Classic Audiobook Collection - The Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster ~ Full Audiobook [scifi]

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

The Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster audiobook. Genre: scifi Long ago, human seed-ships arrived at a barren world to begin a slow, deliberate experiment: first microbes, then plants and insects, and later, a final shipment of animals to complete a living ecosystem. But the last mission never came, and in the silence of millennia the planet's unchecked life runs wild, with fungi spreading like forests and insects swelling into monstrous proportions. When a space liner is wrecked on this half-made world, its survivors fight to endure amid wolf-sized ants, towering webs, and stinging things that rule the air. Generations later, the descendants of those castaways have fallen into a harsh, primitive existence where every day is a contest against hunger, predators, and the poisonous mysteries of the land itself. Burl, a young hunter with an unusual spark of curiosity, begins to notice patterns others ignore and dares to imagine that survival might mean more than hiding and running. As he struggles to lead his small tribe through shifting dangers and ancient leftovers from a lost past, the planet's original purpose and humanity's forgotten connection to it start to surface, raising one urgent question: can people reclaim their future on a world that seems designed to kill them? For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 00 (00:17:56) Chapter 01 (00:52:39) Chapter 02 (01:41:43) Chapter 03 (02:21:31) Chapter 04 (02:46:31) Chapter 05 (03:28:46) Chapter 06 (04:05:12) Chapter 07 (04:30:09) Chapter 08 (04:52:16) Chapter 09 (05:14:59) Chapter 10 (05:42:02) Chapter 11 (06:07:54) Chapter 12 (06:30:57) Chapter 13 (06:54:23) Chapter 14 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

the forgotten planet by murray leinster about the characters in this book there is something of an oddity among fiction stories because some of its characters may be met in person if you wish down at the nearest weed patch or thicket you are quite likely to see a large and unusually perfect spider web with a zigzag silk ribbon woven into its center its engineer is the yellow bandit garden spider, epiria facietta, whose abdomen may be as big as your thumb. I do not name it to impress you, but to suggest a sort of science fiction experience. Take a bit of straw and disturb the web.

Don't break the cables. Simply tap them a bit. The spider will know by the feel of things that you aren't prey and that it can't eat you. so it will set out, frightening you away. It will run nimbly to the center of the web and shake itself violently. A whole web will vibrate so that presently the spider may be swinging through an arc, inches in length, and blurred by the speed of its swing.

You are supposed to be scared. When you are alarmed enough, the spider will stop. That spider, very much magnified, is in this space. book with crickets and grasshoppers and divers beetles you may not know personally. But this is not an insect book, but science fiction. If the habits of the creatures in it are authentic, it is because they are much more dramatic and interesting than things one can invent. Murray Leinster

Prologue The survey ship Tethys made the first landing on the planet, which had no name. it was an admirable planet in many ways it had an ample atmosphere and many seas which the nearby sun warmed so lavishly that a perpetual cloud bank hid them and most of the solid ground from view it had mountains and continents and islands and high plateaus it had day and night and wind and rain and its main temperature was within the range to which human beings could readily accommodate It was rather on the tropic side, but not unpleasant. But there was no life on it. No animals roamed its continents. No vegetation grew from its rocks.

Not even bacteria struggled, with its stones to turn them into soil. So there was no soil, rocks and stones and gravel, and even sand, yes, but no soil in which any vegetation could grow. No living thing, however small, swam in its oceans, so there was not even mud on the ocean bottoms. It was one of that disappointing vast majority of worlds, which turned up when the galaxy was first explored. People couldn't live on it, because nothing had lived there before. Its water was fresh and its oceans were harmless.

Its air was germ-free and breathable. but it was of no use whatever for men. The only possible purpose it could serve would have been as a biological laboratory for experiments involving things growing in a germ-free environment. But there were too many planets like that already. When men first traveled to the stars,

they made the journey because it was starkly necessary to find new worlds for men to live on. Earth was overcrowded, terribly so, so men looked for new worlds to move to. They found plenty of new worlds, but presently they were searching desperately for new worlds where life had preceded them. It didn't matter whether the life was meek and harmless or ferocious and deadly.

If life of any sort were present, human beings could move in. But highly organized beings like men could not live where there was no other life. So the survey ship, Tethys, made sure that the world had no life upon it. Then it made routine measurements of the gravitational constant and the magnetic field and the temperature gradient. It took samples of the air and water, but that was all. The rocks were familiar enough, no novelties there, but the planet was simply useless. The survey ship put its findings on a punched card, six inches by end.

and went hastily on in search of something better. The ship did not even open one of its ports while on the planet. There were no consequences of the Tethys' visit, except that card, none whatever. No other ship came near the planet for eight hundred years. Nearly a millennium later, however, the seed ship Orana arrived. By that time, humanity had spread very widely and very far. there were colonies not less than a quarter of the way to the galaxy's rim an earth was no longer overcrowded there was still emigration but it was now a trickle instead of the swarming flood of centuries before some of the first colonized worlds had emigrants now mankind did not want to crowd itself together again men now considered that there was no excuse for such monstrous slums as overcrowding produced

now too the starships were faster a hundred light years was a short journey a thousand was not impractical explorers had gone many times farther and reported worlds still waiting for mankind on beyond but still the great majority of discovered planets did not contain life whole solar systems floated in space with no single living cell on any of their members so the seed ships came into being theirs was not a glamorous service they merely methodically contaminated the sterile worlds with life the seed ship orana landed on this planet which still had no name it carefully infected it it circled endlessly above the clouds dribbling out of fine dust the spores of every conceivable microorganism which could break down rock to powder and turn that dust to soil it was also a seeding of molds and fungi and lichens and everything which could turn powdery primitive soil it was also a seeding of molds and fungi and lichens and everything which could turn powdery primitive soil into stuff on which higher forms of life could grow. The Orana polluted the seas with plankton. Then it too went away.

More centuries passed, human ships again improved. A thousand light years became a short journey. Explorers reached the galaxy's very edge and looked estimatingly across the emptiness toward other island universes. There were colonies in the Milky Way. way. There were freight lines between star clusters and commercial centers of human affairs shifted some hundreds of parsecs toward the rim. There were many worlds where the schools painstakingly taught the children what earth was and where, and that all other worlds had been

populated from it. And the schools repeated, too, the one lesson that humankind seemed genuinely to have learned, that the secret of peace is freedom, and the secret of freedom is being able to move away from people with whom you do not agree. There were no crowded worlds any more, but human beings love children, and they have them, and children grow up and need room, so more worlds had to be looked out for. They weren't urgently needed yet, but they would be. Therefore, nearly a thousand years after the Orana, the ecology ship, Ludrid, swam to the planet from space and landed on it. It was a gigantic ship of highly improbable purpose.

First of all, it checked on the consequences of the Orana's visit. Things were highly satisfactory from a technical point of view. Now, there was soil which swarmed with minute living things. There were fungi which throve monstrously. The seas stank of minuscule life-forms. There were even some novelties developed by the strictly local conditions. There were, for example, Pyramisia, as big as grapes and yeasts, had increased in size until they bore flowers visible to the naked eye.

