by Jerry
“Those are the giant ants?” she finally said.
“I told you the truth.” He shook his head. “Not yet.”
“No kidding now,” she said.
“The following is a deliberate breach of national security,” he said, “so they tell me.” He raised his hands. “So what?” Chavez motioned toward the screens. “The maripunta apparently are mutating into a radically different form. It’s not an obvious physical change, not like in Them! It’s not by deliberate human agency, as with the bees. It may be through accidental human action—the Brazilian double-X nuclear station is suspected. We just don’t know. What we do understand is that certain internal regulators in the maripunta have gone crazy.”
“And they’re getting bigger?” She looked bewildered.
He shook his head violently. “Do you know the square-cube law? No? It’s a simple rule of nature. If an insect’s dimensions are doubled, its strength and the area of its breathing passages are increased by a factor of four. But the mass is multiplied by eight. After a certain point, and that point isn’t very high, the insect can’t move or breathe. It collapses under its own mass.”
“No giant ants?” she said.
“Not yet. Not exactly. The defective mechanism in the maripunta is one which controls the feeding and foraging phases. Ordinarily the ants—all the millions of them in a group—spend about two weeks in a nomadic phase. Then they alternate three weeks in place in a statary phase. That’s how it used to be. Now only the nomadic phase remains.”
“So they’re moving,” said Bridgewell. “North?” She sat with hands on knees. Her fingers moved as though with independent life.
“The maripunta are ravenous, breeding insanely, and headed our way. The fear is that, like the bees, the ants won’t proceed linearly. Maybe they’ll leapfrog aboard a charter aircraft. Maybe on a Honduran freighter. It’s inevitable.”
Bridgewell clasped her hands; forced them to remain still in her lap.
Chavez continued, “Thanks to slipshod internal Brazilian practices over the last few decades, the maripunta are resistant to every insecticide we’ve tried.”
“They’re unstoppable?” Bridgewell said. “That’s about it,” said Chavez.
“And that’s why the public’s been kept in the dark?”
“Only partially. The other part is that we’ve found an answer.” Chavez toyed with the monitor switches but stopped short of activating them. “The government agencies involved with this project fear that the public will misunderstand our solution to the problem. Next year’s an election year.” Chavez smiled ruefully. “There’s a precedence to politics.”
Bridgewell glanced from the controls to his face. “You’re part of the solution. How?”
Chavez decisively flipped a switch and they again saw the ant-ravaged tree. The limbs were perceptibly barer. He left the sound down. “You know my background. You were correct in suspecting the New Mexico Project had something to do with recombinant DNA and genetic engineering. You’re a good journalist. You were essentially right all down the line.” He looked away from her toward the screen. “I and my people here are creating giant ants.”
Bridgewell’s mouth dropped open slightly. “—but, you—”
“Let me continue. The purpose of the New Mexico Project has been to tinker with the genetic makeup/of the maripunta—to create a virus-borne mutagen that will single out the queens. We’ve got that agent now.”
All correspondent again, Bridgewell said, “What will it do?”
“At first we were attempting to readjust the ants’ biological clocks and alter the nomadic phase. Didn’t work; too sophisticated for what we can accomplish. So we settled for something more basic, more physical. We’ve altered the ants to make them huge.”
“Like in Them!”
“Except that Them! was a metaphor. It stated a physical impossibility. Remember the square-cube law?” She nodded. “Sometime in the near future, bombers will be dropping payloads all across Brazil, Venezuela, the Guianas . . . anywhere we suspect the ants are. The weapon is dispersal bombs, aerosol cannisters containing the viral mutagen to trigger uncontrolled growth in each new generation of ants.”
“The square-cube law . . .” said Bridgewell softly.
“Exactly. We’ve created monsters—and gravity will kill them.”
“It’ll work?”
“It should.” Then Chavez said very quietly, “I hope I live long enough to see the repercussions.”
Bridgewell said equally quietly, “I will file this story.”
