Nightmare Planet

strive.

  * * * * *

  The sun was very near. It shone upon the top of the cloud-bank and theclouds glowed with a marvelous whiteness. It shone upon themountain-peaks where they penetrated the clouds, and the peaks werewarmed, and there was no snow anywhere despite the height. There werewinds here where the sun shone. The sky was very blue. At the edge ofthe plateau where the cloud-bank lay below, the mountainsides seemed todescend into a sea of milk. Great undulations in the mist had theseeming of waves, which moved with great deliberation toward the shores.They seemed sometimes to break against the mountain-wall where it wascliff-like, and sometimes they seemed to flow up gentler inclinationslike water flowing up a beach.

  All this was in the slowest of slow motion, because the cloud-waves weresometimes miles from crest to crest.

  The look of things was different on the plateau, too. This part of theunnamed world, no less than the lowlands, had been seeded with life ontwo separate occasions. Once with bacteria and moulds and lichens tobreak up the rocks and make soil of them, and once with seeds andinsects-eggs and such living things as might sustain themselvesimmediately upon hatching. But here on the heights the conditions weredrastically unlike the lowland tropic moisture. Different things hadthriven, and in quite different fashion.

  Here moulds and yeasts and rusts were stunted by the sunlight. Grassesand weeds and trees survived, instead. This was an ideal environment forplants that needed sunlight to form chlorophyll, and chlorophyll tomake use of the soil that had been formed. So here was vegetation thatwas nearly Earth-like. And there was a remarkable side-effect on thefauna which had been introduced at the same time and in the same manneras down below. In coolness which amounted to a temperate climate therecould be no such frenzy of life as formed the nightmare-jungles in thelowlands. Plants grew at a slower tempo than fungi, and lessluxuriantly. There was no adequate food-supply for large-sizedplant-eaters. Insects which were to survive in sunshine could not growto be monsters. Moreover, the nights were chill. Many insects growtorpid in the cool of a temperate-zone night, but warm up to activitysoon after sunrise. But a large creature, made torpid by cold, will notrevive so quickly. If large enough, it will not become fully activeuntil close to dusk. On the plateau, the lowland monsters would starvein any case. But more--they would have only a fraction of a day of fullactivity.

  There was a necessary limit then, to the size of the insects that livedabove the clouds. The life on the plateau would not have seemedhorrifying at all to humans living on other planets. Save for theabsence of birds to sing and lack of a variety of small mammals, theuntouched sunlit plateau with its warm days and briskly chill nightswould have impressed most men as an ideal habitation.

  But Burl and his companions were hardly prepared to see it that way atfirst glimpse. Certainly if told about it beforehand, they would haveviewed it with despair.

  But they did not know beforehand. They toiled upward, their leader movedby such ridiculous motives as have sometimes caused men to achievegreatness throughout all history. Back on Earth, two great continentswere discovered by a man trying to get spices to conceal the gameyflavor of half-spoiled meat. The power that drives mile-longspace-craft, and that lights and runs the cities of the galaxy, wasfirst developed because it could be used in bombs to kill other men.There were precedents for Burl leading his fellows into sunshine merelybecause he was angered that they ceased to admire him.

  The trudging, climbing folk were high above the valley, now. The thinmist that was never absent anywhere had hidden their former home, littleby little. They climbed a steeply slanting mountain-flank. The stone wasmostly covered by ragged, bluish-green rock-tripe in partly overlappingsheets. Such stuff is always close behind the bacteria which firstattack a rock-face. On a slope, it clings while soil is washed downwardas fast as it forms. The people never ate it. It produced frighteningcramps. In time they would learn that if thoroughly dried it can hesoaked to pliability again and cooked to a reasonable palatability. Butso far they knew neither dryness nor fire.

  Nor had they ever known such surroundings as presently enveloped them. Aslanting, stony mountainside which stretched up frighteningly to thevery sky. Grayness overhead. Grayness, also, to one side--the side awayfrom the mountain. And equal grayness below. The valley in which theylived could no longer be seen at all. Trudging and scrambling up theinterminable incline, the people of Burl's personal following graduallyrealized the strangeness of their surroundings. As one result, they grewsick and dizzy. To them it seemed that the solid earth had tilted, andmight presently tilt further. There was no horizon, but they had neverseen a horizon. So they felt that what had been _down_ was now partly_behind_, and they feared lest a turning universe let them fallultimately toward the grayness they considered sky.

