by Paul Ernst
CHAPTER VI
_In the Food Room_
Restlessly, Jim paced back and forth in the narrow dank cell. At thedoorway 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 asort 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 darkfuture or too nerve-wracked by the terrific suspense, they could stepinto these gigantic, steel-hard jaws. But to be sliced in two ...
Jim stopped his pacing, and stared speculatively at the wall of theircell. For the dozenth time he raised his ponderous spear and thrust thepointed end at the wall with all his strength. And for the dozenth timehe was rewarded only by seeing a flake no larger than his clenched fistfall out.
"Might as well be cement!" he rasped. "God, we're caught like flies in aspiderweb!"
"Well, you wanted excitement," remarked Dennis, a bit acidly. The strainwas telling on him more than on the less finely strung Holden; but hewas struggling to keep himself in hand.
"So I did want excitement," said Jim. "But I want at least a sportingchance 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 nightmareguards stood motionless, as though at command. Then they moved into thecell, straight toward the two men.
"It's come!" said Jim through set teeth. He swung his spear up, ready toshoot it at the horny breastplate of the nearest monster with all hispuny strength. "We're going to catch it now!"
But Dennis gazed more intently; and he saw that the blind but ferociouscreatures showed no real signs of molesting them. Instead, they wereedging to one side. In a moment, as the two men moved warily to keeptheir 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 themove was too apparent: they were again being herded.
Whatever reigning power it was that had let them penetrate so deeplyinto the trap, and then had surrounded and imprisoned them--was nowgoing to honor them with an audience.
"His Majesty commands," commented Jim, reading the sinister gesture asclearly as Denny had. "I'll wager we're about to meet your 'unknownintelligence,' Denny. But be it 'super-termite' or be it Queen--whateverit may be--I want just one chance to use this spear of mine!"
Reluctantly he stepped forth before the fearful guard; reluctantly, butin full command of his nerves now that the wearing inactivity was endedand something definite was about to happen. Which proves but once againthe wisdom of the gods in not allowing man to read the future. For couldJim Holden have foreseen the precise experience awaiting them, his nervecontrol--and Denny's, too--might not have been so firm.
* * * * *
Again their way led sharply down, through tunnels loftier and broaderand glowing more brilliantly with phosphorescence which was atestimonial to their greater age.
The efficiency of their herding was perfect. At each side entrance alongthe way stood one of the ghastly soldiers, jaws clashing with monotonousdeadliness. Now and again several of the monsters appeared straightahead, barring the avenue, and leaving no choice but to turn to right orleft into off-branching tunnels. Small chance here of missing the path!And always behind them marched their two particular guards, closing offtheir retreat.
"How do you suppose they sense our approach?" wondered Jim, who hadnoticed that the menacing jaw-clashing began while they were stillfairly far from whatever side entrance was being barred to them. Andagain: "You're _sure_ they can't see?"
"There isn't an eye in the lot of them," said Denny. "They must senseour coming by the vibration of our footsteps."
But when they tried tiptoeing, on noiseless bare feet, the result wasthe same. Surely the things could not hear them for more than a fewfeet; yet with no sound to guide them, the blind guards commencedautomatically opening and closing those invulnerable jaws with thedistant approach of the two men just the same. They could only ascribeit to the same force that seemed able to follow them, step by step andthought by thought, though it was far away and out of sight--the rulingbrain of the termite tribe.
* * * * *
Ever hotter it grew as they descended, till at length a blast of heatlike a draft from a furnace met them as they rounded a corner andstepped into a corridor that no longer led downward. They knew that theywere very near the ruler's lair now, on the lowest level, deep in thefoundations of the vast pile.
