Burl could not flee. He panted and gasped, but he had to see. He stared down the dizzy wall. Boulders ripped and tore their way down the cliff-wall, pulling the cables loose from the face of the precipice. They shot out into space and jerked violently at the half-globular nest, ripping it loose from its anchorage.
Burl cried out exultantly. And as he cried out the shout became a bubbling sound; for although the ogre's silken castle did swing clear, it did not drop the sixty feet to the hard ground below. There was one cable Burl had missed, hidden by rock-tripe and mould in a depressed part of the cliff-top. The spider's house was dangling crazily by that one strand, bobbing erratically to and fro in mid-air.
And there was a convulsive struggle inside it. One of the arch-doors opened and the spider emerged. It was doubtless confused, but spiders simply do not know terror. Their one response to the unusual is ferocity. There was still one cable leading up the cliff-face—the thing's normal climbing-rope to its hunting-ground above. The spider leaped for this single cable. Its legs grasped the cord. It swarmed upward, poison fangs unsheathed, mandibles clashing in rage. The shaggy hair of its body seemed to bristle with insane ferocity. The skinny articulated legs fairly twinkled as it rose. It made slavering noises, unspeakably horrifying.
Burl's followers were already in panic-stricken flight. He could hear them crashing through obstacles as they ran glassy-eyed from the horror they only imagined, but which Burl could not but encounter. Burl shivered, his body poised for equally frenzied but quite hopeless flight. But his first step was blocked. There was a boulder behind him, standing on end, reaching up to his knee. He could not take the first step without dodging it.
It was not the Burl of the terror-filled childhood who acted then. It was the throw-back, the atavism to a bolder ancestry. While the Burl who was a product of his environment was able to know only the stunned sensations of purest panic, the other Burl acted on a sounder basis of desperation. The emerging normal human seized the upright boulder. He staggered to the rock-face with it. He dumped it down the line of the descending cable.
Humans do have ancestral behavior-patterns built into their nervous systems. A frightened small child does not flee; it swarms up the nearest adult to be carried away from danger. At ten a child does not climb but runs. And there is an age when it is normal for a man to stand at bay. This last instinct can be conditioned away. In Burl's fellows and his immediate forbears it had been. But things had happened to Burl to break that conditioning.
He flung the pointed boulder down. For the fraction of a second he heard only the bubbling, gnashing sounds the spider made as it climbed toward him. Then there was a quite indescribable cushioned impact. After that, there were seconds in which Burl heard nothing whatever—and then a noise which could not be described either, but was the impact of the spider's body on the ground a hundred feet below, together with the pointed boulder it had fought insanely during all its fall. And the boulder was on top. The noise was sickening.
Burl found himself shaking all over. His every muscle was tense and strained. But the spider did not crawl over the edge of the precipice and something had hit far below.
A long minute later he managed to look.
The nest still dangled at the end of the single cable, festooned with its gruesome trophies. But Burl saw the spider. It was, of course, characteristically tenacious of life. Its legs writhed and kicked, but the body was crushed and mangled.
As Burl stared down, trying to breathe again, an ant drew near the shattered creature. It stridulated. Other ants came. They hovered restlessly at the edge of the death-scene. One loathesome leg did not quiver. An ant moved in on it.
The ants began to tear the dead spider apart, carrying its fragments to their city a mile away.
Up on the cliff-top Burl got unsteadily to his feet and found that he could breathe. He was drenched in sweat, but the shock of triumph was as overwhelming as any of the terrors felt by ancestors on this planet.
On no other planet in the Galaxy could any human experience such triumph as Burl felt now because never before had human beings been so completely subjugated by their environment. On no other planet had such an environment existed, with humans flung so helplessly upon its mercy.
Burl had been normal among his fellows when he was as frightened and furtive as they. Now he had been given shock treatment by fate. He was very close to normal for a human being newly come to the forgotten planet, save that he had the detailed information which would enable a normal man to cope with the nightmare environment. What he lacked now was the habit.
But it would be intolerable for him to return to his former state of mind.
He walked almost thoughtfully after his fled followers. And he was still a savage in that he was remarkably matter-of-fact. He paused to break off a huge piece of the edible golden mushrooms his fellow-men had noticed on the way up. Lugging it easily, he went back down over the ground that had looked so astonishingly free of inimical life—which it was because of the spider that had used it as a hunting-preserve.
Burl began to see that it was not satisfactory to be one of a tribe of men who ran away all the time. If one man with a spear or stone could kill spiders, it was ridiculous for half a dozen men to run away and leave that one man the job alone. It made the job harder.
It occurred to Burl that he had killed ants without thinking too much about it, but nobody else had. Individual ants could be killed. If he got his followers to kill foot-long ants, they might in time battle the smaller, two-foot beetles. If they came to dare so much, they might attack greater creatures and ultimately attempt to resist the real predators.
Not clearly but very dimly, the Burl who had been shocked back to the viewpoint which was normal to the race of men saw that human beings could be more than the fugitive vermin on which other creatures preyed. It was not easy to envision, but he found it impossible to imagine sinking back to his former state. As a practical matter, if he was to remain as leader his tribesmen would have to change.
It was a long time before he reached the neighborhood of the hiding-place of which he had not been told the night before. He sniffed and listened. Presently he heard faint, murmurous noises. He traced them, hearing clearly the sound of hushed weeping and excited, timid chattering. He heard old Tama shrilly bewailing fate and the stupidity of Burl in getting himself killed.
He pushed boldly through the toadstool-growth and found his tribe all gathered together and trembling. They were shaken. They chattered together—not discussing or planning, but nervously recalling the terrifying experience they had gone through.
Burl stepped through the screen of fungi and men gaped at him. Then they leaped up to flee, thinking he might be pursued. Tet and Dik babbled shrilly. Burl cuffed them. It was an excellent thing for him to do. No man had struck another man in Burl's memory. Cuffings were reserved for children. But Burl cuffed the men who had fled from the cliff-edge. And because they had not been through Burl's experiences, they took the cuffings like children.
He took Jon and Jak by the ear and heaved them out of the hiding-place. He followed them, and then drove them to where they could see the base of the cliff from whose top they had tumbled stones—and then run away. He showed them the carcass of the spider, now being carted away piecemeal by ants. He told them angrily how it had been killed.
They looked at him fearfully.
He was exasperated. He scowled at them. And then he saw them shifting uneasily. There were clickings. A single, foraging black ant—rather large, quite sixteen inches long—moved into view. It seemed to be wandering purposelessly, but was actually seeking carrion to take back to its fellows. It moved toward the men. They were alive, therefore, it did not think of them as food—though it could regard them as enemies.
Burl moved forward and struck with his club. It was butchery. It was unprecedented. When the creature lay still he commanded one of his typo for followers to take it up. Inside its armored legs there would be meat. He mentioned the fact, pungently. Their faces expressed amazed wonderment.
There was another clicking. Another solitary ant. Burl handed his club to Dor, pushing him forward. Dor hesitated. Though he was not afraid of one wandering ant, he held back uneasily. Burl barked at him.
Dor struck clumsily and botched the job. Burl had to use his spear to finish it. But a second bit of prey lay before the men.
Then, quite suddenly, this completely unprecedented form of foraging became understandable to Burl's followers. Jak giggled nervously.
An hour later Burl led them back to the tribe's hiding-place. The others had been terror-stricken, not knowing where the men had gone. But their terror changed to mute amazement when the men carried huge quantities of meat and edible mushroom into the hiding-place. The tribe held what amounted to a banquet.
