Early next morning windowless walls began to crawl up the stripped
skyscraper between them and the lake. Daisy pulled the black-out
curtains on that side. For a day or two longer their thoughts and
conversations were haunted by Gusterson's vague sardonic visions of a
horde of tickler-energized moles pouring up out of the tunnels to tear
down the remaining trees, tank the atmosphere and perhaps somehow
dismantle the stars--at least on this side of the world--but then they
both settled back into their customary easy-going routines. Gusterson
typed. Daisy made her daily shopping trip to a little topside daytime
store and started painting a mural on the floor of the empty apartment
next theirs but one.
"We ought to lasso some neighbors," she suggested once. "I need
somebody to hold my brushes and admire. How about you making a trip
below at the cocktail hours, Gusterson, and picking up a couple of
girls for a starter? Flash the old viriler charm, cootch them up a
bit, emphasize the delights of high living, but make sure they're
compatible roommates. You could pick up that two-yard check from Micro
at the same time."
"You're an immoral money-ravenous wench," Gusterson said absently,
trying to dream of an insanity beyond insanity that would make his
next novel a real id-rousing best-vender.
"If that's your vision of me, you shouldn't have chewed up the VV
mask."
"I'd really prefer you with green stripes," he told her. "But stripes,
spots, or sun-bathing, you're better than those cocktail moles."
Actually both of them acutely disliked going below. They much
preferred to perch in their eyrie and watch the people of Cleveland
Depths, as they privately called the local sub-suburb, rush up out of
the shelters at dawn to work in the concrete fields and windowless
factories, make their daytime jet trips and freeway jaunts, do their
noon-hour and coffee-break guerrilla practice, and then go scurrying
back at twilight to the atomic-proof, brightly lit, vastly exciting,
claustrophobic caves.
Fay and his projects began once more to seem dreamlike, though
Gusterson did run across a cryptic advertisement for ticklers in _The
Manchester Guardian_, which he got daily by facsimile. Their three
children reported similar ads, of no interest to young fry, on the TV
and one afternoon they came home with the startling news that the
monitors at their subsurface school had been issued ticklers. On sharp
interrogation by Gusterson, however, it appeared that these last were
not ticklers but merely two-way radios linked to the school police
station transmitter.
[Illustration]
"Which is bad enough," Gusterson commented later to Daisy. "But it'd
be even dirtier to think of those clock-watching superegos being
strapped to kids' shoulders. Can you imagine Huck Finn with a tickler,
tellin' him when to tie up the raft to a tow-head and when to take a
swim?"
"I bet Fay could," Daisy countered. "When's he going to bring you that
check, anyhow? Iago wants a jetcycle and I promised Imogene a Vina Kit
and then Claudius'll have to have something."
Gusterson scowled thoughtfully. "You know, Daze," he said, "I got a
feeling Fay's in the hospital, all narcotized up and being fed
intravenously. The way he was jumping around last time, that tickler
was going to cootch him to pieces in a week."
* * * * *
As if to refute this intuition, Fay turned up that very evening. The
lights were dim. Something had gone wrong with the building's old
transformer and, pending repairs, the two remaining occupied
apartments were making do with batteries, which turned bright globes
to mysterious amber candles and made Gusterson's ancient typewriter
operate sluggishly.
Fay's manner was subdued or at least closely controlled and for a
moment Gusterson thought he'd shed his tickler. Then the little man
came out of the shadows and Gusterson saw the large bulge on his right
shoulder.
[Illustration]
"Yes, we had to up it a bit sizewise," Fay explained in clipped tones.
"Additional super-features. While brilliantly successful on the whole,
the subliminal euphorics were a shade too effective. Several hundred
users went hoppity manic. We gentled the cootch and qualified the
subliminals--you know, 'Day by day in every way I'm getting sharper
_and more serene_'--but a stabilizing influence was still needed, so
after a top-level conference we decided to combine Tickler with
Moodmaster."
"My God," Gusterson interjected, "do they have a machine now that does
that?"
