_1. MAD PLANET_
In all his lifetime of perhaps twenty years, it had never occurred toBurl to wonder what his grandfather had thought about his surroundings.The grandfather had come to an untimely end in a fashion which Burlremembered as a succession of screams coming more and more faintly tohis ears, while he was being carried away at the topmost speed of whichhis mother was capable.
Burl had rarely or never thought of his grandfather since. Surely he hadnever wondered what his great-grandfather had thought, and most surelyof all he never speculated upon what his many-times-removedgreat-grandfather had thought when his lifeboat landed from the_Icarus_. Burl had never heard of the _Icarus_. He had done very littlethinking of any sort. When he did think, it was mostly agonized effortto contrive a way to escape some immediate and paralyzing danger. Whenhorror did not press upon him, it was better not to think, because therewasn't much but horror to think about.
At the moment, he was treading cautiously over a brownish carpet offungus, creeping furtively toward the stream which he knew only by thegeneric name of "water." It was the only water he knew. Towering farabove his head, three man-heights high, great toadstools hid the graysky from his sight. Clinging to the yard-thick stalks of the toadstoolswere still other fungi, parasites upon the growths that once had beenparasites themselves.
Burl appeared a fairly representative specimen of the descendants of thelong-forgotten _Icarus_ crew. He wore a single garment twisted about hismiddle, made from the wing-fabric of a great moth which the members ofhis tribe had slain as it emerged from its cocoon. His skin was fairwithout a trace of sunburn. In all his lifetime he had never seen thesun, though he surely had seen the sky often enough. It was rarelyhidden from him save by giant fungi, like those about him now, andsometimes by the gigantic cabbages which were nearly the only greengrowths he knew. To him normal landscape contained only fantastic pallidmosses, and misshapen fungus growths, and colossal moulds and yeasts.
He moved onward. Despite his caution, his shoulder once touched acream-colored toadstool stalk, giving the whole fungus a tiny shock.Instantly a fine and impalpable powder fell upon him from the umbrellalike top above. It was the season when the toadstools sent out theirspores. He paused to brush them from his head and shoulders. They were,of course, deadly poison.
Burl knew such matters with an immediate and specific and detailedcertainty. He knew practically nothing else. He was ignorant of the useof fire, of metals, and even of the uses of stone and wood. His languagewas a scanty group of a few hundred labial sounds, conveying noabstractions and few concrete ideas. He knew nothing of wood, becausethere was no wood in the territory furtively inhabited by his tribe.This was the lowlands. Trees did not thrive here. Not even grasses andtree-ferns could compete with mushrooms and toadstools and their kin.Here was a soil of rusts and yeasts. Here were toadstool forests andfungus jungles. They grew with feverish intensity beneath a cloud-hiddensky, while above them fluttered butterflies no less enlarged than they,moths as much magnified, and other creatures which could thrive on theircorruption.
The only creatures on the planet which crawled or ran or flew--save onlyBurl's fugitive kind--were insects. They had been here before men came,and they had adapted to the planet's extraordinary ways. With a worldmade ready before their first progenitors arrived, insects had thrivenincredibly. With unlimited food-supplies, they had grown large. Withincreased size had come increased opportunity for survival, andenlargement became hereditary. Other than fungoid growths, the solitaryvegetables were the sports of unstable varieties of the plants leftbehind by the _Ludred_. There were enormous cabbages, with leaves thesize of ship-sails, on which stolid grubs and caterpillars atethemselves to maturity, and then swung below in strong cocoons to sleepthe sleep of metamorphosis. The tiniest butterflies of Earth hadincreased their size here until their wings spread feet across, andsome--like the emperor moths--stretched out purple wings which wereyards in span. Burl himself would have been dwarfed beneath a greatmoth's wing.
But he wore a gaudy fabric made of one. The moths and giant butterflieswere harmless to men. Burl's fellow tribesmen sometimes came upon acocoon when it was just about to open, and if they dared they waitedtimorously beside it until the creature inside broke through itssleeping-shell and came out into the light.
Then, before it gathered energy from the air and before its wingsswelled to strength and firmness, the tribesmen fell upon it. They torethe delicate wings from its body and the still-flaccid limbs from theirplaces. And when it lay helpless before them they fled away to feast onits juicy meat-filled limbs.
They dared not linger, of course. They left their prey helpless--staringstrangely at the world about it through its many-faceted eyes--beforethe scavengers came to contest its ownership. If nothing more deadlyappeared, surely the ants would come. Some of them were only incheslong, but others were the size of fox-terriers. All of them had to beavoided by men. They would carry the moth-carcass away to theirunderground cities, triumphantly, in shreds and morsels.
