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Title: The Green Millennium

Author: Fritz Leiber

Release date: June 1, 2021 [eBook #65482]

Language: English

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREEN MILLENNIUM ***




                         THE GREEN MILLENNIUM

                             FRITZ LEIBER

                              AN ACE BOOK

                      Ace Publishing Corporation
                      1120 Avenue of the Americas
                         New York, N.Y. 10036

                   Copyright, 1953, by Fritz Leiber

             An Ace Book, by arrangement with the Author.

                          All Rights Reserved

      [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any
  evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

                      _Cover by John Schoenherr._

                For BOB, FRANK, HANK, GERT, and WENDELL

                           Printed in U.S.A.




The world Phil Gish lived in was not a pretty one, and Phil didn't
enjoy living in it. He was disillusioned, purposeless, hopeless, and
haunted by the fear that a robot would take over his job. But then Phil
was a timid person, not much given to adventure seeking. If he hadn't
been so mild he might have found his kicks at All Amusements, the
syndicated playground where anyone could find fun, providing he had the
proper sadistic and otherwise aberrated elements in his personality.
But Phil was good--and bored.

And then one day a cat perched on his window--not an ordinary cat--a
green cat. For the first time in years Phil was happy. He promptly
named the cat Lucky because he somehow knew that as long as the cat
stayed with him he'd feel fine. But Lucky didn't stay long. In a matter
of minutes he had disappeared into All Amusements park. It was then
that Phil became involved in a grotesque world, peopled with the most
extraordinary personalities. Just what the cat is and its ultimate
meaning is the secret of it all. You will be surprised.




                                   I


Phil Gish woke up feeling as good as if all his previous life had
happened to two other guys--poor, miserable clunks!

Usually his whip-cracking reflexes had him out of bed in a flash and
jerking on his shorts and sockasins while he frantically hunted around
for the jar of beard-dissolving cream. But this time he was able to
outsmart all tyrannous nerve-impulses and keep his eyes closed in order
to enjoy the unprecedented sensation all to himself, not even sharing
it with the advertisement-covered walls of his tiny bachelor apartment.

Why, it was simply wonderful, he decided after a bit. Outrageously,
impossibly wonderful!

He actually felt as if this were not a world in which hot and cold
wars had been gushing unpredictably for fifty years like temperamental
faucets, in which the Federal Bureau of Loyalty and Fun Incorporated
ruled the U. S. A. in the name of that drunken, hymn-singing farmer,
President Robert T. Barnes, and in which (according to the Kremlin
Newsmoon, located on an earth-circling satellite vehicle) a new plan
was being considered for exchanging the descendants of prisoners taken
in the half-century-old Korean War.

And as if he, Phil Gish, weren't a luck-forsaken little guy who on
waking at eight o'clock this morning hadn't taken four sleeping pills
in order to kill the day and temporarily forget that he had just lost
another job to a robot who did it five times as fast and twice as
accurately, and that he'd had a blow-up because of it and been coldly
advised to see a psychiatrist.

He took a long, luxurious breath. Even the air smelt and felt
different, as if dusted with some golden chemical that banished care.

He opened his eyes and looked down at his pale chest with the two lone
hairs that were a sardonic last farewell from glorious jungle ape-hood.
But this time the word that came to him was "slim," not "scrawny." He
rather liked his body, he decided--a neat and compact, if not exactly
out-size, bit of tissue. He yawned, stretched, scratched where the two
hairs were, and looked around. The green cat sat on the sill of the
large open circular window, smiling at him.

"Hey, am I dreaming?"

The sound of his own voice, with its hint of a morning croak, answered
that question.

_Or have I really blasted off from behind the hair line?_ The second
question, thought not spoken, was quickly suppressed. He felt too
good to let it worry him. If this was insanity, then three cheers for
paranoia!

Besides, there were all sorts of natural explanations of the cat's
somewhat unconventional color. Just yesterday Phil had seen a young
matron leading two rose-colored poodles. A flash of what might be an
off-the-bosom dress under her cloak had moved him to pass close enough
to hear her assure her companion, "They aren't dye-jobs, you mood-mad
man. They're mutations!"

Also, weren't some animals naturally green, like the tree-sloth? Though
he seemed to recall that the tree-sloth's hue was due to a fungus or
mold, and there certainly wasn't any mold on the burnished bundle of
benignity on his window sill.

"Hiya, Lucky," he greeted softly. From the very first he had decided to
connect the cat with his newborn, incredible sense of well-being. If
there was going to be a new era in his life, it was a good idea to have
a symbol for it--a symbol green as spring itself. Besides, it felt that
way.

"C'mere, Lucky," he called without lifting his head from the spongy
pillow. "Here, Kitty."

The second invitation, which sounded a trifle silly to Phil as soon as
he said it, wasn't necessary. The cat at once dropped its plump-tummied
body from the window sill and trotted toward him like a soft-shod fat
little horse. Phil felt an odd increase, almost frightening, in the
calm joy inside him. The cat disappeared momentarily under the angle of
the bedside. Then a little green face came over the edge and two tiny
green paws placed themselves beside it, and two coppery eyes inspected
him.

"How are you, fellow?" Phil asked. "Glad to make your acquaintance.
You're a cool little cuss, all right. Where did you come from?"

The little face tipped upward.

"From upstairs?" Phil asked and instantly chuckled at himself for
interpreting the movement as a gesture. "Why not stay with me for a
while? I like your looks and I admire your color. Often wished I were
green myself. Anything for variety--begging your pardon."

It was a strange and curiously attractive cat face. The ears were
large, the forehead high, the nose-button lost in furry down, the
whiskers hardly apparent, and the mouth had a suggestion of a pucker
or pout. For a fleeting instant Phil had the notion Lucky might look
rather different, rather less like a cat, if caught unawares. And he
was really very green--the green of tarnished copper, only brighter.

Thinking the word "he," Phil wondered for a fleeting instant about
Lucky's sex. The fat tummy was suggestive. Yet he was somehow sure the
cat was a male.

Then Lucky smiled again and Phil was aware only of feelings. He reached
out a tentative hand, jerked it back when a little paw flicked out at
it, then shamefacedly corrected the gesture. The little paw touched his
middle finger. Phil stroked the silken paw in turn. Neither time could
he feel a hint of claws. They must all be tucked inside their smooth
sheathes.

"Now we're friends," Phil said huskily. The cat sprang fearlessly onto
the bed. Coppery eyes came close. A furry cheek briefly brushed Phil's
with casual masculine friendliness. Sudden tears smarted in Phil's
eyes, enough to brim the lids but not to run over.

What a lonely, empty-lifed fool he must be, he told himself, that a
cat could make him cry. Yet it was true enough. All his life had been
a fading. His parents had seemed warm and wonderful at first, but then
he had begun to sense their gray uncertainties and boredoms. School had
been full of breath-taking promise at one point, with infinite vistas
of knowledge and idealistic brotherhood opening up; but too many of the
vistas had ended in signs saying "restricted" or "subversive" or the
even more maddening blank signs of calculated silence--just as man had
promised himself he'd reach the planets soon, but hadn't. Phil had had
friends, too, at one time, and had really been in love with girls; but
even that had somehow become washed out and worthless. And then the
endless business of being beaten out of jobs by white-collar robots,
beginning with the mail-sorting robots who fed envelopes into the
proper slots by scanning their addresses photoelectrically. The only
thing robots couldn't do, it seemed, was sit in foxholes. That was one
place where Phil recalled no mechanical competition.

Yes, it had been a very empty, purposeless life indeed, Phil told
himself, at the same time wondering why even that thought could not mar
his present happiness.

He came out of his reverie and saw that the cat was marching down the
bed, closely inspecting his naked body.

"Hey, we're friends, but that's going too far. Leave me _some_
privacy!" Chuckling, he swung out of bed, grabbing up a light robe
as his body left the cone of radiant heat projected from the ceiling
fixture. While shouldering into the robe he hummed a couple of bars
from "Kiss Me, Darling, in Free-Fall" and did a shuffling step that
brought the cat hurrying over to play tag with his toes.

"Where _did_ you come from, Lucky?" Phil repeated and turned toward the
window. In the three steps it took him to reach it, his gaze lit on
the near-empty dispenser of sleeping pills and for a moment the eerie
doubt came back: mightn't this morning's overdose have triggered off or
paralleled a really big change in his mind? After all, this cat wasn't
normal (and neither were hallucinations!) and his crazy, inexplicable
happiness was altogether too much like the inner world of godlike
perfection into which the paranoiac is supposed to retreat.

But then he was at the window experiencing a new twist in his mood and
the doubt was forgotten.

The window opened on a deep, very narrow bay in the remodeled monster
hotel in which Phil roomed. If he risked his neck by leaning out
very far, he could just manage to look out of the bay and glimpse an
advertisement-encrusted corner of Fun Incorporated's wrestling center
and the helicopter field on its roof. The hotel had been built as
a luxury palace for the new war-rich of the 1970's but during the
great housing shortage of the 1980's its vast rooms had been cut up
into tiny sleeping cells. It retained, however, at least one feature
from its lordly days: the large circular windows formed of two sheets
of polarizing glass, the inner of which could be rotated, allowing a
person to blacken his window or have it fully transparent or enjoy any
shade of twilight. One other very unusual luxury touch was that the
windows could actually be opened, swinging on pivots at top and bottom.
Nowadays, with radiant sleep-heating general throughout the hotel and
the air-conditioning system anything but trustworthy, this last feature
was put to real use more often than might have been expected, though
windows were still kept closed most of the daytime.

It had always seemed to Phil that the great gray wall just ten feet
from his window, with its rows of ominous portholes, many of them
blackened, was the grimmest sight in the world--a symbol of the way he
was walled off from life and people.

But now, as he stood leaning out just a little, his cropped hair
brushing the tarnished circular rim, it seemed to him that he could
imagine his way through that wall as if it were made of some material
that conducted emotion as copper conducts electricity. Not see or
think through it, but _feel_ through it to the multiple texture of
warm, pitiful, admirable, ridiculous human lives in the cubicles
behind: the two-fifths happy ones, the nine-tenths sad ones, the ones
who nursed fears and frustrations because you had to nurse something,
the ones who hammered fears and frustrations into a painful armor,
the old man apprehensively sorting his limp ration stamps from three
communo-capitalist wars, the boy playing spaceship and pretending the
blacked-out window was the porthole of a comic-book intergalactic
liner, the three unemployed secretaries--one of them pacing--the lovers
whose rendezvous was tainted with worries about the Federal Bureau
of Morality, the fat man feeling a girl's caress by radio handie and
thinking of something long ago, the old woman coddling her dread of
war-germs and atomic ashes by constantly dusting, dusting, dusting....

Well, his new self certainly had a vivid imagination, Phil decided with
a smile.

An old hand came out of a porthole three floors down and shook
something--or nothing--from a dustpan.

Coincidence, of course, or else he'd once watched the woman without
thinking about it--nevertheless, Phil chose to interpret the event as
an encouraging confirmation of his new feeling of outgoingness. Then
the smile left his lips as he thought of another aspect of the opposite
wall.

This window was the vantage point where he had spent countless drearily
excited hours spying on the activities of all the young women whose
cubicles were even remotely within range. Not the new girl--the one who
wore her black hair in old-fashioned pony style--in the room straight
across, although she was quite beautiful in a sprightly, animal way,
and he sometimes heard her practicing tap-dancing. No, she was a bit
too close and besides, he was vaguely frightened of her. There was
something eerily dryad-like about her and, in any case, she blacked out
her porthole religiously. It was blacked out now, though slightly ajar.

But all the other girls were recipients of his untiring, sterile
interest. The cute green-blonde just below and to the left, for
instance, Miss Phoebe Filmer (he'd once taken the unprecedentedly
realistic step of finding out her name), why, he'd sacrificed a sizable
chunk of his leisure time to that tantalizing minx. There she was at
this very moment dithering around in a short play robe, inspecting an
assortment of wispy lingerie--a very promising situation that normally
would have held Phil helpless for twenty minutes or more. But now he
found he could look at her and then look away without the faintest
gnawing worry he might miss something. Good Lord, if he wanted to
see more, in any sense, of Miss Phoebe Filmer, he'd scrape up an
acquaintance with her.

"Prrrt!" A feathery, furry ball came into his hand and he looked down
at Lucky's apple-green face framed by his curving forefinger and thumb.

"What d'ya want, cat?"

Lucky ducked out of the cupped hand with a twist that let his forehead
and ear be rubbed, and put his front paws on the window rim. Phil
quickly advanced his hand so that it lightly circled the cat's chest.
He didn't want Lucky to get back out on the little ledge that led to
either side of the window. In fact, as Phil now definitely realized,
he didn't want Lucky to leave him at all, though something told him he
wouldn't be able to stop Lucky if the green cat really wanted to go.

It occurred to Phil, with a certain shamefaced satisfaction, that all
pets were strictly forbidden in the Skyway Towers (cats and dogs were
pretty rare since the germ war days when they'd been slaughtered as
possible carriers) and so Lucky's owner wouldn't be able to do anything
openly about getting him back.

But Lucky seemed to have no intention of leaving. He hopped to the
floor and looked eagerly at Phil.

"Prrrt!"

"Do you want something to eat? Is that it?"

"Prrrt-prt!"

Phil took mental inventory of his snack box and found himself thinking
of the cranberry concentrate. Wildly inappropriate--and yet something
assured him that it would be just right for Lucky.

It was done quickly: a dark-red marble that swelled to a glistening
ruby golf ball at the touch of water, and then, at another sudden
inward prompting, the syrupy contents of a vitamino capsule poured over
it.

The last ingredient smelled rather rank and by the time he set the odd
sundae on the floor, Phil was feeling quite doubtful. However, Lucky
examined it with all signs of approval, mewing in eagerness. But then
instead of beginning to eat, he looked up at Phil. Phil thought he
understood: cats have their special proprieties and delicacies. The
little chap wanted to eat in private.

"Okay, fellow, I'll go shower. And I won't peek."

Stepping inside the bathroom, he set the shower control to alternate
tepid and very warm. Instead it chose irresponsibly to alternate icy
and steaming, so that he leaped out with a yell. But the incident
didn't even scratch his mood. As he toweled himself (he didn't like the
air drier and toweling robots made him uneasy) he sang:

    We're out in space, they've cut the jet,
    There isn't any ceiling, floor, or wall.

    Let's dance on air, or better yet--
    Hug me, love me, darling, in free-fall!

He came out of the bathroom feeling like an emperor and fully
determined to inspect the world he owned, the world that was any
man's for the asking and a little courage. As he slipped on singlet,
trousers, sockasins and jacket, he explained his feelings to Lucky, who
had cleaned up every bit of his colorful meal.

"You see, it's this way, fellow: I've always been three-quarters dead.
But not any more. I'm through with being scared and stand-offish and
bored. No more filing, dial-watching, and tape-cutting jobs, with some
about-to-be-invented robot breathing down my neck. I'm just going out
and look things over, talk to people, find out what it's all about. I'm
going to have adventures, really live. Some program, eh? And you know
who's responsible for it, fellow? You are."

Lucky seemed fairly to fluoresce in appreciation. He fluffed his
gleaming green fur.

Phil wondered what time it was. His wrist-watch had gone dead
yesterday, the cranky thing, only five months after having the battery
replaced. He stuck his head out the window and looked up the dizzy gray
crack to where the portholes were tiny dots and the slit ended in a
ribbon of blue sky. Only the top floor to the east was yellow with true
sunlight, though the false sunlight from the sodium mirror circling the
earth to make evening light for this city was beginning to show about
eight stories down.

He scooped up Lucky without a thought of leaving him behind or a worry
as to the attention he might attract. But the verdant cat sprang from
his arms and made for the hall door, looking back as if to say, "I'm
right there with you and game for any adventure, too, but I don't need
a nurse."

Side by side they walked to the stairs and down to twenty-eight--the
overworked elevator stopped only at even-numbered floors. And there he
ran into Phoebe Filmer, play robe swishing and apparently headed for
the snack bar on twenty-eight.

"Hello, Miss Filmer," he heard himself say. "I've admired you for a
long time."

"You have?" she said, glancing at him sideways. "How did you know my
name?"

"Just asked the desk robot who the beautiful girl was in 28-303a."

She tittered with a faintly flirtatious contempt. "You don't talk to
the desk robot. You just punch buttons and it won't give out names when
you punch room numbers, unless you have a government key."

"I have a way with robots," Phil explained. "I win their confidence
with small talk."

"Well," Miss Filmer observed, turning her head and running her hand
through her green-gold hair.

"Say, how do you like my green cat?" Phil inquired.

"A green cat!" Miss Filmer exclaimed excitedly. She looked down quickly
and then up skeptically. "Where?"

Phil looked down too. Lucky wasn't anywhere in sight. A hunk of ice
materialized inside his chest. "Excuse me," he said. "I hope I'll see
you again."

He raced to the stub corridor. Lucky was standing in front of the
elevator.

"Gee, fellow," Phil told him. "Don't give me heart failure."




                                  II


The street snarled at Phil. The snarl came chiefly from a charged-up
electric hot rod that swerved close to the curb to remove a triangular
chunk from the rump of a fat man who had been too slow in skittering to
safety. A second look showed he was not a fat man, but a thin man in a
balloon suit. It deflated rapidly, and he sat down in its limp folds
on the curb and began to sob. Balloon suits were of no real protection
to pedestrians, except by increasing the apparent target, but they
continued as a fad. During the last war they had been pumped full of
hydrogen as a shield against neutrons until a couple of small but
unpleasant explosions in crowded shelters had caused the government to
crack down.

After snarling, the street continued to growl deep in its throat--it
had two lower levels. The growl was composed of the hum of electrics,
the subterranean rumble of heavier traffic, the yak-yak of competing
vocal advertisements, and the nervous shuffle of feet that was the same
when Rome and Babylon were young, but that was intensified here because
most of the women's feet were on platforms three to ten inches high.

Neither the growl nor the snarl disturbed Phil. Normally he'd already
have had his ear plugs tucked in, his face fixed straight ahead, his
eyes nervously questing for hot rods, which were known to jump curbs.
But today he simply wanted to drink it all in, to see the things he'd
always been blind to, to note the anxious but apathetic expressions on
the faces of the pedestrians, to sense the invisible lines of force
that, like spider webs or marionette strings, joined them to the
space-overflowing advertisements, which ranged from the crisp, "Learn
to Break Necks!" and the cute "A Strip-Tease Doll All Your Own!" to the
"Why Not Lobotomy?" and the imagination-tantalizing "Glamorize Your
Figure with a Sprayed-on Evening Dress! Plasticfabric cures in a jiffy,
breathes. No heat, no adhesions! Special forms flare the skirt, shape
the bosom! Designed by artists right on your body!"

Lucky seemed no more frightened of the street than Phil. He scampered
along close to the base of Skyway Towers' monumental façade, the
camouflaging green color of which may have explained why none of the
pedestrians took note of him--not that any explanation was needed as to
why those walking nerve-bags didn't see things right under their noses!

A gleaming sales-robot veered toward Phil on its silent wheels, but
Phil deftly interposed another balloon-suited man between himself and
it. The balloon-suited man began to get a slick reducing pill sales
talk; evidently the robot had scanned his profile. Phil hurried around
the corner after Lucky, who had turned down garish Opperly Avenue.

As if he had picked up a scent, Lucky abruptly left the wall, glided
across the sidewalk and padded across Opperly Avenue between the
passing cars. Phil followed, not without a certain heart pounding,
but with no real anxieties. Something allowed him to sense easily the
intentions of all the cars in the block--dodging them was almost fun.

He reached the opposite curb a good five feet ahead of a playful youth
in a jalopy with a tin body like a space jeep scribbled over with such
signs as "Oh, You Venusian!" and "Girls beware--escape speed zero."
Effortlessly recovering his breath, Phil found himself facing an ornate
cave mouth flanked with old-fashioned fluorescent posters, the largest
lettering on which read: "TONIGHT! Juno Jones, the Man-Maiming Amazon
vs. Dwarf Zubek, the Bone-Crushing Misogynist."

But he had no time to read the rest of the bill, for Lucky was dancing
up the broad corridor lined with giant stereographs of menacing,
half-naked men and women, looking in the dim light like genies freshly
materialized from smoke.

Ordinarily Phil would have felt a certain amount of disgust mixed with
fear and uneasy fascination at entering, or even passing, a wrestling
palace specializing in male-female, but today it seemed simply a part
of life. It never occurred to him not to follow Lucky.

Just short of some turnstiles and a robot ticket taker lost in shadows,
a side corridor spilled light. Lucky whisked into it. Phil had barely
rounded the corner after him when a long, handless, boneless gray arm
shot out of the wall and slapped itself firmly against Phil's middle.

"Where you think you're going, Mack?" a voice rasped from the wall. "On
your way." And it gave him a quick shove toward the ticket taker.

Phil could see Lucky mincing inquisitively down the side corridor,
which was lined with doors. He tried to go around the arm, but it
extended itself until it stretched from wall to wall.

"Still here?" the rasping wall inquired. "Look, Mack, I don't know your
voice. If you got business with somebody, name me their name and the
word they gave you."

"I just want to get my cat," Phil answered. Lucky had reached the end
of the corridor and was peering into the last doorway. "Here, Lucky,"
he called, but the cat took no notice.

"Means nothing to me," the wall rasped on. "You still ain't named me no
names that tripped any of my relays."

Lucky disappeared through the doorway. Phil said, "Please let me
through a minute to get my cat," trying to sound as sincere as he
could. "I'll be right back."

"I ain't letting nobody through," the wall asserted. "Give me a name
and word, quick, Mack."

At that instant an appalling spasm of fear went through Phil, as if a
light had been turned out inside his mind and his heart sprayed with
liquid ice. He knew that something had happened to Lucky. He ducked
under the gray arm and darted forward, but before he had taken five
steps he felt himself grabbed. The corridor whirled as he was roughly
spun back. Looking down he saw the elastic arm wrapped around him like
a gray python, while the wall grated in his ear, "No go, Mack. Now I'll
have to hold you till the man comes."

"Let me go. I've got to get in there, do you hear!" Phil yelled. He
struggled futilely to release his arms, yet all the while he kept his
eyes on the doorway through which Lucky had vanished. "Let me go!"

"Hey, what goes on?" A large, tall woman with close cropped blonde
hair, a broken nose, an out-size jaw and big blue eyes had stepped out
of the nearest doorway. "Cool down, son," she boomed out, coming toward
him. "What did you want?"

"My cat ran in here," he explained, trying to speak calmly. "It ran
in that room down there at the end." He nodded his head toward it. "I
tried to go after it and this thing grabbed me."

"Your cat?"

"Yes, a pet."

She thought. He noticed for the first time, perhaps because he was
watching the far doorway so closely, that she wore maroon tights and
was stripped to the waist. Her breasts were small, her shoulders sloped
steeply and were heavily, though not cordily, muscled.

"Okay," she said after a bit. "Let him go," she told the wall.

"Didn't give a name or word," the wall complained. "Tried to duck
through. Got to hold him till the man comes."

"Which'll be at least an hour, if I know Jake. Let him go, you dumb
robot," she said in a majestic bass. "This man is my friend. I am
inviting him in."

"All right, Mrs. Jones," the wall said, sounding almost sulky. The gray
arm unwrapped from Phil and shot back into the wall.

"Now go find your cat and then beat it," the giantess told him.

"Thank you very much," Phil said, half turning to her, but keeping the
far doorway in the corner of his gaze. But she didn't answer, only
stared after him doubtfully, still appearing quite unconscious of her
partial nakedness.

Phil tried not to hurry, although the corridor seemed endless. He kept
telling himself that nothing had happened to Lucky, and wished very
hard he could believe it. He didn't feel big any more, or adventurous.
He passed the woman's door, vaguely noticing heaps of untidy clothes
and a stationary rubber-armed robot for wrestling practice. He came to
the door at the end, having observed that all the others were tightly
shut. He hesitated. He couldn't hear a sound. He stepped inside.

The room was large, low ceilinged, and lined with lockers and benches.
At the far end was a closed door, flanked by two low mechanical massage
tables, their jointed rubber-fisted arms extended crookedly upward and
making them look like two beetles on their backs. There were a few
other pieces of apparatus, none of which Phil recognized, but most of
the floor was empty.

Almost in the center of the floor was a brown box about a foot square.
Staring at it, their backs turned to Phil, were two men. One was
rather small but quick looking, dressed in a black turtleneck sweater
and tight black trousers, and holding some sort of gun. The other
was smaller and slighter, and similarly clad in blue. He held a wire
leading to the box.

Phil cleared his throat. The two men eyed him expressionlessly, then
turned back to the box. Phil edged forward into the room, peering into
the corners for Lucky. Then he jerked back. He had almost stepped on a
dead mouse.

Looking more closely, he saw there were half a dozen dead mice
scattered around the floor.

He cleared his throat again, louder, but this time the men didn't even
look around. He started forward again, stepping gingerly over the dead
mouse.

There was a click. A tiny door opened in the top of the brown box and
a mouse catapulted out. Hitting the floor, it made off in frantic
zig-zags, skidding at each turn. Phil stared, suddenly expecting Lucky
to come darting out of a corner after it. The man in black followed the
zig-zags with his gun. There was no sound or flash from the gun, but
the mouse stopped moving.

"Try to surprise me better next time, Cookie," the man in black told
his companion. "I saw your hand move when you punched the button." They
resumed their alert, motionless stance.

Moving around them in a cautious circle, Phil searched for Lucky. He
soon realized there were few likely places of concealment. The lockers
reached from floor to ceiling and were all closed.

One of the dead mice began to twitch. Cookie put down the wire with the
push-button at the end of it, picked up the mouse and dumped it in the
box through a side door.

Phil was beginning to feel very queer. He felt there must be some
connection between Lucky and the mice, but it was a dream connection
that didn't make sense. The muscles in the calves of his legs had begun
to ache from his silent tip-toeing.

Nerving himself, he approached the motionless pair. "Excuse me," he
said with difficulty, "but did you see a cat come in here?"

The words got no more response than the throat clearing. "I beg your
pardon," he said, "but really I must find out," and he barely touched
the elbow of the man in black.

The response was instantaneous, though from another quarter. Phil was
grabbed by his jacket front and jerked back by Cookie, whose infantile
features were now tensed into a hard mask.

"What you did!" The voice was shrilly scandalized. "Interrupting the
kingman at his recreation! Shoving the kingman around! That brings
punishment, that brings pain!"

Phil felt sick with fear. He knew if only Lucky were there, if only he
could recapture his earlier mood of golden confidence, he wouldn't be
so shamelessly terrified of this little bully who was holding him at
arm's length.

He wet his lips. "I was only trying to find my cat," he quavered, "and
I didn't shove him."

"You did too! I saw you! A great big rude shove! And as for cats, Swish
Jack Jones, the Lady Killer, is the top cat around here, the only cat."
The hand holding him twisted his lapels tighter around his throat. "You
can't weasel out of what's coming to you. Well, Jackie, what are you
going to do to him?"

And now, at long last, the man in black moved. He slowly turned his
head in its ruff of black wool and fixed on Phil the sad, weary smile
of a king who knows it is his boring but inescapable fate to inflict
doom and punishment. He slowly reached out his hand until it grasped
Phil's elbow.

"Please don't," Phil whispered, but just then a thumb dug into a
nerve between his bones and he couldn't keep back a squeal of pain.
The baby-faced man grinned with mincing approval, as if at last the
proprieties were being satisfied.

Swish Jack Jones frowned, as if he felt the squeal hadn't been loud
enough, and lifted his other hand. "This is a stun-gun," he said in a
voice patchily varnished with intellectualism. "Ultrasonic. I might
spray your spine with it to get you ready for being worked over. It's
set for mouse power now, but I'll step it up if necessary."

Phil's guts turned to water. "You don't need to hurt me," he said. "I
tell you I was just looking for a cat."

The other shook his head sadly and said, "Nosey little men up to Bast
knows what shouldn't tell such great big lies." And he reached for
Phil's thigh.

At that moment the tidal wave struck. Cookie was shoved ten feet, the
stun-gun clattered on the floor, Swish Jack Jones had taken a quick
backward spring, and the blonde giantess was planted enragedly in front
of Phil and was thundering, "You know mucking well I can stand anything
except when you start bullying people."

She had slipped on a very dirty short kimono, beautifully embroidered
in the finest Oriental style, except that the figure on the back was
not a dragon, but a fire-breathing spaceship.

"Don't touch me, Juno, I'm telling you," the man in black snarled in a
voice that had lost a lot of its intellectual veneer. He was massaging
a slapped wrist.

"I licked you the first time I was matched with you," the giantess
replied. "I licked you the night I married you. And I can do it again
anytime. You _and_ Cookie here," she added as the latter made a grimace
that was intended to be threatening but merely registered spite. "Why
was you tormenting the little guy?"

"Tormenting?" Jack's voice rose. "I wasn't tormenting him. Just taking
precautions. He came in here like a screwball, not saying anything,
dancing around on his toes, babbling about a cat. As if he was about to
go off his nut. Dangerous."

Cookie's tight-lipped face bobbed up and down in agreement, but Juno
wasn't at all impressed. "He seemed about as dangerous to me as yeast
spread. Why didn't you let him find his cat and get out?"

Jack's face registered astonishment. "Juno, was it you let in this
Ikeless Joe?" (It took Phil a moment to realize Ikeless meant lacking
I.Q.) "I was wondering how he got past Old Rubberarm. Do you mean to
say you fell for that story about a cat?"

"Well, isn't there one?" Juno demanded, scanning the room.

"How could there be, Juno?" Jack protested, the barest note of
intellectual superiority beginning to creep into his voice. "You didn't
see one, did you? No. And if there had been a cat, wouldn't it have
been after these mice like a shot? And where could it hide in here,
anyway? It couldn't have got in there," he went on as Juno's gaze
rested on the inner door. "_He's_ in there." Juno nodded. "So where
could it be, I ask you?" Jack finished. "You don't suppose Cookie and
me ... I kidnapped it, do you?"

Juno rubbed her battered nose thoughtfully. She turned on Phil a face
that was friendly but heavy with doubt. "Let's hear some more about
that cat, son. What color was it?"

"Green," Phil heard himself say, and even as he saw the looks of
incredulity appear on the faces around him, he couldn't keep himself
from going on: "Yes, bright green. And he liked cranberry sauce. He
just came to me an hour ago. I called him Lucky because he made me
feel so good, as if I could understand everything."

There was a long silence. Phil felt his spirits sink past zero. Then
Juno laid on his shoulder a huge hand that made it sag. "Come on, son,"
she said gently. "You better get going."

Jack strode up with a wry eye on Juno. "Look, Mister," he said to Phil
in a solicitous voice in which the mockery was still cautious, "I had
an appointment with an analyst for tonight, but I think you need it
more than I do." And he handed Phil a torn-off bit of phonoscribe tape.
Phil accepted it humbly and put it in his pocket. Cookie tittered. Juno
whirled on him. "Look," she roared, "his being a nut doesn't excuse
laughing at him any more than bullying!"

The inner door opened, but Phil couldn't see inside, because a tall,
fat man with a sooty jowl and thick dark glasses pretty well filled it.
Phil sensed a note of respectfulness in the other three.

"What's the racketting about?" the fat man demanded in a voice which
startled Phil because it was Old Rubberarm's.

"This guy--" Cookie began, but stopped at a quick look from Jack.

The thick glasses flashed at Phil. "Oh, one of your nut admirers,
Jack," the fat man said comprehendingly. "Get him out of here."

"Sure, Mr. Brimstine," Jack said. "Right away."

The inner door closed. Phil let Juno steer him through the other. He
felt way down in the minuses. So much so that he almost didn't notice
the odd couple coming down the corridor toward them. The man looked
saintly, yet sprightly. He was very sun-burned and he wore orange shoes
and an orange beret. The woman looked like a youngish witch, but with
the nose and chin already seeking each other. A little red hat was
attached by twenty long hatpins to her coarse dark hair, and she had
a red skirt stiff and thick as a carpet. Both of them were wearing
black turtlenecked sweaters. Phil noted them numbly, lost in his own
distress, but was vaguely aware that they were pointedly ignoring the
giantess at his side.

"You'll find your little tin hero back there shooting mice," she
snarled at them as they passed. The woman merely snooted her witchy
nose, but then the sun-burned man looked around with elfin eyes and a
benign smile. "Joy, Juno," he admonished lightly. "Nothing but joy."

The giantess looked after them glumly for a moment, then went on.
"Couple of Jack's intelleckchul fans," she confided bitterly. "Poets,
religious nuts, and all that goes with it. Completely turned his head,
the stinkers."

They reached the corner. Old Rubberarm waggled the tip of a fingerless
hand and muttered, "No loitering," but Juno silenced him with a weary,
"Shut up!"

"Now get along home, son," she told Phil. "I don't know as I'd visit
that analyzer of Jack's. Probably some fancy guy he got put onto by the
Akeleys--those two intelleckchul jerks you just saw. But maybe some
kind of psycher would be a good idea." She patted his shoulder and
grinned, showing a scar inside her lip. "I'm sorry about what happened
back there--that lousy husband of mine. Anytime you feel like it, drop
in on me. Old Rubberarm's got your voice pattern. Just ask for Juno
Jones. Only one thing, son--no more green cats."




                                  III


Through half closed lids, whose lashes blurred everything, Phil watched
the ghostly pale yellow circle of the window, which was all the
illumination he could bear now. He hadn't put on any lights when the
sun had set and the sodium mirror above the stratosphere made the only
light, and minutes ago he'd switched off the TV screen although the
girl's voice still crooned a sex song and he still wore the fat mitten
of the handie. But the pressure of her fingers, holding a hydraulically
compartmented artificial hand and transmitting over the airwaves an
electric signal to change pressures of the hydraulic compartments
of the handie, began to feel like that of a skeleton wearing rubber
gloves. Phil jerked off the handie, switched off the voice, lit a
cigarette, and was back with his problem.

Was he really crazy, he asked himself; was Lucky just a psycho's dream
cat, or had he somehow been tricked? Once again he tormentedly totted
up the evidence. Nobody but himself had admitted to seeing Lucky. And
there were so many other indications of hallucinations: that crazy
color, the silly food, his fleeting hunch that Lucky wasn't "really" a
cat, his suspiciously godlike elation and sense of power.

But those feelings of his were also the reason that Lucky _had_ to
exist. After what had happened today, Phil simply couldn't endure life
without Lucky, without those warm insights that had galvanized him this
afternoon and shut away all thoughts of his lost job, his loneliness,
his cowardice and frustrations. "Lucky," he whispered without knowing
he'd been going to, and the sick child sound of his voice frightened
him so that he fumbled in his pocket for the phonoscribe tape Swish
Jack Jones had given him. Puffing his cigarette hard so that it made a
hell red glow, he read the smoky words, "Dr. Anton Romadka. Top of The
Keep. Eight O'Clock."

He visualized the thin black shaft of The Keep, a luxurious
office-hotel, and thought of how few minutes it would take him to get
there. But then he suddenly crumpled the paper in his pocket and began
to pace. Going to Dr. Romadka would mean that he didn't really believe
in Lucky.

He thought of the sleeping pills but was afraid there weren't enough
left. He reached for a book he'd been reading, but the thought of its
stereotyped sadistic plot was unbearably boring. As a last resort he
turned on the radio again, voice and sight.

"... ravins the antichrist."

That phrase, together with the gaunt bucolic face, inevitably meant
that President Robert T. Barnes was telling his Fellow Americans about
Russia all over again.

"But there are sinners on this side of the polar battlegrounds," the
great midwestern father-image continued, swaying forward and arching
his bushy eyebrows. "Sinners in our midst, creatures of the fleshpots.
They have catered too long to the vilest desires and lusts." He shook a
finger and swayed once more. "I warn them that their time is at hand."

Phil reached for the knob (how often had Barnes made those futile, and
some said drunken, threats, when everyone knew his administration was
hand in glove with Fun Incorporated!) but he hesitated as an unfamiliar
and rather eerie note crept into the President's voice.

"Fellow Americans," Barnes almost whispered, wobbling a little from
side to side, "strange forces are abroad, insane thoughts, spirits of
the upper air like those which troubled ancient Babylon. Our minds are
being worked upon, it is the final testing time for--"

His momentary curiosity gone, Phil twisted the knob to silence and
darkness. Nevertheless, the President's rhetoric set the tone of his
next reverie. He did not pace now, but crouched back in the foam chair
wedged between the radio and bed.

He must be crazy, he told himself with a quiet certainty that didn't
hurt for the moment, perhaps because he sat so very still. Everything
he'd felt this afternoon had been out of character, including his
ridiculous overvaluation of that dream cat.

Yes, he must be crazy.

At that moment the dim circle of the window was intersected by a
smaller and much brighter circle. He automatically stood up and stepped
forward.

The girl in the room across the bay had switched on her light. Now
she threw down a cloak and walked around the room as if searching for
something, the horsetail of black hair flirting from side to side
as she turned her head this way and that. She was less than twenty
feet away and he could see her clearly. She was wearing a gray suit
fashionably pied with great splotches of black. Her face was compact,
nose small, mouth broad, eyes very wide set, and, as Phil now noticed
definitely for the first time, her ears were lobeless and curved up to
an almost faun-like tip. As on those rare occasions when he'd glimpsed
her before, he felt a quiver of uneasiness.

She shrugged her shoulders, as if giving up her hunt, and walked over
to the window, looking straight at Phil. He shrank back a bit, though
he knew he was invisible. She grasped a knob on the rim and swung her
hand in a quarter-circle, the window gradually blacking out as she did
so.

Then, just as Phil started to turn away, the window began to brighten
again until it was almost as transparent as before. He realized what
must have happened. The inner pane of polarizing glass had missed its
catch and revolved silently onward a few extra inches. He'd known it to
happen to his own.

