Part 3

The room was as dark, soft and silent as a womb. Evidently most of Dr. Romadka's patients dreamed expensively. The inevitable desk had a double curve like a love seat. There were no advertisements anywhere: a sure sign of wealth. On one wall was a large, round design, apparently copied from some classical Greek original, which disturbed Phil with its suggestions of nymphs and satyrs. He quickly shifted his gaze to an arch, through which he could see the beginning of a stairway. He decided Dr. Romadka must also have a penthouse.

Suddenly he heard angry voices, a man's and a girl's. The latter's rose to a catsquall of hate. A door somewhere shut with a snap, and a bit later a man came down the stairs without moving his feet. Phil deduced an escalator.

Dr. Romadka was tubby, bald and beaming with subtlety. He had on his left cheek four new, deep scratches, which he ignored completely and apparently expected Phil to. He summoned Phil to the desk with an indicating nod. They sat down and looked at each other across the curved and gleaming plane.

The analyst smiled. "Well, Mr. Gish? Yes, Jack Jones told me your name, and since Sacheverell and Mary are paying for things in any case, the new arrangement is quite all right. Oh, Sacheverell and Mary are Mr. and Mrs. Akeley, Jack Jones' friends. I thought you might have known. Incidentally, you're an hour late for your appointment."

A drop of blood fell from the deepest scratch to his white shirt and spread.

Phil shivered, then made himself say it. "I was spending the time going crazy."

The analyst nodded. "You do seem a bit wrought up."

"A bit?"

"Well," conceded the analyst with a shrug to excuse his own inadequate powers of description. Then he said, "Do not be surprised at going crazy, as you put it, Mr. Gish--may I call you Phil? It is the rule rather than the exception these days, though your admitting it is a bit out of the ordinary. For a full century now Americans have been living in one of those ages of collective madness and herd delusion, comparable only to the Dutch tulip mania, the witchcraft dread, the dancing madness, Trotskyism, and the Crusades. Until 1950 ours might have been called the Automobile Mania, but now the imagination can only grope for a name--I'm writing an unpopular book on the subject, you see. Not that this current social madness is a deep secret or anything to be startled at. What other results could have been expected when American society began to overvalue on the one hand security, censorship, an imagined world-saving idealism and self-sacrifice in war, and on the other hand insatiable hunger for possessions, fiercely competitive aggressiveness, sadistic male belligerence, contempt for parents and the state, and a fantastically overstimulated sexuality?"

The analyst's voice rose stridently and his eyes popped, as if there were a personal element in his indignation. But the next moment he was his merry professional self.

"Now, Phil, let's examine how this sick society has sickened you. It may surprise you but we shan't be using any such modern techniques as electrosleep, deep brain photography or situational therapy complete with a bottle, a blanket and a blonde love-robot. We shall simply do what our great-grandfathers would have done--talk. Feel perfectly at ease. This desk is designed so we can be together, yet need not look at each other. Care to smoke? Good! Do! Now begin at the beginning. Tell me the story of your life."

Phil swallowed. "Excuse me, Dr. Romadka," he said, "but I'd rather not do that right now. I want to tell you about an experience, I mean, hallucination, I just had that convinced me I'm crazy, and then I want you to tell me about it. You know: interpret it or psych it or something."

The analyst shrugged happily. "As good a beginning as any. Go ahead."

So Phil told him what he had seen through the quarter-darkened window. He found himself ashamedly admitting under the analyst's expert rein-twitching how he had long used his own window as an observation post, and when he got to describing the hallucination itself he found himself trembling with restimulated terror, but he did finally get it all out.

Dr. Romadka seemed as delighted as if he had been presented with a rare object of art. "Beautiful!" he commented. "I have seldom heard so magnificent a symbol for the murky sexual longings of this culture. A satyress, or satyrette, prepared to inflict both love and savage stampings. Mary would be enraptured with it, I'm sure, and insist on making one of her dolls in its image." He sighed aesthetically, then recalled himself. "But, of course, Phil, I can't expect you to be interested just now in the artistic product of your unconscious creativity. You want to know about causes, sources. Tell me, have you ever seen a horse?"

"Once in a circus," Phil admitted.

"Greek mythology is one of your interests?"

"Not that I know of."

"Recall seeing that TV show _A Coltish Girl_ or the musical sexedy _The Horsy Set_ or the ancient film _Fantasia_?"

Phil shook his head. The analyst nodded thoughtfully. "You say the fur was distributed over the torso like a clinging, off-the-bosom chemise? And that the legs went straight down, like rods, to end in hoofs?"

"Not exactly," Phil corrected and went on to describe the little heel bumps of the fetlocks and the slim pseudo-wrists of the pasterns.

"But otherwise she was formed exactly like a normal girl?--except for the faun ears?"

