2 Mary Renon

Mary Renon's eyes had momentarily flashed recognition when she spotted Block as she was getting off the elevator after her ses-sion with The Chairman.

She regretted the lapse of demeanor, but quickly brushed past him, sure that he had not noticed. She went over to the desk. She had set the room up and now, in her new title as Assistant, had no trouble getting all the information she needed.

She noted the cashier's I.D number and told him to expect a call from an agent later for additional information.

"The code word will be Argos," she said.

She then raced over to a public phone. She looked at her watch. She was on a short schedule. Fucking around with The Chairman had thrown her off an already tight connection on the StratoJet to Aca-pulco.

She opened the connection and punched in a code, adding numbers to make the call collect. She didn't want to use her own Identicard.

The computer answered almost instantly and she punched in her recognition code.

After a short ring, Mandrake answered: "Yes, Mary."

She often wondered whether Mandrake was a man or a machine. She thought it had to be a man because the patriarchal society she was born into preferred to assign feminine characteristics to its machines.

"Block was just spotted at this locale going to The Chairman's suite. Call back the cashier." She indicated the cashier's I.D. Num-ber. "Use code word Argos to find out Block's plans. Take the cash-ier out to cover me. And Mandrake, let's hope The Pig Man fucks up. It would give me indescribable pleasure to do the bastard myself."

"We can use the bounty."

"I've always put pleasure ahead of money. But not duty."

She hung up. She hadn't indicated the location because it would be on Mandrake's screen. She then found her way to the entrance and a waiting cab. She settled back as the cab, the driver already with his instructions, moved into traffic.

Seeing Block, and putting the machinery into motion to dispose of him, began to override the frustration she felt at not being able to do The Chairman in proper fashion.

She'd had the old bastard right where she wanted him, with his cock in her mouth, and she couldn't do him the way she wanted to.

She had not anticipated getting so close to him so fast. She cer-tainly hadn't expected him to move on her before he hardly knew her name. She had underestimated the senile old shit. She had wanted to kill him, to become known as the person who killed the great one, the person who had thwarted the establishment of the World Dictatorship.

She had been a moment away from the ultimate ecstasy.

She had to give it up. She had let him come and it was over. She might never get another chance at him.

She still had a clear goal, and victory was never won without the establishment of clear goals and their successful accomplish-ment.

She had Sidney stashed in Acapulco and her job was not only to obtain the Diskcard with the electronic bytes in it that would bring down the world economy, a feat already performed by having Sid-ney, she needed his half of the entry code, something she wouldn't have until she had him begging for release.

She shivered with pleasure, anticipating the upcoming session in which he would beg to deliver what he had been programmed to never deliver.

She couldn't wait to get to Lano D'Lazo's villa high on the cliffs overlooking Acapulco Bay. It would not only be fun work, but the time spent with Lano, the elegant former Minister of Culture for one of the peripheral states that had been swallowed up into the European Movement, would in itself be a release.

Ah, the dictatorial pricks, as she referred to The Chairman and his ilk. She couldn't stand to think about them. They were against all decency.

Conversation with Lano would sooth her soul, put her back on course, give her the energy she needed to destroy these destroyers of freedom, justice and humanity.

She quickly exited the cab as it pulled up to the StratoJet Ter-minal. Unlike other terminals at Kennedy International, as many service people as travelers staffed the StratoJet terminal.

The StratoJet System was, of course, open to everyone, but everyone was limited to those with the price of a ticket and the price of a ticket required the income of a government or a multina-tional corporation.

Communications had been a priority for the establishment of The Representative World Government. No sooner had the satellites gone up than proprietary communications webs been structured un-der the non-proprietary bands. You could be talking to your mother long distance and the very grouping of electrons that carried your conversation could be traveling on the same beams, no, could be bundled together in the same packet of electrons that was carrying instructions to murder some brave nationalistic leader halfway around the globe.

Communications had always been control from as far back as the Standard Oil country agents in the 19th century. The satellite net-work, as represented by the Iridium Communications Network, provided the control. The ICN had been named after the element iridium because iridium had historically been classified as having seventy-seven electrons orbiting its nucleus.

Even though the number of satellites had exceeded seventy-seven, and even though it had long been accepted that atoms did not have specific numbers of electrons orbiting their nuclei, the name had stuck.

Mary hated it, just as she hated the StratoJet System. It moved the men and women that were the minions of the World Dictatorship to any of the regional capitals through which they controlled the nations of the world. As she moved freely past the checkpoints out to the boarding area and, without wait, entered the plane to take her spacious seat, she felt guilty. She didn't know whether it was because she was using her position as an agent of The Representa-tive World Government for personal use or because she was going to Acapulco, decidedly not a regional capital, but one of the sin and sun locales that liberally dotted the StratoJet System map.

Probably the latter, she concluded, as she adjusted the knobs on the electronic display board that made up a part of her cubicle. Other than the temperature control, she turned everything off, the TV, telephone, game board, music center and computer interface. Anything that she could do in her position with The Representative World Government to destroy the World Dictatorship was fine with her.

Still, the thought of these supersonic platforms, regularly moving people swiftly to every needed location on the globe, infuri-ated her. No private industry could have set up the iridium net-work, or the StratoJet System. The capital requirement to estab-lish either was too great. And the operational expenses were sim-ply too high to produce anything but massive losses which in turn were underwritten by the same people that supplied the capital, the oppressed multitudes of freedom loving people that occupied the planet.

It drove her insane, made her physically ill, to understand that the World Dictatorship was able to force the people to pay for the instrument of their own enslavement.

Block, being a practicing Perceptionist, would have been able to tell Mary, were she capable of listening, why her mind was burning a hole in her stomach.

Mary's perceptor, just like everybody's, was a hypothetical structure that allowed her to reconstruct reality so that she, as a conglomeration of chemical compounds, could comprehend reality.

It had long been hypothesized that the universe was made up of elementary particles that first formed into basic units, and then into atoms.

The units, billions of elementary particles held together by their own affinity propensity, were the building block of the universe, ultimately responsible for the beauty that punctuated the blackness of space.

The existence of matter, however, would be senseless without something to perceive that existence. With elementary particles coming into existence, forming into matter and, undergoing com-bustion, forming elements and compounds of elements, the multi-plicity of chemicals that gave rise to animate matter provided the basis for a new structure of elementary particles to come into ex-istence, a structure in which the elementary particles were held together in equilibrium, evenly spaced one from the other.

The elementary particles, being mere points of existence, formed a structure that was not measurable because the smallest measuring device used streams of the same elementary particles.

However, it had to exist if animate matter were to move safely through the environment. Animate matter needed a way to perceive the reality it needed to navigate and nature, being efficient, used the same particle it used to produce matter to evolve the detector that allowed movement with a modicum of safety.

The perceptor existed independent of life, but could only per-form its function if it were a part of life. It therefore evolved at-tached to animate chemical structures and made those structures sentient.

The perceptor could discern the universe by reacting to the flows of elementary particles, radiation, light, that filled it, being emitted either directly by burning matter such as stars, or re-flected off matter in its solid state such as moonlight.

The perceptor was therefore able to discern reality through sight and was able to chemically store the pictures of reality that it discerned for later use in comparing future realities.

As the animate structures, animals, to which it was attached, developed and moved through reality, the stored pictures became the sum total of the concept of self that the perceptor held, not only of itself, but of itself as it was attached to the animate organism.

When the concept of self agreed with external reality and with recalled experience, the perceptor, and the organism to which it was attached, was at peace.

In Perceptionism, this was the harmony of the triangle. Experi-ence, awareness and reality were all as one.

The state of being at peace occurred because the juice that pow-ered the perceptor's operation was being used up. Input matched output.

The external input, reality, could be analogized to an electrical packet of information that was converted by the perceptor into a picture of the reality.

If the reality that the concept of self held differed from reality, which was generally the case, then the concept of self modified the electrical packet to suit its own perceptions.

Once modified, the packet was sent off into the storage areas of the brain to retrieve other packets with similar charges. These packets brought back similar pictures for comparison with the pic-ture of reality that the external input had evoked in the perceptor.

If the external input flowed into the perceptor with minor al-teration and passed into the storage chambers bringing back similar pictures, inputs and outputs all matched and there were no shorts in the system.

Problems arose when the input created pictures in the perceptor that could not call up anything from storage that matched the input.

The best example of this problem was the reality, during the old wars, of being shoved out onto a battlefield and seeing those all around losing parts of their bodies. The inputs kept creating pic-tures in the perceptor. The perceptor kept sending out electrical packets created by those pictures.

Nothing came back but the electrical packets. Because the per-ceptor understands by comparing, it could not understand. The in-puts kept coming in and with nowhere to go, they eventually in-vaded the chemical structures of the animate host.

Not everyone, especially with the advent of The Representative World Government, had the experience of watching someone being blown to bits in the next foxhole. However, the same effect was a product of everyday life.

