Earth Is The Strangest Planet

by Robert Silverberg

  “Dese ants,” said Gerilleau, after collecting information at a rancho, “have big eyes. They don’t run about blind— not as most ants do. No! Dey get in the corners and watch what you do.”

  “And they sting?” asked Holroyd.

  “Yes. Dey sting. Dere is poison in the sting.” He meditated. “I do not see what men can do against ants. Dey come and go.”

  “But these don’t go.”

  “Dey will,” said Gerilleau.

  Past Tamandu there is a long low coast of eighty miles without any population, and then one comes to the confluence of the main river and the Batemo arm like a great lake, and then the forest came nearer, came at last intimately near. The character of the channel changes, snags abound, and the Benjamin Constant moored by a cable that night, under the very shadow of dark trees. For the first time for many days came a spell of coolness, and Holroyd and Gerilleau sat late, smoking cigars and enjoying this delicious sensation. Gerilleau’s mind was full of ants and what they could do. He decided to sleep at last, and lay down on a mattress on deck, a man hopelessly perplexed, his last words, when he already seemed asleep, were to ask, with a flourish of despair, “What can one do with ants? … De whole thing is absurd.”

  Holroyd was left to scratch his bitten wrists, and meditate alone.

  He sat on the bulwark and listened to the little changes in Gerilleau’s breathing until he was fast asleep, and then the ripple and lap of the stream took his mind, and brought back that sense of immensity that had been growing upon him since first he had left Para and come up the river. The monitor showed but one small light, and there was a little talking forward and then stillness. His eyes went from the dim black outlines of the middle works of the gunboat towards the bank, to the black overwhelming mysteries of the forest, lit now and then by a firefly, and never still from the murmur of alien and mysterious activities… .

  It was the inhuman immensity of this land that astonished and oppressed him. He knew the skies were empty of men, the stars were specks in an incredible vastness of space; he knew the ocean was enormous and untamable, but in England he had come to think of the land as man’s. In England it is indeed man’s, the wild things live by sufferance, grow on lease, everywhere the roads, the fences, and absolute security runs. In an atlas, too, the land is man’s, and all colored to show his claim to it—in vivid contrast to the universal independent blueness of the sea. He had taken it for granted that a day would come when everywhere about the earth, plough and culture, light tramways and good roads, an ordered security, would prevail. But now, he doubted.

  This forest was interminable, it had an air of being invincible, and man seemed at best an infrequent precarious intruder. One traveled for miles, amidst the still, silent struggle of giant trees, of strangulating creepers, of assertive flowers, everywhere the alligator, the turtle, and endless varieties of birds and insects seemed at home, dwelt irreplaceably—but man, man at most held a footing upon resentful clearings, fought weeds, fought beasts and insects for the barest foothold, fell a prey to snake and beast, insect and fever, and was presently carried away. In many places down the river he had been manifestly driven back, this deserted creek or that preserved the name of a casa, and here and there ruinous white walls and a shattered tower enforced the lesson. The puma, the jaguar, were more the masters here… .

  Who were the real masters?

  In a few miles of this forest there must be more ants than there are men in the whole world! This seemed to Holroyd a perfectly new idea. In a few thousand years man had emerged from barbarism to a stage of civilization that made them feel lords of the future and masters of the earth! But what was to prevent the ants from evolving also? Such ants as one knew lived in little communities of a few thousand individuals, made no concerted efforts against the greater world. But they had a language, they had an intelligence! Why should things stop at the barbaric stage? Suppose presently the ants began to store knowledge, just as men had done by means of books and records, use weapons, form great empires, sustain a planned and organized war?

  Things came back to him that Gerilleau had gathered about these ants they were approaching. They used a poison like the poison of snakes. They obeyed greater leaders, even as the leaf-cutting ants do. They were carnivorous, and where they came, they stayed… .

  Gerilleau stirred in the darkness and sighed. “What can one do?” he murmured, and turned over and was still again.

