rudimentary of levels this morning. Now I can make people perspire. I can raise or lower their blood pressure.' He held up the papers triumphantly. 'Thanks to our friend from the bank, I can now use the interface frequency to reg-ulate hormones in human beings.'
'I am certain every parent with an oversexed teen-ager will be lining up tomorrow for your invention,'
Holz droned in a bored tone. He stared beyond Newton at the reproduction of Toledo in a Storm that hung on his office wall. The dark, grayish green hills and the savage clouds of the El Greco painting seemed to mirror his inner mood.
Newton raised an eyebrow. 'Is there something wrong?'
Holz drummed his fingers on his desk, still staring at the painting. 'There are those who question the wisdom of our little demonstration.'
There was only one thing the scientist could sur-mise. 'You went before the board.'
Holz nodded. 'This afternoon.'
'And you didn't tell me the results?'
'I did not wish to disrupt your research.'
Newton's voice shook with concern. 'They're not thinking of shutting us down?'
Holz shook his head. His gaze was distant, and his voice soft as his eyes traversed the grim Spanish landscape. 'The board is nothing. I don't answer to them.'
'What do you mean?' Newton asked, puzzled.
The board was the ultimate authority at PlattDeutsche.
Holz allowed himself a wan half smile. He pulled his eyes away from the painting. 'Worry about your test tubes and beakers, Curt. Let me worry about other matters,' he said. Newton shrugged. The last test tube he had seen was on a TV show almost a year before. He launched into his report. This was, after all, the reason both of them were putting in such late hours.
'We're working back from our subject's mind to program our computers. The work is going faster than I could have hoped for. But this guy is amazing.
Truly an enigma. There was a whole section of his brain that was virtually walled off to all of my best efforts. Even Mervin had a hard time with it.'
'Was the information damaged when it was downloaded?'
'No, it was perfectly copied. It's just that it was filed away in such a way that proved difficult to access.'
'But not impossible.'
Newton grinned as he placed his computer printouts on the large desk. 'I haven't reached all of it yet, but I've scratched the surface. It's almost like a testament to triviality. This guy has locked away stuff on financial matters. That's always easiest to reach first because of the raw numbers. And I guess that it makes sense for him to lock it up. Prying eyes and all. But I haven't quite nailed down the proper ratios. The computer is probably multiplying everything by a factor of ten or something. It's saying that the amounts he's moving are in the millions, and that can't be right. We were stumped on the cash aspect, which has held us up on the rest of this area of his mind.'
'Maybe his work requires him to move large sums of cash,' Holz suggested.
'Please. He reminded me of my nickel-counting grandmother,' Newton said. 'I just wish so much of the initial data capture didn't revolve around raw numbers. It usually helps, but here it's hindered us.'
He pointed at the printout. 'Look. A lot of this phantom cash goes to Korea, and a lot of it gets moved around here.'
'Korea?'
'Yes. You're not going to believe this. The stuff this guy thinks is important enough to lock away is amazing. The money, according to our best guess, goes to a place called Sinanju.'
Holz sat up. 'Sinanju?' he said sharply. He snatched the computer papers from Newton but no matter how much he stared, could make neither head nor tail out of them.
'It's a small village in North Korea,' Newton explained.
'I know where it is.'
Newton looked surprised. 'Really? I had to look it up. An interesting story. It seems that this small fishing village is listed in our files along with a bunch of other legends. For centuries, since the dawn of civilization, actually, the village of Sinanju has been the seat of the Master of Sinanju. The titular head of an ancient house of assassins. The story goes that the Master of Sinanju has rented his services out to the highest bidder for centuries. All myth, this Sinanju.
I guess it's right up there with Robin Hood or Bigfoot. I'm just wondering how it found its way into our Dr. Smith's head.'
Holz had been frowning over the incoherent computer sheet until Newton's last words.
'Doctor?' he said.
Newton grinned proudly. 'I've found him. He runs a sanitarium up in Rye. The first numbers to yield to our probe were his home and office. I looked him up in the phone book. He lives on the edge of the Westchester Golf Club.'
Holz considered. 'The Master of Sinanju,' he said softly.
Newton nodded and retrieved the computer sheets.
'He's probably just regurgitating stored memories. Neuron junk. He probably read about it years ago.'
'Millions of dollars in gold are shipped to Korea.'
'Only in his head.' Newton was so tired he didn't even remember not mentioning the fact that the millions to Korea were in gold. 'It is probably just a few thousand. Maybe he gets paper clips or other office supplies from there. I'm amazed by how much of his brain is filled up with that sort of minutiae. It seems half his occipital lobe is dedicated to compar-ing the prices of staples today as opposed to thirty years ago.'
Holz was no longer listening. He thought about the millions, about Korea. About the Master of Sinanju.
And about his superiors.
Newton cleared his throat. 'Um, now that I know who he is, Lothar, I would like to get him down here, if you can arrange it. I'd love to do some laboratory study on him. It could step up the process.'
Holz nodded slowly. 'Yes,' he said at long last.
'Yes, I would love to meet this most fascinating individual.'
Newton was beside himself with delight. 'His full name,' he said, 'is Dr. Harold Winston Smith.'
7
The phone rang bright and early at 7:00 a.m.
Maude Smith was in the kitchen preparing a batch of her famous pancakes—the ones that had the tex-ture of dry wool and the color and tang of a block of charcoal. She left the wall phone dangling near the ancient linoleum floor and went to the bottom of the stairs to call up to her husband.
Harold Smith was in the process of knotting his striped Dartmouth tie around the severely starched collar of his plain white shirt. He sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the extension from the nightstand.
'Smith,' he said crisply.
'Morning, Smitty,' Remo's cheery voice announced.
'Remo?' Smith asked, shocked. The voice at the other end of the line gave a cheerful affirmative.
Smith opened his mouth to speak but suddenly heard another voice on the line. It was female and matronly and somewhat distant. And familiar. The new voice was complaining quietly to no one in particular about something smoking far too much. Wordlessly Smith placed the phone on the lace doily that encircled the top of his nightstand and went to the top of the stairs.
'Maude, could you please hang up the phone,'
he called down the staircase. He heard his wife's muffled surprise at her own forgetfulness as she crossed the kitchen to replace the receiver.
This small act gave the already overdone pancake in the frying pan enough time to blacken to unrecog-
