This portion of the text has been called the “Lost Chapter of the Lost Novel” by the man who discovered both, Peter Jairus Frigate, when he announced his discovery in his 1973 retrospective biography Doc Hazzard: His Eschatological Life. The “Lost Novel” is, of course, Brainstorm! itself, which was rejected for publication due to its mention of a Japanese spy cell operating freely and undetected in America even as hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese-Americans were being interned, it’s details about atomic reactions in general and the possibility of an atomic explosive in particular and its revelations regarding Doc Hazzard being of mixed race. The first two points were classified Top Secret and sealed for 50 years, only becoming matters of public record in 1992 and even then known only to handful of scholars until the passage of the Privacy Act of 1994 made them more widely available to casual inquiry.
Only Frigate’s chance discovery of both a carbon copy of the original manuscript and the redacted copy of the actual rejected manuscript returned to Roberson by the original publishers of Doc Hazzard Magazine brought the “Lost Novel” and its “Lost Chapter” to light. Even so, some critics believe that, although the style and substance of Brainstorm! reflect that of Cainnech Roberson as a whole, that of the so-called “Lost Chapter” is much more in keeping with that of Frigate’s own writings throughout the 1970s, to the point that they’d declared the “carbon copy” to be a hoax, perpetuated by Frigate not as a fraud but out of whimsy, in keeping with the quixotic and dark sense of humor that pervade his other published works.
Our opinion falls midway between the two diametrically-opposed positions that the text is indeed a “Lost Chapter” and that it is a total fabrication. The first half of this chapter is consistent with Roberson’s style and answers several questions that might otherwise be left hanging, although it goes beyond the bounds of good taste that he’d already pushed pretty much to the limit with Yuriko’s immodest proposal. It’s only in the second half of the text that the content goes far beyond anything that would be acceptable in any mass medium of the day other than the notorious Dirty Little Eight-Pagers, “Tijuana Bibles” and other underground publications making the rounds at that time. Roberson might have toyed with the ideas in the first half, but would have stricken them prior to submitting the manuscript to the editor. The content of second half seems to have arrived from another time and place, if not another planet!
It is therefore our considered opinion that Frigate may have found a copy carbon of the a chapter not included with the original manuscript submitted to Doc Hazzard Magazine in June of 1942, but that the text ended at the aforementioned halfway point, where Doc tricks Yuriko and precludes her acting any further toward her stated desire, and that Frigate added the second half of the text, spring-boarding off on Roberson’s ill-conceived venture toward spiciness and catapulting all the way into Freudian-fueled Orientalist erotica, on par with anything written by Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton in his 10-volume 1885 unexpurgated translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night—especially since Burton is the protagonist of Frigate’s 1966–1993 science fiction series, the highly-acclaimed but often taboo-breaking River of Eternity Saga, partly inspired by the success of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land.
What we have here is a literary chimera—half-man, half-beast, with a clear line of demarcation half way down its body, in which the two halves can no longer stand on its own. The Roberson half has no satisfactory resolution—Doc resolves his contretemps with Yuriko, but it’s unclear what happens between that point and his subsequent confrontation with Doctor Wu-Hanshu. The Frigate half seems to have no bearing on the Doc/Yuriko dispute other than to offer an implausible scenario totally out of character with Doc Hazzard as we have otherwise known him, but does offer an explanation of his well-established apparent immunity to feminine wiles without suggesting either homosexuality or asexuality on Doc’s part—quite the opposite!—while providing a smooth and direct segue into to the next chapter, albeit with an uncharacteristically jarring note. In short, one can take this chapter or leave it, but one can’t take the one half without also taking the other.
There are, of course, almost as many theories as there are theorists. Some maintain that the “Lost Chapter” was an April Fool’s Day joke on the publisher, written in honor of Cat Hazzard’s April 1st birthday, something to shock the manuscript reader but never intended to be in the final manuscript. Another holds that Roberson, ever the consummate researcher, experimented with herbal remedies like the one described here, which affected him progressively during a two sequential writing sessions. Others believe that Frigate wrote the entire chapter but, stung by criticism that his writing was nothing at all like that the authors whose work he admired, imitated Roberson’s distinctive style for the first half, just to show that he could, before going off on a tangent of his own, again simply because he could. Alas, both men are now gone and neither left any explanation behind, so we’ll never know—unless new facts come to light that explains it all to everyone’s satisfaction.
In light of the ongoing controversy over the legitimacy of this portion of the text, we have decided to remove it from the numbered continuity of the story and to present it separately, numbered in such a way that the reader may read it as if it were indeed part of the story. It is included here only for the sake of completeness and to allow the readers to decide for themselves as to its authenticity, reserving our right to express our professional view that it is not, in fact, part of the Doc Hazzard Canon and, just from a stylistic viewpoint, never could have been.
Thank you for your time and consideration in taking the time to read this text, which we believe to be of genuine historic significance!
—The Editor
Yuriko was stung by Doc’s continued silence, to say nothing of his clear lack of enthusiasm for a prospect that most men would accept in a heartbeat. She decided to take the initiative.
“If we have as little time as you seem to think,” she murmured softly, “then the sooner we get started, the better!” Reaching up with what she hoped would appear to be coy insouciance, she began to unbutton her borrowed work shirt. This proved more difficult than she had imagined, in part because men’s shirts had their buttons on the right panel, with the buttonholes on the overlapping left panel, whereas women’s blouses had the opposite arrangement, with the buttons on the left panel overlapped by buttonholes on the right. The other part of her difficulty was that her fingers trembled and suddenly seemed to have acquired the thickness and lack of dexterity of bananas.
“Why, you scheming little vixen!” Doc was as shocked at his own response as he had been by Yuriko’s unexpected ultimatum. “I can’t believe that I ever thought of you as ‘Snow White’.”
“That’s precisely the problem, Doc!” Yuriko’s voice were as cool and collected as Doc’s usually was, despite the distinct note of exasperation. “You keep thinking of me as Shiro’s little girl. I’ll grant that I’m not all that tall, but I’m not a little girl anymore and haven’t been for quite some time. I just missed voting in the last Presidential election—I was just 18, then—but I’ll be old enough to vote in the next one—if they’ll still let Japanese-Americans vote in 1944.” She put her fists on her hips defiantly. “I’m a grown woman, over the age of consent anywhere in the world that you care to name, and Japan I would be expected to have already been married if not a mother by now. Stop wasting the time we have left and do your part for the war effort!”
“I wish you were still a little girl!” Doc smacked the palm of one hand down sharply into the upraised palm of the other with a resounding crack! that echoed throughout the submarine. “I’d turn you over my knee and spank you until you couldn’t sit for a month of Sundays!”
“Ooh! Really?” Yuriko’s eyes widened like the Big Bad Wolf in a Tex Avery cartoon, then narrowed into a look of shrewd calculation as she assumed the neko-ashi-dachi stance. “Go ahead and try it, Big Boy! I’ll show you who’s ‘little’, you big bronze baboon! Fair warning: I bite!”
Doc gave a derisive snort, where any other man might have given a full-throated laugh. “First you want to make love, now you want to make war? Women!” He shook his head in genuine bemusement. “And here I thought Cat was a royal pain in the pa-toot!”
“Don’t compare me to your tomboy cousin!” Yuriko snarled. “She wants to be you so badly that it’s warped her mind! She’d rather be one of the boys—one of your boys—than to make a name for herself as herself, rather than as Doc Hazzard’s Cousin.” She sneered. “They should be calling her ‘Poor Little Rich Girl” instead of Barbara Woolworth Hutton—she, at least, looks to be the next Mrs. Cary Grant!”
“Me-ow!” Doc acknowledged the cattiness of that remark with a suitable impression. The press had recently dubbed the celebrity couple “Cash & Cary” but Doc knew both of them well enough to know that they honestly cared for one another. “What makes you think that you’re any better, trying to be Daddy’s Good Little Girl by becoming exactly the sort of cold-blooded killer that he left his home and family in Japan to avoid becoming?”
Yuriko was visibly stricken, but Doc pressed on relentlessly. “Cat was quite impressed by your performance aboard the Shao-Hei-Lung. ‘Sudden death with both hands!’ was how she put it. Five men confirmed dead at your hands, with three more missing and presumed dead. Not bad for your first time off your father’s leash! Do you think that your conduct would have made your father, the honorable physician who hoped to turn deadly poisons into healing medicines, proud of you?”
“It’s war!” Yuriko protested. “They would’ve killed me given half a chance, so I didn’t give them any chance—just the way my father taught me.” She looked at him defiantly. “Just the way he taught you!”
“Your father wasn’t my only teachers, Yuriko-kouhai,” Doc replied gently, “and he eventually became my student in some regards. But we both swore the Hippocratic Oath together, swearing to never do harm to anyone according to the best of our ability and judgment.” Doc sighed. “And that makes what I did today doubly abhorrent. Two men were blown to smithereens along with that Japanese patrol plane, two lives extinguished at my hand.” His voice hardened. “You haven’t taken that Oath yet and the Shinobi don’t recognize the sanctity of life, but both your father and I did and the oath doesn’t recognize any exemptions, not even for war.” He grimaced. “Perhaps even especially for war—that’s why doctors and nurses are categorized as non-combatants.”
“Other than that Oath, how is what I did any different than what you did?” Her face and voice hardened, matching his in tone and exceeding it in stridency.
“I didn’t go looking for an excuse to kill people.” Doc held up a hand to cut off her objection. “Yes, I go out of my way to find trouble and, just as often, trouble comes looking for me, but that’s my job description. I don’t sneak into enemy territory like an assassin, armed with an assassin’s weapons and filled with anger, fear and hatred about who or what I might find there and prepared to deal death at the first opportunity. As it happens, my Associates and I did sneak into that same nest of vipers, but we did so expecting the unexpected and with a clear sense of mission, knowing that we were on a job and not just on an adventure. I don’t generally carry a gun and it was only because I had the prototype demolition rounds that even had the means to kill.”
Yuriko visibly wilted, as if Doc’s every word was a tongue of fire.
“When I boarded the Shao-Hei-Lung, I did so with weapons like this—an anesthetic gas capsule, harmless to man or beast.” Doc fished what appeared at first glance to be a marble. “Even here in Japanese waters, the SCAMP Carbine was initially loaded with mercy bullets and I only switched to the demolition rounds when it became clear that even .44-40 slugs wouldn’t stop Tetsuhito at that range. After reloading, I thought better of it and set the gun aside. He’s still alive and out there somewhere because I tried first and foremost to find a way to stop him without killing him or anyone else in the process. I even tried to prevent needless death and injury by finding a way to negate the Brainstorm rather than blowing it up outright.”
