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THE MAD PLANET
by Murray Leinster
The Argosy
_June 12, 1920_
In All His lifetime of perhaps twenty years, it had never occurred to
Burl to wonder what his grandfather had thought about his surroundings.
The grandfather had come to an untimely end in a rather unpleasant
fashion which Burl remembered vaguely as a succession of screams coming
more and more faintly to his ears while he was being carried away at the
top speed of which his mother was capable.
Burl had rarely or never thought of the old gentleman since. Surely
he had never wondered in the abstract of what his great grandfather
thought, and most surely of all, there never entered his head
such a purely hypothetical question as the one of what his
many-times-great-grandfather--say of the year 1920--would have thought
of the scene in which Burl found himself.
He was treading cautiously over a brownish carpet of fungus growth,
creeping furtively toward the stream which he knew by the generic title
of "water." It was the only water he knew. Towering far above his head,
three man-heights high, great toadstools hid the grayish sky from his
sight. Clinging to the foot-thick stalks of the toadstools were still
other fungi, parasites upon the growth that had once been parasites
themselves.
Burl himself was a slender young man wearing a single garment twisted
about his waist, made from the wing-fabric of a great moth the members
of his tribe had slain as it emerged from its cocoon. His skin was fair,
without a trace of sunburn. In all his lifetime he had never seen the
sun, though the sky was rarely hidden from view save by the giant fungi
which, with monster cabbages, were the only growing things he knew.
Clouds usually spread overhead, and when they did not, the perpetual
haze made the sun but an indefinitely brighter part of the sky, never a
sharply edged ball of fire. Fantastic mosses, misshapen fungus growths,
colossal molds and yeasts, were the essential parts of the landscape
through which he moved.
Once as he had dodged through the forest of huge toadstools, his
shoulder touched a cream-colored stalk, giving the whole fungus a tiny
shock. Instantly, from the umbrella-like mass of pulp overhead, a fine
and impalpable powder fell upon him like snow. It was the season when
the toadstools sent out their spores, or seeds, and they had been
dropped upon him at the first sign of disturbance.
Furtive as he was, he paused to brush them from his head and hair. They
were deadly poison, as he knew well.
Burl would have been a curious sight to a man of the twentieth century.
His skin was pink, like that of a child, and there was but little hair
upon his body. Even that on top of his head was soft and downy. His
chest was larger than his forefathers' had been, and his ears seemed
almost capable of independent movement, to catch threatening sounds from
any direction. His eyes, large and blue, possessed pupils which could
dilate to extreme size, allowing him to see in almost complete darkness.
He was the result of the thirty thousand years' attempt of the human
race to adapt itself to the change that had begun in the latter half of
the twentieth century.
At about that time, civilization had been high, and apparently secure.
Mankind had reached a permanent agreement among itself, and all men had
equal opportunities to education and leisure. Machinery did most of the
labor of the world, and men were only required to supervise its
operation. All men were well-fed, all men were well-educated, and it
seemed that until the end of time the earth would be the abode of a
community of comfortable human beings, pursuing their studies and
diversions, their illusions and their truths. Peace, quietness, privacy,
freedom were universal.
Then, just when men were congratulating themselves that the Golden Age
had come again, it was observed that the planet seemed ill at ease.
Fissures opened slowly in the crust, and carbonic acid gas--the carbon
dioxide of chemists--began to pour out into the atmosphere. That gas had
long been known to be present in the air, and was considered necessary
to plant life. Most of the plants of the world took the gas and absorbed
its carbon into themselves, releasing the oxygen for use again.
Scientists had calculated that a great deal of the earth's increased
fertility was due to the larger quantities of carbon dioxide released by
the activities of man in burning his coal and petroleum. Because of
those views, for some years no great alarm was caused by the continuous
exhalation from the world's interior.
Constantly, however, the volume increased. New fissures constantly
opened, each one adding a new source of carbon dioxide, and each one
pouring into the already laden atmosphere more of the gas--beneficent in
small quantities, but as the world learned, deadly in large ones.
The percentage of the heavy, vapor-like gas increased. The whole body of
the air became heavier through its admixture. It absorbed more moisture
and became more humid. Rainfall increased. Climates grew warmer.
Vegetation became more luxuriant--but the air gradually became less
exhilarating.
Soon the health of mankind began to be affected. Accustomed through long
ages to breathe air rich in oxygen and poor in carbon dioxide, men
suffered. Only those who lived on high plateaus or on tall mountaintops
remained unaffected. The plants of the earth, though nourished and
increasing in size beyond those ever seen before, were unable to dispose
of the continually increasing flood of carbon dioxide.
* * * * *
By the middle of the twenty-first century it was generally recognized
that a new carboniferous period was about to take place, when the
earth's atmosphere would be thick and humid, unbreathable by man, when
giant grasses and ferns would form the only vegetation.
When the twenty-first century drew to a close the whole human race began
to revert to conditions closely approximating savagery. The low-lands
were unbearable. Thick jungles of rank growth covered the ground. The
air was depressing and enervating. Men could live there, but it was a
sickly, fever-ridden existence. The whole population of the earth
desired the high lands and as the low country became more unbearable,
men forgot their two centuries of peace.
