"A bug," Remo said.
"Bug? There are millions, billions of bugs out there."
Remo nodded. She was right, of course. But there had been another bug and it didn't belong there. It had not been attracted to the pheromone and had flown off crazily toward the hills where the dust now was from the limousines.
In the caravan, Ndo happily toasted the day with Dom Perignon. The guests, all influential delegates from Third World countries, thought Ndo was toasting the success of that peculiar little demonstration in that dirty little village. They all knew he would have to pay for bringing them out here. Some of them had actually missed cocktail parties to be here. And there was no need for it. What had been done was scut work, the kind of thing that white men or Indians or Pakistanis were hired to do. Not delegates. Ndo, they thought, would surely pay.
Ndo did not care what his delegates thought. He would take care of them as he had in the past. He had Ga back, his protector, and when he toasted the day, he toasted not the fight against the Ung beetle, but the return of the Inuti god.
His problems were relieved somewhat by half the delegates being killed on the way to the airport. Ndo, of course, escaped. Ga was with him and this was Inuti land.
Chapter 9
The delegates who did live to reach their private jets at the national airport could not describe the horrors of the bush. They were glad that some cameramen had been along so their stories would be believed.
They had been attacked by chimpanzees-but not just any chimpanzees.
These ran at them with speeds like motorcycles. These ripped the doors off heavy cars. These crazily smashed their skulls against thick bullet-proof windows. These ate fenders and tore the arms off grown men.
These bent the barrels of guns.
Every delegate knew what was wrong. It was white medicine and First World tampering. The new chemicals used back in the Inuti village had made these normally friendly animals into crazed powerful killers.
The new position of the IHAEO, determined at a caucus in the back of a car, was that IHAEO had developed the part of the chemical that destroyed the Ung beetle. But unfortunately it had been manufactured in a capitalist white factory which had carelessly neglected the environmental concerns so dear to the natural and legitimate inhabitants of the land.
This neglect had led directly to the chimpanzees going berserk. It was all somebody else's fault.
On the planes back, a resolution was passed, over cocktails, praising the delegates for their untiring work toward eradicating famine by their attack on the Ung beetle. The resolution also condemned the greedy manufacturers of the product for failing to take into account its effect on the environment.
The resolution, like all IHAEO resolutions, was passed unanimously. Except this time, there were fewer to be unamimous.
Remo and Chiun had ridden with Dara Worthington and several other scientists in the first ox cart. Up ahead, near the limousine motorcade, they saw dark hairy objects throwing themselves into trees, running around crazed. Up close, they could see a chimpanzee tear off a piece of rock and attempt to eat it. Others slept in a comalike contentment. All along the road were the littered remnants of black limousines, some of the motors still running, some of the air conditioners still making futile little cool puffs into the hot African summer air.
"What is it?" asked Dara.
She saw the remains of one of the delegates who looked as if he had been taken apart, like a chicken sold in pieces.
"I don't know," said one of the scientists in the cart. They all stopped to examine the creatures. All but Remo and Chiun. Remo was noticing a small object half the size of a fingernail, sitting on a branch that had been denuded of leaves by the recent ravishing of the Ung beetle. Chiun was listening to the researchers. "Its bones are crushed," said one scientist, holding up the limp hairy limb of a chimp.
Another discovered an extraordinary enlarged heart inside the ripped-open body of another.
In almost every one of the animals, something had been destroyed, or changed.
None of the scientists had ever seen anything like it. "What on earth happened?" Dara Worthington asked.
While the scientists pored over the remains, Chiun spoke to Remo.
"A chimpanzee, like all other creatures save human beings, uses all its strength. But in this case, look around. It has used more than its strength."
Remo nodded. He knew that he and Chiun were perhaps the only two men on the face of the earth who could use all their strength and power. It was odd, he sometimes thought. He had become more than man by learning to emulate the lower order of creatures.
But the chimps were something else again. They had used all their power, and then more. They had slipped past the regulator built into all animals and used muscles and body parts with so much power that they literally ripped themselves apart or exploded under the strain.
"That's how they killed Dr. Ravits," Remo said. "The cat."
"Exactly," Chiun said.
"Only the cat was inside the room."
"Exactly," Chiun said.
"Nobody could have gotten by you."
"Exactly," said Chiun.
"But something did to the cat what was done to the chimpanzees."
"Exactly," Chiun said.
"Which was why I missed the stroke with that dog in the alley. The dog was infected too."
"No," said Chiun. "You did that because you didn't wear a kimono."
At that moment on the dusty African road, there was satisfaction. Chiun folded his hands delicately into the folds of the sunrise kimono. Remo nodded. They had isolated the problem finally. Now the only questions that remained were how animals could be infected and who would want to do it.
The scientists did not, of course, get to share Remo and Chiun's thinking. Nor were they given the strange thing that Remo had noticed on the branch. It was a simple housefly and it had lain on the branch as if tired. And then, for no reason, it too had quivered and floated off on a hot puff of wind, another small sudden death in a land of vast, violent deaths.
Waldron Perriweather heard about the mass destruction of the Ung beetle near the Inuti village. He heard about the slaughter, the genocide of hundreds of millions of silvery little lives. He wanted to scream; he wanted to infect nurseries; he wanted to drain blood through the skin. He ran to his laboratory and screamed until his eyes almost popped out of his head. "When, damn it, when?"
"Soon, Mr. PerriweAther."
Perriweather buzzed off in a fury. He would have to drive his organization to greater heights.
The Ung beetle had been callously slaughtered, and now it was time to repay that insult.
He had thought that Gloria and Nathan Muswasser might have been helpful but when he had learned that the TNT had been detected before it exploded, he realized he was working with just another pair who were more interested in credit than in doing the work.
"Look," Perriweather had snarled when they reported their failure. "The movement needs workers, not publicity hounds."
"We were only trying to get credit for the SLA," Gloria had said.
"We're moving beyond credit. We're moving to victory. But before we can win final and ultimate victory, you have got to do your share."
Gloria Muswasser, who had dedicated her life to the revolution, who had struggled without credit, answered back sharply to this rich bourgeois:
"And what's your share? We want to make the world safe for all creatures. And you, you seem animal-insensitive at times. I'm sorry to say it, but it's so."