Dik and Tet swaggered under a burden of ant-carcass. This was not, of course, in any way revolting. Back on Earth, even thousands of years before, Arabs had eaten locusts cooked in butter and salted. All men had eaten crabs and other crustaceans, whose feeding habits were similar to those of ants. If Burl and his tribesmen had thought to be fastidious, ants on the forgotten planet would still have been considered edible, since they had not lost the habits of extreme cleanliness which made them notable on Earth.
This feast of all the tribe, in which men had brought back not only mushroom to be eaten, but actual prey—small prey—of their hunting, was very probably the first such occasion in at least thirty generations of the forty-odd since the planet's unintended colonization. Like the other events, which began with Burl trying to spear a fish with a rhinoceros-beetle's horn, it was not only novel, on that world, but would in time have almost incredibly far-reaching consequences. Perhaps the most significant thing about it was its timing. It came at very nearly the latest instant at which it could have done any good.
There was a reason which nobody in the tribe would ever remember to associate with the significance of this banquet. A long time before—months in terms of Earth-time—there had been a strong breeze that blew for three days and nights. It was an extremely unusual windstorm. It had seemed the stranger, then, because during all its duration everyone in the tribe had been sick, suffering continuously. When the windstorm had ended, the suffering ceased. A long time passed and nobody remembered it any longer.
There was no reason why they should. Yet, since that time there had been a new kind of thing growing among the innumerable moulds and rusts and toadstools of the lowlands. Burl had seen them on his travels, and the expeditionary force against the clotho spider had seen them on the journey up to the cliff-edge. Red puffballs, developing first underground, were now pushing the soil aside to expose taut, crimson parchment spheres to the open air. The tribesmen left them alone because they were strange; and strange things were always dangerous. Puffballs they were familiar with—big, misshapen things which shot at a touch a powder into the air. The particles of powder were spores—the seed from which they grew. Spores had remained infinitely small even on the forgotten planet where fungi grew huge. Only their capacity for growth had increased. The red growths were puffballs, but of a new and different kind.
As the tribe ate and admired, the hunters boasting of their courage, one of the new red mushrooms reached maturity.
This particular growing thing was perhaps two feet across, its main part spherical. Almost eighteen inches of the thing rose above-ground. A tawny and menacing red, the sphere was contained in a parchment-like skin that was pulled taut. There was internal tension. But the skin was tough and would not yield, yet the inexorable pressure of life within demanded that it stretch. It was growing within, but the skin without had ceased to grow.
This one happened to be on a low hillside a good half-mile from the place where Burl and his fellows banqueted. Its tough, red parchment skin was tensed unendurably. Suddenly it ripped apart with an explosive tearing noise. The dry spores within billowed out and up like the smoke of a shell-explosion, spurting skyward for twenty feet and more. At the top of their ascent they spread out and eddied like a cloud of reddish smoke. They hung in the air. They drifted in the sluggish breeze. They spread as they floated, forming a gradually extending, descending dust-cloud in the humid air.
A bee, flying back toward its hive, droned into the thin mass of dust. It was preoccupied. The dust-cloud was not opaque, but only a thick haze. The bee flew into it.
For half a dozen wing-beats nothing happened. Then the bee veered sharply. Its deep-toned humming rose in pitch. It made convulsive movements in mid-air. It lost balance and crashed heavily to the ground. There its legs kicked and heaved violently but without purpose. The wings beat furiously but without rhythm or effect. Its body bent in paroxysmic flexings. It stung blindly at nothing.
After a little while the bee died. Like all insects, bees breathe through spiracles—breathing-holes in their abdomens. This bee had flown into the cloud of red dust which was the spore-cloud of the new mushrooms.
The cloud drifted slowly along over the surface of yeasts and moulds, over toadstools and variegated fungus monstrosities. It moved steadily over a group of ants at work upon some bit of edible stuff. They were seized with an affliction like that of the bee. They writhed, moved convulsively. Their legs thrashed about. They died.
The cloud of red dust settled as it moved. By the time it had travelled a quarter-mile, it had almost all settled to the ground.
But a half-mile away there was another skyward-spurting uprush of red dust which spread slowly with the breeze. A quarter-mile away another plumed into the air. Farther on, two of them spouted their spores toward the clouds almost together.
Living things that breathed the red dust writhed and died. And the red-dust puffballs were scattered everywhere.
Burl and his tribesmen feasted, chattering in hushed tones of the remarkable fact that men ate meat of their own killing.
It was very fortunate indeed that the feast took place when it did. Two days later it would probably have been impossible, and three days later it would have been too late to do any good. But coming when it did, it made the difference which was all the difference in the world.
Only thirty hours after the feasting which followed the death of the clotho spider, Burl's fellows—from Jon to Dor to Tet and Dik and Saya—had come to know a numb despair which the other creatures of his world were simply a bit too stupid to achieve.
It was night. There was darkness over all the lowlands, and over all the area of perhaps a hundred square miles which the humans of Burl's acquaintance really knew. He, alone of his tribe, had been as much as forty miles from the foraging-ground over which they wandered. At any given time the tribe clung together for comfort, venturing only as far as was necessary to find food. Although the planet possessed continents, they knew less than a good-sized county of it. The planet owned oceans, and they knew only small brooks and one river which, where they knew it, was assuredly less than two hundred yards across. And they faced stark disaster that was not strictly a local one, but beyond their experience and hopelessly beyond their ability to face.
They were superior to the insects about them only in the fact they realized what was threatening them.
The disaster was the red puffballs.
But it was night. The soft, blanketing darkness of a cloud-wrapped world lay all about. Burl sat awake, wrapped in his magnificent velvet cloak, his spear beside him and the yard-long golden plumes of a moth's antennae bound to his forehead for a headdress. About him and his tribesmen were the swollen shapes of fungi, hiding the few things that could be seen in darkness. From the low-hanging clouds the nightly rain dripped down. Now a drop and then another drop; slowly, deliberately, persistently moisture fell from the skies.
There was other sounds. Things flew through the blackness overhead—moths with mighty wing-beats that sometimes sent rhythmic wind-stirrings down to the tribe in its hiding-place. There were the deep pulsations of sound made by night-beetles aloft. There were the harsh noises of grasshoppers—they were rare—senselessly advertising their existence to nearby predators. Not too far from where Burl brooded came bright chirrupings where relatively small beetles roamed among the mushroom-forests, singing cheerfully in deep bass voices. They were searching for the underground tidbits which took the place of truffles their ancestors had lived on back on Earth.
All seemed to be as it had been since the first humans were cast away upon this planet. And at night, indeed, the new danger subsided. The red puffballs did not burst after sunset. Burl sat awake, brooding in a new sort of frustration. He and all his tribe were plainly doomed—yet Burl had experienced too many satisfying sensations lately to be willing to accept the fact.
The new red growths were everywhere. Months ago a storm-wind blew while somewhere, not too far distant, other red puffballs were bursting and sending their spores into the air. Since it was only a windstorm, there was no rain to wash the air clean of the lethal dust. The new kind of puffball—but perhaps it was not new: it could have thriven for thousands of years where it was first thrown as a sport from a genetically unstable parent—the new kind of puffball would not normally be spread in this fashion. By chance it had.
