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PHIL GISH woke up feeling as good as if all his previous life had happened to two other guys - poor,reflexes had hi 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 hi it with the advertisement-covered walls of his tiny bachelor apartment
Why, it was sieously, 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 USA in the na far to the Kre 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&039;t a luck-forsaken little guy who on waking at eight o&039;clock thispills in order to kill the day and teet that he had just lost another job to a robot who did it five times as fast and twice as accurately, and that he&039;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 solden 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 frole 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 , s?"
The sound of his own voice, with its hint of acroak, answered that question
Or have I really blasted off froht 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&039;s somewhat unconventional color Just yesterday Phil had seen a young ht be an off-the-bosoh to hear her assure her companion, "They aren&039;t dye-jobs, you mood-mad man They&039;re reen, like the tree-sloth? Though he seeus or mold, and there certainly wasn&039;t any nity on hissill
"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 sy itself Besides, it felt that way
"C&039; his head froy pillow "Here, Kitty"
The second invitation, which sounded a trifle silly to Phil as soon as he said it, wasn&039;t necessary The cat at once dropped its plump-tummied body from thesill and trotted toward him like a soft-shod fat little horse Phil felt an odd increase, al, in the calm joy inside hile of the bedside Then a little green face careen paws placed themselves beside it, and two coppery eyes inspected him
"How are you, fellow?" Phil asked "Glad to make your acquaintance You&039;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 hiesture "Why not stay with me for a while? I like your looks and I ad 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 theinstant Phil had the notion Lucky ht 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&039;s sex The fat tuestive Yet he was soain and Phil are only of feelings He reached out a tentative hand, jerked it back when a little paw flicked out at it, then shaesture The little paw touched his er 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
"Noe&039;re friends," Phil said huskily The cat sprang fearlessly onto the bed Coppery eyes came close A furry cheek briefly brushed Phil&039;s with casual masculine friendliness Sudden tears sh to brim the lids but not to run over
What a lonely, empty-lifed fool he must be, he told hih All his life had been a fading His parents had seeun to sense their gray uncertainties and boredo proe and idealistic brotherhood opening up; but too"restricted" or "subversive" or the even ns of calculated silence - just as man had promised himself he&039;d reach the planets soon, but hadn&039;t Phil had had friends, too, at one tiirls; 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 therobots who fed envelopes into the proper slots by scanning their addresses photoelectrically The only thing robots couldn&039;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 hiht could not mar his present happiness
He ca down the bed, closely inspecting his naked body
"Hey, we&039;re friends, but that&039;s going too far Leaveup a light robe as his body left the cone of radiant heat projected fro into the robe he hu, in Free-Fall" and did a shuffling step that brought the cat hurrying over to play tag with his toes
"Wheredid you come from, Lucky?" Phil repeated and turned toward theIn the three steps it took hiaze lit on the near-e pills and for a &039;s overdose have triggered off or paralleled a really big change in his mind? After all, this cat wasn&039;t normal (and neither were hallucinations!) and his crazy, inexplicable happiness was altogether too odlike perfection into which the paranoiac is supposed to retreat
But then he was at theexperiencing a neist in his otten
Theopened on a deep, very narrow bay in the remodeled monster hotel in which Phil roo out very far, he could just limpse an advertise center and the helicopter field on its roof The hotel had been built as a luxury palace for the near-rich of the 1970&039;s but during the great housing shortage of the 1980&039;s its vast roo cells It retained, however, at least one feature froe circular s forlass, the inner of which could be rotated, allowing a person to blacken hisor have it fully transparent or enjoy any shade of twilight One other very unusual luxury touch was that the s could actually be opened, swinging on pivots at top and bottohout the hotel and the air-conditioning syste but trustworthy, this last feature was put to real use h ere still kept closed reat gray wall just ten feet from his ith its rows of oht in the world - a symbol of the way he alled off fro out just a little, his cropped hair brushing the tarnished circular rih that wall as if it were made of some material that conducted eh it, butfeel through it to the multiple texture of warm, pitiful, admirable, ridiculous human lives in the cubicles behind: the two-fifths happy ones, the nine-tenths sad ones, the ones who nursed fears and frustrations because you had to nurse so, the ones who hammered fears and frustrations into a painful ar his limp ration sta spaceship and pretending the blacked-out as the porthole of a coalactic liner, the three une - the lovers whose rendezvous was tainted orries about the Federal Bureau of Morality, the fatof soer
Well, his new self certainly had a vivid iination, Phil decided with a smile
An old hand ca - or nothing - from a dustpan
Coincidence, of course, or else he&039;d once watched the wo about it - nevertheless, Phil chose to interpret the event as an encouraging confirness Then the sht of another aspect of the opposite wall
This as the vantage point where he had spent countless drearily excited hours spying on the activities of all the young woe Not the new girl - the one ore her black hair in old-fashioned pony style - in the roohtly, ani No, she was a bit too close and besides, he was vaguely frightened of her There was so eerily dryad-like about her and, in any case, she blacked out her porthole religiously It was blacked out now, though slightly ajar