The girl across the way thought she was hidden. She wasn't.

She stretched and took off her coat. Phil gnawed his lip. He didn't
quite want to watch her. But anything was welcome that would distract
him from the thought with which his last reverie had ended, and, Phil
knew very well, this window could provide most gripping, if barren,
distractions.

She slowly parted the magnetic clasps on her blouse, then slipped out
of it with a lithe twist of her shoulders. Phil forgot his fears,
enthralled by the beauty of her dark-nippled breasts. Below them,
almost cupping them, she seemed to be wearing some sort of close
fitting, velvet black undergarment.

She stepped out of her skirt. The undergarment ended raggedly at her
thighs. It puzzled him, perhaps because of the faint smokiness of the
window. It looked almost as if it were made of some sort of fur.

Balancing expertly on one leg, she drew the stocking from the other,
and along with the stocking one of those grotesque ten-inch platform
shoes.

Only--and here Phil's heart jumped--she seemed to have stripped off
much more than that. To be precise, her foot.

Then he saw she hadn't taken off quite all her foot. At the point where
her ankle should have been, her leg curved backward a trifle, then
sharply forward again, slimming down abruptly to end in a neat little
black hoof.

She stripped off the other stocking and shoe with the same result. Phil
could see how the foot fitted into a well in the dummy foot and the
platform, and was in that way concealed.

She danced exuberantly around the room. He could hear the clicks of
the little hoofs. He remembered how he'd heard her practicing tap. He
could see very distinctly her slim pasterns, her dainty fetlocks tufted
with fur exactly the same texture and blackness as her "undergarments."

She stopped dancing, took up an electric razor, and began critically to
shave the edge of her "undergarment."

Phil started to think in words. He got as far as "First a green cat,
then--" The next moment he turned and plunged for the door.

He wasn't very clear about anything for a while after that. For
instance, when he darted across the street two blocks away from the
Skyway Towers he was almost run down by a slowly moving black electric,
stylishly designed in the antique, museum-case style of the early
1900's. In it were sitting Cookie, the Akeleys and Swish Jack Jones
with a box on his lap. Phil didn't even recognize them at the time.

All he was really conscious of was what his hand clutched in his
pocket--the crumpled phonoscribe tape with Dr. Romadka's name and
address.




                                  IV


The indicator light sped to the top of the tall column of studs, the
elevator whooshed to a stop, the door opened and Phil stumbled out into
a tiny foyer with carpeting like a gray lawn.

A wall--this one was female, a regular charmer--murmured, "Good
evening. You have an appointment?"

"Uh," Phil managed, rather surprised that he could speak at all.

"Do you have an appointment?" the wall repeated. "Please answer yes or
no."

"Yes," Phil said.

"May I have your name, please?"

"Phil Gish." As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wondered
whether he shouldn't have said Jack Jones, but after humming delicately
for a moment the wall said, "How do you do, Mr. Gish. Please come in."

The wall slid open to a surrealist pear shape. Phil stepped through. A
sinuous arm, slim and glittering as a serpent, sprang from beside him
and indicated a nearby chair with the gracious wave of a hostess who
has studied ballet.

"Will you please sit down?" the wall suggested. "Dr. Romadka will be a
few secs."

Phil gulped. He had the feeling that if he strayed beyond the indicated
area of the room, the arm would do quite as efficient a job as had the
heavier one at the wrestling arena, although probably with an "Excuse
me, please," or even a "Now, Phil."

He took the suggestion. As if, by sinking into the chair, he had
completed a circuit, the wall said, "Thank you." He stood up. The wall
said, "Yes?" with just a hint of impatience. He sat down again. "Thank
you," the wall repeated.

The room was as dark, soft and silent as a womb. Evidently most of
Dr. Romadka's patients dreamed expensively. The inevitable desk had a
double curve like a love seat. There were no advertisements anywhere: a
sure sign of wealth. On one wall was a large, round design, apparently
copied from some classical Greek original, which disturbed Phil with
its suggestions of nymphs and satyrs. He quickly shifted his gaze to
an arch, through which he could see the beginning of a stairway. He
decided Dr. Romadka must also have a penthouse.

Suddenly he heard angry voices, a man's and a girl's. The latter's rose
to a catsquall of hate. A door somewhere shut with a snap, and a bit
later a man came down the stairs without moving his feet. Phil deduced
an escalator.

Dr. Romadka was tubby, bald and beaming with subtlety. He had on his
left cheek four new, deep scratches, which he ignored completely and
apparently expected Phil to. He summoned Phil to the desk with an
indicating nod. They sat down and looked at each other across the
curved and gleaming plane.

The analyst smiled. "Well, Mr. Gish? Yes, Jack Jones told me your name,
and since Sacheverell and Mary are paying for things in any case, the
new arrangement is quite all right. Oh, Sacheverell and Mary are Mr.
and Mrs. Akeley, Jack Jones' friends. I thought you might have known.
Incidentally, you're an hour late for your appointment."

A drop of blood fell from the deepest scratch to his white shirt and
spread.

Phil shivered, then made himself say it. "I was spending the time going
crazy."

The analyst nodded. "You do seem a bit wrought up."

"A bit?"

"Well," conceded the analyst with a shrug to excuse his own inadequate
powers of description. Then he said, "Do not be surprised at going
crazy, as you put it, Mr. Gish--may I call you Phil? It is the rule
rather than the exception these days, though your admitting it is a
bit out of the ordinary. For a full century now Americans have been
living in one of those ages of collective madness and herd delusion,
comparable only to the Dutch tulip mania, the witchcraft dread, the
dancing madness, Trotskyism, and the Crusades. Until 1950 ours might
have been called the Automobile Mania, but now the imagination can
only grope for a name--I'm writing an unpopular book on the subject,
you see. Not that this current social madness is a deep secret or
anything to be startled at. What other results could have been expected
when American society began to overvalue on the one hand security,
censorship, an imagined world-saving idealism and self-sacrifice in
war, and on the other hand insatiable hunger for possessions, fiercely
competitive aggressiveness, sadistic male belligerence, contempt for
parents and the state, and a fantastically overstimulated sexuality?"

The analyst's voice rose stridently and his eyes popped, as if there
were a personal element in his indignation. But the next moment he was
his merry professional self.

"Now, Phil, let's examine how this sick society has sickened you. It
may surprise you but we shan't be using any such modern techniques as
electrosleep, deep brain photography or situational therapy complete
with a bottle, a blanket and a blonde love-robot. We shall simply do
what our great-grandfathers would have done--talk. Feel perfectly at
ease. This desk is designed so we can be together, yet need not look
at each other. Care to smoke? Good! Do! Now begin at the beginning.
Tell me the story of your life."

Phil swallowed. "Excuse me, Dr. Romadka," he said, "but I'd rather not
do that right now. I want to tell you about an experience, I mean,
hallucination, I just had that convinced me I'm crazy, and then I
want you to tell me about it. You know: interpret it or psych it or
something."

The analyst shrugged happily. "As good a beginning as any. Go ahead."

So Phil told him what he had seen through the quarter-darkened window.
He found himself ashamedly admitting under the analyst's expert
rein-twitching how he had long used his own window as an observation
post, and when he got to describing the hallucination itself he found
himself trembling with restimulated terror, but he did finally get it
all out.

Dr. Romadka seemed as delighted as if he had been presented with a
rare object of art. "Beautiful!" he commented. "I have seldom heard so
magnificent a symbol for the murky sexual longings of this culture.
A satyress, or satyrette, prepared to inflict both love and savage
stampings. Mary would be enraptured with it, I'm sure, and insist
on making one of her dolls in its image." He sighed aesthetically,
then recalled himself. "But, of course, Phil, I can't expect you to
be interested just now in the artistic product of your unconscious
creativity. You want to know about causes, sources. Tell me, have you
ever seen a horse?"

"Once in a circus," Phil admitted.

"Greek mythology is one of your interests?"

"Not that I know of."

"Recall seeing that TV show _A Coltish Girl_ or the musical sexedy _The
Horsy Set_ or the ancient film _Fantasia_?"

Phil shook his head. The analyst nodded thoughtfully. "You say the fur
was distributed over the torso like a clinging, off-the-bosom chemise?
And that the legs went straight down, like rods, to end in hoofs?"

"Not exactly," Phil corrected and went on to describe the little heel
bumps of the fetlocks and the slim pseudo-wrists of the pasterns.

"But otherwise she was formed exactly like a normal girl?--except for
the faun ears?"

"No," Phil said frowningly after a moment. "Her thighs were a bit heavy
and powerful looking, as if made for galloping long distances. Her arms
were sort of long, though it didn't occur to me then. And the upper
part of her body was thrown forward a bit, if you know what I mean, and
it was balanced by quite a little rump. But not what you'd call hippy."

"Magnificent!" the analyst crowed. "Phil, you not only have equipped
your vision with accurate horse-legs, but you have made some of the
necessary compensations in the rest of the anatomy that such a mode
of locomotion would involve in a biped." He sat there beaming a bit
vacantly, as if lost in admiration for the creative powers of the
all-resourceful unconscious.

"Yes, but what does it indicate about my mind?" Phil asked. He would
have felt annoyed if he had not been so anxious. "What's wrong with me?"

Dr. Romadka shook off his reverie with a smile that begged pardon
for it. "What's wrong with America?" he asked wryly. "It's much too
early for me to arrive at any conclusions, Phil, or rather to help you
arrive at your own. Of course, the visual projection created by your
unconscious has some interesting references."

"What are they?" Phil asked. "I may not have made it clear, but I'm
worried about this. I can't get it out of my mind."

Dr. Romadka smiled, shrugged. "Perhaps a spot of interpreting would
relieve you," he agreed. "Though you must remember it's just impromptu
analysis, may be quite wrong. Here goes. The first things that come to
mind are such elements as dread of sexual experience and the attempt
to invest it with terror, effort to feminize yourself by conceiving a
savagely-hoofed love object, an attempt to link sex with a trampling
and punishing beast, perhaps as self-punishment for your voyeurism--all
of these fitting in nicely with the classical mythology about the
nymphs and their natural love companions the goat-hoofed satyrs--also
the horse-hoofed centaurs, who were frequently, you may remember,
teachers of men." The analyst frowned. "It's barely possible you were
visually projecting the desire to be taught about love. However," he
went on, "I imagine that as usual the hidden significances are the
more important ones. May I make a spot guess about you?"

Phil nodded.

"Are you a white-collar worker in close competition with robots?"

"Yes," Phil said, astonished.

"Hardly a brilliant deduction," the analyst deprecated, but his eyes
beamed. "In that case we must suspect another mythological ingredient.
Do you know the Pandora story? There's a special point about it. She
was not an ordinary girl sent by the gods to bring mankind a box
containing all ills. No, she was a metal maiden, forged by Hephaestus
at the command of Zeus. In other words, an automaton, a robot--bringing
in this case the ills of the Second Industrial Revolution caused by the
introduction of electronic calculators and sensers."

"But did Pandora have hoofs?" Phil said doubtfully.

Dr. Romadka waved away the objection. "Your unconscious probably fused
in the Arabian legend of the clockwork horse. The unconscious is very
artistic about these things, Phil. If you realized just how artistic,
how fertilely creative, you wouldn't be worried."

"But how does all this tie in with sex?" Phil asked.

The analyst shrugged. "Must it? A visual projection, like a dream, can
mean a thousand things. I warned you this was just impromptu analysis.
We've carried it about as far as we can."

"Look," Phil said hesitantly after a pause. "There's a lot to the
things you said, and some of them really pushed buttons in my mind.
But--I hope you won't object--there's one thing that's still bothering
me."

"Go right ahead."

Phil became even more diffident. Finally he said with difficulty,
"Look, doctor, is there any chance that what I saw could be real in any
way? Any chance at all?"

The analyst chuckled mellowly. "Not one in the world," he said with
complete conviction. "What's been bothering you, Phil? Did you believe
that the Greek gods and their creatures might have been materialized in
some way?"

"Something like that, I guess," Phil said without conviction.

Dr. Romadka leaned toward him, resting an elbow on the curving desk.
"If you had any idea of half the things people tell me across this
desk, normal neurotic people I mean, you wouldn't be so much impressed
by your own experience. There's a woman, for instance, who keeps seeing
shimmery moon-spiders in dark corners. There's a man who is always
getting glimpses of a girl dressed in skin-tight mink that covers her
face, too. And there's another fellow who keeps waking up in the middle
of the night with the absolute conviction that he's in bed with--no, I
shouldn't tell you that one."

"But I actually seemed to see it," Phil persisted stubbornly. "It
wasn't just a glimpse or shadows."

Dr. Romadka smiled. "How many people have seen flying saucers, Phil?
Including astronomers and atomic scientists. How many people have
seen Russian soldiers or Russian homing missiles nosing around their
bedroom windows? And how many people thought they saw Roosevelt--and
thought they walked and talked with him--the day of the Great Panic in
Atom War Two? Besides all that, Phil, there were shadows: you said the
polarizing window wasn't at maximum transparency. Also, you've been
overdosing yourself with sleeping pills--you admit it--and they can do
funny things. As for the hoofs, well, have you ever thought how high
heels are really cruel little hoofs? Anyone who's seen ladies fight
will confirm this. And the girl's hair-do, her suit splotched like a
piebald horse, the remembered sound of the tap-dancing--don't you see
how your unconscious could weave those things and a thousand more into
an image that in your strained condition you were all too ready to
accept?"

"I guess I do," Phil said finally, feeling considerable relief. Not for
long, though.

"But there's one other thing," he said, sitting up suddenly. "The thing
I thought I saw this afternoon. A lot more real than the satyrette
even. I thought I was with it for an hour. Even touched it and fed it."

"What other thing?" the analyst asked gently, with just the hint of a
tolerant laugh.

"The green cat," Phil said.

When the analyst didn't answer, Phil looked around. Dr. Anton Romadka
was simply staring at him. The four scratches and the dried trickles of
blood on his left cheek stood out much more sharply, as if he had grown
pale.

"I said the green cat," Phil said.

"The green cat?" The analyst's voice was a distant echo of itself.

"Yes."

"Umm," the analyst observed hollowly and sank farther down into his
chair, almost as if he were reaching for something with his toe.

Something beeped musically. The analyst snatched up the phone. His face
instantly assumed a fierce expression. He said, with pregnant pauses
during which he scowled, "Yes ... No, I can't. I can't possibly, I tell
you.... You couldn't do that; you'd be arrested.... Very well then, but
only for five minutes. Five minutes, do you hear? I'll be waiting."

He replaced the phone and looked around at Phil with a despair that
his baldness and big eyes turned comical. "This is most embarrassing,"
he said. "A former patient insists on seeing me at once, threatens to
cause a disturbance downstairs if I won't. She would, too. We had some
fine fracases before she broke off the analysis. I have no other course
but to see her. I know how to pacify her temporarily, enough to get her
home."

"I'd better go," Phil said, rising.

"Wouldn't hear of it," Dr. Romadka protested. "I want to go much deeper
into your case this evening. That last thing you mentioned--it opened
vistas! No, you just wait for five minutes in the next room, ten at the
most, and I'll have her out of here."

"I do think I'd better go, though," Phil said, "if you don't mind."

"Quite impossible," Dr. Romadka pronounced, taking a firm hold of his
arm. "She's passionately jealous of all my other patients and would be
sure to attack you the instant you stepped out of the elevator. Did
I tell you she carries a gold squirt gun filled with sulphuric acid?
That's one of her cuter tricks. The only other way out is the service
chute, and that's hardly for human use. No," he said, guiding Phil
through a door beyond the arch but not entering himself, "you just stay
in here for five minutes or so. There's plenty to read, to glance
over and listen to--not that you'll have much time. Trust me, Phil.
Everything's under control."

The door shut. One fleeting glance around showed shelves of books,
racks of vocal booktapes, a divan, a central table and a large mirror
set in the ceiling. Then Phil remembered he had left his cigarettes on
the desk. He punched the door button. Nothing happened. He punched it
again.

There still hadn't been time for Dr. Romadka to have taken five steps
away from the other side. He started to hammer on the wall.

"Dr. Romadka," he called. "Dr. Romadka!"

The lights went out.




                                   V


Phil stopped pounding on the wall and the black silence closed around
him drowningly, stranglingly, like a preview of the mental hospital
cell and electrosleep to which, he was suddenly sure, Dr. Romadka
intended to consign him on a psychiatrist's writ. In the thick darkness
he heard his heart pounding. His rapid breathing was for a moment that
of an animal.

He wondered helplessly why the analyst, after taking his satyrette
hallucination so lightly, should have instantly typed him as a
dangerous lunatic at his mention of a green cat. Psychologists, he
supposed, knew things about the mind's secret language that were never
told to ordinary people: seemingly innocent symbols that stamped
men as cowards, rapists, murderers, traitors, crypto-communists,
non-conformists. A fragment of conversation he'd heard somewhere came
back to him: "Of course as soon as he saw _that_ in the inkblot, they
hustled him off."

There was a sharp click. He started and looked up. A tiny line of light
appeared in the ceiling, widened, and then became an oblong spilling
radiance on the central table below, but leaving the rest of the room
dark. He realized that the mirror he'd noticed had been slid out of
the way. He couldn't see much of the room above except some microfilm
files and part of a TV reading machine of the sort that could use
micro-libraries all over America. No human figures were visible from
where he stood and he felt no desire to step forward into the revealing
light. He wondered, with a certain incredulous pride, whether he was
so dangerous a type that they intended to fish for him with nets. Just
then a foot was dangled over the oblong's edge.

It was a charming foot, slim and clad in the most shimmeringly
expensive sort of digital stocking, which gave each toe its separate
translucent compartment. Running back from between the toes were four
black velvet thongs, which helped attach the airy black shoe and
gave it an exciting though spidery appearance. The foot was joined
to a narrow ankle and gently swelling calf which hardly needed the
stocking's glamorizing. That was all of the figure he could see at
the moment, but the moment didn't last long. The foot was followed by
a second and shortly by all the rest of the girl. She hung briefly,
facing away from him. He got a quick impression of a short black
evening frock; a black shoulder cape; long, dark hair cascading free
and white arms in black gloves that began above the elbows and ended at
the knuckles.

His foot, shifting on the foam carpeting, made a tiny noise. Instantly
she whirled on him like a black panther, complete even to the shrill
snarl. As she did, Phil was rocked by two surprises: the first,
revealed when her short cape spun out, that her evening frock was off
the bosom, a style he had thought and read about a great deal, but
that was not followed at his social level; the second, and far more
attention getting, that the fingers of her right hand were tipped with
clawed, silver thimbles, while in her left she held ten gleaming inches
of that most disturbing anachronism, a knife. Poised like a fencer, she
waggled it rapidly under his chin.

"Did my father set you to spy on me?" she demanded. The "set" and "spy"
were sheer hiss.

"No," he replied chokingly, not wanting his Adam's apple to protrude.

"Then why are you here," she demanded, advancing the knife a bit,
"lurking in the dark?"

"Your father locked me in," he protested, leaning backward.

"Ishtar! Is he doing that to his patients, too?" she commented. Her
accents were a bit incredulous, but she did drop the knife to an easy,
on guard position, which also caused her cape to fall around her
modestly.

"Locked me in and turned off the lights," Phil reaffirmed.

She slitted her long-lashed eyes thoughtfully. "I can almost believe
the first part of that," she said. "He often sends his patients in here
for observation."

"Observation?"

She jerked a silver-fanged thumb at the ceiling. "That mirror's
transparent from above. He likes to watch what his patients do when
they think they're alone, either singly or by couples. Olympian voyeur!
Well, I marked him tonight." And she flashed the claws, which were
faintly stained with reddish brown.

Phil felt a little sick but took the opportunity to ask, "If that
mirror's transparent from above, why didn't you see me when he locked
me in here?"

"He always shuts the mirror off when he's not using it," she said,
"and I was interested in opening it, not seeing through it. I only
discovered the trick of the fastenings a half-minute ago. Father
probably doesn't even know it can be opened. Although well equipped
with the nastier psychological skills, he's no mechanic."

"Well, you seem to be skillful at things all around," said Phil.
"Fencing and that."

She thoughtfully licked the center of her upper lip with the tip of her
tongue. "You're kind of likable in a feeble way," she said. "Why did he
lock you in here anyhow? Too interested in sex? I thought he encouraged
that in his patients and only tried to forbid it to his darling
daughter."

As Phil searched for a suitable way to phrase a denial or confirmation,
her dark eyes grew speculative. "Say," she said, "how about you and
me?" She paused, then decisively whipped down the knife, so that it
stuck quivering in the floor. She advanced toward Phil. "Yes, you and
me."

"Your father'll be back any minute," Phil protested agitatedly.

"True, and I'll so enjoy seeing his face." She lifted her arms. "See
how beautiful I am. Look at them. Like two rose buds."

She was very beautiful indeed. Nevertheless, Phil froze. She bared her
teeth and struck at his cheek with her clawed hand, but at the last
moment turned the blow to a contemptuous pat.

"Don't worry," she said. "I know my glamor is a sort that terrifies
weaklings. Besides, the raven does not mate with the rabbit. And I
only wanted to do it to spite Father. Why did he lock you in? You seem
completely puerile."

"I just mentioned something about a green cat," Phil said with a
certain huffiness.

She rolled her eyes. "Tammuz! And just after encouraging the Akeleys in
their Bast worship. The man's so erratic I sometimes think he must be a
crypto-communist with his cover personalities jumbled."

"Of course he did say something about my waiting here while he got rid
of a violent ex-patient who carries around a--"

"That gold squirt gun story," she interrupted, "is his pet dodge for
getting rid of patients."

"He doesn't seem to want to get rid of me."

"No," she agreed cheerfully, jerking her knife out of the floor, "he
seems to want to keep you."

"I think he wants to send me to a mental hospital," Phil ventured,
rather hoping to be disagreed with, but she merely nodded.

"I don't envy you," she added, inserting the knife in a sheath in her
skirt. "Father favors old-fashioned treatments like convulsive therapy
and simulated snake pits. Well, if the assistant torturers are on their
way, I'd better be on mine." She took three quick steps, then looked
back at him coldly, thinning her lips. "Care to come along?" she asked.
"Not that I like you even faintly--I detest men; I'm seething with what
my grandmother would have called masculine protest--but I always enjoy
frustrating Father."

Phil had an acute sense of a lady-or-the-doctor dilemma, but he lost no
time saying, "Yes."

She nodded once and headed for the back of the room. "Will you try for
the elevator?" he ventured to ask.

"Of course not!" she snapped at him.

"But he said the only other way--" Phil began.

"Sshh!" she hissed and punched a door button.

The wall kept blank. "So it's on code," she said. "I might have
known." And she punched the button in a rapid rhythm. The wall kept on
blank. "Oh, oh, the special code, the one I'm not supposed to know."
She looked round at Phil. "You must be important," she sniffed. She
punched the button in another rhythm. This time, rather to Phil's
surprise, the wall parted obediently. He followed her into a gleaming
kitchen, complete with glassed in shelves of gamma-sterilized steaks
and vegetables, freezer, radionic oven, shadowed mushroom bed and small
microbe tank for home-cultured appetizers. Phil's eyes bugged at the
latter two luxuries, but it did occur to him to say, "What about that
mirror you left open? Mightn't your father come in upstairs and see I'm
gone?"

"Not tonight after what I gave him. Now stop making old maidish
remarks." She was standing in front of a vertical cylinder that half
protruded from the wall, and was busy once more with her button
punching. A tiny green light flashed up a tall column of studs like a
skyrocket. "Get the hassock from the library. Quick!"

When Phil hurried back lugging the foot-high cylinder of foam rubber,
a doorway about as big as a midget was open in the cylinder. "Put it
inside on the platform," she directed, "on top of all the straps and
stuff. They're just for packages. That's right. Now get inside and
squat on it. Reach down your hands on either side of the hassock and
take hold of the clamps. Keep a firm grip, because it drops a bit
faster than free-fall and you wouldn't want to be left behind squatting
on nothing. And squat up straight or you'll get your head rubbed off!"

"Wait a minute," said Phil, withdrawing a foot he had gingerly inserted
in the doorway, "Do you--"

"I have to go last, because I know how to work the button when I'm
inside. Hurry up."

"But this is the service chute, isn't it?" he asked.

"Did you expect Nubian slaves to carry you down a spiral ramp? Later
on you can persuade Father to buy me a copter if you want to."

"You mean," he quavered, "that you think I'm going to fall down that
chute on a little platform without sides?"

She jerked the knife from her skirt. "I think you're going to do that
or else you're going to let me lock you back in the library."

Stepping back from the knife, Phil sat down suddenly on the platform,
cracking the top of his head on the doorway, and then slowly drew in
his legs and assumed the position of the Anxious Buddha. "You didn't
have to rush me," he said with some dignity.

"I'm sending you to the first basement," she told him in clipped tones.
"I'll give you five seconds to get out. I think the door'll be open
there. If not, you'll have to come up again, and hope it's me that gets
you and not some other floor. Now don't worry," she told him as she
slid the door shut, "I've done this a dozen times myself--or at least
thought of doing it."

In the darkness Phil's spine stiffened to condensed steel and his hands
clutching the clamps became those of a gorilla. He had time to think
that if only Lucky were with him, tucked inside his jacket....

The platform was jerked down from under him, dragging him along. His
stomach rapidly scrambled over his heart and nestled just below his
Adam's apple. A giant snake hissed and he was acutely conscious of
being inches from death by friction on every side. Then, just as he
figured he'd got a really firm grip on the clamps, he distinctly felt
the platform through the hassock, his heels cut into his rump, his
vertebrae cut into his intervertebral disks, and various things inside
him jarred loose.

He was staring groggily into a dimly lit and empty room. Time was
passing, it occurred to him. He dove out onto the floor, while behind
him the platform took off with a hearty _whish_. By the time he had
dragged himself to a sitting position and taken a few breaths there
was a gust of air from the chute and a _zing_ as the platform came to
a stop. Miss Romadka sprang out nimbly and curtsied to an imaginary
audience.

"You never did that before?" he asked her glumly.

"Of course I have, but I knew if I said I hadn't you'd take it more
seriously." She tweaked him by the nearest ear. "Come on, you're not
out of Father's clutches yet."

Almost to his disappointment, he found he could scramble to his feet
and follow her. He almost felt calm. "How did you push the button from
the inside, anyhow?"

"Just taped it down, jumped in and shut the door. The platform won't
move if any of the upper-floor doors are open."

"What's your name, by the way?"

"Mitzie," she told him. "Mitzie Romadka."

"Mine's Phil," he said. "Phil Gish."

She led him into a shadowy garage, lined with ornate cars in stalls
barred like prison cells. Several of the cars had recharging cables
plugged in. He saw a ramp ahead that led upward. Mitzie coded open the
barrier in front of a small black coupe without a hint of decor.

"Innocent looking little job, isn't it?" she remarked. "Used to belong
to an undertaker." She hopped in. When, with a sad shrug, Phil followed
her, he was hardly surprised to find she had donned a full-length black
evening-mask. "It's not my car," she explained. "I'm just hiding it for
Carstairs and the gang. It's hot."

And with that reassuring remark she guided it out toward the ramp, its
small electric motor whining faintly. A door rose at her voice. Then
they were outside in the ghostly yellow evening of the sodium mirror.
When they had climbed almost to ground level, a big car slammed to a
stop in the street ahead, three-quarters blocking the exit. Two men
jumped out of the car and someone, of whom Phil could for the moment
see only waddling legs and chubby tummy, hurried to meet them.

"Look, if this is another tame-chicken chase--" he heard the first of
the two men from the car begin in heavy skeptical tones.

"Don't be absurd," the hurrier asserted crisply in a voice Phil
recognized as Dr. Romadka's. "I tell you, he mentioned the green cat."

At that moment the analyst looked around and saw Phil gawking at him.

"There he goes now!"

The analyst's outraged squeal turned to the rasp of plastics as Mitzie
bullied the small black car between the ramp-wall and the newcomer.
With the twang of hooked bumpers parting, they swung out into the
street, the little electric accelerating modestly. Phil looked over his
shoulder.

"They've got back in," he told Mitzie. "They're turning around."

"Like I said, you're important," she murmured through her mask, still
incredulously. "Well, here goes," and she abruptly nosed the car toward
the narrow mouth of a ramp leading downward.

"Hey, that's marked 'Exit Only,'" Phil yiped at her.

"That's why I'm using it," she informed him curtly.

He closed his eyes as the car tilted sharply down, but the gods of
probability seemed inclined to grant boons tonight. When the car
leveled out, Phil opened his eyes to the brighter, nearer, fog-light
sodium yellow of the under level. They were moving ahead smartly. Once
more Phil looked back.

"They've come down after us," he said with wonder perhaps a trifle
mixed with pride.

"Really important," Mitzie muttered, shaking her head. "Well, this
little mouse was never meant to outrace that rhino. Prepare for
acceleration, and hope the cars at the next ten intersections are
stacked right."

Phil felt himself crunched into the foam rubber he had his chin on.
There was a red glow just behind them. The pursuing car shrank rapidly
in size. Twisting himself around with difficulty, he noted that the
sodium lights had become a molten yellow ribbon. Their car flew past
the hood of a truck entering from a side street, though their speed
made it appear to be standing still. Some blocks ahead they shot
between two cars which also seemed frozen. The red glow died. They
sailed up another "Exit Only" ramp into the spectral yellow night.
Proceeding at a speed that soon became reasonable, they turned four
successive corners.

"That should do it," Mitzie said with professional nonchalance. Phil
nodded his slumped head.

"Carstairs put in the rocket assist yesterday," she explained. "He
wasn't altogether sure he had it lined up right. Neat little trick,
isn't it? A great comfort when you've just knocked over a fat
sales-robot, say, and have three cop cars converging and maybe a cop
copter up above. Beats a smoke screen all hollow. You'll see."

"I have," Phil assured her with a rather absent minded shiver.

"That was nothing," she said scornfully. "I mean when you've really
pulled a job and they're closing in. That's the big thrill. You'll see,
I tell you. You know, Phil, I sort of like you. You're so darn scared
and innocent, yet you play along. I'm sure I can persuade Carstairs to
let you join the gang."

Phil shivered again, but with even less of his mind on it. Neither
Mitzie Romadka's criminal pastimes nor her sudden friendliness could
hold his attention. Staring out frowningly at the jaundiced street, he
was thinking of Lucky and of the way he had felt when Lucky was with
him.

He jerked awake. "What is this green cat, anyhow?" Mitzie was asking
with an indifference that her mask intensified. "A carved emerald or
the password in a secret society?"

Phil shrugged.

"Well, let's forget it then," Mitzie was saying, "and have some fun."
She speeded up again to the electric's unassisted limit and ran through
a stop light which yipped protestingly. Her eyes gleamed wickedly in
their circles of black lace. Her breathing grew quicker, her voice
lighter. "Carstairs has a bunch of sales-robots lined up. Got their
after theater routes cased to a hair. We can ram 'em and gut 'em, one,
two, ten! Jump for the curb, sisters!"

This last exuberant remark was directed at two cloaked women on
glittering platforms, and it was accompanied by a vicious swerve of
the car toward them. They made it, just, and tumbled on their knees,
shrieking. Mitzie cooed happily.

Like someone waking from a dream, Phil said sharply, "No! I don't want
any part of it!" He went on, "You can drop me at 3010 Opperly Avenue,
top level."

She looked at him curiously for a change, even with surprise. "All
right," she said after a bit, "I'll do it, if only because I got such a
kick out of the look on your face when I shut the door of the chute."
She spun the car illegally in a tight U-turn. She said harshly, not
looking at Phil, "I never hot rod at old people, you know. They don't
have enough hormones to make it fun. Those two girls were real funnies."

Phil made no comment. They sped for a while in silence. Then he became
vaguely aware that Mitzie was stealing glances at him.

"If you should manage to cook up a little nerve and change your mind,"
she said angrily, "you might possibly find us at the Tan Jet much later
tonight."

He still made no comment. She went on softly, "Night's the only time,
you know, at least in this century. Night in the city. I love the pale
yellow streets and the bright yellow tunnels. They've taken the jungles
away from us, the high seas and the highways, even space and the air.
They've abolished half of the night. They've tried to steal danger.
But we've found it again in the city; we who've got nerve and hate the
sheep!

"Well, here's your 3010 Opperly," she said, jerking the car to a stop.
Phil opened the door and started out. Only then did Mitzie seem to
see the bright marquee and realize that the address was that of Fun
Incorporated's wrestling center. She thrust herself across the seat as
he reached the curb and turned to shut the door.

"So this is what you were looking for!" she yelled at him, her suddenly
passionate voice making her mask puff away from and then huff to her
mouth. "You turn me down, you sniff at my friends and my ways, you're
above violence and sex, and all the while you're planning to satisfy
yourself vicariously, watching male-female!" For an instant before
she slammed the door in his face, lightning seemed to shoot out of
the lace-shirred eyeholes of the black mask. "At least I make my own
thrills, you rotten little virgin!"




                                  VI


The crowd pouring down the corridor squeezed out of Phil his wincing
recollection of Mitzie's last crack. He slithered his way along the
wall, rubbed by shoulder and hip, trodden by heel and toe, set coughing
by gray-blue clouds of tobacco, weed, and so-called Venus weed, and
regaled by such remarks as, "Aaha, he could of thrown her any time he
wanted to," and "What I don't like are those dumb women referees!"

Phil finally wedged his way into an eddy of the crowd near a side
corridor. He unhopefully gasped, "Juno Jones." Old Rubberarm whispered
throatily, "Come right in, Mack," and narrowly arched his gray arm to
let Phil duck through at that point, meanwhile bracing his slaty length
against a general surge of the crowd and whipping back the tentacle-end
of his arm to stop a gent in brown with tennis-ball eyes who tried to
duck in after Phil.

Phil wiped his forehead and took a deep breath. He felt a little
giddy standing just by himself. A woman came out of the door ahead.
She was dressed with an aggressive dowdiness: shapeless long frock,
button shoes, wide brimmed, flower covered hat, fur neckpiece and
gloves. She looked like somebody's scrubwoman from past times out on a
half-holiday. He didn't realize who it was until the crowd behind him
began to cheer and to chant, "Juno! Juno!"

She waved to them, but her eyes were on Phil.

"Gosh, I'm glad to see you," she said, grabbing his elbow. Then she
whispered, "Don't ask questions. Come with me."

The next moment she was hurrying him down the corridor away from the
crowd.

The chanting of the crowd became disappointed and a bit sore. A shrill
voice skirled over it: "Whatcha goin' off with the little shrimp for?"

Juno turned around and stood solid. "Listen, you mugs," she bellowed,
and the crowd was silent while a telephoto spot glowed blindingly. "I
know I'm your heroine and it makes me happy, but even I gotta have a
love life! And don't you be insulting it!"

As the crowd yelped with laughter and started cheering again, Juno
pushed Phil through a door. "I hope you didn't mind my saying that,"
she told him. "They're my fans and I gotta humor 'em."

Phil shook his head a bit dazedly. He had expected her to stop as soon
as they got out of sight of the crowd, but instead she was hurrying him
along a narrow hall.

"Say, look here, Mister--" she began anxiously.

"Phil," he told her. "Phil Gish."

"Well, look, Phil, could I take you to dinner?"

"Sure," Phil said.

"Good," she said with relief. Nevertheless she kept peering about,
almost apprehensively, and didn't slacken their pace. "I know a good
steak place. Quiet and they really know how to broil rabbit." They
reached a narrow, shadowy stairway. Juno steered him toward it. He
started up, but she jerked him back. "Not that way, Phil, for gosh
sake," she warned him. "That's straight to Billig and the wasps. This
place I'm telling you about is on the bottom level." And she started
down. "We could take an elevator," she said apologetically, "but this
is better," adding gruffly, "more private."

At the bottom of the stairs a narrow door led directly into a long
dark room with a counter along one side and a row of booths along the
other. With its browned chrome finishes it had to date back to 1960.
The customers were mostly big men, seemingly evenly divided between
truck-drivers, police, and a less definable category. There was an
elevator door next to the one they'd come out of. Juno wagged her big
hand at a couple of people and shouted to someone, "Whiskey and chops,
and make sure you burn the edges. What'll you have, Phil?"

He realized he hadn't eaten since yesterday and mumbled something about
a yeast sandwich and a glass of soybean milk. She looked at him, but
passed on his order without a comment, then took him in tow once more.
She had to answer a few familiar greetings, but she didn't spend much
time on them and seemed relieved when she'd plunked Phil down in the
booth nearest the front door, where the rumble of trucks was loudest
and their headlights, mixed with the sodium glow, flashed on the
scratched and dusty plastic. But there were, for a wonder, no jukeboxes
or radios of any sort in the place. He also saw that the pushbuttons
on the wall were labeled for out of date synthetic foods and had taped
over them an "Out of Order" sign that must have been twenty years old
itself.

He studied his companion across the table and realized for the first
time that she looked dead beat. His glance began to trace on her large
jaw the outlines of a recent bruise that was only partly concealed by
hastily applied makeup. She dove into her pocketbook with a shy girl's
flusteredness and started to dab at her jaw with a powder-puff, but
then gave up, put back the puff and slumped forward, her meaty elbows
on the plastic.

"Don't ever let 'em tell you the bouts are fixed," she assured him
glumly. "Zubek bust a gut trying to get me tonight."

"You won?" Phil inquired.

"Oh, sure. Two falls, a spaceship spin and a free-fall--that means when
you throw 'em up and out and they don't come back."

A tray came sliding along the bar. Juno went over and got it before
Phil realized that it was for them. From the speed with which the
order had been filled, he decided they still had radionic cooking in
the place. Juno's seared rabbit chops were as big as small steaks--it
must have been an octoploid bunny, at the least--while her whiskey
was intimidatingly huge and brown. He nibbled his yeast sandwich and
found it seemingly okay, though it always made him a bit uneasy to eat
restaurant food that didn't pop out of a wall.

