“Are you absolutely sure of that?” Gusterson asked quietly.
“Why, Gussy, you big oaf—” Fay began heatedly. Suddenly his features quirked and he twitched. “’Scuse me, folks,” he said rapidly, heading for the door, “but my tickler told me I gotta go.”
“Hey Fay, don’t you mean you told your tickler to tell you when it was time to go?” Gusterson called after him.
Fay looked back in the doorway. He wet his lips, his eyes moved from side to side. “I’m not quite sure,” he said in an odd strained voice and darted out.
Gusterson stared for some seconds at the pattern of emptiness Fay had left. Then he shivered. Then he shrugged. “I must be slipping,” he muttered. “I never even suggested something for him to invent.” Then he looked around at Daisy, who was still standing poker-faced in her doorway.
“Hey, you look like something out of the Arabian Nights,” he told her. “Are you supposed to be anything special? How far do those stripes go, anyway?”
“You could probably find out,” she told him coolly. “All you have to do is kill me a dragon or two first.”
He 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.”