Feast or Famine

"It's a machine, actually. Not a creature."

"It has killed and will kill again," Smith warned.

"Oh," said Dr. B. Eugene Roache. "I think I'd better be going now."

"You do that," said Harold Smith. No sooner had he hung up than the phone rang again. He brought it back to his face.

"Yes, Remo?"

"We hit the jackpot. Our man's here. He's in town attending a comic-book convention."

"Ridiculous!" snapped Smith.

"No argument there," agreed Remo. "But listen before you jump to the wrong conclusion."

Smith waited. Remo explained everything that happened from the daylight murder of Death Yellow jacket to their breaking into the hotel room rented to a Peter Pym.

Then Remo said, "We found a case filled with those death's-head bumblebees, and guess what?"

"They are mechanical," said Smith.

Remo's voice lost its note of satisfied triumph. "Yeah. How'd you guess?"

"I didn't. I have just heard from the USDA Honey Bee Center. The dissection showed the sample bee to be a nanobee."

"A what?"

"A nanobee."

Chiun's voice floated over the wire. "Emperor Smith is trying to tell you it is a not-bee, as I have said all along."

"What's a nanobee?"

"An ingenious form of nanomachine."

"Okay," said Remo. "I'll bite. What's a nanomachine?"

"A miniature device engineered on the microscopic level. It is a new branch of engineering. Already, there are microscopic machines capable of performing simple tasks. As the state of the art advances, more-complex devices are expected to come into existence that will allow doctors to perform microsurgery by introducing miniature robots into a patient's body. Or, like an enzyme attacking a biological structure, nanomachines like those that are tearing through America's standing crops might safety demolish obsolete skyscrapers without high explosives."

"The little one-eyed bugs are machines, too?" Remo blurted.

"Obviously. The bees are a cruder form of nanomachine, not as miniaturized but certainly as lethal, not to mention useful for spying."

Remo's voice grew thoughtful. "I guess that explains how all those bees were able to follow us and talk, too. They're robots."

"No doubt controlled by this Bee-Master through radio signals," added Smith. "One assumes the country has been seeded with them."

"Well, I guess that explains that. Now we just have to mop this guy up without getting ourselves chewed alive."

"That will not be easy, Remo," Smith warned.

"You're telling me. Know anything that can jam his frequency?"

"Not without knowing much more about his equipment."

"I was afraid you were going to say that." Remo's voice was distant as he asked, "Any ideas, Little Father?"

"Ask Emperor Smith what an EpiPen is," came Chiun's squeaky voice.

"Chiun wants to know what an EpiPen is. He just found a big clear plastic pen in a drawer and it says EpiPen on the side."

Smith input the question into his ever-ready system. The answer came up instantly.

"An EpiPen is a syringe, not a pen," Smith said. "It is used to deliver epinephrine, an adrenaline."

Smith paused. When he spoke again, his voice was low and urgent.

"Remo, listen, EpiPens are carried by people who are highly allergic to bee stings. In the event of a stinging, they inject themselves in order to counteract the systemic symptoms of anaphylactic shock."

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Remo said.

"That our Bee-Master is allergic to bee stings. Yes."

"Nice going, Little Father," Remo called to Chiun.

"It is nothing," returned the Master of Sinanju. "Any genius would have accomplished the same brilliant result."

"Remo, I think this affair can be resolved safely with no danger to Master Chiun or yourself."

"I'm thinking that, too," said Remo.

"Here is what I suggest you do ...."

Chapter 47

It was his hour of triumph.

It had been a long time coming, but at last it was here.

Peter Pym basked in the applause of the ballroom full of people as he accepted the pewter trophy giving him first prize in the twelfth-anniversary New York Comic Book Spectacular costume parade. And he deserved it. For his Bee-Master regalia wasn't only a faithful reproduction to the most minute detail, but it was fully functional, as well, from the suction-cup vacuum boots to the cybernetic helmet.

It was true that as Bee-Master he couldn't commune with actual living bees. But he had improved on the genius of the original Bee-Master concept. He created his own bees, more powerful, more formidable than any strain known to man or nature.

Now, walking offstage, clutching his trophy, he moved confidently through the crowd of his fellow comic-book fans to the glass elevator and his room.

It was nearly time to do the remote interview with Tamara Terrill of Fox Network News and announce to the world his demands. Demands that had been rudely ignored by the late publisher of the Sacramento Bee.

But Bee-Master would be ignored no more.

Pym ignored the rude stares of the common herd as he roved the hotel corridors. Let lesser mortals gawk as they would. In time, they would be forced to relinquish their dominance over the planet that rightfully belonged to its ultimate inheritors, the insect kingdom. A planet whose dominion would be returned to its proper lords, the crickets and the grasshoppers. The bees and the hornets.