As Juno munched her chops and drank her whiskey, she told Phil snatches
of the story of her life. It turned out she was a farm girl who had
come to the city young and suffered the usual disillusionments. "How's
a girl going to get ahead these days," she asked Phil, "especially
a dumb ox like me? Not that I didn't have a swell figure, but even
then I was too big and strong. I scared the men I knew and I didn't
know then the ones who would have liked what I had. So I tried scrub
mothering for a while--you know, birthing babies for wealthy dames
who didn't want to carry them the nine months themselves--but I knew
there was no future in that. Ten years or so and I'd be sweeping up
after some sweeping robot and trying to make throwaway paper dresses
last a month. So I remembered how I could pin nine out of ten boys
back home, and I entered some amateur wrestling contests and pretty
soon they were grooming me for a pro." She shook her head dourly.
"You should have seen my figure; it really was beautiful before they
put me on hormones." She distastefully inspected her big hands, still
white gloved though now gravy stained. "Even used pituitrin on me, the
bastards." She sighed and shrugged. By now she had reduced her chops
to bones and was working on her second whiskey. "So that's the way it
was, Phil. Of course, I had to go and fall in love with a wrestler
and marry the little skunk--most of the girls in the business make
that mistake--but at least I eat rabbit, even beef, and a lot of dopes
respect me."

Phil nodded eagerly. "You've made a place for yourself. Security."

"Are you kidding?" she asked. "Five years and I'll be through, ten at
the outside if I get to be a character." She shook her head and leaned
forward. "Actually it's much worse than that. Male-female's almost
finished. Government's going to crack down."

"They always say that," Phil reassured her with timid cheeriness, "and
it never happens."

She shrugged fatalistically. "This time it will."

"I heard the president talking about something like that tonight," Phil
said, "but he sounded drunk."

She shrugged.

"But Fun Incorporated is supposed to have all sorts of connections with
the government," Phil continued to object.

She smiled oddly. "You're right. The best connections any syndicate
ever had. Just the same, they're finished. Moe's been worried for
weeks, worried bad. I can tell."

"Moe?"

"Moe Brimstine. You saw him for a minute this afternoon."

"Oh, yes," Phil said, getting a vivid memory flash of the door-filling,
dark jowled hulk, and then went on with a little laugh, "You know, it
startled me when his voice was the same as Old Rubberarm's. He seemed
too important a man to be a door-tender."

"I'll say he is!" she exclaimed, the boom returning to her voice for a
moment. "You didn't actually think, Phil, did you, that he spent his
time peeking through a one-way peephole and working that spring-rubber
dingus? And would I be calling him a dumb robot? He just used his own
voice to record Old Rubberarm's questions and answers. He gets a kick
out of things like that." She lifted her heavy eyebrows. "Don't you
know who Moe Brimstine is?"

Phil shook his head.

"Where you been all your life? 'Scuse me, Phil, but Moe Brimstine
is ... why, he's on top of the syndicate, right next to Mr. Billig
himself!"

When Phil didn't recognize the second name either, she quit trying.
"Well, anyway, Phil," she said in her friendly, quiet voice, "there's
Moe Brimstine, practically the boss of Fun Incorporated, which runs
wrestling and amusement centers, all sales-robots, jukebox burlesque,
and a lot of other things they don't talk so much about. And he's
worried, real worried. Now I know Moe. He don't worry about nothing
but the syndicate. So things must be real bad." She paused, then added
cryptically, but with a sort of personal gloominess, "Lots of things
are real bad."

Phil nodded. There was a silence.

"Say, Phil," she finally said huskily, watching her big, gravy stained
finger rub her near-empty glass. "That really was a--whadya call
it?--delusion, wasn't it, this afternoon when you was talking about a
green cat?"

"I thought so then," Phil said softly. "Now I'm not sure."

She let out a big breath and looked up at him. "You know," she said
with sudden warmth, "neither am I. Say Phil, how valuable is that cat,
anyway, if there is a cat. Could it be worth $10,000?"

Phil felt his eyes bug at the same instant he was thinking that Lucky's
worth could never be measured in money. "$10,000?" he murmured. "I
haven't the faintest idea. What made you think of that figure?"

"Well," Juno said slowly, "after the Akeleys--muck 'em!--had left this
afternoon, Jack came in to me and started talking again about how dumb
I was about you. Only this time it wasn't because I had let you in,
but because I'd let you go. He says to me, 'You're dumb, Juno, you're
deductively dopey. You don't recognize opportunity. Now I'm in a
position to make $10,000 out of that little squirt, only I'm not going
to do it, at least not right away,' he says, 'because there are higher
things, Juno, there are higher things.'" And she rolled her eyes as if
she were in the ring and approaching her spouse in his character of
Swish Jack Jones, the Lady Killer.

"Well, anyway," she went on after a moment in a less outraged voice,
"I didn't wonder too much about that at the time, 'cause he's always
trying to needle me that way since he met Sashy (Jack hates me to call
him that) Akeley. But then, just after I get out of the ring tonight,
Moe Brimstine starts pumping me about a green cat. Seems he'd been
playing through Old Rubberarm's recordings of his conversations for
the afternoon, and I'd talked about a green cat when I was talking
to you. He pretended it was what you call idle curiosity, but that's
something Moe Brimstine's got nothing of. Course I told him you were
just a harmless nut with cats in your bonnet, but he didn't seem
satisfied." She looked at Phil puzzledly. "You did think you were a nut
this afternoon, didn't you? You didn't believe in any green cat then--I
mean, after we'd argued you out of it?"

Phil had to nod.

"But now you've changed your mind?"

"Yes, I have. You see, I finally took your husband's advice and went to
see the analyst."

"That lousy psycher the Akeleys put him onto!" she snorted.

Phil sketched the essentials of his episode with Dr. Romadka. When he
had finished, Juno burst out, "I get it all right. If he locks you up
and calls in some hoods and they demagnetize the law tape chasing you,
then that green cat's no weed dream, brother!"

"They didn't look like hoodlums," Phil objected doubtfully. "Besides,
Miss Romadka didn't seem to think the green cat was important."

"That sexy little she-punk!" Juno dismissed Mitzie contemptuously.

Phil was startled--he hadn't realized he'd told Juno so much about
Mitzie.

"Besides," Juno went on conclusively, "Moe's interested in the green
cat, or he wouldn't pump me about it, and anything Moe's interested in
has gotta be real. Oh, the poor little mutt."

"Who, Moe?" Phil asked confusedly.

"Course not. I mean Jack, specially after Moe catches up with him and
finds he had that green cat and then didn't deliver." Her brow furrowed
excitedly. "Look, Phil, this is the way I figger it: Moe tells Jack
and some of the other punks, 'Boys, I'm paying $10,000 to anybody who
brings me a green cat.' $10,000 is Moe's favorite figger dealing with
smart jerks like Jack."

"But why would Moe Brimstine want a green cat?" Phil objected. "Did you
ask him tonight when he was pumping you?"

"Brother, you don't ask Moe Brimstine anything," Juno assured him.

"But you do think now that your husband and Cookie stole the green cat
while Old Rubberarm was keeping me out?"

Juno's look implied he stated the obvious far too often.

"Has Mr. Brimstine been asking your husband questions?" Phil asked.

"Jack wasn't billed for tonight," Juno explained. "He went off
somewhere."

"To the Akeleys'?" Phil asked, a blurred memory nudging at his mind.

"This isn't the night," Juno said. Her voice became for a moment
bitterly mincing. "They only receive wunct a week! Most likely Jack's
gone off with Cookie somewhere."

"But if your guess is right about Mr. Brimstine offering $10,000 for a
green cat, and Jack stole the cat, then why hasn't he taken it to him?"

Juno rolled her head like an angry bull. "Oh, it'd be something those
Akeleys put him up to; something they flattered him into. Maybe they
even got him to give them the cat. They can really twist him."

Phil felt all at sea again. "But what would the Akeleys want with the
cat?"

"What do screwballs like that want with anything?" Juno countered.
"What do they want with Jack?" She snuffed and looked at Phil. "Get
one thing straight," she said gruffly, "I love Jack, the little rat.
I've taken a lot from him, but I haven't minded too much. Oh, it hurt
when I found out he thought more of Cookie and those other punks than
he did for me, but I didn't let it show through my skin. After all,
if a man knows you can lick him, I suppose it's bound to affect him.
But when those Akeleys discovered him and began to play up to him and
change him, that was too much for me. They're intelleckchuls, you see,
and they flattered Jack and filled him up with a lot of guff about
how he had a hidden artistic talent and how he was Zeus or some name
like that battling the female principle and so on. Well, he falls
for it, see?--goes into a complete free-fall. Starts to buy reading
tapes, printed books even! Next thing he's insulting me--using a lot
of words I never hardly heard of. Keeps talking about how great Mary
is, with her art and her magic figures or whatever they are, and how
wonderful Sashy is, with his great ideas about understanding and love
and a lot of other junk. Tells me to my face that I'm a dumb bell, a
stupe semantically!" And having done well with that last word, Juno
slugged down the rest of her drink. "Look, Phil," she went on, "I could
fight Cookie and the others, because they're on my level, but I can't
fight intelleckchuls. They're lifting Jack away from me and I can't
do nothing about it. And now they've gone and got him into some real
trouble, I bet, with this green cat business. Because Moe Brimstine
isn't impressed with intelleckchuls or anything." She carefully took
the glass out of her hand and made claws. "If I had the little rat
here," she said, "I'd strangle some sense into him. But until Moe
Brimstine talked to me, I didn't really suspicion anything was wrong,
and now I can't do nothing."

Phil's blurred memory suddenly came clear. He told Juno about how,
racing to Dr. Romadka's, he had seen Jack, Cookie, Sacheverell, and
Mary driving somewhere in the ancient electric.

Juno slammed the table with both fists. People looked around. "That
black hearse-box!" She roared. "I should have known it. Tonight's so
important they're receiving special." She jumped up and grabbed Phil
by the wrist, fumbled for her glass, got Phil's instead, recognized it
just before draining the last of the soybean milk, set it down with
a shudder and yanked Phil out of the booth. "Come on," she told him.
"We're going to the Akeleys! To the temple!"

Opening the doorway leading to the sub-street, Juno had to pause. Phil
got a chance to look back the long length of the bar. As he did, the
elevator door at the far end opened. A fat form filled it. Dark glasses
were twin patches of smut.

At that moment, Phil got an unannounced demonstration of Juno Jones'
strength. He was lifted off his feet and lightly swung some ten feet
through the doorway into the sub-street roaring and glaring with trucks.

"That was Moe Brimstine," Phil gasped.

"I know," Juno told him as she yanked him toward the escalator leading
to higher levels and cab phones. "He didn't see us."

Phil wasn't so sure.




                                  VII


The cab had just hummed past Monstro Multi-Products' blindingly bright
basement show windows, behind which a file of dress-display robots
marched in an endless figure eight with considerable realism and oodles
of suede-rubber glamor, when Juno hunched forward and growled to the
driver to stop. She had been silent during most of the ride, as if the
whiskey had gone sour in her, and now when Phil made a move to pay
she impatiently motioned him aside. He hopped out willingly enough,
suddenly eager to see what the Akeley place looked like, as if his
hopes and fears had started rotating again when the wheels of the cab
stopped.

Juno's reference to "the temple" had half led him to expect Greek
columns or an Egyptian portal. Instead he was facing an oblong of
darkness, framed by the sidewalk, show windows some distance to either
side, and the underpinnings of the two upper streets. He crossed the
sidewalk and hesitated, as if he stood on the edge of nothingness. It
was really very black, even for the bottom level. The sodium moon had
set.

Then, as the after effects of the show windows' glare lessened, a house
took shape before him--an old, three story house, looking incredibly as
if it were built of wood, with roofs slanting oddly and lights gleaming
faintly through shuttered bay windows and fanciful dusty fanlights.
Something gritted under his foot and he realized that between him and
the house was a yard of real dirt, if not grass and weeds. This must
have been the ground level of the city some hundred years ago. Now
it was the windows of the third story which peered across the gap at
the top-level street far above Phil's head. The gap was at one point
spanned by a beam. Apparently the house was so ancient and ricketty
that it needed props.

But then a new illusion presented itself. Phil knew that the house
was in the heart of the city, hemmed in by gigantic buildings on
every side. There should have been tiers of lighted windows and, far
overhead, a square of night sky. Instead there was only darkness, as if
the pre-atomic house existed in a private night.

Then headlights of a turning car in the street two levels above swept
across the upper third of the house, and he saw that all around the
house were surfaces painted a dull, non-reflecting black. The flat
black "ceiling" could hardly be a foot above the top of the house's
highest spire.

"Some legal business," Juno explained, coming up beside him. "Jack
wunct told me sumpin about it. Seems the original owners couldn't be
rooted out, but the city seized the air-rights and built over them.
Creepy place, looks as if it were about to rot apart--just right for
those Akeleys." Then, more loudly, "Well, I said I was going to bust
in on them, and I am. C'mon."

Phil followed her across the yard to the ricketty steps leading to the
porch. His hand groping for the rail touched peeling ancient paint.
Halfway up a cat darted past him. For a moment he was swallowing his
heart, then as the cat paused at the top he saw that it was splotched
with some sort of dark and light colors--hardly Lucky. It loped around
a corner of the porch. Following it, Phil and Juno found themselves
facing a six-paneled door lit by a dingy globe, which Phil guessed must
be an ancient tungsten-filament lamp. There was no sign of the cat, or
indication of how it could have vanished, until Phil noticed a tiny and
possibly swinging door cut in the bottom of the big one.

Ignoring a cat-headed knocker, green with verdigris, Juno pounded on
the door in a way that made Phil hunch his shoulders and duck his
head, keeping an apprehensive eye on the ceiling. But the house didn't
collapse.

After a time a peephole opened above the knocker and a watery gray eye
surveyed Juno.

"I want to see that no-good husband of mine," she shouted, but it
didn't seem her usual self-confident roar.

"Now Juno, you're all upset," came the response in a voice Phil
recognized as that of Sacheverell Akeley. "Your aura's all muddy; I can
hardly see you through it."

"Listen here," Juno bellowed, "you let me in or I'll bust your lousy
house down."

Phil thought that, even granting some lack of certainty in Juno, this
was not a threat to be taken lightly, but it didn't faze Sacheverell.
"No, Juno," he said firmly. "I can't let you in when your vibrations
are like that, and when hate hormones are streaming off you. Later
perhaps--then we may even be able to help you achieve inward
tranquility--but not now."

"But look," Juno complained in surprisingly docile tones, "I got a
friend with me that's got business with you." She stepped aside.

"What business?" Sacheverell asked skeptically.

Phil looked straight at the oysterish eye and said, "The green cat."

The door swung back and Sacheverell, now no longer in orange beret and
pants, but a robe of bronze embroidered green, waved Phil in with an
arm that swished emerald silk. His sunburn now seemed the exotically
dark complexion of an Asian mystic. "All doors must open to him who
speaks that name," he said simply. "Do you vouch for your companion's
peacefulness?"

"Ah, I wouldn't touch anybody or anything here," Juno growled surlily,
shouldering in after Phil. "I feel smutched enough already."

"From filth the roses spring, Juno," Sacheverell reminded her gently,
"and good blooms from evil. Be happy that you are to share in the great
transformation."

Phil found himself standing on the threshold of a large living room
twisting with streams of gray incense and cluttered with Victorian
furniture and a bric-a-brac of ornaments and objects suggesting every
religion in the world. The lights here, too, were tungstens, and so
few as to make many shadows. At the far end of the room was a large
doorway, heavily curtained with black velvet. Through the resinous odor
of incense came the dull reek of stale food, clothes and people; also a
sour animal smell.

And then Phil saw that the place was simply alive with cats: black,
white, topaz, silver, taupe; striped, mottled, banded, pied; short
haired, Angora, Persian, Siamese and Siamese mutant. They dripped from
chair tops and shelves; they peered brightly from under little tables
and dully from suffocating-looking crevices between cushions; they
pattered about or posed sublimely still. One stretched full length on
the woven Koran in the center of a Moslem prayer rug; another lay on a
tarnished silver pentacle inlaid in a dark, low table. One was battling
a phylactery hanging from the wall, making the little leather box swing
and jump; another was nosing a small steatopygous, multi-mammiferous
figurine; yet another was lazily entangling itself in a rosary;
two were lapping dirty looking milk from a silver chalice set with
amethysts.

And then for a second time Phil was gulping his heart, for in the
center of a mantlepiece over a real fireplace, and midway between a
gilded icon and a tin Mexican devil-mask, there posed most sublimely
still of all, with forelegs straight as spears ... the green cat.

As Phil walked hypnotically forward, he heard Sacheverell say gently,
"No, that is not his true self, but his simulacrum, his ancient
Egyptian harbinger, a figure of Bast, the Lady of Life and Love."

And as Phil came closer, he saw it truly was the bronze statue of a
cat, encrusted with verdigris almost exactly the hue of Lucky's coat.
Coming up beside him, Sacheverell explained, "As soon as _he_ came,
I routed out all our relics of Bast. Most of them are in there," he
indicated the black velvet curtains, "around the altar. But a few are
here." And he pointed out, beside the bronze statue, a small mummy case
and inside it the linen-banded mummy of a cat, looking like a little
sack with a blob at the top. As Sacheverell was explaining the tiny
Canopic jar of preserved cat entrails beside it, a six-toed Siamese
wandered up and sniffed the mummy thoughtfully.

Finally Phil found his voice. "Then you actually do have Lucky?"

Sacheverell's high curved eyebrows curved still higher. "Lucky?"

"The green cat," Phil added.

Sacheverell's face grew serenely grave. "No one has the green cat," he
reproved Phil. "It would not be permitted. He has us. We are his humble
worshippers, his primal hierophants."

"But I want to see him," Phil said.

"That will be permitted," Sacheverell assured Phil, "when he wakes and
the world changes. Meanwhile, compose yourself, er ... Phil Gish, you
say? Phil ... philo ... love ... an auspicious name."

"Why the mucking hell is this green cat so important, anyhow? What is
it?"

The two men turned. Juno was still standing on the threshold. She was
swayed forward a little, hugging her elbows, yet had her shoulders
squared and was glaring at them surlily, like a rebellious schoolgirl.

"The green cat is love," Sacheverell told her softly. "The love that
blossoms even from hate."

There was another interruption. This one took the form of a coy,
girlish snicker. Phil turned to the side of the room he had not yet
inspected closely, the one facing the fireplace. In it was a deep,
wide bay window closely shuttered with gray jalousies, as were all the
other windows in the room except for one fronting on darkness beside
the fireplace. In the bay was a semicircular couch on which Mary Akeley
sprawled adolescently, still in black sweater and stiff, red skirt.

"You know," she said, "I just can't get used to the idea of loving
everything. Sacheverell says I've got to be nice to my little people
and stop sticking hatpins in them and things, but it's hard."

For a morbid moment Phil thought she was referring to the cats. Then
he saw that there were a series of narrow shelves behind her, starting
at the top of the couch and going halfway up the bay and that these
shelves were crowded with dolls. Moving closer, he saw they were not
ordinary dolls, but extremely realistic human figures, most of them
about six inches high. He had never seen dolls so perfectly formed
or realistically dressed. There must have been two or three hundred.
They stood behind Mary like the cross-section of a crowded three-level
street in some tiny living world. In front of the couch was a low table
crowded with blocks of wax, molds, micro-tools and magnifiers, several
partially completed figurines and piled squares of fabrics so delicate
they must have been woven specially.

"You like my little people?" he heard Mary ask him. "Most everyone
does. I got started out making strip-tease dolls, but these that are
all my own are so much more fun. Sacheverell, I think they like having
pins stuck through them. I think that's the way they want to be loved."

"Perhaps, my dear," Phil heard Sacheverell say with an affectionate
chuckle, "but we'll have to wait to see how _he_ feels about it."

And then Phil saw that the dolls represented actual individual people,
were apparently perfect statuettes of them--so perfect that for a
moment he found himself wondering which was the real world: the big one
or this tiny one of Mary's. He recognized President Barnes, the USSR's
Vanadin, square-jawed John Emmet of the Federal Bureau of Loyalty,
several TV and handie stars, Sacheverell, about eight versions of Mary
herself, Jack Jones in black tights, Juno in maroon ones, Dr. Romadka
and--he caught his breath--Mitzie Romadka in an evening frock very
much like the one he'd seen her wearing.

"Recognizing friends?" Mary asked softly, her young face which was so
predominantly nose and chin poking up inquisitively toward his.

Footsteps clumped. Phil realized that Juno had finally come into the
room and was standing behind him looking at the dolls. Mary looked past
him with an innocent smile. "They're awfully cute, aren't they?" she
remarked.

Juno said, "Ugh!"

"Try to be joyful," Sacheverell kindly admonished with a little wag of
his finger. "Try hard. Soon it will be ever so much easier. I mean,
when _he_ wakes. I must go now and see if there has been any change.
Amuse yourselves." And having lightly set them that stupendous task,
he hurried from the room, his green robes whistling against the black
velvet curtains.

"Sacheverell's been as efficient as can be ever since _he_ came," Mary
observed. "A great little manager. I've never seen him so peppy before
about anything. He's gone in for other things, you know," she prattled
on. "Semantic Christianity, neo-Mithraism, Bhagavad-Gita, Gospel
according to St. Isherwood, Bradburian Folkism, Cretan Triple-Goddess,
devil worship and Satanism--those are the two that _I_ like--and I
don't know what all else. Every time he finds himself a new one,
he gets very enthusiastic, but not like this. I've never seen him
so serious. Ever since Jack handed him the green cat, all cute and
curled-up and sleeping--"

"It wasn't sleeping," Phil cut in almost sharply. "It had been knocked
out by a stun-gun."

"Don't be ridiculous," Mary went on. "Jack just found him sleeping.
Well, as soon as Sacheverell touched him, Sacheverell told us that the
world was going to change and there was going to be a new era of love
and understanding, and ever since then he's been as busy as a little
bee. Soon as we got home, he whirled around and got out all the Bast
things. I told Sacheverell that because Bast was a lady goddess, maybe
we shouldn't call him _he_. But Sacheverell told me no, that was the
way it was and the way it had to be. And I guess maybe he's right,
because when Sacheverell carried him through here sleeping, all the
little cats went for him in a big way, and the little girl cats went
for him even more than the little boy cats. And anyway, I always trust
Sacheverell's notions because he's so good at esping and telepathing
that he makes half our living by it."

At that moment there was a strangled grunt and Phil heard the clumping
begin again behind him. Mary smiled slyly and followed Juno with her
eyes, but kept on babbling.

"And you know," she said, "I guess there is something to what
Sacheverell says about an era of love and understanding, because these
little cats used to fight all the time, but ever since _he's_ been in
the house they've been as peaceful as anything--a regular little cat
UN without Russia and the satellites. Even I feel sweeter, which is
a real test, though it's going to break my heart not to be able to
hate people." She sighed. "Still, if everybody's going to have to love
people, I'll just have to face it, and I better start practicing right
now."

Phil, who had been leaning toward her, jerked up at that. Her face was
just a bit too like a young crone, despite her inviting lips and creamy
skin, but she merely reached behind her and took down the doll of Juno.
"Even love _her_," she said.

The footsteps changed direction and came stamping up. Juno's face was
brick red from rage or outraged modesty.

"You put me down!" she demanded. "I know what you are, you're a witch.
There was one on the next farm back in Pennsylvania. Only witches make
wax dolls of people and stick pins in them."

For answer Mary gave the figurine an affectionate stroke. "No, Juno,
I'm going to have to love you and you're going to have to get used to
it." She looked up sweetly at Juno, who writhed at every touch Mary
gave the figurine. "Incidentally, I really am a witch and if I had any
choice, I would much rather stick needles through you."

"Put me down!" Juno bellowed, raising her arms with all the muscles
standing out tautly underneath the long, tight sleeves of her dress, as
if she had a big rock she was going to drop on Mary.

Mary complied without haste and took down another of the figurines. Her
voice was soft as a serpent gliding. "Would you rather I practiced
loving on Jack? That's what you make me do."

"Don't you touch him!" Juno's face was almost purple. "Bad enough your
going all gooey over him in the flesh, but this is worse. Stop touching
him that way! Aaaaah!"

Phil ducked back as, with the last screaming bellow, Juno kicked the
work table to one side so that its contents scattered and all the cats
went scampering under tables and chairs. "I'm going to smash every last
one of those dolls," Juno announced, advancing.

Instantly Mary rose to her knees on the couch, her back to her little
people, her arms outstretched protectingly to either side.

"Straight through the eyes," she hissed, her face a fury's mask,
"that's where _your_ needles are going. Get thee before me, Satan!"

Phil never found out whether Juno was, as she seemed, a bit cowed by
the diabolical venom in Mary's voice, for just then there was a frantic
padding of feet on the stairs and Jack Jones and Cookie burst into the
room from the hall.

"Juno!" Jack yelled. "I told you I'd kill you if you ever came here!"

In the ensuing moment of silence Cookie could be heard to confirm
primly, "He will, too."

Juno turned on Jack, assuming the stance of a bear. "Listen, you
ten-timing little stinker, you're going straight home with me." She
hitched up her skirt and began to roll up, or rather rip up, the long
sleeves of her frock. Her furpiece had already fallen off and her hat
hung by a cropped hair.

Meanwhile Jack was surveying the scene and getting a real idea of how
much damage had been done.

"Juno," he said aghast, but advancing, "you've been wrecking the place,
you've been wrecking the little people, you even brought the Ikeless
Joe!" And in passing he gave Phil a shove that sent him up against the
wall, his teeth rattling. "Don't you see what you've done, Juno?" Jack
continued with poignantly aggrieved indignation, as if he must convince
Juno of the enormity of her actions before liquidating her. "You've
done the one thing they won't ever forgive, the one thing that'll turn
'em against even me." He was practically tearful. "Don't you realize
they're the only two people in the world that mean anything to me?
Don't you realize that outside of Mary and Sacheverell, I don't care a
fig for anybody?"

Surprisingly to Phil, the retort to this came not from Juno, who was
lifting her now bare arms menacingly, but from Cookie.

"Oh, so you don't care anything about me, either," he accused shrilly.
"I've suspected it for a long time, and now you say it yourself."

"Shut up, you're just a dumb stooge," Jack told him without looking
around.

"Oh, so I'm just a dumb stooge, am I? Well let me tell you, Jackie,
Juno's right about one thing and I wish I'd admitted I agreed with her
long ago. These Akeleys have turned your head. They've dazzled you."

At that moment Sacheverell came popping back into the room, his
brilliant silk robes fairly hissing against the black velvet. "Stop,
at once!" he commanded, raising his arm. "You will disturb _his_
awakening. Rise above hate. Do you realize I can't see anything of you
but ink blobs, your auras are so black? Even _he_ will be unable to
reach you."

"Shut up that silly talk about _he_," Cookie snarled. "I don't want
to hear the word again or anything more about your stupid cults that
I had to pretend to be interested in. You've done Jackie quite enough
damage as it is. Do you know we could have got _ten thousand dollars_
for that cat you're using for your idiotic mumbo-jumbo? Jack had just
stun-gunned it and was all ready to hand it over to Moe Brimstine and
collect _ten thousand dollars_, when you have to prance in with that
_ugly_ witch of a wife of yours and make like a wizard and flatter
Jackie into thinking he was starting a new religion or something and
soft talk him into giving you the cat. I hate you. I want to hurt you."
And he started toward Sacheverell, walking on his toes and puffing out
his sweatered chest like a bright blue fighting cock.

Once again to Phil's surprise, Sacheverell's horrified and reproachful
gaze was turned not on Cookie, but Jack.

"Jack," he gasped, "do you mean to tell me you shot _him_ with a
stun-gun, that you even dreamed of selling _him_ for money? Judas!"

"Now see what you've done," Jack moaned, not at Cookie, but at Juno.
"You've spoiled everything."

"I'll spoil you, you rancid little intelleckchul-lover," she roared and
ran at him blindly like a novice. Jack's face set itself in a shrewd
grimace and he stepped lightly to one side and slipped out a hand for
a hold. But just then Juno's professional training seemed to come back
to her and she checked herself, smoothly grabbed the wrist of the hand
snaking toward her, bent, spun, and sent Jack sailing over her hip in a
flying mare that landed him on the silver pentacled table. It toppled
with a crash and various religious objects fell from the wall.

Meanwhile, Mary Akeley had picked up a small vise that had broken from
her upset work table, and hurled it with great accuracy at Cookie's
head, but then Cookie suddenly hurled himself at Sacheverell's throat
and the vise passed through the space where Cookie's head had been.

While all this was going on, Phil, completely to his surprise, walked
coolly over to the shelves of figurines, carefully picked up that of
Mitzie, and put it in his jacket pocket.

When he turned around, Jack had selected a black glass Aztec
sacrificial knife from the fallen religious objects and writhed to his
knees like a cobra. Juno picked up a rather small, but very solid,
brass Buddha.

Nearer the velvet curtains, Cookie had Sacheverell on his back and was
choking him, while Sacheverell, though his shoulder was pinned, was
industriously trying to beat Cookie on the head with the silver chalice
from which the cats had been drinking.

Mary had grabbed up some hatpins and darted forward. She hesitated whom
to attack, then started for Cookie--not so much, Phil fancied, to help
her husband but because Cookie's "ugly" had rankled.

Never before, not even in the trenches and foxholes, had Phil Gish seen
real murder in a human face.

Now he saw it in five.

And then, very suddenly, it wasn't there at all.

The room grew very still. The black glass knife and the chalice
clattered from Jack's and Sacheverell's hands. Mary's hatpins struck
the floor with a faint, vibrant rattle. Juno's Buddha thudded on the
Moslem prayer rug. Cookie's hands unlocked themselves and writhed back,
as if ashamed even before they had a message from the brain.

Expressions unlocked too. Hate furrows softened and vanished. Lips that
had writhed back from teeth moistly returned. Eyes filled with painful
understanding.

Jack said, in a soft, amazed voice, "Juno, you really do love me. You
don't just want to own me and shame me as a man."

Juno said, "You really do care what I think, don't you, Jack? Gosh!"

Cookie said, "I didn't realize it, Sacheverell: you partly mean what
you say. It isn't all faking."

Mary said, "And you actually want Jack to be happy, Cookie. It isn't
simply vanity and envy."

Sacheverell said, "My God, it's happening. And I mostly thought it was
a stunt I was stage managing."

As for Phil, his feelings were in that golden sea they'd swum in this
afternoon. He felt as if his heart were joined by sensitive strands to
those of the five persons around him. It even seemed to him that there
were delicate, gossamer wires connecting him to the figurines so that
he understood Romadka, Barnes, Vanadin, maybe even himself.

Then, simultaneously with the others, he turned toward the velvet
curtains. A few inches above the floor, Lucky's little green head had
poked through. It hung there like a large green jewel, flooding them in
turn with its mellow rays. Then Lucky pushed all the way through the
curtains.

Swiftly, from under tables and chairs, out from the fireplace, and from
behind tiers of books, all the other cats appeared and gathered around
Lucky in a circle.

"It has begun," Sacheverell whispered happily. "The world is changing."

"Saint Francis of Assisi," Mary murmured weakly, "incarnate in a cat."

Then Lucky walked slowly across the room. The other cats made way for
him and then followed him, still keeping a respectful distance. He
passed Mary and Cookie, passed Sacheverell, who looked just a shade
disappointed, and sprang lightly into Phil's arms.

Phil had never held anything that weighed so little, or felt fur so
electric. His chest seemed to him to be rather too small for his heart.

Sacheverell called softly yet ringingly, "You are the chosen one." Phil
looked at him and then, with an unreasoning and almost mystical gust of
apprehension, at the black window behind him.

The glass in the window was vibrating, circular gray waves were
spreading in it from a central spot.

At the same instant he felt his left hand, the one cradling Lucky, go
dead. Lucky leaped convulsively in the air and fell perhaps six feet
away from him and was still.

The glass in the window shattered all at once and tinkled to the floor,
leaving only a few jagged shards around the frame.

Lucky's cat cortege broke up and its members raced into the hall and up
the stairs.

Moe Brimstine stepped in through the window, with a suppleness one
would never have expected of his huge body. He stood just inside
it, gripping a stun-gun in his big mitt. His jowl seemed to Phil to
be smeared with the darkness behind him, and his glasses elliptical
patches of it.

"There's a couple of boys with orthos out there," Moe said, stepping to
one side of the window. "I know you don't want to get yourselves sliced
up."

Apparently nobody did, though Phil at least hadn't any idea of what
orthos might be.

"Listen carefully, everybody," Moe said. "So long as you forget
about all this, so long as you act and think like it never happened,
beginning with finding the cat this afternoon, then I'm going to forget
all about you. That goes for you, Jack, though you're a dumber bunny
than I ever thought and did yourself out of an easy ten--and for you,
Juno, and Cookie, too. But if you don't forget, if I get just the
littlest hint that you've remembered--well, we won't talk about that."
He slowly scanned their faces. "Okay, then," he said, and shifting the
gun to his left hand, stepped forward and scooped up Lucky.

"He ... he ..." Sacheverell mumbled despairingly. Moe looked at him and
Sacheverell was quiet.

"How long did this pussy sleep after you stun-gunned it?" Moe asked
Jack.

Jack wet his lips. "Almost until now," he said. "Until maybe five
minutes ago." Moe backed away toward the window.

Phil felt something moving from inside, something that tortured him
into movement, for he certainly didn't want to stir a muscle.

He advanced toward Moe, a shaky step, then a couple, all the while
feeling the most exquisite pains racking his torso as it was sliced by
imagined orthos.

"Put that cat down," he croaked.

Moe looked at him with utter boredom.

"He's just a nut," he heard Jack assure Moe in an anxious whisper. "He
won't cause trouble."

"I can see he is and won't," Moe said drily, shifting the gun to the
hand from which Lucky dangled.

But Phil kept on toward the towering figure. He tried to stop, but
the torturer inside him wouldn't let him--and now once again the same
torturer pried open his teeth and lips.

"Put him down," he repeated. "You can't have him. Nobody can." He
raised his fists, but the left one wouldn't close.

Moe looked at him disgustedly. The big fist came toward Phil's jaw,
very slowly. Still, there somehow wasn't enough time to get out of the
way.




                                 VIII


Phil struggled through the slap-slap of an invigorating gray surf,
until he realized it was a wet towel wielded by Juno.

"How's the head?" she inquired with a grin that showed her lip scar.

The head seemed twice as thick and heavy as usual to Phil, but he
didn't feel any special pain until his exploring hands came to the lump
on his chin.

"You're okay," she told him, tossing the towel on the upset black and
silver table. He doubted it.

"Do you think that by any chance Mr. Brimstine is a Beelzebite?"

Phil gingerly swiveled his head around. Sacheverell, whose green
garment now seemed just a garish and not too clean bathrobe and whose
dark complexion was merely sunburn again, appeared to be having a
conference of some sort with Jack and Cookie. They were drinking. Mary
was busy at her work table.

"A what?" Cookie asked suspiciously.

"You know, a Satanist, a devil-worshipper," Sacheverell explained
briskly. "That would explain his stealing the Green One. A Satanist
wouldn't want good to bloom in the world."

"Stop talking that silly guff," Cookie told him. "Moe Brimstine
isn't interested in any kind of mystical crud or anything else, for
that matter, except the do-re-mi. And neither is Mr. Billig. And
Moe Brimstine wouldn't be working for anyone but himself or Mr.
Billig--probably both. That's true, isn't it, Jack?"

The kingman didn't seem at all inclined to be talkative, but at this
question he did nod his head with conviction.

Juno put a glass in Phil's hand. "Here, drink this," she told him. Phil
looked at the brown stuff. "What is it?" he asked.

"Not soybean milk," she assured him. "Drink it up!"

The whiskey, which tasted as if it were laced with something bitter,
burned his throat and brought tears to his eyes, but almost immediately
his head began to feel clearer. He surveyed the room. Outside of Mary's
work table, none of the mess had been cleaned up, though someone had
taped the Moslem prayer rug over the broken window.

"And what's more," Cookie was saying dogmatically, "your idea about
that cat being mystical is crud too."

Sacheverell looked at him and Jack with exquisite blankness. "But
didn't you feel it?" he asked. "Didn't you feel what it did to all of
us?"

Jack shifted uneasily and didn't meet his gaze, but Cookie shrugged his
shoulders and said nervously, "Oh, that! We were just all of us worked
up, between your mumbo-jumbo and the fighting. We'd have believed
anything."

"But didn't you feel your whole being change?" Sacheverell insisted.
"Didn't you feel universal love and understanding burgeon?"

"Universal sky-pie!" Cookie said rudely. "I didn't feel a thing that
meant anything. Did you, Jackie?"

The kingman didn't quite nod his head, but he certainly didn't shake
it. And he didn't look at Sacheverell.

The latter surveyed them both with sad wonderment. "You've already
forgotten," he said. "You've made yourselves forget. But how," he asked
Cookie, "do you explain the behavior of the cats? They recognized the
Green One. They tendered him worship."

"They just panted around after him," Cookie asserted. "He's probably
an oversexed hermaphrodite mutant. And another thing--if that cat's
mystical and all dripping with powers, why did he let himself be
knocked out? Why didn't he feed Moe Brimstine some universal sky-pie?"

"There was glass and distance between them," Sacheverell reminded him.
"Besides, if Mr. Brimstine is a Beelzebite--"

"What's more," Cookie went on relentlessly, "why did he let himself be
knocked out by Jack in the first place? Jackie, before you stun-gunned
the little brute, you didn't feel any great burgeon of universal love,
did you?"

Jack frowned. "I stunned him instinctively," he said slowly, his
downward gazing eyes studying the upset chalice, which chose this
moment to roll two inches. "I glimpsed something out of the corner of
my eye and shot." He paused. "I actually thought it was a mouse."

