Unpopular Science

Chapter 12

Jorge Portillo was finally getting some use out of his AK-47 after all these weeks. Actually, it was only the bayonet that came in handy. He was scraping mud out of the treads of his boots with it.

“What’s this all about?” Pincay hissed.

“Shut up. We’re supposed to stay silent,” Portillo said. He looked around to make sure no one was within earshot. There was just the grassy lawn, the sparse patches of garden that couldn’t possibly hide an attacker and the glimmering sliver of the Mediterranean off down below.

“But why does Allessandro think something is going to happen today?”

Portillo shrugged. He didn’t believe anything would happen today, but it was a nice day for standing outside.

“Why don’t we have a real plan for defending the estate?” Pincay demanded in a whisper. “He’s got us scattered all over the place.”

“I don’t know,” murmured Portillo. The only bad thing about today was spending it with Pincay, who refused to keep his jaw from flapping.

“We’re sitting ducks.”

“You are not worthy of being called a duck,” said a new voice.

By the time Portillo looked up, the owner of the new voice had silenced the voice of Pincay permanently. The throat had been cut most of the way through, including the spinal column, so that Pincay’s skull flopped backward on a skin flap and the back of his head hit between his shoulder blades. The exposed neck column was a spurting fountain of blood until the corpse collapsed amid a pair of jade trees.

“A duck,” explained the killer, “has value. You do not.”

The old man slashed at him so fast Portillo never saw the knife, but he saw his own severed hand jump into the grass still holding the detached bayonet.

“Poke,” said someone else entirely, and at that moment Portillo felt the unbelievable sensation of a steel spike penetrating his skull case and driving deep into his brain tissue. He heard and felt the squish deep between his ears and then the lights went out.

Remo leaned the one-armed corpse against the wall and whacked his knees into position just hard enough to fracture the bone and jam them there. With a little creative balancing he managed to get the dead man to stand where he was, head against the building to hide the drain hole Remo put there.

Franco was very contemplative for a hit man. He was intelligent, but not the kind of intelligent that turned him into a brilliant student. He was more the kind of man who pondered life and nature and even ethical questions. He could have been a philosopher if not for all the school that a fully licensed and accredited philosopher required.

So instead he killed people. Being a philosopher, he pondered deeply the ethics of murder, especially the innocent victims. It was always easy to shrug off annihilating a rival in the drug business, but a lot harder to come up with a rationale for killing, say, the pretty young teacher who kept taking the drugs away from her fourteen-year-old students who just happened to be dealers for Franco’s boss. So after he killed her, which was after he did other things to her, Franco went into a long period of contemplation. At breakfast the next morning, after he was reading about the grisly murder in the paper, he happened to turn to the television listings and, like a message from heaven, his answer came to him.

Conan the Barbarian was on. Not the cartoon show, but the original Schwarzenegger masterpiece, which did suffer somewhat when it was dubbed in Spanish using the same actor who also did the voice for the dubbed Urkel. But it wasn’t Ahnuld that Franco remembered from the movie; it was the philosophy that was presented as the theme at the beginning of the movie. “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” said the badly photographed Spanish cue card at the movie’s beginning.

So, killing someone was a way of making them stronger, right?

So it followed that killing someone was beneficial for all mankind because it strengthened the human race as a whole by increasing the vitality of the pool of human beings. Obviously, anybody Franco tried to kill but couldn’t kill was strong enough that they deserved to keep living. Not that Franco had ever failed to completely murder anyone when he tried to, but it might happen someday.

His conscience entirely eased, he’d moved on to a stellar career as one of the most reliable and effective killers on the entire Iberian Peninsula.

“I’m good at my job because I love my work,” he would tell his prospective employers. “I love my work because I know I am benefiting all of mankind.”

Even the crime bosses of Spain didn’t buy into that, but who cared when he did such a great job?

Franco was now attached to the Cote organization, serving as a security consultant and keeping himself sharp with the occasional hit.

But he wasn’t as sharp as the thin man in the gray chinos, the fine leather shoes and the inappropriate undershirt. The thin man came around the front of the building and took out the guard detail fast, his arms slipping through the air and snatching up heads like a pair of frog tongues, snatching up buzzing flies. Then the heads came together so hard they were crushed together into a single mass. The pair of corpses flopped onto the granite tile of the circular exterior entranceway to the house, still joined.

