Funny Money td-18 Read online

  "Sure, buddy," said the pilot. He watched as Mr. Gordons lifted the box and went to the right fuselage door of the quarter-century-old plane. If that looney-toon was going to open the door, well, maybe it wouldn't be money dropping on Harlem but looney-toon himself.

  Mr. Gordons slid back the door of the plane. The pilot felt the whoosh of wind circulating through the aircraft. He turned the plane slightly to the right, then banked sharply to the left, throwing it into full throttle. The inertial straight-line motion of his body should have thrown Mr. Gordons out of the open door.

  Nothing happened. He merely stood there, poised on his two feet in the open doorway. He had the cardboard box jammed up against the plane wall near his feet and he reached in and began to grab handfuls of money and to throw it through the open door. As the pilot watched over his shoulder, the money sucked in alongside the plane, caught in its air currents, then slowly drifted loose and began to float down onto predawn Harlem.

  The pilot again tried the right turn and left bank in the hope of dislodging Mr. Gordons. It failed again and the early morning money distribution continued.

  Five more times he tried and each time Mr. Gordons just stood there as if nothing had happened and kept throwing out money. Finally, the money box was empty.

  Mr. Gordons left the door open and walked back to the cockpit. The pilot looked at him in awe.

  "How much did you toss out there?"

  "One billion dollars," said Mr. Gordons.

  "Hope you saved some for me, old buddy," the pilot said.

  "You are not my buddy and I am not yours. You tried to damage me by making me fall from the plane. You are not my friend."

  "But I am, I am, I am your friend." The pilot kept screaming this as he was dragged from his seat, along the aisleway to the open door. "You can't fly this craft," he shouted. "You'll crash," he called as he went through the open door and plummeted, un-moneylike, decisively, straight for the ground. The plane took a slight dip forward and Mr. Gordons went back and sat in the pilot's seat. Why was piloting supposed to be difficult? It was all very easy and mechanical. He made it seem that way as he took the plane back to Kennedy Airport. He knew nothing, however, of flight patterns so he ignored the chattering radio and just landed without clearance on the main east-west runway and taxied toward one of the terminals. He was barely missed by a landing Jumbo Jet which whooshed by him with a rush of air that almost made his own plane unmanageable. Mr. Gordons heard the radio squawk: "What the christ is going on in that DC-4? Herman, I'll have your goddamn license for this."

  Mr. Gordons realized he had done something wrong and the authorities would be after him. He watched the first men moving toward the parked plane. They were policemen of some kind, wearing blue uniforms, peaked caps, and badges. He committed it to his mind so his fabricators would work more accurately. He looked over his shoulder. The passenger seats in the plane, the few that were left after the plane had been emptied for cargo carrying, were of a rough blue nubby material.

  When the three policemen boarded his plane, they found no one there. They searched the plane carefully, even looking under the passenger seats whose fabric was ripped and torn. Later they were joined by more men, these in suits, and they never seemed to notice that the three uniformed police officers had become four uniformed police officers. And minutes later, Mr. Gordons, having restructured his uniform into a blue business suit, was walking through the main entrance of the terminal.

  He would have to write another letter, demanding now not only the head of high probability Remo but the head of high probability Chiun, He might not survive in America if the two of them lived. He must devise a threat powerful enough so that the government would obey him. It would take all his creativity.

  It was good. It would take his computers away from the nagging question of what had happened to his friendship. Perhaps some people were just destined not to have friends.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  "It didn't work, Chiun," said Remo holding a copy of the late afternoon paper.

  Emblazoned across the front page was a giant end-of-the-world typeface headline:

  MONEY COMES TO HARLEM

  The story told how the streets had been blanketed with money during the night. It was accompanied by a photograph of some of the bills. When their photographer had gotten to Harlem all the money was off the streets, but he had stopped in a liquor store and there was able to photograph many bills. Two bank managers in the area were shown samples of the money and certified it as genuine.

