****
The next morning Ed felt terrific! Not only were all traces of the stings completely gone, his usual summer allergies weren't even bothering him! After a big breakfast he walked cautiously next-door to Jerry's place to find out why. He felt full of energy! Maybe he would even take up jugging again! He moved slowly however, taking great care where he placed his feet; he certainly didn't want to antagonize Jerry's ant friends. He noticed dozens of Jerry-ants on the ground, scrambling to get out of his way as if they knew that he was coming.
He rang Jerry's doorbell, but there was no answer. Jerry lived alone, not counting his monstrous ant friends, but both his Subaru Forester and his Ford pickup truck were parked in the driveway, so Ed knew that he had to be home. Ed walked around the side of the house, past the truck and SUV, and towards the over-sized triple-car garage in the back.
The closer he got to the garage, the more Jerry-ants Ed saw. There were countless thousands on the driveway, scurrying this way and that but moving mostly either towards or away from the garage. Most of the ants moving towards the garage were carrying small objects: dead insects (mostly army/fire ants), bits of plant material, and other objects too small for Ed to identify. Mostly ant-food, he reasoned. They scrambled aside politely to let him pass, parting like the Red Sea before the fleeing Israelites. Many paused and turned to face him as though they were watching him.
He noticed three or four ants together rolling a big ripe purple plum towards the garage. Then he realized that there were dozens of plums being moved down the driveway that way! How clever of them, he marveled! Then it dawned on him that he had the only plum tree in the neighborhood. These little buggers were heisting HIS plumbs! Of course they had also recently saved his life, so his thoughts towards them quickly became friendly again.
"Hi Ed!" Jerry greeted his visitor, as he exited his garage from the side-door and advanced smiling to shake Ed's hand. "You're looking very much better today!"
"Yes, all the bug-stings and bites are completely gone, and I feel fit as a fiddle. That's actually what I came over to ask you about."
"Yes, my little friends told me that you've come to visit us."
"Us?"
"Yes, me and the ants, of course. Come into the garage with me and we'll endeavor to explain what has happened to you."
Stepping through the garage side-door, Ed saw none of the things that cluttered his own garage. There were no cars or lawn or power tools. Instead, most of Ed's triple-sized garage was an impressive jungle of lab equipment, including tables full of electronic gizmos and bottles, beakers, and test-tubes full of colorful liquids. Maybe Jerry did do gene splicing in his garage! What grabbed most of his attention however was the massive six-foot high rounded mound of sculptured dry mud near where he and Jerry stood. It was honey-combed with holes and covered by countless thousands of Jerry's ant friends.
"This is their main nest," Jerry announced proudly. "They chewed right through concrete slab to build it here!"
"It's a doozy!" Ed remarked. It must have comprised several tons of dried mud and millions of ants.
"OK, let's get to business Ed," Jerry announced, his face suddenly serious. "The shot that I gave you yesterday wasn't simple anti-venom; it was an experimental drug that I was using on myself. It was the only thing I had on hand to save your life. The shot I gave you, in combination with chemicals injected into you by my little ant friends, has vastly improved your ability to heal."
"Really?" Ed stammered. An experimental drug?
"AND YOU HAVE BEEN MADE TELEPATHIC, SO THAT WE MAY TALK DIRECTLY," said a voice in Ed's head.
Somehow Ed knew that the voice was that of Jerry! Thousands of the ants had paused their running about and were facing both him and Jerry, Ed noticed. "What the hell!" he commented astutely.
"Like me, you have been adopted by these ants as a member of their colony."
"A member of an ant colony? Me?" What the bloody hell!
"ONE OF US," affirmed the ants. Their telepathic voice reverberated oddly in his head, echoing as if it were produced by a huge multitude rather than a single being.
"It's a great honor," Jerry added, smiling.
"I'm sure that it is," Ed managed, though his head was spinning.
"THANK YOU FOR THE PLUMS," the ants added.
"Thank you for saving my life," Ed said in return. It was the most upbeat response he could think of.
"Mind if we take a small blood sample?" Jerry asked.
Soon a big brown Jerry-ant was atop the back of Ed's hand, nipping into his skin so gently that he barely felt it.
"They only needed a tiny sample," explained Jerry. "Their chemical processing abilities are far superior to human methods. I make much less use of my conventional laboratory equipment since we established our cooperative relationship."
"That's convenient," Ed remarked, as he examined his newly bitten hand. There was initially a tiny red spot where the ant had taken the blood sample, but it disappeared in seconds while he was watching it. The ant on his hand had also disappeared.
"Perhaps you should take a few ants home with you, Ed," suggested Jerry. "That would make communications between us easier. It wouldn't have to be many of them; probably only a few thousand. Maybe even less, as your body adapts to its new chemistry."
