"Where did you get those?" Smith snapped.
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"Are they back again?" asked the secretary, holding up a seed. It was pale yellow and the size of a gnat.
"It's a grass seed," he said. "They're trying to frighten me. Just some environmentalist nuts."
"Do these people always leave grass seeds around?" Smith asked.
"Yeah. It's their calling card. They believe in the universal goodness of everything. Except people. They are the fringe of fringes. They protest everything."
"When did you put that handkerchief in your pocket?" Smith asked.
"Could you two deal with this later?" the president asked. "We ought to move along with our plans if I'm to leave the country."
"This is why you have to leave the country," Smith said. He took the seeds from the secretary along with the handkerchief. "We found the chambermaid dead. In the ragged edges of her throat were sprinkled a few grass seeds. They may be crazy, Mr. Secretary, but they're not so harmless."
But the secretary of the interior was not listening. At the very moment he realized that the people who had attempted to kill the president had gotten as close to him as his handkerchief, the fear and tension overloaded his nervous system, and he removed himself from the horror of it by simply passing out.
Chapter Six
They called him the Dutchman.
He was an American. His real name had been Jeremiah Purcell, but now 'the Dutchman' suited him as well as any. Long ago, before the madness in him forced him to run endlessly away from the world, he had lived on a small Dutch Caribbean island. The natives there gave him the name. He had tried to isolate himself then, thinking that if he could hide well enough, his powers could be controlled.
But nothing could control what the Dutchman had inside him.
He awoke in the full blaze of afternoon light. He felt a sharp stab of fear, as he did every time he faced a new day.
Where am 1?
Squinting into the brilliant sunlight, he made out the conical shapes of the Anatolian lava mountains with their almost absurd-looking little cutout squares where the inhabitants of the area chose to live.
Cappadocia. Now he remembered. He had been in Asia
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Minor for three days. Although the name was not to be found on any modern map, the residents of this part of eastern Turkey south of Ankara still called their home by its Biblical name.
He was thirsty. He felt his lips with his fingers. They were dry and cracked. His face was tender. He was fair skinned, and burned easily. He didn't remember falling asleep. Sleep was so rare for him that he was grateful whenever it came, but he wished he hadn't slept where the sun could burn him so badly.
What have I done?
There was a woman . . . blisters ... a fire . . . Death, death everywhere . . .
Stop it, he told himself. He couldn't change the past.
Or the future. It will all be the same.
Nearby, a farmer led a goat cart filled with containers of milk toward the village. Jeremiah stumbled forward on wobbly legs. The first hours after waking were sometimes painfully sane. At night, when his energies were high, when his mind flew, free and out of control, he could forget. There was no terrible past for him then, no future filled with dread and loathing. But now, and for a few minutes every day, he remembered the freakish thing that he was with an awful clarity.
/ am the Dutchman.
Maker of nonexistent worlds, manipulators of minds. Heir to the secrets of Sinanju. Possessor of a power greater than any man should have to bear. The Dutchman, specter of death, fated to live without peace, without rest, until his mission was fulfilled.
He moved on silent feet toward the goat cart. As usual, the animals reared and panicked when they caught his scent, knocking the heavy metal containers on their sides. Animals had always feared him. They understood the disguises of death better than humans did.
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But here, among the primitive mountain dwellers of Cappadocia, even the humans knew him. They had seen him kill. They had some idea of the terrible extent of his madness. The farmer fled, screaming. His goats pulled in all directions, their eyes bulging as the Dutchman drew nearer.
He set them free and lifted one of the containers to his lips. The milk was warm but good. He drank greedily.
Something moved. There was a sound like a wail, quickly muffled. With a start, he set down the container and shifted the dried grass inside the cart. At the back, hidden behind the tall containers and half covered with grass, was a thin young woman holding an infant in her arms. Her shoulders shook. With jerky movements, she tried to put the baby behind her. Its fat brown legs kicked out at the air.
He felt something stirring within him. Colors, a strange music, a heightened awareness. The little brown legs seemed to glow, blocking out everything around them.
No, he told himself. He would not let it happen. He had felt the same wild longing nearly all his life. It heralded the unleashing of the inhuman beast he carried inside him. He had watched a pig explode when he was ten years old, and had realized even then that somehow he had made it happen. He was born with the gift of death. He had set his own parents on fire just by imagining it. He had transformed a beautiful girl into a mass of boils with the hideous power of his mind. And now he saw the baby's fat brown legs charred black to the bone, disappearing into ash . . .
The baby cried, jarring his thoughts. It was too late to stop the power, but he could divert it if he . . . tried. . . .
"Go," he shouted in Turkish. "Take the baby. Now."
Feeling as if every muscle and nerve in his body were being ripped apart, he forced his gaze away from the baby
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and onto one of the uninhabited stone mountains. It had been so difficult, just the slight turning of his head, that he thought he would die from the effort. He knew it would not be long before he would be unable to control the power even that much.
Relaxing, allowing his eyes to rest on the great peak of gray rock, he exhaled slowly. The mountain changed before his eyes to a glowing, jagged mass of electric blue. Dissonant music, sounding like a choir of tormented souls, rose up around him. The mountain glowed green, then orange, outlined with an aura of bright white. The air smelled acrid and oppressive. The power had engulfed the mountain.
"Nuihc, why have you done this to me?" he cried. If he had been left alone, he might have died in childhood, as other mutants did. He should not have been permitted to develop to his capabilities. He should never have been privy to the teachings of Sinanju, which strengthened a mind that was already too strong to live among men. But his teacher, Nuihc, the man who had saved him from the world of men, had not allowed him to die. For Nuihc had seen in young Jeremiah Purcell a being who could help him to conquer the earth. In Jeremiah, Nuihc had created the Dutchman, homeless, mad, doomed. And now Nuihc was dead.
"You may serve me in only one way," Nuihc had said a thousand times before his death.
The Dutchman still remembered the first time he heard the conditions of his life under the strange Oriental teacher.
"How may I serve you, Master?" he had asked.
"Kill him who rules the destiny of Sinanju. Should 1 die, bring to death by your own hands the Master Chiun. Only then will you find rest."
Kill Chiun. Find the Master of Sinanju and kill him, or live forever in torment.
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