“My father wanted me to become a doctor, like you!” Yuriko protested angrily. “He wanted it for himself, too, but that was denied him by unjust laws. He taught me everything he knew about everything, including both the ways of the Shinobi and the ways that he learned from you.” Tears began to stream down her face. “But just when I needed him and his guidance the most, he was suddenly gone! And then … and th-then I was faced with what seemed like the real possibility that he himself might be behind that horrible thing that k-killed all those m-men, allowing us to escape … to escape from our own army, our own government! So I got upset and confused and afraid and … and—”
“And angry!” Doc concluded grimly. He tossed the anesthetic capsule up and then snatched it out the air, holding it in a fist that he brandished between them as if preparing to punch someone. “Fear almost always manifests itself as anger sooner or later, then the anger grows until it becomes outright hatred. Both anger and hatred seek a target. When one can’t act against the actual cause of that fear, anger and hatred, one generally finds another and much handier target against which one can act.”
“Like … like those men I killed?” Yuriko whispered hoarsely, her throat suddenly so tight that she could barely breathe.
“Like your mother.” Doc’s voice remained level, but became oddly subdued. “Those people who killed Tamisen didn’t hate her—they didn’t even know who she was—but what she represented—the loss of their jobs and all of the security that goes with having a steady income. It was the middle of the Great Depression and competition for jobs was fierce, with the few jobs going to those who would work the hardest for the least amount of money. That generally meant those who had been considered the Underclass in better times. Rather than blame the lack of work on the employers—a case of biting the hand that might yet feed them—they blamed anyone of color. That included your father, your mother and even you. In some places and times where I went unrecognized, it sometimes included me!”
“I don’t understand.” Yuriko was genuinely confused. “What does my mother’s death have to do with any of this?”
“Because it illustrates what happens when people feel trapped by circumstances beyond control and fear for their lives and livelihoods.” Doc took a step closer and lowered his voice to a more soothing tone. “You were afraid, angry and had every reason to hate anyone and everyone who could even remotely considered a threat. You’ve also been trained from infancy in the most murderous techniques for dealing with physical threats. No one can blame you for acting … impulsively … under those shockingly difficult and unique circumstances.” Doc shrugged. “Then, too, there’s the question of how exposure to the Brainstorm might have affected you.”
“The Brainstorm!” Yuriko’s voice became guarded again. “I thought that the whole idea behind using it as a weapon is that those of Japanese descent are immune to its effects!”
“Unlike your father, Tamisen Kenobi wasn’t pure-bred Japanese,” Doc replied as gently as possible. “She was born in California to a Japanese father and a Hawaiian-born mother of Filipino descent. That makes you half-Japanese, one-quarter Filipino—which might mean one-eighth Pinoy and one-eighth Spanish or possibly Negrito—and one-quarter Hawaiian—which involves an even larger number of possible Oriental, Eurasian and Polynesian lineages, including immigrant Japanese—and there’s no telling how your unique genetic mix might influence how your brain responds to the modified Blue Meteorite radiation.” Doc grimaced. “I thought that the mixed-blood in my own family tree might offer me some protection, but apparently there wasn’t enough of the appropriate non-Caucasian factor to give me even partial immunity.”
“That’s bushwa!” Yuriko protested, then nodded reluctant agreement. “So you think that I had enough of the factor to keep me from going completely jingle-brained, but not enough to prevent the Brainstorm from causing some psychological effect.” She blinked. “You don’t honestly mean to suggest that it made me homicidal, do you?” Her eyes narrowed. “Are you trying out an insanity plea for when I’m brought to trial for killing those men?”
“The very existence of those men has been officially erased,” Doc definitively told her, “along with the details of their mission and actions in American territory, both before and after the American declaration of war with Japan. Your involvement in this matter is also classified Top Secret. There’s no statute of limitations on murder, so a case might be made against you when the files are automatically declassified … in about 50 years!” He gave her a genuine smile. “In any case, I don’t think that the Brainstorm made you homicidal, but I do think that it may have amplified all of your emotions while lowering your impulse control. Your subsequent actions during the week that immediately followed that initial attack would certainly seem to confirm that hypothesis.”
If it had been unreceptive before, Yuriko’s face was now a study in skepticism. “Are you seriously going to stand there and tell me that my wanting you to make love to me before I die is the symptom of radiologically-induced dementia?” She stamped her foot. “Men! Every time a woman expresses a healthy interest in sexual gratification—the same of sort interest that they characterize as boy just being boys—it’s somehow a sign of a female-specific mental disorder! De Clérambault’s syndrome, Electra complex, erotomania, female hysteria, man-eater, nymphomania, obsessive flirtation, penis envy, sexual aggression or domination, transvestism—if a woman just wants to have fun with a man rather than swooning at his feet, there must be something wrong with her!” She snorted. “Even if I bought your cockamamie hypothesis, it’s been weeks since I was exposed to the Brainstorm!”
“I’m not saying that you’re currently under the influence of the Brainstorm, only that it did have an influence on you that has changed your … predisposition … to certain notions. The current situation is also partly my fault. Had I known that you’d been on a liquid diet for over a fortnight and had no solid food in your stomach, I would never had considered giving you a dose of that maní-okka extract.” Doc wiped his face in exasperation and, perhaps, something more. “Without a buffer to slow down its adsorption into the stomach lining and thence into the bloodstream, it has been known to become a powerful … aphrodisiac. Combine that lack of solid food with the fact that over the course of the last fortnight you’ve been pretty much in situations guaranteed to trigger the human ‘fight-or-flight’ response, where the limbic-hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis pumps your body full of hormones, it’s no wonder that you’re in a state of … hyperarousal.”
Yuriko gave this thought serious consideration. Could she somehow be under the influence of Doc’s Central American snake-oil? She certainly hadn’t started hoping that Doc might see her naked—and perhaps become interested enough to take advantage of their mutual isolation—until well after Doc had given her that spoonful of folk-remedy firewater. But she’d had certain pear-shaped ideas about him from the moment that she’d awakened from the effects of the Koroshi nemuri-gona sleeping powder. When he’d mentioned their age difference, it had gotten her to thinking that they were no farther apart in age than her own father and mother, which had gotten her thinking about he might react if she ever brought that up to him. That had happened before he’d fed her his jungle juice. She’d never heard of the nemuri-gona having any aphrodisiac effect. On the other hand, she’d never been on the receiving end of it before.
After weighing the pros and cons of Doc’s premise, she decided that it didn’t matter one way or the other. “I don’t know why I feel this way,” she told him in no uncertain terms. “I know how I feel—about life and death and my prospects for both. Even if we survive this current crisis, I have no future! If we get captured by the Japanese, well, I’m sure that Koroshi clan won’t look upon me kindly, especially with Tetsuhito still out and possibly back in charge. If we get back to America, I’ll either get locked up for the foreseeable future and maybe be charged with murder or who knows what or live the rest of my life on the run from the Federal government. If we go to China the way Wu-Hanshu wants, well, all bets are off but I still can’t see any sort of life for me there.” She sighed—or was it a sob? “I don’t want to die, but I can’t see any way for me to live!” She smiled. “Please, give me a taste of the life that I’ll never have.”
“I see.” Doc placed his fist under Yuriko’s chin and raised her chin, tilting her face until they were looking one another eye to eye. “You’ve appear to have made up your mind and I can’t think of anything that might dissuade you.” His voice took on a formal tone, resonant with the gravity and import of his carefully chosen words. “Yuriko Koroshi, beloved daughter of Shiro and Tamisen, both of whom died in front me as I looked on, unable to help them, given everything I’ve just told you about the probable causes of your current emotional state and its likely effect of boosting the intensity of your … carnal desires … while lowering your inhibitions against untoward behavior, do you still want me to"—his baritone voice rose in pitch, imitating hers almost exactly—"’show you the time … of … your … life’?”
Yuriko’s heart pounded in her ears with more than trepidation and her face burned with something more than shame, but she met Doc’s golden gaze with eyes glowing with more than unflinching determination and outright eagerness. “Oh, very yes!” she all but growled. “Now, more than ever!”
Doc sighed. “I was afraid that you were going to say that!” He held his breath as he bent down, as if to kiss her. As their noses touched, he clenched the fist with which he propped up her chin, producing an almost inaudible snap-crackle-pop of glass disintegrating into fine powder. Wisps of something like cold steam curled up from between his fingers and dissipated like ghosts in the dawn’s early light. As Yuriko gasped in delight and raised her lips toward his, she inhaled the colorless, odorless anesthetic gas that now wreathed them both.
The last thing she heard before losing consciousness was Doc’s baritone voice murmuring in her ear. “You know, Tiger-Lily, for a Shinobi, you’re far too trusting!”
What seem like only seconds later, Yuriko woke up and smelled the coffee.
She had to hand it Doc Hazzard—whatever he used in his anesthetic capsules, it had none of the side effects of the Koroshi nemuri-gona powder or the mimosa-scented stuff that Wu-Hanshu kept up his sleeve. She knew that she’d been unconscious for an unknown amount of time, but she felt as though she had just nodded off and awoken within a second or so, with no drowsiness or mental confusion whatsoever.
Other than the fact that she seemed to be floating face-down horizontally in mid-air, at eye level with Doc as he sat seated comfortably at the wardroom table.
“Ah, you’re back!” Doc looked up from the game of Klondike that he was playing and smiled. “Sorry to keeping you hanging like this, but meeting your demands requires a lot of demanding preparation, so I’m afraid we’ll have to keep you in suspense for some time.” He took a sip from his steaming mug of rehydrated Nescafé powdered coffee and frowned. “I really hate this stuff, but it’s better than Postum or Sanka and, of course, real coffee is out of the question. Caffeine plays havoc with my serotonin levels.” He swept all of the playing cards together, tucked the reassembled deck into its cardboard box and stowed in the drawer of the table. “Now that you’re awake, I can stop playing solitaire and we can start playing doubles.”
Doc’s offhand comments about him leaving her hanging and in suspense gave her the first clues that she needed to figure out how she came to be levitating eye-to-eye with him. Her final clue was the fact that she couldn’t move, not even her head, which was drawn back a full 90° into the “sword-swallower” position favored for inserting a gastrointestinal endoscope, so that she was looking straight ahead, parallel with the rest of her body. Her forearms were bound together behind her across the middle of her back and her bound legs, which would otherwise extended straight, were bent back almost double at the knees, with her ankles bound to her thighs. She tried to imagine how she must look in this position and the mental image she got was that of a living “Flying Lady” radiator cap mascot, like the one on her father’s old 1931 Chrysler Plymouth Series PA Phaeton, a birthday present for her mother that she never lived to see. She wondered briefly what had become of the car and their home after their eviction.
She was certainly dressed like the Flying Lady, which is to say not at all. Except the cords that bound (and, presumably, suspended her from the starboard edge of the overhead) she was quite naked.
