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Title: The Raid on the Termites

Author: Paul Ernst

Release date: November 12, 2008 [eBook #27248]
                Most recently updated: January 4, 2021

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RAID ON THE TERMITES ***




Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net









[Illustration: Denny bounded free and again sent the length of his spear
into the body.]


The Raid on the Termites

_A Complete Novelette_

By Paul Ernst


 Armed with splinters of steel, two
 ant-sized men dare the formidable
     mysteries of a termitary.




CHAPTER I

_The Challenge of the Mound_


It was a curious, somehow weird-looking thing, that mound. About a yard
in height and three and a half in diameter, it squatted in the grassy
grove next the clump of trees like an enormous, inverted soup plate.
Here and there tufts of grass waved on it, of a richer, deeper color,
testifying to the unwholesome fertility of the crumbling outer stuff
that had flaked from the solid mound walls.

Like an excrescence on the flank of Mother Earth herself, the mound
loomed; like an unhealthy, cancerous growth. And inside the enigmatic
thing was another world. A dark world, mysterious, horrible, peopled by
blind and terrible demons--a world like a Dante's dream of a second
Inferno.

Such, at least, were the thoughts of Dennis Braymer as he worked with
delicate care at the task of sawing into the hard cement of a portion of
the wall near the rounded top.

His eyes, dark brown and rimmed with thick black lashes, flashed
earnestly behind his glasses as they concentrated on his difficult job.
His face, lean and tanned, was a mask of seriousness. To him, obviously,
this was a task of vital importance; a task worthy of all a man's
ability of brain and logic.

Obviously also, his companion thought of the work as just something with
which to fill an idle afternoon. He puffed at a pipe, and regarded the
entomologist with a smile.

To Jim Holden, Denny was simply fussing fruitlessly and absurdly with an
ordinary "ant-hill," as he persisted in miscalling a termitary. Playing
with bugs, that was all. Wasting his time poking into the affairs of
termites--and acting, by George, as though those affairs were of supreme
significance!

He grinned, and tamped and relighted the tobacco in his pipe. He
refrained from putting his thoughts into words, however. He knew, of
old, that Denny was apt to explode if his beloved work were interrupted
by a careless layman. Besides, Dennis had brought him here rather under
protest, simply feeling that it was up to a host to do a little
something or other by way of trying to amuse an old college mate who had
come for a week's visit. Since he was there on sufferance, so to speak,
it was up to him to keep still and not interrupt Denny's play.

The saw rasped softly another time or two, then moved, handled with
surgeon's care, more gently--till at last a section about as big as the
palm of a man's hand was loose on the mound-top.

Denny's eyes snapped. His whole wiry, tough body quivered. He visibly
held his breath as he prepared to flip back that sawed section of
curious, strong mound wall.

He snatched up his glass, overturned the section.

Jim drew near to watch, too, seized in spite of himself by some of the
scientist's almost uncontrollable excitement.

Under the raised section turmoil reigned for a moment. Jim saw a horde
of brownish-white insects, looking something like ants, dashing
frenziedly this way and that as the unaccustomed light of sun and
exposure of outer air impinged upon them. But the turmoil lasted only a
little while.

Quickly, in perfect order, the termites retreated. The exposed honeycomb
of cells and runways was deserted. A slight heaving of earth told how
the insects were blocking off the entrances to the exposed floor, and
making that floor their new roof to replace the roof this invading giant
had stripped from over them.

In three minutes there wasn't a sign of life in the hole. The
observation--if one could call so short a glimpse at so abnormally
acting a colony an observation--was over.

       *       *       *       *       *

Denny rose to his feet, and dashed his glass to the ground. His face was
twisted in lines of utter despair, and through his clenched teeth the
breath whistled in uneven gasps.

"My God!" he groaned. "My God--if only I could see them! If only I could
get in there, and watch them at their normal living. But it's always
like this. The only glance we're permitted is at a stampede following
the wrecking of a termitary. And that tells us no more about the real
natures of the things than you could tell about the nature of normal men
by watching their behavior after an earthquake!"

Jim Holden tapped out his pipe. On his face the impatiently humorous
look gave place to a measure of sympathy. Good old Denny. How he took
these trivial disappointments to heart. But, how odd that any man could
get so worked up over such small affairs! These bugologists were queer
people.

"Oh, well," he said, half really to soothe Denny, half deliberately to
draw him out, "why get all boiled up about the contrariness of ordinary
little bugs?"

Denny rose to the bait at once. "Ordinary little bugs? If you knew what
you were talking about, you wouldn't dismiss the termite so casually!
These 'ordinary little bugs' are the most intelligent, the most
significant and highly organized of all the insect world.

"Highly organized?" he repeated himself, his voice deepening. "They're
like a race of intelligent beings from another planet--superior even to
Man, in some ways. They have a king and queen. They have 'soldiers,'
developed from helpless, squashy things into nightmare creations with
lobster-claw mandibles longer than the rest of their bodies put
together. They have workers, who bore the tunnels and build the mounds.
And they have winged ones from among which are picked new kings and
queens to replace the original when they get old and useless. And all
these varied forms, Jim, they hatch at will, through some marvelous
power of selection, from the same, identical kind of eggs. Now, I ask
you, could you take the unborn child and make it into a man with four
arms or a woman with six legs and wings, at will, as these insects, in
effect, do with theirs?"

"I never tried," said Jim.

"Just a soft, helpless, squashy little bug, to begin with," Denny went
on, ignoring his friend's levity. "Able to live only in warm
countries--yet dying when exposed directly to the sun. Requiring a very
moist atmosphere, yet exiled to places where it doesn't rain for months
at a time. And still, under circumstances harsher even than those Man
has had to struggle against, they have survived and multiplied."

"Bah, bugs," murmured Jim maddeningly.

       *       *       *       *       *

But again Denny ignored him, and went on with speculations concerning
the subject that was his life passion. He was really thinking aloud,
now; the irreverent Holden was for the moment nonexistent.

"And the something, the unknown intelligence, that seems to rule each
termitary! The something that seems able to combine oxygen from the air
with hydrogen from the wood they eat and make necessary moisture; the
something that directs all the blind subjects in their marvelous
underground architecture; the something that, at will, hatches a dozen
different kinds of beings from the common stock of eggs--what can it be?
A sort of super-termite? A super-intellect set in the minute head of an
insect, yet equal to the best brains of mankind? We'll probably never
know, for, whatever the unknown intelligence is, it lurks in the
foundations of the termitaries, yards beneath the surface, where we
cannot penetrate without blowing up the whole mound--and at the same
time destroying all the inhabitants."

Jim helped Denny gather up his scientific apparatus. They started across
the fields toward Denny's roadster, several hundred yards away--Jim,
blond and bulking, a hundred and ninety pounds of hardy muscle and bone;
Denny wiry and slender, dark-eyed and dark-haired. The sledge-hammer and
the rapier; the human bull, and the human panther; the one a student
kept fit by outdoor studies, and the other a careless, rich young
time-killer groomed to the pink by the big-game hunting and South Sea
sailing and other adventurous ways of living he preferred.

"This stuff is all very interesting," he said perfunctorily, "but what
has it to do with practical living? How will the study of bugs, no
matter how remarkable the bug, be of benefit to the average man? What I
mean is, your burning zeal--your really bitter disappointment a minute
ago--seem a bit out of place. A bit--well, exaggerated don't you know."

       *       *       *       *       *

Denny halted; and Jim, perforce, stopped, too. Denny's dark eyes burned
into Jim's blue ones.

"How does it affect practical living? You, who have been in the tropics
many times on your lion-spearing and snake-hunting jaunts, ask such a
thing? Haven't you ever seen the damage these infernal things can do?"

Jim shook his head. "I've never happened to be in termite country,
though I've heard tales about them."

"If you've heard stories, you have at least in idea of their deadliness
when they're allowed to multiply. You must have heard how they literally
eat up houses and the furnishings within, how they consume telegraph
poles, railroad ties, anything wooden within reach. The termite is a
ghastly menace. When they move in--men eventually move out! And their
appearance here in California has got many a nationally famous man half
crazy. That's what they mean to the average person!"

Jim, scratched his head. "I didn't think of that angle of it," he
admitted.

"Well, it's time you thought of something besides fantastic ways of
risking your life. The termite has been kept in place, till now, by only
two things: ants, which are its bitterest enemies, and constantly attack
and hamper its development; and climatic conditions, which bar it from
the temperate zones. Now suppose, with all their intelligence and force
of organization--not to mention that mysterious and terrible unknown
intelligence that leads them--they find a way to whip the ants once for
all, and to immunize themselves to climatic changes? Mankind will
probably be doomed."

"Gosh," said Jim, with exaggerated terror.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Laugh if you want to," said Dennis, "but I tell you the termite is a
very real menace. Even in its present stage of development. And the
maddening thing is that we can't observe them and so discover how best
to fight them.

"To get away from the light that is fatal to them, they build mounds
like that behind us, of silicated, half-digested wood, which hardens
into a sort of cement that will turn the cutting edge of steel. If you
pry away some of the wall to spy on them, you get the fiasco I was just
rewarded with. If you try to penetrate to the depths of the mystery,
yards underground, by blowing up the termitary with gun powder, the only
way of getting to the heart of things--you destroy the termites. Strays
are seldom seen; in order, again, to avoid light and air-exposure, they
tunnel underground or build tubes above ground to every destination.
Always they keep hidden and secret. Always they work from within, which
is why walls and boards they have devoured look whole: the outer shell
has been left untouched and all the core consumed."

"Can't you get at the beasts in the laboratory?" asked Jim.

"No. If you put them into glass boxes to watch them, they manage to
corrode the glass so it ceases to be transparent. And they can bore
their way out of any wood, or even metal, containers you try to keep
them in. The termite seems destined to remain a gruesome, marvelous,
possibly deadly mystery."

       *       *       *       *       *

He laughed abruptly, shrugged his shoulders, and started toward the car
again.

"When I get off on my subject, there's no telling when I'll stop. But,
Jim, I tell you, I'd give years of my life to be able to do what all
entomologists are wild to do--study the depths of a termite mound. God!
What wouldn't I give for the privilege of shrinking to ant-size, and
roaming loose in that secretive-looking mound behind us!"

He laughed again, and slapped Holden's broad back.

"_There_ would be a thrill for you, you bored adventurer! There would be
exploration work! A trip to Mars wouldn't be in it. The nightmare
monsters you would see, the hideous creations, the cannibalism, the
horrible but efficient slave system carried on by these blind,
intelligent things in the dark depths of the subterranean cells! Lions?
Suppose you were suddenly confronted by a thing as big as a horse, with
fifteen-foot jaws of steely horn that could slice you in two and hardly
know it! How would you like that?"

And now in the other man's eyes there was a glint, while his face
expressed aroused interest.

Every man to his own game, thought Denny curiously, watching the
transformation. He lived for scientific experiments and observations
having to do with termites. Holden existed, apparently, only for the
thrill of pitting his brain and brawn against dangerous beasts, wild
surroundings, or tempestuous elements. If only their two supreme
interests in life could be combined....

"How would I like it?" said Jim. "Denny, old boy, when you can introduce
me to an adventure like that ..." He waved his arm violently to complete
the sentence. "What a book of travel it would make! 'The Raid on the
Termites. Exploring an Insect Hell. Death in an Ant-hill....'"

"Termitary! Termitary!" corrected Denny irritably.

"Whatever you want to call it," Jim conceded airily. He dumped the
apparatus he was carrying into the rear compartment of the roadster.
"But why speak of miracles? Even if we were sent to a modern hand
laundry, we could hardly be shrunk to ant-size. Shall we ramble along
home?"




CHAPTER II

_The Pact_


"What are we going to do to-night?" asked Jim.

Dennis looked quizzically at his big friend. Jim was pacing restlessly
up and down the living room of the bachelor apartment, puffing jerkily
at his eternal pipe. Dennis knew the symptoms. Though he hadn't seen Jim
for over a year, he remembered his characteristics well enough.

Some men seem designed only for action. They are out of step with the
modern era. They should have lived centuries ago when the world was more
a place of physical, and less of purely mental, rivalry.

Jim was of this sort. Each time he returned from some trip--to Siberia,
the Congo, the mountainous wilderness of the Caucasus--he was going to
settle down and stop hopping about the globe from one little-known and
dangerous spot to another. Each time, in a matter of weeks, he grew
restless again, spoiling for action. Then came another impulsive
journey.

He was spoiling for action now. He didn't really care what happened that
evening, what was planned. His question was simply a bored protest at a
too tame existence--a wistful hope that Denny might lighten his boredom,
somehow.

"What are we going to do to-night?"

"Well," said Denny solemnly, "Mrs. Van Raggan is giving a reception this
evening. We might go there and meet all the Best People. There is a
lecture on the esthetics of modern art at Philamo Hall. Or we can see a
talkie--"

"My Lord!" fumed Jim. Then: "Kidding aside, can't you dig up something
interesting?"

"Kidding aside," said Dennis, in a different tone, "I have dug up
something interesting. We're going to visit a friend of mine, Matthew
Breen. A young man, still unknown, who, in my opinion, is one of our
greatest physicists. Matt is a kind of savage, so he may take to you. If
he does--and if he's feeling in a good humor--he may show you some
laboratory stunts that will afford you plenty of distraction. Come
along--you're wearing out my rugs with your infernal pacing up and
down!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Matt Breen's place was in a ratty part of the poorer outskirts of town;
and his laboratory was housed by what had once been a barn. But place
and surroundings were forgotten at sight of the owner's face.

Huge and gaunt, with unblinking, frosty gray eyes, looking more like an
arctic explorer than a man of science, Matt towered over the average man
and carelessly dominated any assembly by sheer force of mentality. He
even towered a little over big Jim Holden now, as he absently shook
hands with him.

"Come in, come in," he said, his voice vague. And to Denny: "I'm busy as
the devil, but you can watch over my shoulder if you want to. Got
something new on. Great thing--though I don't think it'll have any
practical meaning."

The two padded after him along a dusty hallway, up a flight of stairs
that was little more than a ladder, and into the cavernous loft of the
old barn which had been transformed into a laboratory.

Jim drew Denny aside a pace or two. "He says he's got something new.
Isn't he afraid to show it to a stranger like me?"

"Afraid? Why should he be?"

"Well, ideas do get stolen now and then, you know."

Denny smiled. "When Matt gets hold of something new, you can be sure the
discovery isn't a new kind of can-opener or patent towel-rack that can
be 'stolen.' His ideas are safe for the simple reason that there
probably aren't more than four other scientists on earth capable of even
dimly comprehending them. All you and I can do--whatever this may turn
out to be--is to watch and marvel."

       *       *       *       *       *

Matt, meanwhile, had lumbered with awkward grace to a great wooden
pedestal. Cupping down over this was a glass bell, about eight feet
high, suspended from the roof.

Around the base of the pedestal was a ring of big lamp-affairs, that
looked like a bank of flood-lights. The only difference was that where
flood-lights would have had regular glass lenses to transmit light
beams, these had thin plates of lead across the openings. Thick copper
conduits branched to each from a big dynamo.

Matt reached into a welter of odds and ends on a bench, and picked up a
tube. Rather like an ordinary electric light bulb, it looked, save that
there were no filaments in the thin glass shell. Where filaments should
have been there was a thin cylinder of bluish-gray metal.

"Element number eighty-five," said Matt in his deep, abstracted voice,
pointing at the bluish cylinder. "Located it about a year ago. Last of
the missing elements. Does strange tricks when subjected to heavy
electric current. In each of those things that look like searchlights is
one of these bulbs."

He laid down the extra tube, turned toward a door in the near wall, then
turned back to his silent guests again. Apparently he felt they were
due a little more enlightenment.

"Eighty-five isn't nearly as radioactive as the elements akin to it," he
said. Satisfied that he had now explained everything, he started again
toward the door.

