Killer Chromosomes td-32

by Warren Murphy

  "Little Father," Remo had said. "It is not the blood that makes one man better than another. It is what he has learned, what he has done, and what he thinks."

  "And you have done so well, considering you were born white," said Chiun.

  "You taught me because no one in your own village was worthy. You taught one of them once and he turned out to be a bummer. You had to go to the White world for a pupil. And you got me."

  "I did not know you would learn so well. I taught more because you knew more. What you learned was why I taught. Not because you were white. I would no more go looking for a white to learn the secrets of Sinanju than I would seek an elephant to cut diamonds. However, you proved adequate and with my training techniques, lo, we have an elephant that cuts diamonds. Glory be to me."

  "Is that one of your prayers or a waking-up exercise?" Remo asked. Chiun had not understood the insult but was sure it was more crabbing. When a gentle, loving blossom opens its most valuable blessings, it is done so that a nasty, little bee can stick unpleasantly into it. In this analogy, Chiun was the flower, Remo the bee.

  The guard at Boston Biological squinted at the identification cards.

  "You two are Remo Cloutier and Wango Ho Pang Koo. That right, Mr. Koo?"

  "That is correct," said Chiun.

  "Enter," said the guard.

  On the way through, one of Chiun's fingernails snapped out with the whip coil of a snake's tongue. It was out and back before the guard noticed it.

  The guard felt an itch on his wrist. When he rubbed it, his hand was bloodied. His wrist was bleeding. His ulnar artery had been severed.

  This was not, of course, a random act of violence against the guard. Chiun regarded it as a gift to his employer.

  Chiun, who had never seen any form of government like America's and was therefore dumfounded by Smith's reluctance to murder the president and assume the throne, understood that supposedly he and Remo were working for the American people. Remo had said the guard was an employee of the people.

  Thus, at the entrance to Boston Biological, Chiun, Master of Sinanju, had made an American servant a bit more responsive to his employers and less surly to the public in general.

  He also let him know in a small way that intolerance, especially from a lesser race, would not be tolerated by a Master of Sinanju in America.

  He had not left a guard sinking to his knees calling desperately for help to stem the flow of blood. Actually, Chiun had just spread a bit of understanding in a nation that needed it so much.

  Not that whites were totally hopeless. There were things, he knew, at which they were good. The mysteries of their laboratories was one such thing. For the last century and a half, Masters of Sinanju had been returning to the Korean village with tales of Western mysteries. At first, how men could talk into machines and be heard many miles away, later, how men could fly and how pictures could be seen on glass screens and how, without any mental preparation, merely by inserting a needle, a Western medicine man could put someone to sleep so he would feel no pain.

  There were so many mysteries to the west, especially wanton women with painted faces. Chiun himself, as a young man, had asked his Master and teacher about Western women.

  "No," his teacher had said. "It is not true their private part goes in a different direction, nor does it have needles in it to hurt you if you do not pay them for their services."

  "Then what are they like?" Chiun had asked, for he was a young boy and quite susceptible to tales of mystery.

  "They are like what they are like. The great mystery is life itself. All else is what you know or what you have overlooked."

  "I like mystery better," Chiun had said.

  "You are the most unruly pupil a Master had ever had."

  This comment was often made to the young Chiun but he had never told his own pupil, Remo, about it. Let Remo think that he himself was the most unruly pupil in the history of the House of Sinanju.

  The Western laboratory was a wonder to behold. Beautiful glass shaped like stiff, fat fingers. Bubbling, clear bowls. Lights that crinkled with the power of the universe.

  "It's just a laboratory, Little Father."

  "I want to see the mystery dematerializer. I have heard about it. I have not had a chance, lo, these many years to see one. Yet your magicians in these magical buildings have had them many years. Many years."

  "I don't know what you're talking about. We've got to find Dr. Feinberg's old lab and figure out what the hell it is we're looking for."

  "We are looking for a Western magic woman. Truly a dangerous species. For the power of the West has never been in their ugly white bodies but in their magical machines."

  "There's nothing ugly about a white body."

  "You are right, Remo. Tolerance. I must show tolerance to the fat meat eaters. Death-paleness can be beautiful to others who suffer the same death-paleness."

  There were guards at Dr. Feinberg's old laboratory. They accepted the passes.

  "I love these places," said Chiun.

  A dark-haired man in his middle forties sat morosely behind a desk in the far corner of the room. He wore eyeglasses and stared straight ahead.

  When Remo started to introduce himself the man began a lifeless rendition of what he had obviously told questioner upon questioner. He did not look at Remo when he spoke.

  "No," was his first word.

  "No. There is no more material that can be used to make another of what Dr. Feinberg has become. No, we do not know what the process is that made her happen. No, we do not have similar experiments underway. No, I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the Communist party, Nazi party, Ku Klux Klan or any group that espouses hatred or plans to overthrow the United States government.

  "No, I had no idea this would happen. No, I do not know where Dr. Feinberg may be, nor do I know her personal friends, nor do I know whether she belonged to any lunatic groups."

  "Hello," said Remo.

  "Oh," said the man. "You don't want to question me?"

  "I do," said Remo. "But I have different questions."