The suddenly realization of this caused her to blush from head to toe. She would probably also have gasped out loud, but she was gagged with a bight of rope with a knot the size of baseball that filled her mouth. The taste of burlap told her that she had been bound with the handmade Japanese asanawa hemp jute rope from her own randoseru backpack. She mentally catalogued all of the other Shinobi gear and shivered at the thought of all of the dastardly uses to which some of those items might be put in her current circumstances. To her dismay, she found the ensuing frisson of fear that these thoughts evoke shamefully exciting. Her face—and other parts normally not visible but no less revelatory of both her emotional and physical arousal—became even more inflamed and her blush deepened, something that she would have sworn was impossible.
“I see that you’re beginning to appreciate the vulnerability of your situation,” Doc remarked breezily before draining his mug. “It had become clear that there was no point to any further discussion, so I decided unilaterally that mandatory binding arbitration was in order.” He tapped the rope gag pointedly. “You warned me that you bite but, as you now know, I bight! I think that we’ve both heard quite enough out of you today but, more importantly, we don’t want to wake our guests"—he jerked a thumb back over his shoulder to indicate the forward section of the submarine—"and we certainly don’t want to disturb the next-door neighbor!” He waved his left hand expansively toward the starboard hull.
Yuriko’s eyes popped wide at the very notion that their extracurricular activity might be overheard. She had no doubt that the Japanese POWs were figuratively dead to the world, but was it possible that sound could transmitted through the hull of Devilfish, through the lashings that bound them together and into the hull of the Shao-Hei-Lung? And what would anyone—perhaps everyone—make of it? What would she make up of such sounds, were she hearing them from the other side? She strained her ears trying to pick up any sound that might conceivably be coming from outside the Devilfish but she couldn’t determine the source of most of the sounds she heard, much less if they originated internally or externally. And, even if they were external to Devilfish, how could she possibly tell whether or not they were external or internal to the Shao-Hei-Lung?
He reached out patted her left cheek with his right palm. “I have some more … preparations … to make for our private little petting party.” His voice dropped to a suggestively confidential coo. “We’re going to have a real lollapalooza, Tiger-Lily. What say we start with a game of ‘Spin the Bottle’? Only, this time, you get to be the bottle!”
The right hand on her left cheek suddenly shoved her face hard to starboard with the force of a vicious slap but with no corresponding painful impact, setting her suspended body spinning clockwise. “Round and around and around she goes, where she stops nobody knows!” This was far more disconcerting than she expected, due to the submarine’s list to port. While she spun perfectly perpendicular to the horizon line, like a plumb bob, from her perspective it appeared as though she swung at a 23° angle to the horizon line, with her head describing an arc from somewhere just above the starboard deck to just below the port overhead and back. Her inner ear told her one thing, while her eyes told her another. She had to close her eyes tightly and take deep breaths to keep from getting sick from the disorientation. “Hanging tough is really rough when you’re in the buff, but I’ll be back to give you more guff soon enough and that’s no bluff!”
After about a half-dozen clockwise turns, Yuriko’s body slowed to a stop, but then began turning in the other direction for several turns, then back to clockwise, and on for what seemed like hours. During this time, she struggled against her bonds both voluntarily as she tested the limits of her bindings and involuntarily as her body’s animal instincts responded to the stress and strains as her weight and center of balance shifted from one side to another.
She soon discovered that not only were her arms and legs bound behind her, but that her entire torso was laced within a tight harness of rope that squeezed her with the strictness of a Victorian corset. The pattern of the ropes served to outline and emphasize the contours of her body, revealing them even more fully than if she were simply naked, drawing the eye to the places of greatest interest while fully exposing them to view. In particular, the ropes that circumscribed her breasts acted as a push-up brassiere that enhanced their shape and size, engorging them slightly and increasing their sensitivity in the process, all the while revealing rather than concealing their almost perfectly hemispherical form and substance. That thought only brought on another blush and caused them to plump up even more. Her nipples stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. Although they were closer in size to pinkies than thumbs, they began to throb until they felt as sore as if someone had just hit them with a hammer.
For all of this ostentatious exposure of her person, now on display from every angle as she twisted and turned through the air, she couldn’t really call it indecent exposure. This was because she was effectively “fig-leafed” by a double-bight of rope running from the small of her back, down between buttocks and legs and back up to a point just below her navel, completely covering those areas that would otherwise have to be censored if she were being photographed. Her body was being presented for the delight and delectation of any observer, but she was being presented tastefully, artfully and, despite her almost complete and utter nudity, chastely. She had the rope chastity belt to prove it!
Actually, Yuriko thought, those pesky tumescent nipples would have to be airbrushed out of any such photographs, too. For some reason, it’s permissible to show an entire breast or even two, but only so long as neither the nipples or areolas don’t show. That made no sense to Yuriko, who considered the nipple to be even more the symbol of motherly nourishment and sustenance than the breast itself, but it was one of the three parts of the female anatomy that were forbidden to be depicted, even in the finest of photographic fine art. Is it only because the nipple and areola are both composed of erectile tissue that they’re considered sexually explicit? The buttocks can be shown in profile with no problem, or even straight on provided that the crack and its contents remain out of direct view. Did that something to do with it? Is it simply a matter of avoid any orifice that secretes fluid, even as wholesome a fluid as milk? Am I so dizzy now that even my very thoughts are in a tailspin?
She’d at least stopped spinning now, but she was still yawing from side to side enough that she didn’t think it safe to open her eyes. The continual shifting of tensions among the ropes that bound her, relaxing here and tightening there, pulling first one way than another, was quite literally maddening. She felt as if she were in the grip of giant with hairy calloused hands that fondled her body lustfully and none too gently. The hemp jute fiber ropes were as coarse as burlap and prickled against her skin even where they didn’t also abrasively rub or pinch. The double-bight between her legs was especially trying, pressing and rubbing the most sensitive parts of her anatomy. Even if she were to stop spinning or yawing, she’d still be rocked by the continuous rocking motions of a ship at sea, even one under the sea. Even if she were perfectly still, the coarse rope would still burn, irritate, itch, prickle, scratch, tease and tickle her most intimate parts. Any struggle on her part only made things worse.
It was deliberate and diabolically slow torture that was driving her into a frenzy literally an inch at a time!
If her nipples had become distended, swollen and tender as a result of the bindings, it was nothing compared to what was happening with her pudenda. She’d become increasingly excited about her prospects with regard to Doc Hazzard, right up until he put her to sleep, but since awakening suspended naked in this net of ropes she had become what she could only describe as “hot and bothered” and she was only becoming hotter and more bothered with each passing second. Despite her best efforts to maintain physical self-control and keep her breathing slow and regular, she was soon all but panting, her breath either coming in shallow gasps or almost convulsive gulps, both of which only served to flex her bindings and tighten their grasp. By the time her swinging motion had stilled to the point that she felt that it might be safe to open her eyes, she was trembling with muscular fatigue bordering on cramp in some places, her entire body glistening with perspiration from head to toe. This wasn’t the Shinobi way!
The Shinobi trained from infancy to control their bodily responses and their emotions, enough that they could simulate the outward appearance of any emotion while feeling none, always mindful of an overarching goal or with an ulterior motive. Reason guided their every action, with cold hard rationality dictating every move. If her body was betraying her now, it was only because she had already let her feelings and emotions get the better of her. Had Doc been right all along? Had she become mentally and thus emotionally unbalanced? Or was she merely expressing her long-denied and repressed humanity, overwhelming in its fierce urgency for having been pent up for so long? She prided herself on her cool and calculating self-possession, but here she was struggling like a trapped animal, giving into her own animal cravings. She felt like a prize pig at a Hawaiian-style beach barbecue, slowly roasting on a spit. She fancied that her fevered mind and febrile body must be visibly glowing now, giving off steam.
The air around her was filled with a steamy scent, but it wasn’t from cooking—or, at least, not that kind cooking. It was the reek of the profuse sweat from both her futile voluntary and feral involuntary exertions, mixed with the heady aroma of her own feminine musk! And, like just about everything else in her current desperate situation, it was erotically stimulating and carnally exciting as it was intellectually repugnant, shamefully sinful and physically disgusting. The worst thing about it, though, was that it was as unutterably delightful and intoxicatingly wicked as anything that she’d ever felt in her life. Even as her semi-involuntarily squirming and writhing body suffered the torments of Sisyphus and Tantalus combined, her blood was singing in her veins and every twinge and tickle filled her with an unholy joy. She wanted fulfillment and she knew that it lay somewhere down this road, just a little further perhaps, but still somehow always elusively and tauntingly out of her reach.
She knew deep down that, if she could somehow magically cast off the ropes and free herself, she couldn’t … wouldn’t … shouldn’t do so, not until she reached the climax that she now so desperately craved, the more so now that she seemed just a hairsbreadth away from it. So Near and Yet So Far! The song seemed to play mockingly in her head. Maybe if she just bore down just a little harder or twisted just so—but no! She was in cruel trap, in which every attempt to escape only increased her agony, pushed her toward a goal that was being pushed along as well, always the same distance away. Her eyes were wide open, but she still couldn’t see because she was blinded by tears of angry frustration. Angry at herself, angry at Doc, angry at America and the Japanese and the whole wide world and frustrated, oh so frustrated, aching for the relief that was her only hope, the release that she knew would never ever come until she did, that paradoxically couldn’t come unless she could climax while still bound.
Yuriko Koroshi did something that she hadn’t done since the day her mother was killed. She screamed and cried her heart out in deep, chest-racking sobs. What little reason she had left was extinguished in a wave of animal rage and frustration as she was swallowed whole and alive by the darkness at the bottomless pit of her despair. But even as she lost her reason, it was replaced by animal cunning that continued to drive her toward the satisfaction that she craved and that Reason had told her was impossible. She threw herself against her bonds, knowing that they would never break, but also knowing that, if she tried hard enough, she would break and, when she did, she would finally be free and achieve the only release possible to an animal as thoroughly trapped as she.
And all the while, she burned as though nailed to hottest griddle in the bluest blazes in the nethermost regions of Hades!
“Life,” Doc’s uncle Alex Hazzard had once told him, “is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
Doc Hazzard seldom if ever worked without a plan or specific goal in mind, but then rarely if ever did things go quite the way he’d planned. Even so, he usually managed to get close to the resolution that he wanted through careful advance preparation, contingency planning that included leeway for complete failure of any portion of the plan as well as alternate routes to the goal, continuous improvisation and the flexibility to use whatever resources came to hand to best advantage. He likened his methodology to playing jazz: there was a score, an arrangement, a theme and a band of trained musicians familiar with both, but no two performances would ever go down the same because the circumstances would never be exactly the same. Audience response was as much a factor as the notes on the page and one’s Muse often struck in mid-note, resulting in improvisations that could never have been imagined in advance of the moment that inspired them.
