The Green Millennium E-Book

Erik Schreiber

• Herausgeber: neobooks
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: the green adventuresbook
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 302

Beschreibung

Fritz Leiber is one of the most widely read authors of fantasy. He is an author who was influenced by H. P. Lovecraft and influenced many authors himself. His most famous characters are Ffahrd and the gray mouser, as they are called in Germany. Leiber's work is characterized by diversity. He knew how to express himself with equal artistic energy and quality in different genres or to mix the genres - for example, horror with science fiction in the story The Oldest Soldier, 1960 (Engl. Nachhutgefechte, 1974) - seemingly effortlessly. Leiber did not see science fiction, horror, and fantasy as distinct genres, but rather as narrative possibilities that could be freely combined.

Leseprobe

Herausgeber

Erik Schreiber

Fritz Leiber

The Green Millennium

e-book 186

The Green Adventurebook 18

Fritz Leiber - The Green Millennium

Erstveröffentlichung:

Erste Auflage 01.10.2023

© Herausgeber Erik Schreiber

An der Laut 14

64404 Bickenbach

Titelbild: Simon Faulhaber

Vertrieb: neobooks

Herausgeber

Erik Schreiber

Fritz Leiber

The Green Millennium

The world Phil Gish lived in was not a pretty one, and Phil didn't enjoy living in it. He was disillusioned, purposeless, hopeless, and haunted by the fear that a robot would take over his job. But then Phil was a timid person, not much given to adventure seeking. If he hadn't been so mild he might have found his kicks at All Amusements, the syndicated playground where anyone could find fun, providing he had the proper sadistic and otherwise aberrated elements in his personality. But Phil was good--and bored.

And then one day a cat perched on his window--not an ordinary cat--a green cat. For the first time in years Phil was happy. He promptly named the cat Lucky because he somehow knew that as long as the cat stayed with him he'd feel fine. But Lucky didn't stay long. In a matter of minutes he had disappeared into All Amusements park. It was then that Phil became involved in a grotesque world, peopled with the most extraordinary personalities. Just what the cat is and its ultimate meaning is the secret of it all. You will be surprised.

I

Phil Gish woke up feeling as good as if all his previous life had happened to two other guys--poor, miserable clunks!

Usually his whip-cracking reflexes had him out of bed in a flash and jerking on his shorts and sockasins while he frantically hunted around for the jar of beard-dissolving cream. But this time he was able to outsmart all tyrannous nerve-impulses and keep his eyes closed in order to enjoy the unprecedented sensation all to himself, not even sharing it with the advertisement-covered walls of his tiny bachelor apartment.

Why, it was simply wonderful, he decided after a bit. Outrageously, impossibly wonderful!

He actually felt as if this were not a world in which hot and cold wars had been gushing unpredictably for fifty years like temperamental faucets, in which the Federal Bureau of Loyalty and Fun Incorporated ruled the U. S. A. in the name of that drunken, hymn-singing farmer, President Robert T. Barnes, and in which (according to the Kremlin Newsmoon, located on an earth-circling satellite vehicle) a new plan was being considered for exchanging the descendants of prisoners taken in the half-century-old Korean War.

And as if he, Phil Gish, weren't a luck-forsaken little guy who on waking at eight o'clock this morning hadn't taken four sleeping pills in order to kill the day and temporarily forget that he had just lost another job to a robot who did it five times as fast and twice as accurately, and that he'd had a blow-up because of it and been coldly advised to see a psychiatrist.

He took a long, luxurious breath. Even the air smelt and felt different, as if dusted with some golden chemical that banished care.

He opened his eyes and looked down at his pale chest with the two lone hairs that were a sardonic last farewell from glorious jungle ape-hood. But this time the word that came to him was „slim,“ not „scrawny.“ He rather liked his body, he decided--a neat and compact, if not exactly out-size, bit of tissue. He yawned, stretched, scratched where the two hairs were, and looked around. The green cat sat on the sill of the large open circular window, smiling at him.

„Hey, am I dreaming?“

The sound of his own voice, with its hint of a morning croak, answered that question.

_Or have I really blasted off from behind the hair line?_ The second question, thought not spoken, was quickly suppressed. He felt too good to let it worry him. If this was insanity, then three cheers for paranoia!

