Feeding Frenzy

Destroyer 94: Feeding Frenzy

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Chapter 1

Later on, no one would remember who was actually the first one to eat the bug, but a lot of them tried to take credit for it.

Brother Karl Sagacious said that he remembered it clearly. He had been hiking around the hills north of San Francisco while on sabbatical from his professor's job at UCLA where he taught a history course titled "Egyptians, Phoenicians, Romans, Greeks, and other Black Folk," and as he was pitching his tent one night to sleep, a brilliant light appeared in the sky.

And then a thin voice came and it said, "All your science is false. But I will show you the true way."

It was a woman's voice, Brother Karl Sagacious later recalled.

He remembered he had been blinded by the light, but impelled by some force he could not understand, he staggered sightlessly from his tent and pushed his way through the forest, until the voice commanded him:

"Kneel and eat. This is your truth."

Still unseeing, he obeyed. His hands found tiny nuggets of food which he popped into his mouth. They were delicious. They tasted like miniature lobster tails. He could not stop eating and when he did, he finally fell asleep where he knelt.

He woke with the morning sun and found himself in the middle of a field of weeds. The weeds were covered with brown, soft-shelled bugs. Was that what he had eaten?

He looked closely. The bugs were not moving. They were asleep. Or dead. His stomach rumbled at the thought that he might have chosen to eat dead insects for supper.

But then he remembered the voice.

"This is your truth," She had said.

Slowly, with trembling fingers, he reached out and plucked one of the bugs from the weed. He examined it carefully. It even looked benign. It had a round head, but no pincers, and its legs were but little hairlike stubble on the side of its inch-long body. And it was dead.

He gulped once, swallowed, and then popped the bug into his mouth and bit into it.

It tasted exactly like lobster tail. It was wonderful. Nirvana.

He stayed in that spot for breakfast, and then when he was full, he returned to civilization to spread the word.

At least that was how he remembered it.

Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles remembered it quite a different way.

No modern man, he insisted, had been the one to discover the bug. It had been part of the collected wisdom of the Native Americans who had ruled these lands before the white man came to despoil it with his cities and schools and churches and toilets and homes.

And he, Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles-as the spiritual and physical heir to those noble Red Men-had known since childhood of the magical properties of the thunderbug, so named because they invariably lifted their tiny heads quizzically whenever it thundered-and had been eating nothing but them since he was little more than a papoose on the Chinchilla Indian reservation in Sedona, Arizona.

Some reporters found out later that Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles had never so much as seen an Indian reservation in Arizona. Instead, he had been raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as Theodore Magarac, the son of an immigrant Latvian steelworker. He had spent fifteen of his forty years in jail for petty theft.

His last known scam had been perpetrated in the wake of the U.S. Postal Service's pick-an-Elvis-any-Elvis campaign. Theodore thought that if they're going to put a junkie on a stamp, they ought to put a fag on too, so he started a 900 number to lure people into paying for the privilege of voting on whether Liberace or Rock Hudson should have his gummy backside licked by the Postal Service's patrons.

The scam collapsed when the Postmaster General called the number, got an answering machine and no callback, and subsequently discovered a $49.99 telemarketing charge on his office phone bill. He got steamed and sicced the Inspector General and the FCC onto Theodore. Magarac did a year in Folsom.

However, the reporters decided that running a story on Theodore Magarac's pedigree would add nothing to the public's necessary store of knowledge on the subject. And since the new bug was obviously going to be such a boon to mankind, it would not do to confuse the discussion with a lot of extraneous nonissues, and so the story was never published.

They were saving it for when the story peaked.

But while the history of the bug's discovery might have been in doubt, what was certain was that somehow Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles and Brother Karl Sagacious had come together and created an organization called PAPA-People Against Protein Assassins-and it was their stated goal to make the bug the new staple of the world's diet.

"The world no longer needs chicken farms or cattle ranches or hogs raised for meat. With the discovery of the Miracle Food, we have ended forever the specter of hunger and starvation on our planet," read one of their press releases.

Even in California, where people will sign up to do almost anything, it was a tough sell convincing people to eat bugs. But as time went on, more and more came aboard.

Soon PAPA was taking over the entire membership of the state's hundreds of New Age groups. Crystal-strokers, cosmos-guiders, rain-foresters, Harmonic Convergers, Pyramidologists-all decided that the Miracle Food was the way of the future. They joined by the hundreds and the movement slowly crossed the Rockies and came into America's heartland.

It could no longer be ignored.

The Miracle Food was tested and examined in scores of laboratories, and the preliminary reports were almost as glowing as Brothers Karl and Theodore made them out to be.

The bug was a little-known insect named Ingraticus Avalonicus. It was able to live in all climes but in the past had been slow to reproduce and therefore had not ever been previously found in large numbers.

The entire body of the insect was edible, high in protein, carbohydrates, and essential amino acids, but without fat and with the added property of apparently lowering the blood cholesterol of someone who ate it. People could eat them like popcorn and actually lose weight.

The bug's habits were also peculiar. It did not sting and there were no known allergies exacerbated by it. It did not eat valuable crops. Instead, the lowly and insignificant Ingraticus fed only on common weeds that grew everywhere, and it would simply light on a weed and eat until it died.

A panel from Consumers News magazine made a test of the Miracle Food, both raw and cooked, and reported that the thunderbug tasted better than pizza.

In every state in the union, PAPA groups sprang up. The United Nations called for action. Official Washington decided the lowly thunderbug was now worth its consideration and it ordered redone, at a hundred times the original cost, all the tests that had been done privately. But first a new laboratory had to be built at a cost of six hundred million dollars in the Arkansas district of the Speaker of the House. With cost overruns, the lab ultimately cost four billion dollars, but eventually it got around to studying the thunderbug.

"Is the Millennium Here?" the New York Times wondered in a front-page editorial. "Has mankind really found the answer to worldwide starvation?"

Back in California, in the wooded clearing where the original one hundred members of the very first PAPA group still lived, there were rumblings of internal problems.

Brother Theodore was unhappy because Brother Karl Sagacious had been on television too much of late, depriving him of equal-opportunity face time.

And Brother Karl had been heard to complain that he thought Brother Theodore was raising too much money for "research" that never seemed to get done.

It got so bad that the two stopped talking to each other.

And then came the Great Schism.

One day, Brother Karl came out into the clearing to address the faithful.

"You will remember that I was the first to eat the Miracle Food. And I ate it raw. And now, it seems that many of you are under the misapprehension that the sacred bug must be cooked first. This is heresy. From this moment on, the dietary rules are set by me. And not anyone else."

Brother Theodore entered the clearing an hour later to address the same faithful.

"My people," he said, meaning his imaginary Chinchilla forebears and not the Latvian steelworkers, "have been eating the thunderbug for centuries. It must be cooked. We let it die on the vine and then cook it. It is the only correct way."

Brother Karl was back a few minutes later. "The Miracle Food is better eaten fresh. Cooked dead food is no better than beef stew."

In the morning, the hundred earliest disciples had split into two camps.

Brother Theodore called his people The Harvesters. They waited until the insects had died on the weed of overeating and they cooked them in a clear broth like chick-peas.

Brother Karl said that hereafter there would be only one approved way to eat Ingraticus Avalonicus. "Pick up the bug, snap off its head, and pop it into your mouth. Fresh and good. The way She wants it."

Brother Theodore dismissed Sagacious's followers as heretics, calling them "Snappers."

Sagacious gleefully picked up on the name. He had T-shirts made for his Snappers, in six designer colors and silkscreened with a legend rendered in what he claimed was genuine Phoenician calligraphy:

SNAP OFF THEY HEADS AND EAT THEM RAW

He proclaimed Brother Theodore and his Harvesters to be hopelessly New World and therefore counterprogressive.

Theodore told his followers that the Snappers were practicing the kind of cruelty to living things that all thinking people must protest. He had his own T-shirts made up for the Harvesters. They read:

ALL IN GOD'S GOOD TIME

The calligraphy, he claimed, was fourteenth-century Mohican. They sold like hotcakes at $29.99.

The next day, Brother Karl's followers moved out of the communal clearing into the next clearing. Both groups continued to share the slit trench latrine, and one evening Brother Karl and Brother Theodore met there, quite by accident, when both came to squat.

"Karl, you're screwing things up," Brother Theodore said.

"I am following the way that She set out for me."

"Forget her," Theodore snapped, "whoever the hell she is. We've got a good thing going here and if we start fighting about it, we won't have anything left."

"I'm not interested in 'a good thing,' " Karl said. "I am interested in truth."

"All right, all right. You want truth. Try this: How is it that somehow it's wrong to kill a freaking chicken, but you can snap the heads off the thunderbug and swallow it down warm?"

"Because that is what She told me to do."

"That's your answer? She told you to do it? What kind of an answer is that?"

"A truthful answer," replied Brother Karl Sagacious.

"You know what's wrong with you?" Theodore snapped. "You're a nut. You never should have left the campus. They like nuts at UCLA. That's why it's called macadamia."

"The word is academia," said Karl, "and yours are the remarks of a desperate man."

"Look. Can't we get together on this and stop bickering? Let everybody eat the way they want. No skin off anybody's ass."

"You're a charlatan, Theodore."

Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles growled, pulled up his pants, and left, wondering what he was going to do about Brother Karl Sagacious.

He did not intend to let this one get away from him. He had been on the wire all his life, scratching to make a wrinkled dollar. Con games had put him in jail. Anointing himself as a Chinchilla Indian had gotten him room and board and a little good press for a few years, until his thick black hair began thinning and falling out. Male pattern baldness, a specialist had told him.

"Well, fix it," he had insisted. "I can't be no freaking Chinchilla Indian without hair. You ever see a bald spot on a Mohawk? Or a Dakota Sioux with a receding hairline? Everybody knows the noble Red Man had the follicles of a grizzly bear. That's why my Chinchilla ancestors were so heavy into scalping. Hair was their totem. They ate hair, thus insuring abundant buffalo and no unsightly dandruff on their noble Chinchilla shoulders."

"Sorry, friend. Your hair's going."

Shortly after that, the Indian movement went up in smoke signals when most of its members went to jail for murder, and Brother Theodore drifted West where he lived on the fringes of assorted loony movements until one night, in a restaurant booth, he heard another man-who turned out to be Karl Sagacious-talking about the wonderful bug food he had discovered.

"Tastes just like lobster," the man kept repeating.

Theodore decided that there might be some way to turn a buck from it, and after the people had left, he went into the north California hills the man had been speaking of and, trying hard not to vomit, ate a couple of dozen bugs until he found one that tasted like lobster.

He went immediately to the press, concocting his story about the ancient Chinchilla thunderbug-eating tradition as he talked, and created PAPA right on the spot. A few weeks later, Sagacious-who never quite understood that the discovery had been stolen from him-showed up, and the two men agreed on a partnership to lead the new organization, People Against Protein Assassins.

And it had worked well enough until now . . . until this damn stubborn display by Sagacious.

Something was going to have to be done about him, Brother Theodore thought as he was falling asleep that night.

By morning, something had been done.

"Wake up, wake up, Brother Theodore," a young woman called, rushing into his tepee.

"What's the matter? What is it?"

"He's dead."

"Who's dead?"

"Brother Karl is dead."

"Oh, no. How sad. Oh, what a loss is ours," Theodore moaned and turned and buried his face in his pillow so the woman could not see him smile.

"And that's not all."

"What's not all?"

"Others are dying too," she said. "They're dropping like flies."

"Oh, what a pity," Brother Theodore said. And this time he meant it.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and his favorite movie was still Gunga Din.

He thought about it as he was sitting in the Harvard University auditorium, waiting for the start of the film tribute to Hardy Bricker, Hollywood's newest wonderchild.

He had liked Sam Jaffe in Gunga Din. But Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks and Victor McLaglen were good too. What other movies did he like?

He saw Fantasia once and really liked the dancing hippopotamuses. And Casablanca was okay except he never liked that fat guy who was in it. But Citizen Kane was about a sled, for crying out loud, and he had seen three minutes of Batman once, but the picture was so dark it looked like it had been filmed in a cave. He hadn't seen much else, not even in the various apartments he had lived in all his life, because while he had a VCR, it was always being used by Chiun, his trainer, to watch old soap operas.

It wasn't as if he hated movies. He didn't hate them. He didn't care enough about them to hate them. He just didn't think about them at all.

But he was willing to make an exception for Hardy Bricker.

Hardy Bricker had made five films and was now being called the hottest director in Hollywood history. "The thinking man's director," some critic said on television and Remo thought that might be true if the thinking man involved never thought about anything but bullshit.

Bricker's first film had been called Frag. It showed how American soldiers committed atrocities in Vietnam, pushed to perform them by an evil military-industrial complex intent upon enslaving the world. Remo had been in Vietnam for a while and he knew that the soldiers there were no better or no worse than any America had sent anywhere else. They just wanted to stay alive.

To call them criminals was in itself criminal. But it had rung just the right note for Hollywood. That city, run by people so dumb that they thought conspiracies explained everything, had found in Hardy Bricker an eloquent new spokesman. They bombarded him with picture offers. He took only the ones that paid him the most money.

Frag was followed by Dependent. Day, showing how America was an evil racist country that turned its back on the noble soldiers who had fought in Vietnam-the same noble soldiers who were murderers in Frag.

And then he did a movie called Horn, about some jazz musician who killed himself with a drug overdose brought on by his worrying about America turning into an evil racist country.

Then his movie Jocko told the story of a rising young politician who was killed by an evil racist secret power structure of the United States, in a conspiracy involving 22,167 people. It won Bricker his third Academy Award.

And tonight was to be the preview of Bricker's latest epic: Crap, which proved that all organized religion in the United States was the tool of an evil racist secret power structure trying to promote fascism in America. To be followed by remarks from Hardy Bricker himself, for those who needed even pictures explained to them.

Does anybody believe this bullshit? Remo wondered, then looked around at the bearded, hairy Harvard underclassmen who had packed the auditorium, and he nodded sadly to himself. These zanies would swallow anything.

Remo could tell that it was eight o'clock, and right on time the house lights dimmed and the elegant title Crap appeared on the screen, the individual letters apparently made by arranging dog turds on a white background.

Then the camera pulled away and the white background turned out to be a priest's cassock. The priest had it pulled up around his waist. He was sexually molesting a preteen girl. In the first five minutes of the film, the same priest sexually assaulted three more children. Then he shaved, put on expensive aftershave lotion, and went to lunch with an evangelist at an expensive New York City restaurant, where they talked about following the secret orders of their military-industrial masters. Before lunch was finished, both clergymen had ducked into the hatcheck room to ravage two waitresses.

When they finished and came out of the hatcheck room, they sprinkled Holy Water on the restaurant and blessed it as a Place for God's Work. Then they argued with management about the luncheon bill, refused to pay it, and went outside to their waiting block-long limousines, in each of which three street hookers had been gathered up to make sure the ride back to their churches wasn't too boring.

Remo rubbed his eyes in stupefaction at what he was seeing. The sound was scratchy. The film looked to be out of focus. The dialogue, what little there was beyond sexual grunting, seemed to have been written by an imbecilic fourth-grader.

And all around him, students were cheering, laughing, and applauding.

"Tell them, Hardy. You tell them, man," a black man next to Remo stood up to shout. He punched a clenched fist into the air.

"Sit down and shut up," Remo said.

"I . . . beg . . . your . . . fucking . . . pardon," the man said coldly. He was older than most of the others in the auditorium, so his dumbness couldn't be written off as the ignorance of youth. He wore a goatee, tortoise-shell glasses that might have been swiped from Hedda Hopper's cold corpse, and a black baseball cap with the Roman numeral ten on it.

Remo recognized the man then. He was a famous film director who after running ten million dollars over budget trying to film the life of a burglar-turned-pimp-turned-martyred-civil-rights-leader, cried racism after the film company refused to kick through the shortfall. When other black film personalities ponied up, he publicly demanded that black people all over the country skip work and school and breakfast to see his movie about black responsibility, or risk being branded as Uncle Toms themselves.

Harvard University immediately hired him to teach a humanities course called "Black Values."

Remo reached out and touched the back of the man's left knee. The leg collapsed and the man slumped back into his seat.

"Hey-!" he started.

"One more word out of you," Remo warned, "and I'll do the same thing to your head that I did to your leg. Shut up."

The man did. He whipped off his cap and started chewing on the bill.

Remo could put in only five more minutes of watching Crap before he stood and slipped quietly out of the row and walked around to the back of the theater. Although it was dark, he was able to adjust his eyes so that he saw as clearly as if it were high noon. There was a flight of steps at the side of the small stage and a door behind them.

Remo walked down quietly and let himself backstage through the door.

There were a half-dozen students running around, apparently busying themselves with errands of some sort, but Remo saw no sign of Hardy Bricker.

He walked down a long hall. While he made no effort to eavesdrop, any sound from inside the rooms would register on his sensitive ears. He stopped outside the last door. Inside he could hear sighing and heavy breathing.

The two guards could hear the breathing too. They were Harvard University campus police and they were paid not to remember things they heard or saw, and, occasionally, smelled.

"Hey, get away from that door!" the first guard shouted. "You know who's in there?"

"Another Bolshevik," Remo said.

"Hardy Bricker, that's who," the second guard said.

"Well, la-di-da," said Remo.

They were a Mutt and Jeff pair, one tall and reedy as a flagpole with the blue flag twisted around it, and the other short and squat like a squash ball stuffed into a shapeless blue sack.

They had been standing in their dark blue uniforms at the far end of the corridor, before the fire door and under the darkened EXIT sign, their hands clasped behind them, at parade rest.

Except now their hands were swinging at their sides and they were moving in on Remo with all the purpose of high school corridor monitors and, to Remo Williams, the first white Master of Sinanju, about the same threat level. Which was to say, none.

Remo lifted his hands to show that he had no weapon and wasn't a threat. He didn't look like a threat. He didn't look like much of anything-merely a man of slightly more than average height, very average weight, wearing a white T-shirt and tan chinos that fit tightly enough to suggest he carried no weapons, concealed or otherwise.

While the police were sizing him up with their eyes, satisfying themselves that this lean-bodied intruder was unarmed, Remo reached out with the deadliest weapons on his person-if not the universe-and got his fingers around the police throats. The thin-necked one was easy. The thick-necked one needed an extra two seconds of squeezing before his nervous system shorted too.

Still holding them by their necks, Remo carried the pair over to the fire door and dropped them there. Then he reached up to wave one hand over the EXIT sign. It winked on.

"Take a penny, give a penny," Remo told himself.

The sounds were still coming from behind the closed door. He took the knob, twisted it with deceptive slowness, and slipped in.

Hardy Bricker was standing in front of a mirror, making faces at himself. He had a puffy, spoiled face, the face of somebody with too much money and a private school background. So the way he snarled and frowned at the mirror was funny. It was as if he were trying to put on his tough face for the speech he was scheduled to give to the Harvard undergrads.

Remo stepped into the light so the mirror caught his reflection.

Hardy Bricker caught the reflection too. His face froze with his upper lip curled a la Elvis Presley and his lower lip pushed out in a hemorrhoidal pout.

He pulled both lips into line and turned.

He began, "Who-?"

"-Me," Remo shot back.

"Leave!" said Hardy Bricker, testing his tough voice.

"No," said Remo.

"Don't make me call the guards."

"Don't think you have the lungs to wake them," Remo said casually.

"They dead?"

"Asleep, and so will you be if you don't listen to me."

"Listen to what?"

"I've got this idea for a movie," Remo said.

Bricker groaned. "Everybody's got an idea for a movie," he moaned. "What's yours? Little green men in a spaceship who captured you one night in Iowa? Or a tender love story about a sixteen-year-old and an eighty-year-old checkout clerk at the local Acme? Or maybe a ghost story about a guy who comes back to save his sweetheart's life from killers? I've heard them all. What's yours?"