"Of course. They've been using them on ex-mental patients for years."
"I just don't keep up with progress," Gusterson said, shaking his head
bleakly. "I'm falling behind on all fronts."
"You ought to have your tickler remind you to read Science Service
releases," Fay told him. "Or simply instruct it to scan the releases
and--no, that's still in research." He looked at Gusterson's shoulder
and his eyes widened. "You're not wearing the new-model tickler I sent
you," he said accusingly.
"I never got it," Gusterson assured him. "Postmen deliver topside mail
and parcels by throwing them on the high-speed garbage boosts and
hoping a tornado will blow them to the right addresses." Then he added
helpfully, "Maybe the Russians stole it while it was riding the
whirlwinds."
"That's not a suitable topic for jesting," Fay frowned. "We're hoping
that Tickler will mobilize the full potential of the Free World for
the first time in history. Gusterson, you are going to have to wear a
ticky-tick. It's becoming impossible for a man to get through modern
life without one."
"Maybe I will," Gusterson said appeasingly, "but right now tell me
about Moodmaster. I want to put it in my new insanity novel."
Fay shook his head. "Your readers will just think you're behind the
times. If you use it, underplay it. But anyhow, Moodmaster is a simple
physiotherapy engine that monitors bloodstream chemicals and body
electricity. It ties directly into the bloodstream, keeping blood,
sugar, et cetera, at optimum levels and injecting euphrin or depressin
as necessary--and occasionally a touch of extra adrenaline, as during
work emergencies."
"Is it painful?" Daisy called from the bedroom.
"Excruciating," Gusterson called back. "Excuse it, please," he grinned
at Fay. "Hey, didn't I suggest cocaine injections last time I saw
you?"
"So you did," Fay agreed flatly. "Oh by the way, Gussy, here's that
check for a yard I promised you. Micro doesn't muzzle the ox."
"Hooray!" Daisy cheered faintly.
* * * * *
"I thought you said it was going to be for two." Gusterson complained.
"Budgeting always forces a last-minute compromise," Fay shrugged. "You
have to learn to accept those things."
"I love accepting money and I'm glad any time for three feet," Daisy
called agreeably. "Six feet might make me wonder if I weren't an
insect, but getting a yard just makes me feel like a gangster's moll."
"Want to come out and gloat over the yard paper, Toots, and stuff it
in your diamond-embroidered net stocking top?" Gusterson called back.
"No, I'm doing something to that portion of me just now. But hang onto
the yard, Gusterson."
"Aye-aye, Cap'n," he assured her. Then, turning back to Fay, "So
you've taken the Dr. Coue repeating out of the tickler?"
"Oh, no. Just balanced it off with depressin. The subliminals are
still a prime sales-point. All the tickler features are cumulative,
Gussy. You're still underestimating the scope of the device."
"I guess I am. What's this 'work-emergencies' business? If you're
using the tickler to inject drugs into workers to keep them going,
that's really just my cocaine suggestion modernized and I'm putting in
for another thou. Hundreds of years ago the South American Indians
chewed coca leaves to kill fatigue sensations."
"That so? Interesting--and it proves priority for the Indians, doesn't
it? I'll make a try for you, Gussy, but don't expect anything." He
cleared his throat, his eyes grew distant and, turning his head a
little to the right, he enunciated sharply, "Pooh-Bah. Time: Inst oh
five. One oh five seven. Oh oh. Record: Gussy coca thou budget. Cut."
He explained, "We got a voice-cued setter now on the deluxe models.
You can record a memo to yourself without taking off your shirt.
Incidentally, I use the ends of the hours for trifle-memos. I've
already used up the fifty-nines and eights for tomorrow and started on
the fifty-sevens."
"I understood most of your memo," Gusterson told him gruffly. "The
last 'Oh oh' was for seconds, wasn't it? Now I call that crude--why
not microseconds too? But how do you remember where you've made a memo
so you don't rerecord over it? After all, you're rerecording over the
wallpaper all the time."
