Phase IV

I

Lesko’s Diary: Hubbs says that this is a relatively simple assignment; that some rearrangement in the ecosystem will have to be made and should not take us more than two weeks to find the problem and set the balance again, but I am not so sure of this. I do not like the situation.

Hubbs has been involved in pure research for too long; he is demoniac, possessed, at least this is my guess. He has manipulated abstractions for so long that it is as if personality has fallen away from the man—a thin, balding, obsessed fifty-year-old individual. He approaches what may be an ecological disaster as a simple problem in applied ecology and has to be a little mad. Of course it is possible that he is not at all mad and that I am overreacting. I have been on the pure research bit somewhat too long myself, and there is something about the behavior pattern of whales observed up close for eight months that could unstring a man of somewhat simpler psychological makeup than myself. Whales are so ponderous. What I need is a long rest, but I do not think that this expedition into the Arizona desert is quite the ticket.

Hubbs does. Hubbs’s optimism may be psychopathic, but it has the convincing nature of psychopathology. “Isn’t that interesting?” he said when he informed me back in San Francisco that I had been drafted as his assistant by the National Science Foundation… at his request. Ants being more viable than whales, I suppose.

“What we’ve seen in that desert in the last few months appears to be a complete breakdown of normal ecological checks and balances. The ants are multiplying like crazy out there because something is checking their natural enemies: mantises, spiders, gophers, coyotes. It must be a very strong breed of ants, eh Lesko? Eh?”

His eyes twinkled and this must have been the first time that it occurred to me he was mad. “Great panic, Lesko!” he went on. “Residents fleeing, homesteads abandoned, that entire patch of desert being left to an uncontrollable onslaught of ants! Like a science-fiction movie, wouldn’t you say? The ants are taking over! The invasion of the ant-people! Well,”

he said, returning to a somewhat more level tone of voice, “we’ll go out there and take a look at this. We’ve got a station, computer, equipment, and a great deal of insecticide. All in all, I think that we’ll take care of this invasion of the ant-people in two or three weeks, Lesko, and then you can return to your whales. You’ll appreciate the break from routine.”

I am not sure. I am just not so sure of this. Perhaps it is merely atavism, that ancient quality lurking in the back of all our minds—primitive dread, superstition, the Jungian subconscious I believe they call it—but the specter of ants taking over a section of the Arizona desert, driving people from their homes, apparently suspending all ecological data… this inspires dreams and intimations that I find quite difficult to handle, and recent nights have been long, parched exercises in nightmare. Of all the intelligences on this planet, of course, those of the ants are most foreign to us, and for that reason the most menacing… they simply do not think or behave as all other creatures do but on some level that our best researches can hardly verbalize. They are particles of subliminal intelligence, I suppose, incredibly earnest, very organized, always busy… and they are the only survivors (always excepting the roaches, which are an urban problem) from the Cretaceous age, and that must tell us something.

Dinosaurs, stegosauri, Neanderthals, mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, to say nothing of the geography of the poles themselves… all gone for millions of years. Yet the ants survive in almost the exact form that they had then. Should this teach us something? Yes, gentlemen, it should teach us something.

Hubbs laughs and says that there was always a fear of the ants taking over, and here, perhaps, in an obscure portion of the Southwest the little buggers are at last getting to the job. His laughter to me is insanity, because if this is true, and I do not think that Hubbs realizes this, we are all in very serious trouble. The entire network of man’s living pattern—speaking ecologically—is one that has gone in the opposite direction of ant intelligence and has now reached a great level of intricacy, verbalization, abstraction, interdependence. The ant intelligence, which is highly cooperative, entirely subvocal, and extremely organized could be malignant to us… if for some reason that intelligence turned against us.

Enough of this anxiety neurosis; it comes from being thirty-five years old, unmarried, too deep into abstraction myself, working too hard, thinking too much, needing a long rest. Needing a good woman. It may be that I see Hubbs so clearly and distrust him because he is a projection of myself as I may be in twenty years: pure, neurotic intelligence incapable of feeling, no grasp of metaphor. I have been too long with my whales. I should have gotten married years ago, but who, who, who would have me?

I am frightened.

II

“The evidence at hand,” Hubbs said, bouncing along in the Willys jeep, Lesko struggling with the wheel, trying to keep the overloaded vehicle straight on the negligible desert highway, “is a sudden and dramatic disappearance of several species of predator insect… principally mantises, beetles, millipedes, and spiders.”

“That’s right,” Lesko said. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “That much was made clear from the beginning.”

“Don’t interrupt me,” Hubbs said. “I want to lay this out for you very carefully. The hypothesis to be confirmed is an equally dramatic increase in the population of insects normally controlled by these predators. I refer to ants.”

“Right,” Lesko said.

The sun was pitiless. It would be good to get into the fully air-conditioned and insulated station, but the only way to get there was to track through this hell. Lesko squinted, put both hands on the wheel, and maneuvered the jeep painfully around a small open hole in the roadway.

“Thirdly,” Hubbs said, “proposal.” He took off his glasses, rimmed sweat from his eyes, replaced his glasses, and then went on. “We will see the effects of a biological imbalance on life forms in the subject area… with the emphasis on population dynamics, density controls, species diversity, dominance hierarchies. And genetic aberrations, if any.”

“Of course,” Lesko said, looking back.

“Mode of operation, number four,” Hubbs said. Lesko looked at him sidewise and saw for the first time that Hubbs had not been speaking extemporaneously; he was reading from a sheet of paper that he held before him, covered with painful cursive symbols. “An experimental station to be located, built, and maintained with appropriate equipment for the study and analysis of the ant population.” He put the paper beside him with a flourish. “That station is already available,” he said.

“Yes,” Lesko said. “I know.” The jeep now took them by an abandoned field to their right, in front of which a sign COUNTRY CLUB hung supported by wire. Four weeks ago there had been people here, people on the golf course beyond it; now all of them were gone, the population cleared out. Hubbs and he were probably the only human beings within an area of ten square miles, and this made him shudder, just the two of them and the mysterious ants… but Hubbs seemed quite pleased with the idea. The thing about Hubbs was that he probably would have been happiest of all with no company, but the Coronado Institute, under whose auspices this had been financed, was a little bit stuffy about sending out one man. They had wanted four or five for simple backup and checking procedures if nothing else. But Hubbs had managed to persuade them to settle for one. Lesko. That he had been specifically requested was supposed to be an honor. Honor. Why did I take it? Lesko thought, not for the first or tenth time, what persuaded me to get into this? He had no answer.

There was some question of compulsion here.

“Personnel,” Hubbs was saying, looking at his sheet of paper again.

“One senior scientist—myself that is—plus one associate to be named.

Now named. James R. Lesko. Temporary personnel for construction and installation as noted in the budget.”

Lesko passed a sign that said PARADISE CITY in clumsily painted letters, and then, that quickly, they were in the middle of what had been a development in the process of completion. Half-completed houses, half-filled roadways, foundations. A few television antennaes coming forlornly from a few of the houses that had been completed. Open storefronts, some of them with signs half-painted. Lesko felt the revulsion beginning again—it was such a human thing, this abandoned Paradise City, and yet it had been rendered inhuman. He slowed the jeep, picking out a point of orientation. The station would be somewhere on the outskirts, toward the west, he thought. Where was the west? Sweeping the landscape he saw nothing. “Keep on going,” Hubbs said. “It’s set low to the ground.” Not reading from the paper his voice was high, less certain.

“Concentrate on your driving, don’t look at things.”

“All right,” Lesko said. “All right.” He accelerated fiercely, the jeep holding low to the ground, and they drove through Paradise City at forty or fifty miles an hour, bouncing and jouncing on the seats, possessions behind them sliding but prevented by the lash rope from dropping to the baking road surface. “Where are these so-called towers?”

“Towers?” Hubbs said absently. “Oh, yes, towers. We’ll see them later.”

His voice changed; he started to read again. “Supplementary request,” he said. “In the light of certain events reported in the subject area, and my monograph in this regard may take reference, certain additional funds are requested from the director’s discretionary budget, plus the services of a qualified information specialist with a cryptological background. In this connection,” Hubbs said, Lesko yanking the jeep down a long, empty street of ruined and empty buildings that opened on a long view of the desert, now choked with haze, “I have been most impressed with the recent work of James R. Lesko… at the Naval Undersea Center at San Diego, and I am requesting his assignment as my associate for a period of time not to exceed twenty-one days.” He put the papers away and for the first time smiled. “End of memo,” he said.

“I don’t think it will be twenty-one days,” Lesko said.

“It probably won’t be. It should as a matter of fact be a great deal less.”

Hubbs leaned over, seeing something through the windshield. “There,” he said. “I believe we have found our victim.”

Lesko followed the man’s pointing finger and saw the towers. They were just beyond what probably would have been the far edge of the development, seven slabs eight to ten feet high, clearly visible now as the jeep bore down on them. Even as he looked at them, he felt an oddly disconcerted feeling as if some power, some quality of noise were emanating… but this at least he put down to nervous exhaustion. The slabs were merely that, pieces of concrete, nothing more. Until recently they had attracted so little attention that it had been possible for the builders to complete half of the development without really noticing them.

They must have taken them for artifacts… indeed, Lesko thought rather wryly, the slabs might have struck them as being a possible selling point.

Natural stone wonders, or whatever. The imaginations of the developers were inexhaustible that way… until and unless, of course, they ran out of money.

“End of the line,” Hubbs said briskly. “Let’s have a close look at them.”

