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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42987 ***
+
+                       Nightmare Planet
+
+                     _by_ MURRAY LEINSTER
+
+               (_Illustrations by Tom O'Reilly_)
+
+    [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction
+    Plus June 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+    the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    _In science-fiction, as in all categories of fiction, there are
+    stories that are so outstanding from the standpoint of
+    characterization, concept, and background development that they
+    remain popular for decades. Two such stories were Murray Leinster's_
+    The Mad Planet _and_ Red Dust. _Originally published in 1923, they
+    have been reprinted frequently both here and abroad. They are now
+    scheduled for book publication. Especially for this magazine, Murray
+    Leinster has written the final story in the series. It is not
+    necessary to have read the previous stories to enjoy this one. Once
+    again, Burl experiences magnificent adventures against a colorful
+    background, but to the whole the author has added philosophical and
+    psychological observations that give this story a flavor seldom
+    achieved in science-fiction._
+
+    Under his real name of Will Fitzgerald Jenkins, the author has sold
+    to _The Saturday Evening Post_, _Colliers'_, _Today's Woman_, in
+    fact every important publication in America. He has had over 1200
+    stories published, 15 books and 35 science-fiction stories
+    anthologized. His writing earned him a listing in _Who's Who in
+    America_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+The Directory-ship _Tethys_ made the first landing on the planet,
+L216^{12}. It was a goodly world, with an ample atmosphere and many
+seas, which the nearby sun warmed so lavishly that a perpetual
+cloud-bank hid them and all the solid ground from view. It had mountains
+and islands and high plateaus. It had day and night and rain. It had an
+equable climate, rather on the tropical side. But it possessed no life.
+
+No animals roamed its solid surface. No vegetation grew from its rocks.
+Not even bacteria struggled with the stones to turn them into soil. No
+living thing, however small, swam in its oceans. It was one of that
+disappointing vast majority of otherwise admirable worlds which was
+unsuited for colonization solely because it had not been colonized
+before. It could be used for biological experiments in a completely
+germ-free environment, or ships could land upon it for water and
+supplies of air. The water was pure and the air breathable, but it had
+no other present utility. Such was the case with an overwhelming number
+of Earth-type planets when first discovered in the exploration of the
+galaxy. Life simply hadn't started there.
+
+So the ship which first landed upon it made due note for the Galactic
+Directory and went away, and no other ship came near the planet for
+eight hundred years.
+
+But nearly a millennium later, the Seed-Ship _Orana_ arrived. It landed
+and carefully seeded the useless world. It circled endlessly above the
+clouds, dribbling out a fine dust comprised of the spores of every
+conceivable microorganism that could break down rock to powder and turn
+the powder to organic matter. It also seeded with moulds and fungi and
+lichens, and everything that could turn powdery primitive soil into
+stuff on which higher forms of life could grow. The _Orana_ seeded the
+seas with plankton. Then it, too, went away.
+
+Centuries passed. Then the Ecological Preparation Ship _Ludred_ swam to
+the planet from space. It was a gigantic ship of highly improbable
+construction and purpose. It found the previous seeding successful. Now
+there was soil which swarmed with minute living things. There were fungi
+which throve monstrously. The seas stank of teeming minuscule
+life-forms. There were even some novelties on land, developed by
+strictly local conditions. There were, for example, _paramecium_ as big
+as grapes, and yeasts had increased in size so that they bore flowers
+visible to the naked eye. The life on the planet was not aboriginal,
+though. It had all been planted by the seed-ship of centuries before.
+
+The _Ludred_ released insects, it dumped fish into the seas. It
+scattered plant-seeds over the continents. It treated the planet to a
+sort of Russell's Mixture of living things. The real Russell's Mixture
+is that blend of simple elements in the proportions found in suns. This
+was a blend of living creatures, of whom some should certainly survive
+by consuming the now habituated flora, and others which should survive
+by preying on the first. The planet was stocked, in effect, with
+everything it could be hoped might live there.
+
+But at the time of the _Ludred's_ visit of course no creature needing
+parental care had any chance of survival. Everything had to be able to
+care for itself the instant it burst its egg. So there were no birds or
+mammals. Trees and plants of divers sorts, and fish and crustaceans and
+insects could be planted. Nothing else.
+
+The _Ludred_ swam away through emptiness.
+
+There should have been another planting, centuries later still, but it
+was never made. When the Ecological Preparation Service was moved to
+Algol IV, a file was upset. The cards in it were picked up and replaced,
+but one was missed. So that planet was forgotten. It circled its sun in
+emptiness. Cloud-banks covered it from pole to pole. There were hazy
+markings in certain places, where high plateaus penetrated the clouds.
+But from space the planet was featureless. Seen from afar, it was merely
+a round white ball--white from its cloud-banks and nothing else.
+
+But on its surface, in its lowlands it was nightmare.
+
+Especially was it nightmare--after some centuries--for the descendants
+of the human beings from the space-liner _Icarus_, wrecked there some
+forty-odd generations ago. Naturally, nobody anywhere else thought of
+the _Icarus_ any more. It was not even remembered by the descendants of
+its human cargo, who now inhabited the planet. The wreckage of the ship
+was long since hidden under the seething, furiously striving fungi of
+the boil. The human beings on the planet had forgotten not only the ship
+but very nearly everything--how they came to this world, the use of
+metals, the existence of fire, and even the fact that there was such a
+thing as sunlight. They lived in the lowlands, deep under the
+cloud-bank, amid surroundings which were riotous, swarming, frenzied
+horror. They had become savages. They were less than savages. They had
+forgotten their high destiny as men.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Dawn came. Grayness appeared overhead and increased. That was all. The
+sky was a blank, colorless pall, merely mottled where the clouds
+clustered a little thicker or a little thinner, as clouds do. But the
+landscape was variegated enough! Where the little group of people
+huddled together, there was a wide valley. Its walls rose up and up into
+the very clouds. The people had never climbed those hillsides.
+
+They had not even traditions of what might lie above them, and their
+lives had been much too occupied to allow of speculations on cosmology.
+By day they were utterly absorbed in two problems which filled every
+waking minute. One was the securing of food to eat, under the conditions
+of the second problem, which was that of merely staying alive.
+
+There was only one of their number who sometimes thought of other
+matters, and he did so because he had become lost from his group of
+humans once, and had found his way back to it. His name was Burl, and
+his becoming lost was pure fantastic accident, and his utilization of a
+fully inherited power to think was the result of extraordinary events.
+But he still had not the actual habit of thinking. This morning he was
+like his fellows.
+
+All of them were soaked with wetness. During the night--every night--the
+sky dripped slow, spaced, solemn water-drops during the whole of the
+dark hours. This was customary. But normally the humans hid in the
+mushroom-forests, sheltered by the toadstools which now grew to three
+man-heights. They denned in small openings in the tangled mass of
+parasitic growths which flourished in such thickets. But this last night
+they had camped in the open. They had no proper habitations of their
+own. Caves would have been desirable, but insects made use of caves, and
+the descendants of insects introduced untold centuries before had shared
+in the size-increase of _paramecium_ and yeasts and the few true plants
+which had been able to hold their own. Mining-wasps were two yards long,
+and bumble-bees were nearly as huge, and there were other armored
+monstrosities which also preferred caves for their own purposes. And of
+course the humans could not build habitations, because anything men
+built to serve the purpose of a cave would instantly be preempted by
+creatures who would automatically destroy any previous occupants.
+
+The humans had no fixed dens at any time. Now they had not even shelter.
+They lacked other things, also. They had no tools save salvaged scraps
+of insect-armor--great sawtoothed mandibles or razor-pointed
+leg-shells--which they used to pry apart the edible fungi on which they
+lived, or to get at the morsels of meat left behind when the brainless
+lords of this planet devoured each other. They had not even any useful
+knowledge, except desperately accurate special knowledge of the manners
+and customs of the insects they could not defy. And on this special
+morning they concluded that they were doomed. They were going to be
+killed. They stood shivering in the open, waiting for it to happen.
+
+It was not exactly news. They had had warning days ago, but they could
+do nothing about it. Their home valley, to be sure, would have made any
+civilized human being shudder merely to look at it, but they had
+considered it almost paradise. It was many miles long, and a fair number
+wide, and a stream ran down its middle. At the lower end of the valley
+there was a vast swamp, from which at nightfall the thunderously
+deep-bass croaking of giant frogs could be heard. But that swamp had
+kept out the more terrifying creatures of that world. The thirty-foot
+centipedes could not cross it or did not choose to. The mastodon-sized
+tarantulas which ravaged so much of the planet would not cross it save
+in pursuit of prey. So the valley was nearly a haven of safety.
+
+True, there was one clotho spider in its ogre's castle nearby, and there
+was a labyrinth spider in a minor valley which nobody had ever ventured
+into, and there were some--not many--praying-mantises as tall as
+giraffes. They wandered terribly here and there. But most members of
+insect life here were absorbed in their own affairs and ignored the
+humans. There was an ant-city, whose foot-long warriors competed with
+the humans as scavengers. There were the bees, trying to eke out a
+livelihood from the great, cruciform flowers of the giant cabbage-plants
+and the milkweeds when water-lilies in the swamps did not bear their
+four-foot blooms. Wasps sought their own prey. Flies were consumers of
+corruption, but even the flies two feet in length would shy away from a
+man who waved his arms at it. So this valley had seemed to these people
+to be a truly admirable place.
