The Red Dust

by Murray Leinster

  CHAPTER III

  The Sexton-Beetles

  Burl fell headforemost upon the spongy top of a huge toadstool thatsplit with the impact and let him through to the ground beneath,powdering him with its fine spores. He came to rest with his nakedshoulder half-way through the yielding flesh of a mushroom-stalk, andlay there for a second, catching his breath to scream again.

  Then he heard the whining buzz of his attempted prey. There wassomething wrong with the beetle. Burl's spear had struck it in anawkward spot, and it was rocketing upward in erratic flight that endedin a crash two or three hundreds yards away.

  Burl sprang up in an instant. Perhaps, despite his mistake, he had slainthis infinitely more worthy victim. He rushed toward the spot where ithad fallen.

  His wide blue eyes pierced the darkness well enough to enable him tosheer off from masses of toadstools, but he could distinguish nodetails--nothing but forms. He heard the beetle floundering upon theground; then heard it mount again into the air, more clumsily thanbefore.

  Its wing-beats no longer kept up a sustained note. They thrashed the airirregularly and wildly. The flight was zigzag and uncertain, and thoughlonger than the first had been, it ended similarly, in a heavy fall.Another period of floundering, and the beetle took to the air again justbefore Burl arrived at the spot.

  It was obviously seriously hurt, and Burl forgot the dangers of thenight in his absorption in the chase. He darted after his prey,fleet-footed and agile, taking chances that in cold blood he would neverhave thought of.

  Twice, in the pain-racked struggles of the monster beetle, he arrived atthe spot where the gigantic insect flung itself about madly, insanely,fighting it knew not what, striking out with colossal wings and legs,dazed and drunk with agony. And each time it managed to get aloft inflight that was weaker and more purposeless.

  Crazy, fleeing from the torturing spear that pierced its very vitals,the beetle blundered here and there, floundering among the mushroomthickets in spasms that were constantly more prolonged and moreagonized, but nevertheless flying heavily, lurching drunkenly, managingto graze the tops of the toadstools in one more despairing, tormentedflight.

  And Burl followed, aflame with the fire of the chase, arriving at thescene of each successive, panic-stricken struggle on the ground justafter the beetle had taken flight again, but constantly more closely onthe heels of the weakening monster.

  At last he came up panting, and found the giant lying upon the earth,moving feebly, apparently unable to rise. How far he was from the tribe,Burl did not know, nor did the question occur to him at the moment. Hewaited for the beetle to be still, trembling with excitement andeagerness. The struggles of the huge form grew more feeble, and at lastceased. Burl moved forward and grasped his spear. He wrenched at it tothrust again.

  In an instant the beetle had roused itself, and was exerting its lastatom of strength, galvanized into action by the agony caused by Burl'sseizure of the spear. A great wing-cover knocked Burl twenty feet, andflung him against the base of a mushroom, where he lay, half stunned.But then a strangely pungent scent came to his nostrils--the scent ofthe red mushrooms!

  He staggered to his feet and fled, while behind him the gigantic beetlecrashed and floundered--Burl heard a tearing and ripping sound. Theinsect had torn the covering of one of the red mushrooms, tightly packedwith the fatal red dust. At the noise, Burl's speed was doubled, but hecould still hear the frantic struggles of the dying beetle grow to avery crescendo of desperation.

  The creature broke free and managed to rise in a final flight, fightingfor breath and life, weakened and tortured by the spear and the horriblespores of the red mushrooms. Then it crashed suddenly to the earth andwas still. The red dust had killed it.

  In time to come, Burl might learn to use the red dust as poison gas hadbeen used by his ancestors of thirty thousand years before, but now hewas frightened and alone, lost from his tribe, and with no faintestnotion of how to find them. He crouched beneath a huge toadstool andwaited for dawn, listening with terrified apprehension for the rippingsound that would mean the bursting of another of the red mushrooms.

  Only the wing beats of night-flying creatures came to his ears, however,and the discordant noises of the four-foot truffle-beetles as theyroamed the aisles of the mushroom forests, seeking the places beneathwhich their instinct told them fungoid dainties awaited the courageousminer. The eternal dripping of the raindrops falling at long intervalsfrom the overhanging clouds formed a soft obbligato to the whole.

