_7. JOURNEY THROUGH DEATH_
It was late dusk and the reddened clouds overhead were deepeningsteadily toward black. Dark shadows hung everywhere. The clay cliff cutoff all vision to one side, but elsewhere Burl could see outward untilthe graying haze blotted out the horizon. Here and there, bees dronedhomeward to hive or burrow. Sometimes a slender, graceful wasp passedoverhead, its wings invisible by the swiftness of their vibration.
A few butterflies lingered hungrily in the distance, seeking the fewthings they could still feast upon. No moth had wakened yet to thenight. The cloud-bank grew more sombre. The haze seemed to close in andshrink the world that Burl could see.
He watched, raging, for the sight that would provide him with thetriumph to end all triumphs among his followers. The soft, down-reachingfingers of the night touched here and there and the day ended at thosespots. Then, from the heart of the deep redness to the west a flyingcreature came. It was a beautiful thing--a yellow emperorbutterfly--flapping eastward with great sail-like velvet wings thatseemed black against the sunset. Burl saw it sweep across the incrediblesky, alight delicately, and disappear behind a mass of toadstoolsclustered so thickly they seemed nearly a hillock and not a mass ofgrowing things.
Then darkness closed in completely, but Burl still stared where theyellow emperor had landed. There was that temporary, utter quiet whenday-things were hidden and night-things had not yet ventured out.Fox-fire glowed. Patches of pale phosphorescence--luminousmushrooms--shone faintly in the dark.
Presently Burl moved through the night. He could imagine the yellowemperor in its hiding-place, delicately preening slender limbs before itsettled down to rest until the new day dawned. He had noted landmarks,to guide himself. A week earlier and his blood would have run cold atthe bare thought of doing what he did now. In mere cool-headeddetachment he would have known that what he did was close to madness.But he was neither cool-headed nor detached.
He crossed the clear ground before the low cliff. But for the fox-firebeacons he would have been lost instantly. The slow drippings of rainbegan. The sky was dead black. Now was the time for night-things to fly,and male tarantulas to go seeking mates and prey. It was definitely notime for adventuring.
Burl moved on. He found the close-packed toadstools by the process ofrunning into them in the total obscurity. He fumbled, trying to forcehis way between them. It could not be done; they grew too close and toolow. He raged at this impediment. He climbed.
This was insanity. Burl stood on spongy mushroom-stuff that quivered andyielded under his weight. Somewhere something boomed upward, rising onfast-beating wings into blackness. He heard the pulsing drone offour-inch mosquitos close by. He moved forward, the fungus supportswaying, so that he did not so much walk as stagger over theclose-packed mushroom heads. He groped before him with spear and panteda little. There was a part of him which was bitterly afraid, but heraged the more furiously because if once he gave way even to caution, itwould turn to panic.
Burl would have made a strange spectacle in daylight gaudily clothed ashe was in soft blue fur and velvet cloak, staggering over swayinginsecurity, coddling ferocity in himself against the threat of fear.
Then his spear told him there was emptiness ahead. Something moved,below. He heard and felt it stirring the toadstool-stalks on which hestood.
Burl raised his spear, grasping it in both hands. He plunged down withit, stabbing fiercely.
The spear struck something vastly more resistant than any mushroom couldbe. It penetrated. Then the stabbed thing moved as Burl landed upon it,flinging him off his feet, but he clung to the firmly imbedded weapon.And if his mouth had opened for a yell of victory as he plunged down,the nature of the surface on which he found himself, and the kind ofmovement he felt, turned that yell into a gasp of horror.
It wasn't the furry body of a butterfly he had landed on; his spearhadn't pierced such a creature's soft flesh. He had leaped upon thebroad, hard back of a huge, meat-eating, nocturnal beetle. His spear hadpierced not the armor, but the leathery joint-tissue between head andthorax.
The giant creature rocketed upward with Burl clinging to his spear. Heheld fast with an agonized strength. His mount rose from the blacknessof the ground into the many times more terrifying blackness of the air.It rose up and up. If Burl could have screamed, he would have done so,but he could not cry out. He could only hold fast, glassy-eyed.
Then he dropped. Wind roared past him. The great insect was clumsy atflying. All beetles are. Burl's weight and the pain it felt made itsflying clumsier still. There was a semi-liquid crashing and an impact.Burl was torn loose and hurled away. He crashed into the spongy top of amushroom and came to rest with his naked shoulder hanging halfway oversome invisible drop. He struggled.