Lesko found himself in a shallow field. He bumped the jeep to a point about ten feet downrange from the slabs, put the emergency brake on, and shut off the engine. Insects battered the windshield, swooped around them. Otherwise it was quiet. Lesko could see no sign of ants. Maybe it was a rumor. Panic. Hysteria. A sudden unexplained increase in the ant population, one of those things that could happen in a desert already eaten away by an ecological righting. He shook his head and clambered heavily out of the vehicle. Hubbs was already near the slabs, kneeling, inspecting them with enthusiasm.

“Remarkable,” Hubbs said as Lesko came up to him. “Probably there is some direct connection here with the ant population. Eventually we’ll have to take them apart of course.” He stood slowly and looked up the impassive face of the nearest slab, hands on hips. “No indication of origin,” he said. “Artifacts, of course, but of what?”

Lesko walked past the line of slabs. He had a sudden and total lack of interest in them. It was mysterious; they had traveled a hundred miles to see them, and yet here at last, he wanted only to get away. Was it possible that they were emanating a wave that made him feel this way? Ridiculous

… and yet dolphins had sonar. He looked at a collapsed house some distance away, the last outpost of the ruined development. It looked as if it had been imploded, cheap furniture, plaster, glass lay together unevenly on a foundation. It was a picture of complete disaster; yet it did not seem to concern Hubbs at all. Hubbs’s eyes were bright as he looked at the fallen timbers, then back to the slabs.

“No bodies… I hope,” Lesko said.

“The population evacuated themselves some days ago.”

Lesko and Hubbs walked to the foundation. Probably this house had been intended to be the showpiece of the development: Wake up every morning in the shadow of mysterious, ten-foot artifacts. Yes, that would be how they would have promoted it. There were people who liked that kind of thing. You just could not comprehend fully the perversity of humanity, its endless variety, the range of behavior. “You have some powerful friends,” he said to Hubbs, looking at the walls.

“Wind and weather did most of it, I would say. Call it just another desert development that didn’t develop.”

“And then the ants finished it off?”

“We’ll have to find out about that,” Hubbs said. “I would say that there was more panic in the flight of the residents than actual, ah, menace presented by the ants. The landscape would contribute to it, of course.” He shrugged. “This couldn’t have been a very tasteful environment, Paradise City.”

“I don’t know,” Lesko said. “This house hasn’t simply fallen away. It’s been attacked.”

“Um,” Hubbs said and took out a small camera to almost absently shoot a couple of standing pictures of the house. “Mr. Lesko, you did your major work in applying game theory to the language of killer whales, is that correct?”

“Well,” Lesko said, “it proved to be cheaper than applying it to roulette.”

“Did you actually make any positive contact with the whales?” Hubbs said, toying with the camera, then replacing it. “Or was it—”

“Only with the emotionally disturbed.”

“Oh?” Hubbs said. “How were you able to determine the emotional disturbance?”

“We talked about it a bit. They opened their hearts to me.”

Hubbs’s features broke open into an uneasy smile. “I assume you’re joking,” he said.

Lesko felt a flush building around his cheeks. Hubbs was a small man, not only physically but at a certain level of emotional vulnerability. It was not so much, he saw, that Hubbs was possessed by abstraction as that almost everything else frightened him. He did not know the language of contact… but this was as much Lesko’s fault because he was only one of a number of people who had never tried to teach him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just a pencil and paper guy. I wouldn’t know the front end of a whale from a… well, from a hole in the ground.”

Hubbs turned and walked the other way, picking his way through the ruined foundation. Lesko followed him, staring at the towers. There seemed to be a certain light—

“I know that games are your business, James,” Hubbs said uncomfortably. “You play them well and that’s why you’re here. We’re going to apply game theory to see if we can establish some kind of communication. But this is a very serious business.”

“Isn’t that the best kind?” Lesko said, fascinated by the towers. He could not decide exactly what the material was; it was, he suspected, of a chemical compound that no one on earth could fabricate. It was dirt, a kind of closely packed silt, irregular up and down the columns, but the design, he thought, had an odd rigidity, the angles were sculptured, coming together at certain points in an odd and precise honeycomb. And now that he looked through the dazzle of the sun, was it possible that the towers seemed to have faces—

Suddenly he wanted to look at them no more. Hubbs had gone ahead.

Lesko scurried to keep up with him.

III

Lesko’s Diary: But it turns out that there are a few people here—besides Hubbs and myself that is to say—and one of them, no less, is an attractive girl. It would be nice to think that this is a sign that things are looking up, but I do not think that they are looking up at all; rather, the fact that there are people holding out on this terrain has somehow raised the stakes. It is not just Hubbs and myself now. It is not a mere research project. There is, so to speak, a human element, and meanwhile things are moving so rapidly already that I fear they may be out of control.

After we left the towers, getting back into the jeep, I felt somewhat better. It is hard to express exactly what power they exert upon me, but there is a kind of profound unease here, something perhaps better unphrased here in what I originally intended to be a scientific journal chock-full of routine observations on the progress of the project. Sufficient to say that I do not think that those towers were made by anything human, but I do not, then, know what made them nor do I want to find out. Moving away from them in the jeep I felt better, better yet because of my insight into Hubbs. I could work with this man now because I thought I understood him. Similarly with whales.

Driving toward the station a few miles from the towers, we saw airborne helicopters dangling cargo supplies. They flew low and men stretched out to wave their hands at us. The hardware was coming.

Computer, provisions, insulation, wiring… the station would be converted into an impregnable, functioning, and military base within twenty-four hours, and this made me feel almost cheerful. My mood of depression seemed to lift in the singing and clattering of the engines, and I said to Hubbs, “If the people around here ran away because they saw what the ants were doing… then I wonder what the ants will do when they see what we’re doing.” And this was a cheerful thought; how could these creatures, even assuming a malevolence that we had no right whatsoever to assume, stand up against ordnance. Certainly there were a lot of them… but we had the firepower if necessary to annihilate every ant in the world. The only reason that they had survived from Cretaceous times is that they had posed no threat to man; if they had, they would have gone the way of the mammoth or for that matter the Neanderthal (that threatening subhuman presence that Cro-Magnon could not abide) and just be sure of that.

“Perhaps they’ll laugh,” Hubbs said with that strange seriousness of his.

I said, “That would show no sensitivity whatsoever,” and Hubbs grinned at that, the first time I had gotten through, by God. Then just as I thought that I had the situation under control and understood at last, Hubbs was staring out the jeep at what appeared to be clouds in the distance and said, “You know, there is someone still around here. Doesn’t that look like a tractor?”

Yes, it did look like a tractor. We drove toward a patch of desert where clouds of dust were being moved around by an elderly man in a large orange vehicle, pipe in his mouth, working on the patch of dirt with the maniacal singlemindedness of a Man Who Believes He Can Make A Difference, puffing foul clouds of smoke into the air from a pipe, humming to himself above the whine of machinery, so absorbed in his task that Hubbs had to lean on the horn with growing fury to finally attract his attention. Slowly, the man acknowledged us, took off his hat, waved, cut the machine with the aspect of a man who is living in a different kind of time, where chronology means nothing and only the instant moment counts, walked over to the tractor base, checked it out, then came to us nodding. Hubbs asked what the hell he was doing here, a reasonable question, although, of course, the man was not doing anything illegal.

(Hubbs has a passionate sense of order; if he hears that a place is abandoned, then by God it ought to be abandoned.) The man said that he was digging a ditch and then motioned back in the distance where we could see a farmhouse, little curls of smoke coming from this pastoral refuge, “Name’s Clete,” he said like a character in some half-forgotten rustic play. “I work for Eldridge over there. Come on,” he said, “you want to see Eldridge?”

I guess we did. Eldridge seemed to be worth seeing; if ever a man believed that life must go on and be damned if he would be driven from routine, it would have to be this one. Clete motioned us out of the jeep and led us down rows and rows of plants toward the farmhouse. In a ravine on the way, we saw a dead sheep lying amidst vegetation. Clete paused, said he wanted to show us something, and then, going to the sheep, exposed the neck through the folds and showed us the four small holes there. He did this in a horrid, matter-of-fact way, and I thought I would retch, but Hubbs was fascinated. He forgot, almost at once, that the presence of Clete or Eldridge was somehow a personal attack upon the project and joined Clete at the animal, stroking away at the neck folds. “Remarkable,” he said when they had returned and we had continued toward the farmhouse. “There are several African ants that will attack anything… insect, animal, anything at all that threatens their food supply. The smell triggers the behavior.” He continued chattering to me as we walked on, Clete leading and poking through the vegetation. I failed to detect any more sheep corpses, which disconcerted me not a bit.

The farmhouse itself was another ruined, rotted structure, but it was a human ruination, if it is clear what I am saying; Eldridge lived in dishevelment obviously because he was comfortable that way, and the farmhouse in its noisome deterioration was probably contrived as carefully for that effect as the ragged clothes of rich young people.

Eldridge, a calm, sturdy man in his sixties, another pipe smoker, nodded at us as if he had been expecting a visit for a long time, almost as if we were there to give him approval and assistance, and took us around the house, showing the system of shallow ditches in which pipe had been laid, probably by Clete. He had been digging a ditch farther out when we found him. Eldridge pointed from the pipes to a large oil tank behind the house, and his face was suffused with pleasure. He did not seem to mind the ants; he took them as a challenge. “This here,” he said, “this is what we’re doing.

We’re running lines from the fuel tank, you understand, and if those ants get over the water trap, why then we’re going to set fire to this ditch and watch them all die.” He smiled. “I’m looking forward to that,” he said.

“The filthy little buggers aren’t going to take my land from me. The fact is,” he went on, “I’m almost enjoying this. I’m going to survive and be the better for it,” Leaning on a hoe he looked like something out of American Gothic, although, perhaps, less pessimistic. “Don’t you think I’ve done a good job?” he said.

