While the bellicose spirit had been successfully bred out of the new species, its capacities for material destructions had increased. Likewise the appetite of "_Ant-termes_" was even more ferocious than that of the older species; Lee was feeding all kinds of experimental foods, but woodpulp remained the staple, the very stuff which in its liquid form, lignin, embedded the nerve paths of The Brain. Lifting his strained eyes from the charts, Lee looked over the row of air conditioned glass cubicles wherein "_Ant-termes-pacificus_" continued its lives undisturbed by the new habitat, undisturbed by the rays which flowed over and through their bodies, unconscious that a superhuman intelligence was probing steadily into every manifestation of the mysterious collective brains of their race. They had built their new mounds pointing due North as had their ancestors for the past 100 million years. To the human eye nothing betrayed the teeming life within except the tiny tunnels creeping out from the mounds in the direction of the foods which were placed different from day to day. Cemented from loam and saliva by the invisible sappers, the tunnels, like threads of grey wool, unerringly moved to the deposits of pulpwood, up the shelves, up the tin cans and glass containers they had determined to destroy. Their instincts were uncanny, their destruction as methodical and "scientific" as was modern war. In Northern Australia Lee had come across big eucalyptus trees, healthy-looking and in full bloom, and then they would collapse under the first stroke of an axe or even as one pushed hard against them. The termites had hollowed them out from roof to top, had transformed them into thin walled pipes, leaving just enough "flesh" to keep some sap-circulation going, to maintain a semi-balance of life in order to exploit it more efficiently. Over here in the lab they would open up a number 3 tin can within a couple of hours; first with the soldiers' vicious nasi-corn secretions eating the tin 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....