Naked except for the neck-chain and ID star and holding the gun, he ran down the hallway and into the stoner room. Eighty seconds to go. He could get into the cylinder and try to find room beside the hard and unsqueezable replica or he could pretend that he was just coming out of the cylinder. The second action seemed more perilous. The microsecond that destoning power went on, his wife would probably open her eyes. She would see that the door was closed. Unless he stood in front of the window of his stoner until she had gone away, she would see that other face in the window. Even if she did not see it, she would wonder why he had gotten out of his cylinder before she did. And he would have a hell of a time explaining why he kept standing in front of the cylinder window.
“Choices of equal misfortune,” he muttered.
Cursing, he opened the door and sidled in, bent over. Ten seconds to go. His foot hit the stoned shoulderbag on the floor, and he said, “Ouch!” After dropping the gun, he leaned hard against the cold and heavy dummy. It fell away from him, stopping when the side of its head hit the cylinder. He crowded in front of the dummy and straightened up. Anyone looking in would see part of it behind him.
Three seconds to go before destoning power struck. It would have no effect on him since he was not stoned. Maybe he could pull this off.
Perhaps it was the sight of his wife, recalling the one he had just left, that stabbed a panicky thought through the other panics. “Oh, my God! I forgot to complete the license application! Ozma will kill me!”
Wednesday-World
VARIETY, Second Month of the Year
D5-W1 (Day-Five, Week-One)
8.
Nokomis Moondaughter, a long-legged brunette of medium height, stepped out of the cylinder. She wore a clinging scarlet ankle-length robe slashed with black. Her thinness and sharply angled face made her look like a ballerina, which she was. She stopped just outside the cylinder door and narrowed her eyes.
Caird knew that she was wondering why he was still standing in the cylinder. He gave up his intention to “carve,” as he called the process, the persona of Bob Tingle. That would have to come later; no time for it now. Just now, he must keep her from seeing the dummy.
He pushed the door open, bounded through the doorway, and closed the door behind him quickly. Bounding again, he grabbed Nokomis and lifted her in his arms. Whirling, he danced down the hall.
“What are you doing?” she cried. “What’s gotten into you?”
He set her down in the kitchen and said, “I love you, and I’m so glad to see you! Is that so hard to understand?”
She laughed, then said, “No. Yes. Usually, you slouch out like some rough crotch-scratching beast who’s lost his way to the bathroom. You’re grumpy until you’ve had your coffee. Don’t you think you should put some clothes on?”
“Yes, you’re right. It’s too early for the sight of naked me.”
He leaned down and kissed her lips. “Shall we have coffee and talk a while? Or should we sleep first?”
She narrowed her dark eyes, and something settled over her face, what he called the suspiration of suspicion. It was like the mist formed on a mirror by a breath. Suspiration of suspicion.
“How could you forget?” she said. “You know I slept for six hours before getting up for stoning. You told me you took a nap for an hour or so while I was sleeping. You woke up just as I did. Or so you said. You never go to sleep right after a nap. Why do you want to sleep now?”
As Bob Tingle, he would have remembered what he had told her. But he was still Jeff Caird, desperate after yesterday’s events and jittery with the present urgency. The dummy. He had to deflate it.
He told himself to smooth out the rippling inside himself. Press it down with a quiet and cool mental hand.
“I’m not Tik-Tok,” he said. “I don’t run on wind-up machinery. Now and then, I use free will. Or call it whim. Or indigestion.”
“You certainly didn’t act sleepy and tired when you sprang out like a jack-in-the-box.”
Before he had married her, he had known that she was a radar set sensitized only to nonroutine phenomena, a TV channel with a wavelength of near-paranoia. She even suspected the weathercaster’s motives when rain came instead of the predicted clear skies. Perhaps that was exaggerating somewhat. But not much. As Jeff Caird, he would never have married her, would not even have dated her very long. As Bob Tingle, he had fallen in love with her. Just now, he disliked and resented her because of her suspicions, and he also was wondering why he had ever tied himself to this scrawny woman. No. He, Caird, had not done that. Tingle had.
