This Perfect Day

1

A CITY’S blank white concrete slabs, the giant ones ringed by the less giant, gave space in their midst to a broad pink-floored plaza, a playground in which some two hundred young children played and exercised under the care of a dozen supervisors in white coveralls. Most of the children, bare, tan, and black-haired, were crawling through red and yellow cylinders, swinging on swings, or doing group calisthenics; but in a shadowed corner where a hopscotch grid was inlaid, five of them sat in a close, quiet circle, four of them listening and one speaking.

“They catch animals and eat them and wear their skins,” the speaker, a boy of about eight, said. “And they—they do a thing called ‘fighting.’ That means they hurt each other, on purpose, with their hands or with rocks and things. They don’t love and help each other at all.”

The listeners sat wide-eyed. A girl younger than the boy said, “But you can’t take off your bracelet. It’s impossible.” She pulled at her own bracelet with one finger, to show how safely-strong the links were.

“You can if you’ve got the right tools,” the boy said. “It’s taken off on your linkday, isn’t it?”

“Only for a second.”

“But it’s taken off, isn’t it?”

“Where do they live?” another girl asked.

“On mountaintops,” the boy said. “In deep caves. In all kinds of places where we can’t find them.”

The first girl said, “They must be sick.”

“Of course they are,” the boy said, laughing. “That’s what ‘incurable’ means, sick. That’s why they’re called incurables, because they’re very, very sick.”

The youngest child, a boy of about six, said, “Don’t they get their treatments?”

The older boy looked at him scornfully. “Without their bracelets?” he said. “Living in caves?”

“But how do they get sick?” the six-year-old asked. “They get their treatments until they run away, don’t they?”

“Treatments,” the older boy said, “don’t always work.”

The six-year-old stared at him. “They do,” he said.

“No they don’t.”

“My goodness,” a supervisor said, coming to the group with volley balls tucked one under each arm, “aren’t you sitting too close together? What are you playing, Who’s Got the Rabbit?”

The children quickly hitched away from one another, separating into a larger circle—except the six-year-old boy, who stayed where he was, not moving at all. The supervisor looked at him curiously.

A two-note chime sounded on loudspeakers. “Shower and dress,” the supervisor said, and the children hopped to their feet and raced away.

“Shower and dress!” the supervisor called to a group of children playing passball nearby.

The six-year-old boy stood up, looking troubled and unhappy. The supervisor crouched before him and looked into his face with concern. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

The boy, whose right eye was green instead of brown, looked at her and blinked.

The supervisor let drop her volley balls, turned the boy’s wrist to look at his bracelet, and took him gently by the shoulders. “What is it, Li?” she asked. “Did you lose the game? Losing’s the same as winning; you know that, don’t you?”

The boy nodded.

“What’s important is having fun and getting exercise, right?”

The boy nodded again and tried to smile.

“Well, that’s better,” the supervisor said. “That’s a little better. Now you don’t look like such a sad old sad-monkey.”

The boy smiled.

“Shower and dress,” the supervisor said with relief. She turned the boy around and gave him a pat on his bottom. “Go on,” she said, “skedaddle.”

The boy, who was sometimes called Chip but more often Li—his nameber was Li RM35M4419—said scarcely a word while eating, but his sister Peace kept up a continuous jabbering and neither of his parents noticed his silence. It wasn’t until all four had seated themselves in the TV chairs that his mother took a good look at him and said, “Are you feeling all right, Chip?”

“Yes, I feel fine,” he said.

His mother turned to his father and said, “He hasn’t said a word all evening.”

Chip said, “I feel fine.”

“Then why are you so quiet?” his mother asked.

“Shh,” his father said. The screen had flicked on and was finding its right colors.

When the first hour was over and the children were getting ready for bed, Chip’s mother went into the bathroom and watched him finish cleaning his teeth and pull his mouthpiece from the tube. “What is it?” she said. “Did somebody say something about your eye?”

“No,” he said, reddening.

“Rinse it,” she said.

“I did.”

“Rinse it.”

He rinsed his mouthpiece and, stretching, hung it in its place on the rack. “Jesus was talking,” he said. “Jesus DV. During play.”

“About what? Your eye?”

“No, not my eye, Nobody says anything about my eye.”

“Then what?”

He shrugged. “Members who—get sick and—leave the Family. Run away and take off their bracelets.”

His mother looked at him nervously. “Incurables,” she said.

He nodded, her manner and her knowing the name making him more uneasy. “It’s true?” he said.

“No,” she said. “No, it isn’t. No. I’m going to call Bob. He’ll explain it to you.” She turned and hurried from the room, slipping past Peace, who was coming in closing her pajamas.

In the living room Chip’s father said, “Two more minutes. Are they in bed?”

Chip’s mother said, “One of the children told Chip about the incurables.”

“Hate,” his father said.

“I’m calling Bob,” his mother said, going to the phone.

“It’s after eight.”

“He’ll come,” she said. She touched her bracelet to the phone’s plate and read out the nameber red-printed on a card tucked under the screen rim: “Bob NE20G3018.” She waited, rubbing the heels of her palms tightly together. “I knew something was bothering him,” she said. “He didn’t say a single word all evening.”

Chip’s father got up from his chair. “I’ll go talk to him,” he said, going.

“Let Bob do it!” Chip’s mother called. “Get Peace into bed; she’s still in the bathroom!”

Bob came twenty minutes later.

“He’s in his room,” Chip’s mother said.

“You two watch the program,” Bob said. “Go on, sit down and watch.” He smiled at them. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “Really. It happens every day.”

“Still?” Chip’s father said.

“Of course,” Bob said. “And it’ll happen a hundred years from now. Kids are kids.”

He was the youngest adviser they had ever had—twenty-one, and barely a year out of the Academy. There was nothing diffident or unsure about him though; on the contrary, he was more relaxed and confident than advisers of fifty or fifty-five. They were pleased with him.

He went to Chip’s room and looked in. Chip was in bed, lying on an elbow with his head in his hand, a comic book spread open before him.

“Hi, Li,” Bob said.

Chip said, “Hi, Bob.”

Bob went in and sat down on the side of the bed. He put his telecomp on the floor between his feet, felt Chip’s forehead and ruffled his hair. “Whatcha readin’?” he said.

“Wood’s Struggle,” Chip said, showing Bob the cover of the comic book. He let it drop closed on the bed and, with his forefinger, began tracing the wide yellow W of “Wood’s.”

Bob said, “I hear somebody’s been giving you some cloth about incurables.”

“Is that what it is?” Chip asked, not looking up from his moving finger.

“That’s what it is, Li,” Bob said. “It used to be true, a long, long time ago, but not any more; now it’s just cloth.”

Chip was silent, retracing the W.

“We didn’t always know as much about medicine and chemistry as we do today,” Bob said, watching him, “and until fifty years or so after the Unification, members used to get sick sometimes, a very few of them, and feel that they weren’t members. Some of them ran away and lived by themselves in places the Family wasn’t using, barren islands and mountain peaks and so forth.”

“And they took off their bracelets?”

“I suppose they did,” Bob said. “Bracelets wouldn’t have been much use to them in places like that, would they, with no scanners to put them to?”

“Jesus said they did something called ‘fighting.’”

Bob looked away and then back again. “‘Acting aggressively’ is a nicer way of putting it,” he said. “Yes, they did that.”

Chip looked up at him. “But they’re dead now?” he said.

“Yes, all dead,” Bob said. “Every last one of them.” He smoothed Chip’s hair. “It was a long, long time ago,” he said. “Nobody gets that way today.”

Chip said, “We know more about medicine and chemistry today. Treatments work.”

“Right you are,” Bob said. “And don’t forget there were five separate computers in those days. Once one of those sick members had left his home continent, he was completely unconnected.”

“My grandfather helped build UniComp.”

“I know he did, Li. So next time anyone tells you about the incurables, you remember two things: one, treatments are much more effective today than they were a long time ago; and two, we’ve got UniComp looking out for us everywhere on Earth. Okay?”

“Okay,” Chip said, and smiled.

“Let’s see what it says about you” Bob said, picking up his telecomp and opening it on his knees.

Chip sat up and moved close, pushing his pajama sleeve clear of his bracelet. “Do you think I’ll get an extra treatment?” he asked.

“If you need one,” Bob said. “Do you want to turn it on?”

“Me?” Chip said. “May I?”

“Sure,” Bob said.

Chip put his thumb and forefinger cautiously to the telecomp’s on-off switch. He clicked it over, and small lights came on—blue, amber, amber. He smiled at them.

Bob, watching him, smiled and said, “Touch.”

Chip touched his bracelet to the scanner plate, and the blue light beside it turned red.

