The Forgotten Planet Part 10

After a little while the bee died. Like all insects, bees breathe through spiracles--breathing-holes in their abdomens. This bee had flown into the cloud of red dust which was the spore-cloud of the new mushrooms.

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

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

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

Living things that breathed the red dust writhed and died. And the red-dust puffb.a.l.l.s were scattered everywhere.

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

_6. RED DUST_

It was very fortunate indeed that the feast took place when it did. Two days later it would probably have been impossible, and three days later it would have been too late to do any good. But coming when it did, it made the difference which was all the difference in the world.

Only thirty hours after the feasting which followed the death of the clotho spider, Burl's fellows--from Jon to Dor to Tet and Dik and Saya--had come to know a numb despair which the other creatures of his world were simply a bit too stupid to achieve.

It was night. There was darkness over all the lowlands, and over all the area of perhaps a hundred square miles which the humans of Burl's acquaintance really knew. He, alone of his tribe, had been as much as forty miles from the foraging-ground over which they wandered. At any given time the tribe clung together for comfort, venturing only as far as was necessary to find food. Although the planet possessed continents, they knew less than a good-sized county of it. The planet owned oceans, and they knew only small brooks and one river which, where they knew it, was a.s.suredly less than two hundred yards across. And they faced stark disaster that was not strictly a local one, but beyond their experience and hopelessly beyond their ability to face.

They were superior to the insects about them only in the fact they realized what was threatening them.

The disaster was the red puffb.a.l.l.s.

But it was night. The soft, blanketing darkness of a cloud-wrapped world lay all about. Burl sat awake, wrapped in his magnificent velvet cloak, his spear beside him and the yard-long golden plumes of a moth's antennae bound to his forehead for a headdress. About him and his tribesmen were the swollen shapes of fungi, hiding the few things that could be seen in darkness. From the low-hanging clouds the nightly rain dripped down. Now a drop and then another drop; slowly, deliberately, persistently moisture fell from the skies.

There was other sounds. Things flew through the blackness overhead--moths with mighty wing-beats that sometimes sent rhythmic wind-stirrings down to the tribe in its hiding-place. There were the deep pulsations of sound made by night-beetles aloft. There were the harsh noises of gra.s.shoppers--they were rare--senselessly advertising their existence to nearby predators. Not too far from where Burl brooded came bright chirrupings where relatively small beetles roamed among the mushroom-forests, singing cheerfully in deep ba.s.s voices. They were searching for the underground tidbits which took the place of truffles their ancestors had lived on back on Earth.

All seemed to be as it had been since the first humans were cast away upon this planet. And at night, indeed, the new danger subsided. The red puffb.a.l.l.s did not burst after sunset. Burl sat awake, brooding in a new sort of frustration. He and all his tribe were plainly doomed--yet Burl had experienced too many satisfying sensations lately to be willing to accept the fact.

The new red growths were everywhere. Months ago a storm-wind blew while somewhere, not too far distant, other red puffb.a.l.l.s were bursting and sending their spores into the air. Since it was only a windstorm, there was no rain to wash the air clean of the lethal dust. The new kind of puffball--but perhaps it was not new: it could have thriven for thousands of years where it was first thrown as a sport from a genetically unstable parent--the new kind of puffball would not normally be spread in this fashion. By chance it had.

There were dozens of the things within a quarter-mile, hundreds within a mile, and thousands upon thousands within the area the tribe normally foraged in. Burl had seen them even forty miles away, as yet immature.

They would be deadly at one period alone--the time of their bursting.

But there were limitations even to the deadliness of the red puffb.a.l.l.s, though Burl had not yet discovered the fact. But as of now, they doomed the tribe.

One woman panted and moaned in her exhausted sleep, a little way from where Burl tried to solve the problem presented by the tribe. n.o.body else attempted to think it out. The others accepted doom with fatalistic hopelessness. Burl's leadership might mean extra food, but nothing could counter the doom awaiting them--so their thoughts seemed to run.

But Burl doggedly reviewed the facts in the darkness, while the humans about him slept the sleep of those without hope and even without rebellion. There had been many burstings of the crimson puffb.a.l.l.s. As many as four and five of the deadly dust-clouds had been seen spouting into the air at the same time. A small boy of the tribe had breathlessly told of seeing a hunting-spider killed by the red dust. Lana, the half-grown girl, had come upon one of the gigantic rhinoceros-beetles belly-up on the ground, already the prey of ants. She had s.n.a.t.c.hed a huge, meat-filled joint and run away, faster than the ants could follow.

