SAMPLE THE STORY BY READING CHAPTER ONE

I was searching for a voice. 

The voice had a body attached to it, but I had never seen the body, while I had heard the voice. It was a soft voice, that spoke American with an English accent, though the owner was not an Englishman. His name was Kasim Chand, and he was from India. 

I was easing along in New York's East Village on a gray winter afternoon, keeping my ears attuned to words and voice inflections, listening to the hippies and the teeny boppers passing me by with swinging legs and long hair floating in the breeze off Tompkins Square. I knew I fit right in among these protestants against a society they had rejected in favor of the crash pad and the love-in, the speed trap and the mellow yellow. My three peace buttons were firmly in place, my left cheek was painted in the approved flower-pattern manner, my eyes were outlined in black kohl. I wore the proper bead works. 

My name is Eve Drum. I am the lady from L.U.S.T., a secret agent for the League of Underground Spies and Terrorists. It was my job to meet Kasim Chand, to talk with him, to learn enough about him for the C.I.A. or N.S.A. to take over in a more or less official capacity. The League of Underground Spies and Terrorists has no official standing; it is a product of our times, a torch to fight fire with fire, a hand to kill and loot in the best interests of the nation. We lay the groundwork, we do the dirty work, then the Central Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency goes into high gear. 

Across the street, a big blond man was stalking, with legs encased in hip-hugger pants and Garrison belt, a long-haired wig giving him the look of a dissipated angel. He was decorated by a flower in his golden locks and granny glasses perched on the tip of his nose. This was my case officer, David Anderjanian, working with me on this affair of the frightened Indian. 

Because Kasim Chand was frightened, of enemy agents, of discovery by H.A.T.E.—the Humanitarian Alliance for Total Espionage—which was our bitterest rival in the field of international espionage, and by D.R.A.G.O.N., its Red Chinese equivalent. Our task was to meet and reassure him of his safety, before we brought him to the security agent assigned to his case. 

David glanced at me, then looked away. I sauntered past a rundown bookstore, a small pharmacy, a boarded up shop that once had sold fresh vegetables. In the windows I saw my reflection, I looked like something out of a psychedelic nightmare in a leotard top and micro skirt that bared most of my legs in patterned black stockings. I caught my wooden beads and twirled them lazily. 

Over the phone Kasim Chand had chosen the Avant Garde Arena as our meeting place. It is one of those pseudo-psychedelic parlors like the Electric Circus, the Cheetah, or the Fillmore in San Francisco. 

"I am fascinated by your American culture levels,” his voice had murmured. “Your nation is so young, it has so many facets. It is all part of your growing up period, you know. The hippy is just another manifestation of personal protest, of individual initiative. I am anxious to be a part of it while I am visiting you." 

"Well, sure, whatever you say," I told him. 

I knew this much: Kasim Chand was a good friend of a Chinese scientist named Ling Fu. Ling Fu was in hiding from D.R.A.G.O.N.—the Dedicated Red Action Guards of Nanking—with whose agents I had traded blows and buffets in Hong Kong, a couple of cases before. I did not know what it was Ling Fu had or knew, that Uncle Sam wanted to get hold of. All I was to do was to contact Kasim Chand. 

“I would like to meet you at one of the hippy places," his voice had confided. "I want to experience a group grope, a love-in, to take part in this social hemorrhage called hippie-dom. I can hardly wait. And to combine this pleasure with the business of why I am in your country, is perfect." 

So now I was zapping along the sidewalk, waiting for David to catch up to me before I turned into the Arena. I could make out the rolled-paper decorations framing its double doors, the op art on its facade, the big graffitio-type lettering spelling out Avant Garde Arena. There were other hippies moving toward those doors, girls in micro skirts to show off their legs, wearing tight blouses in psychedelic prints under which their unbrassiered breasts shook like jelly mounds, young men in their digger hats and flowered shirts. 

I hunted for Kasim Chand with my eyes, figuring I would know an Indian when I saw one, but he was no where around. Instead I got an eye-full of big David Anderjanian with his arm around a girl with long black hair coming down to her buttocks, grinning into her upturned face. His hand was roving over those moving buttocks as they walked. 