"Naaaah, nothing like that. I've got this story about a big government conspiracy. To wipe out whole races of people. To promote fascism. Racism. The whole military-industrial conspiracy-stuff like that."

Hardy Bricker's soft features quirked into attentiveness. "Conspiracy?"

"A conspiracy with fifteen thousand people in on the secret," Remo said.

The tension went out of Hardy Bricker's overfed body. "That sounds like something more up my alley," he said, sitting down suddenly. He waved Remo to a chair.

"Alley's the right word," Remo mumbled, adding in an audible voice, "I thought you might like it." He took the other chair. Remo leaned over and whispered conspiratorially, "You know how your movies are always about government conspiracies?"

Hardy Bricker learned forward too. He looked Remo in the eye. "Yeah?" he said, his tone equally conspiratorial.

"Well, I've got the biggest one." Remo pretended to look to see that the door was closed and then that there were no strange faces or shotgun microphones at the only window. "There's a secret government agency, see, and it hires contract killers and they go around knocking off everybody who pisses them off."

"Sounds about right. Who are the killers?"

"Well, one of them is this misunderstood American guy. He grew up in an orphanage in Newark and used to be a cop until they conned him into working for the Feds."

"And he's a racist, right?"

"No, no," Remo said. "He loves everybody. He's really kind of sweet. Thoughtful. Gentle, even."

"Screw all that sweet and gentle. I want some racists. That's what I make movies about. Racist evil Americans. Who's the other guy?"

"You'd like him. He is a racist. He hates everybody."

"Good. Now we're getting somewhere," Bricker said, his puffy face relaxing like a sponge absorbing water.

"Okay," said Remo. "He's about a hundred years old, see? Although he'll only own up to eighty. And he's from this small village and his family have been supporting the village by being professional assassins for a couple of thousand years. See, he gets into it because this secret agency hired him to train the young American and make him into a great assassin too."

"Right. Got it. Where's the village? Upstate New York?"

"No, actually it's called Sinanju. That's in North Korea."

Hardy Bricker's interested expression soured. "You mean this eighty-year-old great assassin is some dinky North Korean?"

"Right," said Remo.

"That's ridiculous! I don't want a Korean racist. I want an American racist. Somebody put you up to this, didn't they? One of the major studios, right? They're trying to con me with this cock-and-bull story about two secret assassins. All right fella, tell me. Who are you?"

"I came on my own," Remo said truthfully.

"Good. Then leave on your own. Interview ended. Good-bye."

Hardy Bricker started to rise, but a hand he couldn't see coming pushed him back down into his chair. The hand stayed there. It was firm. It wasn't clutching or pinching or squeezing, but a numbness filled Hardy Bricker's soft shoulder like Novocaine invading a healthy tooth.

Hardy Bricker noticed then that the hand was attached to its forearm by a very thick wrist. He looked at the man's face again, as if seeing it for the first time. It was a strong face, dominated by deepset dark brown eyes and very pronounced cheekbones. The man's hair was as dark as his eyes and his mouth was a thin twist that suggested cruelty.

"Not until I finish pitching my story," the thickwristed man said casually. "So these two work for this secret government agency called CURE, and their job is to kill America's enemies."

"And they get away with it?"

"Of course," the man said, as if it was no big deal.

"Well, that's the part I like. But as for the rest of it, sorry, pal, it just won't fly."

The man said, "I haven't told you the best part."

"What's that?"

"You know how you always say that there's a secret government that really runs America and goes around killing people?"

"Yes. "

"You were right."

"I knew that."

"No, you were really right. In fact, it's bigger than you dreamed." The thick-wristed man made his voice conspiratorial again. "The President is in on it."

"Which President? Give me names."

"All of them."

"Since when?"

"Since CURE started. Back in the 1960's."

"You don't look old enough to go back that far."

"Macrosymbiotic diet," said the other. "Keeps me young. Besides, I didn't come in until later."

Hardy Bricker was trying to process the information coming into his barely wrinkled brain. Every President since the sixties. Mostly they were Republicans. Hardy was pretty sure about this, because in his forty-odd years of life only twice had he ever voted for a winner.

"Your story has a tinge of truth to it," he allowed.

"I thought you'd think so."

"But tell me this-if every President for the last four decades has known, how come none of them have talked-or shut you down?"

"They haven't talked because they can't."

"You kill them? Is that it?"

The thick-wristed man looked insulted. "No, no. We just erase their memories after they leave office, so that they think they remember everything about their term in office, but they don't."

"That must be an incredible machine that does it," Hardy Bricker said.

The guy blew on his wriggling fingers and said, "It is."

Hardy Bricker started to scoff but then remembered how numb his shoulder had gotten after the skinny guy had touched it.

"That part doesn't sound so plausible," he said.

"Sure it is. All over the human body are nerve centers. Sensitive nerve centers. It's just a matter of putting negative pressure on those nerve centers while reminding the subject of what he shouldn't remember."

"Reminding him of what he shouldn't remember? That sounds awfully Zen."

"The Zen guys overheard something they shouldn't have and that's how they got where they are today-which is to say playing with themselves."

"You're losing me."

"It's like this. I just the other day had a nice chat with the last President."

"Oh, him."

"Yeah, that one. I reminded him that he was supposed to forget all about us when he left office, and he let me pressure the nerve that sort of blocks the bad thoughts."

"This nerve-is it in the shoulder?"

"On some people."

"What kind?"

"Ones without a working brain." Hardy Bricker blinked his watery eyes rapidly, and Remo could tell by his expression that last part hadn't quite sunk in.

"If this is true, why are you telling me?" Bricker wanted to know.

"Because I got to thinking if we make every President we work for forget that there is a secret government agency that really runs America, even though we know they'll keep their mouths shut, we really shouldn't leave a blabbermouth like you out."

"Out of what?" said Hardy Bricker as the hand he couldn't see move came back to his shoulder and squeezed so hard he thought he heard his rotator cup pop.

The pop seemed to pop his eardrums too. And out went his brain.

Hardy Bricker lost consciousness so he didn't feel himself being thrown over a lean shoulder that was as hard as petrified bone or feel the coolness of the evening as he was carried out into Harvard Yard and across Massachusetts Avenue to a park where he was set down with his back to a bus port.

Remo scrounged up a discarded paper coffee cup, splashed out the last congealing brown liquid, and placed it in Hardy Bricker's limp fist. Digging some loose change out of his pocket, he shook it in his palm until a thick subway token showed its brassy face. He picked it out along with a shiny quarter and poured the rest into the flimsy cup.

Then he touched the exact center of the man's forehead, right where the caste mark would be if Hardy Bricker were a Hindu untouchable and not an American unmentionable.

Hardy Bricker's eyes flew upon. He looked around. He did not see Remo, because Remo had slipped behind him and was doubling around so that he could casually pass Hardy Bricker.

Hardy Bricker was still seated on the sidewalk when Remo pretended to come up to him. Remo stopped, dug into his pocket for his last quarter and dropped it into the paper cup, where it rattled the rest of Remo's change.

It rattled Hardy Bricker too. He peered into the cup, and then looked up at Remo's face with big uncomprehending eyes.

"I-I don't understand . . . ."

"Understand what?"

Bricker looked around. He seemed in a daze. "Understand anything. What am I doing here?"

"Well, that depends on who you are."

"Who I am?"

"Yeah, who you are. You know, what your name is, where you live, where you work."

"I-I don't think I know."

"I guess that makes you one of the growing legion of homeless, jobless, penniless unfortunates who fill our streets, public parks, and subways, the cruel victims of a heartless military-industrial conspiracy," Remo said. "Any of it coming back now?"

"Yes, I think I've heard those words before."

"Well, there you go," said Remo happily.

Hardy Bricker looked behind him. There was a park, sure enough. "I don't see any others like me."

"Then you're in luck. First one in has squatter's rights."

Hardy Bricker looked down. He was squatting, sure enough. It was beginning to make sense to his dull, foggy brain.

"What do I do?" he asked, watching the cars and buses zip by.

"You could say thank you."

"For what?"

"For the quarter I dropped into your cup. It was my last quarter too."

"Oh. Thank you." Confusion crept back into his face. "What do I do now?"

"It helps if you shake the cup every little while," Remo suggested.

Hardy Bricker gave it a shot. The cup shook, the change jingled and instantly a woman stepped up and dropped a Susan B. Anthony dollar into the cup. She walked on.

Hardy Bricker looked up. A slow smile crept over his puffy features.

"Thank you," he told Remo gratefully.

"Glad to help the dispossessed of the earth."

And Remo walked off, whistling. He did not walk far-only to the closest subway stop, where he took the Red Line through Boston to the city of Quincy, where he now lived.

He wasn't a big fan of the subway. But he had driven in Boston traffic enough by now to understand he had a better chance of survival if he went over Niagara Falls in a Dixie cup.

Chapter 3

From the North Quincy stop, it was a short walk to the place Remo Williams called home.

The sight of it made Remo long for the days when he lived out of a suitcase. Remo had always envisioned that one day he would live in a nice house with a white picket fence-not in a baroque monstrosity of sandstone and cement.

It had once been a church. It still looked like a church. Or more like a church than anything else. Depending on which compass direction you were approaching it from, it resembled, variously, a Swiss chalet, a Tudor castle, or the condominium from hell.

Right now, it looked like a Gothic warehouse because of all the delivery trucks parked around it. There was a UPS truck, a Federal Express van, another from Purolator Courier, and numerous other package delivery service vehicles.

"What's Chiun up to now?" Remo muttered, quickening his pace.

He caught up with the UPS driver as he was dropping off a plain cardboard box.

"This for a Chiun?"

The man looked at his clip. "The invoice says M.O.S. Chiun."

"I'll take it."

"If you sign for it, it's yours. My responsibility stops at the front steps."

Remo signed "Remo Freud" and took the box. He had to put it down in order to climb the steps. The steps were piled with boxes of all types. He was clearing a path as the other drivers came out of their trucks, their arms laden with boxes of all shapes.

"What is all this stuff?" Remo demanded after he had finished signing for six more packages.

No one knew. Or cared. So Remo reluctantly accepted the boxes and added them to the pile.

He carried what he could inside and set them down at the mailbox buzzers. In the days when Remo was a Newark cop and he had to get into an apartment building, he had used a little trick. Press all the buzzers at once. Usually, somebody would ring him in.

In this case, there were only two inhabitants distributed among the sixteen units that made up the church-turned-condo-himself and Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, the ancient house of assassins which had operated at the edges of history for thousands of years, and to which Remo now belonged.

A squeaky voice called down from above, "Remo, is that you?"

"No," Remo called up, "it's me and the entire Sears gift department."

"My packages have come?"

"They're piled to the freaking ceiling."

The Master of Sinanju floated down the steps. He was a frail wisp of a little Korean with a face that was like a wrinkled-up papyrus mask. The top of his head shone under the lights, bald but for the patches over his ears, where cloudy white tufts of hair clung stubbornly. He wore a chrysanthemum pink kimono bordered in white silk that made him look like a thousand-year-old Easter egg.

His wizened face puckered up in pleasure, bringing a twinkle to his clear hazel eyes.

He fell upon the box with long fingernails that were like X-acto knives. They sliced plastic packing tape cleanly and flaps popped upward like ugly cardboard-colored flowers.

"Where did you get this stuff?" Remo asked, curious.

"From the television."

"Say again."

"It is a new custom. One watches television and one merely calls certain individuals and reads to them certain useless pieces of information and in return they send interesting presents."

"What useless pieces of information?"

"Oh, mere numbers."

"Charge card numbers!"

Chiun made a small mouth. "Possibly."

"Little Father," Remo said patiently, "you know Smith's been on our case about spending. The new President's been after Smith to cut his budget and help reduce the deficit and-" Remo stopped. The Master of Sinanju was holding up a silver utensil like a spatula.

"What's that?" Remo demanded.

"It is a cheese fletcher."

"Cheese! We don't eat cheese. We can't eat cheese."

"We might one day have company who does and they will be insulted if we do not fletch their cheese properly. "

Chiun continued picking over his booty. One box he regarded disdainfully and passed to Remo saying, "This is for you."

"It is?" said Remo, his face momentarily softening. "You bought me a present?"

"No. It is from Smith."

"Why would Smith send me a present?"

Chiun shrugged. "He said something about it the other day. I believe it is a pox."

Remo's face went blank. "Pox? Isn't that a disease?"

"I do not know, for I do not get diseases."

Remo knelt down and ripped open the box. Inside a roll of bubblewrap was the largest, ugliest telephone Remo had ever seen.

"This is a fax machine!" Remo blurted. "Why would Smith send us a fax machine?"

"Possibly because he could not obtain a proper pox."

Remo carried the fax upstairs to the main room of the building, a huge four-windowed crenellated turret that corresponded to the steeple of the former house of worship. It was crammed to the high rafters with all manner of knickknacks and electronic equipment, ranging from microwave ovens to blenders.

In one corner was a stack of televisions. All were turned to the Home Shopping Network. The sound was off.

"When did you get started on this kick?" Remo asked when Chiun came in, bearing boxes balanced in both uplifted hands and atop his shiny amber skull. The combined weight should have slammed him to the pine floor, but Chiun bore them as if the boxes were filled with daydreams.

"I must have some solace in my bitterness and deprivation," Chiun said. "Now that all the light has departed my life and it is barren of love and hope."

"Oh," said Remo. And suddenly he remembered. For years, the Master of Sinanju had been infatuated with Cheeta Ching, the Korean network anchorwoman who had just had a baby. She was no longer on the air. Normally, that would have been enough to plunge Chiun into a killing rage, dismembering network presidents until the flat face of Cheeta Ching was restored to the TV screen.

But after nearly a decade of distant infatuation, the Master of Sinanju had finally gotten to meet the object of his affection, had in fact rescued her from kidnappers, with the end result that he had been horrified by the real Cheeta Ching, an ambitious unfeminine harridan with eyes only for Remo. Chiun's crush had been crushed.

It had been a relief to Remo, who had suffered through Chiun's earlier infatuation with Barbra Streisand. He had been wondering who was next. And now this. Maybe, he thought, looking around at the piles of unboxed electronic equipment and appliances, this was preferable to Chiun falling in love with Dame Edna Everage.

Remo decided not to press his luck. He hoped the subject of Cheeta Ching was closed forever.

"Need any help with that stuff?" Remo asked.

"I am the Master of Sinanju, sun source of the martial arts."

"That's what it says on your credit card-M.O.S. Chiun-but maybe I can take a few of those for you."

Chiun abruptly dipped and stepped back. The three vertical stacks of boxes, like silverware on a tablecloth that had been whisked away by a parlor magician, suddenly stood on the floor, perfectly balanced. It had seemed like magic. It was not. It was Sinanju-the complete control of mind and body and physical surroundings that had inspired the original karate fighters, Ninja warriors, and Zen masters to their achievements-impressive only to those who had never experienced the real thing.

Remo set the fax machine on a taboret and dug out the instruction book.

Chiun was slicing open boxes. "You have not told me how your meeting with the famous Bardy Hicker went," he said.

"It's Hardy Bricker-or at least it was."

Chiun looked up from examining a juice machine. "He refused your entreaties to make a film of my glorious life?"

"Chiun, I told you when I went out the door that making a movie of your life was the furthest thing from Hardy Bricker's agenda," Remo said wearily.

"And so you dispatched him for his gross insensitivity. Good."

"No, I did not dispatch him. I got him a new career."

"He no longer makes movies?"

"You got it."

"Then who will commit my glorious tale to the silvery screen?"

"Nobody," said Remo. "It's not filmable."

"If they waste millions of dollars telling about some scarlet woman in the south whose plantation burns down and other unimportant matters," Chiun retorted bitterly, "why will they not make a film about the most kind, gentle, and gracious assassin who ever lived?"

Remo shrugged. " 'Bricker Balks at Boffo Biopic Bucks.' "

Chiun narrowed his hazel eyes. "What language is this you speak?"

"Variety talk."

"You are just jealous. You do not wish me to become famous."

"You got that right."

"You admit it?"

"Look, we're supposed to be a secret operation. If the whole story's playing in every movie house from here to Guam, everyone will know."

"Everyone now knows who murdered your most famous politician, thanks to Bardy Hicker," Chiun retorted.

"Bricker was full of manure. He wasted one hundred-eighty minutes of perfectly good film accomplishing what most people do every day sitting on the john in twenty."

Chiun sighed. "It is probably just as well."

"Good. I'm glad you agree."

"They probably would not have cast me in the role," Chiun said resignedly.

"Count on that."

"Or gotten Robin Williams to play me," Chiun added.

Remo raised an eyebrow.

"They probably would have gotten someone terrible," Chiun added.

Remo blinked. "Who did you have in mind to play me?"

The Master of Sinanju shrugged unconcernedly. "I do not concern myself with the casting of bit parts."

"Come on, you obviously had this all figured out."

"Perhaps Andy Devine."

"Andy Devine!"

"Or possibly Sydney Greenstreet."

"Sydney-!"

"All those fat white people look alike anyway," Chiun said dismissively. And Remo thought he detected a rare twinkle in the Master of Sinanju's eyes.

Frowning, Remo turned his attention back to the instruction manual. It was eighty pages long and divided into chapters. He read along, one hand resting on the wall, and after twenty minutes the only thing he understood was the part that said, "When the phone rings, lift the handset to answer call."

Remo threw away the book, saying, "What the hell. It's a telephone. How hard can it be to install?"

He pulled out the modular plug of his old phone.

"So far, so good," he said happily, inserting the modular plug of the new phone. There was another plug, like that on the TV. This, he reasoned, obviously went into a wall outlet.

He plugged this in. Nothing happened.

Then he discovered that there was an On switch. He turned the fax phone on and a green power light went on. Unfortunately, so did a red paper light. He wondered what that meant.

He started to hunt up the instruction book, then realized it would probably be easier to ask Harold Smith, who after all had sent the thing to him in the first place.

He picked up the handset and prepared to dial. Instead, he got a loud conversation.

"What is this-a party line fax?"

He listened a moment and on came, of all things, a commercial.

"I think this overfed phone is picking up the TV signal," Remo muttered.

"What good is picking up a TV voice when there is no picture?" Chiun wondered. "You must have gotten a defective pox."

Receiver in hand, Remo grabbed the remote and ran up and down the channels of the nearest TV. None of the voices matched.

"Maybe it's a radio station," he muttered. "You by chance order a radio?"

Chiun was slicing open another box and excavating a Veg-O-Matic. "Yes," he said absently, "I ordered one of everything."

"It looks it."

"I deserve it."

"Tell it to Smith," said Remo.

"You are just jealous because all you have is a pox," said Chiun. "A defective pox at that."

Remo hung up and went looking for a radio. Fortunately most of the boxes were marked. He carried the box, still sealed, back upstairs because he knew that Chiun would insist on opening it himself.

The Master of Sinanju accomplished this with a swift slicing motion of one elongated fingernail.

Remo went to plug in the radio, but all the outlets were full.

"You order an extension cord?" he asked Chiun.

"I do not know what an extension cord is," Chiun replied.

"If I find one, can I use it?"

"What makes you think I ordered one?"

Remo looked around and made a wry mouth. "Mathematical odds are heavily in my favor."

"You may do what you wish," said Chiun, removing from a box a complete set of Ginzu knives.

Remo found, not an extension cord, but a surge protector. It looked like it would do the job, and it did. Remo turned on the radio and roved the dial.

The station was a religious talk station. The broadcast signal was coming through the telephone with greater clarity than the radio.

"You got a cheap radio," Remo grunted.

"It was free."

"Tell that to the American taxpayer," Remo retorted.

Just then the fax phone rang.

"That must be Smitty calling to check the fax," said Remo, picking up the receiver. It beeped in his ear, then tweedled loudly.

