Dayworld Rebel

  “We could have put them with these,” Locks said, waving his hand to indicate the silent ranks. “But they wouldn’t balance. They’d fall over. Besides, who knows? The government might decide to send in auditors. They sometimes do that. We wouldn’t want them to find those two. They’d know this place was being used for purposes other than official. And that might lead them to look around until they found the trap door.”

  Later, when he was able to speak to Duncan with no one else around, he said, “I’ll tell you tomorrow some of what we’re going to do with you. Provided, of course, you volunteer to do it.”

  “I’m ready for anything.”

  “Good! But it’s not something we can prepare for overnight.”

  When bedtime came and the band went down to the room to sleep, Locks was absent. Duncan thought that he must be in the data bank room, completing the operation that had been interrupted by the appearance of the dirigible.

  He slept long and, from his stiffness on awakening, hard. He remembered one terrifying dream in which Mika Dong and Mel Crossant, stoned, moving as if on wheels, had come out of a fog and pointed accusing fingers at him. Their eyes glowed as if lit by fire. He rose, groaning, though his headache was almost gone, and cursed himself for the nightmare. Rationally, he should have no regrets, no knifecut of conscience. But he, like all citizens, had been conditioned from infancy to loathe violence. Which did not keep the government, he reminded himself, from using violence in its dealings with criminals. And he, according to what the psychicist had told him, had once been an organic who had killed several people.

  Feeling much better after exercise and breakfast, he went with Locks and Cabtab to the data bank office. The Decider turned on the computers and indicated a wall screen. This showed three photos of Duncan, face-on and the right and left profiles. Beneath the photos was the biographical data.

  “I want you to look closely at this before it’s printed as an ID card,” Locks said. “If there’s anything you object to or if you see any discrepancy, anything that might cause you trouble, we’ll change it before printing.”

  Ten minutes later, the machine tongued forth a ceramic card.

  “It looks valid,” Duncan said.

  “It is. The data to validate it is in the bank. But if somebody gets suspicious and starts tracking it down, you’re in trouble. It’ll take time to invalidate it, though.”

  “So now I’m David Ember Grim.”

  “Yes. A citizen of the state of Manhattan and a computer specialist, second-grade, who’s been on loan to the agricultural complex of Newark, New Jersey. Your application to migrate to Los Angeles has been accepted. Tuesday’s Los Angeles is just now receiving immigrants of various ethnic-national mixes from selected states in North America and India. These will replace the fifty thousand being sent to China. You’ll be in the twentieth group to go from Manhattan. It’s up to you if you want to go express, stoned, that is, or travel on a passenger train. That’s slower, but you’ll be able to see the country.”

  “Passenger, for sure,” Duncan said. “I’ve never been out of Manhattan. Until recently, that is.”

  “You’ll have all the documents needed for that tomorrow. It takes my man in…never mind…longer to arrange that. You have two weeks to memorize the details. Meanwhile, we have several members working on the mystery of why you’re so badly wanted. It’s very slow, delicate, and dangerous work. If the data bankers think it’s too touchy, they’ll quit the search. Getting codes isn’t at all easy, and it’s usually done by corrupting the code-keepers. That’s easier and safer than trying to hack into them. Relatively safer, that is. It’s all dangerous. In fact, we wouldn’t be sneaking in where angels fear to tread if we weren’t convinced of your importance. Something’s made the government frantic to find you. Ironic, isn’t it, that you don’t know yourself what it is?”

  Duncan nodded, and he said, “Two weeks? Obweeks?”

  “Obweeks. Fourteen normal-sequence days from now.”

  “Meantime, the organics are in a frenzy. One of these days they’re going to think of looking here no matter how ridiculous it might seem to them that outlaws could be holed up here.”

  “That’s a possibility we’re considering. But we have to stay here until the hunt dies down.”

  “It won’t.”

