The Creature from Cleveland Depths | Page 8

shook myself
all my flesh and guts would fall off my shimmying skeleton, Brr! Fay,
before you and Micro go off half cocked, I want you to know there's
one insuperable objection to the tickler as a mass-market item. The
average man or woman won't go to the considerable time and trouble it
must take to load a tickler. He simply hasn't got the compulsive
orderliness and willingness to plan that it requires."
"We thought of that weeks ago," Fay rapped, his hand on the door.
"Every tickler spool that goes to market is patterned like wallpaper with
one of five designs of suitable subliminal supportive euphoric material.
'Ittier and ittier,' 'viriler and viriler'--you know. The buyer is
robot-interviewed for an hour, his personalized daily routine laid out
and thereafter templated on his weekly spool. He's strongly urged next
to take his tickler to his doctor and psycher for further
instruction-imposition. We've been working with the medical
profession from the start. They love the tickler because it'll remind
people to take their medicine on the dot ... and rest and eat and go to
sleep just when and how doc says. This is a big operation, Gussy--a
biiiiiiig operation! 'By!"
Daisy hurried to the wall to watch him cross the park. Deep down she
was a wee bit worried that he might linger to attach a micro-resonator
to this building and she wanted to time him. But Gusterson settled
down to his typewriter and began to bat away.
"I want to have another novel started," he explained to her, "before the
ant marches across this building in about four and a half weeks ... or a

million sharp little gutsy guys come swarming out of the ground and
heave it into Lake Erie."

IV
Early next morning windowless walls began to crawl up the stripped
skyscraper between them and the lake. Daisy pulled the black-out
curtains on that side. For a day or two longer their thoughts and
conversations were haunted by Gusterson's vague sardonic visions of a
horde of tickler-energized moles pouring up out of the tunnels to tear
down the remaining trees, tank the atmosphere and perhaps somehow
dismantle the stars--at least on this side of the world--but then they both
settled back into their customary easy-going routines. Gusterson typed.
Daisy made her daily shopping trip to a little topside daytime store and
started painting a mural on the floor of the empty apartment next theirs
but one.
"We ought to lasso some neighbors," she suggested once. "I need
somebody to hold my brushes and admire. How about you making a
trip below at the cocktail hours, Gusterson, and picking up a couple of
girls for a starter? Flash the old viriler charm, cootch them up a bit,
emphasize the delights of high living, but make sure they're compatible
roommates. You could pick up that two-yard check from Micro at the
same time."
"You're an immoral money-ravenous wench," Gusterson said absently,
trying to dream of an insanity beyond insanity that would make his next
novel a real id-rousing best-vender.
"If that's your vision of me, you shouldn't have chewed up the VV
mask."
"I'd really prefer you with green stripes," he told her. "But stripes, spots,
or sun-bathing, you're better than those cocktail moles."
Actually both of them acutely disliked going below. They much
preferred to perch in their eyrie and watch the people of Cleveland

Depths, as they privately called the local sub-suburb, rush up out of the
shelters at dawn to work in the concrete fields and windowless factories,
make their daytime jet trips and freeway jaunts, do their noon-hour and
coffee-break guerrilla practice, and then go scurrying back at twilight to
the atomic-proof, brightly lit, vastly exciting, claustrophobic caves.
Fay and his projects began once more to seem dreamlike, though
Gusterson did run across a cryptic advertisement for ticklers in The
Manchester Guardian, which he got daily by facsimile. Their three
children reported similar ads, of no interest to young fry, on the TV and
one afternoon they came home with the startling news that the monitors
at their subsurface school had been issued ticklers. On sharp
interrogation by Gusterson, however, it appeared that these last were
not ticklers but merely two-way radios linked to the school police
station transmitter.
[Illustration]
"Which is bad enough," Gusterson commented later to Daisy. "But it'd
be even dirtier to think of those clock-watching superegos being
strapped to kids' shoulders. Can you imagine Huck Finn with a tickler,
tellin' him when to tie up the raft to a tow-head and when to take a
swim?"
"I bet Fay could," Daisy countered. "When's he going to bring you that
check, anyhow? Iago wants a jetcycle and I promised Imogene a Vina
Kit and then Claudius'll have to have something."
Gusterson scowled