This Perfect Day

1

HE WAS BUSY, busier than he’d been in his entire life: planning, looking for people and equipment, traveling, learning, explaining, pleading, devising, deciding. And working at the factory too, where Julia, despite the time off she allowed him, made sure she got her six-fifty-a-week’s worth out of him in machinery repair and production speed-up. And with Lilac’s pregnancy advancing, he was doing more of the at-home chores too. He was more exhausted than he’d ever been, and more wide awake; more sick of everything one day and more sure of everything the next; more alive.

It, the plan, the project, was like a machine to be assembled, with all the parts to be found or made, and each dependent for its shape and size on all the others.

Before he could decide on the size of the party, he had to have a clearer idea of its ultimate aim; and before he could have that, he had to know more about Uni’s functioning and where it could be most effectively attacked.

He spoke to Lars Newman, Ashi’s friend who ran a school. Lars sent him to a man in Andrait, who sent him to a man in Manacor.

“I knew those banks were too small for the amount of insulation they seemed to have,” the man in Manacor said. His name was Newbrook and he was near seventy; he had taught in a technological academy before he left the Family. He was minding a baby granddaughter, changing her diaper and annoyed about it. “Hold still, will you?” he said. “Well, assuming you can get in,” he said to Chip, “the power source is what you’ve obviously got to go for. The reactor or, more likely, the reactors.”

“But they could be replaced fairly quickly, couldn’t they?” Chip said. “I want to put Uni out of commission for a good long time, long enough for the Family to wake up and decide what it wants to do with it.”

“Damn it, hold still!” Newbrook said. “The refrigerating plant, then.”

“The refrigerating plant?” Chip said.

“That’s right,” Newbrook said. “The internal temperature of the banks has to be close to absolute zero; raise it a few degrees and the grids won’t—there, you see what you’ve done?—the grids won’t be superconductive any more. You’ll erase Uni’s memory.” He picked up the crying baby and held her against his shoulder, patting her back. “Shh, shh,” he said.

“Erase it permanently?” Chip asked.

Newbrook nodded, patting the crying baby. “Even if the refrigeration’s restored,” he said, “all the data will have to be fed in again. It’ll take years.”

“That’s exactly what I’m looking for,” Chip said.

The refrigerating plant.

And the stand-by plant.

And the second stand-by plant, if there was one.

Three refrigeration plants to be put out of operation. Two men for each, he figured; one to place the explosives and one to keep members away.

Six men to stop Uni’s refrigeration and then hold its entrances against the help it would summon with its thawing faltering brain. Could six men hold the elevators and the tunnel? (And had Papa Jan mentioned other shafts in the other cut-out space?) But six was the minimum, and the minimum was what he wanted, because if any one man was caught while they were on their way, he would tell the doctors everything and Uni would be expecting them at the tunnel. The fewer the men, the less the danger.

He and five others.

The yellow-haired young man who ran the I A. patrol boat—Vito Newcome, but he called himself Dover—painted the boat’s railing while he listened, and then, when Chip spoke about the tunnel and the real memory banks, listened without painting; crouched on his heels with the brush hanging in his hand and squinted up at Chip with flecks of white in his short beard and on his chest. “You’re sure of it?” he asked.

“Positive,” Chip said.

“It’s about time somebody took another crack at that brother-fighter.” Dover Newcome looked at his thumb, white-smeared, and wiped it on his trouser thigh.

Chip crouched beside him. “Do you want to be in on it?” he asked.

Dover looked at him and, after a moment, nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I certainly do.”

Ashi said no, which was what Chip had expected; he asked him only because not asking, he thought, would be a slight. “I just don’t feel it’s worth the risk,” Ashi said. “I’ll help you out in any way I can, though. Julia’s already hit me for a contribution and I’ve promised a hundred dollars. I’ll make it more than that if you need it.”

“Fine,” Chip said. “Thanks, Ashi. You can help. You can get into the Library, can’t you? See if you can find any maps of the area around EUR-zip-one, U or pre-U. The larger the better; maps with topographical details.”

When Julia heard that Dover Newcome was to be in the group, she objected. “We need him here, on the boat,” she said.

“You won’t once we’re finished,” Chip said.

“God in heaven,” Julia said. “How do you get by with so little confidence?”

“It’s easy,” Chip said. “I have a friend who says prayers for me.

Julia looked coldly at him. “Don’t take anyone else from I.A.,” she said. “And don’t take anyone from the factory. And don’t take anyone with a family that I may wind up supporting!”

“How do you get by with so little faith?” Chip said.

He and Dover between them spoke to some thirty or forty immigrants without finding any others who wanted to take part in the attack. They copied names and addresses from the I.A. files, of men and women over twenty and under forty who had come to Liberty within the previous few years, and they called on seven or eight of them every week. Lars Newman’s son wanted to be in the group, but he had been born on Liberty, and Chip wanted only people who had been raised in the Family, who were accustomed to scanners and walkways, to the slow pace and the contented smile.

He found a company in Pollensa that would make dynamite bombs with fast or slow mechanical fuses, provided they were ordered by a native with a permit. He found another company, in Calvia, that would make six gas masks, but they wouldn’t guarantee them against LFK unless he gave them a sample for testing. Lilac, who was working in an immigrant clinic, found a doctor who knew the LPK formula, but none of the island’s chemical companies could manufacture any; lithium was one of its chief constituents, and there hadn’t been any lithium available for over thirty years.

He was running a weekly two-line advertisement in the Immigrant, offering to buy coveralls, sandals, and take-along kits. One day he got an answer from a woman in Andrait, and a few evenings later he went there to look at two kits and a pair of sandals. The kits were shabby and outdated, but the sandals were good. The woman and her husband asked why he wanted them. Their name was Newbridge and they were in their early thirties, living in a tiny wretched rat-infested cellar. Chip told them, and they asked to join the group—insisted on joining it, actually. They were perfectly normal-looking, which was a point in their favor, but there was a feverishness about them, a keyed-up tension, that bothered Chip a little.

He went to see them again a week later, with Dover, and that time they seemed more relaxed and possibly suitable. Their names were Jack and Ria. They had had two children, both of whom had died in their first few months. Jack was a sewer worker and Ria worked in a toy factory. They said they were healthy and seemed to be.

Chip decided to take them—provisionally, at least—and he told them the details of the plan as it was taking shape.

“We ought to blow up the whole fucking thing, not just the refrigerating plants,” Jack said.

“One thing has to be very clear,” Chip said. “I’m going to be in charge. Unless you’re prepared to do exactly as I say every step of the way, you’d better forget the whole thing.”

“No, you’re absolutely right,” Jack said. “There has to be one man in charge of an operation like this; it’s the only way it can work.”

“We can offer suggestions, can’t we?” Ria said.

“The more the better,” Chip said. “But the decisions are going to be mine, and you’ve got to be ready to go along with them.”

Jack said, “I am,” and Ria said, “So am I.”

Locating the entrance of the tunnel turned out to be more difficult than Chip had anticipated. He collected three large-scale maps of central Eur and a highly detailed pre-U topographic one of “Switzerland” on which he carefully transcribed Uni’s site, but everyone he consulted—former engineers and geologists, native mining engineers—said that more data was needed before the tunnel’s course could be projected with any hope of accuracy. Ashi became interested in the problem and spent occasional hours in the Library copying references to “Geneva” and “Jura Mountains” out of old encyclopedias and works on geology.

On two consecutive moonlit nights Chip and Dover went out in the I.A. boat to a point west of EUR91766 and watched for the copper barges. These passed, they found, at precise intervals of four hours and twenty-five minutes. Each low flat dark shape moved steadily toward the northwest at thirty kilometers an hour, its rolling afterwaves lifting the boat and dropping it, lifting it and dropping it. Three hours later a barge would come from the opposite direction, riding higher on the water, empty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s this ‘kit reinforcing’?”

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

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

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

“When do you think you’ll go?”

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

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

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

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

“Lunky bastards,” Julia said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lilac woke Chip one night.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“Chip?” she said.

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

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

“Yes?”

“And attacks have been made from here before—”

“Yes?” he said.

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

He looked at her and said nothing.

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

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

“Yes,” she said.

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

“No,” she said.

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

“How do you know?” she said.

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

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

He stayed awake.

It couldn’t be. They would need treatments…

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

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

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

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

Lilac was just worrying too much, that was all.

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

He was going ahead with it no matter what.

He fell asleep.

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

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

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

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

“In a week or two,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ria said, “What if you get caught?”

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

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

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

“Woodsday,” Dover said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karl and Dover fell asleep.

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

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

“Merry Christmas,” they said to him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They went into the airport separately and gathered near the flight-schedule signboard. Members pressed them close together; the red-and-green-streamered waiting room was densely crowded, and so voice-filled that Christmas music could only intermittently be heard. Beyond the glass, large planes turned and moved ponderously, took members on from three escalators at once, let lines of members off, rolled to and from the runways.

It was 9:35. The next flight to EUR00001 was at 11:48.

Chip said, “I don’t like the idea of staying here so long. The barge either used extra power or came in late, and if the difference was conspicuous, Uni may have figured out what caused it.”

“Let’s go now,” Ria said, “and get as close to ’001 as we can and then bike again.”

“We’ll get there a lot sooner if we wait,” Karl said. “This isn’t such a bad hiding place.”

“No,” Chip said, looking at the signboard, “let’s go—on the 10:06 to ’00020. That’s the soonest we can manage it, and it’s only about fifty kilometers from ’001. Come on, the door’s over that way.”

They made their way through the crowd to the swing-door at the side of the room and clustered around its scanner. The door opened and a member in orange came out. Excusing himself, he reached between Chip and Dover to touch the scanner—yes, it winked—and went on.

Chip slipped his watch from his pocket and checked it against a clock. “It’s lane six,” he said. “If there’s more than one escalator, be on line for the one at the back of the plane; and make sure you’re near the end of the line but with at least six members behind you. Dover?” He took Dover’s elbow and they went through the door into the depot area. A member in orange standing there said, “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

“Uni okayed it,” Chip said. “We’re in airport design.”

“Three-thirty-seven A,” Dover said.

Chip said, “This wing is being enlarged next year.”

“I see what you meant about the ceiling,” Dover said, looking up at it.

“Yes,” Chip said. “It could easily go up another meter.”

“Meter and a half,” Dover said.

“Unless we run into trouble with the ducts,” Chip said.

The member left them and went out through the door.

“Yes, all the ducts,” Dover said. “Big problem.”

“Let me show you where they lead,” Chip said. “It’s interesting.”

“It certainly is,” Dover said.

They went into the area where members in orange were readying cake and drink containers, working more quickly than members usually did.

“Three-thirty-seven A?” Chip said.

“Why not?” Dover said, and pointed at the ceiling as they separated for a member pushing a cart. “You see the way the ducts run?” he said.

“We’re going to have to change the whole setup,” Chip said. “In here too.”

They false-touched and went into the room where coveralls hung on hooks. No one was in it. Chip closed the door and pointed to the closet where the orange coveralls were kept.

They put orange coveralls on over their yellow ones, and toeguards on their sandals. They tore openings inside the pockets of the orange coveralls so that they could reach into the pockets of the inner ones.

A member in white came in. “Hello,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” they said.

“I was sent up from ’765 to help out,” he said. He was about thirty.

“Good, we can use it,” Chip said.

The member, opening his coveralls, looked at Dover, who was closing his. “What have you got the other ones on underneath for?” he asked.

“It’s warmer that way,” Chip said, going to him.

He turned to Chip, puzzled. “Warmer?” he said. “What do you want to be warmer for?”

“I’m sorry, brother,” Chip said, and hit him in the stomach. He bent forward, grunting, and Chip swung his fist up under his jaw. The member straightened and fell backward; Dover caught him under the arms and lowered him to the floor. He lay with his eyes closed, as if sleeping.

Chip, looking down at him, said, “Christ and Wei, it works.”

They tore up a set of coveralls and tied the member’s wrists and ankles and knotted a sleeve between his teeth; then lifted him and put him into the closet where the floor polisher was.

The clock’s 9:51 became 9:52.

They wrapped their kits in orange coveralls and went out of the room and past the members working at the cake and drink containers. In the depot area they found a half-empty carton of towels and put the wrapped kits into it. Carrying the carton between them, they went out through the portal onto the field.

A plane was opposite lane six, a large one, with members leaving it on two escalators. Members in orange waited at each escalator with a container cart.

They went away from the plane, toward the left; crossed the field diagonally with the carton between them, skirting a slow-moving maintenance truck and approaching the hangars that lay in a flat-roofed wing extending toward the runways.

They went into a hangar. A smaller plane was there, with members in orange underneath it, lowering a square black housing from it. Chip and Dover carried the carton to the back of the hangar where there was a door in the side wall. Dover opened it, looked in, and nodded to Chip.

They went in and closed the door. They were in a supply room: racks of tools, rows of wood crates, black metal drums marked Lub Oil SG. “Couldn’t be better,” Chip said as they put the carton on the floor.

Dover went to the door and stood at its hinge side. He took out his gun and held it by its barrel.

Chip, crouching, unwrapped a kit, opened it, and took out a bomb, one with a yellow four-minute handle.

