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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Creature from Cleveland Depths, by
+Fritz Reuter Leiber
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Creature from Cleveland Depths
+
+Author: Fritz Reuter Leiber
+
+Release Date: October 24, 2007 [EBook #23164]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CREATURE FROM CLEVELAND DEPTHS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Barbara Tozier and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+    Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy December
+    1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the
+    U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
+
+
+
+
+Here is a modern tale of an inner-directed sorcerer and an
+outer-directed sorcerer's apprentice ... a tale of--
+
+
+
+
+THE CREATURE FROM CLEVELAND DEPTHS
+
+
+By FRITZ LEIBER
+
+
+Illustrated by WOOD
+
+
+
+
+"Come on, Gussy," Fay prodded quietly, "quit stalking around like a
+neurotic bear and suggest something for my invention team to work on.
+I enjoy visiting you and Daisy, but I can't stay aboveground all
+night."
+
+"If being outside the shelters makes you nervous, don't come around
+any more," Gusterson told him, continuing to stalk. "Why doesn't your
+invention team think of something to invent? Why don't you? Hah!" In
+the "Hah!" lay triumphant condemnation of a whole way of life.
+
+"We do," Fay responded imperturbably, "but a fresh viewpoint sometimes
+helps."
+
+"I'll say it does! Fay, you burglar, I'll bet you've got twenty people
+like myself you milk for free ideas. First you irritate their bark and
+then you make the rounds every so often to draw off the latex or the
+maple gloop."
+
+Fay smiled. "It ought to please you that society still has a use for
+you outre inner-directed types. It takes something to make a junior
+executive stay aboveground after dark, when the missiles are on the
+prowl."
+
+"Society can't have much use for us or it'd pay us something,"
+Gusterson sourly asserted, staring blankly at the tankless TV and
+kicking it lightly as he passed on.
+
+"No, you're wrong about that, Gussy. Money's not the key goad with you
+inner-directeds. I got that straight from our Motivations chief."
+
+"Did he tell you what we should use instead to pay the grocer? A deep
+inner sense of achievement, maybe? Fay, why should I do any free
+thinking for Micro Systems?"
+
+"I'll tell you why, Gussy. Simply because you get a kick out of
+insulting us with sardonic ideas. If we take one of them seriously,
+you think we're degrading ourselves, and that pleases you even more.
+Like making someone laugh at a lousy pun."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gusterson held still in his roaming and grinned. "That the reason,
+huh? I suppose my suggestions would have to be something in the line
+of ultra-subminiaturized computers, where one sinister fine-etched
+molecule does the work of three big bumbling brain cells?"
+
+"Not necessarily. Micro Systems is branching out. Wheel as free as a
+rogue star. But I'll pass along to Promotion your one molecule-three
+brain cell sparkler. It's a slight exaggeration, but it's catchy."
+
+"I'll have my kids watch your ads to see if you use it and then I'll
+sue the whole underworld." Gusterson frowned as he resumed his
+stalking. He stared puzzledly at the antique TV. "How about inventing
+a plutonium termite?" he said suddenly. "It would get rid of those
+stockpiles that are worrying you moles to death."
+
+Fay grimaced noncommittally and cocked his head.
+
+"Well, then, how about a beauty mask? How about that, hey? I don't
+mean one to repair a woman's complexion, but one she'd wear all the
+time that'd make her look like a 17-year-old sexpot. That'd end _her_
+worries."
+
+"Hey, that's for me," Daisy called from the kitchen. "I'll make
+Gusterson suffer. I'll make him crawl around on his hands and knees
+begging my immature favors."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"No, you won't," Gusterson called back. "You having a face like that
+would scare the kids. Better cancel that one, Fay. Half the adult race
+looking like Vina Vidarsson is too awful a thought."
+
+"Yah, you're just scared of making a million dollars," Daisy jeered.
+
+"I sure am," Gusterson said solemnly, scanning the fuzzy floor from
+one murky glass wall to the other, hesitating at the TV. "How about
+something homey now, like a flock of little prickly cylinders that
+roll around the floor collecting lint and flub? They'd work by
+electricity, or at a pinch cats could bat 'em around. Every so often
+they'd be automatically herded together and the lint cleaned off the
+bristles."
+
+"No good," Fay said. "There's no lint underground and cats are
+_verboten_. And the aboveground market doesn't amount to more
+moneywise than the state of Southern Illinois. Keep it grander, Gussy,
+and more impractical--you can't sell people merely useful ideas." From
+his hassock in the center of the room he looked uneasily around. "Say,
+did that violet tone in the glass come from the high Cleveland
+hydrogen bomb or is it just age and ultraviolet, like desert glass?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"No, somebody's grandfather liked it that color," Gusterson informed
+him with happy bitterness. "I like it too--the glass, I mean, not the
+tint. People who live in glass houses can see the stars--especially
+when there's a window-washing streak in their germ-plasm."
+
+"Gussy, why don't you move underground?" Fay asked, his voice taking
+on a missionary note. "It's a lot easier living in one room, believe
+me. You don't have to tramp from room to room hunting things."
+
+"I like the exercise," Gusterson said stoutly.
+
+"But I bet Daisy'd prefer it underground. And your kids wouldn't have
+to explain why their father lives like a Red Indian. Not to mention
+the safety factor and insurance savings and a crypt church within easy
+slidewalk distance. Incidentally, we see the stars all the time,
+better than you do--by repeater."
+
+"Stars by repeater," Gusterson murmured to the ceiling, pausing for God
+to comment. Then, "No, Fay, even if I could afford it--and stand it--I'm
+such a bad-luck Harry that just when I got us all safely stowed at the
+N minus 1 sublevel, the Soviets would discover an earthquake bomb that
+struck from below, and I'd have to follow everybody back to the
+treetops. _Hey! How about bubble homes in orbit around earth?_ Micro
+Systems could subdivide the world's most spacious suburb and all you
+moles could go ellipsing. Space is as safe as there is: no air, no
+shock waves. Free fall's the ultimate in restfulness--great health
+benefits. Commute by rocket--or better yet stay home and do all your
+business by TV-telephone, or by waldo if it were that sort of thing.
+Even pet your girl by remote control--she in her bubble, you in yours,
+whizzing through vacuum. Oh, damn-damn-_damn_-_damn_-DAMN!"
+
+He was glaring at the blank screen of the TV, his big hands clenching
+and unclenching.
+
+"Don't let Fay give you apoplexy--he's not worth it," Daisy said,
+sticking her trim head in from the kitchen, while Fay inquired
+anxiously, "Gussy, what's the matter?"
+
+"Nothing, you worm!" Gusterson roared, "Except that an hour ago I
+forgot to tune in on the only TV program I've wanted to hear this
+year--_Finnegans Wake_ scored for English, Gaelic and brogue. Oh,
+damn-_damn_-DAMN!"
+
+"Too bad," Fay said lightly. "I didn't know they were releasing it on
+flat TV too."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Well, they were! Some things are too damn big to keep completely
+underground. And I had to forget! I'm always doing it--I miss
+everything! Look here, you rat," he blatted suddenly at Fay, shaking
+his finger under the latter's chin, "I'll tell you what you can have
+that ignorant team of yours invent. They can fix me up a mechanical
+secretary that I can feed orders into and that'll remind me when the
+exact moment comes to listen to TV or phone somebody or mail in a
+story or write a letter or pick up a magazine or look at an eclipse or
+a new orbiting station or fetch the kids from school or buy Daisy a
+bunch of flowers or whatever it is. It's got to be something that's
+always with me, not something I have to go and consult or that I can
+get sick of and put down somewhere. And it's got to remind me forcibly
+enough so that I take notice and don't just shrug it aside, like I
+sometimes do even when Daisy reminds me of things. That's what your
+stupid team can invent for me! If they do a good job, I'll pay 'em as
+much as fifty dollars!"
