_8. A FLIGHT CONTINUES_
Burl kept his people alive until darkness fell. He had assigned watchersfor each direction and when flight was necessary the adults helped thechildren to avoid the red dust. Four times they changed direction aftershrill-voiced warnings. When night settled over the plain they wereforced to come to a halt.
But the puffballs were designed to burst by day. Stumbled into, theycould split at any time, and the humans did hear some few of the tearingnoises that denoted a spore-spout in the darkness. But after slownightly rain began they heard no more.
Burl led his people into the plain of red puffballs as soon as the rainhad lasted long enough to wash down the red haze still hanging in theair and turn the fallen spores to mud.
It was an enterprise of such absolute desperation that very likely nocivilized man would have tried it. There were no stars, for guidance,nor compasses to show the way. There were no lights to enable them tododge the deadly things they strove to escape, and there was nopossibility of their keeping a straight course in the darkness. They hadto trust to luck in perhaps the longest long-shot that humans everyaccepted as a gamble.
Quaintly, they used the long antennae of a dead flying-beetle assense-organs for themselves. They entered the red plain in a long singlefile, Burl leading the way with one of the two feathery whips extendedbefore him. Saya helped him check on what lay in the darkness ahead, butmade sure not to leave his side. Others trailed behind, hand in hand.
Progress was slow. The sky was utter blackness, of course, but nowherein the lowlands is there an absolute black. Where fox-fire doesn't burnwithout consuming, there are mushrooms with glows of their own. Rustssometimes shone faintly. Naturally there were no fireflies or glow-wormsof any sort; but neither were there any living things to hunt the tinytribe as it moved half-blindly in single file through the plain of redpuffballs. Within half an hour even Burl did not believe he had kept tohis original line. An hour later they realized despairingly that theywere marching helpless through puffballs which would make the airunbreathable at dawn. But they marched on.
Once they smelled the rank odor of cabbages. They followed the scent andcame upon them, glowing palely with parasitic moulds on their leaves.And there were living things here: huge caterpillars eating and eating,even in the dark, against the time of metamorphosis. Burl could havecried out infuriatedly at them because they were--so he assumed--immuneto the death of the red dust. But the red dust was all about, and thesmell of cabbages was not the smell of life.
It could have been, of course. Caterpillars breathe like all insects atevery stage of their development. But furry caterpillars breathe throughopenings which are covered over with matted fur. Here, that matted furacted to filter the air. The eggs of the caterpillars had been laidbefore the puffballs were ready to burst. The time of spore-bearingwould be over before the grubs were butterflies or moths. Thesecreatures were safe against all enemies--even men. But men groped andblundered in the darkness simply because they did not think to take thefur garments they wore and hold them to their noses to serve asgas-masks or air-filters. The time for that would come, but not yet.
With the docility of despair, Burl's tribe followed him through all thenight. When the sky began to pale in the east, they numbly resignedthemselves to death. But still they followed.
And in the very early gray light--when only the very ripest of the redpuffballs spouted toward a still-dark sky--Burl looked harassedly abouthim and could have groaned. He was in a little circular clearing, thedeadly red things all about him. There was not yet light enough forcolors to appear. There was merely a vast stillness everywhere, and amocking hint of the hot and peppery scent of death-dust--now turned tomud--all about him.
Burl dropped in bitter discouragement. Soon the misty dust-clouds wouldbegin to move about; the reddish haze would form above all thisspace....
Then, quite suddenly, he lifted his head and whooped. He had heard thesound of running water.
His followers looked at him with dawning hope. Without a word to them,Burl began to run. They followed hastily and quickened their pace whenhis voice came back in a shout of triumph. In a moment they had emergedfrom the tangle of fungus growths to stand upon the banks of a wideriver--the same river whose gleam Burl had seen the day before, from thefarther side of the red puffball plain.
Once before, Burl had floated down a river upon a mushroom raft. Thatjourney had been involuntary. He had been carried far from his tribe andSaya, his heart filled with desolation. But now he viewed theswiftly-running current with delight.
