This Perfect Day (2 page)

Bob snapped the telecomp’s catches. “He’s probably as worried as you were,” he said.

“Can he have an extra treatment too?”

“If he needs one; I’ll alert his adviser. Now to
sleep,
brother; you’ve got school tomorrow.” Bob took Chip’s comic book and put it on the night table.

Chip lay down and snuggled smilingly into his pillow, and Bob stood up, tapped off the lamp, ruffled Chip’s hair again, and bent and kissed the back of his head.

“See you Friday,” Chip said.

“Right,” Bob said. “Good night.”

“’Night, Bob.”

Chip’s parents stood up anxiously when Bob came into the living room.

“He’s fine,” Bob said. “Practically asleep already. He’s getting an extra treatment during his lunch hour tomorrow, probably a bit of tranquilizer.”

“Oh, what a relief,” Chip’s mother said, and his father said, “Thanks, Bob.”

“Thank Uni,” Bob said. He went to the phone. “I want to get some help to the other boy,” he said, “the one who told him”—and touched his bracelet to the phone’s plate.

The next day, after lunch, Chip rode the escalators down from his school to the medicenter three floors below. His bracelet, touched to the scanner at the medicenter’s entrance, produced a winking green
yes
on the indicator; and another winking green
yes
at the door of the therapy section; and another winking green
yes
at the door of the treatment room.

Four of the fifteen units were being serviced, so the line was fairly long. Soon enough, though, he was mounting children’s steps and thrusting his arm, with the sleeve pushed high, through a rubber-rimmed opening. He held his arm grown-uply still while the scanner inside found and fastened on his bracelet and the infusion disc nuzzled warm and smooth against his upper arm’s softness. Motors burred inside the unit, liquids trickled. The blue light overhead turned red and the infusion disc tickled-buzzed-stung his arm; and then the light turned blue again.

Later that day, in the playground, Jesus DV, the boy who had told him about the incurables, sought Chip out and thanked him for helping him.

“Thank Uni,” Chip said. “I got an extra treatment; did you?”

“Yes,” Jesus said. “So did the other kids and Bob UT. He’s the one who told me.”

“It scared me a little,” Chip said, “thinking about members getting sick and running away.”

“Me too a little,” Jesus said. “But it doesn’t happen any more; it was a long, long time ago.”

“Treatments are better now than they used to be,” Chip said.

Jesus said, “And we’ve got UniComp watching out for us everywhere on Earth.”

“Right you are,” Chip said.

A supervisor came and shooed them into a passball circle, an enormous one of fifty or sixty boys and girls spaced out at fingertip distance, taking up more than a quarter of the busy playground.

C
HIP’S GRANDFATHER
was the one who had given him the name Chip. He had given all of them extra names that were different from their real ones: Chip’s mother, who was his daughter, he called “Suzu” instead of Anna; Chip’s father was “Mike” not Jesus (and thought the idea foolish); and Peace was “Willow,” which she refused to have anything at all to do with. “No! Don’t call me that! I’m Peace! I’m Peace KD37T5002!”

Papa Jan was odd. Odd-looking, naturally; all grandparents had their marked peculiarities—a few centimeters too much or too little of height, skin that was too light or too dark, big ears, a bent nose. Papa Jan was both taller and darker than normal, his eyes were big and bulging, and there were two reddish patches in his graying hair. But he wasn’t only odd-looking, he was odd-talking; that was the real oddness about him. He was always saying things vigorously and with enthusiasm and yet giving Chip the feeling that he didn’t mean them at all, that he meant in fact their exact opposites. On that subject of names, for instance: “Marvelous! Wonderful!” he said. “Four names for boys, four names for girls! What could be more friction-free, more everyone-the-same? Everybody would name boys after Christ, Marx, Wood, or Wei anyway, wouldn’t they?”

“Yes,” Chip said.

“Of course!” Papa Jan said. “And if Uni gives out four names for boys it has to give out four names for girls too, right? Obviously! Listen.” He stopped Chip and, crouching down, spoke face to face with him, his bulging eyes dancing as if he was about to laugh. It was a holiday and they were on their way to the parade, Unification Day or Wei’s Birthday or whatever; Chip was seven. “Listen, Li RM35M26J449988WXYZ,” Papa Jan said. “Listen, I’m going to tell you something fantastic, incredible. In my day—are you listening?—in my day there were
oyer twenty different names for boys alone!
Would you believe it? Love of Family, it’s the truth. There was ‘Jan,’ and ‘John,’ and ‘Amu,’ and ‘Lev.’ ‘Higa’ and ‘Mike’! ‘Tonio’! And in my father’s time there were even more, maybe forty or fifty! Isn’t that ridiculous? All those different names when members themselves are exactly the same and interchangeable? Isn’t that the silliest thing you ever heard of?”