If the perceptor received pictures of reality, but had its own perception of what that reality was, the input, the picture reflect-ing reality that the perceptor would naturally attempt to recon-struct would never match the preconceived picture of reality the concept of self maintained in the perceptor. If the concept of self had trouble modifying the picture of reality that its perceptor was attempting to form, it had only to send out electrical packets into the storage areas of the brain to recall pictures that reinforced its own concept of reality and thus modify the incoming picture the perceptor was trying to form.

The resulting struggle between external reality, to which the concept of self refused to give validity, and the reality that the concept of self wanted, caused the perceptor to stop operating.

The electricity that operated the perceptor then had to go somewhere.

It invaded the chemical structures of the animate host.

These invasions were not mild things. Anything that disrupted the efficient operation of the body's chemical connections caused sensory discomfort. Stomachs hurt, heads ached, palms sweated, bowels moved unexpectedly, gas formed, joints stiffened and mus-cles tensed.

It would normally be more pleasant for the animate host to take a good stiff punch to the nose than have to undergo the unpleasant-ness of an invasion from the mind as a result of the excessive in-puts caused by a failure to match the concept of self with reality.

Boxing was an appropriate analogy because the most common situation that led to an excess of input, and a resulting shock to the animate host, was the creation of opposing concepts of self.

The perceptor, in an effort to make the animate host comfort-able, takes all necessary measures to protect itself from the chemical shocks. It therefore builds a concept of self that views the animate host in a favorable light.

In reality, however, the animate host is just another animate host, different, maybe, from other animate hosts, but on the whole, neither better nor worse.

The concept of self that normally is constructed through experi-ence, therefore, will never match reality and adapting it to reality will always cause a certain amount of chemical shock to the ani-mate host.

Others can create these opposing concepts of self simply by calling attention to an individual's failings with respect to reality, or putting a person in a position of failure. One person can cause another person to beat himself to death chemically simply by knowing how to create opposing concepts of self in that person, pushing, in popular parlance, the person's buttons.

Mary was doing something else altogether. She was engaging in a sort of masochistic masturbation. She had created a concept of external reality and stored it away in her memory banks. This con-cept of reality had been carefully constructed so that it opposed her concept of self.

If she saw something in reality that she didn't like, she could fo-cus on it, idealize it by lifting it out of reality and creating a packet containing only that portion of reality and then use the picture to recall a concept of reality that opposed her concept of self.

By attempting to input this opposing concept of reality into her perceptor and actively opposing it with her concept of self, she could very easily work herself into a towering rage that rained chemical blow after chemical blow onto her organic systems.

She could literally drive herself into a frenzy with no particular reference to external reality whatsoever.

That's why she took such great pleasure in newspapers and broadcasts that concentrated on presenting negative headlines and stories. They fed the delight she received from causing herself pain, the same masochistic enjoyment she immersed herself in on the StratoJet, setting the temperature controls so that she would be comfortable and isolating the electronic inputs of the business and entertainment center so that she could rage at the world with-out interruption, feeling the rage at a physical level she had learned to enjoy.

Block could have explained to her what was happening to her using the terms of Perceptionism. He could have told her that op-posing concepts of self caused excessive and erratic electric flows into her chemical subsystems, disrupting them, causing her varying degrees of physical discomfort which in turn altered her perception of reality further.

He could have told her that, but he couldn't have told her why she found pleasure in causing herself pain. That was wrapped up in past events even Mary couldn't recognize, events that circum-scribed every action she was able to take and freed her to form action triangles that allowed her to act in a manner that she would never have willingly chosen for herself had she been aware of the harm they caused her.

Mary had been a sparkling baby, the joy of her father. She had vivid memories of her father when she was impossibly young as her protector, her warmth.

She had memories of her father telling her stories, although she could remember neither the stories, nor much of her father after a certain point.

If she could have remembered the stories, she would have re-called colorful pictures of green dragons spouting red and yellow fire and black smoke poised to come out of the closet door. She would have felt slimy tentacles reaching up from under the bed and sucking her life away.

She grew accustomed, when she was in the dark and afraid, of calling for her father who would immediately come to her aid. Her mother wrote her off as a daddy's girl and left her to her husband.

Mary's memories of her father ended at an impossibly early age, as if he had been frozen. She knew that he was there all the time she was growing up. She just didn't have any memory of him.

The memories were there. They just weren't recallable. The lost memories dated to the first time that her father had returned to her room and instead of telling her stories that would put her to sleep, had awakened her and begun to do things to her that she did-n't like, that she didn't understand, things which overpowered her with such feelings of helplessness she could not form pictures of them in her perceptor.

They were just things.

After he had finished, he told her she mustn't tell or he wouldn't rescue her from the dragons, that if she told, the dragons would come out and do unimaginable things to her that would make the things he did feel good in comparison.

That had been the beginning of the long waits punctuated by the unbearable pain. No longer did she look forward to stories at bed-time. No longer did she look forward to bedtime. Bedtime was the time the wait would begin. When the lights went out, she held her breath as she waited in the dark for the squeak of the door, the sound of bare feet, the shallow breathing.

Many nights it didn't come. Many nights she wore herself out waiting as she drifted off to sleep. Other nights, her wait was re-warded by his presence and the horrible feelings of helplessness and hopelessness as she at first anticipated the agony, then experi-enced it and then quietly sobbed to recover. Still other nights she awoke to his presence next to her, his hands on her. On those nights, she didn't have a chance to experience the hopelessness, only the pain.

In the beginning, she expected her mother to punish her the next day. When she would go to breakfast and the sun would be shinning, with her mother humming and the birds singing in the windows, she knew the world was alright. If the world was alright, then it must be her that wasn't alright.

She started to become two people, to develop two concepts of self. The first was the bright girl who got up, went through the motions of life, learned about the world and decided what the world meant with respect to herself.

The second was born from the wait, from the fear that moving in the bed would cause a spring to creak and bring him for her ag-ony, from the hours of barely breathing and never ever coughing or sneezing.

During the day, her perceptor would construct pictures of real-ity and those pictures would be encoded and stored in memory for use in comparing future reconstructions of reality. Her perceptor developed in the normal three-sided manner, with reality and recall interplaying with her developing concept of self.

When she lay in bed at night, waiting, her other concept of self developed. It developed as she recalled the experiences that oc-curred to her during the day. As each incident or event was re-called, it was forced into her perceptor, a perceptor that was shaped into a picture of anticipated agony.

Every event of her life was therefore stored into her memory twice, once as she lived it and a second time distorted by the con-ditions imposed on her by her father.

Because she could not have two concepts of self existing at the same time, she developed a day personality and a night personality, the night personality shaped by the ultimate degradation that one human being can force on another, an abuse of trust.

Her father had sought her trust, obtained her trust, and then had used her trust to satisfy his own incomprehensible desires. He probably acted on no more instinct than the simple ability to get away with it and probably thought no more of his actions than it was good training for her in life.

However, his acts, in forcing her to reinterpret reality with a perceptor that had been forced into recreating unreality, left her damaged.

A person's chemical structures could be subject to poisons de-rived from the environment. These poisons would weaken the op-eration of the chemical systems so that they would not perform properly. An environmentally unpoisoned organism might be able to withstand the unwanted electric flows set in motion by the opposing concepts of self that were created by day-to-day interactions of life.

However, poisoned organisms might break down at the onslaught and produce a magnified physical response to normal events.

The ability of a person's chemical systems to withstand the on-slaught of the petty conflicts of everyday life depends on the health of those systems.

If poisons in the environment have damaged a person's chemical systems, the person's discomfort from interactions with the envi-ronment will distort the picture the perceptor attaches to the poi-soned system's constructs of reality.

Mary's father could not have poisoned her more had he put bat-tery acid into her orange juice. Instead of a physical deterioration altering her perception of reality, Mary had an altered concept of self that was formed as a result of being forced to do things that she was, as anyone would be, unwilling to do. She had only wanted to share the joy she found in life with her father and that desire had become the source of her agony. She had stored the agony in a separate place, accessible only to her alternate concept of self, a concept of self that she would not willingly allow to occupy her perceptor.

When she began to menstruate, her father abruptly stopped the abuse, not because he desired any less pleasure for himself, and not because he was worried about getting her pregnant. He had a va-sectomy after Mary's mother had betrayed him and become preg-nant once again. He simply felt it unseemly for a daughter to obtain sexual pleasure from her father. Mary's younger sister was, after all, available.

No one can analyze the things they are unaware of, and if her father was aware of anything after he moved on, Mary was not aware of it. The turning over of the perceptor to the concept of self formed in the night gradually ceased and Mary moved smoothly into the daytime part of her life, totally unaware that there had ever been a nighttime Mary. The nighttime Mary, however, continued to percolate through her recall, poisoning all her waking moments with a pervasive distrust.

