"You would call it hooked. Kokmul became a slave to corn, is the way it is inscribed in the Book of Sinanju."
"Okay..."
"So taken with his new addiction was Kokmul that instead of venturing on to the princely court that had summoned him, Kokmul gathered up ears of hard corn and bore them back to the unsuspecting village of Sinanju, then a paradise of rice and fish."
"And laziness," added Remo.
Chiun said nothing to that. He went on. "As you know, Remo, the ground around our ancestral village is not the best. Little grows, except rice in paddies, and often not even that. It was thought by Kokmul that this new thing called corn would grow where other plants did not. So, planting the corn as the Chinese farmer had instructed, Kokmul brought the demon corn to Korea."
They walked along, their feet seeming to float over the loose black loam. At least they left no footprints, though they walked with a firm tread.
"In time," Chiun resumed, "the green stalks rose up. Thick they became. Heavy they grew. The sinister Gold threads that made more corn grow showed themselves like painted harlots peeping out from their hanging tresses. It was much work to raise corn. Not so much as to harvest rice, which is backbreaking work. But it was difficult nonetheless.
"And when the corn was sufficiently tall and ripe, Master Kokmul summoned the villagers and showed them how to strip and shuck the ears and how to store them for the long winter with the winter cabbage. That autumn and winter, the bellies of the villagers were heavy with corn, Remo. And they grew fat."
"Not to mention dumb and happy," said Remo.
A withering glance from Chiun's closest eye stilled Remo's grin. This was serious business to Chiun.
"The First Corn Year passed peacefully. There was no trouble. The second was not so bad, for the corn grew steadily, but not consumingly. Then came the Third Corn Year."
"Uh-oh. What happened? The crops failed?"
Chiun shook his aged head. "No, the pestilence began."
Chiun walked along, narrowed eyes taking in minute details of the ruined corn in his path. Where he could step on a loose kernel, he did. The old Korean seemed to take special delight in extinguishing the half-ripe grains.
"I have warned you, Remo, that corn is not as good or as pure as rice. I have told you it is to be avoided. I have never told you why it is a plague and a pestilence to be crushed wherever it rears its lurid, toothsome head."
Remo grinned. "As they say, I'm all ears."
"You will not laugh when my story is over." Chiun kicked a corncob out of his path. "Rice, when it is digested, nourishes. No grain of rice enters a man's stomach that is not consumed. Not so the sneaky and insidious corn grain."
They came upon a herd of spotted cows busily munching the fallen cobs. The cows hardly took notice of them.
"The corn kernel is hardy and stubborn," Chiun continued. "It cries out to be eaten, but once digested, it does not always surrender its nourishment to the consumer. Some kernels survive, to pass undigested from the body of man and beast alike."
Chiun stopped and gazed down at his feet.
Remo looked down, too.
"What do you see, my son?" asked Chiun.
"Looks like a meadow muffin to me," Remo said.
"Look closer."
Remo knelt. It was cow dung, all right, already dried by the sun. Peeping from the dark mass were glints of smooth golden yellow.
"What do you find so interesting, Remo?" Chiun asked in a thin voice.
"I see the cows have been at the corn."
"Yet the wily corn has escaped the cow's diligence."
"Cows don't chew their food as thoroughly as they could, I guess," said Remo.
"Nor do people. Not even the villagers of Sinanju."
Remo got up. Chiun met his gaze with his thin hazel eyes.
"In the Third Corn Year, Remo, the yellow heads reared everywhere. Where it was planted. Where it was not planted. The villagers ate it in great abundance, with shameless relish, and whenever they squatted in their laxness, they released undigested corn kernels, which took root and grew.
Chiun closed his almond eyes and all but shuddered.
"Before long, the horrid eyesores were everywhere. Even in the rice paddies," he said.
Remo made a mock face of horror. "Not the rice paddies. No."
Chiun nodded grimly. "Yes. By the Third Corn Year, there was no rice. Only corn. This was all right for the villagers, but the Master of Sinanju, on whom the village feeds, required rice to sustain his skills. But there was no rice. Only corn. Kokmul began losing his skills and grew fat and sated on corn."
"What brought him out of it?"
"A simple thing. Death. He died, and his successor took his place. That was Pyo, who went out into the cornfields and with his flashing noble hands decapitated the archdemon's offspring, restoring the bounty of rice to the village of Sinanju and exiling the demon corn from Korea forever. To this day, in the north, it is a crime punishable by death to willfully and knowingly plant corn."
Remo grunted. Looking around, he said, "Well, it's a safe bet Pyo didn't come back from the Void to lay waste to Iowa."
"No, it was not Pyo. It was a plague of another kind."
"What kind?"
"That, we must determine," said Chiun, starting off to a farmhouse beyond the cows.
Shrugging, Remo followed. If Chiun could figure out what happened here, it would have been worth listening to that cockamamy story.
Remo still didn't see what was wrong with a Master of Sinanju eating corn. As long as he chewed his food thoroughly.
Chapter 32
There were no satellite trucks or reporters, no sign of life surrounding the mud-dome laboratory of Helwig X. Wurmlinger as the Freedom Convoy wound its dusty way to the place Commander Mearl Streep of the Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia called "the center of the USDA plot against the heartland."
It didn't look like much when it came into view. A high dome of mud maybe two stories tall. The windows were cut in strange, flowing shapes like bulging insectoid eyes. The only sound that could be heard was the weird, doleful drone of afflicted bees.
"I don't like how that sounds," Gordon Garret said from behind the wheel of the lead RV, which for purely tactical purposes was now bringing up the rear.
"We can't afford to lose our communications nerve center in case point takes a direct hit" was the way Commander Streep put it when they made the switch.