fiscal precedent for the action, since the government had been subsidizing the oil industry for years.

Subsequently, IBM received a government contract for its computers to analyze just how big a piece of the subsidy pie each corporation should get. Thus it was the U.S. government which picked up the computer time. But there was one computer to which the United States no longer had access — the one in South America, the most important one of all, the one that would decide the fate of the world!

And Tom Swift controlled that one!

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

In the basement room of the Juarez brothel, the little old lady was knitting away like Madame DeFarge²⁵ . Cigaretteless, I was nibbling my nails down to the first knuckle. Bugs Ameche was hunched over a tape-p1ayback machine, listening with earphones, jotting down notes on a pad, and cursing to himself.

“I’ve traced it from Juarez through El Paso, Kansas City, and San Francisco,” he told us, disgruntled and muttering. “Tom used a loop-around in Frisco -- very tricky —coming out of Telstar²⁶ from Tokyo. From Tokyo I’ve followed it to Siberia, Moscow, Bonn, and London, where it came out of the transatlantic cable. Going into the cable is where I lose him. There’s some damn sound I can’t figure for beans. It’s like no tandem relay I’ve ever heard before. Listen.”

Bugs turned on the speaker. The sound was a sort of metallic click-click. He looked at me hopelessly. My return look was blank.

“I know what it is.”

We both turned and stared at the little old lady. She kept right on knitting.

“Sure you do, Grandma,” Bugs humored her.

“Listen, Junior, don’t call me ‘Grandma.’ I’ve been meaning to tell you. I don’t like it.”

“Sorry, Gra—- Sorry.”

“Turn that thing off,” she ordered him.

Bugs hesitated a moment, then shrugged and did as she said.

“Now close your eyes. Both of you.”

We closed our eyes.

Click-click!

We both opened our eyes—-wide. Bugs’s jaw was hanging down around his scrawny collarbone.

“What...? How...?”

The old lady held up her knitting and did something with the needles. Click-click!

“The recorder picked up the sound when I was talking to Tom before,” Bugs realized. “But how come only once? You were knitting all the time we were on the phone.”

“Because I only do this when I come to the end of a row.” She showed us. Click-click.

Bugs went back to his equipment and put on his earphones. Fifteen minutes or so passed, and then he removed them. “Bermuda,” he said. “And then New York. From there to Memphis, and that’s the first tandem he seized.” He opened a drawer and took out a book of maps. “The call was made from somewhere south of Memphis.” He found Memphis on one of the maps, drew two lines down from it, and then a third one, forming a triangle. He shaded in a narrow area on either side of the base of the triangle. “The call came from this area here. In Mississippi.”

“That covers about twenty miles,” I realized. “Can’t you pinpoint it?”

“I could if I could dial into the Memphis exchange. But Tom’s put the kibosh on that. The only way now is to go to the area. With all the other phones out, I should be able to pick up Tom with my sonar equipment.”

“Suppose he’s off the phone now?”

“He won’t be. To pull off Operation Silence, he has to keep his phone in use.”

We moved fast. Bugs packed up the necessary equipment, and we hightailed it across the border to the El Paso airport. There I put the little old lady in a cab, thanked her one last time for saving my life.

“Good-bye,” I said. “I hope Henry gets better.”

“Poor Henry-— I try to keep him ‘regular’ . . . but boys just don’t listen to their mothers these days.”

Then I made arrangements to rent a plane to fly Bugs and me to Memphis.

A hungry pilot snapped at the generous offer I made him and gassed up his little Beechcraft. It was a slow night, and the airport tower gave us immediate clearance. Ninety minutes from the time we’d left Juarez, we were in the air and on our way.

Listening to Bugs talk to the pilot, I realized he knew a lot about airplanes. When I commented on it, Bugs told me he had his pilot’s license. That gave me an idea.

“Are you checked out on ’copters?” I asked Bugs. “And could your equipment pick up Swift’s phone from the air?” The answer to both questions was affirmative. We had the pilot radio ahead and arrange for a helicopter rental. It was all gassed up, ready and waiting when we landed in Memphis.

The two of us took off again, with Bugs at the stick. He told me what to do with the sonar equipment, and I soon had it operating. We were over the fertile cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta when it blipped for the first time.

