He knew – he knew for certain – he was going to get his wish for a major adventure. And he wished with all his little centipedish heart that he was safely back in his home-tunnel.
Harry in his pickle-jar was carried along for a short way and then he felt a jolt and saw that there was something solid underneath the floor of the hard-air place. He lost his head and started trying to escape again, running round and round inside the jar. It was useless, of course.
Suddenly he stopped. He’d caught a signal!
Insects and other small creeping creatures can’t speak to each other across the species, but they can make crude signals. I mean, one kind of creature can tell from another’s behaviour if there’s danger, for instance.
Now Harry stopped helplessly running around, and looked through the clear wall. Not far away from him was another hard-air prison. And in it was something he recognised.
He recognised it because it was very like what he’d eaten for breakfast.
It was a beetle, a large one. Not a stag beetle. A dung beetle, a female. Dung beetles are only happy when they have a ball of dung to roll along. This dung beetle didn’t. She had some earth in the bottom of her prison but it wasn’t dung, and she hadn’t the heart to roll it into a ball. Anyway, there was nowhere to roll it to.
She just sat forlornly with her six legs bent and her large head lowered. She looked to Harry like two things at once: a sad lady beetle and a good meal. He didn’t know which came first, but as he was still quite full of one of her distant relations, he decided to treat her as a fellow prisoner.
It was she who’d signalled to him. The signal said something like, “This is bad and I am sad.” (Beetles talk, and signal, in Beetle, a language that always rhymes. Of course Harry didn’t grasp this, just the general meaning – I’ve translated from Beetle as best I can.)
Harry signalled back, “Same here.”
She swayed her head from side to side. Then she moved forward and raised herself clumsily and put her front feet on the hard-air. This said, as clearly as words, “There is no doubt, I can’t get out.”
Harry rose up against the wall nearest to her, putting his front eight pairs of feet against it. “Me neither.”
The lady dung beetle swung her head in a wider arc. “None of us can. Have you a plan?”
Harry looked around. And got another shock.
There were lots of prisons made of the hard-air stuff! Harry couldn’t count, but if he could, he would have counted ten or twelve glass jars on the table where his was. Each one contained a prisoner.
There was a yellow scorpion, nearly as large as Harry, with pincers a lot larger (though his poison was in his tail, just now lying dejectedly behind him). There was a rhinoceros beetle, his big curved horn resting against the prison wall.
There were several caterpillars of different sizes and colours. There were two or three millipedes, a large, hairy tarantula, and several smaller spiders. There was a stick insect, which looked very unhappy indeed – it could hardly stand up straight, and besides, it didn’t have any sticks to hide amongst. Harry looked at all of them and took in their signals. All of the signals were sad and frightened.
And then he stiffened. Down at the far end, there was another centipede!
If centipedes could gasp, Harry would have gasped when he saw him.
It was George!
“Grndd! Grndd!” Harry crackled. But his crackle didn’t go through the hard-air.
Harry began to run around his prison frantically sending signals. The movement attracted the attention of all the prisoners. The ones who were lying on the floor of their jars, some sleeping, some just slumped in despair, stood up and turned his way. His turns, his twists, his liftings and scrabblings of his front feet on the wall, made all the others think something was up.
A sort of current, or wordless message, passed from jar to jar. The dung beetle passed it to the scorpion, who passed it with a curving of his poison-tail to the rhinoceros beetle, who bumped his horn against the glass with a loud click, alerting the caterpillars, who wrigglingly passed it to the tarantula.
She hugged the air with her furry front legs urgently. This passed the message to the other spiders in their own language, and their scuttlings and jumpings passed it to the stick insect.
He was so depressed he couldn’t be bothered to pass it on, but by that time it didn’t matter. George had already grasped the fact that someone was trying to signal to him. He peered through his own glass wall and, though it was far away, he could just about make out some centipedish movements, which he recognised at once as Harry’s.
(Centipedes might look all alike to you, but believe me, they can tell each other apart as easily as you can tell your mother from your worst enemy at school.)
“Hx! Hx! They got you, too! Hx, we’ve got to get out!” signalled George, twisting and turning frenziedly.
Harry picked this up with some difficulty and stood still. He thought about it for a moment and then, slowly and deliberately, he sent this signal:
“Can you tunnel through this hard-air stuff?”
George signalled: “No, and nor can any of the others. There was a mole cricket here before, and he couldn’t.” The centis knew all about mole crickets. They were among the best tunnel-diggers in the earth.
“What happened to him?”
George lowered his head and sent a brief signal.
“Stopped.”
No creature likes to think about death. They all have words for it that soften its meaning, the way we say “passed away”. But Harry had to ask.
“Did the Not-So-Big Hoo-Min stop him?”
“No. He just stopped. He – he’d been here a long time. He wouldn’t eat. He didn’t want to go on moving.”
Harry shuddered all along his cuticle. Could anything so awful happen to him and George?
There followed a long, long time of misery. Sheer misery.
Being in prison is horrible for anyone – or anything. Every creature alive hates it. But some prisons are worse than others.
The Not-So-Big Hoo-Min probably thought he was treating the creatures in his collection quite well. But he wasn’t much of an expert, really. He liked catching things, and then keeping them to look at, but unfortunately he didn’t read much. So instead of studying in books how to look after his captive creatures, he just did what he thought was right.
He wanted them to stay alive, so he put some earth