“They were butchered! Some of them looked like their legs had been burned right off. Their eyes gouged out, their faces—” Chandler brought up sharply. It had been bad enough looking at those wretched, writhing semi-cadavers; he did not want to talk about them.
The parts man nodded seriously. “Sometimes there are more, and sometimes they’re worse hurt than that. Have you got any idea how they get that way? They do it to themselves, that’s how. My own brother was out there for a week, last Statehood Day. He jumped feet first into a concrete mixer, and it took him seven days to die after I put him on my shoulder and carried him out there. I didn’t like it, of course, but I didn’t exactly have any choice; I wasn’t running my own body at the time. Neither was he when he jumped. He was made to do it, because he used to have Bert’s job and he thought he’d take a little short-wave set home. Like I said, you don’t want to cheat on the Exec because it doesn’t pay.”
“But what the devil am I supposed to—”
Hsi held up his hand. “Don’t ask me how to keep out of that Monument bunch, Chandler. I don’t know. Do what you’re told and don’t do anything you aren’t told to do; that is the whole of the law. Now do me a favor and get out of here so I can pack up these other orders.” He turned his back on Chandler.
VIII
By the morning of the fourth day on the island of Oahu, Chandler had learned enough of the ropes to have signed a money-chit at the Tripler currency office against Koitska’s account.
That was about all he had learned, except for a few practical matters like where meals were served and the location of the freshwater swimming pool at the back of the grounds. He was killing time using the pool when, in the middle of a jacknife from the ten-foot board, he felt himself seized. He sprawled into the water with a hard splashing slap, threshed about and, as he came to the surface, found himself giggling.
“Sorry, dear,” he apologized to himself, “but we don’t carry our weight in the same places, you know. Get that square-what’sit thingamajig, like an angel, and meet me in front by the flagpole in twenty minutes.”
He recognized the voice, even if his own vocal chords had made it. It was the girl who had driven him back from the interview with Koitska, the one who had casually announced she had saved his life at his hoaxing trial. Chandler swam to the side of the pool and toweled as he trotted toward his quarters. She was from Koitska now, of course; which meant that his “test” was about to be graded.
Quickly though he dressed, she was there before him, standing beside a low-slung sports car and chatting with one of the groundskeepers. An armful of leis dangled beside her, and although she wore the coronet which was evidence of her status the gardener did not seem to fear her. “Come along, love,” she called to Chandler. “Koitska wants your thingummy. Chuck it in the trunk if it’ll fit, and we’ll head waikiki wikiwiki. Don’t I say that nicely? But I only fool the malihinis, like you.”
She chattered away as the little car dug its rear wheels into the drive and leaped around the green and out the gate.
The wind howled by them, the sun was bright, the sky was piercingly blue. Riding next to this beautiful girl, it was hard for Chandler to remember that she was one of those who had destroyed his world. It was a terrible thing to have so much hatred and to feel it so diluted. Not even Koitska seemed a terrible enough enemy to accept such a load of detestation; it was hate without an object, and it recoiled on the hater, leaving him turgid and constrained. If he could not hate his onetime friend Jack Souther for defiling and destroying his wife, it was almost as hard to hate Souther’s anonymous possessor. It could even have been Koitska. It could even have been this girl by his side. In the strange, cruel fantasies with which the Execs indulged themselves it was likely enough that they would sometimes assume the body, and the role, of the opposite sex. Why not? Strange, ruthless morality; it was impossible to evaluate it by any human standards.
It was also impossible to think of hatred with her beside him. They soared around Honolulu on a broad expressway and paralleled the beach toward Waikiki. “Look, dear. Diamond Head! Mustn’t ignore it—very bad form—like not going to see the night-blooming cereus at the Punahou School. You haven’t missed that, have you?”
“I’m afraid I have—”
“Rosalie. Call me Rosalie, dear.”
“I’m afraid I have, Rosalie.” For some reason the name sounded familiar.
“Shame, oh, shame! They say it was wonderful night before last. Looks like cactus to me, but—”
Chandler’s mental processes had worked to a conclusion. “Rosalie Pan!” he said. “Now I know!”
“Know what? You mean—” she swerved around a motionless Buick, parked arrogantly five feet from the curb—“you mean you didn’t know who I was? And to think I used to pay five thousand a year for publicity.”
Chandler said, smiling, and almost relaxed, “I’m sorry, but musical comedies weren’t my strong point. I did see you once, though, on television. Then, let’s see, wasn’t there something about you disappearing—”
She nodded, glancing at him. “There sure was, dear. I almost froze to death getting out to that airport. Of course, it was worth it, I found out later. If I hadn’t been took, as they say, I would’ve been dead, because you remember what happened to New York about an hour
