This Perfect Day

We're only going to look. That's the reason I came here today, to show you the real UniComp. You want to see it, don't you?"

Chip, after a moment, said, "Yes."

"Then don't worry; it's all right." Papa Jan looked reassuringly into his eyes, and then let go of his head and took his hand.

They were on a landing, with stairs going down. They went down four or five of them—into coolness—and Papa Jan stopped, and stopped Chip. "Stay right here," he said. "I'll be back in two seconds. Don't move."

Chip watched anxiously as Papa Jan went back up to the landing, opened the door to look, and then went quickly out.

The door swung back toward closing.

Chip began to quiver again. He had passed a scanner without touching it, and now he was alone on a chilly silent stairway—and Uni didn't know where he was!

The door opened again and Papa Jan came back in with blue blankets over his arm. "It's very cold," he said.

They walked together, wrapped in blankets, down the just-wide-enough aisle between two steel walls that stretched ahead of them convergingly to a faraway cross-wall and reared up above their heads to within half a meter of a glowing white ceiling—not walls, really, but rows of mammoth steel blocks set each against the next and hazed with cold, numbered on their fronts in eye-level black stencil-figures: H46, H48 on this side of the aisle; H49, H51 on that. The aisle was one of twenty or more; narrow parallel crevasses between back-to-back rows of steel blocks, the rows broken evenly by the intersecting crevasses of four slightly wider cross-aisles.

They came up the aisle, their breath clouding from their nostrils, blurs of near-shadow staying beneath their feet. The sounds they made—the paplon rustle of their coveralls, the slapping of their sandals—were the only sounds there were, edged with echoes.

"Well?" Papa Jan said, looking at Chip. Chip hugged his blanket more tightly around him. "It's not as nice as upstairs," he said.

"No," Papa Jan said. "No pretty young members with pens and clipboards down here. No warm lights and friendly pink machines. It's empty down here from one year to the next. Empty and cold and lifeless. Ugly."

They stood at the intersection of two aisles, crevasses of steel stretching away in one direction and another, in a third direction and a fourth. Papa Jan shook his head and scowled. "It's wrong," he said. "I don't know why or how, but it's wrong. Dead plans of dead members. Dead ideas, dead decisions."

"Why is it so cold?" Chip asked, watching his breath. "Because it's dead," Papa Jan said, then shook his head. "No, I don't know," he said. "They don't work if they're not freezing cold; I don't know; all I knew was getting the things where they were supposed to be without smashing them."

They walked side by side along another aisle: R20, R22, R24. "How many are there?" Chip asked.

"Twelve hundred and forty on this level, twelve hundred and forty on the level below. And that's only for now; there's twice as much space cut out and waiting behind that east wall, for when the Family gets bigger. Other shafts, another ventilating system already in place..."

They went down to the next lower level. It was the same as the one above except that there were steel pillars at two of the intersections and red figures on the memory banks instead of black ones. They walked past J65, J63, J61. "The biggest excavation there ever was," Papa Jan said. "The biggest job there ever was, making one computer to obsolete the old five. There was news about it every night when I was your age. I figured out that it wouldn't be too late to help when I was twenty, provided I got the right classification. So I asked for it."

"You asked for it?"

"That's what I said," Papa Jan said, smiling and nodding. "It wasn't unheard of in those days. I asked my adviser to ask Uni—well, it wasn't Uni, it was EuroComp—anyway I asked her to ask, and she did, and Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei, I got it—042C; construction worker, third class. First assignment, here." He looked about, still smiling, his eyes vivid. "They were going to lower these hulks down the shafts one at a time," he said, and laughed. "I sat up all one night and figured out that the job could be done eight months earlier if we tunneled in from the other side of Mount Love"—he thumbed over his shoulder—"and rolled them in on wheels. EuroComp hadn't thought of that simple idea.

Or maybe it was in no big rush to have its memory siphoned away!" He laughed again.

He stopped laughing; and Chip, watching him, noticed for the first time that his hair was all gray now. The reddish patches that he'd had a few years earlier were completely gone.

"And here they are," he said, "all in their places, rolled down my tunnel and working eight months longer than they would have been otherwise." He looked at the banks he was passing as if he disliked them. Chip said, "Don't you—like UniComp?"