Nightmare Planet
_by_ MURRAY LEINSTER
(_Illustrations by Tom O'Reilly_)
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction
Plus June 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
* * * * *
_In science-fiction, as in all categories of fiction, there are
stories that are so outstanding from the standpoint of
characterization, concept, and background development that they
remain popular for decades. Two such stories were Murray Leinster's_
The Mad Planet _and_ Red Dust. _Originally published in 1923, they
have been reprinted frequently both here and abroad. They are now
scheduled for book publication. Especially for this magazine, Murray
Leinster has written the final story in the series. It is not
necessary to have read the previous stories to enjoy this one. Once
again, Burl experiences magnificent adventures against a colorful
background, but to the whole the author has added philosophical and
psychological observations that give this story a flavor seldom
achieved in science-fiction._
Under his real name of Will Fitzgerald Jenkins, the author has sold
to _The Saturday Evening Post_, _Colliers'_, _Today's Woman_, in
fact every important publication in America. He has had over 1200
stories published, 15 books and 35 science-fiction stories
anthologized. His writing earned him a listing in _Who's Who in
America_.
* * * * *
The Directory-ship _Tethys_ made the first landing on the planet,
L216^{12}. It was a goodly world, with an ample atmosphere and many
seas, which the nearby sun warmed so lavishly that a perpetual
cloud-bank hid them and all the solid ground from view. It had mountains
and islands and high plateaus. It had day and night and rain. It had an
equable climate, rather on the tropical side. But it possessed no life.
No animals roamed its solid surface. No vegetation grew from its rocks.
Not even bacteria struggled with the stones to turn them into soil. No
living thing, however small, swam in its oceans. It was one of that
disappointing vast majority of otherwise admirable worlds which was
unsuited for colonization solely because it had not been colonized
before. It could be used for biological experiments in a completely
germ-free environment, or ships could land upon it for water and
supplies of air. The water was pure and the air breathable, but it had
no other present utility. Such was the case with an overwhelming number
of Earth-type planets when first discovered in the exploration of the
galaxy. Life simply hadn't started there.
So the ship which first landed upon it made due note for the Galactic
Directory and went away, and no other ship came near the planet for
eight hundred years.
But nearly a millennium later, the Seed-Ship _Orana_ arrived. It landed
and carefully seeded the useless world. It circled endlessly above the
clouds, dribbling out a fine dust comprised of the spores of every
conceivable microorganism that could break down rock to powder and turn
the powder to organic matter. It also seeded with moulds and fungi and
lichens, and everything that could turn powdery primitive soil into
stuff on which higher forms of life could grow. The _Orana_ seeded the
seas with plankton. Then it, too, went away.
Centuries passed. Then the Ecological Preparation Ship _Ludred_ swam to
the planet from space. It was a gigantic ship of highly improbable
construction and purpose. It found the previous seeding successful. Now
there was soil which swarmed with minute living things. There were fungi
which throve monstrously. The seas stank of teeming minuscule
life-forms. There were even some novelties on land, developed by
strictly local conditions. There were, for example, _paramecium_ as big
as grapes, and yeasts had increased in size so that they bore flowers
visible to the naked eye. The life on the planet was not aboriginal,
though. It had all been planted by the seed-ship of centuries before.
The _Ludred_ released insects, it dumped fish into the seas. It
scattered plant-seeds over the continents. It treated the planet to a
sort of Russell's Mixture of living things. The real Russell's Mixture
is that blend of simple elements in the proportions found in suns. This
was a blend of living creatures, of whom some should certainly survive
by consuming the now habituated flora, and others which should survive
by preying on the first. The planet was stocked, in effect, with
everything it could be hoped might live there.
But at the time of the _Ludred's_ visit of course no creature needing
parental care had any chance of survival. Everything had to be able to
care for itself the instant it burst its egg. So there were no birds or
mammals. Trees and plants of divers sorts, and fish and crustaceans and
insects could be planted. Nothing else.
The _Ludred_ swam away through emptiness.
There should have been another planting, centuries later still, but it
was never made. When the Ecological Preparation Service was moved to
Algol IV, a file was upset. The cards in it were picked up and replaced,
but one was missed. So that planet was forgotten. It circled its sun in
emptiness. Cloud-banks covered it from pole to pole. There were hazy
markings in certain places, where high plateaus penetrated the clouds.
But from space the planet was featureless. Seen from afar, it was merely
a round white ball--white from its cloud-banks and nothing else.
But on its surface, in its lowlands it was nightmare.
