Still, the next morning, following the directions the desk orderly had given. Chandler boarded a pink and silver bus that took him to downtown Honolulu. The driver did not collect any fares. Chandler got off, as directed, at Fort Street and walked a few blocks to the address he had been given. The name of the place was Parts ‘n Plenty. He found it easily enough. It was a radio parts store; by the size of it, it had once been a big, well-stocked one; but now the counters were almost bare.
A thin-faced man with khaki-colored skin looked up and nodded. Chandler nodded back. He fingered a bin of tuning knobs, hefted a coil of two-strand antenna wire and said, “A fellow at Tripler told me to come here to pick up equipment, but I’m damned if I know what I’m supposed to do when I locate it. I don’t have any money.”
The dark-skinned man got up and came over to him.
“Figured you for a malihini. No sweat. Have you got a list?”
“I can make one.”
“All right. Catalogues on the table behind you, if you want them.” He offered Chandler a cigarette and sat against the edge of the counter, reading over Chandler’s shoulder. “Ho,” he said suddenly. “Koitska’s square-wave generator again, right?” Chandler admitted it, and the man grinned. “Every couple months he sends somebody along, Mr.?”
“Chandler.”
“Glad to know you. I’m John Hsi. Don’t go easy on the job just because Koitska doesn’t really need it. Chandler; it could be pretty important to you.”
Chandler absorbed the information silently and handed over his list. The man did not look at it. “Come back in about an hour,” he said.
“I won’t have any money in an hour, either.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I’ll put it on Koitska’s bill.”
Chandler said frankly, “Look, I don’t know what’s going on. Suppose I came in and picked up a thousand dollars worth of stuff, would you put that on the bill, too?”
“Certainly,” said Hsi optimistically. “You thinking about stealing parts? What would you do with them?”
“Well…” Chandler puffed on his cigarette. “Well, I could”
“No, you couldn’t. Also, it wouldn’t pay, believe me,”
Hsi said seriously. “If there is one thing that doesn’t pay, it is cheating on the Exec.”
“Now, that’s another good question,” said Chandler.
“Who is the Exec?”
Hsi shook his head. “Sorry. I don’t know you. Chandler.”
“You mean you’re afraid even to answer a question?”
“You’re damned well told I am. Probably nobody would mind what I might tell you… but ‘probably’ isn’t good enough.”
Exasperated, Chandler said, “How the devil am I supposed to know what to do next? So I take all this junk back to my room at Tripler and solder up the generator then what?”
“Then Koitska will get in touch with you,” Hsi said, not unkindly. “Play it as it comes to you, Chandler, that’s the best advice I can offer.” He hesitated. “Koitska’s not the worst of them,” he said; and then, daringly, “and maybe he’s not the best, either. Just do whatever he told you.
Keep on doing it until he tells you to do something else.
That’s all. I mean, that’s all the advice I can give you.
Whether it’s going to be enough to satisfy Koitska is something else again.”
There is not much to do in a strange town when you have no money. Chandler’s room at what once had been Tripler General Hospital was free; the bus was free; evidently all the radio parts he could want were also free. But he did not have the price of a cup of coffee or a haircut in the pockets of the suntan slacks the desk man at Tripler had issued him. He wandered around the streets of Honolulu, waiting for the hour to be up.
At Tripler a doctor had also examined his scar and it was now concealed under a neat white bandage; he had been fed; he had bathed; he had been given new clothes.
Tripler was a teeming metropolis in itself, a main building some ten storeys high, a scattering of outbuildings connect-ed to it by covered passages, with thousands of men and women busy about it. Chandler had spoken to a good many of them in the hour after waking up and before boarding the bus to Honolulu, and none of them had been free with information either.
Honolulu had not suffered greatly under the rule of the Exec. Remembering the shattered stateside cities, Chandler thought that this one had been incredibly fortunate. Daw-dling down King Street, in the aromatic reek of the fish markets. Chandler could have thought himself in any port city before the grisly events of that Christmas when the planet went possessed. Crabs waved sluggishly at him from bins; great pinkscaled fish rested on nests of ice, waiting to be sold; smells of frying food came from half a dozen restaurants.
It was only the people who were different. There was a solid sprinkling of those who, like himself, were dressed in insignia-less former Army uniformsobviously conscripts on Exec errandsand a surprising minority who, from overheard snatches of conversation, had come from countries other than the U.S.A. Russian mostly, Chandler guessed; but Russian or American, wearing suntans or aloha shirts, everyone he saw was marked by the visible signs of strain. There was no laughter.
Chandler saw a clock within the door of a restaurant; half an hour still to kill. He turned and wandered up, away from the water, toward the visible bulk of the hills; and in a moment he saw what made Honolulu’s collective face wear its careworn frown.
It was an open squareperhaps it had once been a war memorialand in the center of it was a fenced-off paved area where people seemed to be resting. It struck Chandler as curious that so many persons should have decided to take a nap on what surely was an uncomfortable bed of flat concrete; he approached and saw that they were not resting. Not only his eyes but his ears conveyed the messageand his nose, too, for the mild air was fetid with blood and rot.
These were not sleeping men and women. Some were dead; some were unconscious; all were maimed. The pave-ment was slimed with their blood. None had the strength to scream, but several were moaning and even some of the unconscious ones gasped like the breathing of a man in diabetic coma. Passersby walked briskly around the metal fence, and if their glances were curious it was at Chandler they looked, not at the tortured wrecks before them. He understood that the sight of the dying men and women was familiarwas painfuland thus was ignored; it was himself who was the curiosity, for staring at them. He turned and fled, trying not to vomit.
He was still shaken when he returned to Parts ‘n Plenty.
The hour was up but Hsi shook his head. “Not yet.
You can sit down over there if you like.” Chandler slumped into the indicated swivel chair and stared blankly at the wall.
The terror he had just seen was far worse than anything stateside; the random slaughter of murders and bombs was at least a momentary thing, and when it was done it was done; but this was sustained torture. He buried his head in his hands and did not look up until he heard the sound of a door opening.
Hsi, his face somehow different, was manipulating a lever on the outside of a door while a man inside, becoming visible as the door opened, was doing the same from inside.
It looked as though the lock on the door would not work unless both levers operated; and the man on the inside, whom Chandler had not seen before, was dressed, oddly, only in bathing trunks. His face wore the same expression as Hsi’s.
Chandler guessed (with practice it was becoming easy!) that both were possessed. The man inside wheeled out two shopping carts loaded with electronic equipment of varying kinds, wordlessly received some empty ones from Hsi; and the door closed on him again.
Hsi tugged the lever down, turned, biinked and said, “All right, Chandler. Your stuff’s here.”
Chandler approached. “What was that all about?”
“Go to hell!” Hsi said with sudden violence. “I Oh, never mind. Sorry. But I told you already, ask somebody else your questions, not me.”
He gloomily began to pack the items on Chandler’s list into a cardboard carton. Then he glanced at Chandler and said, half apologetically, “These are tough times, buddy. I guess there’s no harm in answering some questions. You want to know why most of my stock’s locked behind an armor-plate door? Well, you ought to be able to figure that out for yourself, anyway. The Exec doesn’t like to have people playing with radios. Bert stays in the stockroom; I stay out here; twice a day the bosses open the door and we fill whatever orders they’ve approved. A little rough on Bert, of courseit’s a ten-hour day in the stockroom for him, and nothing to do. But it could be worse. Oh, that’s for sure, friend: It could be worse.”