City

III. CENSUS

Richard Grant was resting beside the little spring that gushed out of the hillside and tumbled in a flashing stream across the twisting trail when the squirrel rushed past him and shinnied up a towering hickory tree. Behind the squirrel, in a cyclone of churning autumn-fallen leaves, came the little black dog.

When he saw Grant the dog skidded to a stop, stood watching him, tail wagging, eyes a — dance with fun.

Grant grinned. "Hello, there," he said.

"Hi," said the dog.

Grant jerked out of his easy slouch, jaw hanging limp. The dog laughed back at him, red dish rag of a tongue lolling from its mouth.

Grant jerked a thumb at the hickory. "Your squirrel's up there."

"Thanks," said the dog, "I know it. I can smell him."

Startled, Grant looked swiftly around, suspecting a practical joke. Ventriloquism, maybe. But there was no one in sight. The woods were empty except for himself and the dog, the gurgling spring, the squirrel chattering in the tree.

The dog walked closer.

"My name," he said, "is Nathaniel."

The words were there. There was no doubt of it. Almost like human speech, except they were pronounced carefully, as one who was learning the language might pronounce them. And a brogue, an accent that could not be placed, a certain eccentricity of intonation.

"I live over the hill," declared Nathaniel, "with the Websters."

He sat down, beat his tail upon the ground, scattering leaves. He looked extremely happy.

Grant suddenly snapped his fingers.

"Bruce Webster! Now I know. Should have thought of it before. Glad to meet you, Nathaniel."

"Who are you?" asked Nathaniel.

"Me? I'm Richard Grant, enumerator."

"What's an enum… enumer-"

"An enumerator is someone who counts people," Grant explained. "I'm taking a census."

"There are lots of words," said Nathaniel, "that I can't say."

He got up, walked over to the spring, and lapped noisily. Finished, he plunked himself down beside the man.

"Want to shoot the squirrel?" he asked.

"Want me to?"

"Sure thing," said Nathaniel.

But the squirrel was gone. Together they circled the tree, searching its almost bare branches. There was no bushy tail sticking out from behind the boll, no beady eyes staring down

at them. While they had talked, the squirrel had made his getaway.

Nathaniel looked a bit crestfallen, but he made the best of it.

"Why don't you spend the night with us?" he invited.

"Then, come morning, we could go hunting. Spend all day at it."

Grant chuckled. "I wouldn't want to trouble you. I am used to camping out."

Nathaniel insisted. "Bruce would be glad to see you. And Grandpa wouldn't mind. He don't know half what goes on, anyway."

"Who's Grandpa?"

"His real name is Thomas," said Nathaniel, "but we all call him Grandpa. He is Bruce's father. Awful old now. Just sits all day and thinks about a thing that happened long ago."

Grant nodded. "I know about that, Nathaniel. Juwain."

"Yeah, that's it," agreed Nathaniel. "What does it mean?"

Grant shook his head. "Wish I could tell you, Nathaniel. Wish I knew."

He hoisted the pack to his shoulder, stooped and scratched the dog behind the ear. Nathaniel grimaced with delight.

"Thanks," he said, and started up the path.

Grant followed.

***

Thomas Webster sat in his wheel chair on the lawn and stared out across the evening hills.

I'll be eighty-six to-morrow, he was thinking. Eighty-six. That's a hell of a long time for a man to live. Maybe too long.

Especially when he can't walk any more and his eyes are going bad.

Elsie will have a silly cake for me with lots of candles on it and the robots all will bring me a gift and those dogs of Bruce's will come in and wish me happy returns of the day and wag their tails at me. And there will be a few televisor calls — although not many, perhaps. And I'll pound my chest and say I'm going to live to be a hundred and everyone will grin behind their hands and say "listen to the old fool".

Eighty— six years and there were two things I meant to do. One of them I did and the other one I didn't.

A cawing crow skimmed over a distant ridge and slanted down into the valley shadow. From far away, down by the river, came the quacking of a flock of mallards.

Soon the stars would be coming out. Came out early this time of year. He liked to look at them. The stars! He patted the arms of the chair with fierce pride. The stars, by Lord, were his meat. An obsession? Perhaps — but at least something to wipe out that stigma of long ago, a shield to keep the family from the gossip of historic busybodies. And Bruce was helping too. Those dogs of his A step sounded in the grass behind him.

"Your whisky, sir," said Jenkins.

Thomas Webster stared at the robot, took the glass off the tray.

"Thank you, Jenkins," he said.

He twirled the glass between his fingers. "How long, Jenkins, have you been lugging drinks to this family?"

"Your father, sir," said Jenkins. "And his father before him."

"Any news?" asked the old man.

Jenkins shook his head. "No news."

Thomas Webster sipped the drink. "That means, then, that they're well beyond the solar system. Too far out even for the Pluto station to relay. Halfway or better to Alpha Centauri. If only I live long enough-"

"You will, sir," Jenkins told him. "I feel it in my bones."

"You," declared the old man, "haven't any bones."

He sipped the drink slowly, tasting it with expert tongue.

Watered too much again. But it wouldn't do to say anything. No use flying off the handle at Jenkins. That doctor! Telling Jenkins to water it a bit more. Depriving a man of proper drinking in his final years "What's that down there" he asked, pointing to the path that straggled up the hill.

Jenkins turned to look.

"It appears, sir," he said, "that Nathaniel's bringing someone home."

***

The dogs had trooped in to say good night, had left again.

Bruce Webster grinned after them.

"Great gang," he said.

He turned to Grant. "I imagine Nathaniel gave you quite a start this afternoon."

Grant lifted the brandy glass, squinted through it at the light.

"He did," he said. "Just for a minute. And then I remembered things I'd read about what you're doing here. It isn't in my line, of course, but your work has been popularized, written up in more or less non-technical language."

"Your line?" asked Webster. "I thought-"

Grant laughed. "I see what you mean. A census taker. An enumerator. All of that, I grant you."