They fought destructively, each for a bit of land where he might live
and breathe. Then men began to die, men who had persisted in remaining
near sea-level. They could not live in the poisonous air. The danger
zone crept up as the earth-fissures tirelessly poured out their steady
streams of foul gas. Soon men could not live within five hundred feet of
sea level. The low-lands went uncultivated, and became jungles of a
thickness comparable only to those of the first carboniferous period.
Then men died of sheer inanition at a thousand feet. The plateaus and
mountaintops were crowded with folk struggling for a foothold and food
beyond the invisible menace that crept up, and up--
These things did not take place in one year, or in ten. Not in one
generation, but in several. Between the time when the chemists of the
International Geophysical Institute announced that the proportion of
carbon dioxide in the air had increased from .04 per cent to .1 per cent
and the time when at sea-level six per cent of the atmosphere was the
deadly gas, more than two hundred years intervened.
Coming gradually, as it did, the poisonous effects of the deadly stuff
increased with insidious slowness. First the lassitude, then the
heaviness of brain, then the weakness of body. Mankind ceased to grow in
numbers. After a long period, the race had fallen to a fraction of its
former size. There was room in plenty on the mountaintops--but the
danger-level continued to creep up.
There was but one solution. The human body would have to inure itself to
the poison, or it was doomed to extinction. It finally developed a
toleration for the gas that had wiped out race after race and nation
after nation, but at a terrible cost. Lungs increased in size to secure
the oxygen on which life depended, but the poison, inhaled at every
breath, left the few survivors sickly and filled with a perpetual
weariness. Their minds lacked the energy to cope with new problems or
transmit the knowledge which in one degree or another, they possessed.
And after thirty thousand years, Burl, a direct descendant of the first
president of the Universal Republic, crept through a forest of
toadstools and fungus growths. He was ignorant of fire, or metals, of
the uses of stone and wood. A single garment covered him. His language
was a scanty group of a few hundred labial sounds, conveying no
abstractions and few concrete things.
He was ignorant of the uses of wood. There was no wood in the scanty
territory furtively inhabited by his tribe. With the increase in heat
and humidity the trees had begun to die out. Those of northern climes
went first, the oaks, the cedars, the maples. Then the pines--the
beeches went early--the cypresses, and finally even the forests of the
jungles vanished. Only grasses and reeds, bamboos and their kin, were
able to flourish in the new, steaming atmosphere. The thick jungles gave
place to dense thickets of grasses and ferns, now become treeferns
again.
And then the fungi took their place. Flourishing as never before,
flourishing on a planet of torrid heat and perpetual miasma, on whose
surface the sun never shone directly because of an ever-thickening bank
of clouds that hung sullenly overhead, the fungi sprang up. About the
dank pools that festered over the surface of the earth, fungus growths
began to cluster. Of every imaginable shade and color, of all monstrous
forms and malignant purposes, of huge size and flabby volume, they
spread over the land.
The grasses and ferns gave place to them. Squat footstools, flaking
molds, evil-smelling yeasts, vast mounds of fungi inextricably mingled
as to species, but growing, forever growing and exhaling an odor of dark
places.
The strange growths now grouped themselves in forests, horrible
travesties on the vegetation they had succeeded. They grew and grew with
feverish intensity beneath a clouded or a haze-obscured sky, while
above them fluttered gigantic butterflies and huge moths, sipping
daintily of their corruption.
The insects alone of all the animal world above water, were able to
endure the change. They multiplied exceedingly, and enlarged themselves
in the thickened air. The solitary vegetation--as distinct from fungus
growths--that had survived, was now a degenerate form of the cabbages
that had once fed peasants. On those rank, colossal masses of foliage,
the stolid grubs and caterpillars ate themselves to maturity, then swung
below in strong cocoons to sleep the sleep of metamorphosis from which
they emerged to spread their wings and fly.
The tiniest butterflies of former days had increased their span until
their gaily colored wings should be described in terms of feet, while
the larger emperor moths extended their purple sails to a breadth of
yards upon yards. Burl himself would have been dwarfed beneath the
overshadowing fabric of their wings.
It was fortunate that they, the largest flying creatures, were harmless
or nearly so. Burl's fellow tribesmen sometimes came upon a cocoon just
about to open, and waited patiently beside it until the beautiful
creature within broke through its matted shell and came out into the
sunlight.
Then, before it had gathered energy from the air, and before its wings
had swelled to strength and firmness, the tribesmen fell upon it,
tearing the filmy, delicate wings from its body and the limbs from its
carcass. Then, when it lay helpless before them, they carried away the
juicy, meat-filled limbs to be eaten, leaving the still living body to
stare helplessly at this strange world through its many faceted eyes,
and become a prey to the voracious ants who would soon clamber upon it
and carry it away in tiny fragments to their underground city.
* * * * *
Not all the insect world was so helpless or so unthreatening. Burl knew
of wasps almost the length of his own body who possessed stings that
were instantly fatal. To every species of wasp, however, some other
insect is predestined prey, and the furtive members of Burl's tribe
feared them but little as they sought only the prey to which their
instinct led them.
