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generator, and to my consternation found that the synchronising coils had been short-circuited. Still clinging to the shattered remnants of the osmium toroid were the jaws of the termite that had been sacrificed to wreck the motor…
    ‘For a long time I sat in the ship, considering these outstanding facts. Obviously, the damage had been wrought by the intelligence I had located for a moment on my last visit. If it were the termite ruler, and there was nothing else it could very well be, how did it come to possess its knowledge of atomic motors and the only way in which to wreck them? For some reason, possibly because I was prying too deeply into its secrets, it had decided to destroy me and my works. Its first attempt had been unsuccessful, but it might try again with better results, though I did not imagine that it could harm me inside the stout walls of my yacht.
    ‘Although my psychometer and televisor had been destroyed, I was determined not to be defeated so easily, and started hunting with the ship’s televisor, which though not made for this kind of work could do it very well. Since I lacked the essential psychometer it was some time before I found what I was looking for. I had to explore great sections of the ground with my instrument, focusing the view point through stratum after stratum and examining any suspicious rock that came into the field. When I was at a depth of nearly two hundred feet, I noticed a dark mass looming faintly in the distance, rather like a very large boulder embedded in the soil. But when I approached I saw with a great feeling of elation that it was no boulder, but a perfect sphere of metal, about twenty feet in diameter. My search had ended. There was a slight fading of the image as I drove the beam through the metal, and then on the screen lay revealed the lair of the super-termite.
    ‘I had expected to find some fantastic creature, perhaps a great naked brain with vestigial limbs, but at a glance I could see that there was no living thing in that sphere. From wall to wall that metal-enclosed space was packed with a maze of machinery, most of it very minute and almost unthinkably complex, and all of it clicking and buzzing with lightning-like rapidity. Compared to this miracle of electrical engineering, our great television exchanges would seem the creations of children or savages. I could see myriads of tiny relays operating, director valves flashing intermittently, and strangely shaped cams spinning among moving mazes of apparatus utterly unlike anything we have ever built. To the makers of this machinery, my atomic generator must have seemed a toy.
    ‘For perhaps two seconds I gazed in wonder at that amazing sight, and then, suddenly and incredibly, an obliterating veil of interference slashed down and the screen was a dancing riot of formless colour.
    ‘Here was something we have never been able to produce—a screen which the televisor could not penetrate. The power of this strange creature was even greater than I had imagined, and in the face of this latest revelation I no longer felt safe even in my ship. In fact, I had a sudden desire to put as many miles as possible between myself and Termite Island. This impulse was so strong that a minute later I was high over the Pacific, rising up through the stratosphere in the great ellipse which would curve down again in England.
    ‘Yes, you may smile or accuse me of cowardice, saying that my grandfather Vorac would not have done so—but listen.
    ‘I was about a hundred miles from the island, thirty miles high and already travelling at two thousand miles an hour when there came a sudden crashing of relays, and the low purr of the motors changed to a tremendous deep-throated roar as an overload was thrown on to them. A glance at the board showed me what had happened—the ray screens were on, flaring beneath the impact of a heavy induction beam. But there was comparatively little power behind the beam, though had I been nearer it