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 rapidly turned

to despair. They began to tremble, wondering what they would do with no

bold chieftain to guide them. He was the first man to command allegiance

from others in much too long a period, on the forgotten planet, but the

submission of his followers had been the more complete for its novelty.

His loss was the more appalling. Burl had mistaken the triumphant shout

of the foragers. He'd thought it independence of him--rivalry. Actually,

the men dared to shout only because they felt secure under his

leadership. When they accepted the fact that he had vanished--and to

disappear in the night had always meant death--their old fears and

timidity returned. To them it was added despair.

They huddled together and whispered to one another of their fright. They

waited in trembling silence through all the long night. Had a

hunting-spider appeared, they would have fled in as many directions as

there were people, and undoubtedly all would have perished. But day came

again, and they looked into each other's eyes and saw the self-same

fear. Saya was probably the most pitiful of the group. Her face was

white and drawn beyond that of any one else.

They did not move when day brightened. They remained about the

bee-tunnels, speaking in hushed tones, huddled together, searching all

the horizon for enemies. Saya would not eat, but sat still, staring

before her in numbed grief. Burl was dead.

Atop the low cliff a red puffball glistened in the morning light. Its

tough skin was taut and bulging, resisting the pressure of the spores

within. Slowly, as the morning wore on, some of the moisture that kept

the skin stretchable dried. The parchment-like stuff contracted. The

tautness of the spore-packed envelope grew greater. It became

insupportable.

With a ripping sound, the tough skin split across and a rush of the

compressed spores shot skyward.

The tribesmen saw and cried out and fled. The red stuff drifted down

past the cliff-edge. It drifted toward the humans. They ran from it. Jon

and Tama ran fastest. Jak and Cori and the other were not far behind.

Saya trailed, in her despair.

Had Burl been there, matters would have been different. He had already

such an ascendancy over the minds of the others that even in panic they

would have looked to see what he did. And he would have dodged the

slowly drifting death-cloud by day, as he had during the night. But his

followers ran blindly.

As Saya fled after the others she heard shrieks of fright to the left

and ran faster. She passed by a thick mass of distorted fungi in which

there was a sudden stirring and panic lent wings to her feet. She

fled blindly, panting. Ahead was a great mass of stuff--red

puffballs--showing here and there among great fanlike growths, some

twelve feet high, that looked like sponges.

She fled past them and swerved to hide herself from anything that might

be pursuing by sight. Her foot slipped on the slimy body of a shell-less

snail and she fell heavily, her head striking a stone. She lay still.

Almost as if at a signal a red puffball burst among the fanlike growths.

A thick, dirty-red cloud of dust shot upward, spread and billowed and

began to settle slowly toward the ground again. It moved as it settled

flowing over the inequalities of die ground as a monstrous snail or

leach might have done, sucking from all breathing creatures the life

they had within them. It was a hundred yards away, then fifty, then

thirty....

Had any member of the tribe watched it, the red dust might have seemed

malevolently intelligent. But when the edges of the dust-cloud were no

more than twenty yards from Saya's limp body, an opposing breeze sprang

up. It was a vagrant, fitful little breeze that halted the red cloud and

threw it into some confusion, sending it in a new direction. It passed

Saya without hurting her, though one of its misty tendrils reached out

as if to snatch at her in slow-motion. But it passed her by.

Saya lay motionless on the ground. Only her breast rose and fell

shallowly. A tiny pool of red gathered near her head.

Some thirty feet from where she lay, there were three miniature

toadstools in a clump, bases so close together that they seemed but one.

From between two of them, however, two tufts of reddish thread appeared.

They twinkled back and forth and in and out. As if reassured, two

slender antennae followed, then bulging eyes and a small, black body

with bright-red scalloped markings upon it.

It was a tiny beetle no more than eight inches long--a sexton or

burying-beetle. Drawing near Saya's body it scurried onto her flesh. It

went from end to end of her figure in a sort of feverish haste. Then it

dived into the ground beneath her shoulder, casting back a little shower

of hastily-dug dirt as it disappeared.

Ten minutes later, another small creature appeared, precisely like the

first. Upon the heels of the second came a third. Each made the same

hasty examination and dived under her unmoving form.

