The Red Dust

by Murray Leinster

  CHAPTER IV

  The Forest of Death

  They were oblivious to everything but each other, Saya resting in stillhalf-incredulous happiness against Burl's shoulder while he told her inlittle, jerky sentences of his pursuit of the colossal flying beetle, ofhis search for the tribe, and then his discovery of her apparentlylifeless body.

  When he spoke of the monster that had lurched from the mushroom thicket,and of the desperation with which he had faced it, Saya pressed closeand looked at him with wondering and wonderful eyes. She couldunderstand his willingness to die, believing her dead. A little whilebefore she had felt the same indifference to life.

  A timid, frightened whisper roused them from their absorption, and theylooked up. One of the tribesmen stood upon one foot some distance away,staring at them, almost convinced that he looked upon the living dead. Asudden movement on the part of either of them would have sent him in apanic back into the mushroom forest. Two or three blond heads bobbed andvanished among the tangled stalks. Wide and astonished eyes gazed at thetwo they had believed the prey of malignant creatures.

  The tribe had come slowly back to the mushroom they had been eating,leaderless, and convinced that Saya had fallen a victim to the deadlydust. Instead, they found her sitting by the side of their chief,apparently restored to them in some miraculous fashion.

  Burl spoke, and the pink-skinned people came timorously from theirhiding-places. They approached warily and formed a half-circle beforethe seated pair. Burl spoke again, and presently one of the bravestdared approach and touch him. Instantly a babble of the crude and labiallanguage spoken by the tribe broke out. Awed questions and exclamationsof thankfulness, then curious interrogations filled the air.

  Burl, for once, showed some common sense. Instead of telling them in hisusual vainglorious fashion of the adventures he had undergone, he merelycast down the two long and tapering antennae from the flying beetle thathe had torn from its dead body. They looked at them, and recognizedtheir origin. Amazement and admiration showed upon their faces. ThenBurl rose and abruptly ordered two of the men to make a chair of theirhands for Saya. She was weak from the effects of the blow she hadreceived. The two men humbly advanced and did as they were bid.

  Then the march was taken up again, more slowly than before, because ofSaya as a burden, but none the less steadily. Burl led his people acrossthe country, marching in advance and with every nerve alert for signs ofdanger, but with more confidence and less timidity than he had everdisplayed before.

  All that noontime and that afternoon they filed steadily along, thetribesfolk keeping in a compact group close behind Burl. The man who hadthrown away his spear had recovered it on an order from Burl, and thelittle party fairly bristled with weapons, though Burl knew well thatthey were liable to be cast away as impediments if flight should benecessary.

  He was determined that his people should learn to fight the greatcreatures about them, instead of depending upon their legs for escape.He had led them in an attack upon great slugs, but they were defenselesscreatures, incapable of more dangerous maneuvers than spasmodic jerkingsof their great bodies.

  The next time danger should threaten them, and especially if it camewhile their new awe of him held good, he was resolved to force them tojoin him in fighting it.

  He had not long to wait for an opportunity to strengthen the spirit ofhis followers by a successful battle. The clouds toward the west weretaking on a dull-red hue, which was the nearest to a sunset that wasever seen in the world of Burl's experience, when a bumble bee dronedheavily over their heads, making for its hive.

  The little group of people on the ground looked up and saw a scanty loadof pollen packed in the stiff bristles of the insect's hind legs. Thebees of the world had a hard time securing food upon the nearlyflowerless planet, but this one had evidently made a find. Its crop wasnearly filled with hard-gathered, viscous honey destined for the hivalstore.

  It sped onward, heavily, its almost transparent wings mere blurs in theair from the rapidity of their vibration. Burl saw its many-faceted eyesstaring before it in worried preoccupation as it soared in laboriousspeed over his head, some fifty feet up.

  He dropped his glance, and then his eyes lighted with excitement. Aslender-bodied wasp was shooting upward from an ambush it had found in athicket of toadstools. It darted swiftly and gracefully upon the bee,which swerved and tried to flee. The droning buzz of the bee's wingsrose to a higher note as it strove to increase its speed. The moredelicately formed wasp headed the clumsier insect back.

