Steel Beach Read Free Page B

giant cockroach, nor will I perish in existential despair. There’s even some rock ’em sock ’em action, for those of you who wandered in from the Saturday Matinee. What more could you ask?
    So you’ve been warned. From here on in, you’re on your own.
     
    The tube capsule back to King City was a quarter full. I used the time to try to salvage something from the wasted afternoon. Looking around me, I saw that all my colleagues were busy at the same task. Eyes were rolled up, mouths hung open, here and there a finger twitched. It had to be either a day trip from the Catatonic Academy, or the modern press at work.
    Call me old-fashioned. I’m the only reporter I know who still uses his handwriter except to take notes. Cricket was young enough I doubted she’d ever had one installed. As for the rest of them, over the last twenty years I’d watched as one after the other surrendered to the seductions of Direct Interface, until only I was left, plodding along with antique technology that happened to suit me just fine.
    Okay, so I lied about the open mouths. Not all D.I. users look like retarded zombies when they interface. But they look asleep, and I’ve never been comfortable sleeping in public places.
    I snapped the fingers of my left hand. I had to do it twice more before the handwriter came on. That worried me; it was getting harder to find people who still knew how to work on handwriters.
    Three rows of four colored dots appeared on the heel of my left hand.
    By pressing the dots in different combinations with my fingertips I was able to write the story in shorthand, and watch the loops and lines scrawl themselves on a strip of readout skin on my wrist, just where a suicide would slash himself.
    There couldn’t be that many of us left who knew Gregg. I wondered if I ought to apply for a grant under the Preservation of Vanishing Skills act. Shorthand was certainly useless enough to qualify. It was at least as obsolete as yodeling, and I’d once covered a meeting of the Yodeling Society. While I was at it, maybe I could drum up some interest in the Preservation of the Penis.
     
    (File #Hildy*next avail.*)(code Unitingle)
(headline to come)
     
    How far do you trust your spouse? Or better yet, how much does your spouse trust you!
    That’s the question you’ll be asking yourself if you subscribe to United Bioengineers’ new sex system known as ULTRA-Tingle.
    ULTRA-Tingle is the new, improved, up-dated version of UniBio’s mega-flop of a few years back, known simple as Tingle. Remember Tingle? Well, don’t feel bad. Nobody else does, either. Somewhere, in some remote cavern in this great dusty globe we feel sure there must be someone who converted and stayed that way. Maybe even two of them. Maybe tonight they’re Tingling each other. Or maybe one of them has a tingle-ache.
    If you are a bona fide Tingler, call this padloid immediately, because you’ve won a prize! Ten percent off on the cost of your conversion to ULTRA-Tingle. Second prize: a discount on two conversions!
    What does ULTRA-Tingle offer the dedicated sexual adventurer? In a word: Security!
    Maybe you thought sex was between your legs. It’s not. It’s in your head, like everything. And that is the miracle of ULTRA-Tingle. Merely by saying the word you can have the great thrill of caponizing your mate. You, too, can be a grinning gelding. Imagine the joys of cerebral castration! Be the first in your sector to rediscover the art of psychic infibulation! Who but UniBio could raise impotence into the realm of integrated circuits, elevate frigidity from aberration to abnegation?
    You don’t believe me? Here’s how it works:
    (to come: *insert UniBio faxpad #4985 ref. 6-13.*)
    You may ask yourself: Whatever happened to old fashioned trust? Well, folks, it’s obsolete. Just like the penis, which UniBio assures us will soon go the way of the Do-do bird. So those of you who still own and operate a trouser-snake, better start thinking of a place to