The familiar figure of Tammy Terrill appeared, clutching a microphone in her white-knuckled hands.
"Heather, official Washington is being stonily silent on this latest event in the looming insect crisis, but officials with the U.S. Department of Agriculture are issuing heated denials that they are behind the outbreak of vicious insects."
"How are these denials being met, Tammy?" the news reader asked.
"With skepticism. I myself have been investigating this threat for, oh, almost thirty-six hours now, and I don't believe a word of it. They're hiding something. Just like on 'X-Files.'"
The anchor nodded in agreement, adding, " 'X-Files' rules. And it's on Saturdays now."
"Cool," chirped Tammy.
In his recliner, the farmer was also nodding. "See? Proof positive."
"That's no proof!" exploded Remo. "It's just two media dips throwing wild speculation into the air to see where it will land."
"It landed," the farmer said miserably, "in my corn."
"Look, I'm serious about looking into this. Can you tell me why some farms were stripped clean and others untouched?"
"Any fool can plainly see the why in that!" the farmer exploded.
"Well, I'm a fool from New Jersey. Humor me."
The farmer got up. He was taller than Remo expected. He walked with a stoop to his porch. There didn't seem much fight left in him, so Remo followed him out.
Standing out in the fading sunlight, he waved a plaid arm as if to encompass all of Iowa.
"What you're looking at is the first crop of the new Super Yellow Dent corn. Fool geneticists said it would resist corn borers, worms, cockleburs, you name it. Nothing could touch it. Nothing could lay it low. I paid a third more for that seed as any corn I ever bought. The slickers who sold it to me said the only thing that could kill it was drought. Now look at it. Bugs buzzsawed through it like no one's business."
The man whipped a red handkerchief out of the back pocket of his overalls and wiped his eyes on both sides. There was no moisture there. Remo figured the farmer had already cried himself out.
"I'm sorry this happened to you," Remo said simply.
"I got took. That's all there is to it. I got took for all I had. Super Yellow Dent is supposed to give off an odor that was poison to any pest known to prey on corn. Instead, it seemed to have drawn a worse pest than anyone ever heard of."
"Maybe it wasn't the corn."
The farmer expectorated noisily. "Oh, it was the corn, all right. And I can prove it. You can, too."
"How's that?"
"Take a survey of all the cornfields out this way. The ones that got hit grew Super Yellow. The ones that got off soot-free was ordinary corn. Golden Dent. Boone Country White. Champion White Pearl. Silver Mine. Early Huron. You name it. Everything except Super Yellow Dent, the savior of the corn farmer." The farmer spit a second time angrily.
The Master of Sinanju appeared at that point. He was carrying an ear of corn before him, carrying it by the corn silk, as if it were a distasteful yellow dropping.
The farmer straightened with a start of surprise. "Who in hell is that?"
"My colleague," said Remo.
"Looks more like a refugee from Chautauqua Week, you ask me my opinion."
"Behold, Remo," exclaimed Chiun, lifting his prize high.
"It's an ear of corn. So what?"
"See how it has been chewed on one side and not the other?"
Remo took the ear. It was chewed on one side. The other side showed rows of tiny kernels, each one indented as if nicked by a cold chisel.
"Looks like the stuff that survived had the moisture sucked out of it," Remo remarked.
"You idjit!" the farmer bellowed. "Don't you know corn? That's Dent corn. Them indentations are perfectly natural."
"I never saw corn like that," Remo said defensively.
"That's because Dent corn is purely cattle feed. You boil and bite that stuff, and it'll crack your teeth apart worse than Indian corn."
"Oh. What do you make of the fact the bugs ate only one side?"
"A freak of nature. That's what I make of it."
Chiun shook his head firmly. "Many ears show such signs."
The farmer took the ear from Remo, examined it with methodical interest, then stepped off his porch into the field.
He foraged about until he had picked up a double handful of corncobs. Every example had been stripped on one side and one alone.
"This is powerful fascinating," he muttered.
"Mean anything to you?" asked Remo.
"I could be wrong," he said, looking at the corn and not them, "but I would swear these ears were all chewed at from an easterly direction. The western sides are just fine."
"So what does that mean?" asked Remo.
"It means the pestiferous critters or whatever they were that ripped through my corn were headed away from the hellish place that spawned them, namely Washington."
"There is something else," said Chiun.
"What's that?" asked Remo.
"The corn has been chewed but not consumed."
"Can't be," the farmer snorted.
"Why not?"
"Insects don't chew through corn for purely mischief's sake. They need to eat. I don't know what new species of bug committed this travesty, but I do know it needs to eat. And if it ripped up my corn without eating any, that means but one thing I can think-"
"What's that?" asked Remo.
"It ain't no insect made by God, but something else entirely."
Remo looked to the Master of Sinanju. Chiun beamed back at him. "Perhaps it was a not-pest," he said to the farmer but really for Remo's benefit.
Neither the farmer nor Remo knew what to make of the Master of Sinanju's comment, so they said nothing.
From the farmer's house, Remo called Harold Smith.
"Smitty, we don't have much, but here it is. Looks like every farmer that was hit grew a new kind of pest-proof corn, called Super Dent."
"Super Yellow Dent. Get it correct," the farmer's voice called from outside.
"Super Yellow Dent. According to a farmer who was hit-"
"And don't call us farmers. My pappy was a farmer. His pappy was a farmer. I'm an agribusinessman. I can not only say it, I can spell it, too."
"-this stuff was the only corn that got hit. Everything else survived. You should check it out," finished Remo.
"That is very odd, Remo."
"Also, I think we need to drop our USDA covers," Remo added in a lowered tone of voice.
"Why is that?"
"Tammy Terrill and Fox are painting the USDA as the fountain of all evil. I had to take a doublebarreled scattergun away from the farmer I just questioned before he could perforate me with it."
"I will look into the supercorn theory, Remo."
"Add this to the mix," Remo said. "According to Chiun, the things that leveled the cornfields out here chewed but didn't swallow. And they traveled from east to west. Only the eastern sides of the cobs are stripped clean."
"What kind of insect is attracted to a plant and does not eat it?" Smith asked.
"Search me. Maybe one that's bred to wreck crops."
"Pesticide-resistant crops, in this case," Smith mused.
Dead air filled the line for too long, so Remo asked, "Anything on the dead talking bee?"
"The USDA laboratory is working on the corpse right now. I hope to have something soon."
"Okay, where next?"
"The FBI has generated another profile. It paints a portrait that fits only one individual my computers can find-Helwig X. Wurmlinger. It is time you paid that visit to his laboratory."
"There goes my date ...."
"You are dating again?"
"Yeah," said Remo defensively. "Why are you surprised?"
"Because you did not request a background or marital-status check from me this time."
"That's right. I didn't. I guess I have a good feeling about this one."
"You said that about the last three."