The Forgotten Planet Part 7

Hundreds of thousands of years before, his ancestors had been forced to develop brains as penalty for the lack of claws or fangs. Burl was sunk as low as any of them, but he had to combat more horrifying enemies, more inexorable dangers, and many times more crafty antagonists. His ancestors had invented knives and spears and flying missiles, but the creatures about Burl had weapons a thousand times more deadly than the ones that had defended the first humans.

The fact, however, simply put a premium on the one faculty Burl had which the insect world has not.

In mid-morning he heard a discordant, deep-ba.s.s bellow, coming from a spot not twenty yards from where he moved. He hid in panic, waiting for an instant, listening.

The bellow came again, but this time with a querulous note. Burl heard a crashing and plunging as of some creature caught in a snare. A mushroom tumbled with a spongelike sound, and the thud was followed by a tremendous commotion. Something was fighting desperately against something else, but Burl did not know what creatures were in combat.

He waited, and the noise died gradually away. Presently his breath came more slowly and his courage returned. He stole from his hiding-place and would have made away, but new curiosity held him back. Instead of creeping from the scene, he moved cautiously toward the source of the noise.

Peering between two cream-colored stalks he saw a wide, funnel-shaped snare of silk spread out before him, some twenty yards across and as many deep. The individual threads could be plainly seen, but in the ma.s.s it seemed a fabric of sheerest, finest texture. Held up by tall mushrooms, it was anch.o.r.ed to the ground below and drew away to a small point through which a hole led to some as yet unseen recess. All the s.p.a.ce of the wide snare was hung with threads: fine, twisted threads no more than half the thickness of Burl's finger.

This was the trap of a labyrinth spider. Not one of the interlacing strands was strong enough to hold any but the feeblest prey, but the threads were there by thousands. A cricket had become entangled in the sticky maze. Its limbs thrashed out and broke threads with every stroke, but each time became entangled in a dozen more. It struggled mightily, emitting at intervals--again--its horrible ba.s.s roar.

Burl breathed more easily. He watched with fascinated eyes. Mere death among insects--even tragic death--held no great interest for him. It was too common an occurrence. And there were few insects which deliberately sought man. Most insects have their allotted prey and will seek no others.

But this involved a spider, and spiders have a terrifying impartiality.

A spider devouring some luckless insect was but an example of what might happen to Burl. So he watched alertly, his eyes traveling from the enmeshed cricket to the strange opening at the back of the funnel-shaped labyrinth.

That opening darkened. Two shining, glistening eyes had been watching from the tunnel in which the spider had been waiting. Now it swung out lightly, revealing itself as a gray spider, with twin black ribbons upon its thorax and two stripes of curiously speckled brown and white upon its abdomen. Burl saw, also, two curious appendages like a tail, as it came nimbly out of its hiding-place and approached the trapped creature.

The cricket was struggling weakly, now, and the cries it uttered were but feeble, because of the cords that fettered its limbs. Burl saw the spider throw itself upon the cricket which gave one final, convulsive shudder as fangs pierced its armor.

Shortly after, the spider fed. With b.e.s.t.i.a.l enjoyment it sucked all the succulence, all the fluid, from its victim's carca.s.s.

Then the breath left Burl in a peculiar, frightened gasp. It was not from anything he saw or heard. It was something that he thought.

For a second, his knees knocked together in self-induced panic. It occurred to him that he, Burl, had killed a hunting spider--a tarantula--upon the red-clay cliff. True, the killing had been an accident and had nearly cost him his own life in the web-spider's snare.

But--he had killed a spider and of the most deadly kind. Now it occurred to Burl that he could kill another.

Spiders were the ogres of the human tribes on the forgotten planet.

Knowledge of them was hard to come by, because to study them was death.

But all men knew that web-spiders never left their traps. Never! And Burl had imagined himself making an impossibly splendid, incredibly daring use of that fact.

Denying to himself that he intended any action so suicidal, he nevertheless drew back from the front of the snare and made his way to the back, where the spider's tunnel was no more than ten feet away.

Then he found himself waiting.

