The Raid

: The Raid On The Termites

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!


< r /> 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.