The man who liked ants
"I wonder what would have happened if you had gone into a respectable business, Saint," Ivar Nordsten remarked one afternoon.
Simon Templar smiled at him so innocently that for an instant his nickname might almost have seemed justified — if it had not been for the faint lazy twinkle of unsaintly mockery that stirred at the back of his blue eyes.
"The question is too farfetched, Ivar. You might as well speculate about what would have happened if I'd been a Martian or a horse."
They sat on the veranda of the house of Ivar Nordsten — whose name was not really Ivar Nordsten, but who was alive that day and the master of fabulous millions only because the course of one of the Saint's lawless escapades had once crossed his path at a time when death would have seemed a happy release. He of all living men should have had no wish to change the history of that twentieth-century Robin Hood, whose dark reckless face could be found photographed in half the police archives of the world, and whose gay impudence of outlawry had in its time set the underworlds of five continents buzzing like nests of infuriated wasps. But in that mood of idle fantasy which may well come with the after-lunch contentment of a warm Florida afternoon, Nordsten would have put forward almost any preposterous premise that might give him the pleasure of listening to his friend.
"It isn't as farfetched as that," he said. "You will never admit it, but you have many respectable instincts."
"But I have so many more disreputable ones to keep them under control," answered the Saint earnestly. "And it's always been so much more amusing to indulge the disreputable instincts… No, Ivar, I mustn't let you make a paragon out of me. If I were quite cynically psychoanalyzing myself, I should probably say that the reason why I only soak the more obvious excrescences on the human race is because it makes everything okay with my respectable instincts and lets them go peacefully to sleep. Then I can turn all my disreputable impulses loose on the mechanical problem of soaking this obvious excrescence in some satisfyingly novel and juicy manner, and get all the fun of original sin out of it without any qualms of conscience."
"But you contradict yourself. The mere fact that you speak in terms of what you call 'an obvious excrescence on the human race' proves that you have some moral standards by which you judge him, and that you have some idealistic interest in the human race itself."
"The human race," said the Saint sombrely, "is a repulsive, dull, bloated, ill-conditioned and ill-favoured mass of dimly conscious meat, the chief justification for whose existence is that it provides a contrasting background against which my beauty and spiritual perfections can shine with a lustre only exceeded by your own."
"You have a natural modesty which I had never suspected," Nordsten observed gravely, and they both laughed. "But," he added, "I think you will get on well with Dr. Sardon."
"Who is he?"
"A neighbour of mine. We are dining with him tonight."
Simon frowned.
"I warned you that I was travelling without any Dr.ess clothes," he began, but Nordsten shook his head maliciously.
"Dr. Sardon likes Dr.ess clothes even less than you do. And you never warned me that you were coming here at all. So what could I do? I accepted his invitation a week ago, so when you arrived I could only tell Sardon what had happened. Of course he insisted that you must come with me. But I think he will interest you."
The Saint sighed resignedly and swished the highball gently around in his glass so that the ice clinked.
"Why should I be interested in any of your neighbours?" he protested. "I didn't come here to commit any crimes; and I'm sure all these people are as respectable as millionaires can be."
"Dr. Sardon is not a millionaire. He is a very brilliant biologist."
"What else makes him interesting?"
"He is very fond of ants," said Nordsten seriously, and the Saint sat up.
Then he finished his Dr.ink deliberately and put down the glass.
"Now I know that this climate doesn't agree with you," he said. "Let's get changed and go down to the tennis court. I'll put you in your place before we start the evening."
Nevertheless he Dr.ove over to Dr. Sardon's house that evening in a mood of open-minded curiosity. Scientists he had known before, men who went down thousands of feet into the sea to look at globigerina ooze and men who devised complicated electrical gadgets in laboratories to manufacture gold; but this was the first time that he had heard of a biologist who was fon,d of ants. Everything that was out of the ordinary was prospective material for the Saint. It must be admitted that in simplifying his own career to elementary equations by which obvious excrescences on the human race could be soaked, he did himself less than justice.
