So Phil told him what he had seen through the quarter-darkened window.
He found himself ashamedly admitting under the analyst's expert
rein-twitching how he had long used his own window as an observation
post, and when he got to describing the hallucination itself he found
himself trembling with restimulated terror, but he did finally get it
all out.
Dr. Romadka seemed as delighted as if he had been presented with a
rare object of art. "Beautiful!" he commented. "I have seldom heard so
magnificent a symbol for the murky sexual longings of this culture.
A satyress, or satyrette, prepared to inflict both love and savage
stampings. Mary would be enraptured with it, I'm sure, and insist
on making one of her dolls in its image." He sighed aesthetically,
then recalled himself. "But, of course, Phil, I can't expect you to
be interested just now in the artistic product of your unconscious
creativity. You want to know about causes, sources. Tell me, have you
ever seen a horse?"
"Once in a circus," Phil admitted.
"Greek mythology is one of your interests?"
"Not that I know of."
"Recall seeing that TV show _A Coltish Girl_ or the musical sexedy _The
Horsy Set_ or the ancient film _Fantasia_?"
Phil shook his head. The analyst nodded thoughtfully. "You say the fur
was distributed over the torso like a clinging, off-the-bosom chemise?
And that the legs went straight down, like rods, to end in hoofs?"
"Not exactly," Phil corrected and went on to describe the little heel
bumps of the fetlocks and the slim pseudo-wrists of the pasterns.
"But otherwise she was formed exactly like a normal girl?--except for
the faun ears?"
"No," Phil said frowningly after a moment. "Her thighs were a bit heavy
and powerful looking, as if made for galloping long distances. Her arms
were sort of long, though it didn't occur to me then. And the upper
part of her body was thrown forward a bit, if you know what I mean, and
it was balanced by quite a little rump. But not what you'd call hippy."
"Magnificent!" the analyst crowed. "Phil, you not only have equipped
your vision with accurate horse-legs, but you have made some of the
necessary compensations in the rest of the anatomy that such a mode
of locomotion would involve in a biped." He sat there beaming a bit
vacantly, as if lost in admiration for the creative powers of the
all-resourceful unconscious.
"Yes, but what does it indicate about my mind?" Phil asked. He would
have felt annoyed if he had not been so anxious. "What's wrong with me?"
Dr. Romadka shook off his reverie with a smile that begged pardon
for it. "What's wrong with America?" he asked wryly. "It's much too
early for me to arrive at any conclusions, Phil, or rather to help you
arrive at your own. Of course, the visual projection created by your
unconscious has some interesting references."
"What are they?" Phil asked. "I may not have made it clear, but I'm
worried about this. I can't get it out of my mind."
Dr. Romadka smiled, shrugged. "Perhaps a spot of interpreting would
relieve you," he agreed. "Though you must remember it's just impromptu
analysis, may be quite wrong. Here goes. The first things that come to
mind are such elements as dread of sexual experience and the attempt
to invest it with terror, effort to feminize yourself by conceiving a
savagely-hoofed love object, an attempt to link sex with a trampling
and punishing beast, perhaps as self-punishment for your voyeurism--all
of these fitting in nicely with the classical mythology about the
nymphs and their natural love companions the goat-hoofed satyrs--also
the horse-hoofed centaurs, who were frequently, you may remember,
teachers of men." The analyst frowned. "It's barely possible you were
visually projecting the desire to be taught about love. However," he
went on, "I imagine that as usual the hidden significances are the
more important ones. May I make a spot guess about you?"
Phil nodded.
"Are you a white-collar worker in close competition with robots?"
"Yes," Phil said, astonished.
"Hardly a brilliant deduction," the analyst deprecated, but his eyes
beamed. "In that case we must suspect another mythological ingredient.
Do you know the Pandora story? There's a special point about it. She
was not an ordinary girl sent by the gods to bring mankind a box
containing all ills. No, she was a metal maiden, forged by Hephaestus
at the command of Zeus. In other words, an automaton, a robot--bringing
in this case the ills of the Second Industrial Revolution caused by the
introduction of electronic calculators and sensers."
"But did Pandora have hoofs?" Phil said doubtfully.
Dr. Romadka waved away the objection. "Your unconscious probably fused
in the Arabian legend of the clockwork horse. The unconscious is very
artistic about these things, Phil. If you realized just how artistic,
how fertilely creative, you wouldn't be worried."
"But how does all this tie in with sex?" Phil asked.
The analyst shrugged. "Must it? A visual projection, like a dream, can
mean a thousand things. I warned you this was just impromptu analysis.
