"Yes!" The delegate brushed back his dark hair. "I made notes from the telephone. Garcia is from a volatile family, but he is highly intelligent. Good marks at Havana University, but he left in midterm to study something called 'Scientology' and seems to have done well there too. And judo, despite a sickly nature and bad eyesight. First degree black belt, before dropping out. Some experience with LSD, but he doesn't seem to be a drug addict. Apparently he has tremendous drive, but little staying power—apart from his madness."
Hiroshi nodded. "So the credits he claims are accurate. But what is this 'SLF' he names?"
"There's something about that too. He is a science fiction enthusiast—a 'fan.' He founded a club—" he leafed through his notes, finding the place. "Here: 'Slans Lunatic Fringe,' devoted to the works of A. E. van Vogt, L. Ron Hubbard, and others of the type. Nonsense."
"On the contrary, señor!" Hiroshi said warmly. "This is relevant. You have told me that he is honest, and has studied aspects of the occult powers of the mind. Mad he may be, but his power is real."
He moved up the aisle between the chairs, toward the dais, leaving the confused delegate behind.
Garcia was still demonstrating his control. "All metal! All the world runs on metal, doesn't it? So I am master already!" He glared about. "You!" he cried, pointing at the delegate from Holland. "You are convinced now?"
Someone whispered a translation. The man shook his head scornfully.
"Your metal watch!" Garcia said. "I lift it, thus:" The man's left hand jerked up. "And over—thus!" The man's fist smashed into his own jaw. He fell back in his seat, his lip bleeding. "Now do you believe?" Garcia yelled triumphantly.
The man looked at his watch, then back at Garcia. The shock in his face was answer enough.
"I can as readily make the guns of the guards kill you!" Garcia continued. "I can rip out the metal girders of this building and bring the vault down about your heads! There is no limit to my power! I am the world's first true Clear!"
Hiroshi extended his ki. It met the powerful, aberrant force of the Cuban, related to ki but lacking its restraint. Ki was akin to the force and goodness of the human spirit, while Garcia's variant derived from frustration and insanity. In a more devious respect, the two complemented each other as evil complemented good.
"Now make me King of the world!" Garcia cried again to the group. "Before I destroy you all!"
Hiroshi approached him, knitting his fingers in the kuji-kiri exercise. "I regret this is impossible," he said politely. "Please desist and come with me."
"You dare?" Garcia demanded with a quiver, his eyes watering as he focused on the little man. "I'll bash your head in with your own watch!"
Hiroshi held up his wrists, continuing the hypnotic kuji-kiri motions. He wore no watch, no bracelet, no ring.
"I'll shoot your own coins into your eyes!"
Hiroshi shook his head. "I have no money." He was very close now, his fingers working in marvelously intricate patterns. Garcia tore his gaze away from those fingers. "You'll still die!" He gestured to a guard, and the man's gun leveled.
Hiroshi extended his ki. This was why he had saved it, using the finger-hypnotism instead. He could not use his ki in two ways simultaneously, and could not match the sheer raw power of the youth. But he could begin to rein in Garcia hypnotically, while using his ki to interfere with the man's paranormal control. Just a little jog of the gunman's elbow, as it were, as he fired...
The gun went off. The shot went wide. It had worked! "I, too, am a kind of clear," Hiroshi said softly. He was not familiar with the term, but that did not matter.
Garcia stared—into the winding fingers. "You lie, you little Jap!" But he must have felt the ki interference, and he sounded uncertain.
One of the thrown pistols lay in the dais. Hiroshi picked it up. "I control this metal. Take it—if you can."
Challenged specifically, Garcia concentrated. His force leaped out, surrounding Hiroshi, tearing at his control. If he could take over, Hiroshi was lost. But that power was untrained and unruly, not focused to best advantage. Hiroshi hung on, his ki extended to the utmost. He had never before braved an attack such as this! The gun quivered, but did not leave his hand. He had withstood the storm.
"Now I shall move it," Hiroshi said, as though he had never felt the struggle. His hand flicked. The gun flew off to the side, and struck the lifting weapon of another guard. Both guns dropped to the floor.
