I knew this was big. I hadn't known it was this big.
One of the most significant questions of the war was being answered here. All we had to do was get these pictures back to Houston Center. My throat was suddenly dry. I allowed myself a deep drink of water. "Siegel," I said abruptly. "Let's get our samples."
"Okay. How do you want to proceed with the red stuff?"
"Carefully."
"Can you be more specific than that?"
"Just a minute, I'm still looking." I was studying the recommendations of the LI engine. "Okay," I said at last. "Sher Khan's readouts suggest that it's pretty thick stuff. It's got the consistency of phlegm. It's also proto-cellular; lots of tiny little structures all bunched together like grapes inside a plastic bag-only more than that. I think we're seeing multiple redundancy here, the same kind of recursion we saw on the way down. It's lots of little bags of stuff, clustered inside middle-sized bags, and lots of middle-sized bags clustered inside even bigger bags, etcetera, etcetera, all the way up to the largest size. The same pattern of protection must hold throughout the whole nest. If Willig's map is correct, there are at least twenty more structures like this one spread around the edges of the chamber.
"All right-" I made a decision. "Pull out as large a chunk of it as you can, cut it, and bag it. I'm going to bet that this thing is self-healing and that you won't see a lot of bleeding."
Siegel grunted and went to work. I watched him for a moment, then popped out of the cyberspace reality and looked at Willig. "How's the weather?"
"Light to moderate candy, with flurries of spun sugar expected momentarily. Have a look yourself."
"I'm going to. Reilly, out of the bubble. Let me up."
Reilly lowered himself down from the turret and stood aside while I pulled myself up into the swiveled seat to look around. There was a light cover of dust already apparent on the top of the bubble, but I could still see clearly out the sides.
All across the roof of the van was a light frosting of pink. As I watched, delicate fluffballs of all sizes came bouncing across the panels. They looked like pale smudges in the air. Sometimes when they hit the surface of the van or the side of the bubble, they powdered into nothingness; most of the time they just bounced away.
The fluffballs were both amazingly strong and curiously fragile-they were dandelions with a hair trigger. They could sail across the countryside for hundreds of klicks without shattering; but then, abruptly, for almost no reason at all, the whole structure would just go brittle, and at the first disturbance the whole delicate structure would just come apart. Even a sudden breeze might do it, shattering the fluffballs into a bright powdery haze. The billions of minuscule pink particles could hang in the air for hours, a stifling sweet fog; or they could just as easily settle out, clumping into flakes like snow and piling up in enormous billowy drifts. The landscape around us was already turning into a frothy whipped meringue.
Without appropriate breathing gear, a human being would suffocate in that cloying miasma. Smaller animals would choke. Insects would be unable to move, their body parts clogged with tiny sticky particles. Plants would be unable to grow, their leaves frosted with residue. The dying would be enormous. A month from now, this land would stink with decay. A year from now, it would stink with Chtorrans.
Our more immediate concern, however, would be the events of the next few days. The pink snow would trigger a feeding frenzy of Chtorran life forms. They were probably hatching even now, eating their way out of their shells, eating as fast as they could in a frenzied desperate rush before the next link in the food chain arrived. There was no difference here between diner and dinner. It was the breakdown of order; eat and be eaten. The last time I had been caught in one of these storms, I had seen the whole thing from the underside, looking out of a bubble just like this one. I still had nightmares sometimes
Even as I watched, the pinkness in the air was thickening. The horizon disappeared into the haze, and the field of vision shrank visibly as the thickest part of the storm began rolling over us. Up the slope, the shambler grove stood tall and ominous; their black shaggy presence became softened in the feathery blur. While I watched, the looming shapes faded into the background of the bright pink sky. My imagination filled in the details. The whole intricate structure of each tree would be delicately iced; the grove would be etched in pink magic like a sweet winterland fantasy. What did the tenants do during a pink storm? Did they feed? Would they swarm? Could they function in this haze? It wasn't something I wanted to test personally.
I shuddered and dropped down out of the turret. Below again, the inside of the van was reassuringly dark and gray. Screens and panels glowed with readouts and projections. Even so, the bright pink gloom cast an eerie glow from above.
"Okay, Reilly, it's all yours again." I patted him on the back as he climbed back up. "Try not to go snowblind. Put your goggles on. If it gets too much for you, shutter the bubble and come on down."
"How bad is it?" Willig asked.
"There's no way to tell. It's all pink. You can't see how thick it is, you can't see how densely packed the dust is, you can't tell how hard it's coming down-it's just there. The stuff doesn't even show up on radar; it just soaks it up like a sponge. Satellite pictures can tell you how wide the storm is, but not how deep."
"In other words-?"
"We're here for the duration. A week probably. Did you bring a deck of cards?"
"You're kidding."
"No, I'm not. The First Annual Northeastern Mexico Dirty Limerick contest is now officially open. There once was a lady named Willig-"
"No way!" shouted Corporal Willig. "You have an unfair advantage. You have a dirty mind."
"Excuse me?" I said, giving her the official raised-eyebrow look. "Who are you, and what have you done with the real Kathryn Beth Willig?"
"Besides," she sniffed. "I'll bet you a steak dinner that you'll never find a rhyme for Willig."
"'Twas brillig,"' I replied. "Give me a half hour and I'll find the second rhyme I need. In the meantime, set up a sleep-and-watch schedule for everybody, have Lopez and Reilly start monitoring the public broadcasts on the wideband, let's see if we can get a sense of the weather from the public access-oh, and look-see if there's any more of that poisonous brown stuff left. I need to disinfect my socks."
"Sorry, I used your socks to make the last batch of it." She was already pouring.
I tasted. "It's weak. Next time use both socks."
"I'm trying to conserve."
A voice from up front, Siegel's. "Hey, Captain? Something funny down here. Can you come back on-line?"
"On my way." I dropped into my chair and swiveled crisply into position, grabbed the helmet, and fell back into cyberspace.
Let us perform a thought experiment.
Let us backtrack from the initial onslaught of the plagues to see what had to have happened before the plagues could occur. A mechanism for inserting them into the human population had to be established. What was this mechanism?
This is not a casual question. If anything, it is deceptive in its simplicity and powerful in its implications. Consideration of the initial infection process will reveal some remarkable insights into the mechanisms of the Chtorran ecology, and may in fact also demonstrate some of its potential weaknesses.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 18
Slugs
"Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious creature on Earth."
-SOLOMON SHORT
"Let me guess," I said, even before the image focused. "Something's moving."
"Huh? You peeked," Siegel accused.