And the false god of Earth who cowered in his path would tremble with fear.

Chapter 1

They wanted garbage. Mountains of it. Piled high and reeking. They wanted much more than they could possibly produce themselves. For the volume of garbage they wanted, they'd had to advertise.

The call was heard around the world.

Household or industrial waste, it didn't matter. Coffee grounds and paper plates were the same as asbestos-lined pipes and dioxin drums. All was welcome.

Industrial sludge was shipped by the barrelful, rolled off boats on pallets by men in protective space-age suits with special breathing masks. It found a temporary home next to buckets of old paint, used-car batteries, rotting rubber tires and stacks of bundled newspapers oozing toxic ink.

When Carlos Whitehall toured New Briton Harbor in the small South American country of Mayana and saw the first of the scows festering at the docks, he allowed a tight smile.

"Beautiful," he said softly.

Oh, not in the conventional sense, of course.

The scows were practically overflowing. Men in masks raked the refuse as it smoldered in the hot sun.

The many seagulls flapping around the junk on the boats brought a sense of vitality, of life, to the trash heaps.

That's what this was all about-life.

The country of Mayana was coming to life. Finally claiming its place in the sun. And it would do so by making itself indispensable to the modern world.

The trash was coming in by the boatload. Mounded in teetering piles, it was coming on slow-moving scows down through the Caribbean to Mayana. The first shipment had reached the port city capital of New Briton the previous evening. It was docked at pier 1.

As he walked, seagulls scattered and ran. Carlos Whitehall almost seemed pleased that the birds could share in his good fortune, in the good fortune of all Mayana.