+
+But a fiend had entered it. As the gray light grew stronger the
+shivering folk looked terrifiedly about them. There were only twenty of
+the people now. Two weeks before there had been thirty. In a matter of
+days or less, there would be none. Because the valley had been invaded
+by a great gray furry spider!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a stirring, not far from where the man-folk trembled. Small,
+inquisitive antennae popped into view among a mass of large-sized
+pebbles. There was a violent stirring, and gravel disappeared. Small
+black things thrust upward into view and scurried anxiously about. They
+returned to the spot from which they had emerged. They were ants,
+opening the shaft of their city after scouting for danger outside. They
+scratched and pulled and tugged at the plug of stones. They opened the
+ant-city's artery of commerce. Strings of small black things came
+pouring out. They averaged a foot in length, and they marched off in
+groups upon their divers errands. Presently a group of huge-jawed
+soldier-ants appeared, picking their way stolidly out of the opening.
+They waited stupidly for the workers they were to guard. The workers
+came, each carrying a faintly greenish blob of living matter. The
+caravan moved off. The humans knew exactly what it was. The green blobs
+were aphids--plant lice: ant-cows--small creatures sheltered and guarded
+by the ants and daily carried to nearby vegetation to feed upon its sap
+and yield inestimable honeydew.
+
+Something reared up two hundred yards away, where the thin mist that lay
+everywhere just barely began to fade all colorings before it dimmed all
+outlines. The object was slender. It had a curiously humanlike head. It
+held out horrible sawtoothed arms in a gesture as of benediction--which
+was purest mockery. Something smaller was drawing near to it. The
+colossal praying mantis held its pose, immovable. Presently it struck
+downward with lightning speed. There was a cry. The mantis rose erect
+again, its great arms holding something that stirred and struggled
+helplessly, and repented its unconsonanted outcry. The mantis ate it
+daintily as it struggled and screamed.
+
+The humans did not watch this tragedy. The mantis would eat a man, of
+course. It had. The only creatures immune to its menace were ants, which
+for some reason it would not touch. But it was a mantis' custom after
+spotting its prey to wait immobile for the unlucky creature to come
+within its reach. It preferred to make its captures that way. Only if a
+thing fled did the mantis pursue with deadly ferocity. Even then it
+dined with monstrous deliberation as this one dined now. Still, mantises
+could be seen from a distance and hidden from. They were not the terror
+which had driven the humans even from their hiding-places.
+
+It had been two weeks since the giant hunting-spider had come through a
+mountain pass into this valley to prey upon the life within it. It was
+gigantic even of its kind. It was deadliness beyond compare. The first
+human to see it froze in terror. It was disaster itself. Its legs
+spanned yards. Its fangs were needle-sharp and feet in length--and
+poisoned. Its eyes glittered with insatiable, insane blood-lust. Its
+coming was ten times more deadly to the unarmed folk than a Bengal tiger
+loose in the valley would have been.
+
+It killed a man the very first day it was in the valley, leaving his
+sucked-dry carcass, and going on to destroy a rhinoceros-beetle and a
+cricket--whose deep-bass cries were horrible--and proceeded down the
+valley, leaving only death behind it. It had killed other men and women
+since. It had caught four children. But even that was not the worst. It
+carried worse, more deadly, more inevitable disaster with it.
+
+Because, bumping and bouncing behind its abdomen as it moved, fastened
+to its body with cables of coarse and discolored silk, the
+hunting-spider dragged a burden which was its own ferocity many times
+multiplied. It dragged an egg-bag. The bag was larger than its body,
+four feet in diameter. The female spider would carry this
+burden--cherishing it--until the eggs hatched. Then there would be four
+to five hundred small monsters at large in the valley. And from the
+instant of their hatching they would be just such demoniac creatures as
+their parents. They would be small, to be sure. Their legs would span no
+more than a foot. Their bodies would be the size of a man's fist. But
+they could leap two yards, instantly they reached the open air, and
+their inch-long fangs would be no less envenomed, and their ferocity
+would be in madness, in insanity and in stark maniacal horror equal the
+great gray fiend which had begot them.
+
+The eggs had hatched. Today--now--this morning--they were abroad. The
+little group of humans no longer hid in the mushroom-forests because the
+small hunting-spiders sought frenziedly there for things to kill.
+Hundreds of small lunatic demons roamed the valley. They swarmed among
+the huge toadstools, killing and devouring all living things large and
+small. When they encountered each other they fought in slavering,
+panting fury, and the survivors of such duels dined upon their brothers.
+Small truffle-beetles died, clicking futilely. Infinitesimal grubs,
+newly hatched from butterfly eggs and barely six inches long, furnished
+them with tidbits. But they would kill anything and feast upon it.
+
+A woman had died yesterday, and two small gray devils battled
+murderously above her corpse.
+
+Just before darkness a huge yellow butterfly had flung itself agonizedly
+aloft, with these small dark horrors clinging to its body, feasting upon
+the juices of the body their poison had not yet done to death.
+
+And now, at daybreak, the humans looked about despairingly for their own
+deaths to come to them. They had spent the night in the open lest they
+be trapped in the very forests that had been their protection. Now they
+remained in clear view of the large gray murderer should it pass that
+way. They did not dare to hide because of that ogreish creature's young,
+who panted in their blood-lust as they scurried here and there and
+everywhere.
+
+As the day became established, the clouds were gray--gray only. The
+night-mist thinned. One of the younger women of the tribe--a girl called
+Saya--saw the huge thing far away. She cried out, choking. The others
+saw the monster as it leaped upon and murdered a vividly colored
+caterpillar on a milkweed near the limit of vision. The milkweed was the
+size of a tree. The caterpillar was four yards long. While the enormous
+victim writhed as it died, not one of the humans looked away. Presently
+all was still. The hunting-spider crouched over its victim in obscene
+absorption. Having been madness incarnate, it now was the very exemplar
+of a horrid gluttony.
+
+Again the humans shivered. They were without shelter. They were without
+even the concept of arms. But it was morning, and they were alive, and
+therefore they were hungry. Their desperation was absolute, but
+desperation to some degree was part of their lives. Yet they shivered
+and suffered. There were edible mushrooms nearby, but with the deadly
+small replicas of the hunting-spider giant roaming everywhere, any
+movement was as likely to be deadly as standing still to be found and
+killed. The humans murmured to one another, fearfully.
+
+But there was the young man called Burl, who had been lost from his
+tribe and had found it again. The experience had changed him. He had
+felt stirrings of atavistic impulses in recent weeks--the more
+especially when the young girl Saya looked at him. It was not normal, in
+humans conditioned to survive by flight, that Burl should feel
+previously unimagined hunger for fury--a longing to hate and do battle.
+Of course men sometimes fought for a particular woman's favor, but not
+when there were deadly insects about. The carnivorous insects were not
+only peril, but horror unfaceable. So Burl's sensations were very
+strange. On this planet a courtship did not usually involve displays of
+valor. A man who was a more skillful forager than the foot-long ants was
+an acceptable husband. Warriors did not exist.
+
+Burl did not even know what a warrior was. Yet today the sullen,
+unreasonable impulses to conduct what he could not quite imagine were
+very strong. He knew all the despairing terror the others felt. But he
+also was hungry. The sheer doom that was upon his group did not change
+the fact that he wanted to eat, nor did it change the fact that he felt
+queer when the girl Saya looked at him. Because she was terrified, the
+same sort of atavistic process was at work in her. She looked to Burl.
+Men no longer served as protectors against enemies so irresistible as
+giant spiders. It was not possible. But when Burl realized her regard
+his chest swelled. He felt a half-formed impulse to beat upon it. His
+new-found reasoning processes told him that this particular fear was
+different in some fashion from the terrors men normally experienced. It
+was. This was a different sort of emergency. Most dangers were sudden
+and either immediately fatal or somehow avoidable. This was different.
+There was time to savor its meaning and its hopelessness. It seemed as
+if it should be possible to do something about it. But Burl was not
+able, as yet, to think what to do. The bare idea of doing anything was
+unusual, now. Because of it, though, Burl was able to disregard his
+terror when Saya regarded him yearningly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The other men muttered to each other of the sudden death in the mushroom
+thickets. No less certain death now feasted on the dead yellow
+caterpillar. But Burl abruptly pushed his way clear of the small crowd
+and scowled for Saya to see. He moved toward the nearest fungus-thicket.
+An edible mushroom grew at its very edge. He marched toward it,
+swaggering. Men did not often swagger on this planet.
+
+But then he ceased to swagger. His approach to the mingled mass of
+toadstools and lesser monstrosities grew slower. His feet dragged. He
+came to a halt. His impulse to combat conflicted with the facts of here
+and now. His flesh crawled at the thought of the grisly small beasts
+which now might be within yards. These thickets had been men's safest
+hiding-places. Now they were places of surest disaster.
+
+He stopped, with a coldness at the pit of his stomach. But as it was a
+new experience to be able to have danger come in a form which could be
+foreseen, so Burl now had a new experience in that he was ashamed to be
+afraid. Somehow, having tacitly undertaken to get food for his
+companions, he could not bring himself to draw back while they watched.
+But he did want desperately to get the food in a hurry and get away from
+there.
