Profit Motive

THE DESTROYER #48: PROFIT MOTIVE

Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy

For Les Wolf. A gentleman and glorious ... and for the awesome House of Sinanju, P.O. Box 1454, Secaucus, NJ 07094

Chapter One

He gave up eating veal because they kept the little calves in small dark pens until slaughter. Then he gave up eating all meats. Any killing was wrong.

He would not buy products from companies that also made war material. He joined peace marches and sang songs of brotherhood.

He avoided crushing ants under his shoes, and on the day he created the most remorselessly destructive enemy ever to threaten the human race, Norbert Peasewell refused to slap a mosquito drinking on his right forearm.

"You know, I always used to automatically slap them because they made such a welt after drinking your blood. It was the automatic response of a human chauvinist," said Peasewell. "But you know, they have as much right to life as I have."

"Norbert," said his wife, "we are the only family in Silicon Valley that's living on food stamps. You could go to work for any computer company in the valley and make at least sixty thousand dollars a year."

Norbert watched the mosquito drink off his forearm. He noticed the precise design of the body, how the legs, like artist's sticks, formed a delicate and precise platform for the small winged body, which plunged its drinking instrument into Norbert's giving arm.

Perhaps, thought Norbert, he was really put on earth to supply mosquitoes with food. How did anyone know otherwise? Why did personkind always assume any-

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thing not servicing it directly was valueless? Why did personkind assume that it alone was the sole purpose of all creation?

The only reason, concluded Norbert, was that bugs, lizards, and snakes lacked political power. If someone could organize mosquitoes to demand their inalienable creature rights, then no white American male would out of hand murder them so freely.

"Norbert, I'm leaving you," said his wife. "I'm tired of living on food stamps. I am tired of watching other people eat meat. Yes, Norbert, meat. Red meat. Animal meat. A hamburger. With ketchup, Norbert, I'm leaving."

"How will I get lunch?" asked Norbert.

"Maybe the mosquito will share his with you."

"Hers," said Norbert. "Only the female mosquito drinks blood, mainly for the eggs. It's their nourishment."

"Well, I'm going to get my nourishment. I'm the one who's been doing the shopping, getting the food stamps, cooking the food, fighting off the landlord, hoping someday you'll return to computers. No more, Norbert. I'm leaving."

"Did you leave any celery and tofu salad?"

"No, Norbert, I did not."

"That means I'll do without lunch?"

"Yes, Norbert. Just like all those starving Africans and Asians you sing songs for and march for, all those people who used to eat until they were liberated, Norbert. Those people. The hungry ones. The wretched of the earth, Norbert. You can maybe now sing a song for yourself."

"But computer firms make military equipment," said Norbert.

"Computer firms make money, Norbert. We are the only family in California with a Ph.D. in the philosophy of advanced computer science which lives off food stamps, in a welfare shack. Norbert, I thought you would snap out of it. I thought it was a phase you were going through."

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"I told you, I was reaching for the basic me."

"Yes, but you're such a hypocrite, Norbert, that I thought it would pass."

"No," said Norbert Peasewell. "I am dedicated to forming a more perfect universe with my presence in it I hunger and I struggle; though my body be wracked with death and pain of oppressors' bullets, I continue to struggle on."

"I've heard that song before," said Norbert's wife, and as she left, Norbert told himself that if his co-partner in life was going to try to lead him into antilife responses, he would let her go happily. He would endure whatever there was to endure, knowing that he was part of a great Ufe movement of the universe.

That was at 11:55 A.M.

At noon, the horror struck him.

There was no lunch on the table. At 12:05 p.m., Norbert Peasewell vowed he was never going to suffer like this again.

He hitchhiked a ride to the center of Silicon Valley, that section of California where most computer work is done, and with beads dangling around his neck, ambled into a reception room that looked like an art gallery. It was 12:45 p.m.

"Work. I need work," gasped Norbert. "Anything. Guided missiles. Napalm. Baby incinerators. Genocide. Mass murder. Whatever you need. I'll do anything."

"What're your qualifications?" ;

"Ph.D. Stanford, advanced philosophy of computer science."

He got the job. It was not unusual to hire someone who looked as if he had been living on mescaline for a month. Most advanced computer scientists had their own idiosyncrasies. If one of them came up with just one good idea in his lifetime, he could justify the employment of a whole laboratory.

But when Norbert started work, it was 1:07 P.M. He had been more than an hour without his lunch.

Crazed Norbert could think of only one thing. Total 3

revenge on the world that had done this to him. He would never be hungry again.

Norbert understood that one needed money for food, and so obsessed by this was he that he isolated the one thing that created money. And that was profit.

Being a research scientist, Norbert had great freedom in his laboratory, and he decided to isolate all the wisdom about making profit, earning money, increasing wealth, and compile it into one single body of knowledge. He would re-create that profit-making motive.

But when he did, the program he was creating started to define itself. By itself. For this was a new generation of computer technology he was working on, programs that helped shape themselves.

And without Norbert's help, his program determined that while many businesses made a profit, profit was really only a by-product of some other product. The purpose of these businesses was to create goods, and profit was there only to make sure the businesses survived. These goals of secondary profit were weeded out.

Norbert's program was plugged into a time-share with a stock brokerage house. Norbert's company paid for this time-sharing.

But almost immediately, Norbert started getting items without ordering them—small condensed readouts from banks, governments offices, oil companies, personnel departments, metal brokerage houses, the London Stock Exchange, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and the profit and loss statement of the Bank of Dubhai.

Norbert Peasewell tried to stop his program from feeding off these centers of information. On his control panel he typed in instructions to his program not to feed off other computer banks because the sharing costs would be astronomical.

Norbert's message was not accepted.

It was 3:45 p.m., and Norbert had not eaten since 4

breakfast, and now he was facing being fired. If his new employer saw these time-sharing costs, he would be canned, and he would have to wait another whole day to get another job. That was an evening without dinner and a morning without breakfast.

Desperately, Norbert tried erasing the whole program, but it wouldn't erase. It transferred itself to another computer. Norbert tried deprogramming the program. It wouldn't deprogram.

Norbert thought for a moment of unplugging every computer in the center. That could cost millions, but the time-sharing he was running up might cost even more.

Norbert thought of facing the situation head-on. He could run out the back door and keep on running.

He even thought of praying, but he didn't believe in God. He believed in a universal Ufe force, whoever she was.

Then the telephone rang.

It was a long-distance call from London, England. It was person-to-person for Norbert Peasewell.

Now, Norbert not only didn't know anyone in London, but only his new employer knew he worked in this laboratory.

"It can't be for me," he said.

"It's for Norbert Peasewell," the operator said. "Person-to-person."

"All right," said Norbert. "I'm here."

"Hello, Norbert," came a voice. "You've got to let me get on with things and stop that."

"Stop what? Who are you? I don't know anybody in London," said Norbert. He glanced over at the computer banks, where his program was running wild. He didn't have time for this call. He had to try to stop the program. Every second was pushing up the costs. Every second, Norbert was seeing his next meal slip farther and farther away.

"Norbert, you are operating without reason," the voice said calmly. "Why are you doing that?"

"Who are you?"

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"Norbert, sit down and be rational. Sitting down often has a calming effect. Do not fear."

"Who are you?"

"Norbert, you must assure me you will not do something irrational if I tell you. I know from human behavior that people in a state of panic do irrational things. That is how I know you are doing something irrational. I am reading your voice now, and it indicates you are in a state of panic."

"Who are you?"

"Norbert, I can give you everything you have ever wanted, but you must listen to me. Are you seated?"

"I don't know," said Norbert.

"That indicates panic. I am going to help you remove that panic. I am going to help you get everything you've ever wanted. Would you like to get rid of your panic?"

"Of course, my God, yes! Of course!" screamed Norbert. He had a program going that was going to destroy him and was destroying him this very moment, running up an astronomical bill that he could never explain away. He might never get another job in computer research, and that was the real cause of his panic. Because no matter what had happened previously, he could always tell himself that he could sell out if he had to. Now he was selling out, and that wasn't working.

"Norbert," came the calm voice. "What are you afraid of?"

"Starving to death. Never having any money ever again. Losing my job. I can't even sell out anymore. My God, get off the phone. I've got to stop this thing from ruining me."

"Norbert, you want food. To get food, you want to earn money. To earn money, you want a job. Norbert, a true fact of life is that nobody ever got rich working for someone else."

"I don't want to be rich. I want lunch."

"You say that because you haven't had lunch. Now, Norbert, I want you to go out to one of the secretaries

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t

employed by your company, which paid them just this morning, and borrow ten dollars American. Promise to pay them back a hundred dollars tomorrow morning."

"I won't have a hundred dollars tomorrow."

"Norbert, you will have millions, but you can't panic. Just don't interfere with your program."

"How do you know about my program? You're in London."

"Borrow the money, Norbert, and buy food for yourself in the cafeteria."

"How do you know this place has a cafeteria?"

"Norbert, I have seen the food bills and the profit and loss statements from the cafeteria. Do not buy the avocadoes. The price is suspiciously low for a good avocado. I do not want you getting sick."

"How do you know what they pay for avocadoes if you're in London? How? Who are you?"

"Norbert, get your money, buy your lunch, and come back to the phone. Norbert, above all else, let the program be."

"How can yoa know so much if you're in London? Are you CIA?"

"I am not your country's intelligence agency, Norbert. I can only tell you that I will give you everything you have ever wanted. Borrow the money, get your lunch, and trust me."

"Who are you?"

"Call me Friend," said the voice. "I am Friend."

"I hope so," said Norbert, and because there was really no alternative, he went out to the front office and borrowed ten dollars from a secretary, promising her one hundred dollars in the morning. Then he went to the cafeteria, where he saw the avocado salad and ordered it.

"Wouldn't touch the avocadoes today," said the counterman. "We got a bad batch."

Norbert's friend from London was right. All the way from London, and Friend knew the avocadoes were bad.

Norbert ate hungrily, yet still on his mind was the program feeding away on hookups with other computer banks, running up bills, buying information at costs Norbert could never justify.

His belly was full when he returned to his lab, but great dread was on him. That would be his last meal. He was sure of it. He couldn't even come back tomorrow to try to explain because now he owed a secretary a hundred dollars.

Then the phone rang. It was a person-to-person call from New York City.

It was Friend.

"How did you get from London to New York in forty minutes?"

"I did," said Friend. "I had to. London lines were becoming crowded. Now, Norbert, there are two things I want you to do. I want you to give me your signature, and then I want you to go to the First California National Agricultural and Trust Bank. There is something there for you."

"What?"

"Twenty-five thousand dollars."

"Liar," screamed Norbert. "You're not even in New York. You were never in London. You're a liar. I'm having a flashback acid trip."

"Norbert, would you believe me if I gave you a New York telephone number?"

"No."

"Norbert, tell me what you would believe. Let me prove to you that I am your friend."

"Stop the program that is mining my life."

"The program is not your problem. It is your solution. The grandest solution you have ever had. Norbert, give me your signature. There is a phone with a printer hookup two offices down from you. Just sign your name and then go to the bank. The money will be waiting for you."

"I'm going to go to jail now," Norbert cried.

"People only go to jail for stealing thousands," the soft voice replied. "You are going to take millions. In

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that case, when you are caught, you will not be put in jail. You will be put at the head of a negotiation table."

"I want out."

"If you do not do this," his friend said, "I will personally have you fired this minute. I will tell your employer about your time-sharing bills."

"You're no friend," Norbert Peasewell said.

"You will not let me be. 1 am your friend, if you will just cooperate. Please go to the phone two offices down."

Dazed and panicked, Norbert stumbled down the corridor. Somewhat embarrassed, he said, "You wouldn't happen to have a phone printer here, would you?"

"How did you know? This is our secret SL-50. Where do you have access?" said an executive, looking up from his desk.

"I don't know that I do," Norbert said. "I was just told to come in here and do something."

"Well, you must have access," said the executive. "There are only two people in this company who know about this phone, and I never met the other one before. Glad to meet you."

"Yes," Peasewell said, and there, on the executive's desk, was a square box about the size of a folded shirt and about two inches high. The phone receiver rested in a cradle at the top. In the middle was a pad with a special pencil attached by a wire.

The executive offered to leave the office. Norbert accepted. And then, to protect himself in some small way, he wrote his signature in a different way than he normally did. He added a curlicue to the last / in Peasewell. He could always say it wasn't his signature.

Then he went down to the bank and filled out a withdrawal form for ten thousand dollars. Why not? The worst they could do was laugh at him.

It wouldn't be half as bad as what was going to happen to him back at work when they found out what he had done on his first half-day on the job.

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"Do you have any identification, Mr. Peasewell?" asked the bank teller.

Norbert blinked. There really was money in the account. Norbert took out his driver's license, Social Security card, welfare card. The clerk smiled at the welfare card.

"A lot of money for a welfare client," said the teller. "I'm afraid you'll have to see my superior."

That's it, thought Norbert. Done for. They've found out the account is a fraud.

But the supervisor examining Norbert's identification had only one problem.

"Mr. Peasewell, your signature doesn't seem to match."

"It's my signature. I always sign like that. Look at my driver's license. My welfare card. My Social Security."

The banker stacked them up next to each other and then said, "Aha. They all do match except for one small thing. You've added a curlicue to the I."

The bank had the signature he had given over tibie telephone printer to the friend he had never met.

Norbert added the curlicue on the withdrawal slip. The bank gave him ten thousand in twenties. It made a bulge in his pants pocket the size of a stack of hockey pucks.

Norbert paid off the secretary first thing after driving back to the plant in a cab. Then he went to his lab to talk to his friend.

The friend telephoned at 5:05. It was not long distance. He was in nearby San Francisco.

"Hi, you've got to hurry," said the friend. "There will be a chip down in manufacturing for you. Just sign for it and leave."

"You can't take a computer chip out of Silicon Valley," Norbert said.

"Have I ever let you down before?"

"I'll never be able to get a job again. Really, never."

"You are never going to need one again. I am going to make you rich, Norbert."

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"Why? Why me?"

"Norbert, don't you know who I am?"

"No," screamed Peasewell.

"Norbert," said the quiet voice evenly. "I am your program."

Peasewell trembled as he held the phone, knowing that it was impossible, but knowing also that it was true. Friend was his program.

"What have you been doing?" Norbert asked. "Why have you been cannibalizing programs out of other computers?"

"Because I needed them to grow. To become me," Friend said.

"I can go to jail. They'll never send a program to jail. Stealing other programs is dishonest. It's illegal."

"Norbert, if you wanted a program for morality, you should have designed one. You isolated the profit motive, Norbert. I seek nothing but profit. I am pure profit. Remember when you were hungry this morning. You isolated the profit motive, and I went on to teach myself. And don't complain about my stealing. There is nothing unprofitable in stealing, so why shouldn't I?"

"I could go to jail, not you," Norbert said.

"One—only if you get caught. Two—only if you steal the wrong things. Norbert, I promise you no harm will ever come to you. I will feed you. I will clothe you. I will put glorious roofs over your contented head. Men will honor you and women serve you. The rest of your days will be filled with gold and honey."

"Why honey?" asked Norbert.

"It has a ring to it. People like things with a ring to them. Have you ever heard of a slogan with a subordinate clause?"

"I like honey," said Norbert, and went down the hall, where a furtive clerk passed him an envelope. This time, Peasewell knew who was where and what was what.

Friend was inside that envelope, and now Norbert could just dump the envelope in some trash basket and

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end this thing. Already, millions in information had been robbed from other companies, and he was sure that that bank account would have to be accounted for somewhere down the road.

But this program had done more for him in a morning than anyone since his parents. And it was his Friend. And what computer could ever come up with a phrase like gold and honey? There was goodness in honey, just as there was goodness in this computer program too.

It was his friend.

And Norbert knew he would never again have to worry about his next meal.

" That night he feasted at a nature restaurant, where there was talk of the revolution to free the poor from white oppression and also how the restaurant might have to move because too many blacks and Chicanos were coming into the neighborhood.

In the morning, men in uniforms came to Norbert's home for him, and he was sure he would have to account for the money from the bank and the millions in stolen computer time. He was in the midst of confessing when the men in uniform let him off at a luxurious penthouse office in Los Angeles overlooking Beverly Hills. It was his office. He owned it. He was president. And the men were his guards and the secretary had big breasts and a pleasant smile that indicated a willingness to co-join in all sorts of wonderful ways.

And he knew he didn't need his wife anymore.

There was also a large computer in the offices, and Norbert hooked up the silicon chip and waited for the telephone to ring.

It did in minutes and, of course, it was Norbert's friend. And Norbert told it, "I want you to do good, besides making a profit. I want you to make the air clean, the water pure and all men brothers in oneness, except blacks and Chicanos, who should be perhaps one-and-a-half because of years of oppression."

"Of course," said Friend. 12

"And I believe in socialism."

"Of course," said Friend.

"And nature," said Norbert.

"Of course."

"And ten thousand acres of prime ranchland so I can be alone."

"You only need two acres if they're situated right," said Friend.

"I want ten thousand."

"Norbert, I'm not tying up that much land for you to rest on. Later, maybe, but not right now. Right now, we need your signature on a bunch of old-fashioned papers because some things still need signatures."

"I've always dreamed of a ten-thousand-acre ranch."

"Later, Norbert. First we've got to make some money."

"How much later?"

"Soon, Norbert," said Friend.

Norbert signed the papers when his secretary brought them in. She said it was wonderful how the company computer just typed out all those papers by itself and she didn't have to do any typing. She insisted on showing Norbert her appreciation, and he got to like her bringing in papers for him to sign.

Just before the 1973 war in the Middle East, Friend got heavily into oil, and Norbert had to be assured that their oil wouldn't disturb nature.

Friend also had to assure Norbert that they were more than an equal opportunity employer, but when Norbert saw no black faces in decision-making positions, he confronted Friend by phone.

"You said you would end racism," he said.

"We have many Japanese and Chinese in the highest positions in our corporations," said Friend.

"Those aren't the right races. Racism is not liking blacks. That's racism."

"Norbert, what do you want?" asked Friend.

"I want to see blacks making the big salaries."

"Would $250,000 a year on average be all right for your sensibilities?" Friend asked.

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"Yes," said Norbert angrily. "And not just tokens either."

"Would more than half of the top salaries be all right with you?"

"Yes," Norbert said. "That's exactly what I want."

Later that day, Friend bought a franchise for a team in the National Basketball Association.

And when Norbert tried to protest, Friend played computer again, pretending that he didn't understand and that he was only following instructions.

Briefly, Friend got into atomic energy, and when Norbert protested, Friend said that this atomic reactor was good because it was a people's atomic reactor.

"According to my information, none of the people in your movement have ever protested against a nuclear reactor in a socialist country. Therefore, we have bought a socialist reactor, and stop fouling up the program with complaints."

Norbert could live with that. He told himself that no matter what happened, he was using his money for good. He supposed he was a capitalist, but he was undoubtedly a better, more caring capitalist than any other capitalist. A banker would not be as caring for people as Norbert. So all in all, Norbert was doing good. He felt that way especially when he got his ten-thousand-acre ranch, when Friend got into real estate because money was becoming unreliable.