Webster was puzzled, just a bit embarrassed. "I hope, Mr. Grant, that I haven't-"

"Not at all," Grant told him. "I'm used to being regarded as someone who writes down names and ages and then goes on to the next group of human beings. That was the old idea of a census, of course. A nose counting, nothing more. A matter of statistics. After all, the last census was taken more than three hundred years ago. And times have changed."

"You interest me," said Webster. "You make this nose counting of yours sound almost sinister."

"It isn't sinister," protested Grant. "It's logical. It's an evaluation of the human population. Not just how many of them there are, but what are they really like, what are they thinking and doing?"

Webster slouched lower in his chair, stretching his feet out towards the fire upon the hearth. "Don't tell me, Mr. Grant, that you intend to psycho-analyse me?"

Grant drained the brandy glass, set it on the table. "I don't need to," he said. "The World Committee knows all it needs to know about the folks like you. But it is the others — the ridge runners, you call them here. Up north they're jackpine savages. Farther south they're something else. A hidden population — an almost forgotten population. The ones who took to the woods. The ones who scampered off when the World Committee loosened the strings of government."

Webster grunted. "The governmental strings had to be loosened," he declared. "History will prove that to anyone. Even before the World Committee came into being the governmental set-up of the world was burdened by ox-cart survivals. There was no more reason for the township government three hundred years ago than there is for a national government today."

"You're absolutely right," Grant told him, "and yet when the grip of government was loosened, its hold upon the life of each man was loosened. The man who wanted to slip away and live outside his government, losing its benefits and escaping its obligations, found it an easy thing to do. The World Committee didn't mind. It had more things to worry over than the irresponsibles and malcontents. And there were plenty of them. The farmers, for instance, who lost their way of life with the coming of hydroponics. Many of them found it hard to fit into industrial life. So what? So they slipped away. They reverted to a primitive life. They raised a few crops, they hunted game, they trapped, they cut wood, did a little stealing now and then. Deprived of a livelihood, they went back to the soil, all the way back, and the soil took care of them."

"That was three hundred years ago," said Webster. "The World Committee didn't mind about them then. It did what it could, of course, but, as you say, it didn't really mind if a few slipped through its fingers. So why this sudden interest now?"

"Just, I guess," Grant told him, "that they've got around to it."

He regarded Webster closely, studying the man. Relaxed before the fire, his face held power, the shadows of the leaping flames etching planes upon his features, turning them almost surrealistic.

Grant hunted in his pocket, found his pipe, jammed tobacco in the bowl.

"There is something else," he said.

"Eh," asked Webster.

"There is something else about this census. They'd take it anyhow, perhaps, because a picture of Earth's population must always be an asset, a piece of handy knowledge; But that isn't all."

"Mutants," said Webster.

Grant nodded. "That's right. I hardly expected anyone to guess it."

"I work with mutants," Webster pointed, out. "My whole life is bound up with mutations."

"Queer bits of culture have been turning up," said Grant.

"Stuff that has no precedent. Literary forms which bear the unmistakable imprint of fresh personalities. Music that has broken away from traditional expression. Art that is like nothing ever seen before. And most of it anonymous or at least hidden under pseudonyms."

Webster laughed. "Such a thing, of course, is utter mystery to the World Committee."

"It isn't that so much as something else," Grant explained. "The Committee is not so concerned with art and literature as it is with other things — things that don't show up. If there is a backwoods renaissance taking place, it would first come to notice, naturally, through new art and literary forms. But a renaissance is not concerned entirely with art and literature."

Webster sank even lower in his chair and cupped his hands beneath his chin.

"I think I see," he said, "what you are driving at."

***

They sat for long minutes in silence broken only by the crackling of the fire, by the ghostly whisper of an autumn wind in the trees outside.

"There was a chance once," said Webster, almost as if he were speaking to himself. "A chance for new viewpoints, for something that might have wiped out the muddle of four thousand years of human thought. A man muffed that chance."

Grant stirred uncomfortably, then sat rigid, afraid Webster might have seen him move.

"That man," said Webster, "was my grandfather."

Grant knew he must say something, that he could not continue to sit there, unspeaking.

"Juwain may have been wrong," he said. "He might not have found a new philosophy."

"That is a thought," declared Webster, "we have used to console ourselves. And yet, it is unlikely. Juwain was a great Martian philosopher, perhaps the greatest Mars had ever known. If he could have lived, there is no doubt in my mind he would have developed that new philosophy. But he didn't live. He didn't live because my grandfather couldn't go to Mars."

"It wasn't your grandfather's fault," said Grant. "He tried to. Agoraphobia is a thing that a man can't fight-"

Webster waved the words aside. "That is over and done with. It is a thing that cannot be recaptured. We must accept that and go on from there. And since it was my family, since it was grandfather-"

Grant stared, shaken by the thought that occurred to him. "The dogs! That's why-"

"Yes, the dogs," said Webster.

From far away, in the river bottoms, came a crying sound, one with the wind that talked in the trees outside.

"A raccoon," said Webster. "The dogs will hear him and be rearing to get out."

The cry came again, closer it seemed, although that must have been imagination.

Webster had straightened in the chair, was leaning forward, staring at the flames.

"After all, why not?" he asked. "A dog has a personality. You can sense that in every one you meet. No two are exactly alike in mood and temperament. All of them are intelligent, in varying degrees. And that is all that's needed, a conscious personality and some measure of intelligence.

"They didn't get an even break, that's all. They had two handicaps. They couldn't talk and they couldn't walk erect and because they couldn't walk erect they had no chance to develop hands. But for speech and hands, we might be dogs and dogs be men."

"I'd never thought of it like that," said Grant. "Not of your dogs as a thinking race-"

"No," said Webster, and there was a trace of bitterness running in his words. "No, of course, you didn't. You thought of them as most of the rest of the world still thinks of them. As curiosities, as sideshow animals, as funny pets. Pets that can talk with you.

"But it's more than that, Grant. I swear to you it is. Thus far Man has come alone. One thinking, intelligent race all by itself. Think of how much farther, how much faster it might have gone had there been two races, two thinking, intelligent races, working together. For, you see, they would not think alike. They'd check their thoughts against one another. What one couldn't think of, the other could. The old story of two heads.

