On the table in the tiny lab was a beaker of water, cloudy and frozen solid, and a binocular microscope was beside it. Sitting on a stool was a researcher, also frozen. His stomach was open and the blood had made scarlet icicles.
Chiun nodded at the puddle. Remo understood. Whatever had chewed its way from inside the lab technician was in the blood, which puddled on the floor and froze to a shiny surface.
When Remo felt his skin had become as cold as he could make it without killing his own dermal layer, he stepped over the frozen puddle of blood. The lab technician was still holding the phone to his ear. “I’ll take it.” Remo extracted the phone from the man’s hand. “Hello?”
“Remo?” asked Mark Howard.
“Yeah. Now what?”
“Dr. Alcieni had identified the city water source as the contaminant carrier and was trying to make an identification of the pestilence when he died. He called a fellow microbiologist in Flagstaff, a man he knew was a specialist in infectious diseases, and he was on the phone with him until he died, working until the last minute.”
Remo gave the corpse another glance. Dr. Alcieni could be just another corpse with a crater in his stomach the size of a kumquat. He wondered if anybody would every really recognize the man’s heroism. Remo felt very, very cold.
“He told Dr. Palamas in Flagstaff that he had set the air-conditioning system low to preserve the samples.”
“The doctor and his sample are frozen stiff.”
“Okay.” Mark Howard was breathing hard. “You have got to be careful here, Remo.”
“I know.”
“If Dr. Alcieni did what he hoped he was doing, he preserved whatever contaminant was in the water. That means it’s virulent when thawed.”
“I know.”
“If you warm it up—”
“Look into the microscope.”
Remo hated it; he felt inadequate to look into a microscope. Dammit, he didn’t know what he was looking for in a frigging microscope! You were supposed to have scientists to look into the damn microscope! But here he was, Remo Williams, Sinanju Master and well- known dim bulb, and it was up to him, of all people, to look in a microscope and describe what he saw.
What he saw sent a chill through him. How that was possible he didn’t know.
“Uh.” Remo looked at Chiun. Chiun asked a question with his ancient Korean eyes.
Remo looked again, and some of the chill lessened. “I see it, Junior. It’s not quite what I expected.” Well, he thought, that sounded kind of stupid. He wasn’t known for his scientific knowledge. What would a brainiac like Mark Howard care about what Remo
“Describe it, please, Remo,” Mark said.
“Tentacles. Ten of them.” Remo felt the Master Emeritus tense up nearby. “At first glance it’s sort of a Sa Mangsang Mini-Me, but it has a definite mechanical look to it. There’s little tentacle hinges. The torso is kind of like a rivet holding the limbs together. It’s not moving, by the way.”
“It’s frozen, not deactivated,” Mark Howard explained. “Now let’s see what happens when you start it up again.”
Remo said, “Okay. Here goes nothing.” Then he leaned over the microscope and gently breathed on the slide. His body heat made a mist of steam, and when he looked into the eyepiece again, the tiny robot with the tentacles was moving.
“Junior, you’re not going to believe this. It’s not building a clone of itself. It’s tearing itself apart. Now I see more of them. They’re ripping into one another. They’re helping one another. What the hell is this?” Even as he watched, the thin layer of water was again freezing and locking the little entities in their crystals, halfway through their self-dismantling.
“This is what we suspected, Remo,” Mark Howard said. “Their programming includes a predetermined life span. Once the time is up, they self-destruct as completely as possible. Most of the remaining fragments settle in the water supply, so all that shows up in the tests is normal-looking mineral sediment.”
“So letting the room warm up right now would be the right thing to do?” Remo asked doubtfully.
“It would give them the opportunity to perform their final function,” Chiun observed.
“All of them?” Remo prodded.
“Maybe,” Mark Howard said.
“Understood,” Remo said, but he had squeezed the phone flat before he finished the word. “I didn’t want to give them the chance to say something stupid, like, maybe we should keep the little buggies around to study them,” he explained to Chiun.
“For once, you have made a profoundly wise choice, Remo Williams,” Chiun said. “This is perhaps the most despicable killing tool the Western world has ever devised. It is less honorable than the poison that a coward places in a rival’s wineglass. It is more cowardly than a boom dropped from the clouds to decimate a city.”
“You’re right. Little Father,” Remo said. “You know what worries me? What if some of these buggies are programmed not to self-destruct? Like, maybe just one in a million is supposed to stop working for a while, then maybe get going again in a week or a month or a year.”
