But by then there was no time for surfboarding, or for anything
else but work. The construction job on Hilo had begun, and it was a
nightmare. He was flown to the island with the last load of parts. No
execs were present in the flesh, but in the first day Chandler lost
count of how many different minds possessed his own. He began to be
able to recognize them by a limp as he walked, by tags of German as he
spoke, by a stutter, a distinctive gesture of annoyance, an expletive.
As he was a trained engineer he was left to labor by himself for hours
on end. It was worse for the others. There seemed to be a dozen execs
hovering invisible around all the time; no sooner was a worker released
by one than he was seized by another. The work progressed rapidly,
but at the cost of utter exhaustion. By the end of the fourth day
Chandler had eaten only two meals and could not remember when he had
slept last. He found himself staggering when free, and furious with the
fatigue-clumsiness of his own body when possessed. At sundown on the
fourth day he found himself free for a moment and, incredibly, without
work of his own to do just then, until someone else completed a job
of patchwiring. He stumbled out into the open air and had time only
to gaze around for a moment before his eyes began to close. This must
once have been a lovely island. Even unkempt as it was, the trees were
tall and beautiful. Beyond them a wisp of smoke was pale against the
dark-blue evening sky; the breeze was scented.... He woke and found he
was already back in the building, reaching for his soldering gun.
There came a point at which even the will of the execs was unable to
drive the flogged bodies farther, and then they were permitted to sleep
for a few hours. At daybreak they were awake again. The sleep was not
enough. The bodies were slow and inaccurate. Two of the Hawaiians,
straining a hundred-pound component into place, staggered, slipped--and
dropped it.
Appalled, Chandler waited for them to kill themselves.
But it seemed that the execs were tiring too. One of the Hawaiians said
irritably, with an accent Chandler did not recognize: "That's pau. All
right, you morons, you've won yourselves a vacation; we'll have to fly
you in replacements. Take the day off." And incredibly all eleven of
the haggard wrecks stumbling around the building were free at once.
The first thought of every man was to eat, to relieve himself, to
remove a shoe and ease a blistered foot--to do any of the things they
had not been permitted to do. The second thought was sleep.
Chandler dropped off at once, but he was overtired; he slept fitfully,
and after an hour or two of turning on the hard ground sat up, blinking
red-eyed around. He had been slow. The cushioned seats in the aircraft
and cars were already taken. He stood up, stretched, scratched himself
and wondered what to do next, and he remembered the thread of smoke he
had seen--when? three nights ago?--against the evening sky.
In all those hours he had not had time to think one obvious thought:
There should have been no smoke there! The island was supposed to be
deserted.
He stood up, looked around to get his bearings, and started off in the
direction he remembered.
* * * * *
It was good to own his body again, in poor condition as it was. It was
delicious to be allowed to think consecutive thoughts.
The chemistry of the human animal is such that it heals whatever
thrusts it may receive from the outside world. Short of death, its
only incapacitating wound comes from itself; from the outside it can
survive astonishing blows, rise again and flourish. Chandler was not
flourishing, but he had begun to rise.
Time had been so compressed and blurred in the days since the slaughter
at the Punahou School that he had not had time to grieve over the
deaths of his briefly-met friends, or even to think of their quixotic
plans against the execs. Now he began to wonder.
He understood with what thrill of hope he had been received--a man like
themselves, not an exec, whose touch was at the very center of the exec
power. But how firm was that touch? Was there really anything he could
do?
It seemed not. He barely understood the mechanics of what he was
doing, far less the theory behind it. Conceivably knowing where this
installation was he could somehow get back to it when it was completed.
In theory it might be that there was a way to dispense with the
headsets and exert power from the big board itself.
A Cro-Magnard at the controls of a nuclear-laden jet bomber could
destroy a city. Nothing stopped him. Nothing but his own invincible
ignorance. Chandler was that Cro-Magnard; certainly power was here to
grasp, but he had no way of knowing how to pick it up.
Still--where there was life there was hope. He decided he was wasting
time that would not come again. He had been wandering along a road
that led into a small town, quite deserted, but this was no time for
wandering. His place was back at the installation, studying, scheming,
trying to understand all he could. He began to turn, and stopped.
"Great God," he said softly, looking at what he had just seen. The
town was deserted of life, but not of death.
* * * * *
There were bodies everywhere.
They were long dead, perhaps years. They seemed natural and right as
they lay there. It was not surprising they had escaped his notice at
first. Little was left but bones and an occasional desiccated leathery
rag that might have been a face. The clothing was faded and rotted
away; but enough was left of the bodies and the clothes to make it
clear that none of these people had died natural deaths. A rusted blade
in a chest cage showed where a knife had pierced a heart; a small
skull near his feet (with a scrap of faded blue rompers near it) was
shattered. On a flagstone terrace a family group of bones lay radiating
outward, like a rosette. Something had exploded there and caught them
all as they turned to flee. There was a woman's face, grained like oak
and eyeless, visible between the fender of a truck and a crushed-in
wall.
Like exhumed Pompeii, the tragedy was so ancient that it aroused only
wonder. The whole town had been blotted out.
The execs did not take chances; apparently they had sterilized the
whole island--probably had sterilized all of them except Oahu itself,
to make certain that their isolation was complete, except for the
captive stock allowed to breed and serve them in and around Honolulu.
Chandler prowled the town for a quarter of an hour, but one street was
like another. The bodies did not seem to have been disturbed even by
animals, but perhaps there were none big enough to show traces of such
work.
