COPYRIGHT VIOLATION

   I was singing along with John Lennon when she crowned me from behind: that's
how the rape began.
   I don't often sing along with jukeboxes; a fellow like me can get hurt that way. It's
not just that I can't carry a tune. I seem to have one of those faces that stevedores
and bikers and truck-ers—and even the odd minister in his cups—love to punch,
just on general principles, I guess, so I tend to avoid drawing attention to myself
when I'm in a bar.
   No, I'll be more honest than that. I can be honest, you see—because it's my
choice. I'll metaphorically strip myself for you, and then you'll see that it wasn't
because she raped my body that I wanted to kill her, or even my mind, but because
she raped my soul.
   So, being honest: it isn't just for fear of getting punched that I make myself
inconspicu-ous in bars. Contrary to what you may have heard, there aren't that many
real bullies in the world; most men looking for a fight will leave me alone, the way a
hunter with an elephant gun will walk past a gerbil. What I'm really avoiding when I
make myself inconspicuous is pity.
   I mean, look at me. Most of the people who ever have, failed to see me at all—the
eye tends to subtract me—but those who do notice usu-ally feel sorry for me. My
chin and my Adam's apple are like twin brothers in bunk beds. I got this nose. My
dad used to say that my ears made me look like a taxicab coming down the street
with the doors open. My glasses weigh more than my shoes, and my shoes weigh
more than the rest of me.
   I mean, I'll bet you think a prostitute will take anybody, that any man with enough
money can get laid. It may be true. I've never had enough money. Oh, once I got a
woman to agree, for three times the going rate ... but the way she went about it, I just
couldn't do it—to her total lack of surprise. I've never really given up hope since, in
my adolescence, I first heard the term "mercy hump"—but so far, I haven't found
that much mercy in the world.
   So when the jukebox clicked, and John Lennon began to tell me that he was a
loser, I just naturally chimed in on the second, "I'm a l-o-o-oser". And felt something
circular and weighty being pressed down over my head—and heard the most
beautiful voice in the world, right behind my ear, sing the next line of the song—and
spun quickly around and saw her.
   Oh my, it hurt to look at her. You're a nor-mal man, friend, no doubt you've won
some and lost some but didn't you ever see one that you just knew on sight you'd
trade your home and wife and children and hope of immortality and twenty years of
your mortal life for ten minutes in bed with—and knew just as clearly that you'd
never ever get her, even at that price? God, it's a sweet pain, that is, and I know a lot
more about it than you do. Every man has in his mind an ideal of the Perfectly
Beautiful Woman—she was better looking than that, and better dressed.
   "Forgive me, sir," she said.
   I guess I should remember that those were the fast words she said to me—if you
don't count the song lyric. At the time I remember think-ing that I was prepared to
forgive her anything whatsoever. It shows you how wrong you can be.
   To my gratified surprise, my voice worked. "Forgive you?"
   "I just couldn't help myself."
   With an effort I tore my attention from a close examination of her parts and
perimeters, and tried to imagine why she could possibly feel a need to apologize to
me. Oh yes—she had put something heavy on my head. I felt it with my fingertips. It
felt like a crown. Reluctantly I took my eyes away from her and looked in the mir-ror
behind the bar.
   Yep, that was a crown on my head, all right. A simple, inch-wide band of gold
around my forehead, elaborately chased but otherwise unadorned. It was so heavy, it
had to be real gold or gilded lead.
   Alongside the twin miracles of her existence and the fact that she was speaking to
me (and calling me "sir"!), nothing was strange. "That's perfectly all right," I said,
quite as though pre-ternaturally beautiful women put thousands of dollars worth of
gold on my brow every third Thursday, and I were becoming resigned to it. System
crash of the brain.
   She did something with her face that I don't have a word for. Deep in the shielded
core of my heart, graphite rods slid up out of the fuel mass, and the pile temperature
began climbing toward meltdown point. "It was unforgivable of me to intrude upon
your privacy."
