Warren Murphy: Chained Reaction

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Remo watched for a moment. There seemed to be nothing to distinguish Lucius from any of the other dozen men working at the conveyor table.

At the end of the conveyor belt, on a small platform, stood a wiry man with red hair. He wore a white suit and a white hat and metal-tipped boots and carried a long whip coiled in his right hand.

On the far side of the room, six feet up the wall, there was a door, and, as the three of them watched, the door opened.

Striding out onto a raised platform that looked over the room was Baisley DePauw. Remo recognized him from the newspaper photographs. Baisley DePauw dedicating the liberation library. Baisley DePauw sending his personal jet to Algeria to bring back exiled black Americans. Baisley DePauw opening his heart and his checkbook to every crack-brained anti-American movement that had come up in Eemo's remembrance.

"How are they doing?" DePauw called out to the overseer.

"All right, sir. They get faster every day," the man called back. He had a deep tomb of a voice and Remo thought it odd that for his overseer, DePauw had hired someone obviously from the streets of New York City.

"I've got another inspection today," DePauw said. "I want them singing. Slaves should sing to show how happy they are."

The whip went singing out over the men's heads, cracking sharply in empty space.

"You heard the massa. Sing."

Without slowing down their work, the slaves looked at each other.

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"Sing, I said," the overseer shouted.

The men were still silent.

"You, Lucius. You start it."

Ruby's brother looked up and smiled a fetching grin.

"What should I sing, massa boss ?"

"I don't know. Sing anything you know."

"I don't know many songs," Lucius said.

"Sing what you know. Something with a beat so you can speed up your work."

Lucius opened his mouth and the first halting words came out:

Disco Lady.

Will you be my baby?

Saturday night

to Sunday's light,

Be my baby, Disco lady.

"Stop it," DePauw roared, just as the other men began to join in the singing.

"That's not exactly what I had in mind," DePauw said. "I'll have some words printed up and they can memorize them. Something inspiring, like 'All God's Chilluns Got Shoes.'"

"I'll make sure they learn it, Mr. DePauw."

DePauw nodded and went back inside through the door, which he closed tightly behind him.

"What do you think?" Remo asked Ruby.

"They're working pretty good," she said. "I might put a line like that in my wig factory. Turn up the work."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," Remo said.

"I won't make them sing," Ruby said.

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"I don't like that disco music either," Remo said. "Anyway, Lucius looks all right."

"He looks better somehow," Ruby said.

"Maybe work agrees with him," Remo said.

"Maybe. I wouldn't know. I never saw him work before."

Through this, Chiun had been silent. Remo looked at him and saw the hazel eyes burning with an intensity that Remo had rarely seen.

"What's wrong, Chiun?"

Chiun waved a hand at the door. "This," he said. "This. It is degrading. It is evil."

Remo cocked his head. "This from the man with all the stories of how everybody is inferior to those from Sinanju?"

"It is one thing to understand men as they are, to know their weaknesses, and to deal with them thusly. It is something else to treat man as less than man. Because he who does that defies the glory of God's creation."

Just then the whip lashed again in the slave's workroom. The overseer bellowed, "Faster," and Chiun could take no more.

"Hold!" he cried and with anger fueling the power of his awesome art, he slammed a hand against the hinge side of the huge oaken door and the heavy wood panel shivered, and fell onto the floor in the room.

And like a yellow-robed wraith, Chiun whirled into the room and shouted again, "Hold, animal."

The overseer looked to him with a face torn between shock and anger.

The slaves looked up, hope on their faces, expecting a deliverer. But all they saw was a small yellow man in a yellow robe, looking like a doll,

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whirling into the room, his eyes twisted in anger, glaring at the overseer.

The big man with the white hat and white suit and the pistol at his side, jumped down from his platform, whirled his whip over his head and lashed it out at Chiun.

Just as it reached Chiun, his practiced hand gave it a snap, to move the weighted tip into supersonic speed that created the whip's crack.

But there was no crack. Like a meat slicer, Chiun's right hand moved up alongside his head and as the whip reached him, he sliced off a neat six inches with the side of his palm.

The overseer drew back the whip again behind him, dragging it on the ground, readying an overhead slash that could slice a man's shoulder down to the bone. He brought the lash up over his head with the full power of his sinewy arm, but the lash stopped at Chiun, and then the red-haired man felt himself being pulled across the floor toward the small Oriental. He tried to let go of the whip but it was attached to his wrist with a thong. As he was being dragged, he reached to his side with his left hand to pull out his pistol.

He got the gun out, cocked it with his thumb, but never had time to pull the trigger before an almost-gentle appearing blow from an index finger pushed his lower mandible back into his spinal column with a total, terminal snap.

Chiun looked down as the final breath left the body on the floor, his eyes still glistening with intensity.

The slaves cheered and Chiun whirled toward them; his countenance so fearsome that they stopped in mid-cry and wondered for a split

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second if their salvation might be more fearful than their imprisonment.

Chiun hissed at them. "Remember you this. He who will not be a slave cannot be a slave. You disgust me, all of you, who outnumbered this vile thing and yet took his lashes in silence."

The men looked away as Remo and Ruby came into the glare of the high-ceiling'd room.

"Ruby," called Lucius.

"You all right?" she asked.

"Just tired," he said. "But all right."

From the corner of her eye, she saw Remo vault up to the platform leading to the door to the main house, the platform on which they had seen DePauw.

"Just wait here a little bit longer," Ruby said to Lucius. "We be right back." She hauled herself up onto the platform and followed Remo through the door he forced open. Behind her came Chiun and as he left the slave's workroom, the men gasped, because at one moment he was standing on the floor at the base of the little platform, and then an instant later, his body had lifted into the air onto the platform. And none of them had seen him jump.

The passageway ended at a solid wood and plaster wall. Ruby saw Remo look for a hidden switch to open the door, but instead Chiun put his hands against the two-by-four framing of the wall, pressed right, then left, determined that the hidden door slid left, and pushed against it with more force than seemed to exist in his frail, aged body.

There was a croaking sound as the locking

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mechanism surrendered and the door panel slid smoothly to the left. They were looking into a large hallway on the main floor of the DePauw mansion.

Facing them at the end of the hall were two men. They wore neat business suits, but under the suits were the beefy bodies of athletes. They reached for their guns inside their jackets.

"Hold it right there," one of them called.

"Back in the passage," Remo told Ruby and she stepped back behind the safety of the wall.

She did not see what happened next. She heard a whooshing sound, and later realized it had been Chiun and Remo moving. Then she heard two faint thudding noises. There were no shots and no groans.