+
+He saw a gruesome fragment of a tragedy of days before. It was the
+emptied, scraped, hollow leg-shell of a beetle. It was horrendously
+barbed. Great, knife-edged spines lined its edge. They were six inches
+in length. And men did not have weapons any more, but they sometimes
+used just such objects as this to dismember defenseless giant slugs they
+came upon.
+
+Burl picked up the hollow shell of the leg-joint. He shook it free of
+clinging moulds--and small things an inch or two in length dropped from
+it and scurried frantically into hiding. He moved hesitantly toward the
+edible mushroom which would be food for Saya and the rest. He was four
+yards from the thicket. Three. Two. He needed to move only six feet, and
+then slice at the flabby mushroom-head, and he would be at least an
+admirable person in the eyes of Saya.
+
+Then he cried out thinly. Something small, with insane eyes, leaped upon
+him from the edge of a giant toadstool.
+
+It was, of course, one of the small beasts which had hatched from the
+hunting-spider's egg-bag. It had grown. Its legs now spanned sixteen
+inches. Its body was as large as Burl's two fists together. It was big
+enough to enclose his head in a cage of loathesomeness formed by its
+legs, while its fangs tore at his scalp. Or it could cover his chest
+with its abominableness while its poison filled his veins, and while it
+feasted upon him afterward....
+
+He flung up his hands in a paralytic, horror-stricken attempt to ward it
+off. But they were clenched. His right hand did not let go of the
+leg-section with its razor-sharp barbs.
+
+The spider struck the beetle-leg. He felt the impact. Then he heard
+gaspings and bubblings of fury. He heard an indescribable cry which was
+madness itself. The chitinous object he had picked up now shook and
+quivered of itself.
+
+The spider was impaled. Two of its legs were severed and twitched upon
+the ground before him. Its body was slashed nearly in half. It writhed
+and struggled and made beastly sounds. Thin, colored fluids dripped from
+it. A disgusting musky smell filled the air. It strove to reach and kill
+him as it died. Its eyes looked like flames.
+
+Burl's arm shook convulsively. The small thing dropped to the ground.
+Its remaining legs moved frantically but without purpose.
+
+It died, though its leg continued to twitch and stir and quiver.
+
+Burl remained frozen, for seconds. It was an acquired instinct; a
+conditioned reflex which humans had to develop on this world. When
+danger was past, one stayed desperately still lest it return. But Burl's
+thoughts were now not of horror but a vast astonishment. He had killed a
+spider! He had killed a thing which would have killed him! He was still
+alive!
+
+And then, being a savage, and an animal, as well as a human being, he
+acted according to that highly complicated nature. As a savage, he knew
+with strict practicality that it was improbable that there was another
+baby spider nearby. If there had been, they would have fought each
+other. As an animal, he was again hungry. As a human being, he was vain.
+
+So he moved closer to the toadstool-thicket and put his hand out and
+broke off a great mass of the one edible mushroom at the edge. A
+noisesome broth poured out and little maggots dropped to the ground and
+writhed there in it. But most of what he had broken off was sound. He
+turned to take it to Saya. Then he saw the dropped weapon and the
+spider. He picked up the weapon.
+
+The spider's legs still twitched, though futilely. He spiked the small
+body on the beetle-leg's spines. He strode back to the remnant of his
+tribe with a peculiar gait that even he had not often practiced.
+
+It was rather more pronounced than a swagger. It was a strut.
+
+They trembled when they saw the dead creature he had killed. He gave
+Saya the food. She took it, looking at him with bright and intense eyes.
+He took a part of the mushroom for himself and ate it, scowling.
+Thoughts were struggling to form in his mind. He was not accustomed to
+thinking, but he had done more of it than any other of the pitiful group
+about him.
+
+He felt eyes watching him. There were five adult men in this group
+besides himself, and six women. The rest were children, from gangling
+adolescents to one mere infant in arms. They were a remarkably colorful
+group at the moment, had he only known it. The men wore
+yellow-and-gold-brown loin-cloths of caterpillar-fur, stripped from the
+drained carcasses of creatures that the formerly resident clothed spider
+had killed. The women wore cloaks of butterfly-wing, similarly salvaged
+from the remnants of a meal left unfinished by a finicky or engorged
+praying mantis. The stuff was thick and leathery, but it was
+magnificently tinted in purples and yellows.
+
+Time passed. The mushroom Burl had brought was finished. Some eyes
+always explored the clear ground around this group. But other eyes fixed
+themselves upon Burl. It was not a consciously questioning gaze. It was
+surely not a hopeful one. But men and women and children looked at him.
+They marveled at him. He had dared to go and get food! He had been
+attacked by one of the creatures who doomed them all, but he was not
+dead! Instead, he had killed the spider! It was marvelous! It was
+unparalleled that a man should kill anything that attacked him!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The doomed small group regarded Burl with wondering eyes. He brushed his
+hands together. He looked at Saya. He wished to be alone with her. He
+wished to know what she thought when she looked at him. Why she looked
+at him. What she felt when she looked at him.
+
+He stood up and said dourly:
+
+"Come!"
+
+She moved timidly and gave him her hand. He moved away. There was but
+one way that any human being on this planet would think to move, from
+this particular spot just now--away from the still-feasting gigantic
+horror whose offspring he had killed. The folk shivered near the edge of
+the first upward slope of the valley wall. Burl moved in that direction.
+Toward the slope. Saya went with him.
+
+Before they had gone ten yards a man spoke to his wife. They followed
+Burl, with their three children. Five yards more, and two of the
+remaining three adult men were hustling their families in his wake also.
+In seconds the last was in motion.
+
+Burl moved on, unconscious of any who followed him, aware only of Saya.
+The procession, absurd as it was, continued in his wake simply because
+it had begun to do so. A skinny, half-grown boy regarded Burl's stained
+weapon. He saw something half-buried in the soil and moved aside to tug
+at it. It was part of the armor of a former rhinoceros-beetle. He went
+on, rather awkwardly holding a weapon which might have been called a
+dagger, eighteen inches long, except that no dagger would have a
+hand-guard nearly its own length in diameter.
+
+They passed a struggling milkweed plant, no more than twenty feet high
+and already scabrous with scale and rusts upon its lower parts. Ants
+marched up and down its stalk in a steady, single file, placing aphids
+from the ant-city on suitable spots to feed, and to multiply as only
+parthenogenic aphids can do. But already on the far side of the
+milkweed, an ant-lion climbed up to do murder among them. The ant-lion
+was the larval form the lace-wing fly, of course. Aphids were its
+predestined prey.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Burl continued to march, holding Saya's hand. The reek of formic acid
+came to his nostrils. But that was only ants. The slope grew steeper.
+Massacre began behind him on the tree-sized milkweed. The ant-lion which
+even when it was but half an inch long, on Earth, could bite through the
+skin of a man--the ant-lion reached the pasturing cows. It plunged into
+slaughter. It was demoniac. It was such ghastly ferocity that the eggs
+from which its kind hatched were equipped, each one, with a plastic
+column to hold it well away from the object on which the clutch of eggs
+were laid. But for this precaution by the maternal lace-wing fly, the
+first of her brood to hatch would devour its unhatched brothers and
+sisters. This ant-lion charged into the placidly feeding aphids on the
+milkweed plant. It seized one and crushed it, holding it aloft so that
+the juices of its body would pour into the ant-lion's mouth. Almost
+instantly, it seemed, the mild-eyed aphid was a shrunken empty sack. The
+ant-lion seized another. The remaining aphids fed placidly while their
+enemy did vast slaughter among them.
+
+Clickings and a shrill stridulation sounded. Warrior-ants climbed with
+stupid ferocity to offer battle.
+
+Burl moved on to a minor eminence. He reached its top and looked sharply
+about him with the caution that was the price of existence on this
+world. Two hundred feet away, a small scurrying horror raged and
+searched among the rough-edged layers of what on other worlds was called
+paper-mould or rock-tripe. Here it was thick as quilting, and
+infinitesimal creatures denned under it. The sixteen-inch spider
+devoured them, making gluttonous sounds. But it was busy, and all
+spiders are relatively short-sighted.
+
+Burl turned to Saya--and realized that all the human folk had followed
+him. One of the adults was reaching fearfully for part of a discarded
+cricket-shell in the ground. He tore free an emptied, sickle-shaped jaw.
+It was curved and sharp and deadly if properly wielded. The man had seen
+Burl kill something. He tried vaguely to imagine killing something
+himself. He was not too successful. Another man tugged at the ground.
+The skinny boy was practicing thrusts with his giant dagger.
+
+Two of the adults were armed, without any clear idea of what to do with
+their arms. But Burl knew, now.
+
+He regarded them angrily. He had not meant to desert them, or even to
+take Saya permanently from among them. Humans had little enough of
+satisfaction on this planet. The scared company of their kind was one of
+the most important. So Burl did not resent that they had followed him.
+He did resent that they were near when he wanted to talk to Saya in what
+he did not yet think of as lover-like seclusion.
+
+They halted, regarding him humbly. They had been hungry, and he had
+found food for them. They had been paralyzed by terror, and he had dared
+to move. So they moved with him. They might have followed anybody else,
+but only Burl had initiative--so far. They trustfully waited to follow
+and to imitate him for so long as panic numbed their ability to think
+for themselves.
