The Petrified Ants

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Gloomily, Peter followed his brother out into the thunderstorm. The moment they were outside, Josef seized him by the arm and steered him into the slim shelter of the eaves. “Peter, my boy, Peter—when are you going to grow up?” He sighed heavily, implored with upturned palms. “When? That man is from the police.” He ran his stubby fingers over the polished surface where hair had once been.

  “Well, it is a pigpen,” said Peter stubbornly.

  Josef threw up his hands with exasperation. “Of course it is. But you don’t have to tell the police you think so.” He laid his hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Since your reprimand, anything you say can get you into terrible trouble. It can get us both into terrible trouble.” He shuddered. “Terrible.”

  Lightning blazed across the countryside. In the dazzling instant, Peter saw that the slopes still seethed with the digging horde. “Perhaps I should give up speaking altogether, Josef.”

  “I ask only that you think out what you say. For your own good, Peter. Please, just stop and think.”

  “Everything you’ve called me down for saying has been the truth. The paper I had to apologize for was the truth.” Peter waited for a rolling barrage of thunder to subside. “I mustn’t speak the truth?”

  Josef peered apprehensively around the corner, squinted into the darkness beneath the eaves. “You mustn’t speak certain kinds of truth,” he whispered, “not if you want to go on living.” He dug his hands deep in his pockets, hunched his shoulders. “Give in a little, Peter. Learn to overlook certain things. It’s the only way.”

  Together, without exchanging another word, the brothers returned to the glare and suffocation of the barracks, their feet making sucking noises in their drenched shoes and socks.

  “Too bad all our things are locked up until morning, Peter,” said Josef loudly.

  Peter hung his coat on a nail to dry, dropped heavily on his hard bunk, and pulled his shoes off. His movements were clumsy, his nerves dulled by a vast aching sensation of pity, of loss. Just as the lightning had revealed for a split second the gray men and gouged mountainsides—so had this talk suddenly revealed in a merciless flash the naked, frightened soul of his brother. Now Peter saw Josef as a frail figure in a whirlpool, clinging desperately to a raft of compromises. Peter looked down at his unsteady hands. “It’s the only way,” Josef had said, and Josef was right.

  Josef pulled a thin blanket over his head to screen out the light. Peter tried to lose himself in contemplation of the fossil ant again. Involuntarily, his powerful fingers clamped down on the white chip. The chip and priceless ant snapped in two. Ruefully, Peter examined the faces of the break, hoping to glue them together again. On one of the faces he saw a tiny gray spot, possibly a mineral deposit. Idly, he focused his magnifying glass on it.

  “Josef!”

  Sleepily, Josef pushed the blanket away from his face. “Yes, Peter?”

  “Josef, look.”

  Josef stared through the lens for fully a minute without speaking. When he spoke, his tone was high, uneven. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry or wind my watch.”

  “It looks like what I think it looks like?”

  Josef nodded. “A book, Peter—a book.”

  III

  Josef and Peter yawned again and again, and shivered in the cold twilight of the mountain dawn. Neither had slept, but their bloodshot eyes were quick and bright-looking, impatient, excited. Borgorov teetered back and forth on his thick boot soles, berating a soldier who was fumbling with the lock on a long toolshed.

  “Did you sleep well in your quarters?” Borgorov asked Josef solicitously.

  “Perfectly. It was like sleeping on a cloud,” said Josef.

  “I slept like a rock,” said Peter brightly.

  “Oh?” said Borgorov quizzically. “Then you don’t think it was a pigpen after all, eh?” He didn’t smile when he said it.

  The door swung open, and two nondescript German laborers began dragging boxes of broken limestone from the shed. Each box, Peter saw, was marked with a number, and the laborers arranged them in order along a line Borgorov scratched in the dirt with his iron-shod heel.

  “There,” said Borgorov. “That’s the lot.” He pointed with a blunt finger. “One, two, and three. Number one is from the deepest layer—just inside the limestone—and the rest were above it in the order of their numbers.” He dusted his hands and sighed with satisfaction, as though he himself had moved the boxes. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll leave you to work.” He snapped his fingers, and the soldier marched the two Germans down the mountainside. Borgorov followed, hopping twice to get in step.

