When he was not instantly destroyed the others took courage. Dor's spear

penetrated the very vitals of the ghoul. Jak's club fell with terrific

force upon the wasp's slender waist. There was a crackling, and the

long, spidery limbs quivered and writhed. Then Burl struck again and the

creature fell into two writhing halves.

They butchered it rather messily, but Burl noticed that even as it died,

sundered and pierced with spears, its long tongue licked out in one last

rapturous taste of the honey that had been its undoing.

Some time later, burdened with the pollen laden legs of the great bee,

the tribe resumed its journey.

Now Burl had men behind him. They were still timid and prone to flee at

the least alarm, but they were vastly more dependable than they had

been. They had attacked and slain a wasp whose sting would have killed

any of them. They had done battle under the leadership of Burl, whose

spear had struck the first blow. They were sharers of his glory and,

therefore, much more nearly like the followers of a chieftain ought to

be.

Their new spirit was badly needed. The red puffballs were certainly no

less numerous in the new territory the tribe traversed than in the

territory they had left. And the season of their ripening' was further

advanced. More and more of the ground showed the deadly rime of settled

death-dust. To stay alive was increasingly difficult. When the full

spore-casting season arrived, it would be impossible. And that season

could not be far away.

The very next day after the killing of the wasp, survival despite the

red dust had begun to seem unimaginable. Where, earlier, one saw a

red-dust cloud bursting here and there at intervals, on this day there

was always a billowing mass of lethal vapor in the air. At no time was

the landscape free of a moving mist of death. Usually there were three

or four in sight at once. Often there were half a dozen. Once there were

eight. It could be guessed that in one day more they would ripen in such

monstrous numbers that anything which walked or flew or crawled must

breathe in the spores and perish.

And that day, just at sunset, the tribe came to the top of a small rise

in the ground. For an hour they had been marching and countermarching to

avoid the suddenly-billowing clouds of dust. Once they had been nearly

hemmed in when three of the dull-red mists seemed to flow together,

enclosing the three sides of a circle. They escaped then only by the

most desperate of sprinting.

But now they came to the little hillock and halted. Before them

stretched a plain, all of four miles wide, colored a brownish brick-red

by the red puffballs. The tribe had seen mushroom forests--they had

lived in them--and knew of the dangers that lurked there. But the plain

before them was not simply dangerous; it was fatal. To right and left it

stretched as far as the eye could see, but away on its farther edge Burl

caught a glimpse of flowing water.

Over the plain itself a thin red haze seemed to float. It was simply a

cloud of the deadly spores, dispersed and indefinite, but constantly

replenished by the freshly bursting puffballs. While the tribesfolk

stood and watched, thick columns of dust rose here and there and at the

other place, too many to count. They settled again but left behind

enough of the fine powder to keep a thin red haze over all the plain.

This was a mass of literally millions of the deadly growths. Here was

one place where no carnivorous beetles roamed and where no spiders

lurked. There were nothing here but the sullen columns of dust and the

haze that they left behind.

And of course it would be nothing less than suicide to try to go back.

_8. A FLIGHT CONTINUES_

Burl kept his people alive until darkness fell. He had assigned watchers

for each direction and when flight was necessary the adults helped the

children to avoid the red dust. Four times they changed direction after

shrill-voiced warnings. When night settled over the plain they were

forced to come to a halt.

But the puffballs were designed to burst by day. Stumbled into, they

could split at any time, and the humans did hear some few of the tearing

noises that denoted a spore-spout in the darkness. But after slow

nightly rain began they heard no more.

Burl led his people into the plain of red puffballs as soon as the rain

had lasted long enough to wash down the red haze still hanging in the

air and turn the fallen spores to mud.

It was an enterprise of such absolute desperation that very likely no

civilized man would have tried it. There were no stars, for guidance,

nor compasses to show the way. There were no lights to enable them to

dodge the deadly things they strove to escape, and there was no

possibility of their keeping a straight course in the darkness. They had

to trust to luck in perhaps the longest long-shot that humans every

accepted as a gamble.

Quaintly, they used the long antennae of a dead flying-beetle as

sense-organs for themselves. They entered the red plain in a long single

file, Burl leading the way with one of the two feathery whips extended

before him. Saya helped him check on what lay in the darkness ahead, but

made sure not to leave his side. Others trailed behind, hand in hand.

Progress was slow. The sky was utter blackness, of course, but nowhere

in the lowlands is there an absolute black. Where fox-fire doesn't burn

without consuming, there are mushrooms with glows of their own. Rusts

sometimes shone faintly. Naturally there were no fireflies or glow-worms

of any sort; but neither were there any living things to hunt the tiny

tribe as it moved half-blindly in single file through the plain of red

puffballs. Within half an hour even Burl did not believe he had kept to

his original line. An hour later they realized despairingly that they

were marching helpless through puffballs which would make the air

unbreathable at dawn. But they marched on.

Once they smelled the rank odor of cabbages. They followed the scent and

came upon them, glowing palely with parasitic moulds on their leaves.

And there were living things here: huge caterpillars eating and eating,

even in the dark, against the time of metamorphosis. Burl could have

cried out infuriatedly at them because they were--so he assumed--immune

to the death of the red dust. But the red dust was all about, and the

smell of cabbages was not the smell of life.

It could have been, of course. Caterpillars breathe like all insects at

every stage of their development. But furry caterpillars breathe through

openings which are covered over with matted fur. Here, that matted fur

acted to filter the air. The eggs of the caterpillars had been laid

before the puffballs were ready to burst. The time of spore-bearing

would be over before the grubs were butterflies or moths. These

creatures were safe against all enemies--even men. But men groped and

blundered in the darkness simply because they did not think to take the

fur garments they wore and hold them to their noses to serve as

gas-masks or air-filters. The time for that would come, but not yet.

With the docility of despair, Burl's tribe followed him through all the

night. When the sky began to pale in the east, they numbly resigned

themselves to death. But still they followed.

And in the very early gray light--when only the very ripest of the red

puffballs spouted toward a still-dark sky--Burl looked harassedly about

him and could have groaned. He was in a little circular clearing, the

deadly red things all about him. There was not yet light enough for

colors to appear. There was merely a vast stillness everywhere, and a

mocking hint of the hot and peppery scent of death-dust--now turned to

mud--all about him.

Burl dropped in bitter discouragement. Soon the misty dust-clouds would

begin to move about; the reddish haze would form above all this

space....

Then, quite suddenly, he lifted his head and whooped. He had heard the

sound of running water.

His followers looked at him with dawning hope. Without a word to them,

Burl began to run. They followed hastily and quickened their pace when

his voice came back in a shout of triumph. In a moment they had emerged

from the tangle of fungus growths to stand upon the banks of a wide

river--the same river whose gleam Burl had seen the day before, from the

farther side of the red puffball plain.

Once before, Burl had floated down a river upon a mushroom raft. That

journey had been involuntary. He had been carried far from his tribe and

Saya, his heart filled with desolation. But now he viewed the

swiftly-running current with delight.

He cast his eyes up and down the bank. Here and there it rose in a low

bluff and thick shelf-fungi stretched out above the water. They were

adaptations of the fungi that once had grown on trees and now fed upon

the incredibly nourishing earth-banks formed of dead growing things.

Burl was busy in an instant, stabbing the relatively hard growths with

his spear and striving to wrench them free. The tribesmen stared

blankly, but at a snapped order they imitated him.

Soon two dozen masses of firm, light fungus lay upon the shore. Burl

began to explain what they were for, but Dor remonstrated. They were

afraid to part from him. If they might embark on the same fungus-raft,

it would be a different matter. Old Tama scolded him shrilly at the

thought of separation. Jon trembled at the mere idea.

Burl cast an apprehensive glance at the sky. Day was rapidly

approaching. Soon the red puffballs would burst and shoot their

dust-clouds into the air. This was no time to make stipulations. Then

Saya spoke softly.

Burl made the suggested great sacrifice. He took the gorgeous velvet

cloak of moth-wing from his shoulder and tore it into a dozen long,

irregular pieces along the lines of the sinews reinforcing it. He

planted his spear upright in the largest raft, fastening the other

cranky craft to it with the improvised lines.

In a matter of minutes the small flotilla of rafts bobbed in the stream.

One by one, Burl settled the folk upon them with stern commands about

movement. Then he shoved them out from the bank. The collection of

uneasy, floating things moved slowly out from shore to where the current

caught them. Burl and Saya sat on the same section of fungus, the other

trustful but frightened tribes-people clustered timorously about.

As they began to move between the mushroom-lined banks of the river,

and as the mist of nighttime lifted from its surface, columns of red

dust spurted sullenly upward on the plain. In the light of dawn the

deadly red haze was forming once more over the puffball plain.

By that time, however, the unstable rafts were speeding down the river,

bobbing and whirling in the stream, with wide-eyed people as their

passengers gazing in wonderment at the shores.

Five miles downstream, the red growths became less numerous and other

forms of fungus took their places. Moulds and rusts covered the ground

as grass did on more favored planets. Toadstools showed their creamy,

rounded heads, and there were malformed things with swollen trunks and

branches mocking the trees that were never seen in these lowlands. Once

the tribesmen saw the grisly bulk of a hunting-spider outlined on the

river-bank.

All through the long day they rode the current, while the insect life

that had been absent in the neighborhood of the death-plain became

abundant again. Bees once more droned overhead, and wasps and

dragonflies. Four-inch mosquitoes appeared, to be driven off with blows.

Glittering beetles made droning or booming noises as they flew. Flies of

every imaginable metallic hue flew about. Huge butterflies danced above

the steaming land and running river in seeming ecstasy at simply being

alive.

All the thousand-and-one forms of insect life flew and crawled and swam

and dived where the people of the rafts could see them. Water-beetles

came lazily to the surface to snap at other insects on the surface. The

shell-covered boats of caddis-flies floated in the eddies and

backwaters.

The day wore on and the shores flowed by. The tribesmen ate of their

food and drank of the river. When afternoon came the banks fell away and

the current slackened. The shores became indefinite. The river merged

itself into a vast swamp from which came a continual muttering.

The water seemed to grow dark when black mud took the place of the clay

that had formed its bed. Then there appeared floating green things which

did not move with the flowing water. They were the leaves of the

water-lilies that managed to survive along with cabbages and a very few

other plants in the midst of a fungus world. Twelve feet across, any one

of the green leaves might have supported the whole of Burl's tribe.

They became so numerous that only a relatively narrow, uncovered stream

flowed between tens of acres of the flat, floating leaves. Here and

there colossal waxen blossoms could be seen. Three men could hide in

those enormous flowers. They exhaled an almost overpowering fragrance

into the air.

And presently the muttering sound that had been heard far away grew in

volume to an intermittent deep-bass roar. It seemed to come from the

banks on either side. It was the discordant croaking of frogs, eight

feet in length, which lived and throve in this swamp. Presently the

tribesfolk saw them: green giants sitting immobile upon the banks, only

opening their huge mouths to croak.

