This Perfect Day (37 page)

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.

E
ARLY 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.