The Mad Planet Page 6

Childlike--and savage-like--the instant the thought came tohim, he proceeded to test it out. He fixed his gaze upon his foot. Thesharp edges of pebbles, of the remains of insect-armour, of a dozenthings, hurt his feet when he walked. They had done so ever since he hadbeen born, but never had his feet been sticky so that the irritationcontinued with him for more than a single step.

  Now he gazed upon his foot, and waited for the thought within him todevelop. Meanwhile, he slowly removed the sharp-pointed fragments, oneby one. Partly coated as they were with the half-liquid gum from hisfeet, they clung to his fingers as they had to his feet, except uponthose portions where the oil was thick as before.

  Burl's reasoning, before, was simple and of the primary order. Where oilcovered him, the web did not. Therefore he would coat the rest ofhimself with oil. Had he been placed in the same predicament again, hewould have used the same means of escape. But to apply a bit ofknowledge gained in one predicament to another difficulty was somethinghe had not yet done.

  A dog may be taught that by pulling on the latchstring of a door he mayopen it, but the same dog coming to a high and close-barred gate with alatchstring attached, will never think of pulling on this secondlatchstring. He associates a latchstring with the opening of the door.The opening of a gate is another matter entirely.

  Burl had been stirred to one invention by imminent peril. That is notextraordinary. But to reason in cold blood, as he presently did, thatoil on his feet would nullify the glue upon his feet and enable himagain to walk in comfort--that was a triumph. The inventions of savagesare essentially matters of life and death, of food and safety. Comfortand luxury are only produced by intelligence of a high order.

  Burl, in safety, had added to his comfort. That was truly a moreimportant thing in his development than almost any other thing he couldhave done. He oiled his feet.

  It was an almost infinitesimal problem, but Burl's struggles with themental process of reasoning were actual. Thirty thousand years beforehim, a wise man had pointed out that education is simply training inthought, in efficient and effective thinking. Burl's tribe had been toomuch preoccupied with food and mere existence to think, and now Burl,sitting at the base of a squat toadstool that all but concealed him,reexemplified Rodin's "Thinker" for the first time in many generations.

  For Burl to reason that oil upon the soles of his feet would guard himagainst sharp stones was as much a triumph of intellect as anymasterpiece of art in the ages before him. Burl was learning how tothink.

  He stood up, walked, and crowed in sheer delight, then paused a momentin awe of his own intelligence. Thirty-five miles from his tribe, naked,unarmed, utterly ignorant of fire, of wood, of any weapons save a spearhe had experimented with the day before, abysmally uninformed concerningthe very existence of any art or science, Burl stopped to assure himselfthat he was very wonderful.

  Pride came to him. He wished to display himself to Saya, these thingsupon his feet, and his spear. But his spear was gone.

  * * * * *

  With touching faith in the efficacy of this new pastime, Burl satpromptly down again and knitted his brows. Just as a superstitiousperson, once convinced that by appeal to a favorite talisman he will beguided aright, will inevitably apply to that talisman on all occasions,so Burl plumped himself down to think.

  These questions were easily answered. Burl was naked. He would searchout garments for himself. He was weaponless. He would find himself aspear. He was hungry--and would seek food, and he was far from histribe, so he would go to them. Puerile reasoning, of course, butvaluable, because it was consciously reasoning, consciously appealing tohis mind for guidance in difficulty, deliberate progress from a mentaldesire to a mental resolution.

  Even in the high civilization of ages before, few men had really usedtheir brains. The great majority of people had depended upon machinesand their leaders to think for them. Burl's tribefolk depended on theirstomachs. Burl, however, was gradually developing the habit of thinkingwhich makes for leadership and which would be invaluable to his littletribe.

  He stood up again and faced upstream, moving slowly and cautiously, hiseyes searching the ground before him keenly and his ears alert for theslightest sound of danger. Gigantic butterflies, riotous in coloring,fluttered overhead through the misty haze. Sometimes a grasshopperhurtled through the air like a projectile, its transparent wings beatingthe air frantically. Now and then a wasp sped by, intent upon itshunting, or a bee droned heavily along, anxious and worried, striving ina nearly flowerless world to gather the pollen that would feed the hive.