Here in the swamps there was such luxuriance of insect life that a

normal tribal hunting-ground--in which tribesmen were not yet accustomed

to hunt--would seem like a desert by comparison. Myriads of little

midges, no more than three or four inches across their wings, danced

above the water. Butterflies flew low, seemingly enamoured of their

reflections in the glassy water.

The people watched as if their eyes would become engorged by the strange

new things they saw. Where the river split and split and divided again,

there was nothing with which they were familiar. Mushrooms did not grow

here. Moulds, yes. But there were cattails, with stalks like trees,

towering thirty feet above the waterways.

After a long, long time though, the streams began to rejoin each other.

Then low hills loomed through the thicker haze that filled the air here.

The river flowed toward and through them. And here a wall of high

mountains rose toward the sky, but their height could not be guessed.

They vanished in the mist even before the cloud-bank swallowed them.

The river flowed through a river-gate, a water-gap in the mountains.

While day still held fully bright, the bobbing rafts went whirling

through a narrow pass with sheer walls that rose beyond all seeing in

the mist. Here there was even some white water. Above it, spanning a

chasm five hundred feet across, a banded spider had flung its web. The

rafts floated close enough to see the spider, a monster even of its

kind, its belly swollen to a diameter of yards. It hung motionless in

the center of the snare as the humans swept beneath it.

Then the mountains drew back and the tribe was in a valley where, look

as they might, there was no single tawny-red puffball from whose

spreading range the tribesmen were refugees. The rafts grounded and they

waded ashore while still the day held. And there was food here in

plenty.

But darkness fell before they could explore. As a matter of precaution

Burl and his folk found a hiding-place in a mushroom-thicket and hid

until morning. The night-sounds were wholly familiar to them. The noise

of katydids was louder than usual--the feminine sound of that name gives

no hint of the sonorous, deep-toned notes the enlarged creatures

uttered--and that implied more vegetation as compared with straight

fungoid flora. A great many fireflies glowed in the darkness shrouding

the hiding-place, indicating that the huge snails they fed on were

plentiful. The snails would make very suitable prey for the tribesmen

also. But men were not yet established in their own minds as predators.

They were, though, definitely no longer the furtive vermin they had

been. They knew there were such things as weapons. They had killed ants

for food and a pirate-wasp as an exercise in courage. To some degree

they were acquiring Burl's own qualities. But they were still behind

him--and he still had some way to go.

The next day they explored their new territory with a boldness which

would have been unthinkable a few weeks before. The new haven was a

valley, spreading out to a second swamp at its lower end. They could not

know it, but beyond the swamp lay the sea. Exploring, because of

strictly practical purposes and not for the sake of knowledge, they

found a great trap-door in the earth, sure sign of the lair of a spider.

Burl considered that before many days the monster would have to be dealt

with. But he did not yet know how it could be done.

His people were rapidly becoming a tribe of men, but they still needed

Burl to think for them. What he could not think out, so far, could not

be done. But a part of the proof that they needed Burl to think for them

lay in the fact that they did not realize it. They gathered facts about

their environment. The nearest ant-city was miles away. That meant that

they would encounter its scouting foragers rather than working-parties.

The ant-city would be a source of small prey--a notion that would have

been inconceivable a little while ago. There were numerous giant

cabbages in the valley and that meant there were big, defenseless slugs

to spear whenever necessary.

They saw praying-mantises--the adults were eighteen feet tall and as big

as giraffes, but much less desirable neighbors--and knew that they would

have to be avoided. But there were edible mushrooms on every hand. If

one avoided spiders and praying-mantises and the meat-eating beetles; if

one were safely hidden at night against the amorous male spiders who

took time off from courtship to devour anything living that came their

way; and if one lived at high-tension alertness, interpreting every

sound as possible danger and every unknown thing as certain peril--then

one could live quite comfortably in this valley.

For three days the tribesmen felt that they had found a sort of

paradise. Jon had his belly full to bursting all day long. Tet and Dik

became skilled ant-hunters. Dor found a better spear and practiced

thoughtfully with it.

There were no red puffballs here. There was food. Burl's folk could

imagine no greater happiness. Even old Tama scolded only rarely. They

surely could not conceive of any place where a man might walk calmly

about with no danger at all of being devoured. This was paradise!

And it was a deplorable state of affairs. It is not good for human

beings to feel secure and experience contentment. Men achieve only by

their wants or through their fears. Back at their former

foraging-ground, the tribe would never have emulated Burl with any

passion so long as they could survive by traditional behavior. Before

the menace of the red puffballs developed, he had brought them to the

point of killing ants, with him present and ready to assist. They would

have stayed at about that level. The red dust had forced their flight.

During that flight they had achieved what was--compared to their former

timidity--prodigies of valor.

But now they arrived at paradise. There was food. They could survive

here in the fashion of the good old days before they learned the courage

of desperation. They did not need Burl to keep them alive or to feed

them. They tended to disregard him. But they did not disperse. Social

grouping is an instinct in human beings as it is in cattle or in schools

of fish. Also, when Burl was available there was a sense of pleasant

confidence. He had gotten them out of trouble before. If more trouble

came, he would get them out of it again. But why look for trouble?

Burl's tribesmen sank back into a contented lethargy. They found food

and hid themselves until it was all consumed. A part of the valley was

found where they were far enough from visible dangers to feel blissfully

safe. When they did move, though still with elaborate caution, it was

only to forage for food. And they did not need to go far because there

was plenty of food. They slipped back. Happier than they had ever been,

the foragers finally began to forget to take their new spears or clubs

with them. They were furtive vermin in a particularly favorable

environment.

And Burl was infuriated. He had known adulation. He was cherished, to be

sure, but adulation no longer came his way. Even Saya....

An ironically natural change took place in Saya. When Burl was a

chieftain, she looked at him with worshipful eyes. Now that he was as

other men, she displayed coquetry. And Burl was of that peculiarly

direct-thinking sort of human being who is capable of leadership but not

of intrigue. He was vain, of course. But he could not engage in

elaborate maneuvers to build up a romantic situation. When Saya archly

remained with the women of the tribe, he considered that she avoided

him. When she coyly avoided speech with him, he angrily believed that

she did not want his company.

When they had been in the valley for a week Burl went off on a bitter

journey by himself. Part of his motivation, probably, was a childish

resentment. He had been the great man of the tribe. He was no longer so

great because his particular qualities were not needed. And--perhaps

with some unconscious intent to punish them for their lessened

appreciation--he went off in a pet.

He still carried spear and club, but the grandeur of his costume had

deteriorated. His cloak was gone. The moth-antennae he had worn bound to

his forehead were now so draggled that they were ridiculous. He went off

angrily to be rid of his fellows' indifference.

He found the upward slopes which were the valley's literal boundaries.

They promised nothing. He found a minor valley in which a labyrinth

spider had built its shining snare. Burl almost scorned the creature. He

could kill it if he chose, merely by stabbing it though the walls of

its silken nest as it waited for unlucky insects to blunder into the

intricate web. He saw praying-mantises. Once he came upon that

extraordinary egg-container of the mantis tribe: a gigantic leaf-shaped

mass of solidified foam, whipped out of some special plastic compound

which the mantis secretes, and in which the eggs are laid.

He found a caterpillar wrapped in its thick cocoon and, because he was

not foraging and not particularly hungry, he inspected it with care.

With great difficulty he even broke the strand of silk that formed it,

unreeling several feet in curiosity. Had he meditated, Burl would have

seen that this was cord which could be used to build snares as spiders

did. It could also be used to make defenses in which--if built strongly

and well--even hunting-spiders might be tangled and dispatched.

But again he was not knowingly looking for things to be of use. He

coddled his sense of injury against the tribe. He punished them by

leaving them.

He encountered a four-foot praying-mantis that raised its saw-toothed

forelimbs and waited immobile for him to come within reach. He had

trouble getting away without a fight. His spear would have been a clumsy

weapon against so slender a target and the club certainly not quick

enough to counter the insect's lightning-like movements.

He was bothered. That day he hunted ants. The difficulty was mainly that

of finding individual ants, alone, who could be slaughtered without

drawing hordes of others into the fight. Before nightfall he had three

of them--foot-long carcasses--slung at his belt. Near sunset he came

upon another fairly recent praying-mantis hatchling. It was almost an

ambush. The young monster stood completely immobile and waited for him

to walk into its reach.

Burl performed a deliberate experiment--something that had not been done

for a very long time on the forgotten planet. The small, grisly creature

stood as high as Burl's shoulders. It would be a deadly antagonist.

Burl tossed it a dead ant.

It struck so swiftly that the motion of its horrible forearms could not

be seen. Then it ignored Burl, devouring the tidbit.

It was a discovery that was immediately and urgently useful.

On the second day of his aimless journey Burl saw something that would

be even more deadly and appalling than the red dust had been for his

kind. It was a female black hunting-spider, the so-called American

tarantula. When he glimpsed the thing the blood drained from Burl's

face.

As the monster moved out of sight Burl, abandoning any other project he

might have intended, headed for the place his tribe had more or less

settled in. He had news which offered the satisfaction of making him

much-needed again, but he would have traded that pleasure ten hundred

times over for the simple absence of that one creature from this valley.

That female tarantula meant simply and specifically that the tribe must

flee or die. This place was not paradise!

The entry of the spider into the region had preceded the arrival of the

people. A giant, even of its kind, it had come across some pass among

the mountains for reasons only it could know. But it was deadliness

beyond compare. Its legs spanned yards. The fangs were needle-sharp and

feet in length--and poisoned. Its eyes glittered with insatiable, insane

blood-lust. Its coming was ten times more deadly to the humans--as to

the other living creatures of the valley--than a Bengal tiger loosed in

a human city would have been. It was bad enough in itself, but it

brought more deadly disaster still behind it.

Bumping and bouncing behind its abdomen as it moved, fastened to its

body by dirtied silken ropes, this creature dragged a burden which was

its own ferocity many times multiplied. It was dragging an egg-bag

larger than its body--which was feet in diameter. The female spider

would carry this ghastly burden--cherishing it--until the eggs hatched.

And then there would be four to five hundred small devils loose in the

valley. From the instant of their hatching they would be as deadly as

their parent. Though the offspring would be small--with legs spanning no

more than a foot--their bodies would be the size of a man's fist and

able to leap two yards. Their tiny fangs would be no less envenomed than

their mother's. In stark, maniacal hatred of all other life they would

at least equal the huge gray horror which had begot them.

Burl told his tribesmen. They listened, eyes large with fright but not

quite afraid. The thing had not yet happened. When Burl insistently

commanded that they follow him on a new journey, they nodded uneasily

but slipped away. He could not gather the tribe together. Always there

were members who hid from him--and when he went in search of them, the

ones he had gathered vanished before he could return.

There were days of bright light and murder, and nights of slow rain and

death in the valley. The great creatures under the cloud-bank committed

atrocities upon each other and blandly dined upon their victims.

