Scott snapped frostily, “And you won’t be sheriff on Yarkie long after that!”

Elias Johnson laughed aloud. “Scott, how’d you like for me personally to throw you into that den of roaches!”

But Scott would not be diverted. “I say, see ’em, kill ’em! Talk biology later!”

Elizabeth Carr stepped to the fat man, her eyes blazing. “You, sir, are an unmitigated fathead! Now please sit down and be quiet or leave this house!”

Disconcerted, Scott fumed, “Mind your place, Elizabeth! Your grandfather has something to say about that!”

Elias Johnson shrugged, smiling. “You heard my granddaughter, old friend.”

As Scott subsided, Johnson told Peter Hubbard they did indeed understand his requirement before the nest was annihilated. Then he added with an honest frown, “Peter, you’ve been throwing some heavy stuff at us about this social organization and mutation. I have to say I still don’t get it how a bunch of dumb cockroaches join together and suddenly become what you call a colony.” He showed an uneven smile, confessing, “To admit it, I’ve never really understood about ants and termites and those broods, either.”

Stephen Scott tried to get back on Johnson’s right side by nodding vigorous agreement with the questions. “The whole thing seems damned unnatural to me,” he harrumphed obstreperously.

Hubbard answered the continuing incredulity. “On the contrary,” he said to Scott, “it is the most natural phenomenon in the world, the base of all evolution.” He paused, and saw them waiting for more of an explanation. It was, after all, hard to accept that “dumb cockroaches” could act in concert as cleverly as these had done.

He earnestly wanted them to understand. “You all know that life began with single cell organisms. Way back, some of those cells joined together, making a kind of commune of individuals. We call that a eucaryotic cell. These cells didn’t just cluster like a bunch of grapes—they developed adaptations for different jobs. Some units specialized in gathering food, others in digesting it, others in excretion, locomotion, reproduction, and so forth. Some cells provided a protective skin around the whole group. The process grew more complex through the eons . . .”

Elizabeth interposed, “Right on up to the human body . . .”

“In a way, yes. But in considering a species like termites—or these Yarkie roaches—we’re not talking about cells getting together, we’re talking about separate individual insects forming themselves into a social organism—a group that operates as if it were actually one unity.”

The scientist paused and measured his listeners. What he was about to add would certainly meet with new, deep skepticism. But it was his considered conclusion as a trained biologist. “I am saying,” he told them deliberately, “that the Yarkie roaches are being directed by what I can only describe as a brain.”

Russell Homer’s forehead was strained with his wish to learn, but he could not hold back his scoffing interruption, “A brain like ours . . . ?”