The Petrified Ants Read Free Page A

whispered, “not if you want to go on living.” He dug his hands deep in his pockets, hunched his shoulders. “Give in a little, Peter. Learn to overlook certain things. It’s the only way.”
    Together, without exchanging another word, the brothersreturned to the glare and suffocation of the barracks, their feet making sucking noises in their drenched shoes and socks.
    “Too bad all our things are locked up until morning, Peter,” said Josef loudly.
    Peter hung his coat on a nail to dry, dropped heavily on his hard bunk, and pulled his shoes off. His movements were clumsy, his nerves dulled by a vast aching sensation of pity, of loss. Just as the lightning had revealed for a split second the gray men and gouged mountainsides—so had this talk suddenly revealed in a merciless flash the naked, frightened soul of his brother. Now Peter saw Josef as a frail figure in a whirlpool, clinging desperately to a raft of compromises. Peter looked down at his unsteady hands. “It’s the only way,” Josef had said, and Josef was right.
    Josef pulled a thin blanket over his head to screen out the light. Peter tried to lose himself in contemplation of the fossil ant again. Involuntarily, his powerful fingers clamped down on the white chip. The chip and priceless ant snapped in two. Ruefully, Peter examined the faces of the break, hoping to glue them together again. On one of the faces he saw a tiny gray spot, possibly a mineral deposit. Idly, he focused his magnifying glass on it.
    “Josef!”
    Sleepily, Josef pushed the blanket away from his face. “Yes, Peter?”
    “Josef, look.”
    Josef stared through the lens for fully a minute without speaking. When he spoke, his tone was high, uneven. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry or wind my watch.”
    “It looks like what I think it looks like?”
    Josef nodded. “A book, Peter—a book.”

III
    Josef and Peter yawned again and again, and shivered in the cold twilight of the mountain dawn. Neither had slept, but their bloodshot eyes were quick and bright-looking, impatient, excited. Borgorov teetered back and forth on his thick boot soles, berating a soldier who was fumbling with the lock on a long toolshed.
    “Did you sleep well in your quarters?” Borgorov asked Josef solicitously.
    “Perfectly. It was like sleeping on a cloud,” said Josef.
    “I slept like a rock,” said Peter brightly.
    “Oh?” said Borgorov quizzically. “Then you don’t think it was a pigpen after all, eh?” He didn’t smile when he said it.
    The door swung open, and two nondescript German laborers began dragging boxes of broken limestone from the shed. Each box, Peter saw, was marked with a number, and the laborers arranged them in order along a line Borgorov scratched in the dirt with his iron-shod heel.
    “There,” said Borgorov. “That’s the lot.” He pointed with a blunt finger. “One, two, and three. Number one is from the deepest layer—just inside the limestone—and the rest were above it in the order of their numbers.” He dusted his hands and sighed with satisfaction, as though he himself had moved the boxes. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll leave you to work.” He snapped his fingers, and the soldier marched the two Germans down the mountainside. Borgorov followed, hopping twice to get in step.
    Feverishly, Peter and Josef dug into box number one, the one containing the oldest fossils, piling rock fragments on the ground. Each built a white cairn, sat beside it, 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