This Perfect Day

  Dover calculated that the Eur-bound barges, if they maintained their speed and direction, would reach EUR91772 in a little over six hours.

  On the second night he brought the boat alongside a barge and slowed to match its speed while Chip climbed aboard. Chip rode on the barge for several minutes, sitting comfortably on its flat compacted load of copper ingots in wood cribs, and then he climbed back aboard the boat.

  Lilac found another man for the group, an attendant at the clinic named Lars Newstone who called himself Buzz. He was thirty-six, Chip’s age, and taller than normal; a quiet and capable-seeming man. He had been on the island for nine years and at the clinic for three, during which he had picked up a certain amount of medical knowledge. He was married but living apart from his wife. He wanted to join the group, he said, because he had always felt that “somebody ought to do something, or at least try. It’s wrong,” he said, “to let Uni— have the world without trying to get it back.”

  “He’s fine, just the man we need,” Chip said to Lilac after Buzz had left their room. “I wish I had two more of him instead of the Newbridges. Thank you.”

  Lilac said nothing, standing at the sink washing cups. Chip went to her, took her shoulders, and kissed her hair. She was in the seventh month of her pregnancy, big and uncomfortable.

  At the end of March, Julia gave a dinner party at which Chip, who had by then been working four months on the plan, presented it to her guests—natives with money who could each be counted on, she had said, for a contribution of at least five hundred dollars. He gave them copies of a list he had prepared of all the costs that would be involved, and passed around his “Switzerland” map with the tunnel drawn in in its approximate position.

  They weren’t as receptive as he had thought they would be.

  “Thirty-six hundred for explosives?” one asked.

  “That’s right, sir,” Chip said. “If anyone knows where we can get them cheaper, I’ll be glad to hear about it.”

  “What’s this ‘kit reinforcing’?”

  “The kits we’re going to carry; they’re not made for heavy loads. They have to be taken apart and remade around metal frames.”

  “You people can’t buy guns and bombs, can you?”

  “I’ll do the buying,” Julia said, “and everything will stay on my property until the party leaves. I have the permits.”

  “When do you think you’ll go?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Chip said. “The gas masks are going to take three months from when they’re ordered. And we still have one more man to find, and training to go through. I’m hoping for July or August.”

  “Are you sure this is where the tunnel actually is?”

  “No, we’re still working on that. That’s just an approximation.”

  Five of the guests gave excuses and seven gave checks that added up to only twenty-six hundred dollars, less than a quarter of the eleven thousand that was needed.

  “Lunky bastards,” Julia said.

  “It’s a beginning, anyway,” Chip said. “We can start ordering things. And take on Captain Gold.”

  “We’ll do it again in a few weeks,” Julia said. “What were you so nervous for? You’ve got to speak more forcefully!”

  The baby was born, a boy, and they named him Jan. Both his eyes were brown.

  On Sundays and Wednesday evenings, in an unused loft in Julia’s factory, Chip, Dover, Buzz, Jack, and Ria studied various forms of fighting. Their teacher was an officer in the army, Captain Gold, a small smiling man who obviously disliked them and seemed to take pleasure in having them hit one another and throw one another to the thin mats spread on the floor. “Hit! Hit! Hit!” he would say, bobbing before them in his undershirt and army trousers. “Hit I Like this! This is hitting, not this! This is waving at someone! God almighty, you’re hopeless, you steelies! Come on, Green-eye, hit him”

  Chip swung his fist at Jack and was in the air and on his back on a mat.

  “Good, you!” Captain Gold said. “That looked a little human! Get up, Green-eye, you’re not dead! What did I tell you about keeping low?”

  Jack and Ria learned most quickly; Buzz, most slowly.

  Julia gave another dinner, at which Chip spoke more forcefully, and they got thirty-two hundred dollars.

  The baby was sick—had a fever and a stomach infection— but he got better and was fine-looking and happy, sucking hungrily at Lilac’s breasts. Lilac was warmer than before, pleased with the baby and interested in hearing Chip tell about the money-raising and the gradual coming-into-being of the plan.

