"Krysty, we could..." Ryan began, shaking himself as though he were covered in cold water.

"Lover, we don't have the time," she said, pushing past him, edging Jak out of the way and taking the lead.

Word had finally got out among the scientists that death had come stalking them. Ryan and the others saw lab coats of pink, green and light blue scurrying away from them, up stairs and into rooms that opened off the main part of the complex.

Oddly they saw no more sec men.

"Here," Ryan said, pointing to a section marked with a skull and crossbones and the words over the doorway: All Personnel Caution. Explosives. Alpha-Sec Only. Others Quadruple Negative Entry.

They entered a laboratory filled with glass vials that bubbled and hissed. There was more scientific equipment in the room than Ryan had seen in his entire life. Strapped into a peculiar upright wheeled chair was the huge giant they'd seen previously, this time without his mutie escort. His face, with the distorted, swollen features of an acromegalic, turned incuriously to look in their direction. Then he glanced back to the bench where he was working on an experiment that seemed to involve whirling steel spheres in a huge vacuum jar.

"They said he was an astrophysicist," Krysty whispered. "What's he doing in here?"

"Don't know," Ryan replied. "And I don't care."

His first bullet drilled clean through the giant's torso to the left of his twisted lordotic spine. The bullet smashed into the apparatus, causing a gigantic implosion that sucked the retarded giant forward, his face and upper body almost disappearing into the whirling inferno of splintered glass and metal. They heard a bull-like roar of pain, interrupted by a choking, drowning cry as the body slumped across the bench.

Without giving the massive corpse a second glance, Ryan led them on.

"This is it," he said.

They were in a wing of the sprawling building only forty paces of so from the body of the gigantic scientist, along a corridor that ran parallel to the center aisle of the research section.

Jak smiled, running a tongue over bared teeth. "Look at that. Blow up the world with that."

"What they intended, kid," Ryan replied, shaking his head at the sight. If any baron in Deathlands had access to power like this, he could rule unchallenged. It had to be the largest collection of explosives anywhere.

Row upon row of shelves, with crates upon crates. Thousands of tons of every kind of explosive in raw and refined form, lots of it with long chemical names that Ryan didn't even recognize. Some of it, like good old unstable nitro, he knew well enough. There were miles of wires of varying thickness and hundreds upon hundreds of detonators.

"Timers," Jak said, leaping about the store like a child surrounded by a paradise of dream toys.

"Time's passing, lover," Krysty warned, glancing at her wrist chron.

"Keep watch," Ryan said. "Got to link this up with some of that napalm we saw back yonder. Get everything tied in so it blows together."

She clicked away, the heels of her designer western boots ringing on the stone floor. Watching her, Ryan felt one of those unexpected waves of great affection that come between people who are very much in love.

"Project Eurydice is under threat," the loudspeaker suddenly blared. "All personnel report to HQ section. Central must be obeyed always. Sec men reactivated. Move toward research section where intruders are believed to be." It was the unmistakable little-girl tones of Dr. Tardy. "In event of action take any steps, terminationwise, in lethal mode to protect all."

The speaker clicked off as suddenly as it had come on.

Then it returned to life. There was the noise of coughing, then labored breathing. "Ryan. Doc Tanner here. Do you read me? Over." A pause. "Sorry. My apologies. Course you can't answer, can you? No. Well, we've found what we wanted. Linked in some of J.B.'s best to some of our chum's demonic little games. See you back where we said at the exit. Over and out."

"Fuck," Ryan said, finishing looping a dozen strands of wire into one detonator. "Doc's blown our meeting. Hope nobody was listening in."

But he knew they needed an awful lot of luck for no one else to have heard.

So, with time running out, Ryan hurried Jak and Krysty along through the weapons complex. The timers had been set to go in just thirty minutes. It didn't leave them much of a margin, but it would also make it hard for the scientists to manage to defuse everything. And he'd even scattered a few clever boobies in the shelving, ready to be triggered if anyone was careless. Either way, the subterranean redoubt should go up around 12:40.

There wasn't much time for any delays.

J.B., Lori and Doc Tanner had returned to the base of the main entrance elevator. The bodies of five sec men lay in a tangled heap at the mouth of the corridor that led toward the scientists' living quarters.

The Armorer looked carefully at his chron. "I make it 12:16. I don't hear them coming yet."

Everything was set and ready.

"Twelve-sixteen," Jak said.

If the explosives did their stuff, a devastating chain reaction would occur in the stores of lethal weapons. The first bang would lead to others, eventually spreading fire and destruction throughout the whole complex.

All the three of them had to do now was rejoin the other trio near the single exit to safety.

They were only a couple of turns in the corridor from their destination when Dr. Ethel Tardy appeared from a side door and waddled into the center of the passage. She was holding a chromed handblaster, which was connected to wires that trailed away out of sight. The muzzle was slightly bell-shaped and was pointed in their direction.

The tiny woman smiled, beaming eyes hugely distorted by her thick spectacles. Her sweet, lisping little voice showed no trace of anger.

"You have been busy, sabotagewise. We lost track of our surveillance mode operation on Dr. Tanner and the others in your party."

"Tough shit, lady." Ryan hesitated about trying to blast the diminutive scientist, the short hairs prickling at the back of his neck at the sight of the outlandish weapon she held. What was it, and what might it do?

She answered the unspoken question. "One move from you and I shall use this. It is one of our prize items of research, tested thus far only on our mutant experimental personnel."

"Bitch," Krysty muttered, too quietly for Dr. Tardy to hear her.

"It is listed as an emdee. Which stands for a Molecular Destabilizer. I eagerly anticipate using it upon you three and examining the results."

"What's it do?" Jak asked.

Ryan was wondering whether he should try to snap the G-12 onto continuous and rip the poisonous dwarf into bloody ribbons of flesh. But she was too far away — and her finger was on a button that had to be a firing trigger.

"Your tissue, bone, blood, skin are all composed of molecules bonded together. This will remove those fragile bonds." She could have been lecturing to a class of students.

Only Krysty had even an inkling of what she was trying to explain. "But if you do that..."

Dr. Ethel Tardy positively twinkled at her. "Yes, you see it! The entire structure dissolves. You melt into a billion, billion particles. Total disintegration." She smiled broadly. "And it is so painful. The element of consciousness remains surprisingly long. It is one of the best of my own inventions."

"You death-crazed lunatic," Ryan said, unable to control his loathing for the insane woman.

"No. Central bless you. We are the saviors of the world. Only through death can you come to a new life. That's how it's always been in the rules."

"You're sick," Krysty spat. "Sick and fit for death."