As he neared it, Dennis and Jim heard a throaty growling, and a vicious
scratching on the wooden panels. And as Matt opened the door a big
mongrel dog leaped savagely at him!

       *       *       *       *       *

Calmly, Matt caught the brute by the throat and held it away from him at
arm's length, seeming hardly to be aware of its eighty-odd pounds of
struggling weight. Into Jim's eyes crept a glint of admiration. It was a
feat of strength as well as of animal management; and, himself
proficient in both, Jim could accord tribute where it was due.

"You came just as I was about to try an experiment on the highest form
of life I've yet exposed to my new rays," he said, striding easily
toward the glass bell with the savage hound. "It's worked all right with
frogs and snakes--but will it work with more complex creatures?
Mammalian creatures? That's a question."

Denny forbore to ask him what It did, how It worked, what the devil It
was, anyway. From his own experience he knew that the abstraction of an
experimenter insulates him from every outside contact. Matt, he
realized, was probably making a great effort to remain aware that they
were there in the laboratory at all; probably thought he had explained
in great detail his new device and its powers.

Vaguely wrapped in his fog of concentration, Matt thrust the snarling
dog under the bell, which he lowered quickly till it rested on the
pedestal-floor and ringed the dog with a wall of glass behind which it
barked and growled soundlessly.

Completely preoccupied again, Matt went to a big switch and threw it.
The dynamo hummed, raised its pitch to a high, almost intolerable
keening note. The ring of pseudo-searchlights seemed in an ominous sort
of way to spring into life. The impression must have been entirely
imaginary; actually the projectors didn't move in the slightest, didn't
even vibrate. Yet the conviction persisted in the minds of both Jim and
Dennis that some black, invisible force was pouring down those conduits,
to be sifted, diffused, and hurled through the lead lenses at the dog in
the bell.

       *       *       *       *       *

Thrilled to the core, not having the faintest idea what it was they were
about to see, but convinced that it must surely be of stupendous import,
the two stared unwinkingly at the furious hound. Matt was staring, too;
but his glance was almost casual, and was concentrated more on the glass
of the bell than on the experimental object.

The reason for the direction of his gaze almost immediately became
apparent. And as the reason was disclosed, Dennis and Jim exclaimed
aloud in disappointment--at the same time, so intense was their nameless
suspense, not knowing they had opened their mouths. It appeared that for
yet a little while they were to remain in ignorance of the precise
meaning of the experiment.

The glass of the bell was clouding. A swirling, milky vapor, not unlike
fog, was filling the bell from top to bottom.

The dog, rapidly being hidden from sight by the gathering mist, suddenly
stopped its antics and stood still in the center of the bell as though
overcome by surprise and indecision. Motionless, staring vacantly, it
stood there for an instant--then was concealed completely by the rolling
vapor.

But just before it disappeared, Jim turned to Denny in astonishment, to
see if Denny had observed what he had; namely, that the fog seemed not
to be gathering from the air penned up in the bell, but in some strange
and rather awful way to be exuding _from the body of the dog itself_!

       *       *       *       *       *

The two stared back at the bell again, neither one sure he had been
right in his impression. But now the glass was entirely opaque. So thick
was the vapor within that it seemed on the point of turning to a liquid.
Inside, swathed in the secrecy of the fleecy folds of mist--what was
happening to the dog? The two men could only guess.

Matt glanced up at an electric clock with an oversized second hand. His
fingers moved nervously on the switch, then threw it to cut contact. The
dynamo keened its dying note. A silence so tense that it hurt filled the
great laboratory.

All eyes were glued on the bell.

The thick vapor that had been swirling and crowding as if to force
itself through the glass, grew less restive in motion. Then it began to
rise, ever more slowly, toward the top.

More and more compactly it packed itself into the arched glass dome, the
top layers finally resembling nothing so much as cloudy beef gelatin.
And now these top layers were solidifying, clinging to the glass.

Meanwhile, the bottom line of the vapor was slowly rising, an inch at a
time, like a shimmering curtain being raised from a stage floor. At last
ten inches showed between the pedestal and the swaying bottom of the
almost liquid vapor. Jim and Denny stooped to peer under the blanket of
cloud. The dog! In what way had it been affected?

Again they exclaimed aloud, involuntarily, unconsciously.

There was no dog to be seen.

       *       *       *       *       *

With about fourteen clear inches now exposed, they looked a second time,
more intently. But their first glance had been right. The dog was gone
from the bell. Utterly and completely vanished! Or so, at least, they
thought at the moment.

The rising and solidifying process of the vapor went on, while Dennis
and Jim stood, almost incapable of movement, and watched to see what
Breen was going to do next.

His next move came in about four minutes, when the crowding vapor had at
last completely come to rest at the top of the dome like a deposit of
opaque jelly. He stepped to the windlass that raised the bell, and
turned the handle.

Immediately the two watchers strode impulsively toward the exposed
pedestal floor.

"Wait a minute," commanded the scientist, his eyes sparkling with almost
ferocious intensity. The two stopped. "You might step on it," he added,
amazingly.

He caught up a common glass water tumbler, and cautiously moved to the
edge of the platform. "It may be dead, of course," he muttered. "But I
might as well be prepared."

Wonderingly, Jim and Dennis saw that he was intently searching every
square inch of the pedestal flooring. Then they saw him crawl, like a
stalking cat, toward a portion near the center--saw him clap the
tumbler, upside down, over some unseen thing....

"Got him!" came Matt's deep, fuzzy voice. "And he isn't dead, either.
Not by a long way! Now we'll get a magnifying glass and study him."

Feeling like figures in a dream, Jim and Dennis looked through the lens
with their absorbed host.

       *       *       *       *       *

Capering about under the inverted tumbler, like a four-legged bug--and
not a very large bug, either--was an incredible thing. A thing with a
soft, furry coat such as no true insect possesses. A thing with tiny,
canine jaws, from which hung a panting speck of a tongue like no bug
ever had.

"Yes," rumbled Matt, "the specimen is far indeed from being dead. I
don't know how long it might exist in so microscopic a state, nor
whether it has been seriously deranged, body or brain, by the
diminishing process. But at least--it's alive."

"My God!" whispered Dennis. And, his first coherent sentence since the
physicist had thrown the switch: "So this--_this_--is the overgrown
brute you put under the bell a few minutes ago! This eighth-of-an-inch
thing that is a miniature cartoon of a dog!"

Jim could merely stare from the tumbler and the marvel it walled in, to
the man who had worked the miracle, and back to the tumbler again.

Denny sighed. "That thick, jellylike substance in the top of the bell,"
he said, "what is it?"

"Oh, that." The miracle worker didn't lift his eyes from the tumbler and
the very much alive and protesting bit of life it housed. "That's the
dog. Rather, it's practically all of the dog save for this small residue
of substance that clothes the vital life-spark."

       *       *       *       *       *

Jim dabbed at his forehead and found it moist with sweat. "But how is it
done?" he said shakily.

"With element eighty-five, as I told you," said Breen, most of whose
attention was occupied by a new stunt he was trying: he had cut a
microscopic sliver of meat off a gnawed bone, and was sliding it under
the glass. Would the dog eat? Could it...?

It could, and would! With a mighty bound, that covered all of a quarter
of an inch, the tiny thing leaped on the meat and began to gnaw
wolfishly at it. The effect was doubly shocking--to see this perfect
little creature acting like any regular, full-sized dog, although as
tiny as a woman's beauty spot!

"Marvelous stuff, eighty-five," Matt went on. "Any living thing, exposed
to the lead-filtered emanations it gives off when disintegrated
electrically to precisely the right degree, is reduced indefinitely in
size. I could have made that dog as small as a microbe, even sub-visible
perhaps, if I chose. Curious.... Maybe the presence of eighty-five in
minute quantities on earth is all that has kept every living thing from
growing indefinitely, expanding gigantically right off the face of the
globe...."

       *       *       *       *       *

But now Dennis was hardly listening to him. A notion so fantastic, so
bizarre that he could not at once grasp it fully, had just struck him.

"Listen," he said at last, his voice so hoarse as to be almost
unrecognizable, "listen--can you reverse that process?"

Matt nodded, and pointed to the viscous deposit in the dome of the bell.
"The protoplasmic substance is still there. It can be rebuilt, remolded
to its original form any time I put the dog back in the bell and let the
particles of eighty-five, which are suspended in the vacuum tubes,
settle back into their original, inert mass. You see, there is such a
close affinity--"

Dennis cut him short almost rudely. It wasn't causes, marvelous though
they might be, that he was interested in; it was results.

"Would you dare ... that is ... would you like to try that experiment on
a human being?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Now for once the inventor's entire interest was seized by something
outside his immediate work. He stared open-mouthed at Dennis.

"Would I?" he breathed. "Would I like ..." He grunted. "Such a question!
No experiment is complete till man, the highest form of all life, has
been subjected to it. I'd give anything for the chance!" He sighed
explosively. "But of course that's impossible. I could never get anyone
to be a subject. And I can't have it tried on myself because I'm the
only one able to handle my apparatus in the event that anything goes
wrong."

"But--would you try it on a human being if you had a chance?" persisted
Denny.

"Hah!"

"And could you reduce a human being in stature as radically as you did
the dog? For example, could you make a man ... ant-size?"

Matt nodded vigorously, eyes fairly flaming. "I could make him even
smaller."

Dennis stared at Jim. His face was transfigured. He shook with nervous
eagerness. And Jim gazed back at Dennis as breathlessly and as tensely.

"Well?" said Dennis at last.

Jim nodded slowly.

"Yes," he said. "Of course."

And in those few words two men were committed to what was perhaps the
strangest, most deadly, and surely the most unique, adventure the world
has yet known. The improbable had happened. A man who lived but for
dangers and extraordinary action, and a man who would have gambled his
soul for the scientist's ecstasy of at last learning all about a hidden
study--both had seen suddenly open up to them a broad avenue leading to
the very pinnacle of their dreams.




CHAPTER III

_Ant-Sized Men_


Next morning, at scarcely more than daybreak, Jim and Denny stood,
stripped and ready for the dread experiment, beside Matthew Breen's
glass bell. The night, of course, had been sleepless. Sleep? How could
slumber combat the fierce anticipations, the exotic imaginings, the
clanging apprehensions of the two?

Most of the night had been spent by Denny in dutifully arguing with Jim
about the advisability of his giving up the adventure, in soothing his
conscience by presenting in all the angles he could think of the risks
they would run.

"You'll be entering a different world, Jim," Denny had said. "An
unimaginably different world. A terrible world, in which you'll be a
naked, soft, defenseless thing. I'd hate to bet that we'd live even to
reach the termitary. And once inside that--it's odds of seven to one
that we'll never get out again."

"Stow it," Jim had urged, puffing at his pipe.

"I won't stow it. You may think you've run up against dangers before,
but let me tell you that your most perilous jungle is safe as a church
compared to the jungle an ordinary grass plot will present to us, if, as
we plan, we get reduced to a quarter of an inch. I'm going in this with
a mission. To me it's a heaven-sent opportunity--one I'm sure any
entomologist would grab at. But you, frankly, are just a fool--"

"All right," Jim had cut in, "let it go at that. I'm confirmed in my
folly. You can't argue me out of it, so don't try any more. Now, to be
practical--have you thought of any way we could arm ourselves?"

"Arm ourselves?" repeated Dennis vaguely.

"Yes. It's a difficult problem. The finest watch-maker couldn't turn out
a working model of a gun that could be handled by a man a quarter of an
inch tall. At the same time I have no desire to go into this thing
bare-handed. And I think I know something we can use."

"What?"

"Spears," said Jim with a grin. "Steel spears. They make steel wire, you
know, down to two-thousandths of an inch and finer. Probably our friend
has some in his laboratory. Now, if we grind two pieces about a quarter
of an inch long off such a wire, and sharpen the ends as well as we can,
we'll have short spears we could swing very well.

"Then, there's the matter of clothes." He grinned again. "We'll want a
breech clout, at least. I propose that we get the sheerest silk gauze we
can find, and cut an eighth-inch square apiece to tie about our middles
after the transformation."

       *       *       *       *       *

He slapped his fist into his palm. "By George! Such talk really begins
to bring it home. Two men, clad in eighth-inch squares of silk gauze,
using bits of almost invisibly fine steel wire as weapons, junketing
forth into a world in which they'll be about the smallest and puniest
things in sight! No more lords of creation, Denny. We'll have nothing
but our wits to carry us through. But they, of course, will be supreme
in the insect world as they are in the animal world."

"Will they be supreme?" Denny said softly. That unknown
intelligence--that mysterious intellect (super-termite?) that seemed to
rule each termite tribe, and which appeared so marvelously profound! "I
wonder...."

Then he, in his turn, had descended to the practical.

"You've solved the problem of weapons and clothing, Jim," he said, "and
now for my contribution." He left the room and came back in a few
minutes with something in his hands. "Here are some shields for us.

"Oh, not pieces of steel armor. Shields in a figurative more than a
literal sense."

He set down a small porcelain pot, and opened it. Within was a
repulsive-looking, whitish-brown paste.

"Ground-up termites," he explained. "If we're to go wandering around in
a termitary, we've got to persuade the inmates that we're friends, not
foes. So we'll smear ourselves all over with this termite-paste before
ever we enter the mound."

"Clever, these supposedly impractical scientists," murmured Jim, with a
lightness that did not quite succeed in covering his real admiration of
the shrewdness of the thought.

And now they stood in front of Breen's glass bell, with Breen beside
them all eagerness to begin the experiment.

"What am I supposed to do after I've reduced you to the proper size?" he
asked.

"Take us out to Morton's Grove, to the big termitary you'll find about a
quarter of a mile off the road," said Denny. "Set us down near the
opening to one of the larger termite tunnels. Then wait till we come out
again. You may have to wait quite a while--but that isn't much to ask in
return for our submission to your rays."

"I'll wait a week, if you wish. Let's see, what had I better carry you
in?"

It was decided--with a lack of forethought later to be bitterly
regretted--that an ordinary patty-dish of the kind in which restaurants
serve butter, would make as good a conveyance as anything else.

       *       *       *       *       *

Matt got the patty-dish and placed it on the pedestal floor, tipping it
on edge so Jim and Denny would be able to climb into it unaided (he
wouldn't dare attempt to lift bodies so small for fear of mortally
injuring them between thumb and forefinger). Into the patty-dish, so
they could be readily located, were placed the bits of wire, the tiny
fragments of silk gauze to serve as breech clouts, and a generous dab of
termite-paste; and the two men stepped inside the glass dome to share
the fate that, the night before, had been the dog's.

The bell was lowered around them. They watched the inventor step to the
switch and pull it down....

At first there was no sensation whatever. Almost with incredulity, they
watched the glass walls cloud, realized that the fogging vapor was
formed of exudations from their own substance. Then physical reaction
set in.

The first symptom was paralysis. With the vapor wreathing their heads in
dense clouds, they found themselves unable to move a muscle. The
paralysis spread partially to the involuntary muscles. Heart action was
retarded enormously; and they ceased almost entirely to breathe. In
spite of the cessation of muscular functioning, however, they were still
conscious in a vague way. Conscious enough, at all events, to go through
a hell of agony when--second and last stage--every nerve in their bodies
seemed of a sudden to be rasped with files, and every tiny particle of
their flesh jerked and twitched as if to break loose from the
ever-shrinking skin.

       *       *       *       *       *

Time, of course, was completely lost sight of. It might have been ten
hours, or five minutes later when they realized they were still alive,
still standing on their own feet, and now able to breathe and move. The
spell of rigidity had been broken; nerves and muscles functioned
smoothly and painlessly again. Also they were in clear air.

"I guess the experiment didn't work," Dennis began unsteadily. But then,
as his eyes began to get accustomed to his fantastically new, though
intrinsically unchanged surroundings, he cried aloud.

