Warren Murphy: Encounter Group

Remo had just seen Chiun do it in about six seconds. Even with Chiun's superhuman reflexes and coordination, it didn't make sense that Chiun, who knew no more about higher mathematics than he did about baseball, could master the puzzle so quickly.

Remo spent five minutes trying, and all he managed was to get a bunch of blue squares in an L shape on one side, and a cluster of orange ones on the other. There was a blue square in the middle of the orange cluster, and when Remo tried to get that onto the right side, he lost the orange cluster. Then he gave up.

"Heh, heh, heh," cackled Chiun. "Short attention span. I was right."

"Right about what?" Remo fumed.

"Right that you are not ready to master the art of the Killing Nail. Anyone who cannot solve a child's puzzle is not prepared mentally for the later stages of Sinanju." And having absolved himself of his earlier misjudgment, Chiun, the reigning Master of Sinanju, repaired to the kitchenette to make breakfast.

Remo decided he wasn't hungry.

?Chapter Five

Remo Williams read about flying saucers on the flight to Oklahoma City. Smith's information package consisted of raw data in the form of newspaper clippings, magazine articles, Air Force studies, case histories and computer printouts from CURE. If the CURE computer ever processed this hodgepodge of facts, reports, statistics and wild speculations into a concrete evaluation, Smith had neglected to provide the results.

For once, Remo was not bothered by Chiun. In fact, Chiun was barely in his seat for most of the flight— the one that he always took so he would be the first to know if the wings fell off— and instead walked up and down the aisles, happily demonstrating his ability with Rubik's Cube to anyone who cared to watch. Remo still couldn't figure out how Chiun did it, and it aggravated him.

In Oklahoma City, they registered in a hotel near the Will Rogers World Airport. Remo signed the register as Remo Greeley, the cover name Smith had given him. He was supposed to be a freelance writer affiliated with a tabloid that ran a lot of UFO articles, here in Oklahoma City to do an article on FOES. Remo turned to ask Chiun if he wanted to sign in, but Chiun was off by the elevators, where he had collected a group of bellboys, who stared wide-eyed at Chiun's cube-solving speed.

With a perverse grin, Remo signed the book for Chiun, writing on it, "Hen Nee Yung Man." Chiun would never know.

By afternoon, Remo had read most of the UFO material. He learned that since 1947, when a pilot sighted a formation of plate-shaped objects flying over a mountain range in Washington State and coined the term "flying saucer," UFO sightings had been occurring regularly with only periodic fluctuations. Most of these sightings, about 95.7 percent, according to Folcroft computers, were the result of unskilled people mistaking airplane lights, observation balloons, meteorites and other natural phenomena. The remaining 4.3 percent were simply unidentified. They could be anything— even spacecraft from beyond the earth.

This last was a possibility, according to one set of statistics, which claimed that there were so many stars in the sky that if only one in a billion of them shone on a planet that harbored intelligent life, then mathematically speaking there would be millions of inhabited worlds in the universe. Remo didn't buy it. Even if the numbers were true, nothing said that these intelligent beings could build interstellar spaceships, or that they would bother to visit Earth, even if they could in less than a hundred million zillion years. Or that these beings, no matter how intelligent, might not be exactly human and therefore might not be able to build a treehouse, never mind a spaceship. You had to have hands to build something, right? Remo wondered idly if some of them might not look like Rubik's Cubes. If they did, then the invasion had already begun and all bets were off. They had already gotten to Chiun.

Reading through the eyewitness accounts of reported contact with aliens, Remo learned that UFOs came from the planet Venus and were piloted by tall, long-haired friendly Venusians; that they also came from Mars and were built by short, hairy, vicious creatures intent upon kidnaping South American women for sexual gratification; that they were the work of an underground supercivilization from within the earth itself, who flew out of an unknown hole in the North Pole; or that they were scientific probes from a distant star and manned by gray-skinned vivisectionists with no lips and eyes like tomcats.

Every report contradicted every other one. Except that most of them quoted the aliens as being very concerned about our atomic weapons. And that was why they were here. To make sure it didn't get out of hand.

That was the only common denominator. And the only factor that fit in with the attack on the missile site.

There was a file on FOES, which insisted that the letters stood for Flying Object Evaluation Center, proving to Remo that Smith's computers weren't always infallible. FOES had been founded in 1953 in Dayton, Ohio, and over the years had sprouted chapters in several states. The only unusual activity associated with any chapter took place only a couple of years ago, when a chapter in Utah tried to force the Central Intelligence Agency to make its top-secret files on UFOs open to public inspection under the Freedom of Information Act. The case had gone all the way to the Supreme Court, which threw the suit out when the CIA convinced the Court that it had already released 99 percent of all its data and the remaining data contained the names of agents who might be compromised. A representative of FOES was later quoted as saying that national security should never stand in the way of the pursuit of truth, and said that this "only proved that the UFO cover-up carried on by the government since the forties stretched all the way to the Supreme Court."

"What are you reading?" Chiun asked at one point.

"Confusion," Remo said, and threw Smith's files into the wastebasket.

"From Emperor Smith, of course," said Chiun, who then dropped the subject. "Is Cheeta Ching to be found in this area?" he asked, changing the channels on the television.

"No. Not in Oklahoma."

"Then I will watch my beautiful dramas," Chiun decided, and began setting up the tape system on which he had recorded such soap operas as "As the Planet Revolves" and "The Young and the Wanton," all originally broadcast before sex and violence— overt sex and violence, anyway— invaded daytime television.

Knowing that this would keep Chiun occupied well into the early evening, Remo decided to leave him and infiltrate the local FOES chapter on his own. Chiun would only complicate Remo's carefully thought-out plan— which Remo had yet to devise. Regardless of what it turned out to be, though, he knew Chiun would complicate it. Besides, he was getting sick of that stupid cube.

"I'm going out, Chiun. Don't wait up."

But Chiun made no sign that he heard, already being immersed in the sad story of Dr. Lawrence Walters, psychiatrist at large, who had just learned from Betty Hendon that her husband, the insane billionaire Wilfred Wyatt Hornsby, whom she had married when only a teenager, was planning a sex change operation so he could marry Betty's father, who had been posing as Betty's mother and as the upstairs maid in the house of Jeremy Bladford, the man she truly loved.

Remo closed the door of the bedroom as he picked up his dark blue nylon windbreaker, which he put over his black T-shirt and chinos. The phone in the bedroom gave him his plan. Screw this freelance writer crap, he thought, and dropped the windbreaker, which was only a prop.

Remo dialed the number of the local FOES chapter. Normally, Remo could never remember phone numbers, but this one he had just read in the files, and it had the same exchange as the hotel. The rest of the dial sequence was FOES. That, Remo could remember. So he dialed the exchange of the hotel phone and F-O-E-S.