6 Mary Renon

Mary had no sooner buckled herself into the seat of the Strato-Jet than she regretted her hasty call to D'Lazo from the limousine. Instead of cocooning herself in the seat module, she signaled the stewardess she wanted a glass of red wine.

She mulled over her consternation as the stewardess poured her a glass of the world's best California wine. She knew after two glasses the edge would be taken off the hard set she perpetually found her mind locked in and her body would begin to relax.

To her, a sunny exterior hiding a cloudy interior had always been the way things were. She did not know herself any differently. If her body wasn't tense, she didn't feel alive and it was only by feeling alive that she could move through reality to accomplish the things she wanted to accomplish.

The anger she could work herself into was the engine that drove her tenseness. Her internal view of the world, the construct she had meticulously manufactured in reaction to her own bodily re-sponses, was one where she was left completely alone, untouched, perhaps even floating in space.

What she saw happening, what she read had happened, what she feared would happen constantly infringed on this impossible concept of freedom.

The external world never matched the inner world she idealized, but she didn't fool herself. She was completely aware that it didn't and it couldn't.

She was completely aware that to attempt to superimpose her image of how the world should be on how the world was would lead her to the physical responses she defined as rage and the more she dwelled on the juxtapositions, the misfit of her concepts of reality with actual reality, the greater her rage would become.

Because she was dealing in the realm of the mind where the op-posing perceptions were not actual reality, she was creating situa-tions in which she could take no effective action. The rage could only build up. She could produce no acts to complete the action tri-angles that swirled through her mind and the rage became a rage of impotence.

She felt like a small girl in a dark room subject to the unknown whims of the night and she didn't understand why.

The worst part of it was, she enjoyed it. If she was feeling okay, if she got up in the morning and her physical body matched her external disposition, both were sunny, bouncy, and the world was limitless in its possibilities, it was not long before she began to feel the creepy-crawliness of the dark mist seeping into her brain reminding her this was not the normal state, that she was doing something wrong, or worse, that she was not doing anything and that she should be doing something, that things shouldn't be right because things were never right.

She didn't have far to go to find a homeless person in rags, or a tall tree being toppled, or a porpoise being netted to set up the con-flict within herself.

And once it was set up and the electricity was flowing in her body, it wasn't hard to keep the pain in her body, the inability not to act, not to do something, to build up to the point where the divi-sion in her mind drove her practically crazy, made her mind devise stratagems that would allow her to use her brain and her body in concert to dispel the overflow of energy.

Then all of this divisiveness of her perception of reality would find its true outlet in the hate of the emerging Representative World Government and her ability to act to thwart its consummation.

If she could put a tight enough squeeze around its gonads, she could keep the seed of creation from springing forth and giving it birth.

She had always been successful. She had never failed in anything she had ever undertaken, and especially so in her assignments in working towards the preservation of the status quo, the only envi-ronment she could conceive existing.

But in her project for B.O., to undermine the currency position of the United States and thus prevent the Pound Sterling from being submerged into an emerging world currency, she had fucked up to-tally.

In attempting to get the code word from St. Remain, she had screwed up in an area that she felt not only the pride of being able to do something extremely well, but in an area that she had never known failure.

In fingering Block in Manhattan, something had gone wrong so he was able not only to show up in Acapulco without a hair on his head mussed, he was able to show up apparently on her tail when he should have no reason to even know she had a tail.

Further, she had entered into an unholy alliance with someone reputed to be the essence of culture who turned out to be the es-sence of shit, the part of sustenance that life didn't need.

She had done so in the name of money.

She had hocked her future to do it.

And it wouldn't happen.

Which meant she didn't have a future.

The conflict the lack of a future set up in her mind with her natural rosy picture of the future she had always assumed set up flows of electricity into her body not unlike the flows she created to induce rage and therefore establish and maintain simple hatred, but the effect was entirely different.

Where the flows from contemplating nebulous revenge on The Representative World Government led to concepts of actions that were accomplishable and thus spurred her to action, the flows from contemplating failure led only to concepts of self-destruction and because she didn't particularly want to contemplate acts in pursu-ance of that goal, impotence.

The masochistic masturbation she had come to know and love from hating The Representative World Government was now nothing more than anger at swimmers for polluting the ocean by failing to go to the bathroom before jumping in.

It was like masturbating someone who couldn't ejaculate, working on a victim who couldn't come and thus couldn't be under her power.

Mary didn't like the feeling and she began to wonder why she liked it when it led to positive action.

What, in fact, was positive action?

What was the difference in contemplating actions that led to the death of others and contemplating actions that led to your own death?

She had seen people destroy themselves by becoming addicted to alcohol and drugs, to sex, to food, music, even exercise.

Could you become addicted to a mental process?

If she was addicted to a mental process, the lock she could put her mind in simply by fostering a misunderstanding when she un-derstood it was a misunderstanding, then why didn't failure satisfy the addiction?

Because it couldn't lead to action?

She had no way of knowing that her ability to act with optimism, the external feature that made others perceive her as bouncy and sunny and rosy, was merely her flight from an inability to actually act, her inability to have prevented the dark nights of her youth. The internal picture of that unchangeable reality, hidden from her perceptor, continuously skewered her perception of external real-ity, the concept of self she reconstructed in her perceptor in order to act, and thus skewered her actual actions in reality.

As she sipped her red wine, she was smoothing the edges of the two concepts of reality that she used to obtain the neuronic impacts that drove her. Block would have been able to analyze it precisely, although he would not have been faced with the basic question that was underlying Mary's regret at delivering him into D'Lazo's hands.

The progressive deterioration of D'Lazo's perceptor, the de-struction of the equilibrium that would eventually lead it to being unitized and thus selected out of the evolutionary process, was a process that D'Lazo not only fostered, but one which he enjoyed, delighted in, extolled the virtues of, proselytized on behalf of, forcefully obtained converts to.

He literally slavered over its destruction primarily because he didn't believe in its existence and didn't understand its construc-tion, its physical make-up and thus its potential responses to other matter in the universe.

If he had been aware of the consequences, his actions may have been directed more at creation than destruction. He may have re-sisted the pleasure of neuronic impacts, the destructive result of misinterpreting signals designed to protect, stimuli that were sup-posed to be interpreted as pain and thus cause recoil, as pleasure, resulting in incessant efforts at repetition.

Mary's response to the neuronic impacts, however, was caused by the accident of being born in proximity to a mini-D'Lazo, a mind ensnared in its own medieval net, a mind that was free to move in an area of darkness where normal perception refused to recognize its existence.

Mary's father could perceive of no consequences for his actions, and therefore was drawn inexorably, not by the pleasure he ob-tained at the end of his penis, but by the delightful agony the elec-trical impacts created in his body as what he had done at night cre-ated a reality conflict with what existed in his day. He relived the act and thus recreated the impact, making him salivate for the coming night.

His perceptor would be irretrievably damaged, at his death, unitized, and inexorably drawn into the raging inferno by the force of attraction from the combusting interior of the planet.

Whether he believed in an afterlife or not, he would cease to exist.

Was Mary condemned because of his actions?

It was, after all, his actions that set up the reality conflicts, conflicts the source of which she couldn't even recall, this very inability leading not only to the perpetuation of the freedom to de-stroy, but to Mary's continuous conflict and incessant rage.

Could another predetermine the destruction of your own per-ceptor? Could others, against your will, put you in a position where you were constantly forced to keep the elementary particles that made it up in a state of disequilibrium so that, over the years, it would unitize, and on death, be selected out of the evolutionary process because it was no longer what matter created, a structure that could perceive matter, but what matter was, a structure that could be destroyed by what matter did, combust?

Mary had been environmentally damaged. Would that lead to the same result as a person who took delight in destroying his environ-ment?

The regret Mary felt at turning Block over to D'Lazo was an un-pleasant feeling Mary didn't like.

When D'Lazo discovered that the currency hadn't been debased, and he would just as soon as the interest rates didn't rise and his massive borrowings were called and he himself was flung into de-struction by his creditors, he would be after her ass, and not for a blowjob. He would do things to her body that she wouldn't be able to imagine even while she was experiencing them.

Better to have Block around to destroy D'Lazo than D'Lazo de-stroy her.

Then she could destroy Block.

The wine had served its purpose of melding two incongruous pictures into one. She thought back to her initial response when it had sunk in that she had lost access to the code with St. Remain's demise and thus failed her mission, that she would deal The Repre-sentative World Government a double blow by doing The Chairman and then busting Block.

The thought once again gave her mind a unity of purpose and the electricity pouring into her body a focal point for action in response to that purpose.

She had left New York the previous afternoon. The Chairman had left in his private StratoJet, flying directly to Australia for the meeting of the ministers.

She had to be in San Francisco the next morning to arrange the accommodations for his return. The time was uncertain, but it would not be before the morning after next, which gave her all day tomorrow, and most of the night.

D'Lazo had disclosed more particulars of his appointment at the United Nations, also the following day.

If Block didn't take care of him in Acapulco, an unlikely possibil-ity given her haste in tipping D'Lazo off about his arrival, she would just have to come up with some other way to get D'Lazo.

The Chairman's headquarters for the time being would be where she set them up and she could transfer D'Lazo to her jurisdiction by making his elimination an objective of the currency project. She had his broker's name and she could reference his investment if there were any questions before The Chairman returned.

After The Chairman returned, it wouldn't make any difference because Block would be dead, either as a result of D'Lazo's me-ticulous ministrations, or, more hopefully, as a result of her own fatal form of fellatio.

If Block survived D'Lazo, D'Lazo wouldn't survive Block. In the latter case, Block wouldn't survive her and The Chairman would be finished.

Mary accepted a refill from the stewardess and felt the surge of pleasure the plan of action sent through her system.