"Think of it, Grant. A different mind than the human mind, but one that will work with the human mind. That will see and understand things the human mind cannot, that will develop, if you will, philosophies the human mind could not?'

He spread his hands towards the fire, long fingers with bone-hard, merciless knuckles.

"They couldn't talk and I gave them speech. It was not easy, for a dog's tongue and throat are not designed to speak. But surgery did it… an expedient at first… surgery and grafting. But now… now, I hope, I think… it is too soon to say-"

Grant was leaning forward, tensed.

"You mean the dogs are passing on the changes you have made. That there are hereditary evidences of the surgical corrections?"

Webster shook his bead. "It is too soon to say. Another twenty years, maybe I can tell you."

He lifted the brandy bottle from the table, held it out.

"Thanks," said Grant.

"I am a poor host," Webster told him. "You should have helped yourself."

He raised the glass against the fire. "I had good material to work with. A dog is smart. Smarter than you think. The ordinary, run of the mill dog recognizes fifty words or more. A hundred is not unusual. Add another hundred and he has a working vocabulary. You noticed, perhaps, the simple words that Nathaniel used. Almost basic English."

Grant nodded. "One and two syllables. He told me there were a lot of words he couldn't say."

"There is much more to do," said Webster. "So much more to do. Reading, for example. A dog doesn't see as you and I do. I have been experimenting with lenses — correcting their eyesight so they can see as we do. And if that fails, there's still another way. Man must visualize the way a dog sees — learn to print books that dogs can read."

"The dogs," asked Grant, "what do they think of it?"

"The dogs?' said Webster. "Believe it or not, Grant, they're having the time of their merry lives."

He stared into the fire.

"God bless their hearts," he said.

***

Following Jenkins, Grant climbed the stairs to bed, but as they passed a partially opened door a voice hailed them.

"That you, stranger?"

Grant stopped, jerked around.

Jenkins said in a whisper, "That's the old gentleman, sir. Often he cannot sleep."

"Yes," called Grant.

"Sleepy?" asked the voice.

"Not very," Grant told him.

"Come in for a while," the old man said.

Thomas Webster sat propped up in bed, striped nightcap on his head. He saw Grant staring at it.

"Getting bald," he rasped. "Don't feel comfortable unless I got something on. Can't wear my hat to bed."

He shouted at Jenkins. "What you standing there for? Don't you see he needs a drink?"

"Yes, sir," said Jenkins, and disappeared.

"Sit down," said Thomas Webster. "Sit down and listen for a while. Talking will help me go to sleep. And, besides, we don't see new faces every day." Grant sat down.

"What do you think of that son of mine?" the old man asked.

Grant started at the unusual question. "Why, I think he's splendid. The work he's doing with the dogs-"

The old man chuckled. "Him and his dogs! Ever tell you about the time Nathaniel tangled with a skunk? Of course, I haven't. Haven't said more than a word or two to you."

He ran his hands along the bed covering, long fingers picking at the fabric nervously.

"Got another son, you know. Allen. Call him Al. To-night he's the farthest from Earth that Man has ever been. Heading for the stars."

Grant nodded. "I know. I read about it. The Alpha Centauri expedition."

"My father was a surgeon," said Thomas Webster. "Wanted me to be one, too. Almost broke his heart, I guess, when I didn't take to it. But if he could know, he'd be proud of us to-night."

"You mustn't worry about your son," said Grant.

***

The old man's glare silenced him. "I built that ship myself. Designed it, watched it grow. If it's just a matter of navigating space, it'll get where it is going. And the kid is good. He can ride that crate through hell itself."

He hunched himself straighter in the bed, knocking his nightcap askew against the piled-up pillows.

"And I got another reason to think he'll get there and back. Didn't think much about it at the time, but lately I've been recalling it, thinking it over, wondering if it mightn't mean… well, if it might not be-"

He gasped a bit for breath. "Mind you, I'm not superstitious."

"Of course you're not," said Grant.

"You bet I'm not," said Webster.

"A sign of some sort, perhaps," suggested Grant. "A feeling. A hunch."

"None of those," declared the old man. "An almost certain knowledge that destiny must be with me. That I was meant to build a ship that would make the trip. That someone or something decided it was about time Man got out to the stars and took a hand to help him along a bit."

"You sound as if you're talking about an actual incident," said Grant, "As if there were some positive happening that makes you think the expedition will succeed."

"You bet your boots," said Webster. "That's just exactly what I mean. It happened twenty years ago, out on the lawn in front of this very house."

He pulled himself even straighter, gasped for breath, wheezing.

"I was stumped, you understand. The dream was broken. Years spent for nothing. The basic principle I had evolved to get the speed necessary for interstellar flight simply wouldn't work. And the worst of it was, I knew it was almost right. I knew there was just one little thing, one theoretical change that must be made. But I couldn't find it.

"So I was sitting out there on the lawn, feeling sorry for myself, with a sketch of the plan in front of me. I lived with it, you see. I carried it everywhere I went, figuring maybe that by just looking at it, the thing that was wrong would pop into my mind. You know how it does, sometimes."

Grant nodded.

"While I was sitting there a man came along. One of the ridge runners. You know what a ridge runner is?"

"Sure," said Grant.

"Well, this fellow came along. Kind of limber-jointed chap, ambling along as if he didn't have a trouble in the world. He stopped and looked over my shoulder and asked me what I dad.

"'Spaceship drive," I told him.

"He reached down and took it and all, what was the use? He couldn't understand a thing about it and it was no good, anyhow.

"And then he handed it back to me and jabbed his finger at one place. "That's your trouble," he said. And then he turned and galloped off and I sat staring after him, too done in to say a single word, to even call him back."

The old man sat bolt upright in the bed, staring at the wall, nightcap canted crazily. Outside the wind sucked along the eaves with hollow hooting. And in that well-lighted room, there seemed to be shadows, although Grant knew there weren't any.

