Barry Malzberg - Phase IV

“All right,” Kendra said from the corner. “Leave him alone.”

“Leave him alone?” Lesko said. Cool air was pouring through the laboratory; the thermometer had already dropped to below ninety. He felt the sweat beginning to dry on his forehead in streaks. “I wish I could leave him alone. Don’t you know that he’s responsible—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Kendra said. “Don’t you see that? It doesn’t matter who’s responsible for anything; we’ve got to cooperate with one another.

Otherwise we’ll never—”

“That’s a nice attitude,” Lesko said. “That’s really very touching. It’s just your family—”

“Please, Jim,” she said, quietly. Her eyes were intense; she seemed more self-possessed however than at any moment since he had seen her at the ranch. “You don’t understand that it’s all behind us now. Those things want to kill us. Unless we work together they’re going to.”

“She’s right,” Hubbs said in a small voice. “You must listen to her. But she’s wrong too. They don’t want to kill us.”

The computer cut in with a whop! Lesko heard the chattering. “They don’t?” he said. “What do they want to do, then? Change our life-style?”

Hubbs, holding his wrist, looked at Lesko levelly, seriously. “I think that that’s exactly what they want to do,” he said. “If they had wanted to kill us, they could have done it at any time for the last day. Don’t you realize that?”

“I don’t realize anything,” Lesko said. “I suggest that we take the jeep and try to get out of here. If we’re very lucky, we just might make a run for it—”

“You really think so, James?” Hubbs said weakly. “Look.”

They followed his finger pointing through the window. In the distance, they could see an object burning. A halo of black floated around the flames. Ants, of course. Burning ants.

“There’s the jeep,” Hubbs said.

“I told you,” said Kendra quietly. “We must live or die here. There’s nothing else to do.”

“So what do you suggest we do,” Lesko said to Hubbs. “You’re the senior man; you’re still in command. What do we do with them?”

“That’s quite clear,” Hubbs said. “We send them a message.”

Kendra and Lesko stared at him. He held their gaze. “Do you see anything else?” he said.

Kendra began to laugh desperately.

“I still think that we can reach some kind of accommodation,” Hubbs said.

Pain tore through him and as Lesko watched, he staggered.

Lesko’s Diary: We worked desperately to get the computer back into operation and to work out a code that might be comprehensible to the ants. Three days ago, make it two, I would have thought this insanity: there we were, two Ph.D.s stranded in the desert, trying to strike up a conversation with a colony of ants who we believed to be intelligent. But Kendra’s analysis of the situation had been completely correct; we were going to live or die in the station, and we could only deal on the terms we had left. Flight was hopeless, insecticide too laborious (the ants would only find an immune reaction), and communication with base had been destroyed. We could hope, and in fact did, that base would, after a while, become curious about the break in communication and would send out at least one helicopter, better yet a rescue team… but I knew base; I knew bureaucracy and levels of approval, and it was clear to me that by the time a request for emergency assistance had been bucked up the various levels of the chain of command and then bucked down again, several days might have elapsed. We were, after all, doing independent research, although government financed (this discrimination was important to the bureaucrats if not to me), and Hubbs’s unremitting hostility to base would not count well for us. It could not possibly; their most understandable reaction would be to meet his hostility with apathy. If he wanted not to be bothered, then they would not bother him, and so on. So Kendra was right. She had been the first of us to see it. It was our world in that station; everything depended on us.

It depended upon us because I was increasingly convinced that the ants had far more in mind (and by this time I fell into Hubbs’s pattern of thinking quite easily; this was a “mind” with which we were dealing) than simply overrunning the station. They could have done that at will days ago; for that matter, if this colony had chosen, it could have made our mission impossible simply by rendering the desert uninhabitable. They had let us come to Paradise City just as they had allowed the residents to flee. It was their terrain.

But what did they want us for? For what purpose had they allowed us to set up the station on the desert, prepare our computers, drop the insecticide? I had an idea that I kept to myself, seeing no point or purpose in bringing it to Hubbs’s attention. He was a sick man and this would only have made him sicker; either that or it had occurred to him already, and he certainly would not need to hear it from me. That idea was quite simply that the ants needed our presence because they wanted sample specimens and that through their analysis of us, to say nothing of their analysis of the three corpses littering the desert floor, they would arrive at a clear, methodical plan of attack.

Not to think of it. Not to think of it. What I want to make clear is that all during the events that I am describing I did my best to swing clear of hysteria, to carve panic out of my mind, to function at a pure level of scientific detachment. If I had allowed the thoughts I am describing to enter into the forefront of consciousness, I am quite certain that none of us would have been able to have functioned at all… but I did not, much of this occurred to me only after the fact, when I realized also that I had probably been dwelling on it subconsciously for a long time.

The instant task was all that had mattered. I shared Hubbs’s obsession: we had to establish some kind of communication with the ants. If we could communicate with them, divine their purposes, find some one-to-one correspondence between language and activity, we might be able, if not to understand them, to at least find some point of weakness.

We might even—this insane thought was rattling around, I admit, almost throughout—have the equivalent of a couple of Scotches together and discuss our mutual problems as any group of good fellows might. We had common interests, did we not? We were living tenants of the earth together; that miserable mudball in an exiled section of the Milky Way.

Surely ant and man could coexist peacefully as against the greater common enemy without. We might even be able to voyage to the stars together, the ants developing a communications network that would implement our vast technological resources. Drink up, fellows; next round is on me. I am sure that I will be forgiven for this stream of consciousness; it could have happened to the best of you.

Hubbs became a little stronger as we worked on the communications problem. Kendra, meanwhile, left the laboratory to work in the galley. She seemed to have found her own means of dealing with the situation by placing herself into a domestic situation; she would do housekeeping while the men concentrated on the problems at hand. This did not concern me in the least; I was able to envy the profound instinct and sense of structure that she was able to bring to this. If women did the housekeeping and men the breadwinning in the ancient way, then surely the ants would relent. It was—I will admit this—pleasant to have her out of the way as we worked, because my feelings toward her had reached such a level of intensity by now that her mere presence was disturbing. Madness, perhaps, to entertain lustful thoughts while in the midst of what might have been a world crisis… but this is our nature, or at least my nature, God forgive me. Individual evolution, the primacy of the ego. It would have been better to have been a gestalt.