"Once it has absorbed all the host's thought energy," Jo said, "it can start to consume the body whenever it chooses."
"Why did it let you know this?"
Jo began to sob. "It wants me to know that it's the master. While it was controlling my body, my tongue, my mind, I was buried somewhere deep inside, watching this thing fool you."
Alex went to her and put his arms around her. "My God, Jo," he said, his voice breaking with emotion. "This is a nightmare."
"I wish it were," she said. "When your personality, your ego, is pushed into some secret place in your mind, it is like a nightmare. But it's real, Alex."
"We're gonna beat this thing, baby," he said, caressing her soft hair. "We'll beat it together."
"I think I understand what you're going through," Claire said softly. "I know what it's like for your consciousness to be pushed into a dark prison."
"I'm afraid," Jo cried. "It's going to gain control over me again, once the drug wears off."
"Fight it," Alex said.
"Tell us all you know about the colloid," Siegel said. "The more we learn, the better our chances of defeating it."
Jo trembled against Alex's chest. "It's hard to . . . clarify what I know. I didn't learn about this the way I'm used to learning."
"It's all right. Just say it any way that comes into your head. We have to work fast."
"I know that there's a limited communication with other colloids."
"What are the limitations?"
"Distance is one, even though they're in communication all over the world. But the farther away one is, the fainter its transmission. Once it's distant enough, one colloid only knows another's thoughts at a remove, through an intermediary colloid. Events happening in Europe or Asia or New Zealand are rather vague, but they receive enough information to know how the war is going all over the Earth."
"Then they do think of it as a war?" Alex said.
"Yes, a war of survival."
"But why? What did we ever do to them?"
"It's what we
have
that matters to them, not what we've done."
"The Earth, you mean."
"Yes. Their own world is long gone, but before they left it they found a way to transform themselves."
"Into a virus?"
"Yes, dormant while traveling through space, attracted by the light of suns. As they drift through a solar system, billions of viral cells are pulled down by the gravity of the planets. The sun's actinic rays revive them, and then they actively seek out living creatures to infect."
Alex saw that it was a strain for Jo to talk at all, much less maintain the rational tone required for explaining the life cycle of a colloid. Her face was gleaming with perspiration, in spite of the room's chill. Still, she seemed less distraught than before. Perhaps the virus had been defeated; perhaps it was dying now, or even dead. Or perhaps it was merely lying in wait in Jo's synapses, regaining strength.
"I think you should try to get some rest, Jo," he said.
"Alex," she said, laughing for the first time since she had returned, "how can I rest while I'm tripping my brains out?"
Alex laughed, too, and so did Siegel. It didn't seem possible that Jo could say something like that. A colloid couldn't have a sense of humor, could it? She must be all right. But then Alex remembered that they had been fooled by her parasite for days, maybe even weeks, before he had stumbled onto irrefutable evidence of her infection. Even then he had not wanted to believe what he had seen.
Nevertheless, Siegel went out in search of something for Jo to lie on, and returned in a few minutes with a roll-away cot. Alex helped her to unfold it, and Jo, overcome with exhaustion, stretched out and closed her eyes. Alex kissed her and sat cross-legged on the floor.
"You'd better get some sleep, Claire," he said. "I'll stay with her tonight."
Siegel nodded. "The worst seems to have passed. I won't be far away, though. Just call for me if there's any trouble."
"Yeah, I will."
Siegel went out and closed the door behind her.
Dousing the flame on the kerosene lamp, Alex sat in the dark and listened to Jo's breathing. She seemed to be sleeping soundly, peacefully. He wanted to believe that the ordeal was over, that she was going to be all right. But that was the sort of wishful thinking that he had indulged in when Sharon and Billy had fallen ill. If anything, it had made the heartbreak even more intolerable. That was one of the reasons he had gone over the edge. You had to look at things realistically, no matter how painful it might be to do so.
But it didn't seem realistic to believe that the colloids were the result of a virus from another planet. It seemed like a wild science fiction story . . . a story in which he was one of the characters . . .
