The RED DUST
_By Murray Leinster_
_A Sequel to "The Mad Planet."_
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from January 1927
Amazing Stories. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Illustration: Burl raised his spear, and plunged down on the back of
the moving thing, thrusting his spear with all the force he could
command. He had fallen upon the shining back of one of the huge,
meat-eating beetles, and his spear had slid across the horny armor and
then stuck fast, having pierced only the leathery tissue between the
insect's head and thorax.]
_You who have read "The Mad Planet" by Murray Leinster, will welcome
the sequel to that story. The world, in a far distant future, is
peopled with huge insects and titanic fungus growths. Life has been
greatly altered, and tiny Man is now in the process of becoming
acclimated to the change. We again meet our hero Burl, but this time
a far greater danger menaces the human race. The huge insects are
still in evidence, but the terror they inspire is as nothing
compared to the deadly Red Dust. You will follow this remarkable
story with breathless interest._
CHAPTER I
Prey
The sky grew gray and then almost white. The overhanging banks of clouds
seemed to withdraw a little from the steaming earth. Haze that hung
always among the mushroom forests and above the fungus hills grew more
tenuous, and the slow and misty rain that dripped the whole night long
ceased reluctantly.
As far as the eye could see a mad world stretched out, a world of
insensate cruelties and strange, fierce maternal solicitudes. The
insects of the night--the great moths whose wings spread far and wide in
the dimness, and the huge fireflies, four feet in length, whose beacons
made the earth glow in their pale, weird light--the insects of the night
had sought their hiding-places.
Now the creatures of the day ventured forth. A great ant-hill towered a
hundred feet in the air. Upon its gravel and boulder-strewn side a
commotion became visible.
The earth crumbled, and fell into an invisible opening, then a dark
chasm appeared, and two slender, threadlike antennæ peered out.
A warrior ant emerged, and stood for an instant in the daylight, looking
all about for signs of danger to the ant-city. He was all of ten inches
long, this ant, and his mandibles were fierce and strong. A second and
third warrior came from the inside of the ant-hill, and ran with tiny
clickings about the hillock, waving their antennæ restlessly, searching,
ever searching for a menace to their city.
They returned to the gateway from which they had made their appearance,
evidently bearing reassuring messages, because shortly after they had
reëntered the gateway of the ant-city, a flood of black, ill-smelling
workers poured out of the opening and dispersed upon their business. The
clickings of their limbs and an occasional whining stridulation made an
incessant sound as they scattered over the earth, foraging among the
mushrooms and giant cabbages, among the rubbish-heaps of the gigantic
bee-hives and wasp colonies, and among the remains of the tragedies of
the night for food for their city.
The city of the ants had begun its daily toil, toil in which every one
shared without supervision or coercion. Deep in the recesses of the
pyramid galleries were hollowed out and winding passages that led down a
fathomless distance into the earth below.
Somewhere in the maze of tunnels there was a royal apartment, in which
the queen-ant reposed, waited upon by assiduous courtiers, fed by royal
stewards, and combed and rubbed by the hands of her subjects and
children.
But even the huge monarch of the city had her constant and pressing duty
of maternity. A dozen times the size of her largest loyal servant, she
was no less bound by the unwritten but imperative laws of the city than
they. From the time of waking to the time of rest, she was ordained to
be the queen-mother in the strictest and most literal sense of the word,
for at intervals to be measured only in terms of minutes she brought
forth a single egg, perhaps three inches in length, which was instantly
seized by one of her eager attendants and carried in haste to the
municipal nursery.
There it was placed in a tiny cell a foot or more in length until a
sac-shaped grub appeared, all soft, white body save for a tiny mouth.
Then the nurses took it in charge and fed it with curious, tender
gestures until it had waxed large and fat and slept the sleep of
metamorphosis. When it emerged from its rudimentary cocoon it took the
places of its nurses until its soft skin had hardened into the horny
armor of the workers and soldiers, and then it joined the throng of
workers that poured out from the city at dawn to forage for food, to
bring back its finds and to share with the warriors and the nurses, the
drone males and the young queens, and all the other members of its
communities, their duties in the city itself. That was the life of the
social insect, absolute devotion to the cause of its city, utter
abnegation of self-interest for the sake of its fellows--and death at
their hands when their usefulness was past. They neither knew nor
expected more or less.
It is a strange instinct that prompts these creatures to devote their
lives to their city, taking no smallest thought for their individual
good, without even the call of maternity or sex to guide them. Only the
queen knows motherhood. The others know nothing but toil, for purposes
they do not understand, and to an end of which they cannot dream. At
intervals all over the world of Burl's time these ant-cities rose above
the surrounding ground, some small and barely begun, and others ancient
colonies which were truly the continuation of cities first built when
the ants were insects to be crushed beneath the feet of men. These
ancient strongholds towered two, three, and even four hundred feet above
the plains, and their inhabitants would have had to be numbered in
millions if not billions.
