She saw his expression and said earnestly, “No, don’t think that! You call it murder. It is, of course. But it’s the surgeon’s knife. We’re quicker and less painful than starvation, love … and if some of us enjoy the work of weeding out the unfit, does that change anything? It does not! I admit some of us are, well, mean. But not all. And we’re improving. The new people we take in are better than the old.”
She looked at him thoughtfully for a moment.
Then she shook her head. “Never mind,” she said—apparently to herself. “Forget it, love. Go like an angel and fetch us both some coffee.”
Like an angel he went … not, he thought bitterly, like a man.
She was keeping something from him, and he was too stubborn to let her tease him out of his mood. “Everything’s a secret,” he complained, and she patted his cheek.
“It has to be that way.” She was quite serious. “This is the biggest thing in the world. I’m fond of you, love, but I can’t let that interfere with my duty.”
“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 sprashnivayoo. …”
“Nyet!”
“No Andrei. …”
Rumble, grumble; Chandler’s body twitched and 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 electrodes 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 shape—a pair of great projecting spheres, a 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 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 command 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, blinked 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 and—floated. 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 teenage 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
