“At least half of the world has gotten the printouts of the messages we sent on the override. The other half is going to find out about them. Also, you can bet that the immers and their auxiliary groups aren’t the only subversive organizations in the world. Others will get the messages, and they’ll want to act. If, for instance, we could fire them up with a single reported incident of sabotage, spraying the monitors, for example, then they might do the same. And there are a lot of malcontents out there who might follow them or think up their own ways of expressing their unhappiness with the government and the separation of days. Especially if the government insists that ASF doesn’t exist.”
He stood scowling at her, his fists still working.
“I don’t need lectures,” she said. “I get the idea.”
“Sorry. Was I too intense? We can’t do much unless we have help, an organization with people whose tentacles are deep into the government.”
She laughed, and she said, “You make them sound like octopuses.”
“The government’s an octopus. We need counter-octopuses. There’s OMC…”
“Which tried to kill us when we became a danger to it.”
“Yes, but my grandfather admitted to us that he was its head. He’s dead now. Either OMC is so scared it’s disbanded, or someone else has taken over. And that person may see the situation’s changed, be willing to take us back in.”
“Not likely.”
“But possible,” Duncan said. “It’s the only organization we know about. So…”
“So?”
“Here’s what I think we should do.”
Snick listened without interrupting until he was finished. She shrugged and said, “What else can we do? For the moment, anyway.”
Thursday went smoothly though Duncan and Snick were not entirely at ease. Despite what Lair and Kingsley had said, it was possible a friend or someone at their offices might call them. Duncan and Snick watched the news between exercising, napping, and eating. They were mainly interested in the progress of the search for them. There was none, though the newsheads and official organic bulletins made it seem that there was.
The next day, shortly after midnight, they greeted Friday’s couple as they stepped out of their cylinders. Duncan and Snick rode roughshod over their protests. After using the can of TM he had taken from the University Tower precinct station, Duncan questioned them. They revealed that today was one of their days off from work. Also like Thursday’s tenants, they had planned to go sailing. Later, they were going to meet friends for a live show at a theater on the 123rd level.
Duncan forced them to make calls cancelling their appointments. After that, the couple were put into their stoners and gorgonized.
While eating supper, Duncan said, “Thea, I don’t think we can pull it off by staying in this apartment. What if tomorrow’s tenants don’t have a day off? They have a child, and so do some of the others. What if they have to attend school? It won’t do any good for their parents to leave a message saying the kids are sick. The authorities will send a doctor at once to check up on them.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” she said. “So, why don’t we move into Ananda’s apartment?”
He stared at her for a minute, then grinned. “That’s the kind of bold thinking I like! That’s the last place in the world they’d expect us to go!”
His plate still half-filled, he rose and went to the wallscreen. The diagram of the 125th level appeared in response to his request. Ananda’s suite was still marked as UNOCCUPIED. It was near the emergency public staircase leading to the roof access structure behind which he and Snick had hidden for a while. They would have to walk almost half a mile along the corridors to get to it. There would be monitor screens along the way and, possibly, ganks.
They assumed that every monitor in L.A.—on the West Coast, too—had been set to recognize them automatically. The ganks, of course, had familiarized themselves with their icons. And the citizens would have seen them often on the news channels. By then, he and Snick had gotten into all of the personal possessions closets by using the ID cards of the tenants. These had been removed from the necks of the stonees and destoned in the kitchen stoner box used for gorgonized food supplies. They took out the wigs, a currently fashionable wear for both men and women, and selected two. They put long robes over their uniforms and hats with wide brims on their heads. Then they practiced changing their walking gaits. Snick bent her knees somewhat and reduced the swing of her arms. She also humped over a little. He made his gait a little stiff-legged and kept his elbows closer to his body while swinging his arms.
After watching each other walk up and down the living room and the hall leading from it, they made some minor adjustments. These included decreasing the length of their strides. Duncan raised his chin more, and Snick cocked her head slightly to the left. She also applied lipstick to make her mouth seem larger. Both stuffed a little cotton under their upper lips.
8
At 4:30 p.m., carrying shoulderbags which held gank helmets and other items, they left the apartment. A number of people were in the corridor, returning from their offices. Duncan stiffened when he saw four ganks in the direction he and Snick had to take. But these quick-stepped past Duncan and Snick as if they had urgent and serious business elsewhere.
Fifteen minutes later, Duncan and Snick were outside the door of Ananda’s apartment. The hole in it had been covered with a tape on which a quick-drying cement had been sprayed. Across the doorway, their ends glued to the wall, were two wide green ribbons on which were white letters: ORGANICS DEPT AREA.
Those three words were enough for the law-abiding citizens. They did not have to be told that unauthorized entrance was forbidden.
Glancing at the seals and the sign, Duncan and Snick walked on. The monitor at the far end of the corridor would film them as they pushed open the doors leading to the public staircase. That would mean nothing unless the monitor had been rigged to transmit an alarm to gank HQ if anyone did use that exit. Very few people would use it, and a gank seeing them do so might wonder about it. But there was no reason, as far as Duncan knew, why the monitor should notify the HQ computer if citizens did open those doors.
