This Perfect Day

1

BETWEEN JULY OF 153 and Marx of 162, Chip had four assignments: two at research laboratories in Usa; a brief one at the Institute of Genetic Engineering in Ind, where he attended a series of lectures on recent advances in mutation induction; and a five-year assignment at a chemo-synthetics plant in Chi. He was upgraded twice in his classification and by 162 was a genetic taxonomist, second class.

During those years he was outwardly a normal and contented member of the Family. He did his work well, took part in house athletic and recreational programs, had weekly sexual activity, made monthly phone calls and bi-yearly visits to his parents, was in place and on time for TV and treatments and adviser meetings. He had no discomfort to report, either physical or mental.

Inwardly, however, he was far from normal. The feeling of guilt with which he had left the Academy had led him to withhold himself from his next adviser, for he wanted to retain that feeling, which, though unpleasant, was the strongest feeling he had ever had and an enlargement, strangely, of his sense of being; and withholding himself from his adviser—reporting no discomfort, playing the part of a relaxed, contented member—had led over the years to a withholding of himself from everyone around him, a general attitude of guarded watchfulness. Everything came to seem questionable to him: totalcakes, coveralls, the sameness of members’ rooms and thoughts, and especially the work he was doing, whose end, he saw, would only be to solidify the universal sameness. There were no alternatives, of course, no imaginable alternatives to anything, but still he withheld himself, and questioned. Only in the first few days after treatments was he really the member he pretended to be.

One thing alone in the world was indisputably right: Karl’s drawing of the horse. He framed it—not in a supply-center frame but in one he made himself, out of wood strips ripped from the back of a drawer and scraped smooth—and hung it in his rooms in Usa, his room in Ind, his room in Chi. It was a lot better to look at than Wei Addressing the Chemotherapists or Marx Writing or Christ Expelling the Money Changers.

In Chi he thought of getting married, but he was told that he wasn’t to reproduce and so there didn’t seem much point in it.

In mid-Marx of 162, shortly before his twenty-seventh birthday, he was transferred back to the Institute of Genetic Engineering in IND26110 and assigned to a newly established Genie Subclassification Center. New microscopes had found distinctions between genes that until then had appeared identical, and he was one of forty 663B’s and C’s put to defining subclassifications. His room was four buildings away from the Center, giving him a short walk twice a day, and he soon found a girlfriend whose room was on the floor below his. His adviser was a year younger than he, Bob RO. Life apparently was going to continue as before.

One night in April, though, as he made ready to clean his teeth before going to bed, he found a small white something lodged in his mouthpiece. Perplexed, he picked it out. It was a triple bend of tightly rolled paper. He put down the mouthpiece and unrolled a thin rectangle filled with typing. You seem to be a fairly unusual member, it said. Wondering about which classification you would choose, for instance. Would you like to meet some other unusual members? Think about it. You are only partly alive. We can help you more than you can imagine.

The note surprised him with its knowledge of his past and disturbed him with its secrecy and its “You are only partly alive.” What did it mean—that strange statement and the whole strange message? And who had put it in his mouthpiece, of all places? But there was no better place, it struck him, for making certain that he and he alone should find it. Who then, not so foolishly, had put it there? Anyone at all could have come into the room earlier in the evening or during the day. At least two other members had done so; there had been notes on his desk from Peace SK, his girlfriend, and from the secretary of the house photography club.

He cleaned his teeth and got into bed and reread the note. Its writer or one of the other “unusual members” must have had access to UniComp’s memory of his boyhood self-classification thoughts, and that seemed to be enough to make the group think he might be sympathetic to them. Was he? They were abnormal; that was certain. Yet what was he? Wasn’t he abnormal too? We can help you more than you can imagine. What did that mean? Help him how? Help him do what? And what if he decided he wanted to meet them; what was he supposed to do? Wait, apparently, for another note, for a contact of some kind. Think about it, the note said.

The last chime sounded, and he rolled the piece of paper back up and tucked it down into the spine of his night-table Wei’s Living Wisdom. He tapped off the light and lay and thought about it. It was disturbing, but it was different too, and interesting. Would you like to meet some other unusual members?

He didn’t say anything about it to Bob RO. He looked for another note in his mouthpiece each time he came back to his room, but didn’t find one. Walking to and from work, taking a seat in the lounge for TV, standing on line in the dining hall or the supply center, he searched the eyes of the members around him, alert for a meaningful remark or perhaps only a look and a head movement inviting him to follow. None came.

Four days went by and he began to think that the note had been a sick member’s joke, or worse, a test of some kind. Had Bob RO himself written it, to see if he would mention it? No, that was ridiculous; he was really getting sick.

He had been interested—excited even, and hopeful, though he hadn’t known of what—but now, as more days went by with no note, no contact, he became disappointed and irritable.

And then, a week after the first note, it was there: the same triple bend of rolled paper in the mouthpiece. He picked it out, excitement and hope coming back instantaneously. He unrolled the paper and read it: If you want to meet us and hear how we can help you, be between buildings J16 and J18 on Lower Christ Plaza tomorrow night at 11:15. Do not touch any scanners on the way. If members are in sight of one you have to pass, take another route. I’ll wait until 11:30. Beneath was typed, as a signature, Snowflake.

Few members were on the walkways, and those hurrying to their beds with their eyes set straight ahead of them. He had to change his course only once, walked faster, and reached Lower Christ Plaza exactly at 11:15. He crossed the moonlit white expanse, with its turned-off fountain mirroring the moon, and found J16 and the dark channel that divided it from J18.

No one was there—but then, meters back in shadow, he saw white coveralls marked with what looked like a medicenter red cross. He went into the darkness and approached the member, who stood by J16’s wall and stayed silent.

“Snowflake?” he said.

“Yes.” The voice was a woman’s. “Did you touch any scanners?”

“No.”

“Funny feeling, isn’t it?” She was wearing a pale mask of some kind, thin and close-fitting.

“I’ve done it before,” he said.

“Good for you.”

“Only once, and somebody pushed me,” he said. She seemed older than he, how much he couldn’t tell.

“We’re going to a place that’s a five-minute walk from here,” she said. “It’s where we get together regularly, six of us, four women and two men—a terrible ratio that I’m counting on you to improve. We’re going to make a certain suggestion to you; if you decide to follow it you might eventually become one of us; if you don’t, you won’t, and tonight will be our last contact. In that case, though, we can’t have you knowing what we look like or where we meet.” Her hand came out of her pocket with whiteness in it. “I’ll have to bandage your eyes,” she said. “That’s why I’m wearing these medicenter cuvs, so it’ll look all right for me to be leading you.”

“At this hour?”

“We’ve done it before and had no trouble,” she said. “You don’t mind?”

He shrugged. “I guess not,” he said.

“Hold these over your eyes.” She gave him two wads of cotton. He closed his eyes and put the wads in place, holding them with a finger each. She began winding bandage around his head and over the wads; he withdrew his fingers, bent his head to help her. She kept winding bandage, around and around, up onto his forehead, down onto his cheeks.

“Are you sure you’re really not medicenter?” he said.

She chuckled and said, “Positive.” She pressed the end of the bandage, sticking it tight; pressed all over it and over his eyes, then took his arm. She turned him—toward the plaza, he knew—and started him walking.

“Don’t forget your mask,” he said.

She stopped short. “Thanks for reminding me,” she said. Her hand left his arm, and after a moment, came back. They walked on.

Their footsteps changed, became muted by space, and a breeze cooled his face below the bandage; they were in the plaza. “Snowflake’s” hand on his arm drew him in a diagonal leftward course, away from the direction of the Institute.

“When we get where we’re going,” she said, “I’m going to put a piece of tape over your bracelet; over mine too. We avoid knowing one another’s namebers as much as possible. I know yours—I’m the one who spotted you—but the others don’t; all they know is that I’m bringing a promising member. Later on, one or two of them may have to know it.”

“Do you check the history of everyone who’s assigned here?”

“No. Why?”

“Isn’t that how you ‘spotted’ me, by finding out that I used to think about classifying myself?”

“Three steps down here,” she said. “No, that was only confirmation. And two and three. What I spotted was a look you have, the look of a member who isn’t one-hundred-per-cent in the bosom of the Family. You’ll learn to recognize it too, if you join us. I found out who you were, and then I went to your room and saw that picture on the wall.”

“The horse?”

“No, Marx Writing,” she said. “Of course the horse. You draw the way no normal member would even think of drawing. I checked your history then, after I’d seen the picture.”

They had left the plaza and were on one of the walkways west of it—K or L, he wasn’t sure which.

“You’ve made a mistake,” he said. “Someone else drew that picture.”

“You drew it,” she said; “you’ve claimed charcoal and sketch pads.”

“For the member who drew it. A friend of mine at academy.”

“Well that’s interesting,” she said. “Cheating on claims is a better sign than anything. Anyway, you liked the picture well enough to keep it and frame it. Or did your friend make the frame too?”

He smiled. “No, I did,” he said. “You didn’t miss a thing.”

“We turn here, to the right.”

“Are you an adviser?”

“Me? Hate, no.”

“But you can pull histories?”

“Sometimes.”

“Are you at the Institute?”

“Don’t ask so many questions,” she said. “Listen, what do you want us to call you? Instead of Li RM.”

“Oh,” he said. “Chip.”

“‘Chip’? No,” she said, “don’t just say the first thing that comes into your mind. You ought to be something like ‘Pirate’ or ‘Tiger.’ The others are King and Lilac and Leopard and Hush and Sparrow.”

“Chip’s what I was called when I was a boy,” he said. “I’m used to it.”

“All right,” she said, “but it’s not what I would have chosen. Do you know where we are?”

“No.”

“Fine. Left now.”

They went through a door, up steps, through another door, and into an echoing hall of some kind, where they walked and turned, walked and turned, as if by-passing a number of irregularly placed objects. They walked up a stopped escalator and along a corridor that curved toward the right.

She stopped him and asked for his bracelet. He raised his wrist, and his bracelet was pressed tight and rubbed. He touched it; there was smoothness instead of his nameber. That and his sightlessness made him suddenly feel disembodied; as if he were about to drift from the floor, drift right out through whatever walls were around him and up into space, dissolve there and become nothing.

She took his arm again. They walked farther and stopped. He heard a knock and two more knocks, a door opening, voices stilling. “Hi,” she said, leading him forward. “This is Chip. He insists on it.”

Chairs scuffed against the floor, voices gave greetings. A hand took his and shook it. “I’m King,” a member said, a man. “I’m glad you decided to come.”

“Thanks,” he said.

Another hand gripped his harder. “Snowflake says you’re quite an artist”—an older man than King. “I’m Leopard.”

Other hands came quickly, women: “Hello, Chip; I’m Lilac.” “And I’m Sparrow. I hope you’ll become a regular.” “I’m Hush, Leopard’s wife. Hello.” The last one’s hand and voice were old; the other two were young.

He was led to a chair and sat in it. His hands found tabletop before him, smooth and bare, its edge slightly curving; an oval table or a large round one. The others were sitting down; Snowflake on his right, talking; someone else on his left. He smelled something burning, sniffed to make sure. None of the others seemed aware of it. “Something’s burning,” he said.

“Tobacco,” the old woman, Hush, said on his left.

“Tobacco?” he said.

“We smoke it,” Snowflake said. “Would you like to try some?”

“No,” he said.

Some of them laughed. “It’s not really deadly,” King said, farther away on his left. “In fact, I suspect it may have some beneficial effects.”

“It’s very pleasing,” one of the young women said, across the table from him.

“No, thanks,” he said.

They laughed again, made comments to one another, and one by one grew silent. His right hand on the tabletop was covered by Snowflake’s hand; he wanted to draw it away but restrained himself. He had been stupid to come. What was he doing, sitting there sightless among those sick false-named members? His own abnormality was nothing next to theirs. Tobacco! The stuff had been extincted a hundred years ago; where the hate had they got it?

“We’re sorry about the bandage, Chip,” King said. “I assume Snowflake’s explained why it’s necessary.”

“She has,” Chip said, and Snowflake said, “I did.” Her hand left Chip’s; he drew his from the tabletop and took hold of his other in his lap.

“We’re abnormal members, which is fairly obvious,” King said. “We do a great many things that are generally considered sick. We think they’re not. We know they’re not.” His voice was strong and deep and authoritative; Chip visualized him as large and powerful, about forty. “I’m not going to go into too many details,” he said, “because in your present condition you would be shocked and upset, just as you’re obviously shocked and upset by the fact that we smoke tobacco. You’ll learn the details for yourself in the future, if there is a future as far as you and we are concerned.”

“What do you mean,” Chip said, “’in my present condition?”

There was silence for a moment. A woman coughed. “While you’re dulled and normalized by your most recent treatment,” King said.

Chip sat still, facing in King’s direction, stopped by the irrationality of what he had said. He went over the words and answered them: “I’m not dulled and normalized.”

“But you are,” King said.

“The whole Family is,” Snowflake said, and from beyond her came “Everyone, not just you”—in the old man’s voice of Leopard.

“What do you think a treatment consists of?” King asked.

Chip said, “Vaccines, enzymes, the contraceptive, sometimes a tranquilizer—”

“Always a tranquilizer,” King said. “And LPK, which minimizes aggressiveness and also minimizes joy and perception and every other fighting thing the brain is capable of.”

“And a sexual depressant,” Snowflake said.

“That too,” King said. “Ten minutes of automatic sex once a week is barely a fraction of what’s possible.”

“I don’t believe it,” Chip said. “Any of it.”

They told him it was true. “It’s true, Chip.” “Really, it’s the truth.” “It’s true!”

“You’re in genetics,” King said; “isn’t that what genetic engineering is working toward?—removing aggressiveness, controlling the sex drive, building in helpfulness and docility and gratitude? Treatments are doing the job in the meantime, while genetic engineering gets past size and skin color.”

“Treatments help us,” Chip said.

“They help Uni,” the woman across the table said.

“And the Wei-worshippers who programmed Uni,” King said. “But they don’t help us, at least not as much as they hurt us. They make us into machines.”

Chip shook his head, and shook it again.

“Snowflake told us”—it was Hush, speaking in a dry quiet voice that accounted for her name—“that you have abnormal tendencies. Haven’t you ever noticed that they’re stronger just before a treatment and weaker just after one?”

Snowflake said, “I’ll bet you made that picture frame a day or two before a treatment, not a day or two after one.”

He thought for a moment. “I don’t remember,” he said, “but when I was a boy and thought about classifying myself, after treatments it seemed stupid and pre-U, and before treatments it was—exciting.”

“There you are,” King said.

“But it was sick excitement!”

“It was healthy,” King said, and the woman across the table said, “You were alive, you were feeling something. Any feeling is healthier than no feeling at all.”

He thought about the guilt he had kept secret from his advisers since Karl and the Academy. He nodded. “Yes,” he said, “yes, that could be.” He turned his face toward King, toward the woman, toward Leopard and Snowflake, wishing he could open his eyes and see them. “But I don’t understand this,” he said. “You get treatments, don’t you? Then aren’t you—”

“Reduced ones,” Snowflake said.

“Yes, we get treatments,” King said, “but we’ve managed to have them reduced, to have certain components of them reduced, so that we’re a little more than the machines Uni thinks we are.”

“And that’s what we’re offering you,” Snowflake said; “a way to see more and feel more and do more and enjoy more.”

“And to be more unhappy; tell him that too.” It was a new voice, soft but clear, the other young woman. She was across the table and to Chip’s left, close to where King was.

“That isn’t so,” Snowflake said.

“Yes it is,” the clear voice said—a girl’s voice almost; she was no more than twenty, Chip guessed. “There’ll be days when you’ll hate Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei,” she said, “and want to take a torch to Uni. There’ll be days when you’ll want to tear off your bracelet and run to a mountaintop like the old incurables, just to be able to do what you want to do and make your own choices and live your own life.”

“Lilac,” Snowflake said.

“There’ll be days when you’ll hate us,” she said, “for waking you up and making you not a machine. Machines are at home in the universe; people are aliens.”

“Lilac,” Snowflake said, “we’re trying to get Chip to join us; we’re not trying to scare him away.” To Chip she said, “Lilac is really abnormal.”

“There’s truth in what Lilac says,” King said. “I think we all have moments when we wish there were someplace we could go, some settlement or colony where we could be our own masters—”

“Not me,” Snowflake said.

“And since there isn’t such a place,” King said, “yes, we’re sometimes unhappy. Not you, Snowflake; I know. With rare exceptions like Snowflake, being able to feel happiness seems to mean being able to feel unhappiness as well. But as Sparrow said, any feeling is better and healthier than none at all; and the unhappy moments aren’t that frequent, really.”

“They are,” Lilac said.

“Oh, cloth,” Snowflake said. “Let’s stop all this talk about unhappiness.”

“Don’t worry, Snowflake,” the woman across the table, Sparrow, said; “if he gets up and runs you can trip him.”

“Ha, ha, hate, hate,” Snowflake said.

“Snowflake, Sparrow,” King said. “Well, Chip, what’s your answer? Do you want to get your treatments reduced? It’s done by steps; the first one is easy, and if you don’t like the way you feel a month from now, you can go to your adviser and tell him you were infected by a group of very sick members whom you unfortunately can’t identify.”

After a moment Chip said, “All right. What do I do?” His arm was squeezed by Snowflake. “Good,” Hush whispered.

“Just a moment, I’m lighting my pipe,” King said.

“Are you all smoking?” Chip asked. The burning smell was intense, drying and stinging his nostrils.

“Not right now,” Hush said. “Only King, Lilac, and Leopard.”

“We’ve all been doing it though,” Snowflake said. “It’s not a continuous thing; you do it awhile and then stop awhile.”

“Where do you get the tobacco?”

“We grow it,” Leopard said, sounding pleased. “Hush and I. In parkland.”

“In parkland?”

“That’s right,” Leopard said.

