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

and other forms of fungus took their places. Moulds and rusts covered the ground as grass did on more favored planets. Toadstools showed their creamy, rounded heads, and there were malformed things with swollen trunks and branches mocking the trees that were never seen in these lowlands. Once the tribesmen saw the grisly bulk of a hunting-spider outlined on the river-bank.

All through the long day they rode the current, while the insect life that had been absent in the neighborhood of the death-plain became abundant again. Bees once more droned overhead, and wasps and dragonflies. Four-inch mosquitoes appeared, to be driven off with blows. Glittering beetles made droning or booming noises as they flew. Flies of every imaginable metallic hue flew about. Huge butterflies danced above the steaming land and running river in seeming ecstasy at simply being alive.

All the thousand-and-one forms of insect life flew and crawled and swam and dived where the people of the rafts could see them. Water-beetles came lazily to the surface to snap at other insects on the surface. The shell-covered boats of caddis-flies floated in the eddies and backwaters.

The day wore on and the shores flowed by. The tribesmen ate of their food and drank of the river. When afternoon came the banks fell away and the current slackened. The shores became indefinite. The river merged itself into a vast swamp from which came a continual muttering.

The water seemed to grow dark when black mud took the place of the clay that had formed its bed. Then there appeared floating green things which did not move with the flowing water. They were the leaves of the water-lilies that managed to survive along with cabbages and a very few other plants in the midst of a fungus world. Twelve feet across, any one of the green leaves might have supported the whole of Burl's tribe.

They became so numerous that only a relatively narrow, uncovered stream flowed between tens of acres of the flat, floating leaves. Here and there colossal waxen blossoms could be seen. Three men could hide in those enormous flowers. They exhaled an almost overpowering fragrance into the air.

And presently the muttering sound that had been heard far away grew in volume to an intermittent deep-bass roar. It seemed to come from the banks on either side. It was the discordant croaking of frogs, eight feet in length, which lived and throve in this swamp. Presently the tribesfolk saw them: green giants sitting immobile upon the banks, only opening their huge mouths to croak.

Here in the swamps there was such luxuriance of insect life that a normal tribal hunting-ground—in which tribesmen were not yet accustomed to hunt—would seem like a desert by comparison. Myriads of little midges, no more than three or four inches across their wings, danced above the water. Butterflies flew low, seemingly enamoured of their reflections in the glassy water.

The people watched as if their eyes would become engorged by the strange new things they saw. Where the river split and split and divided again, there was nothing with which they were familiar. Mushrooms did not grow here. Moulds, yes. But there were cattails, with stalks like trees, towering thirty feet above the waterways.

After a long, long time though, the streams began to rejoin each other. Then low hills loomed through the thicker haze that filled the air here. The river flowed toward and through them. And here a wall of high mountains rose toward the sky, but their height could not be guessed. They vanished in the mist even before the cloud-bank swallowed them.

The river flowed through a river-gate, a water-gap in the mountains. While day still held fully bright, the bobbing rafts went whirling through a narrow pass with sheer walls that rose beyond all seeing in the mist. Here there was even some white water. Above it, spanning a chasm five hundred feet across, a banded spider had flung its web. The rafts floated close enough to see the spider, a monster even of its kind, its belly swollen to a diameter of yards. It hung motionless in the center of the snare as the humans swept beneath it.

Then the mountains drew back and the tribe was in a valley where, look as they might, there was no single tawny-red puffball from whose spreading range the tribesmen were refugees. The rafts grounded and they waded ashore while still the day held. And there was food here in plenty.

But darkness fell before they could explore. As a matter of precaution Burl and his folk found a hiding-place in a mushroom-thicket and hid until morning. The night-sounds were wholly familiar to them. The noise of katydids was louder than usual—the feminine sound of that name gives no hint of the sonorous, deep-toned notes the enlarged creatures uttered—and that implied more vegetation as compared with straight fungoid flora. A great many fireflies glowed in the darkness shrouding the hiding-place, indicating that the huge snails they fed on were plentiful. The snails would make very suitable prey for the tribesmen also. But men were not yet established in their own minds as predators.

They were, though, definitely no longer the furtive vermin they had been. They knew there were such things as weapons. They had killed ants for food and a pirate-wasp as an exercise in courage. To some degree they were acquiring Burl's own qualities. But they were still behind him—and he still had some way to go.

The next day they explored their new territory with a boldness which would have been unthinkable a few weeks before. The new haven was a valley, spreading out to a second swamp at its lower end. They could not know it, but beyond the swamp lay the sea. Exploring, because of strictly practical purposes and not for the sake of knowledge, they found a great trap-door in the earth, sure sign of the lair of a spider. Burl considered that before many days the monster would have to be dealt with. But he did not yet know how it could be done.

His people were rapidly becoming a tribe of men, but they still needed Burl to think for them. What he could not think out, so far, could not be done. But a part of the proof that they needed Burl to think for them lay in the fact that they did not realize it. They gathered facts about their environment. The nearest ant-city was miles away. That meant that they would encounter its scouting foragers rather than working-parties. The ant-city would be a source of small prey—a notion that would have been inconceivable a little while ago. There were numerous giant cabbages in the valley and that meant there were big, defenseless slugs to spear whenever necessary.

