VI
They roared through downtown Honolulu with the siren blaring and cars scattering out of the way. At seventy miles an hour they raced down a road by the sea. Chandler caught a glimpse of a sign that said “Hilo,” but where or what “Hilo” might be he had no idea. Soon there were fewer cars; then there were none but their own.
The road was a surburban highway lined with housing development, shopping centers, palm groves and the occasional center of a small municipality, scattering helterskelter together. There was a road like this extending in every direction from every city in the United States, Chandler thought; but this one was somewhat altered. Something had been there before them. About a mile outside Honolulu’s outer fringe, life was cut off as with a knife. There were no people on foot, and the only cars were rusted wrecks lining the roads. The lawns were ragged stands of weeds in front of the ranch-type homes.
It was evidently not allowed to live here.
Chandler craned his neck. His curiosity was becoming almost unbearable. He opened his mouth, but, “I said, ‘Shut up.’ ” rumbled the cop without looking at him. There was a note in the policeman’s voice that impressed Chandler. He did not quite know what it was, but it made him obey. They drove for another fifteen minutes in silence, then drew up before a barricade across the road.
Chandler got out. The policeman slammed the door behind him, ripping rubber off his tires with the speed of his U-turn and acceleration back toward Honolulu. He did not look at Chandler.
Chandler stood staring off after him, in bright warm sunlight with a reek of hibiscus and rotting palms in his nostril. It was very quiet there, except for a soft scratchy sound of footsteps on gravel. As Chandler turned to face the man who was coming toward him, he realized he had learned one fact from the policeman after all. The cop was scared clear through.
Chandler said, “Hello,” to the man who was approaching.
He too wore a uniform, but not that of the Honolulu city police. It was like U.S. Army suntans, but without insignia. Behind him were half a dozen others in the same dress, smoking, chatting, leaning against whatever was handy. The barricades themselves were impressively thorough. Barbed wire ran down the beach and out into the ocean; on the other side of the road, barbed wire ran clear out of sight along the middle of a side road. The gate itself was bracketed with machine-gun emplacements.
The guard waited until he was close to Chandler before speaking. “What do you want?” he asked without greeting. Chandler shrugged. “All right, just wait here,” said the guard, and began to walk away again.
“Wait a minute! What am I waiting for?” The guard shook his head without stopping or turning. He did not seem very interested, and he certainly was not helpful.
Chandler put down the copy of The Prophet which he had carried so far and sat on the ground, but again he had no long time to wait. One of the guards came toward him, with the purposeful movements Chandler had learned to recognize. Without speaking the guard dug into a pocket. Chandler jumped up instinctively, but it was only a set of car keys.
As Chandler took them the look in the guard’s eyes showed the quick release of tension that meant he was free again; and in that same moment Chandler’s own body was occupied once more.
He reached down and picked up the book. Quickly, but a little clumsily, his fingers selected a key, and his legs carried him toward a little French car parked just the other side of the barrier.
Chandler was learning at last the skills of allowing his body to have its own way. He couldn’t help it in any event, so he was consciously disciplining himself to withdraw his attention from his muscles and senses. It involved queerly vertiginous problems. A hundred times a minute there was some unexpected body sway or movement of the hand, and his lagging, imprisoned mind would wrench at its unresponsive nerves to put out the elbow that would brace him or to catch itself with a step. He had learned to ignore these things. The mind that inhabited his body had ways not his own of maintaining balance and reaching an objective, but they were equally sure.
He watched his own hands shifting the gears of the car. It was a make he had never driven, with a clutchless drive he did not understand, but the mind in his brain evidently understood it well enough. They picked up speed in great, gasoline-wasting surges.
Chandler began to form a picture of that mind. It belonged to an older man, from the hesitancy of its walk, and a testy one, from the heedless crash of the gears as it shifted. It drove with careless slapdash speed. Chandler’s mind yelled and flinched in his brain as they rounded blind curves, where any casual other motorist would have been a catastrophe; but the hand on the wheel and the foot on the accelerator did not hesitate.
Beyond the South Gate the island of Oahu became abruptly wild.
