Rock stepped over the police line. The confident professionalism in his demeanor convinced Fleming not to interfere. The detective merely watched with quiet apprehension.

Leila withdrew two containers from the case-a stainless-steel vacuum bottle and an acid-proof, wax-coated quartz Petri dish. “Heads up!” she shouted at Rock. He turned and caught the two tossed items.

“It’s not a liquid,” Flash announced over their earcomms. “It runs like a fluid, but once it’s pooled, it seems to harden. Otherwise the wind would cause ripples.”

Rock picked up a crushed soda can and tossed it into the pool. It bounced once, skidded across the reflective surface, then came to a rest. Within seconds, it softened and disappeared as if sinking into water.

“Fun stuff,” Flash muttered.

“It may seem solid, but look at this.” Rock lowered his head to allow the camera a view of the edge of the mysterious pool. Its shoreline advanced steadily toward him at a slow but perceptible pace.

“Maybe it’s a fluid with a high surface tension,” Leila offered.

“Rock-get out of there,” Flash said. “It may not be an infectious agent, but it sure seems contagious. You might not even be able to tell if you’ve got any on you.”

“I just want to try scooping-”

“Do as he says, Rock.”

The voice behind him spoke in a deep, persuasive tone. Turning, he saw a wretched man in tattered, grimy clothes standing behind the police line. His face looked like a traffic accident, a swollen, red nose the most salient feature. The stranger stood, though, with an amazingly imposing posture. Fists on hips, he surveyed the scene through calm, intense eyes.

“You made it!” Leila shouted at the sound of his voice.

The newcomer nodded, his matted, dirty hair barely shaking with the motion. “Get away from that stuff, Rock. It’s too reactive.”

Rock knew better than to argue. Stepping backward over the thin vinyl barricade, he asked, “Plan is what, then?”

The tattered man surveyed the scene. “We’ll freeze that small puddle there”-his dirty hand pointed to where the paramedics had fallen-“and get a sample to analyze.”

He turned toward a black man in a white lab coat who had just arrived with several others. “Dr. Bhotamo,” he said cordially, “If we find that we need it, may we have the use of the Class Three isolation lab at Lawrence Livermore?”

The scientist eyed the filthy man up and down. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

“I apologize.” The man in the dirty tweed jacket reached up to his weathered face and grasped the red, pocked nose. With a firm tug, he tore it off.

The nose ripped away from his face to reveal another one- thin, sharp, and healthy-beneath it. In quick motions he peeled away bits of latex, exposing smooth tan skin beneath the artifice. His left hand removed the matted wig. Shortly cropped, dark-copper hair shimmered in the sunlight. The disguise dropped to the ground. Reaching up with both hands, the transformed derelict deftly removed a pair of grey contact lenses. Eyes of dark green gazed at Dr. Bhotamo. He peeled the age-spotted and gnarled rubber appliances from his hands and offered his right to his fellow scientist. “Richard Anger,” he said in a resonant voice. “Anger Institute.” “Dr. Anger’s son?” Captain Anger smiled at the mention of his renowned father.

“That’s right.” “You may borrow anything you want,” Bhotamo said, “including my personal staff.”

“Thank you, though I may simply need a steady supply of liquid helium.” Over his shoulder, he shouted toward his two friends. “Lei-get the cryogenics out of my van. Rock-get the fire suit ready.”

•

The fire suit actually served as an all-purpose insulation garment. Made of dozens of layers of insulating fabric and coated with a reflective Mylar surface, it protected equally well against blazing heat or chilling cold. Rock helped Cap seal up inside it, making certain that the internal air conditioning functioned flawlessly.

“How’s the video, Flash?” Cap asked via the communications setup in the fire suit.

“All fine here, boss.”

“If this fails, you know what to do.”

Flash said nothing. He knew what his partner meant. If the bizarre silver stuff should eat through the fire suit before Cap could peel it off and escape, he would be the new man in charge.

Leila, wearing thick gloves of the same material as the fire suit, hefted a two-gallon stainless-steel canister to the edge of the police line. A thick layer of frost coated the cylinder. When she set it down, sheets of ice sheared from the sides to melt steamily on the asphalt. She had taken the container from the same place Rock had gotten the fire suit-Cap’s van. On the outside, it looked like nothing special, with an innocuous white paint job and ordinary commercial license plates. Inside that plain exterior, though, resided enough ingenious tools of superscience to supply several university science labs and several more government weapons centers.

Captain Anger stepped under the line and picked up the tank. Speaking now through the comm, he said, “Warm up the atomic force ‘scope, then keep everyone fifty feet away from the van.”

“Right.” Leila spoke to Fleming, who relayed the request to a police sergeant.

Cap opened the cryogenic canister. Inside, a cloud of icy vapor swirled around like a miniature storm. Carefully advancing to the very edge of the small puddle created by the paramedics’ death, he tilted the cylinder to pour a small amount of clear bluish liquid on the boundary. Amid the cloud of evaporating liquid helium, the mirrored surface dulled and grew grainy. Over the comm, Cap heard a strange, crisp noise, like the sound made by crushing the dried husks of dead insects.

Using a pair of insulated forceps, Cap plucked up a piece of the brittle, frozen grey stuff and deposited it in the quartz dish Rock had left behind the police tape.

“Let’s see if that’s slowed things down enough for us to take a look.” Adding more liquid helium, he handed the vapor-spewing dish to Leila, who rushed it to the van. Laying the forceps near the puddle, Cap sealed the helium canister and stepped to the other side of the police line.

The Hazardous Materials team watched from a safe distance, as did the police and fire personnel. Rock’s angry glare kept reporters at a safe distance.

Inside the van, Leila’s gloved hands carefully placed the dish into the microscope’s sample chamber. She evacuated the chamber and commanded the computer to lower the microscope’s needle to the surface of the sample.

An atomic force microscope creates an image by tracking the point of an infinitesimally thin diamond needle-in this case, just ten atoms wide at the tip-across the sample, letting it rise and fall as it is repelled by the charge of the electrons on the minute features it encounters. A clutch of lasers detects the position of the needle and relays the information to the computer, which generates an image. Leila watched the picture appear line by line while Rock helped the captain out of the fire suit.

“How’s it coming?” Cap asked over the comm.

“I think you’ll be interested in this,” she said.

He climbed inside the van, followed by Rock and Dr. Bhotamo.

“That’s no chemical compound or virus.” She reached over to adjust the monitor. The four gazed at a false-color computer-enhanced image as it focused into a jumble of identical shapes frozen in a sea of elemental atoms.

The shapes-oblong and identical-looked U-shaped, like a length of channel iron. The outer surface bristled with armatures that-if they had been on a bacterium the same size-could have been the hairlike cilia used for locomotion. Those, however, would have been curved. The cilia one these objects consisted of straight sections connected at ball-and-socket joints. More arms clustered inside the lengthwise U-channel. These looked even more complex, some of them ending in tips of various incomprehensible shapes, some in what looked for all the world like miniature scalpels, and still others that mimicked construction tools. What appeared to be cogwheels or gears a few ten-thousandths of an inch wide connected each to the main body.