They were coming fast.
“Hey, sonny, is your dad at home?” the younger one called.
Jack Fast stumbled through the door and dropped through the small shaft into the emergency escape pod.
“Just in case the cave dudes go ballistic, Pops,” Jack had explained weeks ago when he unveiled it.
“You’ll never catch me resorting to that contraption, Jack,” Fastbinder had said at the time.
“Rot in hell. Pops,” Jack grunted now as he slid into the safety harness, slammed the support cage shut and slapped the glowing emergency escape button.
The escape charges fired. The force of the ejection blast turned everything black for teenage genius Jack Fast.
Remo felt the pressure waves and slipped over the wall just as the base of the cliff building shattered. An orange burst of fire split part of the wall and revealed something metal behind it.
“What now?” he demanded of Chiun as they waited out the explosion, then he scrambled atop the wall in time to see the EEP reach the river. It was a metal cage that rocketed over the stony surface with a spray of sparks and slammed into the river beyond the dam.
“Mother of Murgatroyd!” Remo flew from the wall and sped after the pod. “I am so damn sick of your gizmos and gadgets and robots and supersecret pen decoders and whatever the hell this thing is.”
Whatever it was, it was a better machine than the river pods the albinos had used, constructed of a dully gleaming alloy. It compressed and sprang back when it glanced hard off a sharp rock ridge. It swayed in the current, creaked in protest against the shrunken orifice at the far end of the cavern, then deformed itself to slither inside the narrow slot that channeled away the combined water flow from all three rivers.
Remo came to a halt at the bank, too late. “He got away.”
Chiun came up behind him. “That river continues its descent. It will carry him deep into the earth.” Remo stared at the opening, thinking dark thoughts, fighting the urge to pursue Jack Fast. “Who knows what sort of gadgets he equipped himself with?”
“He had no earth drill, and this tunnel is unlike the others, Remo. It is a steep shaft. I think he’ll not walk out this way.”
Remo nodded tightly. “Not this way. But some way.” Chiun was standing calmly in the blazing overhead floodlights as his kimono emitted slivers of steam. His eyebrows moved together.
“What?” Remo asked.
Chiun was looking at the jumble of boulders that formed a narrow, long drainage gap for the heavy river flow. They were, the old Master noticed, of a nearly uniform size and shape. Could they possibly have been carved and placed by human hands?
He touched one of the corners. If man worked the block into this shape, then he did so long centuries ago, for the corner was smoothed by time.
He did not withdraw his hand, but touched the surface of the stone, smearing the coating of fungal slime. He found the tracing on the rock that the slime disguised, and he ran his ancient fingers over the hidden etchings until their shape became clear to him.
Chiun lifted his hand away quickly.
“I think there’s air space down there,” Remo said, squinting into the drainage gash. “Think I should go down after him?”
“No.”
Remo raised his head. “Something wrong, Little Father?”
Chiun cursed himself that he had let the quaver come into his voice. “I saw just one occupant of the pod,” Chiun pointed out. “It was only the mad brat, not the mad scientist himself. The brat is not coming back.”
“You’re sure of that, huh?”
“I am sure.”
“How come you’re sure?”
“Remo, should we not leave? You appear to have earned the enmity of an entire geographic race.” Chiun nodded to the albinos that were marching upriver. There were hundreds of them—more men, women and children were skittering out of openings in the rock like cockroaches swarming.
“Okay, let’s scram.”
They moved swiftly into the room with the overlook, where Jack Fast had been watching the city, and they found the escape tunnel. Slithering inside, they found it led to an empty crystal tunnel, whose walls gleamed magnificently, even under the light of a single glow stick. Nearby it intersected a natural entrance to the city cavern.
“Same crystals we found in New Mexico.” Remo said. “Let’s go.”
The tunnel followed a broad curve, then straightened into an upward slope. Something white and brilliant shimmered far ahead.
“That’s what you call an earth drill?” Remo asked. “Where’s the big screw on the front? Where’s the big engine? This thing’s—I don’t know what.”
“Pretty,” Chiun suggested.
“Yeah! This is a girlie earth drill, not a real man’s earth drill. ERB’s gotta be spinning in his grave.”
As they closed in on the thing, they could feel the sizzling heat and electricity of the lightning and Chiun suggested, “A girlie earth drill will be no challenge for a real man such as yourself.”
Remo watched the patterns of the static electricity and couldn’t find a-gap big enough to get through, although he could make out an oblong space against the rear hatch where the lightning didn’t touch. He just had to reach that place.
“This is gonna hurt,” he announced.
“Probably,” Chiun agreed.
Remo sprinted headlong into the flickering bolts of electricity, felt his body dancing with the fire and sizzle, and then he was flat against the rear of the earth drill. “Did it?” Chiun called. “Hurt?”
Remo scowled, extinguished his T-shirt here and there, then went inside the earth drill without answering.
Chapter 46
Jacob Fastbinder concentrated on what he was doing. He had never spent more than a few minutes behind JED’s controls, and it wasn’t as easy as it looked. Where was Jack’s main tunnel? It should be right here!
Then the wall opened up in front of the drill, and Fastbinder found himself inside an identical, well-used crystal tunnel. Now he could turn off the nerve- racking electric drilling mechanism and simply drive to the surface. He flipped off the charger and raised the dark glass from the windshield.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Remo Williams said, startling Fastbinder almost out of his skin.
“Who are you?” Fastbinder cried. “Oh, it’s you.”
“Yeah, it’s me, and I just fried my follicles getting inside of this glorified minivan, and now you turn the bug zappers off.”
“I—I don’t need it anymore,” Fastbinder said lamely, gesturing to the long tunnel that stretched out for miles in front of them.
“I see that,” Remo declared angrily.
“What will you do with me?” Fastbinder asked.
“Take you up with us,” Remo said.
“Why?” asked Chiun. Fastbinder was startled again by the silent appearance of the old man. “Let’s just kill him here and be done with it.”
“Nope. We’re taking him up with us.”
“Are all sons imbeciles?” Chiun asked of Fastbinder.
“What—what became of my son, by zee way?” Fastbinder asked, thinking he might actually have a chance of not dying today.
“He took some rocket-assisted carnival ride into the main drain,” Remo said. “Where’s that go, by the way?”
Fastbinder looked stricken. “I don’t know,” he said in a shallow voice. “We tried to probe it with tethered robots, but they kept getting mined.”
“Here’s what I’m getting at—think the little brat’s gonna find a way out of there?” Remo asked. “And FYI, I’ll know if you fib.”
Fastbinder’s eyes grew shiny. “Not even Jack,” he said hoarsely, “could come up from there.” Fastbinder sniffed and said, “I so wish I could have just died under zee deserts of New Mexico.”