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.