American geologist Silas Orcutt and his intrepid crew had fully expected to encounter vestiges of prehistoric life in the central Australian desert. But they were hardly prepared for armies of super-intelligent, exceptionally strong insects. A warning shot of formic acid is succeeded by the appearance of six-foot-tall ants that walk upright, communicate by telepathy, and dwell in a sophisticated underground culture.
Their advanced society is nonetheless crippled by prejudice—green ants, black ants, and red ants are all sworn foes. In addition to battling each other, the Ant Men are at constant war with their neighbors, a colony of giant mantises. When one of the fossil hunters is taken captive by the Ant Men, Professor Orcutt must lead a dangerous rescue mission. This gripping adventure, reminiscent of tales by H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, builds on a basis of scientific fact to create an authentic background for its pulp-fiction thrills.
American geologist Silas Orcutt and his intrepid crew had fully expected to encounter vestiges of prehistoric life in the central Australian desert. But they were hardly prepared for armies of super-intelligent, exceptionally strong insects. A warning shot of formic acid is succeeded by the appearance of six-foot-tall ants that walk upright, communicate by telepathy, and dwell in a sophisticated underground culture.
Their advanced society is nonetheless crippled by prejudice—green ants, black ants, and red ants are all sworn foes. In addition to battling each other, the Ant Men are at constant war with their neighbors, a colony of giant mantises. When one of the fossil hunters is taken captive by the Ant Men, Professor Orcutt must lead a dangerous rescue mission. This gripping adventure, reminiscent of tales by H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, builds on a basis of scientific fact to create an authentic background for its pulp-fiction thrills.
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Overview
American geologist Silas Orcutt and his intrepid crew had fully expected to encounter vestiges of prehistoric life in the central Australian desert. But they were hardly prepared for armies of super-intelligent, exceptionally strong insects. A warning shot of formic acid is succeeded by the appearance of six-foot-tall ants that walk upright, communicate by telepathy, and dwell in a sophisticated underground culture.
Their advanced society is nonetheless crippled by prejudice—green ants, black ants, and red ants are all sworn foes. In addition to battling each other, the Ant Men are at constant war with their neighbors, a colony of giant mantises. When one of the fossil hunters is taken captive by the Ant Men, Professor Orcutt must lead a dangerous rescue mission. This gripping adventure, reminiscent of tales by H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, builds on a basis of scientific fact to create an authentic background for its pulp-fiction thrills.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486821313 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 05/17/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 18 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Ant Men
By Eric North
Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 2017 Eric NorthAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-82131-3
CHAPTER 1
Disaster
An extraordinary stillness seemed to brood over the sun-bitten fastnesses of the Central Australian desert, through which the big utility truck was slowly and cautiously making its way toward the mirage-like peaks and scarps of distant ranges. It was top sun, and the inverted bowl of the sky was hard and brittle as glass. It clamped down on the circle of bitter, jagged horizon like a great lid, under which the hot breath of the desert rose and fell as though it were a palpable, living thing. Over the low-lying sand hills and benches the dust swirled endlessly, contracting and expanding, building up an immense prism of fantastic movement and color which shaped and reshaped itself with incredible speed. Red sand crumbled down from the rock piles to rise again in smoking funnels that whirled over the clay pans and salt pans in writhing contours, to vanish in a blood-red haze. All about them was primeval chaos, ageless in time and space and raw with burnt-out colors, like a rainbow crumbling under the sheer weight of eternity. Not a breath of wind stirred.
"Mamma, mamma," Nugget Smith croaked, spitting the alkali scum from his dry lips. "In a place like this, you got to be as careful as a fat man on a diet."
He eased his perspiring body behind the sawing wheel of the utility and blew out his cheeks.
"How you youngsters making out?" he demanded, with a grin.
"I could do with a drink," young Bill Carey said.
"You ain't serious!" the driver said with mock surprise.
"Pull your head in, Nugget," admonished the third occupant of the utility's cabin, Tod Gray. "Bill's been reared on green pastures. He's not a bit of dried-up old leather like you."
Nugget Smith choked back a ferocious retort and gave his attention to a nest of anthills which almost blocked their path.
"Green pastures yourself," Carey said, in his soft, precise English voice. "What do you Aussies think you are, anyhow? You're only Britishers gone ragged at the pants after mixing with the boongs and bush flies for half a dozen generations."
