Chandler's voice answered in English, with a faint Oxford accent:
"It is I, Rosie, Kalman. Where's Koitska's tinkertoy? Oh, all right,
thanks; I'll just pick it up and take it in. Hope it's all right. I
must say one wearies of breaking in these new fellows."
Chandler's body ambled around to the trunk of the car, took out the
square-wave generator on its breadboard base and slouched into the
building. It called ahead in the same language and was answered
wheezily from above: Koitska. "_Zdrastvoi. Iditye suda ko mneh. Kto,
Kalman?_"
"_Konyekhno!_" cried Chandler's voice and he was carried in and up to
where the fat man lounged in a leather-upholstered wheel-chair. There
was a conversation, long minutes of it, while the two men poked at
the generator. Chandler did not understand a word until he spoke to
himself: "You--what's your name."
"Chandler," Koitska filled in.
"You, Chandler. D'you know anything at all about submillimeter
microwaves? Tell Koitska." Briefly Chandler felt himself free--long
enough to nod; then he was possessed again, and Koitska repeated the
nod. "Good, then. Tell Koitska what experience you've had."
Again free, Chandler said, "Not a great deal of actual experience. I
worked with a group at Caltech on spectroscopic measurements in the
million megacycle range. I didn't design any of the equipment, though I
helped put it together." He recited his degrees until Koitska raised a
languid hand.
"_Shto_, I don't care. If ve gave you diagrams you could build?"
"Certainly, if I had the equipment. I suppose I'd need--"
But Koitska stopped him again. "I know vot you need," he said damply.
"Enough. Ve see." In a moment Chandler was taken again, and his voice
and Koitska's debated the matter for a while, until Koitska shrugged,
turned his head and seemed to go to sleep.
Chandler marched himself out of the room and out into the driveway
before his voice said to him: "You've secured a position, then. Go back
to Tripler until we send for you. It'll be a few days, I expect."
And Chandler was free again.
He was also alone. The girl in the Porsche was gone. The door of the
TWA building had latched itself behind him. He stared around him,
swore, shrugged and circled the building to the parking lot at back, on
the chance that a car might be there for him to borrow.
Luckily, there was. There were four, in fact, all with keys in them. He
selected a Ford, puzzled out the likeliest road back to Honolulu and
turned the key in the starter.
It was fortunate, he thought, that there had been several cars; if
there had been only one he would not have dared to take it, for fear of
stranding Koitska or some other exec who might easily blot him out in
annoyance. He did not wish to join the wretches at the Monument.
It was astonishing how readily fear had become a part of his life.
The trouble with this position he had somehow secured--one of the
troubles--was that there was no union delegate to settle employee
grievances. Like no transportation. Like no clear idea of working
hours, or duties. Like no mention at all--of course--of wages. Chandler
had no idea what his rights were, if any at all, or of what the
penalties would be if he overstepped them.
The maimed victims at the Monument supplied a clue, of course. He could
not really believe that that sort of punishment would be applied for
minor infractions. Death was so much less trouble. Even death was not
really likely, he thought, for a simple lapse.
He _thought_.
He could not be sure, of course. He could be sure of only one thing:
He was now a slave, completely a slave, a slave until the day he
died. Back on the mainland there was the statistical likelihood of
occasional slavery-by-possession, but there it was only the body that
was enslaved, and only for moments. Here, in the shadow of the execs,
it was all of him, forever, until death or a miracle turned him loose.
* * * * *
On the second day following he returned to his room at Tripler after
breakfast, and found a Honolulu city policeman sitting hollow-eyed on
the edge of his bed. The man stood up as Chandler came in. "So," he
grumbled, "you take so long! Here. Is diagrams, specs, parts lists,
all. You get everything three days from now, then we begin."
The policeman, no longer Koitska, shook himself, glanced stolidly
at Chandler and walked out, leaving a thick manila envelope on the
pillow. On it was written, in a crabbed hand: _All secret! Do not show
diagrams!_
Chandler opened the envelope and spilled its contents on the bed.