We've carried it about as far as we can."
"Look," Phil said hesitantly after a pause. "There's a lot to the
things you said, and some of them really pushed buttons in my mind.
But--I hope you won't object--there's one thing that's still bothering
me."
"Go right ahead."
Phil became even more diffident. Finally he said with difficulty,
"Look, doctor, is there any chance that what I saw could be real in any
way? Any chance at all?"
The analyst chuckled mellowly. "Not one in the world," he said with
complete conviction. "What's been bothering you, Phil? Did you believe
that the Greek gods and their creatures might have been materialized in
some way?"
"Something like that, I guess," Phil said without conviction.
Dr. Romadka leaned toward him, resting an elbow on the curving desk.
"If you had any idea of half the things people tell me across this
desk, normal neurotic people I mean, you wouldn't be so much impressed
by your own experience. There's a woman, for instance, who keeps seeing
shimmery moon-spiders in dark corners. There's a man who is always
getting glimpses of a girl dressed in skin-tight mink that covers her
face, too. And there's another fellow who keeps waking up in the middle
of the night with the absolute conviction that he's in bed with--no, I
shouldn't tell you that one."
"But I actually seemed to see it," Phil persisted stubbornly. "It
wasn't just a glimpse or shadows."
Dr. Romadka smiled. "How many people have seen flying saucers, Phil?
Including astronomers and atomic scientists. How many people have
seen Russian soldiers or Russian homing missiles nosing around their
bedroom windows? And how many people thought they saw Roosevelt--and
thought they walked and talked with him--the day of the Great Panic in
Atom War Two? Besides all that, Phil, there were shadows: you said the
polarizing window wasn't at maximum transparency. Also, you've been
overdosing yourself with sleeping pills--you admit it--and they can do
funny things. As for the hoofs, well, have you ever thought how high
heels are really cruel little hoofs? Anyone who's seen ladies fight
will confirm this. And the girl's hair-do, her suit splotched like a
piebald horse, the remembered sound of the tap-dancing--don't you see
how your unconscious could weave those things and a thousand more into
an image that in your strained condition you were all too ready to
accept?"
"I guess I do," Phil said finally, feeling considerable relief. Not for
long, though.
"But there's one other thing," he said, sitting up suddenly. "The thing
I thought I saw this afternoon. A lot more real than the satyrette
even. I thought I was with it for an hour. Even touched it and fed it."
"What other thing?" the analyst asked gently, with just the hint of a
tolerant laugh.
"The green cat," Phil said.
When the analyst didn't answer, Phil looked around. Dr. Anton Romadka
was simply staring at him. The four scratches and the dried trickles of
blood on his left cheek stood out much more sharply, as if he had grown
pale.
"I said the green cat," Phil said.
"The green cat?" The analyst's voice was a distant echo of itself.
"Yes."
"Umm," the analyst observed hollowly and sank farther down into his
chair, almost as if he were reaching for something with his toe.
Something beeped musically. The analyst snatched up the phone. His face
instantly assumed a fierce expression. He said, with pregnant pauses
during which he scowled, "Yes ... No, I can't. I can't possibly, I tell
you.... You couldn't do that; you'd be arrested.... Very well then, but
only for five minutes. Five minutes, do you hear? I'll be waiting."
He replaced the phone and looked around at Phil with a despair that
his baldness and big eyes turned comical. "This is most embarrassing,"
he said. "A former patient insists on seeing me at once, threatens to
cause a disturbance downstairs if I won't. She would, too. We had some
fine fracases before she broke off the analysis. I have no other course
but to see her. I know how to pacify her temporarily, enough to get her
home."
"I'd better go," Phil said, rising.
"Wouldn't hear of it," Dr. Romadka protested. "I want to go much deeper
into your case this evening. That last thing you mentioned--it opened
vistas! No, you just wait for five minutes in the next room, ten at the
most, and I'll have her out of here."
"I do think I'd better go, though," Phil said, "if you don't mind."
"Quite impossible," Dr. Romadka pronounced, taking a firm hold of his
arm. "She's passionately jealous of all my other patients and would be
sure to attack you the instant you stepped out of the elevator. Did
I tell you she carries a gold squirt gun filled with sulphuric acid?
That's one of her cuter tricks. The only other way out is the service
chute, and that's hardly for human use. No," he said, guiding Phil
through a door beyond the arch but not entering himself, "you just stay
in here for five minutes or so. There's plenty to read, to glance
over and listen to--not that you'll have much time. Trust me, Phil.
