He stepped callously around the hulk on the floor and found a door
behind the couch, a door and a hall, and at the end of that hall a
large room that had once perhaps been a message center. Now it held
rack after rack of electronic gear. He recognized it without elation.
It had had to be there.
It was the main transmitter for all the coronets of the exec.
He had only to pull one switch--that one there--and power would cease
to flow. The coronets would be dead. The execs would be only humans.
In five minutes he could destroy enough parts so that it would be at
least a week's work to build it again, and in a week the slaves in
Honolulu--somehow he could reach them, somehow he would tell them of
their chance--could root out and destroy every exec on all the islands.
Of course, there was the standby transmitter he himself had helped to
build.
He realized tardily that Koitska would have made some arrangement for
starting that up by remote control.
He put down the tool-kit with which he had been advancing on the racks
of transistors, and paused to think.
He was a fool, he saw after a moment. He could not destroy this
installation--not yet--not until he had used it. He remembered to sit
down so that his body would not crash to the floor, and then he sent
himself out and up, to scan the nearby area.
There was no one there, nobody within a mile or more, except the feeble
glimmer that was dying Koitska. He did not enter that body. He returned
to his own long enough to barricade the door--it had a strong-looking
lock, but he shouldered furniture against it too--and then he went
up and out, grateful to Rosalie, who had taught him how to navigate
in the curious world of the mind, flashing across water, under a
mind-controlled plane, to the island of Hilo.
There _had_ to be someone near the standby installation.
He searched; but there was no one. No one in the building. No one near
the ruined field. No one in the village of the dead nearby. He was
desperate; he became frantic; he was on the point of giving up, and
then he found--someone? But it was a personality feebler than stricken
Koitska's, a bare swampfire glow.
No matter. He entered it.
* * * * *
At once he screamed silently and left it again. He had never known such
pain. A terrifying fire in the belly, a thunder past any migraine in
the head, a thousand lesser aches and woes in every member. He could
not imagine what person lived in such distress; but grimly he forced
himself to enter again.
Moaning--it was astonishing how thick and animal-like the man's voice
was--Chandler forced his borrowed body stumbling through the jungle.
Time was growing very short. He drove it gasping at an awkward run
across the airfield, dodged around one wrecked plane and blundered
through the door. The pain was intolerable. He was hardly able to
maintain control.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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