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THE MAD PLANET
by Murray Leinster
The Argosy
_June 12, 1920_
In All His lifetime of perhaps twenty years, it had never occurred toBurl to wonder what his grandfather had thought about his surroundings.The grandfather had come to an untimely end in a rather unpleasantfashion which Burl remembered vaguely as a succession of screams comingmore and more faintly to his ears while he was being carried away at thetop speed of which his mother was capable.
Burl had rarely or never thought of the old gentleman since. Surelyhe had never wondered in the abstract of what his great grandfatherthought, and most surely of all, there never entered his headsuch a purely hypothetical question as the one of what hismany-times-great-grandfather--say of the year 1920--would have thoughtof the scene in which Burl found himself.
He was treading cautiously over a brownish carpet of fungus growth,creeping furtively toward the stream which he knew by the generic titleof "water." It was the only water he knew. Towering far above his head,three man-heights high, great toadstools hid the grayish sky from hissight. Clinging to the foot-thick stalks of the toadstools were stillother fungi, parasites upon the growth that had once been parasitesthemselves.
Burl himself was a slender young man wearing a single garment twistedabout his waist, made from the wing-fabric of a great moth the membersof his tribe had slain as it emerged from its cocoon. His skin was fair,without a trace of sunburn. In all his lifetime he had never seen thesun, though the sky was rarely hidden from view save by the giant fungiwhich, with monster cabbages, were the only growing things he knew.Clouds usually spread overhead, and when they did not, the perpetualhaze made the sun but an indefinitely brighter part of the sky, never asharply edged ball of fire. Fantastic mosses, misshapen fungus growths,colossal molds and yeasts, were the essential parts of the landscapethrough which he moved.
Once as he had dodged through the forest of huge toadstools, hisshoulder touched a cream-colored stalk, giving the whole fungus a tinyshock. Instantly, from the umbrella-like mass of pulp overhead, a fineand impalpable powder fell upon him like snow. It was the season whenthe toadstools sent out their spores, or seeds, and they had beendropped upon him at the first sign of disturbance.
Furtive as he was, he paused to brush them from his head and hair. Theywere deadly poison, as he knew well.
Burl would have been a curious sight to a man of the twentieth century.His skin was pink, like that of a child, and there was but little hairupon his body. Even that on top of his head was soft and downy. Hischest was larger than his forefathers' had been, and his ears seemedalmost capable of independent movement, to catch threatening sounds fromany direction. His eyes, large and blue, possessed pupils which coulddilate to extreme size, allowing him to see in almost complete darkness.
He was the result of the thirty thousand years' attempt of the humanrace to adapt itself to the change that had begun in the latter half ofthe twentieth century.
At about that time, civilization had been high, and apparently secure.Mankind had reached a permanent agreement among itself, and all men hadequal opportunities to education and leisure. Machinery did most of thelabor of the world, and men were only required to supervise itsoperation. All men were well-fed, all men were well-educated, and itseemed that until the end of time the earth would be the abode of acommunity of comfortable human beings, pursuing their studies anddiversions, their illusions and their truths. Peace, quietness, privacy,freedom were universal.
Then, just when men were congratulating themselves that the Golden Agehad come again, it was observed that the planet seemed ill at ease.Fissures opened slowly in the crust, and carbonic acid gas--the carbondioxide of chemists--began to pour out into the atmosphere. That gas hadlong been known to be present in the air, and was considered necessaryto plant life. Most of the plants of the world took the gas and absorbedits carbon into themselves, releasing the oxygen for use again.
Scientists had calculated that a great deal of the earth's increasedfertility was due to the larger quantities of carbon dioxide released bythe activities of man in burning his coal and petroleum. Because ofthose views, for some years no great alarm was caused by the continuousexhalation from the world's interior.
Constantly, however, the volume increased. New fissures constantlyopened, each one adding a new source of carbon dioxide, and each onepouring into the already laden atmosphere more of the gas--beneficent insmall quantities, but as the world learned, deadly in large ones.