A far-ranging man had seen a b.u.t.terfly, with wings ten yards across, die in a dust-cloud. Another woman--Cori--had been nearby when a red cloud settled slowly over long, solid lines of black worker-ants bound on some unknown mission. Later she saw other workers carrying the dead bodies back to the ant-city to be used for food.

Burl still sat wakeful and frustrated and enraged as the slow rain fell upon the toadstools that formed the tribe's lurking-place. He doggedly went over and over the problem. There were innumerable red puffb.a.l.l.s.

Some had burst. The others undoubtedly would burst. Anything that breathed the red dust died. With thousands of the puffb.a.l.l.s around them it was unthinkable that any human in this place could escape breathing the red dust and dying. But it had not always been so. There had been a time when there were no red puffb.a.l.l.s here.

Burl's eyes moved restlessly over the sleeping forms limned by a patch of fox-fire. The feathery plumes rising from his head were outlined softly by the phosph.o.r.escence. His face was lined with a frown as he tried to think his own and his fellows' way out of the predicament.

Without realizing it, Burl had taken it upon himself to think for his tribe. He had no reason to. It was simply a natural thing for him to do so, now that he had learned to think--even though his efforts were crude and painful as yet.

Saya woke with a start and stared about. There had been no alarm,--merely the usual noises of distant murders and the songs of singers in the night. Burl moved restlessly. Saya stood up quietly, her long hair flowing about her. Sleepy-eyed, she moved to be near Burl. She sank to the ground beside him, sitting up--because the hiding-place was crowded and small--and dozed fitfully. Presently her head drooped to one side. It rested against his shoulder. She slept again.

This simple act may have been the catalyst which gave Burl the solution to the problem. Some few days before, Burl had been in a far-away place where there was much food. At the time he'd thought vaguely of finding Saya and bringing her to that place. He remembered now that the red puffb.a.l.l.s flourished there as well as here--but there had been other dangers in between, so the only half-formed purpose had been abandoned.

Now, though, with Saya's head resting against his shoulder, he remembered the plan. And then the stroke of genius took place.

He formed the idea of a journey which was not a going-after-food. This present dwelling-place of the tribe had been free of red puffb.a.l.l.s until only recently. There must be other places where there were no red puffb.a.l.l.s. He would take Saya and his tribesmen to such a place.

It was really genius. The people of Burl's tribe had no purposes, only needs--for food and the like. Burl had achieved abstract thought--which previously had not been useful on the forgotten planet and, therefore, not practised. But it was time for humankind to take a more fitting place in the unbalanced ecological system of this nightmare world, time to change that unbalance in favor of humans.

When dawn came, Burl had not slept at all. He was all authority and decision. He had made plans.

He spoke sternly, loudly--which frightened people conditioned to be furtive--holding up his spear as he issued commands. His timid tribesfolk obeyed him meekly. They felt no loyalty to him or confidence in his decisions yet, but they were beginning to a.s.sociate obedience to him with good things. Food, for one.

Before the day fully came, they made loads of the remaining edible mushroom and uneaten meat. It was remarkable for humans to leave their hiding-place while they still had food to eat, but Burl was implacable and scowling. Three men bore spears at Burl's urging. He brandished his long shaft confidently as he persuaded the other three to carry clubs.

They did so reluctantly, even though previously they had killed ants with clubs. Spears, they felt, would have been better. They wouldn't be so close to the prey then.

The sky became gray over all its expanse. The indefinite bright area which marked the position of the sun became established. It was part-way toward the center of the sky when the journey began. Burl had, of course, no determined course, only a destination--safety. He had been carried south, in his misadventure on the river. There were red puffb.a.l.l.s to southward, therefore he ruled out that direction. He could have chosen the east and come upon an ocean, but no safety from the red spore-dust. Or he could have chosen the north. It was pure chance that he headed west.

He walked confidently through the gruesome world of the lowlands, holding his spear in a semblance of readiness. Clad as he was, he made a figure at once valiant and rather pathetic. It was not too sensible for one young man--even one who had killed two spiders--to essay leading a tiny tribe of fearful folk across a land of monstrous ferocity and incredible malignance, armed only with a spear from a dead insect's armor. It was absurd to dress up for the enterprise in a velvety cloak made of a moth's wing, blue moth-fur for a loin-cloth, and merely beautiful golden plumes bobbing above his forehead.

Probably, though, that gorgeousness had a good effect upon his followers. They surely could not rea.s.sure each other by their numbers!

