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"Then I will have to take drastic steps," Remo said. Chiun laughed. He was a little man, barely five feet tall, and he had never seen a hundred pounds of body weight. A thin, scraggly beard and tufts of hair around his ears framed his parchment face. He looked every day of his eighty-odd years, and then some. "There are two things," he said. Remo let out a sulky sigh and lay back down, covered his head with a couch cushion, and pulled his feet out of the reach of the Master of Sinanju. He had not quite fallen asleep when he felt it. It was not quite pain, but it was not exactly pleasure. It was something like a single tickle, doubly infuriating because one knew that it couldn't stop there; more had to come. Remo waited, but nothing more came. He closed his eyes to sleep again, and he felt the single tickle again. He sat up. "All right," he said. "It's obvious I'm not going to get

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  any sleep around here until I play your silly game. What two things?"

  But even as he said it, he knew it would not be that easy. He had snubbed Chiun and tried to ignore him. He would pay a price for that before Chiun told him the two things.

  "Look at yourself," Chiun said. He shook his head in disgust. "Everything is wrong. You eat wrong, you breathe wrong, you move wrong, you even sleep wrong. You are a disgrace to a semi-human. You smell like burning newspaper."

  "Yes, Little Father. Wrong. Disgrace. Whatever you say."

  "And to think I once had high hopes for you. You, whom I trained and treated like a son, even though the Emperor Smith cheated me and did not pay me nearly what the job was worth."

  "Right," said Remo. "Cheated."

  "Someday I expect to find you at one of those houses with the yellow rainbows, stuffing yourself full of those things they sell in the packages made of plastic air. Yes. Beef things. And plastic potato slices. And milk jig-gles."

  "Right," agreed Remo. "Beef things. Plastic potatoes. Milk jiggles." He paused to consider thatr then said, "Shakes."

  "What?" asked Chiun.

  "Shakes. They're milk shakes. You said milk jiggles. They're not milk jiggles; they're milk shakes."

  Chiun snorted. "I do not care what they are called. Poison masquerades under many names."

  There was a long silence, and finally Remo rose from the couch and went to stand at the window once

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  more. He breathed deeply of the mixture of polluted lake, jet fuel, and municipal mismanagement.

  "I'm sorry, Little Father, that I offend you so. It was just a very bad day."

  "There are three things," Chiun said.

  "You said two," Remo said.

  "There are three," Chiun insisted.

  "Let's get them over with so I can get some sleep."

  "In my land, the young learn by listening to their elders willingly, not by being disrespectful."

  "And that is why Korea occupies such a central position in the history of mankind?" Remo asked.

  "Indeed."

  "Indeed," Remo agreed. "What are your three things?"

  "The first is my book," Chiun said.

  "What book?"

  "My history of Ung poetry. It is a short history, barely adequate to hint at the true beauty of Ung poetry. Only two thousand pages, but it is a start."

  "I bet it is," Remo said.

  "I have also added two hundred of the very best of my own Ung," Chiun said. "Would you care to hear one?" Before Remo could answer, Chiun took a deep breath and began to recite in Korean in a sing-songy squeak even higher than his usual tone. Remo's sparse Korean was enough to allow him to translate.

  A snowflake A snowflake falls The cold air embraces it It falls to the ground The ground embraces it A snowflake

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  The snowflake

  Dirt follows

  Dirt falls on the snowflake

  The snowflake turns gray

  Dirty gray

  Then black

  The snowflake melts

  Oh, snowflake!

  Oh, dirt!

  Remo knew the poem was ended when Chiun stopped speaking. He turned to the old man, who had lowered his gaze to the floor, as if modestly declining the world's waves of adulation.

  Remo clapped his hands and cheered, "Bravo. Marvelous. Now what is the second thing?"

  "You liked that poem?" Chiun asked

  "Great. Fantastic. The second thing?"

  "I will recite another one for you," Chiun said.

  "No," said Remo, "please don't."