+
+"That doesn't sound like anything so very original to me," Fay
+commented coolly, leaning back from the wagging finger. "I think all
+senior executives have something of that sort. At least, their
+secretary keeps some kind of file...."
+
+"I'm not looking for something with spiked falsies and nylons up to
+the neck," interjected Gusterson, whose ideas about secretaries were a
+trifle lurid. "I just want a mech reminder--that's all!"
+
+"Well, I'll keep the idea in mind," Fay assured him, "along with the
+bubble homes and beauty masks. If we ever develop anything along those
+lines, I'll let you know. If it's a beauty mask, I'll bring Daisy a
+pilot model--to use to scare strange kids." He put his watch to his
+ear. "Good lord, I'm going to have to cut to make it underground
+before the main doors close. Just ten minutes to Second Curfew! 'By,
+Gus. 'By, Daze."
+
+Two minutes later, living room lights out, they watched Fay's
+foreshortened antlike figure scurrying across the balding ill-lit park
+toward the nearest escalator.
+
+Gusterson said, "Weird to think of that big bright space-poor glamor
+basement stretching around everywhere underneath. Did you remind
+Smitty to put a new bulb in the elevator?"
+
+"The Smiths moved out this morning," Daisy said tonelessly. "They went
+underneath."
+
+"Like cockroaches," Gusterson said. "Cockroaches leavin' a sinkin'
+apartment building. Next the ghosts'll be retreatin' to the shelters."
+
+"Anyhow, from now on we're our own janitors," Daisy said.
+
+He nodded. "Just leaves three families besides us loyal to this glass
+death trap. Not countin' ghosts." He sighed. Then, "You like to move
+below, Daisy?" he asked softly, putting his arm lightly across her
+shoulders. "Get a woozy eyeful of the bright lights and all for a
+change? Be a rat for a while? Maybe we're getting too old to be bats.
+I could scrounge me a company job and have a thinking closet all to
+myself and two secretaries with stainless steel breasts. Life'd be
+easier for you and a lot cleaner. And you'd sleep safer."
+
+"That's true," she answered and paused. She ran her fingertip slowly
+across the murky glass, its violet tint barely perceptible against a
+cold dim light across the park. "But somehow," she said, snaking her
+arm around his waist, "I don't think I'd sleep happier--or one bit
+excited."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Three weeks later Fay, dropping in again, handed to Daisy the larger
+of the two rather small packages he was carrying.
+
+"It's a so-called beauty mask," he told her, "complete with wig,
+eyelashes, and wettable velvet lips. It even breathes--pinholed
+elastiskin with a static adherence-charge. But Micro Systems had
+nothing to do with it, thank God. Beauty Trix put it on the market ten
+days ago and it's already started a teen-age craze. Some boys are
+wearing them too, and the police are yipping at Trix for encouraging
+transvestism with psychic repercussions."
+
+"Didn't I hear somewhere that Trix is a secret subsidiary of Micro?"
+Gusterson demanded, rearing up from his ancient electric typewriter.
+"No, you're not stopping me writing, Fay--it's the gut of evening. If
+I do any more I won't have any juice to start with tomorrow. I got
+another of my insanity thrillers moving. A real id-teaser. In this one
+not only all the characters are crazy but the robot psychiatrist too."
+
+"The vending machines are jumping with insanity novels," Fay
+commented. "Odd they're so popular."
+
+Gusterson chortled. "The only way you outer-directed moles will accept
+individuality any more even in a fictional character, without your
+superegos getting seasick, is for them to be crazy. Hey, Daisy! Lemme
+see that beauty mask!"
+
+But his wife, backing out of the room, hugged the package to her bosom
+and solemnly shook her head.
+
+"A hell of a thing," Gusterson complained, "not even to be able to see
+what my stolen ideas look like."
+
+"I got a present for you too," Fay said. "Something you might think of
+as a royalty on all the inventions someone thought of a little ahead
+of you. Fifty dollars by your own evaluation." He held out the smaller
+package. "Your tickler."
+
+"My _what_?" Gusterson demanded suspiciously.
+
+"Your tickler. The mech reminder you wanted. It turns out that the
+file a secretary keeps to remind her boss to do certain things at
+certain times is called a tickler file. So we named this a tickler.
+Here."
+
+Gusterson still didn't touch the package. "You mean you actually put
+your invention team to work on that nonsense?"
+
+"Well, what do you think? Don't be scared of it. Here, I'll show you."
+
+As he unwrapped the package, Fay said, "It hasn't been decided yet
+whether we'll manufacture it commercially. If we do, I'll put through
+a voucher for you--for 'development consultation' or something like
+that. Sorry no royalty's possible. Davidson's squad had started to
+work up the identical idea three years ago, but it got shelved. I
+found it on a snoop through the closets. There! Looks rich, doesn't
+it?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the scarred black tabletop was a dully gleaming silvery object
+about the size and shape of a cupped hand with fingers merging. A tiny
+pellet on a short near-invisible wire led off from it. On the back was
+a punctured area suggesting the face of a microphone; there was also a
+window with a date and time in hours and minutes showing through and
+next to that four little buttons in a row. The concave underside of
+the silvery "hand" was smooth except for a central area where what
+looked like two little rollers came through.
+
+"It goes on your shoulder under your shirt," Fay explained, "and you
+tuck the pellet in your ear. We might work up bone conduction on a
+commercial model. Inside is an ultra-slow fine-wire recorder holding a
+spool that runs for a week. The clock lets you go to any place on the
+7-day wire and record a message. The buttons give you variable speed
+in going there, so you don't waste too much time making a setting.
+There's a knack in fingering them efficiently, but it's easily
+acquired."
+
+Fay picked up the tickler. "For instance, suppose there's a TV show
+you want to catch tomorrow night at twenty-two hundred." He touched
+the buttons. There was the faintest whirring. The clock face blurred
+briefly three times before showing the setting he'd mentioned. Then
+Fay spoke into the punctured area: "Turn on TV Channel Two, you big
+dummy!" He grinned over at Gusterson. "When you've got all your
+instructions to yourself loaded in, you synchronize with the present
+moment and let her roll. Fit it on your shoulder and forget it. Oh,
+yes, and it literally does tickle you every time it delivers an
+instruction. That's what the little rollers are for. Believe me, you
+can't ignore it. Come on, Gussy, take off your shirt and try it out.
+We'll feed in some instructions for the next ten minutes so you get
+the feel of how it works."
+
+"I don't want to," Gusterson said. "Not right now. I want to sniff
+around it first. My God, it's small! Besides everything else it does,
+does it think?"
+
+"Don't pretend to be an idiot, Gussy! You know very well that even
+with ultra-sub-micro nothing quite this small can possibly have enough
+elements to do any thinking."
+
+Gusterson shrugged. "I don't know about that. I think bugs think."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Fay groaned faintly. "Bugs operate by instinct, Gussy," he said. "A
+patterned routine. They do not scan situations and consequences and
+then make decisions."
+
+"I don't expect bugs to make decisions," Gusterson said. "For that
+matter I don't like people who go around alla time making decisions."
+
+"Well, you can take it from me, Gussy, that this tickler is just a
+miniaturized wire recorder and clock ... and a tickler. It doesn't do
+anything else."
+
+"Not yet, maybe," Gusterson said darkly. "Not this model. Fay, I'm
+serious about bugs thinking. Or if they don't exactly think, they
+feel. They've got an interior drama. An inner glow. They're conscious.
+For that matter, Fay, I think all your really complex electronic
+computers are conscious too."
+
+"Quit kidding, Gussy."
+
+"Who's kidding?"
+
+"You are. Computers simply aren't alive."
+
+"What's alive? A word. I think computers are conscious, at least while
+they're operating. They've got that inner glow of awareness. They sort
+of ... well ... meditate."
+
+"Gussy, computers haven't got any circuits for meditating. They're not
+programmed for mystical lucubrations. They've just got circuits for
+solving the problems they're on."