Her mind drifted to the small town she would like to live in for-ever, with everybody knowing everybody else and everybody at peace.

There must have been a town like that in her childhood because she had come from a town like that.

She just couldn't seem to remember any details about the one she had known. She therefore invented the details of the one she would like to know.

She wanted a town in which she would be free of the worldwide conspiracy to deprive her of her freedom.

She could pick a town somewhere on a river, near the ocean, close to the western sunsets which were always out of proportion to reality, a town with jobs and market access.

The first requirement, she knew, would be land, not just a piece of land for her, but the land the town occupied.

At some point in history that land had been vacant.

Or had it?

Who did land belong to before it belonged to the people it now belongs to?

Her perception drifted internally. She didn't see the red wine splash into her glass but felt its effect gladly, a respite.

Land belonged to the animals before it was claimed by owner-ship, the product of the ability to recall and record.

Animals used the land to live off. Land was of no value unless it contributed to survival.

Because survival was important and land was necessary to sur-vival, possessing the land became necessary to survival.

Ownership, then, was the very basis of survival and when she showed up in her hypothetical town, she would have to obtain own-ership to survive.

Others would already be there.

There were always others there before her.

Her town would have already been parceled out. The people who lived in the town had long since agreed on how the ownership of the land would be represented and how it could be allocated for pur-poses of serving the community.

The town would need food so a certain amount would be set aside for the production of food. It would need to send goods to market if it wanted to obtain goods from other markets so it would have to set aside land for a factory to produce goods.

The farms and the factories within the community might be in competition for some of the community's resources, and the ac-tivities of each might affect the other adversely.

The factory might pollute the air as a byproduct. The farmers might want to poison the land to grow more crops. Both might want to outbid the other for labor.

The community would need a government to regulate the dis-putes. The government would also want to regulate the conduct of the members of the community, at least to the extent that conduct might cause damage to the community or its members.

It might be in opposition to the farms and the factories, and even to its citizens at times, but they all had an overriding community of interests and because tradition has to be passed on, schools would develop and newspapers would come into existence to convey in-formation to the community.

Because the members of the community must believe in some-thing other than themselves, churches would grow and associations would be formed out of the various commonalities of interests that the diversity of experience created.

That diversity, and the need for commonality would require that alliances and allegiances be intermingled. Members of factory boards might be deacons, sit on the city council, contribute to the local paper, and farm on weekends.

All would be interested in their own survival, but all would be interested in exchanging the information necessary to keep the town viable.

A deacon on the town planning commission might discuss affairs with a member of the factory board who was also on the town plan-ning commission. The member of the factory board might also be on the board of the bank, which shared a board member with the pub-lisher of the paper and the Mayor's uncle.

What would the situation be when Mary showed up to buy some property?

She would be faced with a diversity of interests that had as their commonality the preservation of the community.

Would she consider that to be a conspiracy on a par with the satanic Representative World Government which sought to control the very air she breathed?

How could anyone label decent people going peacefully about their daily business of survival a conspiracy?

Sure, word got around, but word had to get around to maintain the channels that had carefully been devised to ensure survival.

Babies were born every day in the town's hospital. The hospital was financed by the bank and supported by the volunteer labor of the religious institutions in the community as well as students from the school.

These babies grew up with the potential of changing the town, molding it to their desires when they inherited it, but they didn't grow up to destroy it, and if they did, why should the town let them?

Sure, conformity is not for everyone, but there are other towns.

There is no conspiracy in wanting to establish proper channels for survival, and once established, working together to maintain them.

And of course, the town's welfare depended on its trade with other towns.

If the town made hospital supplies and needed schoolbooks, the trade with neighboring towns would benefit both.

The trade just didn't happen. It had to be instituted, and once in-stituted, maintained.

An organization would be set up to determine the nature of the trade and monitor it to insure it was in the self-interest of the competing interests involved.

Mary could see things happening accidentally, but things do not become permanent accidentally unless they are negative, like loos-ing an arm.

To have the institutions, and the relationship between the insti-tutions that are necessary for survival, requires diligence.

Things don't just happen. They are made to happen, and once they begin to happen, the effect from their happening has to be con-tinually adjusted to ensure their success.

But the guy on the farm board might not be interested in the problems involved with trading schoolbooks for medical supplies.

Mary sipped, drifted, and then sipped more red wine. She was intent. She was aware her thoughts seemed to be taking her into disagreement with herself. She could credit the wine and was will-ing to let her thoughts wander.

The more complex the operation became, the more it required, what?

She tried to focus on the representative to the trade council whose job it was to ensure that the town received a beneficial po-sition in its trade agreement.

The most beneficial aspect was the trade. The agreement had to be beneficial enough to the town to induce the town to maintain it, but it had to be beneficial to the other town in order for the other town to have a similar inducement.

It was complex.

It took expertise.

It took experience.

What was it that they said about a doctor? The difference be-tween you and the doctor was that the doctor has seen a lot more yous than you have.

And you had to trust your doctor . . .

Trust!

That was the word that had been eluding her.

She realized with a physical shudder, the effects of the wine she was sure, that her view of the world, of the emerging Representa-tive World Government was a view of a reality created with a trust never given.

If she moved to her ideal town, she would have to earn the trust of the people who made up the town.

That wasn't the problem.

The problem was, if she wanted to live in peace, not with the town, not with the world, but with herself, she would have to trust the town.

She would have to trust that all of the people performing all the diverse jobs that made up the town's existence were people of good will performing their jobs for the good of all.

She downed the remainder of her glass with a single motion, holding it out to the startled stewardess for a refill.

Being trusted was not the problem.

Trusting was the problem.

Why, she wondered, had she never trusted?

What basis did she have for assuming the people who were working toward The Representative World Government could not be trusted?

She thought back to the arguments that were based on the proposition everything was arranged for the personal profit of the inner coterie who worked behind the scenes.

There was a point, she realized, past which personal profit was pointless.

When people had all the material things the world could possibly offer, why would they be motivated by personal gain?

She thought back to the arguments of power. If all of the mate-rial things you could possibly obtain depended on the orderly mar-keting of goods and services in the world, why would someone use power to endanger the orderly marketing process that had been so assiduously established and maintained?

Why have orderly marketing processes in the first place unless the ultimate goal is not only survival, but also the provision of the most goods and services to the most people reasonably supportable by existing environmental conditions?

If the system were operated by people, and the people were evil, the system would never have been established in the first place.

If the system were established by good people and inherited by evil people, would it survive?

It was not a case of a glass being half-full or half-empty.

If you trust the system that supports you, you can establish a harmony with that system.

If you don't trust the system that supports you, you will not be at harmony with that system.

Who, she wondered, destroys that which supports them?

"Somebody that's pretty fucked up."

"Pardon me?" The stewardess, hovering close by to satisfy Mary's needs, asked.

Mary realized she had muttered out loud and the full glass came back into her consciousness.

"Just talking to myself," she muttered.

It underlined her quandary. If she talked out loud to her imagina-tion, what was her reality?

There was no question the world was composed of giant opposing gears that were constantly turning and, in their turning, inces-santly grinding flesh into bloody pulp.

She didn't have to look far back into history. Accounts of the Russian front at the opening of the Great War uniformly described a cauldron of charnel so amorphous as to be unrecognizable as a facet of human existence. Survival of anyone in the Second World War was a matter of pure chance.

The gears were there. People were caught up in them and torn to shreds by them.

The object was to keep out of their way.

But the gears weren't earthquakes, or hurricanes, or volcanoes, or tornados.

The gears were the result of human interaction.

Natural catastrophes may never be controlled. If the sun blows up, the planet goes with it.

Human interactions are not natural catastrophes.

If the gears are made by human interaction, is it a conspiracy to try to get the gears under human control so that they can be made to stop grinding human flesh into shreds?

Was not distrust the source of the gears to start with?

Mary opened her eyes to the stewardess shaking her gently on the shoulder.

"We're here," she said.

The real world, the world of the slave-making Representative World Government crashed into her ideal vision of a world with trust, a world that couldn't exist and the electrical impacts from the conflict of the dual views of reality bypassed her system and went directly to her mind.

The stewardess recoiled from her scowl. The Captain compen-sated by effusing their wishes for her wellbeing as she departed.

How could she dream of trust, she thought, walking off of a fly-ing platform that traveled in excess of three thousand miles an hour without the touch of a human hand, in a world where you end up screwing yourself if given half a chance.

Block would go, her unreasoning continued, and then The Chair-man, and she mustn't forget Mandrake. If she was going to fail, she was going to erase all record of her failure.

She may not be able to do Mandrake herself because of his own penchants, but she could take advantage of his penchants. She'd send him an exploding prick and let him blow his own brains out.

Determination of action unified her conflicting concepts of real-ity and she felt foolish at the treatment of the StratoJet crew.

She shrugged it off. Nothing could be done about it now. She made her way through the terminal into the waiting limousine.

She decided to commandeer a hotel off Union Square and gave the driver the address. She activated her computer, signing in as Control in The Chairman's absence, and sent an alert to the hotel chain's headquarters to prepare a 4044 room for The Chairman's arrival. They wouldn't be happy about it this time of evening, but they would be less happy to find themselves taken over by a Fiji Island based conglomerate. The Chairman had his needs and his pri-mary need was to move freely where his presence was required and to be safe when he was there.

She then remembered to put out an all points bulletin to elimi-nate D'Lazo.

Satisfied, she settled back and cleared her head during the ride into downtown San Francisco. She wasn't accustomed to drinking, especially so much that she lost track of time.

At the hotel, the manager met her and was more than accommo-dating.

She took the access pass and, getting her bearings, declined an offer to show her the way. She wandered over to one of the bubble elevators that crawled up and down the outside of the building and used the access card to override the car's normal inability to go above the fifty-fourth floor to the Penthouse.