With an incoherent scream, Garcia jumped at Hiroshi, his hands stiffened for deadly blows. That was his mistake. No man who knew Hiroshi would have tried such an attack.
The little sensei caught one arm, lifted it, and hit under Garcia's armpit with his thumb. Then he applied a submission lock on the man's arm.
Garcia screamed with pain. Guns, coins and watches flew up all over the room, but Hiroshi's ki was spread out in a thin interference pattern that prevented accurate attack from that quarter. He held the grip.
All fight left the would-be king of the world. "You are a clear!" he muttered brokenly.
"Merely proper discipline," Hiroshi said modestly, maintaining the grip.
In a moment a crowd formed about them. "Congratulations!" the President of the General Assembly exclaimed, an interpreter standing beside him and rendering it into English almost simultaneously. "You subdued the madman!"
Hiroshi shook his head. "Not mad, merely misunderstood. He has no power over metal. Only over people. He did not realize that himself, or he would have had far more power than he showed. Still, it is a wonderful ki he employs, deserving of scrupulous study. I shall see that this occurs."
"We'll throw the book at him!" a guard cried. "Making us shoot up the assembly hall—"
But the Cuban and Japanese delegates interceded, Communist and Capitalist standing shoulder to shoulder on this issue.
"This man deserves whatever reward he asks," the Cuban said. "He saved our lives!"
"He is Hiroshi, the world's leading aikido sensei," the Japanese said. "No lesser man could have stopped Garcia—and no police can control Garcia now. Let Hiroshi take this man wherever he wishes; what jail could hold him?"
No one could argue with that. "It was I who borrowed your visitor's pass," Hiroshi confessed to the Cuban. "I regret the necessity, and fear the information girl will be blamed."
"I shall demand her promotion!" the man said earnestly. "That madman's plan was full of holes. He could never have been king of the world, but he could have killed many of us and complicated the international situation perilously, if you hadn't been here!"
There was the clamor of Babel as everyone tried to question and congratulate simultaneously in scores of languages. The President was trying to reestablish order, futilely. In the confusion, Hiroshi escaped with his charge.
The trip to Japan was simplified by the complete cooperation of governments and airlines, but complicated by Hiroshi's need to maintain surveillance over Garcia. If the man ever realized the extent of his power and used it effectively, he would never again be confined. Only one place was secure, and that was where Garcia had been destined from the moment Hiroshi responded to the message of ki, could he have known.
They went to the Japanese Isle of Hokkaido, into chill mountainous wilds. Fierce Ninjitsu warriors watched, but recognized Hiroshi, and did not challenge him.
Inside an ancient castle, in a bleak bare chamber, a longbearded, emaciated man of about ninety sat cross-legged. The eyes were shrunken and sightless, the ears deaf, the movements so slow as to suggest idiocy, and an odor of putrefaction rose from the shriveled body.
Hiroshi bowed. "O-Sensei Fu Antos, I have answered your call," he said with unfeigned respect, though his action and words were superfluous. "Here is a talent for study."
Ki reached out from the ancient, far more powerful than Hiroshi's own. Garcia stiffened and looked about, frightened—and the pressure of his containment eased. The blind dumb head inclined. The talent was worthy.
Hiroshi bowed again and backed
away, alone. The relief was vast. What would he have done, had Fu Antos not acceded? Now his mission was done.
A day later, still exhausted, he returned to his dojo. His students crowded about, forgetting themselves in their eagerness to learn of his adventures. They were powerful athletes and ranking practitioners of the martial arts, but before him they were like children.
"A few necessary errands," was all the weary sensei would say as he sat on the floor in his accustomed spot.
One student held a newspaper whose headline screamed of New York and paranormal talents. He looked at Hiroshi and shook his head, resigned. Would any student ever master even a tiny fraction of the spirit and power and humility this wizened little mystic possessed? What was ki, after all?
It was a question Hiroshi himself longed to have answered. Clap two hands, he thought, and there is sound...
BEAST OF
BETELGEUSE
If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears, what sound does it make?
