I couldn"t change the vector of the beer, and I couldn"t move my head more than a few inches. All that I could think of to do was to blow at it, and what with the ball gag, I was limited to blowing through my nose. This was not an efficient procedure, and the deadly glob of beer came closer and closer.
Gyroscopic action! If I could spin myself around and catch it on the back of the head, I just might survive. While I normally don"t use hair oils, this time my bath girls had said that the slicked down look was right for the outfit I would be wearing, and had greased me up. The hair oil, being non-polar and thus hydrophobic, ought to repel the hydrophilic beer! I tried moving my head around, to my left shoulder, then my chest, my right shoulder, back, and repeated the procedure as rapidly as possible.
There was some gyroscopic reaction, but not nearly enough, and the beer blob was still growing, turning from yellow to foamy white, and still coming at me.
I did some rapid mental calculations for a journey of ten years, and came up with a subjective trip length of four minutes, a.s.suming that the program was using our usual temporal velocity, and a.s.suming that Ian hadn"t been lying about sending me back for ten years. If both of these a.s.sumptions were true, I could hold my breath if the blob covered my face, and probably stay conscious until gravity returned to splatter the beer on the deck. But that was two too many a.s.sumptions, when my only life was on the line!
By swiveling my legs rapidly around my hips, I was able to turn myself ninety degrees or so, and from there I could bend over to let the dangerous beer slowly cruise past my head.
Victory! Now I only had to worry about breaking my neck, falling from what could be fourteen feet up when the gravity came back. I had to time it so that I was at or near the deck when that happened.
The problem was that, because of the handcuffs, I couldn"t see my watch, and when I had been high enough above the boxes and crates to see the Nixie tubes on the control panel, I was facing in the wrong direction.
I drifted back toward the air mattress, and tried to flex my body so that I wouldn"t bounce as hard next time. I was only partially successful. The next time I got to the ceiling, I could see the orange numbers, telling me that I had nine seconds to get down before I fell four yards to the floor. Squirming, I b.u.mped the ceiling as hard as I could, and got to within three feet of the floor before gravity returned.
I missed the air mattress, and the fall knocked the wind out of me, but at least I hadn"t broken my neck. Moments later, a gallon and a half of beer foam hit the deck, splattering my face and chest. d.a.m.n Ian, anyway!
I could see the keys to my handcuffs, and had started to wiggle my way toward them, when I heard someone opening the big steel door on the canister. Some rapidly chattering feminine voices echoed in the canister, and my first thought was that Barbara and some of her friends were coming to my rescue!
"Great! It"s a cargo canister!"
"Yeah, but it"s ancient. Can you handle the programing on one this old?"
"Are you kidding? I could reprogram Methuselah, if he had a keyboard!" They spoketo each other very quickly, in something like an Australian accent, with no time wasted between when one left off and another began.
"Then get on it, girl, before somebody comes by!"
I heard the doors being closed while the first voice said, "I"m working, I"m working!"
These weren"t friends of mine. These people were some sort of temporal hijackers!
Still, I tried to get their attention by mumbling past the d.a.m.n ball gag and b.u.mping my feet on the deck, on the theory that once I was free, I could deal with them somehow or another. The trouble was, they were making too much noise to notice me.
Whoever she was, she must have known her stuff, because in a few minutes we were in zero-G again, and presumably going farther into the past.
I drifted up to the ceiling once more, and got a look at my new set of abductors. There were three of them, a blonde who was taking off her backpack, a brunette sitting strapped to the chair at the keyboard, and a real redhead, with freckles and everything. All three had their long hair pulled back into pony tails. They were dressed for roughing it, in flannel shirts, blue jeans, and hiking boots.
I could tell at a glance that they weren"t Smoothies. The girls of Morrow were almost all slender with a lot of hidden muscle, having the sort of bodies you see on ballerinas, lithe figure skaters, or rhythmic gymnasts.
These women were of a different sort, with large, firm b.r.e.a.s.t.s, wasp-tiny waists, and flaring hips, a bit like a slender version of the Victorian ideal, or perhaps like exaggerated Playmate-of-the-Month types. Not the sort that I"m usually attracted to, they were none the less very fine looking women.
I was still near the ceiling when they noticed me.
"Hey! We"ve got company!" The blonde shouted.
"He"s all tied up! Shouldn"t we free him?" The brunette said, undoing her safety belt.
