"You talk too much, Tante," the gaunt man said.

"I'll watch it," the blonde said. She was silent as she removed two cubes of stoned coffee, put them in the wall, closed the door, pushed a b.u.t.ton, opened the door, and removed the coffee in its paper containers. The gaunt man said, "I'll tell you what we know, and then you fill in. We got our data from. . . a verbal source. The data lines weren't used, of course, except to transmit to our superior."

While Dunski was talking, the blonde poured coffee for them and silently indicated the cream and sugar containers. By the time that he had drunk two cups, Dunski had given them all that they should know.

There was a long silence after he quit talking. The gaunt man stroked his chin, then said, "We'll have to find out what this Snick knows. Afterwards, we decide."

"Decide what?" Dunski said.

"Whether we kill her before we stone her again or just hide her someplace. If we don't kill her, there's always the chance that she might be found. If she is, then she can talk."

Dunski grunted as if he had been hit in the ribs, and he said, "I know it may be necessary, but . .

"You knew when you took the immer oath that you might have to kill someday," the gaunt man said. His dark brown eyes looked steadily into Dunski's. "You aren't thinking of arguing about this, are you?"

"No, of course not. I don't take the good but dodge the bad. Whatever's in the package, I accept. But killing. . . it should be done only if absolutely necessary."

"I know that," the gaunt man said. He tipped his cup, swallowed the last of his coffee, set the cup down, and stood up. He nodded at the blonde. "Tante, you get Snick ready."

The blonde told the dark woman to follow her. The gaunt man put the shoulderbag on the table and began removing the interrogation tools. Dunski looked away from them and out through the sheers over the tall and wide window. There were only a few pedestrians and cyclists on the street, none loitering. All were intent on their own affairs or seemed to be. If there were any organics among them, they did not look toward the window. Innocents, Dunski thought, minding their own business, unknowing that something bad was about to take place a few feet from them. Bad. Not evil. The immers were not trying to overthrow the government. They just wanted to live within its forms-more or less-without being disturbed, and they hoped to change it just enough so that all would have true freedom. What harm was there in that?

The gaunt man put some of his tools back into the bag and took the rest into the living room. "We'll put her there," he said, indicating a sofa. "All of you . . . get out of her sight." He tied a handkerchief over his face and stood by the cylinder with a gas-spraying can in his hand. The blonde woman, at a nod from him, turned the power on. A second later, the power having gone off automatically, she closed the panel.

The gaunt man had the door open and had shot the gas into the cylinder and closed the door again before the blonde had turned away from the panel. Dunski glimpsed Snick's wide open eyes, her agonized face, and her attempt to rise from her womb-crouch. He saw her face at the window and the palms of her hands. Both face and hands slid away. The gaunt man lowered the handkerchief to his neck and counted thirty seconds by his watch before he opened the door. Snick fell as it swung out, her head striking the floor, her legs doubled beneath her, b.u.t.tocks in the air.

Dunski helped the dark woman carry Snick's limp body to the sofa. "Gaunt," as Dunski thought of him, pa.s.sed a circular device, held in his fingertips, over her upturned face and body. After telling Dunski and "Dark" to turn her over, he moved the device over her back. As it pa.s.sed over her left thigh, it shrilled. Gaunt said "Ah!" and brought the device back to the area that had triggered it. He took a pen from his robe pocket and outlined a two-inch square area in red. Having put the round device in the pocket, he removed a thin cylinder with a bulb at its end. Holding this bulb close to Snick's skin inside the square, he moved it slowly until it shrilled most loudly.

Gaunt took a pair of thick opaque spectacles from his pocket. He put these on and bent over to stare at the area. Then lie marked a tiny X almost in the center of the square. He took off the spectacles, folded them, put them in the pocket, and said, "Transmitter. Homing pigeon. It's not activated, of course."

"How do you know?" Dunski said.

"If it was, we'd be in custody by now."

Gaunt placed a reader on her pulse. "A little fast," he said, "but that's normal with the gas." He turned a dial on the reader and held the machine on her arm. "Blood pressure normal, considering the circ.u.mstances."

Dunski felt an impulse to close Snick's hanging jaw but repressed it. The others might think that he had some sympathy for her.

