by Primo Levi
Simpson immediately fell for my gambit. “That’s exactly the heart of the matter; at NATCA, they make mistakes or they exaggerate. It’s an old idea of mine: machines are important, we can’t live any longer without them, they shape our world, but they are not always the best solution to our problems.”
His speech was not very coherent. I tried another approach. “Certainly: the human brain is irreplaceable. A truth that those who design electronic brains tend to forget.”
“No, no,” Simpson responded impatiently. “Don’t talk to me about the human brain. First of all, it’s too complicated, then it has yet to be proved that it even has the capacity of understanding itself, and, finally, there are already too many people studying it. Good people, though I won’t say disinterested, but there are too many of them; there are mountains of books and thousands of organizations, other NATCAs, no better or worse than the one I work for, where the human brain is being cooked up in all flavors. Freud, Pavlov, Turing, the cyberneticians, the sociologists, all manipulating it, denaturing it, and our machines try to copy it. No, my idea is different.” He paused, as if he were hesitating, then he leaned over the table and said in a low voice: “It’s not only an idea. Would you like to come over on Sunday?”
It was an old villa in the hills that Simpson had bought for almost nothing at the end of the war. The Simpsons welcomed me and my wife kindly and politely; I was very happy to finally meet Mrs. Simpson: slender, her hair already gray, she was gentle and reserved and yet full of human warmth. He led us to the garden, where we were seated at the edge of a pond; the conversation, distracted and vague, dragged, mostly because of Simpson. He stared off into space, shifted restlessly in his chair, continually lit his pipe and then let it go out. It was easy to tell that he was in an almost comical hurry to get the preambles over with and come to the point.
I have to admit that he did it elegantly. While his wife was serving tea, he asked: “Madam, would you like some blueberries? There are a lot of them, and very delicious ones, on the other side of the valley.”
“I wouldn’t want you to go to the trouble . . . ,” my wife began.
Simpson responded, “Good heavens! No trouble at all.” He then pulled from his pocket a tiny instrument that to me looked like a pan flute, and he played three notes. There was a clear, soft beating of wings, the surface of the pond rippled, and above our heads a rapid flight of dragonflies. “Two minutes!” Simpson said triumphantly, and he clicked his stopwatch. Mrs. Simpson, with a smile that was both proud and a little embarrassed, went inside the house, then reappeared with a crystal bowl and placed it, empty, on the table. At the end of the second minute the dragonflies, like a wave of tiny bombers, returned; there must have been several hundred of them. They remained hovering above us, in motionless flight, making an almost musical metallic whirring sound, then suddenly, one by one, they descended toward the bowl, and, slowing their flight, dropped a blueberry, then swiftly took off again. Within a few moments the bowl was filled: not one blueberry had missed its mark and they were still wet with dew.
“It always works,” Simpson said. “It’s a showy demonstration, but not very rigorous. Nevertheless, now that you’ve seen it yourselves, I won’t need to struggle to find the words to convince you that it’s possible. Now, tell me: if this can be done, would it make any sense to invent a machine that could be instructed to pick blueberries in a two-hectare wood? And do you believe it would be possible to design one that would know how to carry out the command in two minutes, without making a racket, without using fuel, without breaking down, and without ruining the wood? And the cost, think of the cost? How much does a swarm of dragonflies cost? Which, by the way, are delightful.”
“Have the dragonflies been . . . conditioned?” I asked stupidly. I couldn’t keep myself from glancing in alarm at my wife, and I was afraid that Simpson saw me and understood the significance. My wife’s face was impassive, but I could distinctly make out her discomfort.
“They’re not conditioned; they work for me. Actually, to be more precise: we’ve come to an agreement.” Simpson leaned back in his chair and smiled benevolently, enjoying the effect of his comment. Then he went on: “Yes, maybe it would be better to tell the story from the beginning. You will have read, I imagine, about Von Frisch’s brilliant studies on the language of bees: the eight-shaped dance, its forms and significance in regard to distance, direction, and quantity of food. The subject first fascinated me twelve years ago, and since then I have dedicated all my free time on weekends to bees. Initially, I just wanted to try to speak with the bees in their language. It seemed absurd that someone hadn’t already thought of it: it’s an extraordinarily easy thing to do. Come and see.”
