Grant found old Dave Baxter perched on the top rail of the fence, smoke pouring from the short-stemmed pipe almost hidden in his whiskers.
“Howdy, stranger,” said Dave. “Climb up and squat a while.”
Grant climbed up, stared out over the corn-shocked field, gay with the gold of pumpkins.
“Just walkin’?” asked old Dave. “Or snoopin’?”
“Snooping,” admitted Grant.
Dave took the pipe out of his mouth, spat, put it back in again. The whiskers draped themselves affectionately, and dangerously, about it.
“Diggin’?” asked old Dave.
“Nope,” said Grant.
“Had a feller through here four, five years ago,” said Dave, “that was worse’n a rabbit dog for diggin’. Found a place where there had been an old town and just purely tore up the place. Pestered the life out of me to tell him about the town, but I didn’t rightly remember much. Heard my grandpappy once mention the name of the town, but danged if I ain’t forgot it. This here feller had a slew of old maps that he was all the time wavin’ around and studying, tryin’ to figure out what was what, but I guess he never did know.”
“Hunting for antiques,” said Grant.
“Mebbe,” old Dave told him. “Kept out of his way the best I could. But he wasn’t no worse’n the one that was tryin’ to trace some old road that run through this way once. He had some maps, too. Left figurin’ he’d found it and I didn’t have the heart to tell him what he’d found was a path the cows had made.”
He squinted at Grant cagily.
“You ain’t huntin’ no old roads, be you?”
“Nope,” said Grant. “I’m a census taker.”
“You’re what?”
“Census taker,” explained Grant. “Take down your name and age and where you live.”
“What for?”
“Government wants to know,” said Grant.
“We don’t bother the gov’ment none,” declared old Dave. “What call’s the gov’ment got botherin’ us?”
“Government won’t bother you any,” Grant told him. “Might even take a notion to pay you something some day. Never can tell.”
“In that case,” said old Dave, “it’s different.”
They perched on the fence, staring across the fields. Smoke curled up from a chimney hidden in a sunny hollow, yellow with the flame of birches. A creek meandered placidly across a dun autumn-colored meadow and beyond it climbed the hills, tier on tier of golden maple trees.
Hunched on the rail, Grant felt the heat of the autumn sun soak into his back, smelled the stubbled field.
A good life, he told himself. Good crops, wood to burn, plenty of game to hunt. A happy life.
He glanced at the old man huddled beside him, saw the unworried wrinkles of kindly age that puckered up his face, tried for a moment to envision a life like this—a simple, pastoral life, akin to the historic days of the old American frontier, with all the frontier’s compensations, none of its dangers.
Old Dave took the pipe out of his face, waved it at the field.
“Still lots of work to do,” he announced, “but it ain’t agittin’ done. Them kids ain’t worth the power to blow ’em up. Huntin’ all the time. Fishin’ too. Machinery breakin’ down. Joe ain’t been around for quite a spell. Great hand at machinery, Joe is.”
“Joe your son?”
“No. Crazy feller that lives off in the woods somewhere. Walks in and fixes things up, then walks off and leaves. Scarcely ever talks. Don’t wait for a man to thank him. Just up and leaves. Been doin’ it for years now. Grandpappy told me how he first came when he was a youngster. Still comin’ now.”
Grant gasped. “Wait a second. It can’t be the same man.”
“Now,” said old Dave, “that’s the thing. Won’t believe it, stranger, but he ain’t a mite older now than when I first saw him. Funny sort of cuss. Lots of wild tales about him. Grandpappy always told about how he fooled around with ants.”
“Ants!”
“Sure. Built a house—glasshouse, you know, over an ant hill and heated it, come winter. That’s what grandpappy always said. Claimed he’d seen it. But I don’t believe a word of it. Grandpappy was the biggest liar in seven counties. Admitted it hisself.”
A brass-tongued bell clanged from the sunny hollow where the chimney smoked.
The old man climbed down from the fence, tapped out his pipe, squinting at the sun.
The bell boomed again across the autumn stillness.
“That’s ma,” said old Dave. “Dinner’s on. Squirrel dumplings, more than likely. Good eatin’ as you ever hooked a tooth into. Let’s get a hustle on.”
A crazy fellow who came and fixed things and didn’t wait for thanks. A man who looked the same as he did a hundred years ago. A chap who built a glasshouse over an ant hill and heated it, come winter.
It didn’t make sense and yet old Baxter hadn’t been lying. It wasn’t another one of those tall yams that had sprung up and still ran their course out here in the backwoods, amounting now to something that was very close to folklore.
