[In the last installment, Niksin Kyboc and his wife, Dr. Demetria Kyboc, became separated in the mysterious caverns of the Black Planetoid…]
II. A Curious Rendezvous
“Oh, you infernal man!” Dr. Demetria Kyboc sighed, her features heavily downcast from the weary exhaustion produced by fatigue, hunger, and the weight of a terrible concern that threatened momently to evolve into an absolute panic.
She had to fight, almost constantly, to prevent her fears from overwhelming her.
Still, Demetria had enough common sense to stay put; to not move around and further lose herself amidst the unknown labyrinth wherein she was lost. She had settled herself on a rocky bench—rocky only by analogy, for the queer stuff was damnably soft and squishy. It had been several hours since they’d entered the cave; at first, Demetria was terrified that she’d run out of breathable air, but a few careful observations and experiments had proven a remarkable thing: the air in the cavern, or wherever she was, was moist and humid, and—most incredibly—it was breathable.
She’d removed her helmet and carefully tested the air—and there was no doubt of it. The place was full of a respirable oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere; it was an inexplicable mystery that she quickly set aside as one of the many such on this weird planetoid.
So she set her helmet next to her, thankful that she was in no immediate danger of suffocation. But none of that solved the awful mystery of the place—or assuaged her concern for her husband.
What had happened to him?
She’d called out his name several times, and flashed her light in the universal League semiology of distress; but all that had come back to her were the eerie echoes of her strained, distraught voice.
Heavens, how hot it is in here! she thought, not for the first time.
Her face was beaded with sweat, her hair plastered to her neck and shoulders. She unzippered her suit, and daubed at the glistening moisture that had collected on her breast. Perhaps there was latent radioactivity in the tiny planetoid, enough to generate heat and volcanism; the melting of ancient water ices could account for the humidity. What a strange, mysterious place this was!
“Oh, Niksin!” she cried pitifully, tears starting to her eyes. “Oh, where are you, husband?”
Suddenly, she started in terror, as a voice answered from behind her: “I am here, wife.”
It almost didn’t register, in her fright…but then she knew—that was Niksin’s voice!
She whipped around, a strangled cry of joy and relief starting to her lips, and flashed the beams of her radium lamp in the direction whence that unexpected and oddly even-toned voice had come.
For an instant, shock overcame her other emotions. It was her husband, all right…yes, it was her beloved Niksin, there was no doubt of that at all. But…but what was he doing?
“Darling, wha…what’s happened?” she stammered.
Niskin was no more than a yard or two away from her, and he was…stark naked. He stood revealed before her in all his masculine strength and beauty, that she had come to know and love so well during their honeymoon; but that wasn’t the half of it. Oh, brother—that wasn’t even the quarter of it!
To her immense confusion and embarrassment, her naked husband was fully erect—proudly and unashamedly so—and his face was flushed with the unmistakable heat of arousal and sexual desire. His skin was beaded with sweat, even as was hers; his expression was eager and excited, but calm, too, in a way that set her completely at ease.
“Darling, what in Heaven’s name are you doing?” she managed to ask, flustered, blushing furiously.
She had seen him like this often enough, of course, during their honeymoon cruise; it wasn’t the simple fact of seeing him in such a state that shocked her—after all, Dr. Demetria Kyboc, née Palaeologina, was no one’s idea of a prude, and ordinarily she’d take the keenest delight in provoking such an obvious response from her husband.
But here, in their distress, lost in the inky blackness of an unexplored and potentially dangerous hollow within an uncharted planetoid? The spectacle was so ludicrous she almost burst into laughter—but she didn’t, to her own immense astonishment.
For Demetria found herself suddenly overcome with the most intense and inexplicable feelings of sexual attraction for her husband, arrayed thus before her in that vibrant masculinity of his that could always elicit a reaction from her—inexplicable only in that these feelings were so very incongruous, so very out of place in their current, troubling situation.
“I just…Niksin, where are your clothes? What are you…?” she ended lamely, giggling slightly in embarrassment.
He said nothing more to her after that first, unexpected answer to her anguished question. He drew near to her, his bare feet padding softly on the warm, pliant cavern floor; her first reaction was to withdraw from him…he was behaving so very strangely. But, despite herself, she couldn’t—his strong, massive frame, and his very obvious and very sizable arousal kept her rooted where she stood.
In an instant or in an hour, it seemed to her reeling mind, he was ominously close to her, his flesh pressing warmly against her soft spacesuit; he caressed her cheek, her neck, brushed the wet hair from her shoulders. Demetria’s brain was afire; she knew this whole business was damned bizarre, but her mind was too blasted fuzzy to offer her any counsel. This is what she wanted, damn it—oh, this was what she so badly wanted!
