Destroyer - Master's Challenge Part 9

"We do have freedom of speech. I disagree all the time. Some of us think America is the most evil nation in history. But then there's the opposite view. Others think it's the second most evil. They think n.a.z.i Germany was the most evil. What do you think?"

90.91."I think many good people died, young lady, so you would have the freedom and comfort to be so absurdly stupid," said Smith who did not usually bother with retorts like that.

The first thing Smith noticed about Revvers College was the vast green lawns and magnificent trees. The second thing he noticed was the vast number of expensive cars. The third thing he noticed were the obscene scrawlings in day-glo paint, calling for an end to manicured lawns and expensive cars.

Dr. Mildred Pensoitte was a handsome woman in her mid-thirties. She spoke in clear tones, making grammatical statements.

There was the earth, she told her enraptured audience. And the earth was good. Everything about it was good. The air was good, or had been once. The gra.s.s was pure, or had been once. And the rain was good. Or had been, once.

"And then something happened. Then people who did not care whether anything of the earth, other than their bank accounts, survived, began poisoning it all. We broke our basic contract with nature. And what is that contract, that simple obvious contract? That we are a part of it. A part of nature.

"What right do we have to a.s.sume that, just because we can make lawns, we have a right to kill the gra.s.s's natural growth? What right do we have to poison the air for all living things? What right do we have to carve the coal from the earth's tender skin and then burn it into poisoned fumes? What right does man-centered man have to murder anything he wishes to help his bank account?"' .

But Dr. Pensoitte did not hate all men. Only a few men-those who ran America. Not included in Dr. Pensoitte's hates were men who burned people. After all, hadn't the n.a.z.is tried to destroy America? And the Khmer 92.Rouge, which slaughtered tens of thousands of their own kind-didn't they have a right to ma.s.s murder because an American secretary of state once tried to bomb the murderers and didn't confess it all to American reporters before the bombers took off?

At the end, one student stood up and asked, "If America is such a rotten place, why is everyone trying to get in? And if those socialist countries are so good, why is everyone trying to get out?"

There were a few boos. Some of the students said that they wished they had known the other student was going to ask that question so that they could walk out and not listen to it.

But Dr. Pensoitte's cool beauty rode above the anger. She wove a tale of poor, one-crop countries, struggling against imperialistic America. She turned lands that had always had famines into lands that now, somehow, only had famines because of America. Anything the Third World did was a natural right because Americans owned more than one shirt.

Therefore any disasters of socialism were not the fault of socialism but of capitalism. Smith had heard similar reasoning by n.a.z.is against Jews, by Khomeini against Satan, and from fringe preachers about radio stations that wouldn't let them broadcast nonsense without paying for it first.

It was the old devil theory very prominent in the Dark Ages and now with major liberal columnists. It was the new alchemy, the new attempt to make gold from lead, the one piece of thing that would explain everything.

Being young, Smith realized, most of Dr. Pensoitte's audience had not have enough time on earth to realize the nonsense of such simplicity.

She was still talking.

"It is not surprising that a country which would make 93.enough atomic weapons to destroy the world seven times over would not leave the gra.s.s alone. Would someone here tell me how it improves earth to level the gra.s.s?"

There were condescending chuckles.

"We not only level gra.s.s with hand-pushed rotating blades. We have machines that can do it and poison the air at the same time. We burn electricity from nuclear reactors to do it. And what for? Has the world ever been made one jot better for gra.s.s growing in one direction rather than another?"

More chuckles.

"Gra.s.s itself is not the problem, of course," Dr. Pensoitte said. "It's the symbol. The person who feels compelled to reduce the earth's growth for the convenience of his feet is precisely the sort of person who has caused all the misery in the world."

Applause.

"We didn't have atomic bombs and acid rain in the Ice Age and we didn't have something else. We didn't have lawns. We didn't have exploitation by madmen. We didn't have the sort of secretary of the interior who daily rapes your mother, the earth."

"Mother raper," screamed one student. He had read that the secretary of the interior was going to allow copper mining right in the center of the mingus worm population of South Dakota, perhaps one of the finest mingus worm concentrations in the world. He had been outraged that man would take it upon himself to decide arbitrarily that 14,000 jobs were more important than one of the finest sub-earth cultures in the western hemisphere.

The mingus worm would attach itself to itself and feed on its own excrement for months at a time, forming perhaps one of the finer ecological units on the earth, destroying nothing, using nothing, polluting nothing.

94.Into the concentration of innocent worms, the secretary of the interior had ordered the killing blades of tractors, gouging the skin of the world for profit. The young man had tried to throw himself in front of a tractor, tried to explain to the tractor operator -exactly what he was doing to the earth and then was arrested by the police lackies of the state who so crudely accused him of thinking-the young man remembered the words even as he screamed out support for Dr. Mildred Pensoitte"a s.h.i.t-eating worm is more important than a man's job."

"Mother raper. Mother raper," screamed the young man, and the students joined in as the secretary's name was mentioned. The chant had a beat. The chant had a fury. The chant had the confidence of the righteous, sure of the power of their numbers, sure of the inevitability of their triumph, sure of the simple genius of their leader.

