Chapter Three
THROUGH half closed lids, whose lashes blurred everything, Phil watched the ghostly pale yellow circle of the window, which was all the illumination he could bear now. He hadn't put on any lights when the sun had set and the sodium mirror above the stratosphere made the only light, and minutes ago he'd switched off the TV screen although the girl's voice still crooned a sex song and he still wore the fat mitten of the handie. But the pressure of her fingers, holding a hydraulically compartmented artificial hand and transmitting over the airwaves an electric signal to change pressures of the hydraulic compartments of the handie, began to feel like that of a skeleton wearing rubber gloves. Phil jerked off the handie, switched off the voice, lit a cigarette, and was back with his problem.
Was he really crazy, he asked himself; was Lucky just a psycho's dream cat, or had he somehow been tricked? Once again he tormentedly totted up the evidence. Nobody but himself had admitted to seeing Lucky. And there were so many other indications of hallucinations: that crazy color, the silly food, his fleeting hunch that Lucky wasn't "really" a cat, his suspiciously godlike elation and sense of power.
But those feelings of his were also the reason that Luckyhad to exist. After what had happened today, Phil simply couldn't endure life without Lucky, without those warm insights that had galvanized him this afternoon and shut away all thoughts of his lost job, his loneliness, his cowardice and frustrations. "Lucky," he whispered without knowing he'd been going to, and the sick child sound of his voice frightened him so that he fumbled in his pocket for the phonoscribe tape Swish Jack Jones had given him. Puffing his cigarette hard so that it made a hell red glow, he read the smoky words, "Dr. Anton Romadka. Top of The Keep. Eight O'Clock. "
He visualized the thin black shaft of The Keep, a luxurious office-hotel, and thought of how few minutes it would take him to get there. But then he suddenly crumpled the paper in his pocket and began to pace. Going to Dr. Romadka would mean that he didn't really believe in Lucky.
He thought of the sleeping pills but was afraid there weren't enough left. He reached for a book he'd been reading, but the thought of its stereotyped sadistic plot was unbearably boring. As a last resort he turned on the radio again, voice and sight.
". . . ravins the antichrist. "
That phrase, together with the gaunt bucolic face, inevitably meant that President Robert T. Barnes was telling his Fellow Americans about Russia all over again.
"But there are sinners on this side of the polar battlegrounds," the great midwestern father-image continued, swaying forward and arching his bushy eyebrows. "Sinners in our midst, creatures of the fleshpots. They have catered too long to the vilest desires and lusts. " He shook a finger and swayed once more. "I warn them that their time is at hand. "
Phil reached for the knob (how often had Barnes made those futile, and some said drunken, threats, when everyone knew his administration was hand in glove with Fun Incorporated!) but he hesitated as an unfamiliar and rather eerie note crept into the President's voice.
"Fellow Americans," Barnes almost whispered, wobbling a little from side to side, "strange forces are abroad, insane thoughts, spirits of the upper air like those which troubled ancient Babylon. Our minds are being worked upon, it is the final testing time for -"
His momentary curiosity gone, Phil twisted the knob to silence and darkness. Nevertheless, the President's rhetoric set the tone of his next reverie. He did not pace now, but crouched back in the foam chair wedged between the radio and bed.
He must be crazy, he told himself with a quiet certainty that didn't hurt for the moment, perhaps because he sat so very still. Everything he'd felt this afternoon had been out of character, including his ridiculous overvaluation of that dream cat.
Yes, he must be crazy.
At that moment the dim circle of the window was intersected by a smaller and much brighter circle. He automatically stood up and stepped forward.
The girl in the room across the bay had switched on her light. Now she threw down a cloak and walked around the room as if searching for something, the horsetail of black hair flirting from side to side as she turned her head this way and that. She was less than twenty feet away and he could see her clearly. She was wearing a gray suit fashionably pied with great splotches of black. Her face was compact, nose small, mouth broad, eyes very wide set, and, as Phil now noticed definitely for the first time, her ears were lobeless and curved up to an almost faun-like tip. As on those rare occasions when he'd glimpsed her before, he felt a quiver of uneasiness.
She shrugged her shoulders, as if giving up her hunt, and walked over to the window, looking straight at Phil. He shrank back a bit, though he knew he was invisible. She grasped a knob on the rim and swung her hand in a quarter-circle, the window gradually blacking out as she did so.
Then, just as Phil started to turn away, the window began to brighten again until it was almost as transparent as before. He realized what must have happened. The inner pane of polarizing glass had missed its catch and revolved silently onward a few extra inches. He'd known it to happen to his own.
The girl across the way thought she was hidden. She wasn't.
She stretched and took off her coat. Phil gnawed his lip. He didn't quite want to watch her. But anything was welcome that would distract him from the thought with which his last reverie had ended, and, Phil knew very well, this window could provide most gripping, if barren, distractions.
She slowly parted the magnetic clasps on her blouse, then slipped out of it with a lithe twist of her shoulders. Phil forgot his fears, enthralled by the beauty of her dark-nippled breasts. Below them, almost cupping them, she seemed to be wearing some sort of close fitting, velvet black undergarment.
She stepped out of her skirt. The undergarment ended raggedly at her thighs. It puzzled him, perhaps because of the faint smokiness of the window. It looked almost as if it were made of some sort of fur.
Balancing expertly on one leg, she drew the stocking from the other, and along with the stocking one of those grotesque ten-inch platform shoes.
Only - and here Phil's heart jumped - she seemed to have stripped off much more than that. To be precise, her foot.
Then he saw she hadn't taken off quite all her foot. At the point where her ankle should have been, her leg curved backward a trifle, then sharply forward again, slimming down abruptly to end in a neat little black hoof.
She stripped off the other stocking and shoe with the same result. Phil could see how the foot fitted into a well in the dummy foot and the platform, and was in that way concealed.
She danced exuberantly around the room. He could hear the clicks of the little hoofs. He remembered how he'd heard her practicing tap. He could see very distinctly her slim pasterns, her dainty fetlocks tufted with fur exactly the same texture and blackness as her "undergarments. "
She stopped dancing, took up an electric razor, and began critically to shave the edge of her "undergarment. "
Phil started to think in words. He got as far as "First a green cat, then -" The next moment he turned and plunged for the door.
He wasn't very clear about anything for a while after that. For instance, when he darted across the street two blocks away from the Skyway Towers he was almost run down by a slowly moving black electric, stylishly designed in the antique, museum-case style of the early 1900's. In it were sitting Cookie, the Akeleys and Swish Jack Jones with a box on his lap. Phil didn't even recognize them at the time.
All he was really conscious of was what his hand clutched in his pocket - the crumpled phonoscribe tape with Dr. Romadka's name and address.