He ran to call Saya.
The rest of the tribe waked as he roused her. One by one, they followed to watch their first sunrise. The men gaped at the sun as it filled the east with colorings, and rose and rose above the seemingly steaming layer of clouds, and then appeared to spring free of the horizon and swim on upward.
The women stared with all their eyes. The children blinked, and shivered, and crept to their mothers for warmth. The women enclosed them in their cloaks, and they thawed and peered out once more at the glory of sunshine and the day. Very soon, too, they realized that warmth came from the great shining body in the sky. The children presently discovered a game. It was the first game they had ever played. It consisted of running into a shaded place until they shivered, and then of running out into warm sunshine once more. Until this, dawning fear was the motive for such playing as they did. Now they gleefully made a game of sunshine.
In this first morning of their life above the clouds, the tribesmen ate of the food they had brought from below. But there was not an indefinite amount of food left. Burl ate, and considered darkly, and presently summoned his followers' attention. They were quite contented and for the moment felt no need of his guidance. But he felt need of admiration.
He spoke abruptly:
"We do not want to go back to the place we came from," he said sternly. "We must look for food here, so we can stay for always. Today we find food."
It was a seizure of the initiative. It was the linking of what the folk most craved with obedience to Burl. It was the device by which dictators seize power, and it was the instinctive action of a leader.
The eating men murmured agreement. There was a certain definite idea of goodness—not virtue, but of things desirable—associated with what Burl did and what he commanded. His tribe was gradually forming a habit of obedience, though it was a very fragile habit up to now.
He led them exploring as soon as they had eaten. All of them, of course. They straggled irregularly behind him. They came to a brook and regarded it with amazement. There were no leeches. No greenish algae. No foaming masses of scum. It was dear! Greatly daring, Burl tasted it. He drank the first really potable water in a very long time for his race on this planet. It was not fouled by drainage through moulds or rusts.
Dor drank after him. Jak. Cori tasted, and instantly bade her children drink. Even old Tama drank suspiciously, and then raised her voice in shrill complaint that Burl had not led them to this place sooner. Tet and Dik became convinced that there were no deadly things lurking in it, and splashed each other. Dik slipped and sat down hard on white stuff that yielded and almost splashed. He got up and looked fearfully at what he thought might be a deadly slime. Then he yelped shrilly.
He sat down on and crushed part of a bed of mushrooms. But they were tiny, clean, and appetizing. They were miniatures of the edible mushrooms the tribe fed on.
Burl smelled and finally tasted one. It was, of course, nothing more or less than a perfectly normal edible mushroom, growing to the size that mushrooms originally grew on Earth. It grew on a shaded place in enormously rich soil. It had been protected from direct sunlight by trees, but it had not had the means or the stimulus to become a monster.
Burl ate it. He carefully composed his features. Then he announced the find to his followers. There was food here, he told them sternly, but in this splendid world to which he had led them, food was small. There would be no great enemies here, but the food would have to be sought in small objects instead of great ones. They must look at this place and seek others like it, in order to find food....
The tribesmen were doubtful. But they plucked mushrooms—whole ones!—instead of merely breaking off parts of their tops. With deep astonishment they recognized the miniature objects as familiar things ensmalled. These mushrooms had the same savor, but they were not coarse or stringy or tough like the giants. They melted in the mouth; Life in this place to which Burl had led them was delectable! Truly the doings of Burl were astonishing!
When the oldest of Cori's children found a beetle on a leaf, and they recognized it, and instead of being bigger than a man and a thing to flee from, it was less than an inch in size and helpless against them—. They were entranced. From that moment onward they would really follow Burl anywhere, in the happy conviction that he could only bring good to everybody.
The opinion could have drawbacks, and it need not be always even true, but Burl did nothing to discourage it.
And then, near midday, they made a discovery even greater than that of familiar food in unfamiliar sizes. They were struggling, at the time, through a vast patch of bushes with thorns on them—they were not used to thorns—which they deeply distrusted. Eventually they would find out that the glistening dark fruit were blackberries, and would rejoice in them, but at this first encounter they were uneasy. In the midst of such an untouched berry-patch they heard noises in the distance.
