The Forgotten Planet Page 7

  _6. RED DUST_

  It was very fortunate indeed that the feast took place when it did. Twodays later it would probably have been impossible, and three days laterit would have been too late to do any good. But coming when it did, itmade the difference which was all the difference in the world.

  Only thirty hours after the feasting which followed the death of theclotho spider, Burl's fellows--from Jon to Dor to Tet and Dik andSaya--had come to know a numb despair which the other creatures of hisworld were simply a bit too stupid to achieve.

  It was night. There was darkness over all the lowlands, and over all thearea of perhaps a hundred square miles which the humans of Burl'sacquaintance really knew. He, alone of his tribe, had been as much asforty miles from the foraging-ground over which they wandered. At anygiven time the tribe clung together for comfort, venturing only as faras 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 starkdisaster that was not strictly a local one, but beyond their experienceand hopelessly beyond their ability to face.

  They were superior to the insects about them only in the fact theyrealized what was threatening them.

  The disaster was the red puffballs.

  But it was night. The soft, blanketing darkness of a cloud-wrapped worldlay all about. Burl sat awake, wrapped in his magnificent velvet cloak,his spear beside him and the yard-long golden plumes of a moth'santennae bound to his forehead for a headdress. About him and histribesmen were the swollen shapes of fungi, hiding the few things thatcould be seen in darkness. From the low-hanging clouds the nightly raindripped down. Now a drop and then another drop; slowly, deliberately,persistently moisture fell from the skies.

  There was other sounds. Things flew through the blacknessoverhead--moths with mighty wing-beats that sometimes sent rhythmicwind-stirrings down to the tribe in its hiding-place. There were thedeep pulsations of sound made by night-beetles aloft. There were theharsh noises of grasshoppers--they were rare--senselessly advertisingtheir existence to nearby predators. Not too far from where Burl broodedcame bright chirrupings where relatively small beetles roamed among themushroom-forests, singing cheerfully in deep bass voices. They weresearching for the underground tidbits which took the place of trufflestheir ancestors had lived on back on Earth.

  All seemed to be as it had been since the first humans were cast awayupon this planet. And at night, indeed, the new danger subsided. The redpuffballs did not burst after sunset. Burl sat awake, brooding in a newsort of frustration. He and all his tribe were plainly doomed--yet Burlhad experienced too many satisfying sensations lately to be willing toaccept the fact.

  The new red growths were everywhere. Months ago a storm-wind blew whilesomewhere, not too far distant, other red puffballs were bursting andsending their spores into the air. Since it was only a windstorm, therewas no rain to wash the air clean of the lethal dust. The new kind ofpuffball--but perhaps it was not new: it could have thriven forthousands of years where it was first thrown as a sport from agenetically unstable parent--the new kind of puffball would not normallybe spread in this fashion. By chance it had.

  There were dozens of the things within a quarter-mile, hundreds within amile, and thousands upon thousands within the area the tribe normallyforaged 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 doomedthe tribe.

  One woman panted and moaned in her exhausted sleep, a little way fromwhere Burl tried to solve the problem presented by the tribe. Nobodyelse attempted to think it out. The others accepted doom with fatalistichopelessness. Burl's leadership might mean extra food, but nothing couldcounter the doom awaiting them--so their thoughts seemed to run.

  But Burl doggedly reviewed the facts in the darkness, while the humansabout him slept the sleep of those without hope and even withoutrebellion. There had been many burstings of the crimson puffballs. Asmany as four and five of the deadly dust-clouds had been seen spoutinginto the air at the same time. A small boy of the tribe had breathlesslytold of seeing a hunting-spider killed by the red dust. Lana, thehalf-grown girl, had come upon one of the gigantic rhinoceros-beetlesbelly-up on the ground, already the prey of ants. She had snatched ahuge, 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, diein a dust-cloud. Another woman--Cori--had been nearby when a red cloudsettled slowly over long, solid lines of black worker-ants bound on someunknown mission. Later she saw other workers carrying the dead bodiesback to the ant-city to be used for food.

  Burl still sat wakeful and frustrated and enraged as the slow rain fellupon the toadstools that formed the tribe's lurking-place. He doggedlywent over and over the problem. There were innumerable red puffballs.Some had burst. The others undoubtedly would burst. Anything thatbreathed the red dust died. With thousands of the puffballs around themit was unthinkable that any human in this place could escape breathingthe red dust and dying. But it had not always been so. There had been atime when there were no red puffballs here.

