Chapter Fourteen
PHIL'S first impulse was to jump out of the jeep and hunt around. But the chill in his heart told him Lucky was farther away than that. Besides, the place was a regular jungle and one man could hunt through it forever for anything cat-size.
He did not recognize the square at all, but he guessed from the schoolgirls that he was in an intellectual residential neighborhood. At first he thought the school was one for girls, but then he noticed a few lone boys among the homeward-bound students and decided that most of the families in this area must be deliberately having as many girls as possible. When sex-determination had become possible through centrifuging human sperm to separate the male-producing and female-producing types, most parents decided to have sons, especially for their firstborn. They often told themselves they would have daughters later, but unfortunately small families were the rule. The resulting over-production of males had led to some ineffectual state laws forbidding sex-determination, an unsuccessful attempt at self-regulation by the medical profession, a lot of talk in Congress, and an almost fanatically determined movement among a class of thoughtful people to produce only daughters. This last class, besides seeking to balance the sex ratio, perhaps had in mind the fact or rumor that human parthenogenesis had been achieved. Phil remembered a Sunday afternoon video shock talk:Will Women Born of Virgins Become Our Only Intellectuals?
Other aspects of the neighborhood around the square fitted with his guess. There was an appearance of shabbiness, the skyscrapers were low, advertisements lifeless, traffic was light, there were no hot rods.
He let his gaze roam over the tiers of tiny flats, wondering where Lucky might have gone. As he did so, he turned on the jeep's radio. ". . . while Mystery Man Billig, mastermind of Fun Incorporated, is believed to have fled the country. Tonight at 8:30 New Washington Time, President Barnes will address all us American folks, partly to silence the small, syndicate-inspired clamor at the outlawing of male-female wrestling and jukebox burlesque, but more to explain to an amazed citizenry the full reasons behind the charges brought this morning by the federal government against sixty-nine high officials, I predict - and remember this is just my personal libel-free guess, fellow-folks - that the president will reveal that Fun Incorporated has been peddling dream pills, temporary sterility tabs, and I'm as shocked and disgusted as you are, folks, female robots equipped for obscene functioning.
"Now here's an important flash on the cat story. The cats are not carrying an infection and are under no circumstances to be destroyed, whether owned, strayed, or alley. In fact, there's a stiff jail sentence waiting for any person destroying a cat. But all owned cats are to be brought to the nearest security station, while any person sighting a strayed or alley cat is directed to do the same. There's a stiff penalty for not doing the first, a one hundred dollar reward for doing the second. Get busy, kids! Why this sudden federal interest in cats? The National Health Service zips its lips. But your newscaster backs this highly responsible rumor: it has been discovered that a rare strain of cat carries a cancer destroying virus. Wouldn't it be nice, folkses, to know that, once full grown, you would never start to grow again, in any part or place?
"But remember this, dear audiers, and I'll say it to you in Martian: Zip-zap-zup! Meaning: Bring in the cats!
"Now as for this report, folks, that handie-supernova Zelda Zornia, vacationing in Brazil, did a south-of-the-equator handiecast advertising bathing jewelry; let me assure you clean living people. . . "
Phil cleared his mind, trying to put himself in Lucky's place, to feel the direction in which the cat had wandered off. His head swung doubtfully this way and that, like a compass needle or planchette, but finally came to rest. He climbed out of the jeep and walked straight ahead, not turning aside for the dusty, crackling shrubs, but pushing straight through them.
He parted a final straggly hedge and found himself looking across the empty street at a house quite as old as the Akeleys, but with free sky above it.
Built of ancient brick, it was three stories tall and looked as pompously respectable as a 19thcentury banker. It reposed sedately on a terrace that was as weedily overgrown as the square and that was surrounded by a high iron fence.
The only incongruous note was struck by a saucer-shaped object fully fifty feet across set on a framework atop the flat roof. Judging from the dull green of its underside, it might be made of copper. It looked almost as old as the house and quite as proper, as if the 19thcentury banker had decided to wear a green beret and dared anyone to notice it.
Phil crossed the street, mounted some steps and peered through the iron gate. He made out, beside the houses old-fashioned, knob door, a tarnished bronze plate which read: "Humberford Foundation. "
He looked back uneasily. Where he figured the jeep to be, he could see the heads and black-clad shoulders of two men. The black reminded him unpleasantly of the sports togs worn by Billig and his yes men. They seemed to be arguing. One of them took a step up, as if he were getting into the jeep, but the other pulled him back and they hurried off - not in his direction, Phil noted with some relief.
He gave the iron gate a little push. It opened with a rusty "Harrumph" that made Phil shrink apologetically. But nothing else happened so after a minute he slipped through and began to peer around at the undergrowth and then to wander through it, softly calling "Lucky!"
