Barry Spirito leaned back in the chair of his humble office and sipped a glass of champagne. This was a rare occasion. He would never have predicted anything like this would happen, yet here he was staring at two black cats on his desk.

It had been a long day, driving around new york, giving orders to his LIMOS charges, collecting data for the overflowing file cabinets. things were strange and getting stranger by the minute. he parked his cab in the garage and made his way to the back room for a helping of stew on the crockpot and a few shots of whiskey. tired, tired, tired, his bones complained to him.

He had just crossed the garage and stepped in the threshhold of the door to the office when he saw them. these emissaries from the cat secret police sat, calm and unconcerned, grooming themselves on top of his rolltop desk like they had always lived there.

He screamed, of course, tried to leave out the back door which was blocked by yet more cats. he had gone for the gun in his desk drawer, but it was missing. anything that could be used as a weapon, from fire extinguishers to tire irons, were also inconveniently missing.

"All right!" he said, his heavy frame panting, "you got me. what now?"

One cat looked up. the other one didn't even bother to stop licking his fur. the attentive cat reached down with his mouth and picked up a scroll of parchment tied in a black ribbon.

"Is this my death warrant?" Barry said warily. As he took the scroll, he laughed ruefully. "I guess I should have prepared for this day. Written a will or something. Not that I have anyone to leave anything to. Or have anything worth leaving."

His jaw fell open.

"Wait a min... is this...? This is a truce agreement?"

He read on: "Irritating human group, stop looking now. We leave planet. Too dangerous here. Give you technologies and answers if you leave rockets alone. In two days we gone."

He looked up at the cat. "Leaving? Where are you leaving to, and what do you mean it's too dangerous? Is something going to happen, some calamity we should know about? Or is this the 'final solution to the human problem' for you? ... Answer me!"

The cat simply stared.

"Bah!" Barry turned and walked out of his office. He had no idea what he was going to do or where he was going to go. He thought about finishing off the bottle of Campbell's single malt, but before he could turn around and return to the office to get it, the service door rattled.

In walked his two partners: Harvey "Professor" Cook and Abdul "Al" Mustaffa. They were partners in business as well as adventure. In the LIMOS community, their exploits were legendary. Together, they had broken the Olmec-Atlantis connection, proved the hollow-earth theory was real, and gotten a NASA administrator to admit to the web of lies around the Cydonia region of Mars. This lowly taxi maintenance station was their headquarters, their monastary, their shrine to all things bizarre and unaccountable.

The four rooms of their little Bronx complex were full of shelves stuffed with artifacts like the storerooms of a natural history museum: Ch'ang Dynasty chi detector, druid psychic cloaks, a spirit magnet from the Congo, a free energy generator (running the eternal coffee pot), to name just a few.

When they saw Barry, the other two froze. Despite his bulk, Barry was an animated man, loud and jovial in almost any situation. He used to be lead singer for Neutron Sam and the Unstable Isotopes, long ago. No one could match him for vocal intensity and presence. So when he was quiet and subdued, his friends knew something wrong. If he was afraid, then everyone in the area should also be. One look at his blood-drained face told them he was afraid.

The Professor had a sharp mind. Up until ten years ago, he had been tenured at NYU, a professor in anthropology. His career was sizzling until he published that paper about the Avian temple in Belize and its resemblance to a nuclear fusion reactor. A year of hard drinking and languishing in a cheap motel had left him a mess. Barry discovered him, cleaned him up, gave him purpose again. Today, he looked the same as before, curled red hair sprouting from a face locked in a perpetual musing expression, and tweed 3-piece suit stuffed with notepads and pens. Time had not changed his fashion, nor dulled his thinking capacity.

"Cats?" he asked.

Barry nodded.

As gilt-witted was his partner the Professor, so was Al Mustafa canny. Clever as a pack of foxes, they used to say about him. He looked like a fox too, lean and smooth, every line full of elegance and purpose, his eyes dark and watching many directions at once. Having spelunked forbidden labyrinths as a child with his siblings, he developed a relay-quick mind for getting out of trouble. He could disarm a rolling spike pit trap in under a minute. And he raced through the pirates' gunpowder tunnel with time to pose for pictures. If you were going someplace dangerous, and you forgot to bring Al along, God help you.

He was already clinging to the ceiling rails with a battery jump cable, ready to clamp some kitty-ears when Barry called him down: "It's all right, Al. They want a truce."

"What?" Professor looked over Barry's shoulder into the office and saw the black cats, one napping and the other staring at the ceiling fan. "What do you mean a truce?"

Barry handed him the parchment. "Read it."

Al looked over the Professor's shoulder. "But we cannot trust them!" he protested. He knew more than anyone the capricious nature of the Cats. He had been held in a tiny prison cell for two months, tortured by cats brandishing long reeds against his defenseless feet.

