Golden Age of Science Fiction Vol X

by Various

  The trap door clicked faintly, and Burl whirled. His laughter became a scream. Approaching with incredible speed, the monster tarantula opened its dripping jaws. Mandibles gaping wide, poison fangs unsheathed, the creature was 30 paces away, 20, 10. It leaped into the air, all eight legs extended to seize!

  Still screaming, Burl thrust out his arms to ward off the impact. In his terror, his grasp on his spear became agonized. The spear point shot out, and the tarantula fell on it. Nearly a quarter of the spear entered the body of the ferocious thing.

  Transfixed on the spear, the monster writhed nightmarishly, still struggling to reach Burl, who himself was transfixed with horror. Mandibles clashed, awful sounds came from the beast. One of the attenuated, hairy legs rasped across Burl's forearm. He instinctively stepped backward--off the edge of the cliff.

  Down through space, eyes glassy with panic, the two creatures--man and skewered tarantula--fell together. With a strangely elastic crash and crackling, they hit the web below.

  Burl could be no more fear-struck. Struggling madly in the gummy coils of an immense web, ever binding him more tightly, with a wounded creature still striving to reach him with poison fangs--Burl had reached the limit of panic.

  He fought madly to break the coils about him. His arms and breast were greasy from the oily fish; the sticky web did not adhere to them, but his legs and body were inextricably fastened by the elastic threads spread for just such prey as he.

  He paused, exhausted. Then he saw, five yards away, the silvery and black monster waiting patiently for him to tire. It judged the moment propitious. The tarantula and man were one in its eyes, one struggling thing that had fallen opportunely into its snare. They moved but feebly now. The spider advanced delicately, swinging its huge bulk nimbly along the web, paying out a cable after it, coming inexorably closer.

  Burl's arms were free because of the greasy coating they had received. He waved them wildly, shrieking at the approaching, pitiless monster. It paused. Those moving arms suggested mandibles that might wound or slap.

  Spiders take few hazards. This one was no exception. Its spinnerets became busy, and with one of its eight legs, it flung a sheet of gummy silk impartially over both tarantula and man.

  Burl fought the descending shroud, striving vainly to thrust it away. Within minutes he was covered in a silken cloth that hid even the light from his eyes. He and his enemy, the giant tarantula, were beneath the same covering, though the tarantula moved but weakly.

  The shower ceased. The web spider had decided they were helpless. Burl felt the cables of the web give slightly, as the spider approached to sting and suck the sweet juices from its prey.

  Burl froze in an ecstasy of terror, waiting for poison fangs to be thrust into him. He knew the process, having seen the leisurely way giant spiders delicately stung their prey, then withdrew to wait patiently for the venom to take effect.

  When their victim ceased to struggle, they drew near again, and sucked the sweet juices from the body until what was once a creature vibrant with life became a shrunken, withered husk--to be flung from the web at nightfall. Most spiders are tidy housekeepers, destroying their snares daily to spin anew.

  The bloated, evil creature moved meditatively about the shining sheet of silk it had cast over Burl and the giant tarantula. Now only the tarantula moved feebly. Its body, outlined by a bulge in the concealing shroud, throbbed faintly as it struggled with the spear in its vitals. The rounded protuberance offered an obvious target. The web spider moved quickly forward, and stung.

  Galvanized into fresh torment by this new agony, the tarantula writhed in a very hell of pain. Its legs struck out purposelessly, in horrible gestures of delirious suffering. Burl screamed as one touched him, and struggled himself.

  His arms and head were free beneath the silken sheet because of the grease and oil coating them. Striving to escape his deadly neighbor, Burl clutched at the threads about him. They did not break, but parted, and a tiny opening appeared. One of the tarantula's attenuated limbs touched him again. With the strength of utter panic he hauled himself away. The opening enlarged, Burl's head emerged into open air, and he stared down 20 feet on an open space carpeted with chitinous remains of his captor's former victims.