“An undignified technique,” Franco observed.

The guard detail had been three men, with Franco stationed in the hedges twenty yards away. The third man raised his automatic rifle and squeezed the trigger, only to find his hands empty. The rifle clattered in pieces on the granite. Before the third man could say the Spanish equivalent of “Hey, you jerk!” the thin man flicked him in the nose.

Remo flicked hard enough to send nose cartilage and some of the bony nose bridge careening into the man’s head, cutting a path through the brain tissue. The third man slithered silently to the ground.

“Very skillful indeed, but also quite reprehensible.” Remo looked at the guard who was covering him with a whopping big machine gun.

“Shouldn’t that be mounted on a Hummer or something?” Remo asked distractedly, eyes on the building.

“Usually, but I knew you were coming,” Franco noted.

“Oh, yeah, what do you know?”

“I know you are a killer of immense skill. You are an assassin who moves like a bird or a shadow. But you are also a man who does not respect death.”

“Say what?”

“I should say, you do not give your customers a respectful death.”

Franco couldn’t help but notice that the American was hardly paying attention, focusing instead on the front door.

‘You are not even listening.”

“Sorry, did you say something?”

“I’m talking about respect for death! Do you know about respect?”

“R-E-S-P-E-C-T. What is inside of this place, anyway?”

“I will tell you nothing.”

“You don’t know what’s in there?”

“Of course I do!”

“Liar.”

“I do know, but what I don’t know is what kind of a man you are. Imbecile? Moron?”

“Guess I’m such a moron I don’t know if I’m an imbecile. I’ve been called both a hundred times, just since breakfast. Is there some sort of a secret laser weapon in there or something?”

Franco frowned and shook his head in disappointment. “Put these on, please.” He tossed a pair of selflocking manacles to Remo—extra-heavy-duty, meant for veterinary use on terrified zoo creatures like gorillas.

“No, thanks,” Remo answered, and tossed them back.

Franco saw them flash at him like a yellow fluorescent bolt of lightning. They twisted around his wrist and the machine gun like a bolo, but driven by such force that they wrapped themselves with crushing force.

Franco staggered, tried to shake off the machine gun that was now a part of his arm, then the excruciating pain hit him. Why, of course there would be pain. The arm was all but smashed flat, with bloody gore extruding through the trigger guard.

He was opening his mouth to scream and was aware that the killer was standing in front of him. He must have moved impossibly fast.

Then Franco’s good hand was closed into a fist and inserted into his open mouth, just in time to cork the scream.

“With all due respect, sir,” Remo said, and stuffed the fist in even further.

Remo let the goof wander around the football-field-size front yard while he wandered on, his concern mounting. None of the guards on the outside seemed to know what was happening inside, and all the weapons they had were conventional. Maybe whatever was in there wasn’t even a weapon, but now that he was this close to the house, he felt the strangeness unmistakably. It was a black wave of static that reached out and numbed him.

Another pod of dimwits with AKs stood at a side entrance, near the big section of the structure in the middle. Chiun was just finishing up with the final dimwit when Remo joined him. Chiun was barely paying attention to the job at hand, his emerald-green eyes locked on the oversize section of the building.

“It is familiar.” Chiun said.

“But still strange,” Remo added.

Chiun simply nodded slightly. “We go into the unknown.”

“Every day, every minute we venture into the unknown, Little Father.”

Chiun gave him a rare and sincere smile, although it was a little one.

They went back to the front door and walked in without knocking.

“The front door? Don’t tell me it’s them? Coming in the bloody front door?” Allessandro Cote was livid. “That’s just wrong!”

“Perhaps one of our men entered mistakenly without keying in his PIN, suh,” Jenkins said hopefully.

Cote jogged to the keyboard at the bank of monitors. There were only thirty keys or so, all dramatically oversize. They were lighted, too, and when Cote began pressing them they made tiny electronic mews and burps.

“Where’d that overpaid monk go to?” Then one of the monitors switched to an image from the front yard, and there was Franco.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Cote exclaimed.

Jenkins gasped. There was Franco, all right, with one arm sunk into his mouth up to the elbow, the other squashed and bloody and somehow adhered to his weapon. The man was staggering to the road that ran in front of the house, maybe looking for a passing ambulance. He dropped to the grass, never to rise again.