And Chip nodded, confused, feeling that Papa Jan meant the opposite, that somehow it
wasn’t
silly and ridiculous to have forty or fifty different names for boys alone.

“Look at them!” Papa Jan said, taking Chip’s hand and walking on with him—through Unity Park to the Wei’s Birthday parade. “Exactly the same! Isn’t it marvelous? Hair the same, eyes the same, skin the same, shape the same; boys, girls, all the same. Like peas in a pod. Isn’t it fine? Isn’t it top speed?”

Chip, flushing (not his green eye, not the same as
anybody’s),
said, “What does ‘peezinapod’ mean?”

“I don’t know,” Papa Jan said. “Things members used to eat before totalcakes. Sharya used to say it.”

He was a construction supervisor in EUR55131, twenty kilometers from ’55128, where Chip and his family lived. On Sundays and holidays he rode over and visited them. His wife, Sharya, had drowned in a sightseeing-boat disaster in 135, the same year Chip was born; he hadn’t remarried.

Chip’s other grandparents, his father’s mother and father, lived in MEX10405, and the only time he saw them was when they phoned on birthdays. They were odd, but not nearly as odd as Papa Jan.

School was pleasant and play was pleasant. The Pre-U Museum was pleasant although some of the exhibits were a bit scary—the “spears” and “guns,” for instance, and the “prison cell” with its striped-suited “convict” sitting on the cot and clutching his head in motionless month-after-month woe. Chip always looked at him—he would slip away from the rest of the class if he had to—and having looked, he always walked quickly away.

Ice cream and toys and comic books were pleasant too. Once when Chip put his bracelet and a toy’s sticker to a supply-center scanner, its indicator red-winked
no
and he had to put the toy, a construction set, in the turnback bin. He couldn’t understand why Uni had refused him; it was the right day and the toy was in the right category. “There
must
be a reason, dear,” the member behind him said. “You go call your adviser and find out.”

He did, and it turned out that the toy was only being withheld for a few days, not denied completely; he had been teasing a scanner somewhere, putting his bracelet to it again and again, and he was being taught not to. That winking red
no
was the first in his life for a claim that mattered to him, not just for starting into the wrong classroom or coming to the medicenter on the wrong day; it hurt him and saddened him.

Birthdays were pleasant, and Christmas and Marxmas and Unification Day and Wood’s and Wei’s Birthdays. Even more pleasant, because they came less frequently, were his linkdays. The new link would be shinier than the others, and would stay shiny for days and days and days; and then one day he would remember and look and there would be only old links, all of them the same and indistinguishable. Like peezinapod.

In the spring of 145, when Chip was ten, he and his parents and Peace were granted the trip to EUR00001 to see UniComp. It was over an hour’s ride from carport to carport and the longest trip Chip remembered making, although according to his parents he had flown from Mex to Eur when he was one and a half, and from EUR20140 to ’55128 a few months later. They made the UniComp trip on a Sunday in April, riding with a couple in their fifties (someone’s odd-looking grandparents, both of them lighter than normal, she with her hair unevenly clipped) and another family, the boy and girl of which were a year older than Chip and Peace. The other father drove the car from the EUR00001 turnoff to the carport near UniComp. Chip watched with interest as the man worked the car’s lever and buttons. It felt funny to be riding slowly on wheels again after shooting along on air.

They took snapshots outside UniComp’s white marble dome —whiter and more beautiful than it was in pictures or on TV, as the snow-tipped mountains beyond it were more stately, the Lake of Universal Brotherhood more blue and far-reaching —and then they joined the line at the entrance, touched the admission scanner, and went into the blue-white curving lobby. A smiling member in pale blue showed them toward the elevator line. They joined it, and Papa Jan came up to them, grinning with delight at their astonishment.

“What are
you
doing here?” Chip’s father asked as Papa Jan kissed Chip’s mother. They had told him they had been granted the trip and he had said nothing at all about claiming it himself.

