Ira Levin: This Perfect Day

There was another lobby, smaller than the one at ground level, another smiling member in pale blue, and another line, this one extending two by two to double doors that opened on a dimly lit hallway.

“Here we are!” Chip called, and Papa Jan said to him, “We don’t all have to be together.” They had become separated from Chip’s parents and Peace, who were farther ahead in the line and looking back at them questioningly—Chip’s parents; Peace was too short to be seen. The member in front of Chip turned and offered to let them move up, but Papa Jan said, “No, this is all right. Thank you, brother.” He waved a hand at Chip’s parents and smiled, and Chip did the same. Chip’s parents smiled back, then turned around and moved forward.

Papa Jan looked about, his bulging eyes bright, his mouth keeping its smile. His nostrils flared and fell with his breathing. “So,” he said, “you’re finally going to see UniComp. Excited?”

“Yes, very,” Chip said.

They followed the line forward.

“I don’t blame you,” Papa Jan said. “Wonderful! Once-in-a-lifetime experience, to see the machine that’s going to classify you and give you your assignments, that’s going to decide where you’ll live and whether or not you’ll marry the girl you want to marry; and if you do, whether or not you’ll have children and what they’ll be named if you have them—of course you’re excited; who wouldn’t be?”

Chip looked at Papa Jan, disturbed.

Papa Jan, still smiling, clapped him on the back as they passed in their turn into the hallway. “Go look!” he said. “Look at the displays, look at Uni, look at everything! It’s all here for you; look at it!”

There was a rack of earpieces, the same as in a museum; Chip took one and put it in. Papa Jan’s strange manner made him nervous, and he was sorry not to be up ahead with his parents and Peace. Papa Jan put in an earpiece too. “I wonder what interesting new facts I’m going to hear!” he said, and laughed to himself. Chip turned away from him.

His nervousness and feeling of disturbance fell away as he faced a wall that glittered and skittered with a thousand sparkling minilights. The voice of the elevator spoke in his ear, telling him, while the lights showed him, how UniComp received from its round-the-world relay belt the microwave impulses of all the uncountable scanners and telecomps and tele-controlled devices; how it evaluated the impulses and sent back its answering impulses to the relay belt and the sources of inquiry.

Yes, he was excited. Was anything quicker, more clever, more everywhere than Uni?

The next span of wall showed how the memory banks worked; a beam of light flicked over a crisscrossed metal square, making parts of it glow and leaving parts of it dark. The voice spoke of electron beams and superconductive grids, of charged and uncharged areas becoming the yes-or-no carriers of different bits of information. When a question was put to UniComp, the voice said, it scanned the relevant bits…

He didn’t understand it, but that made it more wonderful, that Uni could know all there was to know so magically, so un -understandably!

And the next span was glass not wall, and there it was, UniComp: a twin row of different-colored metal bulks, like treatment units only lower and smaller, some of them pink, some brown, some orange; and among them in the large, rosily lit room, ten or a dozen members in pale blue coveralls, smiling and chatting with one another as they read meters and dials on the thirty-or-so units and marked what they read on handsome pale blue plastic clipboards. There was a gold cross and sickle on the far wall, and a clock that said 11:08 Sun 12 Apr 145 Y.U. Music crept into Chip’s ear and grew louder: “Outward, Outward,” played by an enormous orchestra, so movingly, so majestically, that tears of pride and happiness came to his eyes.

He could have stayed there for hours, watching those busy cheerful members and those impressively gleaming memory banks, listening to “Outward, Outward” and then “One Mighty Family”; but the music thinned away (as 11:10 became 11:11 ) and the voice, gently, aware of his feelings, reminded him of other members waiting and asked him to move on please to the next display farther down the hallway. Reluctantly he turned himself from UniComp’s glass wall, with other members who were wiping at the corners of their eyes and smiling and nodding. He smiled at them, and they at him.

Papa Jan caught his arm and drew him across the hallway to a scanner-posted door. “Well, did you like it?” he asked.

Chip nodded.

“That’s not Uni,” Papa Jan said.

Chip looked at him.

Papa Jan pulled the earpiece out of Chip’s ear. “That’s not UniComp!” he said in a fierce whisper. “Those aren’t real, those pink and orange boxes in there! Those are toys , for the Family to come look at and feel cozy and warm with!” His eyes bulged close to Chip’s; specks of his spit hit Chip’s nose and cheeks. “It’s down below!” he said. “There are three levels under this one, and that’s where it is! Do you want to see it? Do you want to see the real UniComp?”

Chip could only stare at him.

“Do you, Chip?” Papa Jan said. “Do you want to see it? I can show it to you!”

Chip nodded.

Papa Jan let go of his arm and stood up straight. He looked around and smiled. “All right,” he said, “let’s go this way,” and taking Chip’s shoulder he steered him back the way they had come, past the glass wall thronged with members looking in, and the flicking light-beam of the memory banks, and the skittering wall of minilights, and—“Excuse us, please”—through the line of incoming members and down to another part of the hallway that was darker and empty, where a monster telecomp lolled broken away from its wall display and two blue stretchers lay side by side with pillows and folded blankets on them.

There was a door in the corner with a scanner beside it, but as they got near it Papa Jan pushed down Chip’s arm.

“The scanner,” Chip said.

“No,” Papa Jan said.

“Isn’t this where we’re—”

“Yes.”

Chip looked at Papa Jan, and Papa Jan pushed him past the scanner, pulled open the door, thrust him inside, and came in after him, dragging the door shut against its hissing slow-closer.

Chip stared at him, quivering.

“It’s all right,” Papa Jan said sharply; and then, not sharply, kindly, he took Chip’s head in both his hands and said, “It’s all right, Chip. Nothing will happen to you. I’ve done it lots of times.”

“We didn’t ask,” Chip said, still quivering.

“It’s all right,” Papa Jan said. “Look: who does UniComp belong to?”

“Belong to?”

“Whose is it? Whose computer?”

“It’s—it’s the whole Family’s.”

“And you’re a member of the Family, aren’t you?”

“Yes …”

“Well then, it’s partly your computer, isn’t it? It belongs to you, not the other way around; you don’t belong to it.”

“No, we’re supposed to ask for things!” Chip said.

“Chip, please, trust me,” Papa Jan said. “We’re not going to take anything, we’re not even going to touch anything. We’re only going to look. That’s the reason I came here today, to show you the real UniComp. You want to see it, don’t you?”

Chip, after a moment, said, “Yes.”

“Then don’t worry; it’s all right.” Papa Jan looked reassuringly into his eyes, and then let go of his head and took his hand.

They were on a landing, with stairs going down. They went down four or five of them—into coolness—and Papa Jan stopped, and stopped Chip. “Stay right here,” he said. “I’ll be back in two seconds. Don’t move.”