"Why bother? Everyone knows it's a scam."
"Not that aspect of it. The BioBubble was destroyed earlier this evening."
"By what? Cockroach infestation?"
"No. An unknown power that melted it into sticky glass and slag steel."
Remo blinked. "What would cause that kind of meltdown?"
"That is for you and Chiun to discover. Start with the BioBubble founders."
"Isn't this more the FBI's meat?"
"The FBI is reluctant. And there is some urgency here."
"What kind of urgency?"
"Dr. Cosmo Pagan is telling the media that extraterrestrials may be behind the BioBubble's collapse."
"Who would believe that crap?" asked Remo.
"As much as fifty percent of the American people."
"Where did you get that figure?"
"That is the number of Americans who believe in UFOs, according to polls. And once Pagan's views are widely disseminated by the media, it could be the start of a nationwide panic."
"Oh," said Remo. "I guess we go to Arizona."
"Be discreet."
"I'll leave my Spock ears behind," said Remo, hanging up. He turned to Chiun.
"You heard?" he asked.
"Yes. But I did not understand."
"There's a place out west where they've duplicated every environment on earth-desert, prairie, rain forest-under sealed glass to study ourselves."
Chiun cocked his head to one side. "Yes?"
"Something melted it flat."
"Good."
"Good?"
"Yes. Why should something so useless take up precious space? Are there not too many people already? Do Americans not dwell too close together and without proper spacing between their houses?"
"There's plenty of room out in Arizona."
"And now there is more," said Chiun.
With that, the Master of Sinanju lifted himself from his lotus position on the floor. He came to his black-sandaled feet like an expanding genie of gold and emerald, the silken folds of his traditional kimono unfolding like tired origami. His hands, emerging from their sleeves, revealed long curved nails, one of which was capped by what might have been a jade thimble.
"Smith said to start at ground zero, so that's where we're going," Remo said.
"Perhaps while we are in Arizona, we will visit your ne'er-do-well relatives," Chiun suggested.
Remo winced. "We're on assignment."
"It may be that our work will take us to the place where your esteemed father dwells."
"Don't count on it. I don't intend to stay in Arizona any longer than I absolutely have to."
"Why not?"
"Because this is a dippy assignment."
"This is new?" asked the Master of Sinanju.
Chapter 5
No one had ever seen anything like it. No one had ever heard of anything like it.
Project head Amos Bulla walked around the still-warm zone of glazed, brownish glass that surrounded the defunct BioBubble. The striated red sandstone hills of Dodona, Arizona, cooked in the near distance, like Mars without impact craters.
"What could have done this? What the hell could have done this thing?" he was saying over and over again.
"Whatever it was, it produced better than 1600 degrees centigrade of heat," said the planetary geologist from the US Geological Survey in nearby Flagstaff.
"Where do you get that figure, Hulce?" Bulla demanded.
"The name is Pulse. Tom Pulse." He kicked at the red sand with snakeskin boots, pulling the brim of his white Stetson low over his sun-squint eyes. "We know the melting points of glass and steel. Any higher and the thing would have been vaporized."
"Look at it, the glass just ran out like maple syrup."
"No, Mr. Bulla. You are standing on fused molten glass."
"Right. From the dome."
"No. This is new glass. Made by the action of heat on sand."
"Sand turned to glass," Bulla croaked. "My God. What could have done that?"
"A heat source of between 1500 to 1600 degrees centigrade."