“I think you’ve done very well indeed,” Hubbs said, and a look passed between them, call it communion or mutual respect, but it was apparent that Eldridge was doing exactly what Hubbs imagined he would do in this circumstance; he was Taking A Stand, he was Not Being Intimidated. It affected me to see Hubbs responding in this way, and I realized that he was glad to see that Eldridge had held out. The abandoned Paradise City must have affected him as deeply as me in a different way. Suddenly I liked Hubbs much more.

Eldridge suggested that we might as well sit and stay for a while, and that seemed all right to me, all right to Hubbs as well. Clete went and got some chairs and we all went to the porch a-setting and a-rocking, meeting Eldridge’s wife, Mildred, a grim, determined woman with the same hardness that Eldridge had, but with something softer behind the eyes that indicated that she could both participate in defiance with him and not take it that seriously. And we met Eldridge’s granddaughter, Kendra.

Well, music and bells for the others, please; I am not a sentimental man. I will admit that Kendra has already had a great affect on me, but I try not to take this kind of thing too seriously. She is an attractive girl in her late teens; all right, she is more than attractive, a softness and grace is there that lifts her entirely out of the context of mere prettiness and touches me deeply.

My relationships with women, fragmentary at best, have not been so good since I got into whale research (something that this journal already has made clear, I suspect); but I do not think, never thought, that this was so much my fault as the fault of the women themselves. There are very few I have met through the years who struck me as being worth the effort… and for me at least a below-standard woman simply poses no interest at all. Perhaps this makes me a very strange man, but I have never been overly concerned with the fact that most of the time my sexual drive seems to flicker away at a subliminal level, only making its presence known at rare occasions and then always with women like Kendra to whom sexual interest is merely a confirmation of feelings they have already aroused. I realize that I am becoming somewhat confused about this and giving more attention to my feelings than they are really worth, but I want to get this absolutely straight, and if this journal is going to stand up as being of any scientific validity—which I trust it will—then it is not a negligible part of the scientific method that the prejudices and nature of the writer be themselves revealed, integrated as it were into the core of the work. She is a beautiful girl; at another time, in another way, something might have happened here, but I am too preoccupied with the ants. And as Hubbs has made clear over and again this is no pleasure trip. I have been with my whales too long. Kendra has long hair that takes all the colors of the sun, a gentle voice, deep penetrating eyes, to say nothing of fine breasts and hips.

I know that I will be thinking of her out of all relation to the actual role she will play in my life here. Eldridge, I think, might understand this; he showed an amused consciousness of my disturbance as I was introduced to her, and kept giving her sidelong glances as she played with her horse in the backyard, paused to help Mrs. Eldridge bring us drinks now and then, but he is a man of great reserve and said nothing. Why should he?

Eldridge, in answer to Hubbs’s queries, pointed out that they had started pulling out of Paradise City about three or four weeks past, first just a few, then almost all of the residents together. The lemming effect. It was the ants that had discouraged them, of course, but the actual damage inflicted by them, Eldridge went on, most of it anyway, had occurred after the project had been abandoned, which meant that if they had resolved to stay and fight as Eldridge had, the ants would have posed little problem.

He did not seem bitter, however. “People hate ants,” he said. “There’s something about them that just disgusts most of us, but Clete and I we aren’t too bothered. I don’t think of them as animals, but as a kind of vegetation, and what the hell can you do with vegetation except to control it and clear it away? No,” he said, “I don’t think that we’re going to have any trouble now,” just a-setting and a-rocking. Kendra’s horse whickered, Clete begged pardon and went back to do some more ditch-digging.

“Maybe,” Eldridge said, “it was just too much heat for them, these people I mean. Most of them aren’t really desert types, you know; they’re city dwellers with sinus problems who got conned into paying a few thousand for some property they’d never seen. They were looking for any excuse to go. I don’t hold nothing against them,” he said again. “But what I don’t like is that when we get the ants cleared away I’m going to have to do the rebuilding practically single-handed. Most of them are never going to be back.”

“We’re from the National Science Foundation,” Hubbs said. “We’ll give you plenty of assistance, you can be sure of that. And afterward there should be a grant for rebuilding.”

“Maybe,” Eldridge said with the air of a man who had seen both too much and too little government in his time, his suspicion not personal—he liked Hubbs, after all—but radiating as a kind of absent contempt. “And then again maybe not. Only thing that brings people into the Arizona desert is they think they can get something out of it easy; project developers, scientists looking for giant ants, but who’s going to stay? I’m going to stay.”

“There are a lot of collapsed houses around here,” I pointed out, perhaps irrelevantly, but trying to establish some part in the conversation.

Somehow my potential connection to Kendra, I decided, could only be established through Eldridge; I would have to establish a relationship with him in order to reach her… juvenile thinking perhaps, but I had a strange feeling of hesitancy about the girl. “Maybe they had their reasons to run.”

“I really wouldn’t know about that,” Eldridge said. “Like I said, I didn’t pay much attention to any of them. They came from the city mainly and they’re heading right back there. I’ve got to hold my ground. This is my place.”

“Ah,” Hubbs said. “But what about the towers?”

Eldridge squinted; the complexion of his face changed. “I don’t know anything about the towers,” he said.

“Well, you must have seen—”

“I just don’t know anything about them,” Eldridge said. “I seen them and I know what you’re talking about, but mostly I don’t think about them. What’s the point of it?” A practical man.

“Do you think there’s any connection between the towers and the ants?” Hubbs said.

This was the key question; one that had been weaving around in my subconscious for several hours now, and hearing it, dredged it to the surface like a drowned body; I felt, in fact, a kind of nausea. Of course, of course, there had to be some connection, it was obvious; the growth of the towers, the growth of the ants. Hubbs had been able to see it and make that connection easily, whereas I had been afraid to… but Eldridge merely nodded, his face still bearing that strange, implacable expression, and said, “I don’t know about that either.” He paused. “Of course, it’s been a dry year. You know, you can get ants in dry years. I once talked to an entomologist at the State Department of Agriculture and he said that these things were cyclical.”

“He wasn’t talking about ants,” Mildred pointed out matter of factly.

She had been inside the house, but now at Eldridge’s invitation—“Come out and meet these people; lest they think I’ve got you chained up in that house”—she joined us, nodding again.

“These are university people,” Eldridge said to her. “They’re going to develop a new spray for those ants. Give us some help. Of course I think the ditches will do the trick, but you never know; we can always use some reinforcements.”

“You know what I think?” Mrs. Eldridge said.

“Don’t tell them,” Eldridge said.

“I want to.”

“Stop worrying,” he said harshly. His whole expression had changed. So had Mildred’s. They were not American Gothic anymore but something out of Breughel. “Leave these people alone with your ideas.”

She shook her head and Hubbs made then what I think was a serious mistake, but there is no way of rectifying or even going back to it now. He took a sheet of paper out of his pocket, read some bureaucratese at them, and said that they were being evacuated. Eldridge reacted with shock. So did I. I hadn’t even known that he was carrying such an order around with him. Full of surprises, my senior associate.

“Now look here,” Eldridge said, and now we were no longer a-setting and a-rocking, but all of a sudden we were confronting. I looked for Kendra, but she had gone way off into the back, and in some illustration of the pathetic fallacy, the sun had clouded over. “Look here,” this sixty-five-year-old man said. “What’s this all about anyway? This isn’t right; they can’t push us off our own—”

“It’s necessary,” Hubbs said. His pedantry had returned; it seemed that all of the setting and rocking had only been a brief, pastoral interval after all. “For your own protection. Some very dangerous insecticides and other preparations are going to be used here, and they might pose a real threat to you; you can certainly return—”

“The ditches,” Eldridge said. “We have ditches, we have oil, now listen to me, doctor whoever you are, this is our land and—”

“Hubbs,” he said “Ernest D. Hubbs. Now look, Mr. Eldridge, I said that I’m truly sorry about this. It isn’t my doing; it’s a governmental order, and believe me you’ll be much happier not being exposed or exposing your family to our righting of the balance here.” Eldridge’s face had turned orange in color now, his movements were somewhat feebler as he got out of the chair. “I’m sorry,” Hubbs said, perhaps thinking that Eldridge was going to attack him, raising hands to face. “But—”

“Listen,” Mildred said, taking Eldridge by the hand. “The man is right; don’t you see that? He’s right; we can’t go on this way. The ants,” she said and Eldridge’s face was not the only one turning color now. There was a true festival of color on the porch, except that Mildred’s was a bright green. “The ants—” she said and attempted to go on, but couldn’t. She seemed to choke and as she did Eldridge’s expression altered altogether, his fury became despair and he seemed to collapse; it was as if air was going out of him, he collapsed in small stages, sitting on the chair, and Mildred took his hand while Hubbs watched with astonishment, nonplused being the word I suppose, although I doubt if nonplusment is a part of Hubbs’s range of behavior.

“It’s for our own protection,” Eldridge said softly, clutching her, “All right, then. We’ll go.”

I looked to Hubbs for some confirmation of my own astonishment—never have I seen such an alteration so quickly—but he was looking out toward the desert, his eyes shadowed.

“For our own protection,” Eldridge repeated.

I looked for Kendra, but could not see her.

IV

“All right,” Lesko said, driving the jeep. “That’s good enough. But when do they get their farm back?”

“That depends,” Hubbs said. Little marks of strain appeared on his forehead. “Among other things it depends on when we can clear out the ants, doesn’t it?”

“That was rough,” Lesko said. He felt obscurely angry, but was unable, somehow, to penetrate that anger; he knew that it had nothing to do with Hubbs. “The old man may be the last survivor. He’s holding out.”

“That doesn’t concern me,” Hubbs said. “We’ve got a job to do.”