He showed me an apiary whose front wall had been replaced by ground glass. On the external face of the glass he traced a few figure eights with his finger, and soon afterward a small swarm came buzzing out the little door.
“I’m sorry to have deceived them this time. Two hundred meters southeast of here there is absolutely nothing, poor things. I only wanted to show you how I broke the ice, broke through the wall of incomprehension that separates us from insects. At first, I did things the hard way: just imagine that for several months I did the eight-shaped dance myself, I mean with my entire body, not simply by using my finger; yes, right here, on the lawn. They understood all the same, but with difficulty, and it became exhausting and ridiculous. Later I saw that it would take much less; any signaling will do, as you saw, even using a stick, or a finger, as long as it’s consistent with their code.”
“And the same with the dragonflies?”
“With the dragonflies, for the moment, my relationship is only indirect. It was a second step: I realized pretty quickly that the bees’ language extends far beyond the eight-shaped dance for indicating the location of food. Today I can prove that they have other dances, I mean other symbols; I haven’t yet understood them all, but I’ve already been able to compile a small glossary with a hundred or so entries. Here it is: there are equivalents for a large number of substantives such as ‘sun,’ ‘wind,’ ‘rain,’ ‘cold,’ ‘hot,’ et cetera; there is a vast assortment of plant names, and, in relation to these, I’ve recorded at least twelve distinct symbols they use to indicate, for example, an apple tree, according to whether the particular tree is large, small, old, healthy, wild, and so on—something like what we do with horses. They know how to say ‘gather,’ ‘sting,’ ‘fall,’ ‘fly,’ and here, too, they have a surprising number of synonyms for flight: their ‘fly’ is different from that of mosquitoes, butterflies, or sparrows. On the other hand, they don’t distinguish between walk, run, swim, and wheeled travel: for them, all ground or water movements are a ‘crawl.’ Their lexical patrimony relative to other insects, and above all insects that fly, is only slightly inferior to ours; however, they content themselves with an extremely generic nomenclature for larger animals. Their signals for quadrupeds, respectively from rat to dog and from sheep on up, are only two, and they could be approximately rendered as ‘four small’ and ‘four big.’ Neither do they distinguish between man and woman; I had to explain the difference to them.”
“And you speak this language?”
“Badly, for now; but I understand it pretty well, and it helped me comprehend some of the beehive’s greatest mysteries: how the bees decide on which day to drive the drones from the hive, when and why they authorize the queens to fight among themselves to the death, how they establish the numerical relationship between worker bees and drones. They haven’t told me everything, however. They keep certain secrets. They are a very dignified population.”
“Do they talk to the dragonflies, too, by dancing?”
“No. The bees communicate by dancing only among themselves and (pardon my immodesty) with me. As for the other species, I must first of all tell you that the bees have regular relations only with the most evolved, especially other social insects and those which have gregarious practices. For example, they have pretty clo
se contact (if not always friendly) with ants, wasps, and of course dragonflies. Instead, with crickets, and with orthoptera in general, they restrict themselves to commands and threats. In any case, with all the other insects the bees communicate via their antennae. It’s a rudimentary code, but in compensation it’s so fast I wasn’t able to follow it at all, and I fear it’s hopelessly beyond human capability. Besides, to be honest, not only do I think it’s hopeless but I also have no desire to enter into contact with other insects by circumventing the bees; it seems to me that would be rather insensitive to them, and then they are very helpful and enthusiastic mediators, almost as if they were enjoying themselves. But, to return to the code, let’s call it ‘interinsect’; I have the impression that it’s not a true and proper language, and that, instead of being rigidly conventional, it seems to rely on intuition and imagination. It must be vaguely similar to the complicated and yet concise manner in which we humans communicate with dogs (you have noticed, right, that the man-dog language doesn’t exist, yet we understand each other, in both directions, to a considerable degree?), though certainly much richer, as you yourself will see from the results.”
