"I have a way with robots," Phil explained. "I win their confidence with small talk."
"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.