Plague of Pythons

"HEY, CHANDLER," said Lany Grantz, the jailer, "I can get fifty to one for a conviction. What d'you think?"

"Go to hell," said Chandler.

"Come on. Let me in on it. You got any surprises for the judge?"

Chandler didn't answer. He didn't even look at the jailer. A man who was on his way to hell didn't have to worry about what people thought of him.

"Now, look," said the jailer, "you could maybe use a friend or two before long. What do you say? Listen, I can get five for one if you're going to plead guilty. Are you?"

"Why should I? I'm innocent."

"Oh, yeah, all right, but if you plead guilty and throw yourself on the mercy of the court No? The hell with you, then."

The jailer stood in the doorway, picking his nose and looking at Chandler with dislike. That was all right. Chandler was getting used to it.

It was hard to believe that this was the late 20th century ... the third decade of the Atomic Age, the era of spaceflight. Of course, there hadn't been much of that lately. Chandler wondered what the Mars expedition must be thinking these days, waiting for the relief-and-rotation ship that must be a year or two overdue by now. Assuming they were still alive, of course ...

"You're gonna go in there in a minute. Chandler," said Grantz, "and then it's too late. Why don't you be a sport and let me know what's up?"

Chandler said, "I've got nothing to tell you. I'm innocent."

"You gonna plead that way?" pressed the jailer.

"I'm going to plead that way."

"Ah, cripes, they'll shoot you sure."

Chandler shook his head. Meaning: that's not up to me.

Grantz stared at him irresolutely.

Chandler changed position gently, since he still hurt pretty badly. He wished he had a watch, although there was no particular reason for him to worry about the time any more.

Five years before, back in the old days before the demons came, when he was helping design telemetry equipment for the Ganymede probe. Chandler would not have believed his life would be at stake in a witchcraft trial. Not even that. He wasn't accused of being involved in witchcraft. He was about to go on trial for his life for the far more serious crime of not being involved in witchcraft.

It was hard to believe-but believe it or not, it was happening. It was happening to him.

It was happening right now.

Grantz cocked an ear to a voice from outside the door, nodded, ground out his cigarette under a heel and said, "All right, fink. Just remember when they're pulling the trigger on you, you could have had a friend on the firing squad." And he opened the door and marched Chandler out.

Because of the crowd that was attracted by the sensational nature of the charges against him, they held Chandler's trial in the all-purpose room of the high school. It smelled of leather and stale sweat.

There was a mob. There must have been three or four hundred people present. They all looked at him exactly as the jailer had.

Chandler walked up the three steps to the stage, with the jailer's hand on his elbow, and took his place at the defendant's table. His lawyer was there already.

The lawyer, who had been appointed by the court over his vigorous protests, looked at him without emotion. He was willing to do his job, but his job didn't require him to like his client. All he said was, "Stand up. The judge is coming in."

Chandler got to his feet and leaned on the table while the bailiff chanted his call and the chaplain read some verses from John. He did not listen. The Bible verses came too late to help him, and besides he ached.

When the police arrested him they had not been gentle. There were four of them. They were from the plant's own security force and carried no guns. They didn't need any; Chandler had put up no resistance after the first few moments, that is, he stopped fighting as soon as he could stop but the police hadn't stopped. He remembered that very clearly. He remembered the nightstick across the side of his head that left his ear squashed and puffy, he remembered the kick in the gut that still made walking painful. He even remembered the pounding on his skull that had knocked him out.

The bruises along his rib cage and left arm, though, he did not remember getting. Obviously the police had been mad enough to keep right on subduing him after he was already unconscious.

Chandler did not blame them exactly. He supposed he would have done the same thing.

The judge was having a long mumble with the court stenographer, apparently about something which had happened in the Union House the night before. Chandler knew Judge Ellithorp slightly. He did not expect to get a fair trial. The previous December the judge himself, while possessed, had smashed the transmitter of the town's radio station, which he owned, and set fire to the building it occupied. His son-in-law had been killed in the fire.

Since the judge had had his own taste of hell, he would not be kind to Chandler.

Laughing, the judge waved the reporter back to his seat and glanced around the courtroom. His gaze touched Chandler lightly, like the flick of the hanging strands of cord that precede a railroad tunnel. The touch carried the same warning. What lay ahead for Chandler was destruction.

"Read the charge," ordered Judge Ellithorp. He spoke very loudly. There were more than six hundred persons in the auditorium; the judge didn't want any of them to miss a word.

The bailiff ordered Chandler to stand and informed him that he was accused of having, on the seventeenth day of June last, committed on the person of Margaret Flershem, a minor, an act of rape.

"Louder!" ordered the judge testily.

"Yes, Your Honor," said the bailiff, and inflated his chest. "An Act of Rape under Threat of Bodily Violence," he cried; "and Did Further Commit on the Person of Said Margaret Flershem an Act of Aggravated Assault"

Chandler rubbed his aching side, looking at the ceiling. He remembered the look in Peggy Flershem's eyes as he forced himself on her. She was only sixteen years old, and at that time he hadn't even known her last name.

The bailiff boomed on: "and Did Further Commit on that Same Seventeenth Day of June Last on the Person of Ingovar Porter an Act of Assault with Intent to Rape, the Foregoing Being a True Bill Handed Down by the Grand Jury of Marecel County in Extraordinary Session Assembled, the Eighteenth Day of June Last."

Judge Ellithorp looked satisfied as the bailiff sat down, quite winded. While the judge hunted through the papers on his desk the crowd in the auditorium stirred and murmured.

A child began to cry.

The judge stood up and pounded his gavel. "What is it? What's the matter with him? You, Dundon!" The court attendant the judge was looking at hurried over and spoke to the child's mother, then reported to the judge.

"I dunno. Your Honor. All he says is something scared him."

The judge was enraged. "Well, that's just fine! Now we have to take up the time of all these good people, probably for no reason, and hold up the business of this court, just because of a child. Bailiff! I want you to clear this courtroom of all children under" he hesitated, calculating voting blocks in his head "all children under the age of six. Dr. Palmer, are you there? Well, you better go ahead with the prayer." The judge could not make himself say "the exorcism."

"I'm sorry, madam," he added to the mother of the crying two-year-old. "If you have someone to leave the child with, I'll instruct the attendants to save your place for you." She was also a voter.

Dr. Palmer rose, very grave, as he was embarrassed. He glared around the all-purpose room, defying anyone to smile, as he chanted: "Domina Pythonis, I command you, leave! Leave, Hel! Leave, Heloym! Leave, Sother and Thetragrammaton, leave, all unclean ones! I command you! In the name of God, in all of His manifestations!"

He sat down again, still very grave. He knew that he did not make nearly as fine a showing as Father Lon, with his resonant in nomina lesu Christi et Sancti Ubaldi and his censer, but the post of exorcist was filled in strict rotation, one month to a denomination, ever since the troubles started. Dr. Palmer was a Unitarian. Exorcisms had not been in the curriculum at the seminary and he had been forced to invent his own.

Chandler's lawyer tapped him on the shoulder. "Last chance to change your mind," he said.

"No. I'm not guilty, and that's the way I want to plead."

The lawyer shrugged and stood up, waiting for the judge to notice him.

Chandler, for the first time, allowed himself to meet the eyes of the crowd.

He studied the jury first. He knew some of them casually, it was not a big enough town to command a jury of total strangers for any defendant, and Chandler had lived there most of his life. He recognized Pop Matheson, old and very stiff, who ran the railroad station cigar stand. Two of the other men were familiar as faces passed in the street. The forewoman, though, was a stranger. She sat there very composed and frowning, and all he knew about her was that she wore funny hats. Yesterday's had been red roses when she was selected from the panel; today's was, of all things, a stuffed bird.

He did not think that any of them was possessed. He was not so sure of the audience.

He saw girls he had dated in high school, long before he met Margot; men he worked with at the plant. They all glanced at him, but he was not sure who was looking out through some of those familiar eyes. The visitors reliably watched all large gatherings, at least momentarily; it would be surprising if none of them were here.

"All right, how do you plead?" said Judge Ellithorp at last.

Chandler's lawyer straightened up. "Not guilty, Your Honor, by reason of temporary pandemic insanity."

The judge looked pleased. The crowd murmured, but they were pleased too. They had him dead to rights and it would have been a disappointment if Chandler had pleaded guilty. They wanted to see one of the vilest criminals in contemporary human society caught, exposed, convicted and punished; they did not want to miss a step of the process. Already in the playground behind the school three deputies from the sheriff's office were loading their rifles, while the school janitor chalked lines around the handball court to mark where the crowd witnessing the execution would be permitted to stand.

All this, as Chandler very reasonably told himself, was quite insane. There were satellites in orbit in the skies overhead! Every home in the town owned a television set, although to be sure they now did nothing but serve as receptacles for the holding of seashells and flowers ... and hopes for a better world. This was the 20th century!

But they gave every sign of being about to kill him as dead as though it were the seventeenth. The prosecution made its case very quickly. Mrs. Porter testified that she worked at McKelvey Bros., the antibiotics plant, where the defendant also worked. Yes, that was him. She had been attracted by the noise from the culture room last -

Let's see -- "Was it the seventeenth day of June last?" prompted the prosecutor, and Chandler's attorney instinctively gathered his muscles to rise, hesitated, glanced at his client and shrugged. That was right, it was the seventeenth.

Incautiously she went right into the room. She should have known better, she admitted. She should have called the plant police right away, but, well, they hadn't had any trouble at the plant, you know, and well, she didn't. She was a stupid woman, for all that she was rather good-looking, and insatiably curious. She had seen Peggy Flershem on the floor. "She was all blood. And her clothes were ... And she was, I mean her - her body was" With relentless tact the prosecutor allowed her to stammer out her observation that the girl had clearly been raped. And she had seen Chandler laughing and breaking up the place, throwing racks of cultures through the windows, upsetting trays. Of course she had crossed herself and tried a quick exorcism but there was no visible effect; then Chandler had leaped at her. "He was hateful! He was just foul!" But as he began to attack her the plant police came, drawn by her screams.

Chandler's attorney did not question.

Peggy Flershem's deposition was introduced without objection from the defense. But she had little to say anyway, having been dazed at first and unconscious later. The plant police testified to having arrested Chandler; a doctor described in chaste medical words the derangements Chandler had worked on Peggy Flershem's virgin anatomy.

There was no question from Chandler's lawyer and, for that matter, nothing to question. Chandler did not hope to pretend that he had not ravished and nearly killed one girl, then done his best to repeat the process on another. Sitting there as the doctor testified, Chandler was able to tally every break and bruise against the memory of what his own body had done. He had been a spectator then, too, as remote from the event as he was now; but that was why they had him on trial. That was what they did not believe.

At twelve-thirty the prosecution rested its case. Judge Ellithorp looking very pleased. He recessed the court for one hour for lunch, and Larry Grant took Chandler back to the detention cell in the basement of the school.

Two Swiss cheese sandwiches and a wax paper carton of chocolate milk were on the desk. They were Chandler's lunch. As they had been standing, the sandwiches were crusty and the milk lukewarm. He ate them anyway. He knew what the judge looked pleased about. At one-thirty Chandler's lawyer would put him on the stand, and no one would pay very much attention to what he had to say, and the jury would be out at most twenty minutes, and the verdict would be guilty. The judge was pleased because he would be able to pronounce sentence no later than four o'clock, no matter what.

They had formed the habit of holding the executions at sundown. As, at that time of year, sundown was after seven, it would all go very well for everyone but Chandler.

LASRY GRANTZ looked in, eating a wedge of pie from the diner across the street. "You want anything else?" he demanded.

"Coffee."

"Ah, you won't have time to drink it." Grantz licked his fingers. "Of course, if you wasn't such a bastard about tipping me off" He waited a moment and, when Chandler did not reply, closed the door.

Chandler looked out the window. It was a nice day. Far outside, above and away, a thin pale line of cloud stretched itself across the horizon. Contrail. Chandler watched it, listening, and caught the distant thundering mumble of a transonic jet.

He wondered what sort of hand was at its controls. Where they came from no one knew, where they were going no one could tell. None had ever landed in this little part of the world in a long time. Not even at the Air Force base. Not anywhere, in the years since that day of disaster when the old world came to an end. Every once in a while one rasped across the sky, on what errands Chandler could not guess.

In any event he had more pressing problems. The odd thing about his dilemma was not merely that he was innocent in a way, that is, but that many who were guilty (in a way; as guilty as he himself, at any rate) were free and honored citizens. Chandler himself was a widower because his own wife had been murdered. He had seen the murderer leaving the scene of the crime, and the man he had seen was in the courtroom today, watching Chandler's own trial. Of the six hundred or so in the court, at least fifty were known to have taken part in one or more provable acts of murder, rape, arson, theft, sodomy, vandalism, assault and battery or a dozen other offenses indictable under the laws of the state. Of course, that could be said of almost any community in the world in those years; Chandler's was not unique. What had put Chandler in the dock was not what his body had been seen to do, but the place in which it had been seen to do it.

For everybody knew that medicine and agriculture were never molested by the demons.

Chandler's own lawyer had pointed that out to him the day before the trial. "If it was anywhere but at the McKelvey plant, all right, but there's never been any trouble there. You know that. The trouble with you laymen is you think of lawyers in terms of Perry Mason, right? Rabbit out of the hat stuff. Well, I can't do that. I can only present your case, whatever it is, the best way possible. And the best thing I can do for your case right now is tell you you haven't got one." At that time the lawyer was still trying to be fair. He was even casting around for some thought he could use to convince himself that his client was innocent, though he had frankly admitted as soon as he introduced himself that he didn't have much hope there.

Chandler protested that he didn't have to commit rape. He'd been a widower for a year, but...

"Wait a minute," said the lawyer. "Listen. You can't make an ordinary claim of possession stick, but what about good old-fashioned insanity?" Chandler looked puzzled, so the lawyer explained. Wasn't it possible that Chandler was consciously, subconsciously, unconsciously, call it what you will trying to get revenge for what had happened to his own wife?

"No," said Chandler, "certainly not!" But then he had to stop and think. After all, he had never been possessed before; in fact, he had always retained a certain skepticism about "possession" it seemed like such a convenient way for anyone to do any illicit thing he chose until the moment when he looked up to see Peggy Flershem walking into the culture room with a tray of agar disks, and was astonished to find himself striking her with the wrench in his hand and ripping at her absurdly floral printed slacks. Maybe his case was different. Maybe it wasn't the sort of possession that struck at random; maybe he was just off his rocker.

Margot, his wife, had been cut up cruelly. He had seen his friend, Jack Souther, leaving his home hurriedly as he approached; and although he had thought that the stains on his clothes looked queerly like blood, nothing in that prepared him for what he found in the rumpus room. It had taken him some time to identify the spread-out dissection on the floor with his wife Margot .

"No," he told his lawyer, "I was shaken up, of course. The worst time was the next night, when there was a knock on the door and I opened it and it was Jack. He'd come to apologize. I well, I got over it. I tell you I was possessed, that's all."

"And I tell you that defense will put you right in front of a firing squad," said his lawyer. "And that's all."

Five or six others had been executed for hoaxing; Chandler was familiar with the ritual. He even understood it, in a way. The world had gone to pot in the previous two years. The real enemy was out of reach; when any citizen might run wild and, when caught, relapse into his own self, terrified and sick, there was a need to strike back.

But the enemy was invisible. The hoaxers were only whipping boys, but they were the only targets vengeance had.

The real enemy had struck the entire world in a single night. One day the people of the world went about their business in the gloomy knowledge that they were likely to make mistakes but with, at least, the comfort that the mistakes would be their own. The next day had not such comfort. The next day anyone, anywhere, was likely to find himself seized, possessed, working evil or whimsy without ever having formed the intention to do so ... and helplessly. Demons? Martians? No one knew whether the invaders of the soul were from another world or from some djinn's bottle. All they knew was that they were helpless against them.

Chandler stood up, kicked the balled-up wax paper from his sandwiches across the floor and swore violently. He was beginning to wake from the shock that had gripped him. "Damn fool," he said to himself. He had no particular reason. Like the world, he needed a whipping boy too, if only himself. "Damn fool, you know they're going to shoot you!"

He stretched and twisted his body violently, alone in the middle of the room, in silence. He had to wake up. He had to start thinking. In a quarter of an hour or less the court would reconvene, and from then it was only a steady, quick slide 'to the grave.

It was better to do anything than to do nothing. He examined the windows of his improvised cell. They were above his head and barred; standing on the table, he could see feet walking outside, in the paved play yard of the school. He discarded the thought of escaping that way; there was no one to smuggle him a file, and there was no time. He studied the door to the hall. It was not impossible that when the guard opened it he could jump him, knock him out, run ... run where? The room had been a storage place for athletic equipment at the end of a hall; the hall led only to the stairs and the stairs emerged into the courtroom. It was quite likely, he thought, that the hall had another flight of stairs somewhere farther along, or through another room. What had he spent his taxes on these years, if not for schools designed with more than one exit in case of fire? But as he had not thought to mark an escape route when he was brought in, it did him no good. The guard, however, had a gun. Chandler lifted up an edge of the table and tried to shake one of the legs. They did not shake; that part of his taxes had been well enough spent, he thought wryly. The chair? Could he smash the chair to get a club, which would give him a weapon to get the guard's gun?...