  Burl listened, knowing there were red toadstools all about, but not onceduring the whole of the long, dark hours did the rending noise tell of abursting fungus casting loose its freight of deadly dust upon the air.Only when day came again, and the chill dampness of the night wassucceeded by the steaming humidity of the morning, did a tall pyramid ofbrownish-red stuff leap suddenly into the air from a ripped mushroomcovering.

  Then Burl stood up and looked around. Here and there, all over the wholecountryside, slowly and at intervals, the cones of fatal red sprang intothe air. Had Burl lived thirty thousand years earlier, he might havelikened the effect to that of shells bursting from a leisurelybombardment, but as it was he saw in them only fresh and inexorabledangers added to an already peril-ridden existence.

  A hundred yards from where he had hidden during the night the body ofhis victim lay, crumpled up and limp. Burl approached speculatively. Hehad come even before the ants appeared to take their toll of thecarcass, and not even a buzzing flesh-fly had placed its maggots on theunresisting form.

  The long, whiplike antennae lay upon the carpet of mold and rust, and thefiercely toothed legs were drawn close against the body. Themany-faceted eyes stared unseeingly, and the stiff and horny wing-caseswere rent and torn.

  When Burl went to the other side of the dead beetle he saw somethingthat filled him with elation. His spear had been held between his bodyand the beetle's during that mad flight, and at the final crash, whenBurl shot away from the fear-crazed insect, the weight of his body hadforced the spearpoint between the joints of the corselet and the neck.Even if the red dust had not finished the creature, the spear wound intime would have ended its life.

  Burl was thrilled once more by his superlative greatness, andconveniently forgot that it was the red dust that had actuallyadministered the _coup de grace_. It was so much more pleasant to lookupon himself as the mighty slayer that he hacked off one of thebarb-edged limbs to carry back to his tribe in evidence of his feat. Hetook the long antennae, too, as further proof.

  Then he remembered that he did not know where his tribe was to be found.He had no faintest idea of the direction in which the beetle had flown.As a matter of fact, the course of the beetle had been in turn directedtoward every point of the compass, and there was no possible way oftelling the relation of its final landing-place to the point from whichit had started.

  Burl wrestled with his problem for an hour, and then gave up in disgust.He set off at random, with the leg of the huge insect flung over hisshoulder and the long antennae clasped in his hand with his spear. Heturned to look at his victim of the night before just before plunginginto the near-by mushroom forest, and saw that it was already the centerof a mass of tiny black bodies, pulling and hacking at the tough armor,and carving out great lumps of the succulent flesh to be carried to thenear-by ant city.

  In the teeming life of the insect world death is an opportunity for thesurvivors. There is a strangely tense and fearful competition for thebodies of the slain. There had been barely an hour of daylight in whichthe ants might seek for provender, yet in that little time the freshlykilled beetle had been found and was being skilfully and carefullyexploited. When the body of one of the larger insects fell to theground, there was a mighty rush, a fierce race, among all the tribes ofscavengers to see who should be first.

  Usually the ants had come upon the scene and were inquisitivelyexploring the carcass long before even the flesh-flies had arrived, whodropped their living maggots upon the creature. The blue
-bottles camestill later, to daub their masses of white eggs about the delicatemembranes of the eye.

  And while all the preceding scavengers were at work, furtive beetles andtiny insects burrowed below the reeking body to attack the highlyscented flesh from a fresh angle.

  Each working independently of the others, they commonly appeared in theorder of the delicacy of the sense which could lead them to a source offood, though accident could and sometimes did afford one group ofworkers in putrescence an advantage over the others.

  Thus, sometimes a blue-bottle anticipated even the eager ants, and againthe very flesh-flies dropped their squirming offspring upon a limp formthat was already being undermined by white-bellied things working in thedarkness below the body.

  Burl grimaced at the busy ants and buzzing flies, and disappeared intothe mushroom forest. Here for a long time he moved cautiously andsilently through the aisles of tangled stalks and the spongy, roundheads of the fungoids. Now and then he saw one of the red toadstools,and made a wide detour around it. Twice they burst within his sight,circumscribed as his vision was by the toadstools among which he wastraveling.

  Each time he ran hastily to put as much distance as possible betweenhimself and the deadly red dust. He traveled for an hour or more,looking constantly for familiar landmarks that might guide him to histribe. He knew that if he came upon any place he had seen while with histribe he could follow the path they had traveled and in time rejointhem.