Both youngsters were in their late teens. They were classmates at the University of Adelaide Science Research Laboratories. Carey had not been away from England long. He was a fair, tall lad, with sleepy blue eyes and a perpetual air of astonishment, as though he was never through wondering just how he came to find himself in such an outlandish place as Australia, after the orderly existence of the little north of England town from which he had graduated. He had a wide, good-humored mouth, though with a hint of quick temper at its corners. He could use his fists, as well as his head, when occasion demanded it. Many a one, taking heart from his seeming mildness, had come to give him an astonished respect after prodding him to sudden action.
Tod Gray, on the other hand, was short and stocky, with unruly black hair, and large red ears which had earned for him the nickname of Jugs. He, too, was somewhat surprising, for his easy manners and slow, drawling speech belied a very real activity, both of mind and body. When roused, he was as fierce and relentless as a Tasmanian devil.
It was sheer luck that he and Carey, close friends, had been chosen from their class — because of their fitness, rather than their scholarship — to take part in an altogether unusual adventure, an informal semi-scientific exploration of the dead heart of the Australian continent. This was organized by Professor Silas Orcutt, a distinguished member of the Smithsonian Institution in the United States, at his own expense and on his own research terms.
Professor Orcutt and his Australian assistant, Dr. Gregory Wise, senior lecturer in geology at the University of Melbourne, were riding in the back of the utility truck, with the party's rather considerable baggage. Over the frame built up from the sides of the vehicle a light tarp had been fitted as a protection against the fierce sun. The sides were rolled up, however, to give passage to whatever air there was. The two scientists sat chatting, while they compared notes on the field work of the previous day. The party was now three weeks out from Alice Springs, and were heading south by east into country unknown even to the desert old-timer, Nugget Smith. Their guide had been chosen by Professor Orcutt for his wide experience in the never-never badlands. Orcutt had sent Nugget ahead several months earlier to blaze a trail over known country and put down a cache of oil, water drums, and tinned foods, every twenty miles, once past a certain landmark, to a fifty-mile limit. They had refueled and restocked from the outermost of these caches two days back, and reckoned they were equipped now for several hard runs into the desert, then return to the nearest cache.
Professor Orcutt was well on in years. He was lean and tough as a bean pole, for most of his life had been spent in scientific adventuring in odd corners of the globe, where he had learned to take life as it came. He had an almost bald head that was now hidden under a wide Panama hat, big, bushy eyebrows, and a square, bearded jaw which did not quite conceal his wide, clever mouth. He wore sunglasses and was dressed in a checked shirt and thin jodhpurs, the last being worn also by the rest of the party with the exception of Nugget Smith. Nugget clung to his usual disreputable pants of worn dungaree, which, he claimed, were just as good to ward off the spear grass and bitterweed and the bites of the Centralian scorpions as any fancy getup like that of his companions.
Nugget was a hard-bitten giant in his fifties, with a skin of leather and limbs as knotted as those of a corkwood tree. He was squat and broad and hairy as a nest caterpillar. He was acknowledged far and wide as one of the biggest and best liars — when it came to telling of his own prowess — the deserts had ever known. But he knew his job, and was proving just the sort of granite based guide and driver Professor Orcutt had hoped for.
Dr. Wise was a thin-faced, keen-eyed man in his early forties. He and Orcutt, who had similar scientific interests and theories, had corresponded for years, and the present venture had been planned well in advance of Orcutt's arrival in Australia.
Their main purpose was to study the weird geological formations of the ranges of the interior and to search for a rare specimen of obsidian button of a deep purple. Obsidian is a glassy lava, a kind of extremely hard volcanic rock of many colors — mainly black. Professor Orcutt, a mineralogist of world renown, had a theory that the purple obsidian was meteoric in origin.
He was talking of this now.
"The only place where purple obsidian of this particular luster has been found so far, Wise, is in the Meteor Crater in Arizona, in the rock flour. I guess this hungry sour-land desert of yours is just the right spot to root around in for more of it."
Wise mopped his streaming face.
"Well, we've our Henbury meteoric craters. You've seen them, Orcutt." He stared out at the burning sand benches. "I don't like this deadness in the air. Could be the desert's getting on its hind legs for a first-class tornado. Smell anything?"
The professor wrinkled his nose.
"A taint of sulfur gas, maybe. This is all burnt-out country. These leftover gas pockets can last for centuries. Volcanic ... but I guess it's not just that. The haze is sure thickening. Say, did you hear that?"
From somewhere out of the oppressive silence came a succession of dull, explosive sounds.
"Sounds like artillery fire," Bill Carey called to them, over his shoulder.
"Yeah," Jugs grinned. "Too right. What you're hearing, Bill, is our boong desert corps trying out on their secret mulga range, getting ready for the next burst with the Japanese. Didn't I tell you about them?"
