The Laugh by Robert Abernathy _If a lad of eight should get an urge to go tramping into a cosmic shoestore in search of a giant’s boots his egotism might become a frightening thing. Robert Abernathy probably hopes it won’t happen. But he here plants such grave doubts in_ our _mind that we wonder if it’s safe to spoil children._ =To Dicky grownups were absurdly like ants. They worked hard for no good purpose. But some day a big, big change would be coming!= Dicky lay comfortably on his stomach in the high backyard weeds, watching the ants. His eyes darted back and forth, trying to see what all of them were doing at the same time--all around their hill on the sun-warmed bare slope by the weed patch. But there were too many of them and they ran too fast in too many different directions. They skirmished, climbed, and slid. They pushed, lifted, and tugged at bits of straw, at seeds, and even the leg of a beetle. They labored mightily and inefficiently to transport these treasures to their nest. Dicky gazed at them in rapt absorption obscurely awed by their incomprehensible fervor of dedication. They reminded him-- He searched the teeming storehouse of a five-year-old’s memories, and thought that the ants reminded him of the lawn-tender which, every evening when it wasn’t raining, crept out of its little kennel behind the house to see if the grass needed cutting or watering. If it did, the dutiful machine went clicking and buzzing up and down on its fat wheels, pivoting precisely at the edge of the yard. It never came down here, where the ground sloped toward the brook thirty yards away, and the weeds grew rank--where Dicky the courageous wasn’t supposed to go either. He glanced up the slope, suddenly conscious of the naked sun blazing down on him through the thin cover of foliage and of the nearness of the house beyond its clipped green rectangle of lawn. The cooling intake on the house roof turned slowly, flaring to snare an unreliable faint breeze. The windows had half-shuttered themselves against the July afternoon brilliance, and they now resembled squinting eyes. The eyes were dark with indoor shadow and you couldn’t tell whether they were looking at you or not. But if Mother did look out, she couldn’t possibly see him here. She would think he was sitting in the sun by the wall of the house, playing as he was supposed to do with his toy cars or his toy helicopter. The cars would run just to the edge of the yard, and the helicopter would fly only as high as the house. So naturally Dicky had grown bored with them. He wriggled closer to the busy ants, to the very edge of the weed forest. The ants went on behaving as if Dicky wasn’t there. Softly, Dicky said, “Boo! Woo? _You!_” But the ants didn’t notice.