This Perfect Day

They looked at him.

"Why is there always a boat on the beach?" he asked. "AZ-ways, in Eur and in Afr—an old boat that's still good enough to get here. And why are there those handy patched-up maps in museums? Wouldn't it be easier to make fake ones with the islands really omitted?"

They stared at him.

"What do you do," he said, looking at them intently, "when you're programming a computer to maintain a perfectly efficient, perfectly stable, perfectly cooperative society? How do you allow for biological freaks, 'incurables,' possible troublemakers?"

They said nothing, staring at him.

He leaned closer to them. "You leave a few 'un-unified' islands all around the world," he said. "You leave maps in museums and boats on beaches. The computer doesn't have to weed out your bad ones; they do the weeding themselves.

They wiggle their way happily into the nearest isolation ward, and lunkies are waiting, with a General Costanza in charge, to take their boats, jam them into Steelytowns, and keep them helpless and harmless—in ways that high-minded disciples of Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei would never dream of stooping to."

"It can't be" Lilac said.

"A lot of us think it can," the young man said.

Chip said, "Uni let us come here?"

"No," Lilac said. "It's too—twisted."

The young man looked at her, looked at Chip.

Chip said, "I thought I was being so fighting clever!"

"So did I," the young man said, sitting back. "I know just how you feel."

"No, it can't be," Lilac said.

There was silence for a moment, and then the young man said, "I'll take you in now. LA. will take off your bracelets and get your registered and lend you twenty-five bucks to get started." He smiled. "As bad as it is," he said, "it's better than being with the Family. Cloth is more comfortable than paplon—really—and even a rotten fig tastes better than totalcakes. You can have children, a drink, a cigarette—a couple of rooms if you work hard. Some steelies even get rich—entertainers, mostly. If you 'sir' the lunkies and stay in Steelytown, it's all right. No scanners, no advisers, and not one 'Life of Marx' in a whole year's TV."

Lilac smiled. Chip smiled too.

"Put the coveralls on," the young man said. "Lunkies are horrified by nakedness. It's 'ungodly.'" He turned to the boat's controls.

They put aside the blankets and got into their moist coveralls, then stood behind the young man as he drove the boat toward the island. It spread out green and gold in the radiance of the just-risen sun, crested with mountains and dotted with bits of white, yellow, pink, pale blue.

"It's beautiful," Lilac said determinedly.

Chip, with his arm about her shoulders, looked ahead with narrowed eyes and said nothing.

Chapter 5

They lived in a city called Pollensa, in half a room in a cracked and crumbling Steelytown building with intermittent power and brown water. They had a mattress and a table and a chair, and a box for their clothing that they used as a second chair. The people in the other half of the room, the Newmans—a man and woman in their forties with a nine-year-old daughter—let them use their stove and TV and a shelf in the "fridge" where they stored their food. It was the Newmans' room; Chip and Lilac paid four dollars a week for their half of it.

They earned nine dollars and twenty cents a week between them. Chip worked in an iron mine, loading ore into carts with a crew of other immigrants alongside an automatic loader that-stood motionless and dusty, unrepairable. Lilac worked in a clothing factory, attaching fasteners to shirts. There too a machine stood motionless, furred with lint. Their nine dollars and twenty cents paid for the week's rent and food and railfare, a few cigarettes, and a newspaper called the Liberty Immigrant. They saved fifty cents toward clothing replacement and emergencies that might arise, and gave fifty cents to Immigrants' Assistance as partial repayment of the twenty-five-dollar loan they had been given on their arrival. They ate bread and fish and potatoes and figs. At first these foods gave them cramps and constipation, but they soon came to like them, to relish the different tastes and consistencies. They looked forward to meals, although the preparation and the cleaning up afterward became a bother.