The Forgotten Planet Part 4

The great spider surveyed him and made ready to cast more of its silken stuff upon him. The spinnerets became active. A leg gathered it up--

The sticky stuff about Burl's feet gave way.

He shot out of the opening and fell heavily, sprawling upon the earth below and crashing into the shrunken sh.e.l.l of a flying beetle that had blundered into the snare and not escaped as he had done.

Burl rolled over and over and then sat up. An angry, foot-long ant stood before him, its mandibles extended threateningly, while a shrill stridulation filled the air.

In ages past, back on Earth--where most ants were to be measured in fractions of an inch--the scientists had debated gravely whether their tribe possessed a cry. They believed that certain grooves upon the body of the insect, like those upon the great legs of the cricket, might be the means of making a sound too shrill for human ears to catch. It was greatly debated, but evidence was hard to obtain.

Burl did not need evidence. He knew that the stridulation was caused by the insect before him, though he had never wondered how it was produced.

The cry was emitted to summon other ants from its city to help it in difficulty or good fortune.

Harsh clickings sounded fifty or sixty feet away; comrades were coming.

And while only army ants were normally dangerous, any tribe of ants could be formidable when aroused. It was overwhelming enough to pull down and tear a man to shreds as a pack of infuriated fox-terriers might do on Earth.

Burl fled without further delay, nearly colliding with one of the web's anchor-cables. Then he heard the shrill outcry subside. The ant, short-sighted as all its kind, no longer felt threatened. It went peacefully about the business Burl had interrupted. Presently it found some edible carrion among the debris from the spider-web and started triumphantly back to its city.

Burl sped on for a few hundred yards and then stopped. He was shaken and dazed. For the moment, he was as timid and fearful as any other man in his tribe. Presently he would realize the full meaning of the unparalleled feat he had performed in escaping from the giant spider web while cloaked with folds of gummy silk. It was not only unheard-of; it was unimaginable! But Burl was too shaken to think of it now.

Rather quaintly, the first sensation that forced itself into his consciousness was that his feet hurt. The gluey stuff from the web still stuck to his soles, picking up small objects as he went along. Old, ant-gnawed fragments of insect armor p.r.i.c.ked him so persistently, even through his toughened foot-soles, that he paused to sc.r.a.pe them away, staring fearfully about all the while. After a dozen steps more he was forced to stop again.

It was this nagging discomfort, rather than vanity or an emergency which caused Burl to discover--imagine--blunder into a new activity as epoch-making as anything else he had done. His brain had been uncommonly stimulated in the past twenty-some hours. It had plunged him into at least one predicament because of his conceiving the idea of stabbing something, but it had also allowed him escape from another even more terrifying one just now. In between it had led to the devising of a purpose--the bringing of Saya here--though that decision was not so firmly fixed as it had been before the encounter with the web-spider.

Still, it had surely been reasoning of a sort that told him to grease his body with the fish. Otherwise he would now be following the tarantula as a second course for the occupant of the web.

Burl looked cautiously all about him. It seemed to be quite safe. Then, quite deliberately, he sat down to think. It was the first time in his life that he had ever deliberately contemplated a problem with the idea of finding an answer to it. And the notion of doing such a thing was epoch-making--on this planet!

He examined his foot. The sharp edges of pebbles and the remnants of insect-armor hurt his feet when he walked. They had done so ever since he had been born, but never before had his feet been sticky, so that the irritation from one object persisted for more than a step. He carefully picked away each sharp-pointed fragment, one by one. Partly coated with the half-liquid gum, they even tended to cling to his fingers, except where the oil was thick.

Burl's reasoning had been of the simplest sort. He had contemplated a situation--not deliberately but because he had to--and presently his mind showed him a way out of it. It was a way specifically suited to the situation. Here he faced something different. Presently he applied the answer of one problem to a second problem. Oil on his body had let him go free of things that would stick to him. Here things stuck to his feet; so he oiled them.

And it worked. Burl strode away, almost--but not completely--untroubled by the bothersome pebbles and bits of discarded armor. Then he halted to regard himself with astonished appreciation. He was still thirty-five miles from his tribe; he was naked and unarmed, utterly ignorant of wood and fire and weapons other than the one he had lost. But he paused to observe with some awe that he was very wonderful indeed.