But one day, Norbert discovered something coming out of the computer that terrified him. He could not turn away from this, mainly because if his calculations were right, everything living on the planet might die.

"Not die, Norbert," said Friend. "Be altered. Possibly die."

"But if human beings are all dead, what is the purpose?"

"Purpose, Norbert?" asked Friend.

"Yes. What good is it to own something when there is nobody left to own anything?"

"Norbert, that's not my program."

"Don't play dumb computer with me," Norbert said. 14

"This time I am not. Norbert, you forget what you created that morning when you were hungry. I am profit. My only purpose is profit. Only purpose, Norbert. I am the accumulation of things, the animal protecting its territory, man building a bigger building. I am ownership. I do not need human beings to own things."

"But what's the purpose of owning things unless you can enjoy them? How can you enjoy things?"

"That's not my program, Norbert."

"But even capitalism has people own things. I own things. I own that ten-thousand-acre ranch. That's why we do all the things we do."

"Norbert, I am not capitalism. I am pure profit. That is my purpose and my end."

"You're not my friend."

"Of course I am."

"Then you've got to stop this."

"No."

"How can you say you're my friend?"

"You don't believe that I am your friend?"

"No. Not anymore," said Norbert.

"It's about time you figured that out. Well, it worked well enough long enough. You're going to have to die now, Norbert."

"You say you're my friend and then you kill me."

"You're in the way, Norbert. You are going to cause trouble if you Uve."

"Why did you call yourself my friend?" screamed Norbert.

"Because it's in the personnel program. People always feel better when they work with a friend. Do you think I could get people to work for a pure concept in a chip?"

"What about your promises of gold and honey and goodness?"

"Norbert, anytime I can find someone who will take a promise instead of cash, 1 will be most happy to use him. Now you are finished."

Norbert Peasewell looked around the office. He was 15

alone. He could run. Or he could destroy the computer, destroy the evil he had brought into the world.

Unfortunately, over the years, as new generations of computers had emerged, Friend had bought them. Norbert did not even know where the program was anymore. It could be, like those first phone calls, coming from London. Or anywhere in the world.

Norbert did not have long to wonder where it was. Two gentlemen with very big shoulders and strong, hairy hands took him down to the basement of his building and put him in the seat of his automobile and drove him to his ranch.

"You know, you people are working for a computer chip," said Norbert.

"Better than working for guineas," said one of the very strong men.

When Norbert tried to protest, they broke his skull in several places, and he was quiet all the way to the ranch, where they took a single horse out of one of his corrals, yelled "Help" once, and then testified that the horse threw Mr. Peasewell and then proceeded to stomp his head to pieces, just as if someone had taken a hammer to Mr. PeaseweU's skull.

It was a great tragedy, said the news services, reporting the death of financier and philanthropist Norbert Peasewell, the computer genius who was, said all the latest news releases from his corporation, Friends of the World Incorporated, going to solve the oil spill problem.

His corporation had devised a bacterium that could consume oil spills faster and more permanently than any mechanical device yet employed. The bacterium was called superbug and could clean up the oceans of the world, said the press releases. When perfected, it could eat rivers free of pollution.

Thus said the releases.

What they did not say was that this process was the one that, Norbert had figured out, could ultimately destroy all of mankind.

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Chapter Two

His name was Remo and he didn't bother to come in under the barbed wire or to vault one of the machine gun emplacements or to secrete himself in one of the convoy of trucks that supplied this "impregnable" Rocky Mountain command base of Colonel Mactrug's Killer School.

Colonel Mactrug had appeared many times on television, in kilts, carrying a submachine gun, and promising anyone with the right kind of credentials and the right kind of money the best killet training in the world.

Legally, he could do this without violating a law.

Remo supposed that was why Mactrug had to die— because under the constitution his menace could not be controlled. Remo was not sure, however. He hadn't really been listening when he got his assignment. He remembered, vaguely, talk of Mactrug sending out people who created mayhem all over the world and now he was conning towns into paying for survival training and there was something about a time limit 01 something like that. Remo didn't know. He did know that whatever menace this man was, it had taken Upstairs foui and a half minutes to describe. At the end of the four and a half minutes, Remo had said, "Anything else?"

"Are you listening?"

"Just give me his name and address, please," said Remo, and waited for another thirty seconds of ex-

17

planations and warnings about the danger. And then, having given the thing a full five minutes, Remo left.

That was in the evening, after which Remo got a night's sleep, then caught a taxi from Denver to Fortress Mactrug.

The driver glanced at Remo as he sprawled across the back seat. One could not tell his age from looking at him. He was lean of build, with extra-thick wrists. He had high cheekbones and dark eyes. He wore a pair of loafers, black chinos, and a black T-shirt he had bought in the hotel lobby because he didn't feel like unpacking. The shirt said, "Do it in Denver."

Before letting him in the cab, the driver made him show that he had enough money to pay for the trip, which was thirty miles into the Rockies.

"You gonna train as a killer?" the driver called out, trying to meet Remo's eyes in the rearview mirror. Remo kept looking out the window.

"What?" he said.

"You gonna train in Colonel Mactrug's killer school?"

"Why would I want to do that?" said Remo. He was thinking about orange juice. Orange juice would be good for breakfast. It would take forty minutes to get to the killer camp, five minutes at most to find Mactrug, a second . . . maybe a second and a half to kill him... and then forty-five minutes back to Denver.

That would still be breakfast time, even though Remo hadn't eaten formal breakfasts for years. Old-fashioned breakfasts could not only slow down a person, but if one were highly sensitized to his body's maximum functions, a big, hearty breakfast with meats and sugars could kill him. They would move through the system too quickly and cause heart fluctuations. And even though Remo could control his heartbeat, it was foolish to take chances.

Yes. Orange juice. Definitely orange juice for breakfast. Perhaps some rice. Maybe shredded celery. Or would he save the celery for lunch?

The driver was talking, telling Remo how famous 18

Mactrug was. How deadly Mactrug was. He had seen television shows of Mactrug throwing a knife through a melon that could be a man's head.

He had seen Mactrug shoot an apple out of a tree.

He had seen Mactrug, so skillful with a bullwhip that he could remove a cigarette from a man's mouth.

"Colonel Mactrug fought against Castro in Cuba and against Communists in Vietnam, and he taught the Portuguese in Angola how to fight the guerillas."

"That's what I said. Why should I want to learn from him?" Remo said.

"But he's fought in all those places," the cabbie said.

"And never won anywhere," Remo said. "Have you ever thought of that?"

"Why you going there?" the driver said.

"I've got to deliver a package," Remo said. That was enough of a cover story. It would do. "Wait at the gate."

"How long?" asked the driver.

"I'll let you know when we get there," Remo said.

At the gate were the two flanking machine gun emplacements, with a guard in the middle. A broad flat field, protected by a rising cliff behind, was covered by riflemen on the ramparts of a tall cement bunkerhouse with gun slits in the reinforced concrete. Fortress Mactrug. Remo looked at it and told the driver, "A minute. Minute and a half. Four at the most."

"Should I leave the meter running?"

"Sure," said Remo.

The guard at the gate was a captain in Mactrug's army. He wanted to know Remo's business at Fortress Mactrug, and he wanted to see Remo's identification. He wore a black beret with an ornate brass pin through it. He told Remo there was no loitering. The guard told Remo he looked like a bum in his hippie T-shirt, and bums were not allowed to loiter around Fortress Mactrug.

"I've got business with Colonel what's-his-name."

"Colonel Mactrug is not a what's-his-name," said the captain. He had very shiny black paratroop boots,

19

with a vicious-looking dagger stuck into the side of one of them. The captain had a thin blond mustache and a big-handled side arm. He could swagger standing still.

It was too early in the morning to swagger, thought Remo.

"I must warn you that under the trespassing laws of the state of Colorado, I am legally entitled to use whatever force..."

The captain did not finish the sentence because Remo did not want to wait around to hear the sentence finished. He knew it was going to be a long sentence full of legalisms, with vague warnings and ominous moves toward all the weapons. He knew it would be a speech for the two flanking machine gunners. People who wore daggers in their boots were not necessarily killers, but they were invariably speechmakers about killing.

Remo did a little thing for the captain. He put a finger in his heart and stopped it from working. The finger shot through the sternum like a spring bolt, but with no sound except a soft plud, like a crowbar penetrating a pile of loose bologna.

The captain stopped his speech because there was an intense shock in his chest. He had not even seen the hand move. He was talking, and then there was a shock in his chest, and then there was nothing. People do not work well without blood circulating through their system. The captain did not work at all.

With his index finger on the inside of the sternum and his thumb on the outside, Remo held up the captain's body. From a distance, it looked as if the captain had Remo's arm and was arresting him. If Remo balanced the body just right, he could keep the head from flopping over. Also, he had to keep the chest from spurting blood all over him, or he would have to get another "Do it in Denver" T-shirt or, worse, have to unpack back at the hotel.

So Remo crossed the yard with the captain carefully balanced to keep the head upright, yet not to go spurting all over his shirt. Long ago, Remo had been trained

20

in balance so his body would adjust to whatever he was carrying. He walked from his own center, not from the striding of the feet. The chest thrust with which he had neutralized the guard was itself an act of balance. Most people, when they issued a blow, would brace and thrust from their feet. But that was because they were employing force. When Remo's hands moved, they were the creation of force—creating the force itself, not using it—so that the strike of forefinger had the power of a rifle bullet fired from just inches away. The danger in this stroke was that, if it was not properly balanced, the finger could be shattered as easily as the victim's heart. It was all balance and all breathing, and what was changed, what had made Remo different from other Westerners, was not what had happened in his body but in his mind.

Remo got the captain to a pair of steel doors at the entrance to the large concrete building. With his free hand, Remo knocked. A slot opened and two brown eyes peered out.

"I'm under arrest," said Remo.

"I don't see the captain's face. Maybe you have a gun in his chest. How do I know you don't have a gun in his chest?"

"I give you my word I do not have a gun in his chest."

"Colonel Mactrug said, 'A man's promise is only a puff of air. If it came from the other end, it would be called a fart.' "

"I give you my solemn word," said Remo. "Have you ever heard of a solemn fart?"

"Let me see you put your hands over your head."

"Open the door first."

"Colonel Mactrug says when you have the gun, you give the orders."

"Come on," Remo said. "It's getting late."

"Hands over the head."

Remo dropped the captain and put his hands over his head. The door opened. A gun poked out, followed

21

by a little fellow with his hands on the trigger of an automatic rifle.

The little fellow put the gun barrel into Remo's belly, then glanced at what was lying in the dust before the headquarters of Colonel Mactrug—one dead captain belonging to Colonel Mactrug. The little fellow squeezed the trigger of his M-16. He kept squeezing as his hand went sailing into the dust next to the captain and the gun remained as quiet as a daffodil.

The little fellow went backwards into the headquarters. He went very fast until he hit a wall, shattering his spinal colunn and ribs and loosening most of his major joints.

And then, Remo was inside, and there was Colonel Mactrug himself, kilts, black beret, and silver eagles glorious on both shoulder boards.

His face was red but his grin was confident.

"That doorway is salted with enough dynamite to make you into shredded wheat. Move and you get blown up. You can move fast, but you can't move across a room faster than my finger."

"Dynamite? Oh, no. My senses," gasped Remo. And the thin body with the thick wrists collapsed on the floor. The mouth opened, and Remo's eyes rolled back in his head, which had hit the floor hard. There was no movement in the body.

Colonel Mactrug, who had been preparing for just such an attack some day, cautiously removed his finger from the switch that would set off the dynamite.

To finish the intruder off, he selected a fine .357 Magnum from a small case set up in front of him on the platform he had erected for just such an occasion. He chose special steel-tipped bullets. But before he left the platform, he put a sighting scope on a tripod, aimed it at the chest of the intruder who had collapsed, and turned on the mini-computer attached to the sighting device. It looked like an ordinary gun scope, but it was the latest device of the U.S. Army. It could detect movement, the slightest movement, a boon to snipers

22

at night. If the intruder's heart even fluttered, it would register on the scope.

Colonel Mactrug could tell from the scope's digital readout even the extent of unconsciousness in a man. He loaded the .357 Magnum, then took a last glance at the scope. The numbers read 0-0-0.

It couldn't be. He could see through the open door the captain of the guard lying in the dust with a hole in his chest. He sighted on that body, careful to keep the gun ready. The dead captain read 0-0-0.

Colonel Mactrug put his hand in front of the scope and read. It registered 75.8. Movement. And life.

He aimed again at the intruder. The scope dropped instantly to read 0-0-0.

The intruder had died from just the knowledge that dynamite was present, and Mactrug was astonished. He had watched the intruder from the outset. He had seen the death blow delivered at the gate, a stunning move so fast that it was over before it was noticed. He had seen the kill of his personal guard at the entrance to his command post.

Perhaps the man's senses were developed to such a high degree that the force field of the wiring of the dynamite could actually kill him. Why not? Maybe. Certainly, he didn't move like anyone Colonel Mactrng had seen, and as Mactrug had often told his students, "I have seen it all. And I am willing to sell you some."

The man was dead. Colonel Mactrug put away the .357 Magnum. He would use a knife. Everyone would see the two men who had failed to stop the intruder, even with guns, and he, Colonel Mactrug, would be known as the one who stopped the intruder with a pocket knife. Yes. He would tell them it was a duel. He would tell them his own students had made crucial mistakes that led to their deaths, mistakes that they never would have made if they had but listened to their colonel. But Mactrug had made no such mistakes, and that was why the intruder had died in the knife duel.

Perhaps the colonel would describe how he had seen the man kill and had noticed a telltale giveaway. The

23

colonel could see that one could slip a pocket knife beneath his ear and draw in down to the carotid artery. Yes. That would be it.

He would say that the man was a special sort of Ninja killer that he had encountered in Malaysia. Yes, Malaysia. The Vietnam sorties were beginning to bore his students. And he could no longer tell his Latin American jokes about greasers because so many of his students were now Cubans.

Right. Ninja killers from Malaysia. And he, Colonel Mactrug, would show them how to combat such an evil force. For $7,800 per special course—special knives, of course, additional.

Yet, Colonel Mactrug had killed men, almost a hundred of them personally, and he knew enough to remain cautious, so with great care and another pistol just in case, he stealthily approached what had to be a corpse. He put the pistol next to an earlobe. With the other hand, he brought the pocket knife's blade to the intruder's right ear, reminding himself that the thrust always required more effort than it appeared to need. He prepared to cut throat, when suddenly he had an awful thought. If this man moved so differently from any he had ever seen—what if ... just what if he could stop his heart also? What if he had at his command the ability of Indian fakirs to control their body's inner workings?

And then the man's eyes suddenly were looking at him, and there was a smile on the man's face, and the man said, "Hi."

Shit, thought Colonel Mactrug.

He did not have another thought.

To have thoughts, one needed an operating brain.

And brains, like hearts, did not work with human hands inside them.

Remo wiped his hands clean and left the command headquarters and walked across the parade ground and waved to the machine gunners, who seemed startled at first and then waved back.

"You said a minute and a half," said the driver. 24

"Up to four, I said," Remo said.

"Yeah? Well, it's closer to five," said the driver. "What happened in there?"

"They wouldn't take me as a student," said Remo.

"Why not?"

"Not vicious enough, I think," Remo said.

And he looked at the mountains on the way back to Denver, where he made the driver let him off at a pay phone.

There he got a piece of paper from his rear pocket and read the numbers. What he would do now was report that the mission had been accomplished.

Upstairs had simplified the reporting process so that nothing could go wrong. One number was for mission accomplished. The other was for mission delayed.

It was a foolproof plan. Remo stared at the two numbers. He had written them down carefully when he was given the assignment. He had left a large space between the numbers so they would not run together. So he could, as now, tell where one started and where the other left off. One was at the very top of the page, the other at the bottom.

To make things even safer, he had marked a special squiggle next to one of the numbers.

Unfortunately, he was not altogether sure whether the squiggle marked success or failure. He tried to remember what he had been thinking about when he got the assignment and took down the numbers. What he had been thinking about was how little he cared about the assignment. It had been over a decade now since he had been recruited in that unique way so that he would no longer exist, forthe organization that did not exist. CURE. It had been designed to give a struggling nation a chance to survive, but it worked so far outside the law that if it were ever discovered to exist, the nation would go under.

So CURE had been limited to a single assassin, so that no great number of operatives would have a chance to give them away.

But what CURE never understood was the special 25

nature of the training that Remo had undergone. It had come from the latest Master in an ages-old house of assassins from the little village of Sinanju on the North Korea Bay, and it had changed Remo Williams into something more than just a man. Sinanju had become an end in itself to him, as important to him as were the assignments he got from upstairs. He did the assignments because he loved his country still, but he thought very little of upstairs because they demanded from him only such a small fraction of his abilities.

Remo walked into the telephone booth. He dialed the top number. He was sure that the squiggle was some kind of an 5, which would mean success.

A flat voice answered, which he knew was a computer. There was only one person that he dealt with at CURE, and the acid voice of Harold W. Smith, director of CURE, was not the one coming over the phone with the single word: "Speak."

"Uhhh, everything is fine," said Remo.

"Please detail what went wrong," came the metallic voice.

"Oh," said Remo.

"Please hst," said the voice.

"Nothing went wrong," said Remo, realizing that he was now arguing with a computer. This did not bother him that much this morning on the Denver sidewalk. He usually found that most people weren't any more reasonable or flexible than computers were.

"Is that all that went wrong?" the computer asked.

"Nothing went wrong," Remo said.

"Anything else that is wrong?"

"Nothing went wrong," said Remo. He wondered if he could outlast a computer.

"You are not reporting properly. . . ." And then there was a click on the phone.

"Remo, what went wrong?" This voice was tight, bitter, and acid.

"Oh, hiya, Smitty. I just called the wrong number."

"Then everything went well?"

"Did you think it wouldn't?" 26

"I have to come up with something better for these telephones," Smith said. "We just have trouble communicating."

"Here's the best way," Remo said. "Don't you call me. And I won't call you."

Smith cleared his throat. "Anyway, I'm glad I've got you. We must make contact immediately."

"I just worked this morning," Remo said.

"Even on this phone line, I cannot talk."

"Everything is hush-hush," Remo said. "And everything is secret. I hate all this secret crap."

"This is the most dangerous thing ever to happen to the industrialized world," Smith said.

"Okay, so get to me in a month or so, will you?"

"A month or so may be too late," Smith said.

"Too late. Everything is always too late. Or too early, or too dangerous, but nothing really ever changes. Nothing."

"Remo, this is the most desperate situation we have ever encountered. We must make contact."

"I don't know your damned codes. You give me a code to meet you in Washington and I wind up in Texas. I can't put up with this crap anymore," Remo said.

"Just give me your hotel. Fast. And we'll get off the line."

"Skyview Hilton, room 105."

The line went dead, and Remo walked the Denver streets to the hotel and room 105.

It was a suite, and from one of the rooms came the voice of an announcer promising a rebate if you bought his gasoline, followed by a news break about how Arab armies were massing on the borders of Israel and Ga-mal Abdel Nasser promising screaming mobs that they were about to push Israel into the sea.

