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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41637 ***
+
+                          _The FORGOTTEN PLANET_
+
+                          By MURRAY LEINSTER
+
+    [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
+    that the copyright had been renewed.]
+
+
+    ACE BOOKS
+    A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc.
+    23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.
+
+    THE FORGOTTEN PLANET
+    Copyright, 1954, by Murray Leinster
+    An Ace Book, by arrangement with Gnome Press, Inc.
+
+    _The Forgotten Planet_ is based upon _Mad Planet_ and _Red Dust_
+    (copyrighted Amazing Stories 1926, 1927), and _Nightmare Planet_
+    (copyrighted 1953 by Gernsback Publications Inc.).
+
+
+    To Joan Patricia Jenkins
+
+
+
+
+NATURE'S MISLEAD MADHOUSE!
+
+
+Beneath dense gray clouds through which no sun shone lay a forgotten
+planet. It was a nightmare world of grotesque and terrifying
+animal-plant life. Gigantic beetles, spiders, bugs and ants filled the
+putrid, musty earth--ready to kill and devour anything in sight.
+
+There were men amidst this horror--men who cringed and ran from the
+ravening monsters and huddled in the mushroom forests at night.
+
+Burl was one of these creatures. But one day inspiration hit Burl. He
+would find a weapon--he would fight back.
+
+And with this idea the first step was taken in man's most desperate
+flight for freedom in this most horrible of all worlds. But it was only
+a first step.
+
+
+
+
+
+About the characters in this book:
+
+
+This is something of an oddity among fiction stories, because some of
+its characters may be met in person if you wish. Down at the nearest
+weed-patch or thicket you are quite likely to see a large and unusually
+perfect spider-web with a zig-zag silk ribbon woven into its center. Its
+engineer is the yellow-banded garden spider (_Epeira Fasciata_) whose
+abdomen may be as big as your thumb. I do not name it to impress you,
+but to suggest a sort of science-fiction experience.
+
+Take a bit of straw and disturb the web. Don't break the cables. Simply
+tap them a bit. The spider will know by the feel of things that you
+aren't prey and that it can't eat you. So it will set out frightening
+you away. It will run nimbly to the center of the web and shake itself
+violently. The whole web will vibrate, so that presently the spider may
+be swinging through an arc inches in length, and blurred by the speed of
+its swing. You are supposed to be scared. When you are alarmed enough,
+the spider will stop.
+
+That spider, very much magnified, is in this book with crickets and
+grasshoppers and divers beetles you may not know personally. But this is
+not an insect book, but science-fiction. If the habits of the creatures
+in it are authentic, it is because they are much more dramatic and
+interesting than things one can invent.
+
+Murray Leinster
+
+
+
+
+_PROLOGUE_
+
+
+The Survey-Ship _Tethys_ made the first landing on the planet, which had
+no name. It was an admirable planet in many ways. It had an ample
+atmosphere and many seas, which the nearby sun warmed so lavishly that a
+perpetual cloud-bank hid them and most of the solid ground from view. It
+had mountains and continents and islands and high plateaus. It had day
+and night and wind and rain, and its mean temperature was within the
+range to which human beings could readily accommodate. It was rather on
+the tropic side, but not unpleasant.
+
+But there was no life on it.
+
+No animals roamed its continents. No vegetation grew from its rocks. Not
+even bacteria struggled with its stones to turn them into soil. So there
+was no soil. Rock and stones and gravel and even sand--yes. But no soil
+in which any vegetation could grow. No living thing, however small, swam
+in its oceans, so there was not even mud on its ocean-bottoms. It was
+one of that disappointing vast majority of worlds which turned up when
+the Galaxy was first explored. People couldn't live on it because
+nothing had lived there before.
+
+Its water was fresh and its oceans were harmless. Its air was germ-free
+and breathable. But it was of no use whatever for men. The only possible
+purpose it could serve would have been as a biological laboratory for
+experiments involving things growing in a germ-free environment. But
+there were too many planets like that already. When men first traveled
+to the stars they made the journey because it was starkly necessary to
+find new worlds for men to live on. Earth was over-crowded--terribly so.
+So men looked for new worlds to move to. They found plenty of new
+worlds, but presently they were searching desperately for new worlds
+where life had preceded them. It didn't matter whether the life was meek
+and harmless, or ferocious and deadly. If life of any sort were present,
+human beings could move in. But highly organized beings like men could
+not live where there was no other life.
+
+So the Survey-Ship _Tethys_ made sure that the world had no life upon
+it. Then it made routine measurements of the gravitational constant and
+the magnetic field and the temperature gradient; it took samples of the
+air and water. But that was all. The rocks were familiar enough. No
+novelties there! But the planet was simply useless. The survey-ship put
+its findings on a punched card, six inches by eight, and went hastily on
+in search of something better. The ship did not even open one of its
+ports while on the planet. There were no consequences of the _Tethys'_
+visit except that card. None whatever.
+
+No other ship came near the planet for eight hundred years.
+
+Nearly a millenium later, however, the Seed-Ship _Orana_ arrived. By
+that time humanity had spread very widely and very far. There were
+colonies not less than a quarter of the way to the Galaxy's rim, and
+Earth was no longer over-crowded. There was still emigration, but it was
+now a trickle instead of the swarming flood of centuries before. Some of
+the first-colonized worlds had emigrants, now. Mankind did not want to
+crowd itself together again! Men now considered that there was no excuse
+for such monstrous slums as overcrowding produced.
+
+Now, too, the star-ships were faster. A hundred light-years was a short
+journey. A thousand was not impractical. Explorers had gone many times
+farther, and reported worlds still waiting for mankind on beyond. But
+still the great majority of discovered planets did not contain life.
+Whole solar systems floated in space with no single living cell on any
+of their members.
+
+So the Seed-Ships came into being. Theirs was not a glamorous service.
+They merely methodically contaminated the sterile worlds with life. The
+Seed-Ship _Orana_ landed on this planet--which still had no name. It
+carefully infected it. It circled endlessly above the clouds, dribbling
+out a fine dust,--the spores of every conceivable microörganism which
+could break down rock to powder, and turn that dust to soil. It was also
+a seeding of moulds and fungi and lichens, and everything which could
+turn powdery primitive soil into stuff on which higher forms of life
+could grow. The _Orana_ polluted the seas with plankton. Then it, too,
+went away.
+
+More centuries passed. Human ships again improved. A thousand
+light-years became a short journey. Explorers reached the Galaxy's very
+edge, and looked estimatingly across the emptiness toward other island
+universes. There were colonies in the Milky Way. There were
+freight-lines between star-clusters, and the commercial center of human
+affairs shifted some hundreds of parsecs toward the Rim. There were many
+worlds where the schools painstakingly taught the children what Earth
+was, and where, and that all other worlds had been populated from it.
+And the schools repeated, too, the one lesson that humankind seemed
+genuinely to have learned. That the secret of peace is freedom, and the
+secret of freedom is to be able to move away from people with whom you
+do not agree. There were no crowded worlds any more. But human beings
+love children, and they have them. And children grow up and need room.
+So more worlds had to be looked out for. They weren't urgently needed
+yet, but they would be.
+
+Therefore, nearly a thousand years after the _Orana_, the Ecology-Ship
+_Ludred_ swam to the planet from space and landed on it. It was a
+gigantic ship of highly improbable purpose. First of all, it checked on
+the consequences of the _Orana's_ visit.
+
+They were highly satisfactory, from a technical point of view. Now there
+was soil which swarmed with minute living things. There were fungi
+which throve monstrously. The seas stank of minuscule life-forms. There
+were even some novelties, developed by the strictly local conditions.
+There were, for example, paramoecia as big as grapes, and yeasts had
+increased in size until they bore flowers visible to the naked eye. The
+life on the planet was not aboriginal, though. All of it was descended
+and adapted and modified from the microörganisms planted by the
+seed-ship whose hulk was long since rust, and whose crew were merely
+names in genealogies--if that.
+
+The _Ludred_ stayed on the planet a considerably longer time than either
+of the ships that had visited it before. It dropped the seeds of plants.
+It broadcast innumerable varieties of things which should take root and
+grow. In some places it deliberately seeded the stinking soil. It put
+marine plants in the oceans. It put alpine plants on the high ground.
+And when all its stable varieties were set out it added plants which
+were genetically unstable. For generations to come they would throw
+sports, some of which should be especially suited to this planetary
+environment.
+
+Before it left, the _Ludred_ dumped finny fish into the seas. At first
+they would live on the plankton which made the oceans almost broth.
+There were many varieties of fish. Some would multiply swiftly while
+small; others would grow and feed on the smaller varieties. And as a
+last activity, the _Ludred_ set up refrigeration-units loaded with
+insect-eggs. Some would release their contents as soon as plants had
+grown enough to furnish them with food. Others would allow their
+contents to hatch only after certain other varieties had multiplied--to
+be their food-supply.
+
+When the Ecology-Ship left, it had done a very painstaking job. It had
+treated the planet to a sort of Russell's Mixture of life-forms. The
+real Russell's Mixture is that blend of the simple elements in the
+proportions found in suns. This was a blend of life-forms in which some
+should survive by consuming the now-habituated flora, others by preying
+on the former. The planet was stocked, in effect, with everything that
+it could be hoped would live there.
+
+But only certain things could have that hope. Nothing which needed
+parental care had any chance of survival. The creatures seeded at this
+time had to be those which could care for themselves from the instant
+they burst their eggs. So there were no birds or mammals. Trees and
+plants of many kinds, fish and crustaceans and tadpoles, and all kinds
+of insects could be planted. But nothing else.
+
+The _Ludred_ swam away through emptiness.
+
+There should have been another planting centuries later. There should
+have been a ship from the Zoölogical Branch of the Ecological Service.
+It should have landed birds and beasts and reptiles. It should have
+added pelagic mammals to the seas. There should have been herbivorous
+animals to live on the grasses and plants which would have thriven, and
+carnivorous animals to live on them in turn. There should have been
+careful stocking of the planet with animal life, and repeated visits at
+intervals of a century or so to make sure that a true ecological balance
+had been established. And then when the balance was fixed men would come
+and destroy it for their own benefit.
+
+But there was an accident.
+
+Ships had improved again. Even small private space-craft now journeyed
+tens of light-years on holiday journeys. Personal cruisers traveled
+hundreds. Liners ran matter-of-factly on ship-lines tens of thousands of
+light-years long. An exploring-ship was on its way to a second island
+universe. (It did not come back.) The inhabited planets were all members
+of a tenuous organization which limited itself to affairs of space,
+without attempting to interfere in surface matters. That tenuous
+organization moved the Ecological Preparation Service files to Algol IV
+as a matter of convenience. In the moving, a card-file was upset. The
+cards it contained were picked up and replaced, but one was missed. It
+was not picked up. It was left behind.
+
+So the planet which had no name was forgotten. No other ship came to
+prepare it for ultimate human occupancy. It circled its sun, unheeded
+and unthought-of. Cloud-banks covered it from pole to pole. There were
+hazy markings in some places, where high plateaus penetrated its clouds.
+But that was all. From space the planet was essentially featureless.
+Seen from afar it was merely a round white ball--white from its
+cloud-banks--and nothing else.
+
+But on its surface, on its lowlands, it was pure nightmare. But this
+fact did not matter for a very long time.
+
+Ultimately, it mattered a great deal--to the crew of the space-liner
+_Icarus_. The _Icarus_ was a splendid ship of its time. It bore
+passengers headed for one of the Galaxy's spiral arms, and it cut across
+the normal lanes and headed through charted but unvisited parts of the
+Galaxy toward its destination. And it had one of the very, very, very
+few accidents known to happen to space-craft licensed for travel off the
+normal space-lanes. It suffered shipwreck in space, and its passengers
+and crew were forced to take to the life-craft.
+
+The lifeboats' range was limited. They landed on the planet that the
+_Tethys_ had first examined, that the _Orana_ and the _Ludred_ had
+seeded, and of which there was no longer any record in the card-files of
+the Ecological Service. Their fuel was exhausted. They could not leave.
+They could not signal for help. They had to stay there. And the planet
+was a place of nightmares.
+
+After a time the few people--some few thousands--who knew that there was
+a space-liner named _Icarus_, gave it up for lost. They forgot about it.
+Everybody forgot. Even the passengers and crew of the ship forgot it.
+Not immediately, of course. For the first few generations their
+descendants cherished hopes of rescue. But the planet which had no
+name--the forgotten planet--did not encourage the cherishing of hope.
+
+After forty-odd generations, nobody remembered the _Icarus_ anywhere.
+The wreckage of the lifeboats was long since hidden under the seething,
+furiously striving fungi of the soil. The human beings had forgotten not
+only their ancestors' ship, but very nearly everything their ancestors
+had brought to this world: the use of metals, the existence of fire, and
+even the fact that there was such a thing as sunshine. 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, because they had forgotten their destiny as
+men.
+
+
+
+
+_1. MAD PLANET_
+
+
+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 fashion which Burl
+remembered as a succession of screams coming more and more faintly to
+his ears, while he was being carried away at the topmost speed of which
+his mother was capable.
+
+Burl had rarely or never thought of his grandfather since. Surely he had
+never wondered what his great-grandfather had thought, and most surely
+of all he never speculated upon what his many-times-removed
+great-grandfather had thought when his lifeboat landed from the
+_Icarus_. Burl had never heard of the _Icarus_. He had done very little
+thinking of any sort. When he did think, it was mostly agonized effort
+to contrive a way to escape some immediate and paralyzing danger. When
+horror did not press upon him, it was better not to think, because there
+wasn't much but horror to think about.
+
+At the moment, he was treading cautiously over a brownish carpet of
+fungus, creeping furtively toward the stream which he knew only by the
+generic name of "water." It was the only water he knew. Towering far
+above his head, three man-heights high, great toadstools hid the gray
+sky from his sight. Clinging to the yard-thick stalks of the toadstools
+were still other fungi, parasites upon the growths that once had been
+parasites themselves.
+
+Burl appeared a fairly representative specimen of the descendants of the
+long-forgotten _Icarus_ crew. He wore a single garment twisted about his
+middle, made from the wing-fabric of a great moth which 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 he surely had seen the sky often enough. It was rarely
+hidden from him save by giant fungi, like those about him now, and
+sometimes by the gigantic cabbages which were nearly the only green
+growths he knew. To him normal landscape contained only fantastic pallid
+mosses, and misshapen fungus growths, and colossal moulds and yeasts.
+
+He moved onward. Despite his caution, his shoulder once touched a
+cream-colored toadstool stalk, giving the whole fungus a tiny shock.
+Instantly a fine and impalpable powder fell upon him from the umbrella
+like top above. It was the season when the toadstools sent out their
+spores. He paused to brush them from his head and shoulders. They were,
+of course, deadly poison.
+
+Burl knew such matters with an immediate and specific and detailed
+certainty. He knew practically nothing else. He was ignorant of the use
+of fire, of metals, and even of the uses of stone and wood. His language
+was a scanty group of a few hundred labial sounds, conveying no
+abstractions and few concrete ideas. He knew nothing of wood, because
+there was no wood in the territory furtively inhabited by his tribe.
+This was the lowlands. Trees did not thrive here. Not even grasses and
+tree-ferns could compete with mushrooms and toadstools and their kin.
+Here was a soil of rusts and yeasts. Here were toadstool forests and
+fungus jungles. They grew with feverish intensity beneath a cloud-hidden
+sky, while above them fluttered butterflies no less enlarged than they,
+moths as much magnified, and other creatures which could thrive on their
+corruption.
+
+The only creatures on the planet which crawled or ran or flew--save only
+Burl's fugitive kind--were insects. They had been here before men came,
+and they had adapted to the planet's extraordinary ways. With a world
+made ready before their first progenitors arrived, insects had thriven
+incredibly. With unlimited food-supplies, they had grown large. With
+increased size had come increased opportunity for survival, and
+enlargement became hereditary. Other than fungoid growths, the solitary
+vegetables were the sports of unstable varieties of the plants left
+behind by the _Ludred_. There were enormous cabbages, with leaves the
+size of ship-sails, on which stolid grubs and caterpillars ate
+themselves to maturity, and then swung below in strong cocoons to sleep
+the sleep of metamorphosis. The tiniest butterflies of Earth had
+increased their size here until their wings spread feet across, and
+some--like the emperor moths--stretched out purple wings which were
+yards in span. Burl himself would have been dwarfed beneath a great
+moth's wing.
+
+But he wore a gaudy fabric made of one. The moths and giant butterflies
+were harmless to men. Burl's fellow tribesmen sometimes came upon a
+cocoon when it was just about to open, and if they dared they waited
+timorously beside it until the creature inside broke through its
+sleeping-shell and came out into the light.
+
+Then, before it gathered energy from the air and before its wings
+swelled to strength and firmness, the tribesmen fell upon it. They tore
+the delicate wings from its body and the still-flaccid limbs from their
+places. And when it lay helpless before them they fled away to feast on
+its juicy meat-filled limbs.
+
+They dared not linger, of course. They left their prey helpless--staring
+strangely at the world about it through its many-faceted eyes--before
+the scavengers came to contest its ownership. If nothing more deadly
+appeared, surely the ants would come. Some of them were only inches
+long, but others were the size of fox-terriers. All of them had to be
+avoided by men. They would carry the moth-carcass away to their
+underground cities, triumphantly, in shreds and morsels.
+
+But most of the insect world was neither so helpless nor so
+unthreatening. Burl knew of wasps almost the length of his own body,
+with stings that were instantly fatal. To every species of wasp,
+however, some other insect is predestined prey. Wasps need not be
+dreaded too much. And bees were similarly aloof. They were hard put to
+it for existence, those bees. Since few flowers bloomed, they were
+reduced to expedients that once were considered signs of degeneracy in
+their race: bubbling yeasts and fouler things, or occasionally the
+nectarless blooms of the rank giant cabbages. Burl knew the bees. They
+droned overhead, nearly as large as he was, their bulging eyes gazing at
+him and everything else in abstracted preoccupation.
+
+There were crickets, and beetles, and spiders.... Burl knew spiders! His
+grandfather had been the prey of a hunting tarantula which had leaped
+with incredible ferocity from its tunnel in the ground. A vertical pit,
+a yard in diameter, went down for twenty feet. At the bottom of the lair
+the monster waited for the tiny sounds that would warn him of prey
+approaching his hiding-place.
+
+Burl's grandfather had been careless. The terrible shrieks he uttered as
+he was seized still lingered vaguely in Burl's mind. And he had seen,
+too, the webs of another species of spider--inch-thick cables of dirty
+silk--and watched from a safe distance as the misshapen monster sucked
+the juices from a three-foot cricket its trap had caught. He remembered
+the stripes of yellow and black and silver that crossed upon its
+abdomen. He had been fascinated and horrified by the blind struggling of
+the cricket, tangled in hopeless coils of gummy cord, before the spider
+began its feast.
+
+Burl knew these dangers. They were part of his life. It was this
+knowledge that made life possible. He knew the ways to evade these
+dangers. But if he yielded to carelessness for one moment, or if he
+relaxed his caution for one instant, he would be one with his ancestors.
+They were the long-forgotten meals of inhuman monsters.
+
+Now, to be sure, Burl moved upon an errand that probably no other of his
+tribe would have imagined. The day before, he had crouched behind a
+shapeless mound of inter-tangled growths and watched a duel between two
+huge horned beetles. Their bodies were feet long. Their carapaces were
+waist-high to Burl when they crawled. Their mandibles, gaping laterally,
+clicked and clashed upon each other's impenetrable armor. Their legs
+crashed like so many cymbals as they struck against each other. They
+fought over some particularly attractive bit of carrion.
+
+Burl had watched with wide eyes until a gaping hole appeared in the
+armor of the smaller one. It uttered a grating outcry--or seemed to. The
+noise was actually the tearing of its shell between the mandibles of the
+victor.
+
+The wounded creature struggled more and more feebly. When it ceased to
+offer battle, the conqueror placidly began to dine before its prey had
+ceased to live. But this was the custom of creatures on this planet.
+
+Burl watched, timorous but hopeful. When the meal was finished, he
+darted in quickly as the diner lumbered away. He was almost too late,
+even then. An ant--the forerunner of many--already inspected the
+fragments with excitedly vibrating antennae.
+
+Burl needed to move quickly and he did. Ants were stupid and
+short-sighted insects; few of them were hunters. Save when offered
+battle, most of them were scavengers only. They hunted the scenes of
+nightmare for the dead and dying only, but fought viciously if their
+prey were questioned. And always there were others on the way.
+
+Some were arriving now. Hearing the tiny clickings of their approach,
+Burl was hasty. Over-hasty. He seized a loosened fragment and fled. It
+was merely the horn, the snout of the dead and eaten creature. But it
+was loose and easily carried. He ran.
+
+Later he inspected his find with disappointment. There was little meat
+clinging to it. It was merely the horn of a Minotaur beetle, shaped like
+the horn of a rhinoceros. Plucking out the shreds left by its murderer,
+he pricked his hand. Pettishly, he flung it aside. The time of darkness
+was near, so he crept to the hiding place of his tribe to huddle with
+them until light came again.
+
+There were only twenty of them; four or five men and six or seven women.
+The rest were girls or 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. They talked
+together sometimes and, once or twice, Burl shared an especially
+succulent find of foodstuffs with her.
+
+He could share nothing with her now. She stared at him in the deepening
+night when he crept to the labyrinthine hiding place the tribe now used
+in a mushroom forest. He considered that she looked hungry and hoped
+that he would have food to share. And he was bitterly ashamed that he
+could offer nothing. He held himself a little apart from the rest,
+because of his shame. Since he too was hungry, it was some time before
+he slept. Then he dreamed.
+
+Next morning he found the horn where he had thrown it disgustedly the
+day before. It was sticking in the flabby trunk of a toadstool. He
+pulled it out. In his dream he had used it....
+
+Presently he tried to use it. Sometimes--not often--the men of the tribe
+used the saw-toothed edge of a cricket-leg, or the leg of a
+grasshopper, to sever tough portions of an edible mushroom. The horn had
+no cutting edge, but Burl had used it in his dream. He was not quite
+capable of distinguishing clearly between reality and dreams; so he
+tried to duplicate what happened in the dream. Remembering that it had
+stuck into the mushroom-stalk, he thrust it. It stabbed. He remembered
+distinctly how the larger beetle had used its horn as a weapon. It had
+stabbed, too.
+
+He considered absorbedly. He could not imagine himself fighting one of
+the dangerous insects, of course. Men did not fight, on the forgotten
+planet. They ran away. They hid. But somehow Burl formed a fantastic
+picture of himself stabbing food with this horn, as he had stabbed a
+mushroom. It was longer than his arm and though naturally clumsy in his
+hand, it would have been a deadly weapon in the grip of a man prepared
+to do battle.
+
+Battle did not occur to Burl. But the idea of stabbing food with it was
+clear. There could be food that would not fight back. Presently he had
+an inspiration. His face brightened. He began to make his way toward the
+tiny river that ran across the plain in which the tribe of humans lived
+by foraging in competition with the ants. Yellow-bellied newts--big
+enough to be lusted for--swam in its waters. The swimming larvae of a
+thousand kinds of creatures floated on the sluggish surface or crawled
+over the bottom.
+
+There were deadly things there, too. Giant crayfish snapped their claws
+at the unwary. One of them could sever Burl's arm with ease. Mosquitoes
+sometimes hummed high above the river. Mosquitoes had a four-inch
+wing-spread, now, though they were dying out for lack of plant-juices on
+which the males of their species fed. But they were formidable. Burl had
+learned to crush them between fragments of fungus.
+
+He crept slowly through the forest of toadstools. What should have been
+grass underfoot was brownish rust. Orange and red and purple moulds
+clustered about the bases of the creamy mushroom-trunks. Once, Burl
+paused to run his weapon through a fleshy column and reassure himself
+that what he planned was possible.
+
+He made his way furtively through the bulbous growths. Once he heard
+clickings and froze to stillness. Four or five ants, minims only eight
+inches long, were returning by an habitual pathway to their city. They
+moved sturdily along, heavily laden, over the route marked by the scent
+of formic acid left by their fellow-townsmen. Burl waited until they had
+passed, then went on.
+
+He came to the bank of the river. It flowed slowly, green scum covering
+a great deal of its surface in the backwaters, occasionally broken by a
+slowly enlarging bubble released from decomposing matter on the bottom.
+In the center of the stream the current ran a little more swiftly and
+the water itself seemed clear. Over it ran many water-spiders. They had
+not shared in the general increase of size in the insect world.
+Depending as they did on the surface tension of the water for support,
+to have grown larger and heavier would have destroyed them.
+
+Burl surveyed the scene. His search was four parts for danger and only
+one part for a way to test his brilliant notion, but that was natural.
+Where he stood, the green scum covered the stream for many yards.
+Down-river a little, though, the current came closer to the bank. Here
+he could not see whatever swam or crawled or wriggled underwater; there
+he might.
+
+There was an outcropping rock forming a support for crawling stuff,
+which in turn supported shelf-fungi making wide steps almost down to the
+water's edge. Burl was making his way cautiously toward them when he saw
+one of the edible mushrooms which formed so large a part of his diet. He
+paused to break off a flabby white piece large enough to feed him for
+many days. It was the custom of his people, when they found a store of
+food, to hide with it and not venture out again to danger until it was
+all eaten. Burl was tempted to do just that with his booty. He could
+give Saya of this food and they would eat together. They might hide
+together until it was all consumed.
+
+But there was a swirling in the water under the descending platforms of
+shelf-fungi. A very remarkable sensation came to Burl. He may have been
+the only man in many generations to be aware of the high ambition to
+stab something to eat. He may have been a throw-back to ancestors who
+had known bravery, which had no survival-value here. But Burl had
+imagined carrying Saya food which he had stabbed with the spear of a
+Minotaur beetle. It was an extraordinary idea.
+
+It was new, too. Not too long ago, when he was younger, Burl would have
+thought of the tribe instead. He'd have thought of old Jon, bald-headed
+and wheezing and timorous, and how that patriarch would pat his arm
+exuberantly when handed food; or old Tama, wrinkled and querulous, whose
+look of settled dissatisfaction would vanish at sight of a tidbit; of
+Dik and Tet, the tribe-members next younger, who would squabble
+zestfully over the fragments allotted them.
+
+But now he imagined Saya looking astonished and glad when he grandly
+handed her more food than she could possibly eat. She would admire him
+enormously!
+
+Of course he did not imagine himself fighting to get food for Saya. He
+meant only to stab something edible in the water. Things in the water
+did not fight things on land. Since he would not be in the water, he
+would not be in a fight. It was a completely delectable idea, which no
+man within memory had ever entertained before. If Burl accomplished it,
+his tribe would admire him. Saya would admire him. Everybody, observing
+that he had found a new source of food, would even envy him until he
+showed them how to do it too. Burl's fellow-humans were preoccupied with
+the filling of their stomachs. The preservation of their lives came
+second. The perpetuation of the race came a bad third in their
+consideration. They were herded together in a leaderless group, coming
+to the same hiding-place nightly only that they might share the finds of
+the lucky and gather comfort from their numbers. They had no weapons.
+Even Burl did not consider his spear a weapon. It was a tool for
+stabbing something to eat only. Yet he did not think of it in that way
+exactly. His tribe did not even consciously use tools. Sometimes they
+used stones to crack open the limbs of great insects they found
+incompletely devoured. They did not even carry rocks about with them for
+that purpose. Only Burl had a vague idea of taking something to some
+place to do something with it. It was unprecedented. Burl was at least
+an atavar. He may have been a genius.
+
+But he was not a high-grade genius. Certainly not yet.
+
+He reached a spot from which he could look down into the water. He
+looked behind and all about, listening, then lay down to stare into the
+shallow depths. Once, a huge crayfish, a good eight feet long, moved
+leisurely across his vision. Small fishes and even huge newts fled
+before it.
+
+After a long time the normal course of underwater life resumed. The
+wriggling caddis-flies in their quaintly ambitious houses reappeared.
+Little flecks of silver swam into view--a school of tiny fish. Then a
+larger fish appeared, moving slowly in the stream.
+
+Burl's eyes glistened; his mouth watered. He reached down with his long
+weapon. It barely broke through the still surface of the water below.
+Disappointment filled him, yet the nearness and apparent probability of
+success spurred him on.
+
+He examined the shelf-fungi beneath him. Rising, he moved to a point
+above them and tested one with his spear. It resisted. Burl felt about
+tentatively with his foot, then dared to put his whole weight on the
+topmost. It held firmly. He clambered down upon the lower ones, then
+lay flat and peered over the edge.
+
+The large fish, fully as long as Burl's arm, swam slowly to and fro
+beneath him. Burl had seen the former owner of this spear strive to
+thrust it into his adversary. The beetle had been killed by the more
+successful stab of a similar weapon. Burl had tried this upon
+toadstools, practising with it. When the silver fish drifted close by
+again, he thrust sharply downward.
+
+The spear seemed to bend when it entered the water. It missed its mark
+by inches, much to Burl's astonishment. He tried again. Once more the
+spear seemed diverted by the water. He grew angry with the fish for
+eluding his efforts to kill it.
+
+This anger was as much the reaction of a throw-back to a less fearful
+time as the idea of killing itself. But Burl scowled at the fish.
+Repeated strokes had left it untouched. It was unwary. It did not even
+swim away.
+
+Then it came to rest directly beneath his hand. He thrust directly
+downward, with all his strength. This time the spear, entering
+vertically, did not appear to bend, but went straight down. Its point
+penetrated the scales of the swimming fish, transfixing the creature
+completely.
+
+An uproar began with the fish wriggling desperately as Burl tried to
+draw it up to his perch. In his excitement he did not notice a tiny
+ripple a little distance away. The monster crayfish, attracted by the
+disturbance, was coming back.
+
+The unequal combat continued. Burl hung on desperately to the end of his
+spear. Then there was a tremor in the shelf-fungus on which he lay. It
+yielded, collapsed, and fell into the stream with a mighty splash. Burl
+went under, his eyes wide open, facing death. As he sank he saw the
+gaping, horrible claws of the crustacean, huge enough to sever any of
+Burl's limbs with a single snap.
+
+He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Only bubbles
+floated up to the surface. He beat the unresisting fluid in a frenzy of
+horror with his hands and feet as the colossal crayfish leisurely
+approached.
+
+His arms struck a solid object. He clutched it convulsively. A second
+later he had swung it between himself and the crustacean. He felt the
+shock as the claws closed upon the cork-like fungus. Then he felt
+himself drawn upward as the crayfish disgustedly released its hold and
+the shelf-fungus floated slowly upward. Having given way beneath him, it
+had been pushed below when he fell, 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 nearby. Even less securely anchored to the river-bank than the
+shelf to which he had trusted himself, it had broken away when he fell.
+It was larger and floated higher.
+
+He seized it, crazily trying to climb up. It tilted under his weight and
+very nearly overturned. He paid no heed. With desperate haste he clawed
+and kicked until he could draw himself clear of the water.
+
+As he pulled himself up on the furry, orange-brown surface, a sharp blow
+struck his foot. The crayfish, disappointed at finding nothing tasty in
+the shelf-fungus, had made a languid stroke at Burl's foot wriggling in
+the water. Failing to grasp the fleshy member, it went annoyedly away.
+
+Burl floated downstream, perched weaponless and alone upon a flimsy raft
+of degenerate fungus; floated slowly down a stagnant river in which
+death swam, between banks of sheer peril, past long reaches above which
+death floated on golden wings.
+
+It was a long while before he recovered his self-possession. Then--and
+this was an action individual in Burl: none of his tribesmen would have
+thought of it--he looked for his spear.
+
+It was floating in the water, still transfixing the fish whose capture
+had brought him to this present predicament. That silvery shape, so
+violent before, now floated belly-up, all life gone.
+
+Burl's mouth watered as he gazed at the fish. He kept it in view
+constantly while the unsteady craft spun slowly downstream in the
+current. Lying flat he tried to reach out and grasp the end of the spear
+when it circled toward him.
+
+The raft tilted, nearly capsizing. A little later he discovered that it
+sank more readily on one side than the other. This was due, of course,
+to the greater thickness of one side. The part next to the river-bank
+had been thicker and was, therefore, more buoyant.
+
+He lay with his head above that side of the raft. It did not sink into
+the water. Wriggling as far to the edge as he dared, he reached out and
+out. He waited impatiently for the slower rotation of his float to
+coincide with the faster motion of the speared fish. The spear-end came
+closer, and closer.... He reached out--and the raft dipped dangerously.
+But his fingers touched the spear-end. He got a precarious hold, pulled
+it toward him.
+
+Seconds later he was tearing strips of scaly flesh from the side of the
+fish and cramming the greasy stuff into his mouth with vast enjoyment.
+He had lost the edible mushroom. It floated several yards away. He ate
+contentedly none-the-less.
+
+He thought of the tribesfolk as he ate. This was more than he could
+finish alone. Old Tama would coax him avidly for more than her share.
+She had a few teeth left. She would remind him anxiously of her gifts of
+food to him when he was younger. Dik and Tet--being boys--would
+clamorously demand of him where he'd gotten it. How? He would give some
+to Cori, who had younger children, and she would give them most of the
+gift. And Saya--.
+
+Burl gloated especially over Saya's certain reaction.
+
+Then he realized that with every second he was being carried further
+away from her. The nearer river-bank moved past him. He could tell by
+the motion of the vividly colored growths upon the shore.
+
+Overhead, the sun was merely a brighter patch in the haze-filled sky. In
+the pinkish light all about, Burl looked for the familiar and did not
+find it, and dolefully knew that he was remote from Saya and going
+farther all the time.
+
+There were a multitude of flying objects to be seen in the miasmatic
+air. In the daytime a thin mist always hung above the lowlands. Burl had
+never seen any object as much as three miles distant. The air was never
+clear enough to permit it. But there was much to be seen even within the
+limiting mist.
+
+Now and then a cricket or a grasshopper made its bullet-like flight from
+one spot to another. Huge butterflies fluttered gaily above the silent,
+loathesome ground. Bees lumbered anxiously about, seeking the
+cross-shaped flowers of the giant cabbages which grew so rarely.
+Occasionally a slender-waisted, yellow-bellied wasp flashed swiftly by.
+
+But Burl did not heed any of them. Sitting dismally upon his fungus
+raft, floating in midstream, an incongruous figure of pink skin and
+luridly-tinted loin-cloth, with a greasy dead fish beside him, he was
+filled with a panicky anguish because the river carried him away from
+the one girl of his tiny tribe whose glances roused a commotion in his
+breast.
+
+The day wore on. Once, he saw a band of large amazon ants moving briskly
+over a carpet of blue-green mould to raid the city of a species of black
+ants. The eggs they would carry away from the city would hatch and the
+small black creatures would become the slaves of the brigands who had
+stolen them.
+
+Later, strangely-shaped, swollen branches drifted slowly into view. They
+were outlined sharply against the steaming mist behind them. He knew
+what they were: a hard-rinded fungus growing upon itself in peculiar
+mockery of the trees which Burl had never seen because no trees could
+survive the conditions of the lowland.
+
+Much later, as the day drew to an end, Burl ate again of the oily fish.
+The taste was pleasant compared to the insipid mushrooms he usually ate.
+Even though he stuffed himself, the fish was so large that the greater
+part remained still uneaten.
+
+The spear was beside him. Although it had brought him trouble, he still
+associated it 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
+to examine again. The oil-covered point remained as sharp as before.
