This Perfect Day (33 page)

“We’ve got to help them get through,” he said. “If they make it over the bridge they may be able to lose themselves in the city.”

“They’re going to shoot when they get to the scanners,” Dover said.

Chip gave Buzz a blue-handled bomb and said, “Take off the tape and pull when I tell you. Try to get it near the copter; two birds with one net.”

“Do it before they start shooting,” Dover said.

Chip took the binoculars back from him and looked through them and found Jack and Ria again. He scanned the lines ahead of them; about fifteen bikes were between them and the groups at the scanners.

“Do they have bullets or L-beams?” Dover asked.

“Bullets,” Chip said. “Don’t worry, I’ll time it right.” He watched the lines of slow-moving bikes, gauging their speed.

“They’ll probably shoot anyway,” Buzz said. “Just for fun. Did you see that look in Ria’s eyes?”

“Get ready,” Chip said. He watched until Jack and Ria were five bikes from the scanners. “Pull,” he said.

Buzz pulled the handle and threw the bomb underhanded to the side. It hit stone, tumbled downward, bounded off a projection, and landed near the side of the copter. “Get back,” Chip said. He took another look through the binoculars, at Jack and Ria two bikes from the scanners looking tense but confident, and slipped back between Buzz and Dover. “They look as if they’re going to a party,” he said.

They waited, their cheeks on stone, and the explosion roared and the incline shuddered. Metal crashed and grated below. There was silence, and the bomb’s bitter smell; and then voices, murmuring and rising louder. “Those two!” someone shouted.

They edged forward to the rim.

Two bikes were racing onto the bridge. All the others had stopped, their riders standing one-footed, facing toward the copter—tipped to its side below and smoking—and turning now toward the two bikes speeding and the red-cross-coveralled members running after them. The three members in the air veered and flew toward the bridge.

Chip raised the binoculars—to Ria’s bent back and Jack’s ahead of her. They pedaled rapidly in depthless flatness, seeming to get no farther away. A glittering mist appeared, partly obscuring them.

Above, a hovering member downpointed a cylinder gushing thick white gas.

“He’s got them!” Dover said.

Ria stood astride her bike; Jack looked over his shoulder at her.

“Ria, not Jack,” Chip said.

Jack stopped and turned with his gun aimed upward. It jerked, and jerked again.

The member in the air went limp
(crack
and
crack,
the shots sounded), the white-gushing cylinder falling from his hand.

Members fleeing the bridge bicycled in both directions, ran wide-eyed on the flanking walkways.

Ria sat by her bike. She turned her head, and her face was moist and glittering. She looked troubled. Red-crossed coveralls blurred over her.

Jack stared, holding his gun, and his mouth opened big and round, closed and opened again in glittering mist. (“Ria!” Chip heard, small and far away.) Jack raised his gun (“Ria!”) and fired, fired, fired.

Another member in the air
(crack, crack, crack)
went limp and dropped his cylinder. Red spattered on the walkway below him, and more red.

Chip lowered the binoculars.

“Your
gas mask!”
Buzz said. He had binoculars too.

Dover was lying with his face in his arms.

Chip sat up and looked with only his eyes: at the narrow emptied bridge with a faraway cyclist in pale blue wobbling down the middle of it and a member in the air following him at a distance; at the two dead or dying members, turning slowly in the air, drifting; at the red-cross-coveralled members, walking now in a bridge-wide line, and one of them helping a member in yellow by a fallen bike, taking her about the shoulders and leading her back toward the plaza.

The cyclist stopped and looked back toward the red-cross-coveralled members, then turned and bent forward over the front of his bike. The member in the air flew quickly closer and pointed his arm; a thick white feather grew from it and brushed the cyclist.

Chip raised the binoculars.

Jack, gray-snouted in his gas mask, leaned to his left in glittering mist and put a bomb on the bridge. Then he pedaled, skidded, sideslipped, and fell. He raised himself on one arm with the bike lying between his legs. His kit, spilled from the bike’s basket, lay by the bomb.

“Oh Christ and Wei,” Buzz said.

Chip took down the binoculars, looked at the bridge, and then wound the binoculars’ neckstrap tightly around their middle.

“How many?” Dover asked, looking at him.

Chip said, “Three.”