  The newspaper implied that there was some insidious plot behind throwing a billion dollars—that was their inspired guess—onto Harlem's streets, some kind of trick by the power structure to keep the struggling blacks in their place.

  That the newspaper had the story at all was a tribute to the skills and persistence of some of the editorial staff.

  Two hours after they learned that "something was up" in Harlem, they finally found out about the money. During those two hours, the staff had been working on a blockbuster story telling how Harlem had gone on strike, no one was reporting for work, and while there had been no announcements, the action was obviously well-organized and clearly a massive protest by the black community against bias, discrimination, and all forms of tokenistic, non-Jewish liberalism. When the money explanation was found, the editor took all the work that had been done on the "general strike" and put it in his top desk drawer. Plenty of time to use that another day.

  The Treasury Department, asked about the money, would say only that it was investigating.

  "We attack," said Chiun.

  "But I thought this was going to work," needled Remo. "I thought he was going to think it was my head."

  "He probably opened it and when he saw something inside the skull realized it could not be yours. We attack."

  They spoke in a cab and moments later were aboard a plane to Dr. Carlton's laboratories in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

  The next day, Dr. Harold W. Smith at Folcroft Sanitarium had two disturbing items on his desk.

  The first was an immaculately typed letter that looked like printing. It had come from Mr. Gordons to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where it had been routed directly to the director's desk, and routed by him to the President's office, and had finally wound up on this most top secret desk of all. It said simply that unless Mr. Gordons was given the heads of Chiun and Remo, he would buy an entire Strategic Air Command group, by paying a million dollars to each of its members, and would use the equipment to blow up a number of American cities.

  The second item was a newspaper clipping. It reported that Dr. Vanessa Carlton, head of the famous Wilkins Laboratory for space components and equipment, had announced that her staff had developed an entirely new creativity program. It would allow spacecraft computers to think originally for the first time in their history.

  "Our earlier effort at a creativity program compares to this one as an imbecile compares to a genius," Dr. Carlton said. "With this program in operation, a spacecraft will be able to react brilliantly to any kind of unforeseen occurrence in space."

  Dr. Carlton also announced that the equipment would be installed aboard a laboratory rocket and launched into space in two days.

  Remo and Chiun had not reported in. They were alive. Smith knew that because Mr. Gordons had gone ahead with his threat and had dumped a billion dollars onto Harlem. But they had probably tangled with Mr. Gordons somehow. Why else would Mr. Gordons now raise his demand to include Chiun's head as well as Remo's?

  Smith spun in his office seat and looked through the one-way glass toward the waters of Long Island Sound, lapping gently at the shoreline of Rye, New York. He had sat in that seat for more than ten years. Ten years with CURE. For Remo and Chiun, it had been the same. They were, along with Smith, indispensable parts of the operation.

  A slight scowl crossed his pinched, sour-looking face and he raised his right hand to stroke his neatly shaved jaw. Indispensable? Remo and Chiun indispensable? Althou
gh alone in his office, he shook his head. There was no one who was indispensable. Not Remo, not Chiun, not Dr. Smith himself. Only America and its safety and its security was indispensable. Not even the President himself, the only other man who knew about CURE, was indispensable. Presidents came and Presidents went. The only thing indispensable was the nation itself.

  But this latest note from Mr. Gordons had shaken him. It was Smith's responsibility to let the President know what his options were and this was a new President. Who knew what his response might be? Suppose he said simply, pay Mr. Gordons his price. That would be wrong, because blackmail always led to more blackmail and there was never an end to it. They should all fight. They should.

  But years in government service had taught Dr. Smith that there was often a void between "should" and "did." And if the President said to sacrifice Remo and Chiun, then Smith would have no alternative but to try to find a way to deliver their heads to Mr. Gordons.

  So much for loyalty and duty. But what of friendship? Did it count for nothing? Smith looked at the waves gently rolling up on the rocky shoreline, and made his decision. Before he would hand up Remo and Chiun, he would go after Mr. Gordons himself. It had, he insisted to himself, nothing to do with friendship. It was just the right administrative thing to do. But he could not explain to himself why this administrative decision—not to hand up Remo and Chiun without a fight—filled him with pleasure when other administrative decisions never had before.

