Page:Amazing Stories Volume 10 Number 13.djvu/116

114 Through all this space was no living thing; the insects themselves have moved on to the siege of Womanland.

Surmounting Colla Crater, home of my nation's capital city, I discovered at once that my worst fears were realized. The ring of flame that had flickered in the pit—man's ultimate defiance of his creeping conquerors— had gone out.

None but myself lives to name the bitterness and despair of this moment.

Who can say whether it was such urgency as prompts a ghost to haunt the scenes he knew in life, or the irrepressible instinct of self-preservation, that drove me down the rim of the crater, through the still-teeming ant hills, and into the deserted, underground streets of crumbling Colla? The termites ignored me; nor did I fear bodily harm from them as long as remnants of the vegetation, that flourished here hardly more than two years ago, remained for them to digest. My eyes were peeled, however, for warrior ants, which I saw in no quantity until I was walking in the burrows of Colla proper. Here I proceeded cautiously, striving to avoid both the hurrying streams of insects and the bleached skeletons in the streets—skeletons that but yesterday were my friends. Thank God that I had no family!

Before I had advanced a hundred yards the ants' incomparable sense of smell had made them aware of a living presence. They were all around me; one, another, a dozen, a hundred, started up my legs. I beat them off, and felt their sharp jaws sink into my flesh. They filled the street like a carpet, and hung from the walls like a living tapestry. I closed my eyes and ran blindly through the streets, slapping frantically, and realizing even as I slapped that before the sun disappeared on the surface of the world my bleached bones would be indistinguishable from those of my countrymen. The air was barren of oxygen; I had to fight for breath.

Half-blinded by bites, I crashed into an unfamiliar object, and fell prone. In an instant I was up again, peering through protecting fingers at the immense globe I had run against. It stood in the courtyard, which, with the reigning prince's castle, is the only part of modern lunar cities exposed to the outside world. There was a closed panel in the surface of the globe, approached by a hanging ladder up which I swarmed like one of Luna's long-extinct four-handed mammals. The panel shot open when my weight touched the ladder, and closed behind me as I dived inside.

My first thought was to rip away my clothing and crush the life from the insects tearing at my flesh. I was swollen to a quarter again my normal size; one of my eyes was shut; my entire body burned like a campfire.

Quite five minutes passed before I realized that I was inside a spherical space ship, constructed by the Collans in a last, despairing attempt to flee the termites and ants. The stratagem recommended by me in a never-dispatched letter had been invoked spontaneously.

ROM the scaffoldings scattered on the ground outside, it appears that a second flier was built. Is it even now boring through space toward Terra? Why is this one still