Warren Murphy: Bottom Line

To this man with the thick wrists and thin body moving up into darkness under a black, cold sky, fear was, Like bis breathing, something else, something that existed apart from hun, and because he did not need it to climb this slick curtain of glare ice, he did not call on it.

He came up over the top of the cliff with a small rolling motion that barely dented the deep fresh snow and then was standing at the top, looking at the brightly-lighted cabin, half-hidden behind a band of pine trees fifty yards away. He moved toward the cabin. His feet made no sound in the deep fresh snow. No puff of breath noisily escaped his lips, and he thought of the days when he clumped noisily down a flight of steps and puffed like a tea kettle climbing the same steps.

That had been years ago, but it had been more than years too. It had happened in a different lifetime.

He had been Remo Williams then, Patrolman Remo Williams in the Newark, New Jersey, police department, and he had been framed for a murder he hadn't committed and sentenced to an electric chair

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that hadn't worked, and then resurrected to serve as the killer arm for a secret organization that fought crime in the United States.

That was what the organization, CURE, had contracted for, but what they got was something else. No one had known that the years of training and the discipline of body and mind would have changed Remo Williams from what he once was to ... to what?

To what? Remo Williams grinned as he moved through the night. Not even he knew what he was. An ancient and wise Oriental sitting in a houseboat on the shore of Lake Winnepesaukee fifty miles away thought that Remo Williams was the reincarnation of Shiva, the Indian god of destruction. But the same wise Oriental thought that Barbra Streisand was America's most beautiful woman, that soap operas, before they got dirty and obscene, were America's only real art form, and that a depressing little fishing village in North Korea was the center of the universe.

So much for Shiva. Remo was not the reincarnation of a god, but he wasn't just a man either. He had become more. He had become what men could be, if they learned to use their bodies and their minds to the full extent of their powers.

"I'm a man," he said softly to himself, his whisper lost in the wail of wind through the trees. "That's got to be worth something."

Then he was standing alongside one of the windows of the cabin, listening to the voices inside.

There were four of them, four men talking. They were talking with the fearlessness of men who know that no one could reach them because the only way up to the cabin was along a twisting road, and that

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road was spotted with detection devices, and, for the last seventy-five yards to the cabin, with buried land mines.

So the members of the Cypriot Liberation Alliance felt quite free to discuss which kind of babies were best to plant dynamite sticks under. Little black babies or little blonde babies.

"Nobody touch a baby carriage, especially when you wheel it into a maternity ward," said one aloud.

"What that got to do with mainland Greeks?" asked another.

"We show them, Tilhas," said the first, "what we think of how they not help us when we attack the Turks and lose. All we have are the Palestinians, our spiritual brothers."

A third voice spoke up. "Anyone who can see the moral imperative in dynamiting babies as part of revolutionary justice knows and understands Greek Cypriot values," he said.

A fourth voice spoke. "We are victims. Imperialists are the oppressors."

The man called Tilhas who did not seem to understand all this blood lust asked "But why assault Americans?"

"Because they supply the Turks."

"But they supply us also."

"How can you call yourself a Cypriot if you don't blame others for what happens to you? If you put up a bad roof, blame corporate imperialism. If your daughter gets pregnant, blame Hollywood movies. When you rob your father and he breaks your bones for it, blame the Egyptians. You must remember at all times you are a Cypriot and that means you will never invent anything or bund anything or grow any-

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thing anyone else will want. Therefore you can never be on the side of doers. They must always be your enemies, Tilhas. America is made up of the worst doers in the world. Therefore, we must hate them most. Besides, it's easiest to dynamite baby carriages here. If we get caught, nobody pulls our arms out our shoulders. Nobody peels our skin off our back. Nobody starts bonfires on our bare stomach. No one hurts us. They just put us in jail and let us go a little later."

"Wrong," came Remo's voice. He stood inside the door, looking around at the four men. "There are still some of us who think that evil ought to be punished."

"Who are you?" asked one of the Cypriots.

Remo raised a hand for silence. "Which one of you is Tilhas?"

A small man with a scraggly mustache and basset-hound eyes raised his hand meekly. "I Tilhas. Why?"

"I heard you from the window," Remo said. "I'm going to do you a favor. You're going to die easily."

He did. The others didn't.

Remo looked down at the thrashing body of the last one still to live.

"They'll find you in the spring," he said. "When they see what happened to you, I think everybody else in your ragtag little gang is going to go back to Cyprus and forget about dynamiting babies. So don't look at it like you're just dying. You're giving your life to save your fellow Cypriots."

The man mumbled.

"I can't hear, you," Remo said.

The man mumbled again.

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Remo reached down and removed the man's right elbow from his mouth. "Talk up now. What'd you say?" "To hell with fellow Cypriots," the man said. "That's what I'd thought you'd say," Remo said. "If I meet any more, I'll pass on the message."

And then he was back out into the cold windy night, moving smoothly across the snow back toward the icy cliff.

Yes, that's what he was, he was a man. Remo Williams smiled. Sometimes that wasn't a bad thing to be.

When he got back to the houseboat on Lake Win-nepesaukee, that illusion was shattered. He learned that he had two left feet and compared with him, hippopotamuses were ballet dancers and an elephant trumpeting was a whisper and "I don't know why I let you hang around with me."

Remo had changed from his black mesh suit into black chinos and a white tee shirt. He lifted his head up from the built-in couch on the houseboat and looked at the old Oriental who had spoken.

The man was sitting on the indoor-outdoor rugging of the floor. He was surrounded by inkwells and quill pens and on his lap, he had a large sheet of parchment. Behind him were a half dozen more sheets.

All the sheets, including the one on his lap, were blank.

"Can't write again today, huh, Chiun?" Remo said.

"I could write anytime I wanted," Chiun said, "if my heart were not so heavy."

Remo turned away and looked out the window

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over his head. The stars still twinkled in the nighttime sky but akeady the horizon was lightening as dawn grew near. Without looking back, Remo said:

"I suppose you better tell me how I'm ruining your life this time."

"You are very cooperative," Chiun said.

"Just thoughtful," said Remo. "I'm a thoughtful man. I figured that out tonight on the mountain. I'm a man. Nothing else. All your silly Korean legends about Shiva, the Destroyer, and me being a god are all just that. Hogwash. I'm a man."

"Hah," said Chiun. "Thoughtful, you say." His voice was a high pitched piping and his English was precise and unaccented. "It is to laugh. You. Thoughtful. It is to laugh. Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh."

"Yes, thoughtful," said Remo. "Because if I don't let you blame whatever it is you want to blame on me, then you'd have to face up to the fact that you just can't write a thing."