"Hello? Hello?" he said.

"Incoming fax," a voice said. Remo didn't recognize the voice, but it was hard to hear over the radio voices assaulting his ear.

"The paper light is on," Remo said.

"Well, put in the paper and I'll call right back."

Remo hung up and searched out a roll of paper. It was surprisingly simple to insert. He felt proud of himself when he got it in place. The phone rang again and the beeping and tweedling started anew.

The paper began spitting out. And spitting out. It was a long continuous sheet and Remo realized it was going to make a mess if he didn't get hold of it.

He picked up the loose end and started reading.

"This looks like the financial report of some big company," he muttered.

He read some more.

"This is the financial report of International Data Corporation," Remo said in a puzzled voice. "Why would Smith send this to us?"

"No doubt Emperor Smith has his reasons," said the Master of Sinanju, whose Sinanju ancestors had worked for the great emperors of history and assumed that Harold Smith, whose title was director, must be some modern word for emperor.

"I guess so," said Remo. He kept rolling up the greasy fax paper as fast as it was spit out. The paper exhausted itself before the report ended. When it was over, the paper light came back on, along with one saying "Error."

"Error? I didn't do anything wrong."

"You do nothing right," said Chiun thinly.

He grabbed up the receiver and hit the 1 button-the simplified code that enabled him to dial directly his superior without having to remember complicated codes like ten-digit telephone numbers.

"Smitty?" said Remo. "What's with this fax?"

Through the background voices, the lemon-bitter voice of Harold W. Smith was saying, "Fax? I did not send you a fax."

"Well, I just got a fax as long as Roseanne's enemies list."

"You must have gotten a wrong fax."

"You can get those?"

"Remo, I can barely hear you. Who is that speaking in the background?"

"I think it's the Jehovah's Witnesses."

"What?"

"It's a long story. Why did you send me a fax?"

"I just told you I did not," Smith said testily.

"I mean a fax machine, not a fax fax."

"Oh, yes." Smith cleared his voice. "Security reasons. It is best if we communicate by fax from now on. This way I can transmit data with greater efficiency."

"If this is efficient," Remo said sourly, "I say we tie a string to two tin soup cans and try that."

Smith's tone sharpened. "Remo, you are breaking up."

"No," said Remo. "I am hanging up." And he did. Remo dug up the endless fax and located a phone number at the top of the roll. He called it, got a switchboard girl, and said, "I just got your fax."

"Whom shall I inform?"

"The idiot who dialed my number by accident and used up all my freaking paper," Remo told her.

"Sir, the International Data Corporation does not misdial. All our phone calls are made via computer and verified by the central processor."

"Well, your central processor just stroked out. What I want to know is who is going to reimburse me for a new roll of fax paper?"

The switchboard girl's voice became chilly. "Sir, I assure you if you received an IDC fax, it was intended for you."

"Like hell it was."

The switchboard girl's voice cooled dramatically. "Then I must conclude that you are not authorized to use the fax you are using."

"I'm calling from my own freaking castle!" Remo shouted.

"Here, here," said Chiun, opening a plastic egg and sniffing at its inexplicably flesh-colored contents.

"Now you are becoming abusive and I am allowed to hang up without prejudice," the girl retorted.

"Listen, kid," Remo said quickly. "I just read this thing through. It's a financial report. According to this, your bottom line is a circle."

"Circle?"

"Yeah. Circle. Zero. Goose egg. You know what that means?"

The girl's voice trembled. "Bankruptcy?"

" 'Fraid so."

"Um-how bad is it?"

"I'd update your resume before the rush starts," Remo said in his best sincere voice.

"Is it okay if I tell some of the others?"

"Fine with me," Remo said cheerfully. "Good luck job hunting." And Remo hung up. "She fell for it. I'll bet IDC stock drops five points before that little rumor is squelched."

"I see you are enjoying your pox," commented Chiun, donning a pair of headphones that made him look like a superannuated test pilot.

"I am not enjoying my fax. I want to break it into a million pieces."

Chiun's eyebrows quirked upward. "Would it not be better to unplug it?"

Remo did. He plugged his old phone back in and stabbed the 1 button. He got Harold W. Smith again. This time without the Greek Chorus of Jehovah's Witnesses.

"Smitty?"

"Remo, are you ready to receive?" Smith asked.

"Not since my first Communion."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Forget it. And forget the dippy fax. It's in a million pieces. "

"But I was about to fax you your next assignment."

"What's wrong with what we're doing now?" Remo wanted to know. "Just talking?"

"There have been some recent technological breakthroughs in telephone eavesdropping," Smith said in a suddenly soft voice, "specifically by the National Security Agency. They now have the capability to overhear anything we say."

"Smitty, there are probably fifty million telephones in this country and if the National Security Agency has even fifty clerks whose only job it is to listen in to private telephone conversations, I'll eat any fax you care to send me. If you can get it through."

Smith cleared his throat. In the twenty-odd years Remo had worked for him, Smith never managed a decent comeback.

"Listen carefully, Remo," said Harold Smith. "You are familiar with HELP?"

"Sure. It's been at the top of the news every night for the last month. You'd think the bubonic plague was back the way the media is trying to stampede people."

"The death toll has just reached thirteen people," said Smith, ignoring Remo's outburst.

"What's the big deal? If environmentalist dips are getting sick from eating bugs, then all they gotta do is stop eating the stupid bugs, and presto! No more problem. What's the big deal?"

"The big deal," said Harold W. Smith, "is that the members of People Against Protein Assassins, as they call themselves, are now claiming that according to every test known to man, the thunderbugs simply cannot be transmitting the HELP virus."

"Thunderbug?"

"It's the Indian name. I believe it is Pawnee."

"It's pap. The whole thing is pap. Pap and crap."

"The PAPA leader, Theodore Soars-With-Eagles, is claiming that the HELP virus is not a virus at all, but a result of the depletion of the ozone layer."

Chiun's voice lifted. "There is no ozone hole. The illustrious Thrush Limburger has told America this."

"What did he say?" asked Smith.

"Chiun's latest kick-or it was before he discovered the Home Shopping Network."

"He what?"

"Look, let's stay on the subject. You can have your heart attack when the charge card bills come in."

Smith sighed, sounding like a leaky steam valve. "Theodore Soars-With-Eagles has called upon the federal government to help head off the coming HELP epidemic."

"Why doesn't that surprise me?"

"The new Vice President has heard his appeals and made a plea to the new President. He has asked us to look into it."

"Isn't this kinda flaky? Don't we have better things to do like-and here is major hint number 334-taking care of the quack who likes to help sick old ladies commit suicide?"

"The Dr. Mordaunt Gregorian matter is still under review."

"Call him Dr. Doom like everybody else. And I want a crack at him."

"Later."

"Don't we have the right to refuse dippy missions from the President?"

"We do," admitted Smith. "But the President has had a good look at our operating budget, and he is eyeing us for cutbacks."

"Wait'll he finds out Chiun just doubled the budget in one shopping day," Remo said.

Smith groaned. Then he said, "I have decided it would be politic to look into this."

"Chiun isn't going to like this," Remo warned.

Chiun, in the middle of unpacking a juice machine, straightened to demand, "What am I not going to like?"

Remo grinned and saw his chance. "Smitty wants us to look into the bug-eaters who are dying out in California," he said and waited for the wail of outraged complaint.

Instead, the Master of Sinanju said amiably, "Inform Emperor Smith that we will be happy to meet with the unfortunates who are reduced to eating bugs."

"We will?"

Chiun nodded. "Happily."

Remo glowered and said into the phone, "Just tell me what I absolutely have to know, Smitty."

"Their headquarters is called Nirvana West, which is a commune of sorts near the town of Ukiah, north of San Francisco. It was jointly founded by Brother Karl Sagacious and Theodore Soars-With-Eagles."

"Soars-With-Eagles?"

"He claims to be a Chinchilla Indian."

"Chinchilla?"

"According to the newspapers, that is his tribe's name. Although I must admit, his features do not appear very Indian."

"Wait a minute. Are we talking American Indian or East Indian?"

"American. "

"I played cowboys and Indians all over Newark as a kid, Smitty, and I never heard of any Chinchilla tribe. And whoever heard of an Indian brave named Theodore?"

"It's possible Theodore Soars-With-Eagles is a white man with some Chinchilla blood in him," said Smith.

"It's possible he's full of wampum too."

"There has been bad blood between the Sagacious faction and the Eagles faction of PAPA," Smith went on. "Eagles has ample motivation to have done away with Sagacious. Look into that angle, Remo. It may all be a tawdry power struggle in a fringe group. You will go in as investigators from the Food and Drug Administration, and mingle with the federal scientists who are already on site."

"Anything else?"

"Yes. Keep your expenditures to a minimum." And Harold Smith hung up.

Remo hung up too and turned in time to see the Master of Sinanju running a blob of Silly Putty through his juice machine.

"Since when are you all hot to watch a bunch of lunatics in their natural element?" he asked Chiun.

"Since I have gotten tired of watching the old lunatics," replied the Master of Sinanju, lifting the lid and looking in to see the interesting concoction he had just created.

Chapter 4

It had all started on the opening day of school.

Five-year-old Kevin O'Rourke had been looking forward to school for a long time-almost three weeks, since his mother had first sat him down to explain kindergarten to him.

Kevin O'Rourke was an exceptional child. All mothers think their offspring are exceptional. Mrs. Bernadette O'Rourke was no different. She thought young Kevin quite a lad. And he was the spitting image of his dear father, like herself a native-born Irishman, but who fought for his adopted country, the U.S.A., in the Gulf War and died in a Scud missile attack, God rest his soul.

Young Kevin looked exactly like Patrick-the young Patrick whom Bernadette could still conjure up in her mind's eye whenever she thought back to the tiny Irish village of Dingle where they had grown up together. Kevin had the same open face; what one day would be the same fierce Catholic faith, the same stubbornness, but also the same willingness to trust others.

He made her feel proud even through her sharp loss.

And so on the day she drove him to the Walter F. Mondale Grammar School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Mrs. Bernadette O'Rourke rode on a cushion of air. Oh, she was not without motherly pangs. For one thing, there had been no one with whom to talk over her decision to send Kevin to a public school instead of Catholic school. It had been an economic decision, really. The truth was she was already working two jobs and didn't have even the modest tuition the parochial schools charged. There were scholarships, certainly. Unfortunately, they didn't have any for Americans like Kevin O'Rourke. He was the wrong color for scholarships.

But this was Minneapolis, after all, where the public schools were supposed to be very good. Not like New York, where they had to have metal detectors in the school doorways to weed out the hooligans with their guns and their knives.

Mrs. Bernadette O'Rourke shivered at the very thought. Even in the north of Ireland-she was from the south-they didn't have it so terrible.

There was a crowd in front of the school when she pulled up.

"Who are all those people, Mommy?" asked Kevin with those innocent blue eyes.

"Other mommies bringing their wee children," said Mrs. O'Rourke, but when she got Kevin out of the car she noticed an unusual number of very old ladies present. They were well past childbearing age. They looked too old to be teachers, to be sure. Perhaps they were grandmothers, she thought. The Lord alone knew how many mothers had to work these days.

Mrs. O'Rourke took little Kevin by his moist hand and led him up the walk to the school door entrance where the old ladies seemed to be concentrated. They carried old cigar boxes hung with what looked like colored balloons without air in them.

Little Kevin thought so too.

"Bawoons," he cried, pointing.

An old woman in a purple hat stepped up and smiled with teeth yellowed from too much tea and not enough brushing and asked, "Would you like one, sonny?"

"Yes!"

And the woman handed little Kevin O'Rourke a blue foil packet that said "genuine latex" on it.

Only then did Mrs. O'Rourke recognize the limp multicolored things hanging off the old lady's cigar box for what they were.

"Good God, madam! Are ye daft? Do ye not realize what it is ye be handing out to the boy?"

"It's for his own good," replied the woman in a snippy voice. "Here, peewee, let me help you with that," she told the boy.

And before Mrs. O'Rourke's horrified eyes, the old woman dug apart the foil packet and unrolled a lubricated latex condom that was a watermelon red.

"Madam!" Mrs. O'Rourke said huffily, snatching the thing before Kevin could touch it. "What is the matter with ye now?"

"I want my bawoon," said little Kevin, the tears already starting in his young eyes.

"It's not a balloon," his mother and the old woman said in the same breath. Only Mrs. O'Rourke's tone was angry. The old woman's was exasperated.

The old woman fingered one of the garish things as if it were rosary beads. "It's a condom, young man. Can you say con-dom?"

"Madam!"

"It's not to play with," the old woman went on primly. "It's for little boys to know about so when they become naughty men they don't cause diseases in nice young ladies."

"I won't be naughty," Kevin promised. "Can I have my bawoon now?"

"Madam, will you stop?" said Mrs. O'Rourke, clapping her hands over Kevin's ears. "The boy is too young to be knowin' of such things. Let him be, would you please?"

The old woman practically spat her vehemence into Mrs. O'Rourke's reddening face. "He is not too young! If we get them before they know anything, when they grow up they'll only know what we want them to know."

"What nonsense are ye talking now?" Mrs. O'Rourke's Irish temper was rising now.

"It is education. The board of education approved it four to three, and the three slackers were later reprimanded by the superintendent."

"Come on, Kevin," said Mrs. O'Rourke, not believing her ears. She pulled the boy along, trying to stifle her anger.

But another old woman blocked the door and said, "He doesn't have his little rubber safety cap. The young boys are not allowed in until they learn how to unroll their little caps and put them on."

"Put them on what?" Kevin asked, not understanding.

At that point the first old woman bustled up, and before Mrs. O'Rourke could block her son's innocent ears with her strong, protective hands, the old woman told little Kevin O'Rourke exactly where he should put his watermelon red condom.

Mrs. O'Rourke decked her with a roundhouse right that started at her right hip and didn't stop until the old woman was an awkward pile of bones on the school walk, her uppers and lowers bouncing in the grass.

The police were called. Mrs. O'Rourke tried to explain how the old women had provoked her with their foul terrible language-and in front of a mere boy at that-and the next thing she knew they were binding her trembling-with-rage hands behind her back with flexicuffs and she was in the back of what used to be called a paddy wagon in the days the Irish were treated like common dirt in the streets of America, and a matron was explaining to her that her little Kevin, the only good and fine thing that had come out of her brief marriage to darlin' Patrick, would be going to a foster home and the chances of getting him back were not very good at all.

Up until that day, Race Branchwood was just another unhappy three-hundred-thirty-pound disk jockey playing middle of the road music and reading the news-ninety uninterrupted seconds of news as the station's promos boasted-every half hour.

It was no glamour job. Oh, some thought differently. But not Race Branchwood. He had gotten his communications degree from Emerson College and thought he was destined for greater heights than playing mush for mushheads.

As it would turn out, Race Branchwood was absolutely right.

But on this early September day in the year 1991, Race Branchwood was Thrush Limburger, a name which he hated but which was a condition of employment at Radio Station WAKO in the Twin Cities, when he chanted into the microphone for the one-thousand-five-hundred-and-seventy-seventh time, "And now, ten uninterrupted minutes of seventies music, count them, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one uninterrupted minutes from the station that still plays with your bippy. This is Thrush Limburger, and I'll be right back."

He switched off the mike and left the sound booth, muttering under his breath as he hurried to the hall coffee machine.

"Thrush Limburger, my left testicle."

"What was that, Branchwood?" came the surly voice of the station manager.

"I said I got heartburn in my left ventricle."

"Burp. And while you're at it, try to lose a few hundred pounds. The next Arbitron book is only two months away and we're trying to project a lean-and-mean image. How can you show your face at public appearances looking like the the Pillsbury Doughboy?"

"What do you think people expect from a guy named Limburger?" Race Branchwood snapped back.

"The Limburger was to cover our bets. I want you looking like a Thrush, not just sounding like one."

"I could do better work under my own name. Race."

"Everybody knows that Race is short for Horace. You look like a Horace too."

"I am a Horace, you dink. It's my name, for crying out loud."

"We've had this idiot conversation before. I'm going to be next door having my hair done."

"Must be louse season again," muttered Race Branchwood, continuing on to the coffee machine, walking on tippy toes like so many three-hundred-pounders do. He coaxed the machine to fill the cup all the way this time just by punching the C in Coffee and added two sugars-real and not that pink stuff he hated-and a dollop of real cream and was back in time to pick off the latest news script that the WAKO news writer had laid beside his mike.

Race Branchwood took a quick sip of the coffee before picking up the script and switched on his mike.

He didn't know it, but the switching on of the microphone marked the end of his disk jockey career. It was also the end of Race Branchwood. He would never be Race Branchwood again. That was the only downside, the only regret he was to feel for the rest of his natural life.

"And now," he said in a booming baritone that was redolent of the cream in his coffee, "here is the WAKO Ninety-Second News."

Race Branchwood cast his professional eye over the first item and did something he had never done in his radio career. He froze at the mike. But only for six seconds. He took a second hit of the coffee he was destined never to finish.

Clearing his throat, he tried again. "A Mrs. Bernadette O'Rourke was arrested today for-" Race stopped. "This is unbelievable," he said in a stunned whisper. "I mean, ladies and gentlemen, this is an unreal item I have just been handed. Let me-give me a moment here, please."

He tried again. "A Mrs. Bernadette O'Rourke was arrested today for assault and battery of a seventy-eight-year-old woman named Agnes Frug-that's F-R-U-G, like the dance. Now the reason Mrs. O'Rourke was compelled to coldcock the other woman is very simple. It seems that Ms. Frug-the script says Ms. attempted to force Mrs. O'Rourke's five-year-old son Kevin to put on a condom before he could enter the Walter F. Mondale Grammar School. It was Kevin's first day of school. He never got in the door. As a matter of fact, he's now in a foster home. Mrs. O'Rourke is in the county lockup. No, I am not making this up. This is an actual news item and it took place in our fair city."

Race Branchwood took a deep breath. He looked at the wall clock and saw that he was already sixty seconds into the Ninety-Second News spot and he had only read the first squib.

Then he said, "Ah, the hell with it." And with that he became Thrush Limburger forevermore.

"You know what really gets under my skin, ladies and gentlemen? It's the whackjobs. The whackjobs who think five-year-olds have to be indoctrinated in the scare of the month. And the feminasties who put them up to it. And the old toot grannies who get their jollies playing with condoms in public. My friends, if you were to take those old toot grannies and turn their biological clocks back fifty years to when they were twenty, and hand them a rubber, they would have A) slapped you right in the face and B) whistled up the cops. And you, my friend, would be doing hard time on a morals charge.

"So how is it fifty years later those same old ladies are spending their waking hours packaging prophylactics and passing them out to kids too young to even begin to understand what the hell these things are. I'll tell you why. Because before menopause hit them like a ton of bricks and took away the last shred of common sense they may or may not have had, they were terrified at the very thought of a condom. Now they can't get enough of them. And why not? They're out of the game. They can't play anymore. And these dried-up old biddies can't wait to throw these things around like bingo chips."

In the control room, the program director was turning purple. Thrush Limburger-he was Thrush Limburger now even if he didn't know it-never particularly liked the program director, so he ploughed on, hoping to get the man's face to match the particular shade of lavender Thrush happened to be wearing around his own neck that day.

The program director pointed at his watch, at the wall clock, and then at his forehead and pretended to pull the trigger of an imaginary gun, until he realized there was no stopping Thrush Limburger. He buried his head in his arms and Thrush continued on, an unstoppable juggernaut of opinion given voice.

"When are you people going to wake up out there? How many Bernadette O'Rourkes have to be hauled off and stripsearched? And how many Kevin O'Rourkes have to end up wherever some bureaucrat with the child protective services division happens to drop him before people take a stand against these idiots who think they know what's better for our kids than we do? Is everybody asleep, or am I the only one with a functioning brain? Does anyone share my moral outrage at this lunacy?"