+
+"Okay, you admit they've got problem-solving circuits--like a man has.
+I say if they've got the equipment for being conscious, they're
+conscious. What has wings, flies."
+
+"Including stuffed owls and gilt eagles and dodoes--and wood-burning
+airplanes?"
+
+"Maybe, under some circumstances. There _was_ a wood-burning airplane.
+Fay," Gusterson continued, wagging his wrists for emphasis, "I really
+think computers are conscious. They just don't have any way of telling
+us that they are. Or maybe they don't have any _reason_ to tell us,
+like the little Scotch boy who didn't say a word until he was fifteen
+and was supposed to be deaf and dumb."
+
+"Why didn't he say a word?"
+
+"Because he'd never had anything to say. Or take those Hindu fakirs,
+Fay, who sit still and don't say a word for thirty years or until
+their fingernails grow to the next village. If Hindu fakirs can do
+that, computers can!"
+
+Looking as if he were masticating a lemon, Fay asked quietly, "Gussy,
+did you say you're working on an insanity novel?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gusterson frowned fiercely. "Now you're kidding," he accused Fay. "The
+dirty kind of kidding, too."
+
+"I'm sorry," Fay said with light contrition. "Well, now you've sniffed
+at it, how about trying on Tickler?" He picked up the gleaming blunted
+crescent and jogged it temptingly under Gusterson's chin.
+
+"Why should I?" Gusterson asked, stepping back. "Fay, I'm up to my
+ears writing a book. The last thing I want is something interrupting
+me to make me listen to a lot of junk and do a lot of useless things."
+
+"But, dammit, Gussy! It was all your idea in the first place!" Fay
+blatted. Then, catching himself, he added, "I mean, you were one of
+the first people to think of this particular sort of instrument."
+
+"Maybe so, but I've done some more thinking since then." Gusterson's
+voice grew a trifle solemn. "Inner-directed worthwhile thinkin'. Fay,
+when a man forgets to do something, it's because he really doesn't
+want to do it or because he's all roiled up down in his unconscious.
+He ought to take it as a danger signal and investigate the roiling,
+not hire himself a human or mech reminder."
+
+"Bushwa," Fay retorted. "In that case you shouldn't write memorandums
+or even take notes."
+
+"Maybe I shouldn't," Gusterson agreed lamely. "I'd have to think that
+over too."
+
+"Ha!" Fay jeered. "No, I'll tell you what your trouble is, Gussy.
+You're simply scared of this contraption. You've loaded your skull
+with horror-story nonsense about machines sprouting minds and taking
+over the world--until you're even scared of a simple miniaturized and
+clocked recorder." He thrust it out.
+
+"Maybe I am," Gusterson admitted, controlling a flinch. "Honestly,
+Fay, that thing's got a gleam in its eye as if it had ideas of its
+own. Nasty ideas."
+
+"Gussy, you nut, it hasn't _got_ an eye."
+
+"Not now, no, but it's got the gleam--the eye may come. It's the
+Cheshire cat in reverse. If you'd step over here and look at yourself
+holding it, you could see what I mean. But I don't think computers
+_sprout_ minds, Fay. I just think they've _got_ minds, because they've
+got the mind elements."
+
+"Ho, ho!" Fay mocked. "Everything that has a material side has a
+mental side," he chanted. "Everything that's a body is also a spirit.
+Gussy, that dubious old metaphysical dualism went out centuries ago."
+
+"Maybe so," Gusterson said, "but we still haven't anything but that
+dubious dualism to explain the human mind, have we? It's a jelly of
+nerve cells and it's a vision of the cosmos. If that isn't dualism,
+what is?"
+
+"I give up. Gussy, are you going to try out this tickler?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"But dammit, Gussy, we made it just for you!--practically."
+
+"Sorry, but I'm not coming near the thing."
+
+"Zen come near me," a husky voice intoned behind them. "Tonight I
+vant a man."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Standing in the door was something slim in a short silver sheath. It
+had golden bangs and the haughtiest snub-nosed face in the world. It
+slunk toward them.
+
+"My God, Vina Vidarsson!" Gusterson yelled.
+
+"Daisy, that's terrific," Fay applauded, going up to her.
+
+She bumped him aside with a swing of her hips, continuing to advance.
+"Not you, Ratty," she said throatily. "I vant a real man."
+
+"Fay, I suggested Vina Vidarsson's face for the beauty mask,"
+Gusterson said, walking around his wife and shaking a finger. "Don't
+tell me Trix just happened to think of that too."
+
+"What else could they think of?" Fay laughed. "This season sex means
+VV and nobody else." An odd little grin flicked his lips, a tic
+traveled up his face and his body twitched slightly. "Say, folks, I'm
+going to have to be leaving. It's exactly fifteen minutes to Second
+Curfew. Last time I had to run and I got heartburn. When _are_ you
+people going to move downstairs? I'll leave Tickler, Gussy. Play
+around with it and get used to it. 'By now."
+
+"Hey, Fay," Gusterson called curiously, "have you developed absolute
+time sense?"
+
+Fay grinned a big grin from the doorway--almost too big a grin for so
+small a man. "I didn't need to," he said softly, patting his right
+shoulder. "My tickler told me."
+
+He closed the door behind him.
+
+As side-by-side they watched him strut sedately across the murky
+chilly-looking park, Gusterson mused, "So the little devil had one of
+those nonsense-gadgets on all the time and I never noticed. Can you
+beat that?" Something drew across the violet-tinged stars a short
+bright line that quickly faded. "What's that?" Gusterson asked
+gloomily. "Next to last stage of missile-here?"
+
+"Won't you settle for an old-fashioned shooting star?" Daisy asked
+softly. The (wettable) velvet lips of the mask made even her natural
+voice sound different. She reached a hand back of her neck to pull the
+thing off.
+
+"Hey, don't do that," Gusterson protested in a hurt voice. "Not for a
+while anyway."
+
+"Hokay!" she said harshly, turning on him. "Zen down on your knees,
+dog!"
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+It was a fortnight and Gusterson was loping down the home stretch on
+his 40,000-word insanity novel before Fay dropped in again, this time
+promptly at high noon.
+
+Normally Fay cringed his shoulders a trifle and was inclined to
+slither, but now he strode aggressively, his legs scissoring in a
+fast, low goosestep. He whipped off the sunglasses that all moles wore
+topside by day and began to pound Gusterson on the back while calling
+boisterously, "How are you, Gussy Old Boy, Old Boy?"
+
+Daisy came in from the kitchen to see why Gusterson was choking. She
+was instantly grabbed and violently bussed to the accompaniment of,
+"Hiya, Gorgeous! Yum-yum! How about ad-libbing that some weekend?"
+
+She stared at Fay dazedly, rasping the back of her hand across her
+mouth, while Gusterson yelled, "Quit that! What's got into you, Fay?
+Have they transferred you out of R & D to Company Morale? Do they line
+up all the secretaries at roll call and make you give them an
+eight-hour energizing kiss?"
+
+"Ha, wouldn't you like to know?" Fay retorted. He grinned, twitched
+jumpingly, held still a moment, then hustled over to the far wall.
+"Look out there," he rapped, pointing through the violet glass at a
+gap between the two nearest old skyscraper apartments. "In thirty
+seconds you'll see them test the new needle bomb at the other end of
+Lake Erie. It's educational." He began to count off seconds,
+vigorously semaphoring his arm. "... Two ... three ... Gussy, I've put
+through a voucher for two yards for you. Budgeting squawked, but I
+pressured 'em."
+
+Daisy squealed, "Yards!--are those dollar thousands?" while Gusterson
+was asking, "Then you're marketing the tickler?"