Bob tapped the input keys. Chip watched his quickly moving fingers. Bob kept tapping and then pressed the answer button; a line of green symbols glowed on the screen, and then a second line beneath the first. Bob studied the symbols. Chip watched him.

Bob looked at Chip from the corners of his eyes, smiling. “Tomorrow at 12:25,” he said.

“Good!” Chip said. “Thank you!”

“Thank Uni,” Bob said, switching off the telecomp and closing its cover. “Who told you about the incurables?” he asked. “Jesus who?”

“DV33-something,” Chip said. “He lives on the twenty-fourth floor.”

Bob snapped the telecomp’s catches. “He’s probably as worried as you were,” he said.

“Can he have an extra treatment too?”

“If he needs one; I’ll alert his adviser. Now to sleep, brother; you’ve got school tomorrow.” Bob took Chip’s comic book and put it on the night table.

Chip lay down and snuggled smilingly into his pillow, and Bob stood up, tapped off the lamp, ruffled Chip’s hair again, and bent and kissed the back of his head.

“See you Friday,” Chip said.

“Right,” Bob said. “Good night.”

“’Night, Bob.”

Chip’s parents stood up anxiously when Bob came into the living room.

“He’s fine,” Bob said. “Practically asleep already. He’s getting an extra treatment during his lunch hour tomorrow, probably a bit of tranquilizer.”

“Oh, what a relief,” Chip’s mother said, and his father said, “Thanks, Bob.”

“Thank Uni,” Bob said. He went to the phone. “I want to get some help to the other boy,” he said, “the one who told him”—and touched his bracelet to the phone’s plate.

The next day, after lunch, Chip rode the escalators down from his school to the medicenter three floors below. His bracelet, touched to the scanner at the medicenter’s entrance, produced a winking green yes on the indicator; and another winking green yes at the door of the therapy section; and another winking green yes at the door of the treatment room.

Four of the fifteen units were being serviced, so the line was fairly long. Soon enough, though, he was mounting children’s steps and thrusting his arm, with the sleeve pushed high, through a rubber-rimmed opening. He held his arm grown-uply still while the scanner inside found and fastened on his bracelet and the infusion disc nuzzled warm and smooth against his upper arm’s softness. Motors burred inside the unit, liquids trickled. The blue light overhead turned red and the infusion disc tickled-buzzed-stung his arm; and then the light turned blue again.

Later that day, in the playground, Jesus DV, the boy who had told him about the incurables, sought Chip out and thanked him for helping him.

“Thank Uni,” Chip said. “I got an extra treatment; did you?”

“Yes,” Jesus said. “So did the other kids and Bob UT. He’s the one who told me.”

“It scared me a little,” Chip said, “thinking about members getting sick and running away.”

“Me too a little,” Jesus said. “But it doesn’t happen any more; it was a long, long time ago.”

“Treatments are better now than they used to be,” Chip said.

Jesus said, “And we’ve got UniComp watching out for us everywhere on Earth.”

“Right you are,” Chip said.

A supervisor came and shooed them into a passball circle, an enormous one of fifty or sixty boys and girls spaced out at fingertip distance, taking up more than a quarter of the busy playground.

2

CHIP’S GRANDFATHER was the one who had given him the name Chip. He had given all of them extra names that were different from their real ones: Chip’s mother, who was his daughter, he called “Suzu” instead of Anna; Chip’s father was “Mike” not Jesus (and thought the idea foolish); and Peace was “Willow,” which she refused to have anything at all to do with. “No! Don’t call me that! I’m Peace! I’m Peace KD37T5002!”

Papa Jan was odd. Odd-looking, naturally; all grandparents had their marked peculiarities—a few centimeters too much or too little of height, skin that was too light or too dark, big ears, a bent nose. Papa Jan was both taller and darker than normal, his eyes were big and bulging, and there were two reddish patches in his graying hair. But he wasn’t only odd-looking, he was odd-talking; that was the real oddness about him. He was always saying things vigorously and with enthusiasm and yet giving Chip the feeling that he didn’t mean them at all, that he meant in fact their exact opposites. On that subject of names, for instance: “Marvelous! Wonderful!” he said. “Four names for boys, four names for girls! What could be more friction-free, more everyone-the-same? Everybody would name boys after Christ, Marx, Wood, or Wei anyway, wouldn’t they?”

“Yes,” Chip said.

“Of course!” Papa Jan said. “And if Uni gives out four names for boys it has to give out four names for girls too, right? Obviously! Listen.” He stopped Chip and, crouching down, spoke face to face with him, his bulging eyes dancing as if he was about to laugh. It was a holiday and they were on their way to the parade, Unification Day or Wei’s Birthday or whatever; Chip was seven. “Listen, Li RM35M26J449988WXYZ,” Papa Jan said. “Listen, I’m going to tell you something fantastic, incredible. In my day—are you listening?—in my day there were oyer twenty different names for boys alone! Would you believe it? Love of Family, it’s the truth. There was ‘Jan,’ and ‘John,’ and ‘Amu,’ and ‘Lev.’ ‘Higa’ and ‘Mike’! ‘Tonio’! And in my father’s time there were even more, maybe forty or fifty! Isn’t that ridiculous? All those different names when members themselves are exactly the same and interchangeable? Isn’t that the silliest thing you ever heard of?”

And Chip nodded, confused, feeling that Papa Jan meant the opposite, that somehow it wasn’t silly and ridiculous to have forty or fifty different names for boys alone.

“Look at them!” Papa Jan said, taking Chip’s hand and walking on with him—through Unity Park to the Wei’s Birthday parade. “Exactly the same! Isn’t it marvelous? Hair the same, eyes the same, skin the same, shape the same; boys, girls, all the same. Like peas in a pod. Isn’t it fine? Isn’t it top speed?”

Chip, flushing (not his green eye, not the same as anybody’s), said, “What does ‘peezinapod’ mean?”

“I don’t know,” Papa Jan said. “Things members used to eat before totalcakes. Sharya used to say it.”

He was a construction supervisor in EUR55131, twenty kilometers from ’55128, where Chip and his family lived. On Sundays and holidays he rode over and visited them. His wife, Sharya, had drowned in a sightseeing-boat disaster in 135, the same year Chip was born; he hadn’t remarried.

Chip’s other grandparents, his father’s mother and father, lived in MEX10405, and the only time he saw them was when they phoned on birthdays. They were odd, but not nearly as odd as Papa Jan.

School was pleasant and play was pleasant. The Pre-U Museum was pleasant although some of the exhibits were a bit scary—the “spears” and “guns,” for instance, and the “prison cell” with its striped-suited “convict” sitting on the cot and clutching his head in motionless month-after-month woe. Chip always looked at him—he would slip away from the rest of the class if he had to—and having looked, he always walked quickly away.

Ice cream and toys and comic books were pleasant too. Once when Chip put his bracelet and a toy’s sticker to a supply-center scanner, its indicator red-winked no and he had to put the toy, a construction set, in the turnback bin. He couldn’t understand why Uni had refused him; it was the right day and the toy was in the right category. “There must be a reason, dear,” the member behind him said. “You go call your adviser and find out.”

He did, and it turned out that the toy was only being withheld for a few days, not denied completely; he had been teasing a scanner somewhere, putting his bracelet to it again and again, and he was being taught not to. That winking red no was the first in his life for a claim that mattered to him, not just for starting into the wrong classroom or coming to the medicenter on the wrong day; it hurt him and saddened him.

Birthdays were pleasant, and Christmas and Marxmas and Unification Day and Wood’s and Wei’s Birthdays. Even more pleasant, because they came less frequently, were his linkdays. The new link would be shinier than the others, and would stay shiny for days and days and days; and then one day he would remember and look and there would be only old links, all of them the same and indistinguishable. Like peezinapod.

In the spring of 145, when Chip was ten, he and his parents and Peace were granted the trip to EUR00001 to see UniComp. It was over an hour’s ride from carport to carport and the longest trip Chip remembered making, although according to his parents he had flown from Mex to Eur when he was one and a half, and from EUR20140 to ’55128 a few months later. They made the UniComp trip on a Sunday in April, riding with a couple in their fifties (someone’s odd-looking grandparents, both of them lighter than normal, she with her hair unevenly clipped) and another family, the boy and girl of which were a year older than Chip and Peace. The other father drove the car from the EUR00001 turnoff to the carport near UniComp. Chip watched with interest as the man worked the car’s lever and buttons. It felt funny to be riding slowly on wheels again after shooting along on air.

They took snapshots outside UniComp’s white marble dome—whiter and more beautiful than it was in pictures or on TV, as the snow-tipped mountains beyond it were more stately, the Lake of Universal Brotherhood more blue and far-reaching—and then they joined the line at the entrance, touched the admission scanner, and went into the blue-white curving lobby. A smiling member in pale blue showed them toward the elevator line. They joined it, and Papa Jan came up to them, grinning with delight at their astonishment.