“We have two patches,” Hush said, “and last Sunday we found a place for a third.”

“Chip?” King said, and Chip turned toward him and listened. “Basically, step one is just a matter of acting as if you’re being overtreated,” King said; “slowing down at work, at games, at everything—slowing down slightly, not conspicuously. Make a small mistake at your work, and another one a few days later. And don’t do well at sex. The thing to do there is masturbate before you meet your girlfriend; that way you’ll be able to fail convincingly.”

“Masturbate?”

“Oh, fully treated, fully satisfied member,” Snowflake said.

“Bring yourself to an orgasm with your hand,” King said. “And then don’t be too concerned when you don’t have one later. Let your girlfriend tell her adviser; don’t you tell yours. Don’t be too concerned about anything, the mistakes you make, lateness for appointments or whatever; let others do the noticing and reporting.”

“Pretend to doze off during TV,” Sparrow said.

“You’re ten days from your next treatment,” King said. “At your next week’s adviser meeting, if you’ve done what I’ve told you, your adviser will sound you out about your general torpor. Again, no concern on your part. Apathy. If you do the whole thing well, the depressants in your treatment will be slightly reduced, enough so that a month from now you’ll be anxious to hear about step two.”

“It sounds easy enough,” Chip said.

“It is,” Snowflake said, and Leopard said, “We’ve all done it; you can too.”

“There’s one danger,” King said. “Even though your treatment may be slightly weaker than usual, its effects in the first few days will still be strong. You’ll feel a revulsion against what you’ve done and an urge to confess to your adviser and get stronger treatments than ever. There’s no way of telling whether or not you’ll be able to resist the urge. We did, but others haven’t. In the past year we’ve given this talk to two other members; they did the slowdown but then confessed within a day or two after being treated.”

“Then won’t my adviser be suspicious when I do the slowdown? He must have heard about those others.”

“Yes,” King said, “but there are legitimate slowdowns, when a member’s need for depressants has lessened, so if you do the job convincingly you’ll get away with it. It’s the urge to confess that you have to worry about.”

“Keep telling yourself”—it was Lilac speaking—“that it’s a chemical that’s making you think you’re sick and in need of help, a chemical that was infused into you without your consent.”

“My consent?” Chip said.

“Yes,” she said. “Your body is yours, not Uni’s.”

“Whether you’ll confess or hold out,” King said, “depends on how strong your mind’s resistance is to chemical alteration, and there’s not much you can do about it one way or the other. On the basis of what we know of you, I’d say you have a good chance.”

They gave him some more pointers on slowdown technique—to skip his midday cake once or twice, to go to bed before the last chime—and then King suggested that Snowflake take him back to where they had met. “I hope we’ll be seeing you again, Chip,” he said. “Without the bandage.”

“I hope so,” Chip said. He stood and pushed back his chair. “Good luck,” Hush said; Sparrow and Leopard said it too. Lilac said it last: “Good luck, Chip.”

“What happens,” he asked, “if I resist the urge to confess?”

“We’ll know,” King said, “and one of us will get in touch with you about ten days after the treatment.”

“How will you know?”

“We’ll know.”

His arm was taken by Snowflake’s hand. “All right,” he said. “Thank you, all of you.”

They said “Don’t mention it,” and “You’re welcome, Chip,” and “Glad to be of help.” Something sounded strange, and then—as Snowflake led him from the room—he realized what it was: the not-being-said of “Thank Uni.”

They walked slowly, Snowflake holding his arm not like a nurse but like a girl walking with her first boyfriend.

“It’s hard to believe,” he said, “that what I can feel now and see now—isn’t all there is.”

“It isn’t,” she said. “Not even half. You’ll find out.”

“I hope so.”

“You will. I’m sure of it.”

He smiled and said, “Were you sure about those two who tried and didn’t make it?”

“No,” she said. Then, “Yes, I was sure of one, but not of the other.”

“What’s step two?” he asked.

“First get through step one.”

“Are there more than two?”

“No. Two, if it works, gets you a major reduction. That’s when you really come alive. And speaking of steps, there are three right ahead of us, going up.”

They went up the three steps and walked on. They were back in the plaza. It was perfectly silent, with even the breeze gone.

“The fucking’s the best part,” Snowflake said. “It gets much better, much more intense and exciting, and you’ll be able to do it almost every night.”

“It’s incredible.”

“And please remember,” she said, “that I’m the one who found you. If I catch you even looking at Sparrow I’ll kill you.”

Chip started, and told himself not to be foolish.

“Excuse me,” she said; “I’ll act aggressively toward you. Maxi-aggressively.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m not shocked.”

“Not much.”

“What about Lilac?” he said. “May I look at her?”

“All you want; she loves King.”

“Oh?”

“With a pre-U passion. He’s the one who started the group; first her, then Leopard and Hush, then me, then Sparrow.”

Their footsteps became louder and resonant. She stopped him. “We’re here,” she said. He felt her fingers picking at the side of the bandage; he lowered his head. She began unwinding, peeling bandage from margins of skin that turned instantly cool. She unwound more and more and finally took the cotton from his eyes. He blinked them and stretched them wide.

She was close to him and moonlit, looking at him in a way that seemed challenging while she thrust bandage into her medicenter coveralls. Somehow she had got her pale mask back on—but it wasn’t a mask, he saw with a shock; it was her face. She was light. Lighter than any member he had ever seen, except a few near-sixty ones. She was almost white. Almost as white as snow.

“Mask neatly in place,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“That’s all right,” she said, and smiled. “We’re all odd in one way or another. Look at that eye.” She was thirty-five or so, sharp-featured and intelligent-looking, her hair freshly clipped.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“I said it’s all right.”

“Are you supposed to let me see what you look like?”

“I’ll tell you something,” she said. “If you don’t come through I don’t give a fight if the whole bunch of us get normalized. In fact, I think I’d prefer it.” She took his head in both hands and kissed him, her tongue prying at his lips. It slid in and flickered in his mouth. She held his head tight, pushed her groin against his, and rubbed circularly. He felt a responsive stiffening and put his hands to her back. He worked his tongue tentatively against hers.

She withdrew her mouth. “Considering that it’s the middle of the week,” she said, “I’m encouraged.”

“Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei,” he said. “Is that how you all kiss?”

“Only me, brother,” she said, “only me.”

They did it again.

“Go on home now,” she said. “Don’t touch scanners.”

He backed away from her. “I’ll see you next month,” he said.

“You fighting well better had,” she said. “Good luck.”

He went out into the plaza and headed toward the Institute. He looked back once. There was only empty passageway between the blank moon-white buildings.

2

BOB RO, seated behind his desk, looked up and smiled. “You’re late,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Chip said. He sat down.

Bob closed a white folder with a red file tab on it. “How are you?” he asked.

“Fine,” Chip said.

“Have a good week?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Bob studied him for a moment, his elbow on his chair arm, his fingers rubbing the side of his nose. “Anything in particular you want to talk about?” he asked.

Chip was silent, and then shook his head. “No,” he said.

“I hear you spent half of yesterday afternoon doing somebody else’s work.”

Chip nodded. “I took a sample from the wrong section of the IC box,” he said.

“I see,” Bob said, and smiled and grunted.

Chip looked questioningly at him.

“Joke,” Bob said. “IC, I see.”

“Oh,” Chip said, and smiled.

Bob propped his jaw on his hand, the side of a finger lying against his lips. “What happened Friday?” he asked.

“Friday?”

“Something about using the wrong microscope.”

Chip looked puzzled for a moment. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. I didn’t really use it. I just went into the chamber. I didn’t change any of the settings.”

Bob said, “It looks like it wasn’t such a good week.”

“No, I guess it wasn’t,” Chip said.

“Peace SK says you had trouble Saturday night.”

“Trouble?”

“Sexually.”

Chip shook his head. “I didn’t have any trouble,” he said. “I just wasn’t in the mood, that’s all.”

“She says you tried and couldn’t erect.”

“Well I felt I ought to do it, for her sake, but I just wasn’t in the mood.”

Bob watched him, not saying anything.

“I was tired,” Chip said.

“It seems you’ve been tired a lot lately. Is that why you weren’t at your photography club meeting Friday night?”

“Yes,” he said. “I turned in early.”

“How do you feel now? Are you tired now?”

“No. I feel fine.”

Bob looked at him, then straightened in his chair and smiled. “Okay, brother,” he said, “touch and go.”

Chip put his bracelet to the scanner of Bob’s telecomp and stood up.

“See you next week,” Bob said.

“Yes.”

“On time.”

Chip, having turned away, turned back and said, “Beg pardon?”

“On time next week,” Bob said.

“Oh,” Chip said. “Yes.” He turned and went out of the cubicle.

He thought he had done it well but there was no way of knowing, and as his treatment came nearer he grew increasingly anxious. The thought of a significant rise in sensation became more intriguing by the hour, and Snowflake, King, Lilac, and the others became more attractive and admirable. So what if they smoked tobacco? They were happy and healthy members—no, people, not members!—who had found an escape from sterility and sameness and universal mechanical efficiency. He wanted to see them and be with them. He wanted to kiss and embrace Snowflake’s unique lightness; to talk with King as an equal, friend to friend; to hear more of Lilac’s strange but provocative ideas. “Your body is yours, not Uni’s”—what a disturbing pre-U thing to say! If there were any basis for it, it could have implications that might lead him to—he couldn’t think what; a jolting change of some sort in his attitude toward everything!

That was the night before his treatment. He lay awake for hours, then climbed with bandaged hands up a snow-covered mountaintop, smoked tobacco pleasurably under the guidance of a friendly smiling King, opened Snowflake’s coveralls and found her snow-white with a throat-to-groin red cross, drove an early wheel-steered car through the hallways of a huge Genetic Suffocation Center, and had a new bracelet inscribed Chip and a window in his room through which he watched a lovely nude girl watering a lilac bush. She beckoned impatiently and he went to her—and woke feeling fresh and energetic and cheerful, despite those dreams, more vivid and convincing than any of the five or six he had had in the past.

That morning, a Friday, he had his treatment. The tickle-buzz-sting seemed to last a fraction of a second less than usual, and when he left the unit, pushing down his sleeve, he still felt good and himself, a dreamer of vivid dreams, a cohort of unusual people, an outwitter of Family and Uni. He walked falsely-slowly to the Center. It struck him that this of all times was when he should go on with the slowdown, to justify the even greater reduction that step two, whatever it was and whenever he took it, would be aimed at achieving. He was pleased with himself for having realized this, and wondered why King and the others hadn’t suggested it. Perhaps they had thought he wouldn’t be able to do anything after his treatment. Those other two members had apparently fallen apart completely, unlucky brothers.

He made a good small mistake that afternoon, started to type a report with the mike held wrong-side up while another 663B was looking. He felt a bit guilty about doing it, but he did it anyway.

That evening, to his surprise, he really dozed off during TV, although it was something fairly interesting, a tour of a new radio telescope in Isr. And later, during the house photography club meeting, he could hardly keep his eyes open. He excused himself early and went to his room. He undressed without bothering to chute his used coveralls, got into bed without putting on pajamas, and tapped out the light. He wondered what dreams he would have.

He woke feeling frightened, suspecting that he was sick and in need of help. What was wrong? Had he done something he shouldn’t have?

It came to him, and he shook his head, scarcely able to believe it. Was it real? Was it possible? Had he been so—so contaminated by that group of pitiably sick members that he had purposely made mistakes, had tried to deceive Bob RO (and maybe succeeded!), had thought thoughts hostile to his entire loving Family? Oh, Christ, Marx, Wood, and Weil

He thought of what the young one, “Lilac,” had told him: to remember that it was a chemical that was making him think he was sick, a chemical that had been infused into him without his consent. His consent! As if consent had anything to do with a treatment given to preserve one’s health and well-being, an integral part of the health and well-being of the entire Family! Even before the Unification, even in the chaos and madness of the twentieth century, a member’s consent wasn’t asked before he was treated against typhic or typho or whatever it was. Consent! And he had listened without challenging her!

The first chime sounded and he jumped from his bed, anxious to make up for his unthinkable wrongs. He chuted the day before’s coveralls, urined, washed, cleaned his teeth, evened up his hair, put on fresh coveralls, made his bed. He went to the dining hall and claimed his cake and tea, sat among other members and wanted to help them, to give them something, to demonstrate that he was loyal and loving, not the sick offender he had been the day before. The member on his left ate the last of his cake. “Would you like some of mine?” Chip asked.

The member looked embarrassed. “No, of course not,” he said. “But thanks, you’re very kind.”

“No I’m not,” Chip said, but he was glad the member had said he was.

He hurried to the Center and got there eight minutes early. He drew a sample from his own section of the IC box, not somebody else’s, and took it into his own microscope; put on his glasses the right way and followed the OMP to the letter. He drew data from Uni respectfully (Forgive my offenses, Uni who knows everything) and fed it new data humbly (Here is exact and truthful information about gene sample NF5049).

The section head looked in. “How’s it going?” he asked.

“Very well, Bob.”

“Good.”

At midday he felt worse, though. What about them, those sick ones? Was he to leave them to their sickness, their tobacco, their reduced treatments, their pre-U thoughts? He had no choice. They had bandaged his eyes. There was no way of finding them.

But that wasn’t so; there was a way. Snowflake had shown him her face. How many almost-white members, women of her age, could there be in the city? Three? Four? Five? Uni, if Bob RO asked it, could output their namebers in an instant. And when she was found and properly treated, she would give the namebers of some of the others; and they, the namebers of the ones remaining. The whole group could be found and helped within a day or two.

The way he had helped Karl.

That stopped him. He had helped Karl and felt guilt—guilt he had clung to for years and years, and now it persisted, a part of him. Oh Jesus Christ and Wei Li Chun, how sick beyond imagining he was!

“Are you all right, brother?”

It was the member across the table, an elderly woman.

“Yes,” he said, “I’m fine,” and smiled and put his cake to his lips.

“You looked so troubled for a second,” she said.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I thought of something I forgot to do.”

“Ah,” she said.

To help them or not to help them? Which was wrong, which was right? He knew which was wrong: not to help them, to abandon them as if he weren’t his brother’s keeper at all.

But he wasn’t sure that helping them wasn’t wrong too, and how could both be wrong?

He worked less zealously in the afternoon, but well and without mistakes, everything done properly. At the end of the day he went back to his room and lay on his back on his bed, the heels of his hands pressing into his shut eyes and making pulsing auroras there. He heard the voices of the sick ones, saw himself taking the sample from the wrong section of the box and cheating the Family of time and energy and equipment. The supper chime sounded but he stayed as he was, too tangled in himself for eating.

Later Peace SK called. “I’m in the lounge,” she said. “It’s ten of eight. I’ve been waiting twenty minutes.”

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

They went to a concert and then to her room.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve been—upset the last few days.”

She shook her head and plied his slack penis more briskly. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Didn’t you tell your adviser? I told mine.”

“Yes, I did. Look”—he took her hand away—“a whole group of new members came in on sixteen the other day. Why don’t you go to the lounge and find somebody else?”

She looked unhappy. “Well I think I ought to,” she said.

“I do too,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” she said, getting up from the bed.

He dressed and went back to his room and undressed again. He thought he would have trouble falling asleep but he didn’t.

On Sunday he felt even worse. He began to hope that Bob would call, would see that he wasn’t well and draw the truth out of him. That way there would be no guilt or responsibility, only relief. He stayed in his room, watching the phone screen. Someone on the soccer team called; he said he wasn’t feeling well.

At noon he went to the dining hall, ate a cake quickly, and returned to his room. Someone from the Center called, to find out if he knew someone else’s nameber.

Hadn’t Bob been told by now that he wasn’t acting normally? Hadn’t Peace said anything? Or the caller from the soccer team? And that member across the table at lunch yesterday, hadn’t she been smart enough to see through his excuse and get his nameber? (Look at him, expecting others to help him; who in the Family was he helping?) Where was Bob? What kind of adviser was he?

There were no more calls, not in the afternoon, not in the evening. The music stopped once for a starship bulletin.

Monday morning, after breakfast, he went down to the medicenter. The scanner said no, but he told the attendant that he wanted to see his adviser; the attendant telecomped, and then the scanners said yes, yes, yes, all the way into the advisory offices, which were half empty. It was only 7:50.

He went into Bob’s empty cubicle and sat down and waited for him, his hands on his knees. He went over in his mind the order in which he would tell: first about the intentional slowdown; then about the group, what they said and did and the way they could all be found through Snowflake’s lightness; and finally about the sick and irrational guilt-feeling he had concealed all the years since he had helped Karl. One, two, three. He would get an extra treatment to make up for anything he mightn’t have got on Friday, and he would leave the medicenter sound in mind and sound in body, a healthy contented member.

Your body is yours, not Uni’s.

Sick, pre-U. Uni was the will and wisdom of the entire Family. It had made him; had granted him his food, his clothing, his housing, his training. It had granted even the permission for his very conception. Yes, it had made him, and from now on he would be—

Bob came in swinging his telecomp and stopped short. “Li,” he said. “Hello. Is anything wrong?”

He looked at Bob. The name was wrong. He was Chip, not Li. He looked down at his bracelet: Li RM35M4419. He had expected it to say Chip. When had he had one that said Chip? In a dream, a strange happy dream, a girl beckoning…

“Li?” Bob said, putting his telecomp on the floor.

Uni had made him Li. For Wei. But he was Chip, chip off the old block. Which one was he? Li? Chip? Li?

“What is it, brother?” Bob asked, leaning close, taking his shoulder.

“I wanted to see you,” he said.

“About what?”

He didn’t know what to say. “You said I shouldn’t be late,” he said. He looked at Bob anxiously. “Am I on time?”

“On time?” Bob stepped back and squinted at him. “Brother, you’re a day early,” he said. “Tuesday’s your day, not Monday.”

