Chiun's pupil's face was very red all over, like it had been abraded with steel wool. The whites of the eyes were red, too.
"Do something!" Remo shouted.
"Of course," Chiun answered breezily. He reached into the big jar, grabbed a handful of the slippery white stuff and flung it at the back of the senator's bald head, where it landed with a wet splat over his neck and shoulders.
The effect was instantaneous.
Ludlow Baculum let go of Remo's hair and jerked his head around, his nostrils flaring wide. Still leaning against the mattress with his shoulder, the senator scooped some of the stuff off the side of his neck and pushed it into his mouth. A moan of pleasure escaped his withered lips. His rheumy eyes rolled up in their sockets.
From his raggedy porthole in the mattress, Remo croaked, "What the hell is it?"
"Fish paste to a bloodworm," Chiun answered.
"Well, for Pete's sake, give him some more!" The Master made another mayonnaise snowball and hit Bacuium square in the chops with it.
"Nuhhhgghhh," the senator gurgled as he used the edges of both his hands to scrape the full-fat dressing into his open mouth.
"Here," Chiun said, lowering his point of aim. He tossed a string of softball-sized gobs of mayo onto the bedroom carpet, leading Animal Man away from the mattress, and the still trapped Remo.
The distinguished Southern senator hurled himself facedown on the rug and, like a dog in pursuit of its own vomit, frantically licked and sucked up the slick white goo from the tightly woven carpet fibers. When he was through with one wet gob, he scrambled on all fours to the next, totally preoccupied with the task.
Remo pushed the mattress aside and stepped away from the wall. "That bastard almost had me," he said, pausing to pick a stray bit of mattress fluff off the tip of his tongue.
"You did an excellent job of keeping him here while I found the solution to the problem," Chiun said.
"Yeah, right. I sure didn't let him escape...."
"Now that we have the live specimen Emperor Smith desired," Chiun said, "all that is left is to render him senseless so we can bind him securely for transport."
"That honor is mine," Remo said.
Senator Baculum growled menacingly as Remo approached him, but he did not stop sucking the daylights out of the carpet. He remained on his hands and knees, facedown, combing the short strands of carpet through his three surviving teeth.
Chiun watched his pupil carefully. The angle of approach.
The coiling to strike. The choice of fist.
The location and power of the blow.
He was pleased to see that Remo avoided the head completely. A ninety-plus-year-old brain could be a fragile thing, full of leaky vessels and bulging aneurysms, and it was the brain they needed for its information. Remo's strike was open-handed, and there was absolutely no follow-through. The target Remo selected was a small place on the back above the right kidney, a place where many important nerves came together.
Whap!
Senator Baculum let out a startled gasp and slumped face first into a puddle of his own slobber.
Chapter 19
In his white sterile suit, Carlos Sternovsky rushed down the hall of the Family Fing Pharmaceuticals medical wing. At his side was Fosdick Fing. The lanky American took a single loping stride for every four of his Taiwanese counterpart. From the corridor ahead came a series of behemoth roars and a terrible crash of glassware and steel.
It sounded vaguely familiar to Sternovsky. Like feeding time at the lion house.
"The deterioration started to accelerate about an hour ago," Fosdick informed him as they hurried along. "It is occurring in every member of the synthetic-drug test panel. We're getting physiological and behavioral abnormalities that are way beyond anything we've logged to date."
As they neared the first of the test subjects' private suites, the door jerked open and three uniformed female nurses scrambled out, shrieking and brushing frantically at their clothes. One of the nurses had a fresh bruise above her right eye and a bloody lip. They all had wet marks spattered over their uniform dresses, from shoulder to hem. Seeing the open door, an alert orderly jumped forward and slammed it shut. She attacked me," the bloodied, black-eyed nurse cried to Fosdick. "Then after the others pulled her off me, she sprayed us! God, somehow that great ugly cow managed to spray us all!"
"We were just trying to take a hair sample for analysis!" another of the victimized nurses said. She held up a pinch of short brown strands between her fingertips. There appeared to be lighter brown fuzz mixed in with the hair.
"Calm down," Fosdick said. "Please, all of you, calm down. Give those hairs to me." He took the sample from the nurse and placed it in a small plastic bag. "Now, go change your uniforms at once. And when you've done that, I want you to go outside and I don't want you to come back until you've regained your composure."
Sternovsky's attention was elsewhere. He was looking at the surveillance monitor of the room the nurses had just exited. Inside, Test Subject Two was naked. Her body fat hovered just above zero, and her current level of muscle mass was roughly equivalent to that of a male, six-foot-four-inch high-school senior. She sat on the edge of her hospital bed and in great agitation combed at her hair with her fingers. Not the hair on her head.
The hair growing out of the tops of her shoulders. When the forty-eight-year-old romance writer had been admitted to the Fing medical wing four days before, she had weighed close to 350 pounds, less than forty percent of which had been muscle. The woman's weight problem had as much to do with her life-style and career choice as with her genetics. According to the medical history she had provided, all she did was sit at the computer and write.
And eat.
She had worked out a little reward scheme for herself. For every page of manuscript she completed, she gave herself a treat. A cookie. A bonbon. A bite of cake. A spoonful of ice cream. Using this positive-reinforcement scheme, she had produced forty-three novels in ten years.
After she'd completed her thirty-second novel, things began to go seriously wrong. When she submitted a current photograph for use on the back of the book jacket, her publisher rejected it, claiming that it made her look too much like an orangutan-her once passably cute face was lost in concentric rings of stippled white flab. This unfortunate development made book tours out of the question.
When the publisher began to suggest that a slender stand-in take care of the road work, the authoress panicked. She was caught in a terrible trap. Without the steady flow of treats, she couldn't write a word; without giving up the treats, she couldn't get the acclaim and adoration she had strived for her entire life. In her desperation to have it all, she had agreed to become a Family Fing lab rat.
WHE had seemed the perfect solution to her. Especially when its features were explained by a buttersmooth sales type like Farnham Fing. And it was a solution, up to a point.
"This isn't human hair," Fosdick said, holding the plastic specimen bag to the light.
Sternovsky tore his gaze from the monitor screen and the truly amazing definition of the woman's back muscles. "What?" he said.
"It's animal hair."
"Can't be," Sternovsky countered, leaning closer to the bag.
One look told him that despite what he knew-or thought he knew-about genetics, it most certainly was. Human beings didn't have a frizzy insulating undercoat. Wolverines, on the other hand, did.
"I don't understand," he said, a pained and helpless expression slipping over his face. "For this to have happened, WHE would have had to reprogram the test subject's DNA. Which is something we know it can't do...."
"It gets worse," Fosdick told him. And he was right.
The sounds in the medical wing went from lion house to elephant house to ape house. And back again. The bellows of one test subject seemed to stimulate the others to cry out. Uniformed attendants ran from one side of the hall to the other, trying in vain to quiet the patients. The sounds of the staff's voices had just the opposite of the intended effect. The hallway reeled with booming crashes as the Fing lab animals hurled themselves against locked doors and windowless walls.
"Is your father aware of what is happening?" Sternovsky asked.
"He's monitoring everything that's going on from the boardroom," Fosdick replied.
"Hasn't he seen enough? Dammit, man, why haven't you sedated these people?"
"Father wants them conscious because that gives us more information. That's what this is about. Information."