But there was nothing about the square smooth-shaven man who was introduced to him as Dr. Sardon to take away the breath of any hardened outlaw. He might perhaps have been an ordinary efficient doctor, possibly with an exclusive and sophisticated practice; more probably he could have been a successful stockbroker, or the manager of any profitable commercial business. He shook hands with them briskly and almost mechanically, seeming to summarize the Saint in one sweeping glance through his crisp-looking rimless pince-nez.
"No, you're not a bit late, Mr. Nordsten. As a matter of fact I was working until twenty minutes ago. If you had come earlier I should have been quite embarrassed."
He introduced his niece, a dark slender girl with a quiet and rather aloof beauty which would have been chilling if it had not been relieved by the friendly humour of her brown eyes. About her, Simon admitted, there might certainly have been things to attract the attention of a modern buccaneer.
"Carmen has been assisting me. She has a very good degree from Columbia."
He made no other unprompted reference to his researches, and Simon recognized him as the modern type of scientist whose carefully cultivated pose of matter-of-fact worldliness is just as fashionable an affectation as the mystical and bearded eccentricity of his predecessors used to be. Dr. Sardon talked about politics, about his golf handicap and about the art of Otto Soglow. He was an entertaining and effective conversationalist but he might never have heard of such a thing as biology until towards the close of dinner Ivar Nordsten skilfully turned a discussion of gardening to the subject of insect pests.
"Although, of course," he said, "you would not call them that."
It was strange to see the dark glow that came into Sardon's eyes.
"As a popular term," he said in his deep vibrant voice, "I suppose it is too well established for me to change it. But it would be much more reasonable for the insects to talk about human pests."
He turned to Simon.
"I expect Mr. Nordsten has already warned you about the — bee in my bonnet," he said; but he used the phrase without smiling. "Do you by any chance know anything about the subject?"
"I had a flea once," said the Saint reminiscently. "I called him Goebbels. But he left me."
"Then you would be surprised to know how many of the most sensational achievements of man were surpassed by the insects hunDr.eds of years ago without any artificial aids." The finger tips of his strong nervous hands played a tattoo against each other, "You talk about the Age of Speed and Man's Conquest of the Air; and yet the fly Cephenomia, the swiftest living creature, can outpace the fastest of your boasted aeroplanes. What is the greatest scientific marvel of the century? Probably you would say radio. But Count Arco, the German radio expert, has proved the existence of a kind of wireless telegraphy, or telepathy, between certain species of beetle, which makes nothing of a separation of miles. Lakhovsky claims to have demonstrated that this is common to several other insects. When the Redemanni termites build their twenty-five-foot conical towers topped with ten-foot chimneys they are performing much greater marvels of engineering than building an Empire State Building. To match them, in proportion to our size, we should have to put up skyscrapers four thousand feet high — and do it without tools."
"I knew the ants would come into it," said Nordsten sotto voce.
Sardon turned on him with his hot piercing gaze.
"Termites are not true ants — the term 'white ants' is a misnomer. Actually they are related to the cockroach. I merely mentioned them as one of the most remarkable of the lower insects. They have a superb social organization, and they may even be superior strategists to the true ants, but they were never destined to conquer the globe. The reason is that they cannot stand light and they cannot tolerate temperatures below twenty degrees centigrade. Therefore, their fields of expansion are for ever limited. They are one of Nature's false beginnings. They are a much older species than man, and they have evolved as far as they are likely to evolve… It is not the same with the true ants."
He leaned forward over the table, with his face white and transfigured as if in a kind of trance.
"The true ant is the destined ruler of the earth. Can you imagine a state of society in which there was no idleness, no poverty, no unemployment, no unrest? We humans would say that it was an unattainable Utopia; and yet it was in existence among the ants when man was a hairy savage scarcely distinguishable from an ape. You may say that it is incompatible with progress — that it could only be achieved in the same way that it is achieved by domestic cattle. But the ant has the same instincts which have made man the tyrant of creation in his time. Lasius fuliginosus keeps and milks its own domestic cattle, in the form of plant lice. Polyergus rufescens and Formica sanguined capture slaves and put them to work. Messor barbarus, the harvesting ant, collects and stores grain. The Attiini cultivate mushrooms in underground forcing houses. And all these things are done, not for private gain, but for the good of the whole community. Could man in any of his advances ever boast of that?"
