Dayworld

The blonde told the dark woman to follow her. The gaunt man put the shoulderbag on the table and began removing the interrogation tools. Dunski looked away from them and out through the sheers over the tall and wide window. There were only a few pedestrians and cyclists on the street, none loitering. All were intent on their own affairs or seemed to be. If there were any organics among them, they did not look toward the window. I

The gaunt man put some of his tools back into the bag and took the rest into the living room. "We'll put her there," he said, indicating a sofa. "All of you ... get out of her sight." He tied a handkerchief over his face and stood by the cylinder with a gas-spraying can in his hand. The blonde woman, at a nod from him, turned the power on. A second later, the power having gone off automatically, she closed the panel.

The gaunt man had the door open and had shot the gas into the cylinder and closed the door again before the blonde had turned away from the panel. Dunski glimpsed Snick's wide open eyes, her agonized face, and her attempt to rise from her womb-crouch. He saw her face at the window and the palms of her hands. Both face and hands slid away. The gaunt man lowered the handkerchief to his neck and counted thirty seconds by his watch before he opened the door. Snick fell as it swung out, her head striking the floor, her legs doubled beneath her, buttocks in the air.

Dunski helped the dark woman carry Snick's limp body to the sofa. "Gaunt," as Dunski thought of him, passed a circular device, held in his fingertips, over her upturned face and body. After telling Dunski and "Dark" to turn her over, he moved the device over her back. As it passed over her left thigh, it shrilled. Gaunt said "Ah!" and brought the device back to the area that had triggered it. He took a pen from his robe pocket and outlined a two-inch square area in red. Having put the round device in the pocket, he removed a thin cylinder with a bulb at its end. Holding this bulb close to Snick's skin inside the square, he moved it slowly until it shrilled most loudly.

Gaunt took a pair of thick opaque spectacles from his pocket. He put these on and bent over to stare at the area. Then lie marked a tiny X almost in the center of the square. He took off the spectacles, folded them, put them in the pocket, and said, "Transmitter. Homing pigeon. It's not activated, of course."

"How do you know?" Dunski said.

"If it was, we'd be in custody by now."

Gaunt placed a reader on her pulse. "A little fast," he said, "but that's normal with the gas." He turned a dial on the reader and held the machine on her arm. "Blood pressure normal, considering the circumstances."

Dunski felt an impulse to close Snick's hanging jaw but repressed it. The others might think that he had some sympathy for her.

"I don't know what the blow on her head did to her," Gaunt said. "Let's hope that it hasn't addled her wits. Or that she doesn't die on us from a fractured skull."

"Not until the questioning is over, anyway," Dunski said.

Gaunt seemed unaware of the sarcasm. "Yes."

Gaunt passed a vein selector over her lower arm and stopped it when an orange light flashed from its end. He moved it slowly back and forth until the light was at its brightest. Then he pressed the point against the skin and lifted it away. A round orange smudge marked where the injector should enter. He rubbed alcohol on the skin; the orange mark was not dissolved. With a throwaway hypodermic air syringe, he injected three cubic centimeters of a dark reddish liquid. Snick's eyelids fluttered.

Gaunt followed the questioning procedure of the Organic Department by the book. For all Dunski knew,.Gaunt might be an organic. Though he was asking questions in the ma

Gaunt must have used her ID star-disc to check out all the data therein, but there were things that he had not been able to find out, otherwise he would not be interrogating her now.

One of the missing items was the reason for her mission.

He went straight to the heart of matters and asked her what that was. He did not do it by putting a single question to her and then letting her pour out all she knew about the mission. The drug did not open the dam. What she knew had to be pulled out item by item through a patient interrogation. But they came out quickly and easily like well-oiled bureau drawers.

When he was done, Gaunt sat down on a chair near her. Sweat was ru

"I'm relieved that Snick wasn't looking for us," Gaunt said. "But she would have stumbled on us eventually. In fact, she did, but we were lucky we got her before she could inform the organics."

Snick's primary mission had been to find and arrest a day-breaker named Morning Rose Doubleday. She was a scientist who had held a high position in Sunday's Department of Genetics. She was suspected of being a member of a secret organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the government, though, so far, the organization had committed no violent crimes. When Sunday's organics had gone to arrest her, they found that she had gone underground. Someone had warned her, probably someone in the organics force.

Doubleday was so important that Snick had been given a temporal visa to track her down. While in Monday, Snick had been told about Gril and asked to keep an eye out for him. When she was in Wednesday, Snick had also been told that another dangerous criminal, Doctor Chang Castor, was on the loose. Would she, while searching for Doubleday, report to the organics if she heard anything about him?

The governments of the various days wanted her true mission kept as quiet as possible. Thus, Snick had pretended to be looking for the most i

When Snick had seen Castor in Washington Square Park, she had followed him. She should have summoned organics to help her arrest him, but she had some reasons, all invalid, of course, to suspect that Castor might be a me

It was true that everything Castor knew about the immers would have been revealed by the organic interrogation. But his comrades might have gotten wind of it and killed themselves or, like the nonimmer Doubleday, have become daybreakers. They would eventually be chased down, but by then they might be desperate enough to swallow the poison they carried. Or do what some had done and Doubleday should have done. Speak the codephrase that would explode the tiny bomb implanted in her body.

"She must be a coward!" Blonde said.

"Who?" Gaunt said.

"Doubleday, of course. She should have killed herself!"

"We're supposed to do that, tyo," Dunski said.