For a moment, nothing at all happened.
Then Sir James Wylings emerged from the carriage—airborne, clawing at the air, screaming, shouting, and he rose to an impossible height. The cameras followed his high arc and the people gasped in unison.
Then Sir James Wylings came down again, and his girlish screams ended as his body was impaled on the purely ornamental glaives of the Grenadier Guards.
There were cries and the crowd recoiled, the defense teams shouted at one another in instant mayhem. Whatever they had been prepared for, this was not it.
As the pandemonium grew all around her, Her Majesty the queen caught sight of movement beyond the hideous corpse and the dripping gore. There was someone barely visible to her inside the carriage. A small figure was there, looking back at her.
The queen recognized the figure, which explained well enough how the situation had reversed so suddenly. She picked up the sides of her lips in a rare and somewhat sad smile.
Then, as if she had been hallucinating the figure, the interior of the carriage was empty.
Epilogue
The London parade coverage was interrupted on New York television by a breaking story from Hong Kong. Seventies pop star Sheldon Jahn was dead!
“The much-beloved performer has most recently been busy composing the soundtrack for the new animated feature film version of Bomba the Jungle Boy, as well as holding the government of China hostage in an attempt to recolonize Hong Kong,” the entertainment anchor reported. “Sheldon Jahn will be missed, and we can only pray that his work on Bomba was complete.”
“A sad day for us all, Sheila,” said the anchor in New York. “Now, back to London, where we can confirm that the queen of England will not, repeat, not be getting married this afternoon. If you’re just joining us, here once again is the video of the queen’s fiancé as he left the carriage and, as far as we can understand, tripped onto the spears of the queen’s personal guards.”
Harold W. Smith couldn’t seem to drag his attention away from the coverage by the inane anchors, although he had seen the “accident” footage a hundred times already. He concentrated on other intelligence feeds coming in from around the world.
CURE had instantly passed along the news to the President when he heard from Remo and Chiun that the nanobot weapons were all accounted for and destroyed. Twenty minutes later, when the armies showed up in New Jersey, the colonial governor couldn’t surrender fast enough.
“We’re back to having fifty states again—whew!” the news anchor said, pretending to mop his brow. “What a strange, weird trip today has been. Also, we’ve received word that the occupying forces in New Finland have ceased their occupation. It is unclear whether they were forced to abandon their takeover, or if they just left.”
“It’s Newfoundland,” Mark Howard replied to his own video feed.
It was early morning when Mark found another tiny blinker on his display and followed the alert to a news item from the Chicago Tribune. The article was a short piece from the entertainment section of the newspaper—and it was unrelated to any of the wrapup coverage from the Colonies.
The article, Leggy Attraction Closed Due To Gigantic Indigestion, informed the reader that the Chicago Aquarium’s most popular display was closed temporarily.
The Chicago giant squid, the one and only living giant squid in captivity, was off its feed. The article said, “Given the rumored pressure put on the aquarium president to keep the display open to the paying public, at the expense of scientific research projects, one has to wonder about the true nature of the closing.”
Howard did wonder about the nature of the closing. He wondered and he worried. Maybe the scientific community had finally flexed some muscle and gained access to the one-of-kind cephalopod. But scientists never had the finances to stall the accumulation of profits. That’s why they had been relegated to studying the creature only after public hours. Since the squid’s environment was controlled to keep it active for the ticket-buying attendees, the researchers were stuck staring at a snoozing squid for hours at a time. This limited their ability to learn much from the creature. But if the scientists hadn’t engineered the shutdown, then the squid must be very ill. It had to be more than a little stomach upset.
Mark Howard felt weighed down with his nameless thoughts. The squid was just a squid, but he had worried about the thing even when it was first captured and transported to Chicago, when the world was going haywire under the influence of Sa Mangsang. Whatever Sa Mangsang truly was—and Mark Howard wasn’t ready to believe Master Chiun’s assertions that it was an elder god bent on the earth’s destruction—the thing had spread its mental disturbances around the world. Mark Howard had felt the influence more acutely than anyone else, for Sa Mangsang had sought him out as the most receptive mind close to the Masters of Sinanju.
Sa Mangsang used the squid for its dirty work. The big squids had swarmed to the surface by the thousands during the crisis. That was how the Chicago Giant was captured. Now Sa Mangsang was in slumber, or hibernation, or comatose, depending on how you looked at it So the giant squid in Chicago was just a giant squid. Magnificent, but completely natural. Right?
Howard had tried telling himself that there was nothing to worry about—and he wasn’t very convincing. He kept an eye on the Chicago Giant, and set up alerts for news about the creature.
Now the Chicago Giant was ill, maybe even dying, if he read between the lines. Shouldn’t that be good news? When the thing was dead, he wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore.
Smith looked up to find Mark Howard sitting rigid in his chair and even rocking slightly. The young man was as pale as death and didn’t seem to know Smith was there.
“Mark?”
Mark’s eyes flitted in Smith’s direction, then back to the screen.
“What’s the matter?” Smith demanded. He strode behind his assistant’s desk and glared at the open window. Chicago Tribune. The captured giant squid.
“What of it?” Smith demanded.
“I don’t know.”
“What about this concerns you?” Smith pressed, unsatisfied.
“I don’t know.” Howard was pressing his fists into his abdomen. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
Smith wordlessly handed Howard the plastic-lined wastebasket. As Howard wretched into it, Smith leaned over him and scrolled through the article. When Mark sat up again; he hit Smith’s chest with the back of his head.
Smith retreated to his own desk thoughtfully. Mark Howard was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Hurts. I feel like my stomach is full of ball bearings.”
“This is related to the item on your screen?”
Mark Howard nodded slightly, eyes dancing as if he were trying to avoid mentioning it. “Somehow.”
“Is it nerves? Or is this something that is, uh, meaningful?”
Mark Howard made a sort of sickly smile, like the last grin of a dying man who was shot under ironic circumstances. Mark left in a hurry, heading for the washroom, and met Mrs. Mikulka coming in. The old dear was in early. Smith’s secretary wasn’t supposed to arrive until 9:00 a.m., but her old habits died hard. She didn’t get a chance to say good-morning before she got a whiff.
“Oh, dear, poor Mark.” She took away the wastebasket.
Smith was deep in thought. Did Mark just have a case of stomach flu? Was he being nervously affected by the news from Chicago because it was related to the traumatic crisis in the Pacific Ocean? Or were his unique abilities communicating to Mark that there was some sort of impending crisis related to the squid in Chicago?