Black Gondolier and Other Stories (36 page)

“Every employee except the top executives, of course,” Gusterson interrupted jeeringly. “And that's not demoting you, Fay. As the R and 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 horrible.”

“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 smudge proof.”

Gusterson said, “It better be.” Then his face got 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 superego 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 off 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 aluminum-bronze pseudo-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, he unclipped a hand from the rail and touched the second switch beside his headlamp, which instantly began to blink white, 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 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 poling 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 espied 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 spell
id
,” Gusterson said absently, still staring at the interweaving crowd beyond them, trying to figure out what made them different from the last trip. “Creativity fuel. Cranky. Explodes through the parietal fissure if you look at it cross-eyed. Been known to kill knot-heads, open minds, and other people with holes in their heads.”

“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 backward? 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 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. “Think of it as underground surfing,” Fay said. “It's exhilarating . . . if you view it the right way,” he trailed off wanly.

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 if moving faaaassst. Nationwise, adult underground ticklerization is ninety 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.”