Not all the earth was subject to the ants, however. Bees and wasps and
more deadly creatures crawled over and flew above its surface. The bees
were four feet and more in length. And slender-waisted wasps darted here
and there, preying upon the colossal crickets that sang deep bass music
to their mates--and the length of the crickets was the length of a man,
and more.
Spiders with bloated bellies waited, motionless, in their snares, whose
threads were the size of small cables, waiting for some luckless giant
insect to be entangled in the gummy traps. And butterflies fluttered
over the festering plains of this new world, tremendous creatures whose
wings could only be measured in terms of yards.
An outcropping of rock jutted up abruptly from a fungus-covered plain.
Shelf-fungi and strangely colored molds stained the stone until the
shining quartz was hidden almost completely from view, but the whole
glistened like tinted crystal from the dank wetness of the night. Little
wisps of vapor curled away from the slopes as the moisture was taken up
by the already moisture-laden air.
Seen from a distance, the outcropping of rock looked innocent and still,
but a nearer view showed many things.
Here a hunting wasp had come upon a gray worm, and was methodically
inserting its sting into each of the twelve segments of the faintly
writhing creature. Presently the worm would be completely paralyzed, and
would be carried to the burrow of the wasp, where an egg would be laid
upon it, from which a tiny maggot would presently hatch. Then weeks of
agony for the great gray worm, conscious, but unable to move, while the
maggot fed upon its living flesh--
There the tiny spider, youngest of hatchlings, barely four inches
across, stealthily stalked some other still tinier mite, the little,
many-legged larva of the oil-beetle, known as the bee-louse. The almost
infinitely small bee-louse was barely two inches long, and could easily
hide in the thick fur of a great bumblebee.
This one small creature would never fulfill its destiny, however. The
hatchling spider sprang--it was a combat of midgets which was soon over.
When the spider had grown and was feared as a huge, black-bellied
tarantula, it would slay monster crickets with the same ease and the
same implacable ferocity.
The outcropping of rock looked still and innocent. There was one point
where it overhung, forming a shelf, beneath which the stone fell away in
a sheer-drop. Many colored fungus growths covered the rock, making it a
riot of tints and shades. But hanging from the rooflike projection of
the stone there was a strange, drab-white object. It was in the shape of
half a globe, perhaps six feet by six feet at its largest. A number of
little semicircular doors were fixed about its sides, like inverted
arches, each closed by a blank wall. One of them would open, but only
one.
The house was like the half of a pallid orange, fastened to the roof of
rock. Thick cables stretched in every direction for yards upon yards,
anchoring the habitation firmly, but the most striking of the things
about the house--still and quiet and innocent, like all the rest of the
rock outcropping--were the ghastly trophies fastened to the outer walls
and hanging from long silken chains below.
Here was the hind leg of one of the smaller beetles. There was the
wing-case of a flying creature. Here a snail-shell, two feet in
diameter, hanging at the end of an inch-thick cable. There a boulder
that must have weighed thirty or forty pounds, dangling in similar
fashion.
But fastened here and there, haphazard and irregularly, were other more
repulsive remnants. The shrunken head-armor of a beetle, the fierce jaws
of a cricket--the pitiful shreds of a hundred creatures that had formed
forgotten meals for the bloated insect within the home.
Comparatively small as was the nest of the clotho spider, it was
decorated as no ogre's castle had ever been adorned--legs sucked dry of
their contents, corselets of horny armor forever to be unused by any
creature, a wing of this insect, the head of that. And dangling by the
longest cord of all, with a silken cable wrapped carefully about it to
keep the parts together, was the shrunken, shriveled, dried-up body of a
long-dead man!
Outside, the nest was a place of gruesome relics. Within, it was a place
of luxury and ease. A cushion of softest down filled all the bulging
bottom of the hemisphere. A canopy of similarly luxurious texture
interposed itself between the rocky roof and the dark, hideous body of
the resting spider.
The eyes of the hairy creature glittered like diamonds, even in the
darkness, but the loathsome, attenuated legs were tucked under the
round-bellied body, and the spider was at rest. It had fed.
It waited, motionless, without desires or aversions, without emotions or
perplexities, in comfortable, placid, machinelike contentment until time
should bring the call to feed again.