  Chip found a sixth man, a worker on a farm near Santany, who had come over from Afr shortly before Chip and Lilac had. He was a little older than Chip would have liked, forty-three, but he was strong and quick-moving, and sure that Uni could be beaten. He had worked in chromatomicrography in the Family, and his name was Morgan Newmark, though he still called himself by his Family name, Karl.

  Ashi said, “I think I could find the damned tunnel myself now,” and handed Chip twenty pages of notes that he had copied from books in the Library. Chip brought them, along with the maps, to each of the people he had consulted before, and three of them were now willing to hazard a projection of the tunnel’s likeliest course. They came up, not unexpectedly, with three different places for the tunnel’s entrance. Two were within a kilometer of each other and one was six kilometers away. “This is enough if we can’t do better,” Chip said to Dover.

  The company that was making the gas masks went out of business—without returning the eight-hundred-dollar advance Chip had given them—and another maker had to be found.

  Chip talked again with Newbrook, the former technological-academy teacher, about the type of refrigerating plants Uni would be likely to have. Julia gave another dinner and Ashi gave a party; three thousand dollars more was collected. Buzz had a run-in with a gang of natives and, though he surprised them by fighting effectively, came out of it with two cracked ribs and a fractured shinbone. Everyone began looking for another man in case he wasn’t able to go.

  Lilac woke Chip one night.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “Chip?” she said.

  “Yes?” He could hear Jan breathing, asleep in his cradle.

  “If you’re right,” she said, “and this island is a prison that Uni has put us on—”

  “Yes?”

  “And attacks have been made from here before—”

  “Yes?” he said.

  She was silent—he could see her lying on her back with her eyes open—and then she said, “Wouldn’t Uni put other people here, ‘healthy’ members, to warn it of other attacks?”

  He looked at her and said nothing.

  “Maybe to—take part in them?” she said. “And get everyone ‘helped’ in Eur?”

  “No,” he said, and shook his head. “It’s—no. They would have to get treatments, wouldn’t they? To stay ‘healthy’?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You think there’s a secret medicenter somewhere?” he asked, smiling.

  “No,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “I’m sure there aren’t any—‘espions’ here. Before Uni would go to those lengths, it would simply kill incurables the way you and Ashi say it would.”

  “How do you know?” she said.

  “Lilac, there are no espions,” he said. “You’re just looking for things to worry about. Go to sleep now. Go on. Jan’s going to be up in a little while. Go on.”

  He kissed her and she turned over. After a while she seemed to be asleep.

  He stayed awake.

  It couldn’t be. They would need treatments . . .

  How many people had he told about the plan, the tunnel, the real memory banks? There was no counting. Hundreds! And each must have told others . . .

  He’d even put the ad in the Immigrant: Will buy kits, cuvs, sandals . . .

  Someone who was in the group? No. Dover?—impossible. Buzz?—no, never. Jack or Ria?—no. Kar
l? He didn’t really know Karl that well yet—pleasant, talked a lot, drank a little more than he should have but not enough to worry about—no, Karl couldn’t be anything but what he seemed, working on a farm out in the middle of nowhere . . .

  Julia? He was out of his head. Christ and Wei! God in heaven!

  Lilac was just worrying too much, that was all.

  There couldn’t be any espions, any people around who were secretly on Uni’s side, because they would need treatments to stay that way.

  He was going ahead with it no matter what.

  He fell asleep.

  The bombs came: bundles of thin brown cylinders taped around a central black one. They were stored in a shed behind the factory. Each had a small metal handle, blue or yellow, lying taped against its side. The blue handles were thirty-second fuses; the yellow, four-minute ones.

  They tried one in a marble quarry at night; wedged it in a cleft and pulled its fuse handle, blue, with fifty meters of wire from behind a pile of cut blocks. The explosion when it came was thunderous, and where the cleft had been they found a hole the size of a doorway, running with rubble, churning with dust.