“You didn’t have to spring the evacuation order on him. That was rough. You could have worked your way into it.”

“I’m not in the social sciences,” Hubbs said. His face, was very tense now, and sweat was coming off it freely. “I’m not a psychiatrist or a social worker; I’m an ecologist with background in biophysics.”

“All right,” Lesko said.

“And what are you, Mr. Lesko? You’re a researcher in game theory. By your own admission, not mine mind you, you’re strictly a pencil and paper man; you don’t deal with people.”

“I said all right,” Lesko said. His hands were very tight on the wheel. In the distance, off to the right, he could see the towers, and the uncomfortable feeling was rising in his chest again, soaking through his stomach and bowels. He did not know how much longer he could keep on driving, could keep on being matter of fact about the situation. It was bizarre, that was all, entirely bizarre, and the afternoon with Eldridge, which. had started out so promisingly, had ended by making him ill. “Let’s forget the whole thing.”

“It’s the girl,” Hubbs said. His voice was flat and quite even. “You’re thinking about that girl. Well, Lesko, you’re a healthy, normal young man; you’re certainly entitled to such interests, and she is a charming little thing. But if you think that that can interfere—”

“Hubbs,” Lesko said very quietly, slowing the vehicle. “I want you to keep quiet now. I want you to shut up. If you don’t, I can’t tell you what I might do. You asked for me and I’m here at your request; we have to work together and I’m willing to do it… but I don’t want to hear you mention the girl again.” Little blots of color were coming out on his cheeks; abruptly he looked much older than thirty-five. The vehicle was now completely at rest. “Do you hear me?” he said. “Do you hear me now?”

“All right,” Hubbs said in a shaken voice. “I hear you.”

“That’s good,” Lesko said. He put the jeep back in gear again, and they started to roll. Hubbs sat shrunken in one corner, staring out over Lesko’s shoulder at the desert, his eyes clouded. A hand trembled as he raised it to wipe sweat from his forehead.

“I mean that,” Lesko said.

This thing is already getting to me, he thought, and it’s going to destroy me unless I’m careful.

The towers glinted at them.

V

The towers had been waiting for this, and now at last it had come. The signals were clear and strong; contact was being attempted. The creatures had at last acknowledged their existence, and in one way or the other were trying to bridge the gap of communication. All was as had been scheduled.

Everything was moving along.

The queens in a stupor that was and was not conscious, revolved slowly, empty eyes staring into the darkness. Somewhere grids clicked; a series of impulses began, and those impulses coded toward a new level. Eggs began to drop limpidly from the bodies of the queens at a faster rate.

Everything was in order now. Everything was proceeding as it should.

Patiently, the towers waited.

VI

“I’m not going to go,” Eldridge said a little later. “I can’t. I’ve got my life here.”

“You shouldn’t,” Kendra said. She had come back to the house after the scientists had left and had needed to hear little from Mildred or see much of her grandfather before she knew what had happened. “I’ll stay with you.”

“I know why you’ll stay with him,” Mildred said dryly. “You want to stay around where that younger one is. That Lesko, was that his name?”

Eldridge looked at his granddaughter and saw her faint blush. “No harm in that,” he said. “I’ll take her under any conditions. I need her. I need both of you. I want to stay.”

“These aren’t usual ants,” Mildred said. “Don’t you realize that?”

“I try not to realize anything,” Eldridge said. He stood and walked to the door, looked out at the landscape, now deceptively quiet under the sunset.

“Mostly I just go on.”

“What are they planning to do?” Kendra said. “Hubbs and Lesko I mean.”

“Apparently they’re working with computers of some sort,” Eldridge said. “Computers and insecticides. Maybe the computers are whipping up a batch of insecticide for all I know. I’m not a technical man; I don’t know what the hell computers do these days. But they want to use some sophisticated devices to get at the problem.”

“They don’t even know what the problem is,” Mildred said softly.

“I know what it is,” Eldridge said grimly. “It’s a lot of ants, that’s what it is. Killer ants. There was an incident like this in South America not so many years ago, and they had to burn up a hundred square miles of countryside to get rid of them, but they did. They did it. I’ve got ditches and oil, and I’ll do the same goddamned thing. They’re not going to take over this place. I’ve backed out of everything else, out this is my life, and I’ve made my stand here.” He was trembling. “Goddamned ants,” he said.

“All right,” Kendra said. She went to the old man and took his hand.

“All right. Don’t get emotional. We’re all going to stay.”

“This is my goddamned life,” Eldridge said. “Doesn’t anyone understand that?”

He looked out at the desert.

Surely it was a trick of light, but something seemed to be stirring out there.

VII

Lesko’s Diary: Two days in here and I can see that this is not going to be a ten-day job. Or a two-week job or a three-week job or even necessarily a two-month job. We are in here for the duration. Already I have that same murky feeling about the station that long-term enlisted men have about their barracks, the feeling that long-married men have about their hated wives. This is my life. This is what contains me. Meanwhile, Hubbs continues with insane cheerfulness.

The thing is that the ants have not made an appearance. The terrain has been absolutely quiet since we settled in here, almost as if they were watching us and had decided to reconnoiter. (Is this paranoia? Am I ascribing an intelligence to the ants that they do not possess? I would not know this; for one thing, I have never seen them.) Hubbs plays with his computers; the stylographs whisk out geometric patterns that essentially indicate that nothing is being received; the corps of engineers, having dropped hardware, software, provisions, and reading materials on us, have taken off to the west, gratefully no doubt, leaving us to our own devices. Because there is absolutely no research or deductions I can make in the complete absence of data, I have spent these forty-eight hours verging toward an insanity compounded of boredom, an insanity in no way helped by the fact that I continue to feel that there is something peculiarly ominous going on here that we do not understand. The towers for one thing. But Hubbs is perfectly content. He has arrived at what no doubt is his ideal situation. He has a sterile, aseptic environment, a young male associate who he regards only as furniture, his comforting computers, printouts, readouts, binary codes, and speculations, and all the empty space any man could ever need. Not so much as a single feeling or emotion could threaten him in this situation… unless, of course, the ants march. So far they have not. For all I know, the whole series of reports and findings may be the deliberate imaginings of land developers who, faced with a dying property, decided to produce a little mass hysteria in order to evacuate the land and collect their insurance. If they have insurance. This is an idea.

Eldridge is holding out. I know this, for this morning I saw Kendra riding on her horse past the station; I also saw in the distance Clete on the tractor, kicking up more sand clouds as he continued to work on his ditches. Kendra seemed to linger for a moment toward the rear, and for a moment I thought of going out and speaking to her, reaching a hand, inviting her in, holding her, telling her what I thought… any number, in short, of foolish, insane gestures that would have converted a difficult situation into an impossible one. I cannot allow my emotional state to interfere with the business of this project, whatever it is, and although I am touched deeply by this girl in ways that I cannot even know, the fact is that I have barely spoken to her, she exists only in my mind… and furthermore I have no desire to incur Hubbs’s wrath. I am working under him; we must get along. I know instinctively that he would be infuriated were I to attempt a relationship with this girl, and he would be right. For one thing, Eldridge is under government order to vacate this area along with his family, which means that I would be consorting—would I not?—with a felon.

Hubbs knows that Eldridge is holding out, of course, but he has obviously decided, at least for the moment, to make nothing of it. He has his computers to keep him busy; also I think that he is obsessed with the idea that the ants may appear outside or within the station at any moment to launch a vicious attack. He wants to be ready for them, hardly sidetracked in the subissue that Eldridge’s eviction would surely be.

Besides that, and to look at this perfectly objectively, what could Hubbs do if Eldridge defied him? (Which Eldridge already has, although circuitously, of course.) Eldridge is sixty-five, but a tough old bastard for all of that, and although Clete might even be a little older, he has the aspect of a man who knows how to handle a rifle and probably has a few stashed away in that tractor of his. Would a fifty-year-old laureate from the Coronado Institute be willing to take on two tough old southwestern geezers, particularly in the presence of women who might not be entirely sympathetic to this? I can follow this line of argument myself, so surely Hubbs can. I have a certain sympathy for his position, although, of course, it is quite limited.

One side of the station is close to the towers, no more than fifty yards, I would suspect, and has an excellent if rather dismal view of them.

Through the plastic and shading of the windows, they do not appear nearly so ominous; the peculiar quality of light and graining that so disturbs me is filtered out… but they are large, they are very large, and I cannot escape the feeling, somehow, that they are still growing. The computer installation, of course, is now looking out on the towers, and this evening, for lack of anything better to do (I may be a game theorist, but I cannot abide solitaire, cryptograms, crossword puzzles, chess problems, or any of the million devices men use to avoid time; I would rather commit myself fully to suffering), I went into the installation and I found Hubbs, looking acutely frustrated, working over the computer. As he turned toward me, I saw his face showed far more expression and anger than I might have judged, and his eyes were absolutely bleak. It occurred to me that he was infuriated, and this time with no abstraction; it was the ant colony itself that was enraging Hubbs. Certainly no human could bring him to the level of loathing that these ants had. He did not even greet me; he simply took my entrance as inevitable at that time. “Can you believe this?” he said, pointing above him to a transmitter hooked in to the corps of engineers. “They want an itinerary, of all the damned things.”

“There has already been an overrun,” a voice said over the transmitter, as filtered out and dead through the machinery as the color of the towers through glaze. “And that overrun averages out at thirty-six percent when projected over the course of the total program. The comptroller would like to get the final figure before the fiscal period ends on the fourteenth.”

Hubbs picked up a microphone and pressed a button. “I’m sorry, this is not a precise business,” he said. He took his finger off the button and said to me, “Maybe you’d like to talk to them. You might have powers of reasoning that are beyond me.”

