Short Fiction Fritz Leiber (free e books to read .txt) 📖

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 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 brainwaves, maybe, or his unique smell!⁠—so it can spot and follow him around then 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. And night missiles are scarier.”

“I know that building’s been empty for a year,” Daisy 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 fragments and fell away, to be followed quickly by 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 pushes 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?”

Daisy was staring around the violet-walled room with dumb mistrust. Her hands were trembling.

“You don’t have to worry,” Fay assured her with an understanding laugh. “This building’s safe for a month more at least.” Suddenly he grimaced and leaped a foot in the air. He raised a clawed hand to scratch his shoulder but managed to check the movement. “Got to beat it, folks,” he announced tersely. “My tickler gave me the grand cootch.”

“Don’t go yet,” Gusterson called, rousing himself with a shudder which he immediately explained: “I just had the illusion that if I 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 blackout curtains on that side. For a day or two longer their