They worked their way from the press conference, toward the area where federal agencies had set up operations-such as they were. Not much was going on. Except breakfast.
The federals were eating, of all things, lobster salad sandwiches and packing them away as if there were no tomorrow.
"These people are pigs," Chiun observed.
"They're acting like PAPAS, all right," muttered Remo.
Abruptly, the Master of Sinanju flitted to the nearby food service wagon. He disappeared behind it. Frowning, Remo hurried to catch up with him.
He found the Master of Sinanju squeezing the earlobe of a man in cook's whites. The man was dropping to one knee and he would have howled for his life, but the pain was already too intense. Remo knew that there was a nerve cluster in the earlobe that Chiun had trained him to find.
"What's the problem?" Remo asked Chiun.
"This man has been collecting dunderbugs."
"So? It's a fad."
"And feeding them to the unwary," Chiun added.
Remo blinked. He noticed then the stainless steel pot that was filled with mayonnaise. There were thunderbugs in the mix. They moved their hairlike legs sluggishly as if enjoying the prospect of becoming food.
"Whose idea was this?" Remo demanded.
Chiun eased up on the pressure so the man could speak.
"That Chinchilla," the man gasped. "He set up the food concession. We're just hired hands."
"Food concession?"
"After this, we were going to go national. We'd have cleaned up."
"Probably would have too," Remo muttered. "Okay, forget him. He's small potatoes."
Chiun gave the man's lobe a final squeeze and the pain was obviously too much because he fainted dead away.
Back at the press conference, Senator Clancy was still going strong.
"And if it should turn out that the thunderbug, the Miracle Food of our age, should harbor the HELP virus, I pledge to you my fellow Americans to lift any rock, to move any mountain, to find some way to allow Mankind to consume this wonder bug in complete safety."
Remo lifted his voice.
"You better hope it's not the bug because you've all been eating it."
Clancy tried to locate the voice in the sea of media faces. "Who is that? Who is speaking?"
Keeping his minicam up to his face so no one would see his mouth move, Remo added, "Those lobster salad sandwiches you've been wolfing down? It only tastes like lobster. It's thunderbug."
"What!"
"If eating thunderbug gives you HELP," Remo went on, "you're all overdue for a dose."
At that, the food service truck's engine started and began backing out toward the highway.
Its erratic behavior was not lost on the press, some of whom clutched lobster salad sandwiches.
A few brave souls ventured toward the spot where the truck had been set up and came upon the stainless steel mixing pot and its wallowing thunderbugs.
"It's true!" Nightmirror correspondent Ned Doppler cried. 'We've been eating the bug all along!"
"But it tastes exactly like lobster!" MBC News anchor Tim Macaw screamed.
"Thunderbug is supposed to taste exactly like lobster," Remo shouted, after shifting position.
"How do we tell?" a voice wondered.
Just then, a woman came stumbling back from the far side of Nirvana West. Her chest bounced with every halting step. It was Jane Goodwoman. Her face was as white as a sheet.
"I think I'm dying!" she moaned. "I think I'm dying!"
Jane Goodwoman was immediately surrounded by whirring videocams. "Why do you say that?" a reporter asked.
"Because the others are dying too, you idiot!" she snapped, dropping to her knees.
"What others?"
"The other reporters. We went to look over the Harvester encampment, and they started to drop in their tracks."
"The Harvesters?"
"No. They're already dead. Other journalists! It was awful. It was as if their cameras and press credentials couldn't protect them."
The woman's eyes suddenly rolled up in her head and everyone noticed that the whites were turning blue. Jane Goodwoman slumped forward on her face.
Another reporter started to ask, "How does it feel to know you're dying from HELP, Ms. Goodwoman?"
There was no response, so a line producer gave the body a push so the camera could film the columnist's dying face.
"What does it mean?" someone asked.
And not far from Remo and Chiun, Tim Macaw intruded his boyish face between his cameraman's lens and the scene being recorded.
"What does it mean? This is the question of the hour as America asks itself if dying Americans is too high a price to pay in return for a chance to eradicate the specter of world starvation."
The dying columnist was asked, "Did you eat any of the lobster salad sandwiches?"
"Yeah . . . ," she gasped. "They were . . . delicious."