He stood up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’d better get over to the Center”—and started to go.

Bob caught his arm. “Hold on,” he said, his telecomp falling on its side, slamming the floor.

“I’m all right,” Chip said. “I got mixed up. I’ll come tomorrow.” He went from Bob’s hand, out of the cubicle.

“Li,” Bob called.

He kept going.

He watched TV attentively that evening—a track meet in Arg, a relay from Venus, the news, a dance program, and Wei’s Living Wisdom—and then he went to his room. He tapped the light button but something was covering it and it didn’t work. The door closed sharply, had been closed by someone who was near him in the dark, breathing. “Who is it?” he asked.

“King and Lilac,” King said.

“What happened this morning?” Lilac asked, somewhere over by the desk. “Why did you go to your adviser?”

“To tell,” he said.

“But you didn’t.”

“I should have,” he said. “Get out of here, please.”

“You see?” King said.

“We have to try,” Lilac said.

“Please go,” Chip said. “I don’t want to get involved with you again, with any of you. I don’t know what’s right or wrong any more. I don’t even know who I am.”

“You’ve got about ten hours to find out,” King said. “Your adviser’s coming here in the morning to take you to Medicenter Main. You’re going to be examined there. It wasn’t supposed to happen for three weeks or so, after some more slowing down. It would have been step two. But it’s happening tomorrow, and it’ll probably be step minus-one.”

“It doesn’t have to be, though,” Lilac said. “You can still make it step two if you do what we tell you.”

“I don’t want to hear,” he said. “Just go, please.”

They didn’t say anything. He heard King make a movement.

“Don’t you understand?” Lilac said. “If you do what we tell you, your treatments will be reduced as much as ours are. If you don’t, they’ll be put back to where they were. In fact, they’ll probably be increased beyond that, won’t they, King?”

“Yes,” King said.

“To ‘protect’ you,” Lilac said. “So that you’ll never again even try to get out from under. Don’t you see, Chip?” Her voice came closer. “It’s the only chance you’ll ever have. For the rest of your life you’ll be a machine.”

“No, not a machine, a member,” he said. “A healthy member doing his assignment; helping the Family, not cheating it.”

“You’re wasting your breath, Lilac,” King said. “If it were a few days later you might be able to get through, but it’s too soon.”

“Why didn’t you tell this morning?” Lilac asked him. “You went to your adviser; why didn’t you tell? Others have.”

“I was going to,” he said.

“Why didn’t you?”

He turned away from her voice. “He called me Li,” he said. “And I thought I was Chip. Everything got—unsettled.”

“But you are Chip,” she said, coming still closer. “Someone with a name different from the nameber Uni gave him. Someone who thought of picking his own classification instead of letting Uni do it.”

He moved away, perturbed, then turned and faced their dim coverall shapes—Lilac, small, opposite him and a couple of meters away; King to his right against the light-outlined door. “How can you speak against Uni?” he asked. “It’s granted us everything!”

“Only what we’ve given it to grant us,” Lilac said. “It’s denied us a hundred times more.”

“It let us be born!”

“How many,” she said, “will it not let be born? Like your children. Like mine.”

“What do you mean?” he said. “That anyone who wants children—should be allowed to have them?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I mean.”

Shaking his head, he backed to his bed and sat down. She came to him; crouched and put her hands on his knees. “Please, Chip,” she said, “I shouldn’t say such things when you’re still the way you are, but please, please, believe me. Believe us. We are not sick, we are healthy. It’s the world that’s sick—with chemistry, and efficiency, and humility, and helpfulness. Do what we tell you. Become healthy. Please, Chip.”

Her earnestness held him. He tried to see her face. “Why do you care so much?” he asked. Her hands on his knees were small and warm, and he felt an impulse to touch them, to cover them with his own. Faintly he found her eyes, large and less slanted than normal, unusual and lovely.

“There are so few of us,” she said, “and I think that maybe, if there were more, we could do something; get away somehow and make a place for ourselves.”

“Like the incurables,” he said.

“That’s what we learn to call them,” she said. “Maybe they were really the unbeatables, the undruggables.”

He looked at her, trying to see more of her face.

“We have some capsules,” she said, “that will slow down your reflexes and lower your blood pressure, put things in your blood that will make it look as if your treatments are too strong. If you take them tomorrow morning, before your adviser comes, and if you behave at the medicenter as we tell you and answer certain questions as we tell you—then tomorrow will be step two, and you’ll take it and be healthy.”

“And unhappy,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, a smile coming into her voice, “unhappy too, though not as much as I said. I sometimes get carried away.”

“About every five minutes,” King said.

She took her hands from Chip’s knees and stood up. “Will you?” she asked.

He wanted to say yes to her, but he wanted to say no too. He said, “Let me see the capsules.”

King, coming forward, said, “You’ll see them after we leave. They’re in here.” He put into Chip’s hand a small smooth box. “The red one has to be taken tonight and the other two as soon as you get up.”

“Where did you get them?”

“One of the group works in a medicenter.”

“Decide,” Lilac said. “Do you want to hear what to say and do?”

He shook the box but it made no sound. He looked at the two dim figures waiting before him. He nodded. “All right,” he said.

They sat and spoke to him, Lilac on the bed beside him, King on the drawn-over desk chair. They told him about a trick of tensing his muscles before the metabolic examination and one of looking above the objective during the depth-perception test. They told him what to say to the doctor who had charge of him and the senior adviser who interviewed him. They told him about tricks that might be played on him: sudden sounds behind his back; being left all alone, but not really, with the doctor’s report form conveniently at hand. Lilac did most of the talking. Twice she touched him, once on his leg and once on his forearm; and once, when her hand lay by his side, he brushed it with his own. Hers moved away in a movement that might have begun before the contact.

“That’s terrifically important,” King said.

“I’m sorry, what was that?”

“Don’t ignore it completely,” King said. “The report form.”

“Notice it,” Lilac said. “Glance at it and then act as if it really isn’t worth the bother of picking up and reading. As if you don’t care much one way or the other.”

It was late when they finished; the last chime had sounded half an hour before. “We’d better go separately,” King said. “You go first. Wait by the side of the building.”

Lilac stood up and Chip stood too. Her hand found his. “I know you’re going to make it, Chip,” she said.

“I’ll try,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, and went to the door. He thought he would see her by the light in the hallway as she went out, but King got up and was in the way and the door closed.

They stood silently for a moment, he and King, facing each other.

“Don’t forget,” King said. “The red capsule now and the other two when you get up.”

“Right,” Chip said, feeling for the box in his pocket.

“You shouldn’t have any trouble.”

“I don’t know; there’s so much to remember.”

They were silent again.

“Thank you very much, King,” Chip said, holding out his hand in the darkness.

“You’re a lucky man,” King said. “Snowflake is a very passionate woman. You and she are going to have a lot of good times together.”

Chip didn’t understand why he had said that. “I hope so,” he said. “It’s hard to believe it’s possible to have more than one orgasm a week.”

“What we have to do now,” King said, “is find a man for Sparrow. Then everyone will have someone. It’s better that way. Four couples. No friction.”

Chip lowered his hand. He suddenly felt that King was telling him to stay away from Lilac, was defining who belonged with whom and telling him to obey the definition. Had King somehow seen him touching Lilac’s hand?

“I’m going now,” King said. “Turn around, please.”

Chip turned around and heard King moving away. The room appeared dimly as the door was opened, a shadow swept across it, and it disappeared again with the door’s closing.

Chip turned. How strange it was to think of someone loving one member in particular so much as to want no one else to touch her! Would he be that way too if his treatments were reduced? It was—like so many other things—hard to believe.

He went to the light button and felt what was covering it: tape, with something square and flat underneath. He picked at the tape, peeled it away, and tapped the button. He shut his eyes against the ceiling’s glare.

When he could see he looked at the tape; it was skin-colored, with a square of blue cardboard stuck to it. He dropped it down the chute and took the box from his pocket. It was white plastic with a hinged lid. He opened it. A red capsule, a white one, and one that was half white and half yellow lay bedded on a cotton filling.

He took the box into the bathroom and tapped on the light. Setting the open box on the edge of the sink, he turned on the water and pulled a cup from the slot and filled it. He turned the water off.

He started to think, but before he could think too much he picked up the red capsule, put it far back on his tongue, and drank the water.

Two doctors, not one, had charge of him. They led him in a pale blue smock from examination room to examination room, conferred with the examining doctors, conferred with each other, and made checks and notations on a clipboarded report form that they handed back and forth between them. One was a woman in her forties, the other a man in his thirties. The woman sometimes walked with her arm around Chip’s shoulders, smiling and calling him “young brother.” The man watched him impassively, with eyes that were smaller and set closer together than normal. He had a fresh scar on his cheek, running from the temple to the corner of his mouth, and dark bruises on his cheek and forehead. He never took his eyes off Chip except to look at the report form. Even when conferring with doctors he kept watching him. When the three of them walked to the next examination room he usually dropped behind Chip and the smiling woman doctor. Chip expected him to make a sudden sound, but he didn’t.

The interview with the senior adviser, a young woman, went well, Chip thought, but nothing else did. He was afraid to tense his muscles before the metabolic examination because of the doctor watching him, and he forgot about looking above the objective in the depth-perception test until it was too late.

“Too bad you’re missing a day’s work,” the watching doctor said.

“I’ll make it up,” he said, and realized as he said it that it was a mistake. He should have said It’s all for the best or Will I be here all day? or simply a dull overtreated Yes.

At midday he was given a glass of bitter white liquid to drink instead of a totalcake and then there were more tests and examinations. The woman doctor went away for half an hour but not the man.

Around three o’clock they seemed to be finished and went into a small office. The man sat down behind the desk and Chip sat opposite him. The woman said, “Excuse me, I’ll be back in two seconds.” She smiled at Chip and went out.

The man studied the report form for a minute or two, running a fingertip back and forth along his scar, and then he looked at the clock and put down the clipboard. “I’ll go get her,” he said, and got up and went out, closing the door partway.

Chip sat still and sniffed and looked at the clipboard. He leaned over, twisted his head, read on the report form the words cholinesterase absorption factor, unamplified, and sat back in his chair again. Had he looked too long?—he wasn’t sure. He rubbed his thumb and examined it, then looked at the room’s pictures, Marx Writing and Wood Presenting the Unification Treaty.

They came back in. The woman doctor sat down behind the desk and the man sat in a chair near her side. The woman looked at Chip. She wasn’t smiling. She looked worried.

“Young brother,” she said, “I’m worried about you. I think you’ve been trying to fool us.”

Chip looked at her. “Fool you?” he said.

“There are sick members in this town,” she said; “do you know that?”

He shook his head.

“Yes,” she said. “As sick as can be. They cover members’ eyes and take them someplace, and tell them to slow down and make mistakes and pretend they’ve lost their interest in sex. They try to make other members as sick as they are. Do you know any such members?”

“No,” Chip said.

“Anna,” the man said, “I’ve watched him. There’s no reason to think there’s anything wrong beyond what showed on the tests.” He turned to Chip and said, “Very easily corrected; nothing for you to think about.”

The woman shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, it doesn’t feel right. Please, young brother, you want us to help you, don’t you?”

“Nobody told me to make mistakes,” Chip said. “Why? Why should I?”

The man tapped the report form. “Look at the enzymological rundown,” he said to the woman.

“I’ve looked at it, I’ve looked at it.”

“He’s been badly OT’ed there, there, there, and there. Let’s give the data to Uni and get him fixed up again.”

“I want Jesus HL to see him.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m worried.”

“I don’t know any sick members,” Chip said. “If I did I would tell my adviser.”

“Yes,” the woman said, “and why did you want to see him yesterday morning?”

“Yesterday?” Chip said. “I thought it was my day. I got mixed up.”

“Please, let’s go,” the woman said, standing up holding the clipboard.

They left the office and walked down the hallway outside it. The woman put her arm around Chip’s shoulders but she didn’t smile. The man dropped behind.

They came to the end of the hallway, where there was a door marked 600A with a brown white-lettered plaque on it: Chief, Chemotherapeutics Division. They went in, to an anteroom where a member sat behind a desk. The woman doctor told her that they wanted to consult Jesus HL about a diagnostic problem, and the member got up and went out through another door.

“A waste of time all around,” the man said.

The woman said, “Believe me, I hope so.”

There were two chairs in the anteroom, a bare low table, and Wei Addressing the Chemotherapists. Chip decided that if they made him tell he would try not to mention Snowflake’s light skin and Lilac’s less-slanted-than-normal eyes.

The member came back and held the door open.

They went into a large office. A gaunt gray-haired member in his fifties—Jesus HL—was seated behind a large untidy desk. He nodded to the doctors as they approached, and looked absently at Chip. He waved a hand toward a chair facing the desk. Chip sat down in it.

The woman doctor handed Jesus HL the clipboard. “This doesn’t feel right to me,” she said. “I’m afraid he’s malingering.”

“Contrary to the enzymological evidence,” the other doctor said.

Jesus HL leaned back in his chair and studied the report form. The doctors stood by the side of the desk, watching him. Chip tried to look curious but not concerned. He watched Jesus HL for a moment, and then looked at the desk. Papers of all sorts were piled and scattered on it and lay drifted over an old-style telecomp in a scuffed case. A drink container jammed with pens and rulers stood beside a framed snapshot of Jesus HL, younger, smiling in front of Uni’s dome. There were two souvenir paperweights, an unusual square one from CHI61332 and a round one from ARG20400, neither of them on paper.

Jesus HL turned the clipboard end for end and peeled the form down and read the back of it.

“What I would like to do, Jesus,” the woman doctor said, “is keep him here overnight and run some of the tests again tomorrow.”

“Wasting—” the man said.

“Or better still,” the woman said, louder, “question him now under TP.”

“Wasting time and supplies,” the man said.

“What are we, doctors or efficiency analyzers?” the woman asked him sharply.

Jesus HL put down the clipboard and looked at Chip. He got up from his chair and came around the side of the desk, the doctors stepping back quickly to let him pass. He came and stood directly in front of Chip’s chair, tall and thin, his red-crossed coveralls stained with yellow spots.

He took Chip’s hands from the chair arms, turned them over, and looked at the palms, which glistened with sweat.

He let one hand go and held the wrist of the other, his fingers at the pulse. Chip made himself look up, unconcernedly. Jesus HL looked quizzically at him for a moment and then suspected—no, knew—and smiled his knowledge contemptuously. Chip felt hollow, beaten.

Jesus HL took hold of Chip’s chin, bent over, and looked closely at his eyes. “Open your eyes as wide as you can,” he said. His voice was King’s. Chip stared at him.

“That’s right,” he said. “Stare at me as if I’ve said something shocking.” It was King’s voice, unmistakable. Chip’s mouth opened. “Don’t speak, please,” King-Jesus HL said, squeezing Chip’s jaw painfully. He stared into Chip’s eyes, turned his head to one side and then the other, and then released it and stepped back. He went back around the desk and sat down again. He picked up the clipboard, glanced at it, and handed it to the woman doctor, smiling. “You’re mistaken, Anna,” he said. “You can put your mind at rest. I’ve seen many members who were malingering; this one isn’t. I commend you on your concern, though.” To the man he said, “She’s right, you know, Jesus; we mustn’t be efficiency analyzers. The Family can afford a little waste where a member’s health is involved. What is the Family, after all, except the sum of its members?”

“Thank you, Jesus,” the woman said, smiling. “I’m glad I was wrong.”

“Give that data to Uni,” King said, turning and looking at Chip, “so our brother here can be properly treated from now on.”

“Yes, right away.” The woman beckoned to Chip. He got up from the chair.

They left the office. In the doorway Chip turned. “Thank you,” he said.

King looked at him from behind his littered desk—only looked, with no smile, no glimmer of friendship. “Thank Uni,” he said.

Less than a minute after he got back to his room Bob called. “I just got a report from Medicenter Main,” he said. “Your treatments have been slightly out of line but from now on they’re going to be exactly right.”

“Good,” Chip said.

“This confusion and tiredness you’ve been feeling will gradually pass away during the next week or so, and then you’ll be your old self.”

“I hope so.”

“You will. Listen, do you want me to squeeze you in tomorrow, Li, or shall we just let it go till next Tuesday?”

“Next Tuesday’s all right.”

“Fine,” Bob said. He grinned. “You know what?” he said. “You look better already.”

“I feel a little better,” Chip said.

3

HE FELT A LITTLE BETTER every day, a little more awake and alert, a little more sure that sickness was what he had had and health was what he was growing toward. By Friday—three days after the examination—he felt the way he usually felt on the day before a treatment. But his last treatment was only a week behind him; three weeks and more lay ahead, spacious and unexplored, before the next one. The slowdown had worked; Bob had been fooled and the treatment reduced. And the next one, on the basis of the examination, would be reduced even further. What wonders of feeling would he be feeling in five, in six weeks’ time?

That Friday night, a few minutes after the last chime, Snowflake came into his room. “Don’t mind me,” she said, taking off her coveralls. “I’m just putting a note in your mouthpiece.”

She got into bed with him and helped him off with his pajamas. Her body to his hands and lips was smooth, pliant, and more arousing than Peace SK’s or anyone else’s; and his own, as she stroked and kissed and licked it, was more shudderingly reactive than ever before, more strainingly in want. He eased himself into her—deeply, snugly in—and would have driven them both to immediate orgasm, but she slowed him, stopped him, made him draw out and come in again, putting herself into one strange but effective position and then another. For twenty minutes or more they worked and contrived together, keeping as noiseless as they could because of the members beyond the wall and on the floor below.

When they were done and apart she said, “Well?”

“Well it was top speed, of course,” he said, “but frankly, from what you said, I expected even more.”

“Patience, brother,” she said. “You’re still an invalid. The time will come when you’ll look back on this as the night we shook hands.”

He laughed.

“Shh.”

