This Perfect Day

by Ira Levin

  They went into the airport separately and gathered near the flight-schedule signboard. Members pressed them close together; the red-and-green-streamered waiting room was densely crowded, and so voice-filled that Christmas music could only intermittently be heard. Beyond the glass, large planes turned and moved ponderously, took members on from three escalators at once, let lines of members off, rolled to and from the runways.

  It was 9:35. The next flight to EUR00001 was at 11:48.

  Chip said, “I don’t like the idea of staying here so long. The barge either used extra power or came in late, and if the difference was conspicuous, Uni may have figured out what caused it.”

  “Let’s go now,” Ria said, “and get as close to ’001 as we can and then bike again.”

  “We’ll get there a lot sooner if we wait,” Karl said. “This isn’t such a bad hiding place.”

  “No,” Chip said, looking at the signboard, “let’s go—on the 10:06 to ’00020. That’s the soonest we can manage it, and it’s only about fifty kilometers from ’001. Come on, the door’s over that way.”

  They made their way through the crowd to the swing-door at the side of the room and clustered around its scanner. The door opened and a member in orange came out. Excusing himself, he reached between Chip and Dover to touch the scanner—yes, it winked—and went on.

  Chip slipped his watch from his pocket and checked it against a clock. “It’s lane six,” he said. “If there’s more than one escalator, be on line for the one at the back of the plane; and make sure you’re near the end of the line but with at least six members behind you. Dover?” He took Dover’s elbow and they went through the door into the depot area. A member in orange standing there said, “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

  “Uni okayed it,” Chip said. “We’re in airport design.”

  “Three-thirty-seven A,” Dover said.

  Chip said, “This wing is being enlarged next year.”

  “I see what you meant about the ceiling,” Dover said, looking up at it.

  “Yes,” Chip said. “It could easily go up another meter.”

  “Meter and a half,” Dover said.

  “Unless we run into trouble with the ducts,” Chip said.

  The member left them and went out through the door.

  “Yes, all the ducts,” Dover said. “Big problem.”

  “Let me show you where they lead,” Chip said. “It’s interesting.”

  “It certainly is,” Dover said.

  They went into the area where members in orange were readying cake and drink containers, working more quickly than members usually did.

  “Three-thirty-seven A?” Chip said.

  “Why not?” Dover said, and pointed at the ceiling as they separated for a member pushing a cart. “You see the way the ducts run?” he said.

  “We’re going to have to change the whole setup,” Chip said. “In here too.”

  They false-touched and went into the room where coveralls hung on hooks. No one was in it. Chip closed the door and pointed to the closet where the orange coveralls were kept.

  They put orange coveralls on over their yellow ones, and toeguards on their sandals. They tore openings inside the pockets of the orange coveralls so that they could reach into the pockets of the inner ones.

  A member in white came in. “Hello,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas,” they said.

  “I was sent up from ’765 to help out,” he said. He was about thirty.

  “Good, we can use it,” Chip said.

  The member, opening his coveralls, looked at Dover, who was closing his. “What have you got the other ones on underneath for?” he asked.

  “It’s warmer that way,” Chip said, going to him.

  He turned to Chip, puzzled. “Warmer?” he said. “What do you want to be warmer for?”

  “I’m sorry, brother,” Chip said, and hit him in the stomach. He bent forward, grunting, and Chip swung his fist up under his jaw. The member straightened and fell backward; Dover caught him under the arms and lowered him to the floor. He lay with his eyes closed, as if sleeping.

  Chip, looking down at him, said, “Christ and Wei, it works.”

  They tore up a set of coveralls and tied the member’s wrists and ankles and knotted a sleeve between his teeth; then lifted him and put him into the closet where the floor polisher was.

  The clock’s 9:51 became 9:52.

  They wrapped their kits in orange coveralls and went out of the room and past the members working at the cake and drink containers. In the depot area they found a half-empty carton of towels and put the wrapped kits into it. Carrying the carton between them, they went out through the portal onto the field.

