Dream Thing

It became bigger again.

The People! At this rate, the column would soon grow huge enough to drench his precious People with its killing rain. He had to get to them! He staggered along the trail on wobbling legs.

Before he’d traveled ten paces, the earth exploded at the base of the column of water, which doubled in size and height, then doubled again, until the top of it was higher than the mountain of the cave.

The rain fell, boiling water that burned the Caretaker’s unclothed body. He wept for the pain and crawled back into the shelter of the cave. There he lay in misery as the jungle was scalded in every direction. The agony of the animals was so intense he could hear it, even this high up. The screaming stopped eventually, and the jungle became a limp and soggy landscape. Every plant was dead. Every creature was dead.

The People were dead.

The Caretaker hoped his end would come soon, and he found comfort in the rising sea of burning steam that filled the world to the horizon. The water column had finally stopped growing, it seemed, and the steam stopped rising, and as the world below and the air all around became heated, the steam stopped clinging to the earth. It drifted away into the sky, great clouds of it. The Caretaker gagged on the dank, earthy aroma of the steam when it poured in on him, and he hoped it would kill him quickly.

It didn’t kill him at all. The steam dissipated. The steady fall of burning rain no longer allowed it to collect on the jungle floor. The Caretaker wasn’t going to die that easily.

He was alive when everything he loved was dead. He was trapped. He would die slowly from hunger. What was he to do until then?

To his amazement, he heard himself speaking. It was the Plea of Enlightenment to Chuh Mboi Aku, coming unbidden from his lips. He let the words come, although he hated Chuh Mboi Aku more than he had ever hated anything in his life.

Chuh Mboi Aku was the one responsible for this. Chuh Mboi Aku deserved no prayer from him.

But the words kept coming.

Chapter 29

Remo and Chiun found out the same way everybody else was finding out. All the TV monitors in the airport were tuned to the news, and people were gathering around to watch the reports.

The video showed a column of steaming water soaring out of the Pacific Ocean, filling the sky with clouds of steam that went on forever. In the foreground was Waikiki beach, which looked as if it had been hit by a typhoon.

“The tsunami came too fast for the people of Honolulu to react. The evacuation order had just been sounded when the first wave broke here an hour ago.”

“The Pacific Ocean itself is keeping the steam vent in check. In Colorado, a larger vent burst open twenty-five minutes ago and engulfed the town of High Woods in a steam cloud that apparently wiped out the entire town in seconds. This was followed by a deluge of superheated rain water …”

At Folcroft Sanitarium, they joined Smith and Mark Howard in Smith’s office, where the coverage had taken on a less catastrophic tone.

“… appears the worst of the damage is done and first responders are finding an amazingly small death toll, at least as a result of the U.S. hot springs in Colorado and Hawaii,” a new anchor reported.

“They’re calling that a hot spring?” Remo demanded. “It’s a mile high.”

The announcer was almost bouncy. “Two water columns emerged in the Antarctic, where casualties were naturally light. The largest hot spring yet reported is a giant in the Amazon jungle, where again the human population was sparse.”

“The man sounds positively pleased with this,” Smith complained. Mark Howard glowered silently.

Next on the television was an environmentalist. “… possibly the best thing that could have happened. It won’t take long for mankind to learn to harness these new thermal power sources. We may be at the dawn of a new era. As of today, fossil fuels are obsolete!”

“Please turn that off, Emperor,” Chirm asked politely.

The news went away. The office was silent until Remo asked, “How bad is it?”

“We don’t know. But it’s bad,” Smith said.

“The Amazon basin is deluged,” Howard intoned. “The acreage destroyed by the rain is going to be nothing compared to the flood damage. In the Rockies, the water is channeled naturally into the Colorado River, which is already flooding, but they’re controlling it somewhat by opening all the dams.”

Remo shrugged. “I guess it really doesn’t sound all that bad.”

“It is the beginning of the end of the world,” Chiun declared flatly, his eyes masked with gloom. “Sa Mangsang is drinking the world dry.”

Remo said, “But it’s not. In fact, this could solve the water shortages in the Southwest.”

“The water is pure,” Smith agreed. “It’s been distilled by the planet itself. The salinity has been boiled out of it, and any bacterial or viral contamination is killed by the heat.”

“This means nothing.”