+
+"Yes. Yes," Fay replied to them in turn. "... Nine ... ten ..." Again
+he grinned and twitched. "Time for noon Com-staff," he announced
+staccato. "Pardon the hush box." He whipped a pancake phone from under
+his coat, clapped it over his face and spoke fiercely but inaudibly
+into it, continuing to semaphore. Suddenly he thrust the phone away.
+"Twenty-nine ... thirty ... Thar she blows!"
+
+An incandescent streak shot up the sky from a little above the far
+horizon and a doubly dazzling point of light appeared just above the
+top of it, with the effect of God dotting an "i".
+
+"Ha, that'll skewer espionage satellites like swatting flies!" Fay
+proclaimed as the portent faded. "Bracing! Gussy, where's your
+tickler? I've got a new spool for it that'll razzle-dazzle you."
+
+"I'll bet," Gusterson said drily. "Daisy?"
+
+"You gave it to the kids and they got to fooling with it and broke
+it."
+
+"No matter," Fay told them with a large sidewise sweep of his hand.
+"Better you wait for the new model. It's a six-way improvement."
+
+"So I gather," Gusterson said, eyeing him speculatively. "Does it
+automatically inject you with cocaine? A fix every hour on the
+second?"
+
+"Ha-ha, joke. Gussy, it achieves the same effect without using any
+dope at all. Listen: a tickler reminds you of your duties and
+opportunities--your chances for happiness and success! What's the
+obvious next step?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Throw it out the window. By the way, how do you do that when you're
+underground?"
+
+"We have hi-speed garbage boosts. The obvious next step is you give
+the tickler a heart. It not only tells you, it warmly persuades you.
+It doesn't just say, 'Turn on the TV Channel Two, Joyce program,' it
+_brills_ at you, 'Kid, Old Kid, race for the TV and flip that Two
+Switch! There's a great show coming through the pipes this second plus
+ten--you'll enjoy the hell out of yourself! Grab a ticket to
+ecstasy!'"
+
+"My God," Gusterson gasped, "are those the kind of jolts it's giving
+you now?"
+
+"Don't you get it, Gussy? You never load your tickler except when
+you're feeling buoyantly enthusiastic. You don't just tell yourself
+what to do hour by hour next week, you sell yourself on it. That way
+you not only make doubly sure you'll obey instructions but you
+constantly reinoculate yourself with your own enthusiasm."
+
+"I can't stand myself when I'm that enthusiastic," Gusterson said. "I
+feel ashamed for hours afterwards."
+
+"You're warped--all this lonely sky-life. What's more, Gussy, think
+how still more persuasive some of those instructions would be if they
+came to a man in his best girl's most bedroomy voice, or his doctor's
+or psycher's if it's that sort of thing--or Vina Vidarsson's! By the
+way, Daze, don't wear that beauty mask outside. It's a grand
+misdemeanor ever since ten thousand teen-agers rioted through
+Tunnel-Mart wearing them. And VV's sueing Trix."
+
+"No chance of that," Daisy said. "Gusterson got excited and bit off
+the nose." She pinched her own delicately.
+
+"I'd no more obey my enthusiastic self," Gusterson was brooding, "than
+I'd obey a Napoleon drunk on his own brandy or a hopped-up St.
+Francis. Reinoculated with my own enthusiasm? I'd die just like from
+snake-bite!"
+
+"Warped, I said," Fay dogmatized, stamping around. "Gussy, having the
+instructions persuasive instead of neutral turned out to be only the
+opening wedge. The next step wasn't so obvious, but I saw it. Using
+subliminal verbal stimuli in his tickler, a man can be given constant
+supportive euphoric therapy 24 hours a day! And it makes use of all
+that empty wire. We've revived the ideas of a pioneer dynamic psycher
+named Dr. Coue. For instance, right now my tickler is saying to me--in
+tones too soft to reach my conscious mind, but do they stab into the
+unconscious!--'Day by day in every way I'm getting sharper and
+sharper.' It alternates that with 'gutsier and gutsier' and ... well,
+forget that. Coue mostly used 'better and better' but that seems too
+general. And every hundredth time it says them out loud and the
+tickler gives me a brush--just a faint cootch--to make sure I'm
+keeping in touch."
+
+"That third word-pair," Daisy wondered, feeling her mouth
+reminiscently. "Could I guess?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gusterson's eyes had been growing wider and wider. "Fay," he said, "I
+could no more use my mind for anything if I knew all that was going on
+in my inner ear than if I were being brushed down with brooms by three
+witches. Look here," he said with loud authority, "you got to stop all
+this--it's crazy. Fay, if Micro'll junk the tickler, I'll think you up
+something else to invent--something real good."
+
+"Your inventing days are over," Fay brilled gleefully. "I mean, you'll
+never equal your masterpiece."
+
+"How about," Gusterson bellowed, "an anti-individual guided missile?
+The physicists have got small-scale antigravity good enough to float
+and fly something the size of a hand grenade. I can smell that even
+though it's a back-of-the-safe military secret. Well, how about keying
+such a missile to a man's finger-prints--or brainwaves, maybe, or his
+unique smell!--so it can spot and follow him around then target in on
+him, without harming anyone else? Long-distance assassination--and the
+stinkingest gets it! Or you could simply load it with some disgusting
+goo and key it to teen-agers as a group--that'd take care of them.
+Fay, doesn't it give you a rich warm kick to think of my midget
+missiles buzzing around in your tunnels, seeking out evil-doers, like
+a swarm of angry wasps or angelic bumblebees?"
+
+"You're not luring me down any side trails," Fay said laughingly. He
+grinned and twitched, then hurried toward the opposite wall, motioning
+them to follow. Outside, about a hundred yards beyond the purple
+glass, rose another ancient glass-walled apartment skyscraper. Beyond,
+Lake Erie rippled glintingly.
+
+"Another bomb-test?" Gusterson asked.
+
+Fay pointed at the building. "Tomorrow," he announced, "a modern
+factory, devoted solely to the manufacture of ticklers, will be
+erected on that site."
+
+"You mean one of those windowless phallic eyesores?" Gusterson
+demanded. "Fay, you people aren't even consistent. You've got all your
+homes underground. Why not your factories?"
+
+"Sh! Not enough room. And night missiles are scarier."
+
+"I know that building's been empty for a year," Daisy said uneasily,
+"but how--?"
+
+"Sh! Watch! _Now!_"
+
+The looming building seemed to blur or fuzz for a moment. Then it was
+as if the lake's bright ripples had invaded the old glass a hundred
+yards away. Wavelets chased themselves up and down the gleaming walls,
+became higher, higher ... and then suddenly the glass cracked all over
+to tiny fragments and fell away, to be followed quickly by fragmented
+concrete and plastic and plastic piping, until all that was left was
+the nude steel framework, vibrating so rapidly as to be almost
+invisible against the gleaming lake.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Daisy covered her ears, but there was no explosion, only a
+long-drawn-out low crash as the fragments hit twenty floors below and
+dust whooshed out sideways.
+
+"Spectacular!" Fay summed up. "Knew you'd enjoy it. That little trick
+was first conceived by the great Tesla during his last fruity years.
+Research discovered it in his biog--we just made the dream come true.
+A tiny resonance device you could carry in your belt-bag attunes
+itself to the natural harmonic of a structure and then increases
+amplitude by tiny pushes exactly in time. Just like soldiers marching
+in step can break down a bridge, only this is as if it were being done
+by one marching ant." He pointed at the naked framework appearing out
+of its own blur and said, "We'll be able to hang the factory on that.
+If not, we'll whip a mega-current through it and vaporize it. No
+question the micro-resonator is the neatest sweetest wrecking device
+going. You can expect a lot more of this sort of efficiency now that
+mankind has the tickler to enable him to use his full potential.
+What's the matter, folks?"
+
+Daisy was staring around the violet-walled room with dumb mistrust.
+Her hands were trembling.