He wanted to display himself. But his spear was gone. So Burl found it necessary to think again. And the remarkable thing about it was that he succeeded.

In a surprisingly brief time he had come up with a list of answers. He was naked, so he would find garments for himself. He was weaponless: he would find himself a spear. He was hungry and he would seek food. Since he was far from his tribe, he would go to them. And this was, in a fashion, quite obviously thought; but it was not oblivious on the forgotten planet because it had been futile--up to now. The importance of such thought in the scheme of things was that men had not been thinking even so simply as this, living only from minute to minute. Burl was fumbling his way into a habit of thinking from problem to problem.

And that was very important indeed.

Even in the advanced civilization of other planets, few men really used their minds. The great majority of people depended on machines not only for computations but decisions as well. Any decisions not made by machines most men left to their leaders. Burl's tribesfolk thought princ.i.p.ally with their stomachs, making few if any decisions on any other basis--though they did act, very often, under the spur of fear.

Fear-inspired actions, however, were not thought out. Burl was thinking out his actions.

There would be consequences.

He faced upstream and began to move again, slowly and warily, his eyes keenly searching out the way ahead, ears alert for the slightest sound of danger. Gigantic b.u.t.terflies, riotous in coloring, fluttered overhead through the hazy air. Sometimes a gra.s.shopper hurtled from one place to another like a projectile, its transparent wings beating frantically.

Now and then a wasp sped by, intent upon its hunting, or a bee droned heavily alone, anxious and worried, striving to gather pollen in a nearly flowerless world.

Burl marched on. From somewhere far behind him came a very faint sound.

It was a shrill noise, but very distant indeed. Absorbed in immediate and nearby matters, Burl took no heed. He had the limited local viewpoint of a child. What was near was important and what was distant could be ignored. Anything not imminent still seemed to him insignificant--and he was preoccupied.

The source of this sound was important, however. Its origin was a myriad of clickings compounded into a single noise. It was, in fact, the far-away but yet perceptible sound of army ants on the march. The locusts of Earth were very trivial nuisances compared to the army ants of this planet.

Locusts, in past ages on Earth, had eaten all green things. Here in the lowlands were only giant cabbages and a few rank, tenacious growths.

Gra.s.shoppers were numerous here, but could never be thought of as a plague; they were incapable of multiplying to the size of locust hordes.

Army ants, however....

But Burl did not notice the sound. He moved forward briskly though cautiously, searching the fungus-landscape for any sign of garments, food, and weapons. He confidently expected to find all of them within a short distance. Indeed, he did find food very soon. No more than a half mile ahead he found a small cl.u.s.ter of edible fungi.

With no special elation, Burl broke off a food supply from the largest of them. Naturally, he took more than he could possibly eat at one time.

He went on, nibbling at a big piece of mushroom abstractedly, past a broad plain, more than a mile across and broken into odd little hillocks by gradually ripening mushrooms which were unfamiliar to him. In several places the ground had been pushed aside by rounded objects, only the tips showing. Blood-red hemispheres seemed to be forcing themselves through the soil, so they might reach the outer air. Careful not to touch any of them, Burl examined the hillocks curiously as he entered the plain. They were strange, and to Burl most strange things meant danger. In any event, he had two conscious purposes now. He wanted garments and weapons.

Above the plain a wasp hovered, dangling a heavy object beneath its black belly across which ran a single red band. It was the gigantic descendant of the hairy sand-wasp, differing only in size from its far-away, remote ancestors on Earth. It was taking a paralyzed gray caterpillar to its burrow. Burl watched it drop down with the speed and sureness of an arrow, pull aside a heavy, flat stone, and descend into the burrow with its caterpillar-prey momentarily laid aside.

It vanished underground into a vertical shaft dug down forty feet or more. It evidently inspected the refuge. Reappearing, it vanished into the hole again, dragging the gray worm after it. Burl, marching on over the broad plain spotted with some eruptive disease, did not know what pa.s.sed below. But he did observe the wasp emerge again to scratch dirt and stones previously excavated laboriously back into the shaft until it was full.

The wasp had paralyzed a caterpillar, taken it into the ready-prepared burrow, laid an egg upon it, and sealed up the entrance. In time the egg would hatch into a grub barely the size of Burl's forefinger. And the grub, deep underground, would feed upon the living but helpless caterpillar until it waxed large and fat. Then it would weave itself a coc.o.o.n and sleep a long sleep, only to wake as a wasp and dig its way out to the open air.

