"For an American?" Remo asked.
"For an American, it is excellent tea," Chiun said. "For a Korean, it is not bad."
"Good. Then I'll have some," Remo said.
"Same way, right. No sugar, no milk, no lemon, no anything," she told him
"Right," Remo agreed.
"I never could drink it that way," she said. She began to stutter slightly and then stopped. "Oscar always drank his the same way."
"Don't dwell on it, kid," Remo said, rising to take the cup from her. "What's done is done."
"I know." She made an obvious attempt to be more cheerful. "And now for the good news."
"All right," Remo said. "What's the good news?"
"We've figured out how to solve the problem of making the copa-ibas grow in this climate. Or, at least, I think we have."
"Great," Remo said, "How'd you do that?" Behind him,'he heard Pierre LaRue lean forward on the rocking chair to listen.
"Actually, Chiun figured it out."
"It was nothing," Chiun said. Remo nodded agreement. Chiun added, "For me, that is. For Remo, it would have been impossible, because it involved thinking."
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Joey reached out and touched Chiun's hand good-humoredly. For a fraction of a second, Remo thought he could see a flicker of pride pass through the old man's eyes.
"So what's the solution?" Remo asked. "Or maybe I better ask first, what was the problem?"
"The problem has always been that copa-iba is a tropical tree," Joey said.
"Not Korean?" asked Remo, with a serious face.
"We have resolved that satisfactorily," Chiun said. "Probably the tree was brought from Korea to Brazil many thousands of years ago. Then it was brought to this country."
Remo nodded. "Got it," he said.
"With a tropical tree," Joey said, "there's practically no place in the continental U.S. where we can grow them, except for a little fringe on the Texas gulf coast and a little tiny bit of southern Florida."
"So the problem is trying to find a way to make them grow up here in this dismal climate," Remo said. "That's why all the blowers and the fans and heaters?"
"That's right," she said.
"Does it work?" '
"In a way," Joey said. "I mean, we can grow the trees that way. No doubt about it. But it's not worth it. We use more oil and gasoline to run the equipment than the oil we can get out of the trees. The only reason we've been keeping it going is to have some adult trees to study."
"Then the experiment was a flop?" Remo said.
"No. I didn't say that. The big breakthrough was about six months ago. After all this time of planning and trying and fooling around, we finally discovered a way to get the copa-iba seeds to sprout quickly. It used
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to take thirty to forty years for a single seed to germinate. Now we can get it to do that in only three or four weeks. That was the first breakthrough."
"How do you do it?" Remo asked.
Joey walked back to the fire. Behind him, Pierre was still not rocking, Remo noticed.
"I'm not sure I should tell you," Joey said.
"I think you should. It might help us figure out what's going on around here," Remo said.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that people didn't start dying until your breakthrough with getting seeds to sprout or whatever."
Joey hesitated for a moment. "Maybe," she said. "Anyway, all I do is soak the seeds in this special mixture I've developed. And it works. It really works."
"And who else knew about this mixture besides you?"
"Knows it exists?" asked Joey.
"Yes."
"A hundred people at Tulsa Torrent," she said.
"Who knew what was in it?" asked Remo.
"Just Danny and Oscar and me."
"And now they're, dead and somebody's trying to kill you," Remo said.
"It looks that way," she said.
"Why is this so important?" Remo asked. "So who cares if seeds whatchamacallit in weeks or years?"
"It speeds up research. Look. Suppose we grow a hundred trees and two of them seem to have a special resistance to cold. Well, we can take those trees and cross-fertilize them and plant them and get a lot more trees and maybe if you're lucky a lot of them will be more resisfant to the cold. And you keep doing it. But if you can only get seeds every thirty years, it's going to
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take you centuries to make a dent. That's why my breakthrough was so important; now we can speed up the research program."
"I see. Now what does Chiun have to do with all this marvelous wisdom?" Remo said.