This Perfect Day

They stayed where they were for two days—slept and ate and shaved and practiced fighting, played children's word games, talked about democratic government and sex and the pygmies of the equatorial forests—and on the third day, Sunday, they bicycled north. Outside of '00013 they stopped and went up onto the incline overlooking the plaza and the bridge. The bridge was partly repaired and closed off by barriers. Lines of cyclists crossed the plaza in both directions; there were no doctors, no scanners, no copter, no cars. Where the copter had been, there was a rectangle of fresh pink paving.

Early in the afternoon they passed '001 and glimpsed at a distance Uni's white dome beside the Lake of Universal Brotherhood. They went into the parkland beyond the city.

The following evening, at dusk, with their bikes hidden in a branch-covered hollow and their kits on their shoulders, they passed a scanner at the parkland's farther border and went out onto the grassy slopes that approached Mount Love.

They walked briskly, in shoes and green coveralls, with binoculars and gas masks hung about their necks. They held their guns, but as the darkness grew deeper and the slope more rocky and irregular, they pocketed them. Now and then they paused, and Chip put a hand-covered flashlight to his compass.

They came to the first of the three presumed locations of the tunnel's entrance, and separated and looked for it, using their flashlights guardedly. They didn't find it.

They started for the second location, a kilometer to the northeast. A half moon came over the shoulder of the mountain, wanly lighting it, and they searched its base carefully as they crossed the rock-slope before it.

The slope became smooth, but only in the strip where they were walking—and they realized that they were on a road, old and scrub-patched. Behind them it curved away toward the parkland; ahead it led into a fold in the mountain.

They looked at one another, and took out their guns. Leaving the road, they moved close to the side of the mountain and edged along slowly in single file—first Chip, then Dover, then Karl—holding their kits to keep them from bumping, holding their guns.

They came to the fold, and waited against the mountainside, listening.

No sound came from within.

They waited and listened, and then Chip looked back at the others and raised his gas mask and fastened it.

They did the same.

Chip stepped out into the opening of the fold, his gun before him. Dover and Karl stepped out beside him.

Within was a deep and level clearing; and opposite, at the base of sheer mountain wall, the black round flat-bottomed opening of a large tunnel.

It appeared to be completely unprotected.

They lowered their masks and looked at the opening through their binoculars. They looked at the mountain above it and, taking a few steps forward, looked at the fold's outcurving walls and the oval of sky that roofed it. "Buzz must have done a good job," Karl said. "Or a bad one and got caught," Dover said.

Chip swung his binoculars back to the opening. Its rim had a glassy sheen, and pale green scrub lay along its bottom. "It feels like the boats on the beaches," he said. "Sitting there wide open..."

"Do you think it leads back to Liberty?" Dover asked, and Karl laughed.

Chip said, "There could be fifty traps that we won't see until it's too late." He lowered his binoculars. Karl said, "Maybe Ria didn't say anything."

"When you're questioned at a medicenter you say everything," Chip said. "But even if she didn't, wouldn't it at least be closed? That's what we've got the tools for." Karl said, "It must still be in use." Chip stared at the opening. "We can always go back," Dover said. "Sure, let's," Chip said.

They looked all around them, and raised their masks into place, and walked slowly across the clearing. No gas jetted, no alarms sounded, no members in antigrav gear appeared in the sky.

They walked to the opening of the tunnel and shone their flashlights into it. Light shimmered and sparked in high plastic-lined roundness, all the way to the place where the tunnel seemed to end, but no, was bending to its downward angle. Two steel tracks reached into it, wide and flat, with a couple of meters of unplasticked black rock between them. They looked back at the clearing and up at the opening's rim. They stepped inside the tunnel, looked at one another, and lowered their masks and sniffed. "Well," Chip said. "Ready to walk?"

Karl nodded, and Dover, smiling, said, "Let's go."

They stood for a moment, and then walked ahead on the smooth black rock between the tracks.

"Will the air be all right?" Karl asked.

"We've got the masks if it isn't," Chip said. He shone his flashlight on his watch. "It's a quarter of ten/' he said. "We should be there around one."

"Uni'll be up," Dover said.

"Till we put it to sleep," Karl said.

The tunnel bent to a slight incline, and they stopped and looked—at plastic roundness glimmering away and away and away into blackest black.

"Christ and Wei," Karl said.