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The RED DUST
_By Murray Leinster_
_A Sequel to "The Mad Planet."_
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from January 1927 Amazing Stories. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Burl raised his spear, and plunged down on the back ofthe moving thing, thrusting his spear with all the force he couldcommand. He had fallen upon the shining back of one of the huge,meat-eating beetles, and his spear had slid across the horny armor andthen stuck fast, having pierced only the leathery tissue between theinsect's head and thorax.]
_You who have read "The Mad Planet" by Murray Leinster, will welcome the sequel to that story. The world, in a far distant future, is peopled with huge insects and titanic fungus growths. Life has been greatly altered, and tiny Man is now in the process of becoming acclimated to the change. We again meet our hero Burl, but this time a far greater danger menaces the human race. The huge insects are still in evidence, but the terror they inspire is as nothing compared to the deadly Red Dust. You will follow this remarkable story with breathless interest._
CHAPTER I
Prey
The sky grew gray and then almost white. The overhanging banks of cloudsseemed to withdraw a little from the steaming earth. Haze that hungalways among the mushroom forests and above the fungus hills grew moretenuous, and the slow and misty rain that dripped the whole night longceased reluctantly.
As far as the eye could see a mad world stretched out, a world ofinsensate cruelties and strange, fierce maternal solicitudes. Theinsects of the night--the great moths whose wings spread far and wide inthe dimness, and the huge fireflies, four feet in length, whose beaconsmade the earth glow in their pale, weird light--the insects of the nighthad sought their hiding-places.
Now the creatures of the day ventured forth. A great ant-hill towered ahundred feet in the air. Upon its gravel and boulder-strewn side acommotion became visible.
The earth crumbled, and fell into an invisible opening, then a darkchasm appeared, and two slender, threadlike antennae peered out.
A warrior ant emerged, and stood for an instant in the daylight, lookingall about for signs of danger to the ant-city. He was all of ten incheslong, this ant, and his mandibles were fierce and strong. A second andthird warrior came from the inside of the ant-hill, and ran with tinyclickings about the hillock, waving their antennae restlessly, searching,ever searching for a menace to their city.
They returned to the gateway from which they had made their appearance,evidently bearing reassuring messages, because shortly after they hadreentered the gateway of the ant-city, a flood of black, ill-smellingworkers poured out of the opening and dispersed upon their business. Theclickings of their limbs and an occasional whining stridulation made anincessant sound as they scattered over the earth, foraging among themushrooms and giant cabbages, among the rubbish-heaps of the giganticbee-hives and wasp colonies, and among the remains of the tragedies ofthe night for food for their city.
The city of the ants had begun its daily toil, toil in which every oneshared without supervision or coercion. Deep in the recesses of thepyramid galleries were hollowed out and winding passages that led down afathomless distance into the earth below.
Somewhere in the maze of tunnels there was a royal apartment, in whichthe queen-ant reposed, waited upon by assiduous courtiers, fed by royalstewards, and combed and rubbed by the hands of her subjects andchildren.
But even the huge monarch of the city had her constant and pressing dutyof maternity. A dozen times the size of her largest loyal servant, shewas no less bound by the unwritten but imperative laws of the city thanthey. From the time of waking to the time of rest, she was ordained tobe the queen-mother in the strictest and most literal sense of the word,for at intervals to be measured only in terms of minutes she broughtforth a single egg, perhaps three inches in length, which was instantlyseized by one of her eager attendants and carried in haste to themunicipal nursery.
There it was placed in a tiny cell a foot or more in length until asac-shaped grub appeared, all soft, white body save for a tiny mouth.Then the nurses took it in charge and fed it with curious, tendergestures until it had waxed large and fat and slept the sleep ofmetamorphosis. When it emerged from its rudimentary cocoon it took theplaces of its nurses until its soft skin had hardened into the hornyarmor of the workers and soldiers, and then it joined the throng ofworkers that poured out from the city at dawn to forage for food, tobring back its finds and to share with the warriors and the nurses, thedrone males and the young queens, and all the other members of itscommunities, their duties in the city itself. That was the life of thesocial insect, absolute devotion to the cause of its city, utterabnegation of self-interest for the sake of its fellows--and death attheir hands when their usefulness was past. They neither knew norexpected more or less.
It is a strange instinct that prompts these creatures to devote theirlives to their city, taking no smallest thought for their individualgood, without even the call of maternity or sex to guide them. Only thequeen knows motherhood. The others know nothing but toil, for purposesthey do not understand, and to an end of which they cannot dream. Atintervals all over the world of Burl's time these ant-cities rose abovethe surrounding ground, some small and barely begun, and others ancientcolonies which were truly the continuation of cities first built whenthe ants were insects to be crushed beneath the feet of men. Theseancient strongholds towered two, three, and even four hundred feet abovethe plains, and their inhabitants would have had to be numbered inmillions if not billions.
