Warren Murphy: Funny Money

Wherever he was, he was watching Chiun now. Chiun made sure that his face showed only sorrow, the appropriate look for an old man surrendering his pupil's head, then turned and walked away from the basket, softly along the hard terminal floor, toward the door through which he had entered.

Twenty-five yards from the ticket counter, the vibrations had almost vanished. Chiun turned. He was just in time to see the back of Mr. Gordons, stiffly carrying the white pillowcase at his side, disappear through a revolving door at the other end of the terminal.

Chiun looked toward the Eastern Airlines reservation desk.

The litter basket was gone. Where it had stood, there was only a small pile of papers, pop cans, and cigarette butts on the floor. But the litter basket itself was gone, nowhere to be seen.

CHAPTER TEN

Back in the hotel room, Chiun awakened Remo from his sound sleep.

"Come, we must find different lodgings," he said.

"What happened to Forsythe?" asked Remo. He looked around the room and saw the ubiquitous blood stain. "Never mind," he said. "Where have you been? What have you been up to?"

"Just getting your head together," said Chiun with a high-humored cackle. He felt this so good, it deserved repeating. "Getting your head together. Heh, heh, heh, heh."

"Oh, knock it off," said Remo rolling out of bed. Once on his feet, he saw the blood-slicked plate in the corner of the room.

"I guess my plates came in handy," he said. "Aren't you glad I thought of them?"

"I've changed my mind," Chiun said.

"About what?"

"Nobody can get your head together. Heh, heh, heh, heh."

In a small room across the city, a room with not one piece of furniture, Mr. Gordons sat on the floor. He grasped the pillowcase package between his two hands and gently, with no sign of strain or exertion, pulled his hands apart. The pillowcase ripped and the plastic tablecloth inside pulled apart with little strands of fluff from its flannel back fluttering onto the floor.

Mr. Gordons dropped the two halves of the package binding and looked down at its grizzly, blood-soaked contents.

"Very good," he said aloud. Since he had reprogrammed himself with the elementary creativity program developed by Dr. Vanessa Carlton's laboratory, he had taken to speaking his thoughts aloud. He wondered why he did this, but he was not quite creative enough to figure out that five-year-olds spoke to themselves, not because it had anything directly to do with their creativity, but because their growing creativity made them for the first time realize that they were but specks in a giant, unfathomable world and that made them lonely.

These thoughts were still beyond Mr. Gordons, and not having them, he did not even know that it was possible for him to have them.

"Very good," he repeated, putting his two hands down and touching the face. The head certainly looked like Remo's head. And the old Oriental, high probability name of Chiun, had certainly looked unhappy. Unhappy was what one was supposed to look like when one lost one's friend or had to make him give up his life. He had been told about such friends; the ancient Greeks had had many of them. Mr. Gordons was not quite sure what friend meant but if a friend worried about your loss, then was it not logical that a friend might help you to survive? It was, he decided. Very logical. It was also creative. Mr. Gordons was pleased with himself. See: he had already become more creative. Creativity was a means of survival and survival was the most important thing in the world. A friend would also be a help to survival. He would have to get a friend. But that would have to wait.

For now, he would have to look more closely at this head. From the electronic circuits that coursed through his man-like body he withdrew the image of high probability name Remo. There it was. High cheekbones. This head had such cheekbones. Dark brown eyes sunk deep into the head. Mr. Gordons reached out a hand and pried open an eyelid. These were dark brown eyes and they appeared deepset, although his finger could tell that the bones were broken around the eye sockets and it was difficult to be sure. Dark brown hair.

He ran his fingers over the pulpy face of the severed head on the floor between his legs and worked out a correlation between his tactile impressions and the picture analysis of Remo he held in his head. There was no difference. Every dimension his fingers felt were the same dimensions his mechanical brain had measured in those times that he had seen high probability Remo.

Mr. Gordons slid his fingertips off the cheeks to the ears. The ears were badly mangled. Remo must have waged a gigantic struggle not to die. Perhaps he had fought with the old yellow-skinned man, high probability name Chiun. Mr. Gordons felt a desire to have seen that battle. That would have been worth seeing.

When first they had met, Remo had damaged Mr. Gordons. Mr. Gordons had thought for a time that Remo too might be an android. But no longer did he feel that way. After all, here was his head between his feet, the one eye that had been pried open staring up at Mr. Gordons blankly, unseeing. The other eye remained tightly closed.

Mr. Gordons felt where the earlobes would have been.

The ears were twisted, cut, and bloodied. Why should ears be cut like that? The blow to the nose would kill a human. The blows that broke the eye socket bones would kill a human. The blows to the earlobes would not kill a human. They were mutilating wounds. Would the old man who looked sad have mutilated the head of high probability Remo? No. They were friends. He would someday have his own friend, thought Mr. Gordons. Would he mutilate the ears of his friend? No. Perhaps someone else had mutilated the head of Remo. Mr. Gordons thought about this for a moment. No. No one else could mutilate Remo. No one else but the aged yellow person could have killed him.

Why the mutilation?

Mr. Gordons brought all his creativity to bear upon the problem. He could not think of an answer. There must be danger in it. Danger to Mr. Gordons's survival. He must think about this more. More investigation. More data. More creativity.

He reached a pair of fingers into the matted flesh on the underside of the right ear. He felt something that did not belong there. It was of the wrong weight and mass and density. He extracted it. It was a small piece of skin. He felt it between his fingertips. It felt like the skin from the rest of the head. He held it close to his eye sensors and counted the pores per square millimeter on the small piece of skin, then lowered his head and made a random check of the number of pores per millimeter at three different locations on the head. All were within chance tolerances. High probability, the piece of skin was from the ear of the dead person's head between his legs.

He carefully checked the ear to see where the piece of skin had been detached. He saw a little V-shaped cutout in the ear from which the skin had been removed. The pointed end of the scrap of skin in his hand fit into the V exactly. He held it in place with his left hand and extended the skin, down under and around the flesh to try to find where at the back of the ear the skin fit. He found it and held it there with his other hand. The piece of skin formed a U-shaped loop, but the loop was not fully filled with flesh from the ear. There was a space. Three and a half millimeters of space. The ear had been made smaller. Some of the flesh had been removed. He looked again at the loop of skin, correctly anchored in front of and in back of the ear. If that skin had been filled with flesh, as in life it had, that much flesh would have created an earlobe. But high probability Remo had no earlobes.

Therefore this was not the head of high probability Remo.

It was logical. He was correct. While he had no instincts to sense correctness, he knew he was right because his sensory apparatus was infallible.