   She had a faint, indefinable accent; I guessed Middle European of some kind. She
was ... well, I'd say she was beaming at me, but you'd think I only meant she was
smiling. I mean she was beaming at me, the way an airport beams at an approaching
plane to guide it. I realized with a start that she was looking at me just exactly the
same way I was looking at her. Captivated, wistful, yearning—no, outright
hun-gering and thirsting. I'd seen the look before, in movies starring Marilyn
Chambers.
   I ask you to believe that I am not a complete idiot. My first thought was that it had
to be a mistake. But the light in the bar wasn't bad enough. So my second thought
was that it had to be a trick, a trap of some kind.
   That was absolutely fine with me. I tried to visualize the worst possible outcome.
Say that, in exchange for being allowed to touch her, to put my hand somewhere on
her skin—her shoulder, say—I were to be beaten, robbed and killed. Okay, fair
enough; no problem there. A weird little phrase ran through my head: I'll be her
sucker if she'll be my succor. (I seem now to hear a phantom Kingfish saying, "Boy,
you is de suckee.") Male black widow spiders obvi-ously think they have a good
deal going for them.
   "It's uncanny," she repeated, and touched my hand. With hers.
   "It certainly is," I said, referring to the aston-ishing discovery that knuckles can be
erogenous zones.
   "Would you mind standing up, sir?"
   That kicked off an ambiguous reaction. If I stood up, the bulge in my trousers
would become visible. Even more embarrassing, it might not become visible
enough. Conflicting imperatives paralyzed me.
   "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm being rude again. It's just that I dreamt about you last
night. It was a very pleasant dream."
   "I've dreamed about you all my life," I said, "and it has always been pleasant.
You're very beautiful." A happy feeling was growing in me. First, because I had
finally managed to say something intelligent and gallant. And second, because she
had just named a barely plausible reason why a woman like her could be interested in
a guy like me.
   I mean, you have to understand that my father always insisted I wasn't his—until
my sixteenth birthday, when he gave up and apologized to my mother. "It has to be
some kind of mutation," he admitted. "You would never have cheated on me with
someone who looked like that."
   But anything can happen in a dream. Lord, who knows better than I? For the first
time I was willing to—tentatively—believe that her obvious attraction signals might
just be genuine. The possibilities were staggering.
   "My mother was," she answered, dimpling, "the most beautiful Queen that
Ragovia ever had."
   "You're a princess." Well, of course. Dream logic.
   "Only by courtesy. I'll never be queen—Ragovia became a democracy a few
years ago."
   "I'm terribly sorry to hear that."
   "Oh, it was a bloodless coup. A telegram to our summer place in Barbados, and
that was essentially it. Father moped for a week."
   "Well, naturally."
   "I can't get over how much you look like the man in my dream. He was wearing
Father's crown. That's why I just had to put it on your head—to see if the
resemblance could possibly be as complete as it seemed."
   I threw caution to the winds and stood up. "And is it?"
   Her eyes went down and then up me. On the way down they paused just where I
had hoped/feared they would. When her eyes got back up to mine, she was smiling.
"The resemblance is exact."
   "Princess—uh—"
   "Oh, forgive me again. My name is Marga."
   "My name is Fleming, Princess Marga."
   "Please, Marga alone is sufficient." And without the slightest hesitation or change
of voice or manner, she went on, "Fleming, do you know of some quiet, private
place nearby where we could be alone together?"
   A man next to me made an odd swallowing sound. I dug a finger into my ear.
"Too much noise in here. I could have sworn that you just asked me . . . " I could
not repeat what I thought I had heard.
   "I asked you if you have a place where we can be alone together. As we were in
my dream last night."
   I drew in a deep breath, and then could not remember what to do with it. "Why?"
I croaked.
   "So that I can screw you into a coma."
   Exhale. That was what you did with deep breaths. No, too late now: I was
paralyzed. That breath was going to have to last me the rest of my life.
   "—" I said.
   "If you have no place near," she went on, "we could find an alley. Or we could
lock ourselves in the toilet here. But I am mad with lust for you and must have you
as soon as possible."
