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-The Project Gutenberg eBook of Let the Ants Try, by James MacCreigh

-

-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and

-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions

-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms

-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at

-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you

-will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before

-using this eBook.

-

-Title: Let the Ants Try

-

-Author: James MacCreigh

-

-Release Date: February 25, 2021 [eBook #64631]

-

-Language: English

-

-Character set encoding: UTF-8

-

-Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

-             Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

-

-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LET THE ANTS TRY ***

-

-

-

-

-                           Let The Ants Try

-

-                          By JAMES MacCREIGH

-

-         Dr. Salva Gordy looked at the radioactive smear that

-         had been Detroit. Then he looked down at the boiling

-          anthill. Why not, he thought excitedly, why not?...

-

-           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

-                      Planet Stories Winter 1949.

-         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that

-         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

-

-

-Gordy survived the Three-Hour War, even though Detroit didn't; he was

-on his way to Washington, with his blueprints and models in his bag,

-when the bombs struck.

-

-He had left his wife behind in the city, and not even a trace of her

-body was ever found. The children, of course, weren't as lucky as that.

-Their summer camp was less than twenty miles away, and unfortunately

-in the direction of the prevailing wind. But they were not in any pain

-until the last few days of the month they had left to live. Gordy

-managed to fight his way back through the snarled, frantic airline

-controls to them. Even though he knew they would certainly die of

-radiation sickness, and they suspected it, there was still a whole

-blessed week of companionship before the pain got too bad.

-

-That was about all the companionship Gordy had for the whole year of

-1960.

-

-He came back to Detroit, as soon as the radioactivity had died down;

-he had nowhere else to go. He found a house on the outskirts of the

-city, and tried to locate someone to buy it from. But the Emergency

-Administration laughed at him. "Move in, if you're crazy enough to

-stay."

-

-When Gordy thought about it all, it occurred to him that he was in

-a sort of state of shock. His fine, trained mind almost stopped

-functioning. He ate and slept, and when it grew cold he shivered and

-built fires, and that was all. The War Department wrote him two or

-three times, and finally a government man came around to ask what had

-happened to the things that Gordy had promised to bring to Washington.

-But he looked queerly at the pink, hairless mice that fed unmolested in

-the filthy kitchen, and he stood a careful distance away from Gordy's

-hairy face and torn clothes.

-

-He said, "The Secretary sent me here, Mr. Gordy. He takes a personal

-interest in your discovery."

-

-Gordy shook his head. "The Secretary is dead," he said. "They were all

-killed when Washington went."

-

-"There's a new Secretary," the man explained. He puffed on his

-cigarette and tossed it into the patch Gordy was scrabbling into a

-truck garden. "Arnold Cavanagh. He knows a great deal about you, and he

-told me, 'If Salva Gordy has a weapon, we must have it. Our strength

-has been shattered. Tell Gordy we need his help'."

-

-Gordy crossed his hands like a lean Buddha.

-

-"I haven't got a weapon," he said.

-

-"You have something that can be used as a weapon. You wrote to

-Washington, before the War came, and said--"

-

-"The War is over," said Salva Gordy. The government man sighed, and

-tried again, but in the end he went away. He never came back. The

-thing, Gordy thought, was undoubtedly written off as a crackpot idea

-after the man made his report; it was exactly that kind of a discovery,

-anyhow.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-It was May when John de Terry appeared. Gordy was spading his garden.

-"Give me something to eat," said the voice behind Gordy's back.

-

-Salva Gordy turned around and saw the small, dirty man who spoke. He

-rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. "You'll have to work for

-it," he said.

-

-"All right." The newcomer set down his pack. "My name is John de Terry.

-I used to live here in Detroit."

-

-Salva Gordy said, "So did I."

-

-Gordy fed the man, and accepted a cigarette from him after they had

-eaten. The first puffs made him light-headed--it had been that long

-since he'd smoked--and through the smoke he looked at John de Terry

-amiably enough. Company would be all right, he thought. The pink mice

-had been company, of a sort--but it turned out that the mutation that

-made them hairless had also given them an appetite for meat. And after

-the morning when he had awakened to find tiny tooth-marks in his leg,

-he'd had to destroy them. And there had been no other animal since,

-nothing but the ants.

-

-"Are you going to stay?" Gordy asked.

-

-De Terry said, "If I can. What's your name?" When Gordy told him, some

-of the animal look went out of his eyes, and wonder took its place.

-"_Doctor_ Salva Gordy?" he asked. "Mathematics and physics in Pasadena?"

-

-"Yes, I used to teach at Pasadena."

-

-"And I studied there." John de Terry rubbed absently at his ruined

-clothes. "That was a long time ago. You didn't know me; I majored in

-biology. But I knew you."

-

-Gordy stood up and carefully put out the stub of his cigarette. "It was

-too long ago," he said. "I hardly remember. Shall we work in the garden

-now?"

-

-Together they sweated in the spring sunlight that afternoon, and Gordy

-discovered that what had been hard work for one man went quickly enough

-for two. They worked clear to the edge of the plot before the sun

-reached the horizon. John de Terry stopped and leaned on his spade,

-panting.

-

-He gestured to the rank growth beyond Gordy's patch. "We can make a

-bigger garden," he said. "Clear out that truck, and plant more food. We

-might even--" He stopped. Gordy was shaking his head.

-

-"You can't clear it out," said Gordy. "It's rank stuff, a sort of

-crabgrass with a particularly tough root. I can't even cut it. It's all

-around here, and it's spreading."

-

-De Terry grimaced. "Mutation?"

-

-"I think so. And look." Gordy beckoned to the other man and led him to

-the very edge of the cleared area. He bent down, picked up something

-red and wriggling between his thumb and forefinger.

-

-De Terry took it from his hand. "Another mutation?" He brought

-the thing close to his eyes. "It's almost like an ant," he said.

-"Except--well, the thorax is all wrong. And it's soft-bodied." He fell

-silent, examining the thing.

-

-He said something under his breath, and threw the insect from him.

-"You wouldn't have a microscope, I suppose? No--and yet, that thing is

-hard to believe. It's an ant, but it doesn't seem to have a tracheal

-breathing system at all. It's something different."

-

-"Everything's different," Gordy said. He pointed to a couple of

-abandoned rows. "I had carrots there. At least, I thought they were

-carrots; when I tried to eat them they made me sick." He sighed

-heavily. "Humanity has had its chance, John," he said. "The atomic bomb

-wasn't enough; we had to turn everything into a weapon. Even I, I made

-a weapon out of something that had nothing to do with war. And our

-weapons have blown up in our faces."

-

-De Terry grinned. "Maybe the ants will do better. It's their turn now."

-

-"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.

-

-Finally de Terry said, "Maybe we'd better go back."

-

-"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.

-

-De Terry grimaced. "Not very good. What happened?"

