The car rocked and a window pane went shattering onto the hot, sticky asphalt.
Blood coated the windshield like film on the inside of a strawberry malted glass.
The thing that was Dr. Sheila Feinberg screamed and hissed and moaned and could no longer stand the pain that man had withstood. She hobbled from the car.
Remo collapsed.
I guess I'm going to live, were his last thoughts, But it hurts so much I don't want to.
CHAPTER FIVE
Dr. Harold W. Smith had been organized since the age of three and a half. The last bit of untidiness in his life was in the second grade at Gilford Country Day School when someone spilled ink on his notebook. In those days, everyone used ink from inkwells.
Harold did not snitch.
Harold was not a snitcher. He was also not argumentative, although teachers did note a certain stubbornness in Harold when he thought he was right. He was not afraid of bullies, nor of the principal, whom he never failed to call "sir."
"Yes, sir, I do think you are wrong, sir." This during a full auditorium assembly with half his class giggling that Harold was "going to get it now, get it good."
Perhaps it was that principal who saw something worthwhile in the boy's courageous integrity. Smith never forgot how the principal said in front of everyone, and that included Betsy Ogden, "Yes, Harold, you may be right. And I think we can all take a lesson from what you have shown us here today-standing up for what you believe is right."
Later, psychologists would call it reinforcement. But to the young Smith boy, it was like a medal he would never lose. Later, when his country had to select a man of impeccable courage, integrity, and incredible organizing skills to head such a potentially dangerous organization as CURE, they chose the man who had been that boy at Gilford Country Day School.
The cover for the great computer bank that linked and organized information was Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. So organized was Smith that the sanitarium business took him only fifteen minutes a day which meant his real business could get his normal, fourteen-hour work day. He worked six days a week and, if they came on some day other than Sunday, he took off a half day Christmas and a half day on July Fourth.
In the early years of the organization, he could get away to golf. But things had not gone well and the grooved swing he had learned in his twenties left him. As he got worse at the game, he wanted to play less. And there was less time to play.
So on this spring day a remembrance of green fairways came to Dr. Harold W. Smith as he sat in his office overlooking Long Island Sound through one-way windows. To his left was the computer terminal, the only one which gave unscrambled information from the CURE Computers and at his right, the telephone, connected to only one other phone in America. And that other phone was in the White House.
Smith waited for his line to ring. He would need this day all the integrity and courage he could muster.
He idly watched a printout of some information from the Chicago grain exchange. Some millionaire family was trying to corner the soybean market again. It looked so easy and incredibly profitable to these people who wanted to control one of the basic foodstuff of the modern world, then push up prices. It always looked so easy and yet never worked.
It never worked because, as one of its side functions, CURE never let it work. This time the computer would order an agent in New York City to let information leak out about an attempt to corner the market. Other speculators would make the price just too high. Sometimes the families were reminded that their firms had done something illegal a few years back and, while the families themselves were not guilty, it certainly would be unpleasant for them to be indicted and stand trial. This usually came from a local district attorney.
Neither the agent who leaked the takeover rumor nor the district attorney who threatened the indictment would ever know for whom they really worked.
Only three knew.
One sat by a phone.
Another looked into the endless dark pit of death.
The third took time from a busy day to take a red telephone from a dresser drawer in his sleeping room.
The phone rang at Smith's desk.
"Yes, sir," he said.
"What's happening in Boston?" The voice was deeply Southern, but without warmth. This President talked softly but with the biting sting of sharpened steel.
"The person is on it."
"And that means?"
"As I have said. Our special person is on it. He will be more effective than the teams of men you originally wanted to send."
"I regret sending smaller units," the President said.' "I regret sending only enough men from enough departments to make it seem as though we were handling things. I regret not letting my department heads handle it."
"Do you want me to pull him out?" Smith asked.
"No. What reports are you getting?"
"None."
"Weren't you supposed to hear from him today?" the President asked.
"Yes."
"Then why haven't you?"
"I don't know," Smith said.
"Do you mean that something has happened to him? That the doer of miracles has failed? Smith, I don't have to tell you that this is a national emergency. Right now it's contained in Boston, but when it stops being contained, not only is this country in danger but the whole world."
"I am aware of the dangers. It may not be that harm has befallen our special person."
"Then what?" asked the President.
"Sometimes he doesn't get the coding in the phone numbers correctly. Sometimes he forgets to call. Usually he just doesn't bother."
"In a national emergency?" The President's voice was horror-struck.
"Yes."
"And this is the man who is between the human race and possible extinction?"
"Yes."
"And the Oriental?"
"He doesn't believe in telephones," Smith said.
"And you consider these two satisfactory for the mission? Is that what you are telling me, Smith?"
"No, sir, I am not telling you that they are satisfactory."
"Then what in the pluperfect hell are you telling me?"
"I am telling you, Mr. President, that I have assumed for this organization the defense of the human race. That is what we are dealing with, the defense of the species and nothing else. I am telling you I assumed this defense because I had at my disposal the two men who, in the entire history of our species, are the most capable of defending our species from another which might turn out to be stronger and wiser than we. There are none better than my two men, sir. None. I would have been remiss had I not ordered them to duty."
"Yet they don't report in," the President complained.
"Sir, they are not generals made by Presidents or Congresses. You do not pass a law to make a Master of Sinanju. Two hundred people running down every street in America, proclaiming someone a Master of Sinanju could no more make someone a Master of Sinanju than could repeal the law of gravity. A Master of Sinanju is the finest human killing instrument ever made. And it is made only by another Master of Sinanju. The best you have ever known, heard of or read about in your lifetime has been only a pale imitation of these two men.
"No, sir, they do not report," concluded Smith.
"From what I hear, they haven't even taken a look at the parents' house, which I think would be a natural place for Dr. Feinberg to go."
"Mr. President, that woman, or actually, female of the species, is no more related to her parents than you and I are related to baboons or any other species. That woman is a new species."
"Dr. Smith, I think you have mishandled this situation and, as are the conditions of your organization, I am thinking of dismantling you," the President said.