  For many hours he went on, alert for signs of danger. He was quiteignorant of the fact that there were such things as points of thecompass, and though he had a distinct notion that he was not moving in astraight line, he did not realize that he was actually moving in acolossal half-circle. After walking steadily for nearly four hours hewas no more than three miles in a direct line from his starting-point.As it happened, his uncertainty of direction was fortunate.

  The night before the tribe had been feeding happily upon one of theimmense edible mushrooms, when they heard Burl's abruptly changing cry.It had begun as a shout of triumph, and ended as a scream of fear. Thenthey heard hurried wing-beats as a creature rose into the air in ascurry of desperation. The throbbing of huge wings ended in a heavyfall, followed by another flight.

  Velvety darkness masked the sky, and the tribesmen could only stare offinto the blackness, where their leader had vanished, and begin totremble, wondering what they should do in a strange country with no boldchief to guide them.

  He was the first man to whom the tribe had ever offered allegiance, buttheir submission had been all the more complete for that fact, and hisloss was the more appalling.

  Burl had mistaken their lack of timidity. He had thought itindependence, and indifference to him. As a matter of fact, it wassecurity because the tribe felt safe under his tutelage. Now that he hadvanished, and in a fashion that seemed to mean his death, their oldfears returned to them reenforced by the strangeness of theirsurroundings.

  They huddled together and whispered their fright to one another,listening the while in panic-stricken apprehension for signs of danger.The tribesmen visualized Burl caught in fiercely toothed limbs, beingrent and torn in mid air by horny, insatiable jaws, his blood falling ingreat spurts toward the earth below. They caught a faint, reedy cry, andshuddered, pressing closer together.

  And so through the long night they waited in trembling silence. Had ahunting spider appeared among them they would not have lifted a hand todefend themselves, but would have fled despairingly, would probably havescattered and lost touch with one another, and spent the remainder oftheir lives as solitary fugitives, snatching fear-ridden rest in strangehiding-places.

  But day came again, and they looked into each other's eyes, reading ineach the selfsame panic and fear. Saya was probably the most pitiful ofall the group. Burl was to have been her mate, and her face was whiteand drawn beyond that of any of the rest of the tribefolk.

  With the day, they did not move, but remained clustered about the hugemushroom on which they had been feeding the night before. They spoke inhushed and fearful tones, huddled together, searching all the horizonfor insect enemies. Saya would not eat, but sat still, staring beforeher in unseeing indifference. Burl was dead.

  A hundred yards from where they crouched a red mushroom glistened in thepale light of the new day. Its tough skin was taut and bulging,resisting the pressure of the spores within. But slowly, as the morningwore on, some of the moisture that had kept the skin soft and flaccidduring the night evaporated.

  The skin had a strong tendency to contract, like green leather whendrying. The spores within it strove to expand. The opposing forcesproduced a tension that grew greater and greater as more and more of themoisture was absorbed by the air. At last the skin could hold no longer.

  With a ripping sound that could be heard for hundreds of feet, the toughwrapping split and tore across its top, and with a hollow, booming noisethe compressed mass of deadly spores rushed into the air, making apyramidal cloud of brown-red dust some sixty feet in height.

  The tribesmen quivered at the noise and faced the dust cloud for afleeting instant, then ran pell-mell to escape the slowly moving tide ofdeath as the almost imperceptible breeze wafted it slowly toward them.Men and women, boys and girls, they fled in a mad rush from the deadlystuff, not pausing to see that even as it advanced it settled slowly tothe ground, nor stopping to observe its path that they might step asideand let it go safely by.

  Saya fled with the rest, but without their extreme panic. She fledbecause the others had done so, and ran more carelessly, struggling witha half-formed idea that it did not particularly matter whether she werecaught or not.

  She fell slightly behind the others, without being noticed. Then quiteabruptly a stone turned under her foot, and she fell headlong, strikingher head violently against a second stone. Then she lay quite stillwhile the red cloud billowed slowly toward her, drifting gently in thefaint, hardly perceptible breeze.

  It drew nearer and nearer, settling slowly, but still a huge andmenacing mass of deadly dust. It gradually flattened out, too, so thatthough it had been a rounded cone at first, it flowed over the minorinequalities of the ground as a huge and tenuous leech might havecrawled, sucking from all breathing creatures the life they had withinthem.

