by Howard Fast
“Oh?”
My wife poured drinks. His own wife looked at him sharply, as if this was the first she had heard of it and she resented being put on parity with us.
“Good, clear signal,” he said. “High frequency. Queer voice though—know what it said?”
There was another couple there—the Dennisons; he was a rather important surgeon—and Mrs. Dennison made a rather inept attempt at humor. I try to remember her first name, but it escapes me. She was a slim, beautiful blond woman, but not very bright; yet she managed to turn it on Fred and he retreated. We tried to persuade him, but he turned the subject away and became a listener. It wasn’t until after dinner that I pinned him down.
“About that signal?”
“Oh, yes.”
“You’ve become damn sensitive.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Nothing very special or mysterious. A voice said, ‘You must stop killing us.’”
“Just that?”
“It doesn’t surprise you?” Fred asked.
“Oh, no—hardly. As you said, it’s a sort of universal plea. I can think of at least seven places on earth where those would be the most important words they could broadcast.”
“I suppose so. But it did not originate in any of those places.”
“No? Where, then?”
“That’s it,” Fred Goldman said. “That’s just it.”
That’s how I heard about it first. I put it out of mind as I imagine so many others did, and the truth is that I forgot about it. Two weeks later I delivered the second lecture in the Goddard Free Series at Harvard, and during the question period one student demanded:
“What is your own reaction, Dr. Cornwall, to the curtain of silence the Establishment has thrown around the radio messages?”
I was naïve enough to ask what messages he referred to, and a ripple of laughter told me that I was out of it.
“‘You must stop killing us.’ Isn’t that it, Dr. Cornwall?” the boy shouted, and more applause greeted this than I had gotten on my own. “Isn’t that the crux of it?” the student went on. “‘You must stop killing us’—isn’t that it?”
I took a brandy afterward with Dr. Fleming, the dean, in front of the fire in his own warm and comfortable study, and he mentioned that the university did a certain amount of monitoring of sorts. “The kids weren’t too disturbing, were they?” he asked.
I assured him that I agreed with them. “We’re both Establishment of sorts,” I said, “so I don’t want to wriggle out of it. But isn’t that the radio signal? A friend of mine was telling me something about it. Did it come across again?”
“Every day now,” the dean said. “The kids have taken it up as a sort of battle cry.”
“But I saw nothing in the papers.”
“That’s curious, isn’t it?” Fleming said. “I suppose some wraps are being put on it in Washington, although I can’t imagine why.”
“They couldn’t locate the source the first day.”
“We’ve tried on our own, and they’ve tried even harder over at M.I.T. It’s plaintive enough, but of what import I don’t know. Only the student body is very hot about it.”
“So I noticed,” I agreed.
A few days later at breakfast my wife informed me that she had lunched the previous day with Rhoda Goldman. The information was dropped like a small, careful bomb.
“Go on,” I said with great interest.
“You’ll pooh-pooh it.”
“Try me.”
“They have some background on the signals down at the station. Or at least they think they have.”
“Oh?”
“They think they know who is sending them.”
“Thank God for that. Maybe we can stop killing them—or stop whoever is doing the killing. It’s the most God-awful plaintive thing I ever heard of.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I said no, we can’t stop,” my wife replied very seriously, “because it’s the insects.”
“What?”
“That’s what Rhoda Goldman said—insects. They are sending the messages.”
“I am pooh-poohing it,” I agreed.
“I knew you would,” my wife said.
I have been on four of the mayor’s special committees, and the following day his assistant called and asked me whether I would serve on another. However, he refused to spell out the purpose, except to say that it was connected with the high-frequency messages.
“Surely you’ve heard of them,” he said.
I agreed that I had heard of them and I agreed to serve on the committee, chiefly out of curiosity. The day I went downtown for the meeting of the new committee was the same day that General Carl de Hargod, the new chief of staff, had arrived in New York to address a dinner group at the Waldorf; and now he was being welcomed at City Hall by both the mayor and about a thousand pickets. The pickets were a conglomeration of pacifist groups and hippies, and they marched back and forth in front of City Hall in silence, carrying signs which read: “You must stop killing us.”
I had arrived early enough to get inside just before the welcoming ceremonies began, and when I joined the others of the newly formed committee I listened to an apology for the mayor’s absence and an assurance that he would be with us within the half hour. There were five others on the committee, three men and two women. I knew both women, Kate Gordon, who was Commissioner of Health, and Alice Kinderman, who was associated with the Museum of Natural History and newly named consultant to the Parks Department, and one of the men—Frank Meyers, a lawyer with important contacts in Washington. Meyers introduced me to the others, Basehart, who was the head of the Department of Entomology in the huge City University, and Krummer, from the Department of Agriculture in Washington.
It was the presence of the entomologist that bounced off my mind incredulously, and when Meyers asked me whether I knew what we had been gathered together for, I replied only that it had something to do with the radio signals.
“The point is, we know who is sending them.”
“What is,” Alice Kinderman amended. “Who is is rather disturbing.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “I prefer the communists.”