Bees were similarly aloof. They were hard put to it for existence, those
bees. Few flowers bloomed, and they were reduced to expedients once
considered signs of degeneracy in their race. Bubbling yeasts and fouler
things, occasionally the nectarless blooms of the rank, giant cabbages.
Burl knew the bees. They droned overhead, nearly as large as he was
himself, their bulging eyes gazing at him with abstracted preoccupation.
And crickets, and beetles, and spiders--
Burl knew spiders! His grandfather had been the prey of one of the
hunting tarantulas, which had leaped with incredible ferocity from his
excavated tunnel in the earth. A vertical pit in the ground, two feet in
diameter, went down for twenty feet. At the bottom of that lair the
black-bellied monster waited for the tiny sounds that would warn him of
prey approaching his hiding-place (_Lycosa fasciata_).
Burl's grandfather had been careless, and the terrible shrieks he
uttered as the horrible monster darted from the pit and seized him had
lingered vaguely in Burl's mind ever since. Burl had seen, too, the
monster webs of another species of spider, and watched from a safe
distance as the misshapen body of the huge creature sucked the juices
from a three-foot cricket that had become entangled in its trap.
Burl had remembered the strange stripes of yellow and black and silver
that crossed upon its abdomen (_Epiera fasciata_). He had been
fascinated by the struggles of the imprisoned insect, coiled in a
hopeless tangle of sticky, gummy ropes the thickness of Burl's finger,
cast about its body before the spider made any attempt to approach.
Burl knew these dangers. They were a part of his life. It was his
accustomedness to them, and that of his ancestors, that made his
existence possible. He was able to evade them; so he survived. A moment
of carelessness, an instant's relaxation of his habitual caution, and he
would be one with his forebears, forgotten meals of long-dead, inhuman
monsters.
Three days before, Burl had crouched behind a bulky, shapeless fungus
growth while he watched a furious duel between two huge horned beetles.
Their jaws, gaping wide, clicked and clashed upon each other's
impenetrable armor. Their legs crashed like so many cymbals as their
polished surfaces ground and struck against each other. They were
fighting over some particularly attractive bit of carrion.
Burl had watched with all his eyes until a gaping orifice appeared in
the armor of the smaller of the two. It uttered a shrill cry, or seemed
to cry out. The noise was, actually, the tearing of the horny stuff
beneath the victorious jaws of the adversary.
The wounded beetle struggled more and more feebly. At last it collapsed,
and the conqueror placidly began to eat the conquered before life was
extinct.
Burl waited until the meal was finished, and then approached the scene
with caution. An ant--the forerunner of many--was already inspecting the
carcass.
Burl usually ignored the ants. They were stupid, short-sighted insects,
and not hunters. Save when attacked, they offered no injury. They were
scavengers, on the lookout for the dead and dying, but they would fight
viciously if their prey were questioned, and they were dangerous
opponents. They were from three inches, for the tiny black ants, to a
foot for the large termites.
Burl was hasty when he heard the tiny clickings of their limbs as they
approached. He seized the sharp-pointed snout of the victim, detached
from the body, and fled from the scene.
Later, he inspected his find with curiosity. The smaller victim had been
a minotaur beetle, with a sharp-pointed horn like that of a rhinoceros
to reinforce his offensive armament, already dangerous because of his
wide jaws. The jaws of a beetle work from side to side, instead of up
and down, and this had made the protection complete in no less than
three directions.
Burl inspected the sharp, dagger-like instrument in his hand. He felt
its point, and it pricked his finger. He flung it aside as he crept to
the hiding-place of his tribe. There were only twenty of them, four or
five men, six or seven women, and the rest girls and children.
Burl had been wondering at the strange feelings that came over him when
he looked at one of the girls. She was younger than Burl--perhaps
eighteen--and fleeter of foot than he. They talked together, sometimes,
and once or twice Burl shared with her an especially succulent find of
foodstuffs.
* * * * *
The next morning he found the horn where he had thrown it, sticking in
the flabby side of a toadstool. He pulled it out, and gradually, far
back in his mind, an idea began to take shape. He sat for some time with
the thing in his hand, considering it with a far-away look in his eyes.
From time to time he stabbed at a toadstool, awkwardly, but with
gathering skill. His imagination began to work fitfully. He visualized
himself stabbing food with it as the larger beetle had stabbed the
former owner of the weapon he had in his hand.
Burl could not imagine himself coping with one of the fighting insects.
He could only picture himself, dimly, stabbing something that was food
with this death-dealing thing. It was no longer than his arm and though
clumsy to the hand, an effective and terribly sharp implement.
He thought: Where was there food, food that lived, that would not fight
back? Presently he rose and began to make his way toward the tiny river.
Yellow-bellied newts swam in its waters. The swimming larvae of a
thousand insects floated about its surface or crawled upon its bottom.
There were deadly things there, too. Giant crayfish snapped their horny
claws at the unwary. Mosquitoes of four-inch wing-spread sometimes made
their humming way above the river. The last survivors of their race,
they were dying out for lack of the plant-juices on which the male of
the species lived, but even so they were formidable. Burl had learned to
crush them with fragments of fungus.
