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.”
II
THE street snarled at Phil. The snarl came chiefly from a charged-up electric hot rod that swerved close to the curb to remove a triangular chunk from the rump of a fat man who had been too slow in skittering to safety. A second look showed he was not a fat man, but a thin man in a balloon suit. It deflated rapidly, and he sat down in its limp folds on the curb and began to sob. Balloon suits were of no real protection to pedestrians, except by increasing the apparent target, but they continued as a fad. During the last war they had been pumped full of hydrogen as a shield against neutrons until a couple of small but unpleasant explosions in crowded shelters had caused the government to crack down.
After snarling, the street continued to growl deep in its throat – it had two lower levels. The growl was composed of the hum of electrics, the subterranean rumble of heavier traffic, the yak-yak of competing vocal advertisements, and the nervous shuffle of feet that was the same when Rome and Babylon were young, but that was intensified here because most of the women’s feet were on platforms three to ten inches high.
Neither the growl nor the snarl disturbed Phil. Normally he’d already have had his ear plugs tucked in, his face fixed straight ahead, his eyes nervously questing for hot rods, which were known to jump curbs. But today he simply wanted to drink it all in, to see the things he’d always been blind to, to note the anxious but apathetic expressions on the faces of the pedestrians, to sense the invisible lines of force that, like spider webs or marionette strings, joined them to the space-overflowing advertisements, which ranged from the crisp, “Learn to Break Necks!” and the cute “A Strip-Tease Doll All Your Own!” to the “Why Not Lobotomy?” and the imagination-tantalizing “Glamorize Your Figure with a Sprayed-on Evening Dress! Plasticfabric cures in a jiffy, breathes. No heat, no adhesions! Special forms flare the skirt, shape the bosom! Designed by artists right on your body!”
Lucky seemed no more frightened of the street than Phil. He scampered along close to the base of Skyway Towers ’ monumental facade, the camouflaging green color of which may have explained why none of the pedestrians took note of him – not that any explanation was needed as to why those walking nerve-bags didn’t see things right under their noses!
A gleaming sales robot veered toward Phil on its silent wheels, but Phil deftly interposed another balloon-suited man between himself and it. The balloon-suited man began to get a slick reducing pill sales talk; evidently the robot had scanned his profile. Phil hurried around the corner after Lucky, who had turned down garish Opperly Avenue.
As if he had picked up a scent, Lucky abruptly left the wall, glided across the sidewalk and padded across Opperly Avenue between the passing cars. Phil followed, not without a certain heart pounding, but with no real anxieties. Something allowed him to sense easily the intentions of all the cars in the block – dodging them was almost fun.
He reached the opposite curb a good five feet ahead of a playful youth in a jalopy with a tin body like a space jeep scribbled over with such signs as “Oh, You Venusian!” and “Girls beware – escape speed zero.” Effortlessly recovering his breath, Phil found himself facing an ornate cave mouth flanked with old-fashioned fluorescent posters, the largest lettering on which read: “TONIGHT! Juno Jones, the Man-Maiming Amazonvs. Dwarf Zubek, the Bone-Crushing Misogynist.”
But he had no time to read the rest of the bill, for Lucky was dancing up the broad corridor lined with giant stereographs of menacing, half-naked men and women, looking in the dim light like genies freshly materialized from smoke.
Ordinarily Phil would have felt a certain amount of disgust mixed with fear and uneasy fascination at entering, or even passing, a wrestling palace specializing in male-female, but today it seemed simply a part of life. It never occurred to him not to follow Lucky.
Just short of some turnstiles and a robot ticket taker lost in shadows, a side corridor spilled light. Lucky whisked into it. Phil had barely rounded the corner after him when a long, handless, boneless gray arm shot out of the wall and slapped itself firmly against Phil’s middle.
“Where you think you’re going, Mack?” a voice rasped from the wall. “On your way.” And it gave him a quick shove toward the ticket taker.
Phil could see Lucky mincing inquisitively down the side corridor, which was lined with doors. He tried to go around the arm, but it extended itself until it stretched from wall to wall.
“Still here?” the rasping wall inquired. “Look, Mack, I don’t know your voice. If you got business with somebody, name me their name and the word they gave you.”
“I just want to get my cat,” Phil answered. Lucky had reached the end of the corridor and was peering into the last doorway. “Here, Lucky,” he called, but the cat took no notice.
“Means nothing to me,” the wail rasped on. “You still ain’t named me no names that tripped any of my relays.”
Lucky disappeared through the doorway. Phil said, “Please let me through a minute to get my cat,” trying to sound as sincere as he could. “I’ll be right back.”
“I ain’t letting nobody through,” the wall asserted. “Give me a name and word, quick, Mack.”
At that instant an appalling spasm of fear went through Phil, as if a light had been turned out inside his mind and his heart sprayed with liquid ice. He knew that something had happened to Lucky. He ducked under the gray arm and darted forward, but before he had taken five steps he felt himself grabbed. The corridor whirled as he was roughly spun back. Looking down he saw the elastic arm wrapped around him like a gray python, while the wall grated in his ear, “No go, Mack. Now I’ll have to hold you till the man comes.”