Besides, there were all sorts of natural explanations of the cat's somewhat unconventional color. Just yesterday Phil had seen a young matron leading two rose-colored poodles. A flash of what might be an off-the-bosom dress under her cloak had moved him to pass close enough to hear her assure her companion, „They aren't dye-jobs, you mood-mad man. They're mutations!“

Also, weren't some animals naturally green, like the tree-sloth? Though he seemed to recall that the tree-sloth's hue was due to a fungus or mold, and there certainly wasn't any mold on the burnished bundle of benignity on his window sill.

„Hiya, Lucky,“ he greeted softly. From the very first he had decided to connect the cat with his newborn, incredible sense of well-being. If there was going to be a new era in his life, it was a good idea to have a symbol for it--a symbol green as spring itself. Besides, it felt that way.

„C'mere, Lucky,“ he called without lifting his head from the spongy pillow. „Here, Kitty.“

The second invitation, which sounded a trifle silly to Phil as soon as he said it, wasn't necessary. The cat at once dropped its plump-tummied body from the window sill and trotted toward him like a soft-shod fat little horse. Phil felt an odd increase, almost frightening, in the calm joy inside him. The cat disappeared momentarily under the angle of the bedside. Then a little green face came over the edge and two tiny green paws placed themselves beside it, and two coppery eyes inspected him.

„How are you, fellow?“ Phil asked. „Glad to make your acquaintance. You're a cool little cuss, all right. Where did you come from?“

The little face tipped upward.

„From upstairs?“ Phil asked and instantly chuckled at himself for interpreting the movement as a gesture. „Why not stay with me for a while? I like your looks and I admire your color. Often wished I were green myself. Anything for variety--begging your pardon.“

It was a strange and curiously attractive cat face. The ears were large, the forehead high, the nose-button lost in furry down, the whiskers hardly apparent, and the mouth had a suggestion of a pucker or pout. For a fleeting instant Phil had the notion Lucky might look rather different, rather less like a cat, if caught unawares. And he was really very green--the green of tarnished copper, only brighter. Thinking the word „he,“ Phil wondered for a fleeting instant about Lucky's sex. The fat tummy was suggestive. Yet he was somehow sure the cat was a male.

Then Lucky smiled again and Phil was aware only of feelings. He reached out a tentative hand, jerked it back when a little paw flicked out at it, then shamefacedly corrected the gesture. The little paw touched his middle finger. Phil stroked the silken paw in turn. Neither time could he feel a hint of claws. They must all be tucked inside their smooth sheathes.

„Now we're friends,“ Phil said huskily. The cat sprang fearlessly onto the bed. Coppery eyes came close. A furry cheek briefly brushed Phil's with casual masculine friendliness. Sudden tears smarted in Phil's eyes, enough to brim the lids but not to run over.

What a lonely, empty-lifed fool he must be, he told himself, that a cat could make him cry. Yet it was true enough. All his life had been a fading. His parents had seemed warm and wonderful at first, but then he had begun to sense their gray uncertainties and boredoms. School had been full of breath-taking promise at one point, with infinite vistas of knowledge and idealistic brotherhood opening up; but too many of the vistas had ended in signs saying „restricted„ or „subversive„ or the even more maddening blank signs of calculated silence--just as man had promised himself he'd reach the planets soon, but hadn't. Phil had had friends, too, at one time, and had really been in love with girls; but even that had somehow become washed out and worthless. And then the endless business of being beaten out of jobs by white-collar robots, beginning with the mail-sorting robots who fed envelopes into the proper slots by scanning their addresses photoelectrically. The only thing robots couldn't do, it seemed, was sit in foxholes. That was one place where Phil recalled no mechanical competition.

Yes, it had been a very empty, purposeless life indeed, Phil told himself, at the same time wondering why even that thought could not mar his present happiness.

He came out of his reverie and saw that the cat was marching down the bed, closely inspecting his naked body.

„Hey, we're friends, but that's going too far. Leave me _some_privacy!“ Chuckling, he swung out of bed, grabbing up a light robe as his body left the cone of radiant heat projected from the ceiling fixture. While shouldering into the robe he hummed a couple of bars from „Kiss Me, Darling, in Free-Fall„ and did a shuffling step that brought the cat hurrying over to play tag with his toes.