Before he reached the chair the door opened and his lawyer came in.

"Sorry I'm late," he said briskly. "Well. As your attorney I have to tell you they've presented a damaging case. As I see it"

"What case?" Chandler demanded. "I never denied the acts. What else did they prove?"

"Oh, God!" said his lawyer, not quite loudly enough to be insulting. "Do we have to go over that again? Your claim of possession would make a defense if it had happened anywhere else. We know that these cases exist, but we also know that they follow a pattern. Some areas seem to be immune -- medical establishments, pharmaceutical plants among them. So they proved that all this happened in a pharmaceutical plant. I advise you to plead guilty."

Chandler sat down on the edge of the table, controlling himself very well, he thought. He only asked: "Would that do me any good at all?"

The lawyer reflected, gazing at the ceiling. " ... No."

Chandler nodded. "So what else shall we talk about? Want to compare notes about where you were and I was the night the President went possessed?"

The lawyer was irritated. He kept his mouth shut for a moment until he thought he could keep from showing it.

Outside a vendor was hawking amulets: "St. Ann beads! Witch knots! Fresh garlic, local grown, best in town!" The lawyer shook his head.

"All right," he said, "it's your life. We'll do it your way. Anyway, time's up; Sergeant Grantz will be banging on the door any minute."

He zipped up his briefcase. Chandler did not move.

"They don't give us much time anyway," the lawyer added, angry at Chandler and at hoaxers in general but not willing to say so.

"Grantz is a stickler for promptness." Chandler found a crumb of cheese by his hand and absently ate it. The lawyer watched him and glanced at his watch. "Oh, hell," he said, picked up his briefcase and kicked the base of the door. "Grantz! What's the matter with you? You asleep out there?"

Chandler was sworn, gave his name, admitted the truth of everything the previous witnesses had said. The faces were still aimed at him, every one. He could not read them at all any more, could not tell if they were friendly or hating, there were too many and they all had eyes. The jurors sat on their funeral-parlor chairs like cadavers, embalmed and propped, the dead witnessing a wake for the living. Only the forewoman in the funny hat showed signs of life, looking alertly at Chandler, at the judge, at the man next to her, around the auditorium. Maybe it was a good sign. At least she did not have the frozen-in-concrete, guilty-as-hell look of the others.

His attorney asked him the question he had been waiting for: "Tell us, in your own words, what happened."

Chandler opened his mouth, and paused. Curiously, he had forgotten what he wanted to say. He had rehearsed this moment again and again; but all that came out was: "I didn't do it. I mean, I did the acts, but I was possessed. That's all. Others have done worse, under the same circumstances, and been let off. Just as Fisher was acquitted for murdering the Leamards, as Draper got off after what he did to the Cline boy. As Jack Souther over there was let off after he murdered my own wife. They should be. They couldn't help themselves. Whatever this thing is that takes control, I know it can't be fought. My God, you can't even try to fight it!"

He was not getting through. The faces had not changed. The forewoman of the jury was now searching systematically through her pocketbook, taking each item out and examining it, putting it back and taking out another. But between times she looked at him and at least her expression wasn't hostile. He said, addressing her: "That's all there is to it. It wasn't me running my body. It was someone else. I swear it before all of you, and before God."

"The prosecutor did not bother to question him. Chandler went back to his seat and sat down and watched the next twenty minutes go by in the wink of an eye, rapid, rapid; they were in a hurry to shoot him. He could hardly believe that Judge Ellithorp could speak so fast; the jurymen rose and filed out at a gallop, zip, whisk, and they were back again. Too fast! he cried silently, time had gone into high gear; but he knew that it was only his imagination. The twenty minutes had been a full twelve hundred seconds. And then time, as if to make amends, came to a stop, abrupt, brakes on. The judge asked the jury for their verdict and it was an eternity before the forewoman arose.

She was beginning to look rather disheveled. Beaming at Chandler surely the woman was rather odd, it couldn't be just his imagination she fumbled in her pocketbook for the slip of paper with the verdict. But she wore an expression of suppressed laughter.

"I knew I had it," she cried triumphantly and waved the slip above her head. "Now, let's see." She held it before her eyes and squinted. "Oh, yes. Judge, we the jury, and so forth and so on"

She paused to wink at Judge Ellithorp. An uncertain worried murmur welled up in the auditorium. "All that junk, Judge," she explained, "anyway, we unanimously but unanimously, love! find this son of a bitch innocent."

"Why," she 'giggled, "we think he ought to get a medal, you know? I tell you what you do, love, you go right over and give him a big wet kiss and say you're sorry." She stood drunkenly swaying, laughing at the courtroom.

The murmuring became something more like a mass scream.

"Stop her, stop her!" bawled the judge, dropping his glasses. "Bailiff! Sergeant Grantz!"

"Oh, cool it," cried the woman in the floppy hat. "Hi, there! That you, love?" A man in the front row leaped to his feet and waved to her. The scream became a shout, a single word: Possessed!

"I tell you what," shrieked the woman, "let's all sing. Everybody! 'For he's a fairly good fellow, for he's a fairly good fellow' Come on now, loves! All together, for His Honor"

The bailiff, half a dozen policemen, the judge himself were scrambling toward her, but they were fighting a tide of terrified people, flowing away. Possessed she clearly was. And she was not alone. The man in the front row sang raucously along with her; then he flopped like a rag doll, and someone behind him leaped to his feet and carried along with the song without missing a beat, then another, another ... it was like some distant sorcerer at a selector switch, turning first one on, then another. The noise was bedlam. As the police closed in on her the woman blew them kisses. They fell away, as from leprosy, then buried themselves grimly back, like a lynch mob.

She was giggling as they fell on her.

From under their scrambling bodies her voice gasped, "Oh, now, not so rough! Say! Got a cigarette? I've been wanting"

The voice choked and spluttered; and then it screamed.

It was a sound of pure hysteria. The police separated themselves and helped her up, still screaming, eyes weeping with terror. "Oh!" she gasped. "Oh! I couldn't stop!"

Chandler stood up and took one step toward the door. So much confusion. Such utter disorganization. There was a chance.

He stopped and turned. They would catch him before he got outside the door. He made a decision, caught his lawyer by the arm, jerked at it until he got the man's attention. All of a sudden he felt alive again. There was hope! Tiny, insubstantial, but"

"Listen," he said rapidly. "You, damn it! Listen to me. "The jury acquitted me, right?"

The lawyer was startled. "Don't be ridiculous. It's a clear case of"

"Be a lawyer, man! You live on technicalities, don't you? Make this one work for me!"

The attorney gave him a queer, thoughtful look, hesitated, shrugged and got to his feet. He had to shout to be heard. "Your Honor! I take it my client is free to go."

He made almost as much of a stir as the sobbing woman, but he outshouted the storm. "The jury's verdict is on record. Granted there was an apparent case of possession. Nevertheless"

Judge Ellithorp yelled back: "No nonsense, you! Listen to me, young man"

The lawyer snapped, "Permission to approach the bench."

"Granted."

Chandler sat unable to move, watching the brief, stormy conference. It was painful to be coming back to life. It was agony to hope. At least, he thought detachedly, his lawyer was fighting for him; the prosecutor's face was a thunder-cloud.

The lawyer came back, with the expression of a man who has won a victory he did not expect, and did not want. "Your last chance. Chandler. Change your plea to guilty."

"But"

"Don't push your luck, boy! The judge has agreed to accept a plea. They'll throw you out of town, of course. But you'll be alive."

Chandler hesitated. "Make up your mind! The best I can do otherwise is a mistrial, and that means you'll get convicted by another jury next week."

Chandler said, testing his luck: "You're sure they'll keep their end of the bargain?"

The lawyer shook his head, his expression that of a man who smells something unpleasant. "Your Honor! I ask you to discharge the jury. My client wishes to change his plea."

In the school's chemistry lab, an hour later, Chandler discovered that the lawyer had left out one little detail.

Outside there was a sound of motors idling, the police car that would dump him at the town's limits; inside was a thin, hollow hiss. It was the sound of a Bunsen burner, and in its blue flame a crudely shaped iron changed slowly from cherry to orange to glowing straw. It had the shape of a letter - "H."

"H" for "hoaxer." The mark they were about to put on his forehead would be with him wherever he went and as long as he lived, which would probably not be long. "H" for "hoaxer," so that a glance would show that he had been convicted of the worst offense of all.

No one spoke to him as Larry Grantz took the iron out of the fire, but three husky policemen held his arms while he screamed.

THE PAIN was still burning when Chandler awoke the next day. He wished he had a bandage, but he didn't, and that was that.

He was on a freight car, had hopped it on the run at the yards, daring to sneak back into town long enough for that. He could not hope to hitchhike, with that mark on him. Anyway, hitchhiking was an invitation to trouble.

The railroads were safe, far safer than either cars or air transport, notoriously a lightning rod attracting possession. Chandler was surprised when the train came crashing to a stop, each freight car smashing against the couplings of the one ahead, the engine jolting forward and stopping again.

Then there was silence. It endured.

Chandler, who had been slowly waking after a night of very little sleep, sat up against the wall of the boxcar and wondered what was wrong.

It seemed remiss to start a day without signing the Cross or hearing a few exorcismal verses. It seemed to be mid-morning, time for work to be beginning at the plant. The lab men would be streaming in, their amulets examined at the door. The chaplains would be wandering about, ready to pray a possessing spirit out. Chandler, who kept an open mind, had considerable doubt of the effectiveness of all the amulets and spells; certainly they had not kept him from committing a brutal rape, but he felt uneasy without them ... The train was still not moving. In the silence he could hear the distant huffing of the engine.

He went to the door, supporting himself with one hand on the wooden wall, and looked out.

The tracks followed the roll of a river, their bed a few feet higher than an empty three-lane highway, which in turn was a dozen feet above the water. As he looked out the engine brayed twice. The train jolted, then stopped again.

Then there was a very long time when nothing happened at all.

From Chandler's car he could not see the engine. He was on the convex of the curve, and the other door of the car was sealed. He did not need to see it to know that something was wrong. There should have been a brake-man running with a flare to ward off other trains; but there was not. There should have been a station, or at least a water tank, to account for the stop in the first place. There was not. Something had gone wrong, and Chandler knew what it was. Not the details, but the central fact that lay behind this and behind almost everything that went wrong these days.

The engineer was possessed. It had to be that.

Yet it was odd, he thought, as odd as his own trouble. He had chosen this train with care. It contained eight refrigerator cars full of pharmaceuticals, and if anything was known about the laws governing possession, as his lawyer had told him, it was that such things were almost never interfered with.

Chandler jumped down to the roadbed, slipped on the crushed rock and almost fell. He had forgotten the wound on his forehead. He clutched the sill of the car door, where an ankh and fleur-de-lis had been chalked to ward off demons, until the sudden rush of blood subsided and the pain began to relent. After a moment he walked gingerly to the end of the car, slipped between the cars, dodged the couplers and climbed the ladder to its roof.

It was a warm, bright, silent day. Nothing moved. From his height he could see the Diesel at the front of the train and the caboose at its rear. No people. The train was halted a quarter-mile from where the tracks swooped across the river on a suspension bridge. Away from the river, the side of the tracks that had been hidden from him before, was an uneven rock cut and, above it, the slope of a mountain.

By looking carefully he could spot the signs of a number of homes within half a mile or so the corner of a roof, a glassed-in porch built to command a river view, a twenty-foot television antenna poking through the trees. There was also the curve of a higher road along which the homes were strung.

Chandler took thought. He was alive and free, two gifts more gracious than he had had any right to expect. However, he would need food and he would need at least some sort of bandage for his forehead. He had a wool cap, stolen from the high school, which would hide the mark, though what it would do to the burn on his skin was something else again.

Chandler climbed down the ladder. With considerable pain he gentled the cap over the great raw "H" on his forehead and turned toward the mountain.

A voice from behind him said, "Hey. What's that you've got on your head?"

Chandler whirled, mad and scared. There was a man at the open doorway of the next boxcar, kneeling and looking out at him. He was a small man, by no means young.

He wore a dirty Army officer's uniform blouse over chinos. His face was dirty and unshaven, his eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, but his expression was serenely interested.

"Now, where the hell did you come from?" demanded Chandler. "I didn't see you."

"Perhaps you didn't look," the man said cheerfully, untangled his legs and slipped down to the crushed gravel at the side of the roadbed. He caught Chandler's shoulder. to steady himself. From twenty inches away his breath was enough to knock Chandler down.

But the man did not seem drunk. He didn't even seem hung over, though he walked awkwardly, like a man who is just on his feet after a long illness, or a toddling child.

"Excuse," he said, pushing past Chandler and walking a step or two toward the head of the train, staring toward the engine.

As Chandler watched the little man lurched, recovered himself and spun to face him. The change in him was instant; one moment he was staring reflectively down the track, unhurried and calm; the next he was in a flap of consternation and terror. His eyes were wide with fright. His lips worked convulsively.

Alarmed, Chandler snapped, "What's the matter with you?"

"I" The man swallowed, and stared about him. Then his eyes returned to Chandler. He took a step, put out a hand and said, "I"

Then his expression changed again.

His hand dropped. In a tone of friendly curiosity he said, "I asked you what you had on your head. Fall against a hot stove?"

Chandler was now thoroughly jumpy. He didn't understand what was going on, but he understood that he didn't like it. And he didn't like the subject of their conversation.

He snapped, "It's a brand. I got it for committing murder and rape, all right?"

"Oh?" The man nodded reflectively.

"Yeah. I was possessed ... but they didn't believe me . So they put this 'H' on me. It stands for 'hoaxer.' " "Too bad." The man returned to Chandler and patted his shoulder. "Why didn't they believe you?"

"Because it happened in a pharmaceutical plant. I don't know how it is where you come from, buddy, but where I live .. lived that sort of thing didn't happen in that kind of place. Only it does now! Look at this train."

The man smiled brightly. "You think the train is possessed?"

"I think the engineer is."

The man nodded, and glanced impatiently toward the bridge again. "Would that be so bad?"

"Bad? Where've you been?"

The little man apologized, "I mean, do all the what do you call them? Do all the cases of possession have to be wicked?"

Chandler took a deep breath. He couldn't believe the little man was for real. He could feel the short hairs at the back of his neck prickling erect. Something smelled wrong. Nobody asked questions like that ... He said weakly, "I never heard of any that weren't. Did you?"

"Yes, maybe I did," flared the man defensively. "Why not? Nothing is evil. It's all what you make of it ... and I could imagine times when that sort of affair could be good. I can imagine it carrying you up to the stars! I can imagine it filling your brain with a mind grand enough to crack your own. I can ..."

His voice tapered off as he noticed Chandler's popeyed stare.

"I was only saying maybe," he apologized, hesitated, seemed about to speak again.. and then turned and started off toward the head of the train at a dead run.

Chandler stared after him.

He scratched the area of skin around the seared place on his forehead, then turned and began to climb the mountain. Twenty yards uphill he stopped as though he had run into a brick wall. He turned and looked down the tracks, but the man was out of sight. Chandler stood staring down the empty line of crushed rock, not seeing it. There was a big question in his mind. He was wondering just who he had been talking to.

Or what.

By the time he reached the first shelving roadway he had put that particular puzzle away in the back of his mind. He knocked on the first door he came to, a great old three-story house with well tended gardens.

Half a minute passed. There was no answer and no sound. The air smelled warmly of honeysuckle and mown grass, with wild onions chopped down by the blades of the mower. It was pleasant, or would have been in happier times. He knocked again, peremptorily, and the door was opened at once. Evidently someone had been right inside, listening.

A man stared at him. "Stranger, what do you want?" He was short, plump, with an extremely thick and unkempt beard. It did not appear to have been grown for its own sake, for where the facial hair could not be coaxed to grow his skin had the gross pits of old acne.

Chandler said glibly: "Good morning. I'm working my way east. I need something to eat, and I'm willing to work for it."

The man withdrew, leaving the upper half of the Dutch door open. As it looked in on only a vestibule it did not tell Chandler much. There was one curious thing, a lath and cardboard sign, shaped like an arc of a rainbow, lettered: WELCOME TO ORPHALESE

He puzzled over it and dismissed it. The entrance room, apart from the sign, had a knickknack shelf of Japanese carved ivory and an old-fashioned umbrella rack, but that added nothing to his knowledge. He had already guessed that the owners of this home were well off. Also it had been recently painted; so they were not demoralized, as so much of the world had been demoralized, by the coming of the possessors. Even the elaborate sculpturing of its hedges had been maintained.

The man came back and with him was a girl of fifteen or so. She was tall, slim and rather homely, with a large jaw and an oval face. "Guy, he's not much to look at," she said to the pockmarked man.

"Meggie, shall I let him in?" he asked.

"Guy, you might as well," she shrugged, staring at Chandler with interest but not sympathy.

"Stranger, come along," said the man named Guy, and led him through a short hall into an enormous living room, a room two-story's high with a ten-foot fireplace.

Chandler's first thought was that he had stumbled in upon a wake. The room was neatly laid out in rows of folding chairs, more than half of them occupied. He entered from the side, but all the occupants of the chairs were looking toward him. He returned their stares; he had had a good deal of practice lately in looking back at staring faces, he reflected.

"Stranger, go in," said the man who had let him in, nudging him, "and meet the people of Orphalese."

