The forward trench dug itself across the wall and floor, swung drunkenly past Mitzie and the doddering jeep, got ten feet from the green cat and hesitated. It swung this way and that, as if it had encountered a magic circle it couldn’t pierce – and stopped.
Jack murmured, “Sash was right.”
Billig gave a great gasp and began to squeal.
The blue beams winked out. The gun clanked on the floor. The squeal changed to a clucking and Billig swayed. Jack jumped to catch him.
Phil sprang forward and his fingers touched buttons he’d seen Billig touch. The bars in the garage gateways shot up. Phil was on the telescoped stairs almost before they began to move, and rode them to the ground through layers of stinging ozone and golden harmony. The jeep had trembled to a stop just short of Mitzie, who stared at it groggily, her whole figure slack, as if a puff of wind could have felled her.
When the stairs touched the floor, momentum carried Phil forward a half dozen steps but he kept his footing and circled back at a run. When he plunged into the area between the green cat and the spot where the jeep had been abandoned, he felt a shiver of sudden and extreme terror, which even as he felt it, began to fade.
But he hardly had time to ask himself whether that was what had stampeded Carstairs and the rest, for the next instant he was calling, “Lucky!” and Lucky was saying “Prrt!” and he was scooping up the unresisting cat, his fingers trembling as they touched the green fur, and darting back toward Mitzie and the jeep. Her groggy look had now become a dazed smile of triumph and pride.
He grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her toward the jeep. “Get in!” he shouted in her ear. “We’re getting out of here. You’re driving.”
A little life seemed to come back into her as her hands touched the wheel. She kicked the starter as he scrambled in beside her, Lucky gently clutched to his chest. “Which way?” she asked thickly.
“Any exit gateway,” he told her.
With a rather wheezy hum, the jeep started toward the nearest gateway. Phil felt a thinning of the golden peace around them, as if, he told himself, Lucky were resting. The jeep, though gaining a little speed, seemed to move as slowly as a school slideway. But looking back, he saw that the group on the balcony was still standing as motionless as dress display dummies with the power off all except Billig, who was once again moving about rapidly.
“Get them,” Phil could barely hear Billig’s cracked voice implore, as he darted from one to the other. “Kill them.”
The jeep nosed through the high doorway and started up a ramp.
“Dora!” Phil heard Billig yell. “Grab my ortho and kill them.”
The effect of the golden wave must be wearing off, Phil thought, for just as the top of the gateway was cutting off his view he saw the violet blonde stoop rapidly behind the guard wall.
The next second a blue beam flashed, and smoke and starry splatter sprayed up just behind the jeep. The beam moved up and encountered the top of the gateway. It noticed that, came a little closer to them, and then was stopped by the thickness of the wall. The ramp turned and Phil saw a half dozen men in the Fun Incorporated company guard uniform. Two of them had drawn their guns and the other four hadn’t. They turned and saw the jeep. The two with guns raised them and the others reached for theirs.
Then Lucky sat up on Phil’s lap straight as the statuette of Bast, and Phil felt him let go of another of those great golden invisible waves. Phil could tell the moment it hit the guards from the sudden change in their tough faces. They watched the jeep with awe and incredulous grins as it went past.
Farther on they found themselves approaching an expanse of gray cold light, against which a party of some twenty heavily armed men was partly silhouetted, although they were advancing warily along the walls. They were carrying guns, nets and sprays that could swiftly immobilize men in plastic cocoons, and what looked like bird cages.
They leveled their weapons, but once again and mightier than ever, so mighty it made Phil shiver with understanding, the golden wave rolled forward to engulf them. Once again the jeep glided past astonished, troubled faces that smiled in spite of themselves. As the jeep rolled out into the cool, shadowy dawn, Phil stroked Lucky’s soft, springy fur and murmured, “Little peace maker. You even gentled the FBL.”
Lucky looked up at him coquettishly and then yawned tremendously and curled up on Phil’s lap. The feeling of golden harmony subsided until only a ghost of it lingered.
“I know,” Phil said, “you’re tired from so much peace making.” He suddenly felt extremely tired himself, yet he went on to say, in slurred syllables, “Lucky, I don’t care whether you come from Egypt, Russia, or the jungles of the Amazon – you’re good for the USA.”
XIII
THE jeep steadily turned corners, putting block after block of the empty, early morning, upper level streets between it and Fun Incorporated. Phil wondered whether it could be traced by the electric eyes that were said to be at each intersection, but he forgot the question before it became a worry. Lucky was a plump green doughnut on his lap. He felt over-poweringly sleepy and wished he could gently slide into some universe lacking light, sound and gravity.
But before drifting off he glanced at Mitzie. Her face was set in hard, proud, sneering lines, although two tears were jiggling down her cheeks. Phil felt more annoyed than surprised or compassionate. No one, he told himself, had the right to indulge such a mood in Lucky’s presence.
He decided that Mitzie needed to have certain truths rubbed in gently. “Our escape is nothing to puff ourselves up over,” he said softly. “Lucky did it all. Though I admired your bravery dodging the jeep.”
Mitzie didn’t look at him, but she thinned her lips.
“The episode of the jeep was instructive,” Phil went on, beginning to twist the angelic knife just a little. “It showed you exactly what sort of glorious criminal fellowship you had with those three hep-thugs. But now,” he went on, tempering justice with mercy, “you’ve discovered that your romantic worship of evil isn’t worth a fingersnap in the face of true love and understanding. Eh, Mitzie?”
Mitzie let the car jog listlessly to a stop. Phil was dimly aware that they were parking in a bumpy, blind end driveway in a neglected, shrubby square with tall buildings set around. He leaned back, smiling drowsily, his fingers playing with Lucky’s springy fur. He was waiting complacently for Mitzie’s sobs.
Instead, the seat jounced and the door of the jeep slammed.
He looked around. Mitzie was standing outside the jeep against a shadowy background of tangled shrubbery and misty, silent skyscrapers.
Suddenly she leaned forward toward him, bracing herself against the door with stiff arms. She inhaled gustily and her small, tender breasts lifted in their black satin half cups.
Now, he told himself, it must happen. She must yield, sobbing, to Lucky’s power.
“I hate you, Phil,” she said intensely. “You want to see me turn to jelly.” New tears spurted from the inside corners of her eyes, but her expression grew fiercer. “Carstairs, Llewellyn and Buck may have tried to kill me, but at least they gave me a chance to be something. They allowed me the dignity of being hated. They didn’t try to drown me in slop.
“I want glory,” she went on in a voice that certainly should have sounded choked except she simply wouldn’t permit it. “I want my kind of glory, no matter how cheap and selfish you think it is, because it’s the only thing that’s shining and brave in a shoddy, cowardly world. I want to spit in the world’s eye and then face it, when it comes bleating for revenge, like I faced this jeep.”