“Ugly! They’re filthy!”
The antlike creatures were as big as a man, but hard-looking and as obnoxious as black beetles. Their eyes, Gordy saw with surprise, had mutated more than their bodies. For, instead of faceted insect eyes, they possessed iris, cornea and pupil—not round, or vertical like a cat’s eyes, or horizontal like a horse’s eyes, but irregular and blotchy. But they seemed like vertebrate’s eyes, and they were strange and unnatural in the parchment blackness of an ant’s bulged head.
Gordy stepped forward, and simultaneously the ants came out of their vehicle. For a moment they faced each other, the humans and the ants, silently.
“What do I do now?” Gordy asked de Terry over his shoulder.
De Terry laughed—or gasped. Gordy wasn’t sure. “Talk to them,” he said. “What else is there to do?”
Gordy swallowed. He resolutely did not attempt to speak in English to these creatures, knowing as surely as he knew his name that English—and probably any other language involving sound—would be incomprehensible to them. But he found himself smiling pacifically to them, and that was of course as bad … the things had no expressions of their own, that he could see, and certainly they would have no precedent to help interpret a human smile.
Gordy raised his hand in the semantically sound gesture of peace, and waited to see what the insects would do.
They did nothing.
Gordy bit his lip and, feeling idiotic, bowed stiffly to the ants.
The ants did nothing. De Terry said from behind, “Try talking to them, Dr. Gordy.”
“That’s silly,” Gordy said. “They can’t hear.” But it was no sillier than anything else. Irritably, but making the words very clear, he said, “We … are … friends.”
The ants did nothing. They just stood there, with the unwinking pupiled eyes fixed on Gordy. They didn’t shift from foot to foot as a human might, or scratch themselves, or even show the small movement of human breathing. They just stood there.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said de Terry. “Here, let me try.”
He stepped in front of Gordy and faced the ant-things. He pointed to himself. “I am
human,” he said. “Mammalian.” He pointed to the ants. “You are insects. That—” He pointed to the time machine—“took us to the past, where we made it possible for you to exist.” He waited for reaction, but there wasn’t any. De Terry clicked his tongue and began again. He pointed to the tapering metal structures. “This is your city,” he said.
Gordy, listening to him, felt the hopelessness of the effort. Something disturbed the thin hairs at the back of his skull, and he reached absently to smooth them down. His hand encountered something hard and inanimate—not cold, but, like spongy wood, without temperature at all. He turned around. Behind them were half a dozen larger ants. Drones, he thought—or did ants have drones? “John,” he said softly … and the inefficient, fragile-looking pincer that had touched him clamped his shoulder. There was no strength to it, he thought at once. Until he moved, instinctively, to get away, and then a thousand sharp serrations slipped through the cloth of his coat and into the skin. It was like catching oneself on a cluster of tiny fishhooks. He shouted, “John! Watch out!”
De Terry, bending low for the purpose of pointing at the caterpillar treads of the ant vehicle, straightened up, startled. He turned to run, and was caught in a step. Gordy heard him yell, but Gordy had troubles of his own and could spare no further attention for de Terry.
When two of the ants had him, Gordy stopped struggling. He felt warm blood roll down his arm, and the pain was like being flayed. From where he hung between the ants, he could see the first two, still standing before their vehicle, still motionless.
There was a sour reek in his nostrils, and he traced it to the ants that held him, and wondered if he smelled as bad to them. The two smaller ants abruptly stirred and moved forward rapidly on eight thin legs to the time machine. Gordy’s captors turned and followed them, and for the first time since the scuffle he saw de Terry. The younger man was hanging limp from the lifted forelegs of a single ant, with two more standing guard beside. There was pulsing blood from a wound on de Terry’s neck. Unconscious, Gordy thought mechanically, and turned his head to watch the ants at the machine.
It was a disappointing sight. They merely stood there, and no one moved. Then Gordy heard de Terry grunt and swear weakly. “How are you, John?” he called.
De Terry grimaced. “Not very good. What happened?”
Gordy shook his head, and sought for words to answer. But the two ants turned in unison from the time machine and glided toward de Terry, and Gordy’s words died in his throat. Delicately one of them extended a foreleg to touch de Terry’s chest.
Gordy saw it coming. “John!” he shrieked—and then it was all over, and de Terry’s scream was harsh in his ear and he turned his head away. Dimly from the corner of his eye he could see the sawlike claws moving up and down, but there was no life left in de Terry to protest.