"Instinctively or not, you stun-gunned it and we hustled it into the
locker as soon as we saw it was green," Cookie assured him decisively.
"Which certainly proves the cat has no powers. Sash here just worked
us up into thinking he had. Gave even me such an eerie feeling that if
someone had come in wearing an orange sheet and Sash had said it was
Mohammed, I'd have believed him."

"But suppose the Green One was taken by surprise," Sacheverell argued.
"All gods have limitations. Perhaps the Green One is not so much able
to read thought as to join together telepathically the thoughts and
feelings of mortals."

Cookie made a rude noise. Jack gave Cookie a quick look that was both
angry and imploring, as if to say, "You've proved your point. Lay off."

Sacheverell shrugged and said, "Well, if I have to descend to your
materialistic level, what is it that makes the Green One so important
to Mr. Brimstine?"

"How should I know?" Cookie said huffily. "Maybe he's smuggling heroin
in it or secret documents for Vanadin; maybe it belongs to the current
mistress of the King of South Africa. Did Moe tell you anything,
Jackie?"

"Just that he'd give $10,000 for a green cat and that he didn't want
any dye-jobs. That was a couple weeks ago. Some of the other boys asked
for details, but he said there weren't any." He stood up. "But what's
the use of talking about it? We can't do anything," he said harshly,
suddenly glaring at Sacheverell, as if daring him, or imploring him, to
answer.

"Well ..." said Sacheverell.

Phil had finished his thinking. He got to his feet and squared his
narrow shoulders. "We can rescue the green cat from Brimstine," he
said. "Who's with me?"

Cookie whirled on him. "Nobody, not even yourself," he said, while Jack
put his hand to his temple and groaned, "Now the Ikeless Joe."

Juno heaved herself out of her chair and lumbered over with her glass
and bottle. "Look, Phil," she said, "I gotta admit you're a spunky
little mutt. But nobody, simply nobody, goes up against Moe Brimstine."

Phil considered that for a moment. "I did," he said proudly.

"Yeah, I know," she admitted, "but he didn't take it seriously."

Phil looked at Sacheverell. "How about you?" he asked. "You believe in
Lucky."

Cookie glared warningly at Sacheverell. "If any one of us bothers Moe
Brimstine about the green cat," Cookie said, "we'll all be inhaling
molten plastic!"

"Well ..." said Sacheverell, looking around for advice. His gaze
settled on his wife. "Mary, what steps do you think we should take?"

Mary, chewing her tongue over a difficult job of wax shaving, twitched
her shoulders. "I don't care what anyone else does," she said, lifting
off the microtome-thin flake. "I'm working on Moe Brimstine my own
little way." And she held up for their inspection a small wax head
which already was beginning to look like the heavy jowled assistant
boss of Fun Incorporated. "And when it's all finished," she told them,
"then needles and pins!"

Juno said, "Ugh!" Cookie looked almost impressed. While Sacheverell
gnawed his lip thoughtfully and, with a wary eye on Jack and Cookie,
said, "Yes, I suppose that is the best way after all."

"Okay," Phil said and started for the door.

"Where do you think you're going?" Cookie demanded.

"To get him back," Phil said.

At that there was a rush of footsteps and several voices competing in
assuring him he would do no such thing, but it was Juno who grabbed his
shoulders and swiveled him around.

"Phil," she said, "for wunct I gotta admit that I agree with these
jerks. You're not going to do anything about that--that fool cat. You
just gotta get that through your nut wunct and for all."

Phil just smiled at her.

She shook her head disgustedly. "I shouldn't have give you that
whiskey."

"It wasn't the whiskey, but what you put in it," Cookie interjected
crisply. "He's high."

Phil grinned at him serenely, as if to prove his point, then suddenly
they all stepped back a bit, and for a moment he thought they had
recognized his supreme self-confidence and bowed to the inevitable.
Then he realized that they were looking beyond him and he felt cool air
from the porch.

Dr. Romadka put down a black bag inside the doorway, said smilingly,
"Hello, Sacheverell. Hello, Mary," and nodded briefly to Jack, Juno,
and Cookie, before casually turning his gaze to Phil.

"Well, Phil," the analyst said waggishly, "that was quite a chase you
led me, and I consider myself very lucky to have found you at all.
It was a most interesting conversation we were having and I'm eager
to continue it." He spared the others a glance. "You'll excuse us
talking professional matters for a moment, I hope. Now, Phil," he went
on persuasively "I imagine that the ... er ... person who persuaded,
or rather forced you to run away, tried to put all sorts of ideas
into your head. But I'm sure I can show you in a few moments just how
nonsensical they are. Incidentally, it was that same person who turned
out the lights in the first place and put all the doors on code. Quite
a trickster, eh? And my daughter, too! So say good-by to your friends,
Phil--I hope they won't be too angry with me for dragging you off."

By this time Dr. Romadka was far enough into the light so that the
four streaks of dried blood on his cheek showed up plainly. Mary said
mischievously, "Anton, I never did believe in that wild woman patient
of yours who was always threatening mayhem, but now I guess I'm going
to have to. Somebody clawed you real good."

Dr. Romadka's smile thinned a trifle. "Quite a few illusions turn out
to be very real, Mary," he said lightly, "although it's usually my job
to prove the opposite. Eh, Phil? Such as that there really aren't any
young women with hoofs and black fur who forget to turn off the window
when they undress?"

"Or any green cats?" Phil asked quietly.

"Yes, anything like that," Dr. Romadka agreed curtly.

"Why don't you admit, doctor," Phil went on coolly, "that the green cat
is another of those illusions that turn out to be very real? And that
you're after it? You wouldn't startle these people a bit. They've all
seen the green cat."

Dr. Romadka's eyes blazed with sudden suspicion, which didn't
altogether abate when Cookie said in scandalized tones, "We did not,"
and Jack insisted, "Doc, we don't know what the guy's talking about.
But we do know he's a nut. That's why I sent him to you in the first
place."

Phil watched with amusement as the psychoanalyst sharply scanned Juno,
Sacheverell and Mary. Then Phil chuckled and said to them, cryptically,
"It might be worse for you if I go off with the doctor instead of up
against Brimstine."

New suspicions flared in Dr. Romadka's eyes, but Jack said swiftly,
"Look, doc, are you going to take this guy in charge and put him away
somewhere so that he won't be able to cause any trouble?"

"That's one thing you can be sure of," Dr. Romadka snapped, shedding
his smiles and subtlety. "Get this straight, Phil, you're coming with
me whether you want to or not. In case you're thinking about running
away again, I have several friends outside."

"Then that's swell," Jack said, "I'm all for it. We'll be glad to get
rid of him."

Juno, who had been frowning for a long while, now rocked her head like
a puzzled bull. "Gee, Jack, I dunno," she said. "I don't like it at
all."

"Juno--" Jack began threateningly.

"I don't like the idea of tossing the little guy to the wolves," she
finished defiantly.

"To the wolves, Mrs. Jones?" Dr. Romadka asked dangerously. "That's
done to save others. Please explain--"

But at that moment Sacheverell came hustling forward with great
determination. There were no longer any traces of sympathy in the stern
glance he fixed on Phil. "I think that Anton and Jack are quite right,"
he announced, seizing Phil by shoulder and elbow and marching him
toward the door. "I'm tired of your deceptions, Mr. Gish. You go right
along with Anton and his friends, and no nonsense."

Phil heard a grunt of satisfaction from Dr. Romadka. He tried to twist
away from Sacheverell, but the latter pressed even more closely to his
side, so that his face was next to Phil's ear, and suddenly whispered,
"Up the stairs, two flights."

The next moment, Phil felt himself pushed away, while Sacheverell
reeled with a yelp into Dr. Romadka, who was stooping for his black
bag, and at the same time managed to upset the antique floor lamp that
dimly lit the hall.

Then Phil was racing up the creaking stairs in the sudden darkness,
helping himself along by yanks at the ricketty balustrade, while
behind him he heard shouts and racing footsteps. Nearest were those
of Sacheverell, who was crying manfully, "There he goes! After him,
everyone!"

Phil raced along the backstretch of corridor and up the second flight,
Sacheverell flapping at his heels like a green bat. At the top he
grabbed Phil and shoved him through a door. For a moment their faces
were close.

"Out the window and over the beam," Sacheverell whispered. "Dare
anything for _him_."

Then the door was swiftly shut and he heard Sacheverell yell, "He's
gone up in the attic. Follow me." Phil was in darkness, facing a tall
window dimly aglow from outside, while about his feet cats who had
taken refuge in the room scurried frantically.

He walked over to the double-paned thing of wavy, ancient glass. He had
read more than one comedy scene involving the impossibility of opening
such primitive windows, but this one came up easily enough and all the
way. He ducked through and crouched on the sill outside, steadying
himself with one hand.

Around him was nineteenth-century, musty smelling wood and slate.
Opposite him, about twenty feet away, was the top-level street, busy
with speeding electrics. Joining the two was a metal beam about eight
inches wide, faintly outlined in the glow from the car's headlights.
The beam was grimy with dirt. It based itself in the brick chimney that
rose just beside the window. In fact, one of Phil's feet was on it.
Below were two stories of mostly darkness.

What happened next may very well have been made possible by the
fear-abolishing, nerve-steadying drug Juno had put in his whiskey,
though Phil laid it to the influence of Lucky and to Sacheverell's
grotesque yet strangely thrilling injunction. Certainly Phil was no
athlete and had, if anything, a touch of acrophobia.

At any rate, he slowly got to his feet, let go the window, poised
himself for a moment, and then ran lightly across the beam. He rolled
clumsily over the railing at the other end and sprawled on the sidewalk.

At the same instant a needle of glaring blue lanced up through the
dark behind him. It cut through the beam at an angle, spat redly for a
moment against the black "roof" a few feet above the Akeleys' house,
and winked out.

The beam held for a moment, then slowly slid past itself at the cut.
The chimney fell lazily. There were yells and one scream came from
below. The roof of the Akeley place slid forward a foot--and stopped.
Dust mushroomed up.

Then Phil was racing down the street to a cab parked a quarter of
a block away. He was thinking that, whatever those orthos of Moe
Brimstine's boys were, apparently Dr. Romadka's friends had them too.
He couldn't help sparing a thought for the plight of the group in the
reeling attic. He could almost hear Juno's titanic curses.

Then he was piling into the cab.

"The Tan Jet," he told the driver. "It's a kind of night club."

"Yeah, I know," the latter said in a voice heavy with knowledge, fixing
on Phil the sad, resigned gaze one reserves for those who insist,
against all good advice, on running to their dooms.




                                  IX


Someone singing, "Turn of the Century Blues" in a sultry, melancholy
voice was all that Phil could hear as he walked down the dark ramp
and into the hardly brighter Tan Jet. No live or robot doorman was
on guard, at least no obvious one, and no hostess came hurrying up.
Apparently customers were supposed to know their way around.

There were a lot of them. They sat in small parties with a truculent
quietness that sneered at and challenged the frantic hustle of the
times and the belief that the hustle was leading anywhere. There were
no juke box theaters in the corners, no TV screens visible, and the
booths didn't seem to be equipped with handies. Four live musicians
softly blew and strummed old jazz instruments, while a single amber
spotlight shone on the coffee colored, deceivingly languid songstress,
whose sequined dress went all the way to her wrists and chin.

    I'm sad-crazy, sweetheart, tonight,
    My heart is heavy in the sodium light....

A young man and woman coming from opposite shadowy walls sighted each
other. "Lambie Pie!" he cried. She stood stock-still as he walked up
to her and gave her a slap that rocked her red-ringletted head. Then,
"Loverman!" she cried and slapped him back. Phil could see his eyes
roll ecstatically as the red flamed in his smacked cheek. They linked
arms ritualistically and made off.

    And it don't help, sweetheart, to know
    That the whole world went crazy--
    Moon-mazy and space-hazy--
    About a hundred years ago,
    So--

At that moment Phil spotted the dark sheen of Mitzie Romadka's hair
and cloak at the far end of the room. He started toward her, suddenly
feeling a trifle uneasy.

    Put away my sky-high platform shoes
    And don't bring me any happy news,
    For--
    I've got those turn of the century--
    Turn of the millennium--
    Blues!

As the listeners softly hissed their applause, Phil stopped a few feet
away from Mitzie's table. She was with three young men, but they sat
away from her pointedly, as if she were ostracized.

The three young men, without lifting a finger, showed more of the
mystic toughness that seemed to be the specialty of the joint than
any other people in it. They had the quiet dignity of murderers. When
Mitzie turned to see what they were looking at, she sprang up with
the delighted cry of "Phil!" though there was alarm in her eyes. She
wasn't wearing her evening-mask. She walked over to him and slapped him
stingingly with her left hand.

He whipped up his hand to slap her back, hesitated, and barely managed
a sketchy pat. She glared at him but turned back with a bright smile,
saying gayly, "Fellows, Phil. Phil, meet Carstairs, Llewellyn, and
Buck."

Carstairs had a head that bulged at the top like a pear. He wore thin
bangs, the effect of which was not effeminate. He remarked lazily to
Mitzie, "So this is the clown you blabbed tonight's plans to."

Llewellyn looked very British and was very black. He said, "You also
seem to have told him we'd come here later. Puzzles me why he didn't
bring the police."

Buck was hawk faced and had a Kentucky accent that sounded as if it
had been learned from tapes. "P'lice never tried to pick up anybody in
the Tan Jit, yit," he observed. "Not here, Otie!" This last remark was
addressed to a gaunt, mangy dog which thrust its head from under his
legs and snapped at Phil.

Phil leaned on the table, his hand next to a tall, slim pitcher. He
said to Mitzie, "I'm surprised to find you at a tame place like this. I
expected drugs, knife fights and naked women."

Mitzie whirled his way. "As for drugs, what do you think we're
drinking?" she said furiously. "As for knife fights, wait. And as for
naked women, you devotee of male-female wrestling, well, if Carstairs,
Llewellyn, or Buck should happen to see a girl who took their fancy,
I'd just walk up to her and rip off her clothes!"

She was looking past Phil when she finished. He swiveled his head and
saw Miss Phoebe Filmer with a rather scared looking young man. But
Phoebe, in a half off-the-bosom chartreuse evening gown, looked even
more frightened, her face almost as green as her green-blonde hair.
Perhaps she had heard Mitzie's last remark. Then she recognized Phil,
and astonishment was added to her fright. Phil smiled at her with a
somewhat forced reassuringness. At that moment Phoebe's escort called
her attention to an empty booth back toward the door, and the two of
them hurried toward its haven with the eagerness of skimmers who have
overreached themselves.

Phil felt remarkably bucked up. He snared an empty chair from the
next table and found himself an empty glass and filled it from the
tall, slim pitcher. Llewellyn, who, like the others had a half-inch in
the bottom of his glass, caught Buck's attention and rolled his eyes
significantly toward the ceiling. The white made eerie half-moons under
the irises.

"Just rip 'em off," Mitzie repeated with conviction.

Carstairs said, with a quietly scathing coldness, "Mitz, quit playing
the solicitous little mother to Llewellyn, Buck and me." He carefully
smoothed his bangs, as an ancient judge might have adjusted his wig
before pronouncing sentence. "It's quite clear that you spilled our
plans to this clown, and that he told the police so that they were
waiting for us when we knocked over the first sales-robot."

"Quite," Llewellyn said, while Buck nodded.

"And if I hadn't insisted on putting a new charge in the rocket
assist," Carstairs continued, "we'd have been nabbed."

"It was just a coincidence," Mitzie asserted sharply.

"First time we ever had a coincidence," Carstairs observed.
"Personally, I don't believe there are such things."

Phil took a deep drink. It seemed mild, sweet stuff, compared to the
adulterated whiskey Juno had fed him. That is, it seemed so for the
first two or three seconds. Then he felt the top of his head balloon
outward, pear-wise, like Carstairs'. The dark songstress was singing
some song the refrain of which was,

    Darling, I'm queer for you.
    I'm really strange, quite out of any ordinary range....

Carstairs continued quietly, "Mitz, we let you into the gang, we
initiated you, although we knew you were a psychoanalyst's daughter and
doubtful material--"

Mitzie glared at him. "Initiated me?" she said. "I'll say you did!"

"Be that as it may," Carstairs asserted slowly, "you betrayed the gang
tonight. At the best you acted irresponsibly." His words came slower
still. "Your irresponsibility lost us a wad of dough." He paused for a
long cruel moment. "You're out, Mitz.

"Out," Carstairs repeated.

"Definitely," Llewellyn agreed. "Yeah," Buck said, rubbing Ortie's lean
snoot.

Phil put his elbows on the table. "Gentlemen," he said quietly, "you
say you are out a wad of dough? I am in a position to remedy that."

Carstairs looked at him with mild irritation and raised his open hand.
Phil smiled and advanced his cheek. "I am seeking a jewel beyond
price," he continued. "In order to obtain it, I intend tonight to
burgle the premises of Fun Incorporated. I am willing to let you help
me."

At the mention of Fun Incorporated, Buck turned his head at least half
an inch, while Carstairs almost blinked.

"You have rather big ideas, don't you?" Llewellyn remarked quietly.

"Yeah," Buck agreed with a yawn, "he maybe could have picked an easier
place."

Carstairs asked Mitzie softly, "You did say he was one of your father's
nuts, didn't you?"

Mitzie started to reply, but Phil interposed blandly, "I know a private
way into Fun Incorporated, right through Billig's office. It'll be
simple. You needn't worry about the wasps."

Buck drawled, "What is this jewel beyond price, anyhow."

"Something I wouldn't expect you to appreciate," Phil replied.
"However," he continued, taking a more cautious slug of the mind
swelling drink, "there should be enough in the way of ordinary
valuables lying about to compensate you for your effort. I understand
that Fun Incorporated is rather wealthy. For one thing, all
sales-robots work from there," he finished grandly. "Why not hit them
where they live?"

Otie stretched leanly from under Buck's chair and snapped at Phil's
hand. Phil, stiffened by the drink, didn't move it. The jaws clashed
hardly an inch away. "Why do you call him Otie?" Phil asked.

"'Cause he's a coyote," Buck explained, almost with condescension.
"S'posed to have been bred back for ancestral traits to the Oligocene
type."

Phil found himself wondering whether cats could be bred back to their
Egyptian ancestors and whether those ancestors might have been green.

In the pause, Mitzie's eyes grew bright. She looked at her companions.
"Why don't we take him up on it?" she said lightly but not casually. "I
mean, about Fun Incorporated. It sounds exciting.

"Why don't we?" Mitzie repeated after a moment.

Carstairs, Llewellyn and Buck sat there as coolly and as contemptuous
of any challenge as when Phil had first seen them. Yet there was a
difference.

"Of course, it's risky," Phil cut in. "Moe Brimstine's boys have
orthos."

"What do you know about orthos?" Carstairs demanded hungrily.

Phil shrugged. "They're blue and they sizzle," he said. "I got shot at
with one earlier tonight."

"Why don't we, I'm asking?" Mitzie pressed.

"I asked Juno and Jack Jones to help me," Phil put in. "You know, the
wrestlers. But they decided not to."

Still no one answered Mitzie's question. "Well, I guess that's it," she
said with a triumphant smile, turning away from the table. "Come on,
Phil."

They had taken three steps when Carstairs began to chuckle quietly.
Phil might have kept going, but Mitzie turned back with a carefully
repressed eagerness that Phil resented.

"Don't kill yourselves running," Carstairs said. "Llewellyn and Buck
and I are signing up for this little expedition, providing the clown
can give the right answers to a few questions when we get outside." He
smiled as he got up. "Just one thing, Mitz. This time there better be
no cops."

Mitzie laughed. Phil accepted the situation with a "Glad to have your
help, boys," and started to take Mitzie's arm, but she linked hers with
those of Carstairs and Llewellyn, not sparing Phil another look.

The sequined singer had shifted to a snappier rhythm.

    Slap me silly, honey,
    Beat me till I break.
    Love is very funny,
    Laugh until I ache....

To solace his injured feelings, Phil veered over to Phoebe Filmer's
booth, where the green-blonde was being rather pointedly annoyed by two
bearded young men while her escort looked on agitatedly.

Phil tapped the nearest ruffian on the shoulder. "Lay off, boys," he
commanded, with a meaningful nod toward his own party. Buck at least
looked his way and Otie growled. The bearded ruffians slunk off. Phil
made Phoebe a tiny bow.

"Thank you," she said weakly and astoundedly.

He gestured that it was a mere nothing and walked off.

"Say," she asked, hurrying after him and dragging her escort with her,
"did you ever find that green cat of yours?"

He smiled at her. "No," he said, "but I'm going to."




                                   X


"And how did you plan to get inside when the place is closed for the
night?" Carstairs prodded sardonically.

For answer Phil cocked his eyebrows defiantly and gave the restaurant
door a smart shove. It swung silently inward. He led them in haughtily,
vaguely aware that Llewellyn was examining the lock.

The long room was very dark. It smelled stalely of people and liquor
and seared meat; Phil even thought he could distinguish Juno's burned
rabbit chops. Otie snuffed eagerly and tugged Buck forward by his
leash. Phil steered their course confidently between the counter and
the booths. He was feeling particularly pleased with himself because
Mitzie had found opportunity to ask him for his address on the way over.

"All right, all right," he heard Carstairs whisper behind him to
Llewellyn, "so the lock was burned. Somebody's ahead of us. We'll be
watching out."

Phil pushed open the door to the stairs, and hesitated. Inside it was
now completely black.

Something hissed softly beside him and a luminescent cone puffed out. A
couple of seconds later, the half dozen treads of the stairway glowed
milkily.

Buck chuckled inches from Phil's ear. "Lum'niscint mist," he explained
with professional casualness. "You get going. I'll spray."

Phil started up, the milky surface light keeping two or three treads
ahead of him in blobby advances. The mist got on Otie, so that he
glowed like the Hound of the Baskervilles. Some of it even got on
Phil's trouser bottoms and sockasins.

"We're certainly marked if we have to run away and hide," Phil
commented dubiously as he reached the corridor he and Juno had come
through and then took the unknown way upward.

"Uh-uh," Buck chuckled wisely, "'cause I'm spraying a neutralizer
behind us." He directed at Phil's feet a dark, faintly hissing
cannister and Phil's feet blacked out, along with a blob of surrounding
treads. Looking back, Phil saw that the glow on the stairs vanished
abruptly. He could not see Mitzie, Carstairs, and Llewellyn.

He asked Buck, "How do you manage two cannisters and Otie all at the
same time?"

"Hell, I could aim a squirrel rifle and run a still in addition," Buck
assured him.

Phil became aware of a dim radiance above him, beyond the range of
Buck's mist. Buck hurriedly neutralized all the luminescence, including
that on Otie and Phil. Phil cautiously went up the last ten treads,
the upper radiance increasing all the while, and found himself in a
shadowy, curving corridor. His steps got shorter and shorter, then
stopped.

A couple yards ahead lay three swollen furry shapes, each with a half
dozen slim black things stuck into them, like feathered darts.

He recognized at least two of the dead cats. Although grotesquely
puffed up, their markings told him they were a Siamese and a short hair
he had seen at the Akeleys'.

"Watch it!" he heard Carstairs whisper, but at the same instant Otie
jerked away from Buck and moved swiftly forward, his leash trailing,
to snuff at the nearest swollen shape. The tail of the dart next to
Otie's nose began to revolve with a faint, feathery rustle. Otie became
tensely still, disregarding his master's anxious, "Back, Otie!" The
rustle became a whirr. Otie suddenly snapped sidewise at the dart, but
at the same instant the dart withdrew quickly from the dead cat. Otie's
teeth clashed emptily. The dart hovered a few feet in the air, just
like a huge black wasp. "Don't anybody go closer," Carstairs ordered
hoarsely. Buck grabbed for the end of the leash, but it was flirted
away from his hand when Otie abruptly changed position, watching the
dart with deadly intentness.

The whirr became a loud sinister buzz. There were two quick _zings_ and
the hovering dart trembled like a blown candle flame. Half turning,
Phil saw that Carstairs was shooting at it with some sort of airgun.
The dart began to waltz in little loops. Otie leaped straight up and
snapped at it as a dog might at a bee, but the dart curtsied away.

Buck's "Back, Otie," was desperate. Otie stayed on his feet and
batted at the dart with his paws. There were more futile _zings_ from
Carstairs' airgun. The dart looped back and hovered in front of Otie's
muzzle. As he opened his jaws for a snap, it shot down his throat.

Otie, his eyes and jaws open wide, beat the air with his paws. Then he
dropped to all fours and hurled himself off at top speed. He slammed
against a wall, got up with difficulty, trembled over to Buck, and fell
down and didn't move. It seemed to Phil that the gaunt creature was
taking a deep breath, and then Phil suddenly felt sick, for the coyote
was beginning to swell.

"Don't touch him!" Carstairs shouted, but Buck was keeping his
distance. Carstairs came up beside Buck and leaned prudently forward,
his bangs swinging out from his forehead. "Always did want to see one
of those things in action," he said softly.

"They're what they call singular missiles, aren't they?" Llewellyn
asked fascinatedly, coming up. "Anti-individual, I mean."

Carstairs nodded. "Used them in the last cold war, though hardly any
rumors got out. They were for assassinations. The FBL and the Russkies
could tell tales. They're supposed to be driven by a tiny, ion-emitting
radioactive fan. I wish I had a counter so I could know. And of course,
they home on the radiant heat of flesh and then inject a poison."

Buck muttered, "Otie." The coyote's puffed eyes turned toward him, then
glazed over. Buck jerked up and made a derisive noise. "Always was a
dumb pooch," he said harshly. Mitzie, drawn even with Llewellyn, looked
on coldly.

Phil started ahead, drugs battling nausea inside him, so that the dim
corridor seemed both vivid and unreal.

"Where are you going?" Carstairs demanded.

Phil shrugged. "To find what I came for," he said hazily.

"Well, keep away from the cats," Carstairs called after him softly, but
Phil was already hugging the wall.

"How we know those sing'lar missiles won't heat up and go for us like
they went for Otie?" he heard Buck demand fretfully.

"The others got through, didn't they?" Carstairs said irritably.

"What others?" Phil heard Buck ask.

"The ones who burnt the lock on the door, the ones who threw the cats
ahead of them to draw the missiles," Carstairs told him impatiently.
"Incidentally, if any of the missiles start spinning their tails, you
might by throwing your coat over them."

Beyond the dead cats, Phil came to a silvery mesh barricade with
several jagged cuts in it, three of them making a crude doorway. The
mesh looked fine and strong enough to have kept the wasps on this side.
He stepped over the fallen section of mesh. The cut ends of silvery
wire were rounded and fused, as if by great heat.

Just beyond the mesh lay a chunky man in a gray, company guard uniform.
He had a gun in his hand. He was intact except that the top of his head
had rolled about a foot away. It had been sliced off tidily just above
the nose by something hot. Phil remembered how neatly the blue needle
had sliced the steel beam. He hurried past toward an open arch just
ahead, and jerked back from a large gray snake coiled there. Then he
saw that the snake was a robot doorman like Old Rubberarm, and looking
higher he saw that it had been sliced off close to the wall.

Mitzie and the rest came through the mesh. Carstairs kneeled eagerly by
the dead man and examined the gun he was clasping, but a moment later
got up with a shrug.

"Not an ortho, eh?" Buck inquired. "Usin' those sing'lar missiles,
you'd think they'd be up to date in other things."

"No, just an ordinary gas gun," Carstairs told him. "But we can be
pretty sure his head wasn't taken off by a red hot buzz saw. The others
must have orthos." He turned on Phil and grabbed him by the lapels of
his jacket. "Look here, clown," he said quietly, "who are those others?
You must have known someone was going to break in here tonight. You
were counting on that door being open."

"We are a bit like jackals, aren't we?" Phil remarked dreamily.

Carstairs twisted his jacket. "Who were they?"

Phil didn't react, but he did jerk around suddenly when he heard Moe
Brimstine say metallically, "Whatcha want, Mack?"

Llewellyn had pulled out the stub of gray robot arm sticking from the
wall.

"Quit that," Carstairs ordered curtly, letting go of Phil.

"Take it easy, Carstie old boy," Llewellyn said with a smiling flash of
white teeth. "Here's a bit of an odd thing. See where whatever sliced
this robot arm cut into the wall beyond? Well, follow back from the cut
in a straight line through the slice in the robot arm."

Like the others, Phil followed Llewellyn's directions and saw that the
straight line ended in a deep cut in the floor a half dozen feet behind
them.

"I don't git it," Buck said. "You mean somebody shot some kind of beam
from the next floor under us?"

Llewellyn said, "Hardly. The evidence points to a gun that shoots
in opposite directions at the same time. I fancy that if we'd have
looked behind us at the head of the stairs, we'd have seen some cuts
mirror-imaging those in the mesh."

He thinned his eyes at Carstairs. "I'm beginning to think orthos are
rather strange weapons, Carstie old boy." He glanced at Phil. "You said
they're blue and sizzle, Mr. Gish. Do they also backfire?"

"Say, look at this here communicator," Buck interrupted. He had been
poking around the side of the corridor behind the guard. "One button's
got a new-looking gadget rigged up to it that's pushed it twice now
while I've been watching."

"Don't touch it," Carstairs said. "It's probably a button Headless here
is supposed to thumb every so often to show he's on guard. Whoever
broke in ahead of us knows their business. Once more, clown, who were
they?"

"Yeah, talk," Buck said, coming up beside Carstairs. "I figure you're
responsible for my Otie gettin' killed."

"Indeed, do," Llewellyn said, at the same moment letting go of the stub
arm which contracted toward the wall until it was like a wrinkled scar,
while at the same time, as though internal injuries were now showing
up in the thing, a broken clockworks version of Moe Brimstine's voice
wheezed, "That's right, Mack. Go away and stay away."

In the moment while that eerie and ominous admonition held everyone
else stock-still, Phil walked with drugged aplomb past Llewellyn and
through the arch.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I imagine you would like to inspect the treasure
house."

He faced a room that was not extremely high ceilinged, but so wide
and long that the only clearly visible wall was the one against which
they were standing. The room was not brightly lit, yet it seemed so
because of the brightness of the two sorts of ranked objects on which
the light fell. To the left were row on endless row of sales-robots,
shiny high turtle shapes with a smaller dome set on the main one, the
same efficient metal hucksters that daily and eveningly roamed the
streets, guiding themselves and spotting customers by hypersonic radar
and visual scanner. Only now their fascinating windows for displaying
samples were closed, their money collecting and commodity bestowing
arms were neatly folded, the restless wheels under their metal skirts
were still, and their dulcet voices rich with a restrained sex appeal
suitable to robots (male voices for females, female for males,
sprightly and wise-cracking for children) were likewise silent.

To the right, marshaled with equal precision, were a host of
dress-display robots, arrayed in everything from high collared
sable evening cloaks to bathing jewelry. Their hair gleamed with
a hundred tints, their suede-rubber skins glowed with a creamy
seductiveness, they held themselves with the poise of princesses, but
like the sales-robots they were still. No slinky parading, no cute
individualized gestures, no mysterious or haughty smiles, no soft lips
opening to recite the qualities and prices of the garments they were
modeling. They all stared straight ahead like Egyptian mummies not yet
wrapped and indeed one, appropriately crowned and clad in a filmy
sheath, was a precise copy of Nefertiti.

It occurred to Phil that the ranked sales-robots and dress-display
robots really were a military display, that he was looking at the armed
might--the money army and the glamor army--of Fun Incorporated.

Llewellyn was the first to break the silence. He darted to the nearest
sales-robot, made some practiced manipulations, and then there was a
clinking and he was waving a green and silver handful and his teeth and
the whites of his eyes shone gleefully in his black face.

"They're still carrying the day's cash!" he called softly.

Buck looked from the money army to the glamor army with greedy
indecision. When Carstairs snorted contemptuously, he trotted over to
help Llewellyn, who was methodically working his way down the first row
of sales-robots.

Despite his show of greater self control, it was obvious that
Carstairs' hands were itching too. He looked at Phil uncertainly. Then,
"Wake up, Mitz," he commanded sharply. She obediently turned toward him
an oddly incurious face. "Mitz," he went on, "I want you to guard the
clown. If he tries to get away or goes for any buttons, use your shiv
on him." She nodded.

"Hey," Buck called in an excited stage whisper, "I think we're coming
to some that are gambling robots."

But Carstairs didn't go at once, although he was noiselessly snapping
his fingers in an excess of impatience. He studied Mitzie fiercely.
"You get it, Mitz? I don't want any slip-ups. You made one already
today. Not that I believe for a minute you're soft on the clown, but
you've acted a bit silly around him. There mustn't be any more of that.
Understand?"

This time her nod, though mute as the first, seemed to satisfy him and
he rushed off to join Llewellyn and Buck.

At the same instant Phil quietly turned around and walked through an
archway just beside the one through which they had entered the big
room. He hadn't taken ten steps down the curving corridor before Mitzie
had whirled past him and poised herself squarely in his path.

"Get back," she whispered. The hand directing the ten-inch knife at
Phil's chest didn't waver enough to make the frosty highlights on it
flicker.

Phil smiled at her. "Mitzie," he said gently, "your friends have found
what they came for, but I haven't. You're going to let me go past."

She spat her denial and advanced the knife so that it touched his shirt.

Phil didn't budge. "You're going to let me go past," he repeated
softly, "because you're not sure any more that being cruel and smart,
and if need be deadly, is the right way to face the world. You're
not sure any more that the approval of your gang is the only thing
that matters. Incidentally, it's a pretty grudging approval, Mitzie,
something you've had to sit up and do tricks for like that other dumb
pooch, and your comradeship with them isn't at all the romantic, until
death, one for all and all for one thing you pretend it is. But I
haven't the time to tell you any more about that now, because I've got
my business and I've got to get on with it."

"Get back," she snarled. But Phil, although the knife now pricked his
chest, knew it was no longer a command but a plea.

"I'm going past now, Mitzie," Phil murmured and walked ahead into the
knife. For about two feet it drew back at exactly the same speed with
which he walked into it, then it was whipped suddenly to one side, and
as he passed Mitzie he caught the choked off beginning of a sob.

Neither of them made another sound. He looked back once and saw her
profile in the light from the big room, and the slack line of her
shoulder and the arm holding the knife. Often faces look unexpectedly
weak in profile, but Phil felt he'd never seen one that also looked so
tragically lost.

Its image haunted him as the curving corridor grew darker and then
lighter again and then made a very sharp turn and unexpectedly emerged
into a long, richly furnished room. He blundered a step forward before
he saw there were three people at the far end and that one of them
was Moe Brimstine. They weren't looking his way and he could have
ducked back out of sight easily enough, but he hurried it too much and
brushed against a slim pillar topped by a small aquarium in which tiny
pink, green and violet octopuses clung and swam. The pillar teetered
dangerously. Stumbling as he grabbed to steady it, he fell out into the
room with it and thudded into the foam flooring, as the water and the
candy colored octopuses gushed all over.




                                  XI


After a couple of seconds Phil decided regretfully that keeping himself
scrunched against the yielding floor with both eyes tightly closed was
not going to help. He opened them cautiously, blinked at the flooring,
and tried to nerve himself to look up. Meanwhile:

"Brimstine, what's keeping that FBL man?"

"Now don't worry, Mr. Billig. He'll be here any minute."

"I'm beginning to doubt it. What if they're lying about sending a man,
and actually they're planning to raid us, counting on picking up the
green cat when they do?"

"The government wouldn't dare do that, Mr. Billig. They need the green
cat, or they think they do."

"Then why isn't that FBL man here?"

"I tell you not to worry, Mr. Billig. Relax. Let Dora stroke your
forehead."

"Pfui!"

Considerably puzzled, Phil lifted his chin off the flooring and
cautiously swiveled his head. The Mr. Billig he'd heard mentioned
with so much awe turned out to be a very gaunt dark man who looked
at first glance thirty, at second seventy, and at third a mystery to
which youth-prolonging hormones might provide a clue. He was dressed in
severely cut black sports togs. Moe Brimstine bulked a lot bigger, but
only physically--his blunt manner had altered to that of a servant with
clownish privileges. Even his black glasses now looked a trifle comic.

The other member of the trio was a breathtakingly beautiful violet
blonde whose dress consisted of an endless spiral of fine silver wire
over a white satin sheath. She was sitting on a table, watching the
others with a cold smile. Mr. Billig was pacing steadily as if engaged
in some kind of road-work, while Moe Brimstine was hovering behind him
like an anxious trainer.

But to Phil the one overwhelming fact was that they weren't paying any
attention to him at all. Apparently his crashing with the aquarium
into the room hadn't been of enough importance to rate a glance--or if
there had been a glance, it had been a mighty short one. Besides being
utterly mystified and quite frightened, Phil felt a bit piqued.

"I don't think you should take that attitude toward Dora, Mr. Billig,"
Moe Brimstine was saying. "She's a very clever girl; just how clever
even you might enjoy finding out. Isn't that right, Dora?"

"I am infinitely skilled in giving pleasure to men, women and
children," Dora said with a yawn. "Among other things I have memorized
all the important pornographic books written since the dawn of history."

"Pfui and trash! Brimstine, you still don't seem to realize just how
serious this is. I guess I should tell you that, according to my latest
information, the government is all set to indict not only three of
our governors and a half hundred of our mayors, but also four of our
national senators and a dozen of our representatives."

This news did seem to take Moe Brimstine aback. "But that's the whole
lot," he said softly.

"Not quite, but almost," Billig snapped.

"It would mean the absolute finish of Fun Incorporated."

"And what have I been saying to you?" Billig demanded.

Phil sat up a bit morosely and settled his chin on the back of his
right hand to watch them. This maneuver attracted no attention
whatsoever. He gave up trying to figure it out.

