American Obsession

The authoress ended up with her head outside the medical wing and her arms trapped inside. The sumo wrestler got one leg and a hip out, while his head and shoulders remained on the other side of the door.

For Remo, it was a green light.

Spinning to build momentum, he hurled himself at the exposed head. As he left the ground, he coiled, drawing his limbs tight to his body. He wasn't thinking about anything as he flew through the air. The only thing on his mind was the target. A place unprotected by dense layers of hormone-enhanced muscle. When the moment of truth came, he combined his forward speed with a front snap-kick.

The blow caught the authoress between the eyes, snapping her head back and into the edge of the steel door frame. The sole of his Italian loafer made solid contact with the front edge of her brainpan. And his follow-through caught the head again as it bounced off the unyielding metal. Which caused yet another impact to the back of the head. Remo's first doublestrike broke the animal brain loose from its moorings, while the second turned it into so much mush.

As Remo dropped to the ground, so did his opponent, who fell across the threshold. Which gave the other beast room to operate.

With a roar, it burst through the doorway. And as it did, something light blue seemed to rise and flutter around its head and shoulders. A bright butterfly swooping and diving. But the sounds that accompanied the blur of movement were not the least bit springtime warm and fuzzy. They were the sounds of tremendous blows being landed.

Logs smashing against logs. Tree limbs snapping.

The sumo beast lunged past Remo, staggered and fell. Only then did the picture come into focus. Chiun stepped off the monster's neck and dusted off his hands. Though there was not a speck of blood on his blue robe, the beast's head was virtually pulped, reduced to little more than a mass of bloodsoaked hair, the skull shattered in a thousand places, like the shell of a hard-boiled egg.

"Now there are two less too many," the Master said, as they stepped over the threshold and into the wrecked medical wing.

"Actually, there's three less too many," Remo told him. He nodded over at a huge hairy carcass that lay rolled up like an old shag carpet against the foot of the wall. It was what was left of one of the hormone users. The body had been torn inside out, and what had been removed now decorated the back side of the bank-vault door. Remo guessed it was over some kind of territorial dispute between beasts. "That one didn't make the cut," he said.

"Aieee!" Chiun exclaimed, hopping elegantly to one side of the overturned golf cart. "What have I stepped in?"

"'Who,'" Remo corrected. "Who have you stepped in. From what's left of the uniform, it looks like that particular heap once belonged to a nurse."

As they advanced down the corridor, walking over drifts of broken glass without making a sound, Remo could see evidence of the same decorators' hands at work everywhere he looked. Walls. Ceiling. Countertops. Floors. Decorators with an abiding passion for red. Nothing that had once been alive in the Family Fing medical wing was in one piece.

Even the pieces weren't in one piece.

"There are more," Chiun said, on point like an English setter. "And they are close...."

THE BEAST FORMERLY KNOWN as Norton Arthur Grape likewise froze, his dripping brown nose tipped up to sample the faint breeze coming from down the hall.

He smelled not-meat.

In his previous incarnation, he would have further defined the odor as fish, or fishy. Even when served up in a heavy cream-based sauce, he had found the stuff barely palatable and had partaken of it only on those rare occasions when concerns about health and obesity, or career, overcame his lust for well-marbled red meat. Even as a human being, Grape liked his foods hanging with fat he could actually see, and therefore sink his teeth into.

This unpleasant smell-stark, without savor, fat free-was coming from just outside the room in which he crouched. Behind him, in tatters beneath a hospital bed, was what was left of the media personality, cooking-and-decorating guru known as Moira Maillon. In the confines of the Family Fing experimental ward, she was also known as Test Subject One.

While a human being, Maillon had been the perennial Miss Bossy Boots, always telling people how to arrange their lives with her Seven Rules of Baking, of Wallpapering, of Carpet Cleaning, of Upholstery Fabric Selection, etc. As a hormone beast, she had brought some relic of her former control-freak personality along with her. She couldn't seem to leave the others' territories alone. She was always trying to mark inside the lines already drawn, to increase her own turf at the expense of her fellow test subjects. In the human world, such misdemeanors could be overlooked, but not in the medical wing of Family Fing.

