"Want to hear it doubled?" Remo asked. "Halved?" And when he left the doctor's office later, the physician was yelling that he got all the practical jokers and he had a lot of work and only a weirdo like Remo would play the kind of tricks he played. But it hadn't been a trick. As Chiun, his aged Korean trainer, had told him early on:

"People will only believe what they already know and can only see what they have seen before. Especially white people."

And Remo had answered that there were plenty of black and yellow people just as insensitive and probably even more so. And Chiun had said Remo was right about the blacks and about the Chinese and the Japanese and the Thais, and even about the South Koreans and most of the North Koreans, they now being unified under the decadence of Pyong Yang and various other big cities, but that if one went to Sinanju, a small village in North Korea, there were those who appreciated the true outer limits of the human mind and body.

"I've been there, Little Father," Remo had said. "And that means you and the other Masters of Sinanju who have lived throughout the ages. And no one else."

"And you too, Remo," Chiun had said. "Transformed from pale nothingness and worthlessness into a disciple of Sinanju. Oh, never has such glory come to Sinanju as to be able to create something of worth from you. Wonderful me. I have made a student from a white man."

And overwhelmed by his own accomplishment, Chiun had gone into a three day silence broken only by an occasional "from you," and then a swoon of awe at what he had done.

Now Remo moved ahead of the divers, flopping with their artificial fins, leaving streams of shiny air bubbles coming up behind them. Four bodies fighting themselves and the water. They used oxygen they did not need for jerkily pushing muscles they did not know how to use. They hunted the shark, and the shark knew with a kind of knowledge better than mere knowing how to move and do. For that which required knowing always had less force than that which was done by the body itself. So Chiun had taught Remo, and so Remo understood as he, like the shark, snapped and curved through ocean waters off the Florida coast.