"But if ants have so many advantages," said the Saint slowly, "and they've been civilized so much longer than man, why haven't they conquered the earth before this?"
"Because Nature cheated them. Having given them so much, she made them wait for the last essential — pure physical bulk."
"The brontosaurus had enough of that," said Nordsten, "and yet man took its place."
Sardon's thin lips curled.
"The difference in size between man and brontosaurus was nothing compared with the difference in size between man and ant. There are limits to the superiority of brain over brawn — even to the superiority of the brain of an ant, which in proportion to its size is twice as large as the brain of a man. But the time is coming…"
His voice sank almost to a whisper, and in the dim light of candles on the table the smouldering luminous-ness of his eyes seemed to leave the rest of his face in deep shadow.
"With the ant, Nature overreached herself. The ant was ready to take his place at the head of creation before creation was ready for him — before the solar system had progressed far enough to give him the conditions in which his body, and his brain with it, his brain which in all its intrinsic qualities is so much finer than the brain of man, could grow to the brute size at which all its potentialities could be developed. Nevertheless, when the solar system is older, and the sun is red because the white heat of its fire is exhausted, and the red light which will accelerate the growth of all living cells is stronger, the ant will be waiting for his turn. Unless Nature finds a swifter instrument than Time to put right her miscalculation…"
"Does it matter?" asked the Saint lightly, and Sardon's face seemed to flame at him.
"It matters. That is only another thing which we can learn from the ant — that individual profit and ambition should count for nothing beside more enduring good. Listen. When I was a boy I loved small creatures. Among them I kept a colony of ants. In a glass box. I watched them in their busy lives, I studied them as they built their nest, I saw how they divided their labour and how they lived and died so that their common life could go on. I loved them because they were so much better than everyone else I knew. But the other boys could not understand. They thought I was soft and stupid. They were always tormenting me. One day they found my glass box where the ants lived. I fought them, but there were so many of them. They were big and cruel. They made a fire and they put my box on it, while they held me. I saw the ants running, fighting, struggling insanely—" The hushed voice tightened as he spoke until it became thin and shrill like a suppressed scream. "I saw them curling up and shrivelling, writhing, tortured. I could hear the hiss of their seething agony in the flames. I saw them going mad, twisting — sprawling — blackening — burning alive before my eyes —"
"Uncle!"
The quiet voice of the girl Carmen cut softly across the muted shriek in which the last words were spoken, so quietly and normally that it was only in the contrast that Simon realized that Sardon had not really raised his voice.
The wild fire died slowly out of Sardon's eyes. For a moment his face remained set and frozen, and then, as if he had only been recalled from a fleeting lapse of attention, he seemed to come awake again with a slight start.
"Where was I?" he said calmly. "Oh yes. I was speaking about the intelligence of ants… It is even a mistake to assume, because they make no audible sounds, that they have not just as excellent means of communication as ourselves. Whether they share the telepathic gifts of other insects is a disputed point, but it is certain that in their antennae they possess an idiom which is adequate to all ordinary needs. By close study and observation it has even been possible for us to learn some of the elementary gestures. The work of Karl Escherich…"
He went into details, in the same detached incisive tone in which he had been speaking before his outburst.
Simon Templar's fingers stroked over the cloth, found a crumb of bread and massaged it gradually into a soft round pellet. He stole a casual glance at the girl. Her aloof oval face was pale, but that might have been its natural complexion; her composure was unaltered. Sardon's outburst might never have occurred, and she might never have had to interrupt it. Only the Saint thought that he saw a shadow of fear moving far down in her eyes.
