The Golden Globe

But they had brought something with them to Charon, other than psychosis and criminal skills and their own brand of situational ethics. The dominant religion of Pluto, back from the days when they had been the outcasts of the system was Satanism. Diabolism. Devil worship. Mystical, scary stuff.

Well, not really. It's true no one was allowed into a Satanist Temple but a true believer, and it is true the rituals and belief system are secret. But the secret is an open one, and the interior of the temple is no more mysterious than that of the Mormons. If you leave the church, no one comes to hunt you down and kill you. No one cuts out your tongue. You can blab all you wish, and ex-Satanists over the years have blabbed it all. And a more prosaic, boring story has seldom been blabbed. Forget the tales of human sacrifice, of Christian babies slaughtered on black altars and eaten by the congregation. They used to tell those same stories about Catholics. No, Plutonian Satanism was all ritual and show, symbolic as a Christian sacrament. Although I'll have to admit, reading about it, it sounded like a darn good show.

There was nothing symbolic about the Charonese religion. Real people bled real blood and died on Charonese altars.

If that was all, it would be disgusting, but nothing new in the world of religions. The Charonese couldn't hold a candle to the Aztecs for sheer volume of blood shed, or to the Spanish Inquisition for inventiveness. The sheer depravity of the Charonese way of life owed more to medical science than to man's endless capacity for inhumanity to man. The Charonese did it to themselves.

It's been a long time since any slashing or crushing injury below the brain-case could do any permanent harm to anyone, as long as you didn't bleed to death before medical attention arrived. One of the first things medics did to an injury was turn off the pain. In some professions—stunt performers, or even my own work, when I was required to take a sword thrust in the final act—pain would be turned off ahead of time. (For me, anyway. I trust my acting ability to sell the audience on my pain; I don't hold with "method" fanatics who insist only the real thing will do.) There are those who enjoy being mutilated ritually, and have the pain suppressed, and a very small number who actually enjoy that much pain. All perfectly normal, today. Everything can be fixed.

On Charon, possession or use of any pain suppressor was illegal. You need to have studied Charon to understand how awful that was. The Charonese had almost no laws at all. You were expected to do anything you could get away with. Every law they did have was a capital offense. But because pain was good, pain was to be sought, a Charonese execution consisted of confinement to a sensory deprivation tank where one could not harm oneself in any way, and kept alive there for whatever period the court deemed fit for the crime. Typically that was a couple of weeks. The miscreant was usually insane—and defining "insanity" for a Charonese was a pretty problem—within a few days.

The Charonese religion was based around pain and death. Torture began at an early age, some authorities said in infancy. To my way of thinking, any Charonese living at the age of four or five years must already be insane, by any standard I can understand. Others maintain that the Charonese are the next step in evolution. Pain, they note, evolved to warn an organism of damage (why God couldn't just send down a written memo: "Hey, buddy, you're damaged!" was never explained to me). Now that damage was no big deal we ought to just ignore pain. Well, why not eliminate it? sez I, but I'm not writing a doctoral thesis.

There's no need to disturb your sleep with tales of Charonese bloodbaths, self-mutilations, orgies of sex and violence. A description of Charonese love-making alone would haunt you for days. And besides, the information gets very sketchy here. All the authors are dead, and accounts differ; who can say what is true and what is fancy? One example will suffice for all: the Charonese equivalent of a bar mitzvah involves self-disembowelment, after which the honoree amputates both legs and an arm, and then chews off... but I can't go on. It's all healed immediately, so what's the big deal, eh? Unless you have more sensitivity than a garden slug, that is.

Needless to say, such a lifelong regimen has produced a breed of human with not much in common with the rest of us. Nothing but death will stop them, and death is meaningless if you're in my shoes, because if, for instance, Izzy had not completed his mission at the time of his death, someone else would be along soon to rectify the oversight. And if I managed to kill Charonese number two, there would be a number three, and a number four.

The population of Charon was about five million. I'd have to kill a few hundred a day just to break even.

As if. So far I'd killed one through luck and evaded another twice, again, mostly through luck. And if I killed Isambard...

What would number two be like? I didn't think they had sent their champion killer to snuff an actor.

THE DISCOVERY OF SEX

Part Four of a Series

by Hildy Johnson

They tried to warn him.

"It's not like anything you've experienced as a boy," they said.

"Come on, Doc," Sparky said. "I'm thirty years old. You think I haven't had sex?"

Well, of course he'd had sex. Or what passes for sex in one whose puberty has been arrested for many years. And I'm sure he enjoyed it. There was a joke going around school when I was young: Sparky is about to get into bed with one of his young fans. (We all assumed that young fan would someday be us.) He pulls down his trousers and the girl stares. "Who do you think you're going to satisfy with that little thing?" She laughs. And Sparky says, "Me."

They say size doesn't matter, and it's true, to a point. Sixteen inches would be nightmarish. Two inches... Are you in yet, darling? Sparky's measurement has never been a secret. One must assume he had a lot of charitable partners.

So that alone would be a big difference in his experience: being with a woman who wasn't faking anything.

But no matter how considerate we are in the sack, for most of us the primary urge is a rather selfish one, isn't it? Fess up. Is the experience a total loss if you get off, even if he or she didn't? Gee whiz, I'm sorry, hon, I'll do better next time, and... zzzzzzzzz.

The doctors told him what he'd been having were "dry" orgasms, sometimes called "infantile" erections. He felt like he was turned on, and he felt like he was coming, but he didn't know the half of it.

Puberty. A time of exciting and dreadful change. A time of confusion. A time of exploration. Most of us get about a year to adjust to it.

Sparky had about a week....

Ken Valentine leaped up, bounced once on the giant bed, and hit the floor ru

Back in the bed, a lump of sheets and comforters stirred. A hand emerged and cautiously peeled back enough covers to expose disheveled hair, a forehead, and two slightly bruised eyes. The eyes followed Ken's progress around the room. Then the rest of the face was exposed and Hildy Johnson sat up in the bed.

"You've got more energy than three litters of puppies," she said.

"I know, I know!" he shouted, and bounced some more.

They were in the penthouse suite of one of the better hotels in King City. It had been the nearest refuge when Ken began feeling the urge down in the lobby, while Hildy was making yet another attempt to interview him concerning the onset of puberty. Perhaps onslaught would be a better word, she thought. Or maybe attack.