Not all the earth was subject to the ants, however. Bees and wasps andmore deadly creatures crawled over and flew above its surface. The beeswere four feet and more in length. And slender-waisted wasps darted hereand there, preying upon the colossal crickets that sang deep bass musicto their mates--and the length of the crickets was the length of a man,and more.
Spiders with bloated bellies waited, motionless, in their snares, whosethreads were the size of small cables, waiting for some luckless giantinsect to be entangled in the gummy traps. And butterflies flutteredover the festering plains of this new world, tremendous creatures whosewings could only be measured in terms of yards.
An outcropping of rock jutted up abruptly from a fungus-covered plain.Shelf-fungi and strangely colored molds stained the stone until theshining quartz was hidden almost completely from view, but the wholeglistened like tinted crystal from the dank wetness of the night. Littlewisps of vapor curled away from the slopes as the moisture was taken upby the already moisture-laden air.
Seen from a distance, the outcropping of rock looked innocent and still,but a nearer view showed many things.
Here a hunting wasp had come upon a gray worm, and was methodicallyinserting its sting into each of the twelve segments of the faintlywrithing creature. Presently the worm would be completely paralyzed, andwould be carried to the burrow of the wasp, where an egg would be laidupon it, from which a tiny maggot would presently hatch. Then weeks ofagony for the great gray worm, conscious, but unable to move, while themaggot fed upon its living flesh--
There the tiny spider, youngest of hatchlings, barely four inchesacross, stealthily stalked some other still tinier mite, the little,many-legged larva of the oil-beetle, known as the bee-louse. The almostinfinitely small bee-louse was barely two inches long, and could easilyhide in the thick fur of a great bumblebee.
This one small creature would never fulfill its destiny, however. Thehatchling spider sprang--it was a combat of midgets which was soon over
.When the spider had grown and was feared as a huge, black-belliedtarantula, it would slay monster crickets with the same ease and thesame implacable ferocity.
The outcropping of rock looked still and innocent. There was one pointwhere it overhung, forming a shelf, beneath which the stone fell away ina sheer-drop. Many colored fungus growths covered the rock, making it ariot of tints and shades. But hanging from the rooflike projection ofthe stone there was a strange, drab-white object. It was in the shape ofhalf a globe, perhaps six feet by six feet at its largest. A number oflittle semicircular doors were fixed about its sides, like invertedarches, each closed by a blank wall. One of them would open, but onlyone.
The house was like the half of a pallid orange, fastened to the roof ofrock. Thick cables stretched in every direction for yards upon yards,anchoring the habitation firmly, but the most striking of the thingsabout the house--still and quiet and innocent, like all the rest of therock outcropping--were the ghastly trophies fastened to the outer wallsand hanging from long silken chains below.
Here was the hind leg of one of the smaller beetles. There was thewing-case of a flying creature. Here a snail-shell, two feet indiameter, hanging at the end of an inch-thick cable. There a boulderthat must have weighed thirty or forty pounds, dangling in similarfashion.
But fastened here and there, haphazard and irregularly, were other morerepulsive remnants. The shrunken head-armor of a beetle, the fierce jawsof a cricket--the pitiful shreds of a hundred creatures that had formedforgotten meals for the bloated insect within the home.
Comparatively small as was the nest of the clotho spider, it wasdecorated as no ogre's castle had ever been adorned--legs sucked dry oftheir contents, corselets of horny armor forever to be unused by anycreature, a wing of this insect, the head of that. And dangling by thelongest cord of all, with a silken cable wrapped carefully about it tokeep the parts together, was the shrunken, shriveled, dried-up body of along-dead man!
Outside, the nest was a place of gruesome relics. Within, it was a placeof luxury and ease. A cushion of softest down filled all the bulgingbottom of the hemisphere. A canopy of similarly luxurious textureinterposed itself between the rocky roof and the dark, hideous body ofthe resting spider.
The eyes of the hairy creature glittered like diamonds, even in thedarkness, but the loathsome, attenuated legs were tucked under theround-bellied body, and the spider was at rest. It had fed.
It waited, motionless, without desires or aversions, without emotions orperplexities, in comfortable, placid, machinelike contentment until timeshould bring the call to feed again.
