A Plague of Pythons (aka Demon in the Skull) by Frederik Pohl

Author:Frederik Pohl [Pohl, Frederik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

XIII

WHATEVER CHANDLER’S life might be worth, he knew he had given it away and the girl had given it back to him. He did not see her for several days, but the morning after the massacre he woke to find a note beside his bed table. No one had been in the room. It was his own sleeping hand that had written it, though the girl’s mind had moved his fingers: If you get mixed up in anything like that again I won’t be able to help you. So don’t! Those people are just using you, you know. Don’t throw away your chances. Do you like surfboarding? Rosie

But by then there was no time for surfboarding, or for anything else but work. The construction job on Hilo had begun, and it was a nightmare. He was flown to the island with the last load of parts. No execs were present in the flesh, but on the first day Chandler lost count of how many different minds possessed his own. He began to be able to recognize them by a limp as he walked, by tags of German as he spoke, by a stutter, a distinctive gesture of annoyance, an expletive. As he was a trained engineer he was left to labor by himself for hours on end; it was worse for the others in the construction crew. There seemed to be a dozen execs hovering invisible around all the time; no sooner was a worker released by one than he was seized by another. The work progressed rapidly, but at the cost of utter exhaustion.

By the end of the fourth day Chandler had eaten only two meals and could not remember when he had slept last. He found himself staggering when free and furious with the fatigue-clumsiness of his own body when possessed.

At sundown on the fourth day he found himself free for a moment and, incredibly, without work of his own to do just then, until someone else completed a job of patch-wiring. He stumbled out into the open air and had time only to gaze around for a moment before his eyes began to close. He had time to think that this must once have been a lovely island. Even unkempt as it was the trees were tall and beautiful; beyond them a wisp of smoke was pale against the dark-blue evening sky; the breeze was scented … He woke and found he was already back in the building, reaching for his soldering gun.

There came a point at which even the will of the execs was unable to drive the flogged bodies farther, and then they were pefmitted to sleep for a few hours. At daybreak they were awake again.

The sleep was not enough. The bodies were slow and inaccurate. Two of the Hawaiians, straining a hundred-pound component into place, staggered, slipped, and dropped it.

Appalled, Chandler waited for them to kill themselves. But it seemed that the execs were tiring too. One of the Hawaiians said irritably, with an accent Chandler did not recognize: “That’s pan.

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