When Harold Smith turned around, his light-washed face was ghastly, his eyes sunken. "Remo," he croaked. "At any time during this operation, did you happen to encounter an individual who in any way resembled Sam Beasley?"
"Sure," Remo said brightly. "But I wouldn't call him an 'individual.' He was a marionette."
Smith asked in a dead voice, "A what?"
"A robot. You know, one of those animatronic things."
Smith let out a leaky sigh of relief, closing his eyes as if he had narrowly avoided walking off a cliff.
"It was no machine," Chiun inserted testily. "It was Uncle Sam himself."
At that, Harold W. Smith fainted dead away.
Chapter 22
Dr. Osvaldo Revuelta was nervous. He did not understand what was happening. All he knew was that he was being whisked into the pages of history. To his destiny.
It had begun with a phone call. From the man known as "Maus," to whom he had reported his strange encounter with the thick-wristed Anglo and the elderly North Korean less than a day before.
"Be ready to move," Maus had said.
"Move?"
"Today is Beasley Day."
"I do not understand. What is this 'Beasley Day'?"
"You have loaned us your Ultima Hora."
"I loaned my soldados to Zorilla, the patriot."
"Zorilla is dead."
"It is sad. He was muy Cubismo, much Cuban."
"But you are more Cuban," the flattering voice had said. "You are Cubissimo, the most Cuban."
At that, Dr. Osvaldo Revuelta knew he was speaking to a comrade-in-arms.
The car whisked him to a pier, where a great cruise ship waited. The name on the stern was a well-known one. It read: BEASLEY ADVENTURE.
They took him up the gangplank, and two men in uniform escorted him to a stateroom. Their uniforms were white. Not army. Not navy. They bore simple insignia: three black circles in a white badge.
Somehow the men looked familiar.
"Do I not know jou?" he asked them.
"Si, " said one. And then Revuelta knew. They were Ultima Hora. His Ultima Hora. But they acted as if they no longer served him, but another.
"To whom are jou taking me?" he asked.
"To the Director."
"Director who?" he demanded, thinking that the CIA was run by a director. Perhaps they were secretly on his side, after all.
To that, they made no reply. Stone-faced, they escorted him to a cabin amidships and remained outside as he entered. It was incredibly hot in the cabin.
There was a figure seated behind a modest desk. He sat with his back to Revuelta, staring out a porthole at the blue sky. He wore some kind of a top hat. It looked black in silhouette.
"You are Osvaldo Revuelta?" the voice asked in a gravelly tone.
"Si."
"Soon to be President of Cuba?"
"Who says this?" Revuelta snapped.
The figure turned in the creaky chair. His whitemustached face came into the light. The man was old, his face a fist of kindly wrinkles. Osvaldo Revuelta noticed that he wore a white eye patch. He also wore a tall hat of red and white vertical stripes.
It was not a face Revuelta immediately would have recognized. Except that in the center of the eye patch was a black insignia. Three joined circles. The same as on the crew's uniforms.
That was all that was needed. "Jou are el Senor Uncle Sam!" Revuelta exploded. "But, Madre de Dios-jou are dead!"
The man stood up and assumed a grandfatherly pose. He wore a long frock coat. The cut of the coat seemed ancient. It, too, partook of the style of the American flag, Revuelta saw.
"You know," he said, in a chuckling tone that was at once professorial and folksy, "some people laughed when I broke ground for Beasleyland. But I knew what I was doing. I saw the future clearly. I knew what people want. They want escape. They want fantasy. And I gave it to them." He chuckled inwardly. "Simple as that. No secret to it."
"I do not understand how jou cannot be dead," Revuelta said, dull-voiced.
The old man went on, as if unhearing. "Vision. That's what it's all about. Vision. Take my work on radio-animatronics. Robots. An old idea. But I made it come to life. People thought I was cracked. 'Why spend the money?' they asked. 'Stick with rides,' they said. 'That's where the money is.' "
The caricature of Uncle Sam paused, and fixed Osvaldo Revuelta with his single good eye.
"You know who Paul Winchell is?" he asked.
Dr. Osvaldo Revuelta shook his head no.
"Ventriloquist. Used to be on TV. Had a dummy named Jerry something-or-other. Not the point. Winchell perfected a valve that to this day is used in artificial hearts. Not many people know this. Not many would believe it. But it's true."
"Si, I have heard of this. But what does this mean?"
The weird old man smiled under his frosty mustache. "I'm a futurist. Always have been. The problem with being a futurist is that you never live to see all your works bear fruit. So when they told me I had a bum ticker back in '65, I thought it was the end. But I wasn't about to give up. Not me. So I went to my Concepteers-that's what I call the people who work up my ideas-and put the problem to them. They're good people. At first, they wouldn't touch it. Out of our depth, they said. But when I fired the first few, the others got hopping. That was when I first heard the word 'cryogenics.' That's from the Latin. Means 'the science of super-cold applications.' They explained that if I was willing to be frozen alive in a liquid nitrogen bath, some day a cure for heart disease might be found, and I could be defrosted like a mackerel and fixed up good as new."
The old man chuckled reflectively. "At first I told them they were crazy. I'd rather be dead. Then one of them happened to use the phrase 'suspended animation.' Well, that rang a bell with me, as you might expect. So I said, 'Tell me more.' The more I listened, the more it made sense. I liked the idea. It had vision. But I'm not a man to wait. I said, 'I'll go along, but you people have to pitch in. Do your part. I can't wait for science. I have plans.' Good thing, too, because I keeled over a year later. Massive coronary. I never knew what hit me."
"Jou have been frozen all these jears?" Revuelta gasped.
"You got it."
"But-but there has been no cure for heart disease that I have ever heard of," Revuelta pointed out.
The figure in the Uncle Sam outfit opened his coat and shirt with a single gesture, exposing a wrinkled, hairless chest and a long purple scar over his sternum. He clumped out from behind the desk and stood on an ornate silver peg leg that ended in a rubber cap.
"Transplant?" Revuelta croaked.
"Have a listen," said the old man. Revuelta made a face. "Come on, I don't bite!"
Reluctantly, Dr. Osvaldo Revuelta approached the odd figure. He placed one ear to the scarred chest.
"I hear no beating," he said in a strange voice.
"Animatronics," said the old man in a proud voice. "I own the world's first completely portable artificial ticker. They say it'll keep me going long past my hundredth birthday."
Dr. Revuelta straightened.
"Jou have an animatronic heart?" he gasped.
"When Winchell finds out, he's going to hemorrhage through that stupid dummy's mouth."
And Uncle Sam Beasley laughed his familiar grandfatherly laugh. But to Revuelta's ears, it sounded cracked.
Chapter 23
Harold Smith's eyes snapped awake. They looked stark as they flicked from the open face of Remo Williams to Chiun's stern visage.
"You saw Sam Beasley?" he croaked.
Remo shook his head. "A pirate. It only looked like Beasley. He had a peg leg, for crying out loud!"
"No," Chiun insisted. "It was Beasley."
"Bulldookey," Remo said.
Smith said dully, "I fear Master Chiun is correct."
"What?"
"Help me to my feet," said Smith.
Remo obliged. Smith wobbled unsteadily on his feet. He leaned against the stainless-steel cryogenic capsule uncertainly.