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 reinforce 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?