The lights were out all over the Tower. Still, in the dying light of the sun, they could see people in their apartments, some apparently oblivious to their situation as cosmic prisoners.
"Rumpp's office is on the twenty-fourth floor," Cheeta was telling the pilot.
"So?"
"Take us to that floor."
They began counting down from sixty-eight. When they reached twenty-four Cheeta said, "Go to the south side."
The pilot sent the chopper canting around. It twirled like a yo-yo in expert hands, then hovered in place. He said, "I don't see him."
"Who cares? Just fly in."
"Miss Ching?"
"Did you leave your balls at home? I said, 'Fly in'!"
"But we'll crash!"
"Like hell, we will," Cheeta said, grabbing the joystick. She sent the helicopter diving into the side of the Rumpp Tower like a flying buzzsaw.
The pilot's scream was no louder than the rotor noise. It just sounded that way.
Randal Rumpp was sitting with his back to the south facade, trying to put his pants on both legs at a time. Too many people had taken to saying that Randal Rumpp put his trousers on one leg at a time, like everybody else. Rumpp couldn't stand being compared to what he called "the chump in the street." As soon as he had mastered the trick, he would call in a news crew to film the myth-making technique.
Then it happened.
There was no sound. No warning. No nothing.
His first impression was of being swallowed by a monster bird with furiously whirling wings.
One second he was sitting at his desk, trying to draw his five-hundred-dollar button-fly pants over his monogrammed socks, the next he was enveloped in a fast-moving cocoon filled with people.
It happened in an instant. Enough time for him to dive to the floor. He rolled and rolled, wreaking minor havoc on his high-maintenance haircut. Only when he had gotten disentangled from his pants did he get a glimpse of something that made sense. Or almost made sense.
The sight of a helicopter's tail rotors, slipping into the wall separating his office from his assistant's, caused Randal Rumpp's eyes to go very round.
"Are they crazy?" he shouted. "I could have had a heart attack!"
He picked himself up off the floor, calling, "Dorma! Did you get the number of that chopper? I want to sue those jerks!"
There was no answer from the adjoining room. When he went to look, Randal Rumpp found the room deserted.
"I think that was him!" Cheeta was shouting.
"The guy we ran through?" the wide-eyed pilot demanded.
"Yes. Turn around. And turn on your lights."
The pilot obliged. Chin-mounted floodlamps kicked in, painting the corridors and rooms of the Rumpp Tower in blazing light as they passed through them.
"I don't understand this," the pilot was saying, in a voice that could have been coming through a tea strainer.
"Don't try," Cheeta said. "Just go with the flow."
"I gotta get my bearings."
"Get them fast."
The pilot brought the chopper to a hovering point, half in and half out of the main corridors. He was having trouble dealing with the situation, inasmuch as he couldn't see his own tail rotor and there was a potted rubber plant growing out of his crotch.
He sent the chopper spinning in place, until the nose was pointed back in the direction of Randal Rumpp's office. Cheeta Ching's screechy voice was in his ear again.
"Now, go slowly! I'll tell you when to stop!"
The pilot pushed the cyclic ahead. The wall came toward them, and every sense screamed danger. He forced his eyes to stay open as the wall pushed up against his pupils and he entered the wall.
There was a short interval of subatomic darkness, and they were in an anteroom.
"There he is!" Cheeta howled.
Randal Rumpp did not hear the helicopter approach. So when it emerged from the wall like a red-and-cream soap bubble, it took him by surprise.
"I'll sue!" he shouted, shaking his fists at the people in the bubble.
Then he recognized Cheeta Ching, superanchorwoman. The hottest media celebrity of the month, by virtue of the fact that a lucky sperm had penetrated last month's egg.
Rumpp forced his prim lips into a broad grin. He opened his fist and waved, in as friendly a manner as his ragged nerves would allow.
"Hi!" he said gamely.
Cheeta was waving back, all thirty-two teeth seemingly bared.
Randal Rumpp made an all-encompassing gesture with spread arms. "Ask me how I did it!" he shouted.
Cheeta's mouth made a What? shape.
"I said, ask me how I pulled off the greatest magic act since David Copperfield!"
Cheeta stuck her head out of the bubble. She was definitely talking, but there was no sound coming out of her red mouth. It was obvious to Rumpp that she couldn't hear him, either. No more than he could hear the helicopter blades as they slashed the still air of his office. Weren't those things supposed to kick up a little dust? There wasn't even a breeze.
Randal grabbed a pen and stationery off his assistant's desk and wrote ANOTHER RANDAL RUMPP TRIUMPH.
Cheeta ducked inside, scribbled on a notebook, then pressed the open page to the inside of the Plexiglass bubble. One word was visible: HOW?
Rumpp wrote in return: A MAGICIAN NEVER TELLS. He smiled as he held up the answer, because a video camera suddenly poked out of the side and was staring in his direction. He made sure his tie was on straight and the hair was over his ears evenly. Image was everything.
Then he remembered his pants. Rumpp looked down.
"Oh, shit!" He stepped behind his assistant's desk so the camera wouldn't pick up his hairy, exposed legs.
He wrote on the pad, I CALL THIS TRICK SPECTRALIZATION.
The pilot was saying, "I can't hover like this forever."
"Hold your pecker," Cheeta said. "I almost have my story."
"But you don't have any sound."
"For once, this is a time where no sound makes the footage. This is going to look sooo spooky on the air."
"It's pretty freaking weird right now," said Remo, who was feeling like a mere hitchhiker. He and Chiun were absorbing the unique experience of being in a helicopter hovering inside a skyscraper. After they had gotten used to the disorienting effects, Remo decided it felt stupid. Like being inside a video game. He wanted to step out, but even though his eye told him there was solid floor under the skids, everything he had witnessed indicated that to step out would be to fall twenty-four stories to the subbasement, and his death.
"Can you figure this out, Little Father?" he whispered. "He can't hear us and we can't hear him. But we're both making noise."
The Master of Sinanju was silent. His keen hazel eyes were darting this way and that, and Remo could tell by the set expression on his wrinkled face that he had no more idea what had happened to the Rumpp Tower than he did.
Eventually, the pilot could stand it no more.
"I'm outta here!"
He spared Randal Rumpp the novelty of being run through by a helicopter and sidled out through the eastern wall.
Once they had emerged into the night, their flood lamps making hot spots on adjacent buildings, Remo said, "Well, that was an experience we won't soon forget."
Cheeta smacked the pilot on the head and snapped, "You idiot! I wasn't through yet! Go back in there!"
"I vote we land," Remo said.
"This is a news helicopter, not a democracy!" Cheeta snarled, slapping the pilot again. "I order you to go back in there!"
The pilot, holding his head in one hand, sent the helicopter back toward the gleaming pinnacle that was the Rumpp Tower. He looked as scared as if he were about to jump into a bottomless hole in the earth itself.