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 sun-burned 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 sun-burned 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 Lucky had 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."