A fresh carcass had been added to the decorations of the nest only thenight before. For many days the spider would repose in motionlesssplendor within the silken castle. When hunger came again, a nocturnalforay, a creature would be pounced upon and slain, brought bodily to thenest, and feasted upon, its body festooned upon the exterior, andanother half-sleeping, half-waking period of dreamful idleness withinthe sybaritic charnel-house would ensue.
Slowly and timidly, half a dozen pink-skinned creatures made their waythrough the mushroom forest that led to the outcropping of rock underwhich the clotho spider's nest was slung. They were men, degradedremnants of the once dominant race.
Burl was their leader, and was distinguished solely by two three-footstumps of the feathery, golden antennae of a night-flying moth he hadbound to his forehead. In his hand was a horny, chitinous spear, takenfrom the body of an unknown flying creature killed by the flames of theburning purple hills.
Since Burl's return from his solitary--and involuntary--journey, he hadbeen greatly revered by his tribe. Hitherto it had been but aleaderless, formless group of people, creeping to the same hiding-placeat nightfall to share in the food of the fortunate, and shudder at thefate of those who might not appear.
Now Burl had walked boldly to them, bearing, upon his back the gray bulkof a labyrinth spider he had slain with his own hands, and clad inwonderful garments of a gorgeousness they envied and admired. They hungupon his words as he struggled to tell them of his adventures, andslowly and dimly they began to look to him for leadership. He waswonderful. For days they had listened breathlessly to the tale of hisadventures, but when he demanded that they follow him in another andmore perilous affair, they were appalled.
A peculiar strength of will had come to Burl. He had seen and donethings that no man in the memory of his tribe had seen or done. He hadstood by when the purple hills burned and formed a funeral pyre for thehorde of army ants, and for uncounted thousands of flying creatures. Hehad caught a leaping tarantula upon the point of his spear, and hadescaped from the web of a banded web-spider by oiling his body so thatthe sticky threads of the snare refused to hold him fast. He hadattacked and killed a great gray labyrinth spider.
But most potent of all, he had returned and had been welcomed bySaya--Saya of the swift feet and slender limbs, whose smile rousedstrange emotions in Burl's breast.
It was the adoring gaze of Saya that had roused Burl to this last pitchof rashness. Months before the clotho spider in the hemispherical silkcastle of the gruesome decorations had killed and eaten one of the menof the tribe. Burl and the spider's victim had been together when thespider appeared, and the first faint gray light of morning barelysilhouetted the shaggy, horrible creature as it leaped from ambushbehind a toadstool toward the fear-stricken pair.
Its attenuated legs were outstretched, its mandibles gaped wide, and itsjaws clashed horribly as it formed a black blotch in mid air against thelightening sky.
Burl had fled, screaming, when the other man was seized. Now, however,he was leading half a dozen trembling men toward the inverted dome inwhich the spider dozed. Two or three of them bore spears like Burlhimself, but they bore them awkwardly and timorously. Burl himself waspossessed by a strange, fictitious courage. It was the utterrecklessness of youth, coupled with the eternal masculine desire todisplay prowess before a desired female.
The wavering advance came to a halt. Most of the naked men stopped fromfear, but Burl stopped to invoke his newly discovered inner self, thathad furnished him with such marvelous plans. Quite accidentally he hadfound that if he persistently asked himself a question, some sort ofanswer came from within.
Now he gazed up from a safe distance and asked himself how he and theothers were to slay the clotho spider. The nest was some forty feet fromthe ground, on the undersurface of a shelf of rock. There was sheer openspace beneath it, but it was firmly held to its support by long, silkencables that curled to the upper side of the rock-shelf, clinging to thestone.
Burl gazed, and presently an idea came to him. He beckoned to the othersto follow him, and they did so, their knees knocking together from theirfright. At the slightest alarm they would flee, screaming in fear, butBurl did not plan that there should be any alarm.
He led them to the rear of the singular rock formation, up the gentlysloping side, and toward the precipitous edge. He drew near the pointwhere the rock fell away. A long, tentacle-like silk cable curled upover the edge of a little promontory of stone that jutted out intonothingness.
Burl began to feel oddly cold, and something of the panic of the othermen communicated itself to him. This was one of the anchoring cablesthat held the spider's castle secure. He looked and found others, six orseven in all, which performed the task of keeping the shaggy, horridogre's home from falling to the ground below.
His idea did not desert him, however, and he drew back, to whisperorders to his followers. They obeyed him solely because they wereafraid, and he spoke in an authoritative tone, but they did obey, andbrought a dozen heavy boulders of perhaps forty pounds weight each.
