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CHAPTER 1

He had been seven men.

Now he was one man.

The woman whose office he visited for an hour every day had told him that. Until then, he had not known about it, though she claimed that he had once known. According to her, he still might know and probably did. He had no doubt that she was wrong about that. No matter. If he wished to live, he had to convince her that he knew nothing of it.

That was indeed strange. "I'll tell you what's so. Then you try to make me believe that it is so."

If he failed to convince the authorities, he would not be executed, though what would be done to him would be almost as bad as being killed. Unless, and it was a very slim unless, somebody in the far future decided to make him alive again.

The woman, the psychicist, was puzzled and intrigued. He suspected that her superiors were equally mystified. While keeping them so, he might stay alive. Living, he could always hope to escape. He knew, however, or thought he knew, that no one had ever escaped from this place.

The man now calling himself William St.-George Duncan sat in a chair in the office of the psychicist, Doctor Patricia Ching Arszenti. Having just become conscious, he was still a little confused. Breathing in truth mist did that to anyone. A few seconds later, his senses, jigsaw pieces, fell into the proper places. The digits on the wall chronometer told him that, as always, he had been under the mist for thirty minutes. His muscles ached; his back hurt; his mind quivered like a diving board just after the diver had sprung.

What had she learned in that time?

Arszenti smiled, and she said, "How do you feel?"

He sat up straight and massaged the back of his neck.

"I had a dream. I was a cloud of tiny iron particles swirling around in a wind in a vast room. Somebody thrust a huge magnet into the room. I, the cloud of particles, flew to the magnet. I became one solid mass of iron."

"Iron? You're more like putty. Or thermoplastic. You shape yourself into another — or an Other — at will."

"Not that I know of," he said.

"What shape was the solid mass of iron?"

"A two-edged sword."

"I'm not here to psychoanalyze you. That image, however, is significant to me."

"What does it mean?"

"What it means to you may not be what it means to me."

"Whatever I told you," he said, "has to be the truth. Nobody can lie when they've breathed in the mist."

"I've always believed that," she said. She paused, then said, "Until now."

"Until now? Why? You could tell me why you think I'm different from all others. Rather, you should tell me. I think you won't because you can't."

He leaned forward and glared at her. "You have nothing but irrational suspicion to back your statement. Or you've got orders from your superiors, who are crazy with suspicion. You know and they should know that I am not immune to truth mist. You have no proof otherwise. Thus, I'm not the persons arrested for daybreaking and belonging to a subversive organization. I'm not responsible for their crimes because I'm not them. I'm as innocent as a just-born baby."

"A baby is a potential criminal," she said. "However ..."

They were silent for a while. He leaned back, relaxed, and smiled. Arszenti sat as motionless as a healthy adult could, her twitches and shiftings almost undetectable. She was no longer looking at him. Her stare was at the window. Though she could not see the big yard and the high wall beyond it, she could see the right side of the street and the building beyond the wide sidewalk. At lunch hour, the junction of Frederick Douglass Boulevard and St. Nicholas Avenue was crowded. Pedestrians jammed the sidewalks; bicyclists, the street. One-seventh of Manhattan's population was out enjoying the early spring sun. They should be outside. Of the approximately ninety obdays of this season, they would know only approximately eleven days of it.

Timehoppers, he thought. A grasshopper clinging to a weed bending under its weight flashed through his mind. With it came pain. Or memory of pain? He had no idea why he should envision a grasshopper and feel grief. Nothing in his memory connected them to him.

Suddenly, a fly tearing herself loose from a web — a web also of memory? — Arszenti jerked her stare from the window and leaned forward. She looked fiercely at him, which only made the big handsome blonde even more attractive. Her large white teeth looked as if they were about to bite him; they shone like sun on prison bars.

William Duncan grinned. It took more than that to scare him.

"I don't know how you did it," she said. "You integrated seven different personalities. No, that's not right. You dissolved, repressed beyond detectability, let's say, the seven personae. You became an eighth person. You even have some of the memories of that eighth person, your present persona, though they have to be false. But you can't change your fingerprints, odorprints, bloodprints, eyeprints, brainwaveprints, all that declares that you are still Jefferson Cervantes Caird, the Tuesday cop, and all those others, Tingle, Dunski, Repp, Ohm, Zurvan, and Isharashvili. The personae you changed, but the body ... you're no Proteus."

"Until you told me about them, showed me all those tapes," he said, "I'd never heard of them."

"That seems to be true," she said. "Seems is the operative word here."