Unthinkingly solicitous parents paralyzed creatures to be left living

and helpless for their young to feed on. There were enormities of

cruelty done in the matter-of-fact fashion of the insect world. To these

things the humans were indifferent. They were uneasy, but like other

humans everywhere they would not believe the worst until the worst

arrived.

Two weeks after their coming to the valley, the worst was there. When

that day came the first gray light of dawn found the humans in a

shivering, terrified group in a completely suicidal position. They were

out in the open--not hidden but in plain view. They dared not hide any

more. The furry gray monster's brood had hatched. The valley seemed to

swarm with small gray demons which killed and killed, even when they

could not devour. When they encountered each other they fought in

slavering fury and the victors in such duels dined upon their brethren.

But always they hunted for more things to kill. They were literally

maniacs--and they were too small and too quick to fight with spears or

clubs.

So now, at daybreak, the humans looked about despairingly for death to

come to them. They had spent the night in the open lest they be trapped

in the very thickets that had formerly been their protection. They were

in clear sight of the large gray murderer, if it should pass that way.

And they did not dare hide because of that ogreish creature's brood.

The monster appeared. A young girl saw it and cried out chokingly. It

had not seen them. They watched it leap upon and murder a

vividly-colored caterpillar near the limit of vision in the

morning-mist. It was in the tribe's part of the valley. Its young

swarmed everywhere. The valley could have been a paradise, but it was

doomed to become a charnel-house.

And then Burl shook himself. He had been angry when he left his tribe.

He had been more angry when he returned and they would not obey him. He

had remained with them, petulantly silent, displaying the offended

dignity he felt and elaborately refusing to acknowledge any overtures,

even from Saya. Burl had acted rather childishly. But his tribesmen were

like children. It was the best way for him to act.

They shivered, too hopeless even to run away while the shaggy monster

feasted a half-mile away. There were six men and seven women besides

himself, and the rest were children, from gangling adolescents to one

babe in arms. They whimpered a little. Then Saya looked imploringly at

Burl--coquetry forgotten now. The other whimpered more loudly. They had

reached that stage of despair, now, when they could draw the monster to

them by blubbering in terror.

This was the psychological moment. Burl said dourly:

"Come!"

He took Saya's hand and started away. There was but one direction in

which any human being could think to move in this valley, at this

moment. It was the direction away from the grisly mother of horrors. It

happened to be the way up the valley wall. Burl started up that slope.

Saya went with him.

Before they had gone ten yards Dor spoke to his wife. They followed

Burl, with their three children. Five yards more, and Jak agitatedly

began to bustle his family into movement. Old Jon, wheezing, frantically

scuttled after Burl, and Cori competently set out with the youngest of

her children in her arms and the others marching before her. Within

seconds more, all the tribe was in motion.

Burl moved on, aware of his following, but ignoring it. The procession

continued in his wake simply because it had begun to do so. Dik, his

adolescent brashness beaten down by terror, nevertheless regarded Burl's

stained weapon with the inevitable envy of the half-grown for

achievement. He saw something half-buried in the soil and--after a

fearful glance behind--he moved aside to tug at it. It was part of the

armor of a former rhinoceros beetle. Tet joined him. They made an act of

great daring of lingering to find themselves weapons as near as possible

to Burl's.

A quarter-mile on, the fugitives passed a struggling milkweed plant, no

more than twenty feet high and already scabrous with scale and rusts

upon its lower parts. Ants marched up and down its stalk in a steady

single file, placing aphids from their nearby ant-city on suitable spots

to feed,--and to multiply as only parthenogenic aphids can do. But

already, on the far side of the milkweed, an ant-lion climbed up to do

murder among them. The ant-lion, of course, was the larval form of a

lace-wing fly. The aphids were its predestined prey.

Burl continued to march, holding Saya's hand. The reek of formic acid

came to his nostrils. He ignored it. Ants were as much prey to his

tribesmen, now, as crabs and crayfish to other, shore-dwelling tribesmen

on long-forgotten Earth. But Burl was not concerned with food, now. He

stalked on toward the mountain-slopes.

Dik and Tet brandished their new weapons. They looked fearfully behind

them. The monster from whom they fled was lost in its gruesome

feasting,--and they were a long way from it, now. There was a steady,

single-file procession of ants, with occasional gaps in the line. The

procession passed the line through one of those gaps.

Beyond it, Tet and Dik conferred. They dared each other. They went

scrambling back to the line of ants. Their weapons smote. The

slaughtered ants died instantly and were quickly dragged from the

formic-acid-scented path. The remaining ants went placidly on their way.

The weapons struck again.

The two adolescents had to outdo each other. But they had as much food

as they could carry. Gloating--each claiming to have been most daring

and to have the largest bag of game--they ran panting after the tribe.

They grandly distributed their take of game. It was a form of boasting.

But the tribesfolk accepted the gifts automatically. It was, after all,

food.

The two gangling boys, jabbering at each other, raced back once more.

Again they returned with dangling masses of foodstuff,--half-scores of

foot-long creatures whose limbs, at least, contained firm meat.

Behind, the ant-lion made his onslaught into the stupidly feasting

aphids, and warrior-ants took alarm and thrust forward to offer battle.

Tumult arose upon the milkweed.

But Burl led his followers toward the mountainside. He reached a minor

eminence and looked about him. Caution was the price of existence on

this world.

Two hundred feet away, a small scurrying horror raged and searched among

the rough-edged layers of what on other worlds was called paper-mould or

rock-tripe. Here it was thick as quilting, and infinitesimal creatures

denned under it. The sixteen-inch spider devoured them, making

gluttonous sounds. But it was busy, and all spiders are relatively

short-sighted.

Burl turned to Saya, and realized that all his tribe had followed him

fearfully even to this small height he'd climbed only to look around

from. Dor had taken advantage of Burl's pause. There was an empty

cricket-shell partly overwhelmed by the fungoid soil. He tore free a

now-hollow, sickle-shaped jaw. It was curved and sharp and deadly if

properly wielded. Dor had seen Burl kill things. He had even helped.

Now, very grimly, he tried to imagine killing something all alone. Jak

saw him working on the sickle-shaped weapon. He tugged at the cricket's

ransacked carcass for another weapon. Dik and Tet vaingloriously

pretended to fight between themselves with their recently acquired

instruments for killing. Jon wheezed and panted. Old Tama complained to

herself in whispers, not daring to make sounds in the daylight. The rest

waited until Burl should lead them further.

When Burl turned angry eyes upon them--he was beginning to do such

things deliberately, now--they all regarded him humbly. Now they

remembered that they had been hungry and he had gotten food for them,

and they had been paralyzed by terror, and he dared to move. They

definitely had a feeling of dependence upon him, for the present moment

only. Later, their feeling of humbleness would diminish. In proportion

as he met their needs for leadership, they would tend to try to become

independent of him. His leadership would be successful in proportion as

he taught them to lead themselves. But Burl perceived this only dimly.

At the moment it was pleasing to have all his tribe regard him so

worshipfully, even if not in quite the same fashion as Saya. He was

suddenly aware that now--at any rate while they were so frightened--they

would obey him. So he invented an order for them to obey.

"I carry sharp things," he said sternly. "Some of you have gotten sharp

things. Now everybody must carry sharp things, to fight with."

Humbly, they scattered to obey. Saya would have gone with them, but Burl

held her back. He did not quite know why. It could have been that the

absolute equality of the sexes in cravenness was due to end, and for his

own vanity Burl would undertake the defense of Saya. He did not analyze

so far. He did not want her to leave him, so he prevented it.

The tribesfolk scattered. Dor went with his wife, to help her arm

herself. Jak uneasily followed his. Jon went timorously where the

picked-over remnant of the cricket's carcass might still yield an

instrument of defense. Cori laid her youngest child at Burl's feet while

she went fearfully to find some toothed instrument meeting Burl's

specification of sharpness.

There was a stifled scream. A ten-year-old boy--he was Dik's younger

brother--stood paralyzed. He stared in an agony of horror at something

that had stepped from behind a misshapen fungoid object fifty yards from

Burl, but less than ten yards from him.

It was a pallidly greenish creature with a small head and enormous eyes.

It stood upright, like a man,--and it was a few inches taller than a

man. Its abdomen swelled gracefully into a leaflike form. The boy faced

it, paralyzed by horror, and it stood stock-still. Its great, hideously

spined arms were spread out in a pose of hypocritical benediction.

It was a partly-grown praying mantis, not too long hatched. It stood

rigid, waiting benignly for the boy to come closer or try to flee. If

he had fled, it would fling itself after him with a ferocity beside

which the fury of a tiger would be kittenish. If he approached, its

fanged arms would flash down, pierce his body, and hold him terribly

fast by the needle-sharp hooks that were so much worse than trap-claws.

And of course it would not wait for him to die before it began its meal.

All the small party of humans stood frozen. It may be questioned whether

they were filled with horror for the boy, or cast into a deeper abyss of

despair by the sight of a half-grown mantis. Only Burl, so far, had any

notion of actually leaving the valley. To the rest, the discovery of one

partly mature praying mantis meant that there would be hundreds of

others. It would be impossible to evade the tiny, slavering demons which

were the brood of the great spider. It would be impossibility multiplied

to live where a horde of small--yet vastly larger--fiends lived, raising

their arms in a semblance of blessing before they did murder.

Only Burl was capable of thought, and this was because vanity filled

him. He had commanded and had been obeyed. Now obedience was forgotten

because there was this young mantis. If the men had dreamed of fighting

it, it could have destroyed any number of them by sheer ferocity and its

arsenal of knives and daggers. But Burl was at once furious and

experienced. He had encountered such a middle-sized monster, when alone,

and deliberately had experimented with it. In consequence he could dare

to rage. He ran toward the mantis. He swung the small corpse of an

ant--killed by Tet only minutes since--and hurled it past the

terror-fascinated boy. He had hurled it at the mantis.

It struck. And insects simply do not think. Something hurtled at the

ghastly young creature. Its arms struck ferociously to defend itself.

The ant was heavy. Poised upright in its spectral attitude, the mantis

was literally flung backward. But it rolled over, fighting the dead ant

with that frenzy which is not so much ferocity as mania.

The small boy fled, hysterically, once the insect's attention was

diverted.

The human tribe gathered around Burl many hundreds of yards away,--again

uphill. He was their rendezvous because of the example set by Cori. She

had left her baby with Burl. When Burl dashed from the spot, Saya had

quite automatically followed the instinct of any female for the young of

its kind. She'd snatched up the baby before she fled. And--of

course--she'd joined Burl when the immediate danger was over.

The floor of the valley seemed a trifle indistinct, from here. The mist

that hung always in the air partly veiled the details of its horrors. It

was less actual, not quite as deadly as it once had seemed.

Burl said fiercely to his followers:

"Where are the sharp things?"

The tribesfolk looked at one another, numbly. Then Jon muttered

rebelliously, and old Tama raised her voice in shrill complaint. Burl

had led them to this! There had been only the red dust in the place from

which they had come, but here was a hunting-spider and its young and

also a new hatching of mantises! They could dodge the red dust, but how

could they escape the deaths that waited them here? Ai! Ai! Burl had

persuaded them to leave their home and brought them here to die....