"Tickler beeps and then hunts for the nearest information-free space."
"I see. And what's the Pooh-Bah for?"
Fay smiled. "Cut. My password for activating the setter, so it won't
respond to chance numerals it overhears."
"But why Pooh-Bah?"
Fay grinned. "Cut. And you a writer. It's a literary reference, Gussy.
Pooh-Bah (cut!) was Lord High Everything Else in _The Mikado_. He had
a little list and nothing on it would ever be missed."
* * * * *
"Oh, yeah," Gusterson remembered, glowering. "As I recall it, all that
went on that list was the names of people who were slated to have
their heads chopped off by Ko-Ko. Better watch your step, Shorty. It
may be a back-handed omen. Maybe all those workers you're puttin'
ticklers on to pump them full of adrenaline so they'll overwork
without noticin' it will revolt and come out some day choppin' for
your head."
"Spare me the Marxist mythology," Fay protested. "Gussy, you've got a
completely wrong slant on Tickler. It's true that most of our mass
sales so far, bar government and army, have been to large companies
purchasing for their employees--"
"Ah-ha!"
"--but that's because there's nothing like a tickler for teaching a
new man his job. It tells him from instant to instant what he must
do--while he's already on the job and without disturbing other
workers. Magnetizing a wire with a job pattern is the easiest thing
going. And you'd be astonished what the subliminals do for employee
morale. It's this way, Gussy: most people are too improvident and
unimaginative to see in advance the advantages of ticklers. They buy
one because the company strongly suggests it and payment is on easy
installments withheld from salary. They find a tickler makes the work
day go easier. The little fellow perched on your shoulder is a friend
exuding comfort and good advice. The first thing he's set to say is
'Take it easy, pal.'
"Within a week they're wearing their tickler 24 hours a day--and
buying a tickler for the wife, so she'll remember to comb her hair and
smile real pretty and cook favorite dishes."
"I get it, Fay," Gusterson cut in. "The tickler is the newest fad for
increasing worker efficiency. Once, I read somewheres, it was salt
tablets. They had salt-tablet dispensers everywhere, even in
air-conditioned offices where there wasn't a moist armpit twice a year
and the gals sweat only champagne. A decade later people wondered what
all those dusty white pills were for. Sometimes they were mistook for
tranquilizers. It'll be the same way with ticklers. Somebody'll open a
musty closet and see jumbled heaps of these gripping-hand silvery
gadgets gathering dust curls and--"
"They will not!" Fay protested vehemently. "Ticklers are not a
fad--they're history-changers, they're Free-World revolutionary! Why,
before Micro Systems put a single one on the market, we'd made it a
rule that every Micro employee had to wear one! If that's not having
supreme confidence in a product--"
"Every employee except the top executives, of course," Gusterson
interrupted jeeringly. "And that's not demoting you, Fay. As the R & D
chief most closely involved, you'd naturally have to show special
enthusiasm."
"But you're wrong there, Gussy," Fay crowed. "Man for man, our top
executives have been more enthusiastic about their personal ticklers
than any other class of worker in the whole outfit."
Gusterson slumped and shook his head. "If that's the case," he said
darkly, "maybe mankind deserves the tickler."
* * * * *
"I'll say it does!" Fay agreed loudly without thinking. Then, "Oh, can
the carping, Gussy. Tickler's a great invention. Don't deprecate it
just because you had something to do with its genesis. You're going to
have to get in the swim and wear one."
"Maybe I'd rather drown horribly."
"Can the gloom-talk too! Gussy, I said it before and I say it again,
you're just scared of this new thing. Why, you've even got the drapes
pulled so you won't have to look at the tickler factory."
"Yes, I am scared," Gusterson said. "Really sca ... AWP!"
Fay whirled around. Daisy was standing in the bedroom doorway, wearing
the short silver sheath. This time there was no mask, but her bobbed
hair was glitteringly silvered, while her legs, arms, hands, neck,
face--every bit of her exposed skin--was painted with beautifully even
vertical green stripes.