The life on the planet was not aboriginal, though. All of it was descended. and adapted and modified from the microorganisms planted by the seed ship, whose Hulk was long since rust and whose crew were merely names and genealogies, if that. The Ludrid stayed on the planet a considerably longer time than either of the ships that had visited before. It dropped the seeds of plants. It broadcast innumerable varieties of things which should take root and grow. In some places it deliberately seeded the stinking soil.

It put marine plants in the oceans. It put alpine plants on the high ground. And when all its stable varieties were set out, it added plants which were genetically unstable. For generations to come, they would throw spores, some of which should be especially suited to this planetary environment. Before it left, the Luddred dumped fanny fish into the seas. At first, they would live on the plankton, which made the ocean almost broth.

There were many varieties of fish. Some would multiply swiftly while small. Others would grow and feed on the smaller varieties. And as a last activity, the Lundred set up refrigeration units, loaded with insect eggs. Some would release their contents as soon as plants had grown enough to furnish them with food. Others would allow their contents to hatch only after certain other varieties had multiplied to be their food supply. When the ecology ship left, it had done a very painstaking job.

It had treated the planet to a sort of Russell's mixture of life forms. The real Russell's mixture is that blend of the simple, elements in the proportions found in suns. This was a blend of life forms in which some should survive by consuming now the habituated flora, others by praying on the former. The planet was stopped, in effect, with everything that could be hoped would live there. But only certain things could have that hope. Nothing which needed parental care had any chance of survival.

The creature seeded at this time had to be those which could care for themselves from the instant they burst their eggs. So there were no birds or mammals, trees and plants of many kinds, fish and crustaceans and tadpoles, and all kinds of insects could be planted, but nothing else. The Lederates swam away through emptiness. There should have been another planting centuries later. There should have been a ship from the zoological branch of the ecological surface. It should have landed birds and beasts and reptiles.

It should have added pelagic mammals to the sea. There should have been herbiferous animals to live on the grasses and plants which would have thriven, and carniferous animals to live on them in turn. There should have been careful stocking of the planet with animal life, and repeated visits at intervals of a century or so to make sure that a true ecological balance had been established. And then, when the balance was fixed, men would come and destroy it for their own benefit. But there was an accident.

Ships had improved again. Even small private spacecraft now journeyed tens of light years on holiday journeys. Personal cruisers traveled hundreds, liners ran matter-of-factly on ship lines tens of thousands of light years long. An exploring ship was on its way to a second island universe. It did not come back. The inhabited planets were all members of a tenuous organization, which limited itself to affairs of space without attempting to interfere in surface matters.

That tenuous organization moved the ecological preparations. operation service files to Algal 4 as a matter of convenience. In the moving, a card file was upset. The cards it contained were picked up and replaced, but one was missed. It was not picked up. It was left behind. So the planet which had no name was forgotten. No other ship came to prepare it for ultimate human occupancy.

It circled its sun, unheeded, and unheeded. unthought-banks covered it from pole to pole. There were hazing markings in some places where high plateaus penetrated its clouds, but that was all. From space the planet was essentially featureless. Seen from afar, it was merely a round white ball, white from its cloud banks and nothing else. But on its surface on its lowlands, it was pure nightmare. But this fact didn't not matter for a very long time. Ultimately, it mattered a great deal to the crew of the spaceliner, Icarus. The Icarus was a splendid ship of its time.

It bore passengers headed for one of the galaxy's spiral arms, and it cut across the normal lanes, and headed through charted but unvisited parts of the galaxy toward its destination. And it had one of the very, very, very few. accidents known to happen to spacecraft, license for travel, off normal space lanes. It suffered shipwreck and space, and its passengers and crew were forced to take to the lifecraft. The lifeboat's range was limited. They landed on the planet that the Tethys had first examined, that the Orana and the Ludrid

had seated, and of which there was no longer any record in the third. card files of the ecological service. Their fuel was exhausted. They could not leave. They could not signal for help. They had to stay there, and the planet was a place of nightmares. After a time, the few people, some few thousands, who knew that there was a spaceliner named Icarus gave it up for lost. They forgot about it. Everybody forgot. Even the passengers and the crew of the ship forgot it. Not immediately, of course. For the first few generations, their descendants cherished hopes of rescue. But the planet which had no name, the forgotten planet, did not encourage the cherishing of hope. After forty odd generations, nobody remembered the Icarus anywhere.

The wreckage of the lifeboats was long since hidden under the seething, furiously striving fungi of the soil. the human beings had forgotten not only their ancestorship but very nearly everything their ancestors had brought to this world the use of metals the existence of fire and even the fact that there was such a thing as sunshine they lived in the lowlands deep under the cloud bank amid surroundings which were riotous swarming frenzied horror they had become savages they were less than savages because they had forgotten their destiny as men end of prologue chapter one of the forgotten planet by murray leinster this librivox recording is in the public domain mad planet In all his lifetime of perhaps twenty years, it had never occurred to Burrell to wonder what his grandfather had thought about his surroundings. The grandfather had come to an untimely end in a fashion which Burl remembered has a succession of screams coming more and more faintly to his ears, while he was being carried away at the topmost speed of which his mother was capable. Burl had rarely or never thought of his grandfather since.

Surely he had never wondered what his great-grandfather had thought, and most surely, of all, he never speculated upon what as many times removed great-grandfather had thought when his lifeboat landed from the Icarus. Burl had never heard of the Icarus. He had done very little thinking of any sort. When he did think it was mostly absolutely agonized effort to contrive a way to escape some immediate and paralyzing danger.

When horror did not press upon him, it was better not to think, because there wasn't much but horror to think about. At the moment, he was treading cautiously over a brownish carpet of fungus, creeping furtively toward the stream, which he knew only by the generic name of water. It was the only water he knew, towering far above his head, three man heights high, great told stools hid the gray sky from his sight. Clinging to the yard-thick stalks of the tolled-stools were still other fungi, parasites upon the growths that had once been parasites themselves.

Burrell appeared a fairly representative specimen of the descendants of the long-forgotten Icris crew. He wore a single garment twisted about his middle, made from the wing fabric of a great moth, which the members of his tribe had slain as it emerged from its cocoom. His skin was fair, without a trace of sunburn. In all his lifetime he had never seen the sun, though he surely had seen the sky often enough. It was rarely hidden from him, saved by giant fungi, like those about him now, and sometimes, by the gigantic cabbages, which were nearly the only green growths he knew. To him, normal landscapes contained only fantastic pallid mosses, and misshapen fungus growths, and colossal molds and yeasts. He moved onward. Despite his caution, his shoulder once touched

a cream-colored tolled stool stalk, giving the whole fungus a tiny shock. instantly a fine and impalpable powder fell upon him from the umbrella-like top above it was the season when the tolled-stools sent out their spores 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 detailed certainty he knew practically nothing else he was ignorant of the use of fire of metals and even of the uses of stone and wood his language was a scanty group of a few hundred labial sounds conveying no abstractions and few concrete ideas he knew nothing of wood because there was no wood in the territory furtively inhabited by his tribe this was the lowlands trees did not thrive here not even grasses and tree ferns could compete with mushrooms and tolled stools and their kin here was the soil of rusts and yeasts here were told stew forests and fungus jungles they grew with feverish intensity beneath a cloud-hidden sky while above them fluttered butterflies no less in enlarged than they, moths, as much magnified, and other creatures which could thrive on their corruption.