He heard the whining drone of his attempted prey. It rocketed aloftagain. But there was something wrong with it. With his weight applied tothe spear as he was torn free, Burl had twisted the weapon in the wound.It had driven deeper, multiplying the damage of the first stab.
The beetle crashed to earth again, nearby. As Burl struggled again, themushroom-stalk split and let him gently to the ground.
He heard the flounderings of the great beetle in the darkness. Itmounted skyward once more, its wing-beats no longer making a sustainednote. It thrashed the air irregularly and wildly.
Then it crashed again.
There was seeming silence, save for the steady drip-drip of the rain.And Burl came out of his half-mad fear: he suddenly realized that hehad slain a victim even more magnificent than a spider, because thiscreature was meat.
He found himself astonishedly running toward the spot where the beetlehad last fallen.
But he heard it struggle aloft once more. It was wounded to death. Burlfelt certain of it this time. It floundered in mid-air and crashedagain.
He was within yards of it before he checked himself. Now he wasweaponless, and the gigantic insect flung itself about madly on theground, striking out with colossal wings and limbs, fighting it knew notwhat. It struggled to fly, crashed, and fought its way off theground--ever more weakly--then smashed again into mushrooms. There itfloundered horribly in the darkness.
Burl drew near and waited. It was still, but pain again drove it to asenseless spasm of activity.
Then it struck against something. There was a ripping noise andinstantly the close, peppery, burning smell of the red dust was in theair. The beetle had floundered into one of the close-packed redpuffballs, tightly filled with the deadly red spores. The red dust wouldnot normally have been released at night. With the nightly rain, itwould not travel so far or spread so widely.
Burl fled, panting.
Behind him he heard his victim rise one last time, spurred toimpossible, final struggle by the anguish caused by the breathed-in reddust. It rose clumsily into the darkness in its death-throes and crashedto the ground again for the last time.
In time to come, Burl and his followers might learn to use the red-dustpuffballs as weapons--but not how to spread them beyond their normalrange. But now, Burl was frightened. He moved hastily sidewise. The dustwould travel down-wind. He got out of its possible path.
There could be no exultation where the red dust was. Burl suddenlyrealized what had happened to him. He had been carried aloft an unknownthough not-great distance, in an unknown direction. He was separatedfrom his tribe, with no faintest idea how to find them in the darkness.And it was night.
He crouched under the nearest huge toadstool and waited for the dawn,listening dry-throated for the sound of death coming toward him throughthe night.
But only the wind-beats of night-fliers came to his ears, and thediscordant notes of gray-bellied truffle-beetles as they roamed themushroom thickets, seeking the places beneath which--so their adaptedinstincts told them--fungoid dainties, not too much unlike the trufflesof Earth, awaited the industrious miner. And, of course, there was thateternal, monotonous dripping of the raindrops, falling at irregularintervals from the sky.
Red puffballs did
not burst at night. They would not burst anyhow,except at one certain season of their growth. But Burl and his folk hadso far encountered the over-hasty ones, bursting earlier than most. Thetime of ripeness was very nearly here, though. When day came again, andthe chill dampness of the night was succeeded by the warmth of themorning, almost the first thing Burl saw in the gray light was a tallspouting of brownish-red stuff leaping abruptly into the air from aburst red parchment-like sphere.
He stood up and looked anxiously all around. Here and there, all overthe landscape, slowly and at intervals, the plumes of fatal red spranginto the air. There was nothing quite like it anywhere else. An ancientman, inhabiting Earth, might have likened the appearance to that of ascattered and leisurely bombardment. But Burl had no analogy for them.
He saw something hardly a hundred yards from where he had hidden duringthe night. The dead beetle lay there, crumpled and limp. Burl eyed itspeculatively. Then he saw something that filled him with elation. Thelast crash of the beetle to the ground had driven his spear deeplybetween the joints of the corselet and neck. Even if the red dust hadnot finished the creature, the spear-point would have ended its life.
He was thrilled once more by his superlative greatness. He made due notethat he was a mighty slayer. He took the antennae as proof of his valorand hacked off a great barb-edged leg for meat. And then he rememberedthat he did not know how to find his fellow-tribesmen. He had no ideawhich way to go.