"Did you ever find him?" asked Grant.

The old man shook his head. "Hide nor hair," he said.

Jenkins came through the door with a glass, set it on the bedside table.

"I'll be back, sir," be said to Grant, "to show you to your room."

"No need of it," said Grant. "Just tell me where it is."

"If you wish, sir," said Jenkins. "It's the third one down. I'll turn on the light and leave the door ajar."

They sat, listening to the robot's feet go down the hall.

The old man glanced at the glass of whisky and cleared his throat.

"I wish now," he said, "I'd had Jenkins bring me one."

"Why, that's all right," said Grant "Take this one. I don't really need it."

"Sure you don't?"

"Not at all."

The old man stretched out his hand, took a sip, sighed gustily.

"Now that's what I call a proper mix," he said. "Doctor makes Jenkins water mine."

***

There was something in the house that got under one's skin. Something that made one feel like an outsider — uncomfortable and naked in the quiet whisper of its walls.

Sitting on the edge of his bed, Grant slowly unlaced his shoes and dropped them on the carpet.

A robot who had served the family for four generations, who talked of men long dead as if he had brought them a glass of whisky only yesterday. An old man who worried about a ship that slid through the space-darkness beyond the solar system. Another man who dreamed of another race, a race that might go hand in paw with man down the trail of destiny.

And over it all, almost unspoken and yet unmistakable, the shadow of Jerome A. Webster — the man who had failed a friend, a surgeon who had failed his trust.

Juwain, the Martian philosopher, had died, on the eve of a great discovery, because Jerome A. Webster couldn't leave this house, because agoraphobia chained him to a plot a few miles square.

On stockinged feet, Grant crossed to the table where Jenkins had placed his pack. Loosening the straps, he opened it, brought out a thick portfolio. Back at the bed again, he sat down and hauled out sheafs of papers, thumbed through them.

Records, hundreds of sheets of records. The story of hundreds of human lives set down on paper. Not only the things they told him or the questions that they answered, but dozens of other little things — things he had noted down from observation, from sitting and watching, from living with them for an hour or day.

For the people that he ferreted out in these tangled hills accepted him. It was his business that they should accept him. They accepted him because he came on foot, briar-scratched and weary, with a pack upon his shoulder. To him clung none of the modernity that would have set him apart from them, made them suspicious of him. It was a tiresome way to make a census, but it was the only way to make the kind the World Committee wanted — and needed.

For somewhere, sometime, studying sheets like these that lay upon the bed, some man like him would find a thing he sought, would find a clue to some life that veered from the human pattern. Some betraying quirk of behaviourism that would set out one life against all the others.

Human mutations were not uncommon, of course. Many of them were known, men who held high position in the world. Most of the World Committee members were mutants, but, like the others, their mutational qualities and abilities bad been modified and qualified by the pattern of the world, by unconscious conditioning that had shaped their thoughts and reaction into some conformity with other fellow men.

There had always been mutants, else the race would not have advanced. But until the last hundred years or so they had not been recognized as such. Before that they had merely been great businessmen or great scientists or great crooks. Or perhaps eccentrics who had rained no more than scorn or pity at the hands of a race that would not tolerate divergence from the norm.

Those who had been successful had adapted themselves to the world around them, had bent their greater mental powers into the pattern of acceptable action. And this dulled their usefulness, limited their capacity, hedged their ability with restrictions set up to fit less extraordinary people.

Even as today the known mutants' ability was hedged, unconsciously, by a pattern that had been set — a groove of logic that was a terrible thing.

But somewhere in the world there were dozens, probably hundreds, of other humans who were just a little more than human-persons whose lives had been untouched by the rigidity of complex human life. Their ability would not be hedged, they would know no groove of logic.

From the portfolio Grant brought out a pitifully thin sheaf of papers, clipped together, read the title of the script almost reverently:

"Unfinished Philosophical Proposition and Related Notes of Juwain."

It would take a mind that knew no groove of logic, a mind unhampered by the pattern of four thousand years of human thought, to carry on the torch the dead hand of the Martian philosopher had momentarily lifted. A torch that lit the way to a new concept of life and purpose, that showed a path that was easier and straighter. A philosophy that would have put mankind ahead a hundred thousand years in two short generations.

Juwain had died and in this very house a man had lived out his haunted years, listening to the voice of his dead friend, shrinking from the censure of a cheated race.

***

A stealthy scratch came at the door. Startled, Grant stiffened, listened. It came again. Then, a little, silky whine.

Swiftly Grant stuffed the papers back in the portfolio, strode to the door. As he opened it, Nathaniel oozed in, like a sliding black shadow.

"Oscar," he said, "doesn't know I'm hero. Oscar would give it to me if he knew I was."

"Who's Oscar?"

"Oscar's the robot that takes care of us."

Grant grinned at the dog. "What do you want, Nathaniel?"

"I want to talk to you," said Nathaniel. "You've talked to everyone else. To Bruce and Grandpa. But you haven't talked to me and I'm the one that found you."

"O.K.," invited Grant. "Go ahead and talk."

"You're worried," said Nathaniel.

Grant wrinkled his brow. "That's right, perhaps I am. The human race is always worried. You should know that by now, Nathaniel."

"You're worrying about Juwain. Just like Grandpa is."

"Not worrying," protested Grant. "Just wondering. And hoping."

"What's the matter with Juwain?" demanded Nathaniel. "And who is he and-"

"He's no one, really," declared Grant. "That is, he was someone once, but he died years ago. He's just an idea now. A problem. A challenge. Something to think about."

"I can think," said Nathaniel triumphantly. "I think a lot, sometimes. But I mustn't think like human beings. Bruce tells me I mustn't. He says I have to think dog thoughts and let human thoughts alone. He says dog thoughts are just as good as human thoughts, maybe a whole lot better."

Grant nodded soberly. "There is something to that, Nathaniel. After all, you must think differently than man. You must-"

"There's lots of things that dogs know that men don't know," bragged Nathaniel. "We can see things and hear things that men can't see nor hear. Sometimes we howl at night, and people cuss us out. But if they could see and hear what we do they'd be scared too stiff to move. Bruce says we're… we're-"

"Psychic?" asked Grant.