She looked out over the Bay, north and south, and across to Oakland and the mountains beyond as the car ascended. At the Pent-house, now officially room 4044, the bellboys were just removing the last of the hastily packed bags by the service elevator.

She paid them no heed. She was tired. She wanted to get some rest.

She felt, however, as if she had been on a desert island for a year. She had absolutely no information about what had been going on in the real world since she left Manhattan a little over twenty-four hours before.

She disabled the cable feeding the signal into the wall-sized television screen and keyed in her computer code. She then con-nected with the news archive and put a forty-eight hour parameter on her search.

She keyed in Deaths and/or Fatalities and Manhattan. The earli-est broadcast meeting the search requirements flashed on the screen with a male broadcaster reporting a woman killed by a fal-ling chunk of an east river bridge.

Mary keyed the next button and the digital display was replaced by the next broadcast meeting her requirements.

She continued for several minutes, rejecting broadcast after broadcast until she saw an aerial view of a seminude body, ass up, spread-eagled on the copper side of a pyramid.

Mary recognized it immediately as the distinctive trademark of the Worldwide Tower and she also realized that the Worldwide Tower had proximity to the hotel she had put The Chairman in the night before last, that, in fact, she had done The Chairman in.

She let the newscast play. There was only a reference to the body's position disrupting morning traffic.

The next broadcast showed the same clip of the body with the added shot of the broken window a hundred stories above and the speculation that the body had somehow gotten from point B, the hotel window, to point A, the pyramid of the Worldwide Tower.

The next report was the same with variations, and they went on, Mary clicking through them one after another.

The incident seemed to have driven competing news stories from the air.

She held the clicker button down and forced her eyes to watch as the pictures changed on the screen. She stopped and spent time watching a helicopter attempt to get the body off the slanted roof.

It was quite amusing. She fast-forwarded the images until she got one where the attempt succeeded. As the body was lifted off, she activated the close-up feature and zoomed in, trying to catch a glimpse of the face.

It looked like a pig face, but then the whole body looked like a gi-ant porker. It provided no means of recognition.

It had to be Block's potential assassin, however. She clicked forward looking for some commentary, but before she got very far she was greeted by an entirely different scene, this one at ground level.

She slowed the replay to get the commentary. The words "Rockefeller Plaza" put meaning to the visual images. Apparently a lone assassin had attacked government agents-in-place to protect the inherent security of the situation, or so the newscast went.

More Block?

Did Mandrake send out a backup team in case his primary hit squad failed, which, if the body on the roof of the Worldwide Tower were any indication, it did?

If so, did Block take out the backup team?

The Plaza story was gradually replaced with replays and speculations about the body on the roof.

Mary put the display on hold and punched in the communications access channel.

She pulled up The Chairman's notepad. The first note was a note to her to be available on his return, delayed until Monday.

She knew what he wanted and she intended to give it to him, more than he wanted.

She wouldn't have to get back till Sunday, which gave her all day tomorrow to get ready for Block if he survived D'Lazo, and plenty of time to do him properly.

She paged forward. There wasn't much. The Chairman did not keep records of what he did. He just did. What he did jot down, he didn't particularly care who saw because no one was going to form a judgment about his actions. The notes weren't even censored be-cause he was the ultimate arbiter of what should and shouldn't be censored. Mary, however, was careful to read them with the reali-zation that they might be misdirections. The limited access to them made that seem unlikely, however.

She was tired and getting paranoid.

She noted the time indicator of the entries and forwarded to the point at which the body was picked off the building. She found a no-tation that he had phoned SC at the hotel.

Who the hell was SC?

She accessed the command structure and couldn't find anyone with those initials.

She scanned the agent structure and came up with the same re-sult.

She ran SC through her mind. It didn't call up anything.

She wondered if SC could have double X status. The Chairman recruited these people personally and their identities were main-tained under the most limited of access.

That was the first piece of information she had gotten out of him as he babbled under the ministrations of her tongue, begging for relief. She never ceased to marvel at its effect on men. It was like getting them drunk, getting them to reveal things they wouldn't even reveal to themselves and then, when they sobered up, they couldn't remember a thing about what they said.

Only with her, if she did let them wake up, they didn't have a hangover, just an insatiable desire for more.

She punched in the access number. Block, with his X1X status, was first. His assignment, to prevent interference with the out-come of the Australian Equalization Rounds was duly noted.

Mary shook her head. She recognized Block's assignment was to prevent her from debasing the United States currency thereby en-hancing the Pound Sterling.

She could barely see the relationship between that and the words "Australian Equalization Rounds," but it was there.

She paged through the list, looking for the initials SC. Shandra Cottel jumped off the screen.

Assignment: to prevent interference with the outcome of the Australian Equalization Rounds.

Mary smiled. How many times were two double X agents as-signed to accomplish the same thing? She doubted it had ever oc-curred. Two agents doing the same thing usually cancelled each other out.

The Chairman must have something else in mind.

Even more amusing, and time was making it more so, there was no need for the project.

The invisible clash of empire, the slow death of the one, the British Empire, the first on which the sun had never set, and the cautious emergence of another, The Representative World Govern-ment, an empire of self, had been muted by the effect of the ec-static agony on St. Remain's heart.

Without St. Remain's code, the Diskcard she still faithfully car-ried in her case was useless and Block, and this Shandra person, had no project, even if they didn't know it.

She punched in The Chairman's personal telephone number to get a list of his calls. She had no trouble locating the call to the hotel.

It wasn't much help. It backed up what she already knew, that Shandra was backing up Block.

She turned everything off and made herself comfortable for sleep. She had a lot to do the next day. She had a lot to figure out.

Why did Block stay in the hotel? He should have left after the meeting with The Chairman. What happened in the Plaza? It had to be related to Block. Did Mandrake set up a second ambush? Did Block break it up? What part did Shandra play?

What part would Shandra play?

Could Shandra fuck up her plans? she wondered, drifting. A dou-ble X agent was no one to fool with.

Could she be fucked up?

Where had she asked that question?

On the StratoJet.

Did she see the world, not as it was, but distorted through some sort of filter someway implanted into her mind without her knowl-edge?

The world was a big place, far bigger and more complex than she would ever understand.

She was just a little girl, waiting in the night for something to happen, something she had no control over, something she wouldn't like.

But she had to act to keep it from happening. She didn't know what it was she was going to keep from happening. She just knew she wasn't going to like it.

The Representative World Government was a dim outline with fuzzy edges that didn't quite match her own fuzzy outline of the future.

Why couldn't she just drift into a future that existed with The Representative World Government? It was like intercourse. Just the thought of a prick touching her down there, in her private parts, in places not even she touched, made her mind close around reality like a steel clamp.

But was that reality? She always mentally referred to The Rep-resentative World Government collectively as a bunch of pricks, as a bunch of murderous pricks, as a bunch of pricks set out to enslave the population, violate it, pester it for their own slavering pleas-ure.

She didn't need it shoved to her when with a little effort she could turn the shovers into mindless shits.

If she could turn prick wavers into wussies, she could do the same with The Representative World Government.

The individual particles that made up her perceptor reached their greatest point of disequilibrium and began to move back into balance once again.

The question was, what was balance for her perceptor?

Her mind passed through the stage it had reached on the Strato-Jet, forming a picture of a world where trust was freely given and rarely betrayed.

Just the word trust called forth the word distrust, and a picture of the world where trust was never given and thus rarely betrayed tried to compete with the first picture.

The world was going to be the same regardless of whether she gave her trust or withheld it.

If she gave her trust, the elementary particles that sought a perfect balance might reach a perfect balance.

But if a perfect balance for Mary was in fact a disbalance, then she could never rid herself of the distrust.

It was as if the particles of her perceptor had somehow been forced into a permanent disbalance.

As she dosed off, the activities of the day, which had caused the elementary particles to move back and forth around the points of their positions in order to recreate external reality, could only move back into positions of disbalance.

Mary had been forced to accept a reality that existed, but it was a reality that was not in harmony with existence.

As a result, the particles that made up her perceptor had to re-construct reality from a point of disbalance.

Because the point of disbalance was the direct result of the en-vironmental damage inflicted on her when her concept of self was forming, her perceptor, with its particles balanced in disbalance, could not recognize the environmental damage inflicted on her.

The cause of her anger, her abuse at the hands of her father, was hidden from her perception simply because the organ through which she perceived, her perceptor, was altered to the extent of that abuse.

It was disbalanced when it was balanced because it had been forced into disbalance by environmental abuse.

The result would be no different than if she had inflicted her body with drugs or alcohol, or ingested food grown in poisoned soil.

And while the cause of the disbalance was invisible, the disbal-ance affected the way her mind reconstructed reality.

Every picture of reality she constructed started at a base point of disbalance.

The reality of addicts has no reference to the real world, but the reality is nonetheless real because it allows the addicts to form action triangles upon which they can act, and actions are what change the reality of the world.

Addicts cannot see the addiction that is causing their perceptor to distort reality because the addiction has disbalanced their per-ceptors to the extent the disbalance is normal. The particles of their perceptors are in balance when they are in disbalance.

Mary's mind, as she dozed, could form undistorted pictures of reality as the particles in her perceptor attempted to move into actual balance, rather than the environmentally induced imbalance, with the lack of external sensory input.

She could even form pictures of a world where trust was freely given.

But the positions of the particles of her perceptor, when they formed a picture of a world in which trust was freely given, nor-mal balanced positions for a person whose perceptor had not been environmentally damaged, were positions of disbalance for Mary.

The particles of her perceptor were in balance when she per-ceived the world as a world where trust was never freely given and always betrayed.

