"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.
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 newspaperLa 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.
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."
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 inhim, and among the lot of us I think we have a very good chance of deliveringhimfrom 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."
THIRD MILLENNIUM THRILLS!
1000 FEET OF FREE-FALL!
RECORDED KISSES AND HUGS!Cuddle Your Favorite StarBetter Than Handies
YOUR MIND CLEARED IN TEN MINUTES!Relive Your ChildhoodYou'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.