And allied with them until the end of time, their true lord, Bee-Master.

It was a dream come true. A lifelong fantasy made flesh. And it had taken thirty grueling years to bring to fruit ever since that glorious spring day in 1962 when he had picked up his first issue of Tales to Amaze You and was enthralled by the cataclysmic exploits of the one and only Bee-Master.

Coming to his door, he inserted the plastic magnetic pass card, extracted it and twisted the knob when the red light turned green.

He closed the door after him.

Immediately, he sensed something was amiss.

His every insectoid sense went to red alert. His antennae quivered atop his helmet.

His new comic books were out of order. Perhaps it had been the hotel housekeeper.

Then Pym saw his box of death's-head bees lying open and strewed about the floor.

"Someone will pay for this," he said, dropping to one knee on the rug.

Every bee was destroyed. Each exquisite gem of miniaturized technology, pulped as if they were nothing more than winged raisins.

Slowly, fists clenched, he climbed to his feet, standing tall and proud in his Bee-Master uniform.

"I swear," he said, lifting a shaking black fist before his helmeted face, "to wreak my awesome vengeance on all who oppose me."

Then he smiled under his cybernetic helmet. He had always wanted to give that speech in real life. It was from Bizarre Bee-Master #3. The Crimson Cockroach issue.

From the closet, he detected a buzz. Low, curious, it sounded like one of his bumblebees had survived the heartless massacre.

Striding to the door, he laid one black-gloved hand on the doorknob. As he pulled the door open, he narrowed his eyes behind his scarlet eye lenses. If one of his bees was still alive, he should be able to receive its visual-telemetry signal and see exactly what the bee saw.

But there was no transmitted image on the inner side of his flat eye lenses.

Too late, he realized the sound he was hearing wasn't that of one of his death's-head bees, but the annoyed buzz of feral honeybees. Too late, he slammed the door shut.

Too late! For they were out and buzzing around the room.

"No! Stay back. You are not of my brood," he cried. "You are not in league with the Bizarre Bee-Master!"

The bees ignored him. They circled and divebombed him, whether out of anger or as an attack response triggered by his dark uniform, he didn't know.

A sharp prick between his shoulder blades told him he had been stung in the back.

"Nooooo!" he cried. "I am your friend! I am a friend to all bees. All insects."

His right shoulder twitched in sudden pain.

Another sting pierced the back of his right glove.

The bee, withdrawing its barbed sting, fell to the rug squirming in its twisty death throes.

His throat immediately constricted. His breath came in ragged gasps.

"No! Not this way! The Bizarre Bee-Master cannot meet his end this way. Not when I am poised on the threshold of my greatest triumph."

Then he remembered he had prepared for this dire contingency, and stumbled to the hotel-room bureau, where he began clawing through the drawer contents.

"My EpiPen! It will save me. My EpiPen. Where-where is it? Where is my EpiPen?"

But there was no sign of it amid his Bee-Master Underoos and T-shirts.

Meanwhile, the angry bees continued to attack. Their relentless zit-zit-zit-zit signaled each sharp sting that brought coldness to his body.

They were ferocious. Insistent. Indomitable.

He knew from the countless pinpricks erupting all over his body that these were no less than Africanized honeybees.

"How ironic," he moaned, "to die at the stings of those whose habitats I am sworn to protect..."

Falling to the floor, he made a last, desperate attempt to contact his nanomites in the vicinity. They would protect him. They would come to his aid ....

But try as he might, he couldn't focus his thoughts. Couldn't broadcast the electronic signal that would bring the deadly creatures of his own devising to combat these bees who, in their blind fury, their unthinking ignorance, were slowly killing their only champion among a vicious humanity.

Then, like a miracle, an image swam before his eyes.

He was looking into the perfect features of Tamara Terrill. Of course. The interview. His bumblebee emissary was signaling that the interview had begun. It was time to speak. To tell America of his demands if they wanted the scourge he had inflicted upon their farms and cruel scientists to be lifted.

"I bring mankind greetings from the Bizarre BeeMaster, King of all Insects," he heard his drone announce. That was his cue.

He opened his mouth.

A feathery sensation alighted on his tongue. A sharp pain replaced it, and almost at once, his tongue swelled up, reacting to the potent venom of the bee that in its death spasms rolled down his open throat.

He could not speak. Thwarted. In the last ditch, he was thwarted! It was unbearable.

As he clutched up in a ball, like a dying insect himself, the Bizarre Bee-Master heard an insistent glassy tapping. Shutting off his helmet telemetry, he turned his flat scarlet eyes to the balcony window in response to the sound.