He remembered a quote by a guy named J.B.S. Haldane that summed it up nicely, something about the universe not only being stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we
can
imagine.
He dozed, his consciousness spiraling down into an abyss that opened onto the stars. All infinity stretched before him, but he could only dimly perceive the grandeur of the galactic vastnesses. He drifted through a limitless void, asleep but imbued eons ago with a consciousness.
His world erupted, opening like a bloody wound in the darkness of space and hurling its detritus outward. The fragments had cooled and fallen into an eccentric orbit, forming an asteroid belt out past the fifth world in the solar system. The cells that had been propelled sunward had drifted immense distances, a few billion falling toward the first sun they approached, a few billion more falling towards the second. And so on, until the journey had gone on for so long that it began to seem like eternity.
Millions upon millions of years had gone by, but at last a myriad of viral cells had reached a world where they could survive . . . and that world was Earth.
Alex's dark dream was disturbed by a cry. He jumped up, his right shin colliding painfully with the desk. By the faint moonlight, he saw Jo writhing on the cot. Was it the drug? Or the colloid?
"Jo," he said. "I'm here."
She grasped his hand, squeezing with such ferocity that it hurt him. She screamed, a loud, high-pitched sound that hardly seemed human. The metal legs of the cot scored the linoleum as she squirmed in agony.
"Jesus," Alex breathed. Was she losing the battle? The colloid was attacking, trying to regain control. The drug's effect was wearing off, or the alien was learning how to work around it. Either way, Jo was in danger of losing. He knew it to the core of his being.
"Jo," he said, leaning as close as her lashing body would allow, "fight it.
Fight it!"
Jo opened her mouth wide and emitted a long, miserable wail. She might have been a beast in an abattoir, as she tossed her head back and forth, tears streaming from her eyes. They were trying to take away her humanity, and he would not permit it.
"Fight, Jo. For God's sake,
fight
."
He grabbed her shoulder, trying to keep her from falling off the cot. He was amazed by the rigidity of her muscles, the power that was in her—unharnessed now, as she struggled for possession of her own soul. He would help her ride this thing out, help her win. Because if she lost . . . if she lost, he didn't want to think about it, but he had to.
If she lost, he would have to kill her. It wouldn't really be her, but it would be her body, her face, her voice, her hair, her sweet smell that he would kill. But it wouldn't be Jo. He had to keep telling himself that. It wouldn't be Jo anymore. It would be a thing from another world.
He had to remember that. Even as his muscles ached with the effort of keeping her on the cot, he kept it in the forefront of his consciousness. Even as he urged her to fight the colloid, he did not forget what he must do if the battle went against the woman he loved. He would owe it to her, to kill the thing that had robbed her of her soul.
She stopped struggling abruptly, her sweat-soaked face relaxing. She was silent but for her harsh breathing, her breast rising and falling from her recent exertions.
Was she all right? Or did this mean that the colloid had succeeded? Alex would have to wait and see. He went back to sit on the floor, slumping against the wall, exhausted. He had to get some sleep now, because the battle might start up again at any moment. For all he knew, the alien was playing possum, gathering its strength for another onslaught.
He was awakened by Jo's screams an hour later, and again he rushed to her. Frustrated, he watched her agonized flailings as she resisted the colloid. How much ground had it gained? Even if she survived, would it destroy her mind? She had been one of the last sane people on the face of the earth, and now she might lose her mind even in victory.
But this was no time to be thinking the worst. He had to believe that it was possible for her to win, to survive the virus intact. When she was at last becalmed, he collapsed onto the floor once again.
He was awakened by her screams twice more during the night, and twice more he held her until the seizure subsided. Her body seemed weaker each time. Alex began to fear that she could not prevail. He would have to kill her.
He fell onto the floor for the fourth time, losing consciousness almost instantly. The next time he woke up, he would have to do it, would have to kill her. He prayed that he would never wake up, then. If only his aching body gave out before Jo was conquered by the alien . . . .