  A hundred and fifty yards away, a hundred yards away, then only fiftyyards away. From where Saya lay unconscious on the earth, eddies withinthe moving mass could be seen, and the edges took on a striatedappearance, telling of the curling of the dust wreaths in the largermass of deadly powder.

  The deliberate advance kept on, seeming almost purposeful. It would haveseemed possible to draw from the unhurried, menacing movement of thepoisonous stuff that some malign intelligence was concealed in it, thatit was, in fact, a living creature. But when the misty edges of thecloud were no more than twenty-five yards from Saya's prostrate body abreeze from one side sprang up--a vagrant, fitful little breeze, thatfirst halted the red cloud and threw it into confusion and then drove itto one side, so that it passed Saya without harming her, though a singletrailing wisp of dark-red mist floated very close to her.

  Then for a time Saya lay still indeed, only her breast rising andfalling gently with faint and irregular breaths. Her head had struck asharp-edged stone in her fall, and a tiny pool of sticky red hadgathered from the wound.

  Perhaps thirty feet from where she lay, three small toadstools grew in alittle clump, their bases so close together that they seemed but one.From between two of them, however, just where they parted, twin tufts ofreddish threads appeared, twinkling back and forth, and in and out. Asif they had given some reassuring sign, two slender antennae followed,then bulging eyes, and then a small black body which had bright-redscalloped markings upon the wing-cases.

  It was a tiny beetle no more than eight inches long--a burying-beetle.It drew near Saya's body and clambered upon her, explored the ground byher side, moving all the time in feverish haste, and at last dived intothe ground beneath her shoulder, casting back a little
shower of hastilydug earth as it disappeared.

  Ten minutes later another similar insect appeared, and upon the heels ofthe second a third. Each of them made the same hasty examination, andeach dived under the still form. Presently the earth seemed to billow ata spot along Saya's side, then at another. Perhaps ten minutes after thearrival of the third beetle a little rampart had reared itself all aboutSaya's body, precisely following the outline of her form. Then her bodymoved slightly, in a number of tiny jerks, and seemed to settle perhapshalf an inch into the ground.

  The burying beetles were of those who exploited the bodies of thefallen. Working from below, they excavated the earth from the under sideof such prizes as they came upon, then turned upon their backs andthrust with their legs, jerking the body so it sank into the shallowexcavation they had prepared.

  The process would be repeated until at last the whole of the gift offortune had sunk below the surrounding surface and the loosened earthfell in upon the top, thus completing the inhumation.

  Then in the darkness the beetles would feast and rear their young,gorging upon the plentiful supply of succulent foodstuff they had hiddenfrom jealous fellow scavengers above them.

  But Saya was alive. Thirty thousand years before, when scientistsexamined into the habits of the burying-beetles, or the sexton-beetles,they had declared that fresh meat or living meat would not be touched.They based their statement solely upon the fact that the insects (thentiny creatures indeed) did not appear until the trap-meat placed by theinvestigators had remained untouched for days.

  Conditions had changed in thirty thousand years. The ever-present antsand the sharp-eyed flies were keen rivals of the brightly arrayedbeetles. Usually the tribes of creatures who worked in the darknessbelow ground came after the ants had taken their toll, and the fliessipped daintily.

  When Saya fell unconscious upon the ground, however, it was the oneaccident that caused the burying-beetle to find her first, before theants had come to tear the flesh from her slender, soft-skinned body. Shebreathed gently and irregularly, her face drawn with the sorrow of thenight before, while desperately hurrying beetles swarmed beneath herbody, channeling away the earth so that she would sink lower and lowerinto the ground.

  An inch, and a long wait. Then she sank slowly a second inch. Thebright-red tufts of thread appeared again, and a beetle made his way tothe open air. He moved hastily about, inspecting the progress of thework. He dived below again. Another inch, and after a long time anotherinch was excavated.

  Burl stepped out from a group of over-shadowing toadstools and halted.He cast his eyes over the landscape, and was struck by its familiarity.It was, in point of fact, very near the spot he had left the nightbefore, in pursuit of a colossal wounded beetle.

  Burl moved back and forth, trying to account for the sensation ofrecognition, and then trying to approximate the place from which he hadlast seen it.

  He passed within fifty feet of the spot where Saya lay, now half buriedin the ground. The loose earth cast up about her body had begun to fallin little rivulets upon her. One of her shoulders was already screenedfrom view.