It was they! The nanomites had come to succor him. Somehow, some way, they knew! They were trying to penetrate the glass.

His leaping hope turned to crushing defeat when he saw, for the first time, that there were only two ordinary bipeds there. He recognized them. The tall man with the thick wrists and an old Asian who had challenged him before. He didn't know who they really were. Agents of the forces of darkness, without question.

The old Asian was waving goodbye. The other one was holding up the missing EpiPen, the one thing that could preserve his life and all his grandiose plans for the future of insectdom.

Slowly, painfully, as Bravo bees punished him mercilessly, he crawled toward them.

The bees continued to attack. But he would not fail. He refused to fail. He was the Bizarre Bee-Master and he was real. He was alive. He was indomitable.

"I," he moaned through his rapidly constricting throat, "am indomitable. I cannot be defeated. I refuse to be defeated. I refuse..."

And through the glass balcony door came a mocking rebuttal. "That's the biz, sweetheart."

They were the last words the Bizarre Bee-Master heard before he ascended to the great beehive in the sky.

WHEN THE BEE-MASTER had finished convulsing, Remo opened the sliding glass door and stepped in, Chiun right behind him.

The bees in the room came at them with the same single-minded anger they had displayed all along. Casually, Remo and Chiun thwarted their every attempt to strike, urging them out through the open door and into the dusk of late afternoon.

Remo stripped the body of its helmet, lifted it to head height and collapsed it like a shell of tin. The helmet went crunck and its red goggles shattered like bicycle reflectors.

Remo threw the remains into the wastepaper basket.

They looked down at the bloated, cyanosed face of the Bizarre Bee-Master and said, "I wonder who he was?"

"He is dead," intoned the Master of Sinanju. "Nothing else about him matters."

ACROSS TOWN, in the Manhattan studios of Fox TV, Tammy Terrill was getting ready for the interview of her career. It would be live. It would be real. And it would be a TV first.

She could hardly sit still through makeup. But she had to look her best. Fox was almost behind her now.

The majors would be after her by this time tomorrow, and may the highest bid win.

Rushing to the studio, she bumped into Clyde Smoot, who said, "Tam, this had better be good. I wanted you in tall cotton not under hot lights."

"Don't sweat it. It's going to be better than good. It's going to be spectacular."

Taking her seat at the Fox anchor desk, Tammy checked her lavaliere mike and waited for the red tally light that would tell her she was live.

The bumblebee was hiding under the desk. On cue, it would emerge and alight on the desk. Then the interview would begin. And so would Tammy Terrill's national career as a media superstar.

The spooky theme music trailed off into an appropriately long, sinister organ sting.

When the tally light came on, Tammy looked back at the camera with her cool blue gaze and said in her most self-important voice, "This is Tamara Terrill. And this is 'The Tamara Terrill Report.'" She took a breath. "Tonight, with America's heartland under siege and pocked with devastated crop circles, and with killer bees swarming in our major cities, Fox News Network brings you an exclusive that will rock the news world, and the world that watches the news."

The camera zoomed in for a close-up. Tammy lifted the bee onto the desk. It sat there.

"A being known only as Bee-Master has thrown down the gauntlet and is demanding to be heard. And Fox, the news network of the coming millennium, is the only network brave enough to give this mystery man a hearing."

Tammy flashed the quiet bee the okay sign. The bee stirred on its tiny feet.

"With me now is what might appear to be a common, ordinary bumblebee. But is it?"

The bumblebee jumped up into the lights and circled Tammy's head once.

"No. This is no ordinary bee. But a death's-head super-killer bee. But even that is not the entire incredible story."

The bee dropped back onto the desk and faced Tammy. The camera dollied in on the skull imprinted on its back.

"This bee," continued Tammy, "is an emissary of the Bee-Master, and through its own tiny bee voice we will hear what the Bee-Master has to say and how this will affect the future of civilization." Under her breath, Tammy added, "Not to mention my career..."

Tammy picked a microphone off the desk and pointed it at the bee. "Mr. Bee, speak your piece. America is listening."

The bee started to speak.

Later, there were those who denied the bee ever spoke. Or who swore that Tammy Terrill was practicing a cheap form of ventriloquism.

But at that moment, all over America, millions of viewers heard a tinny amplified voice that said clearly, "I bring mankind greetings from the Bizarre Bee-Master, King of all Insects."

"Is that anything like the King of all Media?" Tammy quipped.

The bee didn't reply. For a moment, Tammy thought she had offended the bee. So she asked, "Tell us about the Bee-Master."

The bumblebee just sat there.

Tammy said, "Go ahead. We're listening. We're live."

The bee just sat there.

Face frowning, Tammy nudged it with the mike.