“What are you doing here?” Chip’s father asked as Papa Jan kissed Chip’s mother. They had told him they had been granted the trip and he had said nothing at all about claiming it himself.

Papa Jan kissed Chip’s father. “Oh, I just decided to surprise you, that’s all,” he said. “I wanted to tell my friend here”—he laid a large hand across Chip’s shoulder—“a little more about Uni than the earpiece will. Hello, Chip.” He bent and kissed Chip’s cheek, and Chip, surprised to be the reason for Papa Jan’s being there, kissed him in return and said, “Hello, Papa Jan.”

“Hello, Peace KD37T5002,” Papa Jan said gravely, and kissed Peace. She kissed him and said hello.

“When did you claim the trip?” Chip’s father asked.

“A few days after you did,” Papa Jan said, keeping his hand on Chip’s shoulder. The line moved up a few meters and they all moved with it.

Chip’s mother said, “But you were here only five or six years ago, weren’t you?”

“Uni knows who put it together,” Papa Jan said, smiling. “We get special favors.”

“That’s not so,” Chip’s father said. “No one gets special favors.”

“Well, here I am, anyway,” Papa Jan said, and turned his smile down toward Chip. “Right?”

“Right,” Chip said, and smiled back up at him.

Papa Jan had helped build UniComp when he was a young man. It had been his first assignment.

The elevator held about thirty members, and instead of music it had a man’s voice—“Good day, brothers and sisters; welcome to the site of UniComp”—a warm, friendly voice that Chip recognized from TV. “As you can tell, we’ve started to move,” it said, “and now we’re descending at a speed of twenty-two meters per second. It will take us just over three and a half minutes to reach Uni’s five-kilometer depth. This shaft down which we’re traveling…” The voice gave statistics about the size of UniComp’s housing and the thickness of its walls, and told of its safety from all natural and man-made disturbances. Chip had heard this information before, in school and on TV, but hearing it now, while entering that housing and passing through those walls, while on the very verge of seeing UniComp, made it seem new and exciting. He listened attentively, watching the speaker disc over the elevator door. Papa Jan’s hand still held his shoulder, as if to restrain him. “We’re slowing now,” the voice said. “Enjoy your visit, won’t you?”—and the elevator sank to a cushiony stop and the door divided and slid to both sides.

There was another lobby, smaller than the one at ground level, another smiling member in pale blue, and another line, this one extending two by two to double doors that opened on a dimly lit hallway.

“Here we are!” Chip called, and Papa Jan said to him, “We don’t all have to be together.” They had become separated from Chip’s parents and Peace, who were farther ahead in the line and looking back at them questioningly—Chip’s parents; Peace was too short to be seen. The member in front of Chip turned and offered to let them move up, but Papa Jan said, “No, this is all right. Thank you, brother.” He waved a hand at Chip’s parents and smiled, and Chip did the same. Chip’s parents smiled back, then turned around and moved forward.

Papa Jan looked about, his bulging eyes bright, his mouth keeping its smile. His nostrils flared and fell with his breathing. “So,” he said, “you’re finally going to see UniComp. Excited?”

“Yes, very,” Chip said.

They followed the line forward.

“I don’t blame you,” Papa Jan said. “Wonderful! Once-in-a-lifetime experience, to see the machine that’s going to classify you and give you your assignments, that’s going to decide where you’ll live and whether or not you’ll marry the girl you want to marry; and if you do, whether or not you’ll have children and what they’ll be named if you have them—of course you’re excited; who wouldn’t be?”

Chip looked at Papa Jan, disturbed.

Papa Jan, still smiling, clapped him on the back as they passed in their turn into the hallway. “Go look!” he said. “Look at the displays, look at Uni, look at everything! It’s all here for you; look at it!”

There was a rack of earpieces, the same as in a museum; Chip took one and put it in. Papa Jan’s strange manner made him nervous, and he was sorry not to be up ahead with his parents and Peace. Papa Jan put in an earpiece too. “I wonder what interesting new facts I’m going to hear!” he said, and laughed to himself. Chip turned away from him.

His nervousness and feeling of disturbance fell away as he faced a wall that glittered and skittered with a thousand sparkling minilights. The voice of the elevator spoke in his ear, telling him, while the lights showed him, how UniComp received from its round-the-world relay belt the microwave impulses of all the uncountable scanners and telecomps and tele-controlled devices; how it evaluated the impulses and sent back its answering impulses to the relay belt and the sources of inquiry.

Yes, he was excited. Was anything quicker, more clever, more everywhere than Uni?

The next span of wall showed how the memory banks worked; a beam of light flicked over a crisscrossed metal square, making parts of it glow and leaving parts of it dark. The voice spoke of electron beams and superconductive grids, of charged and uncharged areas becoming the yes-or-no carriers of different bits of information. When a question was put to UniComp, the voice said, it scanned the relevant bits…

He didn’t understand it, but that made it more wonderful, that Uni could know all there was to know so magically, so un-understandably!

And the next span was glass not wall, and there it was, UniComp: a twin row of different-colored metal bulks, like treatment units only lower and smaller, some of them pink, some brown, some orange; and among them in the large, rosily lit room, ten or a dozen members in pale blue coveralls, smiling and chatting with one another as they read meters and dials on the thirty-or-so units and marked what they read on handsome pale blue plastic clipboards. There was a gold cross and sickle on the far wall, and a clock that said 11:08 Sun 12 Apr 145 Y.U. Music crept into Chip’s ear and grew louder: “Outward, Outward,” played by an enormous orchestra, so movingly, so majestically, that tears of pride and happiness came to his eyes.

He could have stayed there for hours, watching those busy cheerful members and those impressively gleaming memory banks, listening to “Outward, Outward” and then “One Mighty Family”; but the music thinned away (as 11:10 became 11:11) and the voice, gently, aware of his feelings, reminded him of other members waiting and asked him to move on please to the next display farther down the hallway. Reluctantly he turned himself from UniComp’s glass wall, with other members who were wiping at the corners of their eyes and smiling and nodding. He smiled at them, and they at him.

Papa Jan caught his arm and drew him across the hallway to a scanner-posted door. “Well, did you like it?” he asked.

Chip nodded.

“That’s not Uni,” Papa Jan said.

Chip looked at him.

Papa Jan pulled the earpiece out of Chip’s ear. “That’s not UniComp!” he said in a fierce whisper. “Those aren’t real, those pink and orange boxes in there! Those are toys, for the Family to come look at and feel cozy and warm with!” His eyes bulged close to Chip’s; specks of his spit hit Chip’s nose and cheeks. “It’s down below!” he said. “There are three levels under this one, and that’s where it is! Do you want to see it? Do you want to see the real UniComp?”

Chip could only stare at him.

“Do you, Chip?” Papa Jan said. “Do you want to see it? I can show it to you!”

Chip nodded.

Papa Jan let go of his arm and stood up straight. He looked around and smiled. “All right,” he said, “let’s go this way,” and taking Chip’s shoulder he steered him back the way they had come, past the glass wall thronged with members looking in, and the flicking light-beam of the memory banks, and the skittering wall of minilights, and—“Excuse us, please”—through the line of incoming members and down to another part of the hallway that was darker and empty, where a monster telecomp lolled broken away from its wall display and two blue stretchers lay side by side with pillows and folded blankets on them.

There was a door in the corner with a scanner beside it, but as they got near it Papa Jan pushed down Chip’s arm.

“The scanner,” Chip said.

“No,” Papa Jan said.

“Isn’t this where we’re—”

“Yes.”

Chip looked at Papa Jan, and Papa Jan pushed him past the scanner, pulled open the door, thrust him inside, and came in after him, dragging the door shut against its hissing slow-closer.

Chip stared at him, quivering.

“It’s all right,” Papa Jan said sharply; and then, not sharply, kindly, he took Chip’s head in both his hands and said, “It’s all right, Chip. Nothing will happen to you. I’ve done it lots of times.”

“We didn’t ask,” Chip said, still quivering.

“It’s all right,” Papa Jan said. “Look: who does UniComp belong to?”

“Belong to?”

“Whose is it? Whose computer?”

“It’s—it’s the whole Family’s.”

“And you’re a member of the Family, aren’t you?”

“Yes …”

“Well then, it’s partly your computer, isn’t it? It belongs to you, not the other way around; you don’t belong to it.”

“No, we’re supposed to ask for things!” Chip said.

“Chip, please, trust me,” Papa Jan said. “We’re not going to take anything, we’re not even going to touch anything. We’re only going to look. That’s the reason I came here today, to show you the real UniComp. You want to see it, don’t you?”

Chip, after a moment, said, “Yes.”