Chandler hardly heard him. He had not expected anything like this. It was a meeting, a Daumier caricature of a Thursday Afternoon Literary Circle, old men with faces like moons, young women with faces like hags. They were strained, haggard and fearful, and a surprising number of them showed some sort of physical defect, a bandaged leg, an arm in a sling or merely the marks of pain on the features.

"Stranger, go in," repeated the man, and it was only then that Chandler noticed the man was holding a pistol, pointed at him.

CHANDLER SAT in the rear of the room, watching. There must be thousands of little colonies like this, he reflected; with the breakdown of long-distance communication the world had been atomized. There was a real fear, well justified, of living in large groups, for they too were lightning rods for possession. The world was stumbling along, but it was lame in all its members; a planetary lobotomy had stolen from it its wisdom and plan. If, he reflected dryly, it had ever had any.

But of course things were better in the old days. The world had seemed on the brink of blowing itself up, but at least it was by its own hand. Then came Christmas.

It had happened at Christmas, and the first sign was on nationwide television. The old President, balding, grave and plump, was making a special address to the nation, urging good will to men and, please, let's everyone remember to use artificial trees because of the fire danger in the event of H-bomb raids. In the middle of a sentence twenty million viewers had seen him stop, look dazedly around and say, in a breathless mumble, what sounded like: "Disht dvornyet itgt." He had then picked up the Bible on the desk before him and thrown it at the camera.

The last the televiewers had seen was the fluttering pages of the Book, growing larger as it crashed against the lens, then a flicker and blinding shot of the studio lights as the cameraman jumped away and the instrument swiveled to stare mindlessly upward. Twenty minutes later the President was dead, as his Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, hurrying with him back to the White House, calmly took a hand grenade from a Marine guard at the gate and blew the President's party to fragments.

For the President's seizure was only the first and most conspicuous. "Disht dvornyet ilgt." C.I.A. specialists were playing the tapes of the broadcast feverishly, electronically cleaning the mumble and stir from the studio away from the words to try to learn, first, the language and second what the devil it meant; but the President who ordered it was dead before the first reel spun, and his successor was not quite sworn in when it became his time to die. The ceremony was interrupted for an emergency call from the War Room, where a very nearly hysterical four-star general was trying to explain why he had ordered the immediate firing of every live missile in his command against Washington, D.C. Over five hundred missiles were involved. In most of the sites the order was disobeyed, but in six of them, unfortunately, unquestioning discipline won out, thus ending not only the swearing in, the general's weeping explanation, the spinning of tapes, but also some two million lives in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia and (through malfunctioning guidance relays on two missiles) Pennsylvania and Vermont. But it was only the beginning.

These were the first cases of possession seen by the world in some five hundred years, since the great casting out of devils of the Middle Ages. A thousand more occurred in the next few days, a hundred in the next hours.

The timetable was made up out of scattered reports in the Wire service newsrooms, while they still had facilities for spot coverage in any part of the world. (That lasted almost a week.) They identified 237 cases of possession by noon of the next day. Disregarding the dubious items -- the Yankee pitcher who leaped from the Manhattan bridge (he had Bright's disease), the warden of San Quentin who seated himself in the gas chamber and, literally, kicked the bucket (did he know the Grand Jury was subpoenaing his books?)disregarding these -- the chronology of major cases that evening was:

8:27 PM, E.S.T.: President has attack on television.

8:28 PM, E.S.T.: Prime Minister of England orders bombing raid against Israel, alleging secret plot (not yet carried out).

8:28 PM, E.S.T.: Captain of USN Ethan Alien, surfaced near Montauk Point, orders crash dive and course change, proceeding submerged at flank speed to New York Harbor.

9:10 PM, E.S.T.: Eastern Airlines four-engine jet makes wheels-up landing on roof of Pentagon, breaking some 1500 windows but causing no other major damage (except to the people aboard the jet); record of this incident fragmentary because entire site charred black in fusion attack two hours later.

9:23 PM, E.S.T.: Rosalie Pan, musical comedy star, jumps off stage, runs up center aisle and vanishes in cab, wearing beaded bra, G-string and $2500 headdress. Her movements are traced to Newark airport where she boards TWA jetliner, which is never seen again.

9:50 PM, E.S.T.: Entire S.A.C. fleet of 1200 jet bombers takes off for rendezvous over Newfoundland, where 72% are compelled to ditch as tankers fail to keep refueling rendezvous. (Orders committing the aircraft originate with S.A.C commander, found to be a suicide.)

10:14 PM, E.S.T.: Submarine fusion explosion destroys 40% of New York City. Analysis of fallout indicates U.S. Navy Polaris missiles were detonated underwater in bay; by elimination it is deduced that the submarine was the Ethan Alien.

10:50 PM, E.S.T.: President's party assassinated by Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare; Secretary then dies on bayonet of Marine guard who furnished the grenade.

10:55 PM, E.S.T.: Satellite stations observe great nuclear explosions in China and Tibet.

11:03 PM, E.S.T.: Heavily loaded munitions barges exploded near North Sea dikes of Holland; dikes breached, 1800 square miles of reclaimed land flooded out..

And so on. The incidents were countless. But before long, before even the C.I.A. had finished the first play-through of the tapes, before their successors in the task identified Disht dvornyet ilgt as a Ukrainian dialect rendering of, My God, it works! before all this, one fact was already apparent. There were many incidents scattered around the world, but not one of them took place in Russia itself.

Warsaw was ablaze, China pockmarked with blasts, East Berlin demolished along with its western sector, in eight rounds fired from a U.S. Army nuclear cannon. But the U.S.S.R. had not suffered at all, as far as could be told by the prying eyes in orbit; and that fact was reason enough for it to suffer very greatly very soon.

Within minutes of this discovery what remained of the military strength of the Western world was roaring through airless space toward the most likely targets of the East.

One unscathed missile base in Alaska completed a full shoot, seven missiles with fusion warheads. The three American bases that survived at all in the Mediterranean fired what they had. Even Britain, which had already watched the fire-tails of the American missiles departing on suicide missions, managed to resurrect its own two prototype Blue Streaks from their racks, where they had moldered since the cancellation of the British missile program.

One of these museum-pieces destroyed itself in launching, but the other chugged painfully across the sky, the tortoise following the flight of the hares. It arrived a full half-hour after the newer, hotter missiles. It might as well not have bothered. There was not much left to destroy.

It was fortunate for the Communists that most of the Western arsenal had already spent itself in suicide. What was left wiped out Moscow, Leningrad and nine other cities. It was even fortunate for the whole world, for this was the Apocalypse they had dreaded, every possible nuclear weapon committed. But the circumstances were such hasty orders, often at once recalled; confusion; panic that most were unfused, many others merely tore great craters in the quickly healing surface of the sea. The fallout was murderous but spotty.

And the conventional forces invading Russia found nothing to fight. The Russians were as confused as they. There were not many survivors of the very top brass, and no one seemed to know just what had happened.

Was the Secretary of the C.P., U.S.S.R. behind that terrible brief agony? As he was dead before it was over, there was no way to tell. More than a quarter of a billion lives went into mushroom-shaped clouds, and nearly half of them were Russian, Latvian, Tatar and Kalmuck. The Peace Commission squabbled for a month, until the breakdown of a communications cut them off from their governments and each other; and in that way, for a time, there was peace.

This was the sort of peace that was left, thought Chandler looking around at the queer faces and queerer surroundings, the peace of medieval baronies, cut off from the world, untouched where the rain of fallout had passed by but hardly civilized any more. Even his own home town, trying to take his life in a form of law, reduced at last to torture and exile to cast him out, was not the civilization he had grown up in but something new and ugly.

There was a great deal of talk he did not understand because he could not quite hear it, though they looked at him. Then Guy, with the gun, led him up to the front of the room. They had constructed an improvised platform out of plywood panels resting on squat, heavy boxes that looked like empty ammunition crates. On the dais was a dentist's chair, bolted to the plywood; and in the chair, strapped in, baby spotlights on steel-tube frames glaring on her, was a girl. She looked at Chandler with regretting eyes but did not speak.

"Stranger, get up there," said Guy, prodding him from behind, and Chandler took a plain wooden chair next to the girl.

"People of Orphalese," cried the teen-age cutie named Meggie, "we have two more brands to save from the imps!"

The men and women in the audience cackled or shrilled, "Save them. Save them!"

They all had a look of invisible uniforms. Chandler saw, like baseball players in the lobby of a hotel or soldiers in a diner outside the gate of their post; they were all of a type. Their type was something strange. Some were tall, some short; there were old, fat, lean and young among them; but they all wore about them a look of glowing excitement, muted by an aura of suffering and pain. They wore, in a word, the look of bigots.

The bound girl was not one of them. She might have been twenty years old or as much as thirty. She might have been pretty. It was hard to tell; she wore no makeup, her hair strung raggedly to her neck, and her face was drawn into a tight, lean line. It was her eyes that were alive. She saw Chandler and she was sorry for him. And he saw, as he turned to look at her, that she was manacled to the dentist's chair.

"People of Orphalese," chanted Guy, standing behind Chandler with the muzzle of the gun against his neck, "the meeting of the Orphalese Self-Preservation Society will now come to order." There was an approving, hungry murmur from the audience.

"Well, people of Orphalese," Guy went on in his sing-song, "the agenda for the day is first the salvation of we Orphalese on McGuire's Mountain."

("All saved, all of us saved," rolled a murmur from the congregation.) A lean, red-headed man bounded to the platform and fussed with the stand of spotlights, turning one of them full on Chandler.

"People of Orphalese, as we are saved, do I have your consent to pass on and proceed to the next order of business?"

("Consent, consent, consent," rolled the echo.)

"And then the second item of business is to welcome and bring to grace these two newly found and adopted souls."

The congregation shouted variously: "Bring them to grace! Save them from the imps! Keep Orphalese from the taint of the beast!"

Evidently Guy was satisfied. He nodded and became more chatty. "Okay, people of Orphalese, let's get down to it. We got two new ones, like I say. Their spirits have gone wandering on the wind, or anyway one of them has, and you all know the et cetera. They have committed a wrong unto others and therefore unto themselves. Herself, I mean.

Course, the other one could have a flame spirit in him too." He stared severely at Chandler. "Boys, keep an eye on him, why don't you?" he said to two men in the front row, surrendering his gun. "Meggie, you tell about the female one."

The teen-aged girl stepped forward and said, in a conversational tone but with modest pride, "People of Orphalese, well, I was walking down the cut and I heard this car coming. Well, I was pretty surprised, you know. I had to figure what to do. You all know what the trouble is with cars."

"The imps!" cried a woman of forty with a face like a catfish.

The girl nodded. "Most prob'ly. Well, I mean, people of Orphalese, well, I was by the switchback where we keep the chewy-freeze hid, so I just waited till I saw it slowing down for the curve, me out of sight, you know and I rolled the chewy-freeze out nice and it caught the wheels. Right over!" she cried gleefully. "Off the shoulder, people of Orph'lese, and into the ditch and over, and I didn't give it a chance to bum. I cut the switch and I had her! I put a knife into her back, just a little, about a quarter of an inch, maybe. Her pain was the breakin' of the shell that enclosed her understanding, like it says. I figured she was all right then because she yelled but I brought her along that way. Then Guy took care of her until we got the synod. Oh," she remembered, "and her tongue staggered a little without purpose while he was putting it on, didn't it, Guy?" The bearded man nodded, grinning, and lifted up the girl's foot.

Incredulously, Chandler saw that it was bound tight with a three-foot length of barbed wire, wound and twisted like a tourniquet, the blood black and congealed around it. He lifted his shocked eyes to meet the girl's. She only looked at him, with pity and understanding.

Guy patted the foot and let it go. "I didn't have any more C-clamps, people of Orphalese," he apologized, "but it looks all right at that. Well, let's see. We got to make up our minds about these two, I guess, no, wait!" He held up his hand as a murmur began. "First thing is, we ought to read a verse or two."

He opened a purple-bound volume at random, stared at a page for a moment, moving his lips, and then read: "Some of you say. It is the north wind who has woven the clothes we wear.' "And I say. Ay, it was the north wind, but shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread. "And when his work was done he laughed in the forest."

Gently he closed the book, looking thoughtfully at the wall at the back of the room. He scratched his head. "Well, people of Orphalese," he said slowly, "they're laughing in the forest all right, I guarantee, but we've got one here that may be honest in the flesh, probably is, though she was a thief in the spirit. Right? Well, do we take her in or reject her, 0 people of Orphalese?"

The audience muttered to itself and then began to call out:

"Accept! Oh, bring in the brand! Accept and drive out the imp!"

"Fine," said the teen-ager, rubbing her hands and looking at the bearded man. "Guy, let her go." He began to release her from the chair. "You, girl stranger, what's your name?"

The girl said faintly, "Ellen Braisted."

"'Meggie, my name is Ellen Braisted,' " corrected the teen-ager. "Always say the name of the person you're talkin' to in Orph'lese, that way we know it's you talkin', not a flame spirit or wanderer. Okay, go sit down."

Ellen limped wordlessly down into the audience. "Oh, and people of Orph'lese,' said Meggie, "the car's still there if we need it for anything. It didn't burn. Guy, you go on with this other fellow."

Guy stroked his beard and assessed Chandler, looking him over carefully. "Okay," he said. "People of Orphalese, the third order of business is to welcome or reject this other brand saved from the imps, as may be your pleasure."

Chandler sat up straighter now that all of them were looking at him again; but it wasn't quite his turn, at that, because there was an interruption. Guy never finished.

From the valley, far below, there was a sudden mighty thunder, rolling among the mountains. The windows blew in with a crystalline crash.

The room erupted into confusion, the audience leaping from their seats, running to the broad windows, Guy and the teen-age girl seizing rifles, everyone in motion at once.

Chandler straightened, then sat down again. The redheaded man guarding him was looking away. It would be quite possible to grab his gun, run, get away from these maniacs. Yet he had nowhere to go. They might be crazy, but they seemed to have organization.

They seemed, in fact, to have worked out, on whatever crazed foundation of philosophy, some practical methods for coping with possession. He decided to stay, wait and see.

And at once he found himself leaping for the gun.

No. Chandler didn't find himself attacking the red-headed man. He found his body doing it; Chandler had nothing to do with it. It was the helpless compulsion he had felt before, that had nearly cost him his life; his body active and urgent and his mind completely cut off from it. He felt his own muscles move in ways he had not planned, observed himself leap forward, felt his own fist strike at the back of the red-headed man's ear. The man went spinning, the gun went flying, Chandler's body leaped after it, with Chandler a prisoner in his own brain, watching, horrified and helpless. And he had the gun!

He caught it in the hand that was his own hand, though someone else was moving it; he raised it and half-turned. He was suddenly conscious of a fusillade of gunfire from the roof, and a scattered echo of guns all round the outside of the house. Part of him was surprised, another alien part was not. He started to shoot the teen-aged girl in the back of the head, silently shouting. No!

His fingers never pulled the trigger.

He caught a second's glimpse of someone just beside him, whirled and saw the girl, Ellen Braisted, limping swiftly toward him with her barbed-wire amulet loose and catching at her feet. In her hands was an axe-handle club caught up from somewhere. She struck at Chandler's head, with a face like an eagle's, impersonal and determined. The blow caught him and dazed him, and from behind someone else struck him with something else. He went down.

He heard shouts and firing, but he was stunned. He felt himself dragged and dropped. He saw a cloudy, misty girl's face hanging over him; it receded and returned. Then a frightful blistering pain in his hand startled him back into full consciousness.

It was the girl, Ellen, still there, leaning over him and, oddly, weeping. And the pain in his hand was the burning flame of a kitchen match. Ellen was doing it, his wrist in one hand, a burning match held to it with the other.

CHANDLER YELLED hoarsely, jerking his hand away. She dropped the match and jumped up, stepping on the flame and watching him. She had a butcher knife that had been caught between her elbow and her body while she burned him. Now she put her hand on the knife, waiting. "Does it hurt?" she demanded tautly.

Chandler howled, with incredulity and rage: "God damn it, yes! What did you expect?"

"I expected it to hurt," she agreed. She watched him for a moment more and then, for the first time since he had seen her, she smiled. It was a small smile, but a beginning.

A fusillade of shots from outside wiped it away at once.

"Sorry," she said. "I had to do that. Please trust me."

"Why did you have to burn my hand?"

"House rules," she said. "Keeps the flame-spirits out, you know. They don't like pain." She took her hand off the knife warily. "It still hurts, doesn't it?"

"It still does, yes," nodded Chandler bitterly, and she lost interest in him and got up, looking about the room. Three of the Orphalese were dead, or seemed to be from the casual poses in which they lay draped across a chair, on the floor. Some of the others might have been freshly wounded, though it was hard to tell the casualties from the others in view of the Orphalese custom of self-inflicted pain. There was still firing going on outside and overhead, and a shooting-gallery smell of burnt powder in the air.

The girl, Ellen Braisted, limped back with the butcher knife held carelessly in one hand. She was followed by the teen-ager, who wore a smile of triumph. Chandler noticed, for the first time, a sort of tourniquet of barbed-wire on her left forearm, the flesh puffy red around it.

"Whopped 'em," she said with glee, and pointed a .22 rifle at Chandler.