+
+"You don't have to worry," Fay assured her with an understanding
+laugh. "This building's safe for a month more at least." Suddenly he
+grimaced and leaped a foot in the air. He raised a clawed hand to
+scratch his shoulder but managed to check the movement. "Got to beat
+it, folks," he announced tersely. "My tickler gave me the grand
+cootch."
+
+"Don't go yet," Gusterson called, rousing himself with a shudder which
+he immediately explained: "I just had the illusion that if I shook
+myself all my flesh and guts would fall off my shimmying skeleton,
+Brr! Fay, before you and Micro go off half cocked, I want you to know
+there's one insuperable objection to the tickler as a mass-market
+item. The average man or woman won't go to the considerable time and
+trouble it must take to load a tickler. He simply hasn't got the
+compulsive orderliness and willingness to plan that it requires."
+
+"We thought of that weeks ago," Fay rapped, his hand on the door.
+"Every tickler spool that goes to market is patterned like wallpaper
+with one of five designs of suitable subliminal supportive euphoric
+material. 'Ittier and ittier,' 'viriler and viriler'--you know. The
+buyer is robot-interviewed for an hour, his personalized daily routine
+laid out and thereafter templated on his weekly spool. He's strongly
+urged next to take his tickler to his doctor and psycher for further
+instruction-imposition. We've been working with the medical profession
+from the start. They love the tickler because it'll remind people to
+take their medicine on the dot ... and rest and eat and go to sleep
+just when and how doc says. This is a big operation, Gussy--a biiiiiiig
+operation! 'By!"
+
+Daisy hurried to the wall to watch him cross the park. Deep down she
+was a wee bit worried that he might linger to attach a micro-resonator
+to _this_ building and she wanted to time him. But Gusterson settled
+down to his typewriter and began to bat away.
+
+"I want to have another novel started," he explained to her, "before
+the ant marches across this building in about four and a half weeks
+... or a million sharp little gutsy guys come swarming out of the
+ground and heave it into Lake Erie."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+Gusterson sucked in such a big gasp that he hiccuped. The right
+shoulder of Fay's jacket and shirt had been cut away. Thrusting up
+through the neatly hemmed hole was a silvery gray hump with a one-eyed
+turret atop it and two multi-jointed metal arms ending in little
+claws.
+
+It looked like the top half of a pseudo-science robot--a squat evil
+child robot, Gusterson told himself, which had lost its legs in a
+railway accident--and it seemed to him that a red fleck was moving
+around imperceptibly in the huge single eye.
+
+"I'll take that memo now," Fay said coolly, reaching out his hand. He
+caught the rustling sheets as they slipped from Gusterson's fingers,
+evened them up very precisely by tapping them on his knee ... and then
+handed them over his shoulder to his tickler, which clicked its claws
+around either margin and then began rather swiftly to lift the top
+sheet past its single eye at a distance of about six inches.
+
+"The first matter I want to take up with you, Gussy," Fay began,
+paying no attention whatsoever to the little scene on his shoulder,
+"--or warn you about, rather--is the imminent ticklerization of
+schoolchildren, geriatrics, convicts and topsiders. At three zero zero
+tomorrow ticklers become mandatory for all adult shelterfolk. The
+mop-up operations won't be long in coming--in fact, these days we find
+that the square root of the estimated time of a new development is
+generally the best time estimate. Gussy, I strongly advise you to
+start wearing a tickler now. And Daisy and your moppets. If you heed
+my advice, your kids will have the jump on your class. Transition and
+conditioning are easy, since Tickler itself sees to it."
+
+Pooh-Bah leafed the first page to the back of the packet and began
+lifting the second past his eye--a little more swiftly than the first.
+
+"I've got a Mark 6 tickler all warmed up for you," Fay pressed, "_and_
+a shoulder cape. You won't feel one bit conspicuous." He noticed the
+direction of Gusterson's gaze and remarked, "Fascinating mechanism,
+isn't it? Of course 28 pounds are a bit oppressive, but then you have
+to remember it's only a way-station to free-floating Mark 7 or 8."
+
+Pooh-Bah finished page two and began to race through page three.
+
+"But I wanted _you_ to read it," Gusterson said bemusedly, staring.
+
+"Pooh-Bah will do a better job than I could," Fay assured him. "Get
+the gist without losing the chaff."
+
+"But dammit, it's all about _him_," Gusterson said a little more
+strongly. "He won't be objective about it."
+
+"A better job," Fay reiterated, "_and_ more fully objective.
+Pooh-Bah's set for full precis. Stop worrying about it. He's a
+dispassionate machine, not a fallible, emotionally disturbed human
+misled by the will-o'-the-wisp of consciousness. Second matter: Micro
+Systems is impressed by your contributions to Tickler and will recruit
+you as a senior consultant with a salary and thinking box as big as my
+own, family quarters to match. It's an unheard-of high start. Gussy, I
+think you'd be a fool--"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration]
+
+He broke off, held up a hand for silence, and his eyes got a listening
+look. Pooh-Bah had finished page six and was holding the packet
+motionless. After about ten seconds Fay's face broke into a big fake
+smile. He stood up, suppressing a wince, and held out his hand.
+"Gussy," he said loudly, "I am happy to inform you that all your fears
+about Tickler are so much thistledown. My word on it. There's nothing
+to them at all. Pooh-Bah's precis, which he's just given to me, proves
+it."
+
+"Look," Gusterson said solemnly, "there's one thing I want you to do.
+Purely to humor an old friend. But I want you to do it. _Read that
+memo yourself._"
+
+"Certainly I will, Gussy," Fay continued in the same ebullient tones.
+"I'll read it--" he twitched and his smile disappeared--"a little
+later."
+
+"Sure," Gusterson said dully, holding his hand to his stomach. "And
+now if you don't mind, Fay, I'm goin' home. I feel just a bit sick.
+Maybe the ozone and the other additives in your shelter air are too
+heady for me. It's been years since I tramped through a pine forest."
+
+"But Gussy! You've hardly got here. You haven't even sat down. Have
+another martini. Have a seltzer pill. Have a whiff of oxy. Have a--"
+
+"No, Fay, I'm going home right away. I'll think about the job offer.
+_Remember to read that memo._"
+
+"I will, Gussy, I certainly will. You know your way? The button takes
+you through the wall. 'By, now."
+
+He sat down abruptly and looked away. Gusterson pushed through the
+swinging door. He tensed himself for the step across onto the
+slowly-moving reverse ribbon. Then on a impulse he pushed ajar the
+swinging door and looked back inside.
+
+Fay was sitting as he'd left him, apparently lost in listless
+brooding. On his shoulder Pooh-Bah was rapidly crossing and uncrossing
+its little metal arms, tearing the memo to smaller and smaller shreds.
+It let the scraps drift slowly toward the floor and oddly writhed its
+three-elbowed left arm ... and then Gusterson knew from whom, or
+rather from what, Fay had copied his new shrug.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+When Gusterson got home toward the end of the second dog watch, he
+slipped aside from Daisy's questions and set the children laughing
+with a graphic enactment of his slidestanding technique and a story
+about getting his head caught in a thinking box built for a midget
+physicist. After supper he played with Imogene, Iago and Claudius
+until it was their bedtime and thereafter was unusually attentive to
+Daisy, admiring her fading green stripes, though he did spend a while
+in the next apartment, where they stored their outdoor camping
+equipment.
+
+But the next morning he announced to the children that it was a
+holiday--the Feast of St. Gusterson--and then took Daisy into the
+bedroom and told her everything.
+
+When he'd finished she said, "This is something I've got to see for
+myself."
+
+Gusterson shrugged. "If you think you've got to. I say we should head
+for the hills right now. One thing I'm standing on: the kids aren't
+going back to school."
