This Perfect Day

"It's good to be here," Chip said, pleased by King's friendliness. His coldness when Chip left his office must have been only a pretense, for the sake, of course, of the onlooking doctors. "Thank you," Chip said. "For everything. Both of you."

Lilac said, "I'm very glad, Chip." Her hand was still held by King's. She was darker than normal, a lovely near-brown touched with rose. Her eyes were large and almost level, her lips pink and soft-looking. She turned away and said, "Hello, Snowflake." She drew her hand from King's and went to Snow-flake and kissed her cheek.

She was twenty or twenty-one, no more. The upper pockets of her coveralls had something in them, giving her the breasted look of the women Karl had drawn. It was a strange, mysteriously alluring look.

"Are you beginning to feel different now, Chip?" King asked. He was at the table, bending and putting tobacco into the bowl of a pipe.

"Yes, enormously," Chip said. "It's everything you said it would be."

Leopard came in and said, "Here you are, Chip." He gave him a yellow thick-bowled pipe with an amber stem. Chip thanked him and tried the feel of it; it was comfortable in his hand and comfortable to his lips. He took it to the table, and King, his gold medallion swinging, showed him the right way to fill it.

Leopard took him through the staff section of the museum, showing him other storerooms, the conference room, and various offices and workrooms. "It's a good idea," he said, "for someone to keep rough track of who goes where during these get-togethers, and then check around later and make sure nothing is conspicuously out of place. The girls could be a little more careful than they are. I generally do it, and when I'm gone perhaps you'll take over the job. Normals aren't quite as unobservant as we'd like them to be."

"Are you being transferred?" Chip asked.

"Oh no," Leopard said. "I'll be dying soon. I'm over sixty-two now, by almost three months. So is Hush."

"I'm sorry," Chip said.

"So are we," Leopard said, "but nobody lives forever. Tobacco ashes are a danger, of course, but everyone's good about that. You don't have to worry about the smell; the air conditioning goes on at seven-forty and whips it right out; I stayed one morning and made sure. Sparrow's going to take over the tobacco growing. We dry the leaves right here, in back of the hot-water tank; I'll show you."

When they got back to the storeroom, King and Snowflake were sitting opposite each other astride a bench, playing intently at a mechanical game of some kind that lay between them. Hush was dozing in her chair and Lilac was crouched at the verge of the mass of relics, taking books one at a time from a carton, looking at them, and putting them in a pile on the floor. Sparrow wasn't there. "What's that?" Leopard asked.

"New game that came in," Snowflake said, not looking up.

There were levers that they pressed and released, one for each hand, making little paddles hit a rusted ball back and forth on a rimmed metal board. The paddles, some of them broken, squeaked as they swung. The ball bounded this way and that and came to a stop in a depression at King's end of the board. "Five!" Snowflake cried. "There you are, brother!"

Hush opened her eyes, looked at them, and closed them again. "Losing's the same as winning," King said, lighting his pipe with a metal lighter. "Like hate it is," Snowflake said. "Chip? Come on, you're next."

"No, I'll watch," he said, smiling.

Leopard declined to play too, and King and Snowflake began another match. At a break in the play, when King had scored a point against Snowflake, Chip said, "May I see the lighter?" and King gave it to him. A bird in flight was painted on the side of it; a duck, Chip thought. He had seen lighters in museums but had never worked one. He opened the hinged top and pushed his thumb against the ridged wheel. On the second try the wick flamed. He closed the lighter, looked at it all over, and at the next break handed it back to King.