Science Tales

Science Fiction stories may be the fairy tales of our contemporary times. Instead of talking animals and wee folk we now have talking animals and green men. There is a story from the fifties I think, by one of the great sci fi writers, and the plot of the several pages length can be summarized in several sentences. A man finds that bugs are taking over the world. Somehow the spiders jump into the battle on the side of the humans. The narrator of the story talks to the leader of the spiders and asks, who is winning. The spider replies that you will be saved. The man is so relieved that the spider hastily adds, oh I mean, you the species, not you the individual. So all this I knew before I even met Jan Cox. Remembering it of course is the trick.