Part 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now he saw it in five.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Put that cat down," he croaked.

Moe looked at him with utter boredom.

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A what?" Cookie asked suspiciously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well ..." said Sacheverell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"To get him back," Phil said.

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

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

Phil just smiled at her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Or any green cats?" Phil asked quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Juno--" Jack began threateningly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he was piling into the cab.

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

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

IX

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

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

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