“Suh!” Jenkins said, and indicated another monitor. One of the guards in the video feed lay on his back, his severed head wobbling nearby.

“The front door must have been them, suh. The killers.”

“All my goons are dead? Every bleeding man jack of them?”

“I suggest you power up the defenses, suh.”

Allessandro Cote stood up straight, looked down his nose at his butler and tightened his lips. “Quite right, Jenkins,” he said, fully in control once more. “These—” he waved at the screens “—were just extras, anyway.”

“Of course, suh.”

The picture of British reserve, Allessandro Cote strolled to the next oversize control panel. There were three chunks of jagged, unpolished quartz crystal set into the panel, each one the size of a teacup. Cote placed his hand against a hard, cool crystal—the purplish one on the end.

The door on the far end of the ballroom burst open.

“It’s stronger, Little Father,” Remo said.

“I feel it in my bones,” Chiun said.

They had moved fast through the endless, opulent rooms of the old section of the ancient mansion, but the strange sensation was intensified now. Remo felt his limbs becoming heavier.

“How far?” Remo asked, realizing his sense of direction was askew.

Chiun yanked open a door that was hand carved, the figurines around the door latch smoothed by centuries of contact with human fingers. “Beyond the next door,” Chiun stated.

Remo wondered how Chiun could sound so sure of himself when Remo’s own disorientation was escalating and this room looked just like all the others, musty and packed with a lot of well-polished antique furniture.

“How many freaking parlors do you freaking need?” Remo demanded.

“This is it,” Chiun announced at the next set of extra-wide double doors. He looked at Remo, and Remo saw the old man thinking hard. “I shall enter alone.”

“No, you won’t.”

“You shall remain here and assess the nature of this anomaly.”

“No way in hell.”

“It is foolish for both of us to walk into danger!”

Remo cocked his head. “Right you are, and I decide who.”

“I am the Master Emeritus!” Chiun stamped one foot, but it was a gesture without vigor.

“I’m Reigning Master and what I say goes and I say I go.”

He never gave the old Korean time to reply before he bashed his shoulder into the doors. They squeaked open and the sensation increased to a shrill pitch. Remo imagined he heard some sort of supersonic sound that assaulted him, drained him of vitality, confused his thinking. It was all he could do to hold himself upright and walk with feigned energy across the huge, open room.

The ceilings were high and set with iron-filigreed frames around frosted glass, and the floor was ancient, polished wood planks. The walls were decorated with bigger-than-life-size murals of Spanish royalty, the paintings separated by red-velvet-upholstered panels.

The room was entirely empty except for flashing, multicolored banks of electronic controls and screens on the far side of the room and the pair of formally dressed men who stood watching him.

“Sorry. Didn’t know it was black tie.” Remo felt that he had to shout to be heard above the chaos that was attacking him. The pair in the money suits seemed unaffected.

“May I ask who you are and what business you have?” asked the younger man.

Remo’s confusion grew. Was he mistaken, or was the man trying to force a hackneyed British accent on top of his native Spanish accent?

“Which of you is Al Cote?”

“I am Mr. Cote. And you are?”

“Annoyed. Remo Annoyed.”

“Not as annoyed as I am, to be sure,” the younger man said. Remo realized the acoustics of the room were allowing them to speak normally despite the distance between them. He seemed to be having trouble walking at a normal pace.

“Which old movie set did you steal, anyway?” Remo asked. “Was it Logan’s Run? Now, that was a stupid-looking computer.”

Cote looked as if he was trying to stifle an outburst. “Not science fiction! Think secret agent.”

“Huh?” Now he was really confused. The movie crack had been just that—a crack, a joke. “You mean, like James Bond?”

“Exactly!” Suddenly Cote was beaming.

“You mean, you really did model your little command console after something out of a James Bond movie?”

Cote looked like an excited corgi about to go walkies. “Not just this, but all of it! Look around you!”

Remo stopped where he was in the middle of the room, hoping a pause would restore some of his waning strength. He looked around the empty old room, trying to make sense of what Cote was saying.

“What?”

“Think about it! Think about what this would look like if we were in a motion picture right now.”

Remo was trying to follow the thread. “Like, a James Bond movie?”

“Yes!” Cote was ecstatic.