As Mary's perceptor went about the daily task of interpreting reality, any messages that attempted to recall those portions of her memory that were associated with the nighttime Mary were short-circuited.

All of Mary's daytime remembrances, however, had been fil-tered through the nighttime Mary and thus she had nothing to draw on prior to puberty.

She mirrored the guy who started drinking heavily before pu-berty. When his body started to give way after twenty years of environmental abuse, he tries to stay sober. When his body gets rid of the chemical, the only experiences he can recall are the experi-ences he obtained prior to having his perception of reality altered by the alcohol. He stares around him cold sober and he can't com-prehend the world because he has nothing from childhood experi-ences to compare it with. The inability to make a match drives him back to the bottle where the world, while not real, is at least fa-miliar.

The difference was that Mary had no desire to go back to the world of unreality that had been forced upon her and about which, in any event, she was unaware.

The existence of that world, the danger that lurked around her continuous perception of reality, the feeling that the nighttime world might come back, that the other concept of self might take over and bring back the agony, limited the way she constructed re-ality in her perceptor.

Her perceptor had been environmentally damaged and the pic-tures of reality that she constructed were skewered by the exis-tence of her hidden concept of self.

Because she couldn't draw on a view of the world that would have normally been established in her formative years, she had to create a world anew, one that would entail no danger of recalling the world of the nighttime Mary.

The centerpiece of the nighttime Mary's world had been the abuse of trust freely given. The new world she proceeded to create by necessity, to avoid accidentally evoking the nighttime world, was centered on trust never given.

Thus, the motives of the emerging Representative World Gov-ernment were never questioned. They were simply ulterior.

Mary, however, had to develop past her own puberty before she could concern herself with planetary puberty.

She had been born and raised in the Midwest to a devout family with firm fundamentalist beliefs. Her mother's sex education course had been simple: Don't lay down with a man. Stay a virgin.

When she was able to obtain enough information about what lay-ing down with a man meant, don't let him do to you what the bull did to the cow, she knew she wouldn't have any trouble keeping this law, or rule, or whatever it was.

She had no memory of what her father had done to her, but just the mere thought of a man doing that to her made her physically ill.

As to the virgin part, she assumed she was, and wasn't about to check to find out.

Although any image of intercourse brought a steel clamp down on her perception of reality, she did like boys and her naturally sunny disposition, which made her seem to bounce through life, at-tracted as many as she wanted. She wasn't particularly attractive, but she exuded optimism and optimism was always attractive.

When she was fourteen, she had fallen for a senior at the local high school. She had no idea what idealization meant but she cer-tainly flashed on the bob of hair that shot out over his forehead and the neat way his nose bulbed at the end.

Visualizing him made her tingle in all the right places and made her behave in a silly fashion. She was soon behaving in the fashion he wanted in any out of the way place he could find to hide his car with them in it.

She liked to kiss him and stick her tongue in his mouth and his ears and lick around his neck, and she liked him to do things to her, to feel her tiny breasts and put his hands in other places, and hers on his places, especially between his legs when he was getting hard. Every time he tried to tip her over on her back, however, or oth-erwise tried to maneuver her so that he had some sort of angle on her vagina, she froze up in a reflection of her mind.

He started to complain about not getting any satisfaction and, when she asked him what that meant, he explained that girls were-n't like boys because boys got to making all sorts of the stuff that makes babies and if they don't get it out, they could die.

"Out of where?" she wanted to know. He put her hand between his legs.

She certainly didn't want him to die so she asked him what she could do to help get the stuff out.

"Put it between your legs," he replied.

"No chance," she had replied. "What else?"

"You could rub it between your hands."

That sounded not only reasonable to Mary, and well within the realm of possibility. It sounded exciting.

"How do I do it, I mean physically?" she asked, feeling she was about to cross a bridge and enter a new kingdom.

He was transported at the prospect of the coming session. He unbuttoned his pants, shifted in the car seat so that he came out from under the wheel and, because of his excitement, flipped it out of his pants with some difficulty.

Mary was stunned. She could not remember having been in love, but she knew what it was all about in a flash. There was no other way to say it. His hardness was love at first sight.

If this was a prick, she would devote her life to pricks.

She didn't even have to take it in her hands. She didn't want to. Before he could object, she simply put it in her mouth. She loved everything about it, the feel, the taste, the parts connected to it, the way it made this guy go absolutely crazy as if it were con-nected to his mind and she was in total control of his innermost de-sires.

What she liked more than anything else was the way it made her feel. She couldn't describe the sensations that she felt between her legs as she explored his hardness and when he got rid of the won-derful stuff that made babies, she felt like she was a delicious mor-sel, like she had opened her legs and swallowed herself whole, had become a droplet falling endlessly in space.

The boy certainly seemed to enjoy her ministrations over the coming weeks as she used him to explore her own physical reac-tions. As she became more accustomed to the incredibly delightful feelings manipulating his prick with her mouth created all over her body, she was able to spend more time concentrating on the effect she was having on the boy.

As long as she had his cock in her mouth, it seemed he had no in-dependent will of his own. He was a piece of shit ready to drop, his fate determined solely by factors beyond his control, factors to-tally within her control.

When the shit dropped, though, it became just like all other shit. When he had gotten rid of his stuff, he just became a prick.

Which really intrigued her.

She certainly liked him better when he was thrashing about, moaning and groaning, than when he was just moaning about her not letting him stick it in her, which he was doing on an increasing basis after he shot his load.

She wondered what the effect would be if she revved him up, and then, by keeping him from coming, kept him revved up.

She began to experiment with ways to keep the stuff from com-ing out the end of his prick while at the same time keeping the end of his prick bathed in a blaze of sensations.

The surprising thing about these experiments was that the more she manipulated his body, the more pleasure she got. She found her-self wondering how long she could keep him going while at the same time she was keeping him from coming. The more she wondered, the more excited she became and the more excited she became, the more intense her pleasure became.

She was soon reveling in her own orgasms while denying him anything but the promise of release. She was able to get her pleas-ure independent from, and at the expense of his.

The breakthrough was even more gratifying when she discov-ered that once she had an orgasm, the next one came more easily and she could go right on having them as long as she could keep him sexed up but unsatisfied.

This she came to look on as the honeymoon period of a relation-ship.

She could take her pleasure from the object of her desire for hours on end and only when she tired would she release the special holds that she had developed and let the sperm that had built up over the hours burst forth as the boy collapsed, utterly exhausted, totally useless, less than he was at the start.

To prolong the honeymoon period, she learned to lengthen the time when she held his fate in her mouth. Sooner than later, as was the case with her first boyfriend, the guy would begin to complain that he wanted some real sex. No matter what they got, they wanted more.

She hit on the idea of making them promise, as a condition of letting them come, that they wouldn't ask her for intercourse.

When she first put this ploy into operation, the guy had resisted. He didn't want to give up what he thought he should do to her. She found that if she just increased the activity at the end of his prick while at the same time increasing the pressure that was keeping him from coming, he would agree to anything. She found that she could make him agree to anything. She could make him grovel.

She was delighted. She had found a way to carry her own pleas-ure to greater heights.

She had four years of high school to perfect her talents. It ab-solutely amazed her how uniformly the script played out. First, the guy did everything he could to get in her pants. She worked this foreplay out to a science, being able to make it last for deliciously long periods of delight. When the guy was frustrated to the point he was in tears, she delighted him by giving him an experience beyond his wildest dreams. But, and she had this timed to the second, he would soon become restless, his mind forming pictures of what it would be like to be where he hadn't been and he would start insist-ing on intercourse.

Asking was not enough, however, to proceed to the next plateau. He had to demand. He had to stick his chest out and literally thump it with his fists.

Then, and only then, would she break him, driving him to the point of insanity, making him grovel, beg, cry real tears of des-peration, his muscles strained to the breaking point in his effort to get off.

That was the point she experienced her most intense orgasms.

Only after her organisms were coming so fast she couldn't dis-tinguish the last one from the next one would she release the pres-sure and allow him to get off.

After that, she quickly tired of the guy who, once broken, be-came a wimp, utterly useless for her purposes. She discarded him and got another one.

As great a pleasure as her high school years were, however, she always felt that she was missing something. She always felt that there was a still greater orgasm to be experienced and she looked forward to expanding her horizons in college.

Like the slingshot it was, the StratoJet reached its maximum altitude and began to descend into Acapulco. Mary, however, re-mained oblivious in her reverie.

College had expanded her horizons. It had taught her that mag-netic theory did not apply to human interactions. Opposites may or may not attract each other, but likes definitely did. If someone was obsessed with sex, he or she would sooner or later cross the path of everybody else obsessed with sex. If someone was obsessed with chemicals, be it drugs or booze, he or she would sooner or later cross the path of everybody else obsessed with chemicals. If someone was obsessed with controlling other people, he or she would sooner or later cross the path of everybody obsessed with controlling other people. The same was true of people obsessed with money, intrigue, politics, and any other deviant human behavior.

