Dead and Alive

will submit to me, and as the whole of Earth serves me, so will it serve you, because I have made you and sent you forth in my name….”
    Chameleon began to move closer—one foot, twofeet, three—as Victor pulled open the middle drawer and felt through the contents, his stare focused on the would-be assassin.
    Just eight feet away, Chameleon stopped. When it decided to move again, it would surely close the remaining distance and rip into its target’s legs, his torso, clip off his fingers when he struggled to resist, as it climbed frantically toward his face.
    Victor glanced down into the drawer. He saw the bottle of pale-green fluid and plucked it out as he returned his attention at once to where Chameleon had been.
    No ripple deformed the floor.
    Victor extracted the stopper from the bottle.
    Chameleon scuttled forward.
    Victor splashed half the contents of the bottle on himself as he quickly sidestepped to his right.
    Because the fluid contained New Race pheromones kept in the desk in the unlikely event that Chameleon escaped from its sack in the freezer, the lethal mimic halted short of attack. Victor no longer smelled like a target but instead like one of the New Race.
    “You live because of me, you live for me, and my happiness is your glory….”
    After a long hesitation, Chameleon turned and crawled away into the laboratory, seeking targets.
    Victor had not allowed himself anger while the threat remained, but now he felt his face flush with fury. He was eager to know how Chameleon had escapedits cold prison and who should be punished for allowing it to roam free.
    At the computer keyboard, he directed the audio-video system to terminate
The Creed
. The Hands of Mercy fell silent, and the images of the Frankensteinian future vanished from the computer as well as from all other screens in the building.
    Instead of displaying the basic menu, however, the computer presented four digits—07:33.
    The Dresden clock. Seven and a half minutes, and counting down.
    Because he had expected to destroy the Hands of Mercy only in the event of the most extreme and irreversible biological calamity, and because he wanted none of his creations to be able to countermand his decision to destruct once the countdown commenced, the clock could not be stopped. In little more than seven minutes, Mercy would be a seething hell of fire.
    His anger gave way to a cool and practical consideration of the circumstances. Having survived two centuries, he could count on a well-exercised survival instinct.
    The linked bricks of incendiary material placed throughout the walls and ceilings had been developed by the world’s third-most tyrannical government, refined by the world’s second-most tyrannical government, and brought to exquisite perfection by the world’s
most
tyrannical government. This was a pyromaniac’s dream fuel.
    In the event those governments ever fell and thoseregimes were in danger of being brought to justice, the press of a button would ensure that their concentration camps, which they denied existed, would burst instantly into flames of such white-hot intensity that even the guards would be unable to escape. The temperatures produced by this incendiary material were not equal to the average surface temperature of the sun; but this stuff would produce the second-hottest fire in the solar system, virtually vaporizing all evidence.
    Victor hurried to a cabinet near his workstation and pulled open a door, revealing what appeared to be a large suitcase. Data-transmission cables connected the luggage to outlets in the back of the cabinet. He quickly disconnected all lines.
    The Hands of Mercy would be reduced not to rubble and char but instead to ashes as fine as thrice-milled flour floating in a pool of molten bedrock no less hot and fluid than lava from a volcano. Not one splinter of bone or any other source of DNA would survive for forensic pathologists to analyze.
    The suitcase contained backup data files of every experiment ever conducted in the Hands of Mercy, including work done within the past hour.
    The countdown clock read 06:55.
    Carrying the suitcase, Victor hurried across the lab toward the hall door, Chameleon forgotten, the entire staff forgotten.
    He had been enamored of the incendiary material now awaiting detonation, and he had been impressedwith himself for having the contacts to acquire a large volume of it. In fact, he had kept on his computer an e-mail sent to his supplier, the most tyrannical