Dayworld Read Free

Immerman, after some agonizing, had decided that the elixir would not be good for humankind as a whole.
    As it was, the stoner society eliminated many generations that would have been born if the stoners had not been invented. It took a person one hundred and forty objective years to reach the physiological age of twenty. Thus, six generations were lost every one hundred and forty years. Who knew what geniuses and saints, not to mention the common people, were never born? Who knew how many people who might have led the world in scientific and artistic and political progress were missing?
    Immerman had thought that the present situation was bad enough. But if the existing slowing-down of living and of birth was increased by seven, then the loss would be even greater. And this global society, the Organic Commonwealth of Earth, would become even more static and would change even more sluggishly.
    Whether Immerman’s decision was ethically right or wrong, he had made it, and its result, the secret immer family, was living today.
    Immerman had not, however, been selfish in keeping the secret for himself, his descendants, and those initiated into the family. The immers would be hidden rebels against the government. In a slow and subtle revolution, they would infiltrate the upper and middle echelons of the commonwealth. Once they had enough power, they would not change the basic structure of the government. They did not want as yet to abandon the stoners. But they did want to get rid of the constant and close monitoring of the citizens by the government. It was not just irksome; it was degrading. It also was not necessary, though the government claimed that it was.
    “Only by being watched may you become free” was one of the government’s slogans often displayed on the strip shows.
    At the age of eighteen subyears, Caird had been told of the immer society by his parents. He had been studied by the council, weighed in the balance and found more than satisfactory. He was asked if he wanted to become an immer. Of course, he did. Who would turn down the opportunity of a much longer life? And what intelligent youth would not want to work for greater freedom and for an eventual position of power?
    It was not until some subyears later that he realized how anxious his parents must have been when they revealed the secret of the immers. What if, through some perversity, their son had refused to join? The immer council could not allow him to live, even though it was unlikely that he would betray the family. He would have been taken away in the dead of night and stoned, then hidden where no one would ever find him. And that would have grieved his parents.
    When Caird had realized that, he had asked his parents what they would have done if he had rejected the offer. Would they have turned against the immers?
    “But no one has ever refused,” his father had said.
    Caird had not said anything, but he had wondered if there had been people who had turned down the offer and no one except those immediately involved had known of it.
    At nineteen, Caird had been approached by his uncle, an organic whom Caird suspected might also be of the Manhattan immer council. Did his nephew wish to become a daybreaker? Not just the ordinary type of daybreaker, a common criminal, but one who would be protected and helped by the immers. He would have a new identity on each day, he could have many professions, and he could carry messages verbally from one day’s council to the next when recorded messages were dangerous.
    Entranced, eager, the youthful Caird had said that he certainly would like to be a daybreaker.
     
     
     

 
    2.
     
    Thinking of this, Caird finally fell asleep. And he was in a chapter of a serial dream, though he had never been in this cliff-hanger before. He was sitting in a room that he somehow knew was part of the long-abandoned sewer system buried by the first great earthquake to level Manhattan. This room was just off the middle of a