  "Why not, my son?"

  "I couldn't stand it."

  Chiun looked at him sharply.

  Remo added quickly, "Too much "beauty in one day. I couldn't take it. I can only deal with the beauty of one Ung at a time. And they have to be spaced very far

  apart."

  Chiun nodded at this very reasonable position on Re-mo's part. "The second thing," he said.

  "Yes?"

  "Your feet are wet," Chiun said. "You look as if you have been slopping around in the water like a penguin. You have not been concentrating. You have been acting like a white man again. You are a disappointment

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  to me. You cannot even walk on water without getting your feet wet, and then tracking up our room. You are a grave disappointment."

  "Ungrateful too," Remo said. "You always tell me I'm ungrateful."

  "That too," said Chiun. "I should make you practice right now, and I would, except for the third thing."

  "What is this third thing?" Remo asked, as he knew he was supposed to.

  "The Emperor Smith has work for us to do."

  "No."

  "Urgent work," Chiun said.

  "No. I need a vacation. I'm tired. That's why my feet got wet. I can't concentrate anymore."

  "I cannot tell your employer that," Chiun said. "If I did, he would not send the gold to Sinanju, and once again my people would have to send their babies home to the sea."

  Remo turned back to the window, hoping for a midair collision that would counteract the dullness of the next few minutes of history lesson. He had heard it a thousand times. Sinanju was a dismal, tiny village on the coast of the barren and even more dismal West Korean Bay. It was a poor village with poor soil. Farming was bad* and fishing was even worse. In the long-ago-past, even in the best of times, its people could just barely eke a living out of the surrounding land and waters. In normal times they starved. In bad times, they drowned their babies and children in the cold waters of the bay, which was more merciful than letting them starve to death. The villagers called it sending the children home to the sea, but no one was fooled by the words.

  Then sometime before the beginning of recorded his-

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  tory, the best fighting men from the village began hiring themselves out as mercenaries and assassins to whichever ruler was willing to pay their price. Because there was always a market for death and because the killers from Sinanju were scrupulous about sending their wages home to their loved ones to buy food, the children of the village were allowed to live.

  The tradition of the men of Sinanju was a long one, ¦ but it was eventually replaced by another tradition. One of Sinanju's greatest fighters was Wang, and one night as he was studying the stars, he was visited by a great ring of fire from the skies. The fire had a message for him. It said simply that men did not use their minds and bodies as they should; they wasted their spirit and strength. The ring of fire taught Wang the lessons of control—and though Wang's enlightenment came in a single burst of flame, his mastery of what he had learned took a lifetime.

  Through control of his own self, Wang became the ultimate weapon. He became the first Master of the House of Sinanju. It was no longer necessary for the other men of the village to fight and die. The Master of the House took that job on himself. And when it was time for him to pass on, the most worthy member of his family took his place. Chiun was the latest in the line of the House of Sinanju, and for the first time, a man who was not a Korean, a man who did not even have yellow skin, was being trained as his successor.

  That man wa
s Remo.

  From the beginning, the Masters of Sinanju had hired themselves out as assassins. For uncountable centuries, they had served the rulers of every nation in every corner of the world, no matter how remote. The wages that they earned were returned to^the rocky vil-

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  lage to buy the people's daily bread. As long as there was a need for political murder—and there always had been such a need—the children of Sinanju could stay safe in the arms of their families and not be sent home to the sea.

  Remo had heard it thousands of times. He watched two planes almost collide, then tuned Chiun back in.

  "The people of Sinanju are a very poor people," Chiun was saying. "They have barely enough food to eat, and they count on me to fulfill our contracts so that I might be paid and that they might not starve. And so they count on you, also."

  "The people of Sinanju have not starved in centuries, Little Father," said Remo patiently.

  "Nevertheless," the Master of Sinanju said, raising one frail yellow finger, "you are honor-bound both to our Emperor Smith and to your people, the people of Sinanju."