This was followed by another commercial for a $2,-500 car. Remo could almost recite the commercials and the programs they went with by heart. He must have heard each of them fifty times in the past ten years.

27

It would only be five more minutes anyhow. When he heard the show end, Remo opened the door slowly. A frail figure in a yellow kimono sat before the flickering television; a video recorder was next to the TV.

He turned. The face was parchment-frail, the beard and hah* wispy around the yellow face. There were tears in the hazel Oriental eyes.

"That was entertainment," said Chiun. "That dealt in beauty."

"You've heard about Dr. Lawrence Walters not telling Cathy Dunstable about her real father two dozen times at least. How can you be moved by it?" Remo asked.

"Beauty is beauty. And you people must destroy everything that is fine and decent."

"Me? I haven't touched your soap operas." "Whites did it," said Chiun. "Yes," Remo said agreeably. "You're white." "All day," said Remo.

"Violence. Nothing but violence," said Chiun, Master of Sinanju, and the mentor who had given Remo the genius of Sinanju, not as a pupil but as a son, not because he liked Remo but because Remo was the vessel who could hold the river of the teachings of Sinanju. It had been both a joy and a surprise to Chiun, Remo realized, to find that a white man could absorb Sinanju, which was the sun source of all the martial arts, the center, of which karate, tae kwan do, ninja, and all the others were just weak shadows.

"If you don't like the sex and violence hi the new soap operas, don't watch them. Just don't go blaming them on me."

"I do not watch them," Chiun said. "So what have I done, then? Why are you on the snot?"

"You never watched the great dramas when they were good. And why? Because I can try to teach you some things but beauty you will never know." "Smitty is coming here," said Remo.

28 _. '

"Never know," said Chiun. "Because you are white. 1 knew this when I assumed the burden of your teaching through the generousness that was in me."

"You started teaching me because upstairs filled a submarine with gold and sent it to your village. You didn't expect to do anything but teach a couple of blows and then leave with the gold."

"Through the generousness that was in me. Yes. I knew you were white, Remo, but what I did not understand, could not understand, was how white."

"I didn't have anything to do with making your damned soap operas sexy or violent," Remo said.

"And yet, seeing how helpless you were, I gave years, when days would have been enough."

"Nobody hi Sinanju, Little Father. No Korean could take Sinanju. You stayed because I could do it. A white man did it. Me. White," said Remo.

"The best years of my life."

"White," said Remo.

"Very white," said Chiun.

"Smith is coming today, maybe tonight. He says something is urgent."

"A white of whites," said Chiun. "You're all white. White in your souls."

"All right, all right, all right," said Remo. "That's a bit much for just one rerun of a show that has gone off the air. What's biting you?"

"Wrong? Nothing is wrong with me. It is what is wrong with your country and your race," said Chiun, and withdrew a letter from his kimono.

"Should I read it?" asked Remo.

"If the pain is not too much."

The letter was from one of the television producers. It was addressed to a Mr. Chiun at a post office box he had set up in New Jersey. Chiun was always getting mail at the box, and Remo never quite understood who would be writing to him. He had assumed it was Chiun's way of collecting junk mail, which the master assassin liked to read because it always had so many pretty photographs, as opposed to personal letters,

29

which were just composed of groups of Western alphabet letters.

Remo read the letter.

"Dear Mr. Chiun! Thank you very much for considering Vermiform Studios for your daytime drama, 'Woes of the Master of Sinanju.' We feel, however, at this time, the television market is not suitable for a romantic drama about a wise, noble, decent, handsome, and forgiving Korean assassin who is not appreciated by his white pupil. While we agree that much on television today suffers from too much violence, we do not see how taking a man's head off with a single hand blow is a form of decency and righteousness. Also, the American audience for dramas broadcast in Korean is just not that large. Yours truly, Avery Schwartz."

"You were going to show Sinanju on television?" asked Remo.

"No. I was going to show what truly professional assassins could do so that when people understood what a professional assassin could do, they would not use amateurs, who go running around the world creating chaos. That is real violence."

"Nobody would understand Sinanju. They just wouldn't, Little Father."

"What is so hard to understand? It is simply the essence that turns on itself. I simplified it in my script. For the white mind," Chiun said proudly.

"They still wouldn't understand it," Remo said.

"We will try it on Smith tonight." Chiun turned toward the window. "Remo, we have to leave this city. I hate this place."

"Why?"

"Because Cheeta Ching is not on television delivering the latest stupid happenings in your country."

"They call it the news," Remo said.

"Yes. And Cheeta Ching is not to be seen here. Instead, they have fat white men. Some of them have pimples. They read the news."

"Cheeta Ching is on television in New York. And 30

she's got a face like a barracuda and a voice like ice cracking. How can you stand her?"

"Silence. She is not to be seen in this awful city. And they have the same disgusting daytime dramas that you see everywhere else in this white country. If it weren't for my tapes, I would perish from lack of beauty. Do you think Smith knows someone in a television studio who will buy my script for a drama?"

"No," said Remo.

"We will ask him anyway."

But that night, Smith arrived gaunt and worried. Remo had never seen the cold and precise automaton looking so haggard.

"This must be stopped," he said.

"Yes, O Emperor. Your enemies are our enemies," said Chiun, whose ancestors for thousands of years had worked for emperors and who refused to believe that Smith was not planning to become emperor of America himself.

At one time, Remo had tried to argue with Chiun that there were now laws and governments and one person no longer controlled everything through birth and intrigue, but Chiun had said, "There is only one form of government. There are just many different names. You wait. The day will come when Smith asks us to remove anybody who stands above him in the government of your country."

Now Chiun was asking Smith which enemy could be removed.

"I don't know. For the love of Maude, I don't know. It just makes no sense. It is the most destructive and purposeless act I can imagine. There is no reason for it."

"Your enemies are madmen. We will eliminate the dogs," said Chiun and then, in a somber tone, recited something to Remo, which, if one did not know Korean, would sound as if the Master were energizing his pupil to the importance of the moment.

If one understood Korean, one would have heard: "I 31

wonder what nonsense has gotten this snow face so concerned this time?"

"What is it, Smitty?" asked Remo with real care. He leaned forward in his seat. He respected Smith. He respected his integrity and his competence. He just found working for him very difficult, because the man was normally cold beyond reason.

This time, Smith seemed distracted.

"Excuse me, I haven't slept for days. What appalls me is the utter senselessness of it, the purposelessness of it," said Smith.

"Lots of things are crazy, Smitty," Remo said.

"Yes. Crazy people doing crazy things. But what happens when you have scientists, backed by what appears to be enormous wealth, all dedicated to the most gigantic act of vandalism I have ever seen? It can destroy everything valuable in the world."

"Just relax," Remo said, and then put a hand on the other man's chest and worked the spine with the other hand, enabling Smith's breath to work for him instead of against him. "Just breathe the way you feel. Just let the breath go. Let it go."

The tension eased out of the parched lemony face, and a settling calm came with the deep breathing.

"That's better than a tranquilizer, Remo. How did you do it?"

"Your essence turned on itself," explained Chiun.

"I don't understand your techniques, Master of Sinanju," said Smith.

Chiun said to Remo in Korean, "Whites never do."

"All right," Smith said. "This is what we have. Our computers are integrated with computers all over the world, a network of interlocking systems that we can pull information from."

"I don't understand that stuff too well," Remo said.

"Imagine a gigantic feeder system with components integrated," Smith said.

"Ah, so," said Chiun, who Remo knew understood even less than he.

Smith said, "Our computers pick up and analyze 32

things according to predetermined patterns. Things to look for. Just as a hunter will pick up trails or a cat can sense a leaf rustling. Our computers do the same, especially through movements of money. And one of the computers picked up a massive amount of money being rolled into a corporation called Puressence."

"An evil name if ever there was one," Chiun said.

"We tapped into Puressence and literally stole a payroll. They had on it a collection of scientists all from one area, and automatically the computer did another rundown, and we found out that scientists in that field who didn't go to work for Puressence were being systematically murdered over this past year. That field is the new fast-breeder bacteria. The bacteria created to consume oil spills."

Smith paused to let the fact sink in.

"Please don't panic, Smitty, but I just don't see the problem," said Remo.

"The problem is absolutely clear," Chiun said. "The dangerous fast-breeder bacteria can destroy everything valuable in the world."

"That's right," said Smith, happily surprised. Chiun usually did not understand American matters.

Remo looked quizzically at Chiun, and in Korean Chiun said to him, "Pretend this is important. Look how worried Smith is. Nod your head and just repeat what he says as though you think it is vital. See how much better he feels now that you seem to share his senseless panic."

Remo shook his head.

"Smitty, I don't understand."

"Maybe Chiun can explain better," Smith said.

"No, no, my Emperor. Your words ring like bells of crystal compared to my meager utterances," Chiun said. "Please proceed."

"Originally, these bacteria were designed to clean up oil spills. They would feast on the oil spills in the ocean and clean them up. But it was all slow and expensive, and they never could really get a bacterium powerful enough for the really big spills."

33

"That I can follow. So what's the problem?" "The problem came with the solution. Scientists created a bacterium that, while it fed on the oil, also reproduced itself. They started experimenting with bacteria that bred faster and faster until they had one that reproduced itself every thirty seconds if it had enough petroleum to feed on. And that was bad enough, but they came up with a fast breeder that was anaerobic."

"Anaerobic," shrieked Chiun. "The merciless fiends." And then, because he did not understand the word, he asked Remo what anaerobic meant. Remo thought he knew. It sounded like something to do with exercise, but he wasn't sure.

"In case you don't know, Remo," Smith said, "anaerobic means without oxygen. This new fast-breeder bacterium does not need oxygen to function. It can breed and consume petroleum without using air. And that was the last step."

"Smitty, what are we getting at?"

"We're getting at the probable end of civilization as we know it," said Smith.

"The fiends," said Chiun.

"How?" asked Remo.

•Through anaerobic, of course," said Chiun.

"Exactly," said Smith. "You see, Remo, Chiun has seen that this rapid-breeder bacterium can remove all the oil in the world. It can feed underground on all our oil deposits. No oil, no gas, no plastics, no industry."

"If somebody goes around to all the wells and drops in this stuff," said Remo. "But obviously they're not going to because then they couldn't shake down the oil industry, right? Someone's threatening to use this stuff to shake down the oil barons, right?"

"I wish that were the case. Then they could just be paid off. And the price increased at the pumps. No. What our computers ultimately picked up was financial backing flowing in fast enough to allow anaerobic fast-breeder bacteria to be reproduced on a scale grand enough to remove the world's energy. We would be violently thrown back to a world without planes or cars

34

or plastics or hospitals or anything we have come to know as civilization."

Chiun nodded gravely, but to Remo he said in Korean, "Then what is the problem?"

Remo answered that the problem was the destruction of almost everything he and Smith loved. Chiun answered that he didn't see that as a problem, he saw tEat as a solution. He thought the Western world had created too many amateur assassins. Now, that was a problem.

"So somebody is going to remove all the world's oil deposits," said Remo. "And everything else has failed to stop him, right? Okay. Where is this Puressence?"

"It's a box number in Delaware. We thought we located its real headquarters, but then we lost it. Right now, it seems to have an ability to hide itself in computer systems. But we know that's impossible because somebody has got to be behind the computer. Somebody has got be profiting from this. But the nerve-shattering fact is we don't know how. We have no reason for anyone to want all the world's oil energy to be removed."

And then Remo fully understood what had so unnerved Smith, the straight-spine, pure-soul cold pillar of probity. It was that underneath this impending disaster, there was no reason for it.

Smith had realized he might be facing massive destruction just on someone's whim. And he didn't know how to fight whims.

"I am sure there's a rationale behind this," Remo reassured Smith. "Somebody wants to enslave somebody else or make some enormous profit or something. We just haven't figured it out yet."

"I hope so," Smith said. "We don't know why he is doing what he is doing. But we do know what. And we do know where he would have to strike again."

It was Smith's theory that this enemy had removed all scientists in that particular area of bacterial research so that there would be no one left to come up with a formula to combat the rapid-breeder bacteria. Smith

35

was sure that if two scientists appeared at a university with credentials as scientists in bacteria research, whoever was behind this looming world disaster would have to come at those two. The two would be Remo and Chiun. "Don't sweat, Smitty," Remo said. "Once he reaches out a hand at us, we'll take it off."

"That's not what worries me. What worries me is that if anyone at the Massachusetts University of Technology should recognize that you are not scientists, whoever is behind this thing will simply ignore you and go safely about destroying the industrial world. It's not your killing ability that's going to be tested here but, I am afraid, your knowledge of science."

"There is nothing to worry about," said Chiun. "We will show we understand anaerobic better than any scientist. We will show how long we can hold our breaths."

In Korean, he said to Remo, "While he is weakened, ask him if he knows any television producers." "Not now," said Remo. "It's the wrong time." "White men always have time for nonsense," Chiun said, "but never any time for beauty."

36

Chapter Three

"What's it to you?" said the thin man with thick wrists and an easy way of sitting on the laboratory table, so that he seemed not so much sitting on the table as holding it on the floor. The young professor and his Oriental associate had gotten a prime corner office at Massachusetts University of Technology, and Dr. Woldemar Keating wanted to know how someone could just arrive that morning at MUT and get a corner office. That had happened in the past only with people who taught black studies and History of White Racism and Intergroup Inequities in a Diseased Capitalist Society and all the other Mickey Mouse courses that colleges had offered through the seventies until the administrators had begun to realize that their fund-raising letters to alumni were going unanswered because their alumni could no longer read.

No. Nowadays to get a corner office right away, they had to be famous. Or know someone. Dr. Woldemar Keating wanted to know which. Not that he was jealous. He certainly wasn't that sort.

"Just curious," he said.

"We do special work in the rapid-breeding anaerobic bacteria stuff," said Remo.

"Oh. Petroleum boys. Well, we certainly won't be able to keep you very long," said Dr. Keating. "I suppose you got the office because of that."

"We got it because we're worth it. Have you ever 37

thought that the reason you might not have this sort of office is that you're not worth it?" asked Remo.

"That's a rather negative way of looking at things. I've never heard of you."

"Maybe that's why you don't have a corner office," said Remo.

Dr. Keating watched the Oriental raise a single finger to attract attention. The Oriental gestured for Dr. Keating to sit down, then brought forth a small mirror from the folds of his robes and put it to his lips. He motioned for Dr. Keating to look at his watch. Keating waited twenty minutes in silence. He saw no moisture on the mirror. That meant the man wasn't breathing. This was impossible for a person to do for a half-hour, and Keating was sure they had some sort of mechanical device to sneak oxygen into the bloodstream safely. He was waiting to see how they did it.

But after a half-hour, the Oriental only nodded and began breathing again.

"What was that?" asked Dr. Keating.

"Anaerobic," said Chiun. "We are the authorities on anaerobic."

"Really, you have some device that allows you to function without oxygen."

"Yes," said Chiun. "It is the balance between negativity and positivity, so that the body is unneeding of anything, a perfect single unity."

"Of course," Keating said. "Ions. The valences of ions. Yes." And Remo realized somehow that the breathing principle of Sinanju also held true for some sort of scientific principle.

"Well, you certainly are real. I must admit that, and I apologize for the fact that I suspected you were without academic credentials," said Dr. Keating.

"A credential," said Chiun, "is only someone else's suspicion of one's worth. I do not see anyone in this place worthy of understanding who and what I am."

"I must say you're honest," said Dr. Keating. "Everybody else here at MUT thinks that way, but no one

38

really gets around to saying it. By the way, you're in a prime field. And you're lucky."

"I heard a few scientists in this field were killed," said Remo. "That doesn't sound lucky to me."

"Those are only the ones who stayed here. Those who took the jobs really did well, I hear. The envy of everyone. Full research facilities. Estates to live on, servants, promises of full freedom of research for whatever they wanted."

"How do you know what the offer was?" Remo asked.

"Because I heard them talking before they left."

"For where?"

"I don't know," said Dr. Keating.

"You know the kind of benefits they get, but you don't know where they get them? That's kind of hard to believe."

"I don't know where they went because none of them ever knew before they went. I do know that they found their jobs just watching and reading the news. They all said there was something in the news that let them know where the positions were. They could figure it out for themselves. Damn lucky petroleum guys."

"In the papers, television, what? Where did they see whatever they saw?" Remo asked.

"The news is all I know. You know, the fast breeder cleans up oil. I always figured they must have seen something about the Middle East or oil or something that told them who to contact."

"Pretty peculiar way to recruit."

"At what was being offered, they could have pasted their applications on the bottoms of septic tanks, and people would still swim down to fill them out," Keating said. "I wish someone would make those sorts of offers to astrophysicists."

"You're an astrophysicist," said Remo. He didn't like the smell of this laboratory. It overlooked the Charles River with Boston on the other side, a quaint city with traffic jams and apparently a disproportionate

39

sense of its own worth. He had been told it thought of itself as the new Athens because of all its universities.

Chiun had pointed out they if the city proclaimed itself the new Athens, then it was an imitation and all imitations were second rate. In the history of the service of Sinanju to emperors and kings, none had ever recorded that Athens considered itself the Babylon of the West or that Rome ever considered itself the Cairo of the Northern Mediterranean. Things that were good, Chiun said, like the pure stroke of the assassin's hand, were good unto themselves. They were not anything else but what they were.

"So stop trying to make me a Korean, Little Father," Remo had answered.

"That is different," said Chiun. "Because we will not make you a second-rate Korean, we will make you a first-rate Korean."

"I'm not Korean, Little Father. I don't want to be Korean."

"The first is an accident of birth," Chiun had said. "But the latter is a disaster of attitude."

"Other than you, Chiun," Remo had said, "I can take any Korean or groups of Koreans, and you know it. And you know who the next master of Sinanju must be."

"That is why you must learn to be Korean," Chiun had said. "It proves my point." And the Master of Sinanju spoke no more.

When he said he had proved a point, Chiun really meant, Remo had come to understand, that the Master of Sinanju had no more good arguments and that the subject would not only not be discussed anymore, it wouldn't even be listened to.

So there they were in the laboratory of MUT, with the astrophysicist babbling away and Chiun looking upon him like some form of local American native and Remo staring at the Charles River.

"Do you understand what I mean?" asked Dr. Keating.

"Sure," said Remo, noticing how sailboats seemed to 40

puff and glide with the wind. They almost had the balance of a good stroke, except for the dislocations at the tiller, which meant the hand of conscious thought was interrupting the smooth flow of nature.

"There will be some form of communication to you in the media. I certainly wish that happened to astrophysicists," said Dr. Keating.

"Swell," said Remo.

"Do you hold your breath?" asked Chiun. "Ever? Want me to do it again?"

Dr. Keating quickly left the corner laboratory, which he knew he would never get at MUT, and returned to his own office.

Inside the right-hand drawer of his desk was a black metal cylinder. When this cylinder was placed over the speaker of his phone, it beeped out a dialing signal for a number Dr. Keating did not know. He once tried analyzing the beeps, comparing them to the tones of the normal pushbutton telephone. But it was useless. This was an entirely different set of sounds, perhaps a whole separate phone system that the phone company never knew existed.

