This Perfect Day

by Ira Levin

  “No, it’s not,” he said. “It wasn’t left by traders because there’s no message or anything in it. The clock stopped last year but it has a new rotor. I didn’t try the lift rotor because of the sand, but even if it works, the skirting is cracked in two places and it may just wallow and get nowhere. On the other hand it may take us directly into ’082—to a little seaside medicenter—even though it’s supposed to be off telecontrol.”

  Lilac stood looking at him.

  “We might as well try it though,” he said. “If traders didn’t leave it, they’re not going to come ashore while it’s sitting here. Maybe we’re just two very lucky members.” He gave the flashlight to her.

  He got the carton and the blanket-bundle from the cave and held one under each arm. They started walking toward the boat. “What about the things to trade?” she said.

  “We’ll have it,” he said. “A boat must be worth a hundred times more than cameras and first-aid kits.” He looked toward the cliff. “All right, doctors!” he called. “You can come out now!”

  “Shh, don’t!” she said.

  “We forgot the sandals,” he said.

  “They’re in the carton.”

  He put the carton and the bundle into the boat and they scraped the birdwaste from the broken windscreen with pieces of shell. They lifted the front of the boat and hauled it around toward the sea, then lifted the back and hauled again.

  They kept lifting and hauling at either end and finally they had the boat down in the surf, bobbing and veering clumsily. Chip held it while Lilac climbed aboard, and then he pushed it farther out and climbed in with her.

  He sat down at the controls and switched on their lights. She sat in the seat beside him, watching. He glanced at her— she looked anxiously at him—and he switched on the propulsion rotors and then the lift rotor. The boat shook violently, flinging them from side to side. Loud clankings banged from beneath it. He caught the steering lever, held it, and turned the speed-control knob. The boat splashed forward and the shaking and clanging lessened. He turned the speed higher, to twenty, twenty-five. The clanking stopped and the shaking subsided to a steady vibration. The boat scuffed along on the water’s surface.

  “It’s not lifting,” he said.

  “But it’s moving,” she said.

  “For how long though? It’s not built to hit the water this way and the skirting’s cracked already.” He turned the speed higher and the boat splashed through the crests of swells. He tried the steering lever; the boat responded. He steered north, got out his compass, and compared its reading with the direction indicator’s. “It’s not taking us into ’082,” he said. “At least not yet.”

  She looked behind them, and up at the sky. “No one’s coming,” she said.

  He turned the speed higher and got a little more lift, but the impact when they scraped the swells was greater. He turned the speed back down. The knob was at fifty-six. “I don’t think we’re doing more than forty,” he said. “It’ll be light when we get there, if we get there. It’s just as well, I suppose; I won’t get us onto the wrong island. I don’t know how much this is throwing us off course.”

  Two other islands were near Majorca: EUR91766, forty kilometers to the northeast, the site of a copper-production complex; and EUR91603, eighty-five kilometers to the southwest, where there was an algae-processing complex and a climatonomy sub-center.

  Lilac leaned close to Chip, avoiding the wind and spray from the broken part of the windscreen. Chip held the steering lever. He watched the direction indicator and the moonlit sea ahead and the stars that shone above the horizon.

  The stars dissolved, the sky began to lighten, and there was no Majorca. There was only the sea, placid and endless all around them.

  “If we’re doing forty,” Lilac said, “it should have taken seven hours. It’s been more than that, hasn’t it?”

  “Maybe we haven’t been doing forty,” Chip said.

  Or maybe he had compensated too much or too little for the eastward drift of the sea. Maybe they had passed Majorca and were heading toward Eur. Or maybe Majorca didn’t exist— had been blanked from pre-U maps because pre-U members had “bombed” it to nothing and why should the Family be reminded again of folly and barbarism?

  He kept the boat headed a hairline west of north, but slowed it down a little.

  The sky grew lighter and still there was no island, no Majorca. They scanned the horizon silently, avoiding each other’s eyes.

  One final star glimmered above the water in the northeast. No, glimmered on the water. No—“There’s a light over there,” he said.

