It was near to sunset. Burl had never seen the sun, so it did not occur to him to think of the coming of night as the setting of anything. To him it was the letting down of darkness from the sky.
The process was invariable. Overhead there was always a thick and unbroken bank of vapor which seemed featureless until sunset. Then, toward the west, the brightness overhead turned orange and then pink, while to the east it simply faded to a deeper gray. As nightfall progressed, the red colorings grew deeper, moving toward mid-sky. Ultimately, scattered blotches of darkness began to spot that reddening sky as it grew darker in tone, going down toward that impossible redness which is indistinguishable from black. It was slowly achieving that redness.
Today Burl watched as never before. On the oily surface of the river the colors and shadings of dusk were reflected with incredible faithfulness. The round tops of toadstools along the shore glowed pink. Dragonflies glinted in swift and angular flight, the metallic sheen of their bodies flashing in the redness. Great, yellow butterflies sailed lightly above the stream. In every direction upon the water appeared the scrap-formed boats of a thousand caddis-flies, floating at the surface while they might. Burl could have thrust his hand down into their cavities to seize the white worms nesting there.
The bulk of a tardy bee droned heavily overhead. He saw the long proboscis and the hairy hind-legs with their scanty load of pollen. The great, multi-faceted eyes held an expression of stupid preoccupation.
The crimson radiance grew dim and the color overhead faded toward black. Now the stalks of ten thousand domed mushrooms lined the river-bank. Beneath them spread fungi of all colors, from the rawest red to palest blue, now all fading slowly to a monochromatic background as the darkness deepened.
The buzzing and fluttering and flapping of the insects of the day died down. From a million hiding places there crept out—into the night—the soft and furry bodies of great moths who preened themselves and smoothed their feathery antennae before taking to the air. The strong-limbed crickets set up their thunderous noise, grown gravelly bass with the increasing size of the noise-making organs. Then there began to gather on the water those slender spirals of deeper mist which would presently blanket the stream in fog.
Night arrived. The clouds above grew wholly black. Gradually the languid fall of large, warm raindrops—they would fall all through the night—began. The edge of the stream became a place where disks of cold blue flame appeared.
The mushrooms on the river-bank were faintly phosphorescent, shedding a ghostly light over the ground below them. Here and there, lambent chilly flames appeared in mid-air, drifting idly above the festering earth. On other planets men call them "Will-o'-the-wisps," but on this planet mankind had no name for them at all.
Then huge, pulsating glows appeared in the blackness: fireflies that Burl knew to be as long as his spear. They glided slowly through the darkness over the stream, shedding intermittent light over Burl crouched on his drifting raft. On the shore, too, tiny paired lights glowed eagerly upward as the wingless females of the species crawled to where their signals could be seen. And there were other glowing things. Fox-fire burned in the night, consuming nothing. Even the water of the river glowed with marine organisms—adapted to fresh water here—contributing their mites of brilliance.
The air was full of flying creatures. The beat of invisible wings came through the night. Above, about, on every side the swarming, feverish life of the insect world went on ceaselessly, while Burl rocked back and forth upon his unstable raft, wanting to weep because he was being carried farther away from Saya whom he could picture looking for him, now, among the hidden, furtive members of the tribe. About him sounded the discordant, machine-like mating cries of creatures trying to serve life in the midst of death and the horrible noises of those who met death and were devoured in the dark.
Burl was accustomed to such tumult. But he was not accustomed to such despair as he felt at being lost from Saya of the swift feet and white teeth and shy smile. He lay disconsolate on his bobbing craft for the greater part of the night. It was long past midnight when the raft struck gently, swung, and then remained grounded upon a shallow in the stream.
When light came back in the morning, Burl gazed about him fearfully. He was some twenty yards from the shore and thick greenish scum surrounded his disintegrating vessel. The river had widened greatly until the opposite bank was hidden in the morning mist, but the nearer shore seemed firm and no more full of dangers than the territory inhabited by Burl's tribe.
He tested the depth of the water with his spear, struck by the multiple usefulness of the weapon. The water was no more than ankle-deep.
