The Forgotten Planet Part 16

At the moment it was pleasing to have all his tribe regard him so wors.h.i.+pfully, even if not in quite the same fas.h.i.+on as Saya. He was suddenly aware that now--at any rate while they were so frightened--they would obey him. So he invented an order for them to obey.

"I carry sharp things," he said sternly. "Some of you have gotten sharp things. Now everybody must carry sharp things, to fight with."

Humbly, they scattered to obey. Saya would have gone with them, but Burl held her back. He did not quite know why. It could have been that the absolute equality of the s.e.xes in cravenness was due to end, and for his own vanity Burl would undertake the defense of Saya. He did not a.n.a.lyze so far. He did not want her to leave him, so he prevented it.

The tribesfolk scattered. Dor went with his wife, to help her arm herself. Jak uneasily followed his. Jon went timorously where the picked-over remnant of the cricket's carca.s.s might still yield an instrument of defense. Cori laid her youngest child at Burl's feet while she went fearfully to find some toothed instrument meeting Burl's specification of sharpness.

There was a stifled scream. A ten-year-old boy--he was Dik's younger brother--stood paralyzed. He stared in an agony of horror at something that had stepped from behind a misshapen fungoid object fifty yards from Burl, but less than ten yards from him.

It was a pallidly greenish creature with a small head and enormous eyes.

It stood upright, like a man,--and it was a few inches taller than a man. Its abdomen swelled gracefully into a leaflike form. The boy faced it, paralyzed by horror, and it stood stock-still. Its great, hideously spined arms were spread out in a pose of hypocritical benediction.

It was a partly-grown praying mantis, not too long hatched. It stood rigid, waiting benignly for the boy to come closer or try to flee. If he had fled, it would fling itself after him with a ferocity beside which the fury of a tiger would be kittenish. If he approached, its fanged arms would flash down, pierce his body, and hold him terribly fast by the needle-sharp hooks that were so much worse than trap-claws.

And of course it would not wait for him to die before it began its meal.

All the small party of humans stood frozen. It may be questioned whether they were filled with horror for the boy, or cast into a deeper abyss of despair by the sight of a half-grown mantis. Only Burl, so far, had any notion of actually leaving the valley. To the rest, the discovery of one partly mature praying mantis meant that there would be hundreds of others. It would be impossible to evade the tiny, slavering demons which were the brood of the great spider. It would be impossibility multiplied to live where a horde of small--yet vastly larger--fiends lived, raising their arms in a semblance of blessing before they did murder.

Only Burl was capable of thought, and this was because vanity filled him. He had commanded and had been obeyed. Now obedience was forgotten because there was this young mantis. If the men had dreamed of fighting it, it could have destroyed any number of them by sheer ferocity and its a.r.s.enal of knives and daggers. But Burl was at once furious and experienced. He had encountered such a middle-sized monster, when alone, and deliberately had experimented with it. In consequence he could dare to rage. He ran toward the mantis. He swung the small corpse of an ant--killed by Tet only minutes since--and hurled it past the terror-fascinated boy. He had hurled it at the mantis.

It struck. And insects simply do not think. Something hurtled at the ghastly young creature. Its arms struck ferociously to defend itself.

The ant was heavy. Poised upright in its spectral att.i.tude, the mantis was literally flung backward. But it rolled over, fighting the dead ant with that frenzy which is not so much ferocity as mania.

The small boy fled, hysterically, once the insect's attention was diverted.

The human tribe gathered around Burl many hundreds of yards away,--again uphill. He was their rendezvous because of the example set by Cori. She had left her baby with Burl. When Burl dashed from the spot, Saya had quite automatically followed the instinct of any female for the young of its kind. She'd s.n.a.t.c.hed up the baby before she fled. And--of course--she'd joined Burl when the immediate danger was over.

The floor of the valley seemed a trifle indistinct, from here. The mist that hung always in the air partly veiled the details of its horrors. It was less actual, not quite as deadly as it once had seemed.

Burl said fiercely to his followers:

"Where are the sharp things?"

The tribesfolk looked at one another, numbly. Then Jon muttered rebelliously, and old Tama raised her voice in shrill complaint. Burl had led them to this! There had been only the red dust in the place from which they had come, but here was a hunting-spider and its young and also a new hatching of mantises! They could dodge the red dust, but how could they escape the deaths that waited them here? Ai! Ai! Burl had persuaded them to leave their home and brought them here to die....

Burl glared about him. It was neither courage nor resolution, but he had come to realize that to be admired by one's fellows was a splendid sensation. The more one was admired, the better. He was enraged that anyone dared to despair instead of thinking admiringly about his remarkableness.

"I," said Burl haughtily, "am not going to stay here. I go to a place where there are neither spiders nor mantises. Come!"

