"I am not. I am but a vessel of humility come to your great house, oh, beautiful maiden of the machines," said Chiun, who whispered to Remo, "She probably has no gold. Do not take paper money."
"I heard that. Come on in. You look okay."
A door slid open in the apparently seamless wall to their right. Sitting at a little cocktail table with shelves of liquor behind her was a blonde with a body that could make a priest burn his collar. Her breasts protruded in mammoth declaration of milk potential, reaching out to the limits of a stretching white smock. Her waist nosedived in and roared out at the hips again. A short light blue skirt revealed smooth white thighs.
When Remo finally noticed her eyes, he saw they were blue. And bloodshot.
"What can I offer you to drink?" she said. "Sit down."
"Ah, sweet delicate flower," said Chiun. "What soaring heights your presence imparts to our humble hearts."
"Glad to meet you," said Remo.
"You're lying through your teeth," she said, pointing a martini glass at Remo. "You can't bullshit me. You like my boobs or my brains." Then she pointed to Chiun. "You, on the other hand, are on the level. You're real. Tell your phony friend not to lay it on."
"He is but ignorant of true sensitivity. True graciousness of which you are the embodiment, fair lady."
"All right. But make sure he keeps his hands to himself," she said. "What'll you have to drink? Hey, Mr. Seagrams. Make it snappy with the booze."
From behind the bar, a liquor cart rolled out, with glasses tinkling as it went.
"Just water, thank you," said Chiun.
"Same for me," said Remo.
"Where'd you meet this wet blanket?" the woman asked Chiun.
"I have my difficulties with him, as you see."
"Difficulties. I can tell you about difficulties."
Metal trays on metal arms moved and shuffled bottles and glasses and ice. To make the water, one tray melted ice cubes.
"These machines are driving me to the brink of schizophrenia," she said. "You program them and program them and then they misfunction. If I programmed Mr. Seagrams once to offer drinks whenever someone enters, I programmed him a hundred times. You give a drink or an explanation why you can't. I don't know why it should be so difficult."
"I know your problems," said Chiun, nodding to Remo. "But I thought machines never forget."
"Well, it's not really the machines. It's that the programming has to be incredibly subtle. I'm Vanessa Carlton, Dr. Carlton. Maybe you've heard of me."
"Ah, the famous Dr. Carlton," said Chiun.
Remo looked up at the ceiling and sighed. Chiun not only hadn't heard of Dr. Carlton, he still hadn't heard of Newton, Edison, and Einstein.
"Unmanned space flight. We do the computer components here which are the brains of it. A little freshening on the martini, Mr. Seagrams," she said, and the cart sent out a shiny arm that brought the martini glass to a large bottle of gin, filled it with two clear shots and then added a small spray of vermouth.
"You want something to eat?"
"Some brown rice would be nice," said Chiun.
"Hey. Johnny Walker. Some brown rice. A hundred grams. And don't let it stick this time. Where was I?"
"You being the brains of the unmanned space program," said Remo.
"An unmanned space program is nothing without its compost," said Chiun.
"Computer components. You're right. Well, if NASA were running Columbus's expedition, they would have withheld the rudder to save costs. I mean it. They don't spring for spit. Hey, this martini is good. You're getting better looking. What's your name?"
"Remo. I look good when people are sober, too."
"I'm not drunk, shithead," said Dr. Carlton and took a good long swallow on her martini.
"Where was I?"
"Columbus being denied a rudder," said Remo. A door on the far side of the room opened and a small tray on wheels came rolling to the little table. On top were two steaming bowls. The tray served them onto the desk with the same metallic arm.
"Dammit," shrieked Dr. Carlton. "You burned the rice." She kicked the cart across the room. "Dammit. Now you know why I drink. These machines."
"Rudders," said Remo.
"Right. Well, that's taken care of, anyway," said Dr. Carlton, unbuttoning one button on the top of her blouse and airing a glorious crevice. "But do you know what they did? You know what they do all the time? First they give me a ton of money. They tell me to make this and buy that and try this. Do you know that I've got a rocket ready to launch, built right into the ground here at these labs? My own rocket. Right here. They insisted on it. So they give you all this money and you get staff and materials and you get started, and then they tell you no more money, and you've got to fire your staff, and the materials you bought gather dust on the shelves. Ah, piss on them."
"Of course," said Chiun, and Remo knew he was acting because he abhorred Western profanity, especially in women.
"What we have come about," Chiun said, "is a creativity. How does one make creativity out of a machine?"
"Aha," said Dr. Carlton. "Come with me. You want to know about creativity, well, I'll show you. It has to do with survival," and she grabbed Remo's arm on her way to her feet and held on as she led them into a room the size of a stadium. Rising to the arched beamed ceiling were frontplates of machines, dials so high Remo looked for elevators for people to get up to read them. Three stories high and Remo assumed that was only the control panel.
"That, my friends, is Mr. Daniels. I have christened him Mr. Jack Daniels. You couldn't send him into space, could you?"
She led them into the room. A man stood to the left, his back to them, looking up at the machine.
Quietly, Dr. Carlton walked up behind him, then gave a tremendous uppercut swing of her right toe. It caught the man in the buttocks and propelled him across the room where he flopped, thwack, head first against the floor.
"Stay out of the way, Mr. Smirnoff," Dr. Carlton yelled. The figure of the man did not move, but lay awkwardly awry on the hard stone floor. "Hahaha-hahahaha." Dr. Carlton's laugh echoed through the high-domed room like the shrieks of a malevolent bird. She turned and saw Remo and Chiun staring at her in silence.
"Hey," she said quickly, "don't take it so hard. That's not a person. It's a dummy. Mr. Smirnoff. We use it for measurements in the lab here. Somebody must have left it out in the middle of the floor. Now where were we? Oh, yes, creativity."
Dr. Carlton walked closer to the control panels, Chiun and Remo on her heels. "Jack Daniels here is a computer. Do you know what a synapse is?"
Remo looked blank. Chiun said, "Not nearly as much as you do, gracious and brilliant doctor." He whispered behind his hand to Remo, "A synapse is when they tell you what happened in yesterday's story. But let her tell us. It will make her feel smart."
"A synapse," said Dr. Carlton, "is a junction of two brain cells. The human brain has more than two billion of them. Out of all those junctions comes what we know as intelligence. Mr. Jack Daniels is the closest we've got to it. He's got two billion synapses, too. If it weren't for transistors and miniaturization, to have that many he'd have to be as big as Central Park. Thanks to transistors, I've been able to shrink him down to a little less than the size of a city block."
"Let her babble," Chiun whispered. "A synapse is a retelling, but shorter, of a story."
"That's a synopsis, Chiun, not a synapse," said Remo.