Presently, through the interstices of the silk, he saw the gray bulk of the spider. It had left the drained and shrunken carca.s.s of the cricket to return to its resting-place, settling itself carefully upon the soft walls of the fabric tunnel. From the yielding, globular nest at the tunnel's end it fixed maniacal eyes once more upon the threads of its snare, seen down the length of the pa.s.sage-way.

Burl's hair stood on end from sheer fright, but he was the slave of an idea.

The tunnel and the nest at its end did not rest on the ground, but were suspended in air by cables like those that spread the gin itself. The gray labyrinth-spider bulged the fabric. It lay in luxurious comfort, waiting for victims to approach.

There was sweat on Burl's face as he raised his spear. The bare idea of attacking a spider was horrifying. But actually he was in no danger whatever before the instant of the spear-thrust, because web-spiders never, never, leave their webs to hunt.

So Burl sweated, and grasped his spear with agonized firmness--and thrust it into the bulge that was the spider's body in its nest. He thrust with hysterical fury.

And then he ran as if the devil were after him.

It was a long time before he dared come back, his heart in his throat.

All was still. He had missed the horrid convulsions of the wounded spider; he had not heard the frightful gnashings of its fangs at the piercing weapon, nor seen the silken threads of the tunnel ripped and torn in the spider's death-struggle. Burl came back to quietness. There was a great rent in the silken tunnel, and a puddle of ill-smelling stuff lay upon the ground. From time to time another droplet fell from the spear to join it. And the great spider had fallen half through its own enlargement of the rent made by the spear in the wall of the nest.

Burl stared. Even when he saw it, the thing was not easy to believe. The dead eyes of the spider looked at him with mad, frozen malignity. The fangs were still raised to kill. The hairy legs were still braced as if to enlarge further the gaping hole through which it had partly fallen.

Then Burl felt exultation. His tribe had been furtive vermin for almost forty generations, fleeing from the mighty insects, hiding from them, and when caught waiting helplessly for death, screaming shrilly in horror. But he, Burl, had turned the tables. He, a man, had killed a spider! His breast expanded. Always his tribesmen went quietly and fearfully, making no sound. But a sudden, surprising, triumphant yell burst from Burl's lips--the first hunting-cry of man upon the forgotten planet in two thousand years.

Next second, of course, his pulse almost stopped in sheer terror because he had made such a noise. He listened fearfully. The insect world was oblivious to him. Presently, shuddering but infinitely proud, he drew near his prey. He carefully withdrew his spear, poised to flee if the spider stirred. It did not. It was dead. The blood upon the spear was revolting. Burl wiped it off on a leathery toadstool. Then....

He thought of Saya and his tribesmen. Trembling even as he gloated over his own remarkable self, he shifted the spider and worked it out of the nest. Presently he moved off with the belly of the spider upon his back and two of its hairy legs over his shoulders. The other limbs of the monster hung limp, trailing on the ground behind him.

Marching, then he was the first such spectacle in history. His velvet cloak shining with its irridescent spots, the yard-long sc.r.a.ps of golden antennae bound to his forehead, a spear in his hand, and the hideous bulk of a gray spider for burden--Burl was a very strange sight indeed.

He believed that other creatures fled before him because of the thing he carried. He tended to grow haughty. But actually, of course, insects do not know fear. They recognize their own specific enemies. That is necessary. But the his of the lowlands on the forgotten planet went on abstractedly, despite the splendid feat of one man.

Burl marched. He came upon a valley full of torn and tattered mushrooms.

There was not a single yellow top among them. Every one had been infested with maggots that had liquefied the tough meat of the mushroom-tops, causing it to drip to the ground below. The liquid was gathered in a golden pool in the center of the small depression. Burl heard a loud and deep-toned humming before he saw the valley. Then he stopped and looked down.

He saw the golden pond, its surface reflecting the gray sky and the darkened stumps of mushrooms on the hillside which looked as if they had been blackened by a running flame. A small brooklet of golden liquid trickled over a rocky ledge, and all round the edges of the pond and brook, in ranks and rows, by hundreds and by thousands and it seemed by millions, were the green-gold bodies of great flies.

