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Did I ever tell you about the time I got up out of bed in the middle of the night to go to the loo and fell over Bosun Sam's blasted dog that was lying asleep across the top of the stairs?

No?

Oh well. I thought I had. Never mind, it went something like this:

I was on Africa 9B at the time, that’s one of the smaller planets in the New Continents System, out past Betelgeuse some way. Fifty third sector in area See Gee something but never mind about that. It was a densely forested planet and had only recently been designated a P triple S.I. which meant all those who’d moved there illegally with the intention of exploiting its resources and peoples had not much time left before they were forced to bugger off somewhere else.

Bosun Sam was ok, he had a right to be there. He was an official settler, a pioneer if you like from the time when 9B were still taking his kind of people. He was a hunter, a trapper and a few dozen other assorted things. That was how I’d met him originally, years ago before all the restrictions and export bans. He had some pelts to sell and I wanted to buy them. Pelts, you know, animal skins, furs and hides. There was good money to be made back on Earth and some of the other planets at that time. On poor old Earth in particular no one had seen anything that wasn’t plastic for years and bloody years.

He’d a trading station as well had Sam, hard against the gate of the spaceport, an alloy shack surrounded by a thickthorn hedge and two dozen unrolled coils of razor wire. And when I say shack I mean almost the entire hull of the good ship Thames Trader, less it’s engines of course. Yes that was the same famous freighter you may have heard about which eventually went crooked and crashed.

Sam, being the kind of man he is, took full advantage of the disaster. That is to say he risked life and limb to rescue the crew members, their personal belonging and one, very disreputable ship’s dog.

Misguided breeding can do bad things to animals as well as to people you know. Make them the way they are I mean. And avarice or stupidity can put that same dog in an inappropriate place. Like on the flight deck of a space freighter when it was more suited to hunting for its dinner in a forest somewhere. Anyway……

Anyway, Sam ended up with the hulk of the ship and set about exploiting his good fortune. The hold was full of hand tools, potatoes and medicines, all priceless commodities on any planet where Homo Sapiens as a settler or explorer might be found.

And, wouldn’t you know it, he also ended up with that damn great ugly ships dog.

Yes, the very same one I fell over in the middle of the night!

……………….


I’ve traded a lot of stuff with Sam over the years. Not only pelts but native arts and artefacts, crudely carved hunks of timber and exquisitely made jewellery with stones so small you couldn’t see them except with the aid of a glass. Furniture too, those rough types of chairs the people in the northern coastal part of the planet make from the driftwood and debris they collect off their beaches. Most of it has a market somewhere.

In return I brought back useful things to exchange, items nobody could get on 9B unless I’d already hauled it there from somewhere else. Pharmaceuticals mostly, along with some of the more delicate electronic things. Like mood sensitive vibrators for ladies for instance. Yes I did a good line in them. And contraceptives by the ton, those thin rubber ones mostly, hell so many you’d never believe. So Sam was my intermediary if you like, on 9B, my buyer for a long time before he became my lover.

And like so many of the things that happen, him becoming my lover came about purely by accident.

I’d kept quiet about my abilities and predilections naturally. Sam had no need to know much more than that my credit was good and I was utterly reliable. He’d seen the shell I wore, early on and made no comment, thinking it to be a brooch of some kind and I’d not enlightened him. At that time in the proceedings the Lady’s teachings hadn’t reached as far as 9B. I must have been one of the first of the Cowries to actually get right out there. So the Lady’s teaching never came into any liaison I ever made.
Sam could be a crude, down to earth sort of bastard sometimes. I know he offended some people with his manner and embarrassed others. I am pleased to say, other than occasionally eliciting some rude comment in return, it didn’t affect me.

Yeah crude and rude and, oh let me give you an example. One typical of Sam and the ill humour he sometimes got into.

I mentioned mood sensitive vibrators earlier; well we’d only that morning begun to unload my latest cargo of them. It was a mixed sex load if you like, a hundred odd different items ranging from various vibrators to underwear, fake appendages and assorted oils and creams. I’d a new line in vibrating gloves which I was rather dubious about. The seller had been eager to get them off his hands, in a manner of speaking. They were all left handed gloves, which was why they weren’t selling, he said but I didn’t see it in quite the same way. After all one could still do all manner of good things with an ungloved right hand. Anyway………

Anyway Sam seized upon the gloves eagerly, then, seeing how they were shaped, suddenly less eagerly. He, being a man could see only the disadvantages of them all being left handed.