Carey, who was not yet awake to when his leg was being pulled, said, "Gosh! I didn't know you had black troops ... Listen, Jugs, another crack like that and ..."
"Them noises," Nugget put in loftily, "is the big granites splitting with the heat. That's so, Prof, ain't it?"
Nugget had early settled in his mind that the correct way to address his principals was "Prof" and "Doc." Nothing could shift him from it. The lads he usually hailed as "youse kids," or, individually, as "Jay" and "Double-you."
"Ever seen a sky like this before, Nugget?" Orcutt asked him.
"No, Prof, I ain't. And I don't want to. It looks real 'spicious to me. Now, one time when I was up in Birds-ville — I disremember the date exactly — I seen something like it, though. An electric storm, they told me it was — arterward, when I woke up in the orspittle. There was me, sitting outside the Birdsville pub one moment, and next thing I knew I was lying stark naked on the back veranda of Old Man Potter's ranch at Birdum. Not even me socks left on me two feet. I muster shot through the air like one of these here jets. Would you believe it!"
"Speaking for myself — no," Jugs told him.
Nugget spared a moment from the wheel to glare at him.
"One of these days, young Jay, you'll be getting that sharp you'll cut yourself. Mamma, mamma! What's going on here?"
Unaccountably, the utility truck had begun to weave from side to side. Unable to hold her straight, Nugget braked to a stop, just missing a sandstone spur. He sat staring about him in an angry, puzzled way.
"It felt as if something hit us," Bill Carey said.
A sudden puff of wind scorched their faces, flattened the tops of the spinifex, and lost itself in the deathly silence. From a ledge of red cliff high overhead a blister of rock slowly opened and fell.
Dr. Wise had scrambled to the ground.
"An earth tremor, I think."
"Some kind of vertical force," Orcutt said quietly. "Yet a vertical force surely can't make things move sideways, the way this jalopy did. I'd say a kick from a real quake someplace. Engine okay, Nugget?"
Nugget had recovered from his amazement.
"Sweet as can be, Prof." He scowled at the dubious looks of the two lads. "Maybe youse kids got something funny to say about my driving, huh?"
They were discreetly silent.
"Mamma, mamma," Nugget grumbled. "Ain't I got enough jerking this bus along without taking a kick in the pants from one of nature's stomach ulcers! Sure, sure it was an earthquake. I said that, didn't I?"
Dr. Wise had climbed back into the utility. His face was uneasy. He looked at the professor as if to say something, but his lips only compressed themselves more tightly.
"Drive slowly," Orcutt said, with a frown.
Nugget spat a mouthful of alkali over the side, and the utility began to lurch forward again. The sulfurous tang in the air seemed more pronounced.
"Funny if a live crater opened up on us," Jugs volunteered.
Ahead of them the heat waves and sand smoke brought a vague impression of solid rock.
"I don't like the looks of that," Professor Orcutt said.
"Too narrow to turn, anyhow," Nugget called back. "Put her on her back, and she'll lie there like a turtle. Any of youse ever die of thirst? That's what 'ud happen. Ditch the bus and you might as well cut your throat"
Jugs broke a tense silence to say derisively, "Bill, I bet you'd give a bit right now to be back in Skeleton-on-the-Marsh, or whatever it was in Old Blighty."
"Don't panic," Bill urged.
Dr. Wise broke in, "I can see an opening ahead, I think."
"I've had me eye on it fer weeks," Nugget assured him. "Oo's driving, Doc?"
"You seem to be," Wise called good-naturedly. They were well used by now to Nugget's jealous defense of his particular job. "Yes, there's a gap there all right."
"Could be a dead end," Jugs muttered.
"Now who's worrying?" his pal gibed. "Golly, look at those cliffs! I can't see the tops of them."
The walls rose sheer on either side of the gorge. Here and there through the haze they caught a gleam of color flung down from the sun-scorched heights ... of yellow and vermilion, cobalt and jet black, with tufts and spumes of frothy gray pumice.
"Reminds me of Standley Chasm, out from the Alice," Nugget grunted. "Maybe it's another freak like that there. Maybe she goes clear through."
He yelled over his shoulder, "Say, Prof, what do I do?"
"You can try it, anyhow," Orcutt encouraged him. "If there's a storm coming up it will give us some sort of shelter, at any rate. The air's just packed with electricity, Wise. Can't you feel it?"
Before his confrere had time to answer, there came again that swift, frightening, sideways roll of the laboring utility. The wheels spun madly in a vain attempt to grip ground that suddenly wrinkled and folded like an accordion. As before, it ceased as suddenly as it had come. Once again a fiery breath swept over them, leaving a stench of burning in its wake. The sand smoke had a blood-red tinge.