Even after Carmen had left the table, and the room was richening with the comfortable aromas of coffee and liqueur, brandy and cigars, Sardon was still riding his hobbyhorse. It went on for nearly an hour, until at one of the rare lulls in the discussion Nordsten said: "All the same, Doctor, you are very mysterious about what this has to do with your own experiments."
Sardon's hands rested on the table, white and motionless, the fingers spread out.
"Because I was not ready. Even to my friends I should not like to show anything incomplete. But in the last few weeks I have disposed of my uncertainty. Tonight, if you like, I could show you a little."
"We should be honoured."
The flat pressure of Sardon's hands on the table increased as he pushed back his chair and stood up.
"My workshops are at the end of the garden," he said, and blew out the four candles.
As they rose and followed him from the room, Nordsten touched the Saint's arm and said in a low voice: "Are you sorry I Dr.agged you out?"
"I don't know yet," answered the Saint soberly.
The girl Carmen rejoined them as they left the house. Simon found her walking beside him as they strolled through the warm moonlight. He Dr.opped the remains of his cigar and offered his cigarette case; they stopped for a moment while he gave her a light. Neither of them spoke, but her arm slipped through his as they went on.
The blaze of lights which Sardon switched on in his laboratory wiped the dim silvery gloom out of their eyes in a crash of harsh glaring illumination. In contrast with the tasteful furnishings of the house, the cold white walls and bare tiled floor struck the Saint's sensitive vision with the hygienic and inhuman chill which such places always gave him. But Sardon's laboratory was not like any other place of that kind in which he had ever been.
Ranged along the walls were rows of big glass-fronted boxes, in which apparently formless heaps of litter and rubble could be dimly made out. His tye was caught by a movement in one of the boxes, and he stepped up to look at it more closely. Almost in the same moment he stopped, and nearly recoiled from it, as he realized that he was looking at the largest ant that he had ever seen. It was fully six inches long; and, magnified in that proportion, he could see every joint in its shiny armour-plated surface and the curious bifurcated claws at the ends of its legs. It stood there with its antennae waving gently, watching him with its bulging beady eyes…
"Tetramorium cespitum," said Dr. Sardon, standing beside him. "One of my early experiments. Its natural size is about three tenths of an inch, but it did not respond very well to treatment."
"I should say it had responded heroically," said the Saint. "You don't mean you can do better than that?"
Sardon smiled.
"It was one of my early experiments," he repeated. "I was then merely trying to improve on the work of Ludwig and Ries of Berne, who were breeding giant insects almost comparable with that one, many years ago, with the aid of red light. Subsequently I discovered another principle of growth which they had overlooked, and I also found that an artificial selective cross-breeding between different species not only improved the potential size but also increased the intelligence. For instance, here is one of my later results — a combination of Oecophylla smaragdina and Prenolepsis imparis."
He went to one of the longer and larger boxes at the end of the room. At first Simon could see nothing but a great mound of twigs and leaves piled high in one corner. There were two or three bones, stripped bare and white, lying on the sandy floor of the box… Then Sardon tapped on the glass, and Simon saw with a sudden thrill of horror that what had been a dark hole in the mound of leaves was no longer black and empty. There was a head peering out of the shadow — dark bronze-green, iridescent, covered with short sparse bristly hairs…
"Oecophylla is, of course, one of the more advanced species," Sardon was saying, in his calm precise manner. "It is the only known creature other than man to use a tool. The larvae secrete a substance similar to silk, with which the ants weave leaves together to make their nests, holding the larvae in their jaws and using them as shuttles. I don't yet know whether my hybrid has inherited that instinct."
"It looks as if it would make a charming pet, anyway," murmured the Saint thoughtfully. "Sort of improved lap dog, isn't it?"
The faint sly smile stayed fixed on Sardon's thin lips. He took two steps further, to a wide sliding door that took up most of the wall at the end of the laboratory, and looked back at them sidelong.
"Perhaps you would like to see the future ruler of the world," he said, so very softly that it seemed as if everyone else stopped breathing while he spoke.
Simon heard the girl beside him catch her breath, and Nordsten said quickly: "Surely we've troubled you enough already—"
"I should like to see it," said the Saint quietly.