"That's it," declared Nathaniel. "I can't remember all them words."

Grant picked his pyjamas off the table.

"How about spending the night with me, Nathaniel? You can have the foot of the bed."

Nathaniel stared at him round eyed. "Gee, you mean you want me to?"

"Sure I do. If we're going to be partners, dogs and men, we better start out on an even footing now."

"I won't get the bed dirty," said Nathaniel. "Honest I won't. Oscar gave me a bath to-night."

He flipped an ear.

"Except," he said, "I think he missed a flea or two."

***

Grant stared in perplexity at the atomic gun. A handy thing, it performed a host of services, ranging from cigarette lighter to deadly weapon. Built to last a thousand years, it was foolproof, or so the advertisements said. It never got out of kilter — except now it wouldn't work.

He pointed it at the ground and shook it vigorously and still it didn't work. He tapped it gently on a stone and got no results.

Darkness was dropping on the tumbled bills. Somewhere in the distant river valley an owl laughed irrationally. The first stars, small and quiet, came out in the east and in the west the green-tinged glow that marked the passing of the sun was fading into night.

The pile of twigs was laid before the boulder and other wood lay near at hand to keep the campfire going through the night. But if the gun wouldn't work, there would be no fire.

Grant cursed under his breath, thinking of chilly sleeping and cold rations.

He tapped the gun on the rock again, harder this time. Still no soap.

A twig crunched in the dark and Grant shot bolt upright.

Beside the shadowy trunk of one of the forest giants that towered into the gathering dusk, stood a figure, tall and gangling.

"Hello," said Grant.

"Something wrong, stranger?"

"My gun— " replied Grant, then cut short the words. No use in letting this shadowy figure know he was unarmed.

The man stepped forward, hand outstretched.

"Won't work, eh?"

Grant felt the gun lifted from his grasp.

The visitor squatted on the ground, making chuckling noises. Grant strained his eyes to see what he was doing, but the creeping darkness made the other's hands an inky blur weaving about the bright metal of the gun.

Metal clicked and scraped. The man sucked in his breath and laughed. Metal scraped again and the man arose, holding out the gun.

"All fixed," he said. "Maybe better than it was before."

A twig crunched again.

"Hey, wait!" yelled Grant, but the man was gone, a black ghost moving among the ghostly trunks.

A chill that was not of the night came seeping from the ground and travelled slowly up Grant's body. A chill that set his teeth on edge, that stirred the short hairs at the base of his skull, that made goose flesh spring out upon his arms.

There was no sound except the talk of water whispering in the dark, the tiny stream that ran just below the campsite.

Shivering, he knelt beside the pile of twigs, pressed the trigger. A thin blue flame lapped out and the twigs burst into flame.

***

Grant found old Dave Baxter perched on the top rail of the fence, smoke pouring from the short-stemmed pipe almost hidden in his whiskers.

"Howdy, stranger," said Dave. "Climb up and squat a while."

Grant climbed up, stared out over the corn-shocked field, gay with the gold of pumpkins.

"Just walkin'?" asked old Dave. "Or snoopin'?"

"Snooping," admitted Grant.

Dave took the pipe out of his mouth, spat, put it back in again. The whiskers draped themselves affectionately, and dangerously, about it.

"Diggin'?" asked old Dave.

"Nope," said Grant.

"Had a feller through here four, five years ago," said Dave. "that was worse'n a rabbit dog for diggin'. Found a place where there had been an old town and just purely tore up the place. Pestered the life out of me to tell him about the town, but I didn't rightly remember much. Heard my grandpappy once mention the name of the town, but danged if I ain't forgot it. This here feller bad a slew of old maps that he was all the time wavin' around and studying, trying' to figure out what was what, but I guess he never did know."

"Hunting for antiques," said Grant.

"Mebbe," old Dave told him. "Kept out of his way the best I could. But he wasn't no worse'n the one that was tryin' to trace some old road that ran through this way once. He had some maps, too. Left figurin' he'd found it and I didn't have the heart to tell him what he'd found was a path the cows had made."

He squinted at Grant cagily.

"You ain't huntin' no old roads, be you?"

"Nope," said Grant. "I'm a census taker."

"You're what?"

"Census taker," explained Grant. "Take down your name and age and where you live."

"What for?"

"Government wants to know," said Grant.

"We don't bother the gov'ment none," declared old Dave. "What call's the gov'ment got botherin' us?"

"Government won't bother you any," Grant told him. Might even take a notion to pay you something, some day. Never can tell."

"In that case," said old Dave, "it's different."

They perched on the fence, staring across the fields. Smoke curled up from a chimney hidden in a sunny hollow, yellow with the flame of birches. A creek meandered placidly across a dun autumn-coloured meadow and beyond it climbed the hills, tier on tier of golden maple trees.

Hunched on the rail, Grant felt the heat of the autumn sun soak into his back, smelled the stubbled field.

A good life, he told himself. Good crops, wood to burn, plenty of game to hunt. A happy life.

He glanced at the old man huddled beside him, saw the unworried wrinkles of kindly age that puckered up his face, tried for a moment to envision a life like this — a simple, pastoral life, akin to the historic days of the old American frontier, with all the frontier's compensations, none of its dangers.

Old Dave took the pipe out of his face, waved it at the field.

"Still lots of work to do," he announced, "but it ain't agittin' done. Them kids ain't worth the power to blow 'em up. Huntin' all the time. Fishin' too. Machinery breakin' down. Just ain't been around for quite a spell. Great hand at machinery, Joe is."

"Joe your son?"

"No. Crazy feller that lives off in the woods somewhere. Walks in and fixes things up, then walks off and leaves. Scarcely ever talks. Don't wait for a man to thank him. Just up and leaves. Been doin' it for years now. Grandpappy told me how he first came when he was a youngster. Still coming now."

Grant gasped. "Wait a second. It can't be the same man."

