The Forgotten Planet

by Murray Leinster

  _5. MEAT OF MAN'S KILLING!_

  In their climb up from savagery, the principal handicap from which menhave always suffered is the fact that they are human. Or it can be saidthat human beings always have to struggle against the obstacle which issimply that they are men. To Burl his splendid return to the tribecalled for a suitable reaction. He expected them to take note that hewas remarkable, unparalleled, and in all ways admirable. He expectedthem to look at him with awe. He rather hoped that the sight of himwould involve something like ecstasy.

  And as a matter of fact, it did. For fully an hour they gathered aroundhim while he used his--and their--scanty vocabulary to tell them of hisunique achievements and adventures during the past two days and nights.They listened attentively and with appropriate admiration and vicariouspride.

  This in itself was a step upward. Mostly their talk was of where foodmight be found and where danger lurked. Strictly practical dataconnected with the pressing business of getting enough to eat andstaying alive. The sheer pressure of existence was so great that thehumans Burl knew had altogether abandoned such luxuries as boastfulnarrative. They had given up tradition. They did not think of art ineven its most primitive forms, and the only craft they knew was thecraftiness which promoted simple survival. So for them to listen to anarrative which did not mean either food or even a lessening of dangerto themselves was a step upward on the cultural scale.

  But they were savages. They inspected the dead spider, shuddering. Itwas pure horror. They did not touch it--the adults not at all, and evenDik and Tet not for a very long time. Nobody thought of spiders as food.Too many of them had been spiders' food.

  But presently even the horror aroused by the spider palled. The youngerchildren quailed at sight of it, of course; but the adults came toignore it. Only the two gangling boys tried to break off a furry legwith which to charge and terrify the younger ones still further. Theyfailed to get it loose because they did not think of cutting it. Butthey had nothing to cut it with anyhow.

  Old Jon went wheezing off, foraging. He waved a hand to Burl as he went.Burl was indignant. But it was true that he had brought back no food.And people must eat.

  Tama went off, her tongue clacking, with Lona the half-grown girl tohelp her find and bring back something edible. Dor, the strongest man inthe tribe, went away to look where he thought there might be ediblemushrooms full-grown again. Cori left with her children--very carefullyon watch for danger to them--to see what she could find.

  In little more than an hour Burl's audience had diminished to Saya.Within two hours ants found the spider where it had been placed for thetribe to admire. Within three hours there was nothing left of it. Duringthe fourth hour--as Burl struggled to dredge up some new, splendid itemto tell Saya for the tenth time, or thereabouts--during the fourth hourone of the tribeswomen beckoned to Saya. She left with a flashingbackward smile for Burl. She went, actually, to help dig up undergroundfungi--much like truffles--discovered by the older woman. Sheundoubtedly expected to share them with Burl.

  But in five hours it was night and Burl was very indignant with histribesfolk. They had shifted the location of the hiding-place for thenight, and nobody had thought to tell him. And if Saya wished to comefor Burl, to lead him to that place, she did not dare for the simplereason that it was night.

  For a long time after he found a hiding-place, Burl fumed bitterly tohimself. He was very much of a human being, differing from hisfellows--so far--mainly because he had been through experiences notshared by them. He had resolved a subjective dilemma of sorts bydetermining to return to his tribe. He had discovered a weapon which, atfirst, had promised--and secured--foodstuff, and later had saved himfrom a tarantula. His discovery that fish-oil was useful when applied tospider-snares and things sticking to the feet was of vast importance tothe tribe. Most remarkable of all, he had deliberately killed a spider.And he had experienced triumph. Temporarily he had even experiencedadmiration.

  The adulation was a thing which could never be forgotten. Humanappetites are formed by human experiences. One never had an appetite fora thing one has not known in some fashion. But no human being who hasknown triumph is ever quite the same again, and anybody who has oncebeen admired by his fellows is practically ruined for life--at least sofar as being independent of admiration is concerned.

