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The Forgotten Planet

by Murray Leinster · English · Gutenberg #41637 · 347,775 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Forgotten Planet

Author: Murray Leinster


        
Release date: December 16, 2012 [eBook #41637]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FORGOTTEN PLANET ***

                          _The FORGOTTEN PLANET_

                          By MURRAY LEINSTER

    [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
    that the copyright had been renewed.]


    ACE BOOKS
    A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc.
    23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

    THE FORGOTTEN PLANET
    Copyright, 1954, by Murray Leinster
    An Ace Book, by arrangement with Gnome Press, Inc.

    _The Forgotten Planet_ is based upon _Mad Planet_ and _Red Dust_
    (copyrighted Amazing Stories 1926, 1927), and _Nightmare Planet_
    (copyrighted 1953 by Gernsback Publications Inc.).


    To Joan Patricia Jenkins




NATURE'S MISLEAD MADHOUSE!


Beneath dense gray clouds through which no sun shone lay a forgotten
planet. It was a nightmare world of grotesque and terrifying
animal-plant life. Gigantic beetles, spiders, bugs and ants filled the
putrid, musty earth--ready to kill and devour anything in sight.

There were men amidst this horror--men who cringed and ran from the
ravening monsters and huddled in the mushroom forests at night.

Burl was one of these creatures. But one day inspiration hit Burl. He
would find a weapon--he would fight back.

And with this idea the first step was taken in man's most desperate
flight for freedom in this most horrible of all worlds. But it was only
a first step.





About the characters in this book:


This is something of an oddity among fiction stories, because some of
its characters may be met in person if you wish. Down at the nearest
weed-patch or thicket you are quite likely to see a large and unusually
perfect spider-web with a zig-zag silk ribbon woven into its center. Its
engineer is the yellow-banded garden spider (_Epeira Fasciata_) whose
abdomen may be as big as your thumb. I do not name it to impress you,
but to suggest a sort of science-fiction experience.

Take a bit of straw and disturb the web. Don't break the cables. Simply
tap them a bit. The spider will know by the feel of things that you
aren't prey and that it can't eat you. So it will set out frightening
you away. It will run nimbly to the center of the web and shake itself
violently. The whole web will vibrate, so that presently the spider may
be swinging through an arc inches in length, and blurred by the speed of
its swing. You are supposed to be scared. When you are alarmed enough,
the spider will stop.

That spider, very much magnified, is in this book with crickets and
grasshoppers and divers beetles you may not know personally. But this is
not an insect book, but science-fiction. If the habits of the creatures
in it are authentic, it is because they are much more dramatic and
interesting than things one can invent.

Murray Leinster




_PROLOGUE_


The Survey-Ship _Tethys_ made the first landing on the planet, which had
no name. It was an admirable planet in many ways. It had an ample
atmosphere and many seas, which the nearby sun warmed so lavishly that a
perpetual cloud-bank hid them and most of the solid ground from view. It
had mountains and continents and islands and high plateaus. It had day
and night and wind and rain, and its mean temperature was within the
range to which human beings could readily accommodate. It was rather on
the tropic side, but not unpleasant.

But there was no life on it.

No animals roamed its continents. No vegetation grew from its rocks. Not
even bacteria struggled with its stones to turn them into soil. So there
was no soil. Rock and stones and gravel and even sand--yes. But no soil
in which any vegetation could grow. No living thing, however small, swam
in its oceans, so there was not even mud on its ocean-bottoms. It was
one of that disappointing vast majority of worlds which turned up when
the Galaxy was first explored. People couldn't live on it because
nothing had lived there before.

Its water was fresh and its oceans were harmless. Its air was germ-free
and breathable. But it was of no use whatever for men. The only possible
purpose it could serve would have been as a biological laboratory for
experiments involving things growing in a germ-free environment. But
there were too many planets like that already. When men first traveled
to the stars they made the journey because it was starkly necessary to
find new worlds for men to live on. Earth was over-crowded--terribly so.
So men looked for new worlds to move to. They found plenty of new
worlds, but presently they were searching desperately for new worlds
where life had preceded them. It didn't matter whether the life was meek
and harmless, or ferocious and deadly. If life of any sort were present,
human beings could move in. But highly organized beings like men could
not live where there was no other life.

So the Survey-Ship _Tethys_ made sure that the world had no life upon
it. Then it made routine measurements of the gravitational constant and
the magnetic field and the temperature gradient; it took samples of the
air and water. But that was all. The rocks were familiar enough. No
novelties there! But the planet was simply useless. The survey-ship put
its findings on a punched card, six inches by eight, and went hastily on
in search of something better. The ship did not even open one of its
ports while on the planet. There were no consequences of the _Tethys'_
visit except that card. None whatever.

No other ship came near the planet for eight hundred years.

Nearly a millenium later, however, the Seed-Ship _Orana_ arrived. By
that time humanity had spread very widely and very far. There were
colonies not less than a quarter of the way to the Galaxy's rim, and
Earth was no longer over-crowded. There was still emigration, but it was
now a trickle instead of the swarming flood of centuries before. Some of
the first-colonized worlds had emigrants, now. Mankind did not want to
crowd itself together again! Men now considered that there was no excuse
for such monstrous slums as overcrowding produced.

Now, too, the star-ships were faster. A hundred light-years was a short
journey. A thousand was not impractical. Explorers had gone many times
farther, and reported worlds still waiting for mankind on beyond. But
still the great majority of discovered planets did not contain life.
Whole solar systems floated in space with no single living cell on any
of their members.

So the Seed-Ships came into being. Theirs was not a glamorous service.
They merely methodically contaminated the sterile worlds with life. The
Seed-Ship _Orana_ landed on this planet--which still had no name. It
carefully infected it. It circled endlessly above the clouds, dribbling
out a fine dust,--the spores of every conceivable microörganism which
could break down rock to powder, and turn that dust to soil. It was also
a seeding of moulds and fungi and lichens, and everything which could
turn powdery primitive soil into stuff on which higher forms of life
could grow. The _Orana_ polluted the seas with plankton. Then it, too,
went away.

More centuries passed. Human ships again improved. A thousand
light-years became a short journey. Explorers reached the Galaxy's very
edge, and looked estimatingly across the emptiness toward other island
universes. There were colonies in the Milky Way. There were
freight-lines between star-clusters, and the commercial center of human
affairs shifted some hundreds of parsecs toward the Rim. There were many
worlds where the schools painstakingly taught the children what Earth
was, and where, and that all other worlds had been populated from it.
And the schools repeated, too, the one lesson that humankind seemed
genuinely to have learned. That the secret of peace is freedom, and the
secret of freedom is to be able to move away from people with whom you
do not agree. There were no crowded worlds any more. But human beings
love children, and they have them. And children grow up and need room.
So more worlds had to be looked out for. They weren't urgently needed
yet, but they would be.

Therefore, nearly a thousand years after the _Orana_, the Ecology-Ship
_Ludred_ swam to the planet from space and landed on it. It was a
gigantic ship of highly improbable purpose. First of all, it checked on
the consequences of the _Orana's_ visit.

They were highly satisfactory, from a technical point of view. Now there
was soil which swarmed with minute living things. There were fungi
which throve monstrously. The seas stank of minuscule life-forms. There
were even some novelties, developed by the strictly local conditions.
There were, for example, paramoecia as big as grapes, and yeasts had
increased in size until they bore flowers visible to the naked eye. The
life on the planet was not aboriginal, though. All of it was descended
and adapted and modified from the microörganisms planted by the
seed-ship whose hulk was long since rust, and whose crew were merely
names in genealogies--if that.

The _Ludred_ stayed on the planet a considerably longer time than either
of the ships that had visited it before. It dropped the seeds of plants.
It broadcast innumerable varieties of things which should take root and
grow. In some places it deliberately seeded the stinking soil. It put
marine plants in the oceans. It put alpine plants on the high ground.
And when all its stable varieties were set out it added plants which
were genetically unstable. For generations to come they would throw
sports, some of which should be especially suited to this planetary
environment.

Before it left, the _Ludred_ dumped finny fish into the seas. At first
they would live on the plankton which made the oceans almost broth.
There were many varieties of fish. Some would multiply swiftly while
small; others would grow and feed on the smaller varieties. And as a
last activity, the _Ludred_ set up refrigeration-units loaded with
insect-eggs. Some would release their contents as soon as plants had
grown enough to furnish them with food. Others would allow their
contents to hatch only after certain other varieties had multiplied--to
be their food-supply.

When the Ecology-Ship left, it had done a very painstaking job. It had
treated the planet to a sort of Russell's Mixture of life-forms. The
real Russell's Mixture is that blend of the simple elements in the
proportions found in suns. This was a blend of life-forms in which some
should survive by consuming the now-habituated flora, others by preying
on the former. The planet was stocked, in effect, with everything that
it could be hoped would live there.

But only certain things could have that hope. Nothing which needed
parental care had any chance of survival. The creatures seeded at this
time had to be those which could care for themselves from the instant
they burst their eggs. So there were no birds or mammals. Trees and
plants of many kinds, fish and crustaceans and tadpoles, and all kinds
of insects could be planted. But nothing else.

The _Ludred_ swam away through emptiness.

There should have been another planting centuries later. There should
have been a ship from the Zoölogical Branch of the Ecological Service.
It should have landed birds and beasts and reptiles. It should have
added pelagic mammals to the seas. There should have been herbivorous
animals to live on the grasses and plants which would have thriven, and
carnivorous animals to live on them in turn. There should have been
careful stocking of the planet with animal life, and repeated visits at
intervals of a century or so to make sure that a true ecological balance
had been established. And then when the balance was fixed men would come
and destroy it for their own benefit.

But there was an accident.

Ships had improved again. Even small private space-craft now journeyed
tens of light-years on holiday journeys. Personal cruisers traveled
hundreds. Liners ran matter-of-factly on ship-lines tens of thousands of
light-years long. An exploring-ship was on its way to a second island
universe. (It did not come back.) The inhabited planets were all members
of a tenuous organization which limited itself to affairs of space,
without attempting to interfere in surface matters. That tenuous
organization moved the Ecological Preparation Service files to Algol IV
as a matter of convenience. In the moving, a card-file was upset. The
cards it contained were picked up and replaced, but one was missed. It
was not picked up. It was left behind.

So the planet which had no name was forgotten. No other ship came to
prepare it for ultimate human occupancy. It circled its sun, unheeded
and unthought-of. Cloud-banks covered it from pole to pole. There were
hazy markings in some places, where high plateaus penetrated its clouds.
But that was all. From space the planet was essentially featureless.
Seen from afar it was merely a round white ball--white from its
cloud-banks--and nothing else.

But on its surface, on its lowlands, it was pure nightmare. But this
fact did not matter for a very long time.

Ultimately, it mattered a great deal--to the crew of the space-liner
_Icarus_. The _Icarus_ was a splendid ship of its time. It bore
passengers headed for one of the Galaxy's spiral arms, and it cut across
the normal lanes and headed through charted but unvisited parts of the
Galaxy toward its destination. And it had one of the very, very, very
few accidents known to happen to space-craft licensed for travel off the
normal space-lanes. It suffered shipwreck in space, and its passengers
and crew were forced to take to the life-craft.

The lifeboats' range was limited. They landed on the planet that the
_Tethys_ had first examined, that the _Orana_ and the _Ludred_ had
seeded, and of which there was no longer any record in the card-files of
the Ecological Service. Their fuel was exhausted. They could not leave.
They could not signal for help. They had to stay there. And the planet
was a place of nightmares.

After a time the few people--some few thousands--who knew that there was
a space-liner named _Icarus_, gave it up for lost. They forgot about it.
Everybody forgot. Even the passengers and crew of the ship forgot it.
Not immediately, of course. For the first few generations their
descendants cherished hopes of rescue. But the planet which had no
name--the forgotten planet--did not encourage the cherishing of hope.

After forty-odd generations, nobody remembered the _Icarus_ anywhere.
The wreckage of the lifeboats was long since hidden under the seething,
furiously striving fungi of the soil. The human beings had forgotten not
only their ancestors' ship, but very nearly everything their ancestors
had brought to this world: the use of metals, the existence of fire, and
even the fact that there was such a thing as sunshine. They lived in the
lowlands, deep under the cloud-bank, amid surroundings which were
riotous, swarming, frenzied horror. They had become savages.

They were less than savages, because they had forgotten their destiny as
men.




_1. MAD PLANET_


In all his lifetime of perhaps twenty years, it had never occurred to
Burl to wonder what his grandfather had thought about his surroundings.
The grandfather had come to an untimely end in a fashion which Burl
remembered as a succession of screams coming more and more faintly to
his ears, while he was being carried away at the topmost speed of which
his mother was capable.

Burl had rarely or never thought of his grandfather since. Surely he had
never wondered what his great-grandfather had thought, and most surely
of all he never speculated upon what his many-times-removed
great-grandfather had thought when his lifeboat landed from the
_Icarus_. Burl had never heard of the _Icarus_. He had done very little
thinking of any sort. When he did think, it was mostly agonized effort
to contrive a way to escape some immediate and paralyzing danger. When
horror did not press upon him, it was better not to think, because there
wasn't much but horror to think about.

At the moment, he was treading cautiously over a brownish carpet of
fungus, creeping furtively toward the stream which he knew only by the
generic name of "water." It was the only water he knew. Towering far
above his head, three man-heights high, great toadstools hid the gray
sky from his sight. Clinging to the yard-thick stalks of the toadstools
were still other fungi, parasites upon the growths that once had been
parasites themselves.

Burl appeared a fairly representative specimen of the descendants of the
long-forgotten _Icarus_ crew. He wore a single garment twisted about his
middle, made from the wing-fabric of a great moth which the members of
his tribe had slain as it emerged from its cocoon. His skin was fair
without a trace of sunburn. In all his lifetime he had never seen the
sun, though he surely had seen the sky often enough. It was rarely
hidden from him save by giant fungi, like those about him now, and
sometimes by the gigantic cabbages which were nearly the only green
growths he knew. To him normal landscape contained only fantastic pallid
mosses, and misshapen fungus growths, and colossal moulds and yeasts.

He moved onward. Despite his caution, his shoulder once touched a
cream-colored toadstool stalk, giving the whole fungus a tiny shock.
Instantly a fine and impalpable powder fell upon him from the umbrella
like top above. It was the season when the toadstools sent out their
spores. He paused to brush them from his head and shoulders. They were,
of course, deadly poison.

Burl knew such matters with an immediate and specific and detailed
certainty. He knew practically nothing else. He was ignorant of the use
of fire, of metals, and even of the uses of stone and wood. His language
was a scanty group of a few hundred labial sounds, conveying no
abstractions and few concrete ideas. He knew nothing of wood, because
there was no wood in the territory furtively inhabited by his tribe.
This was the lowlands. Trees did not thrive here. Not even grasses and
tree-ferns could compete with mushrooms and toadstools and their kin.
Here was a soil of rusts and yeasts. Here were toadstool forests and
fungus jungles. They grew with feverish intensity beneath a cloud-hidden
sky, while above them fluttered butterflies no less enlarged than they,
moths as much magnified, and other creatures which could thrive on their
corruption.

The only creatures on the planet which crawled or ran or flew--save only
Burl's fugitive kind--were insects. They had been here before men came,
and they had adapted to the planet's extraordinary ways. With a world
made ready before their first progenitors arrived, insects had thriven
incredibly. With unlimited food-supplies, they had grown large. With
increased size had come increased opportunity for survival, and
enlargement became hereditary. Other than fungoid growths, the solitary
vegetables were the sports of unstable varieties of the plants left
behind by the _Ludred_. There were enormous cabbages, with leaves the
size of ship-sails, on which stolid grubs and caterpillars ate
themselves to maturity, and then swung below in strong cocoons to sleep
the sleep of metamorphosis. The tiniest butterflies of Earth had
increased their size here until their wings spread feet across, and
some--like the emperor moths--stretched out purple wings which were
yards in span. Burl himself would have been dwarfed beneath a great
moth's wing.

But he wore a gaudy fabric made of one. The moths and giant butterflies
were harmless to men. Burl's fellow tribesmen sometimes came upon a
cocoon when it was just about to open, and if they dared they waited
timorously beside it until the creature inside broke through its
sleeping-shell and came out into the light.

Then, before it gathered energy from the air and before its wings
swelled to strength and firmness, the tribesmen fell upon it. They tore
the delicate wings from its body and the still-flaccid limbs from their
places. And when it lay helpless before them they fled away to feast on
its juicy meat-filled limbs.

They dared not linger, of course. They left their prey helpless--staring
strangely at the world about it through its many-faceted eyes--before
the scavengers came to contest its ownership. If nothing more deadly
appeared, surely the ants would come. Some of them were only inches
long, but others were the size of fox-terriers. All of them had to be
avoided by men. They would carry the moth-carcass away to their
underground cities, triumphantly, in shreds and morsels.

But most of the insect world was neither so helpless nor so
unthreatening. Burl knew of wasps almost the length of his own body,
with stings that were instantly fatal. To every species of wasp,
however, some other insect is predestined prey. Wasps need not be
dreaded too much. And bees were similarly aloof. They were hard put to
it for existence, those bees. Since few flowers bloomed, they were
reduced to expedients that once were considered signs of degeneracy in
their race: bubbling yeasts and fouler things, or occasionally the
nectarless blooms of the rank giant cabbages. Burl knew the bees. They
droned overhead, nearly as large as he was, their bulging eyes gazing at
him and everything else in abstracted preoccupation.

There were crickets, and beetles, and spiders.... Burl knew spiders! His
grandfather had been the prey of a hunting tarantula which had leaped
with incredible ferocity from its tunnel in the ground. A vertical pit,
a yard in diameter, went down for twenty feet. At the bottom of the lair
the monster waited for the tiny sounds that would warn him of prey
approaching his hiding-place.

Burl's grandfather had been careless. The terrible shrieks he uttered as
he was seized still lingered vaguely in Burl's mind. And he had seen,
too, the webs of another species of spider--inch-thick cables of dirty
silk--and watched from a safe distance as the misshapen monster sucked
the juices from a three-foot cricket its trap had caught. He remembered
the stripes of yellow and black and silver that crossed upon its
abdomen. He had been fascinated and horrified by the blind struggling of
the cricket, tangled in hopeless coils of gummy cord, before the spider
began its feast.

Burl knew these dangers. They were part of his life. It was this
knowledge that made life possible. He knew the ways to evade these
dangers. But if he yielded to carelessness for one moment, or if he
relaxed his caution for one instant, he would be one with his ancestors.
They were the long-forgotten meals of inhuman monsters.

Now, to be sure, Burl moved upon an errand that probably no other of his
tribe would have imagined. The day before, he had crouched behind a
shapeless mound of inter-tangled growths and watched a duel between two
huge horned beetles. Their bodies were feet long. Their carapaces were
waist-high to Burl when they crawled. Their mandibles, gaping laterally,
clicked and clashed upon each other's impenetrable armor. Their legs
crashed like so many cymbals as they struck against each other. They
fought over some particularly attractive bit of carrion.

Burl had watched with wide eyes until a gaping hole appeared in the
armor of the smaller one. It uttered a grating outcry--or seemed to. The
noise was actually the tearing of its shell between the mandibles of the
victor.

The wounded creature struggled more and more feebly. When it ceased to
offer battle, the conqueror placidly began to dine before its prey had
ceased to live. But this was the custom of creatures on this planet.

Burl watched, timorous but hopeful. When the meal was finished, he
darted in quickly as the diner lumbered away. He was almost too late,
even then. An ant--the forerunner of many--already inspected the
fragments with excitedly vibrating antennae.

Burl needed to move quickly and he did. Ants were stupid and
short-sighted insects; few of them were hunters. Save when offered
battle, most of them were scavengers only. They hunted the scenes of
nightmare for the dead and dying only, but fought viciously if their
prey were questioned. And always there were others on the way.

Some were arriving now. Hearing the tiny clickings of their approach,
Burl was hasty. Over-hasty. He seized a loosened fragment and fled. It
was merely the horn, the snout of the dead and eaten creature. But it
was loose and easily carried. He ran.

Later he inspected his find with disappointment. There was little meat
clinging to it. It was merely the horn of a Minotaur beetle, shaped like
the horn of a rhinoceros. Plucking out the shreds left by its murderer,
he pricked his hand. Pettishly, he flung it aside. The time of darkness
was near, so he crept to the hiding place of his tribe to huddle with
them until light came again.

