Barry Malzberg - Phase IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is really fascinating,” Hubbs said.

“Those are dead people over there.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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