The Kenzie Report, Mark Clifton [free ebook reader for iphone txt] 📗

go around talking about how brave and smart we are. How someday we might even get so smart we'll contact other intelligent races on other worlds. Yeah, we're smart. You know those star radiations?"

"That's not my specialty, you know," the Chief answered cautiously.

"Some of those radiations started out from their home planet a million light years ago," Pringle said quietly.

"So what again?" the Chief asked.

"Those radiations," Kenzie said, "happen to be communications between the galaxies—beamed at the ants. Sort of a continuous radio program broadcast universe wide. It happens the ants, maybe termites, maybe other insects, are spread through all the galaxies. It happens they are the dominant intelligent race throughout the universe." He shrugged in disgust.

"Us big brave humans," he said contemptuously. "Someday we might even reach Mars. Hell, those ants have been colonizing for hundreds of millions of years. They're still communicating. They are the real intelligence on the earth!"

He crushed a cigarette fiercely into a glass ash tray on the desk.

"Only thing man has got, or ever had, was his ego. He's got to believe he's top dog, or else he folds and quits. Yeah, we're smart all right. Hell, we're so far down the scale the ants don't even recognize us as a life form at all."

Pringle nodded soberly. "Yeah," he said to the Chief, "how would you like to explain a gadget that proved ants have more brains than you have?"

The Chief looked at them with incredulous eyes.

He was still staring at them silently, with a bloodless face, when the office messenger came in and told him the General Manager wished to see him in his office to discuss budgets.

I closed the back office door quietly and went back to work. The other guys clustered around and wanted to know what I heard.

"Nothing," I said, and looked them straight in the eye. "Nothing at all."

——THE END—— End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Kenzie Report, by Mark Clifton