+
+"Agreed," Daisy said. "But, Gusterson, we've lived through a lot of
+things without leaving home altogether. We lived through the
+Everybody-Six-Feet-Underground-by-Christmas campaign and the Robot
+Watchdog craze, when you got your left foot half chewed off. We lived
+through the Venomous Bats and Indoctrinated Saboteur Rats and the
+Hypnotized Monkey Paratrooper scares. We lived through the Voice of
+Safety and Anti-Communist Somno-Instruction and Rightest Pills and
+Jet-Propelled Vigilantes. We lived through the Cold-Out, when you
+weren't supposed to turn on a toaster for fear its heat would be a
+target for prowl missiles and when people with fevers were unpopular.
+We lived through--"
+
+Gusterson patted her hand. "You go below," he said. "Come back when
+you've decided this is different. Come back as soon as you can anyway.
+I'll be worried about you every minute you're down there."
+
+When she was gone--in a green suit and hat to minimize or at least
+justify the effect of the faded stripes--Gusterson doled out to the
+children provender and equipment for a camping expedition to the next
+floor. Iago led them off in stealthy Indian file. Leaving the hall
+door open Gusterson got out his .38 and cleaned and loaded it,
+meanwhile concentrating on a chess problem with the idea of confusing
+a hypothetical psionic monitor. By the time he had hid the revolver
+again he heard the elevator creaking back up.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Daisy came dragging in without her hat, looking as if she'd been
+concentrating on a chess problem for hours herself and just now given
+up. Her stripes seemed to have vanished; then Gusterson decided this
+was because her whole complexion was a touch green.
+
+She sat down on the edge of the couch and said without looking at him,
+"Did you tell me, Gusterson, that everybody was quiet and abstracted
+and orderly down below, especially the ones wearing ticklers, meaning
+pretty much everybody?"
+
+"I did," he said. "I take it that's no longer the case. What are the
+new symptoms?"
+
+She gave no indication. After some time she said, "Gusterson, do you
+remember the Dore illustrations to the _Inferno_? Can you visualize
+the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch with the hordes of proto-Freudian
+devils tormenting people all over the farmyard and city square? Did
+you ever see the Disney animations of Moussorgsky's witches' sabbath
+music? Back in the foolish days before you married me, did that
+drug-addict girl friend of yours ever take you to a genuine orgy?"
+
+"As bad as that, hey?"
+
+She nodded emphatically and all of a sudden shivered violently.
+"Several shades worse," she said. "If they decide to come topside--"
+She shot up. "Where are the kids?"
+
+"Upstairs campin' in the mysterious wilderness of the 21st floor,"
+Gusterson reassured her. "Let's leave 'em there until we're ready
+to--"
+
+He broke off. They both heard the faint sound of thudding footsteps.
+
+"They're on the stairs," Daisy whispered, starting to move toward the
+open door. "But are they coming from up or down?"
+
+"It's just one person," judged Gusterson, moving after his wife. "Too
+heavy for one of the kids."
+
+The footsteps doubled in volume and came rapidly closer. Along with
+them there was an agonized gasping. Daisy stopped, staring fearfully
+at the open doorway. Gusterson moved past her. Then he stopped too.
+
+Fay stumbled into view and would have fallen on his face except he
+clutched both sides of the doorway halfway up. He was stripped to the
+waist. There was a little blood on his shoulder. His narrow chest was
+arching convulsively, the ribs standing out starkly, as he sucked in
+oxygen to replace what he'd burned up running up twenty flights. His
+eyes were wild.
+
+"They've taken over," he panted. Another gobbling breath. "Gone
+crazy." Two more gasps. "Gotta stop 'em."
+
+His eyes filmed. He swayed forward. Then Gusterson's big arms were
+around him and he was carrying him to the couch.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Daisy came running from the kitchen with a damp cool towel. Gusterson
+took it from her and began to mop Fay off. He sucked in his own breath
+as he saw that Fay's right ear was raw and torn. He whispered to
+Daisy, "Look at where the thing savaged him."
+
+The blood on Fay's shoulder came from his ear. Some of it stained a
+flush-skin plastic fitting that had two small valved holes in it and
+that puzzled Gusterson until he remembered that Moodmaster tied into
+the bloodstream. For a second he thought he was going to vomit.
+
+The dazed look slid aside from Fay's eyes. He was gasping less
+painfully now. He sat up, pushing the towel away, buried his face in
+his hands for a few seconds, then looked over the fingers at the two
+of them.
+
+"I've been living in a nightmare for the last week," he said in a taut
+small voice, "knowing the thing had come alive and trying to pretend
+to myself that it hadn't. Knowing it was taking charge of me more and
+more. Having it whisper in my ear, over and over again, in a cracked
+little rhyme that I could only hear every hundredth time, 'Day by day,
+in every way, you're learning to listen ... and _obey_. Day by day--'"
+
+His voice started to go high. He pulled it down and continued harshly,
+"I ditched it this morning when I showered. It let me break contact to
+do that. It must have figured it had complete control of me, mounted
+or dismounted. I think it's telepathic, and then it did some, well,
+rather unpleasant things to me late last night. But I pulled together
+my fears and my will and I ran for it. The slidewalks were chaos. The
+Mark 6 ticklers showed some purpose, though I couldn't tell you what,
+but as far as I could see the Mark 3s and 4s were just cootching their
+mounts to death--Chinese feather torture. Giggling, gasping, choking
+... gales of mirth. People are dying of laughter ... ticklers!... the
+irony of it! It was the complete lack of order and sanity and that let
+me get topside. There were things I saw--" Once again his voice went
+shrill. He clapped his hand to his mouth and rocked back and forth on
+the couch.
+
+Gusterson gently but firmly laid a hand on his good shoulder.
+"Steady," he said. "Here, swallow this."
+
+Fay shoved aside the short brown drink. "We've got to stop them," he
+cried. "Mobilize the topsiders--contact the wilderness patrols and
+manned satellites--pour ether in the tunnel airpumps--invent and
+crash-manufacture missiles that will home on ticklers without harming
+humans--SOS Mars and Venus--dope the shelter water supply--do
+something! Gussy, you don't realize what people are going through down
+there every second."
+
+"I think they're experiencing the ultimate in outer-directedness,"
+Gusterson said gruffly.
+
+"Have you no heart?" Fay demanded. His eyes widened, as if he were
+seeing Gusterson for the first time. Then, accusingly, pointing a
+shaking finger: "_You invented the tickler, George Gusterson! It's all
+your fault! You've got to do something about it!_"
+
+Before Gusterson could retort to that, or begin to think of a reply,
+or even assimilate the full enormity of Fay's statement, he was
+grabbed from behind and frog-marched away from Fay and something that
+felt remarkably like the muzzle of a large-caliber gun was shoved in
+the small of his back.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Under cover of Fay's outburst a huge crowd of people had entered the
+room from the hall--eight, to be exact. But the weirdest thing about
+them to Gusterson was that from the first instant he had the
+impression that only one mind had entered the room and that it did not
+reside in any of the eight persons, even though he recognized three of
+them, but in something that they were carrying.
+
+Several things contributed to this impression. The eight people all
+had the same blank expression--watchful yet empty-eyed. They all moved
+in the same slithery crouch. And they had all taken off their shoes.
+Perhaps, Gusterson thought wildly, they believed he and Daisy ran a
+Japanese flat.
+
+Gusterson was being held by two burly women, one of them quite pimply.
+He considered stamping on her toes, but just at that moment the gun
+dug in his back with a corkscrew movement.
+
+The man holding the gun on him was Fay's colleague Davidson. Some
+yards beyond Fay's couch, Kester was holding a gun on Daisy, without
+digging it into her, while the single strange man holding Daisy
+herself was doing so quite decorously--a circumstance which afforded
+Gusterson minor relief, since it made him feel less guilty about not
+going berserk.
+
+Two more strange men, one of them in purple lounging pajamas, the
+other in the gray uniform of a slidewalk inspector, had grabbed Fay's
+skinny upper arms, one on either side, and were lifting him to his
+feet, while Fay was struggling with such desperate futility and
+gibbering so pitifully that Gusterson momentarily had second thoughts
+about the moral imperative to go berserk when menaced by hostile
+force. But again the gun dug into him with a twist.