"Now," said old Dave, "that's the thing. Won't believe it, stranger, but he ain't a mite older now than when I first saw him. Funny sort of cuss. Lots of wild tales about him. Grandpappy always told about how he fooled around with ants."

"Ants!"

"Sure. Built a house — glasshouse, you know, over an ant hill and heated it, come winter. That's what grandpappy always said. Claimed he'd seen it. But I don't believe a word of it. Grandpappy was the biggest liar in seven counties. Admitted it hisself."

A brass— tongued bell clanged from the sunny hollow where the chimney smoked.

The old man climbed down from the fence, tapped out his pipe, squinting at the sun.

The bell boomed again across the autumn stillness. "That's ma," said old Dave. "Dinner's on. Squirrel dumplings, more than likely. Good eatin' as you ever hooked a tooth into. Let's get a hustle on."

***

A crazy fellow who came and fixed things and didn't wait for thanks. A man who looked the same as he did a hundred years ago. A chap who built a glasshouse over an ant hill and heated it, come winter.

It didn't make sense and yet old Baxter hadn't been lying. It wasn't another one of those tall yarns that had sprung up and still ran their course out here in the backwoods, amounting now to something that was very close to folklore.

All of the folklore had a familiar ring, a certain similarity, a definite pattern of underlying wit that tagged it for what it was. And this wasn't it. There was nothing humorous, even to the backwoods mind, in housing and heating an ant hill. To qualify for humour a tale like that would have to have a snapper, and this tale didn't have one.

Grant stirred uneasily on the cornshuck mattress, pulling the heavy quilt close around his throat.

Funny, he thought, the places that I sleep in. To-night a cornshuck mattress, last night an open campfire, the night before that a soft mattress and clean sheets in the Webster house.

The wind sucked up the hollow and paused on its way to flap a loose shingle on the house, came back to flap it once again. A mouse skittered somewhere in the darkened place. From the bed across the loft came the sound of regular breathing — two of the Baxter younger fry slept there.

A man who came and fixed things and didn't wait for thanks. That was what had happened with the gun. That was what had been happening for years to the Baxters' haywire farm machinery. A crazy feller by the name of Joe, who didn't age and had a handy bent at tinkering.

A thought came into Grant's head; he shoved it back, repressed it. There was no need of arousing hope. Snoop around some, ask guarded questions, keep your eyes open, Grant. Don't make your questions too pointed or they'll shut up like a clam.

Funny folk, these ridge runners. People who had no part of progress, who wanted no part of it. People who had turned their backs upon civilization, returning to the unhampered life of soil and forest, sun and rain.

Plenty of room for them here on Earth, lots of room for everyone, for Earth's population had dwindled in the last two hundred years, drained by the pioneers who flocked out to settle other planets, to shape the other worlds of the system to the economy of mankind.

Plenty of room and soil and game.

Maybe it was the best way after all. Grant remembered he had often thought that in the months he had tramped these hills. At times like this, with the comfort of the handmade quilt, the rough efficiency of the cornshuck mattress, the whisper of the wind along the shingled roof. Times like when be sat on the top rail of the fence and looked at the groups of golden pumpkins loafing in the sun.

A rustle came to him across the dark, the rustle of the corn-shuck mattress where the two boys slept. Then the pad of bare feet coming softly across the boards.

"You asleep, mister?" came the whisper.

"Nope. Want to crawl in with me?"

The youngster ducked under the cover, put cold feet against Grant's stomach.

"Grandpappy tell you about Joe?"

Grant nodded in the dark. "Said he hadn't been around, lately."

"Tell you about the ants?"

"Sure did. What do you know about the ants?"

"Me and Bill found them just a little while ago, keeping it a secret. We ain't told anyone but you. But we gotta tell you, I guess. You're from the gov'ment."

"There really was a glasshouse over the hill?"

"Yes, and… and" — the boy's voice gasped with excitement — "and that ain't all. Them ants had carts and there was chimneys coming out of the hill and smoke comin' from the chimneys. And… and-"

"Yes, what else?"

"We didn't wait to see anything else. Bill and me got scared. We ran."

The boy snuggled deeper into the cornshucks. "Gee, ever hear of anything like it? Ants pulling carts!"

***

The ants were pulling carts. And there were chimneys sticking from the hill, chimneys that belched tiny, acrid puffs of smoke that told of smelting ores.

Head throbbing with excitement, Grant squatted beside the nest, staring at the carts that trundled along the roads leading off into the grass-roots land. Empty carts going out, loaded carts coming back-loaded with seeds and here and there dismembered insect bodies. Tiny carts, moving rapidly, bouncing and jouncing behind the harnessed ants!

The glassite shield that once had covered the nest still was there, but it was broken and had fallen into disrepair, almost as if there were no further use of it, as if it had served a purpose that no longer existed.

The glen was wild, broken land that tumbled down towards the river bluffs, studded with boulders, alternating with tiny patches of meadow and clumps of mighty oaks. A hushed peace that one could believe had never heard a voice except to talk of wind in tree-tops and the tiny voices of the wild things that followed secret paths.

A place where ants might live undisturbed by plough or vagrant foot, continuing the millions of years of senseless destiny that dated from a day before there was anything like man — from a day before a single abstract thought had been born on the Earth. A closed and stagnant destiny that had no purpose except that ants might live.

And now someone had uncoiled the angle of that destiny, had set it on another path, had given the ants the secret of the wheel, the secret of working metals — how many other cultural handicaps bad been lifted from this ant hill, breaking the bottleneck of progress?

Hunger pressure, perhaps, would be one cultural handicap that would have been lifted for the ants. Providing of abundant food which gave them leisure for other things beyond the continued search for sustenance.

Another race on the road to greatness, developing along the social basis that had been built in that long gone day before the thing called Man had known the stir of greatness.

Where would it lead? What would the ant be like in another million years? Would ant and Man — could ant and Man find any common denominator as dog and Man would find for working out a co-operative destiny?