“I know that.”
“Will it get you trouble?”
“Probably nothing I can’t handle.” Chavez shrugged. “Look around you at this multi-million dollar installation. There were many more convenient places to erect it. I demanded it be built here.” His smile was only a flicker. “When you’re a giant in your field—and needed—the people in power tend to indulge you.”
“Thank you, Dr. Chavez,” she said.
“Dr. Chavez? After all this, it’s still not Paul?”
“Thanks, Paul.”
They drove north, back toward Casper, and watched the western photochemical sunset. The sun sank through the clouds in a splendor of reds. They talked very little. Chavez found the silence comfortable.
Why didn’t you re-engage?
The question no longer disturbed him. He hadn’t truly addressed it. Yet it was no longer swept under the carpet. That made all the difference.
I’ll get to it, he thought. Chavez stared into the windshield sun-glare and saw his life bound up in a leaded pane like an ambered insect.
Bridgewell kept glancing at him silently as she drove up the long mountain road to Chavez’s house. She passed the stand of spruce where she had hidden Scarlett earlier in the day and braked to a stop in front of the stone house. They each sat still for the moment.
“You’ll want to be filing your story,” said Chavez.
She nodded.
“Now that you know the way up my tree, perhaps you’ll return to visit in a more conventional way?”
Bridgewell smiled. She leaned across the seat and kissed him on the lips. It was, Chavez thought, a more than filial kiss. “Now I’m not kidding,” she said.
Chavez got out of the Volkswagen and stood on the flagstone walk while Bridgewell backed Scarlett into the drive and turned around. As she started down the mountain, she turned and waved. Chavez waved. He stood there and watched until the car vanished around the first turn.
He walked back to the house and found O’Hanlon waiting, arms folded against the twilight chill, on the stone step. Chavez hesitated beside her and they both looked down the drive and beyond. Casper’s lights began to blossom into a growing constellation.
“Does she remind you considerably of what Patricia might have been like?” said O’Hanlon.
Chavez nodded, and then said quickly, “Don’t go for easy Freud. There’s more to it than that—or there may be.”
A slight smile tugged at O’Hanlon’s lips. “Did I say anything?”
“Well, no.” Chavez stared down at the city. He said, with an attempt at great dignity, “We simply found, in a short time, that we liked each other very much.”
“I thought that might be it.” O’Hanlon smiled a genuine smile. “Shall we go inside? Much longer out here and we’ll be ice. I’ll fix some chocolate.”
He reached for the door. “With brandy?”
“All right.”
“And you’ll join me?”
“You know I ordinarily abstain, Dr. Chavez, but—” Her smile impossibly continued. “It is rather a special day, isn’t it?” She preceded him through the warm doorway.
Chavez followed with a final look at the city. Below the mountain, Casper’s constellation winked and bloomed into the zodiac.
Twelve hours later, the copyrighted story by Laynie Bridgewell made the national news and the wire services.
Eighteen hours later, her story was denied by at least five go
vernmental agencies of two sovereign nations.
Twelve days later, Paul Chavez died quietly in his sleep, napping in the library.
Twenty-two days later, squadrons of jet bombers dropped cargoes of hissing aerosol bombs over a third of the South American continent. The world was saved. For a while, anyway The grotesquely enlarged bodies of Eciton burchelli would shortly litter the laterite tropical soil.
Twenty-seven days later, at night, an intruder climbed up to the balcony of Paul Chavez’s house on Casper Mountain and smashed the stained-glass picture in the French doors leading into the library. No item was stolen. Only the window was destroyed . . .
EXODUS
Stephen L. Suffet
“But will it work, Perkins?” Jamal Hassad demanded of me. “That’s the bottom line. Those generals aren’t about to piddle away good piastres on a weapons system that doesn’t deliver what it promises.”