Especially was it nightmare--after some centuries--for the descendants
of the human beings from the space-liner _Icarus_, wrecked there some
forty-odd generations ago. Naturally, nobody anywhere else thought of
the _Icarus_ any more. It was not even remembered by the descendants of
its human cargo, who now inhabited the planet. The wreckage of the ship
was long since hidden under the seething, furiously striving fungi of
the boil. The human beings on the planet had forgotten not only the ship
but very nearly everything--how they came to this world, the use of
metals, the existence of fire, and even the fact that there was such a
thing as sunlight. They lived in the lowlands, deep under the
cloud-bank, amid surroundings which were riotous, swarming, frenzied
horror. They had become savages. They were less than savages. They had
forgotten their high destiny as men.
* * * * *
[Illustration]
Dawn came. Grayness appeared overhead and increased. That was all. The
sky was a blank, colorless pall, merely mottled where the clouds
clustered a little thicker or a little thinner, as clouds do. But the
landscape was variegated enough! Where the little group of people
huddled together, there was a wide valley. Its walls rose up and up into
the very clouds. The people had never climbed those hillsides.
They had not even traditions of what might lie above them, and their
lives had been much too occupied to allow of speculations on cosmology.
By day they were utterly absorbed in two problems which filled every
waking minute. One was the securing of food to eat, under the conditions
of the second problem, which was that of merely staying alive.
There was only one of their number who sometimes thought of other
matters, and he did so because he had become lost from his group of
humans once, and had found his way back to it. His name was Burl, and
his becoming lost was pure fantastic accident, and his utilization of a
fully inherited power to think was the result of extraordinary events.
But he still had not the actual habit of thinking. This morning he was
like his fellows.
All of them were soaked with wetness. During the night--every night--the
sky dripped slow, spaced, solemn water-drops during the whole of the
dark hours. This was customary. But normally the humans hid in the
mushroom-forests, sheltered by the toadstools which now grew to three
man-heights. They denned in small openings in the tangled mass of
parasitic growths which flourished in such thickets. But this last night
they had camped in the open. They had no proper habitations of their
own. Caves would have been desirable, but insects made use of caves, and
the descendants of insects introduced untold centuries before had shared
in the size-increase of _paramecium_ and yeasts and the few true plants
which had been able to hold their own. Mining-wasps were two yards long,
and bumble-bees were nearly as huge, and there were other armored
monstrosities which also preferred caves for their own purposes. And of
course the humans could not build habitations, because anything men
built to serve the purpose of a cave would instantly be preempted by
creatures who would automatically destroy any previous occupants.
The humans had no fixed dens at any time. Now they had not even shelter.
They lacked other things, also. They had no tools save salvaged scraps
of insect-armor--great sawtoothed mandibles or razor-pointed
leg-shells--which they used to pry apart the edible fungi on which they
lived, or to get at the morsels of meat left behind when the brainless
lords of this planet devoured each other. They had not even any useful
knowledge, except desperately accurate special knowledge of the manners
and customs of the insects they could not defy. And on this special
morning they concluded that they were doomed. They were going to be
killed. They stood shivering in the open, waiting for it to happen.
It was not exactly news. They had had warning days ago, but they could
do nothing about it. Their home valley, to be sure, would have made any
civilized human being shudder merely to look at it, but they had
considered it almost paradise. It was many miles long, and a fair number
wide, and a stream ran down its middle. At the lower end of the valley
there was a vast swamp, from which at nightfall the thunderously
deep-bass croaking of giant frogs could be heard. But that swamp had
kept out the more terrifying creatures of that world. The thirty-foot
centipedes could not cross it or did not choose to. The mastodon-sized
tarantulas which ravaged so much of the planet would not cross it save
in pursuit of prey. So the valley was nearly a haven of safety.
True, there was one clotho spider in its ogre's castle nearby, and there
was a labyrinth spider in a minor valley which nobody had ever ventured
into, and there were some--not many--praying-mantises as tall as
giraffes. They wandered terribly here and there. But most members of
insect life here were absorbed in their own affairs and ignored the
humans. There was an ant-city, whose foot-long warriors competed with
the humans as scavengers. There were the bees, trying to eke out a
livelihood from the great, cruciform flowers of the giant cabbage-plants
and the milkweeds when water-lilies in the swamps did not bear their
four-foot blooms. Wasps sought their own prey. Flies were consumers of
corruption, but even the flies two feet in length would shy away from a
man who waved his arms at it. So this valley had seemed to these people
to be a truly admirable place.
But a fiend had entered it. As the gray light grew stronger the
shivering folk looked terrifiedly about them. There were only twenty of
the people now. Two weeks before there had been thirty. In a matter of
days or less, there would be none. Because the valley had been invaded
by a great gray furry spider!
* * * * *
There was a stirring, not far from where the man-folk trembled. Small,
inquisitive antennae popped into view among a mass of large-sized
pebbles. There was a violent stirring, and gravel disappeared. Small
black things thrust upward into view and scurried anxiously about. They
returned to the spot from which they had emerged. They were ants,
opening the shaft of their city after scouting for danger outside. They
scratched and pulled and tugged at the plug of stones. They opened the
ant-city's artery of commerce. Strings of small black things came
pouring out. They averaged a foot in length, and they marched off in
groups upon their divers errands. Presently a group of huge-jawed
soldier-ants appeared, picking their way stolidly out of the opening.
