The Electric Sword-Swallowers

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

Delilah was beautiful. Delilah was sexy. And Delilah was to blame for all of Ferdie Foxlee's problems. She had let him down at the crucial moment by falling apart. Literally. And in pieces. Her right eye popped, dangling on multicoloured cables. Her right breast spun around and flew off into the distance. As her fuses blew, her smile melted in a blaze of sparks. As an expert in ectoplasmic electronic creations, Ferdie had clearly failed. But eepee experts - even one like Ferdie - are in very high demand. So when he panicked and ran, he ran into the waiting arms of the underworld...

Release date: July 2, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 120

Sample

Slinkily, Ferdie Foxlee’s Delilah reclined on the white amorous battleground of the bed. She looked more beautiful, more desirable, more satisfying than any mortal woman could hope to be. Transparently, Councilor Robert Markgrof thought all those things, which wrought him into a highly emotional state. He panted. He drooled. His pop eyes bulged lasciviously.

Looking on that bedroom scene through the polarized glass with a pleased proprietal air, young Ferdie Foxlee nudged Madam Councilor Robert Markgrof.

“She’s a bewitching piece of pulchritude if ever I made one,” he observed with the loftily detached air of the true scientist.

“Look at him!” The wife of the now hastily disrobing councilor fumed like a pregnant volcano. “He never looks at me like that these days! Just wait till I get my hands on him!”

In the cavern of the bedroom, with lights discreetly shaded and purple conspiratorial shadows lending an aura of cozy amour, Delilah, her white arms uplifted, her blue eyes brilliant, her scarlet lips clingingly parted, rose seductively from the bed.

“Come to me, my pet,” she cooed.

“My pet!” gobbled the madam councilor. “Ah, just you wait, Robert Markgrof! Just you wait!”

Hidden in the cramped cubbyhole behind the polarized glass of her own full-length portrait of thirty years ago—and she’s been no lightweight then—she glowered belligerently on Ferdie Foxlee.

“She’s all you promised the councilor, Mr. Foxlee—more! Those curves never came from dear old Earth.”

“I used the latest catalogues—”

“What they’re coming to back home on Earth, I can’t imagine. But will she do what I want, hey?”

“Yes, madam councilor.” Foxlee held up the control box. His lean thumb curved over a red stud. He smirked with the knowledge of a good job well done. “When I press this—”

“Har, har,” growled the madam councilor coarsely. “That satyr in there will get his comeuppance. I’m going to enjoy this!”

Ferdie Foxlee’s thumb caressed the stud.

“Careful, you young idiot! Don’t press that until he’s drunk the love potion. That’s the whole idea.”

“I know exactly what I’m doing,” said Foxlee stiffly. “I pride myself on my flexibility.”

“When I give the word. Not before.”

Undergarments wafted through the bedroom’s scented air like gulls seeking cliff edges. Delilah swayed and beckoned. The councilor tore his pants.

“Look at him!” The madam councilor raised pudgy fists. “He doesn’t care for anything. I’m going to—I’m going to—” She panted a bit there and ruffled out her shrieking pink negligee. With the tact of a sensitive soul Foxlee looked away from her fat figure. “As soon as he drinks the love potion, press your red stud—and I’m in there!”

“The best of luck,” said Ferdie Foxlee; but he said it under his breath.

Delilah swayed seductively. She lifted the thin glass with the purple love potion. Eagerly, Councilor Robert Markgrof reached for it, kicking his pants out of the way. A faint blue flicker of smoke rose from Delilah’s left ear.

Ferdie Foxlee quivered. He crossed his fingers.

Delilah’s left breast fell off and hit the soft carpet with a plop.

Her right breast began to spin around, full and plump and whizzing in circles like a Catherine wheel, shooting sparks. Coils of blue smoke wafted from her nostrils.

The councilor yelped. “Keep off!” He staggered back. The love potion flipped into the air, scattered purple liquid over white flesh and white bed sheets.

“Come to me, come to me, come to me …” Delilah yammered like a swing door. Her blue left eye sparked devilishly, spun out of its socket and dangled at the end of a fifteen-inch binding of varicolored cables, lashing dangerously with her wild dancing. Her arms flailed. Smoke gushed from her mouth, melting those red and ripely luscious lips, consuming her teeth.

“Help!” screamed the councilor. “Gerrof!”

Delilah climbed all over the no-longer gallant man. In a whirl of arms and legs the couple gyrated about the bedroom. Bits and pieces of Delilah fell off. Her hair frizzed out and long licking sparks shot splendidly.

“You fool!” screeched the madam councilor. “You bumble-fingered nincompoop! He didn’t drink the love potion!”

Ferdie Foxlee’s first thought—after he stopped himself laughing—was to get the hell out of here, but quick.

“I paid you good money to sabotage that revolting eepee sex-image!” The madam councilor’s generous figure shuddered in anguish. “Oh, the shame of it all.”

“I—I—” squeaked Foxlee. “It’s all that confounded protoplasm handler’s fault. I’m the electronics man—”

“I don’t care whose fault it is.” Blood showed in madam councilor’s eyes. A squashy fist struck Foxlee on the nose. He yelped and clutched that offended organ. “I’ll have you run offplanet—so help me!”

“Just let me out of here.”

“Poor Robert. Think how he might have been injured!”

