atches the thing away from Marta and starts
pounding on Avarice, taking unholy glee in the way the stuff alternately
softened and stiffened as he squeezed it. Avarice wrestled it away from him and
tore off for a knot of kids and by the time I got there they were all crowded
around her, spellbound. I caught a cab back to my buddy's apartment and grabbed
all the Ardorite I could lay hands on and brought it back to the park and spent
the next couple hours running an impromptu focus group, watching the kids and
their bombshell nannies play with it. By the time that Marta touched my hand
with her long cool fingers and told me it was time for her to get the kids home
for their nap, I had twenty-five toy ideas, about eight different ways to use
the stuff for clothing fasteners, and a couple of miscellaneous utility uses,
like a portable crib.

"So I ran it down for my pal that afternoon over the phone, and he commed his
boss and I ended up eating Thanksgiving dinner at his boss's house in
Westchester."

"Weren't you worried he'd rip off your ideas and not pay you anything for them?"
Szandor's spellbound by the story, unconsciously unrolling and re-rolling an Ace
bandage.

"Didn't even cross my mind. Of course, he tried to do just that, but it wasn't
any good -- they were engineers; they had no idea how normal human beings
interact with their environments. The stuff wasn't self-revealing -- they added
a million cool features and a manual an inch thick. After prototyping for six
months, they called me in and offered me a two-percent royalty on any products I
designed for them."

"That musta been worth a fortune," says Szandor.

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Actually, they folded before they shipped
anything. Blew through all their capital on R&D, didn't have anything left to
productize their tech with. But my buddy *did* get another gig with a company
that was working on new kitchen stuff made from one-way osmotic materials and he
showed them the stuff I'd done with the Ardorite and all of a sudden I had a
no-fooling career."

"Damn, that's cool."

"You betcha. It's all about being an advocate for the user. I observe what users
do and how they do it, figure out what they're trying to do, and then boss the
engineers around, getting them to remove the barriers they've erected because
engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how
normal people do stuff."

The doctor chuckles. "Look," he says,