Remo gave Felton another tap on the temple, then went back to the control panel. It was a simple panel but Remo didn't understand it.
There was a right lever with gradations, a forward lever, a top lever, an entrance lever, and an automatic control.
Remo grabbed the entrance lever. Then it hit him like a jolt of electricity. He began to laugh. He was still laughing as he heard the heavy steel door begin to hiss open.
He picked up Felton's pistol, then walked to the ramp at the other end of the concrete blockhouse. "Maxwell," he kept repeating. "Maxwell." Felton was where he had left him, his arms spread grotesquely wide over the concrete driveway.
Jimmy had rolled back down the incline after the door had severed his leg. But the hiss of the opening door drove him on. With his one leg and a stump and two hands, Jimmy was hopping and crawling like a horrible, crippled, crab up the incline, trying to escape. In the faint moonlight, Remo could see the terror etched deeply into his face.
Remo cocked Felton's pistol and fired a bullet calmly into Jimmy's one good leg. The bullet spun Jimmy around and Remo took a step into the driveway and kicked the big Texan back into the box over the leg that was no longer his.
Then Remo lifted Felton and heaved him down the concrete incline. Remo ran around to the controls and pushed back the entrance lever. The heavy steel door hissed shut again and a light went on inside the blockhouse. Through some sort of heavy plastic peephole, Remo could see inside. Felton was not moving. Nor was Jimmy.
Felton would come to soon enough. Remo reached into his shirt pocket and lit a cigarette. He glanced once more at the control panel, mumbled "Maxwell" again with a smile, and settled down to smoking his cigarette. So that was it.
On the fourth puff, he heard a scratching on the plastic shield. He took a deliberately long time turning around. When he did, there was Felton's face, pressed against the plastic window.
The old man's hair was wild. He was yelling something. Remo could not make it out.
Carefully, Remo formed the word with his lips: "Maxwell."
Felton's head shook.
"I know you don't know," Remo yelled.
Felton looked desperately puzzled.
"Here's another one," Remo yelled. "MacCleary?"
Felton shook his head.
"Don't know him either, huh?" Remo called. "I didn't think you would. He was just a guy with a hook. Think of him when you're being crushed to death. Think of him when you're a hood ornament on somebody's car. Think of him because he was my friend."
Remo turned from Felton who scratched frantically on the plastic window and examined the idiot panel. He shrugged his shoulders. He heard a muffled plea for mercy. But there had been no mercy for MacCleary or the other CURE agents or for America.
He had been created the destroyer and this was what he was meant to do. He pushed the lever marked automatic and the machine moaned into operations, its giant hydraulic presses forcing hundreds of thousands of pounds of pressure into a moving wall. And Remo knew he was not just working at a job, he was living his role in life, fulfilling what he was born for.
It took no more than five minutes. First the front wall pressed in to crush the contents of the blockhouse, then a side wall moved in to crush from another direction, then the roof slowly lowered and it was over. When all the hydraulic walls had returned to their normal positions, Remo peered through the plastic window. All he saw was a cube of metal, four feet square. An automobile and two humans, now only a cube of scrap iron.
Remo looked around for an implement. He saw a rusted crowbar resting against one of the blockhouse's exterior walls.
He walked slowly over to the crowbar, picked it up, then went back to the panel. He didn't know how to turn off the lights, let alone the machine. Someone would find the cube in the morning. It would probably be shipped out with the rest of the scrap.
Remo pried a small metal badge from the top of the control panel. It was a trademark. It was as far as CURE'S one agent had been able to penetrate.
It read: "Maxwell Steel Reducer. Maxwell Industries, Lima, O."
Cynthia didn't mind too much that Daddy had decided to stay at the yard. She wanted to be alone with Remo anyway, and she was happy that they had finally gotten to understand each other.
She didn't even mind that Daddy didn't come home for breakfast. Remo made a personal phone call from Lamonica Towers to Dr. Smith at Folcroft. He made the call from Felton's bed while Cynthia slept beside him.
"A what?" Smith said.
"That's what Maxwell was," Remo repeated. "Felton was the boss."
"Impossible."
"All right, it's impossible," Remo said.
There was a long pause.
"How much could one of them cost?"
"How should I know, damn it?"
"Just wondering," Smith said.
"Look. I know where we can get one cheap."
"Oh, really?"
"A friend of mine now owns one. She'll sell it to me cheap. One hundred billion dollars," Remo yelled into the receiver, then hung up.
He was caressing his bedmate's fanny when the phone rang.
"This is Viaselli," said the man at the other end of the receiver. "I just wanted to thank Norman for releasing my brother-in-law, Tony."
"This is Carmine Viaselli, right?" Remo asked.
"That's right. Who is this?"
"I'm an employee of Mr. Felton's and I'm glad you called."
Remo continued: "Mr. Felton called me early this morning and said I should try to reach you. He wanted to see you tonight. Something or other about a Maxwell."
"Where should I meet him?"
"He has a junk yard on Route 440. It's the first right off Communipaw Avenue. He'll be there."
"What time?"
"About nine o'clock." Remo felt Cynthia roll into him, cuddling her face in his chest. She slept in the raw. "Better yet, Mr. Viaselli. better make it ten o'clock."
"Right," came the voice from the phone.
Remo hung up.
"Who was it, darling?" Cynthia asked sleepily.
"A man about business."
"What business, dear?" she murmured.
"My business."
AFTERWORD
When was the last time you saw a hero? Not one of those mindless, looney-bin rejects who line the bookracks: The Exterminator, The Extincter, The Ripper, The Slasher, The Wiper-Outer, The Mutilator, The Ix-Nayer, all those same series, with their same covers, their same plots, and their same moronic machine-gunning leads who figure the best way to solve a problem is to shoot it.
No. A real life-saving, mind-craving hero for the world today.
Not Tarzan, he won't help. He's in Africa. Not Doc Savage, he was in the thirties and forties. Not James Bond. He was left behind at the turn of the decade.
For the seventies and eighties, the word is in. It's The Destroyer.
Why The Destroyer? Why the phenomenon that has writers, editors, literary agents, ad men-people who deal in words, and who you think would know better-following these tales of Remo Williams and his Korean teacher Chiun with the same kind of passion and faith that only a few like Holmes and Watson have instilled?
Why has this... this... paperback series drawn such high reviews from such lofty heights as The New York Times, Penthouse, The Village Voice, and the Armchair Detective, a journal for mystery fanatics?
Honesty.
Look beyond the facts that The Destroyer books are written very well and are very funny and very fast and very good.
The Destroyer is honest to today, to the world, and most importantly to itself.
And who is The Destroyer? Who is this new breed of Superman?
Just sad, funny, used-to-be-human-but-now-isn't-quite Remo. Wise-assing Remo whose favorite line is: "That's the biz, sweetheart."