“Then don’t worry; it’s all right.” Papa Jan looked reassuringly into his eyes, and then let go of his head and took his hand.

They were on a landing, with stairs going down. They went down four or five of them—into coolness—and Papa Jan stopped, and stopped Chip. “Stay right here,” he said. “I’ll be back in two seconds. Don’t move.”

Chip watched anxiously as Papa Jan went back up to the landing, opened the door to look, and then went quickly out. The door swung back toward closing.

Chip began to quiver again. He had passed a scanner without touching it, and now he was alone on a chilly silent stairway—and Uni didn’t know where he was!

The door opened again and Papa Jan came back in with blue blankets over his arm. “It’s very cold,” he said.

They walked together, wrapped in blankets, down the just-wide-enough aisle between two steel walls that stretched ahead of them convergingly to a faraway cross-wall and reared up above their heads to within half a meter of a glowing white ceiling—not walls, really, but rows of mammoth steel blocks set each against the next and hazed with cold, numbered on their fronts in eye-level black stencil-figures: H46, H48 on this side of the aisle; H49, H51 on that. The aisle was one of twenty or more; narrow parallel crevasses between back-to-back rows of steel blocks, the rows broken evenly by the intersecting crevasses of four slightly wider cross-aisles.

They came up the aisle, their breath clouding from their nostrils, blurs of near-shadow staying beneath their feet. The sounds they made—the paplon rustle of their coveralls, the slapping of their sandals—were the only sounds there were, edged with echoes.

“Well?” Papa Jan said, looking at Chip.

Chip hugged his blanket more tightly around him. “It’s not as nice as upstairs,” he said.

“No,” Papa Jan said. “No pretty young members with pens and clipboards down here. No warm lights and friendly pink machines. It’s empty down here from one year to the next. Empty and cold and lifeless. Ugly.”

They stood at the intersection of two aisles, crevasses of steel stretching away in one direction and another, in a third direction and a fourth. Papa Jan shook his head and scowled. “It’s wrong,” he said. “I don’t know why or how, but it’s wrong. Dead plans of dead members. Dead ideas, dead decisions.”

“Why is it so cold?” Chip asked, watching his breath.

“Because it’s dead,” Papa Jan said, then shook his head. “No, I don’t know,” he said. “They don’t work if they’re not freezing cold; I don’t know; all I knew was getting the things where they were supposed to be without smashing them.”

They walked side by side along another aisle: R20, R22, R24. “How many are there?” Chip asked.

“Twelve hundred and forty on this level, twelve hundred and forty on the level below. And that’s only for now; there’s twice as much space cut out and waiting behind that east wall, for when the Family gets bigger. Other shafts, another ventilating system already in place…”

They went down to the next lower level. It was the same as the one above except that there were steel pillars at two of the intersections and red figures on the memory banks instead of black ones. They walked past J65, J65, J61. “The biggest excavation there ever was,” Papa Jan said. “The biggest job there ever was, making one computer to obsolete the old five. There was news about it every night when I was your age. I figured out that it wouldn’t be too late to help when I was twenty, provided I got the right classification. So I asked for it.”

“You asked for it?”

“That’s what I said,” Papa Jan said, smiling and nodding. “It wasn’t unheard of in those days. I asked my adviser to ask Uni—well, it wasn’t Uni, it was EuroComp—anyway I asked her to ask, and she did, and Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei, I got it—042C; construction worker, third class. First assignment, here.” He looked about, still smiling, his eyes vivid. “They were going to lower these hulks down the shafts one at a time,” he said, and laughed. “I sat up all one night and figured out that the job could be done eight months earlier if we tunneled in from the other side of Mount Love”—he thumbed over his shoulder—“and rolled them in on wheels. EuroComp hadn’t thought of that simple idea. Or maybe it was in no big rush to have its memory siphoned away!” He laughed again.

He stopped laughing; and Chip, watching him, noticed for the first time that his hair was all gray now. The reddish patches that he’d had a few years earlier were completely gone.

“And here they are,” he said, “all in their places, rolled down my tunnel and working eight months longer than they would have been otherwise.” He looked at the banks he was passing as if he disliked them.

Chip said, “Don’t you—like UniComp?”

Papa Jan was silent for a moment. “No, I don’t,” he said, and cleared his throat. “You can’t argue with it, you can’t explain things to it…”

“But it knows everything,” Chip said. “What’s there to explain or argue about?”

They separated to pass a square steel pillar and came together again. “I don’t know,” Papa Jan said. “I don’t know.” He walked along, his head lowered, frowning, his blanket wrapped around him. “Listen,” he said, “is there any classification that you want more than any other? Any assignment that you’re especially hoping for?”

Chip looked uncertainly at Papa Jan and shrugged. “No,” he said. “I want the classification I’ll get, the one I’m right for. And the assignments I’ll get, the ones that the Family needs me to do. There’s only one assignment anyway, helping to spread the—”

“‘Helping to spread the Family through the universe,’” Papa Jan said. “I know. Through the unified UniComp universe. Come on,” he said, “let’s go back up above. I can’t take this brother-fighting cold much longer.”

Embarrassed, Chip said, “Isn’t there another level? You said there—”

“We can’t,” Papa Jan said. “There are scanners there, and members around who’d see us not touching them and rush to ‘help’ us. There’s nothing special to see there anyway; the receiving and transmitting equipment and the refrigerating plants.”

They went to the stairs. Chip felt let down. Papa Jan was disappointed with him for some reason; and worse, he wasn’t well, wanting to argue with Uni and not touching scanners and using bad language. “You ought to tell your adviser,” he said as they started up the stairs. “About wanting to argue with Uni.”

“I don’t want to argue with Uni,” Papa Jan said. “I just want to be able to argue if I want to argue.”

Chip couldn’t follow that at all. “You ought to tell him anyway,” he said. “Maybe you’ll get an extra treatment.”

“Probably I would,” Papa Jan said; and after a moment, “All right, I’ll tell him.”

“Uni knows everything about everything,” Chip said.

They went up the second flight of stairs, and on the landing outside the display hallway, stopped and folded the blankets. Papa Jan finished first. He watched Chip finish folding his.

“There,” Chip said, patting the blue bundle against his chest.

“Do you know why I gave you the name ‘Chip’?” Papa Jan asked him.

“No,” Chip said.

“There’s an old saying, ‘a chip off the old block.’ It means that a child is like his parents or his grandparents.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t mean you were like your father or even like me,” Papa Jan said. “I meant you were like my grandfather. Because of your eye. He had a green eye too.”

Chip shifted, wanting Papa Jan to be done talking so they could go outside where they belonged.

“I know you don’t like to talk about it,” Papa Jan said, “but it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Being a little different from everyone else isn’t such a terrible thing. Members used to be so different from each other, you can’t imagine. Your great-great grandfather was a very brave and capable man. His name was Hanno Rybeck—names and numbers were separate then—and he was a cosmonaut who helped build the first Mars colony. So don’t be ashamed that you’ve got his eye. They fight around with the genes today, excuse my language, but maybe they missed a few of yours; maybe you’ve got more than a green eye, maybe you’ve got some of my grandfather’s bravery and ability too.” He started to open the door but turned to look at Chip again. “Try wanting something, Chip,” he said. “Try a day or two before your next treatment. That’s when it’s easiest; to want things, to worry about things…”

When they came out of the elevator into the ground-level lobby, Chip’s parents and Peace were waiting for them. “Where have you been?” Chip’s father asked, and Peace, holding a miniature orange memory bank (not really), said, “We’ve been waiting so long!”

“We were looking at Uni,” Papa Jan said.

Chip’s father said, “All this time?”

“That’s right.”

“You were supposed to move on and let other members have their turn.”

“You were, Mike,” Papa Jan said, smiling. “My earpiece said ‘Jan old friend, it’s good to see you! You and your grandson can stay and look as long as you like!’”

Chip’s father turned away, not smiling.

They went to the canteen, claimed cakes and cokes—except Papa Jan, who wasn’t hungry—and took them out to the picnic area behind the dome. Papa Jan pointed out Mount Love to Chip and told him more about the drilling of the tunnel, which Chip’s father was surprised to hear about—a tunnel to bring in thirty-six not-so-big memory banks. Papa Jan told him that there were more banks on a lower level, but he didn’t say how many or how big they were, or how cold and how lifeless. Chip didn’t either. It gave him an odd feeling, knowing there was something that he and Papa Jan knew and weren’t telling the others; it made the two of them different from the others, and the same as each other, at least a little…

When they had eaten, they walked to the carport and got on the claim line. Papa Jan stayed with them until they were near the scanners; then he left, explaining that he would wait and go home with two friends from Riverbend who were visiting Uni later in the day. “Riverbend” was his name for ’55131, where he lived.