“We have been killing a good many communists,” Basehart agreed, with that curious detachment of a scientist. “I’m sure they don’t like it. Well, no one likes to be killed, do they? This time it’s the insects, however.”
“Fudge!” said Kate Gordon.
Then we talked about it, calmly, in a manner befitting the six middle-aged, civilized men and women that we were, and if there were doubters among us, Basehart convinced them. He convinced me. He was a small, long-nosed man with electric blue eyes and an exciting smile. Anyone could see that what had happened was, so far as he was concerned, the most wonderful and exciting thing that had ever happened, and as he explained it, the preposterous disappeared and the inevitable took over. He convinced us that it had been inevitable all along. The only thing he could not persuade us to do was to share his enthusiasm.
“It’s so logical,” he maintained. “The insect is hot a thing in itself but a fragment. The hive is the thing. Insects don’t think in our terms; they don’t have brains. At best they have something that might be thought of as one of these printed circuits we make for mass-produced radios. They are cells, not organs. But does the hive think? Does the swarm think? Does the city of insects think? That’s the question we have never been able to answer satisfactorily. And what of the super-swarm? We have always known that they communicate with each other and with the swarm or the hive. But how? Radio? Certainly some sort of wave—and why not high frequency?”
“Power?” someone asked.
“Power. My goodness—have you any notion as to how many of them there are? Of species alone—almost half a million. Of individuals—beyond our ability to compute. They could generate any power required. Accomplish any task—if of course they come together into the theoretical super-hive or super-swarm and becom
e conscious of themselves. And it appears they have. You know, we’ve always killed them, but now perhaps too many of them. They have a great instinct for survival.”
“And we seem to have lost ours somewhere along the line, haven’t we?” I wondered.
The mayor had too many responsibilities, too many problems in a city that was close to unmanageable, and it was difficult to say how seriously he took the plea of the insects. People in public life tend to become defensive about such things. I had lectured often enough on questions of social ecology to know how difficult it was to impress political leadership with the possibility that we may just be working ourselves out of a livable future.
“We have just had to arrest over a hundred pacifists,” the mayor said tiredly, “most of them from good families—which means I will not sleep tonight, and since I had only an hour or two last night, I think you will understand my reluctance, ladies and gentlemen, to become excited about radio messages sent by insects. I give it credence only because the Department of Agriculture insists that I do—and so I ask you to please serve on this very ad hoc committee and draw up a report on the matter. We are allocating five thousand dollars for clerical assistance, and we have also been promised the full cooperation of the Ford Foundation.”
The mayor could not remain with us, but we spent another half hour chatting about the matter, arranged for our next meeting, and then went our several ways. Belief in the absurd is not very tenacious, and I think that by the time our meeting broke up, we had put away the insects under a solid cover of doubt. With many pressures, I had half forgotten the matter by dinnertime, when my wife asked me pertly:
“Well, Alan—what will you do about the insects?”
When I did not answer immediately, my wife informed me that she had been on the phone that afternoon for almost an hour with her sister, Dorothy, from Upper Montclair, and that they were taking it very seriously indeed. In fact, Dorothy’s son, a physics major at M.I.T., had worked out the electronics—or the physics; she couldn’t say for certain—underlying the high-frequency signals.
“He’s a bright boy,” I said.
“And that’s a very enlightening comment.”
“Well, the mayor formed a committee. I have the honor to be a part of it.”
“That’s just what I adore most about our handsome mayor,” Jane said. “He does have a committee for everything, doesn’t he? I’m sure his conscience is clear now—”
“Good heavens,” I said, “must he have a conscience about this too—”
I never finished my defense of a poor, harassed man. The telephone rang. It was Bert Clegmann, who was one of the editors of The New York Times and whom I knew slightly, and he informed me that they had decided to break the story in their morning edition, since it had already appeared in London and in Rome, and could I tell him anything about, the committee?
I told him about the committee, and then I asked him my question.
“Do I believe it?” Clegmann said. “Well, thank heavens I don’t have to put my own opinion on the line. There’s apparently enough background now for us to quote some eminent people, and the Russians are taking it seriously enough to raise it in the UN. Next week. Also, the little buggers have eaten three thousand four hundred contiguous acres of wheat in eastern Nebraska. Clean as a whistle. That may simply be a coincidence.”
“What little buggers?”
“Locusts.”
“Well, isn’t that a very old business—I mean they always seem to be devouring something somewhere, don’t they?”
But I couldn’t get any commitment from Clegmann. He always felt that he was the articulation of the Times, so as to speak, and very wary, but that made him no different from most. It was much too great a strain to believe.
“If you are on a committee,” my wife said, “then you must believe it.”
“I think that part of the work of the committee is to test the validity of the whole thing.”
“Doesn’t anyone on the committee believe it?”
“Basehart, perhaps. He’s an entomologist.”
“I feel silly,” my wife said, smiling, “but I have been watching the water bugs. They’re such huge, dreadful things anyway—I mean even when they don’t resent being killed. But what a horrible thought! We simply take it for granted that anything not human doesn’t resent being killed.”