Papa Jan kissed Chip’s father. “Oh, I just decided to surprise you, that’s all,” he said. “I wanted to tell my friend here” —he laid a large hand across Chip’s shoulder—“a little more about Uni than the earpiece will. Hello, Chip.” He bent and kissed Chip’s cheek, and Chip, surprised to be the reason for Papa Jan’s being there, kissed him in return and said, “Hello, Papa Jan.”

“Hello, Peace KD37T5002,” Papa Jan said gravely, and kissed Peace. She kissed him and said hello.

“When did you claim the trip?” Chip’s father asked.

“A few days after you did,” Papa Jan said, keeping his hand on Chip’s shoulder. The line moved up a few meters and they all moved with it.

Chip’s mother said, “But you were here only five or six years ago, weren’t you?”

“Uni knows who put it together,” Papa Jan said, smiling. “We get special favors.”

“That’s not so,” Chip’s father said. “No one gets special favors.”

“Well, here I am, anyway,” Papa Jan said, and turned his smile down toward Chip. “Right?”

“Right,” Chip said, and smiled back up at him.

Papa Jan had helped build UniComp when he was a young man. It had been his first assignment.

The elevator held about thirty members, and instead of music it had a man’s voice—“Good day, brothers and sisters; welcome to the site of UniComp”—a warm, friendly voice that Chip recognized from TV. “As you can tell, we’ve started to move,” it said, “and now we’re descending at a speed of twenty-two meters per second. It will take us just over three and a half minutes to reach Uni’s five-kilometer depth. This shaft down which we’re traveling . . .” The voice gave statistics about the size of UniComp’s housing and the thickness of its walls, and told of its safety from all natural and man-made disturbances. Chip had heard this information before, in school and on TV, but hearing it now, while entering that housing and passing through those walls, while on the very verge of
seeing
UniComp, made it seem new and exciting. He listened attentively, watching the speaker disc over the elevator door. Papa Jan’s hand still held his shoulder, as if to restrain him. “We’re slowing now,” the voice said. “Enjoy your visit, won’t you?”—and the elevator sank to a cushiony stop and the door divided and slid to both sides.

There was another lobby, smaller than the one at ground level, another smiling member in pale blue, and another line, this one extending two by two to double doors that opened on a dimly lit hallway.

“Here we are!” Chip called, and Papa Jan said to him, “We don’t all have to be together.” They had become separated from Chip’s parents and Peace, who were farther ahead in the line and looking back at them questioningly—Chip’s parents; Peace was too short to be seen. The member in front of Chip turned and offered to let them move up, but Papa Jan said, “No, this is all right. Thank you, brother.” He waved a hand at Chip’s parents and smiled, and Chip did the same. Chip’s parents smiled back, then turned around and moved forward.

Papa Jan looked about, his bulging eyes bright, his mouth keeping its smile. His nostrils flared and fell with his breathing. “So,” he said, “you’re finally going to see UniComp. Excited?”

“Yes, very,” Chip said.

They followed the line forward.

“I don’t blame you,” Papa Jan said. “Wonderful! Once-in-a-lifetime experience, to see the machine that’s going to classify you and give you your assignments, that’s going to decide where you’ll live and whether or not you’ll marry the girl you want to marry; and if you do, whether or not you’ll have children and what they’ll be named if you have them—of course you’re excited; who wouldn’t be?”

Chip looked at Papa Jan, disturbed.

Papa Jan, still smiling, clapped him on the back as they passed in their turn into the hallway. “Go look!” he said. “Look at the displays, look at Uni, look at everything! It’s all here for you; look at it!”

There was a rack of earpieces, the same as in a museum; Chip took one and put it in. Papa Jan’s strange manner made him nervous, and he was sorry not to be up ahead with his parents and Peace. Papa Jan put in an earpiece too. “I wonder what interesting new facts I’m going to hear!” he said, and laughed to himself. Chip turned away from him.

His nervousness and feeling of disturbance fell away as he faced a wall that glittered and skittered with a thousand sparkling minilights. The voice of the elevator spoke in his ear, telling him, while the lights showed him, how UniComp received from its round-the-world relay belt the microwave impulses of all the uncountable scanners and telecomps and tele-controlled devices; how it evaluated the impulses and sent back its answering impulses to the relay belt and the sources of inquiry.

Yes, he was excited. Was anything quicker, more clever, more everywhere than Uni?