The Cannibalistic Orgy

: The Raid On The Termites

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 struggli g 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.