Even a civilized man would have been at a loss, though he would havehunted for an elevation from which to look for the cliff hiding-place ofthe tribe. But Burl had not yet progressed so far. His wild ride of thenight before had been at random, and the chase after the wounded beetleno less dictated by chance. There was no answer.
He set off anxiously, searching everywhere. But he had to be alert forall the dangers of an inimical world while keeping, at the same time, anextremely sharp eye out for bursting red puffballs.
At the end of an hour he thought he saw familiar things. Then herecognized the spot. He had come back to the dead beetle. It was alreadythe center of a mass of small black bodies which pulled and hacked atthe tough armor, gnawing out great lumps of flesh to be carried to thenearest ant-city.
Burl set off again, very carefully avoiding any place that he recognizedas having been seen that morning. Sometimes he walked throughmushroom-thickets--dangerous places to be in--and sometimes overrelatively clear ground colored exotically with varicolored fungi. Morethan once he saw the clouds of red stuff spurting in the distance. Deepanxiety filled him. He had no idea that there were such things as pointsof the compass. He knew only that he needed desperately to find histribesfolk again.
They, of course, had given him up for dead. He had vanished in thenight. Old Tama complained of him shrilly. The night, to them, meantdeath. Jon quaked watchfully all through it. When Burl did not come tothe feast of mushroom that Jon and Dor had brought back, they soughthim. They even called timidly into the darkness. They heard thethrobbing of huge wings as a great creature rose desperately into thesky, but they did not associate that sound with Burl. If they had, theywould have been instantly certain of his fate.
As it was, the tribe's uneasiness grew into terror which rapidly turnedto despair. They began to tremble, wondering what they would do with nobold chieftain to guide them. He was the first man to command allegiancefrom others in much too long a period, on the forgotten planet, but thesubmission of his followers had been the more complete for its novelty.His loss was the more appalling. Burl had mistaken the triumphant shoutof the foragers. He'd thought it independence of him--rivalry. Actually,the men dared to shout only because they felt secure under hisleadership. When they accepted the fact that he had vanished--and todisappear in the night had always meant death--their old fears andtimidity returned. To them it was added despair.
They huddled together and whispered to one another of their fright. Theywaited in trembling silence through all the long night. Had ahunting-spider appeared, they would have fled in as many directions asthere were people, and undoubtedly all would have perished. But day cameagain, and they looked into each other's eyes and saw the self-samefear. Saya was probably the most pitiful of the group. Her face waswhite and drawn beyond that of any one else.
They did not move when day brightened. They remained about thebee-tunnels, speaking in hushed tones, huddled together, searching allthe horizon for enemies. Saya would not eat, but sat still, staringbefore her in numbed grief. Burl was dead.
Atop the low cliff a red puffball glistened in the morning light. Itstough skin was taut and bulging, resisting the pressure of the sporeswithin. Slowly, as the morning wore on, some of the moisture that keptthe skin stretchable dried. The parchment-like stuff contracted. Thetautness of the spore-packed envelope grew greater. It becameinsupportable.
With a ripping sound, the tough skin split across and a rush of thecompressed spores shot skyward.
The tribesmen saw and cried out and fled. The red stuff drifted downpast the cliff-edge. It drifted toward the humans. They ran from it. Jonand Tama ran fastest. Jak and Cori and the other were not far behind.Saya trailed, in her despair.
Had Burl been there, matters would have been different. He had alreadysuch an ascendancy over the minds of the others that even in panic theywould have looked to see what he did. And he would have dodged theslowly drifting death-cloud by day, as he had during the night. But hisfollowers ran blindly.
As Saya fled after the others she heard shrieks of fright to the leftand ran faster. She passed by a thick mass of distorted fungi in whichthere was a sudden stirring and panic lent wings to her feet. Shefled blindly, panting. Ahead was a great mass of stuff--redpuffballs--showing here and there among great fanlike growths, sometwelve feet high, that looked like sponges.
She fled past them and swerved to hide herself from anything that mightbe pursuing by sight. Her foot slipped on the slimy body of a shell-lesssnail and she fell heavily, her head striking a stone. She lay still.