The experiment _had_ worked. No doubt of that! And they were in a world
where all the old familiar things were new and incredible marvels.

"What can be the nature of this stuff we're standing on?" wondered Jim,
looking down.

Following his gaze, Denny too wondered for an instant, till realization
came to him. "Why, it's ordinary wood! Just the wood of the pedestal
platform!"

But it didn't seem like wood. The grain stood out in knee-high ridges in
all directions to the limit of visibility. It was like a nightmare
picture of a frozen bad-lands, split here and there by six-feet-broad,
unfathomable chasms--which were the cracks in the flooring.

"Where's the patty-dish?" queried Jim.

Dennis gazed about. "We were standing right over it when the reducing
process started.... Oh, there it is!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Far off to the right an enormous, shallowly hollowed plateau caught
their eyes. They started toward it, hurdling the irregular ridges,
leaping across the dizzy chasms.

The tiny dish had been tipped on edge--but when they reached it they
found its thickness alone a daunting thing.

"It's a pity Matt didn't select a thinner kind of china," grumbled
Dennis; gazing at the head-high wall that was the edge of the plate.
"Here--I'll stand on your shoulders, and then give you an arm up. Look
out--it's slippery!"

It was. Their feet slid out from under them on the glazed surface
repeatedly. It was with the utmost effort that they finally made their
way to the center of the shallow plateau.

There, lying beside two heaps of coarse cloth and a mound of
horrible-smelling stuff that he recognized as the dab of termite-paste,
they saw two glistening steel bars. About five feet long, they seemed to
be, and half an inch in diameter. The wire-ends which, a few moments
ago, they had been forced to handle with tweezers for fear of losing!

Jim picked one up and drew it back for a pretended spear-thrust. He
laughed, vibrantly, eagerly.

"I'm just beginning to realize it's really happened, and that the hunt
has started. Bring on your bugs!"

Dennis stooped and picked up his spear. It was unwieldy, ponderous, the
weight of that long, not-too-thin steel bar. Jim's great shoulders and
heavy arms were suited well enough to such a weapon; but Dennis could
have wished that his were some pounds lighter.

They turned their attention to the evil-smelling hill of
termite-ointment. With many grimaces, they took turns in smearing each
other from head to feet with the repulsive stuff. Then they knotted
about them the yard-square pieces of fabric--once sheer silk gauze, now
cloth as stiff and cumbersome as sail-cloth. They faced each other,
ready for their trip.

The heavens above them, trailing up and up into mysterious darknesses,
suddenly became closer and sparkled with a diamond sheen. Stretching off
and up out of sight was a mountainous column that might conceivably be a
wrist.

"Matt's looking at us through a magnifying glass," concluded Denny.

       *       *       *       *       *

Abruptly the ridged bad-lands about them began to vibrate. Thunder
crashed and roared around their ears.

"He's trying to say something to us," said Denny, when the awful din had
ceased. "Oh, Matt--we're ready to go!"

Jim echoed his shout. Then Denny snorted. "Fools! Our voices are
probably pitched way above the limit of audibility. He can't hear us any
more than we can understand him!"

They gazed at each other. More than anything else that had happened,
this showed them how entirely they were cut off from their old world.
Truly, in discarding their normal size, they might as well have been
marooned on another planet!

A tremendous, pinkish-gray wall lowered near them, split into segments,
and surrounded their plateau. The plateau was lifted--with a dizzy
swiftness that made their stomachs turn.

With sickening speed the plateau moved forward. The texture of the
heavens above them changed. The sun--the one thing in their new universe
that seemed unchanged in size and aspect--shone down on them. The
plateau came jarringly to rest. Great cliffs of what seemed black basalt
gleamed high over them.

Matt had carried them out of the building, and had set the patty-dish on
the black leather seat of his automobile.

There was a distant thundering, as though all the worlds in the universe
but Earth were being dashed to pieces. That was the motor starting. And
then, as the car moved off, Jim and Dennis realized their mistake in
choosing a patty-dish to ride in!

       *       *       *       *       *

In spite of the yielding leather cushion on which their dish was set,
the two quarter-inch men were hurled this way and that, jounced horribly
up and down, and slid headlong from one end of the plateau to the other
as the automobile passed over the city streets. Impossible to stand.
They could only crouch low on the hard glazed surface, and try to keep
from breaking legs and arms in the worst earthquake it is possible to
imagine. Anyone who has ever seen two bugs ill-advisedly try to walk
across the vibrating hood of an automobile while the motor is running,
will have some idea of the troubles that now beset Dennis and Jim.

"The ass!" groaned Jim, in a comparatively quiet spell. "Why doesn't he
drive more carefully?"

"Probably," groaned Denny, "he's doing the best he can."

Probably! All that was left them was conjecture. They could only guest
at what was happening in the world about them!

Matthew Breen's face and body were lost in sheer immensity above them.
They knew they were riding in a car; but they couldn't see the car. All
they could see was the black cliff that was the seat-cushion behind
them. The world had disappeared--hidden in its bigness; the world,
indeed, was just at present a patty-dish.

Somehow they endured the ride. Somehow they avoided broken bones, and
were only shaken up and bruised when the distant roar of the motor
ceased and the wind stopped howling about their ears.

"Well, we're here," said Dennis unsteadily. "Now for the real--"

His words were stopped by the sudden rising of the plateau. Again they
felt the poignantly exaggerated, express-elevator feeling, till the
plateau finally came to rest.

The crashing thunder of Matt's voice came to them, words utterly
indistinguishable. The saucer was tipped sideways....

Doubtless Matt thought he was acting with extreme gentleness; but in
fact the dish was tilted so quickly and so without warning that Jim and
Dennis slid from its center, head over heels, to fall over the edge and
land with a bump on the ground. Their spears, sliding after, narrowly
missed impaling them.

Once more came the distant crashing of Matt's voice. Then there was
silence. Their gigantic protector, having dumped them unceremoniously
into the grass of Morton's Grove, had ushered them squarely into the
start of their insane adventure. From now on their fate belonged to them
alone.




CHAPTER IV

_The Raid_


Bewilderedly, they looked around them.

Ahead of them, barely to be seen for the trunks of giant trees
intervening, was a smoothly-rounded mountain. Majestic and aloof it
soared, dwarfing all near it--the termitary which, yesterday, had been
but waist-high. There was their eventual goal; but meanwhile their
immediate surroundings roused their greater interest--and all their
alertness!

When Dennis had said they would find a common grass plot a wild and
exotic jungle, he had spoken perhaps more truly than he knew. At any
rate, the jungle they now found themselves in was something to exceed
man's wildest dreams.

Far over their heads towered a wilderness of trees. But such trees!
Without branches, shooting up and over in graceful, tangling curves,
their trunks oddly flat and ribbonlike and yellow-green. It was
impossible to look on them as grass stems.

Here and there the trees had fallen, presenting a tangled wilderness of
leathery, five-foot-wide strips. Webs of roots, tough and gnarled,
whitish in color, curled in all directions to catch the feet and baffle
the eye. It was an appalling underbrush. And it was an underbrush,
moreover, in which there was plenty of wild life!

A hairy, pulpy thing, reddish in color, with gauzy wings and a myriad
flashing eyes scuttled close to them as though drawn by curiosity to
inspect them. As big as an eagle it appeared to them; both grasped their
spears; but soon, with a wild whistle of its wings, it rose up through
the tangle of underbrush and hummed off. A fruit fly.

       *       *       *       *       *

And now a monstrous thing appeared far off, to stalk like a balloon on
twenty-foot legs in their direction. With incredible quickness it loomed
over them. Six feet through, its body was roughly spherical, and carried
on those amazingly long, jointed legs. It stared at them with beady,
cruel eyes, but finally teetered on its way again, leaving them
untouched.

"I'll never again be able to see a daddy longlegs without shivering,"
said Jim. His voice was unconsciously sunk to little more than a
whisper. This was a world of titanic dangers and fierce alarms. Instinct
cautioned both of them to make no more noise than necessary. "We had
better make for your termitary at once."

Dennis had been thinking that for some time. But he had been unable to
locate a termite tunnel anywhere. Matt had been supposed to set them
down near one. No doubt, to his own mind, he _had_ placed them near one
of the termite highways. But his ideas of distance were now so radically
different from theirs that Dennis, at least, was unable to see a tunnel
opening anywhere.

He spoke his thoughts to Jim. "There must be a tunnel opening somewhere
very near us," he concluded. "But I--Good heavens!"

Both crouched in wary alarm, spears held for a thrust, if necessary, at
the frightful thing approaching them from the near jungle.

Thirty feet long, it was, and six feet through, a blunt-ended, untapered
serpent that glistened a moist crimson color in the rays of the sun. The
trees quaked and rocked as it brushed against them in its deliberate
advance. Dead leaves many feet across and too heavy for the combined
efforts of both men to have budged, were pushed lightly this way and
that as the monster moved. The very ground seemed to shake under its
appalling weight.

"If _that_ comes after us," breathed Jim, "we're through!"

But now Denny drew a long breath of relief.

"Be still," he said. "Make no sound, and no move, and it will probably
pass us by. It's blind, and couldn't harm us in any way--unless it
rolled on us."

The two stood motionless while the nightmare serpent crashed by. Then,
with the earthworm fading into the distance, they resumed their hunt for
the near tunnel entrance.

       *       *       *       *       *

Jim, whose eyes were more accustomed to searching jungle depths, finally
saw it--a black hole leading down into a small hill about two hundred
yards ahead of them. He pointed.

"There we are. Come on."

Laboriously they set out toward it. Laboriously because at every step
some almost insuperable hurdle barred their way. A fallen grass stalk
was a problem; sometimes they had to curve back on their tracks for
sixty or eighty feet in order to get around it. A dead leaf, drifted
there from the trees near at hand, was almost a calamity, necessitating
more circuitous maneuvering.

With every yard the realization of the stark peril that was now theirs
increased.

A grasshopper, blundering to the ground within a rod of them, nearly
crushed them with its several tons of weight. A bumblebee, as big as a
flying elephant and twice as deadly, roared around them for several
minutes as though debating whether or not to attack them, and finally
roared off leaving them shaken and pale. But the most startling and
narrow of their narrow escapes occurred an instant after that.

They had paused for an instant, alert but undecided, to stare at a
coldly glaring spider that was barring their path. It was a small
spider, barely more than waist-high. But something in its malevolent
eyes made the two men hesitate about attacking it. At the same time it
was squatting in the only clear path in sight, with tangles of stalks
and leaves on either side. A journey around the ferocious brute might be
a complicated, long-drawn-out affair.

Their problem was decided for them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Overhead, suddenly roared out a sound such as might have been made by a
tri-motored Fokker. There was a flash of yellow. The roar increased to
an ear-shattering scream. Something swooped so breathlessly and at the
same time so ponderously that the men were knocked flat by the hurricane
of disturbed air.

A fleeting struggle ensued between some vast yellow body and the
unfortunate spider. Then the spider, suddenly as immobile as a lump of
stone, was drawn up into the heavens by the roaring yellow thing, and
disappeared. A wasp had struck, and had obtained another meal.

"Thank God that thing had a one-track mind, and was concentrating on the
spider," said Jim, with a rather humorless laugh.

Dennis was silent. He was beginning to realize that he knew too much
about insects for his peace of mind. To Jim, insects had always
heretofore been something to brush away or step on, as the circumstance
might indicate. He had no idea, for example, of exactly what fate it was
he had just missed. But Denny knew all about it.

He knew that if the wasp had chosen either of them, the chosen one would
have felt a stabbing thing like a red-hot sword penetrate to his vitals.
He knew that swift paralysis would have followed the thrust. He knew
that then the victim would have been taken back, helpless and motionless
as the spider was, to be laid side by side with other helpless but still
conscious victims in the fetid depths of the wasp's nest. And he knew
that finally an egg would have been laid on the victim's chest; an egg
that would eventually hatch and deliver a bit of life that would calmly
and leisurely devour the paralyzed food supply alive.

"Let's hurry," he suggested, glancing up to see if any more wasps were
hovering about.

The lowering tunnel mouth was very near now. Barely twenty yards away.
What with the crowding monsters around them, the tunnel began to look
like a haven. Almost at a run, they continued toward it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Then a commotion like that which might be made by a mighty army sounded
in the underbrush behind them. Dennis looked back over his shoulder.

"Hurry!" he gasped, suddenly accelerating his pace into frank flight.
"Ants...."

Jim glanced back, too--and joined Denny in his flight. Pouring toward
them at express train speed, flinging aside fallen stalks, climbing over
obstructions as though no obstructions were there, was coming a grim and
armored horde. Far in the lead, probably the one that had seen the men
first and started the deadly chase, was a single ant.

The solitary leader was a monster of its kind. As tall as Jim, clashing
in its horny armor, it rushed toward the fugitives.

"It's going to reach the tunnel before we do," Jim panted. "We've got to
kill the thing--and do it before the rest get to us...."

The monster was on them. Blindly, ferociously it hurled its bulk at the
things that smelled like termites however little they resembled them.
The termite-paste was, in this instance, the most deadly of challenges.

Jim stepped to the fore, with his spear point slanted to receive the
onslaught, spear butt grounded at his feet.

Whether the six-legged horror would have had wit enough to comprehend
the nature of the defense offered, and would have striven to circumvent
it, had time been given it, is a question that will never be answered.
For the thing wasn't given the time.

In mid-air it seemed to writhe and try to change the direction of its
leap. But it was on the point and had transfixed itself before its
intelligence, however keen, could have functioned.

The fight, though, was by no means over. With five feet of steel
piercing it through, it whirled with hardly abated vitality toward
Dennis. Its gargoyle head came close and closer.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dennis sprang sideways along its length, lifted the pointed bar he held,
and dashed it down on what looked to him a vital spot--the unbelievably
slender trunk that held its spatulate abdomen to its armored chest.

There was a crack as the bar smashed down on the weak point. The monster
sank quivering to the ground. An instant later it was up, but now its
movements were dazed and sluggish as it dragged its half-paralyzed
abdomen after it, and fumbled and caught on the heavy bar that
transfixed it.

Jim caught the bar and tugged it. "My spear!" he cried. "Denny--help!"

Together the two wrenched to jerk the spear loose from the horny armor
of the dying ant. The rest of the pack were very near now.

"We'll have to let it go...." panted Denny.

But at that instant their desperate efforts tore it loose from the
convulsively jerking hulk. They darted into the tunnel mouth with the
racing horde scarcely twenty yards behind them.

Without hesitation the ants poured in after them. Jim and Dennis leaped
forward, in pitch darkness, now and then bumping heavily against a wall
as the tunnel turned, but having at least no trouble with their footing:
the floor was as smooth as though man-made.

Behind them they could hear the armored horde crashing along in the
blackness. The smashing noise of their progress was growing louder. The
two had run perhaps fifty yards in the darkness. Another fifty, and they
would be caught!

But now, just as their eyes--sharpened also by the danger they were
in--began to grow accustomed to the gloom, they saw ahead of them a
thing that might have stepped straight out of a horrible dream.

       *       *       *       *       *

Six feet of vulnerable, unarmored body, amply protected by horny head
and shoulders and ten feet of awful, scissor-mandibles, faced them. The
creature was doing a strange sort of war dance, swaying its terrible
bulk back and forth rhythmically, while its feet remained immovable. An
instant it did this, then it charged at the two men. Simultaneously the
crashing of the fierce horde behind sounded with appalling nearness--the
noise and odor of the ants preventing the huge termite guard in front of
the men from recognizing and approving the smell of the termite-paste
that covered their bodies.

"Follow me!" snapped Denny, remembering that the hideous attacking thing
before them was blind, and gaining from that knowledge swift
inspiration.

Jim gathered his muscles to follow at command. But he almost shouted
aloud as he saw Denny leap--straight toward the enormous, snapping
mandibles.

