That got him off on a familiarly unpleasant chain of imagination. He would walk into the clinic, where a bunch of big, hairy, full-crotched men would stare at his member and banter their remarks back and forth while Prior stood in the center like the victim of a keep-away game. "Hey, Joe—get a load of this! Less'n four inches and clapped!" "That so? I thought the clap didn't touch anything under the legal limit!" "Mister, you better cut this sort of thing out—" (brandishing a scalpel dangerously near his defenseless penis) "It'll stunt your growth!" "Bring in the mouse you fucked; we'll have to cure it too!" But Prior knew he was as foolish as the matron in this respect. Clinic people didn't really make such crude remarks; they only thought them.

He nerved himself and went in. Everything was quiet and private and clean and deadly serious, to his considerable relief. The clinic tested him and cleared him promptly. The medical attendant didn't even snicker at the size of his penis. Prior was not now, nor had he ever been, a victim of gonorrhea.

So he had lucked out. Ridiculous to have thought himself infected!

But he stayed well dear of the beach.

Though Prior Gross spent many of his days on the dull job, and his nights either dreaming of sexual exploits (his penis was always double length in dreamland) or worrying about their consequences (suppose one of those dreamland dolls had the syph?), his most persistent remaining concern was inventing. At home he had a device converted from a broken-down laser theodolite and a built-up computer-guided atomic-motor fuel-injection transformer. It was supposed to be a cigarette dispenser—one that would check the approaching mouth, analyze it for taste preference and general capacity, insert an appropriate brand, and light it. When the weed had burned out, the machine would remove the butt, rinse the orifice with a sweet jet of aseptic mouthwash, and insert a new cylinder. In such fashion a person would be able to chain-smoke around the clock without ever being aware of it.

He had been tinkering with the device in spare time for three years, and mechanically it seemed perfect. He would have had it ready in half the time, had the Cancer Clinic approved his application for a research grant. But the execs at Cancer had been very obtuse about the benefits of the invention. The Heart Clinic had been even worse. One of its execs had even had to call on the services of the Tranquilizer Clinic, before Prior completed his presentation. Strange folk, these Clinic officials. It almost seemed as though they had something against smoking.

Now his device was ready, at least in prototype. But it seemed that hardly anybody smoked anymore. They preferred to absorb their drugs in more convenient ways, such as incense spiked with nicotine, caffeine, speed and pot. Since Prior did not smoke himself—he had a domineering doctor—he had no way to test the machine in the field.

He had built the better mousetrap after the barn door had robbed Peter to—well, however it went, he was out of luck. That was the story of his life.

One night as he pored over his creation, trying to think of a use for it, the succubus came again. She was every bit as shapely as before, but this time was garbed in a slitskirt super decolletage evening special that put her charms into forceful focus. No wonder she got no arguments from the sleeping men she visited on her collection rounds! But Prior wanted no part of her—particularly not the part she offered.

"How did you find out where I live?" he demanded.

"I took down your tag number, of course. I knew your address before you ever got home that night. But this was the first open date I had. There've been a lot of horny men around here recently, and right now the demon ranks are spread pretty thin, so—"

"Well, reopen it. I don't—"

"It's open, lover. Just waiting for your entry." She hoisted her skirt delicately to show him.

Prior gulped, strongly tempted in spite of himself. "I meant the date. I'm busy."

"You must be. You're hardly horny at all tonight. But at the moment I'm long on female clients and short on males. Just give me a quick fix for the gal in polka-dot who lives down the block, and I'll be on my way." She hauled up her skirt again and draped herself spread-legged on his bed.

"The girl in polka-dot?" he asked, recognizing the description. "She takes an incubus?"

"She will tonight." The succubus elevated her knees, causing her cleft to open wider.

"I haven't washed in a week. I'm cheesy and under four inches erect," he pointed out. "You like six and can take eight."

"Or even nine, in a bind," she agreed. She sighed, her breasts almost flowing out of her dress, which was fashioned for support, not enclosure. "Harvesting you is something of a handicap, but there's something about your produce. I had a load from an advanced syphilitic later that night, and the spirochetes all shriveled up and died." She shook her head, and her chin almost banged a breast, "Just like that, they expired—but the sperm cells stayed fresh. There's something unnatural about that."

A succubus talking about the unnatural? Yet despite his aversion to her, Prior found his curiosity piqued. "How did you know about them dying?"

"I tasted them, of course."

He remembered. Her remarkable demonic vagina could taste and measure. "So you're VD resistant. What's that to me?" Then: "Say! That's why I never caught the clap!"

"But I'm not resistant! I pass along whatever I receive, diseases and all. That's the beauty of it. I have no curative properties. I'm only a run-of-the-furnace sex demon, after all. So it must have been your fault. Nothing like that ever happened to me before, and not since."

"My fault!"

"Some residue from you must have acted on the next load, changing it. So I thought I'd try you again, after the effect wore off, and see if the same thing happened." She shrugged out of her dress with a maneuver Prior couldn't follow, and lifted her legs up toward the ceiling. She had a fine looking aperture, and Prior's penis responded manfully—until he remembered again what he had seen on the beach. She might not have VD right now, but the idea of that hole forming into a phallus caused his own phallus to shrink in dismay.

"Put it right here, lover," she invited, twitching the muscles of her buttocks so that her vulva winked at him.

Prior knew how persistent she could be. She would keep after him until she got her crevice properly stuffed. How could he get rid of her without a scene that would bring the nosey landlord galumphing down the hall?

His eye fell on the cigarette dispenser. Something clicked snidely in his mind. The succubus was lying with her head away from him, tilted so that she could not see him below the general region of his waist.

"Let's have ol Lingam right up Yoni," she murmured, doing a brisk bicycle-pedaling exercise that was something to behold from this angle.

He picked up the machine and turned it on, holding it low.

"Coming, lover," he said.

He tilted the business end appropriately and set the box against her half-creased buttocks.

The sensor-filament poked out and tickled her crack. "Oooh, you've been practicing!" she whispered, wriggling with delight.

The machine hummed. Prior hummed too, to conceal the noise. "You sound happy," she said. "Glad you changed your mind. Fucking can be fun, you know."

Then a slender cigar popped out and nudged into her vulva. "You don't have a full erection, though," she complained. "That's not even a four inch penetration. Come on, get it hard!"

Obligingly, the machine poked the cigar in farther. "Now you taste like tobacco! What have you been doing to that little prick?"

The machine lit the projecting end. Smoke curled aromatically up between her legs. "You're really getting hot now," she said, smiling blissfully.