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.