Burl glared about him. It was neither courage nor resolution, but he had

come to realize that to be admired by one's fellows was a splendid

sensation. The more one was admired, the better. He was enraged that

anyone dared to despair instead of thinking admiringly about his

remarkableness.

"I," said Burl haughtily, "am not going to stay here. I go to a place

where there are neither spiders nor mantises. Come!"

He held out his hand to Saya. She gave the child to Cori and confidently

moved to follow him. Burl stalked grandly away and she went with him. He

went uphill. Naturally! There were spiders and mantises in the

valley,--so many that to stay there meant death. So he moved to go

somewhere else.

And this was the climactic event that changed the whole history of

humanity upon the forgotten planet. Up to this point, there may have

been other individuals who had accomplished somewhat of Burl's kind of

leadership. A few may have learned courage. It is possible that some

even led their tribesfolk upon migrations in search of safer lands to

live in. But until Burl led his people out of a valley filled with food,

up a mountainside toward the unknown, it was simply impossible for

humans to rise permanently above the status of hunted vermin; at the

mercy of monstrous mindless creatures; whose forbears had most

ironically been brought to this planet to prepare it for humans to live

on.

Burl was the first man to lead his fellows toward the heights.

_9. THERE IS SUCH A THING AS SUNSHINE_

The sun that shone upon the forgotten planet was actually very near. It

shone on the top of the cloud-bank, and the clouds glowed with dazzling

whiteness. It shone on the mountain-peaks where they penetrated the

mist, and the peaks were warmed, and there was no snow anywhere despite

the height. There were winds, here where the sun yielded sensible heat.

The sky was very blue. At the edge of the plateau--from which the

cloud-banks were down instead of up--the mountainsides seemed to descend

into a sea of milk. Great undulations in the mist had the semblance of

waves, which moved with great deliberation toward the shores. They

seemed sometimes to break in slow-motion against the mountain-walls

where they were cliff-like, and sometimes they seemed to flow up gentler

inclinations like water flowing up a beach. But all of this was very

deliberate indeed, because the cloud-waves were sometimes twenty miles

from crest to crest.

The look of things was different on the highlands. This part of the

unnamed world, no less than the lowlands, had been seeded with life on

two separate occasions. Once the seedings was with bacteria and moulds

and lichens to break up the rocks and make soil of them, and once with

seeds and insect-eggs and such living things as might sustain themselves

immediately they were hatched. But here on the highlands the different

climatic conditions had allowed other seedlings and creatures to survive

together.

Here moulds and yeasts and rusts were stunted by the sunlight. Grasses

and weeds and trees survived, instead. This was an ideal environment for

plants that needed sunlight to form chlorophyl, with which to make use

of the soil that had been formed. So on the highlands the vegetation was

almost earthlike. And there was a remarkable side-effect on the fauna

which had been introduced in the same manner and at the same time as the

creatures down below. In coolness which amounted to a temperate climate,

there developed no such frenzy of life as made the nightmare jungles

under the clouds. Plants grow at a slower rate than fungi, and less

luxuriantly. There was no vast supply of food for large-sized

plant-eaters. Insects which were to survive, here, could not grow to be

monsters. Moreover, the nights here were chill. Very many insects grow

torpid in the cool of a temperate-zone night, but warm up to activity

soon after sunrise. But a large creature, made torpid by cold, will not

revive so quickly. If large enough, it will not become fully active

until close to dark. On the plateau, the lowland monsters would starve

in any case. But more;--they would have only a fraction of each day of

full activity.

So there was a necessary limit to the size of the creatures that lived

above the clouds. To humans from other planets, the life on the plateau

would not have seemed horrifying at all. Save for the absence of birds

to sing, and a lack of small mammals to hunt or merely to enjoy, the

untouched, sunlit plateau with its warm days and briskly chill nights

would have impressed most civilized men as an ideal habitation.

But Burl and his followers were hardly prepared to see it that way at

first glance. If told about it in advance, they would have thought of it

with despair.

But they did not know beforehand. They toiled upward, their leader moved

by such ridiculous motives of pride and vanity as have caused men to

achieve greatness throughout all history. Two great continents were

discovered back on Earth by a man trying to get spices to hide the gamey

flavor of half-spoiled meat, and the power that drives mile-long

space-craft was first discovered and tamed by men making bombs to

destroy their fellows. There were precedents for foolish motives

producing results far from foolishness.

The trudging, climbing folk crawled up the hillside. They reached a

place high above the valley Burl had led them to. That valley grew misty

in appearance. Presently it could no longer be seen at all. The mist

they had taken for granted, all their lives, hid from them everything

but the slanting stony wall up which they climbed. The stone was mostly

covered by bluish-green rock-tripe in partly overlapping sheets. Such

stuff is always close behind the bacteria which first attack a

rock-face. On a slope, it clings while soil is washed downward as fast

as it is formed. The people never ate rock-tripe, of course. It produces

frightening cramps. In time they might learn that when thoroughly dried

it can be cooked to pliability again and eaten with some satisfaction.

But so far they neither knew dryness nor fire.

Nor had they ever known such surroundings as presently enveloped them. A

slanting rocky mountainside, which stretched up frighteningly to the

very sky. Grayness overhead. Grayness also to one side,--the side away

from the mountain. And equal grayness below. The valley from which they

had come could no longer be seen even as a different shading of the

mist. And as they scrambled and trudged after Burl, his followers

gradually became aware of the utter strangeness of all about them. For

one result, they grew sick and dizzy. To them it seemed that all

solidity was slowly tilting. Had they been superstitious, they might

have thought of demons preparing to punish them for daring to come to

such a place. But--quaintly enough--Burl's followers had developed no

demonology. Your typical savage is resolved not to think, but he does

have leisure to want. He makes gods and devils out of his nightmares,

and gambles on his own speculations to the extent of offering blackmail

to demons if they will only let him alone or--preferably--give him more

of the things he wants.

But the superstitions of savages involve the payment of blackmail in

exact proportion to their prosperity. The Eskimos of Earth lived always

on the brink of starvation. They could not afford the luxury of tabus

and totem animals whose flesh must not be eaten, and forbidden areas

which might contain food.

Religion there was, among Burl's people, but superstition was not. No

humans, anywhere, can live without religion, but on Earth Eskimos did

with a minimum of superstitions,--they could afford no more--and the

humans of the forgotten planet could not afford any at all.

Therefore they climbed desperately despite the unparalleled state of

things about them. There was no horizon, but they had never seen a

horizon. Their feeling was that what had been "down" was now partly

"behind" and they feared lest a toppling universe ultimately let them

fall toward that grayness they considered the sky.

But all kept on. To lag behind would be to be abandoned in this place

where all known sensations were turned topsy-turvy. None of them could

imagine turning back. Even old Tama, whimpering in a whisper as she

struggled to keep up, merely complained bitterly of her fate. She did

not even think of revolt. If Burl had stopped, all his followers would

have squatted down miserably to wait for death. They had no thought of

adventure or any hope of safety. The only goodnesses they could imagine

were food and the nearness of other humans. They had food--nobody had

abandoned any of the dangling ant-bodies Tet and Dik had distributed

before the climb began. They would not be separated from their fellows.

Burl's motivation was hardly more distinct. He had started uphill in a

judicious mixture of fear and injured vanity and desperation. There was

nothing to be gained by going back. The terrors at hand were no greater

than those behind, so there was no reason not to go ahead.

They came to a place where the mountain-flank sank inward. There was a

flat space, and behind it a winding cañon of sorts like a vast crack in

the mountain's substance. Burl breasted the curving edge and found

flatness beyond it. He stopped short.

The mouth of the cañon was perhaps fifty yards from the lip of the

downward slope. So much space was practically level, and on it were

toadstools and milkweed--two of them--and there was food. It was a

small, isolated asylum for life such as they were used to. They

could--it was possible that they could--have found a place of safety

here.

But the possibility was not the fact. They saw the spider-web at once.

It was slung between the opposite cañon-walls by cables all of two

hundred feet long. The radiating cables reached down to anchorages on

stone. The snare-threads, winding out and out in that logarithmic spiral

whose properties men were so astonished to discover, were fully a yard

apart. The web was for giant game. It was empty now, but Burl saw the

telegraph-cord which ran from the very center of the web to the

web-maker's lurking-place. There was a rocky shelf on the cañon-wall. On

it rested the spider, almost invisible against the stone, with one furry

leg touching the cable. The slightest touch on any part of the web would

warn it instantly.

Burl's followers accumulated behind him. Old Jon's wheezing was audible.

Tama ceased her complaints to survey this spot. It might be--it could

be--a haven, and she would have to find new and different things to

complain about in consequence. The spider-web itself, of course, was no

reason for them to be alarmed. Web-spiders do not hunt. Their males do,

but they are rarely in the neighborhood of a web save at mating-time.

The web itself was no reason not to settle here. But there was a reason.

The ground before the web,--between the web and themselves--was a

charnel-house of murdered creatures. Half-inch-thick wing-cases of dead

beetles and the cleaned-out carapaces of other giants. The ovipositor of

an ichneumon-fly,--see feet of springy, slender, deadly-pointed

tube--and the abdomen-plates of bees and the draggled antennae of moths

and butterflies.

Something very terrible lived in this small place. The mountainsides

were barren of food for big flying things. Anything which did fly this

high for any reason would never land on sloping foodless stone.

It would land here. And very obviously it would die. Because

something--Something--killed things as they came. It denned back in the

cañon where they could not see it. It dined here.

The humans looked and shivered, all but Burl. He cast his eyes about for

better weapons than he possessed. He chose for himself a magnificent

lance grown by some dead thing for its own defense. He pulled it out of

the ground.

It was utterly silent, here on the heights. No sounds from the valley

rose so high. There was no noise except the small creakings made as Burl

strove to free the new, splendid weapon for himself.

That was why he heard the gasp which somebody uttered in default of a

scream that would not be uttered. It was a choked, a strangled, an

inarticulate sobbing noise.

He saw its cause.

There was a thing moving toward the folk from the recesses of the cañon.

It moved very swiftly. It moved upon stilt-like, impossibly attenuated

legs of impossible length and inconceivable number. Its body was the

thickness of Burl's own. And from it came a smell of such monstrous

foetor that any man, smelling it, would gag and flee even without fear

to urge him on. The creature was a monstrous millipede, forty feet in

length, with features of purest, unadulterated horror.

It did not appear to plan to spring. Its speed of movement did not

increase as it neared the tribesfolk. It was not rushing, like the

furious charge of the murderers Burl's tribe knew. It simply flowed

sinuously toward them with no appearance of haste, but at a rate of

speed they could not conceivably outrun.

Sticklike legs twitched upward and caught the spinning body of an ant.

The creature stopped, and turned its head about and seized the object

its side-legs had grasped. It devoured it. Burl shouted again and again.