  In this frightening strangeness, their only consolation was the companyof their fellows. To stop would be to be abandoned in this place whereall values were turned topsy-turvy. To go back--but none of them couldimagine descending again to be devoured as one-third of their numberalready had been. If Burl had stopped, his followers would have squatteddown and shivered together miserably, and waited for death. They had nothought of adventure nor any hope of safety. The only goodnesses theycould imagine were food and the nearness of other humans. They clungtogether, obsessed by the dread of being left alone.

  Burl's motivation was no longer noble. He had started uphill in a fit ofsulks, and he was ashamed to stop.

  They came to a place where the mountain-flank sank inward. There was aflat area, and behind it there was a winding canyon of sorts, like a vastcrack in the mountain's substance. Burl breasted the curving edge, andwalked on level ground. Then he stopped short.

  The mouth of the canyon was perhaps fifty yards from the lip of thedownward slope. There was this level space, and on it there weretoadstools and milkweed, and there was food. It was a small, isolatedasylum for life such as they were used to. It could have been that herethey could have found safety. But it wasn't that way.

  * * * * *

  They saw the web at once. It was slung from between the oppositecliff-walls by cables two hundred feet long. Its radiating cablesreached down to anchorages on stone. The snare-threads, winding out andout in that logarithmic spiral which men on other planets had notedthousands of years before--the snare-threads were a yard apart. The webwas set for giant game. It was empty now, but Burl searched keenly andsaw the tight-rope-cable leading from the very center of the web to arocky shelf some fifty feet above the canyon's floor. At its end he sawthe spider. It waited there, almost invisible against the stone, withone furry leg touching the cable that led to its waiting-place so thatthe slightest touch on any part of the web would warn it instantly.

  Burl's followers accumulated behind him. They stared. They knew, ofcourse, that a web-spider will not leave its snare under any normalcircumstances. They were not afraid of that. But they looked at theground between the web and themselves.

  It was a charnel-house of murdered creatures. Half-inch-thick wing-casesof dead beetles. The cleaned-out carcasses of other giants. Theovipositor of an ichneumon-fly--six feet of slender, springy,deadly-pointed tube--and abdomen-plates of bees and draggled antennae ofmoths and butterflies.

  Something very terrible lived in this small place. The mountainsideswere barren of food for big flying things. Anything which did fly sohigh for any reason would never land on sloping, foodless stone. Itwould land here. And very obviously it would die. Becausesomething--something--killed them as they came. It denned back in thecanyon where they could not see. It dined here.

  The humans looked and shivered. All but Burl. He deliberately chose forhimself a magnificent lance grown by one dead creature for its owndefense. He pulled it out of the ground and cleaned it with his hands.He seemed absorbed, but he was terribly aware of the inner depths of thecanyon. He was actually pretending, for the sake of what he believed hisdignity.

  Fearfully, the other humans imitated him in
choosing weapons from thearmory of the devoured. Then Burl stalked grandly to one side and beganto climb again. His people followed him in numbed silence. They werefilled with dread, but it was not quite terror. Insects do not stalktheir prey. The deadly unseen monster of the canyon had not attackedthem. Therefore, it did not know they were there. And therefore theywere safe from it until it appeared. But none of them desired to stay.

  The slope lessened here, and half a mile further on there was a smallthicket of mushrooms. From within it came the cheerful loud clicking ofsome small beetle, arrived at this spot nobody could possibly know how,but happily ensconced in a twenty-yard patch of jungle above a hollowthat had gathered soil through the centuries. There were ediblemushrooms in the thicket.

  The humans ate. Naturally. And here they realized that they were nolonger doomed by the creatures in the valley. Since their climb beganthey had seen no dangerous thing except the one gigantic, motionlessweb-spider. They had left the valley and its particular