+
+Burl opened his mouth to shout furiously at them. But it was not a good
+idea for humans to draw attention. Spiders did not hunt by scent, but
+sound sometimes drew them. Burl closed his mouth again, in a taut
+straight line. The men looked at him supplicatingly. They had never been
+lost, and so had never learned to think even a little. Burl had learned
+to think in a rudimentary fashion and now he suddenly perceived that it
+was pleasing to have all the tribe regard him so worshipfully, even if
+not in quite the same fashion as Saya. He was suddenly aware that even
+as Saya had obeyed him when he told her to come with him, they would
+obey. He had, at the moment, no commands to give, but he immediately
+invented one for the pleasure of seeing it carried out.
+
+"_I carry sharp things_," he said sternly. "I killed a spider. Go find
+_sharp things_ to carry."
+
+They were a meek and abject folk, and they were desperately in need of
+something to do to take their minds from the uselessness of doing
+anything at all.
+
+They moved to obey. Saya would have loosened her hand and obeyed, too,
+but Burl held her beside him. One of the women, with a child three years
+old, laid the child down by Burl's feet while she went fearfully to seek
+some fragment of a dead creature, that would meet Burl's specification
+of sharpness.
+
+Burl heard a stifled scream. A ten-year-old boy stood paralyzed, staring
+in an agony of horror at something which had stepped from behind a
+misshapen fungoid object.
+
+It was a pallidly greenish creature with a small head and enormous eyes.
+It was a very few inches taller than a man. Its abdomen swelled
+gracefully into a pleasing, leaf-like shape. The boy faced it, paralyzed
+by horror, and it stood stock-still. Its great, hideously spiny arms
+were spread out in a pose of pious benediction.
+
+[Illustration: "_The boy faced it, paralyzed by horror._"]
+
+It was a partly-grown praying mantis, not very long hatched. It stood
+rigid, waiting benignly for the boy to come closer. If he fled, it would
+fling itself after him with ferocity beside which the fury of a tiger
+would seem kittenish. If he approached, its fanged arms would flash
+down, pierce his body, and hold him inextricably fast by the spikes that
+were worse than trap-claws. And of course it would not wait for him to
+die before it began its meal.
+
+The small party of humans stood frozen. They were filled with horror
+for the boy. They were cast into a deep abyss of despair by the
+sight of a half-grown mantis, because if there was one such miniature
+insect-dinosaur in the valley, there would be many others. Hundreds of
+others. This meant there had been a hatching of them. And they were as
+deadly as spiders.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But Burl did not think in such terms just now. Vanity filled him. He had
+commanded, and he had been obeyed. But now obedience was forgotten
+because there was this young praying mantis. If men had ever thought of
+fighting such a creature, it could have destroyed any number of them by
+pure ferocity and superiority of armament. But Burl raged. He ran toward
+the spot. Even mantises were sometimes frightened by the unexpected.
+Burl seized a lumpish object barely protruding from the ground. It
+looked like a rock. It was actually a flattened ball-fungus, feeding on
+the soil through thin white threads beneath it. Burl wrenched it free
+and hurled it furiously at the young monster.
+
+Insects simply do not think. Something came swiftly at it, and the
+mantis flashed its ghastly arms to seize and kill its attacker. The
+ball-fungus was heavy. It literally knocked the mantis backward. The boy
+fled frantically. The insect fought crazily against the thing it thought
+had assailed it.
+
+The humans gathered around Burl hundreds of yards away--again uphill.
+The slope of the mountain-flank was marked here. They gathered about
+Burl because of an example set by the woman who had left her
+three-year-old child behind. Saya, in the unfailing instinct of a girl
+for a small child, had snatched it up when Burl left her. Then she had
+joined him because the instinct which had made her obey him in starting
+off--it was not quite the same instinct which moved the others--also
+bade her follow him wherever he went. The mother of the child went to
+retrieve her deposit. Other figures moved cautiously toward him. The
+tribe was reconvened.
+
+The floor of the valley seemed a trifle obscured. The mist that hung
+always in the air made it seem less distinct; less actual; not quite as
+real as it had been.
+
+Burl gulped and said sternly:
+
+"Where are the sharp things?"
+
+The men looked at one another, numbly. Then one spoke despairingly,
+ignoring Burl's question. "Now," said the man dully, "there was not only
+the hunting-spider in the valley, but its young. And not only the young
+of the hunting-spider, but the young of a mantis ... It was hard to stay
+alive at the best of times. Now it had become impossible ..."
+
+Burl glared at him. It was neither courage nor resolution. He had come
+to realize what a splendid sensation it was to be admired by one's
+fellows. The more he was admired, the better. He was enraged that people
+thought to despair.
+
+"I," said Burl haughtily, "am _not_ going to stay here. I go to a place
+where there are neither spiders nor mantises. Come!"
+
+He held out his hand to Saya. She gave the child to its mother and look
+his hand. Burl stalked haughtily away, and she went with him. He went
+uphill. Naturally. He knew there were spiders and mantises in the
+valley. So many that to stay there was to die. So he went away from
+where they were.
+
+Burl had found out that adulation was enjoyable and authority
+delectable. He had found that it was pleasant to be a dictator. And then
+he had been disregarded. So he marched furiously away from his folk, in
+exactly the fashion of a spoiled child refusing to play any longer. He
+happened to march up the mountainside toward the cloud-bank that he
+considered the sky. He had no conscious intent to climb the mountain. He
+did not intend to lead the others. He meant to sulk, by punishing them
+through the removal of his own admirable person from their society. But
+they followed him.
+
+So he led his people upward. It has happened on other planets, in other
+manners. Most human achievements come about through the daring of those
+who strive.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sun was very near. It shone upon the top of the cloud-bank and the
+clouds glowed with a marvelous whiteness. It shone upon the
+mountain-peaks where they penetrated the clouds, and the peaks were
+warmed, and there was no snow anywhere despite the height. There were
+winds here where the sun shone. The sky was very blue. At the edge of
+the plateau where the cloud-bank lay below, the mountainsides seemed to
+descend into a sea of milk. Great undulations in the mist had the
+seeming of waves, which moved with great deliberation toward the shores.
+They seemed sometimes to break against the mountain-wall where it was
+cliff-like, and sometimes they seemed to flow up gentler inclinations
+like water flowing up a beach.
+
+All this was in the slowest of slow motion, because the cloud-waves were
+sometimes miles from crest to crest.
+
+The look of things was different on the plateau, too. This part of the
+unnamed world, no less than the lowlands, had been seeded with life on
+two separate occasions. Once with bacteria and moulds and lichens to
+break up the rocks and make soil of them, and once with seeds and
+insects-eggs and such living things as might sustain themselves
+immediately upon hatching. But here on the heights the conditions were
+drastically unlike the lowland tropic moisture. Different things had
+thriven, and in quite different fashion.
+
+Here moulds and yeasts and rusts were stunted by the sunlight. Grasses
+and weeds and trees survived, instead. This was an ideal environment for
+plants that needed sunlight to form chlorophyll, and chlorophyll to
+make use of the soil that had been formed. So here was vegetation that
+was nearly Earth-like. And there was a remarkable side-effect on the
+fauna which had been introduced at the same time and in the same manner
+as down below. In coolness which amounted to a temperate climate there
+could be no such frenzy of life as formed the nightmare-jungles in the
+lowlands. Plants grew at a slower tempo than fungi, and less
+luxuriantly. There was no adequate food-supply for large-sized
+plant-eaters. Insects which were to survive in sunshine could not grow
+to be monsters. Moreover, the nights were chill. Many insects grow
+torpid in the cool of a temperate-zone night, but warm up to activity
+soon after sunrise. But a large creature, made torpid by cold, will not
+revive so quickly. If large enough, it will not become fully active
+until close to dusk. On the plateau, the lowland monsters would starve
+in any case. But more--they would have only a fraction of a day of full
+activity.
+
+There was a necessary limit then, to the size of the insects that lived
+above the clouds. The life on the plateau would not have seemed
+horrifying at all to humans living on other planets. Save for the
+absence of birds to sing and lack of a variety of small mammals, the
+untouched sunlit plateau with its warm days and briskly chill nights
+would have impressed most men as an ideal habitation.
+
+But Burl and his companions were hardly prepared to see it that way at
+first glimpse. Certainly if told about it beforehand, they would have
+viewed it with despair.
+
+But they did not know beforehand. They toiled upward, their leader moved
+by such ridiculous motives as have sometimes caused men to achieve
+greatness throughout all history. Back on Earth, two great continents
+were discovered by a man trying to get spices to conceal the gamey
+flavor of half-spoiled meat. The power that drives mile-long
+space-craft, and that lights and runs the cities of the galaxy, was
+first developed because it could be used in bombs to kill other men.
+There were precedents for Burl leading his fellows into sunshine merely
+because he was angered that they ceased to admire him.
+
+The trudging, climbing folk were high above the valley, now. The thin
+mist that was never absent anywhere had hidden their former home, little
+by little. They climbed a steeply slanting mountain-flank. The stone was
+mostly covered by ragged, bluish-green rock-tripe in partly overlapping
+sheets. Such stuff is always close behind the bacteria which first
+attack a rock-face. On a slope, it clings while soil is washed downward
+as fast as it forms. The people never ate it. It produced frightening
+cramps. In time they would learn that if thoroughly dried it can he
+soaked to pliability again and cooked to a reasonable palatability. But
+so far they knew neither dryness nor fire.
