Fritz Leiber - The Green Millennium

“But there’s only one green cat,” Phil objected, genuinely puzzled, “and it’s supposed to be attacking America. It isn’t, of course.”

“I’ll say it isn’t. My boy, I am giving you the Marxist facts,” Romadka assured him gravely. “Those stories you have heard are merely blinds put out by the capitalist government to conceal from its own work slaves and pseudo scientists the enormity of its actions. What has happened is that a green cat has escaped from a government laboratory here. You led me to that cat once, Phil. You can do it again.”

“I can’t,” Phil said mildly.

“Phil, you can,” Romadka assured him.

“But you got him once,” Phil objected, “and all you did was let him go again.”

For the first time a shadow of impatience darkened Romadka’s geniality. “I told you I made some mistakes last night. I let someone get a hypo-beam on me, probably a drug spray too. For a time I wasn’t responsible for my actions. It was all I could do to escape the FBL raid. But it won’t happen again.” His voice grew brisk. “So come on along with me, Phil, and bring your friend. There’s no more time for discussion.”

“But -” Phil began.

Dytie da Silva stepped into the foreground. “Me no go,” she told Romadka. “Why should I? You sound crazy head. ‘Lusion-‘mune state? ‘Rationalisms impossible? Abs’lute science? All nonsense!”

The psychoanalyst lifted his eyebrows at her accent and sentiments. “I was just about to take up your case, young lady. Why are you here in the first place?”

“Just come from room across,” Dytie told him, jerking a thumb at the window.

Romadka studied her through narrowed eyes behind which memory seemed to be at work. Suddenly he smiled thinly. “The description tallies,” he said. “You’re the young woman Mr. Gish watched undressing last night, and onto whom he grafted a remarkable delusion.”

“Phil, you never tell me about that,” Dytie said, looking at him brightly.

“Naturally he wouldn’t,” Romadka said, a bit primly.

“Why not?” Dytie demanded. “I don care. If he like, okay.”

Romadka looked at her contemptuously. “A common exhibitionist, I see. Nymphomania too.”

Dytie planted her hands on her hips. “Look, I no say long words good. But your diagnose wrong there. Not nym’omania – satyr’asis. I show you.” And then and there she started to peel off a stocking. Phil watched in fascinated horror.

Romadka stood up angrily. “Of all the -” he began. “If you think that some crude appeal to my sexual urges -”

But at that moment Dytie pulled off her shoe and foot, and held out her dainty black hoof, fur-tufted fetlock and slim pastern for his inspection. “Okay, ‘lusion-‘mune,” she said grimly. “Take good look. Satyr’asis!”

Dr. Romadka’s knees shook. His face was gray. His eyes bulged.

Without warning, Dytie stooped, spun around, and let go with a very accurate kick. The stun-gun shot out of Romadka’s trembling hand and clattered against the wall beyond. Romadka snatched his hand away as if the hoof were hell, and stumbled frantically out of the room. The sound of his rapid, uneven footsteps slowly faded out. Phil knew just how he felt. It was all he could do not to follow him.

Dytie began to laugh uproariously. While doing so, she hobbled over to the door, shut it and then picked up Romadka’s gun.

“This stun-gun?” she asked Phil.

Phil wet his lips and clutched at the table for support. He knew he must be quite as pale as Romadka. “Dytie,” he finally managed to say, his teeth chattering, “you come from a country a lot farther away than Argentina.”

She smiled apologetically. “Thas right, Phil. I got longer story yours tell.”

Phil nodded shakily. “But first, if you please…” he faltered, and pointed at the shoe, foot and crumpled stocking she’d dropped on the floor.

“Sure, Phil. I un’erstand.” She picked them up and sat down on the edge of the bed to put them on. Phil followed her movements unwillingly, but when it came to the point where she was about to thrust her hoof into the deep well in the false foot and the platform he flinched and looked away.

Meanwhile she was saying matter-of-factly, “You no tell ‘lusion-‘mune man, but you got idea where pussycat is?”

“No,” he replied nervously, “but I know where I might be able to find out.”

“Is in this city?”

“Yes.”

“You take me there, Phil?”

“I guess so.”

“Don you want find pussycat too, Phil?”

“Yes, I think I do.”

“Okay, thas fine. You can look now.”

He forced himself to steal a glance at her, then let out a sigh of relief. Her two legs were once more just like any other girl’s. Illusion, he decided, was at times the Bread of Life.

“And now,” he said, “you can answer those questions of mine.”

But just then there was more rapping at the door.

“This time girl friend,” Dytie told him optimistically.

But Phil was taking no more chances. He switched on the one-way peephole first, and looked straight into the face of Dave Greeley.

When Phil whispered “Federal Bureau of Loyalty,” to Dytie, she jumped up. During his long narrative she had asked him several questions about that organization, he had answered them in detail, and she had apparently formed some very definite conclusions. “We got beat it, Phil. No time question-answer now.” And she lightly sprang to the window sill and walked across the ladder.

It wasn’t as long as the beam at the Akeleys’, but it was ten times as high and Phil wasn’t drunk. If he hadn’t crossed the beam at the Akeley’s and gone down the service chute at the Romadkas’, he would never have dared it. His heart was hammering as he let himself down into Dytie’s room. He turned around with some vague idea of removing the ladder. He heard a crash in his room. Dytie grabbed him.

“No time now,” she said. And she urged him out of her room into the corridor.

Seconds later they were entering the elevator on her side of the building. “Hey, that’s the up button,” he warned as she punched it.

“I know, Phil,” she said reassuringly.

Emerging on the roof, Phil felt for a moment a big sense of freedom. The sodium mirror had not quite set, and everything around was bright although the lower part of the sky was dark and many stars showed in it.

Then he saw the half dozen copters swinging in low toward them like june bugs.

Dytie was hustling him along, but only toward an empty corner of the roof. He resented her pointless display of energy. A mighty voice from the sky commanded them to stop.

Dytie halted almost at the edge of the roof, felt around in the air, climbed a couple of feet up into it and felt around again.

There was the sound of a copter scraping, bouncing and grounding behind them

Dytie opened in the air a small doorway that was black as ink, and climbed inside. She turned around, her face a pale mask in an inky rectangle, urged, “Come on, Phil,” and stretched a white arm out of the rectangle down toward him.

Phil stared at this weird air-framed portrait. Beneath it he could clearly see the sheer walls of the building opposite and the dizzying ribbon of street fifty floors below.

Behind him men shouted and there was another shattering command from the sky.

Phil grabbed Dytie’s wrist. His other hand, fumbling blindly, found an invisible rung in the air. So did his foot. He scrambled up the air and pitched over the sill of the inky doorway, into an inky sack and found a curving floor under him. Rolling over, he saw behind him a rectangle of the sky with three stars in it. The rectangle narrowed and vanished, and there was no light at all.