  Duncan thought about what would happen if Locks was captured after he, as David Ember Grim, had left. Locks would be subjected to truth mist, would reveal all, and the organics would go after citizen Grim.

  Locks rose from the chair. “Let’s take a walk to the new section. I always like to look over the latest consignment. There might be a candidate there, a recruit. I’ve not found anyone so far I’ve wanted to take a chance on. Still, new faces, new hope.”

  On the way, Duncan said, “What do you know of the facilities in that village I saw from the window yesterday?”

  “Station NJ3?”

  “You didn’t say what its name was. Is there a biolab there?”

  The three were in an ascending elevator. Locks squinted at Duncan. “Yes, there is. A rather large one. Why?”

  “Do you know the layout? Have you ever scouted it?”

  “You’ve got something up your nose, haven’t you? A brainbug?”

  “Maybe.”

  “No, we haven’t gone near it. Why?”

  “Could you get its layout through the data bank? Without rippling any monitor?”

  The elevator stopped, and they got out. They were in a room even larger than the one they were living in. This, however, had row on row of open cubes rising to the ceiling, which was at least a hundred feet up. There were elevator shafts between the vertical rows of cubes, and each was occupied by about fifty stonees.

  “Yes, it could be done. And would, if the returns were worth the risk.”

  “If we could get a detailed plan of the building and if it could be entered, would you do it? Provided, of course, that the results might far outweigh the danger?”

  Locks moved one side of his mouth. “Well…?”

  “It takes about sixty seconds to scan completely a human body and to store the data. That data can be used to duplicate the body. Under special conditions, forced growth, etcetera, a duplicate can be grown in a week. The biologists have never succeeded in making a duplicate that lives more than a day or two. There are always slight flaws in the duplication because the scanner is not perfect. Those many little flaws result in a dead body or one that soon dies. It looks on the surface, skinwise, you might say, just like the original. It’s useful only for scientific experiments. It—”

  “By God!” Locks said. “I see what you’re driving to, I think! You want us…” He put his hand on Duncan’s shoulder and began laughing. Between explosions, he said, “…to make a duplicate of you and then put it someplace…oh, my!”

  “Where the ganks will find it and will think I died. It’ll have to be somewhat decomposed, not enough for the fingerprints or retinaprints to be lost. When they find that, they’ll…”

  “It’s a great idea, a wild idea, I should say. It’d be splendid…only…how the hell could we pull it off? How’re we going to get into the lab, and if we do, how’re we going to set it up so that the lab people ignore the body growing in their vat?”

  “Let me think about that.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” Locks said.

  “Not until I figure out a workable plan.”

  “I’ll chant for that,” Padre Cob had rumbled behind them.

  By then they had come to the area where the latest consignment had been set up. Fifty of them stood on the lowest level of a chamber, thirty men and twenty women. Locks took his time looking at the faces and reading the plaques hung from chains around their necks. Duncan walked slowly by them, wondering what had brought them to this state and place. He did not bother to read the plaques. And then he stopped before one. The woman was short, five feet eight inches high, slim-bodied with small perfect breasts. Her short black hair was sleek,
reminding him of a seal’s fur, and her open eyes, large and brown, also recalled a seal’s. The face was delicate-boned, high-cheeked, and triangular.

  Duncan bent down to see the inscription on the ceramic plaque.

  PANTHEA PAO SNICK.

  The lines beneath were in code which seemed familiar but which he could not quite comprehend. They trembled like heat waves on the edge of his mind, shimmerings almost ready to form into definite images. And the face. It, too, shaped something. What?

  “Come here, will you?” he called to Locks. “Read this for me.”

  “You know her?” Locks said.

  “Not quite, but it seems to me I should.”

  Locks frowned. “I can read the ID number. The rest…it’s in a code I never saw before.”

  “Isn’t that peculiar?”

  “Damned peculiar. There’s something special about her.”

  Locks removed the plaque. “Let’s take it up to computer. Maybe we can find what it’s all about.”

