This Perfect Day Read Online Free

said. “There are three levels under this one, and that’s where it is! Do you want to see it? Do you want to see the real UniComp?”
    Chip could only stare at him.
    “Do you, Chip?” Papa Jan said. “Do you want to see it? I can show it to you!”
    Chip nodded.
    Papa Jan let go of his arm and stood up straight. He looked around and smiled. “All right,” he said, “let’s go this way,” and taking Chip’s shoulder he steered him back the way they had come, past the glass wall thronged with members looking in, and the flicking light-beam of the memory banks, and the skittering wall of minilights, and—“Excuse us, please”— through the line of incoming members and down to another part of the hallway that was darker and empty, where a monster telecomp lolled broken away from its wall display and two blue stretchers lay side by side with pillows and folded blankets on them.
    There was a door in the corner with a scanner beside it, but as they got near it Papa Jan pushed down Chip’s arm.
    “The scanner,” Chip said.
    “No,” Papa Jan said.
    “Isn’t this where we’re—”
    “Yes.”
    Chip looked at Papa Jan, and Papa Jan pushed him past the scanner, pulled open the door, thrust him inside, and came in after him, dragging the door shut against its hissing slow-closer.
    Chip stared at him, quivering.
    “It’s all right,” Papa Jan said sharply; and then, not sharply, kindly, he took Chip’s head in both his hands and said, “It’s all right, Chip. Nothing will happen to you. I’ve done it lots of times.”
    “We didn’t ask,” Chip said, still quivering.
    “It’s all right,” Papa Jan said. “Look: who does UniComp belong to?”
    “Belong to?”
    “Whose is it? Whose computer?”
    “It’s—it’s the whole Family’s.”
    “And you’re a member of the Family, aren’t you?”
    “Yes ...”
    “Well then, it’s partly your computer, isn’t it? It belongs to you, not the other way around; you don’t belong to it.”
    “No, we’re supposed to ask for things!” Chip said.
    “Chip, please, trust me,” Papa Jan said. “We’re not going to take anything, we’re not even going to touch anything. 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