Dream Thing

“Beautiful!” the attacker said as Chiun stopped several paces short of him. The man was watching his arms become engulfed in sparkling, viscous fluid—like mounds of gemstone fragments swimming in clear glue. “The Cottingsharm family treasure,” he explained joyfully. “I never knew it even existed.”

“It never did, or I would have known of it.” Chiun’s announcement didn’t seem to reach the old Scot. The man began to sing a different tune.

“It hurts! It’s eating me.”

“It is hungry,” Chiun said with a shrug. “Do not ask me to explain it.”

“Make it stop!” The man took a step toward the old Asian, his body now alive with shimmering rainbow colors that became scarlet as the tiny machines ate through the dermal layer and exposed the Scot’s lifeblood. The man collapsed.

Chiun glided away, avoiding the splattering fragments of bloody fluid. He didn’t understand what this substance was, but he knew enough to stay away from it. Even the skills of a Sinanju Master were insufficient to do hand-to-hand combat with enemies the size of mites. The ancient Master snatched up the fallen hammer and scraped it rapidly on the skin of the aluminum cube. The friction became tremendous, and soon enough the steel was orange-hot and smoking.

The Cottingsharm villager was silent, his skinless corpse slumped lifeless in a spreading puddle of blood that glowed scarlet in the surgical lights. A moving mass of rainbow colors trickled and pushed through the puddle, distending the blood spill toward the old Korean. It was reaching for Chiun. It knew he was there.

Chiun waited until it was inches from his sandals before he placed the orange hammer head into the thick fluid. The heat boiled the liquid in the center, and waves of opaque whiteness grew larger as the tiny machines were cooked.

Tiny droplets of substance separated themselves from the main mass ahead of the killing heat and moved away in all directions, making their escape.

Chiun exercised patience. The mass of sparkling stuff turned into frosted crystal floating on boiled black blood, but only when the transformation was complete did he remove the hammer. The heat in its head was still enough to soften the steel. The leather handle was smoking, and Chiun’s fingers danced over it like the rising and falling legs of a millipede—never resting long enough on the hot surface to burn his own skin.

He placed the hot hammer head into the small patches of liquid, sizzling them.

“I tire of ill-tempered machines,” he announced. The final splatter of fluid had now become a starlight cluster of droplets, all fleeing in opposite directions. “I despise killing machines whose only use can be dishonorable. You are no better than a flagon of poison.”

Chiun didn’t know if the things could hear him or understand him. Common sense said they shouldn’t exist at all.

“And exist you shall not,” he concluded as he heated up the hammerhead again on the rim of the aluminum cube. The droplets traveled at snail speeds. One of them was heading toward a crack in the rock.

“I think not,” Chiun announced, and placed the hot steel gently atop the droplet, boiling it instantly. He touched the other droplets one after another, careful not to splash them. Soon all were cooked.

Chiun examined the rock, searching for microscopic escaping droplets. It was a ridiculous exercise, and yet he understood the need for it. His eyes were magnificently sharp, but would they spot an individual germ-sized machine making a run for freedom? Even Chiun had his limits. Still, it looked to him as if the tiny machines were in the process of breaking off into smaller and smaller batches—halving themselves. If that was the case, then Chiun had stopped them while they were still grouped in colonies of thousands of individuals.

“Fah!” he said in disgust, coming off the floor into a dignified stance.

He left the small laboratory.

Then he came back.

He stared at the aluminum box, now scorched black, where he had heated his hammer.

He closed his eyes and stood with his hands in his sleeves. His wrinkled face became loose with relaxation, yet he stood like a mountain. His power was immense and subtle. The buzz of the lightbulbs was like the engines of large jets until he put the noise aside in his thoughts. The sounds from far behind him were like the racket of a house being hammered apart until he dismissed them. Then there were the smaller sounds, the infinitesimal bits of information that came at him from the movement of the air.

Finally, he put that aside, too—and this all in a matter of a few heartbeats. Here in the earth, where the bombardment of information was reduced, he could feel what he might never have felt …

The thing that pricked his skin was so tiny it was like something from a dream, and yet Chiun stiffened and opened his eyes at once. He controlled his revulsion, willing away the prickling of crawling flesh that had come to him. This sensation was unlike anything he had known before—and he had communed with devils.