Ellen Braisted said, "Oh, he Meggie, I mean, he's all right." She pointed at his burned palm. Meg approached him with competent care, the rifle resting on her good right forearm and aimed at him as she examined his burn. She pursed her lips and looked at his face. "All right, Ellen, I guess he's clean. But you want to burn 'em deeper'n that. Never pays to go easy, just means we'll have to do something else to 'im tomorrow."

"The hell you will," thought Chandler, and all but said it; but reason stopped him. In Rome he would have to do Roman deeds. Besides, maybe their ideas worked. Besides, he had until tomorrow to make up his mind about what he wanted to do.

"Ellen, show him around," ordered the teen-ager. "I got no time myself. Shoosh! Almost got us that time, Ellen. Got to be more careful, 'cause the white handed aren't clean, you know." She strutted away, the rifle at trail. She seemed to be enjoying herself very much.

The name of the girl in the barbed-wire anklet was Ellen Braisted. She came from Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, and Chandler's first wonder was what she was doing nearly three thousand miles from home. Nobody liked to travel much these days. One place was as bad as another, except that in the place where you were known you could perhaps count on friends and as a stranger you were probably fair game anywhere else. Of course, there was one likely reason for travel.

Chandler's own reason.

She didn't like to talk about it, that was clear, but that was the reason. She had been possessed. When the teenager trapped her car the day before she had been the tool of another's will. She had had a dozen submachine guns in the trunk and she had meant to deliver them to a party of hunters in a valley just south of McGuire's Mountain.

Chandler said, with some effort, "I must have been"

"Ellen, I must have been," she corrected.

"Ellen, I must have been possessed too, just now. When I grabbed the gun."

"Of course. First time?"

He shook his head. For some reason the brand on his forehead began to throb.

"Well, then you know. Look out here, now." They were at the great pier windows that looked out over the valley. Down below was the river, an arc of the railroad tracks, the wooded mountainside he had scaled.

"Over there. Chandler." She was pointing to the railroad bridge.

Wispy gray smoke drifted off southward toward the stream. The freight train Chandler had ridden on had been stopped, all that time, in the middle of the bridge. The explosion that blew out their windows had occurred when another train plowed into it, evidently at high speed. It seemed that one of the trains had carried some sort of chemicals. The bridge was a twisted mess. "A diversion, Chandler," said Ellen Braisted. "They wanted us looking that way. Then they attacked from up the mountain."

"Who?"

Ellen looked surprised. "The men that crashed the trains ... if they are men. The ones who possessed me and you and the hunters. They don't like these Orphalese, I think. Maybe they're a little afraid of them. I think the Orphalese have a pretty good idea of how to fight them."

Chandler felt a sudden flash of sensation along his nerves. For a moment he thought he had been possessed again, and then he knew it for what it was. It was hope.

"Ellen, I never thought of fighting them. I thought that was given up two years ago."

"So maybe you agree with me? Maybe you think it's worth while sticking with the Orphalese?"

Chandler allowed himself the contemplation of what hope meant. To find someone in this world who had a plan. Whatever the plan was. Even if it was a bad plan. He didn't think specifically of himself, or the brand on his forehead or the memory of the body of his wife. What he thought of was the prospect of thwarting not even defeating, merely hampering or annoying was enough! the imps, the "flame creatures," the pythons, devils, incubi or demons who had destroyed a world he had thought very fair.

"If they'll have me," he said, "I'll stick with them, all right. Where do I go to join?"

It was not hard to join at all.

Meg chattily informed him that he was already practically a member. "Chandler, we got to watch everybody strange, you know. See why, don't you? Might have a flame spirit in 'em, no fault of theirs, but look how they could mess us up. But now we know you don't, so what do you mean, how do we know? Cause you did have one when you busted loose in there."

"I don't get it," said Chandler, lost. "You're saying that you know I don't have a, uh, flame spirit now because I did have one then?"

"Chandler, you'll catch on," said Meggie kindly, suppressing a smile. "Can't have two at a time, you see? So if you're the fella you are now, and the same fella you were before, you got to be honest-in-the-flesh yourself."

Chandler nodded thoughtfully. "Anyway, Chandler," the girl added, "we're going to take time off to eat now. You just make yourself at home. Soon's we start the synod up again we'll see 'bout letting you in."

Ellen Braisted asked, "Can I help with the food?" Meggie looked at her patiently and she corrected herself: "Meggie, can I help with the food?"

"Not this time, Ellen. Just stay out of the way a little."

Ellen took Chandler's arm and led him to a sunporch.

All over the house the Orphalese were putting themselves back together again after the fight.

They didn't seem terribly upset, neither by their wounds nor their losses. They had. Chandler thought, a collective identity. The survival of the community was more important than any incidental damage to its members.

After three years of increasing alienation from a life he could not understand or accept, Chandler found that trait admirable. He liked their style ...

"Sorry about your hand," said Ellen Braisted.

He had not realized that he was rubbing it. "Oh, that's all right. I understand why you had to do it."

"Come over here." She opened a chest of first-aid supplies and took out cotton gauze. "Let me put this on it. You don't want it to stop hurting, that's the whole idea.

But you don't want it getting infected. What's that business on your head?"

He touched the scar with his free hand. He had almost forgotten it.

He found it easy to tell her about it. When he was through she patted his arm. "Tough world. You say you were married?"

"Yes." He told her about Margot. And about Margot's death. She nodded, her face drawn.

"I was married too. Chandler," she said after a moment. "Lost my husband two years ago."

"Murdered?"

"Well," she said thoughtfully, "depends on what you mean by that. It was his own hand that did it. Got up one morning, went into the kitchen, came back looking like I don't know -- his own evil nature. You know those cartoons? The Good You in white, the Bad You in black, whispering suggestions into your ear? He looked the Bad Him. And he cut his throat with a breadknife."

"Oh, God!" The words were jerked out of him. "Did he, didn't he say anything?"

"Yes, Chandler, he did. But I don't want to tell you what, because it was dirty and awful."

There was a smell of coffee percolating from inside the house, and sounds of dishes and silverware. "Let's sit down over here," said Chandler, pointing to a chained swing that looked out over the darkening valley. "I guess your husband was possessed. Or as they say here, he had a flame spirit"

"Ellen."

"Ellen, I mean," he corrected.

"Chandler," she said thoughtfully, "well, I don't quite go along with them on that. I've had quite a lot of experience with them, ever since my husband, ever since two years ago. They used me."

"For what?" Chandler demanded, startled. The concept of being used by the things was new, and peculiarly frightening. It was bad enough to view them as strange diabolic elements out of a hostile universe; to give them purpose was terrifying.

"You name it, Chandler," said the girl. "I did it. I've been practically all over the world in two years, because they used me for a messenger and other things. They used me for all sorts of things, Chandler," she said very temperately, "and some of them I don't intend to discuss."

"Of course."

"Of course." Then she brightened. "But it wasn't all bad. You wouldn't believe some of the things. I flew a jet airplane to Lisbon once, Chandler! Would you believe it? And as a matter of fact, I don't even know how to drive a car very well. When I'm myself, I mean. I've been in Russia and England. I think I was in Africa once, although nobody ever mentioned the name and I wasn't sure. Just now, I came up from San Diego driving a great big truck, and Well, it's been interesting. But I don't agree with the 'flame spirit' idea. They aren't ghosts or witches. They aren't creatures from outer space. Anyway, one of them is a man named Brad Fenell."

Chandler's heels dropped to the floor. The swing stopped with a clatter of its chains.

"A man?"

Ellen nodded soberly. "Or he was at one time, anyway," she corrected after a moment. "I used to go out with him when he lived next door to me in Catasauqua."

"But," cried Chandler, "what, how, how could he-"

She shook her head. "Now you're asking hard questions, Chandler. But I know this one thing was Brad Fenell. Brad asked me to marry him, and when I told him I wouldn't he said those words I heard from my husband, just before he killed himself."

She stood up and turned toward the house. "And now," she said, "Meggie's calling us to eat. I hope I haven't spoiled your appetite."

All through the meal. Chandler was preoccupied. He had to be spoken to twice before he responded, and then he had to be reminded to address the Orphalese by name. He was trying to understand what Ellen had told him, and he was not succeeding. Real human beings? The monsters who had done such things?

It was, he thought somberly, more incredible to think of them as men than as demons from the pits of hell ... The interrupted meeting was resumed after the place had been tidied up. The community had counted its losses and buried its dead.

There had been four of the attacking hunters. Even without their submachine guns, they had succeeded in killing eight Orphalese. But it was not all loss to the Orphalese, because two of the hunters were still alive, though wounded, and under the rules of this chessboard the captured enemy became a friend.

Guy had suffered a broken jaw in the scuffle and another man presided, a fat youth who favored a bandaged leg. He limped to his feet, grimacing and patting his leg. "Orphalese and brothers," he said, "we have lost friends, but we have won a test. Praise the Prophet, we will be spared to win again, and to drive the imps of fire out of our world. Meggie, you going to tie these folks up?"

The girl proudly ordered one of the hunters into the spotlighted dentist's chair, another into a wing chair that was hastily moved onto the platform. The men were bleeding and hurt, but they had clearly been abandoned by their possessors. They watched the Orphalese with puzzlement and fear.

"Walter, they're okay now," Meg reported as others finished tying up the hunters. "Oh, wait a minute." She advanced on Chandler. "Chandler, I'm sorry. You sit down there, hear?"

Chandler suffered himself to be bound to a camp chair on the platform and Walter took a drink of wine and opened the ornate book that was before him on the rostrum.

"Meg, thanks. Guy, I hope I do this as good as you do. Let me read you a little. Let's see." He put on his glasses and read:

" 'Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man, but a shapeless pigmy that walks asleep in the mist searching for its own awakening.' "

He closed the book, looked with satisfaction at Guy and.. said: "Do you understand that, new friends? They are the words of the Prophet, who men call Kahlil Gibran. For the benefit of the new folks I ought to say that he died this fleshly life quite a good number of years ago, but his vision was unclouded. Like we say, we are the sinews that batter the flame spirits but he is our soul." There was an antiphonal murmur from the audience and Walter flipped the pages again rapidly, obviously looking for a familiar passage. "People of Orphalese, here we are now. This is what he says. 'What is this that has torn our world apart?' The Prophet says: It is life in quest of life, in bodies that fear the grave.' Now, honestly, nothing could be clearer than that, people of Orphalese and friends! We got something taking possession of us, see? What is it? Well, he says here, 'People of Orphalese and friends. It is a flame spirit in you ever gathering more of itself.' Now, what the heck! Nobody can blame us for what a flame spirit in us does! So the first thing we got to learn, friends and people of Orphaleseis, we aren't to blame. And the second thing is, we are to blame!"

He turned and grinned at Chandler kindly, while the chorus of responses came from the room. "Like here," he said, "people of Orphalese, the Prophet says everybody is guilty. 'The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder, and the robbed is not blameless in being robbed. The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked, and the white-handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.' You see what he's getting at? We all got to take the responsibility for everything and that means we got to suffer but we don't have to worry about any special things we did when some flame spirit or wanderer, like, took us over.

"But we do have to suffer, people of Orphalese." His expression became grim. "Our beloved founder, Guy, who's sitting there doing a little extra suffering now, was favored enough to understand these things in the very beginning, when he himself was seized by these imps. And it is all in this book! Like it says, 'Your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.' Ponder on that, people of Orphalese and friends. No, I mean really ponder," he explained, glancing at the bound "friends" on the platform. "We always do that for a minute. Ada there will play us some music so we can ponder."

CHANDLER SHIFTED uncomfortably, while an old woman crippled by arthritis began fumbling a tune out of an electric organ. The burn Ellen Braisted had given him was beginning to hurt badly. If only these people were not such obvious nuts, he thought, he would feel a lot better about casting his lot in with them. But maybe it took lunatics to do the job. Sane people hadn't accomplished much.

And anyway he had very little choice ...

"Ada, that's enough," ordered the fat youth. "Meg, come on up here. People of Orphalese, now you can listen again while Meg explains to the new folks how all this got started, seeing Guy's in no condition to do it."

The teen-ager marched up to the platform and took the parade-rest position learned in some high school debating society in the days when there were debating societies and high schools.

"Ladies and gentlemen, well, let's start at the beginning. Guy tells this better'n I do, of course, but I guess I remember it all pretty well too. I ought to. I was in on it and all. " She grimaced and said, "Well, anyway, ladies and gentlemen, people of Orphalese, the way Guy organized this Orphalese self-protection society was, like Walter says, he was possessed. The only difference between Guy and you and me was that he knew what to do about it, because he read the book, you see. Not that that helped him at first, when he was took over. He was really seized.

Yes, people of Orph'lese, he was taken and while his whole soul and brain and body was under the influence of some foul wanderer fiend from hell he did things that, ladies and gentlemen of Orph'lese, I wouldn't want to tell you. He was a harp in the hand of the mighty, as it says. Couldn't help it, not however much he tried. Only while he was doing the things he happened to catch his hand in a gas flame and, well you can see it was pretty bad."

With a deprecatory smile Guy held up a twisted hand. "And, do you know, he was free of his imp right then and there! Now, Guy is a scientist, people of Orph'lese, he worked for the telephone company, and he not only had that training in the company school but he had read the book, yon see, and he put two and two together. Oh, and he's my uncle, of course. I'm proud of him. I've always loved him, and even when he when he was not one with himself, you know, when he was doing those terrible things to me, I knew it wasn't Uncle Guy that was doing them, but something else. I didn't know what, though.

And when he told me he had figured out the Basic Rule, I went along with him every bit. I knew Guy wasn't wrong, and what he said was from Scripture. 'Imps fear pain! So we got to love it.' That one I know by heart, all right: 'Could you keep your heart from wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy.' That's what it says. So that's why we got to hurt ourselves, people of Orph'lese and new brothers, because the Wanderers don't like it when we hurt and they leave us alone. Simple's that."

"Well" the girl's face stiffened momentarily. "I knew I wasn't going to be seized. So Guy and I got Else, that's the other girl he'd been doing things to, and we knew she wasn't going to be taken either. Not if the imps feared pain like Guy said, because," she said solemnly, "I want to tell you Guy hurt us pretty bad.

"And then we came out here, and found this place, and ever since then we've been adding brothers and sisters. It's been slow, of course, because not many people come this way any more, and we've had to kill a lot. Yes, we have. Sometimes the possessed just can't be saved, but"

Abruptly her face changed. Suddenly alert, her face years older, she glanced around the room. Then she relaxed ...

And screamed.

Guy leaped up. Hoarsely, his voice almost inarticulate as he tried to talk with his broken jaw, he cried, "Wha. Wha's ... matter, Meg?"

"Uncle Guy!" she wailed. She plunged off the platform and flung herself into his arms, crying hysterically.

"Who?"

She sobbed, "I could feel it! They took me. Guy, you promised me they couldn't!"

He shook his head, dazed, staring at her as though she were indeed possessed, still possessed, and telling him some fearful great lie to destroy his hopes. He seemed unable to comprehend what she had said. One of the hunters bellowed in stark fear: "For God's sake, untie us! Give us a chance, anyway!" Chandler yelled agreement. In one split second everyone in the room had been transmuted by terror into something less than human. No one seemed capable of any action. Slowly the plump youth who had presided moved over to the hunter bound in the dentist's chair and began to fumble blindly at the knots. Ellen Braisted dropped her head into her hands and began to shake.

The cruelty of the moment was that they had all tasted hope. Chandler writhed wildly against his ropes, his mind racing out of control. The world had become a hell for everyone, but a bearable hell until the promise of a chance to end it gave them a full sight of what their lives had been. Now that that was dashed they were far worse off than before.

Walter finished with the hunter and lethargically began to pick at Chandler's bonds. His face was slack and unseeing.

Then it, too, changed.

The plump youth stood up sharply, glanced about, and walked off the platform.

Ellen Braisted raised her face from her hands and, her eyes streaming, quietly stood up and followed. The old lady with the arthritis about-faced and limped with them.

Chandler stared, puzzled, and then comprehended.

They were marching toward the corner of the room where the rifles were stacked. "Possessed!" Chandler bellowed, the words tasting of acid as they ripped out of his throat. "Stop them! You Guy look!" He flailed wildly at his loosened bonds, lunged, tottered and toppled, chair and all, crashingly off the platform.

The three possessed ones did not need to hurry; they had all the time in the world. They were already reaching out for the rifles when Chandler shouted. Economically they turned, raising the butts to their shoulders and began to fire at the Orphalese. It was a queerly frightening sight to see the arthritic organist, with a face like a relaxed executioner, take quick aim at Guy and, with a thirty-thirty shell, blow his throat out. Three shots, and the nearest three of the congregation were dead. Three more, and others went down, while the remainder turned and tried to run. It was like a slaughter of vermin. They never had a chance.

When every Orphalese except themselves was down on the floor, dead, wounded or, like Chandler, overlooked, the arthritic lady took careful aim at Ellen Braisted and the plump youth and shot them neatly in the temples. They didn't try to prevent her. With expressions that seemed almost impatient they presented their profiles to her aim.

Then the arthritic lady glanced leisurely about, fired into the stomach of a wounded man who was trying to rise, reloaded her rifle for insurance and began to search the bodies of the nearest dead. She was looking for matches. When she found them, she tugged weakly at the upholstery on a couch, swore and began methodically to rip and crumple pages out of Kahlil Gibran. When she had a heap of loose papers piled against the dais she pitched the remainder of the book out of the window, knelt and ignited the crumpled heap.

