“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.”
“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 forever! 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.”