Plague of Pythons

The parts man took Chandler firmly by the shoulder. "This fellow has something for us," he said. "He's working for the Exec Koitska, building what can't be anything else but a duplicate of the machine that they use to control us!"

Chandler was jolted out of his detached calm. "Hey!" he cried. "I never said anything like that!"

"You didn't have to," Hsi said tightly. "What the hell do you think I am, an idiot? I've filled all your parts orders, remember? It's higher frequency, but otherwise it's a duplicate of the master transmitter."

"But they never told me"

"Told you? Did they have to tell you? What else would they be so busy at?"

Chandler hesitated, staring around. The words had been actually frightening. And yet, and yet, he realized, he had been sure within himself that the project he was working on was something very like that. A duplicate of the controlling machine. And that meant ...

A tail, thin, bearded man was moving forward, staring at Chandler angrily. He said dangerously, "You don't seem too reliable, friend. Which side are you on?" Chandler shrugged. "Why, yours, of course, I guess. I mean"

"You guess, hub?" The man nodded, then leaned forward and peered furiously into Chandler's face. "Look at his head!" he cried, his face only inches away from Chandler's own. "Don't you see? He's branded!"

Chandler fell back, touching his scar. The man followed. "Damned Hoaxer! Look at him! The lowest species of life on the face of the earth, someone who pretended to be possessed in order to do some damned dirty act. What was it, hoaxer? Murder? Burning babies alive?"

Hsi economically let go of Chandler's shoulder, half turned the bearded man with one hand and swung with the other, knocking him down. "Shut up, Linton. Wait till you hear what he's got for us."

The bearded man, sprawling and groggy, slowly rose as Hsi explained tersely what he had guessed of Chandler's Work, as much as Chandler himself knew, it seemed.

"Maybe this is only a duplicate. Maybe it won't be used. But maybe it will, and Chandler's the man who can sabotage it! How would you like that? The Exec switching over to this equipment while the other one is down for maintenance, and their headsets don't work!"

"There was a terrible silence, except for the sounds of the children playing ball. Two runs had just scored. Chandler recognized the silence. It was hope.

Linton broke it, his blue eyes gleaming above the beard. "No! Better than that. Why wait? We can use this fellow's machine. Set it up, get us some headsets, and we can control the Execs themselves!"

The silence was even longer; then there was a babble of discussion, but Chandler did not take part in it. He was thinking. It was a tremendous thought.

Suppose a man like himself were actually able to do what they wanted of him. Never mind the practical difficulties, learning how it worked, getting a headset, bypassing the traps Koitska would surely have set to prevent just that. Never mind the penalties for failure. Suppose he could make it work, and find fifty headsets, and fit them to the fifty men and women here in this clandestine meeting of The Society of Slaves . Would there, after all, be any change worth mentioning in the state of the world?

Or was Lord Acton, always and everywhere, right? Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The power locked in the coronets of the Exec was more than flesh and blood could stand; he could almost sense the rot in those near him at the mere thought.

But Hsi was throwing cold water on the idea. "Sorry, but I know that much: One exec can't control another. The headpieces insulate against control. Well." He glanced at his watch. "We agreed on twenty minutes maximum for this meeting," he reminded the red-headed man, who nodded.

"You're right." He glanced around the group. "I'll make the rest of it fast. News: You all know they got some more of us last week. Have you all been by the Monument? Three of our comrades were still there this morning.

But I don't think they know we're organized, they think it's only individual acts of sabotage. In case any of you don't know, the execs can't read our minds. Not even when they're controlling us. Proof is we're all still alive. Hanrahan knew practically every one of us, and he's been lying out there for a week with a broken back, ever since they caught him trying to blow up the guard pits at East Gate. They had plenty of chance to pump him if they could. They can't. Next thing. No more individual attacks on one exec. Not unless it's a matter of life and death, and even then you're wasting your time unless you've got a gun. They can grab your mind faster than you can cut a throat. Third thing: Don't get the idea there are good execs and bad execs. Once they put that thing on their heads they're all the same. Fourth thing. You can't make deals. They aren't that worried. So if anybody's thinking of selling out, I'm not saying anyone is, forget it." He looked around. "Anything else?" "What about germ warfare in the water supply?" somebody ventured.

"Still looking into it. No report yet. All right, that's enough for now. Meeting's adjourned. Watch the ball game for a while, then drift away. One at a time."

Hsi was the first to go, then a couple of women, together, then a sprinkling of other men. Chandler, still numbed by the possibility that had opened before him, was in no particular hurry, although it seemed time to leave anyway.

The ball game appeared to be over. A ten-year-old with freckles on his face was at the plate, but he was leaning on his bat, staring at Chandler with wide, serious eyes. Chandler felt a sudden chill.

He turned, began to walk away, and felt himself seized. He walked slowly into the schoolhouse, unable to look around. Behind him he heard a confused sob, tears and a child's voice trying to blubber through: "Something funny happened."

If the child had been an adult it might have been warning enough. But the child had never experienced possession before, was not sure enough, was not clear enough. Chandler was clear into the schoolhouse before the remaining members of The Society of Slaves awoke to their danger. He heard a quick cry of 'They got him'. Then Chandler's legs stopped walking and he addressed himself savagely. A few yards away a stout Chinese lady was mopping the tiles; she looked up at him, startled, but no more startled than Chandler was himself. "You idiot!" Chandler blazed. "Why do you have to get mixed up in this? Don't you know it's wrong, love? Stay here!" Chandler commanded himself. "Don't you dare leave this building!"

And he was free again, but there was a sudden burst of screams from outside.

Bewildered, Chandler stood for a moment, as little able to move as though the girl still had him under control. Then he leaped through a classroom to a window, staring. Outside in the playground there was wild confusion. Half the spectators were on the ground, trying to rise. As he watched, a teen-age boy hurled himself at an elderly lady, the two of them falling. Another man flung himself to the ground. A woman swung her pocketbook into the face of the man next to her. One of the fallen ones rose, only to trip himself again. It was a mad spectacle, but Chandler understood it: What he was watching was a single member of the execs trying to keep a group of twenty ordinary, unarmed human beings in line. The exec was leaping from mind to mind; even so, the crowd was beginning to scatter.

Without thought Chandler started to leap out to help them; but the possessor had anticipated that. He was caught at the door. He whirled and ran toward the woman with the mop; as he was released, the woman flung herself upon him, knocking him down.

By the time he was able to get up again it was far too late to help... if there ever had been a time when he could have helped.

He heard shots. Two policemen had come running into the playground, guns drawn.

The exec who had looked at him out of the boy's eyes, who had penetrated this nest of enemies and extricated Chandler from it, had taken first things first. Help had been summoned. Quick as the coronets worked, it was no time at all until the nearest persons with weapons were located, commandeered and in action.

Two minutes later there no longer was resistance. Obviously more execs had come to help, attracted by the commotion perhaps, or summoned at some stolen moment after the meeting had first been invaded. There were only five survivors on the field. Each was clearly controlled. They rose and stood patiently while the two police shot them, shot them, paused to reload and shot again. The last to die was the bearded man, Linton, and as he fell his eyes brushed Chandler's.

Chandler leaned against a wall. It had been a terrible sight. The nearness of his own death had been almost the least of it. Far worse, far more damaging, and how many times had it tortured him now? was the death of hope. For one moment there he had seen a vision of freedom again. Him on the island of Hilo, somehow magically gimmicking the controlling machine that gave the Executive Committee its power, here in Honolulu the Society of Slaves somehow magically using the hour of freedom he gave them to destroy their oppressors... But it was all gone now, and it would not come again.

His own escape was both miraculous and, very likely, only a temporary thing. He had no doubt of the identity of the exec who had interfered to save him ... and had destroyed the others. Though he had heard the voice only as it came from his own mouth, he could not mistake it. It was Rosalie Pan.

He looked out at the red-headed man, sprawled across the foul line behind third base, and remembered what he said. There weren't any good execs or bad execs. There were only execs.

WHATEVER CHANDLER'S life might be worth, he knew he had given it away and the girl had given it back to him. He did not see her for several days, but the morning after the massacre he woke to find a note beside his bed table. No one had been in the room. It was his own sleeping hand that had written it, though the girl's mind had moved his fingers: If you get mixed up in anything like that again I won't be able to help you. So don't! Those people are just using you, you know. Don't throw away your chances. Do you like surfboarding? Rosie

But by then there was no time for surfboarding, or for anything else but work. The construction job on Hilo had begun, and it was a nightmare. He was flown to the island with the last load of parts. No execs were present in the flesh, but on the first day Chandler lost count of how many different minds possessed his own. He began to be able to recognize them by a limp as he walked, by tags of German as he spoke, by a stutter, a distinctive gesture of annoyance, an expletive. As he was a trained engineer he was left to labor by himself for hours on end; it was worse for the others in the construction crew. There seemed to be a dozen execs hovering invisible around all the time; no sooner was a worker released by one than he was seized by another. The work progressed rapidly, but at the cost of utter exhaustion.

By the end of the fourth day Chandler had eaten only two meals and could not remember when he had slept last. He found himself staggering when free and furious with the fatigue-clumsiness of his own body when possessed.

At sundown on the fourth day he found himself free for a moment and, incredibly, without work of his own to do just then, until someone else completed a job of patch-wiring. He stumbled out into the open air and had time only to gaze around for a moment before his eyes began to close. He had time to think that this must once have been a lovely island. Even unkempt as it was the trees were tall and beautiful; beyond them a wisp of smoke was pale against the dark-blue evening sky; the breeze was scented ... He woke and found he was already back in the building, reaching for his soldering gun.

