“It’s all super-filtered stuff from its own buried source. No way to get a man in there. Still—I’ll get a team working on tapping into it. We already have one working on bypassing the stairway seals. If we can just buy enough time, we can puke ’em to death. There’s some pretty nasty stuff near here I can get my hands on, stuff that’s absorbed by the skin and pretty ugly, but stuff with an antidote. I agree.”

Riggs left to issue the proper set of commands, leaving Moosic alone to watch the monitors and think. He didn’t like to think much right now, but he did feel a little bit more comfortable with a classical hostage situation. He watched the tiny figures on the monitors and tried to figure out just what they were doing.

Ron Moosic hadn’t started out to be a cop, not even the kind of high-tech one he wound up being. His greatgrandfather had come to the eastern Pennsylvania coal mines when that area was flourishing. The family name then was thirty-seven letters long and pure Georgian—the one south of Russia, not the one south of South Carolina. The old boy had heard that if you didn’t Americanize your name, the immigration boys would, so he looked at a map of where the Immigration Society had written he’d be living and saw, near Scranton, a little town that sounded reasonable to him, and he’d written in the name Moosic with no understanding of the jokes his descendants would have to bear because of it.

Ron’s father had also worked in the mines, and the boy had grown up in the small town of Shamokin, Pennsylvania, a town whose biggest claim to fame was the largest slag heap in North America. It towered over the town, and it was on fire all the time. Still, it was a nice town in which to grow up, large enough for all the civilized amenities and small enough not to have many of civilization’s biggest penalties. One penalty for a miner was always injury, though, and his father had been hauled out of the mine when Ron was still small. A loader had backed into him, crushing him between it and the wall of coal. He’d lived a few more years, a permanent invalid with a strong spirit and sense of life, but complications finally took him when Ron was just eleven.