"I don't know what the blow on her head did to her," Gaunt said. "Let's hope that it hasn't addled her wits. Or that she doesn't die on us from a fractured skull."

"Not until the questioning is over, anyway," Dunski said.

Gaunt seemed unaware of the sarcasm. "Yes."

Gaunt pa.s.sed a vein selector over her lower arm and stopped it when an orange light flashed from its end. He moved it slowly back and forth until the light was at its brightest. Then he pressed the point against the skin and lifted it away. A round orange smudge marked where the injector should enter. He rubbed alcohol on the skin; the orange mark was not dissolved. With a throwaway hypodermic air syringe, he injected three cubic centimeters of a dark reddish liquid. Snick's eyelids fluttered.

Gaunt followed the questioning procedure of the Organic Department by the book. For all Dunski knew,.Gaunt might be an organic. Though he was asking questions in the manner and form required by law, he departed from the legal procedure in all other respects. There were no judges present, no doctor, no defense lawyer, no camera recording crew, no state prosecutor, no data banker to testify that the one questioned was indeed the one the state had identified as Panthea Pao Snick.

Gaunt must have used her ID star-disc to check out all the data therein, but there were things that he had not been able to find out, otherwise he would not be interrogating her now.

One of the missing items was the reason for her mission.

He went straight to the heart of matters and asked her what that was. He did not do it by putting a single question to her and then letting her pour out all she knew about the mission. The drug did not open the dam. What she knew had to be pulled out item by item through a patient interrogation. But they came out quickly and easily like well-oiled bureau drawers.

When he was done, Gaunt sat down on a chair near her. Sweat was running down his forehead as if the air-conditioning had gone off.

"I'm relieved that Snick wasn't looking for us," Gaunt said. "But she would have stumbled on us eventually. In fact, she did, but we were lucky we got her before she could inform the organics."

Snick's primary mission had been to find and arrest a daybreaker named Morning Rose Doubleday. She was a scientist who had held a high position in Sunday's Department of Genetics. She was suspected of being a member of a secret organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the government, though, so far, the organization had committed no violent crimes. When Sunday's organics had gone to arrest her, they found that she had gone underground. Someone had warned her, probably someone in the organics force.

Doubleday was so important that Snick had been given a temporal visa to track her down. While in Monday, Snick had been told about Gril and asked to keep an eye out for him. When she was in Wednesday, Snick had also been told that another dangerous criminal, Doctor Chang Castor, was on the loose. Would she, while searching for Doubleday, report to the organics if she heard anything about him?

The governments of the various days wanted her true mission kept as quiet as possible. Thus, Snick had pretended to be looking for the most innocuous of the criminals, Gril, when she had talked to Tingle. She must have known that this was a flimsy reason. Tingle would wonder why a Sunday organic was looking for a Monday daybreaker. But she was immune from questioning by a civilian, and she must not have cared what he thought.

When Snick had seen Castor in Washington Square Park, she had followed him. She should have summoned organics to help her arrest him, but she had some reasons, all invalid, of course, to suspect that Castor might be a mennber of the organization to which Doubleday belonged. Unlike her superiors, she thought it likely that Doubleday's organization existed in all the days. Arresting Castor at once would have removed any chance of his leading her to other revolutionaries.

It was true that everything Castor knew about the immers would have been revealed by the organic interrogation. But his comrades might have gotten wind of it and killed themselves or, like the nonimmer Doubleday, have become daybreakers. They would eventually be chased down, but by then they might be desperate enough to swallow the poison they carried. Or do what some had done and Doubleday should have done. Speak the codephrase that would explode the tiny bomb implanted in her body.

"She must be a coward!" Blonde said.

"Who?" Gaunt said.

"Doubleday, of course. She should have killed herself!"

"We're ~upposed to do that, tyo," Dunski said.

"I hope none of us will be like Doubleday!" Blonde said.

"I hope none of us have to find out if we are," Dark said. Dunski wondered if he would have the guts. Jeff Caird would do it. Tingle might. But would Dunski? And tomorrow, what would Wyatt Repp do? Probably find a perverse exaltation, satisfaction, anyway, in dying like a hero. The others? He did not know about them. At the moment, they were too remote from him, ectoplasm, not flesh.