He crept slowly through the forest of toadstools. Brownish fungus was
underfoot. Strange orange, red, and purple molds clustered about the
bases of the creamy toadstool stalks. Once Burl paused to run his
sharp-pointed weapon through a fleshy stalk and reassure himself that
what he planned was practicable.
He made his way furtively through the forest of misshapen growths. Once
he heard a tiny clicking, and froze into stillness. It was a troop of
four or five ants, each some eight inches long, returning along their
habitual pathway to their city. They moved sturdily, heavily laden,
along the route marked with the black and odorous formic acid exuded
from the bodies of their comrades. Burl waited until they had passed,
then went on.
He came to the bank of the river. Green scum covered a great deal of its
surface, scum occasionally broken by a slowly enlarging bubble of some
gas released from decomposing matter on the bottom. In the center of the
placid stream the current ran a little more swiftly, and the water
itself was visible.
Over the shining current, water-spiders ran swiftly. They had not shared
in the general increase of size that had taken place in the insect
world. Depending upon the capillary qualities of the water to support
them, an increase in size and weight would have deprived them of the
means of locomotion.
From the spot where Burl first peered at the water the green scum spread
out for many yards into the stream. He could not see what swam and
wriggled and crawled beneath the evil-smelling covering. He peered up
and down the banks.
Perhaps a hundred and fifty yards below, the current came near the
shore. An outcropping of rock there made a steep descent to the river,
from which yellow shelf-fungi stretched out. Dark red and orange above,
they were light yellow below, and they formed a series of platforms
above the smoothly flowing stream. Burl made his way cautiously toward
them.
On his way he saw one of the edible mushrooms that formed so large a
part of his diet, and paused to break from the flabby flesh an amount
that would feed him for many days. It was too often the custom of his
people to find a store of food, carry it to their hiding place, and then
gorge themselves for days, eating, sleeping, and waking only to eat
again until the food was gone.
Absorbed as he was in his plan of trying his new weapon, Burl was
tempted to return with his booty. He would give Saya of this food, and
they would eat together. Saya was the maiden who roused unusual emotions
in Burl. He felt strange impulses stirring within him when she was near,
a desire to touch her, to caress her. He did not understand.
He went on, after hesitating. If he brought her food, Saya would be
pleased, but if he brought her of the things that swam in the stream,
she would be still more pleased. Degraded as his tribe had become, Burl
was yet a little more intelligent than they. He was an atavism, a
throwback to ancestors who had cultivated the earth and subjugated its
animals. He had a vague idea of pride, unformed but potent.
No man within memory had hunted or slain for food. They knew of meat,
yes, but it had been the fragments left by an insect hunter, seized and
carried away by the men before the perpetually alert ant colonies had
sent their foragers to the scene.
If Burl did what no man before him had done, if he brought a whole
carcass to his tribe, they would envy him. They were preoccupied solely
with their stomachs, and after that with the preservation of their
lives. The perpetuation of the race came third in their consideration.
They were herded together in a leaderless group, coming to the same
hiding place that they might share in the finds of the lucky and gather
comfort from their numbers. Of weapons, they had none. They sometimes
used stones to crack open the limbs of the huge insects they found
partly devoured, cracking them open for the sweet meat to be found
inside, but they sought safety from their enemies solely in flight and
hiding.
Their enemies were not as numerous as might have been imagined. Most of
the meat-eating insects have their allotted prey. The sphex--a hunting
wasp--feeds solely upon grasshoppers. Others wasps eat flies only. The
pirate-bee eats bumblebees only. Spiders were the principal enemies of
man, as they devour with a terrifying impartiality all that falls into
their clutches.
Burl reached the spot from which he might gaze down into the water. He
lay prostrate, staring into the shallow depths. Once a huge crayfish, as
long as Burl's body, moved leisurely across his vision. Small fishes and
even the huge newts fled before the voracious creature.
After a long time the tide of underwater life resumed its activity. The
wriggling grubs of the dragonflies reappeared. Little flecks of silver
swam into view--a school of tiny fish. A larger fish appeared, moving
slowly through the water.
Burl's eyes glistened and his mouth watered. He reached down with his
long weapon. It barely touched the water. Disappointment filled him, yet
the nearness and the apparent practicability of his scheme spurred him
on.
He considered the situation. There were the shelf-fungi below him. He
rose and moved to a point just above them, then thrust his spear down.
They resisted its point. Burl felt them tentatively with his foot, then
dared to thrust his weight to them. They held him firmly. He clambered
down and lay flat upon them, peering over the edge as before.
The large fish, as long as Burl's arm, swam slowly to and fro below him.
Burl had seen the former owner of his spear strive to thrust it into his
opponents, and knew that a thrust was necessary. He had tried his weapon
upon toadstools--had practiced with it. When the fish swam below him, he
thrust sharply downward. The spear seemed to bend when it entered the
water, and missed its mark by inches, to Burl's astonishment. He tried
again and again.
He grew angry with the fish below him for eluding his efforts to kill
it. Repeated strokes had left it untouched, and it was unwary, and did
not even try to run away.
