This Perfect Day

by Ira Levin

  “Help them,” Julia said, and began gathering pieces of cloth from the wet floor.

  “If that’s how I spend my time, nothing’s going to be changed,” Chip said. “That’s acceptable to you, but it isn’t to me.”

  “Help them!” Julia said. “Go on! We’ll talk later! You’re not going to get anywhere by being cheeky!”

  Chip helped the men get the pipe secured against the wall, and then he went out with Julia onto a railed landing on the side of the building. New Madrid stretched away below them, bright in the mid-morning sun. Beyond it lay a strip of blue-green sea dotted with fishing boats.

  “Every day it’s something else,” Julia said, reaching into the pocket of her gray apron. She took out cigarettes, offered Chip one, and lit them with ordinary cheap matches.

  They smoked, and Chip said, “The tunnel’s there. It was used to bring in the memory banks.”

  “Some of the groups I wasn’t involved with may have known about it,” Julia said.

  “Can you find out?”

  She drew on her cigarette. In the sunlight she was older-looking, the skin of her face and neck netted with wrinkles. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose so. How do you know about it?”

  He told her. “I’m sure it’s not filled in,” he said. “It must be fifteen kilometers long. And besides, it’s going to be used again. There’s space cut out for more banks for when the Family gets bigger.”

  She looked questioningly at him. “I thought the colonies had their own computers,” she said.

  “They do,” he said, not understanding. And then he understood. It was only in the colonies that the Family was growing; on Earth, with two children per couple and not every couple allowed to reproduce, the Family was getting smaller, not bigger. He had never connected that with what Papa Jan had said about the space for more memory banks. “Maybe they’ll be needed for more telecontrolled equipment,” he said.

  “Or maybe,” Julia said, “your grandfather wasn’t a reliable source of information.”

  “He was the one who had the idea for the tunnel,” Chip said. “It’s there; I know it is. And it may be a way, the only way, that Uni can be gotten at. I’m going to try it, and I want your help, as much of it as you can give me.”

  “You want my money, you mean,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “And your help. In finding the right people with the right skills. And in getting information that we’ll need, and equipment. And in finding people who can teach us skills that we don’t have. I want to take this very slowly and carefully. I want to come back.”

  She looked at him with her eyes narrowed against her cigarette smoke. “Well, you’re not an absolute imbecile,” she said. “What kind of job has Ashi found for you?”

  “Washing dishes at the Casino.”

  “God in heaven!” she said. “Come here tomorrow morning at a quarter of eight.”

  “The Casino leaves my mornings free,” he said.

  “Come here!” she said. “You’ll get the time you need.”

  “All right,” he said, and smiled at her. “Thanks,” he said.

  She turned away and looked at her cigarette. She crushed it against the railing. “I’m not going to pay for it,” she said. “Not all of it. I can’t. You have no idea how expensive it’s going to be. Explosives, for instance: last time they cost over two thousand dollars, and that was five years ago; God knows what they’ll be today.” She scowled at her cigarette stub and threw it away over the railing. “I’ll pay what I can,” she said, “and I’ll introduce you to people who’ll pay the rest if you flatter them enough.”

  “Thank you,” Chip said. “I couldn’t ask for more. Thank you.”

  “God in heaven, here I go again,” Julia said. She turned to Chip. “Wait, you’ll find out,” she said: “the older you get, the more you stay the same. I’m an only child who’s used to having her way, that’s my trouble. Come on, I’ve got work to do.”

  They went down stairs that led from the landing. “Really,” Julia said. “I have all kinds of noble reasons for spending my time and money on people like you—a Christian urge to help the Family, love of justice, freedom, democracy—but the truth of the matter is, I’m an only child who’s used to having her way. It maddens me, it absolutely maddens me, that I can’t go anywhere I please on this planet! Or off it, for that matter! You have no idea how I resent that damned computer!”

  Chip laughed. “I do!” he said. “That’s just the way I feel.”

  “It’s a monster straight out of hell,” Julia said.

  They walked around the building. “It’s a monster, all right,” Chip said, throwing away his cigarette. “At least the way it is now. One of the things I want to try to find out is whether, if we got the chance, we could change its programming instead of destroying it. If the Family were running it, instead of vice versa, it wouldn’t be so bad. Do you really believe in heaven and hell?”

  “Let’s not get into religion,” Julia said, “or you’re going to find yourself washing dishes at the Casino. How much are they paying you?”

  “Six-fifty a week.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll give you the same,” Julia said, “but if anyone around here asks, say you’re getting five.”

  He waited until Julia had questioned a number of people without learning of any attack party that had known about the tunnel, and then, confirmed in his decision, he told his plans to Lilac.

  “You can’t!” she said. “Not after all those other people went!”

  “They were aiming at the wrong target,” he said.

  She shook her head, held her brow, looked at him. “It’s—I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I thought you were—done with all this. I thought we were settled.” She threw her hands out at the room around them, their New Madrid room, with the walls they had painted, the bookshelf he had made, the bed, the refrigerator, Ashi’s sketch of a laughing child.

  Chip said, “Honey, I may be the only person on any of the islands who knows about the tunnel, about the real Uni. I have to make use of that. How can I not do it?”

  “All right, make use of it,” she said. “Plan, help organize a party—fine! I’ll help you! But why do you have to go? Other people should do it, people without families.”

  “I’ll be here when the baby’s born,” he said. “It’s going to take longer than that to get everything ready. And then I’ll only be gone for—maybe as little as a week.”

  She stared at him. “How can you say that?” she said. “How can you say you’ll—you could be gone forever! You could be caught and treated!”

  “We’re going to learn how to fight,” he said. “We’re going to have guns and—”

  “Others should go!” she said.

  “How can I ask them, if I’m not going myself?”

  “Ask them, that’s all. Ask them.”

  “No,” he said. “I’ve got to go too.”

  “You want to go, that’s what it is,” she said. “You don’t have to go; you want to.”

  He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “All right, I want to. Yes. I can’t think of not being there when Uni is beaten. I want to throw the explosive myself, or pull the switch myself, or do whatever it is that’s finally done—myself.”

  “You’re sick,” she said. She picked up the sewing in her lap and found the needle and started to sew. “I mean it,” she said. “You’re sick on the subject of Uni. It didn’t put us here; we’re lucky to have got here. Ashi’s right: it would have killed us the way it kills people at sixty-two; it wouldn’t have wasted boats and islands. We got away from it; it’s already been beaten; and you’re sick to want to go back and beat it again.”

  “It put us here,” Chip said, “because the programmers couldn’t justify killing people who were still young.”

  “Cloth,” Lilac said. “They justified killing old people, they’d have justified killing infants. We got away. And now you’re going b
ack.”

  “What about our parents?” he said. “They’re going to be killed in a few more years. What about Snowflake and Sparrow—the whole Family, in fact?”

  She sewed, jabbing the needle into green cloth—the sleeves from her green dress that she was making into a shirt for the baby. “Others should go,” she said. “People without families.”

  Later, in bed, he said, “If anything should go wrong, Julia will take care of you. And the baby.”

  “That’s a great comfort,” she said. “Thanks. Thanks very much. Thank Julia too.”

  It stayed between them from that night on: resentment on her part and refusal to be moved by it on his.

  PART FOUR

  FIGHTING BACK

  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.