“What do screwballs like that want with anything?” Juno countered. “What do they want with Jack?” She snuffed and looked at Phil. “Get one thing straight,” she said gruffly, “I love Jack, the little rat. I’ve taken a lot from him, but I haven’t minded too much. Oh, it hurt when I found out he thought more of Cookie and those other punks than he did for me, but I didn’t let it show through my skin. After all, if a man knows you can lick him, I suppose it’s bound to affect him. But when those Akeleys discovered him and began to play up to him and change him, that was too much for me. They’re intelleckchuls, you see, and they flattered Jack and filled him up with a lot of gux about how he had a hidden artistic talent and how he was Zeus or some name like that battling the female principle and so on. Well, he falls for it see? – goes into a complete free-fall. Starts to buy reading tapes, printed books even! Next thing he’s insulting me – using a lot of words I never hardly heard of. Keeps talking about how great Mary is, with her art and her magic figures or whatever they are, and how wonderful Sashy is, with his great ideas about understanding and love and a lot of other junk. Tells me to my face that I’m a dumb bell, a stupe semantically!” And having done well with that last word, Juno slugged down the rest of her drink. “Look, Phil,” she went on, “I could fight Cookie and the others, because they’re on my level, but I can’t fight intelleckchuls. They’re lifting Jack away from me and I can’t do nothing about it. And now they’ve done and got him into some real trouble, I bet, with this green cat business. Because Moe Brimstine isn’t impressed with intelleckchuls or anything.” She carefully took the glass out of her hand and made claws. “If I had the little rat here,” she said, “I’d strangle some sense into him. But until Moe Brimstine talked to me, I didn’t really suspicion anything was wrong, and now I can’t do nothing.”
Phil’s blurred memory suddenly came clear. He told Juno about how, racing to Dr. Romadka’s, he had seen Jack, Cookie, Sacheverell, and Mary driving somewhere in the ancient electric.
Juno slammed the table with both fists. People looked around. “That black hearse-box!” She roared. “I should have known it. Tonight’s so important they’re receiving special.” She jumped up and grabbed Phil by the wrist, fumbled for her glass, got Phil’s instead, recognized it just before draining the last of the soybean milk, set it down with a shudder and yanked Phil out of the booth. “Come on,” she told him. “We’re going to the Akeleys! To the temple!”
Opening the doorway leading to the sub-street, Juno had to pause. Phil got a chance to look back the long length of the bar. As he did, the elevator door at the far end opened. A fat form filled it. Dark glasses were twin patches of smut.
At that moment, Phil got an unannounced demonstration of Juno Jones’ strength. He was lifted off his feet and lightly swung some ten feet through the doorway into the sub-street roaring and glaring with trucks.
“That was Moe Brimstine,” Phil gasped.
“I know,” Juno told him as she yanked him toward the escalator leading to higher levels and cab phones. “He didn’t see us.”
Phil wasn’t so sure.
VII
THE cab had just hummed past Monstro Multi-Products’ blindingly bright basement show windows, behind which a file of dress display robots marched in an endless figure eight with considerable realism and oodles of suede-rubber glamor, when Juno hunched forward and growled to the driver to stop. She had been silent during most of the ride, as if the whiskey had gone sour in her, and now when Phil made a move to pay she impatiently motioned him aside. He hopped out willingly enough, suddenly eager to see what the Akeley place looked like, as if his hopes and fears had started rotating again when the wheels of the cab stopped.
Juno’s reference to “the temple” had half led him to expect Greek columns or an Egyptian portal. Instead he was facing an oblong of darkness, framed by the sidewalk, show windows some distance to either side, and the underpinnings of the two upper streets. He crossed the sidewalk and hesitated, as if he stood on the edge of nothingness. It was really very black, even for the bottom level. The sodium moon had set.
Then, as the after effects of the show window’s glare lessened, a house took shape before him – an old, three story house, looking incredibly as if it were built of wood, with roofs slanting oddly and lights gleaming faintly through shuttered bay windows and fanciful dusty fanlights. Something gritted under his foot and he realized that between him and the house was a yard of real dirt, if not grass and weeds. This must have been the ground level of the city some hundred years ago. Now it was the windows of the third story which peered across the gap at the top-level street far above Phil’s head. The gap was at one point spanned by a beam. Apparently the house was so ancient and rickety that it needed props.
But then a new illusion presented itself. Phil knew that the house was in the heart of the city, hemmed in by gigantic buildings on every side. There should have been tiers of lighted windows and, far overhead, a square of night sky. Instead there was only darkness, as if the pre-atomic house existed in a private night.
Then headlights of a turning car in the street two levels above swept across the upper third of the house, and he saw that all around the house were surfaces painted a dull, non-reflecting black. The flat black “ceiling” could hardly be a foot above the top of the house’s highest spire.
“Some legal business,” Juno explained, coming up beside him. “Jack wunct told me sumpin about it. Seems the original owners couldn’t be rooted out, but the city seized the air-rights and built over them. Creepy place, looks as if it were about to rot apart – just right for those Akeleys.” Then, more loudly, “Well, I said I was going to bust in on them, and I am. C’mon.”
Phil followed her across the yard to the rickety steps leading to the porch. His hand groping for the rail touched peeling ancient paint. Halfway up a cat darted past him. For a moment he was swallowing his heart, then as the cat paused at the top he saw that it was splotched with some sort of dark and light colors – hardly Lucky. It loped around a corner of the porch. Following it, Phil and Juno found themselves facing a six-paneled door lit by a dingy globe, which Phil guessed must be an ancient tungsten-filament lamp. There was no sign of the cat, or indication of how it could have vanished, until Phil noticed a tiny and possibly swinging door cut in the bottom of the big one.
Ignoring a cat-headed knocker, green with verdigris, Juno pounded on the door in a way that made Phil hunch his shoulders and duck his head, keeping an apprehensive eye on the ceiling. But the house didn’t collapse.
After a time a peephole opened above the knocker and a watery gray eye surveyed Juno.
“I want to see that no-good husband of mine,” she shouted, but it didn’t seem her usual self-confident roar.
“Now Juno, you’re all upset,” came the response in a voice Phil recognized as that of Sacheverell Akeley. “Your aura’s all muddy; I can hardly see you through it.”
“Listen here,” Juno bellowed, “you let me in or I’ll bust your lousy house down.”
Phil thought that, even granting some lack of certainty in Juno, this was not a threat to be taken lightly, but it didn’t faze Sacheverell. “No, Juno,” he said firmly. “I can’t let you in when your vibrations are like that, and when hate hormones are streaming off you. Later perhaps – then we may even be able to help you achieve inward tranquility – but not now.”
“But look,” Juno complained in surprisingly docile tones, “I got a friend with me that’s got business with you.” She stepped aside.
“What business?” Sacheverell asked skeptically.
Phil looked straight at the oysterish eye and said, “The green cat.”