He separated two of the oil drums and put the bomb on the floor between them, with its taped-down handle facing up. He took his watch out and looked at it. Dover said, “How long?” and he said, “Three minutes.”

He went back to the carton and, still holding the watch, closed the kit and rewrapped it and closed the carton’s leaves.

“Is there anything we can use?” Dover asked, nodding at the tool racks.

Chip went to one and the door of the room opened and a member in orange came in. “Hello,” Chip said, and took a tool from the rack and put the watch in his pocket. “Hello,” the member said, coming to the other side of the rack. She glanced over it at Chip. “Who’re you?” she asked.

“Li RP,” he said. “I was sent up from ’765 to help.” He took another tool from the rack, a pair of calipers.

“It’s not as bad as Wei’s Birthday,” the member said.

Another member came to the door. “We’ve got it, Peace,” he said. “Li had it.”

“I asked him and he said he didn’t,” the first member said.

“Well he did,” the second member said, and went away.

The first member went after him. “He was the first one I asked,” she said.

Chip stood and watched the door as it slowly closed. Dover, behind it, looked at him and closed it all the way, softly. Chip looked back at Dover, and then at his hand holding the tools. It was shaking. He put the tools down, let his breath out, and showed his hand to Dover, who smiled and said, “Very unmemberlike.”

Chip drew a breath and got the watch from his pocket. “Less than a minute,” he said, and went to the drums and crouched. He pulled the tape from the bomb’s handle.

Dover put his gun into his pocket—poked it into the inner one—and stood with his hand on the doorknob.

Chip, looking at the watch and holding the fuse handle, said, ‘Ten seconds.” He waited, waited, waited—and then pulled the handle up and stood as Dover opened the door. They picked up the carton and carried it from the room and pulled the door closed.

They walked with the carton through the hangar—“Easy, easy,” Chip said—and across the field toward the plane opposite lane six. Members were filing onto the escalators, riding up.

“What’s that?” a member in orange with a clipboard asked, walking along with them.

“We were told to bring it over there,” Chip said.

“Karl?” another member said at the other side of the one with the clipboard. He stopped and turned, saying “Yes?” and Chip and Dover kept walking.

They brought the carton to the plane’s rear escalator and put it down. Chip stayed opposite the scanner and looked at the escalator controls; Dover slipped through the line and stood at the scanner’s back. Members passed between them, touching their bracelets to the green-winking scanner and stepping onto the escalator.

A member in orange came to Chip and said, “I’m on this escalator.”

“Karl just told me to take it,” Chip said. “I was sent up from ’765 to help.”

“What’s wrong?” the member with the clipboard asked, coming over. “Why are there three of you here?”

“I thought I was on this escalator,” the other member said. The air shuddered and a loud roar clapped from the hangars.

A black pillar, vast and growing, stood on the wing of hangars, and rolling orange fire was in the black. A black and orange rain fell on the roof and the field, and members in orange came running from the hangars, running and slowing and looking back up at the fiery pillar on the roof.

The member with the clipboard stared, and hurried forward. The other member hurried after him.

The members on line stood motionless, looking upward toward the hangars. Chip and Dover caught at their arms and drew them forward. “Don’t stop,” they said. “Keep moving, please. There’s no danger. The plane is waiting. Touch and step on. Keep moving, please.” They herded the members past the scanner and onto the escalator and one was Jack—“Beautiful,” he said, gazing past Chip as he false-touched; and Ria, who looked as excited as she had the first time Chip had seen her; and Karl, looking awed and somber; and Buzz, smiling. Dover moved to the escalator after Buzz; Chip thrust a wrapped kit to him and turned to the other members on line, the last seven or eight, who stood looking toward the hangars. “Keep moving, please,” he said. “The plane is waiting for you. Sister!”

“There is no cause for alarm,” a woman’s voice loudspeakered. “There has been an accident in the hangars but everything is under control.”

Chip urged the members to the escalator. “Touch and step on,” he said. “The plane’s waiting.”

“Departing members, please resume your places in line,” the voice said. “Members who are boarding planes, continue to do so. There will be no interruption of service.”

Chip false-touched and stepped onto the escalator behind the last member. Riding upward with his wrapped kit under his arm, he glanced toward the hangars: the pillar was black and smudging; there was no more fire. He looked ahead again, at pale blue coveralls. “All personnel except forty-sevens and forty-nines, resume your assigned duties,” the woman’s voice said. “All personnel except forty-sevens and forty-nines, resume your assigned duties. Everything is under control.” Chip stepped into the plane and the door slid down behind him. “There will be no interruption of—” Members stood confusedly, looking at filled seats.

“There are extra passengers because of the holiday,” Chip said. “Go forward and ask members with children to double up. It can’t be helped.”

The members moved down the aisle, looking from one side of the plane to the other.

The five were sitting in the last row, next to the dispensers. Dover took his wrapped kit from the aisle seat and Chip sat down. Dover said, “Not bad.”

“We’re not up yet,” Chip said.

Voices filled the plane: members telling members about the explosion, spreading the news from row to row. The clock said 10:06 but the plane wasn’t moving.

The 10:06 became 10:07.

The six looked at one another, and looked forward, normally.

The plane moved; swung gently to the side and then pulled forward. It moved faster. The light dimmed and the TV screens flicked on.

They watched Christ’s Life and a years-old Family at Work. They drank tea and coke but couldn’t eat; there were no cakes on the plane, because of the hour, and though they had foil-wrapped rounds of cheese in their kits, they would have been seen eating them by the members who came to the dispensers. Chip and Dover sweated in their double coveralls. Karl kept dozing off, and Ria and Buzz on either side of him nudged him to keep him awake and watching.

The flight took forty minutes.

When the location sign said EUR00020, Chip and Dover got up from their seats and stood at the dispensers, pressing the buttons and letting tea and coke flow down the drains. The plane landed and rode and stopped, and members began filing off. After a few dozen had gone through the doorway nearby, Chip and Dover lifted the emptied containers from the dispensers, set them on the floor and raised their covers, and Buzz put a wrapped kit into each. Then Buzz, Karl, Ria, and Jack got up and the six went to the doorway. Chip, carrying a container against his chest, said, “Would you excuse us, please?” to an elderly member and went out. The others followed close behind him. Dover, carrying the other container, said to the member, “You’d better wait till I’m off the escalator,” and the member nodded, looking confused.

At the bottom of the escalator Chip leaned his wrist toward the scanner and then stood opposite it, blocking it from the members in the waiting room. Buzz, Karl, Ria, and Jack passed in front of him, false-touching, and Dover leaned against the scanner and nodded to the member waiting above.

The four went toward the waiting room, and Chip and Dover crossed the field to the portal and went through it into the depot area. Setting down the containers, they took the kits out of them and slipped between two rows of crates. They found a cleared space near the wall and took off the orange coveralls and pulled the toeguards from their sandals.

They left the depot area through the swing-door, their kits slung on their shoulders. The others were waiting around the scanner. They went out of the airport by twos—it was almost as crowded as the one in ’91770—and gathered again at the bike racks.

By noon they were north of ’00018. They ate their rounds of cheese between the bike path and the River of Freedom, in a valley flanked by mountains that rose to awesome snow-streaked heights. While they ate they looked at their maps. By nightfall, they calculated, they could be in parkland a few kilometers from the tunnel’s entrance.

A little after three o’clock, when they were nearing ’00013, Chip noticed an approaching cyclist, a girl in her early teens, who was looking at the faces of the northbound cyclists—his own as she passed him—with an expression of concern, of memberlike wanting-to-help. A moment later he saw another approaching cyclist looking at faces in the same slightly anxious way, an elderly woman with flowers in her basket. He smiled at her as she passed, then looked ahead. There was nothing out of the ordinary in the path and the road beside it; a few hundred meters ahead both path and road turned to the right and disappeared behind a power station.

He rode onto grass, stopped, and looking back, signaled to the others as they came along.

They pushed their bikes farther onto the grass. They were on the last stretch of parkland before the city: a span of grass, then picnic tables and a rising slope of trees.

“We’re never going to make it if we stop every half hour,” Ria said.

They sat down on the grass.

“I think they’re checking bracelets up ahead,” Chip said. Telecomps and red-crossed coveralls. I noticed two members coming this way who looked as if they were trying to spot the sick one. They had that how-can-I-help look.”

“Hate,” Buzz said.

Jack said, “Christ and Wei, Chip, if we’re going to start worrying about members’ facial expressions, we might as well just turn around and go home.”

Chip looked at him and said, “A bracelet check isn’t so unlikely, is it? Uni must know by now that the explosion at ’91770 was no accident, and it might have figured out exactly why it happened. This is the shortest route from ’020 to Uni—and we’re coming to the first sharp turn in about twelve kilometers.”

“All right, so they’re checking bracelets,” Jack said. “What the hate are we carrying guns for?”

“Yes!” Ria said.

Dover said, “If we shoot our way through we’ll have the whole bike path after us.”

“So we’ll drop a bomb behind us,” Jack said. “We’ve got to move fast, not sit on our asses as if we’re in a chess game. These dummies are half dead anyway; what difference does it make if we kill a few of them? We’re going to help all the rest, aren’t we?”

“The guns and bombs are for when we need them,” Chip said, “not for when we can avoid using them.” He turned to Dover. “Take a walk in the woods there,” he said. “See if you can get a look at what’s past the turn.”

“Right,” Dover said. He got up and crossed the grass, picked something up and brought it to a litter basket, and went in among the trees. His yellow coveralls became bits of yellow that vanished up the slope.

They turned from watching him. Chip took out his map.

“Shit,” Jack said.

Chip said nothing. He looked at the map.

Buzz rubbed his leg and took his hand from it abruptly.

Jack tore bits of grass from the ground. Ria, sitting close to him, watched him. “What’s your suggestion,” Jack said, “if they are checking bracelets?”

Chip looked up from the map and, after a moment, said, “Well go back a little way and cut east and by-pass them.”

Jack tore up more grass and then threw it down. “Come on,” he said to Ria, and stood up. She sprang up beside him, bright-eyed.

“Where are you going?” Chip said.

“Where we planned to go,” Jack said, looking down at him. “The parkland near the tunnel. We’ll wait for you until it gets light.”

“Sit down, you two,” Karl said.

Chip said, “You’ll go with all of us when I say we’ll go. You agreed to that at the beginning.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” Jack said. “I don’t like taking orders from you any more than I like taking them from Uni.”

“You’re going to ruin everything,” Buzz said.

Ria said, “You are! Stopping, turning back, by-passing—if you’re going to do a thing, do it!”

“Sit down and wait till Dover gets back,” Chip said.

Jack smiled. “You want to make me?” he said. “Right out here in front of the Family?” He nodded to Ria and they picked up their bikes and steadied the kits in the baskets.

Chip got up, putting the map in his pocket. “We can’t break the group in two this way,” he said. “Stop and think for a minute, will you, Jack? How will we know if—”

“You’re the stopper-and-thinker,” Jack said. “I’m the one who’s going to walk down that tunnel.” He turned and pushed his bike away. Ria pushed hers along with him. They went toward the path.

Chip took a step after them and stopped, his jaw tight, his hands fisted. He wanted to shout at them, to take his gun out and force them back—but there were cyclists passing, members on the grass nearby.

“There’s nothing you can do, Chip,” Karl said, and Buzz said, “The brother-fighters.”

At the edge of the path Jack and Ria mounted their bikes. Jack waved. “So long!” he called. “See you in the lounge at TV!” Ria waved too and they pedaled away.

Buzz and Karl waved after them.

Chip snatched up his kit from his bike and slung it on his shoulder. He took another kit and tossed it in Buzz’s lap. “Karl, you stay here,” he said. “Buzz, come on with me.”

He went into the woods and realized he had moved quickly, angrily, abnormally, but thought Fight it! He went up the slope in the direction Dover had taken. God DAMN them!

Buzz caught up with him. “Christ and Wei,” he said, “don’t throw the kits!”

“God damn them!” Chip said. “The first time I saw them I knew they were no good! But I shut my eyes because I was so fighting—God damn me!” he said. “It’s my fault. Mine.”

“Maybe there’s no bracelet check and they’ll be waiting in the parkland,” Buzz said.

Yellow flickered among the trees ahead: Dover coming down. He stopped, then saw them and came on. “You’re right,” he said. “Doctors on the ground, doctors in the air—”

“Jack and Ria have gone on,” Chip said.

Dover looked at him wide-eyed and said, “Didn’t you stop them?”

“How?” Chip said. He caught Dover’s arm and turned him around. “Show us the way,” he said.

Dover led them quickly up the slope through the trees. “They’ll never get through,” he said. “There’s a whole medicenter, and barriers to prevent the bikes from turning.”

They came out of the trees onto an incline of rock, Buzz last and hurrying. Dover said, “Get down or we’ll be seen.”

They dropped to their stomachs and crawled up the incline to its rim. Beyond lay the city, ’00013, its white slabs standing clean and bright in the sunlight, its interweaving rails glittering, its border of roadways flashing with cars. The river curved before it and continued to the north, blue and slender, with sightseeing boats drifting slowly and a long line of barges passing under bridges.