The bee fell over. Its tiny legs stuck up stiff and lifeless in the air.

And seeing her great moment dispersing like pixels in a blown TV tube, Tammy attempted another broadcast first. She tried to give the bee mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

All she succeeded in accomplishing was to accidentally swallow her guest interviewee.

In the control booth, there was a collective groan.

Coughing violently, Tammy gasped, "We-we seem to be having ...technical...difficulties."

The set went black. So did the career of Tammy Terrill, AKA Tamara.

Chapter 48

A week later, Remo was waiting for the doorbell to ring when the telephone rang instead.

"I have determined the identity of the Bee-Master," said the lemony voice of Harold W. Smith.

"Okay. But hurry up. I have a hot date."

"His real name was Palmer Pym," said Smith.

"Wait a minute. That's the real Bee-Master's real name. I mean, the fictitious one's real name."

"Peter Pym is a nanoscientist attached to UCLA. His diaries have been found. Evidently, as a young boy he discovered a Bee-Master comic book and, struck by the coincidence of their shared name, he resolved to become Bee-Master in real life when he grew up. He studied biology and biochemistry, but his plans were frustrated when he discovered it was impossible to commune with insects through electronic means. And further, that he was highly allergic to bee stings. So Pym pursued other avenues. In time, he was attracted to the field of nanotechnology, and there realized that his dream was not impossible after all. He needn't communicate with actual bees if he could instead create obedient artificial bees of his own."

"That is the nuttiest thing I ever heard," Remo exploded, looking at a wall clock. Jean was due at any moment.

"Nevertheless, it is true. Pym set out on a campaign to wage war on those who had waged war on the insect world, starting with Doyal T. Rand. His nanomites, as he called them, were created to demonstrate his power. But he was unable to make his demands public because his chosen vehicle refused to cooperate."

"Who was that?" asked Remo, not really caring and instead wondering what was keeping his date.

"The publisher of the Sacramento Bee."

"Well, that makes sense in a moronic kind of way," said Remo.

"Instead, he chose Tammy Terrill."

"Yeah. And we know what happened there."

"Your timing was fortunate. She has been so professionally embarrassed she is unlikely to resurface again. More importantly, the Bee-Master menace is over. There has been not a single attack since you vanquished Pym. All his equipment and insects we have found have been destroyed. I have so informed the President."

"Well, all's well that ends," grunted Remo, looking out the window for the zillionth time.

He saw a long white stretch limousine pull up. "And here's my date. Catch you later, Smitty."

Hanging up, Remo started down the stairs as the doorbell chimed. He heard the door open and Jean's smoky voice clash briefly with Grandmother Mulberry's witch's croak.

A moment later, the old bat herself came rushing up, her yellowed prune face crimson as an apple.

"How's it going, Granny?" he asked jauntily.

She glared at him and said, "Hope you and foul-mouth white girl marry soon. You deserve each other. Good riddance."

"Have a nice evening yourself," returned Remo.

Jean was waiting at the door, dressed in a shimmering blue nightgown.

She took one look at Remo's casual attire and asked, "You're not going out looking like that, are you?"

Remo stopped in his tracks. "Oops."

Jean's frown turned into a grin as she reached behind her and hoisted into view a neatly pressed suit on a hanger.

"I cashed in my lottery ticket. So tonight we ride in style and you dress so I'm not embarrassed to be seen in public with you. Not that I would be anyway."

Remo took the suit. "What'd you tell Grandma Mulberry?" he asked. "She looked like someone spanked her good."

"She tried to give me a hard time, so I used the line you taught me to."

"Dwe juhla?"

"Yep."

"That got her, huh?"

Jean smiled mischievously.

"Well, I added 'you old bone bag,' too."

Remo grinned. "Okay, I just gotta let Chiun know not to wait up."

But they couldn't find Chiun anywhere. He wasn't in the bell-tower meditation room. Nor in the kitchen. The fish cellar was empty, too.

Finally, Remo knocked on the door of Chiun's private room. It fell open.

Inside, there was no sign of the Master of Sinanju.

But on a low taboret, Remo found a book. Recognizing the cover, he picked it up.

The title was The Joy of Astral Sex.

"Hey, this is the same book I caught Grandma Mulberry with!" Remo blurted.

"So? They're reading the same book. What's wrong with sharing?"

"Except I jammed her copy down the garbage disposal."

Remo's face turned shock white. "You don't suppose... Not Chiun. Not with her..."

"Hey," said Jean, beckoning Remo to follow her out the door, "he's old. He's not dead. Neither are you. And the night is young. Come on. You can change clothes in the car. I'll try not to peek."

Shrugging, Remo dropped the book and followed her out, muttering, "Now I'll never get rid of that old fishwife ...."