She stood watching the fire, her expression angry and impatient, tapping her foot. The crumpled pages burned briskly. Before they died the wooden dais was beginning to catch. Laboriously the old lady toted folding chairs to pile on the blaze until it was roaring handsomely.

She watched it for several minutes, until it was a great orange pillar of fire sweeping to the ceiling, until the drapes on the wall behind were burning and the platform was a holocaust, until the noise of crackling flame and the beginning of plaster falling from the high ceiling proved that there was no likelihood of the fire going out and, indeed, no way to put it out without a complete fire department on the scene at once.

The old lady's expression cleared. She nodded to herself. She then put the muzzle of the rifle in her mouth and, with her thumb, pulled the trigger that blew the top of her head off. The body fell into the flames, but it was by then already dead.

Chandler had not been shot, but he was very near to roasting. Walter had released one hand and, while the possessed woman's attention was elsewhere, he had worked on the other knots.

When Chandler saw her commit suicide he redoubled his efforts. It was incredible to him that his life had been saved, and he knew that if he escaped the flames he still had nothing to live for; that blasted brief hope had broken his spirit but his fingers had a will of their own.

He lay there, struggling, while great black clouds of smoke, orange-painted from the flames, gathered under the high ceiling, while the thunder of falling lumps of plaster sounded like a child heaving volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica down a flight of stairs, while the heat and shortage of oxygen made Um breathe in violent spasms.

Then he cried out sharply and stumbled to his feet. It was only a matter of moments before he was out of the house, but it was very nearly not time enough.

Behind him was a great, sustained crash. He thought it must have been the furniture on the upper floor toppling through the burned-out ceiling of the hall. He turned and looked.

It was dark, and now every window on the side of the house facing him was lighted. It was as though some mad householder had decided to equip his rooms only with orange lights that flickered and tossed. For a second Chandler thought there were still living people in the Rooms, shapes moved and cavorted at the windows, as though they were gathering up possessions or waving wildly for help. But it was only the drapes, aflame, thrown about in the fierce heat.

Chandler sighed and turned away.

Pain was not a sure defense after all. Evidently it was only an annoyance to the possessors ... whoever, or whatever, they might be ... as soon as they had become suspicious they had exerted themselves and destroyed the Orphalese. He listened and looked about, but no one else moved. He had not expected anyone. He had been sure that he was the only survivor.

He began to walk down the hill toward the wrecked railway bridge, turning only when a roar told him that the roof of the house had fallen in. A tulip of flame a hundred feet tall rose above the standing walls, and above that a shower of floating red-orange sparks, heat-borne, drifting up and away and beginning to settle all over the mountainside. Many were still red when they landed, a few still flaming. It was a distinct risk that the trees would begin to bum, and then he would be in fresh danger; but so great was his stupor that he did not even hurry.

By a plowed field he flung himself to the ground. He could go no farther because he had nowhere to go. He had had two homes and he had been driven from both of them; he had had hope twice, and twice he had been damned. He lay on his back, with the burning house mumbling and crackling in the distance, and stared up at the orange-lit tops of the trees and, past them, the stars. Over his left shoulder Deneb chased Vega across the sky; toward his feet something moved between the bright rosy dot that was Antares and another, the same brightness and hue Mars? He spent several moments wondering if Mars were in that part of the heavens. Then he looked again for the tiny moving point that had crossed the claws of the Scorpion, but it was gone. A satellite, maybe. Although there were few of them left that the naked eye could hope to see. And there would never be any more, because the sort of accumulated wealth of nations that threw rockets into the sky was forever spent. It was probably an airplane, he thought drowsily, and drifted off to sleep without realizing how remote even that possibility had become ...

He woke up to find that he was getting to his feet. Once again an interloper tenanted his brain. He tried to interfere, although he knew how useless it was, but his own neck muscles turned his head from side to side, his own eyes looked this way and that, his own hand reached down for a dead branch that lay on the ground, then hesitated and withdrew. His body stood motionless for a second, the lips moving, the larynx mumbling to itself. He could almost hear words. Chandler felt like a fly in amber, imprisoned in his own brainbox. He was not surprised when his legs moved to carry him back toward the destroyed building, now a fakir's bed of white-hot coals with brush fires spattered around it. He thought he knew why.

It seemed very likely that what possessor had him was a sort of clean-up squad, tidying up the loose ends of the slaughter; he expected that his body's errand was to destroy itself, and thus him, as all the others in the group of the Orphalese had been destroyed.

CHANDLER'S BODY carried him rapidly toward the house. Now and then it paused and glanced about. It seemed to be weighing some shortcut in its errand; but always it resumed its climb.

Chandler could sympathize with it, in a way. He still felt every pain from burn, brand and wound; as they neared the embers of the building the heat it threw off intensified them all. He could not be a comfortable body to inhabit for long. He was almost sympathetic because his tenant could not find a convenient weapon with which to fulfill his purpose.

When it seemed they could get no closer without the skin of his face crackling and bursting into flame his body halted.

Chandler could feel his muscles gathering for what would be the final leap into the auto-da-fe. His feet took a short step and slipped. His body stumbled and recovered itself; his mouth swore thickly in a language he did not know.

Then his body hesitated, glanced at the ground, paused again and bent down. It had tripped on a book. It picked the book up, and Chandler saw that it was the ripped Orphalese copy of Gibran's The Prophet.

Chandler's body stood poised for a moment, in an attitude of thought. Then it sat down, in the play of heat from the coals.

It was a moment before Chandler realized he was free. He tested his legs; they worked; he got up, turned and began to walk away.

He had traveled no more than a few yards when he stumbled slightly, as though shifting gears, and felt the tenant in his mind again.

He continued to walk away from the building, down toward the road. Once his arm raised the book he still carried and his eyes glanced down, as if for reassurance. that it was the same book. That was the only clue he was given as to what had happened and it was not much. It was as though his occupying power, whatever it was, had gone some where to think things over, perhaps to ask a question of an unimaginable companion, and then returned with an altered purpose.

As time passed, Chandler began to receive additional clues, but he was in little shape to fit them together, for his body was near exhaustion. He walked to the road, and waited, rigid, until a pickup truck came bouncing along. He hailed it, his arms making a sign he did not understand, and when it stopped he addressed the driver in a language he did not speak. "Shto," said the driver, a somber-faced Mexican in dungarees. "Ja nie jestem Ruska. Czego pragmesh?"

"Czy ty jedziesz to Los Angeles?" asked Chandler's mouth.

"Nyef. Acapulco."

Chandler's voice argued, "Wes na Los Angeles."

"Nyet." The voices droned on; Chandler lost interest in the argument and was only relieved when it seemed somehow to be settled and he was herded into the back of the truck. The somber Mexican locked him in; he felt the truck begin to move; his tenant left him, and he was at once asleep.

He woke long enough to find himself standing in the mist of early dawn at a crossroads. In a few minutes another car came by, and his voice talked earnestly with the driver for a moment. Chandler got in, was released, slept again and woke to find himself free and abandoned, sprawled across the back seat of the car, which was parked in front of a building marked Los Angeles International Airport.

Chandler got out of the car and strolled around, stretching. He realized he was very hungry.

No one was in sight. The field showed clear signs of having been through the same sort of destruction that had visited every major communications facility in the world. Part of the building before him was smashed flat and showed signs of having been burned; he saw projecting aluminum members, twisted and scorched but still visible aircraft parts; apparently a transport had crashed into the building. Burned-out cars littered the parking lot and what had once been a green lawn. They seemed to have been bulldozed out of the way, but not an inch farther than was necessary to clear the approach roads.

To his right, as he stared out onto the field, was a strange-looking construction on three legs, several storeys high. It did not seem to serve any useful purpose. Perhaps it had been a sort of luxury restaurant at one time, but now it too was burned out and glassless in its windows. The field itself was swept bare except for two or three parked planes in the bays, but he could see wrecked transports lining the approach strips. All in all, Los Angeles International Airport appeared to be serviceable, but only just.

He wondered where all the people were.

Distant truck noises answered part of the question. An Army six-by-six came bumping across a bridge that led from the takeoff strips to this parking area of the airport.

Five men got out next to one of the ships. They glanced at him but did not speak as they began loading crates of some sort of goods from the truck into the aircraft, a four-engine, swept-wing jet of what looked to Chandler like an obsolete model. Perhaps it was one of the early Boeings. There hadn't been many of those in use at the time the troubles began, too big and fast for short hops, too slow to compete over long distances. But, of course, with all the destruction, and with no new aircraft being built anywhere in the world any more, no doubt they were as good as could be found.

The truckmen did not seem to be possessed; they worked with the normal amount of grunting and swearing, pausing to wipe sweat away or to scratch an itch. They showed neither the intense malevolent concentration nor the wide-eyed idiot curiosity of those whose bodies were no longer their own. Chandler settled the woolen cap over the brand on his forehead, to avoid unpleasantness, and drifted over toward them.

They stopped work and regarded him. One of them said something to another, who nodded and walked toward Chandler.

"What do you want?" he demanded warily.

"I don't know. I was going to ask you the same question, I guess." The man scowled. "Didn't your exec tell you what to do?"

"My what?"

The man paused, scratched and shook his head. "Well, stay away from us. This is an important shipment, see? I guess you're all right or you couldn't've got past the guards, but I don't want you messing us up. Got enough trouble already. I don't know why," he said in the tones of an old grievance, "we can't get the execs to let us know when they're going to bring somebody in. It wouldn't hurt them! Now here we got to load and fuel this ship and, for all I know, you've got half a ton of junk around somewhere that you're going to load onto it. How do I know how much fuel it'll take? No weather, naturally. So if there's headwinds it'll take full tanks, but if there's extra cargo I ..."

"The only cargo I brought with me that I can think of is a book," said Chandler. "Weighs maybe a pound. You think I'm supposed to get on that plane?"

The man grunted non-committally.

"All right, suit yourself. Listen, is there any place I can get something to eat?"

The man considered. "Well, I guess we can spare you a sandwich. But you wait here. Ill bring it to you."

He went back to the truck. A moment later one of the others brought Chandler two cold hamburgers wrapped in wax paper, but would answer no questions.

Chandler ate every crumb, sought and found a wash-room in the wrecked building, came out again and sat in the sun, watching the loading crew. He had become quite a fatalist. It did not seem that it was intended he should die immediately, so he might as well live.

There were large gaps in his understanding, but it. seemed clear to Chandler that these men, though not possessed, were in some way working for the possessors. It was a distasteful concept; but on second thought it had reassuring elements. It was evidence that whatever the "execs" were, they were very possibly human beings or, if not precisely human, at least they shared the human trait of working by some sort of organized effort toward some sort of a goal. It was the first non-random phenomenon he had seen in connection with the possessors, barring the short-term tactical matters of mass slaughter and destruction. It made him feel, what he tried at once to suppress, for he feared another destroying frustration a touch of hope.

The men finished their work but did not leave. Nor did they approach Chandler, but sat in the shade of their truck, waiting for something. He drowsed and was awakened by a distant sputter of a single-engined Aerocoupe that hopped across the building behind him, turned sharply and came down with a brisk little run in the parking bay itself. From one side the pilot climbed down and from the other two men lifted, with great care, a wooden crate, small but apparently heavy. They stowed it in the jet while the pilot stood watching; then the pilot and one of the other men got into the crew compartment. Chandler could not be sure, but he had the impression that the truckman who entered the plane was no longer his own master. His movements seemed more sure and confident, but above all it was the mute, angry eyes with which his fellows regarded him that gave Chandler grounds for suspicion. He had no time to worry about that; for in the same breath he felt himself occupied once more.

He did not rise. His own voice said to him, "You. Votever you name, you fellow vit de book! You go get de book verever you pud it and get on dat ship dere, you see?" His eyes turned toward the waiting aircraft. "And don't forget de book!"

He was released. "I won't," he said automatically, and then realized that there was no longer anyone there to hear his answer.

Chandler retrieved the Gibran volume from where he had tossed it, turned and leaped out of the way. Another truck was racing toward them, gears racketing as the driver expertly down-shifted and brought it to a halt with a hiss of airbrakes. Chandler stared at the driver open-mouthed. The ten-wheeler was being driven by a girl of about fourteen.

She turned and shouted over her shoulder into the back of the truck, opened the door of the cab and jumped out. The side door of the truck swung open.

A girl of about eleven stood there. Behind her a young boy in a Scout uniform. They hopped to the ground and were followed by a dozen more, and another dozen, and more.

At least fifty children were piling out of that truck. Some were as young as ten, some as old as the girl driver. They were mixed boys and girls, about half and half. There were Japanese and Negroes, Mexicans and blue-eyed blonds. They formed into a ragged line and marched up the wheeled steps into the jet with a bird-twittering like the sound of a school bus on the way home.

Chandler followed them up the steps and turned to the loading crew standing by. They neither looked at him nor spoke. Inside the ship the children were larking and shouting about the rows of seats.

"What's going on?" Chandler asked.

"Shut up and get in." None of the men were looking at him. He couldn't even tell which one had spoken. All had the worried, angry, helpless expressions on their faces.

"Come on! Look, can't you at least tell me where we're going?"

"Get in." But one of them looked at him at last, for just a moment, then raised an arm and pointed. He pointed west, out toward the Pacific, and to ten million square miles of nearly empty sea.

No lighted sign ordered fastening seat belts, no stewardess handed herself down the aisle between the seats to check on cigarettes. The loading crew slammed down the door from the outside, and shouted through it for Chandler to dog it down. Pilot and copilot were aboard already, but the door to their compartment was locked and Chandler never saw them. As he was levering down the latches that held the door the plane started its engines, blipped them once, wobbled over to a taxi strip ... and took off. Just like that.

Chandler half fell into a seat and held on. The children shouted and sang, bouncing around the seats, pointing out the wrecked buildings of downtown Los Angeles as they slid by a few hundred feet under their wings. "Sit down!" Chandler shouted. "All of you! You'll get your necks broken" But it was useless. They didn't refuse to obey him. They simply didn't hear. The take-off was quicker and more violent than any commercial flight. They rocketed up at full power (there would be no complaints about the noise from householders below), turned tightly in a bank that threw the children, laughing and shouting, into each other in heaps, and leveled off over the Pacific.

Chandler felt his ears popping. He got up, holding on to the back of the seat across the aisle. It had been a long time since he had been in an airplane. For a moment he thought he might be airsick, but the moment passed. The children had no such worries. They were acting like a class trip as the plane headed into the sun.

He counted and discovered there were fifty-two of the children. They were all around him, squeezing past in the aisle, calling to each other; but they didn't speak directly to him, nor he to them. They were in the coach section of the plane.

Chandler explored. The connecting door to the first class compartment was closed, but it was only fabric on a skeleton of metal rods. Chandler did not debate the advisability of breaking his way in; he just kicked it open and squeezed through, while the children watched him, and laughed and whispered to each other.

Most of the first class seats had been removed. A thin scatter of crates and boxes were strapped to the floor. In the lounge section the divans were still in place, though, and Chandler cast himself down on one and closed his eyes.

He thought that it would be very easy to weep for Ellen Braisted. In a couple of hours she had come very close to him.

For that matter, he thought, turning his head to the back of the divan, the Orphalese were worth mourning too. Crazy, of course. A kinder term would be cultist. But out of their oddness had come an attempt to organize a life on a plan that worked.

Worked too well, for beyond doubt, the success of their defenses against the "flame spirits" was what had doomed them. The destruction of Orphalese was no lunatic caprice. It had been planned and methodically carried out, by a concerted effort involving at least a dozen ...

At least a dozen what?

If Ellen Braisted were to be believed, human beings.

If a person wanted something to weep about, thought Chandler, the thought that it was human beings who had done all this was cause for tears enough ...

He slept. In spite of everything, he dropped off and did not wake for at least two or three hours, until the noise of the children woke him.

He stretched and sat up, feeling unutterably weary. Neither terror nor worry could stimulate him any more. He had reached that point of emotional exhaustion when the sudden thunder of shellfire or the unwarned banzai charge has lost its power to pump adrenalin into the blood; the glands were dry. He stared without emotion at the children standing before him.

"Mister!" cried one of them. "We're hungry."

He remembered having seen the boy before, getting out of the truck in his Boy Scout uniform, a child of about twelve, dark and dark-eyed.

"Yes," said Chandler, "I'm hungry too." He wished they were not there wished they weren't on the plane at all; Chandler was not prepared to load his fragile confidence with the responsibility for fifty-two, children, not when he could think of no way to take care even of himself. As a delaying tactic he asked, "Where'd all of you come from?"

But the boy would not be swerved. "St. Rose of Lima. That's a school out Venice way. Do you know if there's anything to eat?"

Chandler shook his head heavily. "I doubt it." He could not help trying to find something to discharge his responsibility, though; he added, "We ought to be landing pretty soon. Probably they'll feed you then."

The boy nodded, accepting the word of the adult

"Where we going, mister? China?"

Chandler almost laughed. But it might just be China, he thought; and admitted, "I'm not entirely sure. It might be Hawaii."

"Hawaii!" cried the teen-age girl behind him. "Keen! Say, there's surfing in Hawaii, right, mister?"

Chandler looked at her. Although he couldn't be sure, he thought she was the one who had been driving the truck and issuing the orders; but evidently the experience of being occupied had not left her with any extra information.