Burl grasped one of the silken cables at its end and tore it loose fromthe rock for a space of perhaps two yards. His flesh crawled as he didso, but something within him drove him on. Then, while beads ofperspiration stood out on his forehead--induced by nothing less thancold, physical fear--he tied the boulder to the cable. The first onedone, he felt emboldened, and made a se
cond fast, and a third.
One of his men stood near the edge of the rock, listening in agonizedapprehension. Burl had soon tied a heavy stone to each of the cables hesaw, and as a matter of fact, there was but one of them he failed tonotice. That one had been covered by the flaking mold that took theplace of grass upon the rocky eminence.
There were left upon the promontory, several of the boulders for whichthere was no use, but Burl did not attempt to double the weights on thecables. He took his followers aside and explained his plan in whispers.Quaking, they agreed, and, trembling, they prepared to carry it out.
One of them stationed himself beside each of the boulders, Burl at thelargest. He gave a signal, and half a dozen ripping, tearing soundsbroke the sullen silence of the day. The boulders clashed and clattereddown the rocky side of the precipice, tearing--perhaps "peeling"--thecables from their adhesion to the stone. They shot into open space andjerked violently at the half-globular nest, which was wrenched from itsplace by the combined impetus of the six heavy weights.
Burl had flung himself upon his face to watch what he was sure would bethe death of the spider as it fell forty feet and more, imprisoned inits heavily weighted home. His eyes sparkled with triumph as he saw theghastly, trophy-laden house swing out from the cliff. Then he gasped interror.
One of the cables had not been discovered. That single cable held thespider's castle from a fall, though the nest had been torn from itsanchorage, and now dangled heavily on its side in mid air. A convulsivestruggle seemed to be going on within.
Then one of the archlike doors opened, and the spider emerged, evidentlyin terror, and confused by the light of day, but still venomous andstill deadly. It found but a single of its anchoring cables intact, thatleading to the cliff top hard by Burl's head.
The spider sprang for this single cable, and its legs grasped theslender thread eagerly while it began to climb rapidly up toward thecliff top.
As with all the creatures of Burl's time, its first thought was ofbattle, not flight, and it came up the thin cord with its poison fangsunsheathed and its mandibles clashing in rage. The shaggy hair upon itsbody seemed to bristle with insane ferocity, and the horrible, thin legsmoved with desperate haste as it hastened to meet and wreak vengeanceupon the cause of its sudden alarm.
Burl's followers fled, uttering shrieks of fear, and Burl started to hisfeet, in the grip of a terrible panic. Then his hand struck one of theheavy boulders. Exerting every ounce of his strength, he pushed it overthe cliff just where the cable appeared above the edge. For the fractionof a second there was silence, and then the indescribable sound of animpact against a soft body.
There was a gasping cry, and a moment later the curiously muffledclatter of the boulder striking the earth below. Somehow, the soundsuggested that the boulder had struck first upon some soft object.
A faint cry came from the bottom of the hill. The last of Burl's men wasleaping to a hiding-place among the mushrooms of the forest, and hadseen the sheen of shining armor just before him. He cried out and waitedfor death, but only a delicately formed wasp rose heavily into the air,bearing beneath it the more and more feebly struggling body of a giantcricket.
Burl had stood paralyzed, deprived of the power of movement, aftercasting the boulder over the cliff. That one action had taken the lastounce of his initiative, and if the spider had hauled itself over therocky edge and darted toward him, slavering its thick spittle anduttering sounds of mad fury, Burl would not even have screamed as itseized him. He was like a dead thing. But the oddly muffled sound of theboulder striking the ground below brought back hope of life and power ofmovement.
He peered over the cliff. The nest still dangled at the end of thesingle cable, still freighted with its gruesome trophies, but on theground below a crushed and horribly writhing form was moving inconvulsions of rage and agony.
Long, hairy legs worked desperately from a body that was no more than amass of pulped flesh. A ferocious jaw tried to clamp upon something--andthere was no other jaw to meet it. An evil-smelling, sticky liquidexuded from the mangled writhing, thing upon the earth, moving interrible contortions of torment.
Presently an ant drew near and extended inquisitive antennae at thehelpless monster wounded to death. A shrill stridulation sounded out,and three or four other foot-long ants hastened up to wait patientlyjust outside the spider's reach until its struggles should have lessenedenough to make possible the salvage of flesh from the perhapsstill-living creature for the ant city a mile away.
And Burl, up on the cliff-top, danced and gesticulated in triumph. Hehad killed the clotho spider, which had slain one of the tribesmen fourmonths before. Glory was his. All the tribesmen had seen the spiderliving. Now he would show them the spider dead. He stopped his dance oftriumph and walked down the hill in haughty grandeur. He would reproachhis timid followers for fleeing from the spider, leaving him to kill italone.