There was a woman with a baby in her arms--Cori. Three children of nine or ten, unable to resist the instinct to play even on so perilous a journey, ate almost constantly of the lumps of foodstuff they had been ordered to carry. After them came Dik, a long-legged adolescent boy with eyes that roved anxiously about. Behind him were two men. Dor with a short spear and Jak hefting a club, both of them badly frightened at the idea of fleeing from dangers they knew and were terrified by, to other dangers unknown and, consequently, more to be feared. The others trailed after them. Tet was rear-guard. Burl had separated the pair of boys to make them useful. Together they were worthless.

It was a pathetic caravan, in a way. In all the rest of the Galaxy, man was the dominant creature. There was no other planet from one rim to the other where men did not build their cities or settlements with unconscious arrogance--completely disregarding the wishes of lesser things. Only on this planet did men hide from danger rather than destroy it. Only here could men be driven from their place by lower life-forms.

And only here would a migration be made on foot, with men's eyes fearful, their bodies poised to flee at sight of something stronger and more deadly than themselves.

They marched, straggling a little, with many waverings aside from a fixed line. Once Dik saw the trap-door of a trapdoor-spider's lair. They halted, trembling, and went a long way out of their intended path to avoid it. Once they saw a great praying-mantis a good half-mile off, and again they deviated from their proper route.

Near midday their way was blocked. As they moved onward, a great, high-pitched sound could be heard ahead of them. Burl stopped; his face grew pinched. But it was only a stridulation, not the cries of creatures being devoured. It was a horde of ants by the thousands and hundreds of thousands, and nothing else.

Burl went ahead to scout. And he did it because he did not trust anybody else to have the courage or intelligence to return with a report, instead of simply running away if the news were bad. But it happened to be a sort of action which would help to establish his position as leader of his tribe.

Burl moved forward cautiously and presently came to an elevation from which he could see the cause of the tremendous waves of sound that spread out in all directions from the level plain before him. He waved to his followers to join him, and stood looking down at the extraordinary sight.

When they reached his side--and Saya was first--the spectacle had not diminished. For quite half a mile in either direction the earth was black with ants. It was a battle of opposing armies from rival ant-cities. They snapped and bit at each other. Locked in vise-like embraces, they rolled over and over upon the ground, trampled underfoot by hordes of their fellows who surged over them to engage in equally suicidal combat. There was, of course, no thought of surrender or of quarter. They fought by thousands of pairs, their jaws seeking to crush each other's armor, snapping at each other's antennae, biting at each other's eyes....

The noise was not like that of army-ants. This was the agonizing sound of ants being dismembered while still alive. Some of the creatures had only one or two or three legs left, yet struggled fiercely to entangle another enemy before they died. There were mad cripples, fighting insanely with head and thorax only, their abdomens sheared away. The whining battle-cry of the mult.i.tude made a deafening uproar.

From either side of the battleground a wide path led back toward separate ant-cities which were invisible from Burl's position. These highways were marked by hurrying groups of ants--reinforcements rushing to the fight. Compared to the other creatures of this world the ants were small, but no lumbering beetle dared to march insolently in their way, nor did any carnivores try to prey upon them. They were dangerous.

Burl and his tribesfolk were the only living things remaining near the battle-field--with one single exception.

That exception was itself a tribe of ants, vastly less in number than the fighting creatures, and greatly smaller in size as well. Where the combatants were from a foot to fourteen inches long, these guerilla-ants were no more than the third of a foot in length. They hovered industriously at the edge of the fighting, not as allies to either nation, but strictly on their own account. Scurrying among the larger, fighting ants with marvelous agility, they carried off piecemeal the bodies of the dead and valiantly slew the more gravely wounded for the same purpose.

They swarmed over the fighting-ground whenever the tide of battle receded. Caring nothing for the origin of the quarrel and espousing neither side, these opportunists busily salvaged the dead and still-living debris of the battle for their own purposes.

Burl and his followers were forced to make a two-mile detour to avoid the battle. The pa.s.sage between bodies of scurrying reinforcements was a matter of some difficulty. Burl hurried the others past a route to the front, reeking of formic acid, over which endless regiments and companies of ants moved frantically to join in the fight. They were intensely excited. Antennae waving wildly, they rushed to the front and instantly flung themselves into the fray, becoming lost and indistinguishable in the black ma.s.s of fighting creatures.

The humans pa.s.sed precariously between two hurrying battalions--Dik and Tet pausing briefly to burden themselves with prey--and hurried on to leave as many miles as possible behind them before nightfall. They never knew any more about the battle. It could have started over anything at all--two ants from the different cities may have disputed some tiny bit of carrion and soon been reinforced by companions until the military might of both cities was engaged. Once it had started, of course, the fighters knew whom to fight if not why they did so. The inhabitants of the two cities had different smells, which served them as uniforms.