As Dion finally put down the mallet, a girl in slacks broke out of the crowd and grabbed Phil’s arm. It was Mitzie Romadka, panting and disheveled. Behind her darted Sacheverell Akeley.
“Jack and Cookie managed to slug Llewellyn,” she panted, “and tried to do the same to us. We got away from them, but they’ve gone to warn Billig.”
Looking around quickly, Phil realized that they had. Standing in the gloomy entrance to Pluto’s Palace was Mr. Billig, flanked by a half dozen gleaming sales robots. Only these sales robots had gun muzzles jutting from their gleaming turrets. Billig had a box slung to his chest.
“Any funny business from anyone and they mow down the crowd,” he called, his fingers poised over the box “Dora, stun that cat and bring it here.”
The crowd sucked back to either side and showed Billig the wreckage of Dora Pannes, with Lucky sitting serenely beside it. Phil could see the horror come into Billig’s face as he sensed the golden wave of peace coming from Lucky. Billig jerked up the ortho and fired.
The blue beam splattered molten rubber a dozen feet from Lucky and did no other damage before it winked out. But as the dazzle died, Phil saw that the beam’s back fire had found a target. Billig pitched forward with a large hole in his head.
Then, as if Billig’s fall had been a cue, a small, fattish man stepped out through the curtains of the Mind Clearers. Although he was wearing some sort of partial gas mask, Phil recognized Dr. Romadka. He pointed a stun-gun, Lucky collapsed and was still, and the night’s eerie peace shifted in a finger snap to a churning terror which seemed to Phil to take the form of a palpable vibration, a wailing roar.
Romadka darted forward toward Lucky. Beside Phil, Mary Akeley jerked something from the pocketbook and waved it in the air. “Anton!” she screamed menacingly, and when the psychiatrist looked her way, she swung the doll of him sharply against her foot, so that its head snapped against her heel.
For a moment Phil believed she was a genuine witch, for Romadka pitched forward on his face.
But then he saw that the wailing roar had been that of a dozen squad cars, converging on the spot from all directions and rocket braking so close to the crowd that there were singed legs and screams. Men uniformed and in plain clothes piled out and barked and pummeled the crowd into a semblance of control. The man who’d jumped from the foremost car lowered the stun-gun with which he’d knocked out Romadka. It was Dave Greeley.
For a moment Phil wondered bleakly whether Billig mightn’t have made arrangements with the government for a deal involving the cat, naming this place as a rendezvous. Then out from behind the FBL man stepped Morton Opperly, peering about with great interest, and Phil decided that this was a world in which you couldn’t even trust noble looking old scientists pretending to be great liberals and babbling government top secrets in order to win your confidence.
He held out his wrists for the handcuffs.
XX
A HALF hour after the big rubber hands of the telemanipulator yanked Phil out of his cubicle in the black maria, he had been exposed to so many sets of security checks that he guessed there were only two places in America he could be headed for: the Heptagon or White House, Junior, in New Washington.
Moved along by telemanipulators which did not seem to care which side up they carried people, he had been prodded, thumped, scanned, sampled, and subjected to other indignities. His footprints, retinal blood vessel layout and other physical patterns and dimensions had been taken, presumably for checking against his FBL dossier; likewise his voice pattern and hand writing. He had been X-rayed and magnetically tested for bombs that might be surgeried inside him. His breath and blood had been checked for BW germs and viruses. He had been thoroughly geigered. Lights had been flashed in his eyes, questions had droned in his ears. Once or twice he thought he’d been put to sleep. All throughout the process he’d felt a miserable and futile indignation.
But now, as a final rubber hand sliding in a slot in the wall hurried him down a corridor and deposited him at the entrance to a large room, he suddenly realized that he didn’t care any more. In fact, he began to feel calm.
And then he was being conducted to a seat by a human usher at last. He looked around. Almost everyone he’d been mixed up with in the past few days was here: Jack and Juno Jones, looking quite awestruck, along with Cookie; Moe Brimstine with his incongruous red hair; Mitzie Romadka and her father, pale and woozy; Sacheverell and Mary Akeley; Dr. Garnett and Chancellor Frobisher from the Humberford Foundation; Dion and Dytie da Silva, the latter with a cloak huddled around her; even Carstairs, Llewellyn and Buck. Along with them were quantities of unfamiliar faces – FBL people, Phil supposed. Others, presumably guards, lined the walls.
Most of these individuals were watching three men who were seated like judges behind a large desk across the room: Dr. Morton Opperly, President Robert T. Barnes, and a stony faced man whom Phil recognized as John Emmet, head of the FBL.
Emmet looked as thin as Opperly, but infinitely tougher. Like Opperly’s his face showed an intense and ceaseless curiosity, but a curiosity that never became carefree, as if each new fact was for him a new responsibility.
At the moment, Emmet was speaking to Dave Greeley, who was supervising two white-smocked technicians as they telemanipulated Lucky, who was limp as a dish cloth, into a low walled box set between banks of electronic tubes and transistors. Apparently Greeley had voiced a doubt as to the safety of the set up, for Emmet was telling Greeley that the research division guaranteed that the low intensity stunfield in which Lucky had now been placed would keep the green cat harmless.
But Phil heard only the tail end of the conversation as he was being seated between Dr. Garnett and Sacheverell. The next moment the room got very quiet. Emmet looked them all over.
Finally Emmet said, “I think you all know why you’re here. I want the fullest cooperation from everyone. Within the walls of security now surrounding us, complete frankness is possible. I, myself, shall be as frank as I expect you to be.”
Emmet paused, then leaned forward a little. “To begin with, the creature known as the green cat is real. Its powers of influencing thought and emotion are also real. It truly intends the conquest of America and of the entire world. Finally, it is neither mutant nor mechanism, but an invader from the planetary system of another star. Dr. Opperty, will you kindly outline the information you have obtained from the being masquerading as Miss Aphrodite da Silva?”
Dr. Opperly’s voice was faint but very clear.
“The eighth planet of the Star Vega – that is, if Miss da Silva and I have got our identifications straight – is earth-type though of somewhat greater mass. Its landscape, Miss da Silva tells me, can be pictured as endless, hard baked plains dotted with small lakes and marshes, and groves of tall trees. On this planet, intelligence evolved in a swift hoofed biped leaf eater, whose forelegs became specialized as organs for manipulating branches and for brief food seeking climbs. This specialization occurred when the creature was a primitive equine, so that while its hind legs were developing very horselike hoofs, its forelegs were becoming startlingly humanoid hands. The result was a being remarkably similar to the satyrs and fauns of Greek mythology. Miss da Silva, would you care to give these people an idea?”
Dytie stood up, whipped off her cloak, and stood facing them in hirsute nudity. For a moment there was no reaction, then she stamped her hoofs twice and her figure became real. She wrapped the cloak around her and sat down.