edible at all and you lived on the cans you spoke about, and felt quite superior because you can digest tin. Well, so be it, we are obviously a younger race and haven’t evolved as far as you. We need flesh for nourishment.”
I picked up a stick with the intention of unearthing some ants for him, but then threw it down. “Mr. Wonk,” I said, “from what I can see of you, we belong to races that if not precisely the same are pretty closely allied. Now, there’s not going to be enough ants in this hole to feed a person your size, let alone your comrades in the ship. Why not try the soup I opened for you—not the can, but rather the contents, that red-colored water with the different things in it. Those are vegetables, and there are also some shreds of beef—that’s the flesh of a cow.”
“Good gracious,” gasped Wonk. “Do you kill and eat things with a central nervous system and warm blood?”
This point was not a new one to me. Before Myra, I had had a vegetarian friend. “You must try carrots and peas and celery, beans, cabbage, and so on: they are plants and grow in the soil.”
“Tell me,” he asked, “are we anywhere near a shop where food is sold? If so, would it not be simpler for all concerned if we simply went there and purchased enough ants to take us on our way? We’re perfectly capable of paying, I assure you.”
“Briceville’s five miles, but I’m afraid my friend has taken the car. Besides, you wouldn’t be able to buy ants there. People here don’t ever eat that sort of thing. You really must try other kinds of food. We have all sorts: grains and eggs and fruits of many varieties. Don’t you eat anything else on Wurtz?”
“Some grasses and leaves,” said Wonk, “as filler, but of course they’re not very nutritional—to leave taste out of the picture.”
“Please come back to the kitchen and try the sardines. They were coldblooded when alive.”
Wonk put his hand out. “Darned nice of you to offer. But I think we’d better try elsewhere. I hope I wasn’t too rude earlier. I apologize.”
“You’re not going to get what you want anywhere else in this country,” I said. “But I’ve seen pictures of eight-foot anthills in Africa. Perhaps you could zoom over there in your saucer.” I snapped my fingers. “Damn! I didn’t bring a camera along this week.”
“Camera?”
“I wish I could take a snapshot of your people and your spacecraft. Nobody will believe this otherwise.” But he was still frowning. “You don’t know what a camera is?” As it turned out, he did not. I explained.
He shook his head. “I confess that Earth has consistently gone beyond our wildest expectations. We were prepared to find you had the wheel and the lever, things that even yet we haven’t mastered. Our wheel is still awfully bumpy, though we have been making some progress from the square we started with: it’s now hexagonal.”
My suspicions about his authenticity had waxed and waned. This was too much. “Come now,” I said derisively, “you supposedly fly here from outer space in a vehicle that obviously has overcome the problems of gravity and friction and centrifugal force, etcetera, and burns a fuel that has no visible exhaust, and you haven’t perfected the wheel ?”
Wonk shrugged his round shoulders. “Oh, the ship. They left it behind. I don’t think it needs fuel. It just runs when you move a switch and stops when you turn it off. To make it go up, you move a stick back, forward to make it go down, and so on. These things are all clearly labeled, else we wouldn’t have the foggiest idea as to how to operate the machine.”
“ They ? Who are they ?”
“The superior people who occupied our planet for a while and dominated us, making us do menial tasks for them.”
“But they left?”
“To conquer other worlds. They gave us up as completely hopeless, I’m afraid. Said we don’t even do a good job as flunkies.” Wonk smiled sweetly. “They had robots