There were only twenty of them; four or five men and six or seven women.
The rest were girls or children. Burl had been wondering at the strange
feelings that came over him when he looked at one of the girls. She was
younger than Burl--perhaps eighteen--and fleeter of foot. They talked
together sometimes and, once or twice, Burl shared an especially
succulent find of foodstuffs with her.

He could share nothing with her now. She stared at him in the deepening
night when he crept to the labyrinthine hiding place the tribe now used
in a mushroom forest. He considered that she looked hungry and hoped
that he would have food to share. And he was bitterly ashamed that he
could offer nothing. He held himself a little apart from the rest,
because of his shame. Since he too was hungry, it was some time before
he slept. Then he dreamed.

Next morning he found the horn where he had thrown it disgustedly the
day before. It was sticking in the flabby trunk of a toadstool. He
pulled it out. In his dream he had used it....

Presently he tried to use it. Sometimes--not often--the men of the tribe
used the saw-toothed edge of a cricket-leg, or the leg of a
grasshopper, to sever tough portions of an edible mushroom. The horn had
no cutting edge, but Burl had used it in his dream. He was not quite
capable of distinguishing clearly between reality and dreams; so he
tried to duplicate what happened in the dream. Remembering that it had
stuck into the mushroom-stalk, he thrust it. It stabbed. He remembered
distinctly how the larger beetle had used its horn as a weapon. It had
stabbed, too.

He considered absorbedly. He could not imagine himself fighting one of
the dangerous insects, of course. Men did not fight, on the forgotten
planet. They ran away. They hid. But somehow Burl formed a fantastic
picture of himself stabbing food with this horn, as he had stabbed a
mushroom. It was longer than his arm and though naturally clumsy in his
hand, it would have been a deadly weapon in the grip of a man prepared
to do battle.

Battle did not occur to Burl. But the idea of stabbing food with it was
clear. There could be food that would not fight back. Presently he had
an inspiration. His face brightened. He began to make his way toward the
tiny river that ran across the plain in which the tribe of humans lived
by foraging in competition with the ants. Yellow-bellied newts--big
enough to be lusted for--swam in its waters. The swimming larvae of a
thousand kinds of creatures floated on the sluggish surface or crawled
over the bottom.

There were deadly things there, too. Giant crayfish snapped their claws
at the unwary. One of them could sever Burl's arm with ease. Mosquitoes
sometimes hummed high above the river. Mosquitoes had a four-inch
wing-spread, now, though they were dying out for lack of plant-juices on
which the males of their species fed. But they were formidable. Burl had
learned to crush them between fragments of fungus.

He crept slowly through the forest of toadstools. What should have been
grass underfoot was brownish rust. Orange and red and purple moulds
clustered about the bases of the creamy mushroom-trunks. Once, Burl
paused to run his weapon through a fleshy column and reassure himself
that what he planned was possible.

He made his way furtively through the bulbous growths. Once he heard
clickings and froze to stillness. Four or five ants, minims only eight
inches long, were returning by an habitual pathway to their city. They
moved sturdily along, heavily laden, over the route marked by the scent
of formic acid left by their fellow-townsmen. Burl waited until they had
passed, then went on.

He came to the bank of the river. It flowed slowly, green scum covering
a great deal of its surface in the backwaters, occasionally broken by a
slowly enlarging bubble released from decomposing matter on the bottom.
In the center of the stream the current ran a little more swiftly and
the water itself seemed clear. Over it ran many water-spiders. They had
not shared in the general increase of size in the insect world.
Depending as they did on the surface tension of the water for support,
to have grown larger and heavier would have destroyed them.

Burl surveyed the scene. His search was four parts for danger and only
one part for a way to test his brilliant notion, but that was natural.
Where he stood, the green scum covered the stream for many yards.
Down-river a little, though, the current came closer to the bank. Here
he could not see whatever swam or crawled or wriggled underwater; there
he might.

There was an outcropping rock forming a support for crawling stuff,
which in turn supported shelf-fungi making wide steps almost down to the
water's edge. Burl was making his way cautiously toward them when he saw
one of the edible mushrooms which formed so large a part of his diet. He
paused to break off a flabby white piece large enough to feed him for
many days. It was the custom of his people, when they found a store of
food, to hide with it and not venture out again to danger until it was
all eaten. Burl was tempted to do just that with his booty. He could
give Saya of this food and they would eat together. They might hide
together until it was all consumed.

But there was a swirling in the water under the descending platforms of
shelf-fungi. A very remarkable sensation came to Burl. He may have been
the only man in many generations to be aware of the high ambition to
stab something to eat. He may have been a throw-back to ancestors who
had known bravery, which had no survival-value here. But Burl had
imagined carrying Saya food which he had stabbed with the spear of a
Minotaur beetle. It was an extraordinary idea.

It was new, too. Not too long ago, when he was younger, Burl would have
thought of the tribe instead. He'd have thought of old Jon, bald-headed
and wheezing and timorous, and how that patriarch would pat his arm
exuberantly when handed food; or old Tama, wrinkled and querulous, whose
look of settled dissatisfaction would vanish at sight of a tidbit; of
Dik and Tet, the tribe-members next younger, who would squabble
zestfully over the fragments allotted them.

But now he imagined Saya looking astonished and glad when he grandly
handed her more food than she could possibly eat. She would admire him
enormously!

Of course he did not imagine himself fighting to get food for Saya. He
meant only to stab something edible in the water. Things in the water
did not fight things on land. Since he would not be in the water, he
would not be in a fight. It was a completely delectable idea, which no
man within memory had ever entertained before. If Burl accomplished it,
his tribe would admire him. Saya would admire him. Everybody, observing
that he had found a new source of food, would even envy him until he
showed them how to do it too. Burl's fellow-humans were preoccupied with
the filling of their stomachs. The preservation of their lives came
second. The perpetuation of the race came a bad third in their
consideration. They were herded together in a leaderless group, coming
to the same hiding-place nightly only that they might share the finds of
the lucky and gather comfort from their numbers. They had no weapons.
Even Burl did not consider his spear a weapon. It was a tool for
stabbing something to eat only. Yet he did not think of it in that way
exactly. His tribe did not even consciously use tools. Sometimes they
used stones to crack open the limbs of great insects they found
incompletely devoured. They did not even carry rocks about with them for
that purpose. Only Burl had a vague idea of taking something to some
place to do something with it. It was unprecedented. Burl was at least
an atavar. He may have been a genius.

But he was not a high-grade genius. Certainly not yet.

He reached a spot from which he could look down into the water. He
looked behind and all about, listening, then lay down to stare into the
shallow depths. Once, a huge crayfish, a good eight feet long, moved
leisurely across his vision. Small fishes and even huge newts fled
before it.

After a long time the normal course of underwater life resumed. The
wriggling caddis-flies in their quaintly ambitious houses reappeared.
Little flecks of silver swam into view--a school of tiny fish. Then a
larger fish appeared, moving slowly in the stream.

Burl's eyes glistened; his mouth watered. He reached down with his long
weapon. It barely broke through the still surface of the water below.
Disappointment filled him, yet the nearness and apparent probability of
success spurred him on.

He examined the shelf-fungi beneath him. Rising, he moved to a point
above them and tested one with his spear. It resisted. Burl felt about
tentatively with his foot, then dared to put his whole weight on the
topmost. It held firmly. He clambered down upon the lower ones, then
lay flat and peered over the edge.

The large fish, fully as long as Burl's arm, swam slowly to and fro
beneath him. Burl had seen the former owner of this spear strive to
thrust it into his adversary. The beetle had been killed by the more
successful stab of a similar weapon. Burl had tried this upon
toadstools, practising with it. When the silver fish drifted close by
again, he thrust sharply downward.

The spear seemed to bend when it entered the water. It missed its mark
by inches, much to Burl's astonishment. He tried again. Once more the
spear seemed diverted by the water. He grew angry with the fish for
eluding his efforts to kill it.

This anger was as much the reaction of a throw-back to a less fearful
time as the idea of killing itself. But Burl scowled at the fish.
Repeated strokes had left it untouched. It was unwary. It did not even
swim away.

Then it came to rest directly beneath his hand. He thrust directly
downward, with all his strength. This time the spear, entering
vertically, did not appear to bend, but went straight down. Its point
penetrated the scales of the swimming fish, transfixing the creature
completely.

An uproar began with the fish wriggling desperately as Burl tried to
draw it up to his perch. In his excitement he did not notice a tiny
ripple a little distance away. The monster crayfish, attracted by the
disturbance, was coming back.

The unequal combat continued. Burl hung on desperately to the end of his
spear. Then there was a tremor in the shelf-fungus on which he lay. It
yielded, collapsed, and fell into the stream with a mighty splash. Burl
went under, his eyes wide open, facing death. As he sank he saw the
gaping, horrible claws of the crustacean, huge enough to sever any of
Burl's limbs with a single snap.

He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Only bubbles
floated up to the surface. He beat the unresisting fluid in a frenzy of
horror with his hands and feet as the colossal crayfish leisurely
approached.

His arms struck a solid object. He clutched it convulsively. A second
later he had swung it between himself and the crustacean. He felt the
shock as the claws closed upon the cork-like fungus. Then he felt
himself drawn upward as the crayfish disgustedly released its hold and
the shelf-fungus floated slowly upward. Having given way beneath him, it
had been pushed below when he fell, only to rise within his reach just
when most needed.

Burl's head popped above-water and he saw a larger bit of the fungus
floating nearby. Even less securely anchored to the river-bank than the
shelf to which he had trusted himself, it had broken away when he fell.
It was larger and floated higher.

He seized it, crazily trying to climb up. It tilted under his weight and
very nearly overturned. He paid no heed. With desperate haste he clawed
and kicked until he could draw himself clear of the water.

As he pulled himself up on the furry, orange-brown surface, a sharp blow
struck his foot. The crayfish, disappointed at finding nothing tasty in
the shelf-fungus, had made a languid stroke at Burl's foot wriggling in
the water. Failing to grasp the fleshy member, it went annoyedly away.

Burl floated downstream, perched weaponless and alone upon a flimsy raft
of degenerate fungus; floated slowly down a stagnant river in which
death swam, between banks of sheer peril, past long reaches above which
death floated on golden wings.

It was a long while before he recovered his self-possession. Then--and
this was an action individual in Burl: none of his tribesmen would have
thought of it--he looked for his spear.

It was floating in the water, still transfixing the fish whose capture
had brought him to this present predicament. That silvery shape, so
violent before, now floated belly-up, all life gone.

Burl's mouth watered as he gazed at the fish. He kept it in view
constantly while the unsteady craft spun slowly downstream in the
current. Lying flat he tried to reach out and grasp the end of the spear
when it circled toward him.

The raft tilted, nearly capsizing. A little later he discovered that it
sank more readily on one side than the other. This was due, of course,
to the greater thickness of one side. The part next to the river-bank
had been thicker and was, therefore, more buoyant.

He lay with his head above that side of the raft. It did not sink into
the water. Wriggling as far to the edge as he dared, he reached out and
out. He waited impatiently for the slower rotation of his float to
coincide with the faster motion of the speared fish. The spear-end came
closer, and closer.... He reached out--and the raft dipped dangerously.
But his fingers touched the spear-end. He got a precarious hold, pulled
it toward him.

Seconds later he was tearing strips of scaly flesh from the side of the
fish and cramming the greasy stuff into his mouth with vast enjoyment.
He had lost the edible mushroom. It floated several yards away. He ate
contentedly none-the-less.

He thought of the tribesfolk as he ate. This was more than he could
finish alone. Old Tama would coax him avidly for more than her share.
She had a few teeth left. She would remind him anxiously of her gifts of
food to him when he was younger. Dik and Tet--being boys--would
clamorously demand of him where he'd gotten it. How? He would give some
to Cori, who had younger children, and she would give them most of the
gift. And Saya--.

Burl gloated especially over Saya's certain reaction.

Then he realized that with every second he was being carried further
away from her. The nearer river-bank moved past him. He could tell by
the motion of the vividly colored growths upon the shore.

Overhead, the sun was merely a brighter patch in the haze-filled sky. In
the pinkish light all about, Burl looked for the familiar and did not
find it, and dolefully knew that he was remote from Saya and going
farther all the time.

There were a multitude of flying objects to be seen in the miasmatic
air. In the daytime a thin mist always hung above the lowlands. Burl had
never seen any object as much as three miles distant. The air was never
clear enough to permit it. But there was much to be seen even within the
limiting mist.

Now and then a cricket or a grasshopper made its bullet-like flight from
one spot to another. Huge butterflies fluttered gaily above the silent,
loathesome ground. Bees lumbered anxiously about, seeking the
cross-shaped flowers of the giant cabbages which grew so rarely.
Occasionally a slender-waisted, yellow-bellied wasp flashed swiftly by.

But Burl did not heed any of them. Sitting dismally upon his fungus
raft, floating in midstream, an incongruous figure of pink skin and
luridly-tinted loin-cloth, with a greasy dead fish beside him, he was
filled with a panicky anguish because the river carried him away from
the one girl of his tiny tribe whose glances roused a commotion in his
breast.

The day wore on. Once, he saw a band of large amazon ants moving briskly
over a carpet of blue-green mould to raid the city of a species of black
ants. The eggs they would carry away from the city would hatch and the
small black creatures would become the slaves of the brigands who had
stolen them.

Later, strangely-shaped, swollen branches drifted slowly into view. They
were outlined sharply against the steaming mist behind them. He knew
what they were: a hard-rinded fungus growing upon itself in peculiar
mockery of the trees which Burl had never seen because no trees could
survive the conditions of the lowland.

Much later, as the day drew to an end, Burl ate again of the oily fish.
The taste was pleasant compared to the insipid mushrooms he usually ate.
Even though he stuffed himself, the fish was so large that the greater
part remained still uneaten.

The spear was beside him. Although it had brought him trouble, he still
associated it with the food it had secured rather than the difficulty
into which it had led him. When he had eaten his fill, he picked it up
to examine again. The oil-covered point remained as sharp as before.

Not daring to use it again from so unsteady a raft, he set it aside as
he stripped a sinew from his loin-cloth to hang the fish around his
neck. This would leave his arms free. Then he sat cross-legged, fumbling
with the spear as he watched the shores go past.




_2. A MAN ESCAPES_


It was near to sunset. Burl had never seen the sun, so it did not occur
to him to think of the coming of night as the setting of anything. To
him it was the letting down of darkness from the sky.

The process was invariable. Overhead there was always a thick and
unbroken bank of vapor which seemed featureless until sunset. Then,
toward the west, the brightness overhead turned orange and then pink,
while to the east it simply faded to a deeper gray. As nightfall
progressed, the red colorings grew deeper, moving toward mid-sky.
Ultimately, scattered blotches of darkness began to spot that reddening
sky as it grew darker in tone, going down toward that impossible
redness which is indistinguishable from black. It was slowly achieving
that redness.

Today Burl watched as never before. On the oily surface of the river the
colors and shadings of dusk were reflected with incredible faithfulness.
The round tops of toadstools along the shore glowed pink. Dragonflies
glinted in swift and angular flight, the metallic sheen of their bodies
flashing in the redness. Great, yellow butterflies sailed lightly above
the stream. In every direction upon the water appeared the scrap-formed
boats of a thousand caddis-flies, floating at the surface while they
might. Burl could have thrust his hand down into their cavities to seize
the white worms nesting there.

The bulk of a tardy bee droned heavily overhead. He saw the long
proboscis and the hairy hind-legs with their scanty load of pollen. The
great, multi-faceted eyes held an expression of stupid preoccupation.

The crimson radiance grew dim and the color overhead faded toward black.
Now the stalks of ten thousand domed mushrooms lined the river-bank.
Beneath them spread fungi of all colors, from the rawest red to palest
blue, now all fading slowly to a monochromatic background as the
darkness deepened.

The buzzing and fluttering and flapping of the insects of the day died
down. From a million hiding places there crept out--into the night--the
soft and furry bodies of great moths who preened themselves and smoothed
their feathery antennae before taking to the air. The strong-limbed
crickets set up their thunderous noise, grown gravely bass with the
increasing size of the noise-making organs. Then there began to gather
on the water those slender spirals of deeper mist which would presently
blanket the stream in fog.

Night arrived. The clouds above grew wholly black. Gradually the languid
fall of large, warm raindrops--they would fall all through the
night--began. The edge of the stream became a place where disks of cold
blue flame appeared.

The mushrooms on the river bank were faintly phosphorescent, shedding a
ghostly light over the ground below them. Here and there, lambent chilly
flames appeared in mid-air, drifting idly above the festering earth. On
other planets men call them "Will-o'-the-wisps," but on this planet
mankind had no name for them at all.

Then huge, pulsating glows appeared in the blackness: fireflies that
Burl knew to be as long as his spear. They glided slowly through the
darkness over the stream, shedding intermittent light over Burl crouched
on his drifting raft. On the shore, too, tiny paired lights glowed
eagerly upward as the wingless females of the species crawled to where
their signals could be seen. And there were other glowing things.
Fox-fire burned in the night, consuming nothing. Even the water of the
river glowed with marine organisms--adapted to fresh water
here--contributing their mites of brilliance.

The air was full of flying creatures. The beat of invisible wings came
through the night. Above, about, on every side the swarming, feverish
life of the insect world went on ceaselessly, while Burl rocked back and
forth upon his unstable raft, wanting to weep because he was being
carried farther away from Saya whom he could picture looking for him,
now, among the hidden, furtive members of the tribe. About him sounded
the discordant, machine-like mating cries of creatures trying to serve
life in the midst of death and the horrible noises of those who met
death and were devoured in the dark.

Burl was accustomed to such tumult. But he was not accustomed to such
despair as he felt at being lost from Saya of the swift feet and white
teeth and shy smile. He lay disconsolate on his bobbing craft for the
greater part of the night. It was long past midnight when the raft
struck gently, swung, and then remained grounded upon a shallow in the
stream.

When light came back in the morning, Burl gazed about him fearfully. He
was some twenty yards from the shore and thick greenish scum surrounded
his disintegrating vessel. The river had widened greatly until the
opposite bank was hidden in the morning mist, but the nearer shore
seemed firm and no more full of dangers than the territory inhabited by
Burl's tribe.

He tested the depth of the water with his spear, struck by the multiple
usefulness of the weapon. The water was no more than ankle-deep.

Shivering a little, Burl stepped down into the green scum and made for
the shore at top speed. He felt something soft clinging to his bare
foot. With a frantic rush he ran even faster and stumbled upon the shore
with horror not at his heels but on one. He stared down at his foot. A
shapeless, flesh-colored pad clung to the skin. As he watched, it
swelled visibly, the pink folds becoming a deeper shade.

It was no more than a leech, the size of his palm, sharing in the
enlargement nearly all the insect and fungoid world had undergone, but
Burl did not know that. He thrust at it with the edge of his spear,
scraping it frantically away. As it fell off Burl stared in horror,
first at the blotch of blood on his foot, then at the thing writhing and
pulsating on the ground. He fled.

A short while later he stumbled into one of the familiar toadstool
forests and paused, uncertainly. The towering toadstools were not
strange to Burl. He fell to eating. The sight of food always produced
hunger in him--a provision of nature to make up for the lack of any
instinct to store food away. In human beings the storage of food has to
be dictated by intellect. The lower orders of creatures are not required
to think.

Even eating, though, Burl's heart was small within him. He was far from
his tribe and Saya. By the measurements of his remotest ancestors, no
more than forty miles separated them. But Burl did not think in such
terms. He'd never had occasion to do so. He'd come down the river to a
far land filled with unknown dangers. And he was alone.

All about him was food, an excellent reason for gladness. But being
solitary was reason enough for distress. Although Burl was a creature to
whom reflection was normally of no especial value and, therefore, not
practiced in thought, this was a situation providing an emotional
paradox. A good fourth of the mushrooms in this particular forest were
edible. Burl should have gloated over this vast stock of food. But he
was isolated, alone; in particular, he was far away from Saya,
therefore, he should have wept. But he could not gloat because he was
away from Saya and he could not mourn because he was surrounded by food.

He was subject to a stimulus to which apparently only humankind can
respond: an emotional dilemma. Other creatures can respond to objective
situations where there is the need to choose a course of action: flight
or fighting, hiding or pursuit. But only man can be disturbed by not
knowing which of two emotions to feel. Burl had reason to feel two
entirely different emotional states at the same time. He had to resolve
the paradox. The problem was inside him, not out. So he thought.

He would bring Saya here! He would bring her and the tribe to this place
where there was food in vast quantity!