There were dozens of the things within a quarter-mile, hundreds within a mile, and thousands upon thousands within the area the tribe normally foraged in. Burl had seen them even forty miles away, as yet immature. They would be deadly at one period alone—the time of their bursting. But there were limitations even to the deadliness of the red puffballs, though Burl had not yet discovered the fact. But as of now, they doomed the tribe.
One woman panted and moaned in her exhausted sleep, a little way from where Burl tried to solve the problem presented by the tribe. Nobody else attempted to think it out. The others accepted doom with fatalistic hopelessness. Burl's leadership might mean extra food, but nothing could counter the doom awaiting them—so their thoughts seemed to run.
But Burl doggedly reviewed the facts in the darkness, while the humans about him slept the sleep of those without hope and even without rebellion. There had been many burstings of the crimson puffballs. As many as four and five of the deadly dust-clouds had been seen spouting into the air at the same time. A small boy of the tribe had breathlessly told of seeing a hunting-spider killed by the red dust. Lana, the half-grown girl, had come upon one of the gigantic rhinoceros-beetles belly-up on the ground, already the prey of ants. She had snatched a huge, meat-filled joint and run away, faster than the ants could follow. A far-ranging man had seen a butterfly, with wings ten yards across, die in a dust-cloud. Another woman—Cori—had been nearby when a red cloud settled slowly over long, solid lines of black worker-ants bound on some unknown mission. Later she saw other workers carrying the dead bodies back to the ant-city to be used for food.
Burl still sat wakeful and frustrated and enraged as the slow rain fell upon the toadstools that formed the tribe's lurking-place. He doggedly went over and over the problem. There were innumerable red puffballs. Some had burst. The others undoubtedly would burst. Anything that breathed the red dust died. With thousands of the puffballs around them it was unthinkable that any human in this place could escape breathing the red dust and dying. But it had not always been so. There had been a time when there were no red puffballs here.
Burl's eyes moved restlessly over the sleeping forms limned by a patch of fox-fire. The feathery plumes rising from his head were outlined softly by the phosphorescence. His face was lined with a frown as he tried to think his own and his fellows' way out of the predicament. Without realizing it, Burl had taken it upon himself to think for his tribe. He had no reason to. It was simply a natural thing for him to do so, now that he had learned to think—even though his efforts were crude and painful as yet.
Saya woke with a start and stared about. There had been no alarm,—merely the usual noises of distant murders and the songs of singers in the night. Burl moved restlessly. Saya stood up quietly, her long hair flowing about her. Sleepy-eyed, she moved to be near Burl. She sank to the ground beside him, sitting up—because the hiding-place was crowded and small—and dozed fitfully. Presently her head drooped to one side. It rested against his shoulder. She slept again.
This simple act may have been the catalyst which gave Burl the solution to the problem. Some few days before, Burl had been in a far-away place where there was much food. At the time he'd thought vaguely of finding Saya and bringing her to that place. He remembered now that the red puffballs flourished there as well as here—but there had been other dangers in between, so the only half-formed purpose had been abandoned. Now, though, with Saya's head resting against his shoulder, he remembered the plan. And then the stroke of genius took place.
He formed the idea of a journey which was not a going-after-food. This present dwelling-place of the tribe had been free of red puffballs until only recently. There must be other places where there were no red puffballs. He would take Saya and his tribesmen to such a place.
It was really genius. The people of Burl's tribe had no purposes, only needs—for food and the like. Burl had achieved abstract thought—which previously had not been useful on the forgotten planet and, therefore, not practised. But it was time for humankind to take a more fitting place in the unbalanced ecological system of this nightmare world, time to change that unbalance in favor of humans.
When dawn came, Burl had not slept at all. He was all authority and decision. He had made plans.
He spoke sternly, loudly—which frightened people conditioned to be furtive—holding up his spear as he issued commands. His timid tribesfolk obeyed him meekly. They felt no loyalty to him or confidence in his decisions yet, but they were beginning to associate obedience to him with good things. Food, for one.
Before the day fully came, they made loads of the remaining edible mushroom and uneaten meat. It was remarkable for humans to leave their hiding-place while they still had food to eat, but Burl was implacable and scowling. Three men bore spears at Burl's urging. He brandished his long shaft confidently as he persuaded the other three to carry clubs. They did so reluctantly, even though previously they had killed ants with clubs. Spears, they felt, would have been better. They wouldn't be so close to the prey then.
The sky became gray over all its expanse. The indefinite bright area which marked the position of the sun became established. It was part-way toward the center of the sky when the journey began. Burl had, of course, no determined course, only a destination—safety. He had been carried south, in his misadventure on the river. There were red puffballs to southward, therefore he ruled out that direction. He could have chosen the east and come upon an ocean, but no safety from the red spore-dust. Or he could have chosen the north. It was pure chance that he headed west.
He walked confidently through the gruesome world of the lowlands, holding his spear in a semblance of readiness. Clad as he was, he made a figure at once valiant and rather pathetic. It was not too sensible for one young man—even one who had killed two spiders—to essay leading a tiny tribe of fearful folk across a land of monstrous ferocity and incredible malignance, armed only with a spear from a dead insect's armor. It was absurd to dress up for the enterprise in a velvety cloak made of a moth's wing, blue moth-fur for a loin-cloth, and merely beautiful golden plumes bobbing above his forehead.
Probably, though, that gorgeousness had a good effect upon his followers. They surely could not reassure each other by their numbers! There was a woman with a baby in her arms—Cori. Three children of nine or ten, unable to resist the instinct to play even on so perilous a journey, ate almost constantly of the lumps of foodstuff they had been ordered to carry. After them came Dik, a long-legged adolescent boy with eyes that roved anxiously about. Behind him were two men. Dor with a short spear and Jak hefting a club, both of them badly frightened at the idea of fleeing from dangers they knew and were terrified by, to other dangers unknown and, consequently, more to be feared. The others trailed after them. Tet was rear-guard. Burl had separated the pair of boys to make them useful. Together they were worthless.
It was a pathetic caravan, in a way. In all the rest of the Galaxy, man was the dominant creature. There was no other planet from one rim to the other where men did not build their cities or settlements with unconscious arrogance—completely disregarding the wishes of lesser things. Only on this planet did men hide from danger rather than destroy it. Only here could men be driven from their place by lower life-forms. And only here would a migration be made on foot, with men's eyes fearful, their bodies poised to flee at sight of something stronger and more deadly than themselves.
They marched, straggling a little, with many waverings aside from a fixed line. Once Dik saw the trap-door of a trapdoor-spider's lair. They halted, trembling, and went a long way out of their intended path to avoid it. Once they saw a great praying-mantis a good half-mile off, and again they deviated from their proper route.
Near midday their way was blocked. As they moved onward, a great, high-pitched sound could be heard ahead of them. Burl stopped; his face grew pinched. But it was only a stridulation, not the cries of creatures being devoured. It was a horde of ants by the thousands and hundreds of thousands, and nothing else.
Burl went ahead to scout. And he did it because he did not trust anybody else to have the courage or intelligence to return with a report, instead of simply running away if the news were bad. But it happened to be a sort of action which would help to establish his position as leader of his tribe.
Burl moved forward cautiously and presently came to an elevation from which he could see the cause of the tremendous waves of sound that spread out in all directions from the level plain before him. He waved to his followers to join him, and stood looking down at the extraordinary sight.
