Andrew drew two lines in the sand, crossed them with two other lines. He made an X in the open square in the upper left hand corner.
«You think I’m crazy,» he said. «You think I’m talking through my hat.»
Homer wriggled his haunches deeper into the sand.
«I don’t know what to think,» he said. «All these years …»
Andrew drew an O with his finger in the center square of the cross-hatch he had drawn in the sand.
«I know,» he said. «All these years you have lived with a dream. The idea that the Dogs were the prime movers. And the facts are hard to understand, hard to reconcile. Maybe it would be just as well if you forgot what I said. Facts are painful things at times. A robot has to work with them, for they are the only things he has to work with. We can’t dream, you know. Facts are all we have.»
«We passed fact long ago,» Homer told him. «Not that we don’t use it, for there are times we do. But we work in other ways. Intuition and cobblying and listening.»
«You aren’t mechanical,» said Andrew. «For you, two and two are not always four, but for us it must be four. And sometimes I wonder if tradition doesn’t blind us. I wonder sometimes if two and two may not be something more or less than four.»
They squatted in silence, watching the river, a flood of molten silver tumbling down a colored land.
Andrew made an X in the upper right hand corner of the cross-hatch, an O in the center upper space, and an X in the center lower space. With the flat of his hand, he rubbed the sand smooth.
«I never win,» he said. «I’m too smart for myself.»
«You were telling me about the ants,» said Homer. «About them not being stupid any more.»
«Oh, yes,» said Andrew. «I was telling you about a man named Joe …»
Jenkins strode across the hill and did not look to either left or right, for there were things he did not wish to see, things that struck too deeply into memory. There was a tree that stood where another tree had stood in another world. There was the lay of ground that had been imprinted on his brain with a billion footsteps across ten thousand years.
The weak winter sun of afternoon flickered in the sky, flickered like a candle guttering in the wind, and when it steadied and there was no flicker it was moonlight and not sunlight at all.
Jenkins checked his stride and swung around and the house was there … low-set against the ground, sprawled across the hill, like a sleepy young thing that clung close to mother earth.
Jenkins took a hesitant step and as he moved his metal body glowed and sparkled in the moonlight that had been sunlight a short heartbeat ago.
From the river valley came the sound of a night bird crying and a raccoon was whimpering in a cornfield just below the ridge.
Jenkins took another step and prayed the house would stay … although he knew it couldn’t because it wasn’t there.
For this was an empty hilltop that had never known a house. This was another world in which no house existed. The house remained, dark and silent, no smoke from the chimneys, no light from the windows, but with remembered lines that one could not mistake.
Jenkins moved slowly, carefully, afraid the house would leave, afraid that he would startle it and it would disappear.
But the house stayed put. And there were other things. The tree at the corner had been an elm and now it was an oak, as it had been before. And it was autumn moon instead of winter sun. The breeze was blowing from the west and not out of the north.
Something happened, thought Jenkins. The thing that has been growing on me. The thing I felt and could not understand. An ability developing? Or a new sense finally reaching light? Or a power I never dreamed I had.
A power to walk between the worlds at will. A power to go anywhere I choose by the shortest route that the twisting lines of force and happenstance can conjure up for me.
He walked less carefully and the house still stayed, unfrightened, solid and substantial.
He crossed the grass-grown patio and stood before the door.
Hesitantly, he put out a hand and laid it on the latch. And the latch was there. No phantom thing, but substantial metal.
Slowly he lifted it and the door swung in and he stepped across the threshold.
After five thousand years, Jenkins had come home … back to Webster House.
So there was a man named Joe. Not a webster, but a man. For a webster was a man. And the Dogs had not been first.
Homer lay before the fire, a limp pile of fur and bone and muscle, with his paws stretched out in front of him and his head resting on his paws.
Through half-closed eyes he saw the fire and shadow, felt the heat of the blazing logs reach out and fluff his fur.
But inside his brain he saw the sand and the squatting robot and the hills with the years upon them.
Andrew had squatted in the sand and talked, with the autumn sun shining on his shoulders … had talked of men and dogs and ants. Of a thing that had happened when Nathaniel was alive, and that was a time long gone, for Nathaniel was the first Dog.
There had been a man named Joe … a mutant-man, a more-than-man … who had wondered about ants twelve thousand years ago. Wondered why they had progressed so far and then no farther, why they had reached the dead end of destiny.
Hunger, perhaps, Joe had reasoned … the ever-pressing need to garner food so that they might live. Hibernation, perhaps, the stagnation of the winter sleep, the broken memory chain, the starting over once again, each year a genesis for ants.
So, Andrew said, his bald pate gleaming in the sun, Joe had picked one hill, had set himself up as a god to change the destiny of ants. He had fed them, so that they need not strive with hunger. He had enclosed their hill in a dome of glassite and had heated it so they need not hibernate.
And the thing had worked. The ants advanced. They fashioned carts and they smelted ore. This much one could know, for the carts were on the surface and acrid smelting smoke came from the chimneys that thrust up from the hill. What other things they did, what other things they learned, deep down in their tunnels, there was no way of knowing.
Joe was crazy, Andrew said. Crazy … and yet, maybe not so crazy either.
For one day he broke the dome of glassite and tore the hill asunder with his foot, then turned and walked away, not caring any more what happened to the ants.
But the ants had cared.
The hand that broke the dome, the foot that ripped the hill had put the ants on the road to greatness. It had made them fight … fight to keep the things they had, fight to keep the bottleneck of destiny from closing once again.
A kick in the pants, said Andrew. A kick in the pants for ants. A kick in the right direction.
Twelve thousand years ago a broken, trampled hill. Today a mighty building that grew with each passing year. A building that had covered a township in one short century, that would cover a hundred townships in the next. A building that would push out and take the land. Land that belonged, not to ants, but animals.
A building … and that was not quite right, although it had been called the Building from the very start. For a building was a shelter, a place to hide from storm and cold. The ants would have no need of that, for they had their tunnels and their hills.
Why would an ant build a place that sprawled across a township in a hundred years and yet that kept on growing? What possible use could an ant have for a place like that?
Homer nuzzled his chin deep into his paws, growled inside his throat.
There was no way of knowing. For first you had to know how an ant would think. You would have to know her ambition and her goal. You would have to probe her knowledge.