“So this is like, the big set where the climax takes place?”

“Yes! Yes! You are exactly right!”

“Uh-huh.” Remo’s mind chewed on this, looking for a nugget of logical filling. If he were thinking straight, would this sound just as stupid? “So you’re like the evil genius, right?”

“Yes, precisely!” He was so worked up that Cote actually started coming toward Remo as if to shake his hand.

Then Cote stopped, stiffened and pulled down on the vest of his three-piece suit. “And now, Mr. Annoyed, I think it is time I give you the welcome you deserve.”

Cote’s hand was resting on a big purple chunk of crystal that was pulsing from a hidden light When he depressed it, the quartz began to glow steadily and the knob recessed into the control panel.

The red-velvet panels around the room shifted, making unnecessarily loud servomotor sounds, then each door began to lift, each on a pair of heavy pneumatic cylinders.

Remo realized he was still standing there and he didn’t think he could move another step. There was a black cloud seeping around the edges of his vision…

Whatever it was behind the doors, which were taking forever to open, how would he be able to run from them, let alone defend himself?

“Hey, Blofeld, laying it on a little thick, aren’t you?”

“Au revoir, Mr. Annoyed. Or perhaps I should say goodbye.”

Remo Williams looked around, found he couldn’t take it all in at once, and concentrated on a single hidden chamber as the doors halted in a fully raised position. He still didn’t think he was seeing it correctly. Was he hallucinating?

It was a man in a wheelchair. The man was silver, grinning easily with a massive chrome grin. Its head rotated ninety degrees left, then right, before turning to face Remo Williams. Red lights came on in its eye sockets.

“Allow me to introduce my dear friend,” Cote said grandly.

“Mecha-Stephen Hawking?” Remo asked.

“I am Mr. U.,” said the thing in the wheelchair.

“Mr. Who?” Remo asked, trying to make his feet function, trying to make his vision clear, trying to think.

He looked at the next open space in the wall. Inside was…a rocking horse. He squeezed his eyes, forcing his tunnel of vision to focus itself, and then saw it was a mechanical jumble with legs bolted to a small tank tread on either side. It still resembled a rocking horse. Its surface was composed of dull gray metal shingles and its doglike head ended in a nose with a gun barrel jutting out of it. In the next cubicle was a steel rack mounted with four wheeled devices, like aluminum bread boxes with many long needles sticking out of their skin.

There must be fifteen or twenty open doors, and if Remo could trust his vision, each one of them contained its own unique glowing, blinking contraption.

“Now, Mr. Annoyed, you die,” said Cote with well-rehearsed understated flair.

“Mr. U. die or you die?” Remo demanded.

“You die, I said,” Cote retorted.

“You?”

“Not me, you!”

“Him?” Remo pointed at the wheelchair droid with the red eyes.

“Shut up!”

Remo couldn’t help but smirk. “Sorry if I’m not playing the right part in your little scene.”

“You will act out the most important part of the scene, have no fear,” Cote said and, almost casually, he depressed the next pulsing crystal, the pink one.

There was a whirring of multiple small motors and Remo saw a connection on a mechanical arm separate from the back of the chrome-toothed Mr. U. The same connection was severed from every cubicle as all the devices were freed of their umbilicals, and at that moment Remo felt the debilitating sensation—stop.

It didn’t fade, it didn’t decrease, it just stopped. Whatever had caused it had been turned off when all the devices were released from their umbilicals. Remo watched his tunnel of vision expand, felt the current of life surge into his limbs.

Mr. U, came at him wearing a wicked smile, and Remo moved out of its path. Now he saw it more clearly and found it was a sort of battering ram on wheels, a sculpted chrome demon head perched-atop a mass of steel arms and claws. The shivering floor attested to its great weight.

Regardless of Mr. U.’s huge mass, it moved fast on its wheelchair, and when Remo moved, Mr. U. altered course to intercept him. Remo moved faster, pushing his wobbly legs, trying to force them to recover faster. Cote and his butler were just standing there, so who had the joystick?

Mr. U. stopped where it was and turned in a circle, rotating, and raised its palm. An inch-wide barrel opening appeared, and Remo braced himself.