Everything's under control."
The door shut. One fleeting glance around showed shelves of books,
racks of vocal booktapes, a divan, a central table and a large mirror
set in the ceiling. Then Phil remembered he had left his cigarettes on
the desk. He punched the door button. Nothing happened. He punched it
again.
There still hadn't been time for Dr. Romadka to have taken five steps
away from the other side. He started to hammer on the wall.
"Dr. Romadka," he called. "Dr. Romadka!"
The lights went out.
V
Phil stopped pounding on the wall and the black silence closed around
him drowningly, stranglingly, like a preview of the mental hospital
cell and electrosleep to which, he was suddenly sure, Dr. Romadka
intended to consign him on a psychiatrist's writ. In the thick darkness
he heard his heart pounding. His rapid breathing was for a moment that
of an animal.
He wondered helplessly why the analyst, after taking his satyrette
hallucination so lightly, should have instantly typed him as a
dangerous lunatic at his mention of a green cat. Psychologists, he
supposed, knew things about the mind's secret language that were never
told to ordinary people: seemingly innocent symbols that stamped
men as cowards, rapists, murderers, traitors, crypto-communists,
non-conformists. A fragment of conversation he'd heard somewhere came
back to him: "Of course as soon as he saw _that_ in the inkblot, they
hustled him off."
There was a sharp click. He started and looked up. A tiny line of light
appeared in the ceiling, widened, and then became an oblong spilling
radiance on the central table below, but leaving the rest of the room
dark. He realized that the mirror he'd noticed had been slid out of
the way. He couldn't see much of the room above except some microfilm
files and part of a TV reading machine of the sort that could use
micro-libraries all over America. No human figures were visible from
where he stood and he felt no desire to step forward into the revealing
light. He wondered, with a certain incredulous pride, whether he was
so dangerous a type that they intended to fish for him with nets. Just
then a foot was dangled over the oblong's edge.
It was a charming foot, slim and clad in the most shimmeringly
expensive sort of digital stocking, which gave each toe its separate
translucent compartment. Running back from between the toes were four
black velvet thongs, which helped attach the airy black shoe and
gave it an exciting though spidery appearance. The foot was joined
to a narrow ankle and gently swelling calf which hardly needed the
stocking's glamorizing. That was all of the figure he could see at
the moment, but the moment didn't last long. The foot was followed by
a second and shortly by all the rest of the girl. She hung briefly,
facing away from him. He got a quick impression of a short black
evening frock; a black shoulder cape; long, dark hair cascading free
and white arms in black gloves that began above the elbows and ended at
the knuckles.
His foot, shifting on the foam carpeting, made a tiny noise. Instantly
she whirled on him like a black panther, complete even to the shrill
snarl. As she did, Phil was rocked by two surprises: the first,
revealed when her short cape spun out, that her evening frock was off
the bosom, a style he had thought and read about a great deal, but
that was not followed at his social level; the second, and far more
attention getting, that the fingers of her right hand were tipped with
clawed, silver thimbles, while in her left she held ten gleaming inches
of that most disturbing anachronism, a knife. Poised like a fencer, she
waggled it rapidly under his chin.
"Did my father set you to spy on me?" she demanded. The "set" and "spy"
were sheer hiss.
"No," he replied chokingly, not wanting his Adam's apple to protrude.
"Then why are you here," she demanded, advancing the knife a bit,
"lurking in the dark?"
"Your father locked me in," he protested, leaning backward.
"Ishtar! Is he doing that to his patients, too?" she commented. Her
accents were a bit incredulous, but she did drop the knife to an easy,
on guard position, which also caused her cape to fall around her
modestly.
"Locked me in and turned off the lights," Phil reaffirmed.
She slitted her long-lashed eyes thoughtfully. "I can almost believe
the first part of that," she said. "He often sends his patients in here
for observation."
"Observation?"
She jerked a silver-fanged thumb at the ceiling. "That mirror's
transparent from above. He likes to watch what his patients do when
they think they're alone, either singly or by couples. Olympian voyeur!
Well, I marked him tonight." And she flashed the claws, which were
faintly stained with reddish brown.
Phil felt a little sick but took the opportunity to ask, "If that
mirror's transparent from above, why didn't you see me when he locked
me in here?"
"He always shuts the mirror off when he's not using it," she said,
"and I was interested in opening it, not seeing through it. I only
discovered the trick of the fastenings a half-minute ago. Father
probably doesn't even know it can be opened. Although well equipped
with the nastier psychological skills, he's no mechanic."