"For God's sake! I've been under the mist many times, and you've also monitored me with blood chemistry and brainwave tests, or so you said, and you haven't found the slightest indication I'm lying."

"But there is no William St.-George Duncan in the records. Therefore, there is no such person. We know who you are ... were, I mean. And ..."

She leaned back, her wrists on the edge of the desk. Her glare had softened to puzzlement.

"I'm authorized to tell you that the official opinion is that you may be unique. May be. They're not sure there aren't others who're also able to resist the truth mist."

He smiled, and he said, "That must really panic them."

"Nonsense. It could, let us say, ripple the fabric of society, make things uncertain for a while. But it won't shake our society to the roots of its being. It'll just take some flexibility to adapt."

"The bureaucracy, which is the government, doesn't have flexibility," Duncan said. "Never did; never will."

"Don't be amused. You'll be subjected to a long and intense experimentation. It may be emotionally painful for you. It'll determine if you are resistant to the mist. And, if you are, why."

"Well, at least that'll put off the time to stone me."

She leaned forward again. Her elbow was on the desk, and her chin was in her hand.

"Your attitude bothers me. You're so cheerful and unafraid. It's as if you expected to escape — soon."

Still smiling, he said, "Of course, you asked me if I planned to escape?"

"Yes. That bothers me even more. You stated that you had no plans, that you knew no one could break out of here. That ... I can't believe that."

"You have to."

She stood up. "Interview is over."

He also rose, his long lean body straightening like a jackknife.

"You showed me some of the interrogation tapes. I don't know what this elixir is you asked me about. But it must be something apocalyptically important. What is it?"

She paled slightly. "We believe you know full well what it's all about."

She called out, and the door swung open inward. Two big men, uniformed in green, stood in the hall, looking through the doorway. Duncan walked toward them. Just as he was going past her, he spoke out of the side of his mouth.

"Whatever it is, you're in danger just because you know about it. See you next Tuesday ... if you're still here."

There was no point in scaring her, because she was only carrying out her duties and had not been brutal to him. But it gave him some satisfaction to threaten her. That was his only way to strike back. Though it was a small way, it was better than none.

As he walked down the corridor, the two guards behind him, he wondered where his optimism came from. Logically, he should have none. No one had ever, not ever, escaped from this place. Yet he thought that he could do it.

He passed along the hall on the thick light-green carpet, seeing but not taking in the sea- and mountainscapes the TV strips showed on Tuesday's walls. Near the end of the silent and empty hallway, he was halted at a command from one of the guards. He stood while the other guard punched the code on the button-panel by the door. The guard made no effort to keep him from seeing the sequence of numbers punched. The code was changed once a day, and, sometimes, in the middle of the afternoon. Moreover, a TV eye was on the wall opposite the door, and the human monitor downstairs also had to punch in a code before the door would open.

The guard stepped back to allow Duncan to enter. Though the escorts carried no weapons, they were skilled in martial arts. Even if a prisoner could overcome two men, he still would be locked in. Both ends of the hall were closed with doors that could only be opened through the same procedure that opened Duncan's door, and his every step would be monitored.

"See you tomorrow," Duncan said, meaning next Tuesday.

They did not reply. Their orders were to utter only commands to him and, if he should try to give them information of any kind, to shut him up. A kidney punch, a blow in the solar plexus, a chop on the neck, or a kick in the testicles would stop him. That such treatment was illegal would not bother them.

The door slid out from wall recesses behind him. He was in a room thirty feet long, twenty wide, and ten high. Shadowless light had come on as he entered. The floor was thickly carpeted, and the walls were lined with monitoring and entertainment strips. At the north end was the door to a bathroom-toilet, the only unmonitored room. Or so he had been told. He suspected that he was watched as closely there as elsewhere. Near that door was the bedroom entrance. That room held one bed suspended by chains from the ceiling.

Along the west wall, starting from the north wall, was a row of seven tall grayish cylinders. Each had a plaque on its base and a circular window three-quarters of the way to the top. Behind all but two windows appeared faces and shoulders. They were motionless as stone. In a sense, they were stone. The molecular motion in their bodies had been considerably slowed. Result: they were "stoned," in a state of suspended animation.

Tuesday's cylinder was empty because that was Duncan's. Wednesday's was also vacant. Its occupant was gone, probably because he had been taken to a warehouse and stored away or because he had been released. The man had been there when Duncan had come here. This morning, when Duncan had been destoned, the man was gone. Next Tuesday, Duncan might find it occupied by another patient. For patient, read prisoner. The empty cylinder was one of the things Duncan had been hoping for. It could not, however, be used as yet, though it must be used tonight. It was now one o'clock in the afternoon.