  "You're bullying me again," Remo said. "Just because I want to take a small vacation, you're telling me that your people will have to drown their babies."

  "They are your people, too," Chiun said.

  Remo was about to answer, then stopped and thought about what Chiun had said, and the more he thought, the better he felt. Perhaps it was true that what he did brought absolutely no benefit to America. For every bad guy he killed, a dozen bad guys sprang up like weeds to take his place. But there was one immutable fact: By Remo's practicing his art, the people of Sinanju were fed. They were the beneficiaries of Remo's skill and work, and if he stopped working, they would feel it. He was needed by them. It made him feel good, or at least better.

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  "I'll call Smith," he told Chiun, "and tell him I'll take the assignment."

  "You cannot call the emperor," Chiun said.

  "Why not?"

  "He is sleeping in the next room. If you were not so out of sorts, you would have heard him."

  Remo listened, and heard the sibilant breathing of a sleeping man. He was pleased with himself; his senses were starting to work correctly again.

  "I hear it now," he told Chiun.

  The old man nodded. "See. All good things come to the man who decides to do good," he said.

  Five minutes later, Dr. Harold W. Smith had joined his two assassins in the living room. Smith was a slender, grayish man near sixty. As he grew older, he was starting to look more and more like the granite crags of his native New England. All those who had ever known him admitted that Smith was brilliant. After all, he had once been a law professor at Yale, and that required some brains since Yale was one of the few schools where law courses still taught law and not consumer advocacy and public relations. And those who had known him during World War II, when he had operated deep behind German lines for the OSS, never doubted his raw physical courage. Nor did anyone who knew him when 'he was one of the top administrators at the CIA doubt his organizational ability.

  But none seemed to know the whole Smith. Those who knew of his brains knew nothing of his courage or his administrative skill. And those who knew of his courage would have been surprised to leam of his intelligence and savvy. Each knew only a piece of Smith, and each who had known him had found him dull, duller, dullest. As dull as the closely tailored

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  three-piece gray suits with crisp- white cotton shirts and striped school ties that he always wore. One personnel officer at Langley, Virginia, had once spread the word that Smith was the only man in the CIA's history to completely confound the company's brain-probers: When he was given a Rorschach test, all he was able to see were ink blots. No imagination they said.

  The shrinks, as usual, were wrong. It wasn't that Smith had no imagination. What it was was that he could deal only in reality. Ink blots were ink blots and nothing more. And his integrity was so much a part of his rock-ribbed soul that he could not unbend enough to play silly psychological games and pretend that he saw something that did not exist for him. Nor, for that matter, could Smith pretend to not see something that did exist.

  It was those two qualities that had led to his being chosen to head CURE.

  A bright young man had just been elected president. To anyone who cared to look, it was obvious that the country was going to hell in a handbasket and that ordinary methods would not help the situation. So the new president began a massive search throughout the country for a man with the ability to see only what was really happening and with the character to act upon it. And when he found that man, he made him head of an ultra-secret organization, an organization so secret that technically it did not exist. An organization whose job it was to ferret out the secrets of all those who would destroy the country, its way of Ufe and its Constitution, and then expose them. Only two people would know of the organization's existence: its director and the President of the United States.

  At first, the organization, which was called CURE,

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  almost worked. CURE employed thousands upon thousands of investigators, all of whom thought they worked for someone else: the FBI, the CIA, the telephone company, the Chamber of Commerce, or Madame Lulu's Lonely Hearts Club. It had an open-ended budget of millions of dollars funneled to it through dozens of government agencies. It had the most sophisticated computer system known to man, which was able to take in, analyze, and disgorge billions of discreet bits of information. It had secret headquarters at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York.

  The only thing it didn't have was success.

  It was obvious that exposure of wrongdoing was not enough. Even if CURE could find some newspaper to print disclosures—and that was not all that easy—the public often shrugged its shoulders and went on its way as if nothing had happened. Trying to send wrongdoers to jail through a court system that no longer worked was hardly any more successful.