  They hiked in the mountains—all except Buzz—wearing kits weighted with stones. Captain Gold showed them how to load a bullet-gun and focus an L-beam; how to draw, aim, and shoot —at planks propped against the factory’s rear wall.

  “Are you giving another dinner?” Chip asked Julia.

  “In a week or two,” she said.

  But she didn’t. She didn’t mention money again, and neither did he.

  He spent some time with Karl, and satisfied himself that he wasn’t an “espion.”

  Buzz’s leg healed almost completely, and he insisted he would be able to go.

  The gas masks came, and the remaining guns, and the tools and the shoes and the razors; and the plastic sheeting, the re-made kits, the watches, the coils of strong wire, the inflatable raft, the shovel, the compasses, the binoculars.

  “Try to hit me,” Captain Gold said, and Chip hit him and split his lip.

  It took till November to get everything done, almost a year, and then Chip decided to wait and go at Christmas, to make the move to ’001 on the holiday, when bike paths and walk-ways, carports and airports, would be at their busiest; when members would move a little less slowly than normal and even a “healthy” one might miss the plate of a scanner.

  On the Sunday before they were to go, they brought everything from the shed into the loft and packed the kits and the secondary kits they would unpack when they landed. Julia was there, and Lars Newman’s son John, who was going to bring back the I.A. boat, and Dover’s girlfriend Nella—twenty-two and yellow-haired as he, excited by it all. Ashi looked in and so did Captain Gold. “You’re nuts, you’re all nuts,” Captain Gold said, and Buzz said, “Scram, you lunky.” When they were done, when all the kits were plastic-wrapped and tied, Chip asked everyone not in the group to go outside. He gathered the group in a circle on the mats.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens if one of us gets caught,” he said, “and this is what I’ve decided. If anyone, even one, gets caught—the rest of us will turn around and go back.”

  They looked at him. Buzz said, “After all this?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We won’t have a chance, once anyone’s treated and telling a doctor that we’re going in through the tunnel. So we’ll go back, quickly and quietly, and find one of the boats. In fact, I want to try to spot one when we land, before we start traveling.”

  “Christ and Wei!” Jack said. “Sure, if three or four get caught, but one?”

  “That’s the decision,” Chip said. “It’s the right one.”

  Ria said, “What if you get caught?”

  “Then Buzz is in charge,” Chip said, “and it’s up to him. But meanwhile that’s the way it’s going to be: if anyone gets caught we all turn back.”

  Karl said, “So let’s nobody get caught.”

  “Right,” Chip said. He stood up. “That’s all,” he said. “Get plenty of sleep. Wednesday at seven.”

  “Woodsday,” Dover said.

  “Woodsday, Woodsday, Woodsday,” Chip said. “Woodsday at seven.”

  He kissed Lilac as if he were going out to see someone about something and would be back in a few hours. “ ’By, love,” he said.

  She held him and kept her cheek against his and didn’t say anything.

  He kissed her again, took her arms from around him, and went to the cradle. Jan was busy reaching for an empty cigarette box hanging on a string. Chip kissed his cheek and said good-by to him.

  Lilac came to him and he kissed her. They held each other and kissed, and then he went out, not looking back at her.

  Ashi was waiting downstairs on his motorbike. He drove Chip to Pollensa and the pier.

  They were all in the I.A. office by a quarter of seven, and while they were clipping one another’s hair the truck came. John Newman and Ashi and a man from the factory loaded the kits and the raft onto the boat, and Julia unpacked sandwiches and coffee. The men clipped their beards and shaved their faces bare.

  They put bracelets on and closed links that looked like ordinary ones. Chip’s bracelet said Jesus AY31G6912.

  He said good-by to Ashi, and kissed Julia. “Pack your kit and get ready to see the world,” he said.

  “Be careful,” she said. “And try praying.”

  He got on the boat, sat on the deck in front of the kits with John Newman and the others—Buzz and Karl, Jack and Ria; strange-looking and Family-like with their clipped hair, their beardless similar faces.