The near-panic wrapped itself around him again. It was an octopus of ectoplasm seen and felt only by himself. But which self? Not just Caird. Caird would not have thought of such phrases as “suspiration of suspicion” and “octopus of ectoplasm.” Tingle was trying to get out, but he would never make it until Caird had a minute to go through the summoning ceremony, the ritual raising the top of Tingle’s tomb, immured in his mind and making him master of this mess—he meant “mass”—known in Wednesday as Tingle. However, Caird would never be completely gone. If he were, Caird—Tingle would be completely ineffective in his role and duties as an immer. Jeff Caird was the primary, the original.
“A jack-in-the-box!” he cried, smiling. “How about a Bob-in-the-box? Your box!”
He picked her up and whirled again. “Let’s!”
She smiled, but she said, “Let’s not. And let me down. You know I have to practice. After that… I’m not frigid, you know.”
He set her down on her feet and said, “No, you’re not, but I wonder sometimes about your thermostat. OK. Anything you want, Tippytoes. Your every desire is mine. You make the coffee, and Tingle will go tinkle.”
Caird would never have said that either. Perhaps, the evocation evulsion was evitable.
I have to stop that sort of thing, Caird thought. At least, water it down. It’s too much. But it’s a sign that Tingle lurks on the threshold of Wednesday and might come out even if I neglected the ritual. Now, however, was no time for experimenting. Too dangerous.
“You went to the toilet just before you were stoned,” Nokomis said.
Choi-oi! How did Tingle put up with her?
He was glad that he had not voiced the exclamation. Wednesday did not know it, since its main ethnic flavoring in Manhattan was not Chinese but Amerind and Bengali. Hearing that, she would have pumped her suspicions to the bursting point.
“Yes, and I have to go again,” he said.
He turned and walked down to the hall to the bathroom, which was on his right. After closing the door, he sat down on the closed toilet lid. He noted that Tuesday had forgotten to replace the toilet paper; three lone sheets clung to the spool. That however, was not worth leaving a remonstratory recording for yesterday’s yahoos.
He closed his eyes and sank into a noiseless and frictionless world. His image of himself as Caird hung solid, bright, and full-sized before him. Watching it with one eye, as it were, he spun the other eye, also imaginary, so that it turned inward. That saw at first only darkness. Then, quickly, many sagging lines, gray in the black, formed. They seemed to stream from the abyss within his body, flying past the eye into the abyss above. He straightened them out until they were so tight that they hummed with tension. He increased the pressure at each end, though he did not know where their ends were, until it seemed that the lines, now glowing brightly and coldly, would snap. He hurled heat at them. The “heat” was comet-shaped energy complexes, each of which struck a line and was absorbed, though not entirely. Some of the heat slid down or up the lines, like drippings from a candle. It was up to them which way they went. Here, in his mind, there was no gravity.
No gravy, either, he thought. Or maybe he was wrong. The drippings did remind him of hot gravy.
The lines of force were used to suppress himself and bring forth Tingle. Who, when summoned from the floor of his mind like the ghost of Samuel evoked by the Witch of Endor, would change from ghost to gu
est. Today’s guest.
He increased the strain on the lines. They snapped and then darted wriggling and shining in the darkness. They went here and there, colliding, then coalescing, until all had touched and melted together and formed one slim, long, and glowing column. It seemed upright, that is, stretching from the darkness below to the darkness above. Now, he rotated it so that it was at right angles to its previous position, and he spun it so fast that it melted from a column into a blurry disc.
The other eye saw that the image of Caird had lost much of its brightness and had shrunk. No wonder. The heat hurled at the lines had been sucked from Caird. Now, a line, the boundaries of a trap door, formed around the image’s feet. Sometimes, the image to be done away with was shot up like a rocket or rolled into a ball and hurled down an alleyway with phantom bowling pins at the far end. Today the image was to be dropped through a floor.
