Short Fiction - Fritz Leiber (desktop ebook reader .TXT) 📗

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 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 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 hardtop 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