He held her and kissed her. “What does it say?” he asked. “The note in my mouthpiece.”

“Sunday night at eleven, the same place as last time.”

“But no bandage.”

“No bandage,” she said.

He would see them all, Lilac and all the others. “I’ve been wondering when the next meeting would be,” he said.

“I hear you whooshed through step two like a rocket.”

“Stumbled through it, you mean. I wouldn’t have made it at all if not for—” Did she know who King really was? Was it all right to speak of it?

“If not for what?”

“If not for King and Lilac,” he said. “They came here the night before and prepped me.”

“Well of course,” she said. “None of us would have made it if not for the capsules and all.”

“I wonder where they get them.”

“I think one of them works in a medicenter.”

“Mm, that would explain it,” he said. She didn’t know. Or she knew but didn’t know that he knew. Suddenly he was annoyed by the need for carefulness that had come between them.

She sat up. “Listen,” she said, “it pains me to say this, but don’t forget to carry on as usual with your girlfriend. Tomorrow night, I mean.”

“She’s got someone new,” he said. “You’re my girlfriend.”

“No I’m not,” she said. “Not on Saturday nights anyway. Our advisers would wonder why we took someone from a different house. I’ve got a nice normal Bob down the hall from me, and you find a nice normal Yin or Mary. But if you give her more than a little quick one I’ll break your neck.”

“Tomorrow night I won’t even be able to give her that.”

“That’s all right,” she said, “you’re still supposed to be recovering.” She looked sternly at him. “Really,” she said, “you have to remember not to get too passionate, except with me. And to keep a contented smile in place between the first chime and the last. And to work hard at your assignment but not too hard. It’s just as tricky to stay undertreated as it is to get that way.” She lay back down beside him and drew his arm around her. “Hate,” she said, “I’d give anything for a smoke now.”

“Is it really so enjoyable?”

“Mm-hmm. Especially at times like this.”

“I’ll have to try it.”

They lay talking and caressing each other for a while, and then Snowflake tried to rouse him again—“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” she said—but everything she did proved unavailing. She left around twelve or so. “Sunday at eleven,” she said by the door. “Congratulations.”

Saturday evening in the lounge Chip met a member named Mary KK whose boyfriend had been transferred to Can earlier in the week. The birth-year part of her nameber was 38, making her twenty-four.

They went to a pre-Marxmas sing in Equality Park. As they sat waiting for the amphitheater to fill, Chip looked at Mary closely. Her chin was sharp but otherwise she was normal: tan skin, upslanted brown eyes, clipped black hair, yellow coveralls on her slim spare frame. One of her toenails, half covered by sandal strap, was discolored a bluish purple. She sat smiling, watching the opposite side of the amphitheater.

“Where are you from?” he asked her.

“Rus,” she said.

“What’s your classification?”

“One-forty B.”

“What’s that?”

“Ophthalmologic technician.”

“What do you do?”

She turned to him. “I attach lenses,” she said. “In the children’s section.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“Of course.” She looked uncertainly at him. “Why are you asking me so many questions?” she asked. “And why are you looking at me so—as if you’ve never seen a member before?”

“I’ve never seen you before,” he said. “I want to know you.”

“I’m no different from any other member,” she said. “There’s nothing unusual about me.”

“Your chin is a little sharper than normal.”

She drew back, looking hurt and confused.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said. “I just meant to point out that there is something unusual about you, even if it isn’t something important.”

She looked searchingly at him, then looked away, at the opposite side of the amphitheater again. She shook her head. “I don’t understand you,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was sick until last Tuesday. But my adviser took me to Medicenter Main and they fixed me up fine. I’m getting better now. Don’t worry.”

“Well that’s good,” she said. After a moment she turned and smiled cheerfully at him. “I forgive you,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said, suddenly feeling sad for her.

She looked away again. “I hope we sing ‘The Freeing of the Masses,’” she said.

“We will,” he said.

“I love it,” she said, and smiling, began to hum it.

He kept looking at her, trying to do so in a normal-seeming way. What she had said was true: she was no different from any other member. What did a sharp chin or a discolored toenail signify? She was exactly the same as every Mary and Anna and Peace and Yin who had ever been his girlfriend: humble and good, helpful and hard-working. Yet she made him feel sad. Why? And could all the others have done so, had he looked at them as closely as he was looking at her, had he listened as closely to what they said?

He looked at the members on the other side of him, at the scores in the tiers below, the scores in the tiers above. They were all like Mary KK, all smiling and ready to sing their favorite Marxmas songs, and all saddening; everyone in the amphitheater, the hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands. Their faces lined the mammoth bowl like tan beads strung away in immeasurable close-laid ovals.

Spotlights struck the gold cross and red sickle at the bowl’s center. Four familiar trumpet notes blasted, and everybody sang:

But they weren’t a mighty Family, he thought. They were a weak Family, a saddening and pitiable one, dulled by chemicals and dehumanized by bracelets. It was Uni that was mighty.

He sang the words automatically, thinking that Lilac had been right: reduced treatments brought new unhappiness.

Sunday night at eleven he met Snowflake between the buildings on Lower Christ Plaza. He held her and kissed her gratefully, glad of her sexuality and humor and pale skin and bitter tobacco taste—all the things that were she and nobody else. “Christ and Wei, I’m glad to see you,” he said.

She gave him a tighter hug and smiled happily at him. “It gets to be a shut-off being with normals, doesn’t it?” she said.

“And how,” he said. “I wanted to kick the soccer team instead of the ball this morning.”

She laughed.

He had been depressed since the sing; now he felt released and happy and taller. “I found a girlfriend,” he said, “and guess what; I fucked her without the least bit of trouble.”

“Hate.”

“Not as extensively or as satisfyingly as we did, but with no trouble at all, not twenty-four hours later.”

“I can live without the details.”

He grinned and ran his hands down her sides and clasped her hipbones. “I think I might even manage to do it again tonight,” he said, teasing her with his thumbs.

“Your ego is growing by leaps and bounds.”

“My everything is.”

“Come on, brother,” she said, prying his hands away and holding onto one, “we’d better get you indoors before you start singing.”

They went into the plaza and crossed it diagonally. Flags and sagging Marxmas bunting hung motionless above it, dim in the glow of distant walkways. “Where are we going anyway?” he asked, walking happily. “Where’s the secret meeting place of the diseased corrupters of healthy young members?”

“The Pre-U,” she said.

“The Museum?”

“That’s right. Can you think of a better place for a group of Uni-cheating abnormals? It’s exactly where we belong. Easy,” she said, tugging at his hand; “don’t walk so energetically.”

A member was coming into the plaza from the walkway they were going toward. A briefcase or telecomp was in his hand.

Chip walked more normally alongside Snowflake. The member, coming closer—it was a telecomp he had—smiled and nodded. They smiled and nodded in return as they passed him.

They went down steps and out of the plaza.

“Besides,” Snowflake said, “it’s empty from eight to eight and it’s an endless source of pipes and funny costumes and unusual beds.”

“You take things?”

“We leave the beds,” she said. “But we make use of them now and again. Meeting solemnly in the staff conference room was just for your benefit.”

“What else do you do?”

“Oh, sit around and complain a little. That’s Lilac’s and Leopard’s department mostly. Sex and smoking is enough for me. King does funny versions of some of the TV programs; wait till you find out how much you can laugh.”

“The making use of the beds,” Chip said; “is it done on a group basis?”

“Only by two’s, dear; we’re not that pre-U.”

“Who did you use them with?”

“Sparrow, obviously. Necessity is the mother of et cetera. Poor girl, I feel sorry for her now.”

“Of course you do.”

“I do! Oh well, there’s an artificial penis in Nineteenth Century Artifacts. She’ll survive.”

“King says we should find a man for her.”

“We should. It would be a much better situation, having four couples.”

“That’s what King said.”

As they were crossing the ground floor of the museum-—lighting their way through the strange-figured dark with a flashlight that Snowflake had produced—another light struck them from the side and a voice nearby said, “Hello there!” They started. “I’m sorry,” the voice said. “It’s me, Leopard.”

Snowflake swung her light onto the twentieth-century car, and a flashlight inside it went off. They went over to the glinting metal vehicle. Leopard, sitting behind the steering wheel, was an old round-faced member wearing a hat with an orange plume. There were several dark brown spots on his nose and cheeks. He put his hand, also spotted, through the car’s window frame. “Congratulations, Chip,” he said. “I’m glad you came through.”

Chip shook his hand and thanked him.

“Going for a ride?” Snowflake asked.

“I’ve been for one,” he said. “To Jap and back. Volvo’s out of fuel now. And thoroughly wet too, come to think of it.”

They smiled at him and at each other.

“Fantastic, isn’t it?” he said, turning the wheel and working a lever that projected from its shaft. “The driver was in complete control from start to finish, using both hands and both feet.”

“It must have been awfully bumpy,” Chip said, and Snowflake said, “Not to mention dangerous.”

“But fun too,” Leopard said. “It must have been an adventure, really; choosing your destination, figuring out which roads to take to get there, gauging your movements in relation to the movements of other cars—”

“Gauging wrong and dying,” Snowflake said.

“I don’t think that really happened as often as we’re told it did,” Leopard said. “If it had, they would have made the front parts of the cars much thicker.”

Chip said, “But that would have made them heavier and they would have gone even slower.”

“Where’s Hush?” Snowflake asked.

“Upstairs with Sparrow,” Leopard said. He opened the car’s door, and coming out of it with a flashlight in his hand, said, “They’re setting things up. Some more stuff was put in the room.” He cranked the window of the door halfway up and closed the door firmly. A wide brown belt decorated with metal studs was fastened about his coveralls.

“King and Lilac?” Snowflake asked.

“They’re around someplace.”

Chip thought, Making use of one of the beds—as the three of them went on through the museum.

He had thought about King and Lilac a good deal since seeing King and seeing how old he was—fifty-two or -three or even more. He had thought about the difference between the ages of the two—thirty years, surely, at the very least—and about the way King had told him to stay away from Lilac; and about Lilac’s large less-slanted-than-normal eyes and her hands that had rested small and warm on his knees as she crouched before him urging him toward greater life and awareness.

They went up the steps of the unmoving central escalator and across the museum’s second floor. The two flashlights, Snowflake’s and Leopard’s, danced over the guns and daggers, the bulbed and wired lamps, the bleeding boxers, the kings and queens in their jewels and fur-trimmed robes, and the three beggars, filthy and crippled, parading their disfigurements and thrusting out their cups. The partition behind the beggars had been slid aside, opening a narrow passageway that extended farther into the building, its first few meters lit by light from a doorway in the left-hand wall. A woman’s voice spoke softly. Leopard went on ahead and through the doorway, while Snowflake, standing beside the beggars, sprung pieces of tape from a first-aid-kit cartridge. “Snowflake’s here with Chip,” Leopard said inside the room. Chip laid a piece of tape over his bracelet plaque and rubbed it down firmly.

They went to the doorway and into a tobacco-smelling stuffiness where an old woman and a young one sat close together on pre-U chairs with two knives and a heap of brown leaves on a table before them. Hush and Sparrow; they shook Chip’s hand and congratulated him. Hush was crinkle-eyed and smiling; Sparrow, large-limbed and embarrassed-looking, her hand hot and moist. Leopard stood by Hush, holding a heat coil in the bowl of a curved black pipe and blowing out smoke around the sides of its stem.

The room, a fairly large one, was a storeroom, its farther reaches filled with a ceiling-high mass of pre-U relics, late and early: machines and furniture and paintings and bundles of clothing; swords and wood-handled implements; a statue of a member with wings, an “angel”; half a dozen crates, opened, unopened, stenciled IND26110 and pasted at their corners with square yellow stickers. Looking around, Chip said, “There are enough things here for another museum.”

“All genuine too,” Leopard said. “Some of the things on display aren’t, you know.”

“I didn’t.”

A varied lot of chairs and benches had been set about the forward part of the room. Paintings leaned against the walls, and there were cartons of smaller relics and piles of moldering books. A painting of an enormous boulder caught Chip’s eye. He moved a chair to get a full view of it. The boulder, a mountain almost, floated above the earth in blue sky, meticulously painted and jarring to the senses. “What an odd picture,” he said.

“A lot of them are odd,” Leopard said.

“The ones of Christ,” Hush said, “show him with a light around his head, and he doesn’t look human at all.”

“I’ve seen those,” Chip said, looking at the boulder, “but I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s fascinating; real and unreal at the same time.”

“You can’t take it,” Snowflake said. “We can’t take anything that might be missed.”

Chip said, “There’s no place I could put it anyway.”

“How do you like being undertreated?” Sparrow asked.

Chip turned. Sparrow looked away, at her hands holding a roll of leaves and a knife. Hush was at the same task, chopping rapidly at a roll of leaves, cutting it into thin shreds that piled before her knife. Snowflake was sitting with a pipe in her mouth; Leopard was holding the heat coil in the bowl of it. “It’s wonderful,” Chip said. “Literally. Full of wonders. More of them every day. I’m grateful to all of you.”

“We only did what we’re told to,” Leopard said, smiling. “We helped a brother.”

“Not exactly in the approved way,” Chip said.

Snowflake offered him her pipe. “Are you ready to try a puff?” she asked.

He went to her and took it. The bowl of it was warm, the tobacco in it gray and smoking. He hesitated for a moment, smiled at them watching him, and put the stem to his lips. He sucked briefly at it and blew out smoke. The taste was strong but pleasant, surprisingly so. “Not bad,” he said. He did it again with more assurance. Some of the smoke went into his throat and he coughed.

Leopard, going smiling to the doorway, said, “I’ll get you one of your own,” and went out.

Chip returned the pipe to Snowflake and, clearing his throat, sat down on a bench of dark worn wood. He watched Hush and Sparrow cutting the tobacco. Hush smiled at him. He said, “Where do you get the seeds?”

“From the plants themselves,” she said.

“Where did you get the ones you started with?”

“King had them.”

“What did I have?” King asked, coming in, tall and lean and bright-eyed, a gold medallion chain-hung on his coveralled chest. He had Lilac behind him, his hand holding hers. Chip stood up. She looked at him, unusual, dark, beautiful, young.

“The tobacco seeds,” Hush said.

King offered his hand to Chip, smiling warmly. “It’s good to see you here,” he said. Chip shook his hand; its grip was firm and hearty. “Really good to see a new face in the group,” King said. “Especially a male one, to help me keep these pre-U women in their proper place!”

“Huh,” Snowflake said.

“It’s good to be here,” Chip said, pleased by King’s friendliness. His coldness when Chip left his office must have been only a pretense, for the sake, of course, of the onlooking doctors. “Thank you,” Chip said. “For everything. Both of you.”

Lilac said, “I’m very glad, Chip.” Her hand was still held by King’s. She was darker than normal, a lovely near-brown touched with rose. Her eyes were large and almost level, her lips pink and soft-looking. She turned away and said, “Hello, Snowflake.” She drew her hand from King’s and went to Snowflake and kissed her cheek.

She was twenty or twenty-one, no more. The upper pockets of her coveralls had something in them, giving her the breasted look of the women Karl had drawn. It was a strange, mysteriously alluring look.

“Are you beginning to feel different now, Chip?” King asked. He was at the table, bending and putting tobacco into the bowl of a pipe.

“Yes, enormously,” Chip said. “It’s everything you said it would be.”

Leopard came in and said, “Here you are, Chip.” He gave him a yellow thick-bowled pipe with an amber stem. Chip thanked him and tried the feel of it; it was comfortable in his hand and comfortable to his lips. He took it to the table, and King, his gold medallion swinging, showed him the right way to fill it.

Leopard took him through the staff section of the museum, showing him other storerooms, the conference room, and various offices and workrooms. “It’s a good idea,” he said, “for someone to keep rough track of who goes where during these get-togethers, and then check around later and make sure nothing is conspicuously out of place. The girls could be a little more careful than they are. I generally do it, and when I’m gone perhaps you’ll take over the job. Normals aren’t quite as unobservant as we’d like them to be.”

“Are you being transferred?” Chip asked.

“Oh no,” Leopard said. “I’ll be dying soon. I’m over sixty-two now, by almost three months. So is Hush.”

“I’m sorry,” Chip said.

“So are we,” Leopard said, “but nobody lives forever. Tobacco ashes are a danger, of course, but everyone’s good about that. You don’t have to worry about the smell; the air conditioning goes on at seven-forty and whips it right out; I stayed one morning and made sure. Sparrow’s going to take over the tobacco growing. We dry the leaves right here, in back of the hot-water tank; I’ll show you.”

When they got back to the storeroom, King and Snowflake were sitting opposite each other astride a bench, playing intently at a mechanical game of some kind that lay between them. Hush was dozing in her chair and Lilac was crouched at the verge of the mass of relics, taking books one at a time from a carton, looking at them, and putting them in a pile on the floor. Sparrow wasn’t there.

“What’s that?” Leopard asked.

“New game that came in,” Snowflake said, not looking up.

There were levers that they pressed and released, one for each hand, making little paddles hit a rusted ball back and forth on a rimmed metal board. The paddles, some of them broken, squeaked as they swung. The ball bounded this way and that and came to a stop in a depression at King’s end of the board. “Five!” Snowflake cried. “There you are, brother!”

Hush opened her eyes, looked at them, and closed them again.

“Losing’s the same as winning,” King said, lighting his pipe with a metal lighter.

“Like hate it is,” Snowflake said. “Chip? Come on, you’re next.”

“No, I’ll watch,” he said, smiling.

Leopard declined to play too, and King and Snowflake began another match. At a break in the play, when King had scored a point against Snowflake, Chip said, “May I see the lighter?” and King gave it to him. A bird in flight was painted on the side of it; a duck, Chip thought. He had seen lighters in museums but had never worked one. He opened the hinged top and pushed his thumb against the ridged wheel. On the second try the wick flamed. He closed the lighter, looked at it all over, and at the next break handed it back to King.

