No Contest

Deaths also occurred during events that were ESN organized. The network organized and broadcast a Rocky Mountain States Extreme Unassisted Freestyling Association competition, which involved competitive rock climbing without the use of rock-climbing gear. The climbers ascended barehanded and barefoot, and the competition always occurred on rock faces where safety harnesses were impossible to deploy. The association lost something like ten percent of its active membership to fatal rock climbing falls every year. It was an absurd sport.

Smith would have assumed the sport would fade away quickly, losing enthusiasts to death or common sense, and yet the total membership numbers climbed each year. As long as there were people willing to take the risks, there were certainly audiences willing to watch, and extreme sports programming was becoming big business. ESN was slurping up audience share from sports viewers and reality TV programming. Advertising dollars were skyrocketing, and extreme games were now high-stakes competitions. That meant more newcomers to the sports, hoping for a share of the pie. The growth and the influx of amateurs meant even more spectacular injuries and deaths, which was caught on video more frequently, which drove up ratings.…

And the death toll mounted.

This evening. Smith intended to clarify one of his many security issues. He knocked on the door of the suite in a private wing of Folcroft Sanitarium. He knocked again. There was no answer. It was three in the morning, so he gave the occupant time to get up and come to the door, but the occupant didn’t materialize.

Smith cocked his head, considered the next door down the hall and walked to it. He glanced at the chart next to the door and read it, just to stall for time. This was getting more awkward by the minute.

The chart showed the patient was doing well. Responding to therapy. Unless he overdid it again, the patient would be able to-permanently discard his wheelchair in a week or so.

Smith finally knocked and waited.

Smith’s assistant, Mark Howard, opened the door. “Dr. Smith. What’s wrong? Why didn’t you call?” The young man was standing there in a pair of jogging shorts and a hastily donned pajama shirt, buttoned incorrectly.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Mark,” Dr. Smith said. “May I have a word with Ms. Slate?”

“Dr. Smith, what’s going on?”

“I must speak with Ms. Slate in private.”

Mark reluctantly nodded and ducked into the private hospital suite—he had not been back to his Rye apartment since he was wounded on the job months before. A hurt leg put him in a wheelchair. He escaped the wheelchair briefly only to aggravate the injury by overdoing his physical therapy exercises. Now he was walking again, a few steps at a time, and taking it slow.

“Oh, don’t worry about it, Mark.” Sarah Slate slipped out of Mark’s room with an easy smile for Dr. Smith.

“Ms. Slate.”

“Call me Sarah.”

“Sarah,” Smith said officiously, and nodded, and then realized that the young woman was buttoning a man’s shirt that was so oversize that he could see… He looked away, then he looked back, his eyes glued to the small ornament around her neck.

“Like it? It’s from Chiun.”

“It’s very pretty,” he said gloomily.

They strolled down the hall together. Smith was trying to recall if he had ever known Chiun to give a gift to anyone—especially something as invaluable as a symbol of the House of Sinanju. Sarah was not perturbed by his silence, as if they were old friends strolling in the park. In fact, she had only been introduced to Smith briefly.

“I don’t quite know where to begin,” he said.

“Let me help,” Sarah offered.

“All right.”

“Short version. A few hundred years ago my ancestor, Andrew Slayte, met and befriended a Korean from the village of Sinanju. This was Master Go.”

Smith stopped walking.

“News to you, I see,” she said. She strolled on. “Here are the parts you might be familiar with. In the last years of the nineteenth century, another ancestor of mine creates an advanced automaton named Ironhand, only to have him stolen in France during World War I. Eighty years later Ironhand comes to my house in Providence, Rhode Island, remote controlled by a German who wants me to give up other secrets regarding my ancestor’s engineering accomplishments.

“Lucky for me, the current Master of Sinanju—a white American, of all things—has also dropped in to visit, along with his Korean trainer and their cute research assistant. They drive away Ironhand, but the research assistant is wounded in the process. Smitten by the research assistant, I accompany them to a private hospital in New York, which is obviously their base of operations.”