by Fritz Leiber
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. Coué. 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. Coué 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 cootchto—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! ’Bye!”
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.
“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.
“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.”