Barry Malzberg - Phase IV

I looked at the monitor. Hubbs was waving and screaming, probably in triumph, although hard to tell, gesturing wildly in that direction. On the monitor, the mounds, already crumpled, were now pulsating, as if something within them were in agony, and caused them to quiver as if they were living bodies, and the monitor, faithfully tracked into the motion, showed everything, the heaving, splitting apart, and final slow opening. Something porous and gelatinous came from the mounds and began to work its way across the desert. My God, Hubbs screamed, the sons of bitches are alive, goddamnit, and it certainly looked that way; it looked as if not only the mounds but the noise had acquired life and was now moving in agony across the desert floor. The piercing went higher and higher; it was an agony in the ears that traced its way through the coils of the body to the bowels, the groin; I felt as if the noise were tearing me apart, and if it was doing this to me, what was it doing to the ants? I thought this was the answer; this had been the answer all the time, and we too stupid to see it, but see it we now had: the creatures could be destroyed by the sheer force of noise; it broke open their communications network and—because they worked at the auditory level to communicate with one another—they were abnormally sensitive to sound. We had them: we had them, I thought and gave one triumphant scream that was inaudible over the greater sounds in the laboratory, looking at the monitor on which the shriveled and blackened bodies of ants were now passing in panorama. We had created a charnel house of the desert, and the monitor had gone crazy, tracking movement after movement, but it could not keep up with the corpses of the ants, heaped in little piles now: they were scurrying from a thousand outlets; from a million secret little passages, the ants were being driven by sound to light… and I screamed yet again, turning to Hubbs, and realized only then that he was bellowing and pointing frantically at the air-conditioning unit above us. His throat and mouth were working, but it was impossible to hear him; all that I could do was to follow his pointing finger, and then I realized that he must have been screaming for thirty seconds or more, but I was so caught up in my own ecstasy I heard nothing.

WARNING MALFUNCTION read jagged letters on a strip above the unit. I had never seen this before, never even been aware that the emergency unit in the computer would have such a signal, but there it was, there it was: WARNING MALFUNCTION, and even as I followed Hubbs’s pointing, shaking finger, the letters glowed and then shifted.

CIRCUITS OVERHEATING.

The circuits overheated. They had somehow contrived to knock down the air conditioner. Feebly, Hubbs was trying to do something with the unit, throw in one or another series of switches, but he could not work one-handed. His injured hand was being held in straight to his belly, and he was obviously in terrible pain, but I could hear nothing. The sound was still oscillating, working its way up the last cycles toward inaudibility, and it was now a deep and profound pain that I felt, a pain that worked out from the network of the body into some generalized and indefinable sense of woe that racked me: I wanted to cry, but all the time I was fighting with myself, forcing myself; I went to the unit, pushed Hubbs out of the way, and tried to work with the switches myself. There was some kind of safety mechanism in here. I did not know where or what it was—my instructions had included little in relation to the equipment itself—but I was still fighting, fighting to find the switch that would throw in the emergency cooling unit and save us when—

—The unit exploded. The air conditioner literally blew up against my hand, little fibers and filters of smoke ripping out with a sound like tearing cloth, and I was able to hear this quite well, was able to hear everything because the screaming white noise stopped instantly. Of course it would, I thought; the sound generator was hooked into the air conditioner itself, for without the proper coolant the terrific heat generated by its functioning would cut off immediately. Be grateful, I thought, be grateful enough that it did stop, because the sound of the white noise unit under malfunction would probably have been quite enough to blow open an eardrum.

I looked over at Hubbs. He was weeping, holding his injured hand, frankly given over to sobs and little empty explosions of sound that were both more terrible and human than anything I had ever seen from the man. “I can’t stand it,” he was saying. “I just can’t stand it anymore. They know everything; they know everything about us.” But I had no time to comfort him, no time to deal with him on any level. There was worse trouble. The abused air conditioner was suddenly on fire, throwing its deadly little fingers of flame into the air, and Kendra was suddenly by my side, a blanket in her hand. Together, we smothered the flames. Her motions were quick, efficient, instinctive: she worked with that sheer economy of motion and absence of panic that comes from the deepest part. It was stunning to see her work; I was amazed that after all she had been through she was able to deal with a situation in this fashion… and then, painfully it occurred to me as she helped me to wrap the blanket tightly against the heaving parts of the gutted unit… of course, of course she would be able to do this. There was no surprise in it at all. It was the first time, since the coming of the ants, that she had been able to use the knowledge she had.

And that was more frightening than anything.

Because the ants had one by one stripped all of us of our weapons.

Everything in the station came in duplicate. Researchers, computers, monitors. Air conditioning and reserve. So after Lesko had gotten the fire extinguished in the gutted unit, he was able, under Hubbs’s direction, to get the auxiliary started. Hubbs was too weak to perform the necessary splicing maneuvers himself. He stood there, sweat coming off his face in little, open rivers, looking at Lesko as he worked. The girl had gone to lean against a wall where she looked at them, her face soot-blackened, her eyes staring points of light, apparently too tired to talk. Hubbs no longer resented her. She was part of the environment with which they had to work, that was all. The ants were inimical to them and so was the girl; that was about the way that Hubbs’s mind had calculated it, Lesko decided. Of course it was possible that he misunderstood the man, but he doubted it. He did not think there were any incalculables at all.

“I can’t believe it,” Hubbs said. He held his pained hand, looked out the window at the bodies of ants heaped like ash on the desert. “To know our plans, our strengths, our weaknesses… even the machine on which everything else depended. How could they know?”

“They knew,” Lesko said.

“It’s just not possible.”

“It’s completely possible,” Lesko said. “Weren’t you the one who predicated that they were intelligent, that they communicated with one another, that they controlled this situation? You were right.” He finished a splice, turned a switch, and the auxiliary unit whined faintly, then began to catch. He felt cool air working its tentative way across the laboratory. “I wonder how long before they get to this one,” he said.

“Stop it!” Hubbs said. His face was white. “Don’t say that! We must not—”

“Be reasonable,” Lesko said quietly. “You were the one who understood this from the first, weren’t you? You said that they were an intelligent, functioning force, that we could develop communication with them, that they were probably aware of our purpose and our moves. You canceled out communications with base because you wanted to study them without interference. You wouldn’t summon a helicopter because it might have gotten between you and your studies and the greater glory of the Coronado Institute.” He looked at Hubbs closely; the man seemed to be dwindling under what Lesko was saying. All right. He deserved it. There was neither pity nor guilt; only implication. “You’ve sustained a bite, the extent of which we can’t even determine because there’s no way to get to medical aid. Also because of your desire to study without interference. There are three people dead out on the desert—”