He cast his eyes up and down the bank. Here and there it rose in a lowbluff and thick shelf-fungi stretched out above the water. They wereadaptations of the fungi that once had grown on trees and now fed uponthe incredibly nourishing earth-banks formed of dead growing things.Burl was busy in an instant, stabbing the relatively hard growths withhis spear and striving to wrench them free. The tribesmen staredblankly, but at a snapped order they imitated him.
Soon two dozen masses of firm, light fungus lay upon the shore. Burlbegan to explain what they were for, but Dor remonstrated. They wereafraid to part from him. If they might embark on the same fungus-raft,it would be a different matter. Old Tama scolded him shrilly at thethought of separation. Jon trembled at the mere idea.
Burl cast an apprehensive glance at the sky. Day was rapidlyapproaching. Soon the red puffballs would burst and shoot theirdust-clouds into the air. This was no time to make stipulations. ThenSaya spoke softly.
Burl made the suggested great sacrifice. He took the gorgeous velvetcloak of moth-wing from his shoulder and tore it into a dozen long,irregular pieces along the lines of the sinews reinforcing it. Heplanted his spear upright in the largest raft, fastening the othercranky craft to it with the improvised lines.
In a matter of minutes the small flotilla of rafts bobbed in the stream.One by one, Burl settled the folk upon them with stern commands aboutmovement. Then he shoved them out from the bank. The collection ofuneasy, floating things moved slowly out from shore to where the currentcaught them. Burl and Saya sat on the same section of fungus, the othertrustful but frightened tribes-people clustered timorously about.
As they began to move between the mushroom-lined banks of the river,and as the mist of nighttime lifted from its surface, columns of reddust spurted sullenly upward on the plain. In the light of dawn thedeadly red haze was forming once more over the puffball plain.
By that time, however, the unstable rafts were speeding down the river,bobbing and whirling in the stream, with wide-eyed people as theirpassengers gazing in wonderment at the shores.
Five miles downstream, the red growths became less numerous and otherforms of fungus took their places. Moulds and rusts covered the groundas grass did on more favored planets. Toadstools showed their creamy,rounded heads, and there were malformed things with swollen trunks andbranches mocking the trees that were never seen in these lowlands. Oncethe tribesmen saw the grisly bulk of a hunting-spider outlined on theriver-bank.
All through the long day they rode the current, while the insect lifethat had been absent in the neighborhood of the death-plain becameabundant again. Bees once more droned overhead, and wasps anddragonflies. Four-inch mosquitoes appeared, to be driven off with blows.Glittering beetles made droning or booming noises as they flew. Flies ofevery imaginable metallic hue flew about. Huge butterflies danced abovethe steaming land and running river in seeming ecstasy at simply beingalive.
All the thousand-and-one forms of insect life flew and crawled and swamand dived where the people of the rafts could see them. Water-beetlescame lazily to the surface to snap at other insects on the surface. Theshell-covered boats of caddis-flies floated in the eddies andbackwaters.
The day wore on and the shores flowed by. The tribesmen ate of theirfood and drank of the river. When afternoon came the banks fell away andthe current slackened. The shores became indefinite. The river mergeditself into a vast swamp from which came a continual muttering.
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p; The water seemed to grow dark when black mud took the place of the claythat had formed its bed. Then there appeared floating green things whichdid not move with the flowing water. They were the leaves of thewater-lilies that managed to survive along with cabbages and a very fewother plants in the midst of a fungus world. Twelve feet across, any oneof the green leaves might have supported the whole of Burl's tribe.
They became so numerous that only a relatively narrow, uncovered streamflowed between tens of acres of the flat, floating leaves. Here andthere colossal waxen blossoms could be seen. Three men could hide inthose enormous flowers. They exhaled an almost overpowering fragranceinto the air.
And presently the muttering sound that had been heard far away grew involume to an intermittent deep-bass roar. It seemed to come from thebanks on either side. It was the discordant croaking of frogs, eightfeet in length, which lived and throve in this swamp. Presently thetribesfolk saw them: green giants sitting immobile upon the banks, onlyopening their huge mouths to croak.
