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"Pure water," Smith said. "Where do you find pure water in the United States?"
"I don't know," Remo said. "You know, when I was a kid, you didn't have to be Jesus to walk across this river. It was so thick with gunk, you could walk on it if you had on big shoes. Now it's pretty clean. They've even got fish in it."
"Clean?" Chiun said. "You call this clean? If you want clean water, you have to see the river in Sinanju."
"I've seen the river in Sinanju," Remo said. "People do their laundry in it. It's filled with soap."
"And soap makes things clean, doesn't it?" Chiun said. He whispered to Smith, "Don't pay any attention to him. He doesn't understand anaerobic at all."
"Please," Smith said. "I guess there's no real problem. I'll just have water made from hydrogen and oxygen."
"Don't forget anaerobic," Chiun said.
"What are you going to do now?" Smith said.
"I'm going to see Reva Bleem," Remo said. "She doesn't know who's behind all this—I'm pretty sure of that—but she can lead me to him. He's the key. You got all this bacteria off St. Maarten's, but he's the guy that invented it. If he did it once, he can do it again. So we've got to get to him."
"You said she thinks Chiun is dead?"
"I figured there was no point in letting her know otherwise. Kind of an insurance policy."
Smith nodded and looked at his watch. "I have to get back. I want stores of pure water in case we need it."
Chiun was back to folding napkins, and he ignored Smith as the CURE director left.
"If you're finished playing," Remo told Chiun, "we can go."
"See," the president of the United States said to his cabinet. "It just takes water."
"That's interesting," said the secretary of the interior. He hoped the president wasn't going to tell him
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to keep his hands off some river somewhere just because somebody needed water. Rivers, if you dammed them up right, were good for making electricity. Then you could use the electricity to power all the homes you could build where the river used to go. It was so simple, he sometimes wondered why people seemed to oppose it.
'Water's always interesting," the president said. "We were always fighting about water." He lapsed smoothly into a Western twang. " 'But I've got to be able to graze and water my flock.' And then the bad guy would say, 'The river's on my property, and you can't use it. Keep those damn sheep outa my way.' Of course, he didn't say 'damn' 'cause you couldn't say it then. You can say anything now, even the four-letter words, but you couldn't say 'damn' then. And then we'd have a range war over the water and I'd always win."
"War?" said the secretary of defense, snapping to attention. "Who's having a war?"
"Range war," the president said. "The old days."
"Oh. I thought it was a new war and somebody forgot to tell me. I've been busy with my budget."
"No," the president said. "An old war. About water. So now we have to find clean water to get rid of all this stuff."
"Big Bear," said the secretary of the interior. "They have great water."
"Who's Big Bear?" the president asked.
"You know. In those big bottles. Your secretary's got one outside in the office. They have great water, and you don't hear them whining all the time about rivers, either."
"No, we can't use that," the president said. He turned to the secretary of commerce. "Get hold of some company and tell them to make us a lot of fresh water. From those chemicals."
"What chemicals?"
"You know, hydrogen and like that," the president said.
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"That's not water," said the secretary of state. "You put that on a boo-boo to make it better."
"That's hydrogen peroxide," said the budget director. "It fizzes. Water is hydrogen and oxygen. Two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen."
"I thought hydrogen was in bombs," the secretary of defense said.
"No, that's different," the president said. "That's like hydrogen air, not hydrogen water. You tell some company to make us a lot of it. And put it in clean barrels without germs."
"What for?" the secretary of commerce asked.
"Haven't you been paying attention?" the president asked.
"Well, I kind of lost track when we were talking about the range war with the sheep. We going to have another range war?"
"No," the president said. "Ever since Enrol Flynn died, there hasn't been a good range war."
The headquarters of Bleem International were located in a low, brick-fronted building two blocks from the state assembly chambers in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Reva Bleem felt comfortably at home as she stepped into her dark oak-paneled office. Along the left wall was her private bathroom and her wet bar. The right wall held a long sofa, with a large conference table dominating the floor. Behind the couch wall, she knew, was the company's computer, which took up an entire wall of the next room. When it was first being installed, she hadn't wanted it there. She had expected that it would be thumping and throbbing and making a terrible noise, but the computer ran silently. Only occasionally, by a faint dimming of the overhead lights, could she tell that the computer was running on full speed because of its drain on the company's power supply.
She poured herself a drink from the bar and fondled the bottle of Stolichnaya for a moment before replacing it in the rack.
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Not bad, she told herself. Not bad for a woman who three years earlier had been selling houses in Florida, supporting a husband who had decided that work was the curse of the leisure class, and wondering how she was going to make the next payment on her thirty-month old Ford station wagon.
It had all started with a telephone call. The warmest, kindest voice she had ever heard was on the other end of the line, and he told her where to buy property in Florida that would soon be condemned for a new state highway. She was desperate, and she did it, and six months later she was rich. She had always assumed her caller was some state official trying to get rich on inside information and that he would come one day to collect his share of the winnings. But he never did.
She next heard from the voice when it called and told her to invest her money in the stock of a company called Polypussides, and she did. She had made $600,-000 on the land deal, and she put almost every cent into Polypussides. Even as she did it, she cursed herself as a fool because she had never had a chance to spend any of her wealth, to revel in it, to try wasting some of it. All she kept was $5,000, and she used that to get a lawyer and get rid of her husband.
Three months after buying Polypussides stock, she was elected president of the company. She had spoken to her friend on the telephone.
"What do I do as president?" she had said in panic. "I don't even know what this company does."
"This company does what I want it to do," her friend had said. "And you do the same thing and I will make you rich."
So she had and he had. She became president of all the Bleem companies and all their subsidiaries, including Puressence. And once she had asked her friend why he had chosen her to help.