Warren Murphy: Lords of the Earth

Smith nodded but assured the prefect that such violence was not normally in the young man's character. A gendarme came into the station carrying the blue piece of cloth at arm's length and holding his nose. It smelled of fish and rotted fruit and coffee grounds. It had been thrown into the garbage disposal.

"That's it. Mine," yelled Barry.

"It's all right, Barry. We're bringing it to you."

"Thank you, Harold," said Barry, sobbing and gratefully clutching the dirty cloth to his cheek. Barry Schweid, computer genius of the organization's vast secret network and newly named "Monster of Marigot," cried meekly and sucked his thumb.

The prefect gave them a driver to return them north to the village of Grand Case. Instead of going to their apartment, Smith had the driver leave them off at what appeared to be the gravel works on a road to a cul-de-sac. Inside the simple office of the gravel works, behind the mosquito-infested salt flats, Smith led Barry to a rear office which secretly opened up into a large cave that housed the storage and retrieval area of CURE's computer network.

It was here that Schweid had devised the portable system that Smith now carried. He also had figured out a way not only to make Smith's files entry-proof, but to find out the identity of anyone who accidentally came close to tapping into the network. Smith, who was not a neophyte to technology himself, never could figure out how.

When the doors behind them were closed, sealed beyond penetration by interlocking steel plates, Smith asked the simple question:

"What happened in Marigot?"

"It's all your fault," Barry Schweid said. He was rubbing his ear with a corner of the blanket.

"My fault?" Smith asked. "How?"

"I don't want to tell you."

"Barry, listen. You know we do a lot of work we don't want others to know about. We can't have attention called to ourselves or people will get curious."

"Secret work?" Barry said.

"Yes," Smith said, and Barry nodded. He brushed an old piece of fish from his blanket and stuffed it into his rear pocket.

"Well, all right," he said. "It's these files." He pointed to the large banks of computers that circled the walls of the cave.

"What about them?"

"You entered some old stuff and put your initials on the entries, and I was scanning the files, doing a ... well, never mind, it was complicated, but this file popped out. And it had your observations on it. You were saying you talked to someone you had recruited and asked what he was doing. And he was saying that he wasn't doing anything except learning how to breathe and the whole thing was stupid and he was going to quit on you anyhow."

Instantly Smith knew what Barry Schweid had discovered. They were Smith's early observations on Remo's training, his very earliest training when Smith had brought in Chiun to try to create a single enforcement arm, one man to do the work that really should have been done by thousands.

Schweid was still talking. "It didn't make sense, of course, if you looked at it for just what people were saying. But it kept popping out because it kept integrating itself into the basic cosmic formulas for power. You understand mass and energy and the speed of light, don't you?"

"As well as most laymen, I guess," said Smith.

"Well, just imagine light curving and you have the whole thing," said Schweid.

Smith cleared his throat. It was beyond anything he could understand.

Barry said, "In the light of cosmic power, the same kind we're using to store all your files now, you can understand what the breathing means. It means synchronizing yourself with these rhythms. Therefore, you're really reflecting the curving of light in its own power. In theory."

"And in practice?" Smith asked.

"Well, I tried it," said Barry, "and suddenly I had all sorts of confidence and I went outside and practically ran all the way to Marigot which has got to be five or six miles and then at the market someone pushed me and I just sort of pushed back."

"Was it that gendarme?" Smith asked.

"Yes, I think so."

"You shattered his collarbone," Smith said.

"Oh, dear."

"And then you threw a 220-pound woman halfway down the street and she is still in the hospital."

"Oh, dear, oh, dear," said Barry. The security blanket came back out of his pocket.

"Could you do these things all the time?" Smith asked.

"What? The breathing thing that gave me the power? No. You see, you have to be able not to think. If you think about what you're doing, you can't do it."

"Like an athletic action," asked Smith, who understood that thinking about a golf swing often ruined it.

"More intensely, though. Everything is quantumed out of sight in this thing."

"Could somebody else learn this?" Smith asked. "Maybe all the time?"

"Possibly, but there really has to be a synch to the max. The odds against it are astronomical."

This surprised Smith because for all he knew, Remo and Chiun always seemed to be in some sort of conflict. There was no apparent synchronization between them.

Or maybe, he thought, it was that Remo and Chiun were both synchronized to something else, to some basic elemental force that each used and no one else could. Chiun had often told Smith that Remo was special, one of a kind. Could it be true? Had Smith just been involved in a miraculous, happy accident when he happened to pick Remo Williams, smart-ass Newark cop, to be CURE's enforcement arm?

He put the entire question out of his mind and decided to keep a promise to Barry's mother.

"Can you get up enough courage to go for a walk with me?" he asked.

"Among strangers?"

"People are all strangers until you get to know them, Barry. I was a stranger to you once myself."

"But Mother said you were a nice man."

"You can bring your blankey," said Smith.

"People will laugh. I know they will."

"Well, then leave Blankey here where it'll be safe," Smith suggested.

"I think I'll take it," said Barry, clutching the blue blanket to his chest. He agreed to walk all the way from the gravel works to Grand Case, almost an entire quarter of a mile.

As they were leaving, there was a slight buzz inside Smith's attache case. Barry quickly ascertained that a message had been received. It had come while Smith was in the cave with Barry. Barry retrieved the message, which had come from the President of the United States.

It read:

"What have you done to me?"

Chapter 5

For almost ten years, world news media had ignored the murders and the problems at the IHAEO laboratories. But on this afternoon, there was just a hint of the possibility that the death of Dr. Ravits at IHAEO had been caused by the President of the United States.

So at the presidential press conference, the peace he had arranged between two warring factions in South America was ignored, the new donations of enough grain to feed half of Africa was overlooked, and the upcoming arms negotiation agreement was not even mentioned.

"Could the President of the United States explain why, after successfully protecting the IHAEO laboratory, the FBI was removed?" asked one reporter who had never before in her life said a kind word about the FBI. In fact, she had once called for its abolition, saying it should be replaced by a civilian review board composed of blacks, women and the socially alienated. Her definition of socially alienated was anyone doing fifteen-to-life for homicide.

"I take full responsibility for what happened," the President responded. "Yes, I was the one who ordered the FBI withdrawn. I cannot say anything more but that there are plans under way for permanently securing the safety of the IHAEO project. I might point out that a sitting target, no matter how well defended, cannot be defended forever. And that's all I can say."