Reconstructing a picture of the world where trust was freely given created a disbalance that disturbed Mary's sleep.

The disturbance resulted from the increased electrical flows re-sulting from the two conflicting pictures of reality.

Because her perceptor was attempting to regain its equilibrium as the period of sensory input was cut off, she would normally sleep with the distrust.

If the chasm between the real external world and the world Mary reconstructed from a position of disbalance became too great, she might get stuck in the real world, the world of trust. She would wake up in a sweat, shaking from the physical impact produced by the conflict of creating a world unreal to her disbalanced perceptor.

Mary awoke from the nightmare.

She looked around. It was still dark. A light was blinking on the video display unit. She realized she never finished looking through the broadcasts she had called up in her request. They were still in-stalled in the set's buffer.

She drifted back to sleep, trying to remember the nightmare.

What were nightmares anyway? Nothing but the imagination. As long as someone had something that someone else wanted, there could never be any trust.

Even if there were enough food to go around, even if there were enough clothes to keep everybody warm, there would always be somebody who wanted something somebody else had.

As long as somebody had something somebody else wanted, there would be no peace and there would be no room for trust.

How could anyone have anything and know that somebody else didn't have it and would therefore eventually want it and try to get it, and still trust?

It just wasn't in the cards.

People coveted, they fought, they killed.

Even with these evanescent pictures fleeting through her mind, the particles of her perceptor attempted to move into disbalance, disbalance, at least, for her, and reach some sort of balance of their own, a balance they might have had at some distant time be-yond her memory, a blue moon, she thought, once in a blue moon where the once didn't mean rare but referenced a point in the past, a signpost that no longer existed, a time when the moon was actu-ally blue with water, and iron and greed didn't rule the world.

If the particles of her perceptor were trying to find a balance of their own, there must be a balance in nature independent of the be-havior of the physical structures the perceptors control, a balance dictated by the normal spacing of the perceptor's particles.

The physical structure would always act in response to the mechanisms that provided it with external awareness. That exter-nal awareness could be either cautionary, warning the physical structure to engage in avoidance, or pleasurable, enticing the physical structure to engage in participation.

The perceptor can only recognize the difference by the physical response the physical systems make.

If the perceptor is so in disbalance it denies pleasurable re-sponses or takes pleasure in cautionary responses, the perceptor's balance will drift into disbalance and the disequilibrium allowing that perceptor to reconstruct reality will reconstruct a reality that does not exist and lessen its chance of regaining its equilibrium.

Because a perceptor's equilibrium determines its ability to sur-vive, to avoid being unitized, and therefore selected out of the evolutionary process, are people who willingly disbalance their perceptors by pursuing pleasure in the pain of others on the same footing as people whose perceptor has been environmentally dam-aged, disbalanced by the actions of the former?

Can one person's conscious evil destroy the very essence of others through no fault of their own?

If the harmony of nature requires that disharmony be selected out, can nature distinguish those which it seeks to select out, those with active disbalances, from those with passive disbalances re-sulting from the actions of those with active disbalances?

Can an objective universe distinguish between evil and the re-sults of evil?

The fact that the particles in Mary's perceptor were seeking a balance that was actually a disbalance to the normal environmen-tally damaged state of Mary's perceptor seemed to argue that an environmentally damaged perceptor will attempt to regain its equi-librium, will guide itself to redemption, will, if reformed, avoid being selected out of the evolutionary process, will, in fact, sur-vive.

On the other hand, Mary's addiction to the electrical flows that resulted in her creating a picture of the world in opposition to the reality she continually confronted, her desire to destroy the emerging Representative World Government in the face of its con-tinuing reality, did not seem to bode well for the ability of her per-ceptor to regain the equilibrium it lost to the repeated dark en-counters at the hands of her father.

By creating the conflicts in reality and accepting the resulting physical impacts as pleasure, and formulating acts in furtherance of the pleasure the impacts provided, carrying out those acts could affect the reality in which she existed thereby increasing the disbalance in her perceptor.

As she reclined on the couch, sleeping, her mind worked to cre-ate a harmony with her perception of the world and the world as it was.

But the pleasure of the physical impacts from the conflict with perceived reality drove the particles of her perceptor right back into disbalance, the disbalance that to her perceptor was equilib-rium.

The elusive thought, was she past redemption, was lost in the light from the open curtains, the light bringing her back to thoughts of action. She was incapable of acting from perceptions of reality that involved trust so her acts would be dictated by distrust and reinforce the disequilibrium with which she started each day.

She walked over to the window to observe the sunrise. The San Francisco Bay glistened below her, with the mountains behind Oak-land providing a base for the sun.

She couldn't see it but could still reconstruct in her mind the downslope house, built into the steep hillside west of Oakland, with its roof the driveway and its living room beneath, the setting for Block's demise if he were to be fortunate enough to escape D'Lazo's delights.

She pushed her face to the window glass and tried to peer to the left and right. She couldn't see San Pablo Bay, of course, to the north of the Southern part of San Francisco Bay. She could visualize the stately trees in the Redwood Preserve in the mountains sur-rounding the downslope house.

She might have been able to afford such a house if D'Lazo's scheme had worked. Rather, if she hadn't fucked the duck and killed St. Remain prematurely. All of the Bay, north and south, was visi-ble in its entire glory under the fabulous Pacific sunsets from the topside of those mountains.

She had never thought of the difference between having the free use of one of the downslopes she obtained from her position with The Chairman and actually having use of it because she owned it.

It didn't matter now.

She turned back to the room and looked around, spotting her computer and the blinking light on the video screen simultaneously.

The hotel would have contacted security but she figured she had better give them official confirmation of The Chairman's arrival. She did so simply by punching the security key on the board. The Iridium Network would be able to pinpoint her location exactly. The hotel and the surrounding area would be manned within the hour by an invisible army from which a cockroach couldn't conceal its ex-istence.

Responding to a knock on the door brought in tables full of food, more than she could ever use but she had learned to let it be, there being no way to limit the manager's hospitality.

"The President wants to know if The Chairman will be in by noon. If he is, he would like to stay to greet him. He'll stay, any-way, if you think The Chairman will need him."

Well, Mary thought. She bumped the President of the United States, a first for her. She certainly didn't want the President around.

"Tell him The Chairman is coming in late and won't be seeing anyone."

"But of course."

He left with the waiters close behind. Mary picked up a roll and re-activated the television. As the picture came on the video screen, the bare-assed assassin hung motionless in space under-neath the helicopter.

She activated the picture and the helicopter, with its load, flew into the distance.

She began to click through to the end of the newscasts. A still picture registered in her mind and she stopped, slowly moving the pictures back in time.

She found it and stopped. It was a picture of James Angular, the Manhattan Station Chief for American Operations.

She knew him. Not well. But she had business with him. She had to deal with A.O. Station Chiefs in all of the cities in which The Chairman spent time.

The newscaster was saying he committed suicide in his office earlier in the day.

If a Station Chief committed suicide, the death was reported as natural causes. If it was reported as a suicide, it was a hit.

What the shit was the Manhattan Station Chief, A.O. doing get-ting himself hit on the same day she had a contract on Block, and somebody else had followed up . . .

Or somebody else also had a contract on Block that resulted in the mayhem in the Plaza, the mayhem in full view of Angular's win-dows.

Could Angular have wanted Block dead?

It seemed absurd.

She checked her watch. This stuff was getting to be twenty-four hours old, long enough for some sort of in-house analysis. She cer-tainly could find out what went on in the hotel room.

She punched up the intelligence analysis menu and asked for Block and/or Shandra and homicide, the generic for any demise. She put her parameters at forty-eight hours, with the first incident first.

Block and Shandra had been in the hotel room discussing their joint project when five men, one assailant known as The Pig Man and high on the list of the wanted, as their leader, broke into the room and attempted to murder both occupants. Four of the assas-sins had been terminated on the premises, the fifth, The Pig Man, unfortunately losing his footing and going through a glass skylight. The broken glass had torn his pants and because of his size, the wind had caught them and they had acted like a sail to float him down the forty or so stories to the Worldwide Tower where he ended up on the face of the copper pyramid that was the building's trademark. Neither agent was injured in any way. A sixth assassin attempted to take out the hotel clerk, but the clerk had a gun under the counter and shot the assassin dead. The hotel clerk, however, was severely injured and did not survive.

She clicked in the next report.

Block had been having lunch with an old friend following project leads. The information was classified. Shandra had stayed at the hotel to take care of the details of disposing of the bodies. It should be noted that Shandra is a scientist with a diverse background and is an avid avocational history scholar. She was to accompany Block to Acapulco where his leads were taking him when an ambush was set up for Block, timed to make his luncheon appointment his last supper.

Shandra foiled the entire plot, eliminating all six British Agents assigned to the assassination squad. The British agents were car-rying British automatic equipment, including grenades. The dead giveaway was the identity cards they carried around their necks, or at least around four of their necks, the other two being scram-bled by an explosion into a sort of soup.

Carrying British identification, my ass, Mary thought. Russian Operations carried British equipment when they were out to assas-sinate someone in such obvious circumstances.

So it was an R.O. operation except for two facts. Block was their ally and they had no reason to hit him. At times R.O. was more in the camp of The Representative World Government than The Rep-resentative World Government.

The other was that B.O. had already set up an assassination at-tempt. When you back up an assassin, you at least did it consis-tently. If there had been a B.O. backup, Block wouldn't have gotten out of the hotel room unless it was the way The Pig Man did.

No. The only answer was the hit was carried out by A.O.

She was willing to bet that Angular was the one who set it up.

He would have known Block's progress and he would have had the time to order up the hit squad, not to mention the means.

So she wasn't surprised when she clicked into the next file and found that Shandra had indeed been to visit Angular.