For urinary crimes against the body politic, Grape had ripped her a new one.

And a new one was precisely what he intended to give whoever, whatever was creeping so quietly along his section of hallway. As he hunkered down, he caught hold of the end of his tail to keep it from swishing involuntarily and giving him away. He watched as the pair of frail figures moved past his doorway, probing deeper into the wing.

A smile twisted his moist, hair-fringed lips.

Not the capped, perfect smile that had been such an integral part of his network weatherman's song-and-dance act. All those high-priced white caps had been pushed out of his mouth as the shaved tooth stumps beneath them had started to grow. And grow and grow. The teeth that Grape now sported would have not been out of place on a mountain lion.

REMO AND CHIUN had proceeded about twenty more steps down the hall, when at the far end of the corridor, a large, dark figure appeared from a doorway. The figure let out a warbling yell and charged them.

Prepared though Remo was for what he had to face, it was still daunting to watch seven hundred pounds of enraged killer barreling at you, full tilt. The arm span of the thing could almost reach all the way across the width of the hall. As she bore down on them, she spread her arms to make sure they wouldn't get away.

When Chiun moved to the center of the corridor, Remo did the same. They stood shoulder to shoulder. The beast was coming very fast. Too fast for her to stop or even change course more than a few degrees. And as she came, she snuffled and snorted, her eyes wide with glee. In a second, the thing that had once sung the lead in Madam Butterfly would have them.

At the same moment, Master and pupil lowered their heads and dived forward, under the straining fingertips of the onrushing creature. As they tucked and rolled to their feet, the beast tried to put on the brakes, skidded through the broken glass and crashed onto her face.

Okra managed to push up to her knees about the time Remo ran up her back. Before she could throw him off, Remo dropped a meaty forearm in front of her throat and, using the power of his wrists, squeezed shut the creature's airway.

Failing to toss him, the beast stood up and threw her back against the wall. Remo took the shock with knees braced against the creature's spine, and kept on squeezing. He endured two more jarring impacts. The third was noticeably less powerful. And on the fourth both he and the beast slid down the wall. Remo didn't let go until he could no longer feel a pulse in the beast's throat.

As he straightened up, behind him he heard a rush of heavy feet and a shrill cry of surprise, suddenly cut off. When he whirled, he saw yet another monster, but this one had caught Chiun from behind by the neck. The Master's face turned the color of a ripe pomegranate as the beast tried to tear off his venerable head.

Remo leaped forward, intending to come to Chitin's aid. But before he could enter the fray, the tide of battle changed.

The hairy arm that gripped the scrawny neck of the Master of Sinanju became the target for a flurry of too-fast-to-follow blows of fists and feet. Shattered in dozens of places, the arm instantly lost its strength and rigidity, and the hand released its grip on Chiun's neck.

The Master, deeply affronted by the very idea of being touched by such a creature, let alone being almost throttled to death by it, proceeded to break every bone in the beast's body, starting with the toes and working up. And only when this task had been satisfactorily completed did he serve up the killing stroke to the huge shambling thing that, in a former life, was known for putting the best face on a rotten weather forecast.

As Chiun stepped away from the body, he announced, "There are no more creatures here."

"Then it's time for us to find the head man," Remo said as he referred to his map.

As they started back down the corridor, they heard a sustained burst of autofire. It was coming from the other side of the building.

Chapter 36

Fillmore and Farnham didn't hear the stealthy approach of Korb the Transcendent through the reception area, so when his loud snort came between the gap in the office doors, it made them both jump a mile. Neither father nor son had a moment of doubt whom that snort belonged to, or what it was meant to do.

It was meant to sniff them out.

They also knew what was certain to come next. Before he had both hands firmly on the M-16, Fillmore pinned back the weapon's trigger. In his eagerness to protect himself, he also badly torqued the point of aim. Once the unintended slide across the desktop was started, the ravening burst of full-auto gunfire kept it moving.