Here in the swamps there was such luxuriance of insect life that anormal tribal hunting-ground--in which tribesmen were not yet accustomedto hunt--would seem like a desert by comparison. Myriads of littlemidges, no more than three or four inches across their wings, dancedabove the water. Butterflies flew low, seemingly enamoured of theirreflections in the glassy water.
The people watched as if their eyes would become engorged by the strangenew things they saw. Where the river split and split and divided again,there was nothing with which they were familiar. Mushrooms did not growhere. Moulds, yes. But there were cattails, with stalks like trees,towering thirty feet above the waterways.
After a long, long time though, the streams began to rejoin each other.Then low hills loomed through the thicker haze that filled the air here.The river flowed toward and through them. And here a wall of highmountains rose toward the sky, but their height could not be guessed.They vanished in the mist even before the cloud-bank swallowed them.
The river flowed through a river-gate, a water-gap in the mountains.While day still held fully bright, the bobbing rafts went whirlingthrough a narrow pass with sheer walls that rose beyond all seeing inthe mist. Here there was even some white water. Above it, spanning achasm five hundred feet across, a banded spider had flung its web. Therafts floated close enough to see the spider, a monster even of itskind, its belly swollen to a diameter of yards. It hung motionless inthe center of the snare as the humans swept beneath it.
Then the mountains drew back and the tribe was in a valley where, lookas they might, there was no single tawny-red puffball from whosespreading range the tribesmen were refugees. The rafts grounded and theywaded ashore while still the day held. And there was food here inplenty.
But darkness fell before they could explore. As a matter of precautionBurl and his folk found a hiding-place in a mushroom-thicket and hiduntil morning. The night-sounds were wholly familiar to them. The noiseof katydids was louder than usual--the feminine sound of that name givesno hint of the sonorous, deep-toned notes the enlarged creaturesuttered--and that implied more vegetation as compared with straightfungoid flora. A great many fireflies glowed in the darkness shroudingthe hiding-place, indicating that the huge snails they fed on wereplentiful. The snails would make very suitable prey for the tribesmenalso. But men were not yet established in their own minds as predators.
They were, though, definitely no longer the furtive vermin they hadbeen. They knew there were such things as weapons. They had killed antsfor food and a pirate-wasp as an exercise in courage. To some degreethey were acquiring Burl's own qualities. But they were still behindhim--and he still had some way to go.
The next day they explored their new territory with a boldness whichwould have been unthinkable a few weeks before. The new haven was avalley, spreading out to a second swamp at its lower end. They could notknow it, but beyond the swamp lay the sea. Exploring, because ofstrictly practical purposes and not for the sake of knowledge, theyfound a great trap-door in the earth, sure sign of the lair of a spider.Burl considered that before many days the monster would have to be dealtwith. But he did not yet know how it could be done.
His people were rapidly becoming a tribe of men, but they still neededBurl to think for them. What he could not think out, so far, could notbe done. But a part of the proof that they needed Burl to think for themlay in the fact that they did not realize it. They gathered facts abouttheir environment. The nearest ant-city was miles away. That meant thatthey would encounter its scouting foragers rather than working-parties.The ant-city would be a source of small prey--a notion that would havebeen inconceivable a little while ago. There were numerous giantcabbages in the valley and that meant there were big, defenseless slugsto spear whenever necessary.
They saw praying-mantises--the adults were eighteen feet tall and as bigas giraffes, but much less desirable neighbors--and knew that they wouldhave to be avoided. But there were edible mushrooms on every hand. Ifone avoided spiders and praying-mantises and the meat-eating beetles; ifone were safely hidden at night against the amorous male spiders whotook time off from courtship to devour anything living that came theirway; and if one lived at high-tension alertness, interpreting everysound as possible danger and every unknown thing as certain peril--thenone could live quite comfortably in this valley.
