This Perfect Day by Ira Levin

headed toward the Institute. He looked back once. There was only empty passageway between the blank moon-white buildings.

2
    B OB R O , seated behind his desk, looked up and smiled. “You’re late,” he said.
    “I’m sorry,” Chip said. He sat down.
    Bob closed a white folder with a red file tab on it. “How are you?” he asked.
    “Fine,” Chip said.
    “Have a good week?”
    “Mm-hmm.”
    Bob studied him for a moment, his elbow on his chair arm, his fingers rubbing the side of his nose. “Anything in particular you want to talk about?” he asked.
    Chip was silent, and then shook his head. “No,” he said.
    “I hear you spent half of yesterday afternoon doing somebody else’s work.”
    Chip nodded. “I took a sample from the wrong section of the IC box,” he said.
    “I see,” Bob said, and smiled and grunted.
    Chip looked questioningly at him.
    “Joke,” Bob said. “IC, I see.”
    “Oh,” Chip said, and smiled.
    Bob propped his jaw on his hand, the side of a finger lying against his lips. “What happened Friday?” he asked.
    “Friday?”
    “Something about using the wrong microscope.”
    Chip looked puzzled for a moment. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. I didn’t really use it. I just went into the chamber. I didn’t change any of the settings.”
    Bob said, “It looks like it wasn’t such a good week.”
    “No, I guess it wasn’t,” Chip said.
    “Peace SK says you had trouble Saturday night.”
    “Trouble?”
    “Sexually.”
    Chip shook his head. “I didn’t have any trouble,” he said. “I just wasn’t in the mood, that’s all.”
    “She says you tried and couldn’t erect.”
    “Well I felt I ought to do it, for her sake, but I just wasn’t in the mood.”
    Bob watched him, not saying anything.
    “I was tired,” Chip said.
    “It seems you’ve been tired a lot lately. Is that why you weren’t at your photography club meeting Friday night?”
    “Yes,” he said. “I turned in early.”
    “How do you feel now? Are you tired now?”
    “No. I feel fine.”
    Bob looked at him, then straightened in his chair and smiled. “Okay, brother,” he said, “touch and go.”
    Chip put his bracelet to the scanner of Bob’s telecomp and stood up.
    “See you next week,” Bob said.
    “Yes.”
    “On time.”
    Chip, having turned away, turned back and said, “Beg pardon?”
    “On time next week,” Bob said.
    “Oh,” Chip said. “Yes.” He turned and went out of the cubicle.
    He thought he had done it well but there was no way of knowing, and as his treatment came nearer he grew increasingly anxious. The thought of a significant rise in sensation became more intriguing by the hour, and Snowflake, King, Lilac, and the others became more attractive and admirable. So what if they smoked tobacco? They were happy and healthy members—no, people, not members!—who had found an escape from sterility and sameness and universal mechanical efficiency. He wanted to see them and be with them. He wanted to kiss and embrace Snowflake’s unique lightness; to talk with King as an equal, friend to friend; to hear more of Lilac’s strange but provocative ideas. “Your body is yours, not Uni’s”—what a disturbing pre-U thing to say! If there were any basis for it, it could have implications that might lead him to—he couldn’t think what; a jolting change of some sort in his attitude toward everything!
    That was the night before his treatment. He lay awake for hours, then climbed with bandaged hands up a snow-covered mountaintop, smoked tobacco pleasurably under the guidance of a friendly smiling King, opened Snowflake’s coveralls and found her snow-white with a throat-to-groin red cross, drove an early wheel-steered car through the hallways of a huge Genetic Suffocation Center, and had a new bracelet inscribed Chip and a window in his room through which he watched a lovely nude girl watering a lilac bush. She beckoned impatiently and he went to her—and woke feeling fresh and