Instantly pictures flooded into his mind. He could actually see old Jon,
his bald head naked as a mushroom itself, stuffing his belly with the
food which was so plentiful here. He imagined Cori feeding her children.
Tama's complaints stilled by mouthfuls of food. Tet and Dik, stuffed to
repletion, throwing scraps of foodstuff at each other. He pictured the
tribe zestfully feasting.--And Saya would be very glad.

It was remarkable that Burl was able to think of his feelings instead of
his sensations. His tribesmen were closer to it than equally primitive
folk had been back on Earth, but they did not often engage in thought.
Their waking lives were filled with nerve-racked physical responses to
physical phenomena. They were hungry and they saw or smelled food: they
were alive and they perceived the presence of death. In the one case
they moved toward the sensory stimulus of food; in the other they fled
from the detected stimulus of danger. They responded immediately to the
world about them. Burl, for the first significant time in his life, had
responded to inner feelings. He had resolved conflicting emotions by
devising a purpose that would end their conflict. He determined to do
something because he wanted to and not because he had to.

It was the most important event upon the planet in generations.

With the directness of a child, or a savage, Burl moved to carry out his
purpose. The fish still slung about his neck scraped against his chest.
Fingering it tentatively, he got himself thoroughly greasy in the
process, but could not eat. Although he was not hungry now, perhaps Saya
was. He would give it to her. He imagined her eager delight, the image
reinforcing his resolve. He had come to this far place down the river
flowing sluggishly past this riotously-colored bank. To return to the
tribe he would go back up that bank, staying close to the stream.

He was remarkably exultant as he forced a way through the awkward aisles
of the mushroom-forest, but his eyes and ears were still open for any
possible danger. Several times he heard the omnipresent clicking of ants
scavenging in the mushroom-glades, but they could be ignored. At best
they were short-sighted. If he dropped his fish, they would become
absorbed in it. There was only one kind of ant he needed to fear--the
army ant, which sometimes traveled in hordes of millions, eating
everything in their path.

But there was nothing of the sort here. The mushroom forest came to an
end. A cheerful grasshopper munched delicately at some dainty it had
found--the barrel-sized young shoot of a cabbage-plant. Its hind legs
were bunched beneath it in perpetual readiness for flight. A monster
wasp appeared a hundred feet overhead, checked in its flight, and
plunged upon the luckless banqueter.

There was a struggle, but it was brief. The grasshopper strained
terribly in the grip of the wasp's six barbed legs. The wasp's flexible
abdomen curved delicately. Its sting entered the jointed armor of its
prey just beneath the head with all the deliberate precision of a
surgeon's scalpel. A ganglion lay there; the wasp-poison entered it. The
grasshopper went limp. It was not dead, of course, simply paralyzed.
Permanently paralyzed. The wasp preened itself, then matter-of-factly
grasped its victim and flew away. The grasshopper would be incubator and
food-supply for an egg to be laid. Presently, in a huge mud castle, a
small white worm would feed upon the living, motionless victim of its
mother--who would never see it, or care, or remember....

Burl went on.

The ground grew rougher; progress became painful. He clambered arduously
up steep slopes--all of forty or fifty feet high--and made his way
cautiously down to the farther sides. Once he climbed through a tangled
mass of mushrooms so closely placed and so small that he had to break
them apart with blows of his spear in order to pass. As they crumbled,
torrents of a fiery-red liquid showered down upon him, rolling off his
greasy breast and sinking into the ground.

A strange self-confidence now took possession of Burl. He walked less
cautiously and more boldly. He had thought and he had struck something,
feeling the vainglorious self-satisfaction of a child. He pictured
himself leading his tribe to this place of very much food--he had no
real idea of the distance--and he strutted all alone amid the
nightmare-growths of the planet that had been forgotten.

Presently he could see the river. He had climbed to the top of a
red-clay mound perhaps a hundred feet high. One side was crumbled where
the river overflowed. At some past flood-time the water had lapped at
the base of the cliff along which Burl was strutting. But now there was
a quarter-mile of space between himself and the water. And there was
something else in mid-air.

The cliffside was thickly coated with fungi in a riotous confusion of
white and yellow and orange and green. From a point halfway up the cliff
the inch-thick cable of a spider-web stretched down to anchorage on the
ground below. There were other cables beyond this one and circling about
their radial pattern the snare-cords of the web formed a perfect
logarithmic spiral.

Somewhere among the fungi of the cliffside the huge spider who had built
this web awaited the entrapment of prey. When some unfortunate creature
struggled frenziedly in its snare it would emerge. Until then it waited
in a motionless, implacable patience; utterly certain of victims,
utterly merciless to them.

Burl strutted on the edge of the cliff, a rather foolish pink-skinned
creature with an oily fish slung about his neck and the draggled
fragment of moth's wing draping his middle. He waved the long shard of
beetle armor exultantly above his head.

The activity was not very sensible. It served no purpose. But if Burl
was a genius among his fellows, then he still had a great deal to learn
before his genius would be effective. Now he looked down scornfully upon
the shining white trap below. He had struck a fish, killing it. When he
hit mushrooms they fell into pieces before him. Nothing could frighten
him! He would go to Saya and bring her to this land where food grew in
abundance.

Sixty paces away from Burl, near the edge of the cliff, a shaft sank
vertically into the soil of the clay-mound. It was carefully rounded and
lined with silk. Thirty feet down, it enlarged itself into a chamber
where the engineer and proprietor of the shaft might rest. The top of
the hole was closed by a trap-door, stained with mud and earth to
imitate the surrounding soil. A sharp eye would have been needed to
detect the opening. But a keener eye now peered out from the crack at
its edge.

That eye belonged to the proprietor.

Eight hairy legs surrounded the body of the monster hanging motionless
at the top of the silk-lined shaft. Its belly was a huge misshapen globe
colored a dirty brown. Two pairs of mandibles stretched before its
mouth-parts; two eyes glittered in the semi-darkness of the burrow. Over
the whole body spread a rough and mangy fur.

It was a thing of implacable malignance, of incredible ferocity. It was
the brown hunting spider, the American tarantula, enlarged here upon the
forgotten planet so that its body was two feet and more in diameter. Its
legs, outstretched, would cover a circle three yards across. The
glittering eyes followed as Burl strutted forward on the edge of the
cliff, puffed up with a sense of his own importance.

Spread out below, the white snare of the spinning-spider impressed Burl
as amusing. He knew the spider wouldn't leave its web to attack him.
Reaching down, he broke off a bit of fungus growing at his feet. Where
he broke it away oozed a soupy liquid full of tiny maggots in a delirium
of feasting. Burl flung it down into the web, laughing as the black bulk
of the watchful spider swung down from its hiding place to investigate.

The tarantula, peering from its burrow, quivered with impatience. Burl
drew nearer, gleefully using his spear as a lever to pry off bits of
trash to fall down the cliffside into the giant web. The spider below
moved leisurely from one spot to another, investigating each new missile
with its palpi and then ignoring it as lifeless and undesirable prey.

Burl leaped and laughed aloud as a particularly large lump of putrid
fungus narrowly missed the black-and-silver shape below. Then--

The trap-door fell into place with a faint sound. Burl whirled about,
his laughter transformed instantly into a scream. Moving toward him
furiously, its eight legs scrambling, was the monster tarantula. Its
mandibles gaped wide; the poison fangs were unsheathed. It was thirty
paces away--twenty paces--ten.

Eyes glittering, it leaped, all eight legs extended to seize the prey.

Burl screamed again and thrust out his arms to ward off the creature. It
was pure blind horror. There was no genius in that gesture. Because of
sheer terror his grip upon the spear had become agonized. The
spear-point shot out and the tarantula fell upon it. Nearly a quarter of
the spear entered the body of the ferocious thing.

Stuck upon the spear the spider writhed horribly, still striving to
reach the paralytically frozen Burl. The great mandibles clashed.
Furious bubbling noises came from it. The hairy legs clutched at his
arm. He cried out hoarsely in ultimate fear and staggered backward--and
the edge of the cliff gave way beneath him.

He hurtled downward, still clutching the spear, incapable of letting go.
Even while falling the writhing thing still struggled maniacally to
reach him. Down through emptiness they fell together, Burl glassy-eyed
with panic. Then there was a strangely elastic crash and crackling. They
had fallen into the web at which Burl had been laughing so scornfully
only a little while before.

Burl couldn't think. He only struggled insanely in the gummy coils of
the web. But the snare-cords were spiral threads, enormously elastic,
exuding impossibly sticky stuff, like bird-lime, from between twisted
constituent fibres. Near him--not two yards away--the creature he had
wounded thrashed and fought to reach him, even while shuddering in
anguish.

Burl had reached the absolute limit of panic. His arms and breast were
greasy from the oily fish; the sticky web did not adhere to them. But
his legs and body were inextricably tangled by his own frantic
struggling in the gummy and adhesive elastic threads. They had been
spread for prey. He was prey.

He paused in his blind struggle, gasping from pure exhaustion. Then he
saw, not five yards away, the silvery-and-black monster he had mocked so
recently now patiently waiting for him to cease his struggles. The
tarantula and the man were one to its eyes--one struggling thing that
had fallen opportunely into its trap. They were moving but feebly, now.
The web-spider advanced delicately, swinging its huge bulk nimbly,
paying out a silken cable behind it as it approached.

Burl's arms were free; he waved them wildly, shrieking at the monster.
The spider paused. Burl's moving arms suggested mandibles that might
wound.

Spiders take few chances. This one drew near cautiously, then stopped.
Its spinnerets became busy and with one of its eight legs, used like an
arm, it flung a sheet of gummy silk impartially over the tarantula and
the man.

Burl fought against the descending shroud. He strove to thrust it away,
futilely. Within minutes he was completely covered in a coarse silken
fabric that hid even the light from his eyes. He and his enemy, the
monstrous tarantula, were beneath the same covering. The tarantula moved
feebly.

The shower ceased. The web-spider had decided they were helpless. Then
Burl felt the cables of the web give slightly as the spider approached
to sting and suck the juices from its prey.

The web yielded gently. Burl froze in an ecstasy of horror. But the
tarantula still writhed in agony upon the spear piercing it. It clashed
its jaws, shuddering upon the horny shaft.

Burl waited for the poison-fangs to be thrust into him. He knew the
process. He had seen the leisurely fashion in which the web-spider
delicately stung its victim, then withdrew to wait with horrible
patience for the poison to take effect. When the victim no longer
struggled, it drew near again to suck out the juices first from one
joint or limb and then from another, leaving a creature once vibrant
with life a shrunken, withered husk, to be flung from the web at
nightfall.

The bloated monstrosity now moved meditatively about the double object
swathed in silk. Only the tarantula stirred. Its bulbous abdomen stirred
the concealing shroud. It throbbed faintly as it still struggled with
the spear in its vitals. The irregularly rounded projection was an
obvious target for the web-spider. It moved quickly forward. With fine,
merciless precision, it stung.

The tarantula seemed to go mad with pain. Its legs struck out
purposelessly, in horrible gestures of delirious suffering. Burl
screamed as a leg touched him. He struggled no less wildly.

His arms and head were enclosed by the folds of silk, but not glued to
it because of the grease. Clutching at the cords he tried desperately to
draw himself away from his deadly neighbor. The threads wouldn't break,
but they did separate. A tiny opening appeared.

One of the tarantula's horribly writhing legs touched him again. With a
strength born of utter panic he hauled himself away and the opening
enlarged. Another lunge and Burl's head emerged into the open air. He
was suspended twenty feet above the ground, which was almost carpeted
with the chitinous remains of past victims of this same web.

Burl's head and breast and arms were free. The fish slung over his
shoulder had shed its oil upon him impartially. But the lower part of
his body was held firm by the viscous gumminess of the web-spider's
cord. It was vastly more adhesive than any bird-lime ever made by men.

He hung in the little window for a moment, despairing. Then he saw the
bulk of his captor a little distance away, waiting patiently for its
poison to work and its prey to cease struggling. The tarantula was no
more than shuddering now. Soon it would be quite still and the
black-bellied creature would approach for its meal.

Burl withdrew his head and thrust desperately at the sticky stuff about
his loins and legs. The oil upon his hands kept them free. The silk
shroud gave a little. Burl grasped at the thought as at a straw. He
grasped the fish and tore it, pushing frantically at his own body with
the now-rancid, scaly, odorous mass. He scraped gum from his legs with
the fish, smearing the rancid oils all over them in the process.

He felt the web tremble again. To the spider Burl's movements meant that
its poison had not taken full effect. Another sting seemed to be
necessary. This time it would not insert its sting into the quiescent
tarantula, but where there was still life. It would send its venom into
Burl.

He gasped and drew himself toward his window as if he would have pulled
his legs from his body. His head emerged. His shoulders--half his body
was out of the hole.

The great spider surveyed him and made ready to cast more of its silken
stuff upon him. The spinnerets became active. A leg gathered it up--

The sticky stuff about Burl's feet gave way.

He shot out of the opening and fell heavily, sprawling upon the earth
below and crashing into the shrunken shell of a flying beetle that had
blundered into the snare and not escaped as he had done.

Burl rolled over and over and then sat up. An angry, foot-long ant stood
before him, its mandibles extended threateningly, while a shrill
stridulation filled the air.

In ages past, back on Earth--where most ants were to be measured in
fractions of an inch--the scientists had debated gravely whether their
tribe possessed a cry. They believed that certain grooves upon the body
of the insect, like those upon the great legs of the cricket, might be
the means of making a sound too shrill for human ears to catch. It was
greatly debated, but evidence was hard to obtain.

Burl did not need evidence. He knew that the stridulation was caused by
the insect before him, though he had never wondered how it was produced.
The cry was emitted to summon other ants from its city to help it in
difficulty or good fortune.

Harsh clickings sounded fifty or sixty feet away; comrades were coming.
And while only army ants were normally dangerous, any tribe of ants
could be formidable when aroused. It was overwhelming enough to pull
down and tear a man to shreds as a pack of infuriated fox-terriers might
do on Earth.

Burl fled without further delay, nearly colliding with one of the web's
anchor-cables. Then he heard the shrill outcry subside. The ant,
short-sighted as all its kind, no longer felt threatened. It went
peacefully about the business Burl had interrupted. Presently it found
some edible carrion among the debris from the spider-web and started
triumphantly back to its city.

Burl sped on for a few hundred yards and then stopped. He was shaken and
dazed. For the moment, he was as timid and fearful as any other man in
his tribe. Presently he would realize the full meaning of the
unparalleled feat he had performed in escaping from the giant spider web
while cloaked with folds of gummy silk. It was not only unheard-of; it
was unimaginable! But Burl was too shaken to think of it now.

Rather quaintly, the first sensation that forced itself into his
consciousness was that his feet hurt. The gluey stuff from the web still
stuck to his soles, picking up small objects as he went along. Old,
ant-gnawed fragments of insect armor pricked him so persistently, even
through his toughened foot-soles, that he paused to scrape them away,
staring fearfully about all the while. After a dozen steps more he was
forced to stop again.

It was this nagging discomfort, rather than vanity or an emergency which
caused Burl to discover--imagine--blunder into a new activity as
epoch-making as anything else he had done. His brain had been uncommonly
stimulated in the past twenty-some hours. It had plunged him into at
least one predicament because of his conceiving the idea of stabbing
something, but it had also allowed him escape from another even more
terrifying one just now. In between it had led to the devising of a
purpose--the bringing of Saya here--though that decision was not so
firmly fixed as it had been before the encounter with the web-spider.
Still, it had surely been reasoning of a sort that told him to grease
his body with the fish. Otherwise he would now be following the
tarantula as a second course for the occupant of the web.

Burl looked cautiously all about him. It seemed to be quite safe. Then,
quite deliberately, he sat down to think. It was the first time in his
life that he had ever deliberately contemplated a problem with the idea
of finding an answer to it. And the notion of doing such a thing was
epoch-making--on this planet!

He examined his foot. The sharp edges of pebbles and the remnants of
insect-armor hurt his feet when he walked. They had done so ever since
he had been born, but never before had his feet been sticky, so that the
irritation from one object persisted for more than a step. He carefully
picked away each sharp-pointed fragment, one by one. Partly coated with
the half-liquid gum, they even tended to cling to his fingers, except
where the oil was thick.

Burl's reasoning had been of the simplest sort. He had contemplated a
situation--not deliberately but because he had to--and presently his
mind showed him a way out of it. It was a way specifically suited to the
situation. Here he faced something different. Presently he applied the
answer of one problem to a second problem. Oil on his body had let him
go free of things that would stick to him. Here things stuck to his
feet; so he oiled them.

And it worked. Burl strode away, almost--but not completely--untroubled
by the bothersome pebbles and bits of discarded armor. Then he halted to
regard himself with astonished appreciation. He was still thirty-five
miles from his tribe; he was naked and unarmed, utterly ignorant of wood
and fire and weapons other than the one he had lost. But he paused to
observe with some awe that he was very wonderful indeed.

He wanted to display himself. But his spear was gone. So Burl found it
necessary to think again. And the remarkable thing about it was that he
succeeded.

In a surprisingly brief time he had come up with a list of answers. He
was naked, so he would find garments for himself. He was weaponless: he
would find himself a spear. He was hungry and he would seek food. Since
he was far from his tribe, he would go to them. And this was, in a
fashion, quite obviously thought; but it was not oblivious on the
forgotten planet because it had been futile--up to now. The importance
of such thought in the scheme of things was that men had not been
thinking even so simply as this, living only from minute to minute. Burl
was fumbling his way into a habit of thinking from problem to problem.
And that was very important indeed.

Even in the advanced civilization of other planets, few men really used
their minds. The great majority of people depended on machines not only
for computations but decisions as well. Any decisions not made by
machines most men left to their leaders. Burl's tribesfolk thought
principally with their stomachs, making few if any decisions on any
other basis--though they did act, very often, under the spur of fear.
Fear-inspired actions, however, were not thought out. Burl was thinking
out his actions.

There would be consequences.

He faced upstream and began to move again, slowly and warily, his eyes
keenly searching out the way ahead, ears alert for the slightest sound
of danger. Gigantic butterflies, riotous in coloring, fluttered overhead
through the hazy air. Sometimes a grasshopper hurtled from one place to
another like a projectile, its transparent wings beating frantically.
Now and then a wasp sped by, intent upon its hunting, or a bee droned
heavily alone, anxious and worried, striving to gather pollen in a
nearly flowerless world.

Burl marched on. From somewhere far behind him came a very faint sound.
It was a shrill noise, but very distant indeed. Absorbed in immediate
and nearby matters, Burl took no heed. He had the limited local
viewpoint of a child. What was near was important and what was distant
could be ignored. Anything not imminent still seemed to him
insignificant--and he was preoccupied.

The source of this sound was important, however. Its origin was a myriad
of clickings compounded into a single noise. It was, in fact, the
far-away but yet perceptible sound of army ants on the march. The
locusts of Earth were very trivial nuisances compared to the army ants
of this planet.

Locusts, in past ages on Earth, had eaten all green things. Here in the
lowlands were only giant cabbages and a few rank, tenacious growths.
Grasshoppers were numerous here, but could never be thought of as a
plague; they were incapable of multiplying to the size of locust hordes.
Army ants, however....

But Burl did not notice the sound. He moved forward briskly though
cautiously, searching the fungus-landscape for any sign of garments,
food, and weapons. He confidently expected to find all of them within a
short distance. Indeed, he did find food very soon. No more than a half
mile ahead he found a small cluster of edible fungi.

With no special elation, Burl broke off a food supply from the largest
of them. Naturally, he took more than he could possibly eat at one time.
He went on, nibbling at a big piece of mushroom abstractedly, past a
broad plain, more than a mile across and broken into odd little hillocks
by gradually ripening mushrooms which were unfamiliar to him. In several
places the ground had been pushed aside by rounded objects, only the
tips showing. Blood-red hemispheres seemed to be forcing themselves
through the soil, so they might reach the outer air. Careful not to
touch any of them, Burl examined the hillocks curiously as he entered
the plain. They were strange, and to Burl most strange things meant
danger. In any event, he had two conscious purposes now. He wanted
garments and weapons.

Above the plain a wasp hovered, dangling a heavy object beneath its
black belly across which ran a single red band. It was the gigantic
descendant of the hairy sand-wasp, differing only in size from its
far-away, remote ancestors on Earth. It was taking a paralyzed gray
caterpillar to its burrow. Burl watched it drop down with the speed and
sureness of an arrow, pull aside a heavy, flat stone, and descend into
the burrow with its caterpillar-prey momentarily laid aside.