The only creatures on the planet which crawled or ran or flew, save only Burrell's fugitive kind, were insects. They had been here before men came, and they had adapted to the planet's extraordinary ways. With a world made ready before their progenitors arrived, insects had thrived. had thriven incredibly. With unlimited food supplies, they had grown large. With increased size had come increased opportunity for survival, and enlargement became hereditary. Other than fungoyed growth, the solitary vegetables were the sports of unstable varieties of the plants left behind by the lundred. There were enormous cabbages with leaves the size of ship's

sails, on which stolid grubs and caterpillars ate themselves to maturity, and then swung below in strong cocoons to sleep the sleep of metamorphoses. The tiniest butterflies of earth had increased their size here until their wings spread feet across, and some, like the emperor moths, stretched out purple wings which were yards and span. Burrell himself would have been dwarfed beneath a great moth's wing. But he wore a gaudy fabric made of one. The moths and giant butterflies were harmless to men. Burl's fellow tribesmen sometimes came upon a cocoon when it was just about to open, and if they dared, they waited timorously beside it until the creature inside broke through its sleeping shell and came out into the light. Then before it gathered energy from the air,

and before its wings swelled to strength and firmness, the tribesmen fell upon it. They tore the delicate wings from its body and the still flaccid limbs from their places, and when it lay helpless before them, they fled away to feast on its juicy, meat-filled limbs. They dared not linger, of course. They left their prey helpless,

staring strangely at the world about it through its many faceted eyes before the scavengers came to contest its ownership if nothing more deadly appeared surely the ants would come some of them were only inches long but others were the size of fox terriers all of them had to be avoided by men they would carry moth carcasses away to their underground cities triumphantly in shreds and morsels but most of the insect world was neither so helpless nor so unthreatening burl knew of wasps almost a 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 be dreaded too much and bees were similarly aloof. They were hard put to it for existence. Those bees, since few flowers bloomed, they were reduced to expedience

that once were considered signs of degeneracy in their race, bubbling yeasts and fowler things, or occasionally the nectarless blooms of the rank giant cabbages. Burrell knew the bees. They roaned overhead, nearly as large as he was, their bulging eyes gazing at him, and everything else in abstracted

preoccupation. There were crickets, said beetles and spiders. Burl knew spiders. His grandfather had been the prey of a hunting tarantula, which had leaped with 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 layer, the monster waited. for the tiny sounds that would warm him of prey approaching his hiding-place.

Burl's grandfather had been careless. The terrible shrieks he uttered as he was seized still lingered vaguely in Burles' mind, and he had seen, too, the webs of another species of spider, inch-thick cables, of dirty silk and watched from a safe distance as the misshapen monster Sucked the juices from a three-foot cricket its trap had caught. He remembered the stripes of yellow and black and silver that crossed upon its abdomen. He had been fascinated and horrified by the blind struggling of the cricket, tangled in hopeless coils of gummy cord, before the spider began its feast.

Burrell knew these dangers. They were part of his life. It was this knowledge that made life possible. he knew the ways to evade these dangers but if he yielded to carelessness for one moment or if he relaxed his caution for one instant he would be won 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 his tribe would have imagined. The day before he had crouched behind a shapeless mound of intertangled growths and watched a duel between two huge horned beetles. Their bodies were feet long. Their carapaces were waist-high to Burrell when they crawled.

Their mandibles, gaping laterly, clicked and clashed upon each other. other's impenetrable armor. Their legs crashed like so many symbols as they struck against each other. They fought over some particularly attractive bit of carrion. Burl had watched with wide eyes until a gaping hole appeared in the armor of the smaller one. It uttered a grating outcry, or seemed to. The noise was actually the tearing of its shell between the mandibles of the victor. The wounded creature struggled more and more feebly. When it ceased to offer battle, the conqueror placidly

began to dine before its prey had ceased to live, but this was the custom of creatures on this planet. Burrell watched, timorous but hopeful. When the meal was finished, he darted in quickly as the diner lumbered away. He was almost too late. Even then, an aunt, the forerunner of many, already inspected the fragments with excitedly vibrating antenna. Burl needed to move quickly, and he did.

Ants were stupid and short-sighted and sexed. Few of them were hunters. Save when offered battle, most of them were scavengers only. They hunted the scenes of nightmare for the dead and dying only, but fought viciously if their prey 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. It was merely the horn, the snout of the dead and eaten creature,

but it was loose and easily carried. He ran. Later he inspected his find with disappointment. There was little meat clinging to it. It was merely the horn of a minotaur beetle. shaped like the horn of a rhinoceros. Plucking out the shreds left by its murderer, he pricked his hand. Pettishly, he flung it aside. The time of darkness was near, so he crept to the hiding place of his tribe

to huddle with them 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 strange, feelings that came over him when he looked at one of the girls. She was younger than Burl, perhaps eighteen, and fleeter of foot. They talked together sometimes, and once or twice, Burl shared an especially succulent find-of-food-stuffs with her. He could share nothing with her now.

She stared at him in the deepening night when he crept to the Lebrinthian hiding place, the tribe now used in a mushroom forest. He can see. considered that she looked hungry and hoped that he would have food to share, and he was bitterly ashamed that he could offer nothing. He held himself a little apart from the rest, because of this shame. Since he, too, was hungry, it was some time before he slept. Then he dreamed. Next morning he found the horn where he had thrown it disgustedly the day before. It was sticking in the flabby trunk of a tolled stool. He pulled it out. In his dream he had used it. Presently, he tried to use it. Sometimes not often. The men of the tribe used the sawtooth edge

of a cricket leg, or the leg of a grasshopper, to sever tough portions of an edible mushroom. The horn had no cutting edge, but Burl had used it in his dream. He was not quite capable of distinguishing clearly between reality and dreams, so he tried to duplicate what happened in the dream. Remembering that it had stuck into the mushroom stalk, he thrust it, it stabbed. He remembered distinctly how the larger beetle had used its horn as a weapon. It had stabbed, too. He considered absorbidly. He could not imagine himself fighting one of the dangerous insects, of course. Men did not fight on the forgotten planet. They ran away, they hid,

but somehow Burl formed a fantastic picture of himself stabbing food with his horn as he had stabbed a mushroom. It was longer than his arm, and though naturally clumsy in his hand, it would have been a deadly weapon in the grip of a man prepared to do battle. Battle did not occur to Burrell,

but the idea of stabbing food with it was clear. There could be food that would not fight back. Presently, he had an inspiration. His face brightened. He began to make his way toward the tiny river that ran across the plain in which the tribe of humans lived by foraging in competition with the ant. Yellow-bellied noots, big enough to be lusted for, swam in its waters. The swimming larvae of a thousand and kinds of creatures, floated on the sluggish surface or crawled over the bottom. There were deadly things there, too. Giant crayfish snapped their claws at the unwary.

