Marcie was right! I thought her hopelessly paranoid, totally delusional, but she was not. I in my arrogance and distrustful stupidity didn’t believe her warning. What she’d tried to tell me was so outlandish, so ridiculous, so impossible that I could not even consider that it could be true. I’d even scoffed, likening her fears to the 1930’s scares about ‘white-slavers’.
Narrative
of Patrick Masters.
I replaced
the phone in its cradle on my desk in the Library at Drysdale House. It was
really my favorite room of all the rooms in the house. It contained my books,
my father’s and grandfather’s collections, and some volumes that had been in
the house when I bought it. Juli had unpacked and shelved most of the books,
but they were in no particular order. I had planned to work on cataloguing and
organizing over the winter, but now the demands of collecting and shipping
candidates for slavery on Gor had pushed that pleasant task to the side.
“Anders reports that Jane Bennet has been confronted and agreed to accommodate us in the matter of selecting candidates for acquisition. He has made a preliminary assessment of her himself. Her responses were very good. She will bring a good price herself in time.”
I said goodbye to the Delegation from the First Families of America who had commandeered my house for use as an Acquisition Center for women to be sent to Gor on behalf of the Steel Worlds. I as affable and genial; there nothing to be gained by a fruitless petulant display. Woodrow Frick left in a pickup truck driven by a man I did not recognize, doubtless from the Lazy F. Elliot Emery and Robert Desjarlais left together in the inevitable black Suburban with tinted windows. Desjarlais was driving. Zach Frick went in Drysdale House. My House, still. I was not pleased with young Zach at that moment. I took a short brisk walk in Fremont Park across the street to clear my head before going home.
