This Perfect Day

"No, you're absolutely right," Jack said. "There has to be one man in charge of an operation like this; it's the only way it can work."

"We can offer suggestions, can't we?" Ria said.

"The more the better," Chip said. "But the decisions are going to be mine, and you've got to be ready to go along with them."

Jack said, "I am," and Ria said, "So am I."

Locating the entrance of the tunnel turned out to be more difficult than Chip had anticipated. He collected three large-scale maps of central Eur and a highly detailed pre-U topographic one of "Switzerland" on which he carefully transcribed Uni's site, but everyone he consulted—former engineers and geologists, native mining engineers—said that more data was needed before the tunnel's course could be projected with any hope of accuracy. Ashi became interested in the problem and spent occasional hours in the Library copying references to "Geneva" and "Jura Mountains" out of old encyclopedias and works on geology.

On two consecutive moonlit nights Chip and Dover went out in the LA. boat to a point west of EUR91766 and watched for the copper barges. These passed, they found, at precise intervals of four hours and twenty-five minutes. Each low fiat dark shape moved steadily toward the northwest at thirty kilometers an hour, its rolling afterwaves lifting the boat and dropping it, lifting it and dropping it. Three hours later a barge would come from the opposite direction, riding higher on the water, empty.

Dover calculated that the Eur-bound barges, if they maintained their speed and direction, would reach EUR91772 in a little over six hours.

On the second night he brought the boat alongside a barge and slowed to match its speed while Chip climbed aboard. Chip rode on the barge for several minutes, sitting comfortably on its flat compacted load of copper ingots in wood cribs, and then he climbed back aboard the boat.

Lilac found another man for the group, an attendant at the clinic named Lars Newstone who called himself Buzz. He was thirty-six, Chip's age, and taller than normal; a quiet and capable-seeming man. He had been on the island for nine years and at the clinic for three, during which he had picked up a certain amount of medical knowledge. He was married but living apart from his wife. He wanted to join the group, he said, because he had always felt that "somebody ought to do something, or at least try. It's wrong," he said, "to let Uni—have the world without trying to get it back."

"He's fine, just the man we need," Chip said to Lilac after Buzz had left their room. "I wish I had two more of him instead of the Newbridges. Thank you."

Lilac said nothing, standing at the sink washing cups. Chip went to her, took her shoulders, and kissed her hair. She was in the seventh month of her pregnancy, big and uncomfortable.

At the end of March, Julia gave a dinner party at which Chip, who had by then been working four months on the plan, presented it to her guests—natives with money who could each be counted on, she had said, for a contribution of at least five hundred dollars. He gave them copies of a list he had prepared of all the costs that would be involved, and passed around his "Switzerland" map with the tunnel drawn in in its approximate position. They weren't as receptive as he had thought they would be. "Thirty-six hundred for explosives?" one asked.

"That's right, sir," Chip said. "If anyone knows where we can get them cheaper, I'll be glad to hear about it."

"What's this 'kit reinforcing'?"

"The kits we're going to carry; they're not made for heavy loads. They have to be taken apart and remade around metal frames."

"You people can't buy guns and bombs, can you?"

"I'll do the buying," Julia said, "and everything will stay on my property until the party leaves. I have the permits."

"When do you think you'll go?"

"I don't know yet," Chip said. "The gas masks are going to take three months from when they're ordered. And we still have one more man to find, and training to go through. I'm hoping for July or August."

"Are you sure this is where the tunnel actually is?"

"No, we're still working on that. That's just an approximation."

Five of the guests gave excuses and seven gave checks that added up to only twenty-six hundred dollars, less than a quarter of the eleven thousand that was needed. "Lunky bastards," Julia said.

"It's a beginning, anyway," Chip said. "We can start ordering things. And take on Captain Gold."

"We'll do it again in a few weeks," Julia said. "What were you so nervous for? You've got to speak more forcefully!" The baby was born, a boy, and they named him Jan. Both his eyes were brown.