In an instant, however, Denny's idea was made clear. With a slide that
would have done credit to any baseball player, the entomologist
catapulted on his chest past the snapping peril. Jim followed, with not
a foot to spare. They were not past the soft rear-parts of the thing,
but they were at least past its horrible jaws. And before the monster
could turn its unwieldy bulk in the tunnel, the ants were upon it.

For a few seconds, blinded to their own danger by the fascination of the
struggle going on before them, the two men witnessed the grim watcher of
the tunnel as it drove back wave after wave of attacking ants.

Two at a time, the invaders charged that wall of living horn. And two at
a time they were swept against the walls, or slashed in two by the
enormous mandibles. One against an army; but it was a full minute or so
before the one began to weaken.

"Come," whispered Dennis, at last. "If what I think is going to happen
occurs, this will be no place for us."

       *       *       *       *       *

They went ahead, with the din of battle dying behind them, till they saw
a small tunnel branching off beside the main stem. Into this they
squeezed. But as Jim started to go farther down its constricted length,
Dennis stopped him.

"We're fairly safe here, I think. We'll stay and watch...."

Silently, motionless, they lurked in the entrance of the side-avenue,
and peered out at the main avenue they had just left. And now that
avenue began to buzz with traffic.

First, more of the horrors with the enormous scissor-mandibles began to
stream past them. In twos and threes, then in whole squads, they
lumbered by, bound for the ant army that had invaded their sanctum.

Not quite too far ahead to be out of sight, the defenders halted.
Several of their number went forward to help the dying Horatius. The
rest lined up in a triple row across a wide patch in the tunnel,
presenting a phalanx it would appear that nothing could beat.

"How do they know enough to gather here from distant parts of this
hollow mountain?" whispered Jim to Denny. "How do they know their city
is besieged just at this spot, and that their help is needed?"

Dennis shrugged. His eyes were shining. This was the kind of thing he
had come here for. This unhampered observation of a strange and terrible
race at war and at work--it was well worth all the personal risks he
might run.

"No man can answer your question, Jim. They're blind--they can't see
their danger so as to know how to combat it. They couldn't hear, and be
alarmed by, the vibrations of battle for a distance of more than a few
yards. My only guess is that they are constantly and silently commanded
by the unknown intelligence, the ruling brain, that hides deep in the
earth beneath us and directs these 'soldier' termites in some marvelous
way--though itself never seeing or hearing the actual dangers it guards
against."

"The queen?" suggested Jim.

Again Denny shrugged. "Who knows? She might be the brains, as well as
the egg layer, of the tribe. But don't talk too much. The vibration of
our voices might lead them to us in spite of their blindness."

       *       *       *       *       *

Now the main avenue before them was humming with a new kind of traffic.
From side to side it was being filled with a new sort of termite. These
were smaller than the soldiers, and entirely unprotected by either horn
armor plate or slashing mandibles.

Each of these carried an unwieldy block of gleaming substance. And each
in turn dropped its block in a growing wall behind the savage defenders
against the ants, and fastened it in place with a thick and viscous
brown liquid that dried almost immediately into a kind of cement.

"The workers," whispered Dennis, enthralled. "The building blocks are
half-digested wood. The cement is a sort of stuff that exudes from
their own bodies. In ten minutes there will be a wall across the tunnel
that no ants on earth could penetrate!"

"But the home guards, the brave lads and all that sort of thing, will be
shut off on the outside of the wall with the enemy. And there are
hundreds of the enemy," protested Jim.

"A necessary sacrifice," said Denny. "And so perfect is their
organization that no one, including the soldiers to be sacrificed, ever
makes any objection."

Jim shivered a little. "It's terrible, somehow. It's--it's inhuman!"

"Naturally. It's insectian, if there is such a word. And a wise man once
predicted that the termite organization, being so much more perfect a
one than man's, indicated the kind of society man would at some time
build up for himself. In ten or twelve more centuries we, too, might go
off in millions and deliberately starve to death because the ruling
power decided there were too many people on earth. We, too, might devour
our dead because it was essential not to let anything go to waste. We,
too, might control our births so that we produced astronomers with
telescopes in their heads instead of regular eyes, carpenters with
hammer and saw instead of hands, soldiers with poison gas sacs in their
chests so they could breathe death and destruction at will. It would be
the perfect state of society."

"Maybe--but I'm glad I'll be dead before that times comes," said Jim
with another shiver.

       *       *       *       *       *

By now the wall ahead of them was complete. On the other side of it the
soldier termites stolidly fought on to their certain death. On the near
side, the workers retreated to unknown depths in the great hollow
mountain behind them. The main avenue was once more clear, and, save
for a few workers hastening on unknown errands, deserted.

"That act's over," sighed Dennis. "But it may well be no more than a
curtain raiser to the acts to come. Shall we be on our way? We're hardly
on the fringe of the termitary yet--and I want to get at the heart of
it, and into the depths far beneath it. Depths of hell, we'll probably
find them, Jim. But a marvelous hell, and one no man has ever before
seen."

They left their little haven and moved along the main tunnel toward the
heart of the termitary, walking easily upright in this tunnel which was
only one of many hundreds in the vast, hollowed mountain--which loomed
into the outer sunshine to almost a height of a yard.




CHAPTER V

_Trapped_


On along the tunnel they went. And as they progressed, Dennis got the
answer to something that had troubled him a great deal before their
entrance here--a problem which had been solved, rather amazingly, of
itself.

Termitaries, as far as the entomologist knew, were pitch-black places
which no ray of light ever entered. He had been afraid he would be
forced to stumble blindly in unlit depths, able to see nothing at all,
on a par with the blind creatures among whom he moved. Yet he and Jim
could see in this subterranean labyrinth.

He observed now the reason for that. The walls on all sides, made of
half-digested cellulose, had rotted just enough through long years to be
faintly phosphorescent. And that simple natural fact was probably going
to mean all the difference between life and death: it gave the two men
at least the advantage of sight over the eyeless savage creatures among
whom, helped by the termite-smell given by the paste, they hoped to
glide unnoticed.

However, even the termite-paste, and the fact that the termitary
citizens were blind, didn't seem enough to account for the immunity
granted the two men as they began to come presently to more crowded
passages and tunnels near the center of the mound.

On every side of them now, requiring the utmost in agility to keep from
actually brushing against them, were hordes of the worker termites, and
dozens of the frightful soldiers. Yet on the two men moved, ever more
slowly, without one of the monsters attempting to touch them. It was
odd--almost uncanny.

"Surely the noise of our walking, tiptoe as we may, must be heard by
them--and noted as different from theirs," whispered Dennis. "Yet they
pay no attention to us. If it is due to the paste, I must say it's
wonderful stuff!"

Jim nodded in a puzzled way. "It's almost as if they wanted to make our
inward path easy. I wonder--if it's going to be different when we try to
get out again!"

Dennis was wondering that, too. It seemed absurd to suspect the things
of being intelligent enough to lay traps. But it did look almost as
though they were encouraging their two unheard-of visitors from another
world to go on deeper and deeper into the heart of the eerie city (all
the tunnels sloped down now), there perhaps to meet with some ghastly
imprisonment.

He gave it up. Sufficient for the moment that they were unmolested, and
that he had a chance at first hand to make observations more complete
than the world of entomology had ever dreamed of.

       *       *       *       *       *

They stumbled onto what seemed a death struggle between one of the giant
soldiers and an inoffensive-looking worker. The drab, comparatively
feeble body of the worker was wriggling right in the center of the great
claws which, with a twitch, could have sliced it in two endwise. Yet the
jaws did not twitch; and in a few moments the worker drew unconcernedly
out and moved away.

"The soldier was getting his meal," whispered Denny, enthralled. "Their
mandibles are enlarged so enormously that they can't feed themselves.
The workers, who digest food for the whole tribe, feed them regularly.
Then if a soldier gets in the least rebellious, he can simply be starved
to death at any time."

"Ugh!" Jim whispered back. "Fancy being official stomach to three or
four other people! More of your wonderful 'organization,' I suppose."

They went on, down and down, till Denny calculated they had at last
reached nearly to the center of the vast city. And now they stumbled
into something weird and wonderful indeed. Rather, they half fell into
it, for it lay down a few feet and came as a complete surprise in the
dimness; and not till they had recovered from their near fall and looked
around for a few seconds did they realize where their last few
steps--the last few steps of freedom they were to have in the grim
underground kingdom--had taken them.

They were in a chamber so huge that it made the largest of man-made
domes shrink to insignificance by comparison.

       *       *       *       *       *

A hundred yards or more in every direction, it extended. And far
overhead, lost in distance, reared the arched roof. A twenty-story
building could have been placed under that roof without trouble.

Lost in awe, Dennis gazed about him; and he saw on the floor, laid in
orderly rows in countless thousands, that which gave further cause for
wonderment: new-hatched larvae about the size of pumpkins but a sickly
white in color--feeble, helpless blobs of life that one day develop into
soldiers and workers, winged rulers or police. The termite nursery.

"Whew!" gasped Jim, wiping his face. "From the heat in here you'd think
we were getting close to the real, old-fashioned hell instead of an
artificial, insect-made one. What are all these nauseating-looking blobs
of lard lying about here, anyway?"

Denny told him. "Which is the reason for the heat," he concluded. "Jim,
it's twenty degrees warmer in here than it is outdoors. How--_how_--can
these insects regulate the temperature like that? The work of the ruling
brain again? But where, and what, can that brain be?"

"Maybe we'll find out before we leave this place," said Jim, more
prophetically than he knew. "Hello--we can't get out through the door we
entered. We'll have to find another exit. Look."

Dennis looked. In the doorway they had just come through was a
soldier--a giant even among giants. Its ten-foot jaws, like a questing,
gigantic vise, were opening and closing regularly and rapidly across the
opening of the portal. It made no attempt to enter the great nursery,
just stood where it was and sliced the air rhythmically with its jaws.

"We haven't a chance of walking through _that_ exit!" Dennis agreed.
"Let's try the other side."

       *       *       *       *       *

But before they could half cross the great room--walking between rows of
life that weakly stirred like protoplasmic mud on either side of
them--a soldier appeared at that door, too. Like the first, it stationed
itself there, and began the same regular, swift slicing movements of
jaws that compassed the doorway from side to side and halfway from top
to bottom.

"We might possibly be able to run through that giant's nut-cracker
before it smashed shut on us," said Jim dubiously. "But I'd hate to try
it. There's a door at the end, too."

They made for this, running now. But a third soldier appeared to block
the way out with those deadly, clashing mandibles.

"You're _sure_ they can't see?" demanded Jim, clutching his spear while
he hesitated whether to try an attack on the fearful guard or to turn
tail again. "Because they certainly act as if they did!"

"Direct commands from the ruling brain," Denny surmised soberly.
"Somewhere, perhaps half a mile down in the earth, Something is able to
see us through solid walls, read in our minds our intentions of what
we're to do next, and send out wordless commands to these soldiers to
execute countermoves."

"Rot!" said Jim testily. "These things are bugs, not supermen. And the
fact that they're now bigger than we are, and much better armed, doesn't
keep them from being just bugs. There's no real brain-power in evidence
here."

But an instant later he changed his mind. They approached the fourth and
last exit from the giant chamber. And here there was no guard. They were
able to race out of it without interference. The oddity of that was
glaring.

"Denny," gasped Jim, "we're being _herded_! Driven in a certain
direction, and for a certain reason, by these damned things! Do you
realize that?"

Dennis did realize it. And a moment later, when he glanced behind, he
realized it more.

       *       *       *       *       *

Behind them, marching in orderly twos that filled the tunnel from side
to side, moved a body of the soldiers. As the men moved, they moved;
never coming nearer and never dropping behind.

Experimentally, Dennis stopped. The grim soldiers stopped, too. Dennis
walked back toward them a step or two, spear held ready.

The monsters did not try to attack. On the other hand they did not give
ground, either; and as Denny got to within a few yards of them, one in
the front line suddenly opened and shut his ponderous jaws.

They clashed together a matter of inches from Denny's torso--a clear
warning to get on back in the direction he had come.

Jim came and stood beside him, heavy shoulder muscles bunched into
knots, standing on the balls of his feet as a boxer stands before
flashing in at an opponent.

"Shall we have it out with them here and now?" said Jim, his jaws set.
"We wouldn't have a chance--but I'm beginning to get awfully doubtful
about the fate these things have in store for us. I can't even guess at
what it may be--but I've an idea it may be a lot worse than a quick,
easy death!"

Denny shook his head. "Let's see it through," he muttered, looking at
the nightmare jaws of their guard. Two sweeps of those jaws and he and
Jim would lie in halves.

       *       *       *       *       *

They started back down the corridor, the monstrous shepherds moving as
they did. The way descended so steeply now that it was difficult for
them to keep their footing. Then, yards below the level of the horrible
nursery, the tunnel narrowed--and widened again into a chamber which had
no other opening save the one they were being herded into. A blind end
to the passageway.

"The bug Bastille," said Jim with a mirthless grin. "Here, I guess,
we're going to wait for the powers-that-be to judge us and give us our
sentence."

The giant soldiers halted. Two of them stood in the narrowed part of the
tunnel, one behind the other, blocking it with a double, living barrier.
Their jaws commenced moving regularly, savagely back and forth, open and
closed. Blind these guards might be; but no living thing, even though it
bristled with eyes, could creep out unscathed through the animated
threshing machine those jaws made of that doorway. The two men were more
securely held in their prison cell than they would have been by two-inch
doors of nickel-steel. They could only wait there, helpless prisoners,
to learn the intentions of the unknown Something that ruled the great
city, and that held them so easily in its grasp.




CHAPTER VI

_In the Food Room_


Restlessly, Jim paced back and forth in the narrow dank cell. At the
doorway the two guards opened and closed their jaws, regularly,
rhythmically, about sixty to the minute. Hours, the two men calculated,
they had been there. And still the clashing of those jaws rang steadily,
maddeningly in their ears.

Clash-clash-clash. The things seemed as tireless as machinery.
Clash-clash-clash. And into that savage, tireless movement, Denny read a
sort of longing refrain.

"Try--to--es--cape! Try--to--es--cape!"

He shivered. At any time, did he and Jim grow too fearful of the dark
future or too nerve-wracked by the terrific suspense, they could step
into these gigantic, steel-hard jaws. But to be sliced in two ...

Jim stopped his pacing, and stared speculatively at the wall of their
cell. For the dozenth time he raised his ponderous spear and thrust the
pointed end at the wall with all his strength. And for the dozenth time
he was rewarded only by seeing a flake no larger than his clenched fist
fall out.

"Might as well be cement!" he rasped. "God, we're caught like flies in a
spiderweb!"

"Well, you wanted excitement," remarked Dennis, a bit acidly. The strain
was telling on him more than on the less finely strung Holden; but he
was struggling to keep himself in hand.

"So I did want excitement," said Jim. "But I want at least a sporting
chance for my white-alley, too. But--"

He stopped; and both stared swiftly toward the door.

       *       *       *       *       *

The ponderous, gruesome clashing of jaws had stopped. The two nightmare
guards stood motionless, as though at command. Then they moved into the
cell, straight toward the two men.

"It's come!" said Jim through set teeth. He swung his spear up, ready to
shoot it at the horny breastplate of the nearest monster with all his
puny strength. "We're going to catch it now!"

But Dennis gazed more intently; and he saw that the blind but ferocious
creatures showed no real signs of molesting them. Instead, they were
edging to one side. In a moment, as the two men moved warily to keep
their distance, they found suddenly that the soldiers were behind them,
and that the doorway was free to them.

The glimpse of freedom, however, was not inspiring. The meaning of the
move was too apparent: they were again being herded.

Whatever reigning power it was that had let them penetrate so deeply
into the trap, and then had surrounded and imprisoned them--was now
going to honor them with an audience.