  Here and there Burl saw flies of various sorts, some no larger than histhumb, but others the size of his whole hand. They fed upon the juicesthat dripped from the maggot-infested mushrooms, when filth more totheir liking was not at hand.

  Very far away a shrill roaring sounded faintly. It was like a multitudeof clickings blended into a single sound, but was so far away that itdid not impress itself upon Burl's attention. He had all the strictlylocalized vision of a child. What was near was important, and what wasdistant could be ignored. Only the imminent required attention, and Burlwas preoccupied.

  Had he listened, he would have realized that army ants were abroad incountless millions, spreading themselves out in a broad array and eatingall they came upon far more destructively than so many locusts.

  Locusts in past ages had eaten all green things. There were only giantcabbages and a few such tenacious rank growths in the world that Burlknew. The locusts had vanished with civilization and knowledge and thegreater part of mankind, but the army ants remained as an invincibleenemy to men and insects, and the most of the fungus growths thatcovered the earth.

  Burl did not notice the sound, however. He moved forward, briskly thoughcautiously, searching with his eyes for garments, food, and weapons. Heconfidently expected to find all of them within a short distance.

  Surely enough he found a thicket--if one might call it so--of ediblefungi no more than half a mile beyond the spot where he had improvisedhis sandals to protect the soles of his feet.

  Without especial elation, Burl tugged at the largest until he had brokenoff a food supply for several days. He went on, eating as he did so,past a broad plain a mile and more across, being broken into odd littlehillocks by gradually ripening and suddenly developing mushrooms withwhich he was unfamiliar.

  The earth seemed to be in process of being pushed aside by roundedprotuberances of which only the tips showed. Blood-red hemispheresseemed to be forcing aside the earth so they might reach the outer air.

  Burl looked at them curiously, and passed among them without touchingthem. They were strange, and to him most strange things meant danger. Inany event, he was full of a new purpose now. He wished garments andweapons.

  Above the plain a wasp hovered, a heavy object dangling beneath itsblack belly, ornamented by a single red band. It was a wasp--the hairysand-wasp--and it was bringing a paralyzed gray caterpillar to itsburrow.

  Burl watched it drop down with the speed and sureness of an arrow, pullaside a heavy, flat stone, and descend into the ground. It had avertical shaft dug down for forty feet or more.

  It descended, evidently inspected the interior, reappeared, and vanishedinto the hole again, dragging the gray worm after it. Burl, marching onover the broad plain that seemed stricken with some erupting diseasefrom the number of red pimples making their appearance, did not knowwhat passed below, but observed the wasp emerge again and busily scratchdirt and stones into the shaft until it was full.

  The wasp had paralyzed a caterpillar, taken it to the already preparedburrow, laid an egg upon it, and rilled up the entrance. In course oftime the egg would hatch into a grub barely as long as Burl'sforefinger, which would then feed upon the torpid caterpillar until ithad waxed large and fat. Then it would weave itself a chrysalis andsleep a long sleep, only to wake as a wasp and dig its way to the openair.

  Burl reached the farther side of the plain and found himself threadingthe aisles of one of th
e fungus forests in which the growths werehideous, misshapen travesties upon the trees they had supplanted.Bloated, yellow limbs branched off from rounded, swollen trunks. Hereand there a pear-shaped puff-ball, Burl's height and half as much again,waited craftily until a chance touch should cause it to shoot upward acurling puff of infinitely fine dust.

  Burl went cautiously. There were dangers here, but he moved forwardsteadily, none the less. A great mass of edible mushroom was slung underone of his arms, and from time to time he broke off a fragment and ateof it, while his large eyes searched this way and that for threats ofharm.

  Behind him, a high, shrill roaring had grown slightly in volume andnearness, but was still too far away to impress Burl. The army ants wereworking havoc in the distance. By thousands and millions, myriads uponmyriads, they were foraging the country, clambering upon every eminence,descending into every depression, their antennae waving restlessly andtheir mandibles forever threateningly extended. The ground was blackwith them, each was ten inches