Shivering a little, Burl stepped down into the green scum and made for the shore at top speed. He felt something soft clinging to his bare foot. With a frantic rush he ran even faster and stumbled upon the shore with horror not at his heels but on one. He stared down at his foot. A shapeless, flesh-colored pad clung to the skin. As he watched, it swelled visibly, the pink folds becoming a deeper shade.
It was no more than a leech, the size of his palm, sharing in the enlargement nearly all the insect and fungoid world had undergone, but Burl did not know that. He thrust at it with the edge of his spear, scraping it frantically away. As it fell off Burl stared in horror, first at the blotch of blood on his foot, then at the thing writhing and pulsating on the ground. He fled.
A short while later he stumbled into one of the familiar toadstool forests and paused, uncertainly. The towering toadstools were not strange to Burl. He fell to eating. The sight of food always produced hunger in him—a provision of nature to make up for the lack of any instinct to store food away. In human beings the storage of food has to be dictated by intellect. The lower orders of creatures are not required to think.
Even eating, though, Burl's heart was small within him. He was far from his tribe and Saya. By the measurements of his remotest ancestors, no more than forty miles separated them. But Burl did not think in such terms. He'd never had occasion to do so. He'd come down the river to a far land filled with unknown dangers. And he was alone.
All about him was food, an excellent reason for gladness. But being solitary was reason enough for distress. Although Burl was a creature to whom reflection was normally of no especial value and, therefore, not practiced in thought, this was a situation providing an emotional paradox. A good fourth of the mushrooms in this particular forest were edible. Burl should have gloated over this vast stock of food. But he was isolated, alone; in particular, he was far away from Saya, therefore, he should have wept. But he could not gloat because he was away from Saya and he could not mourn because he was surrounded by food.
He was subject to a stimulus to which apparently only humankind can respond: an emotional dilemma. Other creatures can respond to objective situations where there is the need to choose a course of action: flight or fighting, hiding or pursuit. But only man can be disturbed by not knowing which of two emotions to feel. Burl had reason to feel two entirely different emotional states at the same time. He had to resolve the paradox. The problem was inside him, not out. So he thought.
He would bring Saya here! He would bring her and the tribe to this place where there was food in vast quantity!
Instantly pictures flooded into his mind. He could actually see old Jon, his bald head naked as a mushroom itself, stuffing his belly with the food which was so plentiful here. He imagined Cori feeding her children. Tama's complaints stilled by mouthfuls of food. Tet and Dik, stuffed to repletion, throwing scraps of foodstuff at each other. He pictured the tribe zestfully feasting. And Saya would be very glad.
It was remarkable that Burl was able to think of his feelings instead of his sensations. His tribesmen were closer to it than equally primitive folk had been back on Earth, but they did not often engage in thought. Their waking lives were filled with nerve-racked physical responses to physical phenomena. They were hungry and they saw or smelled food; they were alive and they perceived the presence of death. In the one case they moved toward the sensory stimulus of food; in the other they fled from the detected stimulus of danger. They responded immediately to the world about them. Burl, for the first significant time in his life, had responded to inner feelings. He had resolved conflicting emotions by devising a purpose that would end their conflict. He determined to do something because he wanted to and not because he had to.
It was the most important event upon the planet in generations.
With the directness of a child, or a savage, Burl moved to carry out his purpose. The fish still slung about his neck scraped against his chest. Fingering it tentatively, he got himself thoroughly greasy in the process, but could not eat. Although he was not hungry now, perhaps Saya was. He would give it to her. He imagined her eager delight, the image reinforcing his resolve. He had come to this far place down the river flowing sluggishly past this riotously-colored bank. To return to the tribe he would go back up that bank, staying close to the stream.
He was remarkably exultant as he forced a way through the awkward aisles of the mushroom-forest, but his eyes and ears were still open for any possible danger. Several times he heard the omnipresent clicking of ants scavenging in the mushroom-glades, but they could be ignored. At best they were short-sighted. If he dropped his fish, they would become absorbed in it. There was only one kind of ant he needed to fear—the army ant, which sometimes traveled in hordes of millions, eating everything in their path.