"If this goes on, they'll be having these poor little kids simulating safe sex with one another just to satisfy these nutso do-gooders. "

The WAKO station manager thought he heard the booming voice of his most problematic DJ coming through the chrome hairdrier capping his head and snapped his fingers. The hairdresser turned and looked blank.

"Is that Thrush?" he asked.

"Yeah, and he's sure telling it like it is."

"What?" The station manager flung up the hairdrier. He always got his hair done at the ladies salon because they knew how to treat the subtle wave in his hair. He also had a crush on a manicurist named Bruce. He listened with growing horror.

"What gets me, my friends, is that our taxes go to keeping these rainbow-chasers in gear. You know, those so-called free condoms aren't free. Uh-uh. You paid for them. And if you keep turning the other cheek, next year they'll have you paying for people's sex change operations, and then when they find out they're still not happy, you'll be paying for them to change back. And after that, you'll be paying again when they sue the state or the city government for malpractice and loss of quality of life because after they get their dicks sewn back on, they still won't function properly. "

"Oh, my God. The sponsors will kill us," moaned the WAKO station manager, rushing from the salon in curlers.

Thrush Limburger was deep into his second quarter hour of commentary when the plug was pulled on him. The ON AIR sign went out and although he was dimly aware of it, Thrush didn't care. He kept going, a human icebreaker of public opinion.

In the control booth, the station manager and the program director were going nuts. Thrush had locked himself in the sound booth, so they could go as nuts as they cared to. He was going to speak his piece. If they wanted WAKO to be heard, they'd have to put him back on the air. After that, they could fire him all they wanted. Just so long as Thrush Limburger had an opportunity to sit on that idiot station manager during the firing.

Thrush Limburger was off the air all of seven minutes. The switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree. Thrush could tell because they were answering the incoming calls frantically. After three minutes of that, the station manager began pulling out his hair, steel curlers and all.

With a resigned gesture, he flipped the ON AIR switch.

And Thrush Limburger was back on the airwaves.

"For those of you just tuning in," he said without skipping a beat, "we're talking about Mrs. Bernadette O'Rourke, who is now languishing in jail because she thought her five-year-old son deserved to be shielded from some of life's more adult topics. Those of you who want to hear the Cowsills or Abba, or any of that tripe, we don't want you. Go find a station that does."

A groan came through the supposedly soundproof glass.

When he came off his shift, the station manager said, "Limburger, your fat ass is fired!"

"It's Branchwood, you pillow-biter."

As it turned out, they were both wrong.

Thrush Limburger became the hottest on-air radio personality in the Twin Cities. WAKO went all-talk with the next Arbitron book. And the station manager ultimately got a job next door in the hair salon, where his heart lay, anyway.

No one ever heard the name Race Branchwood again. Not even Thrush Limburger, who knew a good thing when he saw it and had his name legally changed to Thrush Limburger.

Within a year, he was all over Minnesota. From there, he self syndicated The Thrush Limburger Show, over his own network, the TTT Network. It stood for Tell the Truth. And he did. About everything.

By the time he had landed on TV, he was a genuine phenomenon, with a best-selling book, The Way the World Is, to his credit and rumors of a bright future in national politics swirling about his close-cropped head.

On the second anniversary of the day he had irrevocably become Thrush Limburger, the former Horace Branchwood was doing a restrospective.

"On the phone with me now is a very special person," he was telling his nationwide audience. "Now a lot of you may not know the name Bernadette O'Rourke, but she is a very special lady. It was her story, ladies and gentlemen, that got me started on my meteoric rise to-shall we say-greatness? How are you, Mrs. O'Rourke?"

"Just grand, Thrush."

"And little Kevin. How old is he now?"

"Seven. And he's now in the second grade in St. Mary's Catholic School, thanks to you."

"Ahem. For those who don't know, it was yours truly who brought the sad plight of Mrs. O'Rourke to national attention, resulting in the dropping of all charges and incidentally through the kindness and generosity of my original listening audience, the tuition that enabled Kevin to be enrolled in St. Mary's to begin with. Now you didn't call just to traipse down memory lane with me, Mrs. O'Rourke. Pray tell, what's on your mind?"

"It's this HELP nonsense, Thrush. It's starting to sound like that AIDS hysteria all over again. And over what? Eating bugs? Who would want to do that, for God's sake?"

"Exactly right. Exactly right. And I've been meaning to address this matter myself. Now for those who don't read your newspapers-and even for those who do-HELP is another one of those viral plagues we hear so much about. You can't get it from breathing other people's air, touching their skin, and being bitten by a wild animal. In fact, if you want to get HELP, you have to do all the biting. Even then you probably won't get it. My friends, the only-and I mean only-way you can contract this dreaded fatal, incurable scourge is to consume in great quantities-eating just one won't do it-a lowly bug. Ingraticus Avalonicus is its scientific name. There are those who claim the Indians called it the thunderbug. It's a tiny thing like a dull brown ladybug and about as appetizing. Certain whackjob environmentalists are proclaiming it to be the solution to famine worldwide. All we gotta do is eat this little critter every day and figure out a way not to die."

"It's madness, Thrush," Mrs. O'Rourke said. "Sheer madness."

"And now they're claiming that the bug doesn't cause HELP. It's the thinning ozone layer. Well, if it's the thinning ozone layer, why is it only bug-eaters are coming down with Human Environmental Liability Paradox? That, my friends, is the true paradox. But it's simple. Just bear with me because here at the Triple-T Network, we always . . . tell the truth."

The retrospective show soon became the HELP show. Everyone called in. Microbiologists. Immunologists. Meteorologists. Epidemiologists. Entomologists. Everybody had a windy answer, but no one agreed with anyone else's answer.

At the end of it, Thrush Limburger had had enough.

"I have just now decided after listening to all sides of this growing noncontroversy, that only my on-site presence can possibly dispel the ridiculous myths that surround HELP, the greatest noncrisis since Swine Flu.

"Tomorrow-and you're hearing it here first-I am going to the Nirvana West headquarters of PAPA, where I will broadcast this show live and reveal . . . the startling truth about HELP."

And in a darkened office not far from the White House, a telephone rang. The handset lifted with a click. And a thin voice said, "Harpoon that whale."

Chapter 5

The in-flight movie was Dances With Wolves, possibly the only thing that could make a Boston to San Francisco airline flight even more interminable than it was necessary to be.

Remo told the stewardess clutching the plastic earphones, "Thanks, but these clouds look real interesting."

The stewardess leaned closer, showed perfect capped teeth, and asked Remo if he'd like a headset anyway because the airplane had a wide range of piped-in radio programs.

"Sure, why not?" said Remo.

"And you, sir," she asked Chiun, leaning over so Remo could fully inhale her perfume. Remo held his breath. Perfumes, even the subtle ones, tended to enter his sensitive nostrils like a fragrant Roto-Rooter reamer.

The Master of Sinanju said, "If you are going to expose your udders, madam, expose them to one who is not repelled by their grossness."

The stewardess straightened like a bent bamboo pole springing back.

"I beg your pardon," she said in a chilly tone.

Remo said, "Don't mind him. He gets crochety on long flights." But he was relieved when the stewardess went off in search of another aisle to fumigate. She had been nice to look at, but stewardesses, more so than other women, seemed to respond to Remo's Sinanju-enhanced pheromones. Usually they tried to sit in his lap. Often, they lost it completely and were reduced to tears by the simple and predictable event of Remo getting off at his assigned destination.

Remo plugged the stethoscopelike plastic plug of his earphone set into the seat jack and inserted the earpieces into his ears. He hit the On switch and began moving the numbered dial back and forth.

He got rap, rock, opera, bluegrass, country, heavy metal, acid rock, and gardening hints. The last channel bellowed out in the unctious but exuberant voice of Thrush Limburger.

"My friends," he was saying, "you are being yanked!"

Remo unplugged both ends of the earphones and handed them to the Master of Sinanju, saying, "It's for you."

Chiun's wizened features grew curious, and while he was putting the earpieces in, Remo plugged in the other end.

Surprise, joy, and interest overspread his features and the Master of Sinanju settled down to listen. From time to time, he cackled with undisguised pleasure.

Remo could live with the cackling. It beat Chiun carping about the fragile state of the aircraft wing, which he invariably pronounced at the point of falling off whenever they flew.

At San Francisco International Airport, Remo rented a car and they drove north on Highway 101 past parched orchards and vineyards and into a hilly area dominated by evergreens and towering redwood trees.

"Thrush Limburger have anything good to say?" asked Remo, who really didn't care, but thought Chiun deserved a little conversation after a relatively peaceful flight.

"You are being yanked," said Chiun, who wore a simple but garish vermilion kimono.

"I think I caught that much. About what?"

"About everything. Especially, you are being yanked about this HELP."

"There, I agree with the guy."

"Thrush the Vocal is a brilliant man."

"Says who?"

"No less an authority than Thrush Limburger himself."

"Because . . . ," Remo prompted.

"Because he says so in a loud voice and accepts telephone calls from common Americans who do nothing but agree with him. They are apparently a new emerging sect, called Rogers."

"Rogers?"

"When the great-voiced one pronounces a thing to be true, immediately, Americans in vast numbers call in and say 'Roger, Thrush.' It is apparently a secret code they have so that they recognize one another even over the telephone," Chiun added.

Remo rolled his dark eyes. "Yeah, it's pretty secret all right. Only you, me, and thirty million other radio listeners are in on it."

"He is also coming to this place."

"Oh, great," groaned Remo.

They had left the city behind and the landscape had turned piney and cool. Remo followed the signs to the town of Ukiah, where Nirvana West was located.

"This place is supposed to be only one step above a commune, so we may have a problem finding it," Remo said.

"Just listen for the whacking," said Chiun unconcernedly.

"Whacking?"

"It is their job, according to Thrush. Whacking. They are whackjobs."

"Little Father, a whackjob is a-"

Chiun's hazel eyes, younger by decades than the surrounding face, looked to Remo curiously. He stroked a tendril of beard that clung to his tiny chin.

Traffic started to get heavy.

"Never mind," said Remo. "You keep your ears peeled and I'll keep my eyes on the road."

"No whacking will escape my notice," Chiun promised.

Further along, the traffic thickened and slowed. Before they had traveled another mile, they were bumper-to-bumper with a line of cars wending their way through the parched hills.

"Damn," Remo said.

"Let us walk," said Chiun.

"Do you have any idea how far it is to Nirvana West?" said Remo.

"No," replied the Master of Sinanju, stepping from the car. "And neither do you. So we will walk because we cannot sit here and inhale the stink of others' vehicles until our lungs and brains die."

Remo pulled over, got out, and followed. He saw that the traffic jam of vehicles was far worse than he thought. He stopped and knocked on a car window. It rolled down. A woman with thin blond hair and translucent teeth poked her head out.

"Any idea how far Nirvana West is from here?" Remo asked.

"At the end of this jam," said the woman.

"What is this?"

"This is the media traffic jam."

"It's not moving. Is there another way to get there?"

"You could hook around to the other side. But I hear the federal jam is even worse."

"Damn."

"Or you can sit on my lap and play coochie-coo," the blonde added.

"Thanks, but no thanks," said Remo, going to catch up with the Master of Sinanju.

"If we follow this to the end we'll get there," he said.

"Of course," said Chiun, who walked with his hands serenely tucked into the wide joined sleeves of his kimono.

They walked until they had rounded a piney hill and the line of cars-they saw TV microwave vans idling in the line like dejected war elephants-turned off the highway, and onto a wooded path.

They cut through the woods and started up the hill. Halfway up, they had a good view.

There were three lines of cars, all converging on a woodsy vale that might have been any patch of Northern California land except for the tents that dotted the place. Most were tents. A few were tepees. Big army tents were being pitched at one end. At the other, there were the pup tents and tepees.

The pup tent and tepee end were obviously the PAPA camp.

Most of the PAPA adherents, however, were climbing a brushy hillock in a double line. They bore three shrouded figures in stately procession. At the head of the line was a man in buckskin whose trailing war bonnet even at this distance didn't quite conceal his bald spot from Remo's sharp eyes.

As Remo and Chiun watched, the procession came to a shallow ditch at the hillock's rounded top. They lined it and without preamble, the shrouds were unceremoniously unrolled like flags, and three slightly stiff corpses tumbled out to land in the ditch with a thump.

"We commend our brethren to the earth, where they will abide in ecological harmony, nourishing the roots of the weeds that feed the thunderbugs that feed us now and by the millennium will feed the whole world," chanted the man in the war bonnet.

"Savages," said Chiun. "These people are savages."

"Because they don't bother with caskets?" asked Remo.

"No," said the Master of Sinanju. "Because they are morons. I do not care if they bury their dead in expensive shoe boxes or not. But there," he said, pointing to the hole the mourners were filling by the simple action of kicking clods of dirt in with their sandals and moccasins, "is where the dead are buried."

The Master of Sinanju pointed to a ring of stones at the foot of the hillock. A rusting bucket sat beside it.

"And over there," he added, "is their well. They are burying their dead uphill of their drinking water. In two months, it is going to taste like rancid duck. Have they no brains?"

"If they had," Remo said, "they wouldn't be eating bugs."

The ceremony, such as it was, was hastily concluded.

Someone could be heard asking, "Shouldn't we have waited for the media to set up their cameras?"

The man in the warbonnet-who Remo took to be Theodore Soars-With-Eagles-replied, "No. It will be better that they record my predictions for the endangered American people than the sight of our dead brethren. For if the federal government does not act soon, the dead will be beyond counting."

"What if they don't act?"

"They will act because the destruction of the ozone layer that is causing this will force them to act."

"They didn't act for acid rain."

"Or global warming."

"Or AIDS," someone else said.

"They will act here because it is not innocent trees, or deer, or persons who practice simple alternate lifestyles who are threatened, but the very ones who hold power in our corrupt society. For all know that the depletion of the ozone layer lets down carcinogenic ultraviolet rays, killing those who are cursed by being born light of skin. This is the first Caucasian-specific disaster in human history. The white man cannot wish this away."

Chiun frowned. "I do not understand a single word that man has said, Remo."

"Basically, he's doing a Chicken Little."

Chiun looked blank.

"He's claiming that the sky is falling," Remo explained.

"Is this true, Remo?" Chiun asked. "Will only whites succumb to this threat?"

"Only if they eat bugs. Come on, let's start looking around."

They started down from the hillside just as the first wave of press began setting up their cameras in front of a wooden dais evidently set up for Theodore SoarsWith-Eagles's press conference.

"Let's try to avoid these guys," Remo whispered.

"How? There are so many."

"Let's at least try," said Remo. "Remember our last assignment, where we were up to our hip pockets in television anchormen? Smith is still trying to explain the network casualties to the President."

"It was not our fault so many died."

"Maybe not, but half these guys have your description memorized."

They worked their way around and came upon a malodorous slit trench filled almost to overflowing with yellowish offal.

Chiun peered inward. His nose wrinkled up.

"How can they live in such filth? They do not even bury the waste of their miserable bodies."

"Since they eat only bugs, I'm surprised there is any waste. Boy, does it smell bad in there."

"What can one expect of dead bugs that have passed through the bodies of idiots?"

They leapt over the trench and continued on to a bivouac area where preparations for a full-scale press conference were under way.

A food-service truck was in operation, manned by two men in cook's whites.

"Come get your lobster salad sandwiches here," one cried. "We have lobster salad sandwiches and lobster salad bowls. Tastes just like thunderbug. All the taste and no risk to your health."

The food-service truck was immediately surrounded. Money changed hands and sandwiches were grabbed by eager hands.

Some members of the press, already unable to get close to the truck, held up remotes here and there.

"You know, it's strange knowing we won't run into Cheeta Ching or a Don Cooder out here," Remo remarked.

Chiun sniffed and said nothing. Cheeta Ching remained a sore subject with him. Don Cooder was one of the network anchor casualties and a thorn in their side for years, until they had pulverized him.

A reporter they recognized as Nightmirror correspondent Ned Doppler was speaking into a hand mike and was staring into a minicam.

"Here in the rugged wilderness of Mendocino County, California, a new breed of American environmentalists are taking a stand against the despoiling of nature. PAPA. People Against Protein Assassins. They don't eat meat or dairy products. Only pure, natural food enters their systems. Only the purest water, only foods harvested in their natural habitat. Here, in one of the richest breeding grounds of the thunderbug, a valiant band, ignoring the naysayers, are deep in an experiment more monumental than the much-maligned Biosphere 2 experiment. They are the vanguard, eating a natural insect, becoming human insectivores in their quest for purity and oneness with nature."

"Stay low, Little Father," warned Remo. "This guy knows you on sight."

Ned Doppler, his wealth of hair squatting on his head like some steroid-intoxicated fur, seemed oblivious to everything but his lines, which he was reading off cue cards.

"Crap," said Remo. They moved on.

Another live remote was in progress not much further along. Remo recognized the boyish-looking newsman as Tim Macaw, who anchored the MBC evening news.

"The Thunderbug. Miracle Food or Menace? Who is to know? Who can know? The debate is already raging here in this mountain fastness between the legions of PAPA and the hordes unleashed by the Food and Drug Administration. Will right triumph? Will good be rewarded? Will the PAPA continue to nourish their bodies with Ingraticus Avalonicusor . . . or will we ever know? Can we ever know? Can we ever really, really, really, ever know anything?"

"Not if we listen to dickheads like you," Remo yelled in a loud voice.

A producer called, "Cut!"

Macaw looked around angrily. "What jerk ruined my standup?"

But Remo and Chiun were no longer in sight. They had drifted on.

It was like that for the next five hundred yards. Reporters talking into microphones, giving opinions without foundation, speculating without sources, and clawing for a piney background that would make it seem as if they and only they had the exclusive story.

It was impossible to get close to the podium where Theodore Soars-With-Eagles and his adherents were about to appear, unless Remo and Chiun wanted to insinuate themselves into a growing circle of media that resembled a fast-forming mold ring, which they could, and risk having their faces televised nationally, which they preferred to avoid.

"Those big tents over to the south must be the Feds," Remo whispered. "Let's try them."

"I do not see the bugs everyone speaks of," said Chiun, examining the bottom of one sandal. "What do they look like?"

"Search me. All I know is that they're pretty small."

Chiun stooped, brushing the dried-out grass with his long fingernails. "I see many bugs. Which are which?"

"All bugs look alike to me. Just don't eat any, okay?"

Chiun straightened. "Remo! I would no sooner eat a bug than I would go naked in public."

"Do me a favor. Don't do either."

On the other side of a stand of ponderosa pine that seemed to form a natural barrier, they found the big army-style tents.

"Damn!" said Remo. "The media's all over this place too."

"Why do you not beat them, as did the adherents of the last President?" wondered Chiun. "He would simply revile them before large crowds, and his followers would descend on the Philistines with hard sticks."

"Pass," said Remo. He was looking around, thinking that this assignment, already a pain, was fast becoming a logistical nightmare. He was about to suggest they withdraw to the nearest hotel and wait for the feeding frenzy to subside when someone with a mircrophone suddenly shouted, "Hey! Isn't that Twin Peaks?"

"You mean Capital Hills."

Remo saw what the two meant an instant later. And it wasn't landscape.

She came without a mike or sound man or minicam. She didn't need them to break a path. Her chest looked big enough to knock down an advancing skirmish line. It bounced.

Remo had seen a lot of bouncing breasts in his time. Usually they bounced in tandem. These did not. One went up as the other was going down. Sometimes they collided in passing and caromed off one another.

It was clear the woman was not wearing a bra. She wasn't big on shaving her legs either. She wore khaki shorts that left her legs bare. Or as bare as the legs of a tarantula could be. They were that hairy.

