"I was thinking last night, what if the head of this organization dies?"

"Damned if I know," said the Texan.

"Frankly, this revelation frightens me," said the President raising his eyebrows, head and hands as though just spotting a close friend in a crowd of strangers. "I haven't felt at ease since you told me about it."

"You can stop it anytime," the Texan responded.

"That one man they've got must be pretty good. The one who goes on the assignments, I mean."

"I don't know for sure. But from what that little feller told me that day, they don't just use him for wrapping up garbage."

"Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I don't like this whole business."

"We didn't ask you to take office," said the Texan with a smile.

So Remo Williams stood silently in the gymnasium feeling his conditioning leave him. He breathed deeply, then slid through the dark, in almost imperceptible move and was in the balcony. He wore black tennis shoes so that he could not see his feet, a tee shirt dyed black so that the white of the shirt in the dark would not throw off unbalancing brightness. His shorts were black. Night moving in night.

He moved from the balcony rail to the top of the basketball backboard. He seated himself carefully, with his right hand between his legs and his legs stretched out over the hoop below. Funny, he thought. When he was a policeman in his twenties, he would have been puffing if he ran a block, and probably would have had to engineer a desk job by thirty five or face a heart attack. It was nice then. Just walk into any bar you wanted when off duty. Have a pizza for supper if you wished. Get laid when you had a chance.

But that was when he was alive. And when he was officially alive, there were no such things as peak periods with rice and fish and abstinence. Actually, he didn't really have to follow the regimen. He thought about that often. He could probably do very well at less than full capacity. But a wise Korean had told him that deterioration of the body is like a stone rolling down a mountain. So easy to start, so hard to stop. And if Remo Williams couldn't stop, he would be very dead.