Dayworld

Ohm looked Immerman straight in the eye. "Are you trying to convince me that logic demands one course of action? That I must be a sacrifice? I'm to be stoned and hidden away until some time later? Maybe much later? Or perhaps I won't be destoned ever?"

"Think about what you just said," Immerman said. He sipped some more tea, then refilled his cup.

"You're not going to do that," Ohm said. "If you were, you wouldn't have bothered to bring me here to explain all this. You would've just had me snatched and stoned and buried."

"Good! My children are not fools. Not all of them, anyway."

Charlie Ohm did not feel as if he were a child of Immerman. Looking at him, Charlie had the same emotions that he would have had at looking at a photograph of an unknown grandfather. He knew that he was his flesh and blood, but he had had none of the frequent contacts nor the loving and caring from his grandfather that made loving and caring grow in the grandson. He was awed by the founder, and he had a huge respect and admiration for him. But did he love him or feel that he was truly his grandfather? No.

"What must I do, then?"

"You will abandon all your roles, You will assume a new identity. That will be confined to one day. You will no longer be a daybreaker ... What's the matter?"

"We'll ... they'll ... die!" Charlie said.

"Good God, son, get hold of yourselfl You look as if you'd been told that your best friend had died."

Immerman paused while looking shrewdly at Charlie, then said, "I see. It's even worse."

He bit his lip and looked past Charlie as if he were trying to see into the future.

"I didn't know that you were ... that far gone. Perhaps ..

Charlie said, "Perhaps?"

Immerman sighed, and he said, "We don't have much time for this. I have hardly any at all. I can't personally supervise you, get you into your new persona. It will be'a persona, not just a role, won't it?"

"I'll be all right," Charlie said. "It was such a shock. Maybe I have thrown myself into each day's ID too deeply. But I'm not a halfway person. I do it right or not at all. I can handle this, though. After all, I am very adaptable. How many people you know could make the transition so smoothly from one persona to another? How many could handle seven with ease? An eighth person'll be no trouble. In fact, I'm looking forward to a new ID. I was getting tired of the others."

Had he gone too far in trying to convince Immerman that he could do it?

Voices were shouting in him. "I don't want to die!" They were so loud and desperate that it seemed to him that Immerman must surely hear them. That was nonsense, of course, but he felt as if the room should be ringing with their cries.

Immerman said, "You'll return to your job. As I said, afriend has made an excuse for your lateness at work. The friend called herself Amanda Thrush. Don't forget that. She said that you had hurt your back in a fall in the shower, but that you'd be in later. Got that? Good.

"I want you to think about your new identity and make sure it's a good one. You'll have to be an immigrant, and arrangements will have to be made to cover everything in the data bank. Mudge will see you early in the evening at your apartment; stay home after work. You'll tell him what and who you want to be. Then he'll do the necessary fixing up and leave a message for his Sunday colleague. The colleague will get in touch with you. You have one more day in your old character, Sunday's, unless something happens to prevent it."

Charlie expected to be dismissed then. His grandfather, however, sat staring past him and chewing his lip. Charlie waited. The Siamese was also staring at him, and he was purring loudly while Immerman gently stroked him. His grandfather was using his left hand. Charlie thought, I must have inherited my sinistrality from him. On both sides of my family.

Though apparently delighted with his master's petting, Ming suddenly stood up, stretched, and leaped off Immerman's lap. He walked slowly out of the room, heading for whatever mysterious goal cats went to when they departed. Immerman watched him fondly, then said, "Cats are like people. They're predictable in many respects, but just when you think you've got them completely analyzed, they do something you could never have anticipated. I like to think that that trait is free will."

He looked at Charlie Ohm. "I don't think you completely understand what's at stake, what we're trying to do. Perhaps, when I explain it, you'll get over your repugnance at the little violence necessary now and then in order to attain our goals."

Ohm shifted uneasily in his chair. "That was explained fully by my parents."

"That was a long time ago," Immerman said. "Also, your case is peculiar. Living from day to day, horizontally, and being a new person each day, you've lost some of the intense feeling most of us have about being immers. Each of your personae has tried to repress as much co

"The whole thing is just temporary," Charlie said. "I'll be all right."

"You mean we, don't you?" Immerman said, smiling slightly.

He leaned forward, his hands on his lap. The fingers of his left hand moved over his leg as if he were petting an invisible cat. "You see, Jeff, I mean, Charlie, you're not the only daybreaker we have. There are at least a dozen others in large cities in the Western Hemisphere and several in China. But none of these have thrown themselves into their roles so completely. None have become the personae they adopted. They're just good actors. You are unique, the superdaybreaker."

"I don't believe in half-measures," Charlie said.

Immerman smiled and sat back, his fingers interlocked.

"Very good. A true Immerman. But this same intensity and drive in your personae-being should also be applied to your other role."

"What's that?" Ohm said after a long silence.

Immerman's finger pointed accusingly at Ohm.

"Being an immer!"

Ohm's head jerked back as if the finger was close to his eye. "But ... I am!"

His grandfather put his hands together again, the fingers of the left seeming to tap a code on the back of the right hand.

"Not enough. You've betrayed some hesitation about following orders. You've allowed your personal feelings, your revulsion against violence, admirable enough in other situations, to interfere with your sense of the higher duty."

"I think I know what that is," Charlie said, "but I'll ask anyway."

"You were ordered to go home immediately after Snick was questioned. Yet you stayed outside the apartment building. Obviously, you were thinking about trying to keep Snick from being killed. You failed to consider the danger in which we were placed because she was alive. Now, I don't think that in this case she really had to be killed. As it turned out, because of your interference, she wasn't killed."

"Has she been killed?" Ohm said.

"No. She's in a safe place. But she may have to be killed.

From time to time, we have to do things we don't like to do. We do that, Charlie, because we're working toward the greater good of all."

"Which is ... ?"

"Toward a greater freedom for all, toward a true democracy. A society where we're rid of this constant and close scrutiny by the government. It's bad enough now, but it's going to be far worse. The government has been considering for a long time doing something that would justify the actions of us immers if it was the only thing we opposed."