“Tormenting?” Jack’s voice rose. “I wasn’t tormenting him. Just taking precautions. He came in here like a screwball, not saying anything, dancing around on his toes, babbling about a cat. As if he was about to go off his nut. Dangerous.”
Cookie’s tight-lipped face bobbed up and down in agreement, but Juno wasn’t at all impressed. “He seemed about as dangerous to me as yeast spread. Why didn’t you let him find his cat and get out?”
Jack’s face registered astonishment. “Juno, was it you let in this Ikeless Joe?” (It took Phil a moment to realize Ikeless meant lacking I.Q.) “I was wondering how he got past Old Rubberarm. Do you mean to say you fell for that story about a cat?”
“Well, isn’t there one?” Juno demanded, scanning the room.
“How could there be, Juno?” Jack protested, the barest note of intellectual superiority beginning to creep into his voice. “You didn’t see one, did you? No. And if there had been a cat, wouldn’t it have been after these mice like a shot? And where could it hide in here, anyway? It couldn’t have got in there,” he went on as Juno’s gaze rested on the inner door.“He’s in there.” Juno nodded. “So where could it be, I ask you?” Jack finished. “You don’t suppose Cookie and me… I kidnapped it, do you?”
Juno rubbed her battered nose thoughtfully. She turned on Phil a face that was friendly but heavy with doubt. “Let’s hear some more about that cat, son. What color was it?”
“Green,” Phil heard himself say, and even as he saw the looks of incredulity appear on the faces around him, he couldn’t keep himself from going on: “Yes, bright green. And he liked cranberry sauce. He just came to me an hour ago. I called him Lucky because he made me feel so good, as if I could understand everything.”
There was a long silence. Phil felt his spirits sink past zero. Then Juno laid on his shoulder a huge hand that made it sag. “Come on, son,” she said gently. “You better get going.”
Jack strode up with a wry eye on Juno. “Look, Mister,” he said to Phil in a solicitous voice in which the mockery was still cautious, “I had an appointment with an analyst for tonight, but I think you need it more than I do.” And handed Phil a torn-off bit of phonoscribe tape. Phil accepted it humbly and put it in his pocket. Cookie tittered. Juno whirled on him. “Look,” she roared, “his being a nut doesn’t excuse laughing at him any more than bullying!”
The inner door opened, but Phil couldn’t see inside, because a tall, fat man with a sooty jowl and thick dark glasses pretty well filled it. Phil sensed a note of respectfulness in the other three.
“What’s the racketting about?” the fat man demanded in a voice which startled Phil because it was Old Rubberarm’s
“This guy -” Cookie began, but stopped at a quick look from Jack.
The thick glasses flashed at Phil. “Oh, one of your nut admirers, Jack,” the fat man said comprehendingly. “Get him out of here.”
“Sure, Mr. Brimstine,” Jack said. “Right away.”
The inner door closed. Phil let Juno steer him through the other. He felt way down in the minuses. So much so that he almost didn’t notice the odd couple coming down the corridor toward them. The man looked saintly, yet sprightly. He was very sunburned and he wore orange shoes and an orange beret. The woman looked like a youngish witch, but with the nose and chin already seeking each other. A little red hat was attached by twenty long hatpins to her coarse dark hair, and she had a red skirt stiff and thick as a carpet. Both of them were wearing black turtlenecked sweaters. Phil noted them numbly, lost in his own distress, but was vaguely aware that they were pointedly ignoring the giantess at his side.
“You’ll find your little tin hero back there shooting mice,” she snarled at them as they passed. The woman merely snooted her witchy nose, but then the sunburned man looked around with elfin eyes and a benign smile. “Joy, Juno,” he admonished lightly. “Nothing but joy.”
The giantess looked after them glumly for a moment, then went on. “Couple of Jack’s intelleckchul fans,” she confided bitterly. “Poets, religious nuts, and all that goes with it. Completely turned his head, the stinkers.”
They reached the corner. Old Rubberarm waggled the tip of a fingerless hand and muttered, “No loitering,” but Juno silenced him with a weary, “Shut up!”
“Now get along home, son,” she told Phil. “I don’t know as I’d visit that analyzer of Jack’s. Probably some fancy guy he got put onto by the Akeleys – those two intelleckchul jerks you just saw. But maybe some kind of psycher would be a good idea.” She patted his shoulder and grinned, showing a scar inside her lip. “I’m sorry about what happened back there – that lousy husband of mine. Anytime you feel like it, drop in on me. Old Rubberarm’s got your voice pattern. Just ask for Juno Jones. Only one thing, son – no more green cats.”
III
THROUGH half closed lids, whose lashes blurred everything, Phil watched the ghostly pale yellow circle of the window, which was all the illumination he could bear now. He hadn’t put on any lights when the sun had set and the sodium mirror above the stratosphere made the only light, and minutes ago he’d switched off the TV screen although the girl’s voice still crooned a sex song and he still wore the fat mitten of the handie. But the pressure of her fingers, holding a hydraulically compartmented artificial hand and transmitting over the airwaves an electric signal to change pressures of the hydraulic compartments of the handie, began to feel like that of a skeleton wearing rubber gloves. Phil jerked off the handie, switched off the voice, lit a cigarette, and was back with his problem.
Was he really crazy, he asked himself; was Lucky just a psycho’s dream cat, or had he somehow been tricked? Once again he tormentedly totted up the evidence. Nobody but himself had admitted to seeing Lucky. And there were so many other indications of hallucinations: that crazy color, the silly food, his fleeting hunch that Lucky wasn’t “really” a cat, his suspiciously godlike elation and sense of power.
But those feelings of his were also the reason that Luckyhad to exist. After what had happened today, Phil simply couldn’t endure life without Lucky, without those warm insights that had galvanized him this afternoon and shut away all thoughts of his lost job, his loneliness, his cowardice and frustrations. “Lucky,” he whispered without knowing he’d been going to, and the sick child sound of his voice frightened him so that he fumbled in his pocket for the phonoscribe tape Swish Jack Jones had given him. Puffing his cigarette hard so that it made a hell red glow, he read the smoky words, “Dr. Anton Romadka. Top of The Keep. Eight O’Clock.”
He visualized the thin black shaft of The Keep, a luxurious office-hotel, and thought of how few minutes it would take him to get there. But then he suddenly crumpled the paper in his pocket and began to pace. Going to Dr. Romadka would mean that he didn’t really believe in Lucky.
He thought of the sleeping pills but was afraid there weren’t enough left. He reached for a book he’d been reading, but the thought of its stereotyped sadistic plot was unbearably boring. As a last resort he turned on the radio again, voice and sight.
“… ravins the antichrist.”
That phrase, together with the gaunt bucolic face, inevitably meant that President Robert T. Barnes was telling his Fellow Americans about Russia all over again.
“But there are sinners on this side of the polar battlegrounds,” the great midwestern father-image continued, swaying forward and arching his bushy eyebrows. “Sinners in our midst, creatures of the fleshpots. They have catered too long to the vilest desires and lusts.” He shook a finger and swayed once more. “I warn them that their time is at hand.”