Dayworld

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 gri

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

1-le 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 sca

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 incur- able physical diseases or had mental diseases not responding to therapy or were habitual criminals who couldnot 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 cha

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 perso

"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.