A fresh carcass had been added to the decorations of the nest only the
night before. For many days the spider would repose in motionless
splendor within the silken castle. When hunger came again, a nocturnal
foray, a creature would be pounced upon and slain, brought bodily to the
nest, and feasted upon, its body festooned upon the exterior, and
another half-sleeping, half-waking period of dreamful idleness within
the sybaritic charnel-house would ensue.
Slowly and timidly, half a dozen pink-skinned creatures made their way
through the mushroom forest that led to the outcropping of rock under
which the clotho spider's nest was slung. They were men, degraded
remnants of the once dominant race.
Burl was their leader, and was distinguished solely by two three-foot
stumps of the feathery, golden antennæ of a night-flying moth he had
bound to his forehead. In his hand was a horny, chitinous spear, taken
from the body of an unknown flying creature killed by the flames of the
burning purple hills.
Since Burl's return from his solitary--and involuntary--journey, he had
been greatly revered by his tribe. Hitherto it had been but a
leaderless, formless group of people, creeping to the same hiding-place
at nightfall to share in the food of the fortunate, and shudder at the
fate of those who might not appear.
Now Burl had walked boldly to them, bearing, upon his back the gray bulk
of a labyrinth spider he had slain with his own hands, and clad in
wonderful garments of a gorgeousness they envied and admired. They hung
upon his words as he struggled to tell them of his adventures, and
slowly and dimly they began to look to him for leadership. He was
wonderful. For days they had listened breathlessly to the tale of his
adventures, but when he demanded that they follow him in another and
more perilous affair, they were appalled.
A peculiar strength of will had come to Burl. He had seen and done
things that no man in the memory of his tribe had seen or done. He had
stood by when the purple hills burned and formed a funeral pyre for the
horde of army ants, and for uncounted thousands of flying creatures. He
had caught a leaping tarantula upon the point of his spear, and had
escaped from the web of a banded web-spider by oiling his body so that
the sticky threads of the snare refused to hold him fast. He had
attacked and killed a great gray labyrinth spider.
But most potent of all, he had returned and had been welcomed by
Saya--Saya of the swift feet and slender limbs, whose smile roused
strange emotions in Burl's breast.
It was the adoring gaze of Saya that had roused Burl to this last pitch
of rashness. Months before the clotho spider in the hemispherical silk
castle of the gruesome decorations had killed and eaten one of the men
of the tribe. Burl and the spider's victim had been together when the
spider appeared, and the first faint gray light of morning barely
silhouetted the shaggy, horrible creature as it leaped from ambush
behind a toadstool toward the fear-stricken pair.
Its attenuated legs were outstretched, its mandibles gaped wide, and its
jaws clashed horribly as it formed a black blotch in mid air against the
lightening sky.
Burl had fled, screaming, when the other man was seized. Now, however,
he was leading half a dozen trembling men toward the inverted dome in
which the spider dozed. Two or three of them bore spears like Burl
himself, but they bore them awkwardly and timorously. Burl himself was
possessed by a strange, fictitious courage. It was the utter
recklessness of youth, coupled with the eternal masculine desire to
display prowess before a desired female.
The wavering advance came to a halt. Most of the naked men stopped from
fear, but Burl stopped to invoke his newly discovered inner self, that
had furnished him with such marvelous plans. Quite accidentally he had
found that if he persistently asked himself a question, some sort of
answer came from within.
Now he gazed up from a safe distance and asked himself how he and the
others were to slay the clotho spider. The nest was some forty feet from
the ground, on the undersurface of a shelf of rock. There was sheer open
space beneath it, but it was firmly held to its support by long, silken
cables that curled to the upper side of the rock-shelf, clinging to the
stone.
Burl gazed, and presently an idea came to him. He beckoned to the others
to follow him, and they did so, their knees knocking together from their
fright. At the slightest alarm they would flee, screaming in fear, but
Burl did not plan that there should be any alarm.
He led them to the rear of the singular rock formation, up the gently
sloping side, and toward the precipitous edge. He drew near the point
where the rock fell away. A long, tentacle-like silk cable curled up
over the edge of a little promontory of stone that jutted out into
nothingness.
Burl began to feel oddly cold, and something of the panic of the other
men communicated itself to him. This was one of the anchoring cables
that held the spider's castle secure. He looked and found others, six or
seven in all, which performed the task of keeping the shaggy, horrid
ogre's home from falling to the ground below.
His idea did not desert him, however, and he drew back, to whisper
orders to his followers. They obeyed him solely because they were
afraid, and he spoke in an authoritative tone, but they did obey, and
brought a dozen heavy boulders of perhaps forty pounds weight each.
