For Gordy, there had been a buried hope that a separate race would make a whipping-boy for the passions of humanity. And that, if there were struggle, it would not be between man and man, but between the humans … and the ants.
There had been this buried hope, but the hope was denied. For the ants simply had not allowed man to rise.
The ants put up their camera-like machine, and Gordy looked up in expectation. Half a dozen of them left, and two stayed on. One was the smallish creature with a bangle on the foreleg which seemed to be his personal jailer; the other a stranger to Gordy, as far as he could tell.
The two ants stood motionless for a period of time that Gordy found tedious. He changed his position, and lay on the floor, and thought of sleeping. But sleep would not come. There was no evading the knowledge that he had wiped out his own race—annihilated them by preventing them from birth, forty million years before his own time. He was like no other murderer since Cain, Gordy thought, and wondered that he felt no 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 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 creatines 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 fem 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 fem trees made his heart leap. Burnished metal here could mean but one thing—the machine!
Around a clump of fem 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.
To See Another Mountain
When I wrote “To See Another Mountain,” I had just got a new record player and some new records, including my first LP of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. (Actually his second, though only a few of us true-blue aficionados ever listen to his rather immature first.) My whole memory of writing the story is permeated with that lovely violin. That particular concerto happens to be my favorite, probably because one of the first real live concerts I ever attended featured it, played by Fritz Kreisler, fresh out of the hospital after being almost killed in a car accident and making his comeback. What an evening that was, with old Fritz staring out over packed Carnegie Hall and sawing away like a Vienna Woods carpenter, with a half smile on his face and the most beautiful sounds I had ever heard washing over us … So I had the concerto, I think it was Oistrakh’s version, on the record player, and every time I came to a pause in the story I would get up and start it over again. I have always thought of it as the Mendelssohn story; and what astonishes me, reading it over now, is how little the concerto has to do with the story.
Trucks were coming up the side of the mountain again. The electric motors were quiet enough, but these were heavy-duty trucks and the reduction gears could be heard a mile off. A mile by air; that was 18 miles by the blacktop road that snaked up the side of the mountain, all hairpin curves with banks that fell away to sheer cliffs.
The old man didn’t mind the noise. The trucks woke him up when he was dozing, as he so often was these days.
“You didn’t drink your orange juice, Doctor.”
The old man wheeled himself around in his chair. He liked the nurse. There were three who took care of him, on shifts, but Maureen Wrather was his personal favorite. She always seemed to be around when he needed her. He protested: “I drank most of it.” The nurse waited. “All right.” He drank it, noting that the flavor had changed again. What was it this time? Stimulants, tranquilizers, sedatives, euphoriants. They played him up and down like a yo-yo. “Do I get coffee this morning, Maureen?”
“Cocoa.” She put the mug and a plate with two arrowroot cookies down on the table, avoiding the central space where he laid out his endless hands of solitaire; that was one of the things the old man liked about her. “I have to get you dressed in half an hour,” she announced, “because you’ve got company coming.”
“Company? Who would be coming to see me?” But he could see from the look in her light, cheerful eyes, even before she spoke, that it was a surprise. Well, thought the old man with dutiful pleasure, that was progress; only a few weeks ago they wouldn’t have permitted him any surprises at all. Weeks? He frowned. Maybe months. All the days were like all the other days. He could count one, yesterday; two, the day before; three, last week—he coul
d count a few simple intervals with confidence, but the ancient era of a month ago was a wash of gray confusion. He sighed. That was the price you paid for being crazy, he thought with amusement. They made it that way on purpose, to help him “get well.” But it had all been gray and bland enough anyhow. Back very far ago there had been a time of terror, but then it was bland for a long, long time.
“Drink your cocoa, young fellow,” the nurse winked, cheer-fully flirting. “Do you want any music?”
