Dayworld (12 page)

Snick would have checked on this. She also would have asked Wednesday’s organic data monitors to notify her the moment that Gril made his move. Why, then, require him to report on Gril?

Was she really after something else? Was Gril just an excuse to cover up another interest, the driving interest, in his activities?

He wished now that he had confined his chessgames with Gril to just one of his roles. As it was, every day, in each persona, he had played a game with Gril. Tomorrow, Snick would follow the Gril line to Jim Dunski. She would know then that Bob Tingle and Jim Dunski were the same. Perhaps she already knew that Jeff Caird and Bob Tingle were the same.

No, that surely could not be. She would have arrested him and by now would be grilling him in the closest interrogation room. Perhaps she really was just looking for Gril.

Why, then, had a Sunday organic been chosen to track down a Monday daybreaker?

Whatever her reasons, she must not see him in Thursday. Actually, she did not have to see him in the flesh. One look at Jim Dunski’s face on a data screen would be enough.

“I’m not being too curious, I hope,” he said. “I wonder why you were sent after Gril. Why is his case so unusual? From what I’ve heard, daybreakers are handled by the organics of each day. I never heard of an organic using a temporal visa to go after one.”

“We have our reasons.”

“Oh, I see. None of my business.”

“My call number is a special one. X-X. Easy to remember. If Grit’s game appears, you will call me at once? No delay?”

“Of course. X-X.” He grinned. “It’ll be easy. A double cross.”

Her face was blank. Either she did not get the reference or she was cool enough to ignore it.

She laughed and said, “Yankev Gril, heh? Do you know what Yankev and Grit mean in Yiddish?”

“No. Should I?”

“Yankev is James, which could be Jimmy. Gril means Cricket. Which means that you’re looking for Jimmy Cricket.”

“I suppose so,” she said. “But I don’t see anything amusing or relevant in it. Am I missing something?”

She looked at her watch, and she rose. He stood up, too.

“Just some fun, something to make life a little easier. Puns are a lubricant.”

“I think they’re stupid,” Snick said. “But they’re not against the law, though if...”

“You had your way, they would be.”

“That’s antisocial thinking. No, I wasn’t going to say that.” Whatever she was going to say stayed unsaid. She walked swiftly away without a good-bye, but she did turn her head and say, “I may see you again, Maha Tingle.”

“Hope not,” he muttered. But he sighed. Snick was one of the prettiest women he had ever seen, a seal-fairy, but she did not stir admiration and lust in him. She scared him.

He went down the hail, inserted the ID tip into the hole in the door, and entered as it swung back. The first-shift data banker was already gone. The office was dome-shaped, twenty feet in diameter across the floor, and walled with strips from the floor to the center of the ceiling. In the middle was a chair around which was a circular desk. A small control box sat on the desk. He lifted the flap in the desk and went within the “charmed circle.” After putting the flap down, he sat in the chair. It could rotate so that he could see every strip, and it could be tilted back so he could read the upper displays comfortably.

He punched in a code known only to himself. The strips glowed with the data and photographs that had been on when he had quit work last Wednesday. Reluctant to put aside a project he loved, he scanned the strips for a few minutes. This was an unofficial job ordered unofficially by Paz, who had gotten his orders from his superior. Tingle was not supposed to know who Paz’s chief was. But he had found out through an unofficial investigation of which Paz was unaware.

One of Tingle’s characteristics was a dangerous curiosity, sometimes bordering on the reckless. The immer council would have been alarmed if it had known about it. But it had verified the stability of Jeff Caird’s character, and it had not thought of the possibility that Bob Tingle was not the same person as Jeff Caird. Caird, in programing Tingle’s character, had indulged himself. Yet he knew that he could not have developed certain Tingle traits if these had not existed in embryo in Caird, sternly suppressed though not aborted.

The first stage of the project was to get statistics on the number of people “semi-permanently” stoned and put in storage for the last one hundred subyears. These had been dying of incurable physical diseases or had mental diseases not responding to therapy or were habitual criminals who could not be “cured.” When science found the method for restoring these people to health, they would be destoned.