There came a point at which even the will of the execs was unable to drive the flogged bodies farther, and then they were permitted to sleep for a few hours. At daybreak they were awake again.

The sleep was not enough. The bodies were slow and inaccurate. Two of the Hawaiians, straining a hundred-pound component into place, staggered, slipped, and dropped it.

Appalled, Chandler waited for them to kill themselves. But it seemed that the execs were tiring too. One of the Hawaiians said irritably, with an accent Chandler did not recognize: "That's pan. All right, you morons, you've won yourselves a vacation; we'll have to fly you in replacements. Take the day off." And incredibly all eleven of the haggard wrecks stumbling around the building were free at once.

The first thought of every man was to eat, to relieve himself, to remove a shoe and ease a blistered foot, to do any of the things they had not been permitted to do. The second thought was sleep.

Chandler dropped off at once, but he was over-tired; he slept fitfully, and after an hour or two of turning on the hard ground, sat up, blinking red-eyed around. He had been slow. The cushioned seats in the aircraft and cars were already taken. He stood up, stretched, scratched himself and wondered what to do next, and he remembered the thread of smoke he had seen, when? three nights ago? against the evening sky.

In all those hours he had not had time to think one obvious thought: There should have been no smoke there! The island was supposed to be deserted.

It was of no importance, of course. What could it matter to him? But he had nothing else to do. He stood up, looked around to get his bearings, and started off in the direction be remembered.

It was good to own his body again, in poor condition as it was. It was delicious to be allowed to think consecutive thoughts. The chemistry of the human animal is such that it heals whatever thrusts it may receive from the outside world. Short of death, its only incapacitating wound comes from itself; from the outside it can survive astonishing blows, rise again, and flourish. Chandler was not flourishing, but be had begun to rise.

Time had been so compressed and blurred in the days since the slaughter at the Punahou School that he had not had time to grieve over the deaths of his briefly met friends, or even to think of their quixotic plans against the execs. Now he began to wonder.

He understood with what thrill of hope he had been Received, a man like themselves, not an exec, whose touch was at the very center of the exec power. But how firm was that touch? Was there really anything he could do? It seemed not. He barely understood the mechanics of what he was doing, far less the theory behind it. Conceivably knowing where this installation was he could somehow get back to it when it was completed. In theory it might be that there was a way to dispense with the headsets and exert power from the big board itself.

A Piltdowner at the controls of a nuclear-laden jet bomber could destroy a city. Nothing stopped him. Nothing but his own invincible ignorance. Chandler was that Piltdowner; certainly power was here to grasp, but he had no way of knowing how to pick it up.

Still, where there was life there was hope. He decided he was wasting time that would not come again. He had been wandering along a road that led into a small town, quite deserted, but this was no time for wandering. His place was back at the installation, studying, scheming, trying to understand all he could. He began to turn, and stopped.

"Great God," he sad softly, looking at what he had just seen. The town was deserted of life, but not of death. There were bodies everywhere.

They were long dead, perhaps years. They seemed natural and right as they lay there; it was not surprising they had escaped his notice at first. Little was left but bones and an occasional desiccated leathery rag that might have been a face. The clothing was faded and rotted away; but enough was left of the bodies and the clothes to make it clear that none of these people had died natural deaths. A rusted blade in a chest cage showed where a knife had pierced a heart; a small skull near his feet (with a scrap of faded blue rompers near it) was shattered. On a flagstone terrace a family group of bones lay radiating outward, like a rosette. Something had exploded there and caught them all as they turned to flee. There was a woman's face, grained like oak and eyeless, visible between the fender of a truck and a crushed-in wall. Like exhumed Pompeii, the tragedy was so ancient that it aroused only wonder. The whole town had been blotted out.

The Execs did not take chances; apparently they had sterilized the whole island, probably had sterilized all of them except Oahu itself, to make certain that their isolation was complete, except for the captive stock allowed to breed and serve them in and around Honolulu.

Chandler prowled the town for a quarter of an hour, but one street was like another. The bodies did not seem to have been disturbed even by animals, but perhaps there were none big enough to show traces of such work.

Something moved in a doorway. Chandler thought at once of the smoke he had seen, but no one answered his call and, though he searched, he could neither see nor hear anything alive.

The search was a waste of time. It also wasted his best chance to study the thing he was building. As he returned to the cinder-block structure at the end of the airstrip he heard motors and looked up to see a plane circling in for a landing.

He knew that he had only a few minutes. He spent those minutes as thriftily as he could, but long before he could even grasp the circuitry of the parts he had not himself worked on he felt a touch at his mind. The plane was rolling to a stop. He and all of them hurried over to begin unloading it.

The plane was stopped with one wingtip almost touching the building, heading directly into it, convenient for unloading, but a foolish nuisance when it came time to turn it and take off again, Chandler's mind thought while his body lugged cartons out of the plane. But he knew the answer to that. Take-off would be no problem, any more than it would for the other small transports at the far end of the strip.

These planes were not going to return, ever. The work went on, and then it was done, or all but, and Chandler knew no more about it than when it was begun. The last little bit was a careful check of line voltages and balancing of biases. Chandler could help only up to a point, and then two execs, working through the bodies of one of the Hawaiians and the pilot of a Piper Tri-Pacer who bad flown in some last-minute test equipment, and remained as part of the labor pool laboriously worked on the final tests.

Spent, the other men flopped to the ground, waiting. They were far gone. All of them. Chandler as much as the others. But one of them rolled over, grinned tightly at Chandler and said, "It's been fun. My name's Bradley. I always think people ought to know each other's names in cases like this, imagine sharing a grave with some utter stranger!"

"Grave?"

Bradley nodded. "Like Pharaoh's slaves. The pyramid is just about finished, friend. You don't know what I'm talking about?" He sat up, plucked the end of a tall blade of stemmy grass and put it between his teeth. "I guess you haven't seen the corpses in the woods."

Chandler said, "I found a town half a mile or so over there, nothing in it but skeletons."

"No, heavens, nothing that ancient. These are nice fresh corpses, out behind the junk heap there. Well, not fresh. They're a couple of weeks old. I thought it was neat of the Execs to dispose of the used-up labor out of sight of the rest of us. So much better for morale ... until Juan Simoa and I went back looking for a plain, simple electrical extension cord and found them."

With icy calm Chandler realized that the man was talking sense. Used-up labor: the men who had unloaded the first planes, no doubt, worked until they dropped, then efficiently disposed of, as they were so cheap a commodity that they were not worth the trouble of hauling back to Honolulu for salvage. "I see," he said. "Besides, dead men tell no tales."

"And spread no disease. Probably that's why they did their killing back in the tall trees. Always the chance some exec might have to come down here to inspect in person. Rotting corpses just aren't sanitary." Bradley grinned again. "I used to be a doctor at Molokai."

"Lep ..." began Chandler, but the doctor shook his head.

"No, no, never say leprosy.' It's 'Hansen's disease.' Whatever it is, the execs were sure scared of it. They wiped out every patient we had, except a couple who got away by swimming; then for good measure they wiped out most of the medical staff, too, except for a couple like me who were off-island and had the sense to keep quiet about where they'd worked. Right down the beach it was."

Chandler said, "I was back in the village today. I thought I saw someone still alive."

"You think it might be one of the lepers? It's possible. But don't worry," said the doctor, rolling over on his back and putting his hands behind his head. "Don't let a little Hansen's disease scare you; we suffer from an infection far worse than that." He yawned and said drowsily, "You know, in the old days I used to work on pest-control for the Public Health Service. We sure knocked off a lot of rats and fleas. I never thought I'd be one of them..." He was silent. Chandler looked at him more closely and admired his courage very much. The man had fallen asleep.

Chandler looked at the others. "You going to let them kill us without a struggle?" he demanded.

The remaining Hawaiian was the only one to answer. "Malihini," he said, "you just don't know how much pilikia you're in. It isn't what we let them do."

"We'll see," Chandler promised grimly. "They're only human. I haven't given up yet."

But in the end he could not save himself; it was the girl who saved him.

That night Chandler tossed in troubled sleep, and woke to find himself standing, walking toward the Tri-Pacer. The sun was just beginning to pink the sky and no one else was moving. "Sorry, love," he apologized to himself. "You probably need to bathe and shave, but I don't know how. Shave, I mean." He giggled. "Anyway, you'll find everything you need at my house."

He climbed into the plane. "Ever fly before?" he asked himself. "Well, you'll love it. Here we go close the door ... snap the belt ... turn the switch." He admired the practiced ease with which his body started the motor, raced it with a critical eye on the instruments, turned the plane and lifted it off, up, into the rising sun.

"Oh, dear. You do need a bath," he told himself, wrinkling his nose humorously. "No harm. I've the nicest tub, pink, deep, and nine kinds of bath salts. But I wish you weren't so tired, love, because it's a long flight and you're wearing me out." He was silent as he bent to the correct compass heading and cranked a handle over his head to adjust the trim. "Koitska's going to be so high," he said, smiling. "Never fear, love, I can calm him down. But it's easier to do with you in one piece, you know, the other way's too late."

He was silent for a long time, and then his voice began to sing.

They were songs from Rosalie's own musical comedies. Even with so poor an instrument as Chandler's voice to work with, she sang well enough to keep both of them entertained while his body brought the plane in for a landing; and so Chandler went to live in the villa that belonged to Rosalie Pan.

"LOVE," SHE said, "there are worse things in the world than keeping me amused, when I'm not busy. We'll go to the beach again one day soon, I promise." And she was gone again.

It was like that every day.

