XIII

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 pefmitted 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. Takeoff would be no problem, any more than it would for the other small transports at the far end of the strip.

These planes were not going to return, ever. The work went on, and then it was done, or all but, and Chandler knew no more about it than when it was begun. The last little bit was a careful check of line voltages and 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 huhlt[?],” 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.