Mr. U. fired its weapon and a tiny rocket screamed in Remo’s direction on a tail of blue fire. It wasn’t even a bullet. It was slow. He could dodge this thing. A rocket was just bullet, and a bullet was just a rock, and anybody could dodge a rock.

Remo moved fast on legs of rubber, judged the approach of the missile, judged his own speed and knew he wasn’t going to make it. He pushed harder and lurched into a violent, ungraceful twist.

He felt the heat, and then the rocket was gone. He heard the small burst and turned too slowly to see what was hit, but he knew it was one of the other robots. By the time he had his head turned there was nothing except some collapsing mechanical rabble, enough to fill a bathtub.

Remo didn’t know what the deal was, but he had a pretty good idea that all the rolling, buzzing, whirring doohickeys were of the injury-causing variety. He needed to buy himself some time to get his strength back, then take them on.

“What is all this, Cote?” he demanded loudly, hoping to get the supercriminal wannabe talking again. “I don’t get it.”

“These are my tools of domination, Mr. Annoying.” Cote was now sitting in a throne that looked like a big aluminum champagne glass with a doughnut cushion. The slender stem disappeared into a slot in the floor.

“World domination, I assume.”

Cote was wearing his smuggest look yet. “Perhaps not world domination. I do know, of course, that Remo Annoying is not your real name. What is your real name, pray tell?”

“Hell if I know. So, why not world domination?” Remo could see Cote’s interest was piqued. He had to play this guy’s game for a while—and Cote was more than willing. Cote relaxed against the back of his chair and tried not to reveal the fact that his hands were working a tiny joystick on the side of the doughnut cushion. The chair moved, with a whirring of motors under the floor, carrying him to the front of his banks of obnoxiously bright and flashy controls.

“I don’t know if I am prepared yet to dominate the planet. Someday, perhaps. For now I’ll settle for Europe.”

“With these guys you want to conquer Europe? Mr. U. is cool-looking and well-polished and everything, but does he have what it takes to defeat whole nations?” Remo’s eyesight was restored fully and he turned casually right and left, taking in the vast array of mechanical creatures that surrounded him, all poised as if to strike. The always-smiling Mr. U. adjusted its position by the millimeter to keep the aim of its distended arm- launcher locked on Remo.

Remo had guessed Cote right. He was into his spy-movie super villain role, and the last thing he wanted was for it to be over within a blink of an eye. Cote began explaining the self-replicating properties of the various autonomous vehicles in his menagerie, and Remo put on his best shocked-and-awed expression while he evaluated his body. He felt much better, but he didn’t feel he was back to one hundred percent yet. Maybe it would take hours or days. Maybe he was scarred permanently.

But did he have what it would take to fight off the mysterious Mr. U.?

How good were these contraptions anyway?

“They might be able to replicate themselves in body, but not in mind,” Remo asserted. “You don’t have robots to build Gee-DAMS.”

Cote’s sonorous speech, delivered in a booming stage voice, faltered at the interruption and his face clouded. He advanced on Remo, but the last feet of track was not aligned well and the chair began to shimmy as the mechanics ground together, under the floor. Now Cote was even angrier, his face flushing as he grabbed onto the sides of the seat and held on until the chair managed to come to a halt, tipping a little to one side.

Remo chuckled.

“What is so humorous?”

“What isn’t? Cote, you’re about as much a supervillain as I am George Lazenby. You’re a clown.”

“What?”

“Look at you. You’re a clown. A stupid fake. You’ve got everything wrong. You don’t even know what stupid game you’re trying to pretend at.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what’s with the British accent? Most of the supervillains weren’t British. They were Eastern Europeans or whatever. So what are you trying to do, be the British secret agent and the supervillain at the same time? Can’t play both sides of the fence, Cote.”

“I know what I am doing,” Cote retorted.

“And the accent sucks anyway. I mean, I’ve heard junior high-school kids from Detroit doing Monty Python skits and they’re way more genuine than you.”

“My good man—”

“Also, what’s with the retro look? I mean, okay, if you’ve made the commitment to be a pseudo-supervillain, and you’ve already committed some horrific crimes—and you have—and you’ve got a few million in disposable cash to outfit your new supervillain stronghold, then why in God’s name would you go retro? It makes you look stupider than you already look.”

“You’re wearing my patience, Mr.—”

“Even if you ignore all that, you forgot the most important part of being a supervillain.”

