"That's him," Remo told Chiun aloud. "Gonzalez. The other garbage man."
"I thought you might know each other," the high commander said triumphantly. "Spies often do. Perhaps you cooperate more than he does." She gestured contemptuously toward the tortured Gonzalez.
The telephone rang. She picked it up languidly with an obviously bored expression on her face, but then began to speak animatedly. When she hung up, she was smiling.
"Aha. Yet more spies come. Is capitalist CIA trying to open Moscow office?"
"What more spies?" Remo asked. He felt his right fingertips twitching. The guards who ringed the room noticed, and they tightened their grips on their rifles.
"Will you stop tap dancing?" Chiun hissed. "It will be the final obscenity of your life to get me killed by twitching."
"What more spies?" Remo repeated.
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"A plane full of them has landed. They will be here any minute." The buzzer on her desk sounded, and she picked it up, said "Da" and then told the room, "They are here now."
Remo turned to look at the door, which swung open. Dr. Frances Payton-Holmes was led in by armed guards. Behind her was Ralph Dickey, her assistant. But he was wearing a pilot's uniform. Why? Remo wondered. And Dickey seemed somehow wrong. Remo looked and saw that the young man's fingernails weren't polished. And he was walking straight, his hips hardly moving, totally unlike Ralph Dickey's mincing walk.
The troop of soldiers and prisoners stopped. Dickey looked at the woman behind the desk.
He smiled and said, "Hello is all right."
"It's him!" Gonzalez shouted, his watery eyes strained in their deep and tortured hollows. "That's what he said before he killed Lew. 'Hello is all right.' The robot!"
Everything happened fast. The strange, mechanical-sounding man crossed the office and was on the emaciated Gonzalez. With a quick snap, the prisoner's neck broke, and he slumped to the floor.
Mr. Gordons's next move was to lunge toward Remo. Since his haywire nervous system was compelling him to practice the breast stroke at the time, Remo tried to dodge Mr. Gordons's unexpected attack. He couldn't.
Instead, his handcuffed arms shot out in perfect competitive form and connected with Mr. Gordons's outstretched hand, slicing off the robot's
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arm at the shoulder. Mr. Gordons froze in his tracks. The arm dangled for a moment from his body, a mass of wires and shiny electrodes. His eyes, fixed and glassy, stared straight ahead, unblinking.
There was an audible gasp from the O-mouthed high commander as the metal arm clanked to the floor. At the same time, a loud, piercing shriek issued from across the room.
"Stop," the professor screamed, her arms flapping wildly while she ran to embrace Mr. Gordons.
Chiun buried his face in his hands. "The shame," he muttered. "You were completely off center. An arm. How disgraceful. Even with these restraints."
But Remo wasn't watching Chiun. He was focused on the man he thought was Ralph Dickey, who was standing immobile in his captain's hat, his inner metal workings exposed. And he remembered. Another time, another fight, a mechanical man who could change shape and form at will, an enemy Remo had thought was vanquished.
"Mr. Gordons," Remo said softly. "He's back."
The high commander snapped her head toward the professor. "What is this thing?" she said slowly, more a threat than a question. She poked a probing finger into Mr. Gordons's eye. Her fingernail produced a little click as it tapped Mr. Gordons's glass eyeball.
"I ask what this is."
The professor said nothing.
"Level your weapons," the commander instruct-
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ed the guards in the room. Instantly they dropped to firing position around the inert Mr. Gordons.
The professor looked around frantically. "You're not going to—"
"Aim."
"Stop. Don't shoot. He's the LC-111." The professor's hand flew to her mouth as she stifled a sob. "My baby," she said.
The high commander took a tentative step forward to examine the one-armed statue. "Is true?" she whispered, her face barely able to contain her
joy.
"It's true." The professor wearily explained Gor-dons's transistorized workings, opening his shirt to reveal a sliding panel covering an array of sophisticated circuitry. "His motor functions are in his arms. That's why he's not moving."
The high commander smiled slightly. "I am surprised, professor. I know how you feel about Communists. Why you stop my guards from destroying this machine? If it no work, we no can steal principle of precious NASA computer."
The professor picked up the fallen arm from the floor and placed it into Mr. Gordons's shoulder. "Because to me he's more than a NASA computer," she said. She twisted a couple of wires together to keep Mr. Gordons's arm in place. "I'll need time to repair him."
The high commander laughed. "Oh, you have plenty of time. You will show us everything about your LC-111."
"Commie dyke," the professor grumbled.
"Put them all in cells," the high commander
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1
said. "And get rid of this body." She pointed toward Gonzalez.
As the guards moved in, the dead eyes of the unmoving android rolled into focus for a brief instant. His jaw creaked open a crack. He uttered one muffled word.
"Mom."
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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
As soon as they were put into the cell, Chiun ripped the handcuffs off his wrists. Then, with a flick of his fingers, he snapped the cuffs on Remo's wrists into a million metal shards that tinkled as they hit the floor.
Chiun's fingernails tapped the steel and concrete walls of the cell. It was a strange cell, with no bars and no fixtures of any kind. A buzzer beside a small intercom was the prisoners' only contact with the rest of the prison, except for an inch space between one wall connecting the cell with the next. Through the inch clearance could be seen odd tracks, like those of sliding doors. On the ceiling a large circle was cut to let in air and artificial light.
"Well, what now?" Chiun said. "You have managed to have us arrested, break your computer's arm with one of the sloppiest attacks ever ex-
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ecuted in the history of Sinanju, and make a fool of yourself in the process/What now?"
"He's not the LC-111," Remo said. "That's Mr. Gordons, that damned robot that we killed twice, and he's still alive."
Chiun stared at him, unimpressed. "You are in wonderful condition to fight him now," he said sarcastically. "Perhaps you can get him to die laughing."
"Gordons. My little baby Gordons," the professor wailed from behind the cell wall.
Remo tapped on the wall. "Professor, are you there?"
"Why, yes," she said. "Are you the nice boy from Washington?"
"Yeah," Remo said.
"Got a drink?"
"No."
"Commie pinko. My baby," she cried. "My baby Gordons."
"Your baby Gordons just killed a man. And he tried to kill me," Remo said.
"Tsk, tsk," the professor muttered. "He's got such a temper. He came over here to kill you, actually. I tried to talk him out of it, but once he's made up his mind, he's really determined," she said indulgently. "He really didn't want to kill that other fellow, I don't think. He's just very touchy about people calling him a robot. He wants to be human, sweet thing. Gordons is so neurotic about that. Now I don't know where they've taken him."
"He's a survival machine," Remo said. "Hell be aU right."
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"So he tells me. I hope you won't take it personally."
"We never take killing personally, madam," Chiun said.
"I take it personally," Remo said. "I come to help you find your computer, only you give me the runaround while you fool around with that garbageman, who, incidentally, turns out to be dead...."