He tried turning one inside out, as I had done seven months earlier when I’d bought them, but that didn’t work. Then he tried putting one on his right hand but that didn’t work either.

“Left handed!” he moaned “Why the fuck are they all left handed?”

“Something to do with the machine that made them?” I suggested.

“Fucking hell!” Sam said.

He bought the lot anyway and at ten percent more than I’d paid for them, which, when haulage costs and taxes were taken out meant I more or less broke even. On that item at least.

I tore open a box of the super-duper new vibrators to show him after that.

You know, by the end of the twenty first century electronics generally had become so complex that it was impossible to tell a real live, growing nerve cell from one which had been made, grown in effect, in some fantastic factory. And can you imagine a solid state electric motor with no moving parts? Hey, its difficult isn’t it? And that’s only skimming a tiny bit of a vast and very convoluted surface. I tell you Sweethearts you wouldn’t believe some of the things that could be made!

Hmmmm! The super-duper new vibrators. I expect you’re dying to hear about them? They can be bought where you live, if you know where to go, but they are very expensive! That’s because they’re as realistic as they could be without actually having a real man attached, Some would say they’re better than a real man anyway, I know. I’ve heard it said and heard it said. You can turn them off when you’re done, they’re always ready to go, they cost very little to run, they don’t snore, and so on. And so on ad infinitum.

Personally I’d say yes, they are better than a man but in an entirely different way. Living Latex ™ is whats behind it basically. That’s the stuff they invented specially to make new arms and legs for those people who lost their originals during Earth’s infamous East-West Wars. Oh I expect there were one or two new penises made at the same time because, no doubt, that was what gave some clever bastard the idea. Like someone else said however, you can’t get a vibrator to mown the lawn or change a wheel on your car. Not yet anyway.

“These are damn good!” Bosun Sam declared delightedly.

“They are, aren’t they?” I said “Four different colours and seven different sizes………”

Sam waved the one he was holding. It looked like an eight by two. “So what size is this?”

“Eight by two!” I said “The one in the middle”

“Right! Right!” he cried “Where are the great big ones?”

Well I hadn’t opened the box of great big ones on purpose because I didn’t want to embarrass him. Though I hadn’t experienced it at the time I’d heard he was well made. Several people had told me so I’d no reason to doubt it. Trouble was to compete with the largest one of the vibrators in question a man would have to be as well made as a horse.

“I haven’t unloaded them yet” I told him. They were still in the hold, still in their boxes because, like I said I didn’t want to embarrass him.

“What are these?” he asked, poking about inside my ship nosily.

That did it of course. He found them and demanded a viewing straight away.

“Do you honestly think theres a woman anywhere who’d want to……to use a thing like that?” he asked when he’d nearly finished staring.

“Loads!” I said “I do for a start!”

Yes I know I shouldn’t have said it but sometimes my mouth runs away with me.

Bosun Sam went sort of red around the face and neck. He gulped, opened his mouth, closed it again, then looked at me shrewdly.

“Don’t believe you!” he said.

To this day I don’t know if he really meant it as a challenge and I’m not the sort who generally bothers about challenges anyway but this time, this time I had an idea my sale of the things to him might depend upon what I did and said.

“I can’t put a thing like that on display…….” Sam protested.

“Why the hell not?” I asked.

“Well because………” Bosun Sam said.

It really was quite comical watching him.

“Because I don’t want to frighten my customers away!”

“Sam, Sammy” I crooned.

He hates being called Sammy.

I put my hand on his arm.

“What’ll I do with them if you don’t buy them?”

Red faced as hell Bosun Sam gazed at me.

“Donate ‘em to a stud farm!” he suggested.

………………

Sometimes life can get very silly. Not the life itself, I mean the silly things that happen every day. Coincidences, strokes of luck, minor miracles, that kind of thing. No I didn’t want to walk on water, or even on Walter, but I did want to get rid of those damned vibrators. Sam had taken everything else I’d hauled, almost without exception but there they were, those gigantic vibes. Still boxed and languishing in the hold of my ship. All of them except the one I’d unwrapped to show Sam originally. The one he’d gotten so embarrassed about.

