Phase IV

I

Hubbs put a bandage on the place where he had been bitten and went on working with the computer. No time to waste. The small, red spot sealed off, drained imperceptibly. He said that it felt all right. In a pool of light, Hubbs sat at the keyboard attached to one of the computer banks.

He typed out symbols on a keyboard, waited. Something came back at him. The roller moved. Hubbs smiled with pleasure and looked at Lesko.

His eyes were very bright.

“It’s rather a crude language,” he said. “But it’s clear.”

“Yes,” Lesko said. He was at the next computer unit, for the first time in days totally absorbed in his work. Hubbs was right: the things were communicating, receiving messages, feeding them back. Simple commands produced clear patterns on the printout. “If I keep building up my library of sound words,” he said, “I might actually strike up a conversation with them. Like the whales.” He brushed sweat from his forehead. Kendra was somewhere at the back of his consciousness, but he was not really thinking of her now. Later. He would deal with that problem later; now there was work.

“Of course,” he said, looking at the things in the vials, “we’re talking about just a few survivors. The ants would have to come back… and we’d have to be here for a while.”

“Indeed,” Hubbs said.

“When is the helicopter coming, anyway?”

“It’ll be here,” Hubbs said. He put his fingers on the bandage, then ran them delicately up his arm. The spot was spreading little tendrils, fibers moving toward the arm crease.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said.

“It’s not your fault.”

“We’ve got to get that treated.”

“In time,” Hubbs said, still looking at the infection. “I don’t feel any pain. Insect bites are rarely serious.”

“Ants are rarely serious, but these appear to be. I think we should have it looked at,” Lesko said. “The ’copter is coming in for the girl. I think that they should pick you up too and take you back to the base.”

“And leave you here alone?” Hubbs said with a difficult attempt at a smile. “Just when we’re on the verge of a significant breakthrough, and the invading hordes have been beaten back. Leave you to take all of the tributes from a grateful government?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Lesko said angrily. “For God’s sake, you don’t think that matters to me, do you? Besides, I’ll take the ’copter back with you.”

Hubbs said gently, “I was making an attempt at humor, James. People like me really don’t know how though, do we?” He rubbed the area again, wincing. “Besides, there’s not enough room in one of these ’copters for three passengers. Even one is pushing it when you’re flying against one of those winds. No, I’m going to stay here.”

“I’ll go back with you.”

“And leave the girl here? No,” Hubbs said. “I thought I told you, that’s completely impossible. We came together, and we’re going to finish this project the same way. I’m perfectly all right, I really am; and even if I’m not, if they’ve malevolently injected some slow-acting poison into my system, the deterioration seems to be so slow that I could be back in California, accepting a telephone call from the President before toxemia sets in.” He looked at Lesko’s blank face. “I’m trying a joke again, James,” he said. “But I guess I’d better try no more.”

“All right,” Lesko said, vaguely embarrassed. Hubbs seemed more accessible and understandable to him by the moment; that was part of the trouble. He did not really like the man, probably never would, but more and more he saw his point. Kendra could have wrecked the project for them if they had not already arrived at the solution… he went back to the console, looked at the tracings.

“I don’t have the faintest idea what they mean,” he said. “But aren’t they beautiful?”

“Yes,” Hubbs said, looking over at the delicate tracings, weaving in patterns made through the stylus, geometric shapes, hexagons, pentagons, strangely exact and yet free-flowing… and all from the little figures in the tube. It was a mystery. “They’re very beautiful. We’re dealing with a kind of consciousness here, James, that is entirely different from ours… and may be superior. The gestalt is a wholly acceptable means of alternative evolution, you know. It might have gone the other way entirely if our ancestors had not been so vicious….”

His expression changed; he grabbed at his arm with pain, his mouth momentarily distorted.

Lesko stared at him.

II

Lesko’s Diary: By the next morning, I knew that the situation had irrevocably changed, was no longer proceeding, could not proceed along predictable patterns. The ants had been destroyed by the insecticide; Hubbs had the situation seemingly under control; it was now only a matter of working out the communication patterns for future research…

in short, on the face of the matter, all was over but the mopping up. But I knew that this was not so. I awoke with that peculiar and rather desperate apperception of doom that people who claim to have ESP state they have felt… to find out later that relatives have died, ships have been lost at sea, the mortgage application has fallen through, or similar disasters have occurred. The day as it progressed was a confirmation.

How is it possible to explain something like this? How can one communicate, particularly when one is a scientist supposedly dedicated to methodology, empiricism, the Socratic rule… how can one explain a totally unscientific and unempiric overlay of disasters that began with the dawn’s early light and increased through all the moments of the morning, finally finding the most dreadful of confirmations? I can see that if I were able to give such explanation this would no longer be a scientific journal—which I still maintain is its purpose and its truest form—but one of those rather hysterical confessions associated with middle-aged women or middle-aged novels, small burblings of doom and discomfort while surrounded by neutral stimuli. How to explain that I awoke at seven in the morning stiff in the joints and with the feeling that all had been lost, that the success of the insecticide had been at best a temporary measure as the enemy regrouped, and that from this point onward the total disaster was beginning? Better not to explain this; I can see that I wax and wane upon abstraction; abstraction is at the center of these notes like a small, livid, beating heart, and it would be better to deal only with the objective facts of the matter as they correlate with my own reactions to them: i.e., empiricism and the scientific method. I will do my best. I will do the best that I can. Originally, I thought that these notes would find publication as a scientific abstract, but now I see that I will be quite lucky if I can place them in a confession magazine. More and more I am lurching out of control, deserting objectivity for neurasthenia. It may be that the ants, or what remains of them, are sending out mysterious deathly rays (I feel that this should be capitalized: Mysterious Deathly Rays) to destroy my mind and abort my conscious, but then again what I may truly need is a long rest that I can obtain upon the completion of this project. We will see. I do not know if this project has a completion. I am not sure of anything anymore, which is a poor position for a scientist.

I awoke from a jagged sleep that had been filled with images of ants, smashed towers, broken mounds, surges of power from the towers, and scurrying ants sent by the towers to attack, only to find the station deadly quiet, the low hum of the computer washing it with gentle sound. Outside, the desert was littered with little bodies of all colors: as far as I could see, dead and poisoned ants lay upon the beach of desert like snowflakes. The yellow had lifted during the night as the P-2 was absorbed by the atmosphere or vice versa and had now become a spectrum of colors ranging from deep violet through clear white, a thin haze of vapors rising into the sunlight. The ruined truck was now clearly visible only fifty or sixty yards downrange. Darkness creates a different perception of distance and time; staggering with Kendra back from the accident last night, it had felt like miles, but all of this, three deaths, the attack, and the destruction of the ants, had occurred within a short distance of the station. We thought, dear Lord, that we were operating on a cosmic scale, and all the time it was happening in some clotheshamper of possibility.

Donning my humble scientific garb, I left my cubicle, walked down the hallway, peeked into Hubbs’s quarters (no larger than mine; the democratic principle), which were vacant, indicating either that he had persisted with his infernal experiments all night long or more likely had risen early to resume them. I thought of going into the laboratory to check on him—that had been, after all, a nasty welt on his arm: I agreed with him in doubting that it was truly dangerous, but the mysteriousness of the ants made every wound inflicted by them equally mysterious; I would not have wanted to carry around that bite, much less be working with it. I went into Kendra’s quarters, deciding that I had world enough and time to deal with Hubbs, and our relations were deteriorating so rapidly anyway that it was not necessary to force the issue. Also, I badly wanted to see Kendra.