All of the folklore had a familiar ring, a certain similarity, a definite pattern of underlying wit that tagged it for what it was. And this wasn’t it. There was nothing humorous, even to the backwoods mind, in housing and heating an ant hill. To qualify for humor a tale like that would have to have a snapper, and this tale didn’t have one.
Grant stirred uneasily on the cornshuck mattress, pulling the heavy quilt close around his throat.
Funny, he thought, the places that I sleep in. Tonight a cornshuck mattress, last night an open campfìre, the night before that a soft mattress and clean sheets in the Webster house.
The wind sucked up the hollow and paused on its way to flap a loose shingle on the house, came back to flap it once again. A mouse skittered somewhere in the darkened place. From the bed across the loft came the sound of regular breathing—two of the Baxter younger fry slept there.
A man who came and fixed things and didn’t wait for thanks. That was what happened with the gun. That was what had been happening for years to the Baxter’s 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 on 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 next, 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 along 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 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.”
“So you fed them—”
“And heated the hill,” said Joe, “so they wouldn’t have to hibernate. So they wouldn’t have to start out fresh with the coming of each spring.”
“The carts?”
“I made a couple, left them there. It took ten years, but they finally figured out what they were for.”
Grant nodded at the smokestacks.
“They did that themselves,” Joe told him.
“Anything else?”
Joe lifted his shoulders wearily. “How should I know?”
“But, man, you watched them. Even if you didn’t keep notes, you watched.”
Joe shook his head. “I haven’t laid eyes on them for almost fifteen years. I only came today because I heard you here. These ants, you see, don’t amuse me any more.”
Grant’s mouth opened, then shut tight again. Finally, he said: “So that’s the answer. That’s why you did it. Amusement.”
There was no shame on Joe’s face, no defense, just a pained expression that said he wished they’d forget all about the ants. His mouth said: “Sure. Why else?”
“That gun of mine. I supposed that amused you, too.”
“Not the gun,” said Joe.
Not the gun, Grant’s brain said. Of course, not the gun, you dumbbell, but you yourself. You’re the one that amused him. And you’re amusing him right now.
Fixing up old Dave Baxter’s farm machinery, then walking off without a word, doubtless had been a screaming joke. And probably he’d hugged himself and rocked for days with silent mirth after that time up at the Webster house when he’d pointed out the thing that was wrong with old Thomas Webster’s space drive.
Like a smart-Aleck playing tricks on an awkward puppy.
Joe’s voice broke his thoughts.
“You’re an
enumerator, aren’t you? Why don’t you ask me the questions? Now that you’ve found me you can’t go off and not get it down on paper. My age especially. I’m one hundred sixty-three and I’m scarcely adolescent. Another thousand years at least.”
He hugged his knobby knees against his chest and rocked slowly back and forth. “Another thousand years and if I take good care of myself—”
“But that isn’t all of it,” Grant told him, trying to keep his voice calm. “There is something more. Something that you must do for us.”
“For us?”
“For society,” said Grant. “For the human race.”
“Why?”
Grant stared. “You mean that you don’t care.”
Joe shook his head and in the gesture there was no bravado, no defiance of convention. It was just blunt statement of the fact.
“Money!” suggested Grant
Joe waved his hands at the hills about them, at the spreading river valley. “I have this,” he said. “I have no need of money.”
“Fame, perhaps?”
Joe did not spit, but his face looked like he had.
“The gratitude of the human race?”
“It doesn’t last,” said Joe and the old mockery was in his words, the vast amusement just behind his lips.
“Look, Joe,” said Grant and, hard as he tried to keep it out, there was pleading in his voice, “this thing I have for you to do is important … important to generations yet to come, important to the human race, a milestone in our destiny—”
“And why should I,” asked Joe, “do something for someone who isn’t even born yet? Why should I look beyond the years of my own life? When I die, I die, and all the shouting and the glory, all the banners and the bugles will be nothing to me. I will not know whether I lived a great life or a very poor one.”
“The race,” said Grant.
Joe laughed, a shout of laughter. “Race preservation, race advancement. That’s what you’re getting at. Why should you be concerned with that? Or I?”
The laughter lines smoothed out around his mouth and he shook a finger in mock admonishment. “Race preservation is a myth … a myth that you all have lived by—a sordid thing that has arisen out of your social structure. The race ends every day. When a man dies the race ends for him—so far as he’s concerned there is no longer any race.”
The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume One Page 60