Dayworld (6 page)

“No, I never saw the stiff before, and if I ever see him again I’ll put a banana in him where the sun don’t shine.”

Ruiz had plugged in the woman’s ID before questioning her. Caird was running it off now after instructing the computer to expand and make orange any references to Rootenbeak. After a few seconds, a paragraph swelled and began flashing. Caird stopped its rollup to read it. Pallanguli had been Rootenbeak’s neighbor on the fourth floor of a Dominick Street apartment building three objective years ago.

He sighed with exasperation. Pallanguli must know that that would be in her file, yet she had lied. Was she just stupid or perverse? It made no difference. She must be brought in for questioning. But he would have bet thirty credits that her story was made up. Rootenbeak had asked her for help and gotten it. Moreover, he had gotten two other minnies to give a false story. Instead of turning left and running south and then entering the building, he had turned right and gone ... where? Someplace close to but outside the police net.

That is, unless he was subtle enough to calculate that the person in charge would think of this and so he had, instead, actually entered the building. No. There was too much danger of outsmarting himself.

Caird would have called off the apartment search if he had been one hundred percent sure that he was right. He did ask for more personnel to widen the net and to send organics into nearby block buildings. He was told that he could get no more than ten people.

Caird glanced at the strip with its flashing APPL ON HOLD! No time for that now. The application for permission for Ozma to have a child by him would have to be transmitted later.

Another message appeared on a strip. It was from the commissioner-general’s secretary, asking him if he could move the luncheon date up to 11:30 A.M. He replied that he could. The strip displayed: RCVD & TRMD.

His request for satellite data re the search for Rootenbeak came in then. Usually, he got it within ten minutes. Today, for unexplained reasons, the channels were clogged. Caird studied the pictures and then called the Hudson Park substation for more personnel. He wanted ten more foot organics but was told that none would be available for several hours or more.

“Why not?”

“I’m sorry, Inspector,” the sergeant said. “But we have a particularly gory murder on Carmine Street. Two victims, a woman and a child.”

Caird was shocked. “That makes two murders in Manhattan this subyear, and the second month isn’t over yet. My God, there were only six all last subyear!”

The sergeant nodded solemnly. “It’s become an epidemic. Social rot, sir, though the terrible heat is a contributing factor.”

After Caird had quit talking to the sergeant, he sat and scowled. The organic force could have been much larger and he would not now be lacking personnel if every organic was not required to get a Doctor of Philosophy degree in criminology. But, no, every candidate had to pass a psychological test (which was also a subtle ideological test), which eliminated five out of ten. After this, the candidate studied for six subjective years at West Point. Then, if the candidate could survive the rigorous discipline and get a
B
average in the courses, he or she became an Organic Department foot-patroller, zero class.

Ah, well, he could only work with what he could get. By three this afternoon, according to the weather-strip report, he could no longer depend upon the sky-eyes. A heavy overcast would cut off their view.

5.

When eleven o’clock came, Rootenbeak still had not been observed or caught. Caird worked for a few minutes at other duties before leaving the building. A station-pool robot car took him up Womanway Boulevard to Columbus Circle and up Central Park West to West Seventy-seventh Street. The John Reed Community Block Building occupied all of the Number 100 blocks of Seventy-sixth and Seventy-seventh streets, including the enclosed streets. Just north of it was the Museum of Natural History. Caird got out of the car just off the third-level ramp. The car moved slowly away and disappeared down the west ramp. He walked into a huge lobby decorated this year in Mycenaean Mode. Golden Agamemnon masks smiled at him from the walls, ceiling, and floor. In the middle of the lobby was a fountain holding a statue of Ajax defying the gods. A yellow fluorescent jagged lightning bolt of plastic reached halfway down from the ceiling toward the arrogant and doomed Achaean. This piece of statuary had been selected by some bureaucrat who thought that it would subtly put across a moral. If you were stupid enough to resist the government, you were fried.

However, despite one-hundred-percent literacy and free lifelong education if you wanted it, nine-tenths of the viewers had never heard of Ajax, the first human lightning rod, and most of the others did not care about him. The moral was lost, and the art was, Caird thought, tacky.

