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"Certainly. All I would need to do is plant electrodes inside your skull. Very simple really."

"Has anyone ever offered to plant his foot up your ass?"

Schulter sighed. "Very common response. Not unusual at all." He puffed rapidly on his cigarette, then leaned forward, picked up the cigarette box, turned it in his hand as if examining it and then replaced it precisely in the center of the table. He did the same with the lighter.

"Well, at any rate," he said. "I just thought I'd ask. What I'd really like is to get the flow of your brain waves under stimulation. Very simple really."

"What kind of stimulation?," Remo asked.

"Just photos flashed on a screen," Schulter said.

"Why me?" Remo asked.

"Why not? You're new here. I've done everybody else." Schulter vanished into a large cabinet at the other end of the room, and came out bearing a metal half-helmet and a film cartridge that he placed in the movie projector.

The metal helmet had a long cord attached to it, which Schulter plugged into a console panel on the other side of the room.

He flicked two switches and the round eye of an oscilloscope lit up with a hum at the top of the console.

"Helmet's an induction microphone really," Schulter said, handing it to Remo. "Instead of sound, it picks up tiny electrical impulses from your brain. They're visible on the scope," he said, pointing to the console, "and also on a paper tape. For record keeping."

Remo felt the helmet. He had seen one like it before. It had been lowered over his head when he was strapped into the electric chair at the New Jersey State Prison.

Schulter was still explaining. "You put the helmet on and watch the screen. Pictures appear, at prescribed intervals and the tape records the change in brain pattern from the stimulus. Quite harmless."

Remo shrugged and sat in the chair. Gingerly, he lowered the helmet over his head and looked up at the screen. Flashing through his mind was a ritual of Chiun's. Chiun would sit in the lotus position and hum, a single steady low pitched note, that he claimed drained the brain and body of tension. Remo suspected that it stimulated the frequency of brain-calming alpha waves, perhaps through the direct vibration of the jawbone against the brain cavity forcing the brain into producing them.

Schulter sat down at the console with his back to Remo. The oscilloscope was fully warmed now and its hum echoed through the room. Schulter flicked another switch and the film engaged. Remo cleared his brain of distractions and, tried to emulate the low, humming note that he had heard Chiun emit many times.

A picture lit up the screen. A field of flowers gentled by the breeze, birds flying overhead in the sky. A control film probably to get a typical rested reaction from the subject against which the others could be compared.

Remo hummed, his sound masked by the oscilloscope.

After twenty seconds, the flower scene gave way to a splash of red. The camera faded back and the red turned out to be a blotch of blood on the white-shirted chest of a dead man, his eyes open, his face grinning idiotically.

Remo hummed.

The next picture showed Communist Chinese methodically gunning down Korean villagers standing against a wall.

Remo hummed.

The fourth scene showed a child cringing and then a burly man slapping the little child, hard, hard enough to make the child's head snap back and forth.

Remo hummed.

Schulter flipped a switch and the projector stopped. Others switches turned off the console. The scientist stood up and looked at the long string of paper tape in his hands. Remo stood up and took the helmet off.

"Did I pass?"

Startled, Schulter looked up. "Oh, yes. Yes. Quite good, really. Highly stable."

Remo tried to leer. "Maybe you should have showed me some pornography. Whips and boots. You know. That might have helped."

Schulter's reaction was none at all. If the helmet had been on his head, there would have been no change. Pornography was just a word to him. He knew nothing. Nothing about pornography. Nothing about toy giraffes. Nothing about a wild-eyed, black-haired woman with boots and a whip.

"Perhaps we'll do the test again. Most often, it's best."

"Well, perhaps some other time, Doctor."

Schulter waved Remo out of the cottage, absently, still studying the paper tape. He looked up as Remo left, staring at the broad back of the chief of security. Remo was smiling. And humming.

If the time came, he thought, Schulter would be easy. A wiring switch on the helmet and a tragic laboratory acciA quite different sort of accident from the one which almost befell another Brewster Forum scientist, five minlater, at the hands of Remo Pelham.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

One inch and one-fiftieth of a second. Death had come that close to Anthony J. Ferrante, director of bio-feedback research at Brewster Forum.

Rerno had knocked at the white cottage door bearing Ferrante's name and pushed the door open when a voice called "come in."

The desk facing the door was empty when Remo entered. His eyes scanned the room looking for Ferrante.

Did he hear the sound? Or did he sense the infinitesimal change in pressure as an air mass moved toward his left ear?

Remo pivoted to the left on the ball of his left foot. His right foot extended behind him and his body dropped into a deep crouch, in time to see a hand flashing down toward him in a karate slash.

There was no time to think, no need to think. Thoughts of hours of training and practice had made defence automatic and retaliation instinctive. Remo's left hand flashed up to the side of his head to catch and deflect the blow on his wrist. His right hand had already retracted to his hip, and without stopping had fashioned itself into the classical hand spear and was moving forward toward the left kidney of the man Remo had not yet seen.

Remo's breath exploded in a violent cry of "ai-ee" as his iron hand flashed on toward its target. As it finished its deadly course, Remo felt, rather than saw, his opponent's hand stop on its downward path before making contact. The man had pulled his punch.

Attack is instinctive, triggered by the spinal column, its message bypassing the brain and moving directly to the muscles. But calling off an attack? That is an act of intellect, belonging to the brain, and the brain was not swift enough to stop Remo's hand, to relax the braided rope muscles of his arm, to soften the intensity of these gently curled fingertips which could smash cinder blocks into powder.

Remo's brain did the best it could in one-fiftieth of a second. It changed the course of his hand one inch. The hand spear slid over the hip bone of his opponent, past the vulnerable kidney, and crashed into a wooden coat rack standing alongside his assailant. Fingers hit wood with the crack of a china dish splintering on a stone floor. The top half of the coat rack paused drunkenly, then fell to the floor, its two-inch thick wooden support split cleanby the killing power of Remo's hand.

His opponent looked at the coat rack. Remo looked at his assailant for the first time and a saw a husky, middle-aged man wearing the classic judogi, a black sash wrapped low around his waist. He had a complexion like oiled olives. Dark rings surrounded his eyes, seeming even darker in contrast to his highly-glossed bald head. It was Ferrante.

Remo's left hand snaked out and snared Ferrante's right hand. His thumb insinuated itself into a ganglion of nerves on the back of the hand, just alongside the base of the index finger. The move brought excruciating pain and immediate submission.

The man screamed. "Stop it. I'm Ferrante." His eyes met Remo's in pained, embarrassed truth.

Remo squeezed once more, then released the hand. "What the hell does that make you? The mugger in res

"I wasn't going to hit you," Ferrante said, rubbing his damaged hand. "I just wanted to see how good you are. After yesterday." He looked at the fractured coat rack. "You're good."