When they reached his side—and Saya was first—the spectacle had not diminished. For quite half a mile in either direction the earth was black with ants. It was a battle of opposing armies from rival ant-cities. They snapped and bit at each other. Locked in vise-like embraces, they rolled over and over upon the ground, trampled underfoot by hordes of their fellows who surged over them to engage in equally suicidal combat. There was, of course, no thought of surrender or of quarter. They fought by thousands of pairs, their jaws seeking to crush each other's armor, snapping at each other's antennae, biting at each other's eyes....
The noise was not like that of army-ants. This was the agonizing sound of ants being dismembered while still alive. Some of the creatures had only one or two or three legs left, yet struggled fiercely to entangle another enemy before they died. There were mad cripples, fighting insanely with head and thorax only, their abdomens sheared away. The whining battle-cry of the multitude made a deafening uproar.
From either side of the battleground a wide path led back toward separate ant-cities which were invisible from Burl's position. These highways were marked by hurrying groups of ants—reinforcements rushing to the fight. Compared to the other creatures of this world the ants were small, but no lumbering beetle dared to march insolently in their way, nor did any carnivores try to prey upon them. They were dangerous. Burl and his tribesfolk were the only living things remaining near the battle-field—with one single exception.
That exception was itself a tribe of ants, vastly less in number than the fighting creatures, and greatly smaller in size as well. Where the combatants were from a foot to fourteen inches long, these guerilla-ants were no more than the third of a foot in length. They hovered industriously at the edge of the fighting, not as allies to either nation, but strictly on their own account. Scurrying among the larger, fighting ants with marvelous agility, they carried off piecemeal the bodies of the dead and valiantly slew the more gravely wounded for the same purpose.
They swarmed over the fighting-ground whenever the tide of battle receded. Caring nothing for the origin of the quarrel and espousing neither side, these opportunists busily salvaged the dead and still-living debris of the battle for their own purposes.
Burl and his followers were forced to make a two-mile detour to avoid the battle. The passage between bodies of scurrying reinforcements was a matter of some difficulty. Burl hurried the others past a route to the front, reeking of formic acid, over which endless regiments and companies of ants moved frantically to join in the fight. They were intensely excited. Antennae waving wildly, they rushed to the front and instantly flung themselves into the fray, becoming lost and indistinguishable in the black mass of fighting creatures.
The humans passed precariously between two hurrying battalions—Dik and Tet pausing briefly to burden themselves with prey—and hurried on to leave as many miles as possible behind them before nightfall. They never knew any more about the battle. It could have started over anything at all—two ants from the different cities may have disputed some tiny bit of carrion and soon been reinforced by companions until the military might of both cities was engaged. Once it had started, of course, the fighters knew whom to fight if not why they did so. The inhabitants of the two cities had different smells, which served them as uniforms.
But the outcome of the war would hardly matter. Not to the fighters, certainly. There were many red mushrooms in this area. If either of the cities survived at all, it would be because its nursery-workers lived upon stored food as they tended the grubs until the time of the spouting red dust had ended.
Burl's folk saw many of the red puffballs burst during the day. More than once they came upon empty, flaccid parchment sacs. More often still they came upon red puffballs not yet quite ready to emit their murderous seed.
That first night the tribe hid among the bases of giant puffballs of a more familiar sort. When touched they would shoot out a puff of white powder resembling smoke. The powder was harmless fortunately and the tribe knew that fact. Although not toxic, the white powder was identical in every other way to the terrible red dust from which the tribe fled.
That night Burl slept soundly. He had been without rest for two days and a night. And he was experienced in journeying to remote places. He knew that they were no more dangerous than familiar ones. But the rest of the tribe, and even Saya, were fearful and terrified. They waited timorously all through the dark hours for menacing sounds to crash suddenly through the steady dripping of the nightly rain around them.
The second day's journey was not unlike the first. The following day, they came upon a full ten-acre patch of giant cabbages bigger than a family dwelling. Something in the soil, perhaps, favored vegetation over fungi. The dozens of monstrous vegetables were the setting for riotous life: great slugs ate endlessly of the huge green leaves—and things preyed on them; bees came droning to gather the pollen of the flowers. And other things came to prey on the predators in their turn.
There was one great cabbage somewhat separate from the rest. After a long examination of the scene, Burl daringly led quaking Jon and Jak to the attack. Dor splendidly attacked elsewhere, alone. When the tribe moved on, there was much meat, and everyone—even the children—wore loin-cloths of incredibly luxurious fur.
There were perils, too. On the fifth day of the tribe's journey Burl suddenly froze into stillness. One of the hairy tarantulas which lived in burrows with a concealed trap-door at ground-level, had fallen upon a scarabeus beetle and was devouring it only a hundred yards ahead. The tribesfolk trembled as Burl led them silently back and around by a safe detour.
But all these experiences were beginning to have an effect. It was becoming a matter of course that Burl should give orders which others should obey. It was even becoming matter-of-fact that the possession of food was not a beautiful excuse to hide from all danger, eating and dozing until all the food was gone. Very gradually the tribe was developing the notion that the purpose of existence was not solely to escape awareness of peril, but to foresee and avoid it. They had no clear-cut notion of purpose as yet. They were simply outgrowing purposelessness. After a time they even looked about them with, dim stirrings of an attitude other than a desperate alertness for danger.
Humans from any other planet, surely, would have been astounded at the vistas of golden mushrooms stretching out in forests on either hand and the plains with flaking surfaces given every imaginable color by the moulds and rusts and tiny flowering yeasts growing upon them. They would have been amazed by the turgid pools the journeying tribe came upon, where the water was concealed by a thick layer of slime through which enormous bubbles of foul-smelling gas rose to enlarge to preposterous size before bursting abruptly.
Had they been as ill-armed as Burl's folk, though, visitors from other planets would have been at least as timorous. Lacking highly specialized knowledge of the ways of insects on this world even well-armed visitors would have been in greater danger.
But the tribe went on without a single casualty. They had fleeting glimpses of the white spokes of symmetrical spider-webs whose least thread no member of the tribe could break.
Their immunity from disaster—though in the midst of danger—gave them a certain all-too-human concentration upon discomfort. Lacking calamities, they noticed their discomforts and grew weary of continual traveling. A few of the men complained to Burl.
For answer, he pointed back along the way they had come. To the right a reddish dust-cloud was just settling, and to the rear rose another as they looked.
And on this day a thing happened which at once gave the complainers the rest they asked for, and proved the fatality of remaining where they were. A child ran aside from the path its elders were following. The ground here had taken on a brownish hue. As the child stirred up the surface mould with his feet, dust that had settled was raised up again. It was far too thin to have any visible color. But the child suddenly screamed, strangling. The mother ran frantically to snatch him up.
The red dust was no less deadly merely because it had settled to the ground. If a storm-wind came now—but they were infrequent under the forgotten planet's heavy bank of clouds—the fallen red dust could be raised up again and scattered about until there would be no living thing anywhere which would not gasp and writhe—and die.
But the child would not die. He would suffer terribly and be weak for days. In the morning he could be carried.
When night began to darken the sky, the tribe searched for a hiding-place. They came upon a shelf-like cliff, perhaps twenty or thirty feet high, slanting toward the line of the tribesmen's travel. Burl saw black spots in it—openings. Burrows. He watched them as the tribe drew near. No bees or wasps went in or out. He watched long enough to be sure.