The next time Chip saw Bob NE, his adviser, he told him about Papa Jan; that he didn’t like Uni and wanted to argue with it and explain things to it.

Bob, smiling, said, “That happens sometimes with members your grandfather’s age, Li. It’s nothing to worry about.”

“But can’t you tell Uni?” Chip said. “Maybe he can have an extra treatment, or a stronger one.”

“Li,” Bob said, leaning forward across his desk, “the different chemicals we get in our treatments are very precious and hard to make. If older members got as much as they sometimes need, there might not be enough for the younger members, who are really more important to the Family. And to make enough chemicals to satisfy everyone, we might have to neglect the more important jobs. Uni knows what has to be done, how much of everything there is, and how much of everything everyone needs. Your grandfather isn’t really unhappy, I promise you. He’s just a bit crotchety, and we will be too when we’re in our fifties.”

“He uses that word,” Chip said; “F-blank-blank-blank-T.”

“Old members sometimes do that too,” Bob said. “They don’t really mean anything by it. Words aren’t in themselves ‘dirty’; it’s the actions that the so-called dirty words represent that are offensive. Members like your grandfather use only the words, not the actions. It’s not very nice, but it’s no real sickness. How about you? Any friction? Let’s leave your grandfather to his own adviser for a while.”

“No, no friction,” Chip said, thinking about having passed a scanner without touching it and having been where Uni hadn’t said he could go and now suddenly not wanting to tell Bob about it. “No friction at all,” he said. “Everything is top speed.”

“Okay,” Bob said. “Touch. I’ll see you next Friday, right?”

A week or so later Papa Jan was transferred to USA60607. Chip and his parents and Peace drove to the airport at EUR-55130 to see him off.

In the waiting room, while Chip’s parents and Peace watched through glass the members boarding the plane, Papa Jan drew Chip aside and stood looking at him, smiling fondly. “Chip green-eye,” he said—Chip frowned and tried to undo the frown—“you asked for an extra treatment for me, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Chip said. “How did you know?”

“Oh, I guessed, that’s all,” Papa Jan said. “Take good care of yourself, Chip. Remember who you’re a chip off of, and remember what I said about trying to want something.”

“I will,” Chip said.

“The last ones are going,” Chip’s father said.

Papa Jan kissed them all good-by and joined the members going out. Chip went to the glass and watched; and saw Papa Jan walking through the growing dark toward the plane, an unusually tall member, his take-along kit swinging at the end of a gangling arm. At the escalator he turned and waved—Chip waved back, hoping Papa Jan could see him—then turned again and put his kit-hand wrist to the scanner. Answering green sparked through dusk and distance, and he stepped onto the escalator and was taken smoothly upward.

In the car going back Chip sat silently, thinking that he would miss Papa Jan and his Sunday-and-holiday visits. It was strange, because he was such an odd and different old member. Yet that was exactly why he would miss him, Chip suddenly realized; because he was odd and different, and nobody else would fill his place.

“What’s the matter, Chip?” his mother asked.

“I’m going to miss Papa Jan,” he said.

“So am I,” she said, “but we’ll see him on the phone once in a while.”

“It’s a good thing he’s going,” Chip’s father said.

“I want him not to go,” Chip said. “I want him to be transferred back here.”

“He’s not very likely to be,” his father said, “and it’s a good thing. He was a bad influence on you.”

“Mike,” Chip’s mother said.

“Don’t you start that cloth,” Chip’s father said. “My name is Jesus, and his is Li.”

“And mine is Peace,” Peace said.

3

CHIP REMEMBERED what Papa Jan had told him, and in the weeks and months that followed, thought often about wanting something, wanting to do something, as Papa Jan at ten had wanted to help build Uni. He lay awake for an hour or so every few nights, considering all the different assignments there were, all the different classifications he knew of—construction supervisor like Papa Jan, lab technician like his father, plasmaphysicist like his mother, photographer like a friend’s father; doctor, adviser, dentist, cosmonaut, actor, musician. They all seemed pretty much the same, but before he could really want one he had to pick one. It was a strange thought to think about—to pick, to choose, to decide. It made him feel small, yet it made him feel big too, both at the same time.

One night he thought it might be interesting to plan big buildings, like the little ones he had built with a construction set he had had a long time before (winking red no from Uni). That was the night before a treatment, which Papa Jan had said was a good time for wanting things. The next night big-building planner didn’t seem any different from any other classification. In fact, the whole idea of wanting one particular classification seemed silly and pre-U that night, and he went straight to sleep.

The night before his next treatment he thought about planning buildings again—buildings of all different shapes, not just the three usual ones—and he wondered why the interestingness of the idea had disappeared the month before. Treatments were to prevent diseases and to relax members who were tense and to keep women from having too many babies and men from having hair on their faces; why should they make an interesting idea seem not interesting? But that was what they did, one month, and the next month, and the next.

Thinking such thoughts might be a form of selfishness, he suspected; but if it was, it was such a minor form—involving only an hour or two of sleep time, never of school or TV time—that he didn’t bother to mention it to Bob NE, just as he wouldn’t have mentioned a moment’s nervousness or an occasional dream. Each week when Bob asked if everything was okay, he said yes it was: top speed, no friction. He took care not to “think wanting” too often or too long, so that he always got all the sleep he needed, and mornings, while washing, he checked his face in the mirror to make sure he still looked right. He did—except of course for his eye.

In 146 Chip and his family, along with most of the members in their building, were transferred to AFR71680. The building they were housed in was a brand-new one, with green carpet instead of gray in the hallways, larger TV screens, and furniture that was upholstered though nonadjustable.

There was much to get used to in ’71680. The climate was somewhat warmer, and the coveralls lighter in weight and color; the monorail was old and slow and had frequent breakdowns; and the totalcakes were wrapped in greenish foil and tasted salty and not quite right.

Chip’s and his family’s new adviser was Mary CZ14L8584. She was a year older than Chip’s mother, though she looked a few years younger.

Once Chip had grown accustomed to life in ’71680—school, at least, was no different—he resumed his pastime of “thinking wanting.” He saw now that there were considerable differences between classifications, and began to wonder which one Uni would give him when the time came. Uni, with its two levels of cold steel blocks, its empty echoing hardnesses … He wished Papa Jan had taken him down to the bottom level, where members were. It would be pleasanter to think of being classified by Uni and some members instead of by Uni alone; if he were to be given a classification he didn’t like, and members were involved, maybe it would be possible to explain to them…

Papa Jan called twice a year; he claimed more, he said, but that was all he was granted. He looked older, smiled tiredly. A section of USA60607 was being rebuilt and he was in charge. Chip would have liked to tell him that he was trying to want something, but he couldn’t with the others standing in front of the screen with him. Once, when a call was nearly over, he said, “I’m trying,” and Papa Jan smiled like his old self and said, “That’s the boy!”

When the call was over, Chip’s father said, “What are you trying?”

“Nothing,” Chip said.

“You must have meant something,” his father said.

Chip shrugged.

Mary CZ asked him too, the next time Chip saw her. “What did you mean when you told your grandfather you were trying?” she said.

“Nothing,” Chip said.

“Li,” Mary said, and looked at him reproachfully. “You said you were trying. Trying what?”

“Trying not to miss him,” he said. “When he was transferred to Usa I told him I would miss him, and he said I should try not to, that members were all the same and anyway he would call whenever he could.”

“Oh,” Mary said, and went on looking at Chip, now uncertainly. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” she asked.

Chip shrugged.

“And do you miss him?”

“Just a little,” Chip said. “I’m trying not to.”

Sex began, and that was even better to think about than wanting something. Though he’d been taught that orgasms were extremely pleasurable, he had had no idea whatsoever of the all-but-unbearable deliciousness of the gathering sensations, the ecstasy of the coming, and the drained and boneless satisfaction of the moments afterward. Nobody had had any idea, none of his classmates; they talked about nothing else and would gladly have devoted themselves to nothing else as well. Chip could hardly think about mathematics and electronics and astronomy, let alone the differences between classifications.

After a few months, though, everyone calmed down, and accustomed to the new pleasure, gave it its proper Saturday-night place in the week’s pattern.

One Saturday evening when Chip was fourteen, he bicycled with a group of his friends to a fine white beach a few kilometers north of AFR71680. There they swam—jumped and pushed and splashed in waves made pink-foamed by the foundering sun—and built a fire on the sand and sat around it on blankets and ate their cakes and cokes and crisp sweet pieces of a bashed-open coconut. A boy played songs on a recorder, not very well, and then, the fire crumbling to embers, the group separated into five couples, each on its own blanket.

The girl Chip was with was Anna VF, and after their orgasm—the best one Chip had ever had, or so it seemed—he was filled with a feeling of tenderness toward her, and wished there were something he could give her as a conveyor of it, like the beautiful shell that Karl GG had given Yin AP, or Li OS’s recorder-song, softly cooing now for whichever girl he was lying with. Chip had nothing for Anna, no shell, no song; nothing at all, except, maybe, his thoughts.