Salva Gordy sat against a wall and looked at the ants who were looking at him. If it hadn’t been for that which was done to de Terry, he thought, there would really be nothing to complain about.
It was true that the ants had given him none of the comforts that humanity lavishes on even its criminals … but they had fed him, and allowed him to sleep—when it suited their convenience, of course—and there were small signs that they were interested in his comfort, in their fashion. When the pulpy mush they first offered him came up thirty minutes later, his multilegged hosts brought him a variety of foods, of which he was able to swallow some fairly palatable fruits. He was housed in a warm room, and,
if it had neither chairs nor windows, Gordy thought, that was only because ants had no use for these themselves. And he couldn’t ask for them.
That was the big drawback, he thought. That … and the memory of John de Terry.
He squirmed on the hard floor until his shoulderblades found a new spot to prop themselves against, and stared again at the committee of ants who had come to see him.
They were working an angular thing that looked like a camera—at least, it had a glittering something that might be a lens. Gordy stared into it sullenly. The sour reek was in his nostrils again …
Gordy admitted to himself that things hadn’t worked out just as he had planned. Deep under the surface of his mind—just now beginning to come out where he could see it—there had been a furtive hope. He had hoped that the rise of the ants, with the help he had given them, would aid and speed the rise of mankind. For hatred, Gordy knew, started in the recoil from things that were different. A man’s first enemy is his family—for he sees them first—but he sides with them against the families across the way. And still his neighbors are allies against the ghettos and Harlems of his town—and his town to him is the heart of the nation—and his nation commands life and death in war.
For Gordy, there had been a buried hope that a separate race would make a whipping-boy for the passions of humanity. And that, if there were struggle, it would not be between man and man, but between the humans … and the ants.
There had been this buried hope, but the hope was denied. For the ants simply had not allowed man to rise.
The ants put up their cameralike machine, and Gordy looked up in expectation. Half a dozen of them left, and two stayed on. One was the smallish creature with a bangle on the foreleg which seemed to be his personal jailer; the other a stranger to Gordy, as far as he could tell.
The two ants stood motionless for a period of time that Gordy found tedious. He changed his position, and lay on the floor, and thought of sleeping. But sleep would not come. There was no evading the knowledge that he had wiped out his own race—annihilated them by preventing them from birth, forty million years before his own time. He was like no other murderer since Cain, Gordy thought, and wondered that he felt no blood on his hands.
There was a signal that he could not perceive, and his guardian ant came forward to him, nudged him outward from the wall. He moved as he was directed—out the low exit-hole (he had to navigate it on hands and knees) and down a corridor to the bright day outside.
The light set Gordy blinking. Half blind, he followed the bangled ant across a square to a conical shed. More ants were waiting there, circled around a litter of metal parts. Gordy recognized them at once. It was his time machine, stripped piece by piece.
After a moment the ant nudged him again, impatiently, and Gordy understood what they wanted. They had taken the machine apart for study, and they wanted it put together again.
Pleased with the prospect of something to do with his fingers and his brain, Gordy grinned and reached for the curious ant-made tools …
He ate four times, and slept once, never moving from the neighborhood of the cone-shaped shed. And then he was finished.
Gordy stepped back. “It’s all yours,” he said proudly. “It’ll take you anywhere. A present from humanity to you.”
The ants were very silent. Gordy looked at them and saw drone-ants in the group, all still as statues.
“Hey!” he said in startlement, unthinking. And then the needle-jawed ant claw took him from behind.
Gordy had a moment of nausea—and then terror and hatred swept it away.
Heedless of the needles that laced his skin, he struggled and kicked against the creatures that held him. One arm came free, leaving gobbets of flesh behind, and his heavy-shod foot plunged into a pulpy eye. The ant made a whistling, gasping sound and stood erect on four hairy legs.
Gordy felt himself jerked a dozen feet into the air, then flung free in the wild, silent agony of the ant. He crashed into the ground, cowering away from the staggering monster. Sobbing, he pushed himself to his feet; the machine was behind him; he turned and blundered into it a step ahead of the other ants, and spun the wheel.
A hollow insect leg, detached from the ant that had been closest to him, was flopping about on the floor of the machine; it had been that close.
Gordy stopped the machine where it had started, on the same quivering, primordial bog, and lay crouched over the controls for a long time before he moved.