Chandler was a concubine, not even that; he was a male geisha, convenient to play gin rummy with, or for company on the surfboards, or to make a drink.

He did not quite know what to make of himself. In bad times one hopes for survival. He had hoped; and now he had survival, perfumed and cushioned, but on what mad terms! Rosalie was a pretty girl, and a good-humored one. She was right. There were worse things in the world than being her companion; but Chandler could not adjust himself to the role. It angered him when she got up from the garden swing and locked herself in her room, for he knew that she was not sleeping as she lay there, though her eyes were closed and she was motionless. It infuriated him when she casually usurped his body to bring an ashtray to her side, or to stop him when his hands presumed. And it drove him nearly wild to be a puppet with her friends working his strings.

He was that most of all. One exec who wished to communicate with another cast about for an available human proxy nearby. Chandler served for Rosie Pan: her telephone, her social secretary, and on occasion he was the garment her dates put on. For Rosalie was one of the few execs who cared to conduct any major part of her life in her own skin. She liked dancing. She enjoyed dining out. It was her pleasure to display herself to the worshippers at Luigi the Wharf Rat's and to speed down the long combers on a surfboard. When another exec chose to accompany her, it was Chandler's body which gave the remote "date" flesh.

He ate very well indeed, in surprising variety. He drank heavily sometimes and abstained others. Once, in the person of a Moroccan Exec, he smoked an opium pipe; once he dined on roasted puppy. He saw many interesting things and, when Rosalie was occupied without him, he had the run of her house, her music library, her pantry and her books. He was not mistreated. He was pampered and praised, and every night she kissed him before she retired to her own room with the snap-lock on the door. He was miserable.

He prowled the house in the nights after she had left him, unable to sleep. It had been bad enough on Hilo, under the hanging threat of death. But then, though he was only a slave, he was working at something that used his skill and training.

Now? Now a Pekingese could do nearly all she wanted of him. He despised in himself the knowledge that with a Pekingese's cunning he was contriving to make himself indispensable to her, her slippers fetched in his teeth, his silky mane by her hand to stroke, if not these things in actuality, then their very near equivalents.

But what else was there for him? There was nothing. She had spared his life from Koitska, and if he offended her Koitska's sentence would be carried out.

Even dying might be better than this, he thought. Indeed, it might be better, even, to go back to Honolulu and life.

In the morning he woke to find himself climbing the wide, carpeted steps to her room. She was not asleep; it was her mind that was guiding him.

He opened the door. She lay with a feathery coverlet pulled up to her chin, eyes open, head propped on three pillows; as she looked at him he was free. "Something the matter, love? You fell asleep sitting up."

"Sorry."

She would not be put off. She made him tell her his resentments. She was very understanding and very sure as she said, "You're not a dog, love. I won't have you thinking that way. You're my friend. Don't you think I need a friend?" She leaned forward. Her nightgown was very sheer; but Chandler had tasted that trap before and he averted his eyes. "You think it's all fun for us. I understand. Tell me, if you thought I was doing important work, oh, crucial work, love, would you feel a little easier? Because I am. We've got the whole work of the island to do, and I do my share. We've got our plans to make and our future to provide for. There are so few of us. A single H-bomb could kill us all. Do you think it isn't work, keeping that bomb from ever coming here? There's all Honolulu to monitor, for they know about us there. We can't let some disgusting nitwits like your Society of Slaves destroy us. There's the problems of the world to see to. Why," she said with pride, "we've solved the whole Indian-Pakistani population problem in the last two months. They'll not have to worry about famine again for a dozen generations! We're working on China now; next Japan; next, oh, all the world. Well have three-quarters of the lumps gone soon, and the rest will have space to breathe in. It's work!"

She saw his expression and said earnestly, "No, don't think that! You call it murder. It is, of course. But it's the surgeon's knife. We're quicker and less painful than starvation, love ... and if some of us enjoy the work of weeding out the unfit, does that change anything? It does not! I admit some of us are, well, mean. But not all. And we're improving. The new people we take in are better than the old."

She looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. Then she shook her head. "Never mind," she said apparently to herself. "Forget it, love. Go like an angel and fetch us both some coffee."

Like an angel he went ... not, he thought bitterly, like a man.

She was keeping something from him, and he was too stubborn to let her tease him out of his mood. "Everything's a secret," he complained, and she patted his cheek.

"It has to be that way." She was quite serious. "This is the biggest thing in the world. I'm fond of you, love, but I can't let that interfere with my duty."

"Shto, Rosie?" said Chandler's mouth thickly.

"Oh, there you are, Andrei," she said, and spoke quickly in Russian. Chandler's brows knotted in a scowl and he barked: "Nyeh mozhet bit!"

"Andrei..." she said gently. "Ya vas sprashnivayoo..."

"Nyet!"

"No Andrei."

Rumble, grumble; Chandler's body twitched, and fumed. He heard his own name in the argument, but what the subject matter was he could not tell. Rosalie was coaxing; Koitska was refusing. But he was weakening. After minutes Chandler's shoulders shrugged; he nodded; and he was free.

"Have some more coffee, love," said Rosalie Pan with an air of triumph.

Chandler waited. He did not understand what was going on. It was up to her to enlighten him, and finally she smiled and said: "Perhaps you can join us, love. Don't say yes or no. It isn't up to you ... and besides you can't know whether you want it or not until you try. So be patient a moment."

Chandler frowned; then felt his body taken. His lips barked: "Khorashaw!" His body got up and walked to the wall of Rosalie's room. A picture on the wall moved aside and there was a safe. Flick, flick. Chandler's own fingers dialed a combination so rapidly that he could not follow it. The door of the safe opened.

And Chandler was free, and Rosalie excitedly leaping out of the bed behind him, careless of the wisp of nylon that was her only garment, crowding softly, warmly past him to reach inside the safe. She lifted out a coronet very like her own.

She paused and looked at Chandler.

"You can't do anything to harm us with this one, love," she warned. "Do you understand that? I mean, don't get the idea that you can tell anyone anything. Or do something violent. You can't. I'll be right with you, and Koitska will be monitoring the transmitter." She handed him the coronet. "Now, when you see something interesting, you move right in. You'll see how. It's the easiest thing in the world, and -- Oh, here. Put it on."

Chandler swallowed with difficulty.

She was offering him the tool that had given the execs the world. A blunter, weaker tool than her own, no doubt. But still it was power beyond his imagining. He stood there frozen as she slipped it on his head. Sprung electrodes pressed gently against his temples and behind his ears. She touched something.

Chandler stood motionless for a moment and then, without effort, floated free of his own body. Floating. Floating; a jellyfish floating. Trailing tentacles that whipped and curled, floating over the sand bound claws and chitin that clashed beneath, floating over the world's people, and them not even knowing, not even seeing...

Chandler floated. He was up, out and away. He was drifting. Around him was no-color. He saw nothing of space or size, he only saw, or did not see but felt-smelled-tasted, people. They were the sandbound. They were the creatures that crawled and struggled below, and his tentacles lashed out at them. Beside him floated another. The girl? It had a shape, but not a human shape, a cinctured area-rule shape. Female? Yes, undoubtedly the girl. It waved a member at him and he understood he was beckoned. He followed.

Two of the sandbound ones were ahead. The female shape slipped into one, he into the other. It was as easy to invest this form with his own will as it was to order the muscles of his hand. They looked at each other out of sandbound eyes. "You're a boy!" Chandler laughed. The girl laughed: "You're an old washerwoman!"

They were in a kitchen where fish simmered on an electric stove. The boy-Rosie wrinkled his-her nose, blinked and was empty. Only the small almond-eyed boy was left, and he began to cry convulsively. Chandler understood. He floated out after her.

This way, this way, she gestured. A crowd of mudbound figures. She slipped into one, he into another. They were in a bus now, rocking along an inland road, all men, all roughly dressed. Laborers going to clear a new section of Oahu of its split-level debris. Chandler thought, and looked for the girl in one of the men's eyes, could not find her, hesitated, and, floated. She was hovering impatiently. This way!

He followed, and followed. They were a hundred people doing a hundred things. They lingered a few moments as a teen-age couple holding hands in the twilight of the beach. They fled from a room where Chandler was an old woman dying on a bed, and Rosalie a stolid, uncaring nurse beside her. They played follow-the-leader through the audience of a Honolulu movie theater, and sought each other, laughing, among the fish stalls of King Street. Then Chandler turned to Rosalie to speak and ... it all went out ... the scene disappeared ... he opened his eyes, and he was back in his own flesh.

He was lying on the pastel pile rug in Rosalie's bedroom. He got up, rubbing the side of his face. He had tumbled, it seemed. Rosalie was lying on the bed. In a moment she opened her eyes.

"Well, love?"

He said hoarsely, "What made it stop?"

She shrugged. "Koitska turned you off. Tired of monitoring us, I expect it's been an hour. I'm surprised his patience lasted this long."

She stretched luxuriously, but he was too full of what had happened even to see the white grace of her body. "Did you like it, love?" she asked. "Would you like to have it forever?"

FOR NINE days Chandler's status remained in limbo. He spent those days in a state of numb detachment, remembering the men and women he had worn like garments, appalled and exhilarated.

He did not see Rosalie again that day. She kept to her room, and he was locked out.

He was still a lapdog.

But he was a lapdog with a dream dangling before him. He went to sleep that night thinking that he was a dog who might yet become a god, and had eight days left. The next day Rosalie wheedled another hour of the coronet from Koitska. She and Chandler explored the ice caves on Mount Rainier, wearing the bodies of two sick and dying hermits they had found inhabiting a half-destroyed inn on its slopes.

