Black Gondolier and Other Stories (34 page)

“Bushwa,” Fay retorted. “In that case you shouldn't write memorandums or even take notes.”

“Maybe I shouldn't,” Gusterson agree 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. Remember, Fay, how in
Alice in Wonderland
the Cheshire Cat faded until even its teeth were gone and only the smile was left? This thing'll start with a nasty gleam and get an eye and then go on from there. 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 going 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—the girl with the spiky voom-voom bazoom.” 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. 'Bye 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 goose step. 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 and 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 thousand?” 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 Comstaff,” 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 high-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 afterward.”

“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 teenagers rioted through Tunnel-Mart wearing them. And VV's suing 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—inside my ear—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. “Ballsier and ballsier?”

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've 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 fingerprints—or brain waves, maybe, or his unique smell!—so it can spot and follow him around and 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 teenagers 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 evildoers, 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. It's okay to come topside daytimes. But night missiles are scarier. And then there are the wild animals from the Wastes. No kidding, Gussy, don't you hear wolf-howls at night?”

“Only the groans of the deer dying from hunger and lack of hunters,” the latter assured him.

Daisy brought them back to the topic at hand.

“I know that building's been empty for a year,” she 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 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 pulses 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?"