A Touch of Infinity by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page B

him Herb, and he expected that the summons to his chambers would have something to do with the coming elections. Whereby he was rather surprised to find Chief Bradley already there, as well as two other men, one of them a Dobson of the FBI and the other a Professor Channing of Yale, who was introduced as an entomologist.
    â€œHerb here,” the judge explained, “is the young fellow whose wife swatted the thing—the first one we had. Now we got a round dozen of them.”
    Channing took a flat wooden box out of his pocket—about six inches square. He opened it and exhibited a series of slides, upon each of which one of the tiny folk was neatly pressed. Cooke glanced at it, felt his stomach rise, and fought to control himself.
    â€œIn addition to which,” the judge continued, “Herb has a damn good head on his shoulders. He’ll be our candidate for the House one of these days and a damn important man in the county. I thought he should be here.”
    â€œYou must understand,” said the FBI man, “that we’ve already had our discussions on the highest level. The Governor and a number of people from the state. Thank God it’s still a local matter, and that’s what we’re getting at here.”
    â€œThe point is,” said Channing, “that this whole phenomenon is no more than a few years old. We have more or less mapped the beginning place of origin as somewhere in the woods near the Saugatuck Reservoir. Since then they’ve spread out six or seven miles in every direction. That may not seem like a lot, but if you accept their stride as a quarter inch compared to man’s stride of three feet, you must multiply by one hundred and forty-four times. In our terms, they have already occupied a land area roughly circular and more than fifteen hundred miles in diameter. That’s a dynamic force of terrifying implications.”
    â€œWhat the devil are they?” Bradley asked.
    â€œA mutation—an evolutionary deviation, a freak of nature—who knows?”
    â€œAre they men?” the judge asked.
    â€œNo, no, no, of course they’re not men. Structurally, they appear to be very similar to men, but we’ve dissected them, and internally there are very important points of difference. Entirely different relationships of heart, liver, and lungs. They also have a sort of antenna structure over their ears, not unlike what insects have.”
    â€œYet they’re intelligent, aren’t they?” Herbert Cooke asked. “The bows and arrows—”
    â€œPrecisely, and for that reason very dangerous.”
    â€œAnd doesn’t the intelligence make them human?” the judge asked.
    â€œDoes it? The size and structure of a dolphin’s brain indicate that it is as intelligent as we are, but does it make it human?”
    Channing looked from face to face. He had a short beard and heavy spectacles, and a didactic manner of certainty that Herbert Cooke found reassuring.
    â€œWhy are they dangerous?” Cooke asked, suspecting that Channing was inviting the question.
    â€œBecause they came into being a year or two ago, no more, and they already have the bow and arrow. Our best educated guess is that they exist under a different subjective time sense than we do. We believe the same to hold true of insects. A day can be a lifetime for an insect, even a few hours, but to the insect it’s his whole span of existence and possibly subjectively as long as our own lives. If that’s the case with these creatures, there could be a hundred generations in the past few years. In that time, from their beginning to the bow and arrow. Another six months—guns. How long before something like the atomic bomb does away with the handicap of size? And take the question of population—you remember the checkerboard story. Put a grain of sand on the first box, two grains on the second, four grains on the third, eight grains on the