    People had been surreptitiously watching ever since Marga had sat down next to
me, and now there were two small, musical explosions as the customers on either
side of us dropped their drinks.
    I decided that, while this was a splendid moment to die, even better ones might lie
in the future; with an effort I got my breathing reflex started again.
    "The feeling is mutual. That is, I hope it will be. That is—yes, I have a place near
here."
    "Let's hurry! In my dream we were won-derful together!"
    A lot of people were watching now. I glanced around as I took her hand, the way
I've seen it done in movies, and nothing in my life had ever tasted as good as the
sight of all those gaping faces.
    Understand, I knew perfectly well that something was going to go wrong. I would
never get her to my place, or she'd change her mind, or I wouldn't get it up, or I
wouldn't get it in, or I'd get in and it'd be disappointing, or she'd have AIDS, or a
bonebreaker boyfriend—the exact nature of the doom was as yet unknown, but I
knew in my heart that something was going to go wrong. (And of course, I was
mistaken about that.) But I didn't care. The thrill of seeing all those stunned faces
watching her leave with me, rubbing up against me like a cat who's just heard the can
opener, was—I firmly believed—worth any disappointment. (And you know,
perhaps I was nearly right about that.) As we reached the door, she opened it for me
with her left hand, and her right hand settled firmly and unmistakably on my ass to
guide me out into the night. There was an audible collective gasp from behind us.
    Once we were on the street I flung up my arm to hail a cab. Cabs never stop for
me, even when I wave large bills at them. I was operating on dream logic.
    And a cab pulled up with a squeal of brakes, and the cabbie jumped out and
opened the door for us.
    It was her, of course, not me. I knew just how the cabbie felt. I could sense his
astonishment that she was with me, and I agreed with him, and gave him a smile that
tried to say, "It's a dream, pal, go with it. For God's sake, go with it!"
    When he got back behind the wheel, he adjusted the rearview mirror and I met his
baffled gaze. I gave my address, Marga added "—and hurry!" in a voice thick with
lust, and his eyes widened even further. We started up with a roar and a lurch, and
the moment we were up to speed she opened my fly.
    The cab seemed to lock its brakes on ice, spin wildly and smash into a gasoline
truck. She made a small sound of contentment and continued what she was doing.
The phantom flames roared ...
    The cabdriver was so profoundly shocked he was actually driving at a safe legal
speed, and took us to my place by the shortest, most direct route. Marga appeared
to be totally engrossed in what she was doing, and God knows I was, but she
sensed when we were approaching our destination somehow, and had me zipped
back up as the cab came to a halt. She paid the driver before he or I could think of
it. I had just enough presence of mind to hold the door for her as she got out. A
group of leathered teens were monopolizing the stoop of my brownstone, as usual.
They turned to brown stone at the sight of us, and did not even turn to watch as we
walked up past them and into the building.
    As the elevator door closed behind us, she shut off the light, leaned back against
the wall and pulled me against her. She tucked my face against her neck and hugged
me so tightly, with both arms and one leg, that I could move only a single muscle.
But she seemed to be under no such constraint: she rippled, in several directions at
once, and if I lived one floor higher I'd have disgraced myself. But the elevator door
slid back and light burst in on us, and reluctantly she released me.
    Standing outside the elevator, waiting to board, was Hal Grimsby, the slickest
stud in my build-ing, a jock type who had been bringing home a different girl every
night for the four years I'd been living there, each girl prettier than the last. He was
making no move to get on the eleva-tor. You could have put one of his handballs
into his mouth without touching his lips.
    Marga straightarmed him out of the way and led me past him. "Hurry, darling,"
she said clearly. "I'm dripping."
    Behind us, Hal made a faint gargling sound. The elevator closed and left without
him.
    And still it wasn't perfect yet. As we approached my apartment, the door across
the hall opened and Mary Zanfardino stepped out.
    For the past four years, Mary Zanfardino had been the leading lady in an endless
series of fantasies much like the one I was now living—save that I didn't have this
good an imagination. I had never succeeded in starting a conversation with her, but I
knew that she was perfectly aware of my attraction to her, and deeply revolted by it.