„Where _did_ you come from, Lucky?“ Phil repeated and turned toward the window. In the three steps it took him to reach it, his gaze lit on the near-empty dispenser of sleeping pills and for a moment the eerie doubt came back: mightn't this morning's overdose have triggered off or paralleled a really big change in his mind? After all, this cat wasn't normal (and neither were hallucinations!) and his crazy, inexplicable happiness was altogether too much like the inner world of godlike perfection into which the paranoiac is supposed to retreat.

But then he was at the window experiencing a new twist in his mood and the doubt was forgotten.

The window opened on a deep, very narrow bay in the remodeled monster hotel in which Phil roomed. If he risked his neck by leaning out very far, he could just manage to look out of the bay and glimpse an advertisement-encrusted corner of Fun Incorporated's wrestling center and the helicopter field on its roof. The hotel had been built as a luxury palace for the new war-rich of the 1970's but during the great housing shortage of the 1980's its vast rooms had been cut up into tiny sleeping cells. It retained, however, at least one feature from its lordly days: the large circular windows formed of two sheets of polarizing glass, the inner of which could be rotated, allowing a person to blacken his window or have it fully transparent or enjoy any shade of twilight. One other very unusual luxury touch was that the windows could actually be opened, swinging on pivots at top and bottom. Nowadays, with radiant sleep-heating general throughout the hotel and the air-conditioning system anything but trustworthy, this last feature was put to real use more often than might have been expected, though windows were still kept closed most of the daytime.

It had always seemed to Phil that the great gray wall just ten feet from his window, with its rows of ominous portholes, many of them blackened, was the grimmest sight in the world--a symbol of the way he was walled off from life and people.

But now, as he stood leaning out just a little, his cropped hair brushing the tarnished circular rim, it seemed to him that he could imagine his way through that wall as if it were made of some material that conducted emotion as copper conducts electricity. Not see or think through it, but _feel_ through it to the multiple texture of warm, pitiful, admirable, ridiculous human lives in the cubicles behind: the two-fifths happy ones, the nine-tenths sad ones, the ones who nursed fears and frustrations because you had to nurse something, the ones who hammered fears and frustrations into a painful armor, the old man apprehensively sorting his limp ration stamps from three communo-capitalist wars, the boy playing spaceship and pretending the blacked-out window was the porthole of a comic-book intergalactic liner, the three unemployed secretaries--one of them pacing--the lovers whose rendezvous was tainted with worries about the Federal Bureau of Morality, the fat man feeling a girl's caress by radio handie and thinking of something long ago, the old woman coddling her dread of war-germs and atomic ashes by constantly dusting, dusting, dusting ...

Well, his new self certainly had a vivid imagination, Phil decided with a smile.

An old hand came out of a porthole three floors down and shook something--or nothing--from a dustpan.

Coincidence, of course, or else he'd once watched the woman without thinking about it--nevertheless, Phil chose to interpret the event as an encouraging confirmation of his new feeling of outgoingness. Then the smile left his lips as he thought of another aspect of the opposite wall.

This window was the vantage point where he had spent countless drearily excited hours spying on the activities of all the young women whose cubicles were even remotely within range. Not the new girl--the one who wore her black hair in old-fashioned pony style--in the room straight across, although she was quite beautiful in a sprightly, animal way, and he sometimes heard her practicing tap-dancing. No, she was a bit too close and besides, he was vaguely frightened of her. There was something eerily dryad-like about her and, in any case, she blacked out her porthole religiously. It was blacked out now, though slightly ajar.

But all the other girls were recipients of his untiring, sterile interest. The cute green-blonde just below and to the left, for instance, Miss Phoebe Filmer (he'd once taken the unprecedentedly realistic step of finding out her name), why, he'd sacrificed a sizable chunk of his leisure time to that tantalizing minx. There she was at this very moment dithering around in a short play robe, inspecting an assortment of wispy lingerie--a very promising situation that normally would have held Phil helpless for twenty minutes or more. But now he found he could look at her and then look away without the faintest gnawing worry he might miss something. Good Lord, if he wanted to see more, in any sense, of Miss Phoebe Filmer, he'd scrape up an acquaintance with her.

„Prrrt!“ A feathery, furry ball came into his hand and he looked down at Lucky's apple-green face framed by his curving forefinger and thumb.

