star static."

"Star static?" the Chief faltered.

"He wouldn't know about that," Pringle said, and I could detect contempt in his voice, even if the Chief didn't.

"Sure he would," Kenzie corrected. "Everybody knows about the fifty or so stars that send out continuous radio signals, and how we've been trying for years to unscramble them."

"Why certainly," the Chief said, so positively I knew he hadn't heard of it before.

"Anyway," Kenzie said. "The more we worked out the vocabulary code, the more the star signals began to fit right into it. So we decided to break up the thing, and forget all about ants. Honest Chief, you'll never hear me mention the word again."

"Termites either," Pringle chimed in.

"But I still don't understand," the Chief complained. "It still all sounds marvelous. I just don't understand."

"Draw him a picture," Pringle said disgustedly.

"Okay," Kenzie acceded. "How many years would you say ants have been on earth, Chief?"

"Oh, I don't know," the Chief answered. "Quite a few, I'd say."

"Yeah," Kenzie said drily. "Quite a few. At least a million. Unchanged. A perfect life form with a perfect civilization. So perfect, nature hasn't seen any need to change them for a million years."

"So what?" the Chief asked. "They're nothing. We come along and make them do nip ups."

"Yeah," Kenzie was bitter again. "We humans 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——