“I did think you were courageous there,” Phil temporized, wondering why the devil Lucky’s power, that had softened twenty men at a crack, was so slow in taking effect on a single misguided girl.
“Spare me any praise that’s a cover for slop,” Mitzie said scathingly. “Oh I know what that Sunday school beast there on your lap can do, and I know what you want to see happen. I have only one thing that’s titanium in me, all the rest is stinking mush. You want to see that one thing break. No, worse, you want to see it soften. Well, I’m not going to let that happen.” She stood up and took her hands off the door.
Suddenly Phil felt a kind of sleepy worry. He ran his hand over Lucky’s fur, then shook him hesitatingly. “Wake up,” he said uneasily.
Lucky merely purred. Or perhaps it was a small snore.
“Goodbye for good, Phil,” Mitzie said, turning away.
“No, wait,” Phil called suddenly, at last hunching groggily forward in his seat. “Don’t go yet.” He shook Lucky again, almost roughly. “Wake up,” he demanded. “Stop her.”
The small god hung in his hands like a limp green rag.
Phil put Lucky down on the seat beside him and started to get out of the car. But abruptly a wave of deep melancholy washed over him. He knew that something precious was slipping away from him, but he wasn’t sure it was genuinely precious and he didn’t know whether he had the right to stop it. Besides his god had failed him and he was incredibly sleepy.
So he watched Mitzie slipping away from him as irrevocably as time, and did nothing except lift Lucky back on his lap. He watched her stride off along the misty shrubs like a proud and angry nymph, holding her back straight and her head very high, and also, he supposed, those charming and ridiculous breasts with which she insisted on facing the whole world.
For what seemed a long time he watched the dim, empty corner around which she had turned. He was frozen in a hypnotic daze that temporarily served for sleep. Now and then thoughts crossed his mind’s dull expanse, but they were shadowy things and did not linger. Once it occurred to him that Lucky might have been unable to hold Mitzie because his earlier exertions had drained his powers; small gods couldn’t be expected to exude several great golden waves without suffering some slight after effects.
It occurred to him that at this very moment he must be the object of furious searches by the Federal Bureau of Loyalty, Fun Incorporated’s natty thugs, Romadka and his jolly friends, perhaps even good old Carstairs, Llewellyn and Buck. Yet he felt neither fear nor any inclination to form a plan. The dim corner he was watching grew brighter but stayed empty.
Four feet defined themselves in the doughnut-shaped pressure on his lap. Lucky stretched, shook himself, looked up at Phil with the brightest sort of eyes, and said, “Prrrrt-prt.”
“You’re a fine sort of cat,” Phil complained grumpily, his own eyes feeling anything but bright. “Going to sleep just when I needed you most.”
Lucky disregarded these criticisms. “Prrrt-prt,” he repeated peremptorily.
But now that his hypnotic daze was broken, Phil once again felt overpoweringly sleepy. “I know that mew,” he mumbled muzzily at the green blur beyond the shimmering fence of his eyelashes. “You’re hungry. Well, I s’pose you deserve a feed after all the wonders you did. But I haven’t got any cranberry sauce right now. I’ll get you something to eat… later… on.”
“Prrrt-prt!” Lucky demanded in the outraged tones of an honest workman who finds himself cheated of his pay.
But Phil was beyond reach of any appeal. “G’night,” he told Lucky in the kindliest possible way and dropped off.
He dreamed of things far off and strange and ominous, though misty. He dreamed of dark fronded forests and small animals screeching. The screeches grew louder and he fled out of his dream altogether into the jeep parked in the blind end driveway in the little square.
For a moment he seemed to see the ghosts of the dark fronded trees and hear the echo of the dream screeches, but then he realized that the former were the square’s unpruned shrubs, while the latter were the squeals and cries of schoolgirls scattering out of a building beyond.
He realized groggily that they must be coming from school – no, from afternoon school, since the sunlight wasn’t slanting at all deeply into the square, and that he must have slept here undisturbed all day.
And then, he became aware that his lap and heart were cold and that Lucky was gone.
XIV
PHIL’S first impulse was to jump out of the jeep and hunt around. But the chill in his heart told him Lucky was farther away than that. Besides, the place was a regular jungle and one man could hunt through it forever for anything cat-size.
He did not recognize the square at all, but he guessed from the schoolgirls that he was in an intellectual residential neighborhood. At first he thought the school was one for girls, but then he noticed a few lone boys among the homeward-bound students and decided that most of the families in this area must be deliberately having as many girls as possible. When sex-determination had become possible through centrifuging human sperm to separate the male-producing and female-producing types, most parents decided to have sons, especially for their firstborn. They often told themselves they would have daughters later, but unfortunately small families were the rule. The resulting over-production of males had led to some ineffectual state laws forbidding sex-determination, an unsuccessful attempt at self-regulation by the medical profession, a lot of talk in Congress, and an almost fanatically determined movement among a class of thoughtful people to produce only daughters. This last class, besides seeking to balance the sex ratio, perhaps had in mind the fact or rumor that human parthenogenesis had been achieved. Phil remembered a Sunday afternoon video shock talk:Will Women Born of Virgins Become Our Only Intellectuals?
Other aspects of the neighborhood around the square fitted with his guess. There was an appearance of shabbiness, the skyscrapers were low, advertisements lifeless, traffic was light, there were no hot rods.
He let his gaze roam over the tiers of tiny flats, wondering where Lucky might have gone. As he did so, he turned on the jeep’s radio. “… while Mystery Man Billig, mastermind of Fun Incorporated, is believed to have fled the country. Tonight at 8:30 New Washington Time, President Barnes will address all us American folks, partly to silence the small, syndicate-inspired clamor at the outlawing of male-female wrestling and jukebox burlesque, but more to explain to an amazed citizenry the full reasons behind the charges brought this morning by the federal government against sixty-nine high officials, I predict – and remember this is just my personal libel-free guess, fellow-folks – that the president will reveal that Fun Incorporated has been peddling dream pills, temporary sterility tabs, and I’m as shocked and disgusted as you are, folks, female robots equipped for obscene functioning.
“Now here’s an important flash on the cat story. The cats are not carrying an infection and are under no circumstances to be destroyed, whether owned, strayed, or alley. In fact, there’s a stiff jail sentence waiting for any person destroying a cat. But all owned cats are to be brought to the nearest security station, while any person sighting a strayed or alley cat is directed to do the same. There’s a stiff penalty for not doing the first, a one hundred dollar reward for doing the second. Get busy, kids! Why this sudden federal interest in cats? The National Health Service zips its lips. But your newscaster backs this highly responsible rumor: it has been discovered that a rare strain of cat carries a cancer destroying virus. Wouldn’t it be nice, folkses, to know that, once full grown, you would never start to grow again, in any part or place?