  Burl's head, breast, and arms were free. But his lower body was held firm by a gummy snare far more tenacious than any birdlime ever manufactured by man.

  He hung a moment in his tiny window, despairing. He saw, at a little distance, the monster spider, waiting patiently for its poison to take effect and the struggling of its prey to cease. And the tarantula was weakening, only shuddering now.

  Burl withdrew his head and thrust desperately at the sticky stuff about his loins and legs. The oil on his hands kept it from clinging to them, and it gave a little. In a flash of inspiration, Burl understood. He reached over his shoulder and grasped the greasy fish; tore it in a dozen places and smeared himself with the now rancid exudation, pushing the sticky threads from his limbs and oiling the surface from which he had thrust it.

  He felt the web tremble. To the spider, its poison seemed to have failed. Another sting seemed necessary. It would again inject its deadly venom where the disturbance was manifest--into Burl!

  He gasped, and drew himself toward his window. It felt as if he was pulling his legs from his body. His head emerged, his shoulders--half his body was outside the hole.

  The colossal spider surveyed him, and made ready to cast another silken sheet over him. The spinnerets became active, and the sticky stuff about Burl's feet gave way! He shot through the opening and fell sprawling to the earth below, crashing onto the shrunken shell of a flying beetle which had fallen into the snare and had not escaped.

  Burl rolled over and over, then sat up. An angry, foot-long ant stood before him, mandibles extended threateningly, antennae waving wildly. A shrill stridulation filled the air.

  In ages past, when ants were tiny creatures fractions of an inch long, scientists knew they possessed a cry. Grooves on the body of the insects, like those on the great legs of crickets, enabled them to generate sounds.

  Burl knew the stridulation emanated from the insect before him, though he had never wondered how it was produced. The cry was used to summon others of its city, to help it in difficulty or good fortune.

  Clickings sounded nearby. Reinforcements were coming. Normally harmless--except the army ant, that is--the whole ant tribe was formidable when provoked. Utterly fearless, they could pull down a man and slay him as so many infuriated fox terriers might have done 30,000 years before.

  Burl fled, without debate, and heard the shrill sound suddenly subside. The ant, shortsighted like all ants, no longer felt threatened and went peacefully about the business Burl had interrupted, that of finding among the gruesome relics beneath the spider's web some edible carrion to feed the inhabitants of its city.

  Burl ran a few hundred yards, and stopped. It behooved him to move carefully. Even the most familiar territory was full of unexpected dangers; unknown lands such as these were doubly perilous.

  Burl too found difficulty in moving. The glutinous stuff from the spider's snare still stuck to his feet, picking up small objects as he went. Old ant-gnawed fragments of insect armor pricked him even through his toughened soles.

  He removed them, took a dozen steps and had to stop again. Burl's brain had been uncommonly stimulated lately. It had gotten him into at least one predicament--due to his invention of a spear--but extricated him from another. Reason had led him to oil his body to escape the spider's snare.

  Cautiously, Burl looked about. He seemed safe. Then, deliberately, he sat down to think. Never in his life had he done such a thing; his tribesmen were not given to meditation. But a powerful idea had struck Burl--an abstract idea.

  When he was in difficulties, something within him seemed to suggest a solution. Would it do so now? He puzzled over the problem. Sharp pebbles, remnants of insect-armor, and other things hurt his feet when he walked. They always had, but nev
er had his feet been sticky so that the irritation continued with him more than one step.

  He gazed at his foot, and awaited inspiration. Meanwhile, he slowly removed the sharp-pointed fragments, one by one. Partly coated with the half-liquid gum from his feet, they clung to his finger, except where the oil was thick.

  Burl's reasoning, before, had been simple and of primary order. Where oil covered him, the web did not. Therefore he would coat the rest of himself with oil. But to apply knowledge gained in one predicament to another difficulty was something he had never done.

  A dog may be taught to pull a latchstring to open a door, but the same dog coming to a high, close-barred gate with a latchstring will never think of pulling it. He associates a latchstring with opening the door. Opening a gate is another matter entirely.

