CHAPTER ONE

It was a beautiful morning. Sunlight streamed cheerily through the front windows of my little cabin. I felt like a million dollars. I threw off the light covers, sprang to the window, opened the draperies to let all that glorious sunshine in.

There was a naked girl walking around outside.

For just half a second I thought I was still asleep. She was a blonde goddess, a tall, glowing girl who seemed to give off a radiance of her own. Long gleaming blonde hair hung down to her shoulders, but the back of her neck was the only part of her body that was covered in any way. She had golden-brown skin—acres of it—and it was all showing.

I stood at the window, drinking in the sight. Her breasts were two big deep bowls, high and round and firm-looking, and tanned the same color as the rest of her body. Little dark reddish-brown nipples jutted up delightfully. Below her breasts, her body swept in a tapering, sensuously-rounded drop to the wide hips. Her buttocks were full but athletically muscular, her thighs flawless, her legs twin delights. And she was a genuine blonde, no doubt about it.

The best part of it all was that this wasn't any dream. The girl outside my cabin was as real as I was. Her name was Joanie Baker, and she was one of the members of the Sunland Health Colony, which I had come to the night before. I had met her last night. It had been a fairly chilly night, and she had been wearing a sweater then. That's all—just a sweater. It covered her down to her navel, and, let me tell you, the effect was plenty startling to see her switching her bare buttocks around so casually.

Well, now it was the next morning, and she wasn't even wearing the sweater. I was glad to see that the upper half of her body matched the lower. If anything, she was even easier on the eyes from the waist up than from the hips down, with those two big tip-tilted bosoms of hers bare to the morning sun.

I didn't bother to go into the adjoining room to wake my buddy Jack. I stepped out on the front porch.

I was stark naked. It was my debut in the nudist world.

I felt a little bit like a man in a nightmare. You know, here's this lovely girl waiting for you to pick her up and take her to a flick, and when you show up at her parents' home to get her you turn out to be stark naked in front of everybody.

Except this wasn't her parents' home. And she was stark naked too.

I took a quick glance at myself before I stepped outside. I didn't want anything embarrassing to be going on.

I stood there in the warm morning sun with every inch of me showing, and I fought the temptation to turn and run back inside.

"Morning," I said hesitantly.

Joanie looked up and smiled. "Hi! I was just about to go in and wake you up for breakfast. How'd you sleep last night?"

"Fine," I said. I tried to keep my eyes above her chin, but it was a losing proposition. They kept drifting downward as if drawn by magnets to those two fleshy globes of hers.

"Think you can make it to the mess hall by yourself?" she asked. "Newcomers sometimes need a while to learn how to find their way around."

"I'm kind of doubtful," I said. "It's down the road, and turn a little—" I shrugged. "You'd better show us. Hold on and I'll wake Jack up."

"Right. Hurry it up, now. We don't want to be late for breakfast," she said cheerily.

I went back into the two-bedroom cabin and pushed open the door of the room that belonged to my buddy Jack Meehan. Meehan was sound asleep with the covers dragged up over his head. I shook him.

He opened one eye uncertainly. "Huh? Whaz-zis—"

"Time to get up," I said loudly. "Breakfast time."

"Go 'way."

"Wake up, you dope! Joanie Baker's outside waiting to show us how to get to the mess hall."

"Don't give a damn if she's the Queen of England," Jack mumbled. "What time is it, anyway?"

I looked at my watch, the only thing I was wearing. "Half past seven."

He shuddered and pulled the covers up over his head. "Christ almighty! Come back in two hours, man!"

Putting my hands on my hips, I stared down at him, debating what to do. After a moment I walked to the window and looked out. Joanie was waiting outside, sitting cross-legged in an Indian squat on the grass.

"Well?" she asked.

"He won't wake up."

"Tell him he'll miss breakfast if he doesn't get a move on," she called. "This isn't any country club, you know."

I shook my head. "I know him, Joanie. When he says he won't wake up, he won't."

"Maybe I can fix him," she said.

She rose to her feet, coming up out of that squatting position in a single athletic bound. I gasped at the play of muscles up her flanks and sides as she got up. I began to get the idea that this girl would be a veritable wildcat in bed, with her calendar-girl body and her sinews of steel. That is, if she went to bed with anybody. I had heard stories that some of these nudists simply didn't believe in sex. Constant exposure dulls their interest, or something.

Joanie came trotting up onto the porch, her breasts going jounce-jounce-jounce with each step. She bounded right past me and headed for Jack's room.

"Don't go in there!" I called. "He isn't—dressed," I finished, turning the last word into an idiotic mumble as I realized how foolish I was being at the moment.

I followed her in. She was leaning over Jack, and her breasts were dangling forward until they weren't any more than six inches from the tip of his nose, except that his eyes were screwed tight shut and he didn't know what he was missing.

"Mr. Meehan," she said softly.

Jack didn't stir.