He had made a mistake, he and de Terry; there weren’t any doubts left at all. And there was … there
might
be a way to right it.
He looked out at the Coal Measure forest. The fern trees were not the fern trees he had seen before; the machine had been moved in space. But the time, he knew, was identically the same; trust the machine for that. He thought: I gave the world to the ants, right here. I can take it back. I can find the ants I buried and crush them underfoot … or intercept myself before I bury them …
He got out of the machine, suddenly panicky. Urgency squinted his eyes as he peered around him.
Death had been very close in the ant city; the reaction still left Gordy limp. And was he safe here? He remembered the violent animal scream he had heard before, and shuddered at the thought of furnishing a casual meal to some dinosaur … while the ant queens lived safely to produce their horrid young.
A gleam of metal through the fern trees made his heart leap. Burnished metal here could mean but one thing—the machine!
Around a clump of fern trees, their bases covered with thick club mosses, he ran, and saw the machine ahead. He raced toward it—then came to a sudden stop, slipping on the damp ground. For there were
two
machines in sight.
The farther machine was his own, and through the screening mosses he could see two figures standing in it, his own and de Terry’s.
But the nearer was a larger machine, and a strange design.
And from it came a hastening mob—not a mob of men, but of black insect shapes racing toward him.
Of course, thought Gordy, as he turned hopelessly to run—of course, the ants had infinite time to work in. Time enough to build a machine after the pattern of his own—and time to realize what they had to do to him, to insure their own race safety.
Gordy stumbled, and the first of the black things was upon him.
As his panicky lungs filled with air for the last time, Gordy knew what animal had screamed in the depths of the Coal Measure forest.
Systems. Almost anything can be thought of as part of a system. Chaos theory is based on that idea; we don’t always see the system at work because we’re looking at it from within the system itself or because we don’t have the tools to see the entirety of the system.
Dr. Grew, the protagonist of “Speed Trap,” isn’t a systems man, but because he attends many conferences and meets a lot of scientists in other fields, he’s had occasion to think about how systems—better systems—can make him and everyone function much more efficiently, get more done.
The other side of systems: conspiracy theory. The world is full of people who see conspiracies everywhere. Often those who see conspiracies where there are none are very systematic—one might say “obsessive,” even “paranoid.”
Then again, there are times when paranoia isn’t anything but a sane response to a real threat.
Dr. Grew’s ditemma—and yours—is to decide what is really going on in this rather tantalizing little puzzler from 1967.
My reservation was for a window seat, up front, because on this particular flight they serve from the front back; but on the seat next to mine, I saw a reservation tag for Gordie MacKenzie. I kept right on going until the hostess hailed me. “Why, Dr. Grew, nice to have you with us again …”
I stood blocking the aisle. “Can I switch to a seat back here somewhere, Clara?”
“Why, I think—let me see …”
“How about that one?” I didn’t see a tag on it.
“Well, it’s not a window seat …”
“But it’s free?”
“Well, let’s look.” She flipped the seating chart out of her clipboard. “Certainly. May I take your bag?”
“Uh-uh. Work to do.” And I did have work to do, too; that was why I didn’t want to sit next to MacKenzie. I slouched down in the seat, scowling at the man next to me to indicate that I didn’t want to strike up a conversation; he scowled back to show that that suited him fine. I saw MacKenzie come aboard, but he didn’t see me.
Just before we took off, I saw Clara bend over him to check his seat belt; and in the same motion, she palmed the reservation card with my name on it. Smart girl. I decided to buy her a drink the next time I found myself in the motel where her crew stayed between flights.
I don’t want to give you the idea that I’m a jet-set type who’s on first-name terms
with every airline stewardess around. The only ones I see enough of at all are a couple on the New York—L.A. run, and a few operating out of O’Hare, and maybe a couple that I see now and then between Huntsville and the Cape—oh, and one Air France girl I’ve flown with once or twice out of Orly, but only because she gave me a lift in her Citroen one time when there was a
métro
strike and no cabs to be found. Still, come to think of it, well—all right—yes, I guess I do get around a lot. Those are the hazards of the trade. Although my degree’s in atmospheric physics, my specialty is signatures—you know, the instrument readings or optical observations that we interpret to mean such-and-such pressure, temperature, chemical composition and so on—and that’s a pretty sexy field right now, and I get invited to a lot of conferences. I said “invited.” I don’t mean in the sense that I can say no. Not if I want to keep enough status in the department to have freedom to do my work. And it’s all plushy and kind of fun, at least when I have time to have fun; and really, I’ve got pretty good at locating a decent restaurant in Cleveland or Albuquerque (try the Mexican food at the airport) and vetoing an inferior wine.