-

-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._]

-

-*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LET THE ANTS TRY ***

-

-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will

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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 64631 ***
+
+                           Let The Ants Try
+
+                          By JAMES MacCREIGH
+
+         Dr. Salva Gordy looked at the radioactive smear that
+         had been Detroit. Then he looked down at the boiling
+          anthill. Why not, he thought excitedly, why not?...
+
+           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
+                      Planet Stories Winter 1949.
+         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+Gordy survived the Three-Hour War, even though Detroit didn't; he was
+on his way to Washington, with his blueprints and models in his bag,
+when the bombs struck.
+
+He had left his wife behind in the city, and not even a trace of her
+body was ever found. The children, of course, weren't as lucky as that.
+Their summer camp was less than twenty miles away, and unfortunately
+in the direction of the prevailing wind. But they were not in any pain
+until the last few days of the month they had left to live. Gordy
+managed to fight his way back through the snarled, frantic airline
+controls to them. Even though he knew they would certainly die of
+radiation sickness, and they suspected it, there was still a whole
+blessed week of companionship before the pain got too bad.
+
+That was about all the companionship Gordy had for the whole year of
+1960.
+
+He came back to Detroit, as soon as the radioactivity had died down;
+he had nowhere else to go. He found a house on the outskirts of the
+city, and tried to locate someone to buy it from. But the Emergency
+Administration laughed at him. "Move in, if you're crazy enough to
+stay."
+
+When Gordy thought about it all, it occurred to him that he was in
+a sort of state of shock. His fine, trained mind almost stopped
+functioning. He ate and slept, and when it grew cold he shivered and
+built fires, and that was all. The War Department wrote him two or
+three times, and finally a government man came around to ask what had
+happened to the things that Gordy had promised to bring to Washington.
+But he looked queerly at the pink, hairless mice that fed unmolested in
+the filthy kitchen, and he stood a careful distance away from Gordy's
+hairy face and torn clothes.
+
+He said, "The Secretary sent me here, Mr. Gordy. He takes a personal
+interest in your discovery."
+
+Gordy shook his head. "The Secretary is dead," he said. "They were all
+killed when Washington went."
+
+"There's a new Secretary," the man explained. He puffed on his
+cigarette and tossed it into the patch Gordy was scrabbling into a
+truck garden. "Arnold Cavanagh. He knows a great deal about you, and he
+told me, 'If Salva Gordy has a weapon, we must have it. Our strength
+has been shattered. Tell Gordy we need his help'."
+
+Gordy crossed his hands like a lean Buddha.
+
+"I haven't got a weapon," he said.
+
+"You have something that can be used as a weapon. You wrote to
+Washington, before the War came, and said--"
+
+"The War is over," said Salva Gordy. The government man sighed, and
+tried again, but in the end he went away. He never came back. The
+thing, Gordy thought, was undoubtedly written off as a crackpot idea
+after the man made his report; it was exactly that kind of a discovery,
+anyhow.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was May when John de Terry appeared. Gordy was spading his garden.
+"Give me something to eat," said the voice behind Gordy's back.
+
+Salva Gordy turned around and saw the small, dirty man who spoke. He
+rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. "You'll have to work for
+it," he said.
+
+"All right." The newcomer set down his pack. "My name is John de Terry.
+I used to live here in Detroit."
+
+Salva Gordy said, "So did I."
+
+Gordy fed the man, and accepted a cigarette from him after they had
+eaten. The first puffs made him light-headed--it had been that long
+since he'd smoked--and through the smoke he looked at John de Terry
+amiably enough. Company would be all right, he thought. The pink mice
+had been company, of a sort--but it turned out that the mutation that
+made them hairless had also given them an appetite for meat. And after
+the morning when he had awakened to find tiny tooth-marks in his leg,
+he'd had to destroy them. And there had been no other animal since,
+nothing but the ants.
+
+"Are you going to stay?" Gordy asked.
+
+De Terry said, "If I can. What's your name?" When Gordy told him, some
+of the animal look went out of his eyes, and wonder took its place.
+"_Doctor_ Salva Gordy?" he asked. "Mathematics and physics in Pasadena?"
+
+"Yes, I used to teach at Pasadena."
+
+"And I studied there." John de Terry rubbed absently at his ruined
+clothes. "That was a long time ago. You didn't know me; I majored in
+biology. But I knew you."
+
+Gordy stood up and carefully put out the stub of his cigarette. "It was
+too long ago," he said. "I hardly remember. Shall we work in the garden
+now?"
+
+Together they sweated in the spring sunlight that afternoon, and Gordy
+discovered that what had been hard work for one man went quickly enough
+for two. They worked clear to the edge of the plot before the sun
+reached the horizon. John de Terry stopped and leaned on his spade,
+panting.
+
+He gestured to the rank growth beyond Gordy's patch. "We can make a
+bigger garden," he said. "Clear out that truck, and plant more food. We
+might even--" He stopped. Gordy was shaking his head.
+
+"You can't clear it out," said Gordy. "It's rank stuff, a sort of
+crabgrass with a particularly tough root. I can't even cut it. It's all
+around here, and it's spreading."
+
+De Terry grimaced. "Mutation?"
+
+"I think so. And look." Gordy beckoned to the other man and led him to
+the very edge of the cleared area. He bent down, picked up something
+red and wriggling between his thumb and forefinger.
+
+De Terry took it from his hand. "Another mutation?" He brought
+the thing close to his eyes. "It's almost like an ant," he said.
+"Except--well, the thorax is all wrong. And it's soft-bodied." He fell
+silent, examining the thing.
+
+He said something under his breath, and threw the insect from him.
+"You wouldn't have a microscope, I suppose? No--and yet, that thing is
+hard to believe. It's an ant, but it doesn't seem to have a tracheal
+breathing system at all. It's something different."
+
+"Everything's different," Gordy said. He pointed to a couple of
+abandoned rows. "I had carrots there. At least, I thought they were
+carrots; when I tried to eat them they made me sick." He sighed
+heavily. "Humanity has had its chance, John," he said. "The atomic bomb
+wasn't enough; we had to turn everything into a weapon. Even I, I made
+a weapon out of something that had nothing to do with war. And our
+weapons have blown up in our faces."
+
+De Terry grinned. "Maybe the ants will do better. It's their turn now."
+
+"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.
+
+Finally de Terry said, "Maybe we'd better go back."
+
+"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.
+
+De Terry grimaced. "Not very good. What happened?"
+
+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._]
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 64631 ***
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-<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Let the Ants Try</div>

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-<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: James MacCreigh</div>

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-<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LET THE ANTS TRY ***</div>

-

-<div class="titlepage">

-

-<h1>Let The Ants Try</h1>

-

-<h2>By JAMES MacCREIGH</h2>

-

-<p>Dr. Salva Gordy looked at the radioactive smear that<br />

-had been Detroit. Then he looked down at the boiling<br />

-anthill. Why not, he thought excitedly, why not?...</p>

-

-<p>[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from<br />

-Planet Stories Winter 1949.<br />

-Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that<br />

-the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]</p>

-

-</div>

-

-<hr class="chap" />

-

-<p>Gordy survived the Three-Hour War, even though Detroit didn't; he was

-on his way to Washington, with his blueprints and models in his bag,

-when the bombs struck.</p>

-

-<p>He had left his wife behind in the city, and not even a trace of her

-body was ever found. The children, of course, weren't as lucky as that.

-Their summer camp was less than twenty miles away, and unfortunately

-in the direction of the prevailing wind. But they were not in any pain

-until the last few days of the month they had left to live. Gordy

-managed to fight his way back through the snarled, frantic airline

-controls to them. Even though he knew they would certainly die of

-radiation sickness, and they suspected it, there was still a whole

-blessed week of companionship before the pain got too bad.</p>

-

-<p>That was about all the companionship Gordy had for the whole year of

-1960.</p>

-

-<p>He came back to Detroit, as soon as the radioactivity had died down;

-he had nowhere else to go. He found a house on the outskirts of the

-city, and tried to locate someone to buy it from. But the Emergency

-Administration laughed at him. "Move in, if you're crazy enough to

-stay."</p>

-

-<p>When Gordy thought about it all, it occurred to him that he was in

-a sort of state of shock. His fine, trained mind almost stopped

-functioning. He ate and slept, and when it grew cold he shivered and

-built fires, and that was all. The War Department wrote him two or

-three times, and finally a government man came around to ask what had

-happened to the things that Gordy had promised to bring to Washington.