  She looked where he pointed, held his arm.

  The light moved in an arc from side to side, then up and down as if beckoning. It was a kilometer or so away.

  “Christ and Wei,” Chip said softly, and steered toward it.

  “Be careful,” Lilac said. “Maybe it’s—”

  He changed hands on the steering lever and got the knife from his pocket, laid it in his lap.

  The light went out and a small boat was there. Someone sat waving in it, waving a pale thing that he put on his head—a hat—and then waving his empty hand and arm.

  “One member,” Lilac said.

  “One person,” Chip said. He kept steering toward the boat —a rowboat, it looked like—with one hand on the lever and the other on the speed-control knob.

  “Look at him!” Lilac said.

  The waving man was small and white-bearded, with a ruddy face below his broad-brimmed yellow hat. He was wearing a blue-topped white-legged garment.

  Chip slowed the boat, steered it near the rowboat, and switched all three rotors off.

  The man—old past sixty-two and blue-eyed, fantastically blue-eyed—smiled with brown teeth and gaps where teeth were missing and said, “Running from the dummies, are you? Looking for liberty?” His boat bobbed in their sidewaves. Poles and nets shifted in it—fish-catching equipment.

  “Yes,” Chip said. “Yes, we are! We’re trying to find Majorca.”

  “Majorca?” the man said. He laughed and scratched his beard. “Myorca,” he said. “Not Majorca, Myorca! But Liberty is what it’s called now. It hasn’t been called Myorca for— God knows, a hundred years, I guess! Liberty, it is.”

  “Are we near it?” Lilac asked, and Chip said, “We’re friends. We haven’t come to—interfere in any way, to try to ‘cure’ you or anything.”

  “We’re incurables ourselves,” Lilac said.

  “You wouldn’t be coming this way if you wasn’t,” the man said. “That’s what I’m here for, to watch for folks like you and help them into port. Yes, you’re near it. That’s it over there.” He pointed to the north.

  And now on the horizon a dark green bar lay low and clear. Pink streaks glowed above its western half—mountains lit by the sun’s first rays.

  Chip and Lilac looked at it, and looked at each other, and looked again at Majorca-Myorca-Liberty.

  “Hold fast,” the man said, “and I’ll tie onto your stern and come aboard.”

  They turned in their seats and faced each other. Chip took the knife from his lap, smiled, and tossed it to the floor. He took Lilac’s hands.

  They smiled at each other.

  “I thought we’d gone past it,” she said.

  “So did I,” he said. “Or that it didn’t even exist any more.”

  They smiled at each other, and leaned forward and kissed each other.

  “Hey, give me a hand here, will you?” the man said, looking at them over the back of the boat, clinging with dirty-nailed fingers.

  They got up quickly and went to him. Chip kneeled on the back seat and helped him over.

  His clothes were made of cloth, his hat woven of flat strips of yellow fiber. He was half a head shorter than they and smelled strangely and strongly. Chip grasped his hard-skinned hand and shook it. “I’m Chip,” he said, “and this is Lilac.”

  “Glad to meet you,” the bearded blue-eyed old man said, smiling his
ugly-toothed smile. “I’m Darren Costanza.” He shook Lilac’s hand.

  “Darren Costanza?” Chip said.

  “That’s the name.”

  “It’s beautiful!” Lilac said.

  “You’ve got a good boat here,” Darren Costanza said, looking about.

  “It doesn’t lift,” Chip said, and Lilac said, “But it got us here. We were lucky to find it.”

  Darren Costanza smiled at them. “And your pockets are filled with cameras and things?” he said.

  “No,” Chip said, “we decided not to take anything. The tide was in and—”

  “Oh, that was a mistake,” Darren Costanza said. “Didn’t you take anything?”

  “A gun without a generator,” Chip said, taking it from his pocket. “And a few books and a razor in the bundle there.”

  “Well, this is worth something,” Darren Costanza said, taking the gun and looking at it, thumbing its handle.

  “We’ll have the boat to trade,” Lilac said.