Burl became furious. The big fish came to rest directly beneath his
hand. Burl thrust downward with all his strength. This time the spear,
entering vertically, did not seem to bend. It went straight down. Its
point penetrated the scales of the swimmer below, transfixing that lazy
fish completely.
An uproar began. The fish, struggling to escape, and Burl, trying to
draw it up to his perch, made a huge commotion. In his excitement Burl
did not observe a tiny ripple some distance away. The monster crayfish
was attracted by the disturbance, and was approaching.
The unequal combat continued. Burl hung on desperately to the end of his
spear. Then there was a tremor in Burl's support, it gave way, and fell
into the stream with a mighty splash. Burl went under, his eyes open,
facing death. And as he sank, his wide-open eyes saw waved before him
the gaping claws of the huge crayfish, large enough to sever a limb with
a single stroke of their jagged jaws.
* * * * *
He opened his mouth to scream--a replica of the terrible screams of his
grandfather, seized by a black-bellied tarantula years before--but no
sound came forth. Only bubbles floated to the surface of the water. He
beat the unresisting fluid with his hands--he did not know how to swim.
The colossal creature approached leisurely, while Burl struggled
helplessly.
His arms struck a solid object, and grasped it convulsively. A second
later he had swung it between himself and the huge crustacean. He felt a
shock as the mighty jaws closed upon the corklike fungus, then felt
himself drawn upward as the crayfish released his hold and the
shelf-fungus floated to the surface. Having given way beneath him, it
had been carried below him in his fall, only to rise within his reach
just when most needed.
Burl's head popped above water and he saw a larger bit of the fungus
floating near by. Less securely anchored to the rocks of the river bank
than the shelf to which Burl had trusted himself, it had been dislodged
when the first shelf gave way. It was larger than the fragment to which
Burl clung, and floated higher in the water.
Burl was cool with a terrible self-possession. He seized it and
struggled to draw himself on top of it. It tilted as his weight came
upon it, and nearly overturned, but he paid no heed. With desperate
haste, he clawed with hands and feet until he could draw himself clear
of the water, of which he would forever retain a slight fear.
As he pulled himself upon the furry, orange-brown upper surface, a sharp
blow struck his foot. The crayfish, disgusted at finding only what was
to it a tasteless morsel in the shelf-fungus, had made a languid stroke
at Burl's wriggling foot in the water. Failing to grasp the fleshy
member, the crayfish retreated, disgruntled and annoyed.
And Burl floated downstream, perched, weaponless and alone, frightened
and in constant danger, upon a flimsy raft composed of a degenerate
fungus floating soggily in the water. He floated slowly down the stream
of a river in whose waters death lurked unseen, upon whose banks was
peril, and above whose reaches danger fluttered on golden wings.
It was a long time before he recovered his self-possession, and when he
did he looked first for his spear. It was floating in the water, still
transfixing the fish whose capture had endangered Burl's life. The fish
now floated with its belly upward, all life gone.
So insistent was Burl's instinct for food that his predicament was
forgotten when he saw his prey just out of his reach. He gazed at it,
and his mouth watered, while his cranky craft went downstream, spinning
slowly in the current. He lay flat on the floating fungoid, and strove
to reach out and grasp the end of the spear.
The raft tilted and nearly flung him overboard again. A little later he
discovered that it sank more readily on one side than on the other. That
was due, of course, to the greater thickness--and consequently greater
buoyancy--of the part which had grown next the rocks of the river bank.
Burl found that if he lay with his head stretching above that side, it
did not sink into the water. He wriggled into this new position, then,
and waited until the slow revolution of his vessel brought the
spear-shaft near him. He stretched his fingers and his arm, and touched,
then grasped it.
A moment later he was tearing strips of flesh from the side of the fish
and cramming the oily mess into his mouth with great enjoyment. He had
lost his edible mushroom. That danced upon the waves several yards away,
but Burl ate contentedly of what he possessed. He did not worry about
what was before him. That lay in the future, but suddenly he realized
that he was being carried farther and farther from Saya, the maiden of
his tribe who caused strange bliss to steal over him when he
contemplated her.
The thought came to him when he visualized the delight with which she
would receive a gift of part of the fish he had caught. He was suddenly
stricken with dumb sorrow. He lifted his head and looked longingly at
the river banks.
A long, monotonous row of strangely colored fungus growths. No healthy
green, but pallid, cream-colored toadstools, some bright orange,
lavender, and purple molds, vivid carmine "rusts" and mildews, spreading
up the banks from the turgid slime. The sun was not a ball of fire, but
merely shone as a bright golden patch in the haze-filled sky, a patch
whose limits could not be defined or marked.
In the faintly pinkish light that filtered down through the air, a
multitude of flying objects could be seen. Now and then a cricket or a
grasshopper made its bullet-like flight from one spot to another. Huge
butterflies fluttered gayly above the silent, seemingly lifeless world.
Bees lumbered anxiously about, seeking the cross-shaped flowers of the
monster cabbages. Now and then a slender-waisted, yellow-stomached wasp
flew alertly through the air.