There was a rain of missiles upon the creature. But they were not to

hurt it, but to divert its incredibly automaton-like attention. Its legs

seized the things flung to it. It was not possible to miss. Ten,

fifteen,--twenty of the items of small-game were grasped in mid-air, as

if they were creatures in flight.

Burl's shoutings took effect. His people fled to the side of the level

lip of ground. They climbed frantically past the opening of the valley.

They fled toward the heights.

Burl was the last to retreat. The monstrous millipede stood immobile,

trapped for the moment by the gratification of all its desires. It was

absorbed by the multitude of tiny tidbits with which it had been

provided.

It was a fact to Burl's honor that he debated a frantic attack upon the

monster in its insane absorption. But the strangling stench was

deterrent enough. He fled,--the last of his band of fugitives to leave

the place where the monstrous creature lived and preyed. As he left it,

it was still crunching the small meals, one by one, with which the folk

had supplied it.

They went on up the mountain-flank. It was not to be supposed, of

course, that the creature could not move above the slanting

rock-surface. Unquestionably it roamed far and wide, upon occasion. But

its own foetid reek would make impossible any idea of trailing the

humans by scent. And, climbing desperately as the humans did, it would

be unable to see them when they were past the first protuberance of the

mountain.

In twenty minutes they slackened their pace. Exhaustion prompted it.

Caution ordered it. Because here they saw another small island of

flatness in the slanting universe which was all they could see save

mist. It was simply a place where boulders had piled up, and soil had

formed, and there was a miniature haven for life other than moulds which

could grow on naked stone.

Actually, there was a space a hundred feet by fifty on which wholly

familiar mushrooms grew. It was a thicket like a detached section of the

valley itself. Well-known edible fungi grew here. There were gray

puffballs. And from it came the cheerful loud chirping of some small

beetle, arrived at this spot nobody could possibly know how, but happily

ensconsed in a separate bit of mushroom-jungle remote from the dangers

of the valley. If it was small enough, it would even be safe from the

reeking horror of the cañon just below it.

They broke off edible mushrooms here and ate. And this could have been

safety for them--save for the giant millipede no more than half a mile

below. Old Jon wheezed querulously that here was food and there was no

need for them to go further, just now. Here was food....

Burl regarded him with knitted brows. Jon's reaction was natural enough.

The tribesfolk had never tended to think for the future because it was

impossible to make use of such planning. Even Burl could easily enough

have accepted the fact that this was safety for the moment and food for

the moment. But it happened that to settle down here until driven out

would--and at this moment--have deprived him of the authority he had so

recently learned to enjoy.

"You stay," he said haughtily, to Jon. "I go on, to a better place where

nothing is to be feared at all!"

He held out his hand to Saya. He assailed the slope again, heading

upward in the mist.

His tribe followed him. Dik and Tet, of course, because they were boys

and Burl led on to high adventures in which so far nobody had been

killed. Dor followed because--he being the strongest man in the

tribe--he had thoughtfully realized that his strength was not as useful

as Burl's brains and other qualities. Cori followed because she had

children, and they were safer where Burl led than anywhere else. The

others followed to avoid being left alone.

The procession toiled on and up. Presently Burl noticed that the air

seemed clearer, here. It was not the misty, only half transparent stuff

of the valley. He could see for miles to right and left. He realized the

curvature of the mountain-face. But he could not see the valley. The

mist hid that.

Suddenly he realized that he saw the cloud-bank overhead as an object.

He had never thought of it specifically before. To him it had been

simply the sky. Now he saw an indefinite lower surface which yet

definitely hid the heights toward which he moved. He and his followers

were less than a thousand feet below it. It appeared to Burl that

presently he would run into an obstacle which would simply keep him from

going any further. The idea was disheartening. But until it happened he

obstinately climbed on.

He observed that the thing which was the sky did not stay still. It

moved, though slowly. A little higher, he could see that there were

parts of it which were actually lower than he was. They moved also, but

they moved away from him as often as they moved toward him. He had no

experience of any dangerous thing which did not leap at its victims.

Therefore he was not afraid.

In fact, presently he noticed that the whiteness which was the

cloud-layer seemed to retreat before him. He was pleased. Weak things

like humans fled from enemies. Here was something which fled at his

approach! His followers undoubtedly saw the same thing. Burl had killed

spiders. He was a remarkable person. This unknown white stuff was afraid

of him. Therefore it was wise to stay close to Burl. Burl found his

vanity inflamed by the fact that always--even at its thickest--the white

cloud-stuff never came nearer than some dozens of feet. He swaggered as

he led his people up.

And presently there was brightness about them. It was a greater

brightness than the tribesfolk had ever known. They knew daylight as a

grayness in which one could see. Here was a brightness that shone. They

were not accustomed to brightness.

They were not accustomed to silence, either. The noises of the valley

were like all the noises of the lowlands. They had been in the ears of

every one of the human beings since they could hear at all. They had

gradually diminished as the valley dropped behind them. Now, in the

radiant white mist which was the cloud-layer, there were no sounds at

all, and the fact was suddenly startling.

They blinked in the brightness. When they spoke to each other, they

spoke in whispers. The stone underfoot was not even lichen-covered,

here. It was bare and bright and glistened with wetness. The light they

experienced took on a golden tint. All of these things were utterly

unparalleled, but the stillness was a hush instead of a menacing

silence. The golden light could not possibly be associated with fear.

The people of the forgotten planet felt, most likely, the sort of

promise in this shining tranquility which before they had known only in

dreams. But this was no dream.

They came up through the surface of a sea of mist, and they saw before

them a shore of sunshine. They saw blue and sky and sunlight for the

first time. The light smote their shins and brilliantly colored furry

garments. It glittered in changing, ever-more-colorful flashes upon

cloaks made of butterfly wings. It sparkled on the great lance carried

by Burl in the lead, and the quite preposterous weapons borne by his

followers.

The little party of twenty humans waded ashore through the last of the

thinning white stuff which was cloud. They gazed about them with

wondering, astonished eyes. The sky was blue. There was green grass. And

again there was sound. It was the sound of wind blowing among trees, and

of things living in the sunshine.

They heard insects, but they did not know what they heard. The shrill

small musical whirrings; the high-pitched small cries which made an

elfin melody everywhere,--these were totally strange. All things were

new to their eyes, and an enormous exultation filled them. From

deep-buried ancestral memories they somehow knew that what they saw was

right, was normal, was appropriate and proper, and that this was the

kind of world in which humans belonged, rather than the seething horror

of the lowlands. They breathed clean air for the first time in many

generations.

Burl shouted in his triumph, and his voice echoed among trees and

hillsides.

It was time for the plateau to ring with the shouting of a man in

triumph!

_10. MEN CLIMB UP TO SAVAGERY_

They had food for days. They had brought mushroom from the isolated

thicket not too far beneath the clouds. There were the ants that Dik and

Tet had distributed grandly, and not all of which had been used to

secure escape from the cañon of the millipede. Had they found other food

immediately, they would have settled down comfortably in the fashion

normal to creatures whose idea of bliss is a secure hiding-place and

food on hand so they do not have to leave it. Somehow they believed that

this high place of bright light and new colors was secure. But they had

no hiding-place. And though they did accept with the unreasoning faith

of children and savages that there were no enemies here, they still

wanted one.

They found a cave. It was small, so that it would be crowded with all of

them in it, but as it turned out, this was fortunate. At some time it

had been occupied by some other creature, but the dirt which floored it

had settled flat and showed no tracks. It retained faint traces of a

smell which was unfamiliar but not unpleasing,--it held no connotation

of danger. Ants stank of formic acid plus the musky odor of their

particular city. One could identify not only the kind of ant, but its

home city, by sniffing at an ant-trail. Spiders had their own

hair-raising odor. The smell of a praying-mantis was acrid, and all

beetles reeked of decay. And of course there were those bugs whose main

defense was an effluvium which tended to strangle all but the smell's

happy possessor. This faint smell in the cave was different. The humans

thought vaguely that it might possibly be another kind of man.

Actually, it was the smell of a warm-blooded animal. But Burl and his

fellows knew of no warm-blooded creature but themselves.

They had come above the clouds a bare two hours before sunset,--of which

they knew nothing. For an hour they marveled, staying close together.

They were especially astounded by the sun, since they could not bear to

look at it. But presently, being savages, they accepted it

matter-of-factly.

They could not cease to wonder at the vegetation about them. They were

accustomed only to gigantic fungi and the few straggling plants which

tried so desperately to bear seed before they were devoured. Here they

saw many plants and no fungi,--and they did not see anything they

recognized as insects. They looked only for large things.

They were astounded by the slenderness and toughness of the plants.

Grass fascinated them, and weeds. A large part of their courage came

from the absence of debris upon the ground. The hunting-grounds of

spiders were marked by grisly remnants of finished meals, and where

mantises roamed there were bits of transparent beetle-wings and sharp

spiny bits of armor not tasty enough to be consumed. Here, in the first

hour of their exploration, they saw no sign that an insect like

the lowland ones had ever been in this place at all. But they

could not believe the monsters never came. They correctly--and

pessimistically--assumed that their coming was only rare.

The cave was a great relief. Trees did not grow close enough to give

them a feeling of safety,--though they were ludicrously amazed at the

invincible hardness of tree trunks. They had never known anything but

insect-armour and stone which was as hard as the trunks of those

growing things. They found nothing to eat, but they were not yet

hungry. They did not worry about food while they still had remnants from

their climb.

When the sun sank low and crimson colorings filled the west, they were

less happy. They watched the glory of their first sunset with scared,

incredulous eyes. Yellows and reds and purples reared toward the zenith.

It became possible to look at the sun directly. They saw it descend

behind something they could not guess at. Then there was darkness.

The fact stunned them. So night came like this!

Then they saw the stars for the first time, as they came singly into

being. And the folk from the lowland crowded frantically into the cave

with its faint odor of having once been occupied by something else. They

filled the cave tightly. But Burl had some reluctance to admit his

terror. He and Saya were the last to enter.

And nothing happened. Nothing. The sounds of sunset continued. They were

strange but soothing and somehow--again ancestral memory spoke

comfortingly--they were the way night-sounds ought to be. Burl and the

others could not possibly know it, but for the first time in forty

generations on the forgotten planet, human beings were in an environment

really suited to them. It had a rightness and a goodness which was

obvious in spite of its novelty. And because of Burl's own special

experiences, he was a little bit better able to estimate novelties than

the rest. He listened to the night-noises from close by the cave's small

entrance. He heard the breathing of his tribesfolk. He felt the heat of

their bodies, keeping the crowded enclosure warm enough for all. Saya

held fast to his hand, for the reassurance of the contact. He was

wakeful, and thinking very busily and painfully, but Saya was not

thinking at all. She was simply proud of Burl.

She felt, to be sure, a tumult which was fear of the unknown and relief

from much greater fear of the familiar. She felt warm, prideful

memories of the sight of Burl leading and commanding the others. She had

absorbing fresh memories of the look and feel of sunshine, and mental

pictures of sky and grass and trees which she had never seen before.