  Imminent peril had stirred Burl to invention. That was extraordinary enough. But reasoning in cold blood, as he now did, that oil on his feet would nullify the glue there and enable him to walk in comfort--that was as much a triumph of intellect as any masterpiece of art in the ages before. He oiled his feet.

  It was an infinitesimal problem, but Burl's struggles with the mental process of reasoning were real. 30,000 years earlier, a wise man declared that education is simply training in thought, in efficient and effective thinking. Burl had received no such training, but now, sitting at the base of a squat toadstool, he reexemplified Rodin's Thinker for the first time in millennia. He was teaching himself how to think.

  He stood up, walked, and crowed in delight, then paused a moment in awe of his own intelligence. 35 miles from his tribe, naked, unarmed, ignorant of fire, wood, or any weapons save a spear he had experimented with the day before, abysmally uninformed concerning the very existence of art or science, Burl stopped to assure himself that he was very wonderful.

  With touching faith in this new pastime, Burl sat down again and knitted his brows. His questions were easily answered. He was naked. He would fashion garments. He was weaponless. He would find a spear. He was hungry. He would seek food. He was far from from Saya and his tribe. He would go to them. Puerile reasoning, of course, but valuable, because it was conscious reasoning, conscious appeal to his mind for guidance, deliberate metal progression from desire to resolution.

  Even in the high civilization of ages before, few men had really used their brains. The great majority had depended on machines and leaders to think for them. Burl, however, was developing the habit of thinking--a leadership quality, and an invaluable asset to his little tribe.

  He stood again and faced upstream. Gigantic butterflies, riotously colored, fluttered overhead through the misty haze. Sometimes a grasshopper hurtled through the air like a projectile, transparent wings beating frantically. Occasionally a wasp sped by, intent on its hunting, or a bee droned heavily along, anxious and worried, striving in a nearly flowerless world to gather pollen for the hive.

  Here and there Burl saw various flies, some no larger than his thumb, others the size of his whole hand. They fed on juices dripping from maggot-infested mushrooms, when filth more to their liking was unavailable.

  Far away a shrill roaring sounded faintly. It was like multitudinous clickings blended into a single sound, but was so distant that it did not gain Burl's attention. He had all the strictly localized vision of a child. What was near was important; what was distant could be ignored.

  Had Burl listened, he would have realized that army ants were abroad in countless millions, deploying themselves in a broad array and wreaking greater destruction than so many locusts.

  Locusts in past ages had eaten all green things. Only giant cabbages and a few such tenacious rank growths survived. The locusts had vanished along with civilization, knowledge, and most of mankind, but army ants remained as an invincible enemy to men, insects, and fungi alike.

  Burl did not notice the sound, however. Preoccupied, he moved forward, briskly though cautiously, searching for garments, food, and weapons. He confidently expected to find them all shortly.

  Surely enough he found a thicket of edible fungi just half a mile beyond the spot where he had sat down to think. Burl tugged at one and broke off a piece. Nibbling as he went, he entered a broad plain over a mile across, broken into odd little hillocks by gradually ripening and suddenly developing mushrooms with which he was unfamiliar. Their rounded, blood-red protuberances forced aside the earth as they grew.

  Burl passed among them without touching them. They were strange, and strange things meant danger. Besides, he was full of new purpose. He wished garments and weapons.

  Above the plain a wasp flew, a heavy object dangling beneath its black belly, ornamented by a single red band. It was a hairy sand wasp, carrying a paralyzed gray caterpillar. After depositing the caterpillar in a deep underground burrow, the wasp would lay an egg on it, then emerge and seal the entrance with dirt and stones. Later, the egg would hatch into a tiny grub, which would feed on the torpid caterpillar until it waxed large and fat. Then it would weave itself a chrysalis and sleep a long sleep, only to wake as a wasp and dig its way to open air.