“I forgot nothing!”

Remo shrugged. “Fine.”

“What? What did I forget?”

“You forgot that every supervillain fails,” Remo said.

Cote applied the smug British smile to his sweaty Spanish face. Remo could see, from maybe thirty long paces away, that the man’s respiration was slowing again, his heart rate becoming steady. He was relaxing in a moment of self-confidence. Now was the time to make his move, with Cote’s reflexes slowed. “That is where I have revamped the character, whoever you are,” Cote explained.

“Sorry, old chap.” Remo smirked. “You’re nothing but a Dr. No and away you go.”

Remo charged.

But he attacked Cote as Cote had never been attacked before. Instead of running him down in a flurry of flying legs, Remo Annoying seemed to slip and slither and glide across the ballroom with more grace than any dancer had ever moved, and faster than any human being was capable of moving.

Cote had been told to expect extraordinary skills and speed, but this was inhuman. He stabbed at the nearest control, a fat orange plastic square, and across the room one of the automatons shot into motion. Mr. U. was already activated and it rotated quickly, its body quivering as if it had a bad case of nerves, but it was actually the minute and precise maneuverings of the aiming mechanism—and yet Mr. U. failed to lock on to its target.

Remo Williams slipped around the room in sporadic fits, but he closed in on Cote fast. The man yelped in astonishment when something clamped on to his neck and he became a statue, frozen in his seat. He could only watch what happened around him.

Remo circled the laughably huge computer and zipped out the other side to find Mr. U. bearing down on him. He felt the pressure waves of the next igniting rocket even as it shot from the barrel in Mr. U.’s palm.

It was a different projectile, slightly stubbier, and as he moved out of its path, it moved to intercept him. He stopped, watched it burn the air directly at him, then nodded his head forward when it was just inches from crashing into him.

There was a powerful scream from the second robot, an eight-legged spider of jointed brass legs, and for a moment Remo had an ugly flashback.

But this wasn’t that mechanical spider, just a bunch of hollow tubes for legs, pneumatic cylinders for muscles and tiny discs positioned on every square inch, spinning fast, creating a drone like the buzzing of steel bees. This spider specialized in wasted motion but it still came fast, clattering on the wood, and the sharpness of its tiny rotary saws was made evident by the cloud of sawdust it raised.

The little rocket managed to recover itself before crashing into the walls or floor, spinning wildly in the upper air of the ballroom, then veering into a dive. Remo ran at the spider robot, which turned to catch him by reaching out with four front legs. Remo faked it out by going low, then jumped over the whizzing tubular limbs, and the spider reared up in a vain attempt to tag him.

Remo hit the ground and glided back the way he’d come, under the raised spider legs and around the rear of the spider, moving too fast for the spider to match— but not too fast for the motion-sending rocket, which homed in on Remo without knowing or caring what was in its way. The spider was still balanced on its rear end when the tiny rocket slammed into it as Remo fell and rolled. The explosion was an intense pressure burst, and Remo exhaled fully and let it roll over him.

When he got to his feet he was pleased to see that the spider had been splatted and another nearby automaton was damaged, the pair of round cylinders that made up its body shifting on positioning motors while its wheeled feet adjusted like a circus clown on a ball, trying to get balanced.

Remo stepped up and gave the thing a nudge with his foot, and the two-tank robot raced across the room at Mr. U., who was lining up to fire again. Mr. U.’s grin became less cheerful when it swung away fast to avoid the impact.

It wasn’t fast enough and the twin-tanked robot broadsided Mr. U., toppled on its side and spritzed a yellow liquid out of its mangled barrels. A stream of it tinkled on Mr. U., enough to start smoking.

Whatever was in those tanks was dangerous stuff. Another nearby honeycomb rack of blinking, smallwinged robots was coated with it. They and their metal rack began to collapse in on themselves.

Mr. U. ignored its ruined plating and spun on Remo, only to find Remo gone. It spun left, then right, then did a complete circle before its sensors located the movement that had to be its target.

Allessandro Cote was as miserable as he could have ever been. To fail was despicable; to fail like this, paralyzed and helpless, was disgraceful.

“Please, I can’t move!”

“Here you go,” Remo said. He took Cote by the hand and squeezed his fingers around the tiny joystick on the chair. Then he fiddled with Cote’s neck, looking for the correct nerve combination.