  The bee turned again and fled in terror. Each of the insects wasslightly more than four feet in length, but the bee was much theheavier, and it could not attain the speed of which the wasp wascapable.

  The graceful form of the hunting insect rapidly overhauled its fleeingprey, and the wasp dashed in and closed with the bee at a point almostover the heads of the tribesmen. In a clawing, biting tangle ofthrashing, transparent wings and black bodies, the two creatures tumbledto the earth. They fell perhaps thirty yards from where Burl stoodwatching.

  Over and over the two insects rolled, now one uppermost, and then theother. The bee was struggling desperately to insert her sting in themore supple body of her adversary. She writhed and twisted, fightingwith jaw and mandible, wing and claw.

  The wasp was uppermost, and the bee lay on her back, fighting inpanic-stricken desperation. The wasp saw an opening, her jaws darted in,and there was an instant of confusion. Then suddenly the bee, dazed, wasupright with the wasp upon her. A movement too quick for the eye tofollow--and the bee collapsed. The wasp had bitten her in the neck whereall the nerve-cords passed, and the bee was dead.

  Burl waited a moment more, aflame with excitement. He knew, as did allthe tribefolk, what might happen next. When he saw the second act of thetragedy well begun, Burl snapped quick and harsh orders to hisspear-armed men, and they followed him in a wavering line, their weaponstightly clutched.

  Knowing the habits of the insects as they were forced to know them, theyknew that the venture was one of the least dangerous they couldundertake with fighting creatures the size of the wasp, but the idea ofattacking the great creatures whose sharp stings could annihilate any ofthem with a touch, the mere thought of taking the initiative wasappalling. Had their awe of Burl been less complete they would not havedreamed of following him.

  The second act of the tragedy had begun. The bee had been slain by thewasp, a carnivorous insect normally, but the wasp knew that sweet honeywas concealed in the half-filled crop of the bee. Had the bee arrivedsafely at the hive, the sweet and sticky liquid would have beendisgorged and added to the hival store. Now, though the bee's journeywas ended and its flesh was to be crunched and devoured by the wasp, thehoney was the first object of the pirate's solicitude.[1] The deadinsect was rolled over upon its back, and with eager haste the slayerbegan to exploit the body.

  [Footnote 1: The pirate is the _Philanthus Apivorus_.]

  Burl and his men were creeping nearer, but with a gesture Burl bade themhalt for a moment. The wasp's first move was to force the disgorgementof the honey from the bee's crop, and with feverish eagerness it pressedupon the limp body until the shining, sticky liquid appeared. Then thewasp began in ghoulish ecstasy to lick up the sweet stuff, utterlyabsorbed in the feast.

  Many thousands of years before, the absorption of the then tiny insecthad been noticed when engaged in a similar feat, and it was recorded inbooks moldered into dust long ages before Burl's birth that its rapturewas so great that it had been known to fall a victim to a second banditwhile engaged in the horrible banquet.

  Burl had never read the books, but he had been told that the piratewould continue its feast even though seized by a greater enemy, unableto tear itself from the nectar gathered by the creature it had slain.

  The tribesmen waited until the wasp had begun its orgy, licking up thetoothsome stuff disgorged by its dead prey. It ate in gluttonous haste,blind to all sights, deaf to all sounds, able to think of nothing,conceive of
nothing, but the delights of the liquid it was devouring.

  At a signal the tribesmen darted forward. They wavered when near theslender-waisted gourmet, however, and Burl was the first to thrust hisspear with all his strength into the thinly armored body.

  Then the others took courage. A short, horny spear penetrated the veryvitals of the wasp. A club fell with terrific impact upon the slenderwaist. There was a crackling, and the long, spidery limbs quivered andwrithed, while the tribesmen fell back in fear, but without cause.

  Burl struck again, and the wasp fell into two writhing halves, helplessfor harm. The pink-skinned men danced in triumph, and the women andchildren ventured near, delighted.