+
+Not daring to use it again from so unsteady a raft, he set it aside as
+he stripped a sinew from his loin-cloth to hang the fish around his
+neck. This would leave his arms free. Then he sat cross-legged, fumbling
+with the spear as he watched the shores go past.
+
+
+
+
+_2. A MAN ESCAPES_
+
+
+It was near to sunset. Burl had never seen the sun, so it did not occur
+to him to think of the coming of night as the setting of anything. To
+him it was the letting down of darkness from the sky.
+
+The process was invariable. Overhead there was always a thick and
+unbroken bank of vapor which seemed featureless until sunset. Then,
+toward the west, the brightness overhead turned orange and then pink,
+while to the east it simply faded to a deeper gray. As nightfall
+progressed, the red colorings grew deeper, moving toward mid-sky.
+Ultimately, scattered blotches of darkness began to spot that reddening
+sky as it grew darker in tone, going down toward that impossible
+redness which is indistinguishable from black. It was slowly achieving
+that redness.
+
+Today Burl watched as never before. On the oily surface of the river the
+colors and shadings of dusk were reflected with incredible faithfulness.
+The round tops of toadstools along the shore glowed pink. Dragonflies
+glinted in swift and angular flight, the metallic sheen of their bodies
+flashing in the redness. Great, yellow butterflies sailed lightly above
+the stream. In every direction upon the water appeared the scrap-formed
+boats of a thousand caddis-flies, floating at the surface while they
+might. Burl could have thrust his hand down into their cavities to seize
+the white worms nesting there.
+
+The bulk of a tardy bee droned heavily overhead. He saw the long
+proboscis and the hairy hind-legs with their scanty load of pollen. The
+great, multi-faceted eyes held an expression of stupid preoccupation.
+
+The crimson radiance grew dim and the color overhead faded toward black.
+Now the stalks of ten thousand domed mushrooms lined the river-bank.
+Beneath them spread fungi of all colors, from the rawest red to palest
+blue, now all fading slowly to a monochromatic background as the
+darkness deepened.
+
+The buzzing and fluttering and flapping of the insects of the day died
+down. From a million hiding places there crept out--into the night--the
+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 noise-making organs. Then there began to gather
+on the water those slender spirals of deeper mist which would presently
+blanket the stream in fog.
+
+Night arrived. The clouds above grew wholly black. Gradually the languid
+fall of large, warm raindrops--they would fall all through the
+night--began. The edge of the stream became a place where disks of cold
+blue flame appeared.
+
+The mushrooms on the river bank were faintly phosphorescent, shedding a
+ghostly light over the ground below them. Here and there, lambent chilly
+flames appeared in mid-air, drifting idly above the festering earth. On
+other planets men call them "Will-o'-the-wisps," but on this planet
+mankind had no name for them at all.
+
+Then huge, pulsating glows appeared in the blackness: fireflies that
+Burl knew to be as long as his spear. They glided slowly through the
+darkness over the stream, shedding intermittent light over Burl crouched
+on his drifting raft. On the shore, too, tiny paired lights glowed
+eagerly upward as the wingless females of the species crawled to where
+their signals could be seen. And there were other glowing things.
+Fox-fire burned in the night, consuming nothing. Even the water of the
+river glowed with marine organisms--adapted to fresh water
+here--contributing their mites of brilliance.
+
+The air was full of flying creatures. The beat of invisible wings came
+through the night. Above, about, on every side the swarming, feverish
+life of the insect world went on ceaselessly, while Burl rocked back and
+forth upon his unstable raft, wanting to weep because he was being
+carried farther away from Saya whom he could picture looking for him,
+now, among the hidden, furtive members of the tribe. About him sounded
+the discordant, machine-like mating cries of creatures trying to serve
+life in the midst of death and the horrible noises of those who met
+death and were devoured in the dark.
+
+Burl was accustomed to such tumult. But he was not accustomed to such
+despair as he felt at being lost from Saya of the swift feet and white
+teeth and shy smile. He lay disconsolate on his bobbing craft for the
+greater part of the night. It was long past midnight when the raft
+struck gently, swung, and then remained grounded upon a shallow in the
+stream.
+
+When light came back in the morning, Burl gazed about him fearfully. He
+was some twenty yards from the shore and thick greenish scum surrounded
+his disintegrating vessel. The river had widened greatly until the
+opposite bank was hidden in the morning mist, but the nearer shore
+seemed firm and no more full of dangers than the territory inhabited by
+Burl's tribe.
+
+He tested the depth of the water with his spear, struck by the multiple
+usefulness of the weapon. The water was no more than ankle-deep.
+
+Shivering a little, Burl stepped down into the green scum and made for
+the shore at top speed. He felt something soft clinging to his bare
+foot. With a frantic rush he ran even faster and stumbled upon the shore
+with horror not at his heels but on one. He stared down at his foot. A
+shapeless, flesh-colored pad clung to the skin. As he watched, it
+swelled visibly, the pink folds becoming a deeper shade.
+
+It was no more than a leech, the size of his palm, sharing in the
+enlargement nearly all the insect and fungoid world had undergone, but
+Burl did not know that. He thrust at it with the edge of his spear,
+scraping it frantically away. As it fell off Burl stared in horror,
+first at the blotch of blood on his foot, then at the thing writhing and
+pulsating on the ground. He fled.
+
+A short while later he stumbled into one of the familiar toadstool
+forests and paused, uncertainly. The towering toadstools were not
+strange to Burl. He fell to eating. The sight of food always produced
+hunger in him--a provision of nature to make up for the lack of any
+instinct to store food away. In human beings the storage of food has to
+be dictated by intellect. The lower orders of creatures are not required
+to think.
+
+Even eating, though, Burl's heart was small within him. He was far from
+his tribe and Saya. By the measurements of his remotest ancestors, no
+more than forty miles separated them. But Burl did not think in such
+terms. He'd never had occasion to do so. He'd come down the river to a
+far land filled with unknown dangers. And he was alone.
+
+All about him was food, an excellent reason for gladness. But being
+solitary was reason enough for distress. Although Burl was a creature to
+whom reflection was normally of no especial value and, therefore, not
+practiced in thought, this was a situation providing an emotional
+paradox. A good fourth of the mushrooms in this particular forest were
+edible. Burl should have gloated over this vast stock of food. But he
+was isolated, alone; in particular, he was far away from Saya,
+therefore, he should have wept. But he could not gloat because he was
+away from Saya and he could not mourn because he was surrounded by food.
+
+He was subject to a stimulus to which apparently only humankind can
+respond: an emotional dilemma. Other creatures can respond to objective
+situations where there is the need to choose a course of action: flight
+or fighting, hiding or pursuit. But only man can be disturbed by not
+knowing which of two emotions to feel. Burl had reason to feel two
+entirely different emotional states at the same time. He had to resolve
+the paradox. The problem was inside him, not out. So he thought.
+
+He would bring Saya here! He would bring her and the tribe to this place
+where there was food in vast quantity!
+
+Instantly pictures flooded into his mind. He could actually see old Jon,
+his bald head naked as a mushroom itself, stuffing his belly with the
+food which was so plentiful here. He imagined Cori feeding her children.
+Tama's complaints stilled by mouthfuls of food. Tet and Dik, stuffed to
+repletion, throwing scraps of foodstuff at each other. He pictured the
+tribe zestfully feasting.--And Saya would be very glad.
+
+It was remarkable that Burl was able to think of his feelings instead of
+his sensations. His tribesmen were closer to it than equally primitive
+folk had been back on Earth, but they did not often engage in thought.
+Their waking lives were filled with nerve-racked physical responses to
+physical phenomena. They were hungry and they saw or smelled food: they
+were alive and they perceived the presence of death. In the one case
+they moved toward the sensory stimulus of food; in the other they fled
+from the detected stimulus of danger. They responded immediately to the
+world about them. Burl, for the first significant time in his life, had
+responded to inner feelings. He had resolved conflicting emotions by
+devising a purpose that would end their conflict. He determined to do
+something because he wanted to and not because he had to.
+
+It was the most important event upon the planet in generations.
+
+With the directness of a child, or a savage, Burl moved to carry out his
+purpose. The fish still slung about his neck scraped against his chest.
+Fingering it tentatively, he got himself thoroughly greasy in the
+process, but could not eat. Although he was not hungry now, perhaps Saya
+was. He would give it to her. He imagined her eager delight, the image
+reinforcing his resolve. He had come to this far place down the river
+flowing sluggishly past this riotously-colored bank. To return to the
+tribe he would go back up that bank, staying close to the stream.
+
+He was remarkably exultant as he forced a way through the awkward aisles
+of the mushroom-forest, but his eyes and ears were still open for any
+possible danger. Several times he heard the omnipresent clicking of ants
+scavenging in the mushroom-glades, but they could be ignored. At best
+they were short-sighted. If he dropped his fish, they would become
+absorbed in it. There was only one kind of ant he needed to fear--the
+army ant, which sometimes traveled in hordes of millions, eating
+everything in their path.
+
+But there was nothing of the sort here. The mushroom forest came to an
+end. A cheerful grasshopper munched delicately at some dainty it had
+found--the barrel-sized young shoot of a cabbage-plant. Its hind legs
+were bunched beneath it in perpetual readiness for flight. A monster
+wasp appeared a hundred feet overhead, checked in its flight, and
+plunged upon the luckless banqueter.
+
+There was a struggle, but it was brief. The grasshopper strained
+terribly in the grip of the wasp's six barbed legs. The wasp's flexible
+abdomen curved delicately. Its sting entered the jointed armor of its
+prey just beneath the head with all the deliberate precision of a
+surgeon's scalpel. A ganglion lay there; the wasp-poison entered it. The
+grasshopper went limp. It was not dead, of course, simply paralyzed.
+Permanently paralyzed. The wasp preened itself, then matter-of-factly
+grasped its victim and flew away. The grasshopper would be incubator and
+food-supply for an egg to be laid. Presently, in a huge mud castle, a
+small white worm would feed upon the living, motionless victim of its
+mother--who would never see it, or care, or remember....
+
+Burl went on.
+
+The ground grew rougher; progress became painful. He clambered arduously
+up steep slopes--all of forty or fifty feet high--and made his way
+cautiously down to the farther sides. Once he climbed through a tangled
+mass of mushrooms so closely placed and so small that he had to break
+them apart with blows of his spear in order to pass. As they crumbled,
+torrents of a fiery-red liquid showered down upon him, rolling off his
+greasy breast and sinking into the ground.
+
+A strange self-confidence now took possession of Burl. He walked less
+cautiously and more boldly. He had thought and he had struck something,
+feeling the vainglorious self-satisfaction of a child. He pictured
+himself leading his tribe to this place of very much food--he had no
+real idea of the distance--and he strutted all alone amid the
+nightmare-growths of the planet that had been forgotten.
+
+Presently he could see the river. He had climbed to the top of a
+red-clay mound perhaps a hundred feet high. One side was crumbled where
+the river overflowed. At some past flood-time the water had lapped at
+the base of the cliff along which Burl was strutting. But now there was
+a quarter-mile of space between himself and the water. And there was
+something else in mid-air.
+
+The cliffside was thickly coated with fungi in a riotous confusion of
+white and yellow and orange and green. From a point halfway up the cliff
+the inch-thick cable of a spider-web stretched down to anchorage on the
+ground below. There were other cables beyond this one and circling about
+their radial pattern the snare-cords of the web formed a perfect
+logarithmic spiral.
+
+Somewhere among the fungi of the cliffside the huge spider who had built
+this web awaited the entrapment of prey. When some unfortunate creature
+struggled frenziedly in its snare it would emerge. Until then it waited
+in a motionless, implacable patience; utterly certain of victims,
+utterly merciless to them.
+
+Burl strutted on the edge of the cliff, a rather foolish pink-skinned
+creature with an oily fish slung about his neck and the draggled
+fragment of moth's wing draping his middle. He waved the long shard of
+beetle armor exultantly above his head.
+
+The activity was not very sensible. It served no purpose. But if Burl
+was a genius among his fellows, then he still had a great deal to learn
+before his genius would be effective. Now he looked down scornfully upon
+the shining white trap below. He had struck a fish, killing it. When he
+hit mushrooms they fell into pieces before him. Nothing could frighten
+him! He would go to Saya and bring her to this land where food grew in
+abundance.
+
+Sixty paces away from Burl, near the edge of the cliff, a shaft sank
+vertically into the soil of the clay-mound. It was carefully rounded and
+lined with silk. Thirty feet down, it enlarged itself into a chamber
+where the engineer and proprietor of the shaft might rest. The top of
+the hole was closed by a trap-door, stained with mud and earth to
+imitate the surrounding soil. A sharp eye would have been needed to
+detect the opening. But a keener eye now peered out from the crack at
+its edge.
+
+That eye belonged to the proprietor.
+
+Eight hairy legs surrounded the body of the monster hanging motionless
+at the top of the silk-lined shaft. Its belly was a huge misshapen globe
+colored a dirty brown. Two pairs of mandibles stretched before its
+mouth-parts; two eyes glittered in the semi-darkness of the burrow. Over
+the whole body spread a rough and mangy fur.
+
+It was a thing of implacable malignance, of incredible ferocity. It was
+the brown hunting spider, the American tarantula, enlarged here upon the
+forgotten planet so that its body was two feet and more in diameter. Its
+legs, outstretched, would cover a circle three yards across. The
+glittering eyes followed as Burl strutted forward on the edge of the
+cliff, puffed up with a sense of his own importance.
+
+Spread out below, the white snare of the spinning-spider impressed Burl
+as amusing. He knew the spider wouldn't leave its web to attack him.
+Reaching down, he broke off a bit of fungus growing at his feet. Where
+he broke it away oozed a soupy liquid full of tiny maggots in a delirium
+of feasting. Burl flung it down into the web, laughing as the black bulk
+of the watchful spider swung down from its hiding place to investigate.
+
+The tarantula, peering from its burrow, quivered with impatience. Burl
+drew nearer, gleefully using his spear as a lever to pry off bits of
+trash to fall down the cliffside into the giant web. The spider below
+moved leisurely from one spot to another, investigating each new missile
+with its palpi and then ignoring it as lifeless and undesirable prey.
+
+Burl leaped and laughed aloud as a particularly large lump of putrid
+fungus narrowly missed the black-and-silver shape below. Then--
+
+The trap-door fell into place with a faint sound. Burl whirled about,
+his laughter transformed instantly into a scream. Moving toward him
+furiously, its eight legs scrambling, was the monster tarantula. Its
+mandibles gaped wide; the poison fangs were unsheathed. It was thirty
+paces away--twenty paces--ten.
+
+Eyes glittering, it leaped, all eight legs extended to seize the prey.
+
+Burl screamed again and thrust out his arms to ward off the creature. It
+was pure blind horror. There was no genius in that gesture. Because of
+sheer terror his grip upon the 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.
+
+Stuck upon the spear the spider writhed horribly, still striving to
+reach the paralytically frozen Burl. The great mandibles clashed.
+Furious bubbling noises came from it. The hairy legs clutched at his
+arm. He cried out hoarsely in ultimate fear and staggered backward--and
+the edge of the cliff gave way beneath him.
+
+He hurtled downward, still clutching the spear, incapable of letting go.
+Even while falling the writhing thing still struggled maniacally to
+reach him. Down through emptiness they fell together, Burl glassy-eyed
+with panic. Then there was a strangely elastic crash and crackling. They
+had fallen into the web at which Burl had been laughing so scornfully
+only a little while before.
+
+Burl couldn't think. He only struggled insanely in the gummy coils of
+the web. But the snare-cords were spiral threads, enormously elastic,
+exuding impossibly sticky stuff, like bird-lime, from between twisted
+constituent fibres. Near him--not two yards away--the creature he had
+wounded thrashed and fought to reach him, even while shuddering in
+anguish.
+
+Burl had reached the absolute limit of panic. His arms and breast were
+greasy from the oily fish; the sticky web did not adhere to them. But
+his legs and body were inextricably tangled by his own frantic
+struggling in the gummy and adhesive elastic threads. They had been
+spread for prey. He was prey.
+
+He paused in his blind struggle, gasping from pure exhaustion. Then he
+saw, not five yards away, the silvery-and-black monster he had mocked so
+recently now patiently waiting for him to cease his struggles. The
+tarantula and the man were one to its eyes--one struggling thing that
+had fallen opportunely into its trap. They were moving but feebly, now.
+The web-spider advanced delicately, swinging its huge bulk nimbly,
+paying out a silken cable behind it as it approached.
+
+Burl's arms were free; he waved them wildly, shrieking at the monster.
+The spider paused. Burl's moving arms suggested mandibles that might
+wound.
+
+Spiders take few chances. This one drew near cautiously, then stopped.
+Its spinnerets became busy and with one of its eight legs, used like an
+arm, it flung a sheet of gummy silk impartially over the tarantula and
+the man.
+
+Burl fought against the descending shroud. He strove to thrust it away,
+futilely. Within minutes he was completely covered in a coarse silken
+fabric that hid even the light from his eyes. He and his enemy, the
+monstrous tarantula, were beneath the same covering. The tarantula moved
+feebly.
+
+The shower ceased. The web-spider had decided they were helpless. Then
+Burl felt the cables of the web give slightly as the spider approached
+to sting and suck the juices from its prey.
+
+The web yielded gently. Burl froze in an ecstasy of horror. But the
+tarantula still writhed in agony upon the spear piercing it. It clashed
+its jaws, shuddering upon the horny shaft.
+
+Burl waited for the poison-fangs to be thrust into him. He knew the
+process. He had seen the leisurely fashion in which the web-spider
+delicately stung its victim, then withdrew to wait with horrible
+patience for the poison to take effect. When the victim no longer
+struggled, it drew near again to suck out the juices first from one
+joint or limb and then from another, leaving a creature once vibrant
+with life a shrunken, withered husk, to be flung from the web at
+nightfall.
+
+The bloated monstrosity now moved meditatively about the double object
+swathed in silk. Only the tarantula stirred. Its bulbous abdomen stirred
+the concealing shroud. It throbbed faintly as it still struggled with
+the spear in its vitals. The irregularly rounded projection was an
+obvious target for the web-spider. It moved quickly forward. With fine,
+merciless precision, it stung.
+
+The tarantula seemed to go mad with pain. Its legs struck out
+purposelessly, in horrible gestures of delirious suffering. Burl
+screamed as a leg touched him. He struggled no less wildly.
+
+His arms and head were enclosed by the folds of silk, but not glued to
+it because of the grease. Clutching at the cords he tried desperately to
+draw himself away from his deadly neighbor. The threads wouldn't break,
+but they did separate. A tiny opening appeared.
+
+One of the tarantula's horribly writhing legs touched him again. With a
+strength born of utter panic he hauled himself away and the opening
+enlarged. Another lunge and Burl's head emerged into the open air. He
+was suspended twenty feet above the ground, which was almost carpeted
+with the chitinous remains of past victims of this same web.
+
+Burl's head and breast and arms were free. The fish slung over his
+shoulder had shed its oil upon him impartially. But the lower part of
+his body was held firm by the viscous gumminess of the web-spider's
+cord. It was vastly more adhesive than any bird-lime ever made by men.
+
+He hung in the little window for a moment, despairing. Then he saw the
+bulk of his captor a little distance away, waiting patiently for its
+poison to work and its prey to cease struggling. The tarantula was no
+more than shuddering now. Soon it would be quite still and the
+black-bellied creature would approach for its meal.
+
+Burl withdrew his head and thrust desperately at the sticky stuff about
+his loins and legs. The oil upon his hands kept them free. The silk
+shroud gave a little. Burl grasped at the thought as at a straw. He
+grasped the fish and tore it, pushing frantically at his own body with
+the now-rancid, scaly, odorous mass. He scraped gum from his legs with
+the fish, smearing the rancid oils all over them in the process.
+
+He felt the web tremble again. To the spider Burl's movements meant that
+its poison had not taken full effect. Another sting seemed to be
+necessary. This time it would not insert its sting into the quiescent
+tarantula, but where there was still life. It would send its venom into
+Burl.
+
+He gasped and drew himself toward his window as if he would have pulled
+his legs from his body. His head emerged. His shoulders--half his body
+was out of the hole.
+
+The great spider surveyed him and made ready to cast more of its silken
+stuff upon him. The spinnerets became active. A leg gathered it up--
+
+The sticky stuff about Burl's feet gave way.
+
+He shot out of the opening and fell heavily, sprawling upon the earth
+below and crashing into the shrunken shell of a flying beetle that had
+blundered into the snare and not escaped as he had done.
+
+Burl rolled over and over and then sat up. An angry, foot-long ant stood
+before him, its mandibles extended threateningly, while a shrill
+stridulation filled the air.
+
+In ages past, back on Earth--where most ants were to be measured in
+fractions of an inch--the scientists had debated gravely whether their
+tribe possessed a cry. They believed that certain grooves upon the body
+of the insect, like those upon the great legs of the cricket, might be
+the means of making a sound too shrill for human ears to catch. It was
+greatly debated, but evidence was hard to obtain.
+
+Burl did not need evidence. He knew that the stridulation was caused by
+the insect before him, though he had never wondered how it was produced.
+The cry was emitted to summon other ants from its city to help it in
+difficulty or good fortune.
+
+Harsh clickings sounded fifty or sixty feet away; comrades were coming.
+And while only army ants were normally dangerous, any tribe of ants
+could be formidable when aroused. It was overwhelming enough to pull
+down and tear a man to shreds as a pack of infuriated fox-terriers might
+do on Earth.
+
+Burl fled without further delay, nearly colliding with one of the web's
+anchor-cables. Then he heard the shrill outcry subside. The ant,
+short-sighted as all its kind, no longer felt threatened. It went
+peacefully about the business Burl had interrupted. Presently it found
+some edible carrion among the debris from the spider-web and started
+triumphantly back to its city.
+
+Burl sped on for a few hundred yards and then stopped. He was shaken and
+dazed. For the moment, he was as timid and fearful as any other man in
+his tribe. Presently he would realize the full meaning of the
+unparalleled feat he had performed in escaping from the giant spider web
+while cloaked with folds of gummy silk. It was not only unheard-of; it
+was unimaginable! But Burl was too shaken to think of it now.
+
+Rather quaintly, the first sensation that forced itself into his
+consciousness was that his feet hurt. The gluey stuff from the web still
+stuck to his soles, picking up small objects as he went along. Old,
+ant-gnawed fragments of insect armor pricked him so persistently, even
+through his toughened foot-soles, that he paused to scrape them away,
+staring fearfully about all the while. After a dozen steps more he was
+forced to stop again.
+
+It was this nagging discomfort, rather than vanity or an emergency which
+caused Burl to discover--imagine--blunder into a new activity as
+epoch-making as anything else he had done. His brain had been uncommonly
+stimulated in the past twenty-some hours. It had plunged him into at
+least one predicament because of his conceiving the idea of stabbing
+something, but it had also allowed him escape from another even more
+terrifying one just now. In between it had led to the devising of a
+purpose--the bringing of Saya here--though that decision was not so
+firmly fixed as it had been before the encounter with the web-spider.
+Still, it had surely been reasoning of a sort that told him to grease
+his body with the fish. Otherwise he would now be following the
+tarantula as a second course for the occupant of the web.
+
+Burl looked cautiously all about him. It seemed to be quite safe. Then,
+quite deliberately, he sat down to think. It was the first time in his
+life that he had ever deliberately contemplated a problem with the idea
+of finding an answer to it. And the notion of doing such a thing was
+epoch-making--on this planet!
+
+He examined his foot. The sharp edges of pebbles and the remnants of
+insect-armor hurt his feet when he walked. They had done so ever since
+he had been born, but never before had his feet been sticky, so that the
+irritation from one object persisted for more than a step. He carefully
+picked away each sharp-pointed fragment, one by one. Partly coated with
+the half-liquid gum, they even tended to cling to his fingers, except
+where the oil was thick.
+
+Burl's reasoning had been of the simplest sort. He had contemplated a
+situation--not deliberately but because he had to--and presently his
+mind showed him a way out of it. It was a way specifically suited to the
+situation. Here he faced something different. Presently he applied the
+answer of one problem to a second problem. Oil on his body had let him
+go free of things that would stick to him. Here things stuck to his
+feet; so he oiled them.
+
+And it worked. Burl strode away, almost--but not completely--untroubled
+by the bothersome pebbles and bits of discarded armor. Then he halted to
+regard himself with astonished appreciation. He was still thirty-five
+miles from his tribe; he was naked and unarmed, utterly ignorant of wood
+and fire and weapons other than the one he had lost. But he paused to
+observe with some awe that he was very wonderful indeed.
+
+He wanted to display himself. But his spear was gone. So Burl found it
+necessary to think again. And the remarkable thing about it was that he
+succeeded.
+
+In a surprisingly brief time he had come up with a list of answers. He
+was naked, so he would find garments for himself. He was weaponless: he
+would find himself a spear. He was hungry and he would seek food. Since
+he was far from his tribe, he would go to them. And this was, in a
+fashion, quite obviously thought; but it was not oblivious on the
+forgotten planet because it had been futile--up to now. The importance
+of such thought in the scheme of things was that men had not been
+thinking even so simply as this, living only from minute to minute. Burl
+was fumbling his way into a habit of thinking from problem to problem.
+And that was very important indeed.
+
+Even in the advanced civilization of other planets, few men really used
+their minds. The great majority of people depended on machines not only
+for computations but decisions as well. Any decisions not made by
+machines most men left to their leaders. Burl's tribesfolk thought
+principally with their stomachs, making few if any decisions on any
+other basis--though they did act, very often, under the spur of fear.
+Fear-inspired actions, however, were not thought out. Burl was thinking
+out his actions.
+
+There would be consequences.
+
+He faced upstream and began to move again, slowly and warily, his eyes
+keenly searching out the way ahead, ears alert for the slightest sound
+of danger. Gigantic butterflies, riotous in coloring, fluttered overhead
+through the hazy air. Sometimes a grasshopper hurtled from one place to
+another like a projectile, its transparent wings beating frantically.
+Now and then a wasp sped by, intent upon its hunting, or a bee droned
+heavily alone, anxious and worried, striving to gather pollen in a
+nearly flowerless world.
+
+Burl marched on. From somewhere far behind him came a very faint sound.
+It was a shrill noise, but very distant indeed. Absorbed in immediate
+and nearby matters, Burl took no heed. He had the limited local
+viewpoint of a child. What was near was important and what was distant
+could be ignored. Anything not imminent still seemed to him
+insignificant--and he was preoccupied.
+
+The source of this sound was important, however. Its origin was a myriad
+of clickings compounded into a single noise. It was, in fact, the
+far-away but yet perceptible sound of army ants on the march. The
+locusts of Earth were very trivial nuisances compared to the army ants
+of this planet.
+
+Locusts, in past ages on Earth, had eaten all green things. Here in the
+lowlands were only giant cabbages and a few rank, tenacious growths.
+Grasshoppers were numerous here, but could never be thought of as a
+plague; they were incapable of multiplying to the size of locust hordes.
+Army ants, however....
+
+But Burl did not notice the sound. He moved forward briskly though
+cautiously, searching the fungus-landscape for any sign of garments,
+food, and weapons. He confidently expected to find all of them within a
+short distance. Indeed, he did find food very soon. No more than a half
+mile ahead he found a small cluster of edible fungi.
+
+With no special elation, Burl broke off a food supply from the largest
+of them. Naturally, he took more than he could possibly eat at one time.
+He went on, nibbling at a big piece of mushroom abstractedly, past a
+broad plain, more than a mile across and broken into odd little hillocks
+by gradually ripening mushrooms which were unfamiliar to him. In several
+places the ground had been pushed aside by rounded objects, only the
+tips showing. Blood-red hemispheres seemed to be forcing themselves
+through the soil, so they might reach the outer air. Careful not to
+touch any of them, Burl examined the hillocks curiously as he entered
+the plain. They were strange, and to Burl most strange things meant
+danger. In any event, he had two conscious purposes now. He wanted
+garments and weapons.
+
+Above the plain a wasp hovered, dangling a heavy object beneath its
+black belly across which ran a single red band. It was the gigantic
+descendant of the hairy sand-wasp, differing only in size from its
+far-away, remote ancestors on Earth. It was taking a paralyzed gray
+caterpillar to its burrow. Burl watched it drop down with the speed and
+sureness of an arrow, pull aside a heavy, flat stone, and descend into
+the burrow with its caterpillar-prey momentarily laid aside.
+
+It vanished underground into a vertical shaft dug down forty feet or
+more. It evidently inspected the refuge. Reappearing, it vanished into
+the hole again, dragging the gray worm after it. Burl, marching on over
+the broad plain spotted with some eruptive disease, did not know what
+passed below. But he did observe the wasp emerge again to scratch dirt
+and stones previously excavated laboriously back into the shaft until it
+was full.
+
+The wasp had paralyzed a caterpillar, taken it into the ready-prepared
+burrow, laid an egg upon it, and sealed up the entrance. In time the egg
+would hatch into a grub barely the size of Burl's forefinger. And the
+grub, deep underground, would feed upon the living but helpless
+caterpillar until it waxed large and fat. Then it would weave itself a
+cocoon and sleep a long sleep, only to wake as a wasp and dig its way
+out to the open air.
+
+Reaching the farther side of the plain, Burl found himself threading the
+aisles of a fungus forest in which the growths were misshapen travesties
+of the trees which could not live here. Bloated yellow limbs branched
+off from rounded swollen trunks. Here and there a pear-shaped puffball,
+Burl's height and half his height again, waited until a chance touch
+should cause it to shoot upward a curling puff of infinitely fine dust.
+
+He continued to move with caution. There were dangers here, but he went
+forward steadily. He still held a great mass of edible mushroom under
+one arm and from time to time broke off a fragment, chewing it
+meditatively. But always his eyes searched here and there for threats of
+harm.
+
+Behind him the faint, shrill outcry had risen only slightly in volume.
+It was still too far away to attract his notice. Army ants, however,
+were working havoc in the distance. By thousands and millions, myriads
+of them advanced across the fungoid soil. They clambered over every
+eminence. They descended into every depression. Their antennae waved
+restlessly. Their mandibles were extended threateningly. The ground was
+black with them, each one more than ten inches long.
+
+A single such creature, armored and fearless as it was, could be
+formidable enough to an unarmed and naked man like Burl. The better part
+of discretion would be avoidance. But numbering in the thousands and
+millions, they were something which could not be avoided. They advanced
+steadily and rapidly; the chorus of shrill stridulations and clickings
+marking their progress.
+
+Great, inoffensive caterpillars crawling over the huge cabbages heard
+the sound of their coming, but were too stupid to flee. The black
+multitudes blanketed the rank vegetables. Tiny, voracious jaws tore at
+the flaccid masses of greasy flesh.
+
+The caterpillars strove to throw off their assailants by writhings and
+contortions--uselessly. The bees fought their entrance into the monster
+hives with stings and wing-beats. Moths took to the air in daylight with
+dazzled, blinded eyes. But nothing could withstand the relentless hordes
+of small black things that reeked of formic acid and left the ground
+behind them empty of life.
+
+Before the horde was a world of teeming life, where mushrooms and other
+fungi fought with thinning numbers of cabbages and mutant earth-weeds
+for a foothold. Behind the black multitude was--nothing. Mushrooms,
+cabbages, bees, wasps, crickets, grubs--every living thing that could
+not flee before the creeping black tide reached it was lost, torn to
+bits by tiny mandibles.
+
+Even the hunting spiders and tarantulas fell before the black host. They
+killed many in their desperate self-defense, but the army ants could
+overwhelm anything--anything at all--by sheer numbers and ferocity.
+Killed or wounded ants served as food for their sound comrades. Only the
+web spiders sat unmoved and immovable in their collossal snares, secure
+in the knowledge that their gummy webs could not be invaded along the
+slender supporting cables.
+
+
+
+
+_3. THE PURPLE HILLS_
+
+
+The army ants flowed over the ground like a surging, monstrous, inky
+tide. Their vanguard reached the river and recoiled. Burl was perhaps
+five miles away when they changed their course. The change was made
+without confusion, the leaders somehow communicating the altered line of
+march to those behind them.
+
+Back on Earth, scientists had gravely debated the question of how ants
+conveyed ideas to each other. Honeybees, it was said, performed
+elaborate ritual dances to exchange information. Ants, it had been
+observed, had something less eccentric. A single ant, finding a bit of
+booty too big for it to manage alone, would return to its city to secure
+the help of others. From that fact men had deduced that a language of
+gestures made with crossed antennae must exist.
+
+Burl had no theories. He merely knew facts, but he did know that ants
+could and did pass information to one another. Now, however, he moved
+cautiously along toward the sleeping-place of his tribe in complete
+ignorance of the black blanket of living creatures spreading over the
+ground behind him.
+
+A million tragedies marked the progress of the insect army. There was a
+tiny colony of mining bees, their habits unchanged despite their greater
+size, here on the forgotten planet. A single mother, four feet long, had
+dug a huge gallery with some ten offshooting cells, in which she had
+laid her eggs and fed her grubs with hard-gathered pollen. The grubs had
+waxed fat and large, become bees, and laid eggs in their turn within the
+same gallery their mother had dug out for them.
+
+Ten bulky insects now foraged busily to feed their grubs within the
+ancestral home, while the founder of the colony had grown draggled and
+wingless with the passing of time. Unable to bring in food, herself, the
+old bee became the guardian of the hive. She closed the opening with her
+head, making a living barrier within the entrance. She withdrew only to
+grant admission or exit to the duly authorized members,--her daughters.
+
+The ancient concierge of the underground dwelling was at her post when
+the wave of army ants swept over. Tiny, evil-smelling feet trampled upon
+her and she emerged to fight with mandible and sting for the sanctity of
+her brood. Within moments she was a shaggy mass of biting ants. They
+rent and tore at her chitinous armor. But she fought on madly, sounding
+a buzzing alarm to the colonists yet within.
+
+They came out, fighting as they came: ten huge bees, each four to five
+feet long and fighting with legs and jaws, with wing and mandible, and
+with all the ferocity of so many tigers. But the small ants covered
+them, snapping at their multiple eyes, biting at the tender joints in
+their armour,--and sometimes releasing the larger prey to leap upon an
+injured comrade, wounded by the monster they battled together.
+
+Such a fight, however, could have but one end. Struggle as the bees
+might, they were powerless against their un-numbered assailants. They
+were being devoured even as they fought. And before the last of the ten
+was down the underground gallery had been gutted both of the stored food
+brought by the adult defenders and the last morsels of what had been
+young grubs, too unformed to do more than twitch helplessly,
+inoffensively, as they were torn to shreds.
+
+When the army ants went on there were merely an empty tunnel and a few
+fragments of tough armor, unappetizing even to the ants.
+
+Burl heard them as he meditatively inspected the scene of a tragedy of
+not long before. The rent and scraped fragments of a great beetle's
+shiny casing lay upon the ground. A greater beetle had come upon the
+first and slain him. Burl regarded the remains of the meal.
+
+Three or four minims, little ants barely six inches long, foraged
+industriously among the bits. A new ant-city was to be formed and the
+queen lay hidden half a mile away. These were the first hatchlings. They
+would feed their younger kindred until they grew large enough to take
+over the great work of the ant-city. Burl ignored the minims. He
+searched for a weapon of some sort. Behind him the clicking,
+high-pitched roar of the horde of army ants increased in volume.
