Unpopular Science

Chapter 38

The Air Force general opened the door fast and hard, breaking the nose of the lieutenant who collapsed to the floor, the coffeepot he’d been rushing to refill shattering against his head.

“Your lucky day. Lieutenant,” the general barked. “If there had been coffee in that pot you’d be looking at years of skin grafts.”

“Yeth thir, General,” said the lieutenant, holding his spurting proboscis in one hand and his gashed scalp in the other.

“Have this cleaned up,” the general snapped at his assistant.

The assistant, a captain and decorated fighter pilot, snatched at his lapel and spoke into the clip-on mike. “Cleanup in Command Control.”

General Elvgren “Sick Puppy” Rover was already shoving his way through the crowd around one of the banks of flight controllers. “Show me.”

“Right here, sir,” said a button-pusher.

General Rover looked at a dot on the screen. It was different from the other dots because it had a red circle blinking around it.

“What of it?”

“It came out of nowhere. Sir. One second it wasn’t there, the next second it was just there. Now it’s going Mach 4, Sir.”

Rover shouted, “It’s a missile, you idiots! Shoot it out of the sky!”

“When it first showed on the screen it was going Mach point five, General, Sir.”

“What the hell is this geek going on about? Captain! Where the hell—?”

“Here, Sir!” His assistant had just now elbowed his way through the pack of onlookers. He withered under the disapproving glare of the general, then quickly straightened. General Elvgren “Mad Dog” Rover disdained any sign of weakness. “He’s saying the aircraft is an aircraft. Sir. One-half mach is too slow for a missile. Sir.”

“You screwed up the ID, son, that’s all,” the general accused the flight controller. “You got some dinky plane and this missile mixed up together.”

The flight controller tried to decide how best to defend himself against the accusations of General Elvgren “Ruff! Ruff!” Rover. He decided on the straightforward truth. “It is not my identification, Sir. NORAD’s had a lock on it since it entered the ECUSSA.”

“Excuse you what?” Rover demanded.

“East Coast United States Secure Airspace,” Rover’s pet captain explained.

“What happened to Secure East Coast Air Watch?” The crowd tittered. The air traffic controllers looked at their screens to hide their amusement, and even a visiting Pentagon official scratched his ear to hide his mirth. A janitor rolled his eyes as he pushed his mop bucket into the hall in a big hurry.

“What’s wrong with you people?” Eivgren “The Bitch” Rover exploded.

“The SECAW designation was retired more than a month ago.”

“What? Why?”

“To allow the new designation to be used—District of Columbia And Surrounding Environs Coastal Airspace Watch Perimeter. DOCASECAWP. It failed to roll off the tongue. Sir. The designation was therefore changed to ECUSSA.”

“Why in blazes didn’t they just change it back to SECAW, then?” demanded General Eivgren “Fido” -Rover.

There was silence. The flight controllers looked at one another questioningly, and the officers mulled it over or pretended they knew the answer. Rover’s captain said simply, “Nobody thought of that. Sir.”

“That’s why they call me ‘Smart Puppy’ Rover, Captain.”

“Yes, Sir.”

The Pentagon official, who had once worked in acronym development, was feverishly writing notes on his palm with a ballpoint.

“What about the BOIID?” interjected the controller, who added quickly, “The Belligerent of Indeterminate Identification.”

“Shoot dat BOIID. Didn’t I say that first thing when I walked in here? What’s everybody still talking about it for? Captain, I want court martials for every man in the room. You, too.”

“A moment of your time, Sir,” the captain said.

The exasperated Air Force general accompanied his assistant into a private corner. “We can’t shoot it down, Sir. That’s why I asked you to be consulted in this matter, Sir. The aircraft is behaving like an EVIDA—it’s an Extreme Velocity Intrusion Delivery Aircraft.”

“Never heard of it.”

“In development by the Navy. Top security. But the grapevine says the prototype was stolen recently. No other aircraft we know of could go from a slow stealth airspeed to Mach 5. EVIDA is designed for it, Sir.”

General Elvgren “Sly Dog” Rover nodded thoughtfully. “The Navy’s, you say?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Shoot it down.”

The captain turned to the loiterers in Command Control. “General’s orders. Shoot down dat BOIID.”

“General’s orders. Shoot down dat BOIID,” echoed the Pentagon official, who appeared to have some authority here.

“General’s orders. Shoot down dat BOIID,” radioed the controller whose task it was to relay such orders.

General Elvgren “Bow-Wow” Rover asked quietly, “You sure I’m not supposed to know anything about this Evita?”

“EVIDA, Sir. No, Sir. Even I am not supposed to know.”

“Good. Let’s get out of here before they start singing.”

The room continued echoing with calls of “Shoot down dat BOIID,” and did, indeed, come dangerously close to becoming a chorus.

“Evening, Little Father.”

