"Yes, whizzbees. We are to exterminate all throwers of whizzbees in your country. Because they missed, Emperor Smith said. It makes no sense to me. The man is mad," finished Chiun, who always called Smith "Emperor" because the House of Sinanju had worked for emperors since the Pharaohs. Even though times had changed and Smith chose to call himself a director, because Sinanju worked for him, Smith was thereby exalted by the association with Sinanju and would forevermore be known as Emperor. At least in the annals of Sinanju.
"No, you've got it wrong, Chiun," Remo corrected. "Smith doesn't want us to hit Frisbee players. He wants us to go after some flying saucer people."
"Flying saucers? Whizzbees? Are they not the same thing? They are flat and they fly when thrown."
"No, flying saucers are different. They don't exist— I don't think..."
Chiun stopped gesticulating and regarded Remo steadily with narrowed hazel eyes. "Aah. Now it is clear. Now you are the mad one, Remo. You accepted a contract to go after people who don't exist."
"No, Chiun. It's— look, never mind. I'll explain it another time. It's too complicated. We've got to pack."
"You pack. I am busy."
"Doing what?" Remo asked.
"I am busy," Chiun repeated and turned his back toward Remo. Remo could see he was fiddling with his kimono.
A minute later, Chiun turned around and with a broad smile said, "Here, Remo. I have brought something for you."
"Yeah? What?" Remo asked suspiciously.
"It is a toy. A very simple toy. Many American children play with them, and I have one for you to try."
Remo looked at the multicolored block in Chiun's delicate hands and said, "That's no toy. That's a Rubik's Cube. You've got to be a mathematical genius to line those little squares up right."
"Nonsense," said Chiun. "It is a simple toy. The child who gave me this was himself proficient in its use."
"What child?"
"The one who gave this to me. The one I just spoke about," Chiun said logically.
"Why would a child give you his Rubik's Cube?" demanded Remo.
"Because he dared me to solve it, and I said I would only solve this toy if the toy were the reward for my effort. Masters of Sinanju do not put forth effort without compensation."
"You took that thing away from a kid? I'm ashamed of you, Chiun."
"I did not take it. I earned it," Chiun sniffed.
"Wait a minute. You solved that thing? All by yourself?"
"Of course," Chiun said blandly. "I am the Master of Sinanju."
"I don't believe it. Prove it."
Chiun, taken aback, hesitated and then said stiffly, "Very well, Remo. I will show you." He gathered the cube close to him, holding it with both hands and bent his ancient head. As Remo bent forward for a closer look, Chiun's frail-seeming hands became a blur.
"See, Remo," crowed Chiun, holding the cube up. Each side was a solid color.
"I didn't see your hands," Remo said.
"You saw the cube. You saw me hold the cube. Then you saw me raise the cube and the cube was correctly done. What more is there to see?"
"You might have had another cube stashed in your clothes and switched them."
"Really, Remo. I would not stoop to such subterfuge."
"But you would stoop to conning a little kid."
"I have taught the child a valuable lesson. Not to speak with strangers." Chiun suddenly perked up. "Here, now you try."
Remo took the cube. Chiun had twisted it again, so the little colored squares were in a haphazard pattern. Remo knew, because he had read it somewhere, that there were a quintillion or more possible hand-moves and combinations of arrangements of the mobile squares, and only someone who knew the exact moves necessary to align the squares properly could solve the puzzle. Most people gave up, not understanding that it couldn't be accomplished by trial and error, like a jigsaw puzzle. On the other hand, proficient people could solve the cube in under a minute.
Remo had just seen Chiun do it in about six seconds. Even with Chiun's superhuman reflexes and coordination, it didn't make sense that Chiun, who knew no more about higher mathematics than he did about baseball, could master the puzzle so quickly.
Remo spent five minutes trying, and all he managed was to get a bunch of blue squares in an L shape on one side, and a cluster of orange ones on the other. There was a blue square in the middle of the orange cluster, and when Remo tried to get that onto the right side, he lost the orange cluster. Then he gave up.
"Heh, heh, heh," cackled Chiun. "Short attention span. I was right."
"Right about what?" Remo fumed.