An hour later he realized that sixty minutes had passed in which he had
not been afraid. It was good to be working again, he thought, and then
that thought faded away again as he returned to studying the sheaves of
circuit diagrams and closely typed pages of specifications. It was not
only work, it was hard work, and absorbing. Chandler knew enough about
the very short wavelength radio spectrum to know that the device he was
supposed to build was no proficiency test; this was for real. The more
he puzzled over it the less he could understand of its purpose. There
was a transmitter and there was a receiver. Astonishingly, neither was
directional: that ruled out radar, for example. He rejected immediately
the thought that the radiation was for spectrum analysis, as in the
Caltech project--unfortunate, because that was the only application
with which he had first-hand familiarity; but impossible. The thing
was too complicated. Nor could it be a simple message transmitter--no,
perhaps it could, assuming there was a reason for using the
submillimeter bands instead of the conventional, far simpler short-wave
spectrum. Could it? The submillimeter waves were line-of-sight, of
course, but would ionosphere scatter make it possible for them to
cover great distances? He could not remember. Or was that irrelevant,
since perhaps they needed only to cover the distances between islands
in their own archipelago? But then, why all the power? And in any case,
what about this fantastic switching panel, hundreds of square feet of
it even though it was transistorized and subminiaturized and involving
at least a dozen sophisticated technical refinements he hadn't the
training quite to understand? AT&T could have handled every phone call
in the United States with less switching than this--in the days when
telephone systems spanned a nation instead of a fraction of a city. He
pushed the papers together in a pile and sat back, smoking a cigarette,
trying to remember what he could of the theory behind submillimeter
radiation.
At half a million megacycles and up, the domain of quantum theory began
to be invaded. Rotating gas molecules, constricted to a few energy
states, responded directly to the radio waves. Chandler remembered
late-night bull sessions in Pasadena during which it had been pointed
out that the possibilities in the field were enormous--although only
possibilities, for there was no engineering way to reach them, and
no clear theory to point the way--suggesting such strange ultimate
practical applications as the receiverless radio, for example. Was that
what he had here?
He gave up. It was a question that would burn at him until he found the
answer, but just now he had work to do, and he'd better be doing it.
Skipping lunch entirely, he carefully checked the components lists,
made a copy of what he would need, checked the original envelope and
its contents with the man at the main receiving desk for his safe, and
caught the bus to Honolulu.
At the Parts 'n Plenty store, Hsi read the list with a faint frown that
turned into a puzzled scowl. When he put it down he looked at Chandler
for a few moments without speaking.
"Well, Hsi? Can you get all this for me?" The parts man shrugged and
nodded. "Koitska said in three days."
Hsi looked startled, then resigned. "That puts it right up to me,
doesn't it? All right. Wait a moment."
He disappeared in the back of the store, where Chandler heard him
talking on what was evidently an intercom system. He came back in a
few minutes and slipped Chandler's list into a slit in the locked
door. "Tough for Bert," he said. "He'll be working all night, getting
started--but I can take it easy till tomorrow. By then he'll know what
we don't have, and I'll find some way to get it." He shrugged again,
but his face was lined. Chandler wondered how one went about finding,
for example, a thirty megawatt klystron tube; but it was Hsi's problem.
He said:
"All right, I'll see you Monday."
"Wait a minute, Chandler." Hsi eyed him. "You don't have anything
special to do, do you? Well, come have dinner with me. Maybe I can get
to know you. Then maybe I can answer some of your questions, if you
like."
* * * * *
They took a bus out Kapiolani Boulevard, then got out and walked a
few blocks to a restaurant named Mother Chee's. Hsi was well known
there, it seemed. He led Chandler to a booth at the back, nodded to
the waiter, ordered without looking at the menu and sat back. "You
malihinis don't know much about food," he said, humorously patronizing.
"I think you'll like it. It's all fish, anyway."
The man was annoying. Chandler was moved to say, "Too bad, I was hoping
for duck in orange sauce, perhaps some snow peas--"
Hsi shook his head. "There's meat, all right, but not here. You'll
only find it in the places where the execs sometimes go.... Tell me
something, Chandler. What's that scar on your forehead."
