The Sky is Falling td-63

by Warren Murphy

  He slowed down the Russian aircraft. Zemyatin apparently understood because there was no complaint. They did pick up conversations ground America to air Russia between the American monster and a man named Smith. Smith was asking what on earth kind of game the Russians could be playing now. Even his computer couldn't figure that out.

  Famous ports around the world began noticing the strange new tide licking ever so slightly at their piers and wharves.

  Scientists around the world were tracking the phenomenon over the polar ice cap. The ozone shield was thinning, opening and threatening to collapse, bringing with it the last gasp of life on earth.

  And General Ivan Ivanovich controlled it all with the simple speed of an aircraft headed toward America. He played it perfectly. Chiun's car and the car bearing Remo and Zemyatin arrived at the barricades outside of Chemical Concepts of Massachusetts virtually at the same time.

  Remo and Chiun cried out:

  "Where were you?" And each answered with his own version of: "I am here now. All right?"

  The paratroopers, state police, national guard, and local police had all received orders to seal off the building, but they didn't know why. They were all ordered now to pass the barricades and not to let anyone through until otherwise ordered.

  What they could not be told from above was that they were only constituting a pitiful holding action. Their barricades would not protect them, would not stop the madwoman from incinerating everyone around her in the northeast corridor. They had orders to let only one person through: the one she wanted.

  When three men tried to get through-one Oriental, one American, and one Russian-the guards reacted swiftly. "I just want one, the handsome one," screamed a beautiful red-haired woman from the flat building of CCm. "Remo isn't bad-looking," said Chiun, wondering where in that ugly building the machine was.

  "The young white. Remo. Get in here."

  "You know her?" said Chiun. "You've been hanging around with whores."

  "How do you know she's a whore?"

  "She's white, isn't she? They all do it for money."

  "My mother was white," said Remo.

  "Gentlemen," said Zemyatin. "The world, please. It is coming apart in a multitude of ways."

  "You don't know for sure who your mother is. You told me you're an orphan."

  "She had to be white. I'm white."

  "You don't know that."

  "Gentlemen, the world," said Zemyatin.

  "Remo, you get in here now," screamed Kathy O'Donnell from the factory window.

  "He is not white. Don't believe him," said Chiun. "Ungrateful as a white, yes. Slothful, yes. Cruel, yes. Shortsighted, yes. But he is not white. He is Sinanju."

  "Remo, that is the woman," Zemyatin broke in. "She has got the machine. You get the machine to stop. I will put through the stand-down order of the missiles, the polar ice cap will stop melting, and we may all live to see tomorrow."

  "Am I white?" said Remo.

  "You are as white as snow," said Zemyatin. "Please. In the name of humanity."

  "Not white," said Chiun, moving through the guards.

  "White," said Remo, pushing Zemyatin through also, and leaving a couple of guards trying to disengage their weapons from their jumpsuits.

  "Asking another white? Ask me," said Chiun. "You couldn't do the things you do and be white. Yes?" Inside the building, none of the typewriters were working. None of the bookkeepers were pounding on computer consoles. Only a few terrified technicians and a man named Reemer Bolt huddled in a corner.

  "You've got to stop her," said Bolt. "I can't even get out of here. I've got to establish a Rhode Island branch office."

  "You, Remo," called out Kathy. She had a bullwhip in her hands. She raged with venom. "Are you sorry now? Are you sorry you left me?"

  "Sure," said Remo. "Where's the machine?"

  "I want you to apologize. I want you to suffer the way I suffered."

  "I'm suffering," Said Remo. "Where's the machine?"

  "Are you really?"

  "Yes."

  "I don't believe you. Prove it."

  "What can I say? I'm sorry. How do I turn off the machine?"

  "You love me, don't you? You have to love me. Everyone loves me. Everyone has always loved me. You came back for me."

  "What else?" said Remo.

  "Do you really love me?" said Kathy.

  "Where's the machine?"

  "It's underground, in the basement. It's firing continuously," screamed Bolt.

  Kathy O'Donnell thew herself in front of a locked steel door. She thrust out her magnificent bosom. She allowed her soft lips to smile. She knew that Remo loved her. She knew he had to want her. She couldn't have been that physically excited by someone who didn't crave her also. "Over my dead body," she said. "That's the only way you get to the machine."

  "Sure," said Remo, and obliged her with a simple stroke into her beautiful forehead as he opened the lock to the machine's basement bunker. The technicians followed, along with Zemyatin.

  Rerno and Chiun looked at the console and the glittering chrome tanks in amazement.

  "There should be an Off button somewhere," said Remo.

