"Of course not!"
"Liar," Remo snapped.
"Dr. Dooley," Smith interrupted, "I will require a telephone and a wheelchair."
"I'm sorry. As your physician, I strongly advise against exerting yourself."
"You are an employee of this facility," Smith said coldly. "And I am its director. You will do as I say."
The force in Smith's voice stopped Dr. Dooley's next words. The long fingernails of the Asian called Chiun suddenly floating up to his face helped too. Dooley left hurriedly.
"Well, what are you waiting for?" Smith asked Remo.
"Directions. How the hell would I know where your office is?"
"Oh," Smith said. "I had forgotten. Master Chiun, will you direct him, please?"
"Yes. We will return shortly," Chiun said, bowing. Remo and Chiun left. After the door closed, Dr. Harold W. Smith closed his eyes. It was a strain to speak, but despite the expenditure of effort, he was feeling better.
From the corridor, Remo's voice drifted back. "Explain something to me, will you? If you work for Smith, why does he call you master?"
Norvell Ransome ignored the beeping lights on his computer, warning of developing national-security and domestic concerns. Time enough for those matters later. There must be a hidden file in the Folcroft database. He brought up the system's diagnostic program and began scanning the dump. Lines of raw data sped by his eager eyes, showing a mixture of hexidecimal codes and plain ASCII-readable text.
To his befuddlement, he found no hidden files, no breath of a clue to the identity of the mysterious interloper. And worst of all to his inquisitive mind, the riddle of the CURE acronym remained unexplained.
The intercom buzzed. Annoyance on his face, Ransome reached for the button.
"What is it, Mrs. Mikulka?" he asked petutantly. And then it hit him. Eileen Mikulka, Smith's secretary. Perhaps she ...
But all such suspicions fled his mind when Mrs. Mikulka said breathlessly, "The captain of the guards is reporting a disturbance in the gym, Mr. Ransome."
"Order all security personnel to deal with it," he barked.
"That's the problem. The guard force are already in the gym. And they're requesting reinforcements. Should I call the police?"
"Absolutely not! What is the nature of the disturbance?"
"They're so frantic I can't get that out of them."
"I see," Ransome said slowly. "Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Mrs. Mikulka. I shall see to the matter personally."
Norvell Ransome ignored her as he bounded past her desk. His tread made the water in her desktop flower vase slop over the lip and onto the Rolodex.
Mrs. Eileen Mikulka felt nervous. Since Dr. Smith's heart attack-if that was indeed his problem-nothing had seemed to go right. She thought the whole matter of Norvell Ransome himself was very strange. The lecherous way he looked at the nurses. She had even caught him looking at her in a disturbingly carnal way.
Then a stranger thing happened. A man she knew only as Remo, who had worked at Folcroft in some custodial capacity months before, emerged from the stairwell, looking lost.
"Hi!" he said nervously. "Is this Dr. Smith's office?"
"Of course," she replied. "You know that, Mr.... I'm afraid I've forgotten your name."
"Thanks. Just checking," he said, slipping into the office.
"Wait!" she called after him. "You can't go in there." She started to rise from her desk, but the door lock clicked. He had locked it after him. Something was distinctly wrong, but Mrs. Eileen Mikulka was not about to do anything to get herself fired. She composed herself and waited for Mr. Ransome's return.
Inside Dr. Smith's office, Remo walked up to the desk and lifted the ordinary blue telephone. It was a standard AT nderneath there was a silver lever. He slid it to the end of the slot marked "Louder. "
That done, he paused for a look around the Spartan office. There was a big picture window behind the desk, showing Long Island Sound. None of it looked familiar to him. But it exactly matched the office Smith had occupied in one of his dreams. Puzzled, Remo hurried to the door.
Norvell Ransome approached the big black double doors to the Folcroft gym. He put his ear to the cold metal. There was absolutely no sound on the other side. Ransome procrastinated. This was not to his taste at all. Dealing with physical problems like a common field agent. That was why he had hired a fresh complement of guards. But summoning the police was out of the question.
With painstaking slowness he pushed the door open a crack. He peered inside.
There was a guard lying on his back on the Nautilus machine. His hand clutched the bar of the device that was weighted with heavy metal slabs. Ransome waited for him to push them up. But the guard simply held that position.
Ransome pushed the door open all the way. He saw the other guards. Two hung from gymnast hoops. Not by their hands, but by their necks, their faces a smoky lavender. Ransome gasped in spite of himself.
His entire guard force was dead. Some grotesquely so. The hanging guards, for example, had had their heads somehow forced through the aluminum rings. The rings were obviously too small for their necks, which was why their faces were purple, yet their heads had evidently gone through without crushing their skulls. The guard under the weights was literally under them. His head had been crushed, his hands clutching the handles in a death grip.
The others were worse. Yet there was no blood anywhere. Just mangled bodies. And neither was there any indication of who-or what-had decimated them.
Ransome hurried from the gym. This wing of Folcroft lacked an elevator, forcing him to run. He was puffing by the time he reached the main building. The reception-area guard was absent. Ransome assumed he had been the unfortunate with the mashed cranium.
Ransome reached the elevator in safety and stabbed the button marked two.
Mrs. Mikulka started like a frightened animal when Ransome appeared on the second floor.
"What is it now, Mrs. Mikulka?" he snapped.
"A man barged into your office. I couldn't stop him."
Ransome stopped in his tracks. "Where is he now?"
"I don't know. He left just moments ago."
"Is anyone in there now?" Ransome demanded nervously.
"No."
"Then be good enough to inform any callers that I am out for the day."
"Of course, Mr. Ransome."
Norvell Ransome locked the office door after him. He lumbered for the computer, which was up and running. Then he realized he had forgotten to conceal it this time. He frowned. Such sloppiness was unforgivable.
"Must get a grip on myself," he said, sliding behind the desk. He attacked the keyboard. Somewhere there must be a hidden file. He initiated another diagnostic dump.