  Uncomprehending, Burl watched the wasp go by, then trudged onward. Reaching the farther side of the plain, he found himself threading the aisles of a fungus forest where the growths were hideous, misshapen travesties of the trees they had supplanted. Bloated, yellow limbs branched off from rounded, swollen trunks. Here and there a pearshaped puffball, Burl's height and half as much again, waited craftily until a chance touch should cause it to shoot upward a curling puff of fine dust.

  There were dangers here, and Burl moved forward cautiously. He continued to eat from the mass of edible mushroom under his arm, while his large eyes scanned about for threats of harm.

  Behind, a high, shrill roaring grew slightly louder, but remained too far away to impress Burl. The army ants were working havoc in the distance. By millions, they were foraging the country, climbing every eminence, descending every depression, antennae waving restlessly, mandibles extended threateningly. The ground was black with them, each ten inches long.

  A single such creature would be formidable to an unarmed, naked man like Burl, whose wisest move would be flight, but in numbers they presented a menace from which escape seemed impossible. They advanced steadily and rapidly amid shrill stridulations and multitudinous clickings.

  The great helpless caterpillars on the cabbages heard them coming, but were too stupid to flee. Black multitudes covered the rank vegetables, and tiny but voracious jaws tore at the flaccid masses of flesh.

  Each creature had some futile means of struggling. Caterpillars writhed and contorted ineffectually. Bees fought their entrance to the gigantic hives with stings and wingbeats. Moths took to the air in helpless blindness when discovered by the relentless throngs of small black insects.

  There was a strange contrast between the ground before the advancing horde and that immediately behind it. Before, a busy world, teeming with life. Mushrooms and fungi fought with thinning numbers of giant cabbages for food. Behind the black multitude--nothing. Mushrooms, cabbages, bees, wasps, crickets, every creeping, crawling, or flying thing that did not get aloft before the black tide arrived was lost, torn to bits by tiny mandibles. Even spiders and tarantulas fell before the host of insects, killing many their final struggles, but ultimately overwhelmed by sheer numbers. And the wounded and dying army ants became food for their comrades. There is no mercy among insects.

  Surging onward, flowing like a monstrous, murky tide over the yellow, steaming earth, the army ants advanced. Their vanguard reached the river, and recoiled. Burl was five miles distant when they changed course, communicating the altered line of march to those behind with antenna gestures, stridulations, and formic acid trails.

  A million tragedies marked the insect army's progress. There was a tiny colony of mining bees--Zebra bees; a single mother, four feet long, had dug a huge gallery with ten cells, in which she laid her eggs and fed her grubs with hard-gathered pollen. The grubs had waxed fat and large, become bees, and
laid eggs in turn, in the same gallery.

  Ten such bulky insects now foraged busily for grubs within the ancestral home, while the founder of the colony had grown draggled and wingless with passing time. Unable to forage herself, the old bee became hive guardian, as is customary among mining bees. She closed the opening of the hive with her head, making a living barrier at the entrance, withdrawing to give entrance and exit only to duly authenticated members of the colony.

  She was at her post when the wave of army ants swept over her. Tiny, evil-smelling feet trampled on her. She emerged to fight with mandible and sting for the sanctity of the hive. In a moment she was a shaggy mass of biting ants, rending and tearing her chitinous armor. The other bees emerged, fighting as they came, for the gallery leading down was a dark flood of small insects.

  An epic battle raged. Ten huge bees, each four feet long, fighting with leg and jaw, wing and mandible, with the ferocity of tigers. The tiny, vicious ants covered them, snapping at their multiple eyes, biting at the tender joints in their armor--sometimes releasing the larger prey to leap upon an injured comrade wounded by the huge creature they battled in common.

  The outcome, however, was inevitable. Struggle as the bees might, herculean as their efforts might be, they were powerless against the incredible numbers of their assailants, who tore them into tiny fragments and devoured them. Before the last shred of the hive's defenders had vanished, the hive itself was gutted alike of the grubs it contained and the food brought them by such weary effort of the mature bees.

  The army ants went on. Only an empty gallery remained, and a few fragments of tough armor, unappetizing even to the omniverous ants.