25.
“That’s interesting,” he said in a steady voice. “I mean…it’s puzzling. Why doesn’t the age-slowing life form show up on blood tests?”
He did not, at that moment, care about the subject. But he had to make conversation and then steer it to the subject that just thinking about made his heart hammer.
“It hibernates,” Immerman said. “A single organism sleeps, as it were, in a blood vessel, attached to the wall. Then, at a programed interval, it fissions, and the resultant millions of cells do their work. Then all die but one until the time comes for fissioning again. The statistical chances of a blood test being taken when the life form is populous are very small. But the form has been detected four times. It’s been recorded in medical tapes as a puzzling and seemingly nonpathogenic phenomenon.”
Mudge came with the tea and cookies. After Mudge had returned to the table on which was Ohm’s bag, Immerman sipped his tea.
“Very good,” he said. “Though I suppose you would rather have liquor?”
“Usually I would,” Ohm said coolly. “But I am not quite myself just now. The shock…”
Immerman looked at Ohm over the rim of his teacup. “Not yourself. Who are you, then?”
“I’m having no problem with my identity.”
“I hope not. There have been reports that you are showing signs of mental instability.”
“Those are lies!” Ohm said. “Who reported that? The man who wanted to murder Snick?”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t think you are mentally unstable. Not any more than most people. You are to be commended, by the way, on your handling of the Castor business. However…”
Immerman sipped his tea. Ohm said, “Yes?” and lifted the cup to his lips. He was pleased that his hand was steady.
Immerman put the cup down and said, “The woman…Snick…has been taken care of.”
Ohm hoped that the shudder running over the upper part of his body was slight enough to be unnoticed. Those blue eyes seemed to be looking for some sign of reaction to the news.
He forced a smile and said, “Snick. Already?”
“Early this morning. Her disappearance will eventually cause a hullabaloo, of course. But today’s organics don’t even know she’s missing. She’s a rather independent agent. She doesn’t have to check in with the organics on any schedule. It may be that she’ll not be missed until Sunday. She has to report in on her natal day, of course. But…”
“She hasn’t been killed, has she?”
Immerman raised his eyebrows. “I was told that you objected to her being killed. I’m glad you have such humane feelings, grandson, but the family’s welfare comes first. Always, first. I don’t hold with killing unless it’s absolutely necessary. So far, it never has been necessary. If Garchar had killed Snick, I would’ve made sure that he was punished.”
“Garchar?”
“The man you… No, not you. It was Dunski.”
“Sure,” Ohm said. “I know. Garchar. The man Dunski called ‘Gaunt.’”
Immerman said, “If you know that, you must remember being Dunski.”
“Just a few important things about him,” Ohm said.
Immerman shook his head while he smiled. “You’re a unique phenomenon. Someday…”
He sipped tea instead of finishing his thought. Then he looked suddenly at Ohm and said, “You aren’t personally interested in the Snick woman, are you?”
“What makes you ask that?”
“Answer the question.”
“No, of course I’m not. You’re talking to Charlie Ohm now, grandfather. Tingle and Dunski are the only ones who’ve seen her, as far as I know. I don’t know how they feel about her. I doubt they could be physically attracted to her, if that’s what you mean. After all, she was dangerous to them.”
He was not telling the exact truth. The unremitting pressure these last few days had pierced, though not broken, the walls of segregation of self from self. The memories &f Caird, Tingle, Dunski, and Repp were not his; they were secondhand memories. The most vivid of these were intertwined with the persons and events that most threatened all of them. Yet, he felt a trace, a ghost, of attraction to Snick, which could only be feelings that Tingle and Dunski somehow transmitted to him.
Ohm could not have explained just how he knew that Garchar was the man whom Dunski had called “Gaunt.” Or that he would recognize Snick if he saw her.
Immerman said, “It’s unfortunate that your Wyatt Repp identity has been exposed. We do have a new one to plug into the data bank and are ready to arrange all that goes with that. But would it be better if all seven of you just seemed to disappear and re-emerged with seven new IDs? I doubt it. Some organic Sherlock Holmes might run a massive and detailed data bank search and comparison. You would be found, would be interrogated with truth mist, and you would tell all because you couldn’t help it. And then…”
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 yourself! 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, a friend 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 o
ne. 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 connection with the others as possible. But that’s a limited and qualified segregation because you’ve had to pass from one to the other, had to cover up your tracks, so to speak, and also you were reminded from time to time that you were seven, not one. That was during the rare occasions when you had to take a message from one day to the next. Recently, however, you have often been reminded that you are more than one person. You’ve been shaken up, put into a mixer, as it were. Each of your selves is threatened, each of your self-images clashes with the others.”