  "She locked the arch parameters," said Bolt. "You've got to power them down or ruin them."

  "I go for ruin," said Remo.

  "No," said Chiun. "We need it. We have got to deliver it to the Russians. Destroy that machine and we will never get back our treasure."

  Zemyatin did not know how General Ivanovich had managed to arrange this, but he had known something was happening when the young general had slowed down the plane. So this was it. Brilliant.

  Zemyatin saw Remo move toward the machine, but it seemed only like the jerk of a finger, for the Oriental had done the same. Slowly, ever so slowly, they appeared to turn and face each other and then remained immaculately still.

  They did this for ten minutes on Zemyatin's watch before he realized what he was seeing. When top boxers fought each other, they felt each other out. To the person who knew nothing about boxing it looked as though the fighters were doing nothing, when actually the most important part of the fight was happening. The American monster had apparently met his equal, and their movements were so quick as to be beyond the human eye, like a bullet.

  Zemyatin checked his watch again, and the crystal cracked. Vibrations tickled his toes through the soles of his feet. The American technicians, who would be needed for the future use of the machine if the Oriental won, stood back. They were still horrified by their earlier domination by the beautiful redhead and then by her sudden death. If they are so evenly matched, Zemyatin reasoned, then a small help to the Oriental might turn the tide. But as he tried to get behind Remo, he felt a vibration so strong it almost liquefied his ligaments. Then he knew for sure that this great battle he witnessed was as far beyond the human eye as the first great cataclysm of all creation.

  Then the white spoke. He was breathless.

  "Little Father, the world is flooding. If nothing else, we will lose to waters all the great ports of the world. All the great cities on rivers will go. New York, Paris, London, Tokyo."

  But the Oriental did not break contact, nor did he break off the awesome fight now beyond the eyes of those who watched.

  "And Sinanju is a village on a bay. It will go before Paris."

  Suddenly the room was filled with shattered console, broken drums, parts resembling shrapnel. In a smoking heap, the beams were done for.

  The American monster was gasping for breath. The Oriental's kimono was wet with perspiration. "Good-bye, treasure of Sinanju. Thank you, Remo," said Chiun.

  "Stand down your missiles, Russian," said Remo.

  "Of course. Why not? We never wanted a war."

  "You did well enough for someone who didn't want one," said Remo. But he insisted on waiting for verification that the missiles had been stood down.

  "I am trusting you not to build another one of these weapons."

  "Big deal, trust," said Remo. "Why
would we want to destroy ourselves, too?"

  "For me, it is trust. You are the first one I have ever trusted, monster. And I trust you because you know no fear. You have no need to lie to me. So be it."

  When verification came from the American satellites and was transmitted through Smith to Remo, Remo allowed as how the deal was done, and hoped they would never fight again.

  "Not with those missiles. They are so crude that, once stood down, they can never be used again. It was a very raw button," said Zemyatin.

  "You mean on that order, the new missiles are down forever?"

  "Forever," said Zemyatin.

  And on that, the American he trusted said softly: "Thanks, sweetheart. And I am the first you ever trusted?"

  "The first since I was a young man. Yes," said Zemyatin at the irony of that first person being an American enemy.

  "You lose," said Remo, taking out Zemyatin's frontal lobe with a simple precise backhand that left the front of the face work for the wax embalmers of the Kremlin if they ever wanted to stick what was left in a museum alongside Lenin and Stalin.

  Zemyatin could not in the least have improved America's position anymore by living.

  "Done," said Remo.

  "Not done," said Chiun, who understood the move Remo had made against the Russian to be correct.

  The important thing was that the treasure of the House of Sinanju had been lost, lost because Remo had failed to join Chiun in favor of running after white interests. The least Remo could do to partially make up for that lack of gratitude was to write in his own hand a small sentence saying that he very well could have had a Korean mother because he didn't know who his mother was, being an orphan.

  "I can't do that, Little Father," said Remo. "I am who I am. And that's it."

  "Only a white would be so ungrateful as to not admit he was a Korean," said Chiun.

  THE END

  * * *

  Aftermath: Reemer Bolt went on to become president of a major corporation on the strength of a resume that showed he had been responsible for a fifty-million-dollar project with international ramifications both scientific and commercial. Guy Philliston, of the top-secret British intelligence organ called Source, was called in to handle another problem. According to the Americans, the Russians had placed a mole high up in British intelligence. The man was of a better British family, believed to be homosexual, and of course a total traitor to his country and the whole Western world. Philliston's only comment on getting the assignment to ferret out this blighter was: "Hardly narrows it down, you know."

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