  Burl's eyes moved restlessly over the sleeping forms limned by a patchof fox-fire. The feathery plumes rising from his head were outlinedsoftly by the phosphorescence. His face was lined with a frown as hetried to think his own and his fellows' way out of the predicament.Without realizing it, Burl had taken it upon himself to think for histribe. He had no reason to. It was simply a natural thing for him to doso, now that he had learned to think--even though his efforts were crudeand painful as yet.

  Saya woke with a start and stared about. There had been noalarm,--merely the usual noises of distant murders and the songs ofsingers in the night. Burl moved restlessly. Saya stood up quietly, herlong hair flowing about her. Sleepy-eyed, she moved to be near Burl. Shesank to the ground beside him, sitting up--because the hiding-place wascrowded and small--and dozed fitfully. Presently her head drooped to oneside. It rested against his shoulder. She slept again.

  This simple act may have been the catalyst which gave Burl the solutionto the problem. Some few days before, Burl had been in a far-away placewhere there was much food. At the time he'd thought vaguely of findingSaya and bringing her to that place. He remembered now that the redpuffballs flourished there as well as here--but there had been otherdangers in between, so the only half-formed purpose had been abandoned.Now, though, with Saya's head resting against his shoulder, heremembered the plan. And then the stroke of genius took place.

  He formed the idea of a journey which was not a going-after-food. Thispresent dwelling-place of the tribe had been free of red puffballs untilonly recently. There must be other places where there were no redpuffballs. He would take Saya and his tribesmen to such a place.

  It was really genius. The people of Burl's tribe had no purposes, onlyneeds--for food and the like. Burl had achieved abstract thought--whichpreviously had not been useful on the forgotten planet and, therefore,not practised. But it was time for humankind to take a more fittingplace in the unbalanced ecological system of this nightmare world, timeto change that unbalance in favor of humans.

  When dawn came, Burl had not slept at all. He was all authority anddecision. He had made plans.

  He spoke sternly, loudly--which frightened people conditioned to befurtive--holding up his spear as he issued commands. His timidtribesfolk obeyed him meekly. They felt no loyalty to him or confidencein his decisions yet, but they were beginning to associate obedience tohim with good things. Food, for one.

  Before the day fully came, they made loads of the remaining ediblemushroom and uneaten meat. It was remarkable for humans to leave theirhiding-place while they still had food to eat, but Burl was implacableand scowling. Three men bore spears at Burl's
urging. He brandished hislong shaft confidently as he persuaded the other three to carry clubs.They did so reluctantly, even though previously they had killed antswith clubs. Spears, they felt, would have been better. They wouldn't beso close to the prey then.

  The sky became gray over all its expanse. The indefinite bright areawhich marked the position of the sun became established. It was part-waytoward the center of the sky when the journey began. Burl had, ofcourse, no determined course, only a destination--safety. He had beencarried south, in his misadventure on the river. There were redpuffballs to southward, therefore he ruled out that direction. He couldhave chosen the east and come upon an ocean, but no safety from the redspore-dust. Or he could have chosen the north. It was pure chance thathe 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 afigure at once valiant and rather pathetic. It was not too sensible forone young man--even one who had killed two spiders--to essay leading atiny tribe of fearful folk across a land of monstrous ferocity andincredible malignance, armed only with a spear from a dead insect'sarmor. It was absurd to dress up for the enterprise in a velvety cloakmade of a moth's wing, blue moth-fur for a loin-cloth, and merelybeautiful golden plumes bobbing above his forehead.

  Probably, though, that gorgeousness had a good effect upon hisfollowers. They surely could not reassure each other by their numbers!There was a woman with a baby in her arms--Cori. Three children of nineor ten, unable to resist the instinct to play even on so perilous ajourney, ate almost constantly of the lumps of foodstuff they had beenordered to carry. After them came Dik, a long-legged adolescent boy witheyes that roved anxiously about. Behind him were two men. Dor with ashort spear and Jak hefting a club, both of them badly frightened at theidea of fleeing from dangers they knew and were terrified by, to otherdangers unknown and, consequently, more to be feared. The others trailedafter them. Tet was rear-guard. Burl had separated the pair of boys tomake them useful. Together they were worthless.

