This way, this way, she gestured. A crowd of mudbound figures. She slipped into one, he into another. They were in a bus now, rocking along an inland road, all men, all roughly dressed. Laborers going to clear a new section of Oahu of its split-level debris. Chandler thought, and looked for the girl in one of the men's eyes, could not find her, hesitated, and, floated. She was hovering impatiently. This way!
He followed, and followed. They were a hundred people doing a hundred things. They lingered a few moments as a teen-age couple holding hands in the twilight of the beach. They fled from a room where Chandler was an old woman dying on a bed, and Rosalie a stolid, uncaring nurse beside her. They played follow-the-leader through the audience of a Honolulu movie theater, and sought each other, laughing, among the fish stalls of King Street. Then Chandler turned to Rosalie to speak and ... it all went out ... the scene disappeared ... he opened his eyes, and he was back in his own flesh.
He was lying on the pastel pile rug in Rosalie's bedroom. He got up, rubbing the side of his face. He had tumbled, it seemed. Rosalie was lying on the bed. In a moment she opened her eyes.
"Well, love?"
He said hoarsely, "What made it stop?"
She shrugged. "Koitska turned you off. Tired of monitoring us, I expect it's been an hour. I'm surprised his patience lasted this long."
She stretched luxuriously, but he was too full of what had happened even to see the white grace of her body. "Did you like it, love?" she asked. "Would you like to have it forever?"
FOR NINE days Chandler's status remained in limbo. He spent those days in a state of numb detachment, remembering the men and women he had worn like garments, appalled and exhilarated.
He did not see Rosalie again that day. She kept to her room, and he was locked out.
He was still a lapdog.
But he was a lapdog with a dream dangling before him. He went to sleep that night thinking that he was a dog who might yet become a god, and had eight days left. The next day Rosalie wheedled another hour of the coronet from Koitska. She and Chandler explored the ice caves on Mount Rainier, wearing the bodies of two sick and dying hermits they had found inhabiting a half-destroyed inn on its slopes.
The mountain wore its cloudy flag of ice crystals in a bleak, pale evening. The air was thin and stinging, and their borrowed bodies ached. They left them and found two others, twenty-five hundred miles to the east, and wandered arm in arm under stars, neared the destroyed International Bridge at Niagara, breathing the spray of the unchanging Falls. They came back in a flash when Koitska's patience ran out again and sprawled on her hot, dry lawn, and he had seven days left.
They passed like a dream. Chandler saw a great deal of the inner workings of the Exec. He had privileges, for he was up for membership in the club. Rosalie had proposed him.
He talked with two Czechoslovakian ballet dancers in their persons, lean, dark girls who laughed and frowned alternately, and with a succession of heavily accented Russians and Poles and Japanese, who came to him only through the mouth of the beach boy-servant who worked on Rosalie's garden. Chandler thought they liked him. He was pleased that he had penetrated where he had not been allowed before ... until he realized that these freedoms were in themselves a threat.
They allowed him this contact for a reason. They were looking him over.
If their final decision was to reject him, as it well might be, they would have to kill him, because he had seen too much.
But he had little time to dwell on fears of the future. The present was crowded. On the fourth day one of the members of the exec invited him to join them.
"You'll do for a gang boss, Shanda-lerra," he said through the beach boy's mouth; and once again Chandler found himself working on an executive committee project, though no one had told him what it was. He swam up into the strange, thin sea of the mind, in company with a dozen others, and they arrowed through emptiness to a place Chandler could not recognize. He watched the others spiral down and slip into the bodies of the tiny mud-dwelling dolls that were human beings. When they were all gone he sought a doll-body of his own.
He opened his eyes on a bleak, snow-laden Arctic dawn. A shrieking blast from the North Pole was driving particles of gritty ice into his eyes, his ears, the loose, quilted clothes his body wore. The temperature, he was sure, was far below zero. The cold made his teeth ache, filled his eyes with tears.
All around him great floodlights mounted on poles cast a harsh glare over a hundred acres of barren earth, studded with sheds and concrete pillboxes, heaped over with dirt and snow. In the center of the great lighted ice-desert loomed a skeletal steel object that looked like a madly displaced skyscraper. It rose hundreds of feet into the air, its top beyond the range of the floodlights, its base fogged by driving snow. Chandler looked again; no, it was not a single skyscraper but two of them, two tall steel towers, one like an elongated projectile standing on its tail, the other like the Eiffel Tower, torn out of context.
Someone caught Chandler's arm and bellowed hoarsely: "Come on, darling! That is you, isn't it? Come over here where Djelenko's handing out the guns."
He recognized Rosalie, clad in the corpus of a Siberian yak-herder, and followed her docilely toward a man who was unlocking a concrete bunker. It was not only the girl he had recognized. With an active shock of surprise he saw that the twin towers were a rocket and its gantry. By the size of it, an orbital rocket at the least.
"I didn't think there were any satellites left!" he bellowed into the flat, dirty ear that was at present the property of Rosalie Pan.
The broad, dark-browed face turned toward him. "This'un's about the last, I guess," she shouted. "Wouldn't be out in this mess otherwise! Miserable weather, ain't it?" She pushed him toward the bunker. "Go see Djelenko, love! Faster we get to work, faster we get this over with."
But Djelenko was shouting something at them that Chandler could not understand. "Oh, damn," cried Rosalie. "Love, you went and got yourself the wrong body. This chap's one of the old experts. Zip out of it and pick yourself a nice Mongol like mine."
Confused, Chandler brought his body's fist up before his eyes. The hand was calloused, scarred and twisted with cold, and one finger, its nail mashed, was trying its best to hurt in the numbing chill of the Siberian air, but the fingers had started out to be long and white. They were not the blunt fists of the yak-herders.
"Sorry," shouted Chandler, and took himself out of the body.
What price the Orphalese? What price the murder of so many innocents, including his own wife? For them, and all of them, Chandler did not have a thought. This was his tryout at the spring training of the team, his first day on the new job. Conscientiously he was attempting to acquire the knack of being a demon.
If he regretted anything at this moment, it was only his own lack of expertise. He wished he were a better demon than he was. He hung irresolute in the queerness of this luminous, distorted sea. He saw the sand-dweller he had just quit, moving in its shapeless way toward the place where he knew the gantries stood. There were others like it about, but which should he enter? He swore to himself. No doubt there were recognition marks that were easy enough to find; neither Rosalie nor the other members of the Exec seemed to have much difficulty making their way about. But he lacked pieces for the puzzle, and he was confused.
He reasoned the pattern out: The gantries meant a rocket flight. The European body he had tenanted for a moment was not native to the region: a slave expert, no doubt, once perhaps an official on this project and now impressed into the service of the executive committee. No doubt the Mongols were mere warm bodies, casually commandeered from their nearby villages, to be used for haul-and-lift labor as need be.