"What makes you so sure about that? Maybe he"s some kind of criminal!" The redhead said.
"m.u.f.f m.u.f.f!" I said through the ball gag.
"But he dresses so nicely!" the brunette objected.
"I"ll bet he undresses nicely, too!" the blonde said.
"And quickly, if I have anything to do with it!" the redhead said.
"m.u.f.f?"
"You know, I"ve always wanted a slave boy!" the blonde said.
"m.u.f.f!?!"
"You"ve always wanted anything that involves s.e.x!" the brunette said.
"So what"s wrong with that?" the blonde said.
"Nothing, except that I get him first," the redhead said, as she took her shirt off.
"No way! You got to pick the restaurant we ate lunch at!" The blonde was furiously unlacing her boots.
These women were experts at maneuvering in zero-G, and had apparently been together long enough to be well coordinated in their actions. As a group, they swarmedover me, disrobing themselves and me with equal efficiency. In seconds, they were all naked, and over my strenuous objections, I was floating with gobs of clothes at my bound wrists and ankles, but was otherwise naked save for a ball-gag.
I"ve heard it said that it is physiologically impossible to force a male h.o.m.o Sapiens to have s.e.x, but I can testify that such a statement is a patent lie. Even if you are not a volunteer, and have no intention of partic.i.p.ating in their pleasures, when enough beautiful, naked women spend enough time stroking your body (about thirty seconds, in this case), the gallant reflex occurs.
From then on, they have you at their mercy.
Oh, for a little while, there, I thought the fact that we were in zero-G would save me from further molestation, but as I said earlier, these women were experts at maneuvering without gravity. Furthermore, despite her earlier kindly thoughts, it was the brunette who impaled herself on me first.
The short of it was that I was soon forced into submission and raped six times.
Yes, raped!
I wasn"t in charge, I wasn"t a volunteer, and I didn"t like it.
That having been said, I don"t think that the women involved deserved twenty years in jail apiece for their crimes, which is what would have happened to three men back in the States, if they had done to a woman what these three did to me.
But G.o.d dammit! A good spanking was definitely in order!
Toward the end of my ordeal, they used my socks as a blindfold to add to the ball gag, cuffs and leg irons.
"Whoops!" One of them yelled, "It"s time to hit the deck!"
I was woman-handled to the ground just before the gravity returned.
I heard one of them opening the steel door. "Come on, you two! We gotta get out of here!"
"What about our boy toy here?"
"What about him? We gotta quit this place before we"re caught! Leave him where we found him!"
"No! I like him. I want to take him along."
"Yeah, me too!"
"Then grab him and let"s run! We can"t stay here!"
It took all three of them to set me up on my feet, but I didn"t feel much like cooperating. I went down on my knees, and tried reasoning with them.
"m.u.f.f. m.u.f.f!" I explained.
"Look fellow, you can come with us or you can stay here, but either way, I"m going and I"ve got the keys to your cuffs in my pocket."
"m.u.f.f." I capitulated, and they set me upright again.
I was husteled naked out of the capsule, barefoot with my pants at my ankles. From the sound, I"d guess we went down a long corridor, and then into a much larger room. We came to some steps, where I tripped and fell forward. Before I landed, I was picked up by two pairs of strong arms and hauled up onto some sort of platform. Somebody turned meninety degrees to the right.
"Gentlemen! May I present our guest of honor!" Ian"s voice boomed out.
The blindfold was ripped off, and I found myself on a stage in front of an audience of at least a thousand men!
"Yes, Tom, this is Your Bachelor Party!"
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
A Bachelor Party from h.e.l.l
Things got worse.
I was hauled to the side of the stage, still bound, gagged and naked. Meanwhile, my three former captors and molesters, who had somehow managed to get dressed in evening gowns, were acting like the models on a TV game show. With much swirling, smiling and hand waving, they opened the big curtain behind me, exposing a movie screen, and bowed out stage left.
I was forced to stand there while every man I had ever met on the island watched a movie of everything that had happened to me from the moment Ian and his henchmen walked me down to the subway.
The shouts and catcalls were loud, the display was vulgar and obscene, and I was royally p.i.s.sed. People thought that a.s.saulting me seven to one was funny. They thought that leaving me bound and gagged in a damaged time cannister was a great joke, and that my vigorous avoidance of being drowned in beer foam was marvelous comedy.