Duncan pulled a chair up to the huge round window in the middle of the outer wall. For a while, he more or less amused himself by watching the pedestrians, the cyclists, and the electrically powered buses. At two, the sky became hazy with thin clouds. By three, it was shut out by the dark gray clouds. The newscaster predicted rain by seven that night and said that it would last, off and on, until past midnight. That pleased Duncan.

Later, he watched two programs. One was about the early life of Wang Shen, the Invincible, the Compassionate, the greatest human of all history, the conqueror of the world and founder of modern civilization. Another hour was filled with Chapter Ten of the series titled The Swineherd. This was The Odyssey of Homer dramatized from the viewpoint of Eumaios, Ulysses' chief pigtender. Its main tension derived from the conflict between Eumaios' loyalty to his king and his fierce resentment of his low-class station and his poverty. Though it was well done, it was spoiled for Duncan. He knew that swineherds in Mycenaean times had high prestige, and a reading of Homer's works would reveal that Eumaios was anything but poor or without authority. Moreover, in that era, it would not have occurred to anyone to resent his allotted place in society even if he disliked it. Also, many of the actors looked very unlike ancient Greeks. A viewer who did not know the story or could not understand English might have mistakenly guessed that it was about the first contact between Europeans and Chinese.

Duncan had no idea how he knew that the play was historically inaccurate. It was just part of his memory and without attachment to any recall of teacher, book, or tape.

After sitting for two hours, Duncan did his exercises. Though he had earlier put in an hour of running and swimming in the institution's gymnasium, as required by law for prisoners, he had been alone, except for two guards. Though this was definitely illegal, the authorities had ruled against his having any chance to talk to other inmates. The reason was obvious. He must not pass on knowledge of the elixir. Yet the only thing he knew about that had been told to him by his psychicist.

After somersaulting across the room in many directions, Duncan assumed the lotus position in the center of the carpet. He closed his eyes and passed into a state of transcendental meditation, or so the monitor would be assuming. Actually, he was going over and over his escape plans. After an hour of that, he walked around the room for thirty minutes, then watched a documentary on the current restoration of the Amazon basin from desert to jungle. That was followed by a half-hour show depicting the horrors resulting from the latest drilling to reach the earth's core. Four such holes had been successful, and the heat tapped was being converted into thermionic power. But the drilling equipment for the Dallas project had been destroyed in an eruption of magma, molten white-hot rock. Two hundred workers had been killed, and the magma had spread over fifty square miles before halting. Fortunately, the comparatively few inhabitants of the county had been safely evacuated. The city of Abilene in next-door Taylor County was no longer threatened.

At 5:30, he watched an hour of news, most of which was devoted to the meeting of the All-Days World Government Council in Zurich, Switzerland, the capital of the world government.

After that, he went to a panel in the wall near the southwest corner and pulled out his supper tray. This had been inserted from the hall outside the room. He placed the tray in a destoning cabinet box, turned on the power for a second, opened the door, and withdrew the tray. It went into the microwave unit, and he took it out and set it on a table by the window. While he ate, he looked at the street through the window. Rain was beating against it; there was not much to see except the boat-shaped blockhouse across the way. Most people, like him, were dining, and the rain would have discouraged shoppers, anyway.

From about midnight of today until six in the morning, Duncan had slept. The morpheus machine ensured that four hours of sleep were enough for his body and mind, but he had set the alarm for later because he had no need to get up earlier. Now, though he did not feel tired, he went to bed anyway. If events went as he hoped, he would require a lot of energy. He placed the band holding the electrode to his forehead around his head, closed his eyes, and was voyaging into a sea of dreams. Most of them, though pleasant, were about people whom he did not know yet felt that he had somehow known long long ago.

At eleven-thirty, he was rocketed midway from a wet dream into lonely and dry reality. He got out of bed sluggishly, stripped off the covers, sheets, and pillowcases, put them into another wall panel, and showered. Feeling somewhat better, he left the bathroom. By then a wall strip was flashing and clanging, notice to him to get ready for stoning. Throughout the city-state of Manhattan, throughout this time zone, the warning was sounding.

Clad only in shorts, very aware of being watched by the electronic eyes, he walked to the window. If the rain had stopped while he slept, it had started again. Two men and a woman, blasted by rain and wind, were hurrying bent over along the sidewalks. The street lights were flashing bright orange.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Dayworld Rebel"
by .
Copyright © 1987 Philip José Farmer.
Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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