"Smith," came the lemony voice. "I'm using the phone in my briefcase. If there's no one with you, we should be able to talk privately."
"Oh, it's private, all right. The telephone lines have all been cut. How'd you get the number?"
"The computers, of course."
"Of course," Remo said. He told Smith about the daily injections and everything he could remember about Posie Ponselle except for her sterling performance between the sheets. "She says that she's seventy years old, and that Foxx is even older than she is."
"Oh. Oh. Oh." Smith sounded as if he were about to fall off a tall building.
"What is it?"
"Quiet, please." The phone crackled with the whirr and hum of the Folcroft Four in action. "Good God," Smith uttered, his voice shaky. "Seventy-eight percent."
"Seventy-eight percent of what?"
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Smith told him about the Foxx/Vaux theory and about the scandal involving procaine in 1938. "There's a seventy-eight percent chance that this Dr. Foxx is the same Vaux who was working on the procaine experiments fifty years ago. Foxx may have killed a woman for the procaine in her body. An Irma Schwartz, if that's any help." "How about Ives? And the Air Force guy?" "Their procaine levels are normal. There's still no connection."
"Any word from the military?" "Nothing," Smith said. "If you're running after the wrong man, then whoever killed them will be running around loose forever. What have you picked up from the other guests-besides this woman? Frankly, Remo, that story about the gold drop-offs and the formula shipments to South Dakota doesn't make sense. Those facts don't even compute." "I think she was telling the truth," Remo said. "Until it computes, her information is inconsequential," Smith said crisply. "Who else have you spoken with?"
"Well, I'm getting to that," Remo said, pulling on his trousers. The wires in his makeshift telephone circuit were welding together. The connection was breaking fast.
"We haven't any time to waste," Smith pressed, barely audible among the crackles and static on the line.
"Okay, okay," Remo said. "I'll be here for another twenty-four hours or so, since tomorrow's the big day around here-Smitty?" He juggled the wires in the phone, but no sound came. The line was dead.
Which was just as well, since at that moment the six-foot, four-inch frame of a man wearing what looked
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to be a white toga came flying past the window outside.
"Wa-wa-wa," the man called as he zoomed upward toward the roof. And past the roof, toward the stars.
Remo looked to the snow-covered garden below, already sure of who would be down there.
A crowd of onlookers near the swimming pool, similarly attired and shivering in the cold, gasped and shrieked piteously as a second man, smaller and with graying hair, blasted off into space. In the center of the throng stood Chiun, his arms folded triumphantly across his chest, his face serene.
"Oh, bulldookey," Remo said. The first man, the giant, turned in an arc overhead and began his dive, nose first, like a white-sheathed warhead. He had stopped wailing, his features set rigidly in a mask of unadulterated terror, as he sped downward alongside the house. He was near enough to the walls to touch them, if he felt like skinning his palms on his way to eternity.
"Hang on!" Remo called, throwing open the window and hoisting himself up to his knees.
The man's stone face made a slow turn. "To what?" he moaned.
"To me." He stretched out his arms, slowly pivoting so that he was facing up, supported by the backs of his knees against the window frame. He was directly in line with the falling body.
A woman below screamed and fainted. "This is terrible," another said.
"Quite terrible," Chiun said sympathetically. "Remo is always interfering."
"How could you do such a thing?" a muscular beach-blanket type yelled to Chiun.
"Oh, it was nothing," he said, beaming modestly.
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"Just a small upward thrust. It is an elementary maneuver. ..."
But no one was listening. Everyone was watching the thin young man with the thick wrists trying fruitlessly to save two men falling in space, one behind the other, as they sped toward the hard frozen ground.
"No, no," said the man in the air who was about to meet his maker three seconds before his associate.
"Stretch out," Remo shouted.
"Mama!. . ."
"Stretch out!"
He curled into a fetal position. It was going to make it tougher for Remo. Tougher, but still no sweat. It was an easy job, almost embarrassingly easy. Chiun would laugh him all the way back to Folcroft if Remo couldn't manage to catch two falling people, while supported by his knees. By his toes, maybe. . . .
No, not even then. During Remo's years of training, Chiun had hurled boulders toward him off steel levers thirty feet long and expected him to stop them with a three-finger bounce, while treading water-without getting wet above the waist. That was difficult. This was nothing.
But when he caught the two men, snatching at their strange flowing garments with a manipulation of his fingers that spread the fabric out and cradled them inside it like stork-delivered babies, the crowd below went crazy. They acted as though he'd just come back from Mars with little red men for all of them to play with. The woman who had fainted earlier looked up to Remo with a face radiant with wonder and shouted, "Bless you!" The others gave him three cheers and babbled excitedly about what a hero Remo was.
Only Chiun saw the true insignificance of the maneuver, and he was looking at the weeping, shrieking
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faces around him as if he'd been tossed into a lunatic asylum. Remo shrugged as he hauled the flailing, wild-eyed men into the house through the window.
"Thank you, thank you," the gray-haired man burbled, falling to his knees and kissing Remo's still bare feet.
"Hey, watch it," Remo said irritably. It was bad enough that he'd had to perform grade-school tricks in front of a bunch of spectators, but having some nut smear his lips all over Remo's toes was pushing the limit.
The man raised his tear-stained face. "It's fate," he intoned.
It was Seymour Burdich, finally divested of his black turtleneck and ankh and draped in the Grecian gown that seemed to be the fashion at Shangri-la.
"You again," Remo said.
"You've given me my life. You're a true hero. I'll do anything for you. Anything?"
Remo thought. "Anything?"
"Anything."