Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Your cat?"

"Yes, a pet."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

"... ravins the antichrist."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, he must be crazy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

"Yes," Phil said.

"May I have your name, please?"

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

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

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

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

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