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,
