Jenkins walked across the meadow in the autumn sunshine, being very careful where he placed his feet for fear of harming mice. Except for the mice, he thought, he was alone, and he might almost as well have been alone, for the mice were little help. The Websters were gone and the Dogs and other animals. The robots gone as well, some of them long since having disappeared into the Ants’ building to help the Ants carry out their project, the others blasting for the stars. By this time, Jenkins thought, they should have gotten where they were headed for. They all had been long gone, and now he wondered, for the first time in many ages, how long it might have been. He found he did not know and now would never know, for there had been that far-past moment when he had wiped utterly from his mind any sense of time. Deliberately he had decided that he no longer would take account of time, for as the world then stood, time was meaningless. Only later had he understood that what he’d really sought had been forgetfulness.
But he had been wrong. It had not brought forgetfulness; he still remembered, but in scrambled and haphazard sequences.
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 stair? 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 criss-crossed 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.