to mark it off limits to anyone not an exec or a collaborator. Still,
Chandler thought, who on the island was not a collaborator? The only
effective resistance a man could make would be to kill everyone
within reach and then himself, thus depriving them of slaves--and
that was, after all, only what the execs themselves had done in other
places often enough. It would inconvenience them only slightly. The
next few planeloads or shiploads of possessed warm bodies from the
mainland would be permitted to live, instead of being required to dash
themselves to destruction, like the crew of the airplane that had
carried Chandler. Thus the domestic stocks would be replenished.
An annoying feature of dining with Rosalie in the flesh, Chandler
found, was that half a dozen times while they were talking he found
himself taken, speaking words to Rosie that were not his own, usually
in a language he did not understand. She took it as a matter of
course. It was merely a friend, across the room or across the island,
using Chandler as the casual convenience of a telephone. "Sorry," she
apologized blithely after it happened for the third time, and then
stopped. "You don't like that, love, do you?"
"Can you blame me?" He stopped himself from saying more; he was
astonished even so at his tone.
She said it for him. "I know. It takes away your manhood, I suppose.
Please don't let it do that to you, love. We're not so bad. Even--"
She hesitated, and did not go on. "You know," she said, "I came here
the same way you did. Kidnaped off the stage of the Winter Garden. Of
course, the difference was the one who kidnaped me was an old friend.
Though I didn't know it at the time and it scared me half to death."
Chandler must have looked startled. She nodded. "You've been thinking
of us as another race, haven't you? Like the Neanderthals or--well,
worse than that, maybe." She smiled. "We're not. About half of us
came from Russia in the first place, but the others are from all over.
You'd be astonished, really." She mentioned several names, world-famous
scientists, musicians, writers. "Of course, not everybody can qualify
for the club, love. Wouldn't be exclusive otherwise. The chief rule
is loyalty. I'm loyal," she added gently after a moment, "and don't
you forget it. Have to be. Whoever becomes an exec has to be with us,
all the way. There are tests. It has to be that way--not only for our
protection. For the world's."
Chandler was genuinely startled at that. Rosie nodded seriously. "If
one exec should give away something he's not supposed to it would upset
the whole applecart. There are only a thousand of us, and I guess
probably two billion of you, or nearly. The result would be complete
destruction."
Of the Executive Committee, Chandler thought she meant at first, but
then he thought again. No. Of the world. For the thousand execs,
outnumbered though they were two million to one, could not fail to
triumph. The contest would not be in doubt. If the whole thousand execs
at once began systematically to kill and destroy, instead of merely
playing at it as the spirit moved them, they could all but end the
human race overnight. A man could be made to slash his throat in a
quarter of a minute. An exec, killing, killing, killing without pause,
could destroy his own two million enemies in an eight-hour day.
And there were surer, faster ways. Chandler did not have to imagine
them, he had seen them. The massacre of the Orphalese, the victims at
the Monument--they were only crumbs of destruction. What had happened
to New York City showed what mass-production methods could do. No doubt
there were bombs left, even if only chemical ones. Shoot, stab, crash,
blow up; swallow poison, leap from window, slit throat. Every man a
murderer, at the touch of a mind from Hawaii; and if no one else was
near to murder, surely each man could find a victim in himself. In
one ravaging day mankind would cease to exist as a major force. In a
week the only survivors would be those in such faroff and hopelessly
impotent places that they were not worth the trouble of tracking down.
* * * * *
"You hate us, don't you?"
Chandler paused and tried to find an answer. Rosie was not either
belligerent or mocking. She was only sympathetically trying to reach
his point of view. He shook his head silently.
"Not meaning 'no'--meaning 'no comment'? Well, I don't blame you, love.
But do you see that we're not altogether a bad thing? It's bad that
there should be so much violence. In a way. Hasn't there always been
violence? And what were the alternatives? Until we came along the world
was getting ready to kill itself anyway."
"There's a difference," Chandler mumbled. He was thinking of his wife.
He and Margot had loved each other as married couples do--without any
very great, searing compulsion; but with affection, with habit and
with sporadic passion. Chandler had not given much thought to the
whole, though he was aware of the parts, during the last years of his
marriage. It was only after Margot's murder that he had come to know
that the sum of those parts was a quite irreplaceable love.
But Rosie was shaking her head. "The difference is all on our side.
Suppose Koitska's boss had never discovered the coronets. At any moment
one country might have got nervous and touched off the whole thing--not
carefully, the way we did it, with most of the really dirty missiles
fused safe and others landing where they were supposed to go. I mean,
touched off a _war_. The end, love. The bloody _finis_. The ones that
were killed at once would have been the lucky ones. No, love," she
said, in dead earnest, "we aren't the worst things that ever happened
to the world. Once the--well, the _bad_ part--is over, people will
understand what we really are."
"And what's that, exactly?"