He and the mice, he thought. And the Ants, of course. But the Ants did not really count, for he had no contact with them. Despite the sharpened senses and the new sensory abilities built into his birthday body (now no longer new) that had been given by the Dogs so long ago, he had never been able to penetrate the walls of the Ants’ great building to find out what might be going on in there. Not that he hadn’t tried.
Walking across the meadow, he remembered the day when the last of the Dogs had left. They had stayed much longer than loyalty and common decency had demanded, and although he had scolded them mildly for it, it still kindled a warm glow within him when he remembered it.
He had been sitting in the sun, on the patio, when they had come trailing up the hill and ranged themselves before him like a gang of naughty boys. “We are leaving, Jenkins,” the foremost one of them had said. “Our world is growing smaller. There is no longer room to run.”
He had nodded at them, for he’d long expected it. He had wondered why it had not happened sooner.
“And you, Jenkins?” asked the foremost Dog.
Jenkins shook his head. “I must stay,” he’d said. “This is my place. I must stay here with the Websters.”
“But there are no Websters here.”
“Yes, there are,” said Jenkins. “Not to you, perhaps. But to me. For me they still live in the very stone of Webster House. They live in the trees and the sweep of hill. This is the roof that sheltered them; this is the land they walked upon. They can never go away.”
He knew how foolish it must sound, but the Dogs did not seem to think that it was foolish. They seemed to understand. It had been many centuries, but they still seemed to understand.
He had said the Websters still were there, and at the time they had been. But he wondered as he walked the meadow if now they still were there. How long had it been since he had heard footsteps going down a stairs? How long since there had been voices in the great, fireplaced living room and, when he’d looked, there’d been no one there?
And now, as Jenkins walked in the autumn sunshine, a great crack suddenly appeared in the outer wall of the Ants’ building, a mile or two away. The crack grew, snaking downward from the top in a jagged line, spreading as it grew, and with smaller cracks moving out from it. Pieces of the material of which the wall was fashioned broke out along the crack and came crashing to the ground, rolling and bouncing in the meadow. Then, all at once, the wall on both sides of the crack seemed to come unstuck and came tumbling down. A cloud of dust rose into the air, and Jenkins stood there looking at the great hole in the wall.
Beyond the hole in the wall, the massive building rose like a circular mountain range, with peaks piercing upward here and there above the plateau of the structure.
The hole stood gaping in the wall and nothing further happened. No ants came pouring out, no robots running frantically. It was as though, Jenkins thought, the Ants did not know, or knowing, care, as if the fact that at last their building had been breached held no significance.
Something had happened, Jenkins told himself with some astonishment. Finally, in this Webster world, an event had come to pass.
He moved forward, heading for the hole in the wall, not moving fast, for there seemed no need to hurry. The dust settled slowly, and now and then additional chunks of the wall broke loose and fell. He came up to the broken place, and, climbing the rubble, walked into the building.
The interior was not as bright as it was outdoors, but considerable light still filtered through what might be thought of as the ceiling of the building. For the building, at least in this portion of it, was not partitioned into floors, but was open to the upper reaches of the structure, a great gulf of space soaring to the topmost towers.
Once inside, Jenkins stopped in amazement, for it seemed at first glance that the building was empty. Then he saw that was not the case, for while the greater part of the building might be empty, the floor of it was most uneven, and the unevenness, he saw, was made up of monstrous ant hills, and on top of each of them stood a strange ornament made of metal that shone in the dim light coming through the ceiling. The hills were crisscrossed here and there by what appeared to be tiny roads, but all of them were out of repair and broken, parts of them wiped out by the miniature landslides that scarred the hills. Here and there, as well, were chimneys, but no smoke poured out of them; some had fallen and others were plainly out of plumb and sagging.
There was no sign of ants.
Small aisles lay between the anthills, and, walking carefully, Jenkins made his way between them, working deeper into the building. All the hills were like the first one—all of them lay dead, with their chimneys sagging and their roads wiped out and no sign of any life.
Now, finally, he made out the ornaments that stood atop each hill, and for perhaps the first time in his life, Jenkins felt laughter shaking him. If he had ever laughed before, he could not remember it, for he had been a serious and a dedicated robot. But now he stood between the dead hills and held his sides, as a laughing man might hold his sides, and let the laughter rumble through him.
For the ornament was a human foot and leg, extending midway from the thigh down through the foot, with the knee bent and the foot extended, as if it were in the process of kicking something violently.
Joe’s foot! The kicking foot of the crazy mutant, Joe!
It had been so long ago that he had forgotten it, and he was a little pleased to find there had been something that he had forgotten, that he was capable of forgetting, for he had thought that he was not.
But he remembered now the almost legendary story from the far beginning, although he knew it was not legendary but had really happened, for there had been a mutant human by the name of Joe. He wondered what had happened to such mutants. Apparently not too much. At one time there had been a few of them, perhaps too few of them, and then there had been none of them, and the world had gone on as if they’d never been.