Such was the case here with the seemingly non-negotiable but not necessarily mutually exclusive ultimatums of Doctor Wu-Hanshu and Yuriko Koroshi. Doc didn’t like other people dictating to him any more than when he found it necessary dictate to others and he especially hated ultimatums of any kind. They were so … inflexible. They left little or no room for negotiation or improvisation. Wu-Hanshu’s ultimatum, for example, had essentially been “Surrender to me unconditionally or die!” Doc thought that he’d found a way to put the shoe on the other foot by creating a situation where he and his Associates would achieve their goals whether or not they survived. Yuriko’s ultimatum is much more problematic, because what she was asking for wasn’t just merely not to die a virgin but for “fulfillment"—whatever that might mean to her young woman’s mind—and a “taste of life” that she that might otherwise have should they all survive. Impossible!
Doc finished ironing and folding Yuriko’s freshly laundered and dried clothes—both her Shinobi stalk-suit and its traditional Japanese underwear and Long Tom’s spare work clothing that he’d loaned her—and stacked them neatly next to the shower, so that she could choose what she wanted to wear when they were done making whoopee. If Yuriko were anything at all like her mother—the ever-ready, willing and able Tamisen Kenobi, whose trapeze strip tease and fan dance acts as “Yumi Fukinuki, the Grindhouse Geisha” had become legendary at Hollywood’s 40 Deuce Club during the Roaring 20s—she’d be hot to trot and sweating like a pig by now—and Doc’s highly-developed hearing and sense of smell told him that she most definitely was, in both regards—and would undoubtedly want as well as need another shower. Doc smiled and took a long, slow, deep breath and savored Yuriko’s enchanting and all-natural perfume. There was absolutely nothing else like the bouquet of a wanton woman stewing in her own juices!
“Ah, Shiro-sama!” Doc appealed to his friend’s ghost, the image the lived on his eidetic image and would continue living until he himself died. “Why couldn’t you have taught your daughter the hard-headedly pragmatic and practical Shinobi view of the ‘Facts of Life’?” It was a rhetorical question. In traditional Japanese households like the one in which Shiro had been raised, the two genders might as well have been different species with little or nothing in common except the need to come together to procreate. They lived apart and rarely mixed except at appointed times and places. When it came to matters of deportment and responsibility, men taught boys and women taught girls. Tami-chan had been killed when Yuri-chan was only eight, long before anything but the bare rudiments of inter-gender politeness would have been an issue. When she came of age, Yuriko would only have the counsel of Tamisen’s sisters and whatever she picked up her college pre-ed course and fellow students.
Still, she should have inherited her mother’s fabulous Ukiyo-e shunga “Floating World” sexual picture book, which included a Japanese translation of Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutra illustrated with photographs of nude male and female models, so she at least had some idea of the various possibilities, plus photographs of Shiro’s kinbaku-bi handiwork as demonstrated on Tamisen’s willing and eager female form divine. I wonder if she’s recognized the position in which she’s bound and the technique used to bind her? Doc mused as he ran a Schick Super Twinhead electric razor over his face and jaws. He had to use it in 12-volt DC “automobile/camper” mode, of course, but the oscillating cutter inside slotted shearing head didn’t care which kind of juice it got, because 110- and 120-volt AC was rectified to DC before it got that far. The shave was the same either way. As he cleaned the head and replaced the chrome-plated steel clip-on cover, he hefted the shaver and eyed it speculatively.
Improvise! he thought. Make the best use of whatever comes to hand. His smile turned feral as he put the razor into the black leather physician’s bag that his father had presented to him when he received his New York medical license and set it to one side. Oh, yes, I can think of a very interesting use for this little number! While he was it, he removed the mirror from the door of the medicine chest above the lavatory and set it aside as well. It’s time that we both had even more time for serious reflection!
Speaking of self-reflection, Doc would be the first to admit that he had a problem when it came to dealing with women. It was partly because he had little if any training in the social graces beyond the correct formal protocol for dealing with high societies of the various peoples around the world, to the neglect of the normal socialization that most boys get growing up from their own families and interacting within their neighborhoods and school yards. But it wasn’t, as was so often presumed, that he didn’t understand women and their needs that he always felt ill at ease and uncomfortable dealing with them one-on-one. It was rather because he understood then all too well, often better than they understood themselves, but simply couldn’t read them. He always knew when a man was lying to him or even just shading the truth, but he seldom if ever was able to tell when a woman was prevaricating if not outright lying to him. More often than not, they were, making them all ticking time bombs.
He simply couldn’t trust women were ever completely speaking their minds in his presence. He could give a man the benefit of the doubt and still not be fooled by even the most skillful lie, but always found himself presuming that they were being deceptive, consciously or otherwise. More often than not, they were fooling themselves as well everyone else. Delusional people were impossible to read, because they always believed that everything that they were saying was the absolute truth, no matter how demonstrably false it might turn out to be. Worse, they couldn’t face the actual truth when it was made plain to everyone else. Such people made Doc, who valued the truth above almost everything else, very uncomfortable indeed. As the Bard had so aptly put it in Act I, Scene 2 of Hamlet, “Frailty, thy name is Woman!”
He removed his clothes, folded and stack them neatly next to Yuriko’s and stepped into the shower. He took his time, which meant that it took him a full minute instead of only twenty seconds or so. It took twice that long to towel himself dry and comb his damp hair straight back over his head and pat it as dry as was going to get for the time being. Gliding past the neatly stacked piles of clothes, he reached for what he was already thinking of as his “party clothes” and began winding it around his body, tightening his abdominal muscles and breathing out make it as snug a fit as possible. The international orange ballistic nylon from which it was made was a close enough analog of the hand-dyed vermilion silk specified by tradition that the ghosts of Shiro and Tamisen Koroshi should have no complaint. Neither of them had ever been purists. The color was the same as that used on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and went well with his golden-bronze skin and hair.
When he’d drawn the rig as tightly as he could and secured the final knot, he reached down and picked up the mirror, examining the final result with a critical eye. He dynamically tensed his muscles as if performing his daily exercise routine, watching their interplay within the constraints of his “play suit” until he was satisfied that he’d done the job correctly and completely, then tucked the mirror under his left arm and reached down for the little black bag. Rising to his full height and squaring his shoulders as if entering a boxing ring, he strode aft like a vengeful bronze Greco-Roman demigod, extinguishing the overhead lights as he went like some avenging angel of death.
It was time to shatter Yuriko’s childish and unhealthy fantasies with a harsh but healthy dose of reality.
Yuriko began blinking rapidly, hoping to clear the haze of tears that blurred her vision. She had no idea what Doc had in mind for her next, but she wanted to see it coming when it did.
She had heard the strange buzzing noise coming from the stern of the submarine, followed by the unmistakable triple blast of the deluge shower, which served to refocus her attention briefly from her burning need because it suggested to her that Doc was finishing his “preparations” and would be returning soon. She shook her head to the extent that she could as vigorously as she could, although it cost her yet another stimulating caress from her nethermost bindings, and succeeding in clearing her vision just as Doc squeezed through the hatchway to the now-darkened galley. In fact, the entire forward section of the submarine was now dark, making Doc seem to glow incandescently in the light from the wardroom’s overhead. Yuriko blinked involuntarily when what she was seeing fully registered. Doc was just as naked as she was!
Her mental observation was quite literally true, but perhaps misleading to the casual reader. Doc was wearing a tightly-woven body harness just like the one that held her, except that his was made of a shiny orange-red cord similar to silk, but nothing else except an Elgin A-11 military wristwatch, turned around so that dial was over the inside of his left wrist. He carried what appeared to be a framed picture under his left arm and a doctor’s Little Black Bag in his right hand. He smiled as he caught her looking at him with ever-widening eyes. “Take a good look, Yuri-chan! You won’t be able to see as much or as well after I turn off the overhead lights!” That turned out to less true than he thought, because the light spilling in through the hatchway to the control compartment continued to illuminate them both and, in fact, created a flattering pattern of highlights and shadows that outlined his contours, rather like the glow of firelight in a darkened living room. Yuriko could still feast her eyes.
Three things immediately struck her about the tableau vivant vision that she now had of the nearly-naked Doc Hazzard:
The first thing that struck her was that he was huge! Doc was so perfectly proportioned that it was easy to forget that he was a giant of a man, over six and a half feet tall and a yard across the shoulders. Because his physique was characterized by muscular definition rather than bulk—quality over quantity—he didn’t look like a muscleman with his clothes on and didn’t loom large even with them off. But framed as he was by the dark hatchway behind him and with the top of his head brushing up against the overhead, his relative size suddenly became apparent to her. Oddly enough, he appeared to shrink as he crossed the room and away from anything whose proximity could provide some measure of his actual size, but he appeared to grow and swell as he drew close enough that his size not only became obvious but also quite intimidating. He was bigger than any other man whom Yuriko had ever seen and quite literally twice her physical size!
The second thing that struck her was that he was hairy! Yuriko had been expecting his skin to be a smooth and hairless as hers. She realized belated that all of the pictures that she’d ever seen showing Doc with his shirt open, torn or off had been magazine illustrations, not photographs. The only one of Doc’s crew ever shown with body hair was Trog, but then that was something a trademark for him. Doc was an adult male, so of course he had body hair—she had known that intellectually but it still came as a shock to see that he was a hairy-chested he-man in every sense of the phrase. The hair on his scalp was a coppery reddish-golden bronze just a few shades darker than the perpetual bronze tan of his skin, but the hair spread across his chest and tapering down his abdomen to a thin line running into his pubic bush was a lighter and more metallic hue, like spun copper. Taken altogether, it looks a spread-winged phoenix flying up toward his collarbone trailing fire from a pyre blazing above and around his genitals.
The third thing that struck her was that he was huge! He was perfectly proportioned, but that meant that every part of his anatomy was on the same scale. As he approached, she found herself on the exactly the same level as his manhood, which began to stir and distend as their proximity increased. It underwent a transformation of Biblical proportions, changing from the Serpent that had tempted Eve as it dangled from a branch of the Tree of Knowledge into Aaron’s Rod, stiff and upstanding, tipped with a knob the size of her fist. When his massive thighs came into contact with the wardroom table, Yuriko found herself facing a scepter worthy of King Solomon, with the base of the swollen shaft almost touching her chin and the bobbing head threatening to smack her in the forehead. Her breath stuck in her throat as she began to realize that she had bitten off much more than she—or any woman—could ever possibly chew!
“Be careful what you wish for,” Doc rumbled as if reading her mind, “because you just might get it … and then some!” Chuckling softly, he set the frame face down on the table to her right and the bag next to it on her left, and then, completely without preamble or warning of any kind, thrust his hips forward and back sharply in a lunge worthy of the salle d’armes of the Château de Cheverny. The head described a downward arc as it moved forward like a knight’s lance, smacking the end of her nose softly in a big wet kiss. Before Yuriko could react to this shockingly unexpected liberty, Doc had seated himself at the wardroom table and was looking her straight in the eye.