The Professor took his pipe out of his mouth and pointed it at the paper. "Something is scaring these cats, but what? The Atlantis Guardians?"

"No," Barry scratched his beard. "I still think the cats created them. And they wouldn't be here with that thing on the floor."

He pointed at the giant stone robot lying under two hundred pounds of steel chain and canvas tarpaulin. Every minute or so, it would twitch, making the sound of a mountain hiccuping.

It had been there less than 24 hours. The previous evening, Barry had been driving around taking care of business when the first of the stone robots had stepped out of the water. He heard about it on the police scanner and went to investigate. There about a hundred of them stomping through the waves as helicopters circled, shining lights on them. In minutes they were marching through Manhattan, following some mysterious summoning. One of them took a bad step into a Niagara-Mohawk manhole and fell face-down onto a mercedes SUV. Barry was there to call in Al with the tow truck, and they dragged it all the way back to the garage.

They had correctly identified it as one of the fabled Atlantis Guardians, giant mechanical golems who were once built to protect cities and keep order. Something had triggered a signal to call upon them once more, thousands of years after they had gone quiet.

"They certainly are connected somehow," mused Barry.

"Hmm. You know," said The Professor, "I'm starting to think you're right about the Cats and the Guardians. And you know what convices me? The Chrysler Building."

"What about it?"

"It's getting ready to take off."

"Huh?" Barry's laugh lines crinkled.

"Yes, we investigated those pipelines. One is liquid oxygen. The other... liquid hydrogen."

The three investigators closed their eyes at the same time and nodded. This was one of those delirious moments when an enigma dissolves into plain truth.

What they all surmised was that the stone robots were summoned by the Cats for one purpose: protection. They were to keep interfering humans away as they made preparations to evacuate. This neatly explained the other phenomenon on the register, the fact that cats had been seen streaming from hundreds of miles away into the city center, and specifically toward the Chrysler Building. The fact that it was closed for emergency elevator repair was a convenient tactic to remove humans from it.

It was one thing to keep out unsuspecting Manhattanites. It was quite another to fool LIMOS. These had been a troublesome bunch for the Cats, always snooping around and finding things. For a long time, it was enough just to make them marginalized, to have the authorities spout out official denials, and occasionally to make them feel their lives were in danger. But now, as the critical time came for all cats to escape, every threat had to be neutralized. If this meant bribing LIMOS to keep quiet for a couple days, so be it.

Now, as millions of cats were being strapped into protective pillows, their emissaries waited for an answer.

Barry re-entered his office and sat in his chair. He found the bottle of champagne in a filing cabinet, which he bought after his divorce but never got around to drinking.

"As good a special occasion as any," he murmered before the cap blasted off.

The cats waited patiently as he poured it into a dirty whiskey glass.

"You want any? No? Sorry, I don't have any cream. Unless you want a mini-moo."

Barry took up a pen and scribbled his signature on the parchment. He rolled it back up, snapped a rubberband around it, and returned it to the waiting cats. Both of the sleepy cats suddenly sat up alertly and each raised its right paw. They then bounded onto the cement floor and raced away, leaping through a broken window pane, never to be seen again.

"You want some champagne too, fellas?"

"Not right now," said the Professor. "I want to look some more at the Guardian... hey!"

He stood five paces away from a tall, hairy humanoid dressed in denim coveralls. The creature had already removed the tarpaulin and opened an access port in the side of the robot.

"But... we tried for hours with an air hammer and could not open it up!" Al shouted. "How did you do this?"

The hairy man ignored them and continued its work. Its (its gender being unknown, we are forced to use the neutral pronoun) hands were moving quickly, soldering components, welding metal pieces, as the three LIMOS members slowly circled around. After less than 4 minutes, it had closed up his toolbox and was wiping grease from its hands onto the front of its denim coveralls.

The humans stared at it, as it gazed back.

"Sasquatch?" Barry managed at last.

The hairy mechanic, variously known as Big Foot, Sasquatch, Chiye-tanka, Yeti, Windigo, and Maricoxi, looked up at the ceiling light for a moment, which reflected in his eyes, soft and moist, with a deep, empathic brown color. Then it shrugged and turned around. Before reaching the door, and mere moments before the humans were about to race after it, Sasquatch turned and clicked a button on a remote control.

The stone robot sat up, snapping all of the chains like bits of thread. Its head crashed into the ceiling, raining down clouds of dust and fragments of fluorescent lighting. Its legs drew up and it pushed itself forward with its hands, slowly standing up. Sasquatch watched quietly, perhaps even smiling a little, before opening the door and leaving.

The three humans had by now taken shelter into the small office. The garage was coming apart at the seams as the giant robot walked with little difficulty through the front of the building. Sirens could be heard in the distance.

"Dagnabbut!" Barry shouted in frustration. I have no film in my camera. "Oh well, let's finish off this champagne. It's expensive."