The mountain wore its cloudy flag of ice crystals in a bleak, pale evening. The air was thin and stinging, and their borrowed bodies ached. They left them and found two others, twenty-five hundred miles to the east, and wandered arm in arm under stars, neared the destroyed International Bridge at Niagara, breathing the spray of the unchanging Falls. They came back in a flash when Koitska's patience ran out again and sprawled on her hot, dry lawn, and he had seven days left.

They passed like a dream. Chandler saw a great deal of the inner workings of the Exec. He had privileges, for he was up for membership in the club. Rosalie had proposed him.

He talked with two Czechoslovakian ballet dancers in their persons, lean, dark girls who laughed and frowned alternately, and with a succession of heavily accented Russians and Poles and Japanese, who came to him only through the mouth of the beach boy-servant who worked on Rosalie's garden. Chandler thought they liked him. He was pleased that he had penetrated where he had not been allowed before ... until he realized that these freedoms were in themselves a threat.

They allowed him this contact for a reason. They were looking him over.

If their final decision was to reject him, as it well might be, they would have to kill him, because he had seen too much.

But he had little time to dwell on fears of the future. The present was crowded. On the fourth day one of the members of the exec invited him to join them.

"You'll do for a gang boss, Shanda-lerra," he said through the beach boy's mouth; and once again Chandler found himself working on an executive committee project, though no one had told him what it was. He swam up into the strange, thin sea of the mind, in company with a dozen others, and they arrowed through emptiness to a place Chandler could not recognize. He watched the others spiral down and slip into the bodies of the tiny mud-dwelling dolls that were human beings. When they were all gone he sought a doll-body of his own.

He opened his eyes on a bleak, snow-laden Arctic dawn. A shrieking blast from the North Pole was driving particles of gritty ice into his eyes, his ears, the loose, quilted clothes his body wore. The temperature, he was sure, was far below zero. The cold made his teeth ache, filled his eyes with tears.

All around him great floodlights mounted on poles cast a harsh glare over a hundred acres of barren earth, studded with sheds and concrete pillboxes, heaped over with dirt and snow. In the center of the great lighted ice-desert loomed a skeletal steel object that looked like a madly displaced skyscraper. It rose hundreds of feet into the air, its top beyond the range of the floodlights, its base fogged by driving snow. Chandler looked again; no, it was not a single skyscraper but two of them, two tall steel towers, one like an elongated projectile standing on its tail, the other like the Eiffel Tower, torn out of context.

Someone caught Chandler's arm and bellowed hoarsely: "Come on, darling! That is you, isn't it? Come over here where Djelenko's handing out the guns."

He recognized Rosalie, clad in the corpus of a Siberian yak-herder, and followed her docilely toward a man who was unlocking a concrete bunker. It was not only the girl he had recognized. With an active shock of surprise he saw that the twin towers were a rocket and its gantry. By the size of it, an orbital rocket at the least.

"I didn't think there were any satellites left!" he bellowed into the flat, dirty ear that was at present the property of Rosalie Pan.

The broad, dark-browed face turned toward him. "This'un's about the last, I guess," she shouted. "Wouldn't be out in this mess otherwise! Miserable weather, ain't it?" She pushed him toward the bunker. "Go see Djelenko, love! Faster we get to work, faster we get this over with."

But Djelenko was shouting something at them that Chandler could not understand. "Oh, damn," cried Rosalie. "Love, you went and got yourself the wrong body. This chap's one of the old experts. Zip out of it and pick yourself a nice Mongol like mine."

Confused, Chandler brought his body's fist up before his eyes. The hand was calloused, scarred and twisted with cold, and one finger, its nail mashed, was trying its best to hurt in the numbing chill of the Siberian air, but the fingers had started out to be long and white. They were not the blunt fists of the yak-herders.

"Sorry," shouted Chandler, and took himself out of the body.

What price the Orphalese? What price the murder of so many innocents, including his own wife? For them, and all of them, Chandler did not have a thought. This was his tryout at the spring training of the team, his first day on the new job. Conscientiously he was attempting to acquire the knack of being a demon.

If he regretted anything at this moment, it was only his own lack of expertise. He wished he were a better demon than he was. He hung irresolute in the queerness of this luminous, distorted sea. He saw the sand-dweller he had just quit, moving in its shapeless way toward the place where he knew the gantries stood. There were others like it about, but which should he enter? He swore to himself. No doubt there were recognition marks that were easy enough to find; neither Rosalie nor the other members of the Exec seemed to have much difficulty making their way about. But he lacked pieces for the puzzle, and he was confused.

He reasoned the pattern out: The gantries meant a rocket flight. The European body he had tenanted for a moment was not native to the region: a slave expert, no doubt, once perhaps an official on this project and now impressed into the service of the executive committee. No doubt the Mongols were mere warm bodies, casually commandeered from their nearby villages, to be used for haul-and-lift labor as need be.

Probably the largest groups of doll-bodies would be the Mongols; so he selected one at random, entered it and stood up again into the noise and pain of the freezing gale. He had a pick in his hand. There were forty or fifty like him in this work crew, digging with antlike tenacity and antlike results into the flinty, frozen ground. Apparently they were trying to set stakes to help moor the gantries against the gale.

He dropped the pick and rubbed numbed fingers together. He realized at once that he had not chosen a very good body. For one thing, it had a squint which made everything look fuzzy and doubled; until he learned to adjust to it he was almost blind. For another, it ached with the effects of a very long time of forced labor and hunger. And it was lousy.

Well, he thought, I can stand anything for a while. Let's get to work ... And then he saw that a body very like his own, but a body which was inhabited by a member of the Exec, since it was carrying a rifle, gestured to him, screaming something he could not understand.

He doesn't know I am me, thought Chandler, half amused. He started toward the rifleman. "Wait a minute," he called. "I'm Chandler. I'm ready to go to work, if you'll just tell me what to ... hey! Wait!"

He was very surprised to see that the rifleman was not even making an attempt to understand him. The figure raised its rifle, pointed it at him and fired. That was all. Chandler was very seriously annoyed. It was a clear, careless matter of mistaken identity, he thought angrily. How stupid of the man!

He felt the first shock of the bullet entering his body but did not wait for more. He did not linger to taste death, or even pain. Before either could reach his mind he was up and out of the body again, fuming and mad. Stupid! he thought. Somebody ought to get called down for this! A dizzying sense of falling. A soundless explosion of light.

Then he was back in a body: his own. He picked himself up and stood looking out of Rosalie Pan's picture window onto the thin green lawn, still angry. He had been turned off. Somehow Koitska, or whatever other member of the executive committee had been watching over him, had observed his blundering. His relay coronet had been turned off, and he was back in Hawaii.

Well, he thought grudgingly, that part was all right. He probably was better off out of the way, at least, if they didn't have sense enough to brief him ahead of time. But the rest of the affair was plain stupidity! He had been frozen, scared and pushed about for nothing!

He rubbed his ear angrily. It was soft and warm, not the chilled, numbed thing he had worn moments before. He muttered imprecations at the damned foolishness of the executive committee. If he couldn't run things better than they, he told himself, he would just give up ...

Ten or fifteen minutes later it occurred to him that he had not, after all, been the greatest loser from that particular blunder. A few minutes later still something else occurred to him. He was not merely beginning to live the life of the execs; he was beginning to think like them, too.

An hour later Rosalie came lightly down the stairs, yawning and stretching. "Love," she cried, catching sight of Chandler, "you really screwed that one up. Can't you tell a Kraut missile expert from a Mongolian cowboy?"

Chandler said glumly, "No."

She said consolingly, but with a touch of annoyance, too, "Oh, don't be frightful, love. I know it was a disappointment, but ..."

"It must've disappointed the man I got killed, too," said Chandler.

"You are being frightful. Well, I understand." She patted his arm. "It's the waiting. It's so nervous-making. Embarrassing, too."

"How would you know?"

"Why, love," she said, "don't you think I went through it myself? But it passes, dear, it passes. Meanwhile come have a drink."

Moodily Chandler allowed the girl to soothe him, although he thought she was taking far too light a view of it. He accepted the Scotch from her and tasted it without comment.

"Is something wrong with it, love?"

He said patiently, "You know I don't like too much water in a drink."

"I'm sorry, love."

He shrugged. Well, he thought, she was right. In a way. He was indeed being frightful. He did not see why she would respond with annoyance, however. He had a right to act a little odd, when he was, after all, betraying all of his friends, even the memory of his dead wife. She certainly could not expect him to take all of that in his stride, without a moment's regret.

Rosalie yawned and smothered it. "I'm sorry, love. Funny how it tires you out to work in somebody else's body!"

"Yes."

"Oh, really, now!" she was angry at last. "For cat's sake, love! Mooning around like a puppy that's been swatted for making a mess!"

He said, "I'm sorry if I have been in any way annoying To ---"

"Come off it! This is Rosie you're talking to." She cradled his head in her arm like a mother, an irritated mother, but a mother. " 'Smatter? Are you scared?" He put down the Scotch and admitted, "A little bit. I think so."

"Well, why didn't you say so? Dear heart, everybody's scared waiting for the votes to come in. Very nervous-making, waiting to know."

He demanded, "When will I know?"

She hesitated. "I'm not supposed to discuss some things with you, love, you know that. Not yet."

"When Rosie?"

She capitulated. "Well, I don't suppose it makes much difference under the circumstances."

He knew what circumstances she meant.

"So I'll tell you that much, anyway. See, love, you need a little over seven hundred votes to get in. That's a lot, isn't it? But that's the rules of the game. And right now you have, let's see. --"

Her eyes glazed for a moment. Chandler knew that she was looking out at something else, through some clerk's vision somewhere on the island, or somewhere in the world.