But there was nothing of the sort here. The mushroom forest came to an end. A cheerful grasshopper munched delicately at some dainty it had found—the barrel-sized young shoot of a cabbage-plant. Its hind legs were bunched beneath it in perpetual readiness for flight. A monster wasp appeared a hundred feet overhead, checked in its flight, and plunged upon the luckless banqueter.
There was a struggle, but it was brief. The grasshopper strained terribly in the grip of the wasp's six barbed legs. The wasp's flexible abdomen curved delicately. Its sting entered the jointed armor of its prey just beneath the head with all the deliberate precision of a surgeon's scalpel. A ganglion lay there; the wasp-poison entered it. The grasshopper went limp. It was not dead, of course, simply paralyzed. Permanently paralyzed. The wasp preened itself, then matter-of-factly grasped its victim and flew away. The grasshopper would be incubator and food-supply for an egg to be laid. Presently, in a huge mud castle, a small white worm would feed upon the living, motionless victim of its mother—who would never see it, or care, or remember . . .
Burl went on.
The ground grew rougher; progress became painful. He clambered arduously up steep slopes—all of forty or fifty feet high—and made his way cautiously down to the farther sides. Once he climbed through a tangled mass of mushrooms so closely placed and so small that he had to break them apart with blows of his spear in order to pass. As they crumbled, torrents of a fiery-red liquid showered down upon him, rolling off his greasy breast and sinking into the ground.
A strange self-confidence now took possession of Burl. He walked less cautiously and more boldly. He had thought and he had struck something, feeling the vainglorious self-satisfaction of a child. He pictured himself leading his tribe to this place of very much food—he had no real idea of the distance—and he strutted all alone amid the nightmare-growths of the planet that had been forgotten.
Presently he could see the river. He had climbed to the top of a red-clay mound perhaps a hundred feet high. One side was crumbled where the river overflowed. At some past flood-time the water had lapped at the base of the cliff along which Burl was strutting. But now there was a quarter-mile of space between himself and the water. And there was something else in mid-air.
The cliff-side was thickly coated with fungi in a riotous confusion of white and yellow and orange and green. From a point halfway up the cliff the inch-thick cable of a spider-web stretched down to anchorage on the ground below. There were other cables beyond this one and circling about their radial pattern the snare-cords of the web formed a perfect logarithmic spiral.
Somewhere among the fungi of the cliffside the huge spider who had built this web awaited the entrapment of prey. When some unfortunate creature struggled frenziedly in its snare it would emerge. Until then it waited in a motionless, implacable patience; utterly certain of victims, utterly merciless to them.
Burl strutted on the edge of the cliff, a rather foolish pink-skinned creature with an oily fish slung about his neck and the draggled fragment of moth's wing draping his middle. He waved the long shard of beetle armor exultantly above his head.
The activity was not very sensible. It served no purpose. But if Burl was a genius among his fellows, then he still had a great deal to learn before his genius would be effective. Now he looked down scornfully upon the shining white trap below. He had struck a fish, killing it. When he hit mushrooms they fell into pieces before him. Nothing could frighten him! He would go to Saya and bring her to this land where food grew in abundance.
Sixty paces away from Burl, near the edge of the cliff, a shaft sank vertically into the soil of the clay-mound. It was carefully rounded and lined with silk. Thirty feet down, it enlarged itself into a chamber where the engineer and proprietor of the shaft might rest. The top of the hole was closed by a trap-door, stained with mud and earth to imitate the surrounding soil. A sharp eye would have been needed to detect the opening. But a keener eye now peered out from the crack at its edge.
That eye belonged to the proprietor.
Eight hairy legs surrounded the body of the monster hanging motionless at the top of the silk-lined shaft. Its belly was a huge misshapen globe colored a dirty brown. Two pairs of mandibles stretched before its mouth-parts; eyes glittered in the semi-darkness of the burrow. Over the whole body spread a rough and mangy fur.
It was a thing of implacable malignancy, of incredible ferocity. It was the brown hunting spider, the American tarantula, enlarged here upon the forgotten planet so that its body was two feet and more in diameter. Its legs, outstretched, would cover a circle three yards across. The glittering eyes followed as Burl strutted forward on the edge of the cliff, puffed up with a sense of his own importance.