“Would you like something interesting to think about?” he asked, lying on his back with his arm about her.

“Mm,” she said, and squirmed closer against his side. Her head was on his shoulder, her arm across his chest.

He kissed her forehead. “Think of all the different classifications there are—” he said.

“Mm?”

“And try to decide which one you would pick if you had to pick one.”

“To pick one?” she said.

“That’s right.”

“What do you mean?”

“To pick one. To have. To be in. Which classification would you like best? Doctor, engineer, adviser…”

She propped her head up on her hand and squinted at him. “What do you mean?” she said.

He gave a little sigh and said, “We’re going to be classified, right?”

“Right.”

“Suppose we weren’t going to be. Suppose we had to classify ourselves.”

“That’s silly,” she said, finger-drawing on his chest.

“It’s interesting to think about.”

“Let’s fuck again,” she said.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Just think about all the different classifications. Suppose it were up to us to—”

“I don’t want to,” she said, stopping drawing. “That’s silly. And sick. We get classified; there’s nothing to think about. Uni knows what we’re—”

“Oh, fight Uni,” Chip said. “Just pretend for a minute that we’re living in—”

Anna flipped away from him and lay on her stomach, stiff and unmoving, the back of her head to him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “For you. You’re sick.”

“No I’m not,” he said.

She was silent.

He sat up and looked despairingly at her rigid back. “It just slipped out,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

She stayed silent.

“It’s just a word, Anna,” he said.

“You’re sick,” she said.

“Oh, hate,” he said.

“You see what I mean?”

“Anna,” he said, “look. Forget it. Forget the whole thing, all right? Just forget it.” He tickled between her thighs, but she locked them, barring his hand.

“Ah, Anna,” he said. “Ah, come on. I said I was sorry, didn’t I? Come on, let’s fuck again. I’ll suck you first if you want.”

After a while she relaxed her thighs and let him tickle her.

Then she turned over and sat up and looked at him. “Are you sick, Li?” she asked.

“No,” he said, and managed to laugh. “Of course I’m not,” he said.

“I never heard of such a thing,” she said. “‘Classify ourselves.’ How could we do it? How could we possibly know enough?”

“It’s just something I think about once in a while,” he said. “Not very often. In fact, hardly ever.”

“It’s such a—a funny idea,” she said. “It sounds—I don’t know—pre-U.”

“I won’t think about it any more,” he said, and raised his right hand, the bracelet slipping back. “Love of Family,” he said. “Come on, lie down and I’ll suck you.”

She lay back on the blanket, looking worried.

The next morning at five of ten Mary CZ called Chip and asked him to come see her.

“When?” he asked.

“Now,” she said.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll be right down.”

His mother said, “What does she want to see you on a Sunday for?”

“I don’t know,” Chip said.

But he knew. Anna VF had called her adviser.

He rode the escalators down, down, down, wondering how much Anna had told, and what he should say; and wanting suddenly to cry and tell Mary that he was sick and selfish and a liar. The members on the upgoing escalators were relaxed, smiling, content, in harmony with the cheerful music of the speakers; no one but he was guilty and unhappy.

The advisory offices were strangely still. Members and advisers conferred in a few of the cubicles, but most of them were empty, the desks in order, the chairs waiting. In one cubicle a green-coveralled member leaned over the phone working a screwdriver at it.

Mary was standing on her chair, laying a strip of Christmas bunting along the top of Wei Addressing the Chemotherapists. More bunting was on the desk, a roll of red and a roll of green, and Mary’s open telecomp with a container of tea beside it. “Li?” she said, not turning. “That was quick. Sit down.”

Chip sat down. Lines of green symbols glowed on the telecomp’s screen. The answer button was held down by a souvenir paperweight from RUS81655.

“Stay,” Mary said to the bunting and, watching it, backed down off her chair. It stayed.

She swung her chair around and smiled at Chip as she drew it in to her and sat. She looked at the telecomp’s screen, and while she looked, picked up the container of tea and sipped from it. She put it down and looked at Chip and smiled.

“A member says you need help,” she said. “The girl you fucked last night, Anna”—she glanced at the screen—“VF35H6143.”

Chip nodded. “I said a dirty word,” he said.

“Two,” Mary said, “but that’s hardly important. At least not relatively. What is important are some of the other things you said, things about deciding which classification you would pick if we didn’t have UniComp to do the job.”

Chip looked away from Mary, at the rolls of red and green Christmas bunting.

“Is that something you think about often, Li?” Mary asked.

“Just sometimes,” Chip said. “In the free hour or at night; never in school or during TV.”

“Nighttime counts too,” Mary said. “That’s when you’re supposed to be sleeping.”

Chip looked at her and said nothing.

“When did it start?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, “a few years ago. In Eur.”

“Your grandfather,” she said.

He nodded.

She looked at the screen, and looked at Chip again, ruefully. “Didn’t it ever dawn on you,” she said, “that ‘deciding’ and ‘picking’ are manifestations of selfishness? Acts of selfishness?”

“I thought, maybe,” Chip said, looking at the edge of the desktop, rubbing a fingertip along it.

“Oh, Li,” Mary said. “What am I here for? What are advisers here for? To help us, isn’t that so?”

He nodded.

“Why didn’t you tell me? Or your adviser in Eur? Why did you wait, and lose sleep, and worry this Anna?”

Chip shrugged, watching his fingertip rubbing the desktop, the nail dark. “It was—interesting, sort of,” he said.

“‘Interesting, sort of,’” Mary said. “It might also have been interesting, sort of, to think about the kind of pre-U chaos we’d have if we actually did pick our own classifications. Did you think about that?”

“No,” Chip said.

“Well, do. Think about a hundred million members deciding to be TV actors and not a single one deciding to work in a crematorium.”

Chip looked up at her. “Am I very sick?” he asked.

“No,” Mary said, “but you might have ended up that way if not for Anna’s helpfulness.” She took the paperweight from the telecomp’s answer button and the green symbols disappeared from the screen. “Touch,” she said.

Chip touched his bracelet to the scanner plate, and Mary began tapping the input keys. “You’ve been given hundreds of tests since your first day of school,” she said, “and UniComp’s been fed the results of every last one of them.” Her fingers darted over the dozen black keys. “You’ve had hundreds of adviser meetings,” she said, “and UniComp knows about those too. It knows what jobs have to be done and who there is to do them. It knows everything. Now who’s going to make the better, more efficient classification, you or UniComp?”

“UniComp, Mary,” Chip said. “I know that. I didn’t really want to do it myself; I was just—just thinking what if, that’s all.”

Mary finished tapping and pressed the answer button. Green symbols appeared on the screen. Mary said, “Go to the treatment room.”

Chip jumped to his feet. “Thank you,” he said.

“Thank Uni,” Mary said, switching off the telecomp. She closed its cover and snapped the catches.

Chip hesitated. “I’ll be all right?” he asked.

“Perfect,” Mary said. She smiled reassuringly.

“I’m sorry I made you come in on a Sunday,” Chip said.

“Don’t be,” Mary said. “For once in my life I’m going to have my Christmas decorations up before December twenty-fourth.”

Chip went out of the advisory offices and into the treatment room. Only one unit was working, but there were only three members in line. When his turn came, he plunged his arm as deep as he could into the rubber-rimmed opening, and gratefully felt the scanner’s contact and the infusion disc’s warm nuzzle. He wanted the tickle-buzz-sting to last a long time, curing him completely and forever, but it was even shorter than usual, and he worried that there might have been a break in communication between the unit and Uni or a shortage of chemicals inside the unit itself. On a quiet Sunday morning mightn’t it be carelessly serviced?

He stopped worrying, though, and riding up the escalators he felt a lot better about everything—himself, Uni, the Family, the world, the universe.

The first thing he did when he got into the apartment was call Anna VF and thank her.

At fifteen he was classified 663D—genetic taxonomist, fourth class—and was transferred to RUS41500 and the Academy of the Genetic Sciences. He learned elementary genetics and lab techniques and modulation and transplant theory; he skated and played soccer and went to the Pre-U Museum and the Museum of the Family’s Achievements; he had a girlfriend named Anna from Jap and then another named Peace from Aus. On Thursday, 18 October 151, he and everyone else in the Academy sat up until four in the morning watching the launching of the Altaira, then slept and loafed through a half-day holiday.

One night his parents called unexpectedly. “We have bad news,” his mother said. “Papa Jan died this morning.”

A sadness gripped him and must have shown on his face.

“He was sixty-two, Chip,” his mother said. “He had his life.”

“Nobody lives forever,” Chip’s father said.

