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At that moment Marcassin's silhouette appeared in the gray of the alley which ended among us. "Look out there's Marc'! Shut your jaw," one of the audience benevolently advised. "I'm not afeared not to say what I think!" declared Termite, instantly lowering his voice and worming his way through the straw that divided the next stall from ours. We laughed again. But Margat was serious.
I'll put her on a wide orbit and I'll stick out every alarm on board. I'll also sleep in the control chair. But in case somebody gets here early, we've got to be around to tell them about that space termite trick." Trigger hadn't expected she would be able to sleep, not where they were. But afterwards she couldn't even remember getting stretched out all the way on the bunk.
But there he stopped, with the guard's great mandibles fanning the air less than a foot from him. "Jim!" came the agonized cry again. And behind the gigantic termite, in the tunnel, with at least a possibility of safety lying open before him, Jim heard and answered the call. Savagely he plunged his spear into the unarmored rear of the guard, tore it out, thrust again....
Frantically he stepped out of the mess he had created, and the two stood staring at each other, holding their breaths, fearful of what might result from that accidental destruction of budding termite life. The worker, feeling about for its burden, came in contact with the shattered egg.
As we returned we gathered round Termite and one spoke for the rest. "You're an anarchist, then?" "No," said Termite, "I'm an internationalist. That's why I enlisted." "Ah!" He tried to throw light on his words. "You understand, I'm against all wars." "All wars! But there's times when war's good. There's defensive war."
It could not have lasted more than a second, that wait, yet it seemed at least ten minutes. And then both cried aloud and crouched to repeat the maneuver that had saved them from death when they had first entered this insect hell. For the enormous, smashing jaws had caught the body of the worker termite with ferocious eagerness, and were worrying the inanimate carcass with terrible force.
These innocent amusements, like those which Termite provoked when he discoursed on militarism and the universe, did not detain me, and I gained the street. I went down the paved slope. In gardens and enclosures, the buds were holding out a multitude of lilliputian green hands, all still closed, and the apple-trees had white roses. Spring was hastening everywhere. I came in sight of the pink house.
So hour after hour passed, through which, between vain attempts to sleep, I managed to wade through many pages of Rosny's Le Termite a not very cheerful proceeding, I must say, concerned as it is with the microscopic and over-elaborate recital of Noel Servaise's tortured nerves, bodily pains, and intellectual phantasma.
He shook his fist as he spoke towards the Town Hall. But Termite shrugged his shoulders, looked at him unkindly, and said, "Like a rotten egg, that's how you talk. That captain, and all the red tabs and brass hats, it's not them that invented the rules. They're just gilded machines machines like you, but not so cheap.
In the Northern Territory there are everywhere gigantic mounds raised by these termites, long, narrow, high, and always pointing due north and south. You can tell infallibly the points of the compass from the mounds of this white ant, which has been called the "meridian termite." The aborigines had an ingenious way of finding the nests of the wild bee.
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