-But he looked queerly at the pink, hairless mice that fed unmolested in

-the filthy kitchen, and he stood a careful distance away from Gordy's

-hairy face and torn clothes.</p>

-

-<p>He said, "The Secretary sent me here, Mr. Gordy. He takes a personal

-interest in your discovery."</p>

-

-<p>Gordy shook his head. "The Secretary is dead," he said. "They were all

-killed when Washington went."</p>

-

-<p>"There's a new Secretary," the man explained. He puffed on his

-cigarette and tossed it into the patch Gordy was scrabbling into a

-truck garden. "Arnold Cavanagh. He knows a great deal about you, and he

-told me, 'If Salva Gordy has a weapon, we must have it. Our strength

-has been shattered. Tell Gordy we need his help'."</p>

-

-<p>Gordy crossed his hands like a lean Buddha.</p>

-

-<p>"I haven't got a weapon," he said.</p>

-

-<p>"You have something that can be used as a weapon. You wrote to

-Washington, before the War came, and said&mdash;"</p>

-

-<p>"The War is over," said Salva Gordy. The government man sighed, and

-tried again, but in the end he went away. He never came back. The

-thing, Gordy thought, was undoubtedly written off as a crackpot idea

-after the man made his report; it was exactly that kind of a discovery,

-anyhow.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb" />

-

-<p>It was May when John de Terry appeared. Gordy was spading his garden.

-"Give me something to eat," said the voice behind Gordy's back.</p>

-

-<p>Salva Gordy turned around and saw the small, dirty man who spoke. He

-rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. "You'll have to work for

-it," he said.</p>

-

-<p>"All right." The newcomer set down his pack. "My name is John de Terry.

-I used to live here in Detroit."</p>

-

-<p>Salva Gordy said, "So did I."</p>

-

-<p>Gordy fed the man, and accepted a cigarette from him after they had

-eaten. The first puffs made him light-headed&mdash;it had been that long

-since he'd smoked&mdash;and through the smoke he looked at John de Terry

-amiably enough. Company would be all right, he thought. The pink mice

-had been company, of a sort&mdash;but it turned out that the mutation that

-made them hairless had also given them an appetite for meat. And after

-the morning when he had awakened to find tiny tooth-marks in his leg,

-he'd had to destroy them. And there had been no other animal since,

-nothing but the ants.</p>

-

-<p>"Are you going to stay?" Gordy asked.</p>

-

-<p>De Terry said, "If I can. What's your name?" When Gordy told him, some

-of the animal look went out of his eyes, and wonder took its place.

-"<i>Doctor</i> Salva Gordy?" he asked. "Mathematics and physics in Pasadena?"</p>

-

-<p>"Yes, I used to teach at Pasadena."</p>

-

-<p>"And I studied there." John de Terry rubbed absently at his ruined

-clothes. "That was a long time ago. You didn't know me; I majored in

-biology. But I knew you."</p>

-

-<p>Gordy stood up and carefully put out the stub of his cigarette. "It was

-too long ago," he said. "I hardly remember. Shall we work in the garden

-now?"</p>

-

-<p>Together they sweated in the spring sunlight that afternoon, and Gordy

-discovered that what had been hard work for one man went quickly enough

-for two. They worked clear to the edge of the plot before the sun

-reached the horizon. John de Terry stopped and leaned on his spade,

-panting.</p>

-

-<p>He gestured to the rank growth beyond Gordy's patch. "We can make a

-bigger garden," he said. "Clear out that truck, and plant more food. We

-might even&mdash;" He stopped. Gordy was shaking his head.</p>

-

-<p>"You can't clear it out," said Gordy. "It's rank stuff, a sort of

-crabgrass with a particularly tough root. I can't even cut it. It's all

-around here, and it's spreading."</p>

-

-<p>De Terry grimaced. "Mutation?"</p>

-

-<p>"I think so. And look." Gordy beckoned to the other man and led him to

-the very edge of the cleared area. He bent down, picked up something

-red and wriggling between his thumb and forefinger.</p>

-

-<p>De Terry took it from his hand. "Another mutation?" He brought

-the thing close to his eyes. "It's almost like an ant," he said.

-"Except&mdash;well, the thorax is all wrong. And it's soft-bodied." He fell

-silent, examining the thing.</p>

-

-<p>He said something under his breath, and threw the insect from him.

-"You wouldn't have a microscope, I suppose? No&mdash;and yet, that thing is

-hard to believe. It's an ant, but it doesn't seem to have a tracheal

-breathing system at all. It's something different."</p>

-

-<p>"Everything's different," Gordy said. He pointed to a couple of

-abandoned rows. "I had carrots there. At least, I thought they were

-carrots; when I tried to eat them they made me sick." He sighed

-heavily. "Humanity has had its chance, John," he said. "The atomic bomb

-wasn't enough; we had to turn everything into a weapon. Even I, I made

-a weapon out of something that had nothing to do with war. And our

-weapons have blown up in our faces."</p>

-

-<p>De Terry grinned. "Maybe the ants will do better. It's their turn now."</p>

-

-<p>"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."</p>

-

-<p>"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&mdash;I think they actually have lungs. They could grow, Dr. Gordy.

-And if ants were the size of men ... they'd rule the world."</p>

-

-<p>"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...."</p>

-

-<p>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."</p>

-

-<p>He picked up his spade. "I'm hungry again, Dr. Gordy," he said.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>It was sundown when they had finished, and Gordy moved slowly to light

-a lamp. Then he stopped.</p>

-

-<p>"It's your first night, John," he said. "Come down cellar. We'll start

-the generator and have real electric lights in your honor."</p>

-

-<p>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&mdash;and that."</p>

-

-<p>He swept an arm toward a corner of the basement. "I told you I invented

-a weapon," he added. "That's it."</p>

-

-<p>De Terry looked. It was as much like a cage as anything, he

-thought&mdash;the height of a man and almost cubical. "What does it do?" he

-asked.</p>

-

-<p>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?"</p>

-

-<p>"It is," said de Terry. "What does it do?"</p>

-

-<p>"Well, the War Department had a name for it&mdash;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."</p>

-

-<hr class="tb" />

-

-<p>Fourteen hours later they stepped into the cage, its batteries charged

-again and its strange motor whining....</p>

-

-<p>And, forty million years earlier, they stepped out onto quaking humid

-soil.</p>

-

-<p>Gordy felt himself trembling, and with an effort managed to stop. "No

-dinosaurs or saber-toothed tigers in sight," he reported.</p>

-

-<p>"Not for a long time yet," de Terry agreed. Then, "My Lord!"</p>

-

-<p>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&mdash;or what looked like trees; de Terry decided they were

-rather some sort of soft-stemmed ferns or fungi. Overhead was deep

-cloud.</p>

-

-<p>Gordy shivered. "Give me the ants," he ordered.</p>

-

-<p>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&mdash;it should have been farther,

-he thought, but he was afraid to get too far from de Terry and the

-machine&mdash;he made another hole and repeated the process.</p>

-

-<p>There were eight queens. When the eighth was buried he flung the bottle

-away and came back to de Terry.</p>

-

-<p>"That's it," he said.</p>

-

-<p>De Terry exhaled. His solemn face cracked in a sudden embarrassed

-smile. "I&mdash;I guess I feel like God," he said. "Good lord, Dr. Gordy!