The sound was made up of cries of varying pitch, some of which were loud and abrupt, and others longer and less loud. The people did not understand them in the least. They could have been cries of human beings, perhaps, but they were not cries of pain. Also they were not language. They seemed to express a tremendous, zestful excitement. They had no overtone of horror. And Burl and his folk had known of no excitement among insects except frenzy. They could not imagine what sort of tumult this could be.
But to Burl these sounds had something of the timbre of the yelping noises of the night before. He had felt drawn to that sound. He liked it. He liked this.
He led the way boldly toward the agitated noises. Presently—after a mile or so—he and his people came out of breast-high weeds. Saya was immediately behind him. The others trailed,—Tama complaining bitterly that there was no need to track down sounds which could only mean danger. They emerged in a space of bare stone above a small and grassy amphitheatre. The tumult came from its center.
A pack of dogs was joyously attacking something that Burl could not see clearly. They were dogs. They barked zestfully, and they yelped and snarled and yapped in a dozen different voices, and they were having a thoroughly good time,—though it might not be so good for the thing they attacked.
One of them sighted the humans. He stopped stock-still and barked. The others whirled and saw the humans as they came out into view. The tumult ceased abruptly.
There was silence. The tribesmen saw creatures with four legs only. They had never before seen any living thing with fewer than six,—except men. Spiders had eight. The dogs did not have mandibles. They did not have wing-cases. They did not act like insects. It was stupifying!
And the dogs saw men, whom they had never seen before. Much more important, they smelled men. And the difference between man-smell and insect-smell was so vast—because through hundreds of generations the dogs had not smelled anything with warm blood save their own kind—the difference in smell was so great in kind that the dogs did not react with suspicion, but with a fascinated curiosity. This was an unparalleled smell. It was, even in its novelty, an overwhelmingly satisfying smell.
The dogs regarded the men with their heads on one side, sniffing in the deepest possible amazement,—amazement so intense that they could not possibly feel hostility. One of them whined a little because he did not understand.
Peculiarly enough, it was a matter of topography. The plateau which reached above the clouds rose with a steep slope from the valley from which a hunting-spider's brood had driven the men. This was on the eastern edge of the plateau. On the west, however, the highland was subject to an indentation which almost severed it. No more than twenty miles from where Burl's group had climbed to sunshine, there was a much more gradual slope downward. There, mushroom-forests grew almost to the cloud-layer. From there, giant insects strayed up and onto the plateau itself.
They could not live above the clouds, of course. There was not food enough for their insatiable hunger. Especially at night, it was too cold to allow them to stay active. But they did stray from their normal environment, and some of them did reach the sunshine, and perhaps some of them blundered back down to their mushroom-forests again. But those which did not stumble back were chilled to torpor during their first night underneath the stars. They were only partly active on the second day,—if, indeed, they were active at all. Few or none recovered from their second nights' coldness. None at all kept their full ferocity and deadliness.
And this was how the dogs survived. They were certainly descended from dogs on the wrecked space-ship—theIcarus—whose crew had landed on this planet some forty-odd human generations since. The humans of today had no memories of the ship, and the dogs surely had no traditions. But just because those early dogs had less intelligence, they had more useful instincts. Perhaps the first generations of castaways bred dogs in their first few desperate centuries, hoping that dogs could help them survive. But no human civilization could survive in the lowlands. The humans went back to the primitive state of their race and lived as furtive vermin among monsters. Dogs could not survive there, though humans did linger on, so somehow the dogs took to the heights. Perhaps dogs survived their masters. Perhaps some were abandoned or driven away. But dogs had reached the highlands. And they did survive because giant insects blundered up after them,—and could not survive in a proper environment for dogs and men.
There was even reason for the dogs remaining limited in number, and keenly intelligent. The food-supply was limited. When there were too many dogs, their attacks on stumbling insect giants were more desperate and made earlier, before the monsters' ferocity was lessened. So more dogs died. Then there was an adjustment of the number of dogs to the food-supply. There was also a selection of those too intelligent to attack rashly. Yet those who had insufficient courage would not eat.
In short, the dogs who now regarded men with bright, interested eyes were very sound dogs. They had the intelligence needed for survival. They did not attack anything imprudently, but they also knew that it was not necessary to be more than reasonably wary of insects in general,—not even spiders unless they were very newly arrived from the steaming lowlands. So the dogs regarded men with very much the same astonished interest with which the men regarded the dogs.