I do not deny it; the girl has affected (or afflicted) me deeply. My dreams in part had been occupied with images of Kendra superimposed against a struggling mass of ants, her face translucent so that a clear pattern of ants could be seen wriggling behind her, but somehow she was indefinably sad, having an opacity of expression that matched the translucence of her flesh so that she was still and always herself. My tenuous relations with women seemed to have already reached a complete ambiguity with Kendra. Carrying her back to the station, the softness of her body against mine, I had succumbed to a series of images of Kendra naked, Kendra reaching, Kendra groaning out her need… and those images, rather than giving me appeasement, had made me only more uncomfortable, converted my walk into a stumble, and I had been even more anxious than Hubbs to drop her in her room and return to our experiments… a mistake the more tragic because of her nearly successful attempt to destroy our experimental subjects. Hubbs, when she had smashed the vial, had had a look of murder, but my own feelings were too amorphous to be easily understood. Perhaps I admired her for that. I wish that I could smash these experiments with the same dispatch that she summoned because ultimately I feel that we are involved in something very wrong here, that there are mysteries we cannot penetrate, that our apparent vanquishing of the ants has been merely a matter of gaining time… and that we would be well-advised to clamber aboard that helicopter when it comes and get out of here as quickly as Kendra, and spread the warning to everyone that serious things are happening/have happened out here on the desert. Of course I will not do this. Who would listen? What does the invasion of the ants matter to the urbanite on the eastern slab or for that matter any resident of Tucson a scant two hundred miles from here? No one would know; nobody cares. Hubbs and I are going to stay to finish these experiments. Only he can give the order to leave.

I went to her room and found her sleeping, but smiling in her sleep in so fresh and open a way that I could have grasped her for sheer pity, her brown hair tossing on the pillow, her lovely bare arms extended as if in greeting to something unknown behind the sheet of her eyelids, and then, all in a tumble but still graceful (how many of us can do this gracefully?), she awakened, sitting bolt upright in the bed, shaking her head, looking at me. First her eyes were panels of fear and then they softened, moistened toward something else. The circumstances of her presence filtered into her and her face became closed over although still lovely. She looked at and then away from me as if I were somehow responsible for her being here.

“Hey,” I said to her. I went to the foot of the cot and kneeled there, looking at her as a zoo creature might look at some novel and beautiful wild thing. “Do you remember me?” I said to her quietly, using my voice to pace her slowly from sleep. “Surely you remember me.”

She nodded, slowly. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

“You’re a wonderful sleeper.”

Her eyes rimmed, her mouth twiched in panic.

“Did I oversleep?” she said. She put a leg out of the cot. “Oh, my God, I hope—”

“No,” I said, taking her arm. Soft and white, it fell into my palm like a bow in a hunter’s hand. “No, no, I was just making a little joke.” She fluttered against me. I felt like Hubbs; trying to connect in a language I did not understand, and did not know. “Take it easy,” I said intensely, and through force of pressure if not belief, I felt her relax slightly. “Please relax; it’s important.” She collapsed then, lying on the cold metal rack of the bed as if that act was a sacrament.

“How are you feeling?” I asked after a while, realizing that I had been staring at her without words for quite a time and that she had received that gaze unmoving, unoffended. A signal? Or merely her fear. Certainly, Hubbs and I must have been terrifying to her.

“I’m better,” she said. “I guess I’ll be all right.” Her eyes wandered.

“Maybe.”

“You will be.”

“How is—” she said and then stopped. I thought that she was unable to utter his name for hatred and then realized, feeling foolish, that she simply did not remember it. Or mine either.

“Hubbs,” I said. “Dr. Ernest Hubbs. He’s all right. He’ll survive.”

“Good.”

“My name is James Lesko. You can call me Jim.”

She thought about it. “All right, Jim,” she said, and then after a time, “I lied when I said it was good that Dr. Hubbs would survive. Actually, I’m really sorry to hear that.”

“Taste is taste,” I said and shrugged. In a hideous way, I realized, we were making what is called small talk. One of the advantages of that alternative form of evolution Hubbs and I had discussed is that there would be no need for small talk in a subverbal society. What did the ants do to pass the time, then? Doubtless they worked. I was babbling internally throughout this stream of consciousness, but for some reason I felt happier than I had in days, anyway. The nearness. It must have been the nearness of her. Every popular song one hears contains a particular of truth. I could see that.

“If I were you, I would have done the same thing,” I said. “I don’t blame you for swinging out at them that way.”

“Oh?”

“You have a mean swing.”

“Thanks,” she said. I realized that she did not know what I was talking about. She had no memory at all of last night. I decided to let it go.

“I’m afraid,” she said, her expression changing. She looked nervously through the room, which fortunately had no windows, it having been designed that way. The station is a portable, sealed unit; the living quarters are cubes attached to the main bank.

“What’s wrong?” I said pointlessly.

“My grandparents are dead. Aren’t they?”

“Yes they are.”

“And Clete. Clete is dead too.”

“Yes he is,” I said. I nodded, said slowly, “All of them are dead. You’re lucky to have survived. You were younger than they and stronger or it would have been you too.” I let her think about that for a while and said,

“They were old people. They wouldn’t have lived much longer anyway. You have your whole life in front of you; you couldn’t have stayed with them in the desert.”

“Yes I could.”

“All right,” I said. “Have it your way. You could have. Don’t you have any parents?”

“I have no one,” she said. “No one at all.”

“Neither do I,” I said. The way it came out I sounded almost cheerful, and this slash of morbidity—feeling that I could become closer to her because of the deaths, that is—was so sickening that for a moment I could not bear myself.

“You must be hungry,” I said, a reasonable way of changing the subject

“How about having some breakfast?”

“All right,” she said. She put her feet on the floor, came slowly but gracefully out of bed. Standing, she was closer to my height than I had realized, five seven or eight perhaps, and she carried herself with a dignity and grace that few women have. “Let’s go,” she said.

“Into the galley,” I said. I put out a hand instinctively, without even thinking about it, and she took it delicately. I led her from the room down a long hallway, equipment hanging from the ceiling in clumps like flowers: the wiring and network having the aspect of foliage. We could have been in a jungle, although, of course, we were not.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said, stopping.

I drew up gently, feeling her palm against mine. It would be partially inaccurate to say that simply holding her hand aroused me (and would make me appear some kind of a sexual lunatic as well), but I felt something very much like arousal, I would concede this. Call it an excess of tenderness. “By all means,” I said.

“What exactly are you doing here?”

“We’re doing a little research into statistical probabilities,” I said.

“Does it have to do with the ants?”

“I should say so,” I said. “I would say that the coefficient of correlation between the presence of ants and our own presence is close to point ninety… as you may be well aware.”

“No,” she said. “You don’t understand me. I know you’re here about the ants, the two of you that is. And he’s the one who killed my grandparents and Clete with his insecticide. But what do you do?”

“I’m the statistical part of the team,” I said. “He performs the experiments and I record them. He does the killing and I do the body count. Like that. Do you understand?”

She looked at me blankly. “I think so,” she said.

“Statisticians are famous for their peculiar relationship to fact. They both do and do not participate. But I want to be perfectly fair about this,”

I said judiciously. “Firing off the insecticide might have been his idea, but I hardly protested. In fact I cooperated willingly. The only thing I wouldn’t have done was to attack the towers.”

She started to walk again, pushing me gently. “I don’t think I understand a word you’re saying,” she said.

“That’s perfectly all right. Most people don’t.”

“But I guess that your work must be very interesting.”

“Oh, it is,” I said, leading her into the galley. “It’s fascinating.” There was barely enough space for the two of us in the little enclosure, but I only found the compression gratifying. Shoulder to shoulder with her, I opened a rack above and showed her the menu. “Powdered milk, powdered juice, powdered eggs, dehydrated bacon,” I said. “Just like home. But then again, what’s so great about home?”

“Are you in there, James?” Hubbs said from somewhere. We both jumped. “Come in here as soon as you’re finished, please. There are some things I want to show you.”

Kendra’s face was blank. “I’d better go,” I said.

“All right.”

“You can make yourself something.”