  “You should have taken more,” Darren Costanza said, turning from them and moving away. They glanced at each other and looked at him again, about to follow, but he turned, holding a different gun. He pointed it at them and put Chip’s gun into his pocket. “This old thing shoots bullets,” he said, backing farther away to the front seats. “Doesn’t need a generator,” he said. “Bang, bang. Into the water now, real quick. Go on. Into the water.”

  They looked at him.

  “Get in the water, you dumb steelies!” he shouted. “You want a bullet in your head?” He moved something at the back of the gun and pointed it at Lilac.

  Chip pushed her to the side of the boat. She clambered over the rail and onto the skirting—saying “What is he doing this for?”—and slipped down into the water. Chip jumped in after her.

  “Away from the boat!” Darren Costanza shouted. “Clear away! Swim!”

  They swam a few meters, their coveralls ballooning around them, then turned, treading water.

  “What are you doing this for?” Lilac asked.

  “Figure it out for yourself, steely!” Darren Costanza said, sitting at the boat’s controls.

  “We’ll drown if you leave us!” Chip cried. “We can’t swim that far!”

  “Who told you to come here?” Darren Costanza said, and the boat rushed splashing away, the rowboat dragging from its back carving up fins of foam.

  “You fighting brother-hater!” Chip shouted. The boat turned toward the eastern tip of the far-off island.

  “He’s taking it himself!” Lilac said. “He’s going to trade it!”

  “The sick selfish pre-U—” Chip said. “Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei, I had the knife in my hand and I threw it on the floor! ‘Waiting to help us into port’! He’s a pirate, that’s what he is, the fighting—”

  “Stop! Don’t!” Lilac said, and looked at him despairingly.

  “Oh Christ and Wei,” he said.

  They pulled open their coveralls and squirmed themselves out of them. “Keep them!” Chip said. “They’ll hold air if we tie the openings!”

  “Another boat!” Lilac said.

  A speck of white was speeding from west to east, midway between them and the island.

  She waved her coveralls.

  “Too far!” Chip said. “We’ve got to start swimming!”

  They tied the sleeves of their coveralls around their necks and swam against the chilly water. The island was impossibly far away—twenty or more kilometers.

  If they could take short rests against the inflated coveralls, Chip thought, they could get far enough in so that another boat might see them. But who would be on it? Members like Darren Costanza? Foul-smelling pirates and murderers? Had King been right? “I hope you get there,” King said, lying in his bed with his eyes closed. “The two of you. You deserve it.” Fight that brother-hater!

  The second boat had got near their pirated one, which was heading farther east as if to avoid it.

  Chip swam steadily, glimpsing Lilac swimming beside him. Would they get enough rest to go on, to make it? Or would they drown, choke, slide languidly downward through darkening water... He drove the image from his mind; swam and kept swimming.

  The second boat had stopped; their own was farther from it than before. But the second boat seemed bigger now, and bigger still.

  He stopped and caught Lilac’s kicking leg. She looked around, gasping, and he pointed.

  The boat hadn’t stopped; it had turned and was coming toward them.

  They tugged at the coverall sleeves at their throats, loosed them and waved the light blue, the bright yellow.

  The boat turned slightly away, then back, then away in the other direction.

  “Here!” they cried, “Help! Here! Help!”—waving the coveralls, straining high in the water.

  The boat turned back and away again, then sharply back. It stayed pointed at them, enlarging, and a horn sounded—loud, loud, loud, loud, loud.

  Lilac sank against Chip, coughing water. He ducked his shoulder under her arm and supported her.

  The boat came skimming to full-size white closeness—I.A. was painted large and green on its hull; it had one rotor—and splatted to a stop with a wave that washed over them. “Hang on!” a member cried, and something flew in the air and splashed beside them: a floating white ring with a rope. Chip grabbed it and the rope sprang taut, pulled by a member, young, yellow-haired. He drew them through the water. “I’m all right,” Lilac said in Chip’s arm. “I’m all right.”

