Alternating Currents (9 page)

All in all, I have no alternative but to admit, my present way of life (should I say, ‘of death?’) has its compensations. I do not need to eat or sleep, and I have the ancient little Bantu, N’Ginga, for company in the long night hours and when Brandon is away. He does not wish to make our existence public as yet, though most of the upper-echelon staff of the Museum knows about us; and he promises to find my friend from upstate New York as soon as he can, to find out how to release us from the compulsion to remain where we were commanded to appear. That I look forward to: once free of that part of the spell, both N’Ginga and I can go to meet others like us.

Meanwhile, I have my work, of dictating to Brandon and his helpers all that I can remember of all the magic I had learned. Both N’Ginga and I are anxious to do whatever Brandon wants of us, you see, which is why he is learning English. Partly it is because we want to advance the cause of scientific knowledge, and partly, too, because we are anxious to be released; it is a little lonely for us here. It wasn’t quite so bad while there were three of us, though the Boy Pharaoh was poor enough company. But when he ceased to be with us (I can’t find the proper words to describe the process, you see) it was the first time any of us had realized that even ghosts were, in some ways, vulnerable.

It was entirely my own fault and carelessness; but I wish I had not been so free to conjure up the ghosts of lions and lizards; I have wished it more and more since N’Ginga came running to me, face almost pale, to show me what lizard-teeth had done to the wraith of the Boy.

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~ * ~

Let the Ants Try

Gordy survived the Three-Hour War, even though Detroit didn’t: he was on his way to Washington, with his blueprints and models in his bag, when the bombs struck.

He had left his wife behind in the city, and not even a trace of her body was ever found. The children, of course, weren’t as lucky as that. Their summer camp was less than twenty miles away, and unfortunately in the direction of the prevailing wind. But they were not in any pain until the last few days of the month they had left to live. Gordy managed to fight his way back through the snarled, frantic airline controls to them. Even though he knew they would certainly die of radiation sickness, and they suspected it, there was still a whole blessed week of companionship before the pain got too bad.

That was about all the companionship Gordy had for the whole year of 1960.

He came back to Detroit, as soon as the radioactivity had died down; he had nowhere else to go. He found a house on the outskirts of the city, and tried to locate someone to buy it from. But the Emergency Administration laughed at him. ‘Move in, if you’re crazy enough to stay.’

When Gordy thought about it all, it occurred to him that he was in a sort of state of shock. His fine, trained mind almost stopped functioning. He ate and slept, and when it grew cold he shivered and built fires, and that was all. The War Department wrote him two or three times, and finally a Government man came around to ask what had happened to the things that Gordy had promised to bring to Washington. But he looked queerly at the pink, hairless mice that fed unmolested in the filthy kitchen, and he stood a careful distance away from Gordy’s hairy face and torn clothes.

He said, ‘The Secretary sent me here, Mr Gordy. He takes a personal interest in your discovery.’

Gordy shook his head. ‘The Secretary’s dead,’ he said. ‘They were all killed when Washington went.’

‘There’s a new Secretary,’ the man explained. He puffed on his cigarette and tossed it into the patch Gordy was scrabbling into a truck garden. ‘Arnold Cavanagh. He knows a great deal about you, and he told me, “If Salva Gordy has a weapon, we must have it. Our strength has been shattered. Tell Gordy we need his help.”‘

Gordy crossed his hands like a lean Buddha.

‘I haven’t got a weapon,’ he said.

‘You have something that can be used as a weapon. You wrote to Washington, before the war came, and said -’

‘The war is over,’ said Salva Gordy. The Government man sighed, and tried again, but in the end he went away. He never came back. The thing, Gordy thought, was undoubtedly written off as a crackpot idea after the man made his report; it was exactly that kind of a discovery anyhow.

It was May when John de Terry appeared. Gordy was spading his garden. ‘Give me something to eat,’ said the voice behind Gordy’s back.

Salva Gordy turned around and saw the small, dirty man who spoke. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘You’ll have to work for it,’ he said.

