At that moment another voice behind them, languorous and scornful, said, “Stay where you are, gentlemen. It would be dangerous to move your hands.”
Dora Pannes stood at the head of the stairs. The violet blonde was simply dressed in a gray frock, while a large handbag swung carelessly from her shoulder, but she looked rather more beautiful than last night. In her slender hand was a great big ortho.
Phil didn’t feet at all frightened, although a vague memory nagged momentarily at his mind. He knew she couldn’t hurt anyone while Lucky was there. He was more interested in the reactions of the others.
But with one exception there weren’t any reactions.
The exception was da Silva. He was staring at Dora Pannes with a hungry adoration.
Meanwhile the violet blonde was walking forward in a most business-like way. She didn’t even glance at da Silva. As she passed Greeley, her free hand snatched sidewise like a lizard’s tongue for the stun-gun, snatched again at a larger one inside his coat, dropped them both in her handbag, and kept going straight for the cat.
Now she’ll begin to feel it, Phil told himself.
But she kept straight on. Lucky seemed to be studying her casually. Abruptly he sprang back onto the window sill, his green fur rose, his muzzle lengthened, and from it came a prolonged, spitting hiss.
The next moment Phil felt such a formless terror as he had never known before, as if all reality were about to be crunched in a single fist, as if the blackness between the stars were lashing down to strangle him. Dimly across the hall, he saw the waves of white wash along the ranked faces. He gazed fearfully at Lucky, as if the green cat had turned into a devil, and saw Dora Pannes coolly stooping to grab him. The cat started to streak past her, but Dora’s hands were faster. Then the cat sprang straight at her face, claws raking, but Dora calmly detached him and shoved him in her handbag and shut it and started back. She looked quite as beautiful and composed as she had at the stair head. The blood hadn’t started to flow from the scratches in her face.
As she passed da Silva, he looked up at her groggily. In his expression there was still the ghost of desire.
“You jerk,” she said to him and walked on and went down the stairs.
Phil felt his heart hammering ten, eleven, twelve times, like a clock striking, and then he was racing downstairs and someone was pounding along after him.
He caromed off the open front door and stumbled down the steps in time to see a dark car roar off. Greeley was beside him now, barking orders into a pocket radio. From the other end of the street, another car shot in. Red plumes shot forward from under its hood as it rocket-braked to a heaving stop. Greeley piled into the back seat. Phil scrambled in after him.
“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, roiled 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.
XVI
ASthe 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.