The Creature from Cleveland Depths

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 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, unclipped a hand from the rail and touched the second switch beside his headlamp, which instantly began to blink whitely, 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 half-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 poking 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 esped 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 spells id,” Gusterson said absently, still staring at the interweaving crowd beyond them, trying to figure out what made them different from last trip. “Creativity fuel. Cranky. Explodes through the parietal fissure if you look at it cross-eyed.”

“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 backwards? 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 a 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.

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 is moving faaaasst. Nationwise, adult underground ticklerization is 90 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.”

“Ha, but we’re not in nature, we’re in culture. The progress of an industrial scientific culture is geometric. It goes n-times as many jumps as it takes. More than geometric — exponential. Confidentially, Micro’s Math chief tells me we’re currently on a fourth-power progress curve trending into a fifth.”

“You mean we’re goin’ so fast we got to watch out we don’t bump ourselves in the rear when we come around again?” Gusterson asked, scanning the tunnel ahead for curves. “Or just shoot straight up to infinity?”

“Exactly! Of course most of the last power and a half is due to Tickler itself. Gussy, the tickler’s already eliminated absenteeism, alcoholism and aboulia in numerous urban areas — and that’s just one letter of the alphabet! If Tickler doesn’t turn us into a nation of photo-memory constant-creative-flow geniuses in six months, I’ll come live topside.”

“You mean because a lot of people are standing around glassy-eyed listening to something mumbling in their ear that it’s a good thing?”

“Gussy, you don’t know progress when you see it. Tickler is the greatest invention since language. Bar none, it’s the greatest instrument ever devised for integrating a man into all phases of his environment. Under the present routine a newly purchased tickler first goes to government and civilian defense for primary patterning, then to the purchaser’s employer, then to his doctor-psycher, then to his local bunker captain, then to him. Everything that’s needful for a man’s welfare gets on the spools. Efficiency cubed! Incidentally, Russia’s got the tickler now. Our dip-satellites have photographed it. It’s like ours except the Commies wear it on the left shoulder … but they’re two weeks behind us developmentwise and they’ll never close the gap!”

Gusterson reared up out of the pancake phone to take a deep breath. A sulky-lipped sylph-figured girl two feet from him twitched — medium cootch, he judged — then fumbled in her belt-bag for a pill and popped it in her mouth.

“Hell, the tickler’s not even efficient yet about little things,” Gusterson blatted, diving back into the privacy-yashmak he was sharing with Fay. “Whyn’t that girl’s doctor have the Moodmaster component of her tickler inject her with medicine?”

“Her doctor probably wants her to have the discipline of pill-taking — or the exercise,” Fay answered glibly. “Look sharp now. Here’s where we fork. I’m taking you through Micro’s postern.”

A ribbon of slidewalk split itself from the main band and angled off into a short alley. Gusterson hardly felt the constant-speed juncture as they crossed it. Then the secondary ribbon speeded up, carrying them at about 30 feet a second toward the blank concrete wall in which the alley ended. Gusterson prepared to jump, but Fay grabbed him with one hand and with the other held up toward the wall a badge and a button. When they were about ten feet away the wall whipped aside, then whipped shut behind them so fast that Gusterson wondered momentarily if he still had his heels and the seat of his pants.

Fay, tucking away his badge and pancake phone, dropped the button in Gusterson’s vest pocket. “Use it when you leave,” he said casually. “That is, if you leave.”

Gusterson, who was trying to read the Do and Don’t posters papering the walls they were passing, started to probe that last sinister supposition, but just then the ribbon slowed, a swinging door opened and closed behind them and they found themselves in a luxuriously furnished thinking box measuring at least eight feet by five.

“Hey, this is something,” Gusterson said appreciatively to show he wasn’t an utter yokel. Then, drawing on research he’d done for period novels, “Why, it’s as big as a Pullman car compartment, or a first mate’s cabin in the War of 1812. You really must rate.”

Fay nodded, smiled wanly and sat down with a sigh on a compact overstuffed swivel chair. He let his arms dangle and his head sink into his puffed shoulder cape. Gusterson stared at him. It was the first time he could ever recall the little man showing fatigue.

“Tickler currently does have one serious drawback,” Fay volunteered. “It weighs 28 pounds. You feel it when you’ve been on your feet a couple of hours. No question we’re going to give the next model that antigravity feature you mentioned for pursuit grenades. We’d have had it in this model except there were so many other things to be incorporated.” He sighed again. “Why, the scanning and decision-making elements alone tripled the mass.”

