The Edge of Tomorrow by Howard Fast

to tell the truth.”
    Lieberman said, “You are an intelligent man, Mr. Morgan. Let me show you something.” He then opened the doors of one of the wall cupboards, and there eight jars of formaldehyde and in each jar a specimen like mine—and in each case mutilated by the violence of its death. I said nothing. I just stared.
    Lieberman closed the cupboard doors. “All in five days,” he shrugged.
    â€œA new race of ants,” I whispered stupidly.
    â€œNo. They’re not ants. Come here!” He motioned me to the desk and the other two joined me. Lieberman took a set of dissecting instruments out of his drawer, used one to turn the thing over and then pointed to the underpart of what would be the thorax in an insect.
    â€œThat looks like part of him, doesn’t it, Mr. Morgan?”
    â€œYes, it does.”
    Using two of the tools, he found a fissure and pried the bottom apart. It came open like the belly of a bomber; it was a pocket, a pouch, a receptacle that the thing wore, and in it were four beautiful little tools or instruments or weapons, each about an inch and a half long. They were beautiful the way any object of functional purpose and loving creation is beautiful—the way the creature itself would have been beautiful, had it not been an insect and myself a man. Using tweezers, Lieberman took each instrument off the brackets that held it, offering each to me. And I took each one, felt it, examined it, and then put it down.
    I had to look at the ant now, and I realized that I had not truly looked at it before. We don’t look carefully at a thing that is horrible or repugnant to us. You can’t look at anything through a screen of hatred. But now the hatred and the fear was dilute, and as I looked, I realized it was not an ant although like an ant. It was nothing that I had ever seen or dreamed of.
    All three men were watching me, and suddenly I was on the defensive. “I didn’t know! What do you expect when you see an insect that size?”
    Lieberman nodded.
    â€œWhat in the name of God is it?”
    From his desk, Lieberman produced a bottle and four small glasses. He poured and we drank it neat. I would not have expected him to keep good Scotch in his desk.
    â€œWe don’t know,” Hopper said. “We don’t know what it is.”
    Lieberman pointed to the broken skull from which a white substance oozed. “Brain material—a great deal of it.”
    â€œIt could be a very intelligent creature,” Hopper nodded.
    Lieberman said, “It is an insect in developmental structure. We know very little about intelligence in our insects. It’s not the same as what we call intelligence. It’s a collective phenomenon—as if you were to think of the component parts of our bodies. Each part is alive, but the intelligence is a result of the whole. If that same pattern were to extend to creatures like this one—”
    I broke the silence. They were content to stand there and stare at it.
    â€œSuppose it were?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThe kind of collective intelligence you were talking about.”
    â€œOh? Well, I couldn’t say. It would be something beyond our wildest dreams. To us—well, what we are to an ordinary ant.”
    â€œI don’t believe that,” I said shortly, and Fitzgerald, the government man, told me quietly, “Neither do we. We guess.”
    â€œIf it’s that intelligent, why didn’t it use one of those weapons on me?”
    â€œWould that be a mark of intelligence?” Hopper asked mildly.
    â€œPerhaps none of these are weapons,” Lieberman said.
    â€œDon’t you know? Didn’t the others carry instruments?”
    â€œThey did,” Fitzgerald said shortly.
    â€œWhy? What were they?”
    â€œWe don’t know,” Lieberman said.
    â€œBut you can find out. We have scientists, engineers—good God, this is an age of fantastic