Unpopular Science

Chapter 7

The house was centuries old and the great tree that had protected the house for generations was older still. These days it was just a hulk of dead wood with some green stalks jutting out here and there, somehow finding the force of will to produce a few token leaves every spring.

Sarah Slate hated the tree but clung to it year after year. After all, the Slate family was embodied in the tree. Now that the Slate family was virtually gone, she, Sarah, was the last of the green leaves. This was an idiotic and morbid outlook, she knew, but she couldn’t get it out of her head, so she stayed in the house, although it was far too dark and huge for a bright young woman. And whenever the brisk breezes that gusted over the hills of Providence, Rhode Island, were not too bitter, she would take her breakfast on the small brick patio under the stark limbs of the great oak tree that she hated.

“Oh, my God,” she exclaimed.

Mrs. Sanderson came out of the kitchen entrance with her hands covered in soapsuds. “Is something wrong, Sarah?”

“No. Not really, Mrs. Sanderson. Look at this.” She thrust the newspaper at the woman, who had been cooking breakfast for the Slate family for more than forty years.

“My goodness,” she said. “Who’d have thought it That poor man.”

“Poor man?” Sarah asked. She took back the paper and reexamined it. “Oh—I had not even read that far. I just saw the part about the sighting.”

“It’s an astounding story,” Mrs. Sanderson said. “I’ll bet no one has seen Slate’s mechanical man in eighty years. It was old news when I started with the family. This poor old hermit must have gone soft in the head and forgot what year it was.”

“Then killed himself,” Sarah concluded sadly. “Out there, all alone in the desert.”

“Alone, indeed,” Mrs. Sanderson said. “You would have to be a lonely man to summon the ghost of Iron- hand for company.”

Tsking, Mrs. Sanderson returned to her kitchen and her breakfast dishes. Sarah read the story yet again, thinking that maybe she understood how lonely that poor old desert hermit must have been.

“This is where you get off, isn’t it. Junior?” Remo asked as they touched down in Atlanta.

“Actually, I’m tagging along with you to Morocco.”

Remo smirked. “Did you know your body temperature just started going up, Junior? Your pulse increased at the same time. Also, your forehead started sweating, you started doing a Rodney Dangerfield thing with your tie, and a little neon sign began blinking on and off above your head. It says, He’s Hiding Something, and there’s a big fat arrow pointing at you.”

Mark Howard tried to appear nonplussed but realized that he did so by darting his eyes from side to side.

He tried not saying anything and found himself facing down a slightly irritated, highly smug Remo Williams.

He wondered if Sinanju training included some sort of ability to stimulate a sense of extreme discomfort in selected victims or if that was Remo’s special talent.

“Long flight to Morocco?” Remo asked.

Mark nodded. “Hours. Point taken.”

“So? Fess up.”

“I’m supposed to accompany you and help keep the mission on track.”

“You’re my field handler now?”

“No, not—”

“Chaperone, then?”

“Well—”

“Whatever. I’ve got the picture.” Remo settled in his seat.

Mark and Remo had rarely seen eye to eye, but the relationship had improved over the first antagonistic couple of years Mark served with CURE. Remo had grudgingly accepted Mark as a valuable addition to the team, which meant he treated him with about the same level of disrespect as Dr. Smith. Mark knew Remo’s behavior—thought he did, anyway. He didn’t understand what was happening right now.

“You’re not going to kick me off the plane?”

Remo looked at him. “You want me to?”

“No. I thought you would.”

Remo shook his head.

Mark Howard hated being unsure of what was going on, especially with the Masters of Sinanju. They were, after all, the most awesome, deadly and powerful human beings on the planet. Even if they were on Mark’s team, he sometimes felt in deadly peril just being in the same room.

He wondered if he would ever figure Remo Williams out.

“Your forehead gonna sweat like that all the way across the Atlantic?” Remo asked.

The jet was a private transcontinental aircraft designed to get VIPs from one continent to another continent as soon as possible, in style. The pilot taxied quickly to a terminal where a bored-looking young man in ear protectors drove a set of motorized stairs to meet them. The young man chomped his gum and palmed the steering wheel of the stairs, going too fast and bumping into the aircraft a little too hard and too far to the right. When the flight attendant opened the door, the steps weren’t aligned with the opening.

She waved at the operator. The young man purposely looked in the opposite direction.

“Fix the stairs!” she shouted down.

The operator chomped his gum and watched a tiny corporate jet take off. The flight attendant shrugged and went back to doing whatever she did in the galley for hours at a time.

A small cart appeared from inside the private terminal and rolled across the tarmac, the driver flinching as if he expected to be slapped every time he hit an imperfection in the pavement.

Beside him, in a brilliant display of turquoise, was a robed Asian man at least eighty years old. He had a nearly bald head, with just a few threads of yellowing hair around his ears and on his chin. He had the characteristic eyes of a Korean, but his features were almost masked in the deep wrinkles of advanced age, and his flesh seemed too thin, as if the slightest bump or scrape might rip it open.