The second eye watched the spinning and bright white disc as its sharp edge cut a block from the darkness and then began cutting away parts of the blackness. A rough figure was left from the hewing away of the darkness, a figure that became gray as it absorbed some of the light from the disc. Which became darker as the figure gained a finer form.
When Tingle was almost perfected, the first eye gave a mental order, and the image of Caird dropped through the trap door. The lines forming the door vanished.
Now, both eyes focused on Tingle, and, as the disc became black and small, having lost its heat and worn its edge to almost nothing, Tingle floated glowing in the blackness.
Presently, the disc disappeared, and the image of Tingle was shot upward so swiftly that its friction formed a long ghostly comet tail.
His eyes turned outward, and he opened his lids. Bob Tingle had landed, though not without a residue of Caird. Ninety-eight percent of him was Wednesday’s tenant; two percent, Tuesday’s. Enough of Caird was left to remember the dummy still inflated in the stoner. What would he do if Nokomis saw it? He could not give her an explanation that would satisfy her. And he could not tell her the truth. Why had he ever gotten into this mess?
He rose from the seat and started toward the door. He stopped, grimaced, snapped his fingers, and turned back. If Nokomis did not hear the toilet flushing, she would come galloping down the hall to find out why not. She always noticed the breaking of a pattern, the nonhappening of events that should happen unless something was wrong. He pressed the button, and, as the water roared, he stepped into the hall.
Usually, he was almost all Bob Tingle by now, though Jeff Caird would not have really dropped entirely through the imaginary trap door. Always, Caird was a speck in the eyeball, a tiny itch in the skin of the mind, not noticed by Tingle unless there was a good reason for him to be noticed. As just now, when the dummy had to be deflated. What made him even more present was that Chang Castor was loose in Wednesday—probably—and Tingle could not ignore him.
Tingle looked down the hall. He could not see Nokomis, but she might think of something to fetch from the PP closet.
He called, “I’m going to get dressed! Anything you want from the closet?”
Nokomis said, cheerily, “Nothing, dear! The coffee’ll be ready soon!”
Nokomis would now be destoning the lox and bagels for their breakfast. After that, she’d put the bagels in the toaster. He would have to be dressed by then or she would be looking down the hall to see where he was.
He ran to his stoner, opened the door, and bent down. After he had removed the plug from the base of the dummy, he shut the door and ran to the closet marked WEDNESDAY. He said, “Open,” and a mechanism, recognizing his voiceprint, released the lock so that he could swing the tall door out. He snatched the nearest robe, slid it over his head, said, “Close,” and hurried back down the hall after a glance to assure himself that Nokomis was not looking after him. He opened the stoner again.
“Damn!”
The dummy was deflating too slowly.
He pressed down on it, aware of the louder hissing as the air left it. Nokomis, however, had turned on a strip. The voices should drown the hissing.
When the replica was half-collapsed, he stepped into the cylinder and closed the door. He shoved down on the dummy until it was completely deflated, then rolled it up and put it in the little bottle in the shoulderbag. The gun also went into the bag. Though he knew that Thursday’s ID star was in the bag, he could not resist checking to make sure. His fingers touched the tips of the star.
He stepped out backward and closed the door. Breathing more heavily than he liked, he walked toward the kitchen. Just before he got to it, he saw Nokomis come around the corner.
“There you are. The bagels are getting cold.”
He followed her to the balcony, where a small round table held coffee, orange juice, and the food. He sat down opposite Nokomis. There was just enough light from the street to make him and his wife seem to be in a gray limbo. The katydids and tree frogs were still singing.
He sipped hot coffee and looked at his Tuesday home. Its windows were bright, but he could see no one in it. Enough of Caird lingered for him to think briefly of Ozma, standing in the cylinder. Ozma, waiting to see him six days from now.
Nokomis, as almost always, looked lovely. Her skin was darker in this dimness than the beautiful copper it showed in sunlight. Her black hair was cut close and spotted with white dye to give it Wednesday’s current “skunky” look.