“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.”
He sipped more tea. Charlie leaned forward, intent.
“Some of my colleagues and I have been fighting against this indecent and undignified proposal. But we’re losing.”
So, Charlie thought, he is a world councillor.
“The proposal is that every adult be implanted with a microtransmitter that will emit the individual’s coded ID. Satellites and local stations will receive this whenever it’s being transmitted, and that will be all the time except when the person is stoned. They’d like to have it transmitting then, but that’s impossible.
“What this means is that the government can locate any person within a few inches of his position and can also identify that person immediately.”
Charlie tried to rock mentally with the punch, but he was nevertheless partly stunned.
“Why, that means that no one can daybreak without being found at once!”
“That’s true,” Immerman said. “However, putting your personal problem aside for the moment, the proposal robs all human beings of any dignity whatsoever. Strips them, makes them ciphers, zeros with numbers, you might say. We don’t want that, and we don’t want the monitoring we now have. It’s better for humanity that we have the dangers of democracy along with the benefits. You can’t have one without the other.
“But this is only one of our goals. We believe, we know, that there is more room on this planet than the government says there is. The population can be increased without any loss of the comfort and well-being we now have. It should be a gradual process, of course. That radical Wang wants to stop all methods of birth control, but he’s crazy. You know whom I mean?”
Charlie nodded and said, “He doesn’t have a chance of being elected. He shouldn’t be elected.”
“There are others like him in all the days,” Immerman said. “All, of course, working for the government and acting on its orders.”
Charlie sat up and said, “What?”
“Wang and the others are agents provocateurs. They propose these radical measures just to anger the population and to make themselves look ridiculous. Thus, more moderate and quite reasonable proposals are rejected. The people classify the radical with the moderate. They’re manipulated by the government for the government’s purposes. The government wants a status quo.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Charlie said.
“We intend to establish a government that won’t use such underhanded and unethical methods.”
Immerman looked at the clock strip.
“We don’t intend to do it through swift and violent means until the time is ripe for such means. We have been working slowly and subtly to get the family into high positions in the government. You’d be surprised if you knew how large the family is. But the bigger it becomes, the more danger there is of its being exposed. And the more danger there is, the tighter we have to control our members. It’s unfortunate but necessary.”
Charlie thought, That’s exactly the excuse the government has used since the beginning.
Immerman stood up, and Charlie also rose from his chair.
“I know what you’re thinking.
We won’t be any better than the government we now have and possibly we’ll be worse. Don’t believe it. We’ve been working on the best system of government possible, given the human situation. Someday, that plan will be revealed. Meanwhile, remember this. It was Thomas Jefferson who said that the best government is that which governs least. You were named after him. Or didn’t you know that?”
Charlie shook his head.
“I must be going now,” Immerman said.
“One thing,” Charlie said. “I believe that there’s only one situation in which killing is justified. That’s when it’s in self-defense.”
“Ah, but what is self-defense? Aren’t there many kinds?”
“I won’t be confused by all that,” Charlie said. ‘My ethics are of being rather than of words. I know what’s right.”
“Very admirable,” his grandfather said. “Which one of you is saying that?”
Ohm was surprised when his grandfather stepped up to him and embraced him. While hugging Immerman, Ohm looked over his shoulder at the seventeenth-century tableau. Yes. He had no doubt now, and he hated Immerman for what he had done.
On his way out, he picked up his shoulderbag. It was noticeably lighter, but he said nothing. Immerman would wonder why his grandson wished to keep the weapon when there was no logical reason to do so.
The trip back was almost a complete reversal of the trip up. However, Ohm did not go to his apartment. Instead, he walked into The Isobar. The usual uproar and odor of beer and liquor greeted him. He waved at various patrons in various stages of drunkenness and went into the manager’s office. After getting a mild chewing-out (no sympathy for his supposedly hurt back), Ohm put on an apron and went to work behind a long curving oak bar on which stood the statuettes of three patron saints: Fernand Petiot, creator of the Bloody Mary, W. C. Fields, and Sir John Falstaff. Only half the customers were local weedies. The rest were slummers or organic agents. The latter were hoping to catch someone making a barter deal for bootleg liquor.
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