Antman

by Robert V. Adams

  'Hullo, thank God it's you, Janie. Where have you been?’

  Tom stuck his head round the kitchen door and waved to attract Hugh's attention. 'Keep her talking,' he mouthed. 'I'll ring the police from the line in your study. Hopefully they'll trace the number.'

  Janie's voice sounded faint. 'Hugh, can you hear me?'

  'Janie, darling, are you all right?'

  Another voice came onto the line and spoke quietly into Hugh's ear. 'Please, don't let anything happen to her,' Hugh begged.

  'I'm giving you five seconds,' said the voice.

  'Don't! Wait.'

  There was rustling at the other end of the phone.

  'Hullo, hullo!'

  'Hugh.' The voice was weak. 'Is that you?'

  'This is me, Janie.'

  'You won't ever leave me, darling.'

  'No, of course not.'

  The tears flowed silently down his crumpled face.

  'Come and take me home.'

  'I will.'

  'Tell me you're coming now.'

  Tom was back in the room. Hugh covered the phone with his hand.

  'For God's sake, what can I say?'

  'Tell her you'll be there,' said Tom.

  He took his hand off the mouthpiece.

  'I'm on my way, darling.'

  The phone clicked.

  'Janie, Janie.'

  The line was dead. Hugh's eyes were moist. He bit his lip and turned to Tom.

  'What can I do? Did they trace the call?'

  Tom shrugged. 'They'll ring and let us know.'

  At that moment the phone rang. Tom walked to the hall and picked it up. There was a brief exchange. He replaced the receiver and came back.

  'Damn.'

  Hugh was beside himself with anxiety. 'Didn't they do it?'

  'Not enough time, apparently.'

  'But surely – I thought that was the idea of all this technology.'

  The police are setting up a tap on this number. You're to let them know if you have any other further contact with this person.'

  Chris faced Bradshaw in his office.

  'Why did you leave Hugh Mackintosh like that?'

  'I said we'll do the tap. All calls will be recorded.'

  'You treated him like a suspect. The man's a victim, anyone can see that.'

  'I did not say he's a suspect.'

  'Something else for your little academic coterie to consider, Chief Inspector.' Bradshaw tossed a folder across the desk. 'When you've a minute spare from drinking coffees in the senior common room at the University, let me have your opinion on where these came from.' Chris opened the folder and peered in. They appeared to be faxes to Tom’s Centre from an unnamed person, dated five years ago.

  'Who gave you these?'

  'You aren't the only repository of information in this Station. These were given to one of our DCs on a routine trawl of University staff.'

  'I thought we'd agreed all information would be passed through me.'

  'I'm passing it. Anything more?'

  Back in her office, Chris had time to study the faxes. They were sent on the same day. Each was in the same tone, a vitriolic attack on the integrity of Tom's work, the reputation of the Centre and, in particular, the procedures for selecting staff.

  She was on the phone to Tom. 'I've had it up to here with Bradshaw,' she said.

  'The question is, does he do the business?'

  'Yes, but in the face, rather than on the basis of respect for people.'

  'Your superintendent sounds rather like Dr Dollent,' said Tom.

  Chris looked icily at him. ‘Whose side are you on? He isn't my superintendent.'

  Tom put up a placating hand. 'I didn't mean it like that. Let me tell you about Dr Dollent. He was George Simenon's creation. Very successful too, for his author, although by no means as well known as Inspector Maigret. He also had a habit of approaching cases in an unorthodox way.'

  'Did Dr Dollent make a mess of things?'

  'No, he was rather successful, despite his eccentricities.'

  'Forget him, there isn't much resemblance.'

  * * *

  Hugh crouched at the wheel of his car and drove through the gathering dusk. He'd received another phone message, less than ten minutes after Tom had left and fifteen minutes before the phone tap was in place.

  'I'm coming, Janie darling. Soon you won't need to worry any more.'

  * * *

  Tom was musing on the implication of the faxes. He'd asked Jean to confirm with Stella the names of candidates for all departmental vacancies for the previous six months.