“Yes,” Chip said. “I’d forgot how old he was. How are you? Has Peace been classified yet?”

When they were done talking he went out for a walk, even though it was a rain night and almost ten. He went into the park. Everyone was coming out. “Six minutes,” a member said, smiling at him.

He didn’t care. He wanted to be rained on, to be drenched. He didn’t know why but he wanted to.

He sat on a bench and waited. The park was empty; everyone else was gone. He thought of Papa Jan saying things that were the opposite of what he meant, and then saying what he really meant down in the inside of Uni, with a blue blanket wrapped around him.

On the back of the bench across the walk someone had red-chalked a jagged FIGHT UNI. Someone else—or maybe the same sick member, ashamed—had crossed it out with white. The rain began, and started washing it away; white chalk, red chalk, smearing pinkly down the benchback.

Chip turned his face to the sky and held it steady under the rain, trying to feel as if he were so sad he was crying.

4

EARLY IN HIS THIRD and final year at the Academy, Chip took part in a complicated exchange of dormitory cubicles worked out to put everyone involved closer to his or her girlfriend or boyfriend. In his new location he was two cubicles away from one Yin DW; and across the aisle from him was a shorter-than-normal member named Karl WL, who frequently carried a green-covered sketch pad and who, though he replied to comments readily enough, rarely started a conversation on his own.

This Karl WL had a look of unusual concentration in his eyes, as if he were close on the track of answers to difficult questions. Once Chip noticed him slip out of the lounge after the beginning of the first TV hour and not slip in again till before the end of the second; and one night in the dorm, after the lights had gone out, he saw a dim glow filtering through the blanket of Karl’s bed.

One Saturday night—early Sunday morning, really—as Chip was coming back quietly from Yin DW’s cubicle to his own, he saw Karl sitting in his. He was on the side of the bed in pajamas, holding his pad tilted toward a flashlight on the corner of the desk and working at it with brisk chopping hand movements. The flashlight’s lens was masked in some way so that only a small beam of light shone out.

Chip went closer and said, “No girl this week?”

Karl started, and closed the pad. A stick of charcoal was in his hand.

“I’m sorry I surprised you,” Chip said.

“That’s all right,” Karl said, his face only faint glints at chin and cheekbones. “I finished early. Peace KG. Aren’t you staying all night with Yin?”

“She’s snoring,” Chip said.

Karl made an amused sound. “I’m turning in now,” he said.

“What are you doing?”

“Just some gene diagrams,” Karl said. He turned back the cover of the pad and showed the top page. Chip went close and bent and looked—at cross sections of genes in the B3 locus, carefully drawn and shaded, done with a pen. “I was trying some with charcoal,” Karl said, “but it’s no good.” He closed the pad and put the charcoal on the desk and switched off the flashlight. “Sleep well,” he said.

“Thanks,” Chip said. “You too.”

He went into his own cubicle and groped his way into bed, wondering whether Karl had in fact been drawing gene diagrams, for which charcoal hardly even seemed worth a trial. Probably he should speak to his adviser, Li YB, about Karl’s secretiveness and occasional unmemberlike behavior, but he decided to wait awhile, until he was sure that Karl needed help and that he wouldn’t be wasting Li YB’s time and Karl’s and his own. There was no point in being an alarmist.

Wei’s Birthday came a few weeks later, and after the parade Chip and a dozen or so other students railed out to the Amusement Gardens for the afternoon. They rowed boats for a while and then strolled through the zoo. While they were gathered at a water fountain, Chip saw Karl WL sitting on the railing in front of the horse compound, holding his pad on his knees and drawing. Chip excused himself from the group and went over.

Karl saw him coming and smiled at him, closing his pad. “Wasn’t that a great parade?” he said.

“It was really top speed,” Chip said. “Are you drawing the horses?”

“Trying to.”

“May I see?”

Karl looked him in the eye for a moment and then said, “Sure, why not?” He riffled the bottom of the pad and, opening it partway through, turned back the upper section and let Chip look at a rearing stallion that crammed the page, charcoaled darkly and vigorously. Muscles bulked under its gleaming hide; its eye was wild and rolling; its forelegs quivered. The drawing surprised Chip with its vitality and power. He had never seen a picture of a horse that came anywhere near it. He sought words, and could only come up with, “This is—great, Karl! Top speed!”

“It’s not accurate,” Karl said.

“It is!”

“No it isn’t,” Karl said. “If it were accurate I’d be at the Academy of Art.”

Chip looked at the real horses in the compound and at Karl’s drawing again; at the horses again, and saw the greater thickness of their legs, the lesser width of their chests.

“You’re right,” he said, looking at the drawing again. “It’s not accurate. But it’s—it’s somehow better than accurate.”

“Thanks,” Karl said. “That’s what I’d like it to be. I’m not finished yet.”

Looking at him, Chip said, “Have you done others?”

Karl turned down the preceding page and showed him a seated lion, proud and watchful. In the lower right-hand corner of the page there was an A with a circle around it. “Marvelous!” Chip said. Karl turned down other pages; there were two deer, a monkey, a soaring eagle, two dogs sniffing each other, a crouching leopard.

Chip laughed. “You’ve got the whole fighting zoo!” he said.

“No I haven’t,” Karl said.

All the drawings had the A with the circle around it in the comer. “What’s that for?” Chip asked.

“Artists used to sign their pictures. To show whose work it was.”

“I know,” Chip said, “but why an A?”

“Oh,” Karl said, and turned the pages back one by one. “It stands for Ashi,” he said. “That’s what my sister calls me.” He came to the horse, added a line of charcoal to its stomach, and looked at the horses in the compound with his look of concentration, which now had an object and a reason.

“I have an extra name too,” Chip said. “Chip. My grandfather gave it to me.”

“Chip?”

“It means ‘chip off the old block.’ I’m supposed to be like my grandfather’s grandfather.” Chip watched Karl sharpen the lines of the horse’s rear legs, and then moved from his side. “I’d better get back to the group I’m with,” he said. “Those are top speed. It’s a shame you weren’t classified an artist.”

Karl looked at him. “I wasn’t, though,” he said, “so I only draw on Sundays and holidays and during the free hour. I never let it interfere with my work or whatever else I’m supposed to be doing.”

“Right,” Chip said. “See you at the dorm.”

That evening, after TV, Chip came back to his cubicle and found on his desk the drawing of the horse. Karl, in his cubicle, said, “Do you want it?”

“Yes,” Chip said. “Thanks. It’s great!” The drawing had even more vitality and power than before. An A-in-a-circle was in a corner of it.

Chip tabbed the drawing to the bulletin board behind the desk, and as he finished, Yin DW came in, bringing back a copy of Universe she had borrowed. “Where’d you get that?” she asked.

“Karl WL did it,” Chip said.

“That’s very nice, Karl,” Yin said. “You draw well.”

Karl, getting into pajamas, said, “Thanks. I’m glad you like it.”

To Chip, Yin whispered, “It’s all out of proportion. Keep it there, though. It was kind of you to put it up.”

Once in a while, during the free hour, Chip and Karl went to the Pre-U together. Karl made sketches of the mastodon and the bison, the cavemen in their animal hides, the soldiers and sailors in their countless different uniforms. Chip wandered among the early automobiles and dictypes, the safes and handcuffs and TV “sets.” He studied the models and pictures of the old buildings: the spired and buttressed churches, the turreted castles, the large and small houses with their windows and lock-fitted doors. Windows, he thought, must have had their good points. It would be pleasant, would make one feel bigger, to look out at the world from one’s room or working place; and at night, from outside, a house with rows of lighted windows must have been attractive, even beautiful.

One afternoon Karl came into Chip’s cubicle and stood beside the desk with his hands fisted at his sides. Chip, looking up at him, thought he had been stricken by a fever or worse; his face was flushed and his eyes were narrowed in a strange stare. But no, it was anger that held him, anger such as Chip had never seen before, anger so intense that, trying to speak, Karl seemed unable to work his lips.

Anxiously Chip said, “What is it?”

“Li,” Karl said. “Listen. Will you do me a favor?”

“Sure! Of course!”

Karl leaned close to him and whispered, “Claim a pad for me, will you? I just claimed one and was denied. Five fighting hundred of them, a pile this high, and I had to turn it back in!”

Chip stared at him.

“Claim one, will you?” Karl said. “Anyone can try a little sketching in his spare time, right? Go on down, okay?”

Painfully Chip said, “Karl—”

Karl looked at him, his anger retreated, and he stood up straight. “No,” he said. “No, I—I just lost my temper, that’s all. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, brother. Forget it.” He clapped Chip’s shoulder. “I’m okay now,” he said. “I’ll claim again in a week or so. Been doing too much drawing anyway, I suppose. Uni knows best.” He went off down the aisle toward the bathroom.