For three days the tribesmen felt that they had found a sort ofparadise. Jon had his belly full to bursting all day long. Tet and Dikbecame skilled ant-hunters. Dor found a better spear and practicedthoughtfully with it.
There were no red puffballs here. There was food. Burl's folk couldimagine no greater happiness. Even old Tama scolded only rarely. Theysurely could not conceive of any place where a man might walk calmlyabout with no danger at all of being devoured. This was paradise!
And it was a deplorable state of affairs. It is not good for humanbeings to feel secure and experience contentment. Men achieve only bytheir wants or through their fears. Back at their formerforaging-ground, the tribe would never have emulated Burl with anypassion so long as they could survive by traditional behavior. Beforethe menace of the red puffballs developed, he had brought them to thepoint of killing ants, with him present and ready to assist. They wouldhave stayed at about that level. The red dust had forced their flight.During that flight they had achieved what was--compared to their formertimidity--prodigies of valor.
But now they arrived at paradise. There was food. They could survivehere in the fashion of the good old days before they learned the courageof desperation. They did not need Burl to keep them alive or to feedthem. They tended to disregard him. But they did not disperse. Socialgrouping is an instinct in human beings as it is in cattle or in schoolsof fish. Also, when Burl was available there was a sense of pleasantconfidence. He had gotten them out of trouble before. If more troublecame, he would get them out of it again. But why look for trouble?
Burl's tribesmen sank back into a contented lethargy. They found foodand hid themselves until it was all consumed. A part of the valley wasfound where they were far enough from visible dangers to feel blissfullysafe. When they did move, though still with elaborate caution, it wasonly to forage for food. And they did not need to go far because therewas plenty of food. They slipped back. Happier than they had ever been,the foragers finally began to forget to take their new spears or clubswith them. They were furtive vermin in a particularly favorableenvironment.
And Burl was infuriated. He had known adulation. He was cherished, to besure, but adulation no longer came his way. Even Saya....
An ironically natural change took place in Saya. When Burl was achieftain, she looked at him with worshipful eyes. Now that he was asother men, she displayed coquetry. And Burl was of that peculiarlydirect-thinking sort of human being who is capable of leadership but notof intrigue. He was vain, of course. But he could not engage inelaborate maneuvers to build up a romantic situation. When Saya archlyremained with the women of the tribe, he considered that she avoidedhim. When she coyly avoided speech with hi
m, he angrily believed thatshe did not want his company.
When they had been in the valley for a week Burl went off on a bitterjourney by himself. Part of his motivation, probably, was a childishresentment. He had been the great man of the tribe. He was no longer sogreat because his particular qualities were not needed. And--perhapswith some unconscious intent to punish them for their lessenedappreciation--he went off in a pet.
He still carried spear and club, but the grandeur of his costume haddeteriorated. His cloak was gone. The moth-antennae he had worn bound tohis forehead were now so draggled that they were ridiculous. He went offangrily to be rid of his fellows' indifference.
He found the upward slopes which were the valley's literal boundaries.They promised nothing. He found a minor valley in which a labyrinthspider had built its shining snare. Burl almost scorned the creature. Hecould kill it if he chose, merely by stabbing it though the walls ofits silken nest as it waited for unlucky insects to blunder into theintricate web. He saw praying-mantises. Once he came upon thatextraordinary egg-container of the mantis tribe: a gigantic leaf-shapedmass of solidified foam, whipped out of some special plastic compoundwhich the mantis secretes, and in which the eggs are laid.
He found a caterpillar wrapped in its thick cocoon and, because he wasnot foraging and not particularly hungry, he inspected it with care.With great difficulty he even broke the strand of silk that formed it,unreeling several feet in curiosity. Had he meditated, Burl would haveseen that this was cord which could be used to build snares as spidersdid. It could also be used to make defenses in which--if built stronglyand well--even hunting-spiders might be tangled and dispatched.
But again he was not knowingly looking for things to be of use. Hecoddled his sense of injury against the tribe. He punished them byleaving them.