  Only Burl noticed that even as the wasp was dying, sundered and piercedwith spears, its slender tongue licked out in one last, ecstatic tasteof the nectar that had been its undoing.

  Burdened with the pollen-covered legs of the giant bee, and filled withthe meat from choice portions of the wasp's muscular limbs, the triberesumed its journey. This time Burl had men behind him, still timid,still prone to flee at the slightest alarm, but infinitely moredependable than they had been before.

  They had attacked and slain a wasp whose sting would have killed any ofthem. They had done battle under the leadership of Burl, whose spear hadstruck the first blow. Henceforth they were sharers, in a mild way, ofhis transcendent glory, and henceforth they were more like followers ofa mighty chief and less like spineless worshipers of a demigod whosefeats they were too timid to emulate.

  That night they hid among a group of giant puff-balls, feasting on theloads of meat they had carried thus far with them. Burl watched them nowwithout jealousy of their good spirits. He and Saya sat a little apart,happy to be near each other, speaking in low tones. After a timedarkness fell, and the tribefolk became shapeless bodies speaking invoices that grew drowsy and were silent. The black forms of thetoadstool heads and huge puff-balls were but darker against a dark sky.

  The nightly rain began to fall, drop by drop, drop by drop, upon thedamp and humid earth. Only Burl remained awake for a little while, andhis last waking thought was of pride, disinterested pride. He had thefirst reward of the ruler, gratification in the greatness of his people.

  The red mushrooms had continued to show their glistening heads, thoughBurl thought they were less numerous than in the territory from whichthe tribe had fled. All along the route, now to the right, now to theleft, they had burst and sent their masses of deadly dust into the air.

  Many times the tribefolk had been forced to make a detour to avoid aslowly spreading cloud of death-dealing spores. Once or twice theirescapes had been narrow indeed, but so far there had been no deaths.

  Burl had observed that the mushrooms normally burst only in the daytime,and for a while had thought of causing his followers to do theirjourneying in the night. Only the obvious disadvantages of such acourse--the difficulty of discovering food, and the prowling spidersthat roamed in the darkness--had prevented him. The idea still stayedwith him, however, and two days after the fight with the hunting wasp heput it in practise.

  The tribe came to the top of a small rise in the ground. For an hourthey had been marching and counter-marching to avoid the suddenlyappearing clouds of dust. Once they had been nearly hemmed in, and onlyby mad sprinting did they escape when three of the dull-red cloudsseemed to flow together, closing three sides of a circle.

  They came to the little hillock and halted. Before them stretched aplain all of four miles wide, colored a brownish brick-red by masses ofmushrooms. They had seen mushroom forests before, and knew of thedangers they presented, but there was none so deadly as the plain beforethem. To right and left it stretched as far as the eye could see, butfar away on its farther edge Burl caught a glimpse of flowing water.

  Over the plain itself a dull-red haze seemed to float. It was nothingmore or less than a cloud of the deadly spores, dispersed andindefinite, constantly replenished by the freshly bursting redmushrooms.

  While the people stood and watched a dozen thick columns of dust roseinto the air from scattered points here and there upon the plain,settling slowly again, but leaving behind them enough of their finelydivided substance to keep the thin red haze over the whole plain in itsoriginal, deadly state.

  Burl had seen single red mushrooms before, and even small thickets oftwo and three, but here was a plain of millions, literally millions uponmillions of the malignant growths. Here was one fungoid forest throughwhose aisles no monster beetles stalked, and above whose shadowed depthsno brightly colored butterflies fluttered in joyous abandon. There wereno loud-voiced crickets singing in its hiding-places, nor bodies ofeagerly foraging ants searching inquisitively for bits of food. It was aforest of death, still and silent, quiet and motionless save for thesullen columns of red dust that ever and again shot upward from the tornand ragged envelope of the bursting mushroom.

  Burl and his people watched in wonderment and dismay, but presently ahigh resolve came to Burl. The mushrooms never burst at night, and thedeadly dust from a subsided cloud was not deadly in the morning. As amatter of fact the rain that fell every night made it no more than asodden, thin film of reddish mud by daybreak, mud which dried and caked.