Almost as if at a signal a red puffball burst among the fanlike growths.A thick, dirty-red cloud of dust shot upward, spread and billowed andbegan to settle slowly toward the ground again. It moved as it settledflowing over the inequalities of die ground as a monstrous snail orleach might have done, sucking from all breathing creatures the lifethey had within them. It was a hundred yards away, then fifty, thenthirty....
Had any member of the tribe watched it, the red dust might have seemedmalevolently intelligent. But when the edges of the dust-cloud were nomore than twenty yards from Saya's limp body, an opposing breeze sprangup. It was a vagrant, fitful little breeze that halted the red cloud andthrew it into some confusion, sending it in a new direction. It passedSaya without hurting her, though one of its misty tendrils reached outas if to snatch at her in slow-motion. But it passed her by.
Saya lay motionless on the ground. Only her breast rose and fellshallowly. A tiny pool of red gathered near her head.
Some thirty feet from where she lay, there were three miniaturetoadstools in a clump, bases so close together that they seemed but one.From between two of them, however, two tufts of reddish thread appeared.They twinkled back and forth and in and out. As if reassured, twoslender antennae followed, then bulging eyes and a small, black bodywith bright-red scalloped markings upon it.
It was a tiny beetle no more than eight inches long--a sexton orburying-beetle. Drawing near Saya's body it scurried onto her flesh. Itwent from end to end of her figure in a sort of feverish haste. Then itdived into the ground beneath her shoulder, casting back a little showerof hastily-dug dirt as it disappeared.
Ten minutes later, another small creature appeared, precisely like thefirst. Upon the heels of the second came a third. Each made the samehasty examination and dived under her unmoving form.
Presently the ground seemed to billow at a spot along Saya's side andthen at another. Ten minutes after the arrival of the third beetle, alittle rampart had reared itself all about Saya's body, following heroutli
nes precisely. Then her body moved slightly, in little jerks,seeming to settle perhaps half an inch into the ground.
The burying-beetles were of that class of creatures which exploited thebodies of the fallen. Working from below, they excavated the earth. Whenthere was a hollow space below they turned on their backs and thrust upwith their legs, jerking at the body until it sank into the space theyhad made ready. The process would be repeated until at last all theirdead treasures had settled down below the level of the surroundingground. The loosened dirt then fell in at the sides, completing theinhumation. Then, in the underground darkness, it was the custom for thebeetles to feast magnificently, gorging themselves upon the food theyhad hidden from other scavengers--and of course rearing their young alsoupon its substance.
Ants and flies were rivals of these beetles and not infrequently thesexton-beetles came upon carrion after ants had taken their toll, andwhen it already swarmed with maggots. But in this case Saya was notdead. The fact that she still lived, though unconscious, was the factorthat had given the sexton-beetles this splendid opportunity.
She breathed gently and irregularly, her face drawn with the sorrow ofthe night before, while the desperately hurrying beetles swarmed aboutbeneath her body, channelling away the soil so she would sink lower andlower into it. She descended slowly, a half-inch by a half-inch. Thebright-red tufts of thread appeared again and a beetle made its way tothe open air. It moved hastily about, inspecting the progress of thework.
It dived below again. Another inch and, after a long time, another, wereexcavated.
Matters still progressed when Burl stepped out from a group ofovershadowing toadstools and halted. He cast his eyes over the landscapeand was struck by its familiarity. He was, in fact, very near the spothe had left the night before in that maniacal ride on the back of aflying beetle. He moved back and forth, trying to account for thefeeling of recognition.
He saw the low cliff, then, and moved eagerly toward it, passing withinfifty feet of Saya's body, now more than half-buried in the ground. Theloose dirt around the outline of her figure was beginning to topple inlittle rivulets upon her. One of her shoulders was already half-screenedfrom view. Burl passed on, unseeing.
He hurried a little. In a moment he recognized his location exactly.There were the mining-bee burrows. There was a thrown-away lump ofedible mushroom, cast aside as the tribesfolk fled.
His feet stirred up a fine dust, and he stopped short. A red puffballhad burst here. It fully accounted for the absence of the tribe, andBurl sweated in sudden fear. He thought instantly of Saya. He wentcarefully to make sure. This was, absolutely, the hiding place of thetribe. There was another mushroom-fragment. There was a spear, throwndown by one of the men in his flight. Red dust had settled upon thespear and the mushroom-fragments.