He encountered a four-foot praying-mantis that raised its saw-toothedforelimbs and waited immobile for him to come within reach. He hadtrouble getting away without a fight. His spear would have been a clumsyweapon against so slender a target and the club certainly not quickenough to counter the insect's lightning-like movements.
He was bothered. That day he hunted ants. The difficulty was mainly thatof finding individual ants, alone, who could be slaughtered withoutdrawing hordes of others into the fight. Before nightfall he had threeof them--foot-long carcasses--slung at his belt. Near sunset he cameupon another fairly recent praying-mantis hatchling. It was almost anambush. The young monster stood completely immobile and waited for himto walk into its reach.
Burl performed a deliberate experiment--something that had not been donefor a very long time on the forgotten planet. The small, grisly creaturestood as high as Burl's shoulders. It would be a deadly antagonist.Burl tossed it a dead ant.
It struck so swiftly that the motion of its horrible forearms could notbe seen. Then it ignored Burl, devouring the tidbit.
It was a discovery that was immediately and urgently useful.
On the second day of his aimless journey Burl saw something that wouldbe even more deadly and appalling than the red dust had been for hiskind. It was a female black hunting-spider, the so-called Americantarantula. When he glimpsed the thing the blood drained from Burl'sface.
As the monster moved out of sight Burl, abandoning any other project hemight have intended, headed for the place his tribe had more or lesssettled in. He had news which offered the satisfaction of making himmuch-needed again, but he would have traded that pleasure ten hundredtimes over for the simple absence of that one creature from this valley.That female tarantula meant simply and specifically that the tribe mustflee or die. This place was not paradise!
The entry of the spider into the region had preceded the arrival of thepeople. A giant, even of its kind, it had come across some pass amongthe mountains for reasons only it could know. But it was deadlinessbeyond compare. Its legs spanned yards. The fangs were needle-sharp andfeet in length--and poisoned. Its eyes glittered with insatiable, insaneblood-lust. Its coming was ten times more deadly to the humans--as tothe other living creatures of the valley--than a Bengal tiger loosed ina human city would have been. It was bad enough in itself, but itbrought more deadly disaster still behind it.
Bumping and bouncing behind its abdomen as it moved, fastened to itsbody by dirtied silken ropes, this creature dragged a burden which wasits own ferocity many times multiplied. It was dragging an egg-baglarger than its body--which was feet in diameter. The female spiderwould carry this ghastly burden--cherishing it--until the eggs hatched.And then there would be four to five hundred small devils loose in thevalley. From the instant of their hatching they would be as deadly astheir parent. Though the offspring would be small--with legs spanning nomore than a foot--their bodies would be the size of a man's fist andable to leap two yards. Their tiny fangs would be no less envenomed thantheir mother's. In stark, maniacal hatred of all other life they wouldat least equal the huge gray horror which had begot them.
Burl told his tribesmen. They listened, eyes large with fright but notquite afraid. The thing had not yet happened. When Burl insistentlycommanded that they follow him on a new journey, they nodded uneasilybut slipped away. He could not gather the tribe together. Always therewere members who hid from him--and when he went in search of them, theones he had gathered vanished before he could return.
There were days of bright light and murder, and nights of slow rain anddeath in the valley. The great creatures under the cloud-bank committedatrocities upon each other and blandly dined upon their victims.Unthinkingly solicitous parents paralyzed creatures to be left livingand helpless for their young to feed on. There were enormities ofcruelty done in the matter-of-fact fashion of the insect world. To thesethings the humans were indifferent. They were uneasy, but like otherhumans everywhere they would not believe the worst until the worstarrived.
Two weeks after their coming to the valley, the worst was there. Whenthat day came the first gray light of dawn found the humans in ashivering, terrified group in a completely suicidal position. They wereout in the open--not hidden but in plain view. They dared not hide anymore. The furry gray monster's brood had hatched. The valley seemed toswarm with small gray demons which killed and killed, even when theycould not devour. When they encountered each other they fought inslavering fury and the victors in such duels dined upon their brethren.But always they hunted for more things to kill. They were literallymaniacs--and they were too small and too quick to fight with spears orclubs.