  He turned back to his desk and looked again at the clipping of Dr. Carlton's announcement. A creativity program. That was what Mr. Gordons wanted. With a creativity program, he could be unstoppable. Why had such a thing been announced? Didn't Dr. Carlton, who had created Mr. Gordons, know that such an announcement would bring Gordons running to her door to steal the program?

  He read the clipping again. Words jumped from the paper at him. Creativity. Imbecile. Genius. Survival. And then he had a suspicion.

  He picked up the telephone and set a program in motion that within minutes delivered to his desk the name of every passenger who had that day made a reservation to fly to Wyoming. What name might Mr. Gordons use? He was programmed for survival; he would not use his own. Humans taking aliases generally kept their initials; that was the extent of their creativity. Would Mr. Gordons? Smith look down the slim list of seventy names headed for the Cheyenne area that day. His finger stopped near the bottom of the list. Mr. G. Andrew. He knew. He knew. He didn't think, he knew without thinking, that that was Mr. Gordons. He had used his only initial and his description. He had changed android to Andrew. That was it.

  Smith called his secretary and got a seat on the next plane to Wyoming. The launch was scheduled for tomorrow morning. Mr. Gordons would be there. He suspected that Remo and Chiun already were there.

  And now so would Dr. Harold W. Smith.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The idea to use Dr. Carlton as a lure for Mr. Gordons had been Chiun's.

  "A man must be attacked through what he perceives as his need," Chiun had explained to Remo.

  "But Gordons isn't a man."

  "Silence," said Chiun. "How do you learn anything? Everything feels need. Do you build a dam to stop a river in the desert where there is only flat land and the river will just curl around your dam? No, you build a dam where the river feels a need to run between mountains. Everything feels need. Do you understand?"

  Remo nodded glumly. If he agreed quickly, he might be able to head off one of Chiun's unending stories about the thieving Chinese.

  "Many years ago," Chiun said, "the thieving Chinese had an emperor who, even for such a people, was of a low order. And he did hire the Master of Sinanju to perform a minor service for him and then did refuse to pay him. He did this because he thought, with the arrogance of all Chinese, that he was above all rules. He was, he said, a sun emperor and must be worshipped like the sun."

  "So your ancestor punched his trip ticket," said Remo.

  "That is not the point of this story," said Chiun. "This emperor did live in a castle surrounded by walls and guards and many devices designed to protect the emperor."

  "Child's play to your ancestor," said Remo.

  "Perhaps. But the village depended upon my ancestor for sustenance and therefore he could not risk his person. What did he do then, this ancestor? Did he go home to Sinanju and say 'Oh, I have failed. Send the babies home to the sea.' Because that is what they did with babies in Sinanju when there was starvation. They put them into the sea and they were 'sending them home' again but the people knew they were not sending them home but that they were really drowning them, because they could not feed them. Sinanju is, as you know, a very poor village and…"

  "Chiun, please. I know all that."

  "So this ancestor did not say, I have failed. He looked to see what the emperor's need was. Now this emperor could have stayed safe behind his walls for years. But he was vain and he thought the thieving Chinese could not govern themselves if he remained behind castle walls. He needed to feel important. And soon the emperor opened the gates of his palace so the people could come to him pleading for justice and mercy.

  "And so my ancestor dirtied his face and borrowed a torn old robe…"

  "Without paying for it, I bet," said Remo.

  "He returned it; one need not pay when one returns a thing. And he did enter the palace in the guise of a beggar and when the emperor, fat and complacent, was wallowing on his throne and satisfying what he felt was his need to rule, my ancestor did grab him by the throat and say I have come for my payment."

  "Exit one emperor," said Remo.

  "No," said Chiun. "The emperor paid him on the spot with many jewels and great amounts of coins that were of gold. And the people of the village were fed and the babies did not have to be sent home to the sea."