That’s funny, too, because I didn’t expect it to be this way—not when I was a kid reading Willy Ley’s articles and going out to hunt ginseng in the woods around Potsdam (I mean the New York one) so I could earn money and go to MIT and build spaceships. I thought I would be a lean, hungry-eyed scientist in shabby clothes. I thought probably I would never get out of the laboratory (I guess I thought spaceships were designed in laboratories) and I’d waste my health on long night hours over the slide rule. And, as it turns out, what I’m wasting my health on is
truite amandine
and time-zone disorientation.
But I think I know what to do about that.
That’s why I didn’t want to spend the four and a half hours yakking with Gordie MacKenzie, because, by God, I maybe do know what to do about that.
It’s not really my field, but I’ve talked it over with some systems people and they didn’t get that polite look people get when you’re trying to tell them about their own subject. I’ll see if I can explain it. See, there are like twenty conferences and symposia and colloquia a month in any decent-sized field, and you’re out of it unless you make a few of them. Not counting workshops and planning sessions and get-the-hell-down-here-Charley-or-we-lose-the-grant meetings. And they do have a way of being all over the place. I haven’t slept in my own home all seven nights of any week since Christmas before last, when I had the flu.
Now, question is, what do all the meetings accomplish? I had a theory once that the whole
Gestalt
was planned—I mean, global scatter, jet travel and all. A sort of psychic energizer, designed to keep us all pumped up all the time—after all, if you’re going somewhere in a jet at six hundred miles an hour, you know you’ve got to be doing something important, or else you wouldn’t be doing it so fast. But who would plan something like that?
So I gave up that idea and concentrated on ways of doing it better. You know, there really is no more stupid way of communicating information than flying three thousand miles to sit on a gilt chair in a hotel ballroom and listen to twenty-five people read papers at you. Twenty-three of the papers you don’t care about anyway, and the twenty-fourth you can’t understand because the speaker has a bad accent and, anyway, he’s rushing it because he’s under time pressure to catch his plane to the next conference, and that one single twenty-fifth paper has cost you four days, including travel time, when you could have read it in your own office in fifteen minutes. And got more out of it, too. Of course, there’s the interplay when you find yourself sitting in the coffee shop next to
somebody who can explain the latest instrumentation to you because his company’s doing the telemetry; you can’t get that from reading. But I’ve noticed there’s less and less time for that. And less and less interest, too, maybe, because you get pretty tired of making new friends after about the three hundredth; and you begin to think about what’s waiting for you on your desk when you get back, and you remember the time when you got stuck with that damn loudmouthed Egyptian at the I.A.U. in Brussels and had to fight the Suez war for an hour and a half.
All right, you can see what I mean. Waste of time and valuable kerosene jet fuel, right? Because the pity of it is that electronic information handling is so cheap and easy. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Bell Labs’ demo of their picture phone—they had it at a couple of meetings—but it’s
nearly
like face-to-face. Better than the telephone. You get all the signatures, except maybe the smell of whiskey on the breath or something like that. And that’s only one gadget: there’s facsimile, telemetry, remote-access computation, teletype—well, there it is, we’ve got them, why don’t we use them? And go farther, too. You know about how they can strip down a taped voice message—leave out the unnecessary parts of speech, edit out the pauses, even drop some of the useless syllables? And you can still understand it perfectly, only at about four hundred words a minute instead of maybe sixty or seventy. (And about half of them repetitions or “What I mean to say.”)
Well, that’s the systems part; and, as I say, it’s not my field. But it’s there for the taking—expert opinion, not mine. A couple of the fellows were real hot, and we’re going to get together on it as soon as we can find the time.
Maybe you wonder what I have to contribute. I do have something, I think. For example, how about problem-solving approaches to discussions? I’ve seen some papers that suggest a way of simplifying and pointing up a conference so you could really
confer.
I’ve even got a pet idea of my own. I call it the Quantum of Debate, the irreducible minimum of argument which each participant in a discussion can use to make one single point and get that understood (or argued or refuted) before he goes on to the next.
Why, if half of what I think is so, then people like me can get things done in—oh, be conservative—a quarter of the time we spend now.
