"Begone and call me a taxi car. I will be down shortly. And I will expect my machine to be working again when I return."
* * *
The cabby had had stranger fares before— he thought. First there was this old Chinese character who came flying out of the hotel and as he bounded into the back seat, cried, "My son is ill, and you will take me to him instantly. I will pay you well for your speed."
"Okay, feller. Where is he?" He got the cab rolling.
"He is at a telephone, beside a place where they cook those disgusting meat things you creatures are always consuming."
"Say what?" asked the driver, who wondered what he'd landed by way of a fare.
"A burger thing."
"Oh, Burger Triumph. But which one? There's millions of 'em around these parts."
"The one on the road leading to Chickentown, due south."
"Chick— oh, Chickasha! That's good enough. We'll find him."
They found Remo seated with his back to a telephone booth. In front of him stood a huge roadside rubbish can overflowing with Burger Triumph wrappers, paper cups, and half-eaten cheeseburgers.
"Aiiee." The Master of Sinanju screamed when the cab pulled up to the booth and he beheld Remo semiconscious amid the litter.
Remo looked up with glazed eyes. Oddly, the glassiness made them look more alive than usual. He had seen so much death that it was as if his eyes had absorbed it.
"Little Father..." Remo mumbled. "I tried to get you by phone..."
"Never mind," Chiun snapped, looking from Remo to the overstuffed barrel. "You have outdone yourself this time, Remo."
"What's up? What's the matter with him?" the cabby asked.
"He has slipped back into utter degradation," Chiun said.
"Yeah, I can see that. Booze?"
"Worse."
"Worse?"
"Yes, he has gorged himself on filth. Forgetful of his heritage, he has reverted to whiteness."
"He does look kind of pale at that. If he's your son, that's pretty bad."
"He is not my son. He is a filthy white meat-eater who has violated centuries of tradition. And for what? For hamburgers. Remo, you must have eaten over a hundred hamburgers." Chiun's strident voice lapsed into puzzled plaintiveness. "Why, Remo? I thought you had passed that disgusting phase." Truthfully, this behavior made no sense. As part of his Sinanju training, Remo had long ago given up beef, and an unfortunate incident years ago in which he had almost died from eating a hamburger his metabolism was unable to accept cured him of any relapses to his pre-Sinanju days. In fact, Remo should be dead now, if those hamburger wrappings were any indication of his most recent meal.
"I am waiting for an explanation, Remo," Chiun said sternly.
"Not burgers," Remo mumbled thickly. "Arms and legs. Look."
"What?" Chiun asked.
"He said look at his arms and legs," the cabby said helpfully.
"I know what he said, white. Return to your car."
Chiun bent down and rolled back one of Remo's pants legs and saw the redness of the skin, which contrasted to the paleness of Remo's bare arms and face and made him resemble a comic-book Indian.
"These are burns, Remo."
"Right. Burns. Whole body burned."
"Your arms are not burned. Nor is your face." Chiun examined Remo's other leg. The skin was seared. Not deeply, but thoroughly— although in some places the redness was lighter. The hairs on Remo's legs were not singed, which was strange. Remo's chest was burned also.
Examining Remo's arms, Chiun found that the upper biceps were seared, but only those parts above the short sleeves of his T-shirt. Below, the skin was unaffected. The burns might have been abnormally severe sunburns, except that the exposed parts of Remo's body, which logically would be the ones to experience sunburn, were normal. It was just the opposite.
Chiun, who had lived more than 80 years and had confronted nothing he could not understand, felt something like a chill run along his spine.
"How were you burned, Remo?" the Master of Sinanju said urgently. "What did this to you?"
"Lights. Pretty lights. Shiny. Burns."
Then Remo's head fell forward as he collapsed. Chiun scooped him up into his arms as if Remo were a baby.
"Quickly," Chiun called back to the driver. "We must get him back to the hotel."
"Let me give you a hand, old timer," the driver started to say, but before he could move, the old Oriental straightened up with Remo held tenderly in his arms, and carried him back to the cab without any effort at all.
"I'm not gonna ask how you did that," the cabby said into the rearview mirror as he drove back to Oklahoma City.
"And I am not going to tell you," Chiun said as he ministered to Remo in the back seat.
* * *
"I don't understand what it is you are saying, Chiun," Dr. Harold W. Smith was saying through the new telephone Chiun had demanded be installed in his apartment "because some lunatic had ruined the old one."
"Then I will say it again," Chiun said across the scrambled line. "I found my son Remo burned as if by the sun. He is unconscious and cannot tell me what befell him."
"You called me because Remo has a sunburn?" demanded Smith with ill-disguised incredulity.
"No, I called you because Remo does not have a sunburn. He does not get sunburned, but if he did, I could deal with it. This sunburn-which-is-not is something new. Something I do not understand. He has one of those education burns."
"Education burns?" Smith, in his office overlooking Long Island Sound, hastily gulped two Alka-Seltzer tablets and water. Sometimes he longed for the old days in the CIA without Remo's flip attitude and without Chiun's language barrier.
"Yes, education burns. I have read of them. When a person is burned, the severity of those burns determines his education," repeated Chiun, who sometimes longed to be back in Sinanju, without Remo's lack of responsibility or Emperor Smith's inability to communicate in his own language.
"Oh," said Smith. "You mean as in first-, second-, or third-degree burns."
"Yes. Remo has the least of these. To an ordinary person, this would merely be an inconvenience, but Remo's essence is developed beyond ordinariness. He is now insensible."
"Will he recover?" demanded Smith, who knew that if something should happen to Remo, something serious, he would have to order Remo liquidated and then dissolve CURE, finally ending his own life. Chiun, who did not understand that exposure of CURE would be an admission that America did not work and therefore did not understand CURE, would quietly return to his village after he had killed Remo— which would be his task under those circumstances.
"Thanks to my healing skills, he will recover. I will make him recover whether he wishes to or not. Now he sleeps like a child— the child that he is."
Smith suppressed a relieved sigh. "That is good. How soon will that be? He is in the middle of an assignment."
"I know this," Chiun said abruptly. "What I do not know is what he met with which burned the skin beneath his clothes and which did not burn exposed flesh. This you must tell me."
"Wait one moment. You say his skin is burned. But not as it would be by sunburn, but instead exactly the opposite?"
"Yes. Opposite of reality."
"Just a minute," Smith said, as he pressed a concealed button on his desk and a hidden desktop computer console rose up. Smith keyed a description of the scientific phenomenon into the files of the computer's memory banks, and then punched in the circumstances Chiun had explained to him. The screen went blank, and the cursor raced across the screen like a spider, leaving behind the greenish words that were the answer Smith needed.
"I have it," Smith said. "Ultrasonics."
"Speak English," Chiun snapped.
"I said Remo was affected by ultrasonics. Sound pitched to a degree higher than human ears can perceive. This has been worked out to some degree in laboratories and in practical experiments. Focused ultrasonics have the property of creating heat between interfacing surfaces but don't affect surfaces not in contact with other surfaces. It fits exactly. Remo obviously entered an ultrasound field, which caused intense heat between his skin and clothes, enough to create an effect like a severe sunburn. Exposed skin wasn't affected unless it touched something else."