  Burl did not know what occurred, but knew the result. At night or inearly morning, the danger from the red mushrooms was slight. Thereforehe would lead his people through the very jaws of death that night. Hewould lead them through the deadly aisles of this, the forest ofmalignant growths, the place of lurking annihilation.

  It was an act of desperation, and the resolution to carry it throughleft Burl in a state of mind that kept him from observing one thing thatwould have ended all the struggles of his tribe at once. Perhaps aquarter-mile from the edge of the red forest three or four giantcabbages grew, thrusting their colossal leaves upward toward the sky.

  And on the cabbages a dozen lazy slugs fed leisurely, ignoringcompletely the red haze that was never far from them and sometimescovered them. Burl saw them, but the oddity of their immunity from theeffects of the red dust did not strike him. He was fighting to keep hisresolution intact. If he had only realized the significance of what hesaw, however--

  The slugs were covered with a thick soft fur. The tribespeople woregarments of that same material. The fur protected the slugs, and couldhave made the tribe immune to the deadly red dust if they had onlyknown. The slugs breathed through a row of tiny holes upon their backs,as the mature insects breathed through holes upon the bottom of theirabdomens, and the soft fur formed a mat of felt which arrested the fineparticles of deadly dust, while allowing the pure air to pass through.It formed, in effect, a natural gas-mask which the tribesmen should haveadopted, but which they did not discover or invent.

  The remainder of that day they waited in a curious mixture of resolveand fear. The tribe was rapidly reaching a point where it would followBurl over a thousand-foot cliff, and it needed some such blindconfidence to make them prepare to go through the forest of the milliondeadly mushrooms.

  The waiting was a strain, but the actual journey was a nightmare. Burlknew that the toadstools did not burst of themselves during the night,but he knew that the beetle on which he had taken his involuntary ridehad crashed against one in the darkness, and that the fatal dust hadpoured out. He warned his people to be cautious, and led them down theslope of the hill through the blackness.

  For hours they stumbled on in utter darkness, with the pungent, acridodor of the red growths constantly in their nostrils. They put out theirhands and touched the flabby, damp stalks of the monstrous things. Theystumbled and staggered against the leathery skins of the malignantfungoids.

  Death was all about them. At no time during all the dark hours of thenight was there a moment when they could not reach out their hands andtouch a fungus growth that might burst at their touch and fill the airwith poisonous dust, so that all of them would die in gasping, chokingagony.

  And worst of all, before half an hour was past they had lost all senseof direction, so that they
stumbled on blindly through the utterblackness, not knowing whether they were headed toward the river thatmight be their salvation or were wandering hopelessly deeper and deeperinto the silent depths of the forest of strangled things.

  When day came again and the mushrooms sent their columns of fatal dustinto the air would they gasp and fight for breath in the red haze thatwould float like a tenuous cloud above the forest? Would they breathe inflames of firelike torment and die slowly, or would the red dust bemerciful and slay them quickly?

  They felt their way like blind folk, devoid of hope and curiouslyunafraid. Only their hearts were like heavy, cold weights in theirbreasts, and they shouldered aside the swollen sacs of the red mushroomswith a singular apathy as they followed Burl slowly through the midst ofdeath.

  Many times in their journeying they knew that dead creatures were nearby--moths, perhaps, that had blundered into a distended growth whichhad burst upon the impact and killed the thing that had touched it.

  No busy insect scavengers ventured into this plain of silence to salvagethe bodies, however. The red haze preserved the sanctuary of malignanceinviolate. During the day no creature might hope to approach its redaisles and dust-carpeted clearings, and at night the slow-dropping rainfell only upon the rounded heads of the mushrooms.

  In all the space of the forest, only the little band of hopeless people,plodding on behind Burl in the velvet blackness, callously rubbedshoulders with death in the form of the red and glistening mushrooms.Over all the dank expanse of the forest, the only sound was the drippingof the slow and sodden rainfall that began at nightfall and lasted untilday came again.

