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King of the Worlds. M. Thomas Gammarino
Читать онлайн.Название King of the Worlds
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781634059091
Автор произведения M. Thomas Gammarino
Жанр Научная фантастика
Издательство Ingram
When Werner Von Braun, the brains behind Hitler’s V-2 rocket, was “sanitized” by the US government after Nuremberg, he was immediately put to work on the elite party set’s new “yacht.” It wasn’t particularly difficult, and they were making regular jaunts to the Sea of Tranquility by 1950. The Apollo project, allegedly culminating in the moon landings of 1969, turns out to have been a case of an artist plagiarizing his own work, though Von Braun was careful to make Apollo bulkier, louder, altogether more majestic and less efficient. For a little while, this first generation of world-hoppers was content to eat the space food, wear the spacesuits, and bounce around on the cold dead surface, but they soon grew restless and commissioned the terraforming of a resort inside one of Luna’s more spectacular caverns. Von Braun looked to it, and by the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, the Illuminati had their own psychedelic, pressurized and climate-controlled love grotto inside the moon. Imagine the most luxurious beach you’ve ever seen, with waves like blue gin lapping gently against a snickerdoodle shore. Now put it inside a cave with a glass ceiling and light it with a grove of tiki torches. Then set out some cocktails, rowboats, and individually wrapped contraceptive devices. If you can imagine all of that, congratulate yourself: you think like Hitler’s rocket man.
It wasn’t long, of course, before these lunar getaways became old-hat, so the Illuminati (old, fat, white guys mostly) began cherry-picking entertainers and inviting them up for the weekend to join in the festivities. Naturally these entertainers were sworn to utmost secrecy on penalty of death, but they were happy to oblige, and “the Grotto” quickly became the best-kept secret in Hollywood. Anybody who was anybody had been there.
Gilliam had invited him up for a cast party. You might think Dylan would have been surprised as the limo mounted a steep canyon to a launch pad near the Hollywood sign, but in fact this latest unveiling of the marvelous life that awaited him seemed perfectly in keeping with the series of unveilings that had taken him in the past couple of years from awkward high-school student to star of the silver screen. A week ago he’d been on the cover of Time—was a cast party inside the moon any stranger or less believable than that?
“Can I tell my fiancée?” Dylan asked.
“Now why would you do a thing like that?” Gilliam said. “Tell her I invited you to my house on Catalina for the weekend. We’ll have you back by Monday unscathed. Unless you like it rough, of course.” He winked.
Dylan smiled as if he understood and then called up Erin and told her about Catalina. He felt terrible lying like this, but he had sworn secrecy on penalty of death. Surely she’d understand.
“I’m happy for you,” she told him.
The rocket ship was smaller on the outside than he might have expected, but bigger on the inside. The seats were nicely padded and there was a full bar and a plasma TV (cutting edge, in those days). It was not unlike the inside of the limo he and Erin had once taken to their senior prom, albeit somewhat roomier.
They watched The Right Stuff, for irony’s sake. Out the porthole, the moon grew larger in the sky—nickel, quarter, fifty-cent piece—until it occupied the entire view and took on a third dimension. He could make out the mountain ranges and individual craters and rocks, and everything was so stark and clean and colorless and dead.
Once they made landfall, the captain, a young guy in a blue jacket with yellow wings, ushered them to the front part of the ship. When they were all accounted for, he pressed a button and a door closed with a pneumatic hiss. Then he pressed another button and the whole module they were in separated from the rest of the ship and became a kind of rover thing. The captain steered them across the rugged terrain toward the mouth of a nearby cave and took them straight through an air lock.
Once inside, they stepped down from the rover and found themselves in a sort of cavern. Light flickered on basalt walls, and the air felt humid, even tropical. They wound along a ridge for a couple of minutes and finally emerged at the head of a trail that led straight down to what appeared to be an honest-to-goodness ocean inside the moon. A couple of surfers carved up the waves. Along the beach, a dozen or so men lounged in beach chairs, drinking cocktails or receiving massages from naked, or nearly naked, women. A number of other men gathered by the cabanas beside the beach, drinking and playing cards, buxom women stroking them and giggling. It was to one of these tables that Terry escorted Dylan, and only when they got close did Dylan realize that he recognized most of these faces from the movies, even if he didn’t necessarily know their names. He did, however, know Hugh Hefner’s name, and Hef was there, wearing a burgundy robe. He had a heap of poker chips before him and a nude centerfold on each arm, both of whom smiled absurdly at Dylan. The one on the right even winked. “Welcome, son,” Hef said. “Which one do you want?”
“Want?”
“This is a man’s world up here, son,” Hef said. “Repression is against the rules. What’s your pleasure?”
Dylan indicated the one that had winked at him, and she immediately came over to him and pressed her hard body against his. “I like you too,” she whispered breathily in his ear.
“Why don’t you give him the tour?” Hef suggested.
“I’d love to,” she said. Then she crouched down and took off Dylan’s shoes, lingering at his crotch for effect, having clearly mastered the art of titillation. He was half crazy already when she stood again, took him by the hand, and led him down to the sea.
“This place is something,” Dylan said.
“Isn’t it, though?”
“So do you, like, live up here?”
“You silly,” she said. “Nobody lives up here.”
“So this is your job then?”
“You could say that,” she said.
“You’re well paid, are you?”
She laughed. “Extremely.”
“I’m Dylan.”
“Hi, Dylan. I’m Fantasia.”
Of course she was.
They were down at the water’s edge now, the warm surf licking at their toes. She giggled and turned to him with this dumb puppy-dog look. Then she took his hand and placed it on one of her bulbous breasts, which was so supernaturally perfect it had to be an implant. It was all so much like a dream, who could blame him for surrendering to the wiles of this vapid, well-compensated goddess and making love to her over and over again on the microbead shores of the Selenian sea?
Over the next couple of days, Dylan slept a good deal in his private bungalow, ate seven of the best meals of his life, and drank cult wines like they were orange juice. On the second day, Hef asked if Dylan wouldn’t rather sow his oats in a different girl today, but Dylan said he was perfectly happy with Fantasia. Judging by her body language the rest of the weekend, she was perfectly happy with him too—or just a very talented actress. Either way would do.
He was back in Santa Monica with Erin by Monday. The end of his career, unbeknownst to anyone, was just a few months off, and he would never be invited to the moon again. One might have expected him to retaliate after his firing by publicly outing the Grotto, but he kept his word. For one thing, though he sometimes wanted to die in the aftermath of his shaming, he never wanted to be killed exactly. Moreover, it was fairly certain that even if he did tell someone, he wouldn’t be believed. And anyway, there was something sacred to him about that memory, and he didn’t wish to profane it.