The timing was right, after the assassination attempt but before Angular's death.

No. The only possible answer was that the hit men were being directed by American Operations.

She wondered just what Angular had been up to. With his death, she would probably never find out.

Which left the real question, what was going on with this gal Shandra?

She punched up her background and was impressed. She was no one to fool around with and she was definitely not someone who Mary wanted to keep anywhere near the project, Block's project that was attempting to thwart her own aborted project.

Shandra was going to have to be neutralized.

She called for the next file and saw an initial report indication with no further details.

It indicated that Shandra and Block were involved in the death of one St. Remain in Acapulco.

She realized, as Control, she had access to the highest level of information.

She accessed the command screen.

SITUATION STABLE flashed on and off the screen.

Report, she typed in.

X1X penetrated Nationalist stronghold Acapulco. Level 2 defen-sive forces dispatched. Control established by 0400 H time. Provi-sional Agent in Charge Status established. X18X serving function. Policy questions backing . . .

Four A.M. Hudson time put it at six in Acapulco, seven here? She could never keep it straight.

X18X was Shandra. Did that mean Block was dead?

She paged X18X.

"Shandra here. Renon?"

"Hi, Shandra. Mary Renon here. What the hell is going on down there? Where is Block?"

"Block is taking a rest."

Mary couldn't ask if he was alive. Why wouldn't he be? Because Shandra was in charge. Why wouldn't she be in charge? She would make sure she remained in charge.

"What is the status?"

"We have secured the operations center of Lano D'Lazo. He's ap-parently a Minister of Persuasion without portfolio. Piece of shit. That's not the important thing. He apparently has collected here images of records dating back to the flood. It's incredible."

Mary let the cursor blink for a few seconds. She remembered reading that Shandra had a registered avocation in history.

She typed in: "This is a Class 1 find. We must not lose continu-ity. Where is . . . Lanzo is it?

"Lano D'Lazo. He was able to get away before we could secure the position."

"And the body?"

"St. Remain. I don't know what to make of him. He was Block's target. You'll have to talk to Block about that."

"You have the position thoroughly secured?"

"Absolutely."

"Have Block contact me when he is available. Have him use voice communication."

"Certainly."

"Contact me immediately if you have any problems."

She disconnected, leaving the page open.

She prepared a cup of coffee and took another roll. She walked over to the window and reflected on the mountains covered by the Redwood forest above Oakland. She imagined her lips wrapped around Block's prick, directly accessing his mind, leading it into intolerable anticipation with each stroke of her tongue, forming drop after drop of liquid pleasure between her legs, each drop growing larger and progressively larger until the final golden globe, swollen by her anticipation of Block's death throws, would break across her mind in blessed relief.

She tingled at the thought, her legs and arms growing momen-tarily weak.

Life was glorious. She was delighted Block survived D'Lazo

She could now throw Block at D'Lazo and destroy him and then she could destroy Block.

Her proposed actions were matching the concept of reality she had constructed. D'Lazo dead. Block dead. The Chairman dead.

And let's not forget Mandrake.

She could wipe all knowledge of her failure off the face of the Earth.

The phone rang.

She picked it up and was informed that security was in place for The Chairman's arrival.

She re-accessed the computer and punched up the status of the downslope home she wanted for the evening. It had been reserved for someone out of Mountain View.

She cancelled the reservation and reserved it for herself. She wanted Block's death to be an experience, a pleasurable notch on her belt she would be able to replay for all her years.

She contacted the caterers and arranged for the place to be stocked with the best, not forgetting a variety of scotches, one or more of which she would use as a replacement for her signature Bouillabaisse. She wasn't after information from Block.

She walked around the living room of the Penthouse. She fixed another coffee and sat watching the sun rise higher in the morning sky over the mountains above Oakland.

She wondered about Angular's death. He would have to have been eliminated by Shandra. Why didn't make much difference. Attempt-ing to eliminate a double X agent would make anybody fair game for any other double X agent.

She, herself, was going to be fair game but for the fact that no one would know Block had died at her hand. A medical examiner would never be able to tell the difference between having one's brains blown out and just having been blown to death.

If what was an accident with St. Remain worked with Block, there would be no connection between his death and the other death's she had crafted, all of which involved suffocation.

However, if Angular had put the contract out on Block, he must have been trying to thwart Block from stopping British Operation's plan to debase the U.S. currency which meant he must have been working for B.O. as a double agent.

Unless he was simply a nationalist attempting to thwart the so-lidification of the emerging Representative World Government in which case he would have been working for British Operations without realizing it.

She had to come to some conclusion because if Shandra had ter-minated him because she knew he was working for B.O, there would still be a loose string she had to cut.

She didn't want to cut it if she didn't have to because the death of The Chairman, also by an accidental sexual overdose, was going to lead to all sorts of brouhaha and if two double X agents on the same project ceased to exist at the same time, there would be trails.

She would have to isolate Shandra until she saw how the dust settled.

The only saving feature was that Block's project could not meet with failure. She had seen to that by accidentally terminating St. Remain.

D'Lazo could eliminate Block and The Chairman would still return from Australia with a victory. He would die in triumph. She would have D'Lazo to look out for, but with The Chairman's mission a suc-cess, she was sure she could engineer D'Lazo's death.

If Block survived D'Lazo, then The Chairman and Block would pass into the lore, if not the history books, as successes, and she would be Scot free.

Unless, that is, Shandra was able to piece things together and was willing to act on the resulting picture.

The key was Angular's motivation and she would never know what that motivation was. What was the analogy? The game was a game of chess where the pieces changed identity in your hand, the squares reversed color at a blink, the colors of the players alter-nated randomly, and objectives turned back on themselves before actions could affect them.

Was it possible the game was so much larger than the players that the players had little real input into the outcome?

Water always sought its own level regardless of the activity that occurred around it. Was there an historical drift seeking a level all its own operating here?

When the British Empire, having lost its colonies through the in-attention caused by consolidation necessities closer to home, set out to regain them, had it run into an historical force rather than an emerging empire, a force that dictated not only a change in the na-ture and course of the British Empire, but of the very definition of empire?

Was there a lesson to be learned from the Empire on which the sun never set? Was the lesson that nationalist based empires by definition ceased to be nationalist when the sun failed to set and if they continued to be nationalist, the sun would indeed set and the empire would pass into history?

Instead of retaking the colonies, the colonies had become the Empire, not an empire based on a people with a common heritage opposed to all the peoples of the world, but rather an empire based on the heritage of all of the peoples of the world and thus an empire of the world.

The phone interrupted Mary's musings. The thoughts had not made her comfortable, but they had not made her uncomfortable either.

Block was responding as she had requested. She put on her most seductive voice, so much so that she surprised herself by becoming physically involved, actually feeling the anticipation of her en-counter with Block, her mouth becoming a little dry thereby adding, she hoped, to her effect on Block.

She was more than willing to tell him everything she knew about D'Lazo's movements, being careful to refer to him as D'Lazo rather than Lano. She didn't seem to have any difficulty focusing him on D'Lazo as a target and wondered what had occurred between the two. She used Shandra's historical background as a motivator for her to stay in charge of the Acapulco operation. She knew that no one, let alone herself, could dictate the actions of a double X agent, but if she could keep Shandra out of play for the next twenty-four hours, there might be no play left.

When she hung up, she was quite pleased with what she had ac-complished.

She looked at her watch and made some mental calculations. Block would be able to get to Manhattan around two in the after-noon, which was eleven San Francisco time.

Give him two hours to resolve the business with D'Lazo and he could be on the five o'clock StratoJet to Oakland International.

That would put him in at six thirty at the latest. She could have a limousine waiting to whisk him up to Skyline and he would be in her clutches by sunset.

She'd have several days to cover up the mess and meet The Chairman.

She re-activated her computer and punched up a car to be deliv-ered at the last Bart stop in the Oakland suburbs.

She was going to spend the afternoon shopping and then take a leisurely trip out on the train.

She figured that five hours was about right to kill, killing her thoughts about the coming activity in the process.

When she got to the Bart Station in Oakland, she checked her computer and found she had a red Mercedes waiting. She located the slot and keyed in the appropriate code to unlock the car.

The keys were in the ignition and, putting the top down, she roared out of the lot, heading north toward Berkeley and then east into the hills that made up the Redwood Preserve. The two ranges defined an idyllic valley that provided hairpin curves she could use to test her reflexes and expand her exhilaration.

The responsiveness of the car, the eye-brain coordination, the plan of action, the electricity surging through her body all made her feel like she was moving ahead of herself, that her every action had just occurred and that wherever she moved was safe because she had just been there.

Climbing out of the backside of the valley and heading west once again, she intersected with Skyline, slowing to enjoy the breath-taking glimpses of Oakland, San Francisco, and the Bays, North, Central and South.

The view was among the incomparable views of the world. She started to catch the numbering sequence, slowing at a nondescript redwood fence melded into the trees lining the drive. She slid smoothly into an opening onto an incongruous concrete deck that was divided into parking spaces, a small pool with sun deck, an ele-vator entrance, and stairs carved into the earth by the entrance.

She parked the Mercedes and walked over to the edge of the parking lot. Looking over, her breath caught at the some two thou-sand foot drop almost straight down a wooded hillside that was dotted occasionally with other downslope homes that had found pur-chase among the rocks and crevices.

Looking straight out, west, was where she really lost her breath. San Francisco lay directly west, its hills and skyscrapers prominent over the mouth of the Bay to its north. Beyond the mouth, the Pacific stretched endlessly to become part of the sky.

San Pablo Bay was clear to the north, the lower Bay, with the bytes of silicon cities dotting its far shore to the south.

The Central Bay separated San Francisco from Oakland and the sea of suburbs stretching to the foot of the hills on which she was perched.

