Warren Murphy Destroyer 111 Prophet of Doom

Odnośniki

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

she was. Only after he had carried her from the temple did he push her shining
black hair from her face. And, lo, he beheld the nobleman's
m
271
daughter, who had been offered as bride tribute. Deep was his anger that the
girl should have suffered such a fate, for her mind, like Tang's, was empty of
thought. In his rage Tang approached the temple and, with hands more powerful
than iron and swifter than the eye could follow, he set to work. For one full
day he labored, demolishing walls beneath his fists, pounding rock to powder.
After his work was done, not one stone stood upon another. It is said, Remo,
that an earthquake destroyed the temple at Delphi, but it was in truth the
wrath of Master Tang. Tang stood back and admired his handiwork, for such is
what children do when they wreak random ruin.
"And once he was satisfied, Tang left Greece forever, taking with him the
idiot girl who could neither speak nor think. A perfect match were these two,
and though unable to perform the duties of a proper wife, she did live for
many years. Her grave is still tended in my village, although on the far side
of the garbage dump because she was, after all, a foreigner."
Chiun settled back and folded his arms across his chest, signifying that the
story was finished.
"So Tang beat the oracle," Remo said. The shadowy thing in his mind began to
stretch its tendrils across his thoughts.
"The temple was rebuilt not long after," Chiun explained. "The Delphic oracle
gave many prophecies long after the death of Tang."
"So what's the moral?" asked Remo. The dark image of a battlefield that he had
seen in the Forrester girl's room appeared like a mirage behind Chiun. Remo
stared at the surreal scene.
"There is no moral, but that I should not have
272
waited for Smith to transport us from this country of Tang-like fools. For now
it is too late. For you and for me. But especially for you, my son."
Remo felt the first strains of panic tugging at his stomach. "But there is
something I can do about this, right?" he asked.
The combatants reappeared on the battlefield in his mind. Somewhere in his
consciousness, Remo felt the mocking presence of the Pythian oracle.
Chiun shook his head slowly, the wisps of white hair decorating his head and
chin doing a drifting dance in the darkened room. ' T know of nothing that can
help you, my son," he said. "East has met West. We are of the East, and Delphi
was the West in the time of Tang. It is the will of the sun god."
In Remo's mind the malevolent combatant was poised and ready to strike down
its weaker rival. He felt the force of the Pythia crawl over him like an icy
fog.
Remo was losing the battle. He needed some normalcy, a compass to orient him.
Something to root him in reality. "So why was Tang a braggart?" he asked,
trying to pull away from the strange, otherwordly realm intruding on his
vision.
"When he returned to Sinanju, Tang told the villagers that he had grappled
with a god and had won. This slory he repeated to the end of his days." Chiun
shook his head sadly. "But he did not win, my son. Woe lo us, he did not
win."
Remo could no longer hold up the dam he had built in his thoughts. The
malevolent force of the Pythia's
Page 106
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
273
consciousness burst loose, pouring through his mind in a sickly warm flood.
And like a helpless victim in the raging river of his own thoughts, Remo was
swept away into the darkness.
CHapter Twenty
Telemachus Anaxagoras Kaspurelakos had always known that he was destined for
greatness, and he didn't shy away from sharing this knowledge with those he
met. Since Telemachus had no friends, his family was forced to endure the
theories of his future ascendancy to power. And since most of that family
lived on the other side of the Atlantic, Papa and Mama Kaspurelakos were the
ones who had to suffer most through their young son's delusions of grandeur.
The winds of fate had blown his parents from their native Greece just after
the Second World War, and the Kaspurelakos family had eventually settled in
the familiar-sounding town called Thermopolis, Wyoming. It was there young
Telemachus was born and spent his formative years.
His mother had gone to work in a local bakery, rising at four in the morning
so that she could make enough to school young Telemachus to look and act like
the other American children. Telemachus's father was a natural politician,
having served in public life for many years in his native land. But in the
early 1950s, America found it difficult to accept an ugly little man with
hairy ears and an accent thicker than a
275
vat of feta curd sitting on the local city council. And so the elder
Kaspurelakos found work as a cobbler.
Young Telemachus settled into his life in the United States of America,
content in the knowledge that, humble beginnings aside, his future was as
bright as Apollo's shield.
But the future had other ideas.
Telemachus steered a treacherous course through the Wyoming school system,
graduating early from high school in the spring of what should have been his
junior year. It was of no consequence to him that when he received his diploma
on that sunny Sunday afternoon, he was as friendless as he had been his first
day of kindergarten. After all, great things lay in store.
Down at the bakery Mama had gone on double shifts, and Papa now proud owner of
a cobbler shop had redoubled his tireless efforts to finance Telemachus's
continuing education. The young man would be the first of their family to
receive a college diploma.
With no social life and few extracurricular activities to distract him,
Telemachus graduated from the University of Wyoming with his B.A. in two and a
half years. He then told his aging parents that he wanted to stay on in school
to receive his Master's. A good education, he argued, was the surest way for
him to achieve his ultimate goal of national prestige and power.
Once his next educational goal was met, Telemachus Kaspurelakos, who now went
by the more American-sounding "Mark Kaspar," had informed his parents that he
wanted to stay on in school to get his B.Sc. His father had just celebrated
his seventieth
276
birthday and looked forward to Mark's graduation so that he might at last
retire from the shoe shop. Arthritis had forced his mother to leave her job
long before, and the patriarch of the Kaspurelakos family had worked night and
day to fund his only son's ever rising college tuition.
With a weary sigh of resignation, the senior Kaspurelakos returned to the
sweltering back room of his tiny shoe-repair shop. Family was family. And Mark
was the future of the Kaspurelakos family.
The father died a month into Mark's next semester. Young Mark in truth not
quite so young any longer was devastated. At his father's funeral, he begged
his grieving mother to return to the bakery, but his pleas only made the poor
Page 107
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
woman's mournful wails all the louder.
Without the financial support, Mark couldn't afford to hide out in the halls
of academia. This realization terrified him. For the truth was, in spite of
all the grandiose talk of his future greatness, Mark Kaspar hadn't a clue what
he was going to do with his adult life.
Mark ultimately convinced his mother to surrender the proceeds of the sale of
the Kaspurelakos shoe-repair shop so he could continue along his march to
glory. At that point the old woman was only too willing to give in anything to
get her son out of the house.
Money in hand, Kaspar returned to the world in which he had squandered his
adult life. He got a job as an English professor at a local state college.
Truthfully the only driving ambition Mark Kaspar owned was a compulsion to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

zanotowane.pl

doc.pisz.pl

pdf.pisz.pl

angamoss.xlx.pl