+
+He turned away disgustedly. The best thing he could find in the way of
+a weapon was a fiercely-toothed hind-leg. When he picked it up an angry
+whine rose from the ground. One of the minims had been struggling to
+detach a morsel of flesh from the leg-joint. Burl had snatched the
+tidbit from him.
+
+The little creature was surely no more than half a foot long, but it
+advanced angrily upon Burl, shrilling a challenge. He struck with the
+beetle's leg and crushed the ant. Two of the other minims appeared,
+attracted by the noise the first had made. They discovered the crushed
+body of their fellow, unceremoniously dismembered it, and bore it away
+in triumph.
+
+Burl went on, swinging the toothed limb in his hand. The sound behind
+him became a distant whispering, high-pitched and growing steadily
+nearer. The army ants swept into a mushroom forest and the yellow,
+umbrella-like growths soon swarmed with the black creatures.
+
+A great bluebottle fly, shining with a metallic lustre, stood beneath a
+mushroom on the ground. The mushroom was infected with maggots which
+exuded a solvent pepsin that liquefied the firm white meat. They swam
+ecstatically in the liquid gruel, some of which dripped and dripped to
+the ground. The bluebottle was sipping the dark-colored liquid through
+its long proboscis, quivering with delight as it fed on the noisomeness.
+
+Burl drew near and struck. The fly collapsed in a quivering heap. Burl
+stood over it for an instant and pondered.
+
+The army ants were nearer, now. They swarmed down into a tiny valley,
+rushing into and through a little brook over which Burl had leaped.
+Since ants can remain underwater for a long time without drowning, the
+small stream was not even dangerous. Its current did sweep some of them
+away. A great many of them, however, clung together until they chocked
+its flow by the mass of their bodies, the main force marching across the
+bridge they constituted.
+
+The ants reached a place about a quarter of a mile to the left of Burl's
+line of march, perhaps a mile from the spot where he stood over the dead
+bluebottle. There was an expanse of some acres in which the giant, rank
+cabbages had so far succeeded in their competition with the world of
+fungi. The pale, cross-shaped flowers of the cabbages formed food for
+many bees. The leaves fed numberless grubs and worms. Under the
+fallen-away dead foliage--single leaves were twenty feet across at their
+largest--crickets hid and fed.
+
+The ant-army flowed into this space, devouring every living thing it
+encountered. A terrible din arose. The crickets hurtled away in erratic
+leapings. They shot aimlessly in any direction. More than half of them
+landed blindly in the carpeting of clicking black bodies which were the
+ants from whose vanguard they had fled. Their blind flight had no effect
+save to give different individuals the opportunity to seize them as they
+fell and instantly begin to devour them. As they were torn to fragments,
+horrible screamings reached Burl's ears.
+
+A single such cry of agony would not have attracted Burl's attention. He
+lived in a world of nightmare horror. But a chorus of creatures in
+torment made him look up. This was no minor horror. Something wholesale
+was in progress. He jerked his head about to see what it was.
+
+A wild stretch of sickly yellow fungus was interspersed here and there
+with a squat toadstool, or a splash of vivid color where one of the many
+rusts had found a foothold. To the left a group of branched fungoids
+clustered in silent mockery of a true forest. Burl saw the faded green
+of the cabbages.
+
+With the sun never shining on the huge leaves save through the
+cloud-bank overhead, the cabbages were not vivid. There were even some
+mouldy yeasts of a brighter green and slime much more luridly tinted.
+Even so, the cabbages were the largest form of true vegetation Burl had
+ever seen. The nodding white cruciform flowers stood out plainly
+against the yellowish, pallid green of the leaves. But as Burl gazed at
+them, the green slowly became black.
+
+Three great grubs, in lazy contentment, were eating ceaselessly of the
+cabbages on which they rested. Suddenly first one and then another began
+to jerk spasmodically. Burl saw that around each of them a rim of black
+had formed. Then black motes milled all over them.
+
+The grubs became black--covered with biting, devouring ants. The
+cabbages became black. The frenzied contortions of the grubs told of the
+agonies they underwent as they were literally devoured alive. And then
+Burl saw a black wave appear at the nearer edge of the stretch of yellow
+fungus. A glistening, living flood flowed forward over the ground with a
+roar of clickings and a persistent overtone of shrill stridulations.
+
+Burl's scalp crawled. He knew what this meant. And he did not pause to
+think. With a gasp of pure panic he turned and fled, all intellectual
+preoccupations forgotten.
+
+The black tide came on after him.
+
+He flung away the edible mushroom he had carried under his arm. Somehow,
+though, he clung to the sharp-toothed club as he darted between tangled
+masses of fungus, ignoring now the dangers that ordinarily called for
+vast caution.
+
+Huge flies appeared. They buzzed about him loudly. Once he was struck on
+the shoulder by one of them--at least as large as his hand--and his skin
+torn by its swiftly vibrating wings.
+
+He brushed it away and sped on. But the oil with which he was partly
+covered had turned rancid, now, and the fetid odor attracted them. There
+were half a dozen--then a dozen creatures the size of pheasants, droning
+and booming as they kept pace with his wild flight.
+
+A weight pressed onto his head. It doubled. Two of the disgusting
+creatures had settled upon his oily hair to sip the stuff through their
+hairy feeding-tubes. Burl shook them off with his hand and raced madly
+on, his ears attuned to the sounds of the ants behind him.
+
+That clicking roar continued, but in Burl's ears it was almost drowned
+out by the noise made by the halo of flies accompanying him. Their
+buzzing had deepened in pitch with the increase in size of all their
+race. It was now the note close to the deepest bass tone of an organ.
+Yet flies--though greatly enlarged on the forgotten planet--had not
+become magnified as much as some of the other creatures. There were no
+great heaps of putrid matter for them to lay their eggs in. The ants
+were busy scavengers, carting away the debris of tragedies in the insect
+world long before it could acquire the gamey flavor beloved of
+fly-maggots. Only in isolated spots were the flies really numerous. In
+such places they clustered in clouds.
+
+Such a cloud began to form about Burl as he fled. It seemed as though a
+miniature whirlwind kept pace with him--a whirlwind composed of furry,
+revolting bodies and multi-faceted eyes. Fleeing, Burl had to swing his
+club before him to clear the way. Almost every stroke was interrupted by
+an impact against some thinly-armored body which collapsed with the
+spurting of reddish liquid.
+
+Then an anguish as of red-hot iron struck upon Burl's back. One of the
+stinging flies had thrust its sharp-tipped proboscis into his flesh to
+suck the blood. Burl uttered a cry and ran full-tilt into the stalk of a
+blackened, draggled toadstool.
+
+There was a curious crackling as of wet punk. The toadstool collapsed
+upon itself with a strange splashing sound. A great many creatures had
+laid their eggs in it, until now it was a seething mass of corruption
+and ill-smelling liquid.
+
+When the toadstool crashed to the ground, it crumbled into a dozen
+pieces, spattering the earth for yards all about with stinking stuff in
+which tiny, headless maggots writhed convulsively.
+
+The deep-toned buzzing of the flies took on a note of solemn
+satisfaction. They settled down upon this feast. Burl staggered to his
+feet and darted off again. Now he was nothing but a minor attraction to
+the flies, only three or four bothering to come after him. The others
+settled by the edges of the splashing fluid, quickly absorbed in an
+ecstasy of feasting. The few still hovering about his head, Burl
+killed,--but he did not have to smash them all. The remaining few
+descended to feast on their fallen comrades twitching feebly at his
+feet.
+
+He ran on and passed beneath the wide-spreading leaves of an isolated
+giant cabbage. A great grasshopper crouched on the ground, its
+tremendous radially-opening jaws crunching the rank vegetation. Half a
+dozen great worms ate steadily of the leaves that supported them. One
+had swung itself beneath an overhanging leaf--which would have thatched
+houses for men--and was placidly anchoring itself for the spinning of a
+cocoon in which to sleep the sleep of metamorphosis.
+
+A mile away, the great black tide of army ants advanced relentlessly.
+The great cabbage, the huge grasshopper, and all the stupid caterpillars
+on the leaves would presently be covered with small, black demons. The
+cocoon would never be spun. The caterpillars would be torn into
+thousands of furry fragments and devoured. The grasshopper would strike
+out with his terrific, unguided strength, crushing its assailants with
+blows of its great hind-legs and powerful jaws. But it would die, making
+terrible sounds of torments as the ants consumed it piecemeal.
+
+The sound of the ants' advance overwhelmed all other noises now. Burl
+ran madly, his breath coming in great gasps, his eyes wide with panic.
+Alone of the world about him, he knew the danger that followed him. The
+insects he passed went about their business with that terrifying,
+abstracted efficiency found only in the insect world.
+
+Burl's heart pounded madly from his running. The breath whistled in his
+nostrils--and behind him the flood of army ants kept pace. They came
+upon the feasting flies. Some took to the air and escaped. Others were
+too absorbed in their delicious meal. The twitching maggots, stranded by
+the scattering of their soupy broth, were torn to shreds and eaten. The
+flies who were seized vanished into tiny maws. And the serried ranks of
+ants moved on.
+
+Burl could hear nothing else, now, but the clickings of their limbs and
+the stridulating challenges and cross-challenges they uttered. Now and
+then another sound pierced the noises made by the ants themselves: a
+cricket, perhaps, seized and dying, uttering deep-bass cries of agony.
+
+Before the horde there was a busy world which teemed with life.
+Butterflies floated overhead on lazy wings; grubs waxed fat and huge;
+crickets feasted; great spiders sat quietly in their lairs, waiting with
+implacable patience for prey to fall into the trap-doors and snares;
+great beetles lumbered through the mushroom forests, seeking food and
+making love in monstrous, tragic fashion.
+
+Behind the wide front of the army ants was--chaos. Emptiness.
+Desolation. All life save that of the army ants was exterminated, though
+some bewildered flying creatures still fluttered helplessly over the
+silent landscape. Yet even behind the army ants little bands of
+stragglers from the horde marched busily here and there, seeking some
+trace of life that had been overlooked by the main body.
+
+Burl put forth his last ounce of strength. His limbs trembled. His
+breathing was agony. Sweat stood out upon his forehead. He ran for his
+life with the desperation of one who knows that death is at his heels.
+He ran as if his continued existence among the million tragedies of the
+single day were the purpose for which the universe had been created.
+
+There was redness in the west and in the cloud-bank overhead. To the
+east gray sky became a deeper gray--much deeper. It was not yet time for
+the creatures of the day to seek their hiding-places, nor for the
+night-insects to come forth. But in many secret spots there were vague
+and sleepy stirrings.
+
+Heedless of the approaching darkness Burl sped over an open space a
+hundred yards across. A thicket of beautifully golden mushrooms barred
+his way. Danger lay there. He dogged aside and saw in the gray dusk a
+glistening sheet of white, barely a yard above the ground. It was the
+web of the morning-spider which, on Earth, was noted only in hedges and
+such places when the dew of earliest dawn exposed it as a patternless
+plate of diamond-dust. There were anchor-cables, of course, but no
+geometry. Tidy housewives--also on Earth--used to mop it out of corners
+as a filmy fabric of irritating gossamer. On the forgotten planet it was
+a net with strength and bird-lime qualities that increased day by day,
+as its spinner moved restlessly over the surface, always trailing sticky
+cord behind itself.
+
+Burl had no choice but to avoid it, even though he lost ground to the
+ant-horde roaring behind him. And night was definitely on the way. It
+was inconceivable that a human should travel in the lowlands after dark.
+It literally could not be done over the normal nightmare terrain. Burl
+had not only to escape the army ants, but find a hiding-place quickly if
+he was to see tomorrow's light. But he could not think so far ahead,
+just now.
+
+He blundered through a screen of puffballs that shot dusty powder toward
+the sky. Ahead, a range of strangely colored hills came into
+view--purple, green, black and gold--melting into each other and
+branching off, inextricably mingled. They rose to a height of perhaps
+sixty or seventy feet. A curious grayish haze had gathered above them.
+It seemed to be a layer of thin vapor, not like mist or fog, clinging to
+certain parts of the hills, rising slowly to coil and gather into an
+indefinitely thicker mass above the ridges.
+
+The hills themselves were not geological features, but masses of fungus
+that had grown and cannibalized, piling up upon themselves to the
+thickness of carboniferous vegetation. Over the face of the hills grew
+every imaginable variety of yeast and mould and rust. They grew within
+and upon themselves, forming freakish conglomerations that piled up into
+a range of hills, stretching across the lunatic landscape for miles.
+
+Burl blundered up the nearest slope. Sometimes the surface was a hard
+rind that held him up. Sometimes his feet sank--perhaps inches, perhaps
+to mid-leg. He scrambled frantically. Panting, gasping, staggering from
+the exhaustion of moving across the fungus quicksand, he made his way to
+the top of the first hill, plunged down into a little valley on the
+farther side, and up another slope. He left a clear trail behind him of
+disturbed and scurrying creatures that had inevitably found a home in
+the mass of living stuff. Small sinuous centipedes scuttled here and
+there, roused by his passage. At the bottom of his footprints writhed
+fat white worms. Beetles popped into view and vanished again....
+
+A half mile across the range and Burl could go no farther. He stumbled
+and fell and lay there, gasping hoarsely. Overhead the gray sky had
+become a deep-red which was rapidly melting into that redness too deep
+to be seen except as black. But there was still some light from the
+west.
+
+Burl sobbed for breath in a little hollow, his sharp-toothed club still
+clasped in his hands. Something huge, with wings like sails, soared in
+silhouette against the sunset. Burl lay motionless, breathing in great
+gasps, his limbs refusing to lift him.
+
+The sound of the army ants continued. At last, above the crest of the
+last hillock he had surmounted, two tiny glistening antennae appeared,
+then the small, deadly shape of an army ant. The forerunner of its
+horde, it moved deliberately forward, waving its antennae ceaselessly.
+It made its way toward Burl, tiny clickings coming from its limbs.
+
+A little wisp of vapor swirled toward the ant. It was the vapor that had
+gathered over the whole range of hills as a thin, low cloud. It
+enveloped the ant which seemed to be thrown into a strange convulsion,
+throwing itself about, legs moving aimlessly. If it had been an animal
+instead of an insect, it would have choked and gasped. But ants breathe
+through air-holes in their abdomens. It writhed helplessly on the spongy
+stuff across which it had been moving.
+
+Burl was conscious of a strange sensation. His body felt remarkably
+warm. It felt hot. It was an unparalleled sensation, because Burl had no
+experience of fire or the heat of the sun. The only warmth he had ever
+known was when huddling together with his tribesmen in some hiding-place
+to avoid the damp chill of the night.
+
+Then, the heat of their breath and flesh helped to combat discomfort.
+But this was a fiercer heat. It was intolerable. Burl moved his body
+with a tremendous effort and for a moment the fungus soil was cool
+beneath him. Then the sensation of hotness began again and increased
+until Burl's skin was reddened and inflamed.
+
+The tenuous vapor, too, seemed to swirl his way. It made his lungs smart
+and his eyes water. He still breathed in painful gasps, but even that
+short period of rest had done him some good. But it was the heat that
+drove him to his feet again. He crawled painfully to the crest of the
+next hill. He looked back.
+
+This was the highest hill he had come upon and he could see most of the
+purple range in the deep, deep dusk. Now he was more than halfway
+through the hills. He had barely a quarter-mile to go, northward. But
+east and west the range of purple hills was a ceaseless, undulating mass
+of lifts and hollows, of ridges and spurs of all imaginable colorings.
+
+And at the tips of most of them were wisps of curling gray.
+
+From his position he could see a long stretch of the hills not hidden by
+the surrounding darkness. Back along the way he had come, the army ants
+now swept up into the range of hills. Scouts and advance-guard parties
+scurried here and there. They stopped to devour the creatures inhabiting
+the surface layers. But the main body moved on inexorably.
+
+The hills, though, were alive, not upheavals of the ground but festering
+heaps of insanely growing fungus, hollowed out in many places by
+tunnels, hiding-places, and lurking-places. These the ants invaded. They
+swept on, devouring everything....
+
+Burl leaned heavily upon his club and watched dully. He could run no
+more. The army ants were spreading everywhere. They would reach him
+soon.
+
+Far to the right, the vapor thickened. A thin column of smoke arose in
+the dim half-light. Burl did not know smoke, of course. He could not
+conceivably guess that deep down in the interior of the insanely growing
+hills, pressure had killed and oxidation had carbonized the once-living
+material. By oxidation the temperature down below had been raised. In
+the damp darkness of the bowels of the hills spontaneous combustion had
+begun.
+
+The great mounds of tinderlike mushroom had begun to burn very slowly,
+quite unseen. There had been no flames because the hills' surface
+remained intact and there was no air to feed the burning. But when the
+army ants dug ferociously for fugitive small things, air was admitted to
+tunnels abandoned because of heat.
+
+Then slow combustion speeded up. Smoulderings became flames. Sparks
+became coals. A dozen columns of fume-laden smoke rose into the heavens
+and gathered into a dense pall above the range of purple hills. And Burl
+apathetically watched the serried ranks of army ants march on toward the
+widening furnaces that awaited them.
+
+They had recoiled from the river instinctively. But their ancestors had
+never known fire. In the Amazon basin, on Earth, there had never been
+forest fires. On the forgotten planet there had never been fires at all,
+unless the first forgotten colonists tried to make them. In any case the
+army ants had no instinctive terror of flame. They marched into the
+blazing openings that appeared in the hills. They snapped with their
+mandibles at the leaping flames, and sprang to grapple with the burning
+coals.
+
+The blazing areas widened as the purple surface was consumed. Burl
+watched without comprehension--even without thankfulness. He stood
+breathing more and more easily until the glow from approaching flames
+reddened his skin and the acrid smoke made tears flow from his eyes.
+Then he retreated slowly, leaning on his club and often looking back.
+
+Night had fallen, but yet it was light to the army ants. They marched
+on, shrilling their defiance. They poured devotedly--and
+ferociously--into the inferno of flame. At last there were only small
+groups of stragglers from the great ant-army scurrying here and there
+over the ground their comrades had stripped of all life. The bodies of
+the main army made a vast malodor, burning in the furnace of the hills.
+
+There had been pain in that burning, agony such as no one would willing
+dwell upon. But it came of the insane courage of the ants, attacking the
+burning stuff with their horny jaws, rolling over and over with flaming
+lumps of charcoal clutched in their mandibles. Burl heard them shrilling
+their war-cry even as they died. Blinded, antennae singed off, legs
+shriveling, they yet went forward to attack their impossible enemy.
+
+Burl made his way slowly over the hills. Twice he saw small bodies of
+the vanished army. They had passed between the widening furnaces and
+furiously devoured all that moved as they forged ahead. Once Burl was
+spied, and a shrill cry sounded, but he moved on and only a single ant
+rushed after him. Burl brought down his club and a writhing body
+remained to be eaten by its comrades when they came upon it.
+
+And now the last faint traces of light had vanished in the west. There
+was no real brightness anywhere except the flames of the burning hills.
+The slow, slow nightly rain that dripped down all through the dark hours
+began. It made a pattering noise upon the unburnt part of the hills.
+
+Burl found firm ground beneath his feet. He listened keenly for sounds
+of danger. Something rustled heavily in a thicket of toadstools a
+hundred feet away. There were sounds of preening, and of feet delicately
+placed here and there upon the ground. Then a great body took to the air
+with the throbbing beat of mighty wings.
+
+A fierce down-current of air smote Burl, and he looked upward in time to
+glimpse the outline of a huge moth passing overhead. He turned to watch
+the line of its flight, and saw the fierce glow filling all the horizon.
+The hills burned brighter as the flames widened.
+
+He crouched beneath a squat toadstool and waited for the dawn. The
+slow-dripping rain kept on, falling with irregular, drum-like beats upon
+the tough top of the toadstool.
+
+He did not sleep. He was not properly hidden, and there was always
+danger in the dark. But this was not the darkness Burl was used to. The
+great fires grew and spread in the masses of ready-carbonized mushroom.
+The glare on the horizon grew brighter through the hours. It also came
+nearer.
+
+Burl shivered a little, as he watched. He had never even dreamed of fire
+before, and even the overhanging clouds were lighted by these flames.
+Over a stretch at least a dozen miles in length and from half a mile to
+three miles across, the seething furnaces and columns of flame-lit smoke
+sent illumination over the world. It was like the glow the lights of a
+city can throw upon the sky. And like the flitting of aircraft above a
+city was the assembly of fascinated creatures of the night.
+
+Great moths and flying beetles, gigantic gnats and midges grown huge
+upon this planet, fluttered and danced above the flames. As the fire
+came nearer, Burl could see them: colossal, delicately-formed creatures
+sweeping above the white-hot expanse. There were moths with
+riotously-colored wings of thirty-foot spread, beating the air with
+mighty strokes, their huge eyes glowing like garnets as they stared
+intoxicatedly at the incandescence below them.
+
+Burl saw a great peacock-moth soaring above the hills with wings all of
+forty feet across. They fluttered like sails of unbelievable
+magnificence. And this was when all the separate flames had united to
+form a single sheet of white-hot burning stuff spread across the land
+for miles.
+
+Feathery antennae of the finest lace spread out before the head of the
+peacock-moth; its body was of softest velvet. A ring of snow-white fur
+marked where its head began. The glare from below smote the maroon of
+its body with a strange effect. For one instant it was outlined clearly.
+Its eyes shone more redly than any ruby's fire. The great, delicate
+wings were poised in flight. Burl caught the flash of flame upon the two
+great irridescent spots on the wings. Shining purple and bright red, all
+the glory of chalcedony and of chrysoprase was reflected in the glare of
+burning fungi.
+
+And then Burl saw it plunge downward, straight into the thickest and
+fiercest of the leaping flames. It flung itself into the furnace as a
+willing, drunken victim of their beauty.
+
+Flying beetles flew clumsily above the pyre also, their horny wing-cases
+stiffly outstretched. In the light from below they shone like burnished
+metal. Their clumsy bodies, with spurred and fierce-toothed limbs,
+darted through the flame-lit smoke like so many grotesque meteors.
+
+Burl saw strange collisions and still stranger meetings. Male and female
+flying creatures circled and spun in the glare, dancing their dance of
+love and death. They mounted higher than Burl could see, drunk with the
+ecstasy of living, and then descended to plunge headlong in the roaring
+flames below.
+
+From every side the creatures came. Moths of brightest yellow, with
+furry bodies palpitant with life, flew madly to destruction. Other moths
+of a deepest black, with gruesome symbols on their wings, swiftly came
+to dance above the glow like motes in sunlight.
+
+And Burl crouched beneath a toadstool, watching while the perpetual,
+slow raindrops fell and fell, and a continuous hissing noise came from
+where the rain splashed amid the flames.
+
+
+
+
+_4. A KILLER OF MONSTERS_
+
+
+The night wore on, while the creatures above the firelight danced and
+died, their numbers ever reinforced by fresh arrivals. Burl sat tensely
+still, his eyes watching everything while his mind groped for an
+explanation of what he saw. At last the sky grew dimly gray, then
+brighter, and after a long time it was day. The flames of the burning
+hills seemed to dim and die as all the world became bright. After a long
+while Burl crawled from his hiding-place and stood erect.
+
+No more than two hundred paces from where he stood, a straight wall of
+smoke rose from the still-smouldering fungus-range. Burl could see the
+smoke rising for miles on either hand. He turned to continue on his way,
+and saw the remains of one of the tragedies of the night.
+
+A great moth had flown into the flames, been horribly scorched, and
+floundered out again. Had it been able to fly, it would have returned to
+its devouring deity; but now it lay upon the ground, its antennae
+hopelessly seared. One beautiful wing was nothing but gaping holes. The
+eyes had been dimmed by flame. The exquisitely tapering limbs lay
+broken and crushed by the violence of landing. The creature was helpless
+on the ground, only the stumps of its antennae moving restlessly and the
+abdomen pulsating slowly as it drew pain-racked breaths.
+
+Burl drew near. He raised his club.
+
+When he moved on there was a velvet cloak cast over his shoulders,
+gleaming with all the colors of the rainbows. A gorgeous mass of soft
+blue moth-fur was about his middle, and he had bound upon his forehead
+two yard-long fragments of the moth's magnificent antennae.
+
+He strode on slowly, clad as no man had been clad in all the ages before
+him. After a while another victim of the holocaust--similarly blundered
+out to die--yielded him a spear that was longer and sharper and much
+more deadly than his first. So he took up his journey to Saya looking
+like a prince of Ind upon a bridal journey--though surely no mere prince
+ever wore such raiment.
+
+For many miles, Burl threaded his way through an extensive forest of
+thin-stalked toadstools. They towered high over his head, colorful,
+parasitic moulds and rusts all about their bases. Twice he came upon
+open glades where bubbling pools of green slime festered in corruption.
+Once he hid himself as a monster scarabeus beetle lumbered by three
+yards away, clanking like some mighty machine.
+
+Burl saw the heavy armor and inward-curving jaws of the monster. He
+almost envied him his weapons. The time was not yet come, though, when
+Burl and his kind would hunt such giants for the juicy flesh within its
+armored limbs. Burl was still a savage, still ignorant, still
+essentially timid. His only significant advance had been that where at
+first he had fled without reasoning, now he paused to see if he need
+flee.
+
+He was a strange sight, moving through the shadowed lanes of the forest
+in his cloak of velvet. The fierce-toothed leg of a fighting beetle
+rested in a strip of sinew about his waist, ready for use. His new spear
+was taller than himself. He looked like a conqueror. But he was still a
+fearful and feeble creature, no match for the monstrous creatures about
+him. He was weak--and in that lay his greatest hope. Because if he were
+strong, he would not need to think.
+
+Hundreds of thousands of years before, his ancestors had been forced to
+develop brains as penalty for the lack of claws or fangs. Burl was sunk
+as low as any of them, but he had to combat more horrifying enemies,
+more inexorable dangers, and many times more crafty antagonists. His
+ancestors had invented knives and spears and flying missiles, but the
+creatures about Burl had weapons a thousand times more deadly than the
+ones that had defended the first humans.
+
+The fact, however, simply put a premium on the one faculty Burl had
+which the insect world has not.
+
+In mid-morning he heard a discordant, deep-bass bellow, coming from a
+spot not twenty yards from where he moved. He hid in panic, waiting for
+an instant, listening.
+
+The bellow came again, but this time with a querulous note. Burl heard a
+crashing and plunging as of some creature caught in a snare. A mushroom
+tumbled with a spongelike sound, and the thud was followed by a
+tremendous commotion. Something was fighting desperately against
+something else, but Burl did not know what creatures were in combat.
+
+He waited, and the noise died gradually away. Presently his breath came
+more slowly and his courage returned. He stole from his hiding-place and
+would have made away, but new curiosity held him back. Instead of
+creeping from the scene, he moved cautiously toward the source of the
+noise.
+
+Peering between two cream-colored stalks he saw a wide, funnel-shaped
+snare of silk spread out before him, some twenty yards across and as
+many deep. The individual threads could be plainly seen, but in the mass
+it seemed a fabric of sheerest, finest texture. Held up by tall
+mushrooms, it was anchored to the ground below and drew away to a small
+point through which a hole led to some as yet unseen recess. All the
+space of the wide snare was hung with threads: fine, twisted threads no
+more than half the thickness of Burl's finger.
+
+This was the trap of a labyrinth spider. Not one of the interlacing
+strands was strong enough to hold any but the feeblest prey, but the
+threads were there by thousands. A cricket had become entangled in the
+sticky maze. Its limbs thrashed out and broke threads with every stroke,
+but each time became entangled in a dozen more. It struggled mightily,
+emitting at intervals--again--its horrible bass roar.
+
+Burl breathed more easily. He watched with fascinated eyes. Mere death
+among insects--even tragic death--held no great interest for him. It was
+too common an occurrence. And there were few insects which deliberately
+sought man. Most insects have their allotted prey and will seek no
+others.
+
+But this involved a spider, and spiders have a terrifying impartiality.
+A spider devouring some luckless insect was but an example of what might
+happen to Burl. So he watched alertly, his eyes traveling from the
+enmeshed cricket to the strange opening at the back of the funnel-shaped
+labyrinth.
+
+That opening darkened. Two shining, glistening eyes had been watching
+from the tunnel in which the spider had been waiting. Now it swung out
+lightly, revealing itself as a gray spider, with twin black ribbons upon
+its thorax and two stripes of curiously speckled brown and white upon
+its abdomen. Burl saw, also, two curious appendages like a tail, as it
+came nimbly out of its hiding-place and approached the trapped creature.
+
+The cricket was struggling weakly, now, and the cries it uttered were
+but feeble, because of the cords that fettered its limbs. Burl saw the
+spider throw itself upon the cricket which gave one final, convulsive
+shudder as fangs pierced its armor.
+
+Shortly after, the spider fed. With bestial enjoyment it sucked all the
+succulence, all the fluid, from its victim's carcass.
+
+Then the breath left Burl in a peculiar, frightened gasp. It was not
+from anything he saw or heard. It was something that he thought.
+
+For a second, his knees knocked together in self-induced panic. It
+occurred to him that he, Burl, had killed a hunting spider--a
+tarantula--upon the red-clay cliff. True, the killing had been an
+accident and had nearly cost him his own life in the web-spider's snare.
+But--he had killed a spider and of the most deadly kind. Now it occurred
+to Burl that he could kill another.
+
+Spiders were the ogres of the human tribes on the forgotten planet.
+Knowledge of them was hard to come by, because to study them was death.
+But all men knew that web-spiders never left their traps. Never! And
+Burl had imagined himself making an impossibly splendid, incredibly
+daring use of that fact.
+
+Denying to himself that he intended any action so suicidal, he
+nevertheless drew back from the front of the snare and made his way to
+the back, where the spider's tunnel was no more than ten feet away.
+
+Then he found himself waiting.
+
+Presently, through the interstices of the silk, he saw the gray bulk of
+the spider. It had left the drained and shrunken carcass of the cricket
+to return to its resting-place, settling itself carefully upon the soft
+walls of the fabric tunnel. From the yielding, globular nest at the
+tunnel's end it fixed maniacal eyes once more upon the threads of its
+snare, seen down the length of the passage-way.
+
+Burl's hair stood on end from sheer fright, but he was the slave of an
+idea.
+
+The tunnel and the nest at its end did not rest on the ground, but were
+suspended in air by cables like those that spread the gin itself. The
+gray labyrinth-spider bulged the fabric. It lay in luxurious comfort,
+waiting for victims to approach.
+
+There was sweat on Burl's face as he raised his spear. The bare idea of
+attacking a spider was horrifying. But actually he was in no danger
+whatever before the instant of the spear-thrust, because web-spiders
+never, never, leave their webs to hunt.
+
+So Burl sweated, and grasped his spear with agonized firmness--and
+thrust it into the bulge that was the spider's body in its nest. He
+thrust with hysterical fury.
+
+And then he ran as if the devil were after him.
+
+It was a long time before he dared come back, his heart in his throat.
+All was still. He had missed the horrid convulsions of the wounded
+spider; he had not heard the frightful gnashings of its fangs at the
+piercing weapon, nor seen the silken threads of the tunnel ripped and
+torn in the spider's death-struggle. Burl came back to quietness. There
+was a great rent in the silken tunnel, and a puddle of ill-smelling
+stuff lay upon the ground. From time to time another droplet fell from
+the spear to join it. And the great spider had fallen half through its
+own enlargement of the rent made by the spear in the wall of the nest.
+
+Burl stared. Even when he saw it, the thing was not easy to believe. The
+dead eyes of the spider looked at him with mad, frozen malignity. The
+fangs were still raised to kill. The hairy legs were still braced as if
+to enlarge further the gaping hole through which it had partly fallen.
+
+Then Burl felt exultation. His tribe had been furtive vermin for almost
+forty generations, fleeing from the mighty insects, hiding from them,
+and when caught waiting helplessly for death, screaming shrilly in
+horror. But he, Burl, had turned the tables. He, a man, had killed a
+spider! His breast expanded. Always his tribesmen went quietly and
+fearfully, making no sound. But a sudden, surprising, triumphant yell
+burst from Burl's lips--the first hunting-cry of man upon the forgotten
+planet in two thousand years.
+
+Next second, of course, his pulse almost stopped in sheer terror because
+he had made such a noise. He listened fearfully. The insect world was
+oblivious to him. Presently, shuddering but infinitely proud, he drew
+near his prey. He carefully withdrew his spear, poised to flee if the
+spider stirred. It did not. It was dead. The blood upon the spear was
+revolting. Burl wiped it off on a leathery toadstool. Then....
+
+He thought of Saya and his tribesmen. Trembling even as he gloated over
+his own remarkable self, he shifted the spider and worked it out of the
+nest. Presently he moved off with the belly of the spider upon his back
+and two of its hairy legs over his shoulders. The other limbs of the
+monster hung limp, trailing on the ground behind him.
+
+Marching, then he was the first such spectacle in history. His velvet
+cloak shining with its irridescent spots, the yard-long scraps of golden
+antennae bound to his forehead, a spear in his hand, and the hideous
+bulk of a gray spider for burden--Burl was a very strange sight indeed.
+
+He believed that other creatures fled before him because of the thing he
+carried. He tended to grow haughty. But actually, of course, insects do
+not know fear. They recognize their own specific enemies. That is
+necessary. But the his of the lowlands on the forgotten planet went on
+abstractedly, despite the splendid feat of one man.
+
+Burl marched. He came upon a valley full of torn and tattered mushrooms.
+There was not a single yellow top among them. Every one had been
+infested with maggots that had liquefied the tough meat of the
+mushroom-tops, causing it to drip to the ground below. The liquid was
+gathered in a golden pool in the center of the small depression. Burl
+heard a loud and deep-toned humming before he saw the valley. Then he
+stopped and looked down.
+
+He saw the golden pond, its surface reflecting the gray sky and the
+darkened stumps of mushrooms on the hillside which looked as if they had
+been blackened by a running flame. A small brooklet of golden liquid
+trickled over a rocky ledge, and all round the edges of the pond and
+brook, in ranks and rows, by hundreds and by thousands and it seemed by
+millions, were the green-gold bodies of great flies.
+
+They were small compared to other insects. The flesh-flies laid their
+eggs by the hundreds in decaying carcasses. The others chose mushrooms
+to lay their eggs in. To feed the maggots that would hatch, a relatively
+great quantity of food was needed; therefore, the flies must remain
+comparatively small, or the body of a single grasshopper would furnish
+food for only a few maggots instead of the hundreds it must support.
+There must also be a limit to the size of worms if hundreds were to
+feast upon a single fungus.
+
+But there was no limitation to the greediness of the adult creatures.
+There were bluebottles and green-bottles and all the flies of metallic
+lustre, gathered at a Lucullan feast of corruption. The buzzing of those
+swarming above the golden pool was a tremendous sound. The flying bodies
+flashed and glittered as they flew back and forth, seeking a place to
+alight and join in the orgy.
+
+The glittering bodies clustered in already-found places were motionless
+as if carved from metal. Burl watched them. And then he saw motion
+overhead.
+
+A slender, brilliant shape appeared, darting swiftly through the air,
+enlarging into a needle-like body with transparent, shining wings and
+two huge eyes. It circled and enlarged again, becoming a shimmering
+dragonfly, twenty feet and more in length. It poised itself abruptly
+above the pool, and then darted down, its jaws snapping viciously. They
+snapped again and again. Burl could not follow their slashings. And with
+each snap the glittering body of a fly vanished.
