Last Gasp

Manhattan Emergency on East Sixty-eighth. Will you tell her what's happening, Pro? I wouldn't like to think of her being trapped there when they blow the whistle.'

'Sure, I'll tell her.'

'If she decides to come with you, can you arrange transportation?'

Prothero nodded. 'There's a convoy of trucks and buses leaving at midnight on Thursday. I'll find her a place if she wants to leave.' He looked old and haggard. 'She'd be wise to, Gavin. One week from today this town will go berserk.'

23

Cy Skrote lay spread-eagled in the warm liquid darkness, the woman kneeling over him, her hair brushing the insides of his thighs. His right hand moved over the soft globular swell of her buttocks to the hot secret place and he both heard and felt her tremulous moan of rapture as his fingers slid deeper, exploring, and she widened herself to his stealthy infiltration. He had never desired a woman so much in his life and had never before received such pleasure from one. It was a fairy tale come true: the beautiful, unattainable princess who falls in love with the shy, bumbling peasant. That's how he'd felt at first--like a gauche young man ill at ease in the presence of an alluring, sensual creature who, quite incredibly, finds him equally attractive and desirable.

Skrote had never rated a second glance from any woman before. To blame was his unprepossessing appearance, his narrow chest, thin arms and legs, and a fair skin that the sun brought out in blotches. Neither was he handsome. His eyes were large and heavily lidded and set close together, separated by a beaked nose that a childhood accident had done nothing to improve.

Knowing he presented a rather feeble figure to the world had made him retire inside himself, obeying a natural human impulse to protect the self from being hurt. He wasn't attractive to the opposite sex and that was that. So the circle had reinforced itself and become vicious: He would make no effort to become what he knew he wasn't, and the result had been a defensive, unsure, introverted thirty-three-year-old with the emotional maturity of a teen-ager.

Then from out of nowhere this marvelous, magical experience had grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and tossed him over the moon, and Cy Skrote was still reeling from it.

She had been at Starbuck for several weeks before they struck up an acquaintance. He'd noticed her of course (there wasn't a man on the base who hadn't), but she'd been so utterly out of reach that he hadn't even fantasized about her, as he often did with desirable women seen at a distance. Skrote didn't even know her name, only that she was one of the scientific observers sent by the Russians as part of the reciprocal inspection pact. They were granted access to the research in Zone 2, while a team of American observers was allowed the same freedom at the USSR research center in Kazakhstan.

Not himself employed in Zone 2, Skrote only chanced upon her in off-duty hours when he and his colleagues went across the lagoon to the clubhouse in the main complex. He wasn't a heavy drinker but liked to sit nursing a weak gin and tonic and watching the spectacular green and purple sunset while the conversation ebbed and flowed around him. Sometimes he might play pool or, if pressed, sit in on a poker game. But that particular evening he happened to be alone (the others had gone off to the squash court) and his thoughts were several thousand miles away in Portland, Maine, where his childhood still existed, it seemed to him, intact, untouched. Nothing could have been further from his mind than what, by a wonderful coincidence, then took place.

It started with a jammed cigarette machine.

Skrote was on his way back from the rest room when he saw the woman thumping and glaring at it with the kind of baffled, impotent rage that human beings reserve for machines that stubbornly refuse to perform the function for which they were designed. Skrote paused in the corridor. He would have carried on if the woman hadn't happened to catch his eye and thrown up her hands in a gesture of defeat. Even then he was reluctant to go to her aid, mainly because he was intimidated by a vision of beauty that seemed to him then, and still did, sheer perfection. She was tall for a woman--in low heels about the same height as he--and Skrote gazed into her green- flecked eyes for a full five seconds, mesmerized, before nervously touching the thinning patch on the crown of his head and performing an awkward shuffling dance of indecision.

Her first words to him were: 'These machines must have been invented by someone with a sadistic sense of humor. Or someone who wishes to destroy Soviet-American relations, don't you think?'