But most of the insect world was neither so helpless nor sounthreatening. Burl knew of wasps almost the length of his own body,with stings that were instantly fatal. To every species of wasp,however, some other insect is predestined prey. Wasps need not bedreaded too much. And bees were similarly aloof. They were hard put toit for existence, those bees. Since few flowers bloomed, they werereduced to expedients that once were considered signs of degeneracy intheir race: bubbling yeasts and fouler things, or occasionally thenectarless blooms of the rank giant cabbages. Burl knew the bees. Theydroned overhead, nearly as large as he was, their bulging eyes gazing athim and everything else in abstracted preoccupation.
There were crickets, and beetles, and spiders.... Burl knew spiders! Hisgrandfather had been the prey of a hunting tarantula which had leapedwith incredible ferocity from its tunnel in the ground. A vertical pit,a yard in diameter, went down for twenty feet. At the bottom of the lairthe monster waited for the tiny sounds that would warn him of preyapproaching his hiding-place.
Burl's grandfather had been careless. The terrible shrieks he uttered ashe was seized still lingered vaguely in Burl's mind. And he had seen,too, the webs of another species of spider--inch-thick cables of dirtysilk--and watched from a safe distance as the misshapen monster suckedthe juices from a three-foot cricket its trap had caught. He rememberedthe stripes of yellow and black and silver that crossed upon itsabdomen. He had been fascinated and horrified by the blind struggling ofthe cricket, tangled in hopeless coils of gummy cord, before the spiderbegan its feast.
Burl knew these dangers. They were part of his life. It was thisknowledge that made life possible. He knew the ways to evade thesedangers. But if he yielded to carelessness for one moment, or if herelaxed his caution for one instant, he would be one with his ancestors.They were the long-forgotten meals of inhuman monsters.
Now, to be sure, Burl moved upon an errand that probably no other of histribe would have imagined. The day before, he had crouched behind ashapeless mound of inter-tangled growths and watched a duel between twohuge horned beetles. Their bodies were feet long. Their carapaces werewaist-high to Burl when they crawled. Their mandibles, gaping laterally,clicked and clashed upon each other's impenetrable armor. Their legscrashed like so many cymbals as they struck against each other. Theyfought over some particularly attractive bit of carrion.
Burl had watched with wide eyes until a gaping hole appeared in thearmor of the smaller one. It uttered a grating outcry--or seemed to. Thenoise was actually the tearing of its shell between the mandibles of thevictor.
The wounded creature struggled more and more feebly. When it ceased tooffer battle, the conqueror placidly began to dine before its prey hadceased to live. But this was the custom of creatures on this planet.
Burl watched, timorous but hopeful. When the meal was finished, hedarted in quickly as the diner lumbered away. He was almost too late,even then. An ant--the forerunner of many--already inspected thefragments with excitedly vibratin
g antennae.
Burl needed to move quickly and he did. Ants were stupid andshort-sighted insects; few of them were hunters. Save when offeredbattle, most of them were scavengers only. They hunted the scenes ofnightmare for the dead and dying only, but fought viciously if theirprey were questioned. And always there were others on the way.
Some were arriving now. Hearing the tiny clickings of their approach,Burl was hasty. Over-hasty. He seized a loosened fragment and fled. Itwas merely the horn, the snout of the dead and eaten creature. But itwas loose and easily carried. He ran.
Later he inspected his find with disappointment. There was little meatclinging to it. It was merely the horn of a Minotaur beetle, shaped likethe horn of a rhinoceros. Plucking out the shreds left by its murderer,he pricked his hand. Pettishly, he flung it aside. The time of darknesswas near, so he crept to the hiding place of his tribe to huddle withthem until light came again.
There were only twenty of them; four or five men and six or seven women.The rest were girls or children. Burl had been wondering at the strangefeelings that came over him when he looked at one of the girls. She wasyounger than Burl--perhaps eighteen--and fleeter of foot. They talkedtogether sometimes and, once or twice, Burl shared an especiallysucculent find of foodstuffs with her.
He could share nothing with her now. She stared at him in the deepeningnight when he crept to the labyrinthine hiding place the tribe now usedin a mushroom forest. He considered that she looked hungry and hopedthat he would have food to share. And he was bitterly ashamed that hecould offer nothing. He held himself a little apart from the rest,because of his shame. Since he too was hungry, it was some time beforehe slept. Then he dreamed.
Next morning he found the horn where he had thrown it disgustedly theday before. It was sticking in the flabby trunk of a toadstool. Hepulled it out. In his dream he had used it....
