Doomsday Deferred

An American butterfly collector ventures deep into Brazil searching for an extraordinarily rare specimen. Instead, he encounters José Ribiera, a frightened man carrying several pounds of gold and desperately trying to buy cattle. José refuses to explain why he needs them. He only insists that getting those animals into the jungle is a matter of life or death.

Then José produces something nearly as remarkable as the gold. Somehow, his mysterious "friends" can locate enormous numbers of rare butterfly cocoons almost overnight. The collector should be delighted. Instead, the impossible efficiency begins to trouble him. When he finally visits José's isolated clearing, the explanation waiting there changes everything he thought he understood about insects.

Doomsday Deferred turns the familiar terror of army ants into something far more disturbing. Murray Leinster takes a genuine natural phenomenon—the astonishing coordination of social insects—and asks what might happen if that coordination became conscious. The danger does not arrive from another planet or emerge from a laboratory. It has been beneath human feet all along, learning from everything around it.

Murray Leinster was the best-known pen name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, whose fiction career stretched across more than half a century. Doomsday Deferred was published in The Saturday Evening Post on September 24, 1949, under the Will F. Jenkins name. His other landmark stories include Sidewise in Time, First Contact, A Logic Named Joe, and Exploration Team. The last of these won the 1956 Hugo Award for Best Novelette, while First Contact later received the 1946 Retro Hugo.