-Talk about your great moments in history&mdash;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!"</p>

-

-<p>"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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>Finally de Terry said, "Maybe we'd better go back."</p>

-

-<p>"All right." Stiffly they climbed into the closet-sized interior of the

-time machine.</p>

-

-<p>Gordy stood with his hand on the control wheel, thinking about the

-ants. Assuming that they survived&mdash;assuming that in 40,000,000 years

-they grew larger and developed brains&mdash;what would happen? Would men

-be able to live in peace with them? Would it&mdash;might it not make men

-brothers, joined against an alien race?</p>

-

-<p>Might this thing prevent human war, and&mdash;his thoughts took an insane

-leap&mdash;could it have prevented the war that destroyed Gordy's family!</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb" />

-

-<p>They stopped the machine in the middle of a city, but the city was not

-Detroit. It was not a human city at all.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>"Dr. Gordy!" de Terry whispered. "Do you see them?"</p>

-

-<p>Salva Gordy swallowed. "I see them," he said.</p>

-

-<p>He stepped out of the time machine and stood waiting to greet the race

-to which he had given life.</p>

-

-<p>For these were the children of ants in the three-wheeled vehicle.

-Behind a transparent windshield he could see them clearly.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>"Ugly! They're filthy!"</p>

-

-<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>"What do I do now?" Gordy asked de Terry over his shoulder.</p>

-

-<p>De Terry laughed&mdash;or gasped. Gordy wasn't sure. "Talk to them," he

-said. "What else is there to do?"</p>

-

-<p>Gordy swallowed. He resolutely did not attempt to speak in English

-to these creatures, knowing as surely as he knew his name that

-English&mdash;and probably any other language involving sound&mdash;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.</p>

-

-<p>Gordy raised his hand in the semantically sound gesture of peace, and

-waited to see what the insects would do.</p>

-

-<p>They did nothing.</p>

-

-<p>Gordy bit his lip and, feeling idiotic, bowed stiffly to the ants.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb" />

-

-<p>The ants did nothing. De Terry said from behind, "Try talking to them,

-Dr. Gordy."</p>

-

-<p>"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."</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, for heaven's sake," said de Terry. "Here let me try."</p>

-

-<p>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&mdash;" he pointed to the time machine&mdash;"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.</p>

-

-<p>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&mdash;not cold, but, like spongy wood, without temperature at all.

-He turned around. Behind them were half a dozen larger ants. Drones, he

-thought&mdash;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!"</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>De Terry grimaced. "Not very good. What happened?"</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>Gordy saw it coming. "John!" he shrieked&mdash;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.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb" />

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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&mdash;when it suited their convenience, of course&mdash;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.</p>

-

-<p>That was the big drawback, he thought. That ... and the memory of John

-de Terry.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>They were working an angular thing that looked like a camera&mdash;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....</p>

-

-<p>Gordy admitted to himself that things hadn't worked out just as he had

-planned. Deep under the surface of his mind&mdash;just now beginning to

-come out where he could see it&mdash;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&mdash;for he sees them first&mdash;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&mdash;and his town to him is the heart of

-the nation&mdash;and his nation commands life and death in war.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>There had been this buried hope, but the hope was denied. For the ants

-simply had not allowed man to rise.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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&mdash;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.</p>

-

-<p>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&mdash;out the low exit-hole (he had to navigate it on hands and

-knees) and down a corridor to the bright day outside.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>Gordy recognized them at once. It was his time machine, stripped piece

-by piece.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>Pleased with the prospect of something to do with his fingers and his

-brain, Gordy grinned and reached for the curious ant-made tools....</p>

-

-<p>He ate four times, and slept once, never moving from the neighborhood

-of the cone-shaped shed. And then he was finished.</p>

-

-<p>Gordy stepped back. "It's all yours," he said proudly. "It'll take you

-anywhere. A present from humanity to you."</p>

-

-<p>The ants were very silent. Gordy looked at them and saw that there were

-drone-ants in the group, all still as statues.</p>

-

-<p>"Hey!" he said in startlement, unthinking. And then the needle-jawed

-ant claw took him from behind.</p>

-

-<p>Gordy had a moment of nausea&mdash;and then terror and hatred swept it away.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb" />

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>He had made a mistake, he and de Terry; there weren't any doubts left

-at all. And there was ... there <i>might</i> be a way to right it.</p>

-

-<p>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....</p>

-

-<p>He got out of the machine, suddenly panicky. Urgency squinted his eyes

-as he peered around him.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>A gleam of metal through the fern trees made his heart leap. Burnished

-metal here could mean but one thing&mdash;the machine!</p>

-

-<p>Around a clump of fern trees, their bases covered with thick club

-mosses, he ran, and saw the machine ahead. He raced toward it&mdash;then

-came to a sudden stop, slipping on the damp ground.</p>

-

-<p>For there were <i>two</i> machines in sight.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>But the nearer was a larger machine, and a strange design.</p>

-

-<p>And from it came a hastening mob&mdash;not a mob of men, but of black insect

-shapes racing toward him.</p>

-

-<p>Of course, thought Gordy, as he turned hopelessly to run&mdash;of course,

-the ants had infinite time to work in. Time enough to build a machine

-after the pattern of his own&mdash;and time to realize what they had to do

-to him, to insure their own race safety.</p>

-

-<p>Gordy stumbled, and the first of the black things was upon him.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap" />

-

-<div class="figcenter">

-  <img src="images/illus.jpg" alt=""/>

-  <div class="caption">

-    <p><i>He filled his lungs for one last scream.</i></p>

-  </div>

-</div>

-

-<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LET THE ANTS TRY ***</div>