I felt like kicking him where it hurts. David and the long-haired floosey went into the Arena. I followed after them, feeling left out of things, letting the music from the rock bands inside the Arena wash over me, draw me out of my mood. I stood to one side of the main entrance, staring into the big, barn-like room at the vari-colored lenses that played across the yellow smears, with a movie flickering to life on a white patch, with this kaleidoscope of colors and the blaring, blasting music affecting both the eyes and the ears. 

The Arena simulated an L.S.D. trip. Here in the pot pit you were an atom, an almost-nothing, drowned in sounds and sights that made no sense, that tore at your mind controls. You were a part of this total-environment technique that came close to clawing its way inside you. 

A hand touched my soft behind, petting it, fondling it. The hand went away. I watched a girl slipping her arms out of her blouse and shimmying, letting the blouse slide down her arms to the floor. She had breasts like pears, that bounced and jumped through the reds and blues and yellows that caressed her nakedness from the waist up. Another girl had her skirt to her middle, she was wearing only a black minimum across her groin that blended perfectly with the ebony gloss of her hair. As her pelvis pivoted and rocked, her soft buttock cheeks flew every way at once. 

I moved onto the dance floor, my feet and hips picking up the beat, sensing a little of the mindlessness, the loss of identity to the music and the moving lights. A young man, very thin and with intense black eyes, had moved across the floor to join me. We moved and swayed in the rhythm of the Hully Gully. 

I told myself not to relax this way. I had a job to do. But I could see David Anderjanian with his ebony-tressed trull, pumping away with his arms and torso as he grinned down at the unfettered breasts the girl was shaking at him. If my case officer could do the Hully Gully in public, so could I. 

"Groovy," said the thin boy.

"Super," I agreed. 

My eyes were almost blinded by the spotlights, but I used them to probe past writhing bodies and whirling hair, always hunting for Kasim Chand. Or for someone I thought would be the young man from India. 

Nobody showed. The Hully Gully became the Watusi and then the Ska, and I went on jerking, twisting, turning my back to my companion to rub buttocks, bending over to imitate the war dancer of the North American Indian, standing on spread legs and shaking my shoulders in the Boogaloo beat. 

You could go on dancing forever, here in the Arena. Or you could slide between the dancing bodies for a moment of comparative rest on a bench and watch the underground movies that were being shown on the white patches where the walls had not been done in pop-culture pinks. I got a guilty conscience and draped the Drum bod on a slatted bench-the better to look for Kasim Chand. 

My companion went on dancing by himself. 

I took a cigarette from the huge purse that dangled by a brown leather strap from my left shoulder. I lighted it and drew smoke into my lungs. I let the smoke out of my pinkly painted lips, slowly. 

It was then that I saw the dark-skinned youth, clad in hip-huggers and a flower-print skirt, moving slowly toward me. His face was dark brown, his hair was worn long and uncombed, there was the faintest beard-fuzz along his jawline. He walked like a panther stalking, all grace and easy rhythm. 

“Hi, doll,” he caroled. I had found my voice. 

I said, “Hari Krishna, hari Krishna" This was the Hindu hello of the hipsters, the hippie hymn to happy time. 

Kasim Chand picked it up, as he said he would do on the phone. "Krishna Krishna, hari hari.” 

I lifted to my feet, making a vague gesture at the crowded dance floor. "Shall we turn on?” 

He began to gyrate as the others were doing, arms pumping, legs working. I fell into the beat, facing him, staring into his soulful brown eyes. We got caught up in the Philly Dog, showered by the moving lights of this nouveau art form that made patterns on his face and garments and splashed across my face and blouse. 

“Everything's been arranged,” I told him between jerkings and swayings. "You have some kind of proof you are who you say?" 

His teeth flashed white between his ruddy, over-large lips. “On me, chick. Painted where you can read it big, as soon as I take my shirt off.” 

“When's that?" I wondered.

"When's the group grope?" 

I nodded. David Anderjanian had explained to me, rather carefully and somewhat snidely, that the Avant Garde Arena was not just a big barn, it had rooms on the upper floors where there were hippy happening every so often; a group grope had been arranged for this night, as soon as the blasters and the floaters got high enough to want it. There are no rules at places like the Arena, it is merely a pad to hang your personality on the line with other go-goers. 