There were beautiful homes, but there were also great, gap-toothed spaces where homes had once been and were no longer. It seemed that some monstrous Zoning Commissar had stalked through the island with an eraser, rubbing out the small homes, the cheap ones, the old ones; rubbing out the stores, rubbing out the factories. This whole section of the island had been turned into an exclusive residential park.
It was not uninhabited. Chandler thought he glimpsed a few people, though since the direction of his eyes was not his to control it was hard to be sure. And then the Renault turned into a lane, paved but narrow. Hardwood trees with some sort of blossoms, Chandler could not tell what, overhung it on both sides.
It meandered for a mile or so, turned and opened into a great vacant parking lot. The Renault stopped with a squeal of brakes in front of a door that was flanked by bronze plaques: T.W.A. Flight Message Center.
Chandler caught sight of a skeletal towering form overhead, like a radio transmitter antenna, as his body marched him inside, up a motionless escalator, along a hall and into a room.
His muscles relaxed.
He glanced around and, from a huge couch beside a desk, a huge soft body stirred and, gasping, sat up. It was a very fat old man, almost bald, wearing a coronet of silvery spikes.
He looked at Chandler without much interest. “Vot’s your name?” he wheezed. He had a heavy, ineradicable accent, like a Hapsburg or a Russian diplomat. Chandler recognized it readily. He had heard it often enough, from his own lips.
The man’s name was Koitska, he said in his accented wheeze. If he had another name he did not waste it on Chandler. He took as few words as possible to order Chandler to be seated and to be still.
Koitska squinted at the copy of Gibran’s The Prophet. He did not glance at Chandler, but Chandler felt himself propelled out of his seat, to hand the book to Koitska, then returning. Koitska turned its remaining pages with an expression of bored repugnance, like a man picking off his arm. He seemed to be waiting for something.
A door closed on the floor below, and in a moment a girl came into the room.
She was tall, dark and not quite young. Chandler, struck by her beauty, was sure that he had seen her, somewhere, but could not place her face. She wore a coronet like the fat man’s, intertwined in a complicated hairdo, and she got right down to business. “Chandler, is it? All right, love, what we want to know is what this is all about.” She indicated the book.
A relief that was like pain crossed Chandler’s mind. So that was why he was here! Whoever these people were, however they managed to rule men’s minds, they were not quite certain of their perfect power. To them the sad, futile Orphalese represented a sort of annoyance—not important enough to be a threat—but something which had proved inconvenient at one time and therefore needed investigating. As Chandler was the only survivor they had deemed it worth their godlike whiles to transport him four thousand miles so that he might satisfy their curiosity.
Chandler did not hesitate in telling them all about the people of Orphalese. There was nothing worth concealing, he was quite sure. No debts are owed to the dead; and the Orphalese had proved on their own heads, at the last, that their ritual of pain was only an annoyance to the possessors, not a tactic that could long be used against them.
It took hardly five minutes to say everything that needed saying about Guy, Meggie and the other doomed and suffering inhabitants of the old house on the mountain.
Koitska hardly spoke. The girl was his interrogator, and sometimes translator as well, when his English was not sufficient to comprehend a point. With patient detachment she kept the story moving until Koitska with a bored shrug indicated he was through.
Then she smiled at Chandler and said, “Thanks, love. Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”
“I don’t know. I thought the same thing about you.”
“Oh, everybody’s seen me. Lots of me. But—well, no matter. Good luck, love. Be nice to Koitska and perhaps he’ll do as much for you.” And she was gone.
Koitska lay unmoving on his couch for a few moments, rubbing a fat nose with a plump finger. “Hah,” he said at last. Then, abruptly, “And now, de qvestion is, vot to do vit you, eh? I do not t’ink you can cook, eh?”
With unexpected clarity Chandler realized he was on trial for his life. “Cook? No, I’m afraid not. I mean, I can boil eggs,” he said. “Nothing fancy.”
“Hah,” grumbled Koitska. “Vel. Ve need a couple, three doctors, but I do not t’ink you vould do.”
Chandler shook his head. “I’m an electrical engineer,” he said. “Or was.”
