Chandler marched himself out of the room and out into the driveway before his voice said to him: “You’ve secured a position, then. Go back to Tripler until we send for you.
It’ll be a few days, I expect.”
And Chandler was free again.
He was also alone. The girl in the Porsche was gone.
The door to the TWA building had latched itself behind him. He stared around him, swore, shrugged and circled the building to the parking lot at back on the chance that a car might be there for him to borrow.
Luckily there wasthere were four, in fact, all with keys in them. He selected a Ford, puzzled out the likeliest road back to Honolulu and turned the key in the starter.
It was fortunate, he thought, that there had been several cars; if there had been only one he would not have dared to take it, for fear of stranding Koitska or some other Exec who might easily blot him out in annoyance. He did not wish to join the wretches at the Monument.
It was astonishing how readily fear had become a part of his life.
The trouble with this position he had somehow securedone of the troubleswas that there was no union delegate to settle employee grievances. Like no transportation. Like no clear idea of working hours, or duties. Like no mention at allof courseof wages.
Chandler had no idea what his rights were, if any at all, or of what the penalties would be if he overstepped them.
The maimed victims at the Monument supplied a clue, of course. He could not really believe that that sort of punishment would be applied for minor infractions. Death was so much less trouble. Even death was not really likely, he thought, for a simple lapse.
He thought.
He could not be sure, of course. He could be sure of only one thing: He was now a slave, completely a slave, a slave until the day he died. Back on the mainland there was the statistical likelihood of occasional slavery-by-possession, yet; but there it was only the body that was enslaved, and only for moments. Here, in the shadow of the Execs, it was all of him, forever, until death or a miracle turned him loose.
On the second day follovidng, he returned to his room at Tripler after breakfast, and found a Honolulu city policeman sitting hollow-eyed on the edge of his bed. The man stood up as Chandler came in. “So,” he grumbled, “you take so long! Here. Is diagrams, specs, parts lists, all.
You get everything three days from now, then we begin.”
The policeman, no longer Koitska, shook himself, glanced stolidly at Chandler and walked out, leaving a thick manila envelope on the pillow. On it was written, in a crabbed hand: All secret! Do not show diagrams f Chandler opened the envelope and spilled its contents on the bed.
An hour later he realized that sixty minutes had passed in which he had not been afraid. It was good to be working again, he thought, and then that thought faded away again as he returned to studying the sheaves of circuit diagrams and closely typed pages of specifications.
It was not only work, it was hard work, and absorbing.
Chandler knew enough about the very short wavelength radio spectrum to know that the device he was supposed to build was no proficiency test; this was for real. The more he puzzled over it the less he could understand of its purpose. There was a transmitter and there was a receiver.
Astonishingly, neither was directional: that ruled out ra-dar, for example. He rejected immediately the thought that the radiation was for spectrum analysis, as in the Cal Tech projectunfortunate, because that was the only application with which he had first-hand familiarity; but impossible. The thing was too complicated. Nor could it be a simple message transmitterno, perhaps it could, assuming there was a reason for using the submillimeter bands instead of the conventional, far simpler shortwave spectrum. Could it? The submillimeter waves were line-of-sight, of course, but would ionosphere scatter make it possible for them to cover great distances? He could not remember.
Or was that irrelevant, since perhaps they needed only to cover the distances between islands in their own archipelago? But then, why all the power? And in any case, what about this fantastic switching panel, hundreds of square feet of it even though it was transistorized and subminiaturized and involving at least a dozen sophisti-cated technical refinements he hadn’t the training quite to understand? AT&T could have handled every phone call in the United States with less switching than thisin the days when telephone systems spanned a nation instead of a fraction of a city. He pushed the papers together in a pile and sat back, smoking a cigarette, trying to remember what he could of the theory behind submilUmeter radiation.
At half a million megacycles and up the domain of quantum theory began to be invaded. Rotating gas mole-cules, constricted to a few energy states, responded directly to the radio waves. Chandler remembered late-night bull sessions in Pasadena during which it had been pointed out that the possibilities in the field were enormousalthough only possibilities, for there was no engineering way to reach them, and no clear theory to point the way suggesting such strange ultimate practical applications as the receiverless radio, for example. Was that what he had here?
He gave up. It was a question that would burn at him until he found the answer, but iust now he had work to do, and he’d better be doing it. Skipping lunch entirely, he carefully checked the components lists, made a copy of what he would need, put the original envelope and its contents in the safe at the main receiving desk and caught the bus to Honolulu.
At the Parts ‘n Plenty store, Hsi read the list with a faint frown that turned into a puzzled scowl. When he put it down he looked at Chandler for a few moments without speaking.
“Well, Hsi? Can you get all this for me?” The parts man shrugged and nodded. “Koitska said in three days.”
Hsi looked startled, then resigned. “That puts it right up to me, doesn’t it? All right. Wait a moment.”
He disappeared in the back of the store, where Chandler heard him talking on what was evidently an intercom system. He came back in a few minutes and slipped Chandler’s list into a slit in the locked door. “Tough for Bert,” he said. “He’ll be working all night, getting startedbut I can take it easy till tomorrow. By then he’ll know what we don’t have, and I’ll find some way to get it.” He shrugged again, but his face was lined. Chandler wondered how one went about finding, for example, a thirty megawatt klystron tube; but it was Hsi’s problem.
He said;
“All right, ril see you Monday.”
“Wait a minute, Chandler.” Hsi eyed him. “You don’t have anything special to do, do you? Well, come have dinner with me. Maybe I can get to know you. Then maybe I can answer some of your questions, if you like.”
They took a bus out Kapiolani Boulevard, then got out and walked a few blocks to a restaurant named Mother Chee’s. Hsi was well known there, it seemed. He led Chandler to a booth at the back, nodded to the waiter, ordered without looking at the menu and sat back. “The food’s all fish,” he said. “You’ll only find meat in the places where the Execs sometimes go… . Tell me something, Chandler. What’s that scar on your forehead?”
Chandler touched it, almost with surprise. Since the medics had treated it he had almost forgotten it was there.
He said, “What’s the score? You testing me, too? Want to see if I’ll lie about it?”
Hsi grinned. “Sorry. I guess that’s what I was doing. I do know what an ‘H’ stands for; we’ve seen them before.
Not many. The ones that do get this far usually don’t last long. Unless, of course, they are working for somebody whom it wouldn’t do to offend,” he explained.
“So what you want to know, then, is whether I was really hoaxing or not. Does it make any difference?”
“Damn right it does, man! We’re slaves, but we’re not animals!” Chandler had gotten to him; the parts man looked startled, then sallow, as he observed his own vehemence.
“Sorry, Hsi. It makes a difference to me, too. Well, I wasn’t hoaxing. I was possessed, just like any other every-day rapist, only I couldn’t prove it. And it didn’t look too good for me, because the damn thing happened in a pharmaceuticals plant. That was supposed to be about the only place in town where you could be sure you wouldn’t be possessed, or so everybody thought. Including me. Up to the time I went ape.”
Hsi nodded. The waiter approached with their drinks.