The explosion was bright, loud, and long. Chip watched Ria, walking from the bridge with the red-cross-coveralled member leading her. She didn’t turn around.

Dover, up on his knees and looking, turned to Chip.

“His whole kit,” Chip said. “He was sitting next to it.” He put the binoculars into his kit and closed it. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “Put them away, Buzz. Come on.”

He meant not to look, but before they left the incline he did.

The middle of the bridge was black and rubbled, and its sides were burst outward. A bicycle wheel lay outside the blackened area, and there were other smaller things toward which the red-cross-coveralled members slowly moved. Pieces of pale blue were on the bridge and floating on the river.

They went back to Karl and told him what had happened, and the four of them got on their bikes and rode south for a few kilometers and went into parkland. They found a stream and drank from it and washed.

“And now we turn back?” Dover said.

“No,” Chip said, “not all of us.”

They looked at him.

“I said that we would,” he said, “because if anyone got caught, I wanted him to believe it, and say it when he was questioned. The way Ria’s probably saying it right now.” He took a cigarette that they were passing around—despite the risk of the smoke smell traveling—and drew on it and passed it to Buzz.
“One
of us is going to go back,” he said. “At least I hope only one will go—to set off a bomb or two between here and the coast and take a boat, to make it look as if we’ve stuck to the plan. The rest of us will hide in parkland, work our way closer to ’001, and go for the tunnel in two weeks or so.”

“Good,” Dover said, and Buzz said, “I never thought it made sense to give up so easily.”

“Will three of us be enough?” Karl asked.

“We won’t know till we try,” Chip said. “Would six have been enough? Maybe it can be done by one, and maybe it can’t be done by a dozen. But after coming this far, I fighting well mean to find out.”

“I’m with you; I was just asking,” Karl said. Buzz said, “I’m with you too,” and Dover said, “So am I.”

“Good,” Chip said. “Three stand a better chance than one, that I
do
know. Karl, you’re the one who goes back.”

Karl looked at him. “Why me?” he asked.

“Because you’re forty-three,” Chip said. “I’m sorry, brother, but I can’t think of any other basis for deciding.”

“Chip,” Buzz said, “I think I’d better tell you: my leg has been hurting me for the past few hours. I can make it back or I can go on, but—well, I thought you ought to know.”

Karl gave Chip the cigarette. It was down to a couple of centimeters; he snuffed it into the ground. “All right, Buzz, you’d better be the one,” he said. “Shave first. We’d all better shave, in case we run into anyone.”

They shaved, and then Chip and Buzz worked out a route for Buzz to the nearest part of the coast, about three hundred kilometers away. He would set off a bomb at the airport at ’00015 and another when he was near the sea. He kept two extra in case he needed them and gave his others to Chip. “With luck you’ll be on a boat by tomorrow night,” Chip said. “Make sure there’s nobody counting heads when you take it. Tell Julia, and Lilac too, that we’ll be hiding for at least two weeks, maybe longer.”

Buzz shook hands with all of them, wished them luck, and took his bike and left.

“We’ll stay right here for a while and take turns getting some sleep,” Chip said. “Tonight we’ll go into the city for cakes and cuvs.”

“Cakes,” Karl said, and Dover said, “It’s going to be a long two weeks.”

“No it isn’t,” Chip said. “That was in case
he
gets caught. We’re going to do it in four or five days.”

“Christ and Wei,” Karl said, smiling, “you’re really being cagey.”

T
HEY STAYED
where they were for two days—slept and ate and shaved and practiced fighting, played children’s word games, talked about democratic government and sex and the pygmies of the equatorial forests—and on the third day, Sunday, they bicycled north. Outside of ’00013 they stopped and went up onto the incline overlooking the plaza and the bridge. The bridge was partly repaired and closed off by barriers. Lines of cyclists crossed the plaza in both directions; there were no doctors, no scanners, no copter, no cars. Where the copter had been, there was a rectangle of fresh pink paving.

Early in the afternoon they passed ‘001 and glimpsed at a distance Uni’s white dome beside the Lake of Universal Brotherhood. They went into the parkland beyond the city.