The percentage of the heavy, vapor-like gas increased. The whole body ofthe air became heavier through its admixture. It absorbed more moistureand became more humid. Rainfall increased. Climates grew warmer.Vegetation became more luxuriant--but the air gradually became lessexhilarating.
Soon the health of mankind began to be affected. Accustomed through longages to breathe air rich in oxygen and poor in carbon dioxide, mensuffered. Only those who lived on high plateaus or on tall mountaintopsremained unaffected. The plants of the earth, though nourished andincreasing in size beyond those ever seen before, were unable to disposeof the continually increasing flood of carbon dioxide.
* * * * *
By the middle of the twenty-first century it was generally recognizedthat a new carboniferous period was about to take place, when theearth's atmosphere would be thick and humid, unbreathable by man, whengiant grasses and ferns would form the only vegetation.
When the twenty-first century drew to a close the whole human race beganto revert to conditions closely approximating savagery. The low-landswere unbearable. Thick jungles of rank growth covered the ground. Theair was depressing and enervating. Men could live there, but it was asickly, fever-ridden existence. The whole population of the earthdesired the high lands and as the low country became more unbearable,men forgot their two centuries of peace.
They fought destructively, each for a bit of land where he might liveand breathe. Then men began to die, men who had persisted in remainingnear sea-level. They could not live in the poisonous air. The dangerzone crept up as the earth-fissures tirelessly poured out their steadystreams of foul gas. Soon men could not live within five hundred feet ofsea level. The low-lands went uncultivated, and became jungles of athickness comparable only to those of the first carboniferous period.
Then men died of sheer inanition at a thousand feet. The plateaus andmountaintops were crowded with folk struggling for a foothold and foodbeyond the invisible menace that crept up, and up--
These things did not take place in one year, or in ten. Not in onegeneration, but in several. Between the time when the chemists of theInternational Geophysical Institute announced that the proportion ofcarbon dioxide in the air had increased from .04 per cent to .1 per centand the time when at sea-level six per cent of the atmosphere was thedeadly gas, more than two hundred years intervened.
Coming gradually, as it did, the poisonous effects of the deadly stuffincreased with insidious slowness. First the lassitude, then theheaviness of brain, then the weakness of body. Mankind ceased to grow innumbers. After a long period, the race had fallen to a fraction of itsformer size. There was room in plenty on the mountaintops--but thedanger-level continued to creep up.
There was but one solution. The human body would have to inure itself tothe poison, or it was doomed to extinction. It finally developed atoleration for the gas that had wiped out race after race and nationafter nation, but at a terrible cost. Lungs increased in size to securethe oxygen on which life depended, but the poison, inhaled at everybreath, left the
few survivors sickly and filled with a perpetualweariness. Their minds lacked the energy to cope with new problems ortransmit the knowledge which in one degree or another, they possessed.
And after thirty thousand years, Burl, a direct descendant of the firstpresident of the Universal Republic, crept through a forest oftoadstools and fungus growths. He was ignorant of fire, or metals, ofthe uses of stone and wood. A single garment covered him. His languagewas a scanty group of a few hundred labial sounds, conveying noabstractions and few concrete things.
He was ignorant of the uses of wood. There was no wood in the scantyterritory furtively inhabited by his tribe. With the increase in heatand humidity the trees had begun to die out. Those of northern climeswent first, the oaks, the cedars, the maples. Then the pines--thebeeches went early--the cypresses, and finally even the forests of thejungles vanished. Only grasses and reeds, bamboos and their kin, wereable to flourish in the new, steaming atmosphere. The thick jungles gaveplace to dense thickets of grasses and ferns, now become treefernsagain.
And then the fungi took their place. Flourishing as never before,flourishing on a planet of torrid heat and perpetual miasma, on whosesurface the sun never shone directly because of an ever-thickening bankof clouds that hung sullenly overhead, the fungi sprang up. About thedank pools that festered over the surface of the earth, fungus growthsbegan to cluster. Of every imaginable shade and color, of all monstrousforms and malignant purposes, of huge size and flabby volume, theyspread over the land.