By day it was startling, by sunset, delicious, and in the evening, demarked by the millions of lights on the ground and the stars in the clear mountain sky, something to die for.

Which was exactly what she had in mind.

She used her computer to access the elevator, which opened immediately. She rode down the one long floor and stepped out into the living room.

The entrance to the living was completely enclosed in clear plastic. The living room itself was eight feet tall at the point of the elevator door, but once she stepped out of the elevator, she was in a room that was three stories high with an unbroken panoramic view gently curving for seventy feet.

The room itself was forty feet deep at the apex of its curve. A sunken pit containing an open fireplace with couches and lounge chairs dominated the center of the room.

The remainder of the room was arranged in conversation areas. Beneath the lowered roof behind the elevator, dug into the side of the hill, the functional portions of the house were divided into bed-rooms, bath facilities, a pantry and kitchen area, and a recreation area with a video wall. Off that area, connected to the stairs, the office and workspace was sealable with a soundproof room divider.

Bars on either side of the glass window were fully stocked. Mary went to the one on the side of the office complex and toggled a switch.

Directly in the center of the window, and two feet back, the floor parted slowly and a large semi-circular bed rose up so that it was a foot off the floor.

The head of the bed contained another bar. She checked it to make sure it was fully stocked. It also contained a bank of light and curtain controls the status indicator showed were functioning nor-mally.

Connected stands on either side of the head unit gave easy ac-cess to compartments accessible by drawers.

She went over to the far one and opened it. It contained a nine-millimeter automatic. She picked it up and tested it.

If Block's constitution was stronger than the level of unfulfilled ecstasy she was going to bring him to, she would simply put a bullet in his brain and disappear him back in the mountains somewhere.

The idea of Block being stronger than she was unexpectedly ex-cited her. She found herself moving the recoil back and forth senselessly, thinking what Block would be like in bed.

She shook herself out of the fantasy and, making sure the clip was in place, returned the gun to the drawer.

Then, with a smile, she went back to the bar, opened her case and took out the Diskcard. She didn't know what she would do with it, but she decided to put it next to the gun in the drawer.

She then retoggled the switch and watched as the bed sunk be-neath the floor, the floor replacing itself over the opening.

She mixed herself a drink, spilling a little on the counter. She absent-mindedly took a cloth napkin from the stack on the counter and wiped the liquid up.

She sipped at the drink, folding one napkin, and then another, and still another, into neat rolls, making an O with her thumb and fore-finger around the finished roll and giving it a twist like her mother had taught her on some rainy midwestern afternoon long ago some-where beyond her memory.

She was wondering about her memory. She could remember her mother and the breakfasts her mother prepared for her before she went to school.

She could remember her father coming in and saying good morning, kissing her mother.

She could remember her mother clearly, the way she looked, the shape of her nose, her hair pulled back in a bob, her blue eyes, her bustle.

She couldn't remember anything about her father, not even the sound of his voice.

She sipped at the drink, folding the napkins and putting them into a wicker basket designed for rolls.

She wondered what, or how, or if the food would be. She went back into the pantry and found just about anything she wanted.

Did she want to eat or did she want to get right down to it?

She was feeling relaxed, the result of the vigorous drive and the light drink.

She took out some steaks that could be cooked on the grill at-tached to the fireplace, and put out some raw vegetables.

Red meat and raw vegetables with some sort of dip.

She wandered back to the bar, refilling her glass. She looked at her watch, what she had been delaying doing all along.

Five O'clock!

The die was cast so to speak, she thought as she splashed a little more scotch into her glass and headed for the recreation area.

She sat in front of the video display, feeling like her stomach was about to take the first drop on a roller coaster.

She didn't activate it.

She could page Block direct. If he was on, she could locate him through the Iridium Network. He would be moving on the StratoJet.

She could check the passenger manifest of the New York to Oak-land StratoJet for that matter.

Shit on all the options.

Turning on the TV was probably the best way to find out.

She turned it on.

All she could make out at first was a picture of the Secretariat Building at the UN. When she began to see movement in the Plaza, she realized that it wasn't a picture, but live camera coverage.

" . . . are still trying to figure out how to get him up, or, as the case may be, down," the talking head was effusing.

Who, Mary wondered. Block? Up from where? Down to where?

"We are going to re-run one more time the scene we were con-fronted with when The Secretariat's announcement of the Pacific accord was interrupted by what was apparently a suicide attempt by an unknown party, possibly someone not in accord with the ac-cord."

The picture changed to a camera panning away from dots of peo-ple to an object swinging from a wire suspended from the window washing equipment at the top of the Secretariat Building. It took several seconds for the skilled camera operator to synchronize the camera's swing with the swing of the body.

Once he succeeded in accomplishing this, he zoomed in. Mary saw D'Lazo clearly, hanging bare-assed by his balls.

He was not only swinging back and forth on the end of the wire, he was slowly rotating. As the camera crew redirected the sound dish, Mary could hear a voice, not D'Lazo's, but coming from his mouth as if his vocal chords had been stretched, something to the effect that he could see eternity.

The clip kept going, Mary thought endlessly, until the swinging body didn't make it to cry eternity, but gurgled, and, with a spasm, met eternity.

"We think," the announcer said, "that the attempted suicide be-came a suicide at that moment. However, officials are at present unwilling to cut him down for fear that he is still alive. And it will take hours to move in a cherry picker that will reach ten stories."

Mary clicked off the display. She was delighted. She felt like hugging herself.

She grabbed her computer and punched up the New York to Oak-land StratoJet.

Block was listed on the manifest.

She actually did hug herself.

She went over to the bar, threw out her drink, most of which had not been touched in her anxiety, and made another, this time strong, but not so strong that she would let it get out of hand.

She opened the vents over the window to let in the air as it was beginning to chill and turned on the fire.

She danced into the bedroom, taking her afternoon acquisitions with her.

She stripped down and looked at herself in the complex of full-length mirrors.

She was a wisp of a girl, really. Some people would say she was not even a handful. Her hips were slim and her breasts slight, but perfect and perfectly perky.

She wasn't beautiful, but she was, well, perky.

Everything about her conveyed motion.

She could see herself clearly, but she doubted that others could. She had always had the ability to make others see her as she wanted them to see her.

Of course, when things got down to business, she could turn them into blindness itself, putting in their minds what she wanted, and then making them act accordingly.

That's why, she thought, she wasn't going to have any trouble with the one problem that would remain after she finished The Chairman off come Monday morning.

She had incurred a mountain of debt at D'Lazo's villa, more than she could pay off in a million lifetimes.

That debt had been incurred at the prospect of being able to ob-tain St. Remain's computer access code and input the information on the Diskcard.

The result would have been unbridled currency debasement and uncontrollable inflation, with a resulting skyrocketing of interest rates.

She had bet the entire amount, over a billion dollars, selling thirty-year treasury bonds she didn't have on the anticipation the rise in the interest rates would reduce their price and she could deliver them by buying them at a fraction of their cost. As she only needed one percent margin, she stood to make billions.

Now, the interest on a billion dollars alone was a million dollars a day, not to mention what would happen when the markets opened after the Secretariat's announcement and there was no inflation.

Once she had gotten the name of the game, however, which was to say, once she had gotten the initial debt, she found she could carry it anywhere she wanted simply by word of mouth.

While D'Lazo had been arranging his own windfall, she had transferred her transaction through fifteen currencies, eighty-eight banks and twenty-two countries.

If she had won, she thought as she soaped herself up thoroughly for Block's edification, she would have a pot of gold at the end of her rainbow.

As it was, her initial broker had a blockbuster coming and her debt would be swallowed up somewhere in a long untraceable chain of convoluted transactions.

She was rolling.

She bounced out of the shower, toweled herself off vigorously and spent about an hour putting on as little makeup as possible to highlight what she did have, herself.

Taking one last look, she slipped into the loose fitting green satin chemise she had purchased earlier in San Francisco and exited the living complex heading for her drink at the bar.

She noticed the silhouette immediately, a man gazing out into the combination of sunset and evening lights twinkling on sporadically.

"I must have lost track of time," she said, moving quickly over beside him as he turned, sliding her arm around his waist.

"Things went smoothly," Block replied, putting his arm around her shoulder.

She was almost a foot shorter than Block and half his weight.

He felt small to her.

"You feel good," he said, "as good as I imagined."

"You can imagine how good someone will feel from hearing their voice?" She knew they could. She practiced it.

"With you I could. I had a hard on when I hung up."

She twisted out of his arm. "Uhh. Ummm. You sure know how to compliment a girl. Why didn't you get yourself a drink?"

"I just got here. To tell the truth, I was quite taken with the view. This is a well-kept little secret. Working out of The Chair-man's office has some advantages working in the field doesn't."

Mary moved behind the bar. She set up a selection of scotch, raising her eyebrows.

Block examined the labels and made his selection

"Ice only."

Mary poured him a generous portion and sloshed some over two cubes for herself.

"From the Empire with the setting sun," Block toasted, refer-ring to the import from the country that started Britain on the road to empire.

"To sunshine," Mary responded, tipping the edge of her glass.

She took him by the arm and walked him back to the window.

"And the beauty of the sunset."

They watched silently as the colors retreated into the night sky.

"So," Mary finally whispered, slipping her hand through the crook of Block's arm, turning him toward her and, taking his other arm, steering him back into the room, "tell me how the thing came out." She maneuvered him into the conversation pit. "Did you end up with the Diskcard?"

Before Block could settle in, Mary arranged both their drinks on the table to Block's right and, using his chest as a leaning board, looked up into his face like a small creature that needed stroking.

"According to our latest information," she continued, "you should have gotten it from St. Remain in Acapulco, but St. Remain was dead and the Diskcard was gone. Did D'Lazo have it?"

