"I don't know if he was involved," Smith said.
"Does he exercise? I exercise. Does he have exercises he does to stay so damned fit?"
"Not like you know of, sir. It's not their muscles they exercise."
"They do the damnedest things. You know, the hardest part of this job is not telling anyone about them."
"Only you and I know," Smith said. "Imagine if it were known that the government employs those two. Imagine if my agency's existence were known."
There was a chuckle at the other end of the phone.
"I can imagine what the press would do with that. They'd bust a blood vessel with the joy of it."
The President hung up and Smith reflected that at least the man in the White House had not changed. He still held no rancor toward a press corps that obviously would like nothing more than to feed on his liver, even if they had to destroy the country to get to it.
Smith replaced the telephone and looked out again at Long Island Sound.
No one had changed. Not Remo, not Chiun, not the President.
Only Smith. The gaunt young man with the lemony face and the impossible job had become a gaunt old man with lemony face and impossible job.
sChapter Three
Abner Buell waited until the last actress and her pushy agent had left the party. They had stayed too late for people who already were going to get his backing in a movie. They had lingered over his new three-dimensional Zylon game, the adult version where the Zylon maiden ran around on the screen unclothed and the Orgmork had an engorging male organ.
The woman player was supposed to get the maiden through the maze of electronic obstacles without losing more clothes, until she was safe in the castle. The male operator of the machine was supposed to get the monster Orgmork to capture the maiden while keeping the sex organ at what was called a point level but was really something much cruder.
The big selling point of the game was that when the monster got the maiden, they would simulate a sexual assault. Right down to the screams.
The children's version of the game just had dismembering, and both the maiden and the Orgmork were clothed. It was the biggest arcade triumph of the month and Abner Buell had been bored with it in two days. He had created it.
He had also created Zonkman, where a flashing mouth ate bluish hamburger to music, and he promptly got the highest score ever. There would be little awards for those pimply-faced youngsters who scored in the zillions on those machines but Abner Buell knew that none of them would ever reach his score.
But as the inventor, the computer genius behind the game, he would never let on that the best of the kids were not even at half the level of his skill. That would ruin the image of the game, that youngsters with bubblegum reeking out of their insides or wherever they reeked, could be the best in the world at these things.
They couldn't be, precisely because they were unformed adolescents. Abner Buell invented the games for them because during those complex constructions, he was momentarily relieved of what had plagued him since he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude at the age of ten.
Boredom. The appalling grayness of the never-ending dullness of life.
At twelve, he had obtained a Ph.D. in mathematics and was thinking of getting another one in English literature when he knew that too would fail to suffice. So he planned and executed a perfect bank robbery and that was exciting for at least twenty minutes, but it wore off as soon as he realized that the police had absolutely no hope of catching him.
He was twenty-three now, could not count all his money, owned seven homes and sat morosely through dinner with what had been described as the most exciting people on the Coast. His Malibu home overlooked what was left of the beach. He drummed his fingers on the silk tablecloth as the agent talked of the wonders of his client. He saw her cast eyes at him and he saw everyone else leave.
He made an obscene remark and the actress thought it was funny. He called her names. She said that excited her. He said she was boring. She had an answer to that. She took off her clothes. She said she had always wanted to play one of his video games in the nude.
"Your agent is here," Abner Buell said.
"He's seen me do nude scenes," the actress said.
"I'll help," the agent said. "You want me to take my clothes off too?" he asked. "I'll take them off. All of them."
"If you both are not out of this house in twenty-one seconds, I will stop the funding for the movie," said Abner Buell. That finally did it
As soon as the door had shut, a crease of a grin crossed his face. He had the calm unmarked appearance of plastic, the sort of expression models like to affect. Even his brownish hair looked as if it were extruded from some hydrocarbon base. Abner Buell did not mind his looks and did not even think about them. What did they have to do with reality? And the real reality was that Abner Buell was going to be entertained this night. For at least a half-hour.
The late-night party had ended with dawn coming up behind the Rockies. It was nine A.M. in New York City. He turned on a large gray multiscreen television set and dialed a number in New York City.
"Pamela Thrushwell, please," he said when he got the operator at the computer center. Besides having sound, he also had the operator on the screen when she answered. For a moment, he considered using the voice modulator that changed his own voice to that of a sultry woman, but decided against it.
"Not in yet," the operator said.
"Have her call the number."
"What number, sir?"
"She knows," said Buell.
While he was waiting, he pushed computer memory buttons and reviewed his position on the screen. There was the first player. He had been brought in by simple money, become addicted to it, and pushed as far as he could go. Although Buell was pretty sure he could have gotten Waldo Hammersmith to commit a severe bodily assault. But he wasn't sure he could have gotten him to do murder. That was the policeman. The policeman had been relatively cheap and easy.
Abner had organized the game so that he had only a certain amount of money to spread around and he was not allowed to replace it unless he achieved what he called "Superscore," which meant turning a personality completely around. If Buell could accomplish that, then he could increase his money supply for the game by a factor of one hundred.
But staying within the budget was not the biggest aspect of the game. The real trick was not to lose anyone from service. That cost ten thousand penalty points.
Abner Buell set the video machine on review as he waited for the call. There on the screen was stumpy little Waldo Hammersmith in his elegant clothes; Waldo, the supersuspicious taxi driver who had earned Abner Buell a thousand points the moment he didn't question his good fortune.
Then there was nervous Waldo sweating in that empty office. And then came the good part. Pamela Thrushwell being very civil and polite and Waldo Hammersmith reaching out blindly and grabbing a breast.
Abner's lips almost parted. "Nice," he said softly. That had been five thousand plus points for Abner.
Then came the policeman running out and grabbing Hammersmith. It was so nice that this was in good color because there was that middle-aged former cabdriver mortified in bright red blushing. That was the good cosmetics of the game, just like the maiden's scream in Zylon when she was raped by the Orgmork, or the music in earlier games.
The scene where Hammersmith wanted to die from humiliation and Pamela Thrushwell wanted to forget everything just to end it was no points but an absolute delight to watch. Buell almost smiled at that one.
The goose itself was good too. Pamela looked as if she had been rousted by a cattle prod. He ran that one over again just to see her face. Back and then forward and then back again. The eyes wide in that round blond beautiful face.
"Plucky Brit," thought Buell. He ought to have a game called "Plucky Brit." Maybe a group of five figures in red uniforms marching around through jungles, past alligators. Maybe have the alligators digest two and spit out their bones. That would be the children's version.
Buell saw Detective Casey talking to Hammersmith and then shooting Hammersmith in the head. He did not like that. It cost him ten thousand penalty points for losing a player. He watched the body of the former cabdriver quiver on the old New York pier as the life pumped out of it.
An unsolved crime. He shook his head. No points for an unsolved crime. It was just a saving move.
Points were only given for real achievements. Making little Waldo Hammersmith throw away his working-class skepticism was an achievement. But having Casey kill him was not. Casey was a bad cop who had always been on the take, and making him a bit richer was really just taking him down a path he was already on.
He was annoyed that Casey had cost him ten thousand penalty points and he called up the current screening of him. Sometimes it would not come in or sometimes it would show just a leg or an arm or a ceiling. Abner Buell never knew where Casey would place what he believed was the code box but was really a self-contained video camera whose signal was amplified by satellite and could be sent anywhere in the world.
He had first used Casey when a bank employee noticed a computer error in the Insta-Charge accounts. He called up the scene on the video screen. There was Joe Casey shooting the employee down from a moving car. No points.