  The sky began to grow faintly gray as the sun rose behind the banks ofoverhanging clouds. Burl stopped short and uttered what was no more thana groan. He was in a little circular clearing, and the twisted,monstrous forms of the deadly mushrooms were all about. There was notyet enough light for colors to appear, and the hideous, almost obsceneshapes of the loathsome growths on every side showed only as mocking,leering silhouettes as of malicious demons rejoicing at the coming doomof the gray-faced, huddled tribefolk.

  Burl stood still, drooping in discouragement upon his spear, thefeathery moth's antennae bound upon his forehead shadowed darkly againstthe graying sky. Soon the mushrooms would begin to burst--

  Then, suddenly, he lifted his head, encouragement and delight upon hisfeatures. He had heard the ripple of running water. His followers lookedat him with dawning hope. Without a word, Burl began to run, and theyfollowed him more slowly. His voice came back to them in a shout ofdelight.

  Then they, too, broke into a jog-trot. In a moment they had emerged fromthe thick tangle of brownish-red stalks and were upon the banks of awide and swiftly running river, the same river whose gleam Burl hadcaught the day before from the farther side of the mushroom forest.

  Once before Burl had floated down a river upon a mushroom raft. Then hisjourney had been involuntary and unlooked for. He had been carried farfrom his tribe and far from Saya, and his heart had been filled withdesolation.

  Now he viewed the swiftly running current with eager delight. He casthis eyes up and down the bank. Here and there the river-bank rose in alow bluff, and thick shelf-growths stretched out above the water.

  Burl was busy in an instant, stabbing the hard growths with his spearand striving to wrench them free. The tribesmen stared at him,uncomprehending, but at an order from him they did likewise.

  Soon a dozen thick masses of firm, light fungus lay upon the shore whereit shelved gently into the water. Burl began to explain what they wereto do, but one or two of the men dared remonstrate, saying humbly thatthey were afraid to part from him. If they might embark upon the samething with him, they would be safe, but otherwise they were afraid.

  Burl cast an apprehensive glance at the sky. Day was coming rapidly on.Soon the red mushrooms would begin to shoot their columns of deadly dustinto the air. This was no time to pause and deliberate. Then Saya spokesoftly.

  Burl listened, and made a mighty sacrifice. He took his gorgeous velvetcloak from his shoulders--it was made from the wing of a great moth--andtore it into a dozen long, irregular pieces, tearing it along the linesof the sinews that reinforced it. He planted his spear upright in thelargest piece of shelf-fungus and caused his followers to do likewise,then fastened the strips of sinew and velvet to his spear-shaft, andordered them to do the same to the other spears.

  In a matter of minutes the dozen tiny rafts were bobbing on the water,clustered about the larger, central bit. Then, one by one, the tribefolktook their places, and Burl shoved off.

  The agglomeration of cranky, unseaworthy bits of shelf-fungus movedslowly out from the shore until the current caught it. Burl and Saya satupon the central bit, with the other trustful but somewhat frightenedpink-skinned people all about them. And, as they began to move betweenthe mushroom-lined banks of the river and the mist of the night began tolift from its surface, far in the interior of the forest of the redfungoids a column of sullen red leaped into the air. The first of themalignant growths had cast its cargo of poisonous dust into thestill-humid atmosphere.

  The conelike column spread out and grew thin, but even after it had sunkinto the earth, a reddish taint remained in the air about the placewhere it had been. The deadly red haze that hung all through the dayover the red forest was in process of formation.

  But by that time the unstable fungus rafts were far down the river,bobbing and twirling in the current, with the wide-eyed people upon themgazing in wonderment at the shores as they glided by. The red mushroomsgrew less numerous upon the banks. Other growths took their places.Molds and rusts covered the ground as grass had done in ages past.Mushrooms showed their creamy, rounded heads. Malformed things withswollen trunks and branches in strange mockery of the trees they hadsuperseded made their appearance, and once the tribesmen saw the darkbulk of a hunting spider outlined for a moment upon the bank.

