But while all that meant Remo couldn't marry or raise children or fall permanently in love, it didn't mean he couldn't have a social life. Assuming he was careful.

  Maybe I should start dating, he thought. Why not? There's nothing in my contract that says I can't. I just can't get involved.

  By the time Remo deplaned at Logan Airport, he had resolved to ask the next attractive woman he saw for a date. Just to see what happened.

  But not in the terminal. Too many stewardesses in and out of uniform. The last thing he wanted to date was a stewardess. They were too aggressive. He wanted someone nice. Someone demure. Preferably one with D-cups. C-cups might be acceptable, if she had a really nice walk. If not, D-cups or no cups.

  ENTERING the fieldstone church-turned-condominium he called home, Remo found the downstairs kitchen empty and the upstairs rooms likewise. So he followed the sound of the steadily beating heart only his ears could detect to the bell-tower meditation room, and informed the Master of Sinanju of the new leaf he was going to be turning come the New Year.

  "I need a date for New Year's Eve."

  "I do not recommend this," Chiun said in a low, serious voice entirely unlike his normal excited squeak.

  "Why not?"

  "They will make you flatulent."

  "That's not the kind of date I have in mind," explained Remo patiently.

  "Figs also are to be avoided."

  "I'm not hungry for dates or figs."

  "Then why bring these fruits into the conversation?" asked the deadliest assassin alive.

  "We weren't having a conversation until I walked in."

  "And I was enjoying peace of mind until that moment. But since you are my adopted son and we are related through circuitous and convoluted ways, I will ignore this and listen to your explanations, although I have already judged them the workings of a possibly demented mind."

  "By 'date,' I mean going out with a woman."

  This lifted Chiun's wizened face, touching its wrinkles with startled interest. "You have met a woman?"

  "Not yet. But I will."

  "How do you know this?"

  "Because I'm going to keep my eyes open for a woman to take out on New Year's Eve."

  The Master of Sinanju stirred on his round reed floor mat. Only a knowledgeable anthropologist would recognize him as a member of the Altaic family, which included Turks, Mongols and Koreans. Chiun was Korean. Born late in the last century, he had youthful hazel eyes that bespoke a vitality that virtually guaranteed he would see the next. There was almost no hair on the smooth egg that was his skull. Two cloudlike puffs tickled the tops of his ears. A wisp of a beard curled from his parchment chin. He was the last Korean Master of Sinanju, head of the House of Sinanju, a lineage of assassins who protected pharaohs and popes, caliphs and czars, rulers of all kinds, in an unbroken chain that stretched back to the thin mists of early human civilization.

  "I do not understand this concept, Remo," he said, shifting his golden kimono, whose silken sleeves in his lap formed a tunnel that shielded his hands from view. "Explain it to me."

  "New Year's?"

  "No. Not that. I fully understand the Western dating errors that insist the year begin in the dead of winter when all sane calendars start with the first blooming promise of spring. What is this other dating?"

  "You take a woman out and show her a good time."

  "Why?"

  Remo growled, "Because you like her and she likes you."

  "What then?"

  "Depends. Sometimes you date no more. Other times you date forever more."

  "You marry?"

  "That sometimes happens," Remo admitted.

  "You are in need of a wife?" asked Chiun, his voice thinning.

  "Not me. I just want to slip into a normal life-style for a change. See how it feels."

  "So you will take out a woman you do not know, showering her with undeserved gifts and attention and possibly feeding her?"

  "Something like that."

  "How do you know this woman will be suitable if you have not yet beheld her conniving face?"

  "I won't date anyone who isn't suitable."

  "This is a strange concept. If you desire a woman, why not take one?"

  "I'm not talking about sex. I'm talking about companionship."

  "Leading to what?"

  "Sex, I guess."

  "Aha!" Chiun crowed. "So why do you not dispense with this dating hysteria and take a woman you like, enjoy her for an evening, possibly two if she possesses sturdy bones, abandon her to the winds of chance and then resume your normal existence?"

  "If I want sex, there are willing stewardesses galore."

  "Then I leave you to your stewardesses, just as you leave me to my meditations," said Chiun, his gaze going to one of the big square windows that looked out over the seaside town of Quincy, Massachusetts.