Something moved in a doorway.
Chandler thought at once of the smoke he had seen, but no one answered
his call and, though he searched, he could neither see nor hear
anything alive.
The search was a waste of time. It also wasted his best chance to study
the thing he was building. As he returned to the cinder-block structure
at the end of the airstrip he heard motors and looked up to see a plane
circling in for a landing.
He knew that he had only a few minutes. He spent those minutes as
thriftily as he could, but long before he could even grasp the
circuitry of the parts he had not himself worked on he felt a touch at
his mind. The plane was rolling to a stop. He and all of them hurried
over to begin unloading it.
The plane was stopped with one wingtip almost touching the building,
heading directly into it--convenient for unloading, but a foolish
nuisance when it came time to turn it and take off again, Chandler's
mind thought while his body lugged cartons out of the plane.
But he knew the answer to that. Takeoff would be no problem, any more
than it would for the other small transports at the far end of the
strip.
These planes were not going to return, ever.
* * * * *
The work went on, and then it was done, or all but, and Chandler knew
no more about it than when it was begun. The last little bit was a
careful check of line voltages and a balancing of biases. Chandler
could help only up to a point, and then two execs, working through the
bodies of one of the Hawaiians and the pilot of a Piper Tri-Pacer who
had flown in some last-minute test equipment--and remained as part of
the labor pool--laboriously worked on the final tests.
Spent, the other men flopped to the ground, waiting.
They were far gone. All of them, Chandler as much as the others. But
one of them rolled over, grinned tightly at Chandler and said, "It's
been fun. My name's Bradley. I always think people ought to know each
other's names in cases like this. Imagine sharing a grave with some
utter stranger!"
"Grave?"
Bradley nodded. "Like Pharaoh's slaves. The pyramid is just about
finished, friend. You don't know what I'm talking about?" He sat up,
plucked a blade of stemmy grass and put it between his teeth. "I guess
you haven't seen the corpses in the woods."
Chandler said, "I found a town half a mile or so over there, nothing in
it but skeletons."
"No, heavens, nothing that ancient. These are nice fresh corpses, out
behind the junkheap there. Well, not _fresh_. They're a couple of weeks
old. I thought it was neat of the execs to dispose of the used-up labor
out of sight of the rest of us. So much better for morale ... until
Juan Simoa and I went back looking for a plain, simple electrical
extension cord and found them."
With icy calm Chandler realized that the man was talking sense. Used-up
labor: the men who had unloaded the first planes, no doubt--worked
until they dropped, then efficiently disposed of, as they were so cheap
a commodity that they were not worth the trouble of hauling back to
Honolulu for salvage. "I see," he said. "Besides, dead men tell no
tales."
"_And_ spread no disease. Probably that's why they did their killing
back in the tall trees. Always the chance some exec might have to come
down here to inspect in person. Rotting corpses just aren't sanitary."
Bradley grinned again. "I used to be a doctor at Molokai."
"Lep--" began Chandler, but the doctor shook his head.
"No, no, never say 'leprosy.' It's 'Hansen's disease.' Whatever it is,
the execs were sure scared of it. They wiped out every patient we had,
except a couple who got away by swimming; then for good measure they
wiped out most of the medical staff too, except for a couple like me
who were off-island and had the sense to keep quiet about where they'd
worked. I used," he said, rolling over his back and putting his hands
behind his head, "in the old days to work on pest-control for the
Public Health Service. We sure knocked off a lot of rats and fleas. I
never thought I'd be one of them." He was silent.
Chandler admired his courage very much. The man had fallen asleep.
Chandler looked at the others. "You going to let them kill us without a
struggle?" he demanded.
The remaining Hawaiian was the only one to answer. He said, "You just
don't know how much _pilikia_ you're in. It isn't what we _let_ them
do."
"We'll see," Chandler promised grimly. "They're only human. I haven't
given up yet."
* * * * *
But in the end he could not save himself; it was the girl who saved
him. That night Chandler tossed in troubled sleep, and woke to find
himself standing, walking toward the Tri-Pacer. The sun was just
beginning to pink the sky and no one else was moving. "Sorry, love,"
he apologized to himself. "You probably need to bathe and shave, but
I don't know how. Shave, I mean." He giggled. "Anyway, you'll find
everything you need at my house."
He climbed into the plane. "Ever fly before?" he asked himself. "Well,
you'll love it. Here we go. _Close_ the door ... _snap_ the belt ...
_turn_ the switch." He admired the practiced ease with which his body
started the motor, raced it with a critical eye on the instruments,
turned the plane and lifted it off, up, into the rising sun.
"Oh, dear. You _do_ need a bath," he told himself, wrinkling his nose
humorously. "No harm. I've the nicest tub--pink, deep--and nine kinds
of bath salts. But I wish you weren't so tired, love, because it's
a long flight and you're wearing me out." He was silent as he bent
to the correct compass heading and cranked a handle over his head to
adjust the trim. "Koitska's going to be so _huhu_," he said, smiling.
"Never fear, love, I can calm him down. But it's easier to do with you
in one piece, you know, the other way's too late."
He was silent for a long time, and then his voice began to sing.
They were songs from Rosalie's own musical comedies. Even with so poor
an instrument as Chandler's voice to work with, she sang well enough to
keep both of them entertained while his body brought the plane in for
a landing; and so Chandler went to live in the villa that belonged to
Rosalie Pan.