Below, they looked into a rock-walled half bowl whose floor was a semicircular plaza where the bike path branched; it came down from the north around the power station, and half of it turned, passed over the car-rushing road, and bridged to the city, while the other half went on across the plaza and followed the river’s curving eastern bank with the road coming up to rejoin it. Before it branched, barriers channeled the oncoming cyclists into three lines, each of them passing before a group of red-cross-coveralled members standing beside a short unusual-looking scanner. Three members in antigrav gear hovered face-down in the air, one over each group. Two cars and a copter were in the nearer part of the plaza, and more members in red-crossed coveralls stood by the line of cyclists who were leaving the city, hurrying them along when they slowed to look at the ones who were touching the scanners.

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

Chip, while he looked, pulled his kit open at his side. “They must be in the line somewhere,” he said. He found his binoculars and put them to his eyes and focused them.

“They are,” Dover said. “See the kits in the baskets?”

Chip swept the line and found Jack and Ria; they were pedaling slowly, side by side in wood-barriered lanes. Jack was looking ahead and his lips were moving. Ria nodded. They were steering with their left hands only; their right hands were in their pockets.

Chip passed the binoculars to Dover and turned to his kit.

“We’ve got to help them get through,” he said. “If they make it over the bridge they may be able to lose themselves in the city.”

“They’re going to shoot when they get to the scanners,” Dover said.

Chip gave Buzz a blue-handled bomb and said, “Take off the tape and pull when I tell you. Try to get it near the copter; two birds with one net.”

“Do it before they start shooting,” Dover said.

Chip took the binoculars back from him and looked through them and found Jack and Ria again. He scanned the lines ahead of them; about fifteen bikes were between them and the groups at the scanners.

“Do they have bullets or L-beams?” Dover asked.

“Bullets,” Chip said. “Don’t worry, I’ll time it right.” He watched the lines of slow-moving bikes, gauging their speed.

“They’ll probably shoot anyway,” Buzz said. “Just for fun. Did you see that look in Ria’s eyes?”

“Get ready,” Chip said. He watched until Jack and Ria were five bikes from the scanners. “Pull,” he said.

Buzz pulled the handle and threw the bomb underhanded to the side. It hit stone, tumbled downward, bounded off a projection, and landed near the side of the copter. “Get back,” Chip said. He took another look through the binoculars, at Jack and Ria two bikes from the scanners looking tense but confident, and slipped back between Buzz and Dover. “They look as if they’re going to a party,” he said.

They waited, their cheeks on stone, and the explosion roared and the incline shuddered. Metal crashed and grated below. There was silence, and the bomb’s bitter smell; and then voices, murmuring and rising louder. “Those two!” someone shouted.

They edged forward to the rim.

Two bikes were racing onto the bridge. All the others had stopped, their riders standing one-footed, facing toward the copter—tipped to its side below and smoking—and turning now toward the two bikes speeding and the red-cross-coveralled members running after them. The three members in the air veered and flew toward the bridge.

Chip raised the binoculars—to Ria’s bent back and Jack’s ahead of her. They pedaled rapidly in depthless flatness, seeming to get no farther away. A glittering mist appeared, partly obscuring them.

Above, a hovering member downpointed a cylinder gushing thick white gas.

“He’s got them!” Dover said.

Ria stood astride her bike; Jack looked over his shoulder at her.

“Ria, not Jack,” Chip said.

Jack stopped and turned with his gun aimed upward. It jerked, and jerked again.

The member in the air went limp (crack and crack, the shots sounded), the white-gushing cylinder falling from his hand.

Members fleeing the bridge bicycled in both directions, ran wide-eyed on the flanking walkways.

Ria sat by her bike. She turned her head, and her face was moist and glittering. She looked troubled. Red-crossed coveralls blurred over her.

Jack stared, holding his gun, and his mouth opened big and round, closed and opened again in glittering mist. (“Ria!” Chip heard, small and far away.) Jack raised his gun (“Ria!”) and fired, fired, fired.

Another member in the air (crack, crack, crack) went limp and dropped his cylinder. Red spattered on the walkway below him, and more red.

Chip lowered the binoculars.

“Your gas mask!” Buzz said. He had binoculars too.

Dover was lying with his face in his arms.

Chip sat up and looked with only his eyes: at the narrow emptied bridge with a faraway cyclist in pale blue wobbling down the middle of it and a member in the air following him at a distance; at the two dead or dying members, turning slowly in the air, drifting; at the red-cross-coveralled members, walking now in a bridge-wide line, and one of them helping a member in yellow by a fallen bike, taking her about the shoulders and leading her back toward the plaza.

The cyclist stopped and looked back toward the red-cross-coveralled members, then turned and bent forward over the front of his bike. The member in the air flew quickly closer and pointed his arm; a thick white feather grew from it and brushed the cyclist.

Chip raised the binoculars.

Jack, gray-snouted in his gas mask, leaned to his left in glittering mist and put a bomb on the bridge. Then he pedaled, skidded, sideslipped, and fell. He raised himself on one arm with the bike lying between his legs. His kit, spilled from the bike’s basket, lay by the bomb.

“Oh Christ and Wei,” Buzz said.

Chip took down the binoculars, looked at the bridge, and then wound the binoculars’ neckstrap tightly around their middle.

“How many?” Dover asked, looking at him.

Chip said, “Three.”

The explosion was bright, loud, and long. Chip watched Ria, walking from the bridge with the red-cross-coveralled member leading her. She didn’t turn around.

Dover, up on his knees and looking, turned to Chip.

“His whole kit,” Chip said. “He was sitting next to it.” He put the binoculars into his kit and closed it. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “Put them away, Buzz. Come on.”

He meant not to look, but before they left the incline he did.

The middle of the bridge was black and rubbled, and its sides were burst outward. A bicycle wheel lay outside the blackened area, and there were other smaller things toward which the red-cross-coveralled members slowly moved. Pieces of pale blue were on the bridge and floating on the river.

They went back to Karl and told him what had happened, and the four of them got on their bikes and rode south for a few kilometers and went into parkland. They found a stream and drank from it and washed.

“And now we turn back?” Dover said.

“No,” Chip said, “not all of us.”

They looked at him.

“I said that we would,” he said, “because if anyone got caught, I wanted him to believe it, and say it when he was questioned. The way Ria’s probably saying it right now.” He took a cigarette that they were passing around—despite the risk of the smoke smell traveling—and drew on it and passed it to Buzz. “One of us is going to go back,” he said. “At least I hope only one will go—to set off a bomb or two between here and the coast and take a boat, to make it look as if we’ve stuck to the plan. The rest of us will hide in parkland, work our way closer to ’001, and go for the tunnel in two weeks or so.”

“Good,” Dover said, and Buzz said, “I never thought it made sense to give up so easily.”

“Will three of us be enough?” Karl asked.

“We won’t know till we try,” Chip said. “Would six have been enough? Maybe it can be done by one, and maybe it can’t be done by a dozen. But after coming this far, I fighting well mean to find out.”

“I’m with you; I was just asking,” Karl said. Buzz said, “I’m with you too,” and Dover said, “So am I.”

“Good,” Chip said. “Three stand a better chance than one, that I do know. Karl, you’re the one who goes back.”

Karl looked at him. “Why me?” he asked.

“Because you’re forty-three,” Chip said. “I’m sorry, brother, but I can’t think of any other basis for deciding.”

“Chip,” Buzz said, “I think I’d better tell you: my leg has been hurting me for the past few hours. I can make it back or I can go on, but—well, I thought you ought to know.”

Karl gave Chip the cigarette. It was down to a couple of centimeters; he snuffed it into the ground. “All right, Buzz, you’d better be the one,” he said. “Shave first. We’d all better shave, in case we run into anyone.”

They shaved, and then Chip and Buzz worked out a route for Buzz to the nearest part of the coast, about three hundred kilometers away. He would set off a bomb at the airport at ’00015 and another when he was near the sea. He kept two extra in case he needed them and gave his others to Chip. “With luck you’ll be on a boat by tomorrow night,” Chip said. “Make sure there’s nobody counting heads when you take it. Tell Julia, and Lilac too, that we’ll be hiding for at least two weeks, maybe longer.”

Buzz shook hands with all of them, wished them luck, and took his bike and left.

“We’ll stay right here for a while and take turns getting some sleep,” Chip said. “Tonight we’ll go into the city for cakes and cuvs.”

“Cakes,” Karl said, and Dover said, “It’s going to be a long two weeks.”

“No it isn’t,” Chip said. “That was in case he gets caught. We’re going to do it in four or five days.”

“Christ and Wei,” Karl said, smiling, “you’re really being cagey.”

3

THEY STAYED where they were for two days—slept and ate and shaved and practiced fighting, played children’s word games, talked about democratic government and sex and the pygmies of the equatorial forests—and on the third day, Sunday, they bicycled north. Outside of ’00013 they stopped and went up onto the incline overlooking the plaza and the bridge. The bridge was partly repaired and closed off by barriers. Lines of cyclists crossed the plaza in both directions; there were no doctors, no scanners, no copter, no cars. Where the copter had been, there was a rectangle of fresh pink paving.

Early in the afternoon they passed ‘001 and glimpsed at a distance Uni’s white dome beside the Lake of Universal Brotherhood. They went into the parkland beyond the city.

The following evening, at dusk, with their bikes hidden in a branch-covered hollow and their kits on their shoulders, they passed a scanner at the parkland’s farther border and went out onto the grassy slopes that approached Mount Love. They walked briskly, in shoes and green coveralls, with binoculars and gas masks hung about their necks. They held their guns, but as the darkness grew deeper and the slope more rocky and irregular, they pocketed them. Now and then they paused, and Chip put a hand-covered flashlight to his compass.

They came to the first of the three presumed locations of the tunnel’s entrance, and separated and looked for it, using their flashlights guardedly. They didn’t find it.

They started for the second location, a kilometer to the northeast. A half moon came over the shoulder of the mountain, wanly lighting it, and they searched its base carefully as they crossed the rock-slope before it.

The slope became smooth, but only in the strip where they were walking—and they realized that they were on a road, old and scrub-patched. Behind them it curved away toward the parkland; ahead it led into a fold in the mountain.

They looked at one another, and took out their guns. Leaving the road, they moved close to the side of the mountain and edged along slowly in single file—first Chip, then Dover, then Karl—holding their kits to keep them from bumping, holding their guns.

They came to the fold, and waited against the mountainside, listening.

No sound came from within.

They waited and listened, and then Chip looked back at the others and raised his gas mask and fastened it.

They did the same.

Chip stepped out into the opening of the fold, his gun before him. Dover and Karl stepped out beside him.

Within was a deep and level clearing; and opposite, at the base of sheer mountain wall, the black round flat-bottomed opening of a large tunnel.

It appeared to be completely unprotected.

They lowered their masks and looked at the opening through their binoculars. They looked at the mountain above it and, taking a few steps forward, looked at the fold’s outcurving walls and the oval of sky that roofed it.

“Buzz must have done a good job,” Karl said.

“Or a bad one and got caught,” Dover said.

Chip swung his binoculars back to the opening. Its rim had a glassy sheen, and pale green scrub lay along its bottom. “It feels like the boats on the beaches,” he said. “Sitting there wide open…”

“Do you think it leads back to Liberty?” Dover asked, and Karl laughed.

Chip said, “There could be fifty traps that we won’t see until it’s too late.” He lowered his binoculars.

Karl said, “Maybe Ria didn’t say anything.”

“When you’re questioned at a medicenter you say everything,” Chip said. “But even if she didn’t, wouldn’t it at least be closed? That’s what we’ve got the tools for.”

Karl said, “It must still be in use.”

Chip stared at the opening.

“We can always go back,” Dover said.

“Sure, let’s,” Chip said.

They looked all around them, and raised their masks into place, and walked slowly across the clearing. No gas jetted, no alarms sounded, no members in antigrav gear appeared in the sky.

They walked to the opening of the tunnel and shone their flashlights into it. Light shimmered and sparked in high plastic-lined roundness, all the way to the place where the tunnel seemed to end, but no, was bending to its downward angle. Two steel tracks reached into it, wide and flat, with a couple of meters of unplasticked black rock between them.

They looked back at the clearing and up at the opening’s rim. They stepped inside the tunnel, looked at one another, and lowered their masks and sniffed.

“Well,” Chip said. “Ready to walk?”

Karl nodded, and Dover, smiling, said, “Let’s go.”

They stood for a moment, and then walked ahead on the smooth black rock between the tracks.

“Will the air be all right?” Karl asked.

“We’ve got the masks if it isn’t,” Chip said. He shone his flashlight on his watch. “It’s a quarter of ten,” he said. “We should be there around one.”

“Uni’ll be up,” Dover said.

“Till we put it to sleep,” Karl said.

The tunnel bent to a slight incline, and they stopped and looked—at plastic roundness glimmering away and away and away into blackest black.

“Christ and Wei,” Karl said.

They started walking again, at a brisker pace, side by side between the tracks. “We should have brought the bikes,” Dover said. “We could have coasted.”

“Let’s keep the talk to a minimum,” Chip said. “And just one light at a time. Yours now, Karl.”

They walked without talking, behind the light of Karl’s flashlight. They took their binoculars off and put them in their kits.

Chip felt that Uni was listening to them, was recording the vibrations of their footsteps or the heat of their bodies. Would they be able to overcome the defenses it surely was readying, outfight its members, resist its gases? (Were the gas masks any good? Had Jack fallen because he had got his on too late, or would getting it on sooner have made no difference?)