He chose his words with care. "As a matter of fact, that's where surfing was invented, I think."

"Hey, that's great! But really," she added, "we're awfully hungry"

Chandler roused himself. "Well, let's take a look," he said. He had no real hope of finding food, but anything was better than doing nothing while the children stood there looking at him. Just across the aisle was the flight kitchen.

It contained, as a matter of fact, a great deal of food. Most of it was useless, in stacked trays in the warming ovens, so thoroughly decayed that it hardly even smelled anymore. But there were also little packages of crackers, cheeses, jellies, macadamia nuts ... and cigarettes. Real cigarettes! Factory made!

Chandler put the Scout in charge of handing out the rations and, with trembling fingers, lit a cigarette. It was dried out with age, but it was delicious. Before he did anything else he filled his pockets with the little cardboard packs. Then he made himself some instant coffee with cold water, opened a can of the nuts and abandoned himself to his fate.

The children were far braver than he. At first Chandler thought it was merely the ignorance of youth. But he was wrong. They knew as much of what was ahead as he did, knew at least on what summons they were traveling, and how vile some of the creatures that summoned them could be; they had seen it happen in their own school. They almost reassured him with their careless pleasures in the food and the excitement of flying ... until the hiss of the jets changed key, and Chandler realized his ears were popping again.

Outside the windows it was almost sunset again. Some of the children had been asleep in the reclining seats, others talking or playing with the empty cups and boxes of their feast. But they all waked and stared and commented. "It is Hawaii!" chortled the girl surfer. "Right, Mr. Chandler? I mean, look at those combers!"

"I think so, near as I can tell from the flying time." He raised his voice. "All of you! Sit down! Fasten the seat belts!" Surprisingly they obeyed.

The horizon dipped below the wingtip and straightened again, and there was a chorus of yells as they beheld land. Chandler never saw the airfield. Only water; then beach; then water again, and some buildings. Then the plane staggered, slowed, trees appeared underneath them and to the sides, the wheels touched with a squeal and a jolt, and there was a roar of jets as the clamshells deflected their thrust forward to slow the plane down.

As the plane stopped, Chandler reached to unbuckle his seat belt and found himself once more possessed.

His body strained to rise, surged against the belt and fell back. His lips exclaimed something irritable, in a language he did not understand; his hands went back to fumble with the buckle.

The girl surfer rose stiffly and said, "All right, children! Stay together now. Come with me." She glanced incuriously at Chandler and opened the door. The movable steps were there already and the children filed out.

Chandler's body, mumbling to itself, got the belt open, picked up the book and waited impatiently for the children to get out of the way. Chandler was conscious of a horde of men off to one side, pushing steps toward the other door, but he could not turn his head to look.

As he descended the steps, out of the comer of his eye, he saw the Boy Scout look toward him and wave, but Chandler could not respond. Another swarm of men was waiting for him to clear the steps. As soon as they could, they hurried up and began stripping the aircraft of its cargo.

He wondered at the rush but could not stop to watch them; his legs carried him swiftly across a paved strip to where a police car was cruising.

Chandler cringed inside, instinctively, but his body did not falter as it stepped into the path of the car and raised its hand.

The police car jammed on its brakes. The policeman at the wheel, Chandler thought inside himself, looked startled, but he also looked resigned. "To de South Gate, qvickly," said Chandler's lips, and he felt his legs carry him around to the door on the other side.

There was another policeman on the seat next to the driver. He leaped like a hare to get the door open and get out before Chandler's body got there. He made it with nothing to spare. "Jack, you go on, I'll tell Headquarters," he said hurriedly. The driver nodded without speaking. His lips were white. He reached over Chandler to close the door and made a sharp U-turn.

As soon as the car was moving Chandler felt himself able to move his lips again.

"I" he said. "I don't know"

"Friend," said the policeman, "kindly keep your mouth shut. 'South Gate,' the Exec said, and South Gate is where I'm going."

Chandler shrugged and looked out the window ... just in time to see the jet that had brought him to the islands once more lumbering into life. It crept, wobbling its wingtips, over the ground, picked up speed, roared across taxi strips and over rough ground and at last piled up against an ungainly looking foreign airplane, a Russian turbo prop by its markings, in a thunderous crash and ball of flame ? its fuel exploded. No one got out. It seemed that traffic to Hawaii was all one way.

THEY ROARED through downtown Honolulu with the siren blaring and cars scattering out of the way. At seventy miles an hour they raced down a road by the sea; Chandler caught a glimpse of a sign that said "Hilo," but where or what "Hilo" might be he had no idea. Soon there were fewer cars; then there were none but their own.

The road was a suburban highway lined with housing developments, shopping centers, palm groves and the occasional center of a small municipality, scattering helter-skelter together. There was a road like this extending in every direction from every city in the United States, Chandler thought; but this one was somewhat altered. Something had been there before them. About a mile outside Honolulu's outer fringe life was cut off as with a knife. There were no people on foot, and the only cars were rusted wrecks lining the roads. The lawns were ragged stands of weeds in front of the ranch-type homes.

It was evidently not allowed to live here.

Chandler craned his neck. His curiosity was becoming almost unbearable. He opened his mouth, but "I said, 'Shut up,'" rumbled the cop without looking at him.

There was a note in the policeman's voice that impressed Chandler. He did not quite know what it was, but it made him obey. They drove for another fifteen minutes in silence, then drew up before a barricade across the road.

Chandler got out. The policeman slammed the door behind him, ripping rubber off his tires with the speed of his U-turn and acceleration back toward Honolulu.

Chandler stood staring off after him, in bright warm sunlight with a reek of hibiscus and rotting palms in his nostrils. It was very quiet there, except for a soft scratchy sound of footsteps on gravel. As Chandler turned to face the man who was coming toward him, he realized he had learned one fact from the policeman after all. The cop was scared clear through.

Chandler said, "Hello," to the man who was approaching. He too wore a uniform, but not that of the Honolulu city police. It was like U.S. Army suntans, but without insignia. Behind him were half a dozen others in the same dress, smoking, chatting, leaning against whatever was handy. "The barricades themselves were impressively thorough. Barbed wire ran down the beach and out into the ocean; on the other side of the road, barbed wire ran clear out of sight along the middle of a side-road. The gate itself was bracketed with machine-gun emplacements.

The guard waited until he was close to Chandler before speaking. "What do you want?" he asked without greeting.

Chandler shrugged. "All right, just wait here," said the guard, and began to walk away again.

"Wait a minute! What am I waiting for?"

The guard shook his head without stopping or turning. He did not seem very interested, and he certainly was not helpful.

Chandler put down the fragmentary copy of 'The Prophet' which he had carried so far and sat on the ground, but again he had no long time to wait. One of the guards came toward him, with the purposeful movements Chandler had learned to recognize. Without speaking the guard dug into a pocket. Chandler jumped up instinctively, but it was only a set of car keys.

As Chandler took them the look in the guard's eyes showed the quick release of tension that meant he was free again; and in that same moment Chandler's own body was occupied once more.

He reached down and picked up the tattered book. Quickly, but a little clumsily, his fingers selected a key, and his legs carried him toward a little French car parked just the other side of the barrier.

Chandler was learning at last the skills of allowing his body to have its way. He couldn't help it in any event, so he was consciously disciplining himself to withdraw his attention from his muscles and senses. It involved queerly vertiginous problems. A hundred times a minute there was some unexpected body sway or movement of the hand, and his lagging, imprisoned mind would wrench at its unresponsive nerves to put out the elbow that would brace him, or to catch itself with a step. He had learned to ignore these things. The mind that inhabited his body had ways not his own of maintaining balance and reaching an objective, but they were equally sure.

He watched his own hands shifting the gears of the car. It was a make he had never driven, with a clutchless drive he did not understand, but the mind in his brain evidently understood it well enough. They picked up speed in great, gasoline-wasting surges.

Chandler began to form a picture of that mind. It belonged to an older man, from the hesitancy of its walk, and a testy one, from the heedless crash of the gears as it shifted. It drove with careless slapdash speed. Chandler's mind yelled and flinched in his brain as they rounded blind curves, where any casual other motorist would have been a catastrophe; but his hand on the wheel and his foot on the accelerator did not hesitate.

Beyond the South Gate the island of Oahu became abruptly wild.

There were beautiful homes, but there were also great, gap-toothed spaces where homes had once been and were no longer. It seemed that some monstrous Zoning Commissar had stalked through the island with an eraser, rubbing out the small homes, the cheap ones, the old ones; rubbing out the stores, rubbing out the factories. This whole section of the island had been turned into an exclusive residential park.

It was not uninhabited. Chandler thought he glimpsed a few people, though since the direction of his eyes was not his to control it was hard to be sure. And then the Renault turned into a lane, paved but narrow. Hardwood trees with some sort of blossoms, Chandler could not tell what, overhung it on both sides.

It meandered for a mile or so, turned and opened into a great vacant parking lot. The Renault stopped with a squeal of brakes in front of a door that was flanked by bronze plaques: TWA Flight Message Center.

Chandler caught sight of a skeletal towering form overhead, like radio transmitter antennae, as his body marched him inside, up a motionless escalator, along a hall and into a room.

His muscles relaxed.

He glanced around and, from a huge soft couch beside a desk, a huge soft body stirred and, gasping, sat up. It was a very fat old man, almost bald, wearing a coronet of silvery spikes.

He looked at Chandler without much interest. "Vot's your name?" he wheezed. He had a heavy, ineradicable accent, like a Hapsburg or a Russian diplomat. Chandler recognized it readily. He had heard it often enough, from his own lips.

The man's name was Koitska, he said in his accented wheeze. If he had another name he did not waste it on Chandler. He took as few words as possible to order Chandler to be seated and to be still.

Koitska squinted at the copy of Gibran's The Prophet. He did not glance at Chandler, but Chandler felt himself propelled out of his seat, to hand the book to Koitska, then returning. Koitska turned its pages with an expression of bored repugnance, like a man picking leeches off his arm. He seemed to be waiting for something.

A door closed on the floor below, and in a moment a girl came into the room.

She was tall, dark and not quite young. Chandler, struck by her beauty, was sure that he had seen her, somewhere, but could not place her face. She wore a coronet like the fat man's, intertwined in a complicated hairdo, and she got right down to business. "Chandler, is it? All right, love, what we want to know is what this is all about." She indicated the book.

A relief that was like pain crossed Chandler's mind. So that was why he was here! Whoever these people were, however they managed to rule men's minds, they were not quite certain of their perfect power. To them the sad, futile Orphalese represented a sort of annoyance not important enough to be a threat but something which had proved inconvenient at one time and therefore needed investigating. As Chandler was the only survivor they had deemed it worth their godlike whiles to transport him four thousand miles so that he might bring them the book and satisfy their curiosity.

Chandler did not hesitate in telling them all about the people of Orphalese. There was nothing worth concealing, he was quite sure. No debts are owed to the dead; and the Orphalese had proved on their own heads, at the last, that their ritual of pain was only an annoyance to the possessors, not a tactic that could defeat them.

It took hardly five minutes to say everything that needed saying about Guy, Meggie and the other doomed and suffering inhabitants of the old house on the mountain.

Koitska hardly spoke. The girl was his interrogator, and sometimes translator as well, when his English was not sufficient to comprehend a point. With patient detachment she kept the story moving until Koitska with a bored shrug indicated he was through.

Then she smiled at Chandler and said, "Thanks, love. Haven't I seen you somewhere before?"

"I don't know. I thought the same thing about you." "Oh, everybody's seen me. Lots of me. But, well, no matter. Good luck, love. Be nice to Koitska and perhaps he'll do as much for you." And she was gone.

Koitska lay unmoving on his couch for a few moments, rubbing a fat nose with a plump finger. "Hah," he said at last. Then, abruptly, "And now, da qvestion is, vot to do vit you, eh? I do not fink you can cook, eh?"

With unexpected clarity Chandler realized he was on trial for his life. "Cook? No, I'm afraid, I mean, I can boil eggs," he said. "Nothing fancy."

"Hah," grumbled Koitska. "Vel. Ve need a couple, three doctors, but I do not fink you vould do."

"You mean a medical doctor?" Chandler repeated stupidly.

"Da, konyekhno. Vot you fink I mean?" The fat man's voice was abruptly savage; it was very clear that to him Chandler was of far less importance than the bougainvillea that framed the parking lot outside.

Chandler said carefully, "I'm not a doctor, but I am an electrical engineer. Or was."

"Vas?"

"I haven't had much practice. There has not been a great deal of call for engineers, the last year or two."

"Hah." Koifska seemed to consider. "Vel," he said, "it could be ... yes, it could be dat ve have a job for you. You go back downstairs and, no, vait." The fat man closed his eyes and Chandler felt himself seized and propelled down the stairs to what had once been a bay of a built-in garage. Now it was fitted up with workbenches and the gear of a radio ham's dreams.

Chandler walked woodenly to one of the benches. His own voice spoke to him, out of his own lips. "Ve got here someplace, da, here is circuit diagrams an de specs for a square-vave generator. You know vot dat is? Write down de answer."

Chandler, released with a pencil in his hand and a pad before him, wrote Yes.

"Okay. Den you build vun for me. I areddy got vun but I vant another. You do dis in de city, no here. Go to Tripler, dey tells you dere vere you can verk, vere to get parts, all dat. Couple days you come out here again, I see if I like how you build."

Clutching the thick sheaf of diagrams, Chandler felt himself propelled outside and back into the little car. The interview was over.

He wondered if he would be able to find his way back to Honolulu, but that problem was then postponed as he discovered he could not start the car. His own hands had already done so, of course, but it had been so quick and sure that he had not paid attention; now he found that the ignition key was marked only in French, which he could not speak. After trial and error he discovered the combination that would start the engine and unlock the steering wheel, and then gingerly he toured the perimeter of the lot until he found an exit road.

It was close to midnight, he judged. Stars were shining overhead; there was a rising moon. He then remembered, somewhat tardily, that he should not be seeing stars. The lane he had come in on had been overhung on both sides with trees.

A few minutes later he realized he was quite lost. Chandler stopped the car, swore feelingly, got out and looked around.

There was nothing much to see. The roads bore no markers that made sense to him. He shrugged and rummaged through the glove compartment on the chance of a map; there was none, but he did find a half-empty pack of cigarettes. He added them to the store in his pockets, lit up and relaxed.

Chandler felt exactly as he had felt the day he got his first job.

It was absolutely astonishing, he marveled at himself, but the mere suggestion of a possibility that there might somehow be some sort of an organized place for him in the lunatic framework of this world had calmed jumpy nerves he had almost forgotten he possessed. He puffed smoke over the top of the little car and admired the pleasant evening. There were the stars Vega and Deneb; it did not really seem to matter to him that the last time he had seen those stars, twenty-four hours before, he had just witnessed the murder of a score of innocents and considered his own life to be spent.

It would not be very hard to build a square-wave generator, if he could get parts. No doubt it was a sort of test. If he passed, he would get the job; and this Koitska would have little to worry about, too, because if anyone should somehow fake the test it would not take long to discover the deception, and Chandler had a good idea of what would happen to him or to anyone else whom Koitska caught in a deception.

He felt a light touch at his mind.

Or had he? He flicked the cigarette away, staring around. It was nothing, really. Or nothing that he could quite identify. It was as though he had been, well, nudged. It seemed that someone had paused on the threshold of usurping his body, but then unaccountably refrained.

As he had just about decided to forget it and get back into the car, he saw headlights approaching.

A low, lean sports car slowed as it came near, stopping beside him, and a girl leaned out, almost invisible in the darkness. "There you are, love," she said cheerfully. "Thought I spotted someone. Lost?"

She had a coronet, and Chandler recognized her. It was the girl who had interrogated him. "I guess I am," he admitted.

The girl leaned forward. "Come in, dear. Oh, that car? Leave it here, the silly little bug." She giggled as they drove away from the Renault. "Koitska wouldn't like you wandering around. I guess he decided to give you a job."

"How did you know?"

She said softly, "Well, love, you're still here, you know. What are you supposed to be doing?"

"Going to Tripler, whatever that is. In Honolulu, I guess. Then I have to build some radio equipment."

"Tripler's actually on the other side of the city. I'll take you to the gate; then you tell them where you want to go. They'll take care of it."

"I don't have any money for fare ."

She laughed at the idea. After a moment she said, "Koitska's not the worst. But I'd mind my step if I were you, love. Do what he says, the best you can. You never know. You might find yourself very fortunate ."

"I already think that. I'm alive."

"Why, love, that point of view will take you far." She drove in silence for a minute. "Those Awful-Awfuls of yours"

"The Orphalese?"

"Whatever you call them. They really didn't have much of a chance, you know." Chandler looked at her face, but it was shadowed. He wondered why she was taking the trouble to talk to him. Out of simple compassion? "Nobody does against the Exec," she said, her voice quite cheerful. "You get along best if you make up your mind to that right away."

The sports car slid smoothly to a stop at the barricade. In the floodlights above the machine-gun nests she looked more closely at Chandler. "What's that on your forehead, dear?"

Somehow he had lost the woolen cap, somewhere along the way. "A brand," he said shortly. " 'H' for hoaxer. I did something when one of you people had taken me over, and they thought I'd done it on my own."

