Inside the chamber she could see nothing but darkness and a faint flicker of orange flame. Aiming for that, she continued to blast away. She used up the breath she took before entering and dropped the extinguisher with a loud clank to reach for the still-smoldering form ahead of her. Its own arms extended, the hellish figure staggered toward her, pushing her to the exit.

They burst from the chamber into the marginally fresher air, Weir first, the other second. In the light of the control room, he made for a monstrous vision indeed.

Burnt black all over, the suit he wore consisted of a knobby assemblage of spheres, half-spheres, and short cylinders designed in such a way as to provide freedom of movement in all possible angles of rotation that the human body could achieve. A thick layer of char encrusted the spherical helmet.

Leila dropped to her knees, savoring the fresh air nearer the floor. Clumsily, and with the unsteady creak of roasted rotational surfaces, the suited man eased down to a similar position, struggling to undo his helmet. Weir reached up to help him and after a moment, the sphere rotated counter-clockwise one quarter turn. With a slight pop, it came loose. They lifted it off and stared at each other.

“Safety note,” the man said in a gravelly voice that grated his English through a Russian sieve. “Cavorite Mark Two is flammable under high positron flux.”

“Yes,” Weir said, sitting on the floor inspecting the helmet. “But it works.”

She rose to walk over to the console. Flipping a few switches activated the smoke blowers. With a whine, they sucked the cloud of blackish-grey haze out through the air-conditioning vents and into the pollution scrubber. There, a series of traps and increasingly finer filters removed every particle of pollutant and molecule of unnatural gas before recycling the purified air into the building. The chemicals and elements trapped in the system accumulated in an array of catalytic converters where an ingenious collection of molecules built toxins into more useful chemicals, or stripped them down to their component elements for future use. The system, powered by the huge solar array outside, operated almost without human attention, guided by the silent decision-making of a portion of the mighty parallel processing computer housed in the complex.

The man in the blackened suit stood and stretched. The flame-singed metal joints creaked with each movement. He disassembled the outfit, beginning with the knobby gloves. He was short, stocky, and powerfully built. He looked not unlike a sumo wrestler-trimmer, though, and more obviously muscled. His skin was deeply tanned, the flesh of his face roughened by years in sun that shone over all parts of the world, from steaming tropics to arid deserts to the frigid polar antipodes. His eyes, buried in a perpetual frown, were black as pools of crude oil, a color that matched his crop of hair. Almost as an anachronism, his hair lay straight back on his head, slicked down by hair oil until it resembled a shiny lacquer skullcap.

Clad in nothing but a pair of bright orange Kevlar boating trunks, Pete “The Rock” Kompantzeff gazed at the pile of charred metal and shook his head. “Going to cost bundle to mix up more Cavorite.”

“Rock,” Leila said, “anti-gravity is worth whatever we-”

A buzzing filled the air around them.

Leila quickly punched at the intercom button.

“Better get over here,” a sharp voice crackled. “We’ve got a big problem.”

Rock and Leila glanced at each other. The speaker, Flash, was not one to utter such extensive and alarmist pronouncements. It must really be something.

Leila powered the system down, shut off the computers, and rushed to the door, a dark bolt of blue under the fluorescent lights. Rock-a thumping blur of brown and orange, pounded behind her on thickly muscled legs. The man and woman made a strange duo.

The hallway they rushed into thundered with people headed this way and that. The Anger Institute For Advanced Science served as research center, university, and light industrial facility for hundreds of people. It also served as base of operations for Kompantzeff, Weir, and four others under the guidance of their skipper, mentor, and comrade-at-arms, Richard Anger III.

Dodging the solar electric cars used to reach more distant parts of the sprawling campus, they trotted toward a pair of fire doors a hundred yards down at the end of the corridor. Leila activated a transponder on her wristcomm and the doors slid aside on swift, nearly silent runners, then closed behind them with a slam instants after they sped through. A few more yards of running brought them to an opening in the corridor wall. This part of the Institute possessed no doors. The Captain found them unnecessary and obstructive.

“What’s the deal, Flash?” Kompantzeff bellowed upon entering. “I’m still smolderin’ here and Lei-”

“Listen to this.” The man seated at the computer terminal threw a switch. From a SurroundSound speaker system, the crackley noise of radio communication issued with a hiss of static.

“Don’t know what it is,” a voice said, “but eyewitnesses say a customer just dissolved. Touched a Latino male age fifty on the arm, smeared some of the substance on him. Paramedics can’t get it off. EPA HazMat team threw absorbents on the puddle, but they sank into it without a trace. And it’s spreading. Call Bill Harrison over at Lawrence Livermore and have him send a chemical weapons expert if he has one. This doesn’t look like pollution to me. And try Ames Research Cent-”

Flash was a lean young man, thin almost to the point of looking frail. His sparse, dark hair already betrayed the beginnings of baldness. Pale blue eyes gazed out from a face that looked youthful nonetheless. His slenderness made him seem taller than he actually was, but it also made him seem far less strong than he could be when situations demanded.

“It sounds as if we have something serious here.” Flash was usually far more understated. Right now, he looked grave.

Kompantzeff glanced at the computer screen. It read

Transmission Origin: Police Band Radio Path: EPA.HazMat.gov/Local Wavelength: 79.330 MHz Location: 121° 57’ 50" W; 38° 34’ 30" N City: Los Gatos, California

The graphic window displayed a map of the area. Los Gatos was just south of San Jose.

“Half an hour from here,” Rock said. “Should we check it out?”

“Where’s Cap?” Leila asked, reaching past Flash to change screens on the terminal. He slapped her wrist away lightly.

“I’ve already tried. He’s undercover and switched off the homer. We’re on our own.”

Leila looked at Rock with a grim expression. “Scramble the jets.”

The grizzled old man shuffled along the smog-drenched boulevard, muttering to himself and the world at large. His tattered tweed jacket hung loosely over faded and worn-through denim jeans, held up by a length of dirty clothesline. A torn and repulsively-stained shirt that had at one time been white oxford cloth fitted him poorly. Running shoes-no doubt pulled from a trash bin-slid along the crumbling pavement on feet without socks. Salt and pepper matted greying hair stuck out from under a grimy baseball cap worn backward on his head. A beard crusted with a week’s worth of soup-kitchen overflow looked as stiff as steel wool. His face bore the scars of years of neglect and unremitting exposure to the elements.

The most striking feature about the man was his nose. Bright red and scabby, it seemed to spread over nearly half his face. Pitted, large-pored, and covered with broken capillaries, it had obviously been the recipient of too much sun, too much liquor, and too many fists.

He dragged his feet in a scuffing manner as he pushed the shopping cart full of dirty beer cans and squashed plastic bottles. He stank, but his cargo stank worse. A hideous liquid dribbled continuously from the mess to leave a dotted trail on the sidewalk.