This Perfect Day by Ira Levin Page B

looked closely at his eyes. “Open your eyes as wide as you can,” he said. His voice was King’s. Chip stared at him.
    “That’s right,” he said. “Stare at me as if I’ve said something shocking.” It was King’s voice, unmistakable. Chip’s mouth opened. “Don’t speak, please,” King-Jesus HL said, squeezing Chip’s jaw painfully. He stared into Chip’s eyes, turned his head to one side and then the other, and then released it and stepped back. He went back around the desk and sat down again. He picked up the clipboard, glanced at it, and handed it to the woman doctor, smiling. “You’re mistaken, Anna,” he said. “You can put your mind at rest. I’ve seen many members who were malingering; this one isn’t. I commend you on your concern, though.” To the man he said, “She’s right, you know, Jesus; we mustn’t be efficiency analyzers. The Family can afford a little waste where a member’s health is involved. What is the Family, after all, except the sum of its members?”
    “Thank you, Jesus,” the woman said, smiling. “I’m glad I was wrong.”
    “Give that data to Uni,” King said, turning and looking at Chip, “so our brother here can be properly treated from now on.”
    “Yes, right away.” The woman beckoned to Chip. He got up from the chair.
    They left the office. In the doorway Chip turned. “Thank you,” he said.
    King looked at him from behind his littered desk—only looked, with no smile, no glimmer of friendship. “Thank Uni,” he said.
    Less than a minute after he got back to his room Bob called. “I just got a report from Medicenter Main,” he said. “Your treatments have been slightly out of line but from now on they’re going to be exactly right.”
    “Good,” Chip said.
    “This confusion and tiredness you’ve been feeling will gradually pass away during the next week or so, and then you’ll be your old self.”
    “I hope so.”
    “You will. Listen, do you want me to squeeze you in tomorrow, Li, or shall we just let it go till next Tuesday?”
    “Next Tuesday’s all right.”
    “Fine,” Bob said. He grinned. “You know what?” he said. “You look better already.”
    “I feel a little better,” Chip said.

3
    H E FELT A LITTLE BETTER every day, a little more awake and alert, a little more sure that sickness was what he had had and health was what he was growing toward. By Friday—three days after the examination—he felt the way he usually felt on the day before a treatment. But his last treatment was only a week behind him; three weeks and more lay ahead, spacious and unexplored, before the next one. The slowdown had worked; Bob had been fooled and the treatment reduced. And the next one, on the basis of the examination, would be reduced even further. What wonders of feeling would he be feeling in five, in six weeks’ time?
    That Friday night, a few minutes after the last chime, Snowflake came into his room. “Don’t mind me,” she said, taking off her coveralls. “I’m just putting a note in your mouthpiece.”
    She got into bed with him and helped him off with his pajamas. Her body to his hands and lips was smooth, pliant, and more arousing than Peace SK’s or anyone else’s; and his own, as she stroked and kissed and licked it, was more shudderingly reactive than ever before, more strainingly in want. He eased himself into her—deeply, snugly in—and would have driven them both to immediate orgasm, but she slowed him, stopped him, made him draw out and come in again, putting herself into one strange but effective position and then another. For twenty minutes or more they worked and contrived together, keeping as noiseless as they could because of the members beyond the wall and on the floor below.
    When they were done and apart she said, “Well?”
    “Well it was top speed, of course,” he said, “but frankly, from what you said, I expected even more.”
    “Patience, brother,” she said. “You’re still an invalid. The