Burl turned back, hurrying again, but taking care to disturb the dust nomore than he could possibly help.
The little excavation into which Saya was sinking inch by inch was notin his path. Her body no longer lay above the ground, but in it. Burlwent by, frantic with anxiety about the tribe, but about Saya most ofall.
Her body quivered and sank a fraction into the ground. Half a dozensmall streams of earth were tumbling upon her. In minutes she would bewholly hidden from view.
Burl went to beat among the mushroom-thickets, in quest of the bodies ofhis tribesfolk. They could have staggered out of the red dust andcollapsed beyond. He would have shouted, but the deep sense ofloneliness silenced him. His throat ached with grief. He searched on....
There was a noise. From a huge clump of toadstools--perhaps the very onehe had climbed over in the night--there came the sound of crashings andthe breaking of the spongy stuff. Twin tapering antennae appeared, andthen a monster beetle lurched into the open space, its ghastly mandiblesgaping sidewise.
It was all of eight feet long and supported by six crooked, saw-toothedlegs. Huge, multiple eyes stared with preoccupation at the world. Itadvanced deliberately with clankings and clashings as of a hideousmachine. Burl fled on the instant, running directly away from it.
A little depression lay in the ground before him. He did not swerve, butmade to jump over it. As he leaped he saw the color of bare flesh, Saya,limp and helpless, sinking slowly into the ground with tricklings ofdirt falling down to cover her. It seemed to Burl that she quivered alittle.
Instantly there was a terrific struggle within Burl. Behind him was thegiant meat-eating beetle; beneath him was Saya whom he loved. There wascertain death lurching toward him on evilly crooked legs--and the lifehe had hoped for lay in a shallow pit. Of course he thought Saya dead.
Perhaps it was rage, or despair, or a simple human madness which madehim act otherwise than rationally. The things which raise humans abovebrute creation, however, are only partly reasonable. Most humanemotions--especially the creditable ones--cannot be justified by reason,and very few heroic actions are based upon logical thought.
Burl whirled as he landed, his puny spear held ready. In his left handhe held the haunch of a creature much like the one which clanked andrattled toward him. With a yell of insane defiance--completely beyondjustification by reason--Burl flung that meat-filled leg at the monster.
It hit. Undoubtedly, it hurt. The beetle seized it ferociously. Itcrushed it. There was meat in it, sweet and juicy.
The beetle devoured it. It forgot the man standing there, waiting fordeath. It crunched the leg-joint of a cousin or brother, confusing theblow with the missile that had delivered it. When the tidbit wasfinished it turned and lumbered off to investigate another mushroomthicket. It seemed to consider then an enemy had been conquered anddevoured and that normal life could go on.
Then Burl stopped quickly, and dragged Saya from the grave thesexton-beetles had labored so feverishly to provide for her. Crumbledsoil fell from her shoulders, from her face, and from her body. Threelittle eight-inch beetles with black and red markings scurried for coverin terrified haste. Burl carried Saya to a resting-place of soft mouldto mourn over her.
He was a completely ignorant savage, save that he knew more of the waysof insects than anybody anywhere else--the Ecological Service, which hadstocked this planet, not being excepted. To Burl the unconsciousness ofSaya was as death itself. Dumb misery smote him, and he laid her downgently and quite literally wept. He had been beautifully pleased withhimself for having slain one flying beetle. But for Saya's seemingdeath, he would have been almost unbearable with pride over having putanother to flight. But now he was merely a broken-hearted, very humanyoung man.
But a long time later Saya opened her eyes and looked aboutbewilderedly.
They were in considerable danger for some time after that, because theywere oblivious to everything but each other. Saya rested inhalf-incredulous happiness against Burl's shoulder as he told herjerkily of his attempt on a night-bound butterfly, which turned out tobe a flying beetle that took him aloft. He told of his search for thetribe and then his discovery of her apparently lifeless body. When hespoke of the monster which had lurched from the mushroom thicket, and ofthe desperation with which he had faced it, Saya looked at him withwarm, proud eyes. But Burl was abruptly struck with the remarkableconvenience of that discovery. If his tribesmen could secure an amplesupply of meat, they might defend themselves against attack by throwingit to their attackers. In fact, insects were so stupid that almost anyobject thrown quickly enough and fast enough, might be made to serve assacrifices instead of themselves.
