Nikki Zinder sat in her room on New Pompeii. She was eating and daydreaming as usual, when, suddenly, it seemed that a fog simply disappeared from her mind, and she began thinking with crystal clarity.
She looked around the room, cluttered with the remains of a long habitation, as if she were seeing it for the first time. She shook her head and tried to reason out what had happened.
She felt as if she were coming down from some sort of drug high. She remembered going to sleep, then she remembered getting this tremendous crush on Ben, who took her out and handed her to some people who brought her here. She didn’t understand any of it, though, nor could she relate to it. What had happened was dreamlike, as if it had happened to someone else.
She got up from the little table still littered with food and looked down at herself. She could see enormous breasts and, just barely, some sort of bulge below; but she couldn’t see her own feet. With a gasp she went over to a closet mirror and looked at herself.
She felt like crying. She waddled more than walked; her legs were sore from rubbing against each other every time she moved. Her face was rounder than usual, and she had several chins. Her hair was always long, but now it was uncombed, unkempt, and tangled.
And, worst of all, she was hungry.
What’s happened to me? she wondered, then broke down and cried. It eased her panic but did little to relieve the misery she felt.
“I’ve got to get out of here, got to call Daddy,” she murmured aloud, then wondered if even he would still love her as she was now. There was little else to do, though, and she hunted for some clothes. I’m going to need a twelve-person field tent, she thought morosely.
She found her old nightgown, neatly washed and folded, and tried to get it on. It was too tight now, and it didn’t come down nearly far enough. Finally she gave up and thought for a moment. She spied the rumpled sheet on the bed and, with some difficulty, managed to pull it off. Folding and tying it, she managed to make at least a covering. Then she found a paper clip on the writing desk. By unraveling the clip and using it as a pin, she was able to bind the sheet.
She paused at the desk, looking down at a half-finished, multipaged letter. It was her handwriting, all right, but it read like some insane erotic mishmash. She couldn’t believe she’d written it, although she had vague memories of writing others like it.
She walked over to the door and put her ear up to it, listening. There seemed to be no sound, so she pressed the stud and it opened. Beyond was a corridor, lined in some kind of fur, that ran on in one direction past a lot of doors. In the other direction it was only a short way to an elevator door. She rushed to it, tried to summon the elevator, but she could tell from the call strip that it was keyed. Looking around, she discovered some stairs behind what looked like a laundry room, and she started climbing. It was an easy choice—they only went up.
After only two dozen or so steps, she was already panting, feeling dizzy and out of breath. Not only did the extra weight get to her, but she had had no exercise to speak of for—how long? In over eight weeks of constant eating, she had put on over three kilos a week.
Panting, heart beating so hard she could feel it, she started up again. She again felt dizzy, her head ached, and she could hardly go on. Once she was so dizzy that she almost slipped and fell. Looking down, she saw she’d climbed less than a dozen meters. She felt as if she had climbed a tall mountain and realized she couldn’t go on much farther. Finally, one more landing, one more turn, and she saw a door. Gasping, she almost crawled the last few meters.
The door opened, and a rat-faced little man looked down on her with mixed scorn and disgust.
“Well, well, well,” he said. “And where do you think you’re going, baby hippo?”
It took three of them to carry her, exhausted, back to the elevator and down to her room. From their questions and her reactions, they did find that whatever spell she’d been under was now broken. Their docile idiot had somehow become a near-hysterical captive.
The rat-faced man gave her a shot to calm her, and it did help a little. While the sedative was taking hold, he used a wall intercom outside her room to call and report her new status and to get instructions. This didn’t take long, and he returned to the room and looked at her. She was still breathing hard, but she looked at him and pleaded, “Will somebody please tell me where I am and what is going on?”
Rat-face smiled evilly. “You’re the guest of Antor Trelig, High Councillor and Party Chairman of New Outlook, on his private planetoid of New Pompeii. You should feel honored.”
“Honored, hell!” she spat. “This is some scheme to get at my father, isn’t it? I’m a hostage!”
“Bright girl, aren’t you?” the man replied. “Well, yes, you’ve been sort of hypnotized for the past two months, and now we have to deal with you as you are.”
“My father—” she started hesitantly, “he isn’t—isn’t going to…?”
“He’ll be here with his whole staff and everything within a week,” the man replied.
She turned her head. “Oh, no!” she moaned. Then, for a second, she thought about him seeing her—like this.
“I’d rather die than have him see me like this,” she told the man.
He grinned. “That’s all right. He loves ya anyway. Your condition is a byproduct of a drug we gave you as an insurance policy. Normally we just give a measured dose of the sponge, but we had to make sure that nothin’ happened to spoil your mind as long as we need your old man, so we kinda overdid it. ODs affect different people different ways. In your case the stuff makes you eat like a horse. Believe me, better than the other way. Better than some other OD reactions, too, which usually gets you in the sex department somewheres, gets girls all hairy and deep-voiced, sometimes worse.”
She didn’t know what sponge was, but she had the idea that they had addicted her to some kind of drug that would rot her mind if untreated.
“My daddy can cure me,” she told him defiantly.
The rat-faced man shrugged. “Maybe he can. I don’t know. I just work here. But if he can, he’ll do it only because the boss lets him, and, in the meantime, you’ll continue to grow. Don’t worry—some likes ’em big.”
She got upset at that, and at the tone of the remark. “I won’t eat another thing,” she resolved.
“Oh, yes you will,” he replied, clearing out the other two men and setting the door to external operation by key only. “You won’t be able to stop. You’ll beg for food—and we got to keep you happy, don’t we?” He closed the door.
It took her only three minutes to verify that the door wouldn’t open and she was as much a prisoner as ever, only now she knew it.
And then hunger gnawed at her.
She tried to go to sleep, but the hunger wouldn’t let her. It consumed her, triggered by the drug overdose affecting different areas of her brain.
The little man had been right; inside of an hour she was starving, and could think of nothing but food.
The door opened, and a table full of food was pushed in by a person Nikki could only think of as the most beautiful woman she’d ever seen. The serving lady took her mind off the food for a second, first because here was human, not robot service, and second because the woman was so stunning. Then she tore into the food, and the other turned to go, a sad look on her face.
“Wait!” Nikki called. “Tell me—do you work here, or are you a prisoner, too?”
The woman’s face was sad. “We’re all prisoners here,” she replied in a sad, high, lyrical voice. “Even Agil— that’s the one who found you and brought you back. Agil and I—well, we know about sponge ODs and Antor Trelig’s sadism first-hand.”
“He
The tall, beautiful woman shook her head sadly. “No, that’s the least of what goes on in this chamber of horrors. You see,” she concluded, turning slowly at the door, “I am a fully functioning male. And Agil is my sister.”
