so quickly. Could it have done that if only vampires had spread it? Could their nightly marauding have propelled it on so quickly?
He felt himself jolted by the sudden answer. Only if you accepted bacteria could you explain the fantastic rapidity of the plague, the geometrical mounting of victims.
He shoved aside the coffee cup, his brain pulsing with a dozen different ideas. The flies and mosquitoes had been a part of it. Spreading the disease, causing it to race through the world.
Yes, bacteria explained a lot of things; the staying in by day, the coma enforced by the germ to protect itself from sun radiation.
A new idea: What if the bacteria were the strength of the true vampire? He felt a shudder run down his back. Was it possible that the same germ that killed the living provided the energy for the dead?
He had to know! He jumped up and almost ran out of the house. Then, at the last moment, he jerked back from the door with a nervous laugh. God's sake, he thought, am I going out of my mind? It was nighttime. He grinned and walked restlessly around the living room.
Could it explain the other things? The stake? His mind fell over itself trying to fit that into the framework of bacterial causation. Come on! he shouted impatiently in his mind. But all he could think of was hemorrhage, and that didn't explain that woman. And it wasn't the heart....He skipped it, afraid that his new-found theory would start to collapse before he'd established it.
The cross, then. No, bacteria couldn't explain that. The soil; no, that was no help. Running water, the mirror, garlic...He felt himself trembling without control and he wanted to cry out loudly to stop the runaway horse of his brain. He had to find something! Goddamn it! he raged in his mind. I won't let it go!
He made himself sit down. Trembling and rigid, he sat there and blanked his mind until calm took over. Good Lord, he thought finally, what's the matter with me? I get an idea, and when it doesn't explain everything in the first minute, I panic. I must be going crazy.
He took that drink now; he needed it. He held up his glass, it was shaking. All right, little boy, he tried kidding himself, calm down now. Santa Claus is coming to town with all the nice answers. No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death.
He snickered at that, and it relaxed him. Colorful, he thought, tasty. The last man in the world is Edgar Guest.
All right, then, he ordered himself, you're going to bed. You're not going to go flying off in twenty different directions. You can't take that any more; you're an emotional misfit.
The first step was to get a microscope. That is the first step, he kept repeating forcefully to himself as he undressed for bed, ignoring the tight ball of indecision in his stomach, the almost painful craving to plunge directly into investigation without any priming.
He almost felt ill, lying there in the darkness and planning just one step ahead. He knew it had to be that way, though. That is the first step, that is the first step. God?damn your bones, that is the first step.
He grinned in the darkness, feeling good about the definite work ahead.
One thought on the problem he allowed himself before sleeping. The bitings, the insects, the transmission from person to person--were even these enough to explain the horrible speed with which the plague spread?
He went to sleep with the question in his mind. And, about three n the morning, he woke up to find the house buffeted by another dust storm. And suddenly, in the flash of a second, he made the connection.
PART II: March 1976 Chapter Eleven
THE FIRST ONE HE got was worthless.
The base was so poorly leveled that any vibration at all disturbed it. The action of its moving parts was loose to the point of wobbling. The mirror kept moving out of position because its pivots weren't tight enough. Moreover, the instrument had no substage to hold condenser or polar?izer. It had only one nosepiece, so that he had to remove the object lens when he wanted any variation in magnification. The lenses were impossible.
But, of course, he knew nothing about microscopes, and he'd taken the first one he'd found. Three days later he hurled it against the wall with a strangled curse