  Holroyd was roused from meditations that were becoming sinister by the hum of a mosquito.

  II

  The next morning Holroyd learned they were within forty kilometers of Badama, and his interest in the banks intensified. He came up whenever an opportunity offered to examine his surroundings. He could see no signs of human occupation whatever, save for a weedy ruin of a house and the green-stained facade of the long-deserted monastery at Moju, with a forest tree growing out of a vacant window space, and great creepers netted across its vacant portals. Several flights of strange yellow butterflies with semi-transparent wings crossed the river that morning, and many alighted on the monitor and were killed by the men. It was towards afternoon that they came upon the derelict cuberta.

  She did not at first appear to be derelict; both her sails were set and hanging slack in the afternoon calm, and there was the figure of a man sitting on the fore planking beside the shipped sweeps. Another man appeared to be sleeping face downward on the sort of longitudinal bridge these big canoes have in the waist. But it was presently apparent, from the sway of her rudder and the way she drifted into the course of the gunboat, that something was out of order with her. Gerilleau surveyed her through a field glass, and became interested in the queer darkness of the face of the sitting man, a red-faced man, he seemed, without a nose— crouching he was, rather than sitting, and the longer the captain looked, the less he liked to look at him. and the less able he was to take his glasses away.

  But he did so at last, and went a little way to call up Holroyd. Then he went back to hail the cuberta. He hailed her again, and so she drove past him. Santa Rosa stood out clearly as her name.

  As she came by and into the wake of the monitor, she pitched a little, and suddenly the figure of the crouching man collapsed as though all its joints had given way. His hat fell off, his head was not nice to look at, and his body flopped lax and rolled out of sight behind the bulwarks.

  “Caramba!” cried Gerilleau, and resorted to Holroyd forthwith.

  Holroyd was halfway up the companion. “Did you see dat?” said the captain.

  “Dead!” said Holroyd. “Yes. You’d better send a boat aboard. There’s something wrong.”

  “Did you—by any chance—see his face?”

  Earth Is the Strangest Planet “What was it like?”

  “It was—ugh!—I have no words.” And the captain suddenly turned his back on Holroyd and became an active and strident commander.

  The gunboat came about, steamed parallel to the erratic course of the canoe, and dropped the boat with Lieutenant da Cunha and three sailors to board her. Then the curiosity of the captain made him draw up almost alongside as the lieutenant got aboard, so that the whole of the Santa Rosa, deck and hold, was visible to Holroyd.

  He saw now clearly that the sole crew of the vessel was these two dead men, and though he could not see their faces, he saw by their outstretched hands, which were all of ragged flesh, that they had been subjected to some strange exceptional process of decay. For a moment his attention concentrated on those two enigmatical bundles of dirty clothes and laxly flung limbs, and then his eyes went forward to discover the open hold piled high with trunks and cases, and aft, to where the little cabin gaped inexplicably empty. Then he became aware that the planks of the middle decking were dotted with moving black specks.

  His attention was riveted by these specks. They were all walking in directions radiating from the fallen man in a manner—the image came unsought to his mind—like the crowd dispersing from a bullfight.

  He be
came aware of Gerilleau beside him. “Capo,” he said, “have you your glasses? Can you focus as closely as those planks there?”

  Gerilleau made an effort, grunted, and handed him the glasses.

  There followed a moment of scrutiny. “It’s ants,” said the Englishman, and handed the focused field glass back to Gerilleau.

  His impression of them was of a crowd of large black ants, very like ordinary ants except for their size, and for the fact that some of the larger of them bore a sort of clothing of gray. But at the time his inspection was too brief for any particulars. The head of Lieutenant da Cunha appeared over the side of the cuberta, and a brief colloquy ensued.

  “You must go aboard,” said Gerilleau.

  The lieutenant changed the subject. “How did these men die?” he asked.

  Captain Gerilleau embarked upon speculations that Holroyd could not follow, and the two men disputed with a certain increasing vehemence. Holroyd took up the field glass and resumed his scrutiny, first of the ants and then of the dead man amidships.