„What d'ya want, cat?“

Lucky ducked out of the cupped hand with a twist that let his forehead and ear be rubbed, and put his front paws on the window rim. Phil quickly advanced his hand so that it lightly circled the cat's chest. He didn't want Lucky to get back out on the little ledge that led to either side of the window. In fact, as Phil now definitely realized, he didn't want Lucky to leave him at all, though something told him he wouldn't be able to stop Lucky if the green cat really wanted to go.

It occurred to Phil, with a certain shamefaced satisfaction, that all pets were strictly forbidden in the Skyway Towers (cats and dogs were pretty rare since the germ war days when they'd been slaughtered as possible carriers) and so Lucky's owner wouldn't be able to do anything openly about getting him back.

But Lucky seemed to have no intention of leaving. He hopped to the floor and looked eagerly at Phil.

„Prrrt!“

„Do you want something to eat? Is that it?“

„Prrrt-prt!“

Phil took mental inventory of his snack box and found himself thinking of the cranberry concentrate. Wildly inappropriate--and yet something assured him that it would be just right for Lucky.

It was done quickly: a dark-red marble that swelled to a glistening ruby golf ball at the touch of water, and then, at another sudden inward prompting, the syrupy contents of a vitamino capsule poured over it.

The last ingredient smelled rather rank and by the time he set the odd sundae on the floor, Phil was feeling quite doubtful. However, Lucky examined it with all signs of approval, mewing in eagerness. But then instead of beginning to eat, he looked up at Phil. Phil thought he understood: cats have their special proprieties and delicacies. The little chap wanted to eat in private.

„Okay, fellow, I'll go shower. And I won't peek.“

Stepping inside the bathroom, he set the shower control to alternate tepid and very warm. Instead it chose irresponsibly to alternate icy and steaming, so that he leaped out with a yell. But the incident didn't even scratch his mood. As he toweled himself (he didn't like the air drier and toweling robots made him uneasy) he sang:

We're out in space, they've cut the jet,

There isn't any ceiling, floor, or wall.

Let's dance on air, or better yet--

Hug me, love me, darling, in free-fall!

He came out of the bathroom feeling like an emperor and fully determined to inspect the world he owned, the world that was any man's for the asking and a little courage. As he slipped on singlet, trousers, sockasins and jacket, he explained his feelings to Lucky, who had cleaned up every bit of his colorful meal.

„You see, it's this way, fellow: I've always been three-quarters dead. But not any more. I'm through with being scared and stand-offish and bored. No more filing, dial-watching, and tape-cutting jobs, with some about-to-be-invented robot breathing down my neck. I'm just going out and look things over, talk to people, find out what it's all about. I'm going to have adventures, really live. Some program, eh? And you know who's responsible for it, fellow? You are.“

Lucky seemed fairly to fluoresce in appreciation. He fluffed his gleaming green fur.

Phil wondered what time it was. His wrist-watch had gone dead yesterday, the cranky thing, only five months after having the battery replaced. He stuck his head out the window and looked up the dizzy gray crack to where the portholes were tiny dots and the slit ended in a ribbon of blue sky. Only the top floor to the east was yellow with true sunlight, though the false sunlight from the sodium mirror circling the earth to make evening light for this city was beginning to show about eight stories down.

He scooped up Lucky without a thought of leaving him behind or a worry as to the attention he might attract. But the verdant cat sprang from his arms and made for the hall door, looking back as if to say, „I'm right there with you and game for any adventure, too, but I don't need a nurse.“

Side by side they walked to the stairs and down to twenty-eight--the overworked elevator stopped only at even-numbered floors. And there he ran into Phoebe Filmer, play robe swishing and apparently headed for the snack bar on twenty-eight.

„Hello, Miss Filmer,“ he heard himself say. „I've admired you for a long time.“

„You have?“ she said, glancing at him sideways. „How did you know my name?“

„Just asked the desk robot who the beautiful girl was in 28-303a.“

She tittered with a faintly flirtatious contempt. „You don't talk to the desk robot. You just punch buttons and it won't give out names when you punch room numbers, unless you have a government key.“

„I have a way with robots,“ Phil explained. „I win their confidence with small talk.“

„Well,“ Miss Filmer observed, turning her head and running her hand through her green-gold hair.

„Say, how do you like my green cat?“ Phil inquired.