It vanished underground into a vertical shaft dug down forty feet or
more. It evidently inspected the refuge. Reappearing, it vanished into
the hole again, dragging the gray worm after it. Burl, marching on over
the broad plain spotted with some eruptive disease, did not know what
passed below. But he did observe the wasp emerge again to scratch dirt
and stones previously excavated laboriously back into the shaft until it
was full.

The wasp had paralyzed a caterpillar, taken it into the ready-prepared
burrow, laid an egg upon it, and sealed up the entrance. In time the egg
would hatch into a grub barely the size of Burl's forefinger. And the
grub, deep underground, would feed upon the living but helpless
caterpillar until it waxed large and fat. Then it would weave itself a
cocoon and sleep a long sleep, only to wake as a wasp and dig its way
out to the open air.

Reaching the farther side of the plain, Burl found himself threading the
aisles of a fungus forest in which the growths were misshapen travesties
of the trees which could not live here. Bloated yellow limbs branched
off from rounded swollen trunks. Here and there a pear-shaped puffball,
Burl's height and half his height again, waited until a chance touch
should cause it to shoot upward a curling puff of infinitely fine dust.

He continued to move with caution. There were dangers here, but he went
forward steadily. He still held a great mass of edible mushroom under
one arm and from time to time broke off a fragment, chewing it
meditatively. But always his eyes searched here and there for threats of
harm.

Behind him the faint, shrill outcry had risen only slightly in volume.
It was still too far away to attract his notice. Army ants, however,
were working havoc in the distance. By thousands and millions, myriads
of them advanced across the fungoid soil. They clambered over every
eminence. They descended into every depression. Their antennae waved
restlessly. Their mandibles were extended threateningly. The ground was
black with them, each one more than ten inches long.

A single such creature, armored and fearless as it was, could be
formidable enough to an unarmed and naked man like Burl. The better part
of discretion would be avoidance. But numbering in the thousands and
millions, they were something which could not be avoided. They advanced
steadily and rapidly; the chorus of shrill stridulations and clickings
marking their progress.

Great, inoffensive caterpillars crawling over the huge cabbages heard
the sound of their coming, but were too stupid to flee. The black
multitudes blanketed the rank vegetables. Tiny, voracious jaws tore at
the flaccid masses of greasy flesh.

The caterpillars strove to throw off their assailants by writhings and
contortions--uselessly. The bees fought their entrance into the monster
hives with stings and wing-beats. Moths took to the air in daylight with
dazzled, blinded eyes. But nothing could withstand the relentless hordes
of small black things that reeked of formic acid and left the ground
behind them empty of life.

Before the horde was a world of teeming life, where mushrooms and other
fungi fought with thinning numbers of cabbages and mutant earth-weeds
for a foothold. Behind the black multitude was--nothing. Mushrooms,
cabbages, bees, wasps, crickets, grubs--every living thing that could
not flee before the creeping black tide reached it was lost, torn to
bits by tiny mandibles.

Even the hunting spiders and tarantulas fell before the black host. They
killed many in their desperate self-defense, but the army ants could
overwhelm anything--anything at all--by sheer numbers and ferocity.
Killed or wounded ants served as food for their sound comrades. Only the
web spiders sat unmoved and immovable in their collossal snares, secure
in the knowledge that their gummy webs could not be invaded along the
slender supporting cables.




_3. THE PURPLE HILLS_


The army ants flowed over the ground like a surging, monstrous, inky
tide. Their vanguard reached the river and recoiled. Burl was perhaps
five miles away when they changed their course. The change was made
without confusion, the leaders somehow communicating the altered line of
march to those behind them.

Back on Earth, scientists had gravely debated the question of how ants
conveyed ideas to each other. Honeybees, it was said, performed
elaborate ritual dances to exchange information. Ants, it had been
observed, had something less eccentric. A single ant, finding a bit of
booty too big for it to manage alone, would return to its city to secure
the help of others. From that fact men had deduced that a language of
gestures made with crossed antennae must exist.

Burl had no theories. He merely knew facts, but he did know that ants
could and did pass information to one another. Now, however, he moved
cautiously along toward the sleeping-place of his tribe in complete
ignorance of the black blanket of living creatures spreading over the
ground behind him.

A million tragedies marked the progress of the insect army. There was a
tiny colony of mining bees, their habits unchanged despite their greater
size, here on the forgotten planet. A single mother, four feet long, had
dug a huge gallery with some ten offshooting cells, in which she had
laid her eggs and fed her grubs with hard-gathered pollen. The grubs had
waxed fat and large, become bees, and laid eggs in their turn within the
same gallery their mother had dug out for them.

Ten bulky insects now foraged busily to feed their grubs within the
ancestral home, while the founder of the colony had grown draggled and
wingless with the passing of time. Unable to bring in food, herself, the
old bee became the guardian of the hive. She closed the opening with her
head, making a living barrier within the entrance. She withdrew only to
grant admission or exit to the duly authorized members,--her daughters.

The ancient concierge of the underground dwelling was at her post when
the wave of army ants swept over. Tiny, evil-smelling feet trampled upon
her and she emerged to fight with mandible and sting for the sanctity of
her brood. Within moments she was a shaggy mass of biting ants. They
rent and tore at her chitinous armor. But she fought on madly, sounding
a buzzing alarm to the colonists yet within.

They came out, fighting as they came: ten huge bees, each four to five
feet long and fighting with legs and jaws, with wing and mandible, and
with all the ferocity of so many tigers. But the small ants covered
them, snapping at their multiple eyes, biting at the tender joints in
their armour,--and sometimes releasing the larger prey to leap upon an
injured comrade, wounded by the monster they battled together.

Such a fight, however, could have but one end. Struggle as the bees
might, they were powerless against their un-numbered assailants. They
were being devoured even as they fought. And before the last of the ten
was down the underground gallery had been gutted both of the stored food
brought by the adult defenders and the last morsels of what had been
young grubs, too unformed to do more than twitch helplessly,
inoffensively, as they were torn to shreds.

When the army ants went on there were merely an empty tunnel and a few
fragments of tough armor, unappetizing even to the ants.

Burl heard them as he meditatively inspected the scene of a tragedy of
not long before. The rent and scraped fragments of a great beetle's
shiny casing lay upon the ground. A greater beetle had come upon the
first and slain him. Burl regarded the remains of the meal.

Three or four minims, little ants barely six inches long, foraged
industriously among the bits. A new ant-city was to be formed and the
queen lay hidden half a mile away. These were the first hatchlings. They
would feed their younger kindred until they grew large enough to take
over the great work of the ant-city. Burl ignored the minims. He
searched for a weapon of some sort. Behind him the clicking,
high-pitched roar of the horde of army ants increased in volume.

He turned away disgustedly. The best thing he could find in the way of
a weapon was a fiercely-toothed hind-leg. When he picked it up an angry
whine rose from the ground. One of the minims had been struggling to
detach a morsel of flesh from the leg-joint. Burl had snatched the
tidbit from him.

The little creature was surely no more than half a foot long, but it
advanced angrily upon Burl, shrilling a challenge. He struck with the
beetle's leg and crushed the ant. Two of the other minims appeared,
attracted by the noise the first had made. They discovered the crushed
body of their fellow, unceremoniously dismembered it, and bore it away
in triumph.

Burl went on, swinging the toothed limb in his hand. The sound behind
him became a distant whispering, high-pitched and growing steadily
nearer. The army ants swept into a mushroom forest and the yellow,
umbrella-like growths soon swarmed with the black creatures.

A great bluebottle fly, shining with a metallic lustre, stood beneath a
mushroom on the ground. The mushroom was infected with maggots which
exuded a solvent pepsin that liquefied the firm white meat. They swam
ecstatically in the liquid gruel, some of which dripped and dripped to
the ground. The bluebottle was sipping the dark-colored liquid through
its long proboscis, quivering with delight as it fed on the noisomeness.

Burl drew near and struck. The fly collapsed in a quivering heap. Burl
stood over it for an instant and pondered.

The army ants were nearer, now. They swarmed down into a tiny valley,
rushing into and through a little brook over which Burl had leaped.
Since ants can remain underwater for a long time without drowning, the
small stream was not even dangerous. Its current did sweep some of them
away. A great many of them, however, clung together until they chocked
its flow by the mass of their bodies, the main force marching across the
bridge they constituted.

The ants reached a place about a quarter of a mile to the left of Burl's
line of march, perhaps a mile from the spot where he stood over the dead
bluebottle. There was an expanse of some acres in which the giant, rank
cabbages had so far succeeded in their competition with the world of
fungi. The pale, cross-shaped flowers of the cabbages formed food for
many bees. The leaves fed numberless grubs and worms. Under the
fallen-away dead foliage--single leaves were twenty feet across at their
largest--crickets hid and fed.

The ant-army flowed into this space, devouring every living thing it
encountered. A terrible din arose. The crickets hurtled away in erratic
leapings. They shot aimlessly in any direction. More than half of them
landed blindly in the carpeting of clicking black bodies which were the
ants from whose vanguard they had fled. Their blind flight had no effect
save to give different individuals the opportunity to seize them as they
fell and instantly begin to devour them. As they were torn to fragments,
horrible screamings reached Burl's ears.

A single such cry of agony would not have attracted Burl's attention. He
lived in a world of nightmare horror. But a chorus of creatures in
torment made him look up. This was no minor horror. Something wholesale
was in progress. He jerked his head about to see what it was.

A wild stretch of sickly yellow fungus was interspersed here and there
with a squat toadstool, or a splash of vivid color where one of the many
rusts had found a foothold. To the left a group of branched fungoids
clustered in silent mockery of a true forest. Burl saw the faded green
of the cabbages.

With the sun never shining on the huge leaves save through the
cloud-bank overhead, the cabbages were not vivid. There were even some
mouldy yeasts of a brighter green and slime much more luridly tinted.
Even so, the cabbages were the largest form of true vegetation Burl had
ever seen. The nodding white cruciform flowers stood out plainly
against the yellowish, pallid green of the leaves. But as Burl gazed at
them, the green slowly became black.

Three great grubs, in lazy contentment, were eating ceaselessly of the
cabbages on which they rested. Suddenly first one and then another began
to jerk spasmodically. Burl saw that around each of them a rim of black
had formed. Then black motes milled all over them.

The grubs became black--covered with biting, devouring ants. The
cabbages became black. The frenzied contortions of the grubs told of the
agonies they underwent as they were literally devoured alive. And then
Burl saw a black wave appear at the nearer edge of the stretch of yellow
fungus. A glistening, living flood flowed forward over the ground with a
roar of clickings and a persistent overtone of shrill stridulations.

Burl's scalp crawled. He knew what this meant. And he did not pause to
think. With a gasp of pure panic he turned and fled, all intellectual
preoccupations forgotten.

The black tide came on after him.

He flung away the edible mushroom he had carried under his arm. Somehow,
though, he clung to the sharp-toothed club as he darted between tangled
masses of fungus, ignoring now the dangers that ordinarily called for
vast caution.

Huge flies appeared. They buzzed about him loudly. Once he was struck on
the shoulder by one of them--at least as large as his hand--and his skin
torn by its swiftly vibrating wings.

He brushed it away and sped on. But the oil with which he was partly
covered had turned rancid, now, and the fetid odor attracted them. There
were half a dozen--then a dozen creatures the size of pheasants, droning
and booming as they kept pace with his wild flight.

A weight pressed onto his head. It doubled. Two of the disgusting
creatures had settled upon his oily hair to sip the stuff through their
hairy feeding-tubes. Burl shook them off with his hand and raced madly
on, his ears attuned to the sounds of the ants behind him.

That clicking roar continued, but in Burl's ears it was almost drowned
out by the noise made by the halo of flies accompanying him. Their
buzzing had deepened in pitch with the increase in size of all their
race. It was now the note close to the deepest bass tone of an organ.
Yet flies--though greatly enlarged on the forgotten planet--had not
become magnified as much as some of the other creatures. There were no
great heaps of putrid matter for them to lay their eggs in. The ants
were busy scavengers, carting away the debris of tragedies in the insect
world long before it could acquire the gamey flavor beloved of
fly-maggots. Only in isolated spots were the flies really numerous. In
such places they clustered in clouds.

Such a cloud began to form about Burl as he fled. It seemed as though a
miniature whirlwind kept pace with him--a whirlwind composed of furry,
revolting bodies and multi-faceted eyes. Fleeing, Burl had to swing his
club before him to clear the way. Almost every stroke was interrupted by
an impact against some thinly-armored body which collapsed with the
spurting of reddish liquid.

Then an anguish as of red-hot iron struck upon Burl's back. One of the
stinging flies had thrust its sharp-tipped proboscis into his flesh to
suck the blood. Burl uttered a cry and ran full-tilt into the stalk of a
blackened, draggled toadstool.

There was a curious crackling as of wet punk. The toadstool collapsed
upon itself with a strange splashing sound. A great many creatures had
laid their eggs in it, until now it was a seething mass of corruption
and ill-smelling liquid.

When the toadstool crashed to the ground, it crumbled into a dozen
pieces, spattering the earth for yards all about with stinking stuff in
which tiny, headless maggots writhed convulsively.

The deep-toned buzzing of the flies took on a note of solemn
satisfaction. They settled down upon this feast. Burl staggered to his
feet and darted off again. Now he was nothing but a minor attraction to
the flies, only three or four bothering to come after him. The others
settled by the edges of the splashing fluid, quickly absorbed in an
ecstasy of feasting. The few still hovering about his head, Burl
killed,--but he did not have to smash them all. The remaining few
descended to feast on their fallen comrades twitching feebly at his
feet.

He ran on and passed beneath the wide-spreading leaves of an isolated
giant cabbage. A great grasshopper crouched on the ground, its
tremendous radially-opening jaws crunching the rank vegetation. Half a
dozen great worms ate steadily of the leaves that supported them. One
had swung itself beneath an overhanging leaf--which would have thatched
houses for men--and was placidly anchoring itself for the spinning of a
cocoon in which to sleep the sleep of metamorphosis.

A mile away, the great black tide of army ants advanced relentlessly.
The great cabbage, the huge grasshopper, and all the stupid caterpillars
on the leaves would presently be covered with small, black demons. The
cocoon would never be spun. The caterpillars would be torn into
thousands of furry fragments and devoured. The grasshopper would strike
out with his terrific, unguided strength, crushing its assailants with
blows of its great hind-legs and powerful jaws. But it would die, making
terrible sounds of torments as the ants consumed it piecemeal.

The sound of the ants' advance overwhelmed all other noises now. Burl
ran madly, his breath coming in great gasps, his eyes wide with panic.
Alone of the world about him, he knew the danger that followed him. The
insects he passed went about their business with that terrifying,
abstracted efficiency found only in the insect world.

Burl's heart pounded madly from his running. The breath whistled in his
nostrils--and behind him the flood of army ants kept pace. They came
upon the feasting flies. Some took to the air and escaped. Others were
too absorbed in their delicious meal. The twitching maggots, stranded by
the scattering of their soupy broth, were torn to shreds and eaten. The
flies who were seized vanished into tiny maws. And the serried ranks of
ants moved on.

Burl could hear nothing else, now, but the clickings of their limbs and
the stridulating challenges and cross-challenges they uttered. Now and
then another sound pierced the noises made by the ants themselves: a
cricket, perhaps, seized and dying, uttering deep-bass cries of agony.

Before the horde there was a busy world which teemed with life.
Butterflies floated overhead on lazy wings; grubs waxed fat and huge;
crickets feasted; great spiders sat quietly in their lairs, waiting with
implacable patience for prey to fall into the trap-doors and snares;
great beetles lumbered through the mushroom forests, seeking food and
making love in monstrous, tragic fashion.

Behind the wide front of the army ants was--chaos. Emptiness.
Desolation. All life save that of the army ants was exterminated, though
some bewildered flying creatures still fluttered helplessly over the
silent landscape. Yet even behind the army ants little bands of
stragglers from the horde marched busily here and there, seeking some
trace of life that had been overlooked by the main body.

Burl put forth his last ounce of strength. His limbs trembled. His
breathing was agony. Sweat stood out upon his forehead. He ran for his
life with the desperation of one who knows that death is at his heels.
He ran as if his continued existence among the million tragedies of the
single day were the purpose for which the universe had been created.

There was redness in the west and in the cloud-bank overhead. To the
east gray sky became a deeper gray--much deeper. It was not yet time for
the creatures of the day to seek their hiding-places, nor for the
night-insects to come forth. But in many secret spots there were vague
and sleepy stirrings.

Heedless of the approaching darkness Burl sped over an open space a
hundred yards across. A thicket of beautifully golden mushrooms barred
his way. Danger lay there. He dogged aside and saw in the gray dusk a
glistening sheet of white, barely a yard above the ground. It was the
web of the morning-spider which, on Earth, was noted only in hedges and
such places when the dew of earliest dawn exposed it as a patternless
plate of diamond-dust. There were anchor-cables, of course, but no
geometry. Tidy housewives--also on Earth--used to mop it out of corners
as a filmy fabric of irritating gossamer. On the forgotten planet it was
a net with strength and bird-lime qualities that increased day by day,
as its spinner moved restlessly over the surface, always trailing sticky
cord behind itself.

Burl had no choice but to avoid it, even though he lost ground to the
ant-horde roaring behind him. And night was definitely on the way. It
was inconceivable that a human should travel in the lowlands after dark.
It literally could not be done over the normal nightmare terrain. Burl
had not only to escape the army ants, but find a hiding-place quickly if
he was to see tomorrow's light. But he could not think so far ahead,
just now.

He blundered through a screen of puffballs that shot dusty powder toward
the sky. Ahead, a range of strangely colored hills came into
view--purple, green, black and gold--melting into each other and
branching off, inextricably mingled. They rose to a height of perhaps
sixty or seventy feet. A curious grayish haze had gathered above them.
It seemed to be a layer of thin vapor, not like mist or fog, clinging to
certain parts of the hills, rising slowly to coil and gather into an
indefinitely thicker mass above the ridges.

The hills themselves were not geological features, but masses of fungus
that had grown and cannibalized, piling up upon themselves to the
thickness of carboniferous vegetation. Over the face of the hills grew
every imaginable variety of yeast and mould and rust. They grew within
and upon themselves, forming freakish conglomerations that piled up into
a range of hills, stretching across the lunatic landscape for miles.

Burl blundered up the nearest slope. Sometimes the surface was a hard
rind that held him up. Sometimes his feet sank--perhaps inches, perhaps
to mid-leg. He scrambled frantically. Panting, gasping, staggering from
the exhaustion of moving across the fungus quicksand, he made his way to
the top of the first hill, plunged down into a little valley on the
farther side, and up another slope. He left a clear trail behind him of
disturbed and scurrying creatures that had inevitably found a home in
the mass of living stuff. Small sinuous centipedes scuttled here and
there, roused by his passage. At the bottom of his footprints writhed
fat white worms. Beetles popped into view and vanished again....

A half mile across the range and Burl could go no farther. He stumbled
and fell and lay there, gasping hoarsely. Overhead the gray sky had
become a deep-red which was rapidly melting into that redness too deep
to be seen except as black. But there was still some light from the
west.

Burl sobbed for breath in a little hollow, his sharp-toothed club still
clasped in his hands. Something huge, with wings like sails, soared in
silhouette against the sunset. Burl lay motionless, breathing in great
gasps, his limbs refusing to lift him.

The sound of the army ants continued. At last, above the crest of the
last hillock he had surmounted, two tiny glistening antennae appeared,
then the small, deadly shape of an army ant. The forerunner of its
horde, it moved deliberately forward, waving its antennae ceaselessly.
It made its way toward Burl, tiny clickings coming from its limbs.

A little wisp of vapor swirled toward the ant. It was the vapor that had
gathered over the whole range of hills as a thin, low cloud. It
enveloped the ant which seemed to be thrown into a strange convulsion,
throwing itself about, legs moving aimlessly. If it had been an animal
instead of an insect, it would have choked and gasped. But ants breathe
through air-holes in their abdomens. It writhed helplessly on the spongy
stuff across which it had been moving.

Burl was conscious of a strange sensation. His body felt remarkably
warm. It felt hot. It was an unparalleled sensation, because Burl had no
experience of fire or the heat of the sun. The only warmth he had ever
known was when huddling together with his tribesmen in some hiding-place
to avoid the damp chill of the night.

Then, the heat of their breath and flesh helped to combat discomfort.
But this was a fiercer heat. It was intolerable. Burl moved his body
with a tremendous effort and for a moment the fungus soil was cool
beneath him. Then the sensation of hotness began again and increased
until Burl's skin was reddened and inflamed.