  He has described these ants to me very particularly.

  He says they are as large as any ants he has ever seen, black and moving with a steady deliberation very different from the mechanical fussiness of the common ant. About one in twenty was much larger than its fellows, and with an exceptionally large head. These reminded him at once of the master workers who are said to rule over the leaf-cutter ants; like them they seemed to be directing and coordinating the general movements. They tilted their bodies back in a manner altogether singular, as if they made some use of the fore feet. And he had a curious fancy that he was too far off to verify, that most of these ants of both kinds were wearing accouterments, had things strapped about their bodies by bright white bands like white metal threads… .

  He put down the glasses abruptly, realizing that the question of discipline between the captain and his subordinate had become acute.

  “It is your duty,” said the captain, “to go aboard. It is my instructions.”

  The lieutenant seemed on the verge of refusing. The head of one of the mulatto sailors appeared beside him.

  “I believe these men were killed by the ants,” said Holroyd abruptly in English.

  The captain burst into a rage. He made no answer to Holroyd. “I have commanded you to go aboard,” he screamed to his subordinate in Portuguese. “If you do not go aboard forthwith, it is mutiny—rank mutiny. Mutiny and cowardice! Where is the courage that should animate us? I will have you in irons, I will have you shot like a dog.” He began a torrent of abuse and curses, he danced to and fro. He shook his fists, he behaved as if beside himself with rage, and the lieutenant, white and still, stood looking at him. The crew appeared forward, with amazed faces.

  Suddenly, in a pause of this outbreak, the lieutenant came to some heroic decision, saluted, drew himself together and clambered upon the deck of the cuberta.

  “Ah!” said Gerilleau, and his mouth shut like a trap. Holroyd saw the ants retreating before da Cunha’s boots. The Portuguese walked slowly to the fallen man, stooped down, hesitated, clutched his coat and turned him over. A black swarm of ants rushed out of the clothes, and da Cunha stepped back very quickly and trod two or three times on the deck.

  Holroyd put up the glasses. He saw the scattered ants about the invader’s feet, and doing what he had never seen ants doing before. They had nothing of the blind movements of the common ant; they were looking at him—as a rallying crowd of men might look at some gigantic monster that had dispersed it.

  “How did he die?” the captain shouted.

  Holroyd understood the Portuguese to say the body was too much eaten to tell.

  “What is there forward?” asked Gerilleau.

  The lieutenant walked a few paces, and began his answer in Portuguese. He stopped abruptly and beat off something from his leg. He made some peculiar steps as if he were trying to stamp on something invisible, and went quickly toward the side. Then he controlled himself, turned about, walked deliberately forward to the hold, clambered up to the fore decking, from which the sweeps were worked, stooped for a time over the second man, groaned audibly, and made his way back and aft to the cabin, moving very rigidly. He turned and began a conversation with his captain, cold and respectful in tone on either side, contrasting vividly with the wrath and insult of a few moments before. Holroyd could gather only fragments of its purport.

  He reverted to the field glass, and was surprised to find the ants had vanished from all the exposed surfaces of the deck. He turned toward the shadows beneath the decking, and it seemed to him they were full of watching eyes.

  The cuberta, it was agreed, was derelict, but too full of ants to put men aboard to sit and sleep; it must be towed. The lieutenant went forward to take in and adjust the cable, and the men in the boat stood up to be ready to help him. Holroyd’s glasses searched the canoe.

  He became more and more impressed by the fact that a great if minute and furtive activity was going on. He perceived that a number of gigantic ants—they seemed nearly a couple of inches in length—carrying oddly shaped burdens for which he could imagine no use—were moving in rushes from one point of obscurity to another. They did not move in columns across the exposed places, but in open, spaced-out lines, oddly suggestive of the rushes of modern infantry advancing under fire. A number were taking cover under the dead man’s clothes, and a perfect swarm was gathering along the side over which da Cunha must presently go.