He held out his hand to Saya. She gave the child to Cori and confidently moved to follow him. Burl stalked grandly away and she went with him. He went uphill. Naturally! There were spiders and mantises in the valley,--so many that to stay there meant death. So he moved to go somewhere else.

And this was the climactic event that changed the whole history of humanity upon the forgotten planet. Up to this point, there may have been other individuals who had accomplished somewhat of Burl's kind of leaders.h.i.+p. A few may have learned courage. It is possible that some even led their tribesfolk upon migrations in search of safer lands to live in. But until Burl led his people out of a valley filled with food, up a mountainside toward the unknown, it was simply impossible for humans to rise permanently above the status of hunted vermin; at the mercy of monstrous mindless creatures; whose forbears had most ironically been brought to this planet to prepare it for humans to live on.

Burl was the first man to lead his fellows toward the heights.

_9. THERE IS SUCH A THING AS SUNs.h.i.+NE_

The sun that shone upon the forgotten planet was actually very near. It shone on the top of the cloud-bank, and the clouds glowed with dazzling whiteness. It shone on the mountain-peaks where they penetrated the mist, and the peaks were warmed, and there was no snow anywhere despite the height. There were winds, here where the sun yielded sensible heat.

The sky was very blue. At the edge of the plateau--from which the cloud-banks were down instead of up--the mountainsides seemed to descend into a sea of milk. Great undulations in the mist had the semblance of waves, which moved with great deliberation toward the sh.o.r.es. They seemed sometimes to break in slow-motion against the mountain-walls where they were cliff-like, and sometimes they seemed to flow up gentler inclinations like water flowing up a beach. But all of this was very deliberate indeed, because the cloud-waves were sometimes twenty miles from crest to crest.

The look of things was different on the highlands. This part of the unnamed world, no less than the lowlands, had been seeded with life on two separate occasions. Once the seedings was with bacteria and moulds and lichens to break up the rocks and make soil of them, and once with seeds and insect-eggs and such living things as might sustain themselves immediately they were hatched. But here on the highlands the different climatic conditions had allowed other seedlings and creatures to survive together.

Here moulds and yeasts and rusts were stunted by the sunlight. Gra.s.ses and weeds and trees survived, instead. This was an ideal environment for plants that needed sunlight to form chlorophyl, with which to make use of the soil that had been formed. So on the highlands the vegetation was almost earthlike. And there was a remarkable side-effect on the fauna which had been introduced in the same manner and at the same time as the creatures down below. In coolness which amounted to a temperate climate, there developed no such frenzy of life as made the nightmare jungles under the clouds. Plants grow at a slower rate than fungi, and less luxuriantly. There was no vast supply of food for large-sized plant-eaters. Insects which were to survive, here, could not grow to be monsters. Moreover, the nights here were chill. Very many insects grow torpid in the cool of a temperate-zone night, but warm up to activity soon after sunrise. But a large creature, made torpid by cold, will not revive so quickly. If large enough, it will not become fully active until close to dark. On the plateau, the lowland monsters would starve in any case. But more;--they would have only a fraction of each day of full activity.

So there was a necessary limit to the size of the creatures that lived above the clouds. To humans from other planets, the life on the plateau would not have seemed horrifying at all. Save for the absence of birds to sing, and a lack of small mammals to hunt or merely to enjoy, the untouched, sunlit plateau with its warm days and briskly chill nights would have impressed most civilized men as an ideal habitation.

But Burl and his followers were hardly prepared to see it that way at first glance. If told about it in advance, they would have thought of it with despair.

But they did not know beforehand. They toiled upward, their leader moved by such ridiculous motives of pride and vanity as have caused men to achieve greatness throughout all history. Two great continents were discovered back on Earth by a man trying to get spices to hide the gamey flavor of half-spoiled meat, and the power that drives mile-long s.p.a.ce-craft was first discovered and tamed by men making bombs to destroy their fellows. There were precedents for foolish motives producing results far from foolishness.

The trudging, climbing folk crawled up the hillside. They reached a place high above the valley Burl had led them to. That valley grew misty in appearance. Presently it could no longer be seen at all. The mist they had taken for granted, all their lives, hid from them everything but the slanting stony wall up which they climbed. The stone was mostly covered by bluish-green rock-tripe in partly overlapping sheets. Such stuff is always close behind the bacteria which first attack a rock-face. On a slope, it clings while soil is washed downward as fast as it is formed. The people never ate rock-tripe, of course. It produces frightening cramps. In time they might learn that when thoroughly dried it can be cooked to pliability again and eaten with some satisfaction.

But so far they neither knew dryness nor fire.

