Terri said, nodding dumbly, "I understand."
Remo said, "You understand? He's trying to kill us and you understand? Lady, put your oars in the water."
Remo looked toward Chiun. He knew the two of them could take off through the iron door and escape but Terri would be too slow, too vulnerable. Their fleeing would cost her her life.
Chiun was staring straight ahead at the burly Englishman but the stare was one of neither threat nor fear. It was a curious, dead stare as if Chiun were embalmed, the look of a man dead, but with his eyes wide open and staring. The color had drained from Chiun's face and in the flickering overhead light; he looked ghostlike.
He stepped forward to meet Spencer.
The Englishman had stopped twenty feet from them. Behind him, Remo heard the sound of the trumpet blaring again from the bull arena.
Now Chiun was only three feet from Spencer.
"Out of the way, old man," Spencer said.
Chiun shook his head, sadly and with finality. Remo noticed how stiffly Chiun moved, as if the life already had gone from him. What was he doing?
"Have it your own way, sir," Spencer said.
From only three feet away, he aimed the missile at the center of Chiun's forehead. Then he twisted the firing mechanism on the back of the rocket. It
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shot forward with a hiss, but then, seemingly by magic, it veered upward and exploded against the overhead lightbulb.
Terri inhaled her breath noisily as Chiun slowly extended a finger toward Spencer and touched the Briton's cheek.
"It's cold," Spencer said. "You're cold."
Remo nodded. Of course. The only defense against bombs that sought out the heat of a human body was an inhumanly cold body.
"Cold," Spencer said again.
"As you soon will be," Chiun said slowly. "Remo, remove this one."
"You're there," Remo said. "You do it."
"You need the practice," Chiun said.
Remo sighed and released Terri's arm.
"All right, I'll do it. But I'm getting tired of being the schlepp around here. Wait. We ought to question him. Find out what's going on with these phony inscriptions. Good idea, Chiun. I'll do it."
"I don't think either of you will be doing anything quite so easily," Spencer said. "You ever see one of these before?" He pulled a small black ball that looked like a regulation handball from a clip on the back of his belt.
"Naaah," Remo said. "Chiun, you ever see one of those before?"
"No," Chiun said. "Ask him if it plays Space Invaders."
"I don't think it does," Remo said. He moved past Chiun as the old man went back to guard Terri.
"It's a deadly fragmentation bomb," Spencer said. "Blow you to bits, Yank."
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"Naaah," Remo said. "That stuff never works. It never goes off and if it does go off, it busts up windows and nothing else."
He heard Chiun behind him. "The British always used toys. That is why they never amounted to anything."
"I know, Little Father," Remo said.
Spencer's face reddened in anger. "We will see," he said. Softly, underhanded, he tossed the fragmentation bomb at Remo, then ran back toward the entrance to the tunnel. Remo picked up the bomb and held it in his hand. He could feel it whirring. There was an explosive charge inside of it, and when it went, it would break through the metal covering, which was already scored to break apart in jagged-edged pieces. But just as water could not rush into an already-full vessel, an explosive force could not explode against a containing force that was exactly its equal.
It would be stalemate: an irresistible force pushing an immovable object, neither giving way until the power of the force just passed its vibrations off into the stillness of the surrounding air. Remo felt the bomb still whirring inside his hand. He stretched his fingers to see if his hand could contain the entire sphere, but it was slightly too large. Some parts of the metal remained uncovered and the explosive force would break through there, and then the whole bomb would blow apart, taking Remo's hand with it.
He cupped his left hand over his right. The delicate flesh of his hands felt the coldness of the metal held inside. He softened his hands, relaxing his muscles, until he was sure that the entire sur-
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face of the spherical bomb was touched by his flesh. Then he began to exert pressure. That was the tricky part-to have the pressure forcing inward exactly equal to the pressure blasting outward at the moment of explosion.
He felt a click as the bomb's firing mechanism went off. Inside his hands, he felt the sudden buildup of pressure against his left ring finger and his right pinky. Instinctively, he increased downward pressure of those two fingers. His hands held and the explosion stayed muffled in his hands.
He could feel the pressure waves of the dissipating force vibrate the air around his hands and then the waves reached his face. He could see them shimmer against the light from the partially open doorway at the end of the tunnel. For a split second his arms twitched in the eddy of the force currents. Then the blast slowed down and in another second, the force had leaked harmlessly into the air.
Remo opened his hands and looked at the pure, unbroken black sphere. He tossed it toward Spencer.
"Told you. You can't trust these things."
Spencer recoiled as the bomb hit the stone floor in front of him and rolled harmlessly away.
The Englishman reached down to the back of his shoe, snapped a pellet from the back of his heel, and tossed it onto the ground in front of Remo. It popped, almost a firecracker's pop, and a dark billow of smoke rose, surrounding Remo's face. He stopped breathing, in case it was poison. Spencer pulled a throwing knife from the back of his belt, raised it over his head, and propelled it at
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the center of the smoky mist, at the spot where Remo's chest would be.
An ordinary man would have been defenseless, unable to see to protect himself against the razor-sharp blade flying toward him. But mist and smoke, Remo knew, were not just one thing; they were a bundle of bits, just as television was not one picture, continuously moving, but a series of still pictures flashed at the rate of thirty per second. It took the cooperation of the average person's mind and eyes to make them into a moving picture.
So with smoke. It did not have to blind or obscure if a person simply realized that it was made up of separate particles. Then he could focus on the particules with primary vision, changing the fog and smoke to a transparent drizzle, and then use secondary vision to see the object behind the smoke.
This Remo did and saw the knife flying toward his chest.
Spencer saw the knife disappear into the column of smoke that was Remo. He expected the usual thud and scream when it bit flesh, but there was no thud and no scream.
Instead there was silence. Then a snap, a hard, metallic cracking sound. And then two halves of the knife, the handle and the blade, came flying back from the mist to land on the stone floor at Spencer's feet.