He called the medicenter on Thursday, the day before his treatment, and complained of a toothache. He was offered a Friday-morning appointment, but he said that he was coming in on Saturday morning for his treatment and couldn't he catch two birds with one net? It wasn't a severe toothache, just a slight throb.
He was given an appointment for Saturday morning at 8:15.
Then he called Bob RO and told him that he had a dental appointment at 8:15 on Saturday. Did he think it would be a good idea if he got his treatment then too? Catch two birds with one net.
'I guess you might as well,' Bob said. 'Hold on'—and switched on his telecomp. 'You're Li RM—'
'Thirty-fiveM4419.'
'Right,' Bob said, tapping keys.
Chip sat and watched unconcernedly.
'Saturday morning at 8:05,' Bob said.
'Fine,' Chip said. 'Thanks.'
'Thank Uni,' Bob said.
Which gave him a day longer between treatments than he'd had before.
That night, Thursday, was a rain night, and he stayed in his room. He sat at his desk with his forehead on his fists, thinking, wishing he were in the museum and able to smoke.
If a city of incurables existed, and Uni knew about it and was leaving it to its armed defenders—then—then —Then Uni wasn't letting the Family know—and be troubled or in some instances tempted—and it was feeding concealing data to the mapmaking equipment.
Of course! How could supposedly unused areas be shown on beautiful Family maps? 'But look at that place there, Daddy!' a child visiting the MFA exclaims. 'Why aren't we Using Our Heritage Wisely and Without Waste?' And Daddy replies, 'Yes that is odd...' So the city would be labeled IND99999 or Enormous Desk Lamp Factory, and no one would ever be passed within five kilometers of it. If it were an island it wouldn't be shown at all; blue ocean would replace it.
And looking at maps was therefore useless. There could be cities of incurables here, there, everywhere. Or —there could be none at all. The maps proved or disproved nothing.
Was this the great revelation he had racked his brain for—that his map-examining had been stupidity from the beginning? That there was no way at all of finding the city, except possibly by walking everywhere on Earth? Fight Lilac, with her maddening ideas! No, not really. Fight Uni.
For half an hour he drove his mind against the problem-how do you find a theoretical city in an untravelable world?—and finally he gave up and went to bed.
He thought then of Lilac, of the kiss she had resisted and the kiss she had allowed, and of the strange arousal he had felt when she showed him her soft-looking conical breasts...
On Friday he was tense and on edge. Acting normal was unendurable; he held his breath all day long at the Center, and through dinner, TV, and Photography Club. After the last chime he walked to Snowflake's building —'Ow,' she said, 'I'm not going to be able to move tomorrow!'—and then to the Pre-U. He circled the halls by flashlight, unable to put the idea aside. The city might exist, it might even be somewhere near. He looked at the money display and the prisoner in his cell (The two of us, brother) and the locks and the flat-picture cameras.
There was one answer that he could see, but it involved getting dozens of members into the group. Each could then check out the maps according to his own limited knowledge. He himself, for instance, could verify the genetics labs and research centers and the cities he had seen or heard spoken of by other members. Lilac could verify the advisory establishments and other cities... But it would take forever, and an army of undertreated accomplices. He could hear King raging.
He looked at the 1951 map, and marveled as he always did at the strange names and the intricate networks of borders. Yet members then could go where they wanted, more or less! Thin shadows moved in response to his light at the edges of the map's neat patches, cut to fit precisely into the crosslines of the grid. If not for the moving flashlight the blue rectangles would have been com—Blue rectangles...
If the city were an island it wouldn't be shown; blue ocean would replace it. And would have to replace it on pre-U maps as well.
He didn't let himself get excited. He moved the flashlight slowly back and forth over the glass-covered map and counted the shadow-moving patches. There were eight of them, all blue. All in the oceans, evenly distributed. Five of them covered single rectangles of the grid, and three covered pairs of rectangles. One of the one-rectangle patches was right there off Ind, in 'Bay of Bengal'—Stability Bay.
He put the flashlight on a display case and took hold of the wide map by both sides of its frame. He lifted it free of its hook, lowered it to the floor, leaned its glassed face against his knee, and took up the flashlight again. The frame was old, but its gray-paper backing looked relatively new. The letters EV were stamped at the bottom of it. He carried the map by its wire across the hall, down the escalator, across the second-floor hall, and into the storeroom. Tapping on the light, he brought the map to the table and laid it carefully face-down.
With the corner of a fingernail he tore the taut paper backing along the bottom and sides of the frame, pulled it out from under the wire, and pressed it back so that it stayed. White cardboard lay in the frame, pinned down by ranks of short brads.
He searched in the cartons of smaller relics until he found a rusted pair of pincers with a yellow sticker around one handle. He used the pincers to pull the brads from the frame, then lifted out the cardboard and another piece of cardboard that lay beneath it.
The back of the map was brown-blotched but untorn, with no holes that would have justified the patching. A line of brown writing was faintly visible: Wyndham, MU 7-2161—some kind of early nameber.
He picked at the map's edges and lifted it from the glass, turned it over and raised it sagging above his head against the white light of the ceiling. Islands showed through all the patches: here a large one, 'Madagascar'; here a cluster of small ones, 'Azores.' The patch in Stability Bay showed a line of four small ones, 'Andaman Islands.' He remembered none of the patch-covered islands from the maps at the MFA.
He put the map back down in the frame, face-up, and leaned his hands on the table and looked at it, grinned at its pre-U oddity, its eight blue almost-invisible rectangles. Lilac! he thought. Wait till I tell you!
With the head of the frame propped on piles of books and his flashlight standing under the glass, he traced on a sheet of paper the four small 'Andaman Islands' and the shoreline of 'Bay of Bengal.' He copied down the names and locations of the other islands and traced the map's scale, which was in 'miles' rather than kilometers. One pair of medium-size islands, 'Falkland Islands,' was off the coast of Arg ('Argentina') opposite 'Santa Cruz,' which seemed to be ARG20400. Something teased his memory in that, but he couldn't think what. He measured the Andaman Islands; the three that were closest together were about a hundred and twenty 'miles' in overall length —somewhere around two hundred kilometers, if he remembered correctly; big enough for several cities! The shortest approach to them would be from the other side of Stability Bay, SEA77122, if he and Lilac (and King? Snow-flake? Sparrow?) were to go there. If they were to go? Of course they would go, now that he had found the islands. They'd manage it somehow; they had to.
He turned the map face-down in the frame, put back the pieces of cardboard, and pushed the brads back into their holes with a handle-end of the pincers—wondering as he did so why ARG20400 and the 'Falkland Islands' kept poking at his memory.
He slipped the frame's backing in under the wire—Sunday night he would bring tape and make a better job of it—and carried the map back up to the third floor. He hung it on its hook and made sure the loose backing didn't show from the sides.
ARG20400... A new zinc mine being cut underneath it had been shown recently on TV; was that why it seemed significant? He'd certainly never been there...
He went down to the basement and got three tobacco leaves from behind the hot-water tank. He brought them up to the storeroom, got his smoking things from the carton he kept them in, and sat down at the table and began cutting the leaves.
Could there possibly be another reason why the islands were covered and unmapped? And who did the covering? Enough. He was tired of thinking. He let his mind go—to the knife's shiny blade, to Hush and Sparrow cutting tobacco the first time he'd seen them. He had asked Hush where the seeds had come from, and she'd said that King had had them. And he remembered where he had seen ARG20400—the nameber, not the city itself.
A screaming woman in torn coveralls was being led into Medicenter Main by red-cross-coveralled members on either side of her. They held her arms and seemed to be talking to her, but she kept on screaming—short sharp