“You’ve got to give us an estimate,” the implacable voice said. “Surely you can do that, no?”

“We cannot,” Hubbs said with great weariness, holding the microphone as if it weighed several pounds, “study these ants until they make an appearance.”

“Ah,” the voice said. “Then can we put you down for ten days more? A week? This is a matter of getting a proper cost-estimate. You must realize that overrides are budgetary calculations that simply must be integrated at every step of the line. We cannot arrange for an override unless—”

“Listen,” Hubbs said, emotion flooding his voice. I felt sympathy for him, but not a great deal as I looked past him out at the towers, soft now in the sunset. If only they would go away, if only the accursed ants would come out, if only the desert would explode. Kendra kiss me… this was not a profitable course of speculation. “This is not a controlled experiment,” Hubbs was saying. “Our best judgment indicates another occurrence in this area is highly probable. But we cannot command the ants to appear. We have not established communication with them.”

“Well,” the voice said, “is there something that you might be able to do to hurry them up?”

Hubbs held the microphone and looked up at the transmitter for a while with a curiously calculating expression. “We’ve been thinking about that,” he said.

“You know there’s some concern over possible outbreaks in other areas,” the transmitter said.

“Yes,” Hubbs said. His features coalesced; abruptly he looked rather determined. “I think that my associate, Mr. Lesko, might have something to say to you,” he said and passed the microphone over to me. Then he reached above the computer, took something off a shelf… and, opening the near door, walked out into the desert.

“What is this?” the voice said. “What is going on there? Mr. Lesko?” But all I could do was stand there, microphone in hand, rather dumfounded I must admit and also possessed with a sudden, exact understanding of what Hubbs was going to do. “Wait a minute,” I said into the microphone and then realized that I had forgotten to press the button. “Just wait a minute,” I said, this time speaking into it, and then I flung the microphone from myself with some force, feeling a dread that went beyond even the possibility of verbalization, and sprinted out into the night, the transmitter yammering, the stylus of the computer twitching out its odd little signals and there—

—I saw Hubbs holding a hand-grenade launcher, and even as I ran toward him he fired off the first egg-shaped missile toward the near tower.

The grenade hit high, one or two feet from the top, and instantly there was fire and fragmentation; in that fire a halo of splinters and then the tower was open, the top of it toppling behind to the sand, and from the tower a blackness of ooze was coming—

“There,” Hubbs said, his voice curiously dead and controlled. “That should hasten things right along. You see,” he said turning to me calmly, the grenade launcher held easily at his side, he might have been a man in a bar holding a drink and calmly, dispassionately discussing the events of the day, “they’re quite right back at the base, despite the fact that their attitudes are patronizing. We can’t go on this way, Lesko, we’ve got to get some action out of this, because I have no intention of spending the rest of my life in the desert waiting for those filthy little cunning buggers to pick their time and place. We’re men, we make our own conditions,” and he raised the launcher again and got off another quick shot toward the open space of the tower. More shards in the air, more toppling, and then the ooze, heaving like a river, was pouring down the sides.

My first instinct was that Hubbs had gone entirely mad, but in an acceleration of time and insight, looking at the horror pouring out of there, I became aware that he was not mad, not at all. He had only done a logical, reasonable thing to bring events to confrontation… and if, in some way, the ants were observing us, charting our patterns, then he had been particularly cunning in seizing the launcher and making a frontal attack without any preparation whatsoever. It was the kind of random activity that in game theory is absolutely compelling; in just such a way can an amateur occasionally beat a chess master or at least seriously menace him… by making the wrong moves, by not being predictable.

Staring at what was coming out of the towers as Hubbs fired one more shot, I found myself admiring the man; he was not such a dead, decayed abstraction after all, but rather one of a certain force and courage that had led him to perform precisely that act that I would have if I had had the authority… and the imagination. Hubbs threw the launcher from him out into the desert and went back inside; I followed him. He closed the door and bolted it. Then he turned to me, his face happier than I had ever seen it, and he went back to the computer board.

“Now we’ll see some action,” he said.

VIII

Kendra must have been sleeping when it began, although later she could not think of it as sleep; rather it had been some dull, cylindrical passage of time, unconsciousness perhaps, no dreams, nothing but a traversal of fear (it had been like this for her since the ants came), and then she came fully awake to the screaming of her horse. The filly, tethered outside, was screaming as she had never heard it before; a human scream, a child’s scream, with a note of blood and terror in it that she could not, could never have associated with an animal. She was out of bed instantly, fighting with the window, tearing open the shade, and looking out there.

Her only thought was for the filly; she must somehow save it from its agony. Rearing to seven or eight feet, the horse was frantic, eyeballs rolling, hooves clattering against the posts, and then Kendra saw what had happened to the horse. Ants hung from the body in little distended clumps that at first she took for welts or growths, ants nesting together, biting at the animal; and as the horse reared, a shower of ants fell like a waterfall, translucent, filtering toward the ground, the horse screaming. Kendra screamed too, breath fighting for release in her throat, screamed and lunged at the window; her only impulse was to get to the horse, but now lights were going on all through the house, and she was battering herself against the wall, helpless, her need to get to the filly overwhelmed by shock. Breath moved unevenly in her lungs, and then as she felt a tingling at the calves, she screamed, slapped down there, watching a small, spreading smear of red.

Ants. They were on her.

“Clete!” Her grandfather was shouting from the next room. “Clete, they’re here!” His bellow showed less surprise than the confirmation of something long expected, and there was, she thought with horror, something joyous in it. He’s glad; he’s glad they’re coming. She turned, her only thought now to get out of the room, and something caught her by the wrists, pulled her through the door, and shoved her against the outer wall. “Kendra!” her grandfather said. “Are you all right?” He was holding a rifle.

“The horse!” she said. “They’ve got my horse!”

“I know,” Mildred said, coming from her own bedroom. “They’re here!”

“Please,” Eldridge said, holding Kendra still in that one-hand grasp, the other shoving the rifle barrel at the floor. “Please, you’ve got to be calm.

There isn’t anything we can do—”

But she broke free of him then, screaming Ginger! her strength demoniac out of terror, and she burst through the living room, flung open the door, and ran into the yard. Somewhere Clete ran past her carrying his own rifle, his eyes glaring and terrified. A cluster of insects seemed to be on his shirt, or perhaps Kendra was only seeing this in her panic and terror. The horse: that was all that mattered, she had to get to the horse. It was not that Ginger meant so much to her, although she meant enough; it was that she could not take the suffering, the idea that the animal was in such pain. I didn’t know you cared so much, a cool mad internal voice advised her. Behind her she heard her grandfather and Clete calling to one another, shouting orders; they seemed to want to light the oil in the ditches. In the darkness she did not know what was underneath her feet; all she knew was that she was able to keep her balance. Mildred was screaming in a high wail of terror and doom; fire sputtered, missed, and then with a whoomp! one of the ditches went up, spilling fragments of flaming oil, arcing them into the sky. Kendra fumbled with the gate and got into the corral. The filly had reared up against a post and stood there now in frieze, its eyeballs blackened with the forms of ants. It was quivering through the skeleton and involuntary muscles, but was otherwise poised and quiet. Kendra did not know what to do. The filly looked at her without recognition. Shoot it. That was what you were supposed to do, of course: get a rifle and shoot it. She had never touched a firearm. How could you shoot another living thing, no matter how it was suffering? It was still murder. More fires went up, the glaze of fire lighting the corral to the pitch of day. Her grandfather and grandmother appeared at the fence, their faces illumined and streaked by the fire.

“Wait,” her grandmother said. “We’ll do something.”

“No,” Kendra said. “No!”

“Get me the gun,” Eldridge said, and Mildred went away, came back in a moment holding a rifle uncertainly. She passed it over to Eldridge. He took it and checked the barrel.

“No!” Kendra said. “You can’t do it!”

“It’s got to be done,” Eldridge said. “I was wrong. We should have left when they told us to.”

“You can’t shoot my horse,” Kendra said.

“There’s no other way,” said Eldridge. He pointed the rifle. Clete appeared in the middle of this, looked at the horse, then at Kendra, his eyes wide and confused. “Where are the little bastards?” he said.

“Everything’s on fire.”

“Get her in the house,” Eldridge said.

Clete came toward her hesitantly. “Don’t kill her!” Kendra screamed.

“Don’t kill my horse!” And the screams whipped Clete into action as pleas, probably, would not; he seized her by the arms and began to tug her through the gate. The filly was screaming again now, struggling against the post. Kendra fought free of Clete desperately, but only for an instant; then he had her wrapped up in his arms again, and she felt a curious, absent passion almost as if she and the hired man were lovers and in the next moment he was going to penetrate her. Insanity. She pushed him away with a last effort of will, and then allowed him to drag her by the hand toward the house. “What are they going to do to her?” she said.

“You know what they’re going to do.”

“They can’t!” she said, but she did not try to resist him this time. She left her hand in his. “They can’t do it!”

“They’re going to take care of her,” Clete said. “It’s got to be this way.”

And then they were inside the house, and as the light from the ditches flared up, Kendra saw it fully and screamed again.