Burl watched them with a strange indifference. The wasps were as long as
he himself. The bees, on end, could match his height. The butterflies
ranged from tiny creatures barely capable of shading his face to
colossal things in the folds of whose wings he could have been lost. And
above him fluttered dragonflies, whose long, spindle-like bodies were
three times the length of his own.
Burl ignored them all. Sitting there, an incongruous creature of pink
skin and soft brown hair upon an orange fungus floating in midstream, he
was filled with despondency because the current carried him forever
farther and farther from a certain slender-limbed maiden of his tiny
tribe, whose glances caused an odd commotion in his breast.
* * * * *
The day went on. Once, Burl saw upon the blue-green mold that spread
upward from the river, a band of large, red Amazon ants, marching in
orderly array, to raid the city of a colony of black ants, and carry
away the eggs they would find there. The eggs would be hatched, and the
small black creatures made the slaves of the brigands who had stolen
them.
The Amazon ants can live only by the labor of their slaves, and for that
reason are mighty warriors in their world. Later, etched against the
steaming mist that overhung everything as far as the eye could reach,
Burl saw strangely shaped, swollen branches rearing themselves from the
ground. He knew what they were. A hard-rinded fungus that grew upon
itself in peculiar mockery of the vegetation that had vanished from the
earth.
And again he saw pear-shaped objects above some of which floated little
clouds of smoke. They, too, were fungus growths, puffballs, which when
touched emit what seems a puff of vapor. These would have towered above
Burl's head, had he stood beside them.
And then, as the day drew to an end, he saw in the distance what seemed
a range of purple hills. They were tall hills to Burl, some sixty or
seventy feet high, and they seemed to be the agglomeration of a formless
growth, multiplying its organisms and forms upon itself until the whole
formed an irregular, cone-shaped mound. Burl watched them apathetically.
Presently, he ate again of the oily fish. The taste was pleasant to him,
accustomed to feed mostly upon insipid mushrooms. He stuffed himself,
though the size of his prey left by far the larger part uneaten.
He still held his spear firmly beside him.
It had brought him into trouble, but Burl possessed a fund of obstinacy.
Unlike most of his tribe, he associated the spear with the food it had
secured, rather than the difficulty into which it had led him. When he
had eaten his fill he picked it up and examined it again. The sharpness
of its point was unimpaired.
Burl handled it meditatively, debating whether or not to attempt to fish
again. The shakiness of his little raft dissuaded him, and he abandoned
the idea. Presently he stripped a sinew from the garment about his
middle and hung the fish about his neck with it. That would leave him
both hands free. Then he sat cross-legged upon the soggily floating
fungus, like a pink-skinned Buddha, and watched the shores go by.
Time had passed, and it was drawing near sunset. Burl, never having seen
the sun save as a bright spot in the overhanging haze, did not think of
the coming of night as "sunset." To him it was the letting down of
darkness from the sky.
Today happened to be an exceptionally bright day, and the haze was not
as thick as usual. Far to the west, the thick mist turned to gold, while
the thicker clouds above became blurred masses of dull red. Their
shadows seemed like lavender, from the contrast of shades. Upon the
still surface of the river, all the myriad tints and shadings were
reflected with an incredible faithfulness, and the shining tops of the
giant mushrooms by the river brim glowed faintly pink.
Dragonflies buzzed over his head in their swift and angular flight, the
metallic luster of their bodies glistening in the rosy light. Great
yellow butterflies flew lightly above the stream. Here, there, and
everywhere upon the water appeared the shell-formed boats of a thousand
caddis flies, floating upon the surface while they might.
Burl could have thrust his hand down into their cavities and seized the
white worms that inhabited the strange craft. The huge bulk of a tardy
bee droned heavily overhead. Burl glanced upward and saw the long
proboscis and the hairy hinder legs with their scanty load of pollen. He
saw the great, multiple-lensed eyes with their expression of stupid
preoccupation, and even the sting that would mean death alike for him
and for the giant insect, should it be used.
The crimson radiance grew dim at the edge of the world. The purple hills
had long been left behind. Now the slender stalks of ten thousand
round-domed mushrooms lined the river bank and beneath them spread fungi
of all colors, from the rawest red to palest blue, but all now fading
slowly to a monochromatic background in the growing dusk.
The buzzing, fluttering, and the flapping of the insects of the day died
slowly down, while from a million hiding places there crept out into the
deep night soft and furry bodies of great moths, who preened themselves
and smoothed their feathery antennae before taking to the air. The
strong-limbed crickets set up their thunderous noise--grown gravely bass
with the increasing size of the organs by which the sound was made--and
then there began to gather on the water those slender spirals of tenuous
mist that would presently blanket the stream in a mantle of thin fog.
* * * * *
Night fell. The clouds above seemed to lower and grow dark. Gradually,
now a drop and then a drop, now a drop and then a drop, the languid fall
of large, warm raindrops that would drip from the moisture-laden skies
all through the night began. The edge of the stream became a place where
great disks of coolly glowing flame appeared.
The mushrooms that bordered on the river were faintly phosphorescent
(_Pleurotus phosphoreus_) and shone coldly upon the "rusts" and
flake-fungi beneath their feet. Here and there a ball of lambent flame
appeared, drifting idly above the steaming, festering earth.
