He forced himself to steal a glance at her, then let out a sigh of relief. Her two legs were once more just like any other girl’s. Illusion, he decided, was at times the Bread of Life.

“And now,” he said, “you can answer those questions of mine.”

But just then there was more rapping at the door.

“This time girl friend,” Dytie told him optimistically.

But Phil was taking no more chances. He switched on the one-way peephole first, and looked straight into the face of Dave Greeley.

When Phil whispered “Federal Bureau of Loyalty,” to Dytie, she jumped up. During his long narrative she had asked him several questions about that organization, he had answered them in detail, and she had apparently formed some very definite conclusions. “We got beat it, Phil. No time question-answer now.” And she lightly sprang to the window sill and walked across the ladder.

It wasn’t as long as the beam at the Akeleys’, but it was ten times as high and Phil wasn’t drunk. If he hadn’t crossed the beam at the Akeley’s and gone down the service chute at the Romadkas’, he would never have dared it. His heart was hammering as he let himself down into Dytie’s room. He turned around with some vague idea of removing the ladder. He heard a crash in his room. Dytie grabbed him.

“No time now,” she said. And she urged him out of her room into the corridor.

Seconds later they were entering the elevator on her side of the building. “Hey, that’s the up button,” he warned as she punched it.

“I know, Phil,” she said reassuringly.

Emerging on the roof, Phil felt for a moment a big sense of freedom. The sodium mirror had not quite set, and everything around was bright although the lower part of the sky was dark and many stars showed in it.

Then he saw the half dozen copters swinging in low toward them like june bugs.

Dytie was hustling him along, but only toward an empty corner of the roof. He resented her pointless display of energy. A mighty voice from the sky commanded them to stop.

Dytie halted almost at the edge of the roof, felt around in the air, climbed a couple of feet up into it and felt around again.

There was the sound of a copter scraping, bouncing and grounding behind them

Dytie opened in the air a small doorway that was black as ink, and climbed inside. She turned around, her face a pale mask in an inky rectangle, urged, “Come on, Phil,” and stretched a white arm out of the rectangle down toward him.

Phil stared at this weird air-framed portrait. Beneath it he could clearly see the sheer walls of the building opposite and the dizzying ribbon of street fifty floors below.

Behind him men shouted and there was another shattering command from the sky.

Phil grabbed Dytie’s wrist. His other hand, fumbling blindly, found an invisible rung in the air. So did his foot. He scrambled up the air and pitched over the sill of the inky doorway, into an inky sack and found a curving floor under him. Rolling over, he saw behind him a rectangle of the sky with three stars in it. The rectangle narrowed and vanished, and there was no light at all.

Then he started to fall.

XVII

PHIL struck out wildly, with the instinctive hope that a man falling to his death could warp space to his advantage if he tensed his muscles sufficiently.

Then he wondered how long it would take a man to fall fifty floors, but the mathematics were beyond anything he could do quickly enough in his head.

Then he asked himself why the inky sack was falling with him.

Then he retched, but brought up only the ghosts of a yeast-spread sandwich and a glass of soybean milk consumed a day ago.

He continued to fall.

Soft light sprang up around him. He was inside a sphere some eight feet in diameter and his feet were near the center, while his cheek gently brushed the sphere’s soft lining. Swiveling his gaze past his feet, he noticed Dytie da Silva sprawled negligently in the air and intently studying a screen set in the lining of the sphere.

But he was still falling.

Phil knew little enough about space ships, but he knew they couldn’t safely go into free-fall without accelerating first to get some kind of edge on earth’s gravitational field.

But there had been no acceleration.

“Dytie!” he yelled, and in the confined space the noise was deafening. “What’s happening to me?”

Wincing a bit, she looked around at him. ‘Shh, Phil. You in free-fall but not falling. I turn off grav’ty.”

Still retching, Phil tried to comprehend that idea. “Turn off gravity?” He was still falling, but no longer so sure he was going to hit anything.

Dytie looked along his helplessly sprawled body at his face. “Sure, Phil. Grav’ty go round this little boat just like light do. Grav’ty no pull it, light no show it.”

“That’s why it was invisible?”

“Vis’ble? Nobody see it. Wait bit, Phil, got do things.”

“But in a ship like this you could travel -” Phil began, his mind suddenly full of dizzying speculations.

“This not ship, Phil, just dinghy. No talk now.”

Phil’s falling acquired a direction. He found himself drifting gently toward Dytie. “Here ‘side me, Phil,” she instructed. A few moments later he was comfortably stretched out on his stomach beside Dytie, his head poised like hers above the screen.

And then the speed of his new directed fall increased, although the sphere was no longer falling with him, until his body was comfortably pressed against the soft lining. He deduced after a while that they must be accelerating, although he got his chief clue from the screen.

At first he couldn’t interpret the picture on the screen. It was in shades of violet and showed a few large squares and oblongs with dark ribbons between most of them. On the central square were a number of dots, which slowly moved as he watched them – also three or four crosses with blobs at their centers. Gradually the squares and rectangles shrank, while more of the same came onto the screen from the edges. He realized that he was looking down at the city and that the dots, which he could hardly distinguish any more, were the men hunting them, while the crosses were the copters.

For a bit his stomach chilled at the thought of being poised so high above the city and going higher. But then he began to lose himself in the wonder of the picture. Phil hadn’t traveled a great deal by air and had seen even less when he’d done so, and the growing picture of the city was enthralling. He began to feel rather like a god and to speculate how he’d mete out justice to mankind if he owned this mysterious little dinghy. Visions of sudden descents on dictators danced in his head.

“We soon high ‘nough, Phil,” she said. “Hold on hands, stick feet under bar.”

He obeyed her instructions, taking hold of two handles and thrusting his legs under a large padded bar. A moment later he knew the reason, for he began to be pulled away from the screen and had to hold on tight. He deduced that they were decelerating. After a bit this stopped too and he was once more “in free-fall but not falling.” Meanwhile, the picture in the screen had become one of the whole city – a checkerboard of tiny squares not unlike a map.

Dytie produced and unfolded an ordinary street map and flattened it out beside the screen.

“You say you know where find out pussycat is. You say in city. Show Dytie.”

Phil forced his mind to tackle this problem. His first realization was just how flimsy the hope was on which he’d based his statement to Dytie that he might be able to locate the green cat. It depended on Billig having the green cat, on Jack Jones knowing where Billig had hidden from the FBL, and on Jack being in hiding himself at the Akeleys’. Still, it was the only way he knew of getting a line on Lucky.