Moe Brimstine had recovered his spirits with a happy shrug. "Anyhow,
you've got the green cat, so you're safe."

"Have I got it?" Billig demanded, stopping his pacing. "How well have
you got that cat locked up, Brimstine?"

"Look, Mr. Billig, I got it in a copper cage where nobody can get at it
and it can't get at nobody, even electronically. Besides, it's still
stunned. You can't ask for more than that, can you?"

"Maybe not," Billig allowed grudgingly. "But then I come back to my
other point: How can we be sure the government needs the cat so badly
they'll be willing to quash all those indictments in exchange for it?"

"Now, don't worry about that, Mr. Billig. That's one thing we can be
sure of. We've known for at least a month that finding that cat has
been the absolute top priority, top secret job of the FBL, the FBI and
the special secret service."

"But why should it be?" Billig was pacing again. "Just a funny colored
animal. It doesn't make sense."

"Look, Mr. Billig, we've been all through this before. They're
absolutely convinced that cat is terribly dangerous. They think it can
control minds and change personalities, and they seem to think they
have cases to prove it, including four top officials who've managed to
skip the country, apparently headed for Russia. They've taken all sorts
of secret steps, not only to find the cat, but to guard the president
and all important officials from any possible contact with it. As far
as our information goes, the first government theory was that the cat
came from Russia, that the Lysenko view of genetics was true and that
the Russkies were able to breed intelligent animals with extrasensory
powers, for use as spies and saboteurs and possibly to replace a large
part of the world's population. But now the government seems to believe
that the cat is a mutant or monster of some sort and that it's in a
position to conquer America--the whole world even--by controlling
feelings and thoughts."

Phil sat up indignantly. He wanted to say, "Why, Lucky isn't like that
at all." In his interest in the conversation, he had almost forgotten
his incredible situation.

"I know, I know," Billig was saying, "but what do you think about it,
Brimstine?"

Brimstine shrugged. "I think they're nuts," he said happily. "The cat
didn't seem anything peculiar to me, though I'm taking no chances. I
think it's all a grade-A delusion, a top secret panic."

"You think they're nuts and you expect me not to worry," Billig
groaned. "Where's that FBL man?"

"On his way," Brimstine assured him. "Everything's going to turn out
all right."

"That's what you told me when the president first started to take
action against Fun," Billig flared. "You said it was just a bluff, a
sop to the midwestern vote. You told me Barnes was a drunken farmer who
could be got at twenty ways. You told me it would all blow over, like
the other six times. Well, it didn't. Something happened that changed
things."

"I know," Brimstine admitted, seeming for once at a loss for easy words.

"Do you know yet what happened?" Billig pressed.

Brimstine shrugged. "I think Barnes is nuts."

"That's your explanation for everything!" Billig roared softly. "If
something happens this time, do you suppose I'll be happy because you
tell me the coppers arresting me are nuts? Where _is_ the FBL man?"

"You really should try and relax, I tell you, Mr. Billig," Moe
Brimstine suggested, recovering himself. "Distract yourself somehow.
Like with Dora here." And ignoring Billig's third, "Pfui," Brimstine
looked at her critically. "Fix your mouth, dear," he said.

With a graceful obedience that nevertheless managed to be contemptuous
the violet blonde beauty slid from the table and came straight toward
Phil, who decided that now at last they'd have to stop pretending he
wasn't there.

"Get that slinky walk, Mr. Billig," Moe Brimstine was urging. "What a
gorgeous babe, eh?"

She tossed her head, stopped six feet short of Phil, took out a
lipstick, looked straight ahead of her, and very carefully made up her
lips. At the same time something cold and sucking closed on the fingers
of Phil's left hand. He instinctively flipped it, and a tiny pink
octopus sailed through the air toward the girl and flattened itself
against something in the air about two feet short of her.

Phil watched it clinging there and felt his mind swell to bursting, as
if he'd had another shot of Tan Jet lemonade. Then he got up, walked
cautiously forward, and felt.

There was an invisible flat surface, extending as far as he could
reach, between himself and the other half of the room. He realized he
was on the viewing side of a one-way mirror bisecting the room. Dora,
standing so close he could otherwise have touched her, turned, and as
she did so, her skirt brushed the other side of the surface. He saw it
was at least two inches from the side to which the octopus still clung.
A mirror would hardly be that thick. It must consist of two panes
probably with the space between them evacuated. For as he realized with
a new surprise, he must not be hearing their voices directly, but a
miked and transmitted version of them, which in turn must be binaural,
so that they would be heard in depth and the proper direction.

Confirming this, he noted that the voices did not localize quite
as perfectly as they had seemed to before he had caught on to the
illusion. Also, the depth effect was a bit too rich, as if the mikes
were more than ears-distance apart.

He also saw that all sources of illumination were beyond the panel.

But now that he knew they were not ignoring him, but simply unaware of
his presence, he felt very much the burglar and very uneasy. He looked
nervously back along the corridor he'd traveled and ahead along its
darker and straighter continuation that, also this side of the panel,
led out of the room. He asked himself why Billig should have the setup
arranged and the sound turned on so that he and Brimstine and Dora
could be spied on. It didn't make sense. Although he was protected,
Phil felt a shiver legging it up his spine.

He might have left the spy chamber but at that moment Moe Brimstine put
down a phone and said excitedly, "He's coming!" whereupon Billig at
once stopped pacing and became as cool and unworried as dark tranquil
water. He pointedly did not look at the archway beyond him, though
Brimstine did.

A man came through the archway and stopped. He held his spine and the
expression of his face very straight. His hair was touched with gray
and his face showed years of worry--but not Billig's kind.

Billig looked at him with a questioning smile that barely stopped
short of a smirk. He waited a moment and said softly, "Under the
circumstances, I suppose you do not care to use your name, but--"

"It's Dave Greeley," the other said bluntly.

"--but I do suppose that you come from the Federal Bureau of Loyalty
and that you are fully empowered to deal for the services and the
president?"

The other nodded once.

"Mr. Greeley, Mr. Brimstine," Billig said with a gracious wave of
his arm that reminded Phil of the swaying of a snake. "Mr. Greeley,
Dora ... er, Dora Pannes."

The government man barely acknowledged the introductions.

"Mr. Billig," he said, "you tell us you have the green cat. If you
have, we'll buy it."

"And what will you pay?" Billig murmured.

"The Moreland-McCartney letters, proving the graft those senators
received from Fun Incorporated, plus all related recording and
microwave taps. Similar material in sixty-odd other cases, which I
hardly need enumerate to you in detail."

"Not enough," Billig said softly.

Greeley hesitated. "Of course, I could appeal to you," he said in a
different voice; "simply as Americans, as citizens of this hemisphere
facing a deadly danger--"

"Please, Mr. Greeley," Billig said with a chuckle.

Greeley shut his lips tight. When he opened them, his earlier voice
spoke.

"Letters of confidence on all the indicted officials, dated today and
signed and thumbprinted by the president and all the service heads,
with confirming vocal recordings and pictures of the recordings being
made. Naturally our experts will have to examine the cat before the
exchange is made. They can be here in twenty minutes."

"That is better," Billig murmured, "quite a bit better. But not enough."

"What else do you want?" Greeley demanded angrily, but it seemed to
Phil that he knew.

"The witnesses, delivered into our hands," Billig said. "O'Malley,
Fattori, Madelin Luszcak, and the thirty-odd--no, I'll be
precise--thirty-four others."

"That's out," Greeley said sharply. "I can't offer to pay you in human
lives."

"Who mentioned anything like that?" Billig asked mildly. "I didn't,
did I, Moe? It's just that we'd feel safer with the witnesses in our
protective custody rather than yours."

"You know what you'd do to them," Greeley said.

Billig shrugged. "You wouldn't have to think about it. In any case,
there are ways to forget." And he glanced at Dora, who flashed the FBL
man a lazy, provocative smile.

Greeley flushed. For a few seconds he seemed to be concentrating on
his breathing. "Look here, Billig," he said finally, "don't get the
idea that either I or the government feels anything but loathing and
detestation for you. Fun Incorporated has corrupted a third of a
nation, and we have your headquarters here and in twenty cities so well
cordoned a wasp couldn't get out. The sole reason we haven't smashed
you is that you tell us you've captured something that is a little
more dangerous to America than even your rotten organization. But our
patience is wearing thin. We suspect a bluff, in spite of those green
hairs you sent us. Make a deal while you can."

"The chemical and physical analysis of the hair must have shown your
experts something very interesting," Billig murmured with a reflective
smile. "Like you say, Mr. Greeley, we have something you can't do
without. Something worth roughly--shall we say a third of a nation? It
seems to me that we are letting you off very cheaply. Consider what the
Russkies might be willing to pay. So I'm afraid the witnesses are an
essential part of the exchange. In fact, I'm certain."

"I'm warning you," Greeley flared, "that I'm in full charge of Project
Kitty under Emmet and that I've advised Emmet and the president to
break off the deal and raid if you insist on that condition."

"You've advised," Billig replied, "and you're under Emmet. I'm only
interested in what Barnes and Emmet have advised."

Greeley looked as if he wished he were deaf and dumb. His hands
clenched and slowly unclenched. He set himself to speak.

Just then a phone-light blinked. Moe Brimstine snatched it up,
obviously prepared to roar out a rebuke and slam it down. Instead he
listened silently, and kept on listening. Greeley watched him intently.

At that moment, Phil heard the soft kiss of a door slitting open and
faint footsteps drabber in quality than the binaural richness of the
stuff he'd been listening to. He looked down the straight dark corridor
on his side of the panel. Some forty feet down it, where it ended in
a T, light now flooded across. Then Phil saw Dr. Romadka cross the
corridor at that point. The analyst was still carrying his black bag.
In the other hand was a gun. He disappeared from sight.

"You better take this, Mr. Billig."

Phil switched around just in time to see Billig grab the phone from
Brimstine with a glare. "Three of them?" Billig's words were staccato.
"And a fourth man and a girl, they said? And what did they tell you the
fourth man wanted? I don't care if it sounds silly! _What?_"

Holding the phone, Billig spared Greeley a glance. "We're going to have
to delay making final arrangements for a few minutes," he said curtly.
"Dora will entertain you."

"You can't delay," Greeley assured him with a sudden note of triumph.
"The raid starts in ten minutes unless I return. Besides, there's only
one thing important enough to make you interrupt this interview. You've
lost the green cat, or you're afraid you have."

"I know Emmet would allow more time than that, even if he didn't
tell you," Billig snapped back at him. "Put Benson in charge of him,
Brimstine. Then come back."

"Let me contact Emmet," Greeley said quickly. "We'll cooperate with
you fully in finding the cat. You have my word the indictments will be
quashed."

"Word! Take him out," Billig said sharply.

Greeley, lifting his elbow contemptuously away from Brimstine's hand,
started with him out of the room. Dora accompanied them. Greeley
pointedly edged away from her.

"Don't be frightened, lambie," the violet blonde told him, "I'm just
bound for the little girl's room."

Billig lifted the phone. But before he'd quite got it to his ear and
mouth, the skin around his eyes contracted with sudden suspicion and he
gazed toward Phil, or rather toward a point near Phil, so sharply that
the latter would have sprinted off, except he could not decide for a
second which way.

Then the spread two first fingers of Billig's right hand struck like a
serpent's fangs at two buttons.

Lights flared around Phil, everything was suddenly very still, and Phil
saw himself in a bright mirror that hid Billig and halved the length of
the room. His reflection, although fully clothed, had the expression
of a man caught naked in public. He hesitated for another desperate
second, frozen by the thought that the mirror was one great eye, then
ran down the straight corridor. He came to the T and whisked around
the corner in the direction Romadka had gone, until he heard footsteps
ahead and pounding toward him. He darted back the way Romadka had come
and found himself in a brightly lit room chiefly occupied by a heavy
copper cage with less than an inch between the bars.

But one corner of the cage had been neatly sliced off and rested on
the floor beside it like a little three-sided orange tent. Phil looked
around for a way out and saw nothing but bright white wall marred only
by a deep cut in the same plane as the slice through the cage. His
circling look ended at the door through which he'd come. Mr. Billig
and Moe Brimstine were standing in it. Brimstine held a stun-gun,
Mr. Billig a larger weapon which, while pointing it at Phil, he held
carefully out from his side.

"All right," Billig said, "what have you done with the green cat?"




                                  XII


It couldn't have been three minutes since Phil's capture, yet it
seemed that he had been listening to Mr. Billig for years. He was
sitting apprehensively on a stool in a long low room to which he had
been conducted by two men in sober sports togs--obviously a cut above
company guards--whom Mr. Billig addressed as Harris and Hayes. Along
one of the long sides of the room were windows and a doorway leading
onto a balcony of some sort, beyond which yawned perplexing darkness.
Harris and Hayes stood behind Phil while Billig paced in front of him.

Just now the voice that was like a tape played at triple speed, but
not so high-pitched, was saying, "Have you ever pictured $10,000,000
concretely? Think of it this way: a yacht on the Amazon, bubble-dome
cabin, your private copter, a blonde, a brunette, and a red-head,
yourself absolute monarch of a very interesting microcosm. Doesn't it
appeal to you?"

"But I didn't take the green cat," Phil replied quickly--Billig's speed
was catching. "I don't know where it is."

"What do you want then?" Billig demanded. "Or like most people, are you
afraid to say? Tell me, I've heard everything."

Phil opened his mouth, thought of Lucky, and said nothing.

"Hit him, Harris," Billig ordered, "and don't be all day about it!"

Pain bounced like a steel ball back and forth inside Phil's skull at
Harris' dispassionate swipes. At the last one Phil felt his head go
numb and his thoughts glassy. Harris' bank cashier face swam out of
sight, to be replaced by Billig's smooth mask with its lurking host of
wrinkles.

Billig produced the gun he'd been carrying when Phil was caught. He
informed Phil, "I propose to cut your limbs off, one by one. The beam
burns, which keeps you from bleeding too fast."

All Phil's glazed mind could think was how ludicrous the word "limb"
was. He wondered if Billig considered him a tree. Billig's head
persisted in circling Phil like a small planet, though that may only
have been the room swimming. Suddenly Phil stuck out an arm.

"All right," he informed Billig, "begin with this. Don't hurt the
leaves."

Billig lowered the gun. "You hit him too hard," he told Harris, "or
else he likes it. There are other kinds of pain. Where's Brimstine? I
told him he had only two minutes to find Jack. Hayes, frisk this man."

Slim fingers rippled through Phil's pockets and tossed Billig
commonplace items. When the hand went for his right hand pocket, Phil
had a belated memory and made a move to prevent it, but Harris grabbed
his arms from behind.

Hayes carefully handed Billig the figurine of Mitzie Romadka in black,
off-the-bosom frock.

Billig rattled softly to Hayes, "I'd swear this is Mary
what's-her-name's work--the girl who used to do strip-tease dolls for
us. She always had a touch and now it's got better." He fingered the
doll delicately, studying the reactions in Phil's face. "Do you want
her?" he asked suddenly. "Would it pain you to see her hurt?" He made
as if to wring the doll's head off, then quickly set it on a table
beside him and threw up his hands. "Where _is_ Brimstine!"

"Here," the latter announced, hulking into the room like a bear in a
great hurry. "I've located Jack. And we've caught the girl the three
hep-jerks blabbed about. She lined herself up with the dress-display
robots and might have passed herself off as one, but she sneezed."

Mitzie was marched into the room, her hands twisted behind her by Dora,
whose face wore a disdainful smile that now seemed spiced with cruelty.
The analyst's daughter had lost her evening cape and her long dark hair
hung half over one eye. She held her chin up, as one who has struggled,
found it no use, yet not really submitted. She saw Phil and looked away
from him proudly, as if her being caught had wiped out the problem into
which he had plunged her.

"Ah, the original," Billig observed, looking up from the figurine,
which he deftly pocketed. "Darling," he said, walking toward Mitzie,
"would you care to be featured in coast-to-coast living ads, or sit
for a line of ultra deluxe dress-display robots; would you like to be
a handie star, ambassadress to Brazil, or become my girl Friday and be
in on everything interesting that goes on in the world; would you take
$10,000,000? Just tell us what you've done with the green cat."

Mitzie answered the five-second barrage with a shrug of her upper
lip. "Darling, I'm serious," Billig assured her. "This is a lifetime
opportunity and you're a very nice girl." And he made as if to caress
her shoulder affectionately, but instead whipped around to catch Phil's
reaction.

Jack Jones ran into the room and whisked to a stop. He glanced at Phil
as if he didn't know him and then saluted Billig sardonically.

"What are you standing around for?" Billig demanded. "Get to work.
Hayes, I want those three hep-jerks in here."

Phil tried to squirm away from Harris' seemingly casual grip. And then
Jack's fingers were digging at nerves and pain was not a steel ball but
a fiery plant's red hot roots and million rootlets finding an instant
way through every crevice between the cells of his body. He heard
himself squealing, "Romadka! Romadka!" The pain lessened and he babbled
swiftly, "Dr. Romadka stole the cat. I saw him coming out of the room
where the cage is, carrying his black bag. The cat must have been
inside."

"Who's this Romadka?" Billig whipped at him.

"An analyst," Phil gasped weakly. He nodded at Jack Jones. "He can tell
you about him."

"I never heard of the man," Jack asserted instantly.

"You did," Phil mumbled desperately. "You saw how he was after me
tonight. You must have guessed he was after the green cat."

Jack shook his head curtly. "He's making it up," he assured Billig.

Across the room Brimstine put down a phone and called to Billig,
"Benson says Greeley's acting cool as they come, still confident the
raid will start when he said."

"Well, don't freeze!" Billig rapped exasperatedly at Jack. "Get back to
work on him."

As the small terrible hands approached, Phil looked imploringly at
Mitzie.

"Dr. Anton Romadka is my father," she said coldly, "reputed to be a
great psychoanalyst. This hysteric you're wasting time on is one of his
patients."

"Darling, why didn't you say so before?" Billig asked her joyfully.
"Dora, let go of her wrists at once!" The violet blonde complied with a
cynical hop of her slim eyebrows.

"Darling, it escaped my mind she was still doing that, I'm sorry,"
Billig assured Mitzie as he glided towards her, his feet moving
almost as glibly as his tongue. "Darling, it's very clear to me now:
this hysteric, as you accurately describe him, stole the cat on your
father's orders and handed it to your father, whom I can see you don't
like and who probably forced you to come along. Now just tell us where
your father is, or where you think he is, darling, and you'll have, not
one, but all of those things I mentioned to you a half-minute back."

"My father hasn't skill enough to burgle a banana-vending robot,"
Mitzie snapped at him. "You're as stupid and conceited and unbalanced
as all men, only faster. You think because something clever has been
done, a man must have done it. My father's a rotten analyst, but you
could use a few sessions with him."

"Darling, we're not going to get anywhere if you talk that way," Billig
assured her laughingly. "Realize it, darling, you're among friends and
well-wishers." And he took her arm with a paternal amiability.

Mitzie's right hand was a blurred arc and Billig sashayed back with
four bright red lines on his left cheek.

"Grab her, Dora!" Billig ordered. The violet blonde willingly wrapped
her arms around Mitzie's waist and elbows. Mitzie avoided noticing
it. Meanwhile, Billig was rapid firing, "I assumed she was disarmed,
Brimstine. Get those claws off her." Brimstine grabbed Mitzie's right
hand around the knuckles with one of his big paws and began to jerk off
the needle-fanged thimbles. Billig waved off Harris, who had let go
Phil to offer to minister to his boss's dripping cheek.

Billig paced back toward Mitzie. "Darling," he said, and for once the
words came slow, "you're really wonderful, you're just the sort of
charming vixen the sadisto-hackers dream up to torture the hero. But
tonight I'm afraid you're going to have to reverse roles."

Phil's mysterious inward tormentor who had made him go up against
Moe Brimstine at the Akeleys', now got to work again and despite the
weakness of his pain-threaded muscles, forced him to start a staggering
rush at Billig, meanwhile calling out, "Don't you touch her!"

Naturally Jack tripped him, caught him by the collar almost before he'd
painfully smashed into the flooring, and slammed him back onto the
stool.

At that moment, Hayes and four or five other men, the latter in the
company guard costume of the half-headless man, marched a banged up
Carstairs, Llewellyn and Buck into the far end of the room. Carstairs,
who now had blood as well as hair trailing down his forehead, looked
steadily at Mitzie.

"Thank you for this, Mitz," he said rather quietly.

Llewellyn and Buck each nodded his head.

"You take it for granted I skunked on you?" Mitzie asked. None of the
three acted as if they'd heard the question.

Phil, watching Billig, noted a very slight shiver, smile, and widening
of the eyes, although the boss man of Fun Incorporated wasn't looking
at anything in particular.

"Take those boys down to the company garage," Billig called to Hayes,
keeping his slashed cheek turned away. "I'll phone you orders about
them in fifteen seconds." Then, as Hayes and the guards jumped to obey,
Billig said to Mitzie in a voice just loud enough to reach Carstairs,
"Thanks again, darling. That was a nice job."

Carstairs had time to give her one last deadly look before he was
hurried out with the others.

"Come on, everybody," Billig said gayly, "we're going to have a little
show. Darling, would you like to take my arm? I've quite forgotten
that love tap. If you promise to be a good girl, I'll tell Dora to
let go of you." Mitzie made no reply but Dora unwrapped her arms with
lazy reluctance. "Come on, darling," Billig entreated, starting for
the balcony. Mitzie didn't look at him, but she walked at his side. He
didn't try to touch her. They moved fast. Billig looked back over his
shoulder.

"Hurry up, everybody," he ordered exasperatedly. "Stop acting
slow-motion!"

Brimstine, Dora and Harris quickly fell in behind them. Jack brought up
the rear with Phil.

"I had to do that," Jack whispered in Phil's ear. "I couldn't fake it
and trust you to fake reactions well enough to fool Billig. But for
God's sake, don't spill anything more about Romadka. I know you're
Juno's lover. Well, Romadka made me bring him here. His friends are at
the house. They'll kill Mary and Sacheverell--Juno and Cookie, too--if
he gets caught."

As Phil was trying to formulate some sort of answer to this, they
followed the others onto the balcony. Its railing was split by a
gateway, from which a metal stairway projected down and out into the
darkness, its first dozen treads glimmering faintly.

Without warning Mitzie left Billig and darted down the stairs, taking
them three at a time. Harris lunged after her, but Billig stopped him
with a gesture. "She's doing what I want," he explained softly, "and
five times faster than if you dragged her. Won't you ever understand
it's speed I need?"

Brimstine was closely watching Mitzie, who was now no more than a
glimmering moth flitting through a duller darkness. "She can't see the
steps any more," he said with professional admiration. "That girl's
good."

Billig shrugged and stepped to a control panel in the railing. He
picked up a phone, then paused thoughtfully as if he were making sure
it was a full fifteen seconds since he had spoken to Hayes and not a
mere twelve or thirteen.

"Hayes?" Billig said, and then whispered rapidly. He paused for a
moment, writhing his eyebrows, as though Hayes were being unbelievably
slow in catching on. "Of course, of course!"

Then Billig touched a button and blinding light transformed the
darkness into a huge, empty, gray garage, its floor some thirty feet
below the balcony. There were all sorts of lines and signs indicating
which way cars should move and park, only there weren't any cars. There
were also a dozen open gateways in the gray walls, eight of them marked
"Exit." The silvery stairs down which Mitzie had flown touched the
center point of the garage's vast floor. A few paces away from that,
Mitzie stood tiny and stock-still, as if blinded by the light.

Somewhere, far off, an electric motor was revving up.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Billig said to Dora, Brimstine, Harris, and
Jack, but mostly to Phil, "this is the place where people park their
cars while they watch the wrestling bouts. But now the wrestling's
over and the cars are gone." He delicately touched his cheek, where the
four furrows had almost stopped bleeding. "So now we can have the place
for our little show. Mr. Gish, I must have the green cat. I believe you
value that girl's beauty and life--"

But Phil, whose arms were gripped hard by Jack from behind, hardly
heard him he was watching Mitzie so intently. She seemed to come out
of her daze suddenly, at any rate she darted towards the nearest open
gateway. Dark, close bars shot down and blocked it, as they did all the
other gateways Phil could see. He looked at Billig and saw his dark
fingers lifting from buttons. He looked back at Mitzie and saw her
hesitate and then run back toward the silvery stairs. Billig touched
another button and the stairs retracted, telescoping upward. Mitzie
stood on the gray floor all alone.

The revving of the unseen motor grew louder. Billig leaned over the
guard wall and looked thoughtfully at Mitzie, as if he were a cleverer
Caligula, a more practical Nero. Then he turned back, and took the
figurine of Mitzie out of his pocket, and spoke to Phil.

"Mr. Gish," he said, "I seriously want to know where the green cat
is, or where your Dr. Romadka has taken it. Otherwise, how would you
like this to happen to her down there?" And he jerked off a leg of the
figurine. Phil could see the twin ragged cones of wax where the leg had
parted. "Or this?" Billig jerked off an arm. "Or this, or this?"

At that moment an open topped black jeep came accelerating out from
under the balcony. Phil saw there were three people in it, though for a
moment he couldn't tell who. But Mitzie darted toward the car, calling
out excitedly, "Carstairs!" The car came on. "You're wonderful!" Mitzie
called. But then suddenly the car came forward faster and straight
toward her, and she had to dive out of the way to keep from being hit.

The car started to swing around in a great loop. Mitzie picked herself
up from the harsh floor.

"Or _this_!" Billig hissed at Phil, and he ripped the figurine apart at
the waist, while one thumb made a smashed flatness of the tiny breasts.
"Now please tell me where's this Dr. Romadka."

"I don't know!" Phil yelled, struggling to get away from Jack, who
maddeningly whispered in his ear, "That's right, don't spill a word."

"I'll remind you," Billig continued swiftly, taking something else from
under his coat, "that it's much worse for her--or for anyone--to be
hurt by people she idolizes than by people she hates. So tell me about
the green cat. Look here, this is an ortho. I can cut down that car any
moment you tell me."

But Phil, like all the others, was watching Mitzie. Having picked
herself up, she didn't move. She simply stayed there, facing the
oncoming car. When it was so close that for an instant Phil saw
Mitzie's dark head against its chrome muzzle, it veered and missed her
by a breath. Mitzie stood motionless as a statue, though her short
skirt whipped out.

Then she turned at the waist and watched the retreating jeep.

"Chicken!" she jeered, loudly.

For an instant everyone on the balcony was very still. Then there was
a dull banging, and Phil realized that Moe Brimstine was pounding the
railing, and saying, "I tell you, that girl's good."

"Yes, she is," Billig buzzed at him curtly. Brimstine stopped his
applause, looking ashamed.

"But," Billig continued smoothly, turning to Phil, "they're bound to
get her, sooner or later, unless...." And he wiggled the large black
gun he held in his small hand. "So you better talk."

The jeep swung round under the balcony in a much tighter loop and
headed back, revving screamingly. Mitzie faced it, grinning, hands
as light on her hips as before. Then, just as--from Phil's point of
view--it had swallowed her up to the waist, she sprang to one side.
Phil felt her foot must have brushed the tire. The jeep slammed through
the air where she'd been.

"_Dumb-bell!_" Mitzie screamed.

Brimstine lifted his clenched fists above the railing, glanced at
Billig, and with an effort dropped them to his sides. Phil realized
his arms were numb, Jack was gripping them so tightly. Beyond Billig,
Harris and Dora leaned forward over the guard rail, as abstracted as
gamblers.

But Billig himself, though presumably a gambler, was neither still nor
intent. "Look, Mr. Gish," he said rapidly, "I don't want to see this
girl smashed myself, and Brimstine here is figuring on starring her in
a knife throwing or dodge-the-car act. This is probably the last chance
you have to save her. Where's Romadka? Where's the cat?"

Phil didn't even look at him.

A phone-light began to blink on the control panel. Billig ignored it.
"_Where's the cat?_" he repeated.

But all Phil could think, as the black jeep turned very tightly by the
far wall and as Mitzie pivoted to face it--all he could think was that
this had happened before, in ancient Crete, where girls as slim waisted
and dark haired as Mitzie had faced the black, charging bull and dodged
it or vaulted or somersaulted over its cruel horns, their breasts as
bare as Mitzie's, opposing the most tender thing in the world to the
most terrible.

The phone-light continued to blink.

The jeep finished its tight turn, Llewellyn and Buck leaning out to
balance it like a sailboat while Carstairs stuck steady as death
behind the wheel. Then it shrieked toward Mitzie. She waited until it
was almost as close as the time before, then sprang toward the left.
Quickly, almost as if it were tied to her thoughts, the jeep veered
toward the left, too. But Mitzie's feet, slamming down after that first
jump, didn't carry her farther, but reversed her direction, carrying
her back to the spot she'd first occupied.

Again the jeep slammed past her.

"_Double dumb-bell!_" Mitzie howled.

The jeep, screaming into another tight turn, vanished under the
balcony. There was a grating crash, then a sick, rasping sound, as if
the jeep had sideswiped the wall but was still going.

At the same moment a dark shouldered but pink topped figure walked
out rapidly from under the balcony. It was carrying a black bag. It
stopped, leaned over, set the black bag on the floor, and opened it.

The black jeep came out from under the balcony, limpingly but gaining
speed.

Something green and small stuck its head out of the black bag and
looked toward the jeep.

The jeep didn't stop, but it slowed, and Carstairs, Llewellyn and Buck
tumbled out and sprinted away from the green head as if from horror
itself.

The jeep continued very slowly and haltingly toward Mitzie, like a
blinded, badly injured animal.

The pink topped figure walked rapidly and mechanically back under the
balcony, as if it didn't understand the why of what it had been doing.
Belatedly, Phil realized it must be Dr. Romadka.

The phone-light went on blinking.

The green cat leaped out of the black bag and lightly settled itself
beside it.

"Stun it!" Billig knifed at Brimstine and Harris.

The green cat twisted its neck and looked up curiously.

Brimstine and Harris looked at Billig and each took a step and peered
down over the railing and stopped stock-still. Behind them Dora was as
pale and quiet as a ghost.

And then Phil felt it too--the same invisible golden wave of amiability
and understanding as had quieted the quarrelers at the Akeleys', but
now in a flood, a spring tide.

"Stun that thing down there!" Billig demanded. The hidden wrinkles were
showing themselves twitchingly on his face and he was backing away from
the railing as if he couldn't bear the golden wave.

Brimstine started to reach inside his coat, but instead picked up the
phone beside the blinking light. After a moment he said quite casually,
"The raid's begun, just as Greeley told us it would. The FBL are coming
in everywhere."

"Stun it, I tell you! Get it somehow; it can save us," Billig ordered,
frantically fanning the air in front of his face as if to beat off the
golden wave.

Harris just looked at him. Brimstine slowly and puzzledly shook his
head.

Billig gave a shuddering gasp and clapped his free hand over his mouth
and nostrils, as if the golden wave were something breathed in with the
air, and fought his way to the railing. With his other hand he raised
the big gun until it was high above his shoulder.

A needle of blue light jutted from either end of the big gun and made
smoking trenches in the opposite wall of the garage and the wall behind
them. Then Billig brought the gun steadily downward, lengthening the
forward and rearward trenches. The air smelled acid, as if laced with
ozone. The blue beam dimmed the bright lights and made everything
shadowy.

The green cat still looked up at Billig curiously. Billig didn't look
straight back at it. The little muscles in his jaw and temple bulged
around the hand clamping shut his mouth and nose.

The forward trench dug itself across the wall and floor, swung
drunkenly past Mitzie and the doddering jeep, got ten feet from the
green cat and hesitated. It swung this way and that, as if it had
encountered a magic circle it couldn't pierce--and stopped.

Jack murmured, "Sash was right."

Billig gave a great gasp and began to squeal.

The blue beams winked out. The gun clanked on the floor. The squeal
changed to a clucking and Billig swayed. Jack jumped to catch him.

Phil sprang forward and his fingers touched buttons he'd seen Billig
touch. The bars in the garage gateways shot up. Phil was on the
telescoped stairs almost before they began to move, and rode them to
the ground through layers of stinging ozone and golden harmony. The
jeep had trembled to a stop just short of Mitzie, who stared at it
groggily, her whole figure slack, as if a puff of wind could have
felled her.

When the stairs touched the floor, momentum carried Phil forward a half
dozen steps but he kept his footing and circled back at a run. When
he plunged into the area between the green cat and the spot where the
jeep had been abandoned, he felt a shiver of sudden and extreme terror,
which even as he felt it, began to fade.

But he hardly had time to ask himself whether that was what had
stampeded Carstairs and the rest, for the next instant he was calling,
"Lucky!" and Lucky was saying "Prrt!" and he was scooping up the
unresisting cat, his fingers trembling as they touched the green fur,
and darting back toward Mitzie and the jeep. Her groggy look had now
become a dazed smile of triumph and pride.

He grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her toward the jeep. "Get in!"
he shouted in her ear. "We're getting out of here. You're driving."

A little life seemed to come back into her as her hands touched the
wheel. She kicked the starter as he scrambled in beside her, Lucky
gently clutched to his chest. "Which way?" she asked thickly.

"Any exit gateway," he told her.

With a rather wheezy hum, the jeep started toward the nearest gateway.
Phil felt a thinning of the golden peace around them, as if, he told
himself, Lucky were resting. The jeep, though gaining a little speed,
seemed to move as slowly as a school slideway. But looking back, he saw
that the group on the balcony was still standing as motionless as dress
display dummies with the power off--all except Billig, who was once
again moving about rapidly.

"Get them," Phil could barely hear Billig's cracked voice implore, as
he darted from one to the other. "Kill them."

The jeep nosed through the high doorway and started up a ramp.

"Dora!" Phil heard Billig yell. "Grab my ortho and kill them."

The effect of the golden wave must be wearing off, Phil thought, for
just as the top of the gateway was cutting off his view he saw the
violet blonde stoop rapidly behind the guard wall.

The next second a blue beam flashed, and smoke and starry splatter
sprayed up just behind the jeep. The beam moved up and encountered the
top of the gateway. It notched that, came a little closer to them, and
then was stopped by the thickness of the wall. The ramp turned and Phil
saw a half dozen men in the Fun Incorporated company guard uniform. Two
of them had drawn their guns and the other four hadn't. They seemed to
be arguing hurriedly about something. They turned and saw the jeep. The
two with guns raised them and the others reached for theirs.

Then Lucky sat up on Phil's lap straight as the statuette of Bast, and
Phil felt him let go of another of those great golden invisible waves.
Phil could tell the moment it hit the guards from the sudden change in
their tough faces. They watched the jeep with awe and incredulous grins
as it went past.

Farther on they found themselves approaching an expanse of gray cold
light, against which a party of some twenty heavily armed men was
partly silhouetted, although they were advancing warily along the
walls. They were carrying guns, nets and sprays that could swiftly
immobilize men in plastic cocoons, and what looked like bird cages.

They leveled their weapons, but once again and mightier than ever, so
mighty it made Phil shiver with understanding, the golden wave rolled
forward to engulf them. Once again the jeep glided past astonished,
troubled faces that smiled in spite of themselves. As the jeep rolled
out into the cool, shadowy dawn, Phil stroked Lucky's soft, springy fur
and murmured, "Little peace maker. You even gentled the FBL."

Lucky looked up at him coquettishly and then yawned tremendously and
curled up on Phil's lap. The feeling of golden harmony subsided until
only a ghost of it lingered.

"I know," Phil said, "you're tired from so much peace making." He
suddenly felt extremely tired himself, yet he went on to say, in
slurred syllables, "Lucky, I don't care whether you come from Egypt,
Russia, or the jungles of the Amazon--you're good for the USA."




                                 XIII


The jeep steadily turned corners, putting block after block of
the empty, early morning, upper-level streets between it and Fun
Incorporated. Phil wondered whether it could be traced by the electric
eyes that were said to be at each intersection, but he forgot the
question before it became a worry. Lucky was a plump green doughnut
on his lap. He felt over-poweringly sleepy and wished he could gently
slide into some universe lacking light, sound and gravity.

But before drifting off he glanced at Mitzie. Her face was set in
hard, proud, sneering lines, although two tears were jiggling down her
cheeks. Phil felt more annoyed than surprised or compassionate. No
one, he told himself, had the right to indulge such a mood in Lucky's
presence.

He decided that Mitzie needed to have certain truths rubbed in gently.
"Our escape is nothing to puff ourselves up over," he said softly.
"Lucky did it all. Though I admired your bravery dodging the jeep."

Mitzie didn't look at him, but she thinned her lips.

"The episode of the jeep was instructive," Phil went on, beginning to
twist the angelic knife just a little. "It showed you exactly what sort
of glorious criminal fellowship you had with those three hep-thugs. But
now," he went on, tempering justice with mercy, "you've discovered that
your romantic worship of evil isn't worth a fingersnap in the face of
true love and understanding. Eh, Mitzie?"

Mitzie let the car jog listlessly to a stop. Phil was dimly aware
that they were parking in a bumpy, blind end driveway in a neglected,
shrubby square with tall buildings set around. He leaned back, smiling
drowsily, his fingers playing with Lucky's springy fur. He was waiting
complacently for Mitzie's sobs.

Instead, the seat jounced and the door of the jeep slammed.

He looked around. Mitzie was standing outside the jeep against a
shadowy background of tangled shrubbery and misty, silent skyscrapers.

Suddenly she leaned forward toward him, bracing herself against the
door with stiff arms. She inhaled gustily and her small, tender breasts
lifted in their black satin half cups.

Now, he told himself, it must happen. She must yield, sobbing, to
Lucky's power.

"I hate you, Phil," she said intensely. "You want to see me turn to
jelly." New tears spurted from the inside corners of her eyes, but her
expression grew fiercer. "Carstairs, Llewellyn and Buck may have tried
to kill me, but at least they gave me a chance to be something. They
allowed me the dignity of being hated. They didn't try to drown me in
slop.