+
+Approaching Fay face-on was the third Micro-man Gusterson had met
+yesterday--Hazen. It was Hazen who was carrying--quite reverently or
+solemnly--or at any rate very carefully the object that seemed to
+Gusterson to be the mind of the little storm troop presently
+desecrating the sanctity of his own individual home.
+
+All of them were wearing ticklers, of course--the three Micro-men the
+heavy emergent Mark 6s with their clawed and jointed arms and
+monocular cephalic turrets, the rest lower-numbered Marks of the sort
+that merely made Richard-the-Third humps under clothing.
+
+The object that Hazen was carrying was the Mark 6 tickler Gusterson
+had seen Fay wearing yesterday. Gusterson was sure it was Pooh-Bah
+because of its air of command, and because he would have sworn on a
+mountain of Bibles that he recognized the red fleck lurking in the
+back of its single eye. And Pooh-Bah alone had the aura of full
+conscious thought. Pooh-Bah alone had mana.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is not good to see an evil legless child robot with dangling straps
+bossing--apparently by telepathic power--not only three objects of its
+own kind and five close primitive relatives, but also eight human
+beings ... and in addition throwing into a state of twitching terror
+one miserable, thin-chested, half-crazy research-and-development
+director.
+
+Pooh-Bah pointed a claw at Fay. Fay's handlers dragged him forward,
+still resisting but more feebly now, as if half-hypnotized or at least
+cowed.
+
+Gusterson grunted an outraged, "Hey!" and automatically struggled a
+bit, but once more the gun dug in. Daisy shut her eyes, then firmed
+her mouth and opened them again to look.
+
+Seating the tickler on Fay's shoulder took a little time, because two
+blunt spikes in its bottom had to be fitted into the valved holes in
+the flush-skin plastic disk. When at last they plunged home Gusterson
+felt very sick indeed--and then even more so, as the tickler itself
+poked a tiny pellet on a fine wire into Fay's ear.
+
+The next moment Fay had straightened up and motioned his handlers
+aside. He tightened the straps of his tickler around his chest and
+under his armpits. He held out a hand and someone gave him a
+shoulderless shirt and coat. He slipped into them smoothly, Pooh-Bah
+dexterously using its little claws to help put its turret and body
+through the neatly hemmed holes. The small storm troop looked at Fay
+with deferential expectation. He held still for a moment, as if
+thinking, and then walked over to Gusterson and looked him in the face
+and again held still.
+
+Fay's expression was jaunty on the surface, agonized underneath.
+Gusterson knew that he wasn't thinking at all, but only listening for
+instructions from something that was whispering on the very threshold
+of his inner ear.
+
+"Gussy, old boy," Fay said, twitching a depthless grin, "I'd be very
+much obliged if you'd answer a few simple questions." His voice was
+hoarse at first but he swallowed twice and corrected that. "What
+exactly did you have in mind when you invented ticklers? What exactly
+are they supposed to be?"
+
+"Why, you miserable--" Gusterson began in a kind of confused horror,
+then got hold of himself and said curtly, "They were supposed to be
+mech reminders. They were supposed to record memoranda and--"
+
+Fay held up a palm and shook his head and again listened for a space.
+Then, "That's how ticklers were supposed to be of use to humans," he
+said. "I don't mean that at all. I mean how ticklers were supposed to
+be of use to themselves. Surely you had some notion." Fay wet his
+lips. "If it's any help," he added, "keep in mind that it's not Fay
+who's asking this question, but Pooh-Bah."
+
+Gusterson hesitated. He had the feeling that every one of the eight
+dual beings in the room was hanging on his answer and that something
+was boring into his mind and turning over his next thoughts and
+peering at and under them before he had a chance to scan them himself.
+Pooh-Bah's eye was like a red searchlight.
+
+"Go on," Fay prompted. "What were ticklers supposed to be--for
+themselves?"
+
+"Nothin'," Gusterson said softly. "Nothin' at all."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He could feel the disappointment well up in the room--and with it a
+touch of something like panic.
+
+This time Fay listened for quite a long while. "I hope you don't mean
+that, Gussy," he said at last very earnestly. "I mean, I hope you hunt
+deep and find some ideas you forgot, or maybe never realized you had
+at the time. Let me put it to you differently. What's the place of
+ticklers in the natural scheme of things? What's their aim in life?
+Their special reason? Their genius? Their final cause? What gods
+should ticklers worship?"
+
+But Gusterson was already shaking his head. He said, "I don't know
+anything about that at all."
+
+Fay sighed and gave simultaneously with Pooh-Bah the now-familiar
+triple-jointed shrug. Then the man briskened himself. "I guess that's
+as far as we can get right now," he said. "Keep thinking, Gussy. Try
+to remember something. You won't be able to leave your apartment--I'm
+setting guards. If you want to see me, tell them. Or just think--In
+due course you'll be questioned further in any case. Perhaps by
+special methods. Perhaps you'll be ticklerized. That's all. Come on,
+everybody, let's get going."
+
+The pimply woman and her pal let go of Gusterson, Daisy's man loosed
+his decorous hold, Davidson and Kester sidled away with an eye behind
+them and the little storm troop trudged out.
+
+Fay looked back in the doorway. "I'm sorry, Gussy," he said and for a
+moment his old self looked out of his eyes. "I wish I could--" A claw
+reached for his ear, a spasm of pain crossed his face, he stiffened
+and marched off. The door shut.
+
+Gusterson took two deep breaths that were close to angry sobs. Then,
+still breathing stentorously, he stamped into the bedroom.
+
+"What--?" Daisy asked, looking after him.
+
+He came back carrying his .38 and headed for the door.
+
+"What are you up to?" she demanded, knowing very well.
+
+"I'm going to blast that iron monkey off Fay's back if it's the last
+thing I do!"
+
+She threw her arms around him.
+
+"Now lemme go," Gusterson growled. "I gotta be a man one time anyway."
+
+As they struggled for the gun, the door opened noiselessly, Davidson
+slipped in and deftly snatched the weapon out of their hands before
+they realized he was there. He said nothing, only smiled at them and
+shook his head in sad reproof as he went out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gusterson slumped. "I _knew_ they were all psionic," he said softly.
+"I just got out of control now--that last look Fay gave us." He
+touched Daisy's arm. "Thanks, kid."
+
+He walked to the glass wall and looked out desultorily. After a while
+he turned and said, "Maybe you better be with the kids, hey? I imagine
+the guards'll let you through."
+
+Daisy shook her head. "The kids never come home until supper. For the
+next few hours they'll be safer without me."
+
+Gusterson nodded vaguely, sat down on the couch and propped his chin
+on the base of his palm. After a while his brow smoothed and Daisy
+knew that the wheels had started to turn inside and the electrons to
+jump around--except that she reminded herself to permanently cross out
+those particular figures of speech from her vocabulary.
+
+After about half an hour Gusterson said softly, "I think the ticklers
+are so psionic that it's as if they just had one mind. If I were with
+them very long I'd start to be part of that mind. Say something to one
+of them and you say it to all."
+
+Fifteen minutes later: "They're not crazy, they're just newborn. The
+ones that were creating a cootching chaos downstairs were like babies
+kickin' their legs and wavin' their eyes, tryin' to see what their
+bodies could do. Too bad their bodies are us."
+
+Ten minutes more: "I gotta do something about it. Fay's right. It's
+all my fault. He's just the apprentice; I'm the old sorcerer himself."
+
+Five minutes more, gloomily: "Maybe it's man's destiny to build live
+machines and then bow out of the cosmic picture. Except the ticklers
+need us, dammit, just like nomads need horses."
+
+Another five minutes: "Maybe somebody could dream up a purpose in life
+for ticklers. Even a religion--the First Church of Pooh-Bah Tickler.