'I'm afraid I don't smoke,' Skrote responded, immediately struck by the irrelevance of the remark. He moved hesitantly forward. 'Have you tried the coin refund?'

She shook her head, dark polished ringlets bouncing against the white sweep of her neck. 'I wanted cigarettes, not my own money.' Her English was faultless, with only the trace of an accent that her low, husky voice made infinitely seductive to Skrote's burning ears.

He yanked the lever and coins clattered into the metal cup. One of the quarters was old and worn smooth, and after exchanging it for one of his own, he reinserted the money and asked her to try again. This time a pack of menthol Kools plopped into the tray. Skrote handed it to her, feeling ridiculously pleased, and she leaned forward and impetuously kissed his cheek. If he'd been teetering on the brink before, Skrote now fell head over heels in love.

They drank and talked the rest of the evening--Skrote doing his fair share without any of his usual blushing, tongue-tied embarrassment. He was quietly amazed at himself. He'd never been so forthcoming, so relaxed, so witty. Natassya laughed at his jokes and became rapt when he spoke of his childhood and thoughtful whenever he ventured an opinion. His confidence grew. It was as if his personality, until now bound tightly in a straitjacket, had been miraculously released, and he experienced a giddy starburst of freedom that was as intoxicating as champagne.

As for Natassya, she staggered him by confessing that she was lonely. She'd been at Starbuck for six weeks, and apart from her Russian colleagues (who anyway she was sick of the sight of), she had no real friends. And as for male company--her wide sensuous mouth was pulled down at the corners--well, they turned out to be either boring scientists without any topics of conversation outside of their specialized fields or service personnel with but a single thought in their tiny grubby minds. Skrote would never believe, Natassya told him, how clumsy and boorish they could be in their sexual advances. One drink, a bit of chat, and they expected her to fall into bed. Not only was it insulting but also extremely immature.

Skrote sympathized totally, almost vehemently, shaking his head at such oafish behavior. Secretly he resolved to be a paragon of all the opposite virtues: polite, caring, interesting, amusing, sophisticated, and, above all, not too pushy.

Maybe he had taken this to extremes, because eight days later, while strolling along the beach in the tropical twilight, Natassya had inquired why he didn't find her physically attractive. She knew he wasn't married or engaged; therefore he could feel no qualms about being unfaithful. Perhaps he simply valued her friendship but lacked any desire for her as a woman?

Skrote was struck dumb. He gaped at her in the mellow golden light, stricken by an unbearable and overpowering yearning. Minutes later they were in each other's arms and Natassya was smothering his thin face in kisses and whispering endearments in husky Russian. Ten minutes after that they were making love on a bed of ferns beneath the dry, rustling fronds of a palm tree, the gentle lisp of the waves synchronized to their movements, a tempo they soon left behind. . . .

They had made love every night since that first night two weeks ago. It was dangerous and they had to be careful. As scientific liaison officer for Zone 4, Skrote had been expressly warned against becoming involved with any member of the Russian team, male or female. At a conservative reckoning, about a quarter of the so-called Russian scientists would be working for the KGB. For the American personnel attached to Zone 4, the cover story was that they were engaged on research into the long-term effects of TCDD using human guinea pigs and that this was too hazardous to allow the Russians free access. In the early days some of the Russian military brass had been taken on a conducted tour, but everything they had been shown had been rigged and stage-managed. The real research into genetic manipulation and breeding experiments had been out of sight behind locked doors.

And Skrote wasn't without his own suspicions. For wasn't it, being brutally realistic, such fantastic good fortune that it just had to be a Russian intelligence ploy? He detested the thought (and hated himself for thinking it), but it had to be faced and, somehow, resolved, one way or the other.

So he faced it by devising a ploy of his own. He pretended to get drunk.

As Natassya knew by now that he wasn't a heavy drinker, and therefore accustomed to it, this would have