“If you cool something down, it lasts longer. If you freeze it, and keep it frozen, it lasts practically forever. You can do this with hamburger. Put it in the freezer in your refrigerator and you can eat it a year later. The meat won’t spoil. But the second you take the meat out of the freezer, it thaws out and grows old. Leave it out for a few days and it will rot. Do you get my point?”

“Yes,” Adam said, “But you can’t freeze people to make them live forever. If you freeze people they can’t move. They die.”

“That’s true with the technology we have now,” Bum said. “But don’t forget these visitors from the stars knew things we can’t even imagine. They told the leaders of Mu that—in exchange for wiping out Atlantis—they would show them how to transform the cells of their bodies so that they lived on a frozen substance called Cryo instead of on warm blood. Don’t ask me what this Cryo was made of—I don’t know. But somehow it allowed a person to be colder than ice and yet walk around and act like a living person.”

“Did any of the star people have Cryo in their veins?” Sally asked.

“That’s another good question,” Bum said. “The answer, as far as I know, was no. None of the star scientists visiting the Earth was a Cryo Creature. That should have warned the leaders of Mu that something was fishy. But I think these leaders were all selfish people, cowards, afraid of death. They took the bribe. They thought they would wipe out Atlantis and in exchange they would be made immortal.

“It’s not easy to destroy an entire continent. Even with nuclear bombs, you can’t make a whole land mass vanish. What the leaders of Mu decided was to get a little help from the asteroid belt. You know, it’s out in space between Mars and Jupiter—a bunch of huge rocks floating around the sun. These guys—they may have been evil but they were pretty clever. They hooked rockets and space drives onto a particular asteroid and began to steer it toward the Earth. They adjusted the speed and direction precisely. Just as Atlantis was coming around—as the Earth rotated—the asteroid was right there. Like a big rock flying right toward them.

“Of course the Atlantean people saw it coming. It darkened their entire sky. In the last hours they knew they were about to be wiped out and they guessed the leaders of Mu were behind it all. But what they didn’t know was that those leaders weren’t human anymore.