They waited stupidly for the workers they were to guard. The workers
came, each carrying a faintly greenish blob of living matter. The
caravan moved off. The humans knew exactly what it was. The green blobs
were aphids--plant lice: ant-cows--small creatures sheltered and guarded
by the ants and daily carried to nearby vegetation to feed upon its sap
and yield inestimable honeydew.
Something reared up two hundred yards away, where the thin mist that lay
everywhere just barely began to fade all colorings before it dimmed all
outlines. The object was slender. It had a curiously humanlike head. It
held out horrible sawtoothed arms in a gesture as of benediction--which
was purest mockery. Something smaller was drawing near to it. The
colossal praying mantis held its pose, immovable. Presently it struck
downward with lightning speed. There was a cry. The mantis rose erect
again, its great arms holding something that stirred and struggled
helplessly, and repented its unconsonanted outcry. The mantis ate it
daintily as it struggled and screamed.
The humans did not watch this tragedy. The mantis would eat a man, of
course. It had. The only creatures immune to its menace were ants, which
for some reason it would not touch. But it was a mantis' custom after
spotting its prey to wait immobile for the unlucky creature to come
within its reach. It preferred to make its captures that way. Only if a
thing fled did the mantis pursue with deadly ferocity. Even then it
dined with monstrous deliberation as this one dined now. Still, mantises
could be seen from a distance and hidden from. They were not the terror
which had driven the humans even from their hiding-places.
It had been two weeks since the giant hunting-spider had come through a
mountain pass into this valley to prey upon the life within it. It was
gigantic even of its kind. It was deadliness beyond compare. The first
human to see it froze in terror. It was disaster itself. Its legs
spanned yards. Its 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 unarmed folk than a Bengal tiger
loose in the valley would have been.
It killed a man the very first day it was in the valley, leaving his
sucked-dry carcass, and going on to destroy a rhinoceros-beetle and a
cricket--whose deep-bass cries were horrible--and proceeded down the
valley, leaving only death behind it. It had killed other men and women
since. It had caught four children. But even that was not the worst. It
carried worse, more deadly, more inevitable disaster with it.
Because, bumping and bouncing behind its abdomen as it moved, fastened
to its body with cables of coarse and discolored silk, the
hunting-spider dragged a burden which was its own ferocity many times
multiplied. It dragged an egg-bag. The bag was larger than its body,
four feet in diameter. The female spider would carry this
burden--cherishing it--until the eggs hatched. Then there would be four
to five hundred small monsters at large in the valley. And from the
instant of their hatching they would be just such demoniac creatures as
their parents. They would be small, to be sure. Their legs would span no
more than a foot. Their bodies would be the size of a man's fist. But
they could leap two yards, instantly they reached the open air, and
their inch-long fangs would be no less envenomed, and their ferocity
would be in madness, in insanity and in stark maniacal horror equal the
great gray fiend which had begot them.
The eggs had hatched. Today--now--this morning--they were abroad. The
little group of humans no longer hid in the mushroom-forests because the
small hunting-spiders sought frenziedly there for things to kill.
Hundreds of small lunatic demons roamed the valley. They swarmed among
the huge toadstools, killing and devouring all living things large and
small. When they encountered each other they fought in slavering,
panting fury, and the survivors of such duels dined upon their brothers.
Small truffle-beetles died, clicking futilely. Infinitesimal grubs,
newly hatched from butterfly eggs and barely six inches long, furnished
them with tidbits. But they would kill anything and feast upon it.
A woman had died yesterday, and two small gray devils battled
murderously above her corpse.
Just before darkness a huge yellow butterfly had flung itself agonizedly
aloft, with these small dark horrors clinging to its body, feasting upon
the juices of the body their poison had not yet done to death.
And now, at daybreak, the humans looked about despairingly for their own
deaths to come to them. They had spent the night in the open lest they
be trapped in the very forests that had been their protection. Now they
remained in clear view of the large gray murderer should it pass that
way. They did not dare to hide because of that ogreish creature's young,
who panted in their blood-lust as they scurried here and there and
everywhere.
As the day became established, the clouds were gray--gray only. The
night-mist thinned. One of the younger women of the tribe--a girl called
Saya--saw the huge thing far away. She cried out, choking. The others
saw the monster as it leaped upon and murdered a vividly colored
caterpillar on a milkweed near the limit of vision. The milkweed was the
size of a tree. The caterpillar was four yards long. While the enormous
victim writhed as it died, not one of the humans looked away. Presently
all was still. The hunting-spider crouched over its victim in obscene
absorption. Having been madness incarnate, it now was the very exemplar
of a horrid gluttony.
