Dead-Bang Read Free Page A

about men delighting—or occasionally terrifying—their wives, or vice-versa as sometimes occurred when a woman had been on Erovite for a few weeks and her hubby had not; and of individuals slowly waking to wide-eyed libidinousness after an apparently total sexual anesthesia of years; or of prodigious feats of evil which almost had to be lies; and of that now famous orgy in the old folks’ home, why, then, you can bet your boots, it became plain to those who care deeply about such things that something had to be done to stop this spreading evil lest the stiffs rise up in mortuaries and begin eyeing each other lustfully. Better that all the stiffs should stay dead; for why gain life only to lose it?
    Some were taken in by this argument. Some were not. But if sheer volume of sound and words and fury could have carried the day, those who proposed the argument would surely have carried it well out of sight; for, although there were minor disagreements, once the truth about Erovite’s appalling ability to increase the power and strength and vigor of man’s sexual desires and abilities—apparently raising his lower nature higher than it had ever been before, maybe even raising it almost as high as his higher nature—all those opposed to, or fearful of, or even kind of suspicious of sex, spoke out against it as one.
    Except for Festus Lemming—whose voice was the loudest of all, who volcanically damned sex of any kind, sex right-side-up or upside-down or sideways or back-to-back, with your clothes on, and who denounced at great and intimate length every conceivable nuance of sex, taking as his text and authority the Holy Bible—nobody suggested in public that Emmanuel Bruno should be stoned to death without delay.
    Others in the holy chorus dwelled somewhat less on sex, but paid at least as much, if not more, attention to Bruno and Erovite. It was agreed that every atom of Erovite should be destroyed, but as for Bruno they could not, being good Christians mostly, go so far as to agree completely with Lemming’s suggestion. Something, of course, would have to be done about Bruno, but the mind of mere man could not think of anything sufficiently horrible. So, God would have to do it.
    That, basically, was the message, and it came in loud and clear from first a hundred and then a thousand pulpits and ecclesiastical podiums. Priests and preachers and pastors and innumerable minor popes reared back and roared, at first in isolation, individually, and at last in one great booming mass. The Church spoke, and it spoke in a voice of thunder.
    And the Church said, as usual: No!
    Condensed— much condensed—the message was: as for sex, any kind of it was a dubious virtue; and it rampant and unrestricted by properly appointed restrictors was very bad; thus Erovite, which led to more of it when there should be less of it, was very bad; and Emmanuel Bruno was anathema, doubled and redoubled.
    In the past four or five weeks, aside from the hullabaloo about Erovite itself, two names had been spoken and shouted and screeched and sung; perhaps more than any other two names in a similar span of time throughout history. One, of course, was Emmanuel Bruno. The other was his chief opponent, the now-number-one spokesman for the forces of decency and the angels, Festus Lemming—but we’ll get to Festus later.
    I stood in front of the tropical fish tanks for a few more seconds, watching the guppies poking each other’s lower natures, then turned and walked back to my chocolate-brown divan and looked at Drusilla.
    â€œEmmanuel Bruno, huh?” I said.

3
    By nine-fifteen P . M . I had put on my shoes—I’d been lolling before the television set in canary yellow socks, and slacks, of course, and a loosely knitted short-sleeved white sports shirt—and strapped on my gun harness, fully loaded Colt .38 Special snug in its clamshell holster. Carrying a cashmere jacket that matched the