The Forgotten Planet, Murray Leinster [classic literature books TXT] 📗

he was not afraid of one wandering ant, he held back uneasily. Burl barked at him.

Dor struck clumsily and botched the job. Burl had to use his spear to finish it. But a second bit of prey lay before the men.

Then, quite suddenly, this completely unprecedented form of foraging became understandable to Burl's followers. Jak giggled nervously.

An hour later Burl led them back to the tribe's hiding-place. The others had been terror-stricken, not knowing where the men had gone. But their terror changed to mute amazement when the men carried huge quantities of meat and edible mushroom into the hiding-place. The tribe held what amounted to a banquet.

Dik and Tet swaggered under a burden of ant-carcass. This was not, of course, in any way revolting. Back on Earth, even thousands of years before, Arabs had eaten locusts cooked in butter and salted. All men had eaten crabs and other crustaceans, whose feeding habits were similar to those of ants. If Burl and his tribesmen had thought to be fastidious, ants on the forgotten planet would still have been considered edible, since they had not lost the habits of extreme cleanliness which made them notable on Earth.

This feast of all the tribe, in which men had brought back not only mushroom to be eaten, but actual prey—small prey—of their hunting, was very probably the first such occasion in at least thirty generations of the forty-odd since the planet's unintended colonization. Like the other events, which began with Burl trying to spear a fish with a rhinoceros-beetle's horn, it was not only novel, on that world, but would in time have almost incredibly far-reaching consequences. Perhaps the most significant thing about it was its timing. It came at very nearly the latest instant at which it could have done any good.

There was a reason which nobody in the tribe would ever remember to associate with the significance of this banquet. A long time before—months in terms of Earth-time—there had been a strong breeze that blew for three days and nights. It was an extremely unusual windstorm. It had seemed the stranger, then, because during all its duration everyone in the tribe had been sick, suffering continuously. When the windstorm had ended, the suffering ceased. A long time passed and nobody remembered it any longer.

There was no reason why they should. Yet, since that time there had been a new kind of thing growing among the innumerable moulds and rusts and toadstools of the lowlands. Burl had seen them on his travels, and the expeditionary force against the clotho spider had seen them on the journey up to the cliff-edge. Red puffballs, developing first underground, were now pushing the soil aside to expose taut, crimson parchment spheres to the open air. The tribesmen left them alone because they were strange; and strange things were always dangerous. Puffballs they were familiar with—big, misshapen things which shot at a touch a powder into the air. The particles of powder were spores—the seed from which they grew. Spores had remained infinitely small even on the forgotten planet where fungi grew huge. Only their capacity for growth had increased. The red growths were puffballs, but of a new and different kind.

As the tribe ate and admired, the hunters boasting of their courage, one of the new red mushrooms reached maturity.

This particular growing thing was perhaps two feet across, its main part spherical. Almost eighteen inches of the thing rose above-ground. A tawny and menacing red, the sphere was contained in a parchment-like skin that was pulled taut. There was internal tension. But the skin was tough and would not yield, yet the inexorable pressure of life within demanded that it stretch. It was growing within, but the skin without had ceased to grow.

This one happened to be on a low hillside a good half-mile from the place where Burl and his fellows banqueted. Its tough, red parchment skin was tensed unendurably. Suddenly it ripped apart with an explosive tearing noise. The dry spores within billowed out and up like the smoke of a shell-explosion, spurting skyward for twenty feet and more. At the top of their ascent they spread out and eddied like a cloud of reddish smoke. They hung in the air. They drifted in the sluggish breeze. They spread as they floated, forming a gradually extending, descending dust-cloud in the humid air.

A bee, flying back toward its hive, droned into the thin mass of dust. It was preoccupied. The dust-cloud was not opaque, but only a thick haze. The bee flew into it.

For half a dozen wing-beats nothing happened. Then the bee veered sharply. Its deep-toned humming rose in pitch. It made convulsive movements in mid-air. It lost balance and crashed heavily to the ground. There its legs kicked and heaved violently but without purpose. The wings beat furiously but without rhythm or effect. Its body bent in paroxysmic flexings. It stung blindly at nothing.

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 puffballs 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 assuredly 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 puffballs.

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 grasshoppers—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 bass 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 puffballs 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 puffballs 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 puffballs, 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. Nobody 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 puffballs. 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 snatched a huge, meat-filled joint and run away, faster than the ants could follow. A far-ranging man had seen a butterfly, 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 puffballs. Some had burst. The others undoubtedly would burst. Anything that breathed the red dust died. With thousands of the puffballs 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 puffballs 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 phosphorescence. 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