Barry Malzberg - Phase IV

“When does the computer kick off?” he asked quite levelly.

“Don’t you know?”

“Tell me,” he said. His tone was quite reasonable, modulated, and pleasantly controlled. If nothing else, the ant bite had done wonders for his manner; this new Hubbs was far less pedantic.

I looked at the thermometer, which had now moved up to the small line separating degree marks. “Coming up to eighty-seven. It kicks off at ninety,” I said.

“Ninety, huh?”

“That’s according to the manual,” I said. “But who knows? Maybe ninety-one. Maybe eighty-nine. I don’t know the exact tolerance levels of this machine.”

“Well,” Hubbs said cheerfully. “I believe that we’re going to have a very spirited and even contest, James.”

I looked up at him. “You’re out of your mind,” I said.

He reacted to this as if I had told him that he had a small spot on his nose. Not at all disconcerted, he rubbed at the bridge with his uninjured hand, then dropped it. “No I’m not,” he said. “I’m perfectly sane, James, and so are you. We are dealing with a cunning enemy whose methods of thought and processes of action are entirely different from ours, and to a degree, as is common in modern psychological warfare, I’ve had to adopt their way of thinking so that I can anticipate them. That’s all.”

“I don’t see the point in more destruction,” I said. For the first time that morning, I looked at the ruined towers. They were just barely visible from this angle. The off-white, dead color had remained, but in some imperceptible way, they seemed to be changing. A look of implosion, crumbling-inward, that kind of thing.

“You have a serious misconception of what we’re doing,” Hubbs said.

“Our goal is not destruction. This is not a military operation. We are not, per se, trying to eliminate the ants.”

“We’re not?”

“No.”

Hubbs looked up at me then, his eyes quite clear, and he seemed to give me a wink. “That might have been my original intention, but I am no longer interested in destroying them,” he said quietly. “Rather, our goal is in the conditioning of an intelligence that is as yet not goal-directed, that can be—”

His expression changed. He fluttered against the wall like a butterfly.

“Get her out of here,” he said thickly. “Get her out!”

I turned. Kendra had come into the laboratory, was standing docilely at the door. I had become so absorbed in my discussion with Hubbs, so shocked by my rising and disastrous insight into the man that I had literally, as I have already said, forgotten her. For a moment, it was like looking at a stranger; I had to study her to remember who she was, and then everything came flooding back. Stimulus: response. The ant intelligence must have worked in that fashion, triggered by various extrinsic stimuli. We were turning into ants ourselves. “ Get her out of here,” Hubbs said again.

“No,” I said. “She’s going to stay.”

Kendra walked cautiously over to the shelves, stared at the equipment on them. She made no move to seize anything. Hubbs smiled awkwardly.

“I can’t argue with you, James,” he said. “If it comes to a question of sheer, physical force you can, of course, get your way. Only the will is important, that and the work. All right. Let her stay.”

“You didn’t want her out,” I said reasonably enough. “You could have called the helicopter, but you didn’t. So you obviously want her here. She can’t be any more dangerous to us than the ants.”

Hubbs thought about this for a while. “In other words,” he said, “she is part of the circumstances of the challenge.”

“Exactly. Why not?”

“Why not indeed? All right,” he said almost cheerfully, going over to the air-conditioning unit. “The temperature is now up to eighty-seven. I will reset the controls so that we may begin.”

“Begin what?”

“Our experiments, of course,” he said and began to fiddle with the controls. I walked over to Kendra, who was standing there quietly, hands folded in front of her in a posture of absolute submissiveness. She looked up and smiled at me, and I realized her helplessness to say nothing of my own feelings that had muddled rapidly from infatuation to a kind of protectiveness even more dangerous to both of us. I wanted to touch her, but this, of course, was unthinkable in front of Hubbs. I knew that the man was mad. The poison from the ant bite had probably worked its way all through his system. Still, mad or sane, the experiments would have to continue. Wouldn’t they? Eventually, I thought, the base might get curious on its own and send out a ’copter. We were spending a good deal of money after all, and they had already generated much anxiety on that score. It might only be a few more minutes or hours with the crazed Hubbs, and then we would return to base together. At least this was how I had worked things out in my mind. It seemed a wonderful way of looking at the matter.

“Kendra,” I said, feeling pedagogic, all the feeling rushing outside in an impulse to give her vast amounts of information. “Would you like to see what we’re doing here?”

“Yes,” she said uncertainly. She might as well have said no. I could understand her problem. Doubtless she had taken the two of us for insane; still, what was her alternative to staying here? She could hardly run screaming into the desert, and after what she had been through last night, the station might have been a haven for her.

“I’ll show you,” I said. “This is all very interesting. We’re in a battle with some very intelligent and malevolent ants.”

“Which,” Hubbs burbled, struggling with the dials, “we’re going to win, of course, because our intelligence is far more sophisticated.”

“Oh,” she said. “Of course we’ll win. With two people like you commanding the battle, how could we possibly lose?”

I looked at her.

Her eyes were shrouded.

Kendra watched while the two of them went through their next experiment. She assumed that it was an experiment, in any event, that was what they told her they were doing, and she was not going to argue with them. She was not going to argue with anyone anymore, least of all these two. She had come to the conclusion that they were insane. The younger one, Lesko, was attractive and was insane in a rather nice way, whereas Hubbs, the senior man, was simply crazed, but neither one of them was at all near sanity. But because she was locked up in this station with them, apparently without any hope of escape, she would have to cooperate with them. Humor. Humor them. Humor crazy people. She was pretty sure that this was the right tactic anywhere. She had read someplace that the best tactic with the insane was to go along with their obsessions, agree with what they were saying, not to oppose them in any way, but rather try to enter their fantasies. She would try to do this. What were they after? What did these men want?

They wanted, she guessed, to destroy the ants. That was a reasonable thing for them to try to do; yet between the ants and Hubbs, there was no saying as to which was the more dangerous. The ants, she supposed. The ants would be. They had killed her grandparents and their hired man, had ravaged the desert, killed her horse, changed the entire context of her life… yes, indeed, the ants were dangerous. They had to be respected, and what was going on here was obviously not a game of any sort.

But these men were dangerous too. She knew that it was Hubbs who in a way had been responsible for all the deaths by firing at the towers. If he had left the towers alone, the ants would not have been maddened, they would not have attacked, and her grandparents and Clete would still be alive. But then again, if he had not attacked, the ants might simply have waited for a better time to launch their deadly little waves of attention.