"No," Phil said frowningly after a moment. "Her thighs were a bit heavy and powerful looking, as if made for galloping long distances. Her arms were sort of long, though it didn't occur to me then. And the upper part of her body was thrown forward a bit, if you know what I mean, and it was balanced by quite a little rump. But not what you'd call hippy."

"Magnificent!" the analyst crowed. "Phil, you not only have equipped your vision with accurate horse-legs, but you have made some of the necessary compensations in the rest of the anatomy that such a mode of locomotion would involve in a biped." He sat there beaming a bit vacantly, as if lost in admiration for the creative powers of the all-resourceful unconscious.

"Yes, but what does it indicate about my mind?" Phil asked. He would have felt annoyed if he had not been so anxious. "What's wrong with me?"

Dr. Romadka shook off his reverie with a smile that begged pardon for it. "What's wrong with America?" he asked wryly. "It's much too early for me to arrive at any conclusions, Phil, or rather to help you arrive at your own. Of course, the visual projection created by your unconscious has some interesting references."

"What are they?" Phil asked. "I may not have made it clear, but I'm worried about this. I can't get it out of my mind."

Dr. Romadka smiled, shrugged. "Perhaps a spot of interpreting would relieve you," he agreed. "Though you must remember it's just impromptu analysis, may be quite wrong. Here goes. The first things that come to mind are such elements as dread of sexual experience and the attempt to invest it with terror, effort to feminize yourself by conceiving a savagely-hoofed love object, an attempt to link sex with a trampling and punishing beast, perhaps as self-punishment for your voyeurism--all of these fitting in nicely with the classical mythology about the nymphs and their natural love companions the goat-hoofed satyrs--also the horse-hoofed centaurs, who were frequently, you may remember, teachers of men." The analyst frowned. "It's barely possible you were visually projecting the desire to be taught about love. However," he went on, "I imagine that as usual the hidden significances are the more important ones. May I make a spot guess about you?"

Phil nodded.

"Are you a white-collar worker in close competition with robots?"

"Yes," Phil said, astonished.

"Hardly a brilliant deduction," the analyst deprecated, but his eyes beamed. "In that case we must suspect another mythological ingredient. Do you know the Pandora story? There's a special point about it. She was not an ordinary girl sent by the gods to bring mankind a box containing all ills. No, she was a metal maiden, forged by Hephaestus at the command of Zeus. In other words, an automaton, a robot--bringing in this case the ills of the Second Industrial Revolution caused by the introduction of electronic calculators and sensers."

"But did Pandora have hoofs?" Phil said doubtfully.

Dr. Romadka waved away the objection. "Your unconscious probably fused in the Arabian legend of the clockwork horse. The unconscious is very artistic about these things, Phil. If you realized just how artistic, how fertilely creative, you wouldn't be worried."

"But how does all this tie in with sex?" Phil asked.

The analyst shrugged. "Must it? A visual projection, like a dream, can mean a thousand things. I warned you this was just impromptu analysis. We've carried it about as far as we can."

"Look," Phil said hesitantly after a pause. "There's a lot to the things you said, and some of them really pushed buttons in my mind. But--I hope you won't object--there's one thing that's still bothering me."

"Go right ahead."

Phil became even more diffident. Finally he said with difficulty, "Look, doctor, is there any chance that what I saw could be real in any way? Any chance at all?"

The analyst chuckled mellowly. "Not one in the world," he said with complete conviction. "What's been bothering you, Phil? Did you believe that the Greek gods and their creatures might have been materialized in some way?"

"Something like that, I guess," Phil said without conviction.

Dr. Romadka leaned toward him, resting an elbow on the curving desk. "If you had any idea of half the things people tell me across this desk, normal neurotic people I mean, you wouldn't be so much impressed by your own experience. There's a woman, for instance, who keeps seeing shimmery moon-spiders in dark corners. There's a man who is always getting glimpses of a girl dressed in skin-tight mink that covers her face, too. And there's another fellow who keeps waking up in the middle of the night with the absolute conviction that he's in bed with--no, I shouldn't tell you that one."

"But I actually seemed to see it," Phil persisted stubbornly. "It wasn't just a glimpse or shadows."

Dr. Romadka smiled. "How many people have seen flying saucers, Phil? Including astronomers and atomic scientists. How many people have seen Russian soldiers or Russian homing missiles nosing around their bedroom windows? And how many people thought they saw Roosevelt--and thought they walked and talked with him--the day of the Great Panic in Atom War Two? Besides all that, Phil, there were shadows: you said the polarizing window wasn't at maximum transparency. Also, you've been overdosing yourself with sleeping pills--you admit it--and they can do funny things. As for the hoofs, well, have you ever thought how high heels are really cruel little hoofs? Anyone who's seen ladies fight will confirm this. And the girl's hair-do, her suit splotched like a piebald horse, the remembered sound of the tap-dancing--don't you see how your unconscious could weave those things and a thousand more into an image that in your strained condition you were all too ready to accept?"

