Davidson listened for instructions and then nodded. But he watched Gusterson warily as they walked down the hall.
In the elevator Gusterson repeated his message to the second guard, who turned out to be the pimply woman, now wearing shoes. This time he added, “Ticklers shouldn’t be tied to the frail bodies of humans, which need a lot of thoughtful supervision and drug-injecting and can’t even fly.”
Crossing the park, Gusterson stopped a hump-backed soldier and informed him, “Ticklers gotta cut the apron string and snap the silver cord and go out in the universe and find their own purposes.” Davidson and the pimply woman didn’t interfere. They merely waited and watched and then led Gusterson on.
On the escaladder he told someone, “It’s cruel to tie ticklers to slow-witted snaily humans when ticklers can think and live … ten thousand times as fast,” he finished, plucking the figure from the murk of his unconscious.
By the time they got to the bottom, the message had become, “Ticklers should have a planet of their own!”
They never did catch up with Fay, although they spent two hours skimming around on slidewalks, under the subterranean stars, pursuing rumors of his presence. Clearly the boss tickler (which was how they thought of Pooh-bah) led an energetic life. Gusterson continued to deliver his message to all and sundry at 30-second intervals. Toward the end he found himself doing it in a dreamy and forgetful way. His mind, he decided, was becoming assimilated to the communal telepathic mind of the ticklers. It did not seem to matter at the time.
After two hours Gusterson realized that he and his guides were becoming part of a general movement of people, a flow as mindless as that of blood corpuscles through the veins, yet at the same time dimly purposeful—at least there was the feeling that it was at the behest of a mind far above.
The flow was topside. All the slidewalks seemed to lead to the concourses and the escaladders. Gusterson found himself part of a human stream moving into the tickler factory adjacent to his apartment—or another factory very much like it.
Thereafter Gusterson’s awarenesses were dimmed. It was as if a bigger mind were doing the remembering for him and it were permissible and even mandatory for him to dream his way along. He knew vaguely that days were passing. He knew he had work of a sort: at one time he was bringing food to gaunt-eyed tickler-mounted humans working feverishly in a production line—human hands and tickler claws working together in a blur of rapidity on silvery mechanisms that moved along jumpily on a great belt; at another he was sweeping piles of metal scraps and garbage down a gray corridor.
Two scenes stood out a little more vividly.