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Plugger.
"I don't think so," she said. "He seemed to have changed intothis about a half hour before we quit."
He did not have to ask her what they had quit doing.
"He said he was almost emptied," Sybil said. "He had been to thethree Toc prisoners before he came to me. I suppose he buggered them, I mean, he appliedhis limp prick to their anuses and shocked them with the onlypleasant shockthat I know of. Then he came to me."
Childe did not feel that he was in a position to rebuke her. Whatgood wouldit do, anyway? She took sex where she found it and enjoyed it. And all the time professing that he was her only true love. The truth was, sex was heronly truelove. Impersonal sex.
The unbelievable element in this was not so much the metamorphosis ofPlugger into this dog-monkey thing as it was her calm acceptance ofthe metamorphosis. She should have been in a deep state of psychic shock.
"Why did Plugger feel it necessary to stimulate the prisoners?" he said.
"He told me that everybody in the house had to be hooked into theGrailingand that only if the prisoners and I had sex with an Og could this bedone."
A voice spoke from a jade statuette on a table against the wallnear the bed: "Captain, is there anything you want?"
"Yes!" he said, facing the statuette. "Get this thing out ofhere! Pluggeris making me sick!"
A moment later, the door swung out, and the blond man who hadbeen first in the line entered. Behind him came two women holding trays. The mantook one of Plugger's paws and led him out while the women served the food. Thecoffee was excellent, and the bacon and eggs and toast and cantaloupe weredelicious.
While he ate, he looked steadily at Sybil. She chattered on as ifunaware of his scrutiny. She had certainly acquired a set of stainless steelnerves duringher long imprisonment.
After breakfast, she went into the bathroom to fix herself up forthe day, as she put it. Pao and Vivie
He did not object. When in Rome, and so on. The custom certainlybeat that of kissing the hand of royalty.
Pao touched his penis with one finger, also murmuring, "Yourpermission, Captain."
That was where the power and the glory were stored, Childethought. Nowonder that Igescu and Grasatchow and Dolores del Osorojo and MagdaHolyani hadbeen unable to resist using him sexually. The Ogs were supposed tohave left him alone to develop into something, according to what he had garneredfrom the brief conversation between Vivie
He wondered if the two werewolves had intended to kill him, as hehad thought when they attacked. Maybe they had only meant to herd himback to his prison. And when he had been jumped by that wereleopard while he waskilling
Igescu in his oak-log coffin, she may have just been trying to drivehim away.
It was obvious now that he was supposed to develop into aCaptain. But therewere a number of questions to which he required answers. For onething, whatabout those abandoned cars in front of his house?
Vivie
"I can imagine," said Childe, closing his eyes and shuddering.
"By then, the grail and the junk had gone into a steel millfurnace. We had to do some very intense detective work, very expensive, too, and wefound that that particular load had ended up as metal in a certain number ofcars of a certain make and model. So..."
"But you did not know which cars exactly?" Childe said. He wasbegi
"Luckily, they were cars which were transported to this area. Wehad narrowed the number to about three hundred. And so we started to steal them and leave them in front of your house. We were lucky, very lucky. Threeof the cars contained traces of the metal in the grail. They activated when youwent near them, but you couldn't see that because the paint hid the glow, whichwas extremely feeble, anyway.
"We junked the cars and had them melted in a yard by a man whomwe paidwell. We strained out the grail metal, as it were, and used the tinybits as a detector for those other cars that contained the metal. When one bit of grail isbrought close to the other, both glow. We no longer had to leave carsin front of your house, because we knew exactly what group of cars containedthe metal. We had to do some more bribing of authorities to get the owners'names, and itwas impossible to steal all the cars.
"But we got enough to act as a seed for the growth of more metal. It is a procedure that is terribly tiring for the Captain. And it exhauststhose who take part in the ceremony. But it has to be done."
Childe did not completely understand. He asked that Pao explaineverythingto him. This took an hour and a half with several questions still tobe asked.
Nor did he accept Pao's word that the Tocs were the evil ones andthe Ogsthe good. The Tocs could be evil, but if they were, they werecertainly matchedby the Ogs.
However, what the Ogs wanted of him was not something that he hadto refuse for the good of Earth. Far from it. If he took the Ogs to their homeworld, hewould be doing his world a vast service. He would never be rewardedby humansfor his heroism. In fact, if he were to bring his deeds to theirattention, hewould be put into an insane asylum.
There were several disturbing things about being a Captain. Onewas that he could return to Earth and there arrange to transport the Tocs totheir home planet, too. If the Ogs could scrap cars and make a grail, the Tocscould do the same. There were plenty of cars left for that purpose.
The Ogs must have thought of this possibility. What did theyintend doingabout it? He hated to ask them, because he was afraid of both thetruth and the lies. If they meant to kill him or hold him prisoner on their world, they wouldnot, of course, tell him so. And if he asked them about its, theywould know that he would have to be killed or imprisoned. Either way, he wouldlose.
"It will be glorious," Vivie
Childe was startled, and he had thought he was beyond beingsurprisedanymore.
"You mean that I am expected to give all your, uh, dead, newbodies?" he said.
"You will enable them to give themselves their material bodies," she said.
"It will be a resurrection day for us," Pao said. His slantingvulpine eyesglowed. The light from the lamp was reflected redly in them.
"And just where will this resurrection, or rematerializing, orwhatever youcall it, take place?" Childe said.
"They will, materialize in the barn behind this house," Vivie
"Approximately nine hundred of them," Pao said. "They won't bebrought intomatter all at once. You can control that, Captain. Ten or twenty orso at a time, and these will be conducted out of the place into this house orinto rooms in the barn."
Theologistics of resurrection day, he thought. And am I really asort of god?
"Will Lord Byron, my real father, be among them?" he said. Pao said, "Oh, no. You forget that..." He did not want to continue. No wonder. Byron would be among the