  So during the dark hours, while the slow rain dipped in separate, heavydrops from the sky, Burl first coddled his anger--which was a very goodthing for a member of a race grown timorous and furtive--and then beganto make indignant plans to force his tribesmen to yield him more of thedelectable sensations he alone had begun to know.

  He was not especially comfortable during the night. The hiding-place hehad chosen was not water-tight. Water trickled over him for severalhours before he discovered that his cloak, though it would not keep himdry--which it would have done if properly disposed--would still keep thesame water next to his skin where his body could warm it. Then he slept.When morning came he felt singularly refreshed. For a savage, he wasunusually clean, too.

  He woke before dawn with vainglorious schemes in his head. The sky grewgray and then almost white. The overhanging cloud bank seemed almost totouch the earth, but gradually withdrew. The mist among themushroom-forests grew thinner, and the slow rain ceased reluctantly.When he peered from his hiding-place, the mad world he knew was, as faras he could see, quite mad, as usual. The last of the night-insects hadvanished. The day-creatures began to venture out.

  Not too far from the crevice where he'd hidden was an ant-hill,monstrous by standards on other planets. It was piled up not of sand butgravel and small boulders. Burl saw a stirring. At a certain spot thesmooth, outer surface crumbled and fell into an invisible opening. Aspot of darkness appeared. Two slender, thread-like antennae popped out.They withdrew and popped out again. The spot enlarged until there was asizeable opening. An ant appeared, one of the warrior-ants of thisparticular breed. It stood fiercely over the opening, waving itsantennae agitatedly as if striving to sense some danger to itsmetropolis.

  He was fourteen inches long, this warrior, and his mandibles were fierceand strong. After a moment, two other warriors thrust past him. They ranabout the whole extent of the ant-hill, their legs clicking, antennaewaving restlessly.

  They returned, seeming to confer with the first, then went back downinto the city with every appearance of satisfaction. As if they made aproperly reassuring report, within minutes afterward, a flood of black,ill-smelling workers poured out of the opening and dispersed abouttheir duties.

  The city of the ants had begun its daily toil. There were deep galleriesunderground here: graineries, storage-vaults, refectories, andnurseries, and even a royal apartment in which the queen-ant reposed.She was waited upon by assiduous courtiers, fed by royal stewards, andcombed and caressed by the hands of her subjects and children. A dozentimes larger than her loyal servants, she was no less industrious thanthey in her highly specialized fashion. From the time of waking to thetime of rest she was queen-mother in the most literal imaginable sense.At intervals, to be measured only in minutes, she brought forth an egg,perhaps three inches in length, which was whisked away to the municipalnursery. And this constant, insensate increase in the population of thecity made all its frantic industry at once possible and necessary.

  Burl came out and spread his cloak on the ground. In a little while hefelt a tugging at it. An ant was tearing off a bit of the hem. Burl slewthe ant angrily and retreated. Twice within the next half-hour he had tomove swiftly to avoid foragers who would not directly attack him becausehe was alive--unless he seemed to threaten danger--but who lusted afterthe fabric of his garments.

  This annoyance--and Burl would merely have taken it as a thing to beaccepted a mere two days before--this annoyance added to Burl'sindignation with the world about him. He was in a very bad temper indeedwhen he found old Jon, wheezing as he checked on the possibility ofthere being edible mushrooms in a thicket of poisonous, pink-and-yellowamanitas.

  Burl haughtily c
ommanded Jon to follow him. Jon's untidy whiskers partedas his mouth dropped open in astonishment. Burl's tribe was so far frombeing really a tribe that for anybody to give a command was astonishing.There was no social organization, absolutely no tradition of command.As a rule life was too uncertain for anybody to establish authority.

  But Jon followed Burl as he stamped on through the morning mist. He sawa small movement and shouted imperatively. This was appalling! Men didnot call attention to themselves! He gathered up Dor, the strongest ofthe men. Later, he found Jak who some day would wear an expression ofmonkey-like wisdom. Then Tet and Dik, the half-grown boys, came troopingto see what was happening.

