The Green Millennium

The world Phil Gish lived in was not a pretty one, and Phil didn't enjoy living in it. He was disillusioned, purposeless, hopeless, and haunted by the fear that a robot would take over his job. But then Phil was a timid person, not much given to adventure seeking. If he hadn't been so mild he might have found his kicks at All Amusements, the syndicated playground where anyone could find fun, providing he had the proper sadistic and otherwise aberrated elements in his personality. But Phil was good--and bored.

And then one day a cat perched on his window--not an ordinary cat--a green cat. For the first time in years Phil was happy. He promptly named the cat Lucky because he somehow knew that as long as the cat stayed with him he'd feel fine. But Lucky didn't stay long. In a matter of minutes he had disappeared into All Amusements park. It was then that Phil became involved in a grotesque world, peopled with the most extraordinary personalities. Just what the cat is and its ultimate meaning is the secret of it all. You will be surprised.

I

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 out-size, 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.