He couldn't get his breath. Did that just happen?
"Pamela! Pamela!" he heard Steph say. "Are you all right?"
"The monster! It was here!"
Safely backstage, he rubbed his sated crotch and tried to catch his breath. He'd creamed himself. He'd only had to touch Natalie for ten seconds, tops, and his eyes had rolled up in his head and he'd creamed himself. Christ, but he got worked up on human femmes when he was in season. But more amazingly, the girls seemed not to have noticed. All four were on stage now, running through their lines like nothing had even happened. In fact, when he'd walked off, he thought he might have heard a ripple of applause in the audience.
"That's impossible," said Brooke. "There's no monster."
"Yeah," said Heather. "That's just a story the boys made up to scare us."
He doubled over to collect himself and then staggered to the table where the Dubs were. A few straggling after-dribbles were still leaking out of him, and a jangling thrill clogged his brain like cotton.
"I'm telling you," Natalie gasped, out of breath, at the groped and terrified Pamela. "He was here. He put his hands on me. It was horrible!"
"Well, there's no one here now," assured Heather. "It was dark. Maybe you just bumped into something. Maybe there's a cat." She looked off stage as a gesture to punctuate her line, and in so doing made eye contact with Morgo, who caught Heather's look in a way that made him feel like he had a canary in his mouth.
He needed to hurry. He'd only skimmed this scene in the script but he knew he just had a handful of lines before it ended and the girls bounced back off the stage. Bracing himself on the table by one stiff arm, he shook out the vapors in his head and made himself study the Dubs.
They were boxy, cream colored, bulkier than communicators but still small enough to fit in the palm. A knobby antenna about two inches long poked out the top of each one.
"Cats don't have hands, Corinne, or fingers! It grabbed me! It . . . it felt me all over!"
"Okay," Brooke reasoned, "okay. We're not getting anywhere. I'm pretty sure something was in here with Pamela, whether it was the monster or not. Whatever it is, we need to stick together, and we need to look for it."
Just as the Gob had said, each Dub-LM had an LED display that about spanned its upward face. On the screen was an array of sliders with a word on each end: "Sad" to "Happy," "Lazy" to "Energetic," "Subservient" to "Resistant." Each slider had a heading bug, and they were all zeroed out on both units, except one: the "Assured" to "Frightened" slider, which was edged up to +4.
Method acting, Morgo realized at once. Okay. Sure. That was one way to do it.
He picked up a Dub-LM and turned it in his hand. No labels or markings, no way to tell who it belonged to. Or rather, which girl belonged to it.
"Do we have to?" Natalie wheedled, as Pamela. "Couldn't we call the police? Or wait for the boys. They can take care of it."
"No good," said Brooke. "The storm took out the phones and the nearest house is miles away. And the boys won't be here until midnight, if they're even going to prank us at all."
"I agree," Steph agreed. "If we want to find out what's going on here, we'll have to do it ourselves."
He slid his finger along the long dimension of the screen and the sliders scrolled with it. There seemed to be hundreds. "Polite" to "Rude," "Obsequious" to "Resistant," "Pain" to "Pleasure." The next line, he knew, was the scene's last. Whatever he was going to do, it had to be now.
"It's agreed then," said Heather. "We'll go to the kitchen, get some knives, and search the house."
He scrolled the unit back to the top and flicked the bug on the "Assured, Frightened" slider three quarters of the way up—it went to plus twenty, turned out—and fumbled it back onto the table with the other Dub-LM and raced back to the scrim and feigned acting casual, just as the curtain closed and the girls skipped offstage, all giggles.
"Fantastic!" he heard the director say from the front row. "Take five."
"I think we've found a natural," Natalie added, patting Morgo on the shoulder. "You were great."
"Believe me," replied Morgo, uttering the first sincere words he'd said to these Earth girls since he'd come aboard this ship. "So were you."
***
This sure was an odd play these chicks were putting on, Argon mused, and admittedly it had started off slow, but he couldn't say he wasn't starting to enjoy it.
A lot had happened since Morgo, lucky bastard that he was, had taken on the role of the monster in the first act. After the monster's aborted attack on Pamela, she and the other girls—Adriana, Corinne, and Selena—had decided to arm themselves with kitchen knives and search the house en masse for safety's sake. This had been conveyed through dialogue to save the need for changing sets, and at the end of the first act they'd reconvened in the living room, convinced the house was, in fact, empty.
In the second act, the girls were all in separate bedrooms, this being signified on stage by a quartet of twin cots divided by three flimsy posterboard walls. They whispered like prisoners over the waferish boards about their boyfriends and their plans for college. They confided in each other. Finally, one by one, they fell asleep.
First to go was Adriana. Morgo as the monster, reading stage direction off his script, snuck noiselessly into her room stage left and made his way to her bed as she was snoozing on her back. In a deft, seemingly rehearsed motion, he clutched her face to dam her mouth and nose and at the same time arced a retractable stage knife into her belly. He held her down and silent as she squealed into his greasy palm and her life drained away in a spreading, sick-sweet scented pool of stomach blood. He knew it was fake, but the fragrance of blood met him nonetheless.
Next to go was Pamela, the girl he'd already used to get his quicky jollies. The monster did her in with a clinched pillow to her face as she slowly suffocated.
All along, a clock ticked on the wall high up the rear of the stage, struck twelve and ticked on. No boys. These helpless lasses were dying, murdered by the monster, one by one. Where were the boys to save them?
By the time Act III rolled around, the monster had snatched Corinne and Selena, the only two missies left. Now there was a new set: the monster's lair, a mad scientist's lab with an array of mainframe-sized instruments on the edges and two stretchers in the middle. One girl had been cinched on each. Between them gleamed a clinical table with a boxy prop bearing a huge, wishbone-shaped switch like the ones used for triggering electric chairs.
Argon watched.
The monster had already firmly buckled Corinne to a stretcher and wrangled a wired, aluminum skull dome on the top of her head, and was in the process of doing the same to her lovely compatriot. As Morgo tried to follow his stage direction while fixing the dome on her, poor Selena fought and writhed impossibly, her boy-bob black hair frizzing as she shook and gasped.
Her struggling availed her nothing and soon enough, Morgo had cinched her down and strapped the prop skull dome on her lovely crown. His task done and his hands free, he reached for a folded open, three-ring script.
"And now," declared Morgo off the script, "I will activate the brain transplant machine, and Corinne, you will inhabit Selena's body, and Selena, you will find yourself in Pamela's."
"You're mad!" Natalie cried. "Why are you doing this to us?"
A stagecraft crack of lightning.
"Ten years ago, an experiment went terribly wrong and I, a brilliant scientist, found myself in the body of a monster. But now, with my brain transplant technology, I'll be able to rid myself of this hideous shell," Morgo gestured at himself, clad in the monster costume, "and become like you, the sexy young woman I've always longed to be." To illustrate, he stroked Selena's pliant, prostrate figure from thigh to breast. For her part, the helpless girl quivered nearly uncontrollably. Her chest bellowed with frantic, fearful breath.
"But first," Morgo went on, "I must use it on you to make sure it really works."