Burl grasped one of the silken cables at its end and tore it loose from
the rock for a space of perhaps two yards. His flesh crawled as he did
so, but something within him drove him on. Then, while beads of
perspiration stood out on his forehead--induced by nothing less than
cold, physical fear--he tied the boulder to the cable. The first one
done, he felt emboldened, and made a second fast, and a third.
One of his men stood near the edge of the rock, listening in agonized
apprehension. Burl had soon tied a heavy stone to each of the cables he
saw, and as a matter of fact, there was but one of them he failed to
notice. That one had been covered by the flaking mold that took the
place of grass upon the rocky eminence.
There were left upon the promontory, several of the boulders for which
there was no use, but Burl did not attempt to double the weights on the
cables. He took his followers aside and explained his plan in whispers.
Quaking, they agreed, and, trembling, they prepared to carry it out.
One of them stationed himself beside each of the boulders, Burl at the
largest. He gave a signal, and half a dozen ripping, tearing sounds
broke the sullen silence of the day. The boulders clashed and clattered
down the rocky side of the precipice, tearing--perhaps "peeling"--the
cables from their adhesion to the stone. They shot into open space and
jerked violently at the half-globular nest, which was wrenched from its
place by the combined impetus of the six heavy weights.
Burl had flung himself upon his face to watch what he was sure would be
the death of the spider as it fell forty feet and more, imprisoned in
its heavily weighted home. His eyes sparkled with triumph as he saw the
ghastly, trophy-laden house swing out from the cliff. Then he gasped in
terror.
One of the cables had not been discovered. That single cable held the
spider's castle from a fall, though the nest had been torn from its
anchorage, and now dangled heavily on its side in mid air. A convulsive
struggle seemed to be going on within.
Then one of the archlike doors opened, and the spider emerged, evidently
in terror, and confused by the light of day, but still venomous and
still deadly. It found but a single of its anchoring cables intact, that
leading to the cliff top hard by Burl's head.
The spider sprang for this single cable, and its legs grasped the
slender thread eagerly while it began to climb rapidly up toward the
cliff top.
As with all the creatures of Burl's time, its first thought was of
battle, not flight, and it came up the thin cord with its poison fangs
unsheathed and its mandibles clashing in rage. The shaggy hair upon its
body seemed to bristle with insane ferocity, and the horrible, thin legs
moved with desperate haste as it hastened to meet and wreak vengeance
upon the cause of its sudden alarm.
Burl's followers fled, uttering shrieks of fear, and Burl started to his
feet, in the grip of a terrible panic. Then his hand struck one of the
heavy boulders. Exerting every ounce of his strength, he pushed it over
the cliff just where the cable appeared above the edge. For the fraction
of a second there was silence, and then the indescribable sound of an
impact against a soft body.
There was a gasping cry, and a moment later the curiously muffled
clatter of the boulder striking the earth below. Somehow, the sound
suggested that the boulder had struck first upon some soft object.
A faint cry came from the bottom of the hill. The last of Burl's men was
leaping to a hiding-place among the mushrooms of the forest, and had
seen the sheen of shining armor just before him. He cried out and waited
for death, but only a delicately formed wasp rose heavily into the air,
bearing beneath it the more and more feebly struggling body of a giant
cricket.
Burl had stood paralyzed, deprived of the power of movement, after
casting the boulder over the cliff. That one action had taken the last
ounce of his initiative, and if the spider had hauled itself over the
rocky edge and darted toward him, slavering its thick spittle and
uttering sounds of mad fury, Burl would not even have screamed as it
seized him. He was like a dead thing. But the oddly muffled sound of the
boulder striking the ground below brought back hope of life and power of
movement.
He peered over the cliff. The nest still dangled at the end of the
single cable, still freighted with its gruesome trophies, but on the
ground below a crushed and horribly writhing form was moving in
convulsions of rage and agony.
Long, hairy legs worked desperately from a body that was no more than a
mass of pulped flesh. A ferocious jaw tried to clamp upon something--and
there was no other jaw to meet it. An evil-smelling, sticky liquid
exuded from the mangled writhing, thing upon the earth, moving in
terrible contortions of torment.
Presently an ant drew near and extended inquisitive antennæ at the
helpless monster wounded to death. A shrill stridulation sounded out,
and three or four other foot-long ants hastened up to wait patiently
just outside the spider's reach until its struggles should have lessened
enough to make possible the salvage of flesh from the perhaps
still-living creature for the ant city a mile away.
And Burl, up on the cliff-top, danced and gesticulated in triumph. He
had killed the clotho spider, which had slain one of the tribesmen four
months before. Glory was his. All the tribesmen had seen the spider
living. Now he would show them the spider dead. He stopped his dance of
triumph and walked down the hill in haughty grandeur. He would reproach
his timid followers for fleeing from the spider, leaving him to kill it
alone.
