Page:Amazing Stories Volume 10 Number 13.djvu/113

111 en route here, over the lunar surface, must not only wear specially constructed clothing to shield him from day's burning heat and night's icy cold, but also make constant use of an oxygen tank.

Of themselves, these circumstances would be enough to induce sombre thoughts. How much worse that the dying day of mankind should be cut short by a cumulative inundation of insects! It is unquestionable that the moon-changes which are destroying us are instilling a new vigour in them.

Queen Ala has permitted me to examine minutely the ring of flame which burns about Womanland's constricting borders. Beyond that twenty-foot band of fire the western hemisphere contains no living thing save termites and ants. What instinct has brought about the truce between them? Are they postponing resumption of their age-old warfare, until man, worse enemy of them both, shall have been destroyed? Whatever the reason, the ants' less pretentious hillocks are scattered indiscriminately among the termites' slow-swelling cones. Look where one will, there is nothing else.

When a boy, I wondered how these insects subsist after they have eaten all available food, vegetable or animal. Naturally, they do not. When the last nourishment has been extracted from their food—which, with the aid of the remarkable protozoa living in their bodies, they consume again and again, eating even their abodes in time of famine—they must move or die. Hence, I believe, their steady encroachment on human territory. No being can find the stuff of life in a spot abandoned by these crawlers. Beyond the army of insects that sur- round the flame-walls of Womanland there is only heaped-up sand, empty termitariums, and grey desolation.

The women are finding in their turn that flame is no adequate protection. Though it holds off the termites for one or two Rotations, eventually they smother it, millions dying to lay a path across the blaze for their fellows.

Scientists here are seeking a poison that will end the insects. They ignore my protest that ants and termites have adapted themselves within one Rotation to every lethal preparation, flame only excepted, that Colla could find; and even the fuel for Alania's inadequate fire is growing scarce.

At any rate, they are beginning to take the problem seriously.

My Lords:

At last Womanland has grown really frightened. The insects advanced through the outer flame so suddenly that we had barely time to light a second fire about the entrances to the buried capital itself. The co-operation between ants and termites, though dreadful in its significance, was fascinating to watch.

The queen and I were skirting the border-flame on our daily canter, when we observed that an army of syringe termites was approaching the barrier at a spot opposite us. As it arrived at the blaze, each of them ejected an eight-inch spray of viscous liquid (ordinarily a paralyzing agent, but here altered effectively to serve as a fire-extinguisher) into the flame, then marched on to be consumed. Literally millions died before they even dented the low, green flame; but neither death nor the frantic defense of our border guards stopped the remorseless march until a fire-proof rib-