I stood up with a start, gulping my breath and praying for delivery from this curse of my own creation. I searched around me. There were no tanks, no soldiers, no world in flames. I stood under the elm tree in front of my house, feet planted beside my curb.

The scent of sweet peas dusted the air. A robin sang as it settled to hop about a carpet of welcome green. How could I have had such a daydream here?

The source of my fantasy lay between my feet, where a small ant house was under construction. I shuddered, even though these were just simple home builders. But I saw them as part of a great evil that I had unleashed a couple weeks earlier when I tipped the balance of evolution.

I had always been fascinated by ants building houses. They built fine houses by ant standards, though I couldn't figure out why they kept on building new ones. My dad built our house, but we didn't keep on building. We just lived in it year after year. Why couldn't ants do that?

My parents once talked about moving to a better neighborhood, so I imagined the ants maybe building their way toward ant heaven. But their houses were always in such dumb places, like in the middle of the sidewalk or right in front of the tire of a parked car or in the crack in the front porch by the door. They never built in a better neighborhood.

These thoughts crossed my mind on a spring afternoon on my curb. Sister Mary Margaret's lecture on natural history tangled with them as I watched a row of ant houses rising from a crack in the pavement. I could see her lovely bare forearm appear from that pure white habit and draw a chalk circle full of plusses and minuses. Then an arrow pointed to another circle with more plusses and fewer minuses. Each time she drew another circle, she'd explain some great leap of evolution, like the fish that grew lungs and then legs. When she got to the end of the blackboard, the circle was a man, and only a few minuses remained. Natural selection she called it. Darwin.

Then it came to me in a burst of scientific thought. If ants wouldn't build their houses in such stupid places, maybe they wouldn't have to build so many houses, and they, too, would have time to sit on their curb and discover great mysteries.

I looked down at those ants and began to appreciate their true genius. I saw them in a new light, not as savage beasts but as creatures of destiny. I made my decision: I would help the ant race develop.

I started killing the stupid ants. Each day I would tour the neighborhood and step on any ants coming out of stupid houses, thus raising the intelligence level of the colony. I alone understood the relation between intelligence and natural selection in the ant kingdom. This may have been the peak of scientific insight of my entire life.

"Want to play catch?"

JD's voice caught me by surprise as I hunted stupid ants. "Oh. Can't today. I'm kind of busy."

"What you doing?"

"Uh - nothing much," I said as I squished three ants that ventured out in the middle of the sidewalk.

JD leaned against my elm tree and kicked at an ant house nestled safely among the tree roots. I watched with horror as his foot scattered a family of smart ants. "Let's sit on the curb," I said, pushing him away from the tree.

"What are you pushing me for? I know where the curb is."

There were some stupid ants starting a house in the street, but they were in front of JD, and I couldn't quite reach them with my foot.

"Won't be here this weekend," he said. "Got to go to my stupid aunt's house."

"Your what?" I said, looking directly at him in violation of the boy's code.

"My Aunt Minnie up north. What are you acting so weird about?"

"Oh, nothing," I said as I stretched and got an ant that strayed too far from its stupid house, but then I thought, What if that ant was running away from home because he didn't like where his house was? "Got to be more careful," I mumbled.

"What?" JD said. He picked up a stick and started scratching at something at the base of the curb. That was a smart spot, because the elm tree had pushed the top of the curb out so that the spot at its base was well protected. I looked and saw there was an ant house back there. I knocked JD off the curb and said, "Come on. Let's play catch." I looked over my shoulder as I ran across the street and was glad that he was following me.

"What's with you today? You're even weirder than usual."

After keeping up the selective killing for a while, I noted more ant houses sprouting up in smart places than in dumb places. They appeared in that protected crack between the curb and the pavement and between the tree roots, where they'd be safe from lawn-mower wheels. I even saw some under Mr. Jopp's green Plymouth that hadn't run for years.

I rejoiced in the wisdom that my efforts really were having the desired effect. The intelligence of ants in my neighborhood was clearly rising, based on the scientific evidence I'd collected. Then a terrible thought interrupted my happiness. I had activated an awesome force. Suppose this evolution began to spread, and ants' intelligence continued to grow. The idea overwhelmed me.

I looked at those creatures down in the safety of the curb overhang and under the wreck and imagined them at the beginning of an evolution that might threaten the role of man on earth. It was then that the great war of ants against man started haunting me. Visions of armies of ants ambushing a bunch of tanks or attacking soldiers in a bunker plagued me. I couldn't shake these scenes. Submarines might be the last hope of man against the trillions of cunning little devils. Ants would have a difficult time with submarines - unless they grew gills. I winced.

What if somebody finds out I'm the one that started it? I thought as I tried to swallow. I've got to do something. It was up to me to save the world from this terrible danger.

For the next few weeks, I hunted down these smart ants. I knew I couldn't get them all, maybe just enough to shift evolution back to where it was when I first interfered with Mother Nature. But I had to be careful not to go too far and actually start the ant population on a decline to eventual destruction. It was a delicate balancing act, but I had no choice. I watched their house-building tactics and was pleased by the data.

A few weeks after the grim daydream on my curb, I finally decided that the situation had returned to the preinterference state. The killing stopped.

I've carried this guilt for a lifetime, always believing I could never share my secret with anyone, for someone very wicked or very stupid might use that knowledge to bring about the exact fate of the world that I had worked so hard to prevent. Now it's time for the world to hear this story. Maybe we're ready to look back with the dispassionate eyes of history and learn something from this near tragedy.