Harold VV. Smith had heard the chant before. Only the words were different. The words then were "Seig Heil."

He was sure of it now. He had come to the right place to look for killers.

Dr. Pensoitte held up something between two fingers. Her voice was soft and innocent. Hitler too knew how to raise and lower the level of his voice, even though the newsreel films only showed him yelling. Hitler had his Jews; Dr. Pensoitte had the American government as embodied in the secretary of the interior.

"And so we use as our symbol the seed of the lowly blade of gra.s.s. It was here before capitalism under the hands of white men and it will be here, G.o.d willing, when they no longer abuse the earth . . . when they learn quite simply the obvious fact that we are not consumers of the earth, but part of the earth."

There was a hush among the students, and then one started to clap. It unleashed the flow of dammed-up adoration.

95.Harold W. Smith clapped too. He clapped very hard. He was working.

"She's beautiful, isn't she?" said a girl next to Smith.

"Yes," he said.

Mildred Pensoitte was smiling, cool, content. She had dark brown eyes and high cheekbones and a neck that enhanced the pearls around it.

"Yes. Very beautiful," Smith said.

Dr. Pensoitte was, of course, mobbed after her speech, so Smith couldn't get to her there.

And he realized it would not be easy to get to her at all. The problem with getting to her was that she and her organization, at this time, had no needs. Earth Goodness was oversubscribed with money and had no shortage of volunteers.

Yet without penetrating the organization, he might never find the killer group that had been in Virginia.

He called the Folcroft computers and got good news and bad news. The good news was that after the failure of the second attempt, they would not risk another attempt until the president was back in the country. The bad news was that they would try as soon as he landed.

If only Remo were here. He could get Dr. Pensoitte talking from her ears and nose. He would be on the trail of the killer team within the hour, and once he had them, that would be that.

If Remo were here.

If Remo were there, thought Smith, he could probably seduce Dr. Pensoitte. If he were there, he could penetrate the organization as easily as he did Dr. Pensoitte. He was so good at it, he probably didn't realize it because he didn't even have to stop to think about it.

Smith got a room in Dr. Pensoitte's motel. He phoned to tell her how he admired her organization. He got a male 96.secretary who noted his admiration but would not put him on the telephone with Dr. Pensoitte. Smith said he had a large contribution to make. The male secretary gave him an address to mail it to.

He casually wandered into where she was having dinner among admirers. He smiled and sat down among the very large group and was asked who he was.

"Harry Smith. Fertilizer manufacturer looking to become part of the earth instead of a consumer of it."

"This is a private party," he was told. Dr. Pensoitte did not even look at him.

No entry there.

He came to the Earth Goodness Society with a $5,000 check. He got a thank you. He did not get an invitation to speak to Dr. Pensoitte in person.

He called his computers, but there were no new messages from the killer group. He tried Remo again but didn't get him. He left another message for Chiun but Chiun didn't call back.

And the president was ready to come home any day now. He was running out of excuses to stay in Europe. If he did so much longer, Russia would be sure he was planning a new world war. Nothing else would keep him overseas that long.

Dr. Pensoitte checked out of the motel, and Harold W. Smith was left with a breakfast of prune whip yogurt, a half grapefruit, black coffee, dry toast, and a morning newspaper talking about the strange attacks at the White House and the mysterious sudden presidential trip to Europe.

The Earth Goodness workers to whom he had given his $5,000 came into the motel restaurant with two shoe boxes. They were talking happily. Revvers College had been a good stop for Dr. Pensoitte. There was over $40,000 collected, and that didn't include the heavy contributions 97.in checks. No wonder they hadn't been impressed with Smith's $5,000. And no wonder they didn't have money problems.

In one shoe box, they kept the bankbook and all donations. In the other s...o...b..x, they kept a list of new members' names. When they got back to their office in Washington, D.C., they would have a little old woman type out the new names by hand and put them on addressograph plates. Every few months, when they got around to it, they would send out appeals for money. Receipts for expenditures were kept in an old Jobbo Cleanser barrel. Just before tax time, they would take the barrel down to an accounting service in a discount chain store and have the man do the Earth Goodness Society's books for the year. It cost a hundred dollars and occasionally, they would be a few hundred dollars off the mark in receipts. Every year they had enough money though to sponsor a $'/2 million rally and a $4 million television education show.

The excess millions were left to grow.

In brief, they were as stable as a seabed.

All this Smith picked up while pretending to read his paper and listening to them complain about how they were really disorganized. They were disorganized, said one of the girls, because they had lost one receipt from the day before.

She was talking about a factor of less than five dollars. Smith dropped his hotel spoon into the yogurt and moved in on this one dangling thread.

He introduced himself as the man who had donated $5,000 the day before. One of the girls remembered him. Somewhat.

"I'd like to help," Smith said. "1 see you have problems with receipts, and that's just what I'm good at. I'm retired pretty much, and I would love to do the scut work 98.for you. You need to be freed for the bigger things, the things only young people can do right."

"You've been listening in on our conversation," said one.

