Can he join us?'

What Ray Smith O'Reilly thought of that I didn't know. From the bathroom came silence.

`Who?' she finally asked.

I walked over close to the door.

`A very lonely young anchorite needs your attention. He has a deep need. He's almost crying. Can he join us in bed?'

`Oh yes,' she answered promptly.

Beside the bed where I had left him, Smith stood like an abandoned bulbless lamp. With great gentleness I helped him

undress and guided him to the location of the bed. He pulled the covers up to his chin like an eighty-year-old preparing for thirty below. Soon Terry, clutching the same towel at the same place, came modestly out of the bathroom. Smith stared at her as at another piece of Martian furniture.

`Terry Thrush, I'd like you to meet George Lovelace. George, this is Terry.'

`Oh, hi,' said Terry; with a bright smile.

`How do you do?' said George Ray Smith O'Reilly Lovelace, `How would you like to fuck her, George?'

I asked, my own penis lifting its head in more than idle curiosity.

`You first,' he blurted.

`Okay, me first, Terry. Give me your ass again.'

Terry looked a little surprised, but quickly hopped into bed beside our young man, and stuck her little behind plumply into the air. Her face on a pillow she turned, smiling brightly at George, whose head lay looking ceiling ward on the other pillow a foot away. George looked sick.

I place my penis; prodded and poked, and, with all deliberate speed, it plunged deep into Terry's warm, wet interior. My God, that was good. Terry had helped aim me with her hands but now as I began easing myself in and out she moved herself on her elbows over to silent George and - undoubtedly smiling brightly to the last - moved her face over his and began giving him her sexy, snakelike kisses.

George lay as rigid as a dried straw, except for his central limb, which was as limp as a wet straw. I pulled Tiny Terry's thighs against me and more or less picked her bodily up and deposited her face on Georgie's belly. Discovering a poor, lonely, unloved cock, she did her duty.

The long and the short of it, Reader - and that is the usual sequence in these affairs - was that I made a splendid splash in Terry's interior and Terry did enough favorable groaning and straining to please everyone, presumably including herself. When she finally let go of old Sir George his limb was just as limp as before. However, as Terry rolled onto her back away from him I saw that the rest of him was at last limp too. Sir George too had seen the Holy Grail.

`Terry has a very nice mouth, don't you think, George?'

'Er, yes, she does,' he said.

`You're exceptionally beautiful in the interior, Terry,' I went on.

'Thank you,' she said. My two young friends were lying on their backs side by side while I had settled back on my knees near the foot of the bed. I was feeling very tired and depressed, and my mood was manifesting itself by my heavy-handed irony.

'Is your ass as warm and juicy as your cunt, Terry?'

`I don't know,' she said and she giggled.

`Live and learn, or in the immortal words of Leonardo da Vinci: "Anus delictoris ante uturusi sec."

Tell me, George do you feel now that someone loves you, that life does have a meaning after all?'

`I - beg pardon?'

`I was telling Miss Truss that you came here tonight very unhappy and lonely and unloved. Has she given you the

spiritual nourishment which you needed?'

'A little bit, I guess.'

`Hear that, Terry, only a little bit. George must really be depressed. Don't you realize, George, that Terry kissed you

and caressed you without your even asking? She gave herself unrequested and unselfishly for your pleasure and

enlightenment. Now what do you say?'

His face contorted nervously; he looked at me. Finally he said: `Thank you, I guess.'

`You're welcome,' said Terry. `I like to help people.'

'Terry is unusually helpful, wouldn't you say, Ray?'

`Yes, she is.'

`Let's all have a drink. Scotch for you, Mr. Lovelace?'

`Yes, thank you.'

As I plodded off nude to the liquor cabinet, I found myself for the first time wondering about the reliability of our questionnaires. Little Miss T., the inhibited Catholic virgin, had showed all the juiciness and technique of a forty #161;three-year old nymphomaniac. And lover-boy O'Reilly … Well, back to the old data sheets.

After we'd finished our drinks, during which we had several sporadic conversations on (a) the weather (we need snow),

(b) Renaissance history (Rabelais was actually a serious thinker), and (c) religion (it's frequently misunderstood), I said firmly to George: `Your turn now, Lovelace.'

`Oh yes, thank you.'

Terry lay on her back to receive him, and after several youthful giggles, he seemed to enter the promised land. The doorbell rang.

For a moment I wondered if there weren't some electronic device deep in Miss Tracy's womb which triggered the apartment bell. It seemed unlikely, but…

I located a bathrobe this time, told the little ones to carry on without me and marched stoically to the door. There, as I leaned my slightly debauched face around the edge of the door, stood Dr. Felloni. We exchanged stares in total disbelief for five full seconds. Then she blushed so fully that I can only describe it by saying that her head, which was of course nodding vigorously, had a climax. She turned and ran down the hall. The next day her secretary phoned to say that she was attending a conference in Zurich and would be away for two weeks.

Chapter Twenty-nine

My experience with Terry Tracy and the results of the Columbia Copulation Caper in general were a revelation to me. After Dr. Felloni had left the apartment door that night and taken a taxi across the Atlantic to Zurich, I had returned to the bedroom to find Tracy and George moiling in the bed and as oblivious of my presence as they had apparently been of my absence. I stood there watching the sheet which covered George's behind rising and falling in regular rhythm and as the sheet shuddered I had something like a Religious Revelation. Other people also were capable of playing artificially imposed roles - and therefore dice-dictated roles. If Terry had in fact been even somewhat virginal, she was this evening demonstrating a remarkable ability to open herself to new experience. If she were in fact a nymphomaniac, she had earlier demonstrated a shyness and inhibition in marvelous contrast to her natural open-door policy. And George Lovelace seemed to be a good learner too; from clod to copulator in thirty minutes.

As I stood there I began to feel that I had only been playing at the dice man. It had been a jeu d'esprit of which I was proud but nothing more: a maladjusted man's way of epater les bourgeois without the bourgeoisie knowing about it. But had I innocently discovered gunpowder and then used it for firecrackers, when a larger man would have used it for explosives? Or a magnifying glass which I was using to create pleasant images but which might be used to see something new? Shouldn't I try to turn other people into dice men? If Arlene enjoyed housewife-with-a-lech for a day and Terry call-girl-for-a-day, might not each enjoy other roles the dice might fling her way, as I had? Shouldn't I be using dice games as dice therapy for my friends and patients? My dice life had become almost a joke; at that instant it seemed a mission - a quest I might pursue to lift my fellow men to new heights. I had cast the dice as a bitter game I'd played against the world; now I would cast them to build New Selves, Random Men. Boredom would be wiped out with the vaccine of the dice, like polio. I would create a New World, a better world, a Place of Joy and Variety and Spontaneity. I would become the Father of a new Race. Dicepeople.