Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

“There’s no need to explain.” Flopper smiled, a trace of sadness on his face. “Some of our very best golfers have the same trouble.”

“I was lying in bed, reading, and I saw it at the foot of my bed. I had the club—”

“I understand.” Fitzgerald nodded.

“You avoid looking at it,” Flopper said.

“It turns my stomach.”

“Yes—yes, I suppose so.”

Lieberman said, “Would you mind telling us why you killed it, Mr. Morgan?”

“Why?”

“Yes—why?”

“I don’t understand you,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re driving at.”

“Sit down, please, Mr. Morgan.” Flopper nodded. “Try to relax. I’m sure this has been very tiring.”

“I still haven’t slept. I want a chance to dream before I say how trying.”

“We are not trying to upset you, Mr. Morgan,” Lieberman said. “We do feel, however, that certain aspects of this are very important. That is why I am asking you why you killed it. You must have had a reason. Did it seem about to attack you?”

“No.”

“Or make any sudden motion toward you?”

“No. It was just there.”

“Then why?”

“This is to no purpose,” Fitzgerald put in. “We know why he killed it.”

“Do you?”

“The answer is very simple, Mr. Morgan. You killed it because you are a human being.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Do you understand?”

“No, I don’t.”

‘Then why did you kill it?” Flopper put in.

“I was scared to death. I still am, to tell the truth.”

Lieberman said, “You are an intelligent man, Mr. Morgan. Let me show you something.” He then opened the doors of one of the wall cupboards, and there were eight jars of formaldehyde and in each jar a specimen like mine —and in each case mutilated by the violence of its death. I said nothing. I just stared.

Lieberman closed the cupboard doors. “All in five days.” He shrugged.

“A new race of ants,” I whispered stupidly.

“No. They’re not ants. Come here!” He motioned me to the desk and the other two joined me. Lieberman took a set of dissecting instruments out of his drawer, used one to turn the thing over and then pointed to the underpart of what would be the thorax in an insect.

“That looks like part of him, doesn’t it, Mr. Morgan?”

“Yes, it does.”

Using two of the tools, he found a fissure and pried the bottom apart. It came open like the belly of a bomber; it was a pocket, a pouch, a receptacle that the thing wore, and in it were four beautiful little tools or instruments or weapons, each about an inch and a half long. They were beautiful the way any object of functional purpose and loving creation is beautiful—the way the creature itself would have been beautiful, had it not been an insect and myself a man. Using tweezers, Lieberman took each instrument off the brackets that held it, offering each to me. I took each one, felt it, examined it, and put it down.

I had to look at the ant now, and I realized that I had not truly looked at it before. We don’t look carefully at a thing that is horrible or repugnant to us. You can’t look at anything through a screen of hatred. But now the hatred and the fear was dilute, and as I looked, I realized it was not an ant. It was nothing that I had ever seen or dreamed of.

All three men were watching me, and suddenly I was on the defensive. “I didn’t know! What do you expect when you see an insect that size?”

Lieberman nodded.

“What in the name of God is it?”

From his desk, Lieberman produced a bottle and four small glasses. He poured and we drank it neat. I would not have expected him to keep good Scotch in his desk.

“We don’t know,” Flopper said. “We don’t know what it is.”

Lieberman pointed to the broken skull, from which a white substance oozed. “Brain material—a great deal of it.”

“It could be a very intelligent creature,” Flopper nodded.

Lieberman said, “It is an insect in developmental structure. We know very little about intelligence in our insects. It’s not the same as what we call intelligence. It’s a collective phenomenon—as if you were to think of the component parts of our bodies. Each part is alive, but the intelligence is a result of the whole. If that same pattern were to extend to creatures like this one—”

“Suppose it were?”

“What?”

“The kind of collective intelligence you were talking about.”

“Oh? Well, I couldn’t say. It would be something beyond our wildest dreams. To us—well, what we are to an ordinary ant.”

“I don’t believe that,” I said shortly, and Fitzgerald, the government man, told me quietly, “Neither do we. We guess.”

“If it’s that intelligent, why didn’t it use one of those weapons on me?”

“Would that be a mark of intelligence?” Flopper asked mildly.

“Perhaps none of these are weapons,” Lieberman said.

“Don’t you know? Didn’t the others carry instruments?”

“They did,” Fitzgerald said shortly.

“Why? What were they?”

“We don’t know,” Lieberman said.

“But you can find out. We have scientists, engineers— good God, this is an age of fantastic instruments. Have them taken apart!”

“We have.”

“Then what have you found out?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” I said, “that you can find out nothing about these instruments—what they are, how they work, what their purpose is?”

“Exactly.” Flopper nodded. “Nothing, Mr. Morgan. They are meaningless to the finest engineers and technicians in the United States. You know the old story—suppose you gave a radio to Aristotle? What would he do with it? Where would he find power? And what would he receive with no one to send? It is not that these instruments are complex. They are actually very simple. We simply have no idea of what they can or should do.”

“But there must be a weapon of some kind.”

“Why?” Lieberman demanded. “Look at yourself, Mr. Morgan—a cultured and intelligent man, yet you cannot conceive of a mentality that does not include weapons as a prime necessity. Yet a weapon is an unusual thing, Mr. Morgan. An instrument of murder. We don’t think that way, because the weapon has become the symbol of the world we inhabit. Is that civilized, Mr. Morgan? Or is the weapon and civilization in the ultimate sense incompatible? Can you imagine a mentality to which the concept of murder is impossible—or let me say absent. We see everything through our own subjectivity. Why shouldn’t some other—this creature, for example—see the process of mentation out of his subjectivity? So he approaches a creature of our world —and he is slain. Why? What explanation? Tell me, Mr. Morgan, what conceivable explanation could we offer a wholly rational creature for this—” pointing to the thing on his desk. “I ask you most seriously. What explanation?”

“An accident?” I muttered.

“And the eight jars in my cupboard? Eight accidents?”

“I think, Dr. Lieberman,” Fitzgerald said, “that you can go a little too far in that direction.”

“Yes, you would think so. It’s a part of your own background. Mine is as a scientist. As a scientist, I try to be rational when I can. The creation of a structure of good and evil, or what we call morality and ethics, is a function of intelligence—and unquestionably the ultimate evil may be the destruction of conscious intelligence. That is why, so long ago, we at least recognized the injunction, ‘Thou shalt not kill!’ even if we never gave more than lip service to it. But to a collective intelligence, such as this might be a part of, the concept of murder would be monstrous beyond thought.”