He was two days from a treatment, his mind as active as it ever got. He wished it could get still more active. He felt that there was something he wasn’t thinking of, just beyond the rim of his awareness.
If Uni let the city be, rather than sacrifice members and time and technology to the “helping” of it—then what? There was something else, a next idea to be picked and pried out of that one.
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 corn—
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.