  Burl led onward. A quarter of a mile and they came upon a great, guttedshell which had been a rhinoceros beetle the day before. Today it was adisassembled mass of chitinous armor. Burl stopped, frowningportentously. He showed his quaking followers how to arm themselves. Dorpicked up the horn hesitantly, Burl showing him how to use it. Hestabbed out awkwardly with the sharp fragment of armor. Burl showedothers how to use the leg-sections for clubs. They tested them withoutconviction. In any sort of danger, they would trust to their legs and afrantically effective gift for hiding.

  Burl snarled at his tribesmen and led them on. It was unprecedented. Butbecause of that fact there was no precedent for rebellion. Burl led themin a curve. They glanced all about apprehensively.

  When they came to an unusually large and attractive clump of goldenedible mushrooms, there were murmurings. Old Jon was inclined to go andload himself and retire to some hiding-place for as long as the foodlasted. But Burl snarled again.

  Numbly they followed on--Dor and Jon and Jak and the two youngsters. Theground inclined upward. They came upon puffballs. There was a new kindvisible, colored a lurid red, that did not grow like the others. Itseemed to begin and expand underground, then thrust away the soil abovein its development. Its taut, angry-red parchment envelope seemed toswell from a reservoir of subterranean material. Burl and the others hadnever seen anything like it.

  They climbed higher. As other edible mushrooms came into view Burl'sfollowers cheered visibly. This was a new tribal ground anyhow and ithad not been fully explored. But Burl was leading them to quantities offood they had never suspected before.

  Quaintly, it was Burl himself who began to feel an uncomfortable drynessin his throat. He knew what he was about. His followers did not suspectbecause to them what he intended was simply inconceivable. They couldn'tsuspect it because they couldn't imagine anybody doing such a thing. Itsimply couldn't be thought of at all.

  It is rather likely that Burl began to regret that he had thought of it.It had come to him first as an angry notion in the night. Then the ideahad developed as a suitable punishment for his abandonment. By dawn itwas an ambition so terrifying that it fascinated him. Now he wascommitted to it in his own mind, and the only way to keep his knees fromknocking together was to keep moving. If his followers had protestednow, he would have allowed himself to be persuaded. But he heard morepleased murmurs. There was more edible stuff, in quantity. But therewere no ant-trails here, no sounds of foraging beetles. This was an areawhich Burl's tribesmen could clearly see was almost devoid of dangerouslife. They seemed to brighten a little. This, they seemed to think,would be a good place to move to.

  But Burl knew better. There were few ground-insects here because thearea was hunted out. And Burl knew what had done the hunting.

  He expected the others to realize where they were when they dodgedaround a clump of the new red puffballs and saw bald rock before themand a falling-away to emptiness beyond. Even then they could haveretreated, but it did not enter their heads that Burl could do anythinglike this.

  They didn't know where they were until Burl held up his hand for silencealmost at the edge of the rock-knob which rose a hundred feet sheer,curving out a little near its top. They looked out uncomprehendingly atthe mist-filled air and the nightmare landscape fading into itsgrayness. A tiny spider, the very youngest of hatchlings and barely fourinches across, stealthily stalked another vastly smaller mite. The otherwas the many-legged larva of the oil-beetle. The larva itself had beencalled--on other planets by other men--the bee-louse. It could easilyhide in the thick furl of a giant bumble-bee. But this one smallcreature never practiced that ability. The hatchling spider sprang andthe small midge died. When the spider had grown and, being grown, spun aweb, it would slay great crickets with the same insane ferocity.

  Burl's followers saw first this and then certain three-quarter-inchstrands of dirty silk that came up over the edge of the precipice. Asone man after another realized where he was, he trembled violently. Dorturned gray. Jon and Jak were paralyzed with horror. They couldn't run.

