"I understand," said Artemis. The man owned a small farm, which he helped support with his full-time job at the feed grain store. He had been 35. His wife was 22. They were childless.
She sat in the kitchen of their small house, her hands cracked and red from kneading. Her lips were drawn tight and white. She had melon breasts. She stared hatred at Artemis Thwill as he entered. She did not get up. The police chief introduced Artemis.
Artemis said how truly sorrowful he was. Artemis thought how he'd like to put his hands on the rose print dress, specifically around the breasts.
"You killed him, you son of a bitch, you bastard," screamed the woman.
The police chief, embarrassed, turned his head away. Artemis quickly grabbed a breast. The woman said nothing. Artemis removed the hand before the chief turned back.
"You poor thing," said Artemis. "Killed him, you bastard. Thoughtless son of a bitch. Thoughtless."
"I'm sorry you feel that way," rumbled Artemis, his eyes fixated on her heaving bosom.
"How the hell am I supposed to feel? Insurance policies never pay off for suicides."
It was then, in that small farmhouse, that Artemis Thwill fell in love. Here was a woman raised in the country, probably not even a graduate of high school, with all the wisdom and understanding of a Harvard Graduate School of Business alumna.
Her name was Samantha, and Artemis stayed for dinner when the chief left. He learned you didn't need a master's degree to learn reason. You didn't have to run a country to show understanding. Truly and for the first time, Artemis Thwill had found a woman with whom he could share his life.
"You could have hit him on the head, simple as í that, and left him there. Why'd you have to throw him over to make it look like a suicide? Sheesh."
"I didn't think," Artemis said, filled with remorse. His cashmere coat seemed out of place in the rustic kitchen. He knew he had to give Samantha better than this.
"Well, you should have." "I can't change my story now." "Why'd you do it in the first place?" Artemis thought. He pondered the atavistic rage that prompted people to kill, and the warped social structure that took normal, home-loving persons and drove them to snuff out the lives of innocents. "I felt like it," Artemis said.
"Best damned reason for doing anything," said Samantha.
They made love that instant, and the next day Artemis did not return to his home. In the ensuing week he learned much wisdom from the young farm girl.
"Look, our only chance long range is if God does not exist," Samantha said. " 'Cause if he does, we've had it. And don't give me this repentance crap, cause God don't take too many and even if we did repent, we'd be liars."
"How can you say that, Samantha?" Artemis crooned.
"Bejeezus, I love it when you're hypocritical. Just love it. You're so good at it. With your hypocrisy and my brains, we can do anything." And for the next few days, Samantha thought, deeply, carefully. The only words she uttered during those days were, "I think I've got it. I think I've got it."
On the third day, with the sun setting red over the straw and mud fields of Iowa, Samantha shrieked to wake the dead. "That's it!" yelled Samantha.
"What? What?" Artemis asked.
Tve got it. It's the only business that lasts. In it, you can do anything you want. Hell, your victims will have to figure out what they did wrong to deserve it."
"What is it?"
"And hypocrisy?" She laughed, high and clear as a bell. "You can cripple your victims and then tell them you're the purest soul ever walked the earth, and make 'em believe it. Make them feel like dilly poo if they don't."
"Whaaat?" yelled Artemis, shaking Samantha's shoulders.
"Artemis. You're perfect for it." She planted a big
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wet kiss on his lips. "Artie, honey, you're going into the God business."
Artemis Thwill's hand rose involuntarily to his throat. "You mean be a preacher?" he said, aghast. "Me? Give up my senior vice-presidency to become a fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year Holy Roller?"
"No," Samantha said sweetly. "To become God."
Two
His name was Remo and he was flying like a captive god.
The dragon's skin felt pebbled under his fingertips. Remo held on tight as the giant fire-breathing beast soared through the air, trailing Remo behind like some other-worldly water skier. The clouds below him billowed plump and white.
Remo coiled himself into a tight ball to bring his body closer to the dragon's. Once near enough, he would work a multiple attack in a fast inside une on the beast's underside, turning as he worked to cover space while still maintaining a grip on the tether. It was a modification of an attack taught to him years before by the Master of Sinanju.
But the Master had taught him only the secrets for assassinating men, not dragons. Chiun, the Master, had explained to Remo that man was the only species capable of producing specimens dangerous enough to require extermination. Any animal, Chiun claimed, would lose its desire to kill if offered food, or the return of its young, or its proper territory where it could live in peace, or the cessation of physical torment. Not man. Man would kill
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for greed, for power, or for fun. Man could kill and destroy and pervert and return to do it all again. Of all the life forms on earth, Chiun said, only man could wreak destruction on life itself.
Only man, if you didn't count the monster that was carrying Remo toward certain death.
Remo's attack hadn't even altered the course of the dragon's flight. Its skin was heavier than tank armor. The beast was the size of three square city blocks. It headed with deafening speed toward the blackness of space, where even Remo, with a nervous system developed far beyond the capacity of normal men, would die helpless and gasping.
He made one last attempt. Grateful for the years of exercises under Chiun's tutelage, he spun in a rapid series of six somersaults, which propelled Mm more than 20 stories high—high enough to land on the dragon's back. If he could land safely on the beast, he could crawl up to the animal's slender neck and find a vulnerable spot. . . .
He did not land. While he was still in midair on the crest of his last somersault, the dragon turned sharply and faced Remo with its glowing eyes. The sight was paralyzing. Remo's hands fell from the thin tether, his only connection to life. And as he began to fall, the beast opened its maw and spewed fire onto Remo's plummeting form, setting it aflame and speaking in a voice that came from another universe:
"It is the legend, come now to fruition."
"Chiun!" Remo screamed. "Master, my father!"
And suddenly the flames that charred his body were extinguished, and his fall had been gently broken, and his forehead felt cool and damp. "Awake, my son," said a high, squeaky, familiar voice.
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Remo sat up abruptly in bed. "I was dreaming, Chiun."
The old Oriental nodded. He was wearing a shimmering purple robe pulled loosely across his tiny, frail-looking frame. His white beard and mustache rested like snow against the vibrant purple of the robe. On his head he wore a squat coolie's hat.
"What are you dressed like that for?" Remo asked, trying to force his senses to clarity. He wasn't used to sleeping. He felt drugged.
"The Master of Sinanju clothes himself as he wishes," Chiun said.
Remo stood up, wobbling, and rubbed his face with his hands, feeling the thin line of sweat at his hairline and on his upper lip. Incredulously, he stared at his hands.
Remo did not sweat. The years of training in the ways of Sinanju had given him the tools of the finest assassin on earth, but they had exacted their price in other ways. The body-wracking discipline of Sinanju had gradually evolved his nervous system into that of another being, far more highly developed than even the strongest or fastest normal man, so that, for all the things Remo could do, he did not sweat. And he did not sleep, not the sprawled-out, dream-laden sleep of regular human beings. Yet he had slept, and he had dreamed, and he was sweating.