He went up a pneumatic elevator to the top floor and got off at the entrance to the Zenith Restaurant at 11:26. He told the maître d’ that his reservation had been made by Commissioner Horn. The maître d’ tapped three keys; the screen displayed Caird’s face and some lines of bio-data.

“Very well, Inspector Caird. Follow me.”

The Zenith was very elegant and select. Six musicians on a podium played softly, and the conversation was in low tones. That is, it was until Anthony Horn rose from her table to greet him. She strode toward him, arms out, her orange-and-purple robe flapping in her wake. “Jeff, darling!”

The other diners looked up or flinched or both as her voice boomed out. Then he was enfolded in silk, perfume, and abundant flesh. Looking down her breasts was like looking along the curve of twin planets from forty thousand feet up. He did not mind having his face pressed against them, even though it was undignified. For a brief moment, he was happy and secure in the bosom of the Great Mother Herself.

She released him and smiled, showing big white teeth. Then she turned and led him by the hand to the table in the meat-eaters’ section. She was six inches higher than his six feet three, though her high heels accounted for four of the inches. Her shoulders and hips were broad; her waist, very narrow. Her golden hair was piled high in a coiffure shaped like an eighteenth-century tricorn hat, all the fashion just now. Huge golden earrings, each inset with the Chinese ideogram for “horn,” dangled from small close-set ears.

They sat down, and she leaned against the table, her breasts extending like two white wolfhounds eager for release so they could chase the prey. Her big deep-blue eyes connected with his. In a much lower tone, she said, “We have a big bad problem, Jeff.”

His eyebrows rose. He said, softly, “The government’s found out about us?”

“Not yet. We ...”

She stopped what she was going to say because the waiter, a tall, turbaned, bearded Sikh, had appeared. They were busy ordering drinks and looking at the printed menus for a while. The Zenith was too elegant to display the menus on wall strips. When the waiter had left, Horn said, “You know about Doctor Chang Castor?”

He nodded. “He hasn’t escaped?”

“Yes, he has.”

Caird grunted as if he had been hit in the solar plexus, but just then the waiter brought his wine and Horn’s gin, and two minutes later, a folding table and two trays with dishes of food. It did not take long to fill an order. The food was precooked anywhere from last Tuesday to two subyears ago, stoned, and so kept in perfect state. Destoned, it only needed warming and putting on the plate.

They chatted about their families until the waiter left. Caird jerked a thumb at the waiter’s back.

“He’s an informer?”

“Yes. I used my connections and a code I’m not supposed to have to identify the informers here. The place isn’t bugged, though, and there are no directional mikes. Too many bigshots eat here.”

She cut into her steak and chewed on a small piece. “I ... it’s not just that you’re an organic and we can work through you. It’s much more personal ... involved ... for you.”

After swallowing the meat, she sipped at her gin. The moderation told Caird that she was deeply shaken. Any other time, she would have half-emptied her tall glass before the food was served. Obviously, she was afraid of dulling her wits.

Chang Castor was an immer and a brilliant scientist, head of the physics department at the Retsall Advanced Institute. He had always been eccentric, but, when he had begun showing signs of mental sickness, the immer organization had acted at once. It had framed him so that he seemed to be much more mentally unstable than he really was at the time. He had been committed to an institution that, though owned by the government, was secretly controlled by immers. There, Castor had quickly slid into deep psychotic quicksand in which it seemed that he would stick until he died. Fourteenth-century medical science, for all its advances, was unable to pull him out.

Caird remembered a lunch with Horn at another place when she had told him that Castor believed that he was God.

“He’s an atheist,” Caird had said.

“Was. Well, in a sense, he still is. He says that the universe was formed through sheer chance. But its structure is such that it finally and inevitably, after many eons, gave birth to God. Himself, Castor. Who has now ordained matters so that there is no such thing as chance. Everything that happens from the moment his Godhood was crystallized—which also happened by chance, the last time that chance existed in the universe—everything that happened from that moment is fixed by him. Capital Him, by the way. He insists on being addressed as Your Divinity or O Great Jehovah.

