Clifford Simak - City

The glassite shield that once had covered the nest still was there, but it was broken and had fallen into disrepair, almost as if there were no further use of it, as if it had served a purpose that no longer existed.

The glen was wild, broken land that tumbled down towards the river bluffs, studded with boulders, alternating with tiny patches of meadow and clumps of mighty oaks. A hushed peace that one could believe had never heard a voice except to talk of wind in tree-tops and the tiny voices of the wild things that followed secret paths.

A place where ants might live undisturbed by plough or vagrant foot, continuing the millions of years of senseless destiny that dated from a day before there was anything like man – from a day before a single abstract thought had been born on the Earth. A closed and stagnant destiny that had no purpose except that ants might live.

And now someone had uncoiled the angle of that destiny, had set it on another path, had given the ants the secret of the wheel, the secret of working metals – how many other cultural handicaps bad been lifted from this ant hill, breaking the bottleneck of progress?

Hunger pressure, perhaps, would be one cultural handicap that would have been lifted for the ants. Providing of abundant food which gave them leisure for other things beyond the continued search for sustenance.

Another race on the road to greatness, developing along the social basis that had been built in that long gone day before the thing called Man had known the stir of greatness.

Where would it lead? What would the ant be like in another million years? Would ant and Man – could ant and Man find any common denominator as dog and Man would find for working out a co-operative destiny?

Grant shook his head. That was something the chances were against. For in dog and Man ran common blood, while ant and Man were things apart, life forms that were never meant to understand the other. They had no common basis such as had been joined in the paleolithic days when dog and Man dozed beside a fire and watched against the eyes that roved out in the night.

Grant sensed rather than heard the rustle of feet in the high grass back of him. Erect, he whirled around and saw the man before him. A gangling man with stooping shoulders and hands that were almost hamlike, but with sensitive fingers that tapered white and smooth.

"You are Joe?" asked Grant.

The man nodded. "And you are a man who has been hunting me."

Grant gasped. "Why perhaps I have, Not you personally, perhaps, but someone like you."

"Someone different," said Joe.

"Why didn't you stay the other night?" asked Grant. "Why did you run off? I wanted to thank you for fixing up the gun."

Joe merely stared at him, unspeaking, but behind the silent lips Grant sensed amusement, a vast and secret amusement.

"How in the world," asked Grant, "did you know the gun was broken? Had you been watching me?"

"I heard you think it was."

"You heard me think?"

"Yes," said Joe. "I hear you thinking now."

Grant laughed, a bit uneasily. It was disconcerting, but it was logical. It was the thing that he should have expected – this and more.

He gestured at the hill. "Those ants are yours?'

Joe nodded and the amusement again was bubbling just behind his lips.

"What are you laughing for?" snapped Grant.

"I am not laughing," Joe told him and somehow Grant felt rebuked, rebuked and small, like a child that has been slapped for something it should have known better than to do.

"You should publish your notes." said Grant. "They might be correlated with the work that Webster's doing."

Joe shrugged his shoulders. "I have no notes," he said.

"No notes!"

The lanky man moved towards the ant hill, stood staring down at it. "Perhaps," he declared, "you've figured out why I did it."

Grant nodded gravely. "I might have wondered that. Experimental curiosity, more than likely. Maybe compassion for a lower form of life. A feeling, perhaps, that just because man himself got the head start doesn't give him a monopoly on advancement."

Joe's eyes glittered in the sunlight. "Curiosity – maybe. I hadn't thought of that."

He hunkered down beside line bill. "Ever wonder why the ant advanced so far and then stood still? Why he built a nearly perfect social organization and let it go at that? What it was that stopped him in his tracks?"

"Hunger pressure, for one thing," Grant said.

"That and hibernation," declared the lanky man. "Hibernation, you see, wiped out the memory pattern from one season to the next. Each spring they started over, began from scratch again. They never were able to benefit from past mistakes, cash in on accumulated knowledge."

"So you fed them-"

"And heated the hill," said Joe, "so they wouldn't have to hibernate. So they wouldn't have to start out fresh with the coming of each spring."

"The carts?"

"I made a couple, left them there. It took ten years, but they finally figured out what they were for."

Grant nodded at the smokestacks.

"They did that themselves," Joe told him.

"Anything else?"

Joe lifted his shoulders wearily. "How should I know?"

"But, man, you watched them. Even if you didn't keep notes, you watched."

Joe shook his head. "I haven't laid eyes on them for almost fifteen years. I only came today because I heard you here. These ants, you see, don't amuse me any more."

Grant's mouth opened, then shut tight again. Finally, he said: "So that's the answer. That's why you did it. Amusement."

There was no shame on Joe's face, no defence, just a pained expression that said he wished they'd forget all about the ants. His mouth said: "Sure. Why else?"

"That gun of mine. I suppose that amused you, too."

"Not the gun," said Joe.

Not the gun, Grant's brain said. Of course, not the gun, you dumb-bell, but you yourself. You're the one that amused him. And you're amusing him right now.

Fixing up old Dave Baxter's farm machinery, then walking off without a word, doubtless had been a screaming joke. And probably he'd hugged himself and rocked for days with silent mirth after that time up at the Webster house when he'd pointed out the thing that was wrong with old Thomas Webster's space drive.

Like a smart-Aleck playing tricks on an awkward puppy.

Joe's voice broke his thoughts.

"You're an enumerator, aren't you? Why don't you ask me the questions? Now that you've found me you can't go off and not get it down on paper. My age especially. I'm one hundred and sixty-three and I'm scarcely adolescent. Another thousand years at least."

He hugged his knobby knees against his chest and rocked slowly back and forth. "Another thousand years and if I take good care of myself-"

"But that isn't all of it," Grant told him, trying to keep his voice calm. "There is something more. Something that you must do for us."

"For us?"

"For society," said Grant. "For the human race."

"Why?"

Grant stared. "You mean that you don't care."

Joe shook his head and in the gesture there was no bravado, no defiance of convention. It was just blunt statement of the fact.

"Money?" suggested Grant.

Joe waved his hands at the hills about them, at the spreading river valley. "I have this," he said. "I have no need of money."

"Fame, perhaps?"

Joe did not spit, but his face looked like he had. "The gratitude of the human race?"

"It doesn't last," said Joe and the old mockery was in his words, the vast amusement just behind his lips.

"Look, Joe," said Grant and, hard as he tried to keep it out, there was pleading in his voice, "this thing I have for you to do is important... important to generations yet to come, important to the human race, a milestone in our destiny-"