Kasim Chand was staring at my bouncing breasts. He was getting that love-in look in his baby browns, and there was a big part of him that was hung up on sex at that moment. 

He whispered, "I want to do everything, smoke pot, take a trip, even sample the mellow yellow." 

He was the man with the whip, so I moved in a little closer, until I was scratching nipples with him. His mouth was a little open, he was panting like a sprinter on a ten mile run. I managed to brush him with a thigh or a hip from time to time, to keep him in the groove. 

"Name it, it's yours," I breathed into his brown face.

"Pot," he smiled. 

Arrangements had been made, in case this was what Kasim Chand wanted. The authorities blinked an eye at times like this; it was more important to Uncle Sam to get hold of whatever it was Ling Fu had, than to worry about a few joints. Sure, the fuzz could move in if it wanted, but L.U.S.T. had made certain it would not. 

I made a little signal to David Anderjanian. He kept on dancing, but he Boston Monkeyed his girl-friend our way, until he could hear my whisper. 

“A little panama red for a friend," I told him. Nothing but the best in marijuana for our boy. 

His blue eyes touched Kasim Chand and flicked away. David is a big blonde Viking of a man, six feet four inches of solid muscle. He had little leather compartments inside his Garrison belt. Some of the compartments held paper containers of boo. I watched him fish around in a couple, then he danced sideways, reaching out toward me. I closed fingers over the packet of pot and pushed it into my shoulder bag. 

Kasim Chand watched every move I made. 

"Good,” he nodded, smiling broadly. “Where do we go?" 

There was a narrow staircase off to one side of the dance floor. A few couples, locked together with hands deep inside hip-hugger flies or moving lazily under micro skirts, were already moving up the staircase. These were the initiates, the ones in the know, the right cats. 

I drew Kasim Chand with me, letting my palm slide under his flowered shirt and across his hairless chest. He returned to the compliment, and I felt my nipples stand up big and bold to the delicate strokings of his smooth fingers. I let a sensual shiver run down my spine and fasten itself in my pudendal nerves. 

A dancer bumped us against each other. Kasim Chand put his arms around me and let the front of his body make love to mine in a slow twist of flesh against flesh. He moaned in his throat, hips working. I was not averse to his foreplay, I had been leading a sedentary life lately, and the youthful Indian was handsome. I put my arms about him, I bellied up to his manhood. 

His lips were moist, wide open, as they closed over mine. His tongue was a flail to whip my eroticism into full flower. I rubbed my hardening breasts against his chest. 

Then I got a better idea. I undid the buttons of his shirt, I opened my blouse so that my big goody-gourds thrust out, milky white and hugely nippled. I let them tell his hairless chest how firmly built those 38s were. He got the message, his hands fastened on my behind and held me tight to his straining flesh. 

I glanced down, seeing the blue-veined breasts mashed like flattened balloons. As the pressure eased, they sprang to fullness again, so I could use my dark brown nipples like nails, scratching his flesh. He began to shake uncontrollably. 

I pulled away, smiling up at him. "Come on, honey—let's go find a pot chamber.” 

His eyes were glazed, but he nodded. I went up the narrow stairs with his hands sliding up and down the black patterned stockings that contained the Drum legs. Those palms slid across the Drum buttocks, gripping and clinging. Kasim Chand was panting like a wheezy bellows, discovering how ready-ripe I was for his ideas of fun and games. 

"In here," I whispered, and caught him by his handle, drawing him after me through a doorway and into a blue room where, outside the blue bulbs in the ceiling, the only light came from a slide projector, and the screen where a color slide was blown up almost to life size. 

Kasim Chand gulped loudly. The picture on the wall showed a naked girl sitting on a naked man who sat, in turn, on a straight-backed chair. The picture flicked away and now there was a beach scene, with blue water in the background. In the foreground, reclining on a beach blanket and surrounded by sand, a girl was bending over a man, her long brown hair hiding his loins and her face. 

I pushed between a couple of intertwined couples to a divan against the rear wall. Here we would be alone, more or less, with only a boy showing the slides near us. 

As we sat down, I breathed, "Now clue me in on the details, lover.” At the same time I shook out two joints, and passed one to him. 