The following evening, at dusk, with their bikes hidden in a branch-covered hollow and their kits on their shoulders, they passed a scanner at the parkland’s farther border and went out onto the grassy slopes that approached Mount Love. They walked briskly, in shoes and green coveralls, with binoculars and gas masks hung about their necks. They held their guns, but as the darkness grew deeper and the slope more rocky and irregular, they pocketed them. Now and then they paused, and Chip put a hand-covered flashlight to his compass.

They came to the first of the three presumed locations of the tunnel’s entrance, and separated and looked for it, using their flashlights guardedly. They didn’t find it.

They started for the second location, a kilometer to the northeast. A half moon came over the shoulder of the mountain, wanly lighting it, and they searched its base carefully as they crossed the rock-slope before it.

The slope became smooth, but only in the strip where they were walking—and they realized that they were on a road, old and scrub-patched. Behind them it curved away toward the parkland; ahead it led into a fold in the mountain.

They looked at one another, and took out their guns. Leaving the road, they moved close to the side of the mountain and edged along slowly in single file—first Chip, then Dover, then Karl—holding their kits to keep them from bumping, holding their guns.

They came to the fold, and waited against the mountainside, listening.

No sound came from within.

They waited and listened, and then Chip looked back at the others and raised his gas mask and fastened it.

They did the same.

Chip stepped out into the opening of the fold, his gun before him. Dover and Karl stepped out beside him.

Within was a deep and level clearing; and opposite, at the base of sheer mountain wall, the black round flat-bottomed opening of a large tunnel.

It appeared to be completely unprotected.

They lowered their masks and looked at the opening through their binoculars. They looked at the mountain above it and, taking a few steps forward, looked at the fold’s outcurving walls and the oval of sky that roofed it.

“Buzz must have done a good job,” Karl said.

“Or a bad one and got caught,” Dover said.

Chip swung his binoculars back to the opening. Its rim had a glassy sheen, and pale green scrub lay along its bottom. “It feels like the boats on the beaches,” he said. “Sitting there wide open . . .”

“Do you think it leads back to Liberty?” Dover asked, and Karl laughed.

Chip said, “There could be fifty traps that we won’t see until it’s too late.” He lowered his binoculars.

Karl said, “Maybe Ria didn’t say anything.”

“When you’re questioned at a medicenter you say
everything,”
Chip said. “But even if she didn’t, wouldn’t it at least be closed? That’s what we’ve got the tools for.”

Karl said, “It must still be in use.”

Chip stared at the opening.

“We can always go back,” Dover said.

“Sure, let’s,” Chip said.

They looked all around them, and raised their masks into place, and walked slowly across the clearing. No gas jetted, no alarms sounded, no members in antigrav gear appeared in the sky.

They walked to the opening of the tunnel and shone their flashlights into it. Light shimmered and sparked in high plastic-lined roundness, all the way to the place where the tunnel seemed to end, but no, was bending to its downward angle. Two steel tracks reached into it, wide and flat, with a couple of meters of unplasticked black rock between them.

They looked back at the clearing and up at the opening’s rim. They stepped inside the tunnel, looked at one another, and lowered their masks and sniffed.

“Well,” Chip said. “Ready to walk?”

Karl nodded, and Dover, smiling, said, “Let’s go.”

They stood for a moment, and then walked ahead on the smooth black rock between the tracks.

“Will the air be all right?” Karl asked.

“We’ve got the masks if it isn’t,” Chip said. He shone his flashlight on his watch. “It’s a quarter of ten,” he said. “We should be there around one.”

“Uni’ll be up,” Dover said.

“Till we put it to sleep,” Karl said.

The tunnel bent to a slight incline, and they stopped and looked—at plastic roundness glimmering away and away and away into blackest black.

“Christ and Wei,” Karl said.

They started walking again, at a brisker pace, side by side between the tracks. “We should have brought the bikes,” Dover said. “We could have coasted.”

“Let’s keep the talk to a minimum,” Chip said. “And just one light at a time. Yours now, Karl.”

They walked without talking, behind the light of Karl’s flashlight. They took their binoculars off and put them in their kits.

Chip felt that Uni was listening to them, was recording the vibrations of their footsteps or the heat of their bodies. Would they be able to overcome the defenses it surely was readying, outfight its members, resist its gases? (Were the gas masks any good? Had Jack fallen because he had got his on too late, or would getting it on sooner have made no difference?)