Now she was thunderstruck. I'd never seen pupils that large.
    I turned to look at Marga. I found the sight of her as devastating as everyone else
did. Her hair was disheveled. Her nipples were prominent beneath her silk dress. She
smelled like Tina Turner's panties after a concert. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, and
her smile would have looked just like the Mona Lisa's except for the smeared lipstick
...
    I turned back to Mary, former girl of my dreams. She looked like a mud
simulacrum of a woman, fashioned by a primitive and dressed by a small child.
    This was no time for introductions. I nod-ded curtly to Mary, brushed past her,
and unlocked my door. As Marga came toward me (utterly ignoring Mary) she was
unbuttoning her dress, and before I could get the door closed behind me she was
out of it entirely. I caught one last flash-glimpse of Mary that made me want to
giggle, but I knew intuitively that if I started I might never stop, and this once in my
life I did not want to remind myself of Jerry Lewis. Then the latch slid home and
Marga and I were alone. I knew that my bedroom was a mess, but I also knew we
were not going to get that far.
    I can see it in my mind, even now, but I can't describe it. Just say that, even
displayed to the best possible advantage—that is, even if Marga were wearing
it—there is nothing in the Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue that could ever look
half as lovely, as provocative, as inflam-matory, as what Marga was wearing under
that dress. Enchanted elves had made it. My mouth had gone drier than a user's
manual, and I knew why: some helpful internal resource-dispatcher was rerouting all
the moisture in my body to where it was most needed.
    "Which one of us shall undress you, my king?" she asked.
    We took turns. She left the crown on my head and I didn't argue.
  *****

   No, I'm not going to cheat you; that was not a discreet fade to black. Those
asterisks are there because what she and I did deserves to be set off by itself. It
merits special ceremony.
   I will admit that part of me wants to take refuge in those asterisks, to leave the
lurid details in the limbo which is symbolized by the six-pointed star. I never learned
to enjoy locker-room boasting; it never came up, so to speak. But if I don't tell you
just how it was, you'll never understand how I felt afterward.
   Besides, it won't be a real invasion of my privacy. I mean, it's only me telling
you, and telling you my version of things, and only the parts that can be fit into
words at that. Not even all of them. I'm trying to make the point that what she did to
me was worse than anything I could do to myself.
   So you want to know, was it good, eh friend?

  *****

   As I've said, I knew going in that it would be a fiasco of some kind; we'd be
interrupted, or I'd Fail To Perform and nothing would happen. Probably that's what
you're expecting, and I can't blame you.
   But then to my vast astonishment our clothes seemed to melt away and we were
naked and touching and she was warm and slippery and it was just sort of
happening. No: it was not sort of anything. It was most emphatically happen-ing.
   And happening.

    The Physical Aspect:
    I have no frame of reference except for what I've read, and the accounts all
conflict. You tell me: is it normal for a twenty-five-year-old male losing his virginity
to experience eight orgasms in four hours, without ever completely losing the original
erection? Does a woman's tenth orgasm in half an hour usually trigger an hour-long
continuous climax? I'd always assumed those Penthouse letters were fantasy. And is
it always that noisy? And wet? And glorious?
    For the record, we did everything I've ever heard of that can be done without
additional cast or esoteric equipment and doesn't involve former food, former
people, or animals. We did make use, from time to time, of candles, neckties,
scarves, shoelaces, a little water-color paintbrush, her hairbrush, butter, whipped
cream, strawberry jam, Johnson's Baby Oil, my Swedish hand vibrator, a fascinating
bead necklace she had, miscellaneous other common household items, and every
molecule of flesh that was exposed to the air or could be located with strenuous
search.

  The Mental Aspect:
  So that's what it's like to feel virile! Fas-cinating. Heady. As sweet as it's cracked
up to be. Potentially addictive. Primitively stirring. Part of me wanted to go punch
some son of a bitch—in a little while ...