Well, the time for questioning was over, he told himself. This was the time for going ahead. They would meet whatever was waiting for them and do their best to get to the refrigerating plants and blast them.

How many members would they have to hurt, to kill? Maybe none, he thought; maybe the threat of their guns would be enough to protect them. (Against helpful unselfish members seeing Uni in danger? No, never.)

Well, it had to be; there was no other way.

He turned his thoughts to Lilac—to Lilac and Jan and their room in New Madrid.

The tunnel grew cold but the air stayed good.

They walked on, into plastic roundness that glimmered away into blackest black with the tracks reaching into it. We’re here, he thought. Now. We’re doing it.

At the end of an hour they stopped to rest. They sat on the tracks and divided a cake among them and passed a container of tea around. Karl said, “I’d give my arm for some whiskey.”

“I’ll buy you a case when we get back,” Chip said.

“You heard him,” Karl said to Dover.

They sat for a few minutes and then they got up and started walking again. Dover walked on a track. “You look pretty confident,” Chip said, flashing his light at him.

“I am,” Dover said. “Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Chip said, shining his light ahead again.

“I’d feel better if there were six of us,” Karl said.

“So would I,” Chip said.

It was funny about Dover: he had hidden his face in his arms when Jack had started shooting, Chip remembered, and now, when they would soon be shooting, perhaps killing, he seemed cheerful and carefree. But maybe it was a cover-up, to hide anxiety. Or maybe it was just being twenty-five or twenty-six, however old he was.

They walked, shifting their kits from one shoulder to the other.

“Are you sure this thing ends?” Karl said.

Chip flicked the light at his watch. “It’s eleven-thirty,” he said. “We should be past the halfway mark.”

They kept walking into the plastic roundness. It grew a little less cold.

They stopped again at a quarter of twelve, but they found themselves restless and got up in a minute and went on.

Light glinted far away in the center of the blackness, and Chip pulled out his gun. “Wait,” Dover said, touching his arm, “it’s my light. Look!” He switched his flashlight off and on, off and on, and the glint in the blackness went and came back with it. “It’s the end,” he said. “Or something on the tracks.”

They walked on, more quickly. Karl took his gun out too. The glint, moving slightly up and down, seemed to stay the same distance from them, small and faint.

“It’s moving away from us,” Karl said.

But then, abruptly, it grew brighter, was nearer.

They stopped and raised their masks, fastened them, and walked on.

Toward a disc of steel, a wall that sealed the tunnel to its rim.

They went close to it but didn’t touch it. It would slide upward, they saw; bands of fine vertical scratches ran down it and its bottom was shaped to fit over the tracks.

They lowered their masks and Chip put his watch to Dover’s light. “Twenty of one,” he said. “We made good time.”

“Or else it goes on on the other side,” Karl said.

“You would think of that,” Chip said, pocketing his gun and unslinging his kit. He put it down on the rock, got on one knee beside it, and pulled it open. “Come closer with the light, Dover,” he said. “Don’t touch it, Karl.”

Karl, looking at the wall, said, “Do you think it’s electrified?”

“Dover?” Chip said.

“Hold on,” Dover said.

He had backed a few meters into the tunnel and was shining his light at them. The tip of his L-beam protruded into it. “Don’t panic, you’re not going to be hurt,” he said. “Your guns don’t work. Drop yours, Karl. Chip, let me see your hands, then put them on your head and stand up.”

Chip stared above the light. There was a glistening line: Dover’s clipped blond hair.

Karl said, “Is this a joke or what?”

“Drop it, Karl,” Dover said. “Put down your kit too. Chip, let me see your hands.”

Chip showed his empty hands and put them on his head and stood up. Karl’s gun clattered on the rock, and his kit bumped. “What is this?” he said, and to Chip, “What’s he doing?”

“He’s an espion,” Chip said.

“A what?”

Lilac had been right. An espion in the group. But Dover? It was impossible. It couldn’t be.

“Hands on your head, Karl,” Dover said. “Now turn around, both of you, and face the wall.”

“You brother-fighter,” Karl said.

They turned around and faced the steel wall with their hands on their heads.

“Dover,” Chip said. “Christ and Wei—”

“You little bastard,” Karl said.

“You’re not going to be hurt,” Dover said. The wall slid upward—and a long concrete-walled room extended before them, with the tracks going halfway into it and ending. A pair of steel doors were at the room’s far end.

“Six steps forward and stop,” Dover said. “Go on. Six steps.”

They walked six steps forward and stopped.

Kit-strap fittings clinked behind them. “The gun is still on you,” Dover said—from lower down; he was crouching. They glanced at each other. Karl’s eyes questioned; Chip shook his head.

“All right,” Dover said, his voice coming from his standing height again. “Straight ahead.”

They walked through the concrete-walled room, and the steel doors at the end of it slid apart. White-tiled wall stood beyond.

“Through and to the right,” Dover said.

They went through the doorway and turned to the right. A long white-tiled corridor stretched before them, ending at a single steel door with a scanner beside it. The right-hand wall of the corridor was solid tile; the left was broken by evenly spaced steel doors, ten or twelve of them, each with its scanner, about ten meters apart.

Chip and Karl walked side by side down the corridor with their hands on their heads. Dover! Chip thought. The first person he had gone to! And why not? So bitterly anti-Uni he had sounded, that day on the I.A. boat! It was Dover who had told him and Lilac that Liberty was a prison, that Uni had let them get to it! “Dover!” he said. “How the hate can you—”

“Just keep walking,” Dover said.

“You’re not dulled, you’re not treated!”

“No.”

“Then—how? Why?”

“You’ll see in a minute,” Dover said.

They neared the door at the end of the corridor and it slid abruptly open. Another corridor stretched beyond it: wider, less brightly lit, dark-walled, not tiled.

“Keep going,” Dover said.

They went through the doorway and stopped, staring.

“Go ahead,” Dover said.

They walked on.

What kind of corridor was this? The floor was carpeted, with a gold-colored carpet thicker and softer than any Chip had ever seen or walked on. The walls were lustrous polished wood, with numbered gold-knobbed doors (12, 11) on both sides. Paintings hung between the doors, beautiful paintings that were surely pre-U: a woman sitting with folded hands, smiling knowingly; a hillside city of windowed buildings under a strange black-clouded sky; a garden; a woman reclining; a man in armor. A pleasant odor spiced the air; tangy, dry, impossible to name.

“Where are we?” Karl asked.

“In Uni,” Dover said.

Ahead of them double doors stood open; a red-draped room lay beyond.

“Keep going,” Dover said.

They went through the doorway and into the red-draped room; it spread away on both sides, and members, people, were sitting and smiling and starting to laugh, were laughing and rising and some were applauding; young people, old people, were rising from chairs and sofas, laughing and applauding; applauding, applauding, they all were applauding!; and Chip’s arm was pulled down—by Dover, laughing—and he looked at Karl, who looked at him, stupefied; and still they were applauding, men and women, fifty, sixty of them, alert- and alive-looking, in coveralls of silk not paplon, green-gold-blue-white-purple; a tall and beautiful woman, a black-skinned man, a woman who looked like Lilac, a man with white hair who must have been over ninety; applauding, applauding, laughing, applauding…

Chip turned, and Dover, grinning, said, “You’re awake,” and to Karl, “It’s real, it’s happening.”

“What is?” Chip said. “What the hate is this? Who are they?”

Laughing, Dover said, “They’re the programmers, Chip! And that’s what you’re going to be! Oh if you could only see your faces!”

Chip stared at Karl, and at Dover again. “Christ and Wei, what are you talking about?” he said. “The programmers are dead! Uni’s—it goes on by itself, it doesn’t have—”

Dover was looking past him, smiling. Silence had spread through the room.

Chip turned around.

A man in a smiling mask that looked like Wei (Was this really happening?) was coming to him, moving springily in red silk high-collared coveralls. “Nothing goes on by itself,” he said in a voice that was high-pitched but forceful, his smiling mask-lips moving like real ones. (But was it a mask—the yellow skin shrunken tight over the sharp cheekbones, the glinting slit-eyes, the wisps of white hair on the shining yellow head?) “You must be ‘Chip’ with the one green eye,” the man said, smiling and holding out his hand. “You’ll have to tell me what was wrong with the name ‘Li’ that inspired you to change it.” Laughter lifted around them.

The outstretched hand was normal-colored and youthful. Chip took it (I’m going mad, he thought), and it gripped his hand strongly, squeezed his knucklebones to an instant’s pain.

“And you’re Karl,” the man said, turning and holding out his hand again. “Now if you had changed your name I could understand it.” Laughter rose louder. “Shake it,” the man said, smiling. “Don’t be afraid.”

Karl, staring, shook the man’s hand.

Chip said, “You’re—”

“Wei,” the man said, his slit-eyes twinkling. “From here up, that is.” He touched his coverall’s high collar. “From here down,” he said, “I’m several other members, principally Jesus RE who won the decathlon in 163.” He smiled at them. “Didn’t you ever bounce a ball when you were a child?” he asked. “Didn’t you ever jump rope? ‘Marx, Wood, Wei, and Christ; all but Wei were sacrificed.’ It’s still true, you see. ‘Out of the mouths of babes.’ Come, sit down, you must be tired. Why couldn’t you use the elevators like everyone else? Dover, it’s good to have you back. You’ve done very well, except for that awful business at the ’013 bridge.”

They sat in deep and comfortable red chairs, drank pale yellow tart-tasting wine from sparkling glasses, ate sweetly stewed cubes of meat and fish and who-knew-what brought on delicate white plates by young members who smiled at them admiringly—and as they sat and drank and ate, they talked with Wei.

With Wei!

How old was that tight-skinned yellow head, living and talking on its lithe red-coveralled body that reached easily for a cigarette, crossed its legs casually? The last anniversary of his birth had been what—the two-hundred-and-sixth, the two-hundred-and-seventh?

Wei died when he was sixty, twenty-five years after the Unification. Generations before the building of Uni, which was programmed by his “spiritual heirs.” Who died, of course, at sixty-two. So the Family was taught.

And there he sat, drinking, eating, smoking. Men and women stood listening around the group of chairs; he seemed not to notice them. “The islands have been all those things,” he said. “At first they were the strongholds of the original incurables; and then, as you put it, ‘isolation wards’ to which we let later incurables ‘escape,’ although we weren’t so kind as to supply boats in those days.” He smiled and drew on his cigarette. “Then, however,” he said, “I found a better use for them, and now they serve as, forgive me, wildlife preserves, where natural leaders can emerge and prove themselves exactly as you have done. Now we supply boats and maps, rather obliquely, and ‘shepherds’ like Dover who accompany returning members and prevent as much violence as they can. And prevent, of course, the final intended violence, Uni’s destruction—although the visitors’ display is the usual target, so there’s no real danger whatsoever.”

Chip said, “I don’t know where I am.” Karl, spearing a cube of meat with a small gold fork, said, “Asleep in the parkland,” and the men and women nearby laughed.

Wei, smiling, said, “Yes, it’s a disconcerting discovery, I’m sure. The computer that you thought was the Family’s changeless and uncontrolled master is in fact the Family’s servant, controlled by members like yourselves—enterprising, thoughtful, and concerned. Its goals and procedures change continually, according to the decisions of a High Council and fourteen sub-councils. We enjoy luxuries, as you can see, but we have responsibilities that more than justify them. Tomorrow you’ll begin to learn. Now, though”—he leaned forward and pressed his cigarette into an ashtray—“it’s very late, thanks to your partiality to tunnels. You’ll be shown to your rooms; I hope you find them worth the walk.” He smiled and rose, and they rose with him. He shook Karl’s hand—“Congratulations, Karl,” he said—and Chip’s. “And congratulations to you, Chip,” he said. “We suspected a long time ago that sooner or later you would be coming. We’re glad you haven’t disappointed us. I’m glad, I mean; it’s hard to avoid talking as if Uni has feelings too.” He turned away and people crowded around them, shaking their hands and saying, “Congratulations, I never thought you’d make it before Unification Day, it’s awful isn’t it when you come in and everyone’s sitting here congratulations you’ll get used to things before you congratulations.”

The room was large and pale blue, with a large pale-blue silken bed with many pillows, a large painting of floating water lilies, a table of covered dishes and decanters, dark green armchairs, and a bowl of white and yellow chrysanthemums on a long low cabinet.

“It’s beautiful,” Chip said. “Thank you.”

The girl who had led him to it, an ordinary-looking member of sixteen or so in white paplon, said, “Sit down and I’ll take off your—” She pointed at his feet.

“Shoes,” he said, smiling. “No. Thanks, sister; I can do it myself.”

“Daughter,” she said.

“Daughter?”

“The programmers are our Fathers and Mothers,” she said.

“Oh,” he said. “All right. Thanks, daughter. You can go now.”

She looked surprised and hurt. “I’m supposed to stay and take care of you,” she said. “Both of us.” She nodded toward a doorway beyond the bed. Light and the sound of running water came from it.

Chip went to it.

A pale-blue bathroom was there, large and gleaming; another young member in white paplon kneeled by a filling tub, stirring her hand in the water. She turned and smiled and said, “Hello, Father.”