+
+A second dragonfly appeared and a third. They swooped above the golden
+pool, snapping in mid-air, making their abrupt and angular turns,
+creatures of incredible ferocity and beauty. In that mass of buzzing
+creatures, even the most voracious appetite must soon have been sated,
+but the slender creatures still darted about in frenzied destruction.
+
+And all this while the loud, contented, deep-bass humming went on as
+before. Their comrades were slaughtered by the hundreds not forty feet
+above their heads, but still the glittering rows of red-eyed flies
+gorged themselves upon the fluid of the pond. The dragonflies feasted
+until they were unable to devour even a single one more of their chosen
+prey. But even then they continued to sweep madly above the pool,
+striking down the buzzing flies though their bodies must perforce remain
+uneaten.
+
+Some of the dead flies, crushed to pulp by the angry dragonflies,
+dropped among their feasting brothers. Presently, one of them placed its
+disgusting proboscis upon the mangled creature. It sipped daintily from
+the contents of the broken armor. Another joined it and another. In a
+little while a cluster of them pushed against each other for a chance to
+join them in a cannibalistic feast.
+
+Burl turned aside and went on, leaving the dragonflies still at their
+massacre and the flies absorbed and ecstatic at their feast. The feast,
+indeed, was improved by the rain of murdered brethren from overhead.
+
+Only a few miles farther on, Burl came upon a familiar landmark. He knew
+it well, but had always kept at a safe distance from it. A mass of rock
+had heaved itself up from the almost level plain over which he traveled
+to form an out-jutting cliff. At one point the rock overhung, forming an
+inverted ledge--a roof over nothingness--which had been preempted by a
+hairy monster and made into a fairy-like dwelling. A white hemisphere
+clung to the rock, firmly anchored by long cables.
+
+Burl knew the place as one to be feared. A clotho spider had built
+itself a nest there, from which it emerged to hunt the unwary. Within
+the silken globe was a monstrosity, resting upon cushions of softest
+silk. The exterior had been beautiful once. But if one went too near one
+of the little inverted arches seemingly closed by panels of silk--it
+would open and out would rush a creature from a dream of hell.
+
+Surely Burl knew this place. Hung upon the walls of the fairy palace
+were trophies. They had a purpose, of course. Stones and boulders hung
+there, too, to hold the structure firm against the storm-winds that
+rarely blew. But amid the stones and fragments of insect-armor there was
+a very special decoration: the shrunken, dessicated skeleton of a man.
+
+The death of that man had saved Burl's life two years before. They had
+been together, seeking a new source of edible mushroom. The clotho
+spider was a hunter, not a spinner of webs. It had sprung suddenly from
+behind a great puffball as the two men froze in horror. Then it had come
+forward and deliberately chosen its victim. It did not choose Burl.
+
+Now he looked with half-frightened speculation at the lair of his
+ancient enemy. Some day, perhaps....
+
+But now he passed on. He went past the thicket in which the great moths
+hid by day, past the slimy pool in which something unknown but terrible
+lurked. He penetrated the little forest of mushrooms that glowed at
+night and the place where the truffle-hunting beetles chirped
+thunderously during the dark hours.
+
+And then he saw Saya. He caught a flash of pink skin vanishing behind a
+squat toadstool, and he ran forward calling her name. She emerged, and
+saw the figure with the horrible bulk of the spider on its back. She
+cried out in horror, and Burl understood. He let his burden fall,
+running swiftly to her.
+
+They met. Saya waited timidly until she saw who this man was, and then
+she was astounded indeed. With golden plumes rising from his head, a
+velvet cloak about his shoulders, blue moth-fur about his middle, and a
+spear in his hand--and a dead spider behind him!--this was not the Burl
+she had known.
+
+He took her hands, babbling proudly. She stared at him and at his
+victim--but the language of men had diminished sadly--struggling to
+comprehend. Presently her eyes glowed. She pulled at his wrists.
+
+When they found the other tribesmen, they were carrying the dead spider
+between them, Saya looking more proud than Burl.
+
+
+
+
+_5. MEAT OF MAN'S KILLING!_
+
+
+In their climb up from savagery, the principal handicap from which men
+have always suffered is the fact that they are human. Or it can be said
+that human beings always have to struggle against the obstacle which is
+simply that they are men. To Burl his splendid return to the tribe
+called for a suitable reaction. He expected them to take note that he
+was remarkable, unparalleled, and in all ways admirable. He expected
+them to look at him with awe. He rather hoped that the sight of him
+would involve something like ecstasy.
+
+And as a matter of fact, it did. For fully an hour they gathered around
+him while he used his--and their--scanty vocabulary to tell them of his
+unique achievements and adventures during the past two days and nights.
+They listened attentively and with appropriate admiration and vicarious
+pride.
+
+This in itself was a step upward. Mostly their talk was of where food
+might be found and where danger lurked. Strictly practical data
+connected with the pressing business of getting enough to eat and
+staying alive. The sheer pressure of existence was so great that the
+humans Burl knew had altogether abandoned such luxuries as boastful
+narrative. They had given up tradition. They did not think of art in
+even its most primitive forms, and the only craft they knew was the
+craftiness which promoted simple survival. So for them to listen to a
+narrative which did not mean either food or even a lessening of danger
+to themselves was a step upward on the cultural scale.
+
+But they were savages. They inspected the dead spider, shuddering. It
+was pure horror. They did not touch it--the adults not at all, and even
+Dik and Tet not for a very long time. Nobody thought of spiders as food.
+Too many of them had been spiders' food.
+
+But presently even the horror aroused by the spider palled. The younger
+children quailed at sight of it, of course; but the adults came to
+ignore it. Only the two gangling boys tried to break off a furry leg
+with which to charge and terrify the younger ones still further. They
+failed to get it loose because they did not think of cutting it. But
+they had nothing to cut it with anyhow.
+
+Old Jon went wheezing off, foraging. He waved a hand to Burl as he went.
+Burl was indignant. But it was true that he had brought back no food.
+And people must eat.
+
+Tama went off, her tongue clacking, with Lona the half-grown girl to
+help her find and bring back something edible. Dor, the strongest man in
+the tribe, went away to look where he thought there might be edible
+mushrooms full-grown again. Cori left with her children--very carefully
+on watch for danger to them--to see what she could find.
+
+In little more than an hour Burl's audience had diminished to Saya.
+Within two hours ants found the spider where it had been placed for the
+tribe to admire. Within three hours there was nothing left of it. During
+the fourth hour--as Burl struggled to dredge up some new, splendid item
+to tell Saya for the tenth time, or thereabouts--during the fourth hour
+one of the tribeswomen beckoned to Saya. She left with a flashing
+backward smile for Burl. She went, actually, to help dig up underground
+fungi--much like truffles--discovered by the older woman. She
+undoubtedly expected to share them with Burl.
+
+But in five hours it was night and Burl was very indignant with his
+tribesfolk. They had shifted the location of the hiding-place for the
+night, and nobody had thought to tell him. And if Saya wished to come
+for Burl, to lead him to that place, she did not dare for the simple
+reason that it was night.
+
+For a long time after he found a hiding-place, Burl fumed bitterly to
+himself. He was very much of a human being, differing from his
+fellows--so far--mainly because he had been through experiences not
+shared by them. He had resolved a subjective dilemma of sorts by
+determining to return to his tribe. He had discovered a weapon which, at
+first, had promised--and secured--foodstuff, and later had saved him
+from a tarantula. His discovery that fish-oil was useful when applied to
+spider-snares and things sticking to the feet was of vast importance to
+the tribe. Most remarkable of all, he had deliberately killed a spider.
+And he had experienced triumph. Temporarily he had even experienced
+admiration.
+
+The adulation was a thing which could never be forgotten. Human
+appetites are formed by human experiences. One never had an appetite for
+a thing one has not known in some fashion. But no human being who has
+known triumph is ever quite the same again, and anybody who has once
+been admired by his fellows is practically ruined for life--at least so
+far as being independent of admiration is concerned.
+
+So during the dark hours, while the slow rain dipped in separate, heavy
+drops from the sky, Burl first coddled his anger--which was a very good
+thing for a member of a race grown timorous and furtive--and then began
+to make indignant plans to force his tribesmen to yield him more of the
+delectable sensations he alone had begun to know.
+
+He was not especially comfortable during the night. The hiding-place he
+had chosen was not water-tight. Water trickled over him for several
+hours before he discovered that his cloak, though it would not keep him
+dry--which it would have done if properly disposed--would still keep the
+same water next to his skin where his body could warm it. Then he slept.
+When morning came he felt singularly refreshed. For a savage, he was
+unusually clean, too.
+
+He woke before dawn with vainglorious schemes in his head. The sky grew
+gray and then almost white. The overhanging cloud bank seemed almost to
+touch the earth, but gradually withdrew. The mist among the
+mushroom-forests grew thinner, and the slow rain ceased reluctantly.
+When he peered from his hiding-place, the mad world he knew was, as far
+as he could see, quite mad, as usual. The last of the night-insects had
+vanished. The day-creatures began to venture out.
+
+Not too far from the crevice where he'd hidden was an ant-hill,
+monstrous by standards on other planets. It was piled up not of sand but
+gravel and small boulders. Burl saw a stirring. At a certain spot the
+smooth, outer surface crumbled and fell into an invisible opening. A
+spot of darkness appeared. Two slender, thread-like antennae popped out.
+They withdrew and popped out again. The spot enlarged until there was a
+sizeable opening. An ant appeared, one of the warrior-ants of this
+particular breed. It stood fiercely over the opening, waving its
+antennae agitatedly as if striving to sense some danger to its
+metropolis.
+
+He was fourteen inches long, this warrior, and his mandibles were fierce
+and strong. After a moment, two other warriors thrust past him. They ran
+about the whole extent of the ant-hill, their legs clicking, antennae
+waving restlessly.
+
+They returned, seeming to confer with the first, then went back down
+into the city with every appearance of satisfaction. As if they made a
+properly reassuring report, within minutes afterward, a flood of black,
+ill-smelling workers poured out of the opening and dispersed about
+their duties.
+
+The city of the ants had begun its daily toil. There were deep galleries
+underground here: graineries, storage-vaults, refectories, and
+nurseries, and even a royal apartment in which the queen-ant reposed.
+She was waited upon by assiduous courtiers, fed by royal stewards, and
+combed and caressed by the hands of her subjects and children. A dozen
+times larger than her loyal servants, she was no less industrious than
+they in her highly specialized fashion. From the time of waking to the
+time of rest she was queen-mother in the most literal imaginable sense.
+At intervals, to be measured only in minutes, she brought forth an egg,
+perhaps three inches in length, which was whisked away to the municipal
+nursery. And this constant, insensate increase in the population of the
+city made all its frantic industry at once possible and necessary.
+
+Burl came out and spread his cloak on the ground. In a little while he
+felt a tugging at it. An ant was tearing off a bit of the hem. Burl slew
+the ant angrily and retreated. Twice within the next half-hour he had to
+move swiftly to avoid foragers who would not directly attack him because
+he was alive--unless he seemed to threaten danger--but who lusted after
+the fabric of his garments.
+
+This annoyance--and Burl would merely have taken it as a thing to be
+accepted a mere two days before--this annoyance added to Burl's
+indignation with the world about him. He was in a very bad temper indeed
+when he found old Jon, wheezing as he checked on the possibility of
+there being edible mushrooms in a thicket of poisonous, pink-and-yellow
+amanitas.
+
+Burl haughtily commanded Jon to follow him. Jon's untidy whiskers parted
+as his mouth dropped open in astonishment. Burl's tribe was so far from
+being really a tribe that for anybody to give a command was astonishing.
+There was no social organization, absolutely no tradition of command.
+As a rule life was too uncertain for anybody to establish authority.
+
+But Jon followed Burl as he stamped on through the morning mist. He saw
+a small movement and shouted imperatively. This was appalling! Men did
+not call attention to themselves! He gathered up Dor, the strongest of
+the men. Later, he found Jak who some day would wear an expression of
+monkey-like wisdom. Then Tet and Dik, the half-grown boys, came trooping
+to see what was happening.
+
+Burl led onward. A quarter of a mile and they came upon a great, gutted
+shell which had been a rhinoceros beetle the day before. Today it was a
+disassembled mass of chitinous armor. Burl stopped, frowning
+portentously. He showed his quaking followers how to arm themselves. Dor
+picked up the horn hesitantly, Burl showing him how to use it. He
+stabbed out awkwardly with the sharp fragment of armor. Burl showed
+others how to use the leg-sections for clubs. They tested them without
+conviction. In any sort of danger, they would trust to their legs and a
+frantically effective gift for hiding.
+
+Burl snarled at his tribesmen and led them on. It was unprecedented. But
+because of that fact there was no precedent for rebellion. Burl led them
+in a curve. They glanced all about apprehensively.
+
+When they came to an unusually large and attractive clump of golden
+edible mushrooms, there were murmurings. Old Jon was inclined to go and
+load himself and retire to some hiding-place for as long as the food
+lasted. But Burl snarled again.
+
+Numbly they followed on--Dor and Jon and Jak and the two youngsters. The
+ground inclined upward. They came upon puffballs. There was a new kind
+visible, colored a lurid red, that did not grow like the others. It
+seemed to begin and expand underground, then thrust away the soil above
+in its development. Its taut, angry-red parchment envelope seemed to
+swell from a reservoir of subterranean material. Burl and the others had
+never seen anything like it.
+
+They climbed higher. As other edible mushrooms came into view Burl's
+followers cheered visibly. This was a new tribal ground anyhow and it
+had not been fully explored. But Burl was leading them to quantities of
+food they had never suspected before.
+
+Quaintly, it was Burl himself who began to feel an uncomfortable dryness
+in his throat. He knew what he was about. His followers did not suspect
+because to them what he intended was simply inconceivable. They couldn't
+suspect it because they couldn't imagine anybody doing such a thing. It
+simply couldn't be thought of at all.
+
+It is rather likely that Burl began to regret that he had thought of it.
+It had come to him first as an angry notion in the night. Then the idea
+had developed as a suitable punishment for his abandonment. By dawn it
+was an ambition so terrifying that it fascinated him. Now he was
+committed to it in his own mind, and the only way to keep his knees from
+knocking together was to keep moving. If his followers had protested
+now, he would have allowed himself to be persuaded. But he heard more
+pleased murmurs. There was more edible stuff, in quantity. But there
+were no ant-trails here, no sounds of foraging beetles. This was an area
+which Burl's tribesmen could clearly see was almost devoid of dangerous
+life. They seemed to brighten a little. This, they seemed to think,
+would be a good place to move to.
+
+But Burl knew better. There were few ground-insects here because the
+area was hunted out. And Burl knew what had done the hunting.
+
+He expected the others to realize where they were when they dodged
+around a clump of the new red puffballs and saw bald rock before them
+and a falling-away to emptiness beyond. Even then they could have
+retreated, but it did not enter their heads that Burl could do anything
+like this.
+
+They didn't know where they were until Burl held up his hand for silence
+almost at the edge of the rock-knob which rose a hundred feet sheer,
+curving out a little near its top. They looked out uncomprehendingly at
+the mist-filled air and the nightmare landscape fading into its
+grayness. A tiny spider, the very youngest of hatchlings and barely four
+inches across, stealthily stalked another vastly smaller mite. The other
+was the many-legged larva of the oil-beetle. The larva itself had been
+called--on other planets by other men--the bee-louse. It could easily
+hide in the thick furl of a giant bumble-bee. But this one small
+creature never practiced that ability. The hatchling spider sprang and
+the small midge died. When the spider had grown and, being grown, spun a
+web, it would slay great crickets with the same insane ferocity.
+
+Burl's followers saw first this and then certain three-quarter-inch
+strands of dirty silk that came up over the edge of the precipice. As
+one man after another realized where he was, he trembled violently. Dor
+turned gray. Jon and Jak were paralyzed with horror. They couldn't run.
+
+Seeing the others even more frightened than himself filled Burl with a
+wholly unwarranted courage. When he opened his mouth, they cringed. If
+he shouted then at least one, more likely several, of them would die.
+
+And this was because some forty or fifty feet down the mould-speckled
+precipice hung a drab-white object nearly hemispherical, some six feet
+in its half-diameter. A number of little semi-circular doors were fixed
+about its sides like arches. Though each one seemed to be a doorway,
+only one would open.
+
+The thing had been oddly beautiful at first glance. It was held fast to
+the inward-sloping stone by cables, one or two of which stretched down
+toward the ground. Others reached up over the precipice-edge to hold it
+fast. It was a most unusual engineering feat, yet something more than
+that: this was also an ogre's castle. Ghastly trophies were fastened to
+the outer walls and hung by silken cords below it. Here was the hind-leg
+of one of the smaller beetles, there the wing-case of a flying creature.
+Here a snail-shell--the snails of Earth would hardly have recognized
+their descendant--and there a boulder weighing forty pounds or more. The
+shrunken head-armor of a beetle, the fierce jaws of a cricket, the
+pitiful shreds of dozens of creatures--all had once provided meals for
+the monster in the castle. And dangling by the longest cord of all was
+the shrunken, shriveled body of a long-dead man.
+
+Burl glared at his tribesmen, clamping his jaws tight lest they chatter.
+He knew, as did the others, that any noise would bring the clotho spider
+swinging up its anchor-cables to the cliff-top. The men didn't dare
+move. But every one of them--and Burl was among the foremost--knew that
+inside the half-dome of gruesome relics the monster reposed in luxury
+and ease. It had eight furry, attenuated legs and a face that was a mask
+of horror. The eyes glittered malevolently above needle-sharp mandibles.
+It was a hunting-spider. At any moment it might leave the charnel-house
+in which it lived to stalk and pursue prey.
+
+Burl motioned the others forward. He led one of them to the end of a
+cable where it curled up over the edge for an anchorage. He ripped the
+end free--and his flesh crawled as he did so. He found a boulder and
+knotted the end of the cable about it. In a whisper that imitated a
+spider's ferocity, Burl gave the man orders. He plucked a second quaking
+tribesman by the arm. With the jerky, uncontrolled movements of a robot,
+Dor allowed himself to be led to a second cable.
+
+Burl commanded in a frenzy. He worked with stiff fingers and a dry
+throat, not knowing how he could do this thing. He had formed a plan in
+anger which he somehow was carrying out in a panic. Although his
+followers were as responsive as dead men, they obeyed him because they
+felt like dead men, unable to resist. After all, it was simple enough.
+There were boulders at the top of the precipice and silken cables hung
+taut over the edge. As Burl fastened a heavy boulder to each cable he
+could find, he loosened the silken strand until it hung tight only at
+the very edge of the more-than-vertical fall.
+
+He took his post--and his followers gazed at him with the despairing
+eyes of zombies--and made a violent, urgent gesture. One man dumped his
+boulder over the precipice's edge. Burl cried out shrilly to the others,
+half-mad with his own terror. There was a ripping sound. The other men
+dumped their boulders over, fleeing with the movement--the paralysis of
+horror relieved by that one bit of exertion.
+
+Burl could not flee. He panted and gasped, but he had to see. He stared
+down the dizzy wall. Boulders ripped and tore their way down the
+cliff-wall, pulling the cables loose from the face of the precipice.
+They shot out into space and jerked violently at the half-globular nest,
+ripping it loose from its anchorage.
+
+Burl cried out exultantly. And as he cried out the shout became a
+bubbling sound; for although the ogre's silken castle did swing clear,
+it did not drop the sixty feet to the hard ground below. There was one
+cable Burl had missed, hidden by rock-tripe and mould in a depressed
+part of the cliff-top. The spider's house was dangling crazily by that
+one strand, bobbing erratically to and fro in mid-air.
+
+And there was a convulsive struggle inside it. One of the arch-doors
+opened and the spider emerged. It was doubtless confused, but spiders
+simply do not know terror. Their one response to the unusual is
+ferocity. There was still one cable leading up the cliff-face--the
+thing's normal climbing-rope to its hunting-ground above. The spider
+leaped for this single cable. Its legs grasped the cord. It swarmed
+upward, poison fangs unsheathed, mandibles clashing in rage. The shaggy
+hair of its body seemed to bristle with insane ferocity. The skinny
+articulated legs fairly twinkled as it rose. It made slavering noises,
+unspeakably horrifying.
+
+Burl's followers were already in panic-stricken flight. He could hear
+them crashing through obstacles as they ran glassy-eyed from the horror
+they only imagined, but which Burl could not but encounter. Burl
+shivered, his body poised for equally frenzied but quite hopeless
+flight. But his first step was blocked. There was a boulder behind him,
+standing on end, reaching up to his knee. He could not take the first
+step without dodging it.
+
+It was not the Burl of the terror-filled childhood who acted then. It
+was the throw-back, the atavism to a bolder ancestry. While the Burl who
+was a product of his environment was able to know only the stunned
+sensations of purest panic, the other Burl acted on a sounder basis of
+desperation. The emerging normal human seized the upright boulder. He
+staggered to the rock-face with it. He dumped it down the line of the
+descending cable.
+
+Humans do have ancestral behavior-patterns built into their nervous
+systems. A frightened small child does not flee; it swarms up the
+nearest adult to be carried away from danger. At ten a child does not
+climb but runs. And there is an age when it is normal for a man to stand
+at bay. This last instinct can be conditioned away. In Burl's fellows
+and his immediate forbears it had been. But things had happened to Burl
+to break that conditioning.
+
+He flung the pointed boulder down. For the fraction of a second he heard
+only the bubbling, gnashing sounds the spider made as it climbed toward
+him. Then there was a quite indescribable cushioned impact. After that,
+there were seconds in which Burl heard nothing whatever--and then a
+noise which could not be described either, but was the impact of the
+spider's body on the ground a hundred feet below, together with the
+pointed boulder it had fought insanely during all its fall. And the
+boulder was on top. The noise was sickening.
+
+Burl found himself shaking all over. His every muscle was tense and
+strained. But the spider did not crawl over the edge of the precipice
+and something had hit far below.
+
+A long minute later he managed to look.
+
+The nest still dangled at the end of the single cable, festooned with
+its gruesome trophies. But Burl saw the spider. It was, of course,
+characteristically tenacious of life. Its legs writhed and kicked, but
+the body was crushed and mangled.
+
+As Burl stared down, trying to breathe again, an ant drew near the
+shattered creature. It stridulated. Other ants came. They hovered
+restlessly at the edge of the death-scene. One loathesome leg did not
+quiver. An ant moved in on it.
+
+The ants began to tear the dead spider apart, carrying its fragments to
+their city a mile away.
+
+Up on the cliff-top Burl got unsteadily to his feet and found that he
+could breathe. He was drenched in sweat, but the shock of triumph was as
+overwhelming as any of the terrors felt by ancestors on this planet.
+
+On no other planet in the Galaxy could any human experience such triumph
+as Burl felt now because never before had human beings been so
+completely subjugated by their environment. On no other planet had such
+an environment existed, with humans flung so helplessly upon its mercy.
+
+Burl had been normal among his fellows when he was as frightened and
+furtive as they. Now he had been given shock treatment by fate. He was
+very close to normal for a human being newly come to the forgotten
+planet, save that he had the detailed information which would enable a
+normal man to cope with the nightmare environment. What he lacked now
+was the habit.
+
+But it would be intolerable for him to return to his former state of
+mind.
+
+He walked almost thoughtfully after his fled followers. And he was
+still a savage in that he was remarkably matter-of-fact. He paused to
+break off a huge piece of the edible golden mushrooms his fellow-men had
+noticed on the way up. Lugging it easily, he went back down over the
+ground that had looked so astonishingly free of inimical life--which it
+was because of the spider that had used it as a hunting-preserve.
+
+Burl began to see that it was not satisfactory to be one of a tribe of
+men who ran away all the time. If one man with a spear or stone could
+kill spiders, it was ridiculous for half a dozen men to run away and
+leave that one man the job alone. It made the job harder.
+
+It occurred to Burl that he had killed ants without thinking too much
+about it, but nobody else had. Individual ants could be killed. If he
+got his followers to kill foot-long ants, they might in time battle the
+smaller, two-foot beetles. If they came to dare so much, they might
+attack greater creatures and ultimately attempt to resist the real
+predators.
+
+Not clearly but very dimly, the Burl who had been shocked back to the
+viewpoint which was normal to the race of men saw that human beings
+could be more than the fugitive vermin on which other creatures preyed.
+It was not easy to envision, but he found it impossible to imagine
+sinking back to his former state. As a practical matter, if he was to
+remain as leader his tribesmen would have to change.
+
+It was a long time before he reached the neighborhood of the
+hiding-place of which he had not been told the night before. He sniffed
+and listened. Presently he heard faint, murmurous noises. He traced
+them, hearing clearly the sound of hushed weeping and excited, timid
+chattering. He heard old Tama shrilly bewailing fate and the stupidity
+of Burl in getting himself killed.
+
+He pushed boldly through the toadstool-growth and found his tribe all
+gathered together and trembling. They were shaken. They chattered
+together--not discussing or planning, but nervously recalling the
+terrifying experience they had gone through.
+
+Burl stepped through the screen of fungi and men gaped at him. Then they
+leaped up to flee, thinking he might be pursued. Tet and Dik babbled
+shrilly. Burl cuffed them. It was an excellent thing for him to do. No
+man had struck another man in Burl's memory. Cuffings were reserved for
+children. But Burl cuffed the men who had fled from the cliff-edge. And
+because they had not been through Burl's experiences, they took the
+cuffings like children.
+
+He took Jon and Jak by the ear and heaved them out of the hiding-place.
+He followed them, and then drove them to where they could see the base
+of the cliff from whose top they had tumbled stones--and then run away.
+He showed them the carcass of the spider, now being carted away
+piecemeal by ants. He told them angrily how it had been killed.
+
+They looked at him fearfully.
+
+He was exasperated. He scowled at them. And then he saw them shifting
+uneasily. There were clickings. A single, foraging black ant--rather
+large, quite sixteen inches long--moved into view. It seemed to be
+wandering purposelessly, but was actually seeking carrion to take back
+to its fellows. It moved toward the men. They were alive, therefore, it
+did not think of them as food--though it could regard them as enemies.
+
+Burl moved forward and struck with his club. It was butchery. It was
+unprecedented. When the creature lay still he commanded one of his typo
+for followers to take it up. Inside its armored legs there would be
+meat. He mentioned the fact, pungently. Their faces expressed amazed
+wonderment.
+
+There was another clicking. Another solitary ant. Burl handed his club
+to Dor, pushing him forward. Dor hesitated. Though he was not afraid of
+one wandering ant, he held back uneasily. Burl barked at him.
+
+Dor struck clumsily and botched the job. Burl had to use his spear to
+finish it. But a second bit of prey lay before the men.
+
+Then, quite suddenly, this completely unprecedented form of foraging
+became understandable to Burl's followers. Jak giggled nervously.
+
+An hour later Burl led them back to the tribe's hiding-place. The others
+had been terror-stricken, not knowing where the men had gone. But their
+terror changed to mute amazement when the men carried huge quantities of
+meat and edible mushroom into the hiding-place. The tribe held what
+amounted to a banquet.
+
+Dik and Tet swaggered under a burden of ant-carcass. This was not, of
+course, in any way revolting. Back on Earth, even thousands of years
+before, Arabs had eaten locusts cooked in butter and salted. All men had
+eaten crabs and other crustaceans, whose feeding habits were similar to
+those of ants. If Burl and his tribesmen had thought to be fastidious,
+ants on the forgotten planet would still have been considered edible,
+since they had not lost the habits of extreme cleanliness which made
+them notable on Earth.
+
+This feast of all the tribe, in which men had brought back not only
+mushroom to be eaten, but actual prey--small prey--of their hunting, was
+very probably the first such occasion in at least thirty generations of
+the forty-odd since the planet's unintended colonization. Like the other
+events, which began with Burl trying to spear a fish with a
+rhinoceros-beetle's horn, it was not only novel, on that world, but
+would in time have almost incredibly far-reaching consequences. Perhaps
+the most significant thing about it was its timing. It came at very
+nearly the latest instant at which it could have done any good.
+
+There was a reason which nobody in the tribe would ever remember to
+associate with the significance of this banquet. A long time
+before--months in terms of Earth-time--there had been a strong breeze
+that blew for three days and nights. It was an extremely unusual
+windstorm. It had seemed the stranger, then, because during all its
+duration everyone in the tribe had been sick, suffering continuously.
+When the windstorm had ended, the suffering ceased. A long time passed
+and nobody remembered it any longer.
+
+There was no reason why they should. Yet, since that time there had been
+a new kind of thing growing among the innumerable moulds and rusts and
+toadstools of the lowlands. Burl had seen them on his travels, and the
+expeditionary force against the clotho spider had seen them on the
+journey up to the cliff-edge. Red puffballs, developing first
+underground, were now pushing the soil aside to expose taut, crimson
+parchment spheres to the open air. The tribesmen left them alone because
+they were strange; and strange things were always dangerous. Puffballs
+they were familiar with--big, misshapen things which shot at a touch a
+powder into the air. The particles of powder were spores--the seed from
+which they grew. Spores had remained infinitely small even on the
+forgotten planet where fungi grew huge. Only their capacity for growth
+had increased. The red growths were puffballs, but of a new and
+different kind.
+
+As the tribe ate and admired, the hunters boasting of their courage, one
+of the new red mushrooms reached maturity.
+
+This particular growing thing was perhaps two feet across, its main part
+spherical. Almost eighteen inches of the thing rose above-ground. A
+tawny and menacing red, the sphere was contained in a parchment-like
+skin that was pulled taut. There was internal tension. But the skin was
+tough and would not yield, yet the inexorable pressure of life within
+demanded that it stretch. It was growing within, but the skin without
+had ceased to grow.
+
+This one happened to be on a low hillside a good half-mile from the
+place where Burl and his fellows banqueted. Its tough, red parchment
+skin was tensed unendurably. Suddenly it ripped apart with an explosive
+tearing noise. The dry spores within billowed out and up like the smoke
+of a shell-explosion, spurting skyward for twenty feet and more. At the
+top of their ascent they spread out and eddied like a cloud of reddish
+smoke. They hung in the air. They drifted in the sluggish breeze. They
+spread as they floated, forming a gradually extending, descending
+dust-cloud in the humid air.
+
+A bee, flying back toward its hive, droned into the thin mass of dust.
+It was preoccupied. The dust-cloud was not opaque, but only a thick
+haze. The bee flew into it.
+
+For half a dozen wing-beats nothing happened. Then the bee veered
+sharply. Its deep-toned humming rose in pitch. It made convulsive
+movements in mid-air. It lost balance and crashed heavily to the ground.
+There its legs kicked and heaved violently but without purpose. The
+wings beat furiously but without rhythm or effect. Its body bent in
+paroxysmic flexings. It stung blindly at nothing.
+
+After a little while the bee died. Like all insects, bees breathe
+through spiracles--breathing-holes in their abdomens. This bee had flown
+into the cloud of red dust which was the spore-cloud of the new
+mushrooms.
+
+The cloud drifted slowly along over the surface of yeasts and moulds,
+over toadstools and variegated fungus monstrosities. It moved steadily
+over a group of ants at work upon some bit of edible stuff. They were
+seized with an affliction like that of the bee. They writhed, moved
+convulsively. Their legs thrashed about. They died.
+
+The cloud of red dust settled as it moved. By the time it had travelled
+a quarter-mile, it had almost all settled to the ground.
+
+But a half-mile away there was another skyward-spurting uprush of red
+dust which spread slowly with the breeze. A quarter-mile away another
+plumed into the air. Farther on, two of them spouted their spores toward
+the clouds almost together.
+
+Living things that breathed the red dust writhed and died. And the
+red-dust puffballs were scattered everywhere.
+
+Burl and his tribesmen feasted, chattering in hushed tones of the
+remarkable fact that men ate meat of their own killing.
+
+
+
+
+_6. RED DUST_
+
+
+It was very fortunate indeed that the feast took place when it did. Two
+days later it would probably have been impossible, and three days later
+it would have been too late to do any good. But coming when it did, it
+made the difference which was all the difference in the world.
+
+Only thirty hours after the feasting which followed the death of the
+clotho spider, Burl's fellows--from Jon to Dor to Tet and Dik and
+Saya--had come to know a numb despair which the other creatures of his
+world were simply a bit too stupid to achieve.
+
+It was night. There was darkness over all the lowlands, and over all the
+area of perhaps a hundred square miles which the humans of Burl's
+acquaintance really knew. He, alone of his tribe, had been as much as
+forty miles from the foraging-ground over which they wandered. At any
+given time the tribe clung together for comfort, venturing only as far
+as was necessary to find food. Although the planet possessed continents,
+they knew less than a good-sized county of it. The planet owned oceans,
+and they knew only small brooks and one river which, where they knew it,
+was assuredly less than two hundred yards across. And they faced stark
+disaster that was not strictly a local one, but beyond their experience
+and hopelessly beyond their ability to face.
+
+They were superior to the insects about them only in the fact they
+realized what was threatening them.
+
+The disaster was the red puffballs.
+
+But it was night. The soft, blanketing darkness of a cloud-wrapped world
+lay all about. Burl sat awake, wrapped in his magnificent velvet cloak,
+his spear beside him and the yard-long golden plumes of a moth's
+antennae bound to his forehead for a headdress. About him and his
+tribesmen were the swollen shapes of fungi, hiding the few things that
+could be seen in darkness. From the low-hanging clouds the nightly rain
+dripped down. Now a drop and then another drop; slowly, deliberately,
+persistently moisture fell from the skies.
+
+There was other sounds. Things flew through the blackness
+overhead--moths with mighty wing-beats that sometimes sent rhythmic
+wind-stirrings down to the tribe in its hiding-place. There were the
+deep pulsations of sound made by night-beetles aloft. There were the
+harsh noises of grasshoppers--they were rare--senselessly advertising
+their existence to nearby predators. Not too far from where Burl brooded
+came bright chirrupings where relatively small beetles roamed among the
+mushroom-forests, singing cheerfully in deep bass voices. They were
+searching for the underground tidbits which took the place of truffles
+their ancestors had lived on back on Earth.
+
+All seemed to be as it had been since the first humans were cast away
+upon this planet. And at night, indeed, the new danger subsided. The red
+puffballs did not burst after sunset. Burl sat awake, brooding in a new
+sort of frustration. He and all his tribe were plainly doomed--yet Burl
+had experienced too many satisfying sensations lately to be willing to
+accept the fact.
+
+The new red growths were everywhere. Months ago a storm-wind blew while
+somewhere, not too far distant, other red puffballs were bursting and
+sending their spores into the air. Since it was only a windstorm, there
+was no rain to wash the air clean of the lethal dust. The new kind of
+puffball--but perhaps it was not new: it could have thriven for
+thousands of years where it was first thrown as a sport from a
+genetically unstable parent--the new kind of puffball would not normally
+be spread in this fashion. By chance it had.
+
+There were dozens of the things within a quarter-mile, hundreds within a
+mile, and thousands upon thousands within the area the tribe normally
+foraged in. Burl had seen them even forty miles away, as yet immature.
+They would be deadly at one period alone--the time of their bursting.
+But there were limitations even to the deadliness of the red puffballs,
+though Burl had not yet discovered the fact. But as of now, they doomed
+the tribe.