"It wasn't on him."

"Did you find out what the code was?"

"He wouldn't admit to it."

"Sloppy. But then, you heard the Secretariat's announcement."

"No."

"You did kill D'Lazo, didn't you?" As she asked, she reached across to retrieve her drink, putting her hand on his right breast for support, pinching his nipple between her thumb and forefinger through his shirt. Moving back with her glass, she brushed across his crotch and felt him getting hard.

"That I did," he replied, his chest swelling a little, his body moving toward her touch.

Mary took a sip of her drink and was up before he could respond to her movement. She went over to the bar.

"The Secretariat was announcing the successful conclusion of the Australian Equalization Round, it's going to be called the Pacific accord, when D'Lazo went sailing off the roof of the UN building. How in the world did he get his balls wrapped up like that?"

Block got up to make his own refill, a healthy one.

"People like D'Lazo destroy themselves, and usually in the most horrible ways. With D'Lazo, it wasn't horrible enough, although hopefully it is still going on and will last a long time."

Mary looked at him quizzically.

"Well, anyway," she said after a pause, "it appears you were able to hold off any adverse currency action until an agreement was reached." She laughed. "It really is fitting that D'Lazo, the principal block to the equalization process, made his final appearance at the announcement of the success of the project."

She leaned over the bar and kissed Block on the cheek.

He started to raise his hand but she was gone, moving back around the bar toward the kitchen area.

"Would you like something to eat? I have some meat, some vegetables, and a nice fire."

"Have you got any spits?"

"You mean, like kabob things."

"Yes."

"Come look."

It wasn't long before Block had meat and vegetables cubed and speared resting over the coals of the grill next to the fireplace at the center of the conversation pit.

Mary brought out several bottles of wine and put them on the cart next to the grill. She was sitting on the couch, her legs pulled up to her chest, drinking Chablis while Block concentrated on the coals and his scotch grain.

"I didn't take you for a cook."

"I'm not really. I've just learned a few easy things that are quick and tasty."

"And romantic?"

"If you want."

"So you can get a girl in bed."

"If she wants."

"Did The Chairman tell you about me?"

"He told me you were a good advance person. You get the job done. He was right. I never would have caught up with D'Lazo with-out your help."

"No, silly. Did he tell you about me in bed? What I do in bed?"

"He did mention something about that."

"What did he say?"

"That you . . ."

"Tell me exactly what he said."

"Well," Block grabbed more ice cubes from the bucket on the tray and added them to a healthy dose of scotch.

"What did he say exactly?"

"That you gave some kind of blow job that wouldn't quit."

"What did he call it?"

"A, well, a blockbuster."

Mary's laugh was a tinkle. "I love that. Ever since he called it that, I've wanted to get you in bed. I'm a virgin, you know."

Block turned the spits, at a loss for a response. "Not in your mouth," he finally said, lamely.

"Hymens don't grow in throats," she laughed. "Everybody would starve." She stopped and her laugh tinkled down his spine again. "Or would they grow to stupendous size?"

She held out her glass for Block to refill.

"Do you want a blockbuster, buster?" she asked, smiling over the sparkling wine.

"That is a question that needs no answer," he replied, taking the spits off the fire and sliding the mixture of vegetables and meat onto two plates.

He handed her one, and, taking one himself, sat down next to her on the couch.

"The question would then be, how did you become such an expert at, well what you do so well?"

Mary jumped up, putting her plate on the low table in front of the couch. "Practice?" she asked.

She returned from the bar with two napkins, tossing one to Block.

"Everybody gets practice," he replied, unfolding the napkin and wiping his mouth. "You've apparently brought the art to a science. What do you do?"

"You'll see."

"Well, why do you do it?"

"Why does anybody do anything sexual? It gives me pleasure."

"You mean it makes you feel good? Going down on somebody makes you feel good?"

"No. It gives me an orgasm."

"Do I go down on you at the same time?"

"No."

Mary's voice was a little too sharp and she quickly softened it. "No. I mean, it gives me an orgasm just doing it. It gives me more than one. It gives me a whole lot of orgasms. I really like it. You will too. I guarantee it. You'll never experience anything like it again. Quit eating so fast. You're going to choke yourself."

"Getting fucked would give you an orgasm."

Mary put her plate down, empty, pouring herself some more wine. Having regained control of her tone, she settled back on the couch, knees drawn up, facing Block."

"How do you know that?"

"Because that's the way people normally get orgasms. It's the way the body is constructed."

"Why should I let somebody stick something into my body when I can get the same result without it?"

"What's happening when a guy sticks it in your mouth?"

"A guy doesn't stick it in my mouth. I put it in my mouth if I want to. It's a far cry from somebody punching away senselessly at my underside."

"Senseless for you maybe, not for him."

"I would say senseless for him. Men spend more time screwing in their mind than they do in any woman. They can turn a piece of paper into a substitute. Why should I let myself be treated like a piece of paper?"

"What were you doing when you were going down on The Chair-man? He was just using his position to use you."

"Maybe he was. But I liked doing The Chairman. He's the most powerful man in the world. He gave me powerful orgasms. Why should I mind being used by somebody if it gives me pleasure? I'm going to like doing you. I'll get more pleasure out of doing you than I did out of doing The Chairman."

Block put his plate down and reached out slowly, expecting her to back away. She didn't and he put his hand underneath the hair at the back of her neck, cupping it gently, his large hand circling around almost to the front.

"Something must have happened to you," he said softly.

She rotated her head, enjoying the feel of the movement on the back of her neck.

"I don't understand what you mean. What do you mean, some-thing must have happened to me?"

"Normal people don't act abnormal."

Mary stiffened.

"I don't act abnormal. Not going down, at least not trying it to see if you like it, that's abnormal."

"I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about doing it to the ex-clusion of everything else."

Block's hand had tightened around the base of her neck at her outburst. After minor resistance, she settled back into the warmth of his palm.

"I've just never thought about it. I mean, I have orgasms. I know what other people are talking about when they talk about having orgasms. I've never had trouble talking to other women about sex. Some like it, some don't. Some like it some ways, some like it other ways. The only dysfunction is to not have an orgasm and all that takes is a little time and sometimes a little help."

"But it's unusual to have orgasms without having physical con-tact with the organs that produce the orgasm. You don't just think yourself into an orgasm."

"You don't?"

"Okay. You do need the thought to have the orgasm. But you need the physical stimulation as a basis for the thought process."

"Well, I have the physical stimulation. I have it the way I want it."

"But it's not the same. You didn't go out and get laid, have boy-friends, and worry yourself about whether you should have or shouldn't have done what you did or wanted to do."

"Everybody does things differently. I do it differently, and bet-ter. What do you care?"

She put her hand on the hand her neck rested on. It felt good.

"I just wonder about things," Block continued. "I try to figure out why people do things, like that guy D'Lazo. It's a hobby. I don't have to register an avocation, but I've found that when people aren't like some sort of amorphous norm, there's something hidden deep down in their past that is affecting current behavior."

"I don't have a past. I'm an open book." She closed her hand around his and removed it from her neck. She walked around to the back of the couch, put her hands, tiny in comparison, on his shoul-ders, and massaged them with surprising strength.

He rose in response. She let him, leaving him to go over to the bar and activate the switch that opened the bed.

Block came around the end of the couch and watched from the pit as the floor opened, the lights dimmed and the bed rose.

Mary met him as he stepped up out of the pit, guiding him around to the side of the bed closest to the bar, facing him with his back toward the bed.

She unbuttoned his shirt slowly, methodically, slipping it over his muscular shoulders, tossing it on the floor.

She opened his pants and slid them together with his undershorts down over the resistance of his rigidity, being careful not to touch it with her hand.

When she had his pants around his knees, she took his ankles and tilted them forward so that he buckled gently onto the bed, a foot off the ground. As he leaned back, she pulled his shoes off and then slipped his pants down over his ankles, hooking his socks and taking them off with one smooth motion.

Finished with the disrobing, she stood up, looking down at him. He was propped on his elbows looking up at her in the light filtering in through the window from the millions of points of light twinkling in the darkness.

She lifted the green chemise over her head, displaying her slight body and, stepping out of her pumps, kneeled down on the edge of the bed.

Block stayed there, breathless, motionless, hard, waiting.

Mary took his legs, getting on the bed, straightening him out, pulling him so that he was laying flat. She moved up beside him and took a pillow, propping his head up so he could look down at himself while she was consuming him.

She looked at his hardness, waiting, and looked at his eyes, moist in the dim light, waiting.

She wriggled up, kissing him on the lips, then smoothly moved back down and, placing her knees between his ankles, took his cock in her hand and buried her face between his legs leaving Block with the vision of her bouncing blond hair.

A feeling of power surged through her with incredible speed, taking even her by surprise. She felt it center between her legs as she moved her head up and down, making contact with the smooth flesh.

Her pleasure increased as she felt his muscles tense beneath her arms. She moved her hands over his legs, his stomach, his chest, his biceps, feeling the hardness, the tenseness, the quivering.

The small golden drop she loved so much began to form in her mind and started to grow. It reached a size and stopped, and she braced for the rush that its burst would send flowing through her body.

She moved her head faster, bringing her hand down to the base of Block's hardness until she felt the telltale involuntary spasm of his buried muscle begin to work.

She took her thumb and gently applied pressure directly on the spot, feeling his tension quiet. At the same time she increased the friction at the end of his prick even more. The muscle under her thumb began to exert itself again. She increased the pressure on the spot, keeping its attempt to rise at a standstill while raising the level of friction at the end by moving her tongue in an opposing rhythm to the movement of her head.

Block was starting to whimper and the beautiful golden drop in her mind began to grow once again, reaching a size she had never thought possible without breaking over her in pleasure.

