They moved among the stoves and refrigerators and meat lockers, opening them. They found prime rib in plastic, frozen TV dinners and assorted bottled beverages, including thirty gallons of whole milk under refrigeration.
"Still in code," said Remo, replacing a gallon and slamming the refrigerator shut. He went to a big black range and turned on a burner. Blue gas flames whuffed up. A stainless-steel range hood collected the heat and waste gas.
"It is a Martian secret base," said Chiun.
"A food dump?" Remo said incredulously. "Come off it. It's the secret kitchen of the BioBubble. This is where they make their forbidden pizza. This probably explains why the air levels have been screwed up. They cook with gas, and it eats up their oxygen."
"I see no Martian. Nor do I smell one."
"Looks like they get some of their heat from the stoves," said Remo, studying the acoustical-tile ceiling. "There's gotta be a way up into the BioBubble from here. Come on."
Leading the way, Remo found a simple folding aluminum step-ladder. It stood under a submarine-style airlock hatch. It was up in the closed position.
"BioBubble's directly above," he said.
"So, too, is the Martian foe," Chiun said sternly.
Remo climbed the ladder, undogging the hatch with a twirl of his index finger. The hatch squealed in protest, then dropped like a hungry steel mouth. Remo made it look effortless, but three bodybuilders with a monkey wrench couldn't have budged it.
Remo poked his head up into the open space. It smelled of sulphur.
"What do you see, Remo?"
"Looks like the inside of a melted marble. Stinks, too."
"You cannot smell the Martian?"
"Unless his body-odor smell leans toward glass and plastic, no," Remo called down.
Twisting around on the ladder, Remo tried looking in different directions, then said, "I'm going in."
"I am following," said the Master of Sinanju.
Chiun floated up the ladder and joined Remo in what appeared to be a distorted air pocket that had formed when the BioBubble settled and cooled. There were weird flowing tunnels going in three directions from the central pocket.
"Pick a tunnel, any tunnel," said Remo.
Chiun sniffed the air delicately. "I smell nothing that smells like a man of Mars, therefore I pick this tunnel."
"Why that one?" Remo pressed.
"Why not?" And the Master of Sinanju padded into it.
Remo took the adjacent tunnel and ducked in. It was only five feet high at its highest point, and he moved along it carefully.
The walls were mostly glass. Dimly Remo could make out streaks of color and at one point a skeletal human hand, scorched to black bone, evidence of a BioBubble inhabitatant having been cooked in a cauldron of molten glass. He saw an aluminum chair, bright as the day it was forged, suspended in a glass matrix.
It was like walking through a weird aquarium of rippled glass and bizarre objects. There were an awful lot of bugs. Mostly roaches, their feelers wilted.
The ceiling dropped lower and lower. Remo was about to turn back when he detected a muffled heartbeat. It was pounding.
He froze.
And before Remo could zero in on the source of the sound, something flared white-hot, and the tunnel turned the whitest white Remo had ever beheld. He knew before his eyes could completely shut he had been blinded. The searing pain stabbing deep into his optic nerve told him that. The pain went straight to his toenails, and deep in the pit of his stomach he experienced a growing and alien fear ....
THE MASTER of SINANJU was moving through a tunnel of glass whose sides felt slick to his touch. It was like nothing he had ever before encountered, and he therefore resolved to write of this in the scrolls that were passed down from Master to Master for the edification of future Masters of the House of Sinanju.
Chiun had come to a place where the tunnel swelled, forming a dome where the air was especially foul. Standing there, hands in the sleeves of his kimono, he stepped around, his hazel eyes taking in the strange sight of ordinary objects and cockroaches floating unmoving in cooled glass.
A moment's scrutiny assured him that no skulker lurked in this chamber of glass, so Chiun turned to retrace his steps.
At that moment, the glass to one side flared brightly, and through the tunnel came the wordless scream of his adopted son.
"Remo! My son!"
Throwing back his kimono sleeves, the Master of Sinanju flew back through the surreal tunnel of rehardened glass toward the sound of his pupil's scream of soul-searing pain.
Chapter 8
The Master of Sinanju emerged from his tunnel just as a strange figure backed out of the glass tube into which Remo had gone.
The figure was not Remo Williams.
From the back, the Master of Sinanju discerned a bulky gray quilted suit of armor that made him think of Chinese warriors of the old Qing Dynasty. But the style was not Chinese. The head was encased in a featureless bullet of some dull silver material.
"Turn and face your doom, Man of Mars," Chiun thundered.
The creature turned, sweeping a long rod of some white metal that glowed red at the tip before him. It sought him with its evil glimmerings. But no warrior of this or any world was equal to a Master of Sinanju.
Closing his eyes protectively, Chiun twisted his pipestem body, lifting one foot high while pivoting on the opposite toe.
Turning in midair, he spun a complete circle. It looked like a slow-motion windup to some ferocious stroke, but as the turning toe reached a point horizontal with the Master of Sinanju's chin, it accelerated to an unreadable blur.
The toe struck the side of the bullet head just as the square black panel of glass that hid the fearsome foe's face finished turning in Chiun's direction.
The black top of Chiun's sandal connected just as the red rod emitted a burst of pristine white light so pure it shocked Chiun's eyes, even though they were tightly sealed by his papery eyelids.
Chiun felt the impact, recoiled from it and recovered as the body of his foe went whump on the floor of the air pocket at the heart of the BioBubble.
Only when the rattle of death reached his ears did the Master of Sinanju open his eyes and face the defeated one.
Carefully Chiun padded up to the bulky shape on the floor.
The body lay like a bloated starfish, limbs splayed to the four quarters. Where the head should be was an empty space.
That sight satisfied Chiun, who then flew down the tunnel, seeking his pupil.