Let the Ants Try

In Short

Written in the shadow of the early Atomic Age, Let the Ants Try follows Dr. Salva Gordy, a physicist who loses his family and home during a brief, ruinous global war. Desperate to replace flawed humanity with a more worthy successor, he uses a secret time machine to seed prehistoric Earth with mutated, lunged ant queens. When he travels into the future to see the civilization he fostered, he discovers that the giant, intelligent insects view him not as a creator, but as a biological threat to be analyzed and eradicated. It is a tight, cynical tale of hubris, human self-loathing, and temporal irony.

The Story

Following the total destruction of Detroit in the Three-Hour War, Dr. Salva Gordy lives alone among the radioactive ruins, haunted by the slow death of his irradiated children. Disillusioned with humanity’s terminal impulse for self-destruction, he abandons his scientific work for the government and scrapes out a primitive existence in a solitary garden patch.

His isolation ends when John de Terry, a former biology student from Pasadena, arrives searching for food. Together, the two men tend the plot and discover mutated, soft-bodied red ants that appear to possess lungs instead of a primitive tracheal system—a biological leap that would allow insects to grow to human size. Convinced that humanity has forfeited its right to rule the planet, Gordy reveals his secret invention: a time displacement device that the War Department dubbed a Time Machine.

The two men capture eight mutated queen ants and travel back forty million years into the warm, humid Coal Measure forests. Gordy buries the queens in the primordial soil, convinced that giving the insects a forty-million-year head start might create an alien civilization capable of preventing human warfare or replacing mankind entirely.

Traveling forward into the future, they emerge in a vast metropolis of hundred-foot metal cones inhabited by man-sized, beetle-black ants featuring unnervingly complex, blotchy eyes. Gordy’s hopes for peaceful contact crumble immediately. The silent, expressionless creatures show no recognition of their creators; instead, they capture both men in razor-sharp, serrated pincers. When de Terry struggles, the ants dispassionately slaughter him.

Imprisoned in a windowless room, Gordy reflects bitter-endedly on his hubris. He realizes his grand experiment did not force humanity to unite against an outside threat; it erased humanity entirely before it could ever evolve. The ants strip his time machine to its components and force Gordy to reassemble it. Once he completes the task, his captors move to execute him as well.

Gordy fights back in a flurry of panic, blinding one ant and scrambling back into the controls of the machine just in time to escape back to the prehistoric past. Intent on digging up the queens to undo his catastrophic error, Gordy steps out into the fern jungle only to spot a second, larger time vehicle nearby. The intelligent ants, possessing millions of years to master the technology they stole from him, have followed him back through time to protect their timeline. As the insect horde swarms over him, Gordy meets his end in the ancient forest.

How It Unfolds

The war after the war Left hollowed out by the atomic annihilation of Detroit and the death of his family, Dr. Salva Gordy retreats to a ruined homestead. He turns away government agents seeking his secret research, choosing instead to scavenge for food while coexisting with mutated garden pests.

A new evolutionary path Former biology student John de Terry stumbles onto Gordy’s plot, and the two men team up to clear the tough, mutated weeds around the cabin. Inspecting the local fauna, they discover soft-bodied ants that have mutated to possess lung-like breathing systems, granting them the potential to reach human scale.

Seeding the ancient past Gordy reveals his operational time displacement machine, and together they collect eight mutated ant queens. They travel forty million years into Earth's prehistoric past, burying the queens beneath soft, fern-lined soil to jump-start an insect-led evolutionary line.

The concrete termitarium Jumping forward into the future, the time travelers materialize in a surreal city of soaring metal cones and strange vehicles. They step out to make contact, only to encounter towering, hard-shelled ants with disturbing, pupil-bearing eyes who remain utterly uncommunicative.

Cruel analysis Without provocation or warning, the giant ants pin both men with spiny pincers. When de Terry panics and moves, the creatures execute him with cold efficiency, while Gordy is dragged into a dark chamber to be studied, fed pulpy mash, and kept under constant observation.

