This Perfect Day (30 page)

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.