Presently the ground seemed to billow at a spot along Saya's side and

then at another. Ten minutes after the arrival of the third beetle, a

little rampart had reared itself all about Saya's body, following her

outlines precisely. Then her body moved slightly, in little jerks,

seeming to settle perhaps half an inch into the ground.

The burying-beetles were of that class of creatures which exploited the

bodies of the fallen. Working from below, they excavated the earth. When

there was a hollow space below they turned on their backs and thrust up

with their legs, jerking at the body until it sank into the space they

had made ready. The process would be repeated until at last all their

dead treasures had settled down below the level of the surrounding

ground. The loosened dirt then fell in at the sides, completing the

inhumation. Then, in the underground darkness, it was the custom for the

beetles to feast magnificently, gorging themselves upon the food they

had hidden from other scavengers--and of course rearing their young also

upon its substance.

Ants and flies were rivals of these beetles and not infrequently the

sexton-beetles came upon carrion after ants had taken their toll, and

when it already swarmed with maggots. But in this case Saya was not

dead. The fact that she still lived, though unconscious, was the factor

that had given the sexton-beetles this splendid opportunity.

She breathed gently and irregularly, her face drawn with the sorrow of

the night before, while the desperately hurrying beetles swarmed about

beneath her body, channelling away the soil so she would sink lower and

lower into it. She descended slowly, a half-inch by a half-inch. The

bright-red tufts of thread appeared again and a beetle made its way to

the open air. It moved hastily about, inspecting the progress of the

work.

It dived below again. Another inch and, after a long time, another, were

excavated.

Matters still progressed when Burl stepped out from a group of

overshadowing toadstools and halted. He cast his eyes over the landscape

and was struck by its familiarity. He was, in fact, very near the spot

he had left the night before in that maniacal ride on the back of a

flying beetle. He moved back and forth, trying to account for the

feeling of recognition.

He saw the low cliff, then, and moved eagerly toward it, passing within

fifty feet of Saya's body, now more than half-buried in the ground. The

loose dirt around the outline of her figure was beginning to topple in

little rivulets upon her. One of her shoulders was already half-screened

from view. Burl passed on, unseeing.

He hurried a little. In a moment he recognized his location exactly.

There were the mining-bee burrows. There was a thrown-away lump of

edible mushroom, cast aside as the tribesfolk fled.

His feet stirred up a fine dust, and he stopped short. A red puffball

had burst here. It fully accounted for the absence of the tribe, and

Burl sweated in sudden fear. He thought instantly of Saya. He went

carefully to make sure. This was, absolutely, the hiding place of the

tribe. There was another mushroom-fragment. There was a spear, thrown

down by one of the men in his flight. Red dust had settled upon the

spear and the mushroom-fragments.

Burl turned back, hurrying again, but taking care to disturb the dust no

more than he could possibly help.

The little excavation into which Saya was sinking inch by inch was not

in his path. Her body no longer lay above the ground, but in it. Burl

went by, frantic with anxiety about the tribe, but about Saya most of

all.

Her body quivered and sank a fraction into the ground. Half a dozen

small streams of earth were tumbling upon her. In minutes she would be

wholly hidden from view.

Burl went to beat among the mushroom-thickets, in quest of the bodies of

his tribesfolk. They could have staggered out of the red dust and

collapsed beyond. He would have shouted, but the deep sense of

loneliness silenced him. His throat ached with grief. He searched on....

There was a noise. From a huge clump of toadstools--perhaps the very one

he had climbed over in the night--there came the sound of crashings and

the breaking of the spongy stuff. Twin tapering antennae appeared, and

then a monster beetle lurched into the open space, its ghastly mandibles

gaping sidewise.

It was all of eight feet long and supported by six crooked, saw-toothed

legs. Huge, multiple eyes stared with preoccupation at the world. It

advanced deliberately with clankings and clashings as of a hideous

machine. Burl fled on the instant, running directly away from it.

A little depression lay in the ground before him. He did not swerve, but

made to jump over it. As he leaped he saw the color of bare flesh, Saya,

limp and helpless, sinking slowly into the ground with tricklings of

dirt falling down to cover her. It seemed to Burl that she quivered a

little.