He pressed his lips to hers, kissed her…and she kissed him back, a long, lingering kiss that seemed to have fossilized in it ages of passion and longing—stretching far back and long ago, to those days when she was just a silly schoolgirl, an inexperienced, innocent university student who was learning of the daring exploits of the heroic and handsome Niksin Kyboc on Venus via telescreen for the first time.
Now, he was hers—this beautiful man, fortis tanquam Hercules, et praelepidus, et bene vasatus formosiorque Apolline (why must her mind always revert to Classical Latin when she was aroused?); of all the women in the System, Niksin Kyboc belonged to her! Oh, and what did it matter where they were? Her heart was racing, the blood thundered in her ears, and a kind of heat was gathering in her quivering loins and spreading thence throughout her body—a heat that, in the violence of her passion, threatened to burst the flimsy tissue of her fevered skin.
This was what she wanted…nothing had ever seemed so right in her life.
Yielding to these intense feelings without the slightest hint of protest, Demetria fumblingly unzippered her spacesuit, and wriggled awkwardly out of its prisoning fabrics; nothing seemed strange now, nothing seemed incongruous…all that mattered was their mutual passion, and with the steady aid of his strong hands, she liberated her flushed, sweat-drenched skin from her cloying and stifling underthings.
Suddenly, she stood before her husband as naked and as flushed with sexual excitement as he; in a swift, fluid motion, Niksin lifted her slim, quivering body in his strong arms, and pressed her down onto that same pliant “bench” where she had awaited his coming.
Her body sank lightly into the soft, yielding stuff; a gentle movement that contributed to her arousal, and the sense of utter contentment and complacency that had so mysteriously overcome her. By now she was shaking all over; her arms and legs trembled uncontrollably, as the anticipation of taking her husband built up within her, and threatened to precipitate a premature reaction. A little hysterically, she drew her quivering hands down her neck, along the sweat-slickened skin of her small breasts and stiff nipples, and across her belly and thighs; and sinking deeply into the soft, yielding stuff of the “rock,” she spread her limbs and blossomed before him like a newly opened flower—she was ready, ripe with youth and eager anticipation, to welcome her husband’s embrace and receive the warm fruit of his passion.
Never slow to take a hint, Niksin lowered his big, heavily muscled frame upon his wife’s body with a surprising gentleness, pressing deeply into the softness of their weird love-couch and her receptive flesh alike; she felt his hardness against her, urgently seeking admittance, and with a sigh she opened to receive it.
“Oh, darling,” she breathed, kissing him lightly on neck and ear and cheek, “oh, husband…how I love you.”
She closed her eyes, arched her body slightly to meet his, and pressed her thighs against his own; her body shook violently as she felt the first pressure of his flesh slipping gently into hers. Like a tiny star—a curious, swelling thing compounded of molten passions—she felt a little ball of pleasing warmth spark inside her abdomen, ignite like dry kindling and grow larger and burn hotter until it finally burst its limits, exploding throughout her body and spreading to the very extremities of her limbs.
Suddenly, startlingly, her mind cleared; the fog that had beclouded it withdrew, as if before the burning rays of the new-risen Sun. And her terrified eyes beheld the stranger atop her—the stranger who wore her husband’s shape.
Frantically, she pushed him…pushed it away, disengaging herself and kicking desperately at the alien simulacrum with her bare feet, until it sprang back in rage at its sudden, unexpected defeat. She rolled off the pliant couch of “rock,” and scrambled to her feet in a hot panic.
In a desperate frenzy, she searched for her clothes, her holster, the N-ray pistol…there was nothing!
She was naked, helpless, alone with the alien…thing.
“Oh, Niksin!” she cried in awful, human terror. “Niksin, my love…where are you?”
“Curse this blasted heat!” Niksin Kyboc swore, and—following word with deed—he kicked impotently at the soft, tarry “rock,” or whatever the damned stuff was.
He hated this weird, uncanny place; and he was desperately trying to hold together his wits before the agony of terror that had gripped him since he realized his wife was missing. He’d called out to her in a cold panic; frantically, he’d set off into the cavern to find her, loudly shouting her name the while.
In that, he’d shown a great deal less sense than his wife; he knew he ought to have stayed put, but he just wasn’t built for that sort of thing. Niksin Kyboc wasn’t the “wait patiently and see what happens” sort; he needed to find his wife or else go mad. So he set off into the lightless opacity of that queer cavern, hollering her name and trying to find something to make sense of it all—and all the while, the blackness swallowed the light rays of his radium torch as if it consumed the stuff for sustenance, and grew all the stronger from it.
So here he was, hours later—lost, distraught beyond words, a presentiment of evil in his heart, and his wife still nowhere to be found.
He settled despondently onto the soft rock, and mopped sweat from his face and chest. Indifferently, he placed his space helmet beside him; he’d discovered the inexplicable breathability of the atmosphere almost as quickly as his wife had.
