"It is you who are getting old. Old white flesh, as toneless as the underside of an octopus. This is the legacy of your race."
"You can have the vibrating bed."
The old man's almond eyes turned into shrewd little slits. "And cable television."
"You've got it."
"Also the bathtub. I will use the bathtub first."
Remo sighed. "All right."
"And room service. It is too much to ask one of my years to walk to his food."
"I thought you were planning to walk us both to the jungle."
"This is different. The stench of fried animals saps my strength."
"I don't think motels have room service."
Chiun stopped short. "I will not go unless I can have room service."
"All right, already," Remo said. "We'll get room service."
Twenty minutes later, Chiun was lying on the vibrating bed, chuckling and singing tuneless Korean songs as the television blared at full volume and the motel reservations clerk plopped down two paper containers of plain rice and two glasses of water, for which Remo had paid him fifty dollars.
"That it, mister?" the clerk said.
Remo nodded, sticking his finger in his ear to block out the noise. He had dialed Smith's number at Folcroft directly, without going through the obscure telephone routings that Remo couldn't remember, and that meant he would have to speak to Smith in code, which he also couldn't remember. Something about Aunt Mildred. Aunt Mildred always figured into Smith's calls. Aunt Mildred doing something meant that Smith was to return the call within three minutes, to California. That would be the right one, but what she was doing was the code. "Washing" meant Remo needed money; no point in that one. "Aunt Mildred is gone" meant the mission was accomplished. But California...
"Yes?" Smith's lemony voice twanged on the other end of the line.
"Uh..."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Aunt Mildred picks her nose," Remo said winsomely. "In California."
Smith sighed. "I've been waiting for you. Keep the line open for three minutes so I can trace this call, then wait. I'll come to you."
He arrived within twenty minutes.
"That was fast," Remo said.
"I wasn't at Folcroft." Smith settled down his straw fedora. He wore a three-piece suit, even though it was ninety degrees outside. "I was at an investigation that you should have been conducting." He looked testily to Remo. "Since you couldn't be reached, I had to make the preliminary inquiries myself."
"I'm sure you made a fine assassin, Emperor," Chiun said fawningly.
Smith gave an exasperated snort. "I an not an emperor, Chiun," he explained for the hundredth time. "This is a free country. A democracy. In a democracy—"
Chiun was nodding and smiling broadly. "Never mind," Smith said, directing his attention back to Remo. "As a matter of fact, I was quite nearby, at the UCLA Medical Center. Your call was routed automatically to the telephone in my briefcase. While you've been vacationing, the university and the federal government have been in an uproar."
"Some vacation," Remo said glumly. "Feeling up rocks."
"Well, whatever you've been doing, I'm afraid I've got to cut it short. There's something you have to attend to." He fumbled in his briefcase.
"What a shame," Remo said, smiling. "Just when I was beginning to look forward to seeing the jungle." Chiun stared at him blackly.
"You were?" Smith looked up from his briefcase. He held a sheet of white paper in his hand.
"Sure. I love the jungle. All those neat flies and poisonous snakes. Nothing like it. But duty calls, right, Smitty?"
"Er— yes." He handed Remo the paper. On it was a hand-drawn map.
Remo looked at it from several different angles. "Where's this?"
Smith smiled faintly, the expression looking peculiar and uncomfortable on his face. "The Peten jungle of Guatemala. Quite a coincidence. You won't be disappointed, after all."
"Thrilled," Remo said, ignoring Chiun's smug look. "Thrilled to death."
"It marks the location of an archaeological dig begun several months ago, sponsored by the University of California. There it is," he said, pointing to the map. "About fifty miles west of Progresso, south of the Ucimacita River. The archaelogists believed they'd found the remains of an ancient Mayan temple, which the locals call the Temple of Magic.
"Shortly after they excavated the site, though, a series of small earthquakes began disturbing the region. This, I understand, is part of the normal twenty-year cycle. The quakes weren't serious, but the archaeologists were afraid that some of the material they found in the temple would be damaged unless they could catalog it and clear it out quickly. Also, of course, the possibility of a big earthquake made them nervous. They wrote to the university requesting a second relief team to assist them, and sent along some samples of what they'd already excavated."
"What'd they find?"
"The usual. Pottery, that sort of thing. But quite old. The material was carbon tested at the university. It seems the samples they sent were made more than five thousand years ago."
"An upstart temple," Chiun said, yawning. "Probably a hippo cult."
"Hippo?" said Smith.
"He means hippie," Remo said.
"Oh. Listen to this," Smith said. He pulled out another sheet of paper from his briefcase. "It's a copy of the letter the archaeologists sent to the university." Holding the letter at arm's length, he read: "There is something else here— something that is without doubt the greatest find of this or any other century. I dare reveal no more until our evidence can be documented properly. But the possibility that this discovery may be destroyed utterly by earthquake or other natural causes cannot be borne. We urge you to relay our request for assistance to Doctors Diehl and Drake immediately."
"So who's Diehl and Drake?"
"Richard Diehl and Elizabeth Drake, the two most prominent archaeologists at the university. Both have written seminal works about the Mayan civilization. When they saw the material the expedition team sent, they left for the site right away."
"Think you could get to the point?" Remo asked wearily.
"The point is, when Diehl and Drake arrived, every member of the first archaeological team had been murdered."
"By rival archaeologists?"
"That was Diehl's first guess. From the mysterious letter the first team sent, he figured that they'd discovered something really rare— rare enough that someone else would kill them for it. But then, shortly after they arrived, Diehl and Drake themselves were ambushed." He paused, looking embarrassed.
"And?"
"I should explain first that I've just come from seeing Diehl. He's in the hospital, being treated for shock and exhaustion, and not quite coherent. He was the only one to survive the expedition."
"What's he sayng? That he was attacked by little men from Mars?"
"Not far from it, actually. He claims that the men who attacked the second expedition were definitely Indians of the variety found in Central America. Where his story gets hard to swallow is in the matter of weapons."
"Some Indian weapons are quite unusual," Chiun offered helpfully. "Curare-tipped spears, ropes weighted by knotted stones..."
"He claims they were carrying laser weapons," Smith said, flushing slightly.
Remo's eyebrows arched amusement. "Lasers? What were these guys carrying in their canteens?"
"If Dr. Diehl weren't the respected scholar he is, his observations would be dismissed out of hand," Smith said. "But he seems to be lucid on every point. He says that during the ambush, an earthquake of some magnitude occurred, trapping his associate, Dr. Drake, and some of the attackers. He used the opportunity to escape. He claims to be the only member of the team who wasn't killed.
"At Progresso, the town nearest the site, he notified the Red Cross. They sent a rescue helicopter. The helicopter sent one transmission, acknowledging that the rescue team had located the site, and then the transmission became garbled. The radio man on duty thinks the transmission included something about "exotic weapons." At any rate, Diehl swears that the Indians used lasers. His descriptions of the sound and sight of the weapons in operation vaguely resemble test data gathered by the military on laser weaponry, although we don't have the technology for individual laser guns. Also, the descriptions he gave of the type of wounds inflicted by the weapons match top-secret test data, too."