Spread out below, the white snare of the spinning-spider impressed Burl as amusing. He knew the spider wouldn't leave its web to attack him. Reaching down, he broke off a bit of fungus growing at his feet. Where he broke it away oozed a soupy liquid full of tiny maggots in a delirium of feasting. Burl flung it down into the web, laughing as the black bulk of the watchful spider swung down from its hiding place to investigate.
The tarantula, peering from its burrow, quivered with impatience. Burl drew nearer, gleefully using his spear as a lever to pry off bits of trash to fall down the cliffside into the giant web. The spider below moved leisurely from one spot to another, investigating each new missile with its palpi and then ignoring it as lifeless and undesirable prey.
Burl leaped and laughed aloud as a particularly large lump of putrid fungus narrowly missed the black-and-silver shape below. Then—
The trapdoor fell into place with a faint sound. Burl whirled about, his laughter transformed instantly into a scream. Moving toward him furiously, its eight legs scrambling, was the monster tarantula. Its mandibles gaped wide; the poison fangs were unsheathed. It was thirty paces away—twenty paces—ten.
Eyes glittering, it leaped, all eight legs extended to seize the prey.
Burl screamed again and thrust out his arms to ward off the creature. It was pure blind horror. There was no genius in that gesture! Because of sheer terror his grip upon the spear had become agonized. The spear-point shot out and the tarantula fell upon it. Nearly a quarter of the spear entered the body of the ferocious thing.
Stuck upon the spear the spider writhed horribly, still striving to reach the paralytically frozen Burl. The great mandibles clashed. Furious bubbling noises came from it. The hairy legs clutched at his arm. He cried out hoarsely in ultimate fear and staggered backward—and the edge of the cliff gave way beneath him.
He hurtled downward, still clutching the spear, incapable of letting go. Even while falling the writhing thing still struggled maniacally to reach him. Down through emptiness they fell together, Burl glassy-eyed with panic. Then there was a strangely elastic crash and crackling. They had fallen into the web at which Burl had been laughing so scornfully only a little while before.
Burl couldn't think. He only struggled insanely in the gummy coils of the web. But the snare-cords were spiral threads, enormously elastic, exuding impossibly sticky stuff, like bird-lime, from between twisted constituent fibers. Near him—not two yards away—the creature he had wounded thrashed and fought to reach him, even while shuddering in anguish.
Burl had reached the absolute limit of panic. His arms and breast were greasy from the oily fish; the sticky web did not adhere to them. But his legs and body were inextricably tangled by his own frantic struggling in the gummy and adhesive elastic threads. They had been spread for prey. He was prey.
He paused in his blind struggle, gasping from pure exhaustion. Then he saw, not five yards away, the silvery and black monster he had mocked so recently now patiently waiting for him to cease his struggles. The tarantula and the man were one to its eyes—one struggling thing that had fallen opportunely into its trap. They were moving but feebly, now. The web-spider advanced delicately, swinging its huge bulk nimbly, paying out a silken cable behind it as it approached.
Burl's arms were free; he waved them wildly, shrieking at the monster. The spider paused. Burl's moving arms suggested mandibles that might wound.
Spiders take few chances. This one drew near cautiously, then stopped. Its spinnerets became busy and with one of its eight legs, used like an arm, it flung a sheet of gummy silk impartially over the tarantula and the man.
Burl fought against the descending shroud. He strove to thrust it away, futilely. Within minutes he was completely covered in a coarse silken fabric that hid even the light from his eyes. He and his enemy, the monstrous tarantula, were beneath the same covering. The tarantula moved feebly.
The shower ceased. The web-spider had decided they were helpless. Then Burl felt the cables of the web give slightly as the spider approached to sting and suck the juices from its prey.
The web yielded gently. Burl froze in an ecstasy of horror. But the tarantula still writhed in agony upon the spear piercing it. It clashed its jaws, shuddering upon the horny shaft.
