Would shield Chandler himself from possession if he used it!
He did not hesitate. He slipped the helmet on his head, snapped the
switch and in a moment stood free of his own body, in the gray,
luminous limbo, looking down at the pallid traceries that lay beneath.
* * * * *
He did not hesitate then either.
He did not pause to think or plan; it was as though he had planned
every step, in long detail, over many years. Chandler for at least a
few moments had the freedom to battle the execs on their own ground,
the freedom that any mourning parent or husband in the outside world
would know well how to use.
Chandler also knew. He was a weapon. He might die--but it was not a
great thing to die, millions had done it for nothing under the rule
of the execs, and he was privileged to be able to die trying to kill
_them_.
He stepped callously around the hulk on the floor and found a door
behind the couch, a door and a hall, and at the end of that hall a
large room that had once perhaps been a message center. Now it held
rack after rack of electronic gear. He recognized it without elation.
It had had to be there.
It was the main transmitter for all the coronets of the exec.
He had only to pull one switch--that one there--and power would cease
to flow. The coronets would be dead. The execs would be only humans.
In five minutes he could destroy enough parts so that it would be at
least a week's work to build it again, and in a week the slaves in
Honolulu--somehow he could reach them, somehow he would tell them of
their chance--could root out and destroy every exec on all the islands.
Of course, there was the standby transmitter he himself had helped to
build.
He realized tardily that Koitska would have made some arrangement for
starting that up by remote control.
He put down the tool-kit with which he had been advancing on the racks
of transistors, and paused to think.
He was a fool, he saw after a moment. He could not destroy this
installation--not yet--not until he had used it. He remembered to sit
down so that his body would not crash to the floor, and then he sent
himself out and up, to scan the nearby area.
There was no one there, nobody within a mile or more, except the feeble
glimmer that was dying Koitska. He did not enter that body. He returned
to his own long enough to barricade the door--it had a strong-looking
lock, but he shouldered furniture against it too--and then he went
up and out, grateful to Rosalie, who had taught him how to navigate
in the curious world of the mind, flashing across water, under a
mind-controlled plane, to the island of Hilo.
There _had_ to be someone near the standby installation.
He searched; but there was no one. No one in the building. No one near
the ruined field. No one in the village of the dead nearby. He was
desperate; he became frantic; he was on the point of giving up, and
then he found--someone? But it was a personality feebler than stricken
Koitska's, a bare swampfire glow.
No matter. He entered it.
* * * * *
At once he screamed silently and left it again. He had never known such
pain. A terrifying fire in the belly, a thunder past any migraine in
the head, a thousand lesser aches and woes in every member. He could
not imagine what person lived in such distress; but grimly he forced
himself to enter again.
Moaning--it was astonishing how thick and animal-like the man's voice
was--Chandler forced his borrowed body stumbling through the jungle.
Time was growing very short. He drove it gasping at an awkward run
across the airfield, dodged around one wrecked plane and blundered
through the door. The pain was intolerable. He was hardly able to
maintain control.
Chandler stretched out the borrowed hand to pick up a heavy wrench even
while he thought. But the hand would not grasp. He brought it to the
weak, watering eyes. The hand had no fingers. It ended in a ball of
scar tissue. The left hand was nearly as misshapen.
Panicked, Chandler retreated from the body in a flash, back to his
own; and then he began to think.
It was, it had to be, the creature he had seen in the village of the
dead. A leper. One of the few who escaped from the colony at Molokai.
Chandler drove himself back to that body and, though it could not work
well, he could make it turn a frequency dial, using its clubbed hands
like sticks. He could make it throw a switch. He then caused it to
place the toothed edge of a rusting saw on the ground and strike at it
with its throat in a sort of reverse guillotine. Chandler could not see
that he had a choice; he dared not have that creature left where it
might be seized the moment he quit its body. It was better dead.
After that it all became easy.
In his own body he destroyed the installation in Oahu. A few minutes
at Koitska's work bench, and he had changed the frequency on his own
coronet to transmit on the new band the leper's touch had given the
Hilo equipment.
He worked rapidly and without errors, one ear cocked for the sound of
someone coming to threaten what he was doing (the sound never came),
impatient to get the job done.
He was very impatient, for when he was done he would be the only exec.
And the execs would be only slaves.