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+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Let the Ants Try, by James Maccreigh.
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+  </head>
+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 64631 ***</div>
+
+<div class="titlepage">
+
+<h1>Let The Ants Try</h1>
+
+<h2>By JAMES MacCREIGH</h2>
+
+<p>Dr. Salva Gordy looked at the radioactive smear that<br />
+had been Detroit. Then he looked down at the boiling<br />
+anthill. Why not, he thought excitedly, why not?...</p>
+
+<p>[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from<br />
+Planet Stories Winter 1949.<br />
+Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that<br />
+the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<p>Gordy survived the Three-Hour War, even though Detroit didn't; he was
+on his way to Washington, with his blueprints and models in his bag,
+when the bombs struck.</p>
+
+<p>He had left his wife behind in the city, and not even a trace of her
+body was ever found. The children, of course, weren't as lucky as that.
+Their summer camp was less than twenty miles away, and unfortunately
+in the direction of the prevailing wind. But they were not in any pain
+until the last few days of the month they had left to live. Gordy
+managed to fight his way back through the snarled, frantic airline
+controls to them. Even though he knew they would certainly die of
+radiation sickness, and they suspected it, there was still a whole
+blessed week of companionship before the pain got too bad.</p>
+
+<p>That was about all the companionship Gordy had for the whole year of
+1960.</p>
+
+<p>He came back to Detroit, as soon as the radioactivity had died down;
+he had nowhere else to go. He found a house on the outskirts of the
+city, and tried to locate someone to buy it from. But the Emergency
+Administration laughed at him. "Move in, if you're crazy enough to
+stay."</p>
+
+<p>When Gordy thought about it all, it occurred to him that he was in
+a sort of state of shock. His fine, trained mind almost stopped
+functioning. He ate and slept, and when it grew cold he shivered and
+built fires, and that was all. The War Department wrote him two or
+three times, and finally a government man came around to ask what had
+happened to the things that Gordy had promised to bring to Washington.
+But he looked queerly at the pink, hairless mice that fed unmolested in
+the filthy kitchen, and he stood a careful distance away from Gordy's
+hairy face and torn clothes.</p>
+
+<p>He said, "The Secretary sent me here, Mr. Gordy. He takes a personal
+interest in your discovery."</p>
+
+<p>Gordy shook his head. "The Secretary is dead," he said. "They were all
+killed when Washington went."</p>
+
+<p>"There's a new Secretary," the man explained. He puffed on his
+cigarette and tossed it into the patch Gordy was scrabbling into a
+truck garden. "Arnold Cavanagh. He knows a great deal about you, and he
+told me, 'If Salva Gordy has a weapon, we must have it. Our strength
+has been shattered. Tell Gordy we need his help'."</p>
+
+<p>Gordy crossed his hands like a lean Buddha.</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't got a weapon," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"You have something that can be used as a weapon. You wrote to
+Washington, before the War came, and said&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"The War is over," said Salva Gordy. The government man sighed, and
+tried again, but in the end he went away. He never came back. The
+thing, Gordy thought, was undoubtedly written off as a crackpot idea
+after the man made his report; it was exactly that kind of a discovery,
+anyhow.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb" />
+
+<p>It was May when John de Terry appeared. Gordy was spading his garden.
+"Give me something to eat," said the voice behind Gordy's back.</p>
+
+<p>Salva Gordy turned around and saw the small, dirty man who spoke. He
+rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. "You'll have to work for
+it," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"All right." The newcomer set down his pack. "My name is John de Terry.
+I used to live here in Detroit."</p>
+
+<p>Salva Gordy said, "So did I."</p>
+
+<p>Gordy fed the man, and accepted a cigarette from him after they had
+eaten. The first puffs made him light-headed&mdash;it had been that long
+since he'd smoked&mdash;and through the smoke he looked at John de Terry
+amiably enough. Company would be all right, he thought. The pink mice
+had been company, of a sort&mdash;but it turned out that the mutation that
+made them hairless had also given them an appetite for meat. And after
+the morning when he had awakened to find tiny tooth-marks in his leg,
+he'd had to destroy them. And there had been no other animal since,
+nothing but the ants.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you going to stay?" Gordy asked.</p>
+
+<p>De Terry said, "If I can. What's your name?" When Gordy told him, some
+of the animal look went out of his eyes, and wonder took its place.
+"<i>Doctor</i> Salva Gordy?" he asked. "Mathematics and physics in Pasadena?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I used to teach at Pasadena."</p>
+
+<p>"And I studied there." John de Terry rubbed absently at his ruined
+clothes. "That was a long time ago. You didn't know me; I majored in
+biology. But I knew you."</p>
+
+<p>Gordy stood up and carefully put out the stub of his cigarette. "It was
+too long ago," he said. "I hardly remember. Shall we work in the garden
+now?"</p>
+
+<p>Together they sweated in the spring sunlight that afternoon, and Gordy
+discovered that what had been hard work for one man went quickly enough
+for two. They worked clear to the edge of the plot before the sun
+reached the horizon. John de Terry stopped and leaned on his spade,
+panting.</p>
+
+<p>He gestured to the rank growth beyond Gordy's patch. "We can make a
+bigger garden," he said. "Clear out that truck, and plant more food. We
+might even&mdash;" He stopped. Gordy was shaking his head.</p>
+
+<p>"You can't clear it out," said Gordy. "It's rank stuff, a sort of
+crabgrass with a particularly tough root. I can't even cut it. It's all
+around here, and it's spreading."</p>
+
+<p>De Terry grimaced. "Mutation?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think so. And look." Gordy beckoned to the other man and led him to
+the very edge of the cleared area. He bent down, picked up something
+red and wriggling between his thumb and forefinger.</p>
+
+<p>De Terry took it from his hand. "Another mutation?" He brought
+the thing close to his eyes. "It's almost like an ant," he said.
+"Except&mdash;well, the thorax is all wrong. And it's soft-bodied." He fell
+silent, examining the thing.</p>
+
+<p>He said something under his breath, and threw the insect from him.
+"You wouldn't have a microscope, I suppose? No&mdash;and yet, that thing is
+hard to believe. It's an ant, but it doesn't seem to have a tracheal
+breathing system at all. It's something different."</p>
+
+<p>"Everything's different," Gordy said. He pointed to a couple of
+abandoned rows. "I had carrots there. At least, I thought they were
+carrots; when I tried to eat them they made me sick." He sighed
+heavily. "Humanity has had its chance, John," he said. "The atomic bomb
+wasn't enough; we had to turn everything into a weapon. Even I, I made
+a weapon out of something that had nothing to do with war. And our
+weapons have blown up in our faces."</p>
+
+<p>De Terry grinned. "Maybe the ants will do better. It's their turn now."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;I think they actually have lungs. They could grow, Dr. Gordy.
+And if ants were the size of men ... they'd rule the world."</p>
+
+<p>"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...."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>He picked up his spade. "I'm hungry again, Dr. Gordy," he said.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It was sundown when they had finished, and Gordy moved slowly to light
+a lamp. Then he stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"It's your first night, John," he said. "Come down cellar. We'll start
+the generator and have real electric lights in your honor."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and that."</p>
+
+<p>He swept an arm toward a corner of the basement. "I told you I invented
+a weapon," he added. "That's it."</p>
+
+<p>De Terry looked. It was as much like a cage as anything, he
+thought&mdash;the height of a man and almost cubical. "What does it do?" he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is," said de Terry. "What does it do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the War Department had a name for it&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<hr class="tb" />
+
+<p>Fourteen hours later they stepped into the cage, its batteries charged
+again and its strange motor whining....</p>
+
+<p>And, forty million years earlier, they stepped out onto quaking humid
+soil.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy felt himself trembling, and with an effort managed to stop. "No
+dinosaurs or saber-toothed tigers in sight," he reported.</p>
+
+<p>"Not for a long time yet," de Terry agreed. Then, "My Lord!"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;or what looked like trees; de Terry decided they were
+rather some sort of soft-stemmed ferns or fungi. Overhead was deep
+cloud.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy shivered. "Give me the ants," he ordered.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;it should have been farther,
+he thought, but he was afraid to get too far from de Terry and the
+machine&mdash;he made another hole and repeated the process.</p>
+
+<p>There were eight queens. When the eighth was buried he flung the bottle
+away and came back to de Terry.</p>
+
+<p>"That's it," he said.</p>
+
+<p>De Terry exhaled. His solemn face cracked in a sudden embarrassed
+smile. "I&mdash;I guess I feel like God," he said. "Good lord, Dr. Gordy!
+Talk about your great moments in history&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Finally de Terry said, "Maybe we'd better go back."</p>
+
+<p>"All right." Stiffly they climbed into the closet-sized interior of the
+time machine.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy stood with his hand on the control wheel, thinking about the
+ants. Assuming that they survived&mdash;assuming that in 40,000,000 years