“Hello, Remo. Rested?”

Remo got to his feet, evaluating the grinding of bones in his chest.. “Small fracture,” he said offhandedly. “Nothing too serious.”

“I know this, of course,” Chiun said The smell told Remo he was no longer on the grounds of the White House. He found they were standing in an alley.

“What did you bring that for?” he asked.

“This contrivance?” Chiun asked. “I deemed it could be of value to us. We shall present it to the Emperor for evaluation by his laboratory hirelings.”

“It’s Clockwork. It’s the robot we saw helping Ironhand in Providence,” Remo said. “The one from the TV show. He had a key in his back for winding him up.”

The robot’s body was a copper ball more than two yards in diameter. Out of the gasketed opening at the top protruded a scrawny copper tube of a neck, topped with a copper sphere of a head the size of a basketball. He had ears that were pounded out of tin and riveted in place. A mouth was etched into the metal surface and almost hidden under the layer of scratched stealth paint that coated it head to toe.

“He is not a windup toy,” Chiun said. “He was once powered by a device such as this.” Chiun held up a small egg-shaped lump of steel with dangling wires.

“You took that out of Clockwork?”

“You removed this from Ironhand.”

“I did?” Remo gazed at the thing. “I remember trying. I wasn’t sure if I’d managed to actually do it.”

Chiun showed concern for the first time. “The mechanical man kicked you in the chest, and I thought you were senseless, and yet you did not release your grip on what you were grasping. You pulled this Out of Ironhand and he ceased to function. It was a foolhardy thing to touch it, Remo.”

Remo relived it in his memory, the blackness that came upon his senses and seemed to erase his consciousness. “Little Father, it was not like dying. I’ve died. Death I know.” He fixed the old Korean master with haunted eyes. “This was worse.”

Chiun nodded, but couldn’t understand what Remo had endured. Perhaps, Chiun thought, Remo was correct about this device. Perhaps it was a weapon that was more than just a rock.

Now Remo scrambled to his feet and backed away. “Little Father, get away from it!” The source of his concern was the big round ball of a mechanical man, which stood quite still.

Jack Fast saw the fighter planes come to intercept him. “Hi, guys.” He grinned and waved.

The fighter jets spit out white bursts of fire, and Jack nudged his joystick just enough to dip the EVIDA. She dodged the burst and was past them in an eye blink.

“’Bye, guys,” Fast said as they were left behind.

He had one hand on the stick and another on the laptop on the seat next to him, keying in every command he could think of to optimize his reception.

“Come on, Ballboy, what’s the problem?”

He snapped off a quick repeating command to Clockwork, ordering it to send an emergency black-box data dump. If that fat moldy old robot reject could send even a couple seconds of data stream, it would be enough to tell Jack what was going on in the past few minutes. The glow of Washington, D.C., rushed up under the aircraft at exhilarating speed, but Jack hardly noticed. He had an eye out for another intercept.

An orange light appeared on the controls. The wing temperature was climbing into the danger zone.

“Navy piece of junk!” Jack exclaimed, leaning out the window and staring at the tiny stubs of the fully retracted wings. “Why didn’t those morons use titanium?” He throttled down to Mach 2.2 until the temperature climb stopped.. He could stay in the caution zone if he was careful…

The proximity alarm screamed and a pair of closing fighter jets came at the EVIDA from out of nowhere.

“Fine, jerks, let’s see how this grabs ya.” Jack diddled the joystick and spiraled toward the city just as a burst of fire scorched the air over him.

“He’s going down in D.C.,” the pilot radioed. “Command, you’ve got a real mess about to happen.”

“He’s trying to pull up,” added the pilot of the second fighter.

“He’ll never be able to—”

“He’s leveled it! Look! What the hell is that thing he’s flying, anyway?”

“Officially,” the second Air Force pilot answered, “I have no idea.”

“This one is not functional, Remo,” Chiun insisted. “It was damaged when it flew over the fence and rolled down the street to this alley.”

“You tossed it over the fence?” Remo asked.

“Then steered it into this filthy dark place with my feet. Perhaps I should take up soccer.”

Remo pictured it, the little Asian man carrying his inert body into the streets of D.C., nudging along this bizarre metal ball with tubular arms and tube-mounted treads for feet.

“I hear activity inside this thing.”

Chiun shrugged. “Dead machines are like dead humans. A car will continue to make pulses of electricity for days after it crashes.”

“This is more than that.” Remo could hear the rising concern in his voice. “There’s a gyroscope in there.”

“I hear it,” Chiun said.

“It’s stabilizing.”

“Of course.”

“The gyroscope is still under power. Let’s get the hell away from it, Chiun.”

“Remo, I understand if you are fearful, but this machine is broken. We may safely transport it to the Emperor. Even I can see the need to understand its workings.”