Bugs brought the whirlybird down and we hedgehopped the area. The white cotton rippled eerily in the moonlight. Following the blips, we zeroed in on the small town of Drew in Sunflower County.

“There it is!” Bugs pointed out an isolated cabin sitting all by itself on an abandoned cotton patch a few miles south of Drew. The land around it wasn’t white like the cotton fields, but rather a gray-brown tangle of overgrown weeds and briers with here and there a ragged tufting of cotton bolls struggling to survive.

I studied the terrain. “Drop me over there.” I pointed just beyond a scraggly clump of trees and underbrush about a quarter-mile past the cabin. “I can sneak up on the place from there.”

A few moments later I was on the ground watching the ’copter turn back toward Memphis. When it was out of sight, I started for the cabin. With luck, I hoped to catch Tom Swift by surprise. Instead, it was he who surprised me. Just as I slid around the corner of the cabin, pistol held at the ready, intending to kick in the front door and take the blind man unaware, I felt the hard steel nose of a revolver jammed into my spine.

“Hold it right there.”

I held it right there while his other hand reached around me to take my pistol. Then he prodded me with the revolver, and I moved in lockstep with him. We walked up a couple of steps to the porch and entered the cabin. He shut the door behind us.

It was pitch-black inside. Why not? Tom Swift was blind. He had no need of lights. And he sure as hell wasn’t worried about inconveniencing me.

He pushed me into a chair, drew another up alongside it, and sat down beside me. The gun rested on my shoulder, the cold nose nuzzling the cartilage just under my right ear. He struck a match and lit his pipe.

In the short-lived glare I got a look at Tom Swift for the first time. He fit the description Putnam had passed along to me: about thirty years old, average height and build, sandy hair. He was wearing a corduroy shirt and denim pants. Also dark glasses, which seemed incongruous in the darkness. The match went out, and my nose picked up the rich aroma of Borkum Riff.

“You’re Steve Victor. Right?” He spoke.

“Yeah. How did you guess?”

“I asked the computer what action might be taken to counteract my infiltration of it. You were the answer.”

His voice came from behind the glow of his pipe. “The ’copter was dumb,” he remarked. “My hearing is sharp as a razor. It was easy to peg where you set down. And then it was duck soup to pick a spot you’d have to walk past and nab you.”

“And now that you have?”

“We just sit here and wait for morning. By morning phase three will be unstoppable.”

“Suppose I don’t feel like waiting for morning?”

“Then I’ll have to kill you. I don’t want to do that. I’m pretty squeamish. I’ve never killed anybody before.” Tom Swift sighed. “But don’t make the mistake of thinking that because I’m blind you can outmaneuver me. If you make me shoot, there’s no way I can miss.” He tapped the gun lightly against my noggin, emphasizing the point. “If necessary, I could kill you from across the room,” he added. “I’m a crack shot. Just the sound of your breathing is all I’d need to know.”

It was an unpleasant subject, and I changed it.

“Tell me about phase three,” I suggested.

“Why not? You’ll know by morning anyway. Everybody will. The whole world.” He puffed on his pipe. “I guess I should start at the beginning.”

Only a technological genius could have thought of that approach!

“This planet Earth is in a helluva mess,” he began. “And it’s the fault of people — all people everywhere. But the people have leaders. They’ve always had leaders. And these leaders initiate programs and carry them out and manipulate like crazy so the people will accept them. So, in fact, it’s these leaders who are responsible for the mess. Now, who are these leaders?”

I stared blankly at the pipe smoke swirling around the ember glowing in the darkness.

“I’ll tell you who!” Tom Swift answered his own question. “The sighted! Down through the ages, the sighted have always run this world. They run it now. And they’ll run it tomorrow — if there is a tomorrow. However, what they’ve done with it proves that the sighted are the blindest people of all! No blind man ever aimed a missile! No blind man ever drilled an off-shore oil well! No blind man ever set up a system of apartheid or milked an underdeveloped country of its resources! Sighted men did those things! Sighted men have brought us to the point we’re at today! And if we let them, sighted men will destroy the planet Earth!”

