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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.Advertisement

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.

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"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 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, "Prrrrt-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. "Prrrt-prt," he repeated peremptorily.

But now that his hypnotic daze was broken, Phil once again felt overpoweringly 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. pqdm.com