Grant shook his head. That was something the chances were against. For in dog and Man ran common blood, while ant and Man were things apart, life forms that were never meant to understand the other. They had no common basis such as had been joined in the paleolithic days when dog and Man dozed beside a fire and watched against the eyes that roved out in the night.

Grant sensed rather than heard the rustle of feet in the high grass back of him. Erect, he whirled around and saw the man before him. A gangling man with stooping shoulders and hands that were almost hamlike, but with sensitive fingers that tapered white and smooth.

"You are Joe?" asked Grant.

The man nodded. "And you are a man who has been hunting me."

Grant gasped. "Why perhaps I have, Not you personally, perhaps, but someone like you."

"Someone different," said Joe.

"Why didn't you stay the other night?" asked Grant. "Why did you run off? I wanted to thank you for fixing up the gun."

Joe merely stared at him, unspeaking, but behind the silent lips Grant sensed amusement, a vast and secret amusement.

"How in the world," asked Grant, "did you know the gun was broken? Had you been watching me?"

"I heard you think it was."

"You heard me think?"

"Yes," said Joe. "I hear you thinking now."

Grant laughed, a bit uneasily. It was disconcerting, but it was logical. It was the thing that he should have expected — this and more.

He gestured at the hill. "Those ants are yours?'

Joe nodded and the amusement again was bubbling just behind his lips.

"What are you laughing for?" snapped Grant.

"I am not laughing," Joe told him and somehow Grant felt rebuked, rebuked and small, like a child that has been slapped for something it should have known better than to do.

"You should publish your notes." said Grant. "They might be correlated with the work that Webster's doing."

Joe shrugged his shoulders. "I have no notes," he said.

"No notes!"

The lanky man moved towards the ant hill, stood staring down at it. "Perhaps," he declared, "you've figured out why I did it."

Grant nodded gravely. "I might have wondered that. Experimental curiosity, more than likely. Maybe compassion for a lower form of life. A feeling, perhaps, that just because man himself got the head start doesn't give him a monopoly on advancement."

Joe's eyes glittered in the sunlight. "Curiosity — maybe. I hadn't thought of that."

He hunkered down beside line bill. "Ever wonder why the ant advanced so far and then stood still? Why he built a nearly perfect social organization and let it go at that? What it was that stopped him in his tracks?"

"Hunger pressure, for one thing," Grant said.

"That and hibernation," declared the lanky man. "Hibernation, you see, wiped out the memory pattern from one season to the next. Each spring they started over, began from scratch again. They never were able to benefit from past mistakes, cash in on accumulated knowledge."

"So you fed them-"

"And heated the hill," said Joe, "so they wouldn't have to hibernate. So they wouldn't have to start out fresh with the coming of each spring."

"The carts?"

"I made a couple, left them there. It took ten years, but they finally figured out what they were for."

Grant nodded at the smokestacks.

"They did that themselves," Joe told him.

"Anything else?"

Joe lifted his shoulders wearily. "How should I know?"

"But, man, you watched them. Even if you didn't keep notes, you watched."

Joe shook his head. "I haven't laid eyes on them for almost fifteen years. I only came today because I heard you here. These ants, you see, don't amuse me any more."

Grant's mouth opened, then shut tight again. Finally, he said: "So that's the answer. That's why you did it. Amusement."

There was no shame on Joe's face, no defence, just a pained expression that said he wished they'd forget all about the ants. His mouth said: "Sure. Why else?"

"That gun of mine. I suppose that amused you, too."

"Not the gun," said Joe.

Not the gun, Grant's brain said. Of course, not the gun, you dumb-bell, but you yourself. You're the one that amused him. And you're amusing him right now.

Fixing up old Dave Baxter's farm machinery, then walking off without a word, doubtless had been a screaming joke. And probably he'd hugged himself and rocked for days with silent mirth after that time up at the Webster house when he'd pointed out the thing that was wrong with old Thomas Webster's space drive.

Like a smart-Aleck playing tricks on an awkward puppy.

Joe's voice broke his thoughts.

"You're an enumerator, aren't you? Why don't you ask me the questions? Now that you've found me you can't go off and not get it down on paper. My age especially. I'm one hundred and sixty-three and I'm scarcely adolescent. Another thousand years at least."

He hugged his knobby knees against his chest and rocked slowly back and forth. "Another thousand years and if I take good care of myself-"

"But that isn't all of it," Grant told him, trying to keep his voice calm. "There is something more. Something that you must do for us."

"For us?"

"For society," said Grant. "For the human race."

"Why?"

Grant stared. "You mean that you don't care."

Joe shook his head and in the gesture there was no bravado, no defiance of convention. It was just blunt statement of the fact.

"Money?" suggested Grant.

Joe waved his hands at the hills about them, at the spreading river valley. "I have this," he said. "I have no need of money."

"Fame, perhaps?"

Joe did not spit, but his face looked like he had. "The gratitude of the human race?"

"It doesn't last," said Joe and the old mockery was in his words, the vast amusement just behind his lips.

"Look, Joe," said Grant and, hard as he tried to keep it out, there was pleading in his voice, "this thing I have for you to do is important… important to generations yet to come, important to the human race, a milestone in our destiny-"

"And why should I," asked Joe, "do something for someone who isn't even born yet? Why should I look beyond the years of my own life? When I die, I die, and all the shouting and the glory, all the banners and the bugles will be nothing to me. I will not knew whether I lived a great life or a very poor one."

"The race," said Grant.

Joe laughed, a shout of laughter. "Race preservation, race advancement. That's what you're getting at. Why should you be concerned with that? Or I?"

The laughter lines smoothed out around his mouth and he shook a finger in mock admonishment. "Race preservation is a myth… a myth that you all have lived by — a sordid thing that has arisen out of your social structure. The race ends every day. When a man dies the race ends for him — so far as he's concerned there is no longer any race."

"You just don't care," said Grant.

"That," declared Joe, "is what I've been telling you."

He squinted at the pack upon the ground and a flicker of a smile wove about his lips. 'Perhaps," be suggested, "if it interested me-"

Grant opened up the pack, brought out the portfolio.