Sardon's tongue slid once over his lips. He put his hand up and moved a couple of levers on the glittering panels of dials and switches beside the door. It was to the Saint that his gaze returned, with that rapt expresssion of strangely cunning and yet childish happiness.
"You will see it from where you stand. I will ask you to keep perfectly still, so as not to Dr.aw attention to yourselves — there is a strain of Dorylina in this one. Dorylina is one of the most intelligent and highly disciplined species, but it is also the most savage. I do not wish it to become angry—"
His arm stretched out to the handle of the door. He slid it aside in one movement, standing with his back to it, facing them.
The girl's cold hand touched the Saint's wrist. Her fingers slipped down over his hand and locked in with his own, clutching them in a sudden convulsive grip. He heard Ivar Nordsten's suppressed gasp as it caught in his throat, and an icy tingle ran up his spine and broke out in a clammy dew on his forehead.
The rich red light from the chamber beyond the door spilled out like liquid fire, so fierce and vivid that it seemed as if it could only be accompanied by the scorching heat of an open furnace; but it held only a slight appreciable warmth. It beat down from huge crimson arcs ranged along the cornices of the inner room among a maze of shining tubes and twisted wires; there was a great glass ball opposite in which a pale yellow streak of lightning forked and flickered with a faint humming sound. The light struck scarlet highlights from the-gleaming bars of a great metal cage like a gigantic chicken coop which filled the centre of the room to within a yard of the walls. And within the cage something monstrous and incredible stood motionless, staring at them.
Simon would see it sometimes, years afterwards, in uneasy Dr.eams. Something immense and frightful, glistening like burnished copper, balanced on angled legs like bars of plated metal. Only for a few seconds he saw it then, and for most of that time he was held fascinated by its eyes, understanding something that he would never have believed before…
And then suddenly the thing moved, swiftly and horribly and without sound; and Sardon slammed the door shut, blotting out the eye-aching sea of red light and leaving only the austere cold whiteness of the laboratory.
"They are not all like lap dogs," Sardon said in a kind of whisper.
Simon took out a handkerchief and passed it across his brow. The last thing about that weird scene that fixed itself consciously in his memory was the girl's fingers relaxing their tense grip on his hand, and Sar-don's eyes, bland and efficient and businesslike again, pinned steadily on them both in a sort of secret sneer…
"What do you think of our friend?" Ivar Nordsten asked, as they Dr.ove home two hours later.
Simon stretched out a long arm for the lighter at the side of the car.
"He is a lunatic — but of course you knew that. I'm only wondering whether he is quite harmless."
"You ought to sympathize with his contempt for the human race."
The red glow of the Saint's cigarette end brightened so that for an instant the interior of the car was filled with something like a pale reflection of the unearthly crimson luminance which they had seen in Dr. Sardon's forcing room.
"Did you sympathize with his affection for his pets?"
"Those great ants?" Nordsten shivered involuntarily. "No. That last one — it was the most frightful thing I have ever seen. I suppose it was really alive?"
"It was alive," said the Saint steadily. "That's why I'm wondering whether Dr. Sardon is harmless. I don't know what you were looking at, Ivar, but I'll tell you what made my blood run cold. It wasn't the mere size of the thing — though any common or garden ant would be terrifying enough if you enlarged it to those dimensions. It was worse than that. It was the proof that Sardon was right. That ant was looking at me. Not like any other insect or even animal that I've ever seen, but like an insect with a man's brain might look. That was the most frightening thing to me. It knew!"
Nordsten stared at him.
"You mean that you believe what he was saying about it being the future ruler of the world?"
"By itself, no," answered Simon. "But if it were not by itself—"
He did not finish the sentence; and they were silent for the rest of the Dr.ive. Before they went to bed he asked one more question.
"Who else knows about these experiments?"
"No one, I believe. He told me the other day that he was not prepared to say anything about them until he could show complete success. As a matter of fact, I lent him some money to go on with his work, and that is the only reason he took me into his confidence. I was surprised when he showed us his laboratory tonight — even I had never seen it before."
