Printed in U.S.A.
The world Phil Gish lived in was not a pretty one, and Phil didn't
enjoy living in it. He was disillusioned, purposeless, hopeless, and
haunted by the fear that a robot would take over his job. But then Phil
was a timid person, not much given to adventure seeking. If he hadn't
been so mild he might have found his kicks at All Amusements, the
syndicated playground where anyone could find fun, providing he had the
proper sadistic and otherwise aberrated elements in his personality.
But Phil was good--and bored.
And then one day a cat perched on his window--not an ordinary cat--a
green cat. For the first time in years Phil was happy. He promptly
named the cat Lucky because he somehow knew that as long as the cat
stayed with him he'd feel fine. But Lucky didn't stay long. In a matter
of minutes he had disappeared into All Amusements park. It was then
that Phil became involved in a grotesque world, peopled with the most
extraordinary personalities. Just what the cat is and its ultimate
meaning is the secret of it all. You will be surprised.
I
Phil Gish woke up feeling as good as if all his previous life had
happened to two other guys--poor, miserable clunks!
Usually his whip-cracking reflexes had him out of bed in a flash and
jerking on his shorts and sockasins while he frantically hunted around
for the jar of beard-dissolving cream. But this time he was able to
outsmart all tyrannous nerve-impulses and keep his eyes closed in order
to enjoy the unprecedented sensation all to himself, not even sharing
it with the advertisement-covered walls of his tiny bachelor apartment.
Why, it was simply wonderful, he decided after a bit. Outrageously,
impossibly wonderful!
He actually felt as if this were not a world in which hot and cold
wars had been gushing unpredictably for fifty years like temperamental
faucets, in which the Federal Bureau of Loyalty and Fun Incorporated
ruled the U. S. A. in the name of that drunken, hymn-singing farmer,
President Robert T. Barnes, and in which (according to the Kremlin
Newsmoon, located on an earth-circling satellite vehicle) a new plan
was being considered for exchanging the descendants of prisoners taken
in the half-century-old Korean War.
And as if he, Phil Gish, weren't a luck-forsaken little guy who on
waking at eight o'clock this morning hadn't taken four sleeping pills
in order to kill the day and temporarily forget that he had just lost
another job to a robot who did it five times as fast and twice as
accurately, and that he'd had a blow-up because of it and been coldly
advised to see a psychiatrist.
He took a long, luxurious breath. Even the air smelt and felt
different, as if dusted with some golden chemical that banished care.
He opened his eyes and looked down at his pale chest with the two lone
hairs that were a sardonic last farewell from glorious jungle ape-hood.
But this time the word that came to him was "slim," not "scrawny." He
rather liked his body, he decided--a neat and compact, if not exactly
out-size, bit of tissue. He yawned, stretched, scratched where the two
hairs were, and looked around. The green cat sat on the sill of the
large open circular window, smiling at him.
"Hey, am I dreaming?"
The sound of his own voice, with its hint of a morning croak, answered
that question.
_Or have I really blasted off from behind the hair line?_ The second
question, thought not spoken, was quickly suppressed. He felt too
good to let it worry him. If this was insanity, then three cheers for
paranoia!
Besides, there were all sorts of natural explanations of the cat's
somewhat unconventional color. Just yesterday Phil had seen a young
matron leading two rose-colored poodles. A flash of what might be an
off-the-bosom dress under her cloak had moved him to pass close enough
to hear her assure her companion, "They aren't dye-jobs, you mood-mad
man. They're mutations!"
Also, weren't some animals naturally green, like the tree-sloth? Though
he seemed to recall that the tree-sloth's hue was due to a fungus or
mold, and there certainly wasn't any mold on the burnished bundle of
benignity on his window sill.
"Hiya, Lucky," he greeted softly. From the very first he had decided to
connect the cat with his newborn, incredible sense of well-being. If
there was going to be a new era in his life, it was a good idea to have
a symbol for it--a symbol green as spring itself. Besides, it felt that
way.
"C'mere, Lucky," he called without lifting his head from the spongy
pillow. "Here, Kitty."