“If you say so.”

“Are you okay?” I said. I was propelled by something that I thought was anxiety but which I now understand was only a reluctance to leave her. I did not want to leave her. “If you’re not—”

She nodded. “I’m all right,” she said. “Why don’t you make yourself something to eat?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“James,” Hubbs said again. “We’ve got problems here; I’m afraid that you’d better come as soon as you can.”

She held that curious, intense look on me. “You’re afraid of him, aren’t you?” she said.

“Not exactly. But I am his assistant.”

“All right,” she said. “You’re not afraid of him.”

There was nothing else to say. She still looked at me levelly; she would have held that position indefinitely. I touched her on the shoulder gently and worked my way past her. Is it possible that I am afraid of Hubbs? The thought had never previously occurred to me, and it seems on the face of it to be ridiculous; we have the normal superior/assistant relationship, but I had never equated cooperation with fear. They are two entirely different things. Still, it is something worth considering. Is it possible that I have been intimidated all my life; that instinctively I place myself in a position of dependence to everyone with whom I work? Is it possible, for that matter, that I went into game theory simply because it gave me the illusion of control in a universe where even random factors would be plotted? All of these are chilling thoughts that may force me to rethink a number of assumptions, but there has simply been no time yet for such reflection, events overtaking us as they have. Still, it is interesting and frightening material. Do I identify with the ants, am I so immersed in this project now because unlike the products of individuating evolution the ants have neither a superior nor inferior relation to any of their fellows?

Does the gestalt fascinate me because a gestalt by definition makes no demands upon the discrete individual parts, enables them to flow into the overall pattern? I do not know. I simply do not know.

I left Kendra and went into the laboratory.

III

That unnatural brightness was flaring deep into Hubbs’s eyes, and he had contrived to wear his jacket in such a way that it completely obscured his arm from wrist to shoulder. “Look, James,” he said as Lesko came in, motioning with the unwounded arm through the window. “I may be entirely wrong about this, but we seem to be under a state of siege.”

Lesko’s gaze followed Hubbs’s arm. Outside in the sand, two small mounds about the size of a man’s head were pulsating on the desert. They were the color of mud, appeared to be at least partially liquefied, and it seemed to Lesko that there was an antlike expression on each of them… they seemed to hint at ants’ faces. Behind them, the gutted towers stood, their color now a dead white.

“Well, what the hell is that?” Lesko said.

“Well,” Hubbs said cheerfully, “it’s no optical illusion, my boy. It’s more than reflected sunlight. Our interior temperature is already up more than five degrees.”

“Good Lord,” Lesko said and noticed for the first time that it was indeed warm in the laboratory, warmer than it had ever been before. He verified this with a quick look at the wall thermometer, feeling sweat suddenly pool in his armpits.

“And there’s another interesting detail as well,” Hubbs said, motioning toward the mounds again. “How do you suppose the ants were able to build on a poison strip where they absolutely cannot live?” He struggled one-handed with the computer controls, his face flushed. “Think about that,” he said.

“Did you say five degrees?”

“Five degrees in an hour and a half,” Hubbs said. “I’ve been sitting here and watching it, and it’s been very interesting, let me tell you. It’s fascinating to watch a thermometer inch its way up when it’s really measuring your survival. The sun is far from full strength, of course; I don’t think we’ve begun to see what we will. Now watch this.”

Lesko stared as Hubbs worked the controls of the television monitor.

Now Lesko could see a closeup of the mounds outside, the remote camera closing in; the mounds under inspection were not solid but intersticed, a collection of channels in a network that seemed to be more open than closed, a dull whirring aspect of inner light that reminded Lesko of the look of the galaxies in a slide show. “Did you say five degrees?” Lesko said, putting a finger inside his collar and pushing it away gently. It was definitely a nervous reaction, he thought, and yet it seemed definably hotter. He was sweating.

“This is fascinating,” Hubbs said. “Just watch the monitors, pay some attention for once in your life to something actually going on.” His tone was bantering not harsh. “You know,” he said, “if there weren’t lives at stake here, if those filthy little buggers weren’t actual murderers, I suppose one could see beauty in this. Wouldn’t you agree?”

The camera tracked in, picking up movement as programmed, and a single ant burst into focus. Lesko, fascinated now, watched it bobble in front of the camera. It was almost as if it were bowing, pleased with its new role as a star of stage and screen. Then the camera tracked in to the underbelly, and Lesko’s eyes widened.

The ant, below all of its cilia, was yellow.

He turned to Hubbs, his fingers scrappling at the shelf where momentarily he had to support himself. “My God,” he said. “It’s—”

“Yellow,” Hubbs said helpfully. “It’s quite yellow.”

“It’s apparently integrated—”

Hubbs had had more time to think about this. His voice was calm and soothing, although, Lesko thought, slightly mad. “Isn’t it a beautiful adaptation?” he said. “They are absolutely fantastic. We challenge and they respond. They’re most attentive.”

More ants appeared in the picture, scuttling, rounding the first who reared on his hind legs as if distressed to share any part of the camera.

Then, instinct predominating, it joined the gathering mass and they marched off. They looked quite intent and busy. Happy ants.

Well-oriented into their subculture. Highly motivated and flourishing with stimulus-response. No anomie for them, Lesko thought, and wondered if he was giggling; no, these ants were psychically in excellent condition.

There seemed to be no lag between their efforts and their goals, their intentions and their activities. The genius of the gestalt. The superiority of parallel evolution. Lesko found that he was breathing through his mouth, gasping, really; he closed it and turned away, went to the window, and looked at the sands of the desert, more innocent without remote magnification.

“We’re going to fry in here,” he said.

“You know what my question is?” Hubbs said, turning from the monitor, which now showed an abcess no less empty than what Lesko saw through the window. “I have a very simple question. What do they want?

What are their goals?” His eyes gleamed; he wiped sweat from his forehead and inspected it. “They definitely are after something.”

Lesko’s control snapped. It went suddenly, like a rubber band overextended. “They have no goals!” he said loudly. “Now stop personalizing them. And you ought to get that bite looked at.”

“Now you’re wrong,” Hubbs said quietly. “You’re just not looking at the realities of this, James. You saw how they disabled that truck and killed those unfortunate people. And now this—”

“Listen to me,” Lesko said with growing anger; he turned from the window, his voice rising to a shout, “I came here to do three weeks of science in the sun. To assist you in trying to establish some interconnection with ants that are neither malevolent nor benevolent but simply appear to be a mutated species doing antlike things in a more than antlike way. All right? I did not sign up for a goddamned war against a bunch of goddamned ants, and what the hell did you shoot off the top of those towers for? Why? Why?” His throat was hoarse; he coughed, hawked, spat to the side, and rubbed the spittle into dryness. Hubbs watched him quietly, not moving. After a little while, Lesko felt his rage pass as quickly as it had come. “I repeat,” he said in his most reasonable voice, “why did you destroy the towers?”

“Bait.”

“Bait?” Lesko said, stunned. “What are you—”

“Well, look here now,” Hubbs said, and Lesko made his final decision right then: the man was mad; he had been uncertain about it for a while, but no longer. It was entirely clear. “Look here, I had to get them to attack.

Didn’t I? They’re rather intelligent you know. I thought you observed the geometric pattern in the field. What have you been doing if you haven’t picked up on that by now?”

“You saw intelligence?” Lesko said quietly.

“Of couse I saw it.”

“What does intelligence have to do with any of it? There are dead people—”

“Intelligence,” Hubbs says, “is the key to design, my boy. Once we realize that we are dealing with an intelligence equal to ours, if entirely different in origin and function, we are trembling on the verge of the truly significant. It is no longer, as you put it, three weeks of research in the sun, but possibly the most important project in the history of the National Science Institute. Or don’t you know that?”

