"I… I…"
Remo was speechless.
"Secondly," said Chiun, for he too felt things he did not wish to express, "you cannot serve another emperor. No Master of Sinanju serves a succeeding emperor. For this, there are good reasons. One, people might say the Master arranged the death of the first emperor. Secondly, and this you may not understand for many years, for you are not even four decades old yet, but a new emperor buries the sword of his predecessor."
"I don't understand, Chiun."
"A new emperor wants his own power. It does not happen today, but when ancient rulers died, they were often buried with their most trusted and highly placed ministers. This was not as some have come to believe so they could serve him in another world. No, it was because the new emperor or pharaoh or khan, or whatever men wish to call a president or chairman or czar—because truly they are all alike—it is because the new emperor does not wish other powers than his to be present. Today, a new emperor comes to power and the servants of the old emperor retire, which is a different form of death. But in our world, they must die, as was the way in the past. You cannot serve the new emperor because he does not want you around. He wants his own ministers. This I know."
"We don't work like that in America. This isn't the Orient or 1,200 B.C. This is America in the twentieth century."
"And your country is inhabited by human beings?"
"Of course."
"Then your country is the same. You are just not wise enough to perceive what I tell you, because you are a little baby still short of four decades of life."
"You've made my mind up for me," Remo said. "I'm going to Folcroft."
"I will go with you for you carry more than a decade of my life and we have a saying in Sinanju that babies should not wander the streets alone."
"I wonder when your ancestors ever had time for training," said Remo angrily. "You're so damned busy shooting off your mouth with sayings for this and sayings for that. You ought to go on television like that social worker in the funny Western hat."
"I know the one," said the Master of Sinanju. "Kung Fu. The white man whose eyes are made to look normal."
What Remo did not consider, and what many Americans had never conceived, was that America did have royalty. Not bestowed by accident of womb, but by personal accomplishment, by inventing, discovering, creating, or performing.
And a true lord of the nobility of merit spit the blood from his aging mouth, tried to focus eyes that had been filled with tears of torture, and sat up in the lead-lined basement of a hilltop house near Bolinas, California.
He did not know where he was, not even the continent for sure, or even the week or month. He knew his body was covered by painful welts, that his right leg had suffered nerve damage, and that breathing itself was very hard. But as he swallowed the water that felt like razor blades going down his throat, he knew one more very important thing. His adversary had made an incredible blunder. Dr. Harold W. Smith was alive.
He should not have been alive, not at his age, not after the shock to his body. But he had been reared in the Vermont countryside where winters whipped physical hardship upon a young boy who had wanted above all things to be a lawyer, then a judge. In school, when others cheated on exams, Harold Smith covered his paper, even when he sat next to the class bully. As he had tried to explain to the much larger boy, he would be doing him no favor by helping him through school painlessly. The struggle to learn was part of the growing up process, young Harold had said.
The bully took a much simpler view of cheating. He didn't want any lip from Harold Smith, he wanted the answers. He would get the answers or Harold would get a bloody nose. Nobody, not even his parents, called Harold Smith Harry. It was always Harold. He was somber, even in diapers.
The whole class gathered around to watch Harold get his. Get it, he did. A bloody nose the first day. A black eye the second. A chipped tooth the third. On the fourth day, the class bully explained he did not want to fight after school anymore. If Harold didn't want to give him the answers, then Harold could keep his old answers. Who needed them anyway?
Harold reminded him there was unfinished business. He drew a dusty line with his shoe in the school yard and dared the bully to cross it. The bully did and decked Harold again. By this time the class sympathy had shifted in favor of the school wet blanket against the bully, who tried to explain that it was Harold who started the fight this time.
For five more days, every day at the end of school, Harold and the bully fought. On the fifth day, Harold got in a good right cross to the bully's nose. It bled. The bully cried. And gave up.
No one picked on Harold again. He wasn't worth it
When he was fourteen Harold met Maude. She lived in neighboring Windham. They were married thirteen years later after a courtship so dull, she later confesssed to a friend, that Maude felt they were ready for their golden wedding anniversary celebration halfway through their first date. The date was to a Marx Brothers movie at which Harold not only failed to laugh but kept interrupting to point out that Groucho's moustache was painted on and for fifteen cents the least the movie company could do would be to give them a man with a real moustache.
Harold even had the ability to make his Congregationalist minister, the Rev. Jesse Rolfe Prescott, feel like justifying himself when he said hello. There was an aura about Harold Smith of relentless integrity.
