Barry Malzberg - Phase IV

“Wind and weather did most of it, I would say. Call it just another desert development that didn’t develop.”

“And then the ants finished it off?”

“We’ll have to find out about that,” Hubbs said. “I would say that there was more panic in the flight of the residents than actual, ah, menace presented by the ants. The landscape would contribute to it, of course.” He shrugged. “This couldn’t have been a very tasteful environment, Paradise City.”

“I don’t know,” Lesko said. “This house hasn’t simply fallen away. It’s been attacked.”

“Um,” Hubbs said and took out a small camera to almost absently shoot a couple of standing pictures of the house. “Mr. Lesko, you did your major work in applying game theory to the language of killer whales, is that correct?”

“Well,” Lesko said, “it proved to be cheaper than applying it to roulette.”

“Did you actually make any positive contact with the whales?” Hubbs said, toying with the camera, then replacing it. “Or was it—”

“Only with the emotionally disturbed.”

“Oh?” Hubbs said. “How were you able to determine the emotional disturbance?”

“We talked about it a bit. They opened their hearts to me.”

Hubbs’s features broke open into an uneasy smile. “I assume you’re joking,” he said.

Lesko felt a flush building around his cheeks. Hubbs was a small man, not only physically but at a certain level of emotional vulnerability. It was not so much, he saw, that Hubbs was possessed by abstraction as that almost everything else frightened him. He did not know the language of contact… but this was as much Lesko’s fault because he was only one of a number of people who had never tried to teach him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just a pencil and paper guy. I wouldn’t know the front end of a whale from a… well, from a hole in the ground.”

Hubbs turned and walked the other way, picking his way through the ruined foundation. Lesko followed him, staring at the towers. There seemed to be a certain light —

“I know that games are your business, James,” Hubbs said uncomfortably. “You play them well and that’s why you’re here. We’re going to apply game theory to see if we can establish some kind of communication. But this is a very serious business.”

“Isn’t that the best kind?” Lesko said, fascinated by the towers. He could not decide exactly what the material was; it was, he suspected, of a chemical compound that no one on earth could fabricate. It was dirt, a kind of closely packed silt, irregular up and down the columns, but the design, he thought, had an odd rigidity, the angles were sculptured, coming together at certain points in an odd and precise honeycomb. And now that he looked through the dazzle of the sun, was it possible that the towers seemed to have faces —

Suddenly he wanted to look at them no more. Hubbs had gone ahead.

Lesko scurried to keep up with him.

Lesko’s Diary: But it turns out that there are a few people here—besides Hubbs and myself that is to say—and one of them, no less, is an attractive girl. It would be nice to think that this is a sign that things are looking up, but I do not think that they are looking up at all; rather, the fact that there are people holding out on this terrain has somehow raised the stakes. It is not just Hubbs and myself now. It is not a mere research project. There is, so to speak, a human element, and meanwhile things are moving so rapidly already that I fear they may be out of control.

After we left the towers, getting back into the jeep, I felt somewhat better. It is hard to express exactly what power they exert upon me, but there is a kind of profound unease here, something perhaps better unphrased here in what I originally intended to be a scientific journal chock-full of routine observations on the progress of the project. Sufficient to say that I do not think that those towers were made by anything human, but I do not, then, know what made them nor do I want to find out. Moving away from them in the jeep I felt better, better yet because of my insight into Hubbs. I could work with this man now because I thought I understood him. Similarly with whales.

Driving toward the station a few miles from the towers, we saw airborne helicopters dangling cargo supplies. They flew low and men stretched out to wave their hands at us. The hardware was coming.

Computer, provisions, insulation, wiring… the station would be converted into an impregnable, functioning, and military base within twenty-four hours, and this made me feel almost cheerful. My mood of depression seemed to lift in the singing and clattering of the engines, and I said to Hubbs, “If the people around here ran away because they saw what the ants were doing… then I wonder what the ants will do when they see what we’re doing.” And this was a cheerful thought; how could these creatures, even assuming a malevolence that we had no right whatsoever to assume, stand up against ordnance. Certainly there were a lot of them… but we had the firepower if necessary to annihilate every ant in the world. The only reason that they had survived from Cretaceous times is that they had posed no threat to man; if they had, they would have gone the way of the mammoth or for that matter the Neanderthal (that threatening subhuman presence that Cro-Magnon could not abide) and just be sure of that.

“Perhaps they’ll laugh,” Hubbs said with that strange seriousness of his.

I said, “That would show no sensitivity whatsoever,” and Hubbs grinned at that, the first time I had gotten through, by God. Then just as I thought that I had the situation under control and understood at last, Hubbs was staring out the jeep at what appeared to be clouds in the distance and said, “You know, there is someone still around here. Doesn’t that look like a tractor?”

Yes, it did look like a tractor. We drove toward a patch of desert where clouds of dust were being moved around by an elderly man in a large orange vehicle, pipe in his mouth, working on the patch of dirt with the maniacal singlemindedness of a Man Who Believes He Can Make A Difference, puffing foul clouds of smoke into the air from a pipe, humming to himself above the whine of machinery, so absorbed in his task that Hubbs had to lean on the horn with growing fury to finally attract his attention. Slowly, the man acknowledged us, took off his hat, waved, cut the machine with the aspect of a man who is living in a different kind of time, where chronology means nothing and only the instant moment counts, walked over to the tractor base, checked it out, then came to us nodding. Hubbs asked what the hell he was doing here, a reasonable question, although, of course, the man was not doing anything illegal.

(Hubbs has a passionate sense of order; if he hears that a place is abandoned, then by God it ought to be abandoned.) The man said that he was digging a ditch and then motioned back in the distance where we could see a farmhouse, little curls of smoke coming from this pastoral refuge, “Name’s Clete,” he said like a character in some half-forgotten rustic play. “I work for Eldridge over there. Come on,” he said, “you want to see Eldridge?”

I guess we did. Eldridge seemed to be worth seeing; if ever a man believed that life must go on and be damned if he would be driven from routine, it would have to be this one. Clete motioned us out of the jeep and led us down rows and rows of plants toward the farmhouse. In a ravine on the way, we saw a dead sheep lying amidst vegetation. Clete paused, said he wanted to show us something, and then, going to the sheep, exposed the neck through the folds and showed us the four small holes there. He did this in a horrid, matter-of-fact way, and I thought I would retch, but Hubbs was fascinated. He forgot, almost at once, that the presence of Clete or Eldridge was somehow a personal attack upon the project and joined Clete at the animal, stroking away at the neck folds. “Remarkable,” he said when they had returned and we had continued toward the farmhouse. “There are several African ants that will attack anything… insect, animal, anything at all that threatens their food supply. The smell triggers the behavior.” He continued chattering to me as we walked on, Clete leading and poking through the vegetation. I failed to detect any more sheep corpses, which disconcerted me not a bit.