"We know," Gaunt said, "that Snick wanted to question you as Tingle because she wanted to put some of Wednesday's data bankers to work for her. You weren't the only banker she talked to. But she was cagey, she didn't tell you what her mission was because she had to check you out first. For all she knew, you might be a member of the revolutionaries. She didn't get back to you because she thought she had a hot lead on Doubleday and she spent too much time on it. It turned out that the lead wasn't too hot."

"You talk too much," Dunski said. "Blondie here is a deafmute compared to you."

Scowling, Gaunt rose from the chair.

"What do you mean?"

"You haven't told me your names. With good reason. But you just said the name of my Wednesday ident.i.ty. That's stupid, Oom Gaunt!"

"Gaunt?"

"My nickname for you. You chew out Blonde for running off at the mouth, yet she didn't say anything dangerous to us. But you..."

Gaunt tried to smile.

"You're right. That was stupid, a slip of the tongue, anyway. I apologize. I won't do it again. But there's no real harm done. She"-he pointed at Snick-"can't hear us."

"Her unconscious can. The organics' scientists are working on ways to get information out of the unconscious. One of these days, they might find out how to do it. If they do, then they could run off the interrogation, our conversation, what she heard when she was unconscious, even what she saw if her eyes were open while she was drugged."

Gaunt sighed, and he said, "They won't be able to get anything out of the dead."

Blonde gasped. Dark stared wide-eyed at him.

Dunski felt sick and a little faint. He broke the silence by saying, "You meant all along to kill her?"

Gaunt bit his lip and looked at Snick. Her mouth was closed now; she looked as if she were sleeping. And she really looks beautiful, Dunski thought. A study in brown, as soft and innocent as a seal pup. Yet, according to her bio-data, she was a swift and determined and sometimes ingenious tracker of criminals.

"I don't want to," Gaunt said. "I've never killed before; I loathe the idea of killing. I will do it only if there is nothing else to do, no other way out. But I can't let somebody else make the decision, dodge the responsibility by letting a superior a.s.sume it for me. I..

He was silent for a moment. Dunski had another attack of faintness. It was not caused, however, by reaction to Gaunt's decision. Something flashed. A burst of light and great warmth surrounded him. Though the "interruption"-how describe it as other than an interruption, something breaking in and then out?-was brief, he felt a great love for Gaunt, who was thinking of murdering, and a great love for Snick, who might be murdered.

The light, warmth, and faintness pa.s.sed. He shook his head slightly as if he were trying to shake off water. What the h.e.l.l had happened then?

The thought that perhaps Father Tom Zurvan had thrust through for a second swelled and faded. He did not want to think about that. That Zurvan could do that was a weakness in his, Dunski's, defense, a fault in mental fencing. It also showed him-again, something he did not wish to dwell upon-that the selves more widely separated by the day of the week were as near as, perhaps nearer than, those closer in terms of days. Traveling through time was not always done chronologically.

Whatever had caused this, the ballooning glow was now a fast-shrinking flicker.

"I don't think that she has to be killed," Dunski said. "Look at what she knows. She was trailing Castor, and he knocked her out. She wakes up in a stoner and sees only a masked man who makes her unconscious again. For all she knows, the man who knocked her out again is Castor. She-"

"Is Castor the same height and build as I am?" Gaunt said. "Was he wearing the same clothes?"

"No," Dunski said slowly. "But she only glimpsed you. The door partly hid your body. Anyway, she doesn't have the slightest idea that anybody but Castor is involved. What could she tell the authorities if she was found and destoned?"

He paused to swallow and said, "Does she even have to be stoned permanently? Wouldn't it work out better-for us-if she's found tomorrow, no, wait a minute, she might not be found until next Thursday."

He turned to Blonde. "How long will they--Martin and Bunblossom-be on vacation?"

"They'll be back tomorrow, I mean, their tomorrow, next Thursday."

"That gives us a week before she's found," Dunski said, turning to Gaunt.

"Not us, you," Gaunt said. "The rest of us get stoned before midnight."

"By us, I mean immers," Dunski said. "We should have Castor out of the way before then. We'd better; we have to get him today. We're wasting time with Snick. We should all be out looking for Castor."

