Chapter 1

Virginia tried hard to keep her mind somewhere close to sanity, but it kept bouncing in and out of reality, as if leaping away with each stroke of her husband's hot tongue. She grasped at the pillow beneath her head, and her beautiful, soft mouth formed a single word in the darkness of their bedroom.

"Ohhhhh!"

Leon moved his hungry searching mouth to her breasts. He covered one large nipple with his lips, then slowly moved his tongue around it. He sucked the whole thing into his mouth and then forced his jaws together.

"Oh... Ahh," Virginia moaned, liking the sensation.

"Ahhh, AAHHH," she moaned as he moved his hot mouth to her other breast and sucked.

Her nipples hardened immediately. She felt as though they were on fire. From somewhere deep inside her a flame flickered... started... slowly... and tried to break out of her body through her nipples. She cried out and moved her head from side to side and his hungry hot mouth kept its relentless sucking and tonguing of her breasts...

The next morning her mind actually did return to reality. Her husband, her house, her new job. Oh, why was life so complicated? Why couldn't it always be like that wondrous moment of luxurious tit-sucking? Why?

On calm reflection, when she could collect her scattered, chaotic thoughts enough to concentrate, Virginia realized that she had done a very foolish thing. Now she was in a terrified panic, and she didn't know what she would do.

It had been an exhilarating revelation to her that she could overcome her natural shyness enough to knock on doors, present her sales pitch for products, and actually sell them to other housewives. They were biodegradable and didn't contribute to further pollution of the environment: that was the main thrust of all the advertising brochures; and of course, her sponsor, during the course of his sales meetings, was spellbinding on the subject of ecology and how products would help to solve all the environmental ills that faced the inhabitants of the United States, indeed of the whole Spaceship Planet Earth. Virginia found it all so exciting, especially since it made it possible for her to help out financially.

Leon was trying his best to establish his own business. His service station, leased from an oil company, was in a good location, the nearest competitor more than a mile away. It was just off the freeway near a large housing development and a proposed shopping mall, so the potential was excellent; however, fees for business licenses, the cost of stock, utility hookups, and advertising, as well as many other expenses, had eaten up their meager savings.

Leon believed in the American dream of free enterprise, being your own boss, owning your own business and becoming independent. But it doesn't always work that way. It takes money, lots of it, as well as good credit and experience to start your own business, and the neophyte is liable to make costly errors, so even though Leon was working long hours, he was barely breaking even, his take home pay so piddling that two months ago he had been ready to call it quits. About that time Virginia had spotted the ad which described the possible financial gain in selling Eko-Klean products on a part-time basis. The ad was aimed at housewives, and she eagerly showed it to her husband, exclaiming that this was the exact answer to their financial problems. She would hustle around selling Eko- Klean until they were over their financial hurdle and Leon's service station was on a paying basis.

Leon didn't share her optimism. "Look, honey, this is another one of those pyramid affairs, and you don't really start making any money until you're a sponsor or an area supervisor."

Virginia didn't understand it at all, so Leon patiently drew out a chart for her showing how the representatives, who were paid only a small commission on their sales, were the base of the pyramid; the sponsors, in the next echelon above, were paid not only for their own sales but received an override commission on the sales of each representative under them, and above, in the next tier of the pyramid, an area supervisor was being paid an override commission on the sponsors and their representatives. The regional superintendents in the next echelon were making a commission on all those other people below him, and above that...

"Then I'll become a sponsor!" Virginia declared.

"Great!" Leon told her. "But just remember that the product is probably overpriced! It has to be in order to pay all those commissions!"

She still didn't understand it all clearly, but she went ahead and called Mr. Hartman about it. He came to their home and talked in glowing terms about how much money Virginia could make, especially stressing how the percentage of commission escalated the more a person sold.

"And, of course, you'll want to be signing up your friends to work under you, so that you can become a sponsor yourself," Mr. Hartman had told them unctuously.

Leon had listened patiently, asked a few questions concerning the pyramid sales arrangement, which Hartman had dismissed offhandedly with a remark that it wasn't any different from other forms of marketing; the mark-up was the same, but the sales commissions were distributed differently. Leon was dubious, of course, but Virginia was eager, completely sold on the whole proposition. In the end, she signed up to be a sales representative under Arthur Hartman's sponsorship.

She attended all the training sessions, after which she eagerly began to knock on the doors in their neighborhood. It was slow going at first, then she began to sell and her enthusiasm grew by leaps and bounds. Her first disappointment came when she received her first commission check. It seemed terribly small, considering how much she had worked and the volume of merchandise she had sold.

Leon tried to be sympathetic. He had known what would happen; but he avoided the old saw of I told you so! Instead he suggested, "After you've sold them, sell them again on becoming a representative under your sponsorship. That's where the money is!"

"But I'd have to sign up fifteen people!" Virginia wailed. "I've been working almost every day for a month, and only two people have said they'd do it - and look at this check! I only made twenty-eight dollars!"