in away and then with the
workers mandibles gnawing at the weakened metal. In time perhaps they
would learn to collapse steel bridges, sabotage rails, perforate the
engines of motorcars if these should prove to be menaces to their race.
As they had persevered through the eons of the past, so they would in
all the future; their civilization would be extant long after Man and
his work had disappeared from the earth....

With the aid of The Brain, Lee had accumulated more data, more knowledge
of the "_Ant-termes_" society within a few months than a lifetime of
study could have yielded him under normal conditions. Even so, some of
the greatest mysteries remained. What, for instance, caused these blind
creatures to attack a sealed tin can of syrup in preference to its
neighbor with tomatoes or some other stuff? No racial memory could have
taught them; there were no tin cans a million years, not even a hundred
years, ago. It couldn't be a sense of smell, it couldn't be any sense;
there would have to be some weird extrasensory powers in that
unfathomable collective brain of their race.

The magnifying fluoroscope screens arrayed all along the walls and
hooked up to the circuits of The Brain showed him details and phases of
the specie's life as The Brain perceived them and as no human eye had
ever seen before.

For a minute or so Lee stared at the luminous image nearest to him and
then with an effort he turned his eyes away to escape from its hypnotic
influence. It was but the head of one worn-out worker used as a living
storage tank for excremental food. It was absolutely immobile, its
decaying mandibles pointing down, cemented as the animal was by its
overextended belly to the ceiling. But magnified as were its remaining
life manifestations by the powers of The Brain, he could see it breathe,
could count the slow pulse, could sense a strain in its ophthalmic
region, some hidden effort to see, like a blind man's, and above all Lee
perceived the ganglion primitive as it was, yet twitching in reaction to
pain. There could be no doubt that in its last service for the racial
commonweal the animal was suffering slow torture even if its senses were
closed to that torture. It was a fascinating and at the same time a
terrible thing to see; and it was only one out of the hundred equally
revealing sights.

Lee frowned at himself; manifestly some emotional element interfered
with the objectivity of his observations; this was entirely