  He called into one of the insect laboratories and found a trio of research students poring over one of the observation nests.

  'Watch out,' said Tom. 'One's going into the nest.'

  There was a pause. Then half a dozen ants rushed excitedly from the entrance, casting about on all sides as though searching for something.

  'What are they doing?' asked Colin Nixon, a new student whose research topic was parasitic cuckoo bees in bumble bee nests.

  'Keep watching,' said Roger Farriday, a potentially brilliant student of communication between the social insects and currently the boyfriend of Naomi Waterson.

  After a few seconds, four of the ants struck out in the same direction as the incoming one. The other two were still milling about. One of the four seemed to hesitate and turned back towards the next. But the other three persisted.

  'Hmm, not bad,' mused Tom. 'Some inefficiencies I'd say, but given large enough numbers it gets the job done.'

  'How do they do it?' asked Nixon. ‘Is it memory?’

  'Donisthorpe's pyramid, from way back in 1924,' said Farriday.

  'How do they remember?'

  Farriday answered again. ‘Whether or not you call it memory is a moot point. In any case, whether it is memory or physiological responses from what Wragge Morley called excitement centre ants to the rest, is immaterial. The fact is that great numbers overcome the inevitable inefficiencies of insect error and ensure overwhelming success most of the time, in a pyramid of communication. Or a chain reaction. Make the calculation. Assuming one ant communicates with another in a tenth of a second, that's up to 500 in the first second and up to half a million in the next. Even allowing for a fifty per cent drop out, that's one huge geometric progression. Just think, in less than half an hour every ant on the planet would be on line.'

  'The pyramid sounds a powerful explanation, but surely it's too elementary to be real.'

  'Remember this rule of Nature. The simpler the mechanism the more powerful its effects. It's the key to success among the social insects.'

  Tom intervened. 'Ants communicate with each other. They signal using their antennae. Whether we call this a language or a series of behavioural cues and responses is debatable. It is a highly effective form of communication.' As he spoke he was thinking with irritation of the whereabouts of the antennation equipment. All that effort to develop the technology to stimulate ants' antennae. Other priorities, with appropriate funding which was the driving force, had taken over. He continued: 'In this department we've been carrying out a number of research projects into how ants use their antennae to communicate. Communication is the means by which ant societies capitalise on individual gains. The continuance of the colony as a competitive collective depends on the richness of interaction between individual ants, and, specifically, on the effectiveness of communication, in terms of the speed with which messages from one ant are relayed to more or less the entire affected population. Communication does not have to be absolutely one hundred per cent efficient, but it has to reach a critical mass in ten thousand daily situations requiring a mass response – whether defending or repairing the nest, or overwhelming rapidly moving prey – in order to meet the necessities of their collective life. 'Do you know what marks out ants from many other insects and even animals, birds and fish?'

  'They're social,' said Nixon.

  'Be more specific. What does that entail?'

/>   'They can jump, swim and play.'

  'I admit they are qualities of some species. But more broadly than that, give me an attribute of ants in general.'

  'You've got me.'

  'As I was saying, apart from communicating with their antennae, they leave scent trails with their abdomens, which gives them the power to retrace their steps and encourage other ants to follow them. So they can negotiate mazes.'

  Nixon looked incredulous. Tom continued. 'Their ability to do this is far superior to that of rats.'

  'I don't see that as too useful. Surely they don't encounter many mazes in everyday life.'

  'Quite the contrary. A worker ant's entire life relies heavily upon the negotiation of labyrinths – above and below ground. Think about their nests. Mostly in complete darkness. Hundreds, thousands of metres of tunnels and galleries, each with different functions. The larger ant cities consisting of more tunnels than there are alleys in Bombay or Glasgow. If you watch them under infra-red bulbs – you can see them but as far as they're concerned it's pitch dark – they move round the nest with a confidence and speed which makes it impossible to regard them as mindless. Without a doubt they store a map in their memory of at least part of that complexity. How do they do it with such allegedly primitive brain cells?'