That was the theory. The government had issued figures about the numbers of “abeyants,” as they were called. Paz had asked Tingle to find out if the Wednesday world government was lying. Official statistics said that 46,947,269 people had been put into abeyance as of when Tingle had started the project. Tingle, after four subyears of discreet inquiry via many channels, had found that the real number was 86,927,326. This, of course, was only those who had been semipermanentized (government jargon) in Wednesday. Tingle and Paz assumed that the other dayworlds were doing much the same and that there were approximately 609,000,000 semipermanents.

Paz had then asked Tingle to determine if any successful therapies to treat the abeyants had been developed during the past twenty subyears. This task was easier than the first. Tingle had discovered that enough various “cures” or therapies had been published and put into practice to permit destoning at least 30,000,000 of Wednesday’s abeyants. By extrapolation, 210,000,000 of the entire population.

Not one of Wednesday’s 30,000,000 possibles had been destoned so that the new techniques and therapies could be used on them. Nor had any public proposals been made to do so.

“In the first place,” Tingle had said to Paz, “it would take, at the rate of a million cured per subyear, if that could be done, thirty subyears to restore them. Meanwhile, at least 40,000 are piling up, literally, in storage. The backlog of approximately 87,000,000 will be untouched.

“There’s no need to look for sinister motives in the government’s neglect. It just made a promise that it can’t keep. I’m sure that others have discovered what I did, but their reports have been suppressed.”

“Then all those millions might as well have died,” Paz had said.

“Not necessarily. Maybe ... someday ... we’ll have the number of medical personnel and the system and the funds necessary to fulfill that promise.”

“Sure,” Paz had said. He had looked down at his belly and pinched the lowest of his three chins. “And someday everybody will eat only the amount they need.”

Tingle had thought that, if all the world’s abeyants were to be cured, their overwhelming numbers would be such a problem that an eighth day would have to be added to the week.

“Why do you want this information?” Tingle had said.

“Perhaps we immers can use that as a weapon someday.”

“Blackmail? Extortion? Threat?”

Paz had replied with a grin.

Now, in the last stage of the project, Tingle was “ghosting” into biographical data records and the conversations of some high officials in both the Manhattan and the world government. A device that had been made, he supposed, in the secret laboratory of the immers enabled him to unscramble the dialogs. At first, he had been pleased with the device. Then he realized that what the immers could do, the government secret scientists could do. Which meant that the immer scramblers could be unscrambled any day now or might be right now.

He had passed the word on up via his superior, and that had resulted in the immers’ changing their scrambler format every few weeks.

Tingle had asked Paz about the motive behind his eavesdropping. Paz had said that Tingle had no need to know. Tingle’s theory, kept to himself, was that the immer council meant to use the information as future protection for itself. Or, perhaps, it was using it now to pressure these officials for its own obscure but doubtless worthy reasons.

During his “ghosting,” Tingle had selected and stored certain data. If he should need protection for himself, he would not be above using it.

Thinking of this, he was touched by a “ghost” of the thought that he, Tingle, would not hesitate to use blackmail if he had to. But Caird, his Tuesday client, would have considered that dishonorable.

Looking at the strips, he was reminded that he was supposed to get coercion data for Nokomis’ use. That could not be done today, which meant that she was going to be angry with him. He sighed. Snick was his number-one priority. If he had time, he could tackle the Castor problem.

He muttered, “Castor should have been put in abeyance as soon as possible. Then we wouldn’t be having this crisis.”

The immer council must have been aware of what needed doing. But the legal procedure for stoning Castor as an incurable required that he be thoroughly questioned. He might not have revealed his immer identity to the authorities, especially if he had insisted that he was God. The immer council, however, could not take that chance. It had had to keep him alive as a possibly curable mental patient.

Tingle sighed again and, whistling softly the tune of “The Criminal Creed,” Ko-Ko’s song in Gilbert and Sullivan’s
The Mikado,
started work on Project Snick. The strip displays were replaced by the codes needed to break into the Sunday organic files. These were provided by an immer data bank not to be used except in extreme emergencies. Which this was. Tingle, however, had to wield them carefully, since it was possible that a security system other than the one he knew was now being used by the Sunday data bankers.