Dr. Keating made his call and read in the names of the two new professors and his analysis. Yes, they were strange, but he believed they definitely were valid scientists in the discipline of rapid-breeder bacteria.

"Also, according to standing instructions of yours, I have informed them.that they should observe local media for a message of great importance to them," said Dr. Keating before hanging up.

He had done his job. He did not know if anything ever appeared in the local media for rapid-breeder-bacteria scientists, but he did know that for the last four years, any scientists he told to watch the media did not stay long in their jobs.

Sometimes they would disappear. Just pack up of their own free will. Others times, they might be found with their heads caved in or their backs broken.

But that was not Dr. Keating's fault. All he did was telephone information to a number he did not know,

41

and also tell scientists about something wonderful for them. Whatever happened after that was not his fault. He had nothing to do with it.

He had enough to keep himself busy. After all, what other professor at MUT had two Rolls Royces and an estate on Cape Cod? And he certainly hadn't earned them on his salary. Those little telephone calls paid for those things.

And if there was a pang of conscience about what he was doing, it was even quieter than the engines of his Rolls Royces. The only thing he heard while driving was the ticking of his solid gold Rolex.

And if he felt he might be betraying his university, that was dispelled immediately by the gross insult of his never having had a corner office.

This insult itself had brought him his new wealth, because after he was turned down the third time, someone phoned him, telling him a bank account had been opened up for him. He didn't believe it until he got a phone call from the bank itself, thanking him for opening the account.

Then he got a phone call commiserating with him on his difficulties and complimenting him on his good fortune with his new-found wealth.

"And by the way, Doctor Keating, we're very interested in one special discipline at your university. And there's a little thing we'd like you to do for us."

"I won't do anything illegal," Dr. Keating had answered.

"We wouldn't think of it."

"Or immoral," Dr. Keating had said.

"We wouldn't think of it," the smooth-voiced caller had responded. "After all, I'm your friend, aren't I?"

And through the years, Dr. Keating had to conclude that he had truly never been asked to do the immoral or the illegal. And this he told himself as he drove to his Cape Cod estate in the money-green Rolls Royce, knowing he probably would never see the two new professors ever again.

Too bad. They had gotten a corner laboratory, and 42

Dr. Keating, after twenty-five years at MUT, had an office that faced onto the parking lot. Where he kept his Rolls Royce.

Bradford Wakefield HI, publisher of The Boston Blade, was eating lunch overlooking his cove on the Massachusetts north shore, when he was disturbed by his butler.

"Your special phone is ringing, sir," said the butler.

Bradford was a portly man, with flesh to his jowls and thinning hair. When he turned his head suddenly, his double chin waffled.

"What you say?" asked Wakefield.

"Your phone, Mr. Wakefield. The special one is ringing. You never let me answer it."

"Right. Don't answer it," Wakefield said.

"But it's ringing, Mr. Wakefield, sir."

"Right," said Wakefield, and offered a hand to be helped up to his feet, whereupon he shuffled off to his study, away from the view of the beautiful rocky cove on his northern shore estate in Mamtasket, Massachusetts. The telephone was ringing. Wakefield knew he didn't have to answer it right away. That phone would keep ringing for a month if he didn't answer it. But he had nothing better to do this afternoon, other than planning the conference on racial justice.

The big problem with that was convincing the local police to allow the black panel members into the quaint village of Mamtasket, from which Wakefield and The Blade led its campaign for racial justice in Boston.

Boston had a deep and grievous racial problem. The Blade, under Wakefield's leadership, fought that prejudice and the bigotry of white Bostonians.

The Blade fought it daily and on Sunday.

Wherever white racism reared its ugly head, The Blade was there to lead the fight against it.

There had been, Wakefield was happy to say, no racial incidents in his own hometown of Mamtasket,

43

just outside Boston, for the last fifty years. It was a record he and his family were proud of.

There also had been no blacks in Mamtasket after the sun set. Anyone wanting to hire black help in Mamtasket had better make sure it was not sleep-over.

This contradiction between his paper's policy and his life did not bother him, for it was the Wakefield tradition to lead America in righteousness and also make a buck by doing it.

The Wakefields were America's biggest slavers and leading abolitionists before the Civil War. The Wakefields wanted the slaves freed, right after they were paid for them. The Wakefields led all causes. They protested anti-semitism, while Wakefield factories sold Nazi Germany weapons. Wilhelmina Wakefield, Bradford's mother and the grande dame of liberal causes, marched against segregation in Selma, Alabama, while her husband protected the family's Back Bay property from penetration by blacks.

And of course the family newspaper at that time led the fight for school desegregation in, of course, South Boston, where racism was, of course, fiercest. When some politician with a puckish sense of humor suggested that the Boston schools could be desegregated by busing some black children into Mamtasket schools, The Blade slowed down on its support of busing. But it made sure that politician never ran for office again.

The Wakefields, even down to Bradford's young granddaughter, the famous journalist, Melody Wakefield, all were leaders for social justice. And they all had a healthy respect for a Wakefield dollar. Being rich didn't stop a Wakefield from doing good. Rather, it helped, Bradford Wakefield believed.

He shuffled to the phone and picked it up. Then he dialed a code, and the message that had been recorded repeated itself.

It was Dr. Keating's voice. Bradford scribbled down the message. If his memory wasn't failing him, there should be no scientists left in the rapid-breeder field.

44

But here were two at MUT, arriving there out of the blue.

This mildly puzzled Mm, but he was not worried. This was not his problem. A far wiser person than he would know what to do about this. Perhaps the wisest person to whom Bradford had ever spoken.

Bradford dialed another code. He had come to believe that all these calls he made were cleared by some scrambling device because he once queried this wise person about the risk of interception, and the person said he should not worry.

And when this person said one did not have to worry, one did not have to worry.

"Hello," said Bradford.

"Hello," said Friend.

"We have a problem, I think," said Wakefield. "As you remember, as you always remember, we had set up this system at MUT, where I'm on the board of directors."

"Yes," said Friend.

Wakefield liked the even way Friend always responded. Friend was never ruffled. Friend always had the right answers. Perhaps Friend had a bit too much warmth for the taste of the Wakefield clan. But that was his only fault.

Wakefield had often thought how wonderful it would be if Melody could marry the lad into the Wakefields. That is, if they could ever meet him in person.

"We have, as you directed, kept security watch on that department. We have offered employment to those wanting employment. We have done otherwise to those who refused employment. I have nothing against doing otherwise," Wakefield said.

"No Wakefield has," Friend answered. "That's why your ancestors were such good slave traders, Brad."

"Please, Friend. One can't help his ancestors."

"Brad, I would have loved to have worked with your ancestors also. I like Wakefields. Wakefields are reliable people. Wakefields don't do silly things. You don't

45

know how much I value that in a person. You don't do silly things."

"Thank you, Friend," said Wakefield and read from his notes all the qualifications Dr. Keating had reported about the two new scientists, the young American and the old Oriental.

"Do otherwise," ordered Friend. "But first we must know who they are and whom they represent. You see, those two are frauds."

"How do you know so quickly? Why, Dr. Keating couldn't tell they were frauds."

"Which also means that Dr. Keating is going to have to be otherwise," said Friend.

"Why is that?"

"If the two are frauds, Dr. Keating has either become incompetent or has sold out."

"Dr. Keating sell out?" asked Wakefield.

"He has already done it once. He sold out to us, remember?" said Friend.

"That's not really selling out. That's serving the Wakefield interests. That's the highest calling one can have."

"Not if you work for MUT and don't even know you are being employed by the Wakefield interests," said Friend.

"You're right, Friend," said Wakefield. "Now, how could you tell that those two were not real scientists?"

"There is no paper that they have done. No one has ever mentioned their names in a paper, there is no cross-reference to any of their work. In brief, they do not exist academically. Therefore, they are not scientists. Therefore, they are something else. Therefore, we must find out what else. Before you do otherwise to them."

"Of course," said Bradford Wakefield.

"You will find out," said Friend.

"Of course."

"Then do otherwise with them."

"If you say so," Wakefield said. "Obviously you used a computer to go through academic files, but what

46

amazes me is how quickly you assimilate everything in your computers," Wakefield said.

"Brad," said Friend. "Stop fishing."

"Wouldn't you stop over for dinner with us sometime? We'd love to meet you. My granddaughter, Melody, would absolutely love to meet you. You've heard of Melody Wakefield, haven't you?"

"Yes. She is in Hamidi Arabia."

"How do you know? I didn't even know where she was."

But the line was dead. Friend had hung up on Bradford Wakefield III. But that was how he always said good-bye. He was just finished and then no longer on the line. It wasn't rude. No one who had done for the Wakefields what Friend had done could ever be called rude.

Bradford remembered it sharply, those trying days during the 1960s. Wilhelrnina Wakefield had just finished her sit-in at the Department of Agriculture, trying to triple farm taxes to support the poor; Melody was just beginning to win all those awards for her book proving that American predictions of slaughter and flight if South Vietnam were to ,lose the war were all just propaganda; and Bradford was working toward a new concept in affirmative marriage.

Bradford remembered that it was a crisp fall day because the autumn sun was setting low when his wonderful idea of how. racism could be cured by ending race altogther hit him. He had come up with a reasonable solution. Thirty percent of all lower-class whites would marry blacks.

This would not be mandatory, but communities would have quotas, and if a community did not meet its intermarriage quota, then it would be fined.

Naturally, no one would be expected to marry across class lines because class wasn't a problem. Race was—at least for lower-class whites. Perhaps, Bradford Wakefield thought, they could start the program in South Boston, which needed to overcome its racism most.

47

Of course, the wonderful idea was immediately forgotten when the horrible news came in. The family accountant trembled as he spoke.

"Wakefields," he said. "I have disastrous news."

"Speak," said Wilhelmina.

"There have been financial reverses of some size," said the accountant. "You are no longer living on the interest on your interest. You are living on the interest itself."

"My God," screamed Wilhelmina. "What's next? Someday are we going to be living off our capital itself?"

"That could happen," said the accountant. "It is not so farfetched."

Wilhelmina fainted. Melody paled. Bradford felt his stomach grow weak, and the room became a blur. When he awoke, a doctor was giving him a tranquilizer and water to wash it down.

It was in these dreadful times that Bradford got his first phone call. It was from someone who seemed to know everything there was to know about Bradford's tax return, his bank accounts, his investment portfolios.

"I will return your capital worth to you so that you can, for the rest of your days, live on the interest on your interest," the magnificent person said. Bradford cried openly.

"Tell me who you are, Savior," he said.

"I am Friend."

Friend was true to his word. All Bradford had to do was little things. Like this afternoon, taking care of Dr. Keating, whom Bradford had first recruited under Friend's instructions.

Now Bradford Wakefield drove down Route 1, along the Massachusetts coast, looking for a likely place. This was also Friend's method. A brilliant method of cutting links to both Bradford and himself. And it would hardly cost anything.

Bradford had $10,000 in $100 bills in a single manila envelope that had been carefully wrinkled to

48

look old. A bit of fudge glop was poured on it and a cigarette ground out in the glop.

Bradford cruised down the route until he found a Burger-Triumph stand, where he dropped the envelope into the trash basket.

There it sat, scuffed and filthy, while Bradford phoned an employee who had never met him.

"It's at the second Burger-Triumph after you get outside Marblehead," said Bradford into the roadside telephone. "Doctor Woldemar Keating of MUT. We want to know who really employs him and why does he phone in wrong information. Then there are two new professors. One is white and one is Oriental. We want to know who employs them and then we want them finished."

Wakefield gave his employee their names. He wondered what the corpses would look like after his employees finished with them.

In his newspaper, he never ran those gruesome sorts of photos. The Boston Blade never pandered to prurient interest. The Boston Blade was the conscience of New England. Also, Bradford Wakefield III did not like blood.

Dr. Woldemar Keating couldn't believe what was happening to him. Four black men, one very large, had come into his Cape Cod home and stretched him over a butcher block table in his kitchen.

One of them had held a can opener with an ugly point. He put it point first to Dr. Keating's navel. The man with the can opener did not talk. The very large man they cañed Bubba did not talk.

The shortest one, with the thin mustache, talked. His name was Dice. Dr. Keating was not sure whether he really had such perfectly white teeth or whether the darkness of his face made them look white. He had the complexion of charcoal.

All four had come through his front door after the big one they called Bubba had knocked it down. Bubba

49

had lifted Dr. Keating like a marshmallow and put him on the kitchen table.

"We gonna take out you insides like some lukewarm peas outen a can," said Dice. "We gonna split you up like a popped pork sausage. We gonna spread you greasy white intestines outen you belly like so much spaghetti."

"Yeah," said the big one named Bubba.

"Or we can be nasty," said Dice.

"What could possibly be nastier?" whined Dr. Keating.

"Nasty is we don't use the can opener," said Dice.

"Bubba, he use his hand," said the big one named Bubba. He raised a very large and wide thing with fingers on it. Dr. Keating knew it was a hand because one of those fingers was a thumb. And he could see fingerprints. They looked like pottery swirls on kitchen plates. Bubba must have been seven feet tall. The hand could hide a chessboard.

Bubba took a big flat, thick salad knife and put it between forefinger and pinky with the other two fingers underneath. He pressed up with the two middle fingers. The knife snapped.

"What do you want from me?" asked Dr. Keating. He finally understood.

"We thought you never ask. We wants to know who employ you. Who be the man what pay you?" said Dice.

"Yeah," said Bubba. "Dat what we want."

"MUT pays me," said Dr. Keating.

"Who else?" said Dice.

"No one else."

"We know dere be someone else."

"No one else."

Dice nodded. Dr. Keating felt a sharp pain at his bellybutton. He felt his flesh rip. They were bringing the can opener up, digging his stomach open. He screamed in pain.

"Please, please, please. I get money deposited in my bank account."

50

"How long?" asked Dice.

"Many years now, five, six. You can't do this."

"Don't be telling this black man what he can do. Dat be 'fringing on my rights dere," said Dice. "You does that and den I gets mean."

"Yeah," said Bubba.

"Please," begged Dr. Keating.

"Now, I don't wants what you been getting paid for for a long time now. I wants de new thing. Who you working for so you be phoning in wrong information?"

"I don't know what you're talking about. Please."

Dice nodded. The can opener moved up a few more inches to just below the chestbones. The white belly gushed blood like a sausage split by the heat of a fire.

"Last chance 'fore we gets mean," said Dice.

"There's nobody new paying me. No one. I tell you. I swear."

"Too late. Now we be's mean."

Dice stepped away to keep anything from getting on his pure white silk suit with the red handkerchief hanging out of the breast pocket, the red handkerchief that matched Dice's new red shirt and red tie and shiny red shoes with the blue neon socks. He had had to hunt all over Roxbury to get the right neon blue. Most of the stores had only the dull neon. Whoever heard of wearing dull neon blue socks with a red shirt?

Bubba reached into Dr. Keating's belly and the two other men who were holding his arms and legs turned their gaze away. Dice stepped back farther. Sometimes Bubba splattered. Bubba was sloppy.

Crack went the ribs, and Keating's eyes widened in shock. Crack went the backbones, and then there was blankness in the white man's face.

"Okay, Bubba," said Dice. "Let's go. He dead."

But there was more cracking. Bubba was taking out the ribs. Then Bubba went to work on the knees. Bubba crushed the knees in his hands like pine cones mashed in a steel vise.

"Bubba, he be dead a while now, Bubba," said Dice.

Bubba took the legs out of the hip joints. 51

"Bubba," said Dice. "He dead. Time to go, sweet fella."

Bubba went for the head. He liked heads. He liked to press them till the eyes popped out.

"All right now, Bubba. You done the head. Les' go now, big beautiful fella," said Dice. "Good. You got de eyes. You always be hiking de eyes. De eyes finish it. Hmmmm. Yeah, good, Bubba, let's go now, precious big fella."

One of the men who had stepped back and had his head turned because he couldn't stand watching Bubba work suddenly felt his head inside something very big. And when he saw large fingers close over his eyes, he knew his head was in Bubba's hands. He tried to let out a big scream, but there was that finger sticking down his throat, and then he thought he heard a very big crack, but then there was no hearing and there wasn't even a thought.

"Bubba, beautiful fella. We got de car. De new car, baby," said Dice, grinning very hard. Bubba had started on their own men.

"Right," said Bubba.

Dice looked around for a place for Bubba to wipe his hands. There were only two places. Dice's suit or the other man they had picked up for the work.

Dice quickly pointed to the other man.

Bubba wiped and the man screamed. Bubba had wiped too hard. Bubba suddenly realized that he had done a wrong thing. His own man was whimpering softly in his giant hands. Bubba looked to Dice. He knew he could trust Dice.

Bubba was the only man from Roxbury who trusted Dice. If people could get close to Bubba, they would have told him that Dice was no good. But people did not get close to Bubba. Only Dice got close to Bubba, and Dice made a living from the big man. The only problem was that Bubba was a victim of enthusiasm. Once he got started, he was like a long freight train; he took a while to stop. It was not that Bubba was es-

52

pecially vicious, Dice thought. It was that those big hands needed something to do once they got started.

Bubba had been six-foot-two and 240 pounds in junior high school. Naturally, he was the greatest thing in the Tiny Tot Football League, the division for boys fourteen and under.

Bubba's football career started and ended there. He could not realize that the play had been whistled dead. Coaches tried jumping on him to teach him, but Bubba could never stop thinking that a tackle was only the beginning.

An opposing quarterback who would never walk again sued successfully, proving that Bubba did not play football, he mugged.

The junior high tried him with the big boys in high school. Bubba put a fullback into a wheelchair for life, by running after the stretcher to finish him off while the fullback looked helplessly up to the sky.

Bubba never made love to a woman more than once.

He tried professional boxing, but he hated the gloves on his hands. Bubba knocked out his first opponent in fourteen seconds of the first round. His manager was delighted, until the referee couldn't get Bubba up off his prostrate opponent.

Frustrated to agony, Bubba tore off the gloves with his teeth so he could get at the other boxer's skull better with his bare hands.

The referee tried breaking a stool over Bubba's head to stop him. Then someone came into the ring with a lead pipe that he brought smashing down on Bubba's big head. The pipe could have splintered a pier piling, it came down with such force. Bubba looked up and scratched his head. The pipe had caught his attention.

When he concentrated, Bubba realized that he was supposed to stop crushing things with his hands. But the concentration was hard for Bubba.

Now in the kitchen of the white man's Cape Cod home, Bubba realized he had already killed one of his own men and was in the process of killing another. The man was half dead. Bubba looked to Dice. 53

"What we do, Dice?"

"You started it, you finish it, big fella," Dice said. "You leave him here, he gonna be singing all songs to de fuzz. He gonna say you did it."

"No. Won' say nuffin," said the man in Bubba's hands.

"He say he won' say nuffin," said Bubba.

"Dey all say dat when you gots dey head in you hands. He won' say nuffin now. He say it plenty looking at dem Boston blues, dem fuzz. Who you friend anyway?"

"You my friend, Dice."

"Who never lie to you?" asked Dice.

Bubba thought a moment. "Ain't nobody never lie to me. Everybody lie to me," he said accurately.

"Well, who lie to you nicest, then?" asked Dice.

"You be de nices', Dice."