  Seeing the others even more frightened than himself filled Burl with awholly unwarranted courage. When he opened his mouth, they cringed. Ifhe shouted then at least one, more likely several, of them would die.

  And this was because some forty or fifty feet down the mould-speckledprecipice hung a drab-white object nearly hemispherical, some six feetin its half-diameter. A number of little semi-circular doors were fixedabout its sides like arches. Though each one seemed to be a doorway,only one would open.

  The thing had been oddly beautiful at first glance. It was held fast tothe inward-sloping stone by cables, one or two of which stretched downtoward the ground. Others reached up over the precipice-edge to hold itfast. It was a most unusual engineering feat, yet something more thanthat: this was also an ogre's castle. Ghastly trophies were fastened tothe outer walls and hung by silken cords below it. Here was the hind-legof one of the smaller beetles, there the wing-case of a flying creature.Here a snail-shell--the snails of Earth would hardly have recognizedtheir descendant--and there a boulder weighing forty pounds or more. Theshrunken head-armor of a beetle, the fierce jaws of a cricket, thepitiful shreds of dozens of creatures--all had once provided meals forthe monster in the castle. And dangling by the longest cord of all wasthe shrunken, shriveled body of a long-dead man.

  Burl glared at his tribesmen, clamping his jaws tight lest they chatter.He knew, as did the others, that any noise would bring the clotho spiderswinging up its anchor-cables to the cliff-top. The men didn't daremove. But every one of them--and Burl was among the foremost--knew thatinside the half-dome of gruesome relics the monster reposed in luxuryand ease. It had eight furry, attenuated legs and a face that was a maskof horror. The eyes glittered malevolently above needle-sharp mandibles.It was a hunting-spider. At any moment it might leave the charnel-housein which it lived to stalk and pursue prey.

  Burl motioned the others forward. He led one of them to the end of acable where it curled up over the edge for an anchorage. He ripped theend free--and his flesh crawled as he did so. He found a boulder andknotted the end of the cable about it. In a whisper that imitated aspider's ferocity, Burl gave the man orders. He plucked a second quakingtribesman by the arm. With the jerky, uncontrolled movements of a robot,Dor allowed himself to be led to a second cable.

  Burl commanded in a frenzy. He worked with stiff fingers and a drythroat, not knowing how he could do this thing. He had formed a plan inanger which he somehow was carrying out in a panic. Although hisfollowers were as responsive as dead men, they obeyed him because theyfelt like dead men, unable to resist. After all, it was simple enough.There were boulders at the top of the precipice and silken cables hungtaut over the edge. As Burl fastened a heavy boulder to each cable hecould find, he loosened the silken strand until it hung tight only atthe very edge of the more-than-vertical fall.

  He took his post--and his followers gazed at him with the despairingeyes of zombies--and made a violent, urgent gesture. One man dumped hisboulder over the precipice's edge. Burl cried out shrilly to the others,half-mad with his own terror. There was a ripping sound. The other mendumped their boulders over, fleeing with the movement--the paralysis ofhorror relieved by that one bit of exertion.

  Burl could not flee. He panted and gasped, but he had to see. He stareddown the d
izzy wall. Boulders ripped and tore their way down thecliff-wall, pulling the cables loose from the face of the precipice.They shot out into space and jerked violently at the half-globular nest,ripping it loose from its anchorage.

  Burl cried out exultantly. And as he cried out the shout became abubbling sound; for although the ogre's silken castle did swing clear,it did not drop the sixty feet to the hard ground below. There was onecable Burl had missed, hidden by rock-tripe and mould in a depressedpart of the cliff-top. The spider's house was dangling crazily by thatone strand, bobbing erratically to and fro in mid-air.