So now, at daybreak, the humans looked about despairingly for death tocome to them. They had spent the night in the open lest they be trappedin the very thickets that had formerly been their protection. They werein clear sight of the large gray murderer, if it should pass that way.And they did not dare hide because of that ogreish creature's brood.
The monster appeared. A young girl saw it and cried out chokingly. Ithad not seen them. They watched it leap upon and murder avividly-colored caterpillar near the limit of vision in themorning-mist. It was in the tribe's part of the valley. Its youngswarmed everywhere. The valley could have been a paradise, but it wasdoomed to become a charnel-house.
And then Burl shook himself. He had been angry when he left his tribe.He had been more angry when he returned and they would not obey him. Hehad remained with them, petulantly silent, displaying the offendeddignity he felt and elaborately refusing to acknowledge any overtures,even from Saya. Burl had acted rather childishly. But his tribesmen werelike children. It was the best way for him to act.
They shivered, too hopeless even to run away while the shaggy monsterfeasted a half-mile away. There were six men and seven women besideshimself, and the rest were children, from gangling adolescents to onebabe in arms. They whimpered a little. Then Saya looked imploringly atBurl--coquetry forgotten now. The other whimpered more loudly. They hadreached that stage of despair, now, when they could draw the monster tothem by blubbering in terror.
This was the psychological moment. Burl said dourly:
"Come!"
He t
ook Saya's hand and started away. There was but one direction inwhich any human being could think to move in this valley, at thismoment. It was the direction away from the grisly mother of horrors. Ithappened to be the way up the valley wall. Burl started up that slope.Saya went with him.
Before they had gone ten yards Dor spoke to his wife. They followedBurl, with their three children. Five yards more, and Jak agitatedlybegan to bustle his family into movement. Old Jon, wheezing, franticallyscuttled after Burl, and Cori competently set out with the youngest ofher children in her arms and the others marching before her. Withinseconds more, all the tribe was in motion.
Burl moved on, aware of his following, but ignoring it. The processioncontinued in his wake simply because it had begun to do so. Dik, hisadolescent brashness beaten down by terror, nevertheless regarded Burl'sstained weapon with the inevitable envy of the half-grown forachievement. He saw something half-buried in the soil and--after afearful glance behind--he moved aside to tug at it. It was part of thearmor of a former rhinoceros beetle. Tet joined him. They made an act ofgreat daring of lingering to find themselves weapons as near as possibleto Burl's.
A quarter-mile on, the fugitives passed a struggling milkweed plant, nomore than twenty feet high and already scabrous with scale and rustsupon its lower parts. Ants marched up and down its stalk in a steadysingle file, placing aphids from their nearby ant-city on suitable spotsto feed,--and to multiply as only parthenogenic aphids can do. Butalready, on the far side of the milkweed, an ant-lion climbed up to domurder among them. The ant-lion, of course, was the larval form of alace-wing fly. The aphids were its predestined prey.
Burl continued to march, holding Saya's hand. The reek of formic acidcame to his nostrils. He ignored it. Ants were as much prey to histribesmen, now, as crabs and crayfish to other, shore-dwelling tribesmenon long-forgotten Earth. But Burl was not concerned with food, now. Hestalked on toward the mountain-slopes.
Dik and Tet brandished their new weapons. They looked fearfully behindthem. The monster from whom they fled was lost in its gruesomefeasting,--and they were a long way from it, now. There was a steady,single-file procession of ants, with occasional gaps in the line. Theprocession passed the line through one of those gaps.
Beyond it, Tet and Dik conferred. They dared each other. They wentscrambling back to the line of ants. Their weapons smote. Theslaughtered ants died instantly and were quickly dragged from theformic-acid-scented path. The remaining ants went placidly on their way.The weapons struck again.