"So he is convinced now that he can show a complete success," said the Saint quietly, and was still subdued and preoccupied the next morning.
In the afternoon he refused to swim or play tennis. He sat hunched up in a chair on the veranda, scowling into space and smoking innumerable cigarettes, except when he rose to pace restlessly up and down like a big nervous cat.
"What you are really worried about is the girl," Nordsten teased him.
"She's pretty enough to worry about," said the Saint shamelessly. "I think I'll go over and ask her for a cocktail."
Nordsten smiled.
"If it will make you a human being again, by all means do," he said. "If you don't come back to dinner I shall know that she is appreciating your anxiety. In any case, I shall probably be very late myself. I have to attend a committee meeting at the golf club and that always adjourns to the bar and goes on for hours."
But the brief tropical twilight had already given way to the dark before Simon made good his threat. He took out Ivar Nordsten's spare Rolls-Royce and Dr.ove slowly over the highway until he found the turning that led through the deep cypress groves to the doctor's house. He was prepared to feel foolish; and yet as his headlights circled through the iron gates he touched his hip pocket to reassure himself that if the need arose he might still feel wise.
The trees arching over the Dr.ive formed a ghostly tunnel down which the Rolls chased its own forerush of light. The smooth hiss of the engine accentuated rather than broke the silence, so that the mind even of a hardened and unimaginative man might cling to the comfort of that faint sound in the same way that the mind of a child might cling to the light of a candle as a comfort against the gathering terrors of the night. The Saint's lip curled cynically at the flight of his own thoughts…
And then, as the car turned a bend in the Dr.ive, he saw the girl, and trod fiercely on the brakes.
The tires shrieked on the macadam and the engine stalled as the big car rocked to a standstill. It flashed through the Saint's mind at that instant, when all sound was abruptly wiped out, that the stillness which he had imagined before was too complete for accident. He felt the skin creep over his back, and had to call on an effort of will to force himself to open the door and get out of the car.
She lay face downwards, halfway across the Dr.ive, in the pool of illumination shed by the glaring headlights. Simon turned her over and raised her head on his arm. Her eyelids twitched as he did so; a kind of moan broke from her lips, and she fought away from him, in a Dr.eadful wildness of panic, for the brief moment before her eyes opened and she recognized him.
"My dear," he said, "what has been happening?"
She had gone limp in his arms, the breath jerking pitifully through her lips, but she had not fainted again. And behind him, in that surround of stifling stillness, he heard quite clearly the rustle of something brushing stealthily over the grass beside the Dr.ive. He saw her eyes turning over his shoulder, saw the wide horror in them.
"Look!"
He spun round, whipping the gun from his pocket, and for more than a second he was paralyzed. For that eternity he saw the thing, deep in the far shadows, dimly illumined by the marginal reflections from the beam of the headlights — something gross and swollen, a dirty grey-white, shaped rather like a great bleached sausage, hideously bloated. Then the darkness swallowed it again, even as his shot smashed the silence into a hunDr.ed tiny echoes.
The girl was struggling to her feet. He snatched at her wrist.
"This way."
He got her into the car and slammed the door. Steel and glass closed round them to give an absurd relief, the weak unreasoning comfort to the naked flesh which men under a bombardment find in cowering behind canvas screens. She slumped against his shoulder, sobbing hysterically.
"Oh, my God. My God!"
"What was it?" he asked.
"It's escaped again. I knew it would. He can't handle it—"
"Has it got loose before?"
"Yes. Once."
He tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail, stroked his lighter. His face was a beaten mask of bronze and granite in the red glow as he Dr.ew the smoke down into the mainsprings of his leaping nerves.
"I never Dr.eamed it had come to that," he said. "Even last night, I wouldn't have believed it."
"He wouldn't have shown you that. Even when he was boasting, he wouldn't have shown you. That was his secret… And I've helped him. Oh God," she said. "I can't go on!"
He gripped her shoulders.
"Carmen," he said quietly. "You must go away from here."