+they grew larger and developed brains&mdash;what would happen? Would men
+be able to live in peace with them? Would it&mdash;might it not make men
+brothers, joined against an alien race?</p>
+
+<p>Might this thing prevent human war, and&mdash;his thoughts took an insane
+leap&mdash;could it have prevented the war that destroyed Gordy's family!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb" />
+
+<p>They stopped the machine in the middle of a city, but the city was not
+Detroit. It was not a human city at all.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Dr. Gordy!" de Terry whispered. "Do you see them?"</p>
+
+<p>Salva Gordy swallowed. "I see them," he said.</p>
+
+<p>He stepped out of the time machine and stood waiting to greet the race
+to which he had given life.</p>
+
+<p>For these were the children of ants in the three-wheeled vehicle.
+Behind a transparent windshield he could see them clearly.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Ugly! They're filthy!"</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"What do I do now?" Gordy asked de Terry over his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>De Terry laughed&mdash;or gasped. Gordy wasn't sure. "Talk to them," he
+said. "What else is there to do?"</p>
+
+<p>Gordy swallowed. He resolutely did not attempt to speak in English
+to these creatures, knowing as surely as he knew his name that
+English&mdash;and probably any other language involving sound&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy raised his hand in the semantically sound gesture of peace, and
+waited to see what the insects would do.</p>
+
+<p>They did nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy bit his lip and, feeling idiotic, bowed stiffly to the ants.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb" />
+
+<p>The ants did nothing. De Terry said from behind, "Try talking to them,
+Dr. Gordy."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, for heaven's sake," said de Terry. "Here let me try."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;" he pointed to the time machine&mdash;"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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;not cold, but, like spongy wood, without temperature at all.
+He turned around. Behind them were half a dozen larger ants. Drones, he
+thought&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>De Terry grimaced. "Not very good. What happened?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy saw it coming. "John!" he shrieked&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb" />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;when it suited their convenience, of course&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>That was the big drawback, he thought. That ... and the memory of John
+de Terry.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>They were working an angular thing that looked like a camera&mdash;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....</p>
+
+<p>Gordy admitted to himself that things hadn't worked out just as he had
+planned. Deep under the surface of his mind&mdash;just now beginning to
+come out where he could see it&mdash;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&mdash;for he sees them first&mdash;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&mdash;and his town to him is the heart of
+the nation&mdash;and his nation commands life and death in war.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There had been this buried hope, but the hope was denied. For the ants
+simply had not allowed man to rise.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;out the low exit-hole (he had to navigate it on hands and
+knees) and down a corridor to the bright day outside.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy recognized them at once. It was his time machine, stripped piece
+by piece.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Pleased with the prospect of something to do with his fingers and his
+brain, Gordy grinned and reached for the curious ant-made tools....</p>
+
+<p>He ate four times, and slept once, never moving from the neighborhood
+of the cone-shaped shed. And then he was finished.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy stepped back. "It's all yours," he said proudly. "It'll take you
+anywhere. A present from humanity to you."</p>
+
+<p>The ants were very silent. Gordy looked at them and saw that there were
+drone-ants in the group, all still as statues.</p>
+
+<p>"Hey!" he said in startlement, unthinking. And then the needle-jawed
+ant claw took him from behind.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy had a moment of nausea&mdash;and then terror and hatred swept it away.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb" />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He had made a mistake, he and de Terry; there weren't any doubts left
+at all. And there was ... there <i>might</i> be a way to right it.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>He got out of the machine, suddenly panicky. Urgency squinted his eyes
+as he peered around him.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>A gleam of metal through the fern trees made his heart leap. Burnished
+metal here could mean but one thing&mdash;the machine!</p>
+
+<p>Around a clump of fern trees, their bases covered with thick club
+mosses, he ran, and saw the machine ahead. He raced toward it&mdash;then
+came to a sudden stop, slipping on the damp ground.</p>
+
+<p>For there were <i>two</i> machines in sight.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But the nearer was a larger machine, and a strange design.</p>
+
+<p>And from it came a hastening mob&mdash;not a mob of men, but of black insect
+shapes racing toward him.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, thought Gordy, as he turned hopelessly to run&mdash;of course,
+the ants had infinite time to work in. Time enough to build a machine
+after the pattern of his own&mdash;and time to realize what they had to do
+to him, to insure their own race safety.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy stumbled, and the first of the black things was upon him.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+  <img src="images/illus.jpg" alt=""/>
+  <div class="caption">
+    <p><i>He filled his lungs for one last scream.</i></p>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 64631 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Let the Ants Try, by James MacCreigh
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Let the Ants Try
+
+Author: James MacCreigh
+
+Release Date: February 25, 2021 [eBook #64631]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
+             Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LET THE ANTS TRY ***
+
+
+
+
+                           Let The Ants Try
+
+                          By JAMES MacCREIGH
+
+         Dr. Salva Gordy looked at the radioactive smear that
+         had been Detroit. Then he looked down at the boiling
+          anthill. Why not, he thought excitedly, why not?...
+
+           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
+                      Planet Stories Winter 1949.
+         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+Gordy survived the Three-Hour War, even though Detroit didn't; he was
+on his way to Washington, with his blueprints and models in his bag,
+when the bombs struck.
+
+He had left his wife behind in the city, and not even a trace of her
+body was ever found. The children, of course, weren't as lucky as that.
+Their summer camp was less than twenty miles away, and unfortunately
+in the direction of the prevailing wind. But they were not in any pain
+until the last few days of the month they had left to live. Gordy
+managed to fight his way back through the snarled, frantic airline
+controls to them. Even though he knew they would certainly die of
+radiation sickness, and they suspected it, there was still a whole
+blessed week of companionship before the pain got too bad.
+
+That was about all the companionship Gordy had for the whole year of
+1960.
+
+He came back to Detroit, as soon as the radioactivity had died down;
+he had nowhere else to go. He found a house on the outskirts of the
+city, and tried to locate someone to buy it from. But the Emergency
+Administration laughed at him. "Move in, if you're crazy enough to
+stay."
+
+When Gordy thought about it all, it occurred to him that he was in
+a sort of state of shock. His fine, trained mind almost stopped
+functioning. He ate and slept, and when it grew cold he shivered and
+built fires, and that was all. The War Department wrote him two or
+three times, and finally a government man came around to ask what had
+happened to the things that Gordy had promised to bring to Washington.
+But he looked queerly at the pink, hairless mice that fed unmolested in
+the filthy kitchen, and he stood a careful distance away from Gordy's
+hairy face and torn clothes.
+
+He said, "The Secretary sent me here, Mr. Gordy. He takes a personal
+interest in your discovery."
+
+Gordy shook his head. "The Secretary is dead," he said. "They were all
+killed when Washington went."
+
+"There's a new Secretary," the man explained. He puffed on his
+cigarette and tossed it into the patch Gordy was scrabbling into a
+truck garden. "Arnold Cavanagh. He knows a great deal about you, and he
+told me, 'If Salva Gordy has a weapon, we must have it. Our strength
+has been shattered. Tell Gordy we need his help'."
+
+Gordy crossed his hands like a lean Buddha.
+
+"I haven't got a weapon," he said.
+
+"You have something that can be used as a weapon. You wrote to
+Washington, before the War came, and said--"
+
+"The War is over," said Salva Gordy. The government man sighed, and
+tried again, but in the end he went away. He never came back. The
+thing, Gordy thought, was undoubtedly written off as a crackpot idea
+after the man made his report; it was exactly that kind of a discovery,
+anyhow.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was May when John de Terry appeared. Gordy was spading his garden.
+"Give me something to eat," said the voice behind Gordy's back.
+
+Salva Gordy turned around and saw the small, dirty man who spoke. He
+rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. "You'll have to work for
+it," he said.
+
+"All right." The newcomer set down his pack. "My name is John de Terry.
+I used to live here in Detroit."
