The man shook his head.
"And you've done nothing but answer questions?"
"Nothing for the lab. My private life is my private life."
"Tell me about it," said Remo.
"I don't have to."
Remo tweaked the man's ear. The man thought if Remo wanted to know things that much, he would tell him. He was a lab assistant. His girlfriend had asked for some supplies. The man stemmed the flow of blood at his ear with a towel.
"And is your girlfriend Sheila Feinberg?"
"Are you kidding? Feinberg was built like a slab of sheet rack to her shoulders, Mount Rushmore above the chin. She was so homely, I hear electric vibrators rejected her. She had a face like a prune made ugly."
"What do you make for your girlfriend?"
"Anything she wants. She's got a set on her that would make a Jesuit burn dictionaries."
"Like what?"
"Well, we call it insulator. It's a chemical compound like gelatin that retards temperature changes in anything it surrounds."
"I see," said Remo, who felt there was something here that wasn't as innocent as it sounded.
"Now to serious business," said Chiun. "Where do you keep your magical dematerializers?"
"Our what?"
"Your wondrous devices that go round and round and make things out of other things?"
The man shrugged.
Chiun noticed a container of milk on the man's desk. It sat near a ball of cellophane.
Chiun's long fingernails came out of his kimono. He opened the milk carton wider. He poured the milk into an empty bowl on one of the laboratory tables, then swirled his finger around in the milk.
Gradually the bottom of the glass bowl appeared to hold water, and the top cream.
"It does that by magic instead of by hand," Chiun said to the laboratory assistant.
"My God, you're a walking centrifuge," the man said, amazed.
"That's the word. Centrifuge. The great mystery of the centrifuge that, with a flick of a switch, can do what the hand does. We never understood back home how you do it."
"With your bare hands, you did what a centrifuge does. That's incredible. How can hands separate elements?"
"You just do it. Let the fingers do it. How does the centrifuge do it?"
"By laws of science."
"Genius of the West," exclaimed Chiun. And then he watched the man do it with that wondrous device. No, the man said, they did not give away their centrifuges.
Perhaps, suggested Chiun, they could barter for it.
"What could you give me?" the man asked.
"Perhaps there is someone plotting to take your position?" asked Chiun craftily.
"As a lab assistant? It hardly pays enough to eat on."
"Little Father," Remo whispered to Chiun. "You know it is tradition that the House of Sinanju will not serve two masters."
"Shhhh," said Chiun.
"What sort of answer is that?"
"Shhhh."
"You can't do it," Remo said.
Chiun looked at the centrifuge. You could put any liquid you wanted into it and most often take out two different colored liquids. Sometimes three.
It was, and this was most obvious to anyone with any sort of reasoning power, not being used at the time. By anyone. The lab assistant didn't need it. He was only a servant in this place. Servants were notorious for betraying their masters.
And most importantly, this Remo had to understand, the servant could not possibly have enemies important enough to interfere with Remo and Chiun's service to Emperor Smith. By that, Chiun meant, they could avenge any slight being done to this poor servant and walk out with the centrifuge right now.
What could beat that?
"Not betraying the tradition of Sinanju," said Remo.
Because Chiun knew Remo was right and because Remo had exposed that he was, at this moment, more true to Sinanju than Chiun himself, Chiun said he would forget the centrifuge. But not because of what Remo had said.
"Good," said Remo.
"I will forget the centrifuge because you couldn't possibly understand how I could accept it and still be one with tradition. You are not ready for that yet. You are still young Shiva, young Destroyer, young night tiger, and as a cub there is much you do not know."
"I know we're not supposed to be making hits for this guy when upstairs pays our freight."
"You know nothing," said Chiun. "And you have helped me. I will write my romance about a teacher who gives everything, everything to his pupil and in return is denied a crust of bread."
"Are you two guys really from Agriculture?" asked the lab assistant. "I mean it's just a centrifuge. You can buy one."
"I send all my money home to feed a starving village," said Chiun.
"Too bad," the lab assistant said.
"You feel no sense of sorrow for me?" Chiun asked.
"I got my own problems," said the lab assistant.
And so angered was Chiun that such a decent person as himself should suffer without sympathy, that when the lab assistant said he had his own problems, Chiun offered: "Have another," and delivered a double hernia to the brute. The man rolled on the floor in agony.
"I think we needed him," said Remo. "He's pretty useless now. He's going to have to go to the hospital now. We really could have used him. We needed him."
"It does not strike me as all that strange," said Chiun, "that you are most aware of your own needs when others' needs go unmet. Not strange at all."
The lab assistant's legs came up in fetal position. His hands gripped his groin. He made big weepy noises. Guards ran in. They had heard the sound.
"He fell," said Remo.
The guards saw the man in incredible pain. They looked at Remo and Chiun suspiciously.
"Very hard," said Chiun.
"He... he..." groaned the attendant, but could not finish his sentence because of the pain and did not have the strength to point to Chiun as the perpetrator.
Chiun, having suffered nothing but insensitivity at the hands of that man, turned away. There was no one who was going to force him to tolerate such behavior.
"That's two, Little Father," said Remo. "Come on."
"By that, am I to assume that the guard outside was not discourteous and this vicious animal here was not insensitive?"
"You two. What happened?" asked a guard.
So as not to be disturbed by the guards, Remo spoke in what Korean he knew. He told Chiun the last link between the woman they looked for and this laboratory had not yet been broken.
Chiun asked how Remo knew.
Remo explained that just because they happened to be girlfriends of lab assistants, girls did not go around asking for scientific materials. And lab assistants didn't just give such things away. That was ridiculous.
"Not that ridiculous," Chiun answered, looking at the centrifuge.
"Take my word for it, ridiculous," said Remo in Korean.
"What are you two talking about?" asked the guard.
"Centrifuges," said Remo.
"Don't believe you," said the guard. "Let's see your identification again."
This time there was a close examination of the ID cards.
"Hey. These are ten years old," said the guard.
"Well, then, take my universal identification, accepted everywhere in the world without question," said Remo. He snapped back the two cards with his left hand and with his right patted two finger pads into the temple above the guard's left ear. He went to sleep like a baby.
The other guard said that looked like really good identification to him. Super identification. Best identification he had seen anywhere from anyone. No wonder it was accepted everywhere in the world. Would the two gentlemen like anything from the labs?
"Since you offered," said Chiun.
By the evening news, announcers had brought the Chromosome Cannibal, as they were now calling Sheila Feinberg, to the top of the hour again.
Police believed, according to the announcers, that the Chromosome Cannibal had joined forces with a pair of accomplices.