“Hey,” Gusterson protested, thinking especially of the sulky-lipped girl, “do you mean to tell me all those other people were toting two stone?”

Fay shook his head heavily. “They were all wearing Mark 3 or 4. I’m wearing Mark 6,” he said, as one might say, “I’m carrying the genuine Cross, not one of the balsa ones.”

But then his face brightened a little and he went on. “Of course the new improved features make it more than worth it … and you hardly feel it at all at night when you’re lying down … and if you remember to talcum under it twice a day, no sores develop … at least not very big ones….”

Backing away involuntarily, Gusterson felt something prod his right shoulderblade. Ripping open his coat, he convulsively plunged his hand under it and tore out Fay’s belt-bag … and then set it down very gently on the top of a shallow cabinet and relaxed with the sigh of one who has escaped a great, if symbolic, danger. Then he remembered something Fay had mentioned. He straightened again.

“Hey, you said it’s got scanning and decision-making elements. That means your tickler thinks, even by your fancy standards. And if it thinks, it’s conscious.”

“Gussy,” Fay said wearily, frowning, “all sorts of things nowadays have S&DM elements. Mail sorters, missiles, robot medics, high-style mannequins, just to name some of the Ms. They ‘think,’ to use that archaic word, but it’s neither here nor there. And they’re certainly not conscious.”

“Your tickler thinks,” Gusterson repeated stubbornly, “just like I warned you it would. It sits on your shoulder, ridin’ you like you was a pony or a starved St. Bernard, and now it thinks.”

“Suppose it does?” Fay yawned. “What of it?” He gave a rapid sinuous one-sided shrug that made it look for a moment as if his left arm had three elbows. It stuck in Gusterson’s mind, for he had never seen Fay use such a gesture and he wondered where he’d picked it up. Maybe imitating a double-jointed Micro Finance chief? Fay yawned again and said, “Please, Gussy, don’t disturb me for a minute or so.” His eyes half closed.

Gusterson studied Fay’s sunken-cheeked face and the great puff of his shoulder cape.

“Say, Fay,” he asked in a soft voice after about five minutes, “are you meditating?”

“Why, no,” Fay responded, starting up and then stifling another yawn. “Just resting a bit. I seem to get more tired these days, somehow. You’ll have to excuse me, Gussy. But what made you think of meditation?”

“Oh, I just got to wonderin’ in that direction,” Gusterson said. “You see, when you first started to develop Tickler, it occurred to me that there was one thing about it that might be real good even if you did give it S&DM elements. It’s this: having a mech secretary to take charge of his obligations and routine in the real world might allow a man to slide into the other world, the world of thoughts and feelings and intuitions, and sort of ooze around in there and accomplish things. Know any of the people using Tickler that way, hey?”

“Of course not,” Fay denied with a bright incredulous laugh. “Who’d want to loaf around in an imaginary world and take a chance of missing out on what his tickler’s doing? — I mean, on what his tickler has in store for him — what he’s told his tickler to have in store for him.”

Ignoring Gusterson’s shiver, Fay straightened up and seemed to brisken himself. “Ha, that little slump did me good. A tickler makes you rest, you know — it’s one of the great things about it. Pooh-Bah’s kinder to me than I ever was to myself.” He buttoned open a tiny refrigerator and took out two waxed cardboard cubes and handed one to Gusterson. “Martini? Hope you don’t mind drinking from the carton. Cheers. Now, Gussy old pal, there are two matters I want to take up with you—”

“Hold it,” Gusterson said with something of his old authority. “There’s something I got to get off my mind first.” He pulled the typed pages out of his inside pocket and straightened them. “I told you about these,” he said. “I want you to read them before you do anything else. Here.”

Fay looked toward the pages and nodded, but did not take them yet. He lifted his hands to his throat and unhooked the clasp of his cape, then hesitated.

“You wear that thing to hide the hump your tickler makes?” Gusterson filled in. “You got better taste than those other moles.”

“Not to hide it, exactly,” Fay protested, “but just so the others won’t be jealous. I wouldn’t feel comfortable parading a free-scanning decision-capable Mark 6 tickler in front of people who can’t buy it — until it goes on open sale at twenty-two fifteen tonight. Lot of shelterfolk won’t be sleeping tonight. They’ll be queued up to trade in their old tickler for a Mark 6 almost as good as Pooh-Bah.”

He started to jerk his hands apart, hesitated again with an oddly apprehensive look at the big man, then whirled off the cape.