"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 pommeled 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.