"Much as I'd enjoy that, I don't think Mary would understand."
"I suppose you're right about that," agreed Jerry. "My own dating life has certainly suffered since the ants moved in with me! I fear that not very many women are excited about living with millions of insects."
"That darned 'Joe's Apartment' movie probably soured lots of people on that idea," Ed noted. "And then there's all those reality shows showing exterminators dealing with yucky home bug infestations. That sort of publicity has probably given bug filled homes a bad name."
"I can understand your apprehension about them moving in with you," said Jerry. "We'd like you to keep in touch with us though, so that we can monitor the effects of your transformation."
Transformation? Ed didn't much like the sound of that! Was he turning into an ant? "Perhaps if I simply come here to visit you again occasionally?"
There was a whirl of telepathic gibberish between Jerry and the ants that Ed could 'hear' in his own head, but it was either too fast for him to comprehend or they were using an ant language that he didn't understand.
"Your visits will be satisfactory for now," Jerry finally announced.
"AFFIRMATIVE," seconded the ants.
"And don't worry about what's happening to you, Ed; the effects will all be positive ones that you will hardly notice."
"That's comforting to know," Ed replied, even though he wasn't totally comforted. "On an unrelated question Jerry, I was wondering about those other ants that attacked me. Ants aren't supposed to have stingers, are they? How did those ants end up with stingers?"
"Ants evolved from wasp-like insects Ed, but the stingers of most species are too small to notice. Fire ants have always had big nasty stingers, but the stingers of the ants that attacked you are greatly enlarged. I suspect that they may have tapped into long dormant ancient genes through Lamarckian means."
"That's what I was afraid of, Jerry. Will other creatures do the same thing? Will some elephants get wooly or some tigers get giant saber-teeth? I read somewhere that there used to be beavers the size of black bears and condors that stood as tall as a man!"
Jerry grinned widely. "You again surprise me with your insight, Ed. Yes, those are exactly the sort of things that are beginning to happen! We live in exciting times!"
"A bit too exciting to suit me," Ed remarked. "When should I come back to visit you and your ants again?"
"RETURN TOMORROW," said the ants.
That seemed too much like a command to suit Ed, but he was too anxious to get away from the frightfully huge mound of talking ants to make any objections.
He shook hands with Jerry and gave the ants a little wave goodbye. It may have been his imagination but
he thought that a few hundred of the little buggers waved a tiny foreleg back at him, before returning to their endless routine work.
Ed hurried home, dazed and more than a little terrified. All of this was crazy! He was a member of a hive of telepathic ants? And what about that 'transformation' business they mentioned? His body chemistry was changing? Holy shits! He had been reasonably satisfied with his personal body chemistry before this incident! There was the bigger world-wide picture to consider also. Jerry evidently wasn't crazy; the world was really going crazy through Lamarckism and so-forth! Mysterious forces were afoot, things that he had never imagined!
He didn't tell Mary anything more about all of this of course; he didn't want to worry her and she would have thought he was crazy, not that she didn't already know that he was! Besides, he didn't want to talk about it with anyone or even think about it! If he thought bad thoughts about the ants would they overhear him? What would be the consequences of that? Loss of plums could become the least of his worries! It was all too much to deal with!
Ed found his comfortably ignored and impossibly long household 'to-do' list and set about doing things that had absolutely nothing to do with ants. He spray painted the old wicker chair in the sunroom. He fixed the dripping faucet in the upstairs bathroom. He went through old books and magazines and actually decided to throw away some of them. (A first!) He was really on a roll!
Late that afternoon the front doorbell rang and Ed answered it. A man in uniform stood before him. It was a local fire chief that he recognized. Behind him stood two sour looking guys in dark suits. One was a huge, husky, angry looking man perhaps in his mid-forties, while the other, slightly older man was tall and thin with hawk-nose and penetrating eyes. They both wore permanent-looking frowns that Ed immediately didn't care for. They had to be Federal Government officials of some sort, Ed figured. Working for the Government would account for their sour dispositions.
"I'm Captain Pete Sloan of your local fire department, Mr. Rumsfeld," said the smiling fireman, as he reached forward to shake Ed's hand. "Just checking to see if you're alive and well here. There have been ant attacks in the neighborhood."
"We noticed," said Mary, as she joined them. "Our neighbor was killed by them yesterday. Ed found the body and phoned it in. He had some stings himself!"
"And these are Federal agents Whitmore and Sheffield," added Pete, as he gestured towards each of his companions.
"We have some questions for you, Rumsfeld," growled Whitmore, as he rudely pushed the fireman aside to confront Ed. Whitmore was a huge middle-aged, balding man with piercing brown eyes and harsh grizzly-bear voice. He towered over everyone else, a malevolent, intimidating presence.