"It's time to get up, Jack," she said.

Not a flicker.

With a single quick gesture she grabbed hold of the quilt on Jack's bed and yanked it off. Meehan was mother-naked, curled up in the bed, and as the cool morning air hit him all at once he let out a yelp and opened his eyes.

A moment later, when what he was seeing registered, he let out another yelp. For here was this statuesque blonde standing over him in a school-teacherish way, her arms on her hips, her legs slightly spread, her bare breasts going up and down rapidly with every breath she took. It was one hell of a way for a man to wake up in the morning, and for a second I thought Meehan would have a stroke. He turned red all over and nearly reached for the coverlet. But Joanie saw the motion and she shook her head.

"You don't need to cover yourself here, Mr. Meehan. Remember? Our bodies are the work of God. We have no reason to hide them."

He nodded. "Sure. I forgot. Reflex, you know." He couldn't take his eyes off those big breasts. Neither could I. They weren't cow-like, mind you. They looked almost like the kind of breasts you see on marble statues in the museum—big and firm, and pointing straight out and up, instead of hanging way down and swinging from side to side.

Joanie said softly, "Let's get up now, Mr. Meehan. It's breakfast time."

"Yeah. Yeah."

Jack foggily groped his way toward the john and closed the door behind him. I heard the water running in there. I stood around and looked blithe and unconcerned, which I wasn't. Joanie had her back to me, and I was running my eyetracks up and down that tanned back and those lovely curving rear cheeks.

A few moments later Jack came out, with his face washed, his hair combed, and his wristwatch wound. We were all ready for breakfast.

"Let's go," Joanie said.

We left the cabin—no need to lock any doors in the Sunland Health Colony—and started down the road to the mess hall.

At this point I think I ought to hold things up and give you some idea of who I am and how I happened to be strolling down that road in the buff on that particular morning.

My name is Al Fieldston. I'm thirty-four years old. For the past five years I had been working for an advertising agency. Not Madison Avenue, but the next best thing—a Wacker Drive firm, Chicago. Give me the middle west any day. Over those five years I had worked up the scale from an underpaid trainee to an overpaid copywriter. At the present time I was drawing $14,000 a year, which is not terribly much by the standards of some agencies, but which was plenty for a bachelor like me with relatively simple tastes. Besides, there were frequent raises, and all you had to do to survive at our firm was to smile nicely and turn your work in on time. It wasn't the cutthroat sort of operation that some advertising agencies are. It was a nice, friendly place, easy-going and relaxed—which might possibly explain why our billings weren't all they could have been.

To cover briefly the twenty-nine years before my donning of the gray flannel suit: running backwards, it looks like this—two and a half years on the editorial staff of a reactionary Chicago daily paper, two years spent unwillingly in the grasp of the United States Army, one year spent as chief-cook-and-bottle-washer for an Illinois country weekly, one year spent obtaining a Master's degree in Journalism at Columbia University, four years going to college at Northwestern. Before that comes high school, puberty, grade school, and all the rest, going back to birth in Chicago (South Side) slightly more than a third of a century ago.

So much for past history.

Now, how did I happen to be waking up in a nudist colony with a big-busted blonde parading around in the raw outside my window?

It isn't because I'm a crank or a nature faddist or anything like that. I'm not. I don't mix wheat germ and blackstrap molasses into anything I eat. Nor am I morbidly anxious to see bare bodies of either sex. Masculine nudity has never fascinated me, while in thirty-four years of bachelorhood (minus seventeen months of marriage that I forgot to tell you about above—they happened while I was working for that Chicago newspaper) I've acquired a reasonably good knowledge of the outward anatomy of the feminine body. I'm well aware that some have more than others, but that the basic parts are pretty much the same from one to the next. So it wasn't merely to ogle a lot of bare bosoms and delectable pink buttocks that I came away to the Sunland Health Colony.

No, it was a combination of several other factors. Prime among them was the matter of my advertising agency being the easy-going sort, as I said. You certainly know that every copywriter on Wacker Drive—and Madison too, of course—thinks privately that he might have been a novelist, if only things had worked out a little differently. Perhaps one out of five of these would-be novelists actually has a particular novel all plotted out, ready to be written "as soon as the pressure eases off a little." And maybe one out of eight of this latter group actually gets around to writing all or most of that projected novel, some day.

Well, I was a member of that one-out-of-five category that had a novel all plotted out. I wanted to move on to the one-out-of-eight that actually gets the damned book written.

It was about this time that I found out about our leave-of-absence plan. In keeping with the relaxed atmosphere of our shop, a scheme exists to permit copywriters and such people to go off by themselves for a while and work on any private creative projects they may have. The deal is that you can have up to ninety days, three solid months. Without pay, of course, but you can't have everything. All you had to do was talk to the right man.