Hiroshi sat in the Lotus posture, meditating—on the daily newspaper. The bold strokes of the Japanese symbols slashed down the page, telling of the recent wave of crime. Illegal gambling, prostitution, and narcotics were flourishing, and in seeming response the stock market was roaring. What did it mean?
His eyes focused beyond the printed page, peering at the cause behind the effect. For crime was an effect, the result of a chain of indignities to the human condition, rooted ultimately in a seeming defect in the nature of man. Hiroshi had meditated many times on the paradox of imperfection flowing from perfection, a perfect Supreme Deity creating imperfect man, and had come to no conclusive answer. Perhaps man was put on Earth to earn his redemption, as a good sword was tempered by the fire. If so, the effort seemed to be failing.
But this was more than the usual corruption. Crime was becoming powerful, organized, disciplined, imaginative. Where was the guiding force?
Hiroshi perceived it now. It was the Yakuza, the long-time criminal gangs of Japan. Somehow one of the gangs had multiplied its power in the last few months, emerging paramount. Now it was extending its sticky fingers into formerly legitimate enterprises, investing its ill-gotten profits in solid commercial ventures. This process was already so far advanced that the Yakuza was on the way to the financial domination of Japan itself—something no gang had ever been able to do before. The takeover was proceeding so swiftly, smoothly, silently, and efficiently that no one had sounded the alarm.
Hiroshi was not a politician or business man, but he cared about basic rightness and proportion. This was part of his philosophy of Zen. Meditation was good, but sometimes it became necessary also to act.
So he acted. He opened his mind to commune with his ancient master of martial arts, Fu Antos, Lord of the Ninjas.
COME. The summons rang like the clarion of temple bells inside Hiroshi's mind.
And so Hiroshi came. North from the great metropolitan area of industrial Japan. He journeyed by fishing boat to the port city of Sapporo, then by mule cart to the northern wilds of the interior of the island Hokkaido. He was a little old man with a serene countenance who paid scant attention to obstacles, to the perplexity of those he encountered along the way. He walked through the wilderness, climbing ever higher, his bare feet relishing the earth and grass beneath. He wore only a thin black silk kimono with trousers underneath; he had removed his geta or wooden sandals lest they be damaged in the roughening terrain.
As he ascended, the warm fall weather became cold, the sky darkened, thunder sounded, and a freezing rain started to fall. Yet he continued, his lightly bearded face tranquil; his interior power of ki kept him warm. He arrived, in a remarkably short time, at the ancient, rundown Black Castle of the Ninjas.
It was a ruin, its cyclopean stones tumbled in disarray, its once-proud moat half filled in. He negotiated the difficult causeway through the surrounding marshes, entered the collapsing main gate, and passed through the hoary dark halls until he penetrated to the nethermost chamber.
Here the light of a single taper high on a wall cast a dim radiance across the bleak dank stone. In the center, on a simple tatami or reed mat, sat the incredible old Lord of the Ninjas, Fu Antos. His legs were withered and useless; he had not walked in twenty years, or moved from this self-imposed prison. He looked and smelled somewhat like a week-old corpse. Yet there was an amazing aura of power about him that made him the most remarkable man of recent centuries. Hiroshi could actually perceive a faint luminous field around the hunched figure, startlingly like the haloes in Christian pictures of saints. Yet Fu Antos was no Christian, and certainly no saint.
"O-Sensei," Hiroshi said respectfully.
Fu Antos acknowledged with twitches of his skeletal fingers in the ninja kuji-kiri hypnotic pattern. Hiroshi entered the trance willingly, for it was the old man's only remaining means of specific communication. The chamber seemed to change, becoming darker, as though night had fallen and deprived it of even the smallest leakage of outside light. The lone candle glimmered low. That was all, for a time; the decrepit man sat with his sunken orbs turned upward as if staring through the massive walls and indeed the entire castle to the stars beyond. Now those lights appeared, at first a faint patina on the rough ceiling, then the full night sky. The stars in their myriad glory bathed the chamber, and the great Milky Way stood out bright and clear: so many stars, so distant, that they became no more than a pale white wash. What secrets lay beyond that awesome firmament?