"Right that you are not ready to master the art of the Killing Nail. Anyone who cannot solve a child's puzzle is not prepared mentally for the later stages of Sinanju." And having absolved himself of his earlier misjudgment, Chiun, the reigning Master of Sinanju, repaired to the kitchenette to make breakfast.
Remo decided he wasn't hungry.
?Chapter Five
Remo Williams read about flying saucers on the flight to Oklahoma City. Smith's information package consisted of raw data in the form of newspaper clippings, magazine articles, Air Force studies, case histories and computer printouts from CURE. If the CURE computer ever processed this hodgepodge of facts, reports, statistics and wild speculations into a concrete evaluation, Smith had neglected to provide the results.
For once, Remo was not bothered by Chiun. In fact, Chiun was barely in his seat for most of the flight— the one that he always took so he would be the first to know if the wings fell off— and instead walked up and down the aisles, happily demonstrating his ability with Rubik's Cube to anyone who cared to watch. Remo still couldn't figure out how Chiun did it, and it aggravated him.
In Oklahoma City, they registered in a hotel near the Will Rogers World Airport. Remo signed the register as Remo Greeley, the cover name Smith had given him. He was supposed to be a freelance writer affiliated with a tabloid that ran a lot of UFO articles, here in Oklahoma City to do an article on FOES. Remo turned to ask Chiun if he wanted to sign in, but Chiun was off by the elevators, where he had collected a group of bellboys, who stared wide-eyed at Chiun's cube-solving speed.
With a perverse grin, Remo signed the book for Chiun, writing on it, "Hen Nee Yung Man." Chiun would never know.
By afternoon, Remo had read most of the UFO material. He learned that since 1947, when a pilot sighted a formation of plate-shaped objects flying over a mountain range in Washington State and coined the term "flying saucer," UFO sightings had been occurring regularly with only periodic fluctuations. Most of these sightings, about 95.7 percent, according to Folcroft computers, were the result of unskilled people mistaking airplane lights, observation balloons, meteorites and other natural phenomena. The remaining 4.3 percent were simply unidentified. They could be anything— even spacecraft from beyond the earth.
This last was a possibility, according to one set of statistics, which claimed that there were so many stars in the sky that if only one in a billion of them shone on a planet that harbored intelligent life, then mathematically speaking there would be millions of inhabited worlds in the universe. Remo didn't buy it. Even if the numbers were true, nothing said that these intelligent beings could build interstellar spaceships, or that they would bother to visit Earth, even if they could in less than a hundred million zillion years. Or that these beings, no matter how intelligent, might not be exactly human and therefore might not be able to build a treehouse, never mind a spaceship. You had to have hands to build something, right? Remo wondered idly if some of them might not look like Rubik's Cubes. If they did, then the invasion had already begun and all bets were off. They had already gotten to Chiun.
Reading through the eyewitness accounts of reported contact with aliens, Remo learned that UFOs came from the planet Venus and were piloted by tall, long-haired friendly Venusians; that they also came from Mars and were built by short, hairy, vicious creatures intent upon kidnaping South American women for sexual gratification; that they were the work of an underground supercivilization from within the earth itself, who flew out of an unknown hole in the North Pole; or that they were scientific probes from a distant star and manned by gray-skinned vivisectionists with no lips and eyes like tomcats.
Every report contradicted every other one. Except that most of them quoted the aliens as being very concerned about our atomic weapons. And that was why they were here. To make sure it didn't get out of hand.
That was the only common denominator. And the only factor that fit in with the attack on the missile site.
There was a file on FOES, which insisted that the letters stood for Flying Object Evaluation Center, proving to Remo that Smith's computers weren't always infallible. FOES had been founded in 1953 in Dayton, Ohio, and over the years had sprouted chapters in several states. The only unusual activity associated with any chapter took place only a couple of years ago, when a chapter in Utah tried to force the Central Intelligence Agency to make its top-secret files on UFOs open to public inspection under the Freedom of Information Act. The case had gone all the way to the Supreme Court, which threw the suit out when the CIA convinced the Court that it had already released 99 percent of all its data and the remaining data contained the names of agents who might be compromised. A representative of FOES was later quoted as saying that national security should never stand in the way of the pursuit of truth, and said that this "only proved that the UFO cover-up carried on by the government since the forties stretched all the way to the Supreme Court."