Dennis wiped perspiration, caused as much by emotion as by heat, fromhis face. He alone of all students on earth was going to penetrate thevery heart of the termite mystery. He alone was going to have at least aglimpse of the baffling intelligence that science had guessed about forso many decades He ... alone. For it was hardly likely that he wouldever 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! Hehad thought that the two of them might simply enter the termitary,mingle--perilously, but with at least a margin of safety--with the blindrace it housed, and walk out again whenever they pleased. But from themoment of entering they'd had no chance. They had been hopelessly in theclutch of the insects; played with, indulged, and finally trapped, to beled 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 mustbe the end of this last and deepest of all the tunnels. This end showedas a glare of light. Real light, not the soft gleam of the rotting woodwalls which was already paling feebly in comparison. The glare ahead ofthem, indeed, had something of the texture of electric light. NeitherJim nor Dennis could repress a sudden start; it was like coming abruptlyonto a man-made fact, a bit of man-made world in the midst of thisinsect hell.
The damp heat was almost paralyzing now. Their limbs felt weak as theystumbled toward the light. But they were inexorably herded forward, andsoon were at the threshold of the oddly illuminated chamber.
Now the two stopped for an instant and sniffed, as a peculiar odor cameto their nostrils. It was a vague but fearsome odor, indescribable,making their skin crawl. A smell of decay--of death--and yet somehow ofrank 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 thestart of their adventure. The wasp, he knew, was not the only insectthat had certain dread ways of stocking its larder and keeping thecontents of that larder fresh! The termites did not customarily followthese practises. Yet--yet the odor coming from the place before themcertainly suggested ... But he tried to thrust such apprehensions fromhis thoughts.
They entered the chamber. The two gigantic soldiers stopped on thethreshold behind them and took up their standard guard attitudes. Themen stared about them....
It was huge, this chamber, almost as huge as the nursery chamber theyhad blundered into. The source of the light was not apparent. It seemedto glow from walls and floor and ceiling, as though it were a box ofglass with sunshine pouring in at all six sides.
And now horror began to mingle with awed interest, as they took in morecomprehensively the sights in that place, and saw precisely what itcontained.
Denny's apprehensions had been only too well founded. For larder, foodstoreroom, the chamber certainly was. But what a storeroom! And in whatstate the "food" that stocked it was!
* * * * *
All along the v
ast floor were laid rows of inert, fantastic bodies.Insects. The whole small-insect world seemed to be represented here. Oneor more of everything that crawled, flew, walked or bored, seemedgathered in this great room. Grubs, flies, worms, ants, things soft andslimy and things grim and armored, were piled side by side likecordwood.
These hulks, nearly all larger than the two quarter-inch men, lay starkand motionless where they had been dropped. From them came the odor thathad stopped Jim and Denny on the threshold--the strange odor of blendedlife and death. And the reason for the queer odor became apparent as thetwo gazed more closely at the motionless hulks.
These things, like figures out of a delirium in their great size andexaggerated frightfulness, were rigid as in death--but they werenevertheless not dead! Helpless as so many lumps of stone, they werestill horribly, pitifully alive. Paralyzed, in some inscrutable termitefashion, probably fully conscious of their surroundings, they could onlylie there and wait for their turn to come to be devoured by theferocious creatures that had dragged them down to this, the bowels ofthe mound city.
Besides these things bound in the rigidity of death, there was morenormal life. There were termites in that vast storeroom, too; but theywere specialized creatures, such as termitary life abounds in, that wereso distorted as to be hardly recognizable as termites.
Along one wall of the place, hanging head down and fastened there forlife, was a row of worker termites whose function was obviously that ofreservoirs: their abdomens, so enormously distended as to be nearlytransparent, glistened in varying colors to indicate that they containedvarious liquids whose purpose could only be guessed at.
Living cisterns, never to move, never to know life even in themonotonous, joyless way of the normal worker, they hung there to bedipped into whenever the master that reigned over this inferno, or hisimmediate underlings, desired some of their contents!
* * * * *
In addition, there were several each of two forms of termite soldiersuch as they had not seen before, standing rigidly at attention aboutthe place.
At the door, of course, were the two creatures with the enormousmandibles that had escorted the pigmy men to the larder. But theseothers were as different as though they belonged to a different race.
Three had heads that were hideously bulbous in form, and which wereflabby and elastic instead of armored with thick horn as were the headsof the usual soldiers. Like living syringes, these heads were;perambulating bulbs filled with some defensive or offensive liquid to besquirted out at the owner's will.