  A plane was opposite lane six, a large one, with members leaving it on two escalators. Members in orange waited at each escalator with a container cart.

  They went away from the plane, toward the left; crossed the field diagonally with the carton between them, skirting a slow-moving maintenance truck and approaching the hangars that lay in a flat-roofed wing extending toward the runways.

  They went into a hangar. A smaller plane was there, with members in orange underneath it, lowering a square black housing from it. Chip and Dover carried the carton to the back of the hangar where there was a door in the side wall. Dover opened it, looked in, and nodded to Chip.

  They went in and closed the door. They were in a supply room: racks of tools, rows of wood crates, black metal drums marked Lub Oil SG. “Couldn’t be better,” Chip said as they put the carton on the floor.

  Dover went to the door and stood at its hinge side. He took out his gun and held it by its barrel.

  Chip, crouching, unwrapped a kit, opened it, and took out a bomb, one with a yellow four-minute handle.

  He separated two of the oil drums and put the bomb on the floor between them, with its taped-down handle facing up. He took his watch out and looked at it. Dover said, “How long?” and he said, “Three minutes.”

  He went back to the carton and, still holding the watch, closed the kit and rewrapped it and closed the carton’s leaves.

  “Is there anything we can use?” Dover asked, nodding at the tool racks.

  Chip went to one and the door of the room opened and a member in orange came in. “Hello,” Chip said, and took a tool from the rack and put the watch in his pocket. “Hello,” the member said, coming to the other side of the rack. She glanced over it at Chip. “Who’re you?” she asked.

  “Li RP,” he said. “I was sent up from ’765 to help.” He took another tool from the rack, a pair of calipers.

  “It’s not as bad as Wei’s Birthday,” the member said.

  Another member came to the door. “We’ve got it, Peace,” he said. “Li had it.”

  “I asked him and he said he didn’t,” the first member said.

  “Well he did,” the second member said, and went away.

  The first member went after him. “He was the first one I asked,” she said.

  Chip stood and watched the door as it slowly closed. Dover, behind it, looked at him and closed it all the way, softly. Chip looked back at Dover, and then at his hand holding the tools. It was shaking. He put the tools down, let his breath out, and showed his hand to Dover, who smiled and said, “Very unmemberlike.”

  Chip drew a breath and got the watch from his pocket. “Less than a minute,” he said, and went to the drums and crouched. He pulled the tape from the bomb’s handle.

  Dover put his gun into his pocket—poked it into the inner one—and stood with his hand on the doorknob.

  Chip, looking at the watch and holding the fuse handle, said, ‘Ten seconds.” He waited, waited, waited—and then pulled the handle up and stood as Dover opened the door. They picked up the carton and carried it from the room and pulled the door closed.

  They walked with the carton through the hangar—“Easy, easy,” Chip said—and across the field toward the plane opposite lane six. Members were filin
g onto the escalators, riding up.

  “What’s that?” a member in orange with a clipboard asked, walking along with them.

  “We were told to bring it over there,” Chip said.

  “Karl?” another member said at the other side of the one with the clipboard. He stopped and turned, saying “Yes?” and Chip and Dover kept walking.

  They brought the carton to the plane’s rear escalator and put it down. Chip stayed opposite the scanner and looked at the escalator controls; Dover slipped through the line and stood at the scanner’s back. Members passed between them, touching their bracelets to the green-winking scanner and stepping onto the escalator.

  A member in orange came to Chip and said, “I’m on this escalator.”

  “Karl just told me to take it,” Chip said. “I was sent up from ’765 to help.”

  “What’s wrong?” the member with the clipboard asked, coming over. “Why are there three of you here?”

  “I thought I was on this escalator,” the other member said. The air shuddered and a loud roar clapped from the hangars.

  A black pillar, vast and growing, stood on the wing of hangars, and rolling orange fire was in the black. A black and orange rain fell on the roof and the field, and members in orange came running from the hangars, running and slowing and looking back up at the fiery pillar on the roof.

