Dayworld

A few minutes later, Mudge and Ohm strolled out of the store. Mudge wore a big-brimmed scarlet hat and a green kilt. Ohm, a few paces behind Mudge, wore a"black sombrero with crimson feathers and a green kilt. He followed Mudge up the escalator to the pedestrian bridge across Womanway, went across the bridge, and down the escalator to Waverly Place. They walked west until they came to Fifth Avenue, where they turned north. Ohm sca

Mudge crossed the bridge in front of the square building called the Washington Mews (the Mews had long been gone). Ohm followed him to the west side of Fifth. As he did so, he recalled that Panthea Snick now had an apartment in the Mews building. She must be out in this area now, looking for him. Perhaps. The Friday organics might have had time to run Repp's ID through the data bank and then have passed on the findings to Saturday. If Friday had not done this, Saturday would have.

Which meant one of two actions. One, the Saturday organics would be looking for a daybreaker resembling him, an ordinary, run-of-the-assembly-line breaker. Or, two, they might have tried to match Repp's ID with similar IDs from all of the days. There would have been some delay before the organics could get permission from the North American Superorganic Council for Saturday. But there had been enough time for that. The hounds could know all and be on his scent.

If the latter had happened, what could he do? What had the immer council pla

Mudge walked north on Fifth under the trees. Ohm followed him for a few paces, then stopped. The building on his left was one of the older ones, built before the ship-shape craze. It housed, on Saturday, anyway, Orthodox Jews who used the building gymnasium as a synagogue, worshiping their god amid the odor of sweat socks and sweat shirts. A man was looking out of a second-story window. Yankev Gril.

The strong handsome face appeared only for a minute. Its expression changed subtly, but Ohm could not read it. Was it a sudden but suppressed recognition of him? Not of Charlie Ohm but of Jim Dunski, who had stood for a while by the table in Washington Square and watched Gril play chess? Or was it just suspicion that Ohm might be an organic looking for him?

Whatever it was, Gril was certainly taking chances by being in that building. It would be one of the first places the organics would search. However, Gril might have moved into it after the search. Or he might just be visiting, perhaps to take part in a religious ceremony.

Bob Tingle, the data banker, had ascertained that there were only approximately half a million Orthodox Jews and two million of the Reformed in all of the seven days. The rest had been absorbed, their identity diffused in the Gentile society. Ohm himself had a Jewish great-grandmother, though she was Jewish by courtesy only. She had not practiced the religion.

The government had no public official policy against Jews. It professed toleration of all religions, but it did push a subtle form of persecution of Jews. It was unlawful for parents to arrange marriages of their children or to use any form of coercion to ensure that the children married within the faith. Since it was also forbidden for any group to claim superiority to any other group for religious reasons, the Jews were not allowed to state in words or in writing that they were "the chosen of God."

That would be antisocial and nonegalitarian. Orthodox males also had to delete from their morning prayer their thanks to God that they were not born as wdmen. That attitude was even more antisocia'l and nonegalitarian.

All of the sacred or revered writings of the Jews were legally available only in recordings. These had been censored, though not heavily, and interspersed frequently with comments by the officials of the Bureau of Religious Freedom.

For the same reasons, Christians were forbidden to claim that Jesus was the Son of God except in the sense that all Homo sapiens were the children of God. Who, the government said, did not exist. The New Testament was also lightly censored but heavily a

Chapter 24

The thirteen-story Tower of Evolution looked like a corkscrew. The bright green threadings of its exterior were supposed to suggest the spiraling of life toward higher evolution. Atop the point were the statues of a man and of a woman holding a baby above her head. The baby had its hands raised as if it was trying to grasp something in the sky.

Charlie Ohm followed Mudge into the vast well-lighted lobby and got in line a few people behind him. While waiting, he looked at the outer edge of the circular lobby. Through the plastic walls, he could see the boiling thick-looking liquid and the holograph images of thunder clouds and lightning striking the waters. This was a representation of the primal soup, Earth's oceans, billions of years ago. Here, the numerous strips said, was where life had begun, conceived in violent intercourse by the lightning and out of carbon compounds floating in the thick "soup." The first life forms, very basic indeed, had begun in this simple though splendid rape.

Charlie had no idea why Mudge had gotten into the line of sightseers, but he assumed that Mudge knew what he was doing. He moved forward swiftly, though, and was glad of it. Tourists from all over the world jammed the lobby, and the chatter was, if not deafening, a

Charlie finally got to the credit machine standing on a pole at the entrance to an aisle made by posts co

Charlie glanced at the vast and mostly hollow interior rising twelve stories to the top. He had seen this before at least a dozen times, yet he still felt somewhat awed. The exhibits were in tall and wide recesses in the wall in a staggered ascending arrangement. The visitors traveled on winding escalators that went slanting upward around and around the walls past the sea- and landscapes with the figures of fish, birds, insects, animals, and plants appropriate to the particular geological time. Standing on the escalator, their altitude ever increasing, the visitors would travel from Pre-Cambrian time (plants and animals with soft tissues) to the Cambrian (the backboneless ocean creatures of the first stage of the Paleozoic Era). Then, moving upward diagonally, they would go past the Ordovician (the first primitive fishes). They would continue through the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras, oohing and aahing at the life-sized animated dinosaur robots, and they would end up near the top where Homo sapiens of the New Era was the prime exhibit. They would get off into a recess there and take elevators down to the lobby. Along the corkscrew way, they could step off for a while into recesses to one side of the exhibits to view the curiosities.

Mudge did not get onto the escalator. He turned and went into a doorway to a hall. Passing the two men stationed there, Mudge nodded his head at them. This must have been a signal to let Ohm also pass into the hall. It was not more than ten feet long, ending in a wide strip displaying a montage of some of the life forms on the upper levels. Mudge said something be- fore Ohm got near enough to hear him. Ohm started slightly as the strip before him slid up into a slot in the ceiling and a hall-wide strip slid down behind him from a ceiling slot. For a moment, the two were in a box three feet wide.