'Thank you,' Chip said. 'I couldn't ask for more. Thank you.'
'God in heaven, here I go again,' Julia said. She turned to Chip. 'Wait, you'll find out,' she said: 'the older you get, the more you stay the same. I'm an only child who's used to having her way, that's my trouble. Come on, I've got work to do.'
They went down stairs that led from the landing. 'Really,' Julia said. 'I have all kinds of noble reasons for spending my time and money on people like you—a Christian urge to help the Family, love of justice, freedom, democracy—but the truth of the matter is, I'm an only child who's used to having her way. It maddens me, it absolutely maddens me, that I can't go anywhere I please on this planet! Or off it, for that matter! You have no idea how I resent that damned computer!'
Chip laughed. 'I do?' he said. 'That's just the way I feel.'
'It's a monster straight out of hell,' Julia said.
They walked around the building. 'It's a monster, all right,' Chip said, throwing away his cigarette. 'At least the way it is now. One of the things I want to try to find out is whether, if we got the chance, we could change its programming instead of destroying it. If the Family were running it, instead of vice versa, it wouldn't be so bad. Do you really believe in heaven and hell?'
'Let's not get into religion,' Julia said, 'or you're going to find yourself washing dishes at the Casino. How much are they paying you?'
'Six-fifty a week.'
'Really?'
'Yes.'
'I'll give you the same,' Julia said, 'but if anyone around here asks, say you're getting five.'
He waited until Julia had questioned a number of people without learning of any attack party that had known about the tunnel, and then, confirmed in his decision, he told his plans to Lilac.
'You can't!' she said. 'Not after all those other people went!'
'They were aiming at the wrong target,' he said.
She shook her head, held her brow, looked at him. 'It's—I don't know what to say' she said. 'I thought you were— done with all this. I thought we were settled.' She threw her hands out at the room around them, their New Madrid room, with the walls they had painted, the bookshelf he had made, the bed, the refrigerator, Ashi's sketch of a laughing child.
Chip said, 'Honey, I may be the only person on any of the islands who knows about the tunnel, about the real Uni. I have to make use of that. How can I not do it?'
'All right, make use of it,' she said. 'Plan, help organize a party—fine! I'll help you! But why do you have to go? Other people should do it, people without families.'
'I'll be here when the baby's born,' he said. 'It's going to take longer than that to get everything ready. And then I'll only be gone for—maybe as little as a week.'
She stared at him. 'How can you say that?' she said. 'How can you say you'll—you could be gone foreverl You could be caught and treated!'
'We're going to learn how to fight,' he said. 'We're going to have guns and—'
'Others should go!' she said. 'How can I ask them, if I'm not going myself?'
'Ask them, that's all. Ask them.'
'No,' he said. 'I've got to go too.'
'You want to go, that's what it is,' she said. 'You don't have to go; you want to.'
He was silent for a moment, and then he said, 'All right, I want to. Yes. I can't think of not being there when Uni is beaten. I want to throw the explosive myself, or pull the switch myself, or do whatever it is that's finally done—myself.'
'You're sick,' she said. She picked up the sewing in her lap and found the needle and started to sew. 'I mean it,' she said. 'You're sick on the subject of Uni. It didn't put us here; we're lucky to have got here. Ashi's right: it would have killed us the way it kills people at sixty-two; it wouldn't have wasted boats and islands. We got away from it; it's already been beaten; and you're sick to want to go back and beat it again.'
'It put us here,' Chip said, 'because the programmers couldn't justify killing people who were still young.'
'Cloth,' Lilac said. 'They justified killing old people, they'd have justified killing infants. We got away. And now you're going back.'
'What about our parents?' he said. 'They're going to be killed in a few more years. What about Snowflake and Spar-row—the whole Family, in fact?'
She sewed, jabbing the needle into green cloth—the sleeves from her green dress that she was making into a shirt for the baby. 'Others should go,' she said. 'People without families.'
Later, in bed, he said, 'If anything should go wrong, Julia will take care of you. And the baby.'
'That's a great comfort,' she said. 'Thanks. Thanks very much. Thank Julia too.' It stayed between them from that night on: resentment on her part and refusal to be moved by it on his.
Part Four
FIGHTING BACK
Chapter 1
He was busy, busier than he'd been in his entire life: planning, looking for people and equipment, traveling, learning, explaining, pleading, devising, deciding. And working at the factory too, where Julia, despite the time off she allowed him, made sure she got her six-fifty-a-week's worth out of him in machinery repair and production speed-up. And with Lilac's pregnancy advancing, he was doing more of the at-home chores too. He was more exhausted than he'd ever been, and more wide awake; more sick of everything one day and more sure of everything the next; more alive. It, the plan, the project, was like a machine to be assembled, with all the parts to be found or made, and each dependent for its shape and size on all the others.
Before he could decide on the size of the party, he had to have a clearer idea of its ultimate aim; and before he could have that, he had to know more about Uni's functioning and where it could be most effectively attacked. He spoke to Lars Newman, Ashi's friend who ran a school. Lars sent him to a man in Andrait, who sent him to a man in Manacor.
'I knew those banks were too small for the amount of insulation they seemed to have,' the man in Manacor said. His name was Newbrook and he was near seventy; he had taught in a technological academy before he left the Family. He was minding a baby granddaughter, changing her diaper and annoyed about it. 'Hold still, will you?' he said. 'Well, assuming you can get in,' he said to Chip, 'the power source is what you've obviously got to go for. The reactor or, more likely, the reactors.'
'But they could be replaced fairly quickly, couldn't they?' Chip said. 'I want to put Uni out of commission for a good long time, long enough for the Family to wake up and decide what it wants to do with it.'
'Damn it, hold still!' Newbrook said. 'The refrigerating plant, then.'
'The refrigerating plant?' Chip said.
'That's right,' Newbrook said. 'The internal temperature of the banks has to be close to absolute zero; raise it a few degrees and the grids won't—there, you see what you've done?—the grids won't be superconductive any more. You'll erase Uni's memory.' He picked up the crying baby and held her against his shoulder, patting her back. 'Shh, shh,' he said.
'Erase it permanently?' Chip asked.
Newbrook nodded, patting the crying baby. 'Even if the refrigeration's restored,' he said, 'all the data will have to be fed in again. It'll take years/' 'That's exactly what I'm looking for,' Chip said. The refrigerating plant. And the stand-by plant.