What Remo was hearing was like a rising scream, although he knew it was tiny. A minuscule gyroscope inside the robot, like the gyroscope in an aircraft autopilot, was stabilizing after the wild fluctuations of Chiun’s soccer-ball routine. Any moment now it would reach its baseline and then…what?

“We go now.”

Chiun put his hands into his sleeves and wrinkled his brow, prepared to take a stance, but then the haunted, hollowed, stricken eyes of Remo blazed into him. Rarely had Chiun been the target of that look.

“Now, Chiun.”

But even as he said the words, both of them felt and heard the subtle steadying of the gyroscope inside the foolish-looking machine. Remo made a sound in his chest that hurt his broken bones and he willed his body to move fast, move hard, just move. He had done it before when the blackness came down on him and he would do it again, but it was a nightmare that came back to devour him. The round ball head twisted and then blackness came.

Chiun felt the blackness, just as he had felt it in the grounds of the White House, and he felt Remo’s hands wrench him by the wrist, carrying him off his feet, sending him above the ground to the end of the alley where the blackness slipped away with the distance. Chiun gathered his senses about him and met the slime-coated alley floor easily, turned and skimmed the earth back the way he had come. If the thing avoided recharging itself, he would have time to best it.

The danger was over temporarily, but the damage was done.

Remo lay where he had fallen, his eyes open. He wasn’t stirring. He was more than still. He was rigid, as if long dead.

Chiun felt real terror. What a fool of an old man was he! His pupil had done this great deed once tonight, and Chiun had exposed him to the madness again! How much of this could one be expected to endure?

“Remo, hear me and return!” Chiun cried as he struck the flailing arms and thrashing head of the moronic copper man. “Remo, the blackness is no place for a Master of Sinanju. It is beyond the Void!”

Jack’s fingers were tense on the joystick as he rocketed just 1,100 feet above Washington, D.C.

“Here’s Jack. Talk to me, Ballboy.”

The computer beeped as if in answer.

“Cool!” Jack Fast exclaimed, and steered on an intercept course.

Chiun felt the pressure waves echoing along the street as if some gigantic bullet was approaching, but it wasn’t coming down. Simultaneously he felt the burst of static electricity that flew out of the metal creature disintegrating under his hands.

“Is this a friend of yours?” Chiun asked, snatching the head off of Clockwork. The eye lenses rolled crazily in their sockets. “Then rejoin him!”

He angrily shot-putted the heavy metallic head into the skies over Washington, D.C., as the approach of the low-flying aircraft became an assault of pressure waves. Chiun’s senses were imperfect at this moment, and the aircraft was coming with extraordinary speed; momentarily, the old Master questioned the accuracy—

The head and the aircraft came together with Chiun-like precision.

The interior of the aircraft became a sound chamber filled with screaming alert signals.

“Holy toledo!” Jack Fast exclaimed, not hearing anything. His attention was riveted on the needle-sharp nose of the EVUDA aircraft. A deformed metallic thing was impaled there, shaped like a flattened basketball. Amazingly, the brass bowler hat had survived almost perfectly intact.

“Clockwork!”

One rolling eye dangled in the slipstream, then was jerked out by the force of the air. It was then that Jack noticed the EVIDA was vibrating uncontrollably.

Clockwork’s skewered head was screwing up his aerodynamics big-time.

Chiun felt the rumbling of the city, then the shock wave of the passing aircraft thundered this filthy corner of Washington, D.C., like an earthquake, cracking the crust on the street filth so that the stench blossomed anew.

Chiun was beyond noticing. He didn’t care that he had bested the enemy, It no longer mattered that the thing of copper was reduced to bits and pieces of metallic waste that might as well have gone through a junkyard shredder.

He took the wide-eyed creature from the filthy pavement and carried it into the streets of the hideous city. His ancient, bony fingers could feel the beating of a powerful human heart inside this body—but what else remained? Did anything else remain?

“Fight it, Remo,” he whispered. “Claw out of the blackness. Do not let the blackness imprison you beyond the Void, where there is nothing.”

Chiun took a taxi to the airport, then boarded the aircraft hired for him by Emperor Smith, although he was not truly aware of doing these things. At one point Chiun heard the flight attendant tell him a car would be waiting for him at the other end. Smith’s machinations coming into play.

Chiun was speaking all the while, quietly, whispering, and sometimes weeping. “Old fool!” he would say occasionally, but usually his words were for Remo.

What frightened Chiun the most was the feeling in his own breast, the dreadful emptiness.

There was a connection between a Master and his Pupil, and when a Master died or a Pupil died, the other knew and felt such an emptiness. It was perhaps one of the myths of Sinanju, based on a wish more than the true nature of the art.

Chiun hoped this was just myth, just a Sinanjii old wives’ tale, because at this moment that place was empty, as if Remo Williams had ceased to be.

“Remo,” whispered the old man.

His words went unheard.