studied her. "My God," he said reverently, "I really have all the
fun in life. What do I do to deserve this?"

"You've got a big gun," she told him, "and you go out in the world
with it and hold up big companies and take yards and yards of money
away from them in rolls like ribbon and bring it all home to me."

"Don't say that about the gun again," he said. "Don't whisper it,
don't even think it. I've got one, dammit--thirty-eight caliber,
yet--and I don't want some psionic monitor with two-way clairaudience
they haven't told me about catching the whisper and coming to take the
gun away from us. It's one of the few individuality symbols we've got
left."

Suddenly Daisy whirled away from the door, spun three times so that
her silvered hair stood out like a metal coolie hat, and sank to a
curtsey in the middle of the room.

"I've just thought of what I am," she announced, fluttering her
eyelashes at him. "I'm a sweet silver tickler with green stripes."

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-pitch