He drew out his pancake phone and stretched it so that it covered both their lower faces, like a double yashmak. Gusterson, his neck pushing into the ribbed bulge of the shoulder cape so he could be cheek to cheek with Fay, felt horribly conspicuous, but then he noticed that none of the slidestanders were paying them the least attention. The reason for their abstraction occurred to him. They were listening to their ticklers! He shuddered.
“I got six pages of caution on ticklers,” he repeated into the hot, moist quiet of the pancake phone. “I typed ’em so I wouldn’t forget ’em in the heat of polemicking. I want you to read every word. Fay, I’ve had it on my mind ever since I started wondering whether it was you or your tickler made you duck out of our place last time you were there. I want you to—”
“Ha-ha! All in good time.” In the pancake phone Fay’s laugh was brassy. “But I’m glad you’ve decided to lend a hand, Gussy. This thing is moving faaaasst. Nationwise, adult underground ticklerization is 90 per cent complete.”
“I don’t believe that,” Gusterson protested while glaring at the hunchbacks around them. The slidewalk was gliding down a low glow-ceiling tunnel lined with doors and advertisements. Rapt-eyed people were pirouetting on and off. “A thing just can’t develop that fast, Fay. It’s against nature.”
“Ha, but we’re not in nature, we’re in culture. The progress of an industrial scientific culture is geometric. It goes n-times as many jumps as it takes. More than geometric—exponential. Confidentially, Micro’s Math chief tells me we’re currently on a fourth-power progress curve trending into a fifth.”
“You mean we’re goin’ so fast we got to watch out we don’t bump ourselves in the rear when we come around again?” Gusterson asked, scanning the tunnel ahead for curves. “Or just shoot straight up to infinity?”
“Exactly! Of course most of the last power and a half is due to Tickler itself. Gussy, the tickler’s already eliminated absenteeism, alcoholism and aboulia in numerous urban areas—and that’s just one letter of the alphabet! If Tickler doesn’t turn us into a nation of photo-memory constant-creative-flow geniuses in six months, I’ll come live topside.”
“You mean because a lot of people are standing around glassy-eyed listening to something mumbling in their ear that it’s a good thing?”
“Gussy, you don’t know progress when you see it. Tickler is the greatest invention since language. Bar none, it’s the greatest instrument ever devised for integrating a man into all phases of his environment. Under the present routine a newly purchased tickler first goes to government and civilian defense for primary patterning, then to the purchaser’s employer, then to his doctor-psycher, then to his local bunker captain, then to him. Everything that’s needful for a man’s welfare gets on the spools. Efficiency cubed! Incidentally, Russia’s got the tickler now. Our dip-satellites have photographed it. It’s like ours except the Commies wear it on the left shoulder … but they’re two weeks behind us developmentwise and they’ll never close the gap!”
Gusterson reared up out of the pancake phone to take a deep breath. A sulky-lipped sylph-figured girl two feet from him twitched—medium cootch, he judged—then fumbled in her belt-bag for a pill and popped it in her mouth.