Chandler touched it, almost with surprise. Since the medics had treated
it he had almost forgotten it was there. He began to explain, then
paused, looking at Hsi, and changed his mind. "What's the score? You
testing me, too? Want to see if I'll lie about it?"
Hsi grinned. "Sorry. I guess that's what I was doing. I do know what an
'H' stands for; we've seen them before. Not many. The ones that do get
this far usually don't last long. Unless, of course, they are working
for somebody whom it wouldn't do to offend," he explained.
"So what you want to know, then, is whether I was really hoaxing or
not. Does it make any difference?"
"Damn right it does, man! We're slaves, but we're not animals!"
Chandler had gotten to him; the parts man looked startled, then sallow,
as he observed his own vehemence.
"Sorry, Hsi. It makes a difference to me, too. Well, I wasn't hoaxing.
I was possessed, just like any other everyday rapist-murderer, only I
couldn't prove it. And it didn't look too good for me, because the
damn thing happened in a pharmaceuticals plant. That was supposed to be
about the only place in town where you could be sure you wouldn't be
possessed, or so everybody thought. Including me. Up to the time I went
ape."
Hsi nodded. The waiter approached with their drinks. Hsi looked at
him appraisingly, then did a curious thing. He gripped his left wrist
with his right hand, quickly, then released it again. The waiter did
not appear to notice. Expertly he served the drinks, folded small pink
floral napkins, dumped and wiped their ashtray in one motion--and then,
so quickly that Chandler was not quite sure he had seen it, caught
Hsi's wrist in the same fleeting gesture just before he turned and
walked away.
Without comment Hsi turned back to Chandler. He said, "I believe you.
Would you like to know why it happened? Because I think I can tell you.
The execs have all the antibiotics they need now."
"You mean--" Chandler hesitated.
"That's right. They did leave some areas alone, as long as they weren't
fully stocked on everything they might want for the foreseeable future.
Wouldn't you?"
"I might," Chandler said cautiously, "if I knew what I was--being an
exec."
Hsi said, "Eat your dinner. I'll take a chance and tell you what I
know." He swallowed his whiskey-on-the-rocks with a quick backward jerk
of the head. "They're mostly Russians--you must know that much for
yourself. The whole thing started in Russia."
Chandler said, "Well, that's pretty obvious. But Russia was smashed
up as much as anywhere else. The whole Russian government was
killed--wasn't it?"
Hsi nodded. "They're not the government. Not the exec. Communism
doesn't mean any more to them than the Declaration of Independence
does--which is nothing. It's very simple, Chandler: they're a project
that got out of hand."
* * * * *
Back four years ago, he said, in Russia, it started in the last days
of the Second Stalinite Regime, before the Neo-Krushchevists took over
power in the January Push.
The Western World had not known exactly what was going on, of course.
The "mystery wrapped in a riddle surrounded by an enigma" had become
queerer and even more opaque after Kruschchev's death and the revival
of such fine old Soviet institutions as the Gay Pay Oo. That was the
development called the Freeze, when the Stalinites seized control
in the name of the sacred Generalissimo of the Soviet Fatherland, a
mighty-missile party, dedicated to bringing about the world revolution
by force of sputnik. The neo-Krushchevists, on the other hand, believed
that honey caught more flies than vinegar; and, although there were few
visible adherents to that philosophy during the purges of the Freeze,
they were not all dead. Then, out of the Donbas Electrical Workshop,
came sudden support for their point of view.
It was a weapon. It was more than a weapon, an irresistable tool--more
than that, the way to end all disputes forever. It was a simple radio
transmitter (Hsi said)--or so it seemed, but its frequencies were on
an unusual band and its effects were remarkable. It controlled the
minds of men. The "receiver" was the human brain. Through this little
portable transmitter, surgically patch-wired to the brain of the person
operating it, his entire personality was transmitted in a pattern of
very short waves which could invade and modulate the personality of any
other human being in the world. For that matter, of any animal, as long
as the creature had enough "mind" to seize--
"What's the matter?" Hsi interrupted himself, staring at Chandler.
Chandler had stopped eating, his hand frozen midway to his mouth. He
shook his head.
"Nothing. Go on." Hsi shrugged and continued.