+
+Nor had they ever known such surroundings as presently enveloped them. A
+slanting, stony mountainside which stretched up frighteningly to the
+very sky. Grayness overhead. Grayness, also, to one side--the side away
+from the mountain. And equal grayness below. The valley in which they
+lived could no longer be seen at all. Trudging and scrambling up the
+interminable incline, the people of Burl's personal following gradually
+realized the strangeness of their surroundings. As one result, they grew
+sick and dizzy. To them it seemed that the solid earth had tilted, and
+might presently tilt further. There was no horizon, but they had never
+seen a horizon. So they felt that what had been _down_ was now partly
+_behind_, and they feared lest a turning universe let them fall
+ultimately toward the grayness they considered sky.
+
+In this frightening strangeness, their only consolation was the company
+of their fellows. To stop would be to be abandoned in this place where
+all values were turned topsy-turvy. To go back--but none of them could
+imagine descending again to be devoured as one-third of their number
+already had been. If Burl had stopped, his followers would have squatted
+down and shivered together miserably, and waited for death. They had no
+thought of adventure nor any hope of safety. The only goodnesses they
+could imagine were food and the nearness of other humans. They clung
+together, obsessed by the dread of being left alone.
+
+Burl's motivation was no longer noble. He had started uphill in a fit of
+sulks, and he was ashamed to stop.
+
+They came to a place where the mountain-flank sank inward. There was a
+flat area, and behind it there was a winding cañon of sorts, like a vast
+crack in the mountain's substance. Burl breasted the curving edge, and
+walked on level ground. Then he stopped short.
+
+The mouth of the cañon was perhaps fifty yards from the lip of the
+downward slope. There was this level space, and on it there were
+toadstools and milkweed, and there was food. It was a small, isolated
+asylum for life such as they were used to. It could have been that here
+they could have found safety. But it wasn't that way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They saw the web at once. It was slung from between the opposite
+cliff-walls by cables two hundred feet long. Its radiating cables
+reached down to anchorages on stone. The snare-threads, winding out and
+out in that logarithmic spiral which men on other planets had noted
+thousands of years before--the snare-threads were a yard apart. The web
+was set for giant game. It was empty now, but Burl searched keenly and
+saw the tight-rope-cable leading from the very center of the web to a
+rocky shelf some fifty feet above the cañon's floor. At its end he saw
+the spider. It waited there, almost invisible against the stone, with
+one furry leg touching the cable that led to its waiting-place so that
+the slightest touch on any part of the web would warn it instantly.
+
+Burl's followers accumulated behind him. They stared. They knew, of
+course, that a web-spider will not leave its snare under any normal
+circumstances. They were not afraid of that. But they looked at the
+ground between the web and themselves.
+
+It was a charnel-house of murdered creatures. Half-inch-thick wing-cases
+of dead beetles. The cleaned-out carcasses of other giants. The
+ovipositor of an ichneumon-fly--six feet of slender, springy,
+deadly-pointed tube--and abdomen-plates of bees and draggled antennae of
+moths and butterflies.
+
+Something very terrible lived in this small place. The mountainsides
+were barren of food for big flying things. Anything which did fly so
+high for any reason would never land on sloping, foodless stone. It
+would land here. And very obviously it would die. Because
+something--something--killed them as they came. It denned back in the
+cañon where they could not see. It dined here.
+
+The humans looked and shivered. All but Burl. He deliberately chose for
+himself a magnificent lance grown by one dead creature for its own
+defense. He pulled it out of the ground and cleaned it with his hands.
+He seemed absorbed, but he was terribly aware of the inner depths of the
+cañon. He was actually pretending, for the sake of what he believed his
+dignity.
+
+Fearfully, the other humans imitated him in choosing weapons from the
+armory of the devoured. Then Burl stalked grandly to one side and began
+to climb again. His people followed him in numbed silence. They were
+filled with dread, but it was not quite terror. Insects do not stalk
+their prey. The deadly unseen monster of the cañon had not attacked
+them. Therefore, it did not know they were there. And therefore they
+were safe from it until it appeared. But none of them desired to stay.
+
+The slope lessened here, and half a mile further on there was a small
+thicket of mushrooms. From within it came the cheerful loud clicking of
+some small beetle, arrived at this spot nobody could possibly know how,
+but happily ensconced in a twenty-yard patch of jungle above a hollow
+that had gathered soil through the centuries. There were edible
+mushrooms in the thicket.
+
+The humans ate. Naturally. And here they realized that they were no
+longer doomed by the creatures in the valley. Since their climb began
+they had seen no dangerous thing except the one gigantic, motionless
+web-spider. They had left the valley and its particular dangers behind.
+
+A man exclaimed in naïve astonishment. He was eating raw mushroom at the
+moment, and his mouth was full. But abruptly it occurred to him that
+their doom was lifted. He mentioned the fact in a sort of startled
+wonder.
+
+"We will stay here," he added happily. "There is food."
+
+And Burl regarded him with knitted brows. Burl was well on the way to
+becoming spoiled. He had tasted power over his folk, and he found
+himself jealous of any decision by anybody else.
+
+"I go on," he said haughtily. "Now! You may stay behind if you
+wish--alone!"
+
+He broke off food for the journey. He held out his hand to Saya. He went
+on. And again he went upward because to go back was to go to the cañon
+of the unknown killer. And his folk docilely followed him. They did not
+really reason about it. To follow him had become a pattern, more or less
+precarious. In time it could become a habit. Over a period of years it
+could even become a tradition.
+
+The procession marched on and up. Burl noticed that the air seemed
+clearer, here. It was not the misty, quasi-transparent stuff of the
+valley. He could see for miles to right and left, and the curvatures of
+the mountain-face. But he could not see the valley.
+
+Then he realized that the cloud-bank he saw was finite--an object. He
+had never thought of it specifically before. To him it had seemed 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 that would simply keep him from going any further. But
+until that happened he obstinately continued to climb.
+
+The thing which was the sky appeared to stir. It moved. A little higher,
+and he could see that there were parts of it which were lower than he
+was. They moved also. But they did not approach him. And he had no
+experience of anything inimical which did not plunge upon its victims.
+Therefore he was not afraid.
+
+In fact, a little later he observed that the whiteness retreated before
+him, and he was pleased. Weak things such as humans fled aside when
+predators approached. Here was something which fled aside at his
+approach. His followers undoubtedly observed the same phenomenon. He had
+killed a spider. He was a remarkable person. This unknown white stuff
+was afraid of him.
+
+Burl, with bland conceit, marched confidently through the cloud-bank,
+ever climbing. At its thickest, he could see only feet in each
+direction, but always when he advanced threateningly upon opacity, it
+cleared before him.
+
+Presently the gray light grew brighter. Burl and his folk were
+accustomed to a shadowless illumination such as fungi could endure--the
+equivalent of a heavily overcast day on an Earth-type planet. Now the
+mist about him took on a luminosity which was of a different kind.
+Suddenly he noticed the silence. He had never known even comparative
+silence before in all his life. His ears had been assailed every minute
+since he had been born by a din which was the noise of creatures. By
+stridulations, by chirpings, by screams, or at the least by the clicking
+of armor or the deep-toned pulsations of wings. He had always lived in
+the uproar of frenzied struggle. Now, that hellish chorus of shrieks and
+cries and mating-calls was cut off. The lower surface of the cloud-bank
+reflected it. Burl and his people moved upward through an unparalleled
+stillness.
+
+They fell silent, marveling. They heard each other's movements. They
+could hear each other's voices. But they moved in a vast quietness over
+stones which here were not even lichen-covered, but glistened with wet.
+And all about them a golden glow hung in the very air. Stillness, and
+quietude, and golden light which grew stronger and stronger and
+stronger....
+
+It was very remarkable when they came up through the sea of mist upon a
+shore of sunshine, and saw blue sky and sunlight for the first time. The
+light smote upon their pink skins and brilliantly colored furry
+garments. It glinted in changing, ever-more-colorful flashes upon the
+cloaks made of butterfly wings. It sparkled upon 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
+blinking, wondering, astounded eyes. The sky was blue. There was green
+grass. And there was sound. The sound was of wind blowing in the trees
+and sunshine.
+
+They heard insects, too, but they did not know what it was they heard.
+The shrill, small musical whirrings, the high-pitched small cries which
+made up a strange new elfin melody, were totally strange. All things
+were novel to their eyes, and an enormous exultation filled them. From
+deep-buried ancestral memories, they knew that this was somehow right,
+was somehow normal. And they breathed clean air for the first time in
+many generations.
+
+Burl even shouted, in triumph, and his voice rang echoing among rocks.
+
+The plateau rang with the shouting of a man in triumph!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They had enough food for days. They had brought it from the isolated
+thicket not too far beneath the clouds. 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. Somehow they believed that this high place was secure. But
+it was not a hiding-place. And though they did accept, with the
+simplicity of children and savages, that they had no enemies here, their
+first quest, nevertheless, was for a place in which they could conceal
+themselves.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+They found a cave. It was small to hold all of them, so that they would
+be crowded in it, but, as it turned out, that was fortunate.
+
+At some time it had been occupied by some other creature, but the dirt
+which floored it had settled flat and there were no recent tracks. It
+retained faint traces of an odor which was unfamiliar but not
+unpleasant. It had no connotation of danger.
+
+Ants stank of formic acid plus the musky odor of their particular city
+and kind. One could tell not only the kind of ant but what hill they
+came from, from a mere sniff at a well-traveled ant-trail. Spiders had
+their own hair-raising odor. The smell of a praying-mantis was acrid,
+and of beetles decay, and of course those bugs whose main defense was
+smell gave off an effluvium which tended to strangle all but themselves.
