"Well," Miss Filmer observed, turning her head and running her hand through her green-gold hair. "Say, how do you like my green cat?" Phil inquired. "A green cat!" Miss Filmer exclaimed excitedly. She looked down quickly and then up skeptically. "Where?" Phil looked down too. Lucky wasn't anywhere in sight. A hunk of ice materialized inside his chest. "Excuse me," he said. "I hope I'll see you again." He raced to the stub corridor. Lucky was standing in front of the elevator. "Gee, fellow," Phil told him. "Don't give me heart failure." II The street snarled at Phil. The snarl came chiefly from a charged-up electric hot rod that swerved close to the curb to remove a triangular chunk from the rump of a fat man who had been too slow in skittering to safety. A second look showed he was not a fat man, but a thin man in a balloon suit. It deflated rapidly, and he sat down in its limp folds on the curb and began to sob. Balloon suits were of no real protection to pedestrians, except by increasing the apparent target, but they continued as a fad. During the last war they had been pumped full of hydrogen as a shield against neutrons until a couple of small but unpleasant explosions in crowded shelters had caused the government to crack down. After snarling, the street continued to growl deep in its throat--it had two lower levels. The growl was composed of the hum of electrics, the subterranean rumble of heavier traffic, the yak-yak of competing vocal advertisements, and the nervous shuffle of feet that was the same when Rome and Babylon were young, but that was intensified here because most of the women's feet were on platforms three to ten inches high. Neither the growl nor the snarl disturbed Phil. Normally he'd already have had his ear plugs tucked in, his face fixed straight ahead, his eyes nervously questing for hot rods, which were known to jump curbs. But today he simply wanted to drink it all in, to see the things he'd always been blind to, to note the anxious but apathetic expressions on the faces of the pedestrians, to sense the invisible lines of force that, like spider webs or marionette strings, joined them to the space-overflowing advertisements, which ranged from the crisp, "Learn to Break Necks!" and the cute "A Strip-Tease Doll All Your Own!" to the "Why Not Lobotomy?" and the imagination-tantalizing "Glamorize Your Figure with a Sprayed-on Evening Dress! Plasticfabric cures in a jiffy, breathes. No heat, no adhesions! Special forms flare the skirt, shape the bosom! Designed by artists right on your body!" Lucky seemed no more frightened of the street than Phil. He scampered along close to the base of Skyway Towers' monumental façade, the camouflaging green color of which may have explained why none of the pedestrians took note of him--not that any explanation was needed as to why those walking nerve-bags didn't see things right under their noses!