She had left him. They had kissed with increasing passion, his hands playing about her, her body surging toward him, and then, just then, she whispered, “No, love.” He held her tighter and without another word she opened her eyes and looked at him.
He knew what mind it was that caught him then. It was her mind. Stiffly, like wood, he released her, stood up, walked to the door and locked it behind him.
The lights in the villa went out. He stood there, boiling, looking into the shadows through the great, wide, empty window. He could see her lying there on the couch, and as he watched he saw her body toss and stir; and as surely as he had ever known anything before he knew that somewhere in the world some womanor some man!lay locked with a lover, violent in love, and was unable to tell the other that a third party had invaded their bed.
Chandler did not know it until he saw something glis-tening on his wrist, but he was weeping on the wild ride back to Honolulu in the car. Her car. Would there be trouble for his taking it? God, let there be trouble! He was in a mood for trouble. He was sick and wild with revul-sion.
Worse than her use of him, a casual stimulant, an aphrodisiac touch, was that she thought what she did was right. Chandler thought of the worshipping dozens under the sundeck of the exec restaurant, and Rosalie’s gracious benediction as they made her their floral offerings. Blind, pathetic fools!
Not only the deluded men and women in the garden were worshippers trapped in a vile religion, he thought. It was worse. The gods and goddesses worshipped at their own divinity as well!
THREE DAYS later Koitska’s voice, coming from Chandler’s lips, summoned him out to the TWA shack again.
Wise now in the ways of this world, Chandler commandeered a police car and was hurried out to the South Gate, where the guards allowed him a car of his own. The door of the building was unlocked and Chandler went right up.
He was astonished. The fat man was actually sitting up.
He was fully dressedmore or less; incongruously he wore flowered shorts and a bright red, short-sleeve shirt, with rope sandals. His coronet perched on his plump old head; curiously, he carried another, less ornate one. He said, “You fly a gilikopter? No? No difference. Help me.” An arm like a mountain went over Chandler’s shoulders. The man must have weighed three hundred pounds. Slowly, wheezing, he limped toward the back of the .room and touched a button.
A door opened.
Chandler had not known before that there was an elevator in the building; that was one of the things the Exec did not consider important for his slaves to know.
The elevator lowered them with great grace and delicacy to the first floor, where a large old Cadillac, ancient but immaculately kept, the kind that used to be called a “gangster’s car,” waited in a private parking bay.
Chandler followed Koitska’s directions and drove to an airfield where a small, Plexiglass-nosed helicopter waited.
More by the force of Chandler pushing him from behind than through his own fat thighs, Koitska puffed up the little staircase into the cabin. Originally the copter had been fitted for four passengers. Now there was the pilot’s seat and a seat beside it, and in the back a wide, soft couch. Koitska collapsed onto it, clutching the extra coronet. His face blanked outhe was, Chandler knew, somewhere else, just then.
In a moment his eyes opened again. He looked at Chandler with no interest at all, and turned his face to the wall.
After a moment he wheezed. “Sit down. At de controls.” He breathed noisily for a while. Then, “It von’t pay you to be interested in Rosalie,” he said.
Chandler was startled. He craned around in the seat but saw only Koitska’s back. “I’m not! Or anyway” But he had no place to go in that sentence, and in any case Koitska no longer seemed interested.
After a moment, Koitska stirred, settled himself more comfortablyand Chandler felt himself taken.
He turned, easily and surely, to face the split wheel and the unfamiliar pedals of the helicopter. He started the motor, scanned the panels of instruments, and through maneuvers which he did not understand but whose effect was accurate and sure, caused the machine to roar, tilt and whir up and away. It was an admirable performance.
Chandler could not guess what member of the Exec was inhabiting his body at that moment; there were no clues; but whoever it was, it had turned him into a first-class helicopter pilot.
For more than an hour Chandler was imprisoned in his own body, without let or intermission. Flying a helicopter, it seemed, was a job without coffee breaks. The remote.
exec who was controlling him did not trust his attention away even for a moment.
It was like being the prisoner of a dream, thought Chandler, watching his right hand advance a throttle and his feet press the guiding pedals. From time to time his head turned and his voice spoke over his shoulder to Koitska; but as the conversation seemed to be in Russian or Polish he gleaned nothing from it. There was not much talk, though; the fluttering roar of the vanes overhead drowned out most sounds. Chandler fell into a light, somber, not unpleasant reverie, thinking of Ellen Braisted and the Orphalese, of the girl Rosalie Pan and the fat, murderous slug behind him. It occurred to him, as a phenomenon worthy of study, that he was actually aiding and abetting the monsters who had destroyed his own wife and caused him to defile a silly but blameless girl… .
The moral issues were too deep for him. He preferred to think of Rosalie Pan, and then of nothing at all.
They crossed a wide body of ocean and approached another island; from one quick glance at a navigation map that his eyes had taken, Chandler guessed it to be Hilo. He landed the craft expertly on the margin of a small airstrip, where two DC-3s were already parked and being unloaded, and felt himself free again.
Two husky young men) apparently native Hawaiians by their size, rolled up a ramp and assisted Koitska down it and into a building. Chandler was left to his own devices.
“The building was rundown but sound. Around it stalky grass clumped, long uncut, and a few mauve and scarlet blossoms, almost hidden, showed where someone had once tended beds of bougainvillea and poinsettias.
He could not guess what the building had been doing there, looking like a small office-factory combination out in the remote wilds, until he caught sight of a sign the winds had blown against a wall: Dole. Apparently this had been headquarters for one of the plantations. Now it was stripped almost clean inside, a welter of desks and rusted machines piled heedlessly outside where there once had been a parking lot. New equipment was being loaded into it from the cargo planes. Chandler recognized some of it as from the list he had given the parts man, Hsi. There also seemed to be a gasoline-driven generatora large one but what the other things were he could not guess.
Besides Koitska, there were at least five coronet-wearing execs visible around the place. Chandler was not surprised. It would have to be something big to winkle these torpid slugs out of their shells, but he knew what it was, and that it was big enough to them indeed.
In fact it was their lives. He deduced that Koitska’s plans for his future comfort required a standby transmitter to service the coronets, in case something went wrong perhaps a slightly modified one, judging by the extra coronet Koitska had brought. And clearly it was this that they were to put together here.
For ten hours, while the afternoon became dark night, they worked at a furious pace. When the sun set one of the execs gestured and the generator was started, rocking on its rubber-tired wheels as its rotors spun and fumes chugged out, and they worked on by strings of incandes-cent lights.
It was pick-and-shovel work for Chandler. No engineering, just unloading and roughly grouping the equipment where it was ready to be assembled. The execs did not take part in the work. Nor were they idle. They busied themselves in one room of the building with some small deviceChandler could not see whatand when he looked again it was gone. He did not see them take it away and did not know where it was taken. Toward midnight he suddenly realized that it was likely some essential part which they would not permit anyone but themselves to handle … and that, no doubt, was why they had come in person, instead of working through proxies.
Weary as he was, that realization seemed pregnant with possibilities to Chandler. What could be so important?