Occasionally he looked back in the direction of the jeep and once he saw the radio-helmeted heads and blue shoulders of three policemen. He wondered if the next time he looked he'd see Dr. Romadka or the Akeleys, or perhaps Carstairs, Llewellyn and Buck, and he shivered to think of how close he'd come to being caught - by someone.
But the next shock he got came from something nearer. He had rounded the house, after having poked through its equally lifeless and overgrown back yard, when he saw a dark haired man peering at him through the fence.
The most disturbing thing about the man was that he closely resembled the girl Phil had watched undress in the room across from his. The girl with hoofs. This man had the same vital, faun-like expression.
Phil froze. But the man merely yawned, turned away, and shuffled off, humming or hooting a little melody that gave Phil goosepimples because it reminded him of something in his dream.
For that matter, the whole experience was becoming very dream-like to Phil: the silent house, the neglected garden, the futile searching, the melancholy memory of Mitzie's leave-taking, the powerful sense of a dead past. But the feeling that Lucky was near was still strong and after a bit Phil realized he would have to do something he had been shrinking from.
He reluctantly mounted the steps to the front portal, reached for the knob, and then, to put off the evil moment a little longer, called "Lucky!" a few times along the shallow porch to either side.
Someone behind him inquired pleasantly, "Are you looking for a cat?"
Phil spun around guiltily and found himself facing a very old man as tall and frail as a ghost, and apparently as silent as one, since Phil hadn't heard him coming up the walk. His thin, wrinkle-netted face, crowned by close cropped white hair, was hauntingly familiar. It had something of the grandeur of a pre-Christian ascetic, yet there was a note of Puckish humor in it, as if its owner had arrived at a wise second childhood. Although Phil's heart was pounding at the alarmingly accurate question, he found himself liking the man at first sight.
As he hesitated, the old man went on, "My interest, by the way, is purely academic - or else childish curiosity, which comes to the same thing. " His eyes flashed impishly. "Is it by any chance a green cat?" he asked Phil rapidly. "No, you don't have to answer that question, at least not any more than you have already. I don't want to distress you. It's just that I have a mind that automatically makes the far-fetched deductions first. "
He beamed at Phil, who, though flustered, found himself grinning.
"Perhaps you're a journalist," the oldster went on smoothly, "or at least we
can pretend you are. Dr. Garnett always calls in the press when the Humberford Foundation makes a discovery, though I'm sorry to say the press stopped coming about twenty years ago. They'd quit thinking of para-psychology as newsworthy. But perhaps there's been time to breed a new race of journalists with a revived interest in esping and all the teles. In any case Garnett and the whole staff will be overjoyed at the presence of a pressman. "
"You mean the Humberford Foundation investigates extrasensory perception and things like that?" Phil asked.
"You should know, since you've been sent here to get a story," the old man said reprovingly. "Still, reporters often haven't the foggiest idea what they've been sent out to report, so you're excused. "
Phil found himself grinning again. He hadn't any notion of how the old man knew about Lucky or where he stood in the general picture, except that he felt strangely certain that the old man didn't have anything to do with the organizations out to get Lucky. And the oldster's mischievous pretense that Phil was a reporter might at least get him past the imposing door and let him spy around.
"So the Humberford Foundation has made a new discovery in parapsychology?" he said conversationally.
The other nodded. "Dr. Garnett was most excited. So much so that he didn't have time to tell me what it was all about, except that they'd started to get some amazing results - and just this morning. So I hurried over. Good esp is apt to go poof, so it's best to get it when it's hot. I have a standing order with Garnett to call me over the moment anything starts to flash. For that matter, I have the same orders with practically every scientific laboratory in the area - though the others don't always call me. But - thank Thoth! - Garnett isn't in a field that's under the benign aegis of security and he isn't at all security minded himself. In fact, I'm not certain he's ever heard of the FBL. So you may get a real scoop, Mr. . . ?"
"Gish. Phil Gish. "
The oldster's thin hand pressed his with a feathery touch. "Morton Opperly. "
Phil stared at him for several seconds, then gasped, "The -?"
The other assented with an apologetic shrug. Phil let it sink in. This was Morton Opperly who had worked on the Manhattan Project, whose name had appeared beside Einstein's on the Physicists' Covenant, who had tried unsuccessfully to get himself jailed for refusal to do research during World War III, who had become a legend. Phil had always vaguely assumed he'd died years ago.
He gazed at the renowned physicist in happy awe. The question that rose effortlessly to his lips was a testimony to Opperly's ability to create an atmosphere of unlimited free discussion unknown since 1940.
"Mr. Opperly, what are orthos?"