Thirty thousand years before, men had called them "will-o'-the-wisps,"
but Burl simply stared at them, accepting them as he accepted all that
passed. Only a man attempting to advance in the scale of civilization
tries to explain everything that he sees. The savage and the child is
most often content to observe without comment, unless he repeats the
legends told him by wise folk who are possessed by the itch of
knowledge.
Burl watched for a long time. Great fireflies whose beacons lighted up
their surroundings for many yards--fireflies Burl knew to be as long as
his spear--shed their intermittent glows upon the stream. Softly
fluttering wings, in great beats that poured torrents of air upon him,
passed above Burl.
The air was full of winged creatures. The night was broken by their
cries, by the sound of their invisible wings, by their cries of anguish
and their mating calls. Above him and on all sides the persistent,
intense life of the insect world went on ceaselessly, but Burl rocked
back and forth upon his frail mushroom boat and wished to weep because
he was being carried from his tribe, and from Saya--Saya of the swift
feet and white teeth, of the shy smile.
Burl may have been homesick, but his principal thoughts were of Saya. He
had dared greatly to bring a gift of fresh meat to her, meat captured as
meat had never been known to be taken by a member of the tribe. And now
he was being carried from her!
He lay, disconsolate, upon his floating atom on the water for a great
part of the night. It was long after midnight when the mushroom raft
struck gently and remained grounded upon a shallow in the stream.
When the light came in the morning, Burl gazed about him keenly. He was
some twenty yards from the shore, and the greenish scum surrounded his
now disintegrating vessel. The river had widened out until the other
bank was barely to be seen through the haze above the surface of the
river, but the nearer shore seemed firm and no more full of dangers than
the territory his tribe inhabited. He felt the depth of the water with
his spear, then was struck with the multiple usefulness of that weapon.
The water would come to but slightly above his ankles.
Shivering a little with fear, Burl stepped down into the water, then
made for the bank at the top of his speed. He felt a soft something
clinging to one of his bare feet. With an access of terror, he ran
faster, and stumbled upon the shore in a panic. He stared down at his
foot. A shapeless, flesh-colored pad clung to his heel, and as Burl
watched, it began to swell slowly, while the pink of its wrinkled folds
deepened.
It was no more than a leech, sharing in the enlargement nearly all the
lower world had undergone, but Burl did not know that. He thrust at it
with the side of his spear, then scraped frantically at it, and it fell
off, leaving a blotch of blood upon the skin where it came away. It lay,
writhing and pulsating, upon the ground, and Burl fled from it.
He found himself in one of the toadstool forests with which he was
familiar, and finally paused, disconsolately. He knew the nature of the
fungus growths about him, and presently fell to eating. In Burl the
sight of food always produced hunger--a wise provision of nature to make
up for the instinct to store food, which he lacked.
Burl's heart was small within him. He was far from his tribe, and far
from Saya. In the parlance of this day, it is probable that no more than
forty miles separated them, but Burl did not think of distances. He had
come down the river. He was in a land he had never known or seen. And he
was alone.
All about him was food. All the mushrooms that surrounded him were
edible, and formed a store of sustenance Burl's whole tribe could not
have eaten in many days, but that very fact brought Saya to his mind
more forcibly. He squatted on the ground, wolfing down the insipid
mushroom in great gulps, when an idea suddenly came to him with all the
force of inspiration.
He would bring Saya here, where there was food, food in great
quantities, and she would be pleased. Burl had forgotten the large and
oily fish that still hung down his back from the sinew about his neck,
but now he rose, and its flapping against him reminded him again.
He took it and fingered it all over, getting his hands and himself
thoroughly greasy in the process, but he could eat no more. The thought
of Saya's pleasure at the sight of that, too, reinforced his
determination.
With all the immediacy of a child or a savage he set off at once. He had
come along the bank of the stream. He would retrace his steps along the
bank of the stream.
Through the awkward aisles of the mushroom forest he made his way, eyes
and ears open for possibilities of danger. Several times he heard the
omnipresent clicking of ants on their multifarious businesses in the
wood, but he could afford to ignore them. They were short-sighted at
best, and at worst they were foragers rather than hunters. He only
feared one kind of ant, the army-ant, which sometimes travels in hordes
of millions, eating all that it comes upon. In ages past, when they were
tiny creatures not an inch long, even the largest animals fled from
them. Now that they measured a foot in length, not even the gorged
spiders whose distended bellies were a yard in thickness, dared offer
them battle.
The mushroom forest came to an end. A cheerful grasshopper (_Ephigger_)
munched delicately at some dainty it had found. Its hind legs were
bunched beneath it in perpetual readiness for flight. A monster wasp
appeared above--as long as Burl himself--poised an instant, dropped, and
seized the luckless feaster.
There was a struggle, then the grasshopper became helpless, and the
wasp's flexible abdomen curved delicately. Its sting entered the
jointed armor of its prey, just beneath the head. The sting entered with
all the deliberate precision of a surgeon's scalpel, and all struggle
ceased.