  It was a pathetic caravan, in a way. In all the rest of the Galaxy, manwas the dominant creature. There was no other planet from one rim to theother where men did not build their cities or settlements withunconscious arrogance--completely disregarding the wishes of lesserthings. Only on this planet did men hide from danger rather than destroyit. 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 eyesfearful, their bodies poised to flee at sight of something stronger andmore deadly than themselves.

  They marched, straggling a little, with many waverings aside from afixed line. Once Dik saw the trap-door of a trapdoor-spider's lair. Theyhalted, trembling, and went a long way out of their intended path toavoid it. Once they saw a great praying-mantis a good half-mile off, andagain 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 facegrew pinched. But it was only a stridulation, not the cries of creaturesbeing devoured. It was a horde of ants by the thousands and hundreds ofthousands, and nothing else.

  Burl went ahead to scout. And he did it because he did not trust anybodyelse to have the courage or intelligence to return with a report,instead of simply running away if the news were bad. But it happened tobe a sort of action which would help to establish his position as leaderof his tribe.

  Burl moved forward cautiously and presently came to an elevation fromwhich he could see the cause of the tremendous waves of sound thatspread out in all directions from the level plain before him. He wavedto his followers to join him, and stood looking down at theextraordinary sight.

  When they reached his side--and Saya was first--the spectacle had notdiminished. For quite half a mile in either direction the earth wasblack with ants. It was a battle of opposing armies from rivalant-cities. They snapped and bit at each other. Locked in vise-likeembraces, they rolled over and over upon the ground, trampled underfootby hordes of their fellows who surged over them to engage in equallysuicidal combat. There was, of course, no thought of surrender or ofquarter. They fought by thousands of pairs, their jaws seeking to crusheach other's armor, snapping at each other's antennae, biting at eachother's eyes....

  The noise was not like that of army-ants. This was the agonizing soundof ants being dismembered while still alive. Some of the creatures hadonly one or two or three legs left, yet struggled fiercely to entangleanother enemy before they died. There were mad cripples, fightinginsanely with head and thorax only, their abdomens sheared away. Thewhining battle-cry of the multitude made a deafening uproar.

  From either side of the battleground a wide path led back towardseparate ant-cities which were invisible from Burl's position. Thesehighways were marked by hurrying groups of ants--reinforcements rushingto the fight. Compared to the other creatures of this world the antswere small, but no lumbering beetle dared to march insolently in theirway, nor did any carnivores try to prey upon them. They were dangerous.Burl and his tribesfolk were the only living things remaining near thebattle-field--with one single exception.

  That exception was itself a tribe of ants, vastly less in number thanthe fighting creatures, and greatly smaller in size as well. Where thecombatants were from a foot to fourteen inches long, these guerilla-antswere no more than the third of a foot in length. They hoveredindustriously at the edge of the fighting, not as allies to eithernation, but strictly on their own account. Scurrying among the larger,fighting ants with marvelous agility, they carried off piecemeal thebodies of the dead and valiantly slew the more gravely wounded for thesame purpose.

  They swarmed over the fighting-ground whenever the tide of battlereceded. Caring nothing for the origin of the quarrel and espousingneither side, these opportunists busily salvaged the dead andstill-living debris of the battle for their own purposes.

  Burl and his followers were forced to make a two-mile detour to avoidthe battle. The passage between bodies of scurrying reinforcements was amatter of some difficulty. Burl hurried the others past a route to thefront, reeking of formic acid, over which endless regiments andcompanies of ants moved frantically to join in the fight. They wereintensely excited. Antennae waving wildly, they rushed to the front andinstantly flung themselves into the fray, becoming lost andindistinguishable in the black mass of fighting creatures.

  The humans passed precariously between two hurrying battalions--Dik andTet pausing briefly to burden themselves with prey--and hurried on toleave as many miles as possible behind them before nightfall. They neverknew any more about the battle. It could have started over anything atall--two ants from the different cities may have disputed some tiny bitof carrion and soon been reinforced by companions until the militarymight of both cities was engaged. Once it had started, of course, thefighters knew whom to fight if not why they did so. The inhabitants ofthe 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 thecities survived at all, it would be because its nursery-workers livedupon stored food as they tended the grubs until the time of the spoutingred dust had ended.

