“All right,” said Smith. The voice was weak.
“If you don't want me to do it, just say so. And I won't.”
“Of course we need you, Remo. But I was wondering about Chiun.”
“You don't even know Chiun,” said Remo. He was at a telephone at the Portland, Oregon, airport. A woman at the phone next to him asked him to be quiet. He told her he wasn't yelling. She said he was. He said if she wanted to hear yelling, he could yell. She said he was yelling right now.
“No,” said Remo, collecting power in his lungs, and then setting a high pitch to his voice. “This,” he sang so that the very lights quivered in the ceiling, “is yelling.”
The three floor-to-ceiling windows at gates seven, eight, and nine collapsed like a commercial for sound tape.
“Well,” said the woman. “That certainly is yelling to me.” And she hung up and walked away.
Smith was still on the phone saying shocks had somehow altered the scrambler system and he was getting warning signals that this might be an open line very soon. No protection for secrecy.
“I'm all right,” said Remo. “I know I had my target in panic. That's what does it. Making the life force take over.”
“Does that life force have anything to do with the cosmic relationship?”
“No. That's timing. That's me. Life force is them. No. The answer to your question is no.”
“All right, Remo. All right.”
“The life force is not me,” he said.
“All right,” said Smith.
“All right,” said Remo.
“The name is Gladys Smith. She is twenty-nine years old, a secretary to one of the largest grain-trading companies in the world. She is testifying against her entire firm, which has been making secret deals with the Russians undercutting our entire agricultural policy. The government is keeping her in a Chicago apartment. She is not that heavily defended, but she is defended.”
“So she's defended. Defenses aren't a problem for me,” said Remo.
“I didn't say they were. Remo, you are more important to us than these cases. We've got to know we have you. America needs you. You're upset now.”
“I'm always upset,” said Remo. “Just give me her address.”
When he left the little phone area, he saw workmen were cleaning up the barrier glass at the gates and people were staring at him. Someone was mumbling that Remo was the one whose voice had shattered the windows. But an airport maintenance director said that was impossible. A car could drive into that glass and it would not shatter.
Remo grabbed the next flight to Chicago and dozed in first class. Before they landed he did his breathing and felt the good leveling force of all power move through him, calming him. He realized then he had done what he should never do, let his mind take over, the mind where doubts lived and thrived on selected pieces of negative information culled from the universe of information. He knew he had done his job right. The witness had somehow truly forgotten. He decided not to use fear this time.
* * *
Gladys Smith had finished her fourteenth romance novel of the week and was wondering if she would ever get to have a man's arms around her again, when the finest romantic experience of her life walked through the door she thought had been locked.
He was thin, with thick wrists and a sharp handsome face with dark eyes that told her he knew her. Not from an earlier meeting, but in some other, deeper way.
He moved silently with a grace she had never seen in a man.
“Gladys?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Gladys Smith?”
“Yes.”
“I'm here for you.”
“I know,” she heard herself saying. He did not grab her like one of the boyfriends that haunted her past. He did not even caress her. His touch was gentler than that, as though his fingerpads were an extension of her own flesh.
She never knew her arms could feel so good. She sat down on the bed. She never knew she could feel so good about her body. It was becoming alive in ways she had never known. It was welcoming him, it was wanting him, and finally it was demanding him.
Her mind was like a passenger on a trip her body was taking. And just when she hovered at the edge of a climax that would satisfy every longing she had had as a woman, he asked for something so minor and trivial all she could do was sob, “Yes. Yes. Yes.” And that sob became a scream of satisfaction and joy.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes, darling, anything. Of course I'll remember. What should I remember?”
“Your testimony,” he said.
“Oh, that,” she said. “Of course. What do you want me to remember?”
“Whatever your testimony was,” he said. She put his hand back on her neck. She never wanted his hands away from her again.
“Sure. But I don't remember it. I don't remember anything that happened at the company. It's like almost everything after my twenty-first birthday never happened.”
“Of course it happened.”
“I know it happened. But I don't remember it, darling. I don't. When I look at the pages of testimony I gave, it's as though some stranger had said it. I don't even remember giving the testimony. I don't remember anything past four weeks ago.”
“What happened four weeks ago?”
“Put your hand back where it was. Okay. There. Right where you had it before. People were looking at me. And they were asking me things, strange things about grain transfers. And I didn't know what they were talking about. They told me I had worked for a grain-trading company. They got very angry. I don't know why they got angry. They asked me who bought me off. I would never lie for money. I'm not that sort of person.”
“You really didn't lie,” said the man with the dark eyes that knew her.
“Of course not, darling. I never lie.”
“I was afraid of that. Good-bye.”
“Wait. Where are you going? Take your clothes back off. Get back here. Wait. Wait!”
Gladys ran after him to the door.
“I'll lie. If you want me to lie, I'll lie. I'll memorize everything in the transcript. I'll remember it. I'll say it word for word. Just don't leave me. You can't leave me.”
“Sorry. I've got work.”
“When will I ever find someone else like you?”
“Not in this century,” said Remo.
* * *
This time he did not phone in his failure. He insisted on a meeting with Smith.
“That won't be necessary, Remo. I know you didn't fail. As a test, one of our government agencies damned worried about this thing ran lie-detector tests on two witnesses who claimed to have forgotten their own stories. Both of them passed. They weren't lying. They really did forget their own testimony.”
“Wonderful,” said Remo.
“Wonderful? This is a disaster,” said Smith. “Someone out there knows how to dismantle our entire justice system. This country is going to fall apart pretty soon.”
“Pretty soon? When was the last time you made a phone call, Smitty? You want to watch falling apart in action, call a repairman.”
“I mean there will be no way we can enforce any law if someone knows how to make witnesses forget. No law. Think about it. If you can make people forget, there will never be another witness. Never.”
Remo thought about it. He thought about forgetting things, forgetting his early life in the orphanage. If he could only forget selectively, he thought, it might be the best thing that ever happened.
