Barry Malzberg - Phase IV

he said. “I can’t seem to get on my boots.”

I looked at him and some comprehension of the absurdity of our position must have worked its way into me before it departed again. I went back to the monitor. “Please, James,” he said. “You’re going to have to give me some help with these; I can’t go bootless onto the desert. They’ll attack me.”

“You know?” I said, looking at him, “you’re talking about going out of here, getting through that circle, tramping miles through the desert, destroying an ant colony full of malevolent, poisonous ants that are presided over by a monstrous queen… but you can’t even get your boots on.”

“James—”

“Sit down, Hubbs,” I said. “It won’t work. The only thing to do is to continue working on the area of communications and try to hit them either on the noise belt or with a message of some sort. That’s the only way—”

Hubbs snatched the paper out of my hands, crashed it, and threw it, trembling, against a wall. “No,” he said.

I could have killed him then, but it was only—I realized this instantly—what the ants wanted. It would have saved them the trouble. I sat there, gripping the sides of the chair and said again, “It’s hopeless, Hubbs.”

“No, it isn’t. I am going to show them. I will show them that man will not give in.” He was crying.

“Did I tell you?” I said, through his sobs. “I was able to figure out their first message. With Kendra’s help. Didn’t you hear? The circle is this place and the dot is you. They want you.”

“Or one of us.”

“Oh, no,” I said, shaking my head. I felt a manic certainty. “Kendra made that mistake and that’s why she’s lost out there somewhere. She thought that anyone would do. But it’s only you, Hubbs. It was you all the time. You’re our leader. How they respect you!”

“Then they’re going to have me,” Hubbs said.

He staggered back to his chair and tried once again to put his boots on.

Hopeless. The man, drained by delirium, shaken by obsession, could no longer function. He collapsed over himself, mumbling like an old man.

And something hit the windows.

It hit with a hard, spattering sound, opening into an aqueous rush. I looked out and saw that liquefied matter of some sort was striking us. The source seemed to be the mounds, but it was hard to tell. The monitor itself, the camera covered with the substance, had gone blank. A shrill keening began again. The patches hitting the windows were becoming darker. They looked like nothing more than liquefied human flesh.

Hubbs stood. He was not weaving. “That’s it,” he said. “There has to be an end to this. It will not go on any longer.” His voice was very steady. “Do you see it now, James?” he said. “You must help me.”

He pointed to his boots. The barrage had stopped; the desert hung clear before us like a painting. “Help me,” he said.

I helped him.

Through the monitor Lesko was able to follow Hubbs’s walk toward the mounds. He had wanted to go with him, but Hubbs had said no, this was ridiculous. “The girl is dead,” he said. “Don’t you know that, James? And if they kill the two of us then there will be no one left to defend humanity.

It’s only you and I against them now, James, and we must have at least two chances; we can’t let them have both of us at once. If nothing else, we’re buying time. I will go and if I don’t succeed, you can try it your way.

Goodbye, James. This is the way it must be,” and then Hubbs had gone quickly through the hatch. Lesko had let him go. The point was that the man was absolutely right. Kendra was dead and all of the others were dead and the ants had won everything… but they still had the two wild cards, their individual chances to destroy the mounds of the queen, and he could not halve their chances. He let the old man go. He watched through the monitor.

Hubbs walked through the desert, confident for a while, his stride steadier than it had been in days. In his hand, he carried the dead grenade launcher, large enough, heavy enough, blunt enough to strike the queen’s mound a killing blow… if he could get there. He waved once or twice, looking almost jaunty, the monitor picking him up in the colors of blood that still streaked the lenses of the camera, and Lesko, his hands curled, studying the monitor intently, allowed himself the wild thought that Hubbs was going to get through… that the man was going to make it; he would destroy the queen’s mound and with it the network of the colony. It was a tribute to humanity, that was all it was, this wracked, broken, trembling man, suffering from fever and a fatal infection, was still alive, still out there on the desert… moving implacably toward his goal. It’s man! Lesko found himself thinking; it’s the unconquerable human spirit, and what indeed was there to say about a man like Hubbs who had placed loyalty to his fellow creatures above loyalty to himself, heading out there bravely, the last defender as it were of millions of years of evolution, and Lesko thought he was going to make it, going to make it, Hubbs waved at him again through the monitor and then stopped, pointing downward. He had reached the mound. He raised the grenade launcher over his head.

Lesko held his breath.

And a swarm of ants came out of the mound.

They were red and green, these ants, the monitor, rushing in to track them, showing that telltale spot of yellow on their bellies, that luminiscent pearl of immunity, and as they came out of the mound in a swarm, Lesko realized that he had underestimated their numbers all of the time; not only had they misjudged the situation entirely… they had misjudged the number of queens. There was not one queen; there were probably a hundred nestled under the surfaces of the desert… and then he gave a great despairing cry because the ants were all over Hubbs now, hundreds, thousands, millions, swarming and thrusting their bodies at him until he was a solid jellied mass of green and red, and then the thing on the sands trembled and fell, the launcher also, ant-covered, falling away from him, and as Lesko watched in a kind of suspended attention, feeling linked to the monitor as if he were merely another ingredient within it, the mass on the ground ceased to struggle and then diminished. The bulge of red and green became a carpet of red and green.

The ants were feeding.

And as he watched, they consumed Hubbs.

In the last of the blood streaks, he saw the ants lying satiated on the desert as far as the monitor’s range could cover, a solid, beautiful layer of green and red under the twinkling stars, and he cried then: did not cry for Hubbs so much—because Hubbs was already dead, had been dead from the moment he had left the hatchway, if not long before that—but for millions of years of evolution that everyone had believed in, poor stricken creatures, as being the will of Creation and Eternity… and which were now, it was quite obvious to Lesko, merely a twitch, an aberration, a little mistake that was being rectified cosmically before it could have gotten out of hand.

“Damn you!” he said. “Goddamn you all!” But he knew what he was talking of, and it was not the ants, and because it was the only responsible posture after all, he found himself laughing as the monitor showed the towers seal up and begin to grow at an enormous rate as if waving in triumph.….

Lesko’s Diary: But even now as I sit here, writing the last of this, bringing it up to date and beyond, working out the final moves, I would still like to believe, and this is the paramount insanity, that given time, we could have come to some kind of understanding. They cannot regard us so cheaply. We may have been a mistake, but we were an elegant mistake, goddamn it. We had our points. We had things to say in our behalf. Even if it was only a misjudgment, something gone wrong in the flux of things, and it should have been the ants all the time… there were the pyramids, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Einstein, quasar theory, the Coronado Institute, the very species of intelligence that has, at the least, enabled me to identify exactly what has happened to us….