  Feverishly, Peter and Josef dug into box number one, the one containing the oldest fossils, piling rock fragments on the ground. Each built a white cairn, sat beside it, tailor-fashion, and happily began to sort. The dismal talk of the night before, Peter’s fall from political grace, the damp cold, the breakfast of tepid barley mush and cold tea—all were forgotten. For the moment, their consciousnesses were reduced to the lowest common denominator of scientists everywhere—overwhelming curiosity, blind and deaf to everything but the facts that could satisfy it.

  Some sort of catastrophe had apparently caught the big, pincerless ants in their life routine, leaving them to be locked in rock just as they were until Borgorov’s diggers broke into their tomb millions of years later. Josef and Peter now stared incredulously at evidence that ants had once lived as individuals—individuals with a culture to rival that of the cocky new masters of Earth, men.

  “Any luck?” asked Peter.

  “I’ve found several more of our handsome, big ants,” replied Josef. “They don’t seem to be very sociable. They’re always by themselves. The largest group is three. Have you broken any rocks open?”

  “No, I’ve just been examining the surfaces.” Peter rolled over a rock the size of a good watermelon, and scanned its underside with his magnifying glass. “Well, wait, here’s something, maybe.” He ran his finger over a dome-shaped projection of a hue slightly different than that of the stone. He tapped around it gently with a hammer, painstakingly jarring chips loose. The whole dome emerged at last, bigger than his fist, free and clean—windows, doors, chimney, and all. “Josef,” said Peter. His voice cracked several times before he could finish the sentence. “Josef—they lived in houses.” He stood, with the rock cradled in his arms, an unconscious act of reverence.

  Josef now peered over Peter’s shoulder, breathing down his neck. “A lovely house.”

  “Better than ours,” said Peter.

  “Peter!” warned Josef. He looked around apprehensively.

  The hideous present burst upon Peter again. His arms went limp with renewed anxiety and disgust. The rock crashed down on the others. The dome-shaped house, its interior solid with limestone deposits, shattered into a dozen wedges.

  Again the brothers’ irresistible curiosities took command. They sank to their knees to pick over the fragments. The more durable contents of the house had been locked in rock for eons, only now to meet air and sunlight. The perishable furnishings had left their impressions.

  “Books—dozens of them,” said Peter, turning a fragment this way and that to count the now-familiar rectangular specks.

  “And here’s a painting. I swear it is!” cried Josef.

  “They’d discovered the wheel! Look at this wagon, Josef!” A fit of triumphant laughing burst from Peter. “Josef,” he gasped, “do you realize that we have made the most sensational discovery in history? Ants once had a culture as rich and brilliant as ours. Music! Painting! Literature! Think of it!”

  “And lived in houses—aboveground, with plenty of room, and lots of air and sunshine,” said Josef raptly. “And they had fire and cooked. What could this be but a stove?”

  “Millions of years before the first man—before the first gorilla, chimp, or orangutan, or even the first monkey, Josef—the ants had everything, everything.” Peter stared ecstatically into the distance, shrinking in his imagination do
wn to the size of a finger joint and living a full, rich life in a stately pleasure dome all his own.

  It was high noon when Peter and Josef had completed a cursory examination of the rocks in box number one. In all, they found fifty-three of the houses, each different—some large, some small, varying from domes to cubes, each one a work of individuality and imagination. The houses seemed to have been spaced far apart, and rarely were they occupied by more than a male and a female and young.

  Josef grinned foolishly, incredulously. “Peter, are we drunk or crazy?” He sat in silence, smoking a cigarette and periodically shaking his head. “Do you realize it’s lunchtime? It seems as though we’ve been here about ten minutes. Hungry?”

  Peter shook his head impatiently, and began digging through the second box—fossils from the next layer up, eager to solve the puzzle of how the magnificent ant civilization had declined to the dismal, instinctive ant way of life of the present.