   Part of me wanted to dedicate my remaining life to thanking her, even
though—perhaps because—she was making it clear that she wanted no more thanks
than she was getting. Hyperalert for pretense as only a virgin can be, I was cer-tain I
was genuinely pleasing her.
   We knew each other, in more than the purely Biblical sense. At least, I seemed to
come to know her more intimately, more quickly, than I have ever known anyone,
not excepting my parents, and she, being more experienced than I, surely learned
more than I did. She learned things about me that no one else had ever cared to,
things that I didn't know. My grandmother's heirloom rocking chair collapsed under
us and we howled with laughter together.
   We touched each other.

   The Spiritual Aspect:
   Oh my God I'm not alone anymore! Even if I never see her again after tonight,
I'm not alone anymore. Trillions of my cells, stamped with my identity, have left my
shores and established colonies in another being—and it doesn't even matter if all
the colonies end up as dead as Jamestown or Jonestown: I'm not alone anymore!
This isn't another test shot, another dummy run targeted for a handful of Kleenex,
this is a genuine launch. My sperm have achieved spaceflight. God, they cry,
dying on Mars, we made it!
   Thank you, God, for this crazy stranger, for granting me these memories to
cherish; I never really believed in You before ...

   And inevitably there was an ending. I think that in my last round I finally lost the
last shred of fear—the subconscious suspicion that any minute I was going to wake
up from a coma or a jealous husband was going to kick in the door or some other
slapstick disaster would spoil it—and was able to fully relax and enjoy myself. To
lose myself, to throw myself away, to expand to the size of the universe and trust
that there would still be someone to be when I recon-densed.
   Perhaps, indeed, I became someone else in that timeless time—or perhaps it was
the glo-rious hours that led up to it which worked some kind of change on me,
developing, or maybe only tapping, wells of unsuspected strength.
   Because I'm fairly sure the man I had been when I'd walked into that apartment
would have concluded such stupifying carnal excess with a deep sleep of hours, if
not days ...
   Whereas I returned to something resembling normal consciousness, to a vastly
changed but basically recognizable reality, only a few min-utes after the last
generation ship left the launch pad. I waited until my breathing slowed, and lifted
myself up onto an elbow which was missing considerable skin, and said, "Tell me
about yourself, Marga; what do you do with your life?"
   Something infinitely subtle changed in her face, and even without my glasses I
sensed she was unhappy with the question. The man I had been would have sprained
his tongue changing the subject. I waited, forcing her to make some reply, and the
wait was just long enough for me to notice that the silly crown she had insisted I
leave on was heavy enough to strain my neck; I reached up to remove it.
   "Don't!" she blurted. "It's still saving—"
   There was no pause at all; I'm breaking the sentence only to indicate a barely
perceptible alteration in the tone of her voice as she fin-ished, "—the sweat from
running into your eyes, my love."
   A moment before I'd have been prepared to cut my throat if she wished it. But she
herself had recently and repeatedly wakened in me the primitive male essence, the
killer-ape ancestry I had always thought to be purely theoretical. The old ape is
paranoid.
   I removed the crown.
   "Darling," she said, her lighthearted tone per-fectly plausible, "don't spoil it, now.
You look so handsome with it on—come, let me put it back on and I'll tell you
anything about me you want to know. How I lost my virginity, perhaps...?"
   As she reached coyly for it I pulled it away and sat up. "Just a second, Marga." I
switched on the table lamp—we were on the floor at the time—and turned
fractionally away from her to study the crown. She made a grab for my elbow,
aborted it quickly.
   The light was just a little better than it had been in the bar. I held the crown close
to my eyes, tilted it so the light picked out a portion of its interior surface in high
relief. Most of the intricate engraving was unfamiliar to me, seemingly purely artistic
in design, like the elaborate chasings on the outer surface, but a portion of it I
recognized. Rotating the crown slightly I made out another such portion,
extra-polated a total of three. It reminded me of a mouse I knew . . .
   "I was afraid the sweat might be tarnishing the gold. It is pure gold, isn't it?"
   "Yes, Fleming, but it's sealed against corrosion. Please put it back on? To please
me?" She sat up beside me and tugged playfully at one of my nipples.