Leaving three quarters of our time for—what? Why, for work! For doing the things that we know we ought to do but can’t find the time for. I mean this literally and really and seriously. I honestly think that we can do four times as much work as we do. And I honestly think that this means we can land on Mars in five years instead of twenty, cure leukemia in twelve years instead of fifty, and so on.
Well, that’s the picture, and that’s why I didn’t want to waste the time talking with Gordie MacKenzie. I’d brought all my notes in my briefcase, and four and a half hours was just about enough time to try to pull them all together and make some sort of presentation to show my systems friends and a few others who were interested.
So as soon as we were airborne, I had the little table down and I was sorting out little stacks of paper.
Only it didn’t work out.
It’s funny how often it doesn’t work out—I mean, when you’ve got something you want to do and you look ahead and see where the time’s going to be to do it, and then, all of a sudden, the time’s gone and you didn’t do it. What it was was that Clara worked her way back with the cocktails—she knew mine, an extra-dry martini with a twist of lemon—and I moved the papers out of her way out of politeness, and then she showed up with the hors d’oeuvres and I put them back in my bag out of hunger, and then I had
to decide how I wanted my
tournedos
, and it took almost two hours for dinner, including the wine and the B & B; and although I didn’t really want to watch the movie, there’s something about seeing all those screens ahead of you, with the hero just making his bombing run on your own screen but shot up and falling in flames on the ones you can see out of the corner of your eye in the forward seats—and back in the briefing room, or even in the pub the night before on the screens in the other row that the film gets to after it gets to yours—all sort of like a cross section of instants of time, a plural “now.” Disconcerting. It polarized my attention; of course, the liquor helped; and, anyway, by the time the movie was over, it was time for the second round of coffee and mints, and then the seat-belt sign was on and we were over the big aluminum dome on Mount Wilson, coming in, and I never had found the time to do my sorting. Well, I was used to that. I’d never found any ginseng back in Potsdam, either. I had to get through school on a scholarship.
I checked in, washed my face and went down to the meeting room just in time for a very dull tutorial on clear-air turbulence in planetary atmospheres. There was quite a good turnout, maybe seventy or eighty people in the room; but what they thought they were getting out of it, I cannot imagine, so I picked up a program and ducked out.
Somebody by the coffee machine called to me. “Hi, Chip.”
I went over and shook his hand, a young fellow named Resnik from the little college where I’d got my bachelor’s, looking bored and angry. He was with someone I didn’t know, tall and gray-haired and bankerish. “Dr. Ramos, this is Chesley Grew. Chip, Dr. Ramos. He’s with NASA—I think it’s NASA?”
“No, I’m with a foundation,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Grew. I’ve followed your work.”
“Thank you. Thank you very much.” I would have liked a cup of coffee, but I didn’t particularly want to stand there talking to them while I drank it, so I said, “Well, I’d better get checked in, so if you’ll excuse me …”
“Come off it, Chip,” said Larry Resnik. “I saw you check in half an hour ago. You just want to go up to your room and work.”
That was embarrassing, a little. I didn’t mind it with Resnik, but I didn’t know the other fellow. He grinned and said, “Larry tells me you’re like that. Matter of fact, when you went by, he said you’d be back out in thirty seconds, and you were.”
“Well. Clear-air turbulence isn’t my subject, really …”
“Oh, nobody’s blaming you. God knows not. Care for some coffee?”
The only thing to do was to be gracious about it, so I said, “Yes, please. Thanks.” I watched him take a cup and fill it from the big silver urn. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him. “Did we meet at the Dallas Double-A S sessions?”
“I’m afraid not. Sugar? No, I’ve actually been to very few of these meetings, but I’ve read some of your papers.”
I stirred my coffee. “Thank you, Dr. Ramos.” One of the things I’ve learned to do is repeat a name as often as I can so I won’t forget it. About half the time I forget it anyway, of course. “I’ll be speaking tomorrow morning, Dr. Ramos. ‘A Photometric Technique for Deriving Slopes from Planetary Fly-bys.’ Nothing much that doesn’t follow from what they’ve done at Langley, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, I saw the abstract.”
“But you’ll get your brownie points for reading it, eh?” said Larry. He was breathing heavily. “How many does that make this year?”
“Well, a lot.” I tried to drink my coffee both rapidly and inconspicuously. Larry seemed in an unhappy mood.