That was a good game. “I want a lot of music,” he said immediately. “Stravinsky—that Sac thing, I think. And Al-ban Berg. And—I know. Do you have that old one, ‘The Three Itta Fishes?’” He had been very pleased with the completeness of the tape library in the house on the Hill, until he found out that there was something in that orange juice too. Every request of his was carefully noted and analyzed. Like the tiny microphones taped to throat and heart at night, his tastes in music were data in building up a picture of his condition. Well, that took some of the joy out of it, so the old man had added some other joy of his own.
The nurse turned solemnly to the tape player. There was a pause, a faint marking beep and then the quick running opening bars of the wonderful Mendelssohn concerto, which he had always loved. He looked at the nurse. “You shouldn’t tease us, Doctor,” she said lightly as she left.
Dr. Noah Sidorenko had changed the world. His Hypothesis of Congruent Values, later expanded to his Theory of General Congruences, was the basis for a technology fully as complex and even more important than the nucleonics that had come from Einstein’s energy-mass equation. This morning the brain that had enunciated the principle of congruence was occupied in a harder problem: What were the noises from the courtyard?
He was going to have his picture taken, he guessed, taking his evidence from the white soft shirt the nurse had laid out for him, the gray jacket and, above all, from the tie. He almost never wore a tie. (The nurse seldom gave him one. He didn’t like to speculate about the reasons for this.) While he was dressing, the trucks ground into the courtyard and stopped, and men’s voices came clearly.
‘1 don’t know who they are,” he said aloud, abandoning the attempt to figure it out.
“They’re the television crew,” said the nurse from the next room. “Hush. Don’t spoil your surprise.”
He dressed quickly then, with excitement; why, it was a big surprise. There had never been a television crew on the mountain before. When he came out of the dressing room the nurse frowned and reached for his tie. “Sloppy! Why can’t you large-domes leam how to do a simple knot?” She was a very sweet girl, the old man thought, lifting his chin to help. She could have been his daughter-—even his granddaughter. She was hardly 25; yes, that would have been about right. His granddaughter would have been about that now—
The old man frowned and turned his head away. That was very wrong. He didn’t have a grandchild. He had had one son, no more, and the boy had died, so they had told the old man, in the implosion of the Haaroldsen Free Trawl in the Mindanao Deep. The boy had been 19 years old, and certainly without children; and there had been something about his death, something that the old man didn’t like to remember. He squinted. Worse than that, he thought, something he couldn’t remember any more.
The nurse said: “Doctor, this is for you. It isn’t much, but Happy Birthday.”
She took a small pink-ribboned box out of the pocket of her uniform and handed it to him. He was touched. He saw his fingers trembling as he unwrapped the litde package. That distracted him for a moment but then he dismissed it. It was honest emotion, that was all—well, and age too, of course. He was 95. But it wasn’t the worrying intention tremor that had disfigured the few episodes he could remember clearly, in his first days here on the Hill. It was only gratitude and sentiment.
And that was what the box held for him, sentiment. “Thank you, Maureen. You’re good to an old man.” His eyes stung. It was only a little plastic picture-globe, with Maureen’s young face captured smiling inside it, but it was for him.
She patted his shoulder and said firmly: “You’re a good man. And a beautiful one, too, so come on and let’s show you off to your company.”
She helped him into the wheelchair. It had its motors, but he liked to have her push him and she humored him. They went out the door, down the long sunlit corridors that divided the guest rooms in the front of the building from the broad high terrace behind. Sam Krabbe, Ernest Atkinson, and a couple of the others from the Group came to the doors of their rooms to nod, and to wish the old man a happy birthday. Sidorenko nodded back, tired and pleased. He listened critically to the thumping of his heart—excitement was a risk, he knew—and then grinned. He was getting as bad as the doctors.
Maureen wheeled the old man onto the little open elevator platform. They dropped, quickly and smoothly on magnetic cushions, to the lower floor. The old man leaned far over the side of his chair, studying what he could see of the elevator, because he had a direct and personal interest in it. Somebody had told him that the application of magnetic fields to nonferrous substances was a trick that had been learned from his General Congruences. Well, there was this much to it: Congruence showed that all fields were related and interchangeable, and there was, of course, no reason why what was possible should not be made what is so. But the old man laughed silently inside himself. He was thinking of Albert Einstein confronted with a photo of Enola Gay. Or himself trying to build the communications equipment that Congruence had made possible.
