The Mad Planet
Page 8
foothold. To the left a group of awkward, misshapenfungoids clustered in silent mockery of a forest of trees. There a massof faded green, where the giant cabbages stood.
With the true sun never shining upon them save through a blanket ofthick haze or heavy clouds, they were pallid things, but they were theonly green things Burl had seen. Their nodding white flowers with fourpetals in the form of a cross glowed against the yellowish green leaves.But as Burl gazed toward them, the green became slowly black.
From where he stood, Burl could see two or three great grubs in lazycontentment, eating ceaselessly on the cabbages on which they rested.Suddenly first one and then the other began to jerk spasmodically. Burlsaw that about each of them a tiny rim of black had clustered. Tinyblack motes milled over the green surfaces of the cabbages. The grubsbecame black, the cabbages became black. Horrible contortions of thewrithing grubs told of the agonies they were enduring. Then a black waveappeared at the further edge of the stretch of the sickly yellow fungus,a glistening, living wave, that moved forward rapidly with the roar ofclickings and a persistent overtone of shrill stridulations.
The hair rose upon Burl's head. He knew what this was! He knew all toowell the meaning of that tide of shining bodies. With a gasp of terror,all his intellectual preoccupations forgotten, he turned and fled inultimate panic. And the tide came slowly on after him.
* * * * *
He flung away the great mass of edible mushroom, but clung to hissharp-toothed club desperately, and darted through the tangled aisles ofthe little mushroom forest with a heedless disregard of the dangers thatmight await him there. Flies buzzed about him loudly, huge creatures,glittering with a metallic luster. Once he was struck upon the shoulderby the body of one of them, and his skin was torn by the swiftlyvibrating wings of the insect, as long as Burl's hand.
Burl thrust it away and sped on. The oil with which he was partlycovered had turned rancid, now, and the odor attracted them,connoisseurs of the fetid. They buzzed over his head, keeping pace evenwith his headlong flight.
A heavy weight settled upon his head, and in a moment was doubled. Twoof the creatures had dropped upon his oily hair, to sip the rancid oilthrough their disgusting proboscises. Burl shook them off with his handand ran madly on. His ears were keenly attuned to the sound of the armyants behind him, and it grew but little farther away.
The clicking roar continued, but began to be overshadowed by the buzzingof the flies. In Burl's time the flies had no great heaps of putridmatter in which to lay their eggs. The ants--busy scavengers--cartedaway the debris of the multitudinous tragedies of the insect world longbefore it could acquire the gamey flavor beloved by the fly maggots.Only in isolated spots were the flies really numerous, but there theyclustered in clouds that darkened the sky.
Such a buzzing, whirling cloud surrounded the madly running figure ofBurl. It seemed as though a miniature whirlwind kept pace with thelittle pink-skinned man, a whirlwind composed of winged bodies andmulti-faceted eyes. He twirled his club before him, and almost everystroke was interrupted by an impact against a thinly armoured body whichcollapsed with a spurting of reddish liquid.
An agonizing pain as of a red-hot iron struck upon Burl's back. One ofthe stinging flies had thrust its sharp-tipped proboscis into Burl'sflesh to suck the blood.
Burl uttered a cry and--ran full tilt into the thick stalk of ablackened and draggled toadstool. There was a curious crackling as ofwet punk or brittle rotten wood. The toadstool collapsed upon itselfwith a strange splashing sound. Many flies had laid their eggs in thefungoid, and it was a teeming mass of corruption and ill-smellingliquid.
With the crash of the toadstool's "head" upon the ground, it fell into adozen pieces, and the earth for yards around was spattered with astinking liquid in which tiny, headless maggots twitched convulsively.
The buzzing of the flies took on a note of satisfaction, and theysettled by hundreds about the edges of the ill-smelling pools, becominglost in the ecstacy of feasting while Burl staggered to his feet anddarted off again. This time he was but a minor attraction to the flies,and but one or two came near him. From every direction they werehurrying to the toadstool feast, to the banquet of horrible, liquefiedfungus that lay spread upon the ground.