The second invitation, which sounded a trifle silly to Phil as soon as
he said it, wasn't necessary. The cat at once dropped its plump-tummied
body from the window sill and trotted toward him like a soft-shod fat
little horse. Phil felt an odd increase, almost frightening, in the
calm joy inside him. The cat disappeared momentarily under the angle of
the bedside. Then a little green face came over the edge and two tiny
green paws placed themselves beside it, and two coppery eyes inspected
him.
"How are you, fellow?" Phil asked. "Glad to make your acquaintance.
You're a cool little cuss, all right. Where did you come from?"
The little face tipped upward.
"From upstairs?" Phil asked and instantly chuckled at himself for
interpreting the movement as a gesture. "Why not stay with me for a
while? I like your looks and I admire your color. Often wished I were
green myself. Anything for variety--begging your pardon."
It was a strange and curiously attractive cat face. The ears were
large, the forehead high, the nose-button lost in furry down, the
whiskers hardly apparent, and the mouth had a suggestion of a pucker
or pout. For a fleeting instant Phil had the notion Lucky might look
rather different, rather less like a cat, if caught unawares. And he
was really very green--the green of tarnished copper, only brighter.
Thinking the word "he," Phil wondered for a fleeting instant about
Lucky's sex. The fat tummy was suggestive. Yet he was somehow sure the
cat was a male.
Then Lucky smiled again and Phil was aware only of feelings. He reached
out a tentative hand, jerked it back when a little paw flicked out at
it, then shamefacedly corrected the gesture. The little paw touched his
middle finger. Phil stroked the silken paw in turn. Neither time could
he feel a hint of claws. They must all be tucked inside their smooth
sheathes.
"Now we're friends," Phil said huskily. The cat sprang fearlessly onto
the bed. Coppery eyes came close. A furry cheek briefly brushed Phil's
with casual masculine friendliness. Sudden tears smarted in Phil's
eyes, enough to brim the lids but not to run over.
What a lonely, empty-lifed fool he must be, he told himself, that a
cat could make him cry. Yet it was true enough. All his life had been
a fading. His parents had seemed warm and wonderful at first, but then
he had begun to sense their gray uncertainties and boredoms. School had
been full of breath-taking promise at one point, with infinite vistas
of knowledge and idealistic brotherhood opening up; but too many of the
vistas had ended in signs saying "restricted" or "subversive" or the
even more maddening blank signs of calculated silence--just as man had
promised himself he'd reach the planets soon, but hadn't. Phil had had
friends, too, at one time, and had really been in love with girls; but
even that had somehow become washed out and worthless. And then the
endless business of being beaten out of jobs by white-collar robots,
beginning with the mail-sorting robots who fed envelopes into the
proper slots by scanning their addresses photoelectrically. The only
thing robots couldn't do, it seemed, was sit in foxholes. That was one
place where Phil recalled no mechanical competition.
Yes, it had been a very empty, purposeless life indeed, Phil told
himself, at the same time wondering why even that thought could not mar
his present happiness.
He came out of his reverie and saw that the cat was marching down the
bed, closely inspecting his naked body.
"Hey, we're friends, but that's going too far. Leave me _some_
privacy!" Chuckling, he swung out of bed, grabbing up a light robe
as his body left the cone of radiant heat projected from the ceiling
fixture. While shouldering into the robe he hummed a couple of bars
from "Kiss Me, Darling, in Free-Fall" and did a shuffling step that
brought the cat hurrying over to play tag with his toes.
"Where _did_ you come from, Lucky?" Phil repeated and turned toward the
window. In the three steps it took him to reach it, his gaze lit on
the near-empty dispenser of sleeping pills and for a moment the eerie
doubt came back: mightn't this morning's overdose have triggered off or
paralleled a really big change in his mind? After all, this cat wasn't
normal (and neither were hallucinations!) and his crazy, inexplicable
happiness was altogether too much like the inner world of godlike
perfection into which the paranoiac is supposed to retreat.
But then he was at the window experiencing a new twist in his mood and
the doubt was forgotten.