+
+Salva Gordy said, "So did I."
+
+Gordy fed the man, and accepted a cigarette from him after they had
+eaten. The first puffs made him light-headed--it had been that long
+since he'd smoked--and through the smoke he looked at John de Terry
+amiably enough. Company would be all right, he thought. The pink mice
+had been company, of a sort--but it turned out that the mutation that
+made them hairless had also given them an appetite for meat. And after
+the morning when he had awakened to find tiny tooth-marks in his leg,
+he'd had to destroy them. And there had been no other animal since,
+nothing but the ants.
+
+"Are you going to stay?" Gordy asked.
+
+De Terry said, "If I can. What's your name?" When Gordy told him, some
+of the animal look went out of his eyes, and wonder took its place.
+"_Doctor_ Salva Gordy?" he asked. "Mathematics and physics in Pasadena?"
+
+"Yes, I used to teach at Pasadena."
+
+"And I studied there." John de Terry rubbed absently at his ruined
+clothes. "That was a long time ago. You didn't know me; I majored in
+biology. But I knew you."
+
+Gordy stood up and carefully put out the stub of his cigarette. "It was
+too long ago," he said. "I hardly remember. Shall we work in the garden
+now?"
+
+Together they sweated in the spring sunlight that afternoon, and Gordy
+discovered that what had been hard work for one man went quickly enough
+for two. They worked clear to the edge of the plot before the sun
+reached the horizon. John de Terry stopped and leaned on his spade,
+panting.
+
+He gestured to the rank growth beyond Gordy's patch. "We can make a
+bigger garden," he said. "Clear out that truck, and plant more food. We
+might even--" He stopped. Gordy was shaking his head.
+
+"You can't clear it out," said Gordy. "It's rank stuff, a sort of
+crabgrass with a particularly tough root. I can't even cut it. It's all
+around here, and it's spreading."
+
+De Terry grimaced. "Mutation?"
+
+"I think so. And look." Gordy beckoned to the other man and led him to
+the very edge of the cleared area. He bent down, picked up something
+red and wriggling between his thumb and forefinger.
+
+De Terry took it from his hand. "Another mutation?" He brought
+the thing close to his eyes. "It's almost like an ant," he said.
+"Except--well, the thorax is all wrong. And it's soft-bodied." He fell
+silent, examining the thing.
+
+He said something under his breath, and threw the insect from him.
+"You wouldn't have a microscope, I suppose? No--and yet, that thing is
+hard to believe. It's an ant, but it doesn't seem to have a tracheal
+breathing system at all. It's something different."
+
+"Everything's different," Gordy said. He pointed to a couple of
+abandoned rows. "I had carrots there. At least, I thought they were
+carrots; when I tried to eat them they made me sick." He sighed
+heavily. "Humanity has had its chance, John," he said. "The atomic bomb
+wasn't enough; we had to turn everything into a weapon. Even I, I made
+a weapon out of something that had nothing to do with war. And our
+weapons have blown up in our faces."
+
+De Terry grinned. "Maybe the ants will do better. It's their turn now."
+
+"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.
+
+Finally de Terry said, "Maybe we'd better go back."
+
+"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.
+
+De Terry grimaced. "Not very good. What happened?"
+
+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._]
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LET THE ANTS TRY ***
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+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Let the Ants Try, by James MacCreigh</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
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+
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Let the Ants Try</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: James MacCreigh</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: February 25, 2021 [eBook #64631]</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
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+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net</div>
+
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LET THE ANTS TRY ***</div>
+
+<div class="titlepage">
+
+<h1>Let The Ants Try</h1>
+
+<h2>By JAMES MacCREIGH</h2>
+
+<p>Dr. Salva Gordy looked at the radioactive smear that<br />
+had been Detroit. Then he looked down at the boiling<br />
+anthill. Why not, he thought excitedly, why not?...</p>
+
+<p>[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from<br />
+Planet Stories Winter 1949.<br />
+Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that<br />
+the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<p>Gordy survived the Three-Hour War, even though Detroit didn't; he was
+on his way to Washington, with his blueprints and models in his bag,
+when the bombs struck.</p>
+
+<p>He had left his wife behind in the city, and not even a trace of her
+body was ever found. The children, of course, weren't as lucky as that.
+Their summer camp was less than twenty miles away, and unfortunately
+in the direction of the prevailing wind. But they were not in any pain
+until the last few days of the month they had left to live. Gordy
+managed to fight his way back through the snarled, frantic airline
+controls to them. Even though he knew they would certainly die of
+radiation sickness, and they suspected it, there was still a whole
+blessed week of companionship before the pain got too bad.</p>
+
+<p>That was about all the companionship Gordy had for the whole year of
+1960.</p>
+
+<p>He came back to Detroit, as soon as the radioactivity had died down;
+he had nowhere else to go. He found a house on the outskirts of the
+city, and tried to locate someone to buy it from. But the Emergency
+Administration laughed at him. "Move in, if you're crazy enough to
+stay."</p>
+
+<p>When Gordy thought about it all, it occurred to him that he was in
+a sort of state of shock. His fine, trained mind almost stopped
+functioning. He ate and slept, and when it grew cold he shivered and
+built fires, and that was all. The War Department wrote him two or
+three times, and finally a government man came around to ask what had
+happened to the things that Gordy had promised to bring to Washington.
+But he looked queerly at the pink, hairless mice that fed unmolested in
+the filthy kitchen, and he stood a careful distance away from Gordy's
+hairy face and torn clothes.</p>
+
+<p>He said, "The Secretary sent me here, Mr. Gordy. He takes a personal
+interest in your discovery."</p>
+
+<p>Gordy shook his head. "The Secretary is dead," he said. "They were all
+killed when Washington went."</p>
+
+<p>"There's a new Secretary," the man explained. He puffed on his
+cigarette and tossed it into the patch Gordy was scrabbling into a
+truck garden. "Arnold Cavanagh. He knows a great deal about you, and he
+told me, 'If Salva Gordy has a weapon, we must have it. Our strength
+has been shattered. Tell Gordy we need his help'."</p>
+
+<p>Gordy crossed his hands like a lean Buddha.</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't got a weapon," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"You have something that can be used as a weapon. You wrote to
+Washington, before the War came, and said&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"The War is over," said Salva Gordy. The government man sighed, and
+tried again, but in the end he went away. He never came back. The
+thing, Gordy thought, was undoubtedly written off as a crackpot idea
+after the man made his report; it was exactly that kind of a discovery,
+anyhow.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb" />
+
+<p>It was May when John de Terry appeared. Gordy was spading his garden.
+"Give me something to eat," said the voice behind Gordy's back.</p>
+
+<p>Salva Gordy turned around and saw the small, dirty man who spoke. He
+rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. "You'll have to work for
+it," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"All right." The newcomer set down his pack. "My name is John de Terry.
+I used to live here in Detroit."</p>
+
+<p>Salva Gordy said, "So did I."</p>
+
+<p>Gordy fed the man, and accepted a cigarette from him after they had
+eaten. The first puffs made him light-headed&mdash;it had been that long
+since he'd smoked&mdash;and through the smoke he looked at John de Terry
+amiably enough. Company would be all right, he thought. The pink mice
+had been company, of a sort&mdash;but it turned out that the mutation that
+made them hairless had also given them an appetite for meat. And after
+the morning when he had awakened to find tiny tooth-marks in his leg,
+he'd had to destroy them. And there had been no other animal since,
+nothing but the ants.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you going to stay?" Gordy asked.</p>
+
+<p>De Terry said, "If I can. What's your name?" When Gordy told him, some
+of the animal look went out of his eyes, and wonder took its place.
+"<i>Doctor</i> Salva Gordy?" he asked. "Mathematics and physics in Pasadena?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I used to teach at Pasadena."</p>
+
+<p>"And I studied there." John de Terry rubbed absently at his ruined
+clothes. "That was a long time ago. You didn't know me; I majored in
+biology. But I knew you."</p>
+
+<p>Gordy stood up and carefully put out the stub of his cigarette. "It was
+too long ago," he said. "I hardly remember. Shall we work in the garden
+now?"</p>
+
+<p>Together they sweated in the spring sunlight that afternoon, and Gordy
+discovered that what had been hard work for one man went quickly enough
+for two. They worked clear to the edge of the plot before the sun
+reached the horizon. John de Terry stopped and leaned on his spade,
+panting.</p>
+
+<p>He gestured to the rank growth beyond Gordy's patch. "We can make a
+bigger garden," he said. "Clear out that truck, and plant more food. We
+might even&mdash;" He stopped. Gordy was shaking his head.</p>
+
+<p>"You can't clear it out," said Gordy. "It's rank stuff, a sort of
+crabgrass with a particularly tough root. I can't even cut it. It's all
+around here, and it's spreading."</p>
+
+<p>De Terry grimaced. "Mutation?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think so. And look." Gordy beckoned to the other man and led him to
+the very edge of the cleared area. He bent down, picked up something
+red and wriggling between his thumb and forefinger.</p>