"I did it as a surprise for Gusterson," she explained to Fay. "He says
he likes me this way. The green glop's supposed to be smudgeproof."
Gusterson did not comment. His face had a rapt expression. "I'll tell
you why your tickler's so popular, Fay," he said softly. "It's not
because it backstops the memory or because it boosts the ego with
subliminals. It's because it takes the hook out of a guy, it takes
over the job of withstanding the pressure of living. See, Fay, here
are all these little guys in this subterranean rat race with
atomic-death squares and chromium-plated reward squares and enough
money if you pass Go almost to get to Go again--and a million million
rules of the game to keep in mind. Well, here's this one little guy
and every morning he wakes up there's all these things he's got to
keep in mind to do or he'll lose his turn three times in a row and
maybe a terrible black rook in iron armor'll loom up and bang him off
the chessboard. But now, look, now he's got his tickler and he tells
his sweet silver tickler all these things and the tickler's got to
remember them. Of course he'll have to do them eventually but
meanwhile the pressure's off him, the hook's out of his short hairs.
He's shifted the responsibility...."
"Well, what's so bad about that?" Fay broke in loudly. "What's wrong
with taking the pressure off little guys? Why shouldn't Tickler be a
super-ego surrogate? Micro's Motivations chief noticed that positive
feature straight off and scored it three pluses. Besides, it's nothing
but a gaudy way of saying that Tickler backstops the memory.
Seriously, Gussy, what's so bad about it?"
"I don't know," Gusterson said slowly, his eyes still far away. "I
just know it feels bad to me." He crinkled his big forehead. "Well for
one thing," he said, "it means that a man's taking orders from
something else. He's got a kind of master. He's sinking back into a
slave psychology."
"He's only taking orders from himself," Fay countered disgustedly.
"Tickler's just a mech reminder, a notebook, in essence no more than
the back of an old envelope. It's no master."
"Are you absolutely sure of that?" Gusterson asked quietly.
"Why, Gussy, you big oaf--" Fay began heatedly. Suddenly his features
quirked and he twitched. "'Scuse me, folks," he said rapidly, heading
for the door, "but my tickler told me I gotta go."
"Hey Fay, don't you mean you told your tickler to tell you when it was
time to go?" Gusterson called after him.
Fay looked back in the doorway. He wet his lips, his eyes moved from
side to side. "I'm not quite sure," he said in an odd strained voice
and darted out.
* * * * *
Gusterson stared for some seconds at the pattern of emptiness Fay had
left. Then he shivered. Then he shrugged. "I must be slipping," he
muttered. "I never even suggested something for him to invent." Then
he looked around at Daisy, who was still standing poker-faced in her
doorway.
"Hey, you look like something out of the Arabian Nights," he told her.
"Are you supposed to be anything special? How far do those stripes go,
anyway?"
"You could probably find out," she told him coolly. "All you have to
do is kill me a dragon or two first."
He studied her. "My God," he said reverently, "I really have all the
fun in life. What do I do to deserve this?"
"You've got a big gun," she told him, "and you go out in the world
with it and hold up big companies and take yards and yards of money
away from them in rolls like ribbon and bring it all home to me."
"Don't say that about the gun again," he said. "Don't whisper it,
don't even think it. I've got one, dammit--thirty-eight caliber,
yet--and I don't want some psionic monitor with two-way clairaudience
they haven't told me about catching the whisper and coming to take the
gun away from us. It's one of the few individuality symbols we've got
left."
Suddenly Daisy whirled away from the door, spun three times so that
her silvered hair stood out like a metal coolie hat, and sank to a
curtsey in the middle of the room.
"I've just thought of what I am," she announced, fluttering her
eyelashes at him. "I'm a sweet silver tickler with green stripes."
V
Next day Daisy cashed the Micro check for ten hundred silver smackers,
which she hid in a broken radionic coffee urn. Gusterson sold his
insanity novel and started a new one about a mad medic with a hiccupy
hysterical chuckle, who gimmicked Moodmasters to turn mental patients
into nymphomaniacs, mass murderers and compulsive saints. But this
time he couldn't get Fay out of his mind, or the last chilling words
the nervous little man had spoken.