They climbed up the very wide staircase to the access structure. This had no monitor screens inside, enabling them to strip off their outer clothes and wigs without being observed. After donning the helmets, they stuffed their shoulderbags with the clothes and wigs. A medium wind flowed around them as they left the structure. Light clouds scudded eastward high above them. No one else was on the rooftop. They walked to the hatchway cover over the hangar room of Ananda’s suite. Like the door to the suite, it was sealed with green crisscross ribbons and a sign: ORGANIC DEPT AREA.
It was necessary to cut the ribbons of the seal to open the hatchway cover. Snick drilled through the locking mechanism with a narrow beam from her gun. Duncan knelt and inserted a thin knife blade into the juncture of rooftop floor and hatch edge. The hatch was of thin and light but hard plastic. Prying, he managed to shove the cover back far enough to get his fingers in the opening. Snick helped him shove, and the cover slid back into the floor recess. They opened the hatchway just enough to get through it. Snick hung from the edge with extended arms and dropped to the floor below.
All of this activity would be recorded by the monitor satellites. It did not matter unless it was set to trigger off an alarm if suspicious behavior was filmed at that area. That could be the situation. But Duncan and Snick had to chance it.
Snick placed the ladder against the hatchway edge. The upper end of the ladder was just below that. When Duncan had gotten onto the ladder, he dug his knife into the lower part of the cover near the edge and pushed. The cover slid shut. He went down the ladder and joined Snick. Their guns in hand, they prowled through every room. There was plenty of evidence of the fight during their escape. These included dried blood stains and the chalked outlines of the corpses Duncan and Snick had left behind when they had fled.
>
They had everything they needed to live in these commodious rooms. Since they might be surprised by organics returning to the suite for some reason, they had to be always alert. Snick slept while Duncan stood guard and vice versa. Neither, however, allowed overanxiety to prey on them. They ate well, exercised hard and often in the well-equipped gymnasium, talked much, though Duncan did most of the talking, and watched the news channels and the educational and entertainment shows. They knew that they had to be out of Ananda’s place before Wednesday. On that day, Lair and Kingsley would come out of the stoners with a tale that would electrify the ganks. These, knowing that the archcriminals were in the tower (or had been) would be searching intensively for them.
There had been nothing on the news about the discovery of the airboat that Duncan had sent to the bottom of the dock. That did not mean much, though. The organics would have good reason not to inform the public about it. They could be watching the site in case the two criminals came back to use it again.
Tuesday, early afternoon, he had all the news channels on in Ananda’s study. The newsheads of every day had given much of their time to Duncan’s and Snick’s feats because each day had to have explained to it in detail what these two had done. As Duncan expected, along with the history of Duncan and Snick, time was given to interviews with officials. These claimed that everything in Duncan’s messages was a lie. That the world population was only two billion, not the ten billion counted by the government, was obviously absurd and could be easily disproved.
“By the same methods they used in the censuses,” Duncan said to Snick. “The government controls the data banks. Any information from it is shaped by the government.”
Most of the newshead comments were directed at the claim that the formula in the printouts could increase the life span by a factor of seven. However, to prove to the public that the formula was not valid, the government biologists were going to use the “elixir” or ASF in experiments on fruit flies. These had short enough lives that the use of the formula and its long-range effects or lack thereof could be scientifically demonstrated.
“Extended longevity,” Duncan said. “The opportunity to live seven times longer is something the people will fight for. If a false report is issued, it’ll be up to us to raise hell about it. It won’t end until the government has to prove without a tinge of doubt that ASF is no good. It can’t do that.”
On the actual count of every five minutes, the three-dimensional images of Duncan and Snick and their biodata were displayed on all channels.
“Armed and dangerous,” a newshead said. “Psychopathic killers and completely alienated from society. Wanted for daybreaking, antigovernment activities, assault and battery, possessing false ID cards, resisting arrest, destroying government property, attempted murder, murder, and many other crimes.
“FLASH! We have just been informed that the reward for the identification and location of these criminals has been raised to forty thousand credits. But any citizen who does see them must on no account attempt to apprehend the criminals. Just report their sighting and location immediately to the organic department. I repeat, make no effort to detain the criminals. The government is anxious that no more innocent citizens be murdered.”
“Innocent!” Snick shouted.
Few things shook her, but unjust accusations against her broke through that cool attitude and exposed the white-hot lava that burned deep in her. He did not blame her for erupting. She had been the very model of the organic. She had believed thoroughly in her role of law-keeper and had never deviated from the gank ethics as stated in the department’s rules and regulations tapes. She had been offered bribes three times in her career and had resisted all without the slightest hesitation or regret.
“I’d like to kill those bastards!” Snick said. “Burn them down!”