+
+One woman panted and moaned in her exhausted sleep, a little way from
+where Burl tried to solve the problem presented by the tribe. Nobody
+else attempted to think it out. The others accepted doom with fatalistic
+hopelessness. Burl's leadership might mean extra food, but nothing could
+counter the doom awaiting them--so their thoughts seemed to run.
+
+But Burl doggedly reviewed the facts in the darkness, while the humans
+about him slept the sleep of those without hope and even without
+rebellion. There had been many burstings of the crimson puffballs. As
+many as four and five of the deadly dust-clouds had been seen spouting
+into the air at the same time. A small boy of the tribe had breathlessly
+told of seeing a hunting-spider killed by the red dust. Lana, the
+half-grown girl, had come upon one of the gigantic rhinoceros-beetles
+belly-up on the ground, already the prey of ants. She had snatched a
+huge, meat-filled joint and run away, faster than the ants could follow.
+A far-ranging man had seen a butterfly, with wings ten yards across, die
+in a dust-cloud. Another woman--Cori--had been nearby when a red cloud
+settled slowly over long, solid lines of black worker-ants bound on some
+unknown mission. Later she saw other workers carrying the dead bodies
+back to the ant-city to be used for food.
+
+Burl still sat wakeful and frustrated and enraged as the slow rain fell
+upon the toadstools that formed the tribe's lurking-place. He doggedly
+went over and over the problem. There were innumerable red puffballs.
+Some had burst. The others undoubtedly would burst. Anything that
+breathed the red dust died. With thousands of the puffballs around them
+it was unthinkable that any human in this place could escape breathing
+the red dust and dying. But it had not always been so. There had been a
+time when there were no red puffballs here.
+
+Burl's eyes moved restlessly over the sleeping forms limned by a patch
+of fox-fire. The feathery plumes rising from his head were outlined
+softly by the phosphorescence. His face was lined with a frown as he
+tried to think his own and his fellows' way out of the predicament.
+Without realizing it, Burl had taken it upon himself to think for his
+tribe. He had no reason to. It was simply a natural thing for him to do
+so, now that he had learned to think--even though his efforts were crude
+and painful as yet.
+
+Saya woke with a start and stared about. There had been no
+alarm,--merely the usual noises of distant murders and the songs of
+singers in the night. Burl moved restlessly. Saya stood up quietly, her
+long hair flowing about her. Sleepy-eyed, she moved to be near Burl. She
+sank to the ground beside him, sitting up--because the hiding-place was
+crowded and small--and dozed fitfully. Presently her head drooped to one
+side. It rested against his shoulder. She slept again.
+
+This simple act may have been the catalyst which gave Burl the solution
+to the problem. Some few days before, Burl had been in a far-away place
+where there was much food. At the time he'd thought vaguely of finding
+Saya and bringing her to that place. He remembered now that the red
+puffballs flourished there as well as here--but there had been other
+dangers in between, so the only half-formed purpose had been abandoned.
+Now, though, with Saya's head resting against his shoulder, he
+remembered the plan. And then the stroke of genius took place.
+
+He formed the idea of a journey which was not a going-after-food. This
+present dwelling-place of the tribe had been free of red puffballs until
+only recently. There must be other places where there were no red
+puffballs. He would take Saya and his tribesmen to such a place.
+
+It was really genius. The people of Burl's tribe had no purposes, only
+needs--for food and the like. Burl had achieved abstract thought--which
+previously had not been useful on the forgotten planet and, therefore,
+not practised. But it was time for humankind to take a more fitting
+place in the unbalanced ecological system of this nightmare world, time
+to change that unbalance in favor of humans.
+
+When dawn came, Burl had not slept at all. He was all authority and
+decision. He had made plans.
+
+He spoke sternly, loudly--which frightened people conditioned to be
+furtive--holding up his spear as he issued commands. His timid
+tribesfolk obeyed him meekly. They felt no loyalty to him or confidence
+in his decisions yet, but they were beginning to associate obedience to
+him with good things. Food, for one.
+
+Before the day fully came, they made loads of the remaining edible
+mushroom and uneaten meat. It was remarkable for humans to leave their
+hiding-place while they still had food to eat, but Burl was implacable
+and scowling. Three men bore spears at Burl's urging. He brandished his
+long shaft confidently as he persuaded the other three to carry clubs.
+They did so reluctantly, even though previously they had killed ants
+with clubs. Spears, they felt, would have been better. They wouldn't be
+so close to the prey then.
+
+The sky became gray over all its expanse. The indefinite bright area
+which marked the position of the sun became established. It was part-way
+toward the center of the sky when the journey began. Burl had, of
+course, no determined course, only a destination--safety. He had been
+carried south, in his misadventure on the river. There were red
+puffballs to southward, therefore he ruled out that direction. He could
+have chosen the east and come upon an ocean, but no safety from the red
+spore-dust. Or he could have chosen the north. It was pure chance that
+he headed west.
+
+He walked confidently through the gruesome world of the lowlands,
+holding his spear in a semblance of readiness. Clad as he was, he made a
+figure at once valiant and rather pathetic. It was not too sensible for
+one young man--even one who had killed two spiders--to essay leading a
+tiny tribe of fearful folk across a land of monstrous ferocity and
+incredible malignance, armed only with a spear from a dead insect's
+armor. It was absurd to dress up for the enterprise in a velvety cloak
+made of a moth's wing, blue moth-fur for a loin-cloth, and merely
+beautiful golden plumes bobbing above his forehead.
+
+Probably, though, that gorgeousness had a good effect upon his
+followers. They surely could not reassure each other by their numbers!
+There was a woman with a baby in her arms--Cori. Three children of nine
+or ten, unable to resist the instinct to play even on so perilous a
+journey, ate almost constantly of the lumps of foodstuff they had been
+ordered to carry. After them came Dik, a long-legged adolescent boy with
+eyes that roved anxiously about. Behind him were two men. Dor with a
+short spear and Jak hefting a club, both of them badly frightened at the
+idea of fleeing from dangers they knew and were terrified by, to other
+dangers unknown and, consequently, more to be feared. The others trailed
+after them. Tet was rear-guard. Burl had separated the pair of boys to
+make them useful. Together they were worthless.
+
+It was a pathetic caravan, in a way. In all the rest of the Galaxy, man
+was the dominant creature. There was no other planet from one rim to the
+other where men did not build their cities or settlements with
+unconscious arrogance--completely disregarding the wishes of lesser
+things. Only on this planet did men hide from danger rather than destroy
+it. Only here could men be driven from their place by lower life-forms.
+And only here would a migration be made on foot, with men's eyes
+fearful, their bodies poised to flee at sight of something stronger and
+more deadly than themselves.
+
+They marched, straggling a little, with many waverings aside from a
+fixed line. Once Dik saw the trap-door of a trapdoor-spider's lair. They
+halted, trembling, and went a long way out of their intended path to
+avoid it. Once they saw a great praying-mantis a good half-mile off, and
+again they deviated from their proper route.
+
+Near midday their way was blocked. As they moved onward, a great,
+high-pitched sound could be heard ahead of them. Burl stopped; his face
+grew pinched. But it was only a stridulation, not the cries of creatures
+being devoured. It was a horde of ants by the thousands and hundreds of
+thousands, and nothing else.
+
+Burl went ahead to scout. And he did it because he did not trust anybody
+else to have the courage or intelligence to return with a report,
+instead of simply running away if the news were bad. But it happened to
+be a sort of action which would help to establish his position as leader
+of his tribe.
+
+Burl moved forward cautiously and presently came to an elevation from
+which he could see the cause of the tremendous waves of sound that
+spread out in all directions from the level plain before him. He waved
+to his followers to join him, and stood looking down at the
+extraordinary sight.
+
+When they reached his side--and Saya was first--the spectacle had not
+diminished. For quite half a mile in either direction the earth was
+black with ants. It was a battle of opposing armies from rival
+ant-cities. They snapped and bit at each other. Locked in vise-like
+embraces, they rolled over and over upon the ground, trampled underfoot
+by hordes of their fellows who surged over them to engage in equally
+suicidal combat. There was, of course, no thought of surrender or of
+quarter. They fought by thousands of pairs, their jaws seeking to crush
+each other's armor, snapping at each other's antennae, biting at each
+other's eyes....
+
+The noise was not like that of army-ants. This was the agonizing sound
+of ants being dismembered while still alive. Some of the creatures had
+only one or two or three legs left, yet struggled fiercely to entangle
+another enemy before they died. There were mad cripples, fighting
+insanely with head and thorax only, their abdomens sheared away. The
+whining battle-cry of the multitude made a deafening uproar.
+
+From either side of the battleground a wide path led back toward
+separate ant-cities which were invisible from Burl's position. These
+highways were marked by hurrying groups of ants--reinforcements rushing
+to the fight. Compared to the other creatures of this world the ants
+were small, but no lumbering beetle dared to march insolently in their
+way, nor did any carnivores try to prey upon them. They were dangerous.
+Burl and his tribesfolk were the only living things remaining near the
+battle-field--with one single exception.
+
+That exception was itself a tribe of ants, vastly less in number than
+the fighting creatures, and greatly smaller in size as well. Where the
+combatants were from a foot to fourteen inches long, these guerilla-ants
+were no more than the third of a foot in length. They hovered
+industriously at the edge of the fighting, not as allies to either
+nation, but strictly on their own account. Scurrying among the larger,
+fighting ants with marvelous agility, they carried off piecemeal the
+bodies of the dead and valiantly slew the more gravely wounded for the
+same purpose.
+
+They swarmed over the fighting-ground whenever the tide of battle
+receded. Caring nothing for the origin of the quarrel and espousing
+neither side, these opportunists busily salvaged the dead and
+still-living debris of the battle for their own purposes.
+
+Burl and his followers were forced to make a two-mile detour to avoid
+the battle. The passage between bodies of scurrying reinforcements was a
+matter of some difficulty. Burl hurried the others past a route to the
+front, reeking of formic acid, over which endless regiments and
+companies of ants moved frantically to join in the fight. They were
+intensely excited. Antennae waving wildly, they rushed to the front and
+instantly flung themselves into the fray, becoming lost and
+indistinguishable in the black mass of fighting creatures.
+
+The humans passed precariously between two hurrying battalions--Dik and
+Tet pausing briefly to burden themselves with prey--and hurried on to
+leave as many miles as possible behind them before nightfall. They never
+knew any more about the battle. It could have started over anything at
+all--two ants from the different cities may have disputed some tiny bit
+of carrion and soon been reinforced by companions until the military
+might of both cities was engaged. Once it had started, of course, the
+fighters knew whom to fight if not why they did so. The inhabitants of
+the two cities had different smells, which served them as uniforms.
+
+But the outcome of the war would hardly matter. Not to the fighters,
+certainly. There were many red mushrooms in this area. If either of the
+cities survived at all, it would be because its nursery-workers lived
+upon stored food as they tended the grubs until the time of the spouting
+red dust had ended.
+
+Burl's folk saw many of the red puffballs burst during the day. More
+than once they came upon empty, flaccid parchment sacs. More often still
+they came upon red puffballs not yet quite ready to emit their murderous
+seed.
+
+That first night the tribe hid among the bases of giant puffballs of a
+more familiar sort. When touched they would shoot out a puff of white
+powder resembling smoke. The powder was harmless fortunately and the
+tribe knew that fact. Although not toxic, the white powder was identical
+in every other way to the terrible red dust from which the tribe fled.
+
+That night Burl slept soundly. He had been without rest for two days and
+a night. And he was experienced in journeying to remote places. He knew
+that they were no more dangerous than familiar ones. But the rest of the
+tribe, and even Saya, were fearful and terrified. They waited timorously
+all through the dark hours for menacing sounds to crash suddenly through
+the steady dripping of the nightly rain around them.
+
+The second day's journey was not unlike the first. The following day,
+they came upon a full ten-acre patch of giant cabbages bigger than a
+family dwelling. Something in the soil, perhaps, favored vegetation over
+fungi. The dozens of monstrous vegetables were the setting for riotous
+life: great slugs ate endlessly of the huge green leaves--and things
+preyed on them; bees came droning to gather the pollen of the flowers.
+And other things came to prey on the predators in their turn.
+
+There was one great cabbage somewhat separate from the rest. After a
+long examination of the scene, Burl daringly led quaking Jon and Jak to
+the attack. Dor splendidly attacked elsewhere, alone. When the tribe
+moved on, there was much meat, and everyone--even the children--wore
+loin-cloths of incredibly luxurious fur.
+
+There were perils, too. On the fifth day of the tribe's journey Burl
+suddenly froze into stillness. One of the hairy tarantulas which lived
+in burrows with a concealed trap-door at ground-level, had fallen upon a
+scarabeus beetle and was devouring it only a hundred yards ahead. The
+tribesfolk trembled as Burl led them silently back and around by a safe
+detour.
+
+But all these experiences were beginning to have an effect. It was
+becoming a matter of course that Burl should give orders which others
+should obey. It was even becoming matter-of-fact that the possession of
+food was not a beautiful excuse to hide from all danger, eating and
+dozing until all the food was gone. Very gradually the tribe was
+developing the notion that the purpose of existence was not solely to
+escape awareness of peril, but to foresee and avoid it. They had no
+clear-cut notion of purpose as yet. They were simply outgrowing
+purposelessness. After a time they even looked about them with, dim
+stirrings of an attitude other than a desperate alertness for danger.
+
+Humans from any other planet, surely, would have been astounded at the
+vistas of golden mushrooms stretching out in forests on either hand and
+the plains with flaking surfaces given every imaginable color by the
+moulds and rusts and tiny flowering yeasts growing upon them. They would
+have been amazed by the turgid pools the journeying tribe came upon,
+where the water was concealed by a thick layer of slime through which
+enormous bubbles of foul-smelling gas rose to enlarge to preposterous
+size before bursting abruptly.
+
+Had they been as ill-armed as Burl's folk, though, visitors from other
+planets would have been at least as timorous. Lacking highly specialized
+knowledge of the ways of insects on this world even well-armed visitors
+would have been in greater danger.
+
+But the tribe went on without a single casualty. They had fleeting
+glimpses of the white spokes of symmetrical spider-webs whose least
+thread no member of the tribe could break.
+
+Their immunity from disaster--though in the midst of danger--gave them a
+certain all-too-human concentration upon discomfort. Lacking calamities,
+they noticed their discomforts and grew weary of continual traveling. A
+few of the men complained to Burl.
+
+For answer, he pointed back along the way they had come. To the right a
+reddish dust-cloud was just settling, and to the rear rose another as
+they looked.
+
+And on this day a thing happened which at once gave the complainers the
+rest they asked for, and proved the fatality of remaining where they
+were. A child ran aside from the path its elders were following. The
+ground here had taken on a brownish hue. As the child stirred up the
+surface mould with his feet, dust that had settled was raised up again.
+It was far too thin to have any visible color. But the child suddenly
+screamed, strangling. The mother ran frantically to snatch him up.
+
+The red dust was no less deadly merely because it had settled to the
+ground. If a storm-wind came now--but they were infrequent under the
+forgotten planet's heavy bank of clouds--the fallen red dust could be
+raised up again and scattered about until there would be no living thing
+anywhere which would not gasp and writhe--and die.
+
+But the child would not die. He would suffer terribly and be weak for
+days. In the morning he could be carried.
+
+When night began to darken the sky, the tribe searched for a
+hiding-place. They came upon a shelf-like cliff, perhaps twenty or
+thirty feet high, slanting toward the line of the tribesmen's travel.
+Burl saw black spots in it--openings. Burrows. He watched them as the
+tribe drew near. No bees or wasps went in or out. He watched long enough
+to be sure.
+
+When they were close, he was certain. Ordering the others to wait, he
+went forward to make doubly sure. The appearance of the holes reassured
+him. Dug months before by mining-bees, gone or dead now, the entrances
+to the burrows were weathered and bedraggled. Burl explored, first
+sniffing carefully at each opening. They were empty. This would be
+shelter for the night. He called his followers, and they crawled into
+the three-foot tunnels to hide.
+
+Burl stationed himself near the outer edge of one of them to watch for
+signs of danger. Night had not quite fallen. Jon and Dor, hungry, went
+off to forage a little way beyond the cliff. They would be cautious and
+timid, taking no risks whatever.
+
+Burl waited for the return of his explorers. Meanwhile he fretted over
+the meaning of the stricken child. Stirred-up red dust was dangerous.
+The only time when there would be no peril from it would be at night,
+when the dripping rainfall of the dark hours turned the surface of this
+world into thin shine. It occurred to Burl that it would be safe to
+travel at night, so far as the red dust was concerned. He rejected the
+idea instantly. It was unthinkable to travel at night for innumerable
+other reasons.
+
+Frowning, he poked his spear idly at a tumbled mass of tiny parchment
+cup-like things near the entrance of a cave. And instantly movement
+became visible. Fifty, sixty, a hundred infinitesimal creatures, no more
+than half an inch in length, made haste to hide themselves among the
+thimble-sized paperlike cups. They moved with extraordinary clumsiness
+and immense effort, seemingly only by contortions of their
+greenish-black bodies. Burl had never seen any creature progress in such
+a slow and ineffective fashion. He drew one of the small creatures back
+with the point of his spear and examined it from a safe distance.
+
+He picked it up on his spear and brought it close to his eyes. The thing
+redoubled its frenzied movements. It slipped off the spear and plopped
+upon the soft moth-fur he wore about his middle. Instantly, as if it
+were a conjuring-trick, the insect vanished. Burl searched for minutes
+before he found it hidden deep in the long, soft hairs of his garment,
+resting motionless and seemingly at ease.
+
+It was the larval form of a beetle, fragments of whose armor could be
+seen near the base of the clayey cliffside. Hidden in the remnants of
+its egg-casings, the brood of minute things had waited near the opening
+of the mining-bee tunnel. It was their gamble with destiny when
+mining-bee grubs had slept through metamorphosis and come uncertainly
+out of the tunnel for the first time, that some or many of the larvae
+might snatch the instant's chance to fasten to the bees' legs and writhe
+upward to an anchorage in their fur. It happened that this particular
+batch of eggs had been laid after the emergence of the grubs. They had
+no possible chance of fulfilling their intended role as parasites on
+insects of the order hymenoptera. They were simply and matter-of-factly
+doomed by the blindness of instinct, which had caused them to be placed
+where they could not possibly survive.
+
+On the other hand, if one or many of them had found a lurking-place, the
+offspring of their host would have been doomed. The place filled by
+oil-beetle larvae in the scheme of things is the place--or one of the
+places--reserved for creatures that limit the number of mining-bees.
+When a bee-louse-infested mining-bee has made a new tunnel, stocked it
+with honey for its young, and then laid one egg to float on that pool of
+nourishment and hatch and feed and ultimately grow to be another
+mining-bee--at that moment of egg-laying, one small bee-louse detaches
+itself. It remains zestfully in the provisioned cell to devour the egg
+for which the provisions were accumulated. It happily consumes those
+provisions and, in time, an oil-beetle crawls out of the tunnel a
+mining-bee so laboriously prepared.
+
+Burl had no difficulty in detaching the small insect and casting it
+away, but in doing so he discovered that others had hidden themselves in
+his fur without his knowledge. He plucked them away and found more.
+While savages can be highly tolerant of vermin too small to be seen,
+they feel a peculiar revolt against serving as host to creatures of
+sensible size. Burl reacted violently--as once he had reacted to the
+discovery of a leech clinging to his heel. He jerked off his loin-cloth
+and beat it savagely with his spear.
+
+When it was clean, he still felt a wholly unreasonable sense of
+humiliation. It was not clearly thought out, of course. Burl feared huge
+insects too much to hate them. But that small creatures should fasten
+upon him produced a completely irrational feeling of outrage. For the
+first time in very many years or centuries a human being upon the
+forgotten planet felt that he had been insulted. His dignity had been
+assailed. Burl raged.
+
+But as he raged, a triumphant shout came from nearby. Jon and Dor were
+returning from their foraging, loaded down with edible mushroom. They,
+also, had taken a step upward toward the natural dignity of men. They
+had so far forgotten their terror as to shout in exultation at their
+find of food. Up to now, Burl had been the only man daring to shout. Now
+there were two others.
+
+In his overwrought state this was also enraging. The result of hurt
+vanity on two counts was jealousy, and the result of jealousy was a
+crazy foolhardiness. Burl ground his teeth and insanely resolved to do
+something so magnificent, so tremendous, so utterly breathtaking that
+there could be no possible imitation by anybody else. His thinking was
+not especially clear. Part of his motivation had been provided by the
+oil-beetle larvae. He glared about him at the deepening dusk, seeking
+some exploit, some glamorous feat, to perform immediately, even in the
+night.
+
+He found one.
+
+
+
+
+_7. JOURNEY THROUGH DEATH_
+
+
+It was late dusk and the reddened clouds overhead were deepening
+steadily toward black. Dark shadows hung everywhere. The clay cliff cut
+off all vision to one side, but elsewhere Burl could see outward until
+the graying haze blotted out the horizon. Here and there, bees droned
+homeward to hive or burrow. Sometimes a slender, graceful wasp passed
+overhead, its wings invisible by the swiftness of their vibration.
+
+A few butterflies lingered hungrily in the distance, seeking the few
+things they could still feast upon. No moth had wakened yet to the
+night. The cloud-bank grew more sombre. The haze seemed to close in and
+shrink the world that Burl could see.
+
+He watched, raging, for the sight that would provide him with the
+triumph to end all triumphs among his followers. The soft, down-reaching
+fingers of the night touched here and there and the day ended at those
+spots. Then, from the heart of the deep redness to the west a flying
+creature came. It was a beautiful thing--a yellow emperor
+butterfly--flapping eastward with great sail-like velvet wings that
+seemed black against the sunset. Burl saw it sweep across the incredible
+sky, alight delicately, and disappear behind a mass of toadstools
+clustered so thickly they seemed nearly a hillock and not a mass of
+growing things.
+
+Then darkness closed in completely, but Burl still stared where the
+yellow emperor had landed. There was that temporary, utter quiet when
+day-things were hidden and night-things had not yet ventured out.
+Fox-fire glowed. Patches of pale phosphorescence--luminous
+mushrooms--shone faintly in the dark.
+
+Presently Burl moved through the night. He could imagine the yellow
+emperor in its hiding-place, delicately preening slender limbs before it
+settled down to rest until the new day dawned. He had noted landmarks,
+to guide himself. A week earlier and his blood would have run cold at
+the bare thought of doing what he did now. In mere cool-headed
+detachment he would have known that what he did was close to madness.
+But he was neither cool-headed nor detached.
+
+He crossed the clear ground before the low cliff. But for the fox-fire
+beacons he would have been lost instantly. The slow drippings of rain
+began. The sky was dead black. Now was the time for night-things to fly,
+and male tarantulas to go seeking mates and prey. It was definitely no
+time for adventuring.
+
+Burl moved on. He found the close-packed toadstools by the process of
+running into them in the total obscurity. He fumbled, trying to force
+his way between them. It could not be done; they grew too close and too
+low. He raged at this impediment. He climbed.
+
+This was insanity. Burl stood on spongy mushroom-stuff that quivered and
+yielded under his weight. Somewhere something boomed upward, rising on
+fast-beating wings into blackness. He heard the pulsing drone of
+four-inch mosquitos close by. He moved forward, the fungus support
+swaying, so that he did not so much walk as stagger over the
+close-packed mushroom heads. He groped before him with spear and panted
+a little. There was a part of him which was bitterly afraid, but he
+raged the more furiously because if once he gave way even to caution, it
+would turn to panic.
+
+Burl would have made a strange spectacle in daylight gaudily clothed as
+he was in soft blue fur and velvet cloak, staggering over swaying
+insecurity, coddling ferocity in himself against the threat of fear.
+
+Then his spear told him there was emptiness ahead. Something moved,
+below. He heard and felt it stirring the toadstool-stalks on which he
+stood.
+
+Burl raised his spear, grasping it in both hands. He plunged down with
+it, stabbing fiercely.
+
+The spear struck something vastly more resistant than any mushroom could
+be. It penetrated. Then the stabbed thing moved as Burl landed upon it,
+flinging him off his feet, but he clung to the firmly imbedded weapon.
+And if his mouth had opened for a yell of victory as he plunged down,
+the nature of the surface on which he found himself, and the kind of
+movement he felt, turned that yell into a gasp of horror.
+
+It wasn't the furry body of a butterfly he had landed on; his spear
+hadn't pierced such a creature's soft flesh. He had leaped upon the
+broad, hard back of a huge, meat-eating, nocturnal beetle. His spear had
+pierced not the armor, but the leathery joint-tissue between head and
+thorax.
+
+The giant creature rocketed upward with Burl clinging to his spear. He
+held fast with an agonized strength. His mount rose from the blackness
+of the ground into the many times more terrifying blackness of the air.
+It rose up and up. If Burl could have screamed, he would have done so,
+but he could not cry out. He could only hold fast, glassy-eyed.
+
+Then he dropped. Wind roared past him. The great insect was clumsy at
+flying. All beetles are. Burl's weight and the pain it felt made its
+flying clumsier still. There was a semi-liquid crashing and an impact.
+Burl was torn loose and hurled away. He crashed into the spongy top of a
+mushroom and came to rest with his naked shoulder hanging halfway over
+some invisible drop. He struggled.
+
+He heard the whining drone of his attempted prey. It rocketed aloft
+again. But there was something wrong with it. With his weight applied to
+the spear as he was torn free, Burl had twisted the weapon in the wound.
+It had driven deeper, multiplying the damage of the first stab.
+
+The beetle crashed to earth again, nearby. As Burl struggled again, the
+mushroom-stalk split and let him gently to the ground.
+
+He heard the flounderings of the great beetle in the darkness. It
+mounted skyward once more, its wing-beats no longer making a sustained
+note. It thrashed the air irregularly and wildly.
+
+Then it crashed again.
+
+There was seeming silence, save for the steady drip-drip of the rain.
+And Burl came out of his half-mad fear: he suddenly realized that he
+had slain a victim even more magnificent than a spider, because this
+creature was meat.
+
+He found himself astonishedly running toward the spot where the beetle
+had last fallen.
+
+But he heard it struggle aloft once more. It was wounded to death. Burl
+felt certain of it this time. It floundered in mid-air and crashed
+again.
+
+He was within yards of it before he checked himself. Now he was
+weaponless, and the gigantic insect flung itself about madly on the
+ground, striking out with colossal wings and limbs, fighting it knew not
+what. It struggled to fly, crashed, and fought its way off the
+ground--ever more weakly--then smashed again into mushrooms. There it
+floundered horribly in the darkness.
+
+Burl drew near and waited. It was still, but pain again drove it to a
+senseless spasm of activity.
+
+Then it struck against something. There was a ripping noise and
+instantly the close, peppery, burning smell of the red dust was in the
+air. The beetle had floundered into one of the close-packed red
+puffballs, tightly filled with the deadly red spores. The red dust would
+not normally have been released at night. With the nightly rain, it
+would not travel so far or spread so widely.
+
+Burl fled, panting.
+
+Behind him he heard his victim rise one last time, spurred to
+impossible, final struggle by the anguish caused by the breathed-in red
+dust. It rose clumsily into the darkness in its death-throes and crashed
+to the ground again for the last time.
+
+In time to come, Burl and his followers might learn to use the red-dust
+puffballs as weapons--but not how to spread them beyond their normal
+range. But now, Burl was frightened. He moved hastily sidewise. The dust
+would travel down-wind. He got out of its possible path.
+
+There could be no exultation where the red dust was. Burl suddenly
+realized what had happened to him. He had been carried aloft an unknown
+though not-great distance, in an unknown direction. He was separated
+from his tribe, with no faintest idea how to find them in the darkness.
+And it was night.
+
+He crouched under the nearest huge toadstool and waited for the dawn,
+listening dry-throated for the sound of death coming toward him through
+the night.
+
+But only the wind-beats of night-fliers came to his ears, and the
+discordant notes of gray-bellied truffle-beetles as they roamed the
+mushroom thickets, seeking the places beneath which--so their adapted
+instincts told them--fungoid dainties, not too much unlike the truffles
+of Earth, awaited the industrious miner. And, of course, there was that
+eternal, monotonous dripping of the raindrops, falling at irregular
+intervals from the sky.
+
+Red puffballs did not burst at night. They would not burst anyhow,
+except at one certain season of their growth. But Burl and his folk had
+so far encountered the over-hasty ones, bursting earlier than most. The
+time of ripeness was very nearly here, though. When day came again, and
+the chill dampness of the night was succeeded by the warmth of the
+morning, almost the first thing Burl saw in the gray light was a tall
+spouting of brownish-red stuff leaping abruptly into the air from a
+burst red parchment-like sphere.
+
+He stood up and looked anxiously all around. Here and there, all over
+the landscape, slowly and at intervals, the plumes of fatal red sprang
+into the air. There was nothing quite like it anywhere else. An ancient
+man, inhabiting Earth, might have likened the appearance to that of a
+scattered and leisurely bombardment. But Burl had no analogy for them.
+
+He saw something hardly a hundred yards from where he had hidden during
+the night. The dead beetle lay there, crumpled and limp. Burl eyed it
+speculatively. Then he saw something that filled him with elation. The
+last crash of the beetle to the ground had driven his spear deeply
+between the joints of the corselet and neck. Even if the red dust had
+not finished the creature, the spear-point would have ended its life.
+
+He was thrilled once more by his superlative greatness. He made due note
+that he was a mighty slayer. He took the antennae as proof of his valor
+and hacked off a great barb-edged leg for meat. And then he remembered
+that he did not know how to find his fellow-tribesmen. He had no idea
+which way to go.
+
+Even a civilized man would have been at a loss, though he would have
+hunted for an elevation from which to look for the cliff hiding-place of
+the tribe. But Burl had not yet progressed so far. His wild ride of the
+night before had been at random, and the chase after the wounded beetle
+no less dictated by chance. There was no answer.
+
+He set off anxiously, searching everywhere. But he had to be alert for
+all the dangers of an inimical world while keeping, at the same time, an
+extremely sharp eye out for bursting red puffballs.
+
+At the end of an hour he thought he saw familiar things. Then he
+recognized the spot. He had come back to the dead beetle. It was already
+the center of a mass of small black bodies which pulled and hacked at
+the tough armor, gnawing out great lumps of flesh to be carried to the
+nearest ant-city.
+
+Burl set off again, very carefully avoiding any place that he recognized
+as having been seen that morning. Sometimes he walked through
+mushroom-thickets--dangerous places to be in--and sometimes over
+relatively clear ground colored exotically with varicolored fungi. More
+than once he saw the clouds of red stuff spurting in the distance. Deep
+anxiety filled him. He had no idea that there were such things as points
+of the compass. He knew only that he needed desperately to find his
+tribesfolk again.
+
+They, of course, had given him up for dead. He had vanished in the
+night. Old Tama complained of him shrilly. The night, to them, meant
+death. Jon quaked watchfully all through it. When Burl did not come to
+the feast of mushroom that Jon and Dor had brought back, they sought
+him. They even called timidly into the darkness. They heard the
+throbbing of huge wings as a great creature rose desperately into the
+sky, but they did not associate that sound with Burl. If they had, they
+would have been instantly certain of his fate.
+
+As it was, the tribe's uneasiness grew into terror which rapidly turned
+to despair. They began to tremble, wondering what they would do with no
+bold chieftain to guide them. He was the first man to command allegiance
+from others in much too long a period, on the forgotten planet, but the
+submission of his followers had been the more complete for its novelty.
+His loss was the more appalling. Burl had mistaken the triumphant shout
+of the foragers. He'd thought it independence of him--rivalry. Actually,
+the men dared to shout only because they felt secure under his
+leadership. When they accepted the fact that he had vanished--and to
+disappear in the night had always meant death--their old fears and
+timidity returned. To them it was added despair.
+
+They huddled together and whispered to one another of their fright. They
+waited in trembling silence through all the long night. Had a
+hunting-spider appeared, they would have fled in as many directions as
+there were people, and undoubtedly all would have perished. But day came
+again, and they looked into each other's eyes and saw the self-same
+fear. Saya was probably the most pitiful of the group. Her face was
+white and drawn beyond that of any one else.
+
+They did not move when day brightened. They remained about the
+bee-tunnels, speaking in hushed tones, huddled together, searching all
+the horizon for enemies. Saya would not eat, but sat still, staring
+before her in numbed grief. Burl was dead.
+
+Atop the low cliff a red puffball glistened in the morning light. Its
+tough skin was taut and bulging, resisting the pressure of the spores
+within. Slowly, as the morning wore on, some of the moisture that kept
+the skin stretchable dried. The parchment-like stuff contracted. The
+tautness of the spore-packed envelope grew greater. It became
+insupportable.
+
+With a ripping sound, the tough skin split across and a rush of the
+compressed spores shot skyward.
+
+The tribesmen saw and cried out and fled. The red stuff drifted down
+past the cliff-edge. It drifted toward the humans. They ran from it. Jon
+and Tama ran fastest. Jak and Cori and the other were not far behind.
+Saya trailed, in her despair.
+
+Had Burl been there, matters would have been different. He had already
+such an ascendancy over the minds of the others that even in panic they
+would have looked to see what he did. And he would have dodged the
+slowly drifting death-cloud by day, as he had during the night. But his
+followers ran blindly.
+
+As Saya fled after the others she heard shrieks of fright to the left
+and ran faster. She passed by a thick mass of distorted fungi in which
+there was a sudden stirring and panic lent wings to her feet. She
+fled blindly, panting. Ahead was a great mass of stuff--red
+puffballs--showing here and there among great fanlike growths, some
+twelve feet high, that looked like sponges.
+
+She fled past them and swerved to hide herself from anything that might
+be pursuing by sight. Her foot slipped on the slimy body of a shell-less
+snail and she fell heavily, her head striking a stone. She lay still.
+
+Almost as if at a signal a red puffball burst among the fanlike growths.
+A thick, dirty-red cloud of dust shot upward, spread and billowed and
+began to settle slowly toward the ground again. It moved as it settled
+flowing over the inequalities of die ground as a monstrous snail or
+leach might have done, sucking from all breathing creatures the life
+they had within them. It was a hundred yards away, then fifty, then
+thirty....
+
+Had any member of the tribe watched it, the red dust might have seemed
+malevolently intelligent. But when the edges of the dust-cloud were no
+more than twenty yards from Saya's limp body, an opposing breeze sprang
+up. It was a vagrant, fitful little breeze that halted the red cloud and
+threw it into some confusion, sending it in a new direction. It passed
+Saya without hurting her, though one of its misty tendrils reached out
+as if to snatch at her in slow-motion. But it passed her by.
+
+Saya lay motionless on the ground. Only her breast rose and fell
+shallowly. A tiny pool of red gathered near her head.
+
+Some thirty feet from where she lay, there were three miniature
+toadstools in a clump, bases so close together that they seemed but one.
+From between two of them, however, two tufts of reddish thread appeared.
+They twinkled back and forth and in and out. As if reassured, two
+slender antennae followed, then bulging eyes and a small, black body
+with bright-red scalloped markings upon it.
+
+It was a tiny beetle no more than eight inches long--a sexton or
+burying-beetle. Drawing near Saya's body it scurried onto her flesh. It
+went from end to end of her figure in a sort of feverish haste. Then it
+dived into the ground beneath her shoulder, casting back a little shower
+of hastily-dug dirt as it disappeared.