  Burl's folk saw many of the red puffballs burst during the day. Morethan once they came upon empty, flaccid parchment sacs. More often stillthey came upon red puffballs not yet quite ready to emit their murderousseed.

  That first night the tribe hid among the bases of giant puffballs of amore familiar sort. When touched they would shoot out a puff of whitepowder resembling smoke. The powder was harmless fortunately and thetribe knew that fact. Although not toxic, the white powder was identicalin 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 anda night. And he was experienced in journeying to remote places. He knewthat they were no more dangerous than familiar ones. But the rest of thetrib
e, and even Saya, were fearful and terrified. They waited timorouslyall through the dark hours for menacing sounds to crash suddenly throughthe 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 afamily dwelling. Something in the soil, perhaps, favored vegetation overfungi. The dozens of monstrous vegetables were the setting for riotouslife: great slugs ate endlessly of the huge green leaves--and thingspreyed 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 along examination of the scene, Burl daringly led quaking Jon and Jak tothe attack. Dor splendidly attacked elsewhere, alone. When the tribemoved on, there was much meat, and everyone--even the children--woreloin-cloths of incredibly luxurious fur.

  There were perils, too. On the fifth day of the tribe's journey Burlsuddenly froze into stillness. One of the hairy tarantulas which livedin burrows with a concealed trap-door at ground-level, had fallen upon ascarabeus beetle and was devouring it only a hundred yards ahead. Thetribesfolk trembled as Burl led them silently back and around by a safedetour.

  But all these experiences were beginning to have an effect. It wasbecoming a matter of course that Burl should give orders which othersshould obey. It was even becoming matter-of-fact that the possession offood was not a beautiful excuse to hide from all danger, eating anddozing until all the food was gone. Very gradually the tribe wasdeveloping the notion that the purpose of existence was not solely toescape awareness of peril, but to foresee and avoid it. They had noclear-cut notion of purpose as yet. They were simply outgrowingpurposelessness. After a time they even looked about them with, dimstirrings of an attitude other than a desperate alertness for danger.

  Humans from any other planet, surely, would have been astounded at thevistas of golden mushrooms stretching out in forests on either hand andthe plains with flaking surfaces given every imaginable color by themoulds and rusts and tiny flowering yeasts growing upon them. They wouldhave been amazed by the turgid pools the journeying tribe came upon,where the water was concealed by a thick layer of slime through whichenormous bubbles of foul-smelling gas rose to enlarge to preposteroussize before bursting abruptly.

  Had they been as ill-armed as Burl's folk, though, visitors from otherplanets would have been at least as timorous. Lacking highly specializedknowledge of the ways of insects on this world even well-armed visitorswould have been in greater danger.

  But the tribe went on without a single casualty. They had fleetingglimpses of the white spokes of symmetrical spider-webs whose leastthread no member of the tribe could break.

  Their immunity from disaster--though in the midst of danger--gave them acertain all-too-human concentration upon discomfort. Lacking calamities,they noticed their discomforts and grew weary of continual traveling. Afew of the men complained to Burl.

  For answer, he pointed back along the way they had come. To the right areddish dust-cloud was just settling, and to the rear rose another asthey looked.

  And on this day a thing happened which at once gave the complainers therest they asked for, and proved the fatality of remaining where theywere. A child ran aside from the path its elders were following. Theground here had taken on a brownish hue. As the child stirred up thesurface 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 suddenlyscreamed, strangling. The mother ran frantically to snatch him up.

  The red dust was no less deadly merely because it had settled to theground. If a storm-wind came now--but they were infrequent under theforgotten planet's heavy bank of clouds--the fallen red dust could beraised up again and scattered about until there would be no living thinganywhere which would not gasp and writhe--and die.

  But the child would not die. He would suffer terribly and be weak fordays. In the morning he could be carried.

  When night began to darken the sky, the tribe searched for ahiding-place. They came upon a shelf-like cliff, perhaps twenty orthirty feet high, slanting toward the line of the tribesmen's travel.Burl saw black spots in it--openings. Burrows. He watched them as thetribe drew near. No bees or wasps went in or out. He watched long enoughto be sure.

