"All right." Stiffly they climbed into the closet-sized interior of the
time machine.
Gordy stood with his hand on the control wheel, thinking about the
ants. Assuming that they survived--assuming that in 40,000,000 years
they grew larger and developed brains--what would happen? Would men
be able to live in peace with them? Would it--might it not make men
brothers, joined against an alien race?
Might this thing prevent human war, and--his thoughts took an insane
leap--could it have prevented the war that destroyed Gordy's family!
Beside him, de Terry stirred restlessly. Gordy jumped, and turned the
wheel, and was in the dark mathematical vortex which might have been a
fourth dimension.
* * * * *
They stopped the machine in the middle of a city, but the city was not
Detroit. It was not a human city at all.
The machine was at rest in a narrow street, half blocking it. Around
them towered conical metal structures, some of them a hundred feet
high. There were vehicles moving in the street, one coming toward them
and stopping.
"Dr. Gordy!" de Terry whispered. "Do you see them?"
Salva Gordy swallowed. "I see them," he said.
He stepped out of the time machine and stood waiting to greet the race
to which he had given life.
For these were the children of ants in the three-wheeled vehicle.
Behind a transparent windshield he could see them clearly.
De Terry was standing close behind him now, and Gordy could feel the
younger man's body shaking. "They're ugly things," Gordy said mildly.
"Ugly! They're filthy!"
The antlike creatures were as big as a man, but hard-looking and as
obnoxious as blackbeetles. Their eyes, Gordy saw with surprise, had
mutated more than their bodies. For, instead of faceted insect eyes,
they possessed iris, cornea and pupil,--not round, or vertical like
a cat's eyes, or horizontal like a horse's eyes, but irregular and
blotchy. But they seemed like vertebrate's eyes, and they were strange
and unnatural in the parchment blackness of an ant's bulged head.
Gordy stepped forward, and simultaneously the ants came out of their
vehicle. For a moment they faced each other, the humans and the ants,
silently.
"What do I do now?" Gordy asked de Terry over his shoulder.
De Terry laughed--or gasped. Gordy wasn't sure. "Talk to them," he
said. "What else is there to do?"
Gordy swallowed. He resolutely did not attempt to speak in English
to these creatures, knowing as surely as he knew his name that
English--and probably any other language involving sound--would be
incomprehensible to them. But he found himself smiling pacifically to
them, and that was of course as bad ... the things had no expressions
of their own, that he could see, and certainly they would have no
precedent to help interpret a human smile.
Gordy raised his hand in the semantically sound gesture of peace, and
waited to see what the insects would do.
They did nothing.
Gordy bit his lip and, feeling idiotic, bowed stiffly to the ants.
* * * * *
The ants did nothing. De Terry said from behind, "Try talking to them,
Dr. Gordy."
"That's silly," Gordy said. "They can't hear." But it was no sillier
than anything else. Irritably, but making the words very clear, he
said, "We ... are ... friends."
The ants did nothing. They just stood there, with the unwinking pupiled
eyes fixed on Gordy. They didn't shift from foot to foot as a human
might, or scratch themselves, or even show the small movement of human
breathing. They just stood there.
"Oh, for heaven's sake," said de Terry. "Here let me try."
He stepped in front of Gordy and faced the ant-things. He pointed to
himself. "I am human," he said. "Mammalian." He pointed to the ants.
"You are insects. That--" he pointed to the time machine--"took us to
the past, where we made it possible for you to exist." He waited for
reaction, but there wasn't any. De Terry clicked his tongue and began
again. He pointed to the tapering metal structures. "This is your
city," he said.
Gordy, listening to him, felt the hopelessness of the effort. Something
disturbed the thin hairs at the back of his skull, and he reached
absently to smooth them down. His hand encountered something hard and
inanimate--not cold, but, like spongy wood, without temperature at all.
He turned around. Behind them were half a dozen larger ants. Drones, he
thought--or did ants have drones? "John," he said softly ... and the
inefficient, fragile-looking pincer that had touched him clamped his
shoulder. There was no strength to it, he thought at once. Until he
moved, instinctively, to get away, and then a thousand sharp serrations
slipped through the cloth of his coat and into the skin. It was like
catching oneself on a cluster of tiny fishhooks. He shouted, "John!
Watch out!"
De Terry, bending low for the purpose of pointing at the caterpillar
treads of the ant vehicle, straightened up, startled. He turned to run,
and was caught in a step. Gordy heard him yell, but Gordy had troubles
of his own and could spare no further attention for de Terry.
When two of the ants had him, Gordy stopped struggling. He felt warm
blood roll down his arm, and the pain was like being flayed. From where
he hung between the ants, he could see the first two, still standing
before their vehicle, still motionless.
There was a sour reek in his nostrils, and he traced it to the ants
that held him, and wondered if he smelled as bad to them. The two
smaller ants abruptly stirred and moved forward rapidly on eight thin
legs to the time machine. Gordy's captors turned and followed them, and
for the first time since the scuffle he saw de Terry. The younger man
was hanging limp from the lifted forelegs of a single ant, with two
more standing guard beside. There was pulsing blood from a wound on de
Terry's neck. Unconscious, Gordy thought mechanically, and turned his
head to watch the ants at the machine.
It was a disappointing sight. They merely stood there, and no one
moved. Then Gordy heard de Terry grunt and swear weakly. "How are you,
John?" he called.