+
+Ten minutes later, another small creature appeared, precisely like the
+first. Upon the heels of the second came a third. Each made the same
+hasty examination and dived under her unmoving form.
+
+Presently the ground seemed to billow at a spot along Saya's side and
+then at another. Ten minutes after the arrival of the third beetle, a
+little rampart had reared itself all about Saya's body, following her
+outlines precisely. Then her body moved slightly, in little jerks,
+seeming to settle perhaps half an inch into the ground.
+
+The burying-beetles were of that class of creatures which exploited the
+bodies of the fallen. Working from below, they excavated the earth. When
+there was a hollow space below they turned on their backs and thrust up
+with their legs, jerking at the body until it sank into the space they
+had made ready. The process would be repeated until at last all their
+dead treasures had settled down below the level of the surrounding
+ground. The loosened dirt then fell in at the sides, completing the
+inhumation. Then, in the underground darkness, it was the custom for the
+beetles to feast magnificently, gorging themselves upon the food they
+had hidden from other scavengers--and of course rearing their young also
+upon its substance.
+
+Ants and flies were rivals of these beetles and not infrequently the
+sexton-beetles came upon carrion after ants had taken their toll, and
+when it already swarmed with maggots. But in this case Saya was not
+dead. The fact that she still lived, though unconscious, was the factor
+that had given the sexton-beetles this splendid opportunity.
+
+She breathed gently and irregularly, her face drawn with the sorrow of
+the night before, while the desperately hurrying beetles swarmed about
+beneath her body, channelling away the soil so she would sink lower and
+lower into it. She descended slowly, a half-inch by a half-inch. The
+bright-red tufts of thread appeared again and a beetle made its way to
+the open air. It moved hastily about, inspecting the progress of the
+work.
+
+It dived below again. Another inch and, after a long time, another, were
+excavated.
+
+Matters still progressed when Burl stepped out from a group of
+overshadowing toadstools and halted. He cast his eyes over the landscape
+and was struck by its familiarity. He was, in fact, very near the spot
+he had left the night before in that maniacal ride on the back of a
+flying beetle. He moved back and forth, trying to account for the
+feeling of recognition.
+
+He saw the low cliff, then, and moved eagerly toward it, passing within
+fifty feet of Saya's body, now more than half-buried in the ground. The
+loose dirt around the outline of her figure was beginning to topple in
+little rivulets upon her. One of her shoulders was already half-screened
+from view. Burl passed on, unseeing.
+
+He hurried a little. In a moment he recognized his location exactly.
+There were the mining-bee burrows. There was a thrown-away lump of
+edible mushroom, cast aside as the tribesfolk fled.
+
+His feet stirred up a fine dust, and he stopped short. A red puffball
+had burst here. It fully accounted for the absence of the tribe, and
+Burl sweated in sudden fear. He thought instantly of Saya. He went
+carefully to make sure. This was, absolutely, the hiding place of the
+tribe. There was another mushroom-fragment. There was a spear, thrown
+down by one of the men in his flight. Red dust had settled upon the
+spear and the mushroom-fragments.
+
+Burl turned back, hurrying again, but taking care to disturb the dust no
+more than he could possibly help.
+
+The little excavation into which Saya was sinking inch by inch was not
+in his path. Her body no longer lay above the ground, but in it. Burl
+went by, frantic with anxiety about the tribe, but about Saya most of
+all.
+
+Her body quivered and sank a fraction into the ground. Half a dozen
+small streams of earth were tumbling upon her. In minutes she would be
+wholly hidden from view.
+
+Burl went to beat among the mushroom-thickets, in quest of the bodies of
+his tribesfolk. They could have staggered out of the red dust and
+collapsed beyond. He would have shouted, but the deep sense of
+loneliness silenced him. His throat ached with grief. He searched on....
+
+There was a noise. From a huge clump of toadstools--perhaps the very one
+he had climbed over in the night--there came the sound of crashings and
+the breaking of the spongy stuff. Twin tapering antennae appeared, and
+then a monster beetle lurched into the open space, its ghastly mandibles
+gaping sidewise.
+
+It was all of eight feet long and supported by six crooked, saw-toothed
+legs. Huge, multiple eyes stared with preoccupation at the world. It
+advanced deliberately with clankings and clashings as of a hideous
+machine. Burl fled on the instant, running directly away from it.
+
+A little depression lay in the ground before him. He did not swerve, but
+made to jump over it. As he leaped he saw the color of bare flesh, Saya,
+limp and helpless, sinking slowly into the ground with tricklings of
+dirt falling down to cover her. It seemed to Burl that she quivered a
+little.
+
+Instantly there was a terrific struggle within Burl. Behind him was the
+giant meat-eating beetle; beneath him was Saya whom he loved. There was
+certain death lurching toward him on evilly crooked legs--and the life
+he had hoped for lay in a shallow pit. Of course he thought Saya dead.
+
+Perhaps it was rage, or despair, or a simple human madness which made
+him act otherwise than rationally. The things which raise humans above
+brute creation, however, are only partly reasonable. Most human
+emotions--especially the creditable ones--cannot be justified by reason,
+and very few heroic actions are based upon logical thought.
+
+Burl whirled as he landed, his puny spear held ready. In his left hand
+he held the haunch of a creature much like the one which clanked and
+rattled toward him. With a yell of insane defiance--completely beyond
+justification by reason--Burl flung that meat-filled leg at the monster.
+
+It hit. Undoubtedly, it hurt. The beetle seized it ferociously. It
+crushed it. There was meat in it, sweet and juicy.
+
+The beetle devoured it. It forgot the man standing there, waiting for
+death. It crunched the leg-joint of a cousin or brother, confusing the
+blow with the missile that had delivered it. When the tidbit was
+finished it turned and lumbered off to investigate another mushroom
+thicket. It seemed to consider then an enemy had been conquered and
+devoured and that normal life could go on.
+
+Then Burl stopped quickly, and dragged Saya from the grave the
+sexton-beetles had labored so feverishly to provide for her. Crumbled
+soil fell from her shoulders, from her face, and from her body. Three
+little eight-inch beetles with black and red markings scurried for cover
+in terrified haste. Burl carried Saya to a resting-place of soft mould
+to mourn over her.
+
+He was a completely ignorant savage, save that he knew more of the ways
+of insects than anybody anywhere else--the Ecological Service, which had
+stocked this planet, not being excepted. To Burl the unconsciousness of
+Saya was as death itself. Dumb misery smote him, and he laid her down
+gently and quite literally wept. He had been beautifully pleased with
+himself for having slain one flying beetle. But for Saya's seeming
+death, he would have been almost unbearable with pride over having put
+another to flight. But now he was merely a broken-hearted, very human
+young man.
+
+But a long time later Saya opened her eyes and looked about
+bewilderedly.
+
+They were in considerable danger for some time after that, because they
+were oblivious to everything but each other. Saya rested in
+half-incredulous happiness against Burl's shoulder as he told her
+jerkily of his attempt on a night-bound butterfly, which turned out to
+be a flying beetle that took him aloft. He told of his search for the
+tribe and then his discovery of her apparently lifeless body. When he
+spoke of the monster which had lurched from the mushroom thicket, and of
+the desperation with which he had faced it, Saya looked at him with
+warm, proud eyes. But Burl was abruptly struck with the remarkable
+convenience of that discovery. If his tribesmen could secure an ample
+supply of meat, they might defend themselves against attack by throwing
+it to their attackers. In fact, insects were so stupid that almost any
+object thrown quickly enough and fast enough, might be made to serve as
+sacrifices instead of themselves.
+
+A timid, frightened whisper roused them from their absorption. They
+looked up. The boy Dik stood some distance away, staring at them
+wide-eyed, almost convinced that he looked upon the living dead. A
+sudden movement on the part of either of them would have sent him
+bolting away. Two or three other bobbing heads gazed affrightedly from
+nearby hiding-places. Jon was poised for flight.
+
+The tribe had come back to its former hiding-place simply as a way to
+reassemble. They had believed both Burl and Saya dead, and they accepted
+Burl's death as their own doom. But now they stared.
+
+Burl spoke--fortunately without arrogance--and Dik and Tet came
+timorously from their hiding-places. The others followed, the tribe
+forming a frightened half-circle about the seated pair. Burl spoke again
+and presently one of the bravest--Cori--dared to approach and touch him.
+Instantly a babble of the crude labial language of the tribe broke out.
+Awed exclamations and questions filled the air.
+
+But Burl, for once, showed some common sense. Instead of a vainglorious
+recital, he merely cast down the long tapering antennae of the
+flying-beetle. They looked, and recognized their origin.
+
+Then Burl curtly ordered Dor and Jak to make a chair of their hands for
+Saya. She was weak from her fall and the loss of blood. The two men
+humbly advanced and obeyed. Then Burl curtly ordered the march resumed.
+
+They went on, more slowly than on previous days, but none-the-less
+steadily. Burl led them across-country, marching in advance with a
+matter-of-fact alertness for signs of danger. He felt more confidence
+than ever before. It was not fully justified, of course. Jon now
+retrieved the spear he had discarded. The small party fairly bristled
+with weapons. But Burl knew that they were liable to be cast away as
+impediments if flight seemed necessary.
+
+As he led the way Burl began to think busily in the manner that only
+leaders find necessary. He had taught his followers to kill ants for
+food, though they were still uneasy about such adventures. He had led
+them to attack great yellow grubs upon giant cabbages. But they had not
+yet faced any actual danger, as he had done. He must drive them to face
+something....
+
+The opportunity came that same day, in late afternoon. To westward the
+cloud-bank was barely beginning to show the colors that presage
+nightfall, when a bumble-bee droned heavily overhead, making for its
+home burrow. The little, straggling group of marching people looked up
+and saw the scanty load of pollen packed in the stiff bristles of the
+bee's hind-legs. It sped onward heavily, its almost transparent wings
+mere blurs in the air.
+
+It was barely fifty feet above the ground. Burl dropped his glance and
+tensed. A slender-waisted wasp was shooting upward from an ambush among
+the noisome fungi of this plain.
+
+The bee swerved and tried to escape. The wasp over-hauled it. The bee
+dodged frantically. It was a good four feet in length,--as large as the
+wasp, certainly--but it was more heavily built and could not make the
+speed of which the wasp was capable. It dodged with less agility. Twice,
+in desperation, it did manage to evade the plunging dives of the wasp,
+but the third time the two insects grappled in mid-air almost over the
+heads of the humans.
+
+They tumbled downward in a clawing, biting, tangle of bodies and legs.
+They hit the ground and rolled over and over. The bee struggled to
+insert her barbed sting in the more supple body of her adversary. She
+writhed and twisted desperately.
+
+But there came an instant of infinite confusion and the bee lay on her
+back. The wasp suddenly moved with that ghastly skilled precision of a
+creature performing an incredible feat instinctively, apparently unaware
+that it is doing so. The dazed bee was swung upright in a peculiarly
+artificial pose. The wasp's body curved, and its deadly, rapier-sharp
+sting struck....
+
+The bee was dead. Instantly. As if struck dead by lightning. The wasp
+had stung in a certain place in the neck-parts where all the nerve-cords
+pass. To sting there, the wasp had to bring its victim to a particular
+pose. It was precisely the trick of a _desnucador_, the butcher who
+kills cattle by severing the spinal cord. For the wasp's purposes the
+bee had to be killed in this fashion and no other.
+
+Burl began to give low-toned commands to his followers. He knew what was
+coming next, and so did they. When the sequel of the murder began he
+moved forward, his tribesmen wavering after him. This venture was
+actually one of the least dangerous they could attempt, but merely to
+attack a wasp was a hair-raising idea. Only Burl's prestige plus their
+knowledge made them capable of it.
+
+The second act of the murder-drama was gruesomeness itself. The
+pirate-wasp was a carnivore, but this was the season when the wasps
+raised young. Inevitably there was sweet honey in the half-filled crop
+of the bee. Had she arrived safely at the hive, the sweet and sticky
+liquid would have been disgorged for the benefit of bee-grubs. The wasp
+avidly set to work to secure that honey. The bee-carcass itself was
+destined for the pirate-wasp's own offspring, and that squirming
+monstrosity is even more violently carnivorous than its mother. The
+parent wasp set about abstracting the dead bee's honey, before taking
+the carcass to its young one, because honey is poisonous to the
+pirate-wasp's grub. Yet insects cannot act from solicitude or anything
+but instinct. And instinct must be maintained by lavish rewards.
+
+So the pirate-wasp sought its reward--an insane, insatiable, gluttonous
+satisfaction in the honey that was poison to its young. The wasp foiled
+its murdered victim upon its back again and feverishly pressed on the
+limp body to force out the honey. And this was the reason for its
+precise manner of murder. Only when killed by the destruction of all
+nerve-currents would the bee's body be left limp like this. Only a bee
+killed in this exact fashion would yield its honey to manipulation.
+
+The honey appeared, flowing from the dead bee's mouth. The wasp, in
+trembling, ghoulish ecstasy, devoured it as it appeared. It was lost to
+all other sights or sensations but its feast.
+
+And this was the moment when Burl signalled for the attack. The
+tribesmen's prey was deaf and blind and raptured. It was aware of
+nothing but the delight it savored. But the men wavered, nevertheless,
+when they drew near. Burl was first to thrust his spear powerfully into
+the trembling body.
+
+When he was not instantly destroyed the others took courage. Dor's spear
+penetrated the very vitals of the ghoul. Jak's club fell with terrific
+force upon the wasp's slender waist. There was a crackling, and the
+long, spidery limbs quivered and writhed. Then Burl struck again and the
+creature fell into two writhing halves.
+
+They butchered it rather messily, but Burl noticed that even as it died,
+sundered and pierced with spears, its long tongue licked out in one last
+rapturous taste of the honey that had been its undoing.
+
+Some time later, burdened with the pollen laden legs of the great bee,
+the tribe resumed its journey.
+
+Now Burl had men behind him. They were still timid and prone to flee at
+the least alarm, but they were vastly more dependable than they had
+been. They had attacked and slain a wasp whose sting would have killed
+any of them. They had done battle under the leadership of Burl, whose
+spear had struck the first blow. They were sharers of his glory and,
+therefore, much more nearly like the followers of a chieftain ought to
+be.
+
+Their new spirit was badly needed. The red puffballs were certainly no
+less numerous in the new territory the tribe traversed than in the
+territory they had left. And the season of their ripening' was further
+advanced. More and more of the ground showed the deadly rime of settled
+death-dust. To stay alive was increasingly difficult. When the full
+spore-casting season arrived, it would be impossible. And that season
+could not be far away.
+
+The very next day after the killing of the wasp, survival despite the
+red dust had begun to seem unimaginable. Where, earlier, one saw a
+red-dust cloud bursting here and there at intervals, on this day there
+was always a billowing mass of lethal vapor in the air. At no time was
+the landscape free of a moving mist of death. Usually there were three
+or four in sight at once. Often there were half a dozen. Once there were
+eight. It could be guessed that in one day more they would ripen in such
+monstrous numbers that anything which walked or flew or crawled must
+breathe in the spores and perish.
+
+And that day, just at sunset, the tribe came to the top of a small rise
+in the ground. For an hour they had been marching and countermarching to
+avoid the suddenly-billowing clouds of dust. Once they had been nearly
+hemmed in when three of the dull-red mists seemed to flow together,
+enclosing the three sides of a circle. They escaped then only by the
+most desperate of sprinting.
+
+But now they came to the little hillock and halted. Before them
+stretched a plain, all of four miles wide, colored a brownish brick-red
+by the red puffballs. The tribe had seen mushroom forests--they had
+lived in them--and knew of the dangers that lurked there. But the plain
+before them was not simply dangerous; it was fatal. To right and left it
+stretched as far as the eye could see, but away on its farther edge Burl
+caught a glimpse of flowing water.
+
+Over the plain itself a thin red haze seemed to float. It was simply a
+cloud of the deadly spores, dispersed and indefinite, but constantly
+replenished by the freshly bursting puffballs. While the tribesfolk
+stood and watched, thick columns of dust rose here and there and at the
+other place, too many to count. They settled again but left behind
+enough of the fine powder to keep a thin red haze over all the plain.
+This was a mass of literally millions of the deadly growths. Here was
+one place where no carnivorous beetles roamed and where no spiders
+lurked. There were nothing here but the sullen columns of dust and the
+haze that they left behind.
+
+And of course it would be nothing less than suicide to try to go back.
+
+
+
+
+_8. A FLIGHT CONTINUES_
+
+
+Burl kept his people alive until darkness fell. He had assigned watchers
+for each direction and when flight was necessary the adults helped the
+children to avoid the red dust. Four times they changed direction after
+shrill-voiced warnings. When night settled over the plain they were
+forced to come to a halt.
+
+But the puffballs were designed to burst by day. Stumbled into, they
+could split at any time, and the humans did hear some few of the tearing
+noises that denoted a spore-spout in the darkness. But after slow
+nightly rain began they heard no more.
+
+Burl led his people into the plain of red puffballs as soon as the rain
+had lasted long enough to wash down the red haze still hanging in the
+air and turn the fallen spores to mud.
+
+It was an enterprise of such absolute desperation that very likely no
+civilized man would have tried it. There were no stars, for guidance,
+nor compasses to show the way. There were no lights to enable them to
+dodge the deadly things they strove to escape, and there was no
+possibility of their keeping a straight course in the darkness. They had
+to trust to luck in perhaps the longest long-shot that humans every
+accepted as a gamble.
+
+Quaintly, they used the long antennae of a dead flying-beetle as
+sense-organs for themselves. They entered the red plain in a long single
+file, Burl leading the way with one of the two feathery whips extended
+before him. Saya helped him check on what lay in the darkness ahead, but
+made sure not to leave his side. Others trailed behind, hand in hand.
+
+Progress was slow. The sky was utter blackness, of course, but nowhere
+in the lowlands is there an absolute black. Where fox-fire doesn't burn
+without consuming, there are mushrooms with glows of their own. Rusts
+sometimes shone faintly. Naturally there were no fireflies or glow-worms
+of any sort; but neither were there any living things to hunt the tiny
+tribe as it moved half-blindly in single file through the plain of red
+puffballs. Within half an hour even Burl did not believe he had kept to
+his original line. An hour later they realized despairingly that they
+were marching helpless through puffballs which would make the air
+unbreathable at dawn. But they marched on.
+
+Once they smelled the rank odor of cabbages. They followed the scent and
+came upon them, glowing palely with parasitic moulds on their leaves.
+And there were living things here: huge caterpillars eating and eating,
+even in the dark, against the time of metamorphosis. Burl could have
+cried out infuriatedly at them because they were--so he assumed--immune
+to the death of the red dust. But the red dust was all about, and the
+smell of cabbages was not the smell of life.
+
+It could have been, of course. Caterpillars breathe like all insects at
+every stage of their development. But furry caterpillars breathe through
+openings which are covered over with matted fur. Here, that matted fur
+acted to filter the air. The eggs of the caterpillars had been laid
+before the puffballs were ready to burst. The time of spore-bearing
+would be over before the grubs were butterflies or moths. These
+creatures were safe against all enemies--even men. But men groped and
+blundered in the darkness simply because they did not think to take the
+fur garments they wore and hold them to their noses to serve as
+gas-masks or air-filters. The time for that would come, but not yet.
+
+With the docility of despair, Burl's tribe followed him through all the
+night. When the sky began to pale in the east, they numbly resigned
+themselves to death. But still they followed.
+
+And in the very early gray light--when only the very ripest of the red
+puffballs spouted toward a still-dark sky--Burl looked harassedly about
+him and could have groaned. He was in a little circular clearing, the
+deadly red things all about him. There was not yet light enough for
+colors to appear. There was merely a vast stillness everywhere, and a
+mocking hint of the hot and peppery scent of death-dust--now turned to
+mud--all about him.
+
+Burl dropped in bitter discouragement. Soon the misty dust-clouds would
+begin to move about; the reddish haze would form above all this
+space....
+
+Then, quite suddenly, he lifted his head and whooped. He had heard the
+sound of running water.
+
+His followers looked at him with dawning hope. Without a word to them,
+Burl began to run. They followed hastily and quickened their pace when
+his voice came back in a shout of triumph. In a moment they had emerged
+from the tangle of fungus growths to stand upon the banks of a wide
+river--the same river whose gleam Burl had seen the day before, from the
+farther side of the red puffball plain.
+
+Once before, Burl had floated down a river upon a mushroom raft. That
+journey had been involuntary. He had been carried far from his tribe and
+Saya, his heart filled with desolation. But now he viewed the
+swiftly-running current with delight.
+
+He cast his eyes up and down the bank. Here and there it rose in a low
+bluff and thick shelf-fungi stretched out above the water. They were
+adaptations of the fungi that once had grown on trees and now fed upon
+the incredibly nourishing earth-banks formed of dead growing things.
+Burl was busy in an instant, stabbing the relatively hard growths with
+his spear and striving to wrench them free. The tribesmen stared
+blankly, but at a snapped order they imitated him.
+
+Soon two dozen masses of firm, light fungus lay upon the shore. Burl
+began to explain what they were for, but Dor remonstrated. They were
+afraid to part from him. If they might embark on the same fungus-raft,
+it would be a different matter. Old Tama scolded him shrilly at the
+thought of separation. Jon trembled at the mere idea.
+
+Burl cast an apprehensive glance at the sky. Day was rapidly
+approaching. Soon the red puffballs would burst and shoot their
+dust-clouds into the air. This was no time to make stipulations. Then
+Saya spoke softly.
+
+Burl made the suggested great sacrifice. He took the gorgeous velvet
+cloak of moth-wing from his shoulder and tore it into a dozen long,
+irregular pieces along the lines of the sinews reinforcing it. He
+planted his spear upright in the largest raft, fastening the other
+cranky craft to it with the improvised lines.
+
+In a matter of minutes the small flotilla of rafts bobbed in the stream.
+One by one, Burl settled the folk upon them with stern commands about
+movement. Then he shoved them out from the bank. The collection of
+uneasy, floating things moved slowly out from shore to where the current
+caught them. Burl and Saya sat on the same section of fungus, the other
+trustful but frightened tribes-people clustered timorously about.
+
+As they began to move between the mushroom-lined banks of the river,
+and as the mist of nighttime lifted from its surface, columns of red
+dust spurted sullenly upward on the plain. In the light of dawn the
+deadly red haze was forming once more over the puffball plain.
+
+By that time, however, the unstable rafts were speeding down the river,
+bobbing and whirling in the stream, with wide-eyed people as their
+passengers gazing in wonderment at the shores.
+
+Five miles downstream, the red growths became less numerous and other
+forms of fungus took their places. Moulds and rusts covered the ground
+as grass did on more favored planets. Toadstools showed their creamy,
+rounded heads, and there were malformed things with swollen trunks and
+branches mocking the trees that were never seen in these lowlands. Once
+the tribesmen saw the grisly bulk of a hunting-spider outlined on the
+river-bank.
+
+All through the long day they rode the current, while the insect life
+that had been absent in the neighborhood of the death-plain became
+abundant again. Bees once more droned overhead, and wasps and
+dragonflies. Four-inch mosquitoes appeared, to be driven off with blows.
+Glittering beetles made droning or booming noises as they flew. Flies of
+every imaginable metallic hue flew about. Huge butterflies danced above
+the steaming land and running river in seeming ecstasy at simply being
+alive.
+
+All the thousand-and-one forms of insect life flew and crawled and swam
+and dived where the people of the rafts could see them. Water-beetles
+came lazily to the surface to snap at other insects on the surface. The
+shell-covered boats of caddis-flies floated in the eddies and
+backwaters.
+
+The day wore on and the shores flowed by. The tribesmen ate of their
+food and drank of the river. When afternoon came the banks fell away and
+the current slackened. The shores became indefinite. The river merged
+itself into a vast swamp from which came a continual muttering.
+
+The water seemed to grow dark when black mud took the place of the clay
+that had formed its bed. Then there appeared floating green things which
+did not move with the flowing water. They were the leaves of the
+water-lilies that managed to survive along with cabbages and a very few
+other plants in the midst of a fungus world. Twelve feet across, any one
+of the green leaves might have supported the whole of Burl's tribe.
+
+They became so numerous that only a relatively narrow, uncovered stream
+flowed between tens of acres of the flat, floating leaves. Here and
+there colossal waxen blossoms could be seen. Three men could hide in
+those enormous flowers. They exhaled an almost overpowering fragrance
+into the air.
+
+And presently the muttering sound that had been heard far away grew in
+volume to an intermittent deep-bass roar. It seemed to come from the
+banks on either side. It was the discordant croaking of frogs, eight
+feet in length, which lived and throve in this swamp. Presently the
+tribesfolk saw them: green giants sitting immobile upon the banks, only
+opening their huge mouths to croak.
+
+Here in the swamps there was such luxuriance of insect life that a
+normal tribal hunting-ground--in which tribesmen were not yet accustomed
+to hunt--would seem like a desert by comparison. Myriads of little
+midges, no more than three or four inches across their wings, danced
+above the water. Butterflies flew low, seemingly enamoured of their
+reflections in the glassy water.
+
+The people watched as if their eyes would become engorged by the strange
+new things they saw. Where the river split and split and divided again,
+there was nothing with which they were familiar. Mushrooms did not grow
+here. Moulds, yes. But there were cattails, with stalks like trees,
+towering thirty feet above the waterways.
+
+After a long, long time though, the streams began to rejoin each other.
+Then low hills loomed through the thicker haze that filled the air here.
+The river flowed toward and through them. And here a wall of high
+mountains rose toward the sky, but their height could not be guessed.
+They vanished in the mist even before the cloud-bank swallowed them.
+
+The river flowed through a river-gate, a water-gap in the mountains.
+While day still held fully bright, the bobbing rafts went whirling
+through a narrow pass with sheer walls that rose beyond all seeing in
+the mist. Here there was even some white water. Above it, spanning a
+chasm five hundred feet across, a banded spider had flung its web. The
+rafts floated close enough to see the spider, a monster even of its
+kind, its belly swollen to a diameter of yards. It hung motionless in
+the center of the snare as the humans swept beneath it.
+
+Then the mountains drew back and the tribe was in a valley where, look
+as they might, there was no single tawny-red puffball from whose
+spreading range the tribesmen were refugees. The rafts grounded and they
+waded ashore while still the day held. And there was food here in
+plenty.
+
+But darkness fell before they could explore. As a matter of precaution
+Burl and his folk found a hiding-place in a mushroom-thicket and hid
+until morning. The night-sounds were wholly familiar to them. The noise
+of katydids was louder than usual--the feminine sound of that name gives
+no hint of the sonorous, deep-toned notes the enlarged creatures
+uttered--and that implied more vegetation as compared with straight
+fungoid flora. A great many fireflies glowed in the darkness shrouding
+the hiding-place, indicating that the huge snails they fed on were
+plentiful. The snails would make very suitable prey for the tribesmen
+also. But men were not yet established in their own minds as predators.
+
+They were, though, definitely no longer the furtive vermin they had
+been. They knew there were such things as weapons. They had killed ants
+for food and a pirate-wasp as an exercise in courage. To some degree
+they were acquiring Burl's own qualities. But they were still behind
+him--and he still had some way to go.
+
+The next day they explored their new territory with a boldness which
+would have been unthinkable a few weeks before. The new haven was a
+valley, spreading out to a second swamp at its lower end. They could not
+know it, but beyond the swamp lay the sea. Exploring, because of
+strictly practical purposes and not for the sake of knowledge, they
+found a great trap-door in the earth, sure sign of the lair of a spider.
+Burl considered that before many days the monster would have to be dealt
+with. But he did not yet know how it could be done.
+
+His people were rapidly becoming a tribe of men, but they still needed
+Burl to think for them. What he could not think out, so far, could not
+be done. But a part of the proof that they needed Burl to think for them
+lay in the fact that they did not realize it. They gathered facts about
+their environment. The nearest ant-city was miles away. That meant that
+they would encounter its scouting foragers rather than working-parties.
+The ant-city would be a source of small prey--a notion that would have
+been inconceivable a little while ago. There were numerous giant
+cabbages in the valley and that meant there were big, defenseless slugs
+to spear whenever necessary.
+
+They saw praying-mantises--the adults were eighteen feet tall and as big
+as giraffes, but much less desirable neighbors--and knew that they would
+have to be avoided. But there were edible mushrooms on every hand. If
+one avoided spiders and praying-mantises and the meat-eating beetles; if
+one were safely hidden at night against the amorous male spiders who
+took time off from courtship to devour anything living that came their
+way; and if one lived at high-tension alertness, interpreting every
+sound as possible danger and every unknown thing as certain peril--then
+one could live quite comfortably in this valley.
+
+For three days the tribesmen felt that they had found a sort of
+paradise. Jon had his belly full to bursting all day long. Tet and Dik
+became skilled ant-hunters. Dor found a better spear and practiced
+thoughtfully with it.
+
+There were no red puffballs here. There was food. Burl's folk could
+imagine no greater happiness. Even old Tama scolded only rarely. They
+surely could not conceive of any place where a man might walk calmly
+about with no danger at all of being devoured. This was paradise!
+
+And it was a deplorable state of affairs. It is not good for human
+beings to feel secure and experience contentment. Men achieve only by
+their wants or through their fears. Back at their former
+foraging-ground, the tribe would never have emulated Burl with any
+passion so long as they could survive by traditional behavior. Before
+the menace of the red puffballs developed, he had brought them to the
+point of killing ants, with him present and ready to assist. They would
+have stayed at about that level. The red dust had forced their flight.
+During that flight they had achieved what was--compared to their former
+timidity--prodigies of valor.
+
+But now they arrived at paradise. There was food. They could survive
+here in the fashion of the good old days before they learned the courage
+of desperation. They did not need Burl to keep them alive or to feed
+them. They tended to disregard him. But they did not disperse. Social
+grouping is an instinct in human beings as it is in cattle or in schools
+of fish. Also, when Burl was available there was a sense of pleasant
+confidence. He had gotten them out of trouble before. If more trouble
+came, he would get them out of it again. But why look for trouble?
+
+Burl's tribesmen sank back into a contented lethargy. They found food
+and hid themselves until it was all consumed. A part of the valley was
+found where they were far enough from visible dangers to feel blissfully
+safe. When they did move, though still with elaborate caution, it was
+only to forage for food. And they did not need to go far because there
+was plenty of food. They slipped back. Happier than they had ever been,
+the foragers finally began to forget to take their new spears or clubs
+with them. They were furtive vermin in a particularly favorable
+environment.
+
+And Burl was infuriated. He had known adulation. He was cherished, to be
+sure, but adulation no longer came his way. Even Saya....
+
+An ironically natural change took place in Saya. When Burl was a
+chieftain, she looked at him with worshipful eyes. Now that he was as
+other men, she displayed coquetry. And Burl was of that peculiarly
+direct-thinking sort of human being who is capable of leadership but not
+of intrigue. He was vain, of course. But he could not engage in
+elaborate maneuvers to build up a romantic situation. When Saya archly
+remained with the women of the tribe, he considered that she avoided
+him. When she coyly avoided speech with him, he angrily believed that
+she did not want his company.
+
+When they had been in the valley for a week Burl went off on a bitter
+journey by himself. Part of his motivation, probably, was a childish
+resentment. He had been the great man of the tribe. He was no longer so
+great because his particular qualities were not needed. And--perhaps
+with some unconscious intent to punish them for their lessened
+appreciation--he went off in a pet.
+
+He still carried spear and club, but the grandeur of his costume had
+deteriorated. His cloak was gone. The moth-antennae he had worn bound to
+his forehead were now so draggled that they were ridiculous. He went off
+angrily to be rid of his fellows' indifference.
+
+He found the upward slopes which were the valley's literal boundaries.
+They promised nothing. He found a minor valley in which a labyrinth
+spider had built its shining snare. Burl almost scorned the creature. He
+could kill it if he chose, merely by stabbing it though the walls of
+its silken nest as it waited for unlucky insects to blunder into the
+intricate web. He saw praying-mantises. Once he came upon that
+extraordinary egg-container of the mantis tribe: a gigantic leaf-shaped
+mass of solidified foam, whipped out of some special plastic compound
+which the mantis secretes, and in which the eggs are laid.
+
+He found a caterpillar wrapped in its thick cocoon and, because he was
+not foraging and not particularly hungry, he inspected it with care.
+With great difficulty he even broke the strand of silk that formed it,
+unreeling several feet in curiosity. Had he meditated, Burl would have
+seen that this was cord which could be used to build snares as spiders
+did. It could also be used to make defenses in which--if built strongly
+and well--even hunting-spiders might be tangled and dispatched.
+
+But again he was not knowingly looking for things to be of use. He
+coddled his sense of injury against the tribe. He punished them by
+leaving them.
+
+He encountered a four-foot praying-mantis that raised its saw-toothed
+forelimbs and waited immobile for him to come within reach. He had
+trouble getting away without a fight. His spear would have been a clumsy
+weapon against so slender a target and the club certainly not quick
+enough to counter the insect's lightning-like movements.
+
+He was bothered. That day he hunted ants. The difficulty was mainly that
+of finding individual ants, alone, who could be slaughtered without
+drawing hordes of others into the fight. Before nightfall he had three
+of them--foot-long carcasses--slung at his belt. Near sunset he came
+upon another fairly recent praying-mantis hatchling. It was almost an
+ambush. The young monster stood completely immobile and waited for him
+to walk into its reach.
+
+Burl performed a deliberate experiment--something that had not been done
+for a very long time on the forgotten planet. The small, grisly creature
+stood as high as Burl's shoulders. It would be a deadly antagonist.
+Burl tossed it a dead ant.
+
+It struck so swiftly that the motion of its horrible forearms could not
+be seen. Then it ignored Burl, devouring the tidbit.
+
+It was a discovery that was immediately and urgently useful.
+
+On the second day of his aimless journey Burl saw something that would
+be even more deadly and appalling than the red dust had been for his
+kind. It was a female black hunting-spider, the so-called American
+tarantula. When he glimpsed the thing the blood drained from Burl's
+face.
+
+As the monster moved out of sight Burl, abandoning any other project he
+might have intended, headed for the place his tribe had more or less
+settled in. He had news which offered the satisfaction of making him
+much-needed again, but he would have traded that pleasure ten hundred
+times over for the simple absence of that one creature from this valley.
+That female tarantula meant simply and specifically that the tribe must
+flee or die. This place was not paradise!
+
+The entry of the spider into the region had preceded the arrival of the
+people. A giant, even of its kind, it had come across some pass among
+the mountains for reasons only it could know. But it was deadliness
+beyond compare. Its legs spanned yards. The fangs were needle-sharp and
+feet in length--and poisoned. Its eyes glittered with insatiable, insane
+blood-lust. Its coming was ten times more deadly to the humans--as to
+the other living creatures of the valley--than a Bengal tiger loosed in
+a human city would have been. It was bad enough in itself, but it
+brought more deadly disaster still behind it.
+
+Bumping and bouncing behind its abdomen as it moved, fastened to its
+body by dirtied silken ropes, this creature dragged a burden which was
+its own ferocity many times multiplied. It was dragging an egg-bag
+larger than its body--which was feet in diameter. The female spider
+would carry this ghastly burden--cherishing it--until the eggs hatched.
+And then there would be four to five hundred small devils loose in the
+valley. From the instant of their hatching they would be as deadly as
+their parent. Though the offspring would be small--with legs spanning no
+more than a foot--their bodies would be the size of a man's fist and
+able to leap two yards. Their tiny fangs would be no less envenomed than
+their mother's. In stark, maniacal hatred of all other life they would
+at least equal the huge gray horror which had begot them.
