straightened up and seemed to brisken
himself. "Ha, that little slump did me good. A tickler _makes_ you
rest, you know--it's one of the great things about it. Pooh-Bah's
kinder to me than I ever was to myself." He buttoned open a tiny
refrigerator and took out two waxed cardboard cubes and handed one to
Gusterson. "Martini? Hope you don't mind drinking from the carton.
Cheers. Now, Gussy old pal, there are two matters I want to take up
with you--"

"Hold it," Gusterson said with something of his old authority.
"There's something I got to get off my mind first." He pulled the
typed pages out of his inside pocket and straightened them. "I told
you about these," he said. "I want you to read them before you do
anything else. Here."

Fay looked toward the pages and nodded, but did not take them yet. He
lifted his hands to his throat and unhooked the clasp of his cape,
then hesitated.

"You wear that thing to hide the hump your tickler makes?" Gusterson
filled in. "You got better taste than those other moles."

"Not to hide it, exactly," Fay protested, "but just so the others
won't be jealous. I wouldn't feel comfortable parading a free-scanning
decision-capable Mark 6 tickler in front of people who can't buy
it--until it goes on open sale at twenty-two fifteen tonight. Lot of
shelterfolk won't be sleeping tonight. They'll be queued up to trade
in their old tickler for a Mark 6 almost as good as Pooh-Bah."

He started to jerk his hands apart, hesitated again with an oddly
apprehensive look at the big man, then whirled off the cape.

VI

Gusterson sucked in such a big gasp that he hiccuped. The right
shoulder of Fay's jacket and shirt had been cut away. Thrusting up
through the neatly hemmed hole was a silvery gray hump with a one-eyed
turret atop it and two multi-jointed metal arms ending in little
claws.

It looked like the top half of a pseudo-science robot--a squat evil
child robot, Gusterson told himself, which had lost its legs in a
railway accident--and it seemed to him that a red fleck was moving
around imperceptibly in the huge single eye.

"I'll take that memo now," Fay said coolly, reaching out his hand. He
caught the rustling sheets as they slipped from Gusterson's fingers,
evened them up very precisely by tapping them on his knee ... and then
handed them over his shoulder to his tickler, which clicked its claws
around either margin and then began rather swiftly to lift the top
sheet past its