Burl waited for the poison-fangs to be thrust into him. He knew the process. He had seen the leisurely fashion in which the web-spider delicately stung its victim, then withdrew to wait with horrible patience for the poison to take effect. When the victim no longer struggled, it drew near again to suck out the juices—first from one joint or limb and then from another—leaving a creature once vibrant with life a shrunken, withered-husk, to be flung from the web at nightfall.
The bloated monstrosity now moved meditatively about the double object swathed in silk. Only the tarantula stirred. Its bulbous abdomen stirred the concealing shroud. It throbbed faintly as it still struggled with the spear in its vitals. The irregularly rounded projection was an obvious target for the web-spider. It moved quickly forward. With fine, merciless precision, it stung.
The tarantula seemed to go mad with pain. Its legs struck out purposelessly, in horrible gestures of delirious suffering. Burl screamed as a leg touched him. He struggled no less wildly.
His arms and head were enclosed by the folds of silk, but not glued to it because of the grease. Clutching at the cords he tried desperately to draw himself away from his deadly neighbor. The threads wouldn't break, but they did separate. A tiny opening appeared.
One of the tarantula's horribly writhing legs touched him again. With a strength born of utter panic he hauled himself away and the opening enlarged. Another lunge and Burl's head emerged into the open air. He was suspended twenty feet above the ground, which was almost carpeted with the chitinous remains of past victims of this same web.
Burl's head and breast and arms were free. The fish slung over his shoulder had shed its oil upon him impartially. But the lower part of his body was held firm by the viscous gumminess of the web-spider's cord. It was vastly more adhesive than any bird-lime ever made by men.
He hung in the little window for a moment, despairing. Then he saw the bulk of his captor a little distance away, waiting patiently for its poison to work and its prey to cease struggling. The tarantula was no more than shuddering now. Soon it would be quite still and the black-bellied creature would approach for its meal.
Burl withdrew his head and thrust desperately at the sticky stuff about his loins and legs. The oil upon his hands kept them free. The silk shroud gave a little. Burl grasped at the thought as at a straw. He grasped the fish and tore it, pushing frantically at his own body with the now-rancid, scaly, odorous mass. He scraped gum from his legs with the fish, smearing the rancid oils all over them in the process.
He felt the web tremble again. To the spider Burl's movements meant that its poison had not taken full effect. Another sting seemed to be necessary. This time it would not insert its sting into the quiescent tarantula, but where there was still life. It would send its venom into Burl.
He gasped and drew himself toward his window as if he would have pulled his legs from his body. His head emerged. His shoulders—half his body was out of the hole.
The great spider surveyed him and made ready to cast more of its silken stuff upon him. The spinnerets became active. A leg gathered it up.
The sticky stuff about Burl's feet gave way.
He shot out of the opening and fell heavily, sprawling upon the earth below and crashing into the shrunken shell of a flying beetle that had blundered into the snare and not escaped as he had done.
Burl rolled over and over and then sat up. An angry, foot-long ant stood before him, its mandibles extended threateningly, while a shrill stridulation filled the air.
In ages past, back on Earth—where most ants were to be measured in fractions of an inch—the scientists had debated gravely whether their tribe possessed a cry. They believed that certain grooves upon the body of the insect, like those upon the great legs of the cricket, might be the means of making a sound too shrill for human ears to catch. It was greatly debated, but evidence was hard to obtain.
Burl did not need evidence. He knew that the stridulation was caused by the insect before him, though he had never wondered how it was produced. The cry was emitted to summon other ants from its city to help it in difficulty or good fortune.
Harsh clickings sounded fifty or sixty feet away; comrades were coming. And while only army ants were normally dangerous, any tribe of ants could be formidable when aroused. It was overwhelming enough to pull down and tear a man to shreds as a pack of infuriated fox-terriers might do on Earth.
Burl fled without further delay, nearly colliding with one of the web's anchor-cables. Then he heard the shrill outcry subside. The ant, short-sighted as all its kind, no longer felt threatened. It went peacefully about the business Burl had interrupted. Presently it found some edible carrion among the debris from the spider-web and started triumphantly back to its city.
