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 thoughtfully. "You know, Daze," he said, "I got a
feeling Fay's in the hospital, all narcotized up and being fed
intravenously. The way he was jumping around last time, that tickler
was going to cootch him to pieces in a week."

* * * * *

As if to refute this intuition, Fay turned up that very evening. The
lights were dim. Something had gone wrong with the building's old
transformer and, pending repairs, the two remaining occupied
apartments were making do with batteries, which turned bright globes
to mysterious amber candles and made Gusterson's ancient typewriter
operate sluggishly.

Fay's manner was subdued or at least closely controlled and for a
moment Gusterson thought he'd shed his tickler. Then the little man
came out of the shadows and Gusterson saw the large bulge on his right
shoulder.

[Illustration]

"Yes, we had to up it a bit sizewise," Fay explained in clipped tones.
"Additional super-features. While brilliantly successful on the whole,
the subliminal euphorics were a shade too ef