Probably the largest groups of doll-bodies would be the Mongols; so he selected one at random, entered it and stood up again into the noise and pain of the freezing gale. He had a pick in his hand. There were forty or fifty like him in this work crew, digging with antlike tenacity and antlike results into the flinty, frozen ground. Apparently they were trying to set stakes to help moor the gantries against the gale.
He dropped the pick and rubbed numbed fingers together. He realized at once that he had not chosen a very good body. For one thing, it had a squint which made everything look fuzzy and doubled; until he learned to adjust to it he was almost blind. For another, it ached with the effects of a very long time of forced labor and hunger. And it was lousy.
Well, he thought, I can stand anything for a while. Let's get to work ... And then he saw that a body very like his own, but a body which was inhabited by a member of the Exec, since it was carrying a rifle, gestured to him, screaming something he could not understand.
He doesn't know I am me, thought Chandler, half amused. He started toward the rifleman. "Wait a minute," he called. "I'm Chandler. I'm ready to go to work, if you'll just tell me what to ... hey! Wait!"
He was very surprised to see that the rifleman was not even making an attempt to understand him. The figure raised its rifle, pointed it at him and fired. That was all. Chandler was very seriously annoyed. It was a clear, careless matter of mistaken identity, he thought angrily. How stupid of the man!
He felt the first shock of the bullet entering his body but did not wait for more. He did not linger to taste death, or even pain. Before either could reach his mind he was up and out of the body again, fuming and mad. Stupid! he thought. Somebody ought to get called down for this! A dizzying sense of falling. A soundless explosion of light.
Then he was back in a body: his own. He picked himself up and stood looking out of Rosalie Pan's picture window onto the thin green lawn, still angry. He had been turned off. Somehow Koitska, or whatever other member of the executive committee had been watching over him, had observed his blundering. His relay coronet had been turned off, and he was back in Hawaii.
Well, he thought grudgingly, that part was all right. He probably was better off out of the way, at least, if they didn't have sense enough to brief him ahead of time. But the rest of the affair was plain stupidity! He had been frozen, scared and pushed about for nothing!
He rubbed his ear angrily. It was soft and warm, not the chilled, numbed thing he had worn moments before. He muttered imprecations at the damned foolishness of the executive committee. If he couldn't run things better than they, he told himself, he would just give up ...
Ten or fifteen minutes later it occurred to him that he had not, after all, been the greatest loser from that particular blunder. A few minutes later still something else occurred to him. He was not merely beginning to live the life of the execs; he was beginning to think like them, too.
An hour later Rosalie came lightly down the stairs, yawning and stretching. "Love," she cried, catching sight of Chandler, "you really screwed that one up. Can't you tell a Kraut missile expert from a Mongolian cowboy?"
Chandler said glumly, "No."
She said consolingly, but with a touch of annoyance, too, "Oh, don't be frightful, love. I know it was a disappointment, but ..."
"It must've disappointed the man I got killed, too," said Chandler.
"You are being frightful. Well, I understand." She patted his arm. "It's the waiting. It's so nervous-making. Embarrassing, too."
"How would you know?"
"Why, love," she said, "don't you think I went through it myself? But it passes, dear, it passes. Meanwhile come have a drink."
Moodily Chandler allowed the girl to soothe him, although he thought she was taking far too light a view of it. He accepted the Scotch from her and tasted it without comment.
"Is something wrong with it, love?"
He said patiently, "You know I don't like too much water in a drink."
"I'm sorry, love."
He shrugged. Well, he thought, she was right. In a way. He was indeed being frightful. He did not see why she would respond with annoyance, however. He had a right to act a little odd, when he was, after all, betraying all of his friends, even the memory of his dead wife. She certainly could not expect him to take all of that in his stride, without a moment's regret.
Rosalie yawned and smothered it. "I'm sorry, love. Funny how it tires you out to work in somebody else's body!"
"Yes."
"Oh, really, now!" she was angry at last. "For cat's sake, love! Mooning around like a puppy that's been swatted for making a mess!"
He said, "I'm sorry if I have been in any way annoying To ---"
"Come off it! This is Rosie you're talking to." She cradled his head in her arm like a mother, an irritated mother, but a mother. " 'Smatter? Are you scared?" He put down the Scotch and admitted, "A little bit. I think so."
"Well, why didn't you say so? Dear heart, everybody's scared waiting for the votes to come in. Very nervous-making, waiting to know."
He demanded, "When will I know?"
She hesitated. "I'm not supposed to discuss some things with you, love, you know that. Not yet."
"When Rosie?"
She capitulated. "Well, I don't suppose it makes much difference under the circumstances."
He knew what circumstances she meant.
"So I'll tell you that much, anyway. See, love, you need a little over seven hundred votes to get in. That's a lot, isn't it? But that's the rules of the game. And right now you have, let's see. --"
Her eyes glazed for a moment. Chandler knew that she was looking out at something else, through some clerk's vision somewhere on the island, or somewhere in the world.
"Right now you have about a hundred and fifty. Takes time, doesn't it?"
"That's a hundred and fifty to let me in, right? And how many 'no' votes?"
She patted his hand and said gently, "None of those, love. You wouldn't ever have but one." She got up and refilled his drink. "Never fear, dear," she said. "Rosie's on your side! And now let's have something to eat, eh?"
And he had seven days left.
TIME PASSED. Chandler wheedled information out of Rosalie until he had a clear picture of what he was up against. Two-thirds of all the members of the executive committee had to cast an affirmative vote for him (but they would vote in blocs, Rosalie promised; get this one on his side and she would bring in fifty more, get that one and he could deliver a hundred). If there were a single blackball he was out. And he had ten days to be accepted, which were going fast.
Very fast. He had no idea that so many things could be done so rapidly. He was meeting people by the dozen and score, members of the Exec who were Rosalie's personal friends, all of them votes if he could please them. He did everything he could think of to please them. He was working, too, not on the rocket project any more; and not on any of the other off-island projects of the exec (which was all right with him, as he felt pretty sure that most of these involved selective murder and demolition); but on little odds and ends of electronic jobs for Koitska and others. He was allowed to go into Honolulu for more parts, which the new owner of Parts 'n Plenty provided for him in silence. Her eyes were red with weeping; she was Hsi's widow. Chandler tried to find something to say to her, ran through every possible word in his vocabulary, and left without speaking at all.
Chandler knew that his very great measure of freedom was a dangerous sign. Koitska did not trouble to hide from him any more just what it was that they had built on Hilo. He even allowed Chandler to do some patch-cording and soldering on the installation in the former TWA Message Center, watching him every minute, gasping and snoring as he lay on his couch across the room, and made no effort to keep Chandler from guessing that the Hilo assembly was almost a duplicate of the one here. Hilo had more power, Chandler thought; there had been some hint that more power was needed for the really remote control applications involved in the Executive Committee's Mars project; but basically it was only a standby.