+
+Burl told his tribesmen. They listened, eyes large with fright but not
+quite afraid. The thing had not yet happened. When Burl insistently
+commanded that they follow him on a new journey, they nodded uneasily
+but slipped away. He could not gather the tribe together. Always there
+were members who hid from him--and when he went in search of them, the
+ones he had gathered vanished before he could return.
+
+There were days of bright light and murder, and nights of slow rain and
+death in the valley. The great creatures under the cloud-bank committed
+atrocities upon each other and blandly dined upon their victims.
+Unthinkingly solicitous parents paralyzed creatures to be left living
+and helpless for their young to feed on. There were enormities of
+cruelty done in the matter-of-fact fashion of the insect world. To these
+things the humans were indifferent. They were uneasy, but like other
+humans everywhere they would not believe the worst until the worst
+arrived.
+
+Two weeks after their coming to the valley, the worst was there. When
+that day came the first gray light of dawn found the humans in a
+shivering, terrified group in a completely suicidal position. They were
+out in the open--not hidden but in plain view. They dared not hide any
+more. The furry gray monster's brood had hatched. The valley seemed to
+swarm with small gray demons which killed and killed, even when they
+could not devour. When they encountered each other they fought in
+slavering fury and the victors in such duels dined upon their brethren.
+But always they hunted for more things to kill. They were literally
+maniacs--and they were too small and too quick to fight with spears or
+clubs.
+
+So now, at daybreak, the humans looked about despairingly for death to
+come to them. They had spent the night in the open lest they be trapped
+in the very thickets that had formerly been their protection. They were
+in clear sight of the large gray murderer, if it should pass that way.
+And they did not dare hide because of that ogreish creature's brood.
+
+The monster appeared. A young girl saw it and cried out chokingly. It
+had not seen them. They watched it leap upon and murder a
+vividly-colored caterpillar near the limit of vision in the
+morning-mist. It was in the tribe's part of the valley. Its young
+swarmed everywhere. The valley could have been a paradise, but it was
+doomed to become a charnel-house.
+
+And then Burl shook himself. He had been angry when he left his tribe.
+He had been more angry when he returned and they would not obey him. He
+had remained with them, petulantly silent, displaying the offended
+dignity he felt and elaborately refusing to acknowledge any overtures,
+even from Saya. Burl had acted rather childishly. But his tribesmen were
+like children. It was the best way for him to act.
+
+They shivered, too hopeless even to run away while the shaggy monster
+feasted a half-mile away. There were six men and seven women besides
+himself, and the rest were children, from gangling adolescents to one
+babe in arms. They whimpered a little. Then Saya looked imploringly at
+Burl--coquetry forgotten now. The other whimpered more loudly. They had
+reached that stage of despair, now, when they could draw the monster to
+them by blubbering in terror.
+
+This was the psychological moment. Burl said dourly:
+
+"Come!"
+
+He took Saya's hand and started away. There was but one direction in
+which any human being could think to move in this valley, at this
+moment. It was the direction away from the grisly mother of horrors. It
+happened to be the way up the valley wall. Burl started up that slope.
+Saya went with him.
+
+Before they had gone ten yards Dor spoke to his wife. They followed
+Burl, with their three children. Five yards more, and Jak agitatedly
+began to bustle his family into movement. Old Jon, wheezing, frantically
+scuttled after Burl, and Cori competently set out with the youngest of
+her children in her arms and the others marching before her. Within
+seconds more, all the tribe was in motion.
+
+Burl moved on, aware of his following, but ignoring it. The procession
+continued in his wake simply because it had begun to do so. Dik, his
+adolescent brashness beaten down by terror, nevertheless regarded Burl's
+stained weapon with the inevitable envy of the half-grown for
+achievement. He saw something half-buried in the soil and--after a
+fearful glance behind--he moved aside to tug at it. It was part of the
+armor of a former rhinoceros beetle. Tet joined him. They made an act of
+great daring of lingering to find themselves weapons as near as possible
+to Burl's.
+
+A quarter-mile on, the fugitives passed a struggling milkweed plant, no
+more than twenty feet high and already scabrous with scale and rusts
+upon its lower parts. Ants marched up and down its stalk in a steady
+single file, placing aphids from their nearby ant-city on suitable spots
+to feed,--and to multiply as only parthenogenic aphids can do. But
+already, on the far side of the milkweed, an ant-lion climbed up to do
+murder among them. The ant-lion, of course, was the larval form of a
+lace-wing fly. The aphids were its predestined prey.
+
+Burl continued to march, holding Saya's hand. The reek of formic acid
+came to his nostrils. He ignored it. Ants were as much prey to his
+tribesmen, now, as crabs and crayfish to other, shore-dwelling tribesmen
+on long-forgotten Earth. But Burl was not concerned with food, now. He
+stalked on toward the mountain-slopes.
+
+Dik and Tet brandished their new weapons. They looked fearfully behind
+them. The monster from whom they fled was lost in its gruesome
+feasting,--and they were a long way from it, now. There was a steady,
+single-file procession of ants, with occasional gaps in the line. The
+procession passed the line through one of those gaps.
+
+Beyond it, Tet and Dik conferred. They dared each other. They went
+scrambling back to the line of ants. Their weapons smote. The
+slaughtered ants died instantly and were quickly dragged from the
+formic-acid-scented path. The remaining ants went placidly on their way.
+The weapons struck again.
+
+The two adolescents had to outdo each other. But they had as much food
+as they could carry. Gloating--each claiming to have been most daring
+and to have the largest bag of game--they ran panting after the tribe.
+They grandly distributed their take of game. It was a form of boasting.
+But the tribesfolk accepted the gifts automatically. It was, after all,
+food.
+
+The two gangling boys, jabbering at each other, raced back once more.
+Again they returned with dangling masses of foodstuff,--half-scores of
+foot-long creatures whose limbs, at least, contained firm meat.
+
+Behind, the ant-lion made his onslaught into the stupidly feasting
+aphids, and warrior-ants took alarm and thrust forward to offer battle.
+Tumult arose upon the milkweed.
+
+But Burl led his followers toward the mountainside. He reached a minor
+eminence and looked about him. Caution was the price of existence on
+this world.
+
+Two hundred feet away, a small scurrying horror raged and searched among
+the rough-edged layers of what on other worlds was called paper-mould or
+rock-tripe. Here it was thick as quilting, and infinitesimal creatures
+denned under it. The sixteen-inch spider devoured them, making
+gluttonous sounds. But it was busy, and all spiders are relatively
+short-sighted.
+
+Burl turned to Saya, and realized that all his tribe had followed him
+fearfully even to this small height he'd climbed only to look around
+from. Dor had taken advantage of Burl's pause. There was an empty
+cricket-shell partly overwhelmed by the fungoid soil. He tore free a
+now-hollow, sickle-shaped jaw. It was curved and sharp and deadly if
+properly wielded. Dor had seen Burl kill things. He had even helped.
+Now, very grimly, he tried to imagine killing something all alone. Jak
+saw him working on the sickle-shaped weapon. He tugged at the cricket's
+ransacked carcass for another weapon. Dik and Tet vaingloriously
+pretended to fight between themselves with their recently acquired
+instruments for killing. Jon wheezed and panted. Old Tama complained to
+herself in whispers, not daring to make sounds in the daylight. The rest
+waited until Burl should lead them further.
+
+When Burl turned angry eyes upon them--he was beginning to do such
+things deliberately, now--they all regarded him humbly. Now they
+remembered that they had been hungry and he had gotten food for them,
+and they had been paralyzed by terror, and he dared to move. They
+definitely had a feeling of dependence upon him, for the present moment
+only. Later, their feeling of humbleness would diminish. In proportion
+as he met their needs for leadership, they would tend to try to become
+independent of him. His leadership would be successful in proportion as
+he taught them to lead themselves. But Burl perceived this only dimly.
+At the moment it was pleasing to have all his tribe regard him so
+worshipfully, even if not in quite the same fashion as Saya. He was
+suddenly aware that now--at any rate while they were so frightened--they
+would obey him. So he invented an order for them to obey.
+
+"I carry sharp things," he said sternly. "Some of you have gotten sharp
+things. Now everybody must carry sharp things, to fight with."
+
+Humbly, they scattered to obey. Saya would have gone with them, but Burl
+held her back. He did not quite know why. It could have been that the
+absolute equality of the sexes in cravenness was due to end, and for his
+own vanity Burl would undertake the defense of Saya. He did not analyze
+so far. He did not want her to leave him, so he prevented it.
+
+The tribesfolk scattered. Dor went with his wife, to help her arm
+herself. Jak uneasily followed his. Jon went timorously where the
+picked-over remnant of the cricket's carcass might still yield an
+instrument of defense. Cori laid her youngest child at Burl's feet while
+she went fearfully to find some toothed instrument meeting Burl's
+specification of sharpness.
+
+There was a stifled scream. A ten-year-old boy--he was Dik's younger
+brother--stood paralyzed. He stared in an agony of horror at something
+that had stepped from behind a misshapen fungoid object fifty yards from
+Burl, but less than ten yards from him.
+
+It was a pallidly greenish creature with a small head and enormous eyes.
+It stood upright, like a man,--and it was a few inches taller than a
+man. Its abdomen swelled gracefully into a leaflike form. The boy faced
+it, paralyzed by horror, and it stood stock-still. Its great, hideously
+spined arms were spread out in a pose of hypocritical benediction.
+
+It was a partly-grown praying mantis, not too long hatched. It stood
+rigid, waiting benignly for the boy to come closer or try to flee. If
+he had fled, it would fling itself after him with a ferocity beside
+which the fury of a tiger would be kittenish. If he approached, its
+fanged arms would flash down, pierce his body, and hold him terribly
+fast by the needle-sharp hooks that were so much worse than trap-claws.
+And of course it would not wait for him to die before it began its meal.
+
+All the small party of humans stood frozen. It may be questioned whether
+they were filled with horror for the boy, or cast into a deeper abyss of
+despair by the sight of a half-grown mantis. Only Burl, so far, had any
+notion of actually leaving the valley. To the rest, the discovery of one
+partly mature praying mantis meant that there would be hundreds of
+others. It would be impossible to evade the tiny, slavering demons which
+were the brood of the great spider. It would be impossibility multiplied
+to live where a horde of small--yet vastly larger--fiends lived, raising
+their arms in a semblance of blessing before they did murder.
+
+Only Burl was capable of thought, and this was because vanity filled
+him. He had commanded and had been obeyed. Now obedience was forgotten
+because there was this young mantis. If the men had dreamed of fighting
+it, it could have destroyed any number of them by sheer ferocity and its
+arsenal of knives and daggers. But Burl was at once furious and
+experienced. He had encountered such a middle-sized monster, when alone,
+and deliberately had experimented with it. In consequence he could dare
+to rage. He ran toward the mantis. He swung the small corpse of an
+ant--killed by Tet only minutes since--and hurled it past the
+terror-fascinated boy. He had hurled it at the mantis.
+
+It struck. And insects simply do not think. Something hurtled at the
+ghastly young creature. Its arms struck ferociously to defend itself.
+The ant was heavy. Poised upright in its spectral attitude, the mantis
+was literally flung backward. But it rolled over, fighting the dead ant
+with that frenzy which is not so much ferocity as mania.
+
+The small boy fled, hysterically, once the insect's attention was
+diverted.
+
+The human tribe gathered around Burl many hundreds of yards away,--again
+uphill. He was their rendezvous because of the example set by Cori. She
+had left her baby with Burl. When Burl dashed from the spot, Saya had
+quite automatically followed the instinct of any female for the young of
+its kind. She'd snatched up the baby before she fled. And--of
+course--she'd joined Burl when the immediate danger was over.
+
+The floor of the valley seemed a trifle indistinct, from here. The mist
+that hung always in the air partly veiled the details of its horrors. It
+was less actual, not quite as deadly as it once had seemed.
+
+Burl said fiercely to his followers:
+
+"Where are the sharp things?"
+
+The tribesfolk looked at one another, numbly. Then Jon muttered
+rebelliously, and old Tama raised her voice in shrill complaint. Burl
+had led them to this! There had been only the red dust in the place from
+which they had come, but here was a hunting-spider and its young and
+also a new hatching of mantises! They could dodge the red dust, but how
+could they escape the deaths that waited them here? Ai! Ai! Burl had
+persuaded them to leave their home and brought them here to die....
+
+Burl glared about him. It was neither courage nor resolution, but he had
+come to realize that to be admired by one's fellows was a splendid
+sensation. The more one was admired, the better. He was enraged that
+anyone dared to despair instead of thinking admiringly about his
+remarkableness.
+
+"I," said Burl haughtily, "am not going to stay here. I go to a place
+where there are neither spiders nor mantises. Come!"
+
+He held out his hand to Saya. She gave the child to Cori and confidently
+moved to follow him. Burl stalked grandly away and she went with him. He
+went uphill. Naturally! There were spiders and mantises in the
+valley,--so many that to stay there meant death. So he moved to go
+somewhere else.
+
+And this was the climactic event that changed the whole history of
+humanity upon the forgotten planet. Up to this point, there may have
+been other individuals who had accomplished somewhat of Burl's kind of
+leadership. A few may have learned courage. It is possible that some
+even led their tribesfolk upon migrations in search of safer lands to
+live in. But until Burl led his people out of a valley filled with food,
+up a mountainside toward the unknown, it was simply impossible for
+humans to rise permanently above the status of hunted vermin; at the
+mercy of monstrous mindless creatures; whose forbears had most
+ironically been brought to this planet to prepare it for humans to live
+on.
+
+Burl was the first man to lead his fellows toward the heights.
+
+
+
+
+_9. THERE IS SUCH A THING AS SUNSHINE_
+
+
+The sun that shone upon the forgotten planet was actually very near. It
+shone on the top of the cloud-bank, and the clouds glowed with dazzling
+whiteness. It shone on the mountain-peaks where they penetrated the
+mist, and the peaks were warmed, and there was no snow anywhere despite
+the height. There were winds, here where the sun yielded sensible heat.
+The sky was very blue. At the edge of the plateau--from which the
+cloud-banks were down instead of up--the mountainsides seemed to descend
+into a sea of milk. Great undulations in the mist had the semblance of
+waves, which moved with great deliberation toward the shores. They
+seemed sometimes to break in slow-motion against the mountain-walls
+where they were cliff-like, and sometimes they seemed to flow up gentler
+inclinations like water flowing up a beach. But all of this was very
+deliberate indeed, because the cloud-waves were sometimes twenty miles
+from crest to crest.
+
+The look of things was different on the highlands. This part of the
+unnamed world, no less than the lowlands, had been seeded with life on
+two separate occasions. Once the seedings was with bacteria and moulds
+and lichens to break up the rocks and make soil of them, and once with
+seeds and insect-eggs and such living things as might sustain themselves
+immediately they were hatched. But here on the highlands the different
+climatic conditions had allowed other seedlings and creatures to survive
+together.
+
+Here moulds and yeasts and rusts were stunted by the sunlight. Grasses
+and weeds and trees survived, instead. This was an ideal environment for
+plants that needed sunlight to form chlorophyl, with which to make use
+of the soil that had been formed. So on the highlands the vegetation was
+almost earthlike. And there was a remarkable side-effect on the fauna
+which had been introduced in the same manner and at the same time as the
+creatures down below. In coolness which amounted to a temperate climate,
+there developed no such frenzy of life as made the nightmare jungles
+under the clouds. Plants grow at a slower rate than fungi, and less
+luxuriantly. There was no vast supply of food for large-sized
+plant-eaters. Insects which were to survive, here, could not grow to be
+monsters. Moreover, the nights here were chill. Very many insects grow
+torpid in the cool of a temperate-zone night, but warm up to activity
+soon after sunrise. But a large creature, made torpid by cold, will not
+revive so quickly. If large enough, it will not become fully active
+until close to dark. On the plateau, the lowland monsters would starve
+in any case. But more;--they would have only a fraction of each day of
+full activity.
+
+So there was a necessary limit to the size of the creatures that lived
+above the clouds. To humans from other planets, the life on the plateau
+would not have seemed horrifying at all. Save for the absence of birds
+to sing, and a lack of small mammals to hunt or merely to enjoy, the
+untouched, sunlit plateau with its warm days and briskly chill nights
+would have impressed most civilized men as an ideal habitation.
+
+But Burl and his followers were hardly prepared to see it that way at
+first glance. If told about it in advance, they would have thought of it
+with despair.
+
+But they did not know beforehand. They toiled upward, their leader moved
+by such ridiculous motives of pride and vanity as have caused men to
+achieve greatness throughout all history. Two great continents were
+discovered back on Earth by a man trying to get spices to hide the gamey
+flavor of half-spoiled meat, and the power that drives mile-long
+space-craft was first discovered and tamed by men making bombs to
+destroy their fellows. There were precedents for foolish motives
+producing results far from foolishness.
+
+The trudging, climbing folk crawled up the hillside. They reached a
+place high above the valley Burl had led them to. That valley grew misty
+in appearance. Presently it could no longer be seen at all. The mist
+they had taken for granted, all their lives, hid from them everything
+but the slanting stony wall up which they climbed. The stone was mostly
+covered by bluish-green rock-tripe in partly overlapping sheets. Such
+stuff is always close behind the bacteria which first attack a
+rock-face. On a slope, it clings while soil is washed downward as fast
+as it is formed. The people never ate rock-tripe, of course. It produces
+frightening cramps. In time they might learn that when thoroughly dried
+it can be cooked to pliability again and eaten with some satisfaction.
+But so far they neither knew dryness nor fire.
+
+Nor had they ever known such surroundings as presently enveloped them. A
+slanting rocky mountainside, which stretched up frighteningly to the
+very sky. Grayness overhead. Grayness also to one side,--the side away
+from the mountain. And equal grayness below. The valley from which they
+had come could no longer be seen even as a different shading of the
+mist. And as they scrambled and trudged after Burl, his followers
+gradually became aware of the utter strangeness of all about them. For
+one result, they grew sick and dizzy. To them it seemed that all
+solidity was slowly tilting. Had they been superstitious, they might
+have thought of demons preparing to punish them for daring to come to
+such a place. But--quaintly enough--Burl's followers had developed no
+demonology. Your typical savage is resolved not to think, but he does
+have leisure to want. He makes gods and devils out of his nightmares,
+and gambles on his own speculations to the extent of offering blackmail
+to demons if they will only let him alone or--preferably--give him more
+of the things he wants.
+
+But the superstitions of savages involve the payment of blackmail in
+exact proportion to their prosperity. The Eskimos of Earth lived always
+on the brink of starvation. They could not afford the luxury of tabus
+and totem animals whose flesh must not be eaten, and forbidden areas
+which might contain food.
+
+Religion there was, among Burl's people, but superstition was not. No
+humans, anywhere, can live without religion, but on Earth Eskimos did
+with a minimum of superstitions,--they could afford no more--and the
+humans of the forgotten planet could not afford any at all.
+
+Therefore they climbed desperately despite the unparalleled state of
+things about them. There was no horizon, but they had never seen a
+horizon. Their feeling was that what had been "down" was now partly
+"behind" and they feared lest a toppling universe ultimately let them
+fall toward that grayness they considered the sky.
+
+But all kept on. To lag behind would be to be abandoned in this place
+where all known sensations were turned topsy-turvy. None of them could
+imagine turning back. Even old Tama, whimpering in a whisper as she
+struggled to keep up, merely complained bitterly of her fate. She did
+not even think of revolt. If Burl had stopped, all his followers would
+have squatted down miserably to wait for death. They had no thought of
+adventure or any hope of safety. The only goodnesses they could imagine
+were food and the nearness of other humans. They had food--nobody had
+abandoned any of the dangling ant-bodies Tet and Dik had distributed
+before the climb began. They would not be separated from their fellows.
+
+Burl's motivation was hardly more distinct. He had started uphill in a
+judicious mixture of fear and injured vanity and desperation. There was
+nothing to be gained by going back. The terrors at hand were no greater
+than those behind, so there was no reason not to go ahead.
+
+They came to a place where the mountain-flank sank inward. There was a
+flat space, and behind it a winding cañon of sorts like a vast crack in
+the mountain's substance. Burl breasted the curving edge and found
+flatness beyond it. He stopped short.
+
+The mouth of the cañon was perhaps fifty yards from the lip of the
+downward slope. So much space was practically level, and on it were
+toadstools and milkweed--two of them--and there was food. It was a
+small, isolated asylum for life such as they were used to. They
+could--it was possible that they could--have found a place of safety
+here.
+
+But the possibility was not the fact. They saw the spider-web at once.
+It was slung between the opposite cañon-walls by cables all of two
+hundred feet long. The radiating cables reached down to anchorages on
+stone. The snare-threads, winding out and out in that logarithmic spiral
+whose properties men were so astonished to discover, were fully a yard
+apart. The web was for giant game. It was empty now, but Burl saw the
+telegraph-cord which ran from the very center of the web to the
+web-maker's lurking-place. There was a rocky shelf on the cañon-wall. On
+it rested the spider, almost invisible against the stone, with one furry
+leg touching the cable. The slightest touch on any part of the web would
+warn it instantly.
+
+Burl's followers accumulated behind him. Old Jon's wheezing was audible.
+Tama ceased her complaints to survey this spot. It might be--it could
+be--a haven, and she would have to find new and different things to
+complain about in consequence. The spider-web itself, of course, was no
+reason for them to be alarmed. Web-spiders do not hunt. Their males do,
+but they are rarely in the neighborhood of a web save at mating-time.
+The web itself was no reason not to settle here. But there was a reason.
+
+The ground before the web,--between the web and themselves--was a
+charnel-house of murdered creatures. Half-inch-thick wing-cases of dead
+beetles and the cleaned-out carapaces of other giants. The ovipositor of
+an ichneumon-fly,--see feet of springy, slender, deadly-pointed
+tube--and the abdomen-plates of bees and the draggled antennae of moths
+and butterflies.
+
+Something very terrible lived in this small place. The mountainsides
+were barren of food for big flying things. Anything which did fly this
+high for any reason would never land on sloping foodless stone.
+It would land here. And very obviously it would die. Because
+something--Something--killed things as they came. It denned back in the
+cañon where they could not see it. It dined here.
+
+The humans looked and shivered, all but Burl. He cast his eyes about for
+better weapons than he possessed. He chose for himself a magnificent
+lance grown by some dead thing for its own defense. He pulled it out of
+the ground.
+
+It was utterly silent, here on the heights. No sounds from the valley
+rose so high. There was no noise except the small creakings made as Burl
+strove to free the new, splendid weapon for himself.
+
+That was why he heard the gasp which somebody uttered in default of a
+scream that would not be uttered. It was a choked, a strangled, an
+inarticulate sobbing noise.
+
+He saw its cause.
+
+There was a thing moving toward the folk from the recesses of the cañon.
+It moved very swiftly. It moved upon stilt-like, impossibly attenuated
+legs of impossible length and inconceivable number. Its body was the
+thickness of Burl's own. And from it came a smell of such monstrous
+foetor that any man, smelling it, would gag and flee even without fear
+to urge him on. The creature was a monstrous millipede, forty feet in
+length, with features of purest, unadulterated horror.
+
+It did not appear to plan to spring. Its speed of movement did not
+increase as it neared the tribesfolk. It was not rushing, like the
+furious charge of the murderers Burl's tribe knew. It simply flowed
+sinuously toward them with no appearance of haste, but at a rate of
+speed they could not conceivably outrun.
+
+Sticklike legs twitched upward and caught the spinning body of an ant.
+The creature stopped, and turned its head about and seized the object
+its side-legs had grasped. It devoured it. Burl shouted again and again.
+
+There was a rain of missiles upon the creature. But they were not to
+hurt it, but to divert its incredibly automaton-like attention. Its legs
+seized the things flung to it. It was not possible to miss. Ten,
+fifteen,--twenty of the items of small-game were grasped in mid-air, as
+if they were creatures in flight.
+
+Burl's shoutings took effect. His people fled to the side of the level
+lip of ground. They climbed frantically past the opening of the valley.
+They fled toward the heights.
+
+Burl was the last to retreat. The monstrous millipede stood immobile,
+trapped for the moment by the gratification of all its desires. It was
+absorbed by the multitude of tiny tidbits with which it had been
+provided.
+
+It was a fact to Burl's honor that he debated a frantic attack upon the
+monster in its insane absorption. But the strangling stench was
+deterrent enough. He fled,--the last of his band of fugitives to leave
+the place where the monstrous creature lived and preyed. As he left it,
+it was still crunching the small meals, one by one, with which the folk
+had supplied it.
+
+They went on up the mountain-flank. It was not to be supposed, of
+course, that the creature could not move above the slanting
+rock-surface. Unquestionably it roamed far and wide, upon occasion. But
+its own foetid reek would make impossible any idea of trailing the
+humans by scent. And, climbing desperately as the humans did, it would
+be unable to see them when they were past the first protuberance of the
+mountain.
+
+In twenty minutes they slackened their pace. Exhaustion prompted it.
+Caution ordered it. Because here they saw another small island of
+flatness in the slanting universe which was all they could see save
+mist. It was simply a place where boulders had piled up, and soil had
+formed, and there was a miniature haven for life other than moulds which
+could grow on naked stone.
+
+Actually, there was a space a hundred feet by fifty on which wholly
+familiar mushrooms grew. It was a thicket like a detached section of the
+valley itself. Well-known edible fungi grew here. There were gray
+puffballs. And from it came the cheerful loud chirping of some small
+beetle, arrived at this spot nobody could possibly know how, but happily
+ensconsed in a separate bit of mushroom-jungle remote from the dangers
+of the valley. If it was small enough, it would even be safe from the
+reeking horror of the cañon just below it.
+
+They broke off edible mushrooms here and ate. And this could have been
+safety for them--save for the giant millipede no more than half a mile
+below. Old Jon wheezed querulously that here was food and there was no
+need for them to go further, just now. Here was food....
+
+Burl regarded him with knitted brows. Jon's reaction was natural enough.
+The tribesfolk had never tended to think for the future because it was
+impossible to make use of such planning. Even Burl could easily enough
+have accepted the fact that this was safety for the moment and food for
+the moment. But it happened that to settle down here until driven out
+would--and at this moment--have deprived him of the authority he had so
+recently learned to enjoy.
+
+"You stay," he said haughtily, to Jon. "I go on, to a better place where
+nothing is to be feared at all!"
+
+He held out his hand to Saya. He assailed the slope again, heading
+upward in the mist.
+
+His tribe followed him. Dik and Tet, of course, because they were boys
+and Burl led on to high adventures in which so far nobody had been
+killed. Dor followed because--he being the strongest man in the
+tribe--he had thoughtfully realized that his strength was not as useful
+as Burl's brains and other qualities. Cori followed because she had
+children, and they were safer where Burl led than anywhere else. The
+others followed to avoid being left alone.
+
+The procession toiled on and up. Presently Burl noticed that the air
+seemed clearer, here. It was not the misty, only half transparent stuff
+of the valley. He could see for miles to right and left. He realized the
+curvature of the mountain-face. But he could not see the valley. The
+mist hid that.
+
+Suddenly he realized that he saw the cloud-bank overhead as an object.
+He had never thought of it specifically before. To him it had been
+simply the sky. Now he saw an indefinite lower surface which yet
+definitely hid the heights toward which he moved. He and his followers
+were less than a thousand feet below it. It appeared to Burl that
+presently he would run into an obstacle which would simply keep him from
+going any further. The idea was disheartening. But until it happened he
+obstinately climbed on.
+
+He observed that the thing which was the sky did not stay still. It
+moved, though slowly. A little higher, he could see that there were
+parts of it which were actually lower than he was. They moved also, but
+they moved away from him as often as they moved toward him. He had no
+experience of any dangerous thing which did not leap at its victims.
+Therefore he was not afraid.
+
+In fact, presently he noticed that the whiteness which was the
+cloud-layer seemed to retreat before him. He was pleased. Weak things
+like humans fled from enemies. Here was something which fled at his
+approach! His followers undoubtedly saw the same thing. Burl had killed
+spiders. He was a remarkable person. This unknown white stuff was afraid
+of him. Therefore it was wise to stay close to Burl. Burl found his
+vanity inflamed by the fact that always--even at its thickest--the white
+cloud-stuff never came nearer than some dozens of feet. He swaggered as
+he led his people up.
+
+And presently there was brightness about them. It was a greater
+brightness than the tribesfolk had ever known. They knew daylight as a
+grayness in which one could see. Here was a brightness that shone. They
+were not accustomed to brightness.
+
+They were not accustomed to silence, either. The noises of the valley
+were like all the noises of the lowlands. They had been in the ears of
+every one of the human beings since they could hear at all. They had
+gradually diminished as the valley dropped behind them. Now, in the
+radiant white mist which was the cloud-layer, there were no sounds at
+all, and the fact was suddenly startling.
+
+They blinked in the brightness. When they spoke to each other, they
+spoke in whispers. The stone underfoot was not even lichen-covered,
+here. It was bare and bright and glistened with wetness. The light they
+experienced took on a golden tint. All of these things were utterly
+unparalleled, but the stillness was a hush instead of a menacing
+silence. The golden light could not possibly be associated with fear.
+The people of the forgotten planet felt, most likely, the sort of
+promise in this shining tranquility which before they had known only in
+dreams. But this was no dream.
+
+They came up through the surface of a sea of mist, and they saw before
+them a shore of sunshine. They saw blue and sky and sunlight for the
+first time. The light smote their shins and brilliantly colored furry
+garments. It glittered in changing, ever-more-colorful flashes upon
+cloaks made of butterfly wings. It sparkled on the great lance carried
+by Burl in the lead, and the quite preposterous weapons borne by his
+followers.
+
+The little party of twenty humans waded ashore through the last of the
+thinning white stuff which was cloud. They gazed about them with
+wondering, astonished eyes. The sky was blue. There was green grass. And
+again there was sound. It was the sound of wind blowing among trees, and
+of things living in the sunshine.
+
+They heard insects, but they did not know what they heard. The shrill
+small musical whirrings; the high-pitched small cries which made an
+elfin melody everywhere,--these were totally strange. All things were
+new to their eyes, and an enormous exultation filled them. From
+deep-buried ancestral memories they somehow knew that what they saw was
+right, was normal, was appropriate and proper, and that this was the
+kind of world in which humans belonged, rather than the seething horror
+of the lowlands. They breathed clean air for the first time in many
+generations.
+
+Burl shouted in his triumph, and his voice echoed among trees and
+hillsides.
+
+It was time for the plateau to ring with the shouting of a man in
+triumph!
+
+
+
+
+_10. MEN CLIMB UP TO SAVAGERY_
+
+
+They had food for days. They had brought mushroom from the isolated
+thicket not too far beneath the clouds. There were the ants that Dik and
+Tet had distributed grandly, and not all of which had been used to
+secure escape from the cañon of the millipede. Had they found other food
+immediately, they would have settled down comfortably in the fashion
+normal to creatures whose idea of bliss is a secure hiding-place and
+food on hand so they do not have to leave it. Somehow they believed that
+this high place of bright light and new colors was secure. But they had
+no hiding-place. And though they did accept with the unreasoning faith
+of children and savages that there were no enemies here, they still
+wanted one.
+
+They found a cave. It was small, so that it would be crowded with all of
+them in it, but as it turned out, this was fortunate. At some time it
+had been occupied by some other creature, but the dirt which floored it
+had settled flat and showed no tracks. It retained faint traces of a
+smell which was unfamiliar but not unpleasing,--it held no connotation
+of danger. Ants stank of formic acid plus the musky odor of their
+particular city. One could identify not only the kind of ant, but its
+home city, by sniffing at an ant-trail. Spiders had their own
+hair-raising odor. The smell of a praying-mantis was acrid, and all
+beetles reeked of decay. And of course there were those bugs whose main
+defense was an effluvium which tended to strangle all but the smell's
+happy possessor. This faint smell in the cave was different. The humans
+thought vaguely that it might possibly be another kind of man.
+
+Actually, it was the smell of a warm-blooded animal. But Burl and his
+fellows knew of no warm-blooded creature but themselves.
+
+They had come above the clouds a bare two hours before sunset,--of which
+they knew nothing. For an hour they marveled, staying close together.
+They were especially astounded by the sun, since they could not bear to
+look at it. But presently, being savages, they accepted it
+matter-of-factly.
+
+They could not cease to wonder at the vegetation about them. They were
+accustomed only to gigantic fungi and the few straggling plants which
+tried so desperately to bear seed before they were devoured. Here they
+saw many plants and no fungi,--and they did not see anything they
+recognized as insects. They looked only for large things.
+
+They were astounded by the slenderness and toughness of the plants.
+Grass fascinated them, and weeds. A large part of their courage came
+from the absence of debris upon the ground. The hunting-grounds of
+spiders were marked by grisly remnants of finished meals, and where
+mantises roamed there were bits of transparent beetle-wings and sharp
+spiny bits of armor not tasty enough to be consumed. Here, in the first
+hour of their exploration, they saw no sign that an insect like
+the lowland ones had ever been in this place at all. But they
+could not believe the monsters never came. They correctly--and
+pessimistically--assumed that their coming was only rare.
+
+The cave was a great relief. Trees did not grow close enough to give
+them a feeling of safety,--though they were ludicrously amazed at the
+invincible hardness of tree trunks. They had never known anything but
+insect-armour and stone which was as hard as the trunks of those
+growing things. They found nothing to eat, but they were not yet
+hungry. They did not worry about food while they still had remnants from
+their climb.
+
+When the sun sank low and crimson colorings filled the west, they were
+less happy. They watched the glory of their first sunset with scared,
+incredulous eyes. Yellows and reds and purples reared toward the zenith.
+It became possible to look at the sun directly. They saw it descend
+behind something they could not guess at. Then there was darkness.
+
+The fact stunned them. So night came like this!
+
+Then they saw the stars for the first time, as they came singly into
+being. And the folk from the lowland crowded frantically into the cave
+with its faint odor of having once been occupied by something else. They
+filled the cave tightly. But Burl had some reluctance to admit his
+terror. He and Saya were the last to enter.
+
+And nothing happened. Nothing. The sounds of sunset continued. They were
+strange but soothing and somehow--again ancestral memory spoke
+comfortingly--they were the way night-sounds ought to be. Burl and the
+others could not possibly know it, but for the first time in forty
+generations on the forgotten planet, human beings were in an environment
+really suited to them. It had a rightness and a goodness which was
+obvious in spite of its novelty. And because of Burl's own special
+experiences, he was a little bit better able to estimate novelties than
+the rest. He listened to the night-noises from close by the cave's small
+entrance. He heard the breathing of his tribesfolk. He felt the heat of
+their bodies, keeping the crowded enclosure warm enough for all. Saya
+held fast to his hand, for the reassurance of the contact. He was
+wakeful, and thinking very busily and painfully, but Saya was not
+thinking at all. She was simply proud of Burl.
+
+She felt, to be sure, a tumult which was fear of the unknown and relief
+from much greater fear of the familiar. She felt warm, prideful
+memories of the sight of Burl leading and commanding the others. She had
+absorbing fresh memories of the look and feel of sunshine, and mental
+pictures of sky and grass and trees which she had never seen before.