The boss was insistent, but as Transarmco’s head of R. and D., he wasn’t about to lay the company’s reputation—or his own precious tookas—on the line for another class-A fiasco. Every smarty-pants schoolboy knows the story of the South African War when we developed an ethno-selective bio-toxin that was supposed to zap only the Afrikaaners. Instead it turned up wasting half the black population as well, and in the end two of our directors were hauled before some international tribunal and hanged as war criminals. It took nearly fifteen years for Transarmco to recover from that blunder.
“Oh, you can bet your sweet life it’ll work, chief,” I assured Hassad, “and when it does, we’ll have every military procurement agent from Stockholm to Sao Paulo banging down our door with orders.”
Although he quickly acknowledged my assurance with a slight grin, I doubted that Hassad honestly believed that I had cracked the problem of what we in the armaments community call IPAT: individually programmed antipersonnel targeting. Such a system was until this year thought to be several decades away. However, with recent breakthroughs in microelectronic feedback engineering making it apparent that our competitors could market an analogous system within months, even weeks, the boss had no choice but to accept my word at face value.
Nevertheless, Jamal Hassad was an exceedingly cautious man, and it was just this caution which no doubt enabled him to survive so long in a business where one mistake could literally cost him his neck. Thus, with a gentle shake of the head he informed me, “You know, of course, Perkins, we can’t expect to sell a system like IPAT on computer simulations alone. Before we start taking any of those orders you’re so sure of, we’re going to have to run a field test first.”
“A field test?” I asked with only the barest trace of surprise.
“A field test,” he repeated.
That was terrible news indeed. For a political entity like a nation state, an international alliance, or even a guerrilla movement, a field test is no big deal, especially if it’s conducted during an already-existing military conflict. But for a multinational corporation like Transarmco, which lacks both the desire and the legal right to engage in warfare, a field test is an altogether sticky matter. Invariably it means trashing some innocent third party, usually back across the time barrier so there is absolutely no chance of retaliation.
Even then it isn’t all easy street. You have to publicize the test well enough that all your potential customers know that it’s the real McCoy and not just some razzle-dazzle, hokus-pokus hoax. At the same time you got to keep a tight enough lid on the whole affair so that some snoopy-nosed investigator from the United Nations doesn’t blow the whistle—unless you don’t mind dangling from the short end of a long rope. As you can well imagine, Transarmco cannot simply run an announcement of the IPAT system field test in the classified ad section of Modem Weaponry magazine.
“So when do you want it?” I asked Hassad.
“Thursday. That’s when our guests arrive from the Soviet Union and the United States.”
“The Soviet Union and the United States?” I wondered out loud. “What’s wrong with the big-time powers like Brazil, Sweden, and Iran? Why waste the IPAT on a third-rate has-been like Russia or the U.S.?”
Hassad replied with a nasty scowl. My last remark about third-rate has-beens must have proven especially offensive to him as an Egyptian. After all, it’s not every country that fights and loses the same war eighteen times in three hundred years. Surely retreating from the Suez Canal on a dozen different occasions was embarrassing enough, but watching the blue and white Star of David fly atop the Great Pyramids at Giza destroyed forever any pretenisions Hassad’s country had of greatness. Which, incidentally, brings me to confess a little cover-up of my own: My name isn’t Perkins. It’s Perlman—Yitzak Perlman, son of the Israeli general who commanded the siege of Cairo.
“You still haven’t answered my question, chief,” I reminded Hassad. “Why don’t we go right for the big bucks instead of puttering around with the Russians and Americans? Anyway, those countries are loaded with too many bleeding-heart do-gooders ready to turn us over to some war-crimes tribunal at the first hint of a field test.”
“Orders from above,” he snapped. “The company has its reasons, Perkins. Just make sure everything’s ready to roll Thursday when the customers show up.”
“Usual procedure?” I asked. “Good Guys versus Bad Guys?”