+
+The cave's smell was quite different. The humans thought vaguely that it
+might 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
+creatures 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 astounded by the sun, more particularly since they could not
+look at it. But presently, being savages, they accepted it with the
+matter-of-factness of children.
+
+They could not cease to wonder at the vegetation about them. They were
+accustomed only to gigantic fungi, and a few feverishly growing plants
+striving to flower and bear seed before being devoured. Here they saw
+many plants, and at first no insects at all. However, they looked only
+for the large things they were accustomed to.
+
+They were astounded by the slenderness of the plants. Grass fascinated
+them, and weeds. A large part of their courage came from the absence of
+debris upon the ground. In the valley, the habitation of a trapdoor
+spider was marked by grisly trophies--armor emptied of all meat but not
+yet rotted by the highly specialized bacteria which flourished upon
+chitin. The hunting-ground of even a mantis was marked by discarded,
+transparent beetle-wings and sharp spiny bits of armor, and mandibles
+not tasty enough to be consumed. Here, in the first hour of their
+exploration, they saw no sign that any insect from the lowlands had ever
+come to this place at all. But they interpreted the fact quite correctly
+as rarity, rather than complete absence of huge creatures blundering up
+into the sunlight.
+
+They were relieved that they had found a cave. There was no thicket of
+trees close-growing enough to shelter them. They were ludicrously amazed
+when they found that trees were hard and solid, because the fungi they
+knew were easily cut by sawtoothed tools. They found nothing to eat, but
+they were not yet hungry. They did not worry about it while they still
+had bits of edible mushroom from their climb.
+
+When the sun sank low and the crimson colorings filled the western
+horizon, they shivered. 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 and gaze directly at the
+sun. They saw it descend behind something they could not guess at. Then
+there was dark.
+
+The fact stunned them. So night came like this!
+
+Then they saw the stars as they winked singly into being. And the folk
+from the lowland crowded frantically into the cave with its faint odor
+of having once been occupied. They filled the cave tightly. But Burl was
+somewhat reluctant to admit his fear, and Saya lingered close to him.
+They were the last to enter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nothing happened. Nothing. The sounds of evening continued. They were
+strange but infinitely soothing and somehow what night-sounds ought to
+be. Burl and the others could not possibly analyze it, but for the first
+time in many generations they were in an environment really similar to
+that intended for their race. It had a rightness and a goodness about it
+which was perceptible for all its novelty. And because Burl had once
+been lost from his tribe, he was capable of estimating novelties a
+little better than the rest.
+
+He listened to the night-noises from close by the cave's small entrance.
+He heard the breathing of his tribesmen. He felt the heat of their
+bodies, keeping the crowded enclosure warm enough for all. Saya was
+close beside him. She held fast to his arm for reassurance. He was
+wakeful, and thinking very busily and very painfully.
+
+Saya was filled with a tumult that was combined fear of the unknown and
+relief from much greater fear of the familiar ... and warm, proud
+memories of the sight of Burl leading and commanding the others, and
+memories of the look and feel of sunshine, and pictures of sky and
+grass and trees which she had never seen before. Emotion-filled memories
+of Burl as he killed a spider! Flinging a ball-fungus at a hatchling
+mantis, saving a young boy. Grandly leading the others up the
+mountainside which it had never occurred to anybody else to climb.
+Keeping onward sternly when it seemed that the solid ground had twisted
+and would drop them into a misplaced sky. And now, between her and the
+doorway to the strange and very beautiful night outside.
+
+Saya felt an absorbed, impassioned, delectable disquiet from the touch
+of Burl's arm beneath her fingers.
+
+He stirred. She whispered a question.
+
+"I am going out," he murmured in her ear. "I wish to see the lights. To
+see if they come nearer, or move."
+
+It had occurred to him that the first few stars they had seen glowed in
+darkness like the giant fireflies of the valley. They were comparable in
+size to all the enlarged insect kingdom. They were a yard and more in
+length, and sometimes at night they soared and wheeled above the lowland
+fungus jungles, and the segmented larval females of their kind, which
+never grew wings, grew frantic at the sight. They climbed recklessly
+upon the flat tops of toadstools and waved their dimmer twinned lanterns
+at the flying males.
+
+But this was not the lowland. Burl freed his arm from Saya's fingers. He
+crept through the constricted opening of the cave, carrying his lance
+before him. He already had a vague idea that it should be not only an
+instrument but a weapon. He imagined stabbing enemy creatures with
+it--but only vaguely, as yet.
+
+He stood upright in the open air. There was coolness. Night had fallen,
+but only a little while since. There were smells in the air such as Burl
+had never smelled before--green things growing, and the peculiar clean
+odor of wind that has been bathed in sunshine, and the peculiarly
+satisfying fragrance of coniferous trees.
+
+But Burl raised his eyes to the heavens. He saw the stars in all their
+glory, and he was the first man in at least forty generations 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 come nearer. They were very beautiful.
+
+[Illustration: "_... he was the first man in ... forty generations to
+look at them._"]
+
+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 rustling. Saya stood beside him, trembling a little. To
+leave the others had required great courage. But she had come to realize
+that if any danger befell Burl she wished to share it. So she had come.
+They shared the starlight.
+
+They heard the nightwind and the orchestra of night-singers. They
+wandered aside from the cave-mouth, and Saya found completely primitive
+and wholly atavistic pride in the courage of Burl, who was actually not
+afraid of the dark! Her own uneasiness became merely something to give
+more savor to her pride in him. She stayed close beside him, not only
+for reassurance but also for joy in being close to him.
+
+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. Insect-cries do not. It was a baying, yelping sound. It rose
+in pitch, 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 once more. 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 rarely blew there. But here the nights
+grew cold, after sundown. The heat in the ground radiated to outer space
+at night, not being trapped by a layer of clouds. Before dawn, the
+temperature would be close to freezing, though anything worse than a
+light fleeting hoar-frost would be rare on this plateau.
+
+The two of them went back to the cave. It was warm there. The cave was
+so packed with humans that their body-heat kept the air from growing
+chill. Burl and Saya crouched among the rest, and became drowsy and
+comfortable. Presently Saya dropped off to sleep, her hand trustfully in
+Burl's.
+
+But he remained awake for a long time, blinking. He thought of the
+stars, but they were too strange. He thought of the trees and grass. But
+most of the impressions of this upper world were so remote from previous
+knowledge that he could only accept them as they were and defer
+reflection upon them until later. But he did feel an enormous
+complacency, what with having brought his followers to an effective
+paradise of safety, and having arrived at a completely satisfactory
+emotional status with Saya.
+
+But the last thing he actually thought about, before his eyes blinked
+shut in sleep, was that yelping noise he had heard in the night. It was
+totally novel in kind, yet there was something buried among his racial
+heritages that told him it was good.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Burl was first awake of all the tribesmen and he looked out into a cold
+and pallid grayness. He saw trees. One side of the cluster was brightly
+lighted, the other side was dark. He heard tiny singing noises of the
+creatures of this place. Presently he crawled out of the cave to scout
+for danger.
+
+The air was biting in its chill. It was an excellent reason why giant
+insects could not survive here, but it was particularly invigorating as
+he breathed it in. Then he summoned courage to move to where he could
+peer at the source of this strange light.
+
+He saw the top of the sun as it peered above the eastern cloud-bank. The
+sky grew lighter. He blinked at the sun 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 and women gaped at the sun as it
+filled the east with colorings and rose above the seemingly steaming
+layer of clouds and then appeared to spring free of the horizon and swim
+on upward.
+
+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. Soon, though, they
+realized that warmth came from the glaring body in the sky. The
+children presently discovered a game. It was the first game they had
+ever played, and it consisted simply of running into a shaded place
+until they shivered, and then of running out into the sunshine again
+where they were warm. Until this dawning they had never been free enough
+from fear to play at all. But this discovery of the nightly chill and of
+the utility of cloaks for warmth up here as well as it had been against
+the nightly rain of the lowlands, was a specific suggestion of the value
+of clothing. Which was to have another significance, a short time later.
+
+In this first dawn of their experience, the tribesmen ate of the edible
+mushroom they had brought up the mountain-flank. But there was not an
+indefinite amount of food left. Burl shared the meal Saya brought him.
+She touched him fondly. But he regarded his happy fellows with something
+like a scowl. They were quite contented, and they had for the moment no
+need of his guidance. They did not look to him for orders. And Burl
+wanted attention.
+
+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 look
+for 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 instinct of a leader. The
+eating men murmured agreement. There was a certain definite idea of
+goodness--not moral virtue, but of the desirable--becoming associated
+with what Burl did and what Burl commanded. His tribe was becoming a
+group of which he was the leader, rather than only a loose association
+held together only by the fear of solitude.
+
+He led them exploring as soon as they had eaten. All of them, of course.
+None had yet become confident enough to be left behind. They straggled
+irregularly behind Burl and Saya. They came to a brook and regarded it
+with amazement. There were no leeches. No fungus. No swiftly drifting
+islands of scum. It was clear. Greatly daring, Burl tasted it and it was
+water, but such as he had never tasted before. It was clean, fresh,
+sparkling water, not fouled by drainage through mould or rust.
