This Perfect Day Part 14

"It's possible," she said.

"It's worth looking for anyway," he said.

They went out onto the walkway.

"Which way do you go?" he asked.

"West," she said.

"I'll go a few blocks with you."

"No," she said. "Really, the longer you're out, the more chances there are for someone to see you not touching."

"I touch the rim of the scanner and block it with my body. Very tricky."

"No," she said. "Please, go your own way."

"All right," he said. "Good night."

"Good night."

He put his hand on her shoulder and kissed her cheek.

She didn't move away; she was tense and waiting under his hand.

He kissed her lips. They were warm and soft, slightly parted, and she turned and walked away.

"Lilac," he said, and went after her.

She turned and said, "No. Please, Chip, go," and turned and walked away again.

He stood uncertainly. Another member was in the distance, coming toward them.

He watched her go, hating her, loving her.

5.

EVENING AFTER EVENING he ate quickly (but not too quickly), then railed to the Museum of the Family's Achievements and studied its maze of ceiling-high illuminated maps until the ten-of-TV closing. One night he went there after the last chime-an hour-and-a-half walk-but found that the maps were unreadable by flashlight, their markings lost in glare; and he hesitated to put on their internal lights, which, tied in as they seemed to be with the lighting of the entire hall, might have produced a Uni-alerting overdraft of power. On Sunday he took Mary KK there, sent her off to see the Universe of Tomorrow exhibit, and studied the maps for three hours straight.

He found nothing: no island without its city or industrial installation; no mountaintop that wasn't s.p.a.cewatch or climatonomy center; no square kilometer of land-or of ocean floor, for that matter-that wasn't being mined or harvested or used for factories or houses or airports or parkland by the Family's eight billion. The gold-lettered legend suspended at the entrance of the map area-The Earth Is Our Heritage; We Use It Wisely and Without Waste-seemed true, so true that there was no place left for even the smallest non-Family community.

Leopard died and Sparrow sang. King sat silently, picking at the gears of a pre-U gadget, and Snowflake wanted more s.e.x.

Chip said to Lilac, "Nothing. Nothing at all."

"There must have been hundreds of little colonies to begin with," she said. "One of them must have survived."

"Then it's half a dozen members in a cave somewhere," he said.

"Please, keep looking," she said. "You can't have checked every island."

He thought about it, sitting in the dark in the twentieth-century car, holding its steering wheel, moving its different k.n.o.bs and levers; and the more he thought about it, the less possible a city or even a colony of incurables came to seem. Even if he had overlooked an unused area on the maps, could a community exist without Uni learning of it? People made marks on their environment; a thousand people, even a hundred, would raise an area's temperature, soil its streams with their wastes, and its air perhaps with their primitive fires. The land or sea for kilometers around would be affected by their presence in a dozen detectable ways.

So Uni would have long since known of the theoretical city's existence, and having known, would have-done what? Dispatched doctors and advisers and portable treatment units; would have "cured" the incurables and made them into "healthy" members.

Unless, of course, they had defended themselves . . . Their ancestors had fled the Family soon after the Unification, when treatments were optional, or later, when they were compulsory but not yet at present-day effectiveness; surely some of those incurables must have defended their retreats by force, with deadly weapons. Wouldn't they have handed on the practice, and the weapons too, to succeeding generations? What would Uni do today, in 162, facing an armed, defensive community with an unarmed, unaggressive Family? What would it have done five or twenty-five years ago, detecting the signs of it? Let it be? Leave its inhabitants to their "sickness" and their few square kilometers of the world? Spray the city with LPK? But what if the city's weapons could bring down planes? Would Uni decide in its cold steel blocks that the cost of the "cure" outweighed its usefulness?

He was two days from a treatment, his mind as active as it ever got. He wished it could get still more active. He felt that there was something he wasn't thinking of, just beyond the rim of his awareness.

If Uni let the city be, rather than sacrifice members and time and technology to the "helping" of it-then what? There was something else, a next idea to be picked and pried out of that one.

He called the medicenter on Thursday, the day before his treatment, and complained of a toothache. He was offered a Friday-morning appointment, but he said that he was coming in on Sat.u.r.day morning for his treatment and couldn't he catch two birds with one net? It wasn't a severe toothache, just a slight throb.

He was given an appointment for Sat.u.r.day morning at 8:15.

Then he called Bob RO and told him that he had a dental appointment at 8:15 on Sat.u.r.day. Did he think it would be a good idea if he got his treatment then too? Catch two birds with one net.

"I guess you might as well," Bob said. "Hold on"-and switched on his telecomp. "You're Li RM-"

"Thirty-fiveM4419."

"Right," Bob said, tapping keys.

Chip sat and watched unconcernedly.

"Sat.u.r.day morning at 8:05," Bob said.

"Fine," Chip said. "Thanks."

"Thank Uni," Bob said.

Which gave him a day longer between treatments than he'd had before.