They were small compared to other insects. The flesh-flies laid their eggs by the hundreds in decaying carca.s.ses. The others chose mushrooms to lay their eggs in. To feed the maggots that would hatch, a relatively great quant.i.ty of food was needed; therefore, the flies must remain comparatively small, or the body of a single gra.s.shopper would furnish food for only a few maggots instead of the hundreds it must support.

There must also be a limit to the size of worms if hundreds were to feast upon a single fungus.

But there was no limitation to the greediness of the adult creatures.

There were bluebottles and green-bottles and all the flies of metallic l.u.s.tre, gathered at a Lucullan feast of corruption. The buzzing of those swarming above the golden pool was a tremendous sound. The flying bodies flashed and glittered as they flew back and forth, seeking a place to alight and join in the orgy.

The glittering bodies cl.u.s.tered in already-found places were motionless as if carved from metal. Burl watched them. And then he saw motion overhead.

A slender, brilliant shape appeared, darting swiftly through the air, enlarging into a needle-like body with transparent, shining wings and two huge eyes. It circled and enlarged again, becoming a shimmering dragonfly, twenty feet and more in length. It poised itself abruptly above the pool, and then darted down, its jaws snapping viciously. They snapped again and again. Burl could not follow their slashings. And with each snap the glittering body of a fly vanished.

A second dragonfly appeared and a third. They swooped above the golden pool, snapping in mid-air, making their abrupt and angular turns, creatures of incredible ferocity and beauty. In that ma.s.s of buzzing creatures, even the most voracious appet.i.te must soon have been sated, but the slender creatures still darted about in frenzied destruction.

And all this while the loud, contented, deep-ba.s.s humming went on as before. Their comrades were slaughtered by the hundreds not forty feet above their heads, but still the glittering rows of red-eyed flies gorged themselves upon the fluid of the pond. The dragonflies feasted until they were unable to devour even a single one more of their chosen prey. But even then they continued to sweep madly above the pool, striking down the buzzing flies though their bodies must perforce remain uneaten.

Some of the dead flies, crushed to pulp by the angry dragonflies, dropped among their feasting brothers. Presently, one of them placed its disgusting proboscis upon the mangled creature. It sipped daintily from the contents of the broken armor. Another joined it and another. In a little while a cl.u.s.ter of them pushed against each other for a chance to join them in a cannibalistic feast.

Burl turned aside and went on, leaving the dragonflies still at their ma.s.sacre and the flies absorbed and ecstatic at their feast. The feast, indeed, was improved by the rain of murdered brethren from overhead.

Only a few miles farther on, Burl came upon a familiar landmark. He knew it well, but had always kept at a safe distance from it. A ma.s.s of rock had heaved itself up from the almost level plain over which he traveled to form an out-jutting cliff. At one point the rock overhung, forming an inverted ledge--a roof over nothingness--which had been preempted by a hairy monster and made into a fairy-like dwelling. A white hemisphere clung to the rock, firmly anch.o.r.ed by long cables.

Burl knew the place as one to be feared. A clotho spider had built itself a nest there, from which it emerged to hunt the unwary. Within the silken globe was a monstrosity, resting upon cushions of softest silk. The exterior had been beautiful once. But if one went too near one of the little inverted arches seemingly closed by panels of silk--it would open and out would rush a creature from a dream of h.e.l.l.

Surely Burl knew this place. Hung upon the walls of the fairy palace were trophies. They had a purpose, of course. Stones and boulders hung there, too, to hold the structure firm against the storm-winds that rarely blew. But amid the stones and fragments of insect-armor there was a very special decoration: the shrunken, dessicated skeleton of a man.

The death of that man had saved Burl's life two years before. They had been together, seeking a new source of edible mushroom. The clotho spider was a hunter, not a spinner of webs. It had sprung suddenly from behind a great puffball as the two men froze in horror. Then it had come forward and deliberately chosen its victim. It did not choose Burl.

Now he looked with half-frightened speculation at the lair of his ancient enemy. Some day, perhaps....

But now he pa.s.sed on. He went past the thicket in which the great moths hid by day, past the slimy pool in which something unknown but terrible lurked. He penetrated the little forest of mushrooms that glowed at night and the place where the truffle-hunting beetles chirped thunderously during the dark hours.