Bullet holes appeared at chest height in the left-hand door and crawled farther and farther left, over the door frame, the paneled wall and the enormous oil painting of the Family Fing founder-a sprig of marjoram in one hand, a foaming test tube in the other. Great splintery rents cut through the front of the mahogany credenza, and choking clouds of cordite smoke filled the room.

Fillmore never did get the autorifle under control. It stopped firing only when it ran out of ammunition.

And when it did that, when the earsplitting burst of gunshots ceased, only then did the elder Fing become aware of another noise.

"Yahh! Yahh!"

It was Farnham. Farnham hollering at the top of his lungs while he tried to hide his head under the legs of an armchair. Failing miserably at that, he sat on the floor, back to the wall, eyes squashed shut, covered his ears with both hands and resumed his bellowing.

That his oldest, and now only, son didn't have so much as a millimeter of spine to his name came as no surprise to Fillmore Fing. What he was witnessing, the stress reaction of a congenital idiot, he had seen too many times before. Farnham looked and dressed like a winner, and he could talk a blue streak if given half a chance-but underneath, the boy's game was all a bluff. And always had been. Of course, the village-idiot genes had come from Farnham's mother's side.

"Shut up!" Fillmore shouted, dumping the empty clip and taking a full one from his suit jacket. Farnham paid his father no mind. The perpetual infant continued to bawl.

Fillmore cracked in the fresh magazine and jacked a live round into the chamber. "I'm not kidding," he said. "Shut up so I can tell whether I hit the damned thing or not!"

The last statement seemed to have a calming effect on the big-league pharmaceutical salesman. Farnham opened his eyes and bit down hard on his knuckle to keep from crying out.

Fillmore cocked his head in the direction of the door. "I don't hear anything. Do you?"

Farnham shook his head.

"I think I got him," Fillmore said. Then, with more conviction, "I'm sure I must've got him...." At which point, seven hundred pounds of former computer billionaire came crashing through the bullet-ravaged doors.

The surprise of the sudden entry and the sheer, intimidating size of the creature that faced him gave Fillmore pause. The sights of his assault rifle wavered wide of the intended target.

For his part, Korb the Transcendent seemed torn, as well. There were two not-Korbs in the room. Which to pull apart first? His beady eyes shifted from Fillmore to Farnham, and back again.

Decisions, decisions.

Fillmore, meanwhile, had shouldered the M-16 and was drawing a careful bead on the center of the beast's hairy chest. The smell that Korb had brought into the room with him was enough to gag a maggot; it was making Fillmore's eyes tear.

Farnham blubbered softly on the floor, his eyes unblinking and huge as he took in the creature. He was biting his knuckle so hard he was making blood flow down over his wrist.

"Mr. Korb!" Fillmore cried, cheek to butt-stock, his index finger carefully tightening down on the trigger. When he felt resistance to the squeeze, Fillmore held up. "Mr. Korb," he said, "do you know who I am? Can you understand me?"

Fing wasn't playing for time. He was playing for capital. It had occurred to him how grateful the richest man in the world might be if somehow he was saved from this hairy, bad-smelling fate worse than death.

The beast looked at Fillmore with narrowed eyes. He had no idea what the noise coming out of the not-Korb's mouth meant, but it irritated him a great deal.

"We may be able to find a cure," Fillmore told the creature. "If we had suitable funding, I'm sure we could do it. Why don't we work together on this? What do you say?"

Korb the Transcendent smelled the blood on Farnham's finger. Decision made. He darted away from the doorway in a blur.

Fillmore fired a 10-round burst into the reception area, through the space where the beast had been. When he turned to pick up the target again, the thing had hold of Farnham by the arm. Like a cat playing with a mouse, the former billionaire batted the Fing boy against the wall, and when he bounced back, batted him again.

Fillmore took aim, but then changed his mind. He didn't even know if bullets could kill the monster. What if they only made him madder? The prudent thing to do was to take advantage of the golden opportunity that had presented itself.

As the patriarch rounded the front of his desk, it looked like the beast was trying to make a hand puppet out of poor Farnham. Fillmore said nothing. While the creature was thoroughly engrossed, he just lowered his head and hurried out the door.

