"You are creative. Think of a way."
"I'll try, Frances."
"I love you, Mr. Gordons."
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"I love you too," the android said as the scientist went limp in his arms and died.
Mr. Gordons stood up and looked around the control center. Hé took three steps toward Remo, who wheeled around to face him.
"I am letting you live," Mr. Gordons said. "The Volga was more important to her than anything else, and she loved me. I will stop the Volga and save you for another day."
"How are we going to stop it?"
"I am creative. I will change its trajectory. It will never reach the moon."
Remo smiled. "Go to it, friend."
"I am not your friend," Mr. Gordons said bitterly. "Frances was my friend. She told me that creativity would bring me pain. I should have listened to her. I will be no one's friend again." Softly he kissed the professor on her lips. "I will go," he said. "But I will return for you later."
"Still a robot after all, huh?" Remo said.
"That was what I was created. That is what I will remain." He cast the professor one last look, blinked, and strode across the room. As he walked, he picked up the sprawled form of the high commander, who was just coming to. " What—what are you doing?" she screamed. "Unhand me. Let me down!"
Viciously Mr. Gordons shoved her face first through the dark glass windows. They shattered in a spiderweb pattern, then gave way to the big man with the mechanical stride, and the screaming woman whom he held dangling by her hair.
He tossed her into the seat of an open jeeplike vehicle outside the building and drove quickly to
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the launch site. Remo and Chiun watched through binoculars as Mr. Gordons, still dragging the flailing form of'the high commander behind him, climbed up the scaffolding to the entry hatch of the Volga. Two small monkeys in space suits scurried out as the door opened. Then Mr. Gordons shoved the high commander inside, stepped in himself, and closed the hatch behind him. In a matter of seconds, the missile lifted off in a cloud of white vapor and disappeared into the sky.
"What's he going to do?" Remo asked outside the building.
"Whatever he must, I imagine," Chiun said.
Remo looked up to see the trailing contrail of the missile searing the blue sky. "He got kind of soft over the professor, didn't he?"
Chiun smiled. "Sometimes one is fortunate enough to find something—or someone—more powerful than his strongest impulses. It can happen even to a survival machine, I suppose. That is a good sign for all of us. Especially you."
"What if he gets out of there?" Remo said, thinking of the robot encapsulated in the speeding missile.
"He will find us and try to kill us, obviously."
Remo shrugged. "Hell never get out. That thing will orbit in space forever."
"Let us hope so," Chiun said.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In Rye, New York, in the executive office of the director of Folcroft Sanitarium, Dr. Harold W. Smith pursed his pale lips as he looked at the black object on his desk blotter through the lens of a magnifying glass.
"So?" he said. "It's a small transmitter."
"I just thought maybe you'd like to see it," Remo said, annoyed. "It was in my spine. It almost killed me. That's why we had to let things go till the last second."
"Nonsense," Chiun said. "There were several seconds remaining before it would have been necessary to dismantle the boom ship."
"That was a missile, not a boom ship," Remo complained in Korean. "And if we had so much time, then Gordons wouldn't be flying around in outer space now. We could have finished him off right there in the lab and gotten rid of him for good."
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Chiun clucked. "Tsk, tsk. With you, everything must be total. Life is not total. Much is unfinished, all is question. Become old, Remo, and perhaps you will become wise."
"I'm not going to have a chance to get old with that robot hanging around."
"Oh, how far you are from becoming a true Master of Sinanju," Chiun said. "Your friend is a machine, not a man. Nothing can destroy him. Better to live with him from a distance of millions of miles than next door."
"I wish you'd quit with the Oriental philosophy," Remo said, still in Korean.
"Stop, stop, stop," Smith pleaded. "It's eleven o'clock at night. I do like to get home every four or five days. And you need to rest. Something's brewing on the East Coast which may require your services in a day or two."
"Oh, no you don't," Remo said. "I'm taking some time off."
"Wonderful," Chiun said, smiling. "The ruler of Persia extended a standing offer three hundred years ago to the Master of Sinanju. We are welcome to work for him at any time. For four trunks of rubies a year," he said, wiggling his eyebrows. ^
"There is no Persia anymore, Little Father, It's Iran now. And I'm not working for any guy who wears a hat and a veil."
"What about Africa? The tribe of the Timalu has also requested our services. Oh, it is lovely there. The Ugandan countryside is most—"
"I'm not working for Uganda, either."
"Picky, picky, picky," Chiun said.
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"I'm just taking a rest," Remo said.
"Can we discuss this tomorrow?" Smith asked wearily.
"We're never discussing anything again. This is it. Done. Finito. Vacation time." He walked out the door, stomping deliberately.
Chiun turned to Smith. "I believe I can make him change his decision, Emperor," he said. "However, perhaps I should first accept, with utmost gratitude, the photograph you promised me of the lovely Cheeta Ching."