He watched them play for another few moments and then moved away. He went over to the mass of relics and looked at it, and then moved nearer to Lilac. She looked up at him and smiled, putting a book on one of several piles beside her. “I keep hoping to find one in the language,” she said, “but they’re always in the old ones.”

He crouched and picked up the book she had just put down. On the spine of it were small letters: Bädda för död. “Hmm,” he said, shaking his head. He glanced through the old brown pages, at strange words and phrases: allvarlig, lögnerska, dök ner på brickorna. The double dots and little circles were over many of the letters.

“Some of them are enough like the language so that you can understand a word or two,” she said, “but some of them are—well look at this one.” She showed him a book on which backward N’s and rectangular open-bottomed characters were mixed in with ordinary P’s and E’s and O’s. “Now what does that mean?” she said, putting it down.

“It would be interesting to find one we could read,” he said, looking at her cheek’s rose-brown smoothness.

“Yes, it would,” she said, “but I think they were screened before they were sent here and that’s why we can’t.”

“You think they were screened?”

“There ought to be lots of them in the language,” she said. “How could it have become the language if it wasn’t the one most widely used?”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “You’re right.”

“I keep hoping, though,” she said, “that there was a slip in the screening.” She frowned at a book and put it on a pile.

Her filled pockets stirred with her movements, and suddenly they looked to Chip like empty pockets lying against round breasts, breasts like the ones Karl had drawn; the breasts, almost, of a pre-U woman. It was possible, considering her abnormal darkness and the various physical abnormalities of the lot of them. He looked at her face again, so as not to embarrass her if she really had them.

“I thought I was double-checking this carton,” she said, “but I have a funny feeling I’m triple-checking it.”

“But why should the books have been screened?” he asked her.

She paused, with her dark hands hanging empty and her elbows on her knees, looking at him gravely with her large, level eyes. “I think we’ve been taught things that aren’t true,” she said. “About the way life was before the Unification. In the late pre-U, I mean, not the early.”

“What things?”

“The violence, the aggressiveness, the greed, the hostility. There was some of it, I suppose, but I can’t believe there was nothing else, and that’s what we’re taught, really. And the ‘bosses’ punishing the ‘workers,’ and all the sickness and alcohol-drinking and starvation and self-destruction. Do you believe it?”

He looked at her. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t thought much about it.”

“I’ll tell you what I don’t believe,” Snowflake said. She had risen from the bench, the game with King evidently finished. “I don’t believe that they cut off the baby boys’ foreskins,” she said. “In the early pre-U, maybe—in the early, early pre-U—but not in the late; it’s just too incredible. I mean, they had some kind of intelligence, didn’t they?”

“It’s incredible, all right,” King said, hitting his pipe against his palm, “but I’ve seen photographs. Alleged photographs, anyway.”

Chip shifted around and sat on the floor. “What do you mean?” he said. “Can photographs be—not genuine?”

“Of course they can,” Lilac said. ‘Take a close look at some of the ones inside. Parts of them have been drawn in. And parts have been drawn out.” She began putting books back into the carton.

“I had no idea that was possible,” Chip said.

“It is with the flat ones,” King said.

“What we’re probably given,” Leopard said—he was sitting in a gilded chair, toying with the orange plume of the hat he had worn—“is a mixture of truth and untruth. It’s anybody’s guess as to which part is which and how much there is of each.”

“Couldn’t we study these books and learn the languages?” Chip asked. “One would be all we’d really need.”

“For what?” Snowflake asked.

“To find out,” he said. “What’s true and what isn’t.”

“I tried it,” Lilac said.

“She certainly did,” King said to Chip, smiling. “A while back she wasted more nights than I care to remember beating her pretty head against one of those nonsensical jumbles. Don’t you do it, Chip; I beg you.”

“Why not?” Chip asked. “Maybe I’ll have better luck.”

“And suppose you do?” King said. “Suppose you decipher a language and read a few books in it and find out that we are taught things that are untrue. Maybe everything’s untrue. Maybe life in 2000 A.D. was one endless orgasm, with everyone choosing the right classification and helping his brothers and loaded to the ears with love and health and life’s necessities. So what? You’ll still be right here, in 162 Y.U., with a bracelet and an adviser and a monthly treatment. You’ll only be unhappier. We’ll all be unhappier.”

Chip frowned and looked at Lilac. She was packing books into the carton, not looking at him. He looked back at King and sought words. “It would still be worth knowing,” he said. “Being happy or unhappy—is that really the most important thing? Knowing the truth would be a different kind of happiness—a more satisfying kind, I think, even if it turned out to be a sad kind.”

“A sad kind of happiness?” King said, smiling. “I don’t see that at all.” Leopard looked thoughtful.

Snowflake, gesturing to Chip to get up, said, “Come on, there’s something I want to show you.”

He climbed to his feet. “But we’d probably only find that things have been exaggerated,” he said; “that there was hunger but not so much hunger, aggressiveness but not so much aggressiveness. Maybe some of the minor things have been made up, like the foreskin-cutting and the flag-worship.”

“If you feel that way, then there’s certainly no point in bothering,” King said. “Do you have any idea what a job it would be? It would be staggering.”

Chip shrugged. “It would be good to know, that’s all,” he said. He looked at Lilac; she was putting the last few books into the carton.

“Come on,” Snowflake said, and took his arm. “Save us some tobacco, you mems.”

They went out and into the dark of the exhibit hall. Snowflake’s flashlight lit their way. “What is it?” Chip asked. “What do you want to show me?”

“What do you think?” she said. “A bed. Certainly not more books.”

They generally met two nights a week, Sundays and Woodsdays or Thursdays. They smoked and talked and idled with relics and exhibits. Sometimes Sparrow sang songs that she wrote, accompanying herself on a lap-held instrument whose strings at her fingers made pleasing antique music. The songs were short and sad, about children who lived and died on starships, lovers who were transferred, the eternal sea. Sometimes King reenacted the evening’s TV, comically mocking a lecturer on climate control or a fifty-member chorus singing “My Bracelet.” Chip and Snowflake made use of the seventeenth-century bed and the nineteenth-century sofa, the early pre-U farm wagon and the late pre-U plastic rug. On nights between meetings they sometimes went to one or the other’s room. The nameber on Snowflake’s door was Anna PY24A9155; the 24, which Chip couldn’t resist working out, made her thirty-eight, older than he had thought her to be.

Day by day his senses sharpened and his mind grew more alert and restless. His treatment caught him back and dulled him, but only for a week or so; then he was awake again, alive again. He went to work on the language Lilac had tried to decipher. She showed him the books she had worked from and the lists she had made. Momento was moment; silenzio, silence. She had several pages of easily recognized translations; but there were words in the books’ every sentence that could only be guessed at and the guesses tried elsewhere. Was allora “then” or “already”? What were quale and sporse and rimanesse? He worked with the books for an hour or so at every meeting. Sometimes she leaned over his shoulder and looked at what he was doing—said “Oh, of course!” or “Couldn’t that be one of the days of the week?”—but most of the time she stayed near King, filling his pipe for him and listening while he talked. King watched Chip working and, reflected in glass panes of pre-U furniture, smiled at the others and raised his eyebrows.

Chip saw Mary KK on Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons. He acted normal with her, smiled through the Amusement Gardens and fucked her simply and without passion. He acted normal at his assignment, slowly following the established procedures. Acting normal began to irritate him, more and more as week followed week.

In July, Hush died. Sparrow wrote a song about her, and when Chip returned to his room after the meeting at which she had sung it, she and Karl (Why hadn’t he thought of him sooner?) suddenly came together in his mind. Sparrow was large and awkward but lovely when she sang, twenty-five or so and lonely. Karl presumably had been “cured” when Chip “helped” him, but might he not have had the strength or the genetic capacity or the whatever-it-was to resist the cure, at least to a degree? Like Chip he was a 663; there was a chance that he was right there at the Institute somewhere, an ideal prospect for being led into the group and an ideal match for Sparrow. It was certainly worth a try. What a pleasure it would be to really help Karl! Undertreated, he would draw—well what wouldn’t he draw?—pictures such as no one had ever imagined! As soon as he got up the next morning he got his last nameber book out of his take-along kit, touched the phone, and read out Karl’s nameber. But the screen stayed blank and the phone voice apologized; the member he had called was out of reach.

Bob RO asked him about it a few days later, just as he was getting up from the chair. “Oh, say,” Bob said, “I meant to ask you; how come you wanted to call this Karl WL?”

“Oh,” Chip said, standing by the chair. “I wanted to see how he was. Now that I’m all right, I guess I want to be sure that everyone else is.”

“Of course he is,” Bob said. “It’s an odd thing to do, after so many years.”

“I just happened to think of him,” Chip said.

He acted normal from the first chime to the last and met with the group twice a week. He kept working at the language—Italiano, it was called—although he suspected that King was right and there was no point in it. It was something to do, though, and seemed more worthwhile than playing with mechanical toys. And once in a while it brought Lilac to him, leaning over to look, with one hand on the leather-topped table he worked at and the other on the back of his chair. He could smell her—it wasn’t his imagination; she actually smelled of flowers—and he could look at her dark cheek and neck and the chest of her coveralls pushed taut by two mobile round protrusions. They were breasts. They were definitely breasts.

4

ONE NIGHT LATE IN AUGUST, while looking for more books in Italiano, he found one in a different language whose title, Vers I’avenir, was similar to the Italiano words verso and avvenire and apparently meant Toward the Future. He opened the book and thumbed its pages, and Wei Li Chun caught his eye, printed at the tops of twenty or thirty of them. Other names were at the tops of other clusters of pages, Mario Sofik, A. F. Liebman. The book, he realized, was a collection of short pieces by various writers, and two of the pieces were indeed by Wei. The title of one of them, Le pas prochain en avant, he recognized (pas would be passo; avant, avanti) as “The Next Step Forward,” in Part One of Wei’s Living Wisdom.

The value of what he had found, as he began to perceive it, held him motionless. Here in this small brown book, its cover clinging by threads, were twelve or fifteen pre-U-language pages of which he had an exact translation waiting in his night-table drawer. Thousands of words, of verbs in their bafflingly changing forms; instead of guessing and groping as he had done for his near-useless fragments of Italiano, he could gain a solid footing in this second language in a matter of hours!

He said nothing to the others; slipped the book into his pocket and joined them; filled his pipe as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Le pas-whatever-it-was-avant might not be “The Next Step Forward” after all. But it was, it had to be.

It was; he saw it as soon as he compared the first few sentences. He sat up in his room all that night, carefully reading and comparing, with one finger at the lines in the pre-U language and another at the lines translated. He worked his way two times through the fourteen-page essay, and then began making alphabetical word lists.

The next night he was tired and slept, but the following night, after a visit from Snowflake, he stayed up and worked again.

He began going to the museum on nights between meetings. There he could smoke while he worked, could look for other Français books—Français was the language’s name; the hook below the C was a mystery—and could roam the halls by flashlight. On the third floor he found a map from 1951, artfully patched in several places, where Eur was “Europe,” with the division called “France” where Français had been used, and all its strangely and appealingly named cities: “Paris” and “Nantes” and “Lyon” and “Marseille.”

Still he said nothing to the others. He wanted to confound King with a language fully mastered, and delight Lilac. At meetings he no longer worked at Italiano. One night Lilac asked him about it, and he said, truthfully, that he had given up trying to unravel it. She turned away, looking disappointed, and he was happy, knowing the surprise he was preparing for her.

Saturday nights were wasted, lying by Mary KK, and meeting nights were wasted too; although now, with Hush dead, Leopard sometimes didn’t come, and when he didn’t, Chip stayed on at the museum to straighten up and stayed still later to work.

In three weeks he could read Français rapidly, with only a word here and there that was indecipherable. He found several Français books. He read one whose title, translated, was The Purple Sickle Murders; and another, The Pygmies of the Equatorial Forest; and another, Father Goriot.

He waited until a night when Leopard wasn’t there, and then he told them. King looked as if he had heard bad news. His eyes measured Chip and his face was still and controlled, suddenly older and more gaunt. Lilac looked as if she had been given a longed-for gift. “You’ve read books in it?” she said. Her eyes were wide and shining and her lips stayed parted. But neither one’s reaction could give Chip the pleasure he had looked forward to. He was grave with the weight of what he now knew.

“Three of them,” he said to Lilac. “And I’m halfway through a fourth.”

“That’s marvelous, Chip!” Snowflake said. “What did you keep it a secret for?” And Sparrow said, “I didn’t think it was possible.”

“Congratulations, Chip,” King said, taking out his pipe. “It’s an achievement, even with the help of the essay. You’ve really put me in my place.” He looked at his pipe, working the stem of it to get it straight. “What have you found out so far?” he asked. “Anything interesting?”

Chip looked at him. “Yes,” he said. “A lot of what we’re told is true. There was crime and violence and stupidity and hunger. There was a lock on every door. Flags were important, and the borders of territories. Children waited for their parents to die so they could inherit their money. The waste of labor and material was fantastic.”

He looked at Lilac and smiled consolingly at her; her longed-for gift was breaking. “But with it all,” he said, “members seem to have felt stronger and happier than we do. Going where they wanted, doing what they wanted, ‘earning’ things, ‘owning’ things, choosing, always choosing—it made them somehow more alive than members today.”

King reached for tobacco. “Well that’s pretty much what you expected to find, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yes, pretty much,” Chip said. “And there’s one thing more.”

“What’s that?” Snowflake asked.

Looking at King, Chip said, “Hush didn’t have to die.”

King looked at him. The others did too. “What are you talking about?” King said, his fingers stopped in pipe-filling.

“Don’t you know?” Chip asked him.

“No,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

“What do you mean?” Lilac asked.

“Don’t you know, King?” Chip said.

“No,” King said. “What are—I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re getting at. How could pre-U books tell you anything about Hush? And why should I be expected to know what it is if they could?”

“Living to the age of sixty-two,” Chip said, “is no marvel of chemistry and breeding and totalcakes. Pygmies of the equatorial forests, whose life was hard even by pre-U standards, lived to be fifty-five and sixty. A member named Goriot lived to seventy-three and nobody thought it was terribly unusual, and that was in the early nineteenth century. Members lived to their eighties, even to their nineties!”

“That’s impossible,” King said. “The body wouldn’t last that long; the heart, the lungs—”

“The book I’m reading now,” Chip said, “is about some members who lived in 1991. One of them has an artificial heart. He gave money to doctors and they put it into him in place of his own.”

“Oh for—” King said. “Are you sure you really understand that Frandaze?”

“Francais,” Chip said. “Yes, I’m positive. Sixty-two isn’t a long life; it’s a relatively short one.”

“But that’s when we die” Sparrow said. “Why do we, if it isn’t—when we have to?”

“We don’t die…” Lilac said, and looked from Chip to King.

“That’s right,” Chip said. “We’re made to die. By Uni. It’s programmed for efficiency, for efficiency first, last, and always. It’s scanned all the data in its memory banks—which aren’t the pretty pink toys you’ve seen if you’ve made the visit; they’re ugly steel monsters—and it’s decided that sixty-two is the optimum dying time, better than sixty-one or sixty-three and better than bothering with artificial hearts. If sixty-two isn’t a new high in longevity that we’re lucky to have reached—and it isn’t, I know it isn’t—then that’s the only answer. Our replacements are trained and waiting, and off we go, a few months early or late so that everything isn’t too suspiciously tidy. Just in case anyone is sick enough to be able to feel suspicion.”

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

“Yes,” Chip said. “Especially Wood and Wei.”

“King?” Lilac said.

“I’m staggered,” King said. “I see now, Chip, why you thought I’d know.” To Snowflake and Sparrow he said, “Chip knows that I’m in chemotherapy.”

“And don’t you know?” Chip said.

“I don’t.”

“Is there or is there not a poison in the treatment units?” Chip asked. “You must know that.”

“Gently, brother, I’m an old member,” King said. “There’s no poison as such, no; but almost any compound in the setup could cause death if too much of it were infused.”

“And you don’t know how much of the compounds are infused when a member hits sixty-two?”

“No,” King said. “Treatments are formulated by impulses that go directly from Uni to the units, and there’s no way of monitoring them. I can ask Uni, of course, what any particular treatment consisted of or is going to consist of, but if what you’re saying is true”—he smiled—“it’s going to lie to me, isn’t it?”

Chip drew a breath, and let it go. “Yes,” he said.

“And when a member dies,” Lilac said, “the symptoms are the ones of old age?”

“They’re the ones I was taught are of old age,” King said. “They could very well be the ones of something entirely different.” He looked at Chip. “Have you found any medical books in that language?” he asked.

“No,” Chip said.

King took out his lighter and thumbed it open. “It’s possible,” he said. “It’s very possible. It never even crossed my mind. Members live to sixty-two; it used to be less, some day it’ll be more; we have two eyes, two ears, one nose. Established facts.” He lit the lighter and put the flame to his pipe.

“It must be true,” Lilac said. “It’s the final logical end of Wood’s and Wei’s thinking. Control everyone’s life and you eventually get around to controlling everyone’s death.”

“It’s awful,” Sparrow said. “I’m glad Leopard’s not here. Can you imagine how he’d feel? Not only Hush, but he himself any day now. We mustn’t say anything to him; let him think it’s going to happen naturally.”

Snowflake looked bleakly at Chip. “What did you have to tell us for?” she said.

King said, “So that we can experience a happy kind of sadness. Or was it a sad kind of happiness, Chip?”

“I thought you would want to know,” he said.

“Why?” Snowflake said. “What can we do about it? Complain to our advisers?”

“I’ll tell you one thing we can do,” Chip said. “Start getting more members into this group.”

“Yes!” Lilac said.

“And where do we find them?” King said. “We can’t just grab any Karl or Mary off the walkways, you know.”