KORB THE TRANSCENDENT was far too preoccupied with his new toy to notice that the other not-Korb had left the room. There were so many interesting things to make the toy do. After he tired of playing bouncy-ball, the beast gripped Farnham by the wrist and hurled him like a Frisbee across the room.

Whap! Against the far wall.

With a single bound, Korb the Transcendent crossed the room and retrieved his play toy, then it was Frisbee time again.

Whap went Farnham against the opposite wall.

It was a game that soon bored even a world-class drooler like Korb the Transcendent. There were only so many ways Farnham could go whap! And after those ways had been repeated a few dozen times, the beast decided he'd had enough.

With a stiffened claw finger, he poked the unmoving form on the floor. He wanted the toy to get up and run so he could chase it and then bat it down. Maybe even jump up and down on it a few times. Nothing doing.

So the beast picked the toy up by one foot and gave it a hard shake. The Fing boy's pocket change, money clip and keys went skittering over the floor, but he remained limp as a rag.

If Farnham was playing dead, he deserved an Oscar.

Undeterred, Korb the Transcendent felt an urge to take the damned thing apart-not to see what made it tick, but so he could throw the parts around the room. To that end, he put both feet on the toy's chest, grabbed its head under the chin and started to pull.

HEARING THE TREMENDOUS commotion going on inside the private office of Fillmore Fing, Remo and Chiun paused outside the open doors.

The Master pointed through the doorway, then held his nose.

Remo got the picture.

On a silent three-count, they rushed the office entrance.

Inside, they found a monstrous beast beating on the top of a big desk with a man's leg. From the tassle loafer still on the foot, it looked to be a rightie. The rest of the man was scattered around the room, along with a good deal of pocket change.

The beast was having such a great time that he didn't seem to notice he had company. When he saw the newcomers staring at him, however, he stopped what he was doing at once.

"Do you want him or should I take him?" Remo asked, circling purposefully to the left.

The Master shrugged. "It makes no difference to me."

Korb the Transcendent watched both targets, measuring the distance for his leap.

"Okay, then you take him," Remo said.

The beast launched himself at Remo, stretching out full-length in a headfirst dive. Instinctively, Remo spun out of the way, and the beast hurtled on.

Hidden behind the suite's floor-to-ceiling curtain was a floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the entire complex and grounds. It was an architectural feature that Korb the Transcendent would not have understood even if he'd known it was there. It came as quite a surprise to the seven-hundred-pound beast when he hit the curtain, then the big pane of glass, which shattered outward, allowing him to fall through the empty frame and out into space.

Howling all the way to the ground, the former computer billionaire dropped ten stories to his death. When Remo and Chiun looked out the window, they saw a small man in a very expensive suit running across the floodlit tarmac below. He was carrying an automatic rifle.

"That looks like the tongue sucker to me," Chiun said.

They watched as Fillmore Fing jumped the heaped bodies of his guards by the gate, climbed into one of the jeeps parked there and turned the key. The engine turned over but didn't catch.

Fing tried again. Same result.

"Come on! Before he gets away!" Remo urged, as he sprinted for the door.

Chapter 37

When Fillmore Fing arrived outside the building's main entrance, he was shocked not to see a jeep waiting there at the security post. For a blinding instant, he thought that all was lost. He could envision the murderous beasts his greed had spawned pursuing him as he raced on foot through the endless rice paddies. Without wheels, he didn't stand a chance.

When he stepped away from the building, he immediately saw the jeeps parked in front of the perimeter fence's main gate. He also saw the men scattered across the ground.

Lots of men.

Had the test subjects already broken loose from the wing? he thought.

Had they wiped out his entire security force? Fillmore didn't trot over to the still forms because he was that curious to know the answer; he trotted over because that's where the jeeps where. Finding out who killed his men was a bonus, of sorts. Unpleasant sorts.

Fillmore didn't have to be a medical examiner to be able to tell how the guards had died. By gunshot. By multiple gunshots at extreme close range. Which pretty much eliminated the test subjects as the murderers. They couldn't tell one end of a gun from another.