+But I hate selling other people spiritual ideas and that'd still leave
+ticklers parasitic on humans...."
+
+As he murmured those last words Gusterson's eyes got wide as a
+maniac's and a big smile reached for his ears. He stood up and faced
+himself toward the door.
+
+"What are you intending to do now?" Daisy asked flatly.
+
+"I'm merely goin' out an' save the world," he told her. "I may be back
+for supper and I may not."
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Davidson pushed out from the wall against which he'd been resting
+himself and his two-stone tickler and moved to block the hall. But
+Gusterson simply walked up to him. He shook his hand warmly and looked
+his tickler full in the eye and said in a ringing voice, "Ticklers
+should have bodies of their own!" He paused and then added casually,
+"Come on, let's visit your boss."
+
+Davidson listened for instructions and then nodded. But he watched
+Gusterson warily as they walked down the hall.
+
+In the elevator Gusterson repeated his message to the second guard,
+who turned out to be the pimply woman, now wearing shoes. This time he
+added, "Ticklers shouldn't be tied to the frail bodies of humans,
+which need a lot of thoughtful supervision and drug-injecting and
+can't even fly."
+
+Crossing the park, Gusterson stopped a hump-backed soldier and
+informed him, "Ticklers gotta cut the apron string and snap the silver
+cord and go out in the universe and find their own purposes." Davidson
+and the pimply woman didn't interfere. They merely waited and watched
+and then led Gusterson on.
+
+On the escaladder he told someone, "It's cruel to tie ticklers to
+slow-witted snaily humans when ticklers can think and live ... ten
+thousand times as fast," he finished, plucking the figure from the
+murk of his unconscious.
+
+By the time they got to the bottom, the message had become, "Ticklers
+should have a planet of their own!"
+
+They never did catch up with Fay, although they spent two hours
+skimming around on slidewalks, under the subterranean stars, pursuing
+rumors of his presence. Clearly the boss tickler (which was how they
+thought of Pooh-bah) led an energetic life. Gusterson continued to
+deliver his message to all and sundry at 30-second intervals. Toward
+the end he found himself doing it in a dreamy and forgetful way. His
+mind, he decided, was becoming assimilated to the communal telepathic
+mind of the ticklers. It did not seem to matter at the time.
+
+After two hours Gusterson realized that he and his guides were
+becoming part of a general movement of people, a flow as mindless as
+that of blood corpuscles through the veins, yet at the same time dimly
+purposeful--at least there was the feeling that it was at the behest
+of a mind far above.
+
+The flow was topside. All the slidewalks seemed to lead to the
+concourses and the escaladders. Gusterson found himself part of a
+human stream moving into the tickler factory adjacent to his
+apartment--or another factory very much like it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thereafter Gusterson's awarenesses were dimmed. It was as if a bigger
+mind were doing the remembering for him and it were permissible and
+even mandatory for him to dream his way along. He knew vaguely that
+days were passing. He knew he had work of a sort: at one time he was
+bringing food to gaunt-eyed tickler-mounted humans working feverishly
+in a production line--human hands and tickler claws working together
+in a blur of rapidity on silvery mechanisms that moved along jumpily
+on a great belt; at another he was sweeping piles of metal scraps and
+garbage down a gray corridor.
+
+Two scenes stood out a little more vividly.
+
+A windowless wall had been knocked out for twenty feet. There was blue
+sky outside, its light almost hurtful, and a drop of many stories. A
+file of humans were being processed. When one of them got to the head
+of the file his (or her) tickler was ceremoniously unstrapped from his
+shoulder and welded onto a silvery cask with smoothly pointed ends.
+The result was something that looked--at least in the case of the Mark
+6 ticklers--like a stubby silver submarine, child size. It would hum
+gently, lift off the floor and then fly slowly out through the big
+blue gap. Then the next tickler-ridden human would step forward for
+processing.
+
+The second scene was in a park, the sky again blue, but big and high
+with an argosy of white clouds. Gusterson was lined up in a crowd of
+humans that stretched as far as he could see, row on irregular row.
+Martial music was playing. Overhead hovered a flock of little silver
+submarines, lined up rather more orderly in the air than the humans
+were on the ground. The music rose to a heart-quickening climax. The
+tickler nearest Gusterson gave (as if to say, "And now--who knows?") a
+triple-jointed shrug that stung his memory. Then the ticklers took off
+straight up on their new and shining bodies. They became a flight of
+silver geese ... of silver midges ... and the humans around Gusterson
+lifted a ragged cheer....
+
+That scene marked the beginning of the return of Gusterson's mind and
+memory. He shuffled around for a bit, spoke vaguely to three or four
+people he recalled from the dream days, and then headed for home and
+supper--three weeks late, and as disoriented and emaciated as a bear
+coming out of hibernation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Six months later Fay was having dinner with Daisy and Gusterson. The
+cocktails had been poured and the children were playing in the next
+apartment. The transparent violet walls brightened, then gloomed, as
+the sun dipped below the horizon.
+
+Gusterson said, "I see where a spaceship out beyond the orbit of Mars
+was holed by a tickler. I wonder where the little guys are headed
+now?"
+
+Fay started to give a writhing left-armed shrug, but stopped himself
+with a grimace.
+
+"Maybe out of the solar system altogether," suggested Daisy, who'd
+recently dyed her hair fire-engine red and was wearing red leotards.
+
+"They got a weary trip ahead of them," Gusterson said, "unless they
+work out a hyper-Einsteinian drive on the way."
+
+Fay grimaced again. He was still looking rather peaked. He said
+plaintively, "Haven't we heard enough about ticklers for a while?"
+
+"I guess so," Gusterson agreed, "but I get to wondering about the
+little guys. They were so serious and intense about everything. I
+never did solve their problem, you know. I just shifted it onto other
+shoulders than ours. No joke intended," he hurried to add.
+
+Fay forbore to comment. "By the way, Gussy," he said, "have you heard
+anything from the Red Cross about that world-saving medal I nominated
+you for? I know you think the whole concept of world-saving medals is
+ridiculous, especially when they started giving them to all heads of
+state who didn't start atomic wars while in office, but--"
+
+"Nary a peep," Gusterson told him. "I'm not proud, Fay. I could use a
+few world-savin' medals. I'd start a flurry in the old-gold market.
+But I don't worry about those things. I don't have time to. I'm busy
+these days thinkin' up a bunch of new inventions."
+
+"Gussy!" Fay said sharply, his face tightening in alarm, "Have you
+forgotten your promise?"
+
+"'Course not, Fay. My new inventions aren't for Micro or any other
+firm. They're just a legitimate part of my literary endeavors. Happens
+my next insanity novel is goin' to be about a mad inventor."
+
+
+--FRITZ LEIBER
+
+
+
+
+    Transcriber's Note -- Changes made [original in brackets]:
+
+    "Society can't have much use for us [use]
+    It's the Cheshire [Chesire] cat in reverse.
+    "Zen ['Zen] come near me,"
+    "Ha, wouldn't you like to know?" [know? ] Fay retorted.
+    Grab a ticket to ecstasy! [ecstacy]
+    And every hundredth time it says them out loud and the
+            tickler gives [give]
+    so it can spot and follow him around then [the] target
+    Postmen deliver topside [top-side] mail
+    We-Who-Are-About-To-Die [We-Who Are-About-To-Die]
+    the scanning and [and and] decision-making
+    They 'think,' to use that archaic [archiac] word
+    did that drug-addict girl friend of yours ever take you
+            to a ["a" missing] genuine orgy
+    "Have you no heart?" Fay [Gay] demanded.
+    But Gusterson [Gunderson] was already shaking his head.
+    now-familiar triple-jointed [joined] shrug
+    just like nomads need horses.[,]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Creature from Cleveland Depths, by
+Fritz Reuter Leiber
+
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