"His Majesty commands," commented Jim, reading the sinister gesture as
clearly as Denny had. "I'll wager we're about to meet your 'unknown
intelligence,' Denny. But be it 'super-termite' or be it Queen--whatever
it may be--I want just one chance to use this spear of mine!"

Reluctantly he stepped forth before the fearful guard; reluctantly, but
in full command of his nerves now that the wearing inactivity was ended
and something definite was about to happen. Which proves but once again
the wisdom of the gods in not allowing man to read the future. For could
Jim Holden have foreseen the precise experience awaiting them, his nerve
control--and Denny's, too--might not have been so firm.

       *       *       *       *       *

Again their way led sharply down, through tunnels loftier and broader
and glowing more brilliantly with phosphorescence which was a
testimonial to their greater age.

The efficiency of their herding was perfect. At each side entrance along
the way stood one of the ghastly soldiers, jaws clashing with monotonous
deadliness. Now and again several of the monsters appeared straight
ahead, barring the avenue, and leaving no choice but to turn to right or
left into off-branching tunnels. Small chance here of missing the path!
And always behind them marched their two particular guards, closing off
their retreat.

"How do you suppose they sense our approach?" wondered Jim, who had
noticed that the menacing jaw-clashing began while they were still
fairly far from whatever side entrance was being barred to them. And
again: "You're _sure_ they can't see?"

"There isn't an eye in the lot of them," said Denny. "They must sense
our coming by the vibration of our footsteps."

But when they tried tiptoeing, on noiseless bare feet, the result was
the same. Surely the things could not hear them for more than a few
feet; yet with no sound to guide them, the blind guards commenced
automatically opening and closing those invulnerable jaws with the
distant approach of the two men just the same. They could only ascribe
it to the same force that seemed able to follow them, step by step and
thought by thought, though it was far away and out of sight--the ruling
brain of the termite tribe.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ever hotter it grew as they descended, till at length a blast of heat
like a draft from a furnace met them as they rounded a corner and
stepped into a corridor that no longer led downward. They knew that they
were very near the ruler's lair now, on the lowest level, deep in the
foundations of the vast pile.

Dennis wiped perspiration, caused as much by emotion as by heat, from
his face. He alone of all students on earth was going to penetrate the
very heart of the termite mystery. He alone was going to have at least a
glimpse of the baffling intelligence that science had guessed about for
so many decades He ... alone. For it was hardly likely that he would
ever get back up to the surface of earth to share his knowledge.

How different was this adventure from what he had hoped it might be! He
had thought that the two of them might simply enter the termitary,
mingle--perilously, but with at least a margin of safety--with the blind
race it housed, and walk out again whenever they pleased. But from the
moment of entering they'd had no chance. They had been hopelessly in the
clutch of the insects; played with, indulged, and finally trapped, to be
led at last like dogs on a leash to the lair of the ruling power.

They rounded another corner and now, ahead of them, they saw what must
be the end of this last and deepest of all the tunnels. This end showed
as a glare of light. Real light, not the soft gleam of the rotting wood
walls which was already paling feebly in comparison. The glare ahead of
them, indeed, had something of the texture of electric light. Neither
Jim nor Dennis could repress a sudden start; it was like coming abruptly
onto a man-made fact, a bit of man-made world in the midst of this
insect hell.

The damp heat was almost paralyzing now. Their limbs felt weak as they
stumbled toward the light. But they were inexorably herded forward, and
soon were at the threshold of the oddly illuminated chamber.

Now the two stopped for an instant and sniffed, as a peculiar odor came
to their nostrils. It was a vague but fearsome odor, indescribable,
making their skin crawl. A smell of decay--of death--and yet somehow of
rank and fetid life. A combination of charnel-house and menagerie smell.

       *       *       *       *       *

Denny blanched as an inkling of what was before them came to his mind.
He remembered the swooping wasp, that had so narrowly missed them at the
start of their adventure. The wasp, he knew, was not the only insect
that had certain dread ways of stocking its larder and keeping the
contents of that larder fresh! The termites did not customarily follow
these practises. Yet--yet the odor coming from the place before them
certainly suggested ... But he tried to thrust such apprehensions from
his thoughts.

They entered the chamber. The two gigantic soldiers stopped on the
threshold behind them and took up their standard guard attitudes. The
men stared about them....

It was huge, this chamber, almost as huge as the nursery chamber they
had blundered into. The source of the light was not apparent. It seemed
to glow from walls and floor and ceiling, as though it were a box of
glass with sunshine pouring in at all six sides.

And now horror began to mingle with awed interest, as they took in more
comprehensively the sights in that place, and saw precisely what it
contained.

Denny's apprehensions had been only too well founded. For larder, food
storeroom, the chamber certainly was. But what a storeroom! And in what
state the "food" that stocked it was!

       *       *       *       *       *

All along the vast floor were laid rows of inert, fantastic bodies.
Insects. The whole small-insect world seemed to be represented here. One
or more of everything that crawled, flew, walked or bored, seemed
gathered in this great room. Grubs, flies, worms, ants, things soft and
slimy and things grim and armored, were piled side by side like
cordwood.

These hulks, nearly all larger than the two quarter-inch men, lay stark
and motionless where they had been dropped. From them came the odor that
had stopped Jim and Denny on the threshold--the strange odor of blended
life and death. And the reason for the queer odor became apparent as the
two gazed more closely at the motionless hulks.

These things, like figures out of a delirium in their great size and
exaggerated frightfulness, were rigid as in death--but they were
nevertheless not dead! Helpless as so many lumps of stone, they were
still horribly, pitifully alive. Paralyzed, in some inscrutable termite
fashion, probably fully conscious of their surroundings, they could only
lie there and wait for their turn to come to be devoured by the
ferocious creatures that had dragged them down to this, the bowels of
the mound city.

Besides these things bound in the rigidity of death, there was more
normal life. There were termites in that vast storeroom, too; but they
were specialized creatures, such as termitary life abounds in, that were
so distorted as to be hardly recognizable as termites.

Along one wall of the place, hanging head down and fastened there for
life, was a row of worker termites whose function was obviously that of
reservoirs: their abdomens, so enormously distended as to be nearly
transparent, glistened in varying colors to indicate that they contained
various liquids whose purpose could only be guessed at.

Living cisterns, never to move, never to know life even in the
monotonous, joyless way of the normal worker, they hung there to be
dipped into whenever the master that reigned over this inferno, or his
immediate underlings, desired some of their contents!

       *       *       *       *       *

In addition, there were several each of two forms of termite soldier
such as they had not seen before, standing rigidly at attention about
the place.

At the door, of course, were the two creatures with the enormous
mandibles that had escorted the pigmy men to the larder. But these
others were as different as though they belonged to a different race.

Three had heads that were hideously bulbous in form, and which were
flabby and elastic instead of armored with thick horn as were the heads
of the usual soldiers. Like living syringes, these heads were;
perambulating bulbs filled with some defensive or offensive liquid to be
squirted out at the owner's will.

The third kind of soldier was represented in the spectacle of termites
with heads that were huge and conical, resembling bungs, or the tapered
cylindrical corks with which one plugs a bottle. These, Denny knew from
his studies, had been evolved by termite biology for the purpose of
temporarily stopping up any breach in termitary mound-wall or tunnel
while the workers could assemble and repair the chink with more solid
and permanent building material.

       *       *       *       *       *

But how fantastically, gruesomely different these colossal figures
looked, here in the deepest stronghold of termitedom, than as scurrying
little insects viewed under an entomologist's glass! And how appallingly
different was the viewpoint from which they were now being
observed--here where the human observers were equal in size, and doomed
at any moment perhaps to be paralyzed and piled with the helpless live
things that made up the rest of the "larder"!

And the presiding genius of this mysterious, underground
storeroom--where was it? Denny and Jim looked about over the rows of
live food, and among the termite soldiers with their odd heads, in vain
for a creature that might conceivably be the super-insect that so
omnipotently ruled the mound.

Off in a corner they saw two more termites--standard worker types,
standing motionless side by side, with a queer sort of mushroom growth
linking them together--a large, gray-white ball borne mutually on their
backs. But that was all. The listing of those two workers concluded the
roll-call of termites in the chamber as far as the two men could see.
And the two were--just ordinary workers.

"I guess His Majesty is out," said Jim. But his voice, in spite of the
attempted levity of the words, was low-pitched and somber. "Most
impolite to keep us waiting--"

He stopped as Denny sharply threw up his hand. And he too gazed at the
maneuver that had caught Denny's wary attention.

       *       *       *       *       *

This was nothing save that the various soldiers in the chamber--seven of
them, besides the two that never left their stations at the door--had
moved. But they had moved in concert, almost as harmoniously in unison
as if performing some sort of drill.

In a single line they filed across the rows of inert, palpitating,
paralyzed bodies; and in a line they surrounded Jim and Denny in a
hollow square about twenty feet across. There they took up their
stations, the three soldiers with the syringe-heads, and the four with
the unwieldy craniums that resembled bungs.

So perfectly had the move been executed, so perfectly and in unison had
it been timed, that there could be little doubt it had resulted from a
direct order. But where was the thing to give the command? Where was the
head-general? In some far place, on his way to inspect the new and odd
kind of prisoners, and giving orders to hold them yet more closely in
anticipation of that inspection?

Jim turned to Denny and started to voice some of his thoughts. But the
words were killed by the light that had appeared suddenly in Denny's
eyes. In them had appeared a gleam of almost superstitious terror.

"Jim!" gasped Denny, raising his hand and pointing with trembling
forefinger. "Jim--_look_!"

Jim turned to gaze, and his spear, clutched with almost convulsive
desperation till this moment, sagged to the floor from his limp hinds.

       *       *       *       *       *

The thing Denny had pointed at was the curious, large mushroom growth
supported jointly on the backs of the two worker termites. It had been
across the chamber from them when they first saw it. Now it was moving
toward them, steadily, borne by the team of workers. And now, clearly,
for the first time, they saw what it really was.

It was a head, that mushroom growth. Rather, the whitish-gray,
soft-looking thing was a brain. For it had long ago burst free of the
original insect skull casing in which it had been born. Evidence that it
had once been a normal, termite head was given by the fact that here and
there, on sides and top of the huge, spongy-looking mass, were brownish
scales--fragments of the casing that had once contained its bulk.

Set low down under the sphere, with the whitish-gray mass beetling up
over them like a curving cliff, were eyes; great, staring, dull things
of the type termites have during the short-winged periods of their
existences. Like huge round stones, those eyes regarded the two men as
the team of termites marched closer.

Hanging down from the great mass was an abortive miniature of a
body--soft, shriveled abdomen, almost nonexistent chest, and tiny,
sticklike legs that trailed helplessly along the floor as the
termites--in the manner of two men who support a helpless third man
between them--bore it forward.

Here, then was the Intellect that ruled the tribe, the super-termite,
the master mind of the mound! This travesty of a termite! This thing
with wasted limbs and torso, and with enormous, voracious brain that
drained all sustenance constantly from the body! It was, in the insect
world, a parallel to the dream that present-day Man sometimes has of Man
a million years in the future: a thing all head and staring eyes, with a
brain so enlarged that it must be artificially supported on its flabby
torso.

"I guess His Majesty is out," Jim had said, with a shaky attempt at
lightness.

But he now realized his mistake. His Majesty hadn't been out. His
Majesty had been with them all along--a four-foot, irregular sphere of
grayish-white nerve matter and intricately wrinkled cortex dependent for
movement on borrowed backs and legs--and was now peering at them out of
the only pair of eyes in the termitary as though in doubt as to what to
do first with his helpless-seeming captives.




CHAPTER VII

_"Clinging Brown Stuff"_


Bemused, appalled, the two gazed at this almost disembodied brain that
held them captive. It continued to come steadily toward them, carried by
its two faithful slaves; and the grotesque termite soldiers, that had
closed about them in a hollow square, parted to let it through.

Such was the bewitchment of the two men as they stared at the
monstrosity, that they did not hear the slight clashing of horn that
accompanied a swift movement of one of the soldiers behind them.

The first thing they knew of such a movement was when they felt their
arms pinioned to their sides with crushing force, and looked down to
find a pair of hard, jointed forelegs coiled about their bodies. In
answer to some voiceless command, one of the termites with the conical
heads had approached behind them and wound a leg around each.

Sweat stood out on Denny's forehead at the repellent touch of that
living bond. He turned and twisted wildly.

Jim was struggling madly in the grip of the other foreleg. Great
shoulders bulging with the effort, muscles standing in knots on his
heavy arms, he nearly succeeded in breaking free. Denny felt the tie
that bound him relax ever so little as the monster centered its
attention on the stronger man.

With a last effort, he tore his right arm free, and wriggled partly
around in the thing's grip. He raised the spear and plunged it
slantingly down into the hideous body.

This type of termite was armored more poorly than the others. Only its
head was plated with horn; chest and abdomen were soft and vulnerable as
those of any humble worker in the mound. The spear tore into it for
two-thirds its length. There was a squeak--the first sound they had
heard--from the wounded monster. The clutching forelegs tightened
terribly, then began to loosen, quivering spasmodically as they slowly
relinquished their grasp.

Denny bounded free and again sent the length of his spear into the
loathsome body. Jim, meanwhile, had leaped toward his fallen spear. He
stooped to pick it up--and was lost!

       *       *       *       *       *

Obeying another wordless order, one of the ghastly, syringe-headed
monsters had stepped out of line with the start of the short struggle.
This one bounded on Jim just as he leaned over for his weapon.

Denny shouted a warning, started to run to his friend's aid. The dying
termite, with a last burst of incredible vitality, caught his leg and
held him.

In an instant it was done. The termite with the distorted head had
drenched Jim with a brown, thick liquid that covered him from shoulder
to feet--and Jim was writhing helplessly on the floor.

Denny burst loose at last from the feebly clutching foreleg. He
straightened, poised his spear, and with a strength born of near madness
shot it at the syringe-headed thing's chest.

But this one was different, armored to the full save for its soft
cranium. The steel bar glanced harmlessly from the heavy horn
breastplate. In answer, the monster wheeled and drenched Dennis, too,
with the loathsome liquid.

On the instant Dennis was helpless. As Jim had done, he sank to the
floor, his body constricted in a sheath that tightened as it dried and
which bound him as securely as any straitjacket might have done.

The two rolled on the floor, trying to shed the terrible coating of
hardening fluid that contracted about them. But they were as impotent as
two flies that had rolled in the sticky slime of some super-flypaper. At
last they gave it up.

Panting, helpless as mummies, they glared up at the stony eyes of the
ruler-termite. The team of workers moved, bearing their burden of almost
bodiless, mushroom brain like well-oiled machines.

Their forelegs went out. The two men were shoved along the floor ahead
of the monarch--and were laid in one of the lines of paralyzed insects
so patently held as the ruler's private food supply!

       *       *       *       *       *

The great, stony eyes were next bent, as though in curiosity, on the
spears that had done such damage to the termite with the conical head.
In the true insect world there was no such phenomenon as those
glittering steel bars; and it appeared that the over-developed brain of
the monarch held questions concerning their nature.

The team of termites wheeled, and walked over to the nearest spear,
trailing the feeble, atrophied legs of their rider as they went. They
squatted close to the floor, and the staring eyes examined the spears at
close range. Then the owner of the eyes apparently sent out another
command; for one of the guards at the door left its post and drew near,
scissor-mandibles opened in obedience.

The hard mandible's clashed over one of the steel bars. The jaws
crunched shut, with a nerve-rasping grind. They made, naturally, no
impression on the bar. The guard retired to its post at the doorway.

The termite-ruler seemed to think this over, for a moment. Then at some
telepathic order, its two bearers picked up the spear and carried it,
and their physically helpless ruler, over to one of the living
cisterns--one filled with a dark red liquid.