When they were close, he was certain. Ordering the others to wait, he went forward to make doubly sure. The appearance of the holes reassured him. Dug months before by mining-bees, gone or dead now, the entrances to the burrows were weathered and bedraggled. Burl explored, first sniffing carefully at each opening. They were empty. This would be shelter for the night. He called his followers, and they crawled into the three-foot tunnels to hide.
Burl stationed himself near the outer edge of one of them to watch for signs of danger. Night had not quite fallen. Jon and Dor, hungry, went off to forage a little way beyond the cliff. They would be cautious and timid, taking no risks whatever.
Burl waited for the return of his explorers. Meanwhile he fretted over the meaning of the stricken child. Stirred-up red dust was dangerous. The only time when there would be no peril from it would be at night, when the dripping rainfall of the dark hours turned the surface of this world into thin shine. It occurred to Burl that it would be safe to travel at night, so far as the red dust was concerned. He rejected the idea instantly. It was unthinkable to travel at night for innumerable other reasons.
Frowning, he poked his spear idly at a tumbled mass of tiny parchment cup-like things near the entrance of a cave. And instantly movement became visible. Fifty, sixty, a hundred infinitesimal creatures, no more than half an inch in length, made haste to hide themselves among the thimble-sized paperlike cups. They moved with extraordinary clumsiness and immense effort, seemingly only by contortions of their greenish-black bodies. Burl had never seen any creature progress in such a slow and ineffective fashion. He drew one of the small creatures back with the point of his spear and examined it from a safe distance.
He picked it up on his spear and brought it close to his eyes. The thing redoubled its frenzied movements. It slipped off the spear and plopped upon the soft moth-fur he wore about his middle. Instantly, as if it were a conjuring-trick, the insect vanished. Burl searched for minutes before he found it hidden deep in the long, soft hairs of his garment, resting motionless and seemingly at ease.
It was the larval form of a beetle, fragments of whose armor could be seen near the base of the clayey cliffside. Hidden in the remnants of its egg-casings, the brood of minute things had waited near the opening of the mining-bee tunnel. It was their gamble with destiny when mining-bee grubs had slept through metamorphosis and come uncertainly out of the tunnel for the first time, that some or many of the larvae might snatch the instant's chance to fasten to the bees' legs and writhe upward to an anchorage in their fur. It happened that this particular batch of eggs had been laid after the emergence of the grubs. They had no possible chance of fulfilling their intended role as parasites on insects of the order hymenoptera. They were simply and matter-of-factly doomed by the blindness of instinct, which had caused them to be placed where they could not possibly survive.
On the other hand, if one or many of them had found a lurking-place, the offspring of their host would have been doomed. The place filled by oil-beetle larvae in the scheme of things is the place—or one of the places—reserved for creatures that limit the number of mining-bees. When a bee-louse-infested mining-bee has made a new tunnel, stocked it with honey for its young, and then laid one egg to float on that pool of nourishment and hatch and feed and ultimately grow to be another mining-bee—at that moment of egg-laying, one small bee-louse detaches itself. It remains zestfully in the provisioned cell to devour the egg for which the provisions were accumulated. It happily consumes those provisions and, in time, an oil-beetle crawls out of the tunnel a mining-bee so laboriously prepared.
Burl had no difficulty in detaching the small insect and casting it away, but in doing so he discovered that others had hidden themselves in his fur without his knowledge. He plucked them away and found more. While savages can be highly tolerant of vermin too small to be seen, they feel a peculiar revolt against serving as host to creatures of sensible size. Burl reacted violently—as once he had reacted to the discovery of a leech clinging to his heel. He jerked off his loin-cloth and beat it savagely with his spear.
When it was clean, he still felt a wholly unreasonable sense of humiliation. It was not clearly thought out, of course. Burl feared huge insects too much to hate them. But that small creatures should fasten upon him produced a completely irrational feeling of outrage. For the first time in very many years or centuries a human being upon the forgotten planet felt that he had been insulted. His dignity had been assailed. Burl raged.
But as he raged, a triumphant shout came from nearby. Jon and Dor were returning from their foraging, loaded down with edible mushroom. They, also, had taken a step upward toward the natural dignity of men. They had so far forgotten their terror as to shout in exultation at their find of food. Up to now, Burl had been the only man daring to shout. Now there were two others.
In his overwrought state this was also enraging. The result of hurt vanity on two counts was jealousy, and the result of jealousy was a crazy foolhardiness. Burl ground his teeth and insanely resolved to do something so magnificent, so tremendous, so utterly breathtaking that there could be no possible imitation by anybody else. His thinking was not especially clear. Part of his motivation had been provided by the oil-beetle larvae. He glared about him at the deepening dusk, seeking some exploit, some glamorous feat, to perform immediately, even in the night.
He found one.
It was late dusk and the reddened clouds overhead were deepening steadily toward black. Dark shadows hung everywhere. The clay cliff cut off all vision to one side, but elsewhere Burl could see outward until the graying haze blotted out the horizon. Here and there, bees droned homeward to hive or burrow. Sometimes a slender, graceful wasp passed overhead, its wings invisible by the swiftness of their vibration.
A few butterflies lingered hungrily in the distance, seeking the few things they could still feast upon. No moth had wakened yet to the night. The cloud-bank grew more sombre. The haze seemed to close in and shrink the world that Burl could see.
He watched, raging, for the sight that would provide him with the triumph to end all triumphs among his followers. The soft, down-reaching fingers of the night touched here and there and the day ended at those spots. Then, from the heart of the deep redness to the west a flying creature came. It was a beautiful thing—a yellow emperor butterfly—flapping eastward with great sail-like velvet wings that seemed black against the sunset. Burl saw it sweep across the incredible sky, alight delicately, and disappear behind a mass of toadstools clustered so thickly they seemed nearly a hillock and not a mass of growing things.
Then darkness closed in completely, but Burl still stared where the yellow emperor had landed. There was that temporary, utter quiet when day-things were hidden and night-things had not yet ventured out. Fox-fire glowed. Patches of pale phosphorescence—luminous mushrooms—shone faintly in the dark.
Presently Burl moved through the night. He could imagine the yellow emperor in its hiding-place, delicately preening slender limbs before it settled down to rest until the new day dawned. He had noted landmarks, to guide himself. A week earlier and his blood would have run cold at the bare thought of doing what he did now. In mere cool-headed detachment he would have known that what he did was close to madness. But he was neither cool-headed nor detached.
He crossed the clear ground before the low cliff. But for the fox-fire beacons he would have been lost instantly. The slow drippings of rain began. The sky was dead black. Now was the time for night-things to fly, and male tarantulas to go seeking mates and prey. It was definitely no time for adventuring.
Burl moved on. He found the close-packed toadstools by the process of running into them in the total obscurity. He fumbled, trying to force his way between them. It could not be done; they grew too close and too low. He raged at this impediment. He climbed.
This was insanity. Burl stood on spongy mushroom-stuff that quivered and yielded under his weight. Somewhere something boomed upward, rising on fast-beating wings into blackness. He heard the pulsing drone of four-inch mosquitos close by. He moved forward, the fungus support swaying, so that he did not so much walk as stagger over the close-packed mushroom heads. He groped before him with spear and panted a little. There was a part of him which was bitterly afraid, but he raged the more furiously because if once he gave way even to caution, it would turn to panic.
Burl would have made a strange spectacle in daylight gaudily clothed as he was in soft blue fur and velvet cloak, staggering over swaying insecurity, coddling ferocity in himself against the threat of fear.