„A green cat!“ Miss Filmer exclaimed excitedly. She looked down quickly and then up skeptically. „Where?“

Phil looked down too. Lucky wasn't anywhere in sight. A hunk of ice materialized inside his chest. „Excuse me,“ he said. „I hope I'll see you again.“

He raced to the stub corridor. Lucky was standing in front of the elevator.

„Gee, fellow,“ Phil told him. „Don't give me heart failure.“

II

The street snarled at Phil. The snarl came chiefly from a charged-up electric hot rod that swerved close to the curb to remove a triangular chunk from the rump of a fat man who had been too slow in skittering to safety. A second look showed he was not a fat man, but a thin man in a balloon suit. It deflated rapidly, and he sat down in its limp folds on the curb and began to sob. Balloon suits were of no real protection to pedestrians, except by increasing the apparent target, but they continued as a fad. During the last war they had been pumped full of hydrogen as a shield against neutrons until a couple of small but unpleasant explosions in crowded shelters had caused the government to crack down.

After snarling, the street continued to growl deep in its throat--it had two lower levels. The growl was composed of the hum of electrics, the subterranean rumble of heavier traffic, the yak-yak of competing vocal advertisements, and the nervous shuffle of feet that was the same when Rome and Babylon were young, but that was intensified here because most of the women's feet were on platforms three to ten inches high.

Neither the growl nor the snarl disturbed Phil. Normally he'd already have had his ear plugs tucked in, his face fixed straight ahead, his eyes nervously questing for hot rods, which were known to jump curbs. But today he simply wanted to drink it all in, to see the things he'd always been blind to, to note the anxious but apathetic expressions on the faces of the pedestrians, to sense the invisible lines of force that, like spider webs or marionette strings, joined them to the space-overflowing advertisements, which ranged from the crisp, „Learn to Break Necks!“ and the cute „A Strip-Tease Doll All Your Own!“ to the „Why Not Lobotomy?“ and the imagination-tantalizing „Glamorize Your Figure with a Sprayed-on Evening Dress! Plasticfabric cures in a jiffy, breathes. No heat, no adhesions! Special forms flare the skirt, shape the bosom! Designed by artists right on your body!“

Lucky seemed no more frightened of the street than Phil. He scampered along close to the base of Skyway Towers' monumental façade, the camouflaging green color of which may have explained why none of the pedestrians took note of him--not that any explanation was needed as to why those walking nerve-bags didn't see things right under their noses!

A gleaming sales-robot veered toward Phil on its silent wheels, but Phil deftly interposed another balloon-suited man between himself and it. The balloon-suited man began to get a slick reducing pill sales talk; evidently the robot had scanned his profile. Phil hurried around the corner after Lucky, who had turned down garish Opperly Avenue.

As if he had picked up a scent, Lucky abruptly left the wall, glided across the sidewalk and padded across Opperly Avenue between the passing cars. Phil followed, not without a certain heart pounding, but with no real anxieties. Something allowed him to sense easily the intentions of all the cars in the block--dodging them was almost fun.

He reached the opposite curb a good five feet ahead of a playful youth in a jalopy with a tin body like a space jeep scribbled over with such signs as „Oh, You Venusian!“ and „Girls beware--escape speed zero.“ Effortlessly recovering his breath, Phil found himself facing an ornate cave mouth flanked with old-fashioned fluorescent posters, the largest lettering on which read: „TONIGHT! Juno Jones, the Man-Maiming Amazon vs. Dwarf Zubek, the Bone-Crushing Misogynist.“

But he had no time to read the rest of the bill, for Lucky was dancing up the broad corridor lined with giant stereographs of menacing, half-naked men and women, looking in the dim light like genies freshly materialized from smoke.

Ordinarily Phil would have felt a certain amount of disgust mixed with fear and uneasy fascination at entering, or even passing, a wrestling palace specializing in male-female, but today it seemed simply a part of life. It never occurred to him not to follow Lucky.

Just short of some turnstiles and a robot ticket taker lost in shadows, a side corridor spilled light. Lucky whisked into it. Phil had barely rounded the corner after him when a long, handless, boneless gray arm shot out of the wall and slapped itself firmly against Phil's middle.

„Where you think you're going, Mack?“ a voice rasped from the wall. „On your way.“ And it gave him a quick shove toward the ticket taker.

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.“