“I don’t know anything now. I’m shocked,” Lesko said. “I’m shocked and I’m getting sick and the temperature is rising—”

Hubbs looked at him, saying nothing. For a little while, Lesko did not know what the man’s expression was, then it came to him. Of course.

Hubbs was crazy, and his look was a look of triumph.

“Why didn’t you say something?” he said. “If you were so impressed by their intelligence and the rising Significance—”

“Why didn’t you?” Hubbs said. “You knew it, didn’t you? You know those are no ordinary ants we’re dealing with, that we’ve got a malevolent, active intelligence on our hands out there, one whose evolutionary process can instantly adapt to survival and counterattack. Don’t deny it, James!

You know that’s exactly what we have!”

“All right,” Lesko said. “I knew it.” He felt as if he was staggering through one of those idiotic obligatory scenes at the end of a dramatic second act when characters talk to one another ponderously, wrapping up all the things that they have been doing since the rise of curtain. Making things easier for the audience. But this was displacement, he thought, feeling sick; he was trying to think of this as a play and his conversation with Hubbs as a second act curtain, but outside there were real ants on a real desert… and they were out to kill them. “I didn’t even want to discuss it with you,” he said. “You weren’t interested in their intelligence!

All you wanted to do was to kill them, and now you’ve given them the message.”

“You should have talked it over with me,” Hubbs said. “We should have talked it over with one another. We knew what we had, didn’t we? But nobody wanted to talk. I was very much afraid that you’d be terrified and run away, and I needed you.”

“To go out into the desert,” Lesko said and nodded. “To go out into the desert and check out some dead people, that’s what you needed me for. Well, the hell with all of that. When is the goddamned helicopter coming.”

Hubbs stood there. Lesko caught up in the intensity of their dialogue, only noticed now that Hubbs was standing in a strange, cramped position; his injured arm shoved deep into his pocket, concealed by the jacket.

Under the pale skin, the network radiating from the bite seemed to be spreading up into his face….

“James,” Hubbs said earnestly. “Don’t you see? We are faced with a power that has appeared almost spontaneously and that is now exerting itself. We have the opportunity to study it, to learn from it, to teach it its limitations. We can, in a word, educate it.”

Lesko stared at Hubbs; then his gaze tracked back to the monitor, which, the ants having disappeared, had returned to the two mounds on the desert. They shone like eyes against the reflected sun. “You said you called the helicopter,” he said quietly, trying to talk smoothly.

“We could use another variety of insecticide,” Hubbs said. “But they would only adapt again, probably more quickly this time. Acceleration. So we must consider other alternatives.”

Lesko felt as if he were losing his sense of balance, but it would be, unfortunately, only a neurasthenic reaction again. He would never be so fortunate as to simply collapse and be out of this situation. “You mean?” he said quietly, getting out every word as if it were a discovery of language, “that you didn’t call for the helicopter?”

“You see,” Hubbs said conversationally, looking past him, “it is vital that they have the opportunity to test their power against ours… and learn from the consequences. We must teach them a lesson that the filthy little bastards will never forget.”

“Hubbs,” Lesko said, moving toward the door, “I’m going to call in. I’m going to call in and tell them not only to take the girl and myself out of here, I’m going to tell them to take you out too.”

“You won’t call,” Hubbs said as Lesko flung open the door and walked down the small corridor to the communications room, looking for the radio. Of course Hubbs would have hidden the microphone. He was not even going to waste time looking for it. “You won’t call,” Hubbs was saying, “because you are as fascinated by the challenge of this mission as I am. Don’t deny it. You love science, Lesko; you’ve become an ascetic just like myself, cut yourself off from much human contact, denied the vagrant impulses of what we ascetics call the flesh, just so that you could be immersed more deeply—”

“Go to hell!” Lesko screamed and picked up the auxiliary microphone wired into the radio and flipped the contact switch. A violent spark rimmed the console, leaping from the shielded wires against the steel surfaces, and then, almost anticlimactically, there was a crackle and like something exhaled from the lungs of a cigarette smoker a lazy puff of smoke darted across the room, and landed like a fish against the wall, shattering.

“You son of a bitch,” Lesko said.

He reached under the radio for the emergency kit, found the power tool and put on the switch. This one worked. Desperately, careless of the damage the heat was inflicting on his palms, he sawed at the shielding and opened up the radio like a walnut, staring at the blackened metal and wires. Then he shut off the saw, dropped it to the floor beside him, and rubbed his palms slowly, feeling the little scales of the burn already emerging.

“Dirty bastards,” he said. Then something in the wiring attracted him and he looked more closely, bending over.

Two yellow-bellied ants lay in the wiring. They had, of course, been electrocuted, but all in all, Lesko decided, staring at them, they had probably died happy. They had not even died at all.

He turned toward Hubbs. “You know what has happened?” he said.

“I know.”

“We’re cut off!”

“I know,” Hubbs said again. “I know that very well, and I’m glad.

Because it’s going to make our success now all the sweeter.”

Hubbs extended his injured hand in a gesture, momentarily forgetful.

Lesko saw the enlargement then, the hand bright red and dangling off the wrist, literally inflated with blood, the huge, mangled hand of the insect bite—

Hubbs, seeing Lesko’s face, gasped with realization and hid the hand awkwardly behind his back.

Lesko kept on staring at him, and after a moment, with a series of whimpering and embarrassed little murmurs, Hubbs went back to the console.

IV

Lesko’s Diary: So we were sealed in, cut off from the world. Oddly, this realization did not lift me toward panic, but did the reverse. It put a cap on the frantic emotions that had begun to spill over during the talk with Hubbs, my realization that he was mad, my further realization that the situation was far more serious than either of us (and I will share the blame here) had wanted to admit.

It was that kind of confirmation of utter disaster that enables people to get through crises; the dying relatives, the out-of-control car, the diving airplane, all of those things that finally confirm that suspicion, we are born with and drag around like baggage through all of our days… that we are mortal creatures poised in a frail fashion on the rim of the earth; that we are dying, that we will die, that we are already dead, that our undoing is carried within us in the very message of the cells, the rising of the blood as it pounds through the distended heart a million times a day… and knowing this, knowing that we are doomed, we tend to draw strength from extrinsic confirmation of this, rather than succumb to weakness. Well, we always knew it, it is possible to say, looking at the father dying of cancer. Ah, well, no one lives forever, as the car, completely out of control, speeds toward an abutment, the tires and brakes and steering quite gone; oh, well, it could have been worse, it might have happened years ago, we repeat, as the plane soars and then falls toward the earth at a mile and a half a second. It is a reversion to paganism, of course, but it is not the paganism that will kill us as much as the insulating effects of a civilization that progressively will not allow us true contact and meaningful acknowledgment of our terrors. Is this not true, gentlemen, of the scientific jury? Of course it is true; all of you know in your deadly and shriveled hearts that I speak nothing but the truth… apologies for this lecture, of course.

Hubbs went back to the computer bank, the monitor; I followed him.

There was nothing else to do. We were in for it now, all right, and I felt a peculiar and dismal sense of exaltation for reasons that I have explained above, quite satisfactorily I am sure. Exaltation pursued me into that room, threw a little shroud around my shoulders, and, although I shrugged it off, it stayed with me a bit; I went through the next moments in a peculiar glow of ebullience. Like Hubbs, I was no longer, in the strictest sense of the word, quite sane. Still, who is? Are you, gentlemen? I looked at the thermometer for the first time.

