The man concentrated on the massage. The neck muscles were stiff as a board. Elizabeth Carr, he mused, would be soft and yielding under his touch. He was glad for the break in the dissection, and he let his thoughts spiral. Women should be soft. He was old-­fashioned about that.

Wanda Lindstrom looked up with misty eyes. “You always make me feel like purring.”

“Long practice, after all,” Hubbard laughed companionably.

What the woman said came as a surprise to him. “I like Elizabeth Carr.” In the hovering silence that followed, an explanation seemed necessary, a word to indicate she was making no personal comment about Peter Hubbard’s relationships with anyone else in the world. “I mean, whenever I’ve seen her in Cambridge, she seemed—oh, a princess character. Here she’s been cleaning like a housemaid, peeling potatoes without a fuss.”

“You’ve had her wrong. She is good people,” Peter Hubbard said, dropping his hands.

Wanda Lindstrom returned to her place, her voice quickly clinical again. “I’ve dissected out the brain and ganglia on this specimen. I suspect a high order of neuronal function. I’d guess we’ll find noradrenaline, adrenaline, and neurosecretory cells with granules making kinetic metabolic hormones . . .”

Hubbard responded in the same business-­like tone: “Morphogenetic controls on growth and development, abnormally advanced. Yes.” He studied his own specimen. “I would say these roaches can do damn near everything but think!” He paused, then declared, “And maybe even that, in their own way . . .”

“Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far,” the woman considered.

The two scientists became so absorbed in their dialogue that they did not observe what was happening on a shelf behind them. Had they been looking at the container set aside for the largest group of roaches, they would have witnessed a remarkable feat. An ingenious escape effort was under way. It was an effort requiring the kind of “thinking” Peter Hubbard had just anticipated—a plan requiring common purpose, common effort in an amazing way.

The scientists were sincere and correct in their caution against anthropomorphism, but both Peter and Wanda had themselves described insect colonies acting with seeming intelligence, and an intercommunication that paralleled some human behavior. Wanda Lindstrom would have been reminded instantly of the time she had watched ants cross a water obstacle by forming a bridge of individual insects. It was a living construction, with one ant crawling on top of another and clinging to the preceding body while another ant repeated the process. The linkage of clasped forms became the core of reinforcing strands of ants, until it was strong enough for the whole tribe to use as a span.

Similarly, rats were known to ascend out of deep holes by forming a ladder of their bodies.