Barry Malzberg - Phase IV

Blinded, the rabbit rolled on the sands to free itself, but everywhere it rolled there were ants, they came into its ears, anus, nostrils, clambering within. The rabbit continued to twist on the sands, but a hundred ants raced through the snug caverns inside the rabbit’s body, biting, severing, tormenting… the spinal cord was severed with a thousand bites, and the rabbit lay paralyzed on the desert floor. Unblinking, its distended eyes looked up at the sun exploding before it.

The ants fed.

There was no wastage. They were very hungry, but the choicest parts were taken back to the queens.

Ants now teemed through that area of the Arizona desert, working out from the slabs in a fine spidery network. They were very busy and they needed no rest. Their life cycles were only a month, but the queens thriving on their diet, were spewing out a million a day now, and each of the ants was as careless of its survival as were the queens. There was no such thing as death for any of the ants because the intelligences resided in the slabs. The ants were merely extensions. They worked like fingers on the desert: patting, arranging, spreading. Occasionally they talked to one another without language. They gave one another commands.

Some kind of poisonous spray was thrown over them and several million died before the queens were able to breed immunology. These newer ants and the survivors who had been originally immune buried their dead.

The slabs, parched by sun, now rose higher, ten feet or more, giving room for the expanding queens. The sun had bleached them free of color, and they stood gray against the desert, reaching.

The queens felt imminence and made certain adjustments. All thus far had been preparation; now, inevitably, that time of preparation was done.

The enemy, heightened to awareness, was coming.

The queens sent out signals to the workers, who withdrew to safe positions. They waited.

The queens in their slabs mused.

Lesko’s Diary: Hubbs says that this is a relatively simple assignment; that some rearrangement in the ecosystem will have to be made and should not take us more than two weeks to find the problem and set the balance again, but I am not so sure of this. I do not like the situation.

Hubbs has been involved in pure research for too long; he is demoniac, possessed, at least this is my guess. He has manipulated abstractions for so long that it is as if personality has fallen away from the man—a thin, balding, obsessed fifty-year-old individual. He approaches what may be an ecological disaster as a simple problem in applied ecology and has to be a little mad. Of course it is possible that he is not at all mad and that I am overreacting. I have been on the pure research bit somewhat too long myself, and there is something about the behavior pattern of whales observed up close for eight months that could unstring a man of somewhat simpler psychological makeup than myself. Whales are so ponderous. What I need is a long rest, but I do not think that this expedition into the Arizona desert is quite the ticket.

Hubbs does. Hubbs’s optimism may be psychopathic, but it has the convincing nature of psychopathology. “Isn’t that interesting?” he said when he informed me back in San Francisco that I had been drafted as his assistant by the National Science Foundation… at his request. Ants being more viable than whales, I suppose.

“What we’ve seen in that desert in the last few months appears to be a complete breakdown of normal ecological checks and balances. The ants are multiplying like crazy out there because something is checking their natural enemies: mantises, spiders, gophers, coyotes. It must be a very strong breed of ants, eh Lesko? Eh?”

His eyes twinkled and this must have been the first time that it occurred to me he was mad. “Great panic, Lesko!” he went on. “Residents fleeing, homesteads abandoned, that entire patch of desert being left to an uncontrollable onslaught of ants! Like a science-fiction movie, wouldn’t you say? The ants are taking over! The invasion of the ant-people! Well,”

he said, returning to a somewhat more level tone of voice, “we’ll go out there and take a look at this. We’ve got a station, computer, equipment, and a great deal of insecticide. All in all, I think that we’ll take care of this invasion of the ant-people in two or three weeks, Lesko, and then you can return to your whales. You’ll appreciate the break from routine.”

I am not sure. I am just not so sure of this. Perhaps it is merely atavism, that ancient quality lurking in the back of all our minds—primitive dread, superstition, the Jungian subconscious I believe they call it—but the specter of ants taking over a section of the Arizona desert, driving people from their homes, apparently suspending all ecological data… this inspires dreams and intimations that I find quite difficult to handle, and recent nights have been long, parched exercises in nightmare. Of all the intelligences on this planet, of course, those of the ants are most foreign to us, and for that reason the most menacing… they simply do not think or behave as all other creatures do but on some level that our best researches can hardly verbalize. They are particles of subliminal intelligence, I suppose, incredibly earnest, very organized, always busy… and they are the only survivors (always excepting the roaches, which are an urban problem) from the Cretaceous age, and that must tell us something.

Dinosaurs, stegosauri, Neanderthals, mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, to say nothing of the geography of the poles themselves… all gone for millions of years. Yet the ants survive in almost the exact form that they had then. Should this teach us something? Yes, gentlemen, it should teach us something.

Hubbs laughs and says that there was always a fear of the ants taking over, and here, perhaps, in an obscure portion of the Southwest the little buggers are at last getting to the job. His laughter to me is insanity, because if this is true, and I do not think that Hubbs realizes this, we are all in very serious trouble. The entire network of man’s living pattern—speaking ecologically—is one that has gone in the opposite direction of ant intelligence and has now reached a great level of intricacy, verbalization, abstraction, interdependence. The ant intelligence, which is highly cooperative, entirely subvocal, and extremely organized could be malignant to us… if for some reason that intelligence turned against us.

Enough of this anxiety neurosis; it comes from being thirty-five years old, unmarried, too deep into abstraction myself, working too hard, thinking too much, needing a long rest. Needing a good woman. It may be that I see Hubbs so clearly and distrust him because he is a projection of myself as I may be in twenty years: pure, neurotic intelligence incapable of feeling, no grasp of metaphor. I have been too long with my whales. I should have gotten married years ago, but who, who, who would have me?

I am frightened.

“The evidence at hand,” Hubbs said, bouncing along in the Willys jeep, Lesko struggling with the wheel, trying to keep the overloaded vehicle straight on the negligible desert highway, “is a sudden and dramatic disappearance of several species of predator insect… principally mantises, beetles, millipedes, and spiders.”

“That’s right,” Lesko said. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “That much was made clear from the beginning.”

“Don’t interrupt me,” Hubbs said. “I want to lay this out for you very carefully. The hypothesis to be confirmed is an equally dramatic increase in the population of insects normally controlled by these predators. I refer to ants.”