  "I don't want a stewardess. They just want to climb my tree. I want a woman I can talk to. One who understands me."

  "You can talk to me. I understand your unfathomable ways. "

  "You're not a woman."

  "I am wiser than a woman. I have taught you more than any woman could. What disease has attacked your weak mind that you would seek out a woman for companionship and wisdom, women being notorious for their utter lack of those qualities?"

  Remo started pacing the square room. "Look, I'm an assassin. I can live with it. But I'd like to do something more with my spare time than parry with you and exercise."

  "You sleep?"

  "Yes."

  "You eat?"

  "Yes."

  "You have me in your life?"

  "Always."

  "Therefore, your days are full and rich, and your nights serene. What would a woman bring to them?"

  "I'll let you know after I start dating," Remo growled.

  "If you seek a wife, I will help you."

  "I don't seek a wife."

  "If you seek a woman, I will leave the sordid details to you."

  "Thanks. Appreciate it," Remo said dryly.

  At that point, the telephone on the ironwood taboret rang.

  Remo grabbed it.

  "Remo." It was Harold Smith. He spoke Remo's name with the same warmth he would put into the phrase "Check, please."

  Remo returned the touching sentiment in kind. "Smith."

  "I have been asked by the President to look into the BioBubble event."

  "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."

  "How do you know that?" Bulla demanded.

  "No mystery. That's the temperature range at which sand is fused into glass."

  "Must have been one hellacious blast."

  "Actually all glass is made from superheated sand."

  "It is?" Bulla said.

  "Yes. Sand, limestone and soda ash. Where did you think glass came from?"

  "I don't know, smart-ass. Glass mines, I guess."

  "Forget the sand. I think we can rule out a lightning strike."

  "It must be a lightning strike."

  "The evidence says different. No clouds in the sky to generate an electrical storm. And there are no fulgurites in the sand."

  "I can see that." Then catching himself, Bulla added, "No what?"

  "Fulgurites. Long tubes of fused glass usually found in sand that has been blasted by a lightning strike. When the electrical charge strikes sand, it naturally follows the metallic pathways in the sand until it expends itself. These pathways fuse into electrically created glass. They're almost works of art in themselves."

  Bulla kicked at the red sand. "I still say it's got to be lightning."

  Tom Pulse shook his head slowly. He was being paid by the hour. "Lightning might have blown a hole in the BioBubble," he drawled. "It would have shattered as much as it melted. From what I see, a directed energy source the approximate circumference of three acres did this."

  "Directed energy! You mean this mess is manmade?"

  "If it is, I have never heard of the kind of technology that would focus this much concentrated hell on a piece of the planet."

  "You're sounding like that silly-ass Cosmo Pagan character"

  "You're just saying that because Pagan is against manned space flight."

  "I'm saying this because the man is a sanctimonious ass. He was the clown who first coined the slur BioBoondoggle when we refused to hire him as a consultant during our Mars phase. Man threw a hissy fit to end all hissy fits. You'd think he thought he owned the copyright on anything to do with Mars. Finally shut up when we gave up on NASA participation and went green."

  "I hear he's en route."

  "Sure. To gloat. Screw him. Don't let him near the area," Bulla ordered.

  "What about federal authorities?"

  "Who's coming?"

  "Maybe EPA. Could be DoD."

  "What would the Department of Defense want with this sorry slag heap?"

  "If they buy Dr. Pagan's extracosmic theory, they'll be here with bells on and Geiger counters stuttering."

  Amos Bulla looked up at the early-morning sky. Even it looked reddish to the eye. "There's no way a beam from outer space did this."

  "The force was downward. It came from on high. Other than that, it's anybody's guess."

  Bulla licked his fleshy lips. "Should we still be standing here like this? Exposed?"

  "Why not? Did Uncle Sugar Able nuke Hiroshima twice?"

  Bulla blinked. "Uncle who?"

  "Military talk for the US. of A. Whatever did this got what he, she or it wanted. We're safe."

  "I hate you tech types. Never use a simple word when a convoluted one will do."

  Tom Pulse smiled a tight smile that said Sue me.

  Helicopters began to rattle the shimmering red horizon.

