Clive Bedford - Mistress of torment

The only one not apparently involved was the American girl. Gravely she unplugged the tube from the end of the penis-sheath, waited for the white fluid to run down into the plastic bottle, removed the tube from the neck of the bottle and sealed it. She gathered up everything and got rid of the tube into a slot, presumably intended for garbage. She stood, holding the bottle.

"That will go into deep-freeze," said Gulda. "From that we shall breed maybe five-hundred Andromedan half-breeds. You will become the father of a new race!"

Gerry did not speak. He just lay there, looking up at Sonia who stood beside Gulda motionless, uninvolved, aloof.

The guards came soon after and took him back to his prison. They removed the strap from his ankles, replacing it by a hobble that enabled him to shuffle along with short steps. But they left his hands strapped to the collar. In future two of them always came together with his food and his daily clean suit. They loosed his hands for as long as it took him to eat, or to bathe and change, and then they strapped his hands tight to his neck again.

And three times in twenty-four hours, Sonia came to him. She entered the room alone, although Gerry knew there was a guard outside the door, within call. Always she carried a small box, from which she removed a length of plastic tube attached to the neck of a small bottle. Without a word or a sign of recognition she would attach the tube to his penis-sheath and then proceed to masturbate him, coldly, emotionlessly but very efficiently. Then, having collected the semen she would depart, leaving him alone again for another eight hours.

At first, inevitably, Gerry had enjoyed her ministrations; had looked forward to it eagerly. But as he began to see how automatically she did her work, how her mind was controlled so that she was a mere instrument of Gulda's policy, the pleasure diminished, until at last he came to hate the very idea of her coming to him. Yet he was at the same time obsessed by the knowledge that her arrival was inevitable; that there was nothing he could do to resist her; that he, too was being used by Gulda as an instrument. And sometimes Gulda would come too, and occasionally she would bring her whip! She was careful not to overdo the whipping. Obviously she had gained some experience from Sonia's condition when she was delivered from the craft, showing the undesirability of whipping these Earth people too severely. Gerry never knew when to expect her, nor even when Sonia was likely to arrive because, confined to that cell of a room he had no idea how time was passing.

Sometimes he would panic, imagining that he had been forgotten, that no one would ever come again. Another time, it seemed that the door had no sooner shut on Sonia than it opened again.

One day Gulda said, "We already have enough semen from you to breed fifty thousand new creatures." She was taunting him, but after she had gone he did a quick sum. Assuming her first estimate of five-hundred lives from the first batch of semen, it meant that Sonia must have visited him three times a day for about a month! And still it continued.

At last, close to nervous collapse, and very daring, Gerry asked if it would be possible for him to have a radio. When he explained that he wanted to know what was happening in the world, Gulda, much to his surprise raised no objection. A small, powerful receiver was brought and plugged in with a timer, so that four or five times a day he was able to listen to news bulletins. And such news it was; news of revolution, of starving, hunger-crazed people behaving like animals, fighting for scraps, tearing one another to pieces for food. News of great nations fragmented, with every town and village a separate entity, ruled locally, hanging or shooting strangers who tried to pass that way. News of central governments striving to bring some sense back into affairs, to control anarchy, to prevent the whole fabric of civilization falling into destruction. News of executions, of armored troops forcing their way along roads through and over the bodies of panic-stricken civilians; of those same troops weeping unashamedly by the road side, deserting to wander back to where they had come from in the hope of finding a wife, a child, a parent still living.

And news of disease, rampant, uncontrollable. The saboteurs appointed by the Andromedans had been only too well chosen. It had been wrongly assumed that they would have concentrated on heads of governments, on the armies and air forces; but they had gone much further than that. We Earth people did not appreciate the thoroughness with which their preparations had been made; the patient work their explorers had done over several thousands of years before the invasion was mounted. They knew enough to put under control relatively unimportant people. Those, who had charge of water-works and sewage installations; generating plants and railroad systems. All the vital operations of civilized life that everyone overlooked as having "always been there". Suddenly, almost overnight, they were there no longer.

In the days following Gerry's disappearance from the world, vast quantities of powerful explosives had been issued to the secret agents of the Andromedans. Mankind did not know what had hit it until it turned on a faucet to find it dry, until sewage backed up the pipes into the houses, until food rotted in refrigerators and children died of hypothermia in freezing homes. As oilfields and port installations went up in smoke and dust, transport ground to a halt, so that famine began to stalk Earth, not at first because there was no food, but because there was no way of distributing it.

By the time the Andromedans fleet was discernible to the few space-radar stations that still managed to keep some kind of watch, there was not a country, not a city, not a village in the world whose life was not on a day-to-day emergency basis, with the living hardly able to cope with the daily task of burying the dead…

And then, as you know, they landed. The largest fleet, of about one-hundred-and-fifty ships landed in the Texas Panhandle, where the population was so sparse that it was easily wiped out in a few hours. They were joined by some three-hundred freighters, and within hours of landing the Andromedans were busy at work, establishing themselves on a temporary basis, equipped with everything they required, independent if necessary for months or even years of Earth. Another fleet, rather smaller, landed in the Central Plains of France, and cleared an area of two-hundred square miles of some of the most densely populated and highly industrialized land in the world of every living thing. A small fleet landed in England, in the south east corner, in the county of Kent. Others, even smaller landed in India, China, European Russia, Australia and elsewhere.

The Earth people, distraught, panic-stricken, starving and hopeless learned slowly of these invasions. Often they knew nothing about them until they saw the vast machines lumbering toward their town, destroying everything in their path. They could not believe their eyes. They died incredulous.

And all through this time, exactly on the eighth hour of every day, Sonia Evans was admitted to Gerry's cell to draw from his loins the vital fluid that should establish a new race of Andromedans on Earth.

It was almost exactly a year from the first time when Sonia came into the room in a hurry, her eyes bright and alert.

Gerry did not open his eyes. He was resigned, apathetic. He could not bear even to look at this girl any more. She came, did what she had to do and left, with never a word or a sign of recognition. Outside, everything he valued had gone up in smoke. It did not matter. Nothing mattered any more. Life was a game played by fools for the amusement of some Gods or others with time on their hands and nothing more interesting to do. If it amused them to kick the ant-hill to bits – what of it!