“Shto, Rosie?” said Chandler’s mouth thickly.
“Oh, there you are, Andrei,” she said, and spoke quickly in Russian.
Chandler’s brows knotted in a scowl and he barked: “Nyeh mozhet bit!”
“Andrei…” she said gently. “Ya vas sprashniva-yoo…”
“Nyet!”
“No Andrei…”
Rumble, grumble; Chandler’s body twitchedand fumed.
He heard his own name in the argument, but what the subject matter was he could not tell. Rosalie was coaxing; Koitska was refusing. But he was weakening. After minutes Chandler’s shoulders shrugged; he nodded; and he was free.
“Have some more coffee, love,” said Rosalie Pan with an air of triumph.
Chandler waited. He did not understand what was going on. It was up to her to enlighten him, and finally she smiled and said: “Perhaps you can join us, love. Don’t say yes or no. It isn’t up to you … and besides you can’t know whether you want it or not until you try. So be patient a moment.”
Chandler frowned; then felt his body taken. His lips barked: “Khorashaw!” His body got up and walked to the wall of Rosalie’s room. A picture on the wall moved aside and there was a safe. Flick, flick. Chandler’s own fingers dialed a combination so rapidly that he could not follow it. The door of the safe opened.
And Chandler was free, and Rosalie excitedly leaping out of the bed behind him, careless of the wisp of nylon that was her only garment, crowding softly, warmly past him to reach inside the safe. She lifted out a coronet very like her own.
She paused and looked at Chandler.
“You can’t do anything to harm us with this one, love,”
she warned. “Do you understand that? I mean, don’t get the idea that you can tell anyone anything. Or do something violent. You can’t. I’ll be right with you, and Koitska will be monitoring the transmitter.” She handed him the coronet. “Now, when you see something interesting, you move right in. You’ll see how. It’s the easiest thing in the world, and-Oh, here. Put it on.”
Chandler swallowed with difficulty.
She was offering him the tool that had given the execs the world. A blunter, weaker tool than her own, no doubt.
But still it was power beyond his imagining. He stood there frozen as she slipped it on his head. Sprung elec-trodes pressed gently against his temples and behind his ears. She touched something…
Chandler stood motionless for a moment and then, without effort, floated free of his own body.
Floating. Floating; a jellyfish floating. Trailing tentacles that whipped and curled, floating over the sandbound claws and chitin that clashed beneath, floating over the world’s people, and them not even knowing, not even seeing…
Chandler floated.
He was up, out and away. He was drifting. Around him was no-color. He saw nothing of space or size, he only saw, or did not see but felt-smelled-tasted, people. They were the sandbound. They were the creatures that crawled and struggled below, and his tentacles lashed out at them.
Beside him floated another. The girl? It had a shape, but not a human shapea cinctured area-rule shape.
Female? Yes, undoubtedly the girl. It waved a member at him and he understood he was beckoned. He followed.
Two of the sandbound ones were ahead.
The female shape slipped into one, he into the other. It was as easy to invest this form with his own will as it was to order the muscles of his hand. They looked at each other out of sandbound eyes. “You’re a boy!” Chandler laughed. The girl laughed: “You’re an old washerwoman!”
They were in a kitchen where fish simmered on an electric stove. The boy-Rosie wrinkled his-her nose, biinked and was empty. Only the small almond-eyed boy was left, and he began to cry convulsively. Chandler understood. He floated out after her.
This way, this way, she gestured. A crowd of mudbound figures. She slipped into one, he into another. They were in a bus now, rocking along an inland road, all men, all roughly dressed. Laborers going to clear a new section of Oahu of its split-level debris. Chandler thought, and looked for the girl in one of the men’s eyes, could not find her, hesitated andfloated. She was hovering impatiently. This way!
He followed, and followed.
They were a hundred people doing a hundred things.
They lingered a few moments as a teen-age couple holding hands in the twilight of the beach. They fled from a room where Chandler was an old woman dying on a bed, and Rosalie a stolid, uncaring nurse beside her. They played follow-the-leader through the audience of a Honolulu movie theater, and sought each other, laughing, among the fish stalls of King Street. Then Chandler turned to Rosalie to speak and … it all went out … the scene disappeared … he opened his eyes, and he was back in his own flesh.
He was lying on the pastel pile rug in Rosalie’s bed-room.
He got up, rubbing the side of his face. He had tumbled, it seemed. Rosalie was lying on the bed. In a moment she opened her eyes.
“Well, love?”
He said hoarsely, “What made it stop?”
She shrugged. “Koitska turned you off. Tired of monitoring us, I expectit’s been an hour. I’m surprised his patience lasted this long.”
She stretched luxuriously, but he was too full of what had happened even to see the white grace of her body.
“Did you like it, love?” she asked. “Would you like to have it forever?”
FOR NINE days Chandler’s status remained in limbo. He spent those days in a state of numb detachment, remembering the men and women he had worn like garments, appalled and exhilarated.
He did not see Rosalie again that day. She kept to her room, and he was locked out.
He was still a lapdog.
But he was a lapdog with a dream dangling before him.
He went to sleep that night thinking that he was a dog who might yet become a god, and had eight days left.
The next day Rosalie wheedled another hour of the coronet from Koitska. She and Chandler explored the ice caves on Mount Rainier, wearing the bodies of two sick and dying hermits they had found inhabiting a half-destroyed inn on its slopes. The mountain wore its cloudy flag of ice crystals in a bleak, pale evening. The air was thin and stinging, and their borrowed bodies ached. They left them and found two others, twenty-five hundred miles to the east, and wandered arm in arm under stars, neared the destroyed International Bridge at Niagara, breathing the spray of the unchanging Falls. They came back in a flash when Koitska’s patience ran out again and sprawled on her hot, dry lawn, and he had seven days left.
They passed like a dream.
Chandler saw a great deal of the inner workings of the Exec. He had privileges, for he was up for membership in the club. Rosalie had proposed him.
He talked with two Czechoslovakian ballet dancers in their personslean, dark girls who laughed and frowned alternatelyand with a succession of heavily accented Russians and Poles and Japanese, who came to him only through the mouth of the beach boy-servant who worked on Rosalie’s garden. Chandler thought they liked him. He was pleased that he had penetrated where he had not been allowed before… until he realized that these freedoms were in themselves a threat.
They allowed him this contact for a reason. They were looking him over.
If their final decision was to reject him, as it well might be, they would have to kill him, because he had seen too much.
But he had little time to dwell on fears of the future.
The present was crowded. On the fourth day one of the members of the exec invited him to join them.
“You’ll do for a gang boss, Shanda-lerra,” he said through the beach boy’s mouth; and once again Chandler found himself working on an executive committee project, though no one had told him what it was. He swam up into the strange, thin sea of the mind, in company with a dozen others, and they arrowed through emptiness to a place Chandler could not recognize. He watched the others spiral down and slip into the bodies of the tiny mud-dwelling dolls that were human beings. When they were all gone he sought a doll-body of his own.
He opened his eyes on a bleak, snow-laden Arctic dawn.
A shrieking blast from the North Pole was driving particles of gritty ice into his eyes, his ears, the loose, quilted clothes his body wore. The temperature, he was sure, was far below zero. The cold made his teeth ache, filled his eyes with tears.
All around him great floodlights mounted on poles cast a harsh glare over a hundred acres of barren earth, stud-ded with sheds and concrete pillboxes, heaped over with dirt and snow. In the center of the great lighted ice-desert loomed a skeletal steel object that looked like a madly displaced skyscraper.