What sort of creature had he been inhabiting? Human? Why yes, it must be human, the coronets gave no power over the bodies of animals. But it had not felt human. Chandler experienced one vertiginous moment when all possibilities seemed real, when visions of elves and beings from flying saucers danced in his brain; then sanity returned. Certainly it was human, someone sick, perhaps. Or insane. But human.
He could not understand that clawed club of a hand. But it didn't matter; he could use it, because he had used it. It was only a matter of figuring out how. At that moment he heard a car race into the parking lot, spraying gravel. He looked out the window and saw Rosalie Pan's Porsche.
He unlocked the door for her and she came clattering up the stairs as though chased by bears, glanced at Chandler, passed him by and dropped to her knees beside Koitska's body. She looked up and said, "He's dead."
"I didn't kill him."
"I didn't say you did." She got up slowly, watching him. "You almost might as well be, love," she said. "I don't know what I can do for you now."
"No," agreed Chandler, nodding as though very frank and fair, "you can't help me much if he's dead." Full of guile he approached her, staring at Koitska's body. "But is he? I think I saw him breathe." Perplexed, she turned back to the body.
Chandler took a quick step, reached out and knocked the coronet off her head. It clung to her coiffure. Ruthlessly he grabbed it and yanked, and it came away with locks of her hair clinging to it.
She cried out and put a hand to her head, looking at him with astonishment and fear overriding the pain.
He said, breathing hard: "Maybe I can do something for myself."
Rosalie sobbed, "Love, you're crazy. You don't have a chance. Give it back to me, and I'll try to help you, but Love! Give it back, please!"
Chandler controlled his breathing and asked, very reasonably, "If you were me, would you give it back?"
"Yes! Please!" She took a step toward him, then stopped. Her pretty face was a grimace now, her hair torn and flying. She dropped her hands to her side and sobbed, "No, I wouldn't. But you must, love. Please ... "
Chandler said, "Sit down. Over there, next to his body. I want to think and I don't want you close to me." She started to object and he overrode her: "Sit down! Or --" He touched the coronet on his own head.
She turned like a golem and sat down beside the obese old corpse. She sat watching him, her face passive and drained. Chandler tried to imagine for a moment what it must be like for her, in one second a member of that godlike society of superbeings who ruled the Earth, in another a mere mortal, a figure of clay whose body could be seized by him, Chandler or by any other of the Executive Committee...
There was a threat in that. Chandler frowned. "I can't leave you there," he said, thinking out loud. "Your friend Fenell might drop in on you. Or somebody." Her expression did not change. He said briskly: "Get up. Get in that closet." When she hesitated, he added, "I'm not too good at controlling people. I might not be able to make you tie yourself up. But Rosalie, I could make you kill yourself."
The closet was small and uncomfortable, but it would hold her, and it had a lock. With Rosalie out of the way, Chandler paused for only a moment. There were details to work out...
But he had a plan. He could strike a blow. He could end the menace of the Executive Committee forever! The key to the whole thing was that crippled creature on Hilo. He knew now what it was, and wondered that he had not understood before.
A leper! One of the patients at Molokai the doctor had told him some had got away. Through that leper, Chandler calculated, he could find a way to destroy the installation on Hilo, if nothing else offered, he could contrive to disable the generator, or break open its fuel storage supply and set fire to the building.
And the other installation was right here in this building, within his grasp! He could destroy them both, one through the leper, the other in his own person. And that's the end of the Executive Committee, he thought triumphantly, and then... And then
He paused, suddenly downcast.
And then, of course, they would know something was wrong. There were a thousand of them. They would come here. They would kill him.
And they would rebuild the equipment that would give them back the world.
Chandler was close to weeping. So near to victory! And yet it was out of his reach ...
Except, he thought, that there was something about the standby installation that was different. What had Hsi said? A different frequency. And Koitska had had two coronets with him on the island..
Chandler did not delay. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps it would not work. Perhaps his memory played him false, or his assumptions were in error, or Koitska had reset the frequency in the days since ... perhaps anything, there were more unknown factors than he could guess at ... but still there was a chance!
He leaped out of his body, poised himself to get his bearings and fled through the luminous gray mists toward Hilo. Steeling himself to the pain, he entered the body of the leper and loped shamblingly back toward the duplicate installation.
Five minutes later the generator coughed and spun, and the components came to life. Chandler had no way to test them, to determine what sort of signal they were generating; but he had helped put the installation together and, as far as he could see, it was operating perfectly.
He abandoned the body of the leper with gratitude, and stood up in his own.
Five minutes more and the master transmitter was stilled. Chandler had pulled the switch.
When he found Koitska's standby-frequency coronet and placed it on his head there was only one person in all the world who possessed the terrifying powers of a member of the Executive Committee, and that person was Chandler.
He stood there for a moment with his eyes closed, very tired and very calm. He knew what he had to do, but there was something, he felt, that he should do first. He waited, but could not remember what it was; and so a moment later he left his body and soared off in search of his first quarry. It was not for some time that it came to him what he had wanted to do. He had wanted to pray.
It was all working; his best hopes were coming true! The installation on Hilo functioned perfectly and Chandler was, in fact, the master of the islands and thus of the world!
He accepted it without triumph. Perhaps the triumph would come later, but first he had work to do. For he had been wrong, he saw now, in thinking that the destruction of the machines would free the world from its tyranny.
Koitska had not been the only scientist among the exec. Surely others knew the theory behind the electronic wizardry that gave them control; surely there were plans and wiring diagrams in some safe file, perhaps in a dozen of them, that could be brought out and used again. It was necessary to destroy the machinery, yes; but it was also necessary to destroy the plans ... not only the plans on paper but the plans that might linger in the brains of the members of the Exec. It was, in fact, necessary to kill them all. It was not only necessary, thought Chandler objectively, it was rather easy. It was child's play. All you had to do was the sort of thing members of the Exec had been doing for fun or in furtherance of a purpose every day for years. All you had to do was what he was doing. Up out of the body, and search for the queerly distorted sluggish sort of creature that turned out to be a human mind; enter it; and there you were in the body of a man or woman. You glanced in a mirror or touched the body's head with the body's hand to check to see if it wore a coronet, of course. It did, the body had to be destroyed. There were many ways of doing that. Simple household objects could be employed, a knife, a bottle of iodine to drink, sometimes you could find a gun.