The girls got special applause for every nefarious crime they committed on my body, and came to the front of the stage individually or in a group, each time, to take a bow.
And when the b.l.o.o.d.y-be-d.a.m.ned thing was finally over, the crowd demanded to see it all over again. But for this performance at least, Leftenant Fitzsimmon came around and undid my cuffs and shackles. I was able to get most of my clothes back on, although I was still barefoot.
"All in clean fun, what?"
"No. Not clean fun at all, Ensign." I left him looking stunned and went out hunting Ian. I found him in the middle of a laughing crowd.
"d.a.m.n you, Ian! You promised me that nothing like this was going to happen!"
"Not quite, Tom. I promised that I wouldn"t throw a surprise party. But you know me well enough to know that I couldn"t possibly let a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity like this go by without doing something about it. You knew I"d pull something, now didn"t you?
And if you knew that it was coming, it couldn"t possibly have been a surprise, could it?
So I couldn"t and didn"t throw a surprise party, and therefore I never broke my promise!"
Faced with that line of reasoning, there was only one sensible thing I could think of todo.
I hit him.
My fist caught his jaw just off center, and I heard his jaw bones make a satisfying snapping sound. He went over backward and was out cold on his back.
Then I felt much better.
There was a gasp from the crowd. A single, white-suited man flicked into and out of existence a few feet from me. A half dozen white coated men with a stretcher blinked in, put Ian on the stretcher, and then the lot of them disapeared without a sound.
Apparently, somebody had pressed his red b.u.t.ton. Under other circ.u.mstances, I would have been fascinated, but just then I didn"t give a d.a.m.n.
People backed away from me as I went over to the bar that ran down the left side of the room. The bartender handed me a quart sized boomba of full of dark beer, and I drained it on one breath.
"You know," I said to the man next to me, a plant manager whose name I didn"t remember, "Maybe tonight is a good night to throw a party."
The guy gave me a nod and an overly eager smile, but after seeing me deck the last person I"d talked to, you could tell that he didn"t want to get involved.
Halfway through the next beer, Captain Stepanski came over with the rest of the wedding ushers. "Sir, you weren"t serious about busting Fitzsimmon down to ensign, were you?"
"No, I wasn"t. I meant to make him a midshipman, Cadet Stepanski."
Seargeant Kuhn was about to say something, but I cut him off with, "And that goes for the rest of you as well, Airman Basic Kuhn, or whatever that comes out to in army rank. Did you a.s.sholes actually think that you could get away with kidnapping, s.e.xually molesting, and then publicly humiliating your Commander-in-Chief? After I had stated publicly, and in writing, that this sort of thing would not be tolerated? Because if you did, you are not only ignorant, but you are stupid as well, and both of those conditions are capital offenses in this universe!"
They were all appalled. Somehow Ian had convinced them that I"d be a good sport about it all, once I got over being angry. Well, maybe I would be, but I wasn"t anywhere near over being mad. Maybe later. Much later. Or maybe not.
"Yes sir," Fitzsimmon said. "What are your orders for now, sir?"
"For now, well, you might as well enjoy yourselves, since your next a.s.signments are going to be pure h.e.l.l, the absolute worst things I can think up. However, you might get some small joy in telling everybody else who partic.i.p.ated in this fiasco, or even showed up at this party, that their careers have been wrecked as well, for laughing at the boss when he was tied up and naked, among other things. For myself, there are three women that I promised would get one h.e.l.l of a spanking for the abuse they did me."
"You"re angry at them as well, are you sir? Perhaps I can be of some a.s.sistance in locating them, in partial amends for my transgressions, as it were."
"a.s.sist all you want to, but it won"t do you any good. You know where they are, Fitz?"
"Well, I b.l.o.o.d.y well should! They are my wives, after all. I thought that you"d enjoysome decent, full-bodied women, after all the thin-flanked fare, hereabouts."
"Your wives?! You sent your wives out to rape and fornicate with a stranger?"
"Well, I hardly "sent them out," sir. Actually, it was their idea, once they heard that the job was open. As to that fornicating business, you must understand that these are my wives, not my slave girls. We"re not barbarians! Our contracts call for me to be the biological father of their children, to share in their upbringing, and to support the family during that period. After that, we all get to discreetly play around a bit, when the mood strikes."
"And you figure that raping your boss counts as "discreet"?"