Gaunt looked down on the gently breathing woman. He turned toward the others but looked directly at Dunski.

"You haven't really thought this out," Gaunt said. "You're letting your humane feelings kill your logic, you sense of duty and of right, what's right for us.

"Castor is our out for this problem. I mean by that, the Snick problem. The organics here know he's killed and mutilated two women. If... if Snick is found dead and mutilated, the organics will think that Castor did it. That diverts suspicion from anyone else. And it'll be next Sunday before its government sends out a replacement. If it does."

Blonde, her hand to her mouth, said softly, "Oh, G.o.d! You're going to butcher her!"

"You ... can't ... do... that," Dunski said.

Gaunt mocked him. "And . . . why ... not?"

"That's not very prosocial behavior," Blonde said.

Dunski found himself laughing hysterically at that.

"Oh, my G.o.d, prosocial behavior!" he said, choking. "We're talking about a human being here."

"Yes," Gaunt said. "But it's for the greater good. All right! No more talk! I've never seen such a gabby bunch, parrots, my G.o.d! You're supposed to be immers, but you .. . you ...

Dunski had managed to get hold of himself almost literally. He felt invisible hands, coming from somewhere, placed upon something somewhere within himself. Father Tom?

Gaunt said, "I've made up my mind, and I'm the leader here. You have to do what I tell you."

"I haven't been told that you're in command," Dunski said. "What's your authority?"

Gaunt's nostrils flared; his face got red.

"Your superior didn't tell you that I'd be in command?"

"My superior tells me as little as possible," Dunski said coldly. "Apparently, he told me less than he should. Anyway . .

He turned and walked to his shoulderbag, which was on the floor in a corner. He picked it up, opened it, and put the strap over his right shoulder. Though Gaunt was furious, he was cool enough to realize that Dunski had made a threatening, if subtle, move. Gaunt had not forgotten that Dunski had a gun.

Gaunt's voice was firm, though his head shook a little. "As you said, we don't have time to discuss this. And I am in command here. We will dispose of Snick as I said we would because it's the only logical thing to do. And because I said so."

"Are you going to mutilate her or are you going to get someone else to do it?" Dunski said.

"What does it matter who does it!" Gaunt said, his voice louder. "It'll be done!"

He had looked at his shoulderbag, which was on a small table near the end of the sofa close to Snick's feet. Dunski supposed that Gaunt had a weapon in his bag. He asked himself what he would do if the man went~ for the gun. Was he really prepared to shoot a fellow immer to stop him from killing an organic? He would not know until the time came, and he did not want that time to come.

Time, however, was creeping or sliding or flowing or proceeding in whatever unknown manner Time used to make Then into Now. During the next few seconds, one of the two alternate futures would be chosen. Or would just happen, choice not being one of the factors in the taking of the road.

Blonde said, her voice thin, "I can't believe this is happening!"

"Neither can I," Gaunt said. He moved backward away from Dunski, coming closer to his shoulderbag. "I may have to report your emotional instability to the council."

Dunski lied. "It isn't so much the killing. It's the butchering. It makes me sick. You should understand that. I was. . . am... close to vomiting. But if it has to be done . .

Gaunt seemed to loosen a little. "It does. And I'll do it. I wouldn't ask anyone else to do it."

He looked down at Snick. "Believe me, if there was any other way . . ." He spoke to Blonde. "You and this man," meaning Dunski, "put her in the stoner."

Gaunt was shrewd. If Dunski had his hands full, he could not go for his weapon.

"You can't kill her here," Blonde said. "The organics will investigate everybody in the building. They might stumble across something. I'd be implicated."

"I know that," Gaunt said coolly. "She'll be taken elsewhere. I don't even want you to know where. None of you."

Dunski lifted Snick by her shoulders. How soft and warm she was. How soon to be hard and cold. And then soft and warm again, and then torn apart. He felt numbed. As if he was sharing a little her death.

Blonde grabbed the legs, and the two carried her to the stoner. They propped her up, pushed her into the cylinder in a sitting position, and pushed again on the torso, which had fallen forward. Dunski lifted her legs and pushed them so that they were against her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He raised himself up and backed away while Blonde shut the door. Gaunt turned the control that applied the power and watched the dial as it spun back to OFF.