One of the beasts of burden reached up and thrust an end of the spear
into the hugely distended abdomen filled with the unknown red liquid.
The spear was withdrawn, with about a foot of its blunt end reddened by
the fluid. The termite laid it down; the staring, dull eyes watched
it....

Slowly the end of the bar dulled with swift oxidation; slowly it
turned brownish and flaked away, almost entirely consumed. The acid--if
that was what the red stuff was--was awesomely powerful, at least with
inorganic substances.

The termite team turned away from the bar, as if it were now a matter of
indifference to the bloated brain borne on their backs. It approached
the men again.

"I suppose," groaned Jim, "that our turn is next. The thing will
probably have us dipped into the red stuff, to see if we're consumed,
too."

       *       *       *       *       *

But here His Majesty's curiosity was interrupted while he partook of
nourishment.

The clashing jaws of the two termite soldiers at the door stopped for a
moment. Jim and Dennis struggled to turn their heads--all of them they
could move--to see what the cessation of jaw-clashing might mean.

Three worker termites squeezed past. They approached one of the line of
paralyzed insect hulks, and sank their mandibles into a garden slug.
They tugged at this until they had it under the live cistern of red
liquid into which the spear had been thrust.

One of the three flicked drops of the reddish stuff onto the inert slug,
till it was well sprinkled. Then they dragged the carcass back to the
termite-ruler.

They got it there barely in time. In a matter of seconds after they had
dropped it before the monarch, the slug had collapsed into a half-liquid
puddle of decomposed protoplasm on the floor. One of the main
functions--if not _the_ main function--of the red acid, it seemed, was
to act as a powerful digestive juice for His Majesty's food,
predigesting it before it was taken into the feeble body for
nourishment.

The termite team settled down over the semi-liquid mess that had been
the slug, and tilted back. Now, under the huge globe of the brain, Jim
and Denny saw exposed a small, soft mouth fringed by the tiny rudiments
of atrophied mandibles. The repulsive little mouth touched the
acid-softened mass....

The withered abdomen filled out. The whitish-gray lump of brain-matter
grew slightly darker. It looked as though the mass of the dead slug
were as large as the total bulk of the termite ruler; but not until the
meal was nearly gone did the voracious feeding stop.

The three workers that had spread the banquet before their monarch, left
the chamber. The guards resumed their interrupted jaw-clashing, which
seemed senseless now: the captives, though not paralyzed as were the
other captives there, were held so helpless by the dried and hardened
fluid that escape was out of the question.

       *       *       *       *       *

The misshapen burden of the termite team seemed to relax a little,
lethargically, as though so gorged with food as to render almost
inactive the grotesquely exaggerated brain. The stony eyes became
duller. Plainly the captives were to have a brief respite while the huge
meal was assimilated.

"If I could get loose for just one minute," Jim took the opportunity to
whisper to Denny, "and get at my spear--I think there would be one
termite-ruler less in the world!"

Denny nodded. He had been thinking along the same lines as Jim: that
bloated, swollen brain seemed a very vulnerable thing. Soft and boneless
and formless, contained only by the dirty-white, membranous skin, it did
appear a tempting target for a spear thrust. And now, sluggish with its
meal, it seemed less alert and on guard.

Jim went on with his thought.

"I think you scientists are wrong about _all_ the termites having
intelligence," he whispered. "I believe that thing has the only
reasoning mind in the mound. Look at those two guards at the door, for
instance. There's no earthly need for them to keep guard as eternally as
they do. We can't even move, let alone try to escape. They're utterly
brainless, commanded to guard the entrance with their mandibles, and
continuing to guard it accordingly although the need for it is past."

Jim worked almost unthinkingly at his bonds. "If we could kill the
wizened, little, big-headed thing, we might have a chance. There'd be
nothing left to guide the tribe, no ruling power to direct them against
us. We might even ... escape!"

"Through the entire city--with untold thousands of these horrible things
on our trail?" objected Denny gloomily.

"But if the untold thousands were dummies, used to being directed in
every move by this master brain," urged Jim, "they might just blunder
around while we slipped through the lines...."

His words trailed into silence. Escape seemed so improbable as to be
hardly worth talking about. Quiet reigned for a long time.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was broken finally by Dennis.

"Jim," he breathed suddenly, "can you see my legs?"

With difficulty Jim turned his head. "Yes," he said. "Why?"

"It seems to me I can move my left knee--just a little!"

Jim looked more closely. "By heaven!" he exclaimed. "Denny, _I think the
brown stuff is cracking_! Maybe it was never intended to be more than a
temporary bond, to hold an enemy helpless just long enough for it to be
killed! Maybe it hardens as it dries so that it loses all resiliency!
Maybe--"

He stopped. A faint quivering of the ruler's withered little legs
heralded its reawakening consciousness.

"Act helpless!" whispered Denny excitedly, as he too saw that faint stir
of awakening. "Don't let the thing get an idea of what we're thinking.
Because ... we _might_ get our moment of freedom...."

Both lay relaxed on the floor, eyes half closed. And in the hardening
substance that covered them all over like a shell of cloudy brown
bakelite, appeared more minute seams as it dried unevenly on the
flexible human flesh beneath it. Whether Jim's guess that it was only a
temporary bond was correct, or whether it had been developed to harden
relentlessly only over unyielding surfaces of horn such as the termites'
deadliest enemy, the ants, wear for armor, will never be known. But in a
matter of moments it became apparent that it was going to prove too
brittle to continue clamping flesh as elastic as that of the two humans!

       *       *       *       *       *

By now the termite-ruler seemed to have recovered fully from its
gargantuan meal. And while, of course, there was no expression of any
kind to be read in the stony, dull eyes, its actions seemed once more to
indicate curiosity about these queer, two-legged bugs that wandered in
here where they had no business to be.

The team of workers bore it close again, lowered the great head close to
Denny. One of the team began chipping at the brown shell where it
encased and held immovably to his body Denny's left hand.

A bit of the shell dropped away, exposing the fingers. Delicately,
accurately, the worker's normal-sized but powerful mandibles edged the
little finger away from the rest--and closed down over it....

"Denny!" burst out Jim, who could just see, out of the corners of his
eyes, what was being done. "My God ... Denny...."

Dennis himself said nothing. His face went white as chalk, and great
drops of perspiration stood out on his forehead. But no sound came from
his tortured lips.

The finger was lifted to the terrible little mouth under the gigantic
head. The mouth received it; the worker nuzzled with its mandibles for
another finger. The monarch, having tried the taste of this latest
addition to his larder, had found it good.

Jim writhed and twisted in his weakening bonds. There was a soft
snapping as several now thoroughly dried sections of the brown substance
cracked loose. The termite team whirled around; the ruler stared, as
though in sudden realization of danger.

       *       *       *       *       *

More furiously Jim fought his bonds. Dennis was still, recovering slowly
from the nauseating weakness that had followed the pain of his mutilated
hand. There was less blood flow than might have been expected, due,
perhaps, to the fact that the nipping mandibles had pinched some of the
encasing shell tight over the wound.

With a dull crack, a square foot of the brown stuff burst from Jim's
straining chest. But now the monarch moved to correct the situation.

The two giant soldiers at the doorway started across the great room
toward them. Simultaneously, a second of the syringe-headed termites
moved to renew the bonds that were being broken.

But the move had come a shade too late. Jim kicked his legs free with a
last wild jerk, and staggered to his feet. His arms were still held, in
a measure, in spite of his utmost efforts to free them of the clinging
brown stuff. But he could, and did, run away from the body of soldiers
surrounding the monarch just before the deadly syringe of the first
attacking termite could function against him.

The great, flabby head hurtled his way. But he knew what to expect, now.
As the slimy brown stream, directed by the agitated termite-ruler,
squirted toward him, he leaped alertly aside--leaped again as the head
swung around--and saw with savage hope that the monster had exhausted
its discharge!

The two soldiers from the doorway closed in on him now. With their
apparent command of the situation, the monstrosities with the bung- and
syringe-heads closed in more tightly around their monarch. Theirs,
evidently to protect that vulnerable big brain, and leave the attacking
to others.

Jim fled down between the rows of paralyzed insects. The two great
guards from the doorway, mandibles reaching fiercely toward the
fugitive, followed. And there commenced, there in that deep-buried
insect hell, a chase for life.




CHAPTER VIII

_The Coming of the Soldiers_


For a moment Jim was handicapped in fleetness and agility by the fact
that his arms were hampered. But the two hideous guards, though each was
a dozen times more powerful than any man its size, were handicapped in a
chase, too--by the very weight of their enormous mandibles. In their
thundering chase after Jim, they resembled nothing so much as two
powerful but clumsy battleships chasing a relatively puny but much more
agile destroyer.

Behind the great bulk of a paralyzed June bug, Jim halted for a fraction
while he tore his arms at last free of the clinging brown stuff. The
guards rushed around the June bug at him.

He leaped for the row of hanging cisterns; and there, while he dodged
from one to another of the loathsome vats, he thought over a plan that
had come to his racing mind. It wasn't much of a plan, and it seemed
utterly futile in the face of the odds against him. But he had boasted,
before starting this mad adventure, that Man's wits were superior to any
bug's. It was time now to see if his boast had been an empty one.

He feinted toward the far end of the laboratory. The guards, acting
always as if they had a dozen eyes instead of none, rushed to prevent
this, cutting across his path and closing the exit with clashing jaws.

Jim raced toward the spot where Denny lay. This was within twenty yards
of the spot where, behind his ring of guards, the big-brained ruler now
cowered. But, while one of the syringe-monsters sent a brown stream
blindly toward the leaping, shifting man, no other attacking move was
made. The soldiers remained chained to their posts. Jim retrieved his
spear--and the first part of his almost hopeless plan had succeeded!

It was good, the feel of that smooth steel. He balanced the ponderous
weapon lightly. An ineffective thing against the plates of living armor
covering the scissor-mandibles. But it was not against them--at least
not directly--that he was planning to use it now!

       *       *       *       *       *

Once more he darted toward the living cisterns. The soldiers followed
close behind.

Under the bulging abdomen of the termite containing the reddish acid,
Jim halted as though to make a defiant last stand against the guards.
They stopped, too, then began to advance on him from either side, more
slowly, like two great cats stalking a mouse.

Muscles bunched for a lightning-quick move, eyes narrowed to mere slits
as he calculated distances and fractions of a second. Jim stood there
beneath the great acid vat. The mandibles were almost within slicing
distance now.

The guards opened wide their tremendous jaws, forming two halves of a
deadly horn circle that moved swiftly to encompass him. They leaped....

With barely a foot left him, Jim darted back, then poised his spear and
shot it straight toward the bulging, live sack that held the acid above
the guards.

The acid spurted from the spear hole. Jim clenched his fists and
unconsciously held his breath till his chest ached, as the scarlet
liquid spread over the great hulks that twisted and fought in ponderous
frenzy to untangle legs and antennae and mandibles from the snarl their
collision had made of them.

The acid bit through steel and human flesh. On the other hand, it had
not harmed the horny flipper of the termite worker that had flicked it
onto the garden slug. Did that mean that the flipper was immunized to
the stuff, like the lining of the stomach, which is unharmed by acids
powerful enough to decompose other organic master? Or did it mean that
_all_ horn was untouched by it?

He groaned aloud. The two great insects had drawn apart by now, and had
sprung from under the shattered acid vat. Again they were on the trail.
The maneuver had been fruitless! The chase was on again, which
meant--since he could not hope to elude the blind but ably directed
creatures forever--that all hope was lost....

       *       *       *       *       *

Then he shouted with triumph. A massive foreleg dropped from one of the
guards, to crash to the floor. Whether or not the acid was able to set
on the horny exterior of the termites, it was as deadly to their soft
interiors as to any other sort of flesh! The acid had found the joint of
that foreleg and had eaten through it as hot iron sinks through butter!

Still the injured creature came on, with Jim ever retreating, twisting
and dodging from one side of the huge room to the other, leaping over
the smaller paralyzed insects and darting behind the larger carcasses.
But now the thing's movements were very slow--as were the movements of
its companion.

Another leg fell hollowly to the floor, like an abandoned piece of
armor; and then two at once from the second termite.

Both stopped, shuddering convulsively. The agony of those two enormous,
dumb and blind things must have been inconceivable. The acid was by now
spending its awful force in their vitals, having seeped down through
every joint and crevice in their living armor. They were hardly more
than huge shells of horn, kept alive only by their unbelievable
vitality.

One more feeble lunge both made in concert, toward the puny adversary
that had outwitted them. Then both, as though at a spoken command,
stopped dead still. Next instant they crashed to the floor, shaking it
in their fall.

       *       *       *       *       *

For a second Jim could only stand there and gaze at their monstrous
bodies. His plan had succeeded beyond all belief; and realization of
this success left him dazed for an instant. But it was only for an
instant.

Recovering himself, he raced to the acid vat to recover the spear he'd
punctured it with--only three feet of it was left: the rest had been
eaten away by the powerful stuff--and then wheeled to help Denny.

By now the crackling brown stuff had fallen from Denny, too--enough, at
least for him to struggle to his feet and hasten its cracking by tearing
at it with partially loosened hands. As Jim reached him, he freed
himself entirely save for the last few bits that stuck to him as bits of
shell cling to a newborn chick.

They turned together toward the corner where the termite-ruler was
cowering behind the guards that surrounded it. Intellect to a degree
phenomenal for an insect, this thing might have; but of the blind fierce
courage possessed by its subjects, it assuredly had none! In proof of
this was the fact that when the half dozen specialized soldiers ringing
it round might have leaped to the aid of the two clumsy door guards and
probably have ended the uneven fight in a few minutes, the craven
monarch had ordered them to stay at their guard-posts rather than take
the risk of remaining unguarded and defenseless for a single moment!
Increasing intelligence apparently had resulted (as only too often it
does in the world of men) in decreasing bravery!

An attack on the thing, closely guarded as it was, seemed hopeless.
Those enormous, flat-topped heads held ready to present their steely
surfaces as shields! Those armored terrors with the syringe-heads--one
of which still held a full cargo of the terrible brown fluid that at a
touch could bind the limbs of the men once more in the straitjacket
embrace! What could the two do against that barrier?

       *       *       *       *       *

Nevertheless, without a word being spoken, and without a second's
hesitation, Jim and Denny advanced on the bristling ring--and the heart
of termite power it enclosed. Not only was the slimmest of hopes of
escape rendered impossible while the super-termite lived to direct its
subjects against them--but also they had a reckoning to collect from the
thing if they could....

Denny glanced down at his hand, from which slow red drops still oozed.

At their approach, the guarding ring shifted so that the soldier whose
head was still bulging with the brown liquid, faced them. The two men
stopped, warily. They must draw the sting from that monster before they
dared try to come closer.

Jim feinted, leaping in and to one side. The guard turned with him,
moved forward a bit as though to discharge a brown stream at him--but
held its fire. Jim moved still closer, then leaped crabwise to one side
as the brain behind the guards telepathed in a panic for its blind
minion to release some of its ammunition. The flood missed Jim only by
inches.

Denny took his turn at gambling with death. He shouted ringingly, and
ran a dozen steps straight at the monster that was the principal menace.
At the last moment he flung himself aside as Jim had done--but this time
the stream was not to be drawn.

Still most of the deadly liquid was left; the thing's head bulged with
it. And no real move could be made till that head was somehow emptied.

"Your spear!" panted Denny, who was armed only with the three-foot club
which was all that was left of the spear that had entered the acid bag.

Jim nodded. As he had done under the acid vat, he drew it back for a
throw--and shot it forward with all the power of his magnificent
shoulders.

The glittering length of steel slashed into the flabby, living syringe.
A fountain of molasseslike liquid gushed out.

       *       *       *       *       *

The move had not been elaborately reasoned out; it had been a natural;
almost instinctive one, simply a blow struck for the purpose of draining
the dread reservoir of its sticky contents. But the results--as logical
and inevitable as they were astounding and unforeseen--were such that
the move could not have been wiser had all the gods of war conspired to
help the two men with shrewd advice.