"Right now you have about a hundred and fifty. Takes time, doesn't it?"

"That's a hundred and fifty to let me in, right? And how many 'no' votes?"

She patted his hand and said gently, "None of those, love. You wouldn't ever have but one." She got up and refilled his drink. "Never fear, dear," she said. "Rosie's on your side! And now let's have something to eat, eh?"

And he had seven days left.

TIME PASSED. Chandler wheedled information out of Rosalie until he had a clear picture of what he was up against. Two-thirds of all the members of the executive committee had to cast an affirmative vote for him (but they would vote in blocs, Rosalie promised; get this one on his side and she would bring in fifty more, get that one and he could deliver a hundred). If there were a single blackball he was out. And he had ten days to be accepted, which were going fast.

Very fast. He had no idea that so many things could be done so rapidly. He was meeting people by the dozen and score, members of the Exec who were Rosalie's personal friends, all of them votes if he could please them. He did everything he could think of to please them. He was working, too, not on the rocket project any more; and not on any of the other off-island projects of the exec (which was all right with him, as he felt pretty sure that most of these involved selective murder and demolition); but on little odds and ends of electronic jobs for Koitska and others. He was allowed to go into Honolulu for more parts, which the new owner of Parts 'n Plenty provided for him in silence. Her eyes were red with weeping; she was Hsi's widow. Chandler tried to find something to say to her, ran through every possible word in his vocabulary, and left without speaking at all.

Chandler knew that his very great measure of freedom was a dangerous sign. Koitska did not trouble to hide from him any more just what it was that they had built on Hilo. He even allowed Chandler to do some patch-cording and soldering on the installation in the former TWA Message Center, watching him every minute, gasping and snoring as he lay on his couch across the room, and made no effort to keep Chandler from guessing that the Hilo assembly was almost a duplicate of the one here. Hilo had more power, Chandler thought; there had been some hint that more power was needed for the really remote control applications involved in the Executive Committee's Mars project; but basically it was only a standby.

Checking current flows under Koitska's eye, Chandler thought detachedly that it might just be possible, if one were both daring and very lucky, to overcome the Exec, destroy the installation, find a way to Hilo and destroy that one too ... One did not take that sort of risk lightly, of course, he acknowledged. It was an easy way to get killed. And he did not want to get killed.

He wanted to live very much as a member in good standing of the Executive Committee.

The Russian POWs who manned Hitler's Atlantic Wall would have understood Chandler's reasoning; so would the Americans who broadcast for the enemy in Korea. The ultimately important thing for any man was to stay alive.

Chandler had not forgotten Peggy Flershem or the Orphalese, or Hsi and his tortured friends around the Monument. He merely thought, quite reasonably, that he could do nothing to help them any more; and meanwhile he had to pick up several hundred more votes or he would join them all in death. He acknowledged that it was in some sense degrading that, chances were, the men and women he curried favor with today were perhaps the very ones who had shot Ellen Braisted in Orphalese, raped and murdered his wife through the person of his friend, Jack Souther, kidnapped the children who had flown across the Pacific with him ... there was no sense in cataloguing all the possible abominations these men and women had committed, he told himself firmly. All that was as dead as Hsi.

Life was important. On any terms, life. Considered objectively, the Orphalese and the people in his own home town who had been destroyed by the execs were of no more importance than the stolid, half-frozen Siberians whom he had actually helped (even if ineffectually!) to work to death. Or the inhabitants of the destroyed village in Hilo. Or the peaceful people of New York when the submarine exploded itself in the harbor. Or...

He sighed. It was very difficult to stop making catalogues, or to turn from that to a friendly smile and a gay, friendship-winning quip.

But he managed the task. It revolted him, said Pooh-Bah. But he did it. When she could Rosalie borrowed the use of a coronet for him and they roamed the world, to night clubs in Juarez and lamaseries under the Himalayan peaks, to every place that she thought might amuse and divert him. On the fourth day she took him to a very special place indeed.

"You'll like it," was all she would say. "Oh! I haven't been there for months."

It was half a world away. Chandler had never learned to read the topologically insane patterns of grayed light but he knew it was very distant, and it turned out in fact to be in Italy. They found bodies to wear and commandeered a boat and headed out over blue water, Rosalie claiming she knew where she was going. But when, after repeated sightings on the coast behind them, she cut the little electric motor, the water in which they drifted looked like any other water to Chandler. "I hope you know what you're doing," he said.

"Of course, love! And I adore your mustachios."

He preened them. He rather fancied the body he had found, too; it had come with a gun and a plumed hat, but he had discarded them on the beach where they found the boat. Rosalie had done herself well enough, in a costume of flesh that was not more than eighteen years old, not taller than five feet one and darkly beautiful. She stood up, rocking the boat. "Everybody in the water!" she called.

"Last one in's a malihinil"

"Swimming? Swimming where?" he demanded. She was already taking off her clothes, the ruffled shirt, the toreador pants; in brief underwear she climbed to the gunwale and tugged at his mustache.

"Straight down, love. You'll like it."

He stood up and began taking off the coat and the uniform pants with their broad stripe of gold. "Wait a minute," he grumbled. "It always takes longer for a man to get his clothes off. He doesn't get as much practice, I suppose."

"Love! You're terribly anti-woman! Follow me!" And she dived from the gunwale, neat and clean, heading down.

Chandler followed. He had never been a great swimmer and was, in fact, not very fond of water sports. You can't get hurt, he reminded himself as he swam down into the dark after the pale, wriggling shape that was Rosalie's body. But it felt as if he could get hurt. He was ten yards down, and fifteen, and the end not in sight; and he could feel his borrowed heart pounding and the carabinieri's lungs craving to breathe. The warm Adriatic water was clouded and dim. He could see nothing except for Rosalie, down below, no. There was something else, he could not be sure what. Something darker, and square in outline...

Rosalie's slim, pale form slipped under it and disappeared. Grimly Chandler followed, his muscles tiring, his lungs bursting. With the last of his strength he skirted the dark square thing and came up beneath it. It was a thirty-foot rectangle of metal, he could see now, pierced with darkened windows, swinging on long chains that stretched downward into invisibility.

Where Rosalie had gone there was a square of a different color. It looked like a hatch. It was a hatch. He bobbed up through it and into a dark bubble of air, puffing and gasping.

Rosalie was there before him, sprawled out of the water onto the metal deck, wheezing like himself. "Whew, love," she panted. "Come on up. You've done the hard part. Now let's see if I can find the lights."

The lights were tiny lanterns for which Rosalie found flashlight cells somewhere. They illuminated a chamber containing tables, chairs, beds, racks of instruments, cupboards of food. "Isn't it nice, love? Wasn't I lucky to find it?"

Chandler stared about, beginning to breathe normally again. "What is it?"

"Some sort of experiment, I think." She had found a mirror, coated with grime and was scrubbing it clean with someone's neatly folded sweatshirt. "People used to live here in the old days," she said, propping the mirror against a wall and pirouetting in front of it. "Oh, lovely! Really I looked a little bit like this once, back in, well!"

"Now what do we do?"

She pressed her hair back, squeezing water out of it. "Why, we rest for a minute, love. And if I can find it, we drink some champagne. And then we do something very nice."

Chandler picked up a harpoon gun and put it down again. He could not help wondering who had built this trapped bubble of underwater living-space. "Cousteau," he said out loud, remembering.

"You mean that skin-diver? Well, no, I don't think so, love. He was French. But it's the same idea." She produced a bottle from a chest. "Champagne!" she crowed.

"Just as I promised. A bit warm, I'm afraid, but still it'll give you heart for the next bit."

"And what's that?"

But she would not tell him, only fussed over him while he popped the scarlet plastic cork out with his thumbs and retreated, laughing, from the gush of foam.

They drank, out of a mug and a canteen cup. Chandler could not help prodding at her for information. "The boat's going to be drifted away, you know. How do we get back?"

"Oh, love, you do worry about the most peculiar things. I do wish you'd relax."

"It's not entirely easy" he began, but she flared at him.

"Oh, come on! I must say, you've got a pretty ..." But she relented almost at once. "I'm sorry for snapping at you. I know it's a scary time." She sat down beside him, her bare arm touching his, and said, "We might as well finish the champagne before we go. Want me to tell you about when I went through it?"

"Sure," he said, stirring the wine around in the glass and drinking it down, hardly hearing what she said, although the sound of her voice was welcome.

"Oh, that lousy headdress! It weighed twenty pounds, and they put it on with hatpins." He caressed her absently. He had figured out that she was talking about the night New York was bombed. "I was in the middle of the big first-act curtain number when" her face was strained, even after years, even now that she was herself one of the godlike ones "when something took hold of me. I ran off the stage and right out through the front door. There was a cab waiting. As soon as I got in I was free, and the driver took off like a lunatic through the tunnel, out to Newark Airport. I tell you, I was scared! At the toll-booth I screamed but my friend let go of the driver for a minute, smashed a trailer-truck into a police car, and in the confusion we got away. He took me over again at the airport. I ran bare as a bird into a plane that was just ready to take off. The pilot was under control ... We flew eleven hours, and I wore that damn feather headdress all the way."

She held out her glass for a refill. Chandler busied himself opening the second bottle. Now she was talking about her friend. "I hadn't seen him in six years. I was just a Md, living in Islip. He was with a Russian trade commission next door, in an old mansion. Well, he was one of the ones, back in Russia, that came up with these." She touched her brow where her coronet usually rested.