That night, Thursday, was a rain night, and he stayed in his room. He sat at his desk with his forehead on his fists, thinking, wis.h.i.+ng he were in the museum and able to smoke.

If a city of incurables existed, and Uni knew about it and was leaving it to its armed defenders-then-then- Then Uni wasn't letting the Family know-and be troubled or in some instances tempted-and it was feeding concealing data to the mapmaking equipment.

Of course! How could supposedly unused areas be shown on beautiful Family maps? "But look at that place there, Daddy!" a child visiting the MFA exclaims. "Why aren't we Using Our Heritage Wisely and Without Waste?" And Daddy replies, "Yes that is odd . . ." So the city would be labeled IND99999 or Enormous Desk Lamp Factory, and no one would ever be pa.s.sed within five kilometers of it. If it were an island it wouldn't be shown at all; blue ocean would replace it.

And looking at maps was therefore useless. There could be cities of incurables here, there, everywhere. Or-there could be none at all. The maps proved or disproved nothing.

Was this the great revelation he had racked his brain for- that his map-examining had been stupidity from the beginning? That there was no way at all of finding the city, except possibly by walking everywhere on Earth?

Fight Lilac, with her maddening ideas!

No, not really.

Fight Uni.

For half an hour he drove his mind against the problem-how do you find a theoretical city in an untravelable world?- and finally he gave up and went to bed.

He thought then of Lilac, of the kiss she had resisted and the kiss she had allowed, and of the strange arousal he had felt when she showed him her soft-looking conical b.r.e.a.s.t.s . . .

On Friday he was tense and on edge. Acting normal was unendurable; he held his breath all day long at the Center, and through dinner, TV, and Photography Club. After the last chime he walked to Snowflake's building-"Ow," she said, "I'm not going to be able to move tomorrow!"-and then to the Pre-U. He circled the halls by flashlight, unable to put the idea aside. The city might exist, it might even be somewhere near. He looked at the money display and the prisoner in his cell (The two of us, brother) and the locks and the flat-picture cameras.

There was one answer that he could see, but it involved getting dozens of members into the group. Each could then check out the maps according to his own limited knowledge. He himself, for instance, could verify the genetics labs and research centers and the cities he had seen or heard spoken of by other members. Lilac could verify the advisory establishments and other cities . . . But it would take forever, and an army of undertreated accomplices. He could hear King raging.

He looked at the 1951 map, and marveled as he always did at the strange names and the intricate networks of borders. Yet members then could go where they wanted, more or less! Thin shadows moved in response to his light at the edges of the map's neat patches, cut to fit precisely into the crosslines of the grid. If not for the moving flashlight the blue rectangles would have been corn- Blue rectangles . . .

If the city were an island it wouldn't be shown; blue ocean would replace it.

And would have to replace it on pre-U maps as well.

He didn't let himself get excited. He moved the flashlight slowly back and forth over the gla.s.s-covered map and counted the shadow-moving patches. There were eight of them, all blue. All in the oceans, evenly distributed. Five of them covered single rectangles of the grid, and three covered pairs of rectangles. One of the one-rectangle patches was right there off Ind, in "Bay of Bengal"-Stability Bay.

He put the flashlight on a display case and took hold of the wide map by both sides of its frame. He lifted it free of its hook, lowered it to the floor, leaned its gla.s.sed face against his knee, and took up the flashlight again.

The frame was old, but its gray-paper backing looked relatively new. The letters EV were stamped at the bottom of it.

He carried the map by its wire across the hall, down the escalator, across the second-floor hall, and into the storeroom. Tapping on the light, he brought the map to the table and laid it carefully face-down.

With the corner of a fingernail he tore the taut paper backing along the bottom and sides of the frame, pulled it out from under the wire, and pressed it back so that it stayed. White cardboard lay in the frame, pinned down by ranks of short brads.

He searched in the cartons of smaller relics until he found a rusted pair of pincers with a yellow sticker around one handle. He used the pincers to pull the brads from the frame, then lifted out the cardboard and another piece of cardboard that lay beneath it.

The back of the map was brown-blotched but untorn, with no holes that would have justified the patching. A line of brown writing was faintly visible: Wyndham, MU 7-2161-some kind of early nameber.

He picked at the map's edges and lifted it from the gla.s.s, turned it over and raised it sagging above his head against the white light of the ceiling. Islands showed through all the patches: here a large one, "Madagascar"; here a cl.u.s.ter of small ones, "Azores." The patch in Stability Bay showed a line of four small ones, "Andaman Islands." He remembered none of the patch-covered islands from the maps at the MFA.

He put the map back down in the frame, face-up, and leaned his hands on the table and looked at it, grinned at its pre-U oddity, its eight blue almost-invisible rectangles. Lilac! he thought. Wait till I tell you!

With the head of the frame propped on piles of books and his flashlight standing under the gla.s.s, he traced on a sheet of paper the four small "Andaman Islands" and the sh.o.r.eline of "Bay of Bengal." He copied down the names and locations of the other islands and traced the map's scale, which was in "miles" rather than kilometers.

