“Thanks, but no.” Remo handed his shares back to Wools.
Wools looked hopefully at Chiun. “No better than a check,” Chiun declared, gesturing at the shares he had discarded on the floor of the elevator.
“You always carry printed shares around with you like this?” Remo asked.
“Yeah. All the time.” Wools retrieved his documents while Chiun peered out the sides into the blackness below.
“Remo, it worries me,” Chiun said in Korean. “I fear this place might make it happen to you again.”
“Don’t even talk about it, Chiun. Let’s just leave it alone.”
“Also, I did not have the opportunity to finish my apology. It was I who brought the sickness upon you.”
“Chiun, just stop, okay? Save it for later. Like when we’re sitting at home some night with nothing better to do, then maybe we’ll talk.” Remo could hear himself being defensive. Well, he had the right to be defensive. Whatever happened out on the highway had been just terrible.
He shut off the memory, hard, and concentrated on the here and now.
“I have a bad feeling about this little rat and his billion-dollar rodent den,” Remo said, still in Korean.
“He has said almost nothing that is truthful,” Chirm agreed. “We should be prepared to encounter dangerous radiation.”
“We should be looking out for knives aiming at our backs,” Remo added, nodding at Wools, who didn’t notice. He was too busy plotting.
It took six elevator rides to get them all the way down to the bottom. As the final lift came to a noisy, clanging halt, Remo and Chiun gave each other a silent signal to be wary.
Because there were so many things wrong down here, Remo didn’t know where to begin sorting them out. His senses were flaring from the overload, trying to come to terms with the alien environment. There was the smell of rock dust, so thick and so old it was beyond conception that it should have ever been stirred up. There was the smell of fuel and sweat, and the tinge of radioactivity poisoning the air.
Most subtle and yet most powerful was the combination of signals that told them they were somewhere foreign, where the pressure of the air was different than it had ever been, where the miles of rock above them blocked out the wisps of heat and electronic and pressure waves that had always been there.
And there was a smell unlike any smell Remo knew, and what made it so noticeable was that it was almost human.
But not quite.
Wools led the way. They went past corridors into vast, empty spaces for future waste storage, linked by a rail system for a waste transport car with a clicking electric motor.
“It’s shielded for radiation and it moves slow to make any spillage impossible,” Wools enthused, still trying to win them over.
“Where’s it come from?” Remo asked. “You’re not taking waste down the elevator on a furniture dolly.”
“We have a transport system designed just for the waste-containers,” Wools said. “I’ll show you.”
“So why couldn’t the guys have snuck out that way?” Remo asked. “Seems like the easy explanation for your little ‘we quit’ scenario.”
“Believe me, I’ve tried to come up with a way to make that sound feasible,” Wools admitted. “You’ll see why I can’t in a minute.”
They found the shaft in a hermetically sealed chamber, where a series of mechanical cranes and claws were designed to lift the arriving cargo into the sealed transport car. There was no cargo arriving yet. The radiation level from within was elevated, but not deadly.
“Watch.” Wools took the controls from a bored operator and pressed a button that opened a large pair of metal doors, revealing a transport car with a self-balancing cargo compartment, required to keep the waste level on the steep grade. The car was winched, front and rear, and as they watched it began to move, exiting the doorway and coming to a halt next to a waiting transport car.
“It comes down and gets off-loaded, then travels the second corridor back up,” Wools said, and the car started again, heading through a second pair of metal doors that clanged shut behind it. “Now it’s being superheated,” Wools said. “This sterilizes it of any microorganisms that may be clinging to it. It will be heated seven more times on its trip to the surface, getting as hot as nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit. This way, when we go public we can assure the good folks of Oklahoma that no mutated bacteria and other life-forms are being transported to the world above. As if. Anyway, it discourages stowaways.”
“Couldn’t the sterilizing be turned off?” Remo asked.
“It could, but the alarm system would start a cascading shutdown of all systems. We’d take weeks to get up and running again. Believe me, there’s no way to make this sound like a plausible escape route.”
“Okay,” Remo said. “Show us the murder scene. I mean, show us where, some disgruntled employee scraped his arm before sneaking out.”
“Sure.” Wools chuckled, giving Remo a friendly pat on the arm—or would have, if Remo hadn’t somehow managed to be a lot farther away than Wools had thought.