+
+<p>De Terry took it from his hand. "Another mutation?" He brought
+the thing close to his eyes. "It's almost like an ant," he said.
+"Except&mdash;well, the thorax is all wrong. And it's soft-bodied." He fell
+silent, examining the thing.</p>
+
+<p>He said something under his breath, and threw the insect from him.
+"You wouldn't have a microscope, I suppose? No&mdash;and yet, that thing is
+hard to believe. It's an ant, but it doesn't seem to have a tracheal
+breathing system at all. It's something different."</p>
+
+<p>"Everything's different," Gordy said. He pointed to a couple of
+abandoned rows. "I had carrots there. At least, I thought they were
+carrots; when I tried to eat them they made me sick." He sighed
+heavily. "Humanity has had its chance, John," he said. "The atomic bomb
+wasn't enough; we had to turn everything into a weapon. Even I, I made
+a weapon out of something that had nothing to do with war. And our
+weapons have blown up in our faces."</p>
+
+<p>De Terry grinned. "Maybe the ants will do better. It's their turn now."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;I think they actually have lungs. They could grow, Dr. Gordy.
+And if ants were the size of men ... they'd rule the world."</p>
+
+<p>"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...."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>He picked up his spade. "I'm hungry again, Dr. Gordy," he said.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It was sundown when they had finished, and Gordy moved slowly to light
+a lamp. Then he stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"It's your first night, John," he said. "Come down cellar. We'll start
+the generator and have real electric lights in your honor."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and that."</p>
+
+<p>He swept an arm toward a corner of the basement. "I told you I invented
+a weapon," he added. "That's it."</p>
+
+<p>De Terry looked. It was as much like a cage as anything, he
+thought&mdash;the height of a man and almost cubical. "What does it do?" he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is," said de Terry. "What does it do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the War Department had a name for it&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<hr class="tb" />
+
+<p>Fourteen hours later they stepped into the cage, its batteries charged
+again and its strange motor whining....</p>
+
+<p>And, forty million years earlier, they stepped out onto quaking humid
+soil.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy felt himself trembling, and with an effort managed to stop. "No
+dinosaurs or saber-toothed tigers in sight," he reported.</p>
+
+<p>"Not for a long time yet," de Terry agreed. Then, "My Lord!"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;or what looked like trees; de Terry decided they were
+rather some sort of soft-stemmed ferns or fungi. Overhead was deep
+cloud.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy shivered. "Give me the ants," he ordered.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;it should have been farther,
+he thought, but he was afraid to get too far from de Terry and the
+machine&mdash;he made another hole and repeated the process.</p>
+
+<p>There were eight queens. When the eighth was buried he flung the bottle
+away and came back to de Terry.</p>
+
+<p>"That's it," he said.</p>
+
+<p>De Terry exhaled. His solemn face cracked in a sudden embarrassed
+smile. "I&mdash;I guess I feel like God," he said. "Good lord, Dr. Gordy!
+Talk about your great moments in history&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Finally de Terry said, "Maybe we'd better go back."</p>
+
+<p>"All right." Stiffly they climbed into the closet-sized interior of the
+time machine.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy stood with his hand on the control wheel, thinking about the
+ants. Assuming that they survived&mdash;assuming that in 40,000,000 years
+they grew larger and developed brains&mdash;what would happen? Would men
+be able to live in peace with them? Would it&mdash;might it not make men
+brothers, joined against an alien race?</p>
+
+<p>Might this thing prevent human war, and&mdash;his thoughts took an insane
+leap&mdash;could it have prevented the war that destroyed Gordy's family!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb" />
+
+<p>They stopped the machine in the middle of a city, but the city was not
+Detroit. It was not a human city at all.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Dr. Gordy!" de Terry whispered. "Do you see them?"</p>
+
+<p>Salva Gordy swallowed. "I see them," he said.</p>
+
+<p>He stepped out of the time machine and stood waiting to greet the race
+to which he had given life.</p>
+
+<p>For these were the children of ants in the three-wheeled vehicle.
+Behind a transparent windshield he could see them clearly.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Ugly! They're filthy!"</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"What do I do now?" Gordy asked de Terry over his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>De Terry laughed&mdash;or gasped. Gordy wasn't sure. "Talk to them," he
+said. "What else is there to do?"</p>
+
+<p>Gordy swallowed. He resolutely did not attempt to speak in English
+to these creatures, knowing as surely as he knew his name that
+English&mdash;and probably any other language involving sound&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy raised his hand in the semantically sound gesture of peace, and
+waited to see what the insects would do.</p>
+
+<p>They did nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy bit his lip and, feeling idiotic, bowed stiffly to the ants.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb" />
+
+<p>The ants did nothing. De Terry said from behind, "Try talking to them,
+Dr. Gordy."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, for heaven's sake," said de Terry. "Here let me try."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;" he pointed to the time machine&mdash;"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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;not cold, but, like spongy wood, without temperature at all.
+He turned around. Behind them were half a dozen larger ants. Drones, he
+thought&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>De Terry grimaced. "Not very good. What happened?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy saw it coming. "John!" he shrieked&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb" />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;when it suited their convenience, of course&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>That was the big drawback, he thought. That ... and the memory of John
+de Terry.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>They were working an angular thing that looked like a camera&mdash;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....</p>
+
+<p>Gordy admitted to himself that things hadn't worked out just as he had
+planned. Deep under the surface of his mind&mdash;just now beginning to
+come out where he could see it&mdash;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&mdash;for he sees them first&mdash;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&mdash;and his town to him is the heart of
+the nation&mdash;and his nation commands life and death in war.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There had been this buried hope, but the hope was denied. For the ants
+simply had not allowed man to rise.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;out the low exit-hole (he had to navigate it on hands and
+knees) and down a corridor to the bright day outside.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy recognized them at once. It was his time machine, stripped piece
+by piece.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Pleased with the prospect of something to do with his fingers and his
+brain, Gordy grinned and reached for the curious ant-made tools....</p>
+
+<p>He ate four times, and slept once, never moving from the neighborhood
+of the cone-shaped shed. And then he was finished.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy stepped back. "It's all yours," he said proudly. "It'll take you
+anywhere. A present from humanity to you."</p>
+
+<p>The ants were very silent. Gordy looked at them and saw that there were
+drone-ants in the group, all still as statues.</p>
+
+<p>"Hey!" he said in startlement, unthinking. And then the needle-jawed
+ant claw took him from behind.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy had a moment of nausea&mdash;and then terror and hatred swept it away.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb" />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He had made a mistake, he and de Terry; there weren't any doubts left
+at all. And there was ... there <i>might</i> be a way to right it.</p>
+
+<p>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....</p>
+
+<p>He got out of the machine, suddenly panicky. Urgency squinted his eyes
+as he peered around him.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>A gleam of metal through the fern trees made his heart leap. Burnished
+metal here could mean but one thing&mdash;the machine!</p>
+
+<p>Around a clump of fern trees, their bases covered with thick club
+mosses, he ran, and saw the machine ahead. He raced toward it&mdash;then
+came to a sudden stop, slipping on the damp ground.</p>
+
+<p>For there were <i>two</i> machines in sight.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But the nearer was a larger machine, and a strange design.</p>
+
+<p>And from it came a hastening mob&mdash;not a mob of men, but of black insect
+shapes racing toward him.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, thought Gordy, as he turned hopelessly to run&mdash;of course,
+the ants had infinite time to work in. Time enough to build a machine
+after the pattern of his own&mdash;and time to realize what they had to do
+to him, to insure their own race safety.</p>
+
+<p>Gordy stumbled, and the first of the black things was upon him.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+  <img src="images/illus.jpg" alt=""/>
+  <div class="caption">
+    <p><i>He filled his lungs for one last scream.</i></p>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LET THE ANTS TRY ***</div>
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