The thermometer had two sides; one linked into the computer to show its interior temperature, the other refracting our own, somewhat humbler atmosphere. It showed that the temperature in our humble station was ninety-one degrees; bad enough for a man with an ant bite, I would think, but more ominously the computer temperature was eighty-six. That creature of temperate clime, the computer, muttered and mumbled to itself. Hubbs, having readjusted his clothing to once again conceal the deformity of his hand, a contrived casualness in the way the jacket, slung over his shoulder, managed to conceal any sight of the wound, stood by the computer like an overprotective parent, his uninjured hand on the shielding. He looked at me quite pleasantly as I came in, trying to make amends, I suppose, for the personality conflicts exposed by our conversation, feeling a little guilty about the failure to call the helicopter as promised. On the other hand, and this thought has just occurred to me, his pleasant bearing may have come out of no impulse whatsoever to make amends… it may simply have been that Hubbs did not even remember our conversation, his mind being long gone into other matters. This is possible; for one thing, I had completely forgotten Kendra’s presence in the galley, and if it was possible for me to forget her, Hubbs could certainly let a small detail like our conversation slip by.

“When does the computer kick off?” he asked quite levelly.

“Don’t you know?”

“Tell me,” he said. His tone was quite reasonable, modulated, and pleasantly controlled. If nothing else, the ant bite had done wonders for his manner; this new Hubbs was far less pedantic.

I looked at the thermometer, which had now moved up to the small line separating degree marks. “Coming up to eighty-seven. It kicks off at ninety,” I said.

“Ninety, huh?”

“That’s according to the manual,” I said. “But who knows? Maybe ninety-one. Maybe eighty-nine. I don’t know the exact tolerance levels of this machine.”

“Well,” Hubbs said cheerfully. “I believe that we’re going to have a very spirited and even contest, James.”

I looked up at him. “You’re out of your mind,” I said.

He reacted to this as if I had told him that he had a small spot on his nose. Not at all disconcerted, he rubbed at the bridge with his uninjured hand, then dropped it. “No I’m not,” he said. “I’m perfectly sane, James, and so are you. We are dealing with a cunning enemy whose methods of thought and processes of action are entirely different from ours, and to a degree, as is common in modern psychological warfare, I’ve had to adopt their way of thinking so that I can anticipate them. That’s all.”

“I don’t see the point in more destruction,” I said. For the first time that morning, I looked at the ruined towers. They were just barely visible from this angle. The off-white, dead color had remained, but in some imperceptible way, they seemed to be changing. A look of implosion, crumbling-inward, that kind of thing.

“You have a serious misconception of what we’re doing,” Hubbs said.

“Our goal is not destruction. This is not a military operation. We are not, per se, trying to eliminate the ants.”

“We’re not?”

“No.”

Hubbs looked up at me then, his eyes quite clear, and he seemed to give me a wink. “That might have been my original intention, but I am no longer interested in destroying them,” he said quietly. “Rather, our goal is in the conditioning of an intelligence that is as yet not goal-directed, that can be—”

His expression changed. He fluttered against the wall like a butterfly.

“Get her out of here,” he said thickly. “Get her out!”

I turned. Kendra had come into the laboratory, was standing docilely at the door. I had become so absorbed in my discussion with Hubbs, so shocked by my rising and disastrous insight into the man that I had literally, as I have already said, forgotten her. For a moment, it was like looking at a stranger; I had to study her to remember who she was, and then everything came flooding back. Stimulus: response. The ant intelligence must have worked in that fashion, triggered by various extrinsic stimuli. We were turning into ants ourselves. “Get her out of here,” Hubbs said again.

“No,” I said. “She’s going to stay.”

Kendra walked cautiously over to the shelves, stared at the equipment on them. She made no move to seize anything. Hubbs smiled awkwardly.

“I can’t argue with you, James,” he said. “If it comes to a question of sheer, physical force you can, of course, get your way. Only the will is important, that and the work. All right. Let her stay.”

“You didn’t want her out,” I said reasonably enough. “You could have called the helicopter, but you didn’t. So you obviously want her here. She can’t be any more dangerous to us than the ants.”

Hubbs thought about this for a while. “In other words,” he said, “she is part of the circumstances of the challenge.”

“Exactly. Why not?”

“Why not indeed? All right,” he said almost cheerfully, going over to the air-conditioning unit. “The temperature is now up to eighty-seven. I will reset the controls so that we may begin.”

“Begin what?”

“Our experiments, of course,” he said and began to fiddle with the controls. I walked over to Kendra, who was standing there quietly, hands folded in front of her in a posture of absolute submissiveness. She looked up and smiled at me, and I realized her helplessness to say nothing of my own feelings that had muddled rapidly from infatuation to a kind of protectiveness even more dangerous to both of us. I wanted to touch her, but this, of course, was unthinkable in front of Hubbs. I knew that the man was mad. The poison from the ant bite had probably worked its way all through his system. Still, mad or sane, the experiments would have to continue. Wouldn’t they? Eventually, I thought, the base might get curious on its own and send out a ’copter. We were spending a good deal of money after all, and they had already generated much anxiety on that score. It might only be a few more minutes or hours with the crazed Hubbs, and then we would return to base together. At least this was how I had worked things out in my mind. It seemed a wonderful way of looking at the matter.

“Kendra,” I said, feeling pedagogic, all the feeling rushing outside in an impulse to give her vast amounts of information. “Would you like to see what we’re doing here?”

“Yes,” she said uncertainly. She might as well have said no. I could understand her problem. Doubtless she had taken the two of us for insane; still, what was her alternative to staying here? She could hardly run screaming into the desert, and after what she had been through last night, the station might have been a haven for her.

“I’ll show you,” I said. “This is all very interesting. We’re in a battle with some very intelligent and malevolent ants.”

“Which,” Hubbs burbled, struggling with the dials, “we’re going to win, of course, because our intelligence is far more sophisticated.”

“Oh,” she said. “Of course we’ll win. With two people like you commanding the battle, how could we possibly lose?”

I looked at her.

Her eyes were shrouded.

V

Kendra watched while the two of them went through their next experiment. She assumed that it was an experiment, in any event, that was what they told her they were doing, and she was not going to argue with them. She was not going to argue with anyone anymore, least of all these two. She had come to the conclusion that they were insane. The younger one, Lesko, was attractive and was insane in a rather nice way, whereas Hubbs, the senior man, was simply crazed, but neither one of them was at all near sanity. But because she was locked up in this station with them, apparently without any hope of escape, she would have to cooperate with them. Humor. Humor them. Humor crazy people. She was pretty sure that this was the right tactic anywhere. She had read someplace that the best tactic with the insane was to go along with their obsessions, agree with what they were saying, not to oppose them in any way, but rather try to enter their fantasies. She would try to do this. What were they after? What did these men want?

They wanted, she guessed, to destroy the ants. That was a reasonable thing for them to try to do; yet between the ants and Hubbs, there was no saying as to which was the more dangerous. The ants, she supposed. The ants would be. They had killed her grandparents and their hired man, had ravaged the desert, killed her horse, changed the entire context of her life… yes, indeed, the ants were dangerous. They had to be respected, and what was going on here was obviously not a game of any sort.

But these men were dangerous too. She knew that it was Hubbs who in a way had been responsible for all the deaths by firing at the towers. If he had left the towers alone, the ants would not have been maddened, they would not have attacked, and her grandparents and Clete would still be alive. But then again, if he had not attacked, the ants might simply have waited for a better time to launch their deadly little waves of attention.

But then, still again, the ants might have been peaceable, might have been goaded to the attack by the poisoned gas… and if Lesko was supposed to be such a good man, why hadn’t he stopped it? Why hadn’t he stopped Hubbs?

No. He had not. Quite to the contrary, he was Hubbs’s enthusiastic helper. He had seemed sympathetic this morning; for a few moments, she thought that there was actually feeling there, but then after she had eaten and seen him in the laboratory, all of that had gone away from him. All that he was was Hubbs’s helper, and there had been no need to interpret the look on his face when she came into that laboratory. He had been so absorbed that for an instant he had not even known who she was. He had been involved in his ant experiments, working with Hubbs on another way to attack them. So… so much for Lesko. There was no help here, not from either of them. Nevertheless, she had to cooperate. Having accepted the fact that both of them were insane was perfectly all right, but did this do anything to get her out of this? No, it did not.