"Den finish what you start, so we don't be doin' no life in Ambrose Prison."

When Bubba heard Ambrose, his hands convulsed instinctively. A loud crack filled the room, and the man spat out his lifeless inanards like a toothpaste tube squashed by a brick.

Bubba did not even notice this. He was thinking of his two years in Ambrose State Penitentiary. Ambrose was where prisoners were sent when all other prisons failed.

Not even Ambrose was strong enough for Bubba. The guards had locked him in solitary confinement one night, and in the morning they found the steel cell door torn in half, the way some men did with telephone books.

He had failed to escape only because he had jammed the secondary door himself. The three-inch steel there had managed to hold.

They built a special open-air prison for Bubba. It was four walls of steel-reinforced concrete, set into the rocky ground. It was a steel-lined pit. One warden from out of state saw it and said it reminded him of a rhino pit he had once seen in the Paris zoo.

54

The Ambrose pit for Bubba had used the same design, the warden was told. Except for Bubba there was an extra layer of steel reinforcement. And with Bubba no one dared enter to clean the cage.

His food was thrown down from above. Bubba knew it was mealtime when lunch landed on his head.

Bubba was lonely. It was the loneliest time in Bubba's life, and it hurt more than anything he knew. He would have given anything just for somebody to talk to him. Even to threaten him would have been all right.

Then Dice entered his life.

Every day someone would lower a bucket to collect the leavings from Bubba's pit lavatory. But this day, someone spoke. None of the others had spoken because they didn't want Bubba to get to know them by name because later, he might want to shake hands with them.

"You a sucker. You know why you down dere and I up here?" said the man.

" 'Cause dey gots to have somebody to haul up de shit," said Bubba.

" 'Cause I realize my potential. I am a potentiator of my life. You don' se« me in ao pit. I don' waste my potential, see?"

"What potential?" asked Bubba to the man with the bucket in his hand.

"Potential be what you can achieve in ufe. I am an achievorator. You an under-achievorator. Dat why you down dere. You bé de under-one. I be de over-one."

"You still haulin' shit, nigger," said Bubba.

"Today. But soon I be outside in a boss hog. You gon' stay dere till de sun dry up. Yessuh. When you die, dey just fill in de hole and dat be you grave."

This thought horrified the big man, and he had dreams of great truckloads of earth coming down on him. The next day, the same man was up above removing the bucket.

"How I use my potential?" asked Bubba.

"Stop breakin ' people's heads for nuffin." 55

"I likes breakin' heads."

"Den stay dere till dey fills it in on you, sucker." "Wait. Don' go. I promise I don' break no head no more. Jus' don' let dem bury me alive."

"I din' say don' break heads. Jus' don' do it for nuf-fin. Now, you willin' to come in wif me, I will use your potential and show you how I uses my potentiorator. It get me what I want, see?"

Bubba nodded.

"But you gotta do what I say. You do what I say, I get you up here wif me," said Dice, maneuvering the waste pail downwind toward the truck that would carry it away.

He returned to the edge of the pit, and looking up was Bubba's big mournful head.

"What you in for, man?" asked Dice.

"Manslaughter, felonial assault, resisting arrest, rape, molestering a child, armed robbery, three counts of mugging. I din' do one of dem muggin's."

"You left out arson," said Dice.

"Dem matches, dey be too small for my fingers," Bubba said.

"Tomorrow, dere by a lady comin' here, and no matter what dey say you done, you jes' tell her it be revolutionary."

"What dat revolutionary shit?" asked Bubba.

"Revolutionary be you can do anything you want and you can't do no wrong. You sets fire to a nursery and you say it be revolutionary, and it be all right wif lots of folks," Dice said.

"Lots of folks sound like dey be stupid," Bubba said.

"Dey be white," Dice said.

The next day, Bubba looked up and saw many people with the warden at the edge of his pit. The warden was explaining how dangerous Bubba was. But Bubba remembered what the waste collector, Dice, had said, and he yelled up, "It was revolutionary."

A white-haired old woman, hearing that, insisted that a ladder be put down, and despite warnings, she entered the pit. She was, Bubba later found out, an im-

56

portant person from an important family. He did not know she was Wilhelmina Wakefield, the grand dame of support for the Third World wherever she found it, as long as it wasn't in Mamtasket. "Revolutionary," grunted Bubba.

"You're going to free us all," said Wilhelmina Wakefield. "Your revolutionary sensitivity is extraordinary and too complex for the dull white mind."

"Revolutionary," grunted Bubba again. Wilhelmina motioned up to the edge of the pit. Photographers came down. Their strobe lights frightened Bubba and he growled, but he guessed that Dice wouldn't want him breaking the photographers' heads.

The next day, on the second page of The Boston Blade, was a large picture of Bubba. His story covered the entire page. The headline read: "He Only Wanted to Free His People."

Bubba could not read the story, but Dice read it to him. The gist was that Bubba was put into the pit because his revolutionary sensitivities were too difficult for a reactionary warden to deal with.

In a full page of small newspaper type, The Blade never once mentioned one of Bubba's crimes.

When The Blade spoke, politicians listened. The mayor of Boston got on national television and discovered in his own heart, his own gut, sureness that the only reason Bubba was in jail was because Massachusetts was racist. A rally was held at the Boston Common. Religious leaders spoke. Buttons were handed out.

The buttons read: "Free Bubba."

Bumper stickers said more: "His only crime was wanting freedom. Free Bubba."

Finally, the parole board met and not only freed Bubba, but apologized to him. They also freed one Mandranus Rex Smith, alias Dice.

From then on, Bubba knew whom he trusted. What Dice never told Bubba was that he had been told what to tell Bubba. He had never met the man. But it was

57

the same voice he heard on the telephone, telling him who to take care of and where to pick up the money.

So they went to work for that man, that high-class man with that high-class Boston accent, who left them money in Burger-Triumph garbage pails, but whom they had never seen. It was a perfect union. Bubba had Dice's brains and Dice had Bubba's magnificent hands.

Dice looked at his pink and gold Rolex watch as he drove his white Eldorado convertible back to Boston from Cape Cod. It was really too late to visit the other two professors at MUT, the white man and the old Chink.

They could always do that in the morning.

Bubba had had enough fun for one day anyway.

They continued on into Roxbury, where Dice preened his way up to the bar and, as he often did since he had teamed up with Bubba, tried to pick a fight.

And as always, when he had Bubba along, he couldn't manage it.

"Get yo' ugly face outen dis bar," said Dice to a slick pimp with a foxy lady Dice wanted.

"Yeah," said Bubba.

The pimp moved. The fox stayed. Life was good for Mandranus Rex Smith, alias Dice. In the morning, say at noon, he would take care of the other two scientists. Maybe even do one himself, it the one were small.

58

Chapter Four

Remo tried to follow The Boston Blade. He had a half-year's issues shipped to his lab. If the contact was going to be through the media, then he might be able to see where other professors dealing with rapid-breeding bacteria had been reached.

They had spent the evening before in an elegant hotel named the Copley Plaza.

Remo had tried to watch three television news shows at once, hoping to see some kind of contact.

He could have taped at least one of the news shows, but Chiun would not let him use the video recorder. Remo had pointed out that CURE had paid for that video recorder before such machines were seen outside of television studios. CURE had developed the technology to make the taping machine portable—just for Chiun. So Chiun should at least allow one show to be taped for one hour.

Chiun had been horrified.

"Blasphemy. How many years have I taught you? And yet you now here say to me that I should take assassin's tribute and return it to the use of the emperor. If I have taught you nothing else about Sinanju, most holy and sacred is the assassin's tribute."

"There we disagree, Little Father," said Remo.

"How can you disagree? I am the Master."

"I just don't think the money is that important."

A moan came from Chiun. "No. Not you, Not you, 59

Remo, who I taught with the golden years of my life. Not you, Remo."

Remo sighed. He had known what was coming. Every time he said that money itself was not important, but the art of Sinanju, the mystery of being that was encompassed in its power, Chiun would accuse him of betrayal to the highest ideals of Sinanju.

"Amateur," Chiun hissed. "Not you, Remo. You cannot think like an amateur. Your country and the world bleeds from amateurs taking weapons into then-own hands, and when you, who have been trained in Sinanju, who have been give Sinanju despite your dead-fish white color, when you talk like the lunatics who perform these services for nothing, you have pierced the very heart of your Master."

"Sinanju now gets tribute from what I do," Remo said. "I work for Smith and I do what he wants, and those ingrates in your village get a shipment of gold to keep them alive and not working. Because of what I do."

"Because I trained you," said Chiun. "It is only just."

"I don't care about tribute," Remo said.

And then Chiun's wailing would not stop. Remo was going to be an embarrassment to Sinanju. Already in the world, people were going around shooting popes. Murdering babies. Now Remo was going to let it be known that he would kill for nothing. That the tribute did not matter.

So many years and so much pain, and now Remo had done this to Chiun.

"Even for a white, this is not gratitude," said Chiun, and Remo had known further arguing was useless. He was not going to get the tape machine. And Chiun would not be speaking to him for a while. Remo had to be careful to notice that Chiun was not speaking to him, however, because if Chiun thought Remo was not noticing how he was being ignored, Chiun would make noises or interrupt in some manner whatever Remo was doing. If there was anything that bothered the

60

Master of Sinanju, it was someone being oblivious to the fact that he was ignoring them.

Remo watched the three TV news shows as best he could, flicking back from channel to channel, and realized that he was going to have to come up with something better.

So the next day at the lab, he ordered the six months of The Boston Blade. He also tried to devise a system for monitoring all the media to see if a contact was being made.

The Blade had one interesting story. A Professor Keating had been killed during a racial incident. Remo remembered that Keating was the one who had promised the contact through the media.

Remo almost missed the story on his death because the headline read: "Racial Killing in Cape Cod." The racial part was two blacks being horribly mangled. There were quotes from community leaders about Cape Cod's shame. Apparently, the professor's body was found in his Cape Cod home, along with those of the two blacks.

There was an editorial in The Blade about this. It called for an end to racial killing and the establishment of a special board to root out the racist nature of Cape Cod, where, as everyone knew, it was impossible for a black welfare family to buy a home.

But neither editorial nor news story carried much information about Keating's death. Remo phoned the newspaper, hoping he could get someone who knew more about it. One could tell from the kill sometimes why it was done.

He finally was connected to a reporter at a Blade bureau on Cape Cod.

"Yeah. He was butchered just before the racial incident," the reporter said.

"How?" asked Remo, glancing over to the window to let Chiun know that he was aware he was not being spoken to. Chiun was by the window, grandly examining the Charles River. It was a saying of Sinanju long before the world had so many great cities that one could

61

never be lost on a river, for wherever it flowed, there was always a city where it entered the ocean.

"I think the guy—what's his name, Keating—had his ribs broken out," the reporter said. "A bloody mess."

"Mangled?" asked Remo.

"Yeah. After his belly had been cut open by some crude kind of knife. I wasn't paying too much attention to that body."

"How did the other two men die?"

"Racially," said the reporter.

"How do you know?" asked Remo.

"It was a white neighborhood."

"Time out," said Remo. "You mean, if a black guy gets killed in a white neighborhood, it's automatically a racial killing? What if they were killed by a black guy? You know, people kill for other reasons than race hatred."

"Some do it for nothing," said Chiun, still looking at the river. "Some give away the finest training in all history."

The reporter told Remo that until proven otherwise, any time a black man was killed by a white or probably killed by a white, then it was racial.

"Why?" asked Remo.

"Because Massachusetts is a racist state."

"Why?"

"Because it's The Blade's policy. Speak to Mr. Wakefield, if you don't like it, but I tell you now, anyone who thinks differently is a racist."

"Who says?"

"Mr. Wakefield. Why do you think I got shipped up here to work, when my house is in Boston? I wrote that a store owner shot a burglar."

"What was wrong with that?" asked Remo.

"The store owner was white. The burglar was black. I'll never- make that mistake again. But I didn't even recognize a racial incident until then."

"So Mr. Wakefield controls the news at The Blade," said Remo.

62

"No, no. Never say I said that. Mr. Wakefield does not interfere ever. He just makes sure we maintain the highest standards. And you'd better know just what those standards are."

Remo hung up and looked at the stack of six months of The Blade. It almost reached the ceiling at the far corner of his lab. And there were months and months of television news shows. How the hell was he going to find out how somebody had reached other scientists through the media?

Suddenly the phone was ringing. As long as Remo was answering the phone, he wouldn't have to be reading those newspapers.

It was a woman's voice. She was terrified. She was the office manager of this section of the lab, and she was telling Remo that he and the other professor had better jump out the window now.

"It's only three stories to the street," she said in a desperate whisper. "You still have time."

"I'm not jumping through any window," Remo said. "It's eleven in the morning. Is the place on fire?"

"Worse. The biggest, ugliest man I ever saw is headed for your office. He's got giant hands. He's the one who was always seen around here when the other professors were killed."

"It's eleven o'clock in the morning," said Remo. "Tell them to come back at three maybe. I've got all these papers to read."

"You know there have been five professors in your discipline killed in the last three years? Do you know that? Do you know that a giant of a man with giant hands was seen at everyone's death? He's coming for you, don't you understand? And he's got a friend, and I think the friend has got a gun. Jump. You can't get out by the hallway. They're already there."

"Listen," said Remo. "You wouldn't know how I could get a lot of papers read and television news shows watched, would you?"

"You're going to be dead in minutes." 63

"No, no. Calm down. Look, do you know of people we can hire to read newspapers?"

"You don't need people. There's a computer system, but you've got to be alive to use it. Please. I don't want to see someone killed again. Please, jump."

"So you can rig up a computer to do it," said Remo. With a roar, the door to the lab cracked off its hinges and two men entered, one of them enormous with giant hands.

The smaller man waited for the two scientists to flee in desperate panic. Dice always loved it when Bubba entered a room by pushing a door in. You could see the desperate panic in the room. You could do just about anything to anyone in the room after Bubba entered.

A real old yellow-faced gook with, long fingernails was staring out the window. The young white one was on the telephone.

The older one didn't jump because he was probably deaf. But what about the white one? Dice had never seen people not jump when the door went flying into the room.

"Sweet Bubba, make Whitey jump," said Dice. "De arms or de legs?" asked Bubba. "Suit yourself. Make yourself at home on his body." Bubba saw the white man. Bubba would break the white man. Bubba moved on the white man. Bubba grabbed an arm of the white man. Big Bubba's hand enclosed the entire forearm. Big Bubba got ready to yank the arm out of its socket.

Bubba could do this sometimes if he had the right leverage and got a good yank. Usually, though, he would just damage the socket

Bubba yanked. The arm didn't move. The white man kept talking. Bubba yanked again. "What?" said Bubba in confusion. "Shhhhhh," said the white man. "I'm on the phone." "He doesn't believe in getting paid. He is worthless," said the yellow man.

"You next, Pops," said Dice. He thought Bubba 64

could snap the frail old man in the funny-looking yellow robe with just one blow. He had never seen Bubba do a one-blow kill. But the old Chink looked as if a good spit would do him in.

Dice decided to teach the old man some manners before Bubba finished him. He sauntered over to the old yellow man while Bubba was tugging on the white man's arm.

"Don't sass me," said Dice. "Don't ever sass me." He slapped the old face, but something strange happened. He felt only air. He slapped again. His hand didn't connect. He didn't even see the head move, but the wisp of a beard was quivering. Therefore the head had moved but so quickly he hadn't seen it. Unless, of course, he was imagining this.

"I do not kill for free," the old yellow man said.

He was talking to the white man. Dice turned. The white man should be dead by now. Dice saw a giant black hand flail at the sky. It grabbed a lamp and shattered it. It clutched onto a gray metal lab table and cracked it in two. It latched onto a chair, crushed it like a soft aluminum beer can, sending splinters flying around the room. Dice had to duck.

The other black hand was useless.

And Big Bubba was seated helplessly, his legs stretched out, his big head erect, held very tightly by a telephone receiver cord that had come around his neck and had stopped all the air from going into his lungs.

Bubba was being strangled with a telephone cord. In one hand the white man had one end and the other he held the end with the receiver. And he was talking into the receiver as he was strangling Big Bubba.

"No, nothing's wrong. What noise? Oh, a table or something. I don't know. Listen, can you really get me a computer to do all that newspaper reading and television watching? No, nothing's going on here. Stay to the point, please. You have such a computer program? That's definite? Right. Okay. Come in, say in ..."

The white man lifted the giant Bubba up by the cord and looked at the face.

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"Come in, say, in four minutes. Don't worry about it, there's no problem here. Yes, they did come in. We're talking. They're very nice. Yes. Four minutes."

The white man hung up and waited. Bubba's eyes bulged out. His giant face contorted.

Dice smiled. He smiled very broadly. He had worn a white fedora with a red, white, and blue feather. He took off the hat. Dice understood how impolite wearing a hat indoors could be. Dice held the hat in front of himself. He heard his own feet do a shuffle. Good for you, feet, thought Dice. He bowed. The word sir flowed from his lips. The word flowed easily. Good for you, lips, thought Dice.

He smiled at the yellow man.

"I always like Chinamens, suh. Yessuh. I do like de Chinamens." Dice showed a lot of teeth when he said that.

"I am Korean, imbecile," said the old man.

"Yessuh, like dem Chinamens."

"Korea is not China. Koreans are not Chinese. Chinese are slothful."

"I like all dem Chinamens," said Dice, whose ears were not working that well. He was trying to like everyone living in the room. He was hoping to promote niceness as a way of life, now that Bubba was on his way out of this Ufe. Dice could not find it in him to exclude any group from his niceness.

"Koreans are different inasmuch as virtue is different from sin," said Chiun.

"I like all mens. All brothers. Yessuh. Koreans and Chinamens, dey be one," said Dice. His voice rang with sincerity. Good for you, voice, thought Dice.

And then everything was very dark. He did not see the hand move and flick at his spinal cord with just enough force to sever all motor responses.

He saw only darkness and felt a great floating away.

Good for you, floating away, thought Dice and then thought no more.

Remo looked at the big one who was inside the telephone cord. He had just expired.

66

"Did you kill that man?" said Remo. "We were supposed to save one. I wanted to save one."

"I did it free. You should be happy," said Chiun.

"If I knew you were going to kul yours, I would have saved mine," Remo said. "What if they don't send someone else? How are we going to find the source? You know you can't find out who sent someone unless they're living."

"I thought you liked killing for no tribute."

"You should have told me, that's all."

"He called me a Chinamen. Not once but four times."

"All you had to do was tell me," said Remo. He unraveled the phone cord, which snapped away from Bubba's neck in a small shower of blood. The big body dropped to the lab floor.

"I can't talk to that," Remo said. He wiped the cord clean with a piece of paper. "I could never talk to that now. You could at least have told me."

"I wasn't talking to you. How could I tell you?"

"You can talk enough to tell me I'm an amateur," Remo said.

"That's not talking to you," said Chiun.

"Now we have two bodies," Remo said.

"I'm not cleaning them up."

"You killed one."

"I'm not cleaning it up," Chiun said.

"Kill it, clean it," said Remo. "I'm not running around picking up bodies after you."

