Gordy shook his head, and sought for words to answer. But the two ants
turned in unison from the time machine and glided toward de Terry, and
Gordy's words died in his throat. Delicately one of them extended a
foreleg to touch de Terry's chest.
Gordy saw it coming. "John!" he shrieked--and then it was all over, and
de Terry's scream was harsh in his ear and he turned his head away.
Dimly from the corner of his eye he could see the sawlike claws moving
up and down, but there was no life left in Terry to protest.
* * * * *
Salva Gordy sat against a wall and looked at the ants who were looking
at him. If it hadn't been for that which was done to de Terry, he
thought, there would really be nothing to complain about.
It was true that the ants had given him none of the comforts that
humanity lavishes on even its criminals ... but they had fed him, and
allowed him to sleep--when it suited their convenience, of course--and
there were small signs that they were interested in his comfort, in
their fashion. When the pulpy mush they first offered him came up
thirty minutes later, his multi-legged hosts brought him a variety
of foods, of which he was able to swallow some fairly palatable
fruits. He was housed in a warm room. And, if it had neither chairs or
windows, Gordy thought, that was only because ants had no use for these
themselves. And he couldn't ask for them.
That was the big drawback, he thought. That ... and the memory of John
de Terry.
He squirmed on the hard floor until his shoulder-blades found a new
spot to prop themselves against, and stared again at the committee of
ants who had come to see him.
They were working an angular thing that looked like a camera--at least,
it had a glittering something that might be a lens. Gordy stared into
it sullenly. The sour reek was in his nostrils again....
Gordy admitted to himself that things hadn't worked out just as he had
planned. Deep under the surface of his mind--just now beginning to
come out where he could see it--there had been a furtive hope. He had
hoped that the rise of the ants, with the help he had given them, would
aid and speed the rise of mankind. For hatred, Gordy knew, started in
the recoil from things that were different. A man's first enemy is his
family--for he sees them first--but he sides with them against the
families across the way. And still his neighbors are allies against the
Ghettos and Harlems of his town--and his town to him is the heart of
the nation--and his nation commands life and death in war.
For Gordy, there had been a buried hope that a separate race would
make a whipping-boy for the passions of humanity. And that, if there
were struggle, it would not be between man and man, but between the
humans ... and the ants.
There had been this buried hope, but the hope was denied. For the ants
simply had not allowed man to rise.
The ants put up their camera-like machine and Gordy looked up in
expectation. Half a dozen of them left, and two stayed on. One was the
smallish creature with a bangle on the foreleg which seemed to be his
personal jailer; the other a stranger to Gordy, as far as he could tell.
The two ants stood motionless for a period of time that Gordy found
tedious. He changed his position, and lay on the floor, and thought of
sleeping. But sleep would not come. There was no evading the knowledge
that he had wiped out his own race--annihilated them by preventing them
from birth, forty million years before his own time. He was like no
other murderer since Cain, Gordy thought, and wondered that he felt no
blood on his hands.
There was a signal that he could not perceive, and his guardian ant
came forward to him, nudged him outward from the wall. He moved as he
was directed--out the low exit-hole (he had to navigate it on hands and
knees) and down a corridor to the bright day outside.
The light set Gordy blinking. Half blind, he followed the bangled
ant across a square to a conical shed. More ants were waiting there,
circled around a litter of metal parts.
Gordy recognized them at once. It was his time machine, stripped piece
by piece.
After a moment the ant nudged him again, impatiently, and Gordy
understood what they wanted. They had taken the machine apart for
study, and they wanted it put together again.
Pleased with the prospect of something to do with his fingers and his
brain, Gordy grinned and reached for the curious ant-made tools....
He ate four times, and slept once, never moving from the neighborhood
of the cone-shaped shed. And then he was finished.
Gordy stepped back. "It's all yours," he said proudly. "It'll take you
anywhere. A present from humanity to you."
The ants were very silent. Gordy looked at them and saw that there were
drone-ants in the group, all still as statues.
"Hey!" he said in startlement, unthinking. And then the needle-jawed
ant claw took him from behind.
Gordy had a moment of nausea--and then terror and hatred swept it away.
Heedless of the needles that laced his skin, he struggled and kicked
against the creatures that held him. One arm came free, leaving gobbets
of flesh behind, and his heavy shod foot plunged into a pulpy eye. The
ant made a whistling, gasping sound and stood erect on four hairy legs.
Gordy felt himself jerked a dozen feet into the air, then flung free in
the wild, silent agony of the ant. He crashed into the ground, cowering
away from the staggering monster. Sobbing, he pushed himself to his
feet; the machine was behind him; he turned and blundered into it a
step ahead of the other ants, and spun the wheel.
* * * * *
A hollow insect leg, detached from the ant that had been closest to
him, was flopping about on the floor of the machine; it had been that
close.
Gordy stopped the machine where it had started, on the same quivering,
primordial bog, and lay crouched over the controls for a long time
before he moved.
He had made a mistake, he and de Terry; there weren't any doubts left
at all. And there was ... there _might_ be a way to right it.
He looked out at the Coal Measure forest. The fern trees were not the
fern trees he had seen before; the machine had been moved in space.
But the time, he knew was identically the same; trust the machine for
that. He thought: I gave the world to the ants, right here. I can take
it back. I can find the ants I buried and crush them underfoot ... or
intercept myself before I bury them....
He got out of the machine, suddenly panicky. Urgency squinted his eyes
as he peered around him.
Death had been very close in the ant city; the reaction still left
Gordy limp. And was he safe here? He remembered the violent animal
scream he had heard before, and shuddered at the thought of furnishing
a casual meal to some dinosaur ... while the ant queens lived safely to
produce their horrid young.
A gleam of metal through the fern trees made his heart leap. Burnished
metal here could mean but one thing--the machine!
Around a clump of fern trees, their bases covered with thick club
mosses, he ran, and saw the machine ahead. He raced toward it--then
came to a sudden stop, slipping on the damp ground.
For there were _two_ machines in sight.
The farther machine was his own, and through the screening mosses he
could see two figures standing in it, his own and de Terry's.
But the nearer was a larger machine, and a strange design.
And from it came a hastening mob--not a mob of men, but of black insect
shapes racing toward him.
Of course, thought Gordy, as he turned hopelessly to run--of course,
the ants had infinite time to work in. Time enough to build a machine
after the pattern of his own--and time to realize what they had to do
to him, to insure their own race safety.
Gordy stumbled, and the first of the black things was upon him.
As his panicky lungs filled with air for the last time, Gordy knew what
animal had screamed in the depths of the Coal Measure forest.
[Illustration: _He filled his lungs for one last scream._]