  But, after the code had been fed into the machine, the screen displayed: ACC DEN.

  “Access denied,” Locks said, and he turned the machine off. “I hope that isn’t reported. If they get curious because a request issued from an unauthorized site…”

  Locks asked Cabtab and Duncan to leave. “I trust you, but what you don’t know you can’t tell the ganks.”

  Ten minutes later, Locks called them back into the office. He was smiling. “I put in a request through a certain channel, and my contact got some data. Snick was an organic detective-major, a Sunday citizen, but she had a temporal visa to operate in other days. A temporary temporal. That’s all my informant could find on her aside from the usual biodata. He couldn’t get what case she was working on. But—this is significant—she just disappeared from the bank. Nothing current on her. My informant didn’t pursue the search. He was very careful; he didn’t want to warn the monitors; he was afraid to push his search too far.”

  “Why don’t we destone her and ask her?” Duncan said. “That’s the logical thing to do.”

  “I don’t know she’s that important,” Locks said.

  “How’re we going to find out unless she’s questioned?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Duncan decided that, if Locks wouldn’t do it, he would.

  9

  On Thursday, the weather conditions at 11:00 P.M. were just what the band had been waiting for. Having seen the predictions on the TV in the warehouse office, Locks knew that no better situation would be coming again for at least two weeks. He and six others, Duncan among them, were huddled under trees near the edge of the road. The sky was dark except when veined by lightning, and rain fell heavily. From behind the trees, the outlaws could see the pale water-veiled lights of the village, a mile to the north. No vehicle beams were visible. The inhabitants were inside, sleeping until close to midnight when they would rise to enter the stoners or do whatever they wished to do before they must end their activities.

  Locks stabbed a finger at the lights and led the others out into the strong wind and heavy rain. Clad in rainproof hats and coats taken from the warehouse, they trudged, heads down, behind Locks. They cut across a meadow, turned left when they reached the road, a four-laner which had very little traffic even in the daytime, and left it after a quarter of a mile. Skirting a copse of beeches, they approached the two-story stone biolaboratory. The solar panels atop the octagonal building formed a many-angled bonnet.

  Locks had obtained all the information about it via his computer informant. The building aboveground formed the living quarters of the scientists and technicians. The work facilities were undersurface. There was no security because there was no need for it, or so the officials had assumed. In this relatively crime-free society and with the isolation and small population, why lock the doors? What was there to steal? Why would anybody dare to thieve when there were so many forest rangers and at least a dozen organics nearby? Nevertheless, Sinn scouted the entrance area. He looked through the door, opened it, entered, and was gone for about a minute. When he came outside, he said, “Coast seems to be clear.”

  If the data that Locks had received was correct, Thursday’s personnel would go to bed to resume their interrupted sleep. At 8:00 A.M. they would descend to begin work. It was possible, however, that some people might come down to work immediately after leaving the stoners instead of sleeping. One or more of them might have an experiment that he could not stay away from.

  The seven went down the silent hallway to the stairway entrance and walked down it. The lights came on automatically as they progressed. When they entered the first room, these sprang into hard brightness. Bedeutung was stationed just inside the door, a proton gun in his hand. Locks sent Sinn on ahead to guard the other stairway entrance to this area.

  After passing through the large room with its equipment, strange to these laypersons, they came into another twice as large. Locks, a penciled map in one hand, led them by equally unfamiliar and often exotic-looking machines and vats in which animals in various stages of fetal development floated in a clear liquid. They stopped at a corner occupied by a long vat holding only fluid. Near it was a large coffinlike box with a transparent lid.

  “That’s it,” Locks said to Duncan. “Take off your clothes and get into it.”

  Duncan stripped and climbed into the machine. He lay down on a soft transparent bed and stared upward. The padre, grinning and muttering the last rites in Latin, closed the lid. Duncan could hear nothing after that. He lay still as Locks had instructed him the day before in the warehouse. Though he could not see Locks, he knew that the man was now adjusting the controls of the scanner near the box. Locks was looking at a paper on which were the operating instructions given to him by his informant.

