by Ira Levin
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 glass, 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 cluster 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 glass, he traced on a sheet of paper the four small “Andaman Islands” and the shoreline 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 basement 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 shiny 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 passing in the hallway with a tray of glasses 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, shining 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 classification 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 chinked 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.
Chip said, “I want to know what it’s like on the Falkland Islands.”
King lowered his hand. “On what islands?” he said.
“Falkland,” Chip said. “Where you got the tobacco seeds. And the perfume you gave Lilac.”
“I made the perfume,” King said.
“And the tobacco seeds? Did you make them?”
King said, “Someone gave them to me.”
“In ARG20400?”
After a moment King nodded.
“Where did he get them?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“No,” King said, “I didn’t. Why don’t you get back where you’re supposed to be? We can talk about this tomorrow night.”
“I’m staying,” Chip said. “I’m staying here until I hear the truth. I’m due for a treatment at 8:05. If I don’t take it on time, everything’s going to be finished—me, you, the group. You’re not going to be king of anything.”
“You brother-fighter,” King said, “get out of here.”
“I’m staying,” Chip said.
“I’ve told you the truth.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Then go fight yourself,” King said, and lay down and turned over onto his stomach.
> Chip stayed as he was. He sat looking at King and waiting.
After a few minutes King turned over again and sat up. He threw aside the blanket, swung his legs around, and sat with his bare feet on the floor. He scratched with both hands at his pajamaed thighs. “’Americanueva,’” he said, “not ‘Falkland.’ They come ashore and trade. Hairy-faced creatures in cloth and leather.” He looked at Chip. “Diseased, disgusting savages,” he said, “who speak in a way that’s barely understandable.”
“They exist, they’ve survived.”
“That’s all they’ve done. Their hands are like wood from working. They steal from one another and go hungry.”
“But they haven’t come back to the Family.”
“They’d be better off if they did,” King said. “They’ve still got religion going. And alcohol-drinking.”
“How long do they live?” Chip asked.
King said nothing.
“Past sixty-two?” Chip asked.
King’s eyes narrowed coldly. “What’s so magnificent about living,” he said, “that it has to be prolonged indefinitely? What’s so fantastically beautiful about life here or life there that makes sixty-two not enough of it instead of too fighting much? Yes, they live past sixty-two. One of them claimed to be eighty, and looking at him, I believed it. But they die younger too, in their thirties, even in their twenties—from work and filth and defending their ‘money.’”
“That’s only one group of islands,” Chip said. “There are seven others.”
“They’ll all be the same,” King said. “They’ll all be the same.”
“How do you know?”
“How can they not be?” King asked. “Christ and Wei, if I’d thought a halfway-human life was possible I’d have said something!”
“You should have said something anyway,” Chip said. “There are islands right here in Stability Bay. Leopard and Hush might have got to them and still be living.”
“They’d be dead.”
“Then you should have let them choose where they died,” Chip said. “You’re not Uni.”
He got up and put the chair back by the desk. He looked at the phone screen, reached over the desk, and took the adviser’s-nameber card from under the rim of it: Anna SG38P2823.
“You mean you don’t know her nameber?” King said. “What do you do, meet in the dark? Or haven’t you worked your way out to her extremities yet?”
Chip put the card into his pocket. “We don’t meet at all,” he said.
“Oh come on,” King said, “I know what’s been going on. What do you think I am, a dead body?”
“Nothing’s been going on,” Chip said. “She came to the museum once and I gave her the word lists for Français, that’s all.”
“I can just imagine,” King said. “Get out of here, will you? I need my sleep.” He lay back on the bed, put his legs in under the blanket, and spread the blanket up over his chest.
“Nothing’s been going on,” Chip said. “She feels that she owes you too much.”
With his eyes closed, King said, “But we’ll soon take care of that, won’t we?”
Chip said nothing for a moment, and then he said, “You should have told us. About Americanova.”
“Americanueva,” King said, and then said nothing more. He lay with his eyes closed, his blanketed chest rising and falling rapidly.
Chip went to the door and tapped off the light. “I’ll see you tomorrow night,” he said.
“I hope you get there,” King said. “The two of you. To Americanueva. You deserve it.”
Chip opened the door and went out.
King’s bitterness depressed him, but after he had been walking for fifteen minutes or so he began to feel cheerful and optimistic, and elated with the results of his night of extra clarity. His right-hand pocket was crisp with a map of Stability Bay and the Andaman Islands, the names and locations of the other incurable strongholds, and Lilac’s red-printed nameber card. Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei, what would he be capable of with no treatments at all?
He took the card out and read it as he walked. Anna SG38P2823. He would call her after the first chime and arrange to meet her—during the free hour that evening. Anna SG. Not she, not an “Anna”; a Lilac she was, fragrant, delicate, beautiful. (Who had picked the name, she or King? Incredible. The hater thought they had been meeting and fucking. If only!) Thirty-eight P, twenty-eight twenty-three. He walked to the swing of the nameber for a while, then realized he was walking too briskly and slowed himself, pocketing the card again.