At our first formal committee meeting Krummer, the Department of Agriculture man, touched on the same theme, but he was rather acid-tongued about the humanists. After outlining the new program they had set up in Washington, a three-pronged drive, as he put it, insecticides, poison gas, and radiation, he touched on the position of those sensitive people who held that perhaps we killed too easily.
“Can anyone imagine the disaster that would strike mankind if we should give the insects a free hand! Worldwide starvation—not to mention disease and a matter of discomfort.”
He went on to paint a rather ghastly picture, to which only Basehart objected, and mildly at that. Base-hart pointed out that man had existed before the time of insecticides and had fed himself very nicely.
“There is a natural balance to this kind of thing—an ecological whole. Insects eat each other and birds eat insects and certain animals join in, and even nature in some mysterious way restrains any part of the circle that gets out of hand. But we have killed the birds without mercy and now we are trying to kill the insects, and we keep chopping pieces out of that ecological circle and heaven knows where it will end.”
But the main fact presented to the committee was that the high-frequency messages had stopped, and once that visible manifestation of so unnatural a desire as survival had ceased, the party of doubt took over and proceeded to prove that the public had been hoaxed. Since aside from the single fact of devastation in Nebraska there had been no noticeable change in insect behavior anywhere on earth, the fact of a hoax took hold very readily. We appointed Frank Meyers as a one-man subcommittee to investigate the pros and cons of the matter and to report back to us in two weeks.
“This,” I explained to my wife, “is the normal process of a committee—not to find but to lose. We shall lose this crisis in very short order.”
“In two weeks we are leaving for Vermont,” my wife said.
“We’ll adjourn for the summer,” I assured her. “That too is the normal business of committees.”
When we reconvened two weeks later, both Krum-mer and Meyers delivered reassuring reports.
With great delight Krummer told us that the Pentagon had joined forces with the Department of Agriculture to produce an insecticide so deadly that a quart of it turned into a fine spray would kill any and all insects in a square mile. However, it was almost as deadly to animal and human existence—a matter they hoped to solve in very short order. But Meyers thought it was all to little purpose.
“The people at the C.I.A.,” he said, “are just about decided that the Russians are responsible for the high-frequency hoax. They have secret transmitters all over the place, and it’s a part of their overall plan to sow fear and discord in the Free World. More to the point, knowing they had blown it, Pravda yesterday published a long article blaming it on us. I have also interviewed twenty-three leading naturalists, and all except one agree that the notion of a collective insect intelligence on a par with the intelligence of man is preposterous.”
“Of course, our work isn’t wasted,” Krummer said. “I mean, a new insecticide is worth its weight in gold, and since it will in its present form kill men as readily as insects, it joins our arsenal of secret weapons. It’s an excellent example of how the various sciences tend to overlap, and I think we can salute it as a vital part of the American Way.”
“Who was the scientist who did not agree?” I asked.
“Basehart here,” Meyers said.
Basehart smiled modestly and replied, “I don’t think I can properly be counted, since I am a member of the committee. Which makes the scientific opinion unanimous. Or at least I think tha
t is how it should go into the record.”
“You still think it was the insects?” Mrs. Kinderman asked.
“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.”
“Why?”
“Only because it’s logical and exciting,” said Basehart, “and you know the Russians are so utterly dreary and unimaginative—they would never think of such an idea, not in a thousand years.”
“But a collective intelligence,” I objected. “I dislike the word preposterous—but surely rather unbelievable.”
“Not at all,” Basehart replied, almost apologetically. “It’s a concept quite familiar to entomologists, and we have discussed it for generations. I will admit that we use it pragmatically when we run out of more acceptable explanations, but there are so many things about the social insects that do not submit to any other explanation. Naturally, we are dealing here with a far more developed and complex intelligence—but who is to say that this is not a perfectly legitimate line of evolution? We are like little children in our understanding of the manner of evolution, and as for its purpose, why, we haven’t even begun to inquire.”
“Oh, come now,” said Kate Gordon, or snorted would be more descriptive, “you are becoming positively teleological, Dr. Basehart, and among scientists I think that is indefensible.”
“Oh?” But Basehart did not desire to battle. “Perhaps.” He nodded. “Yet some of us cannot help being just a bit teleological. One doesn’t always surmount one’s childhood religious training.”
“Intellectually, one must,” said Kate Gordon primly.
“Basehart,” I said, “suppose we were to accept this intelligence, not as a reality, but as a matter for discussion. Should we have cause to fear it? Would it be malignant?”
“Malignant? Oh, no—not at all. That has never been my notion of intelligence. Evil is mediocre and rather stupid. No, wisdom is not a malignancy, quite to the contrary. But whether or not we have to fear them—well, that’s something else entirely. I mean, we have not come back with a single response. Oh, I don’t mean us on this committee. I talk of mankind. Mankind moved only in two directions, to convince itself that an insect intelligence did not exist and to make a new insecticide. But they ask us to stop killing them. What are they to do?”