He got a full scholarship to Dartmouth, went on to Harvard Law, got his doctorate, and was teaching law at Yale when World War II broke out. Everyone thought he would be a natural for the inspector general's office. Everyone except Wild Bill Donovan of the OSS who had an uncanny ability to see talent where others failed to even suspect it.
Against the high-booted Nazi SS, with their testicle crushers and ceremonial daggers, the honest boy from Vermont cut a swath like a flamethrower through a spider web. By the third year of the war, he had agents placed high in their command. He compromised the Gestapo. It was the classic case of the diligent worker versus the emotionally involved sadist. Workers always won.
The law professor from Yale had found a vocation he had never sought or even dreamed of. When the OSS retooled to emerge as the CIA for the cold war, Harold Smith was in a high command position. He had the reputation of getting things done successfully and quietly.
He never confided to anyone why he stayed because no one ever asked. While he longed to return to Yale, he felt he owed it to his country to remain in the CIA, mainly to keep the zanies, as he called them, from mucking things up. The zanies had plans for everything, from kidnapping Mao Tse-tung and replacing him with a double, to setting off a thermonuclear explosion at Magnetogor as a way of convincing the Russians that it was not safe to stockpile nuclear weapons.
Harold fervently hoped there were men in Russia and China to keep their zanies in line also. If Harold Smith had a prayer for the human race, it was:
"Lord, save us from those with dramatic solutions."
One month he noticed he was being checked out as thoroughly as if he had never had security clearance. The investigation, as he would later find out, having access to FBI files, had even interviewed the bully from school days who was now an assistant school principal.
"The finest fellow I ever knew," was the bully's comment. "Had a good right cross. Became a lawyer, went off to teach at Yale and we never heard from him again."
Maude's comment was: "Lacks imagination."
The dean of Yale Law School said: "Rather dull, but brilliant too. He reminds me of Dimaggio in centerfield. He does the difficult so routinely, he makes it look easy."
"I don't remember him, unless he was that somber little fellow who criticized our Sunday School for being too frivolous," said Reverend Prescott.
"Somewhat backward in the social amenities. We were worried about him for a while but fortunately he found that lovely girl from Windham," said Nathan Smith, Harold's father.
"Harold always was a good boy," said Mrs. Nathan Smith, Harold's mother.
"Who?" asked SS Obengrupper Fuehrer Heinz Raucht, whose special commando units had been rendered ineffective for the last two years of Warld War II by Operation Plum Bob, Col. Harold Smith, commanding.
"A prick," stated Agent Conrad MacCleary, transferred from European to Asian Theater during World War II for drunkenness, recklessness and gross insubordination. "But a fair prick. Balls to spare. Toughest thin-lipped son of a bitch I ever met."
The investigation into Harold Smith's background led to one job. The most important job of his life, a job that terrified him by the enormity of its prospects.
"Why me, Mr. President?" asked Harold Smith. "Out of 180 million people, there must be someone better."
"You're the someone, Smith. I trust you with a nation's future."
"It's unconstitutional, Mr. President," Smith had said. "As a matter of fact, we are both violating the law by even discussing this. And I'm not all that sure that I won't make a citizen's arrest right here in the White House."
The young president had smiled an engaging politician's smile, a smile that had absolutely no effect on Harold Smith, who had heard an impropriety of the grossest order.
"I'm glad you said that, Smith. I'm not even going to ask you not to do what you have just proposed. I'm going to ask you to think for a week. You know the law. You taught it. You think about whether this cherished constitution can survive. We are facing a trial as a nation, the hope for a kind of government that man has never really known in his history, that we have never faced before. I don't think the constitution is going to survive. I think you've got to violate it to save it. It's that simple."
"Or that complicated," said Smith. In a week he thought and prayed enough for a lifetime, hoping that this task would pass from him, that he would not have to assume this awful power. "If not me, who?" he wondered unhappily. "If not CURE, what?" And with fear and humility he had agreed, but he refused to shake the President's hand.
Now someone else, an outsider, was trying to take over the power of CURE. He might very well have it in his grasp already.
Smith took another long drink of water. It went down with less pain. He heard nothing in the lead room but his heavy breathing. They had not left him much strength, but they had left him his mind.
He looked at the table he was on. The straps hung uselessly at its side. His own blood was on them. The walls of the place were curiously familiar. A bomb shelter. There were two kinds of people who would build a shelter. A military operation or a private individual afraid of nuclear war. Now, if this were a military post, there was nothing much Harold Smith could do for the moment. But if a private individual had constructed this place, a man who was obviously insecure, then there just might be something, then there probably was something.