"I want glory," she went on in a voice that certainly should have
sounded choked except she simply wouldn't permit it. "I want my kind of
glory, no matter how cheap and selfish you think it is, because it's
the only thing that's shining and brave in a shoddy, cowardly world.
I want to spit in the world's eye and then face it, when it comes
bleating for revenge, like I faced this jeep."

"I did think you were courageous there," Phil temporized, wondering why
the devil Lucky's power, that had softened twenty men at a crack, was
so slow in taking effect on a single misguided girl.

"Spare me any praise that's a cover for slop," Mitzie said scathingly.
"Oh I know what that Sunday school beast there on your lap can do,
and I know what you want to see happen. I have only one thing that's
titanium in me, all the rest is stinking mush. You want to see that one
thing break. No, worse, you want to see it soften. Well, I'm not going
to let that happen." She stood up and took her hands off the door.

Suddenly Phil felt a kind of sleepy worry. He ran his hand over Lucky's
fur, then shook him hesitatingly. "Wake up," he said uneasily.

Lucky merely purred. Or perhaps it was a small snore.

"Goodbye for good, Phil," Mitzie said, turning away.

"No, wait," Phil called suddenly, at last hunching groggily forward in
his seat. "Don't go yet." He shook Lucky again, almost roughly. "Wake
up," he demanded. "Stop her."

The small god hung in his hands like a limp green rag.

Phil put Lucky down on the seat beside him and started to get out of
the car. But abruptly a wave of deep melancholy washed over him. He
knew that something precious was slipping away from him, but he wasn't
sure it was genuinely precious and he didn't know whether he had the
right to stop it. Besides his god had failed him and he was still
incredibly sleepy.

So he watched Mitzie slipping away from him as irrevocably as time, and
did nothing except lift Lucky back on his lap. He watched her stride
off along the misty shrubs like a proud and angry nymph, holding her
back straight and her head very high, and also, he supposed, those
charming and ridiculous breasts with which she insisted on facing the
whole world.

For what seemed a long time he watched the dim, empty corner around
which she had turned. He was frozen in a hypnotic daze that temporarily
served for sleep. Now and then thoughts crossed his mind's dull
expanse, but they were shadowy things and did not linger. Once it
occurred to him that Lucky might have been unable to hold Mitzie
because his earlier exertions had drained his powers; small gods
couldn't be expected to exude several great golden waves without
suffering some slight after effects.

It occurred to him that at this very moment he must be the object of
furious searches by the Federal Bureau of Loyalty, Fun Incorporated's
natty thugs, Romadka and his jolly friends, perhaps even good old
Carstairs, Llewellyn and Buck. Yet he felt neither fear nor any
inclination to form a plan. The dim corner he was watching grew
brighter but stayed empty.

Four feet defined themselves in the doughnut-shaped pressure on his
lap. Lucky stretched, shook himself, looked up at Phil with the
brightest sort of eyes, and said, "Prrrt-prt."

"You're a fine sort of cat," Phil complained grumpily, his own eyes
feeling anything but bright. "Going to sleep just when I needed you
most."

Lucky disregarded these criticisms. "Prrrrt-prt," he repeated
peremptorily.

But now that his hypnotic daze was broken, Phil once again felt
over-poweringly sleepy. "I know that mew," he mumbled muzzily at the
green blur beyond the shimmering fence of his eyelashes. "You're
hungry. Well, I s'pose you deserve a feed after all the wonders you
did. But I haven't got any cranberry sauce right now. I'll get you
something to eat ... later ... on."

"Prrrt-prt!" Lucky demanded in the outraged tones of an honest workman
who finds himself cheated of his pay.

But Phil was beyond reach of any appeal. "G'night," he told Lucky in
the kindliest possible way and dropped off.

He dreamed of things far off and strange and ominous, though misty.
He dreamed of dark fronded forests and small animals screeching. The
screeches grew louder and he fled out of his dream altogether into the
jeep parked in the blind end driveway in the little square.

For a moment he seemed to see the ghosts of the dark fronded trees and
hear the echo of the dream screeches, but then he realized that the
former were the square's unpruned shrubs, while the latter were the
squeals and cries of schoolgirls scattering out of a building beyond.

He realized groggily that they must be coming from school--no, from
afternoon school, since the sunlight wasn't slanting at all deeply into
the square, and that he must have slept here undisturbed all day.

And then, he became aware that his lap and heart were cold and that
Lucky was gone.




                                  XIV


Phil's first impulse was to jump out of the jeep and hunt around. But
the chill in his heart told him Lucky was farther away than that.
Besides, the place was a regular jungle and one man could hunt through
it forever for anything cat-size.

He did not recognize the square at all, but he guessed from the
schoolgirls that he was in an intellectual residential neighborhood.
At first he thought the school was one for girls, but then he noticed
a few lone boys among the homeward-bound students and decided that
most of the families in this area must be deliberately having as
many girls as possible. When sex-determination had become possible
through centrifuging human sperm to separate the male-producing and
female-producing types, most parents decided to have sons, especially
for their firstborn. They often told themselves they would have
daughters later, but unfortunately small families were the rule.
The resulting over-production of males had led to some ineffectual
state laws forbidding sex-determination, an unsuccessful attempt at
self-regulation by the medical profession, a lot of talk in Congress,
and an almost fanatically determined movement among a class of
thoughtful people to produce only daughters. This last class, besides
seeking to balance the sex ratio, perhaps had in mind the fact or rumor
that human parthenogenesis had been achieved. Phil remembered a Sunday
afternoon video shock talk: _Will Women Born of Virgins Become Our Only
Intellectuals?_

Other aspects of the neighborhood around the square fitted with his
guess. There was an appearance of shabbiness, the skyscrapers were low,
advertisements lifeless, traffic was light, there were no hot rods.

He let his gaze roam over the tiers of tiny flats, wondering where
Lucky might have gone. As he did so, he turned on the jeep's radio.

"... while Mystery Man Billig, mastermind of Fun Incorporated, is
believed to have fled the country. Tonight at 8:30 New Washington
Time, President Barnes will address all us American folks, partly
to silence the small, syndicate-inspired clamor at the outlawing of
male-female wrestling and jukebox burlesque, but more to explain to
an amazed citizenry the full reasons behind the charges brought this
morning by the federal government against sixty-nine high officials.
I predict--and remember this is just my personal libel-free guess,
fellow-folks--that the president will reveal that Fun Incorporated has
been peddling dream pills, temporary sterility tabs, and I'm as shocked
and disgusted as you are, folks, female robots equipped for obscene
functioning.

"Now here's an important flash on the cat story. The cats are not
carrying an infection and are under no circumstances to be destroyed,
whether owned, strayed, or alley. In fact, there's a stiff jail
sentence waiting for any person destroying a cat. But all owned cats
are to be brought to the nearest security station, while any person
sighting a strayed or alley cat is directed to do the same. There's a
stiff penalty for not doing the first, a one hundred dollar reward for
doing the second. Get busy, kids! Why this sudden federal interest in
cats? The National Health Service zips its lips. But your newscaster
backs this highly responsible rumor: it has been discovered that a rare
strain of cat carries a cancer destroying virus. Wouldn't it be nice,
folkses, to know that, once full grown, you would never start to grow
again, in any part or place?

"But remember this, dear audiers, and I'll say it to you in Martian:
Zip-zap-zup! Meaning: Bring in the cats!

"Now as for this report, folks, that handie-supernova Zelda Zornia,
vacationing in Brazil, did a south-of-the-equator handiecast
advertising bathing jewelry; let me assure you clean living people...."

Phil cleared his mind, trying to put himself in Lucky's place, to
feel the direction in which the cat had wandered off. His head swung
doubtfully this way and that, like a compass needle or planchette, but
finally came to rest. He climbed out of the jeep and walked straight
ahead, not turning aside for the dusty, crackling shrubs, but pushing
straight through them.

He parted a final straggly hedge and found himself looking across the
empty street at a house quite as old as the Akeleys, but with free sky
above it.

Built of ancient brick, it was three stories tall and looked as
pompously respectable as a 19th century banker. It reposed sedately
on a terrace that was as weedily overgrown as the square and that was
surrounded by a high iron fence.

The only incongruous note was struck by a saucer-shaped object fully
fifty feet across set on a framework atop the flat roof. Judging from
the dull green of its underside, it might be made of copper. It looked
almost as old as the house and quite as proper, as if the 19th century
banker had decided to wear a green beret and dared anyone to notice it.

Phil crossed the street, mounted some steps and peered through the
iron gate. He made out, beside the house's old-fashioned, knob door, a
tarnished bronze plate which read: "Humberford Foundation."

He looked back uneasily. Where he figured the jeep to be, he could see
the heads and black-clad shoulders of two men. The black reminded him
unpleasantly of the sports togs worn by Billig and his yes men. They
seemed to be arguing. One of them took a step up, as if he were getting
into the jeep, but the other pulled him back and they hurried off--not
in his direction, Phil noted with some relief.

He gave the iron gate a little push. It opened with a rusty "Harrumph"
that made Phil shrink apologetically. But nothing else happened so
after a minute he slipped through and began to peer around at the
undergrowth and then to wander through it, softly calling "Lucky!"

Occasionally he looked back in the direction of the jeep and once he
saw the radio-helmeted heads and blue shoulders of three policemen.
He wondered if the next time he looked he'd see Dr. Romadka, or the
Akeleys, or perhaps Carstairs, Llewellyn and Buck, and he shivered to
think of how close he'd come to being caught--by someone.

But the next shock he got came from something nearer. He had rounded
the house, after having poked through its equally lifeless and
overgrown back yard, when he saw a dark haired man peering at him
through the fence.

The most disturbing thing about the man was that he closely resembled
the girl Phil had watched undress in the room across from his. The girl
with hoofs. This man had the same vital, faun-like expression.

Phil froze. But the man merely yawned, turned away, and shuffled off,
humming or hooting a little melody that gave Phil goosepimples because
it reminded him of something in his dream.

For that matter, the whole experience was becoming very dreamlike to
Phil: the silent house, the neglected garden, the futile searching,
the melancholy memory of Mitzie's leave-taking, the powerful sense of
a dead past. But the feeling that Lucky was near was still strong and
after a bit Phil realized he would have to do something he had been
shrinking from.

He reluctantly mounted the steps to the front portal, reached for the
knob, and then, to put off the evil moment a little longer, called
"Lucky!" a few times along the shallow porch to either side.

Someone behind him inquired pleasantly, "Are you looking for a cat?"

Phil spun around guiltily and found himself facing a very old man as
tall and frail as a ghost, and apparently as silent as one, since Phil
hadn't heard him coming up the walk. His thin, wrinkle-netted face,
crowned by close cropped white hair, was hauntingly familiar. It had
something of the grandeur of a pre-Christian ascetic, yet there was
a note of Puckish humor in it, as if its owner had arrived at a wise
second childhood. Although Phil's heart was pounding at the alarmingly
accurate question, he found himself liking the man at first sight.

As he hesitated, the old man went on, "My interest, by the way, is
purely academic--or else childish curiosity, which comes to the same
thing." His eyes flashed impishly. "Is it by any chance a green cat?"
he asked Phil rapidly. "No, you don't have to answer that question, at
least not any more than you have already. I don't want to distress you.
It's just that I have a mind that automatically makes the far-fetched
deductions first."

He beamed at Phil, who, though flustered, found himself grinning.

"Perhaps you're a journalist," the oldster went on smoothly, "or at
least we can pretend you are. Dr. Garnett always calls in the press
when the Humberford Foundation makes a discovery, though I'm sorry
to say the press stopped coming about twenty years ago. They'd quit
thinking of para-psychology as newsworthy. But perhaps there's been
time to breed a new race of journalists with a revived interest in
esping and all the teles. In any case Garnett and the whole staff will
be overjoyed at the presence of a pressman."

"You mean the Humberford Foundation investigates extrasensory
perception and things like that?" Phil asked.

"You should know, since you've been sent here to get a story," the old
man said reprovingly. "Still, reporters often haven't the foggiest idea
what they've been sent out to report, so you're excused."

Phil found himself grinning again. He hadn't any notion of how the old
man knew about Lucky or where he stood in the general picture, except
that he felt strangely certain that the old man didn't have anything
to do with the organizations out to get Lucky. And the oldster's
mischievous pretense that Phil was a reporter might at least get him
past the imposing door and let him spy around.

"So the Humberford Foundation has made a new discovery in
para-psychology?" he said conversationally.

The other nodded. "Dr. Garnett was most excited. So much so that he
didn't have time to tell me what it was all about, except that they'd
started to get some amazing results--and just this morning. So I
hurried over. Good esp is apt to go poof, so it's best to get it when
it's hot. I have a standing order with Garnett to call me over the
moment anything starts to flash. For that matter, I have the same
orders with practically every scientific laboratory in the area--though
the others don't always call me. But--thank Thoth!--Garnett isn't in
a field that's under the benign aegis of security and he isn't at all
security minded himself. In fact, I'm not certain he's ever heard of
the FBL. So you may get a real scoop, Mr...?"

"Gish. Phil Gish."

The oldster's thin hand pressed his with a feathery touch. "Morton
Opperly."

Phil stared at him for several seconds, then gasped, "The--?"

The other assented with an apologetic shrug. Phil let it sink in. This
was Morton Opperly who had worked on the Manhattan Project, whose name
had appeared beside Einstein's on the Physicists' Covenant, who had
tried unsuccessfully to get himself jailed for refusal to do research
during World War III, who had become a legend. Phil had always vaguely
assumed he'd died years ago.

He gazed at the renowned physicist in happy awe. The question that rose
effortlessly to his lips was a testimony to Opperly's ability to create
an atmosphere of unlimited free discussion unknown since 1940.

"Mr. Opperly, what are orthos?"

"Orthos? That could be short for any number of scientific terms, Phil,
but I bet you mean the ones that shoot. Those are ortho-fissionables.
Trouble with ordinary fissionables--or fissionables under ordinary
circumstances--is that the fragments and neutrons shoot off in
all directions and the critical mass is large. But if you get the
fissionable atoms all lined up with their axis of spin pointing in the
same direction, then they all split in the same place and every neutron
hits the nucleus of the atom next to it. Because of that last fact,
the neutrons are all used up and the critical mass becomes minute. Half
the fragments fly in one direction, half in the other, making it a very
nasty and convenient weapon, except it has to backfire."

"How do you get the atoms lined up?" Phil asked eagerly.

"Temperature near absolute zero and an electric field," Opperly said,
touching a button beside the doorway. "Simplest thing in the world.
The new insulators can hold a gun magazine at one degree Kelvin for
weeks, and carry enough fissionable pellets to give rapid fire, with
the effect of a steady beam, for more than a minute. Planning to make
yourself an ortho in your home workshop, Phil? I'm afraid they don't
sell that kit. Everything I've been telling you is top security, death
penalty and all that. But I'm getting so senile I don't understand
security regulations. I'm apt to babble anything. I keep telling Bobbie
T. he'll have to have me orthocuted some day, but like everyone else he
refuses to take me seriously. That's the trick they used on me in WW3
and they've never forgot it."

"Bobbie T.?"

Opperly made another of his apologetic grimaces. "Barnes. President
Robert T. Barnes. We were charter members of the Midwest Starship
Society. Of course he was just a shaver then and now he's a besotted,
scripture quoting fox, but shared dreams have a way of linking people
permanently. I drop in on him now and then and flash my Starship badge.
He's one of my pipelines to what's happening in the world, though the
security services don't tell him too much. That's how I learned about
the green cat."

Phil was nerving himself to ask Opperly just what he'd learned, when he
heard footsteps behind him.

The man who looked like a brother of the girl with hoofs was standing
in the gateway.

Just then the door of the mansion opened, revealing a scholarly
appearing man whose face was twitching with excitement and nervousness.
His coat had two bulging brief case pockets, while his vest was crammed
with enough microbooks to make up a dozen encyclopedias, plus two
micronotebooks with stylus, and a fountain pen besides. His hair was
graying and thin, and he wore ancient pince-nez that twitched with his
nose.

"Dr. Opperly!" He greeted in a high-pitched voice that expressed both
fluster and delight. "You come at a whirling moment!"

"That's the way I like them, Hugo," Opperly told him. "Where's Garnett?"

But the other was looking at Phil, who decided the twitch was
permanent. At the moment its owner was using it to express inquiry and
mild apprehension.

"Oh," Opperly said casually, "this is Phil Gish of the press." His
eyes twinkled. "Of the U. S. Newsmoon, in fact. Phil, this is Hugo
Frobisher, Ph.Ch.--Chancellor of Philosophy, you know, the new higher
degree. I'm just a lowly Ph.D. myself."

But Frobisher was beaming at Phil as if he were a donor with a $100,000
check. "This is most gratifying, Mr. Gish," he breathed. Then he
whipped out a micronotebook and poised on its white field the stylus
whose movements would be reproduced on one ten thousandth of the space
on the tape inside. "The U. S. Newsmoon, you say?"

At that moment the man at the gate came clumping up behind them. Phil
felt a gust of uneasiness, but the newcomer merely treated them all
to a big, innocent grin that brought out all the handsomeness of his
faun-like face.

"Me press, too," he announced happily. "Introducing to each you Dion da
Silva. Much delight."

Frobisher seemed about to melt with gratification, though da Silva's
gaiety was undoubtedly generally contagious. "What paper?" Frobisher
asked.

Phil noted that Opperly was studying the newcomer intently. The latter
was having trouble with Frobisher's question.

"Mean what?" he countered, drawing his shaggy eyebrows together in a
frown.

"_La Prensa_," Opperly supplied suddenly. "Mr. da Silva represents _La
Prensa_."

"Is so. Thank you," da Silva confirmed.

Phil could have sworn that Opperly had never seen da Silva before and
that da Silva had never heard of _La Prensa_.

However, Frobisher seemed to accept the explanation. "Come in, come
in, gentlemen," he urged, fluttering backward. "I'm sure you'll first
want to tour our little establishment and have a peek at all our
projects. Story background, you know."

"I'm sure they'll want to go straight to Garnett and get the story
itself," Opperly assured him. "Where is Winston anyway, Hugo?"

"To tell the truth, I haven't the faintest idea of Dr. Garnett's
whereabouts," Frobisher replied with prim satisfaction. "Things have
been popping everywhere since this morning. In every project. We'd have
to tour the Foundation to find him in any case."

Opperly flashed Phil a look of humorous resignation. Dion da Silva
pressed past Phil, flashing his wide white teeth at everyone and
saying, "Is fine, fine." Phil's spirits rose. He felt certain that he
was getting nearer to Lucky.




                                  XV


Inside, the Humberford Foundation was a gloomy Edwardian mansion to
which had been sketchily grafted a pleasantly disorganized scientific
enterprise. Glassed shelves of leatherbound books that hadn't been
opened for decades were elbowed by trim microfilm files. Blackened
portraits of John Junius Humberford and his ancestors looked down on
machines for shuffling the eternal Rhine cards and on fluorescent
screens-in-depth that blended a dozen recordings of a brain wave made
from different angles into the shadowy semblance of a human thought.
Stately drawing rooms that set one thinking of bustles and teacups
instead held solemn faced, scantily clad girls with electrodes attached
to twenty parts of their bodies. Laboratory technicians in loose smocks
caught their heels in stair carpets a hundred years old.

But today there was an excitement that pushed the Edwardian half of
the place far into the background and brightened the very grime on
the walls. Chancellor Frobisher and his little train of visitors were
not even noticed. Girls triumphantly calling Rhine cards stared past
them unseeingly. Clairvoyants sketching objects being imagined by
someone else three floors away didn't look up from their blackboards.
A technician darted out with a large syringe and took air samples
under their very noses without seeming to be aware of their presence.
Correlating engines hummed and spat cards.

Phil was so busy peering about for his green cat that he heard little
of what Frobisher was telling them.

Occasional high-pitched explanatory phrases floated back to Phil: "...
her 117,318th run through the cards ... telepathic communion with
lower animals ... perhaps some day share the thoughts of an amoeba....
No, I really don't know where Dr. Garnett is, I'm busy with important
visitors, Miss Ames ... telekinesis will make handies obsolete...."

Plodding behind da Silva up the stairs to the top floor, Phil started
to listen to Frobisher consecutively. The Chancellor of Philosophy
was saying, "Now in the room I'm about to show you, an experiment in
_complete_ telepathy is underway. When telepathy is perfected, it will
be possible for two individuals to lay their minds side by side and
compare all their thoughts and feelings in the raw, as it were."

"Is good!" da Silva interjected.

Frobisher frowned at the interruption before remembering it was a
journalist talking. He went on smilingly, "In this case, however, we
have only a preliminary stage: two individuals, by means of prolonged
speech, writing, sketching, musical expression and so forth, are
attempting to share their inmost thoughts to such an extent that they
will tend to become telepathic, as seems to be the case with some
husbands and wives." As they came to the top of the stairs, Frobisher
continued a bit breathlessly, "Incidentally, the young man in this
experiment is one of our most consistent espers, while the young lady
is a handie bit player who graciously devotes her leisure time to
science."

He paused with his hand on an ancient brass doorknob.

"Let's not disturb them, Hugo," Opperly suggested a bit faintly,
leaning against the wall though he showed no other effects of the
climb. "Sounds like rather an intimate experiment."

Frobisher shook his head. "As I say," he pronounced, "these two
researchists are seeking to lay their minds side by side."

He opened the door, looked in, gasped, and hastily slammed it--though
not before da Silva, peering over his shoulder, had emitted an
appreciative and rather whinnying chortle.

"As I say, their _minds_," Frobisher repeated, walking away from the
door a bit unevenly. "Perhaps you're right, Dr. Opperly, we'd best
not disturb them. Research is at times a strenuous affair." He looked
apprehensively at the purported representative of _La Prensa_. "I
trust, Señor da Silva--"

"Is very good!" da Silva assured him enthusiastically.

Frobisher looked at him blankly, shook himself a bit and said, briskly,
"It now remains, gentlemen, to give you a glimpse of our crowning
project--the one on the roof. If you'll just precede me up this
circular staircase...."

"I think I'll stay here, Hugo," Opperly told him. "Touring research can
be strenuous too."

"But I rather imagine Dr. Garnett must be on the roof."

"Then bring him down."

As Phil trudged up the musty cylinder lit by tiny bull's-eye windows,
his feet clanking on worn metal treads, it occurred to him that Lucky
certainly seemed to have been having a field day here, bringing people
together in understanding and love and what not. In fact, it made him
rather jealous the way Lucky was strewing his favors around.

From behind Chancellor Frobisher's fussy voice filtered up. "I should
preface this ascent by saying that one of J. J. Humberford's chief
motives in establishing the Foundation was the conviction that mankind
will soon destroy itself unless some superior power intervenes. So we
feel bound to apply what little knowledge of esping we have gained
to seeking such intervention. Even if there is only one chance in a
million of contacting a superior power somewhere in the universe, the
stakes are so great that we must not overlook the chance. Incidentally,
gentlemen, please watch out for the next to the last step. There isn't
any."

Phil, who was just putting his foot on it, caught himself, took a
bigger step, and the next moment was out on the roof. The sodium mirror
that orbited around earth was pouring sunlight down, though hardly
enough to explain the dark glasses Frobisher handed him and da Silva.

Phil briefly studied the verdigris underside of the saucer topping
most of the roof. He noted the flimsy looking beams supporting it
and frowningly inspected the tiny penthouse under its center. Then
Frobisher was urging him and da Silva up a ladder that led to a small
platform next to the rim of the saucer.

Reaching the platform, Phil instantly realized the need for the dark
glasses. The interior of the saucer was polished to such a degree that
even the sodium-reflected sunlight flashed from it with a pale brown
blindingness. He clamped his eyes shut and quickly put on the black
specs.

"As you are aware," Frobisher was saying, "the exact nature of thought
waves is unknown. It may be that they move instantaneously, or at least
at speeds far greater than that of light. We have yet to get a figure
on them, although we have carefully timed thought-casts between here
and Montevideo--but the human or physiological factor confounds us.
They may not be waves at all. On the other hand it is possible that
they are reflected and refracted like ordinary light."

"Is right," interjected da Silva, a vague blur beside Phil, who hadn't
yet got over the first blinding glimpse of the saucer's interior.

"You believe so?" Frobisher questioned sharply.

_La Prensa_'s faun-like representative shrugged his muscular shoulders.
"Just guessing," he said.

"At any rate," Frobisher continued, "we are working on that latter
supposition here. This copper structure is a parabolic mirror. Thought
waves originating at its focus are concentrated into a beam which is
directed upward into the sky toward any stellar planetary systems which
may happen to lie above."

"Amazing," da Silva grunted. "Explains everything."

"What do you mean?" Frobisher asked sharply.

"Just humble before wonders of science," da Silva told him.

Frobisher nodded. "You're right," he said. "Who knows but what
the message now being beamed, with its appeal for help from a
war-threatened and deluded humanity, may some day or century be
received by a truly mature and benign race, which will swiftly come to
our aid? By the by, Mr. Gish, watch that railing. It's broken."

Phil jerked his hand away from the rusted pipe. "Yes," he said to
Frobisher, "but how do these thought waves originate at the focus?"

"Just look," Frobisher told him. Phil squintingly studied the gleaming
saucer through his dark glasses and it became less of a jumble of
highlights. Projecting from a hole in the center of the bowl was a
brownish-red blob wearing goggles that looked as if they were made of a
darker glass than his own specs. The blob's lips moved and Phil heard a
hauntingly familiar voice saying, of all things, "S-O-S, earth. S-O-S,
earth."

"Our star esper," Frobisher chortled, "if you'll pardon a pun of which
we're rather fond. To be sure, it's thought waves, not sound waves,
he's originating, but it helps him esp if he says the message at the
same time he thinks of it. He's a bit of an eccentric--a religious
scholar--but that's the case with most of our best people."

At that moment Phil's vision, buffered by the dark glasses, became
quite clear and he saw that the sweating head at the focus of the
parabolic mirror was that of Sacheverell Akeley. At the same moment
Sacheverell saw Phil and his sun-burned top disappeared from the saucer
as swiftly as a hand puppet jerked below stage.

"He shouldn't do that," Frobisher said sharply. "There's at least
twenty minutes of his duty remaining. Well, I presume you've seen all
you'll need for your articles, gentlemen, so we'd best go down."

As Phil's foot touched the roof, Sacheverell Akeley darted up to him,
sweat pouring off his ruddy-bronze forehead.

"What are you doing here?" Phil asked sharply. "How did you get away
from them--Romadka's friends, I mean."

"They raced off a couple of hours after Romadka left," Sacheverell
answered quickly. "Got a phone call. Incidentally, Romadka abducted
three of our cats. As for me, I've worked here for ages. The important
point is," he continued in an intense whisper, "that _he's_ here,
isn't he? I mean the Green One. I've never esped like this before, even
at stars."

But before Phil could answer, Frobisher and da Silva glanced at them
inquisitively. Phil and Sacheverell followed them down the metal
staircase.

Reaching the top floor they found Opperly deep in conversation with a
man who looked at least half out of this world. He was fat and had a
beard, but his dull eyes seemed to be seeing twice as much as he was
looking at. Sacheverell tugged at Phil's sleeve guardedly. "Garnett's
frightfully espy," he whispered, his lips next to Phil's ear.

"But Winnie, how do you explain it?" Opperly was saying. "Why all this
success with esping, in practically all your projects, all of a sudden?"

Garnett frowned. "Well, there is one unusual circumstance. Our lab
technicians claim to have found hormones, or some sort of specialized
protein molecules floating around in the air."

"What hormones?" Opperly asked quickly.

"Well," Garnett said, "they have had some difficulty identifying
them." He hesitated. "The hormones seem to show a tremendous
variability--almost chameleon-like."

Opperly smiled and threw Phil a twinkling gaze.

"Winnie, do you by any chance know," Opperly said, "whether an odd
animal of some sort appeared at the Foundation early this morning?"

Phil felt Sacheverell's hand tighten on his biceps.

Dr. Garnett looked around puzzledly. Then his eyebrows shot up. "Yes,"
he said, "Ginny Ames found a green cat, a fashion mutant, I suppose,
wailing at the door early this morning. We don't have much food here,
but she tried it on some elderberry preserves and apparently it liked
it. I believe the creature's still around."

"Winnie, don't you get any bulletins from Security?" Opperly asked
incredulously. "Or from the FBL?"

Garnett shook his big head. "Not for the past ten years. Esp's so
unpopular that even the government's forgot us."

"I see," Opperly said, his eyes glittering with interest. "In that
case you haven't read anything about a mutant creature described as a
green cat, that's believed to have super-human parapsychological powers
and to have caused officials to go over to Russia and do all sorts
of other things described as crazy? The public hasn't been told, but
all the higher echelons--scientists, doctors, psychiatrists--have been
getting bulletins on the subject, demanding that they report anything
they know or have heard about a green cat. Even I've been told a
little."

"Can you beat it," Garnett said disgustedly, "something involving esp
and they consult everyone but us." Then he turned to Opperly like a man
waking up. "Do you mean to suggest that this creature is responsible
for the esp results we've been getting?"

Opperly nodded. "I do."

"But how, why?"

Opperly shrugged happily. "I don't know. I've merely been making some
of those far-fetched guesses I've warned my young journalist friends
about." And he smiled at Phil and da Silva.

"Guesses!" Garnett said. "Well, we'll soon find out." And he started
past them toward the front end of the hall, his big feet stirring
dust from the ancient carpet. "We'll have a look at this animal and
see what we think about it. Miss Ames--!" he started to call, and
then suddenly his face went half out of this world again and he
stopped in mid-stride. "She thinks the same," he said so softly and so
astonishedly that even Phil knew he must be esping. "She agrees with
you, Op." The big face seemed to go a little further out of the world.
"In fact, they all do. Practically everybody at the Foundation." The
big face seemed to go out almost all the way, while the voice sank to a
faint murmur. "In fact, you're right."

The door opened at the front end of the hall and a long nosed young
lady in a lab smock stepped out and nodded gently at Garnett. Her brow
smoothed and her eyes half closed, as if she were esping something to
him, then she seemed to notice that there were visitors around. "Would
you care to see this green animal with your outer eyes?" she asked.

"We sure would, Ginny," Garnett told her and started forward again.
Phil wanted to burst out with all his information about Lucky, but da
Silva forestalled him.

"Gentlemen," he said. "Think you understand better I supposed. Sorry
underrate you. Best to tell you now--"

At that moment Lucky ambled out of the door from which Ginny had
emerged. He strode lazily, like a self-confident green god. The long
nosed girl closed the door behind him. Phil felt his spirits splurge
suddenly, happily, familiarly.

Akeley squeezed Phil's upper arm. "It is _he_!"

And almost at the same moment, a voice commanded from behind them,
"Break to either side, everybody."

Phil obeyed the command and so did all the others.

Dave Greeley was standing at the head of the stairs. The representative
of the FBL was looking both knowledgeable and competent, though even
more gray haired and anxious than last night.

He nodded quickly at Opperly, said, "Pardon me, doctor," then leveled
his stun-gun between the ranks of men crowding the wall and punched the
trigger. But his nerves couldn't have been as good as Phil thought they
were, for instead of the green cat collapsing, Miss Ames pitched over
on her face, gasping wonderingly, "My leg--I can't feel it!"

Greeley grimaced and re-directed his stun-gun, as the dust mushroomed
up from the carpet around Miss Ames. But at the same moment Phil felt
the golden wave billowing out from Lucky. Greeley's face turned red and
his fingers stiffly uncurled from the gun, as if invisible hands were
prying them away, and it dropped to the floor.

At that moment another voice behind them, languorous and scornful,
said, "Stay where you are, gentlemen. It would be dangerous to move
your hands."

Dora Pannes stood at the head of the stairs. The violet blonde was
simply dressed in a gray frock, while a large handbag swung carelessly
from her shoulder, but she looked rather more beautiful than last
night. In her slender hand was a great big ortho.

Phil didn't feel at all frightened, although a vague memory nagged
momentarily at his mind. He knew she couldn't hurt anyone while Lucky
was there. He was more interested in the reactions of the others.

But with one exception there weren't any reactions.

The exception was da Silva. He was staring at Dora Pannes with a hungry
adoration.

Meanwhile the violet blonde was walking forward in a most business-like
way. She didn't even glance at da Silva. As she passed Greeley, her
free hand snatched sidewise like a lizard's tongue for the stun-gun,
snatched again at a larger one inside his coat, dropped them both in
her handbag, and kept going straight for the cat.

Now she'll begin to feel it, Phil told himself.

But she kept straight on. Lucky seemed to be studying her casually.
Abruptly he sprang back onto the window sill, his green fur rose, his
muzzle lengthened, and from it came a prolonged, spitting hiss.

The next moment Phil felt such a formless terror as he had never known
before, as if all reality were about to be crunched in a single fist,
as if the blackness between the stars were lashing down to strangle
him. Dimly across the hall, he saw the waves of white wash along the
ranked faces. He gazed fearfully at Lucky, as if the green cat had
turned into a devil, and saw Dora Pannes coolly stooping to grab him.
The cat started to streak past her, but Dora's hands were faster. Then
the cat sprang straight at her face, claws raking, but Dora calmly
detached him and shoved him in her handbag and shut it and started
back. She looked quite as beautiful and composed as she had at the
stair head. The blood hadn't started to flow from the scratches in her
face.

As she passed da Silva, he looked up at her groggily. In his expression
there was still the ghost of desire.

"You jerk," she said to him and walked on and went down the stairs.

Phil felt his heart hammering ten, eleven, twelve times, like a clock
striking, and then he was racing downstairs and someone was pounding
along after him.

He caromed off the open front door and stumbled down the steps in time
to see a dark car roar off. Greeley was beside him now, barking orders
into a pocket radio. From the other end of the street, another car shot
in. Red plumes shot forward from under its hood as it rocket-braked to
a heaving stop. Greeley piled into the back seat. Phil scrambled in
after him.

"You can still see them," Greeley yelled at the driver. "Take all
chances. Rockets!" Then he turned to Phil. "Who are you?"

"Phil Gish of the U. S. Newsmoon," Phil replied recklessly, but the
last word was lost in the rocket's roar.

The other car had been about five blocks away when they had taken off.
As Phil untwisted himself with difficulty from the huddle into which
acceleration had thrown him, he saw that its lead had been reduced to
almost one block.

"Douse the jets," Greeley ordered. "We can curb them on our regulars;
but watch out they don't shift. They may have rockets. Where do you
stand in Project Kitty, Gish?"

"Sort of special observer," Phil improvised gaspingly, still hanging
on with both hands. "My section has decided the green cat may not be
dangerous."

"What?" Greeley demanded, peering ahead.

"Didn't you feel it up there?" Phil asked.

"Feel what?" Greeley said, his eyes measuring the lessening distance
between the two cars. "You mean the horror?"

"No," Phil said. "Peace. Understanding--"

But just then the car ahead of them slowed a bit and something green
flashed out of it, rolled over half a dozen times, and darted toward an
alley.

"Brakes!" Greeley yelled and Phil almost tumbled into the lap of the
man beside the driver as the forward rockets jetted and the back of the
car lifted and slammed down. Then he realized he was the only one left
in the car and scrambled out.

"The alley's blind; there's no way for it to get out," Greeley was
calling. "Advance abreast. Gish, back us up!"

"Don't hurt him," Phil warned.

"We know enough for that!" Greeley yelled back.

By this time Phil was behind them, and saw the green cat crouching
defiantly in the narrow alley's blind end, some twenty feet away from
the advancing men.

The distance lessened to ten, and then the green cat darted forward,
dodged this way, that, and dove between Greeley and the man on his
right, straight into Phil's outstretched hands.

"Lucky!" Phil said blissfully, lifting the cat closer.

Five claws raked his chin painfully, while fifteen others dug into his
hands.

He looked at the little face. Except for its color, it was a most
ordinary, though spittingly furious cat face. In fact, it was a most
ordinary cat.

And he could smell the dye.

"Here," he said calmly and handed the animal to Greeley.

"Lucky?" Greeley yelled as the claws sank into his hands. "It's a
dye-job, or I'll eat it! They had it all ready and threw it out to
misdirect us. Come on! Here, take it, Simms, we've got to keep it to be
on the safe side."

And presumably a third man's hands got clawed as they sprinted to the
car.

But Phil was not with them. He hadn't the heart. As the rockets roared
again, he simply stood halfway down the alley, scratched and weary.




                                  XVI


As the elevator door closed behind Phil and he started the weary climb
from twenty-eight to twenty-nine, he was already tormenting himself for
having turned down Phoebe Filmer's invitation to have a drink in her
room. When she had accosted him in the lobby, babbling about how he had
rescued her at the Tan Jet, he had felt the last thing he wanted to be
with was a human being. But now, with nothing separating him from the
loneliness of his room but an echoing flight of stairs and an empty
corridor, he suddenly realized that he needed human companionship above
everything.

He remembered how boldly he had set forth just yesterday afternoon
from his room to look at life and plunge into any adventure that came
along. And as it happened he had seen so shockingly much of life and
been buffeted by such vast oceans of adventure, that his brain still
buzzed from it. At times during those incredible twenty-four hours, it
had seemed to him that his whole character was changing, that he was
becoming the daring yet sympathetic adventurer and lover he had always
dreamed of being.

Yet here he was, dragging himself miserably back to his room, having
just pulled his usual craven trick of saying "No," when he desperately
wanted, at least ten seconds later, to say "Yes." Why, from the speed
with which he was falling back into his old habit patterns, he'd
probably spend the evening spying on Miss Filmer from his darkened
window.

Oh, he could tell himself there was no reason to give a second thought
to an ordinary pretty woman when he'd just met such a wickedly
desirable girl as Mitzie Romadka and seen such a beauty as Dora
Pannes, not to mention sharing the society of such grotesque but
attractive characters as Juno Jones and Mary Akeley. But that was just
rationalization and he knew it. Phoebe Filmer was more his size, and he
wasn't even big enough for her.

