For one thing, the Nipponese fellow who had got pissed and fallen 
overboard had encountered a group of several other people who had, by a 
remarkable coincidence, also fallen out of their boats on the way here, and who 
upon being rescued had all begun to emit colored light and see visions that 
they insisted on recounting to anyone in the vicinity. These people convened 
into a poorly organized chorus, all shouting at once and articulating visions 
that seemed to be linked in an approximate way—as if they had all just 
now awakened from the same dream and were all doing an equally bad job 
describing it. They stuck together despite their differences, drawn together by 
the same mysterious attractive force that causes streetcorner crackpots to set 
up their soapboxes right next to each other. Shortly after Hackworth zoomed 
toward them in his phenomenoscopic view, they began to hallucinate something 
along the lines of a
giant eyeball peering at them from the heavens, the black skin of its eyelids 
studded with stars.