"He'd kill me."
"You must go away."
The headlamps threw back enough light for him to see her face, tear-streaked and desperate.
"He's mad," she said. "He must be Those horrible things… I'm afraid. I wanted to go away but he wouldn't let me. I can't go on. Something terrible is going to happen. One day I saw it catch a dog… Oh, my God, if you hadn't come when you did—"
"Carmen." He still held her, speaking slowly and deliberately, putting every gift of sanity that he possessed into the level dominance of his voice. "You must not talk like this. You're safe now. Take hold of yourself."
She nodded.
"I know. I'm sorry. I'll be all right. But—"
"Can you Dr.ive?"
"Yes."
He started the engine and turned the car round. Then he pushed the gear lever into neutral and set the hand brake.
"Dr.ive this car," he said. "Take it down to the gates and wait for me there. You'll be close to the highway, and there'll be plenty of other cars passing for company. Even if you do see anything, you needn't be frightened. Treat the car like a tank and run it over. Ivar won't mind — he's got plenty more. And if you hear anything, don't worry. Give me half an hour, and if I'm not back go to Ivar's and talk to him."
Her mouth opened incredulously.
"You're not getting out again?"
"I am. And I'm scared stiff." The ghost of a smile touched his lips, and then she saw that his face was stern and cold. "But I must talk to your uncle."
He gripped her arm for a moment, kissed her lightly and got out. Without a backward glance he walked quickly away from the car, up the Dr.ive towards the house. A flashlight in his left hand lanced the. darkness ahead of him with its powerful beam, and he swung it from left to right as he walked, holding his gun in his right hand. His ears strained into the gloom which his eyes could not penetrate, probing the silence under the soft scuff of his own footsteps for any sound that would give him warning; but he forced himself not to look back. The palms of his hands were moist.
The house loomed up in front of him. He turned off to one side of the building, following the direction in which he remembered that Dr. Sardon's laboratory lay. Almost at once he saw the squares of lighted windows through the trees. A dull clang of sound came to him, followed by a sort of furious thumping. He checked himself; and then as he walked on more quickly some of the lighted windows went black. The door of the laboratory opened as the last light went out, and his torch framed Dr. Sardon and the doorway in its yellow circle.
Sardon was pale and dishevelled, his clothes awry. One of his sleeves was torn, and there was a scratch on his face from which blood ran. He flinched from the light as if it had burned him.
"Who is that?" he shouted.
"This is Simon Templar," said the Saint in a commonplace tone. "I just Dr.opped in to say hullo."
Sardon turned the switch down again and went back into the laboratory. The Saint followed him.
"You just Dr.opped in, eh? Of course. Good. Why not? Did you run into Carmen, by any chance?"
"I nearly ran over her," said the Saint evenly.
The doctor's wandering glance snapped to his face. Sardon's hands were shaking, and a tiny muscle at the side of his mouth twitched spasmodically.
"Of course," he said vacantly. "Is she all right?"
"She is quite safe." Simon had put away his gun before the other saw it. He laid a hand gently on the other's shoulder. "You've had trouble here," he said.
"She lost her nerve," Sardon retorted furiously. "She ran away. It was the worst thing she could do. They understand, these creatures. They are too much for me to control now. They disobey me. My commands must seem so stupid to their wonderful brains. If it had not been that this one is heavy and waiting for her time—"
He checked himself.
"I knew," said the Saint calmly.
The doctor peered up at him out of the corners of his eyes.
"You knew?" he repeated cunningly.
"Yes. I saw it."
"Just now?"
Simon nodded.
"You didn't tell us last night," he said. "But it's what I was afraid of. I have been thinking about it all day."
"You've been thinking, have you? That's funny." Sardon chuckled shrilly. "Well, you're quite right. I've done it. I've succeeded. I don't have to work any more. They can look after themselves now. That's funny, isn't it?"
"So it is true. I hoped I was wrong."
Sardon edged closer to him.