Sighted men? Blind men? As if that were the only distinction to be made? As if there were only two kinds of people in the world? Along with the Borkum Riff, I began to sniff a serious case of paranoia!

Tom Swift went on to confirm my diagnosis. “The time has come for the blind to take over. The time has come for the blind to lead the blind who don’t know they’re blind, who because they’re sighted mistakenly think they have vision.”

“What makes you think blind people can run the world better than people who can see?” I asked. “The way I figure, the only difference is the lack of sight. And that’s a negative thing, not a positive quality.”

“Wrong. Lots of positive qualities go along with being blind. Being sighted, you naturally aren’t hip to them. Besides the increased perceptions of the other senses, there are things like intuition, reasoning ability, and concentration. Only the blind are free enough of distractions to focus on the large problems and find solutions. I’m not religious ordinarily. But the Bible says ‘The meek shall inherit the Earth.’ And who, I ask you, is meeker than the blind?”

“You sure don’t sound meek to me!” I pointed out.

“It takes strength to be truly meek.”

Sophomore Logic 201! In Braille yet! But there was no arguing with it. Tom Swift was beyond reasoning. “You were going to tell me about phase three,” I reminded him.

“It stems from phase two, which gives me absolute control over the most powerful computer in the world. I’ve reprogrammed it from scratch. You see, when I muted all the phones in the U.S., I also seized all the tandems leading into the computer. Right now I’m the only one in the world who can use it—and I am using it. Have you any idea of the scope of the information stored in its memory bank? Just let me give you one example. It not only can tell me the exact strength and placement of the atomic arsenals of every nation on earth, it can also tell me just how—just what codes to use in each country — to trigger the firing of those nuclear stockpiles!”

“But you wouldn’t do that!”

“Nope. But not for the reasons you might think. I wouldn’t do that because there’s a better way. Germ warfare!”

“Germ warfare? I thought the idea was that blind people were more humane! I thought you wanted to solve the problems of humanity, not destroy it!”

“The biggest problem in the world today is overpopulation. Phase three will reverse the population explosion through germ warfare. And—-with the computer’s help -- I pick the germs!”

“What have you got in mind?” Along with feeling scared, I was beginning to feel nauseous.

“A specially bred bacillus with a fifty-percent fatality prognosis. The world’s population will be stabilized with the fifty percent who survive. And they’ll-—” He broke off abruptly. “Can’t you guess?”

“I’m afraid to try.” I swallowed my gorge.

“They’ll be blind!”

“I see.”

“Not for long.” Tom Swift chuckled. “Of course there is a serum,” he added. “But it will be administered only to blind people; The sighted will have to take their chances. Those who survive will develop an immunity—but, as I said, they’ll be blind.”

“Great.” My voice lacked enthusiasm.

“The meek --- the blind — shall inherit the earth. It will be the introduction of a new era, the beginning of a new world, the start of a new order!”

“Sieg Heil!” I commented weakly.

He ignored it. “And the effects will be genetic, too,” he continued. “All the children will be born blind. Oh, there may be a few sighted mutants, but there are new techniques. They’ll be detected in the womb and aborted before birth.”

“Just when does phase three start?” I wondered.

The gun at my head stirred as he touched the wrist holding it with his other hand. I realized he was feeling the raised numerals on his wristwatch to check the time.

“In approximately one hour. Across the room from you — you can’t see it in the dark — is the telephone. As you know, it’s in use, tying up various exchanges around the country. But what you don’t know is that it’s routed directly into the input of the South American computer. Right now a cassette recorder is attached to that phone. It’s playing a coded tape that I prepared. When that tape runs out, the computer will do whatever’s necessary to put phase three into effect immediately.”

I decided he was mad. Stark raving bananas! But he wouldn’t be the first madman to successfully inflict his madness on the world. He had the perverted genius to do everything he said he was doing. One more hour! That’s what he’d said!

And I was the only one who could stop him. It was a real ego-builder. Only me between Tom Swift and Doomsday!

Shee-it!

“Got a cigarette?” I asked him.

“The computer said you’d given up smoking,” he reminded me.

“Did it also mention that I was low on willpower?”