When the cart stopped at the bottom of the stairs, the old Korean stepped out and revealed himself to be short, almost tiny. A breeze rustled the fabric of his robe, and it was as if the wind might flutter him away like a paper scrap.

But the small ancient man didn’t go anywhere. He glanced at the stairs, glanced at the operator of the stairs and put his hands in the sleeves of his robe. He stood there, completely at ease, and waited.

The cart driver finished loading six lacquered chests into the belly of the aircraft and ran, not walked, to his cart, then steered it away as fast as its tiny electric engine would carry it.

The old man never moved.

“What’s he doing?” Mark Howard demanded.

“I see nothing.” Remo moved to a seat farther back in the cabin and read the air-sickness bag.

“Why isn’t he coming up?” Mark asked.

The stewardess emerged from the galley and peered down the steps.

“He need a wheelchair lift or something?” she asked.

“I think he’s insulted by the sloppy alignment of the stairs,” Mark explained.

“Insulted? I thought you guys were in a hurry.”

“We are. Get the pilot, please.”

Remo tried to ignore it all as the flight attendant demanded to know if Mark Howard was joking, then got the pilot, who phoned the tower, who phoned the terminal management office, who eventually radioed the supervisor of the operator of the stairs.

“Why don’t I just go down and carry him up myself,” the flight attendant demanded at one point. “He’s got to weigh less than my dog.”

“Ix-nay,” Remo muttered out the side of his mouth. “She’ll be ed-day.”

“No, better not,” Mark said. He was irked, yet fascinated by the composure of the man, Chiun, the Master of Sinanju Emeritus and trainer of Remo Williams. The small man was in fact, older than he looked—he was born more than a century ago—but he was also stronger than he looked.

The fact was, Chiun was stronger than anybody had ever looked.

The young man in the driveable stairs snarled into his walkie-talkie then angrily started the stairs, pulled away from the jet, stomped on the brakes to halt it, and yanked it into reverse. He backed it into place, and the alignment with the door was only slightly better.

“Still not good enough for you, old man?” the operator demanded, loud enough for Mark Howard to hear from the jet hatch.

Chiun hadn’t moved a muscle. His face hadn’t ticked when the vehicle came within inches of colliding with him. He hadn’t blinked when the young man spoke to him. He remained stationary, as if meditating and oblivious to the world around him.

The operator was grumbling under his breath. Mark Howard looked desperately at his watch. “We’re in a great hurry!” he called down.

Chiun smiled blissfully, as if awakening from a daze.

“Good day, Prince Howard. It is an honor to be in your presence this morning.”

“We’re in a great hurry,” Mark pleaded.

“Ah. It is your wish that I take the steps necessary to expedite our departure.” Cbiun regarded the stairs. “I shall gladly correct the cause of the delay.”

Mark Howard had a sinking What have I done? feeling, but they were in a hurry. He tried to decide if he should say anything more, but by then it was too late.

The Asian man strolled around the side of the stairs, to the small compartment where the operator was seated, and nudged the stairs with his sandaled foot.

The compartment caved in, crushing the operator’s abdomen at the same time the stairs scraped sideways several inches. The solid rubber tires left black skid marks. Mark Howard noticed that the stairs were now perfectly aligned with the jet hatch.

Chiun put his hands into his sleeves and ascended with the dignity of royalty.

“What’s all the shouting?” asked the flight attendant, who reappeared to see Chiun arrive and bow deeply to Mark. “Oh, my God, the man is hurt!” The flight attendant gestured at the sight of the wriggling, bellowing operator trapped by his crushed stomach in the driver’s seat of the stairs.

“We’re ready to go,” Mark told her.

“We can’t go now!” she protested.

“Somebody will come and help him. Let’s get going,” Mark insisted.

“But the stairs have to be moved!”

The small Asian man had a smile on his face that never wavered, but he seemed to kick back briefly with his foot. The flight attendant was sure she saw him do that.

Another thing she was sure of—at that moment, the mobile stairs rolled across the tarmac with a rattle of failing mechanical brakes and, going faster than they were ever designed to, crunched into the fireproof brick face of the terminal building.

“Oh, my God!” she wailed, trying to process what she had witnessed. The small kick. The crash. They couldn’t be connected.

The steps, eleven feet high, wobbled and fell over with a clang and more shouting from the operator, which blended with the cry of an ambulance cart’s siren.

“There you go. Medical personnel are on the way. They’ll take care of him,” Howard said.

“May we begin our journey now?” asked the old man who could not possibly have done what the flight attendant saw him do.

“Yes,” she said with a stiff smile. “Please take your seats.”

The old man took his seat across the aisle from Remo, and they taxied away from the mayhem as more emergency vehicles arrived.

“My son,” Chiun said as he settled in.

“Little Father. Nice trip?”

‘Travel is monotonous,” sighed the old man, peering intently out the window at the wing of the aircraft.

“Here’s a factoid that will put a sparkle into your day—these things aren’t reusable.” Remo held up an air-sickness bag. “Says so right here. ‘Dispose after use.’”

“It is good to see you reading, my son,” Chiun said.