The Golden Globe

Try blitzkrieg.

There was no law against going at it right there in the lobby, but that wasn't Hildy's style; she had been raised to believe public sex was uncouth. Besides, Ke

The room had a spa big enough to bathe a herd of elephants. She'd pushed him into it and surrendered to the inevitable. The bed was fifteen feet on a side and they'd debauched every square foot. Sometimes it seemed more of a war game than lovemaking. Hildy saw her redoubts of pillow and blanket fall to his relentless assaults over and over again. Not that she was much of a fighter. But with such an aggressive partner, she got a kick out of resisting for a while, before allowing her positions to be invaded. She even had a few bruises, a first for her. But she gave as good as she got.

It was just about the best sex she'd ever had, but now she was in the mood for an armistice. She didn't think Ken was.

"Why didn't anyone ever tell me?" he shouted, for possibly the three hundredth time. He leaped into the bed, bounced over to Hildy, and yanked the blankets away from her. She was pale and nude and perfect, with patches of pinkness here and there. He crawled from her feet to her chest, making obeisance at various stations of the corpus, fondly remembering what this was for, what they'd done with that, what had happened here and here and here. He collapsed across her body, resting his head on her moist breasts.

"If I'd only known," he breathed in her ear. "I feel like I wasted fifteen years. Hell, I only have maybe three, four hundred years left! And there are billions of women in the system. Billions!"

"Maybe even a few dozen who don't want to fuck you," Hildy pointed out.

"Impossible! How could they possibly want to miss... this!"

"How indeed. Just plain cruelty, I'd think."

"Exactly! Exactly! Cruel to both of us! What possible reason could there be to not make love?"

"Hmmm. Soreness?"

He frowned. "You aren't sore, are you?"

"Honey, I... never mind. Aren't you?"

"A little," he admitted.

"Then why don't we call a time-out, and finish the interview?"

"Interview? Interview? Is that what you call this?" He kissed her lips, and her breasts.

"That's what it started out to be. Remember? This morning? The hotel lobby? We were going to have breakfast?"

"Breakfast?" He seemed to be having trouble with words longer than four letters. "Oh, yeah. Breakfast. God, am I ever hungry." He reached across her and punched a button on the headboard. "Send up a lot of breakfast," he said.

"Yes, sir. What would you like?" a female voice replied.

"A lot. A lot of everything. Make it real fast, and I'll tip triple. Including you, sweetheart, if you aren't a computer."

"I'm not a computer," said the voice, "and it will be real fast."

"Okay," said Sparky, turning back to Hildy. "What do you want to know?"

Hildy put a fingertip to her left temple and twisted. The pupil of her left eye began to glow a deep red, like a deer caught in headlights.

"Recording," she said, formally. Sitting there naked on the bed, she noticed an almost imperceptible change in his attitude. It was something performers, actors, fashion models did. The director yells "Action!" The spotlight hits the singer on the stage, the photographer lifts his camera, and the people turn on. Or switch to a different level of reality, Hildy thought. The shoulders move, the teeth get brighter somehow, the eyes twinkle. It was a little scary, but not half so much as the other end of the process, when the director yells "Cut!" The smile collapses. The charisma is stored, way back wherever people who have it, keep it. She had to cut through that before she'd get anything useful.

"On the record..." she said, finishing the legal litany. "Sparky, would you agree with the proposition that the pubescent human male is the stupidest animal on two legs?"

He laughed. "If you want to take me as an example... yeah. Or on four legs, or six, or eight." He glanced down at his semierect penis. "Maybe we should say three legs."

Hildy glanced down, too—or at least her right eye did. The left remained stabilized on the establishing shot, recording a solid image she would use mainly as earlier reporters had used sound recorders. There would be Hyper-Text image bites, of course, but she doubted she would use much from this particular session. Sparky was still gazing down with boundless affection. It was like he had a new friend. In a way, he did.

"Say," he said, brightly. "Maybe it's not me that's dumb at all. Maybe when your cock starts to grow, it sort of sucks up your brains." He made a sucking sound with his lips. "Pow! And your IQ drops like a stone. You're at the mercy of any female who walks past you. You'd do anything to... sure, sure, that's it." He grasped his newly burgeoned manhood and waved it more or less in Hildy's direction. "This fellow gets it into his head... so to speak—"

"Off," Hildy said. "Sparky, it's a very bad sign when you start referring to your cock in the third person. Next thing you know you'll give it a name... and I'm out of here."

"You're right, you're right." Sparky apologized. "I'm crazy, but I'm not loony." That look came into his eyes again and his gaze dropped down her body. It landed where it usually did, and he was no longer semierect. "How about it, while we're off the record? Do you think we could—"

The bedroom door swung open and three bellhops hurried in, pushing carts groaning with bacon and eggs and pastries and fruit. For a moment there Sparky was so fu

...and by Friday, though he was not back to anything like "normal," he could at least be trusted again around livestock.

NEXT WEEK:

Part Five

The New Sparky, as Romeo!

What amused Ke

Rooms imploding, shoes pinching, stumbling on stair risers that seemed to get lower even as he climbed them... these he could handle.

But people getting smaller...

He was now the same height as his father. He found it enormously disconcerting. For thirty years his father had been this vast presence, towering, stern, but loving. The fact that other men were taller was completely beside the point. In the ways that mattered, John Valentine had been the tallest man in the world.

But in this new, changed world, his father was only slightly over average height. He had a way of standing that made people think he was taller than he was, a way of dominating a gathering of people so that, from Ke

This was inconceivable.

This was preposterous.

This was... something a billion sons had encountered during their youth, nothing unusual at all. Except they had crept up on the idea. They had done it as a proper son should, a millimeter a week, not sprouted insolently like some demented beanstalk.