I used my gold lighter to fire his stick. He drew a deep breath, inhaling the smoke, settling his spine against the divan back. 

“Look what the girl is doing for that man," he murmured lazily, putting a hand on my knee and running it up the stocking to my pantied crotch. 

"Tell me about Ling Fu," I whispered. 

“Ling Fu is a genius. He is the foremost atomic scientist of Red China. He also hates Mao Tse-tung." 

His fingers probed at me, making me squirm. 

"Two years ago, Ling Fu was working on an atomic motor. A small one, so small that it could be placed inside your American variety of bread box. Ling Fu succeeded in his work. He did invent such a tiny atomic motor." 

"Oh?” 

His smile was beatific. Whether it was my dumb expression that made him grin so fatuously, or the fact that I was now stroking him very gently, or the fact that his fingertips were discovering my own arousal, I did not know. He was panting again, like a dog after a hard run. 

"Please?” he whimpered, shuddering. 

"Ling Fu?" I reminded him. "And what's so great about an atomic motor the size of a bread box?” 

He managed to say, between grunts, “You know that Red China has the atom bomb? In Washington, people who understand such things have been saying the Red Chinese have no way of delivering their bomb to a target in the western hemisphere. To Los Angeles, say, or to San Francisco. 

"Think a moment. If Ling Fu has developed a small atomic motor, this changes things. He can build an intercontinental ballistics missile capable of flying under its own power anywhere in the world. To Washington, to New York, to London, to Moscow, to Rome." 

I knew a cold chill down my spine. I lost my gig for sex. I tried to squirm away, to think. Uncle Sam must have had some idea about what Ling Fu was doing in Red China, maybe some of our top scientists had discovered it and relayed on the information to the C.I.A. In any event, a lot of folks in high places were worried as all hell. 

This was why they had unleashed L.U.S.T. 

I frowned. I asked, “But what's that got to do with you and me?" 

"Ling Fu is not a dedicated communist. His grand father was a mandarin. His family is old and honored —or used to be honored, in China's happier days. He hates Mao Tse-tung and what that madman has done to his nation. He does not want to give his atomic motor to the Red Chinese, knowing what they will do with it." 

Unfortunately for Ling Fu and his family, the fanatics in the Red Chinese government guessed at his disaffection. Knowing his political views, since Ling Fu had not been wise in his open assertions against the Red Guards and Mao Tse-tung, the Red Guards, led by an army officer, came to his house and arrested his family, consisting of his wife and two young daughters, aged fifteen and twelve. They said it was because the wife and the daughters had been heard to criticize Mao Tse-tung. 

Ling Fu was terrified. He knew his family was being held as a hostage for his good behavior. He knew too, that he would break under torture if the Red Guards used it on him. He was a scientist, not a hero, and he knew his own limitations. 

To prevent the Maoists from getting the one atomic motor he had made, he destroyed it. He also burned his notes. His knowledge was in his head, and he prepared to flee the country. 

He was caught and taken before the People's Tribunal. He was not tried for treason, as he expected to be. He was there to witness the trial of his wife and daughters. In ancient law and in the medieval law courts, witnesses were not believed to have spoken the truth unless they had first been tortured. 

The Red Chinese borrowed a leaf from that for gotten text. They stripped Madame Fu naked and tied her down on a wooden frame. They beat her naked breasts and belly with thin bamboo rods, in the old form of the bastinado. These floggers, in the old days of the Chinese emperors, were taught the art by practicing with a slim bamboo rod upon the surface of a custard. The more expert could strike the custard again and again without damaging it. 

Repeated blows by the bamboo rod, though it does not break the flesh, turns the skin blue from the blows, and causes excruciating pain. Madame Fu was screaming steadily, all through her ordeal. Ling Fu himself was wet with sweat, and constantly shaking in his despair. 

He was balancing the pain of his wife against the threat to millions of human beings, if he turned his atomic motor over to the Red Chinese. He came close to biting off his tongue, as he was forced to watch her breasts beaten into bloody paste—they were using a split-bamboo rod now, and its sharp edges were slicing away her flesh as might a series of razors—and then her belly. She was scarcely alive at this time. Ling Fu knew she would not live; and since most of her nerve endings had been whipped away, there was no more pain for her. 

She died under the bamboo rod. 