   I pondered for a half second. "Anything to please you, Marga." I swept back my
damp hair and put the crown back on my head, allowed her to adjust its position
slightly. "Now if you'll excuse me for just one second, my ... bladder is bursting."
   I got up and padded toward the bathroom. Everybody has some cliche they use:
my back teeth are floating, or, my eyes are turning yel-low, or, my cup runneth over.
My own custom-ary euphemism is, "my buffer needs purging," and I was glad I had
caught myself. It might have warned her.
   I have never been a decisive, quick-thinking quick-responding kind of guy. It's
easy to play practical jokes on me; I'm slow to catch on and even slower—days
slower, usually—to figure out what to do about it. Maybe a dozen times in my life
I've had one of those flashes of satori, those moments of insight in which a whole,
long logic chain appears at once before the mind's eye—and each time it came in my
work rather than my social life.
   So maybe it helped that this one was work-related. Maybe it helped that I had just
had the best confidence boosting of my life. Maybe there is a kind of preternatural
clarity of thought that comes with total physical satisfaction ... and how in Hell
would I know?
   It just seemed so simple, so obvious. So ines-capable—
   "Don't bang your elbow on that chair behind you, darling," I called back over my
shoulder, and as she turned to look I bent down.
   Just as I had guessed, the time machine was in her purse. It wasn't hard to
recognize. It looked like a bulky watch with no band. I was interested to find that
there was a weapon along with it, an unfamiliar but unmistakable handgun. I spun
and leaped, whipping my head to shake off the crown, and the distance was short;
as she was turning back toward me I cannoned into her and we went over in a heap,
my cheek against hers and my arms tight around her. For perhaps a second she
mistook it for clumsy erotic play, and that was enough time in the lamplight for me to
read the little word Qun and thumbnail the tiny recessed button which it labeled on
her "watch."
   The light changed drastically, became labor-atory bright. Appropriate, as we were
now in a laboratory.
   So was an astonished man in a white smock of odd design, and a shorter,
weasel-faced man in red high heels, pink patterned stockings, and a loudly-clashing
maroon kilt. Marga and I looked down on them slightly from a railing-encircled
platform whose height must have been calibrated to a high degree of precision.
   Weasel-face was the loudest of the pair in more ways than one, and slowest on
the uptake; as the other man gaped, he was booming cheer-ily, "Welcome back,
pixel, did you get a good—crash, Marga! What did you bring the mark back for?"
His face curled reflexively on itself. "The frotter wants points, eh?"
   “Jimby, help!" Marga screamed, and he step-ped back a pace, high heels
clattering on the lab floor. She tried to break my embrace, and should have
succeeded, but now I was as strong as a normal roan. I not only held her, I got my
thumbnail back on that button.
   The lights dimmed again suddenly, and my rug prickled once again on my bare
skin. I let her go and rolled convulsively clear, sprang to my feet clutching her time
machine. She started to rise too. Halfway up she saw her gun in my other hand, and
sank back down. I must have been holding it correctly.
   I knew that if I said anything my voice would crack, so I waited until I was sure I
had con-trol.
   "Did you ever think to wonder," I asked at last, "what a guy like me would do for
a living?"
   "Do you want me to guess?" she asked sul-lenly. "All right. A janitor? An
accountant? A fast-food cook? A painter? A writer?"
   I nodded. "You wouldn't know, would you? This is too good an apartment for
any of those. But that aside, even in those professions you have to be ... more
impressive-looking than I am."
   "I can believe it," she said. "All right, surprise me."
   "I write software, for a mouse-driven com-puter called the Macintosh.
Independents can't make a lot at it, but no one ever has to see your face."
   "Frot," she said. It was some kind of obscenity where she came from.
   "You may have heard of hackers. A vanguard subculture of today, like the
beatniks and the hippies of earlier days. Just like with them, some expressions that
will be common idiom in another ten or twenty years are familiar to me now. When
you said the word `save,' I heard it the way you would."
   "Frot," she said again, a little more forcefully.