Then his spear told him there was emptiness ahead. Something moved, below. He heard and felt it stirring the toadstool-stalks on which he stood.
Burl raised his spear, grasping it in both hands. He plunged down with it, stabbing fiercely.
The spear struck something vastly more resistant than any mushroom could be. It penetrated. Then the stabbed thing moved as Burl landed upon it, flinging him off his feet, but he clung to the firmly imbedded weapon. And if his mouth had opened for a yell of victory as he plunged down, the nature of the surface on which he found himself, and the kind of movement he felt, turned that yell into a gasp of horror.
It wasn't the furry body of a butterfly he had landed on; his spear hadn't pierced such a creature's soft flesh. He had leaped upon the broad, hard back of a huge, meat-eating, nocturnal beetle. His spear had pierced not the armor, but the leathery joint-tissue between head and thorax.
The giant creature rocketed upward with Burl clinging to his spear. He held fast with an agonized strength. His mount rose from the blackness of the ground into the many times more terrifying blackness of the air. It rose up and up. If Burl could have screamed, he would have done so, but he could not cry out. He could only hold fast, glassy-eyed.
Then he dropped. Wind roared past him. The great insect was clumsy at flying. All beetles are. Burl's weight and the pain it felt made its flying clumsier still. There was a semi-liquid crashing and an impact. Burl was torn loose and hurled away. He crashed into the spongy top of a mushroom and came to rest with his naked shoulder hanging halfway over some invisible drop. He struggled.
He heard the whining drone of his attempted prey. It rocketed aloft again. But there was something wrong with it. With his weight applied to the spear as he was torn free, Burl had twisted the weapon in the wound. It had driven deeper, multiplying the damage of the first stab.
The beetle crashed to earth again, nearby. As Burl struggled again, the mushroom-stalk split and let him gently to the ground.
He heard the flounderings of the great beetle in the darkness. It mounted skyward once more, its wing-beats no longer making a sustained note. It thrashed the air irregularly and wildly.
Then it crashed again.
There was seeming silence, save for the steady drip-drip of the rain. And Burl came out of his half-mad fear: he suddenly realized that he had slain a victim even more magnificent than a spider, because this creature was meat.
He found himself astonishedly running toward the spot where the beetle had last fallen.
But he heard it struggle aloft once more. It was wounded to death. Burl felt certain of it this time. It floundered in mid-air and crashed again.
He was within yards of it before he checked himself. Now he was weaponless, and the gigantic insect flung itself about madly on the ground, striking out with colossal wings and limbs, fighting it knew not what. It struggled to fly, crashed, and fought its way off the ground—ever more weakly—then smashed again into mushrooms. There it floundered horribly in the darkness.
Burl drew near and waited. It was still, but pain again drove it to a senseless spasm of activity.
Then it struck against something. There was a ripping noise and instantly the close, peppery, burning smell of the red dust was in the air. The beetle had floundered into one of the close-packed red puffballs, tightly filled with the deadly red spores. The red dust would not normally have been released at night. With the nightly rain, it would not travel so far or spread so widely.
Burl fled, panting.
Behind him he heard his victim rise one last time, spurred to impossible, final struggle by the anguish caused by the breathed-in red dust. It rose clumsily into the darkness in its death-throes and crashed to the ground again for the last time.
In time to come, Burl and his followers might learn to use the red-dust puffballs as weapons—but not how to spread them beyond their normal range. But now, Burl was frightened. He moved hastily sidewise. The dust would travel down-wind. He got out of its possible path.
There could be no exultation where the red dust was. Burl suddenly realized what had happened to him. He had been carried aloft an unknown though not-great distance, in an unknown direction. He was separated from his tribe, with no faintest idea how to find them in the darkness. And it was night.
He crouched under the nearest huge toadstool and waited for the dawn, listening dry-throated for the sound of death coming toward him through the night.
But only the wind-beats of night-fliers came to his ears, and the discordant notes of gray-bellied truffle-beetles as they roamed the mushroom thickets, seeking the places beneath which—so their adapted instincts told them—fungoid dainties, not too much unlike the truffles of Earth, awaited the industrious miner. And, of course, there was that eternal, monotonous dripping of the raindrops, falling at irregular intervals from the sky.
Red puffballs did not burst at night. They would not burst anyhow, except at one certain season of their growth. But Burl and his folk had so far encountered the over-hasty ones, bursting earlier than most. The time of ripeness was very nearly here, though. When day came again, and the chill dampness of the night was succeeded by the warmth of the morning, almost the first thing Burl saw in the gray light was a tall spouting of brownish-red stuff leaping abruptly into the air from a burst red parchment-like sphere.
He stood up and looked anxiously all around. Here and there, all over the landscape, slowly and at intervals, the plumes of fatal red sprang into the air. There was nothing quite like it anywhere else. An ancient man, inhabiting Earth, might have likened the appearance to that of a scattered and leisurely bombardment. But Burl had no analogy for them.
He saw something hardly a hundred yards from where he had hidden during the night. The dead beetle lay there, crumpled and limp. Burl eyed it speculatively. Then he saw something that filled him with elation. The last crash of the beetle to the ground had driven his spear deeply between the joints of the corselet and neck. Even if the red dust had not finished the creature, the spear-point would have ended its life.
He was thrilled once more by his superlative greatness. He made due note that he was a mighty slayer. He took the antennae as proof of his valor and hacked off a great barb-edged leg for meat. And then he remembered that he did not know how to find his fellow-tribesmen. He had no idea which way to go.
Even a civilized man would have been at a loss, though he would have hunted for an elevation from which to look for the cliff hiding-place of the tribe. But Burl had not yet progressed so far. His wild ride of the night before had been at random, and the chase after the wounded beetle no less dictated by chance. There was no answer.
He set off anxiously, searching everywhere. But he had to be alert for all the dangers of an inimical world while keeping, at the same time, an extremely sharp eye out for bursting red puffballs.
At the end of an hour he thought he saw familiar things. Then he recognized the spot. He had come back to the dead beetle. It was already the center of a mass of small black bodies which pulled and hacked at the tough armor, gnawing out great lumps of flesh to be carried to the nearest ant-city.
Burl set off again, very carefully avoiding any place that he recognized as having been seen that morning. Sometimes he walked through mushroom-thickets—dangerous places to be in—and sometimes over relatively clear ground colored exotically with varicolored fungi. More than once he saw the clouds of red stuff spurting in the distance. Deep anxiety filled him. He had no idea that there were such things as points of the compass. He knew only that he needed desperately to find his tribesfolk again.
They, of course, had given him up for dead. He had vanished in the night. Old Tama complained of him shrilly. The night, to them, meant death. Jon quaked watchfully all through it. When Burl did not come to the feast of mushroom that Jon and Dor had brought back, they sought him. They even called timidly into the darkness. They heard the throbbing of huge wings as a great creature rose desperately into the sky, but they did not associate that sound with Burl. If they had, they would have been instantly certain of his fate.
As it was, the tribe's uneasiness grew into terror which rapidly turned to despair. They began to tremble, wondering what they would do with no bold chieftain to guide them. He was the first man to command allegiance from others in much too long a period, on the forgotten planet, but the submission of his followers had been the more complete for its novelty. His loss was the more appalling. Burl had mistaken the triumphant shout of the foragers. He'd thought it independence of him—rivalry. Actually, the men dared to shout only because they felt secure under his leadership. When they accepted the fact that he had vanished—and to disappear in the night had always meant death—their old fears and timidity returned. To them it was added despair.
