"Andrei...." she said gently. "_Ya vas sprashnivayoo...._"
"_Nyet!_"
"_No Andrei...._"
Rumble, grumble; Chandler's body twitched and fumed. He heard his own
name in the argument, but what the subject matter was he could not
tell. Rosalie was coaxing; Koitska was refusing. But he was weakening.
After minutes Chandler's shoulders shrugged; he nodded; and he was
free.
"Have some more coffee, love," said Rosalie Pan with an air of triumph.
Chandler waited. He did not understand what was going on. It was up to
her to enlighten him, and finally she smiled and said: "Perhaps you can
join us, love. Don't say yes or no. It isn't up to you ... and besides
you can't know whether you want it or not until you try. So be patient
a moment."
Chandler frowned; then felt his body taken. His lips barked:
"_Khorashaw!_" His body got up and walked to the wall of Rosalie's
room. A picture on the wall moved aside and there was a safe. Flick,
flick, Chandler's own fingers dialed a combination so rapidly that he
could not follow it. The door of the safe opened.
And Chandler was free, and Rosalie excitedly leaping out of the bed
behind him, careless of the wisp of nylon that was her only garment,
crowding softly, warmly past him to reach inside the safe. She lifted
out a coronet very like her own.
She paused and looked at Chandler.
"You can't do anything to harm us with this one, love," she warned.
"Do you understand that? I mean, don't get the idea that you can tell
anyone anything. Or do something violent. You can't. I'll be right
with you, and Koitska will be monitoring the transmitter." She handed
him the coronet. "Now, when you see something interesting, you move
right in. You'll see how. It's the easiest thing in the world, and--Oh,
here. Put it on."
Chandler swallowed with difficulty.
She was offering him the tool that had given the execs the world. A
blunter, weaker tool than her own, no doubt. But still it was power
beyond his imagining. He stood there frozen as she slipped it on his
head. Sprung electrodes pressed gently against his temples and behind
his ears. She touched something....
Chandler stood motionless for a moment and then, without effort,
floated free of his own body.
* * * * *
Floating. Floating; a jellyfish floating. Trailing tentacles that
whipped and curled, floating over the sandbound claws and chitin that
clashed beneath, floating over the world's people, and them not even
knowing, not even seeing....
Chandler floated.
He was up, out and away. He was drifting. Around him was no-color.
He saw nothing of space or size, he only saw, or did not see but
felt-smelled-tasted, people. They were the sandbound. They were the
creatures that crawled and struggled below, and his tentacles lashed
out at them.
Beside him floated another. The girl? It had a shape, but not a human
shape--a pair of great projecting spheres, a cinctured area-rule shape.
Female. Yes, undoubtedly the girl. It waved a member at him and he
understood he was beckoned. He followed.
Two of sandbound ones were ahead.
The female shape slipped into one, he into the other. It was as easy to
invest this form with his own will as it was to command the muscles of
his hand. They looked at each other out of sandbound eyes. "You're a
boy!" Chandler laughed. The girl laughed: "You're an old washerwoman!"
They were in a kitchen where fish simmered on an electric stove. The
boy-Rosie wrinkled his-her nose, blinked and was empty. Only the small
almond-eyed boy was left, and he began to cry convulsively. Chandler
understood. He floated out after her.
This way, this way, she gestured. A crowd of mudbound figures. She
slipped into one, he into another. They were in a bus now, rocking
along an inland road, all men, all roughly dressed. Laborers going
to clear a new section of Oahu of its split-level debris, Chandler
thought, and looked for the girl in one of the men's eyes, could not
find her, hesitated and--floated. She was hovering impatiently. This
way!
He followed, and followed.
They were a hundred people doing a hundred things. They lingered a
few moments as a teen-age couple holding hands in the twilight of the
beach. They fled from a room where Chandler was an old woman dying on
a bed, and Rosalie a stolid, uncaring nurse beside her. They played
follow-the-leader through the audience of a Honolulu movie theater, and
sought each other, laughing, among the fish stalls of King Street. Then
Chandler turned to Rosalie to speak and ... it all went out ... the
scene disappeared ... he opened his eyes, and he was back in his own
flesh.
He was lying on the pastel pile rug in Rosalie's bedroom.
He got up, rubbing the side of his face. He had tumbled, it seemed.
Rosalie was lying on the bed.
In a moment she opened her eyes.
"Well, love?"