In the bedroom Delilah’s right breast, after a spectacular spinning flight across the room, struck smashingly into the full-length portrait of madam. Polarized glass cracked, split, and shattered under the pointed impact.

Delilah danced in abandon, shedding bits of herself. Her arms dangled from glinting wires. Smoke puffed. Her hair crackled and frizzed like an oversize sun going nova.

Seeing the shattered opening in the portrait, Foxlee put his disheveled young head down, flung up his arms like a drowning drunk and dashed desperately for liberty.

A sex image on the rampage scared all hell out of him—like the formidable madam councilor herself.

She lunged after him with a jungle-bred growl, caught his plum-colored tunic tail. She yanked. The tunic split from neck to hem. Foxlee thundered on.

“What the—! Who the—!” Markgrof crawled up on hands and knees from where he had tried to hide under the bed. “Ferdie Foxlee! So it’s you! This is all your fault!” Nothing about Foxlee’s abrupt appearance in his bedroom seemed to strike the councilor as incongruous. He could see one thing only and was intent on revenge. “I’ll tear you apart, Foxlee! I’ll run you off Curdiswane. I’ll have you shot into a million pieces if you try to land on this planet again!”

He scrambled up, snatched a vase from the bedside table and hurled it at Foxlee.

That young man ducked.

The vase struck the madam councilor squarely between wind and water. She emitted a coughing grunt like a hippo colliding with a truck.

“Oh, Lor’!”

Ferdie Foxlee started for the door feeling the oven-hot breath of absolute calamity sizzling his short and curlies. This little spot of easy money furthering the old biddie’s lust for her old man had turned into a mad house—and he wanted out. He wrenched the door open and hared out into the corridor.

Screeching like a goosed hyena, Delilah chased after him, her sole remaining eye fixed balefully on the rip in his tunic. To her that acted like the red flag. Foxlee yelped and scuttled for the elevators.

After Delilah ran the councilor—his arms full of ammunition—hurling books, boots, cups, and vases. Amid a shower of missiles Foxlee skidded into the elevator bank, saw the cars were all floors away, started for the stairs with his heart doing a tango in his throat.

Following the councilor ran the councilor’s wife. Her shocking pink negligee tangled around her elephantine thighs. She was yelling something about it not being too late yet, Bobbykins, darlin’.

Hitting the treads of the stairs with feet that felt numb—like the objectionable piece of substance between his ears he liked to call a brain—Ferdie Foxlee panted down.

“Ferdie! Lover boy! I need someone like you, so strong and manly!”

“Oh, no!” gulped Foxlee. “She’s really at it now.”

“Come back here you criminal lunatic so I can belt you one!” roared the councilor.

“Bobbykins, remember how it was.”

Out into the street the procession tore.

At nine o’clock in the evening in the planetary capital city of Curlona, with the sun just about sinking beyond the purple hills across the river, Ferdie Foxlee would have thought that few people would be about; that they’d all be at the theater or the gambling casinos, the race tracks or safely at home watching TV solidos. He should have remembered he was young Ferdie Foxlee, a man to whom things happened—after he’d set the machinery for his own destruction into motion first.

Crowds watching a military parade turned to gawk.

The brass band thundered by. Instruments squawked and squealed as Foxlee shouldered through the crowd and tangled himself up with the band. Legs and arms kicked. The trombone player catapulted head first into the base drum. The flutist booked an appointment with his surgeon in the morning. The fate of the bandmaster was beyond conjecture.

Hallooing at his heels, Delilah, Councilor Markgrof and Madam Councilor Markgrof, stampeded Ferdie Foxlee through the band as a whirlwind strikes through a line of moored yachts.

“I’ll have his guts for banjo strings!”

“I’ll ship him to Bueonosmal in the black squad!”

“Darling! Why do you run away from click—splitz—fizzle.”

An agonized glance back showed Delilah collapsing as her legs tried to propel her disintegrating body in two different directions. The councilor hurdled her and bore on for Foxlee with his wife yowling after him.

The last Foxlee saw of Delilah was her head taking off and landing, grinning, in the lap of the plump lady in whose honor this band parade was being held.

“My Aunt Hattie!” gasped Foxlee. “That’s done it.”

He stiff-armed a policeman out of the way, headed for an alleyway, his tunic flapping about him, the crowd roar a madness in his head. Others joined in the pursuit. Hard footfalls pounded after him.

“If only that sex maniac of a councilor had done his duty this evening and attended that parade instead of using it as a smoke screen to plan amours, all this wouldn’t have started.” Ferdie Foxlee ran with his heart and his lungs slugging it out in his chest cavity. “And that gross female vampire of a wife of his would have to hear about it and drag me into her schemes to get the old lecher after her again. Oh, oh, oh.” Ferdie Foxlee was not a happy man.

“There he goes!”

Foxlee dived into a black back alley, kicked a couple of cats who left off snarling at each other to sink a claw or three into his ankles.

“Yowp!” he yelled, kicking out spasmodically.

He fell over an automated dustbin that snapped at him and barely missed taking off his arm. The loose flap of his tunic disappeared into the dustbin’s maw as the jagged refuse-collection teeth clashed together.

“Whew!” He ran on, more than a trifle unsteadily, headed for an orange oblong of light at the far end.

Cowering in the shadowed corner he watched as the rout bayed . . .