And, of course, because the underlying denominator common to them all was obsession, everyone with common obsessions crossed paths.

The worst always rise to the top of the heap because their common obsessions lead them to divert all attempts at moderating their behavior by those who mold their impressionable minds, leading them on a course dictated by their obsession. Being ob-sessed, they instinctively recognize others driven by the same ob-session and are drawn to them as allies, forgiving them all of their trespasses as they wish their own to be forgiven.

Forming thus into the ultimate network, they are able to take their positions at the leverage points of the societies they inhabit, helping each other as the circumstances require and self-interest dictates.

Mary found college the macrocosm of what she would find soci-ety to be, with a small group of insiders positioning the levers so they fell the correct way when they were pulled by the university population that for the most part went about its business concerned only with life moving interests.

The various intelligence operations didn't hold an actual job fair to recruit applicants. However, the potential players weren't hard to recognize and B.O. as well as A.O., not to mention myriad lesser Os were always ever-present garnering all of the souls they could for their respective causes.

Mary had naturally chosen American Operations, having a men-tal picture formed by bits and snatches of information, of an orga-nization benignly roaming the world helping the widows and orphans who were created by everybody else.

She didn't take long to find out that no one got out alive and be-cause the world was the prize, many got out a lot earlier than oth-ers.

There were no good guys, only successful guys.

She rapidly wimped out her recruiter and moved up into the less apparent levels in the organization. She did basic work. Collect in-formation that might be useful and create false appearances so peo-ple would act in a normal manner with unexpected consequences.

She always thought that her major target would be Marxist Op-erations, which had so many different letters for M she thought it might be omnipresent. She was therefore surprised when her as-signments brought her into increasing contact with British Opera-tions.

At one point, her handler had gone into a rage about some sort of increased activity on the part of B.O. and wanted to know just what was going on.

Mary had learned that it wasn't how you did something when you dealt in operations, but whether you did it, so she decided to wimp out her handler's counterpart and come back with all of the appro-priate information.

She had gone to work on Mandrake at the Student Union bar. Af-ter spending several hours in suggestive conversation and getting nowhere, she talked him into driving her home. In the car, she tried to maneuver him into a compromising position to no effect.

She felt like one of the idiots who always tried to paw her. She didn't like it. Finally, before he could protest, she had his zipper down, his prick out and in her mouth.

He grabbed her gently by the head, roaring with laughter.

"That's my bag," he cried as the tears streamed down his cheeks. "That's how I get my information."

Mary looked puzzled. "You mean you want to do that to me?" she asked.

"No silly. I want to do that to some other guy."

"But . . ." She was still puzzled.

"But what?" He was still trying to stifle his laughs.

"That's unnatural!"

"Not to me."

They went back to his place and spent the next several hours comparing notes. Mandrake had mastered on his own most of the moves that Mary had developed, although he couldn't say his enthu-siasm for the activity was rewarded with as much pleasure as Mary derived from it.

"There is one pleasure," he noted "that you haven't yet experi-enced."

She felt a thrill run through her. "What's that?" she asked ea-gerly.

"We have a method of killing people in the field in such a way that it looks entirely natural. No one has tumbled to it yet and we only use it when we want some collateral effect."

"Yes. Yes. On with it." Mary was leaning forward in her seat.

"If you got the guy's attention, you can take him by the throat, just above where the tubes from the stomach and lungs meet, and then . . ." he made a cup with his hand and gave a twist, "the con-tents of his stomach come up and make a U-turn right into his lungs. He's suffocating before he knows what's happened to him."

"Hey, I've always wanted to leave him holding his rocks, but to tell you the truth, I've been afraid of what he might do to me. This gives a whole new meaning to doing someone."

"Instead of getting him off, you get him off the Earth," Man-drake laughed. "But I'll tell you," he added, becoming serious, "it's a real blockbuster, for you that is. It's an indescribable thrill."

"But, isn't it illegal? I mean, it is murder."

"Only if it isn't sanctioned."

"What do you mean sanctioned?"

"Well, it means that the person is trying to destroy civilization by working to establish The Representative World Government."

"But I work for American Operations. The United States is com-mitted to supporting the establishment of The Representative World Government."

"Work for us. We are the guardians of world civilization. Our culture goes back centuries. We brought civilization to the far cor-ners of the world. Look what we did for India, Africa, China. Hell, China would still be ruled by despots if it weren't for British en-lightenment."

"But don't we, I mean, American Operations, sanction killings to?"

"On a mass scale. They go in and kill whole populations."

"I haven't read anything about that in the papers."

"They do it economically. They destroy an economy and then come along and offer to lend money to rebuild the economy. When the economy gets to the point that it can produce something, they bleed the production out in interest payments."

"I never understood economics."

"Economics is simple. It is simply the process of taking some-thing that belongs to somebody else. We don't do that. We provided the world with its independence."

"So everybody that supports The Representative World Gov-ernment is sanctioned."

Mandrake laughed. "Of course not. Only the ones we don't like."

"Do you have a name?"

Mandrake gave her a name of a man who worked for the school administration. She didn't learn until after she did him that what-ever he supported, he had also refused Mandrake's student aid re-quest. By that time, she was hooked. She had experienced the ulti-mate pleasure. It had been, in Mandrake's word, a real blockbuster for her and she was not about to give it up.

As the StratoJet angled into the extended runway at Acapulco, she felt a thrill of anticipation as she thought of Sidney St. Remain at Lano D'Lazo's cliff top villa and the pleasure he would provide her.

The passage through the StratoJet terminal at Acapulco was the same as Manhattan, as it was, for that matter, everywhere the StratoJet serviced, with attentive help and hassle-free service. Lano had a limousine waiting for her and she sat back enjoying the ride up the cliffs behind the town to the villa overlooking the bay.

The villa itself was a masterpiece of form imitating nature. A crevice, the remnant of some ancient accident of maelstrom, split two level rock surfaces capping the face overlooking the blueness of the bay and the almost imperceptible change of blueness in the sky.

The villa had been sculpted around this crevice, with the floor of the crevice providing the veranda, the rooms tiered on either side with balconies of their own enjoying the same breathtaking view.

A pool had been sculpted right in the center of the veranda, and Lano was standing at the end, his arms out, waiting for Mary.

"My precious Mary," Lano said, embracing her. "You are always a welcome vision." He patted her hair, which always seemed to represent the bouncy approach she took toward life. "You're opti-mism itself."

She put her finger against his lips. "Shush. You're too kind." She looked around. "Sidney?"

Lano gestured out into the bay. "He's a very accomplished man. See that red speck out there?"

"The hang glider?" Mary blanched. "He could kill himself."

"He's quite good, you know. And very charming. Where do you find them?"

Mary shrugged. "Let me go get into something more comfort-able. The usual room?"

If Sidney croaked before she got the code from him, the entire mission would be for naught. That's what came of working with sister operations. Lano D'Lazo didn't know what her mission was and probably wouldn't care if he did. He did know that it depended on Sidney being alive when she got there. Otherwise, she wouldn't have stashed him there.

So what does the sadist do but stick him out a hundred feet above Acapulco Bay knowing it will cause her to turn a couple of days worth of food into liquid acid.

She would like to burn his ass in exchange but she didn't know how. She had no idea what he did for sex, but it apparently had nothing to do with what she could provide. He was powerful in a way she could not understand. Just the mention of his name made people become tense and freeze up, as if they couldn't really admit his existence even though they were well aware that he did exist.

The universal fear to admit his existence allowed him to do as he pleased and the ability to do as he pleased, unchallenged, gave him raw power. If a crime is horrible enough, people who hear of it will have no experience for comparison and will therefore not un-derstand. Baring the crime being committed right in front of the eyes, the rumor is elusive, the perpetuator dangerous. All will deny the existence of horror at the same time they fear becoming fodder of the very horrors that will continue to be beyond the reach of their understanding. Their fear produces deference.

Lano D'Lazo lived just beyond the field of Mary's understanding and therefore presented a problem she had to accept, his existence without understanding. Mary never under any circumstances felt fear.

Lano, for his part, lived the life he wished to live. He would take periodic trips to the fashion capitals of the world and pick and choose from among the latest crop of lovely young men and women who were trying to make their way to fame and fortune. He would befriend them and fly them down to his villa as needed for the pur-poses that he decided upon. His villa was the center for the figure-heads of the world, the people who counted, the people who pushed the levers.

They came in because they feared not to, they sampled his wares because they could not resist, and they left to do his bidding, both out of fear and gratitude.

Mary stashed Sidney with Lano because she could count on Lano to keep Sidney away from the opposition. Even if he didn't give a fig about her operation, he was at the center of the opposition to The Representative World Government. He might get carried away be-cause he could not resist his own little sadistic pleasures, but he wouldn't seriously endanger the operation.