Burl sped on for a few hundred yards and then stopped. He was shaken and dazed. For the moment, he was as timid and fearful as any other man in his tribe. Presently he would realize the full meaning of the unparalleled feat he had performed in escaping from the giant spider web while cloaked with folds of gummy silk. It was not only unheard-of; it was unimaginable! But Burl was too shaken to think of it now.
Rather quaintly, the first sensation that forced itself into his consciousness was that his feet hurt. The gluey stuff from the web still stuck to his soles, picking up small objects as he went along. Old, ant-gnawed fragments of insect armor pricked him so persistently, even through his toughened foot-soles, that he paused to scrape them away, staring fearfully about all the while. After a dozen steps more he was forced to stop again.
It was this nagging discomfort, rather than vanity or an emergency which caused Burl to discover-imagine-blunder into a new activity as epoch-making as anything else he had done. His brain had been uncommonly stimulated in the past twenty-some hours. It had plunged him into at least one predicament because of his conceiving the idea of stabbing something, but it had also allowed him escape from another even more terrifying one just now. In between it had led to the devising of a purpose—the bringing of Saya here—though that decision was not so firmly fixed as it had been before the encounter with the web-spider. Still, it had surely been reasoning of a sort that told him to grease his body with the fish. Otherwise he would now be following the tarantula as a second course for the occupant of the web.
Burl looked cautiously all about him. It seemed to be quite safe. Then, quite deliberately, he sat down to think. It was the first time in his life that he had ever deliberately contemplated a problem with the idea of finding an answer to it. And the notion of doing such a thing was epoch-making—on this planet!
He examined his foot. The sharp edges of pebbles and the remnants of insect-armor hurt his feet when he walked. They had done so ever since he had been born, but never before had his feet been sticky, so that the irritation from one object persisted for more than a step. He carefully picked away each sharp-pointed fragment, one by one. Partly coated with the half-liquid gum, they even tended to cling to his fingers, except where the oil was thick.
Burl's reasoning had been of the simplest sort. He had contemplated a situation—not deliberately but because he had to—and presently his mind showed him a way out of it. It was a way specifically suited to the situation. Here he faced something different. Presently he applied the answer of one problem to a second problem. Oil on his body had let him go free of things that would stick to him. Here things stuck to his feet; so he oiled them.
And it worked. Burl strode away, almost—but not completely—untroubled by the bothersome pebbles and bits of discarded armor. Then he halted to regard himself with astonished appreciation. He was still thirty-five miles from his tribe; he was naked and unarmed, utterly ignorant of wood and fire and weapons other than the one he had lost. But he paused to observe with some awe that he was very wonderful indeed.
He wanted to display himself. But his spear was gone. So Burl found it necessary to think again. And the remarkable thing about it was that he succeeded.
In a surprisingly brief time he had come up with a list of answers. He was naked, so he would find garments for himself. He was weaponless: he would find himself a spear. He was hungry and he would seek food. Since he was far from his tribe, he would go to them. And this was, in a fashion, quite obviously thought; but it was not obvious on the forgotten planet because it had been futile—up to now. The importance of such thought in the scheme of things was that men had not been thinking even so simply as this, living only from minute to minute. Burl was fumbling his way into a habit of thinking from problem to problem. And that was very important indeed.
Even in the advanced civilization of other planets, few men really used their minds. The great majority of people depended on machines not only for computations but decisions as well. Any decisions not made by machines most men left to their leaders. Burl's tribesfolk thought principally with their stomachs, making few if any decisions on any other basis—though they did act, very often, under the spur of fear. Fear-inspired actions, however, were not thought out. Burl was thinking out his actions.
There would be consequences.
He faced upstream and began to move again, slowly and warily, his eyes keenly searching out the way ahead, ears alert for the slightest sound of danger. Gigantic butterflies, riotous in coloring, fluttered overhead through the hazy air. Sometimes a grasshopper hurtled from one place to another like a projectile, its transparent wings beating frantically. Now and then a wasp sped by, intent upon its hunting, or a bee droned heavily alone, anxious and worried, striving to gather pollen in a nearly flowerless world.
