Chandler touched it, almost with surprise. Since the medics had treated it he had almost forgotten it was there.
He said, "What's the score? You testing me, too? Want to see if I'll lie about it?"
Hsi grinned. "Sorry. I guess that's what I was doing. I do know what an 'H' stands for; we've seen them before. Not many. The ones that do get this far usually don't last long. Unless, of course, they are working for somebody whom it wouldn't do to offend," he explained.
"So what you want to know, then, is whether I was really hoaxing or not. Does it make any difference?"
"Damn right it does, man! We're slaves, but we're not animals!" Chandler had gotten to him; the parts man looked startled, then sallow, as he observed his own vehemence.
"Sorry, Hsi. It makes a difference to me, too. Well, I wasn't hoaxing. I was possessed, just like any other everyday rapist, only I couldn't prove it. And it didn't look too good for me, because the damn thing happened in a pharmaceuticals plant. That was supposed to be about the only place in town where you could be sure you wouldn't be possessed, or so everybody thought. Including me. Up to the time I went ape."
Hsi nodded. The waiter approached with their drinks.
Hsi looked at him appraisingly, then did a curious thing. He gripped his left wrist with his right hand, quickly, then released it again. The waiter did not appear to notice.
Expertly he served the drinks, folded small pink floral napkins, dumped and wiped their ashtray in one motion and then, so quickly that Chandler was not quite sure he had seen it, caught Hsi's wrist in the same fleeting gesture just before he turned and walked away.
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 it 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 three years ago, he said, in Russia, it started in the last days of the Second Stalinite Regime, before the neo-Khrushchevists took over power in the January Push.
The Western World had not known exactly what was going on, of course. Russia had become queerer and even more opaque after the Maoist trials 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-Khrushchevists, 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 irresistible 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.
"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 pardoned 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-Khrushchevists 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 rebroadcaster-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 it, 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 bosses in the factory," he said, "trying to figure out how to keep the workers 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 they could find all of them, sooner or later, it was just a matter of looking. As soon as it was safe they moved in here.
"There are only a thousand or so of them here on the Islands, and nobody outside the Islands even knows where they are. If they did, what good would it do them? They can kill anyone, anywhere. They kill for fun, but sometimes they kill for a reason too. When one of them goes wandering for kicks he makes it a point to mess up all the transport and communications facilities he comes across, especially now, since they've stockpiled everything they're likely to need for the next twenty years. We don't know what they're planning to do when the twenty years are up. Maybe they don't care. Would you?"