  Abruptly, two machines, one at each end inside the lid, began moving on little wheels toward each other. They met soundlessly in the middle of the lid and backed away from each other. When they reached the ends of the lid, they again rolled out toward each other. Beneath him, two similar machines would be doing the same thing. After the superior scanners above him had come together thirty-five times, Locks tapped on the lid. He made a whirling motion with his hand, and Duncan rolled over on his side. A few minutes later, he turned onto his other side. Presently, Locks opened the lid.

  “OK. Get out and dress.”

  While putting on his clothes, Duncan said, “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” Locks said. “Every molecule of your body in its proper relationship to every other molecule has been recorded. The growth process has already started.”

  He pointed to the vat in the corner. Something fuzzy and tiny was now suspended in the middle of the fluid. Within an hour, it would be much larger and with a definite shape.

  “Thursday will believe it’s Wednesday’s project,” Locks said. “They’ll run off the data concerning it and find an order from Wednesday and an officially registered description of the project. Wednesday will get an order that seems to have originated from Thursday. The other days will check up the order and will find that this is Thursday’s order. Only Thursday will think that it’s Wednesday’s.”

  The whole thing would be blown if somebody checked out the validity of the order. Why should they? The orders were in proper form and just one in a sequence of the interdiurnal events. Or it would seem to be.

  “Let’s go,” Locks said. “The sooner we get out of here, the better.”

  Duncan tarried for a few seconds. That thing in the fluid-filled vat would be his near-duplicate in seven days. Sometime near the end of Wednesday, it would look to the naked eye just like him. If it were to be scanned then, the data register would reveal tiny differences, the sum of which would be a big difference. Big only in that the duplicate could not live long because of the many flaws. But, someday, so the scientists claimed, the flaws would be eliminated, and long-lived adult duplicates would result. These, however, posed ethical and philosophical problems the solving of which
was for the future—if ever.

  Padre Cob was grinning like a kid who had just gotten into the cookie jar. He said, “This bucks up my morale. Now, we’re not rabbits. We’re rats. Oh, ho, ho, ho! That’s quite a promotion, isn’t it? Rats, not rabbits. One step up in the band’s evolution. But I’d rather be a rat. They have more fun!”

  “Maybe we’ll be wolves someday,” Duncan said.

  “Wolves, like everything else, only exist because the government permits them to exist,” the padre said. He was frowning; his joy had evaporated.

  “What we’ve done tonight we can do tomorrow on a big scale,” Duncan said.

  Cabtab smiled again. “Or die like men, not rabbits or rats!” Duncan did not reply. It seemed to him that it was far more important to live like a man. How you died did not mean much unless it benefited the living.

  They returned to the warehouse, hung up their rain-clothes, and rejoined the group in the oldest building. Duncan would have liked to share his experiences with those who had stayed behind. They would have enjoyed it and would have wanted to celebrate. But Locks had insisted that the fewer who knew about it, the better. The others had been told that the seven had been in the central computer office during their entire absence. Locks had said that he was just gathering data. If some of the others wondered why so many had to be there with Locks, they said nothing.

  The Decider, however, had not entirely lied. Before the party ventured out, Locks had gotten as much information as possible from his informant about the search for Duncan. The news was unsettling. The ring was closing in, and many outlaw refugees had been found.

  “The center of this ring is the storage facility,” he told Duncan. “Sooner or later, probably sooner, the organics will figure out that we’ve had the chutzpah to hide here. Then…”

  “How soon?”

  “I don’t know. But I think we’d better try to get away on the surface. If we could sneak through the ring…”

  “If they could find me,” Duncan said. “I mean, that body…they’d probably give up the search. You’re no priority. But do you have the time to wait?”