“Hello,” Chip said. He stood with his hand on the jamb and looked back at the first girl—drawing the cover from the bed—and back again at the second girl. She smiled up at him, kneeling. He stood with his hand on the jamb. “Daughter,” he said.

4

HE WAS SITTING IN BED—had finished his breakfast and was reaching for a cigarette—when a knock at the door sounded. One of the girls went to answer it and Dover came in, smiling and clean and brisk in yellow silk. “How you doing, brother?” he asked.

“Pretty well,” Chip said, “pretty well.” The other girl lit his cigarette, took the breakfast tray, and asked him if he wanted more coffee. “No, thanks,” he said. “Do you want some coffee?”

“No, thanks,” Dover said. He sat in one of the dark green chairs and leaned back, his elbows on the chair arms, his hands meshed across his middle, his legs outstretched. Smiling at Chip, he said, “Over the shock?”

“Hate, no,” Chip said.

“It’s a long-standing custom,” Dover said. “You’ll enjoy it when the next group comes in.”

“It’s cruel, really cruel,” Chip said.

“Wait, you’ll be laughing and applauding with everyone else.”

“How often do groups turn up?”

“Sometimes not for years,” Dover said, “sometimes a month apart. It averages out to one-point-something people a year.”

“And you were in contact with Uni the whole time, you brother-fighter?”

Dover nodded and smiled. “A telecomp the size of a matchbox,” he said. “In fact, that’s what I kept it in.”

“Bastard,” Chip said.

The girl with the tray had taken it out, and the other girl changed the ashtray on the night table and took her coveralls from a chairback and went into the bathroom. She closed the door.

Dover looked after her, then looked at Chip quizzically. “Nice night?” he asked.

“Mm-hmm,” Chip said. “I gather they’re not treated.”

“Not in all departments, that’s for sure,” Dover said. “I hope you’re not sore at me for not dropping a hint somewhere along the way. The rules are ironclad: no help beyond what’s asked of you, no suggestions, no nothing; stay on the sidelines as much as you can and try to prevent bloodshed. I shouldn’t have even been doing that routine on the boat—about Liberty being a prison—but I’d been there for two years and nobody was even thinking of trying anything. You can see why I wanted to move things along.”

“Yes, I certainly can,” Chip said. He tipped ashes from his cigarette into the clean white tray.

“I’d just as soon you didn’t say anything to Wei about it,” Dover said. “You’re having lunch with him at one o’clock.”

“Karl too?”

“No, just you. I think he’s got you pegged as High Council material. I’ll come by at ten-of and take you to him. You’ll find a razor inside there—a thing that looks like a flashlight. This afternoon we’ll go to the medicenter and start de-whiskerizing.”

“There’s a medicenter?”

“There’s everything,” Dover said. “A medicenter, a library, a gym, a pool, a theater—there’s even a garden that you’d swear was up on top. I’ll show you around later.”

Chip said, “And this is where we—stay?”

“All except us poor shepherds,” Dover said. “I’ll be going out to another island, but not for at least six months, thank Uni.”

Chip put his cigarette out. He pressed it out thoroughly. “What if I don’t want to stay?” he said.

“Don’t want to?” Dover said.

“I’ve got a wife and a baby, remember?”

“Well so do lots of the others,” Dover said. “You’ve got a bigger obligation here, Chip; an obligation to the whole Family, including the members on the islands.”

“Nice obligation,” Chip said. “Silk coveralls and two girls at once.”

“That was for last night only,” Dover said. “Tonight you’ll be lucky to get one.” He sat up straight. “Look,” he said, “I know there are—surface attractions here that make it all look—questionable. But the Family needs Uni. Think of the way things were on Liberty! And it needs untreated programmers to run Uni and—well, Wei’ll explain things better than I can. And one day a week we wear paplon anyway. And eat cakes.”

“A whole day?” Chip said. “Really?”

“All right, all right,” Dover said, getting up. He went to a chair where Chip’s green coveralls lay and picked them up and felt their pockets. “Is everything here?” he asked.

“Yes,” Chip said. “Including some snapshots I’d like to have.”

“Sorry, nothing you came in with,” Dover said. “More rules.” He took Chip’s shoes from the floor and stood and looked at him. “Everyone’s a little unsure at first,” he said. “You’ll be proud to stay once you’ve got the right slant on things. It’s an obligation.”

“I’ll remember that,” Chip said.

There was a knock at the door, and the girl who had taken the tray came in with blue silk coveralls and white sandals. She put them on the foot of the bed.

Dover, smiling, said, “If you want paplon it can be arranged.”

The girl looked at him.

“Hate, no,” Chip said. “I guess I’m as worthy of silk as anyone else around here.”

“You are,” Dover said. “You are, Chip. I’ll see you at ten of one, right?” He started to the door with the green coveralls over his arm and the shoes in his hand. The girl hurried ahead to open the door for him.

Chip said, “What happened to Buzz?”

Dover stopped and turned, regretful-looking. “He was caught in ’015,” he said.

“And treated?”

Dover nodded.

“More rules,” Chip said.

Dover nodded again and turned and went out.

There were thin steaks cooked in a lightly spiced brown sauce, small browned onions, a sliced yellow vegetable that Chip hadn’t seen on Liberty—“Squash,” Wei said—and a clear red wine that was less enjoyable than the yellow of the night before. They ate with gold knives and forks, from plates with wide gold borders.

Wei, in gray silk, ate quickly, cutting his steak, forking it into his wrinkle-lipped mouth, and chewing only briefly before swallowing and raising his fork again. Now and then he paused, sipped wine, and pressed his yellow napkin to his lips.

“These things existed,” he said. “Would there have been any point in destroying them?”

The room was large and handsomely furnished in pre-U style: white, gold, orange, yellow. At a corner of it, two white-coveralled members waited by a wheeled serving table.

“Of course it seems wrong at first,” Wei said, “but the ultimate decisions have to be made by untreated members, and untreated members can’t and shouldn’t live their lives on cakes and TV and Marx Writing.” He smiled. “Not even on Wei Addressing the Chemotherapists,” he said, and put steak into his mouth.

“Why can’t the Family make its decisions itself?” Chip asked.

Wei chewed and swallowed. “Because it’s incapable of doing so,” he said. “That is, of doing so reasonably. Untreated it’s—well, you had a sample on your island; it’s mean and foolish and aggressive, motivated more often by selfishness than by anything else. Selfishness and fear.” He put onions into his mouth.

“It achieved the Unification,” Chip said.

“Mmm, yes,” Wei said, “but after what a struggle! And what a fragile structure the Unification was until we buttressed it with treatments! No, the Family has to be helped to full humanity—by treatments today, by genetic engineering tomorrow—and decisions have to be made for it. Those who have the means and the intelligence have the duty as well. To shirk it would be treason against the species.” He put steak into his mouth and raised his other hand and beckoned.

“And part of the duty,” Chip said, “is to kill members at sixty-two?”

“Ah, that,” Wei said, and smiled. “Always a principal question, sternly asked.”

The two members came to them, one with a decanter of wine and the other with a gold tray that he held at Wei’s side. “You’re looking at only part of the picture,” Wei said, taking a large fork and spoon and lifting a steak from the tray. He held it with sauce dripping from it. “What you’re neglecting to look at,” he said, “is the immeasurable number of members who would die far earlier than sixty-two if not for the peace and stability and well-being we give them. Think of the mass for a moment, not of individuals within the mass.” He put the steak on his plate. “We add many more years to the Family’s total life than we take away from it,” he said. “Many, many more years.” He spooned sauce onto the steak and took onions and squash. “Chip?” he said.

“No, thanks,” Chip said. He cut a piece from the half steak before him. The member with the decanter refilled his glass.

“Incidentally,” Wei said, cutting steak, “the actual time of dying is closer now to sixty-three than sixty-two. It will grow still higher as the population on Earth is gradually reduced.” He put steak into his mouth.

The members withdrew.

Chip said, “Do you include the members who don’t get born in your balance of years added and taken away?”

“No,” Wei said, smiling. “We’re not that unrealistic. If those members were born, there would be no stability, no well-being, and eventually no Family.” He put squash into his mouth and chewed and swallowed. “I don’t expect your feelings to change in one lunch,” he said. “Look around, talk with everyone, browse in the library—particularly in the history and sociology banks. I hold informal discussions a few evenings a week—once a teacher, always a teacher—sit in on some of them, argue, discuss.”

“I left a wife and a baby on Liberty,” Chip said.

“From which I deduce,” Wei said, smiling, “that they weren’t of overriding importance to you.”

Chip said, “I expected to be coming back.”

“Arrangements can be made for their care if necessary,” Wei said. “Dover told me you had already done so.”

“Will I be allowed to go back?” Chip asked.

“You won’t want to,” Wei said. “You’ll come to recognize that we’re right and your responsibility lies here.” He sipped wine and pressed his napkin to his lips. “If we’re wrong on minor points you can sit on the High Council some day and correct us,” he said. “Are you interested in architecture or city planning, by any chance?”

Chip looked at him and, after a moment, said, “I’ve thought once or twice about designing buildings.”

“Uni thinks you should be on the Architectural Council at present,” Wei said. “Look in on it. Meet Madhir, the head of it.” He put onions into his mouth.

Chip said, “I really don’t know anything…”

“You can learn if you’re interested,” Wei said, cutting steak. “There’s plenty of time.”

Chip looked at him. “Yes,” he said. “Programmers seem to live past sixty-two. Even past sixty-three.”

“Exceptional members have to be preserved as long as possible,” Wei said. “For the Family’s sake.” He put steak into his mouth and chewed, looking at Chip with his slit-eyes. “Would you like to hear something incredible?” he said. “Your generation of programmers is almost certain to live indefinitely. Isn’t that fantastic? We old ones are going to die sooner or later—the doctors say maybe not, but Uni says we will. You younger ones though, in all probability you won’t die. Ever.”

Chip put a piece of steak into his mouth and chewed it slowly.

Wei said, “I suppose it’s an unsettling thought. It’ll grow more attractive as you get older.”

Chip swallowed what was in his mouth. He looked at Wei, glanced at his gray-silk chest, and looked at his face again. “That member,” he said. “The decathlon winner. Did he die naturally or was he killed?”

“He was killed,” Wei said. “With his permission, given freely, even eagerly.”

“Of course,” Chip said. “He was treated.”

“An athlete?” Wei said. “They take very little. No, he was proud that he was going to become—allied to me. His only concern was whether I would keep him ‘in condition’—a concern that I’m afraid was justified. You’ll find that the children, the ordinary members here, vie with one another to give parts of themselves for transplant. If you wanted to replace that eye, for instance, they’d be slipping into your room and begging you for the honor.” He put squash into his mouth.

Chip shifted in his seat. “My eye doesn’t bother me,” he said. “I like it.”

“You shouldn’t,” Wei said. “If nothing could be done about it, then you would be justified in accepting it. But an imperfection that can be remedied? That we must never accept.” He cut steak. “’One goal, one goal only, for all of us—perfection,’” he said. “We’re not there yet, but some day we will be: a Family improved genetically so that treatments no longer are needed; a corps of ever-living programmers so that the islands too can be unified; perfection, on Earth and moving ‘outward, outward, outward to the stars.’” His fork, with steak on it, stopped before his lips. He looked ahead of him and said, “I dreamed of it when I was young: a universe of the gentle, the helpful, the loving, the unselfish. I’ll live to see it. I shall live to see it.”

Dover led Chip and Karl through the complex that afternoon—showed them the library, the gym, the pool, and the garden (“Christ and Wei.” “Wait till you see the sunsets and the stars”); the music room, the theater, the lounges; the dining room and the kitchen (“I don’t know, from somewhere,” a member said, watching other members taking bundles of lettuce and lemons from a steel carrier. “Whatever we need comes in,” she said, smiling. “Ask Uni”). There were four levels, passed through by small elevators and narrow escalators. The medicenter was on the bottom level. Doctors named Boroviev and Rosen, young-moving men with shrunken faces as old-looking as Wei’s, welcomed them and examined them and gave them infusions. “We can replace that eye one-two-three, you know,” Rosen said to Chip, and Chip said, “I know. Thanks, but it doesn’t bother me.”

They swam in the pool. Dover went to swim with a tall and beautiful woman Chip had noticed applauding the night before, and he and Karl sat on the edge of the pool and watched them. “How do you feel?” Chip asked.

“I don’t know,” Karl said. “I’m pleased, of course, and Dover says it’s all necessary and it’s our duty to help, but—I don’t know. Even if they’re running Uni, it’s Uni anyway, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Chip said. “That’s how I feel.”

“There would have been a mess up above if we’d done what we planned,” Karl said, “but it would have been straightened out eventually, more or less.” He shook his head. “I honestly don’t know, Chip,” he said. “Any system the Family set up on its own would certainly be a lot less efficient than Uni is, than these people are; you can’t deny that.”

“No, you can’t,” Chip said.

“Isn’t it fantastic how long they live?” Karl said. “I still can’t get over the fact that—look at those breasts, will you? Christ and Wei.”

A light-skinned round-breasted woman dived into the pool from the other side.

Karl said, “Let’s talk some more later on, all right?” He slipped down into the water.

“Sure, we’ve got plenty of time,” Chip said.

Karl smiled at him and kicked off and swam arm-over-arm away.