She emerged from her apartment onto the veranda, her slim fig-ure at a jaunty angle under her beach robe. Some people didn't re-quire a close look to see their beauty and the people that populated the veranda were in that category, the type of people that photo-graphed well. The Marys of the world, either because of their en-ergy or the way they held themselves, prevented others from get-ting a good look at them. All people saw was the energy, some con-cept of a person in their mind, and found it exciting. Later, when they might chance on a photograph of the person, they would see a plain, even homely person and wonder, wow, I thought she was so attractive. Faced with reality and the memory of reality, they would look forward to meeting the person once again so that they could determine categorically whether the person was or was not beautiful, only to have the magic of the person leave the photo-graphic remembrance of reality forgotten when once again they met.

Mary sat down and contemplated the figure still hang gliding, a spec in the distance.

"Fantastic, isn't he?" Lano smiled.

You sadistic fuck, Mary thought. "Sure is. When do you think he'll get tired?"

"He'll be back for your dinner. I had the chef follow your in-structions exactly. How about a drink of some sort?"

"I could use some red wine."

She sat back and shut her eyes, feeling the heat of the late af-ternoon sun on her face.

"Your mission with this Sidney guy is pretty important, eh?"

Mary opened her eyes. Lano's eyes were fixed on the bust of a beautiful young woman who had come out of an apartment and was easing herself into the cool water of the pool, the temperature drawing her shoulders back and emphasizing what Mary had to ad-mit were perfectly formed breasts. The fuck was interested in what she was up to after all. Maybe she could get into him.

"All I can say is that it will be very beneficial to the cause."

"I heard on the grapevine that I could make a killing purchasing interest rate futures on U.S. Treasury bonds."

"I wouldn't know anything about that."

"The reasoning goes that if something would cause the value of the dollar to decline, the United States would have to raise rates to defend it."

The picture perfect blonde had moved into deeper water so that only the tops of her breasts arced above the surface, the clear water giving tantalizing glimpses of what lay below, her nipples broken cherries topping the vision. Lano didn't take his eyes off them and the girl didn't stop displaying them for his pleasure.

"You got me." What was he after?

"I took the liberty of doing some background on your little boy-friend out there. He works in the unit that manipulates the money supply."

"So? Manipulation excites me."

"If the money supply were suddenly increased, it would not only cause a loss in the value of the dollar, it would cause massive in-flation. Interest rates would not only just rise, they would go through the roof. A girl has to look out for her old age."

"I work for the nationalistic cause because I believe in it. How can you even suggest that I profit from it?"

"Someone is going to profit from it. If you don't, some murder-ing torture lover behind The Representative World Government will. They have half the money in the world, if not more, and they al-ways take every conceivable side of every situation. You can do-nate your profits to the cause."

"I need money to make money. I don't have any money."

Lano took his eyes off the seemingly unstoppable breasts and waved his hand around at the surrounding villa. "You can enjoy this without money because I pay for it. But sooner or later, you are going to need money yourself." He gestured at the blonde. "Those tits are ripe. They are there right now. She's here because they're there. Tomorrow they won't float. They'll be gone and her with them. You're nothing in this world. You only get the comfort you can carve out for yourself. Comfort is obtained with money. Money is obtained with what you got. Right now you got some information. You don't need money to make money. All you need is the informa-tion. With your information and my contacts, I can continue to enjoy this place and you can ensure yourself a little comfort tomorrow." His gaze drifted back to the blonde's breasts. "She has no informa-tion," he mused, "she has a today, but no tomorrow."

"But doesn't it take a lot of work to make a lot of money?"

"People think that water is the most abundant thing on the face of the Earth. Water flows like molasses when you compare it to money. In the global money markets, funds cascade around the planet faster than the winds, and travel further. Trillions flow back and forth between the money capitals, more money than a million Vanderbilts or Rockefellers could have ever visualized. If we know which way the wind is blowing, and know the direction it's going to change, we don't have to have any expertise, just an electronic account number to collect the loot. As long as we are not too greedy, as long as we don't force ourselves into the forefront or otherwise call attention to ourselves so we become the targets of the cleanup crews, we can make all we need."

"A million?"

Lano laughed. "If we're talking about the United States merely defending the dollar, maybe." He arched an eyebrow, and once again turned his attention away from contemplating the blonde's breasts. "If you're doing this for British Operations, you could clear in the hundreds of millions."

Mary was startled. She was first startled at the amount in-volved. She was next startled that Lano would know her connection to British Operations. It was generally known who was in the busi-ness, but it was perpetually unclear just who worked for whom.

"Are you?"

"Am I what?" she delayed.

"Are you under the discipline of British Operations on this pro-ject with Sidney?"

So even he wasn't sure.

"Listen," he continued, "I have a top level meeting at the United Nations day after tomorrow. I hope to make an agreement in which I can provide The Representative World Government with my serv-ices. If I can find out whether my source is in the ballpark, and if so, the size of the score, I can have everything set up before I leave. You can walk away from here with an electronic account number that will fill up just as soon as the interest rates begin to rise."

His gaze fell back on the breasts which were poking out of the surface like lava tipped mountains as the girl floated on her back.

"If your project involves the money supply, you are going to make and break fortunes. There's no reason why you shouldn't gain from the fruits of your labor."

"And it's that easy?"

"When you don't have it, money is hard to come by. When you treat it as something of value, you can only put in your mind the meager amounts that represent what gives you your daily needs. When you have your subsistence needs taken care of, however, money becomes just another commodity, blips on a screen. To the market, a billion in profits and a billion in losses is still equal to what the average person has left after the weekly paycheck. Noth-ing. The difference is that we can think in billions and therefore we can act in a manner that allows us to make billions. You can't achieve what you can't conceive and the inability to formulate a picture of yourself making anything but pennies will keep you in pennies."

Mary tried to think about it. She couldn't. Having a hundred mil-lion or having nothing, it was all the same. She thought about what she could buy with a lot of money but then realized that she could have anything she wanted right now simply by access to the people she knew.

"Imagine that blonde without any tits," Lano read her mind. "She wouldn't be here. You wouldn't either, without your talents. You use what you got, but you use it for you first, then for the cause."

All of a sudden, she became aware of the woman putting the glass of red wine down in front of her. The women didn't have the option of jumping into the pool. She couldn't sit down. She couldn't drink the red wine. She couldn't get on a StratoJet and be in San Francisco tomorrow. She didn't have money and she didn't have anything to trade for money but her labor.

Not having money limited your options, and limited options lim-ited possibilities. Without possibilities, you limited yourself.

Money, prosperity, was the root of all freedom!

"How can I trust you?"

"Trust me? Listen, I would even agree to submit to one of your famous blowjobs if I screwed you. But I won't put myself in that position. You don't have to trust me. I will put you in contact with my broker, you can put your broker in contact with him, or if you don't have one, he can recommend anyone you want. Once we con-vince him that we have the inside goods, he'll lend us anything we need. You can make your own position with your own person and control what happens to the proceeds. You don't have to trust me. You are only dealing with yourself. So, is this a British Operation?"

Mary sighed. "Yes."

"Do you know what the play is?"

"Not really. Once I do my magic on Sidney, I wait for a call. When I get it, I go to a terminal, punch in a code series and upload a file."

"You're getting the file from Sidney?"

"Yes."

Lano rubbed his hands in glee. "Do you know why you're doing the uploading."?

"Why?"

"What B.O. hopes to accomplish?"

"Mandrake said that they want to delay converting their cur-rency into some new currency unit."

Lano jumped up and did a little jig. "That's it. That's it. That's it," he chanted as he jumped up and down. The blonde uprighted her-self in the pool to see what was going on. Mary noted that Sidney's glider was making its long descent onto the beach without any problem.

"Come on." He started to settle down. "Let's get a screen into London so we can get the paperwork out of the way while Sidney is making his way back. I can see why you are so bouncy, so optimis-tic all the time. Everything comes easy to you. You'll make a hun-dred million without blinking an eye And I, I think I'll make more."

"How so?" She had picked up her glass of wine and followed him into his office off the veranda.

"If I can conclude an agreement with The Representative World Government, I can become a part of their team. They won't touch me when they go after the insiders that develop from this thing. This is going to be big."

"How can you work for The Representative World Government?"

"I don't work for anybody. I just wait until I'm needed and I go in and do my job. And I'm always needed. Or at least I have been up till now."

They left the veranda, with the blonde going back to floating on her back, her eyes gazing mistily into the darkening afternoon sky, her breasts like twin sundials in the deepening light.

"Hello, Alix." Sidney slung his gear on a beach chair.

The blonde opened her eyes and looked up. "I must have been asleep. What time is it?"

"About six. Where's our host?"

"He went into the office over there. He's with a young girl."

Sidney brightened. "That must be Mary."

Alix paddled over. They had only met that morning. She was im-pressed with his job handing the money supply, whatever that was. He was intrigued with her profession of modeling, with the glamour.

