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 things 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, nonconformists. A fragment of conversation he’d heard somewhere came back to him: “Of course as soon as he sawthat 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.