  And there was a convulsive struggle inside it. One of the arch-doorsopened and the spider emerged. It was doubtless confused, but spiderssimply do not know terror. Their one response to the unusual isferocity. There was still one cable leading up the cliff-face--thething's normal climbing-rope to its hunting-ground above. The spiderleaped for this single cable. Its legs grasped the cord. It swarmedupward, poison fangs unsheathed, mandibles clashing in rage. The shaggyhair of its body seemed to bristle with insane ferocity. The skinnyarticulated legs fairly twinkled as it rose. It made slavering noises,unspeakably horrifying.

  Burl's followers were already in panic-stricken flight. He could hearthem crashing through obstacles as they ran glassy-eyed from the horrorthey only imagined, but which Burl could not but encounter. Burlshivered, his body poised for equally frenzied but quite hopelessflight. But his first step was blocked. There was a boulder behind him,standing on end, reaching up to his knee. He could not take the firststep without dodging it.

  It was not the Burl of the terror-filled childhood who acted then. Itwas the throw-back, the atavism to a bolder ancestry. While the Burl whowas a product of his environment was able to know only the stunnedsensations of purest panic, the other Burl acted on a sounder basis ofdesperation. The emerging normal human seized the upright boulder. Hestaggered to the rock-face with it. He dumped it down the line of thedescending cable.

  Humans do have ancestral behavior-patterns built into their nervoussystems. A frightened small child does not flee; it swarms up thenearest adult to be carried away from danger. At ten a child does notclimb but runs. And there is an age when it is normal for a man to standat bay. This last instinct can be conditioned away. In Burl's fellowsand his immediate forbears it had been. But things had happened to Burlto break that conditioning.

  He flung the pointed boulder down. For the fraction of a second he heardonly the bubbling, gnashing sounds the spider made as it climbed towardhim. Then there was a quite indescribable cushioned impact. After that,there were seconds in which Burl heard nothing whatever--and then anoise which could not be described either, but was the impact of thespider's body on the ground a hundred feet below, together with thepointed boulder it had fought insanely during all its fall. And theboulder was on top. The noise was sickening.

  Burl found himself shaking all over. His every muscle was tense andstrained. But the spider did not crawl over the edge of the precipiceand something had hit far below.

  A long minute later he managed to look.

  The nest still dangled at the end of the single cable, festooned withits gruesome trophies. But Burl saw the spider. It was, of course,characteristically tenacious of life. Its legs writhed and kicked, butthe body was crushed and mangled.

  As Burl stared down, trying to breathe again, an ant drew near theshattered creature. It stridulated. Other ants came. They hoveredrestlessly at the edge of the death-scene. One loathesome leg did notquiver. An ant moved in on it.

  The ants began to tear the dead spider apart, carrying its fragments totheir city a mile away.

  Up on the cliff-top Burl got unsteadily to his feet and found that hecould breathe. He was drenched in sweat, but the shock of triumph was asoverwhelming as any of the terrors felt by ancestors on this planet.

  On no other planet in the Galaxy could any human experience such triumphas Burl felt now because never before had human beings been socompletely subjugated by their environment. On no other planet had suchan environment existed, with humans flung so helplessly upon its mercy.

  Burl had been normal among his fellows when he was as frightened andfurtive as they. Now he had been given shock treatment by fate. He wasvery close to normal for a human being newly come to the forgottenplanet, save that he had the detailed information which would enable anormal man to cope with the nightmare environment. What he lacked nowwas the habit.

  But it would be intolerable for him to return to his former state ofmind.

  He walked almost thoughtfully after his fled followers. And he wasstill a savage in that he was remarkably matter-of-fact. He paused tobreak off a huge piece of the edible golden mushrooms his fellow-men hadnoticed on the way up. Lugging it easily, he went back down over theground that had looked so astonishingly free of inimical life--which itwas because of the spider that had used it as a hunting-preserve.

  Burl began to see that it was not satisfactory to be one of a tribe ofmen who ran away all the time. If one man with a spear or stone couldkill spiders, it was ridiculous for half a dozen men to run away andleave that one man the job alone. It made the job harder.