Cote twitched, face and body and fingers, which sent the track-mounted chair flying backward while spinning fast. The chair reached the end of the track and halted abruptly, then Cote’s body twitched again, violently, and he found himself flying the other way.

“Hey, Mr. U., let’s see what you’ve got!” Remo shouted.

Cote tried to make a noise, but he managed nothing more than a squeak that became a grunt as he twitched and jolted and spun sickeningly. Amid the chaos, he was terrified to see the flash of a rocket, which brightened in his vision, only to vanish as another violent twitch of his nerves sent him spinning and veered away.

Remo led the small rocket like a fox teasing the hounds, leading it through high-powered figure eights. Remo steered it directly into the next robot he came to, then stepped into a conveniently vacated wall cubicle for cover.

The explosion sent mechanical parts raining in all directions, and Remo was now feeling ready to take on the big Mr. U. himself. He eased out of the cubicle as the chrome automaton fired another rocket and ran into the open to give the little missile an easy target, stepping aside just before it slammed into his chest. Then he took hold of the rocket.

“Bet you didn’t think I could do that, did you?” Remo called to Mr. U. as he held the hot little thing in two fingers, shaking it like a match to extinguish it.

Mr. U. couldn’t seem to figure out what had happened or what he should do next.

“Does not compute, huh?” Remo asked it “Here. Think about this.”

Remo flicked his wrist and sent the tiny rocket back to its sender, sent it faster than the little solid-fuel engine could ever have propelled it, and Mr. U. didn’t have time to get out of the way. The rocket shot underneath Mr. U.’s deck and hit the floor, detonating and lifting Mr. U. on a destructive pressure burst that burned it up the center. When Mr. U. landed, it was split up the middle all the way to its chrome skull.

Mr. U. wasn’t dead yet. It jerkily distended its arm and fed power to its drive system, its two halves lurching about in search of its assailant

Somebody tapped Mr. U. on the shoulder.

“Here I am.”

Mr. U.’s grinning face spun 180 degrees to find its assailant standing right behind it, and its programming sent it into its last-ditch, close-combat defense protocol. With a savage lunge it bit down hard. Its programming assured it that its assailant’s forearm had just been amputated.

Its programming could not account for the bizarre nature of the disparity in its sensor position, which told it that its head and its body now moved independent of one another.

“Heads. You lose.”

Mr. U.’s visual sensors saw its own torso rushing at it very fast.

By the time Remo had pounded the droid skull into a much smaller round metal lump, Mr. U. was nonfunctional.

“You’re a mess,” Remo said to Cote, who had by this time vomited on himself repeatedly, the rapid gyration of the chair spreading it everywhere. Remo picked his way through the puddles and brought Cote to a halt with a swift kick that jammed the chair in its track. It began smoking slightly. Cote toppled out.

“Disgusting,” Chiun observed, now standing outside the splash zone.

“You okay, Little Father?”

“I have recovered, my son. I assume I am now allowed to come out of my room?”

“It would have been okay a long time ago. Like when I was being shot at with missiles and so on.”

“I saw you playing with your toys and did not want to interfere. Did you break all your toys as a child, as well?”

“Didn’t have any,” Remo said with a shrug. “What’s that?”

Chiun held up a handful of cables attached to quarter-size glass devices. “Ask the man with the digestive instability. They were in his wall, observing your frolics. I removed them while you were amusing yourself.”

“Well, Cote, what are they?”

Cote lay on the floor, heaving, stinking, twitching, wishing he could die. Remo gingerly touched his neck and Cote’s body was working again, sort of. He sat up and nearly fell over again from the dizziness.

“Cote, answer the question.”

“Video pickups, what do you think?”

“Him? Not much of anything,” Chiun explained.

“Can it. Okay, Cote, we want some real answers now. You’re too stupid to have planned this whole scheme on your own. Who did? Where are they? What are they up to? Why were they watching us?”

“Go to hell, miserable bleeding bastards.”

“I’ve got to hand it to you,” Remo said. “You’re dedicated to your fairy tale. Let’s see if this will convince you to not stay in character.”

Remo touched Cote’s neck again, and Cote began panting and whimpering, racked with unbearable pain. He snapped in mere seconds.

“I’ll talk. I’ll tell you everything.”