Confusedly she remembered that Burl had killed a spider, no less, and he

had shown how to escape a praying-mantis by flinging it at an ant, and

he had grandly led the others up a mountainside it had never occurred to

anybody else to climb. And the giant millipede would have devoured them

all, but that Burl gave commands and set the example, and he had marched

magnificently up the mountainside when it seemed that all the cosmos

twisted and prepared to drop them into an inverted sky....

Saya dozed. And Burl sat awake, listening, and presently with

fast-beating heart he slipped out of the entrance to the cave and stared

about him in the night.

There was coolness such as he had never known before, but nightfall was

not long past. There were smells in the air he had never before

experienced,--green things growing, and the peculiar clean odor of wind

that has been bathed in sunshine, and the oddly satisfying smell of

resinous trees.

But Burl raised his eyes to the heavens. He saw the stars in all their

glory, and he was the first human in two thousand years and more to look

at them from this planet. There were myriads upon myriads of them,

varying in brightness from stabbing lights to infinitesimal twinklings.

They were of every possible color. They hung in the sky above him,

immobile and unthreatening. They had not descended. They were very

beautiful.

Burl stared. And then he noticed that he was breathing deeply, with a

new zest. He was filling his lungs with clean, cool, fragrant air such

as men were intended to breathe from the beginning, and of which Burl

and many others had been deprived. It was almost intoxicating to feel so

splendidly alive and unafraid.

There was a slight sound. Saya stood beside him, trembling a little. To

leave the others had required great courage, but she had come to realize

that if Burl was in danger she wished to share it.

They heard the nightwind and the orchestra of night-singers. They

wandered aside from the cave-mouth and Saya found completely primitive

and satisfying pride in the courage of Burl, who was actually not afraid

of the dark! Her own uneasiness became something which merely added

savor to her pride in him. She followed him wherever he went, to examine

this and consider that in the nighttime. It gave her enormous

satisfaction at once to think of danger and to feel so safe because of

his nearness.

Presently they heard a new sound in the night. It was very far away, and

not in the least like any sound they had ever heard before. It changed

in pitch as insect-cries do not. It was a baying, yelping sound. It

rose, and held the higher note, and abruptly dropped in pitch before it

ceased. Minutes later it came again.

Saya shivered, but Burl said thoughtfully:

"That is a good sound."

He didn't know why. Saya shivered again. She said reluctantly:

"I am cold."

It had been a rare sensation in the lowlands. It came only after one of

the infrequent thunderstorms, when wetted human bodies were exposed to

the gusty winds that otherwise never blew. But here the nights grew cold

after sundown. The heat of the ground would radiate to outer space with

no clouds to intercept it, and before dawn the temperature might drop

nearly to freezing. On a planet so close to its sun, however, there

would hardly be more than light hoar-frost at any time.

The two of them went back to the cave. It was warm there, because of the

close packing of bodies and many breaths. Burl and Saya found places to

rest and dozed off, Saya's hand again trustfully in Burl's.

He still remained awake for a long time. He thought of the stars, but

they were too strange to estimate. He thought of the trees and grass.

But most of his impressions of this upper world were so remote from

previous knowledge that he could only accept them as they were and defer

reflecting upon them until later. He did feel an enormous complacency at

having led his followers here, though.

But the last thing he actually thought about, before his eyes blinked

shut in sleep, was that distant howling noise he had heard in the night.

It was totally novel in kind, and yet there was something buried among

the items of his racial heritage that told him it was good.

He was first awake of all the tribesmen and he looked out into the cold

and pallid grayness of before-dawn. He saw trees. One side was brightly

lighted by comparison, and the other side was dark. He heard the tiny

singing noises of the inhabitants of this place. Presently he crawled

out of the cave again.

The air was biting in its chill. It was an excellent reason why the

giant insects could not live here, but it was invigorating to Burl as he

breathed it in. Presently he looked curiously for the source of the

peculiar one-sided light.

He saw the top of the sun as it peered above the eastern cloud-bank. The

sky grew lighter. He blinked and saw it rise more fully into view. He

thought to look upward, and the stars that had bewildered him were

nearly gone.

He ran to call Saya.

The rest of the tribe waked as he roused her. One by one, they followed

to watch their first sunrise. The men gaped at the sun as it filled the

east with colorings, and rose and rose above the seemingly steaming

layer of clouds, and then appeared to spring free of the horizon and

swim on upward.

The women stared with all their eyes. The children blinked, and

shivered, and crept to their mothers for warmth. The women enclosed them

in their cloaks, and they thawed and peered out once more at the glory

of sunshine and the day. Very soon, too, they realized that warmth came

from the great shining body in the sky. The children presently

discovered a game. It was the first game they had ever played. It

consisted of running into a shaded place until they shivered, and then

of running out into warm sunshine once more. Until this, dawning fear

was the motive for such playing as they did. Now they gleefully made a

game of sunshine.

In this first morning of their life above the clouds, the tribesmen ate

of the food they had brought from below. But there was not an indefinite

amount of food left. Burl ate, and considered darkly, and presently

summoned his followers' attention. They were quite contented and for the

moment felt no need of his guidance. But he felt need of admiration.

He spoke abruptly:

"We do not want to go back to the place we came from," he said sternly.

"We must look for food here, so we can stay for always. Today we find

food."

It was a seizure of the initiative. It was the linking of what the folk

most craved with obedience to Burl. It was the device by which dictators

seize power, and it was the instinctive action of a leader.

The eating men murmured agreement. There was a certain definite idea of

goodness--not virtue, but of things desirable--associated with what Burl

did and what he commanded. His tribe was gradually forming a habit of

obedience, though it was a very fragile habit up to now.

He led them exploring as soon as they had eaten. All of them, of course.

They straggled irregularly behind him. They came to a brook and regarded

it with amazement. There were no leeches. No greenish algae. No foaming

masses of scum. It was dear! Greatly daring, Burl tasted it. He drank

the first really potable water in a very long time for his race on this

planet. It was not fouled by drainage through moulds or rusts.

Dor drank after him. Jak. Cori tasted, and instantly bade her children

drink. Even old Tama drank suspiciously, and then raised her voice in

shrill complaint that Burl had not led them to this place sooner. Tet

and Dik became convinced that there were no deadly things lurking in it,

and splashed each other. Dik slipped and sat down hard on white stuff

that yielded and almost splashed. He got up and looked fearfully at what

he thought might be a deadly slime. Then he yelped shrilly.

He sat down on and crushed part of a bed of mushrooms. But they were

tiny, clean, and appetizing. They were miniatures of the edible

mushrooms the tribe fed on.

Burl smelled and finally tasted one. It was, of course, nothing more or

less than a perfectly normal edible mushroom, growing to the size that

mushrooms originally grew on Earth. It grew on a shaded place in

enormously rich soil. It had been protected from direct sunlight by

trees, but it had not had the means or the stimulus to become a monster.

Burl ate it. He carefully composed his features. Then he announced the

find to his followers. There was food here, he told them sternly, but in

this splendid world to which he had led them, food was small. There

would be no great enemies here, but the food would have to be sought in

small objects instead of great ones. They must look at this place and

seek others like it, in order to find food....

The tribesmen were doubtful. But they plucked mushrooms--whole

ones!--instead of merely breaking off parts of their tops. With deep

astonishment they recognized the miniature objects as familiar things

ensmalled. These mushrooms had the same savor, but they were not coarse

or stringy or tough like the giants. They melted in the mouth; Life in

this place to which Burl had led them was delectable! Truly the doings

of Burl were astonishing!

When the oldest of Cori's children found a beetle on a leaf, and they

recognized it, and instead of being bigger than a man and a thing to

flee from, it was less than an inch in size and helpless against them--.

They were entranced. From that moment onward they would really follow

Burl anywhere, in the happy conviction that he could only bring good to

everybody.

The opinion could have drawbacks, and it need not be always even true,

but Burl did nothing to discourage it.

And then, near midday, they made a discovery even greater than that of

familiar food in unfamiliar sizes. They were struggling, at the time,

through a vast patch of bushes with thorns on them--they were not used

to thorns--which they deeply distrusted. Eventually they would find out

that the glistening dark fruit were blackberries, and would rejoice in

them, but at this first encounter they were uneasy. In the midst of such

an untouched berry-patch they heard noises in the distance.

The sound was made up of cries of varying pitch, some of which were loud

and abrupt, and others longer and less loud. The people did not

understand them in the least. They could have been cries of human

beings, perhaps, but they were not cries of pain. Also they were not

language. They seemed to express a tremendous, zestful excitement. They

had no overtone of horror. And Burl and his folk had known of no

excitement among insects except frenzy. They could not imagine what sort

of tumult this could be.

But to Burl these sounds had something of the timbre of the yelping

noises of the night before. He had felt drawn to that sound. He liked

it. He liked this.

He led the way boldly toward the agitated noises. Presently--after a

mile or so--he and his people came out of breast-high weeds. Saya was

immediately behind him. The others trailed,--Tama complaining bitterly

that there was no need to track down sounds which could only mean

danger. They emerged in a space of bare stone above a small and grassy

amphitheatre. The tumult came from its center.

A pack of dogs was joyously attacking something that Burl could not see

clearly. They were dogs. They barked zestfully, and they yelped and

snarled and yapped in a dozen different voices, and they were having a

thoroughly good time,--though it might not be so good for the thing they

attacked.

One of them sighted the humans. He stopped stock-still and barked. The

others whirled and saw the humans as they came out into view. The tumult

ceased abruptly.

There was silence. The tribesmen saw creatures with four legs only. They

had never before seen any living thing with fewer than six,--except men.

Spiders had eight. The dogs did not have mandibles. They did not have

wing-cases. They did not act like insects. It was stupifying!

And the dogs saw men, whom they had never seen before. Much more

important, they smelled men. And the difference between man-smell and

insect-smell was so vast--because through hundreds of generations the

dogs had not smelled anything with warm blood save their own kind--the

difference in smell was so great in kind that the dogs did not react

with suspicion, but with a fascinated curiosity. This was an

unparalleled smell. It was, even in its novelty, an overwhelmingly

satisfying smell.

The dogs regarded the men with their heads on one side, sniffing in the

deepest possible amazement,--amazement so intense that they could not

possibly feel hostility. One of them whined a little because he did not

understand.

_11. WARM BLOOD IS A BOND_

Peculiarly enough, it was a matter of topography. The plateau which

reached above the clouds rose with a steep slope from the valley from

which a hunting-spider's brood had driven the men. This was on the

eastern edge of the plateau. On the west, however, the highland was

subject to an indentation which almost severed it. No more than twenty

miles from where Burl's group had climbed to sunshine, there was a much

more gradual slope downward. There, mushroom-forests grew almost to the

cloud-layer. From there, giant insects strayed up and onto the plateau

itself.

They could not live above the clouds, of course. There was not food

enough for their insatiable hunger. Especially at night, it was too cold

to allow them to stay active. But they did stray from their normal

environment, and some of them did reach the sunshine, and perhaps some

of them blundered back down to their mushroom-forests again. But those

which did not stumble back were chilled to torpor during their first

night underneath the stars. They were only partly active on the second

day,--if, indeed, they were active at all. Few or none recovered from

their second nights' coldness. None at all kept their full ferocity and

deadliness.