The searching spear-point had evidently found the brain behind the
syringe of the thing; for it reared in an agony that could only have
been that of approaching death, and ran amuck.

No longer did the ruling brain that crouched behind it have the power to
guide its movements, it seemed. The telepathic communications had been
snapped with that crashing spear-point. It charged blindly, undirected,
in havoc-wreaking circles. And in an instant the whole aspect of the
battle had been changed.

The ring of living armor presented by the other soldiers was broken as
the enormous, dying termite charged among them. Furthermore, the
fountain of thick brown liquid exuding from its head, smeared the limbs
of the soldiers the blind, crazed thing touched, as well as its own.

In thirty seconds or less the wounded giant was down, still alive, but
wriggling feebly in a binding sheath of its own poison. And with it, so
smeared as to be utterly out of the struggle, were three of the others.

Quick to seize the advantage, Jim leaped to wrench his spear from the
conquered giant's head. And side by side he and Denny started again the
charge against the ruler's guards, which, while still mighty in defense,
were by their very nature unable to attack.

       *       *       *       *       *

Three of these guards were left. Two of them were the freaks with the
great, armored, bung-heads--and the soft and vulnerable bodies. The
third was of the syringe type, with invulnerable horn breastplate and
body armor--but with a head that, now its fatal liquid was exhausted,
was useless in battle.

"Take 'em one by one," grunted Jim, setting the example by swinging his
spear at the body of the nearest guard. "We'll get at that damn thing
with the overgrown brains yet!"

His spear clanged on iron-hard horn as the termite swung its unwieldy
head to protect its unarmored body. The force of the contact tore the
spear from his hand; but almost before it could drop, he had recovered
it. And in that flashing instant Denny had darted in at the side of the
thing and half disembowelled it with a thrust of the acid-blunted point
of his three-foot bar, and a lightninglike wrench up and to the side.

"Only two left!" cried Jim, stabbing at the flabby head of the
syringe-monster that loomed a foot above his own head. "We'll do it yet,
Denny!"

But at that moment a clashing and rattling at the doorway suddenly burst
in on the din of the eery fight. Both men stared at each other with
surrender in their eyes.

"Now we _are_ all through!" yelled Jim, almost calm in his complete
resignation. "But we'll try to reach that devilish thing before we're
doomed!"

       *       *       *       *       *

In the heat of the swift, deadly fray, the two men had forgotten for the
moment, that these few soldiers ranged against them were not all the
fighters in the mound city. But the quaking intellect they were striving
to reach had not forgotten! At some time early in the one-sided struggle
it had sent out a soundless call to arms. And now, in the doorway,
struggling to force through in numbers too great for the entrance's
narrow limits, were the first of the soldier hordes the ruler had
commanded to report here for fight duty. And behind them, as far as the
eye could see, the tunnel was blocked by yet others marching to kill
the creatures that menaced their leader. The abortive effort at escape,
it seemed, was doomed.

The strength of desperation augmented Jim's naturally massive muscular
power. He whirled his spear high over his head, clubwise. Disdaining now
to try for a thrust behind and to one side of the great conical head
that faced him, he brought the bar down with sledge-hammer force on the
horn-plated thing.

As though it had been a willow wand, the big bar whistled through the
air in its descent. With a crack that could be heard even above the
crashing mandibles of the soldiers pouring across the hundred-yard floor
toward the scene of battle, the bar landed on the living buckler of a
head.

The head could not have been actually harmed. But the brain behind it
was patently jarred and numbed for an instant. The great creature stood
still, its head weaving slowly back and forth. Jim swung his improvised
club in another terrific arc....

       *       *       *       *       *

Denny darted around behind the ponderously wheeling bulk of the last
remaining guard to the team of worker termites. He, too, swung his arms
high--over the bloated brain-bag that cowered down between the backs
that bore it--leaping here and there to avoid the blunt mandibles of the
burden bearers. He, too, brought down his three-foot length of bar with
all the force he could muster, the sight of that swollen, hideous head
atop the withered remnants of termite body lending power to his muscles.

And now, just as the nearest of the soldiers reached out for them, the
termite-ruler lay helpless on the backs of its living crutches, with its
attenuated body quivering convulsively, and its balloonlike, fragile
head cleft almost in two halves. It was possible that even that terrific
injury might not be fatal to a thing so great and flexible of brain, and
so divorced from the ills as well as the powers of the flesh. But for
the moment at least it was helpless, an inert mass on the patient backs
of the termite team.

"To the acid vat," snapped Jim. "We'll make our last stand there."

Dodging the nearest snapping mandibles, Denny ran beside his companion
to where the termite, dead now, with its distended abdomen deflated and
the last of the acid trickling from the hole caused by Jim's spear,
still hung head down from the ceiling.

The powerful ruler of this vast underground city was crushed--for the
moment at least. But the fate of the two humans seemed no less certain
than it had before. For now the huge chamber was swarming with the giant
soldiers. In numbers so great that they crashed and rattled against each
other as they advanced, they marched toward the place where the broken
monarch still quivered in weak convulsions--and behind which, near the
acid vat, the two men crouched.




CHAPTER IX

_The Cannibalistic Orgy_


At first Jim and Dennis could only comprehend the _numbers_ of the
foe--could only grip their bars and resolve to die as expensively as
possible. But then, as a few seconds elapsed during which they were
amazingly not charged by the insects, they began to notice the _actions_
of the things.

They were swarming so thickly about the spot where their leader had
fallen that all the men could see was their struggling bodies. And the
movements of these soldiers were puzzling in the extreme.

The things seemed, of a sudden, to be fighting among themselves! At any
rate, they were not hurrying to attack the unique, two-legged bugs by
the deflated acid bag.

Instead, they seemed to be having a monstrous attack of colic as they
rolled about their vanquished monarch. With their antennae weaving
wildly, and their deadly jaws crashing open and shut along the floor,
they were fairly wallowing about that section. And the crowding ring of
soldiers surrounding the wallowers were fighting like mad things to
shove them out of place.

Over each other they struggled and rolled, those on the top and sides of
the solid mass pressing to get in and down. In stark astonishment, the
two men watched the inexplicable conflict--and wondered why they had not
already been rushed and sliced to pieces by the steely, ten-foot
mandibles.

In Dennis' mind, as he watched, wide-eyed, the crazy battle of the
monsters around the spot, a memory struggled to be recognized. He had
seen something vaguely like this before, on the upper earth, what was
it?

Abruptly he remembered what it was. And with the recollection--and all
the possibilities of deliverance it suggested--he shouted aloud and
clutched Jim's arm with trembling fingers.

       *       *       *       *       *

That scene of carnage suggested to his mind the day he had seen a cloud
of vultures fighting over the carcass of a horse in the desert. The mad
pushing, the slashing and rending of each other as all fought for the
choice morsels of dead flesh! It was identical.

The termites, he knew, were deliberately cannibalistic. A race so
efficiently run, so ingenious in letting nothing of possible value go to
waste, would almost inevitably be trained to consume the bodies of dead
fellow beings. And now--now ...

The gruesome monarch, that thing of monstrous brain and almost
nonexistent body, was no longer the monarch. It was either dead, or
utterly helpless. In that moment of death or helplessness--was it being
fallen upon and eaten by the horde of savage things it normally ruled?
Did the termite hordes make a practice of devouring their helpless and
worn-out directing brains as it was known they devoured all their
worn-out, no longer potent queens?

It certainly looked as if that was what the leaderless horde of soldiers
was doing here! Or, at any rate, trying to do; accustomed to being fed
by the workers, with mandibles too huge to permit of normal
self-feeding, they would probably be able to hardly more than strain
clumsily after the choice mass beneath them and absorb it in morsels so
small as to be more a source of baffled madness than of satisfaction.

Which latter conjecture seemed certainly to support the theory that the
soldier termites were not trying to help their fallen monarch, but were
trampling and slashing it to death in an effort to devour it!

"Quick!" snapped Denny, realizing that it was a chance that must not be
overlooked; that even if he were wrong, they might as well die trying to
get to the doorway as be crushed to death where they stood. "Run to the
exit!"

"Through that nightmare army?" said Jim, astounded. "Why, we haven't a
chance of making it!"

"Come, I say!" Denny dragged him a few feet by main force. "I hope--I
believe--we won't be bothered. If a pair of jaws crushes us, it will
probably be by accident and not design--the brutes are too busy to
bother about us now."

Still gazing at Denny as though he thought him insane, Jim tarried no
longer. He began to edge his way, by Denny's side, toward the distant
door.

       *       *       *       *       *

In a very few feet Denny's theory was proved right. None of the gigantic
insects tried to attack them. But even so that journey to the exit, a
distance of more than the length of a football field, was a ghastly
business.

On all sides the giant, armored bodies rushed and shoved. The clash of
horn breastplates against armored legs, of mandibles and granitic heads
against others of their kind, was ear-splitting. The monsters, in their
effort to indulge the cannibalistic instinct--at once so horrible to the
two humans, and so fortunate for them--were completely heedless of their
own welfare and everything else.

Like giant ice cakes careening in the break-up of a flood, they crunched
against each other; and like loose ice cakes in a flood, every now and
then one was forced clear up off its feet by the surrounding rush, to
fall back to the floor a moment later with a resounding crash.

It would seem an impossibility for any two living things as relatively
weak and soft as men to find a way through such a maelstrom. Yet--Jim
and Denny did.

Several times one or the other was knocked down by a charging, blind
monster. Once Denny was almost caught and crushed between two of the
rock-hard things. Once Jim only saved himself from a pair of terrific,
snapping jaws that rushed his way, by using his short spear as a pole
and vaulting up and over them onto the monster's back, where he was
allowed to slide off unheeded as the maddened thing continued in its
rush. But they reached the door!

There they gazed fearfully down the corridor, sure there would be
hundreds more of the soldiers crowding to answer the last call of their
ruling, master mind. But only a few stragglers were to be seen, and
these, called to the grim feast by some sort of instinct or perhaps some
sense of smell, rushed past with as little attempt to attack them as the
rest.

The two men ran down the tunnel, turned a corner into an ascending
tunnel they remembered from their trip in, raced up this, hearts
pounding wildly with the growing hope of actually escaping from the
mound with their lives--and then halted. Jim cursed bitterly,
impotently.

       *       *       *       *       *

Branching off from this second tunnel, all looking exactly alike and all
identical in the degree of their upward slant, were five more tunnels!
Like spokes of a wheel, they radiated out and up; and no man could have
told which to take. They stopped, in despair, as this phase of their
situation, unthought of till now, was brought home to them.

"God! The place is a labyrinth! How can we ever find, our way out?"
groaned Jim.

"All we can do is keep going on--and up," said Denny, with a shake of
his head.

At random, they picked the center of the five underground passages, and
walked swiftly along it. And now they began to come in contact again
with the normal life of the vast mound city.

Here soldiers were patrolling up and down with seeming aimlessness,
while near-by workers labored at shoring up collapsing sections of
tunnel wall, or at carrying staggering large loads of food from one
unknown place to another. But now there seemed to be a certain lack of
system, of coordination, in the movements of the termites.

"Damned funny these soldiers aren't joining in the rush with the rest to
get to the laboratory in answer to the command of the ruler," said Jim,
warily watching lest one of the gigantic guards end the queer truce and
rush them. "And look at the way the workers move--just running aimlessly
back and forth with their loads. I don't get it."

       *       *       *       *       *

"I think I do," said Denny. He pitched his voice low, and signed for Jim
to walk more slowly, on tiptoe. "These soldiers aren't with the rest
because only a certain number was called. It's simple mathematics: if
all the soldiers in the mound tried to get in that room back there where
the ruler was, they'd get jammed immovably in the tunnels near-by. The
king-termite, with all the astounding reasoning power it must have had,
called only as many as could crowd in, in order to avoid a jam in which
half the soldiers in the city might be killed.

"As for the aimless way the workers are moving--you forget they haven't
a leader any more. They are working by habit and instinct only, carrying
burdens, building new wall sections, according to blind custom alone,
and regardless of whether the carrying and building are necessary."

"In that case," sighed Jim, "we'd have a good chance to getting out of
here--if we could only find the path!"

"I'm sure we can find the path, and I'm sure we can get out," said Denny
confidently. "For in a mound of this size there must be many paths
leading to the upper world, and there is no reason--with the omnipotent
ruling brain dead and eaten--why any of these creatures should try to
stop or fight us."

Which was good logic--but which left entirely out of consideration that
one factor which man so often forgets but is still inevitably governed
by: the unpredictable whims of fate. For on their way out they were to
blunder into the one place in all the mound which was--death or no death
of the ruling power--absolutely deadly to them; and were to arouse the
terrible race about them to frenzies that were based, not on any
reasoned thought processes, or which in any case they were of themselves
incapable, but on the more grim and fanatic foundations of unreasoned,
primal, outraged instinct.




CHAPTER X

_The Termite Queen_


The slope of the upward-leading tunnels had become less noticeable, from
which fact the two men reasoned hopefully that they were near ground
level. And now they began to see termite workers bearing a new sort of
burden: termite eggs, sickly looking lumps that had only too obviously
been newly laid.

A file of workers approached. In a long line, each with an egg, looking
for all the world like a file of human porters bearing the equipment of
a jungle expedition. Slowly, the things moved--carefully--bound for some
such vast incubator as the one Jim and Dennis had stumbled into some
hours before.

"We want to go in the opposite direction from them," Denny whispered.
"They're coming from the Queen termite's den--and we don't want to
blunder in there!"

They about-faced, and moved with the workers till they came to the
nearest passage branching away from the avenue on which the file
marched. Denny dabbed at his forehead.

"Lucky those things came in time to warn us," he said. "From what
little science knows of the termites, I can guess that the Queen's
chamber would be a chamber of horrors for us!"

They walked on, searching for another main avenue, such as the one they
had left; which might be an artery leading to the outside world. But
they had not gone far when they were again forced to change their
course.

Ahead of them, marching in regular formation, came a band of soldiers
larger than the usual squad. They filled the tunnel so compactly that
the two men did not dare try to squeeze past them.

"Here," whispered Jim, pointing to a side tunnel.

       *       *       *       *       *

They stole down it; but in a moment it developed that their choice had
been an unlucky one: the crash of the heavy, armored bodies continued to
follow them. The soldiers had turned down that tunnel, too.

"Are they after us again?" whispered Jim.

Denny shrugged. There was still a remnant of the disguising
termite-paste on their bodies to fool the insects. It seemed impossible
that the ruling brain behind them had survived the cannibalistic rush
and taken command of the mound again? But--was anything impossible in
this world of terror?

Steadily the two were forced to retreat before the measured advance of
the guards. And now the tunnel they were in broadened--and abruptly
ended in another of the vast chambers that seemed to dot the mound city
at fairly regular intervals. But this one appeared to be humming with
activity, if the noise coming from within it was any indication.

The two passed at the threshold, dismayed at the evidence of
super-activity in the chamber ahead of them. But while they paused
there, the soldiers behind them rounded a corner. They could not go
back. There were no more of the opportune side entrances to dodge into.
All they could do was retreat still farther--into the vast room before
them.

They did so, reluctantly, moving step by step as the marching band
behind them crashed rhythmically along. But once inside the great
chamber, they shrank back against the wall with whispered imprecations
at the final, desperate trick fate had played on them.

Their path of retreat, leading around labyrinthine corners and
by-passages, had doubled back on them without their having been aware of
it. They were in the very place Dennis had wished so much to avoid--the
chamber of the Queen termite!

       *       *       *       *       *

High overhead, almost lost in the dimness, was the arching roof. Around
the circular walls were innumerable tunnel entrances. At each of these
stood a termite guard--picked soldiers half again as large as the
ordinary soldiers, with mandibles so great and heavy that it was a
marvel the insects could support them.