"Alex."
Someone touched him, and the Ingram was in his hands. He was on his feet before he realized that it was Claire.
"Alex," she said, "don't shoot."
Morning light illuminated the room, revealing every wrinkle in Siegel's aging face. Behind her, Jo slept peacefully. She was pale and drawn, but she breathed regularly. He went to her.
"She's going to be all right," Siegel said.
Alex wept silently.
"Let her rest now," said Siegel. "Why don't you join us in the briefing room, if you're feeling up to it?"
"I'm okay. What's the meeting about?"
"You'll see." She ushered him out, closing the door behind them. Alex was reasonably alert by the time he took a seat among the other fourteen guerrillas. The briefing room in the south wing was quite large, holding about eighty or ninety seats. All the guerrillas sat in the first two rows, near the pull-down maps and the blackboard. A sense of military order pervaded the scene, in spite of the appearance of Alex's tatterdemalion troops.
"We've learned a great deal about the enemy in the past few hours," Siegel said, gaining everyone's attention. "First of all, we now know that the virus is not man-made, intentionally or otherwise."
Alex waited for murmurs of incredulity, but there were none.
"It's from another planet," Siegel continued. "It is here to conquer the Earth for its own purposes. The invasion requires at least four phases to be successful.
"The first is a tiny, living mote, set free into space from its home world to search for likely planets to conquer. It's dormant in that stage, but in the second phase it becomes parasitical—a colloid—as the mote enters the body through a pore and searches for healthy tissue in which to grow, activated by actinic rays and fueled by neural energy. The third and most recent development is a remote-controlled probe with the ability to invade and manipulate healthy neurological tissue without damaging it, and thus to infiltrate our ranks."
Siegel paused to let them chew on this. Except for a cough, the room was silent until Polly said, "You said there are four phases, but you only named three. What's the other one?"
"We don't know yet, but I suspect that it will be the culmination of the colloid's life-cycle. Its purpose is to dominate the earth. It needs hosts, but the stock of healthy human tissue has just about been used up. They have to find some other way to survive now."
"Maybe they'll just die out," said Irv Finney.
"Doubtful."
"Maybe they'll go somewhere else, then," said a man named Dick Philips.
"I don't think they can. It looks as if they're stuck on Earth for good."
"So why are they sending the infected after us, when they've got the whole world?" Riquelme asked.
"Good question. The colloids are in communication all over the planet, and they know we're not really much of a threat to them. It only goes to show how merciless these creatures are, to attempt to destroy even this small, imperfect enclave of human beings."
"Maybe it shows something else," Alex spoke up.
Siegel looked at him respectfully, as did the others. He stood and said, "Maybe it shows that they're desperate."
"What do you mean, Alex?"
"I mean that time is running out for them. The next phase, whatever it is, has got to be achieved soon, or they're finished."
"What can we do to stop it?" Samuel asked in his booming voice, "if indeed the good Lord wants it stopped."
"You must believe that He does, Samuel," Alex replied, "or you wouldn't be with us, would you?"
"You haven't answered my question."
"Okay, I'll answer you as truthfully as I can." Alex shook his head. "I don't know what we can do to stop it, but I suspect that
it
thinks we can do something. I don't agree with Dr. Siegel that we are harmless to the colloids. They fear us for some reason, or else they would ignore us."
"Why do they fear us?"
"Look at how they've reacted. They kept this armory under guard. They knew that we were going to try and capture it, and they had already targeted one of us in case we were successful. The colloid inside Jo almost caused us to botch the assault, and later led Flash to his death. When we discovered that Jo was infected, they attacked the armory so that we couldn't question her. Well, we drove the colloid out of Jo's body. There's a way to do it, and that means we don't have to fear the colloids anymore."
The guerrillas all started talking at once in excitement, but Siegel shushed them.
"No, Alex," she said, "I'm afraid you're wrong. There are few psychoactive drugs left. Once those are gone, we are at their mercy."