"I have," Smith admitted. "I'm just sort of an old bookkeeper sort. I've done a lot of harm to this earth in my lifetime, and if I can make it up by helping you, in just little things, I would be deeply grateful."

"We already have a bookkeeper."

"I'll be her a.s.sistant. I'll be a gofer. You've got to let me make up for desecrating Mother Earth. I've been such a human about it."

"I don't know. We kind of run sort of well now."

"You're too important to run sort of well. You've got to run perfectly. Your minds have got to be freed from the drudgery of receipt taking and motel room planning. Let h be planned for you."

"But that's our job."

"Your job is to save the world from people like the one I used to be. 1 took the blessings of the earth and made artificial fertilizer to inject into earth's sacred skin so someone could make money. I'm so ashamed."

As he said this, Smith was making an adjustment in the box listing new members. He noticed one corner of the lid wasn't on right. When he adjusted it, it accidentally fell off and the entire box was a mess. "Let me straighten it out," he volunteered. By lunch he was making their hotel reservations, and by supper, he had made his major breakthrough.

They were going to let him give them full and easy access to all their information, immediately, through the use of a computer. Mailing lists were going to go out at the flick of a switch. Receipts would be called up with the touch of another switch. They would have versatility and easy power such as they had never dreamed of.

99.He even got a thank you call from Dr. Pensoitte herself. But she got off the phone quickly and didn't know his name. It didn't matter. He was on his way. In three days, she would be clinging to his arm for help, and she was going to be helpless without him, her closest advisor. And then.he would find out where in the organization a killer arm lurked, and he would intercept it and attack.

He got a mainline computer into their Washington office in the morning before the bookkeeper arrived. Since the little old lady wasn't capable of programming the computer or entering the records, there had to be programmers.

With programmers, of course, there came a personnel director and a personnel committee. There also had to be special programs designed precisely to make Earth Goodness more cost-effective. That used only a few hundred thousand dollars of the surplus.

Instead of Earth Goodness dipping into the bank account to pay all medical bills, Smith drew up a medical program with program director, a minority program, a citizens' awareness program, a rehabilitation program for criminals and, of course, security guards, which he explained were always a necessity when you had a rehabilitation program.

But he was still only nibbling away at the hundreds of thousands. There were millions yet to consume, and a whole day was gone.

It was not until he got the army and navy to help that the battle was won.

Because everything was at their fingertips in the form of a computer identification system for employees, who now numbered over 200, the original Earth Goodness staff in Washington had no more idea of who they were hiring than if they had tried to read the names in the stars.

The Admiral of the Fleet and the Lieutenant General 100.arrived at Earth Goodness on the day of their retirement from the armed services. Smith gave them one instruction.

"Gentlemen, I am trying to conserve money. Therefore, I will give you only half of anything you ask for. But other than that, you are in charge. Make us lean and mean. Cut costs to the bone."

Within two days, under the leadership of these service academy graduates, Earth Goodness, Inc. was $42 million in debt, and if they cut back all programs by half the next year, they would be running a $ 127 million deficit. It cost forty dollars every time the toilet was flushed, and the lowest bid on an office throw rug was $13,782.58, and that did not include delivery, which was extra.

But to make sure there was no climbing out of the hole, Smith cut off all chances of retreat. He retired the little old lady and her addressograph cards. He threw out the Jobbo barrel and retained the most prestigious law firm in Washington for a crash organization program.

Once these people had put their minds to it, there was no way to get back to simple management, even with the Jobbo barrel. The lawyers created the grand illusion that with them on hand, somehow all the chaos would be manageable.

The true nature of the disaster, however, was not lost on Dr. Mildred Pensoitte. Just as Smith had planned.

"My lord, we have to launch a giant fund-raising campaign just to buy the stamps to launch another fund-raising campaign. We're running around in circles, and if we stop, we'll be crushed."

At that moment, a very conservative lemon-faced man in a three-piece gray suit walked into her New York City offices with a plan to absolutely, brutally cut everything in half no matter who or what was destroyed. Fire, discharge, close down, cut back, no matter what. He was an expert at it, he a.s.sured her.

101.

His named was Harry Smith, he said.

She took one look at that cold, bitter face and strictly parted white hair and knew that he would do just what he promised.

"Call me Mildred," said Dr. Pensoitte.

Chapter Ten.

Africa," Remo muttered.

Chiun couldn't choose someone for Remo to fight in Ohio. First Peru, then freaking central Africa.

He walked for miles along a bone-dry dirt road into a village where the thatch-and-earth houses seemed to grow like trees out of rock cliffs. It was the third such village he had been to in the Dogon country of Mali, but smaller by half than the other two.

He was looking for a man named Kiree. Nearly everyone he had talked to was familiar with the name, but no one had seen him.

"The greatest among the Dogon," he had been told. Some said that the warrior was old and wise and lived in the middle of the earth. Others insisted that Kiree was a spirit who only materialized when his people were in need. Some of the older villagers thought he was a giant whose footprints had created the sheer cliff faces of the countryside. And there were some who said that Kiree wasn't a man at all, but an insect.

Great, Remo thought. Here I am in the wilds of Africa to talk sense to a beetle.

102.