Instantly there was a terrific struggle within Burl. Behind him was the

giant meat-eating beetle; beneath him was Saya whom he loved. There was

certain death lurching toward him on evilly crooked legs--and the life

he had hoped for lay in a shallow pit. Of course he thought Saya dead.

Perhaps it was rage, or despair, or a simple human madness which made

him act otherwise than rationally. The things which raise humans above

brute creation, however, are only partly reasonable. Most human

emotions--especially the creditable ones--cannot be justified by reason,

and very few heroic actions are based upon logical thought.

Burl whirled as he landed, his puny spear held ready. In his left hand

he held the haunch of a creature much like the one which clanked and

rattled toward him. With a yell of insane defiance--completely beyond

justification by reason--Burl flung that meat-filled leg at the monster.

It hit. Undoubtedly, it hurt. The beetle seized it ferociously. It

crushed it. There was meat in it, sweet and juicy.

The beetle devoured it. It forgot the man standing there, waiting for

death. It crunched the leg-joint of a cousin or brother, confusing the

blow with the missile that had delivered it. When the tidbit was

finished it turned and lumbered off to investigate another mushroom

thicket. It seemed to consider then an enemy had been conquered and

devoured and that normal life could go on.

Then Burl stopped quickly, and dragged Saya from the grave the

sexton-beetles had labored so feverishly to provide for her. Crumbled

soil fell from her shoulders, from her face, and from her body. Three

little eight-inch beetles with black and red markings scurried for cover

in terrified haste. Burl carried Saya to a resting-place of soft mould

to mourn over her.

He was a completely ignorant savage, save that he knew more of the ways

of insects than anybody anywhere else--the Ecological Service, which had

stocked this planet, not being excepted. To Burl the unconsciousness of

Saya was as death itself. Dumb misery smote him, and he laid her down

gently and quite literally wept. He had been beautifully pleased with

himself for having slain one flying beetle. But for Saya's seeming

death, he would have been almost unbearable with pride over having put

another to flight. But now he was merely a broken-hearted, very human

young man.

But a long time later Saya opened her eyes and looked about

bewilderedly.

They were in considerable danger for some time after that, because they

were oblivious to everything but each other. Saya rested in

half-incredulous happiness against Burl's shoulder as he told her

jerkily of his attempt on a night-bound butterfly, which turned out to

be a flying beetle that took him aloft. He told of his search for the

tribe and then his discovery of her apparently lifeless body. When he

spoke of the monster which had lurched from the mushroom thicket, and of

the desperation with which he had faced it, Saya looked at him with

warm, proud eyes. But Burl was abruptly struck with the remarkable

convenience of that discovery. If his tribesmen could secure an ample

supply of meat, they might defend themselves against attack by throwing

it to their attackers. In fact, insects were so stupid that almost any

object thrown quickly enough and fast enough, might be made to serve as

sacrifices instead of themselves.

A timid, frightened whisper roused them from their absorption. They

looked up. The boy Dik stood some distance away, staring at them

wide-eyed, almost convinced that he looked upon the living dead. A

sudden movement on the part of either of them would have sent him

bolting away. Two or three other bobbing heads gazed affrightedly from

nearby hiding-places. Jon was poised for flight.

The tribe had come back to its former hiding-place simply as a way to

reassemble. They had believed both Burl and Saya dead, and they accepted

Burl's death as their own doom. But now they stared.

Burl spoke--fortunately without arrogance--and Dik and Tet came

timorously from their hiding-places. The others followed, the tribe

forming a frightened half-circle about the seated pair. Burl spoke again

and presently one of the bravest--Cori--dared to approach and touch him.

Instantly a babble of the crude labial language of the tribe broke out.

Awed exclamations and questions filled the air.

But Burl, for once, showed some common sense. Instead of a vainglorious

recital, he merely cast down the long tapering antennae of the

flying-beetle. They looked, and recognized their origin.

Then Burl curtly ordered Dor and Jak to make a chair of their hands for

Saya. She was weak from her fall and the loss of blood. The two men

humbly advanced and obeyed. Then Burl curtly ordered the march resumed.

They went on, more slowly than on previous days, but none-the-less

steadily. Burl led them across-country, marching in advance with a

matter-of-fact alertness for signs of danger. He felt more confidence

than ever before. It was not fully justified, of course. Jon now

retrieved the spear he had discarded. The small party fairly bristled

with weapons. But Burl knew that they were liable to be cast away as

impediments if flight seemed necessary.

