Today there are even devices that can tickle a victim’s pleasure center from a distance. Tasps are illegal on most worlds, and expensive to make, but they are used. (A dour stranger wanders past, rage or misery written in the sour lines of his face. From behind a tree you make his day. Plink! His face lights up. For a moment he’s got no worries at all… ) They don’t generally rain lives. Most people can take it.

The timer clicked and switched off the droud.

Louis seemed to sag in upon himself. He reached across his smooth scalp to the base of the long black braid, and pulled the droud from its socket beneath the hair. He held it in his hand, considering; then, as always, he dropped it into a drawer and locked it. The drawer disappeared. The desk, which seemed a massive wooden antique, was actually paper-thin hullmetal, with endless room for secret compartments.

It was always a temptation to reset the timer. He’d done it routinely in the early years of his addiction. Neglect had made of him a skeletal rag doll, constantly dirty. Finally he had gathered what remained of his ancient dogged determination, and he had built a timer that took twenty minutes of nitpicking concentration to reset. On its present setting it would give him fifteen hours of current and twelve hours for sleep and for what he called maintenance.

The corpses were still there. Louis had no idea what to do about that. If he’d called the police immediately, it would still have attracted unwanted attention… but what could he tell them now, an hour and a half late? That he’d been knocked unconscious? They’d want to deep-radar his head for fractures!

This he knew: in the black depression that always followed his time under the wire, he simply couldn’t make decisions. He followed his maintenance routine like a robot. Even his dinner was preprogrammed.

He drank a full glass of water.