The two adolescents had to outdo each other. But they had as much foodas they could carry. Gloating--each claiming to have been most daringand to have the largest bag of game--they ran panting after the tribe.They grandly distributed their take of game. It was a form of boasting.But the tribesfolk accepted the gifts automatically. It was, after all,food.
The two gangling boys, jabbering at each other, raced back once more.Again they returned with dangling masses of foodstuff,--half-scores offoot-long creatures whose limbs, at least, contained firm meat.
Behind, the ant-lion made his onslaught into the stupidly feastingaphids, and warrior-ants took alarm and thrust forward to offer battle.Tumult arose upon the milkweed.
But Burl led his followers toward the mountainside. He reached a minoreminence and looked about him. Caution was the price of existence onthis world.
Two hundred feet away, a small scurrying horror raged and searched amongthe rough-edged layers of what on other worlds was called paper-mould orrock-tripe. Here it was thick as quilting, and infinitesimal creaturesdenned under it. The sixteen-inch spider devoured them, makinggluttonous sounds. But it was busy, and all spiders are relativelyshort-sighted.
Burl turned to Saya, and realized that all his tribe had followed himfearfully even to this small height he'd climbed only to look aroundfrom. Dor had taken advantage of Burl's pause. There was an emptycricket-shell partly overwhelmed by the fungoid soil. He tore free anow-hollow, sickle-shaped jaw. It was curved and sharp and deadly ifproperly wielded. Dor had seen Burl kill things. He had even helped.Now, very grimly, he tried to imagine killing something all alone. Jaksaw him working on the sickle-shaped weapon. He tugged at the cricket'sransacked carcass for another weapon. Dik and Tet vaingloriouslypretended to fight between themselves with their recently acquiredinstruments for killing. Jon wheezed and panted. Old Tama complained toherself in whispers, not daring to make sounds in the daylight. The restwaited until Burl should lead them further.
When Burl turned angry eyes upon them--he was beginning to do suchthings deliberately, now--they all regarded him humbly. Now theyremembered that they had been hungry and he had gotten food for them,and they had been paralyzed by terror, and he dared to move. Theydefinitely had a feeling of dependence upon him, for the present momentonly. Later, their feeling of humbleness would diminish. In proportionas he met their needs for leadership, they would tend to try to becomeindependent of him. His leadership would be successful in proportion ashe taught them to lead themselves. But Burl perceived this only dimly.At the moment it was pleasing to have all his tribe regard him soworshipfully, even if not in quite the same fashion as Saya. He wassuddenly aware that now--at any rate while they were so frightened--theywould obey him. So he invented an order for them to obey.
"I carry sharp things," he said sternly. "Some of you have gotten sharpthings. Now everybody must carry sharp things, to fight with."
Humbly, they scattered to obey. Saya would have gone with them, but Burlheld her back. He did not quite know why. It could have been that theabsolute equality of the sexes in cravenness was due to end, and for hisown vanity Burl would undertake the defense of Saya. He did not analyzeso far. He did not want her to leave him, so he prevented it.
The tribesfolk scattered. Dor went with his wife, to help her armherself. Jak uneasily followed his. Jon went timorously where thepicked-over remnant of the cricket's carcass might still yield aninstrument of defense. Cori laid her youngest child at Burl's feet whileshe went fearfully to find some toothed instrument meeting Burl'sspecification of sharpness.
There was a stifled scream. A ten-year-old boy--he was Dik's youngerbrother--stood paralyzed. He stared in an agony of horror at somethingthat had stepped from behind a misshapen fungoid object fifty yards fromBurl, but less than ten yards from him.
It was a pallidly greenish creature with a small head and enormous eyes.It stood upright, like a man,--and it was a few inches taller than aman. Its abdomen swelled gracefully into a leaflike form. The boy facedit, paralyzed by horror, and it stood stock-still. Its great, hideouslyspined arms were spread out in a pose of hypocritical benediction.