  All the long day they rode upon the current, while the insect life thathad been absent in the neighborhood of the forest of death made itsappearance again. Bees once more droned overhead, and wasps anddragon-flies. Four-inch mosquitoes made their appearance, to be foughtoff by the tribefolk with lusty blows, and glittering beetles andshining flies, whose bodies glittered with a metallic luster, buzzed andflew above the water.

  Huge butterflies once more were seen, dancing above the steaming,festering earth in an apparent ecstasy from the mere fact of existence,and all the thousand and one forms of insect life that flew and crawled,and swam and dived, showed themselves to the tribesmen on the raft.

  Water-beetles came lazily to the surface, to snap with sudden energy atmosquitoes busily laying their eggs in the nearly stagnant water by theriver-banks. Burl pointed out to Saya, with some excitement, theirsilver breast-plates that shone as they darted under the water again.And the shell-covered boats of a thousand caddis-worms floated in theeddies and back-waters of the stream. Water-boatmen andwhirligigs--almost alone among insects in not having shared in thegeneral increase of size--danced upon the oily waves.

  The day wore on as the shores flowed by. The tribefolk ate of theirburdens of mushroom and meat, and drank from the fresh water of theriver. Then, when afternoon came, the character of the country about thestream changed. The banks fell away, and the current slackened. Theshores became indefinite, and the river merged itself into a swamp, avast swamp from which a continual muttering came which the tribesmenheard for a long time before they saw the swamp itself.

  The water seemed to turn dark, as black mud took the place of the claythat had formed its bed, and slowly, here and there, then morefrequently, floating green things that were stationary, and did not movewith the current, appeared. They were the leaves of water-lilies, thathad remained with the giant cabbages and a very few other plants in themidst of a fungoid world. The green leaves were twelve feet across, andany one of them would have floated the whole of Burl's tribe.

  Presently they grew numerous so that the channel was made narr
ow, andthe mushroom rafts passed between rows of the great leaves, with hereand there a colossal, waxen blossom in which three men might have hiddenand which exhaled an almost over-powering fragrance into the air.

  And the muttering that had been heard far away grew in volume to anintermittent, incredibly deep bass roar. It seemed to come from thebanks on either side, and actually was the discordant croaking of thegiant frogs, grown to eight feet in length, which lived and loved in thehuge swamp, above which golden butterflies danced in ecstasy, and whichthe transcendently beautiful blossoms of the water-lilies filled withfragrance.

  The swamp was a place of riotous life. The green bodies of the colossalfrogs--perched upon the banks in strange immobility and only openingtheir huge mouths to emit their thunderous croakings--the green bodiesof the frogs blended queerly with the vivid color of the water-lilyleaves. Dragon-flies fluttered in their swift and angular flight abovethe black and reeking mud. Green-bottles and blue-bottles and a hundredother species of flies buzzed busily in the misty air, now and thenfalling prey to the licking tongues of the frogs.

  Bees droned overhead in flight less preoccupied and worried thanelsewhere flitting from blossom to blossom of the tremendouswater-lilies, loading their crops with honey and the bristles of theirlegs with yellow pollen.

  Everywhere over the mushroom-covered world the air was never quite freefrom mist, and the steaming exhalations of the pools, but here in theswamps the atmosphere was so heavily laden with moisture that the bodiesof the tribefolk were covered with glistening droplets, while the wide,flat water-lily leaves glittered like platters of jewels from the"steam" that had condensed upon their upper surfaces.

  The air was full of shining bodies and iridescent wings. Myriads of tinymidges--no more than three or four inches across their wings--dancedabove the slow-flowing water. And butterflies of every imaginable shadeand color, from the most delicate lavender to the most vivid carmine,danced and fluttered, alighting upon the white water-lilies to sipdaintily of their nectar, skimming the surface of the water, enamored oftheir brightly tinted reflections.

  And the pink-skinned tribesfolk, floating through this fairyland ontheir mushroom rafts, gazed with wide eyes at the beauty about them, anddrew in great breaths of the intoxicating fragrance of the great whiteflowers that floated like elfin boats upon the dark water.