When Chandler saw her commit suicide he redoubled his efforts. It was incredible to him that his life had been saved, and he knew that if he escaped the flames he still had nothing to live forthat blasted brief hope had broken his spiritbut his fingers had a will of their own.
He lay there, struggling, while great black clouds of smoke, orange-painted from the flames, gathered under the high ceiling, while the thunder of falling lumps of plaster sounded like a child heaving volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica down a flight of stairs, while the heat and shortage of oxygen made Um breathe in violent spasms.
Then he cried out sharply and stumbled to his feet. It was only a matter of moments before he was out of the house, but it was very nearly not time enough.
Behind him was a great, sustained crash. He thought it must have been the furniture on the upper floor toppling through the burned-out ceiling of the hall. He turned and looked.
It was dark, and now every window on the side of the house facing him was lighted. It was as though some mad householder had decided to equip his rooms only with orange lights that flickered and tossed. For a second Chandler thought there were still living people in the roomsshapes moved and cavorted at the windows, as though they were gathering up possessions or waving wildly for help. But it was only the drapes, aflame, thrown about in the fierce heat.
Chandler sighed and turned away.
Pain was not a sure defense after all.
Evidently it was only an annoyance to the possessors … whoever, or whatever, they might be… as soon as they had become suspicious they had exerted themselves and destroyed the Orphalese. He listened and looked about, but no one else moved. He had not expected anyone. He had been sure that he was the only survivor.
He began to walk down the hill toward the wrecked railway bridge, turning only when a roar told him that the roof of the house had fallen in. A tulip of flame a hundred feet tall rose above the standing walls, and above that a shower of floating red-orange sparks, heat-borne, drifting up and away and beginning to settle all over the mountainside. Many were still red when they landed, a few still flaming. It was a distinct risk that the trees would begin to bum, and then he would be in fresh danger; but so great was his stupor that he did not even hurry.
By a plowed field he flung himself to the ground. He could go no farther because he had nowhere to go. He had had two homes and he had been driven from both of them; he had had hope twice, and twice he had been damned. He lay on his back, with the burning house mumbling and crackling in the distance, and stared up at the orange-lit tops of the trees and, past them, the stars.
Over his left shoulder Deneb chased Vega across the sky; toward his feet something moved between the bright rosy dot that was Antares and another, the same brightness and hueMars? He spent several moments wondering if Mars were in that part of the heavens. Then he looked again for the tiny moving point that had crossed the claws of the Scorpion, but it was gone. A satellite, maybe. Although there were few of them left that the naked eye could hope to see. And there would never be any more, because the sort of accumulated wealth of nations that threw rockets into the sky was forever spent. It was probably an airplane, he thought drowsily, and drifted off to sleep without realizing how remote even that possibility had become… .
He woke up to find that he was getting to his feet.
Once again an interloper tenanted his brain. He tried to interfere, although he knew how useless it was, but his own neck muscles turned his head from side to side, his own eyes looked this way and that, his own hand reached down for a dead branch that lay on the ground, then hesitated and withdrew. His body stood motionless for a second, the lips moving, the larynx mumbling to itself. He could almost hear words. Chandler felt like a fly in amber, imprisoned in his own brainbox. He was not surprised when his legs moved to carry him back toward the destroyed building, now a fakir’s bed of white-hot coals with brush fires spattered around it. He thought he knew why.
It seemed very likely that what possessor had him was a sort of clean-up squad, tidying up the loose ends of the slaughter; he expected that his body’s errand was to destroy itself, and thus him, as all the others in the group ol the Orphalese had been destroyed.
CHANDLER’S BODY carried him rapidly toward the house.
Now and then it paused and glanced about. It seemed to be weighing some shortcut in its errand; but always it resumed its climb.
Chandler could sympathize with it, in a way. He still felt every pain from burn, brand and wound; as they neared the embers of the building the heat it threw off intensified them all. He could not be a comfortable body to inhabit for long. He was almost sympathetic because his tenant could not find a convenient weapon with which to fulfill his purpose.
When it seemed they could get no closer without the skin of his face crackling and bursting into flame his body halted.
Chandler could feel his muscles gathering for what would be the final leap into the auto-da-fe. His feet took a short stepand slipped. His body stumbled and recovered itself; his mouth swore thickly in a language he did not know.
Then his body hesitated, glanced at the ground, paused again and bent down. It had tripped on a book. It picked the book up, and Chandler saw that it was the ripped Orphalese copy of Gibran’s The Prophet.
Chandler’s body stood poised for a moment, in an attitude of thought. Then it sat down, in the play of heat from the coals.
It was a moment before Chandler realized he was free.
He tested his legs; they worked; he got up, turned and began to walk away.
He had traveled no more than a few yards when he stumbled slightly, as though shifting gears, and felt the tenant in his mind again.
He continued to walk away from the building, down toward the road. Once his arm raised the book he still carried and his eyes glanced down, as if for reassurance.
that it was the same book. That was the only clue he was given as to what had happened and it was not much. It was as though his occupying power, whatever it was, had gonesomewhereto think things over, perhaps to ask a question of an unimaginable companion, and then returned with an altered purpose.
As time passed, Chandler began to receive additional clues, but he was in little shape to fit them together, for his body was near exhaustion. He walked to the road, and waited, rigid, until a pickup truck came bouncing along.
He hailed it, his arms making a sign he did not understand, and when it stopped he addressed the driver in a language he did not speak. “Shto,” said the driver, a somber-faced Mexican in dungarees. “Ja nie jestem Ruska.
Czego pragmesh?”
“Czy ty jedziesz to Los Angeles?” asked Chandler’s . mouth.
“Nyef. Acapuico.”
Chandler’s voice argued, “Wes na Los Angeles.”
“Nyet.” The voices droned on; Chandler lost interest in the argument and was only relieved when it seemed somehow to be settled and he was herded into the back of the truck. The somber Mexican locked him in; he felt the truck begin to move; his tenant left him, and he was at once asleep.
He woke long enough to find himself standmg in the mist of early dawn at a crossroads. In a few minutes another car came by, and his voice talked earnestly with the driver for a moment. Chandler got in, was released, slept again and woke to find himself free and abandoned, sprawled across the back seat of the car, which was parked in front of a building marked Los Angeles International Airport.
Chandler got out of the car and strolled around, stretching. He realized he was very hungry.
No one was in sight. The field showed clear signs of having been through the same sort of destruction that had visited every major communications facility in the world.
Part of the building before him was smashed flat and showed signs of having been burned; he saw projecting aluminum members, twisted and scorched but still visible aircraft parts; apparently a transport had crashed into the building. Burned-out cars littered the parking lot and what had once been a green lawn. They seemed to have been bulldozed out of the way, but not an inch farther than was necessary to clear the approach roads.