“Are you Silent Mike?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“And are you truly silent?”
He smiled. “Depends on who’s listening.”
“Let’s assume nobody,” I said, and told him what I wanted. It turned out I could have saved my eight bucks, because he had no interest at all in my supposedly cheating wife. It was the equipment I wanted to buy that interested the proprietor of Satellite Electronics. On that subject he was Loquacious Mike.
“Mister, they may have gear like that on whatever planetyoucome from, but we sure don’t have it here.”
That stirred a memory of Miz Mimi comparing me to the alien visitor inThe Day the Earth Stood Still.“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You want a small wireless listening device? Fine. I got a bunch in that glass case right over there to your left. They’re called transistor radios. I stock both Motorola and GE, but the Japanese make the best ones.” He stuck out his lower lip and blew a lock of hair off his forehead. “Ain’t that a kick in the behind? We beat em fifteen years ago by bombing two of their cities to radioactive dust, but do they die? No! They hide in their holes until the dust settles, then come crawling back out armed with circuit boards and soldering irons instead of Nambu machine guns. By 1985, they’ll own the world. The part of itIlive in, anyway.”
“So you can’t help me?”
“Whattaya, kiddin? Sure I can. Silent Mike McEachern’s always happy to help fill a customer’s electronic needs. But it’ll cost.”
“I’d be willing to pay quite a bit. It could save me even more when I get that cheating bitch into divorce court.”
“Uh-huh. Wait here a minute while I get something out of the back. And turn that sign in the door over to CLOSED, wouldja? I’m going to show you something that’s probably not… well, maybe itislegal, but who knows? Is Silent Mike McEachern an attorney?”
“I’m guessing not.”
My guide to sixties-era electronica reappeared with a weird-looking gadget in one hand and a small cardboard box in the other.The printing on the box was in Japanese. The gadget looked like a dildo for pixie chicks, mounted on a black plastic disc. The disc was three inches thick and about the diameter of a quarter, with a spray of wires coming out of it. He put it on the counter.
“This is an Echo. Manufactured right here in town, son. If anyone can beat the sons of Nippon at their own game, it’s us. Electronics is gonna replace banking in Dallas by 1970. Mark my words.” He crossed himself, pointed skyward, and added, “God bless Texas.”
I picked the gadget up. “What exactly is an Echo when it’s at home with its feet up on the hassock?”
“The closest thing to the kind of bug you described to me that you’re gonna get. It’s small because it doesn’t have any vacuum tubes and doesn’t run on batteries. It runs on ordinary AC house current.”
“You plug it into the wall?”
“Sure, why not? Your wife and her boyfriend can look at it and say, ‘How nice, someone bugged the place while we were out, let’s have a nice noisy shag, then talk over all our private business.’?”
He was a geek, all right. Still, patience is a virtue. And I needed what I needed.
“What do you do with it, then?”
He tapped the disc. “This goes inside the base of a lamp. Not a floor lamp, unless you’re interested in recording the mice running around inside the baseboards, you dig? A table lamp, so it’s up where people talk.” He brushed the wires. “The red and yellow ones connect to the lamp cord, lamp cord’s plugged into the wall. The bug’s dead until someone turns on the lamp. When they do, bingo, you’re off to the races.”
“This other thing is the mike?”
“Yep, and for American-made it’s a good one. Now—you see the other two wires? The blue and green ones?”
“Uh-huh.”
He opened the cardboard box with the Japanese writing on it, and took out a reel-to-reel recorder. It was bigger than a pack of Sadie’s Winstons, but not by much.
“Those wires hook up to this. Base unit goes in the lamp, recorder goes in a bureau drawer, maybe under your wife’s scanties. Or drill a little hole in the wall and put it in the closet.”
“The recorder also draws power from the lamp cord.”
“Naturally.”
“Could I get two of these Echoes?”