Or he could once more tell himself that if only Lucky were at his side,
he would be brave and bold again. But even that was no longer quite
true. Fact was, that everything had become much too big for him. He
wanted the green cat, yes, but he wanted him as his own special pet,
his mascot, his good luck cat, something to sleep at the foot of the
bed--not as a mysterious mutant monster that kept getting him involved
with male and female wrestlers, religious crackpots, gun-toting
psychoanalysts, girls with claws, hep-thugs, world-famous scientists,
espers, vice syndicates, FBL raids, national and international crimes,
and a whole lot of other things that were much, much too big for Phil
Gish.

He coded open his door, stepped inside, and had almost closed it behind
him when he realized that he was not returning to loneliness.

On her hands and knees, apparently to look under his bed, but now with
her face turned sharply towards him, was the black haired, faun-like
girl whose window was opposite his. He froze in every muscle, his hand
locked to the barely ajar door, ready to jerk it open and run.

She got up slowly, with a smile. "'Allo," she greeted in a warm voice
with a foreign accent he couldn't place. "I have lost something and I
think maybe he hide in here." She smoothed out the black pied gray suit
he'd watched her take off last night. Then she leisurely ran her hand
back across her head and down the pony tail in which her hair-do ended.

"Something?" Phil croaked gallantly, his hand still glued fast behind
him. He couldn't help it, but every time he looked her in the eye his
gaze had to travel fearfully down her figure to her 10-inch platform
shoes.

"Yes," she confirmed, "a--how you call him?--pussycat." Then, after a
bit, "Say, you act like you know me." Her smile widened and she shook a
finger at him. "'Ave you been peek at me, you naughty boy?"

Phil gulped and said nothing, yet that remark did a great deal to
humanize her for him. Hallucinations don't make one blush.

"Thas all right," she reassured him. "Windows across, why not? Same
thing--windows across and both open a little--make me think maybe my
pussycat jump over here. So I step across to see."

"Step across?" Phil demanded a bit hysterically, his gaze once more
shooting to her legs.

"Sure," she said smilingly and indicated the window. "Take a look."

With considerable reluctance, Phil unstuck his hand from the door and
gingerly walked to the open window. Spanning the ten feet between it
and the one opposite, was a flimsy looking telescope ladder of some
gray metal.

Phil turned around. "Is it a green cat?" he asked reluctantly.

Her face brightened. "So he did jump across."

Phil nodded. "What's more," he went on rapidly, "I think I met your
brother today, a journalist named Dion da Silva, representing the
newspaper _La Prensa_."

She nodded eagerly at the first proper name. "Thas right," she said. "I
am Dytie da Silva."

"And I am Phil Gish. Did you say Dytie?"

"Sure. Short for Aphrodite, goddess of love. You like? Please, where my
brother and pussycat now?"

"I haven't the faintest idea," Phil said sadly.

She shrugged as if she expected to hear just that. "Is nothing new. We
are crazy people, always get lost each other."

"Then you do come from Argentina?" Phil asked doubtfully. Her accent
didn't sound Spanish, but his acquaintance with Spanish accents was
limited.

"Sure," she confirmed carelessly, her thoughts apparently elsewhere.
"Far, far country."

"Tell me, Miss da Silva," he went on, "does your cat have peculiar
powers over people?"

She frowned at him. "Peculiar powers?" she repeated slowly as if
testing each syllable. "Don understand."

"I mean," Phil explained patiently, "can he make people happy around
him?"

The frown smoothed. "Sure. Nice little pussycat, make people happy. You
like animals, Phil?"

Once again he couldn't keep his gaze from flickering to her legs, but
on the whole he was feeling remarkably bucked up.

"Miss da Silva," he said, "I've got a lot more questions to ask you,
but unfortunately I don't know Spanish and I don't think you understand
English well enough to answer the questions if I put them to you cold.
But maybe if I tell you just what's been happening to me, you'll be
able to; at least, I hope so. Sit down Miss da Silva; it's a long, long
story."

"Is very good idea," she agreed, sinking down on the bed. "But please
call Dytie, Phil."

She makes one feel at ease, Phil thought as he placed himself in the
foam chair opposite. "Well, Dytie, it began ..." and for the next hour
he told her in some detail the story of what had happened to him ever
since he had awakened to see Lucky sitting on the window sill. He
suppressed entirely, however, the incident of watching her last night,
which made it necessary for him also to condense the account of his
session with Dr. Romadka. Dytie frequently interrupted him to ask for
explanations, some of them exceedingly obvious things, such as what
was a hatpin, and what was the Federal Bureau of Loyalty and what was
it that male and female wrestlers tried to do to each other in the
ring? On the other hand, she sometimes passed up things he expected
to puzzle her, though he couldn't always tell whether this was because
she really understood them, or because she didn't want to. Orthos
interested her not at all, stun-guns, mightily. Lucky's exploits did
not seem to startle her much. Her usual comment was along these lines:
"That pussycat. Is so stupid. But Lucky, too. Thas good name you give
him, Phil."

When he came to the Humberford Foundation and Dytie's brother, she
rolled over on her stomach and listened with closer attention. But
when he hesitantly mentioned how Dion had seemed to develop such an
instant yen for Dora Pannes, she whooped knowingly. "That brother," she
chortled. "He chase anything with two legs and milk glands. 'Cept of
course when he pregnant."

"What!"

"Say something? Must got wrong word," Dytie interposed quickly,
brushing the matter aside.

But she was very much interested in Morton Opperly and insisted on Phil
telling her a great deal about the famous scientist.

"He smart man," she said with conviction. "Very much like meet."

"I'll try to manage it sometime," Phil said and told how the green cat
had been captured by Dora Pannes.

Dytie shook her head solemnly. "Some people got very hard hearts," she
said. "Don like pussycat all."

Phil quickly rounded off his story with an account of how the fake
green cat in the alley had scratched him.

Dytie got up and came over and touched his hands tenderly. "Poor Phil,"
she said, then summarized: "So we know who have pussycat, but not
where?"

"That's right," Phil said quickly, "and that where is a tough one,
because Billig's hiding from the FBL." And he got up rapidly, trying
not to make it obvious that he wanted to put a few feet between them.
Dytie's fingers were soft and gentle enough, but there was something
about her touch and her close presence that set him shivering.
Conceivably, it was her odor, which wasn't strong or even unpleasant,
just completely unfamiliar. She looked after him rather wistfully, but
did not try to follow. He faced her across the room.

"Well, that's my story, Dytie," he said a bit breathlessly. "And now I
want to ask my questions. Just what kind of a cat have you got, that
Fun Incorporated could hope to bribe the federal government with it? Is
it a mutant with telepathic powers and able to control emotions? Is it
a throwback, or maybe deliberately bred back to an otherwise extinct
animal? Is it some cockeyed triumph of Soviet genetics, working along
lines our scientists don't accept? Damn it, is it even some sort of
Egyptian god, like Sacheverell thinks? It's your turn to talk, Dytie."

But instead of answering him, she merely smiled and said, "'Scuse me,
Phil, but that long story yours really long. Be right back."

He expected her to walk out the window and wondered what he'd do. But
she merely went into the bathroom and shut the door.

He paced around, unbearably keyed up, lifting small objects and putting
them down again. Nervously he turned on the radio, sight and sound,
though he didn't look at it and didn't understand a word of what the
inane sports gossipist was loudly yapping about the feats, follies and
frivolities of the muscle stars. Then on his next circuit of the room,
he happened to tread hard as he passed the radio, and something went
wrong with it, so that the sound sank to a very low mumble and he was
once more alone in his agitation.

So much so that he jumped when he heard a small noise behind him.

The hall door had opened. Mitzie Romadka was standing just outside,
looking both adolescent and weary in faded blue sweater and slacks. A
lock of her long, dark hair trailed in front of her ear. She fixed on
Phil an unhappy, defiant stare.

"Last night I said 'Goodbye forever' and I meant it," she began
abruptly. "So don't get any ideas. I've come here to warn you about
something." Her voice broke a little. "Oh, it's all such an awful
mess." She bit her lip and recovered herself. "It isn't just that
Carstairs, Llewellyn and Buck hate me, or that you tried to make me
get mushy and humble. When I came home by the service chute early this
morning, I overheard my father talking with two other men. I listened
and found out that he's a Soviet agent and that his job now is to get
the green cat no matter how much killing it takes. And he thinks you
have it."

Phil looked at her and the hours between were gone and he was back in
the little tangled square at dawn and Mitzie was about to leave him,
and all his snapping nervous tension flowed in a new and steadier
channel.

"Darling," he said softly and carefully, as if a sudden noise might
make her vanish, "Mitzie darling, I wasn't trying to humble you."

"Oh?" she said, tucking the lock of hair back of her ear.

He moved toward her very slowly. "Actually I was just being conceited
and I was jealous--both of you and your boy friends."

"Be very careful what you say, Phil," she whispered fearfully. "Be very
honest."

"All right then," he said, "I was trying to humble you; I was doing my
best to. I was full of the sort of vanity and condescension that comes
from understanding too much. I didn't know that your kind of defiance
and glory has a place in the world. Mitzie, I love you."

He put his arms around her and she didn't vanish. The feeling of her
body against his wasn't like anything he'd imagined. It was simply slim
and quite trusting and terribly tired.

Then her chin lifted from his shoulder and he was shoved back about six
feet.

Mitzie was glaring at and beyond him. He was relieved that she didn't
seem to have a gun, or knife, or claws, or anything like that.

He looked around. Dytie da Silva, leaning against the bathroom door,
was watching them quizzically. "'Allo," she greeted them cheerfully,
then asked Phil, "Girl friend?"

Mitzie turned pale. "How many do you try to take on at once?" she spat
at Phil.

"Don worry," Dytie advised relaxedly. "He very timid at first."

"Oh!" Mitzie exclaimed loudly, and stamped on the floor with both feet
at once.

The radio came on loud again. "... long been known that she and her
husband weren't on sleeping terms. But ironically her fans had to wait
until what, with the outlawing of male-female wrestling, was probably
her last professional appearance, before getting a glimpse of her new
boy friend."

In the middle of the bright screen was Phil, with a dazed look and a
silly smile on his face. Juno's arm was clutched around him and she was
shouting "... even I gotta have a love life! And don't you be insulting
it!"

"Oh!" Mitzie shouted, crashed the palm of her hand against Phil's left
cheek, ran out the door and slammed it behind her. Phil stood there a
few seconds. Then he turned off the radio and wiped the tears out of
his left eye.

"Why you no chase?" Dytie inquired pleasantly. "Don worry, Phil, she
come back. She really love you all more. She proud you such virile man,
have many girls."

"Please," Phil groaned, lifting his hand. "That was good-bye forever."

"Forever is never. She come back," Dytie said.

And just then there was a timid knock at the door. Phil opened it,
wondering whether he should slap Mitzie right away or wait. Dr. Anton
Romadka pointed significantly at Phil's neck with a stun-gun and walked
in.

The small psychoanalyst looked nattily professional in the
old-fashioned business suit, white shirt and necktie affected by some
doctors. There was even a vest buttoned over his little paunch. His
left cheek was as smooth as his gleaming bald head; evidently he'd
covered the scratches with skin film. His expression radiated fatherly
good will and reasonableness, though he kept the stun-gun pointed
straight at Phil and every now and then his gaze flickered to Dytie.

"Phil," he began, "I shall not deny the statement my daughter just
made about me, for if you will only consider carefully, it will
make us allies and comrades. Who could know as well as you, Phil,
how hideously psychotic American civilization has become? You've
personally experienced what it can do to the brain, the body, the
sense organs. And who could appreciate as well as you, Phil, the
sanity of the Workers' Republics, where under the first firm rule of
Marxist fact and absolute science, all psychosis is impossible--because
all irrationalisms, all illusion (including the mad vaporings of a
gangrened capitalism and its pseudo-science) are inconceivable."

Phil found himself goggling his eyes and vaguely nodding. He shook
himself. Romadka's cheery voice was remarkably hypnotic.

"Of course, I should have realized all this last night, Phil, and
appealed to your reason," said Romadka as he kept the stun-gun
trained on Phil's neck with geometric precision. "But I was hurried
and emotionally upset--even our agents are not wholly immune to the
American infection when living with it--and I made several mistakes.
Among other things I did not take my unfortunate daughter into account
early enough, though I am certainly glad she came to warn you, since it
enabled me to locate you. Which in turn will enable you, Phil, and your
charming companion, to enjoy the bracing sanity of the Soviets."

The small psychiatrist smiled and carefully propped himself on the
arm of the foam chair. His voice became genially confidential. "And
now, children," he said, for the first time including Dytie in his
nod, "I am going to tell you how you can do a great service to the
illusion-immune state and win an undying welcome when you reach its
realistic shores. Psychotic capitalism, faced by total defeat in the
next war, has loosed against the Workers' Republics a final filthy
weapon: its own collective madnesses and herd delusions, catalyzed by
subtle electronic and chemical bombardments of the collective Soviet
nerve tissue. To date this capitalist poison in the Soviet Pan-Union
has largely taken the form of delusions involving green cats. Don't
mistake me, these green cats are undoubtedly real. It is my firm belief
that they are ordinary cats with tiny electronic senders surgeried
into their bodies, and with hormone spraying capacities comparable in
their vileness to those of skunks. Although the green cats are possibly
not the most important element in the assault on the Soviet psyche,
they are the main stage props in that assault. Unfortunately, we have
not been able to lay our hands on one of these creatures, in order
to confirm our deductions and shape proper counter measures. It is
absolutely essential that we do so."

"But there's only one green cat," Phil objected, genuinely puzzled,
"and it's supposed to be attacking America. It isn't, of course."

"I'll say it isn't. My boy, I am giving you the Marxist facts," Romadka
assured him gravely. "Those stories you have heard are merely blinds
put out by the capitalist government to conceal from its own work
slaves and pseudo scientists the enormity of its actions. What has
happened is that a green cat has escaped from a government laboratory
here. You led me to that cat once, Phil. You can do it again."

"I can't," Phil said mildly.

"Phil, you can," Romadka assured him.

"But you got him once," Phil objected, "and all you did was let him go
again."

For the first time a shadow of impatience darkened Romadka's geniality.
"I told you I made some mistakes last night. I let someone get a
hypo-beam on me, probably a drug spray too. For a time I wasn't
responsible for my actions. It was all I could do to escape the FBL
raid. But it won't happen again." His voice grew brisk. "So come on
along with me, Phil, and bring your friend. There's no more time for
discussion."

"But--" Phil began.

Dytie da Silva stepped into the foreground. "Me no go," she told
Romadka. "Why should I? You sound crazy head. 'Lusion-'mune state?
'Rationalisms impossible? Abs'lute science? All nonsense!"

The psychoanalyst lifted his eyebrows at her accent and sentiments. "I
was just about to take up your case, young lady. Why are you here in
the first place?"

"Just come from room across," Dytie told him, jerking a thumb at the
window.

Romadka studied her through narrowed eyes behind which memory seemed to
be at work. Suddenly he smiled thinly. "The description tallies," he
said. "You're the young woman Mr. Gish watched undressing last night,
and onto whom he grafted a remarkable delusion."

"Phil, you never tell me about that," Dytie said, looking at him
brightly.

"Naturally he wouldn't," Romadka said, a bit primly.

"Why not?" Dytie demanded. "I don care. If he like, okay."

Romadka looked at her contemptuously. "A common exhibitionist, I see.
Nymphomania too."

Dytie planted her hands on her hips. "Look, I no say long words good.
But your diagnose wrong there. Not nym'omania--satyr'asis. I show you."
And then and there she started to peel off a stocking. Phil watched in
fascinated horror.

Romadka stood up angrily. "Of all the--" he began. "If you think that
some crude appeal to my sexual urges--"

But at that moment Dytie pulled off her shoe and foot, and held out
her dainty black hoof, fur-tufted fetlock and slim pastern for his
inspection. "Okay, 'lusion-'mune," she said grimly. "Take good look.
Satyr'asis!"

Dr. Romadka's knees shook. His face was gray. His eyes bulged.

Without warning, Dytie stooped, spun around, and let go with a very
accurate kick. The stun-gun shot out of Romadka's trembling hand and
clattered against the wall beyond. Romadka snatched his hand away as if
the hoof were hell, and stumbled frantically out of the room. The sound
of his rapid, uneven footsteps slowly faded out. Phil knew just how he
felt. It was all he could do not to follow him.

Dytie began to laugh uproariously. While doing so, she hobbled over to
the door, shut it and then picked up Romadka's gun.

"This stun-gun?" she asked Phil.

Phil wet his lips and clutched at the table for support. He knew he
must be quite as pale as Romadka. "Dytie," he finally managed to say,
his teeth chattering, "you come from a country a lot farther away than
Argentina."

She smiled apologetically. "Thas right, Phil. I got longer story yours
tell."

Phil nodded shakily. "But first, if you please ..." he faltered, and
pointed at the shoe, foot and crumpled stocking she'd dropped on the
floor.

"Sure, Phil. I un'erstand." She picked them up and sat down on the edge
of the bed to put them on. Phil followed her movements unwillingly, but
when it came to the point where she was about to thrust her hoof into
the deep well in the false foot and the platform he flinched and looked
away.

Meanwhile she was saying matter-of-factly, "You no tell 'lusion-'mune
man, but you got idea where pussycat is?"

"No," he replied nervously, "but I know where I might be able to find
out."

"Is in this city?"

"Yes."

"You take me there, Phil?"

"I guess so."

"Don you want find pussycat too, Phil?"

"Yes, I think I do."

"Okay, thas fine. You can look now."

He forced himself to steal a glance at her, then let out a sigh of
relief. Her two legs were once more just like any other girl's.
Illusion, he decided, was at times the Bread of Life.

"And now," he said, "you can answer those questions of mine."

But just then there was more rapping at the door.

"This time girl friend," Dytie told him optimistically.

But Phil was taking no more chances. He switched on the one-way
peephole first, and looked straight into the face of Dave Greeley.

When Phil whispered "Federal Bureau of Loyalty," to Dytie, she jumped
up. During his long narrative she had asked him several questions
about that organization, he had answered them in detail, and she had
apparently formed some very definite conclusions. "We got beat it,
Phil. No time question-answer now." And she lightly sprang to the
window sill and walked across the ladder.

It wasn't as long as the beam at the Akeleys', but it was ten times
as high and Phil wasn't drunk. If he hadn't crossed the beam at the
Akeley's and gone down the service chute at the Romadkas', he would
never have dared it. His heart was hammering as he let himself down
into Dytie's room. He turned around with some vague idea of removing
the ladder. He heard a crash in his room. Dytie grabbed him.

"No time now," she said. And she urged him out of her room into the
corridor.

Seconds later they were entering the elevator on her side of the
building. "Hey, that's the up button," he warned as she punched it.

"I know, Phil," she said reassuringly.

Emerging on the roof, Phil felt for a moment a big sense of freedom.
The sodium mirror had not quite set, and everything around was bright
although the lower part of the sky was dark and many stars showed in it.

Then he saw the half dozen copters swinging in low toward them like
june bugs.

Dytie was hustling him along, but only toward an empty corner of the
roof. He resented her pointless display of energy. A mighty voice from
the sky commanded them to stop.

Dytie halted almost at the edge of the roof, felt around in the air,
climbed a couple of feet up into it and felt around again.

There was the sound of a copter scraping, bouncing and grounding behind
them.

Dytie opened in the air a small doorway that was black as ink, and
climbed inside. She turned around, her face a pale mask in an inky
rectangle, urged, "Come on, Phil," and stretched a white arm out of the
rectangle down toward him.

Phil stared at this weird air-framed portrait. Beneath it he could
clearly see the sheer walls of the building opposite and the dizzying
ribbon of street fifty floors below.

Behind him men shouted and there was another shattering command from
the sky.

Phil grabbed Dytie's wrist. His other hand, fumbling blindly, found an
invisible rung in the air. So did his foot. He scrambled up the air and
pitched over the sill of the inky doorway, into an inky sack and found
a curving floor under him. Rolling over, he saw behind him a rectangle
of the sky with three stars in it. The rectangle narrowed and vanished,
and there was no light at all.

Then he started to fall.




                                 XVII


Phil struck out wildly, with the instinctive hope that a man falling to
his death could warp space to his advantage if he tensed his muscles
sufficiently.

Then he wondered how long it would take a man to fall fifty floors, but
the mathematics were beyond anything he could do quickly enough in his
head.

Then he asked himself why the inky sack was falling with him.

Then he retched, but brought up only the ghosts of a yeast-spread
sandwich and a glass of soybean milk consumed a day ago.

He continued to fall.

Soft light sprang up around him. He was inside a sphere some eight feet
in diameter and his feet were near the center, while his cheek gently
brushed the sphere's soft lining. Swiveling his gaze past his feet, he
noticed Dytie da Silva sprawled negligently in the air and intently
studying a screen set in the lining of the sphere.

But he was still falling.

Phil knew little enough about space ships, but he knew they couldn't
safely go into free-fall without accelerating first to get some kind of
edge on earth's gravitational field.

But there had been no acceleration.

"Dytie!" he yelled, and in the confined space the noise was deafening.
"What's happening to me?"

Wincing a bit, she looked around at him. "Shh, Phil. You in free-fall
but not falling. I turn off grav'ty."

Still retching, Phil tried to comprehend that idea. "Turn off gravity?"
He was still falling, but no longer so sure he was going to hit
anything.

Dytie looked along his helplessly sprawled body at his face. "Sure,
Phil. Grav'ty go round this little boat just like light do. Grav'ty no
pull it, light no show it."

"That's why it was invisible?"

"Vis'ble? Nobody see it. Wait bit, Phil, got do things."

"But in a ship like this you could travel--" Phil began, his mind
suddenly full of dizzying speculations.

"This not ship, Phil, just dinghy. No talk now."

Phil's falling acquired a direction. He found himself drifting gently
toward Dytie. "Here 'side me, Phil," she instructed. A few moments
later he was comfortably stretched out on his stomach beside Dytie, his
head poised like hers above the screen.

And then the speed of his new directed fall increased, although the
sphere was no longer falling with him, until his body was comfortably
pressed against the soft lining. He deduced after a while that they
must be accelerating, although he got his chief clue from the screen.

At first he couldn't interpret the picture on the screen. It was in
shades of violet and showed a few large squares and oblongs with dark
ribbons between most of them. On the central square were a number of
dots, which slowly moved as he watched them--also three or four crosses
with blobs at their centers. Gradually the squares and rectangles
shrank, while more of the same came onto the screen from the edges. He
realized that he was looking down at the city and that the dots, which
he could hardly distinguish any more, were the men hunting them, while
the crosses were the copters.

For a bit his stomach chilled at the thought of being poised so high
above the city and going higher. But then he began to lose himself
in the wonder of the picture. Phil hadn't traveled a great deal by
air and had seen even less when he'd done so, and the growing picture
of the city was enthralling. He began to feel rather like a god and
to speculate how he'd mete out justice to mankind if he owned this
mysterious little dinghy. Visions of sudden descents on dictators
danced in his head.

"We soon high 'nough, Phil," she said. "Hold on hands, stick feet under
bar."

He obeyed her instructions, taking hold of two handles and thrusting
his legs under a large padded bar. A moment later he knew the reason,
for he began to be pulled away from the screen and had to hold on
tight. He deduced that they were decelerating. After a bit this
stopped too and he was once more "in free-fall but not falling."
Meanwhile, the picture in the screen had become one of the whole
city--a checkerboard of tiny squares not unlike a map.

Dytie produced and unfolded an ordinary street map and flattened it out
beside the screen.

"You say you know where find out pussycat is. You say in city. Show
Dytie."

Phil forced his mind to tackle this problem. His first realization was
just how flimsy the hope was on which he'd based his statement to Dytie
that he might be able to locate the green cat. It depended on Billig
having the green cat, on Jack Jones knowing where Billig had hidden
from the FBL, and on Jack being in hiding himself at the Akeleys'.
Still, it was the only way he knew of getting a line on Lucky.

And then it occurred to him that he didn't know where the Akeley house
was located. But a sudden memory of a huge show window full of marching
mannequins came to his rescue. The Akeley house was next to Monstro
Multi-Products, and everybody knew the address of that vast department
store. He located it for Dytie on the street map and then on the
screen. Soon they were accelerating downward, so that he had to cling
to the handles again, while the squares on the screen were growing
larger, with the large square that was Monstro Multi-Products moving
toward the center.

He started to ask Dytie to answer the questions he'd put to her in his
room, but she cut him off with, "Like say, very long story. No time
now. First find pussycat. Very 'portant."

The rectangle representing the roof of Monstro Multi-Products now
filled quite a bit of the screen, and the streets beside it were broad
ribbons. Their descent slowed. Dytie maneuvered the dinghy around the
department store until Phil spotted, at the base of the building next
to it, the tiny slot indicating the cubical pocket of space in which
the Akeley house stood, robbed of its air-rights.

As they dropped slowly into the canyon of the street past windowed and
windowless walls, Phil felt a witchery in the violet version of the
city. He could make out beetles and tinier bugs--cars and people.

Soon they were hovering only ten feet above the violet sidewalk and the
unsuspecting pedestrians.

Then Dytie slipped the dinghy between the rail of the sidewalk and the
"floor" of the tall building over the Akeley house. The violet picture
grew quite dark. They descended a little farther, past the top-level
street and the one next below it until they were a couple of feet above
the pile of bricks from the fallen chimney. Dytie moved some controls.
The screen went blank, the lights went out, and with breath-taking
suddenness Phil's body crunched into the soft lining as normal weight
returned.

"Got legs down for dinghy to stand on," Dytie told him. "Quiet now,
Phil."

A slit of lesser darkness appeared beyond Dytie and widened to a
rectangle through which, after a bit, he could make out a section of
the Akeley porch. Then the rectangle was obstructed as Dytie climbed
out through it. Phil followed her, feet first, moving them around until
they found the rungs, and carefully climbed down until he could step
off onto the Akeleys' gritty front yard. Then he looked up. As far as
he could see there was absolutely nothing above him except the two
upper-level streets and the dull black "ceiling" above the house. Not
only did light "go around" the dinghy, but it did so without getting
shuffled.

"All safe," Dytie assured him. "Nobody climb over rocks, bump in ladder
legs. This place, Phil?"

The Akeley house looked more ancient and dangerously dilapidated than
ever, canted forward at least a foot after the chimney's collapse. A
gaping wound had been left in the two upper stories and nothing had
been done to bandage it. However, a little light glowed through the
shutters of the living-room windows.

Stepping gingerly, with an eye cocked on the ominously slanting wall,
Phil led Dytie up onto the porch and around the corner of it. He
hesitated for a moment in front of the old door with the tiny cat door
cut in the bottom of it, then lifted his hand to the cat-headed knocker
and banged it twice. After a while there were footsteps, the old style
peephole was opened, and this time Phil immediately recognized the
watery gray eye as Sacheverell's.

"Greetings, Phil," the latter said. "Who's that with you?"

"A young lady named Dytie da Silva."

Sacheverell opened the door. "Come right in. Fate must be at work. Her
brother's here."




                                 XVIII


The Akeley living room was as crazily cluttered as when Phil last saw
it. No one had done much, if any, cleaning up after the fight. In
addition, there were a large number of dirty plates, cups and glasses
abandoned in odd places. Judging by the remnants of food and drink in
them, three informal meals had been consumed since last night, not
counting snacks.

The black velvet curtains at the far end of the room had been pulled
aside, revealing the altar Sacheverell had prepared for Lucky in what
had been the dining room a century ago. It consisted of a small table
or box set against the far wall and covered with reddish-brown velvet
that trailed to the floor in graceful folds. Fastened to the wall above
it was an ancient ankh or crux ansata, the Egyptian cross with looped
top, symbolizing procreation and life. On lower tables to either side
were large unlit candles and statuettes of many of the Egyptian gods:
queenly Isis, whip-wielding Osiris, jackal-jawed Anubis and cat-headed
Bast herself.

And there was the same profusion of cats, though they were no longer
peaceful as they'd been when Lucky was in the house. They stalked about
with ears drawn back and fur fluffed fearsomely; they ambushed each
other from behind and under furniture; they snarled and jumped whenever
they met. Those wolfing the bits of food left on plates would lift
their heads every few seconds to hiss warnings. The only one asleep was
impiously curled on Lucky's altar.

The dark low table inlaid with a silver pentacle had been righted and
placed in the center of the room. On it were glasses and a bottle of
brandy. Beside it sat Juno Jones, still in her dowdy dress with the
ripped sleeves hanging from her meaty arms, but with her flower covered
hat once more jammed down over her cropped blonde hair. She looked
sullen and on the defensive.

Across the table from her, leaning forward in their chairs, sat Dion
da Silva and Morton Opperly. Both of them stood up as Sacheverell
triumphantly swept Phil and Dytie into the room, saying "Our council of
war--or perhaps I should say muscular peace--is complete!"

Opperly smiled courteously, seeming completely at home in these wild,
wonderful and crummy surroundings; perhaps a mind hungry for any and
all facts liked a grubby bohemian atmosphere.

Dion da Silva on the other hand, as soon as he spotted Dytie, put
down the big glass of whiskey he was holding and whooped out three or
four words in a foreign language, then caught himself and changed to,
"'Allo, darling! Great see. 'Allo, 'allo, 'allo."

By this time he had Dytie in his arms and was hugging her with a
hungriness that struck Phil as distinctly unbrotherly. She wasn't being
any too sisterly about it herself. But finally she pushed him away with
a gasp. "Thas 'nough," she told him. "Great see too, dumbhead. 'Bout
time turn up."

Dion looked hurt for as long as it took him to get his glass of
whiskey. "Know what doing?" he asked his sister excitedly.

"Yes, get drunk," she told him and whispered to Phil, "Know what Dion
short for? God wine. Pick good name, eh?"

"No get drunk," Dion asserted with some dignity. Then his excitement
got the better of him again and he burst out with, "We finding
pussycat!"

There was a giggle that Phil recognized. Looking around, he saw Mary
Akeley sitting in her alcove backed by her shelves of wax dolls and
busy at work sewing clothes for another under a large magnifier.
Sacheverell's witch-nosed young wife had shifted to an almost
off-the-bosom evening dress and tied a huge green bow around her coarse
dark hair.

"That man, he cuts me up in little pieces every time he says a word,"
she gurgled, without pausing in her work. "He's so cute."

"Thanks, sweetheart," Dion replied, gayly waving his glass at her, "I
cute all over. All full s'prises. Show sometime."

Dytie suppressed a guffaw and whispered to Phil, "'Member tell you: two
legs, milk glands?" Phil nodded, though he judged that Dion's interest
in Mary didn't nearly come up to his thirsty adoration of Dora Pannes.
The satyr (Phil felt shocked at how glibly the word came into his mind)
was just keeping his hand in.

Sacheverell ignored the flirtatious interchange. His sun-burned
features gleamed with controlled excitement. "The young lady is Dytie
da Silva, Dion's sister," he told Opperly and Juno. Then he turned to
Phil. "I suppose you're wondering why Dr. Opperly and Señor da Silva
are here. Well, I brought them along with me from the Foundation
because both of them are genuinely interested in _him_, and among the
lot of us I think we have a very good chance of delivering _him_ from
his enemies."

"What he mean, him?" Dytie asked Phil. "He means pussycat?"

Phil nodded.

"I mean the Green One," Sacheverell confirmed a bit reprovingly. "I
mean Bast Returned, the Bringer of Love and Concord."

Dytie didn't bother with that, but went on to whisper to Phil, "He say
Op'ly. Op'ly nice slim man there good face? Meet us please."

Sacheverell was getting set for a speech and he gave Phil a faintly
pained look when the latter performed the desired introduction.
Dr. Opperly surprised Phil by gallantly kissing Dytie's hand and
then not letting go of it. He didn't behave at all like a scientist
of eighty-plus years should. And Dytie turned on a lot more charm
than Phil recalled her using on him. As the two of them stood there
murmuring happy but probably highly intelligent nothings to each other,
Phil felt a jealous impulse to call out to Opperly, "Wait until you
see her real legs," but he somehow suspected that Opperly wouldn't be
shocked at Dytie's real legs or anything about her. He had noted a look
of surprise come into Opperly's face as the latter took Dytie's hand,
and from his own experience he'd known why, but Opperly's surprise had
turned not to revulsion, but to eager interest.

Opperly's voice suddenly became sharp, clear and romantic: "I'd be
delighted to, Miss da Silva."

Dytie turned to the others with a self-satisfied smile. "Op'ly me got
much talk 'bout," she announced. "'Scuse please. Dion you take care
pussycat business me."

And she and Dr. Opperly strolled out through the dining room arm in
arm, beaming at each other and chatting happily.

Sacheverell looked after them a shade critically. "They don't seem to
have any great regard for the importance of the situation, I must say,
so we'll carry on by ourselves in making plans to rescue the Green One.
Mr. Gish, what have you to contribute?"

In a few sentences Phil sketched how he'd found Lucky at Fun
Incorporated, lost him again, then caught up with him at the Humberford
Foundation just before Dora Pannes grabbed him.

As soon as Phil finished, Mary Akeley cut in. She was through sewing
clothes and had begun to put them on a relatively bulky doll which
Phil recognized as the portrait of Moe Brimstine she'd started on
last night. To his amazement, Phil noticed that she was even putting
underwear on the doll and slipping almost microscopically tiny objects
into its pants pockets with a tiny tweezer.

She said, "Did you happen to find out, Phil, why little old Dr. Romadka
kidnapped those three cats of ours?"

Phil explained, as briefly and unsickeningly as he could, what had
happened to them.

Mary reached over her shoulder and got the doll that was the image of
Dr. Romadka. She fixed on it her witchiest stare.

"Slow, slow acid dripped on your forehead," she incanted with a
sincerity that sent gooseflesh coursing under Phil's shirt. "And I hope
it's days before it gets in your eye. That's the first and mildest of
your torments." She picked up the doll she'd been dressing and informed
it, "That goes for you, too. After the acid really gets in the first
eye, we deviate to other parts of your body. To begin with...."

A sudden cat fight prevented Phil from finding out just how nasty
Mary Akeley's imagination could get. Sacheverell separated the five
squalling combatants with a few painless but strategic kicks. Then he
hitched up his turquoise slacks and said, looking at his wife severely,
"Now perhaps we can forget all hates and other dark vibrations and get
down to business. Here's the situation, Mr. Gish. Earlier today, Juno
overheard her husband Jackie tell Cookie where Billig and Mr. Brimstine
are hiding...."

"Just Moe Brimstine," Juno corrected dourly.

"Comes to the same thing," Sacheverell went on. "Now Jackie and Cookie
are safely asleep upstairs...."

"Yes," Juno butted in again, "but they're not going to stay that way
too much longer."

"Not after what you put in their whiskey?" Sacheverell asked her with a
thin smile.

"Listen," Juno told him, "those two guys have had more things in their
whiskey than ever got wrote down in books jerks like you read. They're
tough, the little punks."

"Well, if they do wake up, I'm sure you can take care of the two of
them. So there's the situation, Mr. Gish, and the only trouble is
that Mrs. Jones won't tell us where Mr. Brimstine is. She started to,
but then she shut up like an air lock. We've pleaded with her, we've
implored her, we've promised her things. I've done my best to explain
to her just how cosmically important it is that the Green One be served
and worshipped properly, so that he will be able to change the world.
Señor da Silva flattered and jollied her, and Dr. Opperly was friendly
as anything. But she just won't talk."

"I sure won't talk to nuts like you," the female wrestler told him
wrathfully. "If you hadn't started acting so squirrely, I'd have
probably spilled it straight off. But I'm not the sort of person who
likes to be jollied or anything else--"

"'Scuse please," Dion interrupted. "No jolly, really mean. Much like
you, Juno Jones. Big strong woman."

"And I don't enjoy nut talk," Juno said to Sacheverell, ignoring da
Silva. "Every crazy reason you gave me for talking made me that much
surer I wouldn't." She took a drink and turned toward Phil, her elbows
on her correspondingly large knees. "Now, with you it's different," she
said. "You got a nut's idea of food, but outside of that you're pretty
human. And I gotta admit you're a gutsy little guy, because I saw you
go up against Brimstine and from what I hear you did some more of the
same later. But the main thing is that you own this crazy cat, or at
least you was looking for it when I first met you. And I don't believe
you had any nut ideas about it, though I thought so at the time. That
right, Phil? Or are you planning to do something cosmic with that cat?"

"I just want to find it," Phil said honestly.

"That settles it for me. It's your cat and you got a right to know
where it is, even if you get killed trying to get it and I get into
all sorts of mucking trouble for telling you. You want I should tell
you in private, Phil, or just say it right out in front of all these
screwballs?"

"Thank you, Juno," Phil said quietly. "Just say it right out."

Juno opened her mouth--and then said, "Oh, Lord."

Phil turned around. Jack and Cookie were just coming in from the hall.

"Fine sort of wife you turned out to be," Jack informed Juno, striding
toward her with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. "Can't leave
you ten minutes but you start pulling some dumb trick." With circles
under his eyes and a day's growth of beard, the black-sweatered little
wrestler did a fair job of looking outraged and dejected. But Cookie,
automatically imitating his hero, could produce only an expression like
that of a blonde baby about to cry.

"Getting sneaky, too," Jack observed. "Spying on me."

"Underhanded," Cookie commented.

"Underhanded?" Juno banged the silver inlaid table so hard that it
jumped and she had to grab at her glass and the bottle. "Why, you two
stinkers are so permanently underhanded you couldn't play no game but
softball."

"Also, I don't like the company you keep," Jack continued. "The Ikeless
Joe was bad enough," he said, giving Phil the barest glance before
going on to da Silva, "but where between here and Pluto did you ever
pick up this silly greaser who can't even talk English?"