One of them could sever Burl's arm with ease. Mosquitoes sometimes hummed high above the river. Mosquitoes had a four-inch wing spread, now, though they were dying out for lack of plant juices on which the males of their species fed. but they were formidable. Burl had learned to crush them between fragments of fungus. He crept slowly through the forest of tolled stools. What should have been grass underfoot was brownish rust,

orange and red and purple molds clustered about the bases of the creamy mushroom trunks. Once Burl paused to run his weapon through a fleshy column and reassure himself that what he planned was possible. He made his way furtively through the bulbous growths. Once he heard clickings and froze to stillness, four or five ants, Minims only eight inches long, were returning by a habitual pathway to their city.

They moved sturdily along, heavily ladened over the route, marked by the scent of formic acid left by their fellow townsmen. Burrell waited until they had passed, then went on. He came to the bank of the river. It flowed slowly,

green scum covering a great deal of its surface in the backwaters, occasionally, broken by a slowly enlarging bubble, released from decomposing matter on the bottom. In the center of the stream, the current ran a little more swiftly, and the water itself seemed clear. Over it ran many water spiders.

They had not 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. Burrell surveyed the scene. His search was four parts for danger and only one 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.

Here he could not see whatever swam or crawled or wriggled under water. There he might. There was an outcropping rock forming a support for crawling stuff, which in turn supported shelf fungi, making wide steps almost down to the water's edge. Burl was making his way cautiously toward them when he saw one of the edible mushrooms, which formed so large a part of his diet. He paused to break off a flabby white piece large enough to feed him for many days.

It was the custom of his people when they found a store of food to hide with it and not venture out again to danger until it was all eaten. Burrell was tempted to do just that with his booty. He could give Sayah of this food and they would eat together. They might hide together

until it was all consumed. But there was a swirling in the water under the descending platforms of shelf fungi. A very remarkable sensation came to Burrell. He may have been the only man in many generations to be aware of the high ambition to stab something to eat. He may have been a throwback to ancestors

who had known bravery, which had no survival value here. But Burl had imagined carrying Sayah food, which he had stabbed with a spear of a minotar beetle. It was an extraordinary idea. It was new, too. Not too long ago when he was younger, Burrell would have thought of the tribe instead. He'd have thought of old John, bald-headed, and wheezing and timorous,

and how that patriarch would pat his arm exuberantly when handed food, or old Tama, wrinkled and quarreless, whose look of settled dissatisfaction would vanish at sight of a tidbit, of Dick and Tet, the tribe members next younger, who would squabble zestfully over the fragments allotted them. But now he imagined Sia, looking astonished and glad, when he grandly handed her more food than she could possibly eat. She would admire him enormously.

Of course he did not imagine himself fighting to get food for Saya. He meant only to stab something edible in the water. Things in the water did not fight things on land. Since he would not be in the water, he would not be in a fight. It was a completely delectable idea, which no man within memory had ever entertained before. If Burrell accomplished it, his tribe would admire him. Sia would admire him. Everybody, observing, that he had found a new source of food, would even envy him until he showed

them how to do it, too. Burl's fellow humans were preoccupied with the filling of their stomachs. The preservation of their lives came second. The perpetuation of the race came a bad third in their consideration. They were herded together in a leaderless group, coming to the same. hiding-place nightly, only that they might share the finds of the lucky, and gathered comfort from their numbers. They had no weapons, even Burl, did not consider his spear a weapon.

It was a tool for stabbing something to eat only. Yet he did not think of it in that way exactly. His tribe did not even consciously use tools. Sometimes they used stones to crack open the limbs of great insects they found, in completely devoured. They did not even carry rocks about with them for that purpose. Only Burrell had a vague idea of taking something to some place to do something with it. It was unprecedented. Burl was at least an avatar. He may have been a genius. But he was not a high-grade genius, certainly not yet. He reached the spot from which he could look down into the water. He looked

behind and all about listening, then lay down the stair into the shallow depths. Once, a huge crayfish, a good eight feet long, moved leisurely across his vision. Small fishes and even huge noots fled before it. After a long time, the normal course of underwater life resumed. The wriggling caddice flies in their quaintly ambitious houses reappeared. Little flux of sea. silver swam into view, a school of tiny fish. Then a larger fish appeared, moving slowly in the stream. Burl's eyes glistened, his mouth watered. He reached down with his long weapon. It barely broke through the still surface of the water below. Disappointment filled him, yet the nearness and apparent probability of success spurred him on. He examined the shelf fungi beneath him.

Rising, he moved to a point above them and tested one with its spear. It resisted. Burl felt about tentatively with his foot and dared to put his whole weight on the topmost. It held firmly. He clambered down upon the lower ones, then lay flat and peered over the edge. The large fish, fully as long as Burrell's arm swam slowly, to and fro beneath him. Burl had seen the former owner of this spear strived to thrust it into his adversary. The beetle had been killed by a more successful stab of a similar weapon. Burl had tried this upon told stools, practicing with it. When the silver fish drifted close by again, he thrust sharply downward.

The spear seemed to bend when it entered the water. It missed its mark by inches, much to Burl's astonishment. He tried again. Once more the spear seemed diverted by the water. He grew angry with the fish for eluding his efforts to kill it. This anger was as much the reaction of a throwback to a less fearful time as the idea of killing itself. But Burl scowled at the fish, repeated strokes left it untouched. It was unwary. It did not even swim away. Then it came the rest directly beneath his hand. He thrust directly downward with all his strength. This time the spear, entering vertically, did not appear to bend, but went straight down. Its point penetrated the scales

of the swimming fish, transfixing the creature completely. An uproar began with a fish wriggling desperately, as Burl tried to draw up to his perch. In his excitement, he did not notice a tiny ripple a little distance away. The monster crayfish, attracted by the disturbance,

was coming back. The unequal combat continued, Burl hung on desperately, to the end of his spear. Then there was a tremor in the shelf fungus on which he lay. It yielded, collapsed and fell

into the stream with a mighty splash. Burl went under, his eyes wide open, facing death. As he sank, he saw the gaping, horrible claws of the crustacean, huge enough to sever any of Burrell's limbs

with a single snap. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Only bubbles floated up to the surface. He beat the unresisting fluid in a frenzy of horror, with his hands and feet, as the colossal crayfish leisurely approached.

His arms struck a solid object. He clutched it convulsively. A second later, he had swung it between himself and the crustacean. He felt the shock as the claws closed upon the cork-like fungus. Then he felt himself drawn upward as the crayfish disgustedly released its hold and the shelf fungus floated slowly upward. Having given way beneath him, it had been pushed below when he fell, only to rise within his reach just when most needed. Burl's head popped above water, and he saw a large bit of the fungus floating nearby, even less securely anchored to the riverbank than the shelf 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 and very nearly overturned. He paid no heed. With desperate haste, he clawed and kicked until he could draw himself clear of the water. As he pulled himself up on the furry orange-brown surface, a sharp blow struck his foot.