“Perhaps now we can both begin to see eye-to-eye about some things,” Doc began with no trace of irony but not without an almost boyishly buoyant good humor. “Like most young women in the world today, you seem to confuse love and romance with sex and lust and mistake mere attraction and desire with some or all of the above, when in fact they’re often vastly different things, especially when they’re not shared with the object of your infatuation.” He shook his head sadly. “It was clear from your expression just now that the reality of our current situation is shockingly at variance with your expectations. Be advised that such will almost always the case whenever one’s personal and private fantasy runs headlong into stark reality.” Yuriko found that she had no answer to that, not that her current circumstance allowed her to give any reply. She just wished he he’d shut up and do something that might alleviate some—if not all—of her torturous sexual frustration.
Preferably something that doesn’t involve gutting me like a trout with that massive member of his, she thought dejectedly. Here they were, both naked and hot to trot, and already she was having second thoughts even though they hadn’t even gotten to first base yet. On the other hand, her bindings had already taken her to third base and were threatening to steal home plate, while the pitcher was balking. Boo! Hiss! Kill the ump! We was robbed! Maybe Doc was right and she really had gone off her rocker and was living in a fantasy world spun out her own frustrated dreams, desires, hopes and fears.
“Here’s the deal, Yuriko-kouhai,” Doc continued. “As much as I’d like to get your honey on my sticker, as much as we’d both like to play at being Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, that’s simply not going to happen. After your mother died, I promised your father that I’d take care you as if you were my own daughter should anything happen to him. Well, now he’s gone and I can’t help thinking of you as my foster daughter. On the other hand, I’ve been dreaming of being in exactly this situation since before you were born and those dreams have only become more vivid and intense over the years since your mother died.” Seeing her expression, he hastened to add, “I know, I know, none of that makes any sense just now, but hopefully it will in a minute or so, when I’ve finished telling you all of the things that you don’t yet know and, in a perfect world, never would have had any occasion to learn.”
As he spoke, Doc produced three small tins of the type the Yuriko associated with shoe polish from the medical bag. He removed the lids and nested them around the bottoms, revealing flat round travel candles, which he lit and placed around the tabletop beneath her, one each directly below her breasts and pubes. Their heat was negligible, less than that of an incandescent light bulb, but the flickering glow illuminated her sweat-slicked body like the spotlights at a grand opening at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Throughout his monologue, Doc had somehow appeared to be admiring the effect without ever taking his hypnotic flake-gold orbs off Yuriko’s sloe-colored almond eyes. Now he picked up the face-down picture frame, stood up and backed away from the table. “Watch and learn, Tiger-Lily!”
Doc moved back and forth until he found the proper distance, then from side to side until he found the proper angle, at which point he flipped the frame around to reveal the polished-metal mirror that had until recently been mounted above the lavatory in the washroom. The mirror now reflected an image of Yuriko back to her, showing her how she looked to any observer standing in Doc’s position: suspended from the overhead in her rope harness in three-quarter head-on view, dramatically backlit both from behind and below. The image that she now saw in the mirror was reminiscent of a framed subtractive-color Autochrome Lumière photographic portrait. The image was, in fact, “reminiscent” in every sense of the word, because Yuriko suddenly and shockingly remembered seeing that same exact image and felt an icy jolt in the pit of her stomach the moment that she remembered where and when she’d seen it. It was final image in her mother’s sexually explicit Ukiyo-e shunga “pillow book"!
Her father had given it her, along with all of her mother’s jewelry and other personal effects, including a delicately embroidered traditional wedding kimono with tsunokakushi headpiece, the day she turned 16. The “pillow book” had looked like just another of the many family photo albums, except that it had a lock of the sort used on her personal diary and had the Japanese words Ren’ai Shashin or “Love Photography” stamped in small gold kanji characters on the cover. She had never found the key for it, but her Shinobi training had allowed her to open it without difficulty. The contents had amazed and confounded her: a detailed sexual manual illustrated with photographs of live models demonstrating everything described in the text. The album had been divided into three more-or-less even parts, which she’d mentally catalogued as Traditional, Foreign and Domestic, although they were of course never explicitly labeled as such.
The first part was a classical Japanese erotic text that could have dated back to the Heian period, but illustrated with photographs of actual geisha or courtesans disporting with otherwise respectable-looking men—or, sometimes, with one another—instead of the traditional shunga woodblock prints. The second part was a Japanese translation of the notorious Kama Sutra text illustrated with photographs of the same couple, a limber and muscular Nordic man and a lithe and supple Hindu woman depicting the initial and climactic moments of the various positions and postures. Yuriko had presumed that an interracial couple, one blond and one dark, had either been intended to illustrate the principles of Yin and Yang or because the Social Darwinism or “scientific racism” that had become popular during the “New Imperialism” period between the American Civil War and the Great War held that both the Teutonic and Hindu civilizations were believed to have descended from the same Aryan master race.
The third part had been the real eye-popper. Yuriko’s Shinobi training had included both general Nawajutsu rope technique and specific Hojoujutsu prisoner-binding and securing techniques, but had only made passing mention of the more intimate kinbaku-bi art of “beautiful tight binding” for erotic purposes. Here, it was illustrated in detailed photographs accompanied with handwritten notes in elaborate and painstakingly precise calligraphy using vermilion ink. There were a variety of models photographed with varying degrees of professionalism and quality, in varying degrees of dress of undress right, in a variety of tones from sepia-tone, stark black & white, hand tinted color to full color, apparently in the order that they were acquired. Clearly, kinbaku-bi had been or had become something of great interest to her parents, enough to merit its own section in their private and personal marital sexual manual.
Then, at the very end, all of the photographs became beautifully clear, sharp and professional photographic studio portraits of a particular couple, a stereotypical “Sweet Young Thing” or ingénue and a sinister-looking much older man—who, because the situations between the two reminded her of something out of The Perils of Pauline, Yuriko had mentally nicknamed “The Damsel in Distress” and “The Dastardly Villain"—wearing little or nothing at all except their ropes. Although the woman was always the actual subject of the “beautiful binding” with the traditional rough jute rope, the man’s torso was also bound in a harness of vermilion silk cordage decorate with gold brocade. In some of the photos, they wore small placards, with his bearing the kanji for the Japanese word Chikara ("power” or “dominance") and hers the word Juujun ("obedience” or “submission"). Even the very material of the ropes with which they were bound indicated their status relative to one another.
The woman was bound in every conceivable position and some that Yuriko could’ve never imagined had she not actually seen them, after which many of them had become burned into her memory forever. Stressful if not painful poses were a common theme, with the woman was literally tied into a human knot is some poses and stretched or bent every which way in others, but the majority of them involved suspension from rafters or eye bolts in the ceiling. The woman was often suspended from a line attached to her rope harness, as Yuriko was now, but also from her wrists or ankles, either singly or together, seemingly in every possible combination. She was even suspended from her own hair, braided into a long tight queue for that very purpose. She was bound spread-eagle, in strappado, to a chair, to a bed, across a table and to a post. She was posed for maximum exposure and convenient penetration of any or all of her orifices. She was posed in ways that denied access. All of the poses were artfully composed and executed.
After seeing her reflection in the same pose, Yuriko had immediately remembered the photo on which it had been based with startling vividness. How could she ever have forgotten it? She could even remember the notes detailing the rope work and recite them to herself from memory.
The ushiro takate-kote hands-and-arms-behind-the-back cincture was specifically tied in such a way that it pressed against the shokai elbow pressure point. The mune-nawa chest harness used the hishi or “diamond” rhomboid pattern—in contrast, the man’s torso was bound using the kikkou or “turtle” pattern—combined with a shinju or “pearl” breast harness. The torso and legs were bound using the gyaku-ebi inverted “shrimp” technique. The tsuri-nawa suspension rope was tied around the waist and secured solidly at the small of the back at the exact center of gravity and the mata-nawa crotch rope used the sukaranbo used the “cherry “tie and was anchored to the “girdle” formed by the suspension rope. The head was pulled upright and held that way with the hair plaited into a braid secured to the junction of the suspension and crotch ropes. The gag was a double-wrapped honmusube reef knot.
No matter how she’d been posed, what was had been done of her or what could potentially have been done to her, the woman in the original photograph had clearly undergone genuine stress and duress and suffered severe physical, mental or emotional anguish as a result, but her indescribable yet erotically evocative facial expression had clearly shown that she had also enjoyed her predicament just as much as her male companion, whose prominent erection left no doubt as to his state of mind and body. She generally appeared on the verge, if not in the throes, of convulsively explosive sexual climax. Looking in the mirror, Yuriko now saw that same expression, overlaid with desperation and frustration, on her own face. The similarity of the face in the mirror and the face of the woman on which her carefully contrived position was clearly based was undeniable and disturbing in its implications.
She and the woman were as much alike as peas in a pod, as alike as twin sisters … as alike as mother and daughter!
Until this very moment, it had never before occurred to Yuriko that the two people in these photos might be anything other than professional models, as had obviously been the case with all of the other pictures in the collection. She now understood with awful clarity that they were, in fact, her parents disporting themselves in front of whoever had taken the pictures. She also now understood the three divisions of the album: they represented three eras of Shiro Kiroshi’s life: the hidebound classical period before the Meiji Restoration into whose traditions he had been raised by his father Asano, the period of innovation and emulation of foreign scientific and social practices that characterized the Meiji reign in which he came of age and came to embrace wholeheartedly and his new life with Tamisen in California following the death of the Meiji Emperor. The pillow book may have been kept and held by her mother as part of the household treasures, but it had originated with and been updated by her father.
Doc watched as Yuriko’s face and body convulsed with revulsion in reaction her sudden revelation. She closed her eyes tightly and began to thrash and moan, struggling wildly against her bonds like a fish in a net being drawn from its life-sustaining water. He ducked back through the hatchway and glided forward to the washroom, where he quickly and quietly reattached the mirror to the door of the medicine chest above lavatory. By the time that he returned to the wardroom, Yuriko had just about exhausted herself and hung quivering and swaying in her bonds, drenched in sweat, heart pounding and breath panting as if she’d just finished a marathon, which in a sense she had. It was just about time for him to finish showing her the ropes about their intertwined lives and, as she had so rashly requested, give her a taste of what she might otherwise have missed. She wanted to know the meaning of life? Well, so be it! Life could be pretty much all things to all people, but it was never ever easy on any of them.
Doc’s erection had all but subsided while he was replacing the mirror but, the closer he got to Yuriko, the more firmly it reasserted itself. He slipped back into the chair at the end of the wardroom table as quickly as possible, not only to spare Yuriko another extreme close-up view of his throbbing organ but also to quell a sudden and urgent impulse to slap her across the face with it. He almost giggled at the mental image that sprang unbidden into his mind of him first slapping her out of her sulk and then slapping her silly. That was a very dangerous fantasy, especially in his current state of arousal, as it was likely to result in a tremendous outpouring of more than emotion. So he sat, leaned forward on his elbows, took her face between his hands and pressed his forehead against hers. “Look at me!” he commanded softly. “Look, listen … and learn!”
