They brought me to a cold and dimly-lit interrogation room.

     “Unbelievable!” Major Crispwell bellowed, catching me unawares.  “Simply an experiment gone awry, you say?  Back to the drawing board?  Your alleged brain-trust is responsible for 3,000,000 deaths!”

     I suppose he had a right to be angry.  Myself and three other scientists developed what had appeared to be the perfect answer to Los Angeles' problems, a climate-controlled, artificial atmosphere for the city and its suburbs.  The idea was the brainchild of Arthur Levinson, who worked for a major chemical company that now was embroiled in a nasty lawsuit stemming from the catastrophe.  Well, this Levinson guy….

     “Polk, you won't believe what I have to tell you!”  The phone line couldn't contain the man's enthusiasm.

     “What?” I asked.  Levinson had a flair for the dramatic but a propensity for the mundane.

     “We've discovered it, Polk!  The compound that'll put us on top of the Fortune 100!  Ready for this?  I named it myself: Duromer.”

     I'd known the man since college.  After graduation, he chose the money route, while I chose the academic route.  Ten years later he still had not contributed to society, aside from inventing a bogus rubber turf they played baseball on.  So did I care what he had to say?  You tell me.

     “Polk, listen!  Listen carefully.  Duromer—“ he emphasized the trademark with pride—“is the most useful polymer ever invented.  It's extremely light, tough, transparent, and can be blown into any shape and—get this—size.”

     His hard sell wasn't sufficient to yank me out of a yawn.  Nevertheless, I perked up my ear, already sore from being pressed against the receiver, screwed up my eyes to somehow shake out the sleep, and listened.  “So? So what?”

     “So you create a Duromer heli-ellipsoid, thirty miles long and one mile high, which weighs, I might add, only 665 pounds, plop it down on a city like Los Angeles, flood it with oxygen…”

     “And evacuate the pollution….”

     “….and you've got a climate-controlled atmosphere!”

     Oh, how everything seemed so brilliant just one short year ago!  Los Angeles' pollution problem had become intractable by all accounts late in the 1990s, and the President had declared the city an environmental and medical emergency non-pareil.  Citizens wore clean-air masks to work, as did kids playing in Little League games.  The DEC and EPA were trying to give Los Angeles back to Mexico.  What a mess!  Then the President ordered the construction of a Duromer bubble for Los Angeles, without adequate testing.

     Two engineers, Levinson, and myself all served on the original advisory board.  We debated, devised and generally shammed our way through countless meetings, each contending that without proper laboratory experiments the project couldn't be implemented.  The President thought we were attempting to shelve the project and ordered us to make the bubble.  We refused.  He threatened to throw us in jail.  We hesitated.  He promised to have us all transferred to the new academic positions at UCLA.  We panicked!  None of us like the thought of wearing clean-air masks the rest of our lives. 

     The bubble was constructed and put into place.  It took sixty computer-controlled helicopters to handle the job, not because of the weight of the bubble, but because of the wind shear—6,000 square miles of surface area inside and out, you know.

     The Duromer bubble was greeted with great fanfare and few problems.  The main problem lay in creating a gas exchange system that would effectively circulate and thermo-regulate literally trillions of cubic feet of gas.  The man who designed the system, Dr. George Morrow, was blown up in a freak accident.  How I miss the old man….

     “Morrow, buddy, have you worked out that oxygen delivery system?”

     “Polka, Polka..”  The doddering gent wasn't trying to be cute.  He added an “a” to everybody's name.  “I think I've devised a good injection port and oxygen/ carbon dioxide exchanger.  The question is, can we afford to have a pump with an explosive capacity of sixteen trillion pounds per square inch exposed to civilians?”

     “Naturally, I wouldn't be the one to comment on engineering problems, but why have the pump accessible to the public?  It sounds dangerous.”

     “Oh, Polka, you're a smart boy.  Yep.  I should have thought of that in the first place.”

     Maybe I shouldn't have trusted the once premier scientist with such a demanding structural problem.  That was the last day I spoke to Morrow, but the first I spoke to Dey, a perfect candidate for gas-exchange engineer.  He'd gone to school for air conditioner maintenance and seemed to know a bit about oxygen.  Anyway, he took right to the job, attacking it with zeal and youthful impatience, a combination that may have led to the disaster.

     Picture the scene, folks.  Television cameras broadcasting the event of the century, the cleanup of L.A.'s smog.  People are on the streets cheering and waving to relatives elsewhere, the President is making his address, plodding through dunes of platitudes, clichés, verbosity, and then finally uttering the magic words, “Flip the switch, Dey.”

     A great noise reverberated over Los Angeles as the giant fans and vacuum pumps of the Morrow Memorial Gas Exchanger roared to life.  A sense of awe and then jubilation followed as the citizens threw their masks into the sky, images reminiscent of a college graduation, and drew in huge breaths of pure oxygen to which Dey had been clever enough to add fresh pine scent.  Laughing, playing, jumping, carousing—I saw it all on television in a casino bar just over the border in Reno.  My heart delighted in their celebration, and deservedly so, for I took most of the credit for launching the dome.  If I hadn't been lobbying, where would Levinson, Morrow and Dey be now? 