I’d also forty five medipacks left unsold and virtually forgotten. They weren’t in the main hold, they were in an annex, the emergency stairwell if you like and had quite got in the way of the lady who irons and cleans. She’d moved them twice already that day and was beginning to glare at them for the third time when I, as absentmindedly as always came blundering in.

“Them haversacks are getting’ on my nerves!” she announced forcefully “Forty five of the things and all of them right in the way!”

“No there are seven boxes……” I replied thinking about something else entirely.

“Tell me!” I said, entirely without thinking “Did you ever screw a man who was hung like a horse?”

Mrs Cleaning and Ironing stopped moaning for long enough to look across at me.

“Yea, all the time!” she said.

“Good, good!” I went on, still without thinking. “He’s your boyfriend or your husband is he?”

“Yea!” Mrs C&I agreed “That he is!”

She wasn’t that big a woman to look at. Not physically. She wouldn’t have been much use as a cleaner of the interiors of spaceship if she had been, on account of all the little alleyways and nooks and crannies she has to get into with a brush. Not huge like Cass Elliot or Shirley the Wrestler if you see what I mean. And yet………

“Good……..er, good, good!” I burbled again.

Mrs C&I peered at me.

“Nearly done in here” she told me “Apart from the stairwell. All them bloody haversacks are in the way you see……….”

I think she was beginning to get annoyed.

“Don’t worry about the stairwell or the haversacks” I said. “I’ve a buyer for most of them anyway. He’s……”

It dawned on me then that she was waiting for payment.

Ten Sdollars an hour that woman costs me and even then she doesn’t deal with vomit, semen, blood stains or mouse’s nests. She did take the demonstration model gigantic vibrator home with her though, along with her money, and in great glee.

“Might have bin modelled on ‘im!” she grunted when she first saw it.

“Let me know how you get on, won’t you?” I said.

“Might do!” Mrs C&I grinned.

………………


I told Bosun Sam what I done when I saw him that evening.

Immensely surprised he stuck his head out of the window immediately.

“Can’t hear any screaming!” he said.

Well I thought rather than screaming Mrs C&I would, by now, be lying contented in a state of utter exhaustion, if I knew anything about anything.

“You won’t either!” I informed his as his damn great dog came snuffling.

“Seventy of the things!” Sam mused thoughtful.

“Sixty nine!” I corrected.

“Oh, isn’t that something from the Kama Sutra?” he asked

Bosun Sam can be deliberately ignorant sometimes.

I had to shove his damned dog’s head forcibly out of my crotch just then. You know what some dogs are like. Troublesome!

Sam grinned. “He can smell you!” he said.

“I expect he can” I said.

“Can you really get one of those things in there?” he asked.

“Well Mrs C&I certainly can!” I said.

We kind of staggered on in from there. Circling the subject warily, avoiding some words and misusing others. The dog slunk off outside to howl at the moons and after about twenty minutes of so of getting nearly nowhere Sam said to me:

“How about you give me a little demonstration?”

Now I was reluctant to open another new vibrator just for his benefit, specially as there were only sixty nine of them left so I told him, quite carefully that, the way I was feeling at that moment I’d rather have the real thing.

That was how we ended up in bed together and why his damn great dog laid itself outside the door. Because until I came along and ejected it the thing had slept with Bosun Sam in his bed.

…………


I got rid of sixty eight of the gigantic vibrators the very next day. Sam bought all of them of course. That was soon after Mrs C&I came busily bustling in.

She was so full of herself she was almost bursting and bright red all over after enduring the most sexciting night of her life, she said. It was her enthusiasm that persuaded Sam to buy the vibrators ultimately.

I’m off back to the Sol system at the end of next week, when the alignments are favourable. Before I leave Sam and me are going to spend some time together. Quite a lot of it I should think and vigourously. Without the dog in his bed.

And that’s what worries me. I promised I’d demonstrate that sixty ninth vibrator to him tonight and, oh Sweethearts, I don’t think I can!



© Aahlu. 141010.