Quite naïvely Burl assumed that it was his place to give orders and that
of the others to obey. True, no one had attempted to give orders before,
or to enforce their execution, but Burl had reached the eminently
wholesome conclusion that he was a wonderful person whose wishes should
be respected.
Burl, filled with fresh notions of his own importance, strutted on
toward the hiding-place of the tribe, growing more and more angry with
the other men for having deserted him. He would reproach them, would
probably beat them. They would be afraid to protest, and in the future
would undoubtedly be afraid to run away.
Burl was quite convinced that running away was something he could not
tolerate in his followers. Obscurely--and conveniently in the extreme
back of his mind--he reasoned that not only did a larger number of men
present at a scene of peril increase the chances of coping with the
danger, but they also increased the chances that the victim selected by
the dangerous creature would be another than himself.
Burl's reasoning was unsophisticated, but sound; perhaps unconscious,
but none the less effective. He grew quite furious with the deserters.
They had run away! They had fled from a mere spider.
A shrill whine filled the air, and a ten-inch ant dashed at Burl with
its mandibles extended threateningly. Burl's path had promised to
interrupt the salvaging work of the insect, engaged in scraping shreds
of flesh from the corselet of one of the smaller beetles slain the
previous night. The ant dashed at Burl like an infuriated fox-terrier,
and Burl scurried away in undignified retreat. The ant might not be
dangerous, but bites from its formic acid-poisoned mandibles were no
trifles.
Burl came to the tangled thicket of mushrooms in which his tribefolk
hid. The entrance was tortuous and difficult to penetrate, and could be
blocked on occasion with stones and toadstool pulp. Burl made his way
toward the central clearing, and heard as he went the sound of weeping,
and the excited chatter of the tribes people.
Those who had fled from the rocky cliff had returned with the news that
Burl was dead, and Saya lay weeping beneath an over-shadowing toadstool.
She was not yet the mate of Burl, but the time would come when all the
tribe would recognize a status dimly different from the usual tribal
relationship.
Burl stepped into the clearing, and straightway cuffed the first man he
came upon, then the next and the next. There was a cry of astonishment,
and the next second instinctive, fearful glances at that entrance to the
hiding-place.
Had Burl fled from the spider, and was it following? Burl spoke loftily,
saying that the spider was dead, that its legs, each one the length of a
man, were still, and its fierce jaws and deadly poison-fangs harmless
forevermore.
Ten minutes later he was leading an incredulous, awed little group of
pink-skinned people to the spot below the cliff where the spider
actually lay dead, with the ants busily at work upon its remains.
And when he went back to the hiding-place he donned again his great
cloak that was made from the wing of a magnificent moth, slain by the
flames of the purple hills, and sat down in splendor upon a crumbling
toadstool, to feast upon the glances of admiration and awe that were
sent toward him. Only Saya held back shyly, until he motioned for her to
draw near, when she seated herself at his feet and gazed up at him with
unutterable adoration in her eyes.
But while Burl basked in the radiance of his tribe's admiration, danger
was drawing near them all. For many months there had been strange red
mushrooms growing slowly here and there all over the earth, they knew.
The tribefolk had speculated about them, but forebore tasting them
because they were strange, and strange things were usually dangerous and
often fatal.
Now those red growths had ripened and grown ready to emit their spores.
Their rounded tops had grown fat, and the tough skin grew taut as if a
strange pressure were being applied from within. And to-day, while Burl
luxuriated in his position of feared and admired great man of his tribe,
at a spot a long distance away, upon a hill-top, one of the red
mushrooms burst. The spores inside the taut, tough skin shot all about
as if scattered by an explosion, and made a little cloud of reddish,
impalpable dust, which hung in the air and moved slowly with the
sluggish breeze.
A bee droned into the thin red cloud of dust, lazily and heavily flying
back toward the hive. But barely had she entered the tinted atmosphere
when her movements became awkward and convulsive, effortful and excited.
She trembled and twisted in mid air in a peculiar fashion, then dropped
to the earth, while her abdomen moved violently.
Bees, like almost all insects, breathe through spiracles on the
undersurfaces of their abdomens. This bee had breathed in some of the
red mushroom's spores. She thrashed about desperately upon the
toadstools on which she had fallen, struggling for breath, for life.
After a long time she was still. The cloud of red mushroom spores had
strangled or poisoned her. And everywhere the red fringe grew, such
explosions were taking place, one by one, and wherever the red clouds
hung in the air creatures were breathing them in and dying in
convulsions of strangulation.