They huddled together and whispered to one another of their fright. They waited in trembling silence through all the long night. Had a hunting-spider appeared, they would have fled in as many directions as there were people, and undoubtedly all would have perished. But day came again, and they looked into each other's eyes and saw the self-same fear. Saya was probably the most pitiful of the group. Her face was white and drawn beyond that of any one else.
They did not move when day brightened. They remained about the bee-tunnels, speaking in hushed tones, huddled together, searching all the horizon for enemies. Saya would not eat, but sat still, staring before her in numbed grief. Burl was dead.
Atop the low cliff a red puffball glistened in the morning light. Its tough skin was taut and bulging, resisting the pressure of the spores within. Slowly, as the morning wore on, some of the moisture that kept the skin stretchable dried. The parchment-like stuff contracted. The tautness of the spore-packed envelope grew greater. It became insupportable.
With a ripping sound, the tough skin split across and a rush of the compressed spores shot skyward.
The tribesmen saw and cried out and fled. The red stuff drifted down past the cliff-edge. It drifted toward the humans. They ran from it. Jon and Tama ran fastest. Jak and Cori and the other were not far behind. Saya trailed, in her despair.
Had Burl been there, matters would have been different. He had already such an ascendancy over the minds of the others that even in panic they would have looked to see what he did. And he would have dodged the slowly drifting death-cloud by day, as he had during the night. But his followers ran blindly.
As Saya fled after the others she heard shrieks of fright to the left and ran faster. She passed by a thick mass of distorted fungi in which there was a sudden stirring and panic lent wings to her feet. She fled blindly, panting. Ahead was a great mass of stuff—red puffballs—showing here and there among great fanlike growths, some twelve feet high, that looked like sponges.
She fled past them and swerved to hide herself from anything that might be pursuing by sight. Her foot slipped on the slimy body of a shell-less snail and she fell heavily, her head striking a stone. She lay still.
Almost as if at a signal a red puffball burst among the fanlike growths. A thick, dirty-red cloud of dust shot upward, spread and billowed and began to settle slowly toward the ground again. It moved as it settled flowing over the inequalities of die ground as a monstrous snail or leach might have done, sucking from all breathing creatures the life they had within them. It was a hundred yards away, then fifty, then thirty....
Had any member of the tribe watched it, the red dust might have seemed malevolently intelligent. But when the edges of the dust-cloud were no more than twenty yards from Saya's limp body, an opposing breeze sprang up. It was a vagrant, fitful little breeze that halted the red cloud and threw it into some confusion, sending it in a new direction. It passed Saya without hurting her, though one of its misty tendrils reached out as if to snatch at her in slow-motion. But it passed her by.
Saya lay motionless on the ground. Only her breast rose and fell shallowly. A tiny pool of red gathered near her head.
Some thirty feet from where she lay, there were three miniature toadstools in a clump, bases so close together that they seemed but one. From between two of them, however, two tufts of reddish thread appeared. They twinkled back and forth and in and out. As if reassured, two slender antennae followed, then bulging eyes and a small, black body with bright-red scalloped markings upon it.
It was a tiny beetle no more than eight inches long—a sexton or burying-beetle. Drawing near Saya's body it scurried onto her flesh. It went from end to end of her figure in a sort of feverish haste. Then it dived into the ground beneath her shoulder, casting back a little shower of hastily-dug dirt as it disappeared.
Ten minutes later, another small creature appeared, precisely like the first. Upon the heels of the second came a third. Each made the same hasty examination and dived under her unmoving form.
Presently the ground seemed to billow at a spot along Saya's side and then at another. Ten minutes after the arrival of the third beetle, a little rampart had reared itself all about Saya's body, following her outlines precisely. Then her body moved slightly, in little jerks, seeming to settle perhaps half an inch into the ground.
The burying-beetles were of that class of creatures which exploited the bodies of the fallen. Working from below, they excavated the earth. When there was a hollow space below they turned on their backs and thrust up with their legs, jerking at the body until it sank into the space they had made ready. The process would be repeated until at last all their dead treasures had settled down below the level of the surrounding ground. The loosened dirt then fell in at the sides, completing the inhumation. Then, in the underground darkness, it was the custom for the beetles to feast magnificently, gorging themselves upon the food they had hidden from other scavengers—and of course rearing their young also upon its substance.
Ants and flies were rivals of these beetles and not infrequently the sexton-beetles came upon carrion after ants had taken their toll, and when it already swarmed with maggots. But in this case Saya was not dead. The fact that she still lived, though unconscious, was the factor that had given the sexton-beetles this splendid opportunity.
She breathed gently and irregularly, her face drawn with the sorrow of the night before, while the desperately hurrying beetles swarmed about beneath her body, channelling away the soil so she would sink lower and lower into it. She descended slowly, a half-inch by a half-inch. The bright-red tufts of thread appeared again and a beetle made its way to the open air. It moved hastily about, inspecting the progress of the work.
It dived below again. Another inch and, after a long time, another, were excavated.
Matters still progressed when Burl stepped out from a group of overshadowing toadstools and halted. He cast his eyes over the landscape and was struck by its familiarity. He was, in fact, very near the spot he had left the night before in that maniacal ride on the back of a flying beetle. He moved back and forth, trying to account for the feeling of recognition.
He saw the low cliff, then, and moved eagerly toward it, passing within fifty feet of Saya's body, now more than half-buried in the ground. The loose dirt around the outline of her figure was beginning to topple in little rivulets upon her. One of her shoulders was already half-screened from view. Burl passed on, unseeing.
He hurried a little. In a moment he recognized his location exactly. There were the mining-bee burrows. There was a thrown-away lump of edible mushroom, cast aside as the tribesfolk fled.
His feet stirred up a fine dust, and he stopped short. A red puffball had burst here. It fully accounted for the absence of the tribe, and Burl sweated in sudden fear. He thought instantly of Saya. He went carefully to make sure. This was, absolutely, the hiding place of the tribe. There was another mushroom-fragment. There was a spear, thrown down by one of the men in his flight. Red dust had settled upon the spear and the mushroom-fragments.
Burl turned back, hurrying again, but taking care to disturb the dust no more than he could possibly help.
The little excavation into which Saya was sinking inch by inch was not in his path. Her body no longer lay above the ground, but in it. Burl went by, frantic with anxiety about the tribe, but about Saya most of all.
Her body quivered and sank a fraction into the ground. Half a dozen small streams of earth were tumbling upon her. In minutes she would be wholly hidden from view.
Burl went to beat among the mushroom-thickets, in quest of the bodies of his tribesfolk. They could have staggered out of the red dust and collapsed beyond. He would have shouted, but the deep sense of loneliness silenced him. His throat ached with grief. He searched on....
There was a noise. From a huge clump of toadstools—perhaps the very one he had climbed over in the night—there came the sound of crashings and the breaking of the spongy stuff. Twin tapering antennae appeared, and then a monster beetle lurched into the open space, its ghastly mandibles gaping sidewise.
It was all of eight feet long and supported by six crooked, saw-toothed legs. Huge, multiple eyes stared with preoccupation at the world. It advanced deliberately with clankings and clashings as of a hideous machine. Burl fled on the instant, running directly away from it.