Burl saw immediately that the dogs did not act with the blind ferocity of insects, but with an interested, estimative intelligence strikingly like that of men. Insects never examined anything. They fled or they fought. Those who were not carnivorous had no interest in anything but food, and those who were meat-eaters lumbered insanely into battle at the bare sight of possible prey. The dogs did neither. They sniffed and they considered.
Burl said sharply to his followers:
"Stay here!"
He walked slowly down into the amphitheatre. Saya followed him instantly. Dogs moved warily aside. But they raised their noses and sniffed. They were long, luxurious sniffs. The smell of human kind was a good smell. Dogs had lived hundreds of their generations without having it in their nostrils, but before that there were thousands of generations to whom that smell was a necessity.
Burl reached the object the dogs had been attacking. It lay on the grass, throbbing painfully. It was the larva of an azure-blue moth which spread ten-foot wings at nightfall. The time for its metamorphosis was near, and it had traveled blindly in search of a place where it could spin its cocoon safely and change to its winged form. It had come to another world,—the world above the clouds. It could find no proper place. Its stores of fat had protected it somewhat from the chill. But the dogs had found it as it crawled blindly—.
Burl considered. It was the custom of wasps to sting creatures like this at a certain special spot,—apparently marked for them by a tuft of dark fur.
Burl thrust home with his lance. The point pierced that particular spot. The creature died quickly and without agony. The thought to kill was an inspiration. Then instinct followed. Burl cut off meat for his tribesmen. The dogs offered no objection. They were well-fed enough. Burl and Saya, together, carried the meat back to the other tribesfolk. On the way Burl passed within two yards of a dog which regarded him with extreme intentness and almost a wistful expression. Burl's smell did not mean game. It meant—something the dog struggled helplessly to remember. But it was good.
"I have killed the thing," said Burl to the dog, in the tone of one addressing an equal. "You can go and eat it now. I took only part of it."
Burl and his people ate of what he had brought back. Many of the dogs—most of them—went to the feast Burl had left. Presently they were back. They had no reason to be hostile. They were fed. The humans offered them no injury, and the humans smelled of something that appealed to the deepest well-springs of canine nature.
Presently the dogs were close about the humans. They were fascinated. And the humans were fascinated in return. Each of the people had a little of the feeling that Burl had experienced as the tribal leader. In the intent, absorbed and wholly unhostile regard of the dogs, even children felt flattered and friendly. And surely in a place where everything else was so novel and so satisfactory, it was possible to imagine friendliness with creatures which were not human, since assuredly they were not insects.
A similar state of mind existed among the dogs.
Saya had more meat than she desired. She glanced among the members of the tribe. All were supplied. She tossed it to a dog. He jerked away alertly, and then sniffed at it where it had dropped. A dog can always eat. He ate it.
"I wish you would talk to us," said Saya hopefully.
The dog wagged his tail.
"You do not look like us," said Saya interestedly, "but you act like we do. Not like the—Monsters."
The dog looked significantly at meat in Burl's hand. Burl tossed it. The dog caught it with a quick snap, swallowed it, wagged his tail briefly and came closer. It was a completely incredible action, but dogs and men were blood-kin on this planet. Besides, there was racial-memory rightness in friendship between men and dogs. It was not hindered by any past experience of either. They were the only warm-blooded creatures on this world. It was a kinship felt by both.
Presently Burl stood up and spoke politely to the dog. He addressed him with the same respect he would have given to another man. In all his life he had never felt equal to an insect, but he felt no arrogance toward this dog. He felt superior only to other men.
"We are going back to our cave," he said politely. "Maybe we will meet again."
He led his tribe back to the cave in which they had spent the previous night. The dogs followed, ranging on either side. They were well-fed, with no memory of hostility to any creature which smelled of warm blood. They had an instinct without experience to dull it. The latter part of the journey back to the tribal cave was—if anybody had been qualified to notice it—remarkably like a group of dogs taking a walk with a group of people. It was companionable. It felt right.
That night Burl left the cave, as before, to look at the stars. This time Saya went with him matter-of-factly. But as they came out of the cave-entrance there was a stirring. A dog rose and stretched himself elaborately, yawning the while. When Burl and Saya moved away, he trotted amiably with them.
They talked to it, and the dog seemed pleased. It wagged its tail.