Almost reluctantly he pulled out the thin sheaf of papers, glanced at the title:

"Unfinished Philosophical-"

He handed it across, sat watching as Joe read swiftly and even as be watched he felt the sickening wrench of terrible failure closing on his brain.

Back in the Webster house he had thought of a mind that knew no groove of logic, a mind unhampered by four thousand years of mouldy human thought. That, he had told himself, might do the trick.

And here it was. But it still was not enough. There was something lacking — something he had never thought of, something the men in Geneva had never thought of, either. Something, a part of the human make-up that everyone, up to this moment, had taken for granted.

Social pressure was the thing that had held the human race together through all millennia — held the human race together as a unit just as hunger pressure had held the ants enslaved to a social pattern.

The need of one human being for the approval of his fellow humans, the need for a certain cult of fellowship — a psychological, almost physiological need for approval of one's thought and action. A force that kept men from going off at unsocial tangents, a force that made for social security and human solidarity, for the working together of the human family.

Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed for that approval. For without it a man was on his own, an outcast, an animal that had been driven from the pack.

It had led to terrible things, of course — to mob psychology, to racial persecution, to mass atrocities in the name of patriotism or religion. But likewise it had been the sizing that held the race together, the thing that from the very start had made human society possible.

And Joe didn't have it. Joe didn't give a damn. He didn't care what anyone thought of him. He didn't care whether anyone approved or not.

***

Grant felt the sun hot upon his back, heard the whisper of the wind that walked in the trees above him. And in some thicket a bird struck up a song.

Was this the trend of mutancy? This sloughing off of the basic instinct that made man a member of the race?

Had this man in front of him, reading the legacy of Juwain, found within himself, through his mutancy, a life so full that he could dispense with the necessity for the approval of his fellows? Had he, finally, after all these years, reached that stage of civilization where a man stood independent, disdaining all the artificiality of society?

Joe looked up.

"Very interesting," he said. "Why didn't he go ahead and finish it?"

"He died," said Grant.

Joe clucked his tongue inside his cheek. "He was wrong in one place." He flipped the pages, jabbed with a finger. "Right here. That's where the error cropped up. That's what bogged him down."

Grant stammered. "But… but there shouldn't be an error. He died, that's all. He died before he finished it."

Joe folded the manuscript neatly, tucked it in his pocket.

"Just as well," he said. "He probably would have botched it."

"Then you can finish it? You can-"

There was, Grant knew, no use of going on. He read the answer in Joe's eyes.

"You really think," said Joe and his words were terse and measured, "that I'd turn this over to you squalling humans?"

Grant shrugged in defeat. "I suppose not. I suppose I should have known. A man like you-"

"I," said Joe, "can use this thing myself."

He rose slowly, idly swung his foot, ploughing a furrow through the ant hill, toppling the smoking chimneys, burying the toiling carts.

With a cry, Grant leaped to his feet, blind anger gripping him, blind anger driving the hand that snatched out his gun.

"Hold it!" said Joe.

Grant's arm halted with the gun still pointing towards the ground.

"Take it easy, little man," said Joe. "I know you'd like to kill me, but I can't let you do it. For I have plans you see. And, after all, you wouldn't be killing me for the reason that you think."

"What difference would it make why I killed you?" rasped Grant. "You'd be dead, wouldn't you? You wouldn't be loose with Juwain's philosophy."

"But," Joe told him, almost gently, "that's not why you would kill me. You'd do it because you're sore at me for mussing up the ant hill."

"That might have been the reason first," said 'Grant. "But not now-"

"Don't try it," said Joe. "Before you ever pressed the trigger you'd be meat yourself."

Grant hesitated.

"If you think I'm bluffing," Joe taunted him, "go ahead and call me."

For a long moment the two stood face to face, the gun still pointing at the ground.

"Why can't you throw in with us?" asked Grant. "We need a man like you. You were the one that showed old Tom Webster how to build a space drive. The work you've done with ants-"

Joe was stepping forward, swiftly, and Grant heaved up the gun. He saw the fist coming at him, a hamlike, powerful fist that fairly whistled with its vicious speed.

A fist that was faster than his finger on the trigger.

***

Something wet and hot was rasping across Grant's face and he lifted a hand and tried to brush it off.

But it went on, licking across his face.

He opened his eyes and Nathaniel did a jig in front of them.

"You're all right," said Nathaniel. "I was so afraid-"

"Nathaniel!" croaked Grant. "What are you doing herw?"

"I ran away," Nathaniel told him. "I want to go with you."

Grant shook his head. "You can't go with me. I have far to go. I have a job to do."

He got to his hands and knees and felt along the ground. When his hand touched cold metal, he picked it up and slid it in the holster.

"I let him get away," he said, "and I can't let him go. I gave him something that belonged to all mankind and I can't let him use it."

"I can track," Nathaniel told him. "I track squirrels like everything."

"You have more important things to do than tracking,"

Grant told the dog. "You see, I found out something today. Got a glimpse of a certain trend — a trend that all mankind may follow. Not today nor to-morrow, nor even a thousand years from now. Maybe never, but it's a thing we can't overlook. Joe may be just a little farther along the path than the rest of us and we may be following faster than we think. We may all end up like Joe. And if that is what is happening, if that is where it all will end, you dogs have a job ahead of you."

Nathaniel stared up at him, worried wrinkles on his face.

"I don't understand," he pleaded. "You use words I can't make out."

"Look, Nathaniel. Men may not always be the way they are today. They may change. And, if they do, you have to carry on; you have to take the dream and keep it going. You'll have to pretend that you are men."

"Us dogs," Nathaniel pledged, "will do it."

"It won't come for thousands and thousands of years," said Grant. "You will have time to get ready. But you must know. You must pass the word along. You must not forget"

"I know," said Nathaniel. "Us dogs will tell the pups and the pups will tell their pups."

"That's the idea," said Grant.

He stooped and scratched Nathaniel's ear and the dog, tail wagging to a stop, stood and watched him climb the hill.