  Dover started the boat and steered it out of the harbor, then turned it toward the faint orange glow that came from ’91766.

  2

  IN PALLID PRE-DAWN LIGHT they slipped from the barge and pushed the kit-loaded raft away from it. Three of them pushed and three swam along beside, watching the black high-cliffed shore. They moved slowly, keeping about fifty meters out. Every ten minutes or so they changed places; the ones who had been swimming pushed, the ones who had been pushing swam.

  When they were well below ’91772 they turned and pushed the raft in. They beached it in a small sandy cove with towering rock walls, and unloaded the kits and unwrapped them. They opened the secondary kits and put on coveralls; pocketed guns, watches, compasses, maps; then dug a hole and packed into it the two emptied kits and all the plastic wrappings, the deflated raft, their Liberty clothing, and the shovel they had used for digging. They filled the hole and stamped it level, and with kits slung on their shoulders and sandals in their hands, began walking in single file down the narrow strip of beach. The sky lightened and their shadows appeared before them, sliding in and out over rocky cliff-base. Near the back of the line Karl started whistling “One Mighty Family.” The others smiled, and Chip, at the front, joined it. Some of the others did too.

  Soon they came to a boat—an old blue boat lying on its side, waiting for incurables who would think themselves lucky. Chip turned, and walking backward, said, “Here it is, if we need it,” and Dover said, “We won’t,” and Jack, after Chip had turned and they had passed it, picked up a stone, turned, threw it at the boat, and missed.

  They switched their kits from one shoulder to the other as they walked. In a little less than an hour they came to a scanner with its back to them. “Home again,” Dover said, and Ria groaned, and Buzz said, “Hi, Uni, how are you?”—patting the scanner’s top as he passed it. He was walking without limping; Chip had looked around a few times to check.

  The strip of beach began to widen, and they came to a litter basket and more of them, and then lifeguard platforms, speakers and a clock—6:54 Thu 25 Dec 171 Y.U.—and a stairway zigzagging up the cliff with red and green bunting wound around some of its railing supports.

  They put their kits down, and their sandals, and took their coveralls off and spread them out. They lay down on them and rested under the sun’s growing warmth. Chip mentioned things that he thought they should
say when they spoke to the Family—afterwards—and they talked about that and about the extent to which Uni’s stopping would block TV and how long the restoring of it would take.

  Karl and Dover fell asleep.

  Chip lay with his eyes closed and thought about some of the problems the Family would face as it awakened, and different ways of dealing with them.

  “Christ, Who Taught Us” began on the speakers at eight o’clock, and two red-capped lifeguards in sunglasses came walking down the zigzag stairs. One of them came to a platform near the group. “Merry Christmas,” he said.

  “Merry Christmas,” they said to him.

  “You can go in now if you want,” he said, climbing up onto the platform.

  Chip and Jack and Dover got up and went into the water. They swam around for a while, watching members come down the stairs, and then they went out and lay down again.

  When there were thirty-five or forty members on the beach, at 8:22, the six got up and began putting on their coveralls and shouldering their kits.

  Chip and Dover went up the stairs first. They smiled and said “Merry Christmas” to members coming down, and easily false-touched the scanner at the top. The only members nearby were at the canteen with their backs turned.

  They waited by a water fountain, and Jack and Ria came up, and then Buzz and Karl.

  They went to the bike racks, where twenty or twenty-five bikes were lined up in the nearest slots. They took the last six, put their kits in the baskets, mounted, and rode to the entrance of the bike path. They waited there, smiling and talking, until no cyclists and no cars were going by, and then they passed the scanner in a group, touching their bracelets to the side of it in case someone could see them from a distance.

  They rode toward EUR91770 singly and in twos, spaced out widely along the path. Chip went first, with Dover behind him. He watched the cyclists who approached them and the occasional cars that rushed past. We’re going to do it, he thought. We’re going to do it.