Cleverly, the Maoists took Ling Fu away and put him alone in his cell, to reflect upon what had happened to his wife, and what was likely to happen to his daughters. He did not sleep all night. He was haggard and hollow eyed next morning when they came to drag him to the court room. 

His oldest daughter was tied by her ankles to twin chains and suspended upside down. The pulleys creaked and her slim golden legs were dragged apart, exposing her virginity to the bamboo rod. 

The torturer struck only once. Ling Fu was on his feet, his scream close to drowning out the agonized cry that tore from the lips of his oldest daughter. "Stop! In the name of Mao Tse-tung—stop! I will do as you ask. I will build another motor. Only let my daughters go.” 

They brought him to a big laboratory some miles beyond Chu-king, where they placed the entire establishment at his disposal. The daughters were kept in seclusion in Wuhan. They would be well treated, so long as Ling Fu did what was asked and obeyed the Maoists. 

Ling Fu knew well enough that once his atomic motor was built, he himself would be slain. The Red Chinese would have what they wanted of him, and he would be of no further use. His two girls would also be slain, in all probability. 

Ling Fu planned to escape. With his scientific mind it was easy, under guise of working on his atomic motor, to construct a series of trinitrotoluene vials, well hidden, that would explode once an electronic signal was flashed to the lead azide which served the vials as a primer. 

Ling Fu was allowed to go walking in the gardens to one side of the laboratory compound. He took to walking a little farther each day, until he would stroll the cobble-stoned streets of the town which had grown up beside the science buildings. He would stop in at stores, exchange friendly greetings, buy a little tobacco for his pipe or an orange on which to munch. 

His TNT bombs took seven and a half months to make and hide. He waited another month, until the height of the Red Guard atrocities in the spring of 1967. Then he pressed the plunger that sent the laboratory buildings rocketing sky-high, and fled on foot for the Yunnan plateau. 

Along the way he stole a big Kashgar stallion and galloped the beast almost to death on the route he chose through the Minya Konka mountain passes and then southward along the banks of the Chinsha river, to Wehsi. Then he turned westward, crossing over the Indian border at night and made his way through the Pangsau Pass. Here he swung to the west, skirting past East Pakistan, until he came at last to Calcutta. 

"There are many people in India," murmured Kasim Chand, eyes closed and shuddering to the waves of delight that shook his body, "who hate the Red Chinese. We have not forgotten the attack they made upon us when they invaded India in 1962. So Ling Fu was welcomed with open arms by the authorities. 

"He was hidden away and a number of young men were sent to be his servants, to carry out his orders. In India, Ling Fu began working on his small atomic motor. He re-wrote his notebook. But even while he was working most industriously he was thinking about coming to your United States. 

"Only the United States dared defy the communist threats of Red China, by its war in Viet Nam. Or so Ling Fu felt. He was determined to get his revenge on the Maoists who had tortured his wife to death, and he intended to do this by going to the United States and offering it his atomic motor." 

Kasim Chand was groaning, his hips were moving back and forth. His eyes were half closed, but what I could see of them showed them to be feverishly bright. He was in that state the French name avoid velleites, in which the psyche is lost in a sensual sea of pleasure. 

I could deny him no longer. His hands under my micro-skirt were fondling me so hungrily that my own body was jerking its hips. His fingers had caught hold of my pantyhose and were de-nuding my hips of their black patterned nylon. He leaned down suddenly, and ran his mouth across my thigh where he had bared it. 

All around me, there ware the sounds of nude bodies slapping together. I could see a girl writhing against the back of a chair, head tossing fitfully as her thin bare arms were wrapping about a youth who kept jabbing, jabbing, jabbing at her with his loins. Her mouth opened as if to scream, but she made no sound. 

The screen on the wall showed a slide of two women and a husky man, united in a triangle of interlocked mouths and privacies. I stared up at it blindly as Kasim Chand knelt to pull off the legs of my pantyhose so I was naked under the micro-skirt and the flower print blouse. Then his lips started sliding up an inner thigh. 

"Ling Fu," I moaned, telling myself I had a duty to perform. 

There was no answer, only the soft suctioning sounds of his lips against my flesh. I tried to think of other things, sought to calm my fevered blood by reciting one of the poems I had committed to memory years ago. 