And this was how the dogs survived. They were certainly descended from

dogs on the wrecked space-ship--the _Icarus_--whose crew had landed on

this planet some forty-odd human generations since. The humans of today

had no memories of the ship, and the dogs surely had no traditions. But

just because those early dogs had less intelligence, they had more

useful instincts. Perhaps the first generations of castaways bred dogs

in their first few desperate centuries, hoping that dogs could help them

survive. But no human civilization could survive in the lowlands. The

humans went back to the primitive state of their race and lived as

furtive vermin among monsters. Dogs could not survive there, though

humans did linger on, so somehow the dogs took to the heights. Perhaps

dogs survived their masters. Perhaps some were abandoned or driven away.

But dogs had reached the highlands. And they did survive because giant

insects blundered up after them,--and could not survive in a proper

environment for dogs and men.

There was even reason for the dogs remaining limited in number, and

keenly intelligent. The food-supply was limited. When there were too

many dogs, their attacks on stumbling insect giants were more desperate

and made earlier, before the monsters' ferocity was lessened. So more

dogs died. Then there was an adjustment of the number of dogs to the

food-supply. There was also a selection of those too intelligent to

attack rashly. Yet those who had insufficient courage would not eat.

In short, the dogs who now regarded men with bright, interested eyes

were very sound dogs. They had the intelligence needed for survival.

They did not attack anything imprudently, but they also knew that it was

not necessary to be more than reasonably wary of insects in

general,--not even spiders unless they were very newly arrived from the

steaming lowlands. So the dogs regarded men with very much the same

astonished interest with which the men regarded the dogs.

Burl saw immediately that the dogs did not act with the blind ferocity

of insects, but with an interested, estimative intelligence strikingly

like that of men. Insects never examined anything. They fled or they

fought. Those who were not carnivorous had no interest in anything but

food, and those who were meat-eaters lumbered insanely into battle at

the bare sight of possible prey. The dogs did neither. They sniffed and

they considered.

Burl said sharply to his followers:

"Stay here!"

He walked slowly down into the amphitheatre. Saya followed him

instantly. Dogs moved warily aside. But they raised their noses and

sniffed. They were long, luxurious sniffs. The smell of human kind was a

good smell. Dogs had lived hundreds of their generations without having

it in their nostrils, but before that there were thousands of

generations to whom that smell was a necessity.

Burl reached the object the dogs had been attacking. It lay on the

grass, throbbing painfully. It was the larva of an azure-blue moth which

spread ten-foot wings at nightfall. The time for its metamorphosis was

near, and it had traveled blindly in search of a place where it could

spin its cocoon safely and change to its winged form. It had come to

another world,--the world above the clouds. It could find no proper

place. Its stores of fat had protected it somewhat from the chill. But

the dogs had found it as it crawled blindly--.

Burl considered. It was the custom of wasps to sting creatures like this

at a certain special spot,--apparently marked for them by a tuft of dark

fur.

Burl thrust home with his lance. The point pierced that particular spot.

The creature died quickly and without agony. The thought to kill was an

inspiration. Then instinct followed. Burl cut off meat for his

tribesmen. The dogs offered no objection. They were well-fed enough.

Burl and Saya, together, carried the meat back to the other tribesfolk.

On the way Burl passed within two yards of a dog which regarded him with

extreme intentness and almost a wistful expression. Burl's smell did not

mean game. It meant--something the dog struggled helplessly to remember.

But it was good.

"I have killed the thing," said Burl to the dog, in the tone of one

addressing an equal. "You can go and eat it now. I took only part of

it."

Burl and his people ate of what he had brought back. Many of the

dogs--most of them--went to the feast Burl had left. Presently they were

back. They had no reason to be hostile. They were fed. The humans

offered them no injury, and the humans smelled of something that

appealed to the deepest well-springs of canine nature.

Presently the dogs were close about the humans. They were fascinated.

And the humans were fascinated in return. Each of the people had a

little of the feeling that Burl had experienced as the tribal leader. In

the intent, absorbed and wholly unhostile regard of the dogs, even

children felt flattered and friendly. And surely in a place where

everything else was so novel and so satisfactory, it was possible to

imagine friendliness with creatures which were not human, since

assuredly they were not insects.

A similar state of mind existed among the dogs.

Saya had more meat than she desired. She glanced among the members of

the tribe. All were supplied. She tossed it to a dog. He jerked away

alertly, and then sniffed at it where it had dropped. A dog can always

eat. He ate it.

"I wish you would talk to us," said Saya hopefully.

The dog wagged his tail.

"You do not look like us," said Saya interestedly, "but you act like we

do. Not like the--Monsters."

The dog looked significantly at meat in Burl's hand. Burl tossed it. The

dog caught it with a quick snap, swallowed it, wagged his tail briefly

and came closer. It was a completely incredible action, but dogs and men

were blood-kin on this planet. Besides, there was racial-memory

rightness in friendship between men and dogs. It was not hindered by any

past experience of either. They were the only warm-blooded creatures on

this world. It was a kinship felt by both.

Presently Burl stood up and spoke politely to the dog. He addressed him

with the same respect he would have given to another man. In all his

life he had never felt equal to an insect, but he felt no arrogance

toward this dog. He felt superior only to other men.

"We are going back to our cave," he said politely. "Maybe we will meet

again."

He led his tribe back to the cave in which they had spent the previous

night. The dogs followed, ranging on either side. They were well-fed,

with no memory of hostility to any creature which smelled of warm blood.

They had an instinct without experience to dull it. The latter part of

the journey back to the tribal cave was--if anybody had been qualified

to notice it--remarkably like a group of dogs taking a walk with a group

of people. It was companionable. It felt right.

That night Burl left the cave, as before, to look at the stars. This

time Saya went with him matter-of-factly. But as they came out of the

cave-entrance there was a stirring. A dog rose and stretched himself

elaborately, yawning the while. When Burl and Saya moved away, he

trotted amiably with them.

They talked to it, and the dog seemed pleased. It wagged its tail.

When morning came, the dogs were still waiting hopefully for the humans

to come out. They appeared to expect the people to take another nice

long walk, on which they would accompany them. It was a brand-new

satisfaction they did not want to miss. After all, from a dog's

standpoint, humans are made to take long walks with, among other things.

The dogs greeted the people with tail-waggings and cordiality.

The dogs made a great difference in the adjustment of the tribe to life

upon the plateau. Their friendship assured the new status of human life.

Burl and his fellows had ceased to be fugitive game for any insect

murderer. They had hoped to become unpursued foragers,--because they

could hardly imagine anything else. But when the dogs joined them, they

were immediately raised to the estate of hunters. The men did not

domesticate the dogs. They made friends with them. The dogs did not

subjugate themselves to the men. They joined them,--at first

tentatively, and then with worshipful enthusiasm. And the partnership

was so inevitably a right one that within a month it was as if it had

always been.

Actually, save for a mere two thousand years, it had been.

At the end of a month the tribe had a permanent encampment. There were

caves at a suitable distance from the slope up which most wanderers from

the lowlands came. Cori's oldest child found the chrysalis of a giant

butterfly, whose caterpillar form had so offensive an odor that the dogs

had not attacked it. But when it emerged from the chrysalis, men and

dogs together assailed it before it could take flight. They ended the

enterprise with warm mutual approval. The humans had acquired great

wings with which to make warm cloaks,--very useful against the evening

chill. Dogs and men, alike, had feasted.

Then, one dawning, the dogs made a vast outcry which awoke the

tribesmen. Burl led the rush to the spot. They did battle with a monster

nocturnal beetle, less chilled than most such invaders. In the gray

dawnlight Burl realized that the darting, yapping dogs kept the

creature's full attention. He crippled, and then killed it with his

spear. The feat appeared to earn him warm admiration from the dogs. Burl

wore a moth's feathery antenna again, bound to his forehead like a

knight's plumes. He looked very splendid.

The entire pattern of human life changed swiftly, as if an entire

revelation had been granted to men. The ground was often thorny. One man

pierced his foot. Old Tama, scolding him for his carelessness, bound a

strip of wing-fabric about it so he could walk. The injured foot was

more comfortable than the one still unhurt. Within a week the women

were busily contriving diverse forms of footgear to achieve greater

comfort for everybody. One day Saya admired glistening red berries and

tried to pluck one, and they stained her fingers. She licked her fingers

to clean them,--and berries were added to the tribe's menu. A veritable

orgy of experiment began, which is a state of things which is extremely

rare in human affairs. A race with an established culture and tradition

does not abandon old ways of doing things without profound reason. But

men who have abandoned their old ways can discover astonishingly useful

new ones.

Already the dogs were established as sentries and watchmen, and as

friends to every member of the tribe. By now mothers did not feel

alarmed if a child wandered out of sight. There would be dogs along. No

danger could approach a child without vociferous warning from the dogs.

Men went hunting, now, with zestful tail-wagging dogs as companions in

the chase. Dor killed a torpid minotaur-beetle alone, save for assisting

dogs, and Burl felt a twinge of jealousy. But then Burl, himself,

battled a black male spider in a lone duel,--with dogs to help. By the

time a stray monster from the lowlands reached this area, it was dazed

and half-numbed by one night of continuous chill. Even the black spider

could not find the energy to leap. It fought like a fiend, yet

sluggishly. Burl killed this one while the dogs kept it busy,--and the

dogs were reproachful because he carried it back to the tribal

headquarters before dividing it among his assistants. Afterward, he

realized that though he could have avoided the fight he would have been

ashamed to do so, while the dogs barked and snapped at its furry legs.

It was while things were in this state that the way of life for human

beings on the forgotten planet was settled for all time. Burl and Saya

went out early one morning with the dogs, to hunt for meat for the

village. Hunting was easiest in the early hours, while creatures that

strayed up the night before were still sluggish with cold. Often,

hunting was merely butchery of an enfeebled monster to whom any effort

at all was terribly difficult.

This morning they strode away briskly. The dogs roved exuberantly

through the brush before them. They were some five miles from the

village when the dogs bayed game. And Burl and Saya ran to the spot with

ready spears,--which was something of a change from their former actions

on notice of a carnivore abroad. They found the dogs dancing and barking

around one of the most ferocious of the meat-eating beetles. It was not

unduly large, to be sure. Its body might have been four feet long, or

thereabouts. But its horrible gaping mandibles added a good three feet

more.

Those scythelike weapons gaped wide--opening sidewise as insects' jaws

do--as the beetle snapped hideously at its attackers, swinging about as

the dogs dashed at it. Its legs were spurred and spiked and armed with

dagger-like spines. Burl plunged into the fight.

The great mandibles clicked and clashed. They were capable of

disemboweling a man or snapping a dog's body in half without effort.

There were whistling noises as the beetle breathed through its abdominal

spiracles. It fought furiously, making ferocious charges at the dogs who

tormented and bewildered it. But they created the most zestfully excited

of tumults.