"So," she said brightly, "he put me up for membership and by and by they gave me one. You see? It's all very simple, except the waiting."

Chandler pulled her to him and made a toast. "Your friend."

"He's a nice guy," she said moodily, sipping her drink. "You know how careful I am about getting exercise and so on? It's partly because of him. You would have liked him, love, only, well, it turned out that he liked me well enough, but he began to like what he could get through the coronet a lot more. He got fat. A lot of them are awfully fat, love," she said seriously. "That's why they need people like me. And you. Replacements. Heart trouble, liver trouble, what can they expect when they lie in bed day in and day out, taking their lives through other people's bodies? I won't let myself go that way ... It's a temptation. You know, almost every day I find some poor woman on a diet and spend a solid hour eating creampuffs and gravies. How they must hate me!"

She grinned, leaned back and kissed him.

Chandler put his arms around the girl and returned the kiss, hard. She did not draw away. She clung to him, and he could feel in the warmth of her body, the sound of her breath that she was responding.

And then she whispered, "Not yet, love," and pushed him away. "Time for water sports!" she cried, getting to her feet. "You've loafed here long enough, now let me show you what's fun!"

Ten minutes later, wearing scuba gear Rosalie had turned up from somewhere, he was following her out through the grayish green sea.

After the first minute, it was not like swimming at all. For one thing, you didn't feel wet. And you were breathing, through the mask and the tube in your teeth. It was interesting, he thought; but he could not help wondering if this was what Rosalie had meant by "fun."

They had weighted themselves with belts of metal slugs, but he was still buoyant and had to fight continually against rising to the surface, where Rosalie seemed to have over-weighted herself and kept sloping down toward the distant bottom. Swimming was slow, especially as Rosalie had insisted he carry a long-bladed butcher Knife "In case of sharks, love!"

But still! He was under the water and breathing. He followed her, expecting something, but not knowing quite what.

There were sharks, all right. He had seen a dozen of them, and there was something off to the side right now, circling behind him, almost invisible in the distance. He regarded it with great suspicion and dislike. Even if you couldn't get really killed in a borrowed body, you yourself couldn't; he was not prepared to think about what happened to the prisoned owner of the body, there were things that were not attractive about the prospect of great unseen jaws suddenly slicing a ham away.

Rosalie half turned to him, beckoned and started down. Dimly he could see the bottom now, or at any rate something that was where the bottom ought to be. Rosalie was spinning there below him, waiting for him.

It was quite dim, this far from the surface of the sea, but Chandler could see the gleam of her eye and her cheerful wink behind the mask. She stretched out a hand and pointed above him and behind.

Chandler half turned to see. There were five of the great shadowy bulks there now, and they seemed to be moving toward him.

Frantically he kicked and squirmed to face them, but Rosalie caught his arm. She held him, and gestured for him to hand her the knife.

Chandler was frankly terrified. Every childhood fear sprang to life in him; his breath caught, his heart pounded, something churned in his belly and forced its way into his throat. It was no good telling himself that this was not really his body, that his own flesh lay secure in a split-level living room twelve thousand miles away; he cringed from the threat of the grim, silent shapes and it was all he could do to stay in this threatened corpus to see what Rosalie wanted to do.

He gave her the knife. She glanced upward at the sharks calculatingly, then pursed her lips, winked, blew him a kiss and neatly, carefully, sliced his airhose in two. His oxygen blew out in a cascade of great, wriggling bubbles. Water rushed in. He felt her tearing his facemask off, but water was already in his eyes, mouth, nose. He coughed and strangled, more startled than he had ever been in his life; and then she touched his chest with the blade, daintily and precisely. Fire leaped along his side and a cloud of blood began to diffuse through the water. She ripped off her own facemask and slit a careful line across the eighteen-year-old's borrowed abdomen, then reached out her arms to him.

They kissed. Her arms locked around him like manacles. He felt his lungs bursting as they kissed and spun, thrashing, through the water, while the feathery clouds of blood spread out; and as they turned Chandler saw the great torpedo shapes, now incredibly close, coming toward them incredibly fast.

The last he saw was the great yawning grin of teeth; and then he could not help it, he fled. He abandoned Rosalie, abandoned the borrowed body of the carabinieri, fled and did not stop until he was back in his own flesh, still frightened, and violently ill.

CHANDLER COULD sleep only tardily that night, and not well. His sleep was punctuated with sudden wakenings, illuminated with dreams. Ellen Braisted came and spoke to him, and Margot his wife. They did not threaten or terrify him. They only looked at him with reproach... and when he woke and it was broad daylight, and the Kanaka was whirring the lawnmower across the grass outside just as though no murders had been committed by the inmates of the house, he slouched angrily around the living room for an hour and then began to drink.

By the time Rosalie Pan came downstairs, yawning and looking slaked and contented, he was drunk enough to coax her into breakfasting on Bloody Marys.

By the time she had had her third, and no longer minded the fact that she had not eaten, Chandler was stumbling and stammering. Rosalie did not object. Perhaps she understood, or understood at least that she had shown him something of herself that took getting used to. Even when the other members of the exec began calling in, usually through the person of the beach boy who was her handyman, she laughed and made excuses for Chandler.

But when they were gone, when it was only the Kanaka who was in the room with them, turning to leave with a tired fear, she reproached him gently: "Not quite so much of the arm-around-the-neck, love. Do you mind? I mean, everything in its place."

"You didn't mind yesterday," said Chandler sullenly.

"Oh, really! I'm not trying to reform you, you know. But these are members of the exec, and you need the votes." "I certainly wouldn't want to behave badly in the presence of a member of the exec," said Chandler, and lurched to the kitchen for another bottle. He was at that stage of drunkenness when he felt he was not going to be able to get drunk: he observed the symptoms of hands and feet and mouth, and cursed the clarity of his brain that would not anesthetize him. In the kitchen he paused, staggered over to the sink and on impulse put his head under the cold-water tap.

When Rosalie came looking for him minutes later she found him brewing coffee. "Why, that's better, love," she cried. "I thought you were going to drink the island dry!"

He poured a cup of the stuff, hot and black, and began to swallow it in small, painful gulps. Rosalie fetched a cup for herself, added cream and sugar and sat at the table.

"Time's wasting," she said practically, "and you don't have the votes yet, love. I want you to work on Koitska today. Tell him all about the geraniums and what-you-call-thems; he can bring you fifty votes if he wants to."

Chandler finished the coffee and poured another cup. This time he added a generous shot of whiskey to it. Rosalie tightened her lips, but only said, "Then there's that bunch from the East Coast, the Embassy girls and Brad and Tony. They've already voted, but they could get out some more for you if you got them interested. Brad's been a doll, but the girls have all sorts of friends they haven't done anything with."

Chandler lit a cigarette and let her talk. He knew it was important to him. He knew she was trying to help him, and indeed that without her help he was a dead man. He simply could not bring himself to play up to her mood. He stood up and said, "I'm going to take a bath." And he left her sitting there.

And ten minutes later he came shouting into her room, his body still wet from the shower, wearing a pair of khaki shorts and nothing else. "Who?" he cried. "Who did you say? What's the name of your friend?"

Rosalie, sitting at her vanity mirror, wearing nothing but underwear and her coronet, took her hands away from her hair and looked at him. "Love! What's the matter?"

"Answer me, damn it! Brad! Brad who?" She said, with little patience, "Do you mean Brad Fenell? I must say, the way you're acting I don't know why he should go out of his way What's the matter?"

Chandler's eyes were glaring and he had begun to shake. He sat down limply on her bed, staring at her.

"You mean Brad Fenell is helping me? If I get elected to the exec, it will be because of Brad Fenell?"

"Well, love, I have a little something to do with it, too. But Brad's been lovely."

Chandler nodded. "Lovely," he said faintly. "A real doll."

"You remember him, don't you? At the party night before last? The little dark fellow?"

"I remember him." And he did; but he hadn't there for a while. He hadn't remembered at all what Ellen Braisted had told him. The Brad Fenell who had debased and tortured her, who had finally murdered her, was now a powerful friend. There was a joke about that, mused Chandler. With that sort of friend, you didn't need any enemy.

But on all the Executive Committee, what other sort of friend could there possibly be?

Rosalie's irritation was lost in alarm now. Something was clearly wrong with Chandler. She was in very little doubt what it was; she knew nothing of Ellen Braisted, but she knew enough of the exec in general, herself included, to have a shrewd notion of what personal nerve had somehow been touched, and she came over and sat beside him. "Love," she said gently, "It's not as bad as you think. There are good things, too."

Chandler said unrelentingly, "Name one."

"Oh, love! Don't be awful." She put her arm around him. "It's just another few days," she soothed, "and then you can do what you like. Isn't that worth it? I mean really what you like, love. A whole world to play in ... "

Get thee behind me, thought Chandler numbly. But she was right. It was too bad, but facts were facts, he told himself reasonably. Good-by, Ellen, he thought. Good-by, Margot. And he turned to the girl beside him ...

And stiffened and felt himself seized. "Vi myenya zvali?" his own voice demanded, harsh and mocking.

The girl tried to push him away. Her eyes were bright and huge, staring at him. "Andrei!"

"Da, Andrei! Kok eto dosadno!"

"Andrei, please. I know you're ..."

"Filthy!" screamed Chandler's voice. "How can you? I do not allow this carrion to touch you so, not vot is mine. I do not allow him to live!" And Chandler dropped her and leaped to his feet.

He fought. He struggled; but only in his mind, and helplessly; his body carried him out of the room in spite of his struggles, running and stumbling, out into the drive, into her waiting car and away. He drove like a madman on roads he had never seen before. The car's gears bellowed pain at their abuse, the tires screamed.