“Oh, Demetria,” he groaned, tears starting to his eyes in a rare display of emotion, “where are you, my love?”
And a low, sweet voice answered him from the shadows.
“I’m here, darling.”
“What the…” Kyboc whirled, training his N-ray pistol and radium lamp on the unexpected menace.
“Sweetheart! Where the hell have you been…?” The question died on his lips.
His wife stood at the edge of the starveling little circle of light cast by his radium torch—stood revealed to him in all her naked beauty, a glistening dew of sweat filming her bare skin and nothing else.
“Good lord, girl!” he barked, incredulous. “Have you lost your mind, doc, traipsing around this weird place in your birthday suit? You know this ain’t exactly Eotia…”
Once again, his words died on his lips. There was something in her look…in the way she was looking at him, that startled him to silence. He recognized that look—her pale, olive skin was illuminated by that soft, ruddy glow of mingled excitement and sexual arousal that he knew so well. The gold-flecked ringlets of her hair were plastered wetly to the sweat-drenched skin of her shoulders and breasts, and her breathing came in shallow, panting gasps; in her eyes was that wonted glitter that left him in no doubt about what she wanted. No question about it: his girl was in heat—and it elicited a responding thrill in him, try as he might to choke it down.
“Listen, doc,” he stammered, “this ain’t no place for that…”
Immediately, he keenly felt the foolishness of that statement. Why shouldn’t it be? She was his wife, after all; he loved her…why should’t they? It was as good a place as any other. He was so bloody hot; the place was like an oven—and Demetria was so goddamned beautiful, with all her loveliness arrayed before him, and her dark skin glistening with sweat. What in the universe could be more natural?
She glided close to him, her bare feet scarcely making a sound on the soft rock; she took him in her arms, ran her delicate fingers through his hair, caressed his cheek, his jaw, pressed her soft little hands to his chest—she lifted her lips to his, and kissed him. It was like a universe, that kiss—a universe of life and love and inexpressible emotions he never knew he could feel for a woman…even the one he loved most in the world.
“Easy, old girl,” he breathed, “a fella’s liable to get the wrong idea from you…”
Without uttering a word, or acknowledging his flippancy in any way, she unzippered his suit for him, peeling it off his shoulders and slipping it down his torso, helping him to doff the hot, stifling thing; she looked down, and laughed that husky, throaty laugh he so loved—there was no question, now, that he was as eager as she. Flashing her white teeth at him in a shy sort of grin, she drew her warm, youthful body against his; she looked up into his eyes with those dark, liquid, infinitely expressive orbs of hers, and pulled his lips down to meet hers once more in a lingering kiss that touched off a conflagration in his body.
He could feel the soft, yielding warmth of her stomach pressed against his hardness. Like most men, Kyboc was hair-triggered at the best of times; but now, overcome with the sudden, inexplicable eroticism of his wife—and in this weird setting, of all places—he could scarcely contain himself…couldn’t contain himself, in fact, to his intense shame and embarrassment. But his wife seemed neither to notice nor to care…nor, after a moment, did he.
Heedless, she settled herself onto the soft, yielding “rock” of the floor, her body sinking gently into it, and pulled her husband down with her. The expression on her beautiful face was eager, intense, burning with an ardent curiosity; her skin was flushed with excitement and trembling with anticipation, the nipples on her soft white breasts stiffly erect, her legs open to reveal the ripe, red fruit of her.
She was ready—he knew that look well enough. After some minutes of desultory play, the deft ministrations of her slim, skillful fingers had him once again as fully ready as she was, despite his recent mishap; she guided him in—something she had never done before—and he groaned involuntarily as he parted the soft, moist tissues of her and sank deeply into her body. It was like feeling her for the first time; his body lifted against hers, and he felt the imminence of that inevitable reaction that—in another instant, or maybe two—would overwhelm them both with the fullest expression of his overwhelming passion for her.
And then a sharp, cold feeling lanced through his body; he recoiled, as if burned, and wilted like a pricked balloon. Without thinking, without questioning the sharp warning in his mind, he withdrew suddenly from her—something was dreadfully wrong.
This isn’t right, he thought. This isn’t Demetria!
He looked down at his wife—it was the woman he had married, all right, young and vital and beautiful and horny as hell. But it wasn’t her, just the same, and he wondered now that he had ever thought it was. The look in those great, dark eyes of hers—this was not his Demetria!
The being—human or alien or something else entirely—expressed a terrible rage in those liquid eyes that had, just a moment before, mirrored the passionate love he had felt for his true wife.
“Who…wha…?” he stammered.
“Lord in Heaven—what are you?”
[Sex with a simulacrum? It seems as if the married space explorers will have some awkward explanations to offer when next they meet…
In any case, join us in the next issue for the third part of “Nebrouggai, the Ancient,” wherein Niksin and Demetria Kyboc meet the Lord of the Black Planetoid…]