The window opened on a deep, very narrow bay in the remodeled monster
hotel in which Phil roomed. If he risked his neck by leaning out
very far, he could just manage to look out of the bay and glimpse an
advertisement-encrusted corner of Fun Incorporated's wrestling center
and the helicopter field on its roof. The hotel had been built as
a luxury palace for the new war-rich of the 1970's but during the
great housing shortage of the 1980's its vast rooms had been cut up
into tiny sleeping cells. It retained, however, at least one feature
from its lordly days: the large circular windows formed of two sheets
of polarizing glass, the inner of which could be rotated, allowing a
person to blacken his window or have it fully transparent or enjoy any
shade of twilight. One other very unusual luxury touch was that the
windows could actually be opened, swinging on pivots at top and bottom.
Nowadays, with radiant sleep-heating general throughout the hotel and
the air-conditioning system anything but trustworthy, this last feature
was put to real use more often than might have been expected, though
windows were still kept closed most of the daytime.
It had always seemed to Phil that the great gray wall just ten feet
from his window, with its rows of ominous portholes, many of them
blackened, was the grimmest sight in the world--a symbol of the way he
was walled off from life and people.
But now, as he stood leaning out just a little, his cropped hair
brushing the tarnished circular rim, it seemed to him that he could
imagine his way through that wall as if it were made of some material
that conducted emotion as copper conducts electricity. Not see or
think through it, but _feel_ through it to the multiple texture of
warm, pitiful, admirable, ridiculous human lives in the cubicles
behind: the two-fifths happy ones, the nine-tenths sad ones, the ones
who nursed fears and frustrations because you had to nurse something,
the ones who hammered fears and frustrations into a painful armor,
the old man apprehensively sorting his limp ration stamps from three
communo-capitalist wars, the boy playing spaceship and pretending the
blacked-out window was the porthole of a comic-book intergalactic
liner, the three unemployed secretaries--one of them pacing--the lovers
whose rendezvous was tainted with worries about the Federal Bureau
of Morality, the fat man feeling a girl's caress by radio handie and
thinking of something long ago, the old woman coddling her dread of
war-germs and atomic ashes by constantly dusting, dusting, dusting....
Well, his new self certainly had a vivid imagination, Phil decided with
a smile.
An old hand came out of a porthole three floors down and shook
something--or nothing--from a dustpan.
Coincidence, of course, or else he'd once watched the woman without
thinking about it--nevertheless, Phil chose to interpret the event as
an encouraging confirmation of his new feeling of outgoingness. Then
the smile left his lips as he thought of another aspect of the opposite
wall.
This window was the vantage point where he had spent countless drearily
excited hours spying on the activities of all the young women whose
cubicles were even remotely within range. Not the new girl--the one who
wore her black hair in old-fashioned pony style--in the room straight
across, although she was quite beautiful in a sprightly, animal way,
and he sometimes heard her practicing tap-dancing. No, she was a bit
too close and besides, he was vaguely frightened of her. There was
something eerily dryad-like about her and, in any case, she blacked out
her porthole religiously. It was blacked out now, though slightly ajar.
But all the other girls were recipients of his untiring, sterile
interest. The cute green-blonde just below and to the left, for
instance, Miss Phoebe Filmer (he'd once taken the unprecedentedly
realistic step of finding out her name), why, he'd sacrificed a sizable
chunk of his leisure time to that tantalizing minx. There she was at
this very moment dithering around in a short play robe, inspecting an
assortment of wispy lingerie--a very promising situation that normally
would have held Phil helpless for twenty minutes or more. But now he
found he could look at her and then look away without the faintest
gnawing worry he might miss something. Good Lord, if he wanted to
see more, in any sense, of Miss Phoebe Filmer, he'd scrape up an
acquaintance with her.
"Prrrt!" A feathery, furry ball came into his hand and he looked down
at Lucky's apple-green face framed by his curving forefinger and thumb.
"What d'ya want, cat?"
Lucky ducked out of the cupped hand with a twist that let his forehead
and ear be rubbed, and put his front paws on the window rim. Phil
quickly advanced his hand so that it lightly circled the cat's chest.
He didn't want Lucky to get back out on the little ledge that led to
either side of the window. In fact, as Phil now definitely realized,
he didn't want Lucky to leave him at all, though something told him he
wouldn't be able to stop Lucky if the green cat really wanted to go.
It occurred to Phil, with a certain shamefaced satisfaction, that all
pets were strictly forbidden in the Skyway Towers (cats and dogs were
pretty rare since the germ war days when they'd been slaughtered as
possible carriers) and so Lucky's owner wouldn't be able to do anything
openly about getting him back.
