She grinned, leaned back and kissed him.
Chandler put his arms around the girl and returned the kiss, hard. She did not draw away. She clung to him, and he could feel in the warmth of her body, the sound of her breath that she was responding. The drink made him reckless; the last two weeks made him doubtful; he was torn. He could tell that there was no resistance in her body, but the coronet made it in doubt; she could fling him away from her with one touch of the mind. Yet she didn’t do it—
“Vi myenya zvali?” his own voice demanded, harsh and mocking.
The girl tried to push him away. Her eyes were bright and huge, staring at him. “Andrei!”
“Da, Andrei! Kok eto dosadno!”
“Andrei, please. I know that you are—”
“Filthy!” screamed Chandler’s voice. “How can you? I do not allow this carrion to touch you so—not vot is mine—I do not allow him to live!” And Chandler dropped her and leaped to his feet. He fought. He struggled; but only in his mind, and helplessly; his body carried him out of the room, running and stumbling, out into the drive, into her waiting car and away.
He drove like a madman on roads he had never seen before. The car’s gears bellowed pain at their abuse, the tires screamed.
Chandler, prisoned inside himself, recognized that touch. Koitska! He knew who Rosalie Pan’s lover had been. If he had been in doubt his own voice, raucous and hysterical with rage, told him the truth. All that long drive it screamed threats and obscenities at him, in Russian and tortured English.
The car stopped in front of the T.W.A. facility and, still prisoned, his body hurried in, bruising itself deliberately against every doorpost and stick of furniture. “I could have smashed you in the car!” his voice screamed hoarsely. “It is too merciful. I could have thrown you into the sea! It is not painful enough.”
In the garage his body stopped and looked wildly around. “Knives, torches,” his lips chanted. “Shall I gouge out eyes? Slit throat?”
A jar of battery acid stood on a shelf, “Da, da!” screamed Chandler, stumbling toward it. “One drink eh? And I von’t even stay vith you to feel it, the pain—just a moment—then it eats the gut, the long slow dying. …” And all the time the body that was Chandler’s was clawing the cap off the jar, tilting it—
He dropped the jar, and leaped aside instinctively as it splintered at his feet.
He was free!
Before he could move he was seized again, stumbled, crashed into a wall—
And was free again.
He stood waiting for a moment, unable to believe it; but he was still free. The alien invader did not seize his mind. There was no sound. No one moved. No gun fired at him, no danger threatened.
He was free; he took a step, turned, shook his head and proved it.
He was free and, in a moment, realized that he was in the building with the fat bloated body of the man who wanted to murder him, the body that in its own strength could scarcely stand erect.
It was suicide to attempt to harm an exec. He would certainly lose his life—except—that was gone already anyhow; he had lost it. He had nothing left to lose.
XIV
Chandler loped silently up the stairs to Koitska’s suite.
Halfway up he tripped and sprawled, half stunning himself against the stair rail. It had not been his own clumsiness, he was sure. Koitska had caught at his mind again, but only feebly. Chandler did not wait. Whatever was interfering with Koitska’s control, some distraction or malfunction of the coronet or whatever, Chandler could not bank on its lasting.
The door was locked.
He found a heavy mahogany chair, with a back of solid carved wood. He flung it onto his shoulders, grunting, and ran with it into the door, a bull driven frantic, lunging out of its querencia to batter the wall of the arena. The door splintered.
Chandler was gashed with long slivers of wood, but he was through the door.
Koitska lay sprawled along his couch, eyes staring.
Alive or dead? Chandler did not wait to find out but sprang at him hands outstreched. The staring eyes flickered; Chandler felt the pull at his mind. But Koitska’s strength was almost gone. The eyes glazed, and Chandler was upon him. He ripped the coronet off and flung it aside, and the huge bulk of Koitska swung paralytically off the couch and fell to the floor.
The man was helpless. He lay breathing like a steam engine, one eye pressed shut against the leg of a coffee table, the other looking up at Chandler.
Chandler was panting almost as hard as the helpless mass at his feet. He was safe for a moment. At the most for a moment, for at any time one of the other execs might dart down out of the mind-world into the real, looking at the scene through Chandler’s eyes and surely deducing what would be no more to his favor than the truth. He had to get away from there. If he seemed busy in another room perhaps they would go away again. Chandler turned his back on the paralyzed monster to flee. It would be even better to try to lose himself in Honolulu—if he could get that far—he did not in his own flesh know how to fly
