Barry n malzberg, p.6
Barry N. Malzberg, page 6
“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.
PHASE III
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.
