Strangers

it. We should get moving."
        "Not quite yet," Ginger said. The physician folded her hands and looked down at her interlaced fingers, collecting her thoughts. "Since this afternoon, when Brendan first arrived, when the rings appeared on his and Dom's hands, when the motel office was filled with that strange noise and the light… I've been chewing over everything we've been able to learn, trying to make those bizarre phenomena fit in somehow. I've hit on an explanation for some of it; not all, but some of it."
        Everyone expressed an eagerness to hear the theory, half-formed though it might be.
        Ginger said, "As different as our dreams are, one element links all of them: the moon. Okay. Our other dreams - decon suits, IV needles, beds with restraining straps - proved to be based on real experiences, real threats. In fact, they weren't dreams but memories surfacing in the form of dreams. So it seems reasonable to suppose the moon also featured prominently in whatever happened to us, that the moon, too, is a memory trying to surface in our dreams. Agreed?"
        "Agreed," Dom said, and everyone else nodded.
        "We've seen how Marcie's lunar obsession changed to a fascination with a scarlet moon," Ginger continued. "And Jack's told us that, a couple nights ago, the ordinary moonlight in his own nightmare turned into a bloody glow. None of the rest of us has dreamed of a red moon yet, but I submit that the appearance of this scarlet image in Marcie's and Jack's dreams is proof that it's also a memory. In other words, on the night of July 6, we saw something that made the moon turn red. And the apparitional light, which sometimes fills Brendan's bedroom, which some of us witnessed today in the motel office, is a strange sort of reenactment of what happened to the real moon on the night in July. The apparitional light is a message meant to nudge our memories."
        "Message," Jack said. "All right. But who the devil's sending the message? Where's the light come from? How is it generated?"
        "I've got an idea about that," Ginger said. "But let me take this one step at a time. First, let's consider what might've happened to make the moon turn red that night."
        Jorja listened, as did the others, with interest at first and then with growing uneasiness, while Ginger got up from her chair and, pacing, outlined an unnerving explanation.
        

        
        Ginger Weiss wholeheartedly embraced the scientific worldview. To her, the universe unfailingly operated by the rules of logic and reason, and no mystery could long endure once attacked in a logical fashion. But unlike some in the scientific community - and many in the medical community - she did not believe that a vivid imagination was necessarily a hindrance to logic and reason. Otherwise, she might not have devised the theory she now conveyed to the others in the Tranquility Grille.
        It was a pretty strange theory, and she was nervous about how the others would receive it. So she paced to the jukebox, over to the service counter, back to the table, moving constantly as she talked:
        "The men who dealt with us in the first day or two of imprisonment were wearing decontamination suits designed to handle biological risks. They must've been worried we were infected with something. So perhaps part of what we saw was a scarlet cloud of biological contaminant. When it passed overhead, it turned the moon red."
        "And we were all infected with some strange disease," Jorja said.
        Ginger said, "That may be why, yesterday at the special place along the highway, I had the memory-flash of Dom shouting, 'It's inside me. It's inside me." That would have been a logical thing for him to shout if, that night, he had found himself caught up in a red cloud of some contaminant and realized he was breathing it in. And Brendan's told us that the same words-'It's inside me' - came spontaneously to his lips last night in Reno, when the red apparitional light filled his room."
        "Bacteria? Disease? Then why didn't we get sick?" Brendan said.
        "Because they treated us immediately," Dom said. "We've already worked that one out, Brendan - yesterday, before you got here. But, Ginger, the light that filled the office this afternoon was too bright to represent moonlight filtered through a red cloud."
        "I know," Ginger said, pacing. "Underdeveloped as it is, my idea doesn't explain everything - like