And Remo had a deep suspicion that she dispensed with underarm deodorant too. The cool California air was becoming acrid.

The woman carried a stubby pencil and a frayed spiral notepad, so Remo took her to be a print reporter.

"Is anyone here not with the feds?" she bellowed:

The electronic press lifted their hands. Their eyes stayed on her chest.

"Not you idiots!" she snapped. "I know who you are. I'm looking for someone from PAPA."

The hands went down.

"Anyone here from PAPA?" she repeated.

Suddenly her eyes lighted on Remo and Chiun.

"Uh-oh," said Remo.

"Remo," Chiun said worriedly. "It is coming this way."

"I know it."

The woman bounced up, seemingly oblivious to the uppercuts her mammaries were trying to give her pointed chin. "You! Are you the People Against Protein Assassins?"

"No," said Remo. "Go away."

"You can't tell me to go away. I'm from the Boston Blade."

Remo groaned. It was worse than he thought. The Boston Blade was notorious for the political correctness of its reporters. Although they had another phrase for it: moral rectitude.

The woman marched up to Remo and came to a dead stop. Her breasts continued forward, stressing the thin fabric of her peasant blouse beyond reason. Through the gauzy stuff, her nipples showed as big as cow teats mounted on lopsided aureoles.

Remo and Chiun took a unified step backward.

"I'm Jane Goodwoman," the woman announced when her chest stopped rebounding. "And when I write things in my column, great Americans from Senator Ned Clancy to the Reverend Juniper Jackman pay attention. Sixteen column inches of my copy in tomorrow's Blade will have America's best and brightest politicians swarming all over this place."

Remo turned to Chiun and said, "Maybe we should just get rid of her now."

"You can't get rid of the press," Jane Goodwoman snapped, "and you know it. We're eternal, the permafrost of American society."

"That explains the cultural Ice Age," said Remo.

Jane Goodwoman narrowed her thin eyes. "So who are you two?"

Sighing, Remo dug out an ID card and lifted it to her face.

"Remo Cougar Mellencamp," he said in a bored voice. "With the Food and Drug Association."

"You mean 'Administration.' "

Remo pulled the card back real fast, palming it so it couldn't be read. "No, I mean Association."

"I understand it's Administration."

Remo decided to bluff his way through this bullshit conversation. "The new Administration changed the name. Claimed people got it confused with the executive branch. Guess they were right."

Jane Goodwoman's face lost its tension. "Oh, if the Administration says it's all right, then it's all right, right?"

"Right," said Remo. "Now we have work to do."

"Well, I'm here to help," said Jane Goodwoman, who was looking at Remo's pants zipper.

"By hauling every congressman and senator from the fifty states into this?"

"How else are we going to solve America's problems?"

"It is not a problem, according to Thrush Limburger," squeaked Chiun.

Jane Goodwoman blanched. She swayed. For a moment, she looked like she was about to faint or throw up, or possibly do both.

Remo's instinct was to reach out to prevent her from falling on her face. The thought of touching her repelled him. Then she leaned forward and her breasts popped out of her blouse and he realized her face was in no danger at all.

She hit the dirt with a mushy splat. Her pointed nose bent to the left, but only because it struck a stone.

Remo called over to a crew of workmen pitching tents.

"Hey, we could use some help over here."

Their eyes went wide and their faces paled. "Did you say HELP?" one croaked.

"Not that kind of help," said Remo. "We need a tent pitched right here."

They came bearing rolled canvas, pegs, and tent poles and nervous twitches.

"Put it over her so she doesn't draw flies," Remo suggested.

The workmen noticed Jane Goodwoman's pallor. "Is-is she contagious?" one asked shakily.

"Only if you read her column with your brain turned off," said Remo. "Come on, Little Father."

They started making the rounds of tents. Signs were hung on all of them. Remo saw that the Department of the Interior, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the Federal Emergency Management Administration were on the job, among others.

"Is anybody in charge here?" Remo called into open tent flaps as he came to them.

"No, we're just trying to help," a voice from the first tent told him.

"Then why are you all hiding in your tents?"

"Are you crazy? There's a hole in the ozone right over our heads. We're waiting for the sunblock and aluminum umbrellas to arrive."

"And you are?"

"Environmental Protection Agency. We're here to see if the bug belongs on the endangered species list."

"And if it does?"

"America faces the hardest choice in its history-to protect the thunderbug or feed the starving millions of the world. It's a choice I wouldn't want to have to make."

"Amen," added a voice from the next tent. A sign in front said Federal Radon Testing Administration.

"That's probably why you get paid the big bucks," said Remo, rolling his eyes.

At the next tent, he was asked if he was the press. When he said no, the tent was zipped up in his face, and a whining voice complained, "How are we going to get our federal grant without press?"

Remo got similar answers at almost every tent.

"How do you know which of these people can help us and which cannot?" Chiun asked as they walked along.

"I'll know it when I hear it."

At last they came to one that was sealed. Remo looked for something to knock on and settled for slapping the tent flap hard.

A voice said, "Go away, I'm working in here."

"Bingo," said Remo.

Just then, one of the tent pitchers came over and said, "She's calling for you. Ms. Goodwoman is calling for you, sir."

"Let her call," said Remo.

"She says she has something to show you that will explain everything. I suggest you placate her. She's very powerful."

"Watch this tent," Remo told Chiun.

He followed the man to the newly erected tent and slipped in.

Jane Goodwoman was alone in the tent. It was dark.

Remo's eyes adjusted to the lack of light, got a good look, and decided that darkness was preferable.

"Okay, let's hear it," he said.

"I like you," said Jane Goodwoman in a suddenly husky voice.

"I'm politically incorrect. Honest Injun."

She came closer. "I like a challenge."

"Try mounting a giraffe."

Jane Goodwoman approached with the languorous sway of a net bag crammed with assorted misshapen muskmelons.

She reached behind Remo and zipped the tent flap closed.

"You had something to show me," Remo reminded.

"And here they are!" said Jane Goodwoman, pulling down her blouse front. "Check out these casabas."

"Sorry. I'm not working on the problem of bad silicone implants."

Jane Goodwoman's face sagged almost as much as the rest of her. "Back in Boston, they don't react like that. You're not, you know-"

"Yes. Definitely. Whatever you mean, I'm it."

Jane Goodwoman brightened. "Really? I've always wanted to make it with a gay male."

"Try Rock Hudson. He probably won't even put up a fight. I will."

"I want your lean tigerish body."

"I'm opposed to date rape."

"I insist."

"This is sexual harassment, isn't it?"

"Screw sexual harassment. Take me now or you'll never eat lunch in this town again."

"Lunch in this town is ladybugs, remember?"

"Consider me your ladybug," said Jane Goodwoman, lunging with her arms outstretched and her breasts like twin battering rams.

She was as easy to dodge as a Nerf ball swinging on the end of a string, but Remo preferred not to have the tent come crashing down on his head so he caught Jane Goodwoman by one outstretched wrist and applied enough pressure to lay her flat on the floor, quivering in all directions.

He got out of the tent as fast as he could and almost collided with a pimple-faced teenager carrying a boom mike. He had shiny ears and innocent green eyes.

"There's a woman inside who needs your help," Remo told him.

Moaning came from the tent. "Oh-that was the best-foreplay-I-ever-had!"

The boy hesitated. "What-what do I do?"

"Zip up afterwards," said Remo.

Chapter 6

The Master of Sinanju was waiting for Remo at the closed tent.

"You are improving," said Chiun.

"Improving how?" asked Remo.

"Once there was a time when you would have rutted with a woman with such udders without respect for yourself or her."

"If I have any respect for Jane Goodwoman, I haven't noticed," said Remo, slapping the tent side again.

"Who's out there?" an annoyed voice demanded.

"Food and Drug Association," called Remo. "Open up."

"You mean Administration."

"Have it your way. Who are you?"

"Centers for Disease Control and I'm busier than a one-armed paperhanger in here."

"How come you're the only one?"

"Because I have a public to protect. Those other idiots are just concerned about turf, ink, and their reputations."

"Then you're exactly the person we want to talk to and we're coming in."

The man was on the rotund side with squinty eyes behind big glasses. He did not look entirely pleased to see them, but after a few moments his more genial side came through.

"I'm Dale Parsons with the CDC," he said.

"Remo Salk."

Parsons blinked. "Any relation?"

"My mother's cousin's father's son," said Remo, who had gotten the name off the ID card.

"So what's the FDA's interest in HELP?" Parsons wondered, eyeing Remo's casual black T-shirt and matching chinos.

"There's a California candy company looking to market chocolate-covered thunderbugs and we gotta approve it as safe."

"Only in America . . ."

There was not much in the way of equipment inside the tent. A folding card table, racks of test tubes and specimen bottles and test equipment Remo did not recognize. Not that there was much in the way of test equipment he would recognize.

There was an array of covered petri dishes on the table, and each of them was dotted with sluggish bugs that reminded Remo of elongated ladybugs, but without the pleasant orange coloration. These bugs were mud-colored.

"Are these the terrible insects of doom?" asked Chiun.

Parsons seemed to notice the Master of Sinanju for the first time.

"Friend of yours?" he asked Remo.

"Japanese beetle expert," said Remo without thinking.

Chiun puffed out his wrinkled cheeks. His eggshellcolored face began turning a smoky red.

"That is, Chiun's an expect on Japanese beetles," Remo said hastily. "Not a Japanese who's a beetle expert. He's very sensitive about that. He's actually Korean."

Parsons's eyebrows lifted. "My father served in Korea."

"So did my father," said Chiun aridly.

That made Parsons laugh and the tension went out of the air.

Parsons said, "If these things are related to Japanese beetles, it's news to me. But I'm not an expert on bugs. I specialize in food-transmitted diseases and this has me stumped."

"What can you tell us?" Remo prompted.

"Well, it's not an autoimmune disease. Whether or not it's a virus, I'm not ready to say. But there are already thirty dead and not much time to get to the bottom of it if this is another AIDS."

"Are you saying it's like AIDS?"

"Well, HELP is like AIDS in that its chief symptom is a wholesale wasting of the victim's body. No question of that. Whether it's a virus, or if it is a virus of the same family as AIDS, is another matter. But it has the potential to be very dangerous."

"Only if people eat bugs, right?"

"If it is Ingraticus Avalonicus that's causing it."

"You think it isn't?"

"I can't say either way. I do know that viral infections are hard to get from eating an infected host. Often, the stomach acids destroy a virus before it can be absorbed into the system."

"Then it's not the bug?"

"Well, it could be. These people handle the thunderbugs before they eat them. They could become infected in the food preparation process. Or if they chew the raw bugs while they have a cut or sore in the mouth. It all depends on what my tests determine."

Chiun was examining a petri dish critically. The thunderbugs under the glass stood about like contented buggy sheep.

"They look too lazy to be dangerous," he murmured.

"They don't have a lot of energy, that's for sure."

"Maybe they're sick," said Remo.

"They are the wrong color to be dangerous," Chiun said.

"What do you mean?" asked Parsons.

"Venomous creatures always show their true colors. This bug is neither as green as an adder nor blue as blue cheese."

Dale Parsons cocked an eyebrow. "Blue cheese is venomous?"

The Master of Sinanju waggled a remonstrating finger. "Blue is a color not appropriate for food. Avoid blue cheese as you would the pit viper or the scorpion. No good can come from any of these things."

"You're talking about naturally venomous insects," said Parsons. "This is different. This is a disease the thunderbug may have picked up somewhere and is simply a carrier of, much the way deer ticks carry Lyme disease, which is caused by a spirochete, not a virus, by the way."

"But this bug has no teeth," Chiun pointed out.

"Well, HELP is getting into these PAPA idiots' systems somehow. And this has the potential to be worse than AIDS."

"Yeah?" said Remo.

"Absolutely. With AIDS, you get HIV-Human Immunodeficiency Virus-and then maybe a few years later, it blossoms into full-blown Advanced Immune Deficiency Syndrome, putting the sufferer at risk for contracting fatal cancers or flus. Nobody really dies of AIDS, you know. They die of illnesses they contract because AIDS makes them more susceptible. Here, people get HELP and they're dead in forty-eight hours with no sign of any primary illness or secondary infection."

"But that means they're contagious for only a little while, right?"

"If they're contagious. And if they're getting HELP from the bug, and they don't stop eating bugs, it doesn't much matter. More are going to die. And bugeating is a fad now. Kids are doing it all over the country as a dare."

Remo frowned. "Then we're back to the bugs again."

Parsons shrugged. "A lot of them eat bugs. Only a few have died. As soon as I've got my centrifuge and electron microscope set up, I'm going to talk to the local coroner who performed the first HELP autopsies. I'm a pathologist, but I'm not licensed to autopsy people in this state."

The honking of horns suddenly blared all around them.

"Now what?" muttered Remo, going to the tent flap.

Reporters, both print and electronic, were running hither and yon.

Remo reached out and arrested a running sound man. He lifted him off his feet and his feet kept running. Remo recognized him as the human bone he had thrown to Jane Goodwoman.

"I see you survived," Remo said dryly.

"Is it usually that messy?" the boy asked.

"After Jane Goodwoman, all women are downhill."

"That's a relief."

"Now that I've started you along the road to wisdom, who's coming up the road?"

"Senator Ned J. Clancy."

Remo blinked. "Why? Did someone declare this an open bar zone?"

"I don't know."

Remo dropped the man and his feet got in gear again.

"This place is about to become a zoo," Remo told Chiun.

"It is already a zoo."

"It is about to become the zoo of all time. Let's mosey." Remo stuck his head back in the tent. "We'll catch up with you later."

Dale Parsons didn't look up from his work. "I'll be here."

The rush of press was heading south so Remo and Chiun struck off to the west toward the main PAPA encampment.

Over the sound of feet and the honking of horns they could hear Jane Goodwoman calling frantically, "Where is Senator Clancy? Where is Senator Clancy?"

Remo raised his voice. "Go east about a hundred yards. You can't miss him."

Chiun said, "The one they are rushing to meet is to the south."

Remo grinned. "I know. But the latrine is about a hundred yards to the east. Maybe she'll fall in."

"You are in a mean mood."

"You would be too if she tried to jump your bones."

"My bones would jump back and her bones would be broken," Chiun sniffed.

"I'll count on you to throw yourself between us next time she goes into heat," Remo said wryly.

In the main encampment, they came upon a group of hippie types sitting in the weeds and picking tiny bugs off themselves. They sat under staked umbrellas and buckskin hides stretched over wood frames, presumably to protect them from cancerous ultraviolet rays, Remo decided.

Their approach was noticed, and a bony woman raised a thin hand and waved them to come closer.

"Peace! Come to join the wave of the future?"

"Why not?" said Remo.

"Never," said Chiun.

Remo hissed, "We're supposed to get to the bottom of this. So we're joining these dips."

"We are joining, but I am not eating bugs."

"Fine. Just follow along."

"Are you Snappers or are you Harvesters?" someone asked.

"What are you people?" Remo countered.

"Snappers. Look." And the bony woman plucked one of the tiny bugs off a weed and snapped its head off with the flick of a dirty thumbnail. She put the rest in her mouth and began chewing. She chewed soundlessly for over a minute and finally a smile came over her face. It had been preceded by a tiny crunch. "Got the little bugger."

"They still move after they're decapitated so you have to find them with your teeth," someone said helpfully.

"That's the fun part," added a thin man wearing a Coptic cross and shorts that fought to hold on to his skinny hips.

"How do they taste?" wondered Remo.

"Like lobster."

"No, like Cajun popcorn," a man insisted.

"Like fried rice," said someone else.

"Are you all eating the same bug?" Remo asked.

"We don't call it a bug. It's Miracle Food. You can eat them all day long and never get full, or get tired of them."

"They come in different flavors too."

"Are you not concerned that you will sicken and die?" Chiun demanded.

"Only Harvesters catch HELP."

"Yeah, that's because they're too white and don't cover themselves when they go out into the sun."

Everyone agreed that the Harvester sect of the People Against Protein Assassins caught Human Environmental Liability Paradox. In fact, the Snapper group looked reasonably healthy. A number of them were pretty skinny, but it was diet-skinny, not wasting-away-to-skin-and-bones skinny.

"Then we'd better check out the Harvesters," Remo told Chiun.

A man shucked a handful of thunderbugs off a weed and offered them to Remo.

"Here, man. Take a bunch. It's a long walk."

"Yeah," a young girl said, "and over on the other side of the Schism Line, they cook all the flavor out of the little fellows."

"No thanks," said Remo. "Bug sushi doesn't appeal to me."

"Harvester," the young girl hissed. "If you catch HELP, it'll be your own fault."

They left the Snappers to their snapping and snacking.

The Schism Line proved to be exactly that. Someone had dragged a stick across the vale and there was a wooden sign stuck into it. On the approach side it said SNAPPER TURF. When they passed it, the other side of the sign said HAPPY HARVESTER HUNTING GROUND.

The tepees and wigwams were all clustered on the other side of the Schism Line.

They were arrayed around a campfire that was ringed with stones. There was a pot simmering. As they approached, Remo and Chiun saw people come to ladle in thunderbugs, wait a few moments, and ladle them out again.

There seemed to be a continual procession of PAPA adherents coming to contribute to the communal pot and then return to partake. Nobody looked sick. Nobody looked particularly well fed either. They wore Indian costumes that might have once fit them, but the buckskin and beads now fit loosely, if at all.

Remo walked up to the pot and asked, "How can you tell if they're cooked if you're cooking them all together like that?"

A man looked up. "They cook fast. They're always good. That's why Gitchee Manitou created them."

Remo frowned. "I've heard of the shores of Gitchee Goomie. But who's Gitchee Manitou?"

"The Great Spirit who created the thunderbug and sowed them in the fields with their plump bodies that are good to eat and their tiny legs which cannot run fast so they don't get away. Look, see how they can't wait to be eaten."

Remo and Chiun looked. The lethargic thunderbugs, once they were held over the steaming pot, came to life. They leapt from the ladles and into the simmering water, where they immediately curled up in tiny chickpealike balls.

"I never heard of bugs committing mass suicide," said Remo.

"It is not suicide. They only want to share themselves with us. When it is our turn to die, we will go to a place where man is tiny and thunderbugs are great and we will return the favor by allowing them to consume our tasty flesh."

"Who fed you this bulldookie?" Remo said.

"Theodore Soars-With-Eagles."

"Where do we find him?"

"Sometimes he is in the wind and cannot be seen, only felt."

Remo reached down to find the man's neck. He squeezed. "Can the corn."

"We call it maize."

"I call it bullshit. Where is he now?"

"Sometimes he can be found napping in his tepee," the man said through teeth that seemed suddenly welded together.

"Point us."

The man had only a ladle to point with and he swept it back around, throwing hot broth and dead thunderbugs into the parched grass.

When Remo released him, he dived for the bugs and began popping them into his mouth.

"Welcome, brothers in nature," said Theodore Soars-With-Eagles when they pushed aside the flap of his tent. It was made of some slick material that Remo thought he recognized.

"Naugahyde?" he asked.

Theodore Soars-With-Eagles gathered his chinchilla cloak about his shoulders. "Gitchee Manitou invented what the white man came to call Naugahyde. In his great wisdom he has seen fit not to enforce the patent. It is called reciprocity."

"The tribal language around here is obviously bullshit," Remo growled. "You started this cult?"

"There is some disagreement over that. Some say Brother Karl Sagacious, may his noble Greek soul forever rest, founded PAPA. Some give me that honor. Some say we were brothers in creation before our unfortunate misunderstanding."

"Some say you had everything to gain from his death," said Remo.

"Such talk slanders the proud name of the People Against Protein Assassins. My ancestors refused to slaughter the proud beefalo for food. How could I harm my fellow man?"

