Warren Murphy - Bottom Line

Ruby read the three pages and smiled to herself.

"Lifeline Laboratory," she said aloud. "Well, well, well, well, well."

She put the papers in her pocketbook, after first shaking them carefully to make sure there weren't carrying any nonpaying passengers, then let herself out of the apartment, locking it behind her.

Time to sleep. She would look into the Lifeline Laboratory tomorrow.

109

CHAPTER TEN

The two men had been following them since they had left the Upper East Side Clinic. Remo had known it without knowing why he knew it. He had not seen them and they had made no sound that any other pair of pedestrians would not have made, but they were not just pedestrians. They were following Chiun and him, and somehow he had just sensed their presence.

It was one of the problems of Sinanju, Remo thought. The discipline changed you, turned you into something else, but it did it without your conscious knowledge. Once, Smith had asked Remo how he had been able to do some special physical thing, and Remo could only tell him: "Because I can."

The question, Remo knew, was like asking an oak: "How did you become such a great tree?"

"I grew from a little acorn."

"But how?"

There was no answer to the how, no explanation, just as there was no explanation that Remo could give anyone about how he did what he did. Including to himself.

"Let's stop and look in this store window," Remo said to Chiun as they strolled down Sixtieth Street in

111

New York, near the south entrance to Central Park where horsedrawn hansom cabs were lined up, waiting for passengers. The cabs no longer rode their passengers through Central Park, preferring instead the relative safety of city streets. To ride through the park at night, they would have needed somebody next to the driver riding shotgun.

Chiun ignored Remo's suggestion and continued walking.

"I wanted to look in that store window," Remo said.

"It is not necessary," Chiun said. "There are two of them. Both large, blonde men, bigger than you. They are of the size of your football players and may be that because one of them walks with a slight limp. They are of the weight of seventeen stones. The one on the left moves nicely, smoothly. He is not the one who limps. The one who limps moves more with muscle than with grace."

"How do you know that?" Remo said, realizing he was asking Chiun the kind of question Smith occasionally asked Remo. How?

"How did you know they were following us?" Chiun asked back.

"I don't know. I just knew."

"As birds just fly? As fish just swim?" said Chiun.

"That's right," Remo said.

"Then you have no more sense than bird or fish," said Chiun, "because they have no choice but to fly and to swim, but you have learned to do what you do, and how can you learn something without knowing it?"

"I don't know, Little Father, and if you're going to

112

start yelling abuse at me, I don't want to talk about it."

Chiun shook his head. He jammed his hands even farther up into the sleeves of his green and yellow brocaded kimono. The kimono, at the bottom, ballooned out like a child's hoop skirt so that Chiun's slipper-clad feet were not visible, no matter how rapidly he walked.

"You were aware of them, Remo," said Chiun, "because as you live, you move through a field of force. It emanates from you and it surrounds you, and when other people or things move hito that field, they disturb it and send some of that force back to you. That is how you knew they were there, because for thirteen of your blocks they have been moving within your field and finally even your dulled senses picked up thek existence."

"All right," said Remo. "Then how come / don't know how big they are or that one limps or how they move?"

"Because you are like a child with a gun. He thinks that because he knows how to squeeze the trigger, he knows everything there is to know about marksmanship. It is a wise child who learns that he does not know everything and tries to learn more. Unfortunately, it has never been my good fortune to have a student who wishes to learn anything."

"A field of force, hah?" said Remo.

Chiun nodded. "It is why everything works," he said. "Why do you think that women react to you as that nurse did in the hospital? Certainly not because you are the beautiful person of her dreams because you are too tall and your skin is dead pasty white wrong color, and your hair is black and you have too

113

much of it and you have the big nose that all you white people have. No, it is not because of your beauty."

"I have a beautiful heart," Remo said. "When I was in the orphanage, even when I got into trouble, the nuns would tell me I had a beautiful heart and soul."

"Nuns," Chiun said. "These are the ladies who always wear mourning garments, even when no one has died, and always wear wedding rings, even though they are not married?"

"That's right," Remo said.

"They would think you have a beautiful heart," Chiun said. "That child in the hospital was in your field of force and she felt the pressure of it all over her body and she did not know how to deal with it, never having experienced it before. It was like the touching of many hands on her body all at once."

"A psychic massage," Remo said. "You mean I give the little chickies a rubdown without ever raising a hand?"

"If you wish to be gross about it, and of course you do, that is correct," Chiun said.

"And signals rebound back and if I worked harder I could read those signals?"

"Also correct. It is most important that you study and learn this quickly."

"Why?" asked Remo, surprised because Chiun generally gave instructions and lessons as if Remo had another fifty years of study ahead of him.

"Because those two are racing toward us right now," Chiun said, "and if you do not soon defend yourself, I will have to start looking for a new pupil."

Remo spun about as the two men were closing in.

114

One ran heavily, favoring his left leg. The other glided smoothly, with the same kind of natural grace that Remo himself had had years ago when he was just an ordinary man. The limper had a knife. The other man had a blackjack. They were wearing plaid lumber jackets over white pants.

The man with the knife raised it over his head as he ran and as he reached Remo, plunged it downward toward Remo's left shoulder.

Remo drew his shoulder back so the knife missed by a fraction of an inch and then spun on his heel into a 360-degree turn. As he spun, he saw Chiun ambling away toward the entrance of a penny arcade.

As Remo finished his spin, he raised his left foot and took the blackjack out of the right hand of the smooth moving one. The blackjack fell to the ground with a thud. The athletic one bent down for it and his hand closed on the grip, just as Remo's heel closed on his hand. There was a sound like chicken bones breaking.

The man yelped. The other man with the knife lifted it again over his head and spiked it down at Remo's face. The knifepoint stopped a quarter inch from Remo's face as the man's arm was halted by Remo's upflung wrist. The Shockwaves sent pain up the man's arm, radiating down into the base of his spine. For the first time in fifteen years, ever since he had been taken out of the National Football League by a crackback block, his left knee hurt. He had only an instant to savor the hurt because suddenly he felt a burning sensation in his stomach and the skinny man's fingers were buried in it, up to his wrist, and the football player could feel his organs

115

mashed and he felt like a windup toy slowing down as the spring played out. The inner tension of his body slowed down.

Slower. Slower. Slower.

Stop.

The man dropped to the sidewalk. The other man yanked his hand out from under Remo's foot, grabbed the blackjack in his left hand and swung again at Remo's head. Remo slipped under the blow, slapped his hand upward against the man's elbow and instead of stopping his blow when it missed the target, the man felt his arm speeding up and the blackjack winging toward his own temple; he did not have the presence of mind to open his hand and drop the weapon before it crushed his temple bone.