He demanded, “When will I know?”
She hesitated. “I’m not supposed to discuss some things with you, love, you know that. Not yet.”
“When Rosie?”
She capitulated. “Well, I don’t suppose it makes much difference under the circumstances”
He knew what circumstances she meant.
“so I’ll tell you that much, anyway. See, love, you need a little over seven hundred votes to get in. That’s a lot, isn’t it? But that’s the rules of the game. And right now you have, let’s see”
Her eyes glazed for a moment. Chandler knew that she was looking out at something else, through some clerk’s vision somewhere on the islandor somewhere in the world.
“Right now you have about a hundred and fifty. Takes time, doesn’t it?”
“That’s a hundred and fifty to let me in, right? And how many ‘no’ votes?”
She patted his hand and said gently, “None of those, love. You wouldn’t ever have but one.” She got up and refilled his drink. “Never fear, dear,” she said. “Rosie’s on your side! And now let’s have something to eat, eh?”
And he had seven days left.
XVI
TIME PASSED. Chandler wheedled information out of Rosalie until he had a clear picture of what he was up against. Two-thirds of all the members of the executive committee had to cast an affirmative vote for him (but they would vote in blocs, Rosalie promised; get this one on his side and she would bring in fifty more, get that one and he could deliver a hundred). If there were a single blackball he was out. And he had ten days to be accepted, which were going fast.
Very fast. He had no idea that so many things could be done so rapidly. He was meeting people by the dozen and score, members of the Exec who were Rosalie’s personal friends, all of them votes if he could please them. He did everything he could think of to please them. He was working, toonot on the rocket project any more; and not on any of the other off-island projects of the exec (which was all right with him, as he felt pretty sure that most of these involved selective murder and demolition); but on little odds and ends of electronic jobs for Koitska and others. He was allowed to go into Honolulu for more parts, which the new owner of Parts ‘n Plenty provided for him in silence. Her eyes were red with weeping; she was Hsi’s widow. Chandler tried to find something to say to her, ran through every possible word in his vocabulary, and left without speaking at all.
Chandler knew that his very great measure of freedom was a dangerous sign. Koitska did not trouble to hide from him any more just what it was that they had built on Hilo. He even allowed Chandler to do some patch-cording and soldering on the installation in the former TWA Message Centerwatching him every minute, gasping and snoring as he lay on his couch across the roomand made no effort to keep Chandler from guessing that the Hilo assembly was almost a duplicate of the one here. Hilo had more power, Chandler thought; there had been some hint that more power was needed for the really remote control applications involved in the Execudve Committee’s Mars project; but basically it was only a standby.
Checking current flows under Koitska’s eye, Chandler thought detachedly that it might just be possible, if one were both daring and very lucky, to overcome the Exec, destroy the installation, find a way to Hilo and destroy that one too… . One did not take that sort of risk lightly, of course, he acknowledged. It was an easy way to get killed.
And he did not want to get killed.
He wanted to live very much…as a member in good standing of the Executive Committee.
The Russian POWs who manned Hitler’s Atlantic Wall would have understood Chandler’s reasoning; so would the Americans who broadcast for the enemy in Korea. The ultimately important thing for any man was to stay alive.
Chandler had not forgotten Peggy Flershem or the Orphalese, or Hsi and his tortured friends around the Monument. He merely thought, quite reasonably, that he could do nothing to help them any more; and meanwhile he had to pick up several hundred more votes or he would join them all in death. He acknowledged that it was in some sense degrading that, chances were, the men and women he curried favor with today were perhaps the very ones who had shot Ellen Braisted in Orphalese, raped and murdered his wife through the person of his friend, Jack Souther, kidnaped the children who had flown across the Pacific with him… there was no sense in cataloguing all the possible abominations these men and women had committed, he told himself firmly. All that was as dead as Hsi.
Life was important. On any terms, life.
Considered objectively, the Orphalese and the people in his own home town who had been destroyed by the execs were of no more importance than the stolid, half-frozen Siberians whom he had actually helped (even if ineffec-tually!) to work to death. Or the inhabitants of the destroyed village in Hilo. Or the peaceful people of New York when the submarine exploded itself in the harbor.
Or….
He sighed. It was very difficult to stop making catalogues, or to turn from that to a friendly smile and a gay, friendship-winning quip.
But he managed the task. It revolted him, said Pooh-Bah. But he did it.
When she could Rosalie borrowed the use of a coronet for him and they roamed the world, to night clubs in Juarez and lamaseries under the Himalayan peaks, to every place that she thought might amuse and divert him. On the fourth day she took him to a very special place indeed.
“You’ll like it,” was all she would say. “Oh! I haven’t been there for months.”
It was half a world away. Chandler had never learned to read the topologically insane patterns of grayed light but he knew it was very distant, and it turned out in fact to be in Italy. They found bodies to wear and commandeered a boat and headed out over blue water, Rosalie claiming she knew where she was going. But when, after repeated sightings on the coast behind them, she cut the little electric motor, the water in which they drifted looked like any other water to Chandler. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said.
“Of course, love! And I adore your mustachios.”
He preened them. He rather fancied the body he had found, too; it had come with a gun and a plumed hat, but he had discarded them on the beach where they found the boat. Rosalie had done herself well enough, in a costume of flesh that was not more than eighteen years old, not taller than five feet one and darkly beautiful. She stood up, rocking the boat. “Everybody in the water!” she called.
“Last one in’s a malihinil”
“Swimming? Swimming where?” he demanded. She was already taking off her clothes, the ruffled shirt, the tore-ador pants; in brief underwear she climbed to the gunwale and tugged at his mustache.
“Straight down, love. You’ll like it.”
He stood up and began taking off the coat and the uniform pants with their broad stripe of gold. “Wait a minute,” he grumbled. “It always takes longer for a man to get his clothes off. He doesn’t get as much practice, I suppose.”
“Love! You’re terribly anti-woman! Follow me!” And she dived from the gunwale, neat and clean, heading down.
Chandler followed. He had never been a great swimmer and was, in fact, not very fond of water sports. You can’t get hurt, he reminded himself as he swam down into the dark after the pale, wriggling shape that was Rosalie’s body. But it felt as if he could get hurt. He was ten yards down, and fifteen, and the end not in sight; and he could feel his borrowed heart pounding and the carabinieri’s lungs craving to breathe. The warm Adriatic water was clouded and dim. He could see nothing except for Rosalie, down belowno. There was something else, he could not be sure what. Something darker, and square in out-line. …
Rosalie’s slim, pale form slipped under it and disappeared.
Grimly Chandler followed, his muscles tiring, his lungs bursting. With the last of his strength he skirted the dark square thing and came up beneath it. It was a thirty-foot rectangle of metal, he could see now, pierced with darkened windows, swinging on long chains that stretched downward into invisibility.
Where Rosalie had gone there was a square of a different color. It looked like a hatch.
It was a hatch. He bobbed up through it and into a dark bubble of air, puffing and gasping.
Rosalie was there before him, sprawled out of the water onto the metal deck, wheezing like himself. “Whew, love,”