"We just came from the Snappers," said Remo.

Theodore Soars-With-Eagles shook his feathered head sadly. Remo noticed that his bald spot was gone, and his hair moved a half second behind his headdress.

"Poor misguided ones. Gitchee Manitou weeps every time they bite off the head of one of his children."

"According to them, only your side is suffering from HELP."

"A lie. It is only them."

"When we got here, we saw you lead a funeral service."

"The committing of clay to clay. But when one of our number dies we put aside all disagreement and I preside over the ceremony of ashes."

"I didn't see any cremation going on," Remo said.

"We buried three Snappers today. They have been returned to the good earth, never to be seen again. They are ashes."

"They are on their way to your well," said Remo. "Look, we want some straight answers."

"It is only the white skins who speak with false tongues."

"That is a good start," said Chiun, nodding approvingly. "Speaking the obvious truth."

"Stay out of this, Little Father."

"When you are in my tepee," Theodore Soars-With-Eagles said indignantly, "you will treat my yellow brother as you would me."

"Listen, you-" Remo started to say.

Just then a girl in braided pigtails poked her head in and said, "Brother Theodore! Senator Clancy has come to Nirvana West!"

Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles came off his Navajo blanket, revealing a "Made in Japan" tag.

"Senator Clancy is here? I knew he would come. Whenever there is need, the great senator from Massachusetts arrives on the wings of the Thunderbird."

"I think he came in a limo," growled Remo.

"I must go to him. We will parley. There is much we have in common. We are both men of the people."

"Bring your own booze," said Remo, letting the man go.

They watched him lope off in his buckskin breeches.

"We are getting nowhere," Chiun said thinly.

"That's because we are nowhere," Remo complained. "We're going to have to grab Eagles when there aren't so many people around."

"Long have I dwelt in this land, Remo. There are times when its size and greatness have reminded me of the Rome of the Caesars. We worked for the Caesars and although they were white, they were good to work for."

"America hasn't exactly been shy with its gold," Remo pointed out.

"True, but in the days of Rome only the Caesars were crazy. Here, it is the subjects who are the maddest."

"There I can't disagree, Little Father. With all the beef we have in this country, we've got people who are eating bugs."

A disgusted look came over the Master of Sinanju's face.

"Who would eat the dead meat of cows?" he sniffed. "I mean, with such a wonderful range of good-tasting bugs, who would eat an insignificant thing like this lazy dunderbug?"

Remo stared.

"Of course," Chiun added in a lofty voice, "I do not eat bugs. But if lesser creatures wish to eat bugs, should they not eat the best bugs?"

Someone overheard him and said, "Bugs are the next rice."

"There is only one rice," said Chiun. "And it does not have legs."

Remo noticed that the sun was starting to go down.

"Well, we might as well make the best of it. Maybe we can claim a wigwam."

"I am not staying here."

"Look, we gotta infiltrate this lunatic's reservation. How are we going to do that?"

"I will not sleep among people who eat bugs," Chiun insisted. "People who eat bugs may try to eat my toes while I slumber. We will find a suitable hotel. One which boasts a presidential suite."

"Out here, we'll be lucky to find one without roaches," Remo growled.

"If you wish to stay here for the evening, that is your privilege," Chiun allowed. "I am certain that Jane Goodwoman will make space for you in her personal tent."

"You win," said Remo.

They stepped out of the tepee and gave the bugeaters a wide berth. They were too busy scooping thunderbugs out of the communal pot to pay Remo and Chiun any attention.

"The way they're going at it," Remo muttered, "it's a miracle they aren't all overweight."

"The way they eat what they eat," Chiun sniffed, "it is a miracle they are not all dead."

Chapter 7

Senator Ned J. Clancy loved a crowd. He loved people. All people. But especially the half of the human race that wore skirts.

That half of the human race he loved in restaurants, bathroom stalls, sandy beaches-but especially in the backs of limousines.

Most U.S. senators didn't travel by limousine. Most U.S. senators weren't the sole surviving son of a political dynasty that had put its stamp upon American political life for more than a half century now, owing to the fortune the senator's father, Francis X. Clancy, had amassed in the first half of the century, largely through stock manipulation and smut.

So when Senator Ned Clancy traveled, he traveled in style.

These days, Senator Ned J. Clancy no longer entertained teenyboppers in the back of his limousine. Much. He was married now. And as befits a newly married man who is also the senior senator from Massachusetts and who also just turned sixty, he conducted himself as the epitome of probity.

Which didn't mean he couldn't have a little innocent fun now and again.

The white stretch limousine was barreling along at a decorous seventy-five miles an hour along Highway 101 in Mendocino County. The driver was under strict orders never to go any slower and if necessary to force over to the side of the road any blocking vehicle that refused to yield. This was because during a lifetime of public service, irate voters had a distressing habit of shooting innocent Clancys. This had pretty much died down since Ned Clancy had publicly renounced any lingering White House ambitions. But not everybody could be trusted to have gotten the word.

The public renunciation had been a great disappointment to his family and especially to his aged mother, Pearl. But secretly, Ned Clancy was relieved. He never wanted to be President in the first place. He just wanted to draw a government check without having to work too hard for it and enjoy a little nookie when both flesh and spirit were moved. Not unlike his cousins who had remained in the Emerald Isle. Over there, they called it the dole.

Ned Clancy had been married for over a year now and married life was beginning to chafe. He felt like cutting loose.

There was a school bus coming the other way, he noticed.

Talking an asthma atomizer from his pocket, Senator Clancy took two quick hits of vodka-he was officially on the wagon now-and pressed the button that lowered the side window.

"Honk the horn when I tell you," he told the driver.

And Ned Clancy dropped his drawers and jammed his loose cellulite-pocked backside into the open window frame. It was a very tight fit.

"Now!" he shouted.

The driver obeyed. The horn blared.

And the students seated on the left aisle of the bus all turned to look at the speeding pink blob that ejected a blatting sound in their direction. Unfortunately, Ned Clancy wasn't in much of a position to enjoy their expressions, but he imagined they had to be priceless.

Clancy tugged his pants back on and resumed his seat. He had the back all to himself. No wife this time. She was becoming a ball and chain already.

The backseat telephone buzzed and Clancy picked up the receiver.

"Yeah?"

"This is Nalini," said a musical voice. "Your mother is becoming very agitated, Senator."

Clancy looked back at the trailing limos. There were two, both black.

"She saw it?"

"I am afraid so."

"Did you?"

"Yes."

"What kind of a reaction did I get?"

"They appeared to be schoolgirls, Senator, and their expressions were indescribable."

"Great." He caught himself. "I mean, how unfortunate. I would never do anything to harm the young of our great nation. I thought I was mooning a college football team or something."

"You weren't."

"I feel terrible," said Ned Clancy, taking another vodka spritz. His face, like a snarled old pumpkin with a mossy coating of hair on top, dissolved into an inebriated smile. His tiny eyes seemed to shrink into their fatty sockets until they resembled baby eyes mistakenly set in an old man's face.

"Give Mother my apologies," he said, his consonants blurring.

"Of course, Senator. But she appears very angry."

"Remind her that it's the thought that counts."

Clancy hung up. "I knew dragging that old bat along was a mistake," he snarled.

It was not easy being the elder heir to the greatest political dynasty on earth, mused Ned Clancy. If the truth were to be known, he would have retired from the Senate two or three scandals ago. But the Clancy clan had been growing exponentially even after the deaths of Ned's older brothers, Jimbo and Robbo.

They had sired some thirty offspring between them. Neddo, as he was called in his young carefree days, had sired an equal number on his own, despite not having married until late in life.

Between the need to support the orphan Clancys and the illegitimate Clancys, the family fortune-never wisely invested in the first place-was dwindling fast. And since virtually every Clancy seemed to be chronically unemployable outside of public service, the trust funds were not keeping pace with government payroll salaries.

Ned Clancy took solace in the fact that he would not live to see the family fortune completely squandered. He also took solace in hard liquor. As the capillaries burst in his bulbous nose and the facial mottling of the habitual drunk more and more colored his much-photographed face, he had come to be called-always behind his back-Blotto.

Affectionately, of course. Because everyone loved Blotto Clancy. And Blotto loved them back. In any way he could.

He stopped loving a big group of them-specifically Californians-when his limousine caravan rounded a hill and ran smack into the end of a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam.

"What are these people doing here!" he shouted at the passenger-to-driver intercom.

"They're probably going the same place we are, sir," the limo driver patiently explained. "Nirvana West."

"But they're blocking a U.S. senator. They can't do that. Get on the horn to the State Police and have them all towed. That'll teach them."

"But, Senator, we're not in Massachusetts anymore."

Clancy looked confused. "We aren't?"

"No, this is California."

"Is that a state now?"

"It is, Senator."

"Well, who are their senators? I'll call them and pull rank. Use the old boy network for what it was meant."

"The two senators are women, Senator."

"Do they give head?"

"I wouldn't know, Senator."

"Because I think I might let them do me in return for the favor. It'll give them something to impress their girlfriends with. Just don't tell my wife. Or my mother. Especially my mother. She doesn't understand sex. How she managed to have sixteen kids, beats the hell out of me."

The phone buzzed again and Senator Clancy picked it up.

"Yeah?"

"This is Nalini. Your mother is becoming difficult."

Clancy clutched the phone tightly. "Is she saying anything?"

"You know she hasn't been able to speak since her last stroke. But she is jumping up and down in her seat, and that usually means she's growing impatient."

"Well, change her diaper or something. I have to pull a few strings before I can break this logjam up ahead."

"They are probably the media, Senator. If you step out of your car and present yourself, they might clear the way."

Ned Clancy's beet-red face swelled with pleasure. "They'll also want to interview me. That means ink. And face time. The milk and honey of my racket. Listen, Nalini, ever think of becoming a senator's aide?"

"Your mother needs me more, Senator."

"I need you more than more. Know what I mean? Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge."

"It is time for your mother's medication. Excuse me, Senator Clancy." The line went dead.

"Bitch," muttered Clancy, hanging up. "See if I ever let her stroke my love serpent."

He unbuttoned his blue blazer so that when he emerged he could rebutton it. His handlers told him he always looked more senatorial that way. It also distracted people from noticing his weight problem.

Senator Clancy stepped out. Instantly, the third limo in the caravan popped all its doors and his aides leapt out. They came running, forming a circle around him. This helped to hide his weight problem too. They also made perfect bullet catchers in case of assassins.

"Let's see if we can't break this gridlock," he said, grinning. "That would be a switch, wouldn't it?"

Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles ran through the old-growth forest fleet as a deer. His heart was racing. This was it. His first test. If he survived the media spotlight without screwing up, he was home free.

Brother Theodore slowed down and recovered his wind. It would not look good for a pure-blooded Chinchilla to burst on the national scene panting like a hound dog.

When he emerged into the press area, he saw that Senator Ned J. Clancy had already found the podium erected for his own press conference.

"Media hound," Brother Theodore muttered under his breath. Then, straightening his warbonnet and wig, he stepped into the ring of press.

"I have come to palaver with my white brother!" he shouted.

No one heard him.

"I said," he yelled through his cupped hands, "that I have come to speak with the honorable senator from Massachusetts!"

That didn't help any either, so Brother Theodore jumped up and down, trusting his feathers to catch people's attention.

The feathers did the trick. Senator Clancy caught sight of him and lifted a hand. He said in a solemn voice, "How!"

"Hail, white brother from the eastern land of enlightenment," Brother Theodore called back. He tried to keep his face straight.

At a gesture from Clancy, the crowd parted. Cameras flashed in his face. Videocams whirred.

When Theodore reached the podium, Senator Clancy grinned broadly and threw one arm around him. He said, "Thank you for inviting me to your toupee, blood brother."

"That's tepee," whispered Brother Theodore. For the press, he said, "It is a sign that the Great White Father in Washington takes the promise of the mighty thunderbug seriously that you have come, my brother."

"We will smoke the peace pipe together," Senator Clancy said boisterously. "As a sign that there will be no scalping. But I'm afraid I'll have to pass up the firewater. I'm on the wagon. Witch doctor's orders."

As Senator Clancy took a hit of his asthma inhaler, Brother Theodore thought, This guy knows less about the Red Man than I do. This is going to be a snap.

The questions started flying.

"Brother Theodore, what do you have to say about HELP?"

"HELP is a disease of modern civilization. Only those who are attuned to nature will survive the cataclysm that is Human Environmental Liability Paradox."

"What do you mean by attuned to nature?"

"Only by eating the environmentally untainted thunderbug can the white man shield his fragile skin from the deadly rays filtering down from the ozone layer he has wantonly destroyed."

"Then how do you explain the fact that your PAPA followers are dying of HELP?" he was asked.

"Only Snappers are dying. My Harvesters, who cook the thunderbug in a politically and environmentally correct way before eating them, are as healthy as Hekawis. This is the lesson of HELP. Those who wish to see the millennium must live as my ancestors-pure in spirit and politics. I have spoken."

Brother Theodore looked out over the sea of media faces. They appeared to be lapping it all up. It was all going just as he hoped.

Out of one corner of his eye, he noticed the expression on the face of Senator Ned Clancy of Massachusetts. It was an unhappy expression.

"I'm sure Brother Theodore will have more to say after my remarks," Senator Clancy said hastily. Under his breath, he added, "Knowing when to get off the stage is part of the great art of politics, my friend."

And before Theodore Soars-With-Eagles could protest, the senator's aides were pushing him off the podium and Senator Clancy started taking questions.

"Whose press conference is this, anyway?" he muttered. But no one paid him any mind. They were too busy lobbing questions at the senator, whose broad face grew broader as he spoke, like some some elastic human ego feeding on the attention of the media.

Chapter 8

Getting out of Nirvana West was proving to be difficult.

"Has every nutcase on the planet descended on this ecological disaster area?" Remo was complaining.

The Master of Sinanju shaded his eyes with a thin hand.

"I do not see the President of Vice," he said.

"Maybe he's disguised as a tree," Remo growled.

"If this is so, his head is in dire peril, for there are woodpeckers about."

They had retreated to the hillside from which they had first surveyed Nirvana West. If anything, the press and politicians were thicker than before.

"What's that over there?" Remo said suddenly.

Chiun followed the direction of Remo's pointing finger. The press were gravitating toward a central spot.

"I do not know," he said thinly.

"It looks like one of those nature films---you know, the ones that show honey bees swarming around the queen."

Chiun frowned. "I do not see a queen. Only a fat white in the center talking to other whites."

Remo squinted his eyes. Over the heads of the crowd poked a patch of discolored grayish white hair like bleached seaweed on a reddish rock. Under the bad hair was a bloated face that Remo would have recognized three states away.

"Blotto Clancy," he said unhappily.

"Who?"

"Senator Ned J. Clancy. He's the guy we're trying to avoid, remember?"

"Why do they call him Blotto?"

"Because he's half in the bag all the time."

Chiun's sparse eyebrows lifted. "What bag?"

"The one stamped 'Plastered.' "

"You are making no sense, Remo."

"Remember the Roman emperors who liked to get soused on wine and debauch all day long?"' Remo asked.

"Not personally, but their stories are known to me, through the records of my ancestors. Caligula was a good emperor. Domitian was much favored by the House of Sinanju. But Nero was best. His gold took teeth marks exceedingly well."

"Well, down there is the Nero of the twentieth century."

Chiun lifted up on his black sandals and craned his wattled neck. "Really, Remo?"

"He's not President. Never will be. But he gave it his worst shot. He also gave every female that came within grabbing range his worst shot too. If he were ever elected President, the government would be paying child support for a small army of Clancys."

"Perhaps I should meet him," said Chiun, dropping back to his normal height.

"For crying out loud, why?"

Because if he ever becomes Emperor of America, I will want to be on his good side. Emperors of Nero's caliber have notoriously long memories."

"Pass," said Remo.

"Our vehicle is in that direction," Chiun pointed out.

Remo scowled darkly. "Then we gotta go in that direction. But do us both a favor. Let's not get involved. I've seen enough lunatics for one day."

They came down off the hill and joined the rush of PAPA people who had heard of the senator's arrival. For once, they were not noticed.

"He is obviously very popular," said Chiun as they drew near the growing congregation.

"Everybody loves a clown," said Remo.

They worked their way around, sticking to the trees until they were on the other side of the media swarm.

The shouted sounds of press questions came to their ears.

"Senator, why are you here in California?"

"Officially," came the booming voice of Senator Ned J. Clancy, "I've brought my dear mother, Pearl, because I've heard that these wonderful bugs have medicinal properties that might restore her failing faculties."

"You brought your mother here to feed her bugs?"

Clancy looked pained. Obviously, the subject of his mother was a sensitive one.

"No," he said. "But if she takes them off the plate, that of course is her right."

"Is concern for your mother's health the only reason you came to Nirvana West, Senator?"

"While I'm in the Golden State, I thought I'd have a look at the important humanitarian movement called People Against Protein Assassins. In an unofficial capacity, of course."

"Does that mean federal aid?"

"You bet it does," said Remo.

"I never shirk my responsibility to use my political power to help my constituents throughout this great land of ours.""

"Senator, your constituency is limited to Massachusetts. Does this mean you are planning another presidential run?"

"Let me say this about that: No."

"What is your opinion on the HELP crisis, Senator?"

"As I told you," Senator Clancy said, his voice tightening in sympathy with his grimace of a smile, "I'm here unofficially."

"Senator, there are reports that Thrush Limburger is coming here, and that he's prepared to expose HELP as some sort of hoax."

Senator Clancy took up his asthma inhaler and squeezed the canister twice. He immediately began coughing. The thudding of aides' hands on his broad back took several minutes to subside.

"I welcome," Clancy said after his coughing jag abated, "any input into this grave health problem."

"So you think HELP is real?"

"No, I didn't say that."

"Then is it a hoax?"

"That, I cannot say."

"What can you say, Senator?"

"I look forward to Thrush Limburger's arrival here at Nirvana West. Perhaps after he and I have had a chance to chat, I will have more to say on the matter."

The Master of Sinanju said, "That man is a superb politician."

"How's that again?" Remo asked.

"All these people hang on his every word, and he is saying nothing."

"How this guy can have a constituency is beyond me," grumbled Remo. "He can't keep his pants on or his liver dry."

A woman, overhearing that, turned to him and said, "That's an old-fashioned attitude."

"Common decency isn't old-fashioned. Yet."

"I meant that it was true in the old days that we never cared what Senator Clancy did, only what he said. But today we've grown up. We don't care what Neddo says, we only care what he does, and what he does is introduce all our legislation, just the way we write it. What he does in his private hours is his business."

"That's the trouble. None of what he does is private. It's usually all over the front page."

"Regressive," the woman hissed.

"Moron," Remo shot back. He turned to Chiun. "Let's go, Little Father. I've seen enough."

The way to their car was blocked by a clutch of white and black limousines.

"Sorry," a chauffeur said. "You can't pass."

"It's a free country and our car is on the other side of your cars," Remo said tightly.

"We have instructions that no one should pass. Security."

Remo scowled. "Security? Clancy's back there."

"Yeah, but his mother is here."

"And if you keep your voices down, you won't disturb her," Remo pointed out.

Stubby Uzis came up from under the security men's coats.

"We have instructions to shoot potentially hostile persons."

Chiun stepped in front of Remo and said in a plaintive voice, "Please do not hurt my adopted son."

Remo knew Chiun was setting them up for the kill. He hesitated. If any blood was shed, their cover would be blown.

So Remo brought his stiffened fingers up with blurry speed. And before the two guards knew what had happened, their machine pistols were cartwheeling into the underbrush and they were shaking their empty, numbed fingers and sucking air through clenched teeth.

"I didn't know killer bees got this far north," Remo said casually.

Just then a door popped open.

"Is there a problem?" a lilting voice asked.