‘All right.’ The newcomer set down his pack. ‘My name is John de Terry. I used to live here in Detroit.’

Salva Gordy said, ‘So did I.’

Gordy fed the man, and accepted a cigarette from him after they had eaten. The first puffs made him light-headed - it had been that long since he’d smoked - and through the smoke he looked at John de Terry amiably enough. Company would be all right, he thought. The pink mice had been company, of a sort; but it turned out that the mutation that made them hairless had also given them an appetite for meat. And after the morning when he had awakened to find tiny toothmarks in his leg, he’d had to destroy them. And there had been no other animal since, nothing but the ants.

‘Are you going to stay ?’ Gordy asked.

De Terry said, ‘If I can. What’s your name ?’ When Gordy told him, some of the animal look went out of his eyes, and wonder took its place.
‘Doctor
Salva Gordy?’ he asked. ‘Mathematics and physics in Pasadena ?’

‘Yes, I used to teach at Pasadena.’

‘And I studied there.’ John de Terry rubbed absently at his ruined clothes. ‘That was a long time ago. You didn’t know me; I majored in biology. But I knew you.’

Gordy stood up and carefully put out the stub of his cigarette. ‘It was too long ago,’ he said. ‘I hardly remember. Shall we work in the garden now ?’

Together they sweated in the spring sunlight that afternoon, and Gordy discovered that what had been hard work for one man went quickly enough for two. They worked clear to the edge of the plot before the sun reached the horizon. John de Terry stopped and leaned on his spade, panting.

He gestured to the rank growth beyond Gordy’s patch. ‘We can make a bigger garden,’ he said. ‘Clear out that truck, and plant more food. We might even -’ He stopped. Gordy was shaking his head.

‘You can’t clear it out,’ said Gordy. ‘It’s rank stuff, a sort of crabgrass with a particularly tough root. I can’t even cut it. It’s all around here, and it’s spreading.’

De Terry grimaced. ‘Mutation?’

‘I think so. And look.’ Gordy beckoned to the other man and led him to the very edge of the cleared area. He bent down, picked up something red and wriggling between his thumb and forefinger.

De Terry took it from his hand. ‘Another mutation?’ He brought the thing close to his eyes. ‘It’s almost like an ant,’ he said. ‘Except - well, the thorax is all wrong. And it’s soft-bodied.’ He fell silent, examining the thing.

He said something under his breath, and threw the insect from him. ‘You wouldn’t have a microscope, I suppose? No - and yet, that thing is hard to believe. It’s an ant, but it doesn’t seem to have a tracheal breathing system at all. It’s something different.’

‘Everything’s different,’ Gordy said. He pointed to a couple of abandoned rows. ‘I had carrots there. At least, I thought they were carrots; when I tried to eat them they made me sick.’ He sighed heavily. ‘Humanity has had its chance, John,’ he said. ‘The atomic bomb wasn’t enough; we had to turn everything into a weapon. Even I, I made a weapon out of something that had nothing to do with war. And our weapons have blown up in our faces.’

De Terry grinned. ‘Maybe the ants will do better. It’s their turn now.’

‘I wish it were.’ Gordy stirred earth over the boiling entrance to an anthole and watched the insects in their consternation. ‘They’re too small, I’m afraid.’

‘Why, no. These ants are different, Dr Gordy. Insects have always been small because their breathing system is so poor. But these are mutated. I think - I think they actually have lungs. They could grow, Dr Gordy. And if ants were the size of men . . . they’d rule the world.’

‘Lunged ants!’ Gordy’s eyes gleamed. ‘Perhaps they will rule the world, John. Perhaps when the human race finally blows itself up once and for all. . .’

De Terry shook his head, and looked down again at his tattered, filthy clothes. ‘The next blow-up is the last blow-up,’ he said. ‘The ants come too late, by millions and millions of years.’

He picked up his spade. ‘I’m hungry again, Dr Gordy,’ he said.

They went back to the house and, without conversation, they ate. Gordy was preoccupied, and de Terry was too new in the household to force him to talk.