Bill Carey had been staring at the twisting shoulders of lava rock ahead. The sand benches had vanished, leaving a wide, flat expanse of glasslike rock, over which the utility now barely crept forward. To the left he caught sight of the leprous-white tangle of a dead finish bush.
"Hear that!" Jugs cried.
The silence, save for the straining of the truck, had given place to an eerie moaning sound.
As before, Nugget had pulled up the utility. He was snorting with annoyance. His faded eyes held an obstinate gleam, and, oddly, the hairs on his chest and arms seemed suddenly to stand up like thin wires.
He exploded, "Mamma, mamma! I ask you. Say, them cliffs could come down with one of them shakes. So what, says you? I guess I can't turn 'round. The blinking tires can't get ahold of this here going. What say, Prof?"
"Get going again, as fast as you can," Orcutt repeated urgently. Suddenly he appeared anxious and irritable. Staring at him, Jugs and Bill noted that his immense brows had assumed a stiff look, like the hairs on Nugget's chest. On an impulse, Jugs put a hand to his head, and was startled to find that his own hair was almost rigid.
"Electricity!" Bill gasped.
Orcutt was shouting. "Get on! Get on! Look! There's gravel ahead. Get to it and the tires will grip. Head for the ravine, Nugget. There's something cooking."
The utility hung a moment, then, with a crashing of gears, slid from the glassy underhold, took hold suddenly, and shot forward like a frightened animal. The opening of the ravine found them in a haze so thick that Nugget switched on the headlights. At once the beams picked up walls about twenty feet apart, rising with a smoothness and evenness so exact they could hardly believe they were faced not with man's architecture but with nature's.
"Old river bed, like Standley Chasm, out from Alice Springs," Dr. Wise shouted. "Nature can use water like a knife ... goes back into unremembered time."
"Hold tight, youse kids," Nugget advised.
Jugs said, "What do you think? Don't kid yourself."
The moaning of the desert was steadily rising. In the confined space, the noise of the racing utility was flung back at them in a series of vast overlapping echoes. They could hardly hear Orcutt's urgent cry, "Faster ... if you can make it, Nugget. Get out of this place, I say ..."
Beneath them, the ground began once more to heave and twist. The old-timer was almost standing on the accelerator. His eyes were smarting and there was an acrid taste in his mouth. The walls of the chasm had opened out unexpectedly. A greenish light was flickering along the serrated edges of skyline. Nugget felt his stomach run into a tight knot.
Without warning, an enormous volume of sound fell upon them. They were caught in a maelstrom of spinning, twisting light. The utility leaped and bucked ...
Nugget yelled, "Mamma, mammal I can't hold her..."
Then it happened.
A great spear of lightning, a Jovian thunderbolt of incredible brilliance, stabbed the convulsed earth. There came a second of confused consciousness in which their very souls were torn with terror and despair.
Then ... nothingness.
CHAPTER 2The Lost Crater
Jugs returned to consciousness, to find himself lying flat on his back in a bed of hot sand. He straggled to his feet and looked about him, trying to grip his reeling mind. As his sight cleared, he saw the utility truck, with Nugget collapsed over the steering wheel. Beyond him, Carey's head moved uncertainly. Jugs limped to the back of the truck and peered in. Dr. Wise was groping on his hands and knees. He was trying to lift Professor Orcutt from the floor. The American pushed him away with a feeble hand.
"Guess I'm okay. Holy mackerel! That was some lightning! You all right, Wise?"
Nugget's smothered grumble reached them.
"Mamma, mamma! Who hit me?"
Jugs found his voice. Sick as he felt, he couldn't resist a poke at the old-timer.
"I did. Hi, Pommy?"
Bill, weaving his way to the ground, stammered, "Hi, Aussie. How's tricks?"
They grouped about the side of the utility, trying to make some sense of things. It struck them as odd that, beyond a bruise or two and a general comprehensive headache, they were without injury.
Dr. Wise said, "Obviously we were struck by that terrific bolt of lightning. Amazing!"
"I'll say it is," the professor grunted. "But, say, what is this place? How did we come through those walls?"
They stared uncomprehendingly.
Nugget had made a quick examination of the utility. Now he announced in a fuming voice, "Steering gear's all busted to ribbons. Just a junk heap. Who's going to pay me for that?"
"I'll see you don't lose out," the professor soothed him. "I don't see how you got us out from those walls, old-timer, but I guess you must have ... somehow. Or maybe we rode out on the back of a miracle."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Ant Men by Eric North. Copyright © 2017 Eric North. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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