Chandler stretched out the borrowed hand to pick up a heavy wrench even
while he thought. But the hand would not grasp. He brought it to the
weak, watering eyes. The hand had no fingers. It ended in a ball of
scar tissue. The left hand was nearly as misshapen.
Panicked, Chandler retreated from the body in a flash, back to his
own; and then he began to think.
It was, it had to be, the creature he had seen in the village of the
dead. A leper. One of the few who escaped from the colony at Molokai.
Chandler drove himself back to that body and, though it could not work
well, he could make it turn a frequency dial, using its clubbed hands
like sticks. He could make it throw a switch. He then caused it to
place the toothed edge of a rusting saw on the ground and strike at it
with its throat in a sort of reverse guillotine. Chandler could not see
that he had a choice; he dared not have that creature left where it
might be seized the moment he quit its body. It was better dead.
After that it all became easy.
In his own body he destroyed the installation in Oahu. A few minutes
at Koitska's work bench, and he had changed the frequency on his own
coronet to transmit on the new band the leper's touch had given the
Hilo equipment.
He worked rapidly and without errors, one ear cocked for the sound of
someone coming to threaten what he was doing (the sound never came),
impatient to get the job done.
He was very impatient, for when he was done he would be the only exec.
And the execs would be only slaves.
XV
Chandler strolled out of the TWA building, very tired.
It was dawn. His job was done. He carried the coronet, the only working
coronet in the world, in his hand. He had spent the night killing,
killing, killing, and blood had washed away his passions; he was spent.
He had killed every exec he could find, in widening circles from the
building where his body lay. He had slit his dozen throats and fired
bullets into his hundred hearts and hundred brains; he had entered
bodies only long enough to feel for a coronet, and if it was there the
body was doomed; and he stopped only when it occurred to him he wasn't
even doing that much any more. He had probably killed some dozens of
slaves, as well as all the execs in reach. And when he stopped the orgy
of killing he had made one last search of the nearer portions of the
island and found no one alive, and he had then realized that one of the
closest execs had been Rosalie Pan.
He knew that in a while he would feel very badly for having killed that
girl (which could she have been? The one with the shotgun in the mouth?
The one whose intestines he had spilled with a silver letteropener in a
whim of hara-kiri?), but just now he was too worn.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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