Presently he tried to use it. Sometimes--not often--the men of the tribeused the saw-toothed edge of a cricket-leg, or the leg of agrasshopper, to sever tough portions of an edible mushroom. The horn hadno cutting edge, but Burl had used it in his dream. He was not quitecapable of distinguishing clearly between reality and dreams; so hetried to duplicate what happened in the dream. Remembering that it hadstuck into the mushroom-stalk, he thrust it. It stabbed. He remembereddistinctly how the larger beetle had used its horn as a weapon. It hadstabbed, too.
He considered absorbedly. He could not imagine himself fighting one ofthe dangerous insects, of course. Men did not fight, on the forgottenplanet. They ran away. They hid. But somehow Burl formed a fantasticpicture of himself stabbing food with this horn, as he had stabbed amushroom. It was longer than his arm and though naturally clumsy in hishand, it would have been a deadly weapon in the grip of a man preparedto do battle.
Battle did not occur to Burl. But the idea of stabbing food with it wasclear. There could be food that would not fight back. Presently he hadan inspiration. His face brightened. He began to make his way toward thetiny river that ran across the plain in which the tribe of humans livedby foraging in competition with the ants. Yellow-bellied newts--bigenough to be lusted for--swam in its waters. The swimming larvae of athousand kinds of creatures floated on the sluggish surface or crawledover the bottom.
There were deadly things there, too. Giant crayfish snapped their clawsat the unwary. One of them could sever Burl's arm with ease. Mosquitoessometimes hummed high above the river. Mosquitoes had a four-inchwing-spread, now, though they were dying out for lack of plant-juices onwhich the males of their species fed. But they were formidable. Burl hadlearned to crush them between fragments of fungus.
He crept slowly through the forest of toadstools. What should have beengrass underfoot was brownish rust. Orange and red and purple mouldsclustered about the bases of the creamy mushroom-trunks. Once, Burlpaused to run his weapon through a fleshy column and reassure himselfthat what he planned was possible.
He made his way furtively through the bulbous growths. Once he heardclickings and froze to stillness. Four or five ants, minims only eightinches long, were returning by an habitual pathway to their city. Theymoved sturdily along, heavily laden, over the route marked by the scentof formic acid left by their fellow-townsmen. Burl waited until they hadpassed, then went on.
He came to the bank of the river. It flowed slowly, green scum coveringa great deal of its surface in the backwaters, occasionally broken by aslowly enlarging bubble released from decomposing matter on the bottom.In the center of the stream the current ran a little more swiftly andthe water itself seemed clear. Over it ran many water-spiders. They hadnot shared in the general increase of size in the insect world.Depending as they did on the surface tension of the water for support,to have grown larger and heavier would have destroyed them.
Burl surveyed the scene. His search was four parts for danger and onlyone part for a way to test his brilliant notion, but that was natural.Where he stood, the green scum covered the stream for many yards.Down-river a little, though, the current came closer to the bank. Herehe could not see whatever swam or crawled or wriggled underwater; therehe might.
There was an outcropping rock forming a support for crawling stuff,which in turn supported shelf-fungi making wide steps almost down to thewater's edge. Burl was making his way cautiously toward them when he sawone of the edible mushrooms which formed so large a part of his diet. Hepaused to break off a flabby white piece large enough to feed him formany days. It was the custom of his people, when they found a store offood, to hide with it and not venture out again to danger until it wasall eaten. Burl was tempted to do just that with his booty. He couldgive Saya of this food and they would eat together. They might hidetogether until it was all consumed.
But there was a swirling in the water under the descending platforms ofshelf-fungi. A very remarkable sensation came to Burl. He may have beenthe only man in many generations to be aware of the high ambition tostab something to eat. He may have been a throw-back to ancestors whohad known bravery, which had no survival-value here. But Burl hadimagined carrying Saya food which he had stabbed with the spear of aMinotaur beetle. It was an extraordinary idea.
It was new, too. Not too long ago, when he was younger, Burl would havethought of the tribe instead. He'd have thought of old Jon, bald-headedand wheezing and timorous, and how that patriarch would pat his armexuberantly when handed food; or old Tama, wrinkled and querulous, whoselook of settled dissatisfaction would vanish at sight of a tidbit; ofDik and Tet, the tribe-members next younger, who would squabblezestfully over the fragments allotted them.
But now he imagined Saya looking astonished and glad when he grandlyhanded her more food than she could possibly eat. She would admire himenormously!