  The side of the boat had rungs going up it. Chip pulled Lilac’s coveralls from her hand, bent her fingers around a rung, and put her other hand to the rung above. She climbed. The member, leaning over and stretching, caught her hand and helped her. Chip guided her feet and climbed up after her.

  They lay on their backs on warm firm floor under scratchy blankets, hand in hand, panting. Their heads were lifted in turn and a small metal container was pressed to their lips. The liquid in it smelled like Darren Costanza. It burned in their throats, but once it was down it warmed their stomachs surprisingly.

  “Alcohol?” Chip said.

  “Don’t worry,” the young yellow-haired man said, smiling down at them with normal teeth as he screwed the container onto a flask, “one sip won’t rot your brain.” He was about twenty-five, with a short beard that was yellow too, and normal eyes and skin. A brown belt at his hips held a gun in a brown pocket; he wore a white cloth shirt without sleeves and tan cloth trousers patched with blue that ended at his knees. Putting the flask on a seat, he unfastened the front of his belt. “I’ll get your coveralls,” he said. “Catch your breath.” He put the gun-belt with the flask and climbed over the side of the boat. A splash sounded and the boat swayed.

  “At least they’re not all like that other one,” Chip said.

  “He has a gun,” Lilac said.

  “But he left it here,” Chip said. “If he were—sick, he would have been afraid to.”

  They lay silently hand in hand under the scratchy blankets, breathing deeply, looking at the clear blue sky.

  The boat tilted and the young man climbed back aboard with their dripping coveralls. His hair, which hadn’t been clipped in a long time, clung to his head in wet rings. “Feeling better?” he asked, smiling at them.

  “Yes,” they both said.

  He shook the coveralls over the side of the boat. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here in time to keep that lunky away from you,” he said. “Most immigrants come from Eur, so I generally stay to the north. What we need are two boats, not one. Or a longer-range spotter.”

  “Are you a—policeman?” Chip asked.

  “Me?” The young man smiled. “No,” he said, “I’m with Immigrants’ Assistance. That’s an agency we’ve been generously allowed to set up, to help new immigrants get oriented. And get ashore without being drowned.” He hung the coveralls over the boat’s railing and pulled apart their clinging folds.

  Chip raised himself on his elbows. “Does this happen
often?” he asked.

  “Stealing immigrants’ boats is a popular local pastime,” the young man said. “There are others that are even more fun.”

  Chip sat up, and Lilac sat up beside him. The young man faced them, pink sunlight gleaming on his side.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said, “but you haven’t come to any paradise. Four fifths of the island’s population is descended from the families who were here before the Unification or who came here right after; they’re inbred, ignorant, mean, self-satisfied—and they despise immigrants. ‘Steelies,’ they call us. Because of the bracelets. Even after we take them off.”

  He took his gun-belt from the seat and put it around his hips. “We call them ‘lunkies,’” he said, fastening the belt’s buckle. “Only don’t ever say it out loud or you’ll find five or six of them stamping on your ribs. That’s another of their pastimes.”

  He looked at them again. “The island is run by a General Costanza,” he said, “with the—”

  “That’s who took the boat!” they said. “Darren Costanza!”

  “I doubt it,” the young man said, smiling. “The General doesn’t get up this early. Your lunky must have been pulling your leg.”

  Chip said, “The brother-hater!”

  “General Costanza,” the young man said, “has the Church and the Army behind him. There’s very little freedom even for lunkies, and for us there’s virtually none. We have to live in specified areas, ‘Steelytowns,’ and we can’t step outside them without a good reason. We have to show identity cards to every lunky cop, and the only jobs we can get are the lowest, most back-breaking ones.” He took up the flask. “Do you want some more of this?” he asked. “It’s called ‘whiskey.’”

  Chip and Lilac shook their heads.

  The young man unscrewed the container and poured amber liquid into it. “Let’s see, what have I left out?” he said. “We’re not allowed to own land or weapons. I turn in my gun when I set foot on shore.” He raised the container and looked at them. “Welcome to Liberty,” he said, and drank.

  They looked disheartenedly at each other, and at the young man.

  “That’s what they call it,” he said. “Liberty “