Fritz Leiber - The Green Millennium

PHIL GISH woke up feeling as good as if all his previous life had happened to two other guys – poor, miserable clunks!

Usually his whip-cracking reflexes had him out of bed in a flash and jerking on his shorts and sockasins while he frantically hunted around for the jar of beard-dissolving cream. But this time he was able to outsmart all tyrannous nerve-impulses and keep his eyes closed in order to enjoy the unprecedented sensation all to himself, not even sharing it with the advertisement-covered walls of his tiny bachelor apartment.

Why, it was simply wonderful, he decided after a bit. Outrageously, impossibly wonderful!

He actually felt as if this were not a world in which hot and cold wars had been gushing unpredictably for fifty years like temperamental faucets, in which the Federal Bureau of Loyalty and Fun Incorporated ruled the U.S.A. in the name of that drunken, hymn-singing farmer, President Robert T. Barnes, and in which (according to the Kremlin Newsmoon, located on an earth-circling satellite vehicle) a new plan was being considered for exchanging the descendants of prisoners taken in the half-century-old Korean War.

And as if he, Phil Gish, weren’t a luck-forsaken little guy who on waking at eight o’clock this morning hadn’t taken four sleeping pills in order to kill the day and temporarily forget that he had just lost another job to a robot who did it five times as fast and twice as accurately, and that he’d had a blow-up because of it and been coldly advised to see a psychiatrist.

He took a long, luxurious breath. Even the air smelt and felt different, as if dusted with some golden chemical that banished care.

He opened his eyes and looked down at his pale chest with the two lone hairs that were a sardonic last farewell from glorious jungle ape-hood. But this time the word that came to him was “slim,” not “scrawny.” He rather liked his body, he decided – a neat and compact, if not exactly outsize, bit of tissue. He yawned, stretched, scratched where the two hairs were, and looked around. The green cat sat on the sill of the large open circular window, smiling at him.

“Hey, am I dreaming?”

The sound of his own voice, with its hint of a morning croak, answered that question.

Or have I really blasted off from behind the hair line? The second question, thought not spoken, was quickly suppressed. He felt too good to let it worry him. If this was insanity, then three cheers for paranoia!

Besides, there were all sorts of natural explanations of the cat’s somewhat unconventional color. Just yesterday Phil had seen a young matron leading two rose-colored poodles. A flash of what might be an off-the-bosom dress under her cloak had moved him to pass close enough to hear her assure her companion, “They aren’t dye-jobs, you mood-mad man. They’re mutations!”

Also, weren’t some animals naturally green, like the tree-sloth? Though he seemed to recall that the tree-sloth’s hue was due to a fungus or mold, and there certainly wasn’t any mold on the burnished bundle of benignity on his window sill.

“Hiya, Lucky,” he greeted softly. From the very first he had decided to connect the cat with his newborn, incredible sense of well-being. If there was going to be a new era in his life, it was a good idea to have a symbol for it – a symbol green as spring itself. Besides, it felt that way.

“C’mere, Lucky,” he called without lifting his head from the spongy pillow. “Here, Kitty.”

The second invitation, which sounded a trifle silly to Phil as soon as he said it, wasn’t necessary. The cat at once dropped its plump-tummied body from the window sill and trotted toward him like a soft-shod fat little horse. Phil felt an odd increase, almost frightening, in the calm joy inside him. The cat disappeared momentarily under the angle of the bedside. Then a little green face came over the edge and two tiny green paws placed themselves beside it, and two coppery eyes inspected him.

“How are you, fellow?” Phil asked. “Glad to make your acquaintance. You’re a cool little cuss, all right. Where did you come from?”

The little face tipped upward.

“From upstairs?” Phil asked and instantly chuckled at himself for interpreting the movement as a gesture. “Why not stay with me for a while? I like your looks and I admire your color. Often wished I were green myself. Anything for variety – begging your pardon.”

It was a strange and curiously attractive cat face. The ears were large, the forehead high, the nose-button lost in furry down, the whiskers hardly apparent, and the mouth had a suggestion of a pucker or pout. For a fleeting instant Phil had the notion Lucky might look rather different, rather less like a cat, if caught unawares. And he was really very green – the green of tarnished copper, only brighter.

Thinking the word “he,” Phil wondered for a fleeting instant about Lucky’s sex. The fat tummy was suggestive. Yet he was somehow sure the cat was a male.

Then Lucky smiled again and Phil was aware only of feelings. He reached out a tentative hand, jerked it back when a little paw flicked out at it, then shamefacedly corrected the gesture. The little paw touched his middle finger. Phil stroked the silken paw in turn. Neither time could he feel a hint of claws. They must all be tucked inside their smooth sheathes.

“Now we’re friends,” Phil said huskily. The cat sprang fearlessly onto the bed. Coppery eyes came close. A furry cheek briefly brushed Phil’s with casual masculine friendliness. Sudden tears smarted in Phil’s eyes, enough to brim the lids but not to run over.

What a lonely, empty-lifed fool he must be, he told himself, that a cat could make him cry. Yet it was true enough. All his life had been a fading. His parents had seemed warm and wonderful at first, but then he had begun to sense their gray uncertainties and boredoms. School had been full of breathtaking promise at one point, with infinite vistas of knowledge and idealistic brotherhood opening up; but too many of the vistas had ended in signs saying “restricted” or “subversive” or the even more maddening blank signs of calculated silence – just as man had promised himself he’d reach the planets soon, but hadn’t. Phil had had friends, too, at one time, and had really been in love with girls; but even that had somehow become washed out and worthless. And then the endless business of being beaten out of jobs by white-collar robots, beginning with the mail-sorting robots who fed envelopes into the proper slots by scanning their addresses photoelectrically. The only thing robots couldn’t do, it seemed, was sit in foxholes. That was one place where Phil recalled no mechanical competition.

Yes, it had been a very empty, purposeless life indeed, Phil told himself, at the same time wondering why even that thought could not mar his present happiness.

He came out of his reverie and saw that the cat was marching down the bed, closely inspecting his naked body.

“Hey, we’re friends, but that’s going too far. Leave me some privacy!” Chuckling, he swung out of bed, grabbing up a light robe as his body left the cone of radiant heat projected from the ceiling fixture. While shuddering into the robe he hummed a couple of bars from “Kiss Me, Darling, in Free-Fall” and did a shuffling step that brought the cat hurrying over to play tag with his toes.

“Where did you come from, Lucky?” Phil repeated and turned toward the window. In the three steps it took him to reach it, his gaze lit on the near-empty dispenser of sleeping pills and for a moment the eerie doubt came back: mightn’t this morning’s overdose have triggered off or paralleled a really big change in his mind? After all, this cat wasn’t normal (and neither were hallucinations!) and his crazy, inexplicable happiness was altogether too much like the inner world of godlike perfection into which the paranoiac is supposed to retreat.