The next morning Chip left his room and walked down green-carpeted painting-hung corridor toward a steel door at the end of it. He hadn’t gone very far when “Hi, brother,” Dover said and came along and walked beside him. “Hi,” Chip said. He looked ahead again and, walking, said, “Am I being guarded?”

“Only when you go in this direction,” Dover said.

Chip said, “I couldn’t do anything with my bare hands even if I wanted to.”

“I know,” Dover said. “The old man’s cautious. Pre-U mind.” He tapped his temple and smiled. “Only for a few days,” he said.

They walked to the end of the corridor and the steel door slid open. White-tiled corridor stretched beyond it; a member in blue touched a scanner and went through a doorway.

They turned and started back. The door whispered behind them. “You’ll get to see it,” Dover said. “He’ll probably give you the tour himself. Want to go to the gym?”

In the afternoon Chip looked in at the offices of the Architectural Council. A small and cheerful old man recognized him and welcomed him—Madhir, the Council’s head. He looked to be over a hundred; his hands too—all of him apparently. He introduced Chip to other members of the Council: an old woman named Sylvie, a reddish-haired man of fifty or so whose name Chip didn’t catch, and a short but pretty woman called Gri-gri. Chip had coffee with them and ate a piece of pastry with a cream filling. They showed him a set of plans they were discussing, layouts that Uni had made for the rebuilding of “G-3 cities.” They talked about whether or not the layouts should be redone to different specifications, asked questions of a telecomp and disagreed on the significance of its answers. The old woman Sylvie gave a point-by-point explanation of why she felt the layouts were needlessly monotonous. Madhir asked Chip if he had an opinion; he said he didn’t. The younger woman, Gri-gri, smiled at him invitingly.

There was a party in the main lounge that night—“Happy new year!” “Happy U year!”—and Karl shouted in Chip’s ear, “I’ll tell you one thing I don’t like about this place! No whiskey! Isn’t that a shut-off? If wine is okay, why not whiskey?” Dover was dancing with the woman who looked like Lilac (not really, not half as pretty), and there were people Chip had sat with at meals and met in the gym and the music room, people he had seen in one part of the complex or another, people he hadn’t seen in before; there were more than had been there the other night when he and Karl had come in—almost a hundred of them, with white-paploned members channeling trays among them. “Happy U year!” someone said to him, an elderly woman who had been at his lunch table, Hera or Hela. “It’s almost 172!” she said. “Yes,” he said, “half an hour.” “Oh, there he is!” she said, and moved forward. Wei was in the doorway, in white, with people crowding around him. He shook their hands and kissed their cheeks, his shriveled yellow face grin-split and gleaming, his eyes lost in wrinkles. Chip moved back farther into the crowd and turned away. Gri-gri waved, jumping up to see him over people between them. He waved back at her and smiled and kept moving.

He spent the next day, Unification Day, in the gym and the library.

He went to a few of Wei’s evening discussions. They were held in the garden, a pleasant place to be. The grass and the trees were real, and the stars and the moon were near reality, the moon changing phase but never position. Bird warblings sounded from time to time and a gentle breeze blew. Fifteen or twenty programmers were usually at the discussions, sitting on chairs and on the grass. Wei, in a chair, did most of the talking. He expanded on quotations from the Living Wisdom and deftly traced the particulars of questions to their encompassing generalities. Now and then he deferred to the head of the Educational Council, Gustafsen, or to Boroviev, the head of the Medical Council, or to another of the High Council members.

At first Chip sat at the edge of the group and only listened, but then he began to ask questions—why parts, at least, of treatments couldn’t be put back on a voluntary basis; whether human perfection might not include a degree of selfishness and aggressiveness; whether selfishness, in fact, didn’t play a considerable part in their own acceptance of alleged “duty” and “responsibility.” Some of the programmers near him seemed affronted by his questions, but Wei answered them patiently and fully; seemed even to welcome them, heard his “Wei?” over the askings of the others. He moved a little closer in from the group’s edge.

One night he sat up in bed and lit a cigarette and smoked in the dark.

The woman lying beside him stroked his back. “It’s right, Chip,” she said. “It’s what’s best for everyone.”

“You read minds?” he said.

“Sometimes,” she said. Her name was Deirdre and she was on the Colonial Council. She was thirty-eight, light-skinned, and not especially pretty, but sensible, shapely, and good company.

“I’m beginning to think it is what’s best,” Chip said, “and I don’t know whether I’m being convinced by Wei’s logic or by lobsters and Mozart and you. Not to mention the prospect of eternal life.”

“That scares me,” Deirdre said.

“Me too,” Chip said.

She kept stroking his back. “It took me two months to cool down,” she said.

“Is that how you thought of it?” he said. “Cooling down?”

“Yes,” she said. “And growing up. Facing reality.”

“So why does it feel like giving in?” Chip said.

“Lie down,” Deirdre said.

He put out his cigarette, put the ashtray on the night table, and turned to her, lying down. They held each other and kissed. “Truly,” she said. “It’s best for everybody, in the long run. We’ll improve things gradually, working in our own councils.”

They kissed and caressed each other, and then they kicked down the sheet and she threw her leg over Chip’s hip and his hardness slipped easily into her.

He was sitting in the library one morning when a hand took his shoulder. He looked around, startled, and Wei was there. He bent, pushing Chip aside, and put his face down to the viewer hood.

After a moment he said, “Well, you’ve gone to the right man.” He kept his face at the hood another moment, and then stood up and let go of Chip’s shoulder and smiled at him. “Read Liebman too,” he said. “And Okida and Marcuse. I’ll make a list of titles and give it to you in the garden this evening. Will you be there?”

Chip nodded.

His days fell into a routine: mornings at the library, afternoons at the Council. He studied construction methods and environment planning; examined factory flow charts and circulation patterns of residential buildings. Madhir and Sylvie showed him drawings of buildings under construction and buildings planned for the future, of cities as they existed and (plastic overlay) cities as they might some day be modified. He was the eighth member of the Council; of the other seven, three were inclined to challenge Uni’s designs and change them, and four, including Madhir, were inclined to accept them without question. Formal meetings were held on Friday afternoons; at other times seldom more than four or five of the members were in the offices. Once only Chip and Gri-gri were there, and they wound up locked together on Madhir’s sofa.

After Council, Chip used the gym and the pool. He ate with Deirdre and Dover and Dover’s woman-of-the-day and whoever else joined them—sometimes Karl, on the Transportation Council and resigned to wine.

One day in February, Chip asked Dover if it was possible to get in touch with whoever had replaced him on Liberty and find out if Lilac and Jan were all right and whether Julia was providing for them as she had said she would.

“Sure,” Dover said. “No problem at all.”

“Would you do it then?” Chip said. “I’d appreciate it.”

A few days later Dover found Chip in the library. “All’s well,” he said. “Lilac is staying home and buying food and paying rent, so Julia must be coming through.”

“Thanks, Dover,” Chip said. “I was worried.”

“The man there’ll keep an eye on her,” Dover said. “If she needs anything, money can come in the mail.”

“That’s fine,” Chip said. “Wei told me.” He smiled. “Poor Julia,” he said, “supporting all those families when it isn’t really necessary. If she knew she’d have a fit.”

Dover smiled. “She would,” he said. “Of course, everyone who set out didn’t get here, so in some cases it is necessary.”

“That’s right,” Chip said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“See you at lunch,” Dover said.

“Right,” Chip said. “Thanks.”

Dover went, and Chip turned to the viewer and bent his face to the hood. He put his finger on the next-page button and, after a moment, pressed it.

He began to speak up at Council meetings and to ask fewer questions at Wei’s discussions. A petition was circulated for the reduction of cake days to one a month; he hesitated but signed it. He went from Deirdre to Blackie to Nina and back to Deirdre; listened in the smaller lounges to sex gossip and jokes about High Council members; followed crazes for paper-airplane making and speaking in pre-U languages (“Français” was pronounced “Fransay,” he learned).

One morning he woke up early and went to the gym. Wei was there, jumping astride and swinging dumbbells, shining with sweat, slab-muscled, slim-hipped; in a black supporter and something white tied around his neck. “Another early bird, good morning,” he said, jumping his legs out and in, out and in, swinging the dumbbells out and together over his white-wisped head.

“Good morning,” Chip said. He went to the side of the gym and took off his robe and hung it on a hook. Another robe, blue, hung a few hooks away.

“You weren’t at the discussion last night,” Wei said.

Chip turned. “There was a party,” he said, toeing off his sandals. “Patya’s birthday.”

“It’s all right,” Wei said, jumping, swinging the dumbbells. “I just mentioned it.”

Chip walked onto a mat and began trotting in place. The white thing around Wei’s neck was a band of silk, tightly knotted.

Wei stopped jumping and tossed down the dumbbells and took a towel from one of the parallel bars. “Madhir’s afraid you’re going to be a radical,” he said, smiling.

“He doesn’t know the half of it,” Chip said.

Wei watched him, still smiling, wiping the towel over his big-muscled shoulders and under his arms.

“Do you work out every morning?” Chip asked.

“No, only once or twice a week,” Wei said. “I’m not athletic by nature.” He rubbed the towel behind him.

Chip stopped trotting. “Wei, there’s something I’d like to speak to you about,” he said.

“Yes?” Wei said. “What is it?”

Chip took a step toward him. “When I first came here,” he said, “and we had lunch together—”

“Yes?” Wei said.

Chip cleared his throat and said, “You said that if I wanted to I could have my eye replaced. Rosen said so too.”

“Yes, of course,” Wei said. “Do you want to have it done?”

Chip looked at him uncertainly. “I don’t know, it seems like such—vanity,” he said. “But I’ve always been aware of it—”

“It’s not vanity to correct a flaw,” Wei said. “It’s negligence not to.”

“Can’t I get a lens put on?” Chip said. “A brown lens?”

“Yes, you can,” Wei said, “if you want to cover it and not correct it.”

Chip looked away and then back at him. “All right,” he said, “I’d like to do it, have it done.”

“Good,” Wei said, and smiled. “I’ve had eye changes twice,” he said. “There’s blurriness for a few days, that’s all. Go down to the medicenter this morning. I’ll tell Rosen to do it himself, as soon as possible.”

‘Thank you,” Chip said.

Wei put his towel around his white-banded neck, turned to the parallel bars, and lifted himself straight-armed onto them. “Keep quiet about it,” he said, hand-walking between the bars, “or the children will start pestering you.”

It was done, and he looked in his mirror and both his eyes were brown. He smiled, and stepped back, and stepped close again. He looked at himself from one side and the other, smiling.

When he had dressed he looked again.

Deirdre, in the lounge, said, “It’s a tremendous improvement! You look wonderful! Karl, Gri-gri, look at Chip’s eye!”

Members helped them into heavy green coats, thickly quilted and hooded. They closed them and put on thick green gloves, and a member pulled open the door. The two of them, Wei and Chip, went in.

They walked together along an aisle between steel walls of memory banks, their breath clouding from their nostrils. Wei spoke of the banks’ internal temperature and of the weight and number of them. They turned into a narrower aisle where the steel walls stretched ahead of them convergingly to a faraway crosswalk

“I was in here when I was a child,” Chip said.

“Dover told me,” Wei said.

“It frightened me then,” Chip said. “But it has a kind of—majesty to it; the order and precision…”

Wei nodded, his eyes glinting. “Yes,” he said. “I look for excuses to come in.”

They turned into another cross-aisle, passed a pillar, and turned into another long narrow aisle between back-to-back rows of steel memory banks.

In coveralls again, they looked into a vast railed pit, round and deep, where steel and concrete housings lay, linked by blue arms and sending thicker blue arms branching upward to low brightly glowing ceiling. (“I believe you had a special interest in the refrigerating plants,” Wei said, smiling, and Chip looked uncomfortable.) A steel pillar stood beside the pit; beyond it lay a second railed and blue-armed pit, and another pillar, another pit. The room was enormous, cool and hushed. Transmitting and receiving equipment lined its two long walls, with red pinpoint lights gleaming; members in blue drew out and replaced two-handled vertical panels of speckled black and gold. Four red-dome reactors stood at one end of the room, and beyond them, behind glass, half a dozen programmers sat at a round console reading into microphones, turning pages.

“There you are,” Wei said.

Chip looked around at it all. He shook his head and blew out breath. “Christ and Wei,” he said.

Wei laughed happily.

They stayed a while, walking about, looking, talking with some of the members, and then they left the room and walked through white-tiled corridors. A steel door slid open for them, and they went through and walked together down the carpeted corridor beyond.

5

EARLY IN SEPTEMBER OF 172, a party of seven men and women accompanied by a “shepherd” named Anna set out from the Andaman Islands in Stability Bay to attack and destroy Uni. Announcements of their progress were made in the programmers’ dining room at each mealtime. Two members of the party “failed” in the airport at SEA77120 (head-shakings and sighs of disappointment), and two more the following day in a carport in EUR46209 (head-shakings and sighs of disappointment). On the evening of Thursday, September tenth, the three others—a young man and woman and an older man—came single-file into the main lounge with their hands on their heads, looking angry and frightened. A stocky woman behind them, grinning, pocketed a gun.

