"What you did!" The voice was shrilly scandalized. "Interrupting the kingman at his recreation! Shoving the kingman around! That brings punishment, that brings pain!" Phil felt sick with fear. He knew if only Lucky were there, if only he could recapture his earlier mood of golden confidence, he wouldn't be so shamelessly terrified of this little bully who was holding him at arm's length. He wet his lips. "I was only trying to find my cat," he quavered, "and I didn't shove him." "You did too! I saw you! A great big rude shove! And as for cats, Swish Jack Jones, the Lady Killer, is the top cat around here, the only cat." The hand holding him twisted his lapels tighter around his throat. "You can't weasel out of what's coming to you. Well, Jackie, what are you going to do to him?" And now, at long last, the man in black moved. He slowly turned his head in its ruff of black wool and fixed on Phil the sad, weary smile of a king who knows it is his boring but inescapable fate to inflict doom and punishment. He slowly reached out his hand until it grasped Phil's elbow. "Please don't," Phil whispered, but just then a thumb dug into a nerve between his bones and he couldn't keep back a squeal of pain. The baby-faced man grinned with mincing approval, as if at last the proprieties were being satisfied. Swish Jack Jones frowned, as if he felt the squeal hadn't been loud enough, and lifted his other hand. "This is a stun-gun," he said in a voice patchily varnished with intellectualism. "Ultrasonic. I might spray your spine with it to get you ready for being worked over. It's set for mouse power now, but I'll step it up if necessary." Phil's guts turned to water. "You don't need to hurt me," he said. "I tell you I was just looking for a cat." The other shook his head sadly and said, "Nosey little men up to Bast knows what shouldn't tell such great big lies." And he reached for Phil's thigh. At that moment the tidal wave struck. Cookie was shoved ten feet, the stun-gun clattered on the floor, Swish Jack Jones had taken a quick backward spring, and the blonde giantess was planted enragedly in front of Phil and was thundering, "You know mucking well I can stand anything except when you start bullying people." She had slipped on a very dirty short kimono, beautifully embroidered in the finest Oriental style, except that the figure on the back was not a dragon, but a fire-breathing spaceship. "Don't touch me, Juno, I'm telling you," the man in black snarled in a voice that had lost a lot of its intellectual veneer. He was massaging a slapped wrist. "I licked you the first time I was matched with you," the giantess replied. "I licked you the night I married you. And I can do it again anytime. You _and_ Cookie here," she added as the latter made a grimace that was intended to be threatening but merely registered spite. "Why was you tormenting the little guy?"