"Well, you seem to be skillful at things all around," said Phil.
"Fencing and that."
She thoughtfully licked the center of her upper lip with the tip of her
tongue. "You're kind of likable in a feeble way," she said. "Why did he
lock you in here anyhow? Too interested in sex? I thought he encouraged
that in his patients and only tried to forbid it to his darling
daughter."
As Phil searched for a suitable way to phrase a denial or confirmation,
her dark eyes grew speculative. "Say," she said, "how about you and
me?" She paused, then decisively whipped down the knife, so that it
stuck quivering in the floor. She advanced toward Phil. "Yes, you and
me."
"Your father'll be back any minute," Phil protested agitatedly.
"True, and I'll so enjoy seeing his face." She lifted her arms. "See
how beautiful I am. Look at them. Like two rose buds."
She was very beautiful indeed. Nevertheless, Phil froze. She bared her
teeth and struck at his cheek with her clawed hand, but at the last
moment turned the blow to a contemptuous pat.
"Don't worry," she said. "I know my glamor is a sort that terrifies
weaklings. Besides, the raven does not mate with the rabbit. And I
only wanted to do it to spite Father. Why did he lock you in? You seem
completely puerile."
"I just mentioned something about a green cat," Phil said with a
certain huffiness.
She rolled her eyes. "Tammuz! And just after encouraging the Akeleys in
their Bast worship. The man's so erratic I sometimes think he must be a
crypto-communist with his cover personalities jumbled."
"Of course he did say something about my waiting here while he got rid
of a violent ex-patient who carries around a--"
"That gold squirt gun story," she interrupted, "is his pet dodge for
getting rid of patients."
"He doesn't seem to want to get rid of me."
"No," she agreed cheerfully, jerking her knife out of the floor, "he
seems to want to keep you."
"I think he wants to send me to a mental hospital," Phil ventured,
rather hoping to be disagreed with, but she merely nodded.
"I don't envy you," she added, inserting the knife in a sheath in her
skirt. "Father favors old-fashioned treatments like convulsive therapy
and simulated snake pits. Well, if the assistant torturers are on their
way, I'd better be on mine." She took three quick steps, then looked
back at him coldly, thinning her lips. "Care to come along?" she asked.
"Not that I like you even faintly--I detest men; I'm seething with what
my grandmother would have called masculine protest--but I always enjoy
frustrating Father."
Phil had an acute sense of a lady-or-the-doctor dilemma, but he lost no
time saying, "Yes."
She nodded once and headed for the back of the room. "Will you try for
the elevator?" he ventured to ask.
"Of course not!" she snapped at him.
"But he said the only other way--" Phil began.
"Sshh!" she hissed and punched a door button.
The wall kept blank. "So it's on code," she said. "I might have
known." And she punched the button in a rapid rhythm. The wall kept on
blank. "Oh, oh, the special code, the one I'm not supposed to know."
She looked round at Phil. "You must be important," she sniffed. She
punched the button in another rhythm. This time, rather to Phil's
surprise, the wall parted obediently. He followed her into a gleaming
kitchen, complete with glassed in shelves of gamma-sterilized steaks
and vegetables, freezer, radionic oven, shadowed mushroom bed and small
microbe tank for home-cultured appetizers. Phil's eyes bugged at the
latter two luxuries, but it did occur to him to say, "What about that
mirror you left open? Mightn't your father come in upstairs and see I'm
gone?"
"Not tonight after what I gave him. Now stop making old maidish
remarks." She was standing in front of a vertical cylinder that half
protruded from the wall, and was busy once more with her button
punching. A tiny green light flashed up a tall column of studs like a
skyrocket. "Get the hassock from the library. Quick!"
When Phil hurried back lugging the foot-high cylinder of foam rubber,
a doorway about as big as a midget was open in the cylinder. "Put it
inside on the platform," she directed, "on top of all the straps and
stuff. They're just for packages. That's right. Now get inside and
squat on it. Reach down your hands on either side of the hassock and
take hold of the clamps. Keep a firm grip, because it drops a bit
faster than free-fall and you wouldn't want to be left behind squatting
on nothing. And squat up straight or you'll get your head rubbed off!"
"Wait a minute," said Phil, withdrawing a foot he had gingerly inserted
in the doorway, "Do you--"
"I have to go last, because I know how to work the button when I'm
inside. Hurry up."
"But this is the service chute, isn't it?" he asked.
"Did you expect Nubian slaves to carry you down a spiral ramp? Later
on you can persuade Father to buy me a copter if you want to."
