atherers, chemists, bread-makers, and all the varied
specialists of the hive go with the old queen, leaving behind sufficient
number of each class for the needs of the young queen.

"All this apportionment is effected without any means of communication
that we recognize. Still it is most obviously intelligent selection.
For if it were haphazard all the honeymakers might leave and the hive
starve, or all the chemists might go and the food for the young bees not
be properly prepared--and so on and so on."

"But metal," he muttered, "and conscious. It's all very well--but where
did that consciousness come from? And what is it? And where did they
come from? And most of all, why haven't they overrun the world before
this?

"Such development as theirs, such an evolution, presupposes aeons of
time--long as it took us to drag up from the lizards. What have
they been doing--why haven't they been ready to strike--if Ventnor's
right--at humanity until now?"

"I don't know," I answered, helplessly. "But evolution is not the
slow, plodding process that Darwin thought. There seem to be
explosions--nature will create a new form almost in a night. Then comes
the long ages of development and adjustment, and suddenly another new
race appears.

"It might be so of these--some extraordinary conditions that shaped
them. Or they might have developed through the ages in spaces within
the earth--there's that incredible abyss we saw that is evidently one of
their highways. Or they might have dropped here upon some fragment of a
broken world, found in this valley the right conditions and developed in
amazing rapidity. * They're all possible theories--take your pick."

* Professor Svante Arrhenius's theory of propagation of life
by means of minute spores carried through space. See his
"Worlds in the Making."--W.T.G.

"Something's held them back--and they're rushing to a climax," he
whispered. "Ventnor's right about that--I feel it. And what can we do?"

"Go back to their city," I said. "Go back as he ordered. I believe he
knows what he's talking about. And I believe he'll be able to help us.
It wasn't just a request he made, nor even an appeal--it was a command."

"But what can we do--just two men--against these Things?" he groaned.

"Maybe we'll find out--when we're back in the city," I answered.

"Well," his old reckless cheerfulness came back to him, "in every crisis
of this old globe it's been up to one man to turn t