The final paradox Forced to rebuild his dismantled time machine for his captors, Gordy realizes he erased human history entirely. He manages to escape back to the past to destroy the original queens, only to discover that the future ants have built their own machine to hunt him down and secure their existence.

The People

• Dr. Salva Gordy: A brilliant physicist and mathematician formerly based in Pasadena. Traumatized by the loss of his wife and the agonizing death of his children during the Three-Hour War, he rejects human society and harbors a deep misanthropy. Desperate to find a superior successor to flawed mankind, his arrogance drives him to alter natural history, leading to his own undoing.
• John de Terry: A younger man who majored in biology before the atomic conflict devastated Detroit. Wandering the ruined landscape as a scruffy survivalist, his keen biological eye recognizes the evolutionary significance of the mutated, lunged ants. Though enthusiastic about the grand experiment of temporal seeding, his impulsiveness in the future city makes him the first victim of the monstrous ants.
• The Government Man: An uninvited messenger sent by the newly appointed Secretary of War, Arnold Cavanagh. Representing the persistent, self-destructive political structures that survived the nuclear exchange, he tries to press Gordy’s temporal discoveries into service as a weapon, prompting Gordy to break ties with human authority entirely.

In Its Own Voice

"Gordy survived the Three-Hour War, even though Detroit didn't; he was on his way to Washington, with his blueprints and models in his bag, when the bombs struck."

A stark opening line establishing the suddenness of the nuclear disaster and the absolute isolation that breaks Gordy’s allegiance to the human race.

"Humanity has had its chance, John... The atomic bomb wasn't enough; we had to turn everything into a weapon."

Gordy reflects on the collapse of civilization while standing over his ruined garden, framing his decision to intervene in time as a moral verdict against mankind.

"They're ugly things... They're filthy!"

Gordy and de Terry react with sudden horror upon stepping out of the time machine, realizing that their evolutionary experiment has birthed unfeeling, giant monsters rather than noble partners.

What It's Really About

Let the Ants Try is a bleak critique of mid-century scientific hubris and the totalizing despair of the early Nuclear Age. Written shortly after World War II, the story captures the profound self-loathing that emerged alongside atomic weaponry. Gordy’s attempt to play God stems not from curiosity, but from a grief-stricken conviction that humanity is an evolutionary dead end that deserves replacement.

The narrative exposes the fallacy of anthropomorphic thinking. Gordy naively assumes that an advanced, intelligent species would share human concepts of peace, gratitude, or alliance. Instead, the ants operate with absolute, non-human utilitarianism—treating their creators as simple biological specimens to be dissected, utilized, and exterminated. Ultimately, the plot highlights the tragic futility of trying to escape human violence through temporal interference.

Why Read It Today

Pohl’s short story offers a lean, unsentimental slice of mid-twentieth-century pulp science fiction that strips away grand space-opera heroics in favor of dark irony. It reads rapidly, driving from atmospheric post-apocalyptic ruin to prehistoric jungle and dystopic future without wasting a word.

readers accustomed to optimistic time-travel adventures will find a refreshing, gritty pessimism here. Pohl doesn't spare his protagonist from the horrific consequences of his good intentions, making the final action beats feel genuinely desperate. The story serves as a fascinating snapshot of Cold War anxieties, reflecting how quickly post-war writers questioned whether humanity deserved to survive its own technology.

Modern readers may find the swift pacing and pulp-era simplicity somewhat blunt—the dialogue is direct, character depth is minimal, and the scientific premises rely on the rapid mutational logic common to 1940s magazine fiction. Yet the core horror remains surprisingly effective: the quiet realization that in trying to cure human conflict, Gordy accidentally signed humanity’s death warrant forty million years in the past. It is an ideal, quick read for fans of vintage sci-fi and classic twilight-zone premises.