Eve found herself in an unfamiliar role. Her companions could not say enough for her courage in facing down the brutish apparition so that they might scuttle to safety. More irked than embarrassed, she accepted applause and one nightcap before pleading exhaustion. Accepting a chemlamp to light her way, she walked from the central lodge and gracelessly refused Hutch's offer of escort to her cabin. A vagrant breeze at her back tickled the base of her neck.
In black shadow, Ba'al heard her heavy footfalls and the rhythmic song of Eve's corduroy breeches, size fifty. More important, the odor of a ready female was now a steady reek on the wind. He heard her fumble at the front door of a cabin near the one where he stood. The cabins on either side of Eve's were unoccupied, drawing him to slip nearer in the darkness and to study this puzzle. It appeared that he was studying some new hybrid, an inexplicable cross between asiatic swine and human. He had met the person face to face, knew her to be a person and, moreover, one who did not panic at first sight of him.
But her scent was now richly swinish and her great size richly suggestive. He moved to the rear of her cabin near its one feature, the broad sliding glass door, that clashed with its decor. He could not see through its inner partition, but snuffled against the glass.
Eve heard movement through the folding cedar partition; heard a soft explosive grunt. If that poor pitiful Cleve Hutcherson was trying for a late date, he could — well, maybe he could have one. Maybe something about their mutual experience had turned him on so that he would please her without lobotol.
She turned off all but a single nightlight, drew the wooden partition back, and gazed at the demonic face that stood high as her own and near enough to touch were it not for the glass pane.
She stood transfixed, trembling in the grip of her glandular cascade. Ah, but it was unspeakably good!
Her memory served up a scene from a porn cassette, lissome young Cow Patty with her lunging pony, and now the little studhorse seemed shoddy goods. Even if Russian boars were not hung so well, she thought wildly, it would be an ecstatic experience to couple with this devil; with the demon, Ba'al. She smiled and unlocked the glass door, then slowly slid it aside. With this act she did not merely overstep sanity, she flung it to oblivion.
Ba'al had rarely entered a human dwelling but showed no reluctance, snuffling in curiosity, stepping onto floorboards that creaked with his enormous weight. He ignored the distant sounds of merriment from celebrants in the lodge who were still toasting the escape. When he was inside, Eve managed to shut the glass door and the partition with fluttering hands. Now, no one could see or hear the apotheosis of Eve Simpson.
Even among lackluster domestic boars, certain forms of courtship are common. In Ba'al the instinct was tempered with high intelligence and despite goading from the command of pheromone he made haste slowly, emitting his soft insistent mating song as he did so. That song consisted of quick gutteral grunts in a truly subterranean basso with pauses for breath. He smelled fear in her too, a little, a person-sweat. He urinated briefly on the floor, also part of the mating ceremony, and gently thrust the tip of his snout against her side.
Eve could not recall her voice ever carrying such a tremolo as she heard the stream of urine. "Excited, lover? I'll bet you are," she breathed, shuddering in delight, daring to touch the monstrous ivory tusk behind his snout. He looked at her in bold curiosity, his grunting now insistent, and nuzzled her between her legs.
She took off her shirt quickly, ripped the brassiere away, whispering to this impossibly potent lust object in a way that approached prayer. He ceased his nuzzling to let her strip the corduroys away and she had to sit on the bed to accomplish it. She tried to part her oleaginous thighs for him, peeking to see if the devil's penis could rival a pony. But unlike some courting animals, the boar rarely unsheaths before the moment of mounting. Ba'al paused to glance at the object that flashed multihued splinters of light from between her breasts, sniffed at it, and found his head awhirl with the mating command. He placed one forehoof on the bed and rooted under her side to turn her over.
"Ah, so that's it," she teased. Why expect a boar to mount her face-to-face when they probably did it dog-fashion? She rolled over, found herself lifted by a bristly snout between her legs, and then she saw the incredible, endless unsheathment from under his belly. In that instant she scrambled to regain her sanity.
"Ohh, no you don't!" She frog-leapt to the head of the bed, writhing onto hands and knees, facing the great head that nudged and grunted in a demand she understood only too well. But she had erred horrendously in her expectation; this legendary brute carried a schlong like a barber pole! There was simply no question about it, she was far too puny to accept a partner as prodigiously endowed as this. In a clarity that arrived too late she' knew that she had teased this minister of hell into expecting a great favor from her.
His grunts were louder now, his muzzle open in a satanic grin with grindings of teeth and copious foam dripping from his jaws in accompaniment. Again he tried to roll her over.
The bedframe splintered, dropping Eve so that she rolled almost under the beast. She reached up to grasp for a handhold, found that the upswept tusk kept a razor edge, bleated as she saw tendons bared in the palm of her hand. She wondered why it was not bleeding more.
Ba'al smelled blood, fear, and pheromone, stamped in impatience, nuzzled against the flaccid body of the sow-person. Her cries were not screams, not yet, but they were an irritant, and anger began to smoke in his red-rimmed eyes.
Eve saw and recognized the glare. In her extremity of terror she thought of a gift that any sane man would have preferred to her body. "Look, look," she babbled, unlatching the clasp at her neck. "I offer this in — in my place." She reclasped the chain, seeing that it would not reach around the vast pulsating throat, and then she held it aloft in sacrifice.
Ba'al saw the pretty bauble and her blood that smeared it; snuffled the acorn-sized yield chamber and wondered if its message was a lie; and finally he decided that the scent did not emanate from the screaming, praying person, and that he had somehow been cheated.
He might have acted differently had he perceived that Eve, eyes rolled up until only the whites stared blindly from their sockets, was praying directly to him.
CHAPTER 52
Chabrier adjusted the image intensifier and wondered where this madman had sprung from, an intruder who wore no uniform but carried a handgun in an armpit holster outside his coverall. The stranger seemed bent on arranging tons of desiccant in a simple geometric pattern on the floor of the synthesizer rotunda. Could Mills have sent him? But mon Dieu, for what? And could Chabrier afford to simply stroll into the rotunda and ask him? Not while the man — all youth and spring steel, to watch him move — carried that weapon.
It would not be wise to alert his Chinese staff. Only one of them would be any good in a rough-and-tumble, and Chabrier did not want anyone to know of this security breach. If several men converged on the stranger it would only make him more likely to kill them all. Chabrier's schedule would slip and his friends would suffer. But without weapons, how could he disarm the man? None of Chabrier's drugs had enough potency to stop a man immediately without a killing overdose. He wanted to ask questions of that prowler…
Chabrier's fingers instructed the elevator to override any signals to the bottom level. There was no internal stairwell, thanks to the paranoia of Boren Mills. The intruder was now Chabrier's prisoner unless he could defeat the elevator doors and climb the sheer wall or the cables. Chabrier was nothing if not a gamesman; knew he would not be the young man's physical equal in combat. But he did have advantages; he knew his own turf and how to use it. He knew, for example, that the automatic sliding doors of the elevator were virtually noiseless. He knew how to cut power to lights inside the elevator or in any given passage in the lab. And he knew that, in common with hospitals and other limited-access buildings, the elevator had doors on two facing sides. With both sets of doors open, the elevator was simply a short passage through which Chabrier could move from his apartment into the rotunda with the prowler.