“You may get your chance,” Duncan said. He waved at the squares displaying the news channels. “Meanwhile…”
His close attention to the news was based on what, realistically, was probably a hope as thin as a cirrus cloud. Neither he nor Snick had any idea what it would be. But if they saw it, they would recognize it. Perhaps.
He had no sooner sat down again than he leaped up, his face seeming to radiate, his finger pointing at Channel 8. “There! That’s it, by God!”
Snick also rose swiftly. “What?”
“Not what! Who!”
All the channels had from time to time shown their interviewers questioning the citizen on the street. They were brushed off quite often with a “No comment.” But there were some who were eager to voice their opinions pro or con. One of these was now speaking, her face momentarily filling the screen. Across it glowed in orange her name and ID number.
Donna Lee Cloyd was a pretty woman of middle height, dark-skinned and having blonde hair and blue eyes the lightness of which might be due to depigmentation. Her robe was not the same as when Duncan had last seen her, though her canary-yellow high-heeled shoes were.
“The face! The mark on her forehead!” Duncan said.
Snick frowned, then smiled.
“The woman who handed us the note shortly after we arrived in L.A.,” she said, “the OMC messenger.”
Donna Lee Cloyd’s forehead bore a tattoo, a small black right-handed swastika, the symbol of the original Guatama sect.
“I don’t believe a word of that outrageous lying message,” she was saying, her face very serious. “I hope the ganks, I mean, the organics, catch those vicious psychopathic murderers and bring them to justice.”
“Thank you, citizen,” the interviewer said.
Cloyd’s face disappeared, and a man’s replaced it. By then, Duncan had told the screen to back up the recording tape and freeze her face. He wrote down her ID number on the pad on the coffee table in front of the sofa. Then he summoned up the tower directory and wrote down her address.
“She’s sure covering up,” Snick said. “You’d think she loved the government and hated our guts.”
“Wouldn’t you put on an act?” Duncan said.
Only a few weeks ago, as Duncan, Padre Cabtab, and Snick had left the immigration station to go to the La Brea Tower Complex, the woman had come up to them. She had looked as if she meant to speak to them. Instead, she had slipped a note into Duncan’s hand and left swiftly. The note had instructed them to meet someone unnamed at 9:00 p.m. at The Snorter. This was a neighborhood tavern close to their quarters on the twentieth level near the west rim of the west block area in the tower. The unnamed person would recognize them and make contact.
Cloyd was a courier for the subversive group, then named OMC, which had given the three their IDs and arranged for their apartments. They had never seen her again. Not until now.
Her address was an apartment, 364 Tripitaka Street, 12th level. Profession: Part-time data organizer/researcher, freelancer, authorized to work in any nongovernment department. GS 0.5. That is, half-subsidized by the national government.
“She lives in a weedie section,” Snick said.
“Californians would say it’s a bloney section,” Duncan said. “Bloney, from abalone.”
“A weedie,” she said, unable to keep disgust from her tone.
“Hey, they’re just people who prefer not to work full time so they can be rich with their personal time,” Duncan said.
“Parasites,” she said. “What if everybody wanted just to work now and then or not at all?”
“The point is that only a small minority do. Forget it. It’s irrelevant to what we have to do.”
Having seen the name of Barry Gardner Cloyd next to Donna’s in the directory, he checked it. Barry was Donna’s husband and shared her apartment. He was, when he worked, a waiter at a high-class restaurant patronized by upper-level government officials and technicians. Though he was, like Donna, listed as a religionist, he was allowed to work in the restaurant because it was privately owned.
“A good source of information for a subversive,” Duncan said. “Food and booze thaw o
ut the customers’ security-frozen lips.”
“I doubt he did anything with what he overheard,” she said. She was scornful of the organization to which she and Duncan had belonged very briefly. He did not blame her for that since it had tried to kill them when it believed that they were a danger to it. But he thought that, if they could penetrate deeper into it, get close to the leader, they might be able to use it. Immerman (Ananda) had organized the group which called itself, among other names, PUPA and OMC. But he was dead. Therefore someone else had taken it over. Unless OMC had been disbanded when its leader died. However, Immerman was not the local chief, and that person might still be running the group.
There was only one way to find out.
He explained to Snick what he wanted to do while he pointed to the big wall display of the 125th and 12th level maps.
“The private elevator we came up on with Lair and Kingsley is to the left as you go out the door. But if you go right, you come to the public bank of elevators. We take a public elevator to the 12th level. We get out near Blue Moon Plaza. We go down Eight-Ways Causeway for four blocks, then turn onto Tripitaka Street. We have to pass by four corners with street monitors.”
“And any number of ganks looking for us.”
“Yes, but it’ll just be routine. They must still think we’re out in the woods.”
Snick shrugged. “You have to eat the apple to find out if it’s poisoned. Or give it to someone else to take a bite for you, and there’s no one else.”
Their shoulderbags were packed and ready to go. They picked them up and Duncan started to deactivate the wallscreens. He stopped, then said, “Wait! I want to see this.”
Dayworld Breakup Page 7
