by Fritz Leiber
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 Doré 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 tr
oop 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.