A man who came and fixed things and didn’t wait for thanks. That was what had happened with the gun. That was what had been happening for years to the Baxters’ haywire farm machinery. A crazy feller by the name of Joe, who didn’t age and had a handy bent at tinkering.
A thought came into Grant’s head; he shoved it back, repressed it. There was no need of arousing hope. Snoop around some, ask guarded questions, keep your eyes open, Grant. Don’t make your questions too pointed or they’ll shut up like a clam.
Funny folk, these ridge runners. People who had no part of progress, who wanted no part of it. People who had turned their backs upon civilization, returning to the unhampered life of soil and forest, sun and rain.
Plenty of room for them here on Earth, lots of room for everyone, for Earth’s population had dwindled in the last two hundred years, drained by the pioneers who flocked out to settle other planets, to shape the other worlds of the system to the economy of mankind.
Plenty of room and soil and game.
Maybe it was the best way after all. Grant remembered he had often thought that in the months he had tramped these hills. At times like this, with the comfort of the handmade quilt, the rough efficiency of the cornshuck mattress, the whisper of the wind along the shingled roof. Times like when he sat on the top rail of the fence and looked at the groups of golden pumpkins loafing in the sun.
A rustle came to him across the dark, the rustle of the cornshuck mattress where the two boys slept. Then the pad of bare feet coming softly across the boards.
«You asleep, mister?» came the whisper.
«Nope. Want to crawl in with me?»
The youngster ducked under the cover, put cold feet against Grant’s stomach.
«Grandpappy tell you about Joe?»
Grant nodded in the dark. «Said he hadn’t been around, lately.»
«Tell you about the ants?»
«Sure did. What do you know about the ants?»
«Me and Bill found them just a little while ago, keeping it a secret. We ain’t told anyone but you. But we gotta tell you, I guess. You’re from the gov’ment.»
«There really was a glasshouse over the hill?»
«Yes, and … and—» the boy’s voice gasped with excitement, «and that ain’t all. Them ants had carts and there was chimneys coming out of the hill and smoke comin’ from the chimneys. And … and—»
«Yes, what else?»
«We didn’t wait to see anything else. Bill and me got scared. We ran.»
The boy snuggled deeper into the cornshucks. «Gee, ever hear of anything like it? Ants pulling carts!»
The ants were pulling carts. And there were chimneys sticking from the hill, chimneys that belched tiny, acrid puffs of smoke that told of smelting ores.
Head throbbing with excitement, Grant squatted beside the nest, staring at the carts that trundled along the roads leading off into the grass-roots land.
Empty carts going out, loaded carts coming back—loaded with seeds and here and there dismembered insect bodies. Tiny carts, moving rapidly, bouncing and jouncing behind the harnessed ants!
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 toward the river bluffs, studded with boulders, alternating with tiny patches of meadow and clumps of mighty oaks. A hushed place that one could believe had never heard a voice except the talk of wind in treetops and the tiny voices of the wild things that followed secret paths.
A place where ants might live undisturbed by plow 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 had 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 on 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 toward 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 the hill. «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.»