  He did not see them actually rush for the lieutenant as he returned, but he has no doubt they did make a concerted rush. Suddenly the lieutenant was shouting and cursing and beating at his legs. “I’m stung!” he shouted, with a face of hate and accusation towards Gerilleau.

  Then he vanished over the side, dropped into his boat, and plunged at once into the water. Holroyd heard the splash.

  The three men in the boat pulled him out and brought him aboard, and that night he died.

  III

  Holroyd and the captain came out of the cabin in which the swollen and contorted body of the lieutenant lay and stood together at the stern of the monitor, staring at the sinister vessel they trailed behind them. It was a close, dark night that had only phantom flickerings of sheet lightning to illuminate it. The cuberta, a vague black triangle, rocked about in the steamer’s wake, her sails bobbing and flapping, and the black smoke from the funnels, spark-lit ever and again, streamed over her swaying masts.

  Gerilleau’s mind was inclined to run on the unkind things the lieutenant had said in the heat of his last fever.

  “He says I murdered ’im,” he protested. “It is simply absurd. Someone ’ad to go aboard. Are we to run away from dese confounded ants whenever they show up?”

  Holroyd said nothing. He was thinking of a disciplined rush of little black shapes across bare sunlit planking.

  “It was his place to go,” harped Gerilleau. “He died in the execution of his duty. What has he to complain of? Murdered! … But the poor fellow was—what is it?— demented. He was not in his right mind. De poison swelled him … u’m.”

  They came to a long silence.

  “We will sink that canoe—burn it.”

  “And then?”

  The inquiry irritated Gerilleau. His shoulders went up, his hands flew out at right angles from his body. “What is one to do?” he said, his voice going up to an angry squeak.

  “Anyhow,” he broke out vindictively, “every ant in dat cuberta!—I will burn dem alive!”

  Holroyd was not moved to conversation. A distant ululation of howling monkeys filled the sultry night with foreboding sounds, and as the gunboat drew near the black mysterious banks, this was reinforced by a depressing clamor of frogs.

  “What is one to do?” the captain repeated after a vast interval, and suddenly becoming active and savage and blasphemous, decided to burn the Santa Rosa without further delay. Everyone on board was pleased by that idea, everyone helped with zest; they pulled in the cable, cut it, and dropped the boa
t and fired her with tow and kerosine, and soon the cuberta was crackling and flaring merrily amid the immensities of the tropical night. Holroyd watched the mounting yellow flare against the blackness, and the livid flashes of sheet lightning that came and went above the forest summits, throwing them into momentary silhouette, and his stoker stood behind him watching also.

  The stoker was stirred to the depth of his linguistics.

  “Saiiba go pop, pop,” he said. “Wahaw!” and laughed richly.

  But Holroyd was thinking that these little creatures on the decked canoe had also eyes and brains.

  The whole thing impressed him as incredibly foolish and wrong, but—what was one to do? This question came back enormously reinforced on the morrow, when at last the gunboat reached Badama.

  This place, with its leaf-thatch-covered houses and sheds, its creeper-invaded sugar mill, its little jetty of timber and canes, was very still in the morning heat, and showed never a sign of living men. Whatever ants were at that distance were too small to see.

  “All de people have gone,” said Gerilleau, “but we will do one thing anyhow. We will ’oot the vissel.”

  So Holroyd hooted and whistled.

  Then the captain fell into a doubting fit of the worst kind. “Dere is one thing we can do,” he said presently.

  “What’s that?” said Holroyd.

  “ ’Oot and vissel again.”

  So they did.

  The captain walked his deck and gesticulated to himself. He seemed to have many things on his mind. Fragments of speeches came from his lips. He appeared to be addressing some imaginary public tribunal either in Spanish or Portuguese. Holroyd’s improving ear detected something about ammunition. He came out of these preoccupations suddenly into English. “My dear ’Olroyd!” he cried, and broke off with “But what can one do?”