+
+The rest of the tribe tasted. A child slipped on a muddy place and sat
+down hard on white stuff that yielded and almost splashed. The child
+howled. Saya picked it up. Then she looked where it had been for spines
+or small stinging things.
+
+She stared blankly.
+
+She went to Burl with a tiny white thing in her hand. It was a mushroom.
+But it was a _tiny_, clean, appetizing object. Saya had no words for it.
+She was amazed.
+
+Burl smelled it carefully. He tasted it. And it was actually no more and
+no less than a normal mushroom, growing in a shaded place upon
+enormously rich soil. It had been protected from sunlight, but it had
+not the means nor 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. 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 rather than great
+ones. They must look at this place and seek others like it, where food
+would be found....
+
+The tribesmen were doubtful. But they plucked mushrooms--whole
+ones!--instead of merely breaking off parts of their tops. In deep
+astonishment they recognized miniatures of what they had known only in
+gigantic forms. They tasted. The tiny 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 a child found a beetle on a leaf, and they recognized it, they were
+entranced, for 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. From
+that moment on, they would follow Burl anywhere and obey him in any
+matter, in the happy conviction that he could do nothing that was not
+desirable in all respects.
+
+The belief, of course, was not quite accurate. Tender tiny mushrooms as
+a staple, instead of the tough and chewy provender they were used to, in
+time would cause them to have toothaches. But they could not anticipate
+it, and it was actually very far away in time.
+
+They struggled after Burl through vast patches of bushes with thorns on
+them. They were not used to thorns, and they deeply distrusted the
+bushes and even the glistening fruit on them, which eventually they
+would know were blackberries. Near midday they heard noises in the
+distance.
+
+The sounds were made up of cries of varying pitch, some of which were
+sharp and abrupt, and others longer and less loud. The people did not
+understand them in the least. They could have been the cries of human
+beings, but they were assuredly not cries of pain. Also they were not
+language. They seemed to convey an impression of enormous, zestful
+excitement. They had no overtone of horror. And Burl and his folk had
+known of no excitement among insects except the frenzy of ferocity. They
+were unable to imagine even the nature of the tumult.
+
+To Burl the cries seemed to have somewhat the timbre of the yelping
+sounds he had heard the night before. And he had felt instinctively
+drawn to that sound. He liked it.
+
+He led the way boldly in the direction of the noise. And presently he
+came out of breast-high weeds with Saya close behind him and the others
+trailing. He emerged upon a space of bare stone, a little upraised. He
+looked down into a small and grassy amphitheater. The tumult came from
+its center.
+
+A pack of dogs were 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 darted at the
+unseen something and darted away, and they were having a thoroughly
+enjoyable time, though it might not be so good for the thing they
+attacked.
+
+One of them saw the humans and stopped stock-still and barked. The
+others whirled and saw the humans as they came out into view. The tumult
+ceased entirely.
+
+There was silence. The men for the first time saw creatures with only
+four legs. They had never before seen any moving thing with fewer than
+six--except men. Spiders had eight. The dogs did not have mandibles.
+They did not act like insects.
+
+And the dogs saw men, whom they had never seen before. Much more
+important, they smelled men. And the difference between man-smell and
+that of insects was vast. Through many generations the dogs had not
+smelled anything with warm blood save their own kind. The difference in
+smell between insect and man was so great that the dogs did not react
+with suspicion, but with curiosity. This was an unparalleled smell. It
+was even a good smell.
+
+The dogs regarded the men with their heads on one side, sniffing them in
+the deepest possible amazement--amazement so intense that they could not
+feel hostility. One of them whined a little because he did not
+understand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Peculiarly enough, it was a matter of topography. The plateau which
+reached above the clouds rose with a steep slope from the valley in
+which Burl and the others had lived. To westward, 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 on the plateau, of course. There was
+no food for their insatiable hunger. Especially at night, there was no
+warmth to keep them active. But they did stray from their normal
+environment, and some of them reached the sunshine, and perhaps some of
+them blundered back down to their mushroom-forests again. But those that
+did not find their way back were chilled to torpor during their first
+night on the highland. They were only partly active on the second day
+if, indeed, they were active at all. And few or none recovered from the
+second night of cold. Certainly none kept their full ferocity and
+deadliness. And this was how the dogs survived.
+
+Unquestionably the dogs were descended from dogs on the wrecked
+ship--name now unknown--which had landed on this planet some forty-odd
+human generations since. The humans had no memories of that ship, and
+the dogs had surely no traditions. But perhaps because those early dogs
+had less of intellect, they had possessed more useful instincts. Perhaps
+dogs were bred by the first desperate generations of humans, to warn
+them against dangers. But no human civilization could survive the
+environment of the lowlands. The humans inevitably reverted to the
+primitive. The environment was not one in which dogs could survive, so
+somehow they took to the heights. Perhaps dogs survived their masters.
+Perhaps some were abandoned or driven away. But dogs had reached the
+heights. And they did survive because of the simple fact that giant
+insects blundered up after them--and could not survive the proper
+environment for dogs and men.
+
+There was even a reason why they had not multiplied excessively. The
+food-supply was limited. When there were too many dogs, their attacks on
+stumbling insects were more desperate, and made earlier before ferocity
+of the insects was lessened. And more dogs died. So there was a specific
+adjustment of the dog population to the food-supply. There was also a
+selection of those intelligent enough not to attack foolishly, but not
+of those whose cowardice left them out of conflict altogether.
+
+These dogs who regarded men with their heads cocked on one side were
+excellent dogs. Intelligent dogs. They did not attack anything
+imprudently, and they knew it was not necessary to be more than wary of
+insects in general. Even spiders, unless they were very newly arrived
+from the lowlands. So the attitude of men and dogs was that of
+astonished curiosity rather than that of instant fear or rage. Burl knew
+that the shaggy, bright-eyed creatures were unlike insects. Actually,
+they behaved strikingly like men. They were estimating these strange
+beings, men. Insects never estimated. Those that were not carnivorous
+had no interest in anything but food, and those that were carnivorous
+lumbered insanely into battle the instant any prey came to their notice.
+The dogs did neither. They sniffed. They considered. They were amazed.
+
+Burl said harshly to his group:
+
+"Stay here!"
+
+He walked slowly down into the amphitheater. Saya, disregarding his
+order, followed him instantly. The dogs moved warily aside. But they
+raised their noses and sniffed--long, luxurious sniffs. The smell of
+humankind was a good smell. Dogs had gone hundreds of generations
+without having it in their nostrils. But before that there were
+thousands of generations of dogs to whom that smell was a fulfillment.
+
+Burl reached the object the dogs had been attacking. It lay on the
+grass, throbbing painfully. It had come up from the world below. 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 gone
+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 a little from the chill. But the dogs had found it.
+
+Burl considered. It was the custom of wasps to sting creatures like this
+within a certain special spot--marked for them apparently by a tuft of
+dark fur.
+
+Burl thrust his lance into that particular spot. The creature died
+quickly and without agony. The thought to kill was an inspiration, which
+was the result of continued adventuring. 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 blinking
+tribesfolk. On the way they passed within two yards of a dog which
+regarded them with extreme intent and almost a wistful expression. Their
+smell did not mean game. It meant--something the dog struggled dumbly to
+remember.
+
+"I have killed the thing," said Burl, in the tone of one speaking to an
+equal. "You can go and eat it now. I took only part of it."
+
+The dog wagged its tail--and then backed away as if in confusion. After
+all, matters had not yet progressed to cordiality.
+
+The humans consumed what Burl had brought them. Most of the dogs 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. The humans
+smelled good. The dogs were fascinated by their smell.
+
+Presently they were close about the humans. They were not insects. They
+were interested. The humans were extremely interested in anything which
+was interested in them. It was a wholly novel experience. It was the
+feeling Burl had felt in becoming the tribal leader. Now every human
+felt a little of it, in the intent regard of the dogs. And everything
+else was so strange that it was possible to accept anything without
+question. Even the possible friendliness of unparalleled creatures which
+assuredly were not of a kind with past enemies.
+
+A similar state of "mind" existed among the dogs.
+
+Saya had more meat than she desired. She looked about among the humans.
+All were well supplied. She tossed it to a dog. He jerked away alertly,
+and then sniffed at the meat 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 as we
+do. Not as the--monsters!"
+
+The dog looked 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 subconscious racial-memory
+instinct in friendship between man and dog. It was not overlaid by any
+past experience of either. They were the only warm-blooded creatures on
+this world. It was kinship felt by both.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"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 like men. They
+had instinct and intelligence. The latter part of the return to the
+cave--if anybody had been qualified to notice--was remarkably like a
+group of dogs taking a walk with a group of people. It was
+companionable. It felt remarkably right.
+
+That night Burl left the cave, as before, to look at the stars. This
+time Saya went with him, gladly. But as they emerged from the
+cave-entrance there was a stirring. A dog rose and stretched itself
+elaborately, yawning the while. When Burl and Saya walked aside from the
+cave, the dog trotted amiably with them.
+
+They talked to it, embarrassed. 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 humans to take another nice
+long walk, on which they would accompany them. It was a brand-new
+satisfaction they did not wish to miss. After all, from a dog's
+standpoint, humans were made to take long walks with, among other
+things. The dogs greeted the humans with tail-waggings and cordiality.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The friendship of the dogs assured the humans' new status in life. They
+had ceased to be fugitive game for any insect murderer. They had hoped
+to be unpursued foragers. But, joined to the dogs, they were 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 inherently right that within a
+month it was as if it had been always. And indeed, except for a few
+centuries, for them, it had.
