The jeep steadily turned corners, putting block after block of
the empty, early morning, upper-level streets between it and Fun
Incorporated. Phil wondered whether it could be traced by the electric
eyes that were said to be at each intersection, but he forgot the
question before it became a worry. Lucky was a plump green doughnut
on his lap. He felt over-poweringly sleepy and wished he could gently
slide into some universe lacking light, sound and gravity.
But before drifting off he glanced at Mitzie. Her face was set in
hard, proud, sneering lines, although two tears were jiggling down her
cheeks. Phil felt more annoyed than surprised or compassionate. No
one, he told himself, had the right to indulge such a mood in Lucky's
presence.
He decided that Mitzie needed to have certain truths rubbed in gently.
"Our escape is nothing to puff ourselves up over," he said softly.
"Lucky did it all. Though I admired your bravery dodging the jeep."
Mitzie didn't look at him, but she thinned her lips.
"The episode of the jeep was instructive," Phil went on, beginning to
twist the angelic knife just a little. "It showed you exactly what sort
of glorious criminal fellowship you had with those three hep-thugs. But
now," he went on, tempering justice with mercy, "you've discovered that
your romantic worship of evil isn't worth a fingersnap in the face of
true love and understanding. Eh, Mitzie?"
Mitzie let the car jog listlessly to a stop. Phil was dimly aware
that they were parking in a bumpy, blind end driveway in a neglected,
shrubby square with tall buildings set around. He leaned back, smiling
drowsily, his fingers playing with Lucky's springy fur. He was waiting
complacently for Mitzie's sobs.
Instead, the seat jounced and the door of the jeep slammed.
He looked around. Mitzie was standing outside the jeep against a
shadowy background of tangled shrubbery and misty, silent skyscrapers.
Suddenly she leaned forward toward him, bracing herself against the
door with stiff arms. She inhaled gustily and her small, tender breasts
lifted in their black satin half cups.
Now, he told himself, it must happen. She must yield, sobbing, to
Lucky's power.
"I hate you, Phil," she said intensely. "You want to see me turn to
jelly." New tears spurted from the inside corners of her eyes, but her
expression grew fiercer. "Carstairs, Llewellyn and Buck may have tried
to kill me, but at least they gave me a chance to be something. They
allowed me the dignity of being hated. They didn't try to drown me in
slop.
"I want glory," she went on in a voice that certainly should have
sounded choked except she simply wouldn't permit it. "I want my kind of
glory, no matter how cheap and selfish you think it is, because it's
the only thing that's shining and brave in a shoddy, cowardly world.
I want to spit in the world's eye and then face it, when it comes
bleating for revenge, like I faced this jeep."
"I did think you were courageous there," Phil temporized, wondering why
the devil Lucky's power, that had softened twenty men at a crack, was
so slow in taking effect on a single misguided girl.
"Spare me any praise that's a cover for slop," Mitzie said scathingly.
"Oh I know what that Sunday school beast there on your lap can do,
and I know what you want to see happen. I have only one thing that's
titanium in me, all the rest is stinking mush. You want to see that one
thing break. No, worse, you want to see it soften. Well, I'm not going
to let that happen." She stood up and took her hands off the door.
Suddenly Phil felt a kind of sleepy worry. He ran his hand over Lucky's
fur, then shook him hesitatingly. "Wake up," he said uneasily.
Lucky merely purred. Or perhaps it was a small snore.
"Goodbye for good, Phil," Mitzie said, turning away.
"No, wait," Phil called suddenly, at last hunching groggily forward in
his seat. "Don't go yet." He shook Lucky again, almost roughly. "Wake
up," he demanded. "Stop her."
The small god hung in his hands like a limp green rag.
Phil put Lucky down on the seat beside him and started to get out of
the car. But abruptly a wave of deep melancholy washed over him. He
knew that something precious was slipping away from him, but he wasn't
sure it was genuinely precious and he didn't know whether he had the
right to stop it. Besides his god had failed him and he was still
incredibly sleepy.
So he watched Mitzie slipping away from him as irrevocably as time, and
did nothing except lift Lucky back on his lap. He watched her stride
off along the misty shrubs like a proud and angry nymph, holding her
back straight and her head very high, and also, he supposed, those
charming and ridiculous breasts with which she insisted on facing the
whole world.
For what seemed a long time he watched the dim, empty corner around
which she had turned. He was frozen in a hypnotic daze that temporarily
served for sleep. Now and then thoughts crossed his mind's dull
expanse, but they were shadowy things and did not linger. Once it
occurred to him that Lucky might have been unable to hold Mitzie
because his earlier exertions had drained his powers; small gods
couldn't be expected to exude several great golden waves without
suffering some slight after effects.
It occurred to him that at this very moment he must be the object of
furious searches by the Federal Bureau of Loyalty, Fun Incorporated's
natty thugs, Romadka and his jolly friends, perhaps even good old
Carstairs, Llewellyn and Buck. Yet he felt neither fear nor any
inclination to form a plan. The dim corner he was watching grew
brighter but stayed empty.
Four feet defined themselves in the doughnut-shaped pressure on his
lap. Lucky stretched, shook himself, looked up at Phil with the
brightest sort of eyes, and said, "Prrrt-prt."
"You're a fine sort of cat," Phil complained grumpily, his own eyes
feeling anything but bright. "Going to sleep just when I needed you
most."
Lucky disregarded these criticisms. "Prrrrt-prt," he repeated
peremptorily.
But now that his hypnotic daze was broken, Phil once again felt
over-poweringly sleepy. "I know that mew," he mumbled muzzily at the
green blur beyond the shimmering fence of his eyelashes. "You're
hungry. Well, I s'pose you deserve a feed after all the wonders you
did. But I haven't got any cranberry sauce right now. I'll get you
something to eat ... later ... on."
"Prrrt-prt!" Lucky demanded in the outraged tones of an honest workman
who finds himself cheated of his pay.
But Phil was beyond reach of any appeal. "G'night," he told Lucky in
the kindliest possible way and dropped off.
He dreamed of things far off and strange and ominous, though misty.
He dreamed of dark fronded forests and small animals screeching. The
screeches grew louder and he fled out of his dream altogether into the
jeep parked in the blind end driveway in the little square.
For a moment he seemed to see the ghosts of the dark fronded trees and
hear the echo of the dream screeches, but then he realized that the
former were the square's unpruned shrubs, while the latter were the
squeals and cries of schoolgirls scattering out of a building beyond.
He realized groggily that they must be coming from school--no, from
afternoon school, since the sunlight wasn't slanting at all deeply into
the square, and that he must have slept here undisturbed all day.
And then, he became aware that his lap and heart were cold and that
Lucky was gone.