"I guess I do," Phil said finally, feeling considerable relief. Not for long, though.

"But there's one other thing," he said, sitting up suddenly. "The thing I thought I saw this afternoon. A lot more real than the satyrette even. I thought I was with it for an hour. Even touched it and fed it."

"What other thing?" the analyst asked gently, with just the hint of a tolerant laugh.

"The green cat," Phil said.

When the analyst didn't answer, Phil looked around. Dr. Anton Romadka was simply staring at him. The four scratches and the dried trickles of blood on his left cheek stood out much more sharply, as if he had grown pale.

"I said the green cat," Phil said.

"The green cat?" The analyst's voice was a distant echo of itself.

"Yes."

"Umm," the analyst observed hollowly and sank farther down into his chair, almost as if he were reaching for something with his toe.

Something beeped musically. The analyst snatched up the phone. His face instantly assumed a fierce expression. He said, with pregnant pauses during which he scowled, "Yes ... No, I can't. I can't possibly, I tell you.... You couldn't do that; you'd be arrested.... Very well then, but only for five minutes. Five minutes, do you hear? I'll be waiting."

He replaced the phone and looked around at Phil with a despair that his baldness and big eyes turned comical. "This is most embarrassing," he said. "A former patient insists on seeing me at once, threatens to cause a disturbance downstairs if I won't. She would, too. We had some fine fracases before she broke off the analysis. I have no other course but to see her. I know how to pacify her temporarily, enough to get her home."

"I'd better go," Phil said, rising.

"Wouldn't hear of it," Dr. Romadka protested. "I want to go much deeper into your case this evening. That last thing you mentioned--it opened vistas! No, you just wait for five minutes in the next room, ten at the most, and I'll have her out of here."

"I do think I'd better go, though," Phil said, "if you don't mind."

"Quite impossible," Dr. Romadka pronounced, taking a firm hold of his arm. "She's passionately jealous of all my other patients and would be sure to attack you the instant you stepped out of the elevator. Did I tell you she carries a gold squirt gun filled with sulphuric acid? That's one of her cuter tricks. The only other way out is the service chute, and that's hardly for human use. No," he said, guiding Phil through a door beyond the arch but not entering himself, "you just stay in here for five minutes or so. There's plenty to read, to glance over and listen to--not that you'll have much time. Trust me, Phil. Everything's under control."

The door shut. One fleeting glance around showed shelves of books, racks of vocal booktapes, a divan, a central table and a large mirror set in the ceiling. Then Phil remembered he had left his cigarettes on the desk. He punched the door button. Nothing happened. He punched it again.

There still hadn't been time for Dr. Romadka to have taken five steps away from the other side. He started to hammer on the wall.

"Dr. Romadka," he called. "Dr. Romadka!"

The lights went out.

V

Phil stopped pounding on the wall and the black silence closed around him drowningly, stranglingly, like a preview of the mental hospital cell and electrosleep to which, he was suddenly sure, Dr. Romadka intended to consign him on a psychiatrist's writ. In the thick darkness he heard his heart pounding. His rapid breathing was for a moment that of an animal.

He wondered helplessly why the analyst, after taking his satyrette hallucination so lightly, should have instantly typed him as a dangerous lunatic at his mention of a green cat. Psychologists, he supposed, knew things about the mind's secret language that were never told to ordinary people: seemingly innocent symbols that stamped men as cowards, rapists, murderers, traitors, crypto-communists, non-conformists. A fragment of conversation he'd heard somewhere came back to him: "Of course as soon as he saw _that_ in the inkblot, they hustled him off."

There was a sharp click. He started and looked up. A tiny line of light appeared in the ceiling, widened, and then became an oblong spilling radiance on the central table below, but leaving the rest of the room dark. He realized that the mirror he'd noticed had been slid out of the way. He couldn't see much of the room above except some microfilm files and part of a TV reading machine of the sort that could use micro-libraries all over America. No human figures were visible from where he stood and he felt no desire to step forward into the revealing light. He wondered, with a certain incredulous pride, whether he was so dangerous a type that they intended to fish for him with nets. Just then a foot was dangled over the oblong's edge.

It was a charming foot, slim and clad in the most shimmeringly expensive sort of digital stocking, which gave each toe its separate translucent compartment. Running back from between the toes were four black velvet thongs, which helped attach the airy black shoe and gave it an exciting though spidery appearance. The foot was joined to a narrow ankle and gently swelling calf which hardly needed the stocking's glamorizing. That was all of the figure he could see at the moment, but the moment didn't last long. The foot was followed by a second and shortly by all the rest of the girl. She hung briefly, facing away from him. He got a quick impression of a short black evening frock; a black shoulder cape; long, dark hair cascading free and white arms in black gloves that began above the elbows and ended at the knuckles.

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 round 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.