  'Maurice Maeterlinck the philosopher studied cooperation between ants in building walls. He referred to examples of this kind in discussions about the boundary between instinct and intelligence. I think he was attempting to prevent the ant world on one hand being compared too closely with human societies, and on the other being dismissed as having no links at all with other social forms of living. At different times he considered whether the nest was an example of pure harmony – whether of autocracy, democracy or instinctively based – or a kind of organised chaos with the survival of ant societies resulting purely from their overwhelming numbers. He considered other issues too, such as whether ants felt and demonstrated affection for their brood and altruism in sacrificing themselves to protect their fellows, and the queen in particular.'

  'One moment.' Tom walked to the office at one end of the laboratory. He pulled an old and well used book off the shelf and returned to where the students stood. He patted the book, as though welcoming a colleague to their discussion. 'Maeterlinck's Life of the Ant. Let's see if I can find the quote. Ah yes.' He thumbed the book open at one of many bookmarks. 'Here we are, page thirty-five. "The ant is one of the noblest, most courageous, most charitable, most devoted, most generous, and most altruistic creatures on earth." Although Maeterlinck raised the charge of anthropomorphism against some of the cruder comparisons made between human and ant societies, he didn't fundamentally challenge such a view. What is significant is that Maeterlinck's work in the 1930s on the life of the ant which followed his publications on the life of the bee and the life of the white ant, showed remarkable similarity with the work of Eugene Marais, the South African writer, who from 1928 switched his attention from publications on the soul of the baboon to theorising about the analogy between the individual nest of termites and the animal as an organism. He has a place alongside the great names of the natural history of the social insects and ants in particular Rene-Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur, William Morton Wheeler of Harvard, Pierre Huber, Auguste Forel and Emery the taxonomist of myrmecology.'

  At this point, Farriday entered the discussion. 'But wasn't Maeterlinck remiss in not acknowledging his debt to Eugene Marais, for developing the idea of the insect colony as a composite animal? Even though Marais as a South African was relatively unknown in Europe in the late 1920s and early 1930s, his articles on this subject were reported in the French and Belgian press at the time of publication. In any case Maeterlinck would have been able to read the original articles, since they were published in Afrikaans and the similarity between this and Flemish to a Flemish intellectual would have made it easy to make sense of them.'

  Tom shrugged: 'Scientific research is not exempt from human frailties, I admit. But it's the ideas which are interesting rather than the people behind them.'

  * * *

  Once Graver got the hang of setting the antennation machine up, it was easy to pass messages on. Communication was so effective among the driver ants that moments after changing the signal, a ripple of responses would go along the files travelling the pathways into the woods and out again. He was pretty well beside himself with delight about the floodlights. He leapt about his solitary shelter talking to himself like a person possessed.

  'Yes, turn the lights up. Keep focusing on the nest,' he called out loud. 'The more heat you generate, the faster they can move towards their targets.'

  The level of activity in the insects was positively correlated with the temperature. The hotter it was, the better. Up to the point, that is, where the increased heat caused their systems to break down. Once this happened individual ants would progress quickly from hyperactivity to death. This was the fate of an observation nest of Formica Sanguinea, slave-making ants, which he had left on a window sill in the laboratory, returning a few hours later to find the sun had come out and was shining directly on the glass over the foraging area. Virtually all the ants had emerged to sun themselves and forage, before dying in a frenzy of over-activity.

  * * *

  The directions had been difficult to follow, but Hugh had managed to drive there. His entire body felt weak and a fit of dizziness overtook him as he stood up. He wondered momentarily if this was what happened when people had a stroke. He stood in the large porch. His hand shook as he found the doorbell in the gloom and pressed it. Then when this apparently produced no result he used the door knocker. The sound echoed in the silent countryside and seemed to go on echoing in his head.

  'So, Dr Mackintosh.'

  'You know my name.'

  'Everyone at the University knows you.'

