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

led them exploring as soon as they had eaten. All of them, of course. They straggled irregularly behind him. They came to a brook and regarded it with amazement. There were no leeches. No greenish algae. No foaming masses of scum. It was dear! Greatly daring, Burl tasted it. He drank the first really potable water in a very long time for his race on this planet. It was not fouled by drainage through moulds or rusts.

Dor drank after him. Jak. Cori tasted, and instantly bade her children drink. Even old Tama drank suspiciously, and then raised her voice in shrill complaint that Burl had not led them to this place sooner. Tet and Dik became convinced that there were no deadly things lurking in it, and splashed each other. Dik slipped and sat down hard on white stuff that yielded and almost splashed. He got up and looked fearfully at what he thought might be a deadly slime. Then he yelped shrilly.

He sat down on and crushed part of a bed of mushrooms. But they were tiny, clean, and appetizing. They were miniatures of the edible mushrooms the tribe fed on.

Burl smelled and finally tasted one. It was, of course, nothing more or less than a perfectly normal edible mushroom, growing to the size that mushrooms originally grew on Earth. It grew on a shaded place in enormously rich soil. It had been protected from direct sunlight by trees, but it had not had the means or the stimulus to become a monster.

Burl ate it. He carefully composed his features. Then he announced the find to his followers. There was food here, he told them sternly, but in this splendid world to which he had led them, food was small. There would be no great enemies here, but the food would have to be sought in small objects instead of great ones. They must look at this place and seek others like it, in order to find food....

The tribesmen were doubtful. But they plucked mushrooms—whole ones!—instead of merely breaking off parts of their tops. With deep astonishment they recognized the miniature objects as familiar things ensmalled. These mushrooms had the same savor, but they were not coarse or stringy or tough like the giants. They melted in the mouth; Life in this place to which Burl had led them was delectable! Truly the doings of Burl were astonishing!

When the oldest of Cori's children found a beetle on a leaf, and they recognized it, and instead of being bigger than a man and a thing to flee from, it was less than an inch in size and helpless against them—. They were entranced. From that moment onward they would really follow Burl anywhere, in the happy conviction that he could only bring good to everybody.

The opinion could have drawbacks, and it need not be always even true, but Burl did nothing to discourage it.

And then, near midday, they made a discovery even greater than that of familiar food in unfamiliar sizes. They were struggling, at the time, through a vast patch of bushes with thorns on them—they were not used to thorns—which they deeply distrusted. Eventually they would find out that the glistening dark fruit were blackberries, and would rejoice in them, but at this first encounter they were uneasy. In the midst of such an untouched berry-patch they heard noises in the distance.

The sound was made up of cries of varying pitch, some of which were loud and abrupt, and others longer and less loud. The people did not understand them in the least. They could have been cries of human beings, perhaps, but they were not cries of pain. Also they were not language. They seemed to express a tremendous, zestful excitement. They had no overtone of horror. And Burl and his folk had known of no excitement among insects except frenzy. They could not imagine what sort of tumult this could be.

But to Burl these sounds had something of the timbre of the yelping noises of the night before. He had felt drawn to that sound. He liked it. He liked this.

He led the way boldly toward the agitated noises. Presently—after a mile or so—he and his people came out of breast-high weeds. Saya was immediately behind him. The others trailed,—Tama complaining bitterly that there was no need to track down sounds which could only mean danger. They emerged in a space of bare stone above a small and grassy amphitheatre. The tumult came from its center.

A pack of dogs was joyously attacking something that Burl could not see clearly. They were dogs. They barked zestfully, and they yelped and snarled and yapped in a dozen different voices, and they were having a thoroughly good time,—though it might not be so good for the thing they attacked.

One of them sighted the humans. He stopped stock-still and barked. The others whirled and saw the humans as they came out into view. The tumult ceased abruptly.

There was silence. The tribesmen saw creatures with four legs only. They had never before seen any living thing with fewer than six,—except men. Spiders had eight. The dogs did not have mandibles. They did not have wing-cases. They did not act like insects. It was stupifying!

And the dogs saw men, whom they had never seen before. Much more important, they smelled men. And the difference between man-smell and insect-smell was so vast—because through hundreds of generations the dogs had not smelled anything with warm blood save their own kind—the difference in smell was so great in kind that the dogs did not react with suspicion, but with a fascinated curiosity. This was an unparalleled smell. It was, even in its novelty, an overwhelmingly satisfying smell.

The dogs regarded the men with their heads on one side, sniffing in the deepest possible amazement,—amazement so intense that they could not possibly feel hostility. One of them whined a little because he did not understand.

11. WARM BLOOD IS A BOND

Peculiarly enough, it was a matter of topography. The plateau which reached above the clouds rose with a steep slope from the valley from which a hunting-spider's brood had driven the men. This was on the eastern edge of the plateau. On the west, however, the highland was subject to an indentation which almost severed it. No more than twenty miles from where Burl's group had climbed to sunshine, there was a much more gradual slope downward. There, mushroom-forests grew almost to the cloud-layer. From there, giant insects strayed up and onto the plateau itself.