Quite naively Burl assumed that it was his place to give orders and thatof the others to obey. True, no one had attempted to give orders before,or to enforce their execution, but Burl had reached the eminentlywholesome conclusion that he was a wonderful person whose wishes shouldbe respected.
Burl, filled with fresh notions of his own importance, strutted ontoward the hiding-place of the tribe, growing more and more angry withthe other men for having deserted him. He would reproach them, wouldprobably beat them. They would be afraid to protest, and in the futurewould undoubtedly be afraid to run away.
Burl was quite convinced that running away was something he could nottolerate in his followers. Obscurely--and conveniently in the extremeback of his mind--he reasoned that not only did a larger number of menpresent at a scene of peril increase the chances of coping with thedanger, but they also increased the chances that the victim selected bythe dangerous creature would be another than himself.
Burl's reasoning was unsophisticated, but sound; perhaps unconscious,but none the less effective. He grew quite furious with the deserters.They had run away! They had fled from a mere spider.
A shrill whine filled the air, and a ten-inch ant dashed at Burl withits mandibles extended threateningly. Burl's path had promised tointerrupt the salvaging work of the insect, engaged in scraping shredsof flesh from the corselet of one of the smaller beetles slain theprevious night. The ant dashed at Burl like an infuriated fox-terrier,and Burl scurried away in undignified retreat. The ant might not bedangerous, but bites from its formic acid-poisoned mandibles were notrifles.
Burl came to the tangled thicket of mushrooms in which his tribefolkhid. The entrance was tortuous and difficult to penetrate, and could beblocked on occasion with stones and toadstool pulp. Burl made his waytoward the central clearing, and heard as he went the sound of weeping,and the excited chatter of the tribes people.
Those who had fled from the rocky cliff had returned with the news thatBurl was dead, and Saya lay weeping beneath an over-shadowing toadstool.She was not yet the mate of Burl, but the time would come when all thetribe would recognize a status dimly different from the usual tribalrelationship.
Burl stepped into the clearing, and straightway cuffed the first man hecame upon, then the next and the next. There was a cry of astonishment,and the next second instinctive, fearful glances at that entrance to thehiding-place.
Had Burl fled from the spider, and was it following? Burl spoke loftily,saying that the spider was dead, that its legs, each one the length of aman, were still, and its fierce jaws and deadly poison-fangs harmlessforevermore.
Ten minutes later he was leading an incredulous, awed little group ofpink-skinned people to the spot below the cliff where the spideractually lay dead, with the ants busily at work upon its remains.
And when he went back to the hiding-place he donned again his greatcloak that was made from the wing of a magnificent moth, slain by theflames of the purple hills, and sat down in splendor upon a crumblingtoadstool, to feast upon the glances of admiration and awe that weresent toward him. Only Saya held back shyly, until he mo
tioned for her todraw near, when she seated herself at his feet and gazed up at him withunutterable adoration in her eyes.
But while Burl basked in the radiance of his tribe's admiration, dangerwas drawing near them all. For many months there had been strange redmushrooms growing slowly here and there all over the earth, they knew.The tribefolk had speculated about them, but forebore tasting thembecause they were strange, and strange things were usually dangerous andoften fatal.
Now those red growths had ripened and grown ready to emit their spores.Their rounded tops had grown fat, and the tough skin grew taut as if astrange pressure were being applied from within. And to-day, while Burlluxuriated in his position of feared and admired great man of his tribe,at a spot a long distance away, upon a hill-top, one of the redmushrooms burst. The spores inside the taut, tough skin shot all aboutas if scattered by an explosion, and made a little cloud of reddish,impalpable dust, which hung in the air and moved slowly with thesluggish breeze.
A bee droned into the thin red cloud of dust, lazily and heavily flyingback toward the hive. But barely had she entered the tinted atmospherewhen her movements became awkward and convulsive, effortful and excited.She trembled and twisted in mid air in a peculiar fashion, then droppedto the earth, while her abdomen moved violently.
Bees, like almost all insects, breathe through spiracles on theundersurfaces of their abdomens. This bee had breathed in some of thered mushroom's spores. She thrashed about desperately upon thetoadstools on which she had fallen, struggling for breath, for life.
After a long time she was still. The cloud of red mushroom spores hadstrangled or poisoned her. And everywhere the red fringe grew, suchexplosions were taking place, one by one, and wherever the red cloudshung in the air creatures were breathing them in and dying inconvulsions of strangulation.