Well, not exactly as if they’d never been, for there was the Ant world and there was Joe. Joe, so the story ran, had experimented with an ant hill. He had covered it with a dome and had heated it and perhaps done other things to it as well—certain things that no one knew but Joe. He had changed the ants’ environment and in some strange way had implanted in them some obscure spark of greatness, and in time they had developed an intellectual culture, if ants could be said to be capable of intelligence. Then Joe had come along and kicked the hill, shattering the dome, devastating the hill, and had walked away with that strange, high, almost insane laughter that was characteristic of him. He had destroyed the hill and turned his back upon it, not caring any longer. But he had kicked the ants to greatness. Facing adversity, they had not gone back to their old, stupid, antlike ways, but had fought to save what they had gained. As the Ice Age of the Pleistocene had booted the human race to greatness, so had the swinging foot of the human mutant, Joe, set the ants upon their way.
Thinking this, a suddenly sobering thought came to Jenkins. How could the Ants have known? What ant or ants had sensed or seen, so long ago, the kick that had come out of nothingness? Could some ant astronomer, peering through his glass, have seen it all? And that was ridiculous, for there could have been no ant astronomers. But otherwise how could they have tied up the connection between the blurred shape that had loomed, momentarily, so far above them, and the true beginning of the culture they had built?
Jenkins shook his head. Perhaps this was a thing that never would be known. But the ants, somehow, had known, and had built atop each hill the symbol of that mystic shape. A memorial, he wondered, or a religious symbol? Or perhaps something else entirely, carrying some obscure purpose or meaning that could be conceived by nothing but an ant.
He wondered rather idly if the recognition by the ants of the true beginning of their greatness might have anything to do with their not overrunning Webster House, but he did not follow up the thought because he realized it was too nebulous to be worth the time.
He went deeper into the building, making his way along the narrow paths that lay between the hills, and with his mind he searched for any sign of life, but there was none—there was no life at all, not even the feeblest, smallest flicker denoting the existence of those tiny organisms that should be swarming in the soil.
There was a silence and a nothingness that compounded into horror, but he forced himself to continue on his way, thinking that surely he would find, just a little farther on, some evidence of life. He wondered if he should shout in an attempt to attract attention, but reason told him that the ants, even were they there, would not hear a shout, and aside from that, he felt a strange reluctance to make any kind of noise. As if this were a place where one should stay small and furtive.
Everything was dead.
Even the robot that he found.
It was lying in one of the paths, propped up against a hill, and he came upon it as he came around the hill. It dangled and was limp, if it could be said that a robot could be limp, and Jenkins, at the sight of it, stood stricken in the path. There was no doubt that it was dead; he could sense no stir of life within the skull, and in that moment of realization it seemed to him the world stumbled to a halt.
For robots do not die. Wear out, perhaps, or be damaged beyond possible repair, but even then the life would keep ticking in the brain. In all his life he had never heard of a robot dead, and if there had been one, he surely would have heard of it.
Robots did not die, but here one lay dead, and it was not only this one, something seemed to tell him, but all the robots who had served the ants. All the robots and all the ants and still the building stood, an empty symbol of some misplaced ambition, of some cultural miscalculation. Somewhere the ants had gone wrong, and had they gone wrong, he wondered, because Joe had built a dome? Had the dome become a be-all and an end-all? Had it seemed to the ants that their greatness lay in the construction of a dome, that a dome was necessary for them to continue in their greatness?
Jenkins fled. And as he fled, a crack appeared in the ceiling far overhead, and there was a crunching, grating sound as the crack snaked its way along.
He plunged out of the hole in the wall and raced out into the meadow. Behind him he heard the thunder of a part of the roof collapsing. He turned around and watched as that small portion of the building tore itself apart, great shards falling down into all those dead ant hills, toppling the emblems of the kicking human foot that had been planted on their tops.
Jenkins turned away and went slowly across the meadow and up the hill to Webster House. On the patio, he saw that for the moment the collapse of the building had been halted. More of the wall had fallen, and a great hole gaped in the structure held up by the wall.
In this matchless autumn day, he thought, was the beginning of the end. He had been here at the start of it, and he still was here to see the end of it. Once again he wondered how long it might have been and regretted, but only a small regret, that he had not kept track of time.
Men were gone and Dogs were gone, and except for himself, all the robots, too. Now the ants were gone, and the Earth stood lonely except for one hulking robot and some little meadow mice. There might still be fish, he thought, and other creatures of the sea, and he wondered about those creatures of the sea. Intelligence, he thought. But intelligence came hard and it did not last. In another day, he thought, another intelligence might come from the sea, although deep inside himself he knew it was most unlikely.