Chandler, imprisoned inside himself, recognized that touch. Koitska! He knew who Rosalie Pan's lover had been. If he had been in doubt his own voice, raucous and hysterical with rage, told him the truth. All that long drive it screamed threats and obscenities at him, in Russian and tortured English.

The car stopped in front of the TWA facility and, still imprisoned, his body hurried in, bruising itself deliberately against every doorpost and stick of furniture. "I could have smashed you in the car!" his voice screamed hoarsely. "It is too merciful. I could have thrown you into the sea! It is not painful enough."

In the garage his body stopped and looked wildly around. "Knives, torches," his lips chanted. "Shall I gouge out eyes? Slit throat?"

A jar of battery acid stood on a shelf. "Da, da!" screamed Chandler, stumbling toward it. "One drink, eh? And I von't even stay vith you to feel it, the pain, just a moment, then it eats the guts, the long slow dying..."

And all the time the body that was Chandler's was clawing the cap off the jar, tilting it. He dropped the jar, and leaped aside instinctively as it splintered at his feet.

He was free!

Before he could move he was seized again, stumbled, crashed into a wall.

And was free again.

He stood waiting for a moment, unable to believe it; but he was still free. The alien invader did not seize his mind. There was no sound. No one moved. No gun fired at him, no danger threatened.

He was free; he took a step, turned, shook his head and proved it.

He was free and, in a moment, realized that he was in the building with the fat bloated body of the man who wanted to murder him, the body that in its own strength could scarcely stand erect.

It was suicide to attempt to harm an exec. He would certainly lose his life, except, that was gone already anyhow; he had lost it. He had nothing left to lose.

CHANDLER LOPED silently up the stairs to Koitska's suite. Halfway up he tripped and sprawled, half stunning himself against the stair rail. It had not been his own clumsiness, he was sure. Koitska had caught at his mind again. But only feebly. Chandler did not wait. Whatever was interfering with Koitska's control, some distraction or malfunction of the coronet or whatever. Chandler could not bank on its lasting.

The door was locked.

He found a heavy mahogany chair, with a back of solid carved wood. He flung it onto his shoulders, grunting, and ran with it into the door, a bull driven frantic, lunging out of its querencia to batter the wall of the arena. The door splintered. Chandler was gashed with long slivers of wood, but he was through the door.

Koitska lay sprawled along his couch, eyes staring. Alive or dead? Chandler did not wait to find out but sprang at him with hands outstretched. The staring eyes flickered; Chandler felt the pull at his mind. But Koitska's strength was almost gone. The eyes glazed, and Chandler was upon him. He ripped the coronet off and flung it aside, and the huge bulk of Koitska swung paralytically off the couch and fell to the floor.

The man was helpless. He lay breathing like a steam engine, one eye pressed shut against the leg of a coffee table, the other looking up at Chandler.

Chandler was panting almost as hard as the helpless mass at his feet. He was safe for a moment. At the most for a moment, for at any time one of the other execs might dart down out of the mind-world into the real, looking at the scene through Chandler's eyes and surely deducing what would be even less to his favor than the truth. He had to get away from there. If he seemed busy in another room perhaps they would go away again.

Chandler turned his back on the paralyzed monster to flee. It would be even better to try to lose himself in Honolulu, if he could get that far, he did not in his own flesh know how to fly the helicopter that was parked in the yard or he would try to get farther still.

But as he turned he was caught. Chandler's body turned to see Koitska lying there, and screamed.

His eyes were staring at Koitska. It was too late. He was possessed by someone, he did not know whom. Though it made little enough difference, he thought, watching his own hands reach out to touch the staring face.

His body straightened, his eyes looked around the room, he went to the desk. "Love," he cried to himself, "what's the matter with Koitska? Write, for God's sake!" And he took a pencil in his hand and was free.

He hesitated, then scribbled: I don't know. I think he had a stroke. Who are you?

The other mind slipped tentatively into his, scanning the paper. "Rosie, you idiot, who did you think?" he said furiously. "What have you done?"

Nothing, he began instinctively, then scratched the word out. Briskly and exactly he wrote: He was going to kill me, but he had some kind of an attack. I took his coronet away. I was going to run.

"Oh, you fool," he told himself shrilly a moment later. Chandler's body knelt beside the wheezing fat lump, taking its pulse. The faint, fitful throb meant nothing to Chandler; probably meant nothing to Rosie either, for his body stood up, hesitated, shook its head. "You've done it now," he sobbed, and was surprised to find he was weeping real tears. "Oh, love, why? I could have taken care of Koitska somehow. No, maybe I couldn't," he said frantically, breaking down. "I don't know what to do. Do you have any ideas outside of running?"

It took him several seconds to write the one word, but it was really all he could find to write. No. His lips twisted as his eyes read the word. "Well," he said practically, "I guess that's the end, love. I mean, I give up."

He got up, turned around the room. "I don't know," he told himself worriedly. "There might be a chance if we could hush this up. I'd better get a doctor. He'll have to use your body, so don't be surprised if there's someone and it isn't me. Maybe he can pull Andrei through. Maybe Andrei'll forgive you then Or if he dies," Chandler's voice schemed as his eyes stared at the rasping motionless hulk, "we can say you broke down the door to help him. Only you'll have to put his coronet back on, so it won't look suspicious. Besides that will keep anyone from occupying him. Do that, love. Hurry." And he was free.

Gingerly Chandler crossed the floor. He did not like to touch the dying animal that wheezed before him, liked even less to give it back the weapon that, if it had as much as five minutes of sentience again, it would use to kill him. But the girl was right. Without the helmet any wandering curious exec might possess Koitska himself. The helmet would shield him from ...

Would shield anyone from...

Would shield even Chandler himself from possession if he used it!

He did not hesitate. He slipped the helmet on his head, snapped the switch and in a moment stood free of his own body, in the gray, luminous limbo, looking down at the pallid traceries that lay beneath.

He did not pause to think or plan; it was as though he had planned every step, in long detail, over many years. Chandler for at least a few moments had the freedom to battle the execs on their own ground, the freedom that any mourning parent or husband in the outside world would know well how to use.

Chandler also knew how. He was a weapon. The coronet that he wore now was no limited, monitored slave device; it was Koitska's own. While he wore it Chandler could not be touched.

Perhaps it was the aftermath of these wearing, terrifying days; perhaps it was the residual poison of his morning of drinking and night of little sleep. Chandler felt both placid and prepared. There would be a way to use this weapon against the Exec, and he would find it. Margot, Ellen Braisted, Meggie, Hsia, billion others, all would be revenged. He would very likely die for it, but he was a dead man anyway.

In any case it was not a great thing to die; millions had done it for nothing under the rule of the execs, and he was privileged to be able to die trying to kill them. He stepped callously around the hulk on the floor and found a door behind the couch, a door and a hall, and at the end of that hall a large room that had once perhaps been a message center. Now it held rack after rack of electronic gear. He recognized it without elation. It was the main transmitter for all the coronets of the exec.

He had only to pull one switch, that one there, and power would cease to flow. The coronets would be dead. The execs would be only human beings again. In five minutes he could destroy enough parts that it would be at least a week's work to build it again, and in a week the slaves in Honolulu, somehow he could reach them, somehow he would tell them of their chance, could root out and destroy every exec on all the islands.

Of course, there was the standby transmitter he himself had helped to build.

He realized tardily that Koitska would have made some arrangement for starting that up by remote control. He put down the tool-kit with which he had been advancing on the racks of transistors, and paused to think. He was a fool, he saw after a moment. He could not destroy this installation, not yet, not until he had used it. He remembered to sit down so that his body would not crash to the floor, and then he sent himself out and up, to scan the nearby area.

There was no one there, nobody within a mile or more, except the feeble glimmer that was dying Koitska. He did not enter that body. He returned to his own long enough to lock the door, and then he went up and out, grateful to Rosalie, who had taught him how to navigate in the curious world of the mind, flashing across water to the island of Hilo.

There had to be someone near the stand-by installation. He searched; but there was no one. No one in the building. No one near the ruined field. No one in the village of the dead nearby. He was desperate; he became frantic; he was on the point of giving up, and then he found someone? But it was a personality feebler than stricken Koitska's, a bare swampfire glow.

No matter. He entered it. At once he screamed silently and left it again. He had never known such pain. A terrifying fire in the belly, a thunder past any migraine in the head, a thousand lesser aches and woes in every member. He could not imagine what person lived in such distress; but grimly he forced himself to enter again.

Moaning, it was astonishing how thick and animal-like the man's voice was. Chandler forced his borrowed body stumbling through the jungle. Time was growing very short. He drove it gasping at an awkward run across the airfield, dodged around one wrecked plane and blundered through the door.

The pain was intolerable. He was hardly able to maintain control; waves of nausea washed into his mind. How could he drive this agonizing hulk into the protracted, thoroughgoing job of total destruction?

Chandler stretched out the borrowed hand to pick up a heavy wrench even while he thought. But the hand would not grasp. He brought it to the weak, watering eyes. The hand had no fingers. It ended in a ball of scar tissue. The other hand was nearly as misshapen.

Panicked, Chandler retreated from the body in a flash, back to his own; and then he began to think.

What sort of creature had he been inhabiting? Human? Why yes, it must be human, the coronets gave no power over the bodies of animals. But it had not felt human. Chandler experienced one vertiginous moment when all possibilities seemed real, when visions of elves and beings from flying saucers danced in his brain; then sanity returned. Certainly it was human, someone sick, perhaps. Or insane. But human.