   "Yeah. As in `saving the changes to disk.' The inside of that crown thing looks a
lot like the ball-cavity of the mouse on my Mac, two little phototransistors and a
reference point. Yours wouldn't be optical, though, would they? Other than that, the
analogy is pretty good: you ...'turn the head around,' and the sensors translate it into
data. That's ROM circuitry around the sensors, sure as hell. The rest of the crown is
storage space, right? Hell's own data capac-ity, from the size.
    "So the rest was logic. The only thing you could possibly be recording from my
head that required that kind of byte room was ... my memories, my thoughts. My
feelings. That told me you had to be from the future: even the Japanese don't have
brain interface yet. You had to have a way to get back to your own time, and I was
certain you were not wearing it, externally or internally. But you wouldn't go far from
it, so it had to be in the purse. The only thing I don't understand is why your
brain-robbing Peeping ROM takes so infer-nally long to write the data."
    She looked up at me. There was none of the new respect in her eyes that I had
earned. "Fool. We cannot get at short-term memory; Heisen-berg effect. If we could
we'd have effective telepathy, wouldn't we?"
    I was feeling telepathic. I sensed her think-ing about trying to take the time
machine from me; with great pleasure I felt her decide against it. "And
mind-control," I agreed. "I'd never have reached the purse. You have to wait for the
memories to seep from short-term to long-term storage—and I came out of the fog
too soon." I grinned. Taking off that crown must have been like yanking a disk out
of the drive while it's spinning, huh?"
    Her eyes flashed. "I could have killed you. After all I did for you—"
    Give me this much credit. I did not kill her then.
    When I had myself back in control, I spoke very softly. "Recorded memories
must have beat out most other artforms and recreations. I'll bet the pornography is
sensational by my standards. But even my primitive pornography has taught me
something interesting, and you confirmed it earlier tonight: there is a finite limit to
the possibilities. There are only so many ways to do it for the camera: at some point
even you people must get jaded. So you'll pay extra for the can-did-camera kick, for
the memories of someone who doesn't know you're watching, somebody with no
copy protection on his head.
    "More: for recordings of someone who's given up all hope of ecstasy, falling
suddenly into the middle of his wildest wet dreams. For record-ings of the ending of
despair, the ending of a solitude such as none of you must ever have known.
Heightened dramatic effect. Casanova may be happy, skillfully plundering his
hundredth willing wench, but not a fraction as happy as I was tonight. Your world
must not have pain like mine any more—you had to come back here to find it."
    I shifted my weight, and my foot touched something cold. I glanced down and
saw the crown.
    Suddenly I was roaring in a voice I had never known I had. "Do you know that
the moment a pain is fast relieved is the moment you learn how large it truly was?
Agony is defined by relief! I learned tonight just what a horrible joke my life has been
and will be and I didn't even mind! I was grateful to you for calibrating my misery!
For showing me exactly what I'd been missing!"
    I crouched and came up with my ultimate wet dream in my fist. I was dimly
astonished to realize that I was not crying. Rage had always made me cry. "This is
solid gold you've got here," I said, brandishing the crown. "You're very good at
what you do. Not hard, I suppose, when you can rent—or more likely, copy—all the
tricks there are."
   She scowled.
   I looked at it for a while. "Can this thing play back by itself," I asked huskily, "or
do you need other equipment?"
   She looked me in the eye. For the first time since I'd gotten up to pee, a smile
touched the corners of her mouth. "There's a thumbnail toggle inside. Once to stop,
twice to rewind, three times to play back. You'll get the whole thing in six seconds of
realtime."
   "Slick."
   I tore my eyes from the crown, and made a small gasping sound. In the soft
lamplight, with-out my glasses, her naked body was the most beautiful thing I had
ever seen. Even more beautiful, perhaps, than that same body had been four hours
ago. She did that thing that women have been able to do since Eve. There are no
discernible gross muscle movements, but the whole body seems to rearrange itself . .
. to beckon to you, somehow.
   I didn't want to ask. The words were torn out of me. "It was all faked, wasn't it,
Marga?"