While the Western World was celebrating Christmas--the Christmas before
the first outbreak of possession in the outside world--the man who
invented the machine was secretly demonstrating it to another man. Both
of them were now dead. The inventor had been a Pole, the other man a
former Party leader who, four years before, had rescued the inventor's
dying father from a Siberian work camp. The Party leader had reason to
congratulate himself on that loaf cast on the water. There were only
three working models of the transmitter--what ultimately was refined
into the coronet Chandler had seen on the heads of Koitska and the
girl--but that was enough for the January push.
The Stalinites were out. The neo-Krushchevists were in.
A whole factory in the Donbas was converted to manufacturing these
little mental controllers as fast as they could be produced--and
that was fast, for they were simple in design to begin with and were
quickly refined to a few circuits. Even the surgical wiring to the
brain became unnecessary as induction coils tapped the encephalic
rhythms. Only the great amplifying hookup was really complicated. Only
one of those was necessary, for a single amplifier could serve as
re-broadcaster--modulator for thousands of the headsets.
"Are you sure you're all right?" Hsi demanded.
Chandler put down his fork, lit a cigarette and beckoned to the waiter.
"I'm all right. I just want another drink."
He needed the drink. For now he knew what he was building for Koitska.
* * * * *
The waiter brought two more drinks and carried away the uneaten food.
"We don't know exactly who did what after that," Hsi said, "but
somehow or other it got out of hand. I think it was the technical
crew of the factory that took over. I suppose it was an inevitable
danger." He grinned savagely. "I can just imagine the Party workers
in the factory," he said, "trying to figure out how to keep them in
line--bribe them or terrify them? Give them dachas or send a quota
to Siberia? Neither would work, of course, because there isn't any
bribe you can give to a man who only has to stretch out his hand to
take over the world, and you can't frighten a man who can make you
slit your own throat. Anyway, the next thing that happened--the
following Christmas--was when they took over the world. It wasn't a
Party movement at all any more. A lot of the workers were Czechs and
Hungarians and Poles, and the first thing they wanted to do was to
even a few scores.
"So here they are! Before they let the whole world go bang they got out
of range. They got themselves out of Russia on two Red Navy cruisers,
about a thousand of them; then they systematically triggered off every
ballistic missile they could find ... and they could find all of them,
sooner or later, it was just a matter of looking. As soon as it was
safe they moved in here. Best place in the world for them.
"There are only a thousand or so of them here on the Islands, and
nobody outside the Islands even knows where they are. If they did, what
good would it do them? They can kill anyone, anywhere. They kill for
fun, but sometimes they kill for a reason too. When one of them goes
wandering for kicks he makes it a point to mess up all the transport
and communications facilities he comes across--especially now, since
they've stockpiled everything they're likely to need for the next
twenty years. We don't know what they're planning to do when the twenty
years are up. Maybe they don't care. Would you?"
Chandler drained his drink and shook his head. "One question," he said.
"Who's 'we'?"
Hsi carefully unwrapped a package of cigarettes, took one out and lit
it. He looked at it as though he were not enjoying it; cigarettes had a
way of tasting stale these days. As they were. "Just a minute," he said.
Tardily Chandler remembered the quick grasp of the waiter's fingers on
Hsi's wrist, and that the waiter had been hovering, inconspicuously
close, all through their meal. Hsi was waiting for the man to return.
In a moment the waiter was back, looking directly at Chandler. He
looped his own wrist with his fingers and nodded. Hsi said softly,
"'We' is the Society of Slaves. That's all of us--slaves--but only a
few of us belong to the Society. We--"
There was a crash of glass. The waiter had dropped their tray.
Across the table from Chandler, Hsi looked suddenly changed. His left
hand lay on the table before him, his right hand poised over it.
Apparently he had been about to show Chandler again the sign he had
made.
But he could not do it. His hand paused and fluttered, like a captured
bird. Captured it was. Hsi was captured. Out of Hsi's mouth, with
Hsi's voice, came the light, tonal rhythms of Rosalie Pan. "_This_
is an unexpected pleasure, love! I never expected to see you here.
Enjoying your meal?"