Hsi looked at him appraisingly, then did a curious thing.
He gripped his left wrist with his right hand, quickly, then released it again. The waiter did not appear to notice.
Expertly he served the drinks, folded small pink floral napkins, dumped and wiped their ashtray in one motion and then, so quickly that Chandler was not quite sure he had seen it, caught Hsi’s wrist in the same fleeting gesture just before he turned and walked away.
Without comment Hsi turned back to Chandler. He said, “I believe you. Would you like to know why it happened? Because I think I can tell you. The Execs have all the antibiotics they need now.”
“You mean” Chandler hesitated.
“That’s right. They did leave some areas alone, as long as they weren’t fully stocked on everything they might want for the foreseeable future. Wouldn’t you?”
“I might,” Chandler said cautiously, “if I knew what I wasbeing an Exec.”
Hsi said, “Eat your dinner. I’ll take a chance and tell you what I know.” He swallowed his whiskey-on-the-rocks wth a quick backward jerk of the head. “They’re mostly Russiansyou must know that much for yourself.
The whole thing started in Russia.”
Chandler said, “Well, that’s pretty obvious. But Russia was smashed up as much as anywhere else. The whole Russian government was killedwasn’t it?”
Hsi nodded. “They’re not the government. Not the Exec. Communism doesn’t mean any more to them than the Declaration of Independence doeswhich is nothing.
It’s very simple. Chandler: they’re a project that got out of hand.”
Back three years ago, he said, in Russia, it started in the last days of the Second Stalinite Regime, before the neo-Khrushchevists took over power in the January Push.
The Western World had not known exactly what was going on, of course. Russia had become queerer and even more opaque after the Maoist trials and the revival of such fine old Soviet institutions as the Gay Pay Oo. That was the development called the Freeze, when the Stalinites seized control in the name of the sacred Generalissimo of the Soviet Fatherland, a mighty-missile party, dedicated to bringing about the world revolution by force of sputnik.
The neo-Khrushchevists, on the other hand, believed that honey caught more flies than vinegar; and, although there were few visible adherents to that philosophy during the purges of the Freeze, they were not all dead. Then, out of the Donbas Electrical Workshop, came sudden support for their point of view.
It was a weapon. It was more than a weapon, an irresistible toolmore than that, the way to end all dis-putes forever.
It was a simple radio transmitter (Hsi said)or so it seemed, but its frequencies were on an unusual band and its effects were remarkable. It controlled the minds of men.
The “receiver” was the human brain. Through this little portable transmitter, surgically patch-wired to the brain of the person operating it, his entire personality was transmitted in a pattern of very short waves which could invade and modulate the personality of any other human being in the world.
“What’s the matter?” Hsi interrupted himself, staring at Chandler. Chandler had stopped eating, his hand frozen midway to his mouth. He shook his head.
“Nothing. Go on.” Hsi shrugged and continued.
While the Western World was celebrating Christmas the Christmas before the first outbreak of possession in the outside worldthe man who invented the machine was secretly demonstrating it to another man. Both of. them were now dead; the inventor had been a Pole, the other man a former Party leader who, four years before, had pardoned the inventor’s dying father from a Siberian work camp. The Party leader had reason to congratulate himself on that loaf cast on the water. There were only three working models of the transmitterwhat ultimately was refined into the coronet Chandler had seen on the heads of Koitska and the girlbut that was enough for the January Push.
The Stalinites were out. The neo-Khrushchevists were in.
A whole factory in the Donbas was converted to manu-facturing these little mental controllers as fast as they could be producedand that was fast, for they were simple in design to begin with and were quickly refined to a few circuits. Even the surgical wiring to the brain became unnecessary as induction coils tapped the encephalic rhythms. Only the great amplifying hookup was really complicated. Only one of those was necessary, for a single amplifier could serve as rebroadcaster-modulator for thousands of the headsets.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Hsi demanded.
Chandler put down his fork, lit a cigarette and beckoned to the waiter. “I’m all right. I just want another drink.”
He needed it, for now he knew what he was building for Koitska.
The waiter brought two more drinks and carried away the uneaten food. “We don’t know exactly who did what after that,” Hsi said, “but somehow or other it got out of hand. I think it was the technical crew of the factory that took over. I suppose it was an inevitable danger.” He grinned savagely. “I can just imagine the Party bosses in the factory,” he said, “trying to figure out how to keep the workers in linebribe them or terrify them? Give them dachas or send a quota to Siberia? Neither would work, of course, because there isn’t any bribe you can give to a man who only has to stretch out his hand to take over the world, and you can’t frighten a man who can make you slit your own throat. Anyway, the next thing that happened the following Christmaswas when they took over the world. It wasn’t a Party movement at all any more. A lot of the workers were Czechs and Hungarians and Poles, and the first thing they wanted to do was to even a few scores.
“So here they are! Before they let the whole world go bang they got out of range. They got themselves out of Russia on two Red Navy cruisers, about a thousand of them; then they systematically triggered off every ballistic missile they could find… and they could find all of them, sooner or later, it was just a matter of looking. As soon as it was safe they moved in here.
“There are only a thousand or so of them here on the Islands, and nobody outside the Islands even knows where they are. If they did, what good would it do them? They can kill anyone, anywhere. They kill for fun, but sometimes they kill for a reason too. When one of them goes wandering for kicks he makes it a point to mess up all the transport and communications facilities he comes across especially now, since they’ve stockpiled everything they’re likely to need for the next twenty years. We don’t know what they’re planning to do when the twenty years are up.
Maybe they don’t care. Would you?”
Chandler drained his drink and shook his head. “One question,” he said. “Who’s ‘we’?”
Hsi carefully unwrapped a package of cigarettes, took one out and lit it. He looked at it as though he were not enjoying it; cigarettes had a way of tasting stale these days.
As they were. “Just a minute,” he said.
Tardily Chandler remembered the quick grasp of the waiter’s fingers on Hsi’s wrist, and that the waiter had been hovering, inconspicuously close, all through their meal. Hsi was waiting for the man to return. , In a moment the waiter was back, looking directly at Chandler. He looped his own wrist with his fingers and nodded. Hsi said softly, ” ‘We’ is the Society of Slaves.
That’s all of usslavesbut only a few of us belong to the Society. We”
There was a crash of glass. The waiter had dropped their tray.
Across the table from Chandler, Hsi looked suddenly changed. His left hand lay on the table before him, his right hand poised over it. Apparently he had been about to show Chandler again the sign he had made.
But he could not do it. His hand paused and fluttered like a captured bird. Captured it was. Hsi was captured.
Out of Hsi’s mouth, with Hsi’s voice, came the light, tonal rhythms of Rosalie Pan: “This is an unexpected pleasure, love! I never expected to see you here. Enjoying your meal?”
Chandler had his empty glass halfway to his lips, automatically, before he realized there was nothing in it to brace him. He said hoarsely, “Yes, thanks. Do you come here often?” It was like the banal talk of a language handbook, wildly inappropriate to uihat had been going on a moment before. He was shaken.
“Oh, I love it,” cooed Hsi, investigating the dishes before him. “All finished, I see. Too bad. Your friend doesn’t feel like he ate much, either.”
“I guess he wasn’t hungry,” Chandler managed.
“Well, I am.” Hsi cocked his head and smiled like a clumsy female impersonator. “I know! Are you doing anything special right now, love? I know you’ve eaten, butwell, I’ve been a good girl and I guess I can eat a real meal, I mean not with somebody else’s teeth, and still keep the calories in line. Suppose I meet you down at the beach? There’s a place there where the luau is divine. I can be there in half an hour.”