The tone was so insistent that, this time, they obeyed without question. As Roy, who was the last to climb, swung himself up the branches, he heard the approach of a multitudinous scuttering. Looking down, he could see the flashing surfaces of a dozen or more passing ant-machines.
'Close call,' said a voice above him.
'Certainly was—and it'd have been a damn sight closer if you hadn't been about,' Roy answered softly.
'It's all right; you needn't whisper. Those tin things can't hear. I've tried 'em. What's more, they're too dumb to look for anything up above 'em. You're safe here.'
Roy leaned back and looked up at the speaker on his higher branch. He was a man of knotty, compact build, clad in a torn shirt and ill-used khaki trousers. The greater part of his face was hidden beneath an unruly growth of black beard and whiskers, but his mouth smiled, and there was a zestful twinkle in his eyes. Roy climbed higher and stretched out his hand. It was taken in a hardened, calloused grip.
'You can't guess how glad I am to see you folks, whoever you are. I reckoned I'd got the world to myself, 'cept for them crawlin' tin cans down there. I'm Jim Hollis. About four days ago, I was somewhere near Indianapolis—the Lord knows where I am now!'
Roy introduced himself. He added; 'Do you know of any safe place for us? We're mostly about played out.'
Jim Hollis scratched his chin reflectively through his matted beard. He cast a glance towards the Sun, now well in the west.
'Can you make two miles—maybe, two and a half?' he inquired.
'If it's worth while, I guess we could manage that.'
'It's worth while, all right. There's some caves I found in a cliff over there.' He jerked his head in an easterly direction. 'I'd be there now. myself, but I couldn't make the entrance on my own. Way up above my head.'
'It can be defended?' asked Del, from a branch near-by.
The man looked curiously at the dwarf. 'Sure,' he agreed, 'but it don't need it. If I couldn't make the grade, I'm damned if one of them tin things could. If we're goin', we'd better move right now. It'll be sunset in a couple of hours.'
He swung himself down the branches and dropped to the ground. The rest of them followed his lead. The dwarfs' true proportions were revealed when they had descended, and at sight of them and the accompanying Numen, the man's eyes widened with amazement.
'Say, what the―?' he began.
Roy tactfully interposed. 'Lead on,' he said. 'I'll tell you as we go.'
'You'll have to. I'm all dazed up. It's all happened so suddenlike. I was just hiking along, hoping to jump a truck-ride to Indianapolis, when a guy comes out from a shack by the roadside and says he'll give me five bucks if I'll lend him a hand. I'd clean forgot what five bucks looks like, so I said I would. He'd got a piece of machinery he couldn't move by himself, and he wanted it brought out of the shack into the yard. Rummy lookin' sort of cage, with a sling-seat in it. We got it out easy enough between us, and then he went back to find the five bucks, so I sat down in the sling-seat. There was a lot of little switches and thingummies in front of it, so I pressed one, just interested like. Next thing I knew, me and the machine was crashin' down through a lot of branches like these.'
He looked disparagingly at the growths about him. 'And they ain't even ordinary trees. Nothin's ordinary around these parts—what's more, I ain't got my five bucks.'
Roy attempted to explain the situation, and to tell how the rest of them had similarly come to grief. Jim Hollis grunted doubtfully.
'Sounds crazy to me,' he observed, 'but then, it's no crazier than having them tin things runnin' about the place. Ants inside of 'em, you say?'
'Yes, ants.'
Jim sniffed. He was still a trifle uncertain whether this might not be some deep scheme to pull his leg.
'And what about the big red things that walk on two legs? What's in them—black beetles?'
Roy had forgotten the red machines. He smiled at Jim's suggestion, and admitted that none of the party had yet had an opportunity of investigating these inhabitants of this strangely transformed world.
Jim's estimate of two miles was modest by half, but they came at length, and without hesitation, to the edge of the forest. Across a hundred yards of turf rose a cliff-face, pitted in many places with dark holes.
'How's that?' asked Jim, triumphantly pointing to the largest. It measured some ten feet in diameter at the entrance.
'But how do we get there?' Julian objected, looking at the twenty-five feet of sheer cliff which must be scaled.
'Easy enough to reach it by standing on one another's shoulders.'
'I have a better idea than that,' said Del. He produced a ray tube and, with a series of heat-jets, drilled a zig-zag line of holes up the rock face.
'Gee! That's a dandy flashlight you've got,' Jim murmured admiringly.
Roy ascended the holds, after a short interval for cooling. As a precaution, he took with him a heat-ray set ready at low-power. The first glance showed him that the cave was both empty and dry. It broadened out to about fifteen feet, a yard or two inside the entrance, and ran back nearly thirty feet into the cliff. Luck had favoured them with an ideally safe refuge. He stood up at the mouth and looked out towards the setting Sun.
'It's okay,' he called to the group of upturned faces. 'Come on, all of you! Back to the Stone Age!'
'The problems of food and water have been easily settled,' said Del, addressing the group on the following day. 'It is indeed lucky for us that fruit grows in such profusion, but though this will keep us alive, it will not assist us to solve the problem of our return. For that, one thing is essential—we must have metal.'
Roy looked up from his occupation of plaiting creeper strands into a rope.
'I was wondering what you intended to do about that,' he remarked.
'What's the metal for?' asked Jim.
'We must have a framework for the machine which I propose to build—and it must be a metal framework. You want to get back, don't you?'
'Sure I do. That guy still owes me five bucks.'
'What kind of metal?' Roy inquired.
Del shrugged his shoulders. 'A steel containing chromium and tungsten in small quantities would be best; failing that, some other hard metal could be made to serve. I also want some copper, or other good conductors. Very luckily, most of our salvaged parts have withstood the journey.' Turning to Jim, he added: 'Is your machine still in the branches where it fell?'
'No; the tin things found it and carried it off. I watched them from a tree.'
Reflectively, Del looked out of the cave towards the giant ant-hill towering over the trees in the distance. Jim's arrival accounted for one of the extra time-travellers they had seen there. He wondered about the others ... Jim's voice broke in on the unprofitable speculation.
'Maybe, if we scouted round a bit more, we might find a town or something. Anyway, there ought to be a road leading to a town—and where there's a town, there's sure to be metal.'
Del shook his head gently. 'You don't realise. There are no towns.'
'No towns?'
'Neither towns, nor men.'
'You're foolin' me! They can't all be dead.'
'They must be, or the insects would not be ruling.'
'But—but do you mean the ants have killed all the men?'
'It seems unlikely. Probably men just stopped.'
'I don't get you.'
'Men did not kill off the great reptiles who ruled the world before them—the reptiles just stopped. It seems to me that man, too, has "had his little day and ceased to be." '
'But what's the good of his ever havin' lived, if it all finishes this way?'
'What is the use of life? Perhaps man came to a glorious finish, fulfilled his destiny and vanished from the Earth—he had to leave the Earth sooner or later. At least, he has not been compelled to linger on a globe which is drifting into senile decay.'