"But you do have an idea, don't you? A wild guess?" she prompted.

"Yes and no. I have suppositions. I have possibilities. I have a pimple on my ass that needs scratching. What I don't have is information. Whatever I do, I'm not going to rush into anything." To her look, I added, "I'm not going to make any guesses. It's too easy to be wrong. This damn infestation keeps changing so fast, we can't assume that something is impossible because we've never seen it before. I think we know just enough to know how much we don't know. So before we do anything, I want to squirt a report back to Green Mountain. Just in case."

"Just in case," she echoed.

"Right."

"We are sending in probes? Aren't we?"

"Maybe." I scratched my beard. I hadn't shaved in two weeks, and my beard was just getting to that itchy-scratchy stage I hated. "But a probe might trigger the tenants, and that's what we don't want. It's the worms I need to see."

"Want to call down a beam? Sterilize everything. Then we go in and look at the bodies." She swiveled and tapped at her console. "There's two satellites in position right now. We could call for triangulation, flash them twice at the same time; they'd never know what hit them."

"I've been considering that too. But beams do something weird to the worms' metabolism. Sometimes they blow up. They definitely lose their stripes. I'd like to see the pattern of stripes on these worms before we take them out."

"What's so important about the stripes?"

"I don't know. Nobody does. But almost everybody believes they must mean something."

"Do you?"

I shrugged. "The dead worm we saw. It had three little white stripes in its display. That's new. Green Mountain has nothing about white stripes. So maybe this is a clue. Maybe it isn't. I don't know. It's in the domain of I-don't-know that discoveries get made."

"I'm sorry," Willig admitted. "This is starting to get beyond me. The only stripes I know how to read are the ones on an officer's uniform."

"Don't worry. That's the only stripes you need to know." I held out my coffee mug for a refill.

"You are a masochist, aren't you?"

"I'm hoping if I die, I won't have to make the decision. You or Siegel will."

"Then you'd better tell me about the stripes," she prompted. I knew what Willig was doing. I didn't mind. Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to describe it to someone else. Even if that person doesn't understand what you're saying, the mere act of rephrasing the dilemma, explaining it in simpler terms, might trigger the insight necessary to break the mental logjam.

"You've never seen a living worm, have you?" I began. "Pictures don't do them justice. Their colors are so much brighter in person. The fur changes hue while you watch. Sometimes it's brilliant, sometimes it's very dark; but it's always intense. Most interesting of all, the patterns of the stripes shift and ripple like a display on a billboard-or like the side of a blimp. Usually, the stripes settle into semipermanent patterns, they don't move around a lot, but if a worm is agitated, the patterns start flashing like neon. If the worm is angry or attacking, all the stripes turn red. But it varies a lot. We don't know why."

Willig looked puzzled, so I explained, "You know that worm fur isn't fur, don't you? It's a very thick coat of neural symbionts. Well, now we know that the symbionts react to internal stimuli as well as external. One of the reactions is manifested as a change in color. Some people think that the colors of a worm's stripes are a guide to what the worm is thinking or feeling."

"Do you?"

I allowed myself a shrug. "When a worm turns red; I let it have the right of way." Then I added thoughtfully, "It is possible. But if there's a pattern, we haven't discovered it yet. But that's why Green Mountain keeps collecting pictures of worms and their patterns. The lethetic intelligence engines keep chugging away at them, looking to see if there's any correlations between patterns of stripes and patterns of behavior. So far, red means angry. I don't think that's enough yet to qualify for a Nobel prize."

"So we're sitting here and waiting because you want to see the stripes on the sides of the worms."

"Right."

"And you're hoping that the worms will oblige by coming out of their holes so you can take their pictures from the safety of the van."

"Right."

"And if they don't… ?"

"I don't know. I don't even know that any of this has anything at all to do with that dead worm we found." I shrugged in frustration. "But this is the weirdest thing in the neighborhood, so we start here."

"Uh-huh," Willig said. "What you're really doing is wondering whether you've protected yourself sufficiently."

"No, I'm wondering whether I've protected the rest of you. I'm not worried about myself."

"Oh?"

"Don't you know? I'm already dead. According to the law of averages, I died four years ago. At least six times over."

"For a dead man, you're still pretty lively."

"It only seems that way," I admitted. And then, after a moment, I added another thought. "Sometimes I think that as I get older, I get smarter. Then I realize, no-I'm not getting smarter, I'm just getting more careful. Then I realize I'm not even getting more careful. I'm just getting tired."

Willig nodded knowingly. "That's how you get to be my age."

"Mmph," I acknowledged. "I doubt very much that I am ever going to be your age. Not unless I seriously change my life-style." I frowned at the idea. "In fact, I don't think anyone is ever going to reach your age again. I think the infestation is going to keep us all permanently retarded at the age of sixteen-frightened, desperate, and lonely."

Willig shook her head. "I don't see it that way."

"I'm jealous of you," I said. "You're from a different world. You're old enough to remember what it was like before. I'm not. Not really. All I remember is school and TV and play-testing my father's games. And then it was all over-" I stared bitterly into the cup of ersatz; the stuff looked almost as bad as it tasted.

"You want to know the truth?" Willig laughed. "I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but being in the army and fighting this invasion is the most exciting thing I've ever done in my life. I finally feel like I'm making a difference in the world. I'm having fun. I'm getting to do things. I'm being trusted with responsibility. People don't tell me I'm not qualified anymore. I'm playing in the big game now. This war is the best thing that ever happened to me. I wouldn't have it last one day longer than necessary, but I will be sorry when it's over."

"Willig," I said. "Let me give you the bad news. Or, in your case, the good news. This war is never going to be over. The best we're ever going to achieve will be an armed stalemate. From the moment the first Chtorran seeds entered the atmosphere of this planet, we've been in a death-struggle. As long as there are Chtorran creatures on this planet-and I have to tell you, d can't conceive of any way that we can eradicate the Chtorran infestation-the death-struggle will be a daily fact of life."

Willig nodded. "I know that." Her tone became as serious as I'd ever heard her use. "Now let me tell you something. Before this war, ninety percent of the human race-no, make that ninety-five percent-were living like drones. Zombies. They ate, they slept, they made babies. Beyond that, they didn't have any goals. Goals? Most of them didn't think more than two meals ahead. Life wasn't about life; it was about food and money and the occasional fuck and not much more. At best, it was about getting to the next toy. At worst-well, we had ten billion professional consumers who were consuming the Earth. Not as fast as the Chtonans perhaps, but fast enough. You want to talk about the quality of life before the infestation? Okay, some of us had good food and clean water; we had dry beds and a warm place to shit. We had three hundred channels of entertainment and music. Our work was piped in too, so we never had to go out if we didn't want to. Do you think that was living? I don't. It was existence, about as empty and hollow as human life can be. For most of us, the challenges were too small. There was nothing to test us, there was nothing at stake, so there was nothing to live for either. We endured, we waited-and we ran to the television every time a really interesting crisis or plane crash occurred, because at least that gave us the vicarious thrill of participating in something meaningful.