There was no sound. No one moved. No gun fired at him, no danger threatened.
He was free; he took a step, turned, shook his head and proved it.
He was free and, in a moment, realized that he was in the building with the fat bloated body of the man who wanted to murder him, the body that in its own strength could scarcely stand erect.
It was suicide to attempt to harm an exec. He would certainly lose his lifeexceptthat was gone already any-how; he had lost it. He had nothing left to lose.
xvm
CHANDLER LOPED silently up the stairs to Koitska’s suite.
Halfway up he tripped and sprawled, half stunning himself against the stair rail. It had not been his own clumsiness, he was sure. Koitska had caught at his mind again. But only feebly. Chandler did not wait. Whatever was interfering with Koitska’s control, some distraction or malfunction of the coronet or whatever. Chandler could not bank on its lasting.
The door was locked.
He found a heavy mahogany chair, with a back of solid carved wood. He flung it onto his shoulders, grunting, and ran with it into the door, a bull driven frantic, lunging out of its querencia to batter the wall of the arena. The door splintered.
Chandler was gashed with long slivers of wood, but he was through the door.
Koitska lay sprawled along his couch, eyes staring.
Alive or dead? Chandler did not wait to find out but sprang at him with hands outstretched. The staring eyes flickered; Chandler felt the pull at his mind. But Koitska’s strength was almost gone. The eyes glazed, and Chandler was upon him. He ripped the coronet off and flung it aside, and the huge bulk of Koitska swung paralytically off the couch and fell to the floor.
The man was helpless. He lay breathing like a steam engine, one eye pressed shut against the leg of a coffee table, the other looking up at Chandler.
Chandler was panting almost as hard as the helpless mass at his feet. He was safe for a moment. At the most for a moment, for at any time one of the other execs might dart down out of the mind-world into the real, looking at the scene through Chandler’s eyes and surely deducing what would be even less to his favor than the truth. He had to get away from there. If he seemed busy in another room perhaps they would go away again.
Chandler turned his back on the paralyzed monster to flee.
It would be even better to try to lose himself in Honoluluif he could get that farhe did not in his own flesh know how to fly the helicopter that was parked in the yard or he would try to get farther still.
But as he turned he was caught.
Chandler’s body turned to see Koitska lying there, and screamed.
His eyes were staring at Koitska. It was too late. He was possessed by someone, he did not know whom. Though it made little enough difference, he thought, watching his own hands reach out to touch the staring face.
His body straightened, his eyes looked around the room, he went to the desk. “Love,” he cried to himself, “what’s the matter with Koitska? Write, for God’s sake!” And he took a pencil in his hand and was free.
He hesitated, then scribbled: I cMt know. I think he had a stroke. Who are you?
The other mind slipped tentatively into his, scanning the paper. “Rosie, you idiot, who did you think?” he said furiously. “What have you done?”
Nothing, he began instinctively, then scratched the word out. Briskly and exactly he wrote: He was going to kill me, but he had some kind of an attack. I took his coronet away. I was going to run.
“Oh, you fool,” he told himself shrilly a moment later.
Chandler’s body knelt beside the wheezing fat lump, taking its pulse. The faint, fitful throb meant nothing to Chandler; probably meant nothing to Rosie either, for his body stood up, hesitated, shook its head. “You’ve done it now,”
hesobbed, and was surprised to find he was weeping real tears. “Oh, love, why? I could have taken care of Koitskasomehow No, maybe I couldn’t,” he said frantically, breaking down. “I don’t know what to do. Do you have any ideasoutside of running?”
It took him several seconds to write the one word, but it was really all he could find to write. No.
His lips twisted as his eyes read the word. “Well,” he said practically, “I guess that’s the end, love. I mean, I give up.”
He got up, turned around the room. “I don’t know,” he told himself worriedly. “There might be a chanceif we could hush this up. I’d better get a doctor. He’ll have to use your body, so don’t be surprised if there’s someone and it isn’t me. Maybe he can pull Andrei through. Maybe Andrei’ll forgive you then Or if he dies,” Chandler’s voice schemed as his eyes stared at the rasping motionless hulk, “we can say you broke down the door to help him.
Only you’ll have to put his coronet back on, so it won’t look suspicious. Besides that will keep anyone from occupying him. Do that, love. Hurry.” And he was free.
Gingerly Chandler crossed the floor.
He did not like to touch the dying animal that wheezed before him, liked even less to give it back the weapon that, if it had as much as five minutes of sentience again, it would use to kill him. But the girl was right. Without the helmet any wandering curious exec might possess Koitska himself. The helmet would shield him from Would shield anyone from
Would shield even Chandler himself from possession if he used it!
He did not hesitate. He slipped the helmet on his head, snapped the switch and in a moment stood free of his own body, in the gray, luminous limbo, looking down at the pallid traceries that lay beneath.
He did not pause to think or plan; it was as though he had planned every step, in long detail, over many years.
Chandler for at least a few moments had the freedom to battle the execs on their own ground, the freedom that any mourning parent or husband in the outside world would know well how to use.
Chandler also knew how. He was a weapon.
The coronet that he wore now was no limited, monitored slave device; it was Koitska’s own. While he wore it Chandler could not be touched.
Perhaps it was the aftermath of these wearing, terrifying days; perhaps it was the residual poison of his morning of drinking and night of little sleep. Chandler felt both placid and prepared. There would be a way to use this weapon against the Exec, and he would find it. Margot, Ellen Braisted, Meggie, Hsia billion othersall would be revenged. He would very likely die for it, but he was a dead man anyway.
In any case it was not a great thing to die; millions had done it for nothing under the rule of the execs, and he was privileged to be able to die trying to kill them.
He stepped callously around the hulk on the floor and found a door behind the couch, a door and a hall, and at the end of that hall a large room that had once perhaps been a message center. Now it held rack after rack of electronic gear. He recognized it without elation.
It was the main transmitter for all the coronets of the exec.
He had only to pull one switchthat one thereand power would cease to flow. The coronets would be dead.
The execs would be only human beings again. In five minutes he could destroy enough parts that it would be at least a week’s work to build it again, and in a week the slaves in Honolulusomehow he could reach them, somehow he would tell them of their chancecould root out and destroy every exec on all the islands.
Of course, there was the standby transmitter he himself had helped to build.
He realized tardily that Koitska would have made some arrangement for starting that up by remote control.
He put down the tool-kit with which he had been advancing on the racks of transistors, and paused to think.
He was a fool, he saw after a moment. He could not destroy this installationnot yetnot until he had used it.
He remembered to sit down so that his body would not crash to the floor, and then he sent himself out and up, to scan the nearby area.
There was no one there, nobody within a mile or more, except the feeble glimmer that was dying Koitska. He did not enter that body. He returned to his own long enough to lock the door, and then he went up and out, grateful to Rosalie, who had taught him how to navigate in the curious world of the mind, flashing across water to the island of Hilo.