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 sawthatin 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 heartywhish. 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 azingas 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!"
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.
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 ashecame, 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 howhefeels 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, whenhewakes. 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 sincehecame," 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 thatIlike—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 himhe. 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 sincehe'sbeen 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 loveher," 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 whereyourneedles 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 disturbhisawakening. Rise above hate. Do you realize I can't see anything of you but ink blobs, your auras are so black? Evenhewill be unable to reach you."
"Shut up that silly talk abouthe," 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 gotten thousand dollarsfor 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 collectten thousand dollars, when you have to prance in with thatuglywitch 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 shothimwith a stun-gun, that you even dreamed of sellinghimfor 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.