The nurse wheeled him out into the garden.
And there before him was the explanation of the morning’s trucks.
A whole mobile television unit had trundled up those terrible roads. And a fleet of cars and, yes, that other noise was explained, too; there was a helicopter perched on the tennis court, its vanes twisting like blown leaves in the breeze that came up the mountain. The helicopter had a definite meaning, the old man knew. Someone very important must have come up in it. The air space over the institute was closed off, by government order.
And reasoning the thing through, there was a logical conclusion; government orders can be set aside only by government executives, and—yes. There was the answer.
“Are you sure you’re warm enough?” the nurse whispered. But Sidorenko hardly heard. He recognized the stocky blue-eyed man who stood chatting with one of the television crew. Sidorenko’s contacts with the world around him were censored and small, but everyone would recognize that man. His name was Shawn O’Connor; he was the President of the United States.
The President was shaking his hand.
“Dear man,” said President O’Connor warmly, “I can’t tell you how great a pleasure this is for me. Oh, no. You wouldn’t remember me. But I sat in on two of your Roose lectures. Ninety-eight, it must have been. And after the second I went up and got your autograph.”
The old man shook hands and let go. 1998? Good lord, that was close to 50 years ago. True, he thought, cudgeling his memory, not very many persons had ever asked for the autograph of a mathematical physicist, but that was an endless time past. He had no recollection whatever of the event. Still, he remembered the lectures well enough. “Oh, of course,” he said. “In Leeds Hall. Well, Mr. President, I’m not certain but—”
“Dear man,” the President said cheerfully, “don’t pretend. Whatever later honors I have attained, as an engineering sophomore I was an utterly forgettable boy. You must have met a thousand like me. But,” he said, standing straighter, “you, Dr. Sidorenko, are another matter entirely. Oh, yes. You are probably the greatest man our country has produced in this century, and it is only the smallest measure of the esteem in which we hold you that I have come here today. However,” he added briskly, “we don’t want to spoil things for the cameramen, who will undoubtedly want to get all this on tape. So come over here, like a good fellow.”
The old man blinked and allowed the cameramen to bully the President and himself into the best camera angles. One of them wa
s whistling through his teeth, one was flirting with the nurse, but they were very efficient. The old man was trembling. All right, I’m 95, I’m entitled to a little senility, he thought; but was it that? Something was worrying him, nagging at his mind.
“Go ahead, Mr. President,” called the director at last, and tailored men a blue and silver ribbon.
The camera purred faintly, adjusting itself to light and distance, and the President began to speak. “Dr. Sidorenko, Shawn O’Connor took from the hand of one of his alert, well-today’s investiture is one of the most joyous occasions that has been my fortune—” Talk, talk, thought the old man, trying to listen, to identify the tune the cameraman had been whistling and to track down the thing that was bothering him all at once. He caught the President’s merry blue eyes, now shadowed slightly as they looked at him, and realized he was trembling visibly.
Well, he couldn’t help it, he thought resentfully. The body was shaking; the conscious mind had no control over it. He was ashamed and embarrassed, but even shame was a luxury he could only doubtfully afford. Something worse was very close and threatening to drown out mere shame, a touch of the crawling fear he had hoped never to feel again and had prayed not even to remember. He assumed a stiff smile.
“—of America’s great men, who have received the honors due them. For this reason the Congress, by unanimous resolution of both Houses, has authorized me—”
The old man, chilled and shaking, remembered the name of the tune at last.
The hear went over the mountain, The bear went over the mountain. The bear went over the mountain—• And what do you think he saw?
It worried him, though he could not say why.
“—not only your scientific achievements which are honored, Dr. Sidorenko, great though these are. The truths you have discovered have brought us close to the very heart of the universe. The great inventions of our day rest in large part on the brilliant insight you have given our scientific workers. But more than that—”
In the Problem Pit Page 9