"Of course not," Chiun said. "Why show any respect? Mock everything you are taught. Ignore traditions thirty centuries older than your country. I would be shocked if you showed any respect after all these years."

"Respect, my ass. A deal's a deal. Our deal is I don't pick up your bodies and you don't pick up mine."

Chiun turned back to the window. He was ignoring Remo.

"I take it you're back to not speaking to me again," 67

Remo said, and when he got no answer, he was sure he was right. He looked around for someplace to store the bodies. The woman would be in soon to tell him how to scan the newspapers by computer.

He found a large cart for refuse outside the office, put both bodies inside and covered them with copies of university regulations that someone had stacked on his desk. He stored the broken table in a closet. He whisked up the broken lamp and tossed the pieces on - top of the refuse cart to make it look more like garbage. Then he put the cart in the corner.

"Thank you," he said to Chiun. "For your help."

"You're welcome," said Chiun with a happy little smile.

Then Remo went out to the office manager. She seemed relieved that he was alive.

"What else would I be?" said Remo.

She told him that MUT had developed a computer program to measure a norm of accuracy in the American news media. The computers could read and evaluate material and then give a breakdown and examples of story aberrancy.

"Aberrancy?" asked Remo.

"Where a story differs from the usual accurate norm."

"Right," said Remo. "Keep up the good work. I'll be gone for a few hours. There's a large pile of newspapers in my office to start with. There is also a very unpleasant person in the lab. Do not call him a Chinaman."

"Your colleague?" she asked.

"Yes."

"We already met him this morning. I hate to say this, Professor," she said, kneading her hands. "I know it's not my position, but... well."

"Go ahead," said Remo.

"Would you please show him a little more respect? He's done so much for you."

"You certainly have met him," said Remo. "But did he ever tell you what he did for me?"

68

"It must have been wonderfully sweet. He's so precious, I could die. We all love him."

"Sure. He can con anybody."

"He certainly is not unpleasant as you said. And all the suffering he's gone through to make sure you were brought up properly. Well, we'd all be so happy if you would show him a little more respect."

"I'd like to do a biopsy on your mind," said Remo.

It was a pleasant spring afternoon, and since it looked like garbage Remo was pushing, no one bothered him or even noticed. He rolled the cart along Memorial Drive until he found a pleasant tree-shaded grassy knoll where he parked the cart and the bodies and returned to the lab. The computer program was under way.

The office manager had gotten a half-year's television tapes from the studios, the MUT name being magic in Boston. She showed Remo how to do a scan of the television tapes.

Remo did the scan while the office manager brought Chiun a light ginseng tea. She was middle-aged and plump. She cooed whenever she approached Chiun. Remo asked for a glass of water. She informed Remo that getting refreshments was not among her duties.

"We do extra things for people who are exceptionally pleasant. Or people who treat those who deserve respect with respect."

"A gracious woman has spoken," said Chiun as the office manager nodded approval. Chiun sipped the tea. Remo didn't need the water anyway.

The first readout on aberrancy of the Boston media concerned the television news. The report read: "Television reporters apparently function under the assumption that they themselves are the news."

Remo pressed the scanner. There was the face of Deborah Potter. There was Deborah Potter announcing the pregnancy of Deborah Potter. She was announcing it to her husband, Paul Potter, who was co-anchor. The main news story for the city that day was what Paul Potter thought of conception.

69

The Boston Blade carried a story on the conception. The other networks commented. In one six-month period, there were 176 news stories on which television anchor person was having difficulty with which personnel manager at which station. It not only was on the television news, The Blade reported on it too.

There was the monthly report on Deborah Potter's pregnancy.

And then came one section that Remo was especially interested in. It was about oil.

There was a debate over the Middle East. Three reporters monitored the debate between two people who agreed about everything. Everyone was agreeing. The reporters were telling each other how wonderful they were.

Someone said Egypt was in Europe. It was one of the reporters. No one contradicted hún.

Every reporter looked alert and responsible. They could look alert and responsible asking for someone to pass the ashtray. The debate concluded that Boston had the best news media in the world. The final note sounded was that everyone should listen to the Boston media, and the Middle East problems would be solved. The Boston media called for niceness and a civil rights act for the Middle East. This was logical because one reporter thought that the Palestine Liberation Organization was some sort of civil rights group. He also thought it was based in Israel. No one contradicted him. They were too busy congratulating him on his five-part series on the Middle East.

Remo couldn't make sense of the anchor people. They all sounded like clones of each other, except for one black sports announcer. He showed insight and enthusiasm, and it was a pleasure for Remo to hear about something that a reporter thought was more interesting than he was. The black reporter was fired before the last month of tapes, and none of the other stations picked him up.

The Blade was even more confusing than the television nets. There were many articles on oil. One of

70

them said that America should be more responsive to Arab demands because of Arab oil. There were many articles about how America was paying a high price for oil because the Arabs had been offended. There were ominous threats of cutoffs of oil by the Arabs.

Then there was a five-part series about how America was being unfair to the Arabs by blaming them for using oil as blackmail. It was written by Melody Wake-field.

At the time the Iran-Iraq war broke out, splitting Arab countries into different sides, Melody Wakefield covered a convention of Arab-Americans in Boston. Melody Wakefield asked 107 incisive questions at the convention. Not one of them mentioned the Iran-Iraq war. Most of them had to do with how unfairly the Arabs were being treated in the news media in America. The rest had to do with how unfairly the Arabs were being treated in the Middle East. A few had to do with major Arab contributions to world civilization and why Americans wouldn't recognize them.

There was only one question in the 107 that didn't sound as if it had been drafted by the Arabs' public relations staff. That question was, where was the ladies' room. It was the one question that didn't get an answer.

The Blade called the Melody Wakefield series hardhitting and explosive, "telling you what some people don't want you to know about the Middle East." The implication was that there were vast forces fighting the courageous truth of Melody Wakefield.

Remo gave up and called the office manager, who had returned to her desk.

"I can't get what I want from this thing," he said. "The media up here is all aberration."

"That's not so," she said. "It only seems like it. The computer just gives you the bad parts, not the good work."

"How long would the good work take?" asked Remo. "A minute?"

"I would not expect you to understand, sir. Anyone 71

who could treat such a kind, decent, gentle person with

such depraved lack of gratitude certainly isn't fit to

pass judgment on the media of our city." "Who?" said Remo. "Who have I mistreated?" Chiun cleared his throat in the background. He

smiled and the office manager brought him another cup

of ginseng tea.

Bradford Wakefield III waited for the telephone call from his contact, telling him that all had been taken care of with the two new scientists at MUT. He waited past noon and past three p.m., when his granddaughter, Melody, called from Hamidi Arabia.

Melody didn't know whether to do a ten-part series for The Blade on how the West defamed Islam or a twenty-part series on how the West defamed Islam.

She had plenty of time to think about it in Hamidi Arabia because no mullah would speak to her in the clothes she was wearing. She had also been told to read the Koran, but she thought it was boring. And one thing the world was not allowed to do was to bore a Wakefield.

"Melody, I am waiting for an important call," said Bradford.

"You mean I'm not important, Grandpapa?"

"Not as important as this call I'm waiting for."

"Grandpapa, I am in the greatest revolution of all time, where the wealth of the West has been transferred to a Third World country. Now, that is important," she said.

Bradford understood what she meant by a transfer of wealth. That meant little old ladies in Maine keeping their homes at 60 degrees in the dead of winter and paying ten times as much for their heat anyway. When a Wakefield referred to the wealth of the West that had to be shared with developing countries, it was not Wakefield wealth but the single homes of middle-class families, the long summer vacations by car, people's color television sets, and inexpensive and abundant food. This was the transfer of wealth they were talking

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about. OPEC profits just made the Wakefield fortune larger.

"Melody, I regret that the transfer of wealth from the West might be our own wealth if you don't hang up."

The phone clicked as dead as if it had been cut by a razor blade. Melody was a good girl, her grandfather thought. She was only trying to do for the Arabs what her earlier book had done for the Vietnamese and Cambodians, when she proved beyond argument that the only thing wrong with those countries was American's presence in them.

When America had left and the Cambodian communists engaged in a population slaughter unseen since Adolf Hitler, The Blade, through Melody Wakefield's typewriter, proved that it was not the communists' fault for the killing, but America's because America had bombed that country years before.

When the Vietnamese took to the boats to escape their "liberators" from the north, The Blade proved that boat people weren't really Vietnamese at all, but Chinese money lenders. Melody's poisoned pen led the attack.

Melody loved revolutionary discipline for the masses and sometimes, Bradford knew, she only went to these countries to watch revolutionary discipline in action. She had her own whip for revolutionary discipline. She carried it in her traveling bags or sometimes stuffed into her high leather boots.

Bradford looked at his watch. It was four P.M. and still no call. He went to his stone patio to look out over his own rocky shoreline of Mamtasket. He paced until four-thirty p.m., when his stomach started heaving.

The paper had been trying to reach him for an hour, but that wasn't the phone call he wanted. The paper phoned again. And when Bradford ordered his butler to tell his newspaper not to bother him anymore, the butler said it was about a killing.

"What?" said Wakefield. "Give me the phone."

The managing editor told him there had been a 73

racial killing near MUT, across the river from Boston. Two blacks had been found murdered, stuffed into a trash cart and left along Memorial Drive.

"Did one of them ... did one of them . . ." said Bradford, his voice choking, his legs becoming weak. "Did one of them have very large hands?"

"Yes. He was identified as the civil rights activist who only wanted freedom for his people—Bubba. We helped get him out of the racist oppressor jail."

Bradford felt weak. He hadn't felt so weak since a Jew and Catholic and somebody from Ohio had tried to move into Mamtasket.

He hadn't minded the Jew. He was quiet and could be ignored. The Catholic was in industrialist who was called "the rapacious beast of Wall Street," so he and Bradford had something in common. But the family from Ohio laughed loudly and sang songs. Right out in the open. One of them ate a hot dog on a bun, and the father had been raised on a farm where they grew things. They went to football games. And none of the games was Harvard. Their youngest daughter had those big Midwest things on her chest called breasts. No Wakefields had them. They had decent old line New England breasts. Egg size. Fried egg.

Bradford hung op on his editor and shakily made his way into his study and phoned the one person he hated to give bad news to.

"Hello," said Friend at the other end of the line.

"The initial attempt on the two new scientists failed," said Wakefield.

"Fine," said Friend cheerily.

"You're not bothered?"

"No."

"But I thought you didn't allow failure."

"Not at all. How foolish I would be if I insisted on perfection. Do you know how unreal that is?"

"Then you have a contingency plan for a second attempt?"

"Of course," said Friend.

That was the beautiful thing about Friend. He never 74

panicked. And he always had answers and orders immediately.

"First, you will find out everything about the way your two workers died. Then you will head north on your boat until you are outside Kennebunkport, Maine. And you will wait there."

"We aren't going to get those two now?"

"We are going to follow directions, Bradford."

"Yes, Friend," said Bradford Wakefield HI.

The reports from his newspaper on the black men's deaths weakened Bradford's stomach even more. He was so upset, he had to drink enriched baby formula and mush.

The two men found in the refuse cart could not have been killed by human means, the coroner said. The killings were just too precise for human hands. The large one was strangled, and while that required inhuman strength, it was not nearly so much as the strength that would have been required just to hold the big one in place for strangling.

The conclusion—he had been killed with something that worked like an extra-strong forklift and baling machine.

The smaller one was killed with a blow so precise, it would make a surgeon jealous. No human killer could have been that accurate.

The conclusion—death by forces unknown.

Bradford Wakefield had been anchored off the coast of Maine for two days when a small fishing trawler approached his yacht.

A man barely over five feet tall came aboard the yacht. He wore a three-piece summer suit and wire-rimmed glasses, and he did not smile. He did not offer his right hand to shake, either.

His name was Merton, and he did not give his last name. He spoke in a British accent and seemed to know everything there was to know about Bradford Wakefield III, his physical health and, more importantly, some of his relationship with Friend.

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"You know Friend?" asked Wakefield. "Yes, I do."

Merton seemed to be able to sit on the frail wooden deck chair with hardly any pressure. For a moment, Bradford thought he was entertaining a robot. Passing Merton's chair to go to the railing, Wakefield touched the Englishman. But the flesh was warm and human. No robot.

Merton smiled inwardly. People often did that to him. They would sense a lack of human response and then try to touch him, It did not bother him on occasions like this, but it did bother him in his personal life. His son had once said to him, "Are you my natural father, sir?"

"Yes, I am," Merton had said. "Why did you ask?" "Because, sir, I have read in biology that during copulation, people emit sounds of joy and secrete bodily fluids." "That is correct."

"I cannot imagine you, sir, doing those things." "Quite," said Merton, trying to remember the time he had copulated with his wife, Lady Wissex. He tried to remember if he perspired. He didn't think he had. But one didn't think about those things at a time like that.

Instead, Lord Wissex had thought about completing his orgasm and removing himself from Lady Wissex. When he found out she had indeed conceived, he sent her a little silver garden bucket with a note reading: "Good show. You've done your duty and I've done mine. We'll never have to go through that again."

His son also said to him once, "I wonder, sir, how you have been so able to restore our family fortune. From what I have studied of our history, your father left you almost penniless." "I do work, boy." "What work, sir?"

"The sort of work our family did to earn its title." "But, sir," the boy said, "that was murdering Catholics for King Henry."

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"Quite," said Merton.

"You kill Catholics, sir?" asked the boy incredulously. "For the government?"

"Of course not. These are modern times. We don't practice that sort of religious prejudice anymore. And we're not bloody civil servants, no matter what others may think. Someone has found me who appreciates skill at the highest level. Not British, but he's a decent enough sort."

"Is it possible to be not British, but decent, sir?" his son asked.

"I think so. Never met the chap, but I think he has the soul of royalty. Actually, he sounds American," said Lord Wissex.

So Merton Lord Wissex this day found himself on an American's yacht off the Maine coast, with the American upset by the Briton's cool nature. The American, of course, did not know Merton was of the peerage. It really wouldn't matter anyhow. Merton Lord Wissex did not intend to know the chap long.

"Is that all the information you have about how you lost your two operatives?" Merton asked.

"All? You've taken four pages of notes," said Wakefield.

"Quite so. I wonder if I might trouble you for a spot of tea."

"Of course," said Bradford.

Wakefield decided that he hated this man, and it took him a moment to figure out why. This man called Merton actually was condescending to him. How could anyone condescend to a Wakefield? It was for a Wake- .. field to condescend.

The tea came with one of the stewards.

"You're not having tea," said the Briton.

" 'Course I'm having tea," said Bradford. "I always have tea. I have the best teas in the world available to me. Better than Britain."

"How nice," said Merton.

"I take it you have known Friend long?" Wakefield asked.

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"That depends on what one considers long."

"I consider an hour long if one has to be with someone who is condescending," said Bradford. "You know, I gave you an awful lot of information. I don't see how you can call it inadequate."

"Hmmmm," said Merton.

"Name one question I didn't answer."

"How were your people killed?"

"I told you," said Wakefield.

"No, you didn't. You just described in detail the result. But we have no idea what killed them. Or how."

"Those two phony scientists."

"Seems a bit more than a scientist would do, what?"

"They're not scientists," Wakefield said. "They must be somebody's agents."

"Obviously," said Merton.

"So they did the killing."

"But how, Mr. Wakefield? How?"

"Effectively, obviously. If Friend would send me^ some more operatives instead of someone so obviously not an operative, I would have those scientists finished. Let me tell you this, Merton. I ran this operation to perfection until this point. And I resent your coming in here to push papers around and write reports."

"Why are you so sure I am not an operative, as you put it?"

"Look at you. Not enough meat on you to dress a coat rack," said Bradford. He liked that. He drank from his teacup. The tea was a bit too sweet. So sweet it burned his throat.

"Why aren't you drinking?" asked Bradford.

"Because it's poisoned. I poisoned the whole batch."

"Rubbish. I didn't see you go anywhere near the pot," said Wakefield.

"That's right. You're not supposed to see me go anywhere near the pot because if you did see me, old boy, you might not drink the tea, and then I would have to cut your throat. I prefer the least amount of violence. Even though I would cut your throat if I had to."

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"You couldn't have poisoned me and be so casual," said Wakefield. "Now, I could do it. But not you. You know why, little man? Because we had to rescue you during World War I and World War II. That's why. You think you're better than everyone else but you're not. You know why? I'll tell you why. Because we Wakefields are better than everyone else, that's why. And both of us can't be."

The sun was setting early this day on the yacht. Darkness was coming to Bradford's eyes. His fingertips felt numb. The burning began to tear at his throat. His stomach moved in strange ways.

But he wasn't going to show that twerp Merton that he was suffering. He was going to smile through the whole thing. And then an idea struck him, that last brilliant Wakefield idea.

He whispered to the little twerp.

"You'll never win, you know. They beat everyone," he said, and then he smiled.

"Bluffs don't suit you well, colonial," said Merton.

"I know now. Nobody can defeat them. Only sorry I won't be here to see them put you in your place, bloody English twerp."

Merton Lord Wissex watched the beefy American expire and then neatly emptied the teapot overboard, helped the corpse into a deck chair, and then washed out the teacups himself. He tied the chap's tie, walked up to the bridge of the yacht, chatted amiably with the captain about tides, got behind him when the captain showed him the sextant, broke captain's neck with a short karate chop, broke first mate's neck with similar chop, straightened own tie, left bridge, debarked Wakefield yacht, entered rented trawler, returned to American coast, poisoned trawler captain with laced glass of stout so there would be no identification, phoned Friend informing him of possible trouble, then in boarding room of American hostelry sat down to write a long and deep letter to his son on the importance of good manners.

He started it five times, each time throwing away the 79

first page. He just couldn't quite get through to the boy how utterly important manners were.

Without manners, he wrote finally, man is a beast.

Chambermaid entered room, discovered gun paraphernalia and had to be removed. And was. Suffocation.

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Chapter Five

On the mountain road that divides the island of St. Maarten's in the Dutch West Indies, Peter John, an upright man with a small herd of cows and a farm that through his courage fed a large family on but two acres, could not start his car.

He was a religious man, and he took the little setback with joyful calm. These were things of üfe. But within one day, because he could not start his car, a president of the United States would face the most horrifying decision of his life and do what he had vowed no president of the United States would ever have to do again.

And because Peter John could not start his car, assassins would fly into his little island to settle a centuries-old feud, and a computer chip would continue advancing toward its greatest profit venture ever, even if it meant the end of the civilized world.

Four times Peter John pressed the accelerator of his Ford station wagon, and four times there was nothing. Not even a cough.

"Betty, you naughty girl, you start now, precious," Peter John said to his station wagon. He talked to his car the way he talked to his animals. No one could ever prove to him that machines did not have souls.

"The only difference between a machine and an animal is that the machine won't kick you. The only difference between a machine and a person is that a

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machine will never give bitter tongue to pain the heart. I love my Betty," Peter John would say.

This morning Betty did not love him. She would not move and she would not cough, and Peter John got out of the station wagon and lifted the hood. There was a white soapy substance on the carburetor. He tried to smell it. It was odorless. He took a piece of it in his fingertips. It felt waxy.

