But as he turned he was caught.
Chandler turned to see Koitska lying there, and screamed.
His eyes were staring at Koitska. It was too late. He was possessed by someone, he did not know whom. Though it made little enough difference, he thought, watching his own hands reach out to touch the staring face.
His body straightened, his eyes looked around the room, he went to the desk. “Love,” he cried to himself, “what’s the matter with Koitska? Write, for God’s sake!” And he took a pencil in his hand and was free.
He hesitated, then scribbled: I don’t know. I think he had a stroke. Who are you?
The other mind slipped tentatively into his, scanning the paper. “Rosie, you idiot, who did you think?” he said furiously. “What have you done?”
Nothing, he began instinctively, then scratched the word out. Briskly and exactly he wrote: He was going to kill me, but he had some kind of an attack. I took his coronet away. I was going to run.
“Oh, you fool,” he told himself shrilly a moment later. Chandler’s body knelt beside the wheezing fat lump, taking its pulse. The faint, fitful throb meant nothing to Chandler; probably meant nothing to Rosie either, for his body stood up, hesitated, shook its head. “You’ve done it now,” he sobbed, and was surprised to find he was weeping real tears. “Oh, love, why? I could have taken care of Koitska—somehow—No, maybe I couldn’t,” he said frantically, breaking down. “I don’t know what to do. Do you have any ideas—outside of running?”
It took him several seconds to write the one word, but it was really all he could find to write. No.
His lips twisted as his eyes read the word. “Well,” he said practically, “I guess that’s the end, love. I mean, I give up.”
He got up, turned around the room. “I don’t know,” he told himself worriedly. “There might be a chance—if we could hush this up. I’d better get a doctor. He’ll have to use your body, so don’t be surprised if there’s someone and it isn’t me. Maybe he can pull Andrei through. Maybe Andrei’ll forgive you then—Or if he dies,” Chandler’s voice schemed as his eyes stared at the rasping motionless hulk, “we can say you broke down the door to help him. Only you’ll have to put his coronet back on, so it won’t look suspicious. Besides that will keep anyone from occupying him. Do that, love. Hurry.” And he was free.
Gingerly Chandler crossed the floor.
He did not like to touch the dying animal that wheezed before him, liked even less to give it back the weapon that, if it had only a few moments of sentience again, it would use to kill him. But the girl was right. Without the helmet any wandering curi-himself.1 The helmet would shield him from—
Would shield anyone from—
Would shield Chandler himself from possession if he used it!
He did not hesitate. He slipped the helmet on his head, snapped the switch and in a moment stood free of his own body, in the gray, luminous limbo, looking down at the pallid traceries that lay beneath.
He did not hesitate then either.
He did not pause to think or plan; it was as though he had planned every step, in long detail, over many years. Chandler for at least a few moments had the freedom to battle the execs on their own ground, the freedom that any mourning parent or husband in the outside world would know well how to use.
Chandler also knew. He was a weapon. He might die—but it was not a great thing to die, millions had done it for nothing under the rule of the execs, and he was privileged to be able to die trying to kill them.
He stepped callously around the hulk on the floor and found a door behind the couch, a door and a hall, and at the end of that hall a large room that had once perhaps been a message center. Now it held rack after rack of electronic gear. He recognized it without elation. It had had to be there.
It was the main transmitter for all the coronets of the exec.
He had only to pull one switch—that one there—and power would cease to flow. The coronets would be dead. The execs would be only humans. In five minutes he could destroy enough parts so that it would be at least a week’s work to build it again, and in a week the slaves in Honolulu—somehow he could reach them, somehow he would tell them of their chance—could root out and destroy every exec on all the islands.
Of course, there was the standby transmitter he himself had helped to build.
He realized tardily that Koitska would have made some arrangement for starting that up by remote control.
He put down the tool-kit with which he had been advancing on the racks of transistors, and paused to think.
He was a fool, he saw after a moment. He could not destroy this installation—not yet—not until he had used it. He remembered to sit down so that his body would not crash to the floor, and then he sent himself out and up, to scan the nearby area.
There was no one there, nobody within a mile or more, except the feeble glimmer that was dying Koitska. He did not enter that body. He returned to his own long enough to barricade the door—it had a strong-looking lock, but he shouldered furniture against it too—and then he went up and out, grateful to Rosalie, who had taught him how to navigate in the curious world of the mind, flashing across water, under a mind-controlled plane, to the island of Hilo.
There had to be someone near the standby installation.
He searched; but there was no one. No one in the building. No one near the ruined field. No one in the village of the dead nearby. He was desperate;
