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 was—being 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 with a quick backward jerk of the head. “They’re mostly Russians—you 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 killed—wasn’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 does—which is nothing. It’s very simple, Chandler: they’re a project that got out of hand.”
Back four years ago, he said, in Russia, it started in the last days of the Second Stalinite Regime, before the Neo-Krushchevists took over power in the January Push.
The Western World had not known exactly what was going on, of course. The “mystery wrapped in a riddle surrounded by an enigma” had become queerer and even more opaque after Kruschchev’s death 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-Krushchevists, 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 irresistable tool—more than that, the way to end all disputes 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. For that matter, of any animal, as long as the creature had enough “mind” to seize—
“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 world—the 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 rescued 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 transmitter—what ultimately was refined into the coronet Chandler had seen on the heads of Koitska and the girl—but that was enough for the January push.
The Stalinites were out. The neo-Krushchevists were in.
A whole factory in the Donbas was converted to manufacturing these little mental controllers as fast as they could be produced—and 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 re-broadcaster—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 the drink. 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 workers in the factory,” he said, “trying to figure out how to keep them in line—bribe 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 Christmas—was 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