Chip said, “Do you mean to say that in your assignment you can’t pull a print-out on local members with abnormal tendencies?”

“Not without giving Uni a good reason, I can’t,” King said. “One fuzzy move, brother, and the doctors will be examining me. Which would also mean, incidentally, that they’d be reexamining you.”

“Other abnormals are around,” Sparrow said. “Somebody writes ‘Fight Uni’ on the backs of buildings.”

“We’ve got to figure out a way to get them to find us,” Chip said. “A signal of some kind.”

“And then what?” King said. “What do we do when we’re twenty or thirty strong? Claim a group visit and blow Uni to pieces?”

“The idea has occurred to me,” Chip said.

“Chip!” Snowflake said. Lilac stared at him.

“First of all,” King said, smiling, “it’s impregnable. And second of all, most of us have already been there, so we wouldn’t be granted another visit. Or would we walk from here to Eur? And what would we do with the world once everything was uncontrolled—once the factories were clogged and the cars had crashed and the chimes had all stopped chiming—get really pre-U and say a prayer for it?”

“If we could find members who know computer and microwave theory,” Chip said, “members who know Uni, maybe we could work out a way to change its programming.”

“If we could find those members,” King said. “If we could get them with us. If we could get to EUR-zip-one. Don’t you see what you’re asking for? The impossible, that’s all. This is why I told you not to waste time with those books. There’s nothing we can do about anything. This is Uni’s world, will you get that through your head? It was handed over to it fifty years ago, and it’s going to do its assignment—spread the fighting Family through the fighting universe—and we’re going to do our assignments, including dying at sixty-two and not missing TV. This is it right here, brother: all the freedom we can hope for—a pipe and a few jokes and some extra fucking. Let’s not lose what we’ve got, all right?”

“But if we get other—”

“Sing a song, Sparrow,” King said.

“I don’t want to,” she said.

“Sing a song!”

“All right, I will.”

Chip glared at King and got up and strode from the room. He strode into the dark exhibit hall, banged his hip against hardness, and strode on, cursing. He went far from the passageway and the storeroom; stood rubbing his forehead and rocking on the balls of his feet before the jewel-glinting kings and queens, mute darker-than-darkness watchers. “King,” he said. “Thinks he really is, the brother-fighting…”

Sparrow’s singing came faintly, and the string-tinkle of her pre-U instrument. And footsteps, coming closer. “Chip?” It was Snowflake. He didn’t turn. His arm was touched. “Come on back,” she said.

“Leave me alone, will you?” he said. “Just leave me alone for a couple of minutes.”

“Come on,” she said. “You’re being childish.”

“Look,” he said, turning to her. “Go listen to Sparrow, will you? Go smoke your pipe.”

She was silent, and then said, “All right,” and went away.

He turned back to the kings and queens, breathing deeply. His hip hurt and he rubbed it. It was infuriating the way King cut off his every idea, made everyone do exactly as he–

She was coming back. He started to tell her to get the hate away but checked himself. He took a clenched-teeth breath and turned around.

It was King coming toward him, his gray hair and coveralls catching the dim glow from the passageway. He came close and stopped. They looked at each other, and King said, “I didn’t intend to speak quite that sharply.”

“How come you haven’t taken one of these crowns?” Chip asked. “And a robe. Just that medallion—hate, that’s not enough for a real pre-U king.”

King stayed silent for a moment, and then said, “My apologies.”

Chip drew a breath and held it, then let it go. “Every member we can get to join us,” he said, “would mean new ideas, new information we can draw on, possibilities that maybe we haven’t thought of.”

“New risks too,” King said. “Try to see it from my viewpoint.”

“I can’t,” Chip said. “I’d rather go back to full treatments than settle for just this.”

“‘Just this’ seems very nice to a member my age.”

“You’re twenty or thirty years closer to sixty-two than I am; you should be the one who wants to change things.”

“If change were possible, maybe I would be,” King said. “But chemotherapy plus computerization equals no change.”

“Not necessarily,” Chip said.

“It does,” King said, “and I don’t want to see ‘just this’ go down the drain. Even your coming here on off nights is an added risk. But don’t take offense”—he raised a hand—“I’m not telling you to stay away.”

“I’m not going to,” Chip said; and then, “Don’t worry, I’m careful.”

“Good,” King said. “And we’ll go on carefully looking for abnormals. Without signals.” He held out his hand.

After a moment Chip shook it.

“Come on back in now,” King said. “The girls are upset.”

Chip went with him toward the passageway.

“What was that you said before, about the memory banks being ‘steel monsters’?” King asked.

“That’s what they are,” Chip said. “Enormous frozen blocks, thousands of them. My grandfather showed them to me when I was a boy. He helped build Uni.”

“The brother-fighter.”

“No, he was sorry. He wished he hadn’t. Christ and Wei, if he were alive he’d be a marvelous member to have with us.”

The following night Chip was sitting in the storeroom reading and smoking when “Hello, Chip,” Lilac said, and was standing in the doorway with a flashlight at her side.

Chip stood up, looking at her.

“Do you mind my interrupting you?” she asked.

“Of course not, I’m glad to see you,” he said. “Is King here?”

“No,” she said.

“Come on in,” he said.

She stayed in the doorway. “I want you to teach me that language,” she said.

“I’d like to,” he said. “I was going to ask you if you wanted the lists. Come on in.”

He watched her come in, then found his pipe in his hand, put it down, and went to the mass of relics. Catching the legs of one of the chairs they used, he tossed it right side up and brought it back to the table. She had pocketed her flashlight and was looking at the open pages of the book he had been reading. He put the chair down, moved his chair to the side, and put the second chair next to it.

She turned up the front part of the book and looked at its cover.

“It means A Motive for Passion,” he said. “Which is fairly obvious. Most of it isn’t.”

She looked at the open pages again. “Some of it looks like Italiano,” she said.

“That’s how I got onto it,” he said. He held the back of the chair he had brought for her.

“I’ve been sitting all day,” she said. “You sit down. Go ahead.”

He sat and got his folded lists out from under the stacked Français books. “You can keep these as long as you want,” he said, opening them and spreading them out on the table. “I know it all pretty well by heart now.”

He showed her the way the verbs fell into groups, following different patterns of change to express time and subject, and the way the adjectives took one form or another depending on the nouns they were applied to. “It’s complicated,” he said, “but once you get the hang of it, translation’s fairly easy.” He translated a page of A Motive for Passion for her. Victor, a trader in shares of various industrial companies—the member who had had the artificial heart put into him—was rebuking his wife, Caroline, for having been unfriendly to an influential lawmaker.

“It’s fascinating,” Lilac said.

“What amazes me,” Chip said, “is how many non-productive members there were. These share-traders and lawmakers; the soldiers and policemen, bankers, tax-gatherers…”

“They weren’t non-productive,” she said. “They didn’t produce things but they made it possible for members to live the way they did. They produced the freedom, or at least they maintained it.”

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose you’re right.”

“I am,” she said, and moved restlessly from the table.

He thought for a moment. “Pre-U members,” he said, “gave up efficiency—in exchange for freedom. And we’ve done the reverse.”

“We haven’t done it,” Lilac said. “It was done for us.” She turned and faced him, and said, “Do you think it’s possible that the incurables are still alive?”

He looked at her.

“That their descendants have survived somehow,” she said, “and have a—a society somewhere? On an island or in some area that the Family isn’t using?”

“Wow,” he said, and rubbed his forehead. “Sure it’s possible,” he said. “Members survived on islands before the Unification; why not after?”

“That’s what I think,” she said, coming back to him. “There have been five generations since the last ones—”

“Battered by disease and hardship—”

“But reproducing at will!”

“I don’t know about a society,” he said, “but there might be a colony—”

“A city,” she said. “They were the smart ones, the strong ones.”

“What an idea,” he said.

“It’s possible, isn’t it?” She was leaning toward him, hands on the table, her large eyes questioning, her cheeks flushed to a rosier darkness.

He looked at her. “What does King think?” he asked. She drew back a bit and he said, “As if I can’t guess.”

She was angry suddenly, fierce-eyed. “You were terrible to him last night!” she said.

“Terrible? I was? To him?”

“Yes!” She whirled from the table. “You questioned him as if you were—How could you even think he would know about Uni killing us and not tell us?”

“I still think he knew.”

She faced him angrily. “He didn’t!” she said. “He doesn’t keep secrets from me!”

“What are you, his adviser?”

“Yes!” she said. “That’s exactly what I am, in case you want to know.”

“You’re not,” he said.

“I am.”

“Christ and Wei,” he said. “You really are? You’re an adviser? That’s the last classification I would have thought of. How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“And you’re his?”

She nodded.

He laughed. “I decided that you worked in the gardens,” he said. “You smell of flowers, do you know that? You really do.”

“I wear perfume,” she said.

“You wear it?”

“The perfume of flowers, in a liquid. King made it for me.”

He stared at her. “Parfum!” he said, slapping the open book before him. “I thought it was some kind of germicide; she put it in her bath. Of course!” He groped among the lists, took up his pen, crossed out and wrote. “Stupid,” he said. “Parfum equals perfume. Flowers in a liquid. How did he do that?”

“Don’t accuse him of deceiving us.”

“All right, I won’t.” He put the pen down.

“Everything we’ve got,” she said, “we owe to him.”

“What is it though?” he said. “Nothing—unless we use it to try for more. And he doesn’t seem to want us to.”

“He’s more sensible than we are.”

He looked at her, standing a few meters away from him before the mass of relics. “What would you do,” he asked, “if we somehow found that there is a city of incurables?”

Her eyes stayed on his. “Get to it,” she said.

“And live on plants and animals?”

“If necessary.” She glanced at the book, moved her head toward it. “Victor and Caroline seem to have enjoyed their dinner.”

He smiled and said, “You really are a pre-U woman, aren’t you?”

She said nothing.

“Would you let me see your breasts?” he asked.

“What for?” she said.

“I’m curious, that’s all.”

She pulled open the top of her coveralls and held the two sides apart. Her breasts were rose-brown soft-looking cones that stirred with her breathing, taut on their upper surfaces and rounded below. Their tips, blunt and pink, seemed to contract and grow darker as he looked at them. He felt oddly aroused, as if he were being caressed.

“They’re nice,” he said.

“I know they are,” she said, closing her coveralls and pressing the closure. “That’s something else I owe King. I used to think I was the ugliest member in the entire Family.”

“You?”

“Until he convinced me I wasn’t.”

“All right,” he said, “you owe King very much. We all do. What have you come to me for?”

“I told you,” she said. “To learn that language.”

“Cloth,” he said, getting up. “You want me to start looking for places the Family isn’t using, for signs that your ‘city’ exists. Because I’ll do it and he won’t; because I’m not ‘sensible,’ or old, or content to make fun of TV.”

She started for the door but he caught her by the shoulder and pushed her around. “Stay here!” he said. She looked frightenedly at him and he took hold of her jaw and kissed her mouth; clamped her head in both his hands and pushed his tongue against her shut teeth. She pressed at his chest and wrenched her head. He thought she would stop, give in and take the kiss, but she didn’t; she kept struggling with increasing vigor, and finally he let go and she pushed away from him.

“That’s—that’s terrible!” she said. “Forcing me! That’s—I’ve never been held that way!”

“I love you,” he said.

“Look at me, I’m shaking,” she said. “Wei Li Chun, is that how you love, by becoming an animal? That’s awful!”

“A human,” he said, “like you.”

“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t hurt anyone, hold anyone that way!” She held her jaw and moved it.

“How do you think incurables kiss?” he said.

“Like humans, not like animals.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I love you.”

“Good,” she said. “I love you too—the way I love Leopard and Snowflake and Sparrow.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he said.

“But it’s what I mean,” she said, looking at him. She went sideways to the doorway and said, “Don’t do that again. That’s terrible!”

“Do you want the lists?” he asked.

She looked as if she was going to say no, hesitated, and then said, “Yes. That’s what I came for.”

He turned and gathered the lists on the table, folded them together, and took Père Goriot from the stack of books. She came over and he gave them to her.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said.

“All right,” she said. “Just don’t do it again.”

“I’ll look for places the Family isn’t using,” he said. “I’ll go over the maps at the MFA and see if—”

“I’ve done that,” she said.

“Carefully?”

“As carefully as I could.”

“I’ll do it again,” he said. “It’s the only way to begin. Millimeter by millimeter.”

“All right,” she said.

“Wait a second, I’m going now too.”

She waited while he put away his smoking things and got the room back the way it belonged, and then they went out together through the exhibit hall and down the escalator.

“A city of incurables,” he said.

“It’s possible,” she said.

“It’s worth looking for anyway,” he said.

They went out onto the walkway.

“Which way do you go?” he asked.

“West,” she said.

“I’ll go a few blocks with you.”

“No,” she said. “Really, the longer you’re out, the more chances there are for someone to see you not touching.”

“I touch the rim of the scanner and block it with my body. Very tricky.”

“No,” she said. “Please, go your own way.”

“All right,” he said. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

He put his hand on her shoulder and kissed her cheek.

She didn’t move away; she was tense and waiting under his hand.

He kissed her lips. They were warm and soft, slightly parted, and she turned and walked away.

“Lilac,” he said, and went after her.

She turned and said, “No. Please, Chip, go,” and turned and walked away again.

He stood uncertainly. Another member was in the distance, coming toward them.

He watched her go, hating her, loving her.

5

EVENING AFTER EVENING he ate quickly (but not too quickly), then railed to the Museum of the Family’s Achievements and studied its maze of ceiling-high illuminated maps until the ten-of-TV closing. One night he went there after the last chime—an hour-and-a-half walk—but found that the maps were unreadable by flashlight, their markings lost in glare; and he hesitated to put on their internal lights, which, tied in as they seemed to be with the lighting of the entire hall, might have produced a Uni-alerting overdraft of power. On Sunday he took Mary KK there, sent her off to see the Universe of Tomorrow exhibit, and studied the maps for three hours straight.

He found nothing: no island without its city or industrial installation; no mountaintop that wasn’t spacewatch or climatonomy center; no square kilometer of land—or of ocean floor, for that matter—that wasn’t being mined or harvested or used for factories or houses or airports or parkland by the Family’s eight billion. The gold-lettered legend suspended at the entrance of the map area—The Earth Is Our Heritage; We Use It Wisely and Without Waste—seemed true, so true that there was no place left for even the smallest non-Family community.

Leopard died and Sparrow sang. King sat silently, picking at the gears of a pre-U gadget, and Snowflake wanted more sex.

Chip said to Lilac, “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“There must have been hundreds of little colonies to begin with,” she said. “One of them must have survived.”

“Then it’s half a dozen members in a cave somewhere,” he said.

“Please, keep looking,” she said. “You can’t have checked every island.”

He thought about it, sitting in the dark in the twentieth-century car, holding its steering wheel, moving its different knobs and levers; and the more he thought about it, the less possible a city or even a colony of incurables came to seem. Even if he had overlooked an unused area on the maps, could a community exist without Uni learning of it? People made marks on their environment; a thousand people, even a hundred, would raise an area’s temperature, soil its streams with their wastes, and its air perhaps with their primitive fires. The land or sea for kilometers around would be affected by their presence in a dozen detectable ways.

So Uni would have long since known of the theoretical city’s existence, and having known, would have—done what? Dispatched doctors and advisers and portable treatment units; would have “cured” the incurables and made them into “healthy” members.

Unless, of course, they had defended themselves… Their ancestors had fled the Family soon after the Unification, when treatments were optional, or later, when they were compulsory but not yet at present-day effectiveness; surely some of those incurables must have defended their retreats by force, with deadly weapons. Wouldn’t they have handed on the practice, and the weapons too, to succeeding generations? What would Uni do today, in 162, facing an armed, defensive community with an unarmed, unaggressive Family? What would it have done five or twenty-five years ago, detecting the signs of it? Let it be? Leave its inhabitants to their “sickness” and their few square kilometers of the world? Spray the city with LPK? But what if the city’s weapons could bring down planes? Would Uni decide in its cold steel blocks that the cost of the “cure” outweighed its usefulness?

He was two days from a treatment, his mind as active as it ever got. He wished it could get still more active. He felt that there was something he wasn’t thinking of, just beyond the rim of his awareness.

If Uni let the city be, rather than sacrifice members and time and technology to the “helping” of it—then what? There was something else, a next idea to be picked and pried out of that one.

He called the medicenter on Thursday, the day before his treatment, and complained of a toothache. He was offered a Friday-morning appointment, but he said that he was coming in on Saturday morning for his treatment and couldn’t he catch two birds with one net? It wasn’t a severe toothache, just a slight throb.

He was given an appointment for Saturday morning at 8:15.

Then he called Bob RO and told him that he had a dental appointment at 8:15 on Saturday. Did he think it would be a good idea if he got his treatment then too? Catch two birds with one net.

“I guess you might as well,” Bob said. “Hold on”—and switched on his telecomp. “You’re Li RM—”

“Thirty-fiveM4419.”

“Right,” Bob said, tapping keys.

Chip sat and watched unconcernedly.

“Saturday morning at 8:05,” Bob said.

“Fine,” Chip said. “Thanks.”

“Thank Uni,” Bob said.

Which gave him a day longer between treatments than he’d had before.

That night, Thursday, was a rain night, and he stayed in his room. He sat at his desk with his forehead on his fists, thinking, wishing he were in the museum and able to smoke.

If a city of incurables existed, and Uni knew about it and was leaving it to its armed defenders—then—then—

Then Uni wasn’t letting the Family know—and be troubled or in some instances tempted—and it was feeding concealing data to the mapmaking equipment.

Of course! How could supposedly unused areas be shown on beautiful Family maps? “But look at that place there, Daddy!” a child visiting the MFA exclaims. “Why aren’t we Using Our Heritage Wisely and Without Waste?” And Daddy replies, “Yes that is odd…” So the city would be labeled IND99999 or Enormous Desk Lamp Factory, and no one would ever be passed within five kilometers of it. If it were an island it wouldn’t be shown at all; blue ocean would replace it.

