t....

Slowly the end of the bar dulled with swift oxidation; slowly it
turned brownish and flaked away, almost entirely consumed. The acid--if
that was what the red stuff was--was awesomely powerful, at least with
inorganic substances.

The termite team turned away from the bar, as if it were now a matter of
indifference to the bloated brain borne on their backs. It approached
the men again.

"I suppose," groaned Jim, "that our turn is next. The thing will
probably have us dipped into the red stuff, to see if we're consumed,
too."

* * * * *

But here His Majesty's curiosity was interrupted while he partook of
nourishment.

The clashing jaws of the two termite soldiers at the door stopped for a
moment. Jim and Dennis struggled to turn their heads--all of them they
could move--to see what the cessation of jaw-clashing might mean.

Three worker termites squeezed past. They approached one of the line of
paralyzed insect hulks, and sank their mandibles into a garden slug.
They tugged at this until they had it under the live cistern of red
liquid into which the spear had been thrust.

One of the three flicked drops of the reddish stuff onto the inert slug,
till it was well sprinkled. Then they dragged the carcass back to the
termite-ruler.

They got it there barely in time. In a matter of seconds after they had
dropped it before the monarch, the slug had collapsed into a half-liquid
puddle of decomposed protoplasm on the floor. One of the main
functions--if not _the_ main function--of the red acid, it seemed, was
to act as a powerful digestive juice for His Majesty's food,
predigesting it before it was taken into the feeble body for
nourishment.

The termite team settled down over the semi-liquid mess that had been
the slug, and tilted back. Now, under the huge globe of the brain, Jim
and Denny saw exposed a small, soft mouth fringed by the tiny rudiments
of atrophied mandibles. The repulsive little mouth touched the
acid-softened mass....

The withered abdomen filled out. The whitish-gray lump of brain-matter
grew slightly darker. It looked as though the mass of the dead slug
were as large as the total bulk of the termite ruler; but not until the
meal was nearly gone did the voracious feeding stop.

The three workers that had spread the banquet before their monarch, left
the chamber. The guards resumed their interrupted jaw-clashing, which
seemed senseless now: the captives,