Nor had they ever known such surroundings as presently enveloped them. A slanting rocky mountainside, which stretched up frighteningly to the very sky. Grayness overhead. Grayness also to one side,--the side away from the mountain. And equal grayness below. The valley from which they had come could no longer be seen even as a different shading of the mist. And as they scrambled and trudged after Burl, his followers gradually became aware of the utter strangeness of all about them. For one result, they grew sick and dizzy. To them it seemed that all solidity was slowly tilting. Had they been superst.i.tious, they might have thought of demons preparing to punish them for daring to come to such a place. But--quaintly enough--Burl's followers had developed no demonology. Your typical savage is resolved not to think, but he does have leisure to want. He makes G.o.ds and devils out of his nightmares, and gambles on his own speculations to the extent of offering blackmail to demons if they will only let him alone or--preferably--give him more of the things he wants.

But the superst.i.tions of savages involve the payment of blackmail in exact proportion to their prosperity. The Eskimos of Earth lived always on the brink of starvation. They could not afford the luxury of tabus and totem animals whose flesh must not be eaten, and forbidden areas which might contain food.

Religion there was, among Burl's people, but superst.i.tion was not. No humans, anywhere, can live without religion, but on Earth Eskimos did with a minimum of superst.i.tions,--they could afford no more--and the humans of the forgotten planet could not afford any at all.

Therefore they climbed desperately despite the unparalleled state of things about them. There was no horizon, but they had never seen a horizon. Their feeling was that what had been "down" was now partly "behind" and they feared lest a toppling universe ultimately let them fall toward that grayness they considered the sky.

But all kept on. To lag behind would be to be abandoned in this place where all known sensations were turned topsy-turvy. None of them could imagine turning back. Even old Tama, whimpering in a whisper as she struggled to keep up, merely complained bitterly of her fate. She did not even think of revolt. If Burl had stopped, all his followers would have squatted down miserably to wait for death. They had no thought of adventure or any hope of safety. The only goodnesses they could imagine were food and the nearness of other humans. They had food--n.o.body had abandoned any of the dangling ant-bodies Tet and Dik had distributed before the climb began. They would not be separated from their fellows.

Burl's motivation was hardly more distinct. He had started uphill in a judicious mixture of fear and injured vanity and desperation. There was nothing to be gained by going back. The terrors at hand were no greater than those behind, so there was no reason not to go ahead.

They came to a place where the mountain-flank sank inward. There was a flat s.p.a.ce, and behind it a winding canon of sorts like a vast crack in the mountain's substance. Burl breasted the curving edge and found flatness beyond it. He stopped short.

The mouth of the canon was perhaps fifty yards from the lip of the downward slope. So much s.p.a.ce was practically level, and on it were toadstools and milkweed--two of them--and there was food. It was a small, isolated asylum for life such as they were used to. They could--it was possible that they could--have found a place of safety here.

But the possibility was not the fact. They saw the spider-web at once.

It was slung between the opposite canon-walls by cables all of two hundred feet long. The radiating cables reached down to anchorages on stone. The snare-threads, winding out and out in that logarithmic spiral whose properties men were so astonished to discover, were fully a yard apart. The web was for giant game. It was empty now, but Burl saw the telegraph-cord which ran from the very center of the web to the web-maker's lurking-place. There was a rocky shelf on the canon-wall. On it rested the spider, almost invisible against the stone, with one furry leg touching the cable. The slightest touch on any part of the web would warn it instantly.

Burl's followers acc.u.mulated behind him. Old Jon's wheezing was audible.

Tama ceased her complaints to survey this spot. It might be--it could be--a haven, and she would have to find new and different things to complain about in consequence. The spider-web itself, of course, was no reason for them to be alarmed. Web-spiders do not hunt. Their males do, but they are rarely in the neighborhood of a web save at mating-time.

The web itself was no reason not to settle here. But there was a reason.

The ground before the web,--between the web and themselves--was a charnel-house of murdered creatures. Half-inch-thick wing-cases of dead beetles and the cleaned-out carapaces of other giants. The ovipositor of an ichneumon-fly,--see feet of springy, slender, deadly-pointed tube--and the abdomen-plates of bees and the draggled antennae of moths and b.u.t.terflies.

Something very terrible lived in this small place. The mountainsides were barren of food for big flying things. Anything which did fly this high for any reason would never land on sloping foodless stone.

It would land here. And very obviously it would die. Because something--Something--killed things as they came. It denned back in the canon where they could not see it. It dined here.

The humans looked and s.h.i.+vered, all but Burl. He cast his eyes about for better weapons than he possessed. He chose for himself a magnificent lance grown by some dead thing for its own defense. He pulled it out of the ground.

It was utterly silent, here on the heights. No sounds from the valley rose so high. There was no noise except the small creakings made as Burl strove to free the new, splendid weapon for himself.

That was why he heard the gasp which somebody uttered in default of a scream that would not be uttered. It was a choked, a strangled, an inarticulate sobbing noise.