Squeeze Play

It looked like a radio, but it wasn't! All you had to do was concentrate and things you thought about became real!


excerpt

We sat down like I said, and Ham--the barkeep at Oscar's on the night shift --brought us our beer. I took a sip to wet my tongue and leaned close to Pokey and said in a low voice.


"Whatdaya think?"


This jerk thinks I'm talking to him. He turns one stale eye in my direction and tries to bring my face in focus.


"You might be right," he says in a surprisingly reasonable tone of voice for a drunk. And then--oh Brother!--he says: "But you overlook the fact that because of the intimate coalition between the cerebral mass on the one hand and the oral and manual motors on the other, the repercussions of the cortical hypertrophy upon these motors has instigated the trespass from their legitimate preserve of the technological operations upon the ambit of visceral operations with dire contravention of the principle of intrinsic motivation."


After that he blinked his eye owlishly and again tried to bring my face into focus.


Well, that stymied me. Threw my mind out of gear, you might say. I might have ignored the whole thing as beneath my dignity except for the fact that just that afternoon I had read a story about a guy who meets up with a scientist with a gadget in a beer parlor just like this one, and makes a fortune off the deal they cook up over a glass of beer. I don't think this is anything like that, you understand; but I don't know what the guy's talking about and I can't let him get away with it without a try.


So I put on my most intellectual sneer and says: "Oh, yeah? I suppose you got a machine that'll prove it! "