"I'm very sorry," replied Alice, taking the jigsaw piece from the ant's grasp. It showed the picture of a single white ant crawling up the stem of a flower. "I shall place this in London Zoo, just as soon as I get back home." And she slipped the jigsaw piece into her pinafore pocket.
"But it's only a picture," sniffed the ant, "not a living creature."
"That's quite all right," Alice replied, "because he's going to live inside a picture of London Zoo. Is that today's newspaper?"
"I sincerely hope it's today's paper! I've just paid three grubs for it."
"But it says that termites have been found on the Moon?"
"So?"
"But nobody's been to the Moon!"
"What are you going on about?" the ant demanded. "The humans have been travelling to the Moon for years now! For years, I tell you! What, exactly, are you doing in this mound?"
"I'm looking for my parrot."
"A parrot, you say? This wouldn't be a green-and-yellow parrot, with a big orange beak, who just can't stop asking riddles?"
"Yes, that's Whippoorwill! Where did he go?"
"The parrot, he went that-a-way," said the ant, pointing back down the corridor with one of his antennae.
"Oh thank you, Mister Ant. You've been ever so helpful."
"How dare you, young miss!" exclaimed the ant, raising himself onto his back legs and blocking her path. "You have made not one, but two factual errors: firstly, I am not an ant. I am a termite."
"Oh I am sorry," said Alice. "But surely there's not that much difference between ants and termites?"
"Stupid child! Just because we've both got six legs and two sections, and just because we both live in highly organized societies comprising winged males, wingless females and winged queens, you presume ants and termites to be all but identical. You couldn't be more wrong, dear girl. Why, there's a thousand differences between us!"
"Please tell me one," asked Alice.
"Tell you one what?"
"A difference between a termite and an ant."
"Well, now... let me think... I'm sure there was something... it's in here somewhere..." The termite was tapping his head with one of his antennae as he pondered. "Of course! We termites are vegetarians, while the horrible ants are carnivores. In fact..." and here the termite looked around rather nervously as he whispered to Alice, "ants like to eat termites for breakfast. On toast! I suspect that the ants are jealous because they haven't been found on the Moon. Quite a mound of difference, I think you'll agree?"
Alice did agree, but she wasn't sure why. "What is your name, Mister Termite?" she asked.
But this latest (very polite) question only made the termite even angrier: his antennae fairly bristled with indignation. "And that", he trumpeted, "brings me to your second mistake, for, if you had been paying attention to my previous statement, you would have recognized that I am completely wingless and therefore, logically, I am a female termite."
"Very well," said Alice, getting just a little exasperated herself now, "what is your name, Mrs Termite?"
"Mrs? Mrs? Do I look like a Mrs? Only the Queen is a Mrs! I told you already that the Queen has wings. What is the matter with you?"
"Oh!" cried Alice, "Miss Termite, you're just too... too... too logical for me!"
"Logical? Of course I'm logical. I'm a computermite."
"Whatever's a computermite?"
"Exactly what it sounds like, silly. I'm a termite that computes. I work out the answers to questions. Now, what is your question?"
"Very well," began Alice, trying her best to keep her anger in check, "what is your name, Miss Computermite?"
"Name?" squeaked the termite. "Names, names, names! What would I know about names? I'm a termite, for digging's sake! Termites don't have names! Whatever next? You'll be asking if we've got bicycles in a minute!"
Just then, Alice heard a trundling noise coming from behind her, and when she turned to look, what should appear around the corner but a male termite, on a bicycle!
It was quite an ordinary bicycle except that it had two sets of pedals (rather like a tandem) which the male termite pedalled at furiously with his middle and his hind legs, whilst clinging to the handlebars with his forelegs. (This is one of the few cases when two plus two plus fore equals six.) Alice knew it was a male termite because of the wings on his back, and she felt rather proud to have worked out this piece of logic, although why he wasn't flying through the tunnel rather than bicycling through it was quite another question. However, the male termite never gave her a chance to ask this question because he was obviously in a terrible hurry; he simply pedalled past Alice and the female termite at a terrific speed, shouting at them as he did so, "Come on, you two, hop to it! The Queen of the Mound has received a question from Captain Ramshackle and we must answer it immediately. Chop chop!" And with that he disappeared around the curve in the tunnel.
Alice was quite taken aback by this whirlwind appearance. "Who on earth is Captain Ramshackle?" she asked of Miss Computermite, but the female termite was already hurrying along the tunnel after the bicycle. "Come on then," the termite shouted back at her, "there's no time for questions, we've got a question to answer!" Alice thought that sentence completely illogical. "Oh dear, Celia," she said to her doll, "we shall never be home in time for our writing lesson now." And it wasn't until after she'd finished the sentence that Alice realized she no longer had Celia in her hands. "Oh bother!" she said to herself. "Not only have I lost Whippoorwill, I've also lost Celia. And not only that, I've also lost myself! Great Aunt Ermintrude is going to be very, very angry."
And with that Alice started to run along the corridor after Miss Computermite.
The Wriggling of a Worm
Hundreds, indeed thousands of other termites joined with Alice in her race to find Whippoorwill. Of course these termites weren't really after the parrot at alclass="underline" they were after the answer to the question that Captain Ramshackle had posed to the Queen of the Mound. Eventually Alice managed to catch up with Miss Computermite, and immediately she asked of her this question: "What is the question that you're trying to answer?"
"Oh, it's a tricky one, indeed," Miss Computermite answered whilst still running along the corridor at an alarming pace. "Captain Ramshackle wants to know which number, when multiplied by itself, will give the answer minus one. And that question doesn't have an answer!"
"But that doesn't seem such a difficult question," said Alice.
"Well, as you must surely know," the termite replied, "one times one is one, and minus one times minus one is also one, because two negatives always make a plus."
"Do they?"
"They do indeed."
"But I was taught that two wrongs do not make a right."
"That's true in real life. In computermatics, however, it's quite the opposite." And with that Miss Computermite put on an extra dash of speed.
Alice felt quite breathless from trying to keep up because she had only two legs whilst the termite had six: the only possible way she could keep up (because six divided by two equals three) was by running three times as fast as she was used to. But keep up she did. "So then," said Alice, running, "if I had two milk bottles on a table, and I took one of them away, and then I took the other away, I would then be left with one milk bottle. Is that what you're saying?"
"I'm not saying that at all," replied the termite, running. "I'm saying that if you took one milk bottle away from a table, and then another milk bottle away from a table, and then if you multiplied all the milk bottles that were left on the table together, you would get another milk bottle."