The crayfish, disappointed at finding nothing tasty in the shelf fungus, had made a languid stroke at Burrell's side. foot, wriggling in the water. Failing to grasp the fleshy member, it went annoyedly away. Burl floated downstream, perched weaponless, and alone, upon a flimsy raft of degenerate fungus, floating slowly down a stagnant river in which death swam, between banks of sure peril, past long reaches above which death floated on golden wings. It was a long while before he recovered his self-possession. Then, and this was an action, individual in Burrell.

None of his tribesmen would have thought of it. He looked for his spear. It was floating in the water, still transfixing the fish whose capture had brought him to this present predicament. The silvery shape, so violent before, now floated belly up, all life gone. Burl's mouth watered as he gazed at the fish. He kept it in view constantly, while the unsteady crafts spun slowly downstream in the current.

Lying flat, he tried to reach out and grasp the end of the spear, when it circled toward him. The raft tilted, nearly capsizing. A little later he discovered that it sank more readily on one side than the other. This was due, of course, to the grass. great thickness of one side. The part next to the riverbank had been thicker and was, therefore, more buoyant. He lay with his head above that side of the raft. It did not sink into the water. Riggling, as far to the edge as he dared, he reached out and out. He waited impatiently for the slower rotation of his float to coincide with the faster motion of the speared fish. The spear end came

closer and closer. He reached out, and the raft dipped dangerously, but his fingers touched the spear end. He got a precarious hold, pulled it toward him. Seconds later, he was tearing strips of scaly flesh from the sides of the fish and cramming the greasy stuff into his mouth with vast enjoyment. He had lost the edible mushroom. It floated several yards away. He ate contentedly, nonetheless. He thought of the tribe-folk as he ate. This was more than he could finish 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 of food to him when he was younger. Dick and Tett being boys would clamorously demand of him where he had gotten it, how. He would give some the corixt. who had younger children, and she would give them most of the gift. And Sayah? Burl gloated especially over Sayah's certain reaction.

Then he realized that with every second he was being carried farther away from her. The nearer riverbank moved past him. He could tell by the motion of the vividly colored growths upon the shore. Overhead, the sun was merely a brighter patch in the haze-filled sky, and the pinkish light all about.

Burl looked for the familiar and did not find it, and dolefully knew that he was remote from Sayah and going farther all the time. There were a multitude of flying objects to be seen in the miasmatic air. In the daytime,

a thin mist always hung above the lowlands. Burl had never seen any object as much as three miles distant. The air was never clear enough to permit it, but there was much to be seen, even, within the limiting mist. Now and then a cricket or a grasshopper made its bullet-like flight from one spot to another. Huge butterflies fluttered gaily above the silent, loathsome ground.

Bees lumbered anxiously about, seeking the cross-shaped flowers of the giant cabbages, which grew so rarely. Occasionally, a slender-wasted, yellow-bellied wasp flashed swiftly by. But Burl did not heed any of them, sitting dismally upon his fungus raft, floating in midstream,

an incongruous figure of pink skin and luridly tinted lioncloth, with a greasy dead fish beside him, he was filled with a panicky anguish because the river carried him away from the wood, one girl of his tiny tribe whose glances roused a commotion in his breast. The day wore on, once he saw a band of large Amazon ants moving briskly over a carpet of blue-green mold to raid the city of a species of black ants.

The eggs they would carry away from the city would hatch, and the small black creatures would become the slaves of the brigands who had stolen them. Later, strangely shaped, swollen branches drifted slowly into view. They were outlined sharply against the streaming mist behind them. He knew what they were, a hard-rinded fungus growing upon itself in peculiar mockery of the trees which Burl had never seen, because no trees could survive 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 greater part remained still uneaten. The spear was beside him. Although it had brought him trouble, he still associated it with the food it had secured, rather than the difficulty in which it had led him.

When he had eaten his fill, he picked it up to 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 as he stripped a sinew from his loincloth to hang the fish around his neck. This would leave his arms free. Then he sat cross-legged, fumbling with a spear, as he watched the shore. go past. End of Chapter 1.

Chapter 2 of the Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. A man escapes. It was near to sunset. Burrell had never seen the sun, so it did not occur to him to think of a 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 vapor, which it 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, sky. Scattered blotches of darkness began to spot that reddening sky as it grew darker in tone, going down toward the impossible redness, which is indistinguishable from black. It was slowly achieving that redness. Today, Burrell 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 tolled stools 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 cadis 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 multifaceted eyes held an expression of stupid preoccupation. The crimson radiance grew dim and the color overhead faded toward blood. 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 antenna before taking to the air.

The strong-limbed crickets set up their thunderous noise, grown gravely base, 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 willow the wisps, but on this planet, mankind had no name for them at all. The 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. Foxfire 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 and on every side the swarming feverish life of the insect world went on ceaselessly while burrell rocked back and forth upon his unstable wrath wanting to weep because he was being carried farther away from seya 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 burrow was accustomed to such tumult but he was not accustomed to such despair as he felt at being lost from sayah 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 surrounding 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 burrell'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 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 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 fungoyed world had undergone but burle 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 burrell he fell to ee

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, Burle's heart was small within him. He was far from his tribe in Sayah. By the measure of by the measurements of his remotest ancestors no more than forty miles separated them but burl did not think in such terms he 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 burle was a creature to whom reflection was normally of no especial value and therefore not practised 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 seya therefore he should have wept but he could not gloat because he was away from seya 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 the 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 sya 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 john his bald head naked as a mushroom itself stuffing his belly with a food which was so plentiful here he imagined cori feeding her children thomas complaints stilled by mouthfuls of food tett and dick stuffed into replet throwing scraps of foodstuff at each other he pictured the tribe zestfully feasting and sya 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 Sia 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 away 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 chute 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 its flight, and plunged upon the luckless banquiter. There was a struggle, but it was brief. The grasshopper strained terribly in the grip of the wasps' six barbed legs. The wasps, flexible abdomen,

curved delicately. Its sting entered the jointed armor of its prey just beneath the head. It 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 reined 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 burle went on the ground grew rougher progress became painful he clambered arduously up steep slopes all forty or fifty feet high and made his way cautiously down to the farther sides once he climbed through a tangled mass of mushroom 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 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 burrow was strutting but now there was a quarter-mile of space between him and the water and there was something else in mid-air the cliff-side was thickly coated with fungi and the

the cliffside was thickly coated with fungi in a riotous confusion of white and yellow and orange and green from a point half-way 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 the perfect logarithmic spiral somewhere among the fungi of the cliff-side the huge spider who had built his web awaited the entrapment of prey when some unfortunate creature struggled frenzied into its snare it would emerge until then it waited in emotionless implacable patience utterly certain of victims utterly merciless to them burl strutted on the edge of the cliff a rather foolish pink-skin creature with an oily fish slung about his neck and the draggled fragment of moth swing 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 become 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 sayah and bring her to this land where food grew in abundance sixty paces away from burrow 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 the 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 two 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 malignance of incredible ferocity it was the brown hunting spider the american tarantula enlarged here upon this 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 burle 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 burle 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 trap-door 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 mandible 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 and 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 sphere the spider writhed horribly, still striving to reach the paralyticly 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 closed.

clutching the spear, incapable of letting go. Even while falling, the writhing thing, still struggled maniacically to reach him. Down through the 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. Burrow couldn't think. He only struggled insanely in the gummy coils of the web, but the snare cords were spiral threads, enormously elastic,

exuding in possibly sticky stuff like bird line, 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 breasts 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 and 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 him 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 a descending shroud. He strove to thrust it away futilely.