The three stared foolishly, and the programmers rose, laughing and applauding, Chip and Deirdre among them. Chip laughed loud, applauded hard. All the programmers laughed loud and applauded hard as the newcomers lowered their hands and turned to one another and to their laughing applauding shepherd.

Wei in gold-trimmed green went to them, smiling, and shook their hands. The programmers hushed one another. Wei touched his collar and said, “From here up, at any rate. From here down…” The programmers laughed and hushed one another. They moved closer, to hear, to congratulate.

After a few minutes the stocky woman slipped out of the crush and left the lounge. She turned to the right and went toward a narrow upgoing escalator. Chip came after her. “Congratulations,” he said.

“Thanks,” the woman said, glancing back at him and smiling tiredly. She was about forty, with dirt on her face and dark rings under her eyes. “When did you come in?” she asked.

“About eight months ago,” Chip said.

“Who with?” The woman stepped onto the escalator.

Chip stepped on behind her. “Dover,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “Is he still here?”

“No,” Chip said. “He was sent out last month. Your people didn’t come in empty-handed, did they?”

“I wish they had,” the woman said. “My shoulder is killing me. I left the kits by the elevator. I’m going to get them now.” She stepped off the escalator and walked back around it.

Chip went with her. “I’ll give you a hand with them,” he said.

“It’s all right, I’ll pick up one of the boys,” the woman said, turning to the right.

“No, I don’t mind doing it,” Chip said.

They walked down corridor past the glass wall of the pool. The woman looked in and said, “That’s where I’m going to be in fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll join you,” Chip said.

The woman glanced at him. “All right,” she said.

Boroviev and a member came into the corridor toward them. “Anna! Hello!” Boroviev said, his eyes sparkling in his withered face. The member, a girl, smiled at Chip.

“Hello!” the woman said, shaking Boroviev’s hand. “How are you?”

“Fine!” Boroviev said. “Oh, you look exhausted!”

“I am.”

“But everything’s all right?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “They’re downstairs. I’m on my way to get rid of the kits.”

“Get some rest!” Boroviev said.

“I’m going to,” the woman said, smiling. “Six months of it.”

Boroviev smiled at Chip, and taking the member’s hand, went past them and down the corridor. The woman and Chip went ahead toward the steel door at the corridor’s end. They passed the archway to the garden, where someone was singing and playing a guitar.

“What kind of bombs did they have?” Chip asked.

“Crude plastic ones,” the woman said. “Throw and boom. I’ll be glad to get them into the can.”

The steel door slid open; they went through and turned to the right. White-tiled corridor stretched before them with scanner-posted doors in the left-hand wall.

“Which council are you on?” the woman asked.

“Wait a second,” Chip said, stopping and taking her arm.

She stopped and turned and he punched her in the stomach. Catching her face in his hand, he smashed her head back hard against the wall. He let it come forward, smashed it back again, and let go of her. She slid downward—a tile was cracked—and sank heavily to the floor and fell over sideways, one knee up, eyes closed.

Chip stepped to the nearest door and opened it. A two-toilet bathroom was inside. Holding the door with his foot, he reached over and took hold of the woman under her arms. A member came into the corridor and stared at him, a boy of about twenty.

“Help me,” Chip said.

The boy came over, his face pale. “What happened?” he asked.

“Take her legs,” Chip said. “She passed out.”

They carried the woman into the bathroom and set her down on the floor. “Shouldn’t we take her to the medicenter?” the boy asked.

“We will in a minute,” Chip said. He got on one knee beside the woman, reached into the pocket of her yellow-paplon coveralls, and took out her gun. He aimed it at the boy. “Turn around and face the wall,” he said. “Don’t make a sound.”

The boy stared wide-eyed at him, and turned around and faced the wall between the toilets.

Chip stood up, passed the gun between his hands, and holding it by its taped barrel, stepped astride the woman. He raised the gun and quickly swung its butt down hard on the boy’s close-clipped head. The blow drove the boy to his knees. He fell forward against the wall and then sideways, his head stopping against wall and toilet pipe, red gleaming in its short black hair.

Chip looked away and at the gun. He passed it back to a shooting grip, thumbed its safety catch aside, and turned it toward the bathroom’s back wall: a red thread, gone, shattered a tile and drilled dust from behind it. Chip put the gun into his pocket, and holding it, stepped over the woman and moved to the door.

He went into the corridor, pulled the door tightly closed, and walked quickly, holding the gun in his pocket. He came to the end of the corridor and followed its left turn.

A member coming toward him smiled and said, “Hello, Father.”

Chip nodded, passing him. “Son,” he said.

A door was ahead in the right-hand wall. He went to it, opened it, and went through. He closed the door behind him and stood in dark hallway. He took out the gun.

Opposite, under a ceiling that barely glowed, were the pink, brown, and orange memory-banks-for-visitors, the gold cross and sickle, the clock on the wall—9:33 Thu 10 Sep 172 Y.U.

He went to the left, past the other displays, unlighted, dormant, increasingly visible in the light from an open door to the lobby.

He went to the open door.

On the floor in the center of the lobby lay three kits, a gun, and two knives. Another kit lay near the elevator doors.

Wei leaned back, smiling, and drew on his cigarette “Believe me,” he said, “that’s how everybody feels at this point. But even the most stubbornly disapproving come to see that we’re wise and we’re right.” He looked at the programmers standing around the group of chairs. “Isn’t that so, Chip?” he said. ‘Tell them.” He looked about, smiling.

“Chip went out,” Deirdre said, and someone else said, “After Anna.” Another programmer said, ‘Too bad, Deirdre,” and Deirdre, turning, said, “He didn’t go out after Anna, he went out; he’ll be right back.”

“A little tired, of course?” someone said.

Wei looked at his cigarette and leaned forward and pressed it out. “Everyone here will confirm what I’m saying,” he said to the newcomers, and smiled. “Excuse me, will you?” he said. “I’ll be back in a little while. Don’t get up.” He rose, and the programmers parted for him.

Straw filled half the kit, held in place by a wood divider; on the other side, wires, tools, papers, cakes, whatnot. He brushed straw away—from more dividers that formed square straw-filled compartments. He fingered in one and found only straw and hollowness; in another, though, there was something soft-surfaced but firm. He pulled away straw and lifted out a heavy whitish ball, a claylike handful with straw sticking to it. He put it on the floor and took out two more—another compartment was empty—and a fourth one. He ripped the wood framework from the kit, put it aside, and dumped out straw, tools, everything; put the four bombs close together in the kit, opened the other two kits and took out their bombs and put them in with the four—five from one kit, six from the other. Room for three more remained.

He got up and went for the fourth kit by the elevators. A sound in the hallway spun him around—he had left the gun by the bombs—but the doorway was empty-dark and the sound (whisper of silk?) was no more. If it had been at all. His own sound, it might have been, reflected back at him.

Watching the doorway, he backed to the kit, caught up its strap, and brought it quickly to the other kits; kneeled again and brought the gun close to his side. He opened the kit, pulled out straw, and lifted out three bombs and fitted them in with the others. Three rows of six. He covered them and pressed the kit closed, then put his arm through the strap and lodged it on his shoulder. He raised the kit carefully against his hip. The bombs in it shifted heavily.

The gun with the kits was an L-beam too, newer-looking than the one he had. He picked it up and opened it. A stone was in the generator’s place. He put the gun down, took one of the knives—black-handled, pre-U, its blade worn thin but sharp—and slipped it into his right-hand pocket. Taking the working gun and holding the kit with his fingers under its bottom, he got up from his knees, stepped over an empty kit, and went quietly to the doorway.

Darkness and silence were outside it. He waited till he could see more clearly, then walked to the left. A giant telecomp clung to the display wall (it had been broken, hadn’t it, when he had been there before?); he passed it and stopped. Someone lay near the wall ahead, motionless.

But no, it was a stretcher, two stretchers, with pillows and blankets. The blankets Papa Jan and he had wrapped around them. The very same two, conceivably.

He stood for a moment, remembering.

Then he went on. To the door. The door that Papa Jan had pushed him through. And the scanner beside it, the first he had ever passed without touching. How frightened he had been!

This time you don’t have to push me, Papa Jan, he thought.

He opened the door a bit, looked in at the landing—brightly lit, empty—and went in.

And down the stairs into coolness. Quickly now, thinking of the boy and the woman upstairs, who might soon be coming to, crying an alarm.

He passed the door to the first level of memory banks.

And the second.

And came to the end of the stairs, the bottom-level door.

He put his right shoulder against it, held the gun ready, and turned the knob with his left hand.

He eased the door slowly open. Red lights gleamed in dimness, one of the walls of transmitting-receiving equipment. The low ceiling glowed faintly. He opened the door wider. A railed refrigerator pit lay ahead of him, blue arms upreaching; beyond it, a pillar, a pit, a pillar, a pit. The reactors were at the other end of the room, red domes doubled in the glass of the dimly lit programming room. Not a member in sight, closed doors, silence—except for a whining sound, low and steady. He opened the door wider, stepping into the room with it, and saw the second wall of equipment sparked with red lights.

He went farther into the room, caught the door edge behind him and let it pull itself away toward closing. He lowered the gun, thumbed the strap up off his shoulder, and let the kit down gently to the floor. His throat was clamped, his head torn back. A green-silk elbow was under his jaw, the arm crushing his neck, choking him. His gun-wrist was locked in a powerful hand and “You liar, liar,” Wei whispered in his ear, “what a pleasure to kill you.”

He pulled at the arm, punched it with his free left hand; it was marble, a statue’s arm in silk. He tried to back his feet into a stance for throwing Wei off him, but Wei moved backward too, keeping him arched and helpless, dragging him beneath the turning glowing ceiling; and his hand was bent around and smashed, smashed, smashed against hard railing, and the gun was gone, clanging in the pit. He reached back and grabbed Wei’s head, found his ear and wrenched at it. His throat was crushed tighter by the hard-muscled arm and the ceiling was pink and pulsing. He thrust his hand down into Wei’s collar, squeezed his fingers under a band of cloth. He wound his hand in it, driving his knuckles as hard as he could into tough ridged flesh. His right hand was freed, his left seized and pulled at. With his right he caught the wrist at his neck, pulled the arm open. He gasped air down his throat.

He was flung away, thrown flat against red-lit equipment, the torn band wound around his hand. He grabbed two handles and pulled out a panel, turned and flung it at Wei coming at him. Wei struck it aside with an arm and kept coming, both hands raised to chop. Chip crouched, his left arm up. (“Keep low, Green-eye!” Captain Gold shouted.) Blows hit his arm; he punched at Wei’s heart. Wei backed off, kicking at him. He got away from the wall, circled outward, stuffed his numbed hand down into his pocket and found the knife handle. Wei rushed at him and chopped at his neck and shoulders. With his left arm raised, he cut the knife up out of his pocket and stuck it into Wei’s middle—partway in, then hard, all the way, hilt into silk. Blows kept hitting him. He pulled the knife out and backed away.

Wei stayed where he was. He looked at Chip, at the knife in his hand, looked down at himself. He touched his waist and looked at his fingers. He looked at Chip.

Chip circled, watching him, holding the knife.

Wei lunged. Chip knifed, slashed Wei’s sleeve, but Wei caught his arm in both hands and drove him back against railing, kneeing at him. Chip caught Wei’s neck and squeezed, squeezed as hard as he could inside the torn green-and-gold collar. He forced Wei off him, turned from the railing, and squeezed, kept squeezing while Wei held his knife-arm. He forced Wei back around the pit. Wei struck with one hand at his wrist, knocked it downward; he pulled his arm free and knifed at Wei’s side. Wei dodged and spilled over the railing, fell into the pit and fell flat on his back on a cylindrical steel housing. He slid off it and sat leaning against blue pipe, looking up at Chip with his mouth open, gasping, a black-red stain in his lap.

Chip ran to the kit. He picked it up and walked back quickly down the side of the room, holding the kit on his arm. He put the knife in his pocket—it fell through but he let it—ripped the kit open and tucked its cover back under it. He turned and walked backward toward the end of the equipment wall, stopped and stood facing the pits and the pillars between them.

He backhanded sweat from his mouth and forehead, saw blood on his hand and wiped it on his side.

He took one of the bombs from the kit, held it back behind his shoulder, aimed, and threw it. It arched into the center pit. He put his hand on another bomb. A thunk sounded from the pit, but no explosion came. He took out the second bomb and threw it harder into the pit.

The sound it made was flatter and softer than the first bomb’s.

The railed pit stayed as it was, blue arms reaching up from it.

Chip looked at it, and looked at the rows of white straw-stuck bombs in the kit.

He took out another one and hurled it as hard as he could into the nearer pit.

A thunk again.

He waited, and went cautiously toward the pit; went closer, and saw the bomb on the cylindrical steel housing, a blob of white, a white clay breast.

A high-pitched gasping sound came sifting from the farthest pit. Wei. He was laughing.

These three were her bombs, the shepherd’s, Chip thought. Maybe she did something to them. He went to the middle of the equipment wall and stood squarely facing the center pit. He hurled a bomb. It hit a blue arm and stuck to it, round and white.

Wei laughed and gasped. Scrapings, sounds of movement, came from the pit he was in.

