Antman (34 page)

'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.'