Within a few 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 showers ceased. The web spider had decided they were helpless. Then Burl felt the cables of the web at give slightly as the spider approached to sting and sucked 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 shudderingly upon the horny shaft burrow waited for the poison fangs to be thrust into him he knew the process he had seen the leisurely fashion in which the webbed spider delicately stung its victims 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 a 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 tarantulas horribly writhing legs touched him again. With a strength-borne of utter panic, he hauled himself away and the opening enlarged. Another lunge, and Burles' 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 and partially. But the lower part of his body

was held firm by the viscous, gumbiness of the webbed spider's cord. It was vastly more adhesive than any bird lime ever made by a man. 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. Burrow 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 over them in the process. He felt the web tremble again. To the spider, Burrell's movements meant that its poison had not taken full effect.

Another sting seemed to be necessary. This time it would not insert its stature. 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 spinner at became active. A leg gathered it up.

The sticky stuff about Burrell'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 the 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 omitted to summon other ants from its city to help it in difficulty or good fortune. Harsh clicking 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 the shreds as a pack of infuriated fox terriers might do on earth. Burl fled, without further delay, nearly colliding with the same.

one of the web's anchor cables. Then he heard the shrill cry 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 Burrell 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 gloomy stuff from the web still stuck to his soles picking up small objects as he went along old ant-nawed 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 epic making as anything else he had done his brain had become uncommonly stimulated in the past twenty-four 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 to escape from another even more terrifying one just now in between it had led to the devising of a purpose the bringing of sya 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 the grease's body with a 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 epic 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 partially coated with a half-liquid gum they even tended to cling to his fingers except where the oil was thick burle'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 burles 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 important 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. Burrell 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 use their minds.

The great majority of people depended on machines, not only for computations, but decisions as well. well. Any decision not made by machines, most men left to their leaders. But Burl's tribe folk 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. Burrell was thinking out his actions. There would be consequences. He faced up stream 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 hurled from one place to another

like a projectile, its transparent wings beating frantically. Now and then a wassa. A wasse, 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 eminent 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 very 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's 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 passed 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 little hillocks curiously as he entered the plain they were strange and the burl most strange things met danger in any event he had two conscious purposes now he wanted garments and weapons above the plain a wasp hovered dangling a heavy object beneath its black belly across which ran a single red band it was a gigantic descendant of the hairy sand wasp differing only in size from its far away remote ancestors on earth it was taken a paralyzed gray caterpillar to its burrow burrow watched it drop down with the speed and sureness of an arrow pull aside a heavy flat stone and descend into the burrow with its caterpillar prey momentarily laid aside it vanished underground into a vertical shaft dug down forty feet or more it evidently inspected the refuge reappearing it vanished into the hole again dragging the gray worm after it

burle marching over the broad plain spotted with some eruptive disease did not know what passed below but he did observe the wasp emerge again to scratch dirt and stones previously excavated laboriously back into the shaft until it was full the wasp had paralyzed a caterpillar taken it into the ready prepared burrow laid an egg upon it and sealed up the entrance in time the egg would hatch into a grub barely the size of burrow's forefinger and the grub deep underground would feed upon the living but helpless caterpillar until it waxed large and fat then it would weave itself a cocoon and sleep a long sleep only to wake as a wasp and dig its way out to the open air reaching the farther side of the plain burle found himself threading the aisles of fungus forests 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 puff-ball, burles' 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 first fungoid soil. They clambered over every imminence. They descended into every depression. Their antenna 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 burrow. The better part of discretion would be avoidance, but numbering in thousands and millions, they were something which could not be avoided. They advanced steadily and rapidly, the course of shrill, stradulations,

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 blanked the rank vegetables. Tiny voracious jaws tore at the flaccid masses of greasy flesh. The caterpillar 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 and daylight with dazzled, blinded eyes, but nothing could withstand the reliance. endless 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 earthweeds 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 the 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 end of chapter two chapter three of the forgotten planet by murray leinster this librivox recording is in the public domain the purple hills the army ants flowed over the ground like a surging monstrous, inky tide. Their vanguard reached the river and recoiled. Burrell was perhaps five miles away when they changed their course. The change was made without confusion, the leaders somehow communicating the altered line of March to those behind them.

Back on Earth, scientists had gravely debated the question of how ants conveyed ideas to each other. Honeybees, it was said, performed. formed elaborate ritual dances to exchange information. Ants, it had been observed, had something less eccentric. A single ant, finding a bit of booty too big for it to manage alone, would return to its city to secure the help of others. From that fact, men had deduced that a language of gestures, made with crossed antenna, must exist.

Burl had no theories. He merely knew facts, but he did not. know that ants could and did pass information to one another. Now, however, he moved cautiously along toward the sleeping place of his tribe, in complete ignorance of the black blanket of living creatures spreading over the ground behind him. A million tragedies marked the progress of this insect army. There was a tiny colony of mining bees, their habits unchanged, despite their greater size here on the forgotten planet. A single mother, four feet long, had dug a huge gallery with some ten off-shooting cells,

in which she had laid her eggs and fed her grubs with hard-gathered pollen. The grubs had waxed fat and large, become bees and laid eggs in their turn, within the same gallery their mother had dug out for them. Ten bulky insects now forged busily to feed their grubs, within the ancestral home while the founder of the colony had grown draggled and wingless with the passing of time unable to bring in food herself the old bee became the guardian of the hive she closed the opening with her head making a living barrier within the entrance she withdrew only to grant admission or exit to the duly authorized members her daughters The ancient concierge of the underground dwelling was at her post when the wave of army ants swept over. Tiny, evil-smelling feet trampled upon her, and she emerged to fight with mandible and sting for the sanctity of her brood.

Within moments she was a shaggy mass of biting ants. They rent and tore at her chitinous armor, but she fought on madly, sounding a buzzing alarm, to the colonists yet within. They came out, fighting as they came, ten huge bees, each four to five feet long, and fighting with legs and jaws, with wings and mandible, and with all the ferocity of so many tigers.