“White noise,” Lesko was saying to her, his eyes very intense and bright.

“What we’re going to do is to throw every sound in the world at them.” He jiggled dials on a console. A low hum filled the laboratory. Hubbs was working away in a corner on a roller of paper, making notes. The hum was unpleasant, grating; it cut in under her consciousness and made her nauseous. “I know,” Lesko said, seeing her face. “It’s quite upsetting, covering as it does the entire frequency belt. Now that noise, white noise I should say, is, is an amalgam of every noise in the world, from one end of that belt to the next.” He twisted another dial, his fingers poised and delicate. “We’re throwing it right into those mounds outside,” he said,

“which we assume to be the place to which the ant colony has transferred, at least the mobile sectors of it. We’re throwing this noise, as I say, right down their throats on a series of frequencies, and do you know what’s going to happen?”

“No,” Kendra said. “I do not.”

“Then let me tell you,” Lesko said and put an arm around her shoulder.

She felt the soaking pressure of his body; it sickened her and yet on another level created a vague excitement. “Now this white noise, which soaks up the entire range of amplitude, so to speak, is being beamed directly into them, and it’s going to come back. Minus one crucial element of course.”

“Of course,” she said dully.

She looked out the windows, toward the mounds of which he was speaking. There they were, heaped like breasts on the desert. Instinctively, she touched her own. They felt full and hard, but it was not passion that had brought them up but something indefinable. He looked at her and self-conscious, embarrassed, she dropped her hands to her sides, curling them.

“Do you want to know what that element is?” he said awkwardly.

“If you want to tell me.”

“You’re not really interested,” he said. “You’re not really interested in any of this. You think that we’re crazy.”

“No, I don’t,” she said, looking away from the mounds. Hubbs was working feverishly on some sheets of paper in the corner, pausing now and then to swear and to inhale deeply. “I don’t think you’re crazy.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Lesko said. “Crazy or sane, we’re in a very serious situation. Don’t you know that?”

“Now I do. Yes, I do.”

“Do you know what my theory is?” Lesko said.

“You think that the ants want to take over the world,” Kendra said.

“You think that they’re responding to some set of instructions from a higher power or something like that and that they’re going to take over everything unless you and Dr. Hubbs stop them right here.”

He stared at her and his hand went instinctively to his forehead.

“I know,” she said. “I know exactly what you think. That’s why Dr.

Hubbs blew up the towers, isn’t it? To attack them directly before they were able to get their forces together.”

She stared at him levelly, and although she despised herself for this, felt a spark of triumph because she knew she was right. Of course she was right. She did not know a word of their science, but she knew what was in their murderous, maniacal hearts.

Unspeaking, he finally looked away from her.

VI

Lesko’s Diary: The idea was to hurl white sound into them, pure noise; it would come back on the tracking channel lacking only that frequency on which they broadcast… and by doing this, we would know how they could be reached. With luck we could use the transmitter broadcasting that frequency to destroy their communication. But looking at Kendra, it suddenly seemed quite pointless: I do not refer only to the experiment but to the struggle itself, the totality of it. Why, after all, were we challenging the ants? What was the meaning of all of it? This slash of futility, so unexpected and so completely reasonable in the force with which it struck, unsettled me, made me literally stagger, and it was with an effort that I pulled my attention from Kendra and back to the board itself on which the flickering of light indicated that the transmitter was ready. But that one moment of angst during which, however briefly, the entire point of our struggles had looked meaningless stayed with me; I knew that in some deep sense I would never be the same person again maintaining the same attitudes. I say angst but this was not quite the feeling that ran through me; it is better to be honest in this journal and say that what happened was that I suddenly had a clear moment of anticipation, could look into the open shell of the future cleaving open like a walnut, and I said that the ants were going to win and nothing could be done about it. Hubbs in his obsession to do battle or die, Kendra in her ignorance, myself in my ambivalence, all of us were locked into our separate responses, but they were of equal futility because the ants had no responses at all nor did they have any range of feeling. Individuating evolution led to individuating reaction… but the ants had no such problem. One for all and all for one.

We simply could not deal with this. The only question was what the ants wanted, because if they wanted our destruction, and this seemed likely, they would have it. Who were we fooling with our white noise, our grenades, our insecticides, our arguments? I thought. We certainly were not deceiving the ants, for they were as careless of our emotions as Hubbs had been of their towers when, with whatever futility, he had destroyed them. I told Kendra to sit in a corner of the laboratory while we worked with the sound generator. Activity was best: while doing useful things, arranging an experiment, plotting out possibilities one could think that the campaign against the ants was going well, or at least that it was going.

Feed in the tape, arrange the amplifiers, check the printouts, create the sound mix. Force lever B over lever A. Check out oscillation. Watch the frequency belt. Earnest scientific acts performed deftly and with style. The ants had no style or science, of course. They simply performed. If we had evolved in a different way, we would have been performers too. Instead, we had developed a society, a code, a technology that was itself merely an excuse for inaction.

Hubbs threw in the generator, his swollen red hand exposed, and the white noise began. Even though it was being thrown outside and there was heavy shielding within the dome, it was nevertheless audible; a high-pitched, almost unbearable piercing whistle that made the inner ears quiver and jump. In the corner, Kendra gasped and dug her fingers into her ears, moaning. Hubbs upped the amplitude. Kendra began to writhe and looked toward me, her mouth distorted. She said something, but of course I could not hear it. Nor can I lip-read. Then she turned and ran from the room, her gait wobbling and ungraceful. Of course. The noise would attack the middle ear.

I looked at the monitor. Hubbs was waving and screaming, probably in triumph, although hard to tell, gesturing wildly in that direction. On the monitor, the mounds, already crumpled, were now pulsating, as if something within them were in agony, and caused them to quiver as if they were living bodies, and the monitor, faithfully tracked into the motion, showed everything, the heaving, splitting apart, and final slow opening. Something porous and gelatinous came from the mounds and began to work its way across the desert. My God, Hubbs screamed, the sons of bitches are alive, goddamnit, and it certainly looked that way; it looked as if not only the mounds but the noise had acquired life and was now moving in agony across the desert floor. The piercing went higher and higher; it was an agony in the ears that traced its way through the coils of the body to the bowels, the groin; I felt as if the noise were tearing me apart, and if it was doing this to me, what was it doing to the ants? I thought this was the answer; this had been the answer all the time, and we too stupid to see it, but see it we now had: the creatures could be destroyed by the sheer force of noise; it broke open their communications network and—because they worked at the auditory level to communicate with one another—they were abnormally sensitive to sound. We had them: we had them, I thought and gave one triumphant scream that was inaudible over the greater sounds in the laboratory, looking at the monitor on which the shriveled and blackened bodies of ants were now passing in panorama. We had created a charnel house of the desert, and the monitor had gone crazy, tracking movement after movement, but it could not keep up with the corpses of the ants, heaped in little piles now: they were scurrying from a thousand outlets; from a million secret little passages, the ants were being driven by sound to light… and I screamed yet again, turning to Hubbs, and realized only then that he was bellowing and pointing frantically at the air-conditioning unit above us. His throat and mouth were working, but it was impossible to hear him; all that I could do was to follow his pointing finger, and then I realized that he must have been screaming for thirty seconds or more, but I was so caught up in my own ecstasy I heard nothing.

WARNING MALFUNCTION read jagged letters on a strip above the unit. I had never seen this before, never even been aware that the emergency unit in the computer would have such a signal, but there it was, there it was: WARNING MALFUNCTION, and even as I followed Hubbs’s pointing, shaking finger, the letters glowed and then shifted.

CIRCUITS OVERHEATING.