"You mean," he quavered, "that you think I'm going to fall down that
chute on a little platform without sides?"
She jerked the knife from her skirt. "I think you're going to do that
or else you're going to let me lock you back in the library."
Stepping back from the knife, Phil sat down suddenly on the platform,
cracking the top of his head on the doorway, and then slowly drew in
his legs and assumed the position of the Anxious Buddha. "You didn't
have to rush me," he said with some dignity.
"I'm sending you to the first basement," she told him in clipped tones.
"I'll give you five seconds to get out. I think the door'll be open
there. If not, you'll have to come up again, and hope it's me that gets
you and not some other floor. Now don't worry," she told him as she
slid the door shut, "I've done this a dozen times myself--or at least
thought of doing it."
In the darkness Phil's spine stiffened to condensed steel and his hands
clutching the clamps became those of a gorilla. He had time to think
that if only Lucky were with him, tucked inside his jacket....
The platform was jerked down from under him, dragging him along. His
stomach rapidly scrambled over his heart and nestled just below his
Adam's apple. A giant snake hissed and he was acutely conscious of
being inches from death by friction on every side. Then, just as he
figured he'd got a really firm grip on the clamps, he distinctly felt
the platform through the hassock, his heels cut into his rump, his
vertebrae cut into his intervertebral disks, and various things inside
him jarred loose.
He was staring groggily into a dimly lit and empty room. Time was
passing, it occurred to him. He dove out onto the floor, while behind
him the platform took off with a hearty _whish_. By the time he had
dragged himself to a sitting position and taken a few breaths there
was a gust of air from the chute and a _zing_ as the platform came to
a stop. Miss Romadka sprang out nimbly and curtsied to an imaginary
audience.
"You never did that before?" he asked her glumly.
"Of course I have, but I knew if I said I hadn't you'd take it more
seriously." She tweaked him by the nearest ear. "Come on, you're not
out of Father's clutches yet."
Almost to his disappointment, he found he could scramble to his feet
and follow her. He almost felt calm. "How did you push the button from
the inside, anyhow?"
"Just taped it down, jumped in and shut the door. The platform won't
move if any of the upper-floor doors are open."
"What's your name, by the way?"
"Mitzie," she told him. "Mitzie Romadka."
"Mine's Phil," he said. "Phil Gish."
She led him into a shadowy garage, lined with ornate cars in stalls
barred like prison cells. Several of the cars had recharging cables
plugged in. He saw a ramp ahead that led upward. Mitzie coded open the
barrier in front of a small black coupe without a hint of decor.
"Innocent looking little job, isn't it?" she remarked. "Used to belong
to an undertaker." She hopped in. When, with a sad shrug, Phil followed
her, he was hardly surprised to find she had donned a full-length black
evening-mask. "It's not my car," she explained. "I'm just hiding it for
Carstairs and the gang. It's hot."
And with that reassuring remark she guided it out toward the ramp, its
small electric motor whining faintly. A door rose at her voice. Then
they were outside in the ghostly yellow evening of the sodium mirror.
When they had climbed almost to ground level, a big car slammed to a
stop in the street ahead, three-quarters blocking the exit. Two men
jumped out of the car and someone, of whom Phil could for the moment
see only waddling legs and chubby tummy, hurried to meet them.
"Look, if this is another tame-chicken chase--" he heard the first of
the two men from the car begin in heavy skeptical tones.
"Don't be absurd," the hurrier asserted crisply in a voice Phil
recognized as Dr. Romadka's. "I tell you, he mentioned the green cat."
At that moment the analyst looked around and saw Phil gawking at him.
"There he goes now!"
The analyst's outraged squeal turned to the rasp of plastics as Mitzie
bullied the small black car between the ramp-wall and the newcomer.
With the twang of hooked bumpers parting, they swung out into the
street, the little electric accelerating modestly. Phil looked over his
shoulder.
"They've got back in," he told Mitzie. "They're turning around."
"Like I said, you're important," she murmured through her mask, still
incredulously. "Well, here goes," and she abruptly nosed the car toward
the narrow mouth of a ramp leading downward.
"Hey, that's marked 'Exit Only,'" Phil yiped at her.
"That's why I'm using it," she informed him curtly.
He closed his eyes as the car tilted sharply down, but the gods of
probability seemed inclined to grant boons tonight. When the car
leveled out, Phil opened his eyes to the brighter, nearer, fog-light
sodium yellow of the under level. They were moving ahead smartly. Once
more Phil looked back.