  The member with the clipboard stared, and hurried forward. The other member hurried after him.

  The members on line stood motionless, looking upward toward the hangars. Chip and Dover caught at their arms and drew them forward. “Don’t stop,” they said. “Keep moving, please. There’s no danger. The plane is waiting. Touch and step on. Keep moving, please.” They herded the members past the scanner and onto the escalator and one was Jack—“Beautiful,” he said, gazing past Chip as he false-touched; and Ria, who looked as excited as she had the first time Chip had seen her; and Karl, looking awed and somber; and Buzz, smiling. Dover moved to the escalator after Buzz; Chip thrust a wrapped kit to him and turned to the other members on line, the last seven or eight, who stood looking toward the hangars. “Keep moving, please,” he said. “The plane is waiting for you. Sister!”

  “There is no cause for alarm,” a woman’s voice loudspeakered. “There has been an accident in the hangars but everything is under control.”

  Chip urged the members to the escalator. “Touch and step on,” he said. “The plane’s waiting.”

  “Departing members, please resume your places in line,” the voice said. “Members who are boarding planes, continue to do so. There will be no interruption of service.”

  Chip false-touched and stepped onto the escalator behind the last member. Riding upward with his wrapped kit under his arm, he glanced toward the hangars: the pillar was black and smudging; there was no more fire. He looked ahead again, at pale blue coveralls. “All personnel except forty-sevens and forty-nines, resume your assigned duties,” the woman’s voice said. “All personnel except forty-sevens and forty-nines, resume your assigned duties. Everything is under control.” Chip stepped into the plane and the door slid down behind him. “There will be no interruption of—” Members stood confusedly, looking at filled seats.

  “There are extra passengers because of the holiday,” Chip said. “Go forward and ask members with children to double up. It can’t be helped.”

  The members moved down the aisle, looking from one side of the plane to the other.

  The five were sitting in the last row, next to the dispensers. Dover took his wrapped kit from the aisle seat and Chip sat down. Dover said, “Not bad.”

  “We’re not up yet,” Chip said.

  Voices filled the plane: members telling members about the explosion, spreading the news from row to row. The clock said 10:06 but the plane wasn’t moving.

  The 10:06 became 10:07.

  The six looked at one another, and looked forward, normally.

  The plane moved; swung gently to the side and then pulled forward. It moved faster. The light dimmed and the TV screens flicked on.

  They watched Christ’s Life and a years-old Family at Work. They drank tea and coke but couldn’t eat; there were no cakes on the plane, because of the hour, and though they had foil-wrapped rounds of cheese in their kits, they would have been seen eating them by the members who came to the dispensers. Chip and Dover sweated in their double coveralls. Karl kept dozing off, and Ria and Buzz on either side of him nudged him to keep him awake and watching.

  The flight took forty minutes.

  When the location sign said EUR00020, Chip and Dover got up from their seats and stood at the dispensers, pressing the buttons and letting tea and coke flow down the drains. The plane landed and rode and stopped, and members began filing off. After a few dozen had gone through the doorway nearby, Chip and Dover lifted the emptied containers from the dispensers, set them on the floor and raised their covers, and Buzz put a wrapped kit into each. Then Buzz, Karl, Ria, and Jack got up and the six went to the doorway. Chip, carrying a container against his chest, said, “Would you excuse us, please?” to an elderly member and went out. The others followed close behind him. Dover, carrying the other container, said to the member, “You’d better wait till I’m off the escalator,” and the member nodded, looking confused.

  At the bottom of the escalator Chip leaned his wrist toward the scanner and then stood opposite it, blocking it from the members in the waiting room. Buzz, Karl, Ria, and Jack passed in front of him, false-touching, and Dover leaned against the scanner and nodded to the member waiting above.