When she thought about money, she thought of what was before her eyes, the checks she would get from the hours times the amount per hour. When she thought about the money supply, she thought of fast moving presses turning out sheets of money faster than the mind could count. She knew that the process that occurred between the time the money came off the press and the time it ended up in her pocket was very complex and anybody who had anything to do with it must be a very complex person.

She had been lying in the pool thinking just that. She could get the picture of the paper coming off the press. She had seen movies of that. She could form that in her mind.

When she tried to carry the picture forward, however, all she ended up with was the money in her purse. Then she could compare the money with something, a lipstick, a cheeseburger, a pair of pantyhose. If she reverted back to the picture of the money coming off the presses, she could then compare it with a lot of lipsticks, a lot of cheeseburgers, a lot of pantyhose.

When she thought of the villa and tried to compare it with money, all of the money coming off the presses didn't compare with what the villa must cost.

Her mind kept going round and round, with images forming and disappearing, no two images forming into a solid structure, one for instance that had her, the villa and the money all in a single trian-gle. Not being able to connect the money with the villa in more than abstract terms, she could not put herself in the picture as an owner of the villa.

Oh, she could fantasize herself the mistress of the villa, but Lano would have to be in the background of the fantasy because she could never be there alone. She could not form in her mind a picture of the concrete connection between money and its worth and was therefore no threat to Lano.

Sidney was impressed with Alix. He had seen an ad she made for toothpaste. He cut it out and put it up above his desk at work. He often stared at the picture, trying to imagine what it would be like to be next to her in person, to speak to her, to smell her breath on his face, to actually touch her.

He would conjure her up when he touched one of the many girls he met in his evenings about town. His date's skin didn't seem as warm, her breath as sweet, her eyes as sparkling as the girl over the toothpaste ad.

He knew that a picture was a picture, but he didn't realize that he was seeing the picture through a million eyes. He couldn't under-stand that the picture was a cynosure, a focal point of attention, just like an actress, a politician, a mass murderer. None of these people had a particularly broad range of human traits that set them apart from the rest of humanity. The one thing they did have, how-ever, was the attention of humanity.

Sidney was incapable of forming in his own mind the human ex-perience. He could only vaguely recognize the picture was seen by humanity and that humanity therefore had a collective opinion of the person in the picture.

Not knowing what that collective opinion was, he had no way to draw the connection between his experience with women and his opinion of the woman in the picture. As he looked at the picture, his mind was like it started turning over and over without ever catch-ing. It did not have something to catch on, something that would connect himself to the woman in the picture and the reality of his life.

When he found himself in the same place with the picture under circumstances where they had nothing to do but talk with each other, he couldn't connect her with the picture. He couldn't under-stand why he didn't have more of a reaction. He drew as big a blank with her in the flesh as he did with her picture. He tried to compare her with his memory of Mary, ah, sweet Mary, and the memory of Mary was more alive than the reality of Alix.

Alix, on the other hand saw Sidney as the connection between Lano and money. If he handled the money supply, he must know how it got from the printing presses to become the villa.

"Well, I wonder what they have planned for us."

"I don't care. I'm comfortable." Alix climbed out of the pool. "I could use a short drink. How about yourself."

"Let me take a dip to get the salt water off."

Mary saw Alix signal for drinks. She had just gotten off the phone, her attention returning to her surroundings. It was hard to believe that she had just become a millionaire, a hundred times over the broker had said. She didn't feel any different.

The process had been tedious, especially without Mandrake to fall back on, but after half an hour she had gotten the hang of it and completed the deal. She didn't really understand what went on. She had sold something she didn't have and used the proceeds to pur-chase something that she had never heard of which she had then pledged against a future interest in interest rates, which sounded just bazaar.

When it all ended up, she had a figure that she could punch up on the computer, .03845, which represented her investment position.

"Each time the figure went up one, for instance the forty-five became forty-six, she had made 10,000 dollars," her broker had told her. "If the three goes to four, you've made a million, if the zero to a one, its a hundred million. It's as simple as falling off a log."

"If," she commented to Lano, "the numbers go up."

"But they will. You're the one who's going to make them go up."

Mary wondered why she didn't feel as elated as she thought she should about the whole thing, but with the chips down, she had to turn her attention to winning the bet.

"I'd better get Sidney in tow," she said. "How well do they know each other?" she added, referring to the buxom blonde.

"Alix is mine, so it doesn't matter. What are your plans with Sidney? The chef is poised to serve the Bouillabaisse."

Mary thought about the upcoming session with Sidney. Some of her enthusiasm had waned.

"Let's go out, have a drink with the two of them, and see what's up."

"You go on out. I'll be there in a second."

Mary walked out onto the terrace. Sidney came up and hugged her hungrily.

"Where have you been? I've missed you."

Mary disentangled herself and walked over to where Alix was sitting. "We haven't met," she said.

"Alix Janis." Mary looked at her closely. "Well, Resinda All, really, but I model under the name Alix."

"What's wrong with Resinda?"

"It's, well, it's just not me."

"I see you have met my boyfriend."

"Yes. Isn't he just great? I mean, he's interesting to talk to and all."

"Yes. How long have you been here?"

"She was here when I got here," Sidney interjected.

"Lano brought me down yesterday. The place was full when I got here, but everybody's left." She paused. "But us, of course."

What a twit, Mary thought. What a couple of twits. Then, who wasn't? People did what they did and were hopefully good at it. Outside of that, they were just people.

As the sun left the sky streaked with color, the sounds of band music floated over the cliff. Mary felt a stirring.

"Want to go bar hopping, handsome?" she asked Sidney.

Both Sidney and Alix agreed. Alix ran over to Lano, who was emerging from his office. Lano said something to her, then smacked her in the butt as she scurried off.

"A night on the town," he said matter-of-factly. "Why not? What time will we leave?"

Alix was waiting at the limousine when Mary and Sidney showed up. Lano joined them immediately. "The Pyramid," he told the driver.

The oversized car began to navigate the curving road rising be-hind a sparkling city that was landscaped by beaches to the north and south of its narrow grip on the sea. They passed trees that gave no hint to the presence of mansions or the hovels that were positioned in haphazard fashion on the hills above and below the road. In feudal times, the serfs had occupied cottages owned by the masters of the land. Under the new system, the masters were the ones who could obtain title, or at least occupancy, to the expensive houses that dotted the hills while the serfs who did their bidding for subsistence pay crowded into the hovels interspersed among the villas where their services were needed.

In the old days, the lord of the manor required only that he have first right to deflower the maidens fortunate enough to be born on his property and, by implication, were therefore his property, property he was obligated to care for. Today, the ability to live in the villas afforded the right to deflower the very lives of the in-habitants of the hovels without a corresponding obligation to care for them.

The hills were a microcosm of the world with concentrations of wealth surrounded by pools of poverty. Mary was oblivious to it as she turned to Sidney.

"So, you like to hang glide?"

"Not really. It was something to do while I was waiting for you."

"You risk your life waiting for me?"

"It was more of a risk charging for the glider."

"You had to pay for the glider?" She didn't look at Lano. She wanted to leave him ignorant of the rage she was slowly nurturing against him.

"They wanted me to pay five times. They first tried to give me a weekly rate."

"That's cheaper?"

"No. They charged me for a week. I put a stop to that and then they charged me an hourly rate when the full day was cheaper. By the time it was charged and uncharged, you can bet I had a stack of slips."

"It must be nice to be good with figures," Alix said.

"Believe me, he is," Mary said, winking at her.

"So you got it straightened out?"

"He shouldn't have been charged anything," Lano said.

"I'll make it up to him," Mary replied.

They pulled up to The Pyramid's entrance, crowded with the nightlife of the town, and pulled past it, around a corner, stopping at the executive offices. As they got out, the manager appeared at the door and opened it for them.

The four marched through into a small hall, past a door marked "No Admittance", through the kitchen, or at least a small part of it, and out into the Cabaret area, a small stage over a dance floor sur-rounded by plush lounges. A waiter was moving the half-filled glasses of the occupants to a back table, along with the occupants.

"If you had just called . . ." the manager started, but thought better of it when he saw that Lano might look him full in the face. "Please, please, be seated. What would your guests like?"

"We'll have Champaign," Mary said.

Lano looked at her and then told the waiter to hurry it up.

Mary sat the two men in the center with her and Alix on either side.

The Champaign arrived rapidly and Mary began to propose toasts to the good life, to being rich, to the end of poverty, her list was endless but her subject was always money.

Lano became increasingly agitated as he sipped at the edge of his glass. Mary expertly hid the fact that the Champaign going into her mouth was coming right back out. Alix and Sidney, however, en-joyed the vintage and began to show it.

The drunker Sidney got, the more agitated Lano became. Finally, he leaned over to Mary as if he was going to kiss her on the neck.

