Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"There he goes now!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phil shrugged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sure," Phil said.

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

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

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

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

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

"You won?" Phil inquired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She shrugged fatalistically. "This time it will."

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

She shrugged.

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

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

"Moe?"

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

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

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

Phil shook his head.

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

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

Phil nodded. There was a silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phil had to nod.

"But now you've changed your mind?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who, Moe?" Phil asked confusedly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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