"Well, if anything goes wrong, Moustafa will just have to wait. So I'll take the first shift and you go get puss. That means I'll be waiting for ol' Kemel alone tonight at the hotel."
"Looks that way."
There seemed to be no solution except to turn the cat over. Bartouki had approved, and the cat was his. Much as the boys hated to let go of an unsolved mystery, there wasn't any other way.
Hassan drove Rick back into town, with the boy sitting in back. He would have preferred to be in the front seat with the dragoman, but the taxi meter took up too much room.
The guide parked directly in front of the museum and asked, "I go with you?"
"Not this time, Hassan. I won't be long." If Rick's trick was to work, no translator should be at hand.
He paid his piastres at the entrance and walked into the huge entrance hall, very conscious of the kitten in his pocket. It was wrapped in a week-old copy of a newspaper recovered from the debris around the new barracks.
When he reached the second floor he acted like a casual museum visitor, taking his time, and working from exhibit to exhibit. But his mind was not on the wonders of ancient Egypt. It wasn't much use to think about the cat, either. All the ground had been covered many times. Instead, he spent the time speculating on the meaning of the mysterious signal from space. Admittedly, he didn't have much knowledge of astrophysics or radio astronomy. But he had never heard of any natural phenomenon in space that emitted pulsed signals in random fashion. Some stars pulsed, like the Cepheid variables, but in an orderly way.
A half hour of speculation led him nowhere so far as the space mystery was concerned, but it did bring him slowly to the museum area that interested him. He nodded politely at the guard, and continued his examination of exhibits, moving finally into the little room where the cat was hidden. Soon he was close enough to see that the Egyptian cat and its antique friend were still in place. He continued on around the room until he came to a glassed-in case that held some rare alabaster figures. Directly before the glass case was a stone jar. It was big enough to hold the kitten.
Rick got ready. His coat was unbuttoned. He put a hand in the outside pocket, ready to swing the coat out so his other hand could remove the kitten from the inside game pocket with one swoop. He watched the guard, using the glass-case front as a mirror.