As Fillmore moved gingerly through the sprawl of white-putteed corpses, the realization hit him. Just as he had feared, Jimmy Koch-Roche had led the American killers here, to Taiwan. The bodies of his security men were undeniable proof that the assassins were on the grounds, and most likely still alive.

Fing looked over his shoulder, back at the white high-rise monolith of holding tanks, storehouses and office blocks. He had no doubt that whoever had sent the killers here intended the destruction of not only the WHE research program, but of Family Fing Pharmaceuticals itself. And that included its CEO. After all, the assassins had hunted down and killed known users of the drug in the States; they hadn't seized the offending patches and given the users a lecture on substance abuse. Their agenda was annihilation, pure and simple.

Fillmore stepped over the last of the bodies, put the M-16 across the passenger seat and got behind the wheel of the nearest jeep. When he turned the key, the motor growled but didn't start. A cold chill passed down his spine.

This was not the place he was going to die, he assured himself. When he tried the starter again, he got the same, negative result.

The problem was, he wasn't used to driving the damned thing. In desperation, he gave the gas pedal three hard pumps, then flattened it to the floorboards. When he cranked the starter, the engine caught with a roar.

Fillmore gunned the engine, then popped the clutch, jerking and bucking toward the open gate. He got through the gate and into second gear, winding the engine well into the red zone before shifting into third. The road ahead was black and bleak and straight, and his headlights swept across acres of soggy farmland.

He hadn't actually formulated a plan yet. His main concern was in putting as much distance as possible between himself and the Family Fing complex. He was less than a mile from the gate when something bright flashed in his rearview mirror. He looked up to see a pair of headlights.

And they were gaining on him.

For sure, the other driver wasn't Dewayne Korb. Which only left the assassins.

Racking his brain, Fing realized that he couldn't let them catch him on the open road. He wouldn't stand a chance there. Not with a single M-16. His security men had had scads of autoweapons, which hadn't done them any good. He needed cover and a diversion, and there was only one place close at hand to get both.

Fillmore Fing swerved left, taking the company road that dead-ended in the wolverine farm.

CARLOS STERNOVSKY SAT in his dark trailer. He'd been sitting there for hours, unable to turn the lights on, unable to start packing his meager belongings. What he faced was nothing less than professional oblivion. He could never go back and work in the States. Not after what he'd done at Purblind. The slaughter of the lab animals and the theft of his research data would hang like an albatross around his neck forever. No institution, reputable or disreputable, would touch a researcher like him, a man who had proved himself a thief and a vandal of university property. He knew that at that very moment his name, picture and biography were circulating on the World Wide Web home page entitled "America's Most-Wanted Academic Criminals." As far as the scientific community was concerned, Carlos Sternovsky and his wolverine hormone extract were dead meat.

So, if he couldn't resume his life's work-which, despite recent setbacks, he still felt had promise-what could he do? Change his name and get a job at some agribusiness giant? Making food preservatives and flavorings? Stay overseas and find a place for himself in some offshore offshoot of one of the major chemical conglomerates? Designing a new, lemon-scented floor wax for the Third World? And when push came to shove, there was always the last resort: unguentology.

Sternovsky hung his head in his hands.

He was in this position when he heard the wild roar of a jeep approaching at high speed. Knuckling aside the wetness on his cheeks, Sternovsky rose to the trailer window and pulled back a corner of the sun-spotted curtain.

In the floodlights that ringed the little hilltop compound, he could see the jeep bouncing down the road. He was relieved to discover that there was a single occupant in the vehicle. His first thought had been that old Fing had sent some of his white-helmeted goons to turn him out. But no. The driver he recognized as Fing himself.

Fing in a major hurry.

The pharmaceutical tycoon drove the jeep past the trailer and brought it to a screeching stop down the slope, at the start of the rows of wolverine pens. Then he took an automatic rifle from the front of the vehicle, quickly lit up a cigar and hurried down one of the aisles between the cages.

Immediately, the wolverines started snarling, snapping and shaking their enclosures. They weren't used to people walking the grounds this early in the morning. And they weren't used to the smell of Fillmore, who never, ever came out for a visit.

Then Sternovsky saw the lights of the second jeep coming from the direction of the plant.

