Page:Amazing Stories Volume 10 Number 13.djvu/118

116 procession; every indication was that the remaining women, attempting to break through the circle of insect death, had been overwhelmed and destroyed.

I continued to the capital with a heart even heavier than it had been before. The thought of the queens was with me constantly; and the knowledge that I was surrounded by a stillness that could never be broken save by my own voice acted as the advance-agent of madness. The shock of renewed hope when I discovered that the city was still surrounded by a fading ring of fire, though in a dozen places termite trails crossed the flames, very nearly completed the work on my mind that despair had started. Yet I was unable to perceive any signs of life save for the tide-like shifting of ants in the castle yard and about the entrances to the underground passages.

The sudden appearance of a woman on the topmost turret wall arrested me as I was about to sail off. She stared fixedly at my hovering vessel, with the blankness of one who believes she is seeing visions. I could see her ragged clothing and sunken cheeks.

A moment later I had dropped the swaying ladder, descended, and carried her perilously to safety.

Queen Ala's tense gaze relaxed; she sobbed in my arms, broken by relief.

"My women deserted me," she said at last, "locking me in the tower with my maid. It was after the seventh sleep of the seventh Rotation that they went. The food they left lasted, by rationing, until three sleeps ago. The termites broke through the inner wall of flame on the same day that the last of the provisions went; but the tower is of crackless stone, and they could not reach me."

"Where is the maid?" I asked.

"At my last awakening she lay beside me, dead of starvation."

The nightmare continues; but somehow I can no longer despair. Ala smiled a moment since, for the first time; and I think that a measure of happiness may be awaiting us on Terra.

We shall be in terrestrial atmosphere after the next sleep. Ala and I are taking turns at peering through the great, circular windows that line our ship. Never was so courageous, so uncomplaining a woman—or man, for that matter—as Ala!

Providence has left us food and fuel to spare. We shall have the fundamentals of life, to last us until we learn what earthly conditions we face.

What fate, I wonder, is in store for us beneath those milky, opaque clouds, lighted now by the rays of a termite-ruled moon?

I, who write this, am a dead man; in minutes the skin will be torn from my flesh, and the flesh from my bones.

Last night we first realized that insects might be secreted within our walls. Fool that I was! Should I not have apprehended that in the long Rotations of this ship's presence in the Collan courtyard, the termites would learn the secret of its tough metal?

Why did they wait until we had all but reached our destination before revealing themeslvesthemselves [sic]? Did they wish to utilize my superior astronomical knowledge in space? That is madness; but I am near madness.

This morinngmorning [sic] Ala did not rouse at her usual hour. When I went, unsuspecting, to awaken her, I saw such a