Warren Murphy: Acid Rock

"That is its point," Chiun said. "The harder one tries, the less one understands. It is when you stop trying to understand it that it all becomes clear."

Remo felt himself drawn back to the conversation by that lunacy. "That doesn't make any sense, Chiun," he said.

"Nothing makes sense to you except your stomach. Why do you not leave me and these children of peace and find yourself a hamburger stand where you may poison yourself?"

Remo sniffed, his feelings hurt, lifted his chin and turned his head away again without looking at the field.

Without looking at his watch, he knew it was five minutes to one. The concert was due to start soon.

As Remo watched the nearby crowd, Chiun talked, his voice hushed and muffled against the steady rumbling of voices from the quarter-million people gathered in the vast meadow. Occasionally, the buzzing, like a far-off train, would be broken by a shout ... a scream . . . sometimes voices raised in song, singing almost in unison. Remo recognized the characteristic smell and noted for the first time that marijuana smoke drew mosquitoes. They were all over and one of the most persistent sounds throughout the field was hand slapping arm. Only Chiun seemed untroubled, even though the girls were smoking pot as he lectured. Remo felt more people around him. Their intimate group was growing larger. More and more persons had come to sit around the central cluster and listen to Chiun.

"Are you a priest?" one girl asked.

"No. Just a wise man." Remo snickered, and Chiun glared.

"What do you do?" he was asked.

"I raise money to feed the starving babies of my village," Chiun said, oozing humility and love, enjoying the moment.

"Tell them how you do it," growled Remo.

"Pay him no mind," Chiun told the group, which had now grown to a semisilent two dozen, squatting on the ground before him. "You have heard the Zen koan of the sound of one hand clapping. Next to you, you witness an even greater riddle: a mouth that works continually without connection to a working brain."

There were a few giggles. Everyone turned to look at Remo, who thought of answering but could not think of an appropriate retort.

Remo heard the first noises, that familiar rhythmic sound. A minute later it became audible throughout the field. Tension almost rose in waves as the sound of voices became louder. The excitement moved from a far corner of the farm property, across the field, ripping through the 250,000 people, tensing them all up, all of them talking at once. They were coming. They were coming. There it was. Their helicopter. It was Maggot. And the Lice. They were on their way. People stood and stretched their necks to try to see the chopper approaching. A few seconds later it swept into view.

A quarter of a million people saw it at the same time, and they vented their pleasure in a massive roar that made the ground Remo sat on tremble. But at Chiun's feet, the two dozen young people sat unmoving, listening only to Chiun as he spoke gently of love and honor in a world filled with hate and deceit.

Remo watched the helicopter. So also, for a few seconds, did Gunner Nilsson, who stood in front of one of the guards at the far left side of the raised stage.

"I am the doctor hired by the owners," Nilsson said, lifting his bag for emphasis. "I must be near the stage."

"Man, I got no instructions about you," the Dirty Devil said. One other cyclist moved, as if to come over to lend support, but the first one waved him back. Who needed help handling a sixty-year-old man?

"Well, I have my instructions right here," said Dr. Gunner Nilsson.

The helicopter was now overhead. The guard glanced over his shoulder to watch the chopper start its descent in a large empty area between the stage and a stand of trees that marked the end of the farm property.

Nilsson opened his doctor's bag, reached his right hand in and gripped a hypodermic syringe. He waited until the guard's attention was on the chopper, and then slapped the syringe through the leather jacket into the young man's left bicep.

The needle bit flesh. Gunner Nilsson depressed the plunger. The guard turned, an angry look on his face, his hand reaching up to his arm, a curse on his mouth. His mouth opened to speak. It froze there momentarily, and then he fell, collapsing all at once.

The thump of his body on the ground drew the attention of the guard at his left.

"Quick," Nilsson said, "I'm a doctor. This man must be taken to the medical tent."

The guard looked at his fallen partner.

"Heat exhaustion, I think," Nilsson said. He waved his medical bag at the other guard. "Hurry. He needs treatment."

"All right," the man finally said. "Harry, give me a hand here," he said to the guard next to him.

Nilsson moved past the unconscious guard and toward the high, twice-twisting steps that led onto the left side of the empty stage.

The helicopter was on the ground, twenty feet behind the stage. Gunner Nilsson went up the steps and walked to the first landing, from which he could see over the heads of the motorcycle goons who ringed the front of the stage area. The crowd was on its feet now, standing, jumping, trying to get a peek at Maggot and his crew, but no one was willing to come forward across the no man's land separating the audience from the performance area.

Nilsson looked out into the crowd and saw it as a mass wave of humanity, impelled by idiocy and stupidity. How sad, how many people had to come together like this, just to prove to themselves that they existed.

As he looked at the wave of humanity, he saw a quiet, unmoving eddy of stillness. A group of twenty young people were sitting on the ground, many with their backs to the stage, at the center of them was an elderly Oriental in a saffron robe, his hands folded, his mouth working as he spoke. To the side of the Oriental, Nilsson could see an American, a youngish athletic-looking man who seemed to be counting the house.

Nilsson felt excitement raise gooseflesh behind his shoulder blades. His instincts told him who they were. The Oriental and the Remo who had killed Lhasa. They would be first. And then Vickie Stoner for the million and a half dollars. That was important now, because unless that contract were completed there would be no meaning to Lhasa's death.

Nilsson rested his doctor's bag on a bannister made of a rough four-by-four and opened it. Inside the bag, his hands carefully checked his revolver.

Down below, in the eddy of serenity amidst the ocean of confusion, noise, and chaos that swept the field, Chiun sat and talked. And watched and saw.

"The secret of the world is to see," he said, "not just to look. One man looks at another and can see nothing. But another man can look and can see. He can see, for instance, that a man does not blink. It sounds like a nothing but it is a something. What if a man does not blink? He does not blink because he has been trained not to blink and it is good to know that a man has had that kind of training, because then you know what kind of man he is."

His high-pitched voice rambled on, Remo kept watching the crowd, looking for anyone who might be Nilsson. Random words and phrases moved into his consciousness. "The man who does not blink ... dangerous ... one should not just look but one should see."

Chiun was telling him something. What? He looked at Chiun, whose eyes met his. Chiun lifted his head toward the direction of the bandstand. Remo followed his eyes, and then saw the man on the steps, looking out toward Chiun. Remo had seen the man before when he had bumped into him in the Pittsburgh theater lobby.

Gunner Nilsson, here to kill Vickie Stoner. But why wasn't he turned toward the helicopter that had just set down lightly on the ground behind the stage? Vickie would come from there. She would be defenseless.