“Vas?”
“I haven’t had much practice. There has not been a great deal of call for engineers, the last year or two.”
“Hah.” Koitska seemed to consider. “Vel,” he said, “it could be … yes, it could be dat ve have a job for you. You go back downstairs and—no, vait.” The fat man closed his eyes and Chandler felt himself seized and propelled down the stairs to what had once been a bay of a built-in garage. Now it was fitted up with workbenches and the gear of a radio ham’s dreams.
Chandler walked woodenly to one of the benches. His own voice spoke to him. “Ve got here someplace—da, here is cirguit diagrams and de specs for a sqvare-vave generator. You know vot dat is? Write down de answer.” Chandler, released with a pencil in his hand and a pad before him, wrote Yes. “Okay. Den you build vun for me. I areddy got vun but I vant another. You do dis in de city, not here. Go to Tripler, dey tells you dere vere you can work, vere to get parts, all dat. Couple days you come out here again, I see if I like how you build.”
Clutching the thick sheaf of diagrams, Chandler felt himself propelled outside and back into the little car. The interview was over.
He wondered if he would be able to find his way back to Honolulu, but that problem was then postponed as he discovered he could not start the car. His own hands had already done so, of course, but it had been so quick and sure that he had not paid attention; now he found that the ignition key was marked only in French, which he could not speak. After trial and error he discovered the combination that would start the engine and unlock the steering wheel, and then gingerly he toured the perimeter of the lot until he found an exit road.
It was close to midnight, he judged. Stars were shining overhead; there was a rising moon. He then remembered, somewhat tardily, that he should not be seeing stars. The lane he had come in on had been overhung on both sides with trees.
A few minutes later he realized he was quite lost.
Chandler stopped the car, swore feelingly, got out and looked around.
There was nothing much to see. The roads bore no markers that made sense to him. He shrugged and rummaged through the glove compartment on the chance of a map; there was none, but he did find what he had almost forgotten, a half-empty pack of cigarettes. It had been—he counted—nearly a week since he had smoked. He lit up.
It was a pleasant evening, too. He felt almost relaxed. He stood there, wondering just what might be about to happen next—with curiosity more than fear—and then he felt a light touch at his mind.
It was nothing, really. Or nothing that he could quite identify. It was though he had been nudged. It seemed that someone was about to usurp his body again, but that did not develop.
As he had about decided to forget it and get back in the car he saw headlights approaching.
A low, lean sports car slowed as it came near, stopping beside him, and a girl leaned out, almost invisible in the darkness. “There you are, love,” she said cheerfully. “Thought I spotted someone. Lost?”
She had a coronet, and Chandler recognized her. It was the girl who had interrogated him. “I guess I am,” he admitted.
The girl leaned forward. “Come in, dear. Oh, that thing? Leave it here, the silly little bug.” She giggled as they drove away from the Renault. “Koitska wouldn’t like you wandering around. I guess he decided to give you a job?”
“How did you know?”
She said softly, “Well, love, you’re here, you know. Otherwise—never mind. What are you supposed to be doing?”
“Going to Tripler, whatever that is. In Honolulu, I guess. Then I have to build some radio equipment.”
“Tripler’s actually on the other side of the city. I’ll take you to the gate; then you tell them where you want to go. They’ll take care of it.”
“I don’t have any money for fare.”
She laughed. After a moment she said, “Koitska’s not the worst. But I’d mind my step if I were you, love. Do what he says, the best you can. You never know. You might find yourself very fortunate. …”
“I already think that. I’m alive.”
“Why, love, that point of view will take you far.” The sports car slid smoothly to a stop at the barricade and, in the floodlights above the machine-gun nests, she looked more closely at Chandler. “What’s that on your forehead, dear?”
Somehow the woolen cap had been lost. “A brand,” he said shortly. “H for ‘hoaxer.’ I did something when one of you people had me, and they thought I’d done it on my own.”
“Why—why, this is wonderful!” the girl said excitedly. “No wonder I thought I’d seen you before. Don’t you remember? I was in the forewoman at your trial!”