But then he was at the window experiencing a new twist in his mood and the doubt was forgotten.
The window opened on a deep, very narrow bay in the remodeled monster hotel in which Phil roomed. If he risked his neck by leaning out very far, he could just manage to look out of the bay and glimpse an advertisement-encrusted corner of Fun Incorporated’s wrestling center and the helicopter field on its roof. The hotel had been built as a luxury palace for the new war-rich of the 1970’s but during the great housing shortage of the 1980’s its vast rooms had been cut up into tiny sleeping cells. It retained, however, at least one feature from its lordly days: the large circular windows formed of two sheets of polarizing glass, the inner of which could be rotated, allowing a person to blacken his window or have it fully transparent or enjoy any shade of twilight. One other very unusual luxury touch was that the windows could actually be opened, swinging on pivots at top and bottom. Nowadays, with radiant sleep-heating general throughout the hotel and the air-conditioning system anything but trustworthy, this last feature was put to real use more often than might have been expected, though windows were still kept closed most of the daytime.
It had always seemed to Phil that the great gray wall just ten feet from his window, with its rows of ominous portholes, many of them blackened, was the grimmest sight in the world – a symbol of the way he was walled off from life and people.
But now, as he stood leaning out just a little, his cropped hair brushing the tarnished circular rim, it seemed to him that he could imagine his way through that wall as if it were made of some material that conducted emotion as copper conducts electricity. Not see or think through 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 something, the ones who hammered fears and frustrations into a painful armor, the old man apprehensively sorting his limp ration stamps from three communo-capitalist wars, the boy playing spaceship and pretending the blacked-out window was the porthole of a comic-book intergalactic liner, the three unemployed secretaries – one of them pacing – the lovers whose rendezvous was tainted with worries about the Federal Bureau of Morality, the fat man feeling a girl’s caress by radio handie and thinking of something long ago, the old woman coddling her dread of war-germs and atomic ashes by constantly dusting, dusting, dusting…
Well, his new self certainly had a vivid imagination, Phil decided with a smile.
An old hand came out of a porthole three floors down and shook something – or nothing – from a dustpan.
Coincidence, of course, or else he’d once watched the woman without thinking about it – nevertheless, Phil chose to interpret the event as an encouraging confirmation of his new feeling of outgoingness. Then the smile left his lips as he thought of another aspect of the opposite wall.
This window was the vantage point where he had spent countless drearily excited hours spying on the activities of all the young women whose cubicles were even remotely within range. Not the new girl – the one who wore her black hair in old-fashioned pony style – in the room straight across, although she was quite beautiful in a sprightly, animal way, and he sometimes heard her practicing tap-dancing. No, she was a bit too close and besides, he was vaguely frightened of her. There was something eerily dryad-like about her and, in any case, she blacked out her porthole religiously. It was blacked out now, though slightly ajar.
But all the other girls were recipients of his untiring, sterile interest. The cute green-blonde just below and to the left, for instance, Miss Phoebe Filmer (he’d once taken the unprecedentedly realistic step of finding out her name), why, he’d sacrificed a sizable chunk of his leisure time to that tantalizing minx. There she was at this very moment dithering around in a short play robe, inspecting an assortment of wispy lingerie – a very promising situation that normally would have held Phil helpless for twenty minutes or more. But now he found he could look at her and then look away without the faintest gnawing worry he might miss something. Good Lord, if he wanted to see more, in any sense, of Miss Phoebe Filmer, he’d scrape up an acquaintance with her.
“Prrrt!” A feathery, furry ball came into his hand and he looked down at Lucky’s apple-green face framed by his curving forefinger and thumb.
“What d’ya want, cat?”
Lucky ducked out of the cupped hand with a twist that let his forehead and ear be rubbed, and put his front paws on the window rim. Phil quickly advanced his hand so that it lightly circled the cat’s chest. He didn’t want Lucky to get back out on the little ledge that led to either side of the window. In fact, as Phil now definitely realized, he didn’t want Lucky to leave him at all, though something told him he wouldn’t be able to stop Lucky if the green cat really wanted to go.
It occurred to Phil, with a certain shamefaced satisfaction, that all pets were strictly forbidden in the Skyway Towers (cats and dogs were pretty rare since the germ war days when they’d been slaughtered as possible carriers) and so Lucky’s owner wouldn’t be able to do anything openly about getting him back.
But Lucky seemed to have no intention of leaving. He hopped to the floor and looked eagerly at Phil.
“Prrrt!”
“Do you want something to eat? Is that it?”
“Prrrt-prt!”
Phil took mental inventory of his snack box and found himself thinking of the cranberry concentrate. Wildly inappropriate – and yet something assured him that it would be just right for Lucky.
It was done quickly: a dark-red marble that swelled to a glistening ruby golf ball at the touch of water, and then, another sudden inward prompting, the syrupy contents of a vitamino capsule poured over it.
The last ingredient smelled rather rank and by the time he set the odd sundae on the floor, Phil was feeling quite doubtful. However, Lucky examined it with all signs of approval, mewing in eagerness. But then instead of beginning to eat, he looked up at Phil. Phil thought he understood: cats have their special proprieties and delicacies. The little chap wanted to eat in private.
“Okay, fellow, I’ll go shower. And I won’t peek.”
Stepping inside the bathroom, he set the shower control to alternate tepid and very warm. Instead it chose irresponsibly to alternate icy and steaming, so that he leaped out with a yell. But the incident didn’t even scratch his mood. As he toweled himself (he didn’t like the air drier and toweling robots made him uneasy) he sang:
We’re out in space, they’ve cut the jet,
There isn’t any ceiling, floor, or wall.
Let’s dance on air, or better yet -
Hug me, love me, darling, in free-fall!
He came out of the bathroom feeling like an emperor and fully determined to inspect the world he owned, the world that was any man’s for the asking and a little courage. As he slipped on singlet, trousers, sockasins and jacket, he explained his feelings to Lucky, who had cleaned up every bit of his colorful meal.
“You see, it’s this way, fellow: I’ve always been three-quarters dead. But not any more. I’m through with being scared and stand-offish and bored. No more filing, dial-watching, and tape-cutting jobs, with some about-to-be-invented robot breathing down my neck. I’m just going out and look things over, talk to people, find out what it’s all about. I’m going to have adventures, really live. Some program, eh? And you know who’s responsible for it, fellow? You are.”
Lucky seemed fairly to fluoresce in appreciation. He fluffed his gleaming green fur.