There were two men in this one. Two men that he had never set eyes on before. The driver pulled over the top of the hill and stopped the jeep behind Fillmore's. The pair of strangers, one quite small and dressed in a long blue robe, quickly got out of the vehicle and moved down the hill, after the elder Fing.

Seeing this, Sternovsky had a sudden premonition. If he remained in the trailer, if he remained on Taiwan, he knew that the two men he had just seen would hunt him down and kill him. The research biochemist fumbled in the dark, laying hands on his passport, his small cache of hard currency and three high-capacity data-storage cassettes. With these few possessions, he slipped out the door of the trailer.

In great loping strides, he closed the distance to the rearmost jeep. As he jumped behind the wheel and reached for the ignition key, he checked downslope to see if any of his visitors were coming after him. He saw nothing but rows of cages, and the only movement that registered was inside them.

He gunned the jeep and jammed it in reverse, backing his way up the hill. As he rolled over the crest beside his trailer, he thought he caught a glimpse of something between the aisles below. The glint of electric light on steel mesh.

But that was impossible unless someone was opening a cage door.

Sternovsky shifted into first, cut a hard, wheel-spinning turn and headed for parts unknown.

REMO AND CHIUN MOVED soundlessly down the elevated rows of wolverine cages. The animals on either side of them were restless. Something or someone had already stirred them up. Accordingly, the surrounding air was thick with musk spray. Lucky for Remo and Chiun, the beasts had already spent themselves, musk-wise.

"Smell the tobacco?" Chiun said softly. "He came this way. He will not escape us."

Behind them, the engine of one of the jeeps roared to life. They turned in time to see the vehicle reversing its way up the hill.

"Dammit!" Remo cursed. He started to run for the remaining jeep..

"No," Chiun said, catching him by the arm. "That is not the one we seek. It is not the tongue sucker. He is just ahead."

"You're sure?"

"He waits."

Remo moved out to take the point. In the cages on either side of him, the wolverines suddenly became very agitated. They growled and snapped, throwing themselves at the mesh in an attempt to get at him.

"Boy, am I glad they're all in there and we're out here," he said.

"They're not," Chiun countered. With a long nailed finger, he pointed at the line of cages ahead. Hundreds of them, with their doors open.

Empty.

Down every aisle, it was the same story, as far as the eye could see. Nobody was home.

Something low and fast zipped behind Remo's back, disappearing under the cages to his right. And as it passed by, he felt a tug at the heel of his shoe. When he lifted his foot to check, he groaned. "Jesus, that little bastard took a chunk out of my loafer."

"Shh," Chiun hissed. "Listen."

Remo shut up. What he noticed first was the silence. The beasties were no longer raising Cain. If it hadn't been for a rustle of wind, it would have been almost too damned quiet.

It took a second or two for him to realize the rustle he heard wasn't wind, after all.

Instead, it was the sound of thousands of recently freed wolverines closing in for the kill.

FILLMORE FING FOUND it difficult not to laugh out loud as he released the last wolverine. With a growl, the creature launched itself out the cage door and shot off down the aisle.

Let the assassins deal with this, he thought, puffing on his cubano. The idea of the hired killers being torn apart by his vicious lab animals gave him such pleasure that he forgot for a moment about the suit those same beasts had ruined with their vile spray.

All he had to do now was work his way around the perimeter, get back in his jeep and drive away.

It sounded almost too easy.

Halfway to the jeep, he began to wonder why he wasn't hearing death screams from the assassins. The wolverines should have circled and attacked the killers en masse by now. He also began to wonder why he kept seeing dark, fast-moving shapes under the cages. Why were they dogging after him?

When one of the little devils scooted out and bit him on the ankle, Fillmore yelped and jumped in the air. He frantically swung the M-16 around and touched off a short burst in the direction the creature had fled.

Then he saw the red glitter of predator eyes beneath the cages, ahead, to the side, behind, and he knew he was surrounded, cut off from the jeep. In panic, he opened fire, emptying the magazine in a half circle around him.