The circuits overheated. They had somehow contrived to knock down the air conditioner. Feebly, Hubbs was trying to do something with the unit, throw in one or another series of switches, but he could not work one-handed. His injured hand was being held in straight to his belly, and he was obviously in terrible pain, but I could hear nothing. The sound was still oscillating, working its way up the last cycles toward inaudibility, and it was now a deep and profound pain that I felt, a pain that worked out from the network of the body into some generalized and indefinable sense of woe that racked me: I wanted to cry, but all the time I was fighting with myself, forcing myself; I went to the unit, pushed Hubbs out of the way, and tried to work with the switches myself. There was some kind of safety mechanism in here. I did not know where or what it was—my instructions had included little in relation to the equipment itself—but I was still fighting, fighting to find the switch that would throw in the emergency cooling unit and save us when—

—The unit exploded. The air conditioner literally blew up against my hand, little fibers and filters of smoke ripping out with a sound like tearing cloth, and I was able to hear this quite well, was able to hear everything because the screaming white noise stopped instantly. Of course it would, I thought; the sound generator was hooked into the air conditioner itself, for without the proper coolant the terrific heat generated by its functioning would cut off immediately. Be grateful, I thought, be grateful enough that it did stop, because the sound of the white noise unit under malfunction would probably have been quite enough to blow open an eardrum.

I looked over at Hubbs. He was weeping, holding his injured hand, frankly given over to sobs and little empty explosions of sound that were both more terrible and human than anything I had ever seen from the man. “I can’t stand it,” he was saying. “I just can’t stand it anymore. They know everything; they know everything about us.” But I had no time to comfort him, no time to deal with him on any level. There was worse trouble. The abused air conditioner was suddenly on fire, throwing its deadly little fingers of flame into the air, and Kendra was suddenly by my side, a blanket in her hand. Together, we smothered the flames. Her motions were quick, efficient, instinctive: she worked with that sheer economy of motion and absence of panic that comes from the deepest part. It was stunning to see her work; I was amazed that after all she had been through she was able to deal with a situation in this fashion… and then, painfully it occurred to me as she helped me to wrap the blanket tightly against the heaving parts of the gutted unit… of course, of course she would be able to do this. There was no surprise in it at all. It was the first time, since the coming of the ants, that she had been able to use the knowledge she had.

And that was more frightening than anything.

Because the ants had one by one stripped all of us of our weapons.

VII

Everything in the station came in duplicate. Researchers, computers, monitors. Air conditioning and reserve. So after Lesko had gotten the fire extinguished in the gutted unit, he was able, under Hubbs’s direction, to get the auxiliary started. Hubbs was too weak to perform the necessary splicing maneuvers himself. He stood there, sweat coming off his face in little, open rivers, looking at Lesko as he worked. The girl had gone to lean against a wall where she looked at them, her face soot-blackened, her eyes staring points of light, apparently too tired to talk. Hubbs no longer resented her. She was part of the environment with which they had to work, that was all. The ants were inimical to them and so was the girl; that was about the way that Hubbs’s mind had calculated it, Lesko decided. Of course it was possible that he misunderstood the man, but he doubted it. He did not think there were any incalculables at all.

“I can’t believe it,” Hubbs said. He held his pained hand, looked out the window at the bodies of ants heaped like ash on the desert. “To know our plans, our strengths, our weaknesses… even the machine on which everything else depended. How could they know?”

“They knew,” Lesko said.

“It’s just not possible.”

“It’s completely possible,” Lesko said. “Weren’t you the one who predicated that they were intelligent, that they communicated with one another, that they controlled this situation? You were right.” He finished a splice, turned a switch, and the auxiliary unit whined faintly, then began to catch. He felt cool air working its tentative way across the laboratory. “I wonder how long before they get to this one,” he said.

“Stop it!” Hubbs said. His face was white. “Don’t say that! We must not—”

“Be reasonable,” Lesko said quietly. “You were the one who understood this from the first, weren’t you? You said that they were an intelligent, functioning force, that we could develop communication with them, that they were probably aware of our purpose and our moves. You canceled out communications with base because you wanted to study them without interference. You wouldn’t summon a helicopter because it might have gotten between you and your studies and the greater glory of the Coronado Institute.” He looked at Hubbs closely; the man seemed to be dwindling under what Lesko was saying. All right. He deserved it. There was neither pity nor guilt; only implication. “You’ve sustained a bite, the extent of which we can’t even determine because there’s no way to get to medical aid. Also because of your desire to study without interference. There are three people dead out on the desert—”

“All right,” Kendra said from the corner. “Leave him alone.”

“Leave him alone?” Lesko said. Cool air was pouring through the laboratory; the thermometer had already dropped to below ninety. He felt the sweat beginning to dry on his forehead in streaks. “I wish I could leave him alone. Don’t you know that he’s responsible—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Kendra said. “Don’t you see that? It doesn’t matter who’s responsible for anything; we’ve got to cooperate with one another.

Otherwise we’ll never—”

“That’s a nice attitude,” Lesko said. “That’s really very touching. It’s just your family—”

“Please, Jim,” she said, quietly. Her eyes were intense; she seemed more self-possessed however than at any moment since he had seen her at the ranch. “You don’t understand that it’s all behind us now. Those things want to kill us. Unless we work together they’re going to.”

“She’s right,” Hubbs said in a small voice. “You must listen to her. But she’s wrong too. They don’t want to kill us.”

The computer cut in with a whop! Lesko heard the chattering. “They don’t?” he said. “What do they want to do, then? Change our life-style?”

Hubbs, holding his wrist, looked at Lesko levelly, seriously. “I think that that’s exactly what they want to do,” he said. “If they had wanted to kill us, they could have done it at any time for the last day. Don’t you realize that?”

“I don’t realize anything,” Lesko said. “I suggest that we take the jeep and try to get out of here. If we’re very lucky, we just might make a run for it—”

“You really think so, James?” Hubbs said weakly. “Look.”

They followed his finger pointing through the window. In the distance, they could see an object burning. A halo of black floated around the flames. Ants, of course. Burning ants.

“There’s the jeep,” Hubbs said.

“I told you,” said Kendra quietly. “We must live or die here. There’s nothing else to do.”

“So what do you suggest we do,” Lesko said to Hubbs. “You’re the senior man; you’re still in command. What do we do with them?”

“That’s quite clear,” Hubbs said. “We send them a message.”

Kendra and Lesko stared at him. He held their gaze. “Do you see anything else?” he said.

Kendra began to laugh desperately.

“I still think that we can reach some kind of accommodation,” Hubbs said.

Pain tore through him and as Lesko watched, he staggered.

VIII

Lesko’s Diary: We worked desperately to get the computer back into operation and to work out a code that might be comprehensible to the ants. Three days ago, make it two, I would have thought this insanity: there we were, two Ph.D.s stranded in the desert, trying to strike up a conversation with a colony of ants who we believed to be intelligent. But Kendra’s analysis of the situation had been completely correct; we were going to live or die in the station, and we could only deal on the terms we had left. Flight was hopeless, insecticide too laborious (the ants would only find an immune reaction), and communication with base had been destroyed. We could hope, and in fact did, that base would, after a while, become curious about the break in communication and would send out at least one helicopter, better yet a rescue team… but I knew base; I knew bureaucracy and levels of approval, and it was clear to me that by the time a request for emergency assistance had been bucked up the various levels of the chain of command and then bucked down again, several days might have elapsed. We were, after all, doing independent research, although government financed (this discrimination was important to the bureaucrats if not to me), and Hubbs’s unremitting hostility to base would not count well for us. It could not possibly; their most understandable reaction would be to meet his hostility with apathy. If he wanted not to be bothered, then they would not bother him, and so on. So Kendra was right. She had been the first of us to see it. It was our world in that station; everything depended on us.

