them regularly.
Then if a soldier gets in the least rebellious, he can simply be starved
to death at any time."

"Ugh!" Jim whispered back. "Fancy being official stomach to three or
four other people! More of your wonderful 'organization,' I suppose."

They went on, down and down, till Denny calculated they had at last
reached nearly to the center of the vast city. And now they stumbled
into something weird and wonderful indeed. Rather, they half fell into
it, for it lay down a few feet and came as a complete surprise in the
dimness; and not till they had recovered from their near fall and looked
around for a few seconds did they realize where their last few
steps--the last few steps of freedom they were to have in the grim
underground kingdom--had taken them.

They were in a chamber so huge that it made the largest of man-made
domes shrink to insignificance by comparison.

* * * * *

A hundred yards or more in every direction, it extended. And far
overhead, lost in distance, reared the arched roof. A twenty-story
building could have been placed under that roof without trouble.

Lost in awe, Dennis gazed about him; and he saw on the floor, laid in
orderly rows in countless thousands, that which gave further cause for
wonderment: new-hatched larvae about the size of pumpkins but a sickly
white in color--feeble, helpless blobs of life that one day develop into
soldiers and workers, winged rulers or police. The termite nursery.

"Whew!" gasped Jim, wiping his face. "From the heat in here you'd think
we were getting close to the real, old-fashioned hell instead of an
artificial, insect-made one. What are all these nauseating-looking blobs
of lard lying about here, anyway?"

Denny told him. "Which is the reason for the heat," he concluded. "Jim,
it's twenty degrees warmer in here than it is outdoors. How--_how_--can
these insects regulate the temperature like that? The work of the ruling
brain again? But where, and what, can that brain be?"

"Maybe we'll find out before we leave this place," said Jim, more
prophetically than he knew. "Hello--we can't get out through the door we
entered. We'll have to find another exit. Look."

Dennis looked. In the doorway they had just come through was a
soldier--a giant even among giants. Its ten-foot jaws, like a questing,
gigantic vise, were opening and closing regularly and rapidly across the
opening of the portal. It made no attempt to enter th