She shrugged. "It's your dough."

"Just get in the car, why don't you!" Prior was anxious to get away before more of a crowd collected.

He drove her to a private park, certain by this time that he didn't want her at his apartment. She climbed onto the back seat, got on hands and knees, let her breasts dangle low, bared her bottom, and he mounted her from behind and jetted somewhat feebly into her upraised aperture. She was still a luscious hunk of distaff flesh, but he had seen what he had seen, there on the beach, and knew what he knew, and it shook him up quite apart from the VD threat.

Luscious hunk? As his shrinking penis sucked loose, he realized that she had assumed the neuter form: breastless, narrow-hipped, hairless. He felt like a pederast. He didn't like pederasty. "Now you're done; get out," he said shortly.

Chapter Three

After he was rid of her he drove home and took a long morose shower, scrubbing his limp penis thoroughly. Then he dried under the air-blast and spilled wine-scented shaving lotion on it from glans to scrotum, hoping the alcohol would burn off any remaining contamination. It stung like hell, but it didn't ease his mind much.

He dialed the number of the city VD clinic and asked for a printout on gonorrhea. He read it completely. This didn't ease his mind, either.

He had to take three happy-pills to get to sleep. And he dreamed... not happily.

He dreamed that five days had passed and the tip of his penis became inflamed. It was red and tender, at first causing irregular erections, then actual pain. When he urinated there was such intense smarting that he could not tolerate more than a few drops at a time—but there seemed to be gallons in his bladder, and they had to pour out. Then pus choked the conduit, popping out in grisly lumps when the frothing urine finally blasted its way through. The agony was hellish. There was brown blood in it now.

The pus lasted for three months, causing him to stand at the toilet for half an hour at a time without performing, then soiling his pants when he walked away with bursting bladder. He wet his bed at night, hardly noticing because of the other agony, and his constantly soaked buttocks and scrotum began to feel raw, too. He couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, couldn't work because of the viper's nest of pain in his groin. Then the inflammation began to spread.

It covered his bladder and his kidneys and his rectum, making every facet of elimination a continual torture. It invaded his prostate, his testes, his epididymis, rendering him sterile several times over, the hard way. Then it advanced to his mouth, interfering with eating, and his bones and joints, giving him arthritis. It infiltrated the lining of his body cavity and the valves of his heart. It poisoned his blood. It infected his eyes, making him painfully blind. Finally it penetrated to the membranes lining his spinal cord and the brain itself, and he knew he felt the onset of paralysis and insanity.

About then he woke up in sweat so copious he could not be certain it wasn't urine, and remembered that gonorrhea was not the worst of the venereal diseases.

It was Monday, the beginning of his four-day working week. Prior was a parking lot surveyor—the reason he had been so put out about being ticketed himself. He used a laser theodolite to resurvey parking lots and make sure their dimensions were within tolerance. Unscrupulous operators—and that meant all of them—tried to shave the size of individual spaces and the access lanes, and could get ugly when called to account. The worse the offense, the uglier they got. Some threatened him, not realizing that one of the spare lenses he carried was in fact a laser pistol. Some offered him money, not realizing that his theodolite was irrevocably bugged; they were soon out of business, and he was permitted to keep the money as a gratuity for his cooperation. He liked getting bribed, except when they used counterfeit bills. Others sent attractive young sexy parking attendants to reason with him in some remarkably convenient bedroom-like office—not realizing that his penis was less than four inches long, erect, and he was sensitive about exposing it before strangers. As his bastard boss well knew; that was why Prior had been hired over more qualified applicants for the position. Some liabilities tended to make men honest...

All week, as he measured and noted and punched out deficiency reports and accepted bribes and fended off solicitous sex-pots, his mind was on his penis. It probably required the deficiency report, and no bribe could add two inches to its length, but it was the only one he had. Every time he took a leak he watched for pus and fancied he felt the beginning irritation. And there was irritation—but only because he washed it six times a day now and the tissues were being bleached. In the middle of some intricate measurement the little soldier would stand up, stiff as a metal spike despite its brevity, and he would wonder whether this were the first gonhorrheal priapism while he tried to conceal the bulge behind his theodolite.

But nothing happened.

Two weeks later a woman brought her car in to a reserved lot while he was surveying it. He was angry, because the peripheral emanations from the atomic motor interfered with his laser. But before he could formulate some suitably cutting remark, she stepped out. He recognized her: the matron the incubus had serviced on the beach. The gonorrhea trap.

Prior said nothing to her, and she never noticed him. Instead he noted the tag number of her car. When he got home he phoned the registry department and got her name and residence. Then he located her medical file. The information was supposedly confidential, but as a state employee he knew which computer buttons to press.

What he was after, of course, was the truth about her gonorrhea. Had the succubus been trying to scare him out of sheer perversity? She was, after all, a demon, and he had dismissed her impolitely. DOES SUBJECT HAVE VENEREAL DISEASE? he typed into the appropriate line.

NO, the answer came immediately.

Relief and anger fought for supremacy. The succubus had been lying—if in fact she was a succubus, and not just an idle woman with some devilish tricks up her skirt—and he had fallen for it. There was his anger. But he had no risk of contracting gonorrhea. There was his relief.

But computers were demons in their own fashion, and liked to torpedo unwary querists with partial truths. The files only provided the specific information requested. It was always necessary to countercheck. HAS SUBJECT EVER HAD GONORRHEA?

YES.

Oh-oh. PROVIDE DETAIL ON CASE HISTORY, LAYMAN'S TERMINOLOGY.

It turned out that the woman had had a trial marriage a decade ago (only a decade? She must be younger than she looked!) and had contracted the disease then. She had avoided treatment because of the stigma attached, so the illness had become entrenched. She had thought the hysterectomy would clean it up, but it hadn't, and she remained a carrier.

This was the bitch the incubus had tackled. Prior had then had a second contact with the succubus. He had been exposed, all right.

But the most recent note on the case history said simply: SPONTANEOUS CURE, COMPLETE.

Prior read and reread that note, checking its veracity and date. She had had VD—but somehow in the last two weeks the disease of a decade had aborted without treatment. Why? And since she had still had it when he ran afoul of her, why hadn't he come down with it?

If he hadn't. Maybe his case was taking three weeks to develop the first overt symptom.

Suddenly he had the courage to go to the VD clinic himself for a checkup. The notion that he might not have gonorrhea seemed more compelling reason to go than the notion that he had it—because of that potential stigma. And other factors.