  It occurred to Burl that he had killed ants without thinking too muchabout it, but nobody else had. Individual ants could be killed. If hegot his followers to kill foot-long ants, they might in time battle thesmaller, two-foot beetles. If they came to dare so much, they mightattack greater creatures and ultimately attempt to resist the realpredators.

  Not clearly but very dimly, the Burl who had been shocked back to theviewpoint which was normal to the race of men saw that human beingscould be more than the fugitive vermin on which other creatures preyed.It was not easy to envision, but he found it impossible to imaginesinking back to his former state. As a practical matter, if he was toremain as leader his tribesmen would have to change.

  It was a long time before he reached the neighborhood of thehiding-place of which he had not been told the night before. He sniffedand listened. Presently he heard faint, murmurous noises. He tracedthem, hearing clearly the sound of hushed weeping and excited, timidchattering. He heard old Tama shrilly bewailing fate and the stupidityof Burl in getting himself killed.

  He pushed boldly through the toadstool-growth and found his tribe allgathered together and trembling. They were shaken. They chatteredtogether--not discussing or planning, but nervously recalling theterrifying experience they had gone through.

  Burl stepped through the screen of fungi and men gaped at him. Then theyleaped up to flee, thinking he might be pursued. Tet and Dik babbledshrilly. Burl cuffed them. It was an excellent thing for him to do. Noman had struck another man in Burl's memory. Cuffings were reserved forchildren. But Burl cuffed the men who had fled from the cliff-edge. Andbecause they had not been through Burl's experiences, they took thecuffings like children.

  He took Jon and Jak by the ear and heaved them out of the hiding-place.He followed them, and then drove them to where they could see the baseof the cliff from whose top they had tumbled stones--and then run away.He showed them the carcass of the spider, now being carted awaypiecemeal by ants. He told them angrily how it had been killed.

  They looked at him fearfully.

  He was exasperated. He scowled at them. And then he saw them shiftinguneasily. There were clickings. A single, foraging black ant--ratherlarge, quite sixteen inches long--moved into view. It seemed to bewandering purposelessly, but was actually seeking carrion to take backto its fellows. It moved toward the men. They were alive, therefore, itdid not think of them as food--though it could regard them as enemies.

  Burl moved forward and struck with his club. It was butchery. It wasunprecedented. When the creature lay still he commanded one of his typofor followers to take it up. Inside its armored legs there would bemeat. He mentioned the fact, pungently. Their faces expressed amazedwonderment.

  There was another clicking. Another solitary ant. Burl handed his clubto Dor, pushing him forward. Dor hesitated. Though he was not afraid ofon
e wandering ant, he held back uneasily. Burl barked at him.

  Dor struck clumsily and botched the job. Burl had to use his spear tofinish it. But a second bit of prey lay before the men.

  Then, quite suddenly, this completely unprecedented form of foragingbecame understandable to Burl's followers. Jak giggled nervously.

  An hour later Burl led them back to the tribe's hiding-place. The othershad been terror-stricken, not knowing where the men had gone. But theirterror changed to mute amazement when the men carried huge quantities ofmeat and edible mushroom into the hiding-place. The tribe held whatamounted to a banquet.

  Dik and Tet swaggered under a burden of ant-carcass. This was not, ofcourse, in any way revolting. Back on Earth, even thousands of yearsbefore, Arabs had eaten locusts cooked in butter and salted. All men hadeaten crabs and other crustaceans, whose feeding habits were similar tothose of ants. If Burl and his tribesmen had thought to be fastidious,ants on the forgotten planet would still have been considered edible,since they had not lost the habits of extreme cleanliness which madethem notable on Earth.

  This feast of all the tribe, in which men had brought back not onlymushroom to be eaten, but actual prey--small prey--of their hunting, wasvery probably the first such occasion in at least thirty generations ofthe forty-odd since the planet's unintended colonization. Like the otherevents, which began with Burl trying to spear a fish with arhinoceros-beetle's horn, it was not only novel, on that world, butwould in time have almost incredibly far-reaching consequences. Perhapsthe most significant thing about it was its timing. It came at verynearly the latest instant at which it could have done any good.