  The four went toward the waiting room, and Chip and Dover crossed the field to the portal and went through it into the depot area. Setting down the containers, they took the kits out of them and slipped between two rows of crates. They found a cleared space near the wall and took off the orange coveralls and pulled the toeguards from their sandals.

  They left the depot area through the swing-door, their kits slung on their shoulders. The others were waiting around the scanner. They went out of the airport by twos—it was almost as crowded as the one in ’91770—and gathered again at the bike racks.

  By noon they were north of ’00018. They ate their rounds of cheese between the bike path and the River of Freedom, in a valley flanked by mountains that rose to awesome snow-streaked heights. While they ate they looked at their maps. By nightfall, they calculated, they could be in parkland a few kilometers from the tunnel’s entrance.

  A little after three o’clock, when they were nearing ’00013, Chip noticed an approaching cyclist, a girl in her early teens, who was looking at the faces of the northbound cyclists —his own as she passed him—with an expression of concern, of memberlike wanting-to-help. A moment later he saw another approaching cyclist looking at faces in the same slightly anxious way, an elderly woman with flowers in her basket. He smiled at her as she passed, then looked ahead. There was nothing out of the ordinary in the path and the road beside it; a few hundred meters ahead both path and road turned to the right and disappeared behind a power station.

  He rode onto grass, stopped, and looking back, signaled to the others as they came along.

  They pushed their bikes farther onto the grass. They were on the last stretch of parkland before the city: a span of grass, then picnic tables and a rising slope of trees.

  “We’re never going to make it if we stop every half hour,” Ria said.

  They sat down on the grass.

  “I think they’re checking bracelets up ahead,” Chip said. Telecomps and red-crossed coveralls. I noticed two members coming this way who looked as if they were trying to spot the sick one. They had that how-can-I-help look.”

  “Hate,” Buzz said.

  Jack said, “Christ and Wei, Chip, if we’re going to start worrying about members’ facial expressions, we might as well just turn around and go home.”

  Chip looked at him and said, “A bracelet check isn’t so unlikely, is it? Uni must know by now that the explosion at ’91770 was no acc
ident, and it might have figured out exactly why it happened. This is the shortest route from ’020 to Uni— and we’re coming to the first sharp turn in about twelve kilometers.”

  “All right, so they’re checking bracelets,” Jack said. “What the hate are we carrying guns for?”

  “Yes!” Ria said.

  Dover said, “If we shoot our way through we’ll have the whole bike path after us.”

  “So we’ll drop a bomb behind us,” Jack said. “We’ve got to move fast, not sit on our asses as if we’re in a chess game. These dummies are half dead anyway; what difference does it make if we kill a few of them? We’re going to help all the rest, aren’t we?”

  “The guns and bombs are for when we need them,” Chip said, “not for when we can avoid using them.” He turned to Dover. “Take a walk in the woods there,” he said. “See if you can get a look at what’s past the turn.”

  “Right,” Dover said. He got up and crossed the grass, picked something up and brought it to a litter basket, and went in among the trees. His yellow coveralls became bits of yellow that vanished up the slope.

  They turned from watching him. Chip took out his map.

  “Shit,” Jack said.

  Chip said nothing. He looked at the map.

  Buzz rubbed his leg and took his hand from it abruptly.

  Jack tore bits of grass from the ground. Ria, sitting close to him, watched him. “What’s your suggestion,” Jack said, “if they are checking bracelets?”

  Chip looked up from the map and, after a moment, said, “Well go back a little way and cut east and by-pass them.”

  Jack tore up more grass and then threw it down. “Come on,” he said to Ria, and stood up. She sprang up beside him, bright-eyed.

  “Where are you going?” Chip said.

  “Where we planned to go,” Jack said, looking down at him. “The parkland near the tunnel. We’ll wait for you until it gets light.”

  “Sit down, you two,” Karl said.

  Chip said, “You’ll go with all of us when I say we’ll go. You agreed to that at the beginning.”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Jack said. “I don’t like taking orders from you any more than I like taking them from Uni.”