Read "The Green Millennium" by Fritz Leiber online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Through half closed lids, whose lashes blurred everything, Phil watched the ghostly pale yellow circle of the window, which was all the illumination he could bear now. He hadn't put on any lights when the sun had set and the sodium mirror above the stratosphere made the only light, and minutes ago he'd switched off the TV screen although the girl's voice still crooned a sex song and he still wore the fat mitten of the handie. But the pressure of her fingers, holding a hydraulically compartmented artificial hand and transmitting over the airwaves an electric signal to change pressures of the hydraulic compartments of the handie, began to feel like that of a skeleton wearing rubber gloves. Phil jerked off the handie, switched off the voice, lit a cigarette, and was back with his problem.
Was he really crazy, he asked himself; was Lucky just a psycho's dream cat, or had he somehow been tricked? Once again he tormentedly totted up the evidence. Nobody but himself had admitted to seeing Lucky. And there were so many other indications of hallucinations: that crazy color, the silly food, his fleeting hunch that Lucky wasn't "really" a cat, his suspiciously godlike elation and sense of power.