  Ah, thought Hugh, this was a student perhaps, or a former student. There were so many that he couldn't possibly recognise all the people who apparently knew him. The voice was muffled, through one of those voice distorters, he thought.

  'You don't recognise my voice do you, Dr Mackintosh?'

  'I'm afraid not.' Hugh couldn't keep the tremor in his voice under control.

  'Listen carefully, Dr Mackintosh, if you want to see your wife again.'

  Hugh's heart leapt. So Janie was here. He cared not at that moment for any other consequences, but only for seeing her.

  'Is she safe?'

  'Yes, provided you do exactly what I say.'

  'I must warn you –' began Hugh.

  'Shut up,' the man cut in. 'If you want to see your wife. Keep listening and keep your mouth shut.'

  'I'm sorry. I –'

  'In the box on the shelf to your left, you'll find a blindfold. Put it on.'

  Hugh's hand trembled so much he could hardly complete this task. A wave of dizziness overcame him and he thought he'd pass out.

  'Push open the door.'

  Standing inside the house, Hugh jumped as a hand gripped his right arm firmly.

  'Shut up and keep walking. Left here. Down two steps. Through this door. A moment, out of the way. Stand still.'

  Hugh heard the man produce a key. He pushed roughly past Hugh, unlocking the door swiftly and pulling back before Hugh could think to react.

  'Open it and push it open.'

  As Hugh obeyed he felt an enormous blow in the small of his back which forced all the wind from his lungs and propelled him forward violently into the utter blackness of the space ahead. He was so disoriented and dazed that he hardly noticed the prick of the hypodermic.

  There was very little time. Mahler's tenth symphony moved into its third movement – the allegro moderato headed Purgatorio, which lasted less than four minutes.

  Graver's stomach was queazy with anticipation. He leaned forward in the near-pitch darkness and seized the shoulder of the befuddled man, pressing the hypodermic into the upper arm and pressing its syringe before the confused senses of the man enabled him to react. T
he drug would ensure his skin was subjected to multiple punctures – as when bitten by ten thousand ants – without him feeling the full intensity of the pain.

  In the absolute darkness of moonless night, Hugh tried at the very last moment to prevent himself from falling into the deep pit, but with arms waving wildly, pitched headlong into its black depths. Across the corner of the pit was the log Graver had placed strategically to support the largest of the branches with which he had then disguised it. It was this log which the intruder had now tripped over, clutching hopelessly and bringing it down with him when he lost his balance. By a bleak coincidence, the entire nest of army ants had chosen to bivouac in a huge pear-shaped swarm half a metre wide and twice as deep on the underside of this log, around the attractive protection of its hollowed out centre. Lying semi-conscious on the damp ground, his legs hopelessly twisted and partly hidden under the ball of ants, Hugh became vaguely aware of the movements of a myriad tiny feet on his legs. The ball bubbled like a volcano. The soldiers boiled first from its hissing centre and ran blindly about as the angry workers rushed forwards in an unstoppable stream. Thousands upon thousands of them slipped under his torn trouser legs and sank their jaws into his quivering flesh.

  Mercifully, by the time they reached his neck, he was already out of his mind and when the first ants bit into the tender skin inside his nostrils and lips, he had already lost consciousness. Their appetite for flesh was so keen that less than ten minutes after the first attack, when they laid part of his heart bare under his rib cage, it was still beating. Five minutes later there was no sound beyond the irrepressible rhythm of their ticking legs as they skittled back and forth, carrying chunks of grim booty from the body to their brood in the nest.

  Janie wasn't aware of the faint clicking of the antennator, as its leaf like pendants flickered away inside the nest entrance. It could have operated silently, but Graver had introduced the sounds so that when it was placed out of sight inside the nest, he could confirm it was working. She couldn't see him peering at her from behind the one-way glass either, stopwatch, notepad and pen at the ready. He didn't need to use artificial antennation after the initial phase, but was keen to compare the speed of “completion”, as he termed it, with the previously recorded observations using various animals' heads without its stimulus.