The grasses and ferns gave place to them. Squat footstools, flakingmolds, evil-smelling yeasts, vast mounds of fungi inextricably mingledas to species, but growing, forever growing and exhaling an odor of darkplaces.
The strange growths now grouped themselves in forests, horribletravesties on the vegetation they had succeeded. They grew and grew withfeverish intensity beneath a clouded or a haze-obscured sky, whileabove them fluttered gigantic butterflies and huge moths, sippingdaintily of their corruption.
The insects alone of all the animal world above water, were able toendure the change. They multiplied exceedingly, and enlarged themselvesin the thickened air. The solitary vegetation--as distinct from fungusgrowths--that had survived, was now a degenerate form of the cabbagesthat had once fed peasants. On those rank, colossal masses of foliage,the stolid grubs and caterpillars ate themselves to maturity, then swungbelow in strong cocoons to sleep the sleep of metamorphosis from whichthey emerged to spread their wings and fly.
The tiniest butterflies of former days had increased their span untiltheir gaily colored wings should be described in terms of feet, whilethe larger emperor moths extended their purple sails to a breadth ofyards upon yards. Burl himself would have been dwarfed beneath theovershadowing fabric of their wings.
It was fortunate that they, the largest flying creatures, were harmlessor nearly so. Burl's fellow tribesmen sometimes came upon a cocoon justabout to open, and waited patiently beside it until the beautifulcreature within broke through its matted shell and came out into thesunlight.
Then, before it had gathered energy from the air, and before its wingshad swelled to strength and firmness, the tribesmen fell upon it,tearing the filmy, delicate wings from its body and the limbs from itscarcass. Then, when it lay helpless before them, they carried away thejuicy, meat-filled limbs to be eaten, leaving the still living body tostare helplessly at this strange world through its many faceted eyes,and become a prey to the voracious ants who would soon clamber upon itand carry it away in tiny fragments to their underground city.
* * * * *
Not all the insect world was so helpless or so unthreatening. Burl knewof wasps almost the length of his own body who possessed stings thatwere instantly fatal. To every species of wasp, however, some otherinsect is predestined prey, and the furtive members of Burl's tribefeared them but little as they sought only the prey to which theirinstinct led them.
Bees were similarly aloof. They were hard put to it for existence, thosebees. Few flowers bloomed, and they were reduced to expedients onceconsidered signs of degeneracy in their race. Bubbling yeasts and foulerthings, occasionally the nectarless blooms of the rank, giant cabbages.Burl knew the bees. They droned overhead, nearly as large as he washimself, their bulging eyes gazing at him with abstracted preoccupation.And crickets, and beetles, and spiders--
Burl knew spiders! His grandfather had been the prey of one of thehunting tarantulas, which had leaped with incredible ferocity from hisexcavated tunnel in the earth. A vertical pit in the ground, two feet indiameter, went down for twenty feet. At the bottom of that lair theblack-bellied monster waited for the tiny sounds that would warn him ofprey approaching his hiding-place (_Lycosa fasciata_).
Burl's grandfather had been careless, and the terrible shrieks heuttered as the horrible monster darted from the pit and seized him hadlingered vaguely in Burl's mind ever since. Burl had seen, too, themonster webs of another species of spider, and watched from a safedistance as the misshapen body of the huge creature sucked the juicesfrom a three-foot cricket that had become entangled in its trap.
Burl had remembered the strange stripes of yellow and black and silverthat crossed upon its abdomen (_Epiera fasciata_). He had beenfascinated by the struggles of the imprisoned insect, coiled in ahopeless tangle of sticky, gummy ropes the thickness of Burl's finger,cast about its body before the spider made any attempt to approach.
Burl knew these dangers. They were a part of his life. It was hisaccustomedness to them, and that of his ancestors, that made hisexistence possible. He was able to evade them; so he survived. A momentof carelessness, an instant's relaxation of his habitual caution, and hewould be one with his forebears, forgotten meals of long-dead, inhumanmonsters.