"Orthos? That could be short for any number of scientific terms, Phil, but I bet you mean the ones that shoot. Those are orthos-fissionables. Trouble with ordinary fissionables - or fissionables under ordinary circumstances - is that the fragments and neutrons shoot off in all directions and the critical mass is large. But if you get the fissionable atoms all lined up with their axis of spin pointing in the same direction, then they all split in the same place and every neutron hits the nucleus of the atom next to it. Because of that last fact, the neutrons are all used up and the critical mass becomes minute. Half the fragments fly in one direction, half in the other, making it a very nasty and convenient weapon, except it has to backfire. "
"How do you get the atoms lined up?" Phil asked eagerly.
"Temperature near absolute zero and an electric field," Opperly said, touching a button beside the doorway. "Simplest thing in the world. The new insulators can hold a gun magazine at one degree Kelvin for weeks, and carry enough fissionable pellets to give rapid fire, with the effect of a steady beam, for more than a minute. Planning to make yourself an ortho in your home workshop, Phil? I'm afraid they don't sell that kit. Everything I've been telling you is top security, death penalty and all that. But I'm getting so senile I don't understand security regulations. I'm apt to babble anything. I keep telling Bobbie T. he'll have to have me orthocuted some day, but like everyone else he refuses to take me seriously. That's the trick they used on me in WW3 and they've never forgot it. "
"Bobbie T. ?"
Opperly made another of his apologetic grimaces. "Barnes. President Robert T. Barnes. We were charter members of the Midwest Starship Society. Of course he was just a shaver then and now he's a besotted, scripture quoting fox, but shared dreams have a way of linking people permanently. I drop in on him now and then and flash my Starship badge. He's one of my pipelines to what's happening in the world, though the security services don't tell him too much. That's how I learned about the green cat. "
Phil was nerving himself to ask Opperly just what he'd learned, when he heard footsteps behind him.
The man who looked like a brother of the girl with hoofs was standing in the gateway.
Just then the door of the mansion opened, revealing a scholarly appearing man whose face was twitching with excitement and nervousness. His coat had two bulging brief case pockets, while his vest was crammed with enough microbooks to make up a dozen encyclopedias, plus two micronotebooks with stylus, and a fountain pen besides. His hair was graying and thin, and he wore ancient pince-nez that twitched with his nose.
"Dr. Opperly!" He greeted in a high-pitched voice that expressed both fluster and delight. "You come at a whirling moment!"
"That's the way I like them, Hugo," Opperly told him. "Where's Garnett?"
But the other was looking at Phil, who decided the twitch was permanent. At the moment its owner was using it to express inquiry and mild apprehension.
"Oh," Opperly said casually, "this is Phil Gish of the press. " His eyes twinkled. "Of the U. S. Newsmoon, in fact. Phil, this is Hugo Frobisher, Ph. Ch. - Chancellor of Philosophy, you know, the new higher degree. I'm just a lowly Ph. D. myself. "
But Frobisher was beaming at Phil as if he were a donor with a $100,000 check. "This is most gratifying, Mr. Gish," he breathed. Then he whipped out a micronotebook and poised on its white field the stylus whose movements would be reproduced on one ten thousandth of the space on the tape inside. "The U. S. Newsmoon, you say?"
At that moment the man at the gate came clumping up behind them. Phil felt a gust of uneasiness, but the newcomer merely treated them all to a big, innocent grin that brought out all the handsomeness of the faun-like face.
"Me press, too," he announced happily. "Introducing to each you Dion da Silva. Much delight. "
Frobisher seemed about to melt with gratification, though da Silva's gaiety was undoubtedly generally contagious. "What paper?" Frobisher asked.
Phil noted that Opperly was studying the newcomer intently. The latter was having trouble with Frobisher's question.
"Mean what?" he countered, drawing his shaggy eyebrows together in a frown.
" La Prensa ," Opperly supplied suddenly. "Mr. da Silva representsLa Prensa. "
"Is so. Thank you," da Silva confirmed.
Phil could have sworn that Opperly had never seen da Silva before and that da Silva had never heard ofLa Prensa.
However, Frobisher seemed to accept the explanation. "Come in, come in, gentlemen," he urged, fluttering backward. "I'm sure you'll first want to tour our little establishment and have a peek at all our projects. Story background, you know. "
"I'm sure they'll want to go straight to Garnett and get the story itself," Opperly assured him. "Where is Winston anyway, Hugo?"
"To tell the truth, I haven't the faintest idea of Dr. Garnett's whereabouts," Frobisher replied with prim satisfaction. "Things have been popping everywhere since this morning. In every project. We'd have to tour the Foundation to find him in any case. "
Opperly flashed Phil a look of humorous resignation. Dion da Silva pressed past Phil, flashing his wide white teeth at everyone and saying, "Is fine, fine. " Phil's spirits rose. He felt certain that he was getting nearer to Lucky.