Hurrying here and there were worker termites. And these were centering
their activities on an object as fearful as anything that ever haunted
the mind of a madman.

Up and back, this object loomed, half filling the enormous room like a
zeppelin in a hangar. And like a zeppelin--a blunt, bloated
zeppelin--the object was circular and tapered at both ends. But the
zeppelin was a living thing--a horrible travesty of life.

At the end facing the two men was a tiny dot of a head, almost lost in
the whitish mass of the enormous body. Around this a cluster of worker
termites pressed, giving nourishment to the insatiable mouth. At the
far end of the vast shape another cluster of termites thronged. And
these bore away a constant stream of termite eggs--that dripped from the
zeppelinlike, crammed belly at the rate of almost one a second.

Her Highness, the Queen--two hundred tons of flabby, greasy flesh,
immobile, able only to eat and lay eggs.

"My God," whispered Jim. Utterly unstrung, he gazed at that mighty,
loathsome mass, listening to its snapping jaws as it took on the tons of
nourishment needed for its machinelike functioning. "My God!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Instinctively he whirled to run back through the entrance they had come
through. But now, with the admittance of the soldier band that had
pressed them in here, the entrance was guarded again by one of the
giants permanently stationed there.

"What had we better do?" he breathed to Denny.

Dennis stared helplessly around. He had noticed that the termites in
here were acting differently from the others they had encountered since
leaving the lair of the termite-ruler. These were moving uneasily,
restlessly, stopping now and again with waving, inquisitive antennae. It
looked ominously as though they had sensed the presence of intruders
here in the sanctum where their race was born, and were dimly wondering
what to do.

"We might try each tunnel mouth, one by one, on the chance that we can
find a careless guard somewhere," Dennis muttered at last. "But for
heaven's sake don't touch any of the brutes! I think that at the
slightest signal the whole mob of the things would spring on us and tear
us to pieces. Most of the paste is rubbed off by now."

Jim nodded. He had no desire to brush against one of the colossal,
special guard of soldiers if he could help it, or against any of the
relatively weak workers that might give the signal of alarm.

Stealing silently along among the blind, instinctively agitated
monsters, they worked a circuitous way from one exit to another. But
nowhere did any chance of getting out of the place present itself.
Across each tunnel mouth was placed one of the enormous guards,
twelve-foot mandibles opened like a waiting steel trap.

Halfway around the tremendous room they went, without mishap, but also
without finding an exit they could slip through. And then, in the rear
of the vast bulk of the Queen, it happened.

       *       *       *       *       *

One of the worker termites, bearing an egg in its mandibles, faltered,
and dropped its precious burden. The thing fell squashily to the floor
within a foot of Jim, who had brushed against the wall to let the burden
bearer pass without touching him. Jim, attempting to sidestep away from
the spot, as the worker put out blind feelers, to search for the dropped
egg, lost his balance for a fraction of a second--and stepped squarely
on the nauseous ovoid!

Frantically he stepped out of the mess he had created, and the two stood
staring at each other, holding their breaths, fearful of what might
result from that accidental destruction of budding termite life.

The worker, feeling about for its burden, came in contact with the
shattered egg. It drew back abruptly, as though in perplexity: soft and
tough, the egg should not have broken merely from being dropped. Then it
felt again....

For a few seconds nothing whatever occurred. The two breathed again, and
began to hope that their fears had been meaningless. But that was not
to be.

The worker termite finally began to rush back and forth, antennae
whipping from side to side, patently trying to discover the cause of the
tragedy. And Jim and Dennis rushed back and forth, too, engaged in a
deadly game of blind man's buff as they tried to avoid the questing
antennae--which, registering sensation by touch instead of smell, was
not to be fooled by the last disappearing traces of the termite-paste.

The game did not last long. One of the feelers whipped against Dennis'
legs--and hell broke loose!

       *       *       *       *       *

The worker emitted a sound like the shriek of a circular saw gone wild.
And on the instant all its fellows, and the gigantic guards at the
exits, stiffened to rigid attention.

Again came the roaring sound, desolate, terrible, at once a call to arms
and a funeral dirge. And now every termite in the dim, cavernous chamber
began the battle dance Jim and Dennis had seen performed by the termite
guard when it was confronted by the horde of ants. Not moving their
feet, they commenced to sway back and forth, while long, rhythmic
shudders convulsed their grotesque bodies. It was a formal declaration
of war against whatever mad things had dared invade the fountain-spring
of their race.

Jim and Dennis leaped toward the nearest exit, determined to take any
risk on the chance of escaping from the horde of things now aware of
their presence and ravening for their blood. But in this exit--the only
one accessible to them now--the guard had commenced the jaw-clashing
that closed openings more efficiently than steel plates could have done.
An attempt to pass those enormous mandibles presented no risk; what it
presented was suicide.

By now the dread war dance had stopped. All the termites in the chamber
were converging slowly toward the spot where the termite had given the
rasping alarm. Even the workers, ordinarily quick to run from danger,
were advancing instead of retreating. Of all living things in the room
only the Queen, unable to move her mountainous bulk, did not join in the
slow, sure move to slash to pieces the hated trespassers.

Again the questing antennae of the worker that had given the alarm
touched one of the men. With a deafening rasp it sprang toward them,
blind but terrible.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dennis swung his steel club. It clashed against the scarcely less hard
mandibles of the worker, not harming them, but seeming to daze the
insect a little.

Jim followed the act by plunging his longer spear into the soft body. No
words were wasted by the two men. It was a fight for life again, with
the odds even more heavily against them than they had been in the
ruler's lair.

Behind them, blocking the only exit they had any chance whatever of
reaching, the guard continued its clashing mandible duty. If only it,
too, would join in the blind search for the trespassers, thus giving
them an opportunity of slipping out! But the monster gave no indication
of doing such a thing.

Another worker termite flung its bulk at them. Its mandibles, tiny in
comparison with those of the great guards but still capable of slicing
either of the men in two, snapped perilously close to Jim's body. There
was a second's concerted action: Dennis' club lashed against the thing's
head, Jim's spear tore into the vulnerable body.

Ringing them round, the main band of the termites moved closer. They
moved slowly, in no hurry, apparently only too sure the enemy could not
possibly get away from them. And the two worker termites killed were
mere incidents compared to the avalanche of mandible and horn that would
be on them in about thirty seconds.

       *       *       *       *       *

However, the two dead termites gave Jim a sudden inspiration. He glanced
from the carcasses to the mechanically moving, deadly jaws of the guard
that barred the nearest exit.

"Denny," he panted, "feed it this."

He pointed first toward the nearest carcass and then toward the
rock-crushing, steadily snapping jaws.

"I'll try to hold the bridge here--"

But Dennis was on his way, catching Jim's idea with the first gesture.

He stooped down, and caught the dead termite by two of its legs. Close
to two hundred pounds the mass weighed; but strength is an inconstant
thing, and increases or decreases according to the vital needs of
life-preservation.

Clear of the floor, Denny lifted the bulk, and with its repulsive weight
clasped in his arms, he advanced toward the mighty guard.

Behind him, Jim glared desperately at the third termite that was about
to attack. No feeble worker this, but one of the most colossal of all
the Queen's guard.

Towering over Jim, mandibles wide open and ready to smash over its prey,
the giant reared toward him. And behind him came the main body of the
horde. It was painfully evident that the clash with the lone soldier
would be the last single encounter. After that the hundreds of the herd
would be on the men, tearing and trampling them to bits.

During the thing's steady, inexorable approach, which had taken far less
time than that required to tell of it, Jim had clenched his fingers
around his spear and calculated as to the best way to hold the monster
off for just the few seconds needed by Denny to try the plan suggested.

The monster ended its slow advance in a lunge, that, for all its great
bulk, was lightning quick. But a shade more quickly, Jim sidestepped the
terrible mandibles, leaped back along the armored body till he had
reached the unarmored rear, and thrust his spear home with all his
force.

       *       *       *       *       *

The hideous guard reared with pain and rage. But this was no worker
termite, to be killed with a thrust. As though nothing had happened, the
huge hulk wheeled around. The mandibles crashed shut with deafening
force over the space Jim had occupied but an instant before.

And now the inner circle of the multiple ring of death was within a few
yards. Jim leaped to put himself behind the living barrier of the
attacking soldier. But it was only a matter of a few seconds now, before
he and Denny would be caught in the blind bull charges of the wounded
soldier or by the surrounding ring of maddened termites.

"Denny?" he shouted imploringly over his shoulder, not daring to take
his eyes off the danger in front of him.

"Soon!" he heard Dennis pant.

The entomologist had got almost up to the twelve-foot jaws that closed
the exit. He paused a moment, gathering strength. Then he heaved the
soft mass of the dead termite into the clashing mandibles.

"Jim!" he cried, as the burden left his arms.

Jim turned, raced the few yards intervening between the ring of death
and the doorway. Together they waited to see if their forlorn hope would
work....

It could not have lasted more than a second, that wait, yet it seemed at
least ten minutes. And then both cried aloud--and crouched to repeat the
maneuver that had saved them from death when they had first entered this
insect hell.

For the enormous, smashing jaws had caught the body of the worker
termite with ferocious eagerness, and were worrying the inanimate
carcass with terrible force.

The great jaws were occupied just an instant before the monster sensed
that it was one of his own kind that he was mangling so thoroughly. But
in that instant Jim had slid on his chest along the floor past the
armored head and shoulders, and Dennis had leaped to follow.

But Dennis was not to get off so lightly.

       *       *       *       *       *

The charging ring of termites had closed completely in by now. The
snapping mandibles of the nearest one were up to him. They opened; shut.

They caught Denny on the back swing, knocking him six feet away instead
of slicing him wide open. Denny got to his feet almost before he had
landed; but between him and the exit was the bulk of the termite that
had felled him, and in the doorway the guard had dropped the body it was
slashing to bits, and had recommenced its slashing jaw movements.

"Jim! For God's sake...." shrieked the doomed man.

Beside himself, he managed to hurdle clear over the massive insect
between him and the doorway. But there he stopped, with the guard's
great mandibles fanning the air less than a foot from him. "Jim!" came
the agonized cry again.

And behind the gigantic termite, in the tunnel, with at least a
possibility of safety lying open before him, Jim heard and answered the
call.

Savagely he plunged his spear into the unarmored rear of the guard, tore
it out, thrust again....

The thing heaved and struggled to turn, shaking the tunnel with its
rasping anger--and taking its attention at last away from the duty of
closing that tunnel mouth.

With no room to run and slide, Denny fell to the floor and commenced to
creep through the narrow space between the trampling guard's bulk and
the wall. He felt his left arm and shoulder go numb as he was crushed
for a fleeting instant against the wood partition. Broken, he thought
dimly. The collar-bone. But still he kept moving on.

       *       *       *       *       *

He moved in a haze of pain and weakness. He did not see that he had
passed clear of the menacing hulk--that his slow crawling had been
multiplied in results by the fact that the termite guard had finally,
stopped trying to turn in the narrow passage and had rushed ahead into
the Queen's chamber, to turn there and come dashing back. He did not see
that Jim was finally disarmed and completely helpless, with his spear
buried beyond recovery in the bulk of the maddened guard. He hardly felt
Jim's supporting arm as it was thrust under him, to half drag and half
lead him along the tunnel away from the horde behind.

He only knew that they were moving forward, with the din behind them--as
the grim cohorts of the Queen fought to all crowd ahead in the narrow
passage at once--keeping pace with them in spite of all they could do to
make haste. And he only knew that finally Jim gave a great shout, and
that suddenly they were standing under a rent in a tunnel roof through
which sunlight was pouring.

Several worker termites were laboring to close up the chink and cut off
the sunlight; but these, not being of the band outraged by the
destruction of the egg in the Queen's chamber, moved swiftly away as the
two men advanced.

Jim reached up and tore with frantic hands at the crumbling edges of the
rotten wood overhead. Ignoring his gashed and bleeding fingers, he
widened the breach till he, could pull himself up through it. Then he
reached down, caught Denny's sound arm, and raised him by main strength.

They were in the clear air of the outer world once more, on a terrace in
the mound low down near its base.

Jim and Dennis half slid, half fell down the near terrace slope to the
jungle of grass stalks beneath. And there Denny bit his lip sharply,
struggled against the weakness overcoming him--and fainted.

       *       *       *       *       *

Jim caught him up over his shoulder, and staggered forward through the
jungle. Behind, the termites poured out through the broken wall in an
enraged flood, braving even the sunlight and outer air in their chase of
the invaders that had, profaned the Queen's chamber.

"Matt!" shouted Jim with all the strength of his lungs, forgetting that
his voice could not be heard by normal human ears. "Matt!"

But if Matthew Breen could not hear, he could see. The slightest
inattention at his guard duty at that second would have resulted in two
deaths. But he was on the alert.

Jim saw the sun blotted out swiftly, saw a huge, pinkish-gray wall swoop
down between him and Denny, and the deadly horde of termites pursuing
them. Then he saw another pinkish-gray wall, in which was set
something--a shallow, regular, hollowed plateau--that looked familiar.
The patty-dish in which he and Denny had been carried to this place of
death and horror.

Jim knew he could not clamber into that great plateau; he was too
exhausted. But the necessity was spared him.

The patty-dish scooped down under him, uprooting huge trees, digging up
square yards of earth all around him. He was flung from his feet to roll
helplessly beside the unconscious Dennis, as men and earth and all were
shifted from the dish's rim to its center.

Like gigantic express elevator the dish soared dizzily up in the
tremendous hand that held it, over the vast pile of the mound city, over
all the surrounding landscape, and was borne back toward Matt's
automobile--and toward the laboratory where the bulk of their bodies
waited, in protoplasmic form, in the dome of the glass bell.




CHAPTER XI

_Back to Normal_


"I think," said Jim, loading his pipe, "that now I really will settle
down. No other adventures could seem like much after the one"--he
repressed a shiver--"we've just passed through."

"And I think," said Dennis, following his own line of thought, "that as
far the world of science goes, my exploring has been for nothing. Try to
tell sober scientists of the specially evolved, huge-brained thing that
rules the termite tribe and forms and holds the marvelous organization
it has? Try to tell them--now that Matt has to stubbornly decided to
keep secret his work with element eighty-five--that we were reduced to
a quarter of an inch in height, and that we went through a mound and
saw at first hand the things we describe? They'd shut me in an asylum!"

The two were sitting in Denny's apartment, once more conventionally
clothed, and again their normal five feet eleven, and six feet two.

The reassembling of Denny's body had done odd things. Jim had set the
broken bone with rough skill before stepping under the glass bell; and
the fracture had been healed automatically by the growing deposit of
protoplasmic substance resulting when Matt threw his switch.

But Denny's missing finger had baffled the reversing process. With no
tiny pattern to form around, the former substance of his finger had
simply gathered in a shapeless knob of flesh and bone like a tumorous
growth sprouting from his hand. It would have to be amputated.

But the marvels performed under Matthew Breen's glass bell were far
secondary to the two men. The things they had recently seen and
undergone, and the possibility of telling folks about them, occupied
their attention exclusively.

"Then you're not going to write a monograph on the real nature of
termites, as you'd planned?" Jim asked Denny.

Denny shrugged dispiritedly. "People would take it for a joke instead of
a scientific treatise if I did," he said.

Jim puffed reflectively at his pipe. A thought had come, to him that
seemed to hold certain elements of possibility.

"Why not do this," he suggested: "Write it up first as a straight story,
and see if people will believe it. Then, if they do, you can rewrite it
as scientific fact."

And eventually they decided to do just that. And--here is their story.




Transcriber's Note:

    This etext was produced from _Astounding Stories_ June 1932.
    Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
    copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
    typographical errors have been corrected without note.







*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RAID ON THE TERMITES ***


    

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