The woman was slim and the color of a walnut. Her eyes were startlingly large, and so black they might have been constructed of shards of sunglass lenses.

She wore a vivid green sari that shimmered as she approached, topped by a shawl that framed her oval face like a cameo, and all but concealed her lustrous black hair.

The taller guard got control of himself and said, "I don't know who these people are, Miss Nalini, but I told them they can't get close to the cars."

"What is the matter with your fingers?" she asked.

"They sting," the short guard said tightly.

"Killer bees," said Remo. "Maybe they're what's causing HELP. If I were you two, I'd see a doctor."

The two guards just glared. They suspected Remo, but not having seen his hands move, could not accuse him. They recovered their weapons in silence.

"Who are you two, please?" the woman asked.

"It is none of your business," Chiun hissed.

"Little Father," warned Remo. "Let me handle this." He addressed the dusky woman.

"We're with the FDA. We've just been investigating the HELP thing and now we just want to find a decent hotel."

The woman named Nalini looked Remo up and down curiously. Her limpid eyes shone. Then they went to the Master of Sinanju. Their gazes met and locked and a tightness came over each of their faces.

"Allow me to escort you both to your vehicle," she said coolly. She gestured, and the guards lowered their Uzis slightly. They kept their fingers on the triggers.

"Thanks," said Remo.

"It is my pleasure," said the woman. "My name is Nalini."

"We do not care," said Chiun.

"He speaks for himself," said Remo. "I care."

Smiling, the woman lifted slim fingers to take Remo's lean, hard forearm. Remo decided he liked her touch. And her perfume. It was an exotic, musky scent. Usually Remo hated perfume, but this one was both subtle and pleasant. There was none of the flowery excess of manufactured American scents. This had a fruity undersmell to it that reminded Remo of something faraway and unattainable.

"And what is your name?"

"Call me Remo."

Chiun followed with his hands tucked into the sleeves of his kimono and his bearded chin in the air.

"I am the private nurse to Senator Clancy's mother, Pearl," Nalini told Remo.

"I'm surprised she's still alive, after all these years."

"She clings to life. She is a strong woman. Would you like to see her?"

"No," said Chiun.

"We're in a rush," said Remo. "Honest. Another time. "

"Another time then."

"How old is she anyway?"

"One hundred and three years old."

Remo called back, "Hear that, Chiun? She's older than even you!"

"I am only eighty." snapped the Master of Sinanju, "and you are embarrassing me in front of my ancestors."

"Your ancestors are lying in the ground and Nalini is just being polite. What's the matter with you?"

Chiun hurried on, skirts flapping, his hands fists.

The sound of a car window humming down caught Remo's attention. He turned his head and a face appeared in the rear window of the limousine from which Nalini had come.

The face was twisted, as if from paralytic stroke, but Remo recognized Pearl Clancy, matriarch of the Clancy clan. Her mouth hung slack-jawed and a tendril of drool leaked out and flowed into one of the webby wrinkle clusters around her mouth, which was grotesque with red lipstick.

"That's her, huh?" asked Remo.

"I will be just a moment, Adji," Nalini called. "That means Grandmother," she whispered to Remo.

Pearl Clancy seemed not to understand a single word. Staring so hard her eyes seemed to bug out of her head, she brought pale clawlike hands up to her clenched face.

As Remo watched, she made bony fists on either side of her mouth and popped her forefingers out. Then she began wriggling them angrily, as if pointing at Remo. She was bouncing up and down in her seat.

"Come on," said Nalini quickly.

"What was that all about?" Remo asked.

"She's easily upset when left alone. Alzheimer's."

"That's tough. It really is. Bad enough she had to suffer through two of her sons ending up dead and the third a public drunk."

"What did you say your business was, Remo?"

"We're here to look into HELP."

Nalini touched a finger to her mouth. "A terrible thing, all these deaths and no one knows why."

"By the time we're done, everyone will know why. And how. And probably who too."

"You sound very confident."

"When Chiun and I get on something like this," Remo said, surprised at his own boastful words, "we usually bust everything wide open."

''I see," said Nalini in a quiet voice. Remo found himself disappointed in her response. For some reason, he wanted to impress her very much.

Chiun had reached the car when they drew near. His face wore an impatient frown.

"Well, thanks for your help," Remo said.

"I am happy to. Tell me, where are you staying?"

"I don't know yet."

"There is a nice motel three miles beyond Ukiah. You might try that."

"Thanks, I will." Remo hesitated. Normally, he avoided entanglements when on assignment, but there was something about this dusky-skinned woman that caught his interest. "Gonna be here a few days?"

"Yes, I believe so."

"Maybe I'll catch you around."

Nalini's smile was a shy ivory carving beneath the luminous jewels that were her dark eyes.

"Maybe I will allow you to catch me," she murmured.

And Remo smiled back.

He watched her walk away, her slim body swaying in time with the sari, and Remo thought he heard music.

Remo unlocked the door for Chiun and got behind the wheel. The Master of Sinanju's face was a thing carved out of stone.

"What's your problem?" Remo asked after they had started up the road.

"You let that harlot touch you."

"And?"

"She is a Hindu."

"So? She's a nice person. Anyone who would take care of an old dingbat like Pearl Clancy has to have a good heart."

"You did not hear what I said. She is a Hindu."

"I did hear you, and I don't care. I like her."

"Hindus only eat with their right hands."

"So?"

"You know what they do with their left hands."

"No. And knowing you, I don't want to hear."

"They wipe themselves," said Chiun. "Without toilet paper. That is why they do not eat with their left hands. Only their right."

"I knew I didn't want to hear it," said Remo, gunning the engine.

"Now you will need to wash yourself," Chiun sniffed.

"I'm sure Nalini is Americanized."

"Nevertheless, until you have washed the parts of your body that woman has touched, do not touch me."

"Oh brother. Anything else I should know in case I meet her again?"

"I did not like the color of her sari."

"What was wrong with it?"

"It is too vivid." Remo eyed Chiun's vermilion kimono. "Said the Korean fashion cop."

Chapter 9

Ukiah was smaller than Remo had expected. A tiny town of probably a thousand or so people. That limited the choice of hotels. There were two. And both had prominent ABSOLUTELY NO VACANCY signs lit up.

"Let's hope the motel Nalini told me about has some space," Remo said as they put the town behind them.

"It is no doubt infested with roaches if it serves Hindus," Chiun sniffed.

"Get off it, will you?"

"Only if you promise not to get on that Hindu."

"No deal."

Remo drove on and three miles up the road came to a little ticky-tacky nest of bungalow duplexes.

"Doesn't look so bad," Remo said.

As Remo pulled into the parking lot, the Master of Sinanju said, "This does not meet my modest standards."

Remo stabbed a finger out his window. "Look, see that sign? VACANCY. We're in luck. It may not look it, but we are."

"It is insufficient for my needs."

"After the press gets all the film and quotes they want, they're going to be descending on every fleabag motel from here to Oregon. We're just lucky they're so hot to get their stories they didn't bother to book their rooms first."

"I will consider it."

"Or you can sleep in the car."

"Only if you sleep in the trunk."

They went in.

The front desk was about the size of a kitchen table and had the same kind of green-flecked formica top. The man behind it was under thirty and had dirty blond hair.

"Greetings, innkeeper," proclaimed the Master of Sinanju. "We seek suitable lodgings."

"He means we want a room," said Remo.

"We will consider engaging a room if your establishment suits our needs," corrected Chiun.

"You run a wonderful establishment," said Remo, sliding a credit card across the formica countertop. "It comes highly recommended. Give us a bungalow."

"We will negotiate once we have interviewed your room service chef," proclaimed Chiun.

The desk clerk looked blank. "Room service chef?"

"You provide room service, of course," said Chiun.

"From time to time, yeah."

Chiun lifted his wide kimono sleeves to the ceiling. "Summon the illustrious purveyor of victuals."

"Purveyor of victuals?" undertoned Remo.

"We are in the West," whispered Chun, "I am speaking western."

"Yippie ti yo-yo," said Remo.

"Do you want a room or don't you?" the desk clerk demanded.

"I do," said Remo. "He's up in the air. Consider us separate clients."

The desk clerk looked unconvinced. "You gonna want room service?" he asked Remo.

"No."

"Good, because I reserve the right to refuse finicky guests. There're a bazillion press guys about two miles down the road and I foresee a long, busy night coming. "

"So do I. Where's my key?"

The desk clerk handed Remo a brass key which had a greasy green tag hanging from it with the room number written in faded ink.

"Unit sixteen," he said.

"Thanks," said Remo, signing the credit card slip.

"What about me?" squeaked the Master of Sinanju, his face as tight as a cobweb.

The desk clerk said, "You want room service, I got a night man who'll do a run to the Taco Hell. That's when things are slow. They won't be slow tonight."

"Taco Hell!" huffed Chiun, stamping his feet. "Remo, this is totally unacceptable."

"Not to me. And if I were you, pardner, I'd book a room quick because I feel a cool night coming on and that car looked mighty drafty to me."

"I will take the room adjoining this ingrate," said Chiun quickly. "Be sure to put it on his bill."

The desk clerk eyed Remo. "That okay with you, sir?"

Chiun snapped, "He has no say in these matters."

"Anything that placates him is fine with me," sighed Remo.

"Where does one find true food in these parts?" asked Chiun.

"True . . . ?"

"Rice . . . duck . . . fish."

"There's a Chinese restaurant in Ukiah. Yen Sin's. You might try that."

"Have their best dishes sent to my room and put it in on the white ingrate's bill," said Chiun.

"Sorry, the night man doesn't go into Ukiah. Only to the Taco Hell, which is just up the road."

"I'd have him make an exception in this case," Remo told the desk man.

"I don't see why I should."

The Master of Sinanju reached up and took the charge machine. He eyed it critically. The desk man became nervous.

"Don't drop that, sir."

Chiun looked up. "This contraption is important to you?"

"Definitely. Can't run the business without it."

Chiun nodded. "I will hold it for ransom until I have rice and steamed duck, or unseasoned fish, in my room."

"Sir, you don't want me to come around and take that away from you, do you?"

"I do not care what you do as long as I have proper room service," snapped the Master of Sinanju.

The desk clerk sighed and came out from behind his station.

He took hold of the charge machine before Remo could warn him. Chiun let him hold it long enough to get a good grasp. Then he rammed the heavy embossing slide from one end to the other, catching the desk man's fingers painfully.

His scream was exquisite. He lifted up on tippytoe, found a higher register, and his eyeballs in his upward-pointing face started looking like white grapes being squeezed from wrinkled pink baby fists.

Twenty minutes later, Remo and Chiun were seated on a very clean polyester rug in the middle of Chiun's bungalow room eating rice off fine china supplied by the wife of the desk man, who had been exceedingly grateful to discover that his fingerbones, once he recovered his hand, were miraculously whole.

"Not bad," said Remo.

Chiun made an unhappy face. "The rice has been boiled. I asked for steamed."

"Maybe they don't steam their rice out here."

"Steamed rice is best. Whites insist upon boiling it. Whites and Chinese who try to pass for white."

"Maybe it's the cowboy way of eating rice," Remo suggested airily.

"Do not be ridiculous, Remo," said Chiun, putting the rice aside and attacking his duck. "Cowboys eat cows. That is why they are called cowboys."

Without looking at the clock radio, Remo said, "I'd better call Smith before he leaves Folcroft for the night."

"Leave him be. Smith will not be pleased that we have discovered nothing."

"Smitty will worry if we don't call in. This new President has him antsier than I've seen him in a long time."

Harold Smith picked up on the first ring.

"Remo, what have you to report?"

"Not a heck of a lot. This place is lousy with press and politicians, my two least favorite kinds of people."

"No progress?"

"We seen the bugs, we've seen the bug-eaters and we've seen the bug-eaters eat the bugs. If that's progress, I'm on the wrong planet."

"There may be a break coming."

"Yeah?"

"I was listening to Thrush Limburger today-"

"You too?"

"Everyone listens to Thrush Limburger," said Smith. "At any rate, he is coming to Nirvana West."

"Yeah, I heard," Remo said sourly. "Just what we need-an ex-disk jockey to add to the festivities. All that was missing was a sound track, anyway."

"Limburger claims that on tomorrow's broadcast he will reveal the truth about HELP."

"What's the big deal? People are eating bugs and getting sick from it. The nuns who raised me taught me not to eat bugs when I was five."

"And you minded them?"

"No, I marched right out and ate the first bug I come upon. I think it was a firefly. After I got better, Sister Mary Margaret whacked my knuckles with a ruler and I never ate another bug again. What these dips need is a nun with an unbreakable ruler, and the so-called HELP plague is over."

"The deaths are spreading to the non-PAPA population," Smith said.

"They are?"

"It appears that these bugs are common in many areas of the country. Where they aren't, a black market has sprung up."

"Wait a minute! You mean even though people are dying from eating this bug, they're paying money for the privilege?"

"How is that different from cocaine use, or gourmets who eat wild mushrooms, or puffer fish, which if improperly prepared can kill?"

"I still don't get it."

"That is because you have had a proper upbringing. But the President is very concerned. He has not said so in any specific way, but I believe we and CURE are on probation. As you know, there is talk of folding the CIA into the State Department, which would save five billion taxpayer dollars. Our budget is much greater than that. He is looking at us closely."

"Do tell."

"We must show results, Remo. I am counting on you."

"We'll do our best. Talk to you tomorrow."

Remo hung up and returned to his spot on the rug.

"You heard every word, didn't you?" he asked Chiun.

"I do not eavesdrop."

"You don't have to. You have the ears of a fox."

Chiun raised a correcting finger. "I have the ears of an owl. A fox's ears are ugly."

"Thrush Limburger is definitely coming here. He's supposed to have the whole thing figured out."

"Why are you telling me things I already know?"

"I ask myself that question all the time. Look, I know you're a Limburger fan-God knows why-but remember, we're on a secret mission."

"To save America from its latest vice, bug eating. What would this country do without us to save it from itself?"

"Dry up and blow away like the Roman Empire, I guess." Remo started for the door, saying, "I'll see you in the morning."

"Remember to shower."

At the door, Remo turned. "Why do you say that?"

"You reek of that woman."

Remo sniffed his arm. The scent of Nalini was on the spot on his arm where she touched him. It brought a smile to his face. "And here I thought it was just her memory haunting me."

"Pah," said Chiun.

In his room, Remo stripped the bed. He couldn't sleep on most beds anymore. At home, a reed mat on the floor was all the bed he needed. This mattress was too lumpy. So he laid the sheet on the rug, stripped to his underwear, and lay down.

He couldn't sleep. He kept thinking of Nalini. He had liked her smile. He thought it was the tantalizing memory keeping him awake, when he remembered the perfume on his arm. That was what was keeping him awake.

Remo washed his arms in soap and hot water, which got rid of most of the scent. But not all of it. He threw up a window which let in cool air and a sound like an adenoidally challenged gander.

Chiun snored in the next room. He had left his window open too.

Remo willed out the sound, then all sounds, and after a last lingering recollection of Nalini's low, musical voice, he fell into a deep sleep.

Somewhere past three A.M., Remo awoke. Something was crawling along his arm and his first thought was roach.

Remo gave his arm a shake, and he heard something tick against the wall. He went back to sleep. Ten minutes later, the sensitive hairs on his forearm triggered an alarm, and this time he slapped the insect with his fingers, killing it.

Then he flicked the dead thing off, rolled over, and fell into a slumber that lasted until the break of dawn and the first raucous cries of bluejays.

He dreamed of Nalini. In his dream, he was a teenager again, before CURE, before the electric chair that hadn't worked had catapulted patrolman Remo Williams into his new life as the heir apparent to the House of Sinanju.

He and Nalini were walking down lower Broad Street in Newark, New Jersey, where he had grown up.

They were eating ice cream cones, and even in sleep, Remo tasted his because he had not eaten an ice cream cone or a dairy product or most foods since he had come to Sinanju, the sun source of the martial arts. His cone was cherry vanilla. Nalini's was chocolate fudge. He was looking at her's and wondering if he offered her a taste of his cone, would she return the favor.

They turned a corner and coming up it was Sister Mary Margaret, a wraith in black-and-white. Her eyes were steely. And she was carrying a steel ruler which she flicked. Out snapped a straight razor that was rusty with dried blood.

Remo pulled Nalini back and they got three blocks before the Master of Sinanju appeared, blocking their path.

His yellow hands came out of the sleeves of his bone white kimono and the nails attached to the ends of his fingers were long and curved and also the color of bone.

The Master of Sinanju bared his teeth like an enraged tiger, and from between his tiny white teeth came a sibilant hissing.

Remo woke up tasting cherry ice cream and smelling Nalini's perfume. He found himself looking forward to seeing her again. It had been a long time since he had looked forward to seeing a woman. A long time.

It was one of the downsides of Sinanju that while Remo had through correct breathing, stringent diet, and exercise techniques become absolute master of every cell in his body, and a literal killing machine, the techniques that cover the sexual act were focused on reducing the opposite sex to quivering jelly, which was nice, for the express purpose of fathering children, which was not currently on Remo's agenda. Sinanju sex techniques were so rigid and foolproof that no woman could resist them, and the practitioner, in this case Remo, might as well be wiring up a car stereo for all the pleasure he got out of it.

As a consequence, Remo had more and more come to enjoy sex less and less.

But he found himself humming as he dressed while waiting until Chiun's honking snores softened to a intermittent snuffle, and then knocked on his door.

"Rise and shine, Little Father. It's the beginning of a new day."

"What is good about that?" said Chiun.

"For one thing, Thrush Limburger's coming to town. And he knows when you've been naughty or nice."

"And I know when you have not showered. I am not emerging from this room until you do."

"Damn," said Remo. And the faint scent of Nalini came to his nose again. "Give me ten,"' he told the Master of Sinanju, ducking back into his room.

Remo hit the bathroom and turned on the shower, preparatory to taking off his clothes.

He got a metallic groan, a driblet of cold water, and the pipe groan resumed, without so much as a drop of water to make up for all the laborious racket.

"Perfect," Remo grumbled.

He called the front desk.

"What happened to my shower?"

"This happens from time to time. It's the drought."

"When will it come back on?"

"We never know," the desk man said.

Remo went out and said to Chiun, "Why didn't you tell me there's no shower water?"

"I had bath water. I took a wonderful bath."

"Well, you took my shower too, because you must have used up the last of the water."

"Now you are blaming me because you smell like a Hindu."

"I do not smell like a Hindu. Look, let's just have breakfast. Maybe there'll be water after we eat."

"I will not be seen in public with one who smells of the Ganges," said Chiun, flouncing off.

Remo let him go. He wasn't that hungry to begin with. He got into his car and drove into Ukiah, thinking he'd look up the local coroner. Maybe he'd have an empty slab and a hose Remo could borrow for a few hours.

Although the more he thought of it, the more Remo liked having Nalini's scent on him. Maybe he'd hold on to it awhile, just to annoy Chiun. Then again, maybe he'd look up Nalini and ask for a booster shot.

Chapter 10

Remo learned by asking around that the Ukiah coroner was also the local undertaker and that brought him to the town's sole funeral parlor. The name over the door was Esterquest and Son. Remo went in.

A properly funereal-faced man greeted him and said, "I do not believe we are waking anyone today."

"I'm looking for the coroner," said Remo.

"Mr. Esterquest is quite busy."

Remo flashed a CDC ID card and said, "Federal agent. I gotta see him. It's about this HELP problem."

The man exchanged his downcast expression for a glum one. "Could it wait? Mr. Esterquest is in the embalming room."

"I have a strong stomach. We can talk while he works."

The man sucked in his hollow cheeks until the bottom of his face looked like it belonged on a white satin pillow.

"That would hardly be proper," he said.

"Look, just tell him I'm here."

