Cities of the Red Night

' 'Vot's he gonna do?'

' 'He's going to focus.'

' 'Vot? Both of us?'

'Rather good, don't you think, sir? Looking at me with this smile, sir.' He leers at the doctor and squirms in his chair. 'And his body, sir, is a translucent red haze. I got that word out of a navy bulletin on poison fish. Some of them is translucents. You can see all their guts, sir.' He looked pointedly at the doctor's stomach. 'It's like Jerry vaporize hisself. He just steams right into me feeling and wriggling down into each glittering leg hair, sir.' Jimmy hitches up his pants to show white ankles with red hairs that stir and glitter in the sunlight.

'With little electric prickles, sir, into you know and you know and you knows. Then I am going down very fast in an elevator, you knows the feeling, sir, right here.' He cups his crotch. 'And Jerry is floating down with me. Then silver light pops in my eyes, sir.' He makes a loud popping sound with his mouth. The doctor starts. 'And I shoot off and everything turns red. We call it a red-out, sir.'

The doctor made a personal diagnosis of acute homosexual panic. A colleague said it was psychomotor epilepsy. The Old Man said he didn't care what it was, he didn't want it in the navy. So the Juicy-Fruit twins, as he called them, were up for discharge. Since they had no medical record of epileptic seizures or psychosis prior to enlisting in the navy there was the question of a complete disability pension, and this slowed things down. Then project Simulated Space Conditions got under way and the discharge was shelved.

'What's going on here?' I asked Jimmy Lee.

'Well, we're on Krup's spaceship or so he claims. Anyhoo, he's up there with charts and maps and the crew seems to obey him, most of them at least.'

'What do they look like?'

'Germans mostly. Young punks.'

'Who else is here?'

'All the boys from your scripts: Audrey, Jerry, all the Jims and Johns and Alis and Kikis and Strobe, Kelley, and Dahlfar. One foot in a navy mess and the other on some kooky spaceship. You see, there is a pretense this is just a naval station and you never know which is the pretense: spaceship or navy. One minute you are getting popped in Tamaghis, the next you're on KP or swabbing the deck. They got shore patrols out in Tamaghis. Whole area is off limits. And pro stations. And I've got a rundown on Krup. He's an intergalactically known spaceship swindler. You set out for the Big Dipper and wind up stranded in Vladivosotok. And he's a heavy metal junk runner, known as Opium Jones in the trade.'

I'd seen metal junk addicts. Withdrawal is like acute radiation sickness. We sure are in good hands.

'Who's that joker with the doctor?'

'Oh he's one of the old navy set.... The doctor will be back any minute. I have to take a sperm specimen. They run tests on it....'

I start to get a hard-on at the prospect of coming in another body. The doctor is looking down at me.

'How do you feel, young guy?'

'Horny, Doc.'

'That always happens with a vertebral fracture like yours.'

He folds the sheet down to my knees. I can it float up and throb. A throbbing in my neck sends electric tingles down to my crotch. Jimmy sits down with a beaker and runs his fingers lightly up and down my new cock and I go off in a blaze of silver light. Jimmy's face gets black around the edges and I go out for a few seconds. When I come around, the doctor is gone.

'He's a creep and