  It was obvious that CURE would have to change if it were to work. It was obvious that it would need an enforcement branch. That branch would be one man: a former New Jersey policeman named Remo Williams.

  Williams was a rarity among cops: honest, uncor-rupted, and uncorruptible; an orphan with no family and no friends.

  So CURE framed Remo for the murder of a drug dealer and railroaded him to the electric chair in the New Jersey state prison. The executioner pulled the switch, the current flowed, and Remo's body arched in agony. He woke up later at Folcroft Sanitarium, but he was officially dead, a man who no longer existed. His fingerprints were expunged from every file they had ever been in. His training was turned over to Chiun,

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  Master of Sinanju, hired by CURE for the sole purpose of making Remo a killing machine.

  But in the training, he had made Remo something else—something more than a man; and in Chain's mind, Remo had also become his heir. He traveled with his pupil now, just to make sure that no accident befell Remo and wasted Chiun's long investment of time.

  Smith stood in the center of the room. "There are two things," he said.

  "I've already heard that tonight," Remo said.

  "What?"

  "Never mind," Remo said. "What is it you want?"

  "Have you ever heard of the copa-iba tree?" asked . Smith.

  "It is not a Korean tree," Chiun said.

  "No," said Remo. "And I don't want to hear about it either."

  "Its correct name is Copaifera langsdorfii," Smith went on in a helpful, hopeful tone of voice.

  "I am sure it is not a Korean tree," Chiun said. "Korean trees all have beautiful names. For instance, there is the Towering Nest of Swans, The Tree That Whistles When the Wind Walks. . . ."

  "I don't care what you call it or what its correct name is," Remo told Smith. "I still don't want to hear about it. I need a vacation."

  "The tree grows in the rain forests of Brazil," Smith went on. ,

  "That's nice," Remo said.


  "I am not surprised it has such a barbaric name," Chiun said. "Sinanju has never made a penny from Brazil."

  "It grows quite tall," Smith said. "A hundred feet or more. And it is three feet thick through the center."

  37

  Remo stretched out on the floor and closed his eyes.

  "We have bigger trees than that in Korea," Chiun said. "Big trees yith beautiful names."

  "Every six months or so," Smith said, "you can put a tap in a copa-iba, just as you would with a maple tree for syrup, and what you get out is pure, extremely high-quality diesel oil. Just like the stuff that comes out of oil refineries. It's the most valuable tree in the world."

  "It must be a Korean tree," Chiun said.

  "So?" Remo said, half opening one eye to look at Smith.

  "The copa-iba could be an important weapon in our country's energy war," the CURE director said. "It might be more important than nuclear power."

  "Why tell me about it?" Remo asked.

  "We have been growing a grove of copa-ibas in this country out on the West Coast for the last twenty years." -

  "And?"

  "Now somebody is trying to destroy them," Smith said.

  "And you want me to stop whoever it is."

  "Yes."

  "Find somebody else," Remo said. "First of all, I am not a detective. And I am not a bodyguard. I am especially not a bodyguard for a bunch of hundred-fqot-tall trees. I need a vacation. Give me my vacation, and then I'll go sleep in the damn trees if you want."

  "Remember the babies going home," Chiun mumbled in Korean.

  "What's that?" Smith asked.

  "Duty calling," Remo said, sighing. "You said there were two things. What's the second?"

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  "This is a matter of synchronicity, I believe it is called," Smith said.

  "What is?" Remo asked.

  "Beware of emperors using new words," Chiun said in Korean.

  "During the war, the one in Europe," Smith said, "I had a friend. A German, in fact. A very brave man who did much to help our cause."

  "That's nice," Remo said. •

  "For white men, the Germans are not bad," Chiun said. "Except the little one with the funny mustache. Him, nobody liked."

  "Twice this man saved my life," Smith continued. "And I gave him my word that if he ever needed me or my help, all he had to do was ask."