For that matter, he couldn't blank the underground out of his mind as
effectively as usually. He had the feeling that a new kind of mole was
loose in the burrows and that the ground at the foot of their
skyscraper might start humping up any minute.
Toward the end of one afternoon he tucked a half dozen newly typed
sheets in his pocket, shrouded his typer, went to the hatrack and took
down his prize: a miner's hard-top cap with electric headlamp.
"Goin' below, Cap'n," he shouted toward the kitchen.
"Be back for second dog watch," Daisy replied. "Remember what I told
you about lassoing me some art-conscious girl neighbors."
"Only if I meet a piebald one with a taste for Scotch--or maybe a
pearl gray biped jaguar with violet spots," Gusterson told her,
clapping on the cap with a We-Who-Are-About-To-Die gesture.
Halfway across the park to the escalator bunker Gusterson's heart
began to tick. He resolutely switched on his headlamp.
As he'd known it would, the hatch robot whirred an extra and
higher-pitched ten seconds when it came to his topside address, but it
ultimately dilated the hatch for him, first handing him a claim check
for his ID card.
Gusterson's heart was ticking like a sledgehammer by now. He hopped
clumsily onto the escalator, clutched the moving guard rail to either
side, then shut his eyes as the steps went over the edge and became
what felt like vertical. An instant later he forced his eyes open,
unclipped a hand from the rail and touched the second switch beside
his headlamp, which instantly began to blink whitely, as if he were a
civilian plane flying into a nest of military jobs.
With a further effort he kept his eyes open and flinchingly surveyed
the scene around him. After zigging through a bombproof half-furlong
of roof, he was dropping into a large twilit cave. The blue-black
ceiling twinkled with stars. The walls were pierced at floor level by
a dozen archways with busy niche stores and glowing advertisements
crowded between them. From the archways some three dozen slidewalks
curved out, tangenting off each other in a bewildering multiple
cloverleaf. The slidewalks were packed with people, traveling
motionless like purposeful statues or pivoting with practiced grace
from one slidewalk to another, like a thousand toreros doing
veronicas.
* * * * *
The slidewalks were moving faster than he recalled from his last
venture underground and at the same time the whole pedestrian
concourse was quieter than he remembered. It was as if the five
thousand or so moles in view were all listening--for what? But there
was something else that had changed about them--a change that he
couldn't for a moment define, or unconsciously didn't want to.
Clothing style? No ... My God, they weren't all wearing identical
monster masks? No ... Hair color?... Well....
He was studying them so intently that he forgot his escalator was
landing. He came off it with a heel-jarring stumble and bumped into a
knot of four men on the tiny triangular hold-still. These four at
least sported a new style-wrinkle: ribbed gray shoulder-capes that
made them look as if their heads were poking up out of the center of
bulgy umbrellas or giant mushrooms.
One of them grabbed hold of Gusterson and saved him from staggering
onto a slidewalk that might have carried him to Toledo.
"Gussy, you dog, you must have esped I wanted to see you," Fay cried,
patting him on the elbows. "Meet Davidson and Kester and Hazen,
colleagues of mine. We're all Micro-men." Fay's companions were
staring strangely at Gusterson's blinking headlamp. Fay explained
rapidly, "Mr. Gusterson is an insanity novelist. You know, I-D."
"Inner-directed spells _id_," Gusterson said absently, still staring
at the interweaving crowd beyond them, trying to figure out what made
them different from last trip. "Creativity fuel. Cranky. Explodes
through the parietal fissure if you look at it cross-eyed."
"Ha-ha," Fay laughed. "Well, boys, I've found my man. How's the new
novel perking, Gussy?"
"Got my climax, I think," Gusterson mumbled, still peering puzzledly
around Fay at the slidestanders. "Moodmaster's going to come alive.