"This corny gigolo," Cookie added witheringly.

Dion, who until this moment had seemed merely interested, put down his
glass and frowned at Jack. "No like you," he asserted. "You want kick
in face, trample?"

Phil winced, visualizing it in the full, rich details.

"Do you know who you're talking to?" Cookie demanded of Dion.

"Don't brawl, boys," Mary called from the alcove, "at least until I've
finished this ticklish part." She was putting some finishing touches
on Moe Brimstine's face under the magnifier. "Then I think I'd like to
watch you tramp around, Dion man."

"Don't anybody worry," Jack said sadly. "I'm not looking for a fight
even if I was handed one. I'm too downhearted about this innocent,
thoughtless, uneducated wife of mine."

"Uneducated?" she exploded. "After being married to you all these
years? You got so many rotten ideas you're a whole university. Well,
I've graduated. And shut up, now, 'cause I got to tell Phil here where
he can find Moe Brimstine and maybe Billig and his cat."

Jack whirled toward her. "Juno, you don't know what you're saying. You
don't know what you'd be doing. Just come upstairs a minute and I'll
explain the whole deal."

"Come upstairs!" Juno mocked. "Tell that to the green farm girls trying
to break into the wrestling racket. Now look here, Phil. Brimstine...."

"Juno!" Jack yelled, "I didn't want to tell you in front of everybody,
but there's a million dollars riding on this deal for me and you, if
Billig pulls out of his trouble. Which he can do, so long as he has the
green cat to trade to the government. And look, Juno, Billig's lost
all his bodyguards and power and everything--he's got to depend on
Brimstine and me and Cookie."

Juno stared at him. For a second or two there was silence. Then
Sacheverell coughed delicately.

"Jack," he said unhurriedly, "I am convinced that you have a deep
appreciation of spiritual values. Your aura may flicker and dim, but in
the end it always glows out bright and clear. Yesterday you gave up ten
thousand dollars Moe Brimstine would have given you for the Green One,
just in order that we might worship him properly and help him change
the world. Now if you were willing to do that...."

"I know, I know," Jack snarled at him impatiently, "but this time it's
really big money."

Sacheverell looked up at the ceiling, as if he were silently telling
some god just how evil a world it was.

"I was flattered by you and Mary for a while," Jack went on. "I liked
your style and I fell for some of your wild ideas. I played along with
you to the tune of ten thousand dollars, though I won't say I wasn't
going to steal the green cat back and sell it to Brimstine after you'd
had your fun with it. But tuck your aura up over your ears and get this
through your head: this time it's really big money."

Sacheverell said, "Mary, remind me to burn our black sweaters tomorrow
morning."

From the look on Juno's face, Phil could tell that Jack had finally
done something to please her.

But he had done it rather too late. The satisfaction washed out of
Juno's face and only the grimness was left as she said to him, "That
million was just for you, Jack, or for you and Cookie until half a
minute ago. Another thing, Billig isn't going to pull out of this--and
if he did he's the kind of man who kills the people who save him. But
even if you got your million, I wouldn't take any part of it. Don't
get the idea that anybody, including that crazy green cat, has made
me go soft. It's just that I wouldn't ever accept anything from you,
Jack--not ever again." Without a pause she turned to Phil and said,
"Brimstine's behind the counter in the Bug-Eyed Bar in All Pleasures
Amusement Park. I'll take you to the exact spot."

At that moment, when everyone was watching Juno, a cool, scornful voice
spoke from the dining room: "And we'll be coming along."

Phil's head followed the others around. Standing in front of Lucky's
altar, his bulging forehead wrinkled with unsmiling amusement, was
Carstairs. To his left stood Llewellyn, eyes gleaming in his impassive
black face. To Carstairs' right lounged Buck, yawning but watchful.
Phil got the feeling that the hep-thugs were trying to look like the
muzzles of the weapons they held with casual proficiency. Close beside
Buck and a little behind him stood Mitzie Romadka.

Carstairs said, "We've been finding out some things about this green
cat ourselves." He could talk very softly because there wasn't any
noise in the room. "We think it would be a lot more desirable if we
were the ones who sold the cat to Uncle Sammy. You people are going to
help us get the cat. Incidentally, clown," he addressed Phil, "your
little girl friend here was responsible for our locating you people.
Isn't that so, Mitz?"

But Mitzie said nothing. To Phil, she looked remarkably pale,
tight-lipped and miserable for a girl enjoying a revenge.

"Yes," Carstairs continued, "she came whimpering to us a little while
ago, asking us to kidnap you or something silly like that. Can you
imagine, clown, your girl friend was stupid enough to think we'd be
pleased at her and even do something for her, after we'd kicked her
out of the gang and she'd skunked on us to Billig? Youthful illusions
die hard. Well, instead of that she did something for us. After a
little persuasion she told us all she knows about the green cat and you
people, also some addresses--including this one."

And now Phil saw that Mitzie was looking at him agitatedly and trying
to speak, but couldn't get her mouth open. He realized her mouth must
be taped shut with some transparent, non-reflecting material. Buck
noticed and twisted her wrist while thoughtfully watching her face.

Carstairs concluded, "There's not much more to say. You and you and
you"--and he stabbed a gun muzzle at Jack, Cookie and Sacheverell--"are
staying here with my friend Llewellyn. Dear little Mitz will stay here
too--that's partly in case you get any funny ideas, clown. The rest of
you are coming along with Buck and me on a thrill-packed trip to All
Pleasures. According to what Mitz tells us, you all may have useful
angles on catching this cat for us. Transportation's out in front."

Juno got up with a sullen shrug. Dion for once was very quiet. Phil
found himself wondering whether or not Opperly and Dytie had avoided
the hep-thugs.

Mary Akeley took the dolls depicting Moe Brimstine and Dr. Romadka, put
them in a big handbag, caught up a bolero jacket, and calmly announced,
"Well, I'm ready."




                                  XIX


                       THIRD MILLENNIUM THRILLS!

                        1000 FEET OF FREE-FALL!

                       RECORDED KISSES AND HUGS!
                       Cuddle Your Favorite Star
                         _Better Than Handies_

                   YOUR MIND CLEARED IN TEN MINUTES!
                        _Relive Your Childhood_
                   You'll Feel Ripping as a Rocket!

                   TEST YOUR STRENGTH AGAINST A BEM!

                            KILL MARTIANS!

                     THROW ROCKS AT GLAMOR GIRLS!

                         FLUORESCENT TATTOOS!

Those were a few of the signs that flared and blared at Phil as he was
marched across the springy, rubberized, plasti-bottle strewn grounds of
All Pleasures Amusement Park.

The government crack-down on Fun Incorporated had produced a few
tangible changes in Double AP, as far as Phil could judge from his last
visit. The burlesque juke boxes were padlocked, the rubberoid figures
that would shimmy orgiastically for a quarter were shrouded from view.
Dresses were perhaps an inch higher than usual on the bosoms of the
girls working in concessions. There didn't seem to be any shifty-eyed
gents recruiting special parties to meet a gambling robot or enjoy
some other form of illegal entertainment. In front of the side show
someone was painting out the sign that read, "See the Woman With Four
Mammary Glands!" Phil noticed Dion looking up at this defacement rather
wistfully.

Yet there was an uneasiness in the park, and it wasn't just that the
crowd was light. Barkers called out too suddenly and stopped too
soon. Customers hesitated uncomfortably in front of concessions, then
shuffled morosely on. Over-age glamor girls ready to dodge rubber
rocks, or have their bedclothes or skirts jerked off when a spaceball
hit its planet-simulating target, were a trifle hysterical in the
challenges they shrilled at passing patrons. The cries coming faintly
from the top of the 1,000 foot drop in the Spaceship Ride weren't the
usual terrified but delighted squeals; they sounded more like wails.

Perhaps the fall of Fun Incorporated had caused people who pathetically
treasured their thrills, or the money to be made from them, to wonder,
"What next?" Perhaps President Barnes' rambling apocalyptic speeches
had finally taken effect, making people ask themselves what they were
getting from the so-called pleasures of life, especially the more
highly advertised ones. Perhaps the government directive just now being
barked from the public news-speakers for the destruction of all cats
had given people a "We'd be safer at home" feeling.

Or it may have been that the uneasiness at Double AP was part of a
general feeling gripping America, a feeling that had been gathering
power in the unconscious and just now burst into thought, a feeling
that something that even the government couldn't handle was stalking
invisibly, whether for good or ill, behind each man.

Of course, for Phil the menacing stalkers were two very definite
figures: Carstairs and Buck, who at the moment were shepherding their
unwilling assistants through the pupil of one of several surrealistic
eyes that served as the entrances to the Bug-Eyed Bar.

Tonight the gaudy tavern was emptier than the Park outside. Its
famous Ten-G Highballs and Stun-Gun Cocktails were going begging. Its
notoriously drink-hungry hostesses were conspicuous by their absence.
The only two customers were being served soda pop by the smaller of the
two bartenders, making it very simple for Juno, Phil, Mary and Dion to
climb onto pneumo-barstools in front of the other bartender. Carstairs
and Buck stood close behind them.

Phil found it difficult to believe that the man in front of them was
Moe Brimstine. For one thing, his hair was red, even to the stubble
on his cheeks and chin. For another, the eyes that Moe had always
kept behind dark glasses were as small and squinting as a pig's. And
although the fugitive from the FBL must recognize several of them, he
didn't show it in any way that Phil could discern. He looked them all
over stolidly, polishing the speckless bar with the immemorial soiled
towel. For that matter, the whole bar looked much as a bar might have
looked fifty or a hundred years before; robots could not supervise
B-girls, nor had they ever been legalized as bouncers.

"What's your pleasure?" the big red-head asked.

Phil felt Carstairs' gun dig his ribs. He tried to wet his lips.

"Mr. Brimstine, I want my green cat," he croaked.

Moe Brimstine wrinkled his forehead. "That made with creme de menthe,
chartreuse, or green fire?"

"I mean my live green cat," Phil told him.

"We don't serve drunks here," Brimstine said evenly. "Your friend's had
one too many. What would you ladies and gentlemen care for?"

Mary Akeley opened her handbag and laid the Moe Brimstine doll on the
counter before her. She looked at it thoughtfully for a moment and
with deliberate finickiness took off its tiny dark glasses. Its eyes
were piggy. She smiled. She replaced the glasses and fished out of her
handbag a hatpin, a pair of scissors, a small knife, a little pair of
pliers, a sample size flame-pack, a tiny iron with insulated handle,
and a white crusted black bottle, and lined them up in a neat row.

"This isn't a powder room, lady," Brimstine said. "Order your drinks."

Phil couldn't help but be impressed by the big man's composure, and
then without warning he felt a gust of terror that he knew at once
had nothing to do with guns behind him and could hardly stem from the
childish paraphernalia for black magic Mary Akeley had set out.

He could tell that the gust had hit Moe Brimstine too, for the big man
dropped the towel and backed up against the shelves of bottles behind
him.

Mary Akeley said, "Mr. Brimstine, you stole the Green One, whom my
husband adores as Bast. You are going to suffer until you return him."
Her voice shook a little at first, then settled down to a cold and
cruel monotone. "I'm sorry I couldn't bring my little rack and iron
maiden, but these implements are quite adequate." She ignited the
flame-pack and held the tiny iron over it.

Phil heard Juno draw in her breath and Carstairs give a funny grunt
behind him. The end of the iron grew red. Mary Akeley turned the doll
over on its face and touched it lightly with the iron. Its pants smoked.

Moe Brimstine gasped loudly and clapped his hand behind him. Then he
grabbed tremblingly at the doll, but Mary Akeley closed her hand around
its two arms and its middle. Instantly Brimstine's arms clamped down
against his sides and stayed there. Mary stood the doll up. Brimstine
straightened. She moved it away from her a few inches. Brimstine backed
up into the shelves. Sweat beaded his forehead. Mary unexpectedly
flicked the doll on the cheek with the hot iron. Moe Brimstine gasped
again in pain and jerked his head back.

"This sort of thing is going to go on until you give us the Green One,"
the young witch said matter-of-factly. Phil saw that a red spot had
appeared on Moe Brimstine's ashen cheek.

"Only it's going to get much worse fast," she amplified, reaching for
the white crusted bottle. Moe Brimstine started to say something, but
she clamped the thumb of the hand holding the doll over its little
mouth.

"After a while I'll be much more apt to trust the things you say," she
explained. Moe Brimstine's face grew red and his eyes bulged.

Then a shadow came strolling softly along the top of the bar. Turning
fearfully as he shrank away from it, Phil saw that it was green
and silken and had a wise and winsome face. In a split second of
realization Phil knew that it was Lucky who had breathed supernatural
terror at them, just as he had at the Humberford Foundation; Lucky
who had opened Moe Brimstine's mind and built a bridge between it and
Mary's, so that suggestion had made him experience everything happening
to the doll.

And then Phil realized that no further unpleasant things were going
to happen to Moe Brimstine and that no one was going to cause any
trouble, even Carstairs or Buck, for suddenly all terror vanished and
friendliness and invincible good will began to pour out of Lucky like
Scotch from a bottle. Phil could feel it enter and fill all the others.
There were little sighs and chuckles. Mary Akeley's lean finger shrank
from the white crusted bottle, then hurriedly swept all the implements
off the bar into her bag.

Lucky stood in front of Phil and stretched, slowly and luxuriantly
working the muscles of his neck and back. Moe Brimstine beamed at the
green cat, and the happy creases around his little eyes suggested those
of Santa Claus. With an "If you don't mind?" to Phil, he reached out
his big hand and softly and wonderingly stroked the silky fur.

"You sure rescued Uncle Moe in the nick," he told Lucky, scratching
behind his ears. "I'm sincerely sorry for the things I did to you.
I don't understand them now, and I'm sure glad you got yourself
unstunned, though I don't understand how you did."

Then he straightened up and boomed out, "What'll it be, friends? The
drinks are on the house!" And they were, too--several quick, happy
rounds of them. Even Lucky got a cocktail compounded of milk, egg
white, powdered sugar and gin. On Phil's advice Moe put it behind the
bar so Lucky could consume it in private.

Buck let out an adolescent guffaw and handed two guns, butt-first, to
Brimstine.

"Reckon I better check my shootin' arns, podner," he explained,
adapting his hillbilly accent to cowboy lingo. Moe accepted them,
tested one by shooting out a light in the ceiling, and put them away.
Likewise Carstairs gave up his weapons, with the added injunction that
Moe was to sell them and use the money to buy more liquor when the bar
gave out.

Juno, with a smacking big whiskey in front of her, leaned across Phil
and assured Mary, "From now on, I'll believe every word nuts tell me,
especially you and Sash."

"And I'll always tell you when we're lying," Mary assured her back,
rather mumblingly, since Dion was nuzzling her.

As customers drifted into the bar by ones and twos, Brimstine called
them to join the party. As soon as they did, they became as friendly
and glowing as anyone else. After a time there was a small crowd and
Moe did nothing but pour, shake and serve. Shortly he quit the shaking
part.

Mary broke away from Dion and picked up the Brimstine doll and hugged
and kissed it, saying, "You dear, dear man." Moe paused for a moment in
his bartending to shut his eyes and quake ecstatically.

Then Lucky came out from under the bar and jumped on it and walked up
and down in a very lordly way but with a definite lurch. After a bit
he jumped down in front of the bar and the crowd parted for him. The
drunken green creature zigzagged with dignity toward an exit.

Moe heaved himself over the bar, spilling several drinks, and called
out, "Come on, everyone, let's have fun! Everything at Double AP is
free!"

And so a bacchanalian procession began to weave through All Pleasures
Amusement Park, with Moe serving as Bacchus, Lucky as a leopard, and,
thought Phil, if the others only knew about Dion.

There were nymphs a-plenty, as Moe invited each girl to leave her
concession after everybody that wanted had a turn and Moe had explained
how the games were gimmicked and all the prizes had been distributed or
at least offered.

Once or twice concession owners bleated indignantly at Moe's rallying
cry, "It's all free, folks!" But their objections always dissolved at
Lucky's arrival.

The procession grew steadily larger. Occasionally groups would leave it
to go on free rides, but there weren't as many of these groups as might
have been expected and they always seemed to be happy to get back.

Moe was enjoying himself with godlike capacity. He skipped like a lamb
on the rubberized surfacing. He had a word and a joke for everyone and
could always think of a new stunt to cap his last. Perhaps he reached
his high point when he loosed a tiger and two black panthers from the
animal show. Arousing no fear, they wove in and out of the procession
happily, accepting caresses from everyone but apparently getting the
most pleasure out of lowering their necks to rub Lucky's.

Phil was enjoying himself thoroughly, especially while romping hand
in hand with a cute red-head from the "Visit Vicious Venus" show, but
every now and then the thought of neglected dangers and duties returned
to nag him. On one of these occasions, Juno threw a big arm around his
neck, almost knocking his head off, and said, "Got troubles, Phil? Give
'em to Mama Juno and she'll throw 'em away. Oh boy, do I love that
green monkey! He's got the best little formula for living there is.
Hey, looka that!"

She was pointing at Carstairs and Buck, who had discovered a concession
titled in flaming red phospho-flare KICK THE LOVELY LADY INTO YOUR
ARMS and were happily struggling for the possession of a very large
mallet which apparently had something to do with the game. After some
puzzling, Phil understood. The game was the age old one of striking a
target on the ground which caused an indicator to jump up a pole--with
the typical late twentieth-century addition that, if the indicator
reached the top of the pole, not only did a bell ring and lights flare,
but a huge hinged lower leg with a cushioned boot swung down and rudely
lifted a lovely lady off a perch some three feet above the winner and
into his arms, if he were ready to catch her.

This last couldn't have been any too sure, since the lovely lady was
one of the glamor girls pushing fifty rather than forty. At present she
was glowering cynically at Carstairs and Buck, as if certain they were
infinitely more interested in the mallet than in her. She wasn't yet
under Lucky's influence, as the green cat had momentarily romped off
with the black panthers to the tail end of the procession.

The two happy hep-jerks got things settled between them and took many
mighty thumps at the target. The indicator jumped high but always
hesitated just heartbreakingly short of the top. The onlookers sighed
sympathetically. By this time most of the bacchanalian procession had
gathered around the "kick the lady" concession. It was strategically
located between two bars and opposite the "Mind Clearers," as they
chastely labeled themselves in blinking red fluorescents, and a dismal
cavern mouth called "Pluto's Palace," beside which was an inaccurate
model of the solar system with the planets revolving jerkily.

Moe Brimstine was refreshing himself with a pitcher of beer his
attendant nymphs had rushed him from one of the bars. Two black shapes
came undulating in from the outskirts in pursuit of a green flash, as
Lucky returned to his proper position, bringing the other felines with
him.

Then, as Carstairs started to toss aside the mallet with an amiable
grin of defeat, Dion da Silva came charging up and grabbed it. He
stripped off his jacket and shirt, revealing an extremely hairy chest
and back.

"That Dion man is sure male looking," Mary murmured to Phil
appreciatively, eying her hero. "With those cute ears, he's just like a
little old satyr."

Dion flexed his impressive muscles, took up the mallet, and crashed it
down with a force which the spectators felt with their back teeth. The
bell clanged, the light flashed and the big foot started its descent.

At the same time, Dora Pannes pushed out of the crowd from the
direction of Pluto's Palace and walked haughtily past Dion with never
a glance at him or anyone else. She was moving toward Lucky with the
single-purposeness of a sleep walker.

Disregarding the kicked lovely lady, Dion sprang upon Dora Pannes,
crushed her to his hairy chest, and started suffocating her with
kisses. Phil gallantly stepped forward and caught the lovely lady. His
knees sagged. She was now within range of Lucky's influence and pursed
her lips invitingly at Phil, but he quickly set her down, aghast at
something else.

With a sudden howl of furious anger, Dion had pushed Dora Pannes away
from him, so that she fell down heavily. Before anyone could stop him,
Dion snatched up the mallet and brought it down with a titanic crash on
the head of the gorgeous violet blonde.

"I in love with thing like that!" he screamed. "Aah!" And he continued
to batter the beautiful head and body so that it bounced up and down on
the rubber.

Phil was doubly shocked because this was occurring in Lucky's presence.
In fact, the green cat, sitting calmly in front of Phil, seemed to be
looking on with approval.

Dora Pannes began to writhe crippledly and lasciviously between blows
and to sing "Slap Me Silly Honey" in a hideously gay voice. Then her
head, flattened by repeated blows, split open. But instead of brains
there spilled out fragments of glass, plastic and metal, some of them
with wires attached. Her voice rose in a final meaningless duck quack
and she stopped moving.

A number of realizations fitted themselves together in Phil's mind
at this proof that Dora Pannes was not a human being, but the most
advanced of mannequins created by Fun Incorporated's technicians, a
robot operating by scanners and instruction tapes. Why, even her name
was a pun from Greek mythology, a rough anagram of Pandora, the metal
maiden constructed, if Phil remembered Dr. Romadka correctly, at the
command of Zeus.

As Dion finally put down the mallet, a girl in slacks broke out of
the crowd and grabbed Phil's arm. It was Mitzie Romadka, panting and
disheveled. Behind her darted Sacheverell Akeley.

"Jack and Cookie managed to slug Llewellyn," she panted, "and tried
to do the same to us. We got away from them, but they've gone to warn
Billig."

Looking around quickly, Phil realized that they had. Standing in the
gloomy entrance to Pluto's Palace was Mr. Billig, flanked by a half
dozen gleaming sales-robots. Only these sales-robots had gun muzzles
jutting from their gleaming turrets. Billig had a box slung to his
chest.

"Any funny business from anyone and they mow down the crowd," he
called, his fingers poised over the box. "Dora, stun that cat and bring
it here."

The crowd sucked back to either side and showed Billig the wreckage of
Dora Pannes, with Lucky sitting serenely beside it. Phil could see the
horror come into Billig's face as he sensed the golden wave of peace
coming from Lucky. Billig jerked up the ortho and fired.

The blue beam splattered molten rubber a dozen feet from Lucky and did
no other damage before it winked out. But as the dazzle died, Phil saw
that the beam's back fire had found a target. Billig pitched forward
with a large hole in his head.

Then, as if Billig's fall had been a cue, a small, fattish man stepped
out through the curtains of the Mind Clearers. Although he was wearing
some sort of partial gas mask, Phil recognized Dr. Romadka. He pointed
a stun-gun, Lucky collapsed and was still, and the night's eerie peace
shifted in a finger snap to a churning terror which seemed to Phil to
take the form of a palpable vibration, a wailing roar.

Romadka darted forward toward Lucky. Beside Phil, Mary Akeley jerked
something from the pocketbook and waved it in the air. "Anton!" she
screamed menacingly, and when the psychiatrist looked her way, she
swung the doll of him sharply against her foot, so that its head
snapped against her heel.

For a moment Phil believed she was a genuine witch, for Romadka pitched
forward on his face.

But then he saw that the wailing roar had been that of a dozen squad
cars, converging on the spot from all directions and rocket braking
so close to the crowd that there were singed legs and screams. Men
uniformed and in plain clothes piled out and barked and pommeled the
crowd into a semblance of control. The man who'd jumped from the
foremost car lowered the stun-gun with which he'd knocked out Romadka.
It was Dave Greeley.

For a moment Phil wondered bleakly whether Billig mightn't have made
arrangements with the government for a deal involving the cat, naming
this place as a rendezvous. Then out from behind the FBL man stepped
Morton Opperly, peering about with great interest, and Phil decided
that this was a world in which you couldn't even trust noble looking
old scientists pretending to be great liberals and babbling government
top secrets in order to win your confidence.

He held out his wrists for the handcuffs.




                                  XX


A half hour after the big rubber hands of the telemanipulator yanked
Phil out of his cubicle in the black maria, he had been exposed to
so many sets of security checks that he guessed there were only two
places in America he could be headed for: the Heptagon or White House,
Junior, in New Washington.

Moved along by telemanipulators which did not seem to care which
side up they carried people, he had been prodded, thumped, scanned,
sampled, and subjected to other indignities. His footprints, retinal
blood vessel layout and other physical patterns and dimensions had been
taken, presumably for checking against his FBL dossier; likewise his
voice pattern and hand writing. He had been X-rayed and magnetically
tested for bombs that might be surgeried inside him. His breath and
blood had been checked for BW germs and viruses. He had been thoroughly
geigered. Lights had been flashed in his eyes, questions had droned in
his ears. Once or twice he thought he'd been put to sleep. All through
the process he'd felt a miserable and futile indignation.

But now, as a final rubber hand sliding in a slot in the wall hurried
him down a corridor and deposited him at the entrance to a large room,
he suddenly realized that he didn't care any more. In fact, he began to
feel calm.

And then he was being conducted to a seat by a human usher at last. He
looked around. Almost everyone he'd been mixed up with in the past few
days was here: Jack and Juno Jones, looking quite awestruck, along with
Cookie; Moe Brimstine with his incongruous red hair; Mitzie Romadka and
her father, pale and woozy; Sacheverell and Mary Akeley; Dr. Garnett
and Chancellor Frobisher from the Humberford Foundation; Dion and Dytie
da Silva, the latter with a cloak huddled around her; even Carstairs,
Llewellyn and Buck. Along with them were quantities of unfamiliar
faces--FBL people, Phil supposed. Others, presumably guards, lined the
walls.

Most of these individuals were watching three men who were seated
like judges behind a large desk across the room: Dr. Morton Opperly,
President Robert T. Barnes, and a stony faced man whom Phil recognized
as John Emmet, head of the FBL.

Emmet looked as thin as Opperly, but infinitely tougher. Like Opperly's
his face showed an intense and ceaseless curiosity, but a curiosity
that never became carefree, as if each new fact was for him a new
responsibility.

At the moment, Emmet was speaking to Dave Greeley, who was supervising
two white-smocked technicians as they telemanipulated Lucky, who was
limp as a dish cloth, into a low walled box set between banks of
electronic tubes and transistors. Apparently Greeley had voiced a doubt
as to the safety of the set up, for Emmet was telling Greeley that the
research division guaranteed that the low intensity stunfield in which
Lucky had now been placed would keep the green cat harmless.

But Phil heard only the tail end of the conversation as he was being
seated between Dr. Garnett and Sacheverell. The next moment the room
got very quiet. Emmet looked them all over.

Finally Emmet said, "I think you all know why you're here. I want the
fullest cooperation from everyone. Within the walls of security now
surrounding us, complete frankness is possible. I, myself, shall be as
frank as I expect you to be."

Emmet paused, then leaned forward a little. "To begin with, the
creature known as the green cat is real. Its powers of influencing
thought and emotion are also real. It truly intends the conquest of
America and of the entire world. Finally, it is neither mutant nor
mechanism, but an invader from the planetary system of another star.
Dr. Opperly, will you kindly outline the information you have obtained
from the being masquerading as Miss Aphrodite da Silva?"

Dr. Opperly's voice was faint but very clear.

"The eighth planet of the Star Vega--that is, if Miss da Silva and
I have got our indentifications straight--is earth-type though of
somewhat greater mass. Its landscape, Miss da Silva tells me, can be
pictured as endless, hard baked plains dotted with small lakes and
marshes, and groves of tall trees. On this planet, intelligence evolved
in a swift hoofed biped leaf eater, whose forelegs became specialized
as organs for manipulating branches and for brief food seeking climbs.
This specialization occurred when the creature was a primitive equine,
so that while its hind legs were developing very horselike hoofs, its
forelegs were becoming startlingly humanoid hands. The result was a
being remarkably similar to the satyrs and fauns of Greek mythology.
Miss da Silva, would you care to give these people an idea?"

Dytie stood up, whipped off her cloak, and stood facing them in hirsute
nudity. For a moment there was no reaction, then she stamped her hoofs
twice and her figure became real. She wrapped the cloak around her and
sat down.

"Miss da Silva tells me that clothing is not customary on Vega
Eight," Opperly observed. "They have also advanced farther than we in
technology, possessing force fields that divert gravity, also direct
atomic drive spaceships capable of approaching the speed of light.
But perhaps the most remarkable fact about this satyr race is that
they are symbiotes, and that their symbiotic partners are a sort of
creature that never evolved on Earth and that has a way of life with
which we are quite unfamiliar. For the moment I will say nothing about
these symbiotic partners, except that they have no technology, did not
originate on Vega Eight, and that they are not very intelligent, but
are responsible for the Vegan invasion of Earth."

Opperly ignored the murmurs greeting these paradoxical statements.
"Under the urging of their symbiotic partners, the satyrs--if I may
use that term--sent a spaceship to Earth. I gather that the 26 light
years were covered in something like 35, though of course the time
was much less to the voyagers. Approaching Earth, they put their
ship into an orbit and rendered it invisible. For about two more
years they stayed in the ship, except for careful exploratory trips
in a gravity-diverting space dinghy. They monitored our radio and TV
broadcasts, learned something of our languages and customs. The satyrs
realized that it would be possible to disguise themselves as earthlings
and eagerly did so, since they knew it would be highly desirable
for them to keep in close contact with their rather scatter-brained
symbiotic partners when the invasion began.

"And now," Opperly said slowly, "I come to the point where I must
describe the symbiotic partners and I'm not too sure that I can. Don't
you think, Miss da Silva--?" But Dytie shook her head emphatically.
Opperly shut his eyes for a moment, then he said, "You know how the
presence of a pet can occasionally bring harmony into a home. Or
sometimes it's a child. Well, imagine an animal that, at some nudge
in the evolutionary helter-skelter, began to specialize for this
purpose, and to evolve into a harmony bringer. Think how the cat has
established itself in our culture, largely on the basis of its charm,
and imagine how much more successful it would be if it could bring
us not only beauty but harmony and peace. Imagine such a creature
gradually evolving the power to create and spray hormones that would
dispel anger and create amity in other creatures, somewhat like the
flowers which evolved scents and odors to attract the bees. And think
of it developing, for self-defensive purposes, hormones to create
terror. Imagine it acquiring extrasensory perception and a sensitivity
to thought waves, and discovering in this way a whole new realm of
possibilities for bringing harmony and creating peace. Imagine it
becoming what might be called an esp-catalyst, either by acting as
an esp relay station amplifying and redirecting thought waves, or by
receiving, copying and projecting clouds of punched memory molecules.
Imagine it surviving and multiplying because it is paid for the peace
and emotional rapport it brings, as the cat is paid for its beauty, in
the coin of food, fondling and protection.

"Such a creature wouldn't develop general intelligence, because it
would always depend for its survival on the care of others. Yet it
would have a high intelligence in understanding and manipulating moods
and feelings in other animals. It would...."

He hesitated and Dytie da Silva called to him, "... play by ear!"

"Thank you," Opperly told her. "It would always be transmitter, not
originator. But although lacking general intelligence, it would always
seek out beings with the highest possible general intelligence, since
they could bring it the greatest security. It would be cunning in
all deceptions enabling it to penetrate a new culture, such as the
imitation of similar appearing animals for camouflage purposes. Like
any other species, it would strive to multiply and colonize, to fulfill
its destiny in the cosmos. By means of its extrasensory powers, it
would spy out intelligence in distant places, even distant planets,
and persuade its symbiotic partners to take it to those places and
planets."

He paused. "And now I ask all of you," he said, "to try to imagine
what it would be like to be the symbiotic partners of such a harmony
bringing creature, to have a telepathy of feelings and perhaps of
thoughts with those around you, to have a constant guard against those
moments of blind rage and icy selfishness that lead to murder and to
war, to be always reasonably in tune--and yet not deprived of any of
your basic faculties and insights and powers?"

Again he paused, then said softly, "But I don't have to ask you, for
you're in that state of being right now. You're symbiotes of the green
cat--or rather, I should say, one of the green cats."

As he said that, a head rather more golden yellow than Lucky's poked
itself up from Emmet's lap and looked at them all. And Phil realized
that the feeling that had possessed him ever since he had come into
this room was the radiance of one of Lucky's cousins. And then he felt
Lucky's radiance added to it, and looking around toward the electronic
contraption, he saw Lucky lifting his head over the edge.

Meanwhile, John Emmet was saying, "I told you that the green cat--or
rather, cats--intended the conquest of America. I wanted you to hear a
little more of the background before adding that, as far as the Federal
Bureau of Loyalty and the Office of the President are concerned, the
conquest has been completed." And John Emmet smiled.

"Also," he added, "judging from the messages we've just received from
their newsmoon, along with some extraordinary tokens of faith, the
Kremlin has also capitulated to the Vegan invasion."

"Is good!" Dytie shouted, jumping up. "You know just four satyrs, ten
pussycats come in ship. We send seven pussycats, two satyrs behind
ferrous veil--mean iron curtain. We think they need pussycats just a
little bit more you do."

And with that the whole solemn meeting melted into a tumbling flood
of questions and answers, shouted insights, babbling conversation.
Catching a bit here and there, Phil learned how the second and
yellower green cat, out of touch with Dion and Dytie for a week, had
unexpectedly returned to its Vegan mistress after visiting a large
number of most ecstatic church services, and how Opperly had smuggled
that cat in to Barnes and so to Emmet. He heard Dytie explain how
the cats were tricky at feigning unconsciousness after recovering,
from being stunned, and why they insisted on eating in private on
Earth--they were imitating ordinary cats and knew that their hormone
spraying mouths, necessarily extended in eating, would give them away.
He heard Dion try to picture to Dr. Garnett how the cats on Vega Eight
had taken to pointing their muzzles toward the star that was the Sun
and wailing at it at night, and Dr. Garnett proudly suggested that they
must have been esping the brain waves beamed out by the Humberford
Foundation. Whereupon Dion tried to explain how Vega Eight had once
been a war-torn planet, until a race of what sounded like intelligent
space traveling worms had brought them the green cats.

But while Phil was drinking in all this information and exchanging
words with this person and that, he was moving through the churning
crowd in a very definite direction and with a very definite purpose.
Yet during his progress he continued to overhear scraps of discourse.

He heard Sacheverell Akeley explaining to Chancellor Frobisher that
the green cats were probably all offspring of Bast anyway and that the
ancient Egyptians--or perhaps Atlanteans--probably had had spaceships
and had taken the green cats to Vega in the first place.

He heard Cookie gently twitting Mary Akeley about falling for a satyr
and she happily assuring him that she went for men with hoofs, and in
any case was going to make a doll of him.

He heard Jack pointing out to Dr. Romadka that now that they had the
green cats, there wasn't going to be too much use for psychoanalysts
or for thought police and commissars, and Romadka was reminding him
that most of the commodities peddled by Fun Incorporated, including
male-female wrestling, wouldn't have much of a market either.

He heard Carstairs, Llewellyn and Buck talking about organizing a
chivalric order that was to be called the Knights of the Green Cat.

He heard Juno Jones telling Moe Brimstine how ever since her farm
childhood she'd always liked animals better than humans and was very
glad that an animal was going to help her change her mind--and where
was that little rat Jack? Moe Brimstine explained to her in reply that
he'd spent so much time getting the jump on people that he'd never
learned to understand them--while poor old Hans Billig had jumped
around so fast he'd never noticed people at all.

He heard John Emmet and Dave Greeley talking green cat logistics--how
would they ever manage to blanket the whole world with the creatures?

He heard Morton Opperly and Dr. Garnett talking something way over his
head about esp-nexuses and thought lines and which galaxy did the cats
come from in the first place?

He took Mitzie Romadka's slim tired hand and assured her that he
loved her and that he thought that violence and jealousy and even
revengefulness were admirable up to a point.

But he never lost sight of his chief purpose. As he approached the low
walled box from which Lucky was still peering calmly, President Barnes
left off assuring Mary Akeley that the directive for the destruction of
all cats had already been cancelled, and came over to Phil and threw
his arm around his shoulders in a fatherly way and said, "Hi, young
fellow, I hear how you were pretty close to this cat for a couple of
days. Sorry I'm going to have to be taking him off your hands."

Phil straightened up. "You're not," he said, "Lucky is my cat."

"Well, see here, young fellow," Barnes protested amiably, "I'm the
president, so I have to have one of these cats. Emmet has one already
and the Humberford Foundation really needs one, and there are only
three in the country. You heard the young lady from Vega say it."

Several people and the two satyrs wandered up, attracted by the
argument.

"I don't care," Phil said, greatly encouraged by the tightness with
which Mitzie's hand gripped his. "I know that this is a cosmic crisis
and all that, but this is my cat and I fed it and I'm going to keep it.
C'mere, Lucky."

Lucky jumped out of the box into his arms.

"I guess that proves it," Phil said.

Barnes looked at him just a bit indignantly and there were all sorts
of murmured comments, but just then they heard a tiny and varied
mewing. It came from the box from which Lucky had sprung.

They looked in and saw five tiny duplicates of Lucky nosing their
little conical faces upward.

Dytie said, "They small, but they just much good big pussycat, just
much helpful."

Barnes said, spreading himself around, "Why, now there'll be one for
the Army, the Navy, Dr. Opperly, myself, that goon back east who thinks
he's going to be the next president...."

"Now Bobbie," Opperly suggested, "don't go giving away more kittens
than you've got."

"... and, I was about to say," Barnes finished calmly, "one for this
young fellow here."

Phil looked down at Lucky cradled in his arms. "So you're a she after
all," he said.

"Oh no!" Dytie burst out excitedly, half out of her cloak and half
in it. "You no un'erstand Vega. On Vega sex different. On Vega it's
like ..." and she screwed up her face, seeking for the word.

"Kangaroos," Opperly interposed.

"Yes!" Dytie exclaimed triumphantly. "Only this difference: wife carry
babies while, then babies go in father's pouch, he carry rest time.
Everybody help. Later on, babies leave pouch, nurse from mother. Take
off pants, Dion, show pouch."

But Dion refused rather indignantly.

"Vega men much modest," Dytie observed to Phil. "Anyway, Lucky is he."

       *       *       *       *       *


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