One pair of medium-size islands, "Falkland Islands," was off the coast of Arg ("Argentina") opposite "Santa Cruz," which seemed to be ARG20400. Something teased his memory in that, but he couldn't think what.

He measured the Andaman Islands; the three that were closest together were about a hundred and twenty "miles" in overall length-somewhere around two hundred kilometers, if he remembered correctly; big enough for several cities! The shortest approach to them would be from the other side of Stability Bay, SEA77122, if he and Lilac (and King? Snowflake? Sparrow?) were to go there. If they were to go? Of course they would go, now that he had found the islands. They'd manage it somehow; they had to.

He turned the map face-down in the frame, put back the pieces of cardboard, and pushed the brads back into their holes with a handle-end of the pincers-wondering as he did so why ARG20400 and the "Falkland Islands" kept poking at his memory.

He slipped the frame's backing in under the wire-Sunday night he would bring tape and make a better job of it-and carried the map back up to the third floor. He hung it on its hook and made sure the loose backing didn't show from the sides.

ARG20400... A new zinc mine being cut underneath it had been shown recently on TV; was that why it seemed significant? He'd certainly never been there . . .

He went down to the bas.e.m.e.nt and got three tobacco leaves from behind the hot-water tank. He brought them up to the storeroom, got his smoking things from the carton he kept them in, and sat down at the table and began cutting the leaves.

Could there possibly be another reason why the islands were covered and unmapped? And who did the covering?

Enough. He was tired of thinking. He let his mind go-to the knife's s.h.i.+ny blade, to Hush and Sparrow cutting tobacco the first time he'd seen them. He had asked Hush where the seeds had come from, and she'd said that King had had them.

And he remembered where he had seen ARG20400-the nameber, not the city itself.

A screaming woman in torn coveralls was being led into Medicenter Main by red-cross-coveralled members on either side of her. They held her arms and seemed to be talking to her, but she kept on screaming-short sharp screams, each the same as the others, that screamed again from building walls and screamed again from farther in the night. The woman kept on screaming and the walls and the night kept screaming with her.

He waited until the woman and the members leading her had gone into the building, waited longer while the far-off screams lessened to silence, and then he slowly crossed the walkway and went in. He lurched against the admission scanner as if off balance, clicking his bracelet below the plate on metal, and went slowly and normally to an up-gliding escalator. He stepped onto it and rode with his hand on the rail. Somewhere in the building the woman still screamed, but then she stopped.

The second floor was lighted. A member pa.s.sing in the hallway with a tray of gla.s.ses nodded to him. He nodded back.

The third and fourth floors were lighted too, but the escalator to the fifth floor wasn't moving and there was darkness above. He walked up the steps, to the fifth floor and the sixth.

He walked by flashlight down the sixth-floor hallway- quickly now, not slowly-past the doors he had gone through with the two doctors, the woman who had called him "young brother" and the scar-cheeked man who had watched him. He walked to the end of the hallway, s.h.i.+ning his light on the door marked 600A and Chief, Chemotherapeutics Division.

He went through the anteroom and into King's office. The large desk was neater than before: the scuffed telecomp, a pile of folders, the container of pens-and the two paperweights, the unusual square one and the ordinary round one. He picked up the round one-ARG20400 was inscribed on it-and held its cool plated-metal weight on his palm for a moment. Then he put it down, next to King's young smiling snapshot at Uni's dome.

He went around behind the desk, opened the center drawer, and searched in it until he found a plastic-coated section roster. He scanned the half column of Jesuses and found Jesus HL09E6290. His cla.s.sification was 080A; his residence, G35, room 1744.

He paused outside the door for a moment, suddenly realizing that Lilac might be there too, dozing next to King under his outstretched possessing arm. Good! he thought. Let her hear it at first hand! He opened the door, went in, and closed it softly behind him. He aimed his flashlight toward the bed and switched it on.

King was alone, his gray head encircled by his arms.

He was glad and sorry. More glad, though. He would tell her later, come to her triumphantly and tell her all he had found.

He tapped on the light, switched off the flashlight, and put it in his pocket. "King," he said.

The head and the pajamaed arms stayed unmoving.

"King," he said, and went and stood beside the bed. "Wake up, Jesus HL," he said.

King rolled onto his back and laid a hand over his eyes. Fingers c.h.i.n.ked and an eye squinted between them.

"I want to speak to you," Chip said.

"What are you doing here?" King asked. "What time is it?"

Chip glanced at the clock. "Four-fifty," he said.

King sat up, palming at his eyes. "What the hate's going on?" he said. "What are you doing here?"

Chip got the desk chair and put it near the foot of the bed and sat down. The room was untidy, coveralls caught in the chute, tea stains on the floor.

King coughed into the side of a fist, and coughed again. He kept the fist at his mouth, looking red-eyed at Chip, his hair pressed to his scalp in patches.