Fu Antos contemplated the oneness of the universe, the great nothingness. He had achieved Satori, or enlightenment, a oneness with Buddha, and was immersed in the sheer beauty of it.
Suddenly a bright streak developed, much more than a shooting star, much closer, like a bolt of lightning yet more disciplined. This dazzling display illuminated the room as if it were day, though there was no window. Immediately it faded, and there was a tremendous impact that shook the castle and the entire mountain range within which it stood. A sonic boom as of thunder passed deafeningly. The few attendant ninjas woke in alarm.
Tanaka, in charge of the castle, also Fu Antos' chief jailer, rushed down to check on his lord. "Yes I remain alive," Fu Antos said through his fingers, irritably. "Almost I thought the bolt from heaven had come to release me from this prison of a body in which you hold me, but the joy of transformation is not yet."
Relieved, Tanaka made as if to bring food and a sanitary facility (an old pot) for his master, but Fu Antos stopped him with the peremptory lift of one little finger. "This is a thing of awful import. Take three men and investigate."
"A meteorite," Tanaka protested, for he had had an education in the outside world. "Impossible to locate at night—and for what reason? It will not fly away again."
"Do you debate with me?" Fu Antos' fingers demanded. "It is no meteorite. Go, before—"
There was a second burst of light, brighter than before, and again the castle shook. A stone dislodged from the corner of the ceiling and crashed to the floor, throwing off a spark of its own. The sound of a colossal explosion reverberated through the castle chambers.
"Too late," Fu Antos signaled. "Go, then, in the morning." Tanaka bowed and hurried off to check the shaken castle. It had been well constructed in Fu Antos' youth, almost four hundred years before, but such jarring was not good for it.
Next day Tanaka led his three ninjas through the mountain forest below the snow-line in search of the meteorite. It was fall, all the more lovely for its brevity. The men walked silently, and their fierce dogs were quiet too; they had reverence for both the living and the dead. They had known much of each, for the ninjas of Japan had been among the most effective agents of the medieval world. Ninjas had excelled as spies and assassins, but the technological age had reduced the need for their services. These days a lone rifleman in a tall building could kill a President in a crowd, and never even stand trial. Who had need of the lifelong training and specialization of a ninja? The fine art of assassination had come upon hard times. There
were too many do-it-yourselfers in the business.
Yet Fu Antos lived, and with him his diminishing cadre. The world had forgotten the ninjas, and the ninjas had shut out the world. Now that contact was in danger of being renewed, owing to the intercession of an alien presence.
Tanaka's party found the meteorite on the far side of the mountain range. It was a strange one, not round but bullet-shaped, with a charred but basically smooth outline. One end of it terminated in a half-melted tangle of metals. The explosion had destroyed what must have been a large segment. Congealed drops of alloy were spattered across the landscape like tektites, and lingering heat still emanated from the remaining mass. The earth and rock of the mountain had been gouged by both the impact and the explosion, making a double crater.
They explored the fringes and discovered large, strange, hooflike depressions that marked a kind of trail, as though a huge boar had passed. But there were no pigs in this region; the ninjas had hunted them out long ago, not from any aversion to the species but to ensure that this prey attracted no civilized hunting parties that might discover the Black Castle. In any event, there were no pigs on Earth with hoofs exactly like these. They seemed to be in pairs, not fours, as if this pig were traveling upright: an obvious impossibility.
The prints pointed away from the meteorite cavities, and led downhill into the deepest forest. A peculiar aroma was associated with them, that made the dogs whine and growl nervously, and where the trail crossed over rock there were droplets of some kind of oil.
In a forest glade they found it: like a standing pig with a porcine snout and cloven hoof and formidable tusks, about seven feet tall and six hundred pounds heavy. Any notion that this was an ordinary boar was dispelled by the manifest intelligence of the face. The snout was mobile despite the tusks, and the round eyes possessed uncanny comprehension. The creature wore a bright, tight suit over much of its torso, emblazoned with a design like that of the Japanese flag, but with a bigger sun. The rest of the beast was covered by hair, with very thick, stiff bristles, obviously good protection.