“Well, I guess it’s curtains!” he muttered.
A glance at his altimeter showed a scant eighteen hundred now. Another glance showed the western boundary of the city, agonizing miles ahead. Could he make it? He’d try, anyway!
So, nursing his plane along in a shallow glide, Jim slipped down through that dazing heat.
“Got to keep her speed up!” he told himself, half deliriously, as he steadily lost altitude. “Can’t pancake here, or I’ll be a flapjack!”
At an altitude of less than a thousand he levelled off again, eased on down, fully expecting to feel his plane burst into flames. But though his eyebrows crisped and the gas must have boiled, the sturdy little plane made it.
On a long last glide, he put her wheels down on the sandy desert floor, a bare half mile beyond that searing hell.
The heat was still terrific but endurable now. He dared breathe deeper; he found his head clearing. But what was the good of it? It was only a respite. The monsters had seen him, all right—no doubt about that! Already they were swooping out of their weird citadel like a pack of furious hornets.
On they came, incredibly fast, moving in a wide half-circle that obviously was planned to envelop him.
Tense with horror, like a doomed man at the stake, Jim watched the flaming phalanx advance. And now he saw what they really were; saw that his first, fantastic guess had been right.
They were ants—or at least more like ants than anything on earth—great fiery termites ten feet long, hideous mandibles snapping like steel, hot from the forge, their huge compound eyes burning like greenish electric fire in their livid orange sockets.