Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (56 page)

“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?”

“Come now”—Meyers laughed—”aren't we playing the game too. well? We have a committee of sincere and interested citizens, and I don't think we have shirked the problem. I move that we adjourn now and reconvene in September.”

The motion was seconded and carried.

Driving up to our summer place in Vermont, my wife, Jane, said rather sadly, “If the boy were alive, I wouldn't sleep too well. Do you know, it's three years since he died—and it seems like only yesterday.”

“We are beginning a vacation and a rest,” I told her, “and I will not countenance this kind of mood.”

“It's just that I sometimes feel we have stopped caring. Is it a part of growing old?”

“We still care,” I said sharply. But I knew exactly what she meant.

Our summer place is in a wonderful, isolated upland valley, like so many of the upland valleys in Vermont, full of sunny days and cool nights and a starry sky over the green folds of earth. It's a place where time moved differently, and after we are there for a while, we move with the time of the place.

We had occasional company, but not too often or too much, and mostly on the weekends. Town was six miles on a dirt road, and twenty miles away was a fair-sized artist colony with a summer symphony and theater and a great many people to talk to if we got lonely. But our visits there were few, two or. three times a summer, and we were rarely lonely in the way people understand loneliness. Down the road about a mile lived our nearest neighbor, an old widower named Glenn Olson, who made honey in the summer and maple sugar in the winter. Both were delicious. His maples were old and strong and his bees worked among the wild flowers in the abandoned pastures.

I had been meaning to visit him for both honey and sugar, but put it off from day to day. On the third week the thing happened in the cities. But until then, nothing was very different, only the warm summer days and the birds and the insects humming lazily in the hot air. We could have forgotten the whole thing if only we had disbelieved; but somewhere in both of us was a nugget of belief. We had a postcard from Basehart, who was in the Virgin Islands, where he was cataloguing species and types of insects. The postcard ended with a rather sentimental good-by. Neither my wife nor I remarked on that because, as I said, we had a nugget of belief.

And of course, then, toward the beginning of the summer, the cities died.

There had been a great deal of speculation about the insects and what they might do if they were as some thought. Articles were written, books rushed into print, and even films were planned. There were nightmare things about super-insects, armies of ants, winged devils; but no one anticipated the simple directness of the fact. The insects simply moved against the cities to begin it. Apparently a single intelligence controlled all the movements of the insects, and the millions who perished made no great difference to the survival of the intelligence. They filled the aqueducts and stopped the flow of water. They short-circuited the wires and halted the flow of electricity. They ate the food in the cities and swarmed by the millions over the food coming in. They clogged the valves and intakes of motors and stalled them. They clogged the sewers and they spread disease and the cities died. The insects died by the billions, but this time it was not necessary to kill them. They imposed death on themselves, and the festering, malaria-ridden, plague-ridden cities died with them.

First we watched it happen on television, but the television went very soon. We have a relay tower, and it ceased to function on the third day after the attack on the cities began; after that the picture was so bad as to be meaningless, and a few days later it ceased. We listened to the radio then, until the radio stopped. Then there was the valley as it had always been, and the silence, and the insects hanging in the hot air and the sunlight and the nights.

My own feeling was to drive down to the town, and from day to day I felt that this had to be, but my wife would not have it. Her dread of leaving our place and going to the town was so great that it was not until our food began to run low that she agreed to my going—providing she went with me. Our own telephone had stopped functioning long ago, and it was only after days of not seeing a plane overhead that we realized no planes flew any longer.

Driving down toward town finally, we stopped at Glenn Olson's place, to ask him whether he knew how it was in the village, and perhaps to buy some honey and sugar. We found him in his bedroom, dead—not long dead, perhaps only a day. He had been stung three times on the forearm while he slept. My wife had been a nurse once, and she explained the process whereby three consecutive bee stings would work to kill a man. The air outside was full of bees, humming, working, hanging in the air.

“I think we'll go back to the house,” I said.

“We can't leave him like that.”

“We can,” I said, thinking of how many millions of others were like that.

Olson had a well-stocked cupboard. I filled some bags with canned goods, flour, beans, honey in jars, and maple sugar, and I carried them out to my car, while Jane remained in the house. Then I pulled the blanket over Olson and took Jane by the arm.

“I don't want to go out there,” she said.

“Well, we must, you know. We can't stay here.”

“I'm afraid.”

“But we can't stay here.”

Finally I convinced her to come to the car. Her arms were covered and she held a towel over her face, but the bees ignored us. In the car we raised the windows and drove back to our summer place—and then almost ran into our house.

Yet I got over the panic and resisted the temptation to cover myself with mosquito netting. I talked to Jane and finally convinced her that this was not a thing one could avoid or take measures against. It was like the wind, the rain, the sunrise and the sunset. It was happening and nothing we could do would alter it.

“Alan—will it be everyone?” she asked. “Will it be the whole world?”

“I don't know.”

“What good would it do them to make it the whole world?”

