The Petrified Ants Read Free

excitedly. “What is that splinter next to him?” He took a magnifying glass from his breast pocket and squinted through the lens. He swallowed. “Josef,” he said hoarsely, “you look and tell me what you see.”
    Josef shrugged. “Some interesting little parasite maybe, or a plant, perhaps.” He moved the chip up under the magnifying glass. “Maybe a crystal or—” He turned pale. Trembling, he passed the glass and fossil to Borgorov. “Comrade, you tell us what you see.”
    “I see,” said Borgorov, screwing up his face in florid, panting concentration. He cleared his throat and began afresh. “I see what looks like a fat stick.”
    “Look closer,” said Peter and Josef together.
    “Well, come to think of it,” said Borgorov, “it does look something like a—for goodness sake—like a—” He left the sentence unfinished, and looked up at Josef perplexedly.
    “Like a bass fiddle, Comrade?” said Josef.
    “Like a bass fiddle,” said Borgorov, awed …

II
    A drunken, bad-tempered card game was in progress at the far end of the miners’ barracks where Peter and Josef were quartered. A thunderstorm boomed and slashed outside. The brother myrmecologists sat facing each other on their bunks, passing their amazing fossil back and forth and speculating as to what Borgorov would bring from the storage shed in the morning.
    Peter probed his mattress with his hand—straw, a thin layer of straw stuffed into a dirty white bag and laid on planks. Peter breathed through his mouth to avoid drawing the room’s dense stench through his long, sensitive nose. “Could it be a child’s toy bass fiddle that got washed into that layer with the ant somehow?” he said. “You know this place was once a toy factory.”
    “Did you ever hear of a toy bass fiddle, let alone one that size? It’d take the greatest jeweler in the world to turn out a job like that. And Borgorov swears there wasn’t any way for it to get down that deep—not in the past million years, anyway.”
    “Which leaves us one conclusion,” said Peter.
    “One.” Josef sponged his forehead with a huge red handkerchief.
    “Something could be worse than
this
pigpen?” said Peter. Josef kicked him savagely as a few heads raised up from the card games across the room. “Pigpen,” laughed a small man as he threw his cards down and walked to his cot. He dug beneath his mattress and produced a bottle of cognac. “Drink, Comrade?”
    “Peter!” said Josef firmly. “We left some of our things in the village. We’d better get them right away.”
    Gloomily, Peter followed his brother out into the thunderstorm. The moment they were outside, Josef seized him by the arm and steered him into the slim shelter of the eaves. “Peter, my boy, Peter—when are you going to grow up?” He sighed heavily, implored with upturned palms. “When? That man is from the police.” He ran his stubby fingers over the polished surface where hair had once been.
    “Well, it
is
a pigpen,” said Peter stubbornly.
    Josef threw up his hands with exasperation. “Of course it is. But you don’t have to tell the police you think so.” He laid his hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Since your reprimand, anything you say can get you into terrible trouble. It can get us both into terrible trouble.” He shuddered. “Terrible.”
    Lightning blazed across the countryside. In the dazzling instant, Peter saw that the slopes still seethed with the digging horde. “Perhaps I should give up speaking altogether, Josef.”
    “I ask only that you think out what you say. For your own good, Peter. Please, just stop and think.”
    “Everything you’ve called me down for saying has been the truth. The paper I had to apologize for was the truth.” Peter waited for a rolling barrage of thunder to subside. “I mustn’t speak the truth?”
    Josef peered apprehensively around the corner, squinted into the darkness beneath the eaves. “You mustn’t speak certain kinds of truth,” he