Warren Murphy: Timber Line

"I will recite another one for you," Chiun said.

"No," said Remo, "please don't."

"Why not, my son?"

"I couldn't stand it."

Chiun looked at him sharply.

Remo added quickly, "Too much beauty in one day. I couldn't take it. I can only deal with the beauty of one Ung at a time. And they have to be spaced very far apart."

Chiun nodded at this very reasonable position on Remo's part. "The second thing," he said.

"Yes?"

"Your feet are wet," Chiun said. "You look as if you have been slopping around in the water like a penguin. You have not been concentrating. You have been acting like a white man again. You are a disappointment to me. You cannot even walk on water without getting your feet wet, and then tracking up our room. You are a grave disappointment."

"Ungrateful too," Remo said. "You always tell me I'm ungrateful."

"That too," said Chiun. "I should make you practice right now, and I would, except for the third thing."

"What is this third thing?" Remo asked, as he knew he was supposed to.

"The Emperor Smith has work for us to do."

"No."

"Urgent work," Chiun said.

"No. I need a vacation. I'm tired. That's why my feet got wet. I can't concentrate anymore."

"I cannot tell your employer that," Chiun said. "If I did, he would not send the gold to Sinanju, and once again my people would have to send their babies home to the sea."

Remo turned back to the window, hoping for a midair collision that would counteract the dullness of the next few minutes of history lesson. He had heard it a thousand times. Sinanju was a dismal, tiny village on the coast of the barren and even more dismal West Korean Bay. It was a poor village with poor soil. Farming was bad and fishing was even worse. In the long-ago-past, even in the best of times, its people could just barely eke a living out of the surrounding land and waters. In normal times they starved. In bad times, they drowned their babies and children in the cold waters of the bay, which was more merciful than letting them starve to death. The villagers called it sending the children home to the sea, but no one was fooled by the words.

Then sometime before the beginning of recorded history, the best fighting men from the village began hiring themselves out as mercenaries and assassins to whichever ruler was willing to pay their price. Because there was always a market for death and because the killers from Sinanju were scrupulous about sending their wages home to their loved ones to buy food, the children of the village were allowed to live.

The tradition of the men of Sinanju was a long one, but it was eventually replaced by another tradition. One of Sinanju's greatest fighters was Wang, and one night as he was studying the stars, he was visited by a great ring of fire from the skies. The fire had a message for him. It said simply that men did not use their minds and bodies as they should; they wasted their spirit and strength. The ring of fire taught Wang the lessons of control — and though Wang's enlightenment came in a single burst of flame, his mastery of what he had learned took a lifetime.

Through control of his own self, Wang became the ultimate weapon. He became the first Master of the House of Sinanju. It was no longer necessary for the other men of the village to fight and die. The Master of the House took that job on himself. And when it was time for him to pass on, the most worthy member of his family took his place. Chiun was the latest in the line of the House of Sinanju, and for the first time, a man who was not a Korean, a man who did not even have yellow skin, was being trained as his successor.

That man was Remo.

From the beginning, the Masters of Sinanju had hired themselves out as assassins. For uncountable centuries, they had served the rulers of every nation in every corner of the world, no matter how remote. The wages that they earned were returned to the rocky village to buy the people's daily bread. As long as there was a need for political murder — and there always had been such a need — the children of Sinanju could stay safe in the arms of their families and not be sent home to the sea.

Remo had heard it thousands of times. He watched two planes almost collide, then tuned Chiun back in.

"The people of Sinanju are a very poor people," Chiun was saying. "They have barely enough food to eat, and they count on me to fulfill our contracts so that I might be paid and that they might not starve. And so they count on you, also."

"The people of Sinanju have not starved in centuries, Little Father," said Remo patiently.

"Nevertheless," the Master of Sinanju said, raising one frail yellow finger, "you are honor-bound both to our Emperor Smith and to your people, the people of Sinanju."

"You're bullying me again," Remo said. "Just because I want to take a small vacation, you're telling me that your people will have to drown their babies."

"They are your people, too," Chiun said.

Remo was about to answer, then stopped and thought about what Chiun had said, and the more he thought, the better he felt. Perhaps it was true that what he did brought absolutely no benefit to America. For every bad guy he killed, a dozen bad guys sprang up like weeds to take his place. But there was one immutable fact: By Remo's practicing his art, the people of Sinanju were fed. They were the beneficiaries of Remo's skill and work, and if he stopped working, they would feel it. He was needed by them. It made him feel good, or at least better.

"I'll call Smith," he told Chiun, "and tell him I'll take the assignment."

"You cannot call the emperor," Chiun said.

"Why not?"

"He is sleeping in the next room. If you were not so out of sorts, you would have heard him."

Remo listened, and heard the sibilant breathing of a sleeping man. He was pleased with himself; his senses were starting to work correctly again.

"I hear it now," he told Chiun.

The old man nodded. "See. All good things come to the man who decides to do good," he said.

Five minutes later, Dr. Harold W. Smith had joined his two assassins in the living room. Smith was a slender, grayish man near sixty. As he grew older, he was starting to look more and more like the granite crags of his native New England. All those who had ever known him admitted that Smith was brilliant. After all, he had once been a law professor at Yale, and that required some brains since Yale was one of the few schools where law courses still taught law and not consumer advocacy and public relations. And those who had known him during World War II, when he had operated deep behind German lines for the OSS, never doubted his raw physical courage. Nor did anyone who knew him when he was one of the top administrators at the CIA doubt his organizational ability.

But none seemed to know the whole Smith. Those who knew of his brains knew nothing of his courage or his administrative skill. And those who knew of his courage would have been surprised to learn of his intelligence and savvy. Each knew only a piece of Smith, and each who had known him had found him dull, duller, dullest. As dull as the closely tailored three-piece gray suits with crisp-white cotton shirts and striped school ties that he always wore. One personnel officer at Langley, Virginia, had once spread the word that Smith was the only man in the CIA's history to completely confound the company's brain-probers: When he was given a Rorschach test, all he was able to see were ink blots. No imagination they said.

The shrinks, as usual, were wrong. It wasn't that Smith had no imagination. What it was was that he could deal only in reality. Ink blots were ink blots and nothing more. And his integrity was so much a part of his rock-ribbed soul that he could not unbend enough to play silly psychological games and pretend that he saw something that did not exist for him. Nor, for that matter, could Smith pretend to not see something that did exist.