Again the humans shivered. They were without shelter. They were without
even the concept of arms. But it was morning, and they were alive, and
therefore they were hungry. Their desperation was absolute, but
desperation to some degree was part of their lives. Yet they shivered
and suffered. There were edible mushrooms nearby, but with the deadly
small replicas of the hunting-spider giant roaming everywhere, any
movement was as likely to be deadly as standing still to be found and
killed. The humans murmured to one another, fearfully.
But there was the young man called Burl, who had been lost from his
tribe and had found it again. The experience had changed him. He had
felt stirrings of atavistic impulses in recent weeks--the more
especially when the young girl Saya looked at him. It was not normal, in
humans conditioned to survive by flight, that Burl should feel
previously unimagined hunger for fury--a longing to hate and do battle.
Of course men sometimes fought for a particular woman's favor, but not
when there were deadly insects about. The carnivorous insects were not
only peril, but horror unfaceable. So Burl's sensations were very
strange. On this planet a courtship did not usually involve displays of
valor. A man who was a more skillful forager than the foot-long ants was
an acceptable husband. Warriors did not exist.
Burl did not even know what a warrior was. Yet today the sullen,
unreasonable impulses to conduct what he could not quite imagine were
very strong. He knew all the despairing terror the others felt. But he
also was hungry. The sheer doom that was upon his group did not change
the fact that he wanted to eat, nor did it change the fact that he felt
queer when the girl Saya looked at him. Because she was terrified, the
same sort of atavistic process was at work in her. She looked to Burl.
Men no longer served as protectors against enemies so irresistible as
giant spiders. It was not possible. But when Burl realized her regard
his chest swelled. He felt a half-formed impulse to beat upon it. His
new-found reasoning processes told him that this particular fear was
different in some fashion from the terrors men normally experienced. It
was. This was a different sort of emergency. Most dangers were sudden
and either immediately fatal or somehow avoidable. This was different.
There was time to savor its meaning and its hopelessness. It seemed as
if it should be possible to do something about it. But Burl was not
able, as yet, to think what to do. The bare idea of doing anything was
unusual, now. Because of it, though, Burl was able to disregard his
terror when Saya regarded him yearningly.
* * * * *
The other men muttered to each other of the sudden death in the mushroom
thickets. No less certain death now feasted on the dead yellow
caterpillar. But Burl abruptly pushed his way clear of the small crowd
and scowled for Saya to see. He moved toward the nearest fungus-thicket.
An edible mushroom grew at its very edge. He marched toward it,
swaggering. Men did not often swagger on this planet.
But then he ceased to swagger. His approach to the mingled mass of
toadstools and lesser monstrosities grew slower. His feet dragged. He
came to a halt. His impulse to combat conflicted with the facts of here
and now. His flesh crawled at the thought of the grisly small beasts
which now might be within yards. These thickets had been men's safest
hiding-places. Now they were places of surest disaster.
He stopped, with a coldness at the pit of his stomach. But as it was a
new experience to be able to have danger come in a form which could be
foreseen, so Burl now had a new experience in that he was ashamed to be
afraid. Somehow, having tacitly undertaken to get food for his
companions, he could not bring himself to draw back while they watched.
But he did want desperately to get the food in a hurry and get away from
there.
He saw a gruesome fragment of a tragedy of days before. It was the
emptied, scraped, hollow leg-shell of a beetle. It was horrendously
barbed. Great, knife-edged spines lined its edge. They were six inches
in length. And men did not have weapons any more, but they sometimes
used just such objects as this to dismember defenseless giant slugs they
came upon.
Burl picked up the hollow shell of the leg-joint. He shook it free of
clinging moulds--and small things an inch or two in length dropped from
it and scurried frantically into hiding. He moved hesitantly toward the
edible mushroom which would be food for Saya and the rest. He was four
yards from the thicket. Three. Two. He needed to move only six feet, and
then slice at the flabby mushroom-head, and he would be at least an
admirable person in the eyes of Saya.
Then he cried out thinly. Something small, with insane eyes, leaped upon
him from the edge of a giant toadstool.
It was, of course, one of the small beasts which had hatched from the
hunting-spider's egg-bag. It had grown. Its legs now spanned sixteen
inches. Its body was as large as Burl's two fists together. It was big
enough to enclose his head in a cage of loathesomeness formed by its
legs, while its fangs tore at his scalp. Or it could cover his chest
with its abominableness while its poison filled his veins, and while it
feasted upon him afterward....
He flung up his hands in a paralytic, horror-stricken attempt to ward it
off. But they were clenched. His right hand did not let go of the
leg-section with its razor-sharp barbs.
The spider struck the beetle-leg. He felt the impact. Then he heard
gaspings and bubblings of fury. He heard an indescribable cry which was
madness itself. The chitinous object he had picked up now shook and
quivered of itself.
