Dayworld by Philip José Farmer Read Free Book Online Page A

a subtle ideological test), which eliminated five out of ten. After this, the candidate studied for six subjective years at West Point. Then, if the candidate could survive the rigorous discipline and get a B average in the courses, he or she became an Organic Department foot-patroller, zero class.
    Ah, well, he could only work with what he could get. By three this afternoon, according to the weather-strip report, he could no longer depend upon the sky-eyes. A heavy overcast would cut off their view.
     
     
     

 
    5.
     
    When eleven o’clock came, Rootenbeak still had not been observed or caught. Caird worked for a few minutes at other duties before leaving the building. A station-pool robot car took him up Womanway Boulevard to Columbus Circle and up Central Park West to West Seventy-seventh Street. The John Reed Community Block Building occupied all of the Number 100 blocks of Seventy-sixth and Seventy-seventh streets, including the enclosed streets. Just north of it was the Museum of Natural History. Caird got out of the car just off the third-level ramp. The car moved slowly away and disappeared down the west ramp. He walked into a huge lobby decorated this year in Mycenaean Mode. Golden Agamemnon masks smiled at him from the walls, ceiling, and floor. In the middle of the lobby was a fountain holding a statue of Ajax defying the gods. A yellow fluorescent jagged lightning bolt of plastic reached halfway down from the ceiling toward the arrogant and doomed Achaean. This piece of statuary had been selected by some bureaucrat who thought that it would subtly put across a moral. If you were stupid enough to resist the government, you were fried.
    However, despite one-hundred-percent literacy and free lifelong education if you wanted it, nine-tenths of the viewers had never heard of Ajax, the first human lightning rod, and most of the others did not care about him. The moral was lost, and the art was, Caird thought, tacky.
    He went up a pneumatic elevator to the top floor and got off at the entrance to the Zenith Restaurant at 11:26. He told the maître d’ that his reservation had been made by Commissioner Horn. The maître d’ tapped three keys; the screen displayed Caird’s face and some lines of bio-data.
    “Very well, Inspector Caird. Follow me.”
    The Zenith was very elegant and select. Six musicians on a podium played softly, and the conversation was in low tones. That is, it was until Anthony Horn rose from her table to greet him. She strode toward him, arms out, her orange-and-purple robe flapping in her wake. “Jeff, darling!”
    The other diners looked up or flinched or both as her voice boomed out. Then he was enfolded in silk, perfume, and abundant flesh. Looking down her breasts was like looking along the curve of twin planets from forty thousand feet up. He did not mind having his face pressed against them, even though it was undignified. For a brief moment, he was happy and secure in the bosom of the Great Mother Herself.
    She released him and smiled, showing big white teeth. Then she turned and led him by the hand to the table in the meat-eaters’ section. She was six inches higher than his six feet three, though her high heels accounted for four of the inches. Her shoulders and hips were broad; her waist, very narrow. Her golden hair was piled high in a coiffure shaped like an eighteenth-century tricorn hat, all the fashion just now. Huge golden earrings, each inset with the Chinese ideogram for “horn,” dangled from small close-set ears.
    They sat down, and she leaned against the table, her breasts extending like two white wolfhounds eager for release so they could chase the prey. Her big deep-blue eyes connected with his. In a much lower tone, she said, “We have a big bad problem, Jeff.”
    His eyebrows rose. He said, softly, “The government’s found out about us?”
    “Not yet. We ...”
    She stopped what she was going to say because the waiter, a tall, turbaned, bearded Sikh, had