Nokomis had tried to get Tingle to spot his hair and grow a beard, which would be cut to the fashionable square shape. He had refused, though he could not give her, of course, his true reasons for not being in mode.
He thought: the clothes in the hamper. I must not forget to hide them better.
Nokomis, halfway through her second cup of coffee, perked up. She began chattering away about her role in the new ballet, Proteus and Menelaus. It had not opened yet, and its troubles were many.
“…composer is crazy. She thinks atonal music is something new. She won’t listen when you tell her it was dead ten generations ago. Roger Shenachi is constipated, and every time he comes down from a grand jeté he farts something awful. I told Fred…”
“Fred?”
“Haven’t you been listening? Pay attention. I just hate talking to myself, you know that. Fred Pandi is the big muckamuck; she wrote the story, composed the music, and did the choreography. I told her she should rewrite the whole thing around Roger, call it Gas or something like that, and while she was at it, she should throw out the music and write something that could at least be danced to…”
“I’m sure you’re artist enough to overcome all that,” Tingle said. “Anyway, since when does a ballerina, even one of your stature, have any say in—”
“Thank you, but you don’t understand. I have a say in it, a big one, because I’m a committee member, as you know very well. At least, I’m supposed to be one, but the composer and the orchestra director are lovers, and they gang up on the rest of us.”
“Two doesn’t make a gang.”
“What do you know about it, Bob?”
“Not much. What’s this about a committee? Since when has a committee ever produced great art?”
“Oh, don’t you ever listen? I told you all about it last yesterday. Or was it the day before? Never mind, I did tell you.”
“Oh, sure, I remember,” he said. “Whose idea was that?”
“Some bureaucrat’s. I’m sure the other days don’t have such problems. It’s just…”
9.
Though it was not fair to let his mind wander, he could not help it. Gril, Rootenbeak, and Castor had risen from the depths like sunken ships filled with gas from decaying corpses. Never before, well, hardly ever before, had he found it hard to shut out the other days. Usually, when he was in Wednesday, he was almost completely Bob Tingle; Wednesday was sufficient unto itself. Now, the pattern and routine had been shattered. There were three daybreakers on the loose, and two could be very dangerous. Well, one could be. Rootenbeak might come across him and reco
gnize him, but it was not likely that he would say anything to the authorities about Bob Tingle looking so much like Jeff Caird. Unless he did so anonymously via TV. Castor…that maniac could have been lurking nearby in the shadows and seen him running from the house to this apartment building. Or Castor might be apprehended at any moment and, as Horn had put it, spill the beans.
“Bob!”
Tingle pulled himself from his mental morass.
“Sure, I agree with you. Committees stink. But look at it this way. If you were living in the old days, you wouldn’t have a thing to say about the production. This way, you might get some things changed.”
“Committees are just like balloons, always up in the air, subject to the whims of the winds or of the windy, and they come down when they run out of gas. I’m telling you, the whole show’s going to crash. Utterly crash! And I’ll be ruined, utterly ruined!”
He sipped on the coffee and said, “Tell you what. I am an official at the World Data Bank…”
“I know that. What about it?”
“I’ll find out if there’s anything in the way of blackmail material that can be used against the committee members, especially against Pandi and Shenachi. You can use it, if I find any, that is, to get those two to knuckle under. Of course, I might have to dig up dirt about everyone on the committee.”
She rose from the chair, came around the table, and kissed him. “Oh, Bob, do you think you could?”
“Sure. Only…doesn’t the ethics bother you? It’ll be…”
“It’s for art’s sake!”
“Mostly for your sake, isn’t it?”
“I’m not just thinking about me,” she said. She went back to the chair and poured more coffee. “It’s the whole production. I’m thinking organically. For everybody’s good.”
“I don’t know that I can get enough leverage to pry the composer loose from her atonal music. Even if I could, that means a long delay, a new score written.”