Sunday’s people were all stoned—except for Snick, of course—but when they awoke on their appointed day, they would know that someone had tried to ghost into the bank. If, that is, Tingle’s requests for data tripped the alarm. If this happened, he would have to cover his own electronic tracks. He might even have to wipe out the immer data bank to keep the organics from tracing it to the source.

Within fifteen minutes, Tingle had gotten from six different sources all the available biographical data re Panthea Pao Snick. After two hours of trying every safe approach and every relevant circuit, he gave up trying to get her official orders for her mission. Either they were inaccessible or she had gotten them verbally.

At least, he knew all her weaknesses. That is, all that had been recorded. From his own experience, however, he knew that she could have withheld some of them from the government psychicists. He was just going to start his inquiries into Castor when all the operating strips flashed red and the data displays faded. Startled, he spoke into the strip connected with the door. His heart was beating fast, telling him that he was not as calm as he wanted to be. He was more distressed than he had admitted to himself.

“It’s me,” Paz’s voice said.

The security system was set up to warn Tingle and to turn off the displays if anyone tried to talk to him through the strips or inserted a lock-tip into the door hole.

Tingle pressed a button. The door swung open. Though he knew that Paz would have warned him if he had a companion, he swung around on the chair to make sure. Paz strode in; the door swung shut.

Tingle opened his mouth to tell his chief that he had not taken as much time with Snick as he had expected. The paleness and grimness of Paz’s face cut off his intention. He said, “What’s the matter?”

“The news on the organic channel! Somebody’s been killed in the house next to your apartment building! I don’t know, of course. It may be just a coincidence, but Castor ...”

Tingle had risen to greet Paz. Suddenly feeling woozy, he sat back down.

Paz said, “Hey, what’s the matter?”

In that moment, Tingle had become a little less Tingle and a little more of Caird.

“Who’s been killed?”

“Hell, I don’t know!” Paz said loudly. “They were just bringing out the body. I thought since you live next door and Castor ... maybe he was found there and he got killed. Or he killed someone in the house by mistake.”

Paz did not know that Caird lived next door to Tingle. It was not necessary that he have that information.

“I think ...” Tingle said.

Paz said, “Yes?” He looked expectantly at Tingle.

Tingle made a dismissing motion with his hand.

“Never mind. Turn the channel on. We’ll wait and see. This may have nothing to do with us. There are a dozen explanations ...”

Paz breathed in deeply several times. “Yes. I probably jumped the gun, got spooked. It’s just a coincidence. But if Castor was cornered there and killed, that’s all to the good.”

The strip showed blue-uniformed organics on the sidewalk and in the street holding back the curious. Three news crews were shooting the scene. There were several patrol cars and an ambulance from the coroner’s office parked near the curb. Two men were guiding a cart down the steps, its wheels moving up and down to adjust to the steps. On top of the cart, strapped down, was a green bodybag—filled.

The face of Channel 87’s on-the-spot reporter, Robert Amanullah, appeared on the screen. He said, “We’ve just talked to Maha Aditi Rotwa via ...”

The strip went blank.

12.

“Organic cutoff,” Paz said. “What’re they suppressing?”

Whatever the reason, other cameras were still operating. Paz ordered two other channels on, and these showed the scene from different angles. After a thirty-second delay, Channel 87 came back on. Amanullah was talking again but not saying a word about the identity of the body. This was put into the ambulance, which moved away slowly through the crowd. Once beyond the onlookers, the ambulance picked up speed but did not turn on its lights and siren. There was no hurry.

From what reporters said, someone had been murdered in the house. No details were known as yet. When the reporters got the story from the organics, they would broadcast it. Meanwhile ... two of the cameras shifted to the East Side and other reporters took over the on-the-spot news there. Channel 87 continued its coverage, probably because Amanullah was angry at being censored.