     My fascination turned to horror as I witnessed through a fading snowy picture the frolic taking an evil turn.  Debauchery and mischief were overtaking the population, and just as I was heading for my car, wondering if I had enough gas to make it to L.A., the most inexplicable and horrifying sight was presented to my eyes:  people were disappearing—in a flash of light and a puff of smoke!  I decided I would have to blow the joint and head for the hills before fanatics could claim me.  Luckily, Uncle Sam's mercenaries found me first….

     “Unbelievable!” Major Crispwell repeated, snapping me from this reverie.  “You authorized a mass murder of three million Los Angeleans!  How can you sit there so smugly and tell me you had no idea this would happen?  Dammit, you're a scientist!”

     “All right, I'm a scientist!  But I can't bring those people back to life!  They've combusted!  All they are is dust in the wind.”

     “I'll give you one chance to avoid execution.”  Derision covered his words so I knew he wasn't about to offer me much.  He reached beneath a steel desk and withdrew a large Ziplock bag marked E. Michaels, F., age 42, SSN 142-26-2869.  Granular yellow powder shifted inside the translucent plastic.

     “Five thousand young soldiers who ought to be protecting Democracy have been out cleaning up with these.  The army's not supposed to be a cleaning service!  Anyway, the UCLA biotechnology facility is yours and we'll provide technical support.  You, Doctor Polk, have been assigned to reconstitute this people powder into its former, vital form.”  A big grin appeared on his face.  I was confronted with the task of performing a godlike miracle or perishing.

     I plotted out two courses of action.  One was to approach the problem scientifically, methodically—and ultimately fail.  The other was to obscure the results and save myself.  Unfortunately, the second strategy seemed impossible—I could obfuscate with the best of them, but this was ridiculous.  I accepted the two weeks of precious life without hesitation, all the while hoping that the authorities would soon appreciate the cleanup of L.A.'s streets.  Maybe they'd commission a dome for Jersey City as well.

     All my life I'd been a thinker and not an experimenter.  In lab lingo, I just didn't have good hands.  During my doctoral training I'd wrecked an ultra-centrifuge, damaged two spectro/photometers, and succeeded on countless occasions to contaminate every preparation I touched (I maybe should have worn gloves).  I'd graduated via highly accurate fabrications that were consistent with theory and that luckily no other researchers had attempted to duplicate.  Now I was given the opportunity to prove my mettle, the chance to redeem myself, rescue my conscience and at the same time achieve scientific pre-eminence.  Or else die.

     Samples were brought in on the basis of a person's gross income according to the 2009 tax returns.  Crispwell figured that if all men were created equal, then whatever technique perfected on the “poor bastards” was used, would work equally well on the “rich bastards”.  I showed the major thirty different bags of people and defied him to make any judgments as to who was rich, poor, black, white, Jewish or Catholic.  No matter  who, dust was all that remained.

     Something in it, though, had to go the extra mile and contribute the elements of personality separating humans from other organic matter.  I looked at myself, wondering for the first time since preschool at how amazingly complex and inscrutable the human body really is.  All functioned together in perfect harmony, without so much as a “good job!” or a pat on the back from the spirit upstairs.  It sickened me to think that I'd taken my body for granted for so long.  I spent a whole vainglorious day rediscovering myself, staring into anything that reflected.  My technicians thought I'd gone mad.  Maybe I had.  They'll never know.

     Experiments proceeded slowly and progress not at all.  Adding water or any buffer known to man created slurries suitable only for pouring down the drain.  We tried baking at various temperatures, adding aminos, yeast, even molasses; we tried scrubbing and spraying, but could not obtain even one that looked faintly human.  Day six I phoned Crispwell.

     “Buddy, yo!” I said.  “I need a vacation.  I'm tired, my body aches.  If you'd just give me a day or two leave I'd recover and attack the project with newfound zest.”

     I spent hours drawing imaginary curves showing how I'd increased the “human resemblance over time” in a significantly larger portion of lyophilized then freeze-dried powder puffs.  He almost bought it.  Day and night I had those techs' noses to the grindstone while I analyzed data.  You cannot beat the life of a professor.  “Run this.”  “Run that.”  They obediently did whatever I asked, no matter how unorthodox.  This was a crisis situation.

     When it came down to it, though, ten days into my crash course in original research, I truly began to fatigue and at the same time doubt myself.  I felt that the reconstitution of spontaneously combusted humans may not be so straightforward after all.

