This Perfect Day (32 page)

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.