sh-gray,
soft-looking thing was a brain. For it had long ago burst free of the
original insect skull casing in which it had been born. Evidence that it
had once been a normal, termite head was given by the fact that here and
there, on sides and top of the huge, spongy-looking mass, were brownish
scales--fragments of the casing that had once contained its bulk.

Set low down under the sphere, with the whitish-gray mass beetling up
over them like a curving cliff, were eyes; great, staring, dull things
of the type termites have during the short-winged periods of their
existences. Like huge round stones, those eyes regarded the two men as
the team of termites marched closer.

Hanging down from the great mass was an abortive miniature of a
body--soft, shriveled abdomen, almost nonexistent chest, and tiny,
sticklike legs that trailed helplessly along the floor as the
termites--in the manner of two men who support a helpless third man
between them--bore it forward.

Here, then was the Intellect that ruled the tribe, the super-termite,
the master mind of the mound! This travesty of a termite! This thing
with wasted limbs and torso, and with enormous, voracious brain that
drained all sustenance constantly from the body! It was, in the insect
world, a parallel to the dream that present-day Man sometimes has of Man
a million years in the future: a thing all head and staring eyes, with a
brain so enlarged that it must be artificially supported on its flabby
torso.

"I guess His Majesty is out," Jim had said, with a shaky attempt at
lightness.

But he now realized his mistake. His Majesty hadn't been out. His
Majesty had been with them all along--a four-foot, irregular sphere of
grayish-white nerve matter and intricately wrinkled cortex dependent for
movement on borrowed backs and legs--and was now peering at them out of
the only pair of eyes in the termitary as though in doubt as to what to
do first with his helpless-seeming captives.

CHAPTER VII

_"Clinging Brown Stuff"_

Bemused, appalled, the two gazed at this almost disembodied brain that
held them captive. It continued to come steadily toward them, carried by
its two faithful slaves; and the grotesque termite soldiers, that had
closed about them in a hollow square, parted to let it through.

Such was the bewitchment of the two men as they stared at the
monstrosity, that they did not hear the slight clashing of horn that
accompanied a swift movement of one