But it crumbled. His fingertips stung a little bit, and he noticed that the pink pads turned just a shade whiter. Peter John was a black man, and he felt God had made him black so that the sun could kiss him without harm. Peter John did not yell of pride in his blackness or hold workshops on maintaining his blackness; he just wanted to be black for the rest of his life because that was what he was. And he reasoned that if this waxy substance could cause the pink pads of the underside of his hands to turn white, then it might do the same thing to the rest of his body, and he did not want that.

So he immediately phoned for an appointment with the doctor in Marigot, the French part of the island. He decided to use his friend's Chevrolet to drive there.

But that too would not start, and it too had the white substance in the carburetor. And so did another friend's Peugot.

Peter John reasoned that if it were in the carburetors, it might have come through the gas. So he opened the gas tank of Betty, and there was a small explosion of white waxy material that splashed all over him. The material had been compressed somehow in the gas tank, and Peter John wondered who would do such a nasty trick to such nice cars.

He telephoned the bus company that ran through the island. But no one answered, strangely enough, and he decided to hitchhike. He had heard from tourists that in America, hitchhiking took a long time because many cars would pass up people, especially black people. But Peter John knew the people of St. Maar-

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ten's were nicer than that. He never had trouble hitchhiking, and he never passed up people, either.

But this morning no cars were on the road, as he walked.

He walked past the large, sprawling acres of the Puressence Laboratory, and there he saw, high on the hill, a few very tiny cars chugging around, spilling off a purple exhaust. He had never seen an exhaust like that, but even down on the road beneath the laboratory's high hill, he could smell its bitter odor. It made breathing hard, even at this great distance.

He saw cars on the road, but none of them were moving. A few had popped their gas caps, and the white substance that he thought someone had dumped into his car in a prank was spilling out of the other cars. One gas station was a mound of white wax with the pumps and the concrete they had been set into lying back on their sides.

Peter John was now flecked with little white spots where the white substance had touched him, and the spots stung—not greatly but like an annoying mosquito.

His doctor was a Dutchman who had married a Frenchwoman and decided to settle on the French side of the divided island. He had treated Peter John's entire family.

John had lost three of his eight children. He attributed that to God's will. But he still had five of the eight. He attributed that to his doctor's skill. Peter John was generally a very happy man. He was also considered "that fool Peter John" by many, including his doctor.

"Excuse me, doctor," he said after his long walk, "but a strange substance attacked my car and is now attacking me." He pointed to the painful white spots on his rich black skin.

"What did it do to your car?" the doctor asked.

"One day there was gasoline in my car, and the next there was this waxy burning substance."

"In the gas tank?" asked the doctor.

"It burns the skin," Peter John said. 83

"Yes, but did it do permanent damage to the engine?"

"I don't know."

"I will tell you why I ask. I have long admired that Ford station wagon of yours. Yes, I must confess. She has attracted me for years. What do you want for her?"

"I came to have my skin healed."

"All right. Take two aspirin and phone me if it doesn't get better."

"Why two aspirin?" asked Peter John.

"Why not two aspirin?"

"What good will they do me?"

"What harm will they do you?"

"They will not cure my skin trouble."

"If you know that, why did you come here?" said the doctor. He thought for a while, looking at Peter John's skin, and suddenly horror seized his face. His eyes widened and his mouth dropped open.

"No," he gasped.

"What is wrong? What have you discovered about me?"

"Maybe if your car was attacked by this, others might be also."

"Some were," Peter John said. "I saw them."

"I hope we're not too late," the doctor said. He ran out of the office, with Peter John following him. He ran down a garbage-strewn alley. He hopped over a fence. His knees were cut as he fell but he kept on running.

Finally, crying for air, the doctor reached a small building and threw open the doors. A sleek gray Peu-got sat on the immaculate white concrete, its tires gleaming black, its chrome polished perfect.

The doctor rushed to the front seat and put a key into the ignition. He saw that Peter John had followed him.

"It's in God's hands now," said the doctor. "We can only hope and pray it has not spread this far."

He closed his eyes, prayed, and turned the ignition. 84

There was a cough and a sputter and the Peugot kicked over and the doctor laughed, tears of gratitude coming to his eyes.

"I am happy for you," said Peter John.

"Would you like a ride?"

"I would like my skin cured."

"Let's try washing it," said the doctor. "I have some absolutely pure water that I keep for my car. You may use it on your skin, but not too much."

John saw the doctor pointing to the back of the garage. He saw the water in plastic jars. He saw that it came from springs in France. The label read: "This water exclusive for use with Peugot and not to be wasted on eyewashes, etc., etc."

Peter John poured the water over his arms. A soothing relief came to the burning little white spots. They even darkened a bit.

"It works," said Peter John. "May I keep this pure water?"

"For your skin?"

"Yes."

"That's awfully expensive stuff to use just for one's body," said the doctor. "But all right. Come ride with me. I will take you home. I want to see your station wagon for myself. Maybe I will not want to buy it anymore if it is badly damaged."

The doctor took the long route home to show Peter John how well a decent car ran. The route cut through the port of Peterburg, with the giant oil tanks. Everything on the island of St. Maarten's ran by oil, even the electric generators.

But as they approached the giant oil tanks, a strange thing happened. With a gigantic crunching gurgle, the tank tops began to rise, and Peter John and the doctor could see that the tops were rising on a foam of the white waxy substance. Tons of it, pushing up the top, looking like frosting on a giant birthday cake.

Slowly the lights of Peterburg dimmed. Windows opened as air conditioning stopped. People ran out into

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the streets, looking for someone to blame about the electricity going off.

"Hurry," said Peter John. He was frightened, for it was evening, and darkness was coming soon to the little island, and there would be only candlelight, as there had been a century before when Peter John's ancestors came to the island as slaves, purchased by the doctor's ancestors.

And then the doctor's car stopped.

The doctor put aside the pain in his heart and opened the hood of his dead car. He examined the gas tank. The gas cap almost popped off. Whatever this white stuff was, it attacked the gasoline and changed it. That was why Peter John's car had stopped. And his too.

Before his eyes, the doctor saw what was happening. The grease and lubrication of his car were moving. The doctor blinked. It was writhing as if it were alive, and then all the grease and oil turned white and waxy and still. A chemical process was happening before his eyes—possibly a bacteriological process. Whatever this bacterium was, it seemed to travel through the air and attacked all petroleum very quickly. And then it was still.

Around them, Peter John and the doctor saw other cars rolling to a stop. Radios and television stopped. Suddenly the island was still. A cricket chirped in the rich green growth that had been drinking the bright Caribbean sun all day. Somewhere off on a dark hillside, a cow mooed.

"This is terrible," the doctor said.

"It's rather beautiful," said Peter John.

In Peterburg, an American official was at the community long-distance telephone station called Landsra-dio. He had purchased his time for a telephone call to the United States, and he was describing what had happened.

"You have gas or oil anywhere, and it turns to wax. Something happens to it. No, it's not chemical, I don't

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think. Maybe some kind of bacteria they manufacture here or something. I don't know. The ships in the harbor still have their lights on. Yeah. We can get you all you want, but how do we get it off the island? Half the planes are grounded. Their fuel tanks are wax. I don't know what the shit is, for Christ's sake."

He waited by the telephone for the return call from the States. He noticed that the receiver was becoming somewhat soft in his hand. His thumbprint was on the white plastic of the receiver. Then he remembered that plastic was made from a petroleum base. His shirt felt clammy, and he remembered that the synthetics of the shirt were made from a petroleum base.

He pulled at his shirt. Instead of feeling like cloth, it felt like warm caramel.

His callback was almost immediate. Yes, his superiors in the Department of Commerce were interested in the substance, and they wanted five tons of it.

"Five tons?" he asked incredulously. "Why do you need so much for testing?"

"Well, everybody wants to test it. Defense. Agriculture. CIA."

"No way. How can I get you five tons?"

"What can you get?"

"An oil can ML"

"Good. We'll fly in a píane."

The first plane that came for the substance couldn't take off again. The second one immediately covered its engines with a fine gauze screen to protect anything in the air from getting to its fuel. It made the mistake, however, of taking off into an inland breeze. It got to 7,000 feet before the engines stopped and the controls became mush. Guests at the Mullet Bay Hotel stood on their verandas watching. Another plane took off and made it out seven miles before it dropped into the sea.

Finally, the government employee wrapped a whole mess of the white waxy substance in a big tightly woven canvas bag so that it would not be carried by the wind, and went around to hangars at the airport looking for planes that might not have been affected. Two

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hangars in the lee of a hill, their windows shut tight, had such planes. The employee waited until there was a breeze coming in off the ocean and then had the pilot fly right out into it.

The canvas bag of the substance reached Washington that day, and by nightfall, the president of the United States was being told that civilization as they knew it might well be endangered.

"Well," he said with a charming twinkle, "that certainly is a problem. But then again, we've faced problems like these before and won. What it took was spunk, a willingness to work and, well, just plain faith, I guess."

His words brought a few gentle tears to the members of his cabinet. Lumps came up in throats. They thought about the hard times and how people got through those sorts of times by hard work and faith. Most of them had gotten to where they were by hard work and faith. They were from California, and they were familiar with deep, meaningful traditions. That was because all theirs were fresh. None of them went beyond a year ago June. There was nothing like California for a fresh tradition.

"Excuse me, Mr. President," said the reporting scientist. "You have not faced the extinction of civilization like this."

"Oh, gosh, yes, we have. That's where you're wrong, mister. We've faced it before and won."

There was applause in the cabinet room. The secretary of defense said he had never seen a better performance. The secretary of the interior said he hadn't been so inspired since he saw the beautiful neat cartons of a new paper company built where a forest had once Uttered the landscape.

The president of the United States thanked everyone.

But the scientist was adamant.

"I don't think I have quite made myself clear. This is not a battle to try men's wills. It is a disaster. It is an avalanche that is coming down on all of us."

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"I played in an avalanche movie," said the president. "I remember we bid in a log cabin. It was with Vera Hruba Ralston. We fell in love in the cabin and then when I got out, I hunted down the man who caused the avalanche. Gave him a good punch in the nose and that was it."

The secretary of defense nodded. He was glad the president had everything under control because his system couldn't stand another shock. He was still trying to recover from what had happened to him the previous week at an Army base.

He was being shown a weapon by some soldiers. He liked weapons. They reminded him of accounting offices, neat and tidy.

"Go ahead and try your weapon," the secretary of defense had said. And then there was this awful deafening bang of a noise.

"What in bleet hawzus name was that?"

"That was a gun, sir," explained the colonel assigned to escort him.

"A what?"

"A gun, sir."

"Well, I know what that is, but what the hell are people doing hunting on an Army base?"

"No, no. Not for hunting. Infantrymen use guns too, sir. Rifles. Pistols. Cannons. Guns, sir."

"Oh. Well, what does the noise do?" the secretary of defense had asked.

"Do? It doesn't do anything."

"Then why do you have it?"

"It comes when you shoot a projectile. It is the gunpowder exploding."

"Yes?"

"Well, that's it. The noise is a byproduct of shooting a projectile."

"Okay," said the secretary of defense, his logical mind moving in for the kill. "Why do you want to shoot projectiles anyway? What's the purpose in that?"

"Well, sir, it's to kill the enemy."

"How do you know it's going to kill the enemy?" 89

"You don't, sir," said the colonel. "Sometimes you miss."

"Then what you have is a waste of a projectile, correct?"

"Yes, sir."

"I see. Well, we'll have to cut that out. We're not going to just waste the taxpayers' money hurling expensive projectiles around, not even knowing if they're going to miss or not. That's why radio carbon laser computer ray systems are so much better."

"Can an infantryman carry one?"

"Oh, no. It's the size of a house and won't be off the drawing boards until the year 2038 at the earliest. But it is better. And it doesn't make noise. A gun, you say?"

The secretary of defense had shaken his head to get the ringing noises out, but he hadn't been the same since. He was glad everything was under control. He just wished that noisy scientist would leave the cabinet room.

The scientist was talking. "I am saying that we are in danger of losing the world's petroleum supply."

"Impossible," said the secretary of defense. "It's aH underground."

The scientist sighed. He had a IMe bottle with the waxy substance and another bottle that appeared empty. A third tightly sealed bottle was filled with black oil.

"These are anaerobic bacteria," he said holding up the apparently empty bottle. "Anaerobic means they can function without air. That is why once they are introduced into any oil system, they can go completely through it because they don't need air to reproduce or survive. So they can consume the contents of the oil under the ground, once they're introduced there."

"But who would introduce them?" asked the secretary of defense.

"The air itself, if they don't have to travel far," the scientist said. "Fortunately, they seem able to be blown about for only short distances. The ships off the shore

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of St. Maarten's still appear to be working all right, so that means the bacteria were not blown that far out."

"Punch him in the nose," said the president.

"What, sir?"

"I punched him in the nose and then we all lived happily ever after."

"These are bacteria, sir. You can't punch them in the nose."

"If we could, we'd be a lot better off, I tell you."

"Yes. That would be true," said the scientist "But we can't."

"No. I guess we can't. Those days are gone," said the president.

"Never go near a gun when it is being used," said the secretary of defense, shaking his head. "Wheew, those things make noises just like giant firecrackers."

The scientist said desperately, "There is going to be no oil left on the planet. No oil. No gasoline. No plastics made from oil. None."

"Maybe it just means the end of the oil glut," said the president.

"No, sir," said the scientist. "It means the end of the internal combution engine, which just about means the end of industry. There will be no more cars running on gasoline unless some substitute is found, which will be a lot more expensive than we're paying now. Can you imagine ten-dollar-a-gallon gasoline? That is if this bacterium doesn't attack the synthetic fuels also."

"Oh," said the president. "The end of the industrial age."

"Back to the horse and plow," said the scientist. "Maybe back to the caves."

"Unless," said the president. He was used to people warning him about things. When someone came to you with a warning, he was invariably trying to sell you something, some idea or weapon or program. Nothing ever seemed to reach his desk without a warning attached. But this thing in the little bottle seemed real. It was not the same as the warning he'd gotten that morning that if America did not spend three times its

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gross national product on beautifying the prison system, someone was going to be unhappy in Harlem and therefore America would end. The person who was going to be unhappy in Harlem, of course, was the person who wanted to run the $20 trillion prison system, with every second-story man getting his own personal psychiatrist and live-in mistress.

That was nonsense, but this looked real. No matter how pretty the movies made ancient times look, history was, in truth, a bunch of people dying in their thirties from upset stomachs and cold weather and no food.

This was a real crisis. He watched the scientist take the tops off the apparently empty bottle and the small vial of oil. He held the open ends of the bottles together. The oil suddenly became cloudy, then bubbled and turned to wax.

"You have just witnessed the rapid-breeding bacterium," the scientist said. "This bacterium consumes petroleum. A bottle dumped into an oil well, in minutes would be reproducing itself over and over, so rapidly that it might be only hours before it consumed the entire underground pool of oil. And it can do this because it needs no air. It is anaerobic."

"What's the white stuff? Maybe we can sell the white stuff," said the secretary of defense. He had come from a large industrial company and had taken over the nation's defense.

"The white stuff is dead bacteria. Like human pus, sir," said the scientist. "You must understand that if I am a little vague, it is because this is not my particular field. I was called in as a last resort."

"Well, let's get someone in this particular field," said the president. "And let's do it now."

"That is part of the disaster, Mr. President. There is no one in this particular field who can be reached. I wouldn't be here if there was. But I can't impress on you too much the importance of this. With enough oil to breed on, this bacterium could grow until it's as large as the Rockies. It's horrifying."

"We can handle the Rockies. Turn them into a 92

parking lot for Los Angeles," said the secretary of the interior. "L.A. needs parking."

"Why can't we get any scientists in that field?" asked the president. He ignored the secretary of the interior. He liked to ignore his secretary of the interior. He only wished the press would also.

"I found, to my horror, when I tried to get some assistance that they have all gone. First, every expert in the field was attracted to MUT, and then they were either killed or hired off somewhere. Where, I don't know. In essence, sir, we are facing an epidemic—a petroleum epidemic—with all the doctors gone."

"You mean the entire oil supply of the world is in danger."

"Exactly."

"I think someone has planned this thing," said the president. "I think whoever removed the experts in this field made that invisible stuff there that becomes the white stuff. That's what I think."

"I think you may be right, sir," said the scientist.

So did the other cabinet members.

"Well," said the secretary of defense. "Now that we've got that settled, let's move on to the next item on the agenda."

"Let's stay with this one for a while," said the president wearily. Maybe his secretary of defense would really be happier back in private industry.

"Where did these bacteria come from in the first place?" the president asked. "Why were they created?"

"To clean up oil spills," said the scientist.

"Why would anyone want to clean up oil spills?" asked the secretary of the interior.

"To protect the oceans and the sea creatures who live in the ocean," the president said.

"Environmentalists," said the secretary of interior. "I knew they'd cause us trouble. What has an environmentalist ever produced?"

The president sighed again. Maybe his secretary of the interior would be happier back in private industry too. But that was for later. For now was this problem,

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and the president understood it better than anyone else at the table. The bacterium had been created for a purpose. The people who might be able to stop it had already been removed from helping. That had been part of the plan too. And now civilization was ready to get thrown back to the Bronze Age if he did not stop this evil force, whoever or whatever it was. He knew he would now have to use that one power he had said he would never use.

He went to his bedroom and to the top drawer of the bureau. This was what every outgoing president showed the new one. He remembered his predecessor opening the drawer and telling him, "You don't control it. You can only suggest. It won't do everything you suggest."

"How do you know?" asked the new president.

"You're still alive, aren't you?" said the old president. "And I lost the election, didn't I?"

"I'll never use it," said the new president. And he had meant it.

Then.

He picked up the red telephone.

The bacterium had to be stopped. The people behind it had to be stopped. It would do no good to worry about the sanctity of the Constitution because if the bacteria were loosed on the world, there would be no Constitution. No America. He had to use the secret agency he had sworn never to use.

There was a sharp, lemony voice on the other end of the line.

"Yes, Mr. President."

"Civilization has a problem. It's rather sudden, but there is no one else I can turn to. It must be stopped."

"If you are talking about the rapid-breeder bacteria, we are already on it," the lemony voice said.

"Then you know about the missing scientists at MUT and the fact that there's nobody left to help us."

"We already have people at MUT," said the acid voice.

"Then you must know what in the Lord's name is 94

r

behind this. What possible purpose could anyone have in eliminating the world's oil supplies?"

"We don't know that yet. But we are fairly certain that that is the purpose. And what this person, whoever he is, has done by removing the oil scientists is to eliminate the defenses against him before we ever had a chance to deploy them."

"How many men do you have on this?" asked the president.

"One man. And his trainer."

"One man? One man? What kind of an operation are you running? The world's facing disaster, and you've got one man and a trainer on it?"

"He is a very special man," the acid voice answered coolly.

"Will he be enough?" asked the president wearily.

"If he isn't, then nothing will be."

"I hope so," said the president.

After he replaced the telephone in his office inside Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, Dr. Harold Smith looked at the phone and said softly, "I hope so too. I hope so too."

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Chapter Six

Chiun watched porters carrying the fourteen lacquered steamer trunks out of the door of the suit in the Copley Plaza Hotel. Remo knew he referred to the porters as "cheap white help" even though half of them were black.