When morning came, the dogs were still waiting hopefully for the humans to come out. They appeared to expect the people to take another nice long walk, on which they would accompany them. It was a brand-new satisfaction they did not want to miss. After all, from a dog's standpoint, humans are made to take long walks with, among other things. The dogs greeted the people with tail-waggings and cordiality.
The dogs made a great difference in the adjustment of the tribe to life upon the plateau. Their friendship assured the new status of human life. Burl and his fellows had ceased to be fugitive game for any insect murderer. They had hoped to become unpursued foragers,—because they could hardly imagine anything else. But when the dogs joined them, they were immediately raised to the estate of hunters. The men did not domesticate the dogs. They made friends with them. The dogs did not subjugate themselves to the men. They joined them,—at first tentatively, and then with worshipful enthusiasm. And the partnership was so inevitably a right one that within a month it was as if it had always been.
Actually, save for a mere two thousand years, it had been.
At the end of a month the tribe had a permanent encampment. There were caves at a suitable distance from the slope up which most wanderers from the lowlands came. Cori's oldest child found the chrysalis of a giant butterfly, whose caterpillar form had so offensive an odor that the dogs had not attacked it. But when it emerged from the chrysalis, men and dogs together assailed it before it could take flight. They ended the enterprise with warm mutual approval. The humans had acquired great wings with which to make warm cloaks,—very useful against the evening chill. Dogs and men, alike, had feasted.
Then, one dawning, the dogs made a vast outcry which awoke the tribesmen. Burl led the rush to the spot. They did battle with a monster nocturnal beetle, less chilled than most such invaders. In the gray dawnlight Burl realized that the darting, yapping dogs kept the creature's full attention. He crippled, and then killed it with his spear. The feat appeared to earn him warm admiration from the dogs. Burl wore a moth's feathery antenna again, bound to his forehead like a knight's plumes. He looked very splendid.
The entire pattern of human life changed swiftly, as if an entire revelation had been granted to men. The ground was often thorny. One man pierced his foot. Old Tama, scolding him for his carelessness, bound a strip of wing-fabric about it so he could walk. The injured foot was more comfortable than the one still unhurt. Within a week the women were busily contriving diverse forms of footgear to achieve greater comfort for everybody. One day Saya admired glistening red berries and tried to pluck one, and they stained her fingers. She licked her fingers to clean them,—and berries were added to the tribe's menu. A veritable orgy of experiment began, which is a state of things which is extremely rare in human affairs. A race with an established culture and tradition does not abandon old ways of doing things without profound reason. But men who have abandoned their old ways can discover astonishingly useful new ones.
Already the dogs were established as sentries and watchmen, and as friends to every member of the tribe. By now mothers did not feel alarmed if a child wandered out of sight. There would be dogs along. No danger could approach a child without vociferous warning from the dogs. Men went hunting, now, with zestful tail-wagging dogs as companions in the chase. Dor killed a torpid minotaur-beetle alone, save for assisting dogs, and Burl felt a twinge of jealousy. But then Burl, himself, battled a black male spider in a lone duel,—with dogs to help. By the time a stray monster from the lowlands reached this area, it was dazed and half-numbed by one night of continuous chill. Even the black spider could not find the energy to leap. It fought like a fiend, yet sluggishly. Burl killed this one while the dogs kept it busy,—and the dogs were reproachful because he carried it back to the tribal headquarters before dividing it among his assistants. Afterward, he realized that though he could have avoided the fight he would have been ashamed to do so, while the dogs barked and snapped at its furry legs.
It was while things were in this state that the way of life for human beings on the forgotten planet was settled for all time. Burl and Saya went out early one morning with the dogs, to hunt for meat for the village. Hunting was easiest in the early hours, while creatures that strayed up the night before were still sluggish with cold. Often, hunting was merely butchery of an enfeebled monster to whom any effort at all was terribly difficult.
This morning they strode away briskly. The dogs roved exuberantly through the brush before them. They were some five miles from the village when the dogs bayed game. And Burl and Saya ran to the spot with ready spears,—which was something of a change from their former actions on notice of a carnivore abroad. They found the dogs dancing and barking around one of the most ferocious of the meat-eating beetles. It was not unduly large, to be sure. Its body might have been four feet long, or thereabouts. But its horrible gaping mandibles added a good three feet more.
