When Doc crawled out of the hut, he saw a clear, turquoise sky above and the sun dipping below the tree line. The ville’s square was peopled by living statues, everything dusted with pale yellow.
All around him, the snowdrifts were visibly shrinking. He bent and scooped up some in his hand.
It wasn’t made of flakes, as he had thought, but individual grains. Like pollen. Or crystals.
In seconds, the pile of stuff on his palm grew smaller. He could see it wasn’t melting into a liquid; nothing was dripping off the heel of his hand. It was just disappearing, which was impossible. Doc knew the basics of physics and chemistry. He knew that matter couldn’t disappear, couldn’t be created or destroyed; however, it could be made to change form. In this case, it appeared that solid matter, the snow, was turning into a gas, perhaps upon contact with air. According to the laws of physics, this required the application or release of some kind of energy. But the material wasn’t hot.
What he was observing seemed to violate the most fundamental principles of science.
Doc dumped what was left of the snow on the ground and brushed off his hands.
Moments later, he began to notice a tingling numbness in his fingers and feet. It spread rapidly to his mouth and lips. He clenched his fists, heart pounding up under his chin as he anticipated being turned to stone like the others. But the numbing sensation didn’t travel any farther. He quickly rubbed back the circulation in his hands and face.
Doc hurried across the square, walking between the rigidly upright human forms. The snowfall had produced immediate and total paralysis in every other person present. Even the baron, the black man who had tended the cookfire and three who had come out of the Baja Bug were frozen.
When he reached Ryan, Doc laid his hand on his friend’s chest. The one-eyed man was breathing, but only just barely. His heartbeat was very slow, but steady. The pupil of his eye was dilated, and its blink reflex was stifled. Doc took hold of Ryan’s arm and shook him, then he shouted in his ear.
Nothing.
No response.
It was the same with all the companions. He couldn’t rouse them from their stupor.
Doc retreated to the front wall of the blockhouse, despairing and at a loss as to how to help his friends.
After a few minutes passed, he was relieved to see the paralysis starting to wear off. Gradually everyone began to stir. As they regained their faculties, there was a noticeable change in their behavior. They were all quiet, tranquil and smiling. Behavior that the circumstances hardly called for. It seemed to Doc they were now all suffering from the same variety of madness. He sensed that whatever was influencing them had reestablished complete control. The evidence so far pointed to some chemical in the snow.
Doc reflected on what the baron had said about the pool being the source of everything here. He had no doubt that a complex system was in operation. A living system. Its size, its power and its menace were almost tangible. If it existed as a single entity, as the baron had suggested, it was the largest creature Doc had ever encountered, indeed had ever heard of. Of course, the baron’s view wasn’t necessarily accurate. He was as impacted by the snow as the others. And he was not trained as a scientist.
If the tendrils were fungal, as Doc had speculated, then the snow would be fungal spores. If they were vegetable, the snow would be plant pollen. Either way, they were the entity’s genetic material.
Doc could recall no sign of anything growing in, on or around the pool. That didn’t mean much. Fungi and plants could be living out of sight and in profusion on the pool’s bottom. Because fungi were such simple structures, and tended to grow so closely together, it was sometimes difficult to separate one individual from others of the same type in the same area. Whether it was one gigantic creature or a population of ten thousand smaller ones, the danger was palpable.