The noise of the gunshots held the wolverines at bay. But only for a moment. Before the last echo died away, they were on him. The scrambling wave of fang and claw drove him to the ground, and there, in a frenzy of greed and gluttony, thousands of wolverines ripped him apart, fighting over the tastiest of the spoils.

FROM INSIDE the wolverine cage where he had taken refuge, Remo listened to the fading sounds of animals doing battle. Then, like a rising tide, down the aisle beside his cage, came wolverines. Tens, then hundreds, all scampering, leaping, deliriously happy to be free, eager to once again be on the hunt. The animals slipped past the farm's perimeter and disappeared, fanning out into the surrounding fields.

"Do you think it's over?" Remo said.

From his own cage, Chiun replied, "They are gone. We have nothing to fear. They will not be back." The assassins opened the cage doors and climbed out of their temporary shelters.

Near the remaining jeep, they found what was left of Fillmore Fing-hardly more than a scrap of gory gray worsted fabric.

"The tongue sucker is no more," Chiun said. "Emperor Smith will be pleased."

"But there's still the tongue sucker's monument," Remo said, hooking a thumb back in the direction of the Family Fing Pharmaceutical complex.

"We must burn it to the ground," Chiun said.

"It's the least we can do," Remo agreed.

EPILOGUE

Dr. Harold W. Smith peeled back the edges of the green-and-silver plastic pouch, exposing the pale brown end of his midafternoon treat. The no-fat-no-calorie cranberry-maple granola bar was everything he wanted in a snack food. Dry as the Mohave desert, it had twice the dietary fiber of a ten-ounce bag of pitted prunes. The director of CURE nibbled at the top of the brittle bar without taking it out of its plastic pouch. He was concerned about crumbs marring the perfection of his desktop.

As he savored each granule of dried cranberry, the show he had been waiting for finally appeared on the Emerson's screen. The show in question was the weekend edition of "Peephole USA," a summary and general rehash of the week's most exciting stories. Lucky for Smith, the very first story was the one he was interested in.

"Well, Molly," said Jed the talking head, "we've got an update on our 'Look Who's Buffed!' story that ran earlier in the week. Remember Princess Pye with the new body to die for?"

"I sure do, Jed," Molly said. "But let's remind the viewers."

The video cut to pre-aired tape of the princess, WHE buffed, waving to the paparazzi outside a Big Apple nightspot.

"That was the princess then," Jed said, "and this is the princess now...."

At first, Smith couldn't interpret what he was seeing on the screen. There was too much of it and it was all the same color: white. Then something moved, and all the pieces fell into place. The picture was of a queen-size bed. Under a sheet on the bed was the largest person Smith had ever seen. A Mount Everest of flab. With a pair of tiny little arms set high on the opposing slopes. And at the summit, the equally tiny but unmistakable head of Princess Pye. While the video rolled, a uniformed assistant fed her Royal Highness trifle from a bucket with a silver trowel.

"In a related development," Molly went on, "the international rock star Skizzle, who was also featured in our 'Look Who's Buffed!' piece, was fatally injured last night when he fell through the stage at a sold-out concert in Montrose, New York. According to the concert promoter, the stage had been certified as strong enough to bear the full weight of a bull elephant."

Dr. Smith pushed back in his ergonomic chair. What he had just seen and heard had put to rest any lingering fears on his part about the remaining former users of the now extinct drug, WHE. He had been prepared, albeit reluctantly, to send the CURE assassins to track down the rest of the celebrities and bigwigs if they still presented a threat to the social order. It was a relief to know that his concerns were groundless, and that he could avoid such a time-consuming, costly proposition.

As it turned out, without fresh hormone patches the users' bodies quickly lost their inhuman accumulation of muscle, and with it, their homicidal urges. But all was not quite as before. The former drug takers continued to eat at the same prodigious rate as they had while on WHE, with entirely predictable, large-scale consequences.

Dr. Smith popped the last scrumptious shard of granola bar into his mouth. And after fully masticating it to a fine paste, raised a glass of his favorite beverage, lukewarm tap water, in a toast to himself.

"Mission accomplished," he said aloud, "and at no further expense!"