With the right maps and charts, someone who knew what he was doing could probably work out its exact location, or very nearly.
'You there! Get moving!' someone shouted.
He walked ahead quickly, thinking about it, thinking about it.
It was there. The tunnel.
Chapter 6
'If it's money, the answer is no,' Julia Costanza said, walking briskly past clattering looms and immigrant women glancing at her. 'If it's a job,' she said, 'I might be able to help you.'
Chip, walking along beside her, said, 'Ashi's already got me a job.'
'Then it's money,' she said.
'Information first,' Chip said, 'then maybe money.' He pushed open a door.
'No,' Julia said, going through. 'Why don't you go to I. A.? That's what it's there for. What information? About what?'
She glanced at him as they started up a spiral stairway that shifted with their weight.
Chip said, 'Can we sit down somewhere for five minutes?'
'If I sit down,' Julia said, 'half this island will be naked tomorrow. That's probably acceptable to you, but it isn't to me.
What information?'
He held in his resentment. Looking at her beak-nosed profile, he said, 'Those two attacks on Uni you—'
'No,' she said. She stopped and faced him, one hand holding the stairway's centerpost. 'If it's about that I really won't listen,' she said. 'I knew it the minute you walked into that living room, the disapproving air you had. No. I'm not interested in any more plans and schemes. Go talk to somebody else.' She went up the stairs.
He went quickly and caught up with her. 'Were they planning to use a tunnel?' he asked. 'Just tell me that; were they going in through a tunnel from behind Mount Love?'
She pushed open the door at the head of the stairway; he held it and went through after her, into a large loft where a few machine parts lay. Birds rose fluttering to holes in the peaked roof and flew out.
'They were going in with the other people,' she said, walking straight through the loft toward a door at its far end. 'The sightseers. At least that was the plan. They were going to go down in the elevators.'
'And then?'
'There's no point in—'
'Just answer me, will you, please?' he said.
She glanced at him, angrily, and looked ahead. 'There's supposed to be a large observation window,' she said. 'They were going to smash it and throw in explosives.'
'Both groups?'
'Yes.'
'They may have succeeded,' he said.
She stopped with her hand on the door and looked at him, puzzled.
'That's not really Uni,' he said. 'It's a display for the sightseers. And maybe it's also meant as a false target for attackers. They could have blown it up and nothing would have happened—except that they would have been grabbed and treated.'
She kept looking at him.
'The real thing is farther down,' he said. 'On three levels. I was in it once when I was ten or eleven years old.'
She said, 'Digging a tunnel is the most ri—'
'It's there already,' he said. 'It doesn't have to be dug.'
She closed her mouth, looked at him, and turned quickly away and pushed open the door. It led to another loft, brightly lit, where a row of presses stood motionless with layers of cloth on their beds. Water was on the floor, and two men were trying to lift the end of a long pipe that had apparently fallen from the wall and lay across a stopped conveyor belt piled with cut cloth pieces. The wall end of the pipe was still anchored, and the men were trying to lift its other end and get it off the belt and back up against the wall. Another man, an immigrant, waited on a ladder to receive it.
'Help them,' Julia said, and began gathering pieces of cloth from the wet floor.
'If that's how I spend my time, nothing's going to be changed,' Chip said. 'That's acceptable to you, but it isn't to me.'
'Help them!' Julia said. 'Go on! We'll talk later! You're not going to get anywhere by being cheeky!
Chip helped the men get the pipe secured against the wall, and then he went out with Julia onto a railed landing on the side of the building. New Madrid stretched away below them, bright in the mid-morning sun. Beyond it lay a strip of blue-green sea dotted with fishing boats.
'Every' day it's something else,' Julia said, reaching into the pocket of her gray apron. She took out cigarettes, offered Chip one, and lit them with ordinary cheap matches.
They smoked, and Chip said, 'The tunnel's there. It was used to bring in the memory banks.'
'Some of the groups I wasn't involved with may have known about it,' Julia said.
'Can you find out?'
She drew on her cigarette. In the sunlight she was older-looking, the skin of her face and neck netted with wrinkles.
'Yes,' she said. 'I suppose so. How do you know about it?'
He told her. 'I'm sure it's not filled in,' he said. 'It must be fifteen kilometers long. And besides, it's going to be used again. There's space cut out for more banks for when the Family gets bigger.'
She looked questioningly at him. 'I thought the colonies had their own computers,' she said.
'They do,' he said, not understanding. And then he understood. It was only in the colonies that the Family was growing; on Earth, with two children per couple and not every couple allowed to reproduce, the Family was getting smaller, not bigger. He had never connected that with what Papa Jan had said about the space for more memory banks.
'Maybe they'll be needed for more telecontrolled equipment,' he said.
'Or maybe,' Julia said, 'your grandfather wasn't a reliable source of information.'
'He was the one who had the idea for the tunnel,' Chip said. 'It's there; I know it is. And it may be a way, the only way, that Uni can be gotten at. I'm going to try it, and I want your help, as much of it as you can give me.'
'You want my money, you mean,' she said.
'Yes,' he said. 'And your help. In finding the right people with the right skills. And in getting information that we'll need, and equipment. And in finding people who can teach us skills that we don't have. I want to take this very slowly and carefully. I want to come back.'
She looked at him with her eyes narrowed against her cigarette smoke. 'Well, you're not an absolute imbecile,' she said. 'What kind of job has Ashi found for you?'
'Washing dishes at the Casino.'
'God in heaven!' she said. 'Come here tomorrow morning at a quarter of eight.'
'The Casino leaves my mornings free,' he said.
'Come here!' she said. 'You'll get the time you need.'
'All right,' he said, and smiled at her. 'Thanks,' he said.
She turned away and looked at her cigarette. She crushed it against the railing. 'I'm not going to pay for it,' she said.
'Not all of it. I can't. You have no idea how expensive it's going to be. Explosives, for instance: last time they cost over two thousand dollars, and that was five years ago; God knows what they'll be today.' She scowled at her cigarette stub and threw it away over the railing. 'I'll pay what I can,' she said, 'and I'll introduce you to people who'll pay the rest if you flatter them enough.'
