Book One: The Thing Was, Chapter 27-Chapter 28 Summary

Selena MacIntosh never knows during her lifetime that her father is dead. Her blindness is due to retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited condition from her mother. If Selena had had a child, it would have had a fifty percent chance of inheriting the disease, and a female would have a fifty percent chance of passing the disease on. By chance, neither retinitis pigmentosa nor Huntington's chorea were passed down to future humanity.

While MacIntosh and Zenji are walking outside, Private Geraldo Delgado, a paranoid schizophrenic soldier who has deserted his post, breaks into a souvenir shop, getting into the blocked-off zone around the Hotel El Dorado. He believes that people are destroying his brain with radios, and when he sees Mandarax, he thinks it is a radio. He shoots MacIntosh and Zenji...