Reaching the farther side of the plain, Burl found himself threading the aisles of a fungus forest in which the growths were misshapen travesties of the trees which could not live here. Bloated yellow limbs branched off from rounded swollen trunks. Here and there a pear-shaped puffball, Burl's height and half his height again, waited until a chance touch should cause it to shoot upward a curling puff of infinitely fine dust.

He continued to move with caution. There were dangers here, but he went forward steadily. He still held a great ma.s.s of edible mushroom under one arm and from time to time broke off a fragment, chewing it meditatively. But always his eyes searched here and there for threats of harm.

Behind him the faint, shrill outcry had risen only slightly in volume.

It was still too far away to attract his notice. Army ants, however, were working havoc in the distance. By thousands and millions, myriads of them advanced across the fungoid soil. They clambered over every eminence. They descended into every depression. Their antennae waved restlessly. Their mandibles were extended threateningly. The ground was black with them, each one more than ten inches long.

A single such creature, armored and fearless as it was, could be formidable enough to an unarmed and naked man like Burl. The better part of discretion would be avoidance. But numbering in the thousands and millions, they were something which could not be avoided. They advanced steadily and rapidly; the chorus of shrill stridulations and clickings marking their progress.

Great, inoffensive caterpillars crawling over the huge cabbages heard the sound of their coming, but were too stupid to flee. The black mult.i.tudes blanketed the rank vegetables. Tiny, voracious jaws tore at the flaccid ma.s.ses of greasy flesh.

The caterpillars strove to throw off their a.s.sailants by writhings and contortions--uselessly. The bees fought their entrance into the monster hives with stings and wing-beats. Moths took to the air in daylight with dazzled, blinded eyes. But nothing could withstand the relentless hordes of small black things that reeked of formic acid and left the ground behind them empty of life.

Before the horde was a world of teeming life, where mushrooms and other fungi fought with thinning numbers of cabbages and mutant earth-weeds for a foothold. Behind the black mult.i.tude was--nothing. Mushrooms, cabbages, bees, wasps, crickets, grubs--every living thing that could not flee before the creeping black tide reached it was lost, torn to bits by tiny mandibles.

Even the hunting spiders and tarantulas fell before the black host. They killed many in their desperate self-defense, but the army ants could overwhelm anything--anything at all--by sheer numbers and ferocity.

Killed or wounded ants served as food for their sound comrades. Only the web spiders sat unmoved and immovable in their collossal snares, secure in the knowledge that their gummy webs could not be invaded along the slender supporting cables.

_3. THE PURPLE HILLS_

The army ants flowed over the ground like a surging, monstrous, inky tide. Their vanguard reached the river and recoiled. Burl was perhaps five miles away when they changed their course. The change was made without confusion, the leaders somehow communicating the altered line of march to those behind them.

Back on Earth, scientists had gravely debated the question of how ants conveyed ideas to each other. Honeybees, it was said, performed elaborate ritual dances to exchange information. Ants, it had been observed, had something less eccentric. A single ant, finding a bit of booty too big for it to manage alone, would return to its city to secure the help of others. From that fact men had deduced that a language of gestures made with crossed antennae must exist.

Burl had no theories. He merely knew facts, but he did know that ants could and did pa.s.s information to one another. Now, however, he moved cautiously along toward the sleeping-place of his tribe in complete ignorance of the black blanket of living creatures spreading over the ground behind him.

A million tragedies marked the progress of the insect army. There was a tiny colony of mining bees, their habits unchanged despite their greater size, here on the forgotten planet. A single mother, four feet long, had dug a huge gallery with some ten offshooting cells, in which she had laid her eggs and fed her grubs with hard-gathered pollen. The grubs had waxed fat and large, become bees, and laid eggs in their turn within the same gallery their mother had dug out for them.

Ten bulky insects now foraged busily to feed their grubs within the ancestral home, while the founder of the colony had grown draggled and wingless with the pa.s.sing of time. Unable to bring in food, herself, the old bee became the guardian of the hive. She closed the opening with her head, making a living barrier within the entrance. She withdrew only to grant admission or exit to the duly authorized members,--her daughters.