"I guess they're still pretty popular."
"Throw it away, it will give you bad ideas."
Remo dropped the book where he found it.
"Okay, but only because we have work do do. But they used to be pretty exciting. I remember one where Blaize Fury single-handedly-"
"Who is Blaize Fury?"
"The Extinguisher's real name. He was a fire fighter whose entire family was burned to death by Mafia arsonists and decided to hunt them down."
"It has taken him 214 adventures and he had not yet succeeded?"
"Actually he got the arsonists in the first book, but it wasn't enough. After that he decided to wipe out the entire Mafia. He would go from city to city shooting practically everyone whose name ended in a vowel."
"No wonder he still struggles. He employs a boom stick and wastes his wrath upon soldiers. Any fool understands if you cut off the head, a snake will quickly die."
"The Mafia had a lot of snakes heads in those days. Besides, it's only fiction."
"One man wrote all those books?"
"I don't know about now, but back then, yeah."
"What was his name?"
"Cooper, Carter, or something like that. He was good. But after five or six books, you kinda noticed he was repeating the same three plots over and over again."
"Just like Gordons," sniffed Chiun.
"Now that you mention it, yeah, just like Mr. Gordons. All he was programmed to do was survive, but he lacked one essential ingredient. Creativity. Even when he finally got his programming fixed, he was still as naive as a six-year-old. Last time out, we pulled the wool over his eyes pretty easily."
"What do you mean 'we,' round-eyes?"
"It was a team effort, okay? Stop busting my chops."
"I do not like to hear about Gordons."
"He's out of commission, so what's the problem?"
"He robbed me of my most precious possession."
"Oh, here we go again ...." Remo groaned.
"Yes, scoff. Minimize. You are a minimizer of tragedies."
"Right now," Remo said, hoisting the trunk up onto his right shoulder, "I'm just a beast of burden."
"And I am the last pure-blooded Master of Sinanju. It was my responsibility to sire the next in my line. But I am unable to fulfill this sacred duty because of the accursed man-machine Gordons. "
"Actually he was an android, not a machine."
"He was a cruel monster. Fashioned by a white lunatic to bring horror to the world just as he brought horror to my formerly serene life."
"He was created for the space program. To go where human astronauts couldn't. To survive at all costs so that he could send back telemetry of what he found. But I agree with you about the lunatic part. The idiot who built Gordons programmed him to assimilate anything living or not so he could take whatever form maximized his survival."
"Instead, he maximized my grief by robbing me of my precious seed. An undeniable fact that you persist in minimizing."
In the jungle darkness Remo rolled his eyes to the interlacing jungle canopy.
In his mind's eye, Remo remembered a previous encounter with the survival android whose creator had named it Mr. Gordons after her favorite brand of gin. It had been shot into outer space, but had returned to earth orbit and assimilated a Soviet space shuttle. The shuttle carried in its cargo bay a doomsday satellite called the Sword of Damocles. Designed to orbit earth indefinitely, the Sword had to receive an annual radio signal or it would activate, bathing the planet in microwaves designed to sterilize the human race. No one would be killed, but eventually humanity would die out from lack of offspring. Showing more malevolence than foresight, the Kremlin had engineered it as a final revenge in the event the USSR ever fell to a Western nuclear strike.
They had successfully neutralized Gordons, but Chiun had been subjected to the rays. Ever since, he swore up and down he'd been sterilized.
The fact that he hadn't attempted to have children throughout the fifty to seventy years before that meant nothing to the Master of Sinanju. It was an injury that cut to the quick of his pride, and whenever the subject came up he wouldn't let Remo hear the end of it.
"I am childless, barren. Doomed forever to bring forth no sons. Though maidens throw their fecund wombs at my feet, I must spurn them, for they are of no use to me."
"Yeah, maidens throw themselves at your feet all the time. Refresh my memory, Little Father. Exactly when was the last time that happened?"
"This they no longer do because they can read the barren emptiness in my eyes. It is written across my features in lines of indescribable pain and sorrow."
"Well, at least you got your revenge."
"Gordons deserved to die a thousand times a thousand ignominious deaths."
"He never really lived, so I don't think it matters much."
"Now the future of the House has fallen upon shoulders that care not whether they sire a child or not. You hoard your precious seed like a miser."
"I gave at the office," Remo grumbled.
"You have squandered your seed. A grown son you did not know exists and a young daughter you never see. It is the end of the pure line of Sinanju. The sun is guttering in the sky, and you fritter away your time on nonsense."
"I have enough Sinanju blood in me and enough seed that when the time comes, I can make all the grandsons you could ever want."
"There is no such number. And it is never too soon to begin."
Noticing Remo shifting shoulders again, the Master of Sinanju asked a pointed question. "Is my precious trunk growing more heavy?"
"A little," Remo admitted.
"That is because its contents grow more heavy with each childless step you take."
"What contents?"
"Guilt."