"What the shit are you up to?" he whispered fiercely.

"What the shit do you mean, what the shit am I up to?" she hissed in his ear, not bothering to hide it with a fake kiss.

"You get him drunk, you're not going to get the job done."

"What do you know about how I get the job done?"

"A flaccid flute won't play your song."

She realized that Alix and Sidney were listening to their con-versation. "Why, Lano, you old dog. You're a poet."

"A flaccid flute won't play your song," Alix repeated. "That's pretty. What does it mean?"

"It means that we all need some more Champagne. And a dance. Let's dance. Lano? No? Alix? No. You wouldn't want to dance with me? Then it's you and me, Sidney."

"I'm a little dizzy," he said as she led him out onto the small floor.

"So am I." She pulled him close, putting her hand on the back of his neck to make his prick aware of his neck.

"Hmmm," she cooed, "what do you think of Alix?"

"She's beautiful."

"She is, isn't she?" Mary rubbed herself against his growing excitement. "What do you think it would be like being inside her?"

"I thought we . . ."

"We will. Just close your eyes and picture her." She felt him get harder. "Feel your prick slipping into her." He was massive.

She engineered him around to the table, opening the embrace with him facing Alix.

"Sidney would like the honor of dancing with you, Alix."

"Sure. That would be fun." She started to go into his arms, but hesitated. "Sidney. Are you still here, Sidney?"

Mary pushed them onto the floor.

"He's here," she said. "You'll see."

She sat back down next to Lano. "Well," she said.

"What are you doing?" His voice was high and too loud. "I mean," he lowered it, "just what are you trying to do?"

"Make you jealous?"

"Of what? That twit? Don't be ridiculous. That would be like having my left hand get jealous of my right."

"What?"

"If you get him zonked, you won't be able to get the code from him."

"What makes you think I haven't already got it?"

He brightened. "You have?"

"Not yet."

"Damn." He grabbed his glass, and this time he didn't sip it.

"If you're irritated at Alix, I can ask Sidney not to dance with her. I think he's seen her picture and he's really taken with her."

"You'd do me a favor to get me irritated at Alix. I have plans for her and being irritated at her would heighten the pleasure I'm going to have from her."

"Well, why would you be irritated at me?" Mary was beginning to like the pleasure his irritation was giving her.

When she had set up the deal with the broker, she had asked what would happen if the interest rates didn't go up.

"How much do you have?" he had asked.

"How much of what do I have?"

"How much of anything?"

"Not much."

"Good. Because you stand to lose as much as you stand to gain."

"You mean that if I had a lot of property, I could lose it?"

"Sure."

"You mean this could ruin someone?"

"It sure could."

Mary was determined to give Lano a little of the discomfort he had given her by sending Sidney off hang gliding.

Lano, she reasoned, had an image of himself that included him having anything he wanted on the veranda of his villa. If she could paint a picture for him that opposed the image that he held of him-self, then she could send a little jolt of electricity into his system. She could, literally, make him punch himself.

"I'm irritated at you because you are not doing your job. I al-ways do my job. I do my job even when I'm not required to do it. I do it out of pleasure, out of the satisfaction I get from a job well done. You are not doing your job. You are down here drinking. You are getting your target drunk. You are letting him get sexed up at my expense. You are not making me happy."

"But I need a break. I've been working hard in Manhattan all day." She took a protracted drink of Champaign and signaled for a refill.

Lano sat back in his chair and glowered. "Just think how much money your going to make."

"I'm thinking how much money I'm not going to make."

She rubbed him on the leg.

"Don't do that," he shrieked.

"You don't like girls?"

"I love girls. I love everybody. Just leave me alone. I'm danger-ous."

She rubbed his leg again, his last words sending an intense thrill though her body. She always suspected he was dangerous. She did-n't know how dangerous, but the idea excited her.

Now here he was claiming that he was dangerous. He was seething. His neck muscles were straining. He wanted to do unpleas-ant things to her, she was sure.

And here he was being subjected to her hand a second time, un-able to move, unable to get away, unable to do anything about it because she literally held his most precious possession right be-tween her teeth. If she didn't get the code, if she didn't go through with her project, he would be ruined, maybe not forever. She had heard that he had been down before but had always recovered, the need for his services rumored to be greater than any temporary setback.

He wasn't thinking about a comeback. He was only thinking about what he had and what he could lose. As she rubbed his leg and smiled into his eyes, she could see the unpleasant effects of the out-of-control emotions she was causing to run amok through his system reflected in his eyes, in his struggle to keep calm.

She could feel the pleasure rising between her legs. The more pressure she put on his leg, the broader her smile became, the more puzzling his look became, the more his leg trembled under her hand, and the closer she came to her climax until, slowly leaning forward, she kissed him on the lips, making him shudder and the droplet released itself into the space that defined her goal. She couldn't disguise the blush of pleasure that rushed to her face.

"You bitch," he muttered as he realized what she had done.

Then he laughed.

"You wonderful bitch. You got me. I'll be damned. You're good. You're real good. You're great. I have no doubt you'll get whatever you want out of Sidney." He paused. "But don't think I won't get my pleasure out of you. And when I get my pleasure, you won't walk away with a bad memory. You'll be lucky if you can walk at all."

Sidney and Alix returned as the band took a break. They didn't say anything, just sat, half turned to each other, totally turned on by each other, looking into each other's eyes. Mary signaled the waiter to keep their glasses filled.

"Just wanted to see how much self-control you have," she said, ignoring the two lovebirds. "I wasn't causing you physical harm."

"It's not real unless you cause physical harm. I like to make a person cry out in agony. I want to hear my victim scream."

"Surely you don't want to hear them scream," she replied, surprised.

"Well, I'm not going to make Sidney cry. You've gotten them quite drunk. The only thing that's going to hurt him is if you let him wake up in the morning."

"That's alright. Sidney can wait."

"Are you coming to the ball tomorrow evening?" he asked, changing the subject.

"I have to be in San Francisco day after tomorrow, so I'll be leaving on the PM StratoJet."

"The cream of society will be here."

Later, after they had gotten both Alix and Sidney back to the villa, Mary ruminated over the steaming pot of Bouillabaisse. She absently refolded the napkins at the two settings, peering occasion-ally over at Sidney, limp on the sofa.

She had planned on his eagerness for Alix to increase in the same proportion that his alcohol intake increased. Both would in-crease inversely with his ability to do anything about it.

She knew that as the mind reconstructed its pictures of reality, drawing on memories, the memories were themselves idealized.

If she remembered a wart on a person being particularly ugly and didn't like the person because of the wart, she would tend to view the person as a wart. When she recalled the image of the per-son, she would only reconstruct the wart. If she liked the person, wart and all, because the person reinforced her self-image, then when she reconstructed the image of the person from memory, she would leave the wart off.

When she saw a person, she would, because the mind can only construct one image at a time, tend to see the person with or with-out a wart depending on her other feelings about the person.

Once the mind constructs a recallable image of someone, it really takes an effort to see the person as he really is.

It made no difference to Mary how large the wart grew if he were in favor, or whether it was removed if he weren't.

That's why, she realized, people could ignore a person's defects completely if that person has been able to construct a recallable image in them that reinforces their image of themselves.

That's why politicians could get away with anything.

Some people had a talent for it, others didn't.

Alix was certainly beautiful. She didn't have warts. But being a model, she was already imbued with peer reinforcement. If some-one thought she was beautiful, the fact that she was a model and therefore recognized as beautiful, reinforced the opinion of self the person had that their opinions were correct. To go against the con-sensus and say that someone the consensus thought was beautiful was not beautiful would be to risk setting up a image conflict in their mind.

Even if Alix hadn't been beautiful, and being beautiful, objec-tively at least, was merely the cumulative effect of wearing the warts off your recallable memory, the effect of the alcohol on Sid-ney's recall process simply removed any visible warts that re-mained past his idealization of her.

He could see external reality by constructing a picture of it in his mind or he could use external reality as a mere guide and con-struct what he wanted to construct in his mind.

If Sidney thought Alix beautiful before he had his glasses of Champagne, he thought her painfully so after because his recall process simply recalled only what he wanted to see and what he wanted to see was what reinforced his image of himself.

Mary had waited patiently for the alcohol to burn out of his system, leaving behind the poisons that went into its distillation.

She ladled out a half bowl of the Bouillabaisse and began to sip it out of the edge of a spoon.

She thought about the flow of reality. The more alcohol Sidney took in, the less capable he became of doing what his urges de-manded he do with beauty. The mental process of idealization could enhance performance or, if it was mixed with chemicals, frustrate it, making future performance more of a necessity once the alcohol wore off.

As long as the booze stayed in the mind as alcohol, it burned up the electrons that would otherwise have connected the images of what he would like to do with the physical responses that would allow him to do what he wanted to do.

A person could deal with reality because the images he con-structed of reality flowed with the reality he existed in. If he watched the activity around him, the activity flowed like a ballet and the motion provided it with its own meaning.