“I don't know.”

“I would not want to live if it were the whole world.”

“It's not a question of what we want. It's the way it is. We can only live with it the way it is.”

Yet when I went out to the car to bring in the supplies we had taken from Olson's place, I had to call upon every shred of courage and strength I possessed.

It was a little better the next day, and by the third day I convinced jane to leave the house with me and to walk a little. She covered herself at first, but after a while her fear begin to dissipate, and then, bit by bit, it became something you live with—as I suppose anything can. The following week I sat down to write this account. I had been working on it for three days. Yesterday a bee lighted on the back of my hand, a large, fuzzy, working bumblebee. I held my hand firmly and looked at the bee, and the bee returned my stare.

Then the bee flew away, and I had a feeling that it was over and that what would happen had happened. But how we will pick it up and what we will put together, I don't know. I talked about it with my wife last night.

“I hope Basehart is alive and well,” she said. “It would be nice to see him again.” Which was rather curious, since all she knew about Basehart was what I told her. Then she began to cry. She was not a woman who cries a great deal, and soon she dried her eyes and took up some sewing that she had laid aside weeks before. I lit my pipe. It was the last of the day. We sat there in silence as darkness fell.

“I lit our single kerosene lamp, and she said to me, “We will have to go down to the village sooner or later, won't we?”

“Sooner or later,” I agreed.

26
The Sight of Eden

T
hey were in orbit, and it was over. They had crossed the void, leaped all the gaps of time and imagination, and bridged the unbridgeable, and they had been through the seven fires of hell. They were sane, although they had touched all the fringes of insanity. They could smile, although they had known all the profound depths of grief and suicidal profession; and they were alive, although they had flirted with all the varieties of death that boundless space can concoct.

They had come through fear and terror indescribable, and now they could speak about it and to each other. There were seven of them, three women and four men, and they had been locked away in this starship for five interminable years. They were light years from the Planet Earth beyond calculation; they had leaped their ship across the strange curves and tricks of space, played havoc with all the calculus and geometry known to men, and had flung themselves over the void to where the stars clustered thick as grapes on the autumn vines. They had done what they were ordained to do, and what no people from the Planet Earth had ever done before. And now they were in silent, flowing orbit over a planet as blue and green and lovely as the one they had left behind them.

It was something to think about and to crow about. It gave them a sense of themselves that was understandable. It made them look at each other in a certain way as they sat together in the wardroom. They had done it.

For that reason, all the words that could be said to the point were pointless; in five years, all the words had been said; all the reactions had been tested; all the tears had been wept. Now there remained only the fact, and the fact was the planet beneath them, bathed in sunshine, washed with air, and laced with rivers and lakes and lagoons. It was the proof of the universe, all they had ventured their lives and sanity to prove, that life was not limited to the Planet Earth and the Solar System, but was a part of the logic of the universe. The fact was a planet slightly larger than Earth, perhaps of somewhat less density, with a breathable nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, well-watered and with abundant plant life. Its revolution upon its axis was thirty-two hours; its year, as well as they could calculate, was four hundred and fifteen days. Its sun was a Sol-type sun, somewhat better than 900,000 miles in diameter and at this moment 112,000,576 miles from the planet it warmed. There were eleven other planets in the system; first this one, the other ten could wait.

Their own orbit time was five hours and sixteen minutes, and. since they had gone into orbit to study the planet, their starship had made eight revolutions. This was their final meeting in the wardroom for comparative discussion. It would be a short meeting, and then they would descend.

2

Briggs, the pilot and as much the captain as anyone was captain upon the starship, looked from face to face and said, “Not very much left to talk about, unless someone can come up with a reason not to go down?”

“All the reasons,” Frances Rhodes, the physician, nodded. “Bugs, germs, virus, radiation—and none of them hold water.” She smiled—and she was lovely then, as they all were in the radiance of their accomplishment. “We'd go down if it was a leper colony, wouldn't we?”

They would have gone down if it were boiling lava under them, because they had endured all the confinement that is endurable and had felt all the nakedness of empty space that men can feel and remain sane.

“I'm not worried about bugs,” Carrington, the agronomist, said.. “Disease doesn't work that way. Not about radiation either. Something else.”

Gene Ling, second navigator and Nobel Prize winner, nodded. She was a slender, gentle half-Chinese from San Francisco. “Yes, something else,” she said. “No oceans.”

“No deserts either,” said Carrington.

“No lights in the cities at night,” said Gluckman, the engineer.

“If they are cities,” said McCaffery, the navigator.

“The nights are full of starlight,” Briggs thought. “Perhaps they sleep at night. It must be different. Why do we forget how different it must be?”

“They must see us,” said Laura Shawn, the biologist. “Why don't they call to us, signal us, come up to us?”

“They?”

“In the scopes, it looks like fairyland,” Phillips, second engineer, observed self-consciously. “I don't like that.”

“Where was your childhood, Phillips?”