They saw praying-mantises—the adults were eighteen feet tall and as big as giraffes, but much less desirable neighbors—and knew that they would have to be avoided. But there were edible mushrooms on every hand. If one avoided spiders and praying-mantises and the meat-eating beetles; if one were safely hidden at night against the amorous male spiders who took time off from courtship to devour anything living that came their way; and if one lived at high-tension alertness, interpreting every sound as possible danger and every unknown thing as certain peril—then one could live quite comfortably in this valley.

For three days the tribesmen felt that they had found a sort of paradise. Jon had his belly full to bursting all day long. Tet and Dik became skilled ant-hunters. Dor found a better spear and practiced thoughtfully with it.

There were no red puffballs here. There was food. Burl's folk could imagine no greater happiness. Even old Tama scolded only rarely. They surely could not conceive of any place where a man might walk calmly about with no danger at all of being devoured. This was paradise!

And it was a deplorable state of affairs. It is not good for human beings to feel secure and experience contentment. Men achieve only by their wants or through their fears. Back at their former foraging-ground, the tribe would never have emulated Burl with any passion so long as they could survive by traditional behavior. Before the menace of the red puffballs developed, he had brought them to the point of killing ants, with him present and ready to assist. They would have stayed at about that level. The red dust had forced their flight. During that flight they had achieved what was—compared to their former timidity—prodigies of valor.

But now they arrived at paradise. There was food. They could survive here in the fashion of the good old days before they learned the courage of desperation. They did not need Burl to keep them alive or to feed them. They tended to disregard him. But they did not disperse. Social grouping is an instinct in human beings as it is in cattle or in schools of fish. Also, when Burl was available there was a sense of pleasant confidence. He had gotten them out of trouble before. If more trouble came, he would get them out of it again. But why look for trouble?

Burl's tribesmen sank back into a contented lethargy. They found food and hid themselves until it was all consumed. A part of the valley was found where they were far enough from visible dangers to feel blissfully safe. When they did move, though still with elaborate caution, it was only to forage for food. And they did not need to go far because there was plenty of food. They slipped back. Happier than they had ever been, the foragers finally began to forget to take their new spears or clubs with them. They were furtive vermin in a particularly favorable environment.

And Burl was infuriated. He had known adulation. He was cherished, to be sure, but adulation no longer came his way. Even Saya....

An ironically natural change took place in Saya. When Burl was a chieftain, she looked at him with worshipful eyes. Now that he was as other men, she displayed coquetry. And Burl was of that peculiarly direct-thinking sort of human being who is capable of leadership but not of intrigue. He was vain, of course. But he could not engage in elaborate maneuvers to build up a romantic situation. When Saya archly remained with the women of the tribe, he considered that she avoided him. When she coyly avoided speech with him, he angrily believed that she did not want his company.

When they had been in the valley for a week Burl went off on a bitter journey by himself. Part of his motivation, probably, was a childish resentment. He had been the great man of the tribe. He was no longer so great because his particular qualities were not needed. And—perhaps with some unconscious intent to punish them for their lessened appreciation—he went off in a pet.

He still carried spear and club, but the grandeur of his costume had deteriorated. His cloak was gone. The moth-antennae he had worn bound to his forehead were now so draggled that they were ridiculous. He went off angrily to be rid of his fellows' indifference.

He found the upward slopes which were the valley's literal boundaries. They promised nothing. He found a minor valley in which a labyrinth spider had built its shining snare. Burl almost scorned the creature. He could kill it if he chose, merely by stabbing it though the walls of its silken nest as it waited for unlucky insects to blunder into the intricate web. He saw praying-mantises. Once he came upon that extraordinary egg-container of the mantis tribe: a gigantic leaf-shaped mass of solidified foam, whipped out of some special plastic compound which the mantis secretes, and in which the eggs are laid.

He found a caterpillar wrapped in its thick cocoon and, because he was not foraging and not particularly hungry, he inspected it with care. With great difficulty he even broke the strand of silk that formed it, unreeling several feet in curiosity. Had he meditated, Burl would have seen that this was cord which could be used to build snares as spiders did. It could also be used to make defenses in which—if built strongly and well—even hunting-spiders might be tangled and dispatched.

But again he was not knowingly looking for things to be of use. He coddled his sense of injury against the tribe. He punished them by leaving them.

He encountered a four-foot praying-mantis that raised its saw-toothed forelimbs and waited immobile for him to come within reach. He had trouble getting away without a fight. His spear would have been a clumsy weapon against so slender a target and the club certainly not quick enough to counter the insect's lightning-like movements.

He was bothered. That day he hunted ants. The difficulty was mainly that of finding individual ants, alone, who could be slaughtered without drawing hordes of others into the fight. Before nightfall he had three of them—foot-long carcasses—slung at his belt. Near sunset he came upon another fairly recent