"I wish it were." Gordy stirred earth over the boiling entrance to an
anthole and watched the insects in their consternation. "They're too
small, I'm afraid."
"Why, no. These ants are different, Dr. Gordy. Insects have always been
small because their breathing system is so poor. But these are mutated.
I think--I think they actually have lungs. They could grow, Dr. Gordy.
And if ants were the size of men ... they'd rule the world."
"Lunged ants!" Gordy's eyes gleamed. "Perhaps they will rule the world,
John. Perhaps when the human race finally blows itself up once and for
all...."
De Terry shook his head, and looked down again at his tattered, filthy
clothes. "The next blow-up is the last blow-up," he said. "The ants
come too late, by millions and millions of years."
He picked up his spade. "I'm hungry again, Dr. Gordy," he said.
They went back to the house and, without conversation, they ate. Gordy
was preoccupied, and de Terry was too new in the household to force him
to talk.
It was sundown when they had finished, and Gordy moved slowly to light
a lamp. Then he stopped.
"It's your first night, John," he said. "Come down cellar. We'll start
the generator and have real electric lights in your honor."
De Terry followed the older man down a flight of stairs, groping in
the dark. By candlelight they worked over a gasoline generator; it was
stiff from disuse, but once it started it ran cleanly. "I salvaged it
from my own," Gordy explained. "The generator--and that."
He swept an arm toward a corner of the basement. "I told you I invented
a weapon," he added. "That's it."
De Terry looked. It was as much like a cage as anything, he
thought--the height of a man and almost cubical. "What does it do?" he
asked.
For the first time in months, Salva Gordy smiled. "I can't tell you in
English," he said. "And I doubt that you speak mathematics. The closest
I can come is to say that it displaces temporal co-ordinates. Is that
gibberish?"
"It is," said de Terry. "What does it do?"
"Well, the War Department had a name for it--a name they borrowed from
H. G. Wells. They called it a Time Machine." He met de Terry's shocked,
bewildered stare calmly. "A time machine," he repeated. "You see, John,
we can give the ants a chance after all, if you like."
* * * * *
Fourteen hours later they stepped into the cage, its batteries charged
again and its strange motor whining....
And, forty million years earlier, they stepped out onto quaking humid
soil.
Gordy felt himself trembling, and with an effort managed to stop. "No
dinosaurs or saber-toothed tigers in sight," he reported.
"Not for a long time yet," de Terry agreed. Then, "My Lord!"
He looked around him with his mouth open wide. There was no wind, and
the air was warm and wet. Large trees were clustered quite thickly
around them--or what looked like trees; de Terry decided they were
rather some sort of soft-stemmed ferns or fungi. Overhead was deep
cloud.
Gordy shivered. "Give me the ants," he ordered.
Silently de Terry handed them over. Gordy poked a hole in the soft
earth with his finger and carefully tilted the flask, dropped one of
the ant queens he had unearthed in the back yard. From her belly hung
a slimy mass of eggs. A few yards away--it should have been farther,
he thought, but he was afraid to get too far from de Terry and the
machine--he made another hole and repeated the process.
There were eight queens. When the eighth was buried he flung the bottle
away and came back to de Terry.
"That's it," he said.
De Terry exhaled. His solemn face cracked in a sudden embarrassed
smile. "I--I guess I feel like God," he said. "Good lord, Dr. Gordy!
Talk about your great moments in history--this is all of them! I've
been thinking about it, and the only event I can remember that measures
up is the Flood. Not even that. We've created a race!"
"If they survive, we have." Gordy wiped a drop of condensed moisture
off the side of his time machine and puffed. "I wonder how they'll get
along with mankind," he said.
They were silent for a moment, considering. From somewhere in the
fern jungle came a raucous animal cry. Both men looked up in quick
apprehension, but moments passed and the animal did not appear.