Dara watched in astonishment as four soldiers emptied their guns around her, but always away from her. When the final pop was gone, she saw the two new scientists step out from behind the ox cart and casually remove the weapons from the soldiers and stack them up. Then they attached the soldiers to the carts with wires and used them to help the oxen move faster.
Cheers, soft at first, then louder, came from behind nearby rocks. Old women and children crept out. Then young women. Then men, some in just loincloths, some in tattered long pants.
They rushed up to the last remaining tank in the Uwenda armored arsenal. One jumped inside and started to pass out bundles. It was their food which the soldiers had stolen. Some of them recovered old trinkets they had treasured.
"Viye la France!" one cried, thinking all whites were French. One of them asked in French when the French were coming back.
Chiun, who understood the old French, answered that they were not coming back. There were moans of sadness.
To Dara and Remo as the carts pulled closer to the Inuti village up ahead, Chiun explained that this had once been a thriving land of great Inuti kings, but then the white man had come and taught another way of life. It looked like a better way and for a while it was, but it required white men to run it.
The old ways of the Inuti were forgotten; the old kings discredited. The loyalty of king to subject and subject to king was ignored. The efficient Inuti way of farming was abandoned. Then the whites left.
And the poor tribesmen had neither white way nor traditional Inuti way to run anything.
"So once again, we see how white ways are wrong," Chiun said.
"I've never heard that explained so well, so beautifully," said Dara.
"I'm still not wearing a kimono," said Remo.
The carts arrived at a field that seemed to be undulating silver waves, glistening in the sun.
"The Ung beetle," said Dara. "It used to be kept under control naturally but since we've been fighting it, it's actually increased."
Then she turned in the cart and patted the white refrigerator box.
"This is going to change it all. It used to be such a beautiful land. This is going to give the land back to the people."
A runner emerged from the long line of black limousines, all with windows closed. The motors were running, the air conditioners on full blast.
"His excellency wants to know when you are ready to begin."
"In fifteen minutes," said Dara.
"He wants the machinery set up by the cars."
"It will work better in the middle of the field," she said.
"All right then. Signal when you are ready."
Dara ordered the carts into the middle of the field: The oxen twitched and almost bolted because the Ung beetles were all over them. Remo and Chiun released the Uwenda soldiers from the wires and they ran away, brushing the shiny bugs off them.
Dara stayed at the head of the cart. The other scientists rode too, some batting the bugs away, others trying just to ignore them.
"What are you two using? Give the rest of us some of it," Dara said.
"Using?" said Remo.
"That repellent. Why aren't the bugs landing on you?"
"Just keep your skin moving," Remo said.
"You mean you can control your own skin?"
"You mean you can't?" Remo said, remembering now the times before his training when mosquitoes used to bother him.
The carts reached the center of the field and the oxen were released to dash clumsily over the dry dead earth, away from the beetles which were devouring the last flimsy crop of the village.
Dara and the scientists prepared small canisters from the large refrigerated container.
"You see," she told Remo and Chiun, "the big danger of the Ung is that it reproduces so quickly. But that's also its weakness. Dr. Ravits found a pheromone, an attractive scent for the beetles. The canisters will release it and the beetles won't be able to stay away. They'll stop eating, just to reproduce."
"Screwing themselves to death?" Remo said.
"How crude you are," Dara said. "You are the most worthless scientist I ever met."
"Doesn't DDT work?" asked Remo.
"It did. But after a few weeks they built up a resistance to it. Then EDB didn't work. No matter how deadly the toxin, in a short time the Ung is immune to it. It actually feeds on the toxins."
The scientists stumbled through the bugs, getting coatings of the silvery Ung all over themselves as they placed the canisters every ten yards.
Then they ran. The heat of the day would release the scent from the canisters. Some of the scientists stumbled, blinded by the bugs, but when they had all made it back to the cars, the beetles seemed to be gone from them. Still, the very fresh memory of the bugs crawling over them made them slap their bare arms.
Out in the middle of the field there was a hum, dull at first like a whisper and then like a train and then suddenly there appeared to be a writhing hill in the middle of the field. Not only couldn't anyone see the canisters, they couldn't have seen a person anymore if he were standing there.
"It's working, it's working!"cried Dara. She hugged Remo. She liked what she hugged. In joy, one of the scientists hugged everyone around him and hugged Chiun too. He was allowed to escape with multiple abrasions of the arms.
In Korean, Chiun commented that Remo had refused the best offers of Sinanju maidens but now was willing to let himself be publicly disgraced by being fondled and mauled by a passing white.
"I'm still not wearing a kimono, Little Father," said Remo.
When the bugs were densely packed in a hill four stories high, devouring themselves, doors opened briefly from the limousines and the delegates from the countries all over Africa and Asia gathered for the television cameras. Amabasa Franeois Ndo gave a little speech congratulating himself. Everyone applauded and then returned to the cars and headed back to the airport. All except Ndo. His car rolled up to Remo and Chiun. The door opened and he looked toward Chiun.
Chiun stood motionless. The director general of the IHAEO got out of the car and went to Chiun. Chiun allowed the little wooden god Ga to come from the folds of his kimono, and dropped it into the hands of Ndo.
A television announcer following the Ndo car ordered his cameramen to get the shot of the director general speaking to the man in the kimono and to the scientists.
The announcer spoke into a tape recorder. "After successfully advancing science, the director general stopped to give final instructions to the technicians on how the IHAEO must now keep moving ahead in its relentless struggle against ignorance, disease and famine."
Ndo, like a chubby sneaking a chocolate, secreted the doll in the vest of his suit and was back in the car immediately. The caravan disappeared down the road making giant dust clouds, leaving half-naked natives behind who watched unbelievingly as their dreaded beetle enemy devoured itself in a writhing massive pile.
"I don't know how you two got everybody here, but thank you. Both of you," said Dara, who suddenly realized she was still holding onto the obnoxious one of the pair. She liked holding onto Remo too much.
"One must understand international politics," Chiun said mildly.
"Did you notice it?" Remo suddenly asked Chiun.
"Of course," Chiun said.
"Notice what?" asked Dara.
"A bug," Remo said.
"Bug? There are millions, billions of bugs out there."
Remo nodded. She was right, of course. But there had been another bug and it didn't belong there. It had not been attracted to the pheromone and had flown off crazily toward the hills where the dust now was from the limousines.
In the caravan, Ndo happily toasted the day with Dom Perignon. The guests, all influential delegates from Third World countries, thought Ndo was toasting the success of that peculiar little demonstration in that dirty little village. They all knew he would have to pay for bringing them out here. Some of them had actually missed cocktail parties to be here. And there was no need for it. What had been done was scut work, the kind of thing that white men or Indians or Pakistanis were hired to do. Not delegates. Ndo, they thought, would surely pay.