It was sundown when they had finished, and Gordy moved slowly to light a lamp. Then he stopped.

‘It’s your first night, John,’ he said. ‘Come down to the cellar. We’ll start the generator and have real electric lights in your honour.’

De Terry followed the older man down a flight of stairs, groping in the dark. By candlelight they worked over a gasoline generator; it was stiff from disuse, but once it started it ran cleanly. ‘I salvaged it from my own,’ Gordy explained. ‘The generator - and that.’

He swept an arm towards a corner of the basement. ‘I told you I invented a weapon,’ he added. ‘That’s it.’

De Terry looked. It was as much like a cage as anything, he thought - the height of a man and almost cubical. ‘What does it do ?’ he asked.

For the first time in months, Salva Gordy smiled. ‘I can’t tell you in English,’ he said. ‘And I doubt that you speak mathematics. The closest I can come is to say that it displaces temporal co-ordinates. Is that gibberish?’

‘It is,’ said de Terry. ‘What does it do?’

‘Well, the War Department had a name for it - a name they borrowed from H. G. Wells. They called it a Time Machine.’ He met de Terry’s shocked, bewildered stare calmly. ‘A time machine,’ he repeated. ‘You see, John, we can give the ants a chance after all, if you like.’

~ * ~

Fourteen hours later they stepped into the cage, its batteries charged again and its strange motor whining . . .

And, forty million years earlier, they stepped out on to quaking, humid soil.

Gordy felt himself trembling, and with an effort managed to stop. ‘No dinosaurs or saber-toothed tigers in sight,’ he reported.

‘Not for a long time yet,’ de Terry agreed. Then, ‘My Lord!’

He looked around him with his mouth open wide. There, was no wind, and the air was warm and wet. Large trees were clustered quite thickly around them - or what looked like trees; de Terry decided they were rather some sort of soft-stemmed ferns or fungi. Overhead was deep cloud.

Gordy shivered. ‘Give me the ants,’ he ordered.

Silently de Terry handed them over. Gordy poked a hole in the soft earth with his finger and carefully tilted the flask, dropped one of the ant queens he had unearthed in the back yard. From her belly hung a slimy mass of eggs. A few yards away - it should have been farther, he thought, but he was afraid to get too far from de Terry and the machine - he made another hole and repeated the process.

There were eight queens. When the eighth was buried he flung the bottle away and came back to de Terry. ‘That’s it,’ he said.

De Terry exhaled. His solemn face cracked in a sudden embarrassed smile. ‘I - I guess I feel like God,’ he said. ‘Good Lord, Dr Gordy! Talk about your great moments in history - this is all of them! I’ve been thinking about it and the only event I can remember that measures up is the Flood. Not even that. We’ve created a race!’

‘If they survive, we have.’ Gordy wiped a drop of condensed moisture off the side of his time machine and puffed. ‘I wonder how they’ll get along with mankind,’ he said.

They were silent for a moment, considering. From somewhere in the fern jungle came a raucous animal cry. Both men looked up in quick apprehension, but moments passed and the animal did not appear.

Finally de Terry said, ‘Maybe we’d better go back.’

‘All right.’ Stiffly they climbed into the closet-sized interior of the time machine.

Gordy stood with his hand on the control wheel, thinking about the ants. Assuming that they survived - assuming that in 40,000,000 years they grew larger and developed brains - what would happen ? Would men be able to live in peace with them ? Would it - might it not make men brothers, joined against an alien race?

Might this thing prevent human war, and - his thoughts took an insane leap - could it have prevented the war that destroyed Gordy’s family!

Beside him, de Terry stirred restlessly. Gordy jumped, and turned the wheel, and was in the dark mathematical vortex which might have been a fourth dimension.

~ * ~

They stopped the machine in the middle of a city, but the city was not Detroit. It was not a human city at all.

The machine was at rest in a narrow street, half blocking it. Around them towered conical metal structures, some of them a hundred feet high. There were vehicles moving in the street, one coming towards them and stopping.

‘Dr Gordy!’ de Terry whispered.’ Do you see them ?’