And looking at maps was therefore useless. There could be cities of incurables here, there, everywhere. Or—there could be none at all. The maps proved or disproved nothing.

Was this the great revelation he had racked his brain for—that his map-examining had been stupidity from the beginning? That there was no way at all of finding the city, except possibly by walking everywhere on Earth?

Fight Lilac, with her maddening ideas!

No, not really.

Fight Uni.

For half an hour he drove his mind against the problem—how do you find a theoretical city in an untravelable world?—and finally he gave up and went to bed.

He thought then of Lilac, of the kiss she had resisted and the kiss she had allowed, and of the strange arousal he had felt when she showed him her soft-looking conical breasts…

On Friday he was tense and on edge. Acting normal was unendurable; he held his breath all day long at the Center, and through dinner, TV, and Photography Club. After the last chime he walked to Snowflake’s building—“Ow,” she said, “I’m not going to be able to move tomorrow!”—and then to the Pre-U. He circled the halls by flashlight, unable to put the idea aside. The city might exist, it might even be somewhere near. He looked at the money display and the prisoner in his cell (The two of us, brother) and the locks and the flat-picture cameras.

There was one answer that he could see, but it involved getting dozens of members into the group. Each could then check out the maps according to his own limited knowledge. He himself, for instance, could verify the genetics labs and research centers and the cities he had seen or heard spoken of by other members. Lilac could verify the advisory establishments and other cities… But it would take forever, and an army of undertreated accomplices. He could hear King raging.

He looked at the 1951 map, and marveled as he always did at the strange names and the intricate networks of borders. Yet members then could go where they wanted, more or less! Thin shadows moved in response to his light at the edges of the map’s neat patches, cut to fit precisely into the crosslines of the grid. If not for the moving flashlight the blue rectangles would have been corn—

Blue rectangles…

If the city were an island it wouldn’t be shown; blue ocean would replace it.

And would have to replace it on pre-U maps as well.

He didn’t let himself get excited. He moved the flashlight slowly back and forth over the glass-covered map and counted the shadow-moving patches. There were eight of them, all blue. All in the oceans, evenly distributed. Five of them covered single rectangles of the grid, and three covered pairs of rectangles. One of the one-rectangle patches was right there off Ind, in “Bay of Bengal”—Stability Bay.

He put the flashlight on a display case and took hold of the wide map by both sides of its frame. He lifted it free of its hook, lowered it to the floor, leaned its glassed face against his knee, and took up the flashlight again.

The frame was old, but its gray-paper backing looked relatively new. The letters EV were stamped at the bottom of it.

He carried the map by its wire across the hall, down the escalator, across the second-floor hall, and into the storeroom. Tapping on the light, he brought the map to the table and laid it carefully face-down.

With the corner of a fingernail he tore the taut paper backing along the bottom and sides of the frame, pulled it out from under the wire, and pressed it back so that it stayed. White cardboard lay in the frame, pinned down by ranks of short brads.

He searched in the cartons of smaller relics until he found a rusted pair of pincers with a yellow sticker around one handle. He used the pincers to pull the brads from the frame, then lifted out the cardboard and another piece of cardboard that lay beneath it.

The back of the map was brown-blotched but untorn, with no holes that would have justified the patching. A line of brown writing was faintly visible: Wyndham, MU 7-2161—some kind of early nameber.

He picked at the map’s edges and lifted it from the glass, turned it over and raised it sagging above his head against the white light of the ceiling. Islands showed through all the patches: here a large one, “Madagascar”; here a cluster of small ones, “Azores.” The patch in Stability Bay showed a line of four small ones, “Andaman Islands.” He remembered none of the patch-covered islands from the maps at the MFA.

He put the map back down in the frame, face-up, and leaned his hands on the table and looked at it, grinned at its pre-U oddity, its eight blue almost-invisible rectangles. Lilac! he thought. Wait till I tell you!

With the head of the frame propped on piles of books and his flashlight standing under the glass, he traced on a sheet of paper the four small “Andaman Islands” and the shoreline of “Bay of Bengal.” He copied down the names and locations of the other islands and traced the map’s scale, which was in “miles” rather than kilometers.

One pair of medium-size islands, “Falkland Islands,” was off the coast of Arg (“Argentina”) opposite “Santa Cruz,” which seemed to be ARG20400. Something teased his memory in that, but he couldn’t think what.

He measured the Andaman Islands; the three that were closest together were about a hundred and twenty “miles” in overall length—somewhere around two hundred kilometers, if he remembered correctly; big enough for several cities! The shortest approach to them would be from the other side of Stability Bay, SEA77122, if he and Lilac (and King? Snowflake? Sparrow?) were to go there. If they were to go? Of course they would go, now that he had found the islands. They’d manage it somehow; they had to.

He turned the map face-down in the frame, put back the pieces of cardboard, and pushed the brads back into their holes with a handle-end of the pincers—wondering as he did so why ARG20400 and the “Falkland Islands” kept poking at his memory.

He slipped the frame’s backing in under the wire—Sunday night he would bring tape and make a better job of it—and carried the map back up to the third floor. He hung it on its hook and made sure the loose backing didn’t show from the sides.

ARG20400… A new zinc mine being cut underneath it had been shown recently on TV; was that why it seemed significant? He’d certainly never been there…

He went down to the basement and got three tobacco leaves from behind the hot-water tank. He brought them up to the storeroom, got his smoking things from the carton he kept them in, and sat down at the table and began cutting the leaves.

Could there possibly be another reason why the islands were covered and unmapped? And who did the covering?

Enough. He was tired of thinking. He let his mind go—to the knife’s shiny blade, to Hush and Sparrow cutting tobacco the first time he’d seen them. He had asked Hush where the seeds had come from, and she’d said that King had had them.

And he remembered where he had seen ARG20400—the nameber, not the city itself.

A screaming woman in torn coveralls was being led into Medicenter Main by red-cross-coveralled members on either side of her. They held her arms and seemed to be talking to her, but she kept on screaming—short sharp screams, each the same as the others, that screamed again from building walls and screamed again from farther in the night. The woman kept on screaming and the walls and the night kept screaming with her.

He waited until the woman and the members leading her had gone into the building, waited longer while the far-off screams lessened to silence, and then he slowly crossed the walkway and went in. He lurched against the admission scanner as if off balance, clicking his bracelet below the plate on metal, and went slowly and normally to an up-gliding escalator. He stepped onto it and rode with his hand on the rail. Somewhere in the building the woman still screamed, but then she stopped.

The second floor was lighted. A member passing in the hallway with a tray of glasses nodded to him. He nodded back.

The third and fourth floors were lighted too, but the escalator to the fifth floor wasn’t moving and there was darkness above. He walked up the steps, to the fifth floor and the sixth.

He walked by flashlight down the sixth-floor hallway—quickly now, not slowly—past the doors he had gone through with the two doctors, the woman who had called him “young brother” and the scar-cheeked man who had watched him. He walked to the end of the hallway, shining his light on the door marked 600A and Chief, Chemotherapeutics Division.

He went through the anteroom and into King’s office. The large desk was neater than before: the scuffed telecomp, a pile of folders, the container of pens—and the two paperweights, the unusual square one and the ordinary round one. He picked up the round one—ARG20400 was inscribed on it—and held its cool plated-metal weight on his palm for a moment. Then he put it down, next to King’s young smiling snapshot at Uni’s dome.

He went around behind the desk, opened the center drawer, and searched in it until he found a plastic-coated section roster. He scanned the half column of Jesuses and found Jesus HL09E6290. His classification was 080A; his residence, G35, room 1744.

He paused outside the door for a moment, suddenly realizing that Lilac might be there too, dozing next to King under his outstretched possessing arm. Good! he thought. Let her hear it at first hand! He opened the door, went in, and closed it softly behind him. He aimed his flashlight toward the bed and switched it on.

King was alone, his gray head encircled by his arms.

He was glad and sorry. More glad, though. He would tell her later, come to her triumphantly and tell her all he had found.

He tapped on the light, switched off the flashlight, and put it in his pocket. “King,” he said.

The head and the pajamaed arms stayed unmoving.

“King,” he said, and went and stood beside the bed. “Wake up, Jesus HL,” he said.

King rolled onto his back and laid a hand over his eyes. Fingers chinked and an eye squinted between them.

“I want to speak to you,” Chip said.

“What are you doing here?” King asked. “What time is it?”

Chip glanced at the clock. “Four-fifty,” he said.

King sat up, palming at his eyes. “What the hate’s going on?” he said. “What are you doing here?”

Chip got the desk chair and put it near the foot of the bed and sat down. The room was untidy, coveralls caught in the chute, tea stains on the floor.

King coughed into the side of a fist, and coughed again. He kept the fist at his mouth, looking red-eyed at Chip, his hair pressed to his scalp in patches.

Chip said, “I want to know what it’s like on the Falkland Islands.”

King lowered his hand. “On what islands?” he said.

“Falkland,” Chip said. “Where you got the tobacco seeds. And the perfume you gave Lilac.”

“I made the perfume,” King said.

“And the tobacco seeds? Did you make them?”

King said, “Someone gave them to me.”

“In ARG20400?”

After a moment King nodded.

“Where did he get them?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“No,” King said, “I didn’t. Why don’t you get back where you’re supposed to be? We can talk about this tomorrow night.”

“I’m staying,” Chip said. “I’m staying here until I hear the truth. I’m due for a treatment at 8:05. If I don’t take it on time, everything’s going to be finished—me, you, the group. You’re not going to be king of anything.”

“You brother-fighter,” King said, “get out of here.”

“I’m staying,” Chip said.

“I’ve told you the truth.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Then go fight yourself,” King said, and lay down and turned over onto his stomach.

Chip stayed as he was. He sat looking at King and waiting.

After a few minutes King turned over again and sat up. He threw aside the blanket, swung his legs around, and sat with his bare feet on the floor. He scratched with both hands at his pajamaed thighs. “’Americanueva,’” he said, “not ‘Falkland.’ They come ashore and trade. Hairy-faced creatures in cloth and leather.” He looked at Chip. “Diseased, disgusting savages,” he said, “who speak in a way that’s barely understandable.”

“They exist, they’ve survived.”

“That’s all they’ve done. Their hands are like wood from working. They steal from one another and go hungry.”

“But they haven’t come back to the Family.”

“They’d be better off if they did,” King said. “They’ve still got religion going. And alcohol-drinking.”

“How long do they live?” Chip asked.

King said nothing.

“Past sixty-two?” Chip asked.

King’s eyes narrowed coldly. “What’s so magnificent about living,” he said, “that it has to be prolonged indefinitely? What’s so fantastically beautiful about life here or life there that makes sixty-two not enough of it instead of too fighting much? Yes, they live past sixty-two. One of them claimed to be eighty, and looking at him, I believed it. But they die younger too, in their thirties, even in their twenties—from work and filth and defending their ‘money.’”

“That’s only one group of islands,” Chip said. “There are seven others.”

“They’ll all be the same,” King said. “They’ll all be the same.”

“How do you know?”

“How can they not be?” King asked. “Christ and Wei, if I’d thought a halfway-human life was possible I’d have said something!”

“You should have said something anyway,” Chip said. “There are islands right here in Stability Bay. Leopard and Hush might have got to them and still be living.”

“They’d be dead.”

“Then you should have let them choose where they died,” Chip said. “You’re not Uni.”

He got up and put the chair back by the desk. He looked at the phone screen, reached over the desk, and took the adviser’s-nameber card from under the rim of it: Anna SG38P2823.

“You mean you don’t know her nameber?” King said. “What do you do, meet in the dark? Or haven’t you worked your way out to her extremities yet?”

Chip put the card into his pocket. “We don’t meet at all,” he said.

“Oh come on,” King said, “I know what’s been going on. What do you think I am, a dead body?”

“Nothing’s been going on,” Chip said. “She came to the museum once and I gave her the word lists for Français, that’s all.”

“I can just imagine,” King said. “Get out of here, will you? I need my sleep.” He lay back on the bed, put his legs in under the blanket, and spread the blanket up over his chest.

“Nothing’s been going on,” Chip said. “She feels that she owes you too much.”

With his eyes closed, King said, “But we’ll soon take care of that, won’t we?”

Chip said nothing for a moment, and then he said, “You should have told us. About Americanova.”

“Americanueva,” King said, and then said nothing more. He lay with his eyes closed, his blanketed chest rising and falling rapidly.

Chip went to the door and tapped off the light. “I’ll see you tomorrow night,” he said.

“I hope you get there,” King said. “The two of you. To Americanueva. You deserve it.”

Chip opened the door and went out.

King’s bitterness depressed him, but after he had been walking for fifteen minutes or so he began to feel cheerful and optimistic, and elated with the results of his night of extra clarity. His right-hand pocket was crisp with a map of Stability Bay and the Andaman Islands, the names and locations of the other incurable strongholds, and Lilac’s red-printed nameber card. Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei, what would he be capable of with no treatments at all?

He took the card out and read it as he walked. Anna SG38P2823. He would call her after the first chime and arrange to meet her—during the free hour that evening. Anna SG. Not she, not an “Anna”; a Lilac she was, fragrant, delicate, beautiful. (Who had picked the name, she or King? Incredible. The hater thought they had been meeting and fucking. If only!) Thirty-eight P, twenty-eight twenty-three. He walked to the swing of the nameber for a while, then realized he was walking too briskly and slowed himself, pocketing the card again.

He would be back in his building before the first chime, would shower, change, call Lilac, eat (he was starving), then get his treatment at 8:05 and keep his 8:15 dental appointment (“It feels much better today, sister. The throbbing’s almost completely gone”). The treatment would dull him, fight it, but not so much that he wouldn’t be able to tell Lilac about the Andaman Islands and start planning with her—and with Snowflake and Sparrow if they were interested—how they would try to get there. Snowflake would probably choose to stay. He hoped so; it would simplify things tremendously. Yes, Snowflake would stay with King, laugh and smoke and fuck with him, and play that mechanical paddle-ball game. And he and Lilac would go.

Anna SG, thirty-eight P, twenty-eight twenty-three…

He got to the building at 6:22. Two up-early members were coming down his hallway, one naked, one dressed. He smiled and said, “Good morning, sisters.”

“Good morning,” they said, smiling back.

He went into his room, tapped on the light, and Bob was on the bed, lifting himself up on his elbows and blinking at him. His telecomp lay open on the floor, its blue and amber lights gleaming.

6

HE CLOSED the door behind him.

Bob swung his legs off the bed and sat up, looking at him anxiously. His coveralls were partway open. “Where’ve you been, Li?” he asked.

“In the lounge,” Chip said. “I went back there after Photography Club—I’d left my pen there—and I suddenly got very tired. From being late on my treatment, I guess. I sat down to rest and”—he smiled—“all of a sudden it’s morning.”

Bob looked at him, still anxiously, and after a moment shook his head. “I checked the lounge,” he said. “And Mary KK’s room, and the gym, and the bottom of the pool.”

“You must have missed me,” Chip said. “I was in the corner behind—”

“I checked the lounge, Li,” Bob said. He pressed closed his coveralls and shook his head despairingly.

Chip moved from the door, walked a slow away-from-Bob curve toward the bathroom. “I’ve got to ure,” he said.

He went into the bathroom and opened his coveralls and urined, trying to find the extra mental clarity he had had before, trying to think of an explanation that would satisfy Bob or at worst seem like only a one-night aberration. Why had Bob come there anyway? How long had he been there?

“I called at eleven-thirty,” Bob said, “and there was no answer. Where have you been between then and now?”

He closed his coveralls. “I was walking around,” he said—loudly, to reach Bob in the room.

“Without touching scanners?” Bob said.

Christ and Wei.

“I must have forgot,” he said, and turned on the water and rinsed his fingers. “It’s this toothache,” he said. “It’s gotten worse. The whole side of my head aches.” He wiped his fingers, looking in the mirror at Bob on the bed looking back at him. “It was keeping me awake,” he said, “so I went out and walked around. I told you that story about the lounge because I know I should have gone right down to the—”

“It was keeping me awake too,” Bob said, “that ‘toothache’ of yours. I saw you during TV and you looked tense and abnormal. So finally I pulled the nameber of the dental-appointment clerk. You were offered a Friday appointment but you said your treatment was on Saturday.”

Chip put the towel down and turned and stood facing Bob in the doorway.

The first chime sounded, and “One Mighty Family” began to play.

Bob said, “It was all an act, wasn’t it, Li—the slowdown last spring, the sleepiness and overtreatedness.”

After a moment Chip nodded.

“Oh, brother,” Bob said. “What have you been doing?”

Chip didn’t say anything.

“Oh, brother,” Bob said, and bent over and switched his telecomp off. He closed its cover and snapped the catches. “Are you going to forgive me?” he asked. He stood the telecomp on end and steadied the handle between the fingers of both hands, trying to get it to stay standing up. “I’ll tell you something funny,” he said. “I have a streak of vanity in me. I do. Correction, I did. I thought I was one of the two or three best advisers in the house. In the house, hate; in the city. Alert observant, sensitive… ‘Comes the rude awakening.’” He had the handle standing, and slapped it down and smiled drily at Chip. “So you’re not the only sick one,” he said, “if that’s any consolation.”

“I’m not sick, Bob,” Chip said. “I’m healthier than I’ve been in my entire life.”

Still smiling, Bob said, “That’s kind of contrary to the evidence, isn’t it?” He picked up the telecomp and stood up.

“You can’t see the evidence,” Chip said. “You’ve been dulled by your treatments.”

Bob beckoned with his head and moved toward the door. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go get you fixed up.”

Chip stayed where he was. Bob opened the door and stopped, looking back.

Chip said, “I’m perfectly healthy.”