Chip turned back to the desk and leaned on his elbows and held his head, shaking.

That was Tuesday. Chip’s weekly adviser meetings were on Woodsday mornings at 10:40, and this time he would tell Li YB about Karl’s sickness. There was no longer any question of being an alarmist; there was faulted responsibility, in fact, in having waited as long as he had. He ought to have said something at the first clear sign, Karl’s slipping out of TV (to draw, of course), or even when he had noticed the unusual look in Karl’s eyes. Why in hate had he waited? He could hear Li YB gently reproaching him: “You haven’t been a very good brother’s keeper, Li.”

Early on Woodsday morning, though, he decided to pick up some coveralls and the new Geneticist. He went down to the supply center and walked through the aisles. He took a Geneticist and a pack of coveralls and walked some more and came to the art-supplies section. He saw the pile of green-covered sketch pads; there weren’t five hundred of them, but there were seventy or eighty and no one seemed in a rush to claim them.

He walked away, thinking that he must be going out of his mind. Yet if Karl were to promise not to draw when he wasn’t supposed to…

He walked back again—“Anyone can try a little sketching in his spare time, right?”—and took a pad and a packet of charcoal. He went to the shortest check-out line, his heart pounding in his chest, his arms trembling. He drew a deep-as-possible breath; another, and another.

He put his bracelet to the scanner, and the stickers of the coveralls, the Geneticist, the pad, and the charcoal. Everything was yes. He gave way to the next member.

He went back up to the dorm. Karl’s cubicle was empty, the bed unmade. He went into his own cubicle and put the coveralls on the shelf and the Geneticist on the desk. On the top page of the pad he wrote, his hand still trembling, Free time only. I want your promise. Then he put the pad and the charcoal on his bed and sat at the desk and looked at the Geneticist.

Karl came, and went into his cubicle and began making his bed. “Are those yours?” Chip asked.

Karl looked at the pad and charcoal on Chip’s bed. Chip said, “They’re not mine.”

“Oh, yes. Thanks,” Karl said, and came over and took them. “Thanks a lot,” he said.

“You ought to put your nameber on the first page,” Chip said, “if you’re going to leave it all over like that.”

Karl went into his cubicle, opened the pad, and looked at the first page. He looked at Chip, nodded, raised his right hand, and mouthed, “Love of Family.”

They rode down to the classrooms together. “What did you have to waste a page for?” Karl said.

Chip smiled.

“I’m not joking,” Karl said. “Didn’t you ever hear of writing a note on a piece of scrap paper?”

“Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei,” Chip said.

In December of that year, 152, came the appalling news of the Gray Death, sweeping through all the Mars colonies except one and completely wiping them out in nine short days. In the Academy of the Genetic Sciences, as in all the Family’s establishments, there was helpless silence, then mourning, and then a massive determination to help the Family overcome the staggering setback it had suffered. Everyone worked harder and longer. Free time was halved; there were classes on Sundays and only a half-day Christmas holiday. Genetics alone could breed new strengths in the coming generations; everyone was in a hurry to finish his training and get on to his first real assignment. On every wall were the white-on-black posters: MARS AGAIN!

The new spirit lasted several months. Not until Marxmas was there a full day’s holiday, and then no one quite knew what to do with it. Chip and Karl and their girlfriends rowed out to one of the islands in the Amusement Gardens lake and sunbathed on a large flat rock. Karl drew his girlfriend’s picture. It was the first time, as far as Chip knew, that he had drawn a living human being.

In June, Chip claimed another pad for Karl.

Their training ended, five weeks early, and they received their assignments: Chip to a viral genetics research laboratory in USA90058; Karl to the Institute of Enzymology in JAP50319.

On the evening before they were to leave the Academy they packed their take-along kits. Karl pulled green-covered pads from his desk drawers—a dozen from one drawer, half a dozen from another, more pads from other drawers; he threw them into a pile on his bed. “You’re never going to get those all into your kit,” Chip said.

“I’m not planning to,” Karl said. “They’re done; I don’t need them.” He sat on the bed and leafed through one of the pads, tore out one drawing and another.

“May I have some?” Chip asked.

“Sure,” Karl said, and tossed a pad over to him.

It was mostly Pre-U Museum sketches. Chip took out one of a man in chain mail holding a crossbow to his shoulder, and another of an ape scratching himself.

Karl gathered most of the pads and went off down the aisle toward the chute. Chip put the pad on Karl’s bed and picked up another one.

In it were a nude man and woman standing in parkland outside a blank-slabbed city. They were taller than normal, beautiful and strangely dignified. The woman was quite different from the man, not only genitally but also in her longer hair, protrusive breasts, and overall softer convexity. It was a great drawing, but something about it disturbed Chip, he didn’t know what.

He turned to other pages, other men and women; the pictures grew surer and stronger, done with fewer and bolder lines. They were the best drawings Karl had ever made, but in each there was that disturbing something, a lack, an imbalance that Chip was at a loss to define.

It hit him with a chill.

They had no bracelets.

He looked through to check, his stomach knotting sick-tight. No bracelets. No bracelets on any of them. And there was no chance of the drawings being unfinished; in the corner of each of them was an A with a circle around it.

He put down the pad and went and sat on his bed; watched as Karl came back and gathered the rest of the pads and, with a smile, carried them off.

There was a dance in the lounge but it was brief and subdued because of Mars. Later Chip went with his girlfriend into her cubicle. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

Karl asked him too, in the morning while they were folding their blankets. “What’s the matter, Li?”

“Nothing.”

“Sorry to be leaving?”

“A little.”

“Me too. Here, give me your sheets and I’ll chute them.”

“What’s his nameber?” Li YB asked.

“Karl WL35S7497,” Chip said.

Li YB jotted it down. “And what specifically seems to be the trouble?” he asked.

Chip wiped his palms on his thighs. “He’s drawn some pictures of members,” he said.

“Acting aggressively?”

“No, no,” Chip said. “Just standing and sitting, fucking, playing with children.”

“Well?”

Chip looked at the desktop. “They don’t have bracelets,” he said.

Li YB didn’t speak. Chip looked at him; he was looking at Chip. After a moment Li YB said, “Several pictures?”

“A whole padful.”

“And no bracelets at all.”

“None.”

Li YB breathed in, and then pushed out the breath between his teeth in a series of rapid hisses. He looked at his note pad. “KWL35S7497,” he said.

Chip nodded.

He tore up the picture of the man with the crossbow, which was aggressive, and tore up the one of the ape too. He took the pieces to the chute and dropped them down.

He put the last few things into his take-along kit—his clippers and mouthpiece and a framed snapshot of his parents and Papa Jan—and pressed it closed.

Karl’s girlfriend came by with her kit slung on her shoulder. “Where’s Karl?” she asked.

“At the medicenter.”

“Oh,” she said. “Tell him I said good-by, will you?”

“Sure.”

They kissed cheeks. “Good-by,” she said.

“Good-by.”

She went away down the aisle. Some other students, no longer students, went past. They smiled at Chip and said good-by to him.

He looked around the barren cubicle. The picture of the horse was still on the bulletin board. He went to it and looked at it; saw again the rearing stallion, so alive and wild. Why hadn’t Karl stayed with the animals in the zoo? Why had he begun to draw living humans?

A feeling formed in Chip, formed and grew; a feeling that he had been wrong to tell Li YB about Karl’s drawings, although he knew of course that he had been right. How could it be wrong to help a sick brother? Not to tell would have been wrong, to keep quiet as he had done before, letting Karl go on drawing members without bracelets and getting sicker and sicker. Eventually he might even have been drawing members acting aggressively. Fighting.

Of course he had been right.

Yet the feeling that he had been wrong stayed and kept growing, grew into guilt, irrationally.

Someone came near, and he whirled, thinking it was Karl coming to thank him. It wasn’t; it was someone passing the cubicle, leaving.

But that was what was going to happen: Karl was going to come back from the medicenter and say, “Thanks for helping me, Li. I was really sick but I’m a whole lot better now,” and he was going to say, “Don’t thank me, brother; thank Uni,” and Karl was going to say, “No, no,” and insist and shake his hand.

Suddenly he wanted not to be there, not to get Karl’s thanks for having helped him; he grabbed his kit and hurried to the aisle—stopped short, uncertainly, and hurried back. He took the picture of the horse from the board, opened his kit on the desk, pushed the drawing in among the pages of a notebook, closed the kit, and went.

He jogged down the downgoing escalators, excusing himself past other members, afraid that Karl might come after him; jogged all the way down to the lowest level, where the rail station was, and got on the long airport line. He stood with his head held still, not looking back.

Finally he came to the scanner. He faced it for a moment, and touched it with his bracelet. Yes, it green-winked.

He hurried through the gate.