They could not live above the clouds, of course. There was not food enough for their insatiable hunger. Especially at night, it was too cold to allow them to stay active. But they did stray from their normal environment, and some of them did reach the sunshine, and perhaps some of them blundered back down to their mushroom-forests again. But those which did not stumble back were chilled to torpor during their first night underneath the stars. They were only partly active on the second day,—if, indeed, they were active at all. Few or none recovered from their second nights' coldness. None at all kept their full ferocity and deadliness.

And this was how the dogs survived. They were certainly descended from dogs on the wrecked space-ship—the Icarus—whose crew had landed on this planet some forty-odd human generations since. The humans of today had no memories of the ship, and the dogs surely had no traditions. But just because those early dogs had less intelligence, they had more useful instincts. Perhaps the first generations of castaways bred dogs in their first few desperate centuries, hoping that dogs could help them survive. But no human civilization could survive in the lowlands. The humans went back to the primitive state of their race and lived as furtive vermin among monsters. Dogs could not survive there, though humans did linger on, so somehow the dogs took to the heights. Perhaps dogs survived their masters. Perhaps some were abandoned or driven away. But dogs had reached the highlands. And they did survive because giant insects blundered up after them,—and could not survive in a proper environment for dogs and men.

There was even reason for the dogs remaining limited in number, and keenly intelligent. The food-supply was limited. When there were too many dogs, their attacks on stumbling insect giants were more desperate and made earlier, before the monsters' ferocity was lessened. So more dogs died. Then there was an adjustment of the number of dogs to the food-supply. There was also a selection of those too intelligent to attack rashly. Yet those who had insufficient courage would not eat.

In short, the dogs who now regarded men with bright, interested eyes were very sound dogs. They had the intelligence needed for survival. They did not attack anything imprudently, but they also knew that it was not necessary to be more than reasonably wary of insects in general,—not even spiders unless they were very newly arrived from the steaming lowlands. So the dogs regarded men with very much the same astonished interest with which the men regarded the dogs.

Burl saw immediately that the dogs did not act with the blind ferocity of insects, but with an interested, estimative intelligence strikingly like that of men. Insects never examined anything. They fled or they fought. Those who were not carnivorous had no interest in anything but food, and those who were meat-eaters lumbered insanely into battle at the bare sight of possible prey. The dogs did neither. They sniffed and they considered.

Burl said sharply to his followers:

"Stay here!"

He walked slowly down into the amphitheatre. Saya followed him instantly. Dogs moved warily aside. But they raised their noses and sniffed. They were long, luxurious sniffs. The smell of human kind was a good smell. Dogs had lived hundreds of their generations without having it in their nostrils, but before that there were thousands of generations to whom that smell was a necessity.

Burl reached the object the dogs had been attacking. It lay on the grass, throbbing painfully. It was the larva of an azure-blue moth which spread ten-foot wings at nightfall. The time for its metamorphosis was near, and it had traveled blindly in search of a place where it could spin its cocoon safely and change to its winged form. It had come to another world,—the world above the clouds. It could find no proper place. Its stores of fat had protected it somewhat from the chill. But the dogs had found it as it crawled blindly—.

Burl considered. It was the custom of wasps to sting creatures like this at a certain special spot,—apparently marked for them by a tuft of dark fur.

Burl thrust home with his lance. The point pierced that particular spot. The creature died quickly and without agony. The thought to kill was an inspiration. Then instinct followed. Burl cut off meat for his tribesmen. The dogs offered no objection. They were well-fed enough. Burl and Saya, together, carried the meat back to the other tribesfolk. On the way Burl passed within two yards of a dog which regarded him with extreme intentness and almost a wistful expression. Burl's smell did not mean game. It meant—something the dog struggled helplessly to remember. But it was good.

"I have killed the thing," said Burl to the dog, in the tone of one addressing an equal. "You can go and eat it now. I took only part of it."

Burl and his people ate of what he had brought back. Many of the dogs—most of them—went to the feast Burl had left. Presently they were back. They had no reason to be hostile. They were fed. The humans offered them no injury, and the humans smelled of something that appealed to the deepest well-springs of canine nature.

Presently the dogs were close about the humans. They were fascinated. And the humans were fascinated in return. Each of the people had a little of the feeling that Burl had experienced as the tribal leader. In the intent, absorbed and wholly unhostile regard of the dogs, even children felt flattered and friendly. And surely in a place where everything else was so novel and so satisfactory, it was possible to imagine friendliness with creatures which were not human, since assuredly they were not insects.

A similar state of mind existed among the dogs.

Saya had more meat than she desired. She glanced among the members of the tribe. All were supplied. She tossed it to a dog. He jerked away alertly, and then sniffed at it where it had dropped. A dog can always eat. He ate it.

"I wish you would talk to us," said Saya hopefully.

The dog wagged his tail.

"You do not look like us," said Saya interestedly, "but you act like we do. Not like the—Monsters."

The dog looked significantly at meat in Burl's hand. Burl tossed it. The dog caught it with a quick snap, swallowed it, wagged his tail briefly and came closer. It was a