• • •
He led us through the garden and the arbor and pointed out to us that there wasn’t a single ant. There were no insecticides: his wife did not like ants (Mrs. Simpson, who was following us, blushed deeply), so he had made a deal with them. He would provide maintenance for all of their colonies as far as the outside wall (at a cost of two or three thousand lire, he explained to me) if they would undertake to demobilize all their anthills within a fifty-meter range of the villa, not create new ones, and daily get through in two hours, from 5 to 7 p.m., all the work of micro-cleaning and elimination of noxious larvae in the garden and the villa. The ants had accepted. A short time later, however, through the mediation of the bees, they complained about a certain colony of ant lions that had infested a strip of sand at the edge of the woods. Simpson confessed to me that at the time he had no idea ant lions were dragonfly larvae; he went to the spot and witnessed in horror their bloodthirsty habits. The sand was a constellation of little conical holes: an ant would venture to the edge of one and immediately, along with the unstable sand, fall to the bottom. A pair of ferocious curved jaws would emerge from the bottom, and Simpson was forced to recognize that the ants’ protest was justified. He told me that he felt both proud and mortified by the arbitration he was asked to perform: the entire good name of the human race would depend upon his decision.
He had convened a small meeting: “It took place last September, and it was a memorable gathering. Present were bees, ants, and dragonflies—adult dragonflies, who with great rigor and urbanity defended the rights of their larvae. They pointed out to me that the latter could not in any way be held responsible for their alimentary regimen. They were incapable of mobility and, if they didn’t lay snares for the ants, they would die of hunger. I then proposed to allocate to them an adequate daily ration of a balanced feed, the same given to the chickens. The dragonflies asked for a practical trial: the larvae displayed an evident liking for the feed, and so the dragonflies declared themselves ready to interpose their good offices until every trap set for the ants was eliminated. It was on that occasion that I offered them a bonus for every expedition to the blueberry bushes, but it’s a job I rarely ask them to perform. They are among the most intelligent and hardy insects and I expect a lot from them.”
He explained to me that he thought it inappropriate to offer a contract of any kind to the bees, since they were already far too busy; on the other hand, he was in advanced negotiations with the flies and the mosquitoes. The flies were stupid and you couldn’t get much out of them: only that they not be bothersome in autumn and that they keep away from the stalls and the manure pile. For four milligrams of milk a day, they agreed. Simpson proposed that they carry simple urgent messages, at least until a telephone was installed in the villa. Negotiations with the mosquitoes proved problematic for other reasons: not only were they good for nothing but they made it clear that they didn’t want, in fact were unable, to give up human blood, or at least the blood of mammals. Given the proximity of the pond, the mosquitoes constituted a considerable nuisance, therefore an agreement seemed desirable to Simpson: he consulted the local veterinarian, and proposed that he draw half a liter of blood from one of the cows in the barn every two months. With a little citrate it wouldn’t coagulate, and by his calculations it should be enough for all the mosquitoes around the place.
He pointed out to me that it didn’t appear to be such a great deal, but it was still less expensive than spraying DDT, and moreover it wouldn’t disturb the biological equilibrium of the area. This detail was not insignificant, since this method could be patented and exploited in all malarial regions. He claimed that the mosquitoes would soon comprehend that it was in their obvious interest to avoid infecting themselves with plasmodium, and, as for the plasmodia themselves, even if they were to become extinct, it wouldn’t be a great loss. I asked him if analogous nonaggression pacts could be made with other human and domestic parasites. Simpson confirmed to me that up until then contact with ungregarious insects had proved difficult; that, however, he hadn’t devoted himself to it with particular care, given the negligible success that could possibly be hoped for, even in the best of hypotheses; that, further he considered that these insects were not gregarious precisely because of their incapacity to communicate. Nevertheless, with regard to noxious insects, he had already prepared a draft of a contract, approved by the Food and Agriculture Organization, and proposed to discuss it with a delegation of locusts right after their period of metamorphosis, through the mediation of a friend of his, the NATCA representative for the United Arab Republic and Lebanon.