He could not understand that clawed club of a hand. But it didn't matter; he could use it, because he had used it. It was only a matter of figuring out how. At that moment he heard a car race into the parking lot, spraying gravel. He looked out the window and saw Rosalie Pan's Porsche.

He unlocked the door for her and she came clattering up the stairs as though chased by bears, glanced at Chandler, passed him by and dropped to her knees beside Koitska's body. She looked up and said, "He's dead."

"I didn't kill him."

"I didn't say you did." She got up slowly, watching him. "You almost might as well be, love," she said. "I don't know what I can do for you now."

"No," agreed Chandler, nodding as though very frank and fair, "you can't help me much if he's dead." Full of guile he approached her, staring at Koitska's body. "But is he? I think I saw him breathe." Perplexed, she turned back to the body.

Chandler took a quick step, reached out and knocked the coronet off her head. It clung to her coiffure. Ruthlessly he grabbed it and yanked, and it came away with locks of her hair clinging to it.

She cried out and put a hand to her head, looking at him with astonishment and fear overriding the pain.

He said, breathing hard: "Maybe I can do something for myself."

Rosalie sobbed, "Love, you're crazy. You don't have a chance. Give it back to me, and I'll try to help you, but Love! Give it back, please!"

Chandler controlled his breathing and asked, very reasonably, "If you were me, would you give it back?"

"Yes! Please!" She took a step toward him, then stopped. Her pretty face was a grimace now, her hair torn and flying. She dropped her hands to her side and sobbed, "No, I wouldn't. But you must, love. Please ... "

Chandler said, "Sit down. Over there, next to his body. I want to think and I don't want you close to me." She started to object and he overrode her: "Sit down! Or --" He touched the coronet on his own head.

She turned like a golem and sat down beside the obese old corpse. She sat watching him, her face passive and drained. Chandler tried to imagine for a moment what it must be like for her, in one second a member of that godlike society of superbeings who ruled the Earth, in another a mere mortal, a figure of clay whose body could be seized by him, Chandler or by any other of the Executive Committee...

There was a threat in that. Chandler frowned. "I can't leave you there," he said, thinking out loud. "Your friend Fenell might drop in on you. Or somebody." Her expression did not change. He said briskly: "Get up. Get in that closet." When she hesitated, he added, "I'm not too good at controlling people. I might not be able to make you tie yourself up. But Rosalie, I could make you kill yourself."

The closet was small and uncomfortable, but it would hold her, and it had a lock. With Rosalie out of the way, Chandler paused for only a moment. There were details to work out...

But he had a plan. He could strike a blow. He could end the menace of the Executive Committee forever! The key to the whole thing was that crippled creature on Hilo. He knew now what it was, and wondered that he had not understood before.

A leper! One of the patients at Molokai the doctor had told him some had got away. Through that leper, Chandler calculated, he could find a way to destroy the installation on Hilo, if nothing else offered, he could contrive to disable the generator, or break open its fuel storage supply and set fire to the building.

And the other installation was right here in this building, within his grasp! He could destroy them both, one through the leper, the other in his own person. And that's the end of the Executive Committee, he thought triumphantly, and then... And then

He paused, suddenly downcast.

And then, of course, they would know something was wrong. There were a thousand of them. They would come here. They would kill him.

And they would rebuild the equipment that would give them back the world.

Chandler was close to weeping. So near to victory! And yet it was out of his reach ...

Except, he thought, that there was something about the standby installation that was different. What had Hsi said? A different frequency. And Koitska had had two coronets with him on the island..

Chandler did not delay. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps it would not work. Perhaps his memory played him false, or his assumptions were in error, or Koitska had reset the frequency in the days since ... perhaps anything, there were more unknown factors than he could guess at ... but still there was a chance!

He leaped out of his body, poised himself to get his bearings and fled through the luminous gray mists toward Hilo. Steeling himself to the pain, he entered the body of the leper and loped shamblingly back toward the duplicate installation.

Five minutes later the generator coughed and spun, and the components came to life. Chandler had no way to test them, to determine what sort of signal they were generating; but he had helped put the installation together and, as far as he could see, it was operating perfectly.

He abandoned the body of the leper with gratitude, and stood up in his own.

Five minutes more and the master transmitter was stilled. Chandler had pulled the switch.

When he found Koitska's standby-frequency coronet and placed it on his head there was only one person in all the world who possessed the terrifying powers of a member of the Executive Committee, and that person was Chandler.

He stood there for a moment with his eyes closed, very tired and very calm. He knew what he had to do, but there was something, he felt, that he should do first. He waited, but could not remember what it was; and so a moment later he left his body and soared off in search of his first quarry. It was not for some time that it came to him what he had wanted to do. He had wanted to pray.

It was all working; his best hopes were coming true! The installation on Hilo functioned perfectly and Chandler was, in fact, the master of the islands and thus of the world!

He accepted it without triumph. Perhaps the triumph would come later, but first he had work to do. For he had been wrong, he saw now, in thinking that the destruction of the machines would free the world from its tyranny.

Koitska had not been the only scientist among the exec. Surely others knew the theory behind the electronic wizardry that gave them control; surely there were plans and wiring diagrams in some safe file, perhaps in a dozen of them, that could be brought out and used again. It was necessary to destroy the machinery, yes; but it was also necessary to destroy the plans ... not only the plans on paper but the plans that might linger in the brains of the members of the Exec. It was, in fact, necessary to kill them all. It was not only necessary, thought Chandler objectively, it was rather easy. It was child's play. All you had to do was the sort of thing members of the Exec had been doing for fun or in furtherance of a purpose every day for years. All you had to do was what he was doing. Up out of the body, and search for the queerly distorted sluggish sort of creature that turned out to be a human mind; enter it; and there you were in the body of a man or woman. You glanced in a mirror or touched the body's head with the body's hand to check to see if it wore a coronet, of course. It did, the body had to be destroyed. There were many ways of doing that. Simple household objects could be employed, a knife, a bottle of iodine to drink, sometimes you could find a gun.

Carefully and scientifically Chandler experimented with modes of suicide. He tried them all. He discovered that, failing all else, you really could choke yourself to death; but it was difficult and slow, and quite painful; he only did that once. He discovered that even a nail file, sawed vigorously enough across a throat, would ultimately open the artery that would spill out the life. He set fire to one house and trapped himself in a closet, but that was slow, too; drowned himself in a bathtub, but it took so irritatingly long for the tub to fill. Knives were almost always available if you just took the trouble to look, though; and saws, chisels, barbecue forks, scythes, almost anything with an edge could be used.

When Chandler had first learned that the "flame spirits" were human beings he had dreamed at night about them, and wakened to wonder how it must feel to kill oneself over and over again in some other flesh.

Now he knew. It felt very painful and very wearing; but of emotion, regret, sorrow, shame, there was little or none. It became very quickly a job. Like any other job, it was susceptible to time study and rationalization; after the first hour, when Chandler realized he had only managed seven deaths and would at that rate pass out from exhaustion before he had made himself safe against attack, he systematically improved his methods, finally settling for the quickest and easiest of them all. Too bad, he thought as he slew and slew, that it was only good in two-story buildings; annoying that the Hawaiians had gone in so heavily for ranch houses; but it was quite possible to kill yourself by leaping from a second-story window, provided only that you had the resolution to land headfirst ... The orgy of killing went on and on, all that day, and all that night, killing, killing in widening circles from the TWA Message Center, killing everything that wore a coronet and then as he grew wearier and more careless, and realized that the execs might by then have begun taking their useless coronets off, killing everything that moved.

He stopped only when he realized that he was in the fringes of Honolulu itself.

He had lost count long since, but he had surely killed a thousand times and died a thousand times. No doubt some execs still survived, but he no longer had a way to distinguish them from the slaves. He stopped for that reason... and because he was tired beyond further effort ... and most of all because blood had washed away his passions.

He was spent.

He slumped against a wall for a moment, back in his own body. And then he stood up, and took off the coronet and, dangling it from one hand, walked out into the dawn of a new world.

Chandler the giant killer looked upon his world and did not find it good.

Exhaustion diminished all his emotions, but he was aware that this was wrong. He should be exultant! He should be shouting with joy, caroling his gratitude to God; and he was not.

Why, he told himself reasonably, every most fantastic prayer of the past years had been granted at once! In one night he had avenged New York and the Orphalese, the incinerated millions of Russia and the raped slaves in Honolulu...

But he could not help feeling that the job was not really done after all. He swung the coronet idly in his hand, staring blankly at the lightening sky, while a sly and treasonable voice in a corner of his mind whispered to him.

Who held this coronet held the world, said the voice in his mind.

He nodded, for that was true. Absently he poked at the steel-bright filigree of the thing, as a man might caress the pretty rug which once had been the skin of a tiger poised to kill him. It was such a small thing to hold so much power...

Chandler went back into the building and brewed himself strong black coffee. He could hear Rosalie Pan stirring inside the closet where he had left her; in a minute he would let her out, he thought. Not just yet, but in a minute. As soon as he had thought things out. As soon as he had made up his mind to an extremely important decision. For it was true that the job was not quite done yet. The plans had to be located and destroyed, of course. Naturally, destroyed. Survivors of the Exec had to be found, and also destroyed.

Yes, there was much to do. While he was waiting for the coffee to seep through its filter he slipped the coronet casually back atop his head. Only for a while, of course. A very little while. He pledged himself solemnly that there would definitely be no question about that. He would wear it just long enough to clean up all the loose ends just that long and not one second longer, he pledged, and knew as he pledged it that he lied.