Kasim Chand was an expert at the love kiss. 

The love kiss is the faire minette of the French, the qiradz of the Arabs, the padmachati of the Hindus. It is the touch of tongue and lips on the female minon, as Rabelais called it, the worshiping caress that is sometimes referred to as the gamahuchage. It was this caress which the Empress Wu Hu of the T'ang dynasty demanded of the foreign ambassadors and her own Chinese statesmen who came to seek her favor. In the ancient biblical lands, this minette was considered the proper due of the wanton Midianite woman, who were both beautiful and perversely promiscuous. They offered up their pleasure in this act to the honor of their carnal god, Baal-peor. 

I found my hands clutching his long hair, holding him in a painful grip. My bare legs were lifting of their own will, it seemed, to make him my prisoner of love. I held him tighter, squeezing him between my thighs. I groaned, I cried out, as his devotions shook me like a leaf in the wind. Finally I was unable to control myself. I screamed thickly in that agony of pleasure known as the gokuraku-ojo in Japan. 

We were motionless for a long time, Kasim Chand still gripped by his fleshy prison-bars. Trembling and shaking, just as I had been. He was unsatisfied, he must have been in torment. 

I crooned, “Come, Kasim Chand. You will never be able to tell me anything, being so excited. Come, let me calm you." 

He rose up, he fumbled with his hip-huggers, pushing them down. He lunged himself at me, and completed our union in the familiar man-above position. 

How long we moved together on the divan, I do not know. Eventually the Indian cried out and trembled, his arms like steel bars about my softness. Then he pushed himself away and slid off me. 

"Marijuana is supposed to be an aphrodisiac," he muttered. “I don't know whether it is or not—it's derived from the hemp plant, you know, from which we also get hashish—but I guess I really didn't need it." 

The hemp plant to which Kasim Chand referred is called cannabis sativa in America, and cannabis indica in India. It is related to the hop plant, from which we take the hops used to flavor beer and ale. It grows up to twenty feet in height and contains many dark green leaves. Marijuana is made from the resinous leaves of the female plant, the hemp plant being dioscious, both male and female. Hashish is taken from the very tops of the plant, where the most resinous leaves are to be found. Often these plants are stripped of all foliage but these topmost leaves, to get a stronger drug. 

"Pot doesn't act like an aphrodisiac," I told him, "unless you consider that, since it slows down your physical reactions, it gives you more staying power. Marijuana also causes a slight intoxication, the way a couple of belts of liquor might do. It's a kind of pick-me-up, but it doesn't turn you on sexually." 

His smile was lazy. “You speak of Western people's reactions to the weed, honey. In the East—which is a lot older than your Uncle Sam, and has had much more time to become accustomed to the effects of such drugs it is a definite aphrodisiac. Believe me, I could quote you cases." 

He made a motion and I lifted out the packet of joints. This marijuana was of the black variety, harvested after a very hard frost. As a result, it gave you a strong smoke. I know; L.U.S.T. made it to order, against possible need. The paper that formed the cigarette was Top, considered by experts to be the very best. "Now about Ling Fu," I prompted. 

Kasim Chand lit up and drew several lungfuls be fore he began to speak again, slowly, his head on the divan back, his right hand running up and down my upper thigh. "Ling Fu is a very cautious man..." 

Being a scientist, Ling Fu had several good friends among the scientists in Calcutta. He made his way to the home of one such man, was welcomed by him and taken into his household. The Indian scientist made guarded inquiries, here and there. He learned there was a branch of the Indian government that roughly corresponded to the Ministry of Defense in other nations. It was to his Defense Ministry he addressed himself. 

Ling Fu was assured of asylum until such time as he could be safely ushered out of India and into the United States. The American ambassador was consulted. He contacted our National Security Agency, which is a branch of the intelligence service not nearly so well publicized as the Central Intelligence Agency, but which is perhaps, even more powerful. 

The ambassador was given permission to promise sanctuary to Ling Fu in the United States, proving Ling Fu was whom he said he was, the foremost Red Chinese scientist. The American government would need some proof of this. 

"I am the proof,” Kasim Chand said, "the living proof!" 

Also Available in a NEW Edition RePrint Paperback