The girl caught her breath, then laughed. "Why, this is wonderful!" she said excitedly. "No wonder I thought I'd seen you before. Don't you remember? I was the fore-woman at your trial!"

CHANDLER SPENT the night in a sort of hostel for casual employees of the Executive Committee. It had once been an Army hospital and was still run with the military's casual, loose-jointed efficiency. Everything he needed was provided for him; room, bedding, food, directions, but without anyone ever taking a moment to explain.

Still, the next morning, following the directions the desk orderly had given. Chandler boarded a pink and silver bus that took him to downtown Honolulu. The driver did not collect any fares. Chandler got off, as directed, at Fort Street and walked a few blocks to the address he had been given. The name of the place was Parts 'n Plenty. He found it easily enough. It was a radio parts store; by the size of it, it had once been a big, well-stocked one; but now the counters were almost bare.

A thin-faced man with khaki-colored skin looked up and nodded. Chandler nodded back. He fingered a bin of tuning knobs, hefted a coil of two-strand antenna wire and said, "A fellow at Tripler told me to come here to pick up equipment, but I'm damned if I know what I'm supposed to do when I locate it. I don't have any money."

The dark-skinned man got up and came over to him. "Figured you for a malihini. No sweat. Have you got a list?"

"I can make one."

"All right. Catalogues on the table behind you, if you want them." He offered Chandler a cigarette and sat against the edge of the counter, reading over Chandler's shoulder. "Ho," he said suddenly. "Koitska's square-wave generator again, right?" Chandler admitted it, and the man grinned. "Every couple months he sends somebody along, Mr.?"

"Chandler."

"Glad to know you. I'm John Hsi. Don't go easy on the job just because Koitska doesn't really need it. Chandler; it could be pretty important to you."

Chandler absorbed the information silently and handed over his list. The man did not look at it. "Come back in about an hour," he said.

"I won't have any money in an hour, either."

"Oh, that's all right. I'll put it on Koitska's bill."

Chandler said frankly, "Look, I don't know what's going on. Suppose I came in and picked up a thousand dollars worth of stuff, would you put that on the bill, too?"

"Certainly," said Hsi optimistically. "You thinking about stealing parts? What would you do with them?"

"Well." Chandler puffed on his cigarette. "Well, I could"

"No, you couldn't. Also, it wouldn't pay, believe me," Hsi said seriously. "If there is one thing that doesn't pay, it is cheating on the Exec."

"Now, that's another good question," said Chandler. "Who is the Exec?"

Hsi shook his head. "Sorry. I don't know you. Chandler."

"You mean you're afraid even to answer a question?"

"You're damned well told I am. Probably nobody would mind what I might tell you ... but 'probably' isn't good enough."

Exasperated, Chandler said, "How the devil am I supposed to know what to do next? So I take all this junk back to my room at Tripler and solder up the generator, then what?"

"Then Koitska will get in touch with you," Hsi said, not unkindly. "Play it as it comes to you, Chandler, that's the best advice I can offer." He hesitated. "Koitska's not the worst of them," he said; and then, daringly, "and maybe he's not the best, either. Just do whatever he told you. Keep on doing it until he tells you to do something else. That's all. I mean, that's all the advice I can give you. Whether it's going to be enough to satisfy Koitska is something else again."

There is not much to do in a strange town when you have no money. Chandler's room at what once had been Tripler General Hospital was free; the bus was free; evidently all the radio parts he could want were also free. But he did not have the price of a cup of coffee or a haircut in the pockets of the suntan slacks the desk man at Tripler had issued him. He wandered around the streets of Honolulu, waiting for the hour to be up.

At Tripler a doctor had also examined his scar and it was now concealed under a neat white bandage; he had been fed; he had bathed; he had been given new clothes.

Tripler was a teeming metropolis in itself, a main building some ten storeys high, a scattering of outbuildings connected to it by covered passages, with thousands of men and women busy about it. Chandler had spoken to a good many of them in the hour after waking up and before boarding the bus to Honolulu, and none of them had been free with information either.

Honolulu had not suffered greatly under the rule of the Exec. Remembering the shattered stateside cities, Chandler thought that this one had been incredibly fortunate. Dawdling down King Street, in the aromatic reek of the fish markets. Chandler could have thought himself in any port city before the grisly events of that Christmas when the planet went possessed. Crabs waved sluggishly at him from bins; great pink scaled fish rested on nests of ice, waiting to be sold; smells of frying food came from half a dozen restaurants.

It was only the people who were different. There was a solid sprinkling of those who, like himself, were dressed in insignia-less former Army uniforms, obviously conscripts on Exec errands and a surprising minority who, from overheard snatches of conversation, had come from countries other than the U.S.A. Russian mostly, Chandler guessed; but Russian or American, wearing suntans or aloha shirts, everyone he saw was marked by the visible signs of strain. There was no laughter.

Chandler saw a clock within the door of a restaurant; half an hour still to kill. He turned and wandered up, away from the water, toward the visible bulk of the hills; and in a moment he saw what made Honolulu's collective face wear its careworn frown.

It was an open square, perhaps it had once been a war memorial, and in the center of it was a fenced-off paved area where people seemed to be resting. It struck Chandler as curious that so many persons should have decided to take a nap on what surely was an uncomfortable bed of flat concrete; he approached and saw that they were not resting. Not only his eyes but his ears conveyed the message and his nose, too, for the mild air was fetid with blood and rot.

These were not sleeping men and women. Some were dead; some were unconscious; all were maimed. The pavement was slimed with their blood. None had the strength to scream, but several were moaning and even some of the unconscious ones gasped like the breathing of a man in diabetic coma. Passersby walked briskly around the metal fence, and if their glances were curious it was at Chandler they looked, not at the tortured wrecks before them. He understood that the sight of the dying men and women was familiar, was painful, and thus was ignored; it was himself who was the curiosity, for staring at them. He turned and fled, trying not to vomit.

He was still shaken when he returned to Parts 'n Plenty.

The hour was up but Hsi shook his head. "Not yet.

You can sit down over there if you like." Chandler slumped into the indicated swivel chair and stared blankly at the wall. The terror he had just seen was far worse than anything stateside; the random slaughter of murders and bombs was at least a momentary thing, and when it was done it was done; but this was sustained torture. He buried his head in his hands and did not look up until he heard the sound of a door opening.

Hsi, his face somehow different, was manipulating a lever on the outside of a door while a man inside, becoming visible as the door opened, was doing the same from inside.

It looked as though the lock on the door would not work unless both levers operated; and the man on the inside, whom Chandler had not seen before, was dressed, oddly, only in bathing trunks. His face wore the same expression as Hsi's.

Chandler guessed (with practice it was becoming easy!) that both were possessed. The man inside wheeled out two shopping carts loaded with electronic equipment of varying kinds, wordlessly received some empty ones from Hsi; and the door closed on him again.

Hsi tugged the lever down, turned, blinked and said, "All right, Chandler. Your stuff's here."

Chandler approached. "What was that all about?"

"Go to hell!" Hsi said with sudden violence. "I Oh, never mind. Sorry. But I told you already, ask somebody else your questions, not me."

He gloomily began to pack the items on Chandler's list into a cardboard carton. Then he glanced at Chandler and said, half apologetically, "These are tough times, buddy. I guess there's no harm in answering some questions. You want to know why most of my stock's locked behind an armor-plate door? Well, you ought to be able to figure that out for yourself, anyway. The Exec doesn't like to have people playing with radios. Bert stays in the stockroom; I stay out here; twice a day the bosses open the door and we fill whatever orders they've approved. A little rough on Bert, of course, it's a ten-hour day in the stockroom for him, and nothing to do. But it could be worse. Oh, that's for sure, friend: It could be worse."

"Why the bathing suit? Hot in there?"

"Hot for Bert if they think he's smuggling stuff out," said Hsi. "You been here long enough to see the Monument yet?"

Chandler shook his head, then grimaced. "You mean up about three blocks that way? Where the people ...?"

"That's right," said Hsi, "three blocks mauka from here, where the people ...Where the people are serving as a very good object lesson to you and me. About a dozen there, right? Small for this time of year, Chandler. Usually there are more. Notice anything special about them?"

"They were butchered! Some of them looked like their legs had been burned right off. Their eyes gouged out, their faces" Chandler brought up sharply. It had been bad enough looking at those wretched, writhing semi-cadavers; he did not want to talk about them.

The parts man nodded seriously. "Sometimes there are more, and sometimes they're worse hurt than that. Have you got any idea how they get that way? They do it to themselves, that's how. My own brother was out there for a week, last Statehood Day. He jumped feet first into a concrete mixer, and it took him seven days to die after I put him on my shoulder and carried him out there. I didn't like it, of course, but I didn't exactly have any choice; I wasn't running my own body at the time. Neither was he when he jumped. He was made to do it, because he used to have Bert's job and he thought he'd take a little short-wave set home. Like I said, you don't want to cheat on the Exec because it doesn't pay."

"But what am I supposed to"

Hsi held up his hand. "Don't ask me how to keep out of that Monument bunch. Chandler. I don't know. Do what you're told and don't do anything you aren't told to do; that is the whole of the law. Now do me a favor and get out of here so I can pack up these other orders."

BY THE morning of the fourth day on the island of Oahu Chandler had learned enough of the ropes to have signed a money-chit at the Tripler currency office against Koitska's account. That was about all he had learned, except for a few practical matters like where meals were served and the location of the fresh-water swimming pool at the back of the grounds. He was killing time using the pool when, in the middle of a jackknife from the ten-foot board, he felt himself seized.

He sprawled into the water with a hard splashing slap, threshed about and, as he came to the surface, found himself giggling. "Sorry, dear," he apologized to himself, "but we don't carry our weight in the same places, you know. Get that square-what'sit thingamajig, like an angel, and meet me in front by the flagpole in twenty minutes."

He recognized the voice, even if his own vocal chords had made it. It was the girl who had driven him back from the interview with Koitska, the one who had casually announced she had saved his life at his hoaxing trial.

Chandler swam to the side of the pool and toweled as he trotted toward his quarters. She was from Koitska now, of course; which meant that his "test" was about to be graded.

Quickly though, he dressed, she was there before him, standing beside a low-slung sports car and chatting with one of the groundskeepers. An armful of leis dangled beside her, and although she wore the coronet which was evidence of her status the gardener did not seem to fear her.

"Come along, love," she called to Chandler. "Koitska wants your thingummy. Chuck it in the trunk if it'll fit, and we'll head waikiki wikiwiki. Don't I say that nicely? But I only fool the malihinis, like you."

She chattered away as the little car dug its rear wheels into the drive and leaped around the green and out the gate.

The wind howled by them, the sun was bright, the sky was piercingly blue. Riding next to this beautiful girl, it was hard for Chandler to remember that she was one of those who had destroyed his world. It was a terrible thing to have so much hatred and to feel it so diluted. Not even Koitska seemed a terrible enough enemy to accept such a load of detestation; it was hate without an object, and it recoiled on the hater, leaving him turgid and constrained. If he could not hate his onetime friend Jack Souther for defiling and destroying his wife, it was almost as hard to hate Souther's anonymous possessor.

It could have been Koitska. It could even have been this girl by his side. In the strange, cruel fantasies with which the Execs indulged themselves it was likely enough that they would sometimes assume the body, and the role, of the opposite sex. Why not? Strange, ruthless morality; it was impossible to evaluate it by any human standards.

It was also impossible to think of hatred with her beside him. They soared around Honolulu on a broad expressway and paralleled the beach toward Waikiki. "Look, dear. Diamond Head! Mustn't ignore it very bad form like not going to see the night-blooming cereus at the Punahou School. You haven't missed that, have you?"

"I'm afraid I have." "Rosalie. Call me Rosalie, dear."

"I'm afraid I have, Rosalie." For some reason the name sounded familiar.

"Shame, oh, shame! They say it was wonderful night before last. Looks like cactus to me, but ... "

Chandler's mental processes had worked to a conclusion. "Rosalie Pan."' he said. "Now I know!"

"Know what? You mean" she swerved around a motionless Buick, parked arrogantly five feet from the curb "you mean you didn't know who I was? And to think I used to pay my press agent five thousand a year."

Chandler said, smiling, and almost relaxed, "I'm sorry, but musical comedies weren't my strong point. Let's see, wasn't there something about you disappearing"

She nodded, glancing at him. "There sure was, dear. I almost froze to death getting out to that airport. Of course, it was worth it, I found out later. If I hadn't been took, as they say, I would've been dead. You remember what happened to New York about an hour later."

"You must have had some friends," Chandler began, and let it trail off.

So did the girl. After a moment she began to talk about the scenery again, pointing out the brick-red and purple bougainvillea, describing how the shoreline had looked before they'd "cleaned it up." "Oh, thousands and thousands of the homeliest little houses. You'd have hated it. So we have done at least a few good things, anyway," she said complacently, and began gently to probe into his life story. But as they stopped before the TWA Message Center, a few moments later, she said, "Well, love, it's been fun. Go on in; Koitska's expecting you. I'll see you later."

And her eyes added gently: I hope.

Chandler got out of the car, turned ... and felt himself taken. His voice said briskly, "Zdrastvoi, Rosie. Gd'yeh Koitska?"

Unsurprised the girl pointed to the building. "Kto gowrit?"

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. Kto, Katman? Iditye suda ko mneh." "Konyekhno!" cried Chandler's voice and he was carried in and up to where the fat man lounged in a leather-upholstered wheelchair. 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 for him.

"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 Cal Tech 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 to 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, yet; 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 Cal Tech 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 shortwave 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, put the original envelope and its contents in the safe at the main receiving desk 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. "The food's all fish," he said. "You'll only find meat 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 said, "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, 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 it 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 three years ago, he said, in Russia, it started in the last days of the Second Stalinite Regime, before the neo-Khrushchevists took over power in the January Push.

The Western World had not known exactly what was going on, of course. Russia had become queerer and even more opaque after the Maoist trials 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-Khrushchevists, 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 irresistible 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.

"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 pardoned 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-Khrushchevists 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 rebroadcaster-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 it, 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 bosses in the factory," he said, "trying to figure out how to keep the workers 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.

"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?"

Chandler had his empty glass halfway to his lips, automatically, before he realized there was nothing in it to brace him. He said hoarsely, "Yes, thanks. Do you come here often?" It was like the banal talk of a language handbook, wildly inappropriate to what had been going on a moment before. He was shaken.

"Oh, I love it," cooed Hsi, investigating the dishes before him. "All finished, I see. Too bad. Your friend doesn't feel like he ate much, either."

"I guess he wasn't hungry," Chandler managed.

"Well, I am." Hsi cocked his head and smiled like a clumsy female impersonator. "I know! Are you doing anything special right now, love? I know you've eaten, but, well, I've been a good girl and I guess I can eat a real meal, I mean not with somebody else's teeth, and still keep the calories in line. Suppose I meet you down at the beach? There's a place there where the luau is divine. I can be there in half an hour."

Chandler's breathing was back to normal. Why not? "I'll be delighted."

"Luigi the Wharf Rat, that's the name of it. They won't let you in, though, unless you tell them you're with me. It's special." Hsi's eye closed in Rosalie Pan's wink.

"Half an hour," he said, and was again himself.

He began to shake.

The waiter brought him straight whiskey and, pretense abandoned, stood by while Hsi drank it. After a moment he said, "Scares you. But I guess we're all right. You'd better go. Chandler. I'll talk to you again some other time."

Chandler stood up. But he couldn't leave Hsi like that. "Are you all right?"

Hsi almost managed control. "Oh I think so. Not the first time it's come close, you know. Sooner or later it'll come closer still and that will be the end, but yes. I'm all right for now."

Chandler tarried. "You were saying something about the Society of Slaves."

"Damn it, go!" Hsi barked. "She'll be waiting for you ... Sorry, I didn't mean to shout. But go." As Chandler turned, he said more quietly, "Come around to the store tomorrow. Maybe we can finish our talk then."

LUIGI THE Wharf Rat's was not actually on the beach but on the bank of a body of water called the Ala Wai Canal. Across the water were the snow topped hills. A maitre-d' escorted Chandler personally to a table on a balcony, and there he waited. Rosalie's "half-hour" was nearly two; but then he heard her calling him from across the room, in the voice which had reached a thousand second balconies, and he rose as she came near.

She said lightly, "Sorry. You ought to be flattered, though. It's a twenty-minute drive and an hour and a half to put on my face, so you won't be ashamed to be seen with me. Well, it's good to be out in my own skin for a change. Let's eat!"

The talk with Hsi had left a mark on Chandler that not even this girl's pretty face could obscure. It was a pretty face, though, and she was obviously exerting herself to make him enjoy himself. He could not help responding to her mood.

She talked of her life on the stage, the excitement of a performance, the entertainers she had known. Her conversation was one long name-drop, but it was not vanity: the world of the famous was the world she had lived in. It was not a world that Chandler had ever visited, but he recognized the names. Rosie had been married once to an English actor whose movies Chandler had made a point of watching on television. It was interesting, in a way, to know that the man snored and lived principally on vitamin pills. But it was a view of the man that Chandler had not sought.

The restaurant drew its clientele mostly from the Execs, young ones or young-acting ones, like the girl. The coronets were all over. There had been a sign on the door: KAPU, WALIHINI! 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. "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. Kidnapped off the stage of the Winter Garden. Of course, the difference was the one who kidnapped 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 far off and hopelessly impotent places that they were not worth the trouble of tracking down.