“Anyway, he says that there was no God until he came along. So he divides cosmic time into two eras—B.G., that is, Before God. And A.G., After God. He will tell you the precise second when the new chronology began even if you don’t ask him.”

That conversation had taken place three obyears ago.

Anthony Horn said, softly, “God hates you.”

Caird said, “What?”

“Don’t look so confused and guilty. By God I mean Castor, of course. Castor hates you, and he’s out to get you. That’s why I had to call you in on this.”

“Why? I mean ... why does he hate me? Because I was the one who arrested him?”

“You got it.”

The whole operation had been immer-directed and immer-controlled. Horn, a lieutenant-general then, had given him private orders to take Castor into custody. Caird had gone to the neighborhood of the Retsall Institute. By chance, or so it seemed, he had been handy when the frame had been put into action. Two other immers had smashed up the laboratory but blamed it on Castor. By then the victim was raving and had attacked the two because of his fury at the put-up job. Caird had taken him to the nearest hospital as organic routine required him to. But, shortly thereafter, the courts having been advised by Dr. Naomi Atlas, also an immer, Castor was transferred to the Tamasuki Experimental Psychicist Hospital on West Forty-ninth Street. Since then, no one had seen him except for Atlas and three first-class nurses. Only Atlas was allowed to talk to him.

“It could have been someone else,” Horn said. “Anyone who arrested him. It was your bad luck to be the one.”

She sipped at her gin, put the glass down, and said quietly, “In a way, he’s a Manichaean. He’s split the universe into good and evil, just as he split time. Evil is the tendency of the cosmos to revert to chance in its operations. But chance has to be directed.”

“How in hell could chance be directed?”

Horn shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Who am I to question God? You don’t expect conventional logic from a crazy, do you? Castor has no trouble reconciling his schizophrenic contradictions. In that, he’s far from being alone. What matters is what he thinks. In his divine wisdom and perception, he knows that you are the Secret and Malignant Director of Chance. He refers to you as Satan, The Great Beast, Beelzebub, Angra Mainyu, and a dozen other names. He’s said that he will find you, vanquish you, and hurl you howling and with utter ruin and complete combustion into the deepest pit.”

“Why wasn’t I told about this before?”

“Don’t look so indignant. People will notice. Because there was no need for it. You know we try to keep all communication at a minimum. I was the only one to hear about Castor from Atlas, and that was at parties or social functions and not much was said about it then.”

Tony was silent for a moment. Then she leaned forward again and spoke even more softly.

“The orders are to stone him and hide the body if it’s possible. If not, kill him.”

Caird gave a slight start, and he sighed.

“I knew it would come to this someday.”

“I hate it,” Tony said. “But it’s for the common good.”

“Of the immers, you mean.”

“Everybody’s. Castor is hopelessly insane, and he’s dangerous to anyone who gets in his way.”

“I’ve never killed anybody,” Caird said.

“You can do it. I can do it.”

He shook his head. “Our psych tests showed that we could, but they’re not one hundred percent accurate. I won’t know until I either must do it or can’t do it.”

“You will. You’ll catch him, and you’ll do what must be done. Listen, Jeff ...”

She put one hand on his and stared into his eyes. He stiffened.

“I ...”

She cleared her throat.

“I got the decision on ... Arid ... from the council today. I’m sorry, really sorry, Jeff. But …”

“She’s been rejected!”

She nodded. “They say she’s too unstable. The psych projection is that she’d be burdened with too much social conscience. She’d break eventually and confess all to the authorities. Or, if she didn’t, she’d have a mental breakdown.”

“They don’t really know, they don’t really know,” he murmured.

“They know enough. They can’t take the chance.”

“There’s no use appealing right now,” he said harshly. “Not in a case like this. Tell me. Was the decision final or will they reconsider in five years? After all, Arid’s only twenty. She could mature.”

“You can try again then. The psych projection, however ...”

“That’s enough,” he said. “Are you finished?”