Burl marched on. From somewhere far behind him came a very faint sound. It was a shrill noise, but very distant indeed. Absorbed in immediate and nearby matters, Burl took no heed. He had the limited local viewpoint of a child. What was near was important and what was distant could be ignored. Anything not imminent still seemed to him insignificant—and he was preoccupied.
The source of this sound was important, however. Its origin was a myriad of clickings compounded into a single noise. It was, in fact, the far-away but yet perceptible sound of army ants on the march. The locusts of Earth were very trivial nuisances compared to the army ants of this planet.
Locusts, in past ages on Earth, had eaten all green things. Here in the lowlands were only giant cabbages and a few rank, tenacious growths. Grasshoppers were numerous here, but could never be thought of as a plague; they were incapable of multiplying to the size of locust hordes. Army ants, however . . .
But Burl did not notice the sound. He moved forward briskly though cautiously, searching the fungus-landscape for any sign of garments, food, and weapons. He confidently expected to find all of them within a short distance. Indeed, he did find food very soon. No more than a half mile ahead he found a small cluster of edible fungi.
With no special elation, Burl broke off a food supply from the largest of them. Naturally, he took more than he could possibly eat at one time. He went on, nibbling at a big piece of mushroom abstractedly, past a broad plain, more than a mile across and broken into odd little hillocks by gradually ripening mushrooms which were unfamiliar to him. In several places the ground had been pushed aside by rounded objects, only the tips showing. Blood-red hemispheres seemed to be forcing themselves through the soil, so they might reach the outer air. Careful not to touch any of them, Burl examined the hillocks curiously as he entered the plain. They were strange, and to Burl most strange things meant danger. In any event, he had two conscious purposes now. He wanted garments and weapons.
Reaching the farther side of the plain, Burl found himself threading the aisles of a fungus forest in which the growths were misshapen travesties of the trees which could not live here. Bloated yellow limbs branched off from rounded swollen trunks. Here and there a pear-shaped puffball, Burl's height and half his height again, waited until a chance touch should cause it to shoot upward a curling puff of infinitely fine dust.
He continued to move with caution. There were dangers here, but he went forward steadily. He still held a great mass of edible mushroom under one arm and from time to time broke off a fragment, chewing it meditatively. But always his eyes searched here and there for threats of harm.
Behind him the faint, shrill outcry had risen only slightly in volume. It was still too far away to attract his notice. Army ants, however, were working havoc in the distance. By thousands and millions, myriads of them advanced across the fungoid soil. They clambered over every eminence. They descended into every depression. Their antennae waved restlessly. Their mandibles were extended threateningly. The ground was black with them, each one more than ten inches long.
A single such creature, armored and fearless as it was, could be formidable enough to an unarmed and naked man like Burl. The better part of discretion would be avoidance. But numbering in the thousands and millions, they were something which could not be avoided. They advanced steadily and rapidly; the chorus of shrill stridulations and clickings marking their progress.
Great, inoffensive caterpillars crawling over the huge cabbages heard the sound of their coming, but were too stupid to flee. The black multitudes blanketed the rank vegetables. Tiny, voracious jaws tore at the flaccid masses of greasy flesh.
The caterpillars strove to throw off their assailants by writhings and contortions—uselessly. The bees fought their entrance into the monster hives with stings and wing-beats. Moths took to the air in daylight with dazzled, blinded eyes. But nothing could withstand the relentless hordes of small black things that reeked of formic acid and left the ground behind them empty of life.
Before the horde was a world of teeming life, where mushrooms and other fungi fought with thinning numbers of cabbages and mutant earth-weeds for a foothold. Behind the black multitude was—nothing. Mushrooms, cabbages, bees, wasps, crickets, grubs—every living thing that could not flee before the creeping black tide reached it was lost, torn to bits by tiny mandibles.
Even the hunting spiders and tarantulas fell before the black host. They killed many in their desperate self-defense, but the army ants could overwhelm anything—anything at all—by sheer numbers and ferocity. Killed or wounded ants served as food for their sound comrades. Only the web spiders sat unmoved and immovable in their colossal snares, secure in the knowledge that their gummy webs could not be invaded along the slender supporting cables.