Chandler prowled the town for a quarter of an hour, but one street was like another. The bodies did not seem to have been disturbed even by animals, but perhaps there were none big enough to show traces of such work.
Something moved in a doorway. Chandler thought at once of the smoke he had seen, but no one answered his call and, though he searched, he could neither see nor hear anything alive.
The search was a waste of time. It also wasted his best chance to study the thing he was building. As he returned to the cinder-block structure at the end of the airstrip he heard motors and looked up to see a plane circling in for a landing.
He knew that he had only a few minutes. He spent those minutes as thriftily as he could, but long before he could even grasp the circuitry of the parts he had not himself worked on he felt a touch at his mind. The plane was rolling to a stop. He and all of them hurried over to begin unloading it.
The plane was stopped with one wingtip almost touching the building, heading directly into it, convenient for unloading, but a foolish nuisance when it came time to turn it and take off again, Chandler's mind thought while his body lugged cartons out of the plane. But he knew the answer to that. Take-off would be no problem, any more than it would for the other small transports at the far end of the strip.
These planes were not going to return, ever. The work went on, and then it was done, or all but, and Chandler knew no more about it than when it was begun. The last little bit was a careful check of line voltages and balancing of biases. Chandler could help only up to a point, and then two execs, working through the bodies of one of the Hawaiians and the pilot of a Piper Tri-Pacer who bad flown in some last-minute test equipment, and remained as part of the labor pool laboriously worked on the final tests.
Spent, the other men flopped to the ground, waiting. They were far gone. All of them. Chandler as much as the others. But one of them rolled over, grinned tightly at Chandler and said, "It's been fun. My name's Bradley. I always think people ought to know each other's names in cases like this, imagine sharing a grave with some utter stranger!"
"Grave?"
Bradley nodded. "Like Pharaoh's slaves. The pyramid is just about finished, friend. You don't know what I'm talking about?" He sat up, plucked the end of a tall blade of stemmy grass and put it between his teeth. "I guess you haven't seen the corpses in the woods."
Chandler said, "I found a town half a mile or so over there, nothing in it but skeletons."
"No, heavens, nothing that ancient. These are nice fresh corpses, out behind the junk heap there. Well, not fresh. They're a couple of weeks old. I thought it was neat of the Execs to dispose of the used-up labor out of sight of the rest of us. So much better for morale ... until Juan Simoa and I went back looking for a plain, simple electrical extension cord and found them."
With icy calm Chandler realized that the man was talking sense. Used-up labor: the men who had unloaded the first planes, no doubt, worked until they dropped, then efficiently disposed of, as they were so cheap a commodity that they were not worth the trouble of hauling back to Honolulu for salvage. "I see," he said. "Besides, dead men tell no tales."
"And spread no disease. Probably that's why they did their killing back in the tall trees. Always the chance some exec might have to come down here to inspect in person. Rotting corpses just aren't sanitary." Bradley grinned again. "I used to be a doctor at Molokai."
"Lep ..." began Chandler, but the doctor shook his head.
"No, no, never say leprosy.' It's 'Hansen's disease.' Whatever it is, the execs were sure scared of it. They wiped out every patient we had, except a couple who got away by swimming; then for good measure they wiped out most of the medical staff, too, except for a couple like me who were off-island and had the sense to keep quiet about where they'd worked. Right down the beach it was."
Chandler said, "I was back in the village today. I thought I saw someone still alive."
"You think it might be one of the lepers? It's possible. But don't worry," said the doctor, rolling over on his back and putting his hands behind his head. "Don't let a little Hansen's disease scare you; we suffer from an infection far worse than that." He yawned and said drowsily, "You know, in the old days I used to work on pest-control for the Public Health Service. We sure knocked off a lot of rats and fleas. I never thought I'd be one of them..." He was silent. Chandler looked at him more closely and admired his courage very much. The man had fallen asleep.
Chandler looked at the others. "You going to let them kill us without a struggle?" he demanded.
The remaining Hawaiian was the only one to answer. "Malihini," he said, "you just don't know how much pilikia you're in. It isn't what we let them do."
"We'll see," Chandler promised grimly. "They're only human. I haven't given up yet."
But in the end he could not save himself; it was the girl who saved him.
That night Chandler tossed in troubled sleep, and woke to find himself standing, walking toward the Tri-Pacer. The sun was just beginning to pink the sky and no one else was moving. "Sorry, love," he apologized to himself. "You probably need to bathe and shave, but I don't know how. Shave, I mean." He giggled. "Anyway, you'll find everything you need at my house."
He climbed into the plane. "Ever fly before?" he asked himself. "Well, you'll love it. Here we go close the door ... snap the belt ... turn the switch." He admired the practiced ease with which his body started the motor, raced it with a critical eye on the instruments, turned the plane and lifted it off, up, into the rising sun.
"Oh, dear. You do need a bath," he told himself, wrinkling his nose humorously. "No harm. I've the nicest tub, pink, deep, and nine kinds of bath salts. But I wish you weren't so tired, love, because it's a long flight and you're wearing me out." He was silent as he bent to the correct compass heading and cranked a handle over his head to adjust the trim. "Koitska's going to be so high," he said, smiling. "Never fear, love, I can calm him down. But it's easier to do with you in one piece, you know, the other way's too late."
He was silent for a long time, and then his voice began to sing.
They were songs from Rosalie's own musical comedies. Even with so poor an instrument as Chandler's voice to work with, she sang well enough to keep both of them entertained while his body brought the plane in for a landing; and so Chandler went to live in the villa that belonged to Rosalie Pan.
"LOVE," SHE said, "there are worse things in the world than keeping me amused, when I'm not busy. We'll go to the beach again one day soon, I promise." And she was gone again.
It was like that every day.
Chandler was a concubine, not even that; he was a male geisha, convenient to play gin rummy with, or for company on the surfboards, or to make a drink.
He did not quite know what to make of himself. In bad times one hopes for survival. He had hoped; and now he had survival, perfumed and cushioned, but on what mad terms! Rosalie was a pretty girl, and a good-humored one. She was right. There were worse things in the world than being her companion; but Chandler could not adjust himself to the role. It angered him when she got up from the garden swing and locked herself in her room, for he knew that she was not sleeping as she lay there, though her eyes were closed and she was motionless. It infuriated him when she casually usurped his body to bring an ashtray to her side, or to stop him when his hands presumed. And it drove him nearly wild to be a puppet with her friends working his strings.
He was that most of all. One exec who wished to communicate with another cast about for an available human proxy nearby. Chandler served for Rosie Pan: her telephone, her social secretary, and on occasion he was the garment her dates put on. For Rosalie was one of the few execs who cared to conduct any major part of her life in her own skin. She liked dancing. She enjoyed dining out. It was her pleasure to display herself to the worshippers at Luigi the Wharf Rat's and to speed down the long combers on a surfboard. When another exec chose to accompany her, it was Chandler's body which gave the remote "date" flesh.