s with "_Ant-termes-pacificus_". Formidable as this
chemical artillery already was, in another ten thousand generations it
would eat through every known substance including glass and high-carbon
steel.

Another development which had escaped human observation, was a mutation
of the workers' mandibles; it went very fast. Within no more than maybe
a thousand generations they would double in size and strength, would
become veritable jumping tools.

While the bellicose spirit had been successfully bred out of the new
species, its capacities for material destructions had increased.
Likewise the appetite of "_Ant-termes_" was even more ferocious than
that of the older species; Lee was feeding all kinds of experimental
foods, but woodpulp remained the staple, the very stuff which in its
liquid form, lignin, embedded the nerve paths of The Brain.

Lifting his strained eyes from the charts, Lee looked over the row of
air conditioned glass cubicles wherein "_Ant-termes-pacificus_"
continued its lives undisturbed by the new habitat, undisturbed by the
rays which flowed over and through their bodies, unconscious that a
superhuman intelligence was probing steadily into every manifestation of
the mysterious collective brains of their race.

They had built their new mounds pointing due North as had their
ancestors for the past 100 million years. To the human eye nothing
betrayed the teeming life within except the tiny tunnels creeping out
from the mounds in the direction of the foods which were placed
different from day to day. Cemented from loam and saliva by the
invisible sappers, the tunnels, like threads of grey wool, unerringly
moved to the deposits of pulpwood, up the shelves, up the tin cans and
glass containers they had determined to destroy. Their instincts were
uncanny, their destruction as methodical and "scientific" as was modern
war.

In Northern Australia Lee had come across big eucalyptus trees,
healthy-looking and in full bloom, and then they would collapse under
the first stroke of an axe or even as one pushed hard against them.

The termites had hollowed them out from roof to top, had transformed
them into thin walled pipes, leaving just enough "flesh" to keep some
sap-circulation going, to maintain a semi-balance of life in order to
exploit it more efficiently. Over here in the lab they would open up a
number 3 tin can within a couple of hours; first with the soldiers'
vicious nasi-corn secretions eating the t