“Were you working for him when you had your three hoods try to grab Alicia that first time? The time they got me instead?”
“No. That was my own idea. You see, she was complicating things. Hans und Fritz didn’t know she was Dickson’s daughter. They weren’t worried when she got close to Dickson. But I was. I was afraid she’d find out he was a robot and blow the whistle. That could have ruined everything for all of us.”
“And that’s why you cooperated with the Lilliputians snatching her the second time?”
“Right. I wanted her out of the way. I couldn’t risk her continued proximity to Dickson.”
“But then why did you double-cross the LLA in the end? Why that attack at the palm tree where we met to deliver the gold?”
“Because by then we’d found out that the LLA was being backed by D.O.P.E. We didn’t double-cross them. They’d been double-crossing us from the beginning. D.O.P.E. had arranged the whole thing so they could step in and kill Dickson. They were behind the poison attempt and the attempt to kill him with high-powered rifles and the sabotaging of the plane.”
“D.O.P.E.? But why did they want him dead?”
“That I don’t know.”
“Did D.O.P.E. know he was a robot?”
“I doubt it, ” Rococco said. “Someone on this island has been acting for D.O.P.E. right along, but I’ve been unable to find out who it is. Actually, for a long time I thought it was you.”
“Me?” I was surprised.
“Sure. You were an imposter. I knew right away you weren’t Karl Powers.”
“What gave me away?” I wondered.
“You didn’t contact me. The real Karl Powers was supposed to contact ‘Insecticide.’ I was ‘Insecticide,’ ” Rococco reminded me. “When you didn’t contact me, I knew you were a phoney. So I called Algerpulp. He was in on the whole thing with me and Bussinger. When we put our heads together, it was easy to figure that the real Karl Powers had been wasted and you substituted in his place. It didn’t take a helluva lot to find out that you really were Steve Victor. That’s when we realized that Charles Putnam might be involved. And that really scared us.”
“What did you do?”
“We decided that for the time being our interests were the same as those of Hans und Fritz. We had to warn them.”
“And then what happened?”
‘Tm not quite sure. But they had a shortwave input into Dickson. They could reprogram him that way whenever they wanted to. I think they reprogrammed him to self-destruct.”
“But why would they do that?”
“I don’t know,” Rococco admitted. “You’ll have to ask them that.”
“Are you sure Dickson did self-destruct?”
“What else could have caused that explosion?”
Rococco had me there. My head was already aching from trying to make sense out of all the twists and turns of what he’d been telling me.
The surgeon informed me that my time was up. He bent over Rococco and spent a long time examining him. Finally he decided to move him to a caretaker’s cottage which was still standing on the grounds.
As Rococco was being moved, another copter arrived. Charles Putnam was on board. I took him aside and told him everything I’d learned.
“You failed in your assignment, Mr. Victor,” he chided me when I’d finished my account.
“The hell I did!” I was indignant. “You wanted me to find out who ‘Insecticide’ was. Well, I’ve done at.”
“You were also supposed to keep Nicholas Dickson alive.
“He’s as alive as he ever was,” I told him haughtily, “considering that he was a robot.”
“He was a live robot,” Putnam insisted.
There was no point in arguing. I left Putnam to continue his investigations. As for me, I’d had it for the night. What I needed was a hot bath and a bed with cool sheets.
I was out of luck. All the beds and baths had been blown up with the house. With the caretaker’s cottage being used for a hospital, that left me out in the Caribbean cold.
As I was standing there wondering what I was going to do about it, Pisha Dickson came along. There were tears streaming from her eyes and she was clutching a sheaf of typewritten papers in her hands. “I’ve found it!” she announced. “Daddy’s manuscript for the revised book on which he was working. Here it is: Six Crises and a Catastrophe!”
I turned away from her grief and found myself face to face with Alicia Alvarez. She’d gotten over the effects of the explosion. Indeed, she seemed positively bouncy. She’d cleaned herself up as best she could, and although her white shorts and halter were pretty well smudged, her overall appearance was quite crisp considering the circumstances. '
Her long, red hair was neatly brushed. That exotic, Spanish-Indian face of hers had been freshly scrubbed. Her cobalt eyes were sharp—flashing in the light of what was left of the fire. Her tan-gold skin looked particularly alluring in the firelight. Her breasts, her hips, her bottom, her long legs—all seemed vibrantly alive to the tingle of the night air.
I sniffed. She had even put on perfume—sensual, musky perfume!
“Where am I supposed to sleep?” she asked.
“You’re one ahead of me,” I told her. “Where did you find to get cleaned up?”
“There’s a cabana down the beach with a shower. Want me to show you?”
I told her I’d appreciate that. It wasn’t far. She led me to it and waited while I showered and cleaned up my clothes as best I could. The best was lousy. Finally I gave up on them, found a pair of trunks in one of the lockers of the cabana, and tried them on. They were tight, but close enough to my size to do. I kept them on and went out to model them for Alicia.
She was busy with other things. She’d been investigating the refrigcrator in the cabana and had found the makings for martinis. I gulped mine gratefully and she paced me. We slowed up for the second one and sat down on the steps of the cabana.
“Too bad they didn’t leave the chaises longues out,” I observed. “We could have slept on them.”
“They’re locked up in a shed attached to the main house. They were probably all burned up,” Alicia said.
“Still, this is probably the best we’re going to do,” I guessed. “We might as well sleep on the floor here. At least it’ll be dry.”
“No good.”
“Why not?”
“That’s why.” Alicia pointed.
Three or four people—I couldn’t make out their faces in the darkness-were walking toward the cabana. Probably they had the same idea I’d had. “I see what you mean.” I got to my feet. “We wouldn’t exactly have much privacy, would we?”
“Whatever would we want privacy for?” Alicia asked. But she stood up and followed me away from the cabana into the shadows.
“This, for a start.” I took her in my arms and kissed her.
Alicia—in case I’d forgotten—was not a girl who kissed only with her mouth. Oh, she knew how to use her mouth all right-teeth, lips, tongue, all that goes into a sucking, licking, biting kiss technique. But she also put her whole body into it.
A halter full of hot, squirmy breasts assaulted my bare chest. I could feel those hard, long nipples of hers through the material, boring twin holes in my flesh. The length of her bare legs pressed against mine, rubbing and flexing, warm thigh flesh pulsing. And her shorts were swallowed up by her crotch as she socked it to me, the cleft hillock riding high on my already erect cock, the stiff clitty swelling as it moved up and down.
As a kiss, it was a helluva lot more than a preliminary.
The kiss was over, but our mouths still clung together—tantalizing, teasing, titillating-as I backed her over the sand to a palm tree. When I had her against it, I reached under her halter with both hands and grabbed her breasts. She caught her breath and they filled with air. The nipples swelled even more. Her fleshy hips ground against me. She reached behind me, under my trunks, and dug her nails into the cheeks of my behind.