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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Raid on the Termites, by Paul Ernst
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Raid on the Termites
+
+Author: Paul Ernst
+
+Release Date: November 12, 2008 [EBook #27248]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS 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 of The Raid on the Termites, by Paul Ernst
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