"They've come down after us," he said with wonder perhaps a trifle
mixed with pride.
"Really important," Mitzie muttered, shaking her head. "Well, this
little mouse was never meant to outrace that rhino. Prepare for
acceleration, and hope the cars at the next ten intersections are
stacked right."
Phil felt himself crunched into the foam rubber he had his chin on.
There was a red glow just behind them. The pursuing car shrank rapidly
in size. Twisting himself around with difficulty, he noted that the
sodium lights had become a molten yellow ribbon. Their car flew past
the hood of a truck entering from a side street, though their speed
made it appear to be standing still. Some blocks ahead they shot
between two cars which also seemed frozen. The red glow died. They
sailed up another "Exit Only" ramp into the spectral yellow night.
Proceeding at a speed that soon became reasonable, they turned four
successive corners.
"That should do it," Mitzie said with professional nonchalance. Phil
nodded his slumped head.
"Carstairs put in the rocket assist yesterday," she explained. "He
wasn't altogether sure he had it lined up right. Neat little trick,
isn't it? A great comfort when you've just knocked over a fat
sales-robot, say, and have three cop cars converging and maybe a cop
copter up above. Beats a smoke screen all hollow. You'll see."
"I have," Phil assured her with a rather absent minded shiver.
"That was nothing," she said scornfully. "I mean when you've really
pulled a job and they're closing in. That's the big thrill. You'll see,
I tell you. You know, Phil, I sort of like you. You're so darn scared
and innocent, yet you play along. I'm sure I can persuade Carstairs to
let you join the gang."
Phil shivered again, but with even less of his mind on it. Neither
Mitzie Romadka's criminal pastimes nor her sudden friendliness could
hold his attention. Staring out frowningly at the jaundiced street, he
was thinking of Lucky and of the way he had felt when Lucky was with
him.
He jerked awake. "What is this green cat, anyhow?" Mitzie was asking
with an indifference that her mask intensified. "A carved emerald or
the password in a secret society?"
Phil shrugged.
"Well, let's forget it then," Mitzie was saying, "and have some fun."
She speeded up again to the electric's unassisted limit and ran through
a stop light which yipped protestingly. Her eyes gleamed wickedly in
their circles of black lace. Her breathing grew quicker, her voice
lighter. "Carstairs has a bunch of sales-robots lined up. Got their
after theater routes cased to a hair. We can ram 'em and gut 'em, one,
two, ten! Jump for the curb, sisters!"
This last exuberant remark was directed at two cloaked women on
glittering platforms, and it was accompanied by a vicious swerve of
the car toward them. They made it, just, and tumbled on their knees,
shrieking. Mitzie cooed happily.
Like someone waking from a dream, Phil said sharply, "No! I don't want
any part of it!" He went on, "You can drop me at 3010 Opperly Avenue,
top level."
She looked at him curiously for a change, even with surprise. "All
right," she said after a bit, "I'll do it, if only because I got such a
kick out of the look on your face when I shut the door of the chute."
She spun the car illegally in a tight U-turn. She said harshly, not
looking at Phil, "I never hot rod at old people, you know. They don't
have enough hormones to make it fun. Those two girls were real funnies."
Phil made no comment. They sped for a while in silence. Then he became
vaguely aware that Mitzie was stealing glances at him.
"If you should manage to cook up a little nerve and change your mind,"
she said angrily, "you might possibly find us at the Tan Jet much later
tonight."
He still made no comment. She went on softly, "Night's the only time,
you know, at least in this century. Night in the city. I love the pale
yellow streets and the bright yellow tunnels. They've taken the jungles
away from us, the high seas and the highways, even space and the air.
They've abolished half of the night. They've tried to steal danger.
But we've found it again in the city; we who've got nerve and hate the
sheep!
"Well, here's your 3010 Opperly," she said, jerking the car to a stop.
Phil opened the door and started out. Only then did Mitzie seem to
see the bright marquee and realize that the address was that of Fun
Incorporated's wrestling center. She thrust herself across the seat as
he reached the curb and turned to shut the door.
"So this is what you were looking for!" she yelled at him, her suddenly
passionate voice making her mask puff away from and then huff to her
mouth. "You turn me down, you sniff at my friends and my ways, you're
above violence and sex, and all the while you're planning to satisfy
yourself vicariously, watching male-female!" For an instant before
she slammed the door in his face, lightning seemed to shoot out of
the lace-shirred eyeholes of the black mask. "At least I make my own
thrills, you rotten little virgin!"