  "Yes, we do," said Chiun.

  "What have you been doing here these last few days?" asked Remo.

  "Answering questions," said the man.

  "Where do you keep your magic dematerializers?" asked Chiun craftily.

  "In a minute, Little Father," said Remo. "Let me ask my questions first." And then to the morose man in the white coat, "Anybody ask you for anything other than information?"

  The man shook his head.

  "And you've done nothing but answer questions?"

  "Nothing for the lab. My private life is my private life."

  "Tell me about it," said Remo.

  "I don't have to."

  Remo tweaked the man's ear. The man thought if Remo wanted to know things that much, he would tell him. He was a lab assistant. His girlfriend had asked for some supplies. The man stemmed the flow of blood at his ear with a towel.

  "And is your girlfriend Sheila Feinberg?"

  "Are you kidding? Feinberg was built like a slab of sheet rack to her shoulders, Mount Rushmore above the chin. She was so homely, I hear electric vibrators rejected her. She had a face like a prune made ugly."

  "What do you make for your girlfriend?"

  "Anything she wants. She's got a set on her that would make a Jesuit burn dictionaries."

  "Like what?"

  "Well, we call it insulator. It's a chemical compound like gelatin that retards temperature changes in anything it surrounds."

  "I see," said Remo, who felt there was something here that wasn't as innocent as it sounded.

  "Now to serious business," said Chiun. "Where do you keep your magical dematerializers?"

  "Our what?"

  "Your wondrous devices that go round and round and make things out of other things?"

  The man shrugged.

  Chiun noticed a container of milk on the man's desk. It sat near a ball of cellophane.

  Chiun's long fin
gernails came out of his kimono. He opened the milk carton wider. He poured the milk into an empty bowl on one of the laboratory tables, then swirled his finger around in the milk.

  Gradually the bottom of the glass bowl appeared to hold water, and the top cream.

  "It does that by magic instead of by hand," Chiun said to the laboratory assistant.

  "My God, you're a walking centrifuge," the man said, amazed.

  "That's the word. Centrifuge. The great mystery of the centrifuge that, with a flick of a switch, can do what the hand does. We never understood back home how you do it."

  "With your bare hands, you did what a centrifuge does. That's incredible. How can hands separate elements?"

  "You just do it. Let the fingers do it. How does the centrifuge do it?"

  "By laws of science."

  "Genius of the West," exclaimed Chiun. And then he watched the man do it with that wondrous device. No, the man said, they did not give away their centrifuges.

  Perhaps, suggested Chiun, they could barter for it.

  "What could you give me?" the man asked.

  "Perhaps there is someone plotting to take your position?" asked Chiun craftily.

  "As a lab assistant? It hardly pays enough to eat on."

  "Little Father," Remo whispered to Chiun. "You know it is tradition that the House of Sinanju will not serve two masters."

  "Shhhh," said Chiun.

  "What sort of answer is that?"

  "Shhhh."

  "You can't do it," Remo said.

  Chiun looked at the centrifuge. You could put any liquid you wanted into it and most often take out two different colored liquids. Sometimes three.

  It was, and this was most obvious to anyone with any sort of reasoning power, not being used at the time. By anyone. The lab assistant didn't need it. He was only a servant in this place. Servants were notorious for betraying their masters.

  And most importantly, this Remo had to understand, the servant could not possibly have enemies important enough to interfere with Remo and Chiun's service to Emperor Smith. By that, Chiun meant, they could avenge any slight being done to this poor servant and walk out with the centrifuge right now.

  What could beat that?

  "Not betraying the tradition of Sinanju," said Remo.

  Because Chiun knew Remo was right and because Remo had exposed that he was, at this moment, more true to Sinanju than Chiun himself, Chiun said he would forget the centrifuge. But not because of what Remo had said.

  "Good," said Remo.

  "I will forget the centrifuge because you couldn't possibly understand how I could accept it and still be one with tradition. You are not ready for that yet. You are still young Shiva, young Destroyer, young night tiger, and as a cub there is much you do not know."

  "I know we're not supposed to be making hits for this guy when upstairs pays our freight."

  "You know nothing," said Chiun. "And you have helped me. I will write my romance about a teacher who gives everything, everything to his pupil and in return is denied a crust of bread."

  "Are you two guys really from Agriculture?" asked the lab assistant. "I mean it's just a centrifuge. You can buy one."

  "I send all my money home to feed a starving village," said Chiun.

  "Too bad," the lab assistant said.

  "You feel no sense of sorrow for me?" Chiun asked.

  "I got my own problems," said the lab assistant.

  And so angered was Chiun that such a decent person as himself should suffer without sympathy, that when the lab assistant said he had his own problems, Chiun offered: "Have another," and delivered a double hernia to the brute. The man rolled on the floor in agony.

  "I think we needed him," said Remo. "He's pretty useless now. He's going to have to go to the hospital now. We really could have used him. We needed him."

  "It does not strike me as all that strange," said Chiun, "that you are most aware of your own needs when others' needs go unmet. Not strange at all."

  The lab assistant's legs came up in fetal position. His hands gripped his groin. He made big weepy noises. Guards ran in. They had heard the sound.

