This Perfect Day by Ira Levin Read Free Book Online Page B

said. “I’ll claim again in a week or so. Been doing too much drawing anyway, I suppose. Uni knows best.” He went off down the aisle toward the bathroom.
    Chip turned back to the desk and leaned on his elbows and held his head, shaking.
    That was Tuesday. Chip’s weekly adviser meetings were on Woodsday mornings at 10:40, and this time he would tell Li YB about Karl’s sickness. There was no longer any question of being an alarmist; there was faulted responsibility, in fact, in having waited as long as he had. He ought to have said something at the first clear sign, Karl’s slipping out of TV (to draw, of course), or even when he had noticed the unusual look in Karl’s eyes. Why in hate had he waited? He could hear Li YB gently reproaching him: “You haven’t been a very good brother’s keeper, Li.”
    Early on Woodsday morning, though, he decided to pick up some coveralls and the new Geneticist. He went down to the supply center and walked through the aisles. He took a Geneticist and a pack of coveralls and walked some more and came to the art-supplies section. He saw the pile of green-covered sketch pads; there weren’t five hundred of them, but there were seventy or eighty and no one seemed in a rush to claim them.
    He walked away, thinking that he must be going out of his mind. Yet if Karl were to promise not to draw when he wasn’t supposed to . . .
    He walked back again —“Anyone can try a little sketching in his spare time, right?”— and took a pad and a packet of charcoal. He went to the shortest check-out line, his heart pounding in his chest, his arms trembling. He drew a deep-as-possible breath; another, and another.
    He put his bracelet to the scanner, and the stickers of the coveralls, the Geneticist, the pad, and the charcoal. Everything was yes. He gave way to the next member.
    He went back up to the dorm. Karl’s cubicle was empty, the bed unmade. He went into his own cubicle and put the coveralls on the shelf and the Geneticist on the desk. On the top page of the pad he wrote, his hand still trembling, Free time only. I want your promise. Then he put the pad and the charcoal on his bed and sat at the desk and looked at the Geneticist.
    Karl came, and went into his cubicle and began making his bed. “Are those yours?” Chip asked.
    Karl looked at the pad and charcoal on Chip’s bed. Chip said, “They’re not mine.”
    “Oh, yes. Thanks,” Karl said, and came over and took them. “Thanks a lot,” he said.
    “You ought to put your nameber on the first page,” Chip said, “if you’re going to leave it all over like that.”
    Karl went into his cubicle, opened the pad, and looked at the first page. He looked at Chip, nodded, raised his right hand, and mouthed, “Love of Family.”
    They rode down to the classrooms together. “What did you have to waste a page for?” Karl said.
    Chip smiled.
    “I’m not joking,” Karl said. “Didn’t you ever hear of writing a note on a piece of scrap paper?”
    “Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei,” Chip said.
    In December of that year, 152, came the appalling news of the Gray Death, sweeping through all the Mars colonies except one and completely wiping them out in nine short days. In the Academy of the Genetic Sciences, as in all the Family’s establishments, there was helpless silence, then mourning, and then a massive determination to help the Family overcome the staggering setback it had suffered. Everyone worked harder and longer. Free time was halved; there were classes on Sundays and only a half-day Christmas holiday. Genetics alone could breed new strengths in the coming generations; everyone was in a hurry to finish his training and get on to his first real assignment. On every wall were the white-on-black posters: MARS AGAIN!
    The new spirit lasted several months. Not until Marxmas was there a full day’s holiday, and then no one quite knew what to do with it. Chip and Karl and their girlfriends rowed out to one of the islands in