“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 outsize 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. Youand 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?”