A timid, frightened whisper roused them from their absorption. Theylooked up. The boy Dik stood some distance away, staring at themwide-eyed, almost convinced that he looked upon the living dead. Asudden movement on the part of either of them would have sent himbolting away. Two or three other bobbing heads gazed affrightedly fromnearby hiding-places. Jon was poised for flight.
The tribe had come back to its former hiding-place simply as a way toreassemble. They had believed both Burl and Saya dead, and they acceptedBurl's death as their own doom. But now they stared.
> Burl spoke--fortunately without arrogance--and Dik and Tet cametimorously from their hiding-places. The others followed, the tribeforming a frightened half-circle about the seated pair. Burl spoke againand presently one of the bravest--Cori--dared to approach and touch him.Instantly a babble of the crude labial language of the tribe broke out.Awed exclamations and questions filled the air.
But Burl, for once, showed some common sense. Instead of a vaingloriousrecital, he merely cast down the long tapering antennae of theflying-beetle. They looked, and recognized their origin.
Then Burl curtly ordered Dor and Jak to make a chair of their hands forSaya. She was weak from her fall and the loss of blood. The two menhumbly advanced and obeyed. Then Burl curtly ordered the march resumed.
They went on, more slowly than on previous days, but none-the-lesssteadily. Burl led them across-country, marching in advance with amatter-of-fact alertness for signs of danger. He felt more confidencethan ever before. It was not fully justified, of course. Jon nowretrieved the spear he had discarded. The small party fairly bristledwith weapons. But Burl knew that they were liable to be cast away asimpediments if flight seemed necessary.
As he led the way Burl began to think busily in the manner that onlyleaders find necessary. He had taught his followers to kill ants forfood, though they were still uneasy about such adventures. He had ledthem to attack great yellow grubs upon giant cabbages. But they had notyet faced any actual danger, as he had done. He must drive them to facesomething....
The opportunity came that same day, in late afternoon. To westward thecloud-bank was barely beginning to show the colors that presagenightfall, when a bumble-bee droned heavily overhead, making for itshome burrow. The little, straggling group of marching people looked upand saw the scanty load of pollen packed in the stiff bristles of thebee's hind-legs. It sped onward heavily, its almost transparent wingsmere blurs in the air.
It was barely fifty feet above the ground. Burl dropped his glance andtensed. A slender-waisted wasp was shooting upward from an ambush amongthe noisome fungi of this plain.
The bee swerved and tried to escape. The wasp over-hauled it. The beedodged frantically. It was a good four feet in length,--as large as thewasp, certainly--but it was more heavily built and could not make thespeed of which the wasp was capable. It dodged with less agility. Twice,in desperation, it did manage to evade the plunging dives of the wasp,but the third time the two insects grappled in mid-air almost over theheads of the humans.
They tumbled downward in a clawing, biting, tangle of bodies and legs.They hit the ground and rolled over and over. The bee struggled toinsert her barbed sting in the more supple body of her adversary. Shewrithed and twisted desperately.
But there came an instant of infinite confusion and the bee lay on herback. The wasp suddenly moved with that ghastly skilled precision of acreature performing an incredible feat instinctively, apparently unawarethat it is doing so. The dazed bee was swung upright in a peculiarlyartificial pose. The wasp's body curved, and its deadly, rapier-sharpsting struck....
The bee was dead. Instantly. As if struck dead by lightning. The wasphad stung in a certain place in the neck-parts where all the nerve-cordspass. To sting there, the wasp had to bring its victim to a particularpose. It was precisely the trick of a _desnucador_, the butcher whokills cattle by severing the spinal cord. For the wasp's purposes thebee had to be killed in this fashion and no other.
Burl began to give low-toned commands to his followers. He knew what wascoming next, and so did they. When the sequel of the murder began hemoved forward, his tribesmen wavering after him. This venture wasactually one of the least dangerous they could attempt, but merely toattack a wasp was a hair-raising idea. Only Burl's prestige plus theirknowledge made them capable of it.