"You hoped you were wrong? You fool! But I would expect it of you. You are the egotistical human being who believes in his ridiculous conceit that the whole history of the world from its own birth, all the species and races that have come into being and been discarded, everything — everything has existed only to lead up to his own magnificent presence on the earth. Bah! Do you imagine that your miserable little life can stand in the way of the march of evolution? Your day is over! Finished! In there" — his arm stiffened and pointed—"in there you can find the matriarch of the new ruling race of the earth. At any moment she will begin to lay her eggs, thousands upon thousands of them, from which her sons and daughters will breed — as big as she is, with her power and her brains." His voice Dr.opped. "To me it is only wonderful that I should have been Nature's chosen instrument to give them their rightful place a million years before Time would have opened the door to them."
The flame in his eyes sank down as his voice sank and his features seemed to relax so that his square clean-cut efficient face became soft and beguiling like the face of an idiot child.
"I know what it feels like to be God," he breathed.
Simon held both his arms.
"Dr. Sardon," he said, "you must not go on with this experiment."
The other's face twisted.
"The experiment is finished," he snarled. "Are you still blind? Look — I will show you."
He was broad-shouldered and powerfully built, and his strength was that of a maniac. He threw off the Saint's hands with a convulsive wrench of his body and ran to the sliding door at the end of the room. He turned with his back to it, grasping the handle, as the Saint started after him.
"You shall meet them yourself," he said hoarsely. "They are not in their cage any more. I will let them out here, and you shall see whether you can stand against them. Stay where you are!"
A revolver flashed in his hand; and the Saint stopped four paces from him.
"For your own sake, Dr. Sardon," he said, "stand away from that door."
The doctor leered at him crookedly.
"You would like to burn my ants," he whispered.
He turned and fumbled with the spring catch, his revolver swinging carelessly wide from its aim; and the door had started to move when Simon shot him twice through the heart.
Simon was stretched out on the veranda, sipping a highball and sniping mosquitoes with a cigarette end, when Nordsten came up the steps from his car. The Saint looked up with a smile.
"My dear fellow," said Nordsten, "I thought you would be at the fire."
"Is there a fire?" Simon asked innocently.
"Didn't you know? Sardon's whole laboratory has gone up in flames. I heard about it at the club, and when I left I Dr.ove back that way thinking I should meet you. Sardon and his niece were not there, either. It will be a terrible shock for him when he hears of it. The place was absolutely gutted — I've never seen such a blaze. It might have been soaked in gasoline. It was still too hot to go near, but I suppose all his work has been destroyed. Did you miss Carmen?"
The Saint pointed over his shoulder.
"At the present moment she's sleeping in your best guest room," he said. "I gave her enough of your sleeping tablets to keep her like that till breakfast time."
Nordsten looked at him.
"And where is Sardon?" he asked at length.
"He is in his laboratory."
Nordsten poured himself out a Dr.ink and sat down.
"Tell me," he said.
Simon told him the story. When he had finished, Nordsten was silent for a while. Then he said: "It's all right, of course. A fire like that must have destroyed all the evidence. It could all have been an accident. But what about the girl?"
"I told her that her uncle had locked the door and refused to let me in. Her evidence will be enough to show that Sardon was not in his right mind."
"Would you have done it anyhow, Simon?"
The Saint nodded.
"I think so. That's what I was worried about, ever since last night. It came to me at once that if any of these brutes could breed—" He shrugged a little wearily. "And when I saw that great queen ant, I knew that it had gone too far. I don't know quite how rapidly ants can breed, but I should imagine that they do it by thousands. If the thousands were all the same size as Sardon's specimens, with the same intelligence, who knows what might have been the end of it?"
"But I thought you disliked the human race," said Nordsten.
Simon got up and strolled across the veranda.
"Taken in the mass," he said soberly, "it will probably go on nauseating me. But it isn't my job to alter it. If Sardon was right, Nature will find her own remedy. But the world has millions of years left, and I think evolution can afford to wait."
His cigarette spun over the rail and vanished into the dark like a firefly as the butler came out to announce dinner; and they went into the dining room together.