Ants were all through the house. The fire must have driven them from the safety of the earth; now they had enveloped the beams, the ceiling, the walls… even as she watched, stiff with shock, pieces of ceiling plaster collapsed under the weight of ants, shattering on the floor, the struggling forms scattering with the impact. Clete, stunned, reached out a foot and stamped on one clump of ants, then another, a slow shuffle step. Kendra thought that she might be laughing. She did not want to put a hand to her mouth to verify. Better not to know certain things; all that she did know was that she had to get out of this house. More plaster dropped, rattled, squirming little things scuttled from it, some of them moving across her shoe-tips. Suddenly she felt herself weightless, being lifted from the floor and through the thick air of the house, and she screamed again, feeling as if it were a blanket of ants that had somehow appropriated her, but no, it was Clete, his face close to hers. “I’m getting you out,” he said. “Please, don’t scream; we’re getting out.” His face was stricken and youthful in the light. She tried to show him that she understood, that she knew he was trying to help her, but no words would come. And then she was being tossed, roughly but precisely, over the tailgate of the truck, Clete vaulting behind her. They were in the back of the pickup. Eldridge, at the wheel, leaned over, looked through the open panel. “Is she all right?” he said.

“I’m all right,” Kendra said and stretched out on the wood. “I’ll be all right.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Mildred said, and Eldridge turned back to the wheel. Kendra felt a terrific force shoving her against the panels, and then the truck was in flight, Clete supporting her, bumping and rolling down the road. Fires illuminated their path; in the fires, she could see the black forms struggling. Some of them seemed airborne. Groups of them slapped against the slats of the truck like birds. “It’s all right,” Clete said again.

“We’re getting out. We’re going to be all right.”

“Is Ginger dead?”

“Yes,” he said. “She didn’t suffer. She’s dead.”

“We should have gotten out of here when they told us.”

“Too late now.”

“Why didn’t we listen?”

“Nobody listens ever,” Clete said. “Listening isn’t human. Be calm. We’ll leave now.”

“The ants would listen,” she said crazily. “They talk to one another. They don’t have to argue. They just know.”

“I forgot to turn off the lights,” Mildred said through the front. Hearing this made Kendra laugh; she began to laugh almost hysterically until Clete soothed her by rubbing her back. They were out of range of the fires now; the road illuminated only by their headlights… and then Mildred screamed.

Kendra reared to attention, Clete’s arm dropping from her, and Mildred screamed again, a shorter, more piercing note, a high bark. Looking through the open panel, Kendra saw what had made her grandmother scream, and if she had had the voice left, she would have screamed too… but she could only gasp. Ants were all over her grandfather’s head. They had formed a net over his white hair, they had worked their way in jagged little clumps into his ears, they were down his neck, spinning onto his shirt… she fell straight back in the pickup, striking her head on the planks.

Clete, bellowing, was trying to get through the opening, to take the wheel himself, but he could not. The opening was too small; he battered himself against it, wailing. The truck, now completely out of control, lurched off the roadway and onto the naked desert, the wheels breaking into a long, jagged slide, the truck weaving in patterns that no vehicle could make and yet remain on four wheels. Kendra, half-conscious, gripped the planks feeling all sensation depart. Mildred’s screaming continued, but in this altered perspective Kendra found it almost pleasant; if the world was ending, as it surely was, better with screams than submission… Clete was bellowing and kicking at the slats, trying to free himself. For a moment it seemed that he might make it, drop to the sands of the desert, and at least get free—and Kendra was glad; Clete owed her nothing, and he was entitled to a fight for survival if he could maintain it—but the truck was moving crazily at angles to itself and the sky that it could not sustain… and Kendra lay back, pinned by the gravity, watching Clete’s struggles like those of an insect on a pin. The truck rolled sickeningly, yawed to one side… and then with the kind of magnificent certainty that can only come, she thought, from complete disaster, it broke entirely free of the ground, rolled through the air in an abbreviated flight that seemed to last for an interminable length of time… and then as her consciousness vaulted to embrace the fact of her death, of her grandparents’ deaths, of the death of everything that she had had so briefly and now lost… the truck hit something, was embraced in a sheet of flame. She waited for the explosion. Surely it was coming. Then it came.

IX

“You see,” Hubbs said to Lesko when they were once more in the station, “what I’ve done is very interesting.”

“You shouldn’t have shot the towers,” Lesko said weakly. “You just shouldn’t have—”

“But I had to,” Hubbs said in a positive professorial tone. “You see, what I’ve done is to get at the parameters of the problem by breaking down the movements of a vector of a single ant unit.”

He motioned to the figures that the stylus of the computer was implacably tracking out, singing all the time to itself. “They’ve changed, you see,” he said. “I’ve broken down their simple, obvious movements, and the whole pattern of the colony has changed. You can see that the overall refraction of the agglomeration of movements is now represented by a bell curve rather than a wave line. That is extraordinarily interesting.”

Lesko backed against one of the walls. “You shouldn’t have done it,” he said again. “You don’t know. We don’t know the quality of the things in those towers; we can’t understand—”

“We couldn’t have waited,” Hubbs said with that same curious precision. “You’re not the only one who wants to get out of the desert; I have feelings too, you know. This is a mission to be completed in a minimum amount of time, and now we’re making strides. Look at the ant signals,” he said, tearing the paper off the roller with a flourish. “The whole pattern has changed. Assumption, Lesko: what we are seeing and hearing on the printout are commands directing the movements of the mass. Okay?”

“Probably,” Lesko said dully. He looked out through the windows and saw the broken clumps falling from the towers. Hubbs had hurt them, yes… but what were they going to do now? “We’re not denying that there is a level of communication among the creatures.”

“Good,” Hubbs said. He made marks on the paper; he might have been instructing a class. “Now what we are seeing and hearing then are commands, and I can make various adjustments to take care of the time lag and some other things. Don’t worry about that.” He was moving the pencil swiftly now, caught in a computational ecstasy. “I find something,” he said.

“What?”

“Do you know what? I find a positive correlation on the order of eighty percent between this squiggle—” he took the paper and put it abruptly in Lesko’s hands, who looked at it as Hubbs’s pen point traced out the finding—“a correlation between that squiggle, and a command that we might generally verbalize as stop.” He pointed at another arc on the paper.

“And there is also a positive correlation between this little squiggle and movement. Do you know what that means, Lesko,” he said. He whipped off his glasses and stared, his eyes little points of light through which things flickered. “Do you see what we’re getting at now?”

“I think so.”

“It means that the sons of bitches are talking to one another,” Hubbs said, and the lights in the station went out.

X

Lesko’s Diary: I will give Hubbs credit; he did not panic. When we lost power in the station, this incident directly connected in my mind with the assault upon the towers, I felt that the fundamental imbalance that I had felt about the situation since it began was now asserting itself. To put it another way (I must learn to phrase these matters as simply as possible; scientific jargon or convoluted rhetoric will get me nowhere, and I must relate the facts as straightforwardly as possible), I was sure that the ants, crippled by the damage to the tower, had now regrouped and were striking back with vicious force; the first part of the attack, of course, being the cutting of our power. Helplessness overwhelmed me; instantly it seemed ten degrees hotter as the hum of the air conditioners, the whine of the computer bank, the yammering of the speaker all stopped at once, and atavistic panic came over me in great waves. Night, I must have screamed, we are stranded in eternal night, or some such nonsense, and it was Hubbs, putting a steady hand on my wrist, who brought me back to myself. “It’s all right,” he said. Close against me, he was visible in the dim light streaking through the windows, and as my eyes began to readjust, I now glimpsed the station whole again. “It’s all right. Now we know that they’re hurt. They’re coming out,” he said. “Let’s get them.”

“Get them?”

“Get them,” he said. “We’re going to paint them yellow, the filthy little sons of bitches,” his tones quite cheerful and confident. He guided me toward a rack on which our full-protection gear hung: helmets, outer suits, masks, breathing apparatus, all making us look as if we were preparing for a walk on the moon, not the benign Arizona desert. As Hubbs began very calmly and methodically to work himself into one, I felt myself stricken with admiration for the man: truly he had anticipated this necessity. The suits were required gear, of course, but it had been he who had thought of hanging them toward the side of the station within reach. I joined him there, clambering into the gear, and as I zipped up the blank, thick surfaces of the suit and clamped the helmet and inhalator into place, I had a feeling that only a naked man stranded streetside and then thrown a merciful blanket must feel… I was coming back to myself, piece by shaken piece as I put on the gear. As we were making our final adjustments, the power came back with a roar, lights to bright, the computer making up for its brief sleep with a grateful whoomp! of greeting, making up for lost time as well with a frantic series of printouts pouring out of the rollers as if the computer, no less human than we, had been embarrassed by its failure. Behind his mask, Hubbs looked as foreign as any of the towers, but his voice through the face-speaker was quite flat and calm, and as I listened, it was as if I could still see that smile of his.

“Let’s put on the yellow,” he said again, and charged toward the safety switches.

“Shouldn’t we wait?” I said. “Maybe—” and with a solemn relevance, the power went off again. The lights faded, the computer gave a disgusted whap! and was silent, left in the middle of a printout that looked vaguely like an obscene doodle. Hubbs was already working on switches fired by the emergency generator implanted deep underground, and around the station I could see a fine, yellow mist rising, already coating everything in the colors of the sun. The towers yellow, the sands yellow, the windows yellow, my own gloved hand yellow. Hubbs’s hands were slap, slapping at the switches. Nozzles extended from the station to throw long-range bombs of insecticide into the desert.

P-2 or PX-2, some chemical insecticide, I was not clear on the name, leaving that business to Hubbs, who is, of course, the biologist and killer-expert. My own area has given me a happy immunity to technology; I could not give the chemical formula for water, nor have I ever felt a personal or educational emptiness because I could not schematize the formulae for those interesting poison gases that could destroy half the population in a trice. No, it was sufficient for me to know that P-2 or PX-2 was doing the job; its effectiveness could not be questioned. Not only were we plunged into a world of yellow that in other, less grim circumstances might have had a kind of gaiety (a million daffodils rising through harsh grasses, the sun beaming lushly through a meadow), but the ants were obviously in dire straits. I could see huge clumps of them, soldered together into necklaces, falling like rain past the windows; tumbling from all parts of the station where they had previously taken up a precarious position; black forms were rapidly being coated with yellow and were writhing and twisting like dancers on the sands, and Hubbs himself was in an ecstasy of happiness. “That does it!” he was shouting, his voice no longer flat. Mechanical reduction or not, the pleasure this gave him rang through. “Let’s go out and do the finishing touches ourselves!” and he seized off the wall a small, flat spray can, a kind of Portable Yellow, handed it to me, took another for himself, and led me out into the desert.

