Chapter 7

A pink and silver bus let Chandler off at Fort Street in downtown Honolulu and he walked a few blocks to the address he had been given. The name of the place was Parts ‘n Plenty. He found it easily enough. It was a radio parts store; by the size of it, it had once been a big, well-stocked one; but now the counters were almost bare.

A thin-faced man with khaki-colored skin looked up and nodded. Chandler nodded back. He fingered a bin of tuning knobs, hefted a coil of two-strand antenna wire and said, “A fellow at Tripler told me to come here to pick up equipment, but I’m damned if I know what I’m supposed to do when I locate it. I don’t have any money.”

The dark-skinned man got up and came over to him. “Figured you for a mainlander. No sweat. Have you got a list?”

“I can make one.”

“All right. Catalogues on the table behind you, if you want them.” He offered Chandler a cigarette and sat against the edge of the counter, reading over Chandler’s shoulder. “Ho,” he said suddenly. “Koitska’s square-wave generator again, right?” Chandler admitted it, and the man grinned. “Every couple months he sends somebody along. He doesn’t really need the generator, you know. He just wants to see how much you know about building it, Mr.--?”

“Chandler.”

“Glad to know you. I’m John Hsi. But don’t go easy on the job just because it’s a waste of time, Chandler; it could be pretty important to you.”

Chandler absorbed the information silently and handed over his list. The man did not look at it. “Come back in about an hour,” he said.

“I won’t have any money in an hour, either.”

“Oh, that’s all right. I’ll put it on Koitska’s bill.”

Chandler said frankly, “Look, I don’t know what’s going on. Suppose I came in and picked up a thousand dollars’ worth of stuff, would you put that on the bill, too?”

“Certainly,” said Hsi optimistically. “You thinking about stealing them? What would you do with them?”

“Well...” Chandler puffed on his cigarette. “Well, I could--”

“No, you couldn’t. Also, it wouldn’t pay, believe me,” Hsi said seriously. “If there is one thing that doesn’t pay, it is cheating on the Exec.”

“Now, that’s another good question,” said Chandler. “Who is the Exec?”

Hsi shook his head. “Sorry. I don’t know you, Chandler.”

“You mean you’re afraid even to answer a question?”

“You’re damned well told I am. Probably nobody would mind what I might tell you ... but ‘probably’ isn’t good enough.”

Exasperated, Chandler said, “How the devil am I supposed to know what to do next? So I take all this junk back to my room at Tripler and solder up the generator--then what?”

“Then Koitska will get in touch with you,” Hsi said, not unkindly. “Play it as it comes to you, Chandler, that’s the best advice I can offer.” He hesitated. “Koitska’s not the worst of them,” he said; and then, daringly, “and maybe he’s not the best, either. Just do whatever he told you. Keep on doing it until he tells you to do something else. That’s all. I mean, that’s all the advice I can give you. Whether it’s going to be enough to satisfy Koitska is something else again.”

There is not much to do in a strange town when you have no money. Chandler’s room at what once had been Tripler General Hospital was free; the bus was free; evidently all the radio parts he could want were also free. But he did not have the price of a cup of coffee or a haircut in the pockets of the suntan slacks the desk man at Tripler had issued him. He wandered around the streets of Honolulu, waiting for the hour to be up.

At Tripler a doctor had also examined his scar and it was now concealed under a neat white bandage; he had been fed; he had bathed; he had been given new clothes. Tripler was a teeming metropolis in itself, a main building some ten stories high, a scattering of outbuildings connected to it by covered passages, with thousands of men and women busy about it. Chandler had spoken to a good many of them in the hour after waking up and before boarding the bus to Honolulu, and none of them had been free with information either.

Honolulu had not suffered greatly under the rule of the Exec. Remembering the shattered stateside cities, Chandler thought that this one had been spared nearly all the suffering of the rule of the world by the Exec, whoever they were. Dawdling down King Street, in the aromatic reek of the fish markets, Chandler could have thought himself in any port city before the grisly events of that Christmas when the planet went possessed. Crabs waved sluggishly at him from bins. Great pink-scaled fish rested on nests of ice, waiting to be sold. Smells of frying food came from half a dozen restaurants. It was only the people who were different. There was a solid sprinkling of those who, like himself, were dressed in insigneless former Army uniforms--obviously conscripts on Exec errands--and a surprising minority who, from overheard snatches of conversation, had come from countries other than the U.S.A. Russian mostly, Chandler guessed; but Russian or U.S., wearing suntans or aloha shirts, everyone he saw was marked by the visible signs of strain. There was no laughter.

Chandler saw a clock within the door of a restaurant; half an hour still to kill. He turned and wandered up, away from the water, toward the visible bulk of the hills; and in a moment he saw what made Honolulu’s collective face wear its careworn frown.