"Yon hate us, don't you?"

Chandler paused and tried to find an answer. Rosie was neither belligerent nor mocking. She was only sympathetically trying to reach his point of view. He shook his head.

"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? 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 the 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 bad part is over, people will understand what we really are."

"And what's that, exactly?"

She hesitated, smiled and said modestly, "We're gods."

It took Chandler's breath away, not because it was untrue, but because it had never occurred to him that gods were aware of their divinity.

"We're gods, love, with the privilege of electing mortals to the club. Don't judge us by anything that has gone before. Don't judge us by anything. We are a New Thing. We don't have to conform to precedent because we upset all precedents. From now on, to the end of time, the rules will grow from us."

She patted her lips briskly with a napkin and said, "Would you like to see something? Let's take a little walk."

She took him by the hand and led him across the room, out to a sundeck on the other side of the restaurant. They were looking down on what had once been a garden.

There were people in it; Chandler was conscious of sounds coming from them, and he was able to see that there were dozens of them, perhaps a hundred, and that they all seemed to be wearing suntans like his own.

"From Tripler?" he guessed.

"No, love. They pick out those clothes themselves. Stand there a minute."

The girl in the coronet walked out to the rail of the sundeck, where pink and amber spotlights were playing on nothing. As she came into the colored lights there was a sigh from the people in the garden. A man walked forward with an armload of leis and deposited them on the ground below the rail.

They were adoring her.

Rosalie stood gravely for a moment, then nodded and returned to Chandler.

"They began doing that about a year ago," she whispered to him, as a murmur of disappointment came up from the crowd. "Their own idea. We didn't know what they wanted at first, but they weren't doing any harm. You see, love," she said softly, "we can make them do anything we like. But we don't make them do that."

Hours later, Chandler was not sure just how, they were in a light plane flying high over the Pacific, clear out of sight of land. The moon was gold above them, the ocean black beneath.

Chandler stared down as the girl circled the plane, slipping lower toward the water, silent and perplexed. But he was not afraid. He was almost content. Rosie was good company, gay, cheerful, and she had treasures to share.

It had been an impulse of hers, a long drive in her sports car and a quick, comfortable flight over the ocean to cap the evening. It had been a pleasant impulse. He reflected gravely that he could understand now how generations of country maidens had been dazzled and despoiled. A touch of luxury was a great seducer.

The coronet on the girl's body could catch his body at any moment. She had only to think herself into his mind, and her will, flashed to a relay station like the one he was building for Koitska, at loose in infinity, could sweep into him and make him a puppet. If she chose, he would open that door beside him and step out into a thousand feet of air and a meal for the sharks.

But he did not think she would do it. He did not think anyone would, really, though with his own eyes he had seen some anyones do things as bad as that and sickeningly worse. There was not a corrupt whim of the most diseased mind in history that some torpid exec had not "visited" on a helpless man, woman or child in the past years. Even as they flew here. Chandler knew, the gross bodies that lay in luxury in the island's villas were surging restlessly around the world; and death and shame remained where they had passed.

It was a paradox too great to be reconciled, this girl and this vileness. He could not forget it, but he could not feel it in his glands. She was pretty. She was gay. He began to think thoughts that had left him alone for a long time.

The dark bulk of the island showed ahead and they were sinking toward a landing.

The girl landed skillfully on a runway that sprang into light as she approached: electronic wizardry, or the coronet and some tethered serf at a switch? It didn't matter.

Nothing mattered very greatly at that moment to Chandler. "Thank you, love," she said, laughing. "I liked that. It's all very well to use someone else's body for this sort of thing, but every now and then I want to keep my own in practice."

She linked arms with him as they left the plane. "When I was first given the coronet here," she reminisced, amusement in her voice, "I got the habit real bad. I spent six awful months, really, six months in bed! And by myself at that. Oh, I was all over the world, and skin-diving on the Barrier Reef and skiing in Norway and, well," she said, squeezing his arm, "never mind what all. And then one day I got on the scales, just out of habit. Do you know what I weighed?" She closed her eyes in mock horror, but they were smiling when she opened them again. "I won't do that again, love. Of course, a lot of us do let ourselves go. Even Koitska. Especially Koitska. And some of the women But just between us, the ones who do really didn't have much to keep in shape in the first place."

She led the way into a villa that smelled of jasmine and gardenias, snapped her fingers and subdued lights came on. "Like it? Oh, we've nothing but the best. What would you like to drink?"

She fixed them both tall, cold glasses and vetoed Chandler's choice of a sprawling wicker chair to sit on.

"Over here, love." She patted the couch beside her. She drew up her legs, leaning against him, very soft, warm and fragrant, and said dreamily, "Let me see. What's nice? What do you like in music, love?"

"Oh ... anything."

"No, no! You're supposed to say, 'Why, the original-cast album from Fancy Free.' Or anything else I starred in." She shook her head reprovingly, and the points of her coronet caught golden reflections from the lights. "But since you're obviously a man of low taste I'll have to do the whole bit myself." She touched switches at a remote-control set by her end of the couch, and in a moment dreamy strings began to come from tri-aural speakers hidden around the room. It was not Fancy Free. "That's better," she said drowsily, and in a moment, "Wasn't it nice in the plane?"

"It was fine," Chandler said. Gently, but firmly, he sat up and reached automatically into his pocket.

The girl sighed and straightened. "Cigarette? They're on the table beside you. Hope you like the brand. They only keep one big factory going, not to count those terrible Russian things that're all air and no smoke." She touched his forehead with cool fingers. "You never told me about that, love."

It was like an electric shock, the touch of her fingers and the touch of reality at once.

Chandler said stiffly, "My brand. But I thought you were there."

"Oh, only now and then. I missed all the naughty parts, though, to tell the truth, that's why I was hanging around. I do like to hear a little naughtiness now and then.. but all I heard was that stupid lawyer and that stupid judge. Made me mad." She giggled. "Lucky for you. I was so irritated I decided to spoil their fun too."

Chandler sat up and took a long pull at his drink. Curiously, it seemed to sober him. He said: "It's nothing. I happened to rape a young girl. Happens every day. Of course, it was one of your friends that was doing it for me, but I didn't miss any of what was going on, I can give you a blow-by-blow description if you like. The people in the town where I lived, at that time, thought I was doing it on my own, though, and they didn't approve. Hoaxing, you know? They thought I was so perverse and cruel that I would do that sort of thing under my own power, instead of with some exec or, as they would have put it, being ignorant, some imp, or devil, or demon pulling the strings."

He was shaking. He waited for what she had to say; but she only whispered, "I'm sorry, love," and looked so contrite and honest that, as rapidly as it had come upon him, his anger passed.

He opened his mouth to say something to her. He didn't get it said. She was sitting there, looking at him, alone and soft and inviting. He kissed her; and as she returned the kiss, he kissed her again, and again.

But less than an hour later he was in her Porsche, cold sober, raging, frustrated, miserable. He slammed it through the unfamiliar gears as he sped back to the city.

She had left him. They had kissed with increasing passion, his hands playing about her, her body surging toward him, and then, just then, she whispered, "No, love." He held her tighter and without another word she opened her eyes and looked at him.

He knew what mind it was that caught him then. It was her mind. Stiffly, like wood, he released her, stood up, walked to the door and locked it behind him.

The lights in the villa went out. He stood there, boiling, looking into the shadows through the great, wide, empty window. He could see her lying there on the couch, and as he watched he saw her body toss and stir; and as surely as he had ever known anything before he knew that somewhere in the world some woman or some man lay locked with a lover, violent in love, and was unable to tell the other that a third party had invaded their bed.

Chandler did not know it until he saw something glistening on his wrist, but he was weeping on the wild ride back to Honolulu in the car. Her car. Would there be trouble for his taking it? God, let there be trouble! He was in a mood for trouble. He was sick and wild with revulsion. Worse than her use of him, a casual stimulant, an aphrodisiac touch, was that she thought what she did was right. Chandler thought of the worshipping dozens under the sundeck of the exec restaurant, and Rosalie's gracious benediction as they made her their floral offerings. Blind, pathetic fools!

Not only the deluded men and women in the garden were worshippers trapped in a vile religion, he thought. It was worse. The gods and goddesses worshipped at their own divinity as well!

THREE DAYS later Koitska's voice, coming from Chandler's lips, summoned him out to the TWA shack again.

Wise now in the ways of this world, Chandler commandeered a police car and was hurried out to the South Gate, where the guards allowed him a car of his own. The door of the building was unlocked and Chandler went right up.

He was astonished. The fat man was actually sitting up. He was fully dressed, more or less; incongruously he wore flowered shorts and a bright red, short-sleeve shirt, with rope sandals. His coronet perched on his plump old head; curiously, he carried another, less ornate one. He said, "You fly a gilikopter? No? No difference. Help me." An arm like a mountain went over Chandler's shoulders. The man must have weighed three hundred pounds. Slowly, wheezing, he limped toward the back of the room and touched a button.

A door opened.

Chandler had not known before that there was an elevator in the building; that was one of the things the Exec did not consider important for his slaves to know. The elevator lowered them with great grace and delicacy to the first floor, where a large old Cadillac, ancient but immaculately kept, the kind that used to be called a "gangster's car," waited in a private parking bay.

Chandler followed Koitska's directions and drove to an airfield where a small, Plexiglass-nosed helicopter waited. More by the force of Chandler pushing him from behind than through his own fat thighs, Koitska puffed up the little staircase into the cabin. Originally the copter had been fitted for four passengers. Now there was the pilot's seat and a seat beside it, and in the back a wide, soft couch. Koitska collapsed onto it, clutching the extra coronet. His face blanked out he was, Chandler knew, somewhere else, just then. In a moment his eyes opened again. He looked at Chandler with no interest at all, and turned his face to the wall.

After a moment he wheezed. "Sit down. At de controls." He breathed noisily for a while. Then, "It von't pay you to be interested in Rosalie," he said.

Chandler was startled. He craned around in the seat but saw only Koitska's back. "I'm not! Or anyway" But he had no place to go in that sentence, and in any case Koitska no longer seemed interested.

After a moment, Koitska stirred, settled himself more Comfortably, and Chandler felt himself taken. He turned, easily and surely, to face the split wheel and the unfamiliar pedals of the helicopter. He started the motor, scanned the panels of instruments, and through maneuvers which he did not understand but whose effect was accurate and sure, caused the machine to roar, tilt and whir up and away. It was an admirable performance.

Chandler could not guess what member of the Exec was inhabiting his body at that moment; there were no clues; but whoever it was, it had turned him into a first-class helicopter pilot.

For more than an hour Chandler was imprisoned in his own body, without let or intermission. Flying a helicopter, it seemed, was a job without coffee breaks. The remote. exec who was controlling him did not trust his attention away even for a moment.

It was like being the prisoner of a dream, thought Chandler, watching his right hand advance a throttle and his feet press the guiding pedals. From time to time his head turned and his voice spoke over his shoulder to Koitska; but as the conversation seemed to be in Russian or Polish he gleaned nothing from it. There was not much talk, though; the fluttering roar of the vanes overhead drowned out most sounds. Chandler fell into a light, somber, not unpleasant reverie, thinking of Ellen Braisted and the Orphalese, of the girl Rosalie Pan and the fat, murderous slug behind him. It occurred to him, as a phenomenon worthy of study, that he was actually aiding and abetting the monsters who had destroyed his own wife and caused him to defile a silly but blameless girl ...

The moral issues were too deep for him. He preferred to think of Rosalie Pan, and then of nothing at all.

They crossed a wide body of ocean and approached another island; from one quick glance at a navigation map that his eyes had taken, Chandler guessed it to be Hilo. He landed the craft expertly on the margin of a small airstrip, where two DC-3s were already parked and being unloaded, and felt himself free again.

Two husky young men, apparently native Hawaiians by their size, rolled up a ramp and assisted Koitska down it and into a building. Chandler was left to his own devices.

The building was rundown but sound. Around it stalky grass clumped, long uncut, and a few mauve and scarlet blossoms, almost hidden, showed where someone had once tended beds of bougainvillea and poinsettias.

He could not guess what the building had been doing there, looking like a small office-factory combination out in the remote wilds, until he caught sight of a sign the winds had blown against a wall: Dole. Apparently this had been headquarters for one of the plantations. Now it was stripped almost clean inside, a welter of desks and rusted machines piled heedlessly outside where there once had been a parking lot. New equipment was being loaded into it from the cargo planes. Chandler recognized some of it as from the list he had given the parts man, Hsi. There also seemed to be a gasoline-driven generator a large one but what the other things were he could not guess.

Besides Koitska, there were at least five coronet-wearing execs visible around the place. Chandler was not surprised. It would have to be something big to winkle these torpid slugs out of their shells, but he knew what it was, and that it was big enough to them indeed.

In fact it was their lives. He deduced that Koitska's plans for his future comfort required a standby transmitter to service the coronets, in case something went wrong, perhaps a slightly modified one, judging by the extra coronet Koitska had brought. And clearly it was this that they were to put together here.

For ten hours, while the afternoon became dark night, they worked at a furious pace. When the sun set one of the execs gestured and the generator was started, rocking on its rubber-tired wheels as its rotors spun and fumes chugged out, and they worked on by strings of incandescent lights. It was pick-and-shovel work for Chandler. No engineering, just unloading and roughly grouping the equipment where it was ready to be assembled. The execs did not take part in the work. Nor were they idle. They busied themselves in one room of the building with some small device, Chandler could not see what, and when he looked again it was gone. He did not see them take it away and did not know where it was taken. Toward midnight he suddenly realized that it was likely some essential part which they would not permit anyone but themselves to handle ... and that, no doubt, was why they had come in person, instead of working through proxies.

Weary as he was, that realization seemed pregnant with possibilities to Chandler. What could be so important? And what use could he make of the information? So much had happened to Chandler, so quickly, that he seemed to have numbed his reflexes. He was not reacting as rapidly or as surely as he should; in this Wonderland if the Red Queen were to come up to him and lop off his head he might not even remember to die. Dizzying, worrying, his sensory network simply could not cope with the demands on it. But all the same, he thought slowly and painfully, there was a weapon here, a lever ...

Just before they left Koitska and two or three of the other execs quizzed him briefly. He was too tired to think beyond the questions, but they seemed to be trying to find out if he were able to do the simpler parts of the construction without supervision, and they seemed satisfied with the answers. He flew the helicopter home, with someone else guiding his arms and legs, but he was half asleep as he did it, and he never quite remembered how he managed to get back to his room at Tripler.

The next morning he went back to Parts 'n Plenty with an additional list, covering replacement of some components that had turned out defective. Hsi glanced at it quickly and nodded. "All this stuff I have. You can pick it up this afternoon if you like."

Chandler offered him a cigarette out of a stale pack. "About the other night "

But Hsi shook his head violently. He began to perspire, but he said, casually enough, "Interested in baseball?"

"Baseball?"

Hsi said, as though there had been nothing incongruous about the question, "Why, there's a little league game this afternoon. Back of the school on Punahou and Wilder. I thought I might stop by, then we can come back and pick up the rest of your gear. Two o'clock. Hope I'll see you."

Chandler walked away thoughtfully. Something in Hsi's attitude suggested more than a ball game; after a quick and poor lunch he decided to go.

The field was a dirty playground, scuffed out of what had probably once been an attractive campus. The players were ten-year-olds, of the mixture of hair colors and complexions typical of the islands. Chandler was puzzled.

Surely even the wildest baseball rooter wouldn't go far out of his way for this, and yet there was an audience of at least fifty adults watching the game. And none seemed to be related to the ballplayers. The little leaguers played grave, careful ball, and the audience watched them without a word of parental encouragement or joy.

Hsi approached him from the shadow of the school building. "Glad you could make it. Chandler. No, no questions. Just watch."

In the fifth inning, with the score aggregating around thirty, there was an interruption. A tall, red-headed man glanced at his watch, licked his lips, took a deep breath and walked out onto the diamond. He glanced at the crowd, while the kids suspended play without surprise.

Then the red-headed man nodded to the umpire and stepped off the field. The ballplayers resumed their game, but now the whole attention of the audience was on the red-headed man.

Suspicion crossed Chandler's mind. In a moment it was confirmed, as the red-headed man raised his hands waist high and clasped his right hand around his left wrist, only for a moment, but that was enough.

The ball game was a cover. Chandler was present at a meeting of what Hsi had called The Society of Slaves, the underground that dared to pit itself against the Execs.

Hsi cleared his throat and said, "This is the one. I vouch for him." And that was startling too, Chandler thought, because all these wrist-circled men and women were looking at him.

"All right," said the red-headed man nervously, "let's get started then. First thing, anybody got any weapons? Sure? Take a look, we don't want any slip-ups. Turn out your pockets."

There was a flurry and a woman near Chandler held up a key ring with a tiny knife on it. "Penknife? Hell, yes; get rid of it. Throw it in the outfield. You can pick it up after the meeting." A hundred eyes watched the pearly object fly. "We ought to be all right here," said the red-headed man. "The kids have been playing every day this week and nobody looked in. But watch your neighbor. See anything suspicious, don't wait. Don't take a chance. Holler 'Kill the umpire!' or anything you like, but holler. Good and loud." He paused, breathing hard. "All right, Hsi. Introduce him."