  Burl passed on, unseeing. He was puzzling over the direction from whichhe had seen the particular section of countryside before him. Perhaps alittle farther on he would come to the place. He hurried a little. In amoment he recognized his location. There was the great edible mushroom,half broken away, from which the tribe had been feeding. There were themining bee burrows.

  His feet stirred up a fine dust, and he stopped short. A red mushroomhad covered the earth with a thin layer of its impalpable, deadlypowder. Burl understood why the tribe had gone, and a cold sweat cameupon his body. Was Saya safe, or had the whole tribe succumbed to thepoisonous stuff? Had they all, men and women and children, died inconvulsions of gasping strangulation?

  He hurried to retrace his footsteps. There was a fragment of mushroomson the ground. Here was a spear, cast away by one of the tribesmen inhis flight. Burl broke into a run.

  The little excavation into which Saya was sinking, inch by inch, was allof twenty-five feet to the right of the path. Burl dashed on, franticwith anxiety about the tribe, but most of all about Saya. Saya's bodyquivered and sank a fraction more into the earth.

  Half a dozen little rivulets of dirt were tumbling upon her body now. Ina matter of minutes she would be hidden from view. Burl ran madly pasther, too busy searching the mushroom thickets before him with his eyesto dream of looking upon the ground.

  Twenty yards from a huge toadstool thicket a noise arrested him sharply.There was a crashing and breaking of the brittle, spongy growths. Twintapering antennae appeared, and then a monster beetle lurched into theopen space, its horrible, gaping jaws stretched wide.

  It was all of eight feet long, and its body was held up from the groundby six crooked, saw-toothed limbs. Its huge multiple eyes stared withmachinelike preoccupation at the world.

  It advanced deliberately, with a clanking and clashing as of a hideousmachine. Burl fled on the instant, running as madly away from the beetleas he had a moment before been running toward it.

  A little depression in the earth was before him. He did not swerve, butmade to leap it. As he shot over it, however, the glint of pink skincaught his eye, and there was impressed upon his brain with photographiccompleteness the picture of Saya, lying limp and helpless, sinkingslowly into the ground, with tiny rills of earth falling down the sidesof the excavation upon her. It seemed to Burl's eye that she quiveredslightly as he saw.

  There was a terrific struggle within Burl. Behind him the colossalmeat-eating beetle. Beneath him Saya, whom he loved. There was certaindeath lurching toward him on evilly glittering legs, and there was lifefor his race and tribe lying in the shallow pit.

  He turned, aware with a sudden reckless glow that he was throwing awayhis life, aware that he was deliberately giving himself over to death,and stood on the side of the little pit nearest the great beetle, hispuny spear held defiantly at the ready. In his left hand he held justsuch a leg as those which bore the living creature toward him. He hadtorn it from the body of just such a monster but a few hours ago, amonster in whose death he had had a share. With a yell of insanedefiance, he flung the fiercely toothed limb at his advancing opponent.

  The sharp teeth cut into the base of one of the beetle's antennae, and itducked clumsily, then seized the missile in its fierce jaws and crushedit in frenzy of rage. There was meat within it, sweet and juicy meatthat pleased the beetle's palate.

  It forgot the man, standing there, waiting for death. It crunched themissile that had attacked it, eating the palatable contents of the hornyarmor, confusing the blow with the object that had delivered it, andevidently satisfied that an enemy had been conquered and was beingdevoured. A moment later it turned and lumbered off to investigateanother mushroom thicket.

  And Burl turned quickly and dragged Saya's limp form from the grave thathad been prepared for it by the busy insect scavengers. Earth fell fromher shoulders, from her hair, and from the mass of yellow fur about hermiddle, and three little beetles with black and red markings scurried interrified haste for cover, while Burl bore Saya to a resting-place ofsoft mold.

  Burl was an ignorant savage, and to him Saya's deathlike unconsciousnesswas like death itself, but dumb misery smote him, and he laid her downgently, while tears came to his eyes and he called her name again andagain in an agony of grief.

  For an hour he sat there beside her, a man so lately pleased withhimself above all creatures for having slain one huge beetle and putanother to flight, as he would have looked upon it, now abroken-hearted, little pink-skinned man, weeping like a child, hunchedup and bowed over with sorrow.

  Then Saya slowly opened her eyes and stirred weakly.