The tenuous vapor, too, seemed to swirl his way. It made his lungs smart
and his eyes water. He still breathed in painful gasps, but even that
short period of rest had done him some good. But it was the heat that
drove him to his feet again. He crawled painfully to the crest of the
next hill. He looked back.

This was the highest hill he had come upon and he could see most of the
purple range in the deep, deep dusk. Now he was more than halfway
through the hills. He had barely a quarter-mile to go, northward. But
east and west the range of purple hills was a ceaseless, undulating mass
of lifts and hollows, of ridges and spurs of all imaginable colorings.

And at the tips of most of them were wisps of curling gray.

From his position he could see a long stretch of the hills not hidden by
the surrounding darkness. Back along the way he had come, the army ants
now swept up into the range of hills. Scouts and advance-guard parties
scurried here and there. They stopped to devour the creatures inhabiting
the surface layers. But the main body moved on inexorably.

The hills, though, were alive, not upheavals of the ground but festering
heaps of insanely growing fungus, hollowed out in many places by
tunnels, hiding-places, and lurking-places. These the ants invaded. They
swept on, devouring everything....

Burl leaned heavily upon his club and watched dully. He could run no
more. The army ants were spreading everywhere. They would reach him
soon.

Far to the right, the vapor thickened. A thin column of smoke arose in
the dim half-light. Burl did not know smoke, of course. He could not
conceivably guess that deep down in the interior of the insanely growing
hills, pressure had killed and oxidation had carbonized the once-living
material. By oxidation the temperature down below had been raised. In
the damp darkness of the bowels of the hills spontaneous combustion had
begun.

The great mounds of tinderlike mushroom had begun to burn very slowly,
quite unseen. There had been no flames because the hills' surface
remained intact and there was no air to feed the burning. But when the
army ants dug ferociously for fugitive small things, air was admitted to
tunnels abandoned because of heat.

Then slow combustion speeded up. Smoulderings became flames. Sparks
became coals. A dozen columns of fume-laden smoke rose into the heavens
and gathered into a dense pall above the range of purple hills. And Burl
apathetically watched the serried ranks of army ants march on toward the
widening furnaces that awaited them.

They had recoiled from the river instinctively. But their ancestors had
never known fire. In the Amazon basin, on Earth, there had never been
forest fires. On the forgotten planet there had never been fires at all,
unless the first forgotten colonists tried to make them. In any case the
army ants had no instinctive terror of flame. They marched into the
blazing openings that appeared in the hills. They snapped with their
mandibles at the leaping flames, and sprang to grapple with the burning
coals.

The blazing areas widened as the purple surface was consumed. Burl
watched without comprehension--even without thankfulness. He stood
breathing more and more easily until the glow from approaching flames
reddened his skin and the acrid smoke made tears flow from his eyes.
Then he retreated slowly, leaning on his club and often looking back.

Night had fallen, but yet it was light to the army ants. They marched
on, shrilling their defiance. They poured devotedly--and
ferociously--into the inferno of flame. At last there were only small
groups of stragglers from the great ant-army scurrying here and there
over the ground their comrades had stripped of all life. The bodies of
the main army made a vast malodor, burning in the furnace of the hills.

There had been pain in that burning, agony such as no one would willing
dwell upon. But it came of the insane courage of the ants, attacking the
burning stuff with their horny jaws, rolling over and over with flaming
lumps of charcoal clutched in their mandibles. Burl heard them shrilling
their war-cry even as they died. Blinded, antennae singed off, legs
shriveling, they yet went forward to attack their impossible enemy.

Burl made his way slowly over the hills. Twice he saw small bodies of
the vanished army. They had passed between the widening furnaces and
furiously devoured all that moved as they forged ahead. Once Burl was
spied, and a shrill cry sounded, but he moved on and only a single ant
rushed after him. Burl brought down his club and a writhing body
remained to be eaten by its comrades when they came upon it.

And now the last faint traces of light had vanished in the west. There
was no real brightness anywhere except the flames of the burning hills.
The slow, slow nightly rain that dripped down all through the dark hours
began. It made a pattering noise upon the unburnt part of the hills.

Burl found firm ground beneath his feet. He listened keenly for sounds
of danger. Something rustled heavily in a thicket of toadstools a
hundred feet away. There were sounds of preening, and of feet delicately
placed here and there upon the ground. Then a great body took to the air
with the throbbing beat of mighty wings.

A fierce down-current of air smote Burl, and he looked upward in time to
glimpse the outline of a huge moth passing overhead. He turned to watch
the line of its flight, and saw the fierce glow filling all the horizon.
The hills burned brighter as the flames widened.

He crouched beneath a squat toadstool and waited for the dawn. The
slow-dripping rain kept on, falling with irregular, drum-like beats upon
the tough top of the toadstool.

He did not sleep. He was not properly hidden, and there was always
danger in the dark. But this was not the darkness Burl was used to. The
great fires grew and spread in the masses of ready-carbonized mushroom.
The glare on the horizon grew brighter through the hours. It also came
nearer.

Burl shivered a little, as he watched. He had never even dreamed of fire
before, and even the overhanging clouds were lighted by these flames.
Over a stretch at least a dozen miles in length and from half a mile to
three miles across, the seething furnaces and columns of flame-lit smoke
sent illumination over the world. It was like the glow the lights of a
city can throw upon the sky. And like the flitting of aircraft above a
city was the assembly of fascinated creatures of the night.

Great moths and flying beetles, gigantic gnats and midges grown huge
upon this planet, fluttered and danced above the flames. As the fire
came nearer, Burl could see them: colossal, delicately-formed creatures
sweeping above the white-hot expanse. There were moths with
riotously-colored wings of thirty-foot spread, beating the air with
mighty strokes, their huge eyes glowing like garnets as they stared
intoxicatedly at the incandescence below them.

Burl saw a great peacock-moth soaring above the hills with wings all of
forty feet across. They fluttered like sails of unbelievable
magnificence. And this was when all the separate flames had united to
form a single sheet of white-hot burning stuff spread across the land
for miles.

Feathery antennae of the finest lace spread out before the head of the
peacock-moth; its body was of softest velvet. A ring of snow-white fur
marked where its head began. The glare from below smote the maroon of
its body with a strange effect. For one instant it was outlined clearly.
Its eyes shone more redly than any ruby's fire. The great, delicate
wings were poised in flight. Burl caught the flash of flame upon the two
great irridescent spots on the wings. Shining purple and bright red, all
the glory of chalcedony and of chrysoprase was reflected in the glare of
burning fungi.

And then Burl saw it plunge downward, straight into the thickest and
fiercest of the leaping flames. It flung itself into the furnace as a
willing, drunken victim of their beauty.

Flying beetles flew clumsily above the pyre also, their horny wing-cases
stiffly outstretched. In the light from below they shone like burnished
metal. Their clumsy bodies, with spurred and fierce-toothed limbs,
darted through the flame-lit smoke like so many grotesque meteors.

Burl saw strange collisions and still stranger meetings. Male and female
flying creatures circled and spun in the glare, dancing their dance of
love and death. They mounted higher than Burl could see, drunk with the
ecstasy of living, and then descended to plunge headlong in the roaring
flames below.

From every side the creatures came. Moths of brightest yellow, with
furry bodies palpitant with life, flew madly to destruction. Other moths
of a deepest black, with gruesome symbols on their wings, swiftly came
to dance above the glow like motes in sunlight.

And Burl crouched beneath a toadstool, watching while the perpetual,
slow raindrops fell and fell, and a continuous hissing noise came from
where the rain splashed amid the flames.




_4. A KILLER OF MONSTERS_


The night wore on, while the creatures above the firelight danced and
died, their numbers ever reinforced by fresh arrivals. Burl sat tensely
still, his eyes watching everything while his mind groped for an
explanation of what he saw. At last the sky grew dimly gray, then
brighter, and after a long time it was day. The flames of the burning
hills seemed to dim and die as all the world became bright. After a long
while Burl crawled from his hiding-place and stood erect.

No more than two hundred paces from where he stood, a straight wall of
smoke rose from the still-smouldering fungus-range. Burl could see the
smoke rising for miles on either hand. He turned to continue on his way,
and saw the remains of one of the tragedies of the night.

A great moth had flown into the flames, been horribly scorched, and
floundered out again. Had it been able to fly, it would have returned to
its devouring deity; but now it lay upon the ground, its antennae
hopelessly seared. One beautiful wing was nothing but gaping holes. The
eyes had been dimmed by flame. The exquisitely tapering limbs lay
broken and crushed by the violence of landing. The creature was helpless
on the ground, only the stumps of its antennae moving restlessly and the
abdomen pulsating slowly as it drew pain-racked breaths.

Burl drew near. He raised his club.

When he moved on there was a velvet cloak cast over his shoulders,
gleaming with all the colors of the rainbows. A gorgeous mass of soft
blue moth-fur was about his middle, and he had bound upon his forehead
two yard-long fragments of the moth's magnificent antennae.

He strode on slowly, clad as no man had been clad in all the ages before
him. After a while another victim of the holocaust--similarly blundered
out to die--yielded him a spear that was longer and sharper and much
more deadly than his first. So he took up his journey to Saya looking
like a prince of Ind upon a bridal journey--though surely no mere prince
ever wore such raiment.

For many miles, Burl threaded his way through an extensive forest of
thin-stalked toadstools. They towered high over his head, colorful,
parasitic moulds and rusts all about their bases. Twice he came upon
open glades where bubbling pools of green slime festered in corruption.
Once he hid himself as a monster scarabeus beetle lumbered by three
yards away, clanking like some mighty machine.

Burl saw the heavy armor and inward-curving jaws of the monster. He
almost envied him his weapons. The time was not yet come, though, when
Burl and his kind would hunt such giants for the juicy flesh within its
armored limbs. Burl was still a savage, still ignorant, still
essentially timid. His only significant advance had been that where at
first he had fled without reasoning, now he paused to see if he need
flee.

He was a strange sight, moving through the shadowed lanes of the forest
in his cloak of velvet. The fierce-toothed leg of a fighting beetle
rested in a strip of sinew about his waist, ready for use. His new spear
was taller than himself. He looked like a conqueror. But he was still a
fearful and feeble creature, no match for the monstrous creatures about
him. He was weak--and in that lay his greatest hope. Because if he were
strong, he would not need to think.

Hundreds of thousands of years before, his ancestors had been forced to
develop brains as penalty for the lack of claws or fangs. Burl was sunk
as low as any of them, but he had to combat more horrifying enemies,
more inexorable dangers, and many times more crafty antagonists. His
ancestors had invented knives and spears and flying missiles, but the
creatures about Burl had weapons a thousand times more deadly than the
ones that had defended the first humans.

The fact, however, simply put a premium on the one faculty Burl had
which the insect world has not.

In mid-morning he heard a discordant, deep-bass bellow, coming from a
spot not twenty yards from where he moved. He hid in panic, waiting for
an instant, listening.

The bellow came again, but this time with a querulous note. Burl heard a
crashing and plunging as of some creature caught in a snare. A mushroom
tumbled with a spongelike sound, and the thud was followed by a
tremendous commotion. Something was fighting desperately against
something else, but Burl did not know what creatures were in combat.

He waited, and the noise died gradually away. Presently his breath came
more slowly and his courage returned. He stole from his hiding-place and
would have made away, but new curiosity held him back. Instead of
creeping from the scene, he moved cautiously toward the source of the
noise.

Peering between two cream-colored stalks he saw a wide, funnel-shaped
snare of silk spread out before him, some twenty yards across and as
many deep. The individual threads could be plainly seen, but in the mass
it seemed a fabric of sheerest, finest texture. Held up by tall
mushrooms, it was anchored to the ground below and drew away to a small
point through which a hole led to some as yet unseen recess. All the
space of the wide snare was hung with threads: fine, twisted threads no
more than half the thickness of Burl's finger.

This was the trap of a labyrinth spider. Not one of the interlacing
strands was strong enough to hold any but the feeblest prey, but the
threads were there by thousands. A cricket had become entangled in the
sticky maze. Its limbs thrashed out and broke threads with every stroke,
but each time became entangled in a dozen more. It struggled mightily,
emitting at intervals--again--its horrible bass roar.

Burl breathed more easily. He watched with fascinated eyes. Mere death
among insects--even tragic death--held no great interest for him. It was
too common an occurrence. And there were few insects which deliberately
sought man. Most insects have their allotted prey and will seek no
others.

But this involved a spider, and spiders have a terrifying impartiality.
A spider devouring some luckless insect was but an example of what might
happen to Burl. So he watched alertly, his eyes traveling from the
enmeshed cricket to the strange opening at the back of the funnel-shaped
labyrinth.

That opening darkened. Two shining, glistening eyes had been watching
from the tunnel in which the spider had been waiting. Now it swung out
lightly, revealing itself as a gray spider, with twin black ribbons upon
its thorax and two stripes of curiously speckled brown and white upon
its abdomen. Burl saw, also, two curious appendages like a tail, as it
came nimbly out of its hiding-place and approached the trapped creature.

The cricket was struggling weakly, now, and the cries it uttered were
but feeble, because of the cords that fettered its limbs. Burl saw the
spider throw itself upon the cricket which gave one final, convulsive
shudder as fangs pierced its armor.

Shortly after, the spider fed. With bestial enjoyment it sucked all the
succulence, all the fluid, from its victim's carcass.

Then the breath left Burl in a peculiar, frightened gasp. It was not
from anything he saw or heard. It was something that he thought.

For a second, his knees knocked together in self-induced panic. It
occurred to him that he, Burl, had killed a hunting spider--a
tarantula--upon the red-clay cliff. True, the killing had been an
accident and had nearly cost him his own life in the web-spider's snare.
But--he had killed a spider and of the most deadly kind. Now it occurred
to Burl that he could kill another.

Spiders were the ogres of the human tribes on the forgotten planet.
Knowledge of them was hard to come by, because to study them was death.
But all men knew that web-spiders never left their traps. Never! And
Burl had imagined himself making an impossibly splendid, incredibly
daring use of that fact.

Denying to himself that he intended any action so suicidal, he
nevertheless drew back from the front of the snare and made his way to
the back, where the spider's tunnel was no more than ten feet away.

Then he found himself waiting.

Presently, through the interstices of the silk, he saw the gray bulk of
the spider. It had left the drained and shrunken carcass of the cricket
to return to its resting-place, settling itself carefully upon the soft
walls of the fabric tunnel. From the yielding, globular nest at the
tunnel's end it fixed maniacal eyes once more upon the threads of its
snare, seen down the length of the passage-way.

Burl's hair stood on end from sheer fright, but he was the slave of an
idea.

The tunnel and the nest at its end did not rest on the ground, but were
suspended in air by cables like those that spread the gin itself. The
gray labyrinth-spider bulged the fabric. It lay in luxurious comfort,
waiting for victims to approach.

There was sweat on Burl's face as he raised his spear. The bare idea of
attacking a spider was horrifying. But actually he was in no danger
whatever before the instant of the spear-thrust, because web-spiders
never, never, leave their webs to hunt.

So Burl sweated, and grasped his spear with agonized firmness--and
thrust it into the bulge that was the spider's body in its nest. He
thrust with hysterical fury.

And then he ran as if the devil were after him.

It was a long time before he dared come back, his heart in his throat.
All was still. He had missed the horrid convulsions of the wounded
spider; he had not heard the frightful gnashings of its fangs at the
piercing weapon, nor seen the silken threads of the tunnel ripped and
torn in the spider's death-struggle. Burl came back to quietness. There
was a great rent in the silken tunnel, and a puddle of ill-smelling
stuff lay upon the ground. From time to time another droplet fell from
the spear to join it. And the great spider had fallen half through its
own enlargement of the rent made by the spear in the wall of the nest.

Burl stared. Even when he saw it, the thing was not easy to believe. The
dead eyes of the spider looked at him with mad, frozen malignity. The
fangs were still raised to kill. The hairy legs were still braced as if
to enlarge further the gaping hole through which it had partly fallen.

Then Burl felt exultation. His tribe had been furtive vermin for almost
forty generations, fleeing from the mighty insects, hiding from them,
and when caught waiting helplessly for death, screaming shrilly in
horror. But he, Burl, had turned the tables. He, a man, had killed a
spider! His breast expanded. Always his tribesmen went quietly and
fearfully, making no sound. But a sudden, surprising, triumphant yell
burst from Burl's lips--the first hunting-cry of man upon the forgotten
planet in two thousand years.

Next second, of course, his pulse almost stopped in sheer terror because
he had made such a noise. He listened fearfully. The insect world was
oblivious to him. Presently, shuddering but infinitely proud, he drew
near his prey. He carefully withdrew his spear, poised to flee if the
spider stirred. It did not. It was dead. The blood upon the spear was
revolting. Burl wiped it off on a leathery toadstool. Then....

He thought of Saya and his tribesmen. Trembling even as he gloated over
his own remarkable self, he shifted the spider and worked it out of the
nest. Presently he moved off with the belly of the spider upon his back
and two of its hairy legs over his shoulders. The other limbs of the
monster hung limp, trailing on the ground behind him.

Marching, then he was the first such spectacle in history. His velvet
cloak shining with its irridescent spots, the yard-long scraps of golden
antennae bound to his forehead, a spear in his hand, and the hideous
bulk of a gray spider for burden--Burl was a very strange sight indeed.

He believed that other creatures fled before him because of the thing he
carried. He tended to grow haughty. But actually, of course, insects do
not know fear. They recognize their own specific enemies. That is
necessary. But the his of the lowlands on the forgotten planet went on
abstractedly, despite the splendid feat of one man.

Burl marched. He came upon a valley full of torn and tattered mushrooms.
There was not a single yellow top among them. Every one had been
infested with maggots that had liquefied the tough meat of the
mushroom-tops, causing it to drip to the ground below. The liquid was
gathered in a golden pool in the center of the small depression. Burl
heard a loud and deep-toned humming before he saw the valley. Then he
stopped and looked down.

He saw the golden pond, its surface reflecting the gray sky and the
darkened stumps of mushrooms on the hillside which looked as if they had
been blackened by a running flame. A small brooklet of golden liquid
trickled over a rocky ledge, and all round the edges of the pond and
brook, in ranks and rows, by hundreds and by thousands and it seemed by
millions, were the green-gold bodies of great flies.

They were small compared to other insects. The flesh-flies laid their
eggs by the hundreds in decaying carcasses. The others chose mushrooms
to lay their eggs in. To feed the maggots that would hatch, a relatively
great quantity of food was needed; therefore, the flies must remain
comparatively small, or the body of a single grasshopper would furnish
food for only a few maggots instead of the hundreds it must support.
There must also be a limit to the size of worms if hundreds were to
feast upon a single fungus.

But there was no limitation to the greediness of the adult creatures.
There were bluebottles and green-bottles and all the flies of metallic
lustre, gathered at a Lucullan feast of corruption. The buzzing of those
swarming above the golden pool was a tremendous sound. The flying bodies
flashed and glittered as they flew back and forth, seeking a place to
alight and join in the orgy.

The glittering bodies clustered in already-found places were motionless
as if carved from metal. Burl watched them. And then he saw motion
overhead.

A slender, brilliant shape appeared, darting swiftly through the air,
enlarging into a needle-like body with transparent, shining wings and
two huge eyes. It circled and enlarged again, becoming a shimmering
dragonfly, twenty feet and more in length. It poised itself abruptly
above the pool, and then darted down, its jaws snapping viciously. They
snapped again and again. Burl could not follow their slashings. And with
each snap the glittering body of a fly vanished.

A second dragonfly appeared and a third. They swooped above the golden
pool, snapping in mid-air, making their abrupt and angular turns,
creatures of incredible ferocity and beauty. In that mass of buzzing
creatures, even the most voracious appetite must soon have been sated,
but the slender creatures still darted about in frenzied destruction.

And all this while the loud, contented, deep-bass humming went on as
before. Their comrades were slaughtered by the hundreds not forty feet
above their heads, but still the glittering rows of red-eyed flies
gorged themselves upon the fluid of the pond. The dragonflies feasted
until they were unable to devour even a single one more of their chosen
prey. But even then they continued to sweep madly above the pool,
striking down the buzzing flies though their bodies must perforce remain
uneaten.

Some of the dead flies, crushed to pulp by the angry dragonflies,
dropped among their feasting brothers. Presently, one of them placed its
disgusting proboscis upon the mangled creature. It sipped daintily from
the contents of the broken armor. Another joined it and another. In a
little while a cluster of them pushed against each other for a chance to
join them in a cannibalistic feast.

Burl turned aside and went on, leaving the dragonflies still at their
massacre and the flies absorbed and ecstatic at their feast. The feast,
indeed, was improved by the rain of murdered brethren from overhead.

