Free The Devil's Garden by Edward Docx

my notes.
    Our usual routine was to return to the Station in good time to do the lab work, write everything up and prepare for the next day long before nightfall. We had power for two hours every evening,
but we preferred not to consume the oil for the generators with unnecessary lighting. Each evening, we recharged the computer’s battery. Then, when the power went off, we ran it down halfway
again. This way we could use it for four hours rather than two.
    We took turns in staying late to send email or do any personal work or correspondence and that night was mine. So I set about trying to read and then rewrite a draft of one of the early sections
of my book, struggling to make simple the complexity and implications of the ant’s reproductive system. But even my notes would not hold to their purpose. Pages wandered and my tone and
observations became tangled. The advances I had been making prior to the arrival seemed to have halted; it was as if the jungle had started colonizing the clearing of my own mind, confusing me,
distracting me, planting a hundred rogue seeds in what should have been the clean-kempt prose of scientific method.
    Did I feel myself slipping into the old lassitude? Certainly, this lack of progress frustrated me. After all, this was supposed to be my side of the partnership with Quinn. He did most of the
practical work. I wrote up our findings and kept our studies in the front pages of the influential science journals. And the harsh truth was that I had never relished the field. I was a talented
collator – collegiate, collaborative – the communicator. But I was not really a scientist of any originality save on paper – and even then, it was seven years since I had written
anything of depth or value. Anything new.
    Quinn, though . . . Quinn was forever fearless and unbound – in his imagination, in his work and in his relations with his fellow human beings. He carried with him some great affirmation
towards life. Ideas just poured out of him as though from a never-empty bottle; you pulled the cork and there they came – dancing and chattering and laughing and frothing; silly, mad,
serious, insightful, profound, primitive, emotional, glorious, foolish, generous ideas; about man and God, science and myths, creation and extinction, and always – always – his own
ideas.
    I know that I’m painting a flattering picture of my friend. And I do myself down the more to do him up. (It is true: Quinn could not write or structure his thinking.) And yet the larger
part of the portrait is accurate. I have come to believe that the greatest divide in humanity is neither age nor race nor gender but between those few who possess self-belief and the rest who must
thrash about in uncertainty or communal delusion.
    Most of all, I was conscious that Quinn would have dealt with the Judge and the Colonel differently and that he would not suddenly be finding our work . . . inconsequential, minor. Perhaps I was
annoyed with Felipe, too. I disliked the way he sought to hide behind me – or, rather, to confer jurisdiction on me when I had none. Nonetheless, having given up on my book, I wrote another
email to Rebaque – my third without a reply – and another to the head of administration in my department. Our satellite connection was slow, fragile and intermittent – we had long
ago abandoned trying to send our photographs and heavy data files – and, after the third attempt, I rose and went through the plastic rather than sit waiting for the confirmation that they
had gone through.
    I stooped to look into one of the thin sealed glass tanks in which we kept a colony of my favourite ants: Daceton armigerum , a strange-looking species – voracious, omnivorous,
powerful – and yet with these sad and oddly beautiful heart-shaped heads.
    ‘Hello, Dr Forle. I am sorry to disturb you.’
    Tord appeared unctuously around the door.
    ‘I’ve finished for the day,’ I said.
    He had the trick of watching