Three days before, Burl had crouched behind a bulky, shapeless fungusgrowth while he watched a furious duel between two huge horned beetles.Their jaws, gaping wide, clicked and clashed upon each other'simpenetrable armor. Their legs crashed like so many cymbals as theirpolished surfaces ground and struck against each other. They werefighting over some particularly attractive bit of carrion.
Burl had watched with all his eyes until a gaping orifice appeared inthe armor of the smaller of the two. It uttered a shrill cry, or seemedto cry out. The noise was, actually, the tearing of the horny stuffbeneath the victorious jaws of the adversary.
The wounded beetle struggled more and more feebly. At last it collapsed,and the conqueror placidly began to eat the conquered before life wasextinct.
Burl waited until the meal was finished, and then approached the scenewith caution. An ant--the forerunner of many--was already inspecting thecarcass.
Burl usually ignored the ants. They were stupid, short-sighted insects,and not hunters. Save when attacked, they offered no injury. They werescavengers, on the lookout for the dead and dying, but they would fightviciously if their prey were questioned, and they were dangerousopponents. They were from three inches, for the tiny black ants, to afoot for the large termites.
Burl was hasty when he heard the tiny clickings of their limbs as theyapproached. He seized the sharp-pointed snout of the victim, detachedfrom the body, and fled from the scene.
Later, he inspected his find with curiosity. The smaller victim had beena minotaur beetle, with a sharp-pointed horn like that of a rhinocerosto reinforce his offensive armament, already dangerous because of hiswide jaws. The jaws of a beetle work from side to side, instead of upand down, and this had made the protection complete in no less thanthree directions.
Burl inspected the sharp, dagger-like instrument in his hand. He feltits point, and it pricked his finger. He flung it aside as he crept tothe hiding-place of his tribe. There were only twenty of them, four orfive men, six or seven women, and the rest girls and children.
Burl had been wondering at the strange feelings that came over him whenhe looked at one of the girls. She was younger than Burl--perhapseighteen--and fleeter of foot than he. They talked together, sometimes,and once or twice Burl
shared with her an especially succulent find offoodstuffs.
* * * * *
The next morning he found the horn where he had thrown it, sticking inthe flabby side of a toadstool. He pulled it out, and gradually, farback in his mind, an idea began to take shape. He sat for some time withthe thing in his hand, considering it with a far-away look in his eyes.From time to time he stabbed at a toadstool, awkwardly, but withgathering skill. His imagination began to work fitfully. He visualizedhimself stabbing food with it as the larger beetle had stabbed theformer owner of the weapon he had in his hand.
Burl could not imagine himself coping with one of the fighting insects.He could only picture himself, dimly, stabbing something that was foodwith this death-dealing thing. It was no longer than his arm and thoughclumsy to the hand, an effective and terribly sharp implement.
He thought: Where was there food, food that lived, that would not fightback? Presently he rose and began to make his way toward the tiny river.Yellow-bellied newts swam in its waters. The swimming larvae of athousand insects floated about its surface or crawled upon its bottom.
There were deadly things there, too. Giant crayfish snapped their hornyclaws at the unwary. Mosquitoes of four-inch wing-spread sometimes madetheir humming way above the river. The last survivors of their race,they were dying out for lack of the plant-juices on which the male ofthe species lived, but even so they were formidable. Burl had learned tocrush them with fragments of fungus.
He crept slowly through the forest of toadstools. Brownish fungus wasunderfoot. Strange orange, red, and purple molds clustered about thebases of the creamy toadstool stalks. Once Burl paused to run hissharp-pointed weapon through a fleshy stalk and reassure himself thatwhat he planned was practicable.
He made his way furtively through the forest of misshapen growths. Oncehe heard a tiny clicking, and froze into stillness. It was a troop offour or five ants, each some eight inches long, returning along theirhabitual pathway to their city. They moved sturdily, heavily laden,along the route
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