Barry Malzberg - Phase IV

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.