I will tell of my plan shortly. I will return to the meeting and outline the details of the plan as I had worked it out in the hours before. It is an excellent plan and surely cannot fail. Right now, however, I must vault ahead in time. I tumble in eagerness to speak what happened to me after the meeting. One hundred and sixty-one stayed behind after the others had left. I closed my door, I extinguished the lights and then had her sexually on my bed without words, endearments, or preparation. This was what I had been waiting for; I had felt the sense of her need overtaking me through the latter stages of the meeting and knew, once she stayed behind, seduction would be unnecessary. She collapsed under me groaning, yielding, her body soft and wet under the hard surfaces of her apparel and manner and I entered her crying, screaming, already at the apex of my insistence and without a word between us; I grabbed her, seized her, poked and entered her with a righteous slamming rod and, for the first time, fucking her on the bed, groaning, wordless, I felt a surge of desire, real desire; a feeling which reduced what I had had with the other females to the feeble twitchings of impotence which it must have been; I felt the desire taking me like flame and fought it only briefly, then dove into the center and at the center she was there, waiting for me, her mouth open, her thighs drawn, her breasts heavy and pendant, swinging above my mouth and I reached toward them, took, squeezed, buried my teeth around the nipples in an effort to give her hurt as she had given me vulnerability and she took it, took all the pain as if it were the most delicate of caresses, and drew me into the fire, the two of us bucking and fighting against the flames and finally overcome, falling, falling great distances and back then to my humble bed where I found myself still pinned on her in the position of desire, gripped between her thighs, waiting, waiting . . . and I moved, then, to withdraw from her but found that she would not let me; her thighs closed like metal across my softness and held me in there like the most delicate of flowers. I pounded and pummeled again for simple release until at last, with a cry, she opened and disgorged me, sending me staggering to one side and then off the bed while still deep within herself she moaned and groaned, so piteously that at last I had to help her in the few ambitious ways that I know . . . and at last passed her a cigarette and then she was quiet.
“Who would have known?” she said, “who would have known?” and then lay quietly and said, “I don’t believe you, Quir; I think that you are entirely mad,” and “who would have thought that we would have been so easily corrupted; God, it’s insane, these bodies, these assignments that they have made for us, they must be as demented as we have become,” and “but it’s good, Quir, it’s good; you have no understanding of how it can be; the sheer goodness of it all,” and finally, “don’t call me one hundred sixty-one anymore; I’m not one hundred and sixty-one. Call me by my name, call me Nala.”
“Nala,” I say, reaching toward her again, “Nala,” and perform once again the ponderous acts of generation upon her, sliding over the smooth emptiness of her surfaces, penetrating and burrowing to the hidden parts of her, shouting her name into the moist air which surrounds us; but all the time some part of me, some part of my consciousness remains detached with the precision of the therapist; like the therapist I evaluate her mood, her need, her position as I dive upon her and, as I do so, as this part of me continues its calculation, I realize that the aliens have made us more like them than we can ever know and that a taste for calculation, once acquired, can never be lost. “Nala,” I say, sweeping into her, “Nala.” All of this happened after the meeting. I do not know whether Nala and I now have what could be called a “relationship.” I do not feel any closer to her than to the other females I have had over these months but on the other hand she seems to feel that I have made certain commitments and in any event we are bound together now by the rigors of the plot.