Barry Malzberg - Phase IV

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

“Too late now.”

“Why didn’t we listen?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

“I think so.”

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

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

“Get them?”

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