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.
The Tunnel Under the World
I
On the morning of June 15th, Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream.
It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. He could still hear and feel the sharp, ripping-metal explosion, the violent heave that had tossed him furiously out of bed, the searing wave of heat.
He sat up convulsively and stared, not believing what he saw, at the quiet room and the bright sunlight coming in the window.
He croaked, “Mary?”
His wife was not in the bed next to him. The covers were tumbled and awry, as though she had just left it, and the memory of the dream was so strong that instinctively he found himself searching the floor to see if the dream explosion had thrown her down.
But she wasn’t there. Of course she wasn’t, he told himself, looking at the familiar vanity and slipper chair, the uncracked window, the unbuckled wall. It had only been a dream.
“Guy?” His wife was calling him querulously from the foot of the stairs. “Guy, dear, are you all right?”
He called weakly, “Sure.”
There was a pause. Then Mary said doubtfully, “Breakfast is ready. Are you sure you’re all right? I thought I heard you yelling—”
Burckhardt said more confidently, “I had a bad dream, honey. Be right down.”
In the shower, punching the lukewarm-and-cologne he favored, he told himself that it had been a beaut of a dream. Still,
