Barry Malzberg - Phase IV

Hubbs stood there. Lesko caught up in the intensity of their dialogue, only noticed now that Hubbs was standing in a strange, cramped position; his injured arm shoved deep into his pocket, concealed by the jacket.

Under the pale skin, the network radiating from the bite seemed to be spreading up into his face….

“James,” Hubbs said earnestly. “Don’t you see? We are faced with a power that has appeared almost spontaneously and that is now exerting itself. We have the opportunity to study it, to learn from it, to teach it its limitations. We can, in a word, educate it.”

Lesko stared at Hubbs; then his gaze tracked back to the monitor, which, the ants having disappeared, had returned to the two mounds on the desert. They shone like eyes against the reflected sun. “You said you called the helicopter,” he said quietly, trying to talk smoothly.

“We could use another variety of insecticide,” Hubbs said. “But they would only adapt again, probably more quickly this time. Acceleration. So we must consider other alternatives.”

Lesko felt as if he were losing his sense of balance, but it would be, unfortunately, only a neurasthenic reaction again. He would never be so fortunate as to simply collapse and be out of this situation. “You mean?” he said quietly, getting out every word as if it were a discovery of language, “that you didn’t call for the helicopter?”

“You see,” Hubbs said conversationally, looking past him, “it is vital that they have the opportunity to test their power against ours… and learn from the consequences. We must teach them a lesson that the filthy little bastards will never forget.”

“Hubbs,” Lesko said, moving toward the door, “I’m going to call in. I’m going to call in and tell them not only to take the girl and myself out of here, I’m going to tell them to take you out too.”

“You won’t call,” Hubbs said as Lesko flung open the door and walked down the small corridor to the communications room, looking for the radio. Of course Hubbs would have hidden the microphone. He was not even going to waste time looking for it. “You won’t call,” Hubbs was saying, “because you are as fascinated by the challenge of this mission as I am. Don’t deny it. You love science, Lesko; you’ve become an ascetic just like myself, cut yourself off from much human contact, denied the vagrant impulses of what we ascetics call the flesh, just so that you could be immersed more deeply—”

“Go to hell!” Lesko screamed and picked up the auxiliary microphone wired into the radio and flipped the contact switch. A violent spark rimmed the console, leaping from the shielded wires against the steel surfaces, and then, almost anticlimactically, there was a crackle and like something exhaled from the lungs of a cigarette smoker a lazy puff of smoke darted across the room, and landed like a fish against the wall, shattering.

“You son of a bitch,” Lesko said.

He reached under the radio for the emergency kit, found the power tool and put on the switch. This one worked. Desperately, careless of the damage the heat was inflicting on his palms, he sawed at the shielding and opened up the radio like a walnut, staring at the blackened metal and wires. Then he shut off the saw, dropped it to the floor beside him, and rubbed his palms slowly, feeling the little scales of the burn already emerging.

“Dirty bastards,” he said. Then something in the wiring attracted him and he looked more closely, bending over.

Two yellow-bellied ants lay in the wiring. They had, of course, been electrocuted, but all in all, Lesko decided, staring at them, they had probably died happy. They had not even died at all.

He turned toward Hubbs. “You know what has happened?” he said.

“I know.”

“We’re cut off!”

“I know,” Hubbs said again. “I know that very well, and I’m glad.

Because it’s going to make our success now all the sweeter.”

Hubbs extended his injured hand in a gesture, momentarily forgetful.

Lesko saw the enlargement then, the hand bright red and dangling off the wrist, literally inflated with blood, the huge, mangled hand of the insect bite—

Hubbs, seeing Lesko’s face, gasped with realization and hid the hand awkwardly behind his back.

Lesko kept on staring at him, and after a moment, with a series of whimpering and embarrassed little murmurs, Hubbs went back to the console.

Lesko’s Diary: So we were sealed in, cut off from the world. Oddly, this realization did not lift me toward panic, but did the reverse. It put a cap on the frantic emotions that had begun to spill over during the talk with Hubbs, my realization that he was mad, my further realization that the situation was far more serious than either of us (and I will share the blame here) had wanted to admit.

It was that kind of confirmation of utter disaster that enables people to get through crises; the dying relatives, the out-of-control car, the diving airplane, all of those things that finally confirm that suspicion, we are born with and drag around like baggage through all of our days… that we are mortal creatures poised in a frail fashion on the rim of the earth; that we are dying, that we will die, that we are already dead, that our undoing is carried within us in the very message of the cells, the rising of the blood as it pounds through the distended heart a million times a day… and knowing this, knowing that we are doomed, we tend to draw strength from extrinsic confirmation of this, rather than succumb to weakness. Well, we always knew it, it is possible to say, looking at the father dying of cancer. Ah, well, no one lives forever, as the car, completely out of control, speeds toward an abutment, the tires and brakes and steering quite gone; oh, well, it could have been worse, it might have happened years ago, we repeat, as the plane soars and then falls toward the earth at a mile and a half a second. It is a reversion to paganism, of course, but it is not the paganism that will kill us as much as the insulating effects of a civilization that progressively will not allow us true contact and meaningful acknowledgment of our terrors. Is this not true, gentlemen, of the scientific jury? Of course it is true; all of you know in your deadly and shriveled hearts that I speak nothing but the truth… apologies for this lecture, of course.

Hubbs went back to the computer bank, the monitor; I followed him.

There was nothing else to do. We were in for it now, all right, and I felt a peculiar and dismal sense of exaltation for reasons that I have explained above, quite satisfactorily I am sure. Exaltation pursued me into that room, threw a little shroud around my shoulders, and, although I shrugged it off, it stayed with me a bit; I went through the next moments in a peculiar glow of ebullience. Like Hubbs, I was no longer, in the strictest sense of the word, quite sane. Still, who is? Are you, gentlemen? I looked at the thermometer for the first time.

The thermometer had two sides; one linked into the computer to show its interior temperature, the other refracting our own, somewhat humbler atmosphere. It showed that the temperature in our humble station was ninety-one degrees; bad enough for a man with an ant bite, I would think, but more ominously the computer temperature was eighty-six. That creature of temperate clime, the computer, muttered and mumbled to itself. Hubbs, having readjusted his clothing to once again conceal the deformity of his hand, a contrived casualness in the way the jacket, slung over his shoulder, managed to conceal any sight of the wound, stood by the computer like an overprotective parent, his uninjured hand on the shielding. He looked at me quite pleasantly as I came in, trying to make amends, I suppose, for the personality conflicts exposed by our conversation, feeling a little guilty about the failure to call the helicopter as promised. On the other hand, and this thought has just occurred to me, his pleasant bearing may have come out of no impulse whatsoever to make amends… it may simply have been that Hubbs did not even remember our conversation, his mind being long gone into other matters. This is possible; for one thing, I had completely forgotten Kendra’s presence in the galley, and if it was possible for me to forget her, Hubbs could certainly let a small detail like our conversation slip by.