The spider was impaled. Two of its legs were severed and twitched upon
the ground before him. Its body was slashed nearly in half. It writhed
and struggled and made beastly sounds. Thin, colored fluids dripped from
it. A disgusting musky smell filled the air. It strove to reach and kill
him as it died. Its eyes looked like flames.
Burl's arm shook convulsively. The small thing dropped to the ground.
Its remaining legs moved frantically but without purpose.
It died, though its leg continued to twitch and stir and quiver.
Burl remained frozen, for seconds. It was an acquired instinct; a
conditioned reflex which humans had to develop on this world. When
danger was past, one stayed desperately still lest it return. But Burl's
thoughts were now not of horror but a vast astonishment. He had killed a
spider! He had killed a thing which would have killed him! He was still
alive!
And then, being a savage, and an animal, as well as a human being, he
acted according to that highly complicated nature. As a savage, he knew
with strict practicality that it was improbable that there was another
baby spider nearby. If there had been, they would have fought each
other. As an animal, he was again hungry. As a human being, he was vain.
So he moved closer to the toadstool-thicket and put his hand out and
broke off a great mass of the one edible mushroom at the edge. A
noisesome broth poured out and little maggots dropped to the ground and
writhed there in it. But most of what he had broken off was sound. He
turned to take it to Saya. Then he saw the dropped weapon and the
spider. He picked up the weapon.
The spider's legs still twitched, though futilely. He spiked the small
body on the beetle-leg's spines. He strode back to the remnant of his
tribe with a peculiar gait that even he had not often practiced.
It was rather more pronounced than a swagger. It was a strut.
They trembled when they saw the dead creature he had killed. He gave
Saya the food. She took it, looking at him with bright and intense eyes.
He took a part of the mushroom for himself and ate it, scowling.
Thoughts were struggling to form in his mind. He was not accustomed to
thinking, but he had done more of it than any other of the pitiful group
about him.
He felt eyes watching him. There were five adult men in this group
besides himself, and six women. The rest were children, from gangling
adolescents to one mere infant in arms. They were a remarkably colorful
group at the moment, had he only known it. The men wore
yellow-and-gold-brown loin-cloths of caterpillar-fur, stripped from the
drained carcasses of creatures that the formerly resident clothed spider
had killed. The women wore cloaks of butterfly-wing, similarly salvaged
from the remnants of a meal left unfinished by a finicky or engorged
praying mantis. The stuff was thick and leathery, but it was
magnificently tinted in purples and yellows.
Time passed. The mushroom Burl had brought was finished. Some eyes
always explored the clear ground around this group. But other eyes fixed
themselves upon Burl. It was not a consciously questioning gaze. It was
surely not a hopeful one. But men and women and children looked at him.
They marveled at him. He had dared to go and get food! He had been
attacked by one of the creatures who doomed them all, but he was not
dead! Instead, he had killed the spider! It was marvelous! It was
unparalleled that a man should kill anything that attacked him!
* * * * *
The doomed small group regarded Burl with wondering eyes. He brushed his
hands together. He looked at Saya. He wished to be alone with her. He
wished to know what she thought when she looked at him. Why she looked
at him. What she felt when she looked at him.
He stood up and said dourly:
"Come!"
She moved timidly and gave him her hand. He moved away. There was but
one way that any human being on this planet would think to move, from
this particular spot just now--away from the still-feasting gigantic
horror whose offspring he had killed. The folk shivered near the edge of
the first upward slope of the valley wall. Burl moved in that direction.
Toward the slope. Saya went with him.
Before they had gone ten yards a man spoke to his wife. They followed
Burl, with their three children. Five yards more, and two of the
remaining three adult men were hustling their families in his wake also.
In seconds the last was in motion.
Burl moved on, unconscious of any who followed him, aware only of Saya.
The procession, absurd as it was, continued in his wake simply because
it had begun to do so. A skinny, half-grown boy regarded Burl's stained
weapon. He saw something half-buried in the soil and moved aside to tug
at it. It was part of the armor of a former rhinoceros-beetle. He went
on, rather awkwardly holding a weapon which might have been called a
dagger, eighteen inches long, except that no dagger would have a
hand-guard nearly its own length in diameter.
They 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 the 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
was the larval form the lace-wing fly, of course. Aphids were its
predestined prey.
[Illustration]
Burl continued to march, holding Saya's hand. The reek of formic acid
came to his nostrils. But that was only ants. The slope grew steeper.
Massacre began behind him on the tree-sized milkweed. The ant-lion which
even when it was but half an inch long, on Earth, could bite through the
skin of a man--the ant-lion reached the pasturing cows. It plunged into
slaughter. It was demoniac. It was such ghastly ferocity that the eggs
from which its kind hatched were equipped, each one, with a plastic
column to hold it well away from the object on which the clutch of eggs
were laid. But for this precaution by the maternal lace-wing fly, the
first of her brood to hatch would devour its unhatched brothers and
sisters. This ant-lion charged into the placidly feeding aphids on the
milkweed plant. It seized one and crushed it, holding it aloft so that
the juices of its body would pour into the ant-lion's mouth. Almost
instantly, it seemed, the mild-eyed aphid was a shrunken empty sack. The
ant-lion seized another. The remaining aphids fed placidly while their
enemy did vast slaughter among them.
