The Petrified Ants - By Kurt Vonnegut Page 0,5
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 down 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