Those scythelike weapons gaped wide—opening sidewise as insects' jaws do—as the beetle snapped hideously at its attackers, swinging about as the dogs dashed at it. Its legs were spurred and spiked and armed with dagger-like spines. Burl plunged into the fight.
The great mandibles clicked and clashed. They were capable of disemboweling a man or snapping a dog's body in half without effort. There were whistling noises as the beetle breathed through its abdominal spiracles. It fought furiously, making ferocious charges at the dogs who tormented and bewildered it. But they created the most zestfully excited of tumults.
Burl and Saya were, of course, at least as absorbed and excited as the dogs, or they would have noticed the thing that was to make so much difference to every human being, not only on the plateau but still down in the lowlands. This unnoticed thing was beyond their imagining. There had been nothing else like it on this world in many hundreds of years. It was half a dozen miles away and perhaps a thousand feet high when Burl and Saya prepared to intervene professionally on behalf of the dogs. It was a silvery needle, floating unsupported in the air. As they entered the battle, it swerved and moved swiftly in their direction.
It was silent, and they did not notice. They knew of no reason to scan the sky in daytime. And there was business on hand, anyhow.
Burl leaped in toward the beetle with a lance-thrust at the tough integument where an armored leg joined the creature's body. He missed, and the beetle whirled. Saya flashed her cloak before the monster so that it seemed a larger and a nearer antagonist. As the creature whirled again, Burl stabbed and a hind-leg crumpled.
Instantly the thing was limping. A beetle does not use its legs like four-legged creatures. A beetle moving shifts the two end legs on one side and the central leg on the other, so that it always stands on an adjustable tripod of limbs. It cannot adjust readily to crippling. A dog snatched at a spiny lower leg and crunched,—and darted away. The machine-like monster uttered a formless, deep-bass cry and was spurred to unbelievable fierceness. The fight became a thing of furious movement and joyous uproar, with Burl striking once at a multiple eye so the pain would deflect it from a charge at Saya, and Saya again deflecting it with her cloak and once breathlessly trying to strike it with her shorter spear.
They struck it again, and a third time, and it sank horribly to the ground, all three legs on one side crippled. The remaining three thrust and thrust and struggled senselessly,—and suddenly it was on its back, still striking its gigantic jaws frantically in the hope of murder. But then Burl struck home between two armor-plates where a ganglion was almost exposed. The blow killed it instantly.
Burl and Saya were smiling at each other when there was a monstrous sound of crashing trees. They whirled. The dogs pricked up their ears. One of them barked defiantly.
Something huge—truly huge!—had settled to the ground a bare two hundred yards away. It was metal, and there were ports in its sides, and it was quite beyond imagining. Because, of course, no space-ship had landed on this planet in forty-odd human generations.
A port opened as they stared at it. Men came out. Burl and Saya were barbarically attired, but they had been fighting some sort of local monster—the men on the space-ship could not quite grasp what they had seen—and they had been helped by dogs. Human beings and dogs, together, always mean some sort of civilization.
The dogs gave an impression of a very high level indeed. They trotted confidently over to the ship, and they sniffed cautiously at the men who had landed. Then their behavior was admirable. They greeted the new-come men with the self-confident cordiality of dogs who are on the best possible terms with human beings,—and there was no question of any suspicion by anybody. The attitude of a man toward a dog is a perfectly valid indication of his character, if not of his technical education. And the newcomers knew how to treat dogs.
So Burl and Saya went forward, with the confident pleasure with which well-raised children and other persons of innate dignity greet strangers.
The ship was theWapiti, a private cruiser doing incidental exploration for the Biological Survey in the course of a trip after good hunting. It had touched on the forgotten planet, and it would never be forgotten again.
The survey-shipTethysmade the first landing on the forgotten planet, and theOranafollowed, and some centuries later theLudred. Then the planet was forgotten until theWapitiarrived. The arrival of theWapitiwas as much an accident as the loss of the punched card which caused the planet to be overlooked for some thousands of years. Somebody had noticed that the sun around which it circled was of a type which usually has useful planets, but there was no record that it had ever been visited. So a request to the sportsmen on theWapitihad caused them to turn aside. They considered, anyhow, that it would be interesting to land on a brand-new world or two. They considered it fascinating to find human beings there before them. But they could not understand the use of such primitive weapons or garments of such barbaric splendor. They had trouble, too, because in forty-odd generations the speech of the universe had changed, while Burl and Saya spoke a very archaic language indeed.