The man went away. He was back less than a minute later, wearing the same hollow expression. His tune was different, however.

"Mr. Esterquest says that he takes no responsibility for any unpleasant thing you may see."

"Fair enough," said Remo, and he followed the man into the back, past bare wake rooms and an atmosphere that was faintly sweet with flowers, but somehow bitter to breathe.

The double door had a brass plate that said EMBALMING ROOM, and the man threw it open. Remo entered and immediately cycled his breathing rhythms down so that the strong odor of formaldehyde wouldn't sear his sensitive lung linings.

Esterquest was bent over a body on a slab. The body was of a man, a sheet modestly covering his midsection. He was as gray as a dead picture tube.

He looked up and said, "I thought you were press."

"Center for Disease Control," said Remo.

Esterquest straightened.

"Don't you mean 'Centers'?"

"Who ever heard of something having more than one center?" Remo countered.

"Let me see that ID card of yours."

Remo handed it over. Esterquest was an ordinary-looking man with soft brown hair and no worry lines on his smooth, thirtyish face. He handed the card back with a reddish thumbprint on it.

"Excuse the blood," he said. "You're genuine. Even if you do have a goofy sense of humor. What can I do for you?"

"I'm looking into this HELP business. I hear you autopsied one of the first victims."

"Brother Sagacious. The UCLA professor. He was the only one they didn't dump into a shallow grave, and only because the family insisted upon a proper Southern Baptist burial. Later, I ordered some of the others exhumed for a proper autopsy. Public health regulations, you know. I'm up for reelection next year. "

"Find anything?"

"Yes and no."

"Let's hear both sides of it," said Remo.

"The dead all seem to be from the so-called Snapper wing of PAPA."

"I talked to both sides. Each side said only the other side caught the HELP virus."

"What do you expect from people who eat bugs? Well, I did six autopsies before it started getting out of hand. I'm the only coroner for six towns and I have enough of a job autopsying the car accident victims, natural causes deaths, and the like."

"Tough job."

"I said I was overworked, not that I didn't like it. Actually, it's very interesting sometimes. Take this man. Do you see any mark on him?"

Remo looked closer. "No."

"There isn't one. Not that I can find. But they found him behind the wheel of his car, parked at a rest stop, dead as yesterday's corned brisket. Barely forty too."

"Heart attack?"

"He'd be a distinct grayish blue."

"Carbon monoxide poisoning?"

"He'd be an exquisite cherry pink. There's no trauma, edema, no contusions, no cranial concussion. It's a mystery."

Remo grunted.

The man looked up and his face lost its hangdog look. He smiled. A twinkle came into his colorless eyes. "I happen to love a good mystery. You know, a woman's kinda like a mystery."

"Most women are," said Remo, thinking of Nalini.

"They're kinda like a puzzle every man aches to solve. You take your time about it, of course. You have to. Even with the shallowest woman, it takes time to solve the riddle of her ways. If you stay together long enough, finally you do. If you don't, they hang in your memory forever."

"Better to figure them out quick, huh?"

"Oh, I don't know. Once you crack the code, once you figure out what makes them tick-why their moods darken or lighten when they do-they're no longer quite as interesting. Some women, I think, it's better to leave unsolved."

"What good is a mystery if you can't solve it, right?"

"Which brings us back to this gray gentleman," Esterquest said suddenly. "There is no reason for him being dead that I can see."

"Well, he had to die of something," said Remo.

"True, which is why I'm going to spend all of today and as much of tomorrow as I dare, poking about this man's viscera. Because I know they hold the secret and I ache to solve it. Once I do," Esterquest shrugged broadly, "he's just another poor stiff and I'll go plodding on, embalming accident cases and stroke victims until the next tantalizing corpse comes along."

"Corpses don't tantalize me."

"Nor me. As corpses. But mysteries do. And in my job, I see a really meaty one but once in a blue moon. It's the same with the HELP victims."

"You have any ideas about that?"

"No, not yet. But I've been saving all my data, blood and tissue samples. I think HELP can be explained. It's just a matter of time."

"Let's get to the yes of this conversation."

Esterquest smiled easily. "You'll never be a detective, my CDC friend. You don't have the patience. As I was saying, the bodies I saw were all from the Snapper wing. This makes sense if the dreaded thunderbug was transmitting the disease, because the Snappers don't cook their bugs. Cooking would likely kill the viral microorganism, rendering them harmless protein. As you know, a virus is just a bit of genetic material surrounded by a protective protein envelope."

"So it is the bug?"

"Except for one tiny but significant detail. I found no trace of viral infection in the linings of their stomachs, the logical invasion site."

"One federal guy I spoke to thought they could be getting it through mouth sores or cuts."

"A good theory, except that if the bug was carrying a bug, some of the victims surely would show soft-tissue damage in the mouth. And I didn't find any cold sores. Cooties, yes. Periodontal disease, also. But their mouths were clean of viral infection."

"That brings us back to the no-bug theory."

"Except there is something killing these people that suggests a virus. If not a virus, perhaps a communicable disease on the order of Lyme disease or a lethal toxin like paralytic shellfish poisoning. Those possibilities are real enough. But I don't know enough about these things to say how they might work or not work inside the body. The HELP agent doesn't appear to be of a type that could kill a full-grown adult inside of forty-eight hours."

"Why not?"

"Because there are no discernible symptoms or effects. The person just becomes very tired one day, and starts wasting until he dies. In order for a virus to kill, there must be physical symptoms, wouldn't you think?"

"I guess," said Remo.

"After all, warts are a symptom of one kind of virus. Chicken pox and mumps have their signature symptoms. Other viral infections settle in major internal organs, such as the heart or the lungs. None of these organs have been affected in any way I can find. HELP victims waste away and they die. But they don't seem to die of the wasting process."

"Kinda like a stealth virus."

"A good way of putting it." Esterquest gestured toward the body on the slab. "You know, I was about to open this man up."

"Be my guest," said Remo.

Esterquest eyed Remo doubtfully. "You have the stomach for seeing me remove this man's stomach?"

"I was in Nam. I've seen everything."

"If you faint, I'm just going to leave you there."

"Don't sweat it," Remo said. "I only faint at election returns."

As Remo watched, Esterquest made a lateral incision from the breastbone down to the pubic bone, without getting anything in the way of blood. He poked around happily.

"Since I see no external signs," he mused, "I'm going to look at this man's major organs. Examine the stomach contents. Perhaps it was something he ate."

"Like thunderbugs?"

"I hear it's a fad now." Esterquest shook his rumpled head in disbelief. "What is this country coming to?"

Remo shrugged. He watched as the dead man's limp liver-colored stomach was excised, sliced open, and the contents removed and set on a stainless steel tray. It was a milky mass that looked like nothing remotely edible.

"If the virus kills after forty-eight hours, will you find any bugs?" Remo asked.

"Probably not. Carapace material is usually impervious to stomach acid, but that damn bug is almost one hundred percent digestible." Esterquest was picking the mass apart and smearing samples on a glass slide. He looked at it through a microscope.

"No bug parts that I can see."

"Then he didn't eat the bugs."

Esterquest looked up and smiled knowingly.

"Oh, there's still the bowel contents to look at, yet."

Remo's face fell. "That part I think I can skip."

"Everyone has their limitations. Myself, I'd prefer to forgo a bowel incision. Even with a face mask, built-up gasses are the worst."

Remo started to go.

Esterquest called, "Oh, there is one other thing."

Remo turned. "Yeah?"

"Even though there was no viral agent in their stomachs, there was something funny in their blood."

"What?"

"I don't know. Never saw anything like it before. And without an electron microscope, and a whole range of testing dyes and the like, I can't pursue it any further."

"Oh," said Remo.

As he started to go, the man called after him, "Next time you're in town, drop by again. Maybe we can compare notes some more. Lord knows an old poison oaker like me could use the company."

Remo noticed the man's colorless eyes flick to a framed picture of a smiling young woman with curly hair.

"Wife?" Remo asked.

Esterquest nodded. "Be gone six years in October."

"Sorry."

"I'm used to death in my business."

"Ever figure her out?"

Esterquest didn't look up. His no was barely audible.

"Catch you around," said Remo, shutting the door after himself. A hissing of released gas came distinctly through the door and Esterquest, his voice once more buoyant, exclaimed, "Gahh! I hate this part. But it'll be worth it if you give up all your secrets, my silent gray friend."

Remo left the funeral parlor in a better mood than when he had gone in. It was good to come upon unexpectedly, someone who was really excited about his work. Even if the nature of that work wasn't always so pleasant. Funny how someone who deals in death all the time should find in that a way to make his life more interesting.

Remo reflected that he and the undertaker were in the same business. Death. Except Remo was more of a manufacturer and the undertaker a packager of the final product.

The town was pretty quiet once Remo got out into the fresh air. There was no sign of the press and Remo wondered if they had simply camped out at Nirvana West. He wasn't looking forward to going back to that clowns' nest.

On the other hand, maybe Nalini would be there.

As Remo started for his car, from down the road came the blare of rock music. It was loud. It was very loud. And it was coming this way fast. It sounded like some idiot teenager had his car stereo cranked up to one-hundred-fifty decibels.

As Remo got his motor going, he saw in his rearview mirror a big RV barreling through town. It was painted red, white, and blue and the too-loud rock was blaring from a loudspeaker mounted on the roof.

"Damn, another politician," muttered Remo, gunning into reverse and peeling out one step ahead of the approaching RV.

On the way back to the motel, Remo spotted the Master of Sinanju walking along, his hands tucked into the sleeves of his sky blue kimono. Remo stopped and rolled down his window.

"Going my way?" he asked cheerfully.

Chiun looked at him with a wrinkling nose and disdainful eyes. "Have you showered?"

"No," Remo admitted.

"Then I am not going your way, unclean one."

"Oh, come on. Don't be that way."

"You smell worse than before," Chiun said pointedly.

"I just attended an autopsy."

"Then it is doubly important that you shower," sniffed the Master of Sinanju, hurrying on.

Remo let him go. He drove past, watching the one who taught him Sinanju in his rearview mirror with unhappy eyes.

"Every time I meet somebody I like, he's gotta pull this tired old crap," muttered Remo.

Chapter 11

The conventional wisdom was that Thrush Limburger would end up like Morton Downey. His ego is too big, they said. He's growing too fast. People listen to him just to laugh at him, others insisted. Just you watch, once his ratings start to fall, they'll find that windbag in some airport men's room stall, his head shaved, Mirrors of Venus-the symbol for womankind-lipsticked all over his dazed face, babbling that the "Feminasties" are out to get him.

They said that in his first year. They said it in his second. When he jumped to television, they claimed it would be the kiss of death. Thrush Limburger. He's so "hot" he's on TV. Ha-ha-ha.

The conventional wisdom said that when a trend or movement or whatever hit the tube, that meant it was on its way out, if not already dead.

Everybody knew it. Everybody except Thrush Limburger, that is. He was already hard at work on his next bestseller, I Told You So, as his red, white, and blue remote broadcast RV rolled into the town of Ukiah, the proud letters TTT NETWORK emblazoned on the side.

"As I speak to you from the rolling hills of Mendocino County," Thrush boomed into the microphone, simultaneously typing on his portable computer, whose keys were padded so he could write and broadcast simultaneously, "I am struck by how gullible large segments of the American people have become in our electronic age. Let's take Theodore Soars-With-Beagles-I mean Eagles. Now the press is reporting that he's a full-blooded Chinchilla Indian. My friends, I have combed every encyclopedia, spoken to noted anthropologists and ethnologists, and they all tell me that there is no such being as a Chinchilla Indian. Now I admit even I had to look this up. I couldn't be certain. Sure, it sounded funny, but I suppose it's possible for there to be such a thing. After all, there's a tribe calling itself the Pontiacs, and they have nothing to do with the auto industry. So let me share something with you."

Abruptly, Limburger gave his jowly right cheek a slap with his fleshy right hand. The sound was like raw pork chops colliding.

His audience accepted the mushy sound without a qualm. They understood that Thrush Limburger was an excitable fellow. He often drummed his fingers, stamped his feet, and fluttered faxes and newspaper clippings into the open mike. It was part of his on-air persona, he boasted. What he neglected to mention was that Thrush Limburger suffered from a mild form of Tourette's Syndrome.

Thrush was also on a self-improvement program where if he found himself using a mushy word on the air, he would stop and slap himself in the face as an ungentle reminder that he had committed an inappropriate public utterance.

In this case, the mushy word was "share."

"Now Theodore Soars-With-Eagles calls himself a Chinchilla Indian," Thrush continued. "And that is his God-given right. He can call himself a springbok if it so pleases him. But here's a flash. There are no Chinchillas, except the furry ones women wrap around their necks. At great peril to their well-being, by the way, thanks to the animal rights crowd. For the benefit of the adherents of PAPA and Mr. Theodore Soars-With-Eagles, if you can hear me, my fine feathered friend, the correct tribal name is Chowchilla. Not Chin chilla. Chow chilla. Now I ask you, listeners, how seriously can we take the pronouncements of a self-appointed Indian spokesman if he can't even get the name of his own tribe right?"

Thrush chuckled throatily, a good-natured sound, even amplified by sound systems all across the nation. "I'll be back, after this message from our sponsor, Tipple."

Limburger popped a cassette into the rack, and as his deep orator's voice extolled the virtues of his favorite soft drink, his haberdasher, and the very loud ties he wore, he hit the intercom button and asked his assistant, "Where are we, Custer?"

"Approaching Ukiah, Thrush."

"Hot damn. You call that coroner?"

"He says he'll see you. But not on the air."

"Why not? Doesn't he know Thrush Limburger is on three-hundred-thirty stations here and in Canada, one for every blessed pound in his generously proportioned body?"

"Maybe he doesn't like the press."

"Press? I'm not the press. I'm the antipress. I'm the truth. "

"He won't budge, Thrush."

"Okay, I'm a reasonable man. We'll do it his way. What we'll do is a bunch of packaged stuff. Feminasty Report. Furry Friends Update. Liberal Valhalla. The whole works. That should give me time to talk to him, and the audience won't even miss me-because I won't ever have stopped talking."

"You got it, Thrush."

When the RV pulled up before the Esterquest and Son funeral parlor, the rear door popped open and Thrush Limburger lumbered out, the sound of his own canned voice following him in.

He was inside not ten minutes. He came out like a rogue elephant, jumping to the driver's side window and bouncing happily. The entire van rocked on its heavy-duty shocks.

"I got it!" he chortled. "I figured it out! This is perfect. This is amazing. Only Thrush Limburger could just roll into a town and crack open something that has stumped official Washington."

"You always say official Washington is made up of lukewarm chowderheads," said his assistant, behind the wheel.

"I was right then and I'm right now, Custer. Let's get on to Nirvana West, pronto. I want to bust this thing wide open from the environmentalist whackjob ground zero. Damn, am I good."

The red, white, and blue RV roared out of Ukiah trailing a long coil of carbon monoxide.

And all across American, the voice of Thrush Limburger proclaimed, "My faithful listeners, you are about to be rewarded for your loyalty to this show. In the months to come, you people are going to be able to boast that you were among the discerning multitudes who heard Thrush Limburger debunk the HELP crisis for all time. That's right, while you were listening to my Democratic Hall of Shame via the magic of audiotape, your tireless servant was lifting up rocks and digging up the unpleasant muck under them. And guess what I found? What I always find. What you expect me to find. Dramatic pause here." Thrush cleared his throat with a sound like a steamroller grumbling and lowered his voice, knowing that millions of Americans, already on the edge of their seats, would lean closer to their radios. "I found . . . the truth. And it shall set you free!"

With that, Thrush Limburger popped in an ad cassette and leaned back in his chair, his pudgy hands folding over his ample belly. A self-satisfied smile crossed his broad, open features.

Cody Custer was Thrush Limburger's chief of staff, gofer, and when necessity arose, his personal driver. Thrush Limburger did not drive. He liked to say that he had been too busy to stop and learn how. But the truth was, at three-hundred-thirty pounds, getting behind the wheel of even a Lincoln Continental was an effort for Thrush Limburger. Besides, the steering wheel always left a red crease in the rolls of fat surrounding his navel.

So he didn't drive. Cody Custer drove for him.

Two minutes out of Ukiah, a tape cassette came through a slot that connected the driver's cab with the RV body, and Thrush Limburger's voice said, "When we get there, put this out over the PA speaker. That ought to atttact a huge crowd."

"Right, Thrush."

As he piloted the TTT Network RV to Nirvana West, Cody Custer wondered how even his brilliant boss could pierce the veil of media fog that surrounded Human Environmental Liability Paradox. Sure, Thrush was a genius in his way, part philosopher, part showman. And his book had been number one on the bestseller list for three months, except for that black period when Madonna's overhyped nonbook had knocked it to the number two slot. But Thrush hadn't been inside that funeral parlor for more than ten minutes. Less.

Cody Custer's musings were interrupted when, coming around a sharp bend in the road, he was confronted with a set of California Highway Patrol saw horses.

He started compressing the brake pedal. The big RV began to slow. Rubber smoked and squealed.

There was a CHP black-and-white unit and a motorcycle, he saw, parked off on the shoulder of the highway.

Three CHP officers in suntan khaki and calf-high black boots approached. They looked grim behind their mirror shades.

Cody Custer returned their grimness with a polite tone. "Hi. This is the Thrush Limburger mobile broadcast van. Is there a problem?"

"Going to Nirvana West, sir?" one officer asked.

"That's right."

"We're warning all traffic going into the area that there is a chance this HELP plague is getting contagious."

"My boss will laugh at that. He says there's no such virus."

"It's our duty to warn you of the dangers of proceeding, sir. This is the only roadblock between here and Nirvana West."

"We'll go ahead."

"I'm sorry. I have to apprise every motorist individually of the risks involved. Health Department regs."

Now they are taking this too far, Custer thought. Aloud, he said, "My boss is in back, but he's broadcasting."

"We won't take but a minute of his time."

"Okay, go ahead and knock. But don't be surprised if you wind up explaining yourself on the air. Thrush loves this kind of weak-kneed stuff."

The California Highway Patrol officer touched the bill of his uniform cap, and two of them went around to the rear of the RV.

Custer watched them in his rearview mirror while the third officer watched him with unreadable eyes. Those eyes kept Custer from grinning noticeably. One of the cops had a ponytail tucked up under his cap. Only in California, he thought.

The two officers were not gone long. But they did get in. Custer could tell by the creaking of the RV springs, caused by the shifting of weight in back. Every time Thrush moved around, the springs complained.

Only one of the troopers came back. "You're all set."

"Did he give you a hard time?"

"No, sir. He was very cooperative."

"Guess he is in a good mood."

The sawhorses were set aside and Custer drove on.

The Tell the Truth mobile broadcast RV lumbered into Nirvana West like a red, white, and blue amphibious vehicle. The loudspeaker was blaring Fed Leppar, known to be Thrush Limburger's favorite rock band.

That was enough to get the attention of the swarm of press people who were jostling one another for the rapidly dwindling supply of lobster salad sandwiches being handed out at the food service truck. They were eating them as if it were the last food on earth.

The music stopped when the RV did. Behind the wheel, the driver popped the music cassette and inserted another.

Fanfare blared. Minicams were rushed to the site. A white limousine arrived and out squeezed Senator Ned J. Clancy, looking worried and working his asthma inhaler often. His aides, seeing this, pressed close in case he started to list.

And from the loudspeaker, came a hearty baritone.

"Ladies and Gentlemen. This is Thrush Limburger. I have promised that I would come and now I have. You have been yanked. That is, you have been deceived. I have brought you the truth, and it shall set you free."

The fanfare returned. It was brassy, triumphal, attention-getting.

And everyone who could, got around to the back of the RV where they expected Thrush Limburger to emerge. Those who had sandwiches brought them.