The ants had shut themselves in, he thought. Their world had been a closed world. Was it because there was no place for them to go that they had failed? Or was it because their world had been a closed one from the start? There had been ants in the world as early as the Jurassic, 180 million years, and probably before that. Millions of years before the forerunners of man had existed, the ants had established a social order. They had advanced only so far; they had established their social order and been content with it—content because it was what they wanted, or because they could go no further? They had achieved security, and in the Jurassic and for many millions of years later, security had been enough. Joe’s dome had served to reenforce that security, and it had then been safe for them to develop further if they held the capacity to develop. It was quite evident, of course, that they had the capability, but, Jenkins told himself, the old idea of security had continued to prevail. They had been unable to rid themselves of it. Perhaps they never even tried to rid themselves of it, had never recognized it as something that should be gotten off their backs. Was it, Jenkins wondered, that old, snug security that had killed them?
With a booming crash that went echoing around the horizon, another section of the roof fell.
What would an ant strive for, Jenkins wondered. A maintenance of security, and what else? Hoarding, perhaps. Grubbing from the earth everything of value and storing it away against another day. That in itself, he realized, would be no more than another facet to the fetish of security. A religion of some sort, perhaps—the symbols of the kicking foot that stood atop the hills could have been religious. And again security. Security for the souls of ants. The conquest of space? And perhaps the ants had conquered space, Jenkins told himself. For a creature the size of an ant the world itself must have appeared to be a quite sufficient galaxy. Conquering one galaxy with no idea that an even greater galaxy lay beyond. And even the conquering of a galaxy might be another sort of security.
It was all wrong, Jenkins realized. He was attributing to ants the human mental process, and there might be more to it than that. There might lie in the minds of ants a certain ferment, a strange direction, an unknown ethical equation which had never been a part, or could never be a part, of the minds of men.
Thinking this, he realized with horror that in building a picture of an ant he’d built the picture of a human.
He found a chair and sat down quietly to gaze across the meadow to the place where the building of the ants still was falling in upon itself.
But Man, Jenkins remembered, had left something behind him. He had left the Dogs and robots. What, if anything, had the ants left? Nothing, certainly, that was apparent, but how was he to know?
A man could not know, Jenkins told himself, and neither could a robot, for a robot was a man, not blood and flesh as was a man, but in every other way. The ants had built their society in the Jurassic or before and had existed within its structure for millions of years, and perhaps that was the reason they had failed—the society of the hill was so firmly embedded in them they could not break away from it.
And I? he asked himself. How about me? I am embedded as deeply in man’s social structure as any ant in hers. For less than a million years, but for a long, long time, he had lived in, not the structure of man’s society, but in the memory of that structure. He had lived in it, he realized, because it had offered him the security of an ancient memory.
He sat quietly, but stricken at the thought—or at least at the fact that he could allow the thought.
“We never know,” he said aloud. “We never know ourselves.”
He leaned far back in the chair and thought how unrobot-like it was to be sitting in a chair. He never used to sit. It was the man in him, he thought. He allowed his head to settle back against the rest and let his optic filters down, shutting out the light. To sleep, he wondered—what would sleep be like? Perhaps the robot he had found beside the hill—but no, that robot had been dead, not sleeping. Everything was wrong, he told himself. Robots neither sleep nor die.
Sounds came to him. The building still was breaking up, and out in the meadow the autumn breeze was rustling the grasses. He strained a little to hear the mice running in their tunnels, but for once the mice were quiet. They were crouching, waiting. He could sense their waiting. They knew somehow, he thought, that there was something wrong.
And another sound, a whisper, a sound he’d never heard before, an entirely alien sound.
He snapped his filters open and sat erect abruptly, and out in front of him he saw t
he ship landing in the meadow.
The mice were running now, frightened, running for their lives, and the ship came to rest like floating thistledown, settling in the grass.
Jenkins leaped to his feet and stabbed his senses out, but his probing stopped at the surface of the ship. He could no more probe beyond it than he could the building of the ants before it came tumbling down.
He stood on the patio, utterly confused by this unexpected thing. And well he might be, he thought, for until this day there had been no unexpected happenings. The days had all run together, the days, the years, the centuries, so like one another there was no telling them apart. Time had flowed like a mighty river, with no sudden spurts. And now, today, the building had come tumbling down and a ship had landed.
A hatch came open in the ship and a ladder was run out. A robot climbed down the ladder and came striding up the meadow toward Webster House. He stopped at the edge of the patio. “Hello, Jenkins,” he said. “I thought we’d find you here.”
“You’re Andrew, aren’t you?”
Andrew chuckled at him. “So you remember me.”
“I remember everything,” said Jenkins. “You were the last to go. You and two others finished up the final ship, and then you left the Earth. I stood and watched you go. What have you found out there?”
“You used to call us wild robots,” Andrew said. “I guess you thought we were. You thought that we were crazy.”
“Unconventional,” said Jenkins.
“What is conventional?” asked Andrew. “Living in a dream? Living for a memory? You must be weary of it.”
“Not weary…” said Jenkins, his voice trailing off. He began again. “Andrew, the ants have failed. They’re dead. Their building’s falling down.”
“So much for Joe,” said Andrew. “So much for Earth. There is nothing left.”
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