"Don't argue with me, you heathen midgets," Lippincott said. "I know what you're like. Trying to catch us unawares, trying to do us in. When you and those Chinks get together, the first thing you'll do is try to figure out how you can pick on our flesh." Lippincott's knuckles were white where he gripped the arms of the chair.
Mariko Kakirano rose in his chair. "Mr. Lippincott, I must protest."
Before he could say anything more, Lippincott shrunk back in his chair. "Stay away from me, you. I'm warning you. Stay away from me. No more Ba-taan death marches. Remember Corregidor." He cringed like a child waiting to be struck.
"You have no right," Kakirano said.
The thirteen other businessmen rose to their feet, too. Some of their faces were angry. Most were just startled or confused.
But before Kakirano could say any more, Lem Lippincott jumped to his feet. He put his hands out in front of him, as if warding off invisible blows from the fourteen men standing in front of him.
"No, you don't, you yellow devils. I know what
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you're after, trying to pick my bones, eat my flesh. You won't get away with it."
The secretary rose. Lippincott was waving his arms in front of him, fighting imaginary hordes of
insects.
"Sir," the secretary said, "I think we'd better . . ."
Before he could finish his sentence, one of Lippincott's flailing arms caught him alongside the head and knocked him back into his chair.
"You too, eh? In league with these vultures."
Mariko Kakirano shook his head in disgust. He glanced around, the table. The other men nodded to him. Kakirano took a step toward the door, and the other men moved from their chairs, and lined up behind him in a neat single file.
"Coming after me, eh? You won't get me," Lippincott shouted. He turned away and ran. His left leg knocked against his secretary's chair, spilling it over and dumping the young man onto the carpet. He rolled to a sitting position and looked after Lippincott, just in time to see the businessman dive headfirst through the plate glass window and extend his arms in a swandive toward the street, four stories below.
Lem Lippincott did not go alone. His plunging body crashed into three elderly Japanese as it hit the crowded sidewalk. All four were killed.
The Tokyo police, after careful investigation, called it a tragic accident.
Later that day, the telephone rang in the office of Dr. Elena Gladstone, director of Lifeline Laboratory. The telephone sounded with an electronic beep, instead of the usual ringing bell. Before answering it,
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Dr. Gladstone pressed a button under her desk, which double-locked her office door.
"Yes," she said as she 'picked up the phone, then listened to a voice that explained what had happened to Lem Lippincott.
"Oh, I'm sorry," she said.
"I didn't want him dead," the voice said.
"You can't always tell how someone will react," she said. "This is all very experimental."
"Don't let anything like that happen again," the voice said.
"I won't," she promised, as she replaced the receiver, but with the phone hung up and behind the privacy of her locked office door, Dr. Gladstone put back her head and laughed aloud.
Twenty-five miles north of Dr. Gladstone's Manhattan office, another telephone rang that afternoon.
Dr. Harold W. Smith, head of the secret agency known as CURE, took the receiver from the bottom left drawer of his desk, and spun around in his chair so he could look through the one-way windows out over Long Island Sound.
"Yes, sir," he said.
Smith had run the secret agency through five Presidents and each had a different character on the telephone. The agency had been set up by the first of those five, a young President who had met an assassin's bullet. He had designed CURE intentionally to work independently of the White House. A President could not assign CURE or its personnel. He could only suggest missions. The single order a President could give to Smith would be for CURE to disband. In choosing Smith to head the organization, that first
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President had picked wisely because Smith was one man who would disband the organization immediately upon receiving such an order, without any regard for his own life or that of anyone else. It was a sign of what America had gone through in the sixties and seventies that every President had wanted to disband CURE but none had ever given that order.
Smith knew all their voices. The brittle, clipped New England accent that made its mispronunciations sound like a planned virtue; the earthy Texas drawl that was the sound of a man who lived close to the soil and whose emotions lived close to the surface, the most truly alive of all the Presidents Smith had known. There was the California sharpness of the voice of the next President, a voice that always sounded as if it had everything planned and organized in advance; that sounded as if it had considered twenty-five things it might say and rejected twenty-four and seized upon the best. It was a voice that sounded professional and precise and Smith always had the feeling that under it was a man held on such a tight string that if any part of it every loosened, the entire man would come apart. That voice was followed by another, a halting flat Midwestern voice. The President who spoke like that seemed to have no feel for the English language and gave no sense that he had any idea what he was talking about. But bis instincts had been sound and his heart was strong. Smith had liked him. He couldn't speak but he could
lead.
It was a mark of Smith's character that he had not voted for a President in eighteen years. He thought choosing between one candidate or another might, in some small way, influence him when dealing with
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whichever man became President. So he hadn't voted for this new President and had never even considered whether he would have or not. But he allowed himself the occasional luxury of admitting to himself that he did not like the man. The President was a Southerner and Smith recognized that he was prejudiced against him, thought about him primarily in terms of how the man's voice sounded over the telephone. His voice wasn't melodic, the way many Southern voices were. This voice was choppy, pausing at the wrong time, as if reading groups of words selected at random. And while the man was a trained scientist, he seemed to Smith to be continuously fighting to overcome the possibility that the scientific method might have any influence hi his life. He had an inordinate capacity for fooling himself and seeing things that weren't there, and Smith realized that not only did he dislike the man, but he was displeased with himself for not being able to figure the President out more clearly.
But he put his personal feelings toward the President of the United States aside as he answered the telephone.
"What do you know about the Lippincott case?" the Southern voice asked.
"I received the reports on what actually happened in Tokyo," Smith said. "I have investigated and found them accurate. I did a cursory probe and turned up nothing. No problems in Mr. Lippincott's home Ufe or business. No record of mental illness, no record of hospitalization or private treatment or whatever," said Smith. At this time, Lern Lippincott had been dead eight hours. "So I would tend toward the conclusion that it was a total, unpredictable, and
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tragic breakdown. The man just snapped under some kind of pressure."
"I thought that too," said the President, "but just a few minutes ago, this very unusual letter came across my desk." • "Letter? From whom?" asked Smith.
The President sighed. "I wish I knew. It's just a rambling, disjointed kind of thing that doesn't make a lot of sense."
"It sounds like much of your mail," Smith said
drily.
"Yes, it does," the President said. "Usually it would have been thrown right out and I never would have seen it, but this happened to hang around and somebody showed it to me after we heard about Lippincott. And I thought it might be important."
"What does it say, sir?" Smith asked, trying to hide his impatience. He hooked the telephone onto his shoulder and carefully tightened the knot of his regimental striped tie.