  "And all because of what the emperor thought he needed?"

  "Correct," said Chiun.

  "Good for your ancestor. Now what has this got to do with Mr. Gordons?"

  "He thinks he needs creativity to survive. If we tell him where he can get it, he will go there. And then we will attack."

  "And this will work?"

  "You have the promise of a Master of Sinanju."

  "Hear, hear," said Remo. "I still think you should have let me go after him, head to head, me and him."

  "See. You have a need, too," said Chiun. "You need to be stupid."

  And then he would say no more until they stood before Dr. Carlton in her office at the Wilkins Laboratory. She was happy to see them.

  "I've thought of nothing but you, Browneyes, since you left," she told Remo. "You've got a hell of a nerve. It took me three days to fix Mr. Jack Daniels. You really did a number on his transistors. On mine, too."

  "Aw, shucks," said Remo. "Twere nothin'."

  "Twere too something," she said, smoothing her white nylon blouse down over her pillowy breasts. "You could take lessons from this man, Mr. Smirnoff," she called over Remo's shoulder. "You're supposed to be a pleasure machine, and you're not a pimple on his butt."

  Remo turned. The android, Mr. Smirnoff, stood silently in a corner of the room looking at them. Was he watching? Listening? Or was he just propped up, empty, turned off? As he looked, Remo saw Mr. Smirnoff nod his head, as if in agreement with Dr. Carlton. Then his eyes turned and locked on Remo's. Remo turned away.

  "Yes, you're really something, Browneyes."

  "Yes, yes, yes, yes," Chiun said, "but we are here on important business."

  "I never discuss business without a drink. Mr. Seagrams!" The self-powered cart rolled through the door and obeyed her command for a double dry, very dry, martini. She took a long sip of it while the liquor dispenser rolled away.

  "Now what's on your mind?"

  "You're going to announce the discovery of a new creativity program," Remo said.

  Dr. Carlton laughed. "And you're going to walk on the ceiling."

  "You have to," Remo said. Chiun nodded. "We need it to lure Mr. Gordons here
."

  "And that's just why I'm not going to do it. I've got no control over Mr. Gordons anymore. I don't know what he's likely to do if he shows up here. I don't need that headache. Why do you think I changed all the security at the entrances? No thank you. No thank you. No thank you."

  "You misunderstand me," Remo said. "We're not asking you to announce the program. We're telling you to." Chiun nodded.

  "That's a threat, I take it."

  "You've got it."

  "What have you got to threaten me with?"

  "This," said Remo. "The government cut off the funds for this place. But you're still operating as merrily as ever. On what? With what? Two cents will get you four that it's Mr. Gordons's counterfeit money. The government takes a dim view of people, even scientists, who go around spreading funny money."

  Dr. Carlton took another long sip from her drink, then sat at her desk. She started to answer, then stopped, took another sip of the martini, and finally said, "All right."

  "No arguments?" asked Remo. "Just 'all right'?"

  She nodded.

  "What gave you the idea of programming Mr. Gordons for counterfeiting anyway?" Remo asked.

  "You browneyed bastard," she said. "You were just guessing."

  Remo shrugged.

  "I didn't program him for counterfeiting," she said heatedly. "One day I had a staff meeting about our money problems. I said the government was destroying us. I think I said that if we had money, we'd survive. Money always means survival. Something like that."

  She finished the drink with an angry swallow and bellowed again for Mr. Seagrams.

  "Anyway, Mr. Gordons was in the room. He overheard. That night he left. The next day he sent me a pile of counterfeit money. To help me survive, the note said."

  "And with perfect counterfeits, it was easy," Remo said.

  "At first they weren't perfect." She paused while the liquor cart refilled her glass. "But I kept sending the bills back to him with suggestions. Finally he got them right."

  "Well now, we're going to get him right. Tonight you announce a new creativity program. Announce that you're going to test it the day after tomorrow on a rocket launch from here."