A little depression lay in the ground before him. He did not swerve, but made to jump over it. As he leaped he saw the color of bare flesh, Saya, limp and helpless, sinking slowly into the ground with tricklings of dirt falling down to cover her. It seemed to Burl that she quivered a little.
Instantly there was a terrific struggle within Burl. Behind him was the giant meat-eating beetle; beneath him was Saya whom he loved. There was certain death lurching toward him on evilly crooked legs—and the life he had hoped for lay in a shallow pit. Of course he thought Saya dead.
Perhaps it was rage, or despair, or a simple human madness which made him act otherwise than rationally. The things which raise humans above brute creation, however, are only partly reasonable. Most human emotions—especially the creditable ones—cannot be justified by reason, and very few heroic actions are based upon logical thought.
Burl whirled as he landed, his puny spear held ready. In his left hand he held the haunch of a creature much like the one which clanked and rattled toward him. With a yell of insane defiance—completely beyond justification by reason—Burl flung that meat-filled leg at the monster.
It hit. Undoubtedly, it hurt. The beetle seized it ferociously. It crushed it. There was meat in it, sweet and juicy.
The beetle devoured it. It forgot the man standing there, waiting for death. It crunched the leg-joint of a cousin or brother, confusing the blow with the missile that had delivered it. When the tidbit was finished it turned and lumbered off to investigate another mushroom thicket. It seemed to consider then an enemy had been conquered and devoured and that normal life could go on.
Then Burl stopped quickly, and dragged Saya from the grave the sexton-beetles had labored so feverishly to provide for her. Crumbled soil fell from her shoulders, from her face, and from her body. Three little eight-inch beetles with black and red markings scurried for cover in terrified haste. Burl carried Saya to a resting-place of soft mould to mourn over her.
He was a completely ignorant savage, save that he knew more of the ways of insects than anybody anywhere else—the Ecological Service, which had stocked this planet, not being excepted. To Burl the unconsciousness of Saya was as death itself. Dumb misery smote him, and he laid her down gently and quite literally wept. He had been beautifully pleased with himself for having slain one flying beetle. But for Saya's seeming death, he would have been almost unbearable with pride over having put another to flight. But now he was merely a broken-hearted, very human young man.
But a long time later Saya opened her eyes and looked about bewilderedly.
They were in considerable danger for some time after that, because they were oblivious to everything but each other. Saya rested in half-incredulous happiness against Burl's shoulder as he told her jerkily of his attempt on a night-bound butterfly, which turned out to be a flying beetle that took him aloft. He told of his search for the tribe and then his discovery of her apparently lifeless body. When he spoke of the monster which had lurched from the mushroom thicket, and of the desperation with which he had faced it, Saya looked at him with warm, proud eyes. But Burl was abruptly struck with the remarkable convenience of that discovery. If his tribesmen could secure an ample supply of meat, they might defend themselves against attack by throwing it to their attackers. In fact, insects were so stupid that almost any object thrown quickly enough and fast enough, might be made to serve as sacrifices instead of themselves.
A timid, frightened whisper roused them from their absorption. They looked up. The boy Dik stood some distance away, staring at them wide-eyed, almost convinced that he looked upon the living dead. A sudden movement on the part of either of them would have sent him bolting away. Two or three other bobbing heads gazed affrightedly from nearby hiding-places. Jon was poised for flight.
The tribe had come back to its former hiding-place simply as a way to reassemble. They had believed both Burl and Saya dead, and they accepted Burl's death as their own doom. But now they stared.
Burl spoke—fortunately without arrogance—and Dik and Tet came timorously from their hiding-places. The others followed, the tribe forming a frightened half-circle about the seated pair. Burl spoke again and presently one of the bravest—Cori—dared to approach and touch him. Instantly a babble of the crude labial language of the tribe broke out. Awed exclamations and questions filled the air.
But Burl, for once, showed some common sense. Instead of a vainglorious recital, he merely cast down the long tapering antennae of the flying-beetle. They looked, and recognized their origin.
Then Burl curtly ordered Dor and Jak to make a chair of their hands for Saya. She was weak from her fall and the loss of blood. The two men humbly advanced and obeyed. Then Burl curtly ordered the march resumed.
They went on, more slowly than on previous days, but none-the-less steadily. Burl led them across-country, marching in advance with a matter-of-fact alertness for signs of danger. He felt more confidence than ever before. It was not fully justified, of course. Jon now retrieved the spear he had discarded. The small party fairly bristled with weapons. But Burl knew that they were liable to be cast away as impediments if flight seemed necessary.
As he led the way Burl began to think busily in the manner that only leaders find necessary. He had taught his followers to kill ants for food, though they were still uneasy about such adventures. He had led them to attack great yellow grubs upon giant cabbages. But they had not yet faced any actual danger, as he had done. He must drive them to face something....
The opportunity came that same day, in late afternoon. To westward the cloud-bank was barely beginning to show the colors that presage nightfall, when a bumble-bee droned heavily overhead, making for its home burrow. The little, straggling group of marching people looked up and saw the scanty load of pollen packed in the stiff bristles of the bee's hind-legs. It sped onward heavily, its almost transparent wings mere blurs in the air.
It was barely fifty feet above the ground. Burl dropped his glance and tensed. A slender-waisted wasp was shooting upward from an ambush among the noisome fungi of this plain.
The bee swerved and tried to escape. The wasp over-hauled it. The bee dodged frantically. It was a good four feet in length,—as large as the wasp, certainly—but it was more heavily built and could not make the speed of which the wasp was capable. It dodged with less agility. Twice, in desperation, it did manage to evade the plunging dives of the wasp, but the third time the two insects grappled in mid-air almost over the heads of the humans.
They tumbled downward in a clawing, biting, tangle of bodies and legs. They hit the ground and rolled over and over. The bee struggled to insert her barbed sting in the more supple body of her adversary. She writhed and twisted desperately.
But there came an instant of infinite confusion and the bee lay on her back. The wasp suddenly moved with that ghastly skilled precision of a creature performing an incredible feat instinctively, apparently unaware that it is doing so. The dazed bee was swung upright in a peculiarly artificial pose. The wasp's body curved, and its deadly, rapier-sharp sting struck....
The bee was dead. Instantly. As if struck dead by lightning. The wasp had stung in a certain place in the neck-parts where all the nerve-cords pass. To sting there, the wasp had to bring its victim to a particular pose. It was precisely the trick of adesnucador, the butcher who kills cattle by severing the spinal cord. For the wasp's purposes the bee had to be killed in this fashion and no other.
Burl began to give low-toned commands to his followers. He knew what was coming next, and so did they. When the sequel of the murder began he moved forward, his tribesmen wavering after him. This venture was actually one of the least dangerous they could attempt, but merely to attack a wasp was a hair-raising idea. Only Burl's prestige plus their knowledge made them capable of it.
The second act of the murder-drama was gruesomeness itself. The pirate-wasp was a carnivore, but this was the season when the wasps raised young. Inevitably there was sweet honey in the half-filled crop of the bee. Had she arrived safely at the hive, the sweet and sticky liquid would have been disgorged for the benefit of bee-grubs. The wasp avidly set to work to secure that honey. The bee-carcass itself was destined for the pirate-wasp's own offspring, and that squirming monstrosity is even more violently carnivorous than its mother. The parent wasp set about abstracting the dead bee's honey, before taking the carcass to its young one, because honey is poisonous to the pirate-wasp's grub. Yet insects cannot act from solicitude or anything but instinct. And instinct must be maintained by lavish rewards.