By now, the sun had set, and we retired to the living room: my wife and I full of admiration and anxiety. We were unable to tell Simpson what we were thinking; then my wife decided she would, and with great difficulty she told him that he had landed upon . . . upon a big, new “thing,” rich in not only scientific but also poetic advancements. Simpson stopped her: “Madam, I never forget that I am a businessman; in fact, I still haven’t mentioned the biggest business deal of all. I beg you not to talk to anyone about this yet, but you should know that my work here is of profound interest to the bigs* at NATCA, and especially to the brainiacs at the Research Center at Fort Kiddiwanee. I informed them of my work, of course, only after I had the patent situation under control, and it appears that an interesting merger will come of it. Look what’s inside here.” He gave me a minuscule cardboard box, no bigger than a thimble. I opened it.
“There’s nothing in here!”
“Almost nothing,” Simpson said. He gave me a magnifying glass: on the white bottom of the box I saw a wire, thinner than a hair, maybe a centimeter in length. Halfway along it a slight increase in size was detectable.
“It’s a resistor,” Simpson said. “The wire is two thousandths of a millimeter, the joint is five, and the whole thing costs four thousand lire, but soon it will cost two hundred. This piece is the first one put together by my ants: by southern wood ants, which are the hardiest and most capable of all. During the summer I taught a team of ten, and they set up a school for all the others. You should see them, it’s a unique spectacle: two of them grab the two electrodes with their lower jaws, one twists it three times and then fixes it with a tiny drop of resin, then all three deposit the piece on the conveyor belt. A group of three can put together a resistor in fourteen seconds, including downtime, and they work twenty out of twenty-four hours. Understandably, a problem with the union developed, but these things are always worked out: they were satisfied, no doubt about it. They receive payment in kind, subdivided into two parts: one is personal, so to speak, which the ants consume during their work breaks, and the other is collective, destined for the anthill reserves, which they store in the lower sections; in total, fifteen grams a day for the entire work team, which is composed of five hundred workers. It’s t
riple what they could scrape up in one day of gathering here in the woods. But this is only the beginning. I’m training other teams for other ‘impossible’ jobs. One is to trace the diffraction grid of a spectrometer, a thousand lines in eight millimeters; another is to repair miniaturized printed circuit boards that, until now, were thrown out when they broke; another is to retouch photographic negatives; a fourth is to perform auxiliary tasks during brain surgery, and already I can say that they have proved irreplaceable in their ability to stop capillary hemorrhages.
“Think about it for just a moment, and right away a dozen jobs come to mind that require a minimum expenditure of energy but can’t be carried out economically because our fingers are too big and slow, because a micromanipulator is too expensive, or because they involve too many operations in too vast an area. I’ve already been in touch with an experimental agricultural station regarding various thrilling experiments: I would like to train an anthill to ‘home-deliver’ fertilizer, by which I mean one granule per seed; another anthill to clear rice fields by removing the weeds while they’re still seeds; another to clean silos; yet another to carry out cellular micro-grafting . . . Life is short, believe me. I curse myself for having begun so late. Alone we can do so little!”
“Why don’t you get a partner?”
“Do you think I haven’t tried? I almost ended up in jail. I’m convinced that . . . how does that proverb of yours go? Better alone.”
“In jail?”
“Yes, because of O’Toole, just six months ago. Young, optimistic, intelligent, indefatigable, and full of imagination, a treasure trove of ideas. But one day on my desk I found a strange little object, a small ball, no bigger than a grape, made of hollowed-out plastic, with a tiny bit of powder inside. I had it in my hand, you see, when they knocked on the door: it was Interpol, eight agents. It took an army of lawyers to get me out, to persuade them that I had no idea about any of it.”