Remo put his foot on the brake. It didn't help much. The bear continued leaning. The Bronco moved forward until he lost his balance. Then he climbed back up and started the comical cycle all over again.
Ahead, the other bears had dropped into the water. Their black bruin eyes regarded Remo with quiet expectation.
"Okay, show's over," he growled, cracking the door. "Get away. Shoo!"
The bear refused to shoo. But it did keep pushing as if he had an intelligence and a single-minded determi nation to push Remo, vehicle and all, into the frigid Arctic sea. Or wherever he was.
Having no choice, Remo got out, slamming the door behind him like an angry motorist who had been rearended.
"What the ding-dong hell are you doing!" he shouted.
The bear jumped away from the Bronco and retreated a few yards, where he began pawing the ice lazily. He yawned, exposing a fanged mouth like a scarlet cave full of stalactites.
"And stay away!" Remo added for good measure. It must have been the wrong thing to say to a polar bear, because without warning, the bruin started to gallop at him like an express train.
He was fast. Remo, annoyed, was faster. He took a run at the bear, jumped off the ice and nailed it on the tip of the nose with a furious snap kick.
Remo bounced off and landed on his feet. The bear recoiled as if shot. Shaking its head, it came again. "You don't learn, do you?" Remo snapped. And let fly again.
This time there was a loud snap as the polar bear's spinal column broke under the expert kick. Remo landed on his feet, the bear lay down dead and the Bronco teetered over the edge of the ice pack and into the cold gray water.
"Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!" Remo shouted, scaring the other bears away. "Damn that Chiun!" Because there was nothing else to take his frustration out on, he walked over and gave the dead polar bear a splintering kick in the ribs.
He felt better, but it hardly improved the situation any.
Standing by himself, he felt the cold of the Arctic Circle take hold of him with crushing, energy-sapping fingers. His rib cartilage began crackling with each breath. The air going into his lungs became like cold fire. Remo began drawing it in slowly, letting his mouth and air passages warm it before it could reach the delicate tissues of his lungs.
"What would Shang do in this situation?" Remo wondered.
The wind picked up. It blew soft waves of heat off the polar bear's dead hulk.
Snapping his fingers, Remo got down on hands and knees and crawled under the warm body of the dead polar bear, figuring it would get him to morning even though technically it was still daylight.
THAT NIGHT, he walked the polar wastes in his dreams. The snow and ice lay like a trackless expanse as far as the eye could see. The sun hung low to the horizon as if it were slowly dying. A wind howled, creating spiral vortices like sparkling diamond galaxies.
After a time Remo came upon footprints in the snow. He followed them because he recognized them. Prints left by Korean sandals.
As he walked, leaving no footprints himself, Remo thought to himself how interesting it was that in three thousand years, sandal prints had not changed.
Remo didn't ask himself how in this timeless place of snow and wind he knew he was in the polar wastes of three thousand years gone by. He just knew.
Remo found the owner of the sandal prints shivering in an ice cave.
Squatting in snow, the man seemed to be clothed in snow. His limbs peeped out from a white covering that swathed his body. He was looking down at his naked brown feet.
As Remo approached, he looked up. "I will not fight you, ghost-face," he said.
"Good," said Remo.
"It is not for your benefit that I spare you the challenge, but for the future of the House, which was young when I lived."
"Suit yourself," said Remo.
"I have two things of great import to tell you."
"Shoot," said Remo.
"First be careful whom you love. I loved badly and the line suffered. You must love wisely or love not at all."
Remo said nothing.
"The second thing I must tell you is very important."
"Yeah..."
"You must wake up."
"Why?"
"Because you will freeze to death if you do not follow my example."
"What example is that?"
But the Korean only bowed his head and reached back to flip a fragment of the whiteness that covered his bare limbs over his intensely black hair.
Remo saw the fragment had a furred snout, black nose and inexpressibly sad eyes.
Harold W Smith was lurking on the net.
As the international infobahn crept across the face of the globe like an alien nervous system, a new lexicon evolved to capture the uncharted reality of what some called cyberspace. People posted notes on the net, flamed one another in anger and, in an effort to impart feeling to what had formerly been known as cold type, created symbols known as emoticons-like smilies and frownies-the better to make electronic conversation convey exact shades of meaning only spoken words could.
One coinage of the electronic age was lurker. A lurker was someone who browsed the nets and bulletin boards anonymously but never posted messages. Lurkers just lurked and watched, unsuspected.
Harold Smith might be said to be the first lurker in the history of the Internet.
Back when the net was limited to a small handful of computers in government and educational hands, Harold Smith lurked, unknown and unsuspected, watching the message traffic and growing aware that the day was coming when the average American would own a home computer and do the same.
Harold Smith feared that day. Not that he thought it would be entirely a bad thing. If it involved the average American citizen, it would offer a mixture of good and bad.
No, the information explosion was feared by Harold Smith because of the enormous drain it would place on CURE resources. CURE operated on several levels. Wiretapping and other illegal information gathering was part of its intelligence-gathering outreach. So were human intelligence plants. CURE had agents in everything from the National Security Agency to the Department of Agriculture. All reported by mail or telephone or dead drop-or most recently, by E-mail. None knew they worked for Harold W Smith, although many thought they worked for the CIA.
Data constantly flowed into Harold Smith's mainframes. Data that had to be stored, scanned, evaluated and disposed of. Most were erased as not mission specific. Some were filed for future action or investigation. A few were acted upon.
The proliferation of home computers and electronic exchanges of all kinds meant an entire domain of accessible data had come into existence for Harold Smith to patrol.
Thus, he lurked, unsuspected. He had recently created an electronic-mail address that couldn't be traced back to Folcroft Sanitarium or himself. Through this, an increasingly large number of field contacts reported to him.
Early on Smith had written programs whose sole function was to troll the net for events or people. Global searches were executed on all incoming data so that buzzwords captured pertinent data for review.
But not all the buzzwords in the universe could patrol the net in search of CURE-critical events. Only a discerning mind could perform that function.
So Harold W. Smith lurked.
He skipped the news groups. They were the electronic equivalent of graffiti, Smith had long ago discovered. Most might as well have been scrawled in crayon on sheets of brown wrapping paper.
But all sorts of news traveled the fiber-optic route these days. Especially local news that never went national.
Smith was scanning these. He had a particular and unusual way of dealing with vast blocks of trivia that might contain a kernel of importance. It was an adaptation of the primary speed-reading method whereby the reader ran his eye down the middle of the page at a constant speed and absorbed the gist of the text semisubconsciously.