Fritz Leiber - The Green Millennium

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 around 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.