When he got the correct resolution, he saw it, lying on its side. It had eight barbed legs, classifying it as a member of the arachnid family, which included spiders and scorpions. Except it possessed wings, which was impossible. Arachnids do not fly.
Lifting a probe, he moved the specimen around in its sawdust bed, excitement mounting in his pigeon chest. He got it turned around so that it faced the lens tube.
"My God!" he gasped when its burning red cyclops eye glared back at him.
"You found it, huh?" Remo asked.
Wurmlinger swallowed his shock. His knobby Adam's apple bobbed spasmodically. Still, he couldn't get any words out. He nodded vigorously, then shook his head from side to side as his educated brain began denying the evidence before his very eyes.
But it was there. A long silvery green body, more like a scorpion than anything else in the arachnid family, boasting eight barbed and pincer-tipped legs and a pair of dragonflylike wings. And instead of a multieyed spider face, or the compound eyes of a fly or a bee, there was only a single smooth round orb mounted above an oval mouth with tiny serrated teeth all around the edges. The mouth made Wurmlinger think of a shark, not an insect.
"This is new!" he gasped. "This is incredibly new. This is a new class of insects. And I will go down in history as its discoverer."
"I found it first," Chiun squeaked.
"Are you accredited in any university?" Wurmlinger asked, regarding the old Korean with disapproval.
"No."
"Then your discovery does not count. I am one of the leading experts in the field of insects. This is my laboratory. Therefore, I am the discoverer of-" He paused, regarded his shoes a long moment while his long face worked. "Luscus wurmlingi!" he announced. "Yes, that will be its scientific name."
"You named that ugly thing after yourself?" Remo blurted.
"It is not ugly. It is unique. The name means One-eyed Wurmlinger."
"Is that anything like one-eyed wonder worm?" Remo asked dryly.
Wurmlinger ignored that. Reaching for a wall telephone, he said, "I must inform my colleagues before one of them happens to stumble upon a wurmlingi specimen in the field."
Remo beat him to the phone, pulled it bodily from the wall and handed it to Wurmlinger. Wurmlinger took it, saw the trailing wires and said, "Um..."
"Let's consider this classified for now, okay?" said Remo.
"You have no authority over me."
At that, Remo placed one hand on Wurmlinger's bony shoulder and said, "Pretend my hand is a tarantula."
Wurmlinger's eyes went to the hand, which started creeping up his neck on plodding fingers.
"Here comes the stealthy tarantula," Remo warned.
Wurmlinger flinched. "Stop it."
"The tarantula is on your neck. Feel its padded feet? Feel how soft they are?"
"I don't-"
"The tarantula is unhappy with you. It wants to bite. But you don't want it to bite, do you?" said Remo.
"No," Wurmlinger admitted, shrinking from the soft pads of Remo's fingers. He had tarantulas for pets. It was amazing how Remo's naked fingers felt like plodding tarantula feet on his neck.
"Too late," said Remo, his deliberately creepy voice speeding up. "The tarantula strikes!"
Wurmlinger felt a pinch. The hand withdrew, and Remo stepped away.
Wurmlinger had been bitten by tarantulas before. It was an occupational hazard. Their mandibles are poisonous, but not fatally so. Still, there is pain and numbness.
Wurmlinger felt no pain. But the numbness came on him very suddenly.
In a matter of seconds, he stood paralyzed on his feet. He swayed. Like a tree in the wind, he teetered from one side to the other. The horrible thing was that he couldn't move, couldn't stop himself from swaying.
Chiun padded up on one side and, when Wurmlinger swayed toward him, he blew out a strong breath.
The force of the breath pushed his swaying body the other way, and Helwig X. Wurmlinger felt himself tipping precariously even as his mind assured him screamingly that this couldn't be happening.
Fortunately, Remo caught him and carried him stiff as a stick to the bed and left him there, immobile. Time passed. Considerable time. During which the pair left without a word of farewell.
Having no better option, Helwig X. Wurmlinger drifted off to a mindless sleep.
When he awoke hours later, the slide containing the only known specimen of Luscus wurmlingi in the world was gone.
But at least they had left his Bee-Master collection intact.
And when he went out into the yard, the dead soldiers had begun fruiting, their mouths and empty eye sockets squirming with the most lovely maggots imaginable.
AT A PAY PHONE, Remo called Harold Smith.
"You want the bad news first or the good?" asked Remo.
"Why do you always have good news and bad news to report?" Smith asked glumly.
Remo looked to Chiun helplessly. Chiun got up on tiptoe, cupped the mouthpiece with one hand and whispered briefly into his pupil's ear.
"Because we're thorough," said Remo, into the phone. "Isn't that right, Little Father?"
"If we bear only bad tidings and not good, or good tidings, but no bad," Chiun said in a too-loud voice, "we would be accused of doing our duty without sufficient diligence. If in the future, Emperor Smith prefers not to know certain things, let him tell us of these things in advance and we will scrupulously avoid them in our travels."
Smith sighed.
"Give it to me as you wish," he said glumly.
"Okay," said Remo. "Wurmlinger isn't our man."
"How do you know this?"
"We know when a guy is lying to us. He wasn't. He's just a bug nut, pure and simple. And the only bees we found were sick ones."