As the big man flashed some sort of identification badge at him far too quickly for it to be read, Ed decided already that he didn't like him. He reminded Ed too much of a grade-school bully that used to steal his lunch money. "So ask away," he responded politely, nevertheless.
"When did you first encounter the ants, Mr. Rumsfeld?" asked Sheffield, in a quiet respectful voice that immediately helped return Ed to a more calm state.
"Which ants?" Ed asked.
"The ones that tried to eat you, wise ass!" Whitmore rumbled sarcastically.
"When I cut my grass around 10 AM yesterday. There were millions of them in the yard next door."
"Millions?" Whitmore asked. "Are you sure?"
"Certainly. And by the thousands they attacked me."
"Yet you and several other of your neighbors mysteriously escaped any serious harm," Sheffield stated. "Remarkable!"
"No mystery about it at all," Ed said. "My neighbor Jerry saved the day with powdered diatomitous earth."
"Yes, we noticed the white powder," said the fire chief, from somewhere behind his black suited companions. "See! I told you! They're using that stuff now all over the country. No mystery here!"
"So you say," said Whitmore, with a sneer. "But there are some mysteries here that have gotten our attention. We haven't found millions of dead ant bodies, for example."
"And the invading ants have been completely stopped here," added Sheffield. "Surrounding areas suffered more casualties, but this particular neighborhood was spared."
"Thanks to Jerry," Ed noted.
"Jerry sounds like quite a guy, Rumsfeld," Whitmore snarled. "I think we better go have a little talk with him right away." Sheffield gave a little nod of his head to Ed, then without another word he and his grumpy partner turned and walked out of the house.
"Thank you, folks," said the fireman, as he politely shook Ed's hand and then Mary's before running to catch up with the Feds. They all drove next door to Jerry's place in a very big and shiny black sedan with Government plates, Ed noticed. His tax dollars at work!
Less than half an hour later as they watched TV Ed and Mary heard sirens, lots of them. They went out onto their front porch and discovered that dozens of emergency vehicles with flashing lights and several unmarked cars and trucks had converged next door at Jerry's place. A few minutes later dozens of black-uniformed heavily armed men fanned out from Jerry's house, moving away briskly in all directions. They carried automatic rifles that they waved about menacingly, the watching couple noticed. Four of the armed men approached Ed and Mary.
"We're looking for Jerry Green," the lead man announced. This man was in a sense both less threatening and more threatening than Whitmore had been. He didn't have Whitmore's enormous size, intimidating scowl, or gruff voice, but he was muscular, wore military garb, waved an automatic rifle about like he knew what he was doing, and hadn't even bothered to tell them his name or show them any personal identification.
"He was home this morning," Ed noted, "but that was over eight hours ago. Haven't seen Jerry since. He saved our lives though, so why are you looking for him? Shouldn't you be looking for giant pythons and condors and blasting them with those guns?"
"Condors are a harmless protected species."
"How nice for them," Ed noted. He wanted to protest that a 'harmless' condor had tried to kill him, but he hadn't told Mary about the condor attack and didn't want to worry her further. "Say, our neighbors are getting pretty scarce. Maybe people should be a protected species too."
"Why are you looking for Jerry with guns?" Mary asked directly.
"That's Government business, Mam," the uniformed man replied. "Do you know where he is?"
"Of course not," Mary retorted testily. Ed didn't think that she liked being called 'Mam' at all. It sounded like a term for old ladies, not for an attractive young woman of only thirty-two years. "Not that it's any business of ours or yours."
"Search the house," the man responded.
"Hey! You can't..." Ed began to protest, as the three remaining armed men pushed past him and into the house, where they began walking about with guns pointed this way and that as they looked behind furniture and opened doors and drawers.
"Yes we can!" said the lead man, as he interposed himself in front of the door to keep Ed from entering and pulled a folded piece of paper from a jacket pocket and handed it to him. It was written in unintelligible legalese, but Ed recognized some of the terms, including 'warrant' and 'Environmental Emergency Act.'
"Crap!" remarked Mary as she also read what her husband was holding. "Yes they can!"
The Feds searched the house for only a few minutes, though to Ed and Mary it seemed like hours as they helplessly watched and waited. The leader entered the house also to join in the search, and he allowed Ed and Mary to follow him about. The home invaders claimed to be searching for Jerry but they were looking for him in places Jerry was extremely unlikely to be, such as in the refrigerator, kitchen cupboards, and Ed's underwear drawer. It occurred to Ed that although they may have also been looking for Jerry, they were certainly looking for his ant friends.
"Besides the army/fire ants have you seen any unusual insects lately, or seen your neighbor do anything unusual?" the lead man asked, as his men finally began to exit the home.