But the small ants covered them, snapping at their multiple eyes, biting at the tender joints in their armor, and sometimes releasing the larger prey to leap upon an injured comrade, wounded by the monsters they battled together. Such a fight, however, could have but one end. Struggle as the bees might, they were powerless against their unnumbered assailants. They were being devoured, even as they fought.

And before the last of the ten was down, the underground gallery had been gutted, both of the stored food, brought by the adult defenders, and the last morsels, of what had been young grubs too unformed to do more than twitch helplessly inoffensively as they were torn to shreds when the army ants went on there was merely an empty tunnel and a few fragments of tough armor unappetizing even to the ants burl heard them as he meditatively inspected the scene of a tragedy of not long before the rent and scraped fragments of a great beetle's shiny casing lay upon the ground a greater beetle had come upon the first and slain him burl regarded the remains of the meal three or four minims little ants barely six inches long foraged industriously among the bits the new ants city was being formed, and the queen lay hidden half a mile away. These were the first hatchlings. They would feed their younger kindred until they grew large enough to take over the great work of the Ant City. Burl ignored the minims. He searched for a weapon of some sort. Behind him,

the clicking, high-pitched roar of the horde of army ants increased in volume. He turned away disgustedly. The best thing he could find in the way of a weapon was a fiercely toothed hind leg. When he picked it up, an angry wine rose from the ground. One of the menoms had been struggling to detach a morsel of flesh from the leg joint. Burl had snatched the tidbit from him. The little creature was surely no more than a half a foot long, but it advanced angrily upon Burl, shrilling a challenge. He struck with the beetle's leg and crushed the ant. Two of the other minims appeared, attracted by the noise the first had made.

They discovered the crushed body of their fellow, unceremoniously dismembered it, and bore it away in triumph. Burrell went on, swinging the tooth limb in his hand. The sound behind him became a distant whispering, high-pitched, and growing steadily nearer. The army ants swept into a mushroom forest, and the yellow umbrella-like growths soon swarmed with the black creatures. A great blue bottle fly, shining with a metallic luster, stood beneath a mushroom on the ground. The mushroom was infected with maggots, which exuded the solvent pepsum, that liquefied the firm white meat.

They swam ecstatically in the liquid gruel, some of which dripped. and dripped to the ground. The blue bottle was sipping the dark-colored liquid through its long proboscis, quivering with delight, as it fed on the noisomeness. Burl drew nearer and struck. The fly collapsed in a quivering heap. Burl stood over it for an instant and pondered. The army ants were nearer now. They swarmed down into a tiny valley, rushing into, and threw a little brook over which Burl had leaped. Since ants can remain underwater for a long time without drowning, the small stream was not even dangerous.

Its current did sweep some of them away. The great many of them, however, clung together until they choked its flow by the mass of their bodies, the main force marching across the bridge they constituted. The ants reached the place about a quarter of a mile to the left of Burlain. girl's line of march, perhaps a mile from the spot where he stood over the dead blue bottle. There was an expanse of some acres in which the giant rank cabbages had so far succeeded in their competition with a world of fungi. The pale cross-shaped flowers of the cabbages formed food for many bees. The leaves fed numberless grubs and worms. Under the fallen away

dead foliage, single leaves were twenty feet across at their largest. Crickets hid and fed. The army ants flowed into this space, devouring every living thing it encountered. A terrible den arose. The crickets hurtled away in erratic leapings. They shot aimlessly in any direction. More than half of them landed blindly in the carpeting of clicking black bodies, which were the ants from whose vanguard they had fled. Their blind flight had no effect, save to give different individuals the opportunity to seize them as they fell and instantly began to devour them. As they were torn to fragments, horrible screamings reached Burrell's ears. A single such cry of agony would not have attracted Burl's attention. He lived in a whirl of nightmare horror,

But a chorus of creatures, in torment, made him look up. This was no minor horror. Something wholesale was in progress. He jerked his head about to see what it was. A wild stretch of sticky yellow fungus was interspersed here and there with a squat tolled stool, or a splash of vivid color, where one of the many rusts had found a foothold. To the left, a group of branched fungoy. clustered in silent mockery of a true forest.

Burl saw the faded green of the cabbages. With the sun never shining on the huge leaves, save through the cloud bank overhead, the cabbages were not vivid. They were even some moldy yeasts of brighter green and slime much more luridly tinted. Even so, the cabbages were the largest form of true vegetation. Burl had ever seen.

The nodding white cruciform flowers stood out plainly against the yellowish-pallied green of the leaves. But as Burl gazed at them, the green slowly became black. Three great grubs in lazy contentment were eating ceaselessly of the cabbages on which they rested.

Suddenly, first one and then another began the jerk spasmodically. Burl saw that, that around each of them a rim of black had formed. Then black motes milled all over them. The grubs became black, covered with biting, devouring ants. The cabbages became black. The frenzied contortions of the grubs told of the agonies they underwent

as they were literally devoured alive. And then Burrell saw a black wave appear at the nearer edge of the stretch of yellow fungus. The glistening, living flood flowed forward over the ground with a roar of clickings and a persistent overtone of shrill stridulations. Burl's scalp crawled. He knew what this meant, and he did not pause to think. With a gasp of pure panic, he turned and fled, all intellectual preoccupations forgotten. The black tide came on after him.

he flung away the edible mushroom he had carried under his arm somehow though he clung to the sharp-tooth club as he darted between tangled masses of fungus ignoring now the dangers that ordinarily called for vast caution huge flies appeared they buzzed about him loudly once he was struck on the shoulder by one of them at least as large as his hand and his skin torn by its skin torn by its swiftly vibrating wings. He brushed it away and sped on, but the oil, with which he was partly covered, had turned rancid down, and the fetid odor attracted them. There were a half a dozen,

than a dozen creatures, the size of pheasants, droning and booming, as they kept pace with his wild flight. A weight pressed onto his head, it doubled. Two of the disgusting creatures had settled upon,

on his oily hair to sip the stuff through their hairy feeding tubes. Burl shook them off with his hand and raced madly on, his ears attuned to the sounds of the ants behind him. That clicking roar continued, but in Burl's ears it was almost drowned out by the noise made by the halo of flies accompanying him. Their buzzing had deepened in pitch, with the increase in size of all their race. It was now the note close to the deepest base tone of an organ, yet flies, though greatly enlarged on the forgotten planet, had not become magnified as much as some of the other creatures.

There were no great heaps of putrid matter for them to lay their eggs in. The ants were busy scavengers, carting away the debris of tragedies in the insubree of tragedies in the insect world, long before it could acquire the gamey flavor, beloved of fly maggots. Only in isolated spots were the flies really numerous. In such places, they clustered in clouds. Such a cloud began the form above burrow as he fled. It seemed as though a miniature whirlwind kept pace with him, a whirlwind composed of furry, revolting bodies and multifaceted eyes. fleeing. Burl had to swing his club before him to clear the way.