Of course he did not imagine himself fighting to get food for Saya. Hemeant only to stab something edible in the water. Things in the waterdid not fight things on land. Since he would not be in the water, hewould not be in a fight. It was a completely delectable idea, which noman within memory had ever entertained before. If Burl accomplished it,his tribe would admire him. Saya would admire him. Everybody, observingthat he had found a new source of food, would even envy him until heshowed them how to do it too. Burl's fellow-humans were preoccupied withthe filling of their stomachs. The preservation of their lives camesecond. The perpetuation of the race came a bad third in theirconsideration. They were herded together in a leaderless group, comingto the same hiding-place nightly only that they might share the finds ofthe lucky and gather comfort from their numbers. They had no weapons.Even Burl did not consider his spear a weapon. It was a tool forstabbing something to eat only. Yet he did not think of it in that wayexactly. His tribe did not even consciously use tools. Sometimes theyused stones to crack open the limbs of great insects they foundincompletely devoured. They did not even carry rocks about with them forthat purpose. Only Burl had a vague idea of taking something to someplace to do something with it. It was unprecedented. Burl was at leastan atavar. He may have been a genius.
But he was not a h
igh-grade genius. Certainly not yet.
He reached a spot from which he could look down into the water. Helooked behind and all about, listening, then lay down to stare into theshallow depths. Once, a huge crayfish, a good eight feet long, movedleisurely across his vision. Small fishes and even huge newts fledbefore it.
After a long time the normal course of underwater life resumed. Thewriggling caddis-flies in their quaintly ambitious houses reappeared.Little flecks of silver swam into view--a school of tiny fish. Then alarger fish appeared, moving slowly in the stream.
Burl's eyes glistened; his mouth watered. He reached down with his longweapon. It barely broke through the still surface of the water below.Disappointment filled him, yet the nearness and apparent probability ofsuccess spurred him on.
He examined the shelf-fungi beneath him. Rising, he moved to a pointabove them and tested one with his spear. It resisted. Burl felt abouttentatively with his foot, then dared to put his whole weight on thetopmost. It held firmly. He clambered down upon the lower ones, thenlay flat and peered over the edge.
The large fish, fully as long as Burl's arm, swam slowly to and frobeneath him. Burl had seen the former owner of this spear strive tothrust it into his adversary. The beetle had been killed by the moresuccessful stab of a similar weapon. Burl had tried this upontoadstools, practising with it. When the silver fish drifted close byagain, he thrust sharply downward.
The spear seemed to bend when it entered the water. It missed its markby inches, much to Burl's astonishment. He tried again. Once more thespear seemed diverted by the water. He grew angry with the fish foreluding his efforts to kill it.
This anger was as much the reaction of a throw-back to a less fearfultime as the idea of killing itself. But Burl scowled at the fish.Repeated strokes had left it untouched. It was unwary. It did not evenswim away.
Then it came to rest directly beneath his hand. He thrust directlydownward, with all his strength. This time the spear, enteringvertically, did not appear to bend, but went straight down. Its pointpenetrated the scales of the swimming fish, transfixing the creaturecompletely.
An uproar began with the fish wriggling desperately as Burl tried todraw it up to his perch. In his excitement he did not notice a tinyripple a little distance away. The monster crayfish, attracted by thedisturbance, was coming back.
The unequal combat continued. Burl hung on desperately to the end of hisspear. Then there was a tremor in the shelf-fungus on which he lay. Ityielded, collapsed, and fell into the stream with a mighty splash. Burlwent under, his eyes wide open, facing death. As he sank he saw thegaping, horrible claws of the crustacean, huge enough to sever any ofBurl's limbs with a single snap.
He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Only bubblesfloated up to the surface. He beat the unresisting fluid in a frenzy ofhorror with his hands and feet as the colossal crayfish leisurelyapproached.
His arms struck a solid object. He clutched it convulsively. A secondlater he had swung it between himself and the crustacean. He felt theshock as the claws closed upon the cork-like fungus. Then he felthimself drawn upward as the crayfish disgustedly released its hold andthe shelf-fungus floated slowly upward. Having given way beneath him, ithad been pushed below when he fell, only to rise within his reach justwhen most needed.
Burl's head popped above-water and he saw a larger bit of the fungusfloating nearby. Even less securely anchored to the river-bank than theshelf to which he had trusted himself, it had broken away when he fell.It was larger and floated higher.
He seized it, crazily trying to climb up. It tilted under his weight andvery nearly overturned. He paid no heed. With desperate haste he clawedand kicked until he could draw himself clear of the water.