Only a few miles farther on, Burl came upon a familiar landmark. He knew
it well, but had always kept at a safe distance from it. A mass of rock
had heaved itself up from the almost level plain over which he traveled
to form an out-jutting cliff. At one point the rock overhung, forming an
inverted ledge--a roof over nothingness--which had been preempted by a
hairy monster and made into a fairy-like dwelling. A white hemisphere
clung to the rock, firmly anchored by long cables.

Burl knew the place as one to be feared. A clotho spider had built
itself a nest there, from which it emerged to hunt the unwary. Within
the silken globe was a monstrosity, resting upon cushions of softest
silk. The exterior had been beautiful once. But if one went too near one
of the little inverted arches seemingly closed by panels of silk--it
would open and out would rush a creature from a dream of hell.

Surely Burl knew this place. Hung upon the walls of the fairy palace
were trophies. They had a purpose, of course. Stones and boulders hung
there, too, to hold the structure firm against the storm-winds that
rarely blew. But amid the stones and fragments of insect-armor there was
a very special decoration: the shrunken, dessicated skeleton of a man.

The death of that man had saved Burl's life two years before. They had
been together, seeking a new source of edible mushroom. The clotho
spider was a hunter, not a spinner of webs. It had sprung suddenly from
behind a great puffball as the two men froze in horror. Then it had come
forward and deliberately chosen its victim. It did not choose Burl.

Now he looked with half-frightened speculation at the lair of his
ancient enemy. Some day, perhaps....

But now he passed on. He went past the thicket in which the great moths
hid by day, past the slimy pool in which something unknown but terrible
lurked. He penetrated the little forest of mushrooms that glowed at
night and the place where the truffle-hunting beetles chirped
thunderously during the dark hours.

And then he saw Saya. He caught a flash of pink skin vanishing behind a
squat toadstool, and he ran forward calling her name. She emerged, and
saw the figure with the horrible bulk of the spider on its back. She
cried out in horror, and Burl understood. He let his burden fall,
running swiftly to her.

They met. Saya waited timidly until she saw who this man was, and then
she was astounded indeed. With golden plumes rising from his head, a
velvet cloak about his shoulders, blue moth-fur about his middle, and a
spear in his hand--and a dead spider behind him!--this was not the Burl
she had known.

He took her hands, babbling proudly. She stared at him and at his
victim--but the language of men had diminished sadly--struggling to
comprehend. Presently her eyes glowed. She pulled at his wrists.

When they found the other tribesmen, they were carrying the dead spider
between them, Saya looking more proud than Burl.




_5. MEAT OF MAN'S KILLING!_


In their climb up from savagery, the principal handicap from which men
have always suffered is the fact that they are human. Or it can be said
that human beings always have to struggle against the obstacle which is
simply that they are men. To Burl his splendid return to the tribe
called for a suitable reaction. He expected them to take note that he
was remarkable, unparalleled, and in all ways admirable. He expected
them to look at him with awe. He rather hoped that the sight of him
would involve something like ecstasy.

And as a matter of fact, it did. For fully an hour they gathered around
him while he used his--and their--scanty vocabulary to tell them of his
unique achievements and adventures during the past two days and nights.
They listened attentively and with appropriate admiration and vicarious
pride.

This in itself was a step upward. Mostly their talk was of where food
might be found and where danger lurked. Strictly practical data
connected with the pressing business of getting enough to eat and
staying alive. The sheer pressure of existence was so great that the
humans Burl knew had altogether abandoned such luxuries as boastful
narrative. They had given up tradition. They did not think of art in
even its most primitive forms, and the only craft they knew was the
craftiness which promoted simple survival. So for them to listen to a
narrative which did not mean either food or even a lessening of danger
to themselves was a step upward on the cultural scale.

But they were savages. They inspected the dead spider, shuddering. It
was pure horror. They did not touch it--the adults not at all, and even
Dik and Tet not for a very long time. Nobody thought of spiders as food.
Too many of them had been spiders' food.

But presently even the horror aroused by the spider palled. The younger
children quailed at sight of it, of course; but the adults came to
ignore it. Only the two gangling boys tried to break off a furry leg
with which to charge and terrify the younger ones still further. They
failed to get it loose because they did not think of cutting it. But
they had nothing to cut it with anyhow.

Old Jon went wheezing off, foraging. He waved a hand to Burl as he went.
Burl was indignant. But it was true that he had brought back no food.
And people must eat.

Tama went off, her tongue clacking, with Lona the half-grown girl to
help her find and bring back something edible. Dor, the strongest man in
the tribe, went away to look where he thought there might be edible
mushrooms full-grown again. Cori left with her children--very carefully
on watch for danger to them--to see what she could find.

In little more than an hour Burl's audience had diminished to Saya.
Within two hours ants found the spider where it had been placed for the
tribe to admire. Within three hours there was nothing left of it. During
the fourth hour--as Burl struggled to dredge up some new, splendid item
to tell Saya for the tenth time, or thereabouts--during the fourth hour
one of the tribeswomen beckoned to Saya. She left with a flashing
backward smile for Burl. She went, actually, to help dig up underground
fungi--much like truffles--discovered by the older woman. She
undoubtedly expected to share them with Burl.

But in five hours it was night and Burl was very indignant with his
tribesfolk. They had shifted the location of the hiding-place for the
night, and nobody had thought to tell him. And if Saya wished to come
for Burl, to lead him to that place, she did not dare for the simple
reason that it was night.

For a long time after he found a hiding-place, Burl fumed bitterly to
himself. He was very much of a human being, differing from his
fellows--so far--mainly because he had been through experiences not
shared by them. He had resolved a subjective dilemma of sorts by
determining to return to his tribe. He had discovered a weapon which, at
first, had promised--and secured--foodstuff, and later had saved him
from a tarantula. His discovery that fish-oil was useful when applied to
spider-snares and things sticking to the feet was of vast importance to
the tribe. Most remarkable of all, he had deliberately killed a spider.
And he had experienced triumph. Temporarily he had even experienced
admiration.

The adulation was a thing which could never be forgotten. Human
appetites are formed by human experiences. One never had an appetite for
a thing one has not known in some fashion. But no human being who has
known triumph is ever quite the same again, and anybody who has once
been admired by his fellows is practically ruined for life--at least so
far as being independent of admiration is concerned.

So during the dark hours, while the slow rain dipped in separate, heavy
drops from the sky, Burl first coddled his anger--which was a very good
thing for a member of a race grown timorous and furtive--and then began
to make indignant plans to force his tribesmen to yield him more of the
delectable sensations he alone had begun to know.

He was not especially comfortable during the night. The hiding-place he
had chosen was not water-tight. Water trickled over him for several
hours before he discovered that his cloak, though it would not keep him
dry--which it would have done if properly disposed--would still keep the
same water next to his skin where his body could warm it. Then he slept.
When morning came he felt singularly refreshed. For a savage, he was
unusually clean, too.

He woke before dawn with vainglorious schemes in his head. The sky grew
gray and then almost white. The overhanging cloud bank seemed almost to
touch the earth, but gradually withdrew. The mist among the
mushroom-forests grew thinner, and the slow rain ceased reluctantly.
When he peered from his hiding-place, the mad world he knew was, as far
as he could see, quite mad, as usual. The last of the night-insects had
vanished. The day-creatures began to venture out.

Not too far from the crevice where he'd hidden was an ant-hill,
monstrous by standards on other planets. It was piled up not of sand but
gravel and small boulders. Burl saw a stirring. At a certain spot the
smooth, outer surface crumbled and fell into an invisible opening. A
spot of darkness appeared. Two slender, thread-like antennae popped out.
They withdrew and popped out again. The spot enlarged until there was a
sizeable opening. An ant appeared, one of the warrior-ants of this
particular breed. It stood fiercely over the opening, waving its
antennae agitatedly as if striving to sense some danger to its
metropolis.

He was fourteen inches long, this warrior, and his mandibles were fierce
and strong. After a moment, two other warriors thrust past him. They ran
about the whole extent of the ant-hill, their legs clicking, antennae
waving restlessly.

They returned, seeming to confer with the first, then went back down
into the city with every appearance of satisfaction. As if they made a
properly reassuring report, within minutes afterward, a flood of black,
ill-smelling workers poured out of the opening and dispersed about
their duties.

The city of the ants had begun its daily toil. There were deep galleries
underground here: graineries, storage-vaults, refectories, and
nurseries, and even a royal apartment in which the queen-ant reposed.
She was waited upon by assiduous courtiers, fed by royal stewards, and
combed and caressed by the hands of her subjects and children. A dozen
times larger than her loyal servants, she was no less industrious than
they in her highly specialized fashion. From the time of waking to the
time of rest she was queen-mother in the most literal imaginable sense.
At intervals, to be measured only in minutes, she brought forth an egg,
perhaps three inches in length, which was whisked away to the municipal
nursery. And this constant, insensate increase in the population of the
city made all its frantic industry at once possible and necessary.

Burl came out and spread his cloak on the ground. In a little while he
felt a tugging at it. An ant was tearing off a bit of the hem. Burl slew
the ant angrily and retreated. Twice within the next half-hour he had to
move swiftly to avoid foragers who would not directly attack him because
he was alive--unless he seemed to threaten danger--but who lusted after
the fabric of his garments.

This annoyance--and Burl would merely have taken it as a thing to be
accepted a mere two days before--this annoyance added to Burl's
indignation with the world about him. He was in a very bad temper indeed
when he found old Jon, wheezing as he checked on the possibility of
there being edible mushrooms in a thicket of poisonous, pink-and-yellow
amanitas.

Burl haughtily commanded Jon to follow him. Jon's untidy whiskers parted
as his mouth dropped open in astonishment. Burl's tribe was so far from
being really a tribe that for anybody to give a command was astonishing.
There was no social organization, absolutely no tradition of command.
As a rule life was too uncertain for anybody to establish authority.

But Jon followed Burl as he stamped on through the morning mist. He saw
a small movement and shouted imperatively. This was appalling! Men did
not call attention to themselves! He gathered up Dor, the strongest of
the men. Later, he found Jak who some day would wear an expression of
monkey-like wisdom. Then Tet and Dik, the half-grown boys, came trooping
to see what was happening.

Burl led onward. A quarter of a mile and they came upon a great, gutted
shell which had been a rhinoceros beetle the day before. Today it was a
disassembled mass of chitinous armor. Burl stopped, frowning
portentously. He showed his quaking followers how to arm themselves. Dor
picked up the horn hesitantly, Burl showing him how to use it. He
stabbed out awkwardly with the sharp fragment of armor. Burl showed
others how to use the leg-sections for clubs. They tested them without
conviction. In any sort of danger, they would trust to their legs and a
frantically effective gift for hiding.

Burl snarled at his tribesmen and led them on. It was unprecedented. But
because of that fact there was no precedent for rebellion. Burl led them
in a curve. They glanced all about apprehensively.

When they came to an unusually large and attractive clump of golden
edible mushrooms, there were murmurings. Old Jon was inclined to go and
load himself and retire to some hiding-place for as long as the food
lasted. But Burl snarled again.

Numbly they followed on--Dor and Jon and Jak and the two youngsters. The
ground inclined upward. They came upon puffballs. There was a new kind
visible, colored a lurid red, that did not grow like the others. It
seemed to begin and expand underground, then thrust away the soil above
in its development. Its taut, angry-red parchment envelope seemed to
swell from a reservoir of subterranean material. Burl and the others had
never seen anything like it.

They climbed higher. As other edible mushrooms came into view Burl's
followers cheered visibly. This was a new tribal ground anyhow and it
had not been fully explored. But Burl was leading them to quantities of
food they had never suspected before.

Quaintly, it was Burl himself who began to feel an uncomfortable dryness
in his throat. He knew what he was about. His followers did not suspect
because to them what he intended was simply inconceivable. They couldn't
suspect it because they couldn't imagine anybody doing such a thing. It
simply couldn't be thought of at all.

It is rather likely that Burl began to regret that he had thought of it.
It had come to him first as an angry notion in the night. Then the idea
had developed as a suitable punishment for his abandonment. By dawn it
was an ambition so terrifying that it fascinated him. Now he was
committed to it in his own mind, and the only way to keep his knees from
knocking together was to keep moving. If his followers had protested
now, he would have allowed himself to be persuaded. But he heard more
pleased murmurs. There was more edible stuff, in quantity. But there
were no ant-trails here, no sounds of foraging beetles. This was an area
which Burl's tribesmen could clearly see was almost devoid of dangerous
life. They seemed to brighten a little. This, they seemed to think,
would be a good place to move to.

But Burl knew better. There were few ground-insects here because the
area was hunted out. And Burl knew what had done the hunting.

He expected the others to realize where they were when they dodged
around a clump of the new red puffballs and saw bald rock before them
and a falling-away to emptiness beyond. Even then they could have
retreated, but it did not enter their heads that Burl could do anything
like this.

They didn't know where they were until Burl held up his hand for silence
almost at the edge of the rock-knob which rose a hundred feet sheer,
curving out a little near its top. They looked out uncomprehendingly at
the mist-filled air and the nightmare landscape fading into its
grayness. A tiny spider, the very youngest of hatchlings and barely four
inches across, stealthily stalked another vastly smaller mite. The other
was the many-legged larva of the oil-beetle. The larva itself had been
called--on other planets by other men--the bee-louse. It could easily
hide in the thick furl of a giant bumble-bee. But this one small
creature never practiced that ability. The hatchling spider sprang and
the small midge died. When the spider had grown and, being grown, spun a
web, it would slay great crickets with the same insane ferocity.

Burl's followers saw first this and then certain three-quarter-inch
strands of dirty silk that came up over the edge of the precipice. As
one man after another realized where he was, he trembled violently. Dor
turned gray. Jon and Jak were paralyzed with horror. They couldn't run.

Seeing the others even more frightened than himself filled Burl with a
wholly unwarranted courage. When he opened his mouth, they cringed. If
he shouted then at least one, more likely several, of them would die.

And this was because some forty or fifty feet down the mould-speckled
precipice hung a drab-white object nearly hemispherical, some six feet
in its half-diameter. A number of little semi-circular doors were fixed
about its sides like arches. Though each one seemed to be a doorway,
only one would open.

The thing had been oddly beautiful at first glance. It was held fast to
the inward-sloping stone by cables, one or two of which stretched down
toward the ground. Others reached up over the precipice-edge to hold it
fast. It was a most unusual engineering feat, yet something more than
that: this was also an ogre's castle. Ghastly trophies were fastened to
the outer walls and hung by silken cords below it. Here was the hind-leg
of one of the smaller beetles, there the wing-case of a flying creature.
Here a snail-shell--the snails of Earth would hardly have recognized
their descendant--and there a boulder weighing forty pounds or more. The
shrunken head-armor of a beetle, the fierce jaws of a cricket, the
pitiful shreds of dozens of creatures--all had once provided meals for
the monster in the castle. And dangling by the longest cord of all was
the shrunken, shriveled body of a long-dead man.

Burl glared at his tribesmen, clamping his jaws tight lest they chatter.
He knew, as did the others, that any noise would bring the clotho spider
swinging up its anchor-cables to the cliff-top. The men didn't dare
move. But every one of them--and Burl was among the foremost--knew that
inside the half-dome of gruesome relics the monster reposed in luxury
and ease. It had eight furry, attenuated legs and a face that was a mask
of horror. The eyes glittered malevolently above needle-sharp mandibles.
It was a hunting-spider. At any moment it might leave the charnel-house
in which it lived to stalk and pursue prey.

Burl motioned the others forward. He led one of them to the end of a
cable where it curled up over the edge for an anchorage. He ripped the
end free--and his flesh crawled as he did so. He found a boulder and
knotted the end of the cable about it. In a whisper that imitated a
spider's ferocity, Burl gave the man orders. He plucked a second quaking
tribesman by the arm. With the jerky, uncontrolled movements of a robot,
Dor allowed himself to be led to a second cable.

Burl commanded in a frenzy. He worked with stiff fingers and a dry
throat, not knowing how he could do this thing. He had formed a plan in
anger which he somehow was carrying out in a panic. Although his
followers were as responsive as dead men, they obeyed him because they
felt like dead men, unable to resist. After all, it was simple enough.
There were boulders at the top of the precipice and silken cables hung
taut over the edge. As Burl fastened a heavy boulder to each cable he
could find, he loosened the silken strand until it hung tight only at
the very edge of the more-than-vertical fall.

He took his post--and his followers gazed at him with the despairing
eyes of zombies--and made a violent, urgent gesture. One man dumped his
boulder over the precipice's edge. Burl cried out shrilly to the others,
half-mad with his own terror. There was a ripping sound. The other men
dumped their boulders over, fleeing with the movement--the paralysis of
horror relieved by that one bit of exertion.

Burl could not flee. He panted and gasped, but he had to see. He stared
down the dizzy wall. Boulders ripped and tore their way down the
cliff-wall, pulling the cables loose from the face of the precipice.
They shot out into space and jerked violently at the half-globular nest,
ripping it loose from its anchorage.

Burl cried out exultantly. And as he cried out the shout became a
bubbling sound; for although the ogre's silken castle did swing clear,
it did not drop the sixty feet to the hard ground below. There was one
cable Burl had missed, hidden by rock-tripe and mould in a depressed
part of the cliff-top. The spider's house was dangling crazily by that
one strand, bobbing erratically to and fro in mid-air.

And there was a convulsive struggle inside it. One of the arch-doors
opened and the spider emerged. It was doubtless confused, but spiders
simply do not know terror. Their one response to the unusual is
ferocity. There was still one cable leading up the cliff-face--the
thing's normal climbing-rope to its hunting-ground above. The spider
leaped for this single cable. Its legs grasped the cord. It swarmed
upward, poison fangs unsheathed, mandibles clashing in rage. The shaggy
hair of its body seemed to bristle with insane ferocity. The skinny
articulated legs fairly twinkled as it rose. It made slavering noises,
unspeakably horrifying.

Burl's followers were already in panic-stricken flight. He could hear
them crashing through obstacles as they ran glassy-eyed from the horror
they only imagined, but which Burl could not but encounter. Burl
shivered, his body poised for equally frenzied but quite hopeless
flight. But his first step was blocked. There was a boulder behind him,
standing on end, reaching up to his knee. He could not take the first
step without dodging it.

It was not the Burl of the terror-filled childhood who acted then. It
was the throw-back, the atavism to a bolder ancestry. While the Burl who
was a product of his environment was able to know only the stunned
sensations of purest panic, the other Burl acted on a sounder basis of
desperation. The emerging normal human seized the upright boulder. He
staggered to the rock-face with it. He dumped it down the line of the
descending cable.

Humans do have ancestral behavior-patterns built into their nervous
systems. A frightened small child does not flee; it swarms up the
nearest adult to be carried away from danger. At ten a child does not
climb but runs. And there is an age when it is normal for a man to stand
at bay. This last instinct can be conditioned away. In Burl's fellows
and his immediate forbears it had been. But things had happened to Burl
to break that conditioning.

He flung the pointed boulder down. For the fraction of a second he heard
only the bubbling, gnashing sounds the spider made as it climbed toward
him. Then there was a quite indescribable cushioned impact. After that,
there were seconds in which Burl heard nothing whatever--and then a
noise which could not be described either, but was the impact of the
spider's body on the ground a hundred feet below, together with the
pointed boulder it had fought insanely during all its fall. And the
boulder was on top. The noise was sickening.

Burl found himself shaking all over. His every muscle was tense and
strained. But the spider did not crawl over the edge of the precipice
and something had hit far below.

A long minute later he managed to look.

The nest still dangled at the end of the single cable, festooned with
its gruesome trophies. But Burl saw the spider. It was, of course,
characteristically tenacious of life. Its legs writhed and kicked, but
the body was crushed and mangled.

As Burl stared down, trying to breathe again, an ant drew near the
shattered creature. It stridulated. Other ants came. They hovered
restlessly at the edge of the death-scene. One loathesome leg did not
quiver. An ant moved in on it.

The ants began to tear the dead spider apart, carrying its fragments to
their city a mile away.

Up on the cliff-top Burl got unsteadily to his feet and found that he
could breathe. He was drenched in sweat, but the shock of triumph was as
overwhelming as any of the terrors felt by ancestors on this planet.

On no other planet in the Galaxy could any human experience such triumph
as Burl felt now because never before had human beings been so
completely subjugated by their environment. On no other planet had such
an environment existed, with humans flung so helplessly upon its mercy.