It was a partly-grown praying mantis, not too long hatched. It stoodrigid, waiting benignly for the boy to come closer or try to flee. Ifhe had fled, it would fling itself after him with a ferocity besidewhich the fury of a tiger would be kittenish. If he approached, itsfanged arms would flash down, pierce his body, and hold him terriblyfast by the needle-sharp hooks that were so much worse than trap-claws.And of course it would not wait for him to die before it began its meal.
All the small party of humans stood frozen. It may be questioned whetherthey were filled with horror for the boy, or cast into a deeper abyss ofdespair by the sight of a half-grown mantis. Only Burl, so far, had anynotion of actually leaving the valley. To the rest, the discovery of onepartly mature praying mantis meant that there would be hundreds ofothers. It would be impossible to evade the tiny, slavering demons whichwere the brood of the great spider. It would be impossibility multipliedto live where a horde of small--yet vastly larger--fiends lived, raisingtheir arms in a semblance of blessing before they did murder.
Only Burl was capable of thought, and this was because vanity filledhim. He had commanded and had been obeyed. Now obedience was forgottenbecause there was this young mantis. If the men had dreamed of fightingit, it could have destroyed any number of them by sheer ferocity and itsarsenal of knives and daggers. But Burl was at once furious andexperienced. He had e
ncountered such a middle-sized monster, when alone,and deliberately had experimented with it. In consequence he could dareto rage. He ran toward the mantis. He swung the small corpse of anant--killed by Tet only minutes since--and hurled it past theterror-fascinated boy. He had hurled it at the mantis.
It struck. And insects simply do not think. Something hurtled at theghastly young creature. Its arms struck ferociously to defend itself.The ant was heavy. Poised upright in its spectral attitude, the mantiswas literally flung backward. But it rolled over, fighting the dead antwith that frenzy which is not so much ferocity as mania.
The small boy fled, hysterically, once the insect's attention wasdiverted.
The human tribe gathered around Burl many hundreds of yards away,--againuphill. He was their rendezvous because of the example set by Cori. Shehad left her baby with Burl. When Burl dashed from the spot, Saya hadquite automatically followed the instinct of any female for the young ofits kind. She'd snatched up the baby before she fled. And--ofcourse--she'd joined Burl when the immediate danger was over.
The floor of the valley seemed a trifle indistinct, from here. The mistthat hung always in the air partly veiled the details of its horrors. Itwas less actual, not quite as deadly as it once had seemed.
Burl said fiercely to his followers:
"Where are the sharp things?"
The tribesfolk looked at one another, numbly. Then Jon mutteredrebelliously, and old Tama raised her voice in shrill complaint. Burlhad led them to this! There had been only the red dust in the place fromwhich they had come, but here was a hunting-spider and its young andalso a new hatching of mantises! They could dodge the red dust, but howcould they escape the deaths that waited them here? Ai! Ai! Burl hadpersuaded them to leave their home and brought them here to die....
Burl glared about him. It was neither courage nor resolution, but he hadcome to realize that to be admired by one's fellows was a splendidsensation. The more one was admired, the better. He was enraged thatanyone dared to despair instead of thinking admiringly about hisremarkableness.
"I," said Burl haughtily, "am not going to stay here. I go to a placewhere there are neither spiders nor mantises. Come!"
He held out his hand to Saya. She gave the child to Cori and confidentlymoved to follow him. Burl stalked grandly away and she went with him. Hewent uphill. Naturally! There were spiders and mantises in thevalley,--so many that to stay there meant death. So he moved to gosomewhere else.
And this was the climactic event that changed the whole history ofhumanity upon the forgotten planet. Up to this point, there may havebeen other individuals who had accomplished somewhat of Burl's kind ofleadership. A few may have learned courage. It is possible that someeven led their tribesfolk upon migrations in search of safer lands tolive in. But until Burl led his people out of a valley filled with food,up a mountainside toward the unknown, it was simply impossible forhumans to rise permanently above the status of hunted vermin; at themercy of monstrous mindless creatures; whose forbears had mostironically been brought to this planet to prepare it for humans to liveon.
Burl was the first man to lead his fellows toward the heights.
The Forgotten Planet Page 9