Ever occur to you that 'mood' is 'doom' spelled backwards? And
then...." He let his voice trail off as he realized that Kester and
Davidson and Hazen had made their farewells and were sliding into the
distance. He reminded himself wryly that nobody ever wants to hear an
author talk--he's much too good a listener to be wasted that way.
Let's see, was it that everybody in the crowd had the same facial
expression...? Or showed symptoms of the same disease...?
"I was coming to visit you, but now you can pay me a call," Fay was
saying. "There are two matters I want to--"
Gusterson stiffened. "My God, _they're all hunchbacked_!" he yelled.
"Shh! Of course they are," Fay whispered reprovingly. "They're all
wearing their ticklers. But you don't need to be insulting about it."
"_I'm gettin' out o' here._" Gusterson turned to flee as if from five
thousand Richard the Thirds.
"Oh no you're not," Fay amended, drawing him back with one hand.
Somehow, underground, the little man seemed to carry more weight.
"You're having cocktails in my thinking box. Besides, climbing a down
escaladder will give you a heart attack."
* * * * *
In his home habitat Gusterson was about as easy to handle as a rogue
rhinoceros, but away from it--and especially if underground--he became
more like a pliable elephant. All his bones dropped out through his feet,
as he described it to Daisy. So now he submitted miserably as Fay
surveyed him up and down, switched off his blinking headlamp ("That
coalminer caper is corny, Gussy.") and then--surprisingly--rapidly
stuffed his belt-bag under the right shoulder of Gusterson's coat and
buttoned the latter to hold it in place.
"So you won't stand out," he explained. Another swift survey. "You'll
do. Come on, Gussy. I got lots to brief you on." Three rapid paces and
then Gusterson's feet would have gone out from under him except that
Fay gave him a mighty shove. The small man sprang onto the slidewalk
after him and then they were skimming effortlessly side by side.
Gusterson felt frightened and twice as hunchbacked as the
slidestanders around him--morally as well as physically.
Nevertheless he countered bravely, "I got things to brief _you_ on. I
got six pages of cautions on ti--"
"Shh!" Fay stopped him. "Let's use my hushbox."
He drew out his pancake phone and stretched it so that it covered both
their lower faces, like a double yashmak. Gusterson, his neck pushing
into the ribbed bulge of the shoulder cape so he could be cheek to
cheek with Fay, felt horribly conspicuous, but then he noticed that
none of the slidestanders were paying them the least attention. The
reason for their abstraction occurred to him. They were listening to
their ticklers! He shuddered.
"I got six pages of caution on ticklers," he repeated into the hot,
moist quiet of the pancake phone. "I typed 'em so I wouldn't forget
'em in the heat of polemicking. I want you to read every word. Fay,
I've had it on my mind ever since I started wondering whether it was
you or your tickler made you duck out of our place last time you were
there. I want you to--"
"Ha-ha! All in good time." In the pancake phone Fay's laugh was
brassy. "But I'm glad you've decided to lend a hand, Gussy. This thing
is moving faaaasst. Nationwise, adult underground ticklerization is 90
per cent complete."
"I don't believe that," Gusterson protested while glaring at the
hunchbacks around them. The slidewalk was gliding down a low
glow-ceiling tunnel lined with doors and advertisements. Rapt-eyed
people were pirouetting on and off. "A thing just can't develop that
fast, Fay. It's against nature."
"Ha, but we're not in nature, we're in culture. The progress of an
industrial scientific culture is geometric. It goes n-times as many
jumps as it takes. More than geometric--exponential. Confidentially,
Micro's Math chief tells me we're currently on a fourth-power progress
curve trending into a fifth."
"You mean we're goin' so fast we got to watch out we don't bump
ourselves in the rear when we come around again?" Gusterson asked,
scanning the tunnel ahead for curves. "Or just shoot straight up to
infinity?"
