And if you, the one-celled being, could somehow, impossibly, imagine the existence of beings greater than yourself, could you then make the even more impossible leap to consider the interrelationships of such beings? If you can imagine a single being, can you imagine a family of beings? A tribe? A corporation? A city? Can you imagine a nation of cooperative processes? And finally, could you make the biggest leap of all, to consider the processes of an entire world? Could you?
Could an amoeba imagine a human being?
Could a human being imagine the nature of the Chtorr?
At least the amoeba had a good excuse-it couldn't even imagine. The failure of human beings was that we couldn't imagine big enough.
Sometimes, in my sleep, I felt glimpses-like something large and silent moving through the night, a great shape, larger than an Enterprise fish rising from the sea of dreams. I could sense it like a wall. A mountain. A tide of meaning. It lifted me upon its crest.
Sometimes, in my sleep, I heard it call-a lonely sound, deep and dreadful; a soft chorus of despair. It was a mournful note, like an enormous gong resonating at the bottom of the abyss of unconscious knowledge. The sadness was profound and inescapable.
I would try to turn and see it behind me. It felt almost like a face or a voice or a person that I knew, but wherever I turned, it was hidden in the veils of the dream.
Sometimes the feeling was sexual, a hot sliding wet embrace that enveloped me as if my whole body were plunging deep into the womb of home.
Sometimes I heard my name being called as if from very far away. Sometimes I knew-as if I had suddenly been expanded a millionfold-fireworks of understanding exploded in my mind-in that white-hot pinpoint moment, I not only understood the scale of the thought that held me, I also became the being capable of creating and holding such grandeur. I would reach for it, but before I could complete the action, before my fingers could close around it, I would awake, sweating, trembling-and the unnerving bottomless feeling would stay with me for days or weeks; my sleep patterns would remain disrupted and my body would ache with a desire that no physical act could satiate.
Sometimes I felt enveloped in a fog of my own mind, still enraptured in the aftermath of these mordant bright hallucinations.
Or perhaps it was just the sweats, a milder form of hallucinogenic fever. I didn't know.
Sometimes I felt as if I were a worm. Seeing and hearing and tasting with my entire body all at once. It made me twitchy. I itched in places I couldn't scratch. I was hungry for things I couldn't taste, things I didn't know; as desperate as the adolescent yearning for the mystery of mating, but so profound and far beyond that simpler urge that human beings still knew nothing of it.
Sometimes I sat alone and pondered this incredible driving need I felt for greater consummations than were previously dreamt. And sometimes I was certain that I was mad and that my madness had devoured me, left me plunging down a corridor of red obsession.
Sometimes I felt ripped open.
I wanted to tell someone exactly how I felt, and even as I felt the urge to speak, I felt the greater urge to hold my tongue. I was supposed to be an agent of discovery. But if what I was discovering was so disturbing that it called into question my ability to perform my task, I dared not report it. I couldn't let them stop me. Now now.
So I kept my silence and kept my strange dreams to myself. And wondered what it was that my subconscious mind was trying desperately to tell me.
-and were these mindless slugs baby worms or not? I couldn't complete the picture. I couldn't find the rightness. The thought gnawed at me that there was something terribly important to be discovered here. It annoyed me, because I was sure that I should see it, and I couldn't. I had another piece of the puzzle, but nothing to connect it to. As hard as I stared, I couldn't figure it out.
I became aware that Siegel was saying something. "Huh? What? Sorry."
"I asked, what are you thinking?" he repeated.
"Oh, uh-nothing important." I covered quickly. "Just considering that we're probably going to get one helluva bounty for this."
"And that isn't important?" Siegel asked.
"What are you going to spend it on?" I retorted.
"I'll think of something. I could buy myself a cup of coffee and just sit and sniff it for a whole afternoon."
"Coffee?" asked Willig. "What's coffee?"
"It's like brown stuff, only not as awful."
"I remember coffee," I said. And then I wished I hadn't. I remembered it too vividly; the hot black smell of it. "Oh, God-I'd kill for a cup of the real stuff. Even instant."
"Me too," agreed Siegel. From above, Reilly grunted something unintelligible; but it sounded like agreement.
"What's the lowest thing you'd do for a cup of coffee?" Willig asked.
"Are we fantasizing, or do you know someone?"
"Dannenfelser."
"You're kidding."
"Uh-uh. He manages General Wainright's private store."
"Offer me fresh strawberries and Nova Scotia smoked salmon and I might consider it-" I started to say, then caught myself with a shudder. "No, forget I said that. If I ever get that desperate, you're authorized to put a bullet through my brain. I'll be of no further use to humanity."
"Will you put that in writing?"
"Don't be so hasty."
"Hey, is that true about Dannenfelser? Whyizzit that scumbags like him always end up with the biggest slice of pie?"
"Because the good people of the world have too much self-respect to cheat their comrades," I said.
"Oh, yeah, I forgot. Thanks for reminding me."
"Anytime."
"Captain?"
"Yeah?"
"Is this nest really important?"
"I think so," I said. "I think this is how they got here."
For the record, the first wave of plagues wiped out at least 3 billion human beings. We will never have an exact count.
At this point, we should also note that secondary and tertiary waves of disease, coupled with the many ancillary effects of the mass dying, will probably result in an additional 2 billion deaths. The surviving human population may eventually stabilize at 3.5 billion. No reliable predictions about population rate can be made beyond that point.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 19
Seeds and Eggs
"The third eye does not need a contact dens."
-SOLOMON SHORT
There was silence for a moment. Finally, Siegel asked quietly, "'Splain me, Boss?"
"Not quite sure of the details," I said. "But I'll bet you Randy Dannenfelser's shriveled little testicles that this whole thing is some kind of incubation womb. We never found spaceships, no evidence of any kind; no sightings, no sites, no nothing. We couldn't figure out how they got here, right? So everybody's been crazy over that one question. How did the infestation get started?"