+
+The humans had made a permanent encampment by then. There were a few
+caves at an appropriate distance from the slope up which most wanderers
+from the lowlands came. The humans moved into the caves. A 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, humans and dogs together assailed it before
+it could take flight. They ended with warm approval of each other. The
+humans had great wings with which to make cloaks. And men wore cloaks
+now--shorter than the women's--but cloaks. They were very useful against
+the evening chill. When one dawning a vast outcry of dogs awoke the
+humans, Burl led the rush to the spot, and his great lance did execution
+which the dogs appeared to admire. Burl wore a moth's feathery antennae,
+now, bound to his forehead like a knight's plumes. They were very
+splendid.
+
+In a single month their entire way of life went through a revolution.
+The ground was often thorny. A man pierced his foot, and bandaged it
+with a strip of wing-fabric so he could walk. The injured foot was more
+comfortable to walk with than the well one. Within a week women were
+busily contriving divers forms of footgear, to achieve the greatest
+comfort. One day Saya admired glistening red berries and tried to pluck
+them, and they stained her fingers. She licked the fingers--and berries
+were added to the tribe's menu. A veritable orgy of experimentation
+began. And this was a state of affairs which is very, very rare among
+human beings. A tribe with an established culture and tradition cannot
+change without disaster. But men who have abandoned their old ways and
+are seeking new ones can go far.
+
+Already the dogs were established as sentries and watchmen and friends
+to every one of the humans. 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.
+By the time a stray monster from the lowlands reached this area, it was
+dazed and half-numbed by at least one night of bitter cold. Even spiders
+could not find energy to leap. They fought like fiends, but sluggishly.
+Men could kill them while dogs kept their attention. Burl killed one
+the third week on the plateau. He was nerved to the deed by a peculiar
+feeling that he must be worthy of the courage of the dogs with him at
+the time.
+
+And presently, while their way of life was still fluid, the permanent
+pattern of civilization on the nightmare planet was settled. Burl and
+Saya went out early one morning with the dogs, to hunt for meat for the
+village. Hunting was easiest in the morning while creatures strayed up
+the night before were still numbed. Often, hunting was merely butchery
+of an enfeebled monster to whom any sort of movement was enormous
+effort.
+
+This morning the humans moved briskly. The dogs roamed exuberantly
+through the brush before them. They were five miles from the village
+when the dogs bayed game some distance ahead. And Burl and Saya ran to
+the spot hand in hand--which was something of a change from their former
+actions at the thought of a giant creature of the insect kind--and found
+the dogs dancing and barking around one of the most ferocious and most
+ghastly of the carnivorous beetles. It was not too large, to be sure.
+Its body might have been four feet long, but its horrid mandibles added
+three feet more.
+
+Those scythe-like objects gaped wide--opening sidewise as a beetle's
+jaws do--and snapped hideously, swinging about as the dogs dashed at
+them. The legs were spurred and spiked and armed with dagger-like
+spines. Burl plunged into the fight.
+
+[Illustration: "_Those scythe-like objects gaped wide ... as the dogs
+dashed at them._"]
+
+The great gaping 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 frantic plunges at the dogs who
+dashed in and out to torment and bewilder it while they created the most
+zestfully excited of uproars.
+
+There was something beside this conflict that Burl and Saya should have
+noticed, but they were instantly intent. The other thing was quite
+unparalleled. There had been nothing else like it on this planet in many
+hundreds of years. It moved slowly above the plateau as if examining it.
+It was half a dozen miles away and perhaps a mile higher when Burl and
+Saya prepared to intervene professionally on behalf of the dogs. Then it
+swerved and moved directly toward them. It moved swiftly.
+
+But it was silent, and they did not know at all. Burl leaped in with a
+lance-thrust at the tough integument where an armored leg joined the
+body. He missed, and the monster whirled. Then Saya flashed her cloak
+before the beetle, so that it seemed a larger and nearer antagonist. As
+the creature whirled again, Burl thrust once more and a hind-leg
+crumpled.
+
+Instantly the thing limped crazily. A beetle does not use its legs like
+four-legged creatures. It moves the two end legs on one side with the
+center leg on the other, so that always it is braced on an adjustable
+tripod. But it cannot adjust readily to crippling.
+
+A dog snatched at a spiny lower leg and crunched and darted away. The
+expressionless, machine-like horror uttered a formless, deep-bass cry
+and was spurred to all possible ferocity. The fight became a thing of
+furious movement and uproar, with Burl striking once at a multiple eye
+so the pain would deflect it from a charge on Saya, and Saya again
+deflecting it with her cloak and once breathlessly trying to strike it
+with her shorter spear.
+
+Then the beetle sank to the ground, all three legs on one side crippled.
+The remaining three thrust and thrust and struggled terribly and
+suddenly it was on its back, still striking its gigantic jaws
+frantically in the hope of murder. But Burl stabbed home between two
+armor-plates where a ganglion was almost exposed. A thrust killed it
+instantly.
+
+Burl and Saya smiled at each other. There was a monstrous sound of
+splintering trees. They whirled. The dogs pricked up their ears. One of
+them barked defiantly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Something huge--truly huge!--settled to the ground a bare hundred yards
+away. It was metal, and there were ports, and it was utterly beyond
+experience, because, of course, there had been no spaceship landings on
+this planet in forty-odd human generations. But as Burl and Saya stared
+blankly at it, a port opened, and men came out, and they waved hopefully
+to the two barbarically attired figures who had been seen fighting a
+monster with the help of dogs. Which meant some sort of civilization.
+
+The dogs confirmed it. They sniffed. These, also, were men. And Burl and
+his tribe had this smell, and were friends. So the dogs trotted forward
+with the self-confident cordiality of dogs on excellent terms with
+men--and there was no question of friendship. None at all. The men came
+forward joyously to talk to Burl and Saya.
+
+There were difficulties, of course. But Burl and Saya had the calm
+composure of savages, and the alertness of people who are changing the
+pattern of their lives of their own volition--and finding it very
+pleasant--and things went swimmingly. There was, on the spaceship, an
+"educator." They invited Burl to put it on his head. He obliged. And
+very shortly he understood a new language, and was equipped with a very
+considerable fund of general information. Among the items of information
+was the fact that presently he would have a splitting headache--he
+did--and that the making of records for an educator was so different
+that it required generations to get all the facts and knowledge for a
+single type of education down in permanent form.
+
+All of which fitted admirably into the arrangements that the men on the
+spaceship were anxious to make, and Burl was enthusiastically willing to
+accede to. He and his folk knew the creatures of the lowlands as nobody
+else could possibly know them. No electronic educator could possibly
+make a record making available that knowledge in less than two
+generations--maybe three. Therefore--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The nightmare world swims in space about its nearby sun. It has a name
+now, but it does not matter. It has a city on it, which probably matters
+less. It is a curious city, though. The people in it wear gorgeous
+colored fur, and cloaks of butterfly wings. The least of the people in
+that city wear garments which would fetch fortunes on other inhabited
+worlds. In fact, such garments do. But it is most practical for Burl,
+and Saya, and their followers to wear such garments. There is no day but
+that a small, winged flying craft rises from the city to go silently
+over the plateau until it reaches the space above the cloud-bank, and
+then dives down into it. It is wise for the occupants and the operators
+of such small craft to wear garments like the other humans on this
+planet. They are recognized, that way, when garments such as most
+planets find suitable would make them seem strange.
+
+They want to be recognized, in the jungles and the noisesome valleys of
+the lowlands. There are other humans down there. The people of the city,
+of course, bring their fellows out as fast as they can find them. There
+is a session with an educator--and a splitting headache afterward--and
+very soon the folk who have hidden from monsters all their lives are
+zestfully hunting them with dogs. Presently they are hunting them with
+flying machines.
+
+It is a nice arrangement. The search for more people in the lowlands is
+a prosperous business even when it is unsuccessful. The wings of white
+morph butterflies bring the highest price, but even a common
+swallow-tail is riches enough. And the fur of caterpillars--duly
+processed--goes into the holds of the regular spaceliners with the same
+care given elsewhere to jewels and platinum.
+
+But the nightmare planet has not become a merely sordid place of
+business. What comforts and what luxuries spaceships can bring are
+available enough, to be sure. But the city on the plateau, and the homes
+of the barbarically clad inhabitants are not places to which invitations
+are coveted for the luxury of them. The planet is a sportman's paradise.
+
+Not long since, the Planet President of _Surmor III_ was a guest in
+Burl's dwelling. Burl is all hard muscle, despite his graying hair, and
+he and Saya have fitted very beautifully into the sort of civilization
+that turned out to be congenial to them. They have grown children now,
+and their home is quite fit to entertain a World President in its
+richness. But it is small--the size they want it to be.
+
+The atmosphere is oddly informal. There are self-respecting and amiable
+dogs nearly everywhere. The World President of _Surmor III_ was inclined
+to be stand-offish at first. But he is a sportsman, like Burl. And since
+the last hunting trip, he is very respectful. After all, there are few
+planet leaders who will, as they do, for pure sporting joy of the hunt,
+fight the mastodon-sized tarantula of the lowlands with nothing but a
+spear--and win.
+
+But Burl does.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Nightmare Planet, by Murray Leinster
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42987 ***