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!”