Chiun was a wonder. He was on his feet and looked regal somehow, despite all the chaos. An airborne slab of tom steel plating, half a ton at least, ripped off a wrecked fabrication machine and caromed at Chiun, only to be deflected as if it were an inflated toy. His eyes, all the while, were on Remo. Smith knew he was trying to determine if his protégé was wounded.
At the end of the few seconds of tape, both the Masters looked directly into the screen and redirected pieces of flying metal into it, putting an end to their brief television appearance.
“Fast hit them with everything, all at once,” Mark guessed. “The proton charge took them off guard so he could get a few good seconds of video, and he retransmitted it in real time.”
“Go back to the first frame,” Smith said. The still image of a rocky, sandy rooftop came back, with various discarded junk around it. Smith tapped the far right-hand corner. “Enlarge this corner.”
The image enlarged but the details were still sharp. They began getting fuzzy when the image enlarged to sixteen times normal, but that was enough.
“What is that thing?” Mark asked. They were seeing what looked like a circular stepped device that was mounted on a framework of aluminum rails. “It’s gotta be more than two yards around.”
“Electromagnet,” Smith decided. “These aluminum shafts are arms of a positioning device. I’m betting there are some big generators, big electric motors and a very powerful proton field generator. At the moment the camera breaks through, the proton device channels all the electricity it can generate into the motors.”
“Yeah,” Mark agreed. “They’d have to move as fast as hell. Wouldn’t matter if they were burned out fast. Their useful life’s gotta be less than a minute. Dr. Smith, when the second proton charge happened, Remo and Chiun wouldn’t have been able to defend themselves.”
Smith found himself thinking of the two Chiuns— the frail, crippled old man and the powerful Sinanju Master who swept steel slabs out of his way. Would he ever see the Sinanju Master again?
Chapter 35
Dr. Harold Smith couldn’t divest himself of the image of the crippled, weak Chiun. Years ago, when the two men met for the first time, Chiun was already elderly. Now both of them qualified as senior citizens. Smith had caught up and surpassed Chiun.
It occurred to him why he was so bothered by the image of Chiun he had seen in the video. For just a couple of seconds, Chiun had become the old man that Smith was—arthritic and frail.
As the hours of the long night passed, he found himself distracted more by the idea that if it had been him in that room, he would have succumbed instantly under the meteor shower of scrap metal. If Chiun had been weakened to such a state during the barrage, even for a second, he would have been pummeled into oblivion.
“Hey, Smitty.”
Smith started violently out of his reverie to find Remo, standing at his desk, disheveled but unhurt. Chiun stood nearby, hands in his sleeves and just as composed as he ever was. He was still wearing the kimono from the video, but it looked unblemished.
“Remo! Chiun!” Mark Howard exclaimed as he rolled through the doors in his wheelchair.
“Mark,” Remo said. “Harold.” He tipped an invisible hat to Dr. Smith. “What’s everybody all excited about?”
“Remo, why didn’t you report in?” Smith asked, his shock becoming a slow-boiling anger.
“Why should I? You said come right back, remember? Quick jaunt to New Mexico, back in time for breakfast? Well, it’s not quite 7:00 a.m.” Remo looked at the invisible watch on his freakishly thick wrist, gave an exaggerated nod and showed the wrist to Smith. “See? Besides, there was nothing you could have done anything about.”
“That’s not exactly true, is it?” Smith asked sourly.
“I insisted that we call before boarding the aircraft,” Chiun sang out.
“You did not,” Remo said.
“My wisdom was spurned, Emperor.”
“What’s going on, Smitty?”
Smith found himself physically fighting to. contain an outburst. It seemed he was always fighting it now— the urge to lay into Remo for his long list of indiscretions and lack of professional behavior. But now was not the time. Right now CURE needed to work as a team. In fact, CURE needed to fight for its survival.
“We’re in crisis. You, both of you, figure into it,” Smith said. “Show them the video, please, Mark.”
Smith munched antacids while Remo and Chiun watched the New Mexican video. Smith expected Chiun to be livid at this invasion of his privacy, and Remo would likely make some remarks about having movie-star qualities—but they let an uncomfortable silence hang in the air when the video was done.
“We’ve been worried,” Mark said. “We didn’t know if there was a second proton discharge and what had happened if there was.”
“What else? What’s the President got in mind?” Remo looked to Smith, who was clearly fatigued and allowed Mark Howard to bring them up to speed on the reappearance of Senator Herbert Whiteslaw.
“Wait, I don’t get it. He wants the President to withdraw from the race? What good will it do Whiteslaw?”
“The President’s party will have to field an alternative candidate, but they’ll be sure losers if the President retires under the shadow of some unspecified scandal,” Mark said. “If Whiteslaw convinces his own party to withdraw its candidate for supposed health reasons and run Whiteslaw, the heroic recent assassination-attempt survivor, they’ll have a strong chance of winning the election.”
“What? How? How does that make them qualified for the presidency?” Remo asked. “Don’t answer that. It was a stupid question. Everybody knows you don’t need qualifications when you’ve got some good tricks up your sleeve.”
“Exactly,” Chiun trilled. “The tides of popularity ebb and flow and affections of the ignorant masses may be twisted around the fingers of a clever man. Is that not so. Emperor?”
“I suppose so,” Smith said.
“The last election of a puppet president was a circus of fools, was it not?”
“That’s not a fair example of how our democracy works. Little Father,” Remo said.
“Do you have a better example in mind, such as the election of the Terminator Who Took California?”
“That’s not a good example either.”
“The truth, my son, is that this country does not even have the courage to behave like a true democracy, as the last farcical presidential election proves,” Chiun lectured. “In a democracy the citizens cast their votes for a leader, and the man with the most votes is the winner. In this country, the one who leads the people was the popular loser! That is not democracy as the Greek idiots defined it, Remo Williams.”
“Even the Greeks didn’t do it exactly right, Chiun,” Remo protested. “You had to be a citizen to vote, and you weren’t a citizen unless you were a pure-blood male Greek landowner with a minimum of fourteen goats. Something like that, right?” He looked to Smith for confirmation. Smith looked weary, but he nodded. “Besides, we don’t claim to be a pure democracy. We’re a democratic republicancy. Or something.”
“It is a fraud,” Chiun said, shrugging.
“We elected a president, didn’t we? We’re doing it again, aren’t we? Better than letting the local warlord take over.”
“Have you noticed the billboards and the radio snippets and the television commercials? Chopped bovine sandwiches are sold in the same way as the presidential contenders. They call this an advertising blitz.”