  “Here’s a piece of luck, Josef—ten ants so close together I can cover them with my thumb.” Peter picked up rock after rock, and, wherever he found one ant, he found at least a half dozen close by. “They’re starting to get gregarious.”

  “Any physical changes?”

  Peter frowned through his magnifying glass. “Same species, all right. No, now, wait—there is a difference, the pincers are more developed, considerably more developed. They’re starting to look like modern workers and soldiers.” He handed a rock to Josef.

  “Mmmm, no books here,” said Josef. “You find any?”

  Peter shook his head, and found that he was deeply distressed by the lack of books, searching for them passionately. “They’ve still got houses, but now they’re jammed with people.” He cleared his throat. “I mean ants.” Suddenly a cry of joy escaped him. “Josef! Here’s one without the big pincers, just like the ones in the lower level!” He turned the specimen this way and that in the sunlight. “By himself, Josef. In his house, with his family and books and everything! Some of the ants are differentiating into workers and soldiers—some aren’t!”

  Josef had been reexamining some of the gatherings of the ants with pincers. “The gregarious ones may not have been interested in books,” he announced. “But everywhere that you find them, you find pictures.” He frowned perplexedly. “There’s a bizarre twist, Peter; the picture lovers evolving away from the book lovers.”

  “The crowd lovers away from the privacy lovers,” said Peter thoughtfully. “Those with big pincers away from those without.” To rest his eyes, he let his gaze wander to the toolshed and a weathered poster from which the eyes of Stalin twinkled. Again he let his gaze roam, this time into the distance—to the teeming mouth of the nearest mine shaft, where a portrait of Stalin beamed paternally on all as they shambled in and out; to a cluster of tar-paper barracks below, where a portrait of Stalin stared shrewdly, protected from the weather by glass, at the abominable sanitary facilities.

  “Josef,” Peter began uncertainly, “I’ll bet tomorrow’s tobacco ration that those works of art the pincered ants like so well are political posters.”

  “If so, our wonderful ants are bound for an even higher civilization,” said Josef enigmatically. He shook rock dust from his clothing. “Shall we see what is in box number three?”

  Peter found himself looking at the third box with fear and loathing. “You look, Josef,” he said at last.

  Josef shrugged. “All right.” He studied the rocks in silence for several minutes. “Well, as you might expect, the pincers are even more pronounced, and—”

  “And the gatherings are bigger and more crowded, and there are no books, and the posters are as numerous as the ants!” Peter blurted suddenly.

  “You’re quite right,” said Josef.

  “And the wonderful ants without pincers are gone, aren’t they, Josef?” said Peter huskily.

  “Calm down,” said Josef. “You’re losing your head over something that happened a thousand thousand years ago—or more.” He tugged thoughtfully at his earlobe. “As a matter of fact, the pincerless ants do seem extinct.” He raised his eyebrows. “As far as I know, it’s without precedent in paleontology. Perhaps those without pincers were susceptible to some sort of disease that those with pincers were immune to. At any rate, they certainly disappeared in a hurry. Natural selection at its ruggedest—survival of the fittest.”

  “Survival of the somethingest,” said Peter balefully.

  “No! Wait, Peter. We’re both wrong. Here is one of the old type ants. And another and another! It looks like they were beginning to congregate, too. They’re all packed together in one house, like matchsticks in a box.”

  Peter took the rock fragment from him, unwilling to believe what Josef said. The rock had been split by Borgorov’s diggers so as to give a clean cross section through the ant-packed house. He chipped away at the rock enclosing the other side of the house. The rock shell fell away. “Oh,” he said softly, “I see.” His chippings had revealed the doorway of the little building, and guarding it were seven ants with pincers like scythes. “A camp,” he said, “a reeducation camp.”

  Josef blanched at the word, as any good Russian might, but regained his composure after several hard swallows. “What is that starlike object over there?” he said, steering away from the unpleasant subject.