Instantly the doors had been closed, the locks cleared; he pointed his spray before him, and the aerosol can sent huge, lazy spurting jets of yellow into ground before him.

Seen this way, the desert was curiously beautiful. The nozzles had projected the insecticide through an area of several hundred square yards, perhaps more than that; throughout the whole range of vision, in any event, the world was coated with a merry yellow, broad, happy streaks of yellow being painted across the landscape, and like flies in gelatin, crumbs on a coffee cake, little black heaps were embedded in the yellow, flakes falling like snow upon it, turning black into yellow, ants into artifacts even as we watched. “This is the end,” Hubbs said. “Now we can go home.” And holding his spray gun as a drunken conductor might handle a baton, he danced out on the desert, bellowing in what must have been song. I followed him; he sprinted down the roadway, firing random little bursts, more ants wherever we looked, and then as we rounded a little corner, turned a little rise, we saw something—

—We saw an overturned truck, human forms crawling from it, two of them waving feebly like drowned insects, another lying quietly, and my first thought was where did a truck come from? But in the next instant, after that small interval of total stupidity, everything came clear, all of it bursting or yellowing in upon me, and I was sprinting ahead of Hubbs, running desperately, lungs burning in the insufficient air I could draw through the inhalator. The first body was that of Mrs. Eldridge. She was coated with yellow, only her eyes, pure black, stared through, her knees drawn up in a fetal position, one hand extended childlike, balled into a fist. I reached over to touch her and then instantly straightened, horrified.

I started to walk toward the next body, terrified of who I might find fifty yards away, but was brought up by Hubbs’s voice. He was not behind me.

He had stopped at the truck and was squatting, looking at one of the wheels, which was still spinning, then squinting up into the exposed chassis. I went over to him, not because I wanted to see anything but because I dreaded what lay ahead. I knew. I knew that they were all dead.

“This is really fascinating,” Hubbs said.

“Those are dead people over there.”

“I know,” Hubbs said, his gaze not shifting. “It’s really a tragedy and I don’t understand it. They heard the order. They accepted it. Why would they stay?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they had nowhere else to go.” I cannot remember what my exact emotional state was. I suppose I wanted to hit them, although this would have been irrelevant.

Yellow, he looked up at me. “Irrational behavior,” he said. “It’s really very sad, these so-called desert people. But James, look at this.”

I leaned over. Perhaps he was going to show me his heart and with it some sense of what his purposes were, how he could be this way. But he was pointing at mounds of ants impacted well up into the chassis.

“Consider that,” he said. “The execution of the maneuver… for this was clearly a maneuver. In order to create the spark—”

“Goddamn it all Hubbs,” I said in a strange detachment that children must feel when they are being dragged away by their parents but must protest if only for dignity’s sake. “Those people are dead, don’t you understand? They’re dead. The insecticide killed them.”

“Well,” Hubbs said, looking up into the chassis, extending a gloved finger to delicately brush some ants away from an exposed rod. “People do get killed sometimes, you know. Death is being killed itself; that happens to all of us.”

“I don’t understand you,” I said to him, although of course I understood perfectly well; understanding was assaulting me in spokes of yellow no less brilliant than the landscape, and along with my revulsion, there was respect as well. I will admit this; it was impossible not to respect Hubbs, because it was people like him who made the world work; people who were able to shoot off the grenades, spread the insecticide, inspect the chassis, look at death dispassionately—they were the hope of the world, these people; Hubbs was the hope of the project because some agonized, sensitive types like myself, trapped in our delicate sensitivities and revulsions, would have been incapable of taking the strong, decisive action that Hubbs had taken. And if Hubbs seemingly was unable to feel, then this kind of insulation was probably necessary if you were going to get anything done. Most of the real accomplishments in the world were managed by people who had a lessened or negligible capacity to feel; they could not or would not be concerned with the pain of progress or battle, and therefore they could move ahead. This internal soliloquy, hpwever, did not exactly exalt the spirits; it added a slow, mean edge to my despair, and, finding it necessary to get away from Hubbs at once, I scrambled to my feet and walked away from him down the road. He had given me courage, however: I was so mad at him that I believed that I could confront anything now without feeling.

Hubbs followed me, murmuring to himself. Seventy or eighty paces down the road, I saw the form of the hired man, Clete, lying half-concealed by tarpaulin that he had probably pulled from the truck in his death agonies, already shrouded as he had hit the ground, crawled a few feeble yards, and then died. I pulled away from the corpse as soon as I had identified it, but Hubbs, scooting up behind me, seized the tarpaulin and took it all the way down to the dead man’s feet. He was covered with yellow right down to his shoes. Hubbs took a thin metal probe from a leg pouch and extended it toward the corpse’s hand.

Fascinated, I will admit, I came back. All gesture fails with people like Hubbs; they are simply immune to any such display, and knowing that I had no power to affect him enabled curiosity to return. He nodded and poked away at the hand with the probe.

There was a small, neat hole about the size of a bullet hole in Clete’s palm. Hubbs worked on it with the probe, one side to the other, and as we watched, three ants came marching out in close-order formation, marche funebre the solemnity and precision of their movements grotesquely comical. They looked entirely purposeful as they turned to the left of the probe and continued their march, going into the sands. Hubbs took out a small container and put it over the ants. “Now,” he said, “I guess that we can begin our researches.” He picked up the filled container, sealed it over with a slide, and dropped it into his leg pouch again. “I know this may upset you, James,” he said. “But you’ve got to realize that there was nothing to be done, nothing at all; if we had not used the insecticide, they might have taken over the station.”

I guess that this was as close to an apology as Hubbs might get, in or out of this world, and I was just turning to tell him what I (and of course the entire company of decent, right-thinking people of this world) thought of him when, behind me, some yards down, I heard a horrid clash and creaking, and a truck door that I had not even noticed before, the yellow dust having amalgamated the whole landscape into a single color, came open, horrifyingly, inch by inch, and as I stared at it, paralyzed, unable to imagine what was coming out of it (I suppose that I thought it might be a giant ant), a figure covered with yellow staggered from the opening, weaved a step or two, and then, hand extended, collapsed on the sands in front of me.

Kendra.

I ran toward her and was about to seize her, embrace her against me, anything to get her out of here and relieve the agony, but it was Hubbs, coming up swiftly, who once again showed more sense. “Don’t touch her,” he said. “She’s got to be covered.” He pulled from another pouch some kind of canvas or burlap, yanking it out like a rope and then, furling it out against the yellow, dropped it over her body. He took her by the shoulders and motioned to me that I was to take her by the feet, and that was the way we got her out of there, a long, stumbling walk back toward the shelter, clouds of yellow coming off her in little puffs, but she was alive, alive: I could feel respiration, I could feel warmth; she had somehow survived, was going to live through the insecticide. I found myself thinking of course she would, of course she would in rhythm to our effort; she was younger than the other three, she had more resistance, and there was at least a chance that she would get through this. We would save her. We would get her back to the shelter, clean her, make her warm, aspirate the stuff out of her lungs in time, and bring her back to herself…. But for what? dear God… and to what?

XI

After they had put the girl through the decontamination chambers, gotten her warm, gotten her into clothing, and placed her in a spare room of the station where she lay peacefully, not in coma but in a deep sleep, Hubbs and Lesko took off their own gear. Only then did Lesko take some measure of what these hours had done to him; he was trembling top to bottom, all of his body below the waist shaking so uncontrollably that he could barely walk. “You’ve probably taken in some of the fumes through the inhalator,” Hubbs said matter of factly as he led them into the laboratory. “But I doubt if there’ll be any lasting effects. The girl was out there, breathing P-2 for at least fifteen minutes, and she’s going to be all right. Vital signs are normal.”

“That’s fine,” Lesko said. “That changes everything, doesn’t it?” But he was too tired, too shaken to argue with Hubbs. Hubbs was in command, and Lesko had an almost childlike desire to keep that relationship now, for Hubbs was their only means of getting out of this. The man knew what he was doing or at least seemed to… whereas Lesko had literally lost the ability to deal with the situation. Through the windows of the laboratory they could see ants still floating through the air, dropping to the sands: most of them black, a few green ones intermixed, all with white bellies, falling like little paratroopers. “The little sons of bitches,” Lesko said. “The dirty bastards.”

“Don’t personalize,” Hubbs said, picking up a vial “That won’t do any good at all. They’re not individuals. They’re just individual cells, tiny functioning parts of a whole. Would you get mad at your corpuscles if you had leukemia?”

“I hate them,” Lesko said, and he thought, so do you; I heard you cursing them before, that was why you fired off the grenades, you son of a bitch, because you couldn’t take the situation anymore. So don’t get scientific on me now… but he said nothing.

“Think of a society, James,” Hubbs said. “A society with complete harmony, altruism, and self-sacrifice, perfect division of labor according to preordained roles; think of the building of elaborate and complex structures according to plans they know nothing of… and yet execute perfectly. Think of their powers of aggression and their ability to evolve and adapt in ways that are so beautiful and still so unknown.” His voice was almost reverent. “I’ve got to respect them,” Hubbs said quietly. “It’s all based on a simple form… so helpless in the individual. So powerful in the mass.”

“In other words,” Lesko said slowly, “it’s a completely alternative approach to evolution.”