Almost every stroke was interrupted by an impact against some thinly armored body, which collapsed with a spurting of reddish liquid. Then an anguish as of a red-hot iron struck upon Burl's back. One of the stinging flies had thrust its sharp tip proboscis into his flesh to suck the blood. Burl uttered a cry and ran, full tilt, into the stalk of a blackened, draggled toadstool. There was a curious crackling as of wet punk. The toadstool collapsed upon itself with a strange, splashing sound.

A great many creatures had laid their eggs in it, until now it was a seething mass of corruption and ill-smelling liquid. When the toad-stool crashed to the ground, it crumbled into a dozen pieces, spattering the earth for yards all about, with stinking stuff in which tiny headless maggots writhed convulsively. The deep-tone buzzing of the flies took on a note of solemn satisfaction. They settled down upon this feast. Burl staggered to his feet and darted off again.

Now he was nothing but a minor attraction to the flies. only three or four bothering to come after him. The others settled by the edges of the splashing fluid, quickly absorbed in an ecstasy of feasting. The few still hovering about his head, Burl killed, but he did not have to smash them all. The remaining few descended to feast on their fallen comrades, twitching feebly at his feet.

He ran on and passed beneath the widespread leaves of an isolated giant cabbage. The great grasshopper crouched on the ground, its tremendous radially opening jaw, crunching the rank vegetation. Half a dozen great worms ate steadily of the leaves that supported them. One had swung itself beneath an overhanging leaf,

which would have thatched houses for men, and was placidly anchoring itself for the spinning of a cocoon in which to sleep the sleep of metamorphosis. A mile away, the great black tide of army ants advanced relentlessly. The great cabbage, the huge grasshopper, and all the stupid caterpillars on the leaves would presently be covered with small black demons.

The cocoon would never be spun. The caterpillars would be torn into thousands of furry, fragments, and devoured. The grasshopper would strike out with his terrific, unguided strength, crushing its assailants with blows of its great hind legs and powerful jaws. But it would die,

making terrible sounds of torment, as the ants consumed it piecemeal. The sound of the ants' advance overwhelmed all other noises now. Burl ran madly, his breath coming, in great gasps. His eyes wide with panic. Alone of the world about him, he knew the danger that followed him. The insects he passed went about their business with that terrifying,

abstracted efficiency found only in the insect world. Burl's heart pounded madly from his running. The breath whistled in his nostrils, and behind him the flood of army ants kept pace. They came upon the feasting flies. Some took to the air and escaped. Others were too absorbed in their delicious meal. The twitching maggots, stranded by the scattering of their soupy broth, were torn to shreds and eaten. The flies who were seized vanished into tiny maws,

and the serried ranks of ants moved on. Burl could hear nothing else now, but the clicking of their limbs and the stridulating challenges and cross-challenges they uttered. Now and then another sound pierced the noises made by the ants themselves, a cricket perhaps seized and dying, uttering deep-base cries of agony. Before the hoard there was a busy world which teemed with life. Butterflies floated overhead on lazy wings.

Grubs waxed fat and huge. Crickets feasted. Great spider sat quietly in their lairs, waiting with implacable patience for prey to fall into the trap doors and snares. Great beetles lumbered through the mushroom forests, seeking food and making love in monstrous, tragic fashion. Behind the wide front of the army ants was chaos,

emptiness, desolation. All life, save that of the army ants was exterminated, though some bewildered flying creatures still fluttered helplessly over the silent landscape. Yet even behind the army ants, little bands of stragglers from the horde marched busily here and there,

seeking some trace of life that had been overlooked by the main body. Burl put forth his last ounce of strength, his limbs trembled, his breathing was agony, Sweat stood out upon his forehead. He ran for his life with the desperation of one who knows that death is at his heels.

He ran, as if his continued existence among the million tragedies of the single day or the purpose for which the universe had been created. There was redness in the west, and in the cloud bank overhead. To the east, gray sky became a deeper gray, much deeper. It was not yet time for the creatures of the day to seek their hiding places, nor for the night insects to come forth. But in many secret spots there were vague and sleepy stirrings.

Heatless of the approaching darkness, Burles sped over an open space a hundred yards across. A thicket of beautifully golden mushrooms barred his way. Danger lay there. He dodged aside and saw in the grass. and saw in the gray dusk a glistening sheet of white, barely a yard above the ground. It was the web of the morning spider, which on earth was noted only in hedges, and such places where the dew of earliest dawn exposed it as a patternless plate of diamond dust. There were anchor cables, of course, but no geometry.

Tidy housewives, also on earth, used to mop it, out of corners as a filmy fabric of irritating gossamer. On the forgotten planet, it was a net with strength and bird-lime qualities that increased day by day as its spinner moved restlessly over the surface, always trailing sticky cord behind itself. Burl had no choice but to avoid it, even though he lost ground to the ant-horde roaring behind him. and night was definitely on the way. It was inconceivable that a human should travel in the lowlands after dark.

It literally could not be done over the normal nightmare to rain. Burrow had not only to escape the army ants, but find a hiding place quickly if he was to see tomorrow's light. But he could not think so far ahead, just now. He blundered through a screen of puffballs that shot, dusty powder toward the sky. The head, a range of strangely colored hills, came into view.

Purple, green, black, and gold, melting into each other, and branching off, inextricably mingled. They rose to a height of perhaps sixty or seventy feet. A curious, grayish haze had gathered above them. It seemed to be a layer of thin vapor,

not like Mr. Fogg, clinging to certain parts of the hills, rising slowly to coil and gather into an indefinitely thicker mass above the ridges. The hills themselves were not geological features, but masses of fungus that had grown and cannibalized, piling upon themselves to the thickness of carboniferous vegetation. Over the face of the hills grew every imaginable variety of yeast, and mold and rust they grew within and upon themselves forming freakish conglomerations that piled up into a range of hills stretching across the lunatic landscape for miles burrow blundered up the nearest slope sometimes the surface was a hard rind that held him up sometimes his feet sank perhaps inches perhaps to mid-leg he scrambled frantically panting gasping staggering from the exhaustion of moving across the fungus quicksand he made his way to the top of the first hill plunged down into a little valley on the farther side and up another slope

he left a clear trail behind him of disturbed and scurrying creatures that had inevitably found a home in the mass of living stuff small sinuous centipedes scuttled here and there roused by his passage at the bottom of his footprints rived fat white worms beetles popped into view and vanished again A half mile across the range, and Burl could go no farther. He stumbled and fell and lay there, gasping hoarsely. Overhead, the gray sky had become a deep red, which was rapidly melting into that redness, too deep to be seen except as black. But there was still some light from the west.

Burl sobbed for breath in a little hollow. His sharp-toothed club still clasped in his hand. something huge with wings like sails, soared in silhouette against the sunset. Burl lay motionless, breathing in great gasps, his limbs refusing to lift him. The sound of the army ants continued. At last, above the crest of the last hillock he had surmounted,

two tiny glistening antenna appeared. Then the small, deadly shape of an army ant, the forerunner of its horde. It moved deliberately forward, waving its antenna ceaselessly. It made its way toward burl, tiny, clickings, coming from its limbs. A little wisp of vapor swirled toward the ant.

It was the