The second act of the murder-drama was gruesomeness itself. Thepirate-wasp was a carnivore, but this was the season when the waspsraised young. Inevitably there was sweet honey in the half-filled cropof the bee. Had she arrived safely at the hive, the sweet and stickyliquid would have been disgorged for the benefit of bee-grubs. The waspavidly set to work to secure that honey. The bee-carcass itself wasdestined for the pirate-wasp's own offspring, and that squirmingmonstrosity is even more violently carnivorous than its mother. Theparent wasp set about abstracting the dead bee's honey, before takingthe carcass to its young one, because honey is poisonous to thepirate-wasp's grub. Yet insects cannot act from solicitude or anythingbut instinct. And instinct must be maintained by lavish rewards.
So the pirate-wasp sought its reward--an insane, insatiable, gluttonoussatisfaction in the honey that was poison to its young. The wasp foiledits murdered victim upon its back again and feverishly pressed on thelimp body to force out the honey. And this was the reason for itsprecise manner of murder. Only when killed by the destruction of allnerve-currents would the bee's body be left limp like this. Only a beekilled in this exact fashion would yield its honey to manipulation.
The honey appeared, flowing from the dead bee's mouth. The wasp, intrembling, ghoulish ecstasy, devoured it as it appeared. It was lost toall other sights or sensations but its feast.
And this was the moment when Burl signalled for the attack. Thetribesmen's prey was deaf and blind and raptured. It was aware ofnothing but the delight it savored. But the men wavered, nevertheless,when they drew near. Burl was first to thrust his spear powerfully intothe trembling body.
When he was not instantly destroyed the others took courage. Dor's spearpenetrated the very vitals of the ghoul. Jak's club fell with terrificforce upon the wasp's slender waist. There was a crackling, and thelong, spidery limbs quivered and writhed. Then Burl struck again and thecreature fell into two writhing halves.
They butchered it rather messily, but Burl noticed that even as it died,sundered and pierced with spears, its long tongue licked out in one lastrapturous taste of the honey that had been its undoing.
Some time later, burdened with the pollen laden legs of the great bee,the tribe resumed its journey.
Now Burl had men behind him. They were still timid and prone to flee atthe least alarm, but they were vastly more dependable than they hadbeen. They had attacked and slain a wasp whose sting would have killedany of them. They had done battle under the leadership of Burl, whosespear had struck the first blow. They were sharers of his glory and,therefore, much more nearly like the followers of a chieftain ought tobe.
Their new spirit was badly needed. The red puffballs were certainly noless numerous in the new territory the tribe traversed than in theterritory they had left. And the season of their ripening' was furtheradvanced. More and more of the ground showed the deadly rime of settleddeath-dust. To stay alive was increasingly difficult. When the fullspore-casting season arrived, it would be impossible. And that seasoncould not be far away.
The very next day after the killing of the wasp, survival despite thered dust had begun to seem unimaginable. Where, earlier, one saw ared-dust cloud bursting here and there at intervals, on this day therewas always a billowing mass of lethal vapor in the air. At no time wasthe landscape free of a moving mist of death. Usually there were threeor four in sight at once. Often there were half a dozen. Once there wereeight. It could be guessed that in one day more they would ripen in suchmonstrous numbers that anything which walked or flew or crawled mustbreathe in the spores and perish.
And that day, just at sunset, the tribe came to the top of a small risein the ground. For an hour they had been marching and countermarching toavoid the suddenly-billowing clouds of dust. Once they had been nearlyhemmed in when three of the dull-red mists seemed to flow together,enclosing the three sides of a circle. They escaped then only by themost desperate of sprinting.
But now they came to the little hillock and halted. Before themstretched a plain, all of four miles wide, colored a brownish brick-redby the red puffballs. The tribe had seen mushroom forests--they hadlived in them--and knew of the dangers that lurked there. But the plainbefore them was not simply dangerous; it was fatal. T
o right and left itstretched as far as the eye could see, but away on its farther edge Burlcaught a glimpse of flowing water.
Over the plain itself a thin red haze seemed to float. It was simply acloud of the deadly spores, dispersed and indefinite, but constantlyreplenished by the freshly bursting puffballs. While the tribesfolkstood and watched, thick columns of dust rose here and there and at theother place, too many to count. They settled again but left behindenough of the fine powder to keep a thin red haze over all the plain.This was a mass of literally millions of the deadly growths. Here wasone place where no carnivorous beetles roamed and where no spiderslurked. There were nothing here but the sullen columns of dust and thehaze that they left behind.
And of course it would be nothing less than suicide to try to go back.
The Forgotten Planet Page 8