  "Here they come," Bulla muttered. "I don't know what I'm going to hate worse. The media or the Feds."

  "Either way, be sure to smile real friendly-like as they Roto-Rooter your unhappy ass."

  Bulla winced. "I liked you better when you talked like a techie, not a Texan," he muttered.

  Then he strode off to greet the arriving media.

  THEY PILED out of their helicopters, unloading video cams, sound systems and enough equipment to record the end of the world. As soon as the equipment was off-loaded, the choppers took off and began circling the site, taping aerial and establishing shots of the glass pancake that had supported Amos Bulla for six fat, happy years.

  The media pointedly ignored him as he started wading into their midst, looking to shake hands and make friends before tape rolled and there was no turning back.

  No one was having any of it.

  In fact, they were so cold Bulla started to wonder whether he had shown up for an expose with himself scheduled for the hot seat.

  "We're ready for you," someone said after the cameras were hefted onto shoulders and the reporters were pointing their microphones at him as if testing his firecracker red necktie for radioactivity.

  "I would like to make a brief statement," Bulla began.

  The media were having none of that, either.

  "What did this?" a reporter asked.

  "If I could..." Bulla said, waving the prepared statement.

  "Do you believe, as many Americans do, in the existence of extraterrestrial visitants?" another reporter interrupted.

  Bulla opened his mouth to reply, and a third question jumped at him.

  "Have you ever been abducted by grays?"

  "Grays?"

  "Highly evolved aliens. Think of little green men-except they're gray. They like to perform medical experiments on humans."

  Bulla swallowed his anger. "I have a statement," he said tightly. "It will only take five minutes."

  "Too long. We need a soundbite. Thirty seconds or less. Can you boil it down to the pithiest point?"

  "Lightning," Amos Bulla said quickly.

  "How's that?"

  "As far as we can now tell, a gargantuan thunderbolt struck the BioBubble. It was a freak accident. Nobody at fault. Nobody to blame. Let's just keep our heads and the lawyers out of this, shall we?"

  "What evidence supports this belief?"

  "Fulgurites. They're all over the site. In fact, you could say it's one gigantic fulgurite."

  The media failed to ask what a fulgurite was, so Amos Bulla got away with it. Not that he expected otherwise. The media was not one to display its ignorance. At least while the cameras were whirring. Later some would question the lightning-bolt hypothesis. Others would simply report it as fact. By that time, Bulla would know if he were out of a job or not. It sure stank that way from ground zero.

  "Will you rebuild?" a new voice asked from in back of the pack.

  "That decision has not been made yet," Bulla admitted.

  "Who will make it? You?"

  "I'm only project director."

  "Will the decision be made by the mysterious backer of the project?"

  Amos Bulla smiled as he had been instructed to.

  "You'll have to ask Mr. Mystery. If you can locate him."

  No one laughed or chuckled or even smiled. They were deadly serious. He was hoping for some humor.

  "Will BioBubble IV come equipped with a lightning rod?" someone asked.

  "This is being looked at," Bulla ad-libbed.

  A mistake. He knew it was a mistake the moment the words spilled from his lips. Great communicators did not ad-lib. You tumbled ass over teakettle down the rabbit hole that way.

  "Sir, why did the BioBubble, a multimillion-dollar research station, fail to include a common lightning rod-a precaution even the most modest trailer home enjoys?"

  "A common lightning rod would not have saved the BioBubble from the gigantic bolt that thundered down from the heavens last night, say our experts," Bulla said, throwing a keep-your-damn-mouth-shut glance over his shoulder to Tom Pulse, who loitered out of camera range.

  "Then you anticipated a lightning strike?" a reporter asked quickly.

  "No."

  "Then you were negligent?" another demanded.

  "No one was negligent!" Bulla snapped.

  "Then why are nearly thirty scientific volunteers now entombed in glass like so many ants in amber?"

  There was no answer for that. No good answer, and Amos Bulla knew that. He swallowed hard and considered giving his reply in cryptic, TV unfriendly Latin when a scarlet Saturn SU sedan came down the winding road and out stepped a serious-faced man with short black hair, professorial glasses and the vague air of a professional stage magician. He wore a camel-colored corduroy coat over a brick red turtleneck.