Chandler’s breathing was back to normal. Why not?
“I’ll be delighted.”
“Luigi the Wharf Rat, that’s the name of it. They won’t let you in, though, unless you tell them you’re with me.
It’sspecial.” Hsi’s eye closed in Rosalie Pan’s wink.
“Half an hour,” he said, and was again himself.
He began to shake.
The waiter brought him straight whiskey and, pretense abandoned, stood by while Hsi drank it. After a moment he said, “Scares you. But1 guess we’re all right. You’d better go. Chandler. I’ll talk to you again some other time.”
Chandler stood up. But he couldn’t leave Hsi like that.
“Are you all right?”
Hsi almost managed control. “Oh1 think so. Not the first time it’s come close, you know. Sooner or later it’ll come closer still and that will be the end, butyes. I’m all right for now.”
Chandler tarried. “You were saying something about the Society of Slaves.”
“Damn it, go!” Hsi barked. “She’ll be waiting for you… . Sorry, I didn’t mean to shout. But go.” As Chandler turned, he said more quietly, “Come around to the store tomorrow. Maybe we can finish our talk then.”
LUIGI THE Wharf Rat’s was not actually on the beach but on the bank of a body of water called the Ala Wai Canal.
Across the water were the snowtopped hills. A maitred’
escorted Chandler personally to a table on a balcony, and there he waited. Rosalie’s “half-hour” was nearly two; but then he heard her calling him from across the room, in the voice which had reached a thousand second balconies, and he rose as she came near.
She said lightly, “Sorry. You ought to be flattered, though. It’s a twenty-minute driveand an hour and a half to put on my face, so you won’t be ashamed to be seen with me. Well, it’s good to be out in my own skin for a change. Let’s eat!”
The talk with Hsi had left a mark on Chandler that not even this girl’s pretty face could obscure. It was a pretty face, though, and she was obviously exerting herself to make him enjoy himself. He could not help responding to her mood.
She talked of her life on the stage, the excitement of a performance, the entertainers she had known. Her conversation was one long name-drop, but it was not vanity: the world of the famous was the world she had lived in. It was not a world that Chandler had ever visited, but he recognized the names. Rosie had been married once to an English actor whose movies Chandler had made a point of watching on television. It was interesting, in a way, to know that the man snored and lived principally on vitamin pills. But it was a view of the man that Chandler had not sought.
The restaurant drew its clientele mostly from the Execs, young ones or young-acting ones, like the girl. The coronets were all over. There had been a sign on the door: KAPU, WALIHINI!
to mark it off limits to anyone not an exec or a collaborator. Still, Chandler thought, who on the island was not a collaborator? The only effective resistance a man could make would be to kill everyone within reach and then himself, thus depriving them of slavesand that was, after all, only what the Execs themselves had done in other places often enough. It would inconvenience them only slightly. The next few planeloads or shiploads of possessed warm bodies from the mainland would be permitted to live, instead of being required to dash themselves to destruction, like the crew of the airplane that had carried Chandler. Thus the domestic stocks would be replenished.
An annoying feature of dining with Rosalie in the flesh, Chandler found, was that half a dozen times while they were talking he found himself taken, speaking words to Rosie that were not his own, usually in a language he did not understand. She took it as a matter of course; it was merely a friend, across the room or across the island, using Chandler as the casual convenience of a telephone. “Sorry,” she apologized blithely after it happened for the third time. “You don’t like that, love, do you?”
“Can you blame me?” He stopped himself from saying more; he was astonished even so at his tone.
She said it for him. “I know. It takes away your manhood, I suppose. Please don’t let it do that to you, love. We’re not so bad. Even” She hesitated, and did not go on. “You know,” she said, “I came here the same way you did. Kidnapped off the stage of the Winter Garden. Of course, the difference was the one who kid-napped me was an old friend. Though I didn’t know it at the time and it scared me half to death.”
Chandler must have looked startled. She nodded.
“You’ve been thinking of uS as another race, haven’t you?
Like the Neanderthals orwell, worse than that, maybe.”
She smiled. “We’re not. About half of us came from Russia in the first place, but the others are from all over.
You’d be astonished, really.” She mentioned several names, world-famous scientists, musicians, writers. “Of course, not everybody can qualify for the club, love. Wouldn’t be exclusive otherwise. The chief rule is loyalty. I’m loyal,”
she added gently after a moment, “and don’t you forget it.
Have to be. Whoever becomes an exec has to be with us, all the way. There are tests. It has to be that waynot only for our protection. For the world’s.”
Chandler was genuinely startled at that. Rosie nodded seriously. “If one exec should give away something he’s not supposed to, it would upset the whole applecart. There are only a thousand of us, and I guess probably two billion of you, or nearly. The result would be complete destruction.”
Of the Executive Committee, Chandler thought she meant at first, but then he thought again. No. Of the world. For the thousand execs, outnumbered though they were two million to one, could not fail to triumph. The contest would not be in doubt. If the whole thousand execs at once began systematically to kill and destroy, instead of merely playing at it as the spirit moved them, they could all but end the human race overnight. A man could be made to slash his throat in a quarter of a minute.
An exec, killing, killing, killing without pause, could destroy his own two million enemies in an eight-hour day.
And there were surer, faster ways. Chandler did not have to imagine them, he had seen them. The massacre of the Orphalese, the victims at the Monumentthey were only crumbs of destruction. What had happened to New York City showed what mass-production methods could do. No doubt there were bombs left, even if only chemical ones. Shoot, stab, crash, blow up; swallow poison, leap from window, slit throat. Every man a murderer, at the touch of a mind from Hawaii; and if no one else was near to murder, surely each man could find a victim in himself.
In one ravaging day mankind would cease to exist as a major force. In a week the only survivors would be those in such far off and hopelessly impotent places that they were not worth the trouble of tracking down.
“Yon hate us, don’t you?”
Chandler paused and tried to find an answer. Rosie was neither belligerent nor mocking. She was only sympatheti-cally trying to reach his point of view. He shook his head.
“Not meaning ‘no’meaning ‘no comment?’ Well, I don’t blame you, love. But do you see that we’re not altogether a bad thing? Until we came along the world was getting ready to kill itself anyway.”
“There’s a difference,” Chandler mumbled. He was thinking of his wife. He and Margot had loved each other as married couples dowithout any very great, searing compulsion; but with affection, with habit and with spo-radic passion. Chandler had not given much thought to the whole, though he was aware of the parts, during the last years of his marriage. It was only after Margot’s murder that he had come to know that the sum of those parts was a quite irreplaceable love.
But Rosie was shaking her head. “The difference is all on our side. Suppose Koitska’s boss had never discovered the coronets. At any moment one country might have got nervous and touched off the whole thingnot carefully, the way we did it, with most of the really dirty missiles fused safe and the others landing where they were supposed to go. I mean, touched off a war. The end, love.
The bloody finis. The ones that were killed at once would have been the lucky ones. No, love,” she said, in dead earnest, “we aren’t the worst things that ever happened to the world. Once the bad part is over, people will understand what we really are.”
“And what’s that, exactly?”
She hesitated, smiled and said modestly, “We’re gods.”