Clickings and a shrill stridulation sounded. Warrior-ants climbed with
stupid ferocity to offer battle.
Burl moved on to a minor eminence. He reached its top and looked sharply
about him with the caution that 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 the human folk had followed
him. One of the adults was reaching fearfully for part of a discarded
cricket-shell in the ground. He tore free an emptied, sickle-shaped jaw.
It was curved and sharp and deadly if properly wielded. The man had seen
Burl kill something. He tried vaguely to imagine killing something
himself. He was not too successful. Another man tugged at the ground.
The skinny boy was practicing thrusts with his giant dagger.
Two of the adults were armed, without any clear idea of what to do with
their arms. But Burl knew, now.
He regarded them angrily. He had not meant to desert them, or even to
take Saya permanently from among them. Humans had little enough of
satisfaction on this planet. The scared company of their kind was one of
the most important. So Burl did not resent that they had followed him.
He did resent that they were near when he wanted to talk to Saya in what
he did not yet think of as lover-like seclusion.
They halted, regarding him humbly. They had been hungry, and he had
found food for them. They had been paralyzed by terror, and he had dared
to move. So they moved with him. They might have followed anybody else,
but only Burl had initiative--so far. They trustfully waited to follow
and to imitate him for so long as panic numbed their ability to think
for themselves.
Burl opened his mouth to shout furiously at them. But it was not a good
idea for humans to draw attention. Spiders did not hunt by scent, but
sound sometimes drew them. Burl closed his mouth again, in a taut
straight line. The men looked at him supplicatingly. They had never been
lost, and so had never learned to think even a little. Burl had learned
to think in a rudimentary fashion and now he suddenly perceived that it
was pleasing to have all the tribe regard him so worshipfully, even if
not in quite the same fashion as Saya. He was suddenly aware that even
as Saya had obeyed him when he told her to come with him, they would
obey. He had, at the moment, no commands to give, but he immediately
invented one for the pleasure of seeing it carried out.
"_I carry sharp things_," he said sternly. "I killed a spider. Go find
_sharp things_ to carry."
They were a meek and abject folk, and they were desperately in need of
something to do to take their minds from the uselessness of doing
anything at all.
They moved to obey. Saya would have loosened her hand and obeyed, too,
but Burl held her beside him. One of the women, with a child three years
old, laid the child down by Burl's feet while she went fearfully to seek
some fragment of a dead creature, that would meet Burl's specification
of sharpness.
Burl heard a stifled scream. A ten-year-old boy stood paralyzed, staring
in an agony of horror at something which had stepped from behind a
misshapen fungoid object.
It was a pallidly greenish creature with a small head and enormous eyes.
It was a very few inches taller than a man. Its abdomen swelled
gracefully into a pleasing, leaf-like shape. The boy faced it, paralyzed
by horror, and it stood stock-still. Its great, hideously spiny arms
were spread out in a pose of pious benediction.
[Illustration: "_The boy faced it, paralyzed by horror._"]
It was a partly-grown praying mantis, not very long hatched. It stood
rigid, waiting benignly for the boy to come closer. If he fled, it would
fling itself after him with ferocity beside which the fury of a tiger
would seem kittenish. If he approached, its fanged arms would flash
down, pierce his body, and hold him inextricably fast by the spikes that
were worse than trap-claws. And of course it would not wait for him to
die before it began its meal.
The small party of humans stood frozen. They were filled with horror
for the boy. They were cast into a deep abyss of despair by the
sight of a half-grown mantis, because if there was one such miniature
insect-dinosaur in the valley, there would be many others. Hundreds of
others. This meant there had been a hatching of them. And they were as
deadly as spiders.
* * * * *
But Burl did not think in such terms just now. Vanity filled him. He had
commanded, and he had been obeyed. But now obedience was forgotten
because there was this young praying mantis. If men had ever thought of
fighting such a creature, it could have destroyed any number of them by
pure ferocity and superiority of armament. But Burl raged. He ran toward
the spot. Even mantises were sometimes frightened by the unexpected.
Burl seized a lumpish object barely protruding from the ground. It
looked like a rock. It was actually a flattened ball-fungus, feeding on
the soil through thin white threads beneath it. Burl wrenched it free
and hurled it furiously at the young monster.
Insects simply do not think. Something came swiftly at it, and the
mantis flashed its ghastly arms to seize and kill its attacker. The
ball-fungus was heavy. It literally knocked the mantis backward. The boy
fled frantically. The insect fought crazily against the thing it thought
had assailed it.