  When they were close, he was certain. Ordering the others to wait, hewent forward to make doubly sure. The appearance of the holes reassuredhim. Dug months before by mining-bees, gone or dead now, the entrancesto the burrows were weathered and bedraggled. Burl explored, firstsniffing carefully at each opening. They were empty. This would beshelter for the night. He called his followers, and they crawled intothe three-foot tunnels to hide.

  Burl stationed himself near the outer edge of one of them to watch forsigns of danger. Night had not quite fallen. Jon and Dor, hungry, wentoff to forage a little way beyond the cliff. They would be cautious andtimid, taking no risks whatever.

  Burl waited for the return of his explorers. Meanwhile he fretted overthe 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 thisworld into thin shine. It occurred to Burl that it would be safe totravel at night, so far as the red dust was concerned. He rejected theidea instantly. It was unthinkable to travel at night for innumerableother reasons.

  Frowning, he poked his spear idly at a tumbled mass of tiny parchmentcup-like things near the entrance of a cave. And instantly movementbecame visible. Fifty, sixty, a hundred infinitesimal creatures, no morethan half an inch in length, made haste to hide themselves among thethimble-sized paperlike cups. They moved with extraordinary clumsinessand immense effort, seemingly only by contortions of theirgreenish-black bodies. Burl had never seen any creature progress in sucha slow and ineffective fashion. He drew one of the small creatures backwith 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 thingredoubled its frenzied movements. It slipped off the spear and ploppedupon the soft moth-fur he wore about his middle. Instantly, as if itwere a conjuring-trick, the insect vanished. Burl searched for minutesbefore 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 beseen near the base of the clayey cliffside. Hidden in the remnants ofits egg-casings, the brood of minute things had waited near the openingof the mining-bee tunnel. It was their gamble with destiny whenmining-bee grubs had slept through metamorphosis and come uncertainlyout of the tunnel for the first time, that some or many of the larvaemight snatch the instant's chance to fasten to the bees' legs and writheupward to an anchorage in their fur. It happened that this particularbatch of eggs had been laid after the emergence of the grubs. They hadno possible chance of fulfilling their intended role as parasites oninsects of the order hymenoptera. They were simply and matter-of-factlydoomed by the blindness of instinct, which had caused them to be placedwhere they could not possibly survive.

  On the other hand, if one or many of them had found a lurking-place, theoffspring of their host would have been doomed. The place filled byoil-beetle larvae in the scheme of things is the place--or one of theplaces--reserved for creatures that limit the number of mining-bees.When a bee-louse-infested mining-bee has made a new tunnel, stocked itwith honey for its young, and then laid one egg to float on that pool ofnourishment and hatch and feed and ultimately grow to be anothermining-bee--at that moment of egg-laying, one small bee-louse detachesitself. It remains zestfully in the provisioned cell to devour the eggfor which the provisions were accumulated. It happily consumes thoseprovisions and, in time, an oil-beetle crawls out of the tunnel amining-bee so laboriously prepared.

  Burl had no difficulty in detaching the small insect and casting itaway, but in doing so he discovered that others
had hidden themselves inhis 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 ofsensible size. Burl reacted violently--as once he had reacted to thediscovery of a leech clinging to his heel. He jerked off his loin-clothand beat it savagely with his spear.

  When it was clean, he still felt a wholly unreasonable sense ofhumiliation. It was not clearly thought out, of course. Burl feared hugeinsects too much to hate them. But that small creatures should fastenupon him produced a completely irrational feeling of outrage. For thefirst time in very many years or centuries a human being upon theforgotten planet felt that he had been insulted. His dignity had beenassailed. Burl raged.

  But as he raged, a triumphant shout came from nearby. Jon and Dor werereturning from their foraging, loaded down with edible mushroom. They,also, had taken a step upward toward the natural dignity of men. Theyhad so far forgotten their terror as to shout in exultation at theirfind of food. Up to now, Burl had been the only man daring to shout. Nowthere were two others.

  In his overwrought state this was also enraging. The result of hurtvanity on two counts was jealousy, and the result of jealousy was acrazy foolhardiness. Burl ground his teeth and insanely resolved to dosomething so magnificent, so tremendous, so utterly breathtaking thatthere could be no possible imitation by anybody else. His thinking wasnot especially clear. Part of his motivation had been provided by theoil-beetle larvae. He glared about him at the deepening dusk, seekingsome exploit, some glamorous feat, to perform immediately, even in thenight.

  He found one.