Huh? This was odd. A circular arrangement of shamblers only a few kilometers northwest of John Doe's death. A mandala seed? Could there be nests underneath-?

Son of a bitch!

It was the same grove of shamblers. The one I had used to scare the shit out of Major Bellus!

I should have recognized

No, from the ground, it wasn't obvious. From the air, it was unmistakable. Even so, I still felt like an idiot. I had to remind myself that I had been otherwise preoccupied at the time.

All right… I typed quickly. Scan the movement of these shamblers-

I waited while the LI engine sorted through six months of images. Nothing… These shamblers had been sitting in this exact spot for at least six months.

Huh? That wasn't normal.

But the unbelievable evidence glowed on the surface of the screen. These shamblers had taken root and stayed. The LI engine would have to wait until it could access the Green Mountain Archives before it could download and display any previous history of this region. Meanwhile, there were other things to correlate. It began overlaying transitory images-what else had moved through this terrain? It began to build an overlay of undeniable evidence.

Worms. Worm paths. Worm patterns.

Here was repeated evidence of a family of worms moving in and out of the shambler grove with impunity.

So that took care of my theory that the shambler tenants killed the John Doe worm.

Or did it?

The fact that these worms were moving in and out of the shambler grove didn't necessarily imply that any worm could safely enter the shambler radius. Maybe there was some kind of relationship-partnership ?-between these worms and these shamblers?

The patterns of movement were definitely consistent with those found around other worm nests

Worm nests underneath a shambler grove? Well, why not?

Damn!

This should have been discovered before the mission went in! And it would have been too, if there had been the skillage available. There were a lot of jobs not getting done these days because of the shortage of trained personnel.

One of the big LI engines in Atlanta or Florida would have spotted it, if anyone had thought to ask; except most of the H.A.R.L.I.E.[1] units' were so busy trying to model the larger patterns of the infestation that they probably hadn't put any attention on the way so many of the smaller pieces were fitting together.

I wondered if that might not be a mistake-if perhaps the real understanding of the Chtorran ecology might better be found down in the dirt, down among the bugs and beetles and wormberries. Maybe we were looking in the wrong place.

I didn't automatically assume anymore that someone somewhere was already considering these questions. I knew better. Yes, there were people on the job, but they were all like me-playing catch-up as fast as they could. You got promoted and you learned the job you were thrust into, or reinvented it, or just ran as hard as you could and hoped nobody would notice that you weren't producing any results. You crossed your fingers and hoped it wasn't another mistake. And everybody prayed like hell that the critical jobs were getting done. It was the ultimate in on-the-job training. If you survived, you were doing it right.

But nobody was really trained; not the way they needed to be. There wasn't the time anymore. Even the Modies were too little, too late. The core group wasn't enough. We needed to train the whole planet overnight. Hardly anybody had the right mind-set for the jobs they had been thrust into. It's not enough to be handed a responsibility; you have to be trained how to use it. You have to learn to think the work. Unfortunately, too many important positions were being filled with people like Major Bellus.

It was a disaster. The network of scientific minds that was really needed to tackle this problem had disintegrated during the first set of plagues, and it had never properly been rebuilt.

There was only so much you could do with ancillary intelligence. Someday, perhaps, an LI would have the creativity to invent instead of simply synthesize. Until then, human thinkers were still a necessary part of the process. I didn't know if there were enough of the right kind of thinkers anymore; I did know that damn few of them were where they needed to be.

Despite the application of larger and better LI engines, despite the near-planetwide coverage of remotes, despite the improved observational devices, the enhanced information-gathering networks, despite the massive amount of sheer brainpower applied to the problem… the brainpower was completely and totally ineffective unless somebody was there to ask the right questions.

That was the real skill that would win the war. Asking the right questions. Applying the intelligence where it would have the most effect.

We had assembled the world's most powerful network of LI engines for application to the problem of the Chtorran infestation. There were nearly seven hundred Harlie units now connected in a worldwide network of applied intelligence, and new machines were coming on-line at the rate of one a week. The scale of information that could now be processed was beyond human comprehension. But real-time analysis of macro-realities only worked when you had an accurate model of the problem to begin with.

Translation: the Intelligence Engines were still defining the problem. They asked more questions than they answered. Nevertheless, they were our last best hope. One day the critical piece of information would be found; that part of the puzzle which would let us begin unlocking all of the other secrets of the Chtorran mystery. Dr. Zymph called it "the first olive out of the bottle." The Harlie network was looking for the olives.

We had no idea what the alive would be, where it might be found, or even if we already had it in hand and didn't recognize that it was an olive because it had a pimento sticking out its ass.

The Harlie network was the only human agency capable of recognizing the olive when we found it, pimento or not.

The network was something entirely new in human experience, an environment of pure thought in which ideas could be born and raised, free of cultural or emotional prejudice.

Any notion, no matter how outrageous oi silly or bizarre, could be fairly considered before it had to venture out into the cold nastiness of reality. It could be simultaneously nurtured in the warm soup of possibility and bathed in the harsh acid of skepticism, and ultimately either weeded out as unfit for further consideration, or rewarded with teraflops and teraflops of processing time.

Human beings, on the other hand, couldn't seem to tell the difference between an idea and the person who espoused it. We punished the practitioners of unpopular concepts; anything that threatened us, we killed the bearer of the message. Conversely, we rewarded those who came before us speaking pretty phrases that validated our most deeply ingrained beliefs. People who said popular things found that money and power floated their way. Even if what they said was wrong, the money and power validated their position. Meanwhile, great truths often languished unnoticed in the shadows. New theories have to wait for old theorists to die. Sometimes the obvious sat before us, unnoticed and overlooked for years, before we realized the truth of it.

This was something else that Foreman had talked about in the training. The lethetic intelligence engine was the first environment of concepts-of symbol management-in which emotions, prejudice, and personal gain were not factors considered relevant to the validity of a position.

According to Foreman, and others, what passed for human thinking was the management of symbols in the domain of language-a slippery terrain in which the concept behind every Word was as elusive as the word was mutable; a looking-glass world where any idea constructed of these shape-changing bricks shifted like a hill of psychotic tapioca, first as the words were defined in the speaker's speaking, and second as they were redefined again in the listener's listening. None of us ever really heard another person's speaking, without first hearing our own way of hearing it. Here, meaning was pushed, pulled, bent, squeezed, and ultimately mangled to mean whatever we wanted or needed it to mean. Even people became the simplest of objects in this domain-one mote thing to be manipulated, pushed and pulled, by language.