"Exactly! Of course most of the last power and a half is due to
Tickler itself. Gussy, the tickler's already eliminated absenteeism,
alcoholism and aboulia in numerous urban areas--and that's just one
letter of the alphabet! If Tickler doesn't turn us into a nation of
photo-memory constant-creative-flow geniuses in six months, I'll come
live topside."
* * * * *
"You mean because a lot of people are standing around glassy-eyed
listening to something mumbling in their ear that it's a good thing?"
"Gussy, you don't know progress when you see it. Tickler is the
greatest invention since language. Bar none, it's the greatest
instrument ever devised for integrating a man into all phases of his
environment. Under the present routine a newly purchased tickler first
goes to government and civilian defense for primary patterning, then
to the purchaser's employer, then to his doctor-psycher, then to his
local bunker captain, then to _him_. _Everything_ that's needful for a
man's welfare gets on the spools. Efficiency cubed! Incidentally,
Russia's got the tickler now. Our dip-satellites have photographed it.
It's like ours except the Commies wear it on the left shoulder ... but
they're two weeks behind us developmentwise and they'll never close
the gap!"
Gusterson reared up out of the pancake phone to take a deep breath. A
sulky-lipped sylph-figured girl two feet from him twitched--medium
cootch, he judged--then fumbled in her belt-bag for a pill and popped
it in her mouth.
"Hell, the tickler's not even efficient yet about little things,"
Gusterson blatted, diving back into the privacy-yashmak he was sharing
with Fay. "Whyn't that girl's doctor have the Moodmaster component of
her tickler inject her with medicine?"
"Her doctor probably wants her to have the discipline of
pill-taking--or the exercise," Fay answered glibly. "Look sharp now.
Here's where we fork. I'm taking you through Micro's postern."
A ribbon of slidewalk split itself from the main band and angled off
into a short alley. Gusterson hardly felt the constant-speed juncture
as they crossed it. Then the secondary ribbon speeded up, carrying
them at about 30 feet a second toward the blank concrete wall in which
the alley ended. Gusterson prepared to jump, but Fay grabbed him with
one hand and with the other held up toward the wall a badge and a
button. When they were about ten feet away the wall whipped aside,
then whipped shut behind them so fast that Gusterson wondered
momentarily if he still had his heels and the seat of his pants.
Fay, tucking away his badge and pancake phone, dropped the button in
Gusterson's vest pocket. "Use it when you leave," he said casually.
"That is, if you leave."
Gusterson, who was trying to read the Do and Don't posters papering
the walls they were passing, started to probe that last sinister
supposition, but just then the ribbon slowed, a swinging door opened
and closed behind them and they found themselves in a luxuriously
furnished thinking box measuring at least eight feet by five.
* * * * *
"Hey, this is something," Gusterson said appreciatively to show he
wasn't an utter yokel. Then, drawing on research he'd done for period
novels, "Why, it's as big as a Pullman car compartment, or a first
mate's cabin in the War of 1812. You really must rate."
Fay nodded, smiled wanly and sat down with a sigh on a compact
overstuffed swivel chair. He let his arms dangle and his head sink
into his puffed shoulder cape. Gusterson stared at him. It was the
first time he could ever recall the little man showing fatigue.
"Tickler currently does have one serious drawback," Fay volunteered.
"It weighs 28 pounds. You feel it when you've been on your feet a
couple of hours. No question we're going to give the next model that
antigravity feature you mentioned for pursuit grenades. We'd have had
it in this model except there were so many other things to be
incorporated." He sighed again. "Why, the scanning and decision-making
elements alone tripled the mass."
"Hey," Gusterson protested, thinking especially of the sulky-lipped
girl, "do you mean to tell me all those other people were toting two
stone?"
Fay shook his head heavily. "They were all wearing Mark 3 or 4. I'm
wearing Mark 6," he said, as one might say, "I'm carrying the genuine
Cross, not one of the balsa ones."
But then his face brightened a little and he went on. "Of course the
new improved features make it more than worth it ... and you hardly
feel it at all at night when you're lying down ... and if you remember
to talcum under it twice a day, no sores develop ... at least not very
big ones...."