With alcohol limiting the picture of reality that was being formed to only that portion of reality that reinforced the self-image the person had, the flow of reality was faster and required less meaning.

To be comfortable with the reality around him, he had to be able to construct its image as it flowed around him, with one image of the changing reality logically following the next image to reflect the changing reality.

He could stop the changing reality, focus in on one slice of it, idealize it, epiphanize it, and still feel comfortable with reality be-cause he could always return to it by altering his attention.

Mary wanted to experiment with what happened when the mind lost its capacity to construct continuous images that reflected con-tinually changing reality. If the flow of reality provided its own meaning, what would be the effect of crippling that flow by the poi-sons that were left behind in the body after the effect of the alcohol had left the brain?

She had long known being hung over left her horny. She had often thought that it was just the result of trying to replace feeling lousy with feeling good. It was hard to feel bad in the throes of an or-gasm.

Then she realized what was happening. The reality was losing its meaning because her ability to construct an image of reality was being crippled by the poisons that the booze left in her system.

Her information gathering sessions had always been successful. The combination of increasing the sensations while blocking the ability to come had always put her subject into the position of being willing to do anything, say anything, or promise her anything just to get off.

With Sidney's co-workers, as inexperienced as each was, it had been a snap. It was only minutes before they were begging to do anything she wanted. It was hard to build the excitement required for serial orgasms when the guys were so easy. She wanted a little more from Sidney.

Her normal routine had been to feed her victim Bouillabaisse, a nice bowl of it. When the proper time came, he would have some-thing sufficiently caustic in his stomach to burn out the lining of his lungs when she gave him the ultimate climax, closing one hand around his balls and the other around his throat to redirect the contents of his stomach as it convulsed from the pressure on his balls.

Nothing was left for the coroner. The pressure on both parts of the body was minimal and left no mark. All the coroner was left with was a body with a loaded charge, leading no doubt to the con-clusion that the wet dream had been so violent the victim had belched up his dinner and accidentally inhaled it.

Mary was not to be denied her pleasure, which had been dwin-dling as the routine increased, and she had determined that she would draw Sidney out. Having Lano had been exciting. Now she wanted to stretch the pleasure out.

The Champagne was meant to replace the Bouillabaisse. The vinegar residue would be more caustic anyway. The trick had been to use Alix to sex him up when he was only capable of screwing with his mind.

The way they had been devouring each other with their eyes clearly showed she had succeeded on that score. When she had got-ten him back to the room, everything had been limp.

As the alcohol wore off, however, his mind was disconnected from his body. He woke incapable of comprehending reality because he could only take it in one frame at a time.

He would try to recall, and when he did, it would be a hazy pic-ture of what he felt when he was with Alix.

He wouldn't be able to create the flow of reality from the night before and he wouldn't be able to connect the frames of reality that were in front of him.

Besides a probable headache, he would be totally uncomfortable with himself because he couldn't fit himself into the reality. Reality existed, he just couldn't reconstruct in on a continuous basis. He would find himself constructing the reflection in the glass table and wondering what the fuck it meant.

But he would have physical reactions much the same as the legs of a dog with a severed spinal cord can be made to mimic walking if placed on a treadmill.

Sidney didn't need to construct an image of reality to under-stand the reality of having his cock sucked. The sensations went directly into his body and his body responded directly.

His inability to construct a continuous image of reality no longer made any difference to him. They only thing that made a difference was to blot out reality in the glorious spasm of a climax, a spasm that she would make sure he was denied and denied and denied, much to her continuous delight.

It had, she thought as she looked at his lifeless body, been a de-light. She had lost herself completely, experiencing orgasm after orgasm as he screamed and cried under her expert ministrations.

She had unfortunately been so wrapped up in her own pleasure that her own image of reality had been totally internalized.

She was so used to hearing the man scream, "God, please stop, make me come!" as he writhed under her mouth, that is precisely what she thought she had heard Sidney scream.

Now she realized that he had been yelling, "God, please don't stop, don't make me come!"

She had reconstructed an image of reality that matched her memory and that image had been the opposite of reality.

Her logic had certainly worked. Sidney was horny, horny as hell. He was hung over, so he wasn't doing too well at constructing his own reality. But faced with the reality that he awoke to, hung over and headachy, he was more than willing to take the alternate reality that Mary's mouth had created for him, perhaps a hazy picture of Alix's eyebrows, the tip of her nose, and the tilt of her chin floating on a gossamer thread in the blue.

Whatever it was, he had simply not wanted to leave it.

The things that Mary was doing to him, which were intended to drive him to the brink of despair, were really sending him into an ecstasy. The more he implored her to continue, the more she did, thinking he was begging her to stop. The more pleasure she got, the further into the shadows of bliss he went until . . .

Well. Until she had gone to far and he didn't come back.

No ball squeezing for Sidney. No throat tightening for Sidney.

No Sidney.

And no code.

When it finally dawned on her what had happened, the magnitude of what had happened, she barely made it to the toilet as the Bouil-labaisse took a direct line through her stomach.

There had been no conflict of self-images. It was a total, imme-diate, irreversible change that sent a bolt of disruptive feelings directly into her stomach, producing a cauldron of activity. If it had taken a different course, she could well have ended up in the situa-tion she had planned for Sidney with her lungs burned out by her own stomach acid.

She had definitely fucked up. She had one-half of a whole. She had the Diskcard, but only half a code that was no code at all. Now she was tempted to begin playing what if.

She knew, though, that time was defined by events. It didn't de-fine the events themselves. There were no alternate realities.

She knew that reality could be perceived anyway one wished, but that when real events affect future choices, that reality was not a perceived reality but a concrete reality that had to be dealt with, that determined all future reality with respect to the event.

Quite simply, her mission had been a failure. There would be no creation of excess currency, no collapse of the drive for a Repre-sentative World Government, no hundreds of millions of dollars.

There was no alternate reality that did not take into considera-tion the fact that she had blown away Sidney before she'd gotten the code out of him.

Not having the code was the reality.

The only thing she could think to do was to go to San Francisco, where she was to pick up The Chairman, talk him into bed again, and do him in just for the spite of it. With The Chairman on a trip, and with his ironclad instructions that he was not to be reached under any circumstances, she could step in.

After she eliminated his trained murderer Block, already dead, the movement could be stopped.

Not being able to face the existing reality, she sank into alter-nate futures that would accommodate the existing reality, hoping for the same outcome.

She drifted into fantasy, sleeping with the dead Sidney into the late afternoon, waking with a start when Lano knocked and warned her that she would miss the evening StratoJet to San Francisco if she didn't get a move on.

The veranda was already party prepared with the guests start-ing to arrive. Sidney could wait the morning to be cleaned up, she thought as she told Lano that she would be talking to him when they were in the chips.

She jumped into the limousine for the trip to the airport.

The trip was just as circuitous as it had been to the club the night before.

She could actually see the villas nestled among the hills. She saw the maids and butlers making their way along the road to their predetermined destinations without a thought of where they were coming from.

She was idly watching the oncoming cars and their occupants when she received her second violent jolt of the day.

The jolt wasn't as bad as the jolt she had received when she fi-nally realized that she had overdone it with Sidney, that she had misjudged, heard the opposite of what she thought she had heard because she had constructed a picture of reality in her mind and then conformed reality to the false picture.

It wasn't as bad, but it was almost as bad, because the picture she now saw was a picture of reality that conflicted with a picture of reality she already possessed.

Coming up the hill as clear as day she saw a jeep. It wasn't the jeep that caught her attention. At the wheel of the jeep was the dead Block, the Block that The Pig Man should have stuck.

She picked up the intercom and asked the driver to connect her with Lano.

"Block is headed your way," she told him when he came on. "I hope you know how to take care of him."

What a bunch of shit, she thought. At least he's going to get it from Lano.

A shadow crawled over her shoulder and settled on her mind, though. What's the matter with me, she asked herself. She wasn't acting like Mary. First she had the chance to finish off The Chair-man, and she had let it pass. Then she had turned Block over to The Pig Man when she should have kept him for herself. She had spent an hour on the StratoJet reminiscing about her high school and col-lege years when she never went back, never, ever. She let her self get pissed at D'Lazo over Sidney's hang gliding and then she had bartered her patriotism for profit. She had apparently misread Sid-ney's interest in Alix on the patio and then squandered her pleasure on that bug D'Lazo. Worse, she had allowed herself to put her pleas-ure before business, experimenting on Sidney, turning a slam-dunk into a catastrophe. Finally, she had once again turned Block over to potential destruction when she should have saved the pleasure for herself.

Something was happening to her and she didn't know what.

She would do one more thing, though. She would, as soon as the StratoJet was over U.S. territory, sign on as control in The Chair-man's absence and issue an all points bulletin to eliminate D'Lazo with all possible dispatch.