Burl had been normal among his fellows when he was as frightened and
furtive as they. Now he had been given shock treatment by fate. He was
very close to normal for a human being newly come to the forgotten
planet, save that he had the detailed information which would enable a
normal man to cope with the nightmare environment. What he lacked now
was the habit.

But it would be intolerable for him to return to his former state of
mind.

He walked almost thoughtfully after his fled followers. And he was
still a savage in that he was remarkably matter-of-fact. He paused to
break off a huge piece of the edible golden mushrooms his fellow-men had
noticed on the way up. Lugging it easily, he went back down over the
ground that had looked so astonishingly free of inimical life--which it
was because of the spider that had used it as a hunting-preserve.

Burl began to see that it was not satisfactory to be one of a tribe of
men who ran away all the time. If one man with a spear or stone could
kill spiders, it was ridiculous for half a dozen men to run away and
leave that one man the job alone. It made the job harder.

It occurred to Burl that he had killed ants without thinking too much
about it, but nobody else had. Individual ants could be killed. If he
got his followers to kill foot-long ants, they might in time battle the
smaller, two-foot beetles. If they came to dare so much, they might
attack greater creatures and ultimately attempt to resist the real
predators.

Not clearly but very dimly, the Burl who had been shocked back to the
viewpoint which was normal to the race of men saw that human beings
could be more than the fugitive vermin on which other creatures preyed.
It was not easy to envision, but he found it impossible to imagine
sinking back to his former state. As a practical matter, if he was to
remain as leader his tribesmen would have to change.

It was a long time before he reached the neighborhood of the
hiding-place of which he had not been told the night before. He sniffed
and listened. Presently he heard faint, murmurous noises. He traced
them, hearing clearly the sound of hushed weeping and excited, timid
chattering. He heard old Tama shrilly bewailing fate and the stupidity
of Burl in getting himself killed.

He pushed boldly through the toadstool-growth and found his tribe all
gathered together and trembling. They were shaken. They chattered
together--not discussing or planning, but nervously recalling the
terrifying experience they had gone through.

Burl stepped through the screen of fungi and men gaped at him. Then they
leaped up to flee, thinking he might be pursued. Tet and Dik babbled
shrilly. Burl cuffed them. It was an excellent thing for him to do. No
man had struck another man in Burl's memory. Cuffings were reserved for
children. But Burl cuffed the men who had fled from the cliff-edge. And
because they had not been through Burl's experiences, they took the
cuffings like children.

He took Jon and Jak by the ear and heaved them out of the hiding-place.
He followed them, and then drove them to where they could see the base
of the cliff from whose top they had tumbled stones--and then run away.
He showed them the carcass of the spider, now being carted away
piecemeal by ants. He told them angrily how it had been killed.

They looked at him fearfully.

He was exasperated. He scowled at them. And then he saw them shifting
uneasily. There were clickings. A single, foraging black ant--rather
large, quite sixteen inches long--moved into view. It seemed to be
wandering purposelessly, but was actually seeking carrion to take back
to its fellows. It moved toward the men. They were alive, therefore, it
did not think of them as food--though it could regard them as enemies.

Burl moved forward and struck with his club. It was butchery. It was
unprecedented. When the creature lay still he commanded one of his typo
for followers to take it up. Inside its armored legs there would be
meat. He mentioned the fact, pungently. Their faces expressed amazed
wonderment.

There was another clicking. Another solitary ant. Burl handed his club
to Dor, pushing him forward. Dor hesitated. Though he was not afraid of
one wandering ant, he held back uneasily. Burl barked at him.

Dor struck clumsily and botched the job. Burl had to use his spear to
finish it. But a second bit of prey lay before the men.

Then, quite suddenly, this completely unprecedented form of foraging
became understandable to Burl's followers. Jak giggled nervously.

An hour later Burl led them back to the tribe's hiding-place. The others
had been terror-stricken, not knowing where the men had gone. But their
terror changed to mute amazement when the men carried huge quantities of
meat and edible mushroom into the hiding-place. The tribe held what
amounted to a banquet.

Dik and Tet swaggered under a burden of ant-carcass. This was not, of
course, in any way revolting. Back on Earth, even thousands of years
before, Arabs had eaten locusts cooked in butter and salted. All men had
eaten crabs and other crustaceans, whose feeding habits were similar to
those of ants. If Burl and his tribesmen had thought to be fastidious,
ants on the forgotten planet would still have been considered edible,
since they had not lost the habits of extreme cleanliness which made
them notable on Earth.

This feast of all the tribe, in which men had brought back not only
mushroom to be eaten, but actual prey--small prey--of their hunting, was
very probably the first such occasion in at least thirty generations of
the forty-odd since the planet's unintended colonization. Like the other
events, which began with Burl trying to spear a fish with a
rhinoceros-beetle's horn, it was not only novel, on that world, but
would in time have almost incredibly far-reaching consequences. Perhaps
the most significant thing about it was its timing. It came at very
nearly the latest instant at which it could have done any good.

There was a reason which nobody in the tribe would ever remember to
associate with the significance of this banquet. A long time
before--months in terms of Earth-time--there had been a strong breeze
that blew for three days and nights. It was an extremely unusual
windstorm. It had seemed the stranger, then, because during all its
duration everyone in the tribe had been sick, suffering continuously.
When the windstorm had ended, the suffering ceased. A long time passed
and nobody remembered it any longer.

There was no reason why they should. Yet, since that time there had been
a new kind of thing growing among the innumerable moulds and rusts and
toadstools of the lowlands. Burl had seen them on his travels, and the
expeditionary force against the clotho spider had seen them on the
journey up to the cliff-edge. Red puffballs, developing first
underground, were now pushing the soil aside to expose taut, crimson
parchment spheres to the open air. The tribesmen left them alone because
they were strange; and strange things were always dangerous. Puffballs
they were familiar with--big, misshapen things which shot at a touch a
powder into the air. The particles of powder were spores--the seed from
which they grew. Spores had remained infinitely small even on the
forgotten planet where fungi grew huge. Only their capacity for growth
had increased. The red growths were puffballs, but of a new and
different kind.

As the tribe ate and admired, the hunters boasting of their courage, one
of the new red mushrooms reached maturity.

This particular growing thing was perhaps two feet across, its main part
spherical. Almost eighteen inches of the thing rose above-ground. A
tawny and menacing red, the sphere was contained in a parchment-like
skin that was pulled taut. There was internal tension. But the skin was
tough and would not yield, yet the inexorable pressure of life within
demanded that it stretch. It was growing within, but the skin without
had ceased to grow.

This one happened to be on a low hillside a good half-mile from the
place where Burl and his fellows banqueted. Its tough, red parchment
skin was tensed unendurably. Suddenly it ripped apart with an explosive
tearing noise. The dry spores within billowed out and up like the smoke
of a shell-explosion, spurting skyward for twenty feet and more. At the
top of their ascent they spread out and eddied like a cloud of reddish
smoke. They hung in the air. They drifted in the sluggish breeze. They
spread as they floated, forming a gradually extending, descending
dust-cloud in the humid air.

A bee, flying back toward its hive, droned into the thin mass of dust.
It was preoccupied. The dust-cloud was not opaque, but only a thick
haze. The bee flew into it.

For half a dozen wing-beats nothing happened. Then the bee veered
sharply. Its deep-toned humming rose in pitch. It made convulsive
movements in mid-air. It lost balance and crashed heavily to the ground.
There its legs kicked and heaved violently but without purpose. The
wings beat furiously but without rhythm or effect. Its body bent in
paroxysmic flexings. It stung blindly at nothing.

After a little while the bee died. Like all insects, bees breathe
through spiracles--breathing-holes in their abdomens. This bee had flown
into the cloud of red dust which was the spore-cloud of the new
mushrooms.

The cloud drifted slowly along over the surface of yeasts and moulds,
over toadstools and variegated fungus monstrosities. It moved steadily
over a group of ants at work upon some bit of edible stuff. They were
seized with an affliction like that of the bee. They writhed, moved
convulsively. Their legs thrashed about. They died.

The cloud of red dust settled as it moved. By the time it had travelled
a quarter-mile, it had almost all settled to the ground.

But a half-mile away there was another skyward-spurting uprush of red
dust which spread slowly with the breeze. A quarter-mile away another
plumed into the air. Farther on, two of them spouted their spores toward
the clouds almost together.

Living things that breathed the red dust writhed and died. And the
red-dust puffballs were scattered everywhere.

Burl and his tribesmen feasted, chattering in hushed tones of the
remarkable fact that men ate meat of their own killing.




_6. RED DUST_


It was very fortunate indeed that the feast took place when it did. Two
days later it would probably have been impossible, and three days later
it would have been too late to do any good. But coming when it did, it
made the difference which was all the difference in the world.

Only thirty hours after the feasting which followed the death of the
clotho spider, Burl's fellows--from Jon to Dor to Tet and Dik and
Saya--had come to know a numb despair which the other creatures of his
world were simply a bit too stupid to achieve.

It was night. There was darkness over all the lowlands, and over all the
area of perhaps a hundred square miles which the humans of Burl's
acquaintance really knew. He, alone of his tribe, had been as much as
forty miles from the foraging-ground over which they wandered. At any
given time the tribe clung together for comfort, venturing only as far
as was necessary to find food. Although the planet possessed continents,
they knew less than a good-sized county of it. The planet owned oceans,
and they knew only small brooks and one river which, where they knew it,
was assuredly less than two hundred yards across. And they faced stark
disaster that was not strictly a local one, but beyond their experience
and hopelessly beyond their ability to face.

They were superior to the insects about them only in the fact they
realized what was threatening them.

The disaster was the red puffballs.

But it was night. The soft, blanketing darkness of a cloud-wrapped world
lay all about. Burl sat awake, wrapped in his magnificent velvet cloak,
his spear beside him and the yard-long golden plumes of a moth's
antennae bound to his forehead for a headdress. About him and his
tribesmen were the swollen shapes of fungi, hiding the few things that
could be seen in darkness. From the low-hanging clouds the nightly rain
dripped down. Now a drop and then another drop; slowly, deliberately,
persistently moisture fell from the skies.

There was other sounds. Things flew through the blackness
overhead--moths with mighty wing-beats that sometimes sent rhythmic
wind-stirrings down to the tribe in its hiding-place. There were the
deep pulsations of sound made by night-beetles aloft. There were the
harsh noises of grasshoppers--they were rare--senselessly advertising
their existence to nearby predators. Not too far from where Burl brooded
came bright chirrupings where relatively small beetles roamed among the
mushroom-forests, singing cheerfully in deep bass voices. They were
searching for the underground tidbits which took the place of truffles
their ancestors had lived on back on Earth.

All seemed to be as it had been since the first humans were cast away
upon this planet. And at night, indeed, the new danger subsided. The red
puffballs did not burst after sunset. Burl sat awake, brooding in a new
sort of frustration. He and all his tribe were plainly doomed--yet Burl
had experienced too many satisfying sensations lately to be willing to
accept the fact.

The new red growths were everywhere. Months ago a storm-wind blew while
somewhere, not too far distant, other red puffballs were bursting and
sending their spores into the air. Since it was only a windstorm, there
was no rain to wash the air clean of the lethal dust. The new kind of
puffball--but perhaps it was not new: it could have thriven for
thousands of years where it was first thrown as a sport from a
genetically unstable parent--the new kind of puffball would not normally
be spread in this fashion. By chance it had.

There were dozens of the things within a quarter-mile, hundreds within a
mile, and thousands upon thousands within the area the tribe normally
foraged in. Burl had seen them even forty miles away, as yet immature.
They would be deadly at one period alone--the time of their bursting.
But there were limitations even to the deadliness of the red puffballs,
though Burl had not yet discovered the fact. But as of now, they doomed
the tribe.

One woman panted and moaned in her exhausted sleep, a little way from
where Burl tried to solve the problem presented by the tribe. Nobody
else attempted to think it out. The others accepted doom with fatalistic
hopelessness. Burl's leadership might mean extra food, but nothing could
counter the doom awaiting them--so their thoughts seemed to run.

But Burl doggedly reviewed the facts in the darkness, while the humans
about him slept the sleep of those without hope and even without
rebellion. There had been many burstings of the crimson puffballs. As
many as four and five of the deadly dust-clouds had been seen spouting
into the air at the same time. A small boy of the tribe had breathlessly
told of seeing a hunting-spider killed by the red dust. Lana, the
half-grown girl, had come upon one of the gigantic rhinoceros-beetles
belly-up on the ground, already the prey of ants. She had snatched a
huge, meat-filled joint and run away, faster than the ants could follow.
A far-ranging man had seen a butterfly, with wings ten yards across, die
in a dust-cloud. Another woman--Cori--had been nearby when a red cloud
settled slowly over long, solid lines of black worker-ants bound on some
unknown mission. Later she saw other workers carrying the dead bodies
back to the ant-city to be used for food.

Burl still sat wakeful and frustrated and enraged as the slow rain fell
upon the toadstools that formed the tribe's lurking-place. He doggedly
went over and over the problem. There were innumerable red puffballs.
Some had burst. The others undoubtedly would burst. Anything that
breathed the red dust died. With thousands of the puffballs around them
it was unthinkable that any human in this place could escape breathing
the red dust and dying. But it had not always been so. There had been a
time when there were no red puffballs here.

Burl's eyes moved restlessly over the sleeping forms limned by a patch
of fox-fire. The feathery plumes rising from his head were outlined
softly by the phosphorescence. His face was lined with a frown as he
tried to think his own and his fellows' way out of the predicament.
Without realizing it, Burl had taken it upon himself to think for his
tribe. He had no reason to. It was simply a natural thing for him to do
so, now that he had learned to think--even though his efforts were crude
and painful as yet.

Saya woke with a start and stared about. There had been no
alarm,--merely the usual noises of distant murders and the songs of
singers in the night. Burl moved restlessly. Saya stood up quietly, her
long hair flowing about her. Sleepy-eyed, she moved to be near Burl. She
sank to the ground beside him, sitting up--because the hiding-place was
crowded and small--and dozed fitfully. Presently her head drooped to one
side. It rested against his shoulder. She slept again.

This simple act may have been the catalyst which gave Burl the solution
to the problem. Some few days before, Burl had been in a far-away place
where there was much food. At the time he'd thought vaguely of finding
Saya and bringing her to that place. He remembered now that the red
puffballs flourished there as well as here--but there had been other
dangers in between, so the only half-formed purpose had been abandoned.
Now, though, with Saya's head resting against his shoulder, he
remembered the plan. And then the stroke of genius took place.

He formed the idea of a journey which was not a going-after-food. This
present dwelling-place of the tribe had been free of red puffballs until
only recently. There must be other places where there were no red
puffballs. He would take Saya and his tribesmen to such a place.

It was really genius. The people of Burl's tribe had no purposes, only
needs--for food and the like. Burl had achieved abstract thought--which
previously had not been useful on the forgotten planet and, therefore,
not practised. But it was time for humankind to take a more fitting
place in the unbalanced ecological system of this nightmare world, time
to change that unbalance in favor of humans.

When dawn came, Burl had not slept at all. He was all authority and
decision. He had made plans.

He spoke sternly, loudly--which frightened people conditioned to be
furtive--holding up his spear as he issued commands. His timid
tribesfolk obeyed him meekly. They felt no loyalty to him or confidence
in his decisions yet, but they were beginning to associate obedience to
him with good things. Food, for one.

Before the day fully came, they made loads of the remaining edible
mushroom and uneaten meat. It was remarkable for humans to leave their
hiding-place while they still had food to eat, but Burl was implacable
and scowling. Three men bore spears at Burl's urging. He brandished his
long shaft confidently as he persuaded the other three to carry clubs.
They did so reluctantly, even though previously they had killed ants
with clubs. Spears, they felt, would have been better. They wouldn't be
so close to the prey then.

The sky became gray over all its expanse. The indefinite bright area
which marked the position of the sun became established. It was part-way
toward the center of the sky when the journey began. Burl had, of
course, no determined course, only a destination--safety. He had been
carried south, in his misadventure on the river. There were red
puffballs to southward, therefore he ruled out that direction. He could
have chosen the east and come upon an ocean, but no safety from the red
spore-dust. Or he could have chosen the north. It was pure chance that
he headed west.

He walked confidently through the gruesome world of the lowlands,
holding his spear in a semblance of readiness. Clad as he was, he made a
figure at once valiant and rather pathetic. It was not too sensible for
one young man--even one who had killed two spiders--to essay leading a
tiny tribe of fearful folk across a land of monstrous ferocity and
incredible malignance, armed only with a spear from a dead insect's
armor. It was absurd to dress up for the enterprise in a velvety cloak
made of a moth's wing, blue moth-fur for a loin-cloth, and merely
beautiful golden plumes bobbing above his forehead.

Probably, though, that gorgeousness had a good effect upon his
followers. They surely could not reassure each other by their numbers!
There was a woman with a baby in her arms--Cori. Three children of nine
or ten, unable to resist the instinct to play even on so perilous a
journey, ate almost constantly of the lumps of foodstuff they had been
ordered to carry. After them came Dik, a long-legged adolescent boy with
eyes that roved anxiously about. Behind him were two men. Dor with a
short spear and Jak hefting a club, both of them badly frightened at the
idea of fleeing from dangers they knew and were terrified by, to other
dangers unknown and, consequently, more to be feared. The others trailed
after them. Tet was rear-guard. Burl had separated the pair of boys to
make them useful. Together they were worthless.

It was a pathetic caravan, in a way. In all the rest of the Galaxy, man
was the dominant creature. There was no other planet from one rim to the
other where men did not build their cities or settlements with
unconscious arrogance--completely disregarding the wishes of lesser
things. Only on this planet did men hide from danger rather than destroy
it. Only here could men be driven from their place by lower life-forms.
And only here would a migration be made on foot, with men's eyes
fearful, their bodies poised to flee at sight of something stronger and
more deadly than themselves.

They marched, straggling a little, with many waverings aside from a
fixed line. Once Dik saw the trap-door of a trapdoor-spider's lair. They
halted, trembling, and went a long way out of their intended path to
avoid it. Once they saw a great praying-mantis a good half-mile off, and
again they deviated from their proper route.

Near midday their way was blocked. As they moved onward, a great,
high-pitched sound could be heard ahead of them. Burl stopped; his face
grew pinched. But it was only a stridulation, not the cries of creatures
being devoured. It was a horde of ants by the thousands and hundreds of
thousands, and nothing else.

Burl went ahead to scout. And he did it because he did not trust anybody
else to have the courage or intelligence to return with a report,
instead of simply running away if the news were bad. But it happened to
be a sort of action which would help to establish his position as leader
of his tribe.

Burl moved forward cautiously and presently came to an elevation from
which he could see the cause of the tremendous waves of sound that
spread out in all directions from the level plain before him. He waved
to his followers to join him, and stood looking down at the
extraordinary sight.

When they reached his side--and Saya was first--the spectacle had not
diminished. For quite half a mile in either direction the earth was
black with ants. It was a battle of opposing armies from rival
ant-cities. They snapped and bit at each other. Locked in vise-like
embraces, they rolled over and over upon the ground, trampled underfoot
by hordes of their fellows who surged over them to engage in equally
suicidal combat. There was, of course, no thought of surrender or of
quarter. They fought by thousands of pairs, their jaws seeking to crush
each other's armor, snapping at each other's antennae, biting at each
other's eyes....

The noise was not like that of army-ants. This was the agonizing sound
of ants being dismembered while still alive. Some of the creatures had
only one or two or three legs left, yet struggled fiercely to entangle
another enemy before they died. There were mad cripples, fighting
insanely with head and thorax only, their abdomens sheared away. The
whining battle-cry of the multitude made a deafening uproar.

From either side of the battleground a wide path led back toward
separate ant-cities which were invisible from Burl's position. These
highways were marked by hurrying groups of ants--reinforcements rushing
to the fight. Compared to the other creatures of this world the ants
were small, but no lumbering beetle dared to march insolently in their
way, nor did any carnivores try to prey upon them. They were dangerous.
Burl and his tribesfolk were the only living things remaining near the
battle-field--with one single exception.

That exception was itself a tribe of ants, vastly less in number than
the fighting creatures, and greatly smaller in size as well. Where the
combatants were from a foot to fourteen inches long, these guerilla-ants
were no more than the third of a foot in length. They hovered
industriously at the edge of the fighting, not as allies to either
nation, but strictly on their own account. Scurrying among the larger,
fighting ants with marvelous agility, they carried off piecemeal the
bodies of the dead and valiantly slew the more gravely wounded for the
same purpose.

They swarmed over the fighting-ground whenever the tide of battle
receded. Caring nothing for the origin of the quarrel and espousing
neither side, these opportunists busily salvaged the dead and
still-living debris of the battle for their own purposes.