It depended upon us because I was increasingly convinced that the ants had far more in mind (and by this time I fell into Hubbs’s pattern of thinking quite easily; this was a “mind” with which we were dealing) than simply overrunning the station. They could have done that at will days ago; for that matter, if this colony had chosen, it could have made our mission impossible simply by rendering the desert uninhabitable. They had let us come to Paradise City just as they had allowed the residents to flee. It was their terrain.

But what did they want us for? For what purpose had they allowed us to set up the station on the desert, prepare our computers, drop the insecticide? I had an idea that I kept to myself, seeing no point or purpose in bringing it to Hubbs’s attention. He was a sick man and this would only have made him sicker; either that or it had occurred to him already, and he certainly would not need to hear it from me. That idea was quite simply that the ants needed our presence because they wanted sample specimens and that through their analysis of us, to say nothing of their analysis of the three corpses littering the desert floor, they would arrive at a clear, methodical plan of attack.

Not to think of it. Not to think of it. What I want to make clear is that all during the events that I am describing I did my best to swing clear of hysteria, to carve panic out of my mind, to function at a pure level of scientific detachment. If I had allowed the thoughts I am describing to enter into the forefront of consciousness, I am quite certain that none of us would have been able to have functioned at all… but I did not, much of this occurred to me only after the fact, when I realized also that I had probably been dwelling on it subconsciously for a long time.

The instant task was all that had mattered. I shared Hubbs’s obsession: we had to establish some kind of communication with the ants. If we could communicate with them, divine their purposes, find some one-to-one correspondence between language and activity, we might be able, if not to understand them, to at least find some point of weakness.

We might even—this insane thought was rattling around, I admit, almost throughout—have the equivalent of a couple of Scotches together and discuss our mutual problems as any group of good fellows might. We had common interests, did we not? We were living tenants of the earth together; that miserable mudball in an exiled section of the Milky Way.

Surely ant and man could coexist peacefully as against the greater common enemy without. We might even be able to voyage to the stars together, the ants developing a communications network that would implement our vast technological resources. Drink up, fellows; next round is on me. I am sure that I will be forgiven for this stream of consciousness; it could have happened to the best of you.

Hubbs became a little stronger as we worked on the communications problem. Kendra, meanwhile, left the laboratory to work in the galley. She seemed to have found her own means of dealing with the situation by placing herself into a domestic situation; she would do housekeeping while the men concentrated on the problems at hand. This did not concern me in the least; I was able to envy the profound instinct and sense of structure that she was able to bring to this. If women did the housekeeping and men the breadwinning in the ancient way, then surely the ants would relent. It was—I will admit this—pleasant to have her out of the way as we worked, because my feelings toward her had reached such a level of intensity by now that her mere presence was disturbing. Madness, perhaps, to entertain lustful thoughts while in the midst of what might have been a world crisis… but this is our nature, or at least my nature, God forgive me. Individual evolution, the primacy of the ego. It would have been better to have been a gestalt.

Hubbs at least could now be leaned upon. He was still in pain, but had somehow internalized it, and although his cheeks were bright with fever, his eyes were calm. He helped me feed a simple binary figure into the computer. Mathematics, the universal language. We would alternate 1 and 2 in rhythmic and irrhythmic powers, working on the channel of sound that seemed to be their belt; then we would clear channels for receptivity.

Hubbs was pretty sure that if communication was established and the ants willing to meet us, they would hurl back our own signal at us 1 and 2

exactly as we had sent it. “I’m going to believe that the sons of bitches are reasonable and that they want to work with us,” Hubbs said, working over the charts. “We may have a malevolent intelligence here, but I am going to assume for our immediate purposes that they have merely been trying to call our attention to them in order to establish communication, and when we do this, our purposes will have met theirs and the siege will stop. I will assume this because if it is not so, our problems are probably insuperable.

Do you see what I mean, James?” I saw what he meant. I had made the same set of assumptions myself. We sent them our message in binary code.

And we waited.

IX

The queens accepted the signal. Glucose balances shifted; something happened in an almost electrical fashion, and a series of impulses were transferred from the queens to the soldiers. The soldiers had been burying their dead, thousands of them, in little depressions carved by the grenade near the towers. Now they stopped.

They picked up the signal from the queens.

And then, responsive, their cilia quivering, they advanced.

X

Lesko: NO CORRELATION

NO CORRELATION

NO CORRELATION

“What do they want?” he said. “What do they want?”

“They won’t tell us,” Hubbs said.

NO CORRELATION

“I know they’re receiving,” he said. “Activity is indicated. They’re lying to us! They know we’re communicating!”

NO CORRELATION

“Don’t take this personally, James,” Hubbs said. He was bent over the printout. Lesko could see the smooth slick spot at the back of his skull. “If they don’t want to respond, it must be for other reasons.”

NO CORRELATION

NO CORRELATION

“I’ll kill them,” Lesko said. He felt insanity working within his veins like blood, and it was a good feeling. Smash, injure, kill, he thought: it might be the only thing we know, but we know it well. “I think we should burn them,” he said. “Go after them with the blue.”

“It won’t work, James,” Hubbs said. He stood wearily, turned toward Lesko, his face as impenetrable as steel. Now he was the calmer one; the roles were shifting back and forth almost in a binary way themselves, Lesko thought. “We know that they are receiving, which is something.

They can be reached. So if we can reach them now with something that can hurt—”

“No,” Lesko said. “We tried that before.”

“We’ll have to try it again.”

Kendra came into the room. “If you want something to eat, you can have it,” she said. “You can—” and then, she looked over at the monitor.

The two men had ignored it, absorbed in the printout. Her eyes bulged.

She screamed.

Lesko turned, lunged toward her, and she fell into his grasp, her finger pointing at the monitor. “Look,” she said. “Just look—” and he looked then as Hubbs also turned to look, Kendra falling back in his arms. He felt her full weight and thought for a moment that she had fainted, but then her feet scrambled for balance on the floor, and she righted herself. Strong.

She was strong. There was a deer mouse on the monitor—

—A deer mouse lying on the desert, tongue hanging out of its mouth, twitching in final death agonies. From its ears, mouth, nose hung clusters of ants like little bouquets, and as Lesko watched, the mouse made one last frantic attempt to find purchase and then collapsed, writhed, died.

The monitor tracked in to show the green and gold clusters of death.

Kendra breathed against his neck. “It’s horrible,” she said. “They killed—”

She could not go on.

NO CORRELATION

NO CORRELATION

“They don’t want to listen to us,” Hubbs said flatly. “They don’t want any part of us at all. All that they want to do is to kill.”

“I can’t stand it,” Kendra said quietly. “I can’t—”

NO CORRELATION

NO CORRELATION

The deer mouse began to move.

It writhed again on the ground, but in a different fashion. The limbs did not seem coordinated; they worked against one another, off-balance, painfully. But even as they watched, the motions seemed to acquire smoothness and flow. To take on the appearance of efficiency. The green and gold of the body had now become a deep red as burst blood vessels carried their contents near the surface.

The mouse rolled and began to walk.

It walked across the desert, parading for the monitor in a way that no mouse had ever walked before, all limbs stiff, head forward, dead eyes glazed with the light of the sun. It headed toward one of the broken towers. It moved quite rapidly. The new mode of locomotion might be unmouselike, but you had to give the ants credit: they knew the locomotor facilities.

The mouse went rapidly, proudly, into the nearest of the towers and disappeared from the monitor. The monitor, disengaged, tracked back, and showed another deer mouse writhing on the sand.

“Mother of God,” Hubbs said. “Mother of God.” He sounded quite reverent.

Holding Kendra, Lesko walked her quietly from the laboratory and into the bedroom where he lay her on the cot.

When he returned to the laboratory, Hubbs had collapsed or, more likely, fallen asleep against one of the shelves, a strange, broken grin on his face.

Lesko turned off the monitor and went out of there.