Backing away involuntarily, Gusterson felt something prod his right
shoulderblade. Ripping open his coat, he convulsively plunged his hand
under it and tore out Fay's belt-bag ... and then set it down very
gently on the top of a shallow cabinet and relaxed with the sigh of
one who has escaped a great, if symbolic, danger. Then he remembered
something Fay had mentioned. He straightened again.
"Hey, you said it's got scanning and decision-making elements. That
means your tickler thinks, even by your fancy standards. And if it
thinks, it's conscious."
"Gussy," Fay said wearily, frowning, "all sorts of things nowadays
have S&DM elements. Mail sorters, missiles, robot medics, high-style
mannequins, just to name some of the Ms. They 'think,' to use that
archaic word, but it's neither here nor there. And they're certainly
not conscious."
"Your tickler thinks," Gusterson repeated stubbornly, "just like I
warned you it would. It sits on your shoulder, ridin' you like you was
a pony or a starved St. Bernard, and now it thinks."
"Suppose it does?" Fay yawned. "What of it?" He gave a rapid sinuous
one-sided shrug that made it look for a moment as if his left arm had
three elbows. It stuck in Gusterson's mind, for he had never seen Fay
use such a gesture and he wondered where he'd picked it up. Maybe
imitating a double-jointed Micro Finance chief? Fay yawned again and
said, "Please, Gussy, don't disturb me for a minute or so." His eyes
half closed.
Gusterson studied Fay's sunken-cheeked face and the great puff of his
shoulder cape.
"Say, Fay," he asked in a soft voice after about five minutes, "are
you meditating?"
"Why, no," Fay responded, starting up and then stifling another yawn.
"Just resting a bit. I seem to get more tired these days, somehow.
You'll have to excuse me, Gussy. But what made you think of
meditation?"
"Oh, I just got to wonderin' in that direction," Gusterson said. "You
see, when you first started to develop Tickler, it occurred to me that
there was one thing about it that might be real good even if you did
give it S&DM elements. It's this: having a mech secretary to take
charge of his obligations and routine in the real world might allow a
man to slide into the other world, the world of thoughts and feelings
and intuitions, and sort of ooze around in there and accomplish
things. Know any of the people using Tickler that way, hey?"
"Of course not," Fay denied with a bright incredulous laugh. "Who'd
want to loaf around in an imaginary world and take a chance of
_missing out on what his tickler's doing_?--I mean, on what his
tickler has in store for him--what he's _told_ his tickler to have in
store for him."
Ignoring Gusterson's shiver, Fay straightened up and seemed to brisken
himself. "Ha, that little slump did me good. A tickler _makes_ you
rest, you know--it's one of the great things about it. Pooh-Bah's
kinder to me than I ever was to myself." He buttoned open a tiny
refrigerator and took out two waxed cardboard cubes and handed one to
Gusterson. "Martini? Hope you don't mind drinking from the carton.
Cheers. Now, Gussy old pal, there are two matters I want to take up
with you--"
"Hold it," Gusterson said with something of his old authority.
"There's something I got to get off my mind first." He pulled the
typed pages out of his inside pocket and straightened them. "I told
you about these," he said. "I want you to read them before you do
anything else. Here."
Fay looked toward the pages and nodded, but did not take them yet. He
lifted his hands to his throat and unhooked the clasp of his cape,
then hesitated.
"You wear that thing to hide the hump your tickler makes?" Gusterson
filled in. "You got better taste than those other moles."
"Not to hide it, exactly," Fay protested, "but just so the others
won't be jealous. I wouldn't feel comfortable parading a free-scanning
decision-capable Mark 6 tickler in front of people who can't buy
it--until it goes on open sale at twenty-two fifteen tonight. Lot of
shelterfolk won't be sleeping tonight. They'll be queued up to trade
in their old tickler for a Mark 6 almost as good as Pooh-Bah."
He started to jerk his hands apart, hesitated again with an oddly
apprehensive look at the big man, then whirled off the cape.