“As a matter of fact, it did.” He chuckled. “You’re in luck. I’m a pipe smoker myself, but last week I had a sore throat from a cold and I tried switching to mentholated cigarettes. I still have hall a pack left. I’m afraid they’re kind of stale.”

“Grubbers can’t be choosers.” I accepted a dried-out cylinder and stuck it between my lips. “Got a light?’

He lit a kitchen match on the sole of his shoe with his free hand. His other hand still held the gun behind my ear. I bent my head as if to meet the flame halfway. My hand came up as if to steady his. For a few short seconds I could see him, while he, of course, couldn’t see me.

I chopped at the wrist of the hand holding the match. Still lit, it fell into his lap. Simultaneously, I jerked my head to one side and dived for the floor.

His reflexes were fast. As the heat of the match seared his crotch, he jumped to his feet. With the move, he fired the gun.

The roar deafened me. A micrometer couldn’t have measured how close the bullet came to blowing off my head. Even as I was scrambling, my hand went by reflex to my ear. A trickle of blood! The slug had nicked my earlobe.

Unconcerned with the problem of wearing earrings, I wasted no time worrying about the mangled lobe. Even as I touched it, my shoulder was slamming into Tom Swift’s legs. The gun roared again as he went sprawling to the floor.

It slowed me down. Like I have this survival instinct which points me away from the mouth of the cannon. Custer would have shot me for a coward, and I probably would have been drummed out of the Light Brigade. Still, not being a hero does increase the chances of staying alive.

So, with Swift’s second shot, I scrambled away on my hands and knees, seeking some kind of cover. When my head butted against an iron cot, I crawled underneath it and stayed very still. In the darkness, I couldn’t see any better than he could, and he still had the gun. With his acute hearing, it figured that any sound I made would give away my position, and — blind as he was -- I believed what he’d said about his accuracy once he’d located his target.

So I held my breath. Unfortunately, crouching the way I was, I got a cramp in one leg. I moved slightly to relieve it. The bedspring above me squeaked. The gun roared again!

The sonofabitch nicked my other earlobe! Shades of Billy the Kid! I darted out from under the bed and dived behind some kind of cabinet before he could correct his aim. Another shot pinged at my heel.

“Give it up, Victor. Next time I won’t miss.”

His voice came from across the room, somewhere in the vicinity of the telephone. By the time I realized his words were covering the fact that he was reloading, it was too late to take advantage of it. Then I also realized that he’d positioned himself to guard the phone and the cassette player hooked into it.

Smart! That was my objective, all right. I either had to disconnect the cassette or hang up the phone. I heard him move again. It sounded like he’d picked up both the phone and the cassette player. He wasn’t taking any chances. The only way to get at them was to get him first.

Hoping to mislead him, I raced sideways across the room -- not toward him, but at an angle. It worked — but just barely! His shot passed between my legs, grazing my inner thigh. A quarter-inch higher, and I’d have been singing soprano! I zigzagged back the way I’d come.

Something tangled up my feet and tripped me. Momentum kept my body going, and I toppled over, slamming my head against a baseboard. It was a lucky accident: One of his bullets passed through the exact spot I’d been an instant before I tripped.

But now my feet were all tangled up in some kind of wire. It gave Tom Swift his big chance. He could zero in on me before I had a chance to get away.

I kicked frantically, trying to get free of the wire. He sighed loudly. It was a very ominous sigh. I jerked my foot hard, but without hope. The gun exploded!

For a long moment it was very quiet. Then there was the sound of something heavy settling to the floor. And then it was quiet again.

What the hell? A trick? I couldn’t be sure. It took me a long time to get up the courage to investigate.

Finally, hesitantly, I moved toward the tiny glow a few feet away from me. It was the ash smoldering in Tom Swift’s pipe. The pipe was lying on the floor.

Tom Swift himself was off to one side. He was very still. I fished in his pockets, came up with a kitchen match, and lit it. Only then did I comprehend what must have happened.

When he’d picked up the phone to guard it from me, he must have inadvertently twisted the telephone wire around his arm-—the arm of the hand holding the gun. This was the same cord in which my feet had become tangled. My last kick, just as he’d fired, must have snapped the looped cord tight and jerked up his arm.