Chip hurled more bombs. One of them may work, one of them will work! (“Throw and boom,” she had said. “Glad to get them into the can.” She wouldn’t have lied to him. What had gone wrong with them?) He hurled bombs at the blue arms and the pillars, plastered the square steel pillars with flat white overlapping discs. He hurled all the “bombs,” hurled the last one clean across the room; it splattered wide on the opposite equipment wall.

He stood with the empty kit in his hand.

Wei laughed loud.

He was sitting astride pit railing, holding the gun in both hands, pointing it at Chip. Black-red smears ran down his clinging coverall legs; red leaked over his sandal straps. He laughed more. “What do you think?” he asked. “Too cold? Too damp? Too dry? Too old? Too what?” He took one hand from the gun, reached back behind him, and eased down off the railing. Lifting his leg over it, he winced and drew in breath hissingly. “Ooh Jesus Christ,” he said, “you really hurt this body. Ssss! You really did it damage.” He stood and held the gun with both hands again, facing Chip. He smiled. “Idea,” he said. “You give me yours, right? You hurt a body, you give me another one. Fair? And—neat, economical! What we have to do now is shoot you in the head, very carefully, and then between us we’ll give the doctors a long night’s work.” He smiled more broadly. “I promise to keep you ‘in condition,’ Chip,” he said, and walked forward with slow stiff steps, his elbows tight to his sides, the gun clasped before him chest-high, aimed at Chip’s face.

Chip backed to the wall.

“I’ll have to change my speech to newcomers,” Wei said. “‘From here down I’m Chip, a programmer who almost fooled me with his talk and his new eye and his smiles in the mirror.’ I don’t think we’ll have any more newcomers though; the risk has begun to outweigh the amusement.”

Chip threw the kit at him and lunged, leaped at Wei and threw him backward to the floor. Wei cried out, and Chip, lying on him, wrestled for the gun in his hand. Red beams shot from it. Chip forced the gun to the floor. An explosion roared. He tore the gun from Wei’s hand and got off him, got up to his feet and backed away and turned and looked.

Across the room, a cave, crumbling and smoking, hollowed the middle of the wall of equipment—where the bomb he had thrown had been splattered. Dust shimmered in the air and a wide arc of black fragments lay on the floor.

Chip looked at the gun and at Wei. Wei, on an elbow, looked across the room and up at Chip.

Chip backed away, toward the end of the room, toward its corner, looking at the white-plastered pillars, the white-hung blue arms over the center pit. He raised the gun.

“Chip!” Wei cried. “It’s yours! It’ll be yours some day! We both can live! Chip, listen to me,” he said, leaning forward, “there’s joy in having it, in controlling, in being the only one. That’s the absolute truth, Chip. You’ll see for yourself. There’s joy in having it.”

Chip fired the gun at the farther pillar. A red thread hit above the white discs; another hit directly on one. An explosion flashed and roared, thundered and smoked. It subsided and the pillar was bent slightly toward the other side of the room.

Wei moaned grievingly. A door beside Chip started to open; he pushed it closed and stood back against it. He fired the gun at the bombs on the blue arms. Explosion roared, flame erupted, and a louder explosion blasted from the pit, mashing him against the door, breaking glass, flinging Wei to the swaying wall of equipment, slamming doors that had opened at the other side of the room. Flame filled the pit, a huge shuddering cylinder of yellow-orange, railed around and drumming at the ceiling. Chip raised his arm against the heat of it.

Wei climbed to all fours and onto his feet. He swayed and started stumblingly forward. Chip shot a red thread to his chest, and another, and he turned away and stumbled toward the pit. Flames feathered his coveralls, and he dropped to his knees, fell forward on the floor. His hair caught fire, his coveralls burned.

Blows shook the door and cries came from behind it. The other doors opened and members came in. “Stay back!” Chip shouted, and aimed the gun at the nearer pillar and fired. Explosion roared, and the pillar was bent.

The fire in the pit lowered, and the bent pillars slowly turned, screeching.

Members came into the room. “Get back!” Chip shouted, and they retreated to the doors. He moved into the corner, watching the pillars, the ceiling. The door beside him opened. “Stay back!” he shouted, pressing against it.

The steel of the pillars split and rolled open; a chunk of concrete slid from the nearer one.

The blackened ceiling cracked, groaned, sagged, dropped fragments.

The pillars broke and the ceiling fell. Memory banks crashed into the pits; mammoth steel blocks smashed down on one another and slid thunderously, butted into the walls of equipment. Explosions roared in the nearest and farthest pits, lifting blocks and cushioning them in flames.

Chip raised his arm against the heat. He looked where Wei had been. A block was there, its edge above the cracked floor.

More groaning and cracking sounded—from the blackness above, framed by the ceiling’s broken fire-lit borders. And more banks fell, pounded down on the ones below, crushing and bursting them. Memory banks filled the opening, sliding, rumbling.

And the room, despite the fires, cooled.

Chip lowered his arm and looked—at the dark shapes of fire-gleaming steel blocks piled through the broken border of ceiling. He looked and kept looking, and then he moved around the door and pushed his way out through the members staring in.

He walked with the gun at his side through members and programmers running toward him down white-tiled corridors, and through more programmers running down carpeted corridors hung with paintings. “What is it?” Karl shouted, stopping and grabbing his arm.

Chip looked at him and said, “Go see.”

Karl let go of him, glanced at the gun and at his face, and turned and ran.

Chip turned and kept walking.

6

HE WASHED, sprayed the bruises on his hand and some cuts on his face, and put on paplon coveralls. Closing them, he looked around at the room. He had planned to take the bedcover, for Lilac to use for dressmaking, and a small painting or something for Julia; now, though, he didn’t want to. He put cigarettes and the gun in his pockets. The door opened and he pulled the gun out again. Deirdre stared at him, looking frantic.

He put the gun back in his pocket.

She came in and closed the door behind her. “It was you,” she said.

He nodded.

“Do you realize what you’ve done?”

“What you didn’t do,” he said. “What you came here to do and talked yourself out of.”

“I came here to stop it so it could be reprogrammed,” she said, “not to destroy it completely!”

“It was being reprogrammed, remember?” he said. “And if I’d stopped it and forced a real reprogramming—I don’t know how, but if I had—it would still have wound up the same way sooner or later. The same Wei. Or a new one—me. ‘There’s joy in having it’: those were his last words. Everything else was rationalization. And self-deception.”

She looked away, angrily, and back at him. “The whole place is going to cave in,” she said.

“I don’t feel any tremors,” he said.

“Well everyone’s going. The ventilation may stop. There’s danger of radiation.”

“I wasn’t planning to stay,” he said.

She opened the door and looked at him and went out.

He went out after her. Programmers hurried along the corridor in both directions, carrying paintings, pillowcase bundles, dictypes, lamps. (“Wei was in it! He’s dead!” “Stay away from the kitchen, it’s a madhouse!”) He walked among them. The walls were bare except for large frames hanging empty. (“Sirri says it was Chip, not the new ones!” “—twenty-five years ago, “Unify the islands, we’ve got enough programmers,’ but he gave me a quote about selfishness.”)

The escalators were working. He rode up to the top level and went around through the steel door, half open, to the bathroom where the boy and the woman were. They were gone.

He went down one level. Programmers and members holding paintings and bundles were pushing into the room that led to the tunnel. He went into the merging crowd. The door ahead was down but must have been partway up because everyone kept moving forward slowly. (“Quickly!” “Move, will you?” “Oh Christ and Wei!”)

His arm was grabbed and Madhir glared at him, hugging a filled tablecloth to his chest. “Was it you?” he asked.

“Yes,” Chip said.

Madhir glared, trembled, flushed. “Madman!” he shouted. “Maniac! Maniac!”

Chip pulled his arm free and turned and moved forward.

“Here he is!” Madhir shouted. “Chip! He’s the one! He’s the one who did it! Here he is! Here! He’s the one who did it”

Chip moved forward with the crowd, looking at the steel door ahead, holding the gun in his pocket. (“You brother-fighter, are you crazy?” “He’s mad, he’s mad!”)

They walked up the tunnel, quickly at first, then slowly, an endless straggle of dark laden figures. Lamps shone here and there along the line, each lamp drawing with it a section of shining plastic roundness.

Chip saw Deirdre sitting at the side of the runnel. She looked at him stonily. He kept walking, the gun at his side.

Outside the tunnel they sat and lay in the clearing, smoked and ate and talked in huddles, rummaged in their bundles, traded forks for cigarettes.

Chip saw stretchers on the ground, four or five of them, a member holding a lamp beside them, other members kneeling.

He put the gun in his pocket and went over. The boy and the woman lay on two of the stretchers, their heads bandaged, their eyes closed, their sheeted chests moving. Members were on two other stretchers, and Barlow, the head of the Nutritional Council, was on another, dead-looking, his eyes closed. Rosen kneeled beside him, taping something to his chest through cut-open coveralls.

“Are they all right?” Chip asked.

“The others are,” Rosen said. “Barlow’s had a heart attack.” He looked up at Chip. “They’re saying that Wei was in there,” he said.

“He was,” Chip said.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Chip said. “He’s dead.”

“It’s hard to believe,” Rosen said. He shook his head and took a small something from a member’s hand and screwed it onto what he had taped to Barlow’s chest.

Chip watched for a moment, then went over to the entrance of the clearing and sat down against stone and lit a cigarette. He toed his sandals off and smoked, watching members and programmers come out of the tunnel and walk around and find places to sit. Karl came out with a painting and a bundle.

A member came toward him. Chip took the gun out of his pocket and held it in his lap.

“Are you Chip?” the member asked. He was the older of the two men who had come in that evening.

“Yes,” Chip said.

The man sat down next to him. He was about fifty, very dark, with a jutting chin. “Some of them are talking about rushing you,” he said.

“I figured they would be,” Chip said. “I’m leaving in a second.”

“My name’s Luis,” the man said.

“Hello,” Chip said.

They shook hands.

“Where are you going?” Luis asked.

“Back to the island I came from,” Chip said. “Liberty. Majorca. Myorca. You don’t know how to fly a copter by any chance, do you?”

“No,” Luis said, “but it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.”

“It’s the landing that worries me,” Chip said.

“Land in the water.”

“I wouldn’t want to lose the copter, though. Assuming I can find one. You want a cigarette?”

“No, thanks,” Luis said.

They sat silently for a moment. Chip drew on his cigarette and looked up. “Christ and Wei, real stars,” he said. “They had fake ones down there.”

“Really?” Luis said.

“Really.”

Luis looked over at the programmers. He shook his head. “They’re talking as if the Family’s going to die in the morning,” he said. “It isn’t. It’s going to be born.”

“Born to a lot of trouble, though,” Chip said. “It’s started already. Planes have crashed…”

Luis looked at him and said, “Members haven’t died who were supposed to die…”

After a moment Chip said, “Yes. Thanks for reminding me.”

Luis said. “Sure, there’s going to be trouble. But there are members in every city—the undertreated, the ones who write ‘Fight Uni’—who’ll keep things going in the beginning. And in the end it’s going to be better. Living people!”

“It’s going to be more interesting, that’s for sure,” Chip said, putting his sandals on.

“You aren’t going to stay on your island, are you?” Luis asked.

“I don’t know,” Chip said. “I haven’t thought beyond getting there.”

“You come back,” Luis said. “The Family needs members like you.”

“Does it?” Chip said. “I had an eye changed down there, and I’m not sure I only did it to fool Wei.” He crushed his cigarette out and stood up. Programmers were looking around at him; he pointed the gun at them and they turned quickly away.

Luis stood up too. “I’m glad the bombs worked,” he said, smiling. “I’m the one who made them.”

“They worked beautifully,” Chip said. “Throw and boom.”

“Good,” Luis said. “Listen, I don’t know about any eye; you land on land and come back in a few weeks.”

“I’ll see,” Chip said. “Good-by.”

“Good-by, brother,” Luis said.

Chip turned and went out of the clearing and started down rocky slope toward parkland.

He flew over roadways where occasional moving cars zigzagged slowly past series of stopped ones; along the River of Freedom, where barges bumped blindly against the banks; past cities where monorail cars clung motionless to the rail, copters hovering over some of them.

As he grew more sure of his handling of the copter he flew lower; looked into plazas where members milled and gathered; skimmed over factories with stopped feed-in and feed-out lines; over construction sites where nothing moved except a member or two; and over the river again, passing a group of members tying a barge to the shore, climbing onto it, looking up at him.

He followed the river to the sea and started across it, flying low. He thought of Lilac and Jan, Lilac turning startled from the sink (he should have taken the bedcover, why hadn’t he?). But would they still be in the room? Could Lilac, thinking him caught and treated and never coming back, have—married someone else? No, never. (Why not? Almost nine months he’d been gone.) No. She wouldn’t. She—

Drops of clear liquid hit the copter’s plastic front and streaked back along its sides. Something was leaking from above, he thought, but then he saw that the sky had gone gray, gray on both sides and darker gray ahead, like the skies in some pre-U paintings. It was rain that was hitting the copter.

Rain! In the daytime! He flew with one hand, and with a fingertip of the other, followed on the inside of the plastic the paths of the streaking raindrops outside it.

Rain in the daytime! Christ and Wei, how strange! And how inconvenient!

But there was something pleasing about it too. Something natural.

He brought his hand back to its lever—Let’s not get overconfident, brother—and smiling, flew ahead.