This Perfect Day

She stared at him. "How can you say that?" she said. "How can you say you'll—you could be gone foreverl You could be caught and treated!"

"We're going to learn how to fight," he said. "We're going to have guns and—"

"Others should go!" she said. "How can I ask them, if I'm not going myself?"

"Ask them, that's all. Ask them."

"No," he said. "I've got to go too."

"You want to go, that's what it is," she said. "You don't have to go; you want to."

He was silent for a moment, and then he said, "All right, I want to. Yes. I can't think of not being there when Uni is beaten. I want to throw the explosive myself, or pull the switch myself, or do whatever it is that's finally done—myself."

"You're sick," she said. She picked up the sewing in her lap and found the needle and started to sew. "I mean it," she said. "You're sick on the subject of Uni. It didn't put us here; we're lucky to have got here. Ashi's right: it would have killed us the way it kills people at sixty-two; it wouldn't have wasted boats and islands. We got away from it; it's already been beaten; and you're sick to want to go back and beat it again."

"It put us here," Chip said, "because the programmers couldn't justify killing people who were still young."

"Cloth," Lilac said. "They justified killing old people, they'd have justified killing infants. We got away. And now you're going back."

"What about our parents?" he said. "They're going to be killed in a few more years. What about Snowflake and Spar-row—the whole Family, in fact?"

She sewed, jabbing the needle into green cloth—the sleeves from her green dress that she was making into a shirt for the baby. "Others should go," she said. "People without families."

Later, in bed, he said, "If anything should go wrong, Julia will take care of you. And the baby."

"That's a great comfort," she said. "Thanks. Thanks very much. Thank Julia too." It stayed between them from that night on: resentment on her part and refusal to be moved by it on his.

Part Four FIGHTING BACK

Chapter 1

He was busy, busier than he'd been in his entire life: planning, looking for people and equipment, traveling, learning, explaining, pleading, devising, deciding. And working at the factory too, where Julia, despite the time off she allowed him, made sure she got her six-fifty-a-week's worth out of him in machinery repair and production speed-up. And with Lilac's pregnancy advancing, he was doing more of the at-home chores too. He was more exhausted than he'd ever been, and more wide awake; more sick of everything one day and more sure of everything the next; more alive. It, the plan, the project, was like a machine to be assembled, with all the parts to be found or made, and each dependent for its shape and size on all the others.

Before he could decide on the size of the party, he had to have a clearer idea of its ultimate aim; and before he could have that, he had to know more about Uni's functioning and where it could be most effectively attacked. He spoke to Lars Newman, Ashi's friend who ran a school. Lars sent him to a man in Andrait, who sent him to a man in Manacor.

"I knew those banks were too small for the amount of insulation they seemed to have," the man in Manacor said. His name was Newbrook and he was near seventy; he had taught in a technological academy before he left the Family. He was minding a baby granddaughter, changing her diaper and annoyed about it. "Hold still, will you?" he said. "Well, assuming you can get in," he said to Chip, "the power source is what you've obviously got to go for. The reactor or, more likely, the reactors."

"But they could be replaced fairly quickly, couldn't they?" Chip said. "I want to put Uni out of commission for a good long time, long enough for the Family to wake up and decide what it wants to do with it."

"Damn it, hold still!" Newbrook said. "The refrigerating plant, then."

"The refrigerating plant?" Chip said.

"That's right," Newbrook said. "The internal temperature of the banks has to be close to absolute zero; raise it a few degrees and the grids won't—there, you see what you've done?—the grids won't be superconductive any more. You'll erase Uni's memory." He picked up the crying baby and held her against his shoulder, patting her back. "Shh, shh," he said.

"Erase it permanently?" Chip asked.

Newbrook nodded, patting the crying baby. "Even if the refrigeration's restored," he said, "all the data will have to be fed in again. It'll take years/' "That's exactly what I'm looking for," Chip said. The refrigerating plant. And the stand-by plant.

And the second stand-by plant, if there was one.

Three refrigeration plants to be put out of operation. Two men for each, he figured; one to place the explosives and one to keep members away.