But Lucky seemed to have no intention of leaving. He hopped to the
floor and looked eagerly at Phil.
"Prrrt!"
"Do you want something to eat? Is that it?"
"Prrrt-prt!"
Phil took mental inventory of his snack box and found himself thinking
of the cranberry concentrate. Wildly inappropriate--and yet something
assured him that it would be just right for Lucky.
It was done quickly: a dark-red marble that swelled to a glistening
ruby golf ball at the touch of water, and then, at another sudden
inward prompting, the syrupy contents of a vitamino capsule poured over
it.
The last ingredient smelled rather rank and by the time he set the odd
sundae on the floor, Phil was feeling quite doubtful. However, Lucky
examined it with all signs of approval, mewing in eagerness. But then
instead of beginning to eat, he looked up at Phil. Phil thought he
understood: cats have their special proprieties and delicacies. The
little chap wanted to eat in private.
"Okay, fellow, I'll go shower. And I won't peek."
Stepping inside the bathroom, he set the shower control to alternate
tepid and very warm. Instead it chose irresponsibly to alternate icy
and steaming, so that he leaped out with a yell. But the incident
didn't even scratch his mood. As he toweled himself (he didn't like the
air drier and toweling robots made him uneasy) he sang:
We're out in space, they've cut the jet,
There isn't any ceiling, floor, or wall.
Let's dance on air, or better yet--
Hug me, love me, darling, in free-fall!
He came out of the bathroom feeling like an emperor and fully
determined to inspect the world he owned, the world that was any
man's for the asking and a little courage. As he slipped on singlet,
trousers, sockasins and jacket, he explained his feelings to Lucky, who
had cleaned up every bit of his colorful meal.
"You see, it's this way, fellow: I've always been three-quarters dead.
But not any more. I'm through with being scared and stand-offish and
bored. No more filing, dial-watching, and tape-cutting jobs, with some
about-to-be-invented robot breathing down my neck. I'm just going out
and look things over, talk to people, find out what it's all about. I'm
going to have adventures, really live. Some program, eh? And you know
who's responsible for it, fellow? You are."
Lucky seemed fairly to fluoresce in appreciation. He fluffed his
gleaming green fur.
Phil wondered what time it was. His wrist-watch had gone dead
yesterday, the cranky thing, only five months after having the battery
replaced. He stuck his head out the window and looked up the dizzy gray
crack to where the portholes were tiny dots and the slit ended in a
ribbon of blue sky. Only the top floor to the east was yellow with true
sunlight, though the false sunlight from the sodium mirror circling the
earth to make evening light for this city was beginning to show about
eight stories down.
He scooped up Lucky without a thought of leaving him behind or a worry
as to the attention he might attract. But the verdant cat sprang from
his arms and made for the hall door, looking back as if to say, "I'm
right there with you and game for any adventure, too, but I don't need
a nurse."
Side by side they walked to the stairs and down to twenty-eight--the
overworked elevator stopped only at even-numbered floors. And there he
ran into Phoebe Filmer, play robe swishing and apparently headed for
the snack bar on twenty-eight.
"Hello, Miss Filmer," he heard himself say. "I've admired you for a
long time."
"You have?" she said, glancing at him sideways. "How did you know my
name?"
"Just asked the desk robot who the beautiful girl was in 28-303a."
She tittered with a faintly flirtatious contempt. "You don't talk to
the desk robot. You just punch buttons and it won't give out names when
you punch room numbers, unless you have a government key."
"I have a way with robots," Phil explained. "I win their confidence
with small talk."
"Well," Miss Filmer observed, turning her head and running her hand
through her green-gold hair.
"Say, how do you like my green cat?" Phil inquired.
"A green cat!" Miss Filmer exclaimed excitedly. She looked down quickly
and then up skeptically. "Where?"
Phil looked down too. Lucky wasn't anywhere in sight. A hunk of ice
materialized inside his chest. "Excuse me," he said. "I hope I'll see
you again."
He raced to the stub corridor. Lucky was standing in front of the
elevator.
"Gee, fellow," Phil told him. "Don't give me heart failure."