like the maitre 'd at the Chez Larousse on South Street. He sipped slowly. Gods be praised: effervescence, liquid sunshine, a hint of apple. She must have one great expense account, he thought.
Miss Annie- Brown drank hers as if she had stock in Moet.
"Look, Miss Annie-Brown," William said, "I'm not stupid. I've been acting a little foolish, but I'm not stupid."
"You are not stupid! Your intelligence quotient is 43:12:AA:65 on the Grizz-Zimma scale."
"Damn right! I know everything has a price, and I'm sure yours is way beyond anything I can pay." He figured he might as well get a few things settled right off the bat.
"You are right, Mr. Holt-Fennimore. There is no such thing as a free breakfast. Did I get that right?"
"Sure, absolutely." He finished his third glass and she immediately poured another. "Besides you haven't really told me anything. Just what sort of good time did you have in mind?" William felt as if he was leering like a pervert in a girl's school.
"I can't tell you here. We must go to the briefing locus. Do you mind rapid travel, Mr. Holt-Fennimore?" He didn't miss the impish grin.
Her statement had a hint of challenge, and he was feeling the booze. Anyway, that was his excuse. In reality an odd phenomenon was taking place. He wasn't bored. He was interested.
"No," he answered confidently, "I don't mind rapid travel."
She stood sinuously, stretched, and smoothed her dress down over her hips. "Will you follow me please?"
Hey, now we're getting somewhere, he thought. She moved gracefully across the drawing room, and the silken dress moved lovingly over her shapely bottom. He reached out and snagged the half empty bottle of champagne and followed, never taking his eyes from that delightfully undulating rump.
They went into a bedroom...but there wasn't any bed! Against one wall was a dressing table, and other articles one might expect to find in a wealthy woman's boudoir.
Instead of a bed there was a shiny metal plate about six feet square in the middle of the floor. It was surrounded by a series of ceramic tubes pulsating with a pale green light. He felt an energetic tingle, like too much electricity in the air.
Pretty kinky, Miss Annie-Brown, he thought. You want to do it on an electric plate, that's okay with me. William was really beginning to feel the champagne.
She stepped over the glowing pipes and held her hand out to him. The way he was feeling, he'd have walked across a bed of red hot coals to take that dainty hand. It was warm and soft. He stumbled slightly, but managed to get on the plate.
"Please stand in the center, Mr. Holt-Fennimore."
He didn't let go of her hand. He stood where she told him, and waited with anticipation for the next phase of this strange evening.
She carried an object in her hand that looked like an extra-wide belt. She reached around him and fastened it. Her hair in his face felt soft and fresh, with a hint of exotic perfume. She was like the Dom Perignon, delicious and intoxicating.
She reached down and pushed some raised studs on her belt, then did the same to his. Small square lights glowed on each. Then she looked up at him and smiled enigmatically.
A baritone humming began. It was more visceral than audible. The cool light from the tubes around the stage got brighter, pulsing up and down every half second.
He started to get a queasy feeling. It didn't make sense, not on three glasses of Dom Perignon. Great wines don't have that effect. Headaches are the product of northern California chemistry sets, sometimes called wineries, sluicing out the juice of the grape faster than the North Slope pumps oil.
The feeling of electrical energy became increasingly apparent. There was a nimbus of flickering blue-light around Miss Annie-Brown's hair, then an unbelievably loud snap, and William found himself on his knees in a clinically white room with a tinge of sulphur smell in the air. It was similar to the after-effects of summer lightning.
Miss Annie-Brown was gone. William was slightly drunk, and had the bottle clutched tightly in his left hand. He took a healthy pull and looked around. At first glance the room was entirely featureless. There were no square corners. It was basically a box with rounded corners.
"Mr. Holt-Fennimore, can you hear me?" A voice, a man's voice. He couldn't tell where it was coming from.
"That's me. What's happening?"
"Welcome to locus 41-10Y." A chair-like object began to rise magically out of the floor in the center of the room.
William looked at it with surprise. "Hello, where'd you come from?"
The place was hilarious. He giggled foolishly and couldn't seem to stop. Screw it, who cares, he thought. He took another drink from the bottle. Then as he was trying to sit in the chair, the wall in front of him slowly became clear, like a picture window.
Behind it, in a chair similar to his, sat a middle-aged man in a brown suit with bushy eyebrows and a friendly smile.
"Mr. Holt-Fennimore, I am the director of “For A Good Time Call” in this quadrant. It's time to get down to business. Would you like to have a good time?" He had a mellow, salesman's voice.
"Sure, why not? Where's Miss Annie-Brown? Now she's what I call a good time."
"Let me ask you a few questions, Mr. Holt-Fennimore. Are you happy in your current existence?"
Damn! What a shitty thing to ask, William thought, this guys going to ruin a perfectly good dream.
It all came back, the boredom, the disconnection from life. A short body trapped in a six-foot world. He hadn't had a purpose since he was in the Navy, and that was a pretty rigid view of what life is supposed to be.
"Not much, Mr..."
"You may call me Mr. Carson. How far would you be willing to go to change your life?" he asked.
“Christ, I feel like a character in one of those plays where the hero sells his soul to the devil”, William muttered.
"Are you the devil by any chance?" he asked.
Carson laughed. "I'm afraid not. May I call you William?"
"Sure."
"William, Miss Annie-Brown is not your good time. We could provide that experience well enough, but what about tomorrow, or next week, or next year? No, our concept of a good time is something that lasts a good deal longer than one evening."
The little man with bushy eyebrows was very sincere. William began to sober up.
"Look, what's going on here? Is this some kind of secret government installation? You CIA guys into those crazy drug experiments again? I told Miss Annie-Brown, I'm not stupid. I know the state of our current technology, and there's nothing like this anywhere on earth."
Mr. Carson smiled and said nothing.
"Exactly where am I? Is this some secret base out in the desert? You don't mind my saying so, it looks like a George Lucas movie set." In the back of his mind he knew where he was, but he couldn't confront the answer he was getting.
"I will answer your questions, William. Your current location is approximately six million miles beyond the planet you call Pluto. This is not a secret government installation. It is a legitimate business establishment." He was very matter of fact.
William's jaw was hanging down a foot. "Whooaa!" He was beginning to catch on. "Are you telling me, you and Miss Annie-Brown are not from Earth? I get it, you're from some sort of galactic civilization, another planet," he said sarcastically.
"That is correct, William. Sorry, I thought you knew." He delivered his answer as though that sort of thing happened every day.
"It may come as a surprise to you, Mr. Carson, but we, that is people from Earth, aren't doing a lot of business off-planet these days. As a matter