Barry Malzberg - Phase IV

One side of the station is close to the towers, no more than fifty yards, I would suspect, and has an excellent if rather dismal view of them.

Through the plastic and shading of the windows, they do not appear nearly so ominous; the peculiar quality of light and graining that so disturbs me is filtered out… but they are large, they are very large, and I cannot escape the feeling, somehow, that they are still growing. The computer installation, of course, is now looking out on the towers, and this evening, for lack of anything better to do (I may be a game theorist, but I cannot abide solitaire, cryptograms, crossword puzzles, chess problems, or any of the million devices men use to avoid time; I would rather commit myself fully to suffering), I went into the installation and I found Hubbs, looking acutely frustrated, working over the computer. As he turned toward me, I saw his face showed far more expression and anger than I might have judged, and his eyes were absolutely bleak. It occurred to me that he was infuriated, and this time with no abstraction; it was the ant colony itself that was enraging Hubbs. Certainly no human could bring him to the level of loathing that these ants had. He did not even greet me; he simply took my entrance as inevitable at that time. “Can you believe this?” he said, pointing above him to a transmitter hooked in to the corps of engineers. “They want an itinerary, of all the damned things.”

“There has already been an overrun,” a voice said over the transmitter, as filtered out and dead through the machinery as the color of the towers through glaze. “And that overrun averages out at thirty-six percent when projected over the course of the total program. The comptroller would like to get the final figure before the fiscal period ends on the fourteenth.”

Hubbs picked up a microphone and pressed a button. “I’m sorry, this is not a precise business,” he said. He took his finger off the button and said to me, “Maybe you’d like to talk to them. You might have powers of reasoning that are beyond me.”

“You’ve got to give us an estimate,” the implacable voice said. “Surely you can do that, no?”

“We cannot,” Hubbs said with great weariness, holding the microphone as if it weighed several pounds, “study these ants until they make an appearance.”

“Ah,” the voice said. “Then can we put you down for ten days more? A week? This is a matter of getting a proper cost-estimate. You must realize that overrides are budgetary calculations that simply must be integrated at every step of the line. We cannot arrange for an override unless—”

“Listen,” Hubbs said, emotion flooding his voice. I felt sympathy for him, but not a great deal as I looked past him out at the towers, soft now in the sunset. If only they would go away, if only the accursed ants would come out, if only the desert would explode. Kendra kiss me… this was not a profitable course of speculation. “This is not a controlled experiment,” Hubbs was saying. “Our best judgment indicates another occurrence in this area is highly probable. But we cannot command the ants to appear. We have not established communication with them.”

“Well,” the voice said, “is there something that you might be able to do to hurry them up?”

Hubbs held the microphone and looked up at the transmitter for a while with a curiously calculating expression. “We’ve been thinking about that,” he said.

“You know there’s some concern over possible outbreaks in other areas,” the transmitter said.

“Yes,” Hubbs said. His features coalesced; abruptly he looked rather determined. “I think that my associate, Mr. Lesko, might have something to say to you,” he said and passed the microphone over to me. Then he reached above the computer, took something off a shelf… and, opening the near door, walked out into the desert.

“What is this?” the voice said. “What is going on there? Mr. Lesko?” But all I could do was stand there, microphone in hand, rather dumfounded I must admit and also possessed with a sudden, exact understanding of what Hubbs was going to do. “Wait a minute,” I said into the microphone and then realized that I had forgotten to press the button. “Just wait a minute,” I said, this time speaking into it, and then I flung the microphone from myself with some force, feeling a dread that went beyond even the possibility of verbalization, and sprinted out into the night, the transmitter yammering, the stylus of the computer twitching out its odd little signals and there—

—I saw Hubbs holding a hand-grenade launcher, and even as I ran toward him he fired off the first egg-shaped missile toward the near tower.

The grenade hit high, one or two feet from the top, and instantly there was fire and fragmentation; in that fire a halo of splinters and then the tower was open, the top of it toppling behind to the sand, and from the tower a blackness of ooze was coming —

“There,” Hubbs said, his voice curiously dead and controlled. “That should hasten things right along. You see,” he said turning to me calmly, the grenade launcher held easily at his side, he might have been a man in a bar holding a drink and calmly, dispassionately discussing the events of the day, “they’re quite right back at the base, despite the fact that their attitudes are patronizing. We can’t go on this way, Lesko, we’ve got to get some action out of this, because I have no intention of spending the rest of my life in the desert waiting for those filthy little cunning buggers to pick their time and place. We’re men, we make our own conditions,” and he raised the launcher again and got off another quick shot toward the open space of the tower. More shards in the air, more toppling, and then the ooze, heaving like a river, was pouring down the sides.

My first instinct was that Hubbs had gone entirely mad, but in an acceleration of time and insight, looking at the horror pouring out of there, I became aware that he was not mad, not at all. He had only done a logical, reasonable thing to bring events to confrontation… and if, in some way, the ants were observing us, charting our patterns, then he had been particularly cunning in seizing the launcher and making a frontal attack without any preparation whatsoever. It was the kind of random activity that in game theory is absolutely compelling; in just such a way can an amateur occasionally beat a chess master or at least seriously menace him… by making the wrong moves, by not being predictable.

Staring at what was coming out of the towers as Hubbs fired one more shot, I found myself admiring the man; he was not such a dead, decayed abstraction after all, but rather one of a certain force and courage that had led him to perform precisely that act that I would have if I had had the authority… and the imagination. Hubbs threw the launcher from him out into the desert and went back inside; I followed him. He closed the door and bolted it. Then he turned to me, his face happier than I had ever seen it, and he went back to the computer board.

“Now we’ll see some action,” he said.

Kendra must have been sleeping when it began, although later she could not think of it as sleep; rather it had been some dull, cylindrical passage of time, unconsciousness perhaps, no dreams, nothing but a traversal of fear (it had been like this for her since the ants came), and then she came fully awake to the screaming of her horse. The filly, tethered outside, was screaming as she had never heard it before; a human scream, a child’s scream, with a note of blood and terror in it that she could not, could never have associated with an animal. She was out of bed instantly, fighting with the window, tearing open the shade, and looking out there.