The humans gathered around Burl hundreds of yards away--again uphill.
The slope of the mountain-flank was marked here. They gathered about
Burl because of an example set by the woman who had left her
three-year-old child behind. Saya, in the unfailing instinct of a girl
for a small child, had snatched it up when Burl left her. Then she had
joined him because the instinct which had made her obey him in starting
off--it was not quite the same instinct which moved the others--also
bade her follow him wherever he went. The mother of the child went to
retrieve her deposit. Other figures moved cautiously toward him. The
tribe was reconvened.
The floor of the valley seemed a trifle obscured. The mist that hung
always in the air made it seem less distinct; less actual; not quite as
real as it had been.
Burl gulped and said sternly:
"Where are the sharp things?"
The men looked at one another, numbly. Then one spoke despairingly,
ignoring Burl's question. "Now," said the man dully, "there was not only
the hunting-spider in the valley, but its young. And not only the young
of the hunting-spider, but the young of a mantis ... It was hard to stay
alive at the best of times. Now it had become impossible ..."
Burl glared at him. It was neither courage nor resolution. He had come
to realize what a splendid sensation it was to be admired by one's
fellows. The more he was admired, the better. He was enraged that people
thought to despair.
"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 its mother and look
his hand. Burl stalked haughtily away, and she went with him. He went
uphill. Naturally. He knew there were spiders and mantises in the
valley. So many that to stay there was to die. So he went away from
where they were.
Burl had found out that adulation was enjoyable and authority
delectable. He had found that it was pleasant to be a dictator. And then
he had been disregarded. So he marched furiously away from his folk, in
exactly the fashion of a spoiled child refusing to play any longer. He
happened to march up the mountainside toward the cloud-bank that he
considered the sky. He had no conscious intent to climb the mountain. He
did not intend to lead the others. He meant to sulk, by punishing them
through the removal of his own admirable person from their society. But
they followed him.
So he led his people upward. It has happened on other planets, in other
manners. Most human achievements come about through the daring of those
who strive.
* * * * *
The sun was very near. It shone upon the top of the cloud-bank and the
clouds glowed with a marvelous whiteness. It shone upon the
mountain-peaks where they penetrated the clouds, and the peaks were
warmed, and there was no snow anywhere despite the height. There were
winds here where the sun shone. The sky was very blue. At the edge of
the plateau where the cloud-bank lay below, the mountainsides seemed to
descend into a sea of milk. Great undulations in the mist had the
seeming of waves, which moved with great deliberation toward the shores.
They seemed sometimes to break against the mountain-wall where it was
cliff-like, and sometimes they seemed to flow up gentler inclinations
like water flowing up a beach.
All this was in the slowest of slow motion, because the cloud-waves were
sometimes miles from crest to crest.
The look of things was different on the plateau, too. This part of the
unnamed world, no less than the lowlands, had been seeded with life on
two separate occasions. Once with bacteria and moulds and lichens to
break up the rocks and make soil of them, and once with seeds and
insects-eggs and such living things as might sustain themselves
immediately upon hatching. But here on the heights the conditions were
drastically unlike the lowland tropic moisture. Different things had
thriven, and in quite different fashion.
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 chlorophyll, and chlorophyll to
make use of the soil that had been formed. So here was vegetation that
was nearly Earth-like. And there was a remarkable side-effect on the
fauna which had been introduced at the same time and in the same manner
as down below. In coolness which amounted to a temperate climate there
could be no such frenzy of life as formed the nightmare-jungles in the
lowlands. Plants grew at a slower tempo than fungi, and less
luxuriantly. There was no adequate food-supply for large-sized
plant-eaters. Insects which were to survive in sunshine could not grow
to be monsters. Moreover, the nights were chill. 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 dusk. On the plateau, the lowland monsters would starve
in any case. But more--they would have only a fraction of a day of full
activity.
There was a necessary limit then, to the size of the insects that lived
above the clouds. The life on the plateau would not have seemed
horrifying at all to humans living on other planets. Save for the
absence of birds to sing and lack of a variety of small mammals, the
untouched sunlit plateau with its warm days and briskly chill nights
would have impressed most men as an ideal habitation.
But Burl and his companions were hardly prepared to see it that way at
first glimpse. Certainly if told about it beforehand, they would have
viewed it with despair.
But they did not know beforehand. They toiled upward, their leader moved
by such ridiculous motives as have sometimes caused men to achieve
greatness throughout all history. Back on Earth, two great continents
were discovered by a man trying to get spices to conceal the gamey
flavor of half-spoiled meat. The power that drives mile-long
space-craft, and that lights and runs the cities of the galaxy, was
first developed because it could be used in bombs to kill other men.
There were precedents for Burl leading his fellows into sunshine merely
because he was angered that they ceased to admire him.