     My prospects danced before my eyes.  Indirect responsibility for three million deaths…taking into account as many nuances of the law as I knew of, I figured that I wouldn't be eligible for parole for at least ten years.  The risks that I took to make Los Angeles a healthier living place had strapped lead weights around my waist and cast me into a six-foot pool of water.  What if the Durodome had worked properly?  If George Morrow had been around to nurture the temperamental air exchanger rather than Dey?  I'd have been a hero and probably the most popular man in the world and everybody would have loved me and I'd get anything I wanted whenever I wanted it.  I sat at my desk sketching fantastic designs for laboratory equipment that might do the job.  A reverse spray drier.  Human fusion in a Dewar jar.

     Later on that day, a dog came scampering into the laboratory.  I checked the collie's tag and found out her name was Jillian, and she belonged to a Mr. Harper of West 53^rd Street.  It acted most peculiar, whining and pawing at the sample sitting on my laboratory desk.  She wagged her tail and glanced back and forth between the bag and myself.  “If only I had a Scooby Snack for you,” I said, when suddenly a profound thought occurred to me.  The dog recognized the dust as a friend or loved one.

     I checked the tag accompanying the bag.  S. Harper, M, age 8, SSN 601-67-1010.  I whistled and petted Jillian, applauding her love for the boy.  Then I started to hallucinate, seeing Stevie Harper's face appear and being welcomed by the dog, and feeling heartbreak at the naïve scene.  The full report of what had happened to Los Angeles had finally hit home.  So what if the city degenerated into a crime-ridden moil?  Crack owned the streets and police stood by helplessly as gangs shot one another up.  So what if the majority of Americans polled by Gallup approved of the Los Angeles conflagration?  Not everybody is bad!  Love had a place in the city.  This boy and his dog demonstrated that love had endowed me with a whole new sense of purpose, a reason, a fear.  I had to discover within three days the answer or not only would the evil elements of L.A. be history, but so would the good.

     What was this strange phenomenon known as spontaneous combustion?  Well, I knew it implied a chain reaction of destructive oxidation, the generation of carbon dioxide at the expense of organic carbon.  Carbon was the very substance of life, a component of amino acids, carbohydrates, lipids.  If nearly all the carbon was consumed in combustion, that left a lot of water as a byproduct and a pile of trace elements.  Sulfer must be what gives the residues a yellow hue, I thought.  I had tried adding water and carbon earlier, but nothing had happened.  A nursery rhyme cascaded through my mind:  Ring around the rosy, pockets full of posies, ashes to ashes, all fall down.  What was the key?

     I thought there remained one option, a slim hope that may have worked once in a movie.  I set Harper's remains near Jillian, who took the bag out the door.  Why didn't the dogs perish as well?  Or other animals?  Why only birds and humans?  I followed Jillian outside and studied her every move, hoping that if science couldn't solve the puzzle, maybe fealty could.  She set the bag down on a bare patch in front of UCLA's biochemistry building and began digging, her paws kicking up a little pile of dirt before setting down Stevie into the hole.

     I returned to the lab feeling frustrated and irked, and I couldn't think any more, for I'd been counting on a miracle and all Jillian had delivered was standard canine sociobiology.  I returned to my desk and basically let the techs run the lab, perform their own experiments, as I brooded and occasionally went outside to see if Stevie's status had changed.

     Crispwell returned punctually at twelve noon on the fourteenth day, and with him was a police escort.

     “Dr. Polk, we're picking you up and taking you to Washington, D.C.  I trust you've made little or no progress in your research?”

     “Major Crispwell, with all due respect, I've made significant progress, and in fact, I feel that I've laid the problem to rest.”

     “Listen,” the major angrily said, “I hate your guts, Polk.  However, the President has seen fit to pardon your worthless carcass.  He cited as his reason in a nationally televised speech that science is like gambling, that with every success there's a failure, that you have to know when to bet and when to be conservative.  The way he saw it, you guys bet heavily but were dealt a pretty lousy hand.”  After waning poetically he became angry again.  “Personally, I think you're a careless bastard and should hang for your crime.  Instead I have to bring you to Washington so you can testify before Congress, and then smuggle you out of the country to a Mediterranean island of your choice.  The President seems to think there's a lot of people out there who want you dead.”

     I was stung by what Crispwell said.  Two weeks ago his words would have slid off me easily.  Now I agreed with him—except for one thing. 

     “I've finished my work, Major, and for the sake of Los Angeles, I'd like to show you my results.”

     We exited the building, passing all the lab techs who were disassembling apparatus, cracking jokes and filling Eppendorf tubes with powder to sell as curiosities back home.  The Major, MPs and I approached the spot where Jillian had buried the boy, where she sat at this very moment in her sad vigil.  “The dust of Steve Harper, only eight years old, lies here,” I began, voice quaking.  “His dog, Jillian, buried him.  There's no magic, no hope of returning the boy to life.  But, Major, the dog had enough common sense and discretion to lay little Stevie to rest!  I can't bring those people back to life, reconstitute them!  They're dead.” 

     One of the military police, a brawny boy about twenty years old, put his arm around me and consoled me.

     As they led me away, I witnessed a flicker of compassion in Crispwell's eyes and heard him whisper, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

     Maybe I had reclaimed a soul.