Page:Weird Tales Volume 46 Number 3 (1954-07).djvu/36

 kitten, its eyes bright, its back still arched to rub against Hanrahan's leg. Its purr was still on the air.

But no Hanrahan.

Seaforth went to the corner, looked both ways. Nobody at all was in sight except a couple arm in arm, and an old gentleman with a cane. "He walked around the horses," Seaforth murmured; he was a science fiction writer. But Hanrahan hadn't. He had just stopped to pat a kitten.

To Hanrahan, it was the kitten and Seaforth who had disappeared. He looked everywhere for them, but they just weren't there any more. The street was otherwise exactly the same, except that it was deserted.

Hanrahan was one to accept strangeness. He walked on, thinking of possible improbabilities, learned from Seaforth. Of teleportation—but he was not somewhere else, he was here in his own city. Of another space-time continuum—but at a corner was a stand full of tomorrow morning's papers, and he remembered the headlines he had read an hour before. Of death—but in his abstraction he walked into a traffic signal, and it was hard and hurt his knee. Of insanity, which was the most disturbing—but everything seemed perfectly clear and normal to his mind, except that Seaforth and the kitten had vanished.

He had mentally painted himself into a corner; he decided to give up and go home. He and Seaforth had only been taking a late walk, because it was hot in the apartment and they wanted some fresh air and exercise after a lazy Sunday. Probably when he got home he would find Seaforth and there would be some simple explanation. Even the kitten might be there—it had seemed to have no owner and to be interested in being adopted.

Only, why were the streets so curiously empty, even for late on a Sunday night? He saw not one living creature in the mile or so back to the apartment, and not a single car passed him or could be heard on nearby streets.

He let himself into the apartment house, and his key worked. The downstairs hall was lighted but vacant. That was natural, at such an hour; there was no desk or lobby. The automatic elevator worked too, and so did the key to his apartment.

Seaforth wasn't there. Neither, needless to say, was the kitten. Hanrahan went out to the kitchen, switched on the light, and got himself a can of beer out of the refrigerator. He took it back to the living room, and sat down to think things over. He could make no sense out of what had happened.

He picked up the book he had been reading when Seaforth sug-