The trudging, climbing folk were high above the valley, now. The thin
mist that was never absent anywhere had hidden their former home, little
by little. They climbed a steeply slanting mountain-flank. The stone was
mostly covered by ragged, 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 forms. The people never ate it. It produced frightening
cramps. In time they would learn that if thoroughly dried it can he
soaked to pliability again and cooked to a reasonable palatability. But
so far they knew neither dryness nor fire.
Nor had they ever known such surroundings as presently enveloped them. A
slanting, stony 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 in which they
lived could no longer be seen at all. Trudging and scrambling up the
interminable incline, the people of Burl's personal following gradually
realized the strangeness of their surroundings. As one result, they grew
sick and dizzy. To them it seemed that the solid earth had tilted, and
might presently tilt further. There was no horizon, but they had never
seen a horizon. So they felt that what had been _down_ was now partly
_behind_, and they feared lest a turning universe let them fall
ultimately toward the grayness they considered sky.
In this frightening strangeness, their only consolation was the company
of their fellows. To stop would be to be abandoned in this place where
all values were turned topsy-turvy. To go back--but none of them could
imagine descending again to be devoured as one-third of their number
already had been. If Burl had stopped, his followers would have squatted
down and shivered together miserably, and waited for death. They had no
thought of adventure nor any hope of safety. The only goodnesses they
could imagine were food and the nearness of other humans. They clung
together, obsessed by the dread of being left alone.
Burl's motivation was no longer noble. He had started uphill in a fit of
sulks, and he was ashamed to stop.
They came to a place where the mountain-flank sank inward. There was a
flat area, and behind it there was a winding cañon of sorts, like a vast
crack in the mountain's substance. Burl breasted the curving edge, and
walked on level ground. Then he stopped short.
The mouth of the cañon was perhaps fifty yards from the lip of the
downward slope. There was this level space, and on it there were
toadstools and milkweed, and there was food. It was a small, isolated
asylum for life such as they were used to. It could have been that here
they could have found safety. But it wasn't that way.
* * * * *
They saw the web at once. It was slung from between the opposite
cliff-walls by cables two hundred feet long. Its radiating cables
reached down to anchorages on stone. The snare-threads, winding out and
out in that logarithmic spiral which men on other planets had noted
thousands of years before--the snare-threads were a yard apart. The web
was set for giant game. It was empty now, but Burl searched keenly and
saw the tight-rope-cable leading from the very center of the web to a
rocky shelf some fifty feet above the cañon's floor. At its end he saw
the spider. It waited there, almost invisible against the stone, with
one furry leg touching the cable that led to its waiting-place so that
the slightest touch on any part of the web would warn it instantly.
Burl's followers accumulated behind him. They stared. They knew, of
course, that a web-spider will not leave its snare under any normal
circumstances. They were not afraid of that. But they looked at the
ground between the web and themselves.
It was a charnel-house of murdered creatures. Half-inch-thick wing-cases
of dead beetles. The cleaned-out carcasses of other giants. The
ovipositor of an ichneumon-fly--six feet of slender, springy,
deadly-pointed tube--and abdomen-plates of bees and 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 so
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 them as they came. It denned back in the
cañon where they could not see. It dined here.
The humans looked and shivered. All but Burl. He deliberately chose for
himself a magnificent lance grown by one dead creature for its own
defense. He pulled it out of the ground and cleaned it with his hands.
He seemed absorbed, but he was terribly aware of the inner depths of the
cañon. He was actually pretending, for the sake of what he believed his
dignity.
Fearfully, the other humans imitated him in choosing weapons from the
armory of the devoured. Then Burl stalked grandly to one side and began
to climb again. His people followed him in numbed silence. They were
filled with dread, but it was not quite terror. Insects do not stalk
their prey. The deadly unseen monster of the cañon had not attacked
them. Therefore, it did not know they were there. And therefore they
were safe from it until it appeared. But none of them desired to stay.
The slope lessened here, and half a mile further on there was a small
thicket of mushrooms. From within it came the cheerful loud clicking of
some small beetle, arrived at this spot nobody could possibly know how,
but happily ensconced in a twenty-yard patch of jungle above a hollow
that had gathered soil through the centuries. There were edible
mushrooms in the thicket.
The humans ate. Naturally. And here they realized that they were no
longer doomed by the creatures in the valley. Since their climb began
they had seen no dangerous thing except the one gigantic, motionless
web-spider. They had left the valley and its particular dangers behind.
A man exclaimed in naïve astonishment. He was eating raw mushroom at the
moment, and his mouth was full. But abruptly it occurred to him that
their doom was lifted. He mentioned the fact in a sort of startled
wonder.
"We will stay here," he added happily. "There is food."
And Burl regarded him with knitted brows. Burl was well on the way to
becoming spoiled. He had tasted power over his folk, and he found
himself jealous of any decision by anybody else.