Bob held out his hand sympathetically. “Come on, Li,” he said.

After a moment Chip went to him. Bob took his arm and they went out into the hallway. Doors were open and members were about, talking quietly, walking. Four or five were gathered at the bulletin board, reading the day’s notices.

“Bob,” Chip said, “I want you to listen to what I’m going to say to you.”

“Don’t I always listen?” Bob said.

“I want you to try to open your mind,” Chip said. “Because you’re not a stupid member, you’re bright, and you’re good-hearted and you want to help me.”

Mary KK came toward them from the escalators, holding a pack of coveralls with a bar of soap on top of it. She smiled and said, “Hi,” and to Chip, “Where were you?”

“He was in the lounge,” Bob said.

“In the middle of the night?” Mary said.

Chip nodded and Bob said, “Yes,” and they went on to the escalators, Bob keeping his hand lightly on Chip’s arm.

They rode down.

“I know you think your mind is open already,” Chip said, “but will you try to open it even more, to listen and think for a few minutes as if I’m just as healthy as I say I am?”

“All right, Li, I will,” Bob said.

“Bob,” Chip said, “we’re not free. None of us is. Not one member of the Family.”

“How can I listen as if you’re healthy,” Bob said, “when you say something like that? Of course we’re free. We’re free of war and want and hunger, free of crime, violence, aggressiveness, sel—”

“Yes, yes, we’re free of things,” Chip said, “but we’re not free to do things. Don’t you see that, Bob? Being ‘free of really has nothing to do with being free at all.”

Bob frowned. “Being free to do what?” he said.

They stepped off the escalator and started around toward the next one. “To choose our own classifications,” Chip said, “to have children when we want, to go where we want and do what we want, to refuse treatments if we want…”

Bob said nothing.

They stepped onto the next escalator. “Treatments really do dull us, Bob,” Chip said. “I know that from my own experience. There are things in them that ‘make us humble, make us good’—like in the rhyme, you know? I’ve been undertreated for half a year now”—the second chime sounded—“and I’m more awake and alive than I’ve ever been. I think more clearly and feel more deeply. I fuck four or five times a week, would you believe that?”

“No,” Bob said, looking at his telecomp riding on the handrail.

“It’s true,” Chip said. “You’re more sure than ever that I’m sick now, aren’t you. Love of Family, I’m not. There are others like me, thousands, maybe millions. There are islands all over the world, there may be cities on the mainland too”—they were walking around to the next escalator—“where people live in true freedom. I’ve got a list of the islands right here in my pocket. They’re not on maps because Uni doesn’t want us to know about them, because they’re defended against the Family and the people there won’t submit to being treated. Now, you want to help me, don’t you? To really help me?”

They stepped onto the next escalator. Bob looked grievingly at him. “Christ and Wei,” he said, “can you doubt it, brother?”

“All right, then,” Chip said, “this is what I’d like you to do for me: when we get to the treatment room tell Uni that I’m okay, that I fell asleep in the lounge the way I told you. Don’t input anything about my not touching scanners or the way I made up the toothache. Let me get just the treatment I would have got yesterday, all right?”

“And that would be helping you?” Bob said.

“Yes, it would,” Chip said. “I know you don’t think so, but I ask you as my brother and my friend to—to respect what I think and feel. I’ll get away to one of these islands somehow and I won’t harm the Family in any way. What the Family has given me, I’ve given back to it in the work I’ve done, and I didn’t ask for it in the first place, and I had no choice about accepting it.”

They walked around to the next escalator.

“All right,” Bob said when they were riding down, “I listened to you, Li; now you listen to me.” His hand above Chip’s elbow tightened slightly. “You’re very, very sick,” he said, “and it’s entirely my fault and I feel miserable about it. There are no islands that aren’t on maps; and treatments don’t dull us; and if we had the kind of ‘freedom’ you’re thinking about we’d have disorder and overpopulation and want and crime and war. Yes, I’m going to help you, brother. I’m going to tell Uni everything, and you’ll be cured and you’ll thank me.

They walked around to the next escalator and stepped onto it. Third floor—Medicenter, the sign at the bottom said. A red-cross-coveralled member riding toward them on the up escalator smiled and said, “Good morning, Bob.”

Bob nodded to him.

Chip said, “I don’t want to be cured.”

“That’s proof that you need to be,” Bob said. “Relax and trust me, Li. No, why the hate should you? Trust Uni, then; will you do that? Trust the members who programmed Uni.”

After a moment Chip said, “All right, I will.”

“I feel awful,” Bob said, and Chip turned to him and struck away his hand. Bob looked at him, startled, and Chip put both hands at Bob’s back and swept him forward. Turning with the movement, he grasped the handrail—hearing Bob tumble, his telecomp clatter—and climbed out onto the up-moving central incline. It wasn’t moving once he was on it; he crept sideways, clinging with fingers and knees to metal ridges; crept sideways to the up-escalator handrail, caught it, and flung himself over and down into the sharp-staired trench of humming metal. He got quickly to his feet—“Stop him!” Bob shouted below—and ran up the upgoing steps taking two in each stride. The red-crossed member at the top, off the escalator, turned. “What are you—” and Chip took him by the shoulders—elderly wide-eyed member—and swung him aside and pushed him away.

He ran down the hallway. “Stop him!” someone shouted, and other members: “Catch that member!” “He’s sick; stop him!”

Ahead was the dining hall, members on line turning to look. He shouted, “Stop that member!” running at them and pointing; “Stop him!” and ran past them. “Sick member in there!” he said, pushing past the ones at the doorway, past the scanner. “Needs help in there! Quickly!”

In the dining hall he looked, and ran to the side, through a swing-door to the behind-the-dispensers section. He slowed, walked quickly, trying to still his breathing, past members loading stacks of cakes between vertical tracks, members looking down at him while dumping tea powder into steel drums. A cart filled with boxes marked Napkins; he took the handle of it, swung it around, and pushed it before him, past two members standing eating, two more gathering cakes from a broken carton.

Ahead was a door marked Exit, the door to one of the corner stairways. He pushed the cart toward it, hearing raised voices behind him. He rammed the cart against the door, butted it open, and went with the cart out onto the landing; closed the door and brought the cart handle back against it. He backed down two steps and pulled the cart sideways to him, wedged it tight between the door and the stair-rail post with one black wheel turning in air.

He hurried down the stairs.

He had to get out, out of the building and onto the walkways and plazas. He would walk to the museum—it wouldn’t be open yet—and hide in the storeroom or behind the hot-water tank until tomorrow night, when Lilac and the others would be there. He should have grabbed some cakes just now. Why hadn’t he thought of it? Hate!

He left the stairway at the ground floor and walked quickly along the hallway, nodded at an approaching member. She looked at his legs and bit her lip worriedly. He looked down and stopped. His coveralls were torn at the knees and his right knee was bruised, with blood in small beads on the surface.

“Can I do anything?” the member asked.

“I’m on my way to the medicenter now,” he said. “Thanks, sister.” He went on. There was nothing he could do about it; he would have to take his chances. When he got outside, away from the building, he would tie a tissue around the knee and fix the coveralls as best he could. The knee began to sting, now that he knew about it. He walked faster.

He turned into the back of the lobby and paused, looked at the escalators planing down on either side of him and, up ahead, the four glass scanner-posted doors with the sunny walkway beyond them. Members were talking and going out, a few coming in. Everything looked ordinary; the murmur of voices was low, unalarmed.

He started toward the doors, walking normally, looking straight ahead. He would do his scanner trick—the knee would be an excuse for the stumbling if anyone noticed—and once he was out on—The music stopped, and “Excuse me,” a woman’s voice loudspeakered, “would everyone please stay exactly where he is for a moment? Would everyone please stop moving?”

He stopped, in the middle of the lobby.

Everyone stopped, looked around questioningly and waited. Only the members on the escalators kept moving, and then they stopped too and looked down at their feet. One member walked down steps. “Don’t move!” several members called to her, and she stopped and blushed.

He stood motionless, looking at the huge stained-glass faces above the doors: bearded Christ and Marx, hairless Wood, smiling slit-eyed Wei. Something slipped down his shin: a drop of blood.

“Brothers, sisters,” the woman’s voice said, “an emergency has arisen. There’s a member in the building who’s sick, very sick. He’s acted aggressively and run away from his adviser”—members drew breath—“and he needs every one of us to help find him and get him to the treatment room as quickly as possible.”

“Yes!” a member behind Chip said, and another said, “What do we do?”

“He’s believed to be somewhere below the fourth floor,” the woman said; “a twenty-seven-year-old—” A second voice spoke to her, a man’s voice, quick and unintelligible. A member about to step on the nearest escalator was looking at Chip’s knees. Chip looked at the picture of Wood. “He’ll probably try to leave the building,” the woman said, “so the two members nearest each exit will move to it and block it, please. No one else move; only the two members nearest each exit.”

The members near the doors looked at one another, and two moved to each door and put themselves uneasily side by side in line with the scanners. “It’s awful!” someone said. The member who had been looking at Chip’s knees was looking now at his face. Chip looked back at him, a man of forty or so; he looked away.

“The member we’re looking for,” a man’s voice on the speaker said, “is a twenty-seven-year-old male, nameber Li RM35M4419. That’s Li, RM, 35M, 4419. First we’ll check among ourselves and then we’ll search the floors we’re on. Just a minute, just a minute, please. UniComp says the member is the only Li RM in the building, so we can forget the rest of his nameber. All we have to look for is Li RM. Li RM. Look at the bracelets of the members around you. We’re looking for Li RM. Be sure that every member within your sight is checked by at least one other member. Members who are in their rooms will come out now into the hallways. Li RM. We’re looking for Li RM.”

Chip turned to a member near him, took his hand and looked at his bracelet. “Let me see yours,” the member said. Chip raised his wrist and turned away, went toward another member. “I didn’t see it,” the member said. Chip took the other member’s hand. His arm was touched by the first member, saying, “Brother, I didn’t see.”

He ran for the doors. He was caught and arm-pulled around—by the member who had been looking at him. He clenched his hand to a fist and hit the member in the face and he fell away.

Members screamed. “It’s him!” they cried. “There he is!” “Help him!” “Stop him!”

He ran to a door and fist-hit one of the members there. His arm was grabbed by the other, saying in his ear, “Brother, brother!” His other arm was caught by other members; he was clutched around the chest from behind.

“We’re looking for Li RM,” the man on the speaker said. “He may act aggressively when we find him but we mustn’t be afraid. He’s depending on us for our help and our understanding.

“Let go of me!” he cried, trying to pull himself free of the arms tightly holding him.

“Help him!” members cried. “Get him to the treatment room!” “Help him!”

“Leave me alone!” he cried. “I don’t want to be helped! Leave me alone, you brother-fighting haters!”

He was dragged up escalator steps by members panting and flinching, one of them with tears in his eyes. “Easy, easy,” they said, “we’re helping you. You’ll be all right, we’re helping you.” He kicked, and his legs were caught and held.

“I don’t want to be helped!” he cried. “I want to be left alone! I’m healthy! I’m healthy! I’m not sick!”

He was dragged past members who stood with hands over ears, with hands pressed to mouths below staring eyes.

“You’re sick,” he said to the member whose face he had hit. Blood was leaking from his nostrils, and his nose and cheek were swollen; Chip’s arm was locked under his. “You’re dulled and you’re drugged,” Chip said to him. “You’re dead. You’re a dead man. You’re dead!”

“Shh, we love you, we’re helping you,” the member said.

“Christ and Wei, let GO of me!”

He was dragged up more steps.

“He’s been found,” the man on the speaker said. “Li RM has been found, members. He’s being brought to the medicenter. Let me say that again: Li RM has been found, and is being brought to the medicenter. The emergency is over, brothers and sisters, and you can go on now with what you were doing. Thank you; thank you for your help and cooperation. Thank you on behalf of the Family, thank you on behalf of Li RM.”

He was dragged along the medicenter hallway.

Music started in mid-melody.

“You’re all dead,” he said. “The whole Family’s dead. Uni’s alive, only Uni. But there are islands where people are living! Look at the map! Look at the map in the Pre-U Museum!”

He was dragged into the treatment room. Bob was there, pale and sweating, with a bleeding cut over his eyebrow; he was jabbing at the keys of his telecomp, held for him by a girl in a blue smock.

“Bob,” he said, “Bob, do me a favor, will you? Look at the map in the Pre-U Museum. Look at the map from 1951.”

He was dragged to a blue-lighted unit. He grabbed the edge of the opening, but his thumb was pried up and his hand forced in; his sleeve torn back and his arm shoved in all the way to the shoulder.

His cheek was soothed—by Bob, trembling. “You’ll be all right, Li,” he said. “Trust Uni.” Three lines of blood ran from the cut into his eyebrow hairs.

His bracelet was caught by the scanner, his arm touched by the infusion disc. He clamped his eyes shut. I will not be made dead! he thought. I will not be made dead! I’ll remember the islands, I’ll remember Lilac! I will not be made dead! I will not be made dead! He opened his eyes, and Bob smiled at him. A strip of skin-colored tape was over his eyebrow. “They said three o’clock and they meant three o’clock,” he said.

“What do you mean?” he asked. He was lying in a bed and Bob was sitting beside it.

“That’s when the doctors said you’d wake up,” Bob said.

“Three o’clock. And that’s what it is. Not 2:59, not 3:01, but three o’clock. These mems are so clever it scares me.”

“Where am I?” he asked.

“In Medicenter Main.”

And then he remembered—remembered the things he had thought and said, and worst of all, the things he had done. “Oh, Christ,” he said. “Oh, Marx. Oh, Christ and Wei.”

“Take it easy, Li,” Bob said, touching his hand.

“Bob,” he said, “oh, Christ and Wei, Bob, I—I pushed you down the—”

“Escalator,” Bob said. “You certainly did, brother. That was the most surprised moment in my life. I’m fine though.” He tapped the tape above his eyebrow. “All closed up and good as new, or will be in a day or two.”

“I hit a member! With my hand!”

“He’s fine too,” Bob said. “Two of those are from him.” He nodded across the bed, at red roses in a vase on a table. “And two from Mary KK, and two from the members in your section.”

He looked at the roses, sent to him by the members he had hit and deceived and betrayed, and tears came into his eyes and he began to tremble.

“Hey, easy there, come on,” Bob said.

But Christ and Wei, he was thinking only of himself! “Bob, listen,” he said, turning to him, getting up on an elbow, back-handing at his eyes.

“Take it easy,” Bob said.

“Bob, there are others,” he said, “others who’re just as sick as I was! We’ve got to find them and help them!”

“We know.”

“There’s a member called ‘Lilac,’ Anna SG38P2823, and another one—”

“We know, we know,” Bob said. “They’ve already been helped. They’ve all been helped.”

“They have?”

Bob nodded. “You were questioned while you were out,” he said. “It’s Monday. Monday afternoon. They’ve already been found and helped—Anna SG; and the one you called ‘Snowflake,’ Anna PY; and Yin GU, ‘Sparrow.’”

“And King,” he said. “Jesus HL; he’s right here in this building; he’s—”

“No,” Bob said, shaking his head. “No, we were too late. That one—that one is dead.”

“He’s dead?”

Bob nodded. “He hung himself,” he said.

Chip stared at him.

“From his shower, with a strip of blanket,” Bob said.

“Oh, Christ and Wei,” Chip said, and lay back on the pillow. Sickness, sickness, sickness; and he had been part of it.

“The others are all fine though,” Bob said, patting his hand. “And you’ll be fine too. You’re going to a rehabilitation center, brother. You’re going to have yourself a week’s vacation. Maybe even more.”

“I feel so ashamed, Bob,” he said, “so fighting ashamed of myself…”

“Come on,” Bob said, “you wouldn’t feel ashamed if you’d slipped and broken an ankle, would you? It’s the same thing. I’m the one who should feel ashamed, if anyone should.”

“I lied to you!”

“I let myself be lied to,” Bob said. “Look, nobody’s really responsible for anything. You’ll see that soon.” He reached down, brought up a take-along kit, and opened it on his lap. “This is yours,” he said. “Tell me if I missed anything. Mouthpiece, clippers, snapshots, nameber books, picture of a horse, your—”

“That’s sick,” he said. “I don’t want it. Chute it.”

“The picture?”

“Yes.”

Bob drew it from the kit and looked at it. “It’s nicely done,” he said. “It’s not accurate, but it’s—nice in a way.”

“It’s sick,” he said. “It was done by a sick member. Chute it.”

“Whatever you say,” Bob said. He put the kit on the bed and got up and crossed the room; opened the chute and dropped the picture down.

“There are islands full of sick members,” Chip said. “All over the world.”

“I know,” Bob said. “You told us.”

“Why can’t we help them?”

“That I don’t know,” Bob said. “But Uni does. I told you before, Li: trust Uni.”

“I will,” he said, “I will,” and tears came into his eyes again.

A red-cross-coveralled member came into the room. “How are we feeling?” he asked.

Chip looked at him.

“He’s pretty low,” Bob said.

“That’s to be expected,” the member said. “Don’t worry; we’ll get him evened up.” He went over and took Chip’s wrist.

“Li, I have to go now,” Bob said.

“All right,” Chip said.

Bob went over and kissed his cheek. “In case you’re not sent back here, good-by, brother,” he said.

“Good-by, Bob,” Chip said. “Thanks. Thanks for everything.”

“Thank Uni,” Bob said, and squeezed his hand and smiled. He nodded at the red-crossed member and went out.

The member took an infusion syringe from his pocket and snapped off its cap. “You’ll be feeling perfectly normal in no time at all,” he said.

Chip lay still and closed his eyes, wiped with one hand at tears while the member pushed up his other sleeve. “I was so sick,” he said. “I was so sick.”

“Shh, don’t think about it,” the member said, gently infusing him. “It’s nothing to think about. You’ll be fine in no time.”