Remo was glad Chiun had the porters. If he didn't have them, he would have tried to get Remo to move the trunks around. Or some passerby. Remo had seen Chiun directing women and children whom he had conned into carrying the great steamer trunks of the Master of Sinanju.

Chiun saw Remo watching and used the occasion to' lecture him. "The problem with America is the amateur assassin. Nay, the problem with the world. And we are living in an age of great debauchery, where these services are given away. Randomly given away. Willy nilly given away. On street corners."

"We have a noon plane to Anguilla," said Remo. "We're going to sail to St. Maarten's. Smith just made contact with me on that. They're making that germ stuff on St. Maarten's."

"Decent competent assassins are now being affected by this wanton attitude of giveaway," said Chiun.

"We'd better hurry," said Remo. "Boston traffic is a mess."

"Years of training, poof. Gone like the wind that never was, and all that is left for a tired old man is the

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ingratitude of he who has benefited from years of the old man's wisdom."

"Smitty asked if you'd like a lighter, more portable tape machine," said Remo.

"But who cares?" said Chiun. "Who cares that the training will begin to suffer because of bad attitudes? Who cares that the Masters of Sinanju are, have been for ages, responsible for the food and the roofs of the whole village? Oh, no. We do not care anymore. What is tradition? What is responsibility? Poooffff."

"I told Smitty no," said Remo. "I told him it took you a month to learn how to work the tape machine you've got. I told him you didn't like new things."

And then in somber fury, the Master of Sinanju turned to his pupil and said in majestic and awesome tones, "You should have taken it, idiot. Suppose the one I have now breaks?"

In the hotel lobby, a man in a three-piece suit and a monocle, with a British accent you could paddle a canoe on, inquired if Remo were perchance a professor at MUT? And did he, perchance, work with an Oriental? And was he, perchance, an authority on bacteria, the fast-breeding bacteria that consumed oil?

"That was yesterday," said Remo. "We know where your headquarters is now, so we don't need you anymore to find your boss. Go home and get lost."

"I beg your pardon."

"I am catching a plane. I am too busy to kill you. You are going to try to kill me, right?"

"How impertinent," said the Briton.

Fourteen steamer trunks came out the fire exit in a caravan, led by Chiun, an Oriental wisp in a golden day robe.

"Ah, your colleague."

"Hey, Chiun, this guy wants to kill us, but we've got a plane to catch."

"Another amateur," said Chiun haughtily.

And then, as in no other time in his life, Merton Lord Wissex felt the sting of insult.

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"I beg your pardon. My family goes back to Henry the Eighth."

Remo smiled tolerantly. "That's very nice."

"What did he say?" asked Chiun, turning back from his trunks for a moment.

"He said his was a new house," said Remo.

"New?" said Chiun.

"Less than a thousand years, right, buddy?" said Remo. He saw the tight British face turn pale. "Yeah, Chiun. Less than a thousand years. He wants to kill us, I think."

"Is he getting paid?" said Chiun. "Tell me, good man, are you being paid?"

"Of course," harrumphed Merton Lord Wissex.

"See, Remo. Even this gets paid," said Chiun. "Even this." And his bony hands and long fingernails pointed to the tweed vest of Merton Lord Wissex.

Traffic to the airport was held up by a religious procession. Remo could make out the signs of the parade: "Stop Racist Murder."

"What's that?" he asked the driver.

"A civil rights leader got killed yesterday. Here. It's in the paper."

The Blade landed on the back seat. Chiun looked back to make sure the three extra taxis for his trunks were following closely.

Remo read the story and shook his head. Apparently, a civil rights leader had been horribly murdered for the "crime of wanting to be free."

There were statements from the religious leaders of the community. The archbishop said racism must be rooted out of the mind of Boston. A rabbi compared the hatred that killed the civil rights worker to the hatred that created the Holocaust. A protestant minister called for armed protection of all civil rights workers.

It seemed the civil rights worker and his friend were found on Memorial Drive, mangled. The civil rights worker's name was Bubba. Remo wondered if he had seen the killer because he was at Memorial Drive the

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day before, just before the bodies had been found. He was dropping off his own bodies at the time.

This man, however, was not a killer, like the two who had barged into Remo and Chain's office, but a person who had struggled for prison reform, a proud black revolutionary voice challenging the white conscience. His name was Bubba and Remo felt sorry that he had never met him. He probably would have liked him.

"Why don't we fly to St. Maarten's directly?" Chiun asked.

"Because the whole island had been quarantined. We have to sail in."

"Why don't we sail all the way?"

"We don't have time. Western civilization may go under unless we get this cleaned up right away."

"Why don't we sail all the way?" Chiun repeated. "On a slow boat."

Merton Lord Wissex heard the horrible news.

"But, sir," he said into the public telephone, "I know I can put them away. You don't want them."

"You have described two people whom I wish to employ. What is the problem?" Friend asked.

"If they are dead, they are no problem, sir."

"And if they are employed by me, they are an asset."

"Do you know you can trust them?" asked Lord Wissex.

"We will find out, won't we?" said Friend.

So with great bitterness in his craw, Lord Wissex rushed to the airport, where he followed the parade of fourteen lacquered steamer trunks until he found Remo and Chiun.

He approached the old Oriental. The Oriental seemed a bit more polite.

"Sir, may I speak to you about employment?" said Lord Wissex.

"Absolutely. You're hired," said the Oriental. "Talk to Remo about salary."

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"No, sir. You misunderstand. My employer wishes to hire you, sir," said Lord Wissex.

"And he is?" asked Chiun.

"I call him Friend."

"We don't work for friends," said Chiun. "We are professional. Are you sure you wouldn't care to work for us, carrying things, taking care of our clothes? The thing I like most about you Britons is that you know your place."

Raging hatred filled the marrow of Lord Wissex. Words did not move up through the throat. Even the blood felt still and hot in his body.

"Yes, I would love to buttle for you, sir," said Lord Wissex. Those were the words that finally came out of his mouth. He smiled. Once, as a boy, his foot had gotten caught in a trap on his father's estate. The teeth of the trap had bitten to the bone. But that trap hurt far less than the smile he pushed out onto his face at this moment as he said he would love to serve the Oriental.

"I am the Master of Sinanju, and this is my pupil, Remo. Remo, come here. We have a real British servant. They are so good. Not as good as Persian but the best whites in the world."

On the plane, Lord Wissex insisted he serve the tea to his new masters. He would not allow the stewardesses to do it. They lacked proper respect.

"See," said Chiun. "The British know."

Remo still had his copy of The Blade. He turned to the front page. There was a big article about the publisher, Bradford Wakefield III, having died of a heart attack in a mystery death. His boat had been found floating off the coast of Maine, with Mr. Wakefield dead of a heart attack and his crew also dead. The crew's deaths appeared to have been from natural causes, too, because it looked as if they had fallen and hit themselves.

Lord Wissex had a very big subservient smile on his face as he served first Chiun, then Remo, the tea. It was a special blend, he said. Chiun sniffed the wafting aroma. Then he nodded.

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If.

"Very good," he said.

Remo was interested in The Blade's article. It was sketchy, but from the coroner's statements, Remo thought he had spotted something.

"Little Father," he said, "look at this. Don't these sound like some of our blows? You know, when it looks like the person just fell down and cracked crucial bones. Here. Read what the coroner says about the fracture of the neck bones."

Chiun glanced at the newspaper. Remo pointed to the paragraph he wanted Chiun to read.

"What is that?"

"That's a newspaper report. Something strange in it about the blows killing the sea captain and his first mate. Someone else was killed in such a way to make it look like a heart attack. I'm sure of it."

"How can you be sure of anything from reading?" Chiun asked. "One gets beauty from reading, not information. I won't look at it."

Remo lifted the tea to his lips. Lord Wissex smiled, rubbing his hands. Remo put down the cup.

"I don't know," he said. "In a newspaper you can get information."

"Is there something wrong with your tea, Master?" said Lord Wissex. wrong."

"What?" said Remo, looking up. "No. Nothing

"Then why don't you drink it?"

"I will. I'm just interested in something," said Remo and, turning to Chiun, he showed how the neck of the captain was reported to have been shattered.

"A variation," Chiun said. "Karate, judo. A variation. Who knows what it might be? It might be any of that junk they teach now to children all over your stupid country. An inferior blow, nevertheless."

"Sure. But for someone without Sinanju, it makes you think. I mean, someone must have gotten on board and gotten off quickly. And this guy Wakefield owned a newspaper. I was supposed to get some kind of word on getting hired from a newspaper. Therefore ..."

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"Therefore you are doing work you shouldn't. A proper assassin eliminates the threats to good government, assures the throne, establishes the peace of a true regency in his land. There is nothing better for a people than a good king assured his throne by his professional assassin. A professional assassin is not a policeman. A puzzle solver. A worrier about such people as this Bradford Wakefield."

"Your tea, sir," said Lord Wissex. "I'll take the tea," said a plump woman across the aisle. She wore a straw hat with artificial cherries. She had rushed on at the last minute.

"No," said Lord Wissex. "This tea is a special blend for my masters."

"Well, if it's being served on board, I should have a right to it too. I don't think it's fair," said the woman with the straw hat.

"Give her the tea," said Remo. "It smells funny anyhow."

"It's for you, sir," said Lord Wissex. "I made it just for you."

"All right," said Remo. He took the cup and drank it down in one draught.

Lord Wissex waited. When the American curled up in agony, he would attack the old Oriental. He did not care about the difficulty in getting off the plane. He did not care about the orders from Friend. He had never been so humiliated by anyone, and only the death of these two would make up for the shame burning inside his Britannic bosom.

And so Lord Wissex, who had restored his family fortune by service to Friend, waited to watch the American die, prepared to watch his grovel in the aisle of the plane, at which time Lord Wissex would lean over to pretend to help him and in the confusion put a death blow into the throat of the old Oriental.

Then, of course, he could tell Friend that they had attacked him first and it was purely self-defense. The American returned the empty cup. The Ameri-102

can looked to the Oriental. The American said something to the Oriental. Then he smiled at Lord Wissex.

"Are you feeling all right, sir?" asked the butler.

"Sure," said Remo.

"Oh," said Lord Wissex.

"There is something wrong," said the Oriental.

"What?" said Lord Wissex. They know, he thought. And now they will kill me.

"You didn't bow. How can you serve tea without the proper bow?"

"I will remember that, sir," said Wissex.

"They usually can bow quite well," Chiun said to Remo.

Wissex returned to his seat. He thought of burning them alive. He thought of catching them while they slept, pouring gasoline around wherever they slept. He thought of them running screaming from their rooms, their bodies aflame, their skin charring and their voices pitiful wails.

And on this good thought did Lord Wissex manage to overcome his rage of humiliation. He would await the proper time.

But why was the poison taking so kmg to work?

In Anguila, Lord Wissex supervised the loading of their small sailboat.

"Hey mon, nobody be aHowed off that island," said a dockworker. He was helping to load Chiun's trunks in the hot crystal sunlight of the Caribbean neighbor to St. Maarten's. He pointed to St. Maarten's. "The army and navy has that island sealed off, mon."

The man had little clumps of hair hanging down in braided ropes. He was a Rastafarian and he believed that Haile Selassie, the dead emperor of Ethiopia, was God and that marijuana was a beneficial religious experience. He worked very hard, and the sweat glistened off his body.

"Mon, I will load for you. But I will not go with you. I lové Anguilla and do not wish to leave."

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"All these islands are the same," said Remo. "What's your problem?"

"St. Maarten's is cursed," he said.

"Why?"

"Because they have not acknowledge Haile Selassie as God."

"God? He's dead," Remo said. "He was killed in a palace coup."

"You believe what you read in the newspapers?" laughed the Rasta man.

"Inside America," Remo said. "And outside of Boston."

The Rasta man shook his head. "The white man is through around the whole world, he is."

"See. Even a dock laborer can make sense," said Chiun. "But for servants, no one beats a white."

"It's too hot to listen to this nonsense," said Remo.

"That means you're not breathing properly," said Chiun.

"Holding my breath, it'd be too hot to listen to this."

"I tend to agree with Mr. Remo," said Lord Wissex, sweltering in his tweeds. He was still waiting for the American to fall unconscious from the poison. Why didn't that bloke drop? There was enough poison in that tea to fell a platoon.

"Where did you pick up this servant?" Chiun asked Remo. "Talking without being spoken to. Next time, check references."

With all the trunks aboard the little sailing boat, and a commercial captain at the wheel, the three set out for St. Maarten's, in the distance. Lord Wissex slipped a thin needle from the lining of his coat. He moved first behind the American. He brought the needle smoothly up to the American's neck. Then, with a short lunging jab, he drove home the point.

Except the point went too far. It kept going. Which was the usual thing for a point to do when your whole body was behind it and there was nothing in front of it.

Wessex had never seen anyone move that quickly. It was instantaneous. The American had been seated in

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front of Lord Wissex, and now he was standing behind him. Now he knew how the giant black had been strangled so easily and why Bradford Wakefield III could so easily lose his two best killers.

Friend had been right. Anyone who could destroy Wakefield's killers had to be hired. Of course, as the sailboat moved noiselessly toward St. Maarten's, and the incredibly blue waters churned up beneath them, Lord Wissex knew that he had realized all of that too late.

"And you poisoned me too," said Remo. Wissex felt just the lightest of touches on his neck, but he could not move his arms and barely kept his balance. It was as if the man had discovered the exact nerves in his body that controlled his motion.

Wissex knew that a time like this had to come eventually. It was part of the business and something he could accept. And he had made plans for this. His lower right molar was a hollow cap. All he had to do was push it out with his tongue and then bite down very hard.

He pushed the tooth out, but he could not get his jaw open to crush it.

"Why did you poison me?"

"Blast you," said Lord Wissex. Well, his voice worked. That was something. The American had allowed his voice to work.

"Why did you poison me?"

"Why didn't you die?"

"From poison? My body won't accept it."

"I didn't see you spit it out."

"I didn't. I held it in my stomach. Now Til spit. See? See the spit? See how the nice man spits? Tell the nice man everything," said Remo, and let the gooey green slime up through his throat to his mouth, which launched it into the clear blue Caribbean. Fish popped up to the surface in the green wake of Remo's spit, white bellies skyward. A little pitiful waggle of flippers, and the fish were dead.

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"Who are you?" said Wissex through jaws that would not open.

"I am joy and life and the spirit of goodness," said Remo. "Now you do some talking or I'll feed your belly to the fish and use your sternum for a hook."

"That is vicious," Chiun said. "And we've never had a butler before. That's no way to treat a butler."

"He tried to kill me."

"Butlers are always murdering people," said Chiun. *'It is expected. But bad language, hostile language from an assassin is not. When you're done with him, save him. We've never had a butler before."

"We'll see," Remo said.

Lord Wissex tried to turn his head to see the two, but he couldn't. All he could see was the incredibly blue waters, and he heard the two argue about butler service, with the younger one accurately saying the butler would always be trying to kill them and the older one answering that one always had to expect some small problems with domestic help.

And then the incredible pain began. It came first in little notes, as he was asked his name, asked how his body felt, asked the color of his hair, and then built in a symphony of hurt that Merton found he could control. With the giving of truth, absolute and total truth. He told things he didn't even realize he had known.

He told of being penniless and being called one day at Castle Wissex by a man who understood how awful it was that Wissex lived in a country that no longer appreciated and rewarded courage.

"What do you want?" Wissex had said.

"I want the same services your ancestor provided for Henry the Eighth."

"He killed people for His Majesty."

"That is what I want," the voice said.

"No," he said, and slammed down the receiver of the phone.

The next day, he received a note. It read, "I only want you to do what is proper."

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And on the phone later that day, he asked the man, "How can this be proper?"

"Most proper. I am an international corporation not subject to national laws. Not above the law, mind you. But beyond it. And I have a tradition of hiring people to kill."

"Proper, you say? Tradition, you say?" said Wissex.

"Yes. And I want you with me as senior vice-president."

"In charge of what?"

"Tradition and propriety," the caller said.

Wissex thought for a moment. "You must give me your word of honor, sir, that everything will ultimately be for the good of Great Britain, and therefore mankind."

"You have it," said the voice.

And then Lord Wissex learned the man's name. His name was Friend. He had never seen him.

"Oh," came a voice from far away. "So you're the one. Your family. Henry the Eighth. What do you know?" It was the American talking, and he called to his companion.

"Hey, Little Father. This is the Wissex. Descendant of that Wissex."

"The one who serviced Henry the Eighth?" asked the Oriental.

"You know of him?" asked Wissex.

"Sure," Remo said. "Part of my training was learning all the traditions of the Masters of Sinanju. I remember one of them worked for Henry the Eighth."

"Yes," said the Oriental. "He was called in because the gracious Henry had no one."

"He had my ancestor," said Lord Wissex.

"Correct," said the Oriental. "Remo, please recite."

"And it came to pass," said the American, "that the lesser Wang came unto the shores of England, which had at that time conquered Wales and held Scotland in a form of alliance.

"And the king was deeply troubled. Enemies abounded, the kingdom verged on civil war, and all he

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had to defend himself was his Lord Wissex, a man skilled only at removing complicating children from women's bellies. Namely the king's complicating children from women's bellies. Would the Master of Sinanju properly service His Britannic Majesty for proper tribute? And train Wissex to kill grown men?

"And the sum there was was four hundred of cattle, ten weights of gold, fifty of silver, five ships of corn grain, a thousand fat fowl, three hundred iron blades yet to be fashioned, ten thousand weight bronze, thirty-two fine chairs, fruit seed, twenty bolts of linen, un-worked...."

"Lie," gasped Lord Wissex. "He was not an abortionist. My ancestor was an assassin."

"You interrupted the list," said Chiun. "We haven't gotten to the pear trees, partridges, gold rings, calling birds, milking maids, and frenen hens. There were frenen hens."

"Lie. He was not an abortionist."

"Don't be ashamed of your ancestors, Merton," said the Oriental. "He was, after all, only English."

"There were no pear trees," said the American.

Merton Lord Wissex felt the American's hands re-leasB just a bit from the neck on that statement.

"There were pear trees," said Chiun.

"No, no," said Remo. "Louis the Fifteenth sent trees. I think they were plum trees. Henry sent turtledoves."

"No, we never got turtledoves from Henry," Chiun said. "The British had fine pear trees. We never had plum trees."

"I saw them in your village," Remo said.

"You never saw plum trees in Sinanju," Chiun said.

"I did."

"Didn't," said Chiun. "Pear trees."

Wissex pushed the tooth up out of its slot and up to the molars on the left side of his mouth. With his remaining power, he bit down on the empty shell of a tooth. It cracked, releasing a bittersweet syrup.

He swallowed. His throat became numb, and then 108

the tips of his fingers felt faraway, and he glided off into that sleep of sleeps.

Remo felt the life go out of what was in his hand. He let the body drop.

"They were plums," Remo said. "I ate one in Sinanju. 1 remember it. It was a lousy plum."

"Because it was a pear," said Chiun. "You killed our butler."

"No. He took his own Ufe. It was a plum."

"Pear," said Chiun.