ONTO CENTER STAGE WALKED MISTER CALICO!
Oh, indeed Snide was off the script!
The cat had a black harness. It was wearing a big, black bow tie. It surveyed the audience.
"Chair on your right," said the Countess Krak in Voltarian into her left-hand mike.
The cat jumped up on the second interview chair. It sat down, looking at the Whiz Kid double.
"What the hell is this?" said the double. "That's no attorney. That's a cat!"
The cat opened its jaws. It said, "I am a lawyer cat."
The girl with the cards was just standing there staring. The audience was open-mouthed.
A talking cat!
Oh, that devil Krak. I knew exactly what she had done. She was using Eyes and Ears of Voltar gear. She had a mike hidden in the cat's ear to direct it and she had a speaker hidden in the cat's tie so she could talk through the cat. And she'd even trained the cat to open and close its mouth when it heard the speaker going. (Bleep) her!
Snide was in on it! The fool had fallen for it as an unheard-of novelty! Snide said to the cat, "The Whiz Kid seems to doubt your credentials, Lawyer Calico. Perhaps you had better convince him."
The cat-Krak talking through her right-hand mike -said, "He should understand the PURR-pose of the law."
The girl with the cards had recovered. She raised a card:
LAUGH
The audience didn't read the card. They were saying, "A talking cat." "It's really talking." "What a cute cat." "Listen to it TALK!"
"Snide," said the cat, "you have a very disorderly audience." It turned to the seats. "Order in the court!"
Snide banged a gavel. "I am sorry, Lawyer Calico. Continue with your credentials."
Krak, watching her TV of the show, leaned into her right-hand mike. The cat seemed to say, "Cats are the very basic of the law. All cases begin with a CAT-alogue of crimes."
The girl raised her card:
LAUGH
It wasn't needed. The audience was laughing.
Where the Hells was Krak operating from? I grabbed the walkie-talkie. I said, "That's her, making the cat talk!"
"We'll handle," said the security officer back.
"Continue," said Snide to the cat.
The cat seemed to say, "The law violently opposes anything DOG-matized. Police CAT and MOUSE with criminals. Criminals RAT on one another. Judges think everyone is a RAT. And the end product of any legal action is a CAT-astrophe!"
The audience, uncoached, was screaming with laughter.
"But Snide," the cat seemed to say, "I'll give you the final proof that I am indeed a lawyer cat."
Krak was whispering orders into her left-hand mike.
The cat got up off the chair and jumped onto the Whiz Kid double's knee. It seemed to pull something out of its harness. It was sniffing into the Whiz Kid's pockets. Had it put something in one?
"What are you doing?" said Snide.
"I'm doing what every lawyer does," said the cat.
Suddenly it grabbed the double's wallet out of his hip pocket!
It clenched the wallet in its teeth.
It ran off the stage!
THE DOUBLE RACED AFTER IT!
The audience howled with laughter.
I screamed into the walkie-talkie, "FOLLOW THAT CAT!"
Ignoring the red lights, security men were all over the stage, racing across it after the cat.
I leaped up and sped after them!
On their trail, I burst out of an outside door just in time to see the cat streaking down a long flight of steps. The double was speeding in its wake.
A van, different from the one they had had before, was sitting at the bottom of those steps!
Yikes! The cat had planted Unit B on the double and had the Unit A on itself! The follow-compellers!
The cat was almost to the van!
ZWOOOP!
The double, racing down the steps, seemed to fly into a bundle of whirling arms and legs. He hurtled toward the bottom.
He lit!
The security guards were streaming down the steps.
ZWOOP! ZWOOP! ZWOOP! ZWOOP! ZWOOP!
They were skidding like they were on a toboggan slide!
I was running forward.
I was going down the steps.
Bang-Bang had the double by the collar and was throwing him into the van.
The security men were landing in a disorderly pile.
ZWOOP!
My own legs went in six directions at once and I rocketed down the steps in a power dive.
I landed on my head.
Security men were all around me in piles.
The security officer at the top screamed, "GET THAT VEHICLE NUMBER!" Then he started down.
I looked at the speeding van. It was roaring down an alley and away.
IT HAD NO LICENSE PLATES!
The security chief landed near me with a thud.
I couldn't account for any of this.
What had caused such a catastrophe?
And then I looked at the steps.
The cat could run down them but nobody else could.
THEY WERE COVERED WITH BANANA PEELS!
The Eagle Eye Security officer picked himself up off the pavement. He was shaking his fist down the alley in the direction the van had disappeared. "I'll get you if it's the last thing I ever do!" he screamed. He whirled. "What make of van was that?" he roared at his men.
They were unscrambling themselves and picking banana peels off their messed up uniforms.
"Transvan!" said one.
"Econoline," said another.
"Quicklay," said a third.
All they could agree upon was that it had no license plates, was white and was basically commercial. I already knew there were tens of thousands of such vans in New York.
"You goofed!" I screamed. "You let them get away!"
"Please God!" cried the security officer, "give us another chance." He was pointing to the process server and the two Bellevue attendants who had come up, strait-jackets in their hands. "I'll get that process served and that fiend committed if I have to do it myself!"
"Go ahead!" I said. And he rushed off to phone police and put up roadblocks and get helicopter coverage and do the other things they do.
I made my way back to the "Weirdo World" talk show, where Tom Snide was ending off his half hour with slides of famous outlaw lovers of history. He seemed to be pretty annoyed that his audience of hand-picked females were talking to one another about the cat. "In short," he said, "when you look at some of these skinny runts and compare them to a virile type like me, you wonder what women see in such men."
"What a CAT-ty remark!" some blonde in the front row yelled loud enough to get it into the mikes.
Screams of laughter rolled through the TV theater. In vain, the card girl in the housecoat held up her sign:
REVERENT COOS
"We're tired of your PUSS!" another called, not to be outdone.
That started them all off and they were vying for who could get off the vilest puns about the cat.
Snide could look after himself. I grabbed my viewer off the floor where it had fallen and got out of there.
It was up to me, I knew.
I was not in very good shape. My head was hurting from falling on it, my eye had begun to bleed and I was literally seeing red. But an Apparatus officer has to have stamina and overlook his pain. One must have courage.
Besides, I was afraid I might be overdue for my afternoon appointment with lesbians at the apartment. Adora must get no suspicion that I had to figure out how to do in Krak and Heller and run, before the homo education began. Teenie I would get to, somehow, some way.
All the way to the apartment in a cab, I watched the viewer.
A police car screamer was sounding, rising, in the speaker.
The Countess was holding the cat. She had taken off the bow tie and the harness. She was rubbing the cat's ears and petting him and the cat was absolutely grinning! I had heard that witches on Earth had cats but they were usually black, and this cat only had a few black patches amongst the orange and white.