Read "The Green Millennium" by Fritz Leiber online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Phil stopped pounding on the wall and the black silence closed around him drowningly, stranglingly, like a preview of the mental hospital cell and electrosleep to which, he was suddenly sure, Dr. Romadka intended to consign him on a psychiatrist's writ. In the thick darkness he heard his heart pounding. His rapid breathing was for a moment that of an animal.
He wondered helplessly why the analyst, after taking his satyrette hallucination so lightly, should have instantly typed him as a dangerous lunatic at his mention of a green cat. Psychologists, he supposed, knew things about the mind's secret language that were never told to ordinary people: seemingly innocent symbols that stamped men as cowards, rapists, murderers, traitors, crypto-communists, non-conformists. A fragment of conversation he'd heard somewhere came back to him: "Of course as soon as he saw _that_ in the inkblot, they hustled him off."