l make our last stand there."

Dodging the nearest snapping mandibles, Denny ran beside his companion
to where the termite, dead now, with its distended abdomen deflated and
the last of the acid trickling from the hole caused by Jim's spear,
still hung head down from the ceiling.

The powerful ruler of this vast underground city was crushed--for the
moment at least. But the fate of the two humans seemed no less certain
than it had before. For now the huge chamber was swarming with the giant
soldiers. In numbers so great that they crashed and rattled against each
other as they advanced, they marched toward the place where the broken
monarch still quivered in weak convulsions--and behind which, near the
acid vat, the two men crouched.

CHAPTER IX

_The Cannibalistic Orgy_

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 struggling 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 s