Caraal appeared, watched her husband struggle with the object and giggled. Her voice sounded warm and soft. Like Remo, she had passed through the middle school in the first stage of convent studies. Caraal could read — in that sense she was one up on Remo, who knew only a few words — but the symbols inscribed along the side of the cylinder made no sense to her. They were of things she had not seen before.
The two men began to laugh along with Caraal at her husband's futile attempt to find an opening.
"Maybe the gods do not want us to open it," she teased.
The words had barely escaped her lips when Remo heard a snapping noise, followed by a hissing sound that immediately reminded him of the times Zercher peeled back a tab on a can of Red Top.
The tranquility of the beach setting was suddenly assailed by a second sound, this one reminiscent of a vacuum being broken. As it did, a thin, pale-yellow vapor began to seep ominously from the cylinder. The air was suddenly fouled with the odor of rotting things — a bloated pig in the heat of the sun or the spoiled leftovers where the starving dogs gathered to scavange.
Caraal was the first to clutch at her throat. She began clawing frantically, then stumbled and sagged to her knees. She fell face forward, her slender body convulsing in the fine white sand.
Only Remo seemed to be able to keep his wits about him. He realized immediately that the vapor was deadly. He kicked at the cylinder, shoving it forward and rolling it down the incline of the beach toward the water. Melton joined him in the struggle, but Japal, like Caraal, was already clawing at this throat and retching. He too began to stagger and, like the woman, fell to the ground, convulsing violently.
Remo and Melton succeeded in getting the metal object as far as the water's edge, but the deadly vapor continued to erupt into the stillness of the evening air.
Japal rolled over in agony and rivulets of blood streamed from the corners of his mouth. He had clawed at his throat until he had gouged gaping holes in his soft flesh.
Remo couldn't breathe. It felt as if his lungs were collapsing. Melton was staggering. A gaping hole had erupted in his narrow chest, and he plunged head first into the shallow water.
The yellowish, foul-smelling cloud continued to expand.
Remo sank to his knees, coughing, no longer able to keep his eyes open. The pain in his chest was excruciating. He reached up to touch his face and realized that it had already been transformed into a mask of open sores.
He fell face forward in the sand, wondering if this was as terrible as the pain Brutan had felt when he was attacked by the scorpion fish. But for Remo there was no hope; there was no Japal to put an end to his agony.
The next morning, an icy blanket of death hovered over the once beautiful island. Remo Tayapal and all other living creatures on Deechapal were dead.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
It was, for Elliott, a quiet time; a time for healing, and a time for reflection. I say this even though he worked feverishly to complete what was then his eleventh novel and, to everyone's surprise, he uncharacteristically met each and every one of his lecturing commitments. All of this was accomplished, however, with a certain kind of grim resignation and a noticeable absence of the old E.G. Wages charm.
His commitments met, a somewhat surly Elliott Grant Wages announced his intention to spend the midwinter university break doing what little he could to further deplete the world's supply of Scotch whiskey. Good friend that he is, he invited me to join him in his lofty endeavor.
Being the first day of the break, we had already launched our heroic effort when Cosmo called. I could see the change in my old friend even as they talked. By the time he hung up, he was ebullient. "Hey," he said, "things are looking up. Cosmo has just extended an invitation to spend the next couple of weeks in warmer climes."
"By all means… go!" I urged.
Elliott went… and returned… and gave me his journal to read. It was, to say the least, quite an adventure. Elliott never gives his journals titles; he simply numbers them.
This then, is the text of Elliott Grant Wages' Journal #5. I call it, "The Prometheus Project."
1
I threaded my way through the tangle of holiday traffic in the Tampa terminal and stepped out into the welcome early morning glare of a Florida December sun. Cosmo was waiting, just where he said he would be. He spied me and inched his way out of a long line of waiting drivers, deftly edging his big Continental to the curb. He released the trunk lid from inside and motioned for me to dump my things in the cavernous hole.
Knowing Cosmo, he wasn't awake yet. He stuck out a gnarled hand and bestowed upon me what I'm sure the old boy was convinced was a proper welcome. Then he pulled back out in the flow of traffic and headed up Westshore toward the causeway that would eventually carry us over to the beach area.
"Beautiful weather," I offered.
Cosmo grunted.
"How's Honey Bear?"
"Tolerable," he muttered. I was making progress. He had managed four syllables.
"How about stopping for coffee? The stuff they served on the plane was the next thing to battery acid."
Still taciturn, he turned south on Seminole and headed for the "Tom Stuart," slipped easily over the bridge and dropped us down on the island. The morning rush hour traffic was just starting to pick up when we pulled into a seedy looking little dive called "Shannon's Shanty." It needed a good coat of paint — even a bad coat would have helped.
"Goosey has the best coffee on the island," Cosmo assured me. It was the first indication of civility.
The Shanty was the kind of place hordes of tourists spend an entire winter ignoring. I figured it had to be the number one target on the local Chamber of Commerce hit list. The odor of fried eggs and bacon grease had permeated every nook and cranny of the little dive, and the clientele reeked of hard times.
Cosmo headed straight for a booth at the back, out of the high traffic area, and slumped down like a spoiled child in his seat. Goosey, at least that's who I figured it was, was right behind us with two steaming cups of coffee.
"Keep 'em full, Goose, and see that we're left alone," Cosmo groused.
Goosey shrugged, nodded and disappeared.
Cosmo dug out his pipe, packed it, lit it and went through one of his coughing routines; I'd heard it before. It always sounds like his next breath will be his last. With that out of the way, he started fumbling through his pockets until he came up with a wadded piece of paper. It was a newspaper article, the local version of a wire story I had read a few days earlier in colder climes. ''Did you see this?" he questioned.
I took it, scanned it and handed it back to him, nodding.
"Well?"
"Well what?"
"What do you think caused it?"
The news item Cosmo was expressing interest in concerned a story coming out of a remote area west of Jamaica known as the Doobacque Cluster. Despite the magnitude of the tragedy, it hadn't received much attention from the press other than the initial flurry of reports about an apparent explosion that had killed several hundred locals. "Hard to say. Other than something similar to what you just showed me, I haven't heard much more about it."
"Know why?" We were going to play this Cosmo's way.
"I give. Why?"
"News blackout."
"What's the deal? Some sort of nuclear device gone haywire?"
Cosmo studied me a moment, took a long sip of coffee, relit his pipe and settled back in the seat. "You really don't know anything about it, do you?"