But there was an educator on theWapiti. It was quite standard apparatus,—simply basic-education for a human child, so that one's school-years could be begun with a backlog of correct speech, and reading, with the practical facts of mathematics, sanitation, and the general information that any human being anywhere needs to know. Children use it before they start school, and they absorb its information quite painlessly. It is rare that an adult needs it. But Burl and Saya did.
Burl was politely invited to wear the head-set, and he politely obliged. He found himself equipped with a new language and what seemed to him an astonishing amount of information. Among the information was the item that he was going to have—as an adult—a severe headache. Which he did. Also included was the fact that the making of records for such educators was so laborious a process that it took generations to compile one master-record for the instruments.
Burl, with a splitting headache, nevertheless urged Saya to join him in getting an education. And she did. And thereafter they were able to converse with the sportsmen on theWapiticomfortably enough,—except for their headaches.
And all this led to extremely satisfactory arrangements. Sportsmen could not but be enthusiastic about the hunting of giant insects with dogs and spears. The sportsmen on theWapitiwanted some of that kind of sport. Burl's fellow-tribesmen were delighted to oblige,—though they had not quite the zest of Burl. They had to acquire educations in their turn, so they could talk to their new hunting-companions. But the hunting was magnificent. TheWapitiabandoned its original plans and settled down for a stay.
Presently Burl's casual talk of the lowlands produced results. An atmosphere-flier came out of the ship's storage-compartments. And through the educator Burl was now a civilized man. He had not the specialized later information of his guests, but he had knowledge they could not dream of, and which it would take much of a century to put in recordable form for an educator.
So an atmosphere-flier went down into the lowlands through the cloud-banks. There were three men on board. They had good hunting. Magnificent hunting. Even more importantly, they found another cluster of human beings who lived as fugitives among the insect giants. They brought them to the plateau, a few at a time. Sportsmen stayed in the lowlands with modern weapons, hunting enthusiastically, while the transfer took place.
In all, theWapitistayed for two months Earth-time. When it left, its sportsmen had such trophies as would make them envied of all other hunters in three star-clusters. They left behind weapons and atmosphere-fliers and their library and tools. But they took with them enthusiasm for the sport on the once-forgotten planet, and rather warm feelings of friendship for Burl.
They sent their friends back. The next ship to come in found a small city on the plateau, with a population of three hundred souls,—all civilized by educator. Naturally, they'd had no trouble building civilized dwellings or practising sanitation, or developing a neatly adapted culture-pattern for their particular environment. This second ship brought more weapons and fliers and news from the first party about commercial demand for the incredibly luxurious moth-fur, to be found on only one planet in all the galaxy.
The fourth ship to land on the plateau was a trading-ship anxious to load such furs for recklessly bidding merchants in a dozen interplanetary marts. There were then nearly a thousand people living on the plateau. They had a natural monopoly,—not of moth-fur and butterfly-wing fabric, and panels of irridescent chitin for luxurious decoration, but—of the strictly practical and detailed knowledge of insect-habits which made it possible to obtain them. Off-planet visitors who tried to hunt without local knowledge did not come back from the lowlands. In time, Burl firmly enacted a planetary law which forbade the inexperienced to go below the cloud-layer.
Because, of course, a government had to be formed for the planet. But men with the basic education of citizens everywhere did not fumble it. They had a job to do which was more important than anybody's vanity. It was a job which gave deep and abiding satisfaction. When naked, trembling folk were found in the mushroom-jungles and brought to the plateau, they had one instant, feverish desire as soon as they got over the headache from the educator.
They wanted to go back to the lowlands. It was profitable, to be sure. But it was even more of a satisfaction to hunt and kill the monsters that had hunted and killed men for so long. It felt good, too, to find other humans and bring them out to sunshine.
So nowadays the forgotten planet has ceased to be forgotten. It is hardly necessary to name it, because its name is known through all the Galaxy. Its population is not large, so far, but it is an interesting place to live in. In the popular mind, it is the most glamorous of all possible worlds,—and for easily understandable reasons. The inhabitants of its capital city wear moth-fur garments and butterfly-wing cloaks for the benefit of their fellows in the lowlands. There is no day but fliers take off and dive down into the mists. When human hunters are in the lowlands, they dress as the lowlanders they used to be, so that lowlanders who may spy them will be sure that they are men, and friends, and come to them to be raised to proper dignity above the insects. It is not unusual for a man to be brought up to sunshine, and have his session with the educator, and be flying his own assigned atmosphere-flier within a week, diving back above what used to be the place where he was hunted, but where he has become the hunter.
