Phil sat up indignantly. He wanted to say, “Why, Lucky isn’t like that at all.” In his interest in the conversation, he had almost forgotten his incredible situation.
“I know, I know,” Billig was saying, “but what do you think about it, Brimstine?”
Brimstine shrugged. “I think they’re nuts,” he said happily. “The cat didn’t seem anything peculiar to me, though I’m taking no chances. I think it’s all a grade-A delusion, a top secret panic.”
“You think they’re nuts and you expect me not to worry,” Billig groaned. “Where’s that FBL man?”
“On his way.” Brimstine assured him. “Everything’s going to turn out all right.”
“That’s what you told me when the president first started to take action against Fun.” Billig flared. “You said it was just a bluff, a sop to the midwestern vote. You told me Barnes was a drunken farmer who could be got at twenty ways. You told me it would all blow over, like the other six times. Well, it didn’t. Something happened that changed things.”
“I know,” Brimstine admitted, seeming for once at a loss for easy words.
“Don’t you know yet what happened?” Billig pressed.
Brimstine shrugged. “I think Barnes is nuts.”
“That’s your explanation for everything!” Billig roared softly. “If something happens this time, do you suppose I’ll be happy because you tell me the coppers arresting me are nuts? Whereis the FBL man?”
“You really should try and relax, I tell you, Mr. Billig,” Moe Brimstine suggested, recovering himself. “Distract yourself somehow. Like with Dora here.” And ignoring Billig’s third, “Pfui,” Brimstine looked at her critically. “Fix your mouth, dear,” he said.
With a graceful obedience that nevertheless managed to be contemptuous the violet blonde beauty slid from the table and came straight toward Phil, who decided that now at last they’d have to stop pretending he wasn’t there.
“Get that slinky walk, Mr. Billig,” Moe Brimstine was urging. “What a gorgeous babe, eh?”
She tossed her head, stopped six feet short of Phil, took out a lipstick, looked straight ahead of her, and very carefully made up her lips. At the same time something cold and sucking closed on the fingers of Phil’s left hand. He instinctively flipped it, and a tiny pink octopus sailed through the air toward the girl and flattened itself against something in the air about two feet short of her.
Phil watched it clinging there and felt his mind swell to bursting, as if he’d had another shot of Tan Jet lemonade. Then he got up, walked cautiously forward, and fell.
There was an invisible flat surface, extending as far as he could reach, between himself and the other half of the room. He realized he was on the viewing side of a one-way mirror bisecting the room. Dora, standing so close he could otherwise have touched her, turned, and as she did so, her skirt brushed the other side of the surface. He saw it was at least two inches from the side to which the octopus still clung. A mirror would hardly be that thick. It must consist of two panes probably with the space between them evacuated. For as he realized with a new surprise, he must not be hearing their voices directly, but a miked and transmitted version of them, which in turn must be binaural, so that they would be heard in depth and the proper direction.
Confirming this, he noted that the voices did not localize quite as perfectly as they had seemed to before he had caught on to the illusion. Also, the depth effect was a bit too rich, as if the mikes were more than ears-distance apart.
He also saw that all sources of illumination were beyond the panel.
But now that he knew they were not ignoring him, but simply unaware of his presence, he felt very much the burglar and very uneasy. He looked nervously back along the corridor he’d traveled and ahead along its darker and straighter continuation that, also this side of the panel, led out of the room. He asked himself why Billig should have the setup arranged and the sound turned on so that he and Brimstine and Dora could be spied on. It didn’t make sense. Although he was protected, Phil felt a shiver legging it up his spine.
He might have left the spy chamber but at that moment Moe Brimstine put down a phone and said excitedly, “He’s coming!” whereupon Billig at once stopped pacing and became as cool and unworried as dark tranquil water. He pointedly did not look at the archway beyond him, though Brimstine did.
A man came through the archway and stopped. He held his spine and the expression of his face very straight.
His hair was touched with gray and his face showed years of worry – but not Billig’s kind.
Billig looked at him with a questioning smile that barely stopped short of a smirk. He waited a moment and said softly, “Under the circumstances, I suppose you do not care to use your name, but -”
“It’s Dave Greeley,” the other said bluntly.
“ – but I do suppose that you come from the Federal Bureau of Loyalty and that you are fully empowered to deal for the services and the president?”
The other nodded once.
“Mr. Greeley, Mr. Brimstine,” Billig said with a gracious wave of his arm that reminded Phil of the swaying of a snake. “Mr. Greeley, Dora… er, Dora Pannes.”
The government man barely acknowledged the introductions.
“Mr. Billig,” he said, “you tell us you have the green cat. If you have, we’ll buy it.”
“And what will you pay?” Billig murmured.
“The Moreland-McCartney letters, proving the graft those senators received from Fun Incorporated, plus all related recording and microwave tapes. Similar material in sixty-odd other cases, which I hardly need enumerate to you in detail.”
“Not enough,” Billig said softly.
Greeley hesitated. “Of course, I could appeal to you,” he said in a different voice; “simply as Americans, as citizens of this hemisphere facing a deadly danger -”
“Please, Mr. Greeley,” Billig said with a chuckle.
Greeley shut his lips tight. When he opened them, his earlier voice spoke.
“Letters of confidence on all the indicted officials, dated today and signed and thumbprinted by the president and all the service heads, with confirming vocal recordings and pictures of the recordings being made. Naturally our experts will have to examine the cat before the exchange is made. They can be here in twenty minutes.”
“That is better,” Billig murmured, “quite a bit better. But not enough.”
“What else do you want?” Greeley demanded angrily, but it seemed to Phil that he knew.
“The witnesses, delivered into our hands,” Billig said. “O’Malley, Fattori, Madelin Luszcak, and the thirty-odd – no, I’ll be precise – thirty-four others.”
“That’s out,” Greeley said sharply. “I can’t offer to pay you in human lives.”
“Who mentioned anything like that?” Billig asked mildly. “I didn’t, did I, Moe? It’s just that we’d feel safer with the witnesses in our protective custody rather than yours.”
“You know what you’d do to them,” Greeley said.
Billig shrugged. “You wouldn’t have to think about it. In any case, there are ways to forget.” And he glanced at Dora, who flashed the FBL man a lazy, provocative smile.