Dayworld by Philip José Farmer Read Free Book Online Page B

appeared. They were busy ordering drinks and looking at the printed menus for a while. The Zenith was too elegant to display the menus on wall strips. When the waiter had left, Horn said, “You know about Doctor Chang Castor?”
    He nodded. “He hasn’t escaped?”
    “Yes, he has.”
    Caird grunted as if he had been hit in the solar plexus, but just then the waiter brought his wine and Horn’s gin, and two minutes later, a folding table and two trays with dishes of food. It did not take long to fill an order. The food was precooked anywhere from last Tuesday to two subyears ago, stoned, and so kept in perfect state. Destoned, it only needed warming and putting on the plate.
    They chatted about their families until the waiter left. Caird jerked a thumb at the waiter’s back.
    “He’s an informer?”
    “Yes. I used my connections and a code I’m not supposed to have to identify the informers here. The place isn’t bugged, though, and there are no directional mikes. Too many bigshots eat here.”
    She cut into her steak and chewed on a small piece. “I ... it’s not just that you’re an organic and we can work through you. It’s much more personal ... involved ... for you.”
    After swallowing the meat, she sipped at her gin. The moderation told Caird that she was deeply shaken. Any other time, she would have half-emptied her tall glass before the food was served. Obviously, she was afraid of dulling her wits.
    Chang Castor was an immer and a brilliant scientist, head of the physics department at the Retsall Advanced Institute. He had always been eccentric, but, when he had begun showing signs of mental sickness, the immer organization had acted at once. It had framed him so that he seemed to be much more mentally unstable than he really was at the time. He had been committed to an institution that, though owned by the government, was secretly controlled by immers. There, Castor had quickly slid into deep psychotic quicksand in which it seemed that he would stick until he died. Fourteenth-century medical science, for all its advances, was unable to pull him out.
    Caird remembered a lunch with Horn at another place when she had told him that Castor believed that he was God.
    “He’s an atheist,” Caird had said.
    “Was. Well, in a sense, he still is. He says that the universe was formed through sheer chance. But its structure is such that it finally and inevitably, after many eons, gave birth to God. Himself, Castor. Who has now ordained matters so that there is no such thing as chance. Everything that happens from the moment his Godhood was crystallized—which also happened by chance, the last time that chance existed in the universe—everything that happened from that moment is fixed by him. Capital Him, by the way. He insists on being addressed as Your Divinity or O Great Jehovah.
    “Anyway, he says that there was no God until he came along. So he divides cosmic time into two eras—B.G., that is, Before God. And A.G., After God. He will tell you the precise second when the new chronology began even if you don’t ask him.”
    That conversation had taken place three obyears ago.
    Anthony Horn said, softly, “God hates you.”
    Caird said, “What?”
    “Don’t look so confused and guilty. By God I mean Castor, of course. Castor hates you, and he’s out to get you. That’s why I had to call you in on this.”
    “Why? I mean ... why does he hate me? Because I was the one who arrested him?”
    “You got it.”
    The whole operation had been immer-directed and immer-controlled. Horn, a lieutenant-general then, had given him private orders to take Castor into custody. Caird had gone to the neighborhood of the Retsall Institute. By chance, or so it seemed, he had been handy when the frame had been put into action. Two other immers had smashed up the laboratory but blamed it on Castor. By then the victim was raving and had attacked the two because of his fury at the put-up job. Caird had taken him to the