Greeley, lifting his elbow contemptuously away from Brimstine's hand, started with him out of the room. Dora accompanied them. Greeley pointedly edged away from her.
"Don't be frightened, lambie," the violet blonde told him, "I'm just bound for the little girl's room."
Billig lifted the phone. But before he'd quite got it to his ear and mouth, the skin around his eyes contracted with sudden suspicion and he gazed toward Phil, or rather toward a point near Phil, so sharply that the latter would have sprinted off, except he could not decide for a second which way.
Then the spread two first fingers of Billig's right hand struck like a serpent's fangs at two buttons.
Lights flared around Phil, everything was suddenly very still, and Phil saw himself in a bright mirror that hid Billig and halved the length of the room. His reflection, although fully clothed, had the expression of a man caught naked in public. He hesitated for another desperate second, frozen by the thought that the mirror was one great eye, then ran down the straight corridor. He came to the T and whisked around the corner in the direction Romadka had gone, until he heard footsteps ahead and pounding toward him. He darted back the way Romadka had come and found himself in a brightly lit room chiefly occupied by a heavy copper cage with less than an inch between the bars.
But one corner of the cage had been neatly sliced off and rested on the floor beside it like a little three-sided orange tent. Phil looked around for a way out and saw nothing but bright white wall marred only by a deep cut in the same plane as the slice through the cage. His circling look ended at the door through which he'd come. Mr. Billig and Moe Brimstine were standing in it. Brimstine held a stun-gun, Mr. Billig a larger weapon which, while pointing it at Phil, he held carefully out from his side.
"All right," Billig said, "what have you done with the green cat?"
XII
It couldn't have been three minutes since Phil's capture, yet it seemed that he had been listening to Mr. Billig for years. He was sitting apprehensively on a stool in a long low room to which he had been conducted by two men in sober sports togs—obviously a cut above company guards—whom Mr. Billig addressed as Harris and Hayes. Along one of the long sides of the room were windows and a doorway leading onto a balcony of some sort, beyond which yawned perplexing darkness. Harris and Hayes stood behind Phil while Billig paced in front of him.