He would be back in his building before the first chime, would shower, change, call Lilac, eat (he was starving), then get his treatment at 8:05 and keep his 8:15 dental appointment (“It feels much better today, sister. The throbbing’s almost completely gone”). The treatment would dull him, fight it, but not so much that he wouldn’t be able to tell Lilac about the Andaman Islands and start planning with her—and with Snowflake and Sparrow if they were interested—how they would try to get there. Snowflake would probably choose to stay. He hoped so; it would simplify things tremendously. Yes, Snowflake would stay with King, laugh and smoke and fuck with him, and play that mechanical paddle-ball game. And he and Lilac would go.
Anna SG, thirty-eight P, twenty-eight twenty-three . . .
He got to the building at 6:22. Two up-early members were coming down his hallway, one naked, one dressed. He smiled and said, “Good morning, sisters.”
“Good morning,” they said, smiling back.
He went into his room, tapped on the light, and Bob was on the bed, lifting himself up on his elbows and blinking at him. His telecomp lay open on the floor, its blue and amber lights gleaming.
6
HE CLOSED the door behind him.
Bob swung his legs off the bed and sat up, looking at him anxiously. His coveralls were partway open. “Where’ve you been, Li?” he asked.
“In the lounge,” Chip said. “I went back there after Photography Club—I’d left my pen there—and I suddenly got very tired. From being late on my treatment, I guess. I sat down to rest and”—he smiled—“all of a sudden it’s morning.”
Bob looked at him, still anxiously, and after a moment shook his head. “I checked the lounge,” he said. “And Mary KK’s room, and the gym, and the bottom of the pool.”
“You must have missed me,” Chip said. “I was in the corner behind—”
“I checked the lounge, Li,” Bob said. He pressed closed his coveralls and shook his head despairingly.
Chip moved from the door, walked a slow away-from-Bob curve toward the bathroom. “I’ve got to ure,” he said.
He went into the bathroom and opened his coveralls and urined, trying to find the extra mental clarity he had had before, trying to think of an explanation that would satisfy Bob or at worst seem like only a one-night aberration. Why had Bob come there anyway? How long had he been there?
“I called at eleven-thirty,” Bob said, “and there was no answer. Where have you been between then and now?”
He closed his coveralls. “I was walking around,” he said— loudly, to reach Bob in the room.
“Without touching scanners?” Bob said.
Christ and Wei.
“I must have forgot,” he said, and turned on the water and rinsed his fingers. “It’s this toothache,” he said. “It’s gotten worse. The whole side of my head aches.” He wiped his fingers, looking in the mirror at Bob on the bed looking back at him. “It was keeping me awake,” he said, “so I went out and walked around. I told you that story about the lounge because I know I should have gone right down to the—”
“It was keeping me awake too,” Bob said, “that ‘toothache’ of yours. I saw you during TV and you looked tense and abnormal. So finally I pulled the nameber of the dental-appointment clerk. You were offered a Friday appointment but you said your treatment was on Saturday.”
Chip put the towel down and turned and stood facing Bob in the doorway.
The first chim
e sounded, and “One Mighty Family” began to play.
Bob said, “It was all an act, wasn’t it, Li—the slowdown last spring, the sleepiness and overtreatedness.”
After a moment Chip nodded.
“Oh, brother,” Bob said. “What have you been doing?”
Chip didn’t say anything.
“Oh, brother,” Bob said, and bent over and switched his telecomp off. He closed its cover and snapped the catches. “Are you going to forgive me?” he asked. He stood the telecomp on end and steadied the handle between the fingers of both hands, trying to get it to stay standing up. “I’ll tell you something funny,” he said. “I have a streak of vanity in me. I do. Correction, I did. I thought I was one of the two or three best advisers in the house. In the house, hate; in the city. Alert observant, sensitive . . . ‘Comes the rude awakening.’” He had the handle standing, and slapped it down and smiled drily at Chip. “So you’re not the only sick one,” he said, “if that’s any consolation.”
“I’m not sick, Bob,” Chip said. “I’m healthier than I’ve been in my entire life.”
Still smiling, Bob said, “That’s kind of contrary to the evidence, isn’t it?” He picked up the telecomp and stood up.
“You can’t see the evidence,” Chip said. “You’ve been dulled by your treatments.”
Bob beckoned with his head and moved toward the door. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go get you fixed up.”
Chip stayed where he was. Bob opened the door and stopped, looking back.
Chip said, “I’m perfectly healthy.”
Bob held out his hand sympathetically. “Come on, Li,” he said.
After a moment Chip went to him. Bob took his arm and they went out into the hallway. Doors were open and members were about, talking quietly, walking. Four or five were gathered at the bulletin board, reading the day’s notices.
“Bob,” Chip said, “I want you to listen to what I’m going to say to you.”
“Don’t I always listen?” Bob said.
“I want you to try to open your mind,” Chip said. “Because you’re not a stupid member, you’re bright, and you’re good-hearted and you want to help me.”
