"Looks like they died happy," Remo muttered, kneeling to feel their flesh. Warm, but cooling. "And they didn't die all that long ago," he added.
Chiun nudged a body with a sandled toe. "They died of the dunderbug disease?"
"Sure looks that way to me," said Remo. "Come on."
They found more bodies further along. They too had died sitting in the weeds eating to their heart's content.
"I guess that cinches it," Remo decided. "You eat the bugs raw and you die. It just takes a little longer to get some people."
They crossed the Schism Line to the Happy Harvester Hunting Grounds. There, the Harvesters were gathering thunderbugs, of which there seemed an inexhaustible supply, and dropping them into the simmering communal pot.
"Anybody know where Theodore is?" Remo called.
"Sometimes he flies with the eagles, and can be seen wheeling in the sky above," a buckskin-clad blond girl called back.
Chiun looked up and said, "I see only crows."
"Theodore Soars-With-Eagles would not be caught dead flying with crows," the blonde said unconcernedly.
"That was my guess," said Remo.
"Therefore, he must be in his wigwam, thinking wise thoughts," she added.
"I'd bet on the former, but I have doubts about the latter."
They found Theodore Soars-With-Eagles in his tepee, his warbonnet and toupee askew. They seemed to be of one piece. He had collapsed in a seated position, and only the tepee wall kept his balding head from slipping to the grass floor.
His eyes were rolled up in his head, and the whites were blue.
"Remo!" squeaked Chiun. "Look at his eyes!"
"I see them. They're all blue."
"This man is not yet dead."
"Yet?"
"He is dying."
Remo knelt and shook the man.
"Magarac, can you hear me?"
Theodore Magarac stared sightlessly at nothing. His thin lips began to writhe. "She came . . ."
Remo knelt to catch the dying man's words. "Who is she?" he asked.
"Eldress. She . . . did . . . this . . ."
"What did she look like?"
"Didn't . . . see . . . her."
Then he died. He had been breathing in and out shallowly. Then the air began coming out of his mouth and nose in a long, slow exhalation, like a balloon slowly deflating. Ten seconds after his lungs went flat, Remo and Chiun heard his heart skip a beat, then stop beating altogether.
"Gone," said Remo, coming to his feet. "And I don't see a mark on him."
The Master of Sinanju began looking around the inside of the tepee. They found a modest cache of junk food, three back copies of The Girls of Penthouse, and not much else.
Remo heard a crunching sound and lifted a foot.
"What did I step on?" he asked.
Chiun looked at a mushy spot on the rug.
"A bug."
"Musts been a loose snack," Remo said. "I don't see much here." He stepped out of the tepee and looked around.
The Harvesters were busily cooking thunderbugs. They seemed oblivious to the death of their leader. In fact, they seemed oblivious to everything but thunderbugs.
Grabbing a passing Harvester, Remo asked, "Anybody visit Theodore lately?"
The man frowned and brushed back his pigtails before speaking. "There was a woman at the tepee."
"How long ago?"
"Ten or fifteen minutes."
"See what she looked liked?"
"I only saw her back."
"How was she dressed?"
"Like an Indian."
Remo looked around at the Harvesters dressed in their buckskins and growled, "That narrows it down a heap."
Remo returned to the tepee.
"Guy says there was a squaw hanging around not fifteen minutes ago," he told Chiun.
The Master of Sinanju lifted a wizened claw. "Look what I found in the man's hand, Remo."
Remo looked. It was a carved rosewood box covered with ivory inlays and lined with white velvet. Otherwise it was empty.
"He clutched this as he died," said Chiun.
"Mean anything?"
"I do not know . . ."
"Well, someone murdered this guy."
"I see no marks on him," said Chiun.
"Yeah. But he's not wasted enough to be a HELP victim. Besides, he wasn't sick when we saw him yesterday."
"We will extract the truth from the others."
The Harvesters were only too happy to answer their questions, even with their mouths full. They couldn't seem to stop eating thunderbugs.
"Yeah, I saw her too," a youth in a mohawk haircut admitted. "But only from the back. She had on a nice dress."
"Ever see her before?" Remo asked.
"I don't think so," he said, picking black bug meat from between his teeth with a toothpick. "She's probably a Snapper."
"What makes you say that?"
"I don't know. It was just a feeling. But she wasn't a Harvester."
"That's right. She wasn't one of us."
"I got news for you," Remo told them. "The only difference between you and the Snappers is that they're dead from eating bugs and you're not. Yet."
"Only Snappers catch HELP. And if they are dead, it is because Gitchee Manitou had decreed it. We will give them a proper burial once we are full of his children."
Remo asked, "If only Snappers catch HELP, what killed Theodore Magarac?"
"Who?"
"The Latvian Chinchilla. We just found him keeled over in his wigwam, scalped."
Assorted confused expressions crawled over the faces of the Harvesters. Disbelief won out in the end.
"Theodore Soars-With-Eagles is eternal," one shouted.
"Yes. Gitchee Manitou would not take him from us on the eve of a Chinchilla rebirth," insisted another.
"It can't hurt to look," prompted Remo.
The blonde in buckskin did look. She pulled aside the tepee flap and let out a screech.
"Brother Theodore is dead!" she cried.
Between mouthfuls, others took up the cry. "Oh, this is terrible!"
"Woe, we are leaderless!"
"The last of the proud Chinchillas has gone to the Happy Hunting Ground. It is the end of an era."
Through their plaintive cries, they kept stuffing bugs into their mouths.
"It might be a good idea to lay off the bugs until we know exactly what killed him," Remo suggested.
"We know what killed him."
"Yes, it is the hole in the ozone layer, created by the white man's inhuman progress."
"What if it was the bug?" Remo countered.
"Heresy. Don't let Gitchee Manitou hear you slander his powerful but humble creatures."
Remo looked at the thunderbugs as they were dropped into the boiling pot water. They immediately curled their inchlong bodies into tight brown balls, as if death relieved the tedium of their mundane existence.
"One last question," he said. "Ever hear of someone called the Eldress?"
No one had. Then someone remembered that in the days before the Great Schism, Brother Karl Sagacious spoke of the prophet he referred to as She.
"She?" said Chiun.
"That is the only name Brother Karl gave to her. We think it is one of the goddesses of his Greek ancestors."
"Sagacious was no more a Greek than I am," Remo said.
"You are too pale to be a Greek."
"Greeks were as pale as Americans," said Chiun.
"Pale as African-Americans, you mean."
The Master of Sinanju turned to Remo and undertoned, "These people are demented, Remo."
"Must be something they ate," Remo said, eyeing the contentedly boiling thunderbugs.
No one appeared to be lying-their pulse rates and respiration cycles were audible to both Remo and Chiun, and neither betrayed telltale nervousness-so there was no point in extracting any more information by force. Remo took Chiun aside and said, "Something's going on here. First the Snappers keel over, and now Magarac."
"These ones do not appear ill. Only hungry. Do they never stop eating?"