Everything was moving in concert. As the muscle started to throb, her thumb added pressure, the friction increased, Block's moaning grew in intensity, his muscles like quivering iron, the golden ball of liquid becoming larger and larger, the anticipation of pleasure greater and greater.

Under her mouth, Block's body was arching, growing stiffer than he could have ever realized possible. His mind was a tumble of images, breasts, buttocks, vaginas, clitorides, flashes of pleasure, periods of blackness, strain, effort, ejaculations, ejaculations, ejaculations, concentrate on ejaculations.

He wanted to come. He wanted to come more than he had ever wanted to come in his life. If he concentrated on ejaculation, he could ejaculate fountains, sprays, waterfalls.

He strained to come. The more he strained, the more he had to and the harder it became. His mind tumbled over and over looking for release. He opened his eyes to concentrate on the frenetic blond movement between his legs, increasing his desire even more.

He shut them, trying to think of the last time he had come. He thought of Jeannine, but he couldn't even remember her, coming in her. He could remember desiring her, but his desire was increasing and increasing. He had to come.

He thought back to Shandra and the night in the hotel in Manhat-tan, the all-night, the night that he and Shandra had come and come and come again, not in a frenzy, but in a pleasant serial of pleasure, continuous delicious pleasure.

How had he gotten that pleasure? He hadn't strained to get it, it was just there with her. Now he wanted it, he needed it, he was straining for it.

How did he get in that hotel room with Shandra, beautiful Shandra. It was St. Remain. St. Remain had died straining with pleasure, with uneaten Bouillabaisse, with folded napkins like they had a napkin ring, like his prick which was acting like it had a cock ring, but it didn't only Mary Renon who was giving him a napkin folded like it had a napkin ring in St. Remain's basket . . .

The golden ball of liquid growing to unbelievable proportions in Mary's brain didn't burst. It just disappeared. It evaporated in the unexpected spasm from Block that drove him deep into her throat.

"Damn shit," she spit, pushing his cock out of her mouth. "I've already had a tonsillectomy, you prick."

She started to jump up, not knowing what had happened, but in-tent on getting to the drawer at the side of the bed.

She was stopped, immobilized. Two strong hands had her on each shoulder. They didn't hurt her but they were large and far stronger than she could ever hope to overcome.

She looked up at Block. He was looking down at her. She saw traces of surprise disappearing from his face. She closed her eyes. Damn, was all she could think. She reopened her eyes and looked up at Block again, trying to figure out what he was going to do.

She could see a trace of a smile on his face. Her face was still between his crotch, her shoulders anchored by his hands. She thought to lean back onto her buttocks so that she could kick him in the balls but he was already moving his leg over her back, forcing her flat on her stomach between his legs.

She tried to reach in with her hands to get a hold of his balls, but it was useless.

She was totally immobilized. She couldn't move. She felt a small thrill, unreasoned, perhaps the prelude to the end, but the thrill was replaced by an overpowering anger, a rage, and she again tried to break free, moving her arms and legs uselessly against Block's overpowering force.

She stopped struggling and he let her remain motionless, catch-ing her breath.

He then started to draw her up towards him.

She looked up into his eyes but they were inscrutable, unwav-ering, looking at her intently.

She felt his prick, harder even than when she had had it in her mouth, move between her breasts as she was slowly pulled up to-ward his face.

His gaze never flickered as it moved closer to hers. She couldn't think, only feel the slow progress of his prick as it slid down to her stomach, and then her belly, and then into her pubic hairs.

Panic seized her. He was moving it toward her vagina. He was going to stick it in her. Her mind closed like a steel trap. His face disappeared in the blackness that was engulfing her mind. She wanted it to stop. She wanted time to stop. She tried to cry out, to protest, to scream no.

She could do nothing but be aware of the slow progress of his hardness as it moved over the lips of her vagina and stood up be-tween her legs.

She buried her face in his chest, shutting her eyes tight, closing her mind, making her body numb to the coming thrust, the horror of pain, a mental agony that would engulf her very being, her entire essence.

Her mind exploded.

She was stunned.

Her thoughts ran down between her legs trying to feel the intru-sion.

There was nothing there.

Still, her mind was reeling. What had happened?

She moved her pelvic region to see where she was in relation to his cock. She felt it strong between her legs, beneath her vagina, not touching it. She moved up involuntarily but the movement opened the lips and her clitoris came into contact with the pubic hair above his cock, the bone they rested on.

She tried to pull away but the explosion in her mind happened again and instead of pulling away from the entanglement, her clito-ris was forced deeper into the tangle of hair.

Her mind raced, trying to figure out what was going on. Her mind flew over her body, checking its parts, seeing what was where, what felt like what. Before she could complete the inven-tory, her mind exploded once again and this time she could feel a distinct sensation directly from her clitoris.

And behind it, a sting on her buttocks.

She knew what was happening in a flash and the rage that over-came her was of an intensity she didn't know possible.

Block had spanked her, unpardonable, and in doing so forced her clitoris into physical contact with his body. Not unpardonable, no word for it. She didn't even allow herself to touch her clitoris.

She opened her eyes, looking up at Block, hate in her eyes, words on her lips so vile she couldn't recognize them, but before she could accumulate the spittle to spray in his face, he brought his palm down sharply twice, once on each cheek.

Her pelvis moved forward unnaturally to escape the blows, in-creasing the friction on her clitoris, immediately forcing her to move it back, creating more friction on the return.

She had no sooner gotten her back unarched than a pair of sharp slaps forced her buttocks forward again.

The friction spreading out through her pelvis was beginning to encompass her mind. Every time she tried to get her back into a normal position, Block's slaps forced it to move back into an arch.

As she went back and forth, the friction between her legs began to grow in her mind. She didn't recognize the ball that was building. It wasn't a droplet, it wasn't golden. It was more like a blue dot in the blackness of her pleasure.

She didn't even notice that Block was no longer slapping her buttocks, but gently guiding them, keeping the lips of her vagina centered and opened over the mound at the base of his prick as she moved back and forth with increasing urgency, the friction seeming to move into the blue dot, making it grow in size, becoming larger and larger.

Her mind was transfixed with anticipation as the ball grew to what must have been a trillion times the size of infinity and began to move towards her at an increasing rate.

She stood in mental awe as the blue ball grew so large as to en-compass the entire blackness of the universe, filling her mind with its brilliance.

She didn't flinch as it collided with her mind, breaking up into a thousand points of pleasure, droplets ricocheting off in every di-rection only to reach their zenith and begin to return, smaller but more intense points of pleasure.

And each point was a point of blackness, night, that was illumi-nated in the blue pleasure of the shattered globe, coming into her mind as clear, clean, cleansed of all dirt, of all filth, of all the bur-ied obscenities that had distorted her reality.

All of the fault, the blame, the shame, the self-hate that had created an interlocking clear black jigsaw puzzle cemented with her own fear and distrust disappeared in the light that flooded through her mind as if it had never existed.

She watched in wonder as the balls of blue grew smaller and smaller, bouncing off and returning, the pleasure receding, the storm subsiding.

When reality came back, she found herself with her arms pulling herself up to Block's face, pasting her mouth on his as if she wanted to crawl inside it.

She moved her pelvis tentatively to see if there was any sensa-tion left, sensation that she had only imagined she had felt up to then, sensation that, when real, replaced her flesh with her mind.

She had barely moved when Block laid three sharp slaps, his large hand stinging both cheeks.

She didn't have a chance to move. The sensation, pure, unrea-soned pleasure, started instantly from her extremities, traveled directly to her crotch, exploded, shooting wave after wave of pleasure through her body. It mingled with the pain in her arms and her mouth as she clung desperately to Block, the pain slowly bring-ing her back, making her relax her grasp.

Block leaned his head back on the pillow, took her buttocks, one in each hand, moved her back down into her prior position and started to rotate her in a circle, the lips of her vagina opening and closing, sending incredible sensations into her body through her clitoris.

Time seemed to disappear as she experienced orgasm after or-gasm, variation after variation, the pleasure going on and on.

She became aware of Block, still hard, always between her legs, just beneath her vagina. She began to feel selfish that she was enjoying so much and he so little.

She started to think what it would be like to have him inside her. She started to think of orgasms with him inside her. She started to want him inside her.

She rolled off him and propped herself up on her elbow, looking at him, his head still propped up on the pillow.

"I want to fuck you," she said.

Block rolled off the bed, got to his feet and went over to the bar.

"You," he said, pouring himself a stiff scotch, "already have."

"No, I mean . . ."

"You killed St. Remain."

"I did nothing of the sort. How . . ."

"You stole the Diskcard."

"Absolutely not. I would . . ."

"You are working for British Operations."

"You're crazy." Mary was trying to be angry, but she was far too exhausted to be convincing.

Block picked one of the napkins out of the breadbasket and tossed it to her on the bed.

"What's this for?" she asked, puzzled.

"It's the way it's folded."

"Shit." She hadn't even been conscious of the frigging napkins. She rolled over and opened the drawer.

When she turned back, she was facing Block who was holding a nine-millimeter pointing directly between her eyes.

"Why didn't you kill The Chairman when you had a chance?" Block asked.

Mary held up the Diskcard she had taken out of the drawer. Block waved the barrel of the gun and she propped it up on the head-board.

"Why did I do a lot of things? I don't know. That was then, this is now. I wouldn't kill you. I want you. I feel like a free person because of you."

Block walked over as Mary moved to the side of the bed, invit-ing him with everything she had.

Block felt the gun in his hand, his cock pointing in the same di-rection.

"Please," she whispered

Block thought about the sensation he would feel as the end of his prick slid gently into the warmth of her vagina.

"What the hell," he thought out loud.

Which was the last thing Mary heard before the gun exploded.