  Peter chiseled the chip in which the object was embedded free from the rest of the rock, and held it out for Josef to contemplate. It was a sort of rosette. In the center was a pincerless ant, and the petals looked like warriors and workers with their weapons buried and locked in the flesh of the lone survivor of the ancient race. “There’s your quick evolution, Josef.” He watched his brother’s face intently, yearning for a sign that his brother was sharing his hectic thoughts, his sudden insight into their own lives.

  “A great curiosity,” said Josef evenly.

  Peter looked about himself quickly. Borgorov was struggling up the path from far below. “It’s no curiosity, and you know it, Josef,” said Peter. “What happened to those ants is happening to us.”

  “Hush!” said Josef desperately.

  “We’re the ones without pincers, Josef. We’re done. We aren’t made to work and fight in huge hordes, to live by instinct and nothing more, perpetuating a dark, damp anthill without the wits even to wonder why!”

  They both fell into red-faced silence as Borgorov navigated the last hundred yards. “Come now,” said Borgorov, rounding the corner of the toolshed, “our samples couldn’t have been as disappointing as all that.”

  “It’s just that we’re tired,” said Josef, giving his ingratiating grin. “The fossils are so sensational we’re stunned.”

  Peter gently laid the chip with the murdered ant and its attackers embedded in it on the last pile. “We have the most significant samples from each layer arranged in these piles,” he said, pointing to the row of rock mounds. He was curious to see what Borgorov’s reaction might be. Over Josef’s objections, he explained about two kinds of ants evolving within the species, showed him the houses and books and pictures in the lower levels, the crowded gatherings in the upper ones. Then, without offering the slightest interpretation, he gave Borgorov his magnifying glass, and stepped back.

  Borgorov strolled up and down the row several times, picking up samples and clucking his tongue. “It couldn’t be more graphic, could it?” he said at last.

  Peter and Josef shook their heads.

  “Obviously,” said Borgorov, “what happened was this.” He picked up the chip that showed the bas-relief of the pincerless ant’s death struggle with countless warriors. “There were these lawless ants, such as the one in the center, capitalists who attacked and exploited the workers—ruthlessly killing, as we can see here, scores at a time.” He set down the melancholy exhibit, and picked up the house into which the pincerless ants were crammed. “And here we have a conspiratorial meeting of the lawless ants, plotting against the workers. Fortunately”—and he pointed to the soldier ants outside the door—“their
plot was overheard by vigilant workers.

  “So,” he continued brightly, holding up samples from the next layer, a meeting of the pincered ants and the home of a solitary ant, “the workers held democratic indignation meetings, and drove their oppressors out of their community. The capitalists, overthrown, but with their lives spared by the merciful common people, were soft and spoiled, unable to survive without the masses to slave for them. They could only dillydally with the arts. Hence, put on their own mettle, they soon became extinct.” He folded his arms with an air of finality and satisfaction.

  “But the order was just the reverse,” objected Peter. “The ant civilization was wrecked when some of the ants started growing pincers and going around in mobs. You can’t argue with geology.”

  “Then an inversion has taken place in the limestone layer—some kind of upheaval turned it upside down. Obviously.” Borzorov sounded like sheathed ice. “We have the most conclusive evidence of all—the evidence of logic. The sequence could only have been as I described it. Hence, there was an inversion. Isn’t that so?” he said, looking pointedly at Josef.

  “Exactly, an inversion,” said Josef.

  “Isn’t that so?” Borgorov wheeled to face Peter.

  Peter exhaled explosively, slouched in an attitude of utter resignation. “Obviously, Comrade.” Then he smiled, apologetically. “Obviously, Comrade,” he repeated …

  Epilogue

  “Good Lord, but it’s cold!” said Peter, letting go of his end of the saw and turning his back to the Siberian wind.

  “To work! To work!” shouted a guard, so muffled against the cold as to look like a bundle of laundry with a submachine gun sticking out of it.

  “Oh, it could be worse, much worse,” said Josef, holding the other end of the saw. He rubbed his frosted eyebrows against his sleeve.

  “I’m sorry you’re here, too, Josef,” said Peter sadly. “I’m the one who raised his voice to Borgorov.” He blew on his hands. “I guess that’s why we’re here.”