“But remember this, dear audiers, and I’ll say it to you in Martian: Zip-zap-zup! Meaning: Bring in the cats!
“Now as for this report, folks, that handie-supernova Zelda Zornia, vacationing in Brazil, did a south-of-the-equator handiecast advertising bathing jewelry; let me assure you clean living people…”
Phil cleared his mind, trying to put himself in Lucky’s place, to feel the direction in which the cat had wandered off. His head swung doubtfully this way and that, like a compass needle or planchette, but finally came to rest. He climbed out of the jeep and walked straight ahead, not turning aside for the dusty, crackling shrubs, but pushing straight through them.
He parted a final straggly hedge and found himself looking across the empty street at a house quite as old as the Akeleys, but with free sky above it.
Built of ancient brick, it was three stories tall and looked as pompously respectable as a 19thcentury banker. It reposed sedately on a terrace that was as weedily overgrown as the square and that was surrounded by a high iron fence.
The only incongruous note was struck by a saucer-shaped object fully fifty feet across set on a framework atop the flat roof. Judging from the dull green of its underside, it might be made of copper. It looked almost as old as the house and quite as proper, as if the 19thcentury banker had decided to wear a green beret and dared anyone to notice it.
Phil crossed the street, mounted some steps and peered through the iron gate. He made out, beside the houses old-fashioned, knob door, a tarnished bronze plate which read: “Humberford Foundation.”
He looked back uneasily. Where he figured the jeep to be, he could see the heads and black-clad shoulders of two men. The black reminded him unpleasantly of the sports togs worn by Billig and his yes men. They seemed to be arguing. One of them took a step up, as if he were getting into the jeep, but the other pulled him back and they hurried off – not in his direction, Phil noted with some relief.
He gave the iron gate a little push. It opened with a rusty “Harrumph” that made Phil shrink apologetically. But nothing else happened so after a minute he slipped through and began to peer around at the undergrowth and then to wander through it, softly calling “Lucky!”
Occasionally he looked back in the direction of the jeep and once he saw the radio-helmeted heads and blue shoulders of three policemen. He wondered if the next time he looked he’d see Dr. Romadka or the Akeleys, or perhaps Carstairs, Llewellyn and Buck, and he shivered to think of how close he’d come to being caught – by someone.
But the next shock he got came from something nearer. He had rounded the house, after having poked through its equally lifeless and overgrown back yard, when he saw a dark haired man peering at him through the fence.
The most disturbing thing about the man was that he closely resembled the girl Phil had watched undress in the room across from his. The girl with hoofs. This man had the same vital, faun-like expression.
Phil froze. But the man merely yawned, turned away, and shuffled off, humming or hooting a little melody that gave Phil goosepimples because it reminded him of something in his dream.
For that matter, the whole experience was becoming very dream-like to Phil: the silent house, the neglected garden, the futile searching, the melancholy memory of Mitzie’s leave-taking, the powerful sense of a dead past. But the feeling that Lucky was near was still strong and after a bit Phil realized he would have to do something he had been shrinking from.
He reluctantly mounted the steps to the front portal, reached for the knob, and then, to put off the evil moment a little longer, called “Lucky!” a few times along the shallow porch to either side.
Someone behind him inquired pleasantly, “Are you looking for a cat?”
Phil spun around guiltily and found himself facing a very old man as tall and frail as a ghost, and apparently as silent as one, since Phil hadn’t heard him coming up the walk. His thin, wrinkle-netted face, crowned by close cropped white hair, was hauntingly familiar. It had something of the grandeur of a pre-Christian ascetic, yet there was a note of Puckish humor in it, as if its owner had arrived at a wise second childhood. Although Phil’s heart was pounding at the alarmingly accurate question, he found himself liking the man at first sight.
As he hesitated, the old man went on, “My interest, by the way, is purely academic – or else childish curiosity, which comes to the same thing.” His eyes flashed impishly. “Is it by any chance a green cat?” he asked Phil rapidly. “No, you don’t have to answer that question, at least not any more than you have already. I don’t want to distress you. It’s just that I have a mind that automatically makes the far-fetched deductions first.”
He beamed at Phil, who, though flustered, found himself grinning.
“Perhaps you’re a journalist,” the oldster went on smoothly, “or at least we can pretend you are. Dr. Garnett always calls in the press when the Humberford Foundation makes a discovery, though I’m sorry to say the press stopped coming about twenty years ago. They’d quit thinking of para-psychology as newsworthy. But perhaps there’s been time to breed a new race of journalists with a revived interest in esping and all the teles. In any case Garnett and the whole staff will be overjoyed at the presence of a pressman.”
“You mean the Humberford Foundation investigates extrasensory perception and things like that?” Phil asked.
“You should know, since you’ve been sent here to get a story,” the old man said reprovingly. “Still, reporters often haven’t the foggiest idea what they’ve been sent out to report, so you’re excused.”
Phil found himself grinning again. He hadn’t any notion of how the old man knew about Lucky or where he stood in the general picture, except that he felt strangely certain that the old man didn’t have anything to do with the organizations out to get Lucky. And the oldster’s mischievous pretense that Phil was a reporter might at least get him past the imposing door and let him spy around.
“So the Humberford Foundation has made a new discovery in parapsychology?” he said conversationally.
The other nodded. “Dr. Garnett was most excited. So much so that he didn’t have time to tell me what it was all about, except that they’d started to get some amazing results – and just this morning. So I hurried over. Good esp is apt to go poof, so it’s best to get it when it’s hot. I have a standing order with Garnett to call me over the moment anything starts to flash. For that matter, I have the same orders with practically every scientific laboratory in the area – though the others don’t always call me. But – thank Thoth! – Garnett isn’t in a field that’s under the benign aegis of security and he isn’t at all security minded himself. In fact, I’m not certain he’s ever heard of the FBL. So you may get a real scoop, Mr…?”
“Gish. Phil Gish.”
The oldster’s thin hand pressed his with a feathery touch. “Morton Opperly.”
Phil stared at him for several seconds, then gasped, “The -?”
The other assented with an apologetic shrug. Phil let it sink in. This was Morton Opperly who had worked on the Manhattan Project, whose name had appeared beside Einstein’s on the Physicists’ Covenant, who had tried unsuccessfully to get himself jailed for refusal to do research during World War III, who had become a legend. Phil had always vaguely assumed he’d died years ago.
He gazed at the renowned physicist in happy awe. The question that rose effortlessly to his lips was a testimony to Opperly’s ability to create an atmosphere of unlimited free discussion unknown since 1940.
“Mr. Opperly, what are orthos?”
“Orthos? That could be short for any number of scientific terms, Phil, but I bet you mean the ones that shoot. Those are orthos-fissionables. Trouble with ordinary fissionables – or fissionables under ordinary circumstances – is that the fragments and neutrons shoot off in all directions and the critical mass is large. But if you get the fissionable atoms all lined up with their axis of spin pointing in the same direction, then they all split in the same place and every neutron hits the nucleus of the atom next to it. Because of that last fact, the neutrons are all used up and the critical mass becomes minute. Half the fragments fly in one direction, half in the other, making it a very nasty and convenient weapon, except it has to backfire.”