The third kind of soldier was represented in the spectacle of termiteswith heads that were huge and conical, resembling bungs, or the taperedcylindrical corks with which one plugs a bottle. These, Denny knew fromhis studies, had been evolved by termite biology for the purpose oftemporarily stopping up any breach in termitary mound-wall or tunnelwhile the workers could assemble and repair the chink with more solidand permanent building material.
* * * * *
But how fantastically, gruesomely different these colossal figureslooked, here in the deepest stronghold of termitedom, than as scurryinglittle insects viewed under an entomologist's glass! And how appallinglydifferent was the viewpoint from which they were now beingobserved--here where the human observers were equal in size, and doomedat any moment perhaps to be paralyzed and piled with the helpless livethings that made up the rest of the "larder"!
And the presiding genius of this mysterious, undergroundstoreroom--where was it? Denny and Jim looked about over the rows oflive food, and among the termite soldiers with their odd heads, in vainfor a creature that might conceivably be the super-insect that soomnipotently 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 growthlinking them together--a large, gray-white ball borne mutually on theirbacks. But that was all. The listing of those two workers concluded theroll-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 theattempted levity of the words, was low-pitched and somber. "Mostimpolite to keep us waiting--"
He stopped as Denny sharply threw up his hand. And he too gazed at themaneuver that had caught Denny's wary attention.
* * * * *
This was nothing save that the various soldiers in the chamber--seven ofthem, besides the two that never left their stations at the door--hadmoved. But they had moved in concert, almost as harmoniously in unisonas 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 ahollow square about twenty feet across. There they took up theirstations, the three soldiers with the syringe-heads, and the four withthe unwieldy craniums that resembled bungs.
So perfectly had the move been executed, so perfectly and in unison hadit been timed, that there could be little doubt it had resulted from adirect order. But where was the thing to give the command? Where was thehead-general? In some far place, on his way to inspect the new and oddkind of prisoners, and giving orders to hold them yet more closely inanticipation of that inspection?
Jim turned to Denny and started to voice some of his thoughts. But thewords were killed by the light that had appeared suddenly in Denny'seyes. In them had appeared a gleam of almost superstitious terror.
"Jim!" gasped Denny, raising his hand and pointing with tremblingforefinger. "Jim--_look_!"
Jim turned to gaze, and his spear, clutched with almost convulsivedesperation till this moment, sagged to the floor from his limp hinds.
* * * * *
The thing Denny had pointed at was the curious, large mushroom growthsupported jointly on the backs of the two worker termites. It had beenacross the chamber from them when they first saw it. Now it was movingtoward 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 theoriginal insect skull casing in which it had been born. Evidence that ithad once been a normal, termite head was given by the fact that here andthere, on sides and top of the huge, spongy-looking mass, were brownishscales--fragments of the casing that had once contained its bulk.
Set low down under the sphere, with the whitish-gray mass beetling upover them like a curving cliff, were eyes; great, staring, dull thingsof the type termites have during the short-winged periods of theirexistences. Like huge round stones, those eyes regarded the two men asthe team of termites marched closer.
Hanging down from the great mass was an abortive miniature of abody--soft, shriveled abdomen, almost nonexistent chest, and tiny,sticklike legs that trailed helplessly along the floor as thetermites--in the manner of two men who support a helpless third manbetween 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 thingwith wasted limbs and torso, and with enormous, voracious brain thatdrained all sustenance constantly from the body! It was, in the insectworld, a parallel to the dream that present-day Man sometimes has of Mana million years in the future: a thing all head and staring eyes, with abrain so enlarged that it must be artificially supported on its flabbytorso.
"I guess His Majesty is out," Jim had said, with a shaky attempt atlightness.
But he now realized his mistake. His Majesty hadn't been out. HisMajesty had been with them all along--a four-foot, irregular sphere ofgrayish-white nerve matter and intricately wrinkled cortex dependent formovement on borrowed backs and legs--and was now peering at them out ofthe only pair of eyes in the termitary as though in doubt as to what todo first with his helpless-seeming captives.