Warren Murphy: Return Engagement

Chiun slammed the door and returned to his throne. "I don't understand the Korean sense of humor," said Remo.

"That is because you have none yourself. You are like all Americans, who turn the relieving of bodily wastes into a leisure activity. If I let you get your way now, you will next litter my poor village with condoms."

"What's this?"

"Condoms," repeated Chiun. "They are another American confidence trick. The tall buildings in which there are many rooms and each person owns a different room. But actually they own only the empty space within those walls, which is to say they own nothing."

"Those are condos," Remo corrected.

"And this is the treasure house of Sinanju. The house of my ancestors, and the house of all future Masters of Sinanju. Including you. Is it not good enough for you, toilet-loving American white?"

"I like it fine."

"Good. Then you will live here."

"When I am head of the village, yes," said Remo. "But until then, Mah-Li and I will live in the house I am building with my own hands."

"So be it," said Chiun, coming to his feet. "I have given you everything and you have spurned my best. Take your filthy belongings and go sleep on the beach."

"What belongings?" said Remo. "I'm wearing everything I own."

Chiun's fingernails flashed to the mahogany floor and speared the slip of paper on which Remo had written his list of improvements for the village of Sinanju.

"This filthy belonging," said Chiun, lifting it to Remo's hurt face. "I will have no toilets or condoms in Sinanju."

"Have it your way, then," Remo said unhappily.

He plucked the list and walked out of the House of the Masters without a backward glance.

Chapter 5

Dr. Harold K. Smith was a simple country doctor. The people of Oakham, Massachusetts, liked Dr. Harry, as he was called. He made house calls. No doctors made house calls anymore. Not when there was so much money to be made off the sick, and the most efficient way was to jam them into the office waiting room with plenty of waiting.

Dr. Harry had been making house calls for nearly forty years. He liked the homey touch. It was a nice, stress-free way to practice medicine. It filled his sixty-nine-year-old soul with peace. And even at his age, peace was what he most yearned for.

Dr. Harry might never have taken this route in life, but upon his graduation from Tufts Medical School, he was drafted. That was in 1943. Dr. Harry spent the next two years as a combat medic with the First Attack Squad, A Company, as they liberated France.

He had seen young men running one minute and screaming in muddy ditches-their legs chopped to hamburger by .50-caliber machine-gun bullets-the next. Crouched in foxholes, he had watched them being blown to ragged chunks of meat by grenades, crushed under panzer treads, and snuffed out with such appalling suddenness that even today he still had nightmares and woke up in cold sweats.

It had not been the best way to first practice medicine, but it had meant something. For some of the wounded Dr. Harry had treated, it had meant the difference between life and death, between walking back on the troop ships to America and hobbling on one leg and two crutches. Dr. Harry had absorbed everything it was possible for a physician to learn about wound cavitation, traumatic amputation, and human endurance, but after returning home in 1946, he went into family medicine and put the war out of his mind. Almost.

And so, on a particularly bitter winter's day, when a triple amputee was wheeled, unannounced, into his shabbily genteel office, Dr. Harry didn't hesitate to greet him. Even though the sight of the man brought back shuddering memories.

The man's age was impossible to guess. His face was rilled like a topographical map of the mountains of Mexico. His skin was unnaturally pale, and the thin red blanket that rested on his lap, covering the front of the motorized wheelchair, hung slack. There were two blunt bulges under it where his legs stopped.

The man's right arm ended in a steel claw, one of the new appliances which were such a boon to the amputee population. Dr. Harry had read about them, but had never seen one. His medical curiosity overcame his war memories and he found himself looking forward to examining this patient with unexpected eagerness.

"I'm Dr. Smith," said Dr. Harry to the old man and his beautiful blond companion. "What seems to be the trouble'?"

"I'm Ilsa," the blond said. "He's having trouble with his good arm. I think it's the sciatic nerve. It's acted up before. "

"You are his nurse?"

"His companion," said Ilsa.

She is so young, thought Dr. Harry, and so beautiful. He could tell by the solicitous way she hovered over him that she was intensely devoted to this shattered shell of a human being.

"Follow me into the examination room, and we'll have a look," Dr. Harry suggested.

"Ilsa, you will wait here," the man said. His voice was as dry as his eves were bright. And they were very bright, unnaturally bright.

"Yes, of course."

Behind the closed pine door, Dr. Harry opened the stainless-steel drawer containing his instruments and said, "Please remove your shirt."

Dr. Harry watched the man unbutton his shirt with his good hand. The fingers, gnarled and scarred, fumbled at the buttons. Dr. Harry nodded. Dexterity was impaired, but not as bad as all that. Probably the nerve was just inflamed.

When the shirt was off, Dr. Harry saw that from the neck down the man's body was a striated mass of scar tissue. Burns, horrible ones, had done that a very long time ago.

"I hope my appearance does not disturb you," said the old man. Dr. Harry suddenly remembered that he'd not asked the patient's name. Normally he left that to his receptionist, but she had already gone home for the day.

"I saw as much and worse in my time. During the war."

The patient seemed to tense as Dr. Harry approached with the blood-pressure cuff.

"You were in the war, World War Two?" the patient asked.

"Medic. European Theater of Operations."

"Those were terrible times, for both sides."

Dr. Harry nodded absently as he fitted the blood-pressure sleeve about the patient's bicep. "Do you think you could work the pump?" he asked.

The patient took the bulb and began squeezing rhythmically. The sleeve began inflating.

"I have never seen an appliance like yours," Dr. Harry said. "Bionic?"

"Yes. It is a boon to me, especially after all these years. You see, I, too, was in the war. My life ended there, for all intents."

"A terrible thing," said Dr. Harry sympathetically, looking at his watch, but surreptitiously examining the claw. It fitted onto the wooden stump of the man's wrist, the joining sealed in a plastic sleeve. Tiny wires led from the base of the appliance to the man's intact shoulder muscles. Electrodes. Brain impulses to those muscles produced twitches which in turn sent electrical signals to the artificial hand. The signals produced humanlike finger movements.

Even as Dr. Harry watched, the steel claw tensed.

The machinery whirred briefly. It was fascinating. He couldn't take his eves off it.

"Medical science is making remarkable strides," the patient said, noticing the doctor's gaze.

"They're way ahead of this country doctor. I understand they'll be making bionic legs one day."

"Yes, but those are for men who still have one good leg. I know, I have looked into this. They cannot make them strong enough to support a man on two metal legs."

"Interesting that you should say that," said Dr. Harry, taking the inflating bulb from the patient's hand. "I was reading about a new process someone has invented for forging titanium. You know, it's stronger than steel and lighter as well. They've had excellent luck using it for implants, artificial joints and the like."