Yuriko flinched at his touch, but met his gaze directly and unflinchingly. “You recognized your current situation and you also recognized the situation on which it’s based, mainly the final image in your parents’ ‘pillow book’ photo album. That means that you now know, just as I myself only became aware only a short time ago after not seeing for over a decade, that you are the spit-and-image of your mother at the very end of her tragically short life—the way that I most fondly remember seeing her!” He let that sink in fully before continuing. “I have wanted you from the first moment I laid eyes on you aboard Shao-Hei-Lung. It was all that I could to keep my hands from straying inappropriately while you were crying on my shoulder. Then, when we became isolated from everyone else here aboard the Devilfish, you made it plain that you felt exactly the same and, well, I sort of lost my own mind. I decided that, if you were offering, I was going to accept—but on my terms, not yours.”
“I know from the way that you began acting after you woke up from being drugged by Tetsuhito that you’ve been speculating about the age difference between your father and mother and the almost identical difference between our ages. You’ve been thinking that I could take the place of your deceased father, that you could take the place of your deceased mother and that we could somehow all live together happily ever after. That’s impossible—and we both know it!”
Doc waited to see a glint of understanding and acknowledgement in Yuriko’s eyes before continuing. “There’s a corollary to that proposition about our relative age differences that you obviously have never even considered. Your father was born in 1880 and married your mother in 1921, when he was 41, the same as I am now. You were born in 1922 and are now 20 going on 21, the same as your mother when she married your father. Simple subtraction should show you that both your mother and I were both born in 1901 and are thus exactly the same age, a fact that would’ve been apparent had she lived beyond her 29th birthday. Tamisen was just as lovely and attractive as you are now when I met her two decades ago. We were the same age and, as Americans, had much more in common with each other than either of us did with Shiro. It should come as no surprise that we soon fell in love with one another.”
Doc began retrieving the candles that he had laid out on the table, blowing them out, replacing the lids and putting them back in his little black bag. “Shiro knew all about it, of course. He may even have approved on some level, since we made a good match for one another, but he was a man of honor in the bushidou tradition, the Way of the Warrior, so he could neither ignore nor forgive our transgressions.” Doc shook his head sadly. “He even tried to warn me, making a joking comment comparing himself and Tamisen to King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, then observing that it was fortunate that my father had raised to me to be like Galahad, not like Lancelot.” Doc didn’t mention a bitter comment that Shiro had made after their treachery was discovered. You may indeed be a modern-day Galahad, he’d sneered, but you can’t seem to refrain from using your Lance a lot! He flushed at the memory, but Yuriko was in no position, condition or frame of mind to take any notice. “He caught us in the act.”
Doc also refrained to telling her that the act in question had given him cause to suspect that Yuriko might conceivably be his biological daughter, not Shiro’s, and thus potentially more susceptible than not to the effects of the Brainstorm. Doc’s experiences in the Great War, combined with medical studies, had taught him the need for contraception, but also the lack of quality control and odds of failure of the method that he’d chosen. Shiro had the same knowledge and the relations between the two of them had become and more strained after Tamisen discovered that she was pregnant, increasing in intensity as she neared the end of her term and only easing after Yuriko was born. She appeared to be entirely Japanese, with none of Doc’s distinctive features or coloration, which went a long way to reassuring both Shiro and Tamisen that she was indeed their mutual child and no more of a hybrid than her mother was already.
Doc was not nearly so certain. He knew more about genetics in general and hybridization in particular than Shiro would ever know. Yuriko favored her mother and had all of her distinctive features and coloration, that was no guarantee that she was also the child of Shiro. Yuriko didn’t have any of Shiro’s features that he didn’t also share with Tamisen, either. Whatever traits that she inherited from her biological father simply didn’t show at this stage of her life and might not do so for some time to come, if ever. Doc and Shiro had the same blood type and, in any case, serological testing for based on the Rh, Kell and Duffy blood group systems only eliminated 40% of the entire male population from being the possible father. It couldn’t be used to prove paternity. Doc thought he might be able to come up with a better paternity test based on other and more specific blood proteins, but even beginning such a project would arouse suspicion and raise disturbing questions for all concerned.
“Your father decided to punish us for our betrayal in a manner that he deemed as fitting to the crime,” Doc continued with no hint of his own brief mental digressions. “He partially forgave my lapse as youthful indiscretion, on the theory that no man worthy of the name could resist Tamisen’s charms, any more than he could, despite being twice her age, so the fault must lay with her for leading me on or, at least, not dissuading me forcefully enough. He knew her sexual appetites and predilections from her days as a night club entertainer and, before that, a circus acrobat, so he knew full well that she was more than capable of taking the initiative in such matters and assuming the dominant role if necessary. In any case, he decided to punish her by taking his pleasure with her in my presence, demonstrating his of mastery of her body, mind and emotions by alternating prolonged denial of the needs with forced multiple orgasms, in ways that he knew she found enjoyable but mortifying even without me there.”
Doc grimaced at the recollection. “If you think that he was letting me off easy, well, who do you think took all those sweet little photos? Tamisen was tied up at the time and Shiro had his hands full with her both literally and figuratively, so they needed a third party to stand back and record their art for posterity. I used my own then-state-of-the-art Eastman Kodak No.3-A Model B Autographic Special camera with a coupled telemetric range finder, Kodamatic pneumatic shutter and Bausch & Lomb f6.3 lens using #A122 roll film to produce 3¼×5½-inch ‘postcard’ full-color exposures.” Yuriko rolled her eyes, that being just about the best response that she could make. Doc smiled sheepishly. “What can I say, Yuri-chan? I’ve always been something of a shutterbug and that particular camera was a present from my father for my 18th birthday.” He shook his head sadly. “In any case, that was the last time I saw her before you were born. I never saw her after that without you or Shiro or both also being present.”
Once again, Doc spared Yuriko details that would only upset her, one of which was that Shiro had in fact also punished him the same way as Tamisen looked on. The only reason that there weren’t photographs of a 20-year-old Doc Hazzard in that album was that Tamisen had no aptitude to operate a professional camera of that complexity. Unlike Doc and Shiro, she’d never had technical skills, not even typing. Her abilities were purely acrobatic, gymnastic and erotic and in those skills she was indeed masterful. Doc suspected that she might have been able to operate the camera with a little coaching, but had played dumb convincingly enough to fool Shiro in order to spare him the persistent humiliation of a permanent record that might be used against him in the future. Oh, perhaps, Shiro himself had decided that forcing him, the photograph enthusiast, to use his skills to torment the woman that he loved was sufficient. In any case, no images of his punishment existed other than those in his own head.
He kissed her on the forehead as one who kiss a child being tucked into bed and removed his palms from her cheeks. “We all have erotic and romantic fantasies and, although sex and love are all too often quite different things, fantasies about them need not be mutually exclusive.” He placed his hands under her heaving breasts and hefted them, as if picking melons at a market. “That’s one of the reasons behind my decision to act on my impulse to tie you up and play erotic games with you like this. I never got the chance to do anything like this with your mother.” This was Doc’s hands turning from side to side around her breasts, as if tuning into a particularly elusive radio station, then drawing together until they gently squeezed her throbbing nipples. Under his manipulation, they become hard and tight, contracting into ultra-sensitive nubs the size and shape of pencil erasers. Yuriko’s moan could be heard through her rope gag and, impossible as it seemed, her face became even more flushed and hot.
“Are we having fun yet?” Doc murmured as he shifted to a thumb-and-forefinger grip and gently but firmly pinched her nipples. “It’s nice to be kneaded, isn’t it?” He cooed, and then began pulling her nipples to full extension and letting them retract, first one and then the other, as if milking a cow. “Got milk? No? No, I suppose that would be too much to hope for—more’s the pity!” He released her as suddenly as he’d begun touching and leaned back in his seat until she stopped moaning and squirming, which took a while. Then he reached forward again and began hefting her breast as before, but with considerably more vigor. “Look! I’m juggling!” The speed and force of his wrist action increased until the impacts made audible slaps and her swollen lobes began to visibly redden, far beyond any blush or flush. Doc was now beating her breasts rhythmically as if they were inverted tom-toms. Slap-slap-slap-slap slap-slap-slap-slap slap-slap-slap-slap! “Na-ta-hi-ya-hi-ya-hi-ya!” he chanted.
He finished with a two genuinely hard slaps that resounded throughout the submarine. “Spanks for the Mammary!” Doc crooned, then delivered a spot-on impression of radio comedian Lou Costello. “‘I’ve been a ba-a-ad boy!’ On the other hand, you’ve been a very bad girl, now haven’t you? Offering me your rosy red ass on a platter like that! Oh, wait, it’s not really rose red, is it? At least, not yet!” He took her face between his hands again and locked eyes with her. “I saw how your eyes widened and your nostrils flared when I said that really ought to spank you. You really liked that idea, probably because you know just how much you deserve to be spanked!” Her eyes widened, her nostrils flared but she shook her head vehemently from side to side. “No? Well, I know a really simple and foolproof way to find out!” He grasped her chin with his left hand to keep her gaze on his and reached forward with his right hand to probe the crotch rope were it covered and chafed against her muff.
Yuriko spasmed as if shocked by a live electrical wire. Doc’s hand came back wet, as she had known it would. He brought it up to his nose, although that was hardly necessary, took a deep breath and let it out with a satisfied sigh. “Nectar!” he exulted. “What an enchanting perfume you’re wearing, my dear!” Despite her struggles, he began wiping his wet fingers over her upper lip. “Mm-mm-mm, good!” he taunted, then held her head between his hand yet and looked her straight in the eye again. “Your eyes say ‘No!’, but your lips"—she knew exactly which set of lips he meant—"say ‘Oh, very yes!’” He laughed, then his voice turned deadly serious. “I’ll ask you one last time: have you been a bad little girl?”
He waited. It took a while, but she finally nodded. Yes! “Do you deserve to be spanked until you’re bottom is rosy red and you can’t sit down for a week?” She nodded again, more firmly. Oh, yes! “Are you sure? Once I start, I won’t stop until the job is done!” Oh, very yes!
“What you tell me three times is true,” Doc mused as he began untying the rope that kept her legs elevated and in line with her torso. There was a slight bobble as she suddenly jackknifed at the waist and her knees swung down until they touched the table. He moved to port side of the table, wrapped his left arm around her waist and began rubbing her bottom with his right palm as if trying to summon a genie. He was certainly planning on making something come gushing forth from her. “Whenever you’re ready, you naughty little girl!” he called over her shoulder, patting her left cheek impatiently. Yuriko produced an emphatic but muffled sound that could be taken for verbal assent. “Okay, you asked for it, Missy! Now you’re going to get it!” Doc’s left arm tightened like a vise as he raised his right hand as if it were a blacksmith’s hammer. “Ready or not, here it comes!”