   "In the sense that all performance art is faked."
   A graceful out. I wouldn't take it. "You know what I mean. As the cliche goes ...
was it good for you, too?"
   I saw a flicker of pity in her eyes, I know that one real well, and I saw it die in the
instant it was born. She knew I couldn't be conned any more. She glanced down
briefly to my groin, and back up. "You notice I didn't wear a crown myself," she
muttered.
   Again I didn't kill her. I didn't do anything at all, as far as I know. I'm sure I
stopped breathing. I remember hearing the fan in the next room in the sudden
silence. How long did I stare at her in the stillness, feeling the metal crown cool
against one palm, the time machine and gun faintly warm against the other? My
medulla licked in finally, and I sucked in a deep breath.
   And she said, clear as a bell and twice as pretty, "But you were sweet, and you're
taking it like a man. All right: nine percent of the net, my final offer. Jimby will be
furious—that's a point over the going rate."
   In that instant I became, not merely a func-tional male animal, but a man.
   I put the time machine gently down on the couch. "All right," I said, "you got me
good. I guess the joke's on me. And as long as you're prepared to give me a whore's
usual cut, I guess I really have no kick coming, have I? Oh, I admit, I'm tempted to
give you a good spanking—"
   Her eyes showed genuine interest for the first time.
   "—but why give you more good material for free? Tell you what: make my end
ten percent why should I pay an agent's commission?—and you can have your time
machine and gun and crown back."
   She relaxed. "Fleming, you're a sport."
   "Damn right." I smiled. "A contact sport, as clumsy and laughable as professional
wrestling. But at least I'm well-paid."
   And I gave her back her time machine and gun and crown, and she went back
home to her boss Jimby. I'm still waiting to hear back from her, but I assume the
check is in the mail.
   Perhaps the delay has something to do with what I did before I gave her back her
things. While I still held the gun trained on her lovely face, I took that crown and
crushed it flat in my hands, and ripped it into pieces, and hammered the pieces into
gold leaves with a ball-peen hammer, and made multiple passes over each leaf with
my tape-head demagnetizer, and scrubbed them with steel wool, and heated them
just to melting point with a blowtorch, and I really had had to pee for quite some
time so I cooled the pieces the way they used to temper swords, and finally I
wrapped the damp and sizzling shards up in her dress and handed her the whole
bundle with my compliments—
   --yes, now that I come to think of it, I do seem to recall a rather unhappy
expression on her face as she winked out of existence for the last time.
   I don't see why. I let her live ...

   There was a whole lot of tedious low com-edy then, which lasted several days.
Too many people had the vivid memory of Marga coming home with me indelibly
engraved on their brains, in persuasive detail; too many neighbors had heard our
frenzied athletics and shouted quar-rel and the sound of repeated hammering; no one
had seen her leave. No clothing or ID was found. I had not cleaned up the suggestive
clut-ter in the apartrnent. I flatly refused to hear any questions whatsoever
concerning her, let alone answer them. I declined a lawyer. I ignored the third degree
treatment, the good cop/bad cop and the threats and all that.
   What kept it from mattering was that they lacked a corpse and they lacked a
missing person from which to infer one. All witnesses were unanimous and emphatic
in describing the kind of woman who could not conceivably disappear from the
world (by any means known) without being missed. There was no Marga missing.
The bartender and two patrons remembered the name "Ragovia," and of course
there is no such country. The only people who were certain where she had gone
had, in all likelihood, not been born yet. The police, growing more indifferent as they
sensed a conviction receding out of probability, finally stopped bothering me.
   Mary Zanfardino knocked on my door a few days after that, and a few days later
she became my girlfriend. She has never once asked me about Marga, and she has
no complaints about my Iovemaking, and all things considered we are reasonably
happy. One of these days perhaps we'll come to know each other so well that we'll
be inside each other's skull—and since she'll be there by invitation, I don't plan to
charge her.
   I know exactly how happy we are, and exactly how happy we are not. And she
and I are the only persons anywhere in space and time who know that ... and that
suits me fine.