Burl and his followers were forced to make a two-mile detour to avoid
the battle. The passage between bodies of scurrying reinforcements was a
matter of some difficulty. Burl hurried the others past a route to the
front, reeking of formic acid, over which endless regiments and
companies of ants moved frantically to join in the fight. They were
intensely excited. Antennae waving wildly, they rushed to the front and
instantly flung themselves into the fray, becoming lost and
indistinguishable in the black mass of fighting creatures.

The humans passed precariously between two hurrying battalions--Dik and
Tet pausing briefly to burden themselves with prey--and hurried on to
leave as many miles as possible behind them before nightfall. They never
knew any more about the battle. It could have started over anything at
all--two ants from the different cities may have disputed some tiny bit
of carrion and soon been reinforced by companions until the military
might of both cities was engaged. Once it had started, of course, the
fighters knew whom to fight if not why they did so. The inhabitants of
the two cities had different smells, which served them as uniforms.

But the outcome of the war would hardly matter. Not to the fighters,
certainly. There were many red mushrooms in this area. If either of the
cities survived at all, it would be because its nursery-workers lived
upon stored food as they tended the grubs until the time of the spouting
red dust had ended.

Burl's folk saw many of the red puffballs burst during the day. More
than once they came upon empty, flaccid parchment sacs. More often still
they came upon red puffballs not yet quite ready to emit their murderous
seed.

That first night the tribe hid among the bases of giant puffballs of a
more familiar sort. When touched they would shoot out a puff of white
powder resembling smoke. The powder was harmless fortunately and the
tribe knew that fact. Although not toxic, the white powder was identical
in every other way to the terrible red dust from which the tribe fled.

That night Burl slept soundly. He had been without rest for two days and
a night. And he was experienced in journeying to remote places. He knew
that they were no more dangerous than familiar ones. But the rest of the
tribe, and even Saya, were fearful and terrified. They waited timorously
all through the dark hours for menacing sounds to crash suddenly through
the steady dripping of the nightly rain around them.

The second day's journey was not unlike the first. The following day,
they came upon a full ten-acre patch of giant cabbages bigger than a
family dwelling. Something in the soil, perhaps, favored vegetation over
fungi. The dozens of monstrous vegetables were the setting for riotous
life: great slugs ate endlessly of the huge green leaves--and things
preyed on them; bees came droning to gather the pollen of the flowers.
And other things came to prey on the predators in their turn.

There was one great cabbage somewhat separate from the rest. After a
long examination of the scene, Burl daringly led quaking Jon and Jak to
the attack. Dor splendidly attacked elsewhere, alone. When the tribe
moved on, there was much meat, and everyone--even the children--wore
loin-cloths of incredibly luxurious fur.

There were perils, too. On the fifth day of the tribe's journey Burl
suddenly froze into stillness. One of the hairy tarantulas which lived
in burrows with a concealed trap-door at ground-level, had fallen upon a
scarabeus beetle and was devouring it only a hundred yards ahead. The
tribesfolk trembled as Burl led them silently back and around by a safe
detour.

But all these experiences were beginning to have an effect. It was
becoming a matter of course that Burl should give orders which others
should obey. It was even becoming matter-of-fact that the possession of
food was not a beautiful excuse to hide from all danger, eating and
dozing until all the food was gone. Very gradually the tribe was
developing the notion that the purpose of existence was not solely to
escape awareness of peril, but to foresee and avoid it. They had no
clear-cut notion of purpose as yet. They were simply outgrowing
purposelessness. After a time they even looked about them with, dim
stirrings of an attitude other than a desperate alertness for danger.

Humans from any other planet, surely, would have been astounded at the
vistas of golden mushrooms stretching out in forests on either hand and
the plains with flaking surfaces given every imaginable color by the
moulds and rusts and tiny flowering yeasts growing upon them. They would
have been amazed by the turgid pools the journeying tribe came upon,
where the water was concealed by a thick layer of slime through which
enormous bubbles of foul-smelling gas rose to enlarge to preposterous
size before bursting abruptly.

Had they been as ill-armed as Burl's folk, though, visitors from other
planets would have been at least as timorous. Lacking highly specialized
knowledge of the ways of insects on this world even well-armed visitors
would have been in greater danger.

But the tribe went on without a single casualty. They had fleeting
glimpses of the white spokes of symmetrical spider-webs whose least
thread no member of the tribe could break.

Their immunity from disaster--though in the midst of danger--gave them a
certain all-too-human concentration upon discomfort. Lacking calamities,
they noticed their discomforts and grew weary of continual traveling. A
few of the men complained to Burl.

For answer, he pointed back along the way they had come. To the right a
reddish dust-cloud was just settling, and to the rear rose another as
they looked.

And on this day a thing happened which at once gave the complainers the
rest they asked for, and proved the fatality of remaining where they
were. A child ran aside from the path its elders were following. The
ground here had taken on a brownish hue. As the child stirred up the
surface mould with his feet, dust that had settled was raised up again.
It was far too thin to have any visible color. But the child suddenly
screamed, strangling. The mother ran frantically to snatch him up.

The red dust was no less deadly merely because it had settled to the
ground. If a storm-wind came now--but they were infrequent under the
forgotten planet's heavy bank of clouds--the fallen red dust could be
raised up again and scattered about until there would be no living thing
anywhere which would not gasp and writhe--and die.

But the child would not die. He would suffer terribly and be weak for
days. In the morning he could be carried.

When night began to darken the sky, the tribe searched for a
hiding-place. They came upon a shelf-like cliff, perhaps twenty or
thirty feet high, slanting toward the line of the tribesmen's travel.
Burl saw black spots in it--openings. Burrows. He watched them as the
tribe drew near. No bees or wasps went in or out. He watched long enough
to be sure.

When they were close, he was certain. Ordering the others to wait, he
went forward to make doubly sure. The appearance of the holes reassured
him. Dug months before by mining-bees, gone or dead now, the entrances
to the burrows were weathered and bedraggled. Burl explored, first
sniffing carefully at each opening. They were empty. This would be
shelter for the night. He called his followers, and they crawled into
the three-foot tunnels to hide.

Burl stationed himself near the outer edge of one of them to watch for
signs of danger. Night had not quite fallen. Jon and Dor, hungry, went
off to forage a little way beyond the cliff. They would be cautious and
timid, taking no risks whatever.

Burl waited for the return of his explorers. Meanwhile he fretted over
the meaning of the stricken child. Stirred-up red dust was dangerous.
The only time when there would be no peril from it would be at night,
when the dripping rainfall of the dark hours turned the surface of this
world into thin shine. It occurred to Burl that it would be safe to
travel at night, so far as the red dust was concerned. He rejected the
idea instantly. It was unthinkable to travel at night for innumerable
other reasons.

Frowning, he poked his spear idly at a tumbled mass of tiny parchment
cup-like things near the entrance of a cave. And instantly movement
became visible. Fifty, sixty, a hundred infinitesimal creatures, no more
than half an inch in length, made haste to hide themselves among the
thimble-sized paperlike cups. They moved with extraordinary clumsiness
and immense effort, seemingly only by contortions of their
greenish-black bodies. Burl had never seen any creature progress in such
a slow and ineffective fashion. He drew one of the small creatures back
with the point of his spear and examined it from a safe distance.

He picked it up on his spear and brought it close to his eyes. The thing
redoubled its frenzied movements. It slipped off the spear and plopped
upon the soft moth-fur he wore about his middle. Instantly, as if it
were a conjuring-trick, the insect vanished. Burl searched for minutes
before he found it hidden deep in the long, soft hairs of his garment,
resting motionless and seemingly at ease.

It was the larval form of a beetle, fragments of whose armor could be
seen near the base of the clayey cliffside. Hidden in the remnants of
its egg-casings, the brood of minute things had waited near the opening
of the mining-bee tunnel. It was their gamble with destiny when
mining-bee grubs had slept through metamorphosis and come uncertainly
out of the tunnel for the first time, that some or many of the larvae
might snatch the instant's chance to fasten to the bees' legs and writhe
upward to an anchorage in their fur. It happened that this particular
batch of eggs had been laid after the emergence of the grubs. They had
no possible chance of fulfilling their intended role as parasites on
insects of the order hymenoptera. They were simply and matter-of-factly
doomed by the blindness of instinct, which had caused them to be placed
where they could not possibly survive.

On the other hand, if one or many of them had found a lurking-place, the
offspring of their host would have been doomed. The place filled by
oil-beetle larvae in the scheme of things is the place--or one of the
places--reserved for creatures that limit the number of mining-bees.
When a bee-louse-infested mining-bee has made a new tunnel, stocked it
with honey for its young, and then laid one egg to float on that pool of
nourishment and hatch and feed and ultimately grow to be another
mining-bee--at that moment of egg-laying, one small bee-louse detaches
itself. It remains zestfully in the provisioned cell to devour the egg
for which the provisions were accumulated. It happily consumes those
provisions and, in time, an oil-beetle crawls out of the tunnel a
mining-bee so laboriously prepared.

Burl had no difficulty in detaching the small insect and casting it
away, but in doing so he discovered that others had hidden themselves in
his fur without his knowledge. He plucked them away and found more.
While savages can be highly tolerant of vermin too small to be seen,
they feel a peculiar revolt against serving as host to creatures of
sensible size. Burl reacted violently--as once he had reacted to the
discovery of a leech clinging to his heel. He jerked off his loin-cloth
and beat it savagely with his spear.

When it was clean, he still felt a wholly unreasonable sense of
humiliation. It was not clearly thought out, of course. Burl feared huge
insects too much to hate them. But that small creatures should fasten
upon him produced a completely irrational feeling of outrage. For the
first time in very many years or centuries a human being upon the
forgotten planet felt that he had been insulted. His dignity had been
assailed. Burl raged.

But as he raged, a triumphant shout came from nearby. Jon and Dor were
returning from their foraging, loaded down with edible mushroom. They,
also, had taken a step upward toward the natural dignity of men. They
had so far forgotten their terror as to shout in exultation at their
find of food. Up to now, Burl had been the only man daring to shout. Now
there were two others.

In his overwrought state this was also enraging. The result of hurt
vanity on two counts was jealousy, and the result of jealousy was a
crazy foolhardiness. Burl ground his teeth and insanely resolved to do
something so magnificent, so tremendous, so utterly breathtaking that
there could be no possible imitation by anybody else. His thinking was
not especially clear. Part of his motivation had been provided by the
oil-beetle larvae. He glared about him at the deepening dusk, seeking
some exploit, some glamorous feat, to perform immediately, even in the
night.

He found one.




_7. JOURNEY THROUGH DEATH_


It was late dusk and the reddened clouds overhead were deepening
steadily toward black. Dark shadows hung everywhere. The clay cliff cut
off all vision to one side, but elsewhere Burl could see outward until
the graying haze blotted out the horizon. Here and there, bees droned
homeward to hive or burrow. Sometimes a slender, graceful wasp passed
overhead, its wings invisible by the swiftness of their vibration.

A few butterflies lingered hungrily in the distance, seeking the few
things they could still feast upon. No moth had wakened yet to the
night. The cloud-bank grew more sombre. The haze seemed to close in and
shrink the world that Burl could see.

He watched, raging, for the sight that would provide him with the
triumph to end all triumphs among his followers. The soft, down-reaching
fingers of the night touched here and there and the day ended at those
spots. Then, from the heart of the deep redness to the west a flying
creature came. It was a beautiful thing--a yellow emperor
butterfly--flapping eastward with great sail-like velvet wings that
seemed black against the sunset. Burl saw it sweep across the incredible
sky, alight delicately, and disappear behind a mass of toadstools
clustered so thickly they seemed nearly a hillock and not a mass of
growing things.

Then darkness closed in completely, but Burl still stared where the
yellow emperor had landed. There was that temporary, utter quiet when
day-things were hidden and night-things had not yet ventured out.
Fox-fire glowed. Patches of pale phosphorescence--luminous
mushrooms--shone faintly in the dark.

Presently Burl moved through the night. He could imagine the yellow
emperor in its hiding-place, delicately preening slender limbs before it
settled down to rest until the new day dawned. He had noted landmarks,
to guide himself. A week earlier and his blood would have run cold at
the bare thought of doing what he did now. In mere cool-headed
detachment he would have known that what he did was close to madness.
But he was neither cool-headed nor detached.

He crossed the clear ground before the low cliff. But for the fox-fire
beacons he would have been lost instantly. The slow drippings of rain
began. The sky was dead black. Now was the time for night-things to fly,
and male tarantulas to go seeking mates and prey. It was definitely no
time for adventuring.

Burl moved on. He found the close-packed toadstools by the process of
running into them in the total obscurity. He fumbled, trying to force
his way between them. It could not be done; they grew too close and too
low. He raged at this impediment. He climbed.

This was insanity. Burl stood on spongy mushroom-stuff that quivered and
yielded under his weight. Somewhere something boomed upward, rising on
fast-beating wings into blackness. He heard the pulsing drone of
four-inch mosquitos close by. He moved forward, the fungus support
swaying, so that he did not so much walk as stagger over the
close-packed mushroom heads. He groped before him with spear and panted
a little. There was a part of him which was bitterly afraid, but he
raged the more furiously because if once he gave way even to caution, it
would turn to panic.

Burl would have made a strange spectacle in daylight gaudily clothed as
he was in soft blue fur and velvet cloak, staggering over swaying
insecurity, coddling ferocity in himself against the threat of fear.

Then his spear told him there was emptiness ahead. Something moved,
below. He heard and felt it stirring the toadstool-stalks on which he
stood.

Burl raised his spear, grasping it in both hands. He plunged down with
it, stabbing fiercely.

The spear struck something vastly more resistant than any mushroom could
be. It penetrated. Then the stabbed thing moved as Burl landed upon it,
flinging him off his feet, but he clung to the firmly imbedded weapon.
And if his mouth had opened for a yell of victory as he plunged down,
the nature of the surface on which he found himself, and the kind of
movement he felt, turned that yell into a gasp of horror.

It wasn't the furry body of a butterfly he had landed on; his spear
hadn't pierced such a creature's soft flesh. He had leaped upon the
broad, hard back of a huge, meat-eating, nocturnal beetle. His spear had
pierced not the armor, but the leathery joint-tissue between head and
thorax.

The giant creature rocketed upward with Burl clinging to his spear. He
held fast with an agonized strength. His mount rose from the blackness
of the ground into the many times more terrifying blackness of the air.
It rose up and up. If Burl could have screamed, he would have done so,
but he could not cry out. He could only hold fast, glassy-eyed.

Then he dropped. Wind roared past him. The great insect was clumsy at
flying. All beetles are. Burl's weight and the pain it felt made its
flying clumsier still. There was a semi-liquid crashing and an impact.
Burl was torn loose and hurled away. He crashed into the spongy top of a
mushroom and came to rest with his naked shoulder hanging halfway over
some invisible drop. He struggled.

He heard the whining drone of his attempted prey. It rocketed aloft
again. But there was something wrong with it. With his weight applied to
the spear as he was torn free, Burl had twisted the weapon in the wound.
It had driven deeper, multiplying the damage of the first stab.

The beetle crashed to earth again, nearby. As Burl struggled again, the
mushroom-stalk split and let him gently to the ground.

He heard the flounderings of the great beetle in the darkness. It
mounted skyward once more, its wing-beats no longer making a sustained
note. It thrashed the air irregularly and wildly.

Then it crashed again.

There was seeming silence, save for the steady drip-drip of the rain.
And Burl came out of his half-mad fear: he suddenly realized that he
had slain a victim even more magnificent than a spider, because this
creature was meat.

He found himself astonishedly running toward the spot where the beetle
had last fallen.

But he heard it struggle aloft once more. It was wounded to death. Burl
felt certain of it this time. It floundered in mid-air and crashed
again.

He was within yards of it before he checked himself. Now he was
weaponless, and the gigantic insect flung itself about madly on the
ground, striking out with colossal wings and limbs, fighting it knew not
what. It struggled to fly, crashed, and fought its way off the
ground--ever more weakly--then smashed again into mushrooms. There it
floundered horribly in the darkness.

Burl drew near and waited. It was still, but pain again drove it to a
senseless spasm of activity.

Then it struck against something. There was a ripping noise and
instantly the close, peppery, burning smell of the red dust was in the
air. The beetle had floundered into one of the close-packed red
puffballs, tightly filled with the deadly red spores. The red dust would
not normally have been released at night. With the nightly rain, it
would not travel so far or spread so widely.

Burl fled, panting.

Behind him he heard his victim rise one last time, spurred to
impossible, final struggle by the anguish caused by the breathed-in red
dust. It rose clumsily into the darkness in its death-throes and crashed
to the ground again for the last time.

In time to come, Burl and his followers might learn to use the red-dust
puffballs as weapons--but not how to spread them beyond their normal
range. But now, Burl was frightened. He moved hastily sidewise. The dust
would travel down-wind. He got out of its possible path.

There could be no exultation where the red dust was. Burl suddenly
realized what had happened to him. He had been carried aloft an unknown
though not-great distance, in an unknown direction. He was separated
from his tribe, with no faintest idea how to find them in the darkness.
And it was night.

He crouched under the nearest huge toadstool and waited for the dawn,
listening dry-throated for the sound of death coming toward him through
the night.

But only the wind-beats of night-fliers came to his ears, and the
discordant notes of gray-bellied truffle-beetles as they roamed the
mushroom thickets, seeking the places beneath which--so their adapted
instincts told them--fungoid dainties, not too much unlike the truffles
of Earth, awaited the industrious miner. And, of course, there was that
eternal, monotonous dripping of the raindrops, falling at irregular
intervals from the sky.

Red puffballs did not burst at night. They would not burst anyhow,
except at one certain season of their growth. But Burl and his folk had
so far encountered the over-hasty ones, bursting earlier than most. The
time of ripeness was very nearly here, though. When day came again, and
the chill dampness of the night was succeeded by the warmth of the
morning, almost the first thing Burl saw in the gray light was a tall
spouting of brownish-red stuff leaping abruptly into the air from a
burst red parchment-like sphere.

He stood up and looked anxiously all around. Here and there, all over
the landscape, slowly and at intervals, the plumes of fatal red sprang
into the air. There was nothing quite like it anywhere else. An ancient
man, inhabiting Earth, might have likened the appearance to that of a
scattered and leisurely bombardment. But Burl had no analogy for them.

He saw something hardly a hundred yards from where he had hidden during
the night. The dead beetle lay there, crumpled and limp. Burl eyed it
speculatively. Then he saw something that filled him with elation. The
last crash of the beetle to the ground had driven his spear deeply
between the joints of the corselet and neck. Even if the red dust had
not finished the creature, the spear-point would have ended its life.

He was thrilled once more by his superlative greatness. He made due note
that he was a mighty slayer. He took the antennae as proof of his valor
and hacked off a great barb-edged leg for meat. And then he remembered
that he did not know how to find his fellow-tribesmen. He had no idea
which way to go.

Even a civilized man would have been at a loss, though he would have
hunted for an elevation from which to look for the cliff hiding-place of
the tribe. But Burl had not yet progressed so far. His wild ride of the
night before had been at random, and the chase after the wounded beetle
no less dictated by chance. There was no answer.

He set off anxiously, searching everywhere. But he had to be alert for
all the dangers of an inimical world while keeping, at the same time, an
extremely sharp eye out for bursting red puffballs.

At the end of an hour he thought he saw familiar things. Then he
recognized the spot. He had come back to the dead beetle. It was already
the center of a mass of small black bodies which pulled and hacked at
the tough armor, gnawing out great lumps of flesh to be carried to the
nearest ant-city.

Burl set off again, very carefully avoiding any place that he recognized
as having been seen that morning. Sometimes he walked through
mushroom-thickets--dangerous places to be in--and sometimes over
relatively clear ground colored exotically with varicolored fungi. More
than once he saw the clouds of red stuff spurting in the distance. Deep
anxiety filled him. He had no idea that there were such things as points
of the compass. He knew only that he needed desperately to find his
tribesfolk again.

They, of course, had given him up for dead. He had vanished in the
night. Old Tama complained of him shrilly. The night, to them, meant
death. Jon quaked watchfully all through it. When Burl did not come to
the feast of mushroom that Jon and Dor had brought back, they sought
him. They even called timidly into the darkness. They heard the
throbbing of huge wings as a great creature rose desperately into the
sky, but they did not associate that sound with Burl. If they had, they
would have been instantly certain of his fate.

As it was, the tribe's uneasiness grew into terror which r

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