He was running a weekly two-line advertisement in the Immigrant, offering to buy coveralls, sandals, and take-along kits. One day he got an answer from a woman in Andrait, and a few evenings later he went there to look at two kits and a pair of sandals. The kits were shabby and outdated, but the sandals were good. The woman and her husband asked why he wanted them. Their name was Newbridge and they were in their early thirties, living in a tiny wretched rat-infested cellar. Chip told them, and they asked to join the group—insisted on joining it, actually. They were perfectly normal-looking, which was a point in their favor, but there was a feverishness about them, a keyed-up tension, that bothered Chip a little.
He went to see them again a week later, with Dover, and that time they seemed more relaxed and possibly suitable. Their names were Jack and Ria. They had had two children, both of whom had died in their first few months. Jack was a sewer worker and Ria worked in a toy factory. They said they were healthy and seemed to be.
Chip decided to take them—provisionally, at least—and he told them the details of the plan as it was taking shape.
“We ought to blow up the whole fucking thing, not just the refrigerating plants,” Jack said.
“One thing has to be very clear,” Chip said. “I’m going to be in charge. Unless you’re prepared to do exactly as I say every step of the way, you’d better forget the whole thing.”
“No, you’re absolutely right,” Jack said. “There has to be one man in charge of an operation like this; it’s the only way it can work.”
“We can offer suggestions, can’t we?” Ria said.
“The more the better,” Chip said. “But the decisions are going to be mine, and you’ve got to be ready to go along with them.”
Jack said, “I am,” and Ria said, “So am I.”
Locating the entrance of the tunnel turned out to be more difficult than Chip had anticipated. He collected three large-scale maps of central Eur and a highly detailed pre-U topographic one of “Switzerland” on which he carefully transcribed Uni’s site, but everyone he consulted—former engineers and geologists, native mining engineers—said that more data was needed before the tunnel’s course could be projected with any hope of accuracy. Ashi became interested in the problem and spent occasional hours in the Library copying references to “Geneva” and “Jura Mountains” out of old encyclopedias and works on geology.
On two consecutive moonlit nights Chip and Dover went out in the I.A. boat to a point west of EUR91766 and watched for the copper barges. These passed, they found, at precise intervals of four hours and twenty-five minutes. Each low flat dark shape moved steadily toward the northwest at thirty kilometers an hour, its rolling afterwaves lifting the boat and dropping it, lifting it and dropping it. Three hours later a barge would come from the opposite direction, riding higher on the water, empty.
Dover calculated that the Eur-bound barges, if they maintained their speed and direction, would reach EUR91772 in a little over six hours.
On the second night he brought the boat alongside a barge and slowed to match its speed while Chip climbed aboard. Chip rode on the barge for several minutes, sitting comfortably on its flat compacted load of copper ingots in wood cribs, and then he climbed back aboard the boat.
Lilac found another man for the group, an attendant at the clinic named Lars Newstone who called himself Buzz. He was thirty-six, Chip’s age, and taller than normal; a quiet and capable-seeming man. He had been on the island for nine years and at the clinic for three, during which he had picked up a certain amount of medical knowledge. He was married but living apart from his wife. He wanted to join the group, he said, because he had always felt that “somebody ought to do something, or at least try. It’s wrong,” he said, “to let Uni—have the world without trying to get it back.”
“He’s fine, just the man we need,” Chip said to Lilac after Buzz had left their room. “I wish I had two more of him instead of the Newbridges. Thank you.”
Lilac said nothing, standing at the sink washing cups. Chip went to her, took her shoulders, and kissed her hair. She was in the seventh month of her pregnancy, big and uncomfortable.
At the end of March, Julia gave a dinner party at which Chip, who had by then been working four months on the plan, presented it to her guests—natives with money who could each be counted on, she had said, for a contribution of at least five hundred dollars. He gave them copies of a list he had prepared of all the costs that would be involved, and passed around his “Switzerland” map with the tunnel drawn in in its approximate position.
They weren’t as receptive as he had thought they would be.
“Thirty-six hundred for explosives?” one asked.
“That’s right, sir,” Chip said. “If anyone knows where we can get them cheaper, I’ll be glad to hear about it.”
“What’s this ‘kit reinforcing’?”
“The kits we’re going to carry; they’re not made for heavy loads. They have to be taken apart and remade around metal frames.”
“You people can’t buy guns and bombs, can you?”
“I’ll do the buying,” Julia said, “and everything will stay on my property until the party leaves. I have the permits.”
“When do you think you’ll go?”
“I don’t know yet,” Chip said. “The gas masks are going to take three months from when they’re ordered. And we still have one more man to find, and training to go through. I’m hoping for July or August.”
“Are you sure this is where the tunnel actually is?”
“No, we’re still working on that. That’s just an approximation.”
Five of the guests gave excuses and seven gave checks that added up to only twenty-six hundred dollars, less than a quarter of the eleven thousand that was needed.
“Lunky bastards,” Julia said.
“It’s a beginning, anyway,” Chip said. “We can start ordering things. And take on Captain Gold.”
“We’ll do it again in a few weeks,” Julia said. “What were you so nervous for? You’ve got to speak more forcefully!”
The baby was born, a boy, and they named him Jan. Both his eyes were brown.
On Sundays and Wednesday evenings, in an unused loft in Julia’s factory, Chip, Dover, Buzz, Jack, and Ria studied various forms of fighting. Their teacher was an officer in the army, Captain Gold, a small smiling man who obviously disliked them and seemed to take pleasure in having them hit one another and throw one another to the thin mats spread on the floor. “Hit! Hit! Hit!” he would say, bobbing before them in his undershirt and army trousers. “Hit I Like this! This is hitting, not this! This is waving at someone! God almighty, you’re hopeless, you steelies! Come on, Green-eye, hit him”
Chip swung his fist at Jack and was in the air and on his back on a mat.
“Good, you!” Captain Gold said. “That looked a little human! Get up, Green-eye, you’re not dead! What did I tell you about keeping low?”
Jack and Ria learned most quickly; Buzz, most slowly.
Julia gave another dinner, at which Chip spoke more forcefully, and they got thirty-two hundred dollars.
The baby was sick—had a fever and a stomach infection—but he got better and was fine-looking and happy, sucking hungrily at Lilac’s breasts. Lilac was warmer than before, pleased with the baby and interested in hearing Chip tell about the money-raising and the gradual coming-into-being of the plan.