The wasp grasped the paralyzed, not dead, insect and flew away. Burl
grunted, and passed on. He had hidden when the wasp darted down from
above.
The ground grew rough, and Burl's progress became painful. He clambered
arduously up steep slopes and made his way cautiously down their farther
sides. Once he had to climb through a tangled mass of mushrooms so
closely placed, and so small, that he had to break them apart with blows
of his spear before he could pass, when they shed upon him torrents of a
fiery red liquid that rolled off his greasy breast and sank into the
ground (_Lactarius deliciosus_).
A strange self-confidence now took possession of Burl. He walked less
cautiously and more boldly. The mere fact that he had struck something
and destroyed it provided him with a curious fictitious courage.
He had climbed slowly to the top of a red clay cliff, perhaps a hundred
feet high, slowly eaten away by the river when it overflowed. Burl could
see the river. At some past floodtime it had lapped at the base of the
cliff on whose edge he walked, though now it came no nearer than a
quarter-mile.
The cliffside was almost covered with shelf-fungi, large and small,
white, yellow, orange, and green, in indescribable confusion and
luxuriance. From a point halfway up the cliff the inch-thick cable of a
spider's web stretched down to an anchorage on the ground, and the
strangely geometrical pattern of the web glistened evilly.
Somewhere among the fungi of the cliffside the huge creature waited
until some unfortunate prey should struggle helplessly in its monster
snare. The spider waited in a motionless, implacable patience,
invincibly certain of prey, utterly merciless to its victims.
Burl strutted on the edge of the cliff, a silly little pink-skinned
creature with an oily fish slung about his neck and a draggled fragment
of a moth's wing about his middle. In his hand he bore the long spear of
a minotaur beetle. He strutted, and looked scornfully down upon the
whitely shining trap below him. He struck mushrooms, and they had fallen
before him. He feared nothing. He strode fearlessly along. He would go
to Saya and bring her to this land where food grew in abundance.
Sixty paces before him, a shaft sank vertically in the sandy, clayey
soil. It was a carefully rounded shaft, and lined with silk. It went
down for perhaps thirty feet or more, and there enlarged itself into a
chamber where the owner and digger of the shaft might rest. The top of
the hole was closed by a trap door, stained with mud and earth to
imitate with precision the surrounding soil. A keen eye would have been
needed to perceive the opening. But a keen eye now peered out from a
tiny crack, the eye of the engineer of the underground dwelling.
Eight hairy legs surrounded the body of the creature that hung
motionless at the top of the silk-lined shaft. A huge misshapen globe
formed its body, colored a dirty brown. Two pairs of ferocious mandibles
stretched before its fierce mouth-parts. Two eyes glittered evilly in
the darkness of the burrow. And over the whole body spread a rough,
mangy fur.
It was a thing of implacable malignance, of incredible ferocity. It was
the brown hunting-spider, the American tarantula (_Mygale Hentzii_). Its
body was two feet and more in diameter, and its legs, outstretched,
would cover a circle three yards across. It watched Burl, its eyes
glistening. Slaver welled up and dropped from its jaws.
And Burl strutted forward on the edge of the cliff, puffed up with a
sense of his own importance. The white snare of the spinning spider
below him impressed him as amusing. He knew the spider would not leave
its web to attack him. He reached down and broke off a bit of fungus
growing at his feet. Where he broke it, it was oozing a soupy liquid and
was full of tiny maggots in a delirium of feasting. Burl flung it down
into the web, and then laughed as the black bulk of the hidden spider
swung down from its hiding place to investigate.
* * * * *
The tarantula, peering from its burrow, quivered with impatience. Burl
drew near, and nearer. He was using his spear as a lever, now, and
prying off bits of fungus to fall down the cliffside into the colossal
web. The spider, below, went leisurely from one place to another,
investigating each new missile with its palpi, then leaving them, as
they appeared lifeless and undesirable prey. Burl laughed again as a
particularly large lump of shelf-fungus narrowly missed the
black-and-silver figure below. Then--
The trap door fell into place with a faint click, and Burl whirled
about. His laughter turned to a scream. Moving toward him with
incredible rapidity, the monster tarantula opened its dripping jaws. Its
mandibles gaped wide. The poison fangs were unsheathed. The creature was
thirty paces away, twenty paces--ten. It leaped into the air, eyes
glittering, all its eight legs extended to seize, fangs bared--
Burl screamed again, and thrust out his arms to ward off the impact of
the leap. In his terror, his grasp upon his spear had become agonized.
The spear point shot out, and the tarantula fell upon it. Nearly a
quarter of the spear entered the body of the ferocious thing.
It struck upon the spear, writhing horribly, still struggling to reach
Burl, who was transfixed with horror. The mandibles clashed, strange
sounds came from the beast. Then one of the attenuated, hairy legs
rasped across Burl's forearm. He gasped in ultimate fear and stepped
backward--and the edge of the cliff gave way beneath him.
He hurtled downward, still clutching the spear which led the writhing
creature from him. Down through space, eyes glassy with panic, the two
creatures--the man and the giant tarantula--fell together. There was a
strangely elastic crash and crackling. They had fallen into the web
beneath them.