It is a very pleasant arrangement. The search for more humans in the lowlands is a prosperous business, even when it is unsuccessful. The wings of white Morpho butterflies bring the highest prices, but even a common swallow-tail is riches, and the fur of caterpillars—duly processed—goes into the holds of the planet-owned space-line ships with the care given elsewhere to platinum and diamonds.
And also it is good sport. The planet is a sportsman's paradise. There are not too many visitors. Nobody may go hunting without an experienced host. And off-planet sportsmen tend to feel somewhat queasy after a session as guest of the folk who have made Burl their planet-president. Visitors are not so much alarmed at fighting flying beetles in mid-air, even though the beetles may compare with the hunters' craft in size and are terrifically tenacious of life. The thing that appalls strangers is the insistence of Burl's fellow-citizens—no longer only tribesmen—upon fighting spiders on the ground. With their memories, they like it that way. It's more satisfactory.
Not long ago the Planet President of Sumor XI was Burl's guest for a hunt. Sumor XI is a highly civilized planet, and life there has become tame. Its president is an ardent hunter. He liked Burl, who is still all hard muscle despite his graying hair. He and Saya have a very comfortable dwelling, and now that their children are grown they have room in it even for a planet president, if he comes as a sportsman guest. The Planet President of Sumor XI even liked the informal atmosphere of a house where pleasantly self-possessed dogs curl up comfortably on rugs of emperor-moth down that elsewhere are beyond price.
But the President of Sumor XI was embarrassed on his visit. He and Burl are both hunters, and they are highly congenial. But the President of Sumor XI was upset on his last flight to the lowlands. Burl got out of the atmosphere-flier alone, and for pure deep personal satisfaction he fought a mastodon-sized wolf spider with nothing but a spear.
He killed the creature, of course. But the President of Sumor XI was embarrassed. He wouldn't have dared try it. He felt that, however sporting it might be, it was too risky a thing for a Planet President to do.
But Saya took it for granted.
You're missing the big thrills in science-fiction if you miss any of the
For instance, here's what theNew York Herald-Tribune(just one of the many applauding reviewers) said about Ace Book D-103:
SOLAR LOTTERYby Philip K. Dick andTHE BIG JUMPby Leigh Brackett
"The latest Ace double-volume offers, for the first time, two new books at one low price, and both well worth reading.Solar Lottery, a first novel by one of the most striking young magazine writers, creates a strange and fascinating civilization for the year 2203, a culture based upon Heisenberg's idea of randomness and Von Neumann's Games-Theory.... Against this background two plots develop, one of intricately deadly and suspenseful palace politics, one of an ambitious attempt to rediscover our sun's once-glimpsed tenth planet.... As elaborately exciting as vintage Van Vogt—with an added touch of C. M. Kornbluth's social satire.
"The Big Jumpis more conventional ... the battle of a monopolist family to hold the secret of interstellar flight makes a lively melodrama, with a virtually compelling finale of alien life on a remote star."
Ace Book D-103—35¢
D-139ALIEN FROM ARCTURUSby Gordon R. DicksonTHE ATOM CURTAINby Nick Boddie Williams
S-133 (25¢)ADVENTURES ON OTHER PLANETSA new anthology edited by Donald A. Wollheim
D-121THREE FACES OF TIMEby Sam Merwin, Jr.THE STARS ARE OURS!by Andre Norton
D-118THE PARADOX MENby Charles L. HarnessDOME AROUND AMERICAby Jack Williamson
D-113ONE IN THREE HUNDREDby J. T. McIntoshTHE TRANSPOSED MANby Dwight V. Swain
D-110NO WORLD OF THEIR OWNby Poul AndersonTHE 1,000 YEAR PLANby Isaac Asimov
D-125THE MAN WHO UPSET THE UNIVERSEby Isaac Asimov
Except as marked, any of these books may be obtained for 35¢ (plus 5¢ handling charges) directly from Ace Books, (Sales Dept.), 23 W. 47th St., New York 36, N. Y.
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