“Usual procedure,” he responded. “And be damned sure the Good Guys win. We’re not dealing with Brazilians this time. The Russians and Americans like to see happy endings.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Jamal Hassad declared as he led his small entourage of prospective purchasers into the secret S-4 annex of Transarmco’s telechronological laboratory, “it is my pleasure to introduce to you the genius behind our company’s IPAT system, the distinguished Dr. Ike Perkins.”
I thanked my boss for his kind words, then immediately commenced my presentation. “As you no doubt know,” I began as I sat down at the console, “you are about to watch an actual combat deployment of Transarmco’s individually programmed antipersonnel targeting system. Until now it has generally been believed that such weaponry could not possibly be on line for at least thirty or forty years, but because of recent advances by our scientists and engineers here at Transarmco, we can. . . .”
“Perkins,” Hassad interrupted, “you can dispense with the sales pitch. Our clients have been fully briefed, so please procede at once to the test.”
“Oh, yes, the test. Very well,” I said, “for today’s demonstration I have selected an altercation between an ancient, semi-nomadic, aboriginal tribe from the eastern Mediterranean and a powerful empire which has held them in slavery for several generations. . . .”
“That’s what I like, Perkins,” Hassad again interrupted, “Good Guys versus Bad Guys. And we are intervening on the side of the Good Guys, of course.”
“Of course,” I echoed.
“Then continue with the show, Perkins,” he said as he nodded to his apparently contented audience.
“I have recently established contact with the leader of the enslaved tribe,” I explained, “and he’s more than willing to cooperate with us. In fact, on his own initiative he has already instigated a series of work stoppages and other acts of sabotage which have created havoc throughout the empire. In one instance he managed to get his people to simultaneously release thousands of frogs in the homes of their masters, and in another instance he had his followers spill so much honey that it attracted great swarms of flies. Several times the emperor who has been holding them in captivity was about to free the tribe, but he has always reconsidered at the last moment.”
Just then one of the Americans spoke up. “Dr. Perkins,” he asked me, “what exactly do you mean by ‘established contact?’ Are you implying that these ancient nomads are cognizant of your identity?”
“Not at all,” I answered. “You must realize that they are an extremely primitive people. I don’t even appear to them in anthropomorphic form. I maintain contact only with their leader, an elder statesman
well into his eighties, and to him I look like a patch of fire. Nothing else.”
“And this old man responds to a patch of fire?” a Russian wanted to know.
“He does,” I replied. “To tell the truth, he believes I’m some sort of god, and I’ve done nothing to dispel that notion.”
Hassad and the group of customers chuckled at that last assertion, although I didn’t find it so amusing. With the IPAT system and the telechronological console, at my disposal, there actually wasn’t that much difference between me and a god—at least not to the old man whom I contacted.
When the audience had recovered from their brief spurt of laughter I went on. “My conversations with this tribal leader indicate that one more hard blow will bring the evil emperor to his knees and allow the Good Guys to get what they want.”
“And what is that?” another Russian inquired. “The destruction of their masters’ empire?”
“Not at all,” I said once more. “What they want is their own emancipation from bondage, not conquest, vengeance, or anything else. And that’s precisely why our company’s individually programmed antipersonnel targeting is so appropriate for the situation. The destruction of the masters’ empire can be achieved by any sophisticated modem weapons system. But what IPAT offers is more than just simple sophistication. IPAT offers absolutely perfect control over the degree and quality of the kill. If it is your desire to wipe out any one portion of a population—say blue-eyed, left-handed females bom of twenty-nine-year-old mothers—and leave everyone else entirely unscathed, then IPAT is your baby.”
“Does that mean, Dr. Perkins,” the first Russian said, “that your IPAT can put an end to the Trotskyites once and for all?”
That time everyone laughed, including me.
“No,” I told the questioner, “I’m afraid that it cannot yet be programmed to destroy people on the basis of their beliefs alone. But,” I added, “if your Trotskyites are—how do you say it?—card-carrying members of some counter-revolutionary organization, then, yes, it can zap them.”