I talked. I came out of the VP's office with permission to take the months of June, July, and August off, provided my desk was clear when I left. The first three weeks of that period would be considered my vacation for the year, and I would be paid for them. The subsequent weeks, up to a total of nine, could be taken without pay. When I returned to the agency, I would slip right back into my slot without suffering any disadvantages.

There was a risk, of course. There was always the possibility that some bright boy from below might shove his way into the accounts I was handling, while I wasn't around to defend myself. But I had to take that chance. I had to risk getting scragged while I was away. I figured ours wasn't the throat-cutting kind of place, and, anyway, I had a couple of good friends who I could probably trust to look out for my interests while I was gone.

The next step was to find a place to go.

Staying in Chicago to write the book was out of the question. For one thing, nobody stays in Chicago in the summertime if he can arrange to be somewhere else. For another, I knew that if I spent the summer close to my telephone I would never get a page written. There would be calls from the office, calls from old friends, calls from old enemies, shows to see, girls to make, etc., etc., etc. I had to get out of town.

Where to?

At this point Jack Meehan came to my aid. Jack was a buddy of mine from my Northwestern days. These days he earns a living—to put it mildly—by writing journalistic-type articles for the big slicks. You've seen his work in the Post, the Digest, and a lot of other places, under a variety of names. In his thirty-odd years he's been through three wives (he had already been divorced once before his freshman year at college) and he was pulling in something like fifty grand a year from his typewriter lately, which is fair dough in any line.

It was the middle of May, two weeks before the beginning of my leave of absence, and I still hadn't decided where I was going to go to write my novel. And then Jack Meehan called. He made a habit of keeping in touch with me, and generally I got a call from him every time he landed some juicy assignment.

He had one this time. After we talked around for a few minutes, he said, "You'll never guess what sort of story I'm about to start on now."

"I know. Life is going to smuggle you into King Saud's harem disguised as a eunuch."

"Not quite, pal. Try again."

"You're going to play shortstop for a girl baseball team, and illustrate your articles with juicy locker-room candids."

"Wrong again. I'm going to spend the summer in a nudist colony."

"You aren't serious!"

"Why the hell not? You think I'm inhibited, man?"

"What's the deal?" I asked.

It was a good one. One of the big magazines wanted him to do a feature on Nudism. The idea was an unsensational piece, stressing the individualistic character of the nudists, painting them as staunch rugged spirits in the middle of a society of conformists. Any illustrations would be strictly tame, because this was for a family magazine. There was about three thousand bucks in the assignment for Jack, which wouldn't be terribly little for a job that would take him no more than a few weeks of researching.

But on top of that he had arranged an even better deal. Taking his slick-mag outline to a hard-cover house, he got himself commissioned to do a full-length expansion of the magazine article, complete with some rather more revealing photos. The book people figured they had a hot thing, and they wanted Jack to spend the whole summer in the nudist camp, really getting to know the people on all sorts of levels. The advance they had given him made me practically swallow my bubble-gum. And they expected tremendous sales, television plugs and interviews for Jack, nationwide publicity, and maybe even a magazine condensation of the book after publication, thereby rounding out a neat mag-to-book-to-mag double play.

"I've been shopping around for a place," Jack went on, "and I've got a honey. She's around sixty miles out of Chicago, in pretty secluded territory. I've talked the whole deal out with them and they've agreed to let me stay for the whole summer. I can't mention any names, of course, but it's otherwise okay with them about the article and the book. I drove out there last week to have a look. It's a lot of little cabins and some community buildings. Just like a camp for kids, get it, only the kids are grown up and they don't wear any pants."

"You see any of the inmates?" I asked.

"Just a couple. There's only about nine or ten people there now. It begins crowding up after the first of June, and by midsummer they have around fifty."

"And the ones you saw were just wandering around in the altogether?"

"You guessed it, sonny." I could hear him chuckling over the wire. "I saw a grand total of three nudists. There was an old gentleman of about seventy, and a boy who looked like he was around five. It was sort of a disappointment."

"You said there were three," I reminded him.

"Oh. Yeah," he said. "The third one was a girl. Twenty-three or so. Big blonde with the nicest pair of knobs you ever want to dream about. I guess she sort of slipped my mind."

"I'll bet she did."

"She's the friendly type, too. I passed her in the car on the road, and she waved at me, and like I mean wow, man! Those big beautiful things hanging under her chin like a couple of howitzers, and I damn near drove into a tree when I saw her." He paused. "It sounds like a restful way to spend a vacation. Swim and sun and read, and peck out a couple lines a day on the typewriter. And when the summer's over I hand in my copy and the publishers shower me with gold. Don't you wish you were a writer, boy? A real writer, I mean, not one of those Wacker wacks."

"Yeah," I said remotely. "Yeah, sure." An idea was springing to life in my mind, full-blown and giving off radioactive emissions. "Tell me something, Jack."

"Yeah?"

"You think this nudist camp might have room for a friend of yours?"