Surely others knew the theory behind the electronic wizardry that gave them control; surely there were plans and wiring diagrams in some safe file, perhaps in a dozen of them, that could be brought out and used again. It was necessary to destroy the machinery, yes; but it was also necessary to destroy the plans … not only the plans on paper but the plans that might linger in the brains of the members of the Exec.
It was, in fact, necessary to kill them all.
It was not only necessary, thought Chandler objectively, it was rather easy. It was child’s play. All you had to do was the sort of thing members of the Exec had been doing for fun or in furtherance of a purpose every day for years.
All you had to do was what he was doing. Up out of the body, and search for the queerly distorted sluggish sort of creature that turned out to be a human mind; enter it; and there you were in the body of a man or woman. You glanced in a mirror or touched the body’s head with the body’s handto check to see if it wore a coronet, of course. It if did, the body had to be destroyed. There were many ways of doing that. Simple household objects could be employeda knife, a bottle of iodine to drink, sometimes you could find a gun.
Carefully and scientifically Chandler experimented with modes of suicide. He tried them all. He discovered that, failing all else, you really could choke yourself to death; but it was difficult and slow, and quite painful; he only did that once. He discovered that even a nail file, Sawed vigorously enough across a throat, would ultimately open the artery that would spill out the life. He set fire to one house and trapped himself in a closet, but that was slow, too; drowned himself in a bathtub, but it took so irritat-ingly long for the tub to fill. Knives were almost always available if you just took the trouble to look, though; and saws, chisels, barbecue forks, scythesalmost anything with an edge could be used.
When Chandler had first learned that the “flame spirits”
were human beings he had dreamed at night about them, and wakened to wonder how it must feel to kill oneself over and over again in some other flesh.
Now he knew. It felt very painful and very wearing; but of emotionregret, sorrow, shamethere was little or none. It became very quickly a job. Like any other job, it was susceptible to time study and rationalization; after the first hour, when Chandler realized he had only managed seven deaths and would at that rate pass out from exhaustion before he had made himself safe against attack, he systematically improved his methods, finally settling for the quickest and easiest of them all. Too bad, he thought as he slew and slew, that it was only good in two-story buildings; annoying that the Hawaiians had gone in so heavily for ranch houses; but it was quite possible to kill yourself by leaping from a second-story window, provided only that you had the resolution to land headfirst… . The orgy of killing went on and on, all that day, and all that night, killing, killing in widening circles from the TWA Message Center, killing everything that wore a coronet and then as he grew wearier and more carelessand realized that the execs might by then have begun taking their useless coronets off, killing everything that moved.
He stopped only when he realized that he was in the fringes of Honolulu itself.
He had lost count long since, but he had surely killed a thousand timesand died a thousand times. No doubt some execs still survived, but he no longer had a way to distinguish them from the slaves. He stopped for that reason… and because he was tired beyond further effort … and most of all because blood had washed away his passions.
He was spent.
He slumped against a wall for a moment, back in his own body. And then he stood up, and took off the coronet and, dangling it from one hand, walked out into the dawn of a new world.
Chandler the giant killer looked upon his world and did not find it good.
Exhaustion diminished all his emotions, but he was aware that this was wrong. He should be exultant! He should be shouting with joy, caroling his gratitude to God; and he was not.
Why, he told himself reasonably, every most fantastic prayer of the past years had been granted at once! In one night he had avenged New York and the Orphalese, the incinerated millions of Russia and the raped slaves in Honolulu….
But he could not help feeling that the job was not really done after all. He swung the coronet idly in his hand, staring blankly at the lightening sky, while a sly and treasonable voice in a corner of his mind whispered to him.
Who held this coronet held the world, said the voice in his mind.
He nodded, for that was true. Absently he poke4 at the steel-bright filigree of the thing, as a man might caress the pretty rug which once had been the skin of a tiger poised to kill him. It was such a small thing to hold so much power….
Chandler went back into the building and brewed himself strong black coffee. He could hear Rosalie Pan stirring inside the closet where he had left her; in a minute he would let her out, he thought. Not just yet, but in a minute. As soon as he had thought things out. As soon as he had made up his mind to an extremely important decision. For tt was true that the job was not quite done yet. The plans had to be locatedand destroyed, of course. Naturally, destroyed. Survivors of the Exec had to be found, and also destroyed.
Yes, there was much to do. While he was waiting for the coffee to seep through its filter he slipped the coronet casually back atop his head. Only for a while, of course. A very little while. He pledged himself solemnly that there would definitely be no question about that. He would wear it just long enough to clean up all the loose ends just that long and not one second longer, he pledged, and knew as he pledged it that he lied.