get out again."

"Stow it," Jim had urged, puffing at his pipe.

"I won't stow it. You may think you've run up against dangers before,
but let me tell you that your most perilous jungle is safe as a church
compared to the jungle an ordinary grass plot will present to us, if, as
we plan, we get reduced to a quarter of an inch. I'm going in this with
a mission. To me it's a heaven-sent opportunity--one I'm sure any
entomologist would grab at. But you, frankly, are just a fool--"

"All right," Jim had cut in, "let it go at that. I'm confirmed in my
folly. You can't argue me out of it, so don't try any more. Now, to be
practical--have you thought of any way we could arm ourselves?"

"Arm ourselves?" repeated Dennis vaguely.

"Yes. It's a difficult problem. The finest watch-maker couldn't turn out
a working model of a gun that could be handled by a man a quarter of an
inch tall. At the same time I have no desire to go into this thing
bare-handed. And I think I know something we can use."

"What?"

"Spears," said Jim with a grin. "Steel spears. They make steel wire, you
know, down to two-thousandths of an inch and finer. Probably our friend
has some in his laboratory. Now, if we grind two pieces about a quarter
of an inch long off such a wire, and sharpen the ends as well as we can,
we'll have short spears we could swing very well.

"Then, there's the matter of clothes." He grinned again. "We'll want a
breech clout, at least. I propose that we get the sheerest silk gauze we
can find, and cut an eighth-inch square apiece to tie about our middles
after the transformation."

* * * * *

He slapped his fist into his palm. "By George! Such talk really begins
to bring it home. Two men, clad in eighth-inch squares of silk gauze,
using bits of almost invisibly fine steel wire as weapons, junketing
forth into a world in which they'll be about the smallest and puniest
things in sight! No more lords of creation, Denny. We'll have nothing
but our wits to carry us through. But they, of course, will be supreme
in the insect world as they are in the animal world."

"Will they be supreme?" Denny said softly. That unknown
intelligence--that mysterious intellect (super-termite?) that seemed to
rule each termite tribe, and which appeared so marvelously profound! "I
wonder...."

Then he, in his turn, had descended to the practical.

"You've solved the problem of weapons and clothing, Jim," he said, "a