“Go on, James.”

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? We’ve developed. The dominant species of the planet has developed through greater and greater individualization, isolation, but it could have gone the other way, couldn’t it? You’re talking about the ant gestalt in which only the pattern, the group, holds, the individual being a small cell of the mass. In that sense, the ants are immortal, aren’t they? Individualization, the path we’ve taken, leads to greater and greater fragmentation and a terror of death as the loss of the individual consciousness. Whereas the ants would have no fear of death whatsoever; it would merely be the peeling off of one cell the way our own cells are supposed to die a million a day.”

“That’s almost profound, James,” Hubbs said softly. “My faith in you was not misplaced after all. Yes, if you consider evolution as a series of choices, then it could have gone the other way. The ants could have been the dominant species—”

“And might yet be,” Lesko said. “Is that the next step in the speculation? Maybe they’re taking over now, fifty million years later.”

Hubbs’s face was very solemn. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve thought of that.” He shrugged, made a dismissive gesture. “Nevertheless,” he said, “if that’s true, it simply means that we must go on redoubled, eh? Surely they have no devices in comparison to the sophistication of ours; I’m afraid that they gave us too much time.” He opened the vial, sniffed at it delicately, then put it on a rack. “Let’s start with the first behavorial series,” he said and took the container that had been filled in the desert. “Heat, cold, starvation, isolation, slow squeezing—”

“Yes,” Lesko said.

“Let’s put some mantises on these ants,” Hubbs said quietly, but with a tremor of anticipation under all of this. “Let’s see what kind of signals we get.”

Lesko said, “When are we going to get her out of here?”

“We’re running some experiments.”

Lesko shook his head. “Well and good,” he said, “but we can’t talk about comparable theories of evolution so easily. How are we going to get that girl out of here?”

Hubbs said, “That’s going to be a bit difficult, isn’t it? Turn on the microphones and the recorder, please.”

“Why don’t you call and have them send out a helicopter,” Lesko said.

“We’re back in contact again.”

Hubbs turned toward him and leaned on an elbow. “I would,” he said. “I share your feelings of sympathy. But I don’t think our bureaucrats would be too happy to know that we’ve had some fatalities. We’d be tied up in reports and explanations for days, and there are more important things to do.” He turned back toward the sealed glass enclosure. “The mantises are at one end of our maze now,” he said. “The ants at the other….”

Lesko said, “What are we going to do with the girl, then? We’ve got to do something. She won’t go away simply because you refuse to think of her, you know.”

“What is your concern with her?” Hubbs said. “You’re being wholly unprofessional about this, James.”

“My concern is that she’s in shock!” Lesko said loudly. “And we just cannot keep her here—”

“Don’t shout at me,” Hubbs said with deadly containment. “That is totally unnecessary.” He paused, went back to the board, and then, as if still being prodded, said, “The girl, obviously, is a problem to be dealt with in a few days. After we’ve finished. We’re making progress now, and we simply cannot be sidetracked.”

“If you won’t call the base,” Lesko said quietly, “then I will.”

“I’m very much afraid that that would end our mission. We would find ourselves swarming with personnel of the most odious type, and it would be impossible for us to complete our job here. We’re not in human relations or social work, Lesko; we’re involved in very difficult and, need I say, dangerous research here. This has become a very serious situation, and I don’t think that we’re out of the woods yet. The ants are entirely capable of gathering their remaining forces and striking yet again, and unless we are able to code out—”

“Forget our mission,” Lesko said. He looked at Hubbs in a level, deadly way, and before this, Hubbs’s eyes fell. Lesko stood, feeling the power coming into him. It all came down to physical intimidation, eventually.

Everything was based upon that. Call it an outcome of the evolution of individualization: the stronger life-forms could intimidate the weaker.

Implicit was the statement: I can supplant you.

“I’m going to call in,” he said. “Do you want to argue with me about this?”

Hubbs said nothing.

Lesko turned, reached for the microphone, and heard the door open behind him. Both men jumped, Hubbs actually reaching for the gun in his waistband. Kendra stood in the doorway, looking uneasy but back to herself. She was streaked here and there with lines that bore the shadows of yellow, her skin curiously opaque, but otherwise she looked merely tired. “I slept,” she said. “Then after a while I didn’t feel like sleeping anymore, so I got up. I remember everything. They’re all dead, aren’t they?”

“I guess so,” Lesko said.

“They’re all dead,” Hubbs said at the console. “It’s quite unfortunate, but they were warned.”

“It occurred to me,” she said to Lesko, ignoring Hubbs, “that I don’t even know your name.”

“My name is Jim Lesko. Jim. Come in,” he said, motioning. “We’re just starting to run some experiments, but it doesn’t matter. We have a moment or two.”

“We have nothing,” Hubbs said, his mouth tight. “We have no time at all. Time is beyond us; we must hurry.”

“I’ll go,” Kendra said.

“No,” said Lesko. He hit the arm of his chair, indicating that she was not to move. “You had a very close call,” he said gently.

“I remember,” she said. “I told you—I remember everything.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m ready to go home now,” Kendra said.

Lesko looked over at Hubbs. The scientist’s face was completely blank, his shoulders sjumped. “Are you?” Lesko said pointlessly. “All right. Good.

I mean it’s good that you want to go home but—”

“I’ll send a message,” Hubbs said, saving him. Lesko could not tell if it was deliberate or if Hubbs was simply being himself. Did he see what was going on here? “Someone can come by to get you tomorrow, take you out of the desert if that is convenient.”

“They killed my horse,” she said dully.

“All right,” Hubbs said after a moment. “I’ll put the call in.” His eyes were very nervous. “It would be best if you left here as quickly as possible; I agree with that.” He reached toward the microphone.

“They had no right to kill my horse,” Kendra said. “My grandfather was stupid, but at least it was his own choice. My grandmother too, and Clete.

But my horse had nothing to say about it.”

She reached toward the shelf above Hubbs, suddenly seized a vial, and raised it above her head. The glass twinkled in the fluorescence. Then she threw the vial to the floor, shattering it.

Hubbs and Lesko moved together, acting as a team for perhaps the first time. Ants, three of them, had rippled out on the floor, scurrying blindly for shelter, gelatinous fluid pouring from their bodies. Hubbs reached out and scooped them off the floor, careless of his safety, and as Lesko held out the vial, he inserted them, wriggling, one by one, into the open neck; then Lesko stoppered the vial and put it back on the rack. Hubbs, his face suffused with rage, stood to check the tracer mechanism; the ants had displaced it and it had ceased its printout. Lesko went to Kendra, pinned her arms carefully but harshly behind her back, and pulled her from the room, twisting them, giving enough pressure to force cooperation. She screamed then, the first sound in the room since the shattering of the vial.

“You killed my horse!” she was saying. “You killed everyone!” But Lesko had her under control; he brought her all the way down the corridor and shoved her into an aseptic cubicle, the end of which was her room, and then he bolted the door and came back to the laboratory.

His feelings were a complex blend of fury and sympathy, but he guessed that fury predominated. Hubbs was right. The work had to go forward; nothing could. stop them from that primary obligation, because only the work had reality, only the work had meaning… and if Hubbs were not able to continue his experiments, then they might indeed literally never get out of here. The ants were not fooling. There was nothing remotely comic about the situation. Yet, and he had to concede this, the girl was reacting normally… Hubbs and he were now so far from normal behavior that they were able to go forward with field studies in the aftermath of a tragedy that would have shattered, should have shattered, anyone in a normal condition; we are becoming monsters, Lesko thought, we are becoming the enemy, a wriggling mass of stimulus-response, and he went back into the laboratory, where he saw Hubbs, stunned, looking at the console, his body motionless. Above him, the ants and mantises moved within their separate vials. Hubbs’s eyes were deep and stricken. He turned toward Lesko and showed him his wrist. Near the major vein was a deep imprint where his thumb had pressed, but that was not what he was showing nor what Lesko saw. Lesko looked at the small red mark and its spreading corona of stain.

“You’ve been bitten,” Lesko said.

XII

The yellow poison had shocked them. The ants could not feel pain, but they could sense their losses with the dull precision with which a building might note the loss of its foundation and crumple, and now, their troops decimated, the queens, solemn in their chambers, could feel what had happened and every implication of it. The enemy was cunning and clever; their deadly compound had struck at the heart of the troops, and the queens in their dead way felt every loss. Soldiers, those that had not been exposed to the chemical, hovered around the queens, protecting them. The queens, without thought or language, meditated.

Something happened within the queens. A compound shifted, became something else; something too complex to be notated in chemical formulae occurred deep within the bodies. Yellow was absorbed, transversed through the devious interstices of the queens, and it muddled, changed colors, began to flow openly.

It flowed then like a river bursting free past an obstruction, the color shifting in the darkness of the interstices, first yellow, then something not yellow: red, green, purple, off-white, a chiaroscuro of colors, and then from the bodies of the queens, one by one, drifted eggs that were of a different color, and from those eggs came things—

—Came and came again, small, winged things, blind and yet cunning in the deep caves, scuttling in the ruined towers, and then pouring from them, moving irresistibly into the yellow streaks and fumes that persisted and—

—Moved beyond them, flowing over in waves, more eggs streaming out, hundreds in sequence now, the little black things pouring free and they dove, stalked, scuttled through the yellow untouched—

—By it, invulnerable, pouring out into the desert, their small soundless cries breaking into the coma of the queens, and the queens cried back, all of them in pulses of light and heat, a tight web of communication buildings and then flowering in the desert and then—

—The queens produced a shower of eggs, coming out in a clotted, unending outpour, light and heat making celebration in the desert.

Far away, another receptor twitched a signal it noted as clear.