The janitor was just that. A janitor. In his panic Yakamoto had misheard the man's accent.
He might be arrested. But there was nothing he could be charged with. He had not done anything yet.
Probably deportation. He would be sent back to Japan. A failure, yes. Probably fired from his job. But he would be alive. And at the moment he realized that there were things far worse than personal disgrace.
Feeling the tension of months of subterfuge drain from his narrow shoulders, Toshimi Yakamoto offered no resistance as the trio led him back up the road to the small complex of buildings.
He assumed they were going to the security room to call the police. Ahead, he saw the closed gate in the chain-link fence that led to the Vaporizer.
No, not closed. Open now. Which was very strange, since Yakamoto was certain he had locked up everything tight before leaving a few minutes earlier. He must have left them open, since the gates could only be opened by special access codes.
The security building was a simple concrete salt box at the edge of the main road. The fear returned full-blown when the group bypassed the building and headed for the open gate to the Vaporizer.
"No," Yakamoto whined in disbelief as they propelled him up along the alley formed by the high hurricane fence.
"No!" he cried louder when they forced him toward the sprawling black deck of the Vaporizer. "No!" he screamed when they shoved him through.
The frictionless black deck was slicker than ice. Without the special boots over his shoes, Yakamoto's feet went out from under him. He landed roughly on his back. Forward momentum skimmed him across the surface of the deck. He only realized that the inner fence directly around the pit had been rolled back when he slipped out into open air. The scientist felt a horrible instant of weightlessness.
Then he fell.
The pit walls tapered halfway down. Yakamoto hit the wall hard. Something snapped in his right leg. Daggers of pain shot from his shin as he rolled to the floor of the pit.
He fell onto something soft. In the darkness he couldn't see what it was.
All around was black. When he looked up he saw stars.
"Let me out, please!" he screamed.
His reply was a gentle hum of electricity from the walls. As the sound grew, lights winked on all around him. Tiny dots of yellow arranged in perfect little lines stretching around the four walls of the deep pit.
The nozzle lights illuminated the floor of the pit. He saw what it was he had landed on.
Dr. Hiro Taki was cold in death. The scientist's mouth yawned wide from his last moment of shock and pain.
When Toshimi Yakamoto saw the dead man's belly, his own mouth dropped in shock.
Dr. Taki's stomach wasn't there. There was a wide hole from sternum to pelvis. A perfect circle had been carved through from front to back. Whatever had hollowed him out had somehow cauterized the wound. No blood or organs spilled into the vacant, ghastly circle.
The hum grew in intensity. "Stop, please!"
Yakamoto was begging, crying.
He hopped on his uninjured leg, scratching at the walls. There was nothing to hold on to. There were no handholds. The nozzles were rounded stubs. In his clawing desperation he tore off a fingernail. He screamed in fresh pain.
By now the air around him was humming like a furious wasp. In all the tests he had never before heard the sound. Somewhere in his terrified brain he realized that sound could not escape the Vaporizer pit once the machine was switched on. He didn't care. He cried and screamed.
The sound was sucked to silence from his parted lips.
And then was a sudden stillness. Yakamoto held his breath.
And all around nozzle tips flashed to brilliant white.
Stars in a midnight sky, impossibly close. Burning, flaring. The light exploded from every point, all around-dizzying, blinding. And he was suddenly part of the light, and the light was accepting him into it.
Toshimi Yakamoto felt a strange whooshing vibration as his molecules rattled apart. As the world compressed and stretched into a single living stream, the black wall suddenly flew up to meet him. A single glowing nozzle tip burst in warm light all around him.
And then he was in the light and gone.
The black walls of eternity closed in around Toshimi Yakamoto. There was a weird out-of-body experience as he traveled through an endless black tunnel. It seemed to take forever, but he knew that it was only the wink of an eye.
The tunnel opened, the whooshing stopped and Toshimi Yakamoto found himself looking at other stars.
These stars weren't regimented like the false stars of the Vaporizer. These were the real thing, scattered randomly throughout the twinkling night sky.
The warm breeze touched the swaying tops of tropical trees. Though dry, it felt wet on his skin. When he looked, he saw why.
What should have been skin was now a damp mass of reddish blue, a human husk stripped and turned inside out. Fused bones of rib and spine curled in horrid shapes from pulsing, exposed organs.
There was no horror. In fact, Toshimi Yakamoto didn't mind at all.
The brain had gone the way of the body, twisted in shapes that no longer comprehended pain. When the end came, it came without understanding. The final breath wheezed out, and the quivering mass simply died.
And on the growing mountain of garbage, the rats came tentatively out of hiding. To feast on the inhuman jumble of flesh and organs that in life had been one of the brightest minds of Japan's Nishitsu Corporation.
Chapter 13
The Caribbean sun rose yellow and beautiful in a cloudless dawn. Petrovina Bulganin watched it sneak over the horizon as if it were a skulking enemy.
This mission was proving more of a nuisance than she had thought it would be. It wasn't just the side trip to the Vaporizer where she was doing the work of the SVR. It was the company she was being forced to keep.
The men on the Russian fishing trawler were blockish, simple-minded things. They lumbered around the deck doing their best to ignore the woman in their midst. As she watched them, she wondered if KGB idiocy was contagious.
Suspicions that extended to the center of the solar system were not typical for Petrovina Bulganin of the Institute, Petrovina Bulganin, formerly of the SVR. That sort of mindless distrust for everyone and everything was an old KGB trait. It was definitely her companions who were making Petrovina suspicious of the sunrise.
They looked ridiculous. Though at sea, they each wore the badly tailored black business suits of the former KGB. And not one of the fools realized how silly he looked.
Although it could have been worse, she decided. For a moment she pictured them in matching black swimming trunks, black socks and dress shoes, their shoulder holsters and guns leaving sunburn lines in their pale flesh.
This was the fault of Russia's current president. The man was former KGB and so trusted almost no one but former KGB. His entourage for the coming Globe Summit consisted almost entirely of Soviet-era KGB dinosaurs drafted from the ranks of the modern SVR. And so Petrovina was forced to work with them or no one.
Petrovina stood on the deck of the trawler. In the distance was floating Garbage City. The foreign scows and other sea traffic had been ordered from the area where the two boats had gone down. There wasn't strict enforcement. Petrovina's trawler had sailed in unmolested.
The men around her were fastening metal clips and checking for holes in her old canvas-and-rubber diving suit.
There was one metal barrel at the edge of the deck. One chance for defense if they were discovered. Not that they would be. This mission was a simple matter of confirming Director Chutesov's suspicions. If the Institute head was right, others would be called in to clean up the mess.