As he led the way Burl began to think busily in the manner that only

leaders find necessary. He had taught his followers to kill ants for

food, though they were still uneasy about such adventures. He had led

them to attack great yellow grubs upon giant cabbages. But they had not

yet faced any actual danger, as he had done. He must drive them to face

something....

The opportunity came that same day, in late afternoon. To westward the

cloud-bank was barely beginning to show the colors that presage

nightfall, when a bumble-bee droned heavily overhead, making for its

home burrow. The little, straggling group of marching people looked up

and saw the scanty load of pollen packed in the stiff bristles of the

bee's hind-legs. It sped onward heavily, its almost transparent wings

mere blurs in the air.

It was barely fifty feet above the ground. Burl dropped his glance and

tensed. A slender-waisted wasp was shooting upward from an ambush among

the noisome fungi of this plain.

The bee swerved and tried to escape. The wasp over-hauled it. The bee

dodged frantically. It was a good four feet in length,--as large as the

wasp, certainly--but it was more heavily built and could not make the

speed of which the wasp was capable. It dodged with less agility. Twice,

in desperation, it did manage to evade the plunging dives of the wasp,

but the third time the two insects grappled in mid-air almost over the

heads of the humans.

They tumbled downward in a clawing, biting, tangle of bodies and legs.

They hit the ground and rolled over and over. The bee struggled to

insert her barbed sting in the more supple body of her adversary. She

writhed and twisted desperately.

But there came an instant of infinite confusion and the bee lay on her

back. The wasp suddenly moved with that ghastly skilled precision of a

creature performing an incredible feat instinctively, apparently unaware

that it is doing so. The dazed bee was swung upright in a peculiarly

artificial pose. The wasp's body curved, and its deadly, rapier-sharp

sting struck....

The bee was dead. Instantly. As if struck dead by lightning. The wasp

had stung in a certain place in the neck-parts where all the nerve-cords

pass. To sting there, the wasp had to bring its victim to a particular

pose. It was precisely the trick of a _desnucador_, the butcher who

kills cattle by severing the spinal cord. For the wasp's purposes the

bee had to be killed in this fashion and no other.

Burl began to give low-toned commands to his followers. He knew what was

coming next, and so did they. When the sequel of the murder began he

moved forward, his tribesmen wavering after him. This venture was

actually one of the least dangerous they could attempt, but merely to

attack a wasp was a hair-raising idea. Only Burl's prestige plus their

knowledge made them capable of it.

The second act of the murder-drama was gruesomeness itself. The

pirate-wasp was a carnivore, but this was the season when the wasps

raised young. Inevitably there was sweet honey in the half-filled crop

of the bee. Had she arrived safely at the hive, the sweet and sticky

liquid would have been disgorged for the benefit of bee-grubs. The wasp

avidly set to work to secure that honey. The bee-carcass itself was

destined for the pirate-wasp's own offspring, and that squirming

monstrosity is even more violently carnivorous than its mother. The

parent wasp set about abstracting the dead bee's honey, before taking

the carcass to its young one, because honey is poisonous to the

pirate-wasp's grub. Yet insects cannot act from solicitude or anything

but instinct. And instinct must be maintained by lavish rewards.

So the pirate-wasp sought its reward--an insane, insatiable, gluttonous

satisfaction in the honey that was poison to its young. The wasp foiled

its murdered victim upon its back again and feverishly pressed on the

limp body to force out the honey. And this was the reason for its

precise manner of murder. Only when killed by the destruction of all

nerve-currents would the bee's body be left limp like this. Only a bee

killed in this exact fashion would yield its honey to manipulation.

The honey appeared, flowing from the dead bee's mouth. The wasp, in

trembling, ghoulish ecstasy, devoured it as it appeared. It was lost to

all other sights or sensations but its feast.

And this was the moment when Burl signalled for the attack. The

tribesmen's prey was deaf and blind and raptured. It was aware of

nothing but the delight it savored. But the men wavered, nevertheless,

when they drew near. Burl was first to thrust his spear powerfully into

the trembling body.