Salva Gordy sat against a wall and looked at the ants who were looking at him. If it hadn't been for that which was done to de Terry, he thought, there would really be nothing to complain about.
It was true that the ants had given him none of the comforts that humanity lavishes on even its criminals . . . but they had fed him, and allowed him to sleep—when it suited their convenience, of course—and there were small signs that they were interested in his comfort, in their fashion. When the pulpy mush they first offered him came up 30 minutes later, his multilegged hosts brought him a variety of foods, of which he was able to swallow some fairly palatable fruits. He was housed in a warm room, and, if it had neither chairs nor windows, Gordy thought, that was only because ants had no use for these themselves. And he couldn't ask for them.
That was the big drawback, he thought. That. . . and the memory of John de Terry.
He squirmed on the hard floor until his shoulderblades found a new spot to prop themselves against, and stared again at the committee of ants who had come to see him.
They were working an angular thing that looked like a camera—at least, it had a glittering something that might be a lens. Gordy stared into it sullenly. The sour reek was in his nostrils again . . .
Gordy admitted to himself that things hadn't worked out just as he had planned. Deep under the surface of his mind —just now beginning to come out where he could see it— there had been a furtive hope. He had hoped that the rise of the ants, with the help he had given them, would aid and speed the rise of mankind. For hatred, Gordy knew, started in the recoil from things that were different. A man's first enemy is his family—for he sees them first—but he sides with them against the families across the way. And still his neighbors are allies against the ghettos and Harlems of his town— and his town to him is the heart of the nation—and his nation commands life and death in war.
For Gordy, there had been a buried hope that a separate race would make a whipping-boy for the passions of humanity. And that, if there were struggle, it would not be between man and man, but between the humans . . . and the ants.
There had been this buried hope, but the hope was denied. For the ants simply had not allowed man to rise.
The ants put up their camera-like machine, and Gordy looked up in expectation. Half a dozen of them left, and two stayed on. One was the smallish creature with a bangle on the foreleg which seemed to be his personal jailer; the other a stranger to Gordy, as far as he could tell.
The two ants stood motionless for a period of time that Gordy found tedious. He changed his position, and lay on the floor, and thought of sleeping. But sleep would not come. There was no evading the knowledge that he had wiped out his own race—annihilated them by preventing them from birth, forty million years before his own time. He was like no other murderer since Cain, Gordy thought, and wondered that he felt no blood on his hands.
There was a signal that he could not perceive, and his guardian ant came forward to him, nudged him outward from the wall. He moved as he was directed—out the low exit-hole (he had to navigate it on hands and knees) and down a corridor to the bright day outside.
The light set Gordy blinking. Half blind, he followed the bangled ant' across a square to a conical shed. More ants were waiting there, circled around a litter of metal parts. Gordy recognized them at once. It was his time machine, stripped piece by piece.
After a moment the ant nudged him again, impatiently, and Gordy understood what they wanted. They had taken the machine apart for study, and they wanted it put together again.
Pleased with the prospect of something to do with his fingers and his brain, Gordy grinned and reached for the curious ant-made tools ...
He ate four times, and slept once, never moving from the neighborhood of the cone-shaped shed. And then he was finished.
Gordy stepped back. 'It's all yours," he said proudly. "It'll take you anywhere. A present from humanity to you."
The ants were very silent. Gordy looked at them and saw drone-ants in the group, all still as statues.
"Hey!" he said in startlement, unthinking. And then the needle-jawed ant claw took him from behind.
Gordy had a moment of nausea—and then terror and hatred swept it away.
Heedless of the needles that laced his skin, he struggled and kicked against the creatures that held him. One arm came free, leaving gobbets of flesh behind, and his heavy-shod foot plunged into a pulpy eye. The ant made a whistling, gasping sound and stood erect on four hairy legs.
Gordy felt himself jerked a dozen feet into the air, then flung free in the wild, silent agony of the ant. He crashed into the ground, cowering away from the staggering monster. Sobbing, he pushed himself to his feet; the machine was behind him; he turned and blundered into it a step ahead of the other ants, and spun the wheel.
A hollow insect leg, detached from the ant that had been closest to him, was flopping about on the floor of the machine; it had been that close.
Gordy stopped the machine where it had started, on the same quivering, primordial bog, and lay crouched over the controls for a long time before he moved.
He had made a mistake, he and de Terry; there weren't any doubts left at all. And there was . . . there might be a way to right it.
He looked out at the Coal Measure forest. The fern trees were not the fem trees he had seen before; the machine had been moved in space. But the time, he knew, was identically the same; trust the machine for that. He thought: I gave the world to the ants, right here. I can take it back. I can find the ants I buried and crush them underfoot ... or intercept myself before I bury them . . .
He got out of the machine, suddenly panicky. Urgency squinted his eyes as he peered around him.
Death had been very close in the ant city; the reaction still left Gordy limp. And was he safe here? He remembered the violent animal scream he had heard before, and shuddered at the thought of furnishing a casual meal to some dinosaur . . . while the ant queens lived safely to produce their horrid young.
A gleam of metal through the fem trees made his heart leap. Burnished metal here could mean but one thing—the machine!
Around a clump of fem trees, their bases covered with thick club mosses, he ran, and saw the machine ahead. He raced toward it—then came to a sudden stop, slipping on the damp ground. For there were two machines in sight.
The farther machine was his own, and through the screening mosses he could see two figures standing in it, his own and de Terry's.
But the nearer was a larger machine, and a strange design.
And from it came a hastening mob—not a mob of men, but of black insect shapes racing toward him.
Of course, thought Gordy, as he turned hopelessly to run— of course, the ants had infinite time to work in. Time enough to build a machine after the pattern of his own—and time to realize what they had to do to him, to insure their own race safety.
Gordy stumbled, and the first of the black things was upon him.
As his panicky lungs filled with air for the last time, Gordy knew what animal had screamed in the depths of the Coal Measure forest.
To See Another Mountain
When I wrote "To See Another Mountain," I had just got a new record player and some new records, including my first LP of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. (Actually his second, though only a few of us true-blue aficionados ever listen to his rather immature first.) My whole memory of writing the story is permeated with that lovely violin. That particular concerto happens to be my favorite, probably because one of the first real live concerts I ever attended featured it, played by Fritz Kreisler, fresh out of the hospital after being almost killed in a car accident and making his comeback. What an evening that was, with old Fritz staring out over packed Carnegie Hall and sawing away like a Vienna Woods carpenter, with a half smile on his face and the most beautiful sounds I had ever heard washing over us ... So I had the concerto, I think it was Oistrakh's version, on the record player, and every time I came to a pause in the story I would get up and start it over again. I have always thought of it as the Mendelssohn story; and what astonishes me, reading it over now, is how little the concerto has to do with the story.