It rose hundreds of feet into the air, its top beyond the range of the floodlights, its base fogged by driving snow.
Chandler looked again; no, it was not a single skyscraper but two of them, two tall steel towers, one like an elongated projectile standing on its tail, tHe other like the Eiffel Tower, torn out of context.
Someone caught Chandler’s arm and bellowed hoarsely: “Come on, darling! That is you, isn’t it? Come over here where Djelenko’s handing out the guns.”
He recognized Rosalie, clad in the corpus of a Siberian yak-herder, and followed her docilely toward a man who was unlocking a concrete bunker. It was not only the girl he had recognized. With an active shock of surprise he saw that the twin towers were a rocket and its gantry. By the size of it, an orbital rocket at the least.
“I didn’t think there were any satellites left!” he bellowed into the flat, dirty ear that was at present the prop-erty of Rosalie Pan.
The broad, dark-browed face turned toward him.
“This’un’s about the last, I guess,” she shouted. “Wouldn’t be out in this mess otherwise! Miserable weather, ain’t it?”
She pushed him toward the bunker. “Go see Djelenko, love! Faster we get to work, faster we get this over with.”
But Djelenko was shouting something at them that Chandler could not understand.
“Oh, damn,” cried Rosalie. “Love, you went and got yourself the wrong body. This chap’s one of the old experts. Zip out of it and pick yourself a nice Mongol like mine.”
Confused, Chandler brought his body’s fist up before his eyes. The hand was calloused, scarred and twisted with coldand one finger, its nail mashed, was trying its best to hurt in the numbing chill of the Siberian airbut the fingers had started out to be long and white. They were not the blunt fists of the yak-herders.
“Sorry,” shouted Chandler, and took himself out of the body.
What price the Orphalese? What price the murder of so many innocents, including his own wife? For them, and all of them, Chandler did not have a thought. This was his tryout at the spring training of the team, his first day on the new job. Conscientiously he was attempting to acquire the knack of being a demon.
If he regretted anything at this moment, it was only his own lack of expertise. He wished he were a better demon than he was. He hung irresolute in the queemess of this luminous, distorted sea. He saw the sand-dweller he had just quit, moving in its shapeless way toward the place where he knew the gantries stood. There were others like it aboutbut which should he enter? He swore to himself.
No doubt there were recognition marks that were easy enough to find; neither Rosalie nor the other members of the Exec seemed to have much difficulty making their way about. But he lacked pieces for the puzzle, and he was confused.
He reasoned the pattern out: The gantries meant a rocket flight. The European body he had tenanted for a moment was not native to the region: a slave expert, no doubt, once perhaps an official on this project and now impressed into the service of the executive committee. No doubt the Mongols were mere warm bodies, casually commandeered from their nearby villages, to be used for haul-and-lift labor as need be.
Probably the largest groups of doll-bodies would be the Mongols; so he selected one at random, entered it and stood up again into the noise and pain of the freezing gale.
He had a pick in his hand. There were forty or fifty like him in this work crew, digging with antlike tenacityand antlike resultsinto the flinty, frozen ground. Apparently they were trying to set stakes to help moor the gantries against the gale.
He dropped the pick and rubbed numbed fingers together. He realized at once that he had not chosen a very good body. For one thing, it had a squint which made everything look fuzzy and doubled; until he learned to adjust to it he was almost blind. For another, it ached with the effects of a very long time of forced labor and hunger. And it was lousy.
Well, he thought, I can stand anything for a while. Let’s get to work… . And then he saw that a body very like his ownbut a body which was inhabited by a member of the Exec, since it was carrying a riflegestured to him, screaming something he could not understand.
He doesn’t know I am me, thought Chandler, half amused. He started toward the rifleman. “Wait a minute,”
he called. “I’m Chandler. I’m ready to go to work, if you’ll just tell me what tohey! Wait!”
He was very surprised to see that the rifleman was not even making an attempt to understand him. The figure raised its rifle, pointed it at him and fired. That was all.
Chandler was very seriously annoyed. It was a clear, careless matter of mistaken identity, he thought angrily.
How stupid of the man!
He felt the first shock of the bullet entering his body but did not wait for more. He did not linger to taste death, or even pain. Before either could reach his mind he was up and out of the body again, fuming and mad. Stupid! he thought. Somebody ought to get called down for this!
A dizzying sense of falling. A soundless explosion of light.
Then he was back in a body: his own.
He picked himself up and stood looking out of Rosalie Pan’s picture window onto the thin green lawn, still angry.
He had been turned off. Somehow Koitska, or whatever other member of the executive committee had been watching over him, had observed his blundering. His relay coronet had been turned off, and he was back in Hawaii.
Well, he thought grudgingly, that part was all right. He probably was better off out of the wayat least, if they didn’t have sense enough to brief him ahead of time. But the rest of the affair was plain stupidity! He had been frozen, scared and pushed about for nothing!
He rubbed his ear angrily. It was soft and warm, not the chilled, numbed thing he had worn moments before.
He muttered imprecations at the damned foolishness of the executive committee. If he couldn’t run things better than they, he told himself, he would just give up… .
Ten or fifteen minutes later it occurred to him that he had not, after all, been the greatest loser from that particular blunder.
A few minutes later still something else occurred to him.
He was not merely beginning to live the life of the execs; he was beginning to think like them, too.
An hour later Rosalie came lightly down the stairs, yawning and stretching. “Love,” she cried, catching sight of Chandler, “you really screwed that one up. Can’t you tell a Kraut missile expert from a Mongolian cowboy?”
Chandler said glumly, “No.”
She said consolingly, but with a touch of annoyance, too, “Oh, don’t be frightful, love. I know it was a disappointment, but”
“It must’ve disappointed the man I got killed, too,” said Chandler.
“You are being frightful. Well, I understand.” She patted his arm. “It’s the waiting. It’s so nervous-making.
Embarrassing, too.”
“How would you know?”
“Why, love,” she said, “don’t you think I went through it myself? But it passes, dear, it passes. Meanwhile come have a drink.”
Moodily Chandler allowed the girl to soothe him, although he thought she was taking far too light a view of it. He accepted the Scotch from her and tasted it without comment.
“Is something wrong with it, love?”
He said patiently, “You know I don’t like too much water in a drink.”
“I’m sorry, love.”
He shrugged.
Well, he thought, she was right. In a way. He was indeed being frightful. He did not see why she would respond with annoyance, however. He had a right to act a little odd, when he was, after all, betraying all of his friends, even the memory of his dead wife. She certainly could not expect him to take all of that in his stride, without a moment’s regret.
Rosalie yawned and smothered it. “I’m sorry, love.
Funny how it tires you out to work in somebody else’s body!”
“Yes.”
“Oh, really, now!” she was angry at last. “For cat’s sake, love! Mooning around like a puppy that’s been swatted for making a mess!”
He said, “I’m sorry if I have been in any way annoying to”
“Come off it! This is Rosie you’re talking to.” She cradled his head in her arm like a motheran irritated mother, but a mother. ” ‘Smarter? Are you scared?”
He put down the Scotch and admitted, “A little bit. I think so.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so? Dear heart, everybody’s scared waiting for the votes to come in. Very nervous-making waiting to know.”