Burl and Saya were, of course, at least as absorbed and excited as the

dogs, or they would have noticed the thing that was to make so much

difference to every human being, not only on the plateau but still down

in the lowlands. This unnoticed thing was beyond their imagining. There

had been nothing else like it on this world in many hundreds of years.

It was half a dozen miles away and perhaps a thousand feet high when

Burl and Saya prepared to intervene professionally on behalf of the

dogs. It was a silvery needle, floating unsupported in the air. As they

entered the battle, it swerved and moved swiftly in their direction.

It was silent, and they did not notice. They knew of no reason to scan

the sky in daytime. And there was business on hand, anyhow.

Burl leaped in toward the beetle with a lance-thrust at the tough

integument where an armored leg joined the creature's body. He missed,

and the beetle whirled. Saya flashed her cloak before the monster so

that it seemed a larger and a nearer antagonist. As the creature whirled

again, Burl stabbed and a hind-leg crumpled.

Instantly the thing was limping. A beetle does not use its legs like

four-legged creatures. A beetle moving shifts the two end legs on one

side and the central leg on the other, so that it always stands on an

adjustable tripod of limbs. It cannot adjust readily to crippling. A dog

snatched at a spiny lower leg and crunched,--and darted away. The

machine-like monster uttered a formless, deep-bass cry and was spurred

to unbelievable fierceness. The fight became a thing of furious movement

and joyous uproar, with Burl striking once at a multiple eye so the pain

would deflect it from a charge at Saya, and Saya again deflecting it

with her cloak and once breathlessly trying to strike it with her

shorter spear.

They struck it again, and a third time, and it sank horribly to the

ground, all three legs on one side crippled. The remaining three thrust

and thrust and struggled senselessly,--and suddenly it was on its back,

still striking its gigantic jaws frantically in the hope of murder. But

then Burl struck home between two armor-plates where a ganglion was

almost exposed. The blow killed it instantly.

Burl and Saya were smiling at each other when there was a monstrous

sound of crashing trees. They whirled. The dogs pricked up their ears.

One of them barked defiantly.

Something huge--truly huge!--had settled to the ground a bare two

hundred yards away. It was metal, and there were ports in its sides, and

it was quite beyond imagining. Because, of course, no space-ship had

landed on this planet in forty-odd human generations.

A port opened as they stared at it. Men came out. Burl and Saya were

barbarically attired, but they had been fighting some sort of local

monster--the men on the space-ship could not quite grasp what they had

seen--and they had been helped by dogs. Human beings and dogs, together,

always mean some sort of civilization.

The dogs gave an impression of a very high level indeed. They trotted

confidently over to the ship, and they sniffed cautiously at the men who

had landed. Then their behavior was admirable. They greeted the new-come

men with the self-confident cordiality of dogs who are on the best

possible terms with human beings,--and there was no question of any

suspicion by anybody. The attitude of a man toward a dog is a perfectly

valid indication of his character, if not of his technical education.

And the newcomers knew how to treat dogs.

So Burl and Saya went forward, with the confident pleasure with which

well-raised children and other persons of innate dignity greet

strangers.

The ship was the _Wapiti_, a private cruiser doing incidental

exploration for the Biological Survey in the course of a trip after good

hunting. It had touched on the forgotten planet, and it would never be

forgotten again.

_EPILOGUE_

The survey-ship _Tethys_ made the first landing on the forgotten planet,

and the _Orana_ followed, and some centuries later the _Ludred_. Then

the planet was forgotten until the _Wapiti_ arrived. The arrival of the

_Wapiti_ was as much an accident as the loss of the punched card which

caused the planet to be overlooked for some thousands of years.

Somebody had noticed that the sun around which it circled was of a type

which usually has useful planets, but there was no record that it had

ever been visited. So a request to the sportsmen on the _Wapiti_ had

caused them to turn aside. They considered, anyhow, that it would be

interesting to land on a brand-new world or two. They considered it

fascinating to find human beings there before them. But they could not

understand the use of such primitive weapons or garments of such

barbaric splendor. They had trouble, too, because in forty-odd

generations the speech of the universe had changed, while Burl and Saya

spoke a very archaic language indeed.

But there was an educator on the _Wapiti_. It was quite standard

apparatus,--simply basic-education for a human child, so that one's

school-years could be begun with a backlog of correct speech, and

reading, with the practical facts of mathematics, sanitation, and the

general information that any human being anywhere needs to know.

Children use it before they start school, and they absorb its

information quite painlessly. It is rare that an adult needs it. But

Burl and Saya did.

Burl was politely invited to wear the head-set, and he politely obliged.

He found himself equipped with a new language and what seemed to him an

astonishing amount of information. Among the information was the item

that he was going to have--as an adult--a severe headache. Which he did.

Also included was the fact that the making of records for such educators

was so laborious a process that it took generations to compile one

master-record for the instruments.

Burl, with a splitting headache, nevertheless urged Saya to join him in

getting an education. And she did. And thereafter they were able to

converse with the sportsmen on the _Wapiti_ comfortably enough,--except

for their headaches.

And all this led to extremely satisfactory arrangements. Sportsmen

could not but be enthusiastic about the hunting of giant insects with

dogs and spears. The sportsmen on the _Wapiti_ wanted some of that kind

of sport. Burl's fellow-tribesmen were delighted to oblige,--though they

had not quite the zest of Burl. They had to acquire educations in their

turn, so they could talk to their new hunting-companions. But the

hunting was magnificent. The _Wapiti_ abandoned its original plans and

settled down for a stay.

Presently Burl's casual talk of the lowlands produced results. An

atmosphere-flier came out of the ship's storage-compartments. And

through the educator Burl was now a civilized man. He had not the

specialized later information of his guests, but he had knowledge they

could not dream of, and which it would take much of a century to put in

recordable form for an educator.

So an atmosphere-flier went down into the lowlands through the

cloud-banks. There were three men on board. They had good hunting.

Magnificent hunting. Even more importantly, they found another cluster

of human beings who lived as fugitives among the insect giants. They

brought them to the plateau, a few at a time. Sportsmen stayed in the

lowlands with modern weapons, hunting enthusiastically, while the

transfer took place.

In all, the _Wapiti_ stayed for two months Earth-time. When it left, its

sportsmen had such trophies as would make them envied of all other

hunters in three star-clusters. They left behind weapons and

atmosphere-fliers and their library and tools. But they took with them

enthusiasm for the sport on the once-forgotten planet, and rather warm

feelings of friendship for Burl.

They sent their friends back. The next ship to come in found a small

city on the plateau, with a population of three hundred souls,--all

civilized by educator. Naturally, they'd had no trouble building

civilized dwellings or practising sanitation, or developing a neatly

adapted culture-pattern for their particular environment. This second

ship brought more weapons and fliers and news from the first party

about commercial demand for the incredibly luxurious moth-fur, to be

found on only one planet in all the galaxy.

The fourth ship to land on the plateau was a trading-ship anxious to

load such furs for recklessly bidding merchants in a dozen

interplanetary marts. There were then nearly a thousand people living on

the plateau. They had a natural monopoly,--not of moth-fur and

butterfly-wing fabric, and panels of irridescent chitin for luxurious

decoration, but--of the strictly practical and detailed knowledge of

insect-habits which made it possible to obtain them. Off-planet visitors

who tried to hunt without local knowledge did not come back from the

lowlands. In time, Burl firmly enacted a planetary law which forbade the

inexperienced to go below the cloud-layer.

Because, of course, a government had to be formed for the planet. But

men with the basic education of citizens everywhere did not fumble it.

They had a job to do which was more important than anybody's vanity. It

was a job which gave deep and abiding satisfaction. When naked,

trembling folk were found in the mushroom-jungles and brought to the

plateau, they had one instant, feverish desire as soon as they got over

the headache from the educator.

They wanted to go back to the lowlands. It was profitable, to be sure.

But it was even more of a satisfaction to hunt and kill the monsters

that had hunted and killed men for so long. It felt good, too, to find

other humans and bring them out to sunshine.

So nowadays the forgotten planet has ceased to be forgotten. It is

hardly necessary to name it, because its name is known through all the

Galaxy. Its population is not large, so far, but it is an interesting

place to live in. In the popular mind, it is the most glamorous of all

possible worlds,--and for easily understandable reasons. The inhabitants

of its capital city wear moth-fur garments and butterfly-wing cloaks for

the benefit of their fellows in the lowlands. There is no day but

fliers take off and dive down into the mists. When human hunters are in

the lowlands, they dress as the lowlanders they used to be, so that

lowlanders who may spy them will be sure that they are men, and friends,

and come to them to be raised to proper dignity above the insects. It is

not unusual for a man to be brought up to sunshine, and have his session

with the educator, and be flying his own assigned atmosphere-flier

within a week, diving back above what used to be the place where he was

hunted, but where he has become the hunter.

It is a very pleasant arrangement. The search for more humans in the

lowlands is a prosperous business, even when it is unsuccessful. The

wings of white Morpho butterflies bring the highest prices, but even a

common swallow-tail is riches, and the fur of caterpillars--duly

processed--goes into the holds of the planet-owned space-line ships with

the care given elsewhere to platinum and diamonds.

And also it is good sport. The planet is a sportsman's paradise. There

are not too many visitors. Nobody may go hunting without an experienced

host. And off-planet sportsmen tend to feel somewhat queasy after a

session as guest of the folk who have made Burl their planet-president.

Visitors are not so much alarmed at fighting flying beetles in mid-air,

even though the beetles may compare with the hunters' craft in size and

are terrifically tenacious of life. The thing that appalls strangers is

the insistence of Burl's fellow-citizens--no longer only tribesmen--upon

fighting spiders on the ground. With their memories, they like it that

way. It's more satisfactory.

Not long ago the Planet President of Sumor XI was Burl's guest for a

hunt. Sumor XI is a highly civilized planet, and life there has become

tame. Its president is an ardent hunter. He liked Burl, who is still all

hard muscle despite his graying hair. He and Saya have a very

comfortable dwelling, and now that their children are grown they have

room in it even for a planet president, if he comes as a sportsman

guest. The Planet President of Sumor XI even liked the informal

atmosphere of a house where pleasantly self-possessed dogs curl up

comfortably on rugs of emperor-moth down that elsewhere are beyond

price.

But the President of Sumor XI was embarrassed on his visit. He and Burl

are both hunters, and they are highly congenial. But the President of

Sumor XI was upset on his last flight to the lowlands. Burl got out of

the atmosphere-flier alone, and for pure deep personal satisfaction he

fought a mastodon-sized wolf spider with nothing but a spear.

He killed the creature, of course. But the President of Sumor XI was

embarrassed. He wouldn't have dared try it. He felt that, however

sporting it might be, it was too risky a thing for a Planet President to

do.

But Saya took it for granted.

* * * * *

_You're missing the big thrills in science-fiction if you miss any of

the_

_ACE SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS_

For instance, here's what the _New York Herald-Tribune_ (just one of the

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