  There was a reason which nobody in the tribe would ever remember toassociate with the significance of this banquet. A long timebefore--months in terms of Earth-time--there had been a strong breezethat blew for three days and nights. It was an extremely unusualwindstorm. It had seemed the stranger, then, because during all itsduration everyone in the tribe had been sick, suffering continuously.When the windstorm had ended, the suffering ceased. A long time passedand nobody remembered it any longer.

  There was no reason why they should. Yet, since that time there had beena new kind of thing growing among the innumerable moulds and rusts andtoadstools of the lowlands. Burl had seen them on his travels, and theexpeditionary force against the clotho spider had seen them on thejourney up to the cliff-edge. Red puffballs, developing firstunderground, were now pushing the soil aside to expose taut, crimsonparchment spheres to the open air. The tribesmen left them alone becausethey were strange; and strange things were always dangerous. Puffballsthey were familiar with--big, misshapen things which shot at a touch apowder into the air. The particles of powder were spores--the seed fromwhich they grew. Spores had remained infinitely small even on theforgotten planet where fungi grew huge. Only their capacity for growthhad increased. The red growths were puffballs, but of a new anddifferent kind.

  As the tribe ate and admired, the hunters boasting of their courage, oneof the new red mushrooms reached maturity.

  This particular growing thing was perhaps two feet across, its main partspherical. Almost eighteen inches of the thing rose above-ground. Atawny and menacing red, the sphere was contained in a parchment-likeskin that was pulled taut. There was internal tension. But the skin wastough and would not yield, yet the inexorable pressure of life withindemanded that it stretch. It was growing within, but the skin withouthad ceased to grow.

  This one happened to be on a low hillside a good half-mile from theplace where Burl and his fellows banqueted. Its tough, red parchmentskin was tensed unendurably. Suddenly it ripped apart with an explosivetearing noise. The dry spores within billowed out and up like the smokeof a shell-explosion, spurting skyward for twenty feet and more. At thetop of their ascent they spread out and eddied like a cloud of reddishsmoke. They hung in the air. They drifted in the sluggish breeze. Theyspread as they floated, forming a gradually extending, descendingdust-cloud in the humid air.

  A bee, flying back toward its hive, droned into the thin mass of dust.It was preoccupied. The dust-cloud was not opaque, but only a thickhaze. The bee flew into it.

  For half a dozen wing-beats nothing happened. Then the bee veeredsharply. Its deep-toned humming rose in pitch. It made convulsivemovements in mid-air. It lost balance and crashed heavily to the ground.There its legs kicked and heaved violently but without purpose. Thewings beat furiously but without rhythm or effect. Its body bent inparoxysmic flexings. It stung blindly at nothing.

  After a little while the bee died. Like all insects, bees breathethrough spiracles--breathing-holes in their abdomens. This bee had flowninto the cloud of red dust which was the spore-cloud of the newmushrooms.

  The cloud drifted slowly along over the surface of yeasts and moulds,over toadstools and variegated fungus monstrosities. It moved steadilyover a group of ants at work upon some bit of edible stuff. They wereseized with an affliction like that of the bee. They writhed, movedconvulsively. Their legs thrashed about. They died.

  The cloud of red dust settled as it moved. By the time it had travelleda quarter-mile, it had almost all settled to the ground.

  But a half-mile away there was another skyward-spurting uprush of reddust which spread slowly with the breeze. A quarter-mile away anotherplumed into the air. Farther on, two of them spouted their spores towardthe clouds almost together.

  Living things that breathed the red dust writhed and died. And thered-dust puffballs were scattered everywhere.

  Burl and his tribesmen feasted, chattering in hushed tones of theremarkable fact that men ate meat of their own killing.