Dayworld Rebel by Farmer Philip José

Author:Farmer, Philip José [Farmer, Philip José]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy
ISBN: 9780441140022
Amazon: 0441140025
Goodreads: 1254977
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1987-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

18

Her face rode by in his mind like a duck in a shooting gallery. It rose, flopped over, rose, flopped over. Flashes of her in various places appeared like a holograph beamed at random. Though he did not recall much about her, he remembered enough to know that she knew him well. What was she doing here? Visiting? Immigrated? It did not matter.

He forced a smile. “I’m sorry. You’re mistaken. I’m Andrew Vishnu Beewolf. Do I look like this… Caird?”

Ruiz was not so sure now. She stopped a few paces from him, squinted, and said, “A natural clone. I was shocked when I saw you. I thought for just a minute…you can’t be! Caird’s dead!”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

His heart was beating hard, and his body seemed to be about fifty pounds lighter. If this kept on, he would be floating off the sidewalk.

“You needn’t be. He was a traitor, a subversive. He—”

She stopped, probably because she was revealing more than she should.

She quit smiling and said, “ID, please.”

He looked up and down the courseway. No one else in sight.

“Sure.” Then, “Are you an organic?”

She nodded and reached with the other hand into an inside pocket. Duncan did not give her time to pull the card out. He slammed her on the point of her chin with his fist, lunged after her as she staggered back, and chopped the edge of his hand against the side of her neck. She fell heavily, her head striking the soft and springy courseway.

It took him three seconds to carry her limp body into his apartment. After removing her ID card and her proton-accelerator handgun, he went to his personal closet. He came back with the illegal can of truth mist and spurted a cloud on her face. That would guarantee that she would be unconscious for fifteen minutes. But he had little more than an hour to decide what to do with her.

“Could’ve bluffed it out,” he muttered. “Only she wouldn’t have been satisfied. She would’ve run my card against Caird’s file. And that would be all, brother. Damn it! Why’d I have to run into her?”

Actually, if the encounter had to happen, it was best that it take place as it had. If she had seen him anywhere else, he might not have been able to attack her without causing public attention.

He considered giving her a posthypnotic suggestion to forget the whole incident. But she would awake with a sore jaw and aching neck that would make her more than just suspicious. She would go to a psychicist who would run the passage of time just before, during, and immediately after the unexplained blankness. The psychicist would see to it that she recalled everything, including the tactile and audio data she recorded while knocked out and while under the mist. He could not take that chance. What was he to do with her?

If she disappeared, the organics would investigate. Undoubtedly, she had reported in every half hour, and HQ knew that she was last seen in this area.

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