Yuriko had expected a loud smack! and a sharp sting. Instead, she heard what sounded like a gun shot, felt like a kick from a mule shod with red-hot iron and saw a blinding flash behind her eyes. The pain was negligible—she contemptuously thought that she’d experienced ten times as much pain freeing herself from Wu-Hanshu’s Plexiglas prison cell—but it was unexpected enough to make her gasp. The first spank had landed on her right cheek, whose temperature seemed to rise a full degree in response. The second struck her left cheek and the third was back in the right, continuing to alternate like the pistons of a Harley-Davidson “Knucklehead” OHV V-twin two-cylinder motorcycle engine, which produced over 20 horsepower—it certainly felt like it! Doc took his time with both the wind-up and the pitch, so that she had plenty of time between swats to anticipate and brace for the next. That anxious wait was sometimes worse than the actual impact. Yuriko’s tolerance slowly but surely began to erode.
The interval between spanks wasn’t actually all that great, perhaps two or three seconds, it only seemed that way. In any case, it was neither the pain nor the heat in her buttocks that was problematic, it was the heat and urgency being generated in her already tender and tumescent mound that really mattered. Each impact was transmitted through the crotch rope directly to the most sensitive and responsive part of her body. As it that weren’t bad enough—or should that be good enough?—every flinch and flex of her gluteus maximus also stimulated the same area, so even her attempts to brace herself or resist each impending impact was just as teasingly arousing and erotically exciting as the impacts themselves. By the time that they’d reached the count of 20—what would’ve counted as “birthday spanking” even if she weren’t in her “birthday suit"—she was in an agony of arousal and teetering on the verge of climax. Although it seemed like hours, the spanking had only lasted less than a minute!
And then the dirty rotten no-good seventh son of a seventh son of a son of gun stopped!
She registered as much protest as she could in her situation, which only prompted him to a snort and shake his arm as if he were easing a cramp. “Hey, I’m doing all the work here, Missy!” He began patting her fanny again, as if checking the temperature as much as anything else. Her distressed derriere felt as if it were incandescent and his hand, as smooth as that of any professional man who worked with his hands, now felt as rough and abrasive as sandpaper. He resumed spanking as suddenly and abruptly as he’d stopped and this time it became clear that he wasn’t going to stop again until, as he’d promised, until the job was well and truly done. Yuriko didn’t know if “truly” actually applied, but her pert posterior had already been in the fire until it’s redness was undeniably past medium rare and would undoubtedly be quite “well done” before he was.
Doc resumed her spanking at a significantly faster pace, the spanks being correspondingly lighter and milder—about what she’d initially expected when he first began. This kinder and gentler spanking only continued until the count reached 20 again, then reverted to the hard and heavy for the next 20, then back to fast and stinging for 20 and hard and heavy for a final set of 20. “The Hot 100!” Doc exulted when he completed the final set, after which he paused and added, “And one to grow on!” That 101st swat was the hardest and heaviest of them all and delivered to both cheeks simultaneously. By that time, Yuriko was past caring. She had lost count and had just about lost her mind. Each of the hard and heavy sets had brought her to the brink, but the light and easy sets took her off the boil, but kept up the heat on enough to keep her simmering.
When it was all over, she was blinded by tears, deafened by her own thundering pulse, overwhelmed by sensation that she couldn’t even name much less describe … and hotter than a frantic and frustrated female fox flagrantly fornicating in a forest fire!
“Well, now, let’s see how we’re doing here!” Doc mused, inspecting his handiwork. “You’re certainly rosy enough.” He kneaded her buttocks as if they were some much bread dough, turning up the heat. “Should I start calling you ‘Rosie the Riveter’ now?” Releasing her, he returned to the forward end of the table, where his erection loomed large in her view. “I’ve got your ‘Riveteer’ right here, Rosie!” He sat down abruptly, bringing them eye to eye once more.
“Out of sight, but never out of mind, eh?” Doc glanced down at his lap, then back at Yuriko. She made a moue, which is extremely difficult to do when you’re gagged with a knot half the size of your own fist. “I know that you think that I’ve been toying with you, torturing you with prolonged arousal but denial of orgasm but, as much fun as that would’ve been with your mother, it’s not what I intended with you. I’ve not only been trying to pop your cork all this time, but to set off a string of firecrackers worthy of Chinese New Year.” He frowned. “You’re certainly not frigid—your sexual response has been quite remarkable for a virgin and, yes, I took the liberty of checking—but something is preventing from climaxing. I think that it may be a result of your Shinobi in iron discipline and self-control. You’re not only fighting the ropes and the stimulation that they were intended to provide, but also yourself. You need to learn to surrender yourself to your carnal desires. That, and work for it!”
Doc’s sigh was one of genuine regret. “Your mother knew all of this. She was, in fact, a genuinely sensual woman who understood the need not only to submit and surrender to both one’s own desires and those of your partner, but also the need to exert one’s self to satisfy them. Unfortunately, she died long before you were ready for her to pass her knowledge on to you and, of course, Shiro could never bring himself to explain such things to you—he may not even known himself. Your American upbringing has taught to regard sex as dirty and given you an unrealistic view of your role as a woman. So I’m speaking to now not as a sexual partner, father figure, friend of the family or even as a concerned friend, but as a medical doctor. Please listen to what I have to say next with that in mind.”
Yuriko was no state of mind to listen to anything, but Doc’s hypnotic flake-gold eyes compelled the obedience of her mind even though her body remained as rebellious to his will as it was to hers. “On the one hand, sex is over-rated. The satisfaction that gives is as ephemeral and fleeting as that of a good meal and a good night’s sleep. On the other hand, denial of the urge can be as harmful as thirst, starvation or insomnia and the sex drive can be as urgent as hunger and thirst. Every human language describes lust as an a appetite that must be appeased. So while we strive to master our urges, whenever we ignore, repress or suppress our sexual impulses, we do so at our own peril. This is the mistake that the ascetics make. They believe in mind over matter, but mind arises out of matter and the thoughts in our minds are filtered by and expressed through our brains, which in turn depend on healthy bodies supplying sufficient oxygen and nutrients. Break any of the links and the entire chain falls apart.”
He paused as if collecting his thoughts. “So intellectuals, materialists and spiritualists attempt to divorce mind from body and rationality from animal instinct, while popular cultures around the world often fail to distinguish between purely physical or sexual attraction or desire and emotional caring, comfort, love or romance expressed physically or sexually. In fact, sex and love can sometimes be quite different or even mutually exclusive, although are both are definitely most fulfilling when expressed simultaneously with the same person or persons, within the constraints of the society as a whole. Lovers, like doctors, should have to swear an oath to First Do No Harm. It was perfectly fine for us to love one another, but quite another to express our feelings physically through sex with one another. It would be just as wrong for us to express our feeling for one another through sexual intercourse. I make mistakes, Yuri-chan, but I never make the same mistake twice.”
Doc smiled ruefully. “After you propositioned me, my first thought was how I could satisfy our mutual desires without actual breaking my word to both your father and to myself. So, once I decided to use kinbaku-bi for that purpose and mindful of all of the many consequences of carnal union, both physical and emotional, I was careful not to leave myself any openings.” He tapped the knot gag to make his point and let the other rope barriers speak for themselves. “What we’re doing now is certainly sexual or, at least, sexually charged and should bring us both to a satisfying climax, but it’s not actually sexual congress so much as it is mutual masturbation. We both obtain sexual satisfaction, you get a taste of sexual satisfaction as you requested and no one gets hurt. Unfortunately, it’s proving to be even more problematic than I anticipated.” He patted her cheek paternalistically but in no way condescendingly.
“As I said earlier, you should have popped your cork several times now. It was only while I was spanking you, as you so richly deserved and obviously craved, that I realized why. You’re like a thoroughbred pony on the obstacle course who performs all of the elements of dressage well but balks at the final jump. The problem, I think, is that you think—as do all too many girls nowadays—that all you have to do is lie back and think of England. You think that you can have all of the rewards without doing any of the work. It doesn’t work that way with sex any more than they do in any other aspect of life. You can’t have something just because you want it or think you deserve it. You have put in some effort and do your share of the work to earn it!” He smiled reminiscently. “Your mother certainly knew this. She threw herself fully into the sexual act, even when it was being used to punish and torment her, because she knew that it was how the game worked. No pain, no gain. No work, no reward.”
He tapped her on the nose to draw her full attention and emphasize his points. “Your mother wasn’t there to tell this, so it’s up to me to teach you ‘What Every Young Woman Should Know’ but, alas, all too seldom does. You’ve studied reproductive anatomy at the University of Southern California, so at least I won’t have to explain the female genitalia to you and describe how the various parts work together, but I can teach you how to actually work them well enough to get you over that last jump.” He smiled again. “I have this on the best authorities, namely my own research combined with my own personal experience. I know, the accounts of my life and career emphasize a decided lack of interpersonal skills in general and with women in particular, but these accounts are written for audience consisting mainly of 10- to 15-year old boys, whose own experience in this regard was negligible and widely believed to be nonexistent.” Doc chortled. “As if!” Then he sobered, as befit the subject at hand.
“These accounts generally characterize me as being ‘woman-proof’ and, to some degree, I am. Like you, I’ve learned total self-control but, as previously noted, the urges are always there and it’s unhealthy to repress them for long. I learned the hard way that sex and love are both distractions that I cannot afford, leading the entanglements that compromise my very reason for being. So I learned how to gratify my sexual desires without a partner and made doing so a part of my daily two-hour exercise routine. What is an orgasm but a spontaneous muscle spasm? One of my mentors referred to male ejaculation as a ‘genital sneeze’ that could be induced by tickling like any other sneeze. For women, I would compare more to a charley horse, but then women always have things more difficult than men do, as witness menstruation and childbirth. Life is unfair, but we can level the playing field and make it more. So here’s my Dirty Little Secret!” He leaned closer and lowered his voice to a confidential tone.
“Thanks to the pulp magazine publishing industry, almost every schoolboy in America now knows that I regularly exercise every muscle in my body. Few have drawn what should have been an obvious conclusion: every muscle includes muscles that most don’t even consider muscles. In particular, it included the pubococcygeus muscle of the pelvic diaphragm, which almost everyone uses on a daily basis without even knowing it, because they use it to hold their water whenever they have the urge to urinate at an inconvenient time or place. That muscle also plays an important role in sexual intercourse, allowing the female genitalia to bear down on the male organ like a squeezing fist and the male organ to flex within the female organ. In the female, it’s often referred to as ‘milking’ and, in the male, it’s often called ‘flourishing’.” He smiled distractedly yet again. “Your mother, in particular, was a ‘milkmaid’ par excellence!” He cleared his throat and continued somewhat sheepishly at the digression.