"No," Mary said, as Ed mutely shook his head in agreement. These Government guys with their pushy attitude troubled Ed more than Jerry's ants, and he wasn't about to 'out' either the ants or Jerry to these hooligans! After all, Jerry and his ants had saved his life and possibly Mary's as well.
"We'll have to fumigate your house anyway; just to be safe," the Fed said. He ushered the homeowners outside, where they noted that a dozen people in bio-hazard suits were spreading huge sheets of plastic over their house. Meanwhile a big tractor pulling a spraying attachment was drenching the yard with a clear liquid that smelled like a chemical factory. Its tractor tires crushed both lawn and flowers indiscriminately as it spewed noxious poison throughout the yard.
The lead G-man noticed that Ed was watching. "You'll want to stay out of your house for a couple of days after we're done," he said, "and stay out of your yard for a couple of weeks. We'll be spraying there repeatedly."
Ed could only stare with mouth agape as he and Mary witnessed the monstrous affront to his poor house and yard. When the house was completely draped in plastic several Feds carried several ominous looking metallic gas cylinders into the house. So called 'bug bombs', Ed assumed.
Ed and Mary were escorted further away from their house. "For their safety," they were told. After a few moments of blessed silence several explosive puffing noises could be heard from inside their poor house, signifying the release of poison gas. Return to the house in a couple of days? No way! He and Mary would stay in a hotel for at least a couple of weeks while the house aired-out!
"It could have been worse," said Mary, as she and Ed stood huddled together on their driveway.
"I don't see how," Ed started to reply, until he turned in the direction that Mary was now pointing. Jerry's house was on fire! From Jerry's front yard a couple dozen firemen and an equal number of Government men in black suits and military garb watched passively! They were burning down Jerry's house on purpose! Thirty-foot flames and billowing black smoke shot up from the nice colonial!
The ground shook as a huge ball of fire erupted where Jerry's garage used to be.
"Napalm,'" remarked the lead G-man. "Does a nice job."
"Yeah, really nice," Ed replied. "What, may I ask, is it doing a nice job on? What has Jerry done?"
"I can't tell you the details of course," he replied. "But you two will be much safer now."
"Sure, I feel safer already," Ed replied, as he watched the flames next door build even higher. The Feds finished fumigating the Ford and kindly let Ed and Mary drive away in it, windows open despite the hundred degree temperature to help blow away some of the noxious fumes. Fortunately their little town was a suburb to a suburb of a fairly large town that had several hotels, where they were able to book a room for two weeks.
From the relative sanctity of their hotel room, day after day they watched television and the internet in vain for news reports about Jerry, ants, and the Government attack on their neighborhood. There was nothing. Finally after they moved back into their house they saw a brief national news story about Jerry. Jerry was wanted by federal and local authorities for suspected bio-terrorism and arson. According to the internet several other people from across the country were also wanted on similar charges. Just how many Jerry Green-types were there, Ed wondered? And how many Whitmores and Sheffields and nameless uniformed Government men were chasing them?
Ed looked for Jerry's promised articles in Nature and Scientific American for the next few months but nothing appeared. Nothing was in the news about Lamarckism research at all! After four months Ed phoned the magazine offices and was told that they weren't at liberty to discuss either Jerry Green or Lamarckism.
The next day a couple of nameless dark-suited G-men again paid Ed a visit. Fortunately Mary wasn't at home. They sat Ed down in his own living-room, taped several lie detecting electrodes to several parts of his body, and interrogated him about Jerry. He confessed that Jerry had mentioned Lamarckism and his upcoming magazine articles but no, he truthfully didn't know where he was now. Yes, he had seen some big brown ants, but no, he hadn't seen any since Jerry disappeared. In the name of national security, the Feds made Ed promise not to talk to anyone about Jerry, ants, or Lamarckism, and after he signed some papers to that effect they left him intact but shaking. He was pissed-off, but probably more scared than pissed-off. He couldn't believe that his taxes paid the salaries of these people!
There were ominous rumors in the socal media about Government interference with the news, with scientific studies, and with other things. But most news reports were getting rosier, even though the actual situation seemed to obviously be getting worse. It was even widely reported that global warming had been disproven and that 'the good-old days' were upon us. That was after a summer in which temperatures exceeded 120 degrees in New York City and a sixty-foot python was discovered in the sewers of Baltimore. But such stories were down-played by the major news outlets as same-old-same-old events or hoaxes. If it wasn't new it wasn't news, but if was new and bad it wasn't even happening at all! Negative events were quickly discredited and dismissed. The Government pumped money into the economy and the economy rallied weakly. People again worried more about sports and celebrities than they did about global warming and negative world news.
The over-all message was pretty clear: Don't worry folks! Your Government and the American economy are taking care of everything! Right.