Barry Malzberg - Phase IV

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

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

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

Kendra.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go on, James.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” Lesko said.

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

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

“We’re running some experiments.”

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