As he pulled himself up on the furry, orange-brown surface, a sharp blowstruck his foot. The crayfish, disappointed at finding nothing tasty inthe shelf-fungus, had made a languid stroke at Burl's foot wriggling inthe water. Failing to grasp the fleshy member, it went annoyedly away.
Burl floated downstream, perched weaponless and alone upon a flimsy raftof degenerate fungus; floated slowly down a stagnant river in whichdeath swam, between banks of sheer peril, past long reaches above whichdeath floated on golden wings.
It was a long while before he recovered his self-possession. Then--andthis was an action individual in Burl: none of his tribesmen would havethought of it--he looked for his spear.
It was floating in the water, still transfixing the fish whose capturehad brought him to this present predicament. That silvery shape, soviolent before, now floated belly-up, all life gone.
Burl's mouth watered as he gazed at the fish. He kept it in viewconstantly while the unsteady craft spun slowly downstream in thecurrent. Lying flat he tried to reach out and grasp the end of the spearwhen it circled toward him.
The raft tilted, nearly capsizing. A little later he discovered that itsank more readily on one side than the other. This was due, of course,to the greater thickness of one side. The part next to the river-bankhad been thicker and was, therefore, more buoyant.
He lay with his head above that side of the raft. It did not sink intothe water. Wriggling as far to the edge as he dared, he reached out andout. He waited impatiently for the slower rotation of his float tocoincide with the faster motion of the speared fish. The spear-end camecloser, and closer.... He reached out--and the raft dipped dangerously.But his fingers touched the spear-end. He got a precarious hold, pulledit toward him.
Seconds later he was tearing strips of scaly flesh from the side of thefish and cramming the greasy stuff into his mouth with vast enjoyment.He had lost the edible mushroom. It floated several yards away. He atecontentedly none-the-less.
He thought of the tribesfolk as he ate. This was more than he couldfinish alone. Old Tama would coax him avidly for more than her share.She had a few teeth left. She would remind him anxiously of her gifts offood to him when he was younger. Dik and Tet--being boys--wouldclamorously demand of him where he'd gotten it. How? He would give someto Cori, who had younger children, and she would give them most of thegift. And Saya--.
Burl gloated especially over Saya's certain reaction.
Then he realized that with every second he was being carried furtheraway from her. The nearer river-bank moved past him. He could tell bythe motion of the vividly colored growths upon the shore.
Overhead, the sun was merely a brighter patch in the haze-filled sky. Inthe pinkish light all about, Burl looked for the familiar and did notfind it, and dolefully knew that he was remote from Saya and goingfarther all the time.
There were a multitude of flying objects to be seen in the miasmaticair. In the daytime a thin mist always hung above the lowlands. Burl hadnever seen any object as much as three miles distant. The air was neverclear enough to permit it. But there was much to be seen even within thelimiting mist.
Now and then a cricket or a grasshopper made its bullet-like flight fromone spot to another. Huge butterflies fluttered gaily above the silent,loathesome ground. Bees lumbered anxiously about, seeking thecross-shaped flowers of the giant cabbages which grew so rarely.Occasionally a slender-waisted, yellow-bellied wasp flashed swiftly by.
But Burl did not heed any of them. Sitting dismally upon his fungusraft, floating in midstream, an incongruous figure of pink skin andluridly-tinted loin-cloth, with a greasy dead fish beside him, he wasfilled with a panicky anguish because the river carried him away fromthe one girl of his tiny tribe whose glances roused a commotion in hisbreast.
The day wore on. Once, he saw a band of large amazon ants moving brisklyover a carpet of blue-green mould to raid the city of a species of blackants. The eggs they would carry away from the city would hatch and thesmall black creatures would become the slaves of the brigands who hadstolen them.
Later, strangely-shaped, swollen branches drifted slowly into view. Theywere outlined sharply against the steaming mist behind them. He knewwhat they were: a hard-rinded fungus growing upon itself in peculiarmockery of the trees which
Burl had never seen because no trees couldsurvive the conditions of the lowland.
Much later, as the day drew to an end, Burl ate again of the oily fish.The taste was pleasant compared to the insipid mushrooms he usually ate.Even though he stuffed himself, the fish was so large that the greaterpart remained still uneaten.
The spear was beside him. Although it had brought him trouble, he stillassociated it with the food it had secured rather than the difficultyinto which it had led him. When he had eaten his fill, he picked it upto examine again. The oil-covered point remained as sharp as before.
Not daring to use it again from so unsteady a raft, he set it aside ashe stripped a sinew from his loin-cloth to hang the fish around hisneck. This would leave his arms free. Then he sat cross-legged, fumblingwith the spear as he watched the shores go past.