  "He fell," said Remo.

  The guards saw the man in incredible pain. They looked at Remo and Chiun suspiciously.

  "Very hard," said Chiun.

  "He... he..." groaned the attendant, but could not finish his sentence because of the pain and did not have the strength to point to Chiun as the perpetrator.

  Chiun, having suffered nothing but insensitivity at the hands of that man, turned away. There was no one who was going to force him to tolerate such behavior.

  "That's two, Little Father," said Remo. "Come on."

  "By that, am I to assume that the guard outside was not discourteous and this vicious animal here was not insensitive?"

  "You two. What happened?" asked a guard.

  So as not to be disturbed by the guards, Remo spoke in what Korean he knew. He told Chiun the last link between the woman they looked for and this laboratory had not yet been broken.

  Chiun asked how Remo knew.

  Remo explained that just because they happened to be girlfriends of lab assistants, girls did not go around asking for scientific materials. And lab assistants didn't just give such things away. That was ridiculous.

  "Not that ridiculous," Chiun answered, looking at the centrifuge.

  "Take my word for it, ridiculous," said Remo in Korean.

  "What are you two talking about?" asked the guard.

  "Centrifuges," said Remo.

  "Don't believe you," said the guard. "Let's see your identification again."

  This time there was a close examination of the ID cards.

  "Hey. These are ten years old," said the guard.

  "Well, then, take my universal identification, accepted everywhere in the world without question," said Remo. He snapped back the two cards with his left hand and with his right patted two finger pads into the temple above the guard's left ear. He went to sleep like a baby.

  The other guard said that looked like really good identification to him. Super identification. Best identification he had seen anywhere from anyone. No wonder it was accepted everywhere in the world. Would the two gentlemen like anything from the labs?

  "Since you offered," said Chiun.

  By the evening news, announcers had brought the Chromosome Cannibal, as they were now calling Sheila Feinberg, to the top of the hour again.

  Police believed, according to the announcers, that the Chromosome Cannibal had joined forces with a pair of accomplices.

  "A thin white man and an elderly Oriental, using false identification police said was almost as good as the real thing, bluffed their way past tight security and stole a key scientific instrument from the lab of chromosome-crazed Dr. Sheila Feinberg.

  "Police are not commenting tonight on what this new addition to the scientist's arsenal will mean to greater Boston but all residents are urged to stay off the streets after dark. Do not go out alone. Report any mysterious behavior to the following police number."

  Remo turned off the television set. Chiun smiled.

  "You know," said Chiun, "if you put strawberry preserves into this thing, the pits go right to the top, the sugar sauce stays in the middle and the pulp goes to the bottom."

  Remo signaled for quiet. Already the centrifuge noise had attracted the attention of the one nurse who had to be told it was only a patient in excruciating pain before she lost interest and left them alone.

  They were in a room next to the one where the lab assistant lay. He had undergone surgery for his hernia and was now resting. There were no police guards on his door. Remo waited to see if he had a visitor.

  He heard footsteps move down the hall, steps so light he almost missed them. He looked out. The woman came with a fashionable, white, draped dress and an expensive, groomed look, as if she had just come from posing for a magazine advertisement selling dresses to housewives fifty pounds heavier than she.

  Except for
a couple of things. She was a bit too busty and the hair was a bit too golden. Remo put his ear to the wall and heard her talk to the lab assistant.

  "I couldn't find it, darling. Where did you leave it? In the inner storeroom? Why there? Yes, of course I love you. Got to run now. Good-bye."

  Remo heard her leave the hospital room. He heard her steps down the hallway, remarkably soft for a woman in high heels. Most clomped with sharp bangs of stiff leather on stiff floors.

  Remo left the room.

  She padded up the hallway, and waited for an elevator. Remo waited with her.

  "Nice night," he said.

  She smiled coldly.

  He let out a bit more of the smooth charm he had, the cool rhythm so many women found deliriously stimulating. He smiled his sexiest smile and let his thin body relax slightly.

  "Nights like these are too nice to spend in a hospital," he said.

  She didn't answer. He went down in the elevator with her.

  "What's your name?" he asked.

  "Why? Are you afraid of riding four floors with a stranger?"

  "I hoped you wouldn't be a stranger much longer," said Remo.

  "Really?"

  "Yes," said Remo.

  "That's nice," said the busty blonde.

  Outside in the Boston street it was hot. The smell of exhaust clogged breathing and the pavement felt like hostile rock underfoot. The groan of racing engines reminded Remo that Massachusetts was supposed to have the worst drivers in the nation and what many people believed were the most trigger-happy state police. The woman went to a car in the parking lot.

  It was a dark station wagon. Remo followed her.

  He touched her arm gently. She snarled.

  "Look, sweetie. Don't get uptight. We can be friends or not be friends."

  "Not be friends," said the woman.

  She got in her car. Remo got in the other front seat.

  "How did you do that? The door was locked," she said.

  "I'm a magician," said Remo.

  "Then make yourself disappear," she said.

  "All right, lady, I have a job to do. I think you're a link to that loony cannibal lady who's been running around Boston."