+Confusedly she remembered that Burl had killed a spider, no less, and he
+had shown how to escape a praying-mantis by flinging it at an ant, and
+he had grandly led the others up a mountainside it had never occurred to
+anybody else to climb. And the giant millipede would have devoured them
+all, but that Burl gave commands and set the example, and he had marched
+magnificently up the mountainside when it seemed that all the cosmos
+twisted and prepared to drop them into an inverted sky....
+
+Saya dozed. And Burl sat awake, listening, and presently with
+fast-beating heart he slipped out of the entrance to the cave and stared
+about him in the night.
+
+There was coolness such as he had never known before, but nightfall was
+not long past. There were smells in the air he had never before
+experienced,--green things growing, and the peculiar clean odor of wind
+that has been bathed in sunshine, and the oddly satisfying smell of
+resinous trees.
+
+But Burl raised his eyes to the heavens. He saw the stars in all their
+glory, and he was the first human in two thousand years and more to look
+at them from this planet. There were myriads upon myriads of them,
+varying in brightness from stabbing lights to infinitesimal twinklings.
+They were of every possible color. They hung in the sky above him,
+immobile and unthreatening. They had not descended. They were very
+beautiful.
+
+Burl stared. And then he noticed that he was breathing deeply, with a
+new zest. He was filling his lungs with clean, cool, fragrant air such
+as men were intended to breathe from the beginning, and of which Burl
+and many others had been deprived. It was almost intoxicating to feel so
+splendidly alive and unafraid.
+
+There was a slight sound. Saya stood beside him, trembling a little. To
+leave the others had required great courage, but she had come to realize
+that if Burl was in danger she wished to share it.
+
+They heard the nightwind and the orchestra of night-singers. They
+wandered aside from the cave-mouth and Saya found completely primitive
+and satisfying pride in the courage of Burl, who was actually not afraid
+of the dark! Her own uneasiness became something which merely added
+savor to her pride in him. She followed him wherever he went, to examine
+this and consider that in the nighttime. It gave her enormous
+satisfaction at once to think of danger and to feel so safe because of
+his nearness.
+
+Presently they heard a new sound in the night. It was very far away, and
+not in the least like any sound they had ever heard before. It changed
+in pitch as insect-cries do not. It was a baying, yelping sound. It
+rose, and held the higher note, and abruptly dropped in pitch before it
+ceased. Minutes later it came again.
+
+Saya shivered, but Burl said thoughtfully:
+
+"That is a good sound."
+
+He didn't know why. Saya shivered again. She said reluctantly:
+
+"I am cold."
+
+It had been a rare sensation in the lowlands. It came only after one of
+the infrequent thunderstorms, when wetted human bodies were exposed to
+the gusty winds that otherwise never blew. But here the nights grew cold
+after sundown. The heat of the ground would radiate to outer space with
+no clouds to intercept it, and before dawn the temperature might drop
+nearly to freezing. On a planet so close to its sun, however, there
+would hardly be more than light hoar-frost at any time.
+
+The two of them went back to the cave. It was warm there, because of the
+close packing of bodies and many breaths. Burl and Saya found places to
+rest and dozed off, Saya's hand again trustfully in Burl's.
+
+He still remained awake for a long time. He thought of the stars, but
+they were too strange to estimate. He thought of the trees and grass.
+But most of his impressions of this upper world were so remote from
+previous knowledge that he could only accept them as they were and defer
+reflecting upon them until later. He did feel an enormous complacency at
+having led his followers here, though.
+
+But the last thing he actually thought about, before his eyes blinked
+shut in sleep, was that distant howling noise he had heard in the night.
+It was totally novel in kind, and yet there was something buried among
+the items of his racial heritage that told him it was good.
+
+He was first awake of all the tribesmen and he looked out into the cold
+and pallid grayness of before-dawn. He saw trees. One side was brightly
+lighted by comparison, and the other side was dark. He heard the tiny
+singing noises of the inhabitants of this place. Presently he crawled
+out of the cave again.
+
+The air was biting in its chill. It was an excellent reason why the
+giant insects could not live here, but it was invigorating to Burl as he
+breathed it in. Presently he looked curiously for the source of the
+peculiar one-sided light.
+
+He saw the top of the sun as it peered above the eastern cloud-bank. The
+sky grew lighter. He blinked and saw it rise more fully into view. He
+thought to look upward, and the stars that had bewildered him were
+nearly gone.
+
+He ran to call Saya.
+
+The rest of the tribe waked as he roused her. One by one, they followed
+to watch their first sunrise. The men gaped at the sun as it filled the
+east with colorings, and rose and rose above the seemingly steaming
+layer of clouds, and then appeared to spring free of the horizon and
+swim on upward.
+
+The women stared with all their eyes. The children blinked, and
+shivered, and crept to their mothers for warmth. The women enclosed them
+in their cloaks, and they thawed and peered out once more at the glory
+of sunshine and the day. Very soon, too, they realized that warmth came
+from the great shining body in the sky. The children presently
+discovered a game. It was the first game they had ever played. It
+consisted of running into a shaded place until they shivered, and then
+of running out into warm sunshine once more. Until this, dawning fear
+was the motive for such playing as they did. Now they gleefully made a
+game of sunshine.
+
+In this first morning of their life above the clouds, the tribesmen ate
+of the food they had brought from below. But there was not an indefinite
+amount of food left. Burl ate, and considered darkly, and presently
+summoned his followers' attention. They were quite contented and for the
+moment felt no need of his guidance. But he felt need of admiration.
+
+He spoke abruptly:
+
+"We do not want to go back to the place we came from," he said sternly.
+"We must look for food here, so we can stay for always. Today we find
+food."
+
+It was a seizure of the initiative. It was the linking of what the folk
+most craved with obedience to Burl. It was the device by which dictators
+seize power, and it was the instinctive action of a leader.
+
+The eating men murmured agreement. There was a certain definite idea of
+goodness--not virtue, but of things desirable--associated with what Burl
+did and what he commanded. His tribe was gradually forming a habit of
+obedience, though it was a very fragile habit up to now.
+
+He led them exploring as soon as they had eaten. All of them, of course.
+They straggled irregularly behind him. They came to a brook and regarded
+it with amazement. There were no leeches. No greenish algae. No foaming
+masses of scum. It was dear! Greatly daring, Burl tasted it. He drank
+the first really potable water in a very long time for his race on this
+planet. It was not fouled by drainage through moulds or rusts.
+
+Dor drank after him. Jak. Cori tasted, and instantly bade her children
+drink. Even old Tama drank suspiciously, and then raised her voice in
+shrill complaint that Burl had not led them to this place sooner. Tet
+and Dik became convinced that there were no deadly things lurking in it,
+and splashed each other. Dik slipped and sat down hard on white stuff
+that yielded and almost splashed. He got up and looked fearfully at what
+he thought might be a deadly slime. Then he yelped shrilly.
+
+He sat down on and crushed part of a bed of mushrooms. But they were
+tiny, clean, and appetizing. They were miniatures of the edible
+mushrooms the tribe fed on.
+
+Burl smelled and finally tasted one. It was, of course, nothing more or
+less than a perfectly normal edible mushroom, growing to the size that
+mushrooms originally grew on Earth. It grew on a shaded place in
+enormously rich soil. It had been protected from direct sunlight by
+trees, but it had not had the means or the stimulus to become a monster.
+
+Burl ate it. He carefully composed his features. Then he announced the
+find to his followers. There was food here, he told them sternly, but in
+this splendid world to which he had led them, food was small. There
+would be no great enemies here, but the food would have to be sought in
+small objects instead of great ones. They must look at this place and
+seek others like it, in order to find food....
+
+The tribesmen were doubtful. But they plucked mushrooms--whole
+ones!--instead of merely breaking off parts of their tops. With deep
+astonishment they recognized the miniature objects as familiar things
+ensmalled. These mushrooms had the same savor, but they were not coarse
+or stringy or tough like the giants. They melted in the mouth; Life in
+this place to which Burl had led them was delectable! Truly the doings
+of Burl were astonishing!
+
+When the oldest of Cori's children found a beetle on a leaf, and they
+recognized it, and instead of being bigger than a man and a thing to
+flee from, it was less than an inch in size and helpless against them--.
+They were entranced. From that moment onward they would really follow
+Burl anywhere, in the happy conviction that he could only bring good to
+everybody.
+
+The opinion could have drawbacks, and it need not be always even true,
+but Burl did nothing to discourage it.
+
+And then, near midday, they made a discovery even greater than that of
+familiar food in unfamiliar sizes. They were struggling, at the time,
+through a vast patch of bushes with thorns on them--they were not used
+to thorns--which they deeply distrusted. Eventually they would find out
+that the glistening dark fruit were blackberries, and would rejoice in
+them, but at this first encounter they were uneasy. In the midst of such
+an untouched berry-patch they heard noises in the distance.
+
+The sound was made up of cries of varying pitch, some of which were loud
+and abrupt, and others longer and less loud. The people did not
+understand them in the least. They could have been cries of human
+beings, perhaps, but they were not cries of pain. Also they were not
+language. They seemed to express a tremendous, zestful excitement. They
+had no overtone of horror. And Burl and his folk had known of no
+excitement among insects except frenzy. They could not imagine what sort
+of tumult this could be.
+
+But to Burl these sounds had something of the timbre of the yelping
+noises of the night before. He had felt drawn to that sound. He liked
+it. He liked this.
+
+He led the way boldly toward the agitated noises. Presently--after a
+mile or so--he and his people came out of breast-high weeds. Saya was
+immediately behind him. The others trailed,--Tama complaining bitterly
+that there was no need to track down sounds which could only mean
+danger. They emerged in a space of bare stone above a small and grassy
+amphitheatre. The tumult came from its center.
+
+A pack of dogs was joyously attacking something that Burl could not see
+clearly. They were dogs. They barked zestfully, and they yelped and
+snarled and yapped in a dozen different voices, and they were having a
+thoroughly good time,--though it might not be so good for the thing they
+attacked.
+
+One of them sighted the humans. He stopped stock-still and barked. The
+others whirled and saw the humans as they came out into view. The tumult
+ceased abruptly.
+
+There was silence. The tribesmen saw creatures with four legs only. They
+had never before seen any living thing with fewer than six,--except men.
+Spiders had eight. The dogs did not have mandibles. They did not have
+wing-cases. They did not act like insects. It was stupifying!
+
+And the dogs saw men, whom they had never seen before. Much more
+important, they smelled men. And the difference between man-smell and
+insect-smell was so vast--because through hundreds of generations the
+dogs had not smelled anything with warm blood save their own kind--the
+difference in smell was so great in kind that the dogs did not react
+with suspicion, but with a fascinated curiosity. This was an
+unparalleled smell. It was, even in its novelty, an overwhelmingly
+satisfying smell.
+
+The dogs regarded the men with their heads on one side, sniffing in the
+deepest possible amazement,--amazement so intense that they could not
+possibly feel hostility. One of them whined a little because he did not
+understand.
+
+
+
+
+_11. WARM BLOOD IS A BOND_
+
+
+Peculiarly enough, it was a matter of topography. The plateau which
+reached above the clouds rose with a steep slope from the valley from
+which a hunting-spider's brood had driven the men. This was on the
+eastern edge of the plateau. On the west, however, the highland was
+subject to an indentation which almost severed it. No more than twenty
+miles from where Burl's group had climbed to sunshine, there was a much
+more gradual slope downward. There, mushroom-forests grew almost to the
+cloud-layer. From there, giant insects strayed up and onto the plateau
+itself.
+
+They could not live above the clouds, of course. There was not food
+enough for their insatiable hunger. Especially at night, it was too cold
+to allow them to stay active. But they did stray from their normal
+environment, and some of them did reach the sunshine, and perhaps some
+of them blundered back down to their mushroom-forests again. But those
+which did not stumble back were chilled to torpor during their first
+night underneath the stars. They were only partly active on the second
+day,--if, indeed, they were active at all. Few or none recovered from
+their second nights' coldness. None at all kept their full ferocity and
+deadliness.
+
+And this was how the dogs survived. They were certainly descended from
+dogs on the wrecked space-ship--the _Icarus_--whose crew had landed on
+this planet some forty-odd human generations since. The humans of today
+had no memories of the ship, and the dogs surely had no traditions. But
+just because those early dogs had less intelligence, they had more
+useful instincts. Perhaps the first generations of castaways bred dogs
+in their first few desperate centuries, hoping that dogs could help them
+survive. But no human civilization could survive in the lowlands. The
+humans went back to the primitive state of their race and lived as
+furtive vermin among monsters. Dogs could not survive there, though
+humans did linger on, so somehow the dogs took to the heights. Perhaps
+dogs survived their masters. Perhaps some were abandoned or driven away.
+But dogs had reached the highlands. And they did survive because giant
+insects blundered up after them,--and could not survive in a proper
+environment for dogs and men.
+
+There was even reason for the dogs remaining limited in number, and
+keenly intelligent. The food-supply was limited. When there were too
+many dogs, their attacks on stumbling insect giants were more desperate
+and made earlier, before the monsters' ferocity was lessened. So more
+dogs died. Then there was an adjustment of the number of dogs to the
+food-supply. There was also a selection of those too intelligent to
+attack rashly. Yet those who had insufficient courage would not eat.
+
+In short, the dogs who now regarded men with bright, interested eyes
+were very sound dogs. They had the intelligence needed for survival.
+They did not attack anything imprudently, but they also knew that it was
+not necessary to be more than reasonably wary of insects in
+general,--not even spiders unless they were very newly arrived from the
+steaming lowlands. So the dogs regarded men with very much the same
+astonished interest with which the men regarded the dogs.
+
+Burl saw immediately that the dogs did not act with the blind ferocity
+of insects, but with an interested, estimative intelligence strikingly
+like that of men. Insects never examined anything. They fled or they
+fought. Those who were not carnivorous had no interest in anything but
+food, and those who were meat-eaters lumbered insanely into battle at
+the bare sight of possible prey. The dogs did neither. They sniffed and
+they considered.
+
+Burl said sharply to his followers:
+
+"Stay here!"
+
+He walked slowly down into the amphitheatre. Saya followed him
+instantly. Dogs moved warily aside. But they raised their noses and
+sniffed. They were long, luxurious sniffs. The smell of human kind was a
+good smell. Dogs had lived hundreds of their generations without having
+it in their nostrils, but before that there were thousands of
+generations to whom that smell was a necessity.
+
+Burl reached the object the dogs had been attacking. It lay on the
+grass, throbbing painfully. It was the larva of an azure-blue moth which
+spread ten-foot wings at nightfall. The time for its metamorphosis was
+near, and it had traveled blindly in search of a place where it could
+spin its cocoon safely and change to its winged form. It had come to
+another world,--the world above the clouds. It could find no proper
+place. Its stores of fat had protected it somewhat from the chill. But
+the dogs had found it as it crawled blindly--.
+
+Burl considered. It was the custom of wasps to sting creatures like this
+at a certain special spot,--apparently marked for them by a tuft of dark
+fur.
+
+Burl thrust home with his lance. The point pierced that particular spot.
+The creature died quickly and without agony. The thought to kill was an
+inspiration. Then instinct followed. Burl cut off meat for his
+tribesmen. The dogs offered no objection. They were well-fed enough.
+Burl and Saya, together, carried the meat back to the other tribesfolk.
+On the way Burl passed within two yards of a dog which regarded him with
+extreme intentness and almost a wistful expression. Burl's smell did not
+mean game. It meant--something the dog struggled helplessly to remember.
+But it was good.
+
+"I have killed the thing," said Burl to the dog, in the tone of one
+addressing an equal. "You can go and eat it now. I took only part of
+it."
+
+Burl and his people ate of what he had brought back. Many of the
+dogs--most of them--went to the feast Burl had left. Presently they were
+back. They had no reason to be hostile. They were fed. The humans
+offered them no injury, and the humans smelled of something that
+appealed to the deepest well-springs of canine nature.
+
+Presently the dogs were close about the humans. They were fascinated.
+And the humans were fascinated in return. Each of the people had a
+little of the feeling that Burl had experienced as the tribal leader. In
+the intent, absorbed and wholly unhostile regard of the dogs, even
+children felt flattered and friendly. And surely in a place where
+everything else was so novel and so satisfactory, it was possible to
+imagine friendliness with creatures which were not human, since
+assuredly they were not insects.
+
+A similar state of mind existed among the dogs.
+
+Saya had more meat than she desired. She glanced among the members of
+the tribe. All were supplied. She tossed it to a dog. He jerked away
+alertly, and then sniffed at it where it had dropped. A dog can always
+eat. He ate it.
+
+"I wish you would talk to us," said Saya hopefully.
+
+The dog wagged his tail.
+
+"You do not look like us," said Saya interestedly, "but you act like we
+do. Not like the--Monsters."
+
+The dog looked significantly at meat in Burl's hand. Burl tossed it. The
+dog caught it with a quick snap, swallowed it, wagged his tail briefly
+and came closer. It was a completely incredible action, but dogs and men
+were blood-kin on this planet. Besides, there was racial-memory
+rightness in friendship between men and dogs. It was not hindered by any
+past experience of either. They were the only warm-blooded creatures on
+this world. It was a kinship felt by both.
+
+Presently Burl stood up and spoke politely to the dog. He addressed him
+with the same respect he would have given to another man. In all his
+life he had never felt equal to an insect, but he felt no arrogance
+toward this dog. He felt superior only to other men.
+
+"We are going back to our cave," he said politely. "Maybe we will meet
+again."
+
+He led his tribe back to the cave in which they had spent the previous
+night. The dogs followed, ranging on either side. They were well-fed,
+with no memory of hostility to any creature which smelled of warm blood.
+They had an instinct without experience to dull it. The latter part of
+the journey back to the tribal cave was--if anybody had been qualified
+to notice it--remarkably like a group of dogs taking a walk with a group
+of people. It was companionable. It felt right.
+
+That night Burl left the cave, as before, to look at the stars. This
+time Saya went with him matter-of-factly. But as they came out of the
+cave-entrance there was a stirring. A dog rose and stretched himself
+elaborately, yawning the while. When Burl and Saya moved away, he
+trotted amiably with them.
+
+They talked to it, and the dog seemed pleased. It wagged its tail.
+
+When morning came, the dogs were still waiting hopefully for the humans
+to come out. They appeared to expect the people to take another nice
+long walk, on which they would accompany them. It was a brand-new
+satisfaction they did not want to miss. After all, from a dog's
+standpoint, humans are made to take long walks with, among other things.
+The dogs greeted the people with tail-waggings and cordiality.
+
+The dogs made a great difference in the adjustment of the tribe to life
+upon the plateau. Their friendship assured the new status of human life.
+Burl and his fellows had ceased to be fugitive game for any insect
+murderer. They had hoped to become unpursued foragers,--because they
+could hardly imagine anything else. But when the dogs joined them, they
+were immediately raised to the estate of hunters. The men did not
+domesticate the dogs. They made friends with them. The dogs did not
+subjugate themselves to the men. They joined them,--at first
+tentatively, and then with worshipful enthusiasm. And the partnership
+was so inevitably a right one that within a month it was as if it had
+always been.
+
+Actually, save for a mere two thousand years, it had been.
+
+At the end of a month the tribe had a permanent encampment. There were
+caves at a suitable distance from the slope up which most wanderers from
+the lowlands came. Cori's oldest child found the chrysalis of a giant
+butterfly, whose caterpillar form had so offensive an odor that the dogs
+had not attacked it. But when it emerged from the chrysalis, men and
+dogs together assailed it before it could take flight. They ended the
+enterprise with warm mutual approval. The humans had acquired great
+wings with which to make warm cloaks,--very useful against the evening
+chill. Dogs and men, alike, had feasted.
+
+Then, one dawning, the dogs made a vast outcry which awoke the
+tribesmen. Burl led the rush to the spot. They did battle with a monster
+nocturnal beetle, less chilled than most such invaders. In the gray
+dawnlight Burl realized that the darting, yapping dogs kept the
+creature's full attention. He crippled, and then killed it with his
+spear. The feat appeared to earn him warm admiration from the dogs. Burl
+wore a moth's feathery antenna again, bound to his forehead like a
+knight's plumes. He looked very splendid.
+
+The entire pattern of human life changed swiftly, as if an entire
+revelation had been granted to men. The ground was often thorny. One man
+pierced his foot. Old Tama, scolding him for his carelessness, bound a
+strip of wing-fabric about it so he could walk. The injured foot was
+more comfortable than the one still unhurt. Within a week the women
+were busily contriving diverse forms of footgear to achieve greater
+comfort for everybody. One day Saya admired glistening red berries and
+tried to pluck one, and they stained her fingers. She licked her fingers
+to clean them,--and berries were added to the tribe's menu. A veritable
+orgy of experiment began, which is a state of things which is extremely
+rare in human affairs. A race with an established culture and tradition
+does not abandon old ways of doing things without profound reason. But
+men who have abandoned their old ways can discover astonishingly useful
+new ones.
+
+Already the dogs were established as sentries and watchmen, and as
+friends to every member of the tribe. By now mothers did not feel
+alarmed if a child wandered out of sight. There would be dogs along. No
+danger could approach a child without vociferous warning from the dogs.
+Men went hunting, now, with zestful tail-wagging dogs as companions in
+the chase. Dor killed a torpid minotaur-beetle alone, save for assisting
+dogs, and Burl felt a twinge of jealousy. But then Burl, himself,
+battled a black male spider in a lone duel,--with dogs to help. By the
+time a stray monster from the lowlands reached this area, it was dazed
+and half-numbed by one night of continuous chill. Even the black spider
+could not find the energy to leap. It fought like a fiend, yet
+sluggishly. Burl killed this one while the dogs kept it busy,--and the
+dogs were reproachful because he carried it back to the tribal
+headquarters before dividing it among his assistants. Afterward, he
+realized that though he could have avoided the fight he would have been
+ashamed to do so, while the dogs barked and snapped at its furry legs.
+
+It was while things were in this state that the way of life for human
+beings on the forgotten planet was settled for all time. Burl and Saya
+went out early one morning with the dogs, to hunt for meat for the
+village. Hunting was easiest in the early hours, while creatures that
+strayed up the night before were still sluggish with cold. Often,
+hunting was merely butchery of an enfeebled monster to whom any effort
+at all was terribly difficult.
+
+This morning they strode away briskly. The dogs roved exuberantly
+through the brush before them. They were some five miles from the
+village when the dogs bayed game. And Burl and Saya ran to the spot with
+ready spears,--which was something of a change from their former actions
+on notice of a carnivore abroad. They found the dogs dancing and barking
+around one of the most ferocious of the meat-eating beetles. It was not
+unduly large, to be sure. Its body might have been four feet long, or
+thereabouts. But its horrible gaping mandibles added a good three feet
+more.
+
+Those scythelike weapons gaped wide--opening sidewise as insects' jaws
+do--as the beetle snapped hideously at its attackers, swinging about as
+the dogs dashed at it. Its legs were spurred and spiked and armed with
+dagger-like spines. Burl plunged into the fight.
+
+The great mandibles clicked and clashed. They were capable of
+disemboweling a man or snapping a dog's body in half without effort.
+There were whistling noises as the beetle breathed through its abdominal
+spiracles. It fought furiously, making ferocious charges at the dogs who
+tormented and bewildered it. But they created the most zestfully excited
+of tumults.
+
+Burl and Saya were, of course, at least as absorbed and excited as the
+dogs, or they would have noticed the thing that was to make so much
+difference to every human being, not only on the plateau but still down
+in the lowlands. This unnoticed thing was beyond their imagining. There
+had been nothing else like it on this world in many hundreds of years.
+It was half a dozen miles away and perhaps a thousand feet high when
+Burl and Saya prepared to intervene professionally on behalf of the
+dogs. It was a silvery needle, floating unsupported in the air. As they
+entered the battle, it swerved and moved swiftly in their direction.
+
+It was silent, and they did not notice. They knew of no reason to scan
+the sky in daytime. And there was business on hand, anyhow.
+
+Burl leaped in toward the beetle with a lance-thrust at the tough
+integument where an armored leg joined the creature's body. He missed,
+and the beetle whirled. Saya flashed her cloak before the monster so
+that it seemed a larger and a nearer antagonist. As the creature whirled
+again, Burl stabbed and a hind-leg crumpled.
+
+Instantly the thing was limping. A beetle does not use its legs like
+four-legged creatures. A beetle moving shifts the two end legs on one
+side and the central leg on the other, so that it always stands on an
+adjustable tripod of limbs. It cannot adjust readily to crippling. A dog
+snatched at a spiny lower leg and crunched,--and darted away. The
+machine-like monster uttered a formless, deep-bass cry and was spurred
+to unbelievable fierceness. The fight became a thing of furious movement
+and joyous uproar, with Burl striking once at a multiple eye so the pain
+would deflect it from a charge at Saya, and Saya again deflecting it
+with her cloak and once breathlessly trying to strike it with her
+shorter spear.
+
+They struck it again, and a third time, and it sank horribly to the
+ground, all three legs on one side crippled. The remaining three thrust
+and thrust and struggled senselessly,--and suddenly it was on its back,
+still striking its gigantic jaws frantically in the hope of murder. But
+then Burl struck home between two armor-plates where a ganglion was
+almost exposed. The blow killed it instantly.
+
+Burl and Saya were smiling at each other when there was a monstrous
+sound of crashing trees. They whirled. The dogs pricked up their ears.
+One of them barked defiantly.
+
+Something huge--truly huge!--had settled to the ground a bare two
+hundred yards away. It was metal, and there were ports in its sides, and
+it was quite beyond imagining. Because, of course, no space-ship had
+landed on this planet in forty-odd human generations.
+
+A port opened as they stared at it. Men came out. Burl and Saya were
+barbarically attired, but they had been fighting some sort of local
+monster--the men on the space-ship could not quite grasp what they had
+seen--and they had been helped by dogs. Human beings and dogs, together,
+always mean some sort of civilization.
+
+The dogs gave an impression of a very high level indeed. They trotted
+confidently over to the ship, and they sniffed cautiously at the men who
+had landed. Then their behavior was admirable. They greeted the new-come
+men with the self-confident cordiality of dogs who are on the best
+possible terms with human beings,--and there was no question of any
+suspicion by anybody. The attitude of a man toward a dog is a perfectly
+valid indication of his character, if not of his technical education.
+And the newcomers knew how to treat dogs.
+
+So Burl and Saya went forward, with the confident pleasure with which
+well-raised children and other persons of innate dignity greet
+strangers.
+
+The ship was the _Wapiti_, a private cruiser doing incidental
+exploration for the Biological Survey in the course of a trip after good
+hunting. It had touched on the forgotten planet, and it would never be
+forgotten again.
+
+
+
+
+_EPILOGUE_
+
+
+The survey-ship _Tethys_ made the first landing on the forgotten planet,
+and the _Orana_ followed, and some centuries later the _Ludred_. Then
+the planet was forgotten until the _Wapiti_ arrived. The arrival of the
+_Wapiti_ was as much an accident as the loss of the punched card which
+caused the planet to be overlooked for some thousands of years.
+Somebody had noticed that the sun around which it circled was of a type
+which usually has useful planets, but there was no record that it had
+ever been visited. So a request to the sportsmen on the _Wapiti_ had
+caused them to turn aside. They considered, anyhow, that it would be
+interesting to land on a brand-new world or two. They considered it
+fascinating to find human beings there before them. But they could not
+understand the use of such primitive weapons or garments of such
+barbaric splendor. They had trouble, too, because in forty-odd
+generations the speech of the universe had changed, while Burl and Saya
+spoke a very archaic language indeed.
+
+But there was an educator on the _Wapiti_. It was quite standard
+apparatus,--simply basic-education for a human child, so that one's
+school-years could be begun with a backlog of correct speech, and
+reading, with the practical facts of mathematics, sanitation, and the
+general information that any human being anywhere needs to know.
+Children use it before they start school, and they absorb its
+information quite painlessly. It is rare that an adult needs it. But
+Burl and Saya did.
+
+Burl was politely invited to wear the head-set, and he politely obliged.
+He found himself equipped with a new language and what seemed to him an
+astonishing amount of information. Among the information was the item
+that he was going to have--as an adult--a severe headache. Which he did.
+Also included was the fact that the making of records for such educators
+was so laborious a process that it took generations to compile one
+master-record for the instruments.
+
+Burl, with a splitting headache, nevertheless urged Saya to join him in
+getting an education. And she did. And thereafter they were able to
+converse with the sportsmen on the _Wapiti_ comfortably enough,--except
+for their headaches.
+
+And all this led to extremely satisfactory arrangements. Sportsmen
+could not but be enthusiastic about the hunting of giant insects with
+dogs and spears. The sportsmen on the _Wapiti_ wanted some of that kind
+of sport. Burl's fellow-tribesmen were delighted to oblige,--though they
+had not quite the zest of Burl. They had to acquire educations in their
+turn, so they could talk to their new hunting-companions. But the
+hunting was magnificent. The _Wapiti_ abandoned its original plans and
+settled down for a stay.
+
+Presently Burl's casual talk of the lowlands produced results. An
+atmosphere-flier came out of the ship's storage-compartments. And
+through the educator Burl was now a civilized man. He had not the
+specialized later information of his guests, but he had knowledge they
+could not dream of, and which it would take much of a century to put in
+recordable form for an educator.
+
+So an atmosphere-flier went down into the lowlands through the
+cloud-banks. There were three men on board. They had good hunting.
+Magnificent hunting. Even more importantly, they found another cluster
+of human beings who lived as fugitives among the insect giants. They
+brought them to the plateau, a few at a time. Sportsmen stayed in the
+lowlands with modern weapons, hunting enthusiastically, while the
+transfer took place.
+
+In all, the _Wapiti_ stayed for two months Earth-time. When it left, its
+sportsmen had such trophies as would make them envied of all other
+hunters in three star-clusters. They left behind weapons and
+atmosphere-fliers and their library and tools. But they took with them
+enthusiasm for the sport on the once-forgotten planet, and rather warm
+feelings of friendship for Burl.
+
+They sent their friends back. The next ship to come in found a small
+city on the plateau, with a population of three hundred souls,--all
+civilized by educator. Naturally, they'd had no trouble building
+civilized dwellings or practising sanitation, or developing a neatly
+adapted culture-pattern for their particular environment. This second
+ship brought more weapons and fliers and news from the first party
+about commercial demand for the incredibly luxurious moth-fur, to be
+found on only one planet in all the galaxy.
+
+The fourth ship to land on the plateau was a trading-ship anxious to
+load such furs for recklessly bidding merchants in a dozen
+interplanetary marts. There were then nearly a thousand people living on
+the plateau. They had a natural monopoly,--not of moth-fur and
+butterfly-wing fabric, and panels of irridescent chitin for luxurious
+decoration, but--of the strictly practical and detailed knowledge of
+insect-habits which made it possible to obtain them. Off-planet visitors
+who tried to hunt without local knowledge did not come back from the
+lowlands. In time, Burl firmly enacted a planetary law which forbade the
+inexperienced to go below the cloud-layer.
+
+Because, of course, a government had to be formed for the planet. But
+men with the basic education of citizens everywhere did not fumble it.
+They had a job to do which was more important than anybody's vanity. It
+was a job which gave deep and abiding satisfaction. When naked,
+trembling folk were found in the mushroom-jungles and brought to the
+plateau, they had one instant, feverish desire as soon as they got over
+the headache from the educator.
+
+They wanted to go back to the lowlands. It was profitable, to be sure.
+But it was even more of a satisfaction to hunt and kill the monsters
+that had hunted and killed men for so long. It felt good, too, to find
+other humans and bring them out to sunshine.
+
+So nowadays the forgotten planet has ceased to be forgotten. It is
+hardly necessary to name it, because its name is known through all the
+Galaxy. Its population is not large, so far, but it is an interesting
+place to live in. In the popular mind, it is the most glamorous of all
+possible worlds,--and for easily understandable reasons. The inhabitants
+of its capital city wear moth-fur garments and butterfly-wing cloaks for
+the benefit of their fellows in the lowlands. There is no day but
+fliers take off and dive down into the mists. When human hunters are in
+the lowlands, they dress as the lowlanders they used to be, so that
+lowlanders who may spy them will be sure that they are men, and friends,
+and come to them to be raised to proper dignity above the insects. It is
+not unusual for a man to be brought up to sunshine, and have his session
+with the educator, and be flying his own assigned atmosphere-flier
+within a week, diving back above what used to be the place where he was
+hunted, but where he has become the hunter.
+
+It is a very pleasant arrangement. The search for more humans in the
+lowlands is a prosperous business, even when it is unsuccessful. The
+wings of white Morpho butterflies bring the highest prices, but even a
+common swallow-tail is riches, and the fur of caterpillars--duly
+processed--goes into the holds of the planet-owned space-line ships with
+the care given elsewhere to platinum and diamonds.
+
+And also it is good sport. The planet is a sportsman's paradise. There
+are not too many visitors. Nobody may go hunting without an experienced
+host. And off-planet sportsmen tend to feel somewhat queasy after a
+session as guest of the folk who have made Burl their planet-president.
+Visitors are not so much alarmed at fighting flying beetles in mid-air,
+even though the beetles may compare with the hunters' craft in size and
+are terrifically tenacious of life. The thing that appalls strangers is
+the insistence of Burl's fellow-citizens--no longer only tribesmen--upon
+fighting spiders on the ground. With their memories, they like it that
+way. It's more satisfactory.
+
+Not long ago the Planet President of Sumor XI was Burl's guest for a
+hunt. Sumor XI is a highly civilized planet, and life there has become
+tame. Its president is an ardent hunter. He liked Burl, who is still all
+hard muscle despite his graying hair. He and Saya have a very
+comfortable dwelling, and now that their children are grown they have
+room in it even for a planet president, if he comes as a sportsman
+guest. The Planet President of Sumor XI even liked the informal
+atmosphere of a house where pleasantly self-possessed dogs curl up
+comfortably on rugs of emperor-moth down that elsewhere are beyond
+price.
+
+But the President of Sumor XI was embarrassed on his visit. He and Burl
+are both hunters, and they are highly congenial. But the President of
+Sumor XI was upset on his last flight to the lowlands. Burl got out of
+the atmosphere-flier alone, and for pure deep personal satisfaction he
+fought a mastodon-sized wolf spider with nothing but a spear.
+
+He killed the creature, of course. But the President of Sumor XI was
+embarrassed. He wouldn't have dared try it. He felt that, however
+sporting it might be, it was too risky a thing for a Planet President to
+do.
+
+But Saya took it for granted.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_You're missing the big thrills in science-fiction if you miss any of
+the_
+
+_ACE SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS_
+
+
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+
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+
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+
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+
+
+_Ace Book D-103--35¢_
+
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+
+    D-139 ALIEN FROM ARCTURUS by Gordon R. Dickson
+             THE ATOM CURTAIN by Nick Boddie Williams
+
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+             A new anthology edited by Donald A. Wollheim
+
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+             THE STARS ARE OURS! by Andre Norton
+
+    D-118 THE PARADOX MEN by Charles L. Harness
+             DOME AROUND AMERICA by Jack Williamson
+
+    D-113 ONE IN THREE HUNDRED by J. T. McIntosh
+             THE TRANSPOSED MAN by Dwight V. Swain
+
+    D-110 NO WORLD OF THEIR OWN by Poul Anderson
+             THE 1,000 YEAR PLAN by Isaac Asimov
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+             by Isaac Asimov
+
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+
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+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Forgotten Planet, by Murray Leinster
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41637 ***