Burl ran on. He passed beneath the wide-spreading leaves of a giantcabbage. A great grasshopper crouched upon the ground, its tremendousjaws crunching the rank vegetation voraciously. Half a dozen great wormsate steadily from their resting-places among the leaves. One of them hadslung itself beneath an overhanging leaf--which would have thatched adozen homes for as many men--and was placidly anchoring itself inpreparation for the spinning of a cocoon in which to sleep the sleep ofmetamorphosis.
A mile away, the great black tide of army ants was advancingrelentlessly. The great cabbage, the huge grasshopper, and all thestupid caterpillars upon the wide leaves would soon be covered with thetiny biting insects. The cabbage would be reduced to a chewed anddestroyed stump, the colossal, furry grubs would be torn into a myriadmouthfuls and devoured by the black army ants, and the grasshopper wouldstrike out with terrific, unguided strength, crushing its assailants byblows of its powerful hind legs and bites of its great jaws. But itwould die, making terrible sounds of torment as the vicious mandibles ofthe army ants found crevices in its armour.
The clicking roar of the ants' advance overshadowed all other sounds,now. Burl was running madly, breath coming in great gasps, his eyes widewith panic. Alone of all the world about him, he knew the danger behind.The insects he passed were going about their business with thatterrifying efficiency found only in the insect world.
* * * * *
There is something strangely daunting in the actions of an insect. Itmoves so directly, with such uncanny precision, with such utterindifference to anything but the end in view. Cannibalism is a rule,almost without exception. The paralysis of prey, so it may remain aliveand fresh--though in agony--for weeks on end, is a common practice. Theeating piecemeal of still living victims is a matter of course.
Absolute mercilessness, utter callousness, incredible inhumanity beyondanything known in the animal world is the natural and commonplacepractice of the insects. And these vast cruelties are performed byarmoured, machine-like creatures with an abstraction and a routine airthat suggests a horrible Nature behind them all.
Burl nearly stumbled upon a tragedy. He passed within a dozen yards of aspace where a female dung-beetle was devouring the mate whose honeymoonhad begun that same day and ended in that gruesome fashion. Hiddenbehind a clump of mushrooms, a great yellow-banded spider was coylythreatening a smaller male of her own species. He was discreetly ardent,but if he won the favor of the gruesome creature he was wooing, he wouldfurnish an appetizing meal for her some time within twenty-four hours.
Burl's heart was pounding madly. The breath whistled in hisnostrils--and behind him, the wave of army ants was drawing nearer. Theycame upon the feasting flies. Some took to the air and escaped, butothers were too engrossed in their delicious meal. The twitching littlemaggots, stranded upon the earth by the scattering of their soupy broth,were torn in pieces. The flies who were seized vanished into tiny maws.The serried ranks of black insects went on.
The tiny clickings of their limbs, the perpetual challenges andcross-challenges of crossed antennae, the stridulations of thecreatures, all combined to make a high-pitched but deafening din. Nowand then another sound pierced the noises made by the ants themselves. Acricket, seized by a thousand tiny jaws, uttered cries of agony. Theshrill note of the crickets had grown deeply bass with the increase insize of the organs that uttered it.
There was a strange contrast between the ground before the advancinghorde and that immediately behind it. Before, a busy world, teeming withlife. Butterflies floating overhead on lazy wings, grubs waxing fat andhuge upon the giant cabbages, crickets eating, great spiders sittingquietly in their lairs waiting with invincible patience for prey to drawnear their trap doors or fall into
their webs, colossal beetleslumbering heavily through the mushroom forests, seeking food, makinglove in monstrous, tragic fashion.
And behind the wide belt of army ants--chaos. The edible mushrooms gone.The giant cabbages left as mere stumps of unappetizing pulp, the busylife of the insect world completely wiped out save for the flyingcreatures that fluttered helplessly over an utterly changed landscape.Here and there little bands of stragglers moved busily over the denudedearth, searching for some fragment of food that might conceivably havebeen overlooked by the main body.
Burl was putting forth his last ounce of strength. His limbs trembled,his breathing was agony, sweat stood out upon his forehead. He ran alittle, naked man with the disjointed fragment of a huge insect's limbin his hand, running for his insignificant life, running as if hiscontinued existence among the million tragedies of that single day werethe purpose for which the whole of the universe had been created.
He sped across an open space a hundred yards