“In any case, I’ve exercised this muscle throughout my life, along with all the others, but I discovered during puberty that I could use it to climax almost at will. I later learned that the human brain its the ultimate sexual organ. By combining my photographic memory and vivid imagination, including what the Dutch psychiatrist and writer Frederik Willem van Eden called ‘lucid dreaming’, I discovered that I could improve my fantasy life to the point that I could satisfy all of my urges whenever and wherever they occurred. I found that sex really is over-rated with regard to my purely physical needs and, if I could take every woman that I’ve ever known, seen or ever just heard mentioned and brought them all together for one night, they’d never match my sweet imagination. Knowing that, and knowing to the problems that even the least encouragement might bring, I have indeed become ‘woman-proof’ in the sense of being able to resist almost any temptation. For me, sex simply isn’t worth the cost.”
The expression on his face suggested that Doc still sorely tempted by Yuriko. “This aspect of my reputation is something of double-edge sword, as many women take it a challenge and pursue intimacy with me all the more. It’s also contributed to some unflattering and downright nasty speculation as to my sexual preferences. You have seen firsthand how false such notions are and how just well I’ve risen to the occasion.” Yuriko nodded emphatic agreement, the image of Doc’s fully upright organ still burned into retinas. “The discovery of the benefits of this exercise are such that I’ve working with a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, Arnold H. Kegel, to develop an exercise to treat or prevent genital prolapse, increase bladder and bowel control and sexual function in both men and women. You may even have met him, as he’s Assistant Professor of Gynecology at the USC School of Medicine. He’s had to his studies on hold for the Duration and probably won’t be able to publish his findings for some years.”
Yuriko started getting impatient again, so Doc cut to the chase. “According to the Chinese proverb generally misattributed to Confucius, Lao-Tzu or Kuan Chung, ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.’ I’m going to teach you how to fish in way that will feed your desires for the rest of your life. Doctor Kegel and I have co-developed an women’s exercise that I call the pelvic squeeze because that doesn’t conjure up mental images of milking and such. I’ve even written a mnemonic to make it easier perform the exercise properly:
Find the muscle you’d locate
When you don’t want to urinate
Then squeeze that muscle to the max
Just squeeze, squeeze, squeeze … and relax
That’s pretty much it, Yuri-chan: apply pressure to the pelvic diaphragm or ‘pelvic floor’ as it’s sometimes called, squeezing the pubococcygeus muscle as tightly as possible and then relaxing it completely. The sukaranbo mata-nawa tie normally spreads the labia apart, but the one that I used acts to do the opposite. It also applies pressure to external muscles and nerve clusters that trigger the pubococcygeus reflex, creating an involuntarily pelvic squeeze. You’ve already felt that effect and even responded to it, but you haven’t actively applied such pressure internally and that’s the key. As my Uncle Alex used to say, ‘If you want a drink of water, you’ve got to get it from a well. If you want to get to Heaven, you’ll have to raise a little Hell.’ You’re going to have to work that muscle until the cows come home, and then milk those cows for all you’re worth!”
Yuriko stared at him as if he were crazy, then realized that was ironic, given that he had been going on about the fact that he was concerned that she might be crazy. Seeing her concern, Doc took her face between his hands and spoke as soothingly as possible. “Trust me on this one, Yuri-chan. You won’t be sorry! Now, will you do exactly what I tell you, exactly the way I tell you?” He waited for her to affirmative nod.
“Good girl! Okay, here’s your mantra. Do you know what a ‘mantra’ is? It’s is a sound, syllable, word or phrase that are considered capable of transforming thoughts. Hindu ascetics use mantras to shut out the everyday world and bring themselves closer to the spiritual enlightenment that they seek, but such sounds may be used to concentrate the mind for other and much more worldly pursuits. My so-called ‘trilling’ is a mantra that I used while learning at the various Hindu schools of Yoga, Vedanta, Tantra and Bhakti mind-body technique. Since you have trouble letting go of your will and releasing your desires, I want to recite the following phrases in time with the pelvic squeezes: ‘Give up … give in … go nuts … get off!’ They correspond to ‘squeeze, squeeze, squeeze and release’ of the mnemonic. Think about it, visualize it, internalize it and let me know when you’re ready to begin.”
At her nod, Doc began massaging first her breast and then her nipples. As she began to respond to that, he began to manipulate the ropes, inducing even stronger reactions. All the while, he repeated the mnemonic and coached her. “Work it, Yuri-chan! Milk it! Come on, girl, work that body!” When it became clear that she was getting the hang of it, Doc reached into his little black bag and produced the shaver that he’d set aside before beginning their session. He turned on, adjusted it until its vibrations were at the maximum strength possible and then tucked between the crotch rope and her Mount of Venus. The effect was almost instantaneous and quite dramatic.
Yuriko’s body and face contorted and she moaned through her gag loudly enough to be heard in the engine compartment. Within a few minutes, she was hotter than ever before and on the brink. Doc began to spank her breasts and pinch her nipples while murmuring words of encouragement. The mantra and the actions to which it was timed began to merge in Yuriko's mind and, more importantly, deep within her body.
Give up—squeeze! … Give in—squeeze! … Go nuts—squeeze! … Get off—relax! … Give up—squeeze! … Give in—squeeze! … Go nuts—squeeze! … Get off—relax!
Suddenly, the balking show pony’s defiant spirit broke and she surrendered herself to the mastery of her rider and jumped the final hurdle. Her body arched as if she were being electrocuted, held in a spastic rictus as if turned to stone, as she screamed and screamed and screamed again. Doc counted a half-dozen orgasms on her part before he initiated his own much-practiced pelvic exercise and joined her somewhere over the rainbow. The resulting fountain covered Yuriko’s face and breasts and dripped down onto the table, but both Doc and Yuriko were oblivious to this for several minutes. Doc would apologize for the mess and Yuriko would assure him that it was fine. She’d wanted him to give her a taste and he had more than delivered. Although it had seemed like hours and, at times, even like days, the entire session had only lasted a little over 90 minutes.
As Yuriko’s body finally relaxed and hung limply in its bonds, her face went through a series of facial expressions familiar to those who had seen her deal with emotional turmoil: denial, anger, appeal, sadness and acceptance.
Her long personal nightmare was over. Now the healing could begin.
Doc and Yuriko sat at the freshly-scrubbed—as was so much else aboard the Devilfish during the last half-hour—wardroom table. They were both freshly showered and back into their shipboard work clothes, Yuriko having decided that she’d had quite enough of Japanese culture in general and Shinobi tradition in particular to last her for the rest of her life. Just how long that life would last was the topic currently under discussion, over grilled Velveeta processed-cheese sandwiches and Nescafé reconstituted coffee substitute. Yuriko was still working some of the kinks out of her muscles and reflecting on some the kinks in her psyche to which she had only recently become aware.
“So, we’re back to the original question: do you feel that you are ready, willing and able to die for your country—the country that will likely lock up given half a chance—should the need arise, as it certainly will if I can’t convince Wu-Hanshu that it’s in everyone’s best interest for him to surrender?”
“I’ll tell you the God’s honest truth, Doc—I don’t ever want to die!” Yuriko opined from behind a mouthful of toasted bread and cheese. “That said, I still don’t think that I have all that much to look forward to in any of the forseeable futures.”
“I have to have a definitive answer, yea or nay, Yuri-chan. Either we surrender or we call his bluff and force him to either surrender or carry out his threat. I don’t see any other solution.”
“I’m just a passenger on this boat, Doc Hazzard!” Yuriko drained the last of her so-called coffee. “You do whatever you feel is right and proper and I’ll deal whatever consequences follow, just like everyone else here.” She looked him squarely in the eye. “I’ve decided to stop fighting my Fate, give in, give up and go nuts.” She winked. “I’ve also decided to you where to get off!”
Doc didn’t smile, but he stopped frowning. “Okay, I’ll ring up the Doctor and deliver the bad news. I … I really don’t know what else to say to you at this point.”
“Don’t say anything. On second thought, answer a question that’s been bothering me.” She dropped the bantering tone. “How did you know that … all that … was what I needed?”
Doc didn’t ask her to elucidate on what she meant by “all that” even though it left a lot of room for interpretation. “I also needed it. I, too, was exposed to effects of the Brainstorm.”
Yuriko made of moue. “Do you really think that the Brainstorm device had longer term effects than what it did while actually radiating?”
Doc finished his own snack and began clearing up. “Everyone has acted uncharacteristically silly at some point following a Brainstorm attack, especially while under of a drug or medication that shouldn’t affect them quite that way.” He shrugged. “We’ll just have to wait and see what develops over time.”
“However much time we have left!” Yuriko impulsively stood up on tiptoe and kissed Doc on the mouth. He kissed her back, but not nearly as emphatically as she wanted. She rocked back on her heels and extended her hand, which he shook just as he would “one of the boys"—Cat would be so-o-o jealous if she ever found out. Yuriko beamed. “You really know how to show a girl a good time, Doc Hazzard. Thanks for … everything!”
Doc beamed back and replied sincerely, “It was my pleasure, Tami-chan!”
Yuriko’s face froze solid in an instant. Her heart froze just a few seconds later, when she realized that this had been the second time that Doc had called her Tami-chan and not Yuri-chan. The first time had been when he had climaxed so explosively that it had taken two towels to clean up the mess.
“You … dirty … rotten … no-good … seventh son … of a seventh son … of a son of a gun … lying … cheating … conniving … two-faced … opportunistic … malefactor!” Yuriko’s voice rose in pitch and volume with each word until it echoed throughout the Devilfish with enough force to heard on sonar ten miles away. Her frozen heart seemed to drop through the deck and down into the depths all the way to sea floor, where it stopped an incipient volcano from bursting through and froze it back into Arctic basalt. “You have what you want now, because I wish I were dead! I wish you were dead! I hope you die screaming in agony and get blown straight to Hell, where you and my mother can burn for all eternity! How could you!” She flinched from his outstretched hand. “Don’t touch me! Don’t even talk to me! I hate you!” She turned on her heel and reeling unsteadily as she retreated to the diving compartment and slammed the hatch behind her.
If there had anything hanging on the walls, it would have fallen. If there had been anything breakable left unsecured in the diving compartment, she’d now be breaking it.
“Oops!” Doc muttered quietly toward her retreating back. Sometimes you just can’t win for losing! Doc reflected morosely. He turned on his own heel, strode aft, sat down in the command seat in the control compartment and picked up the makeshift inter-ship telephone handset and pressed the annunciator key. “Trog? Please be so kind as to put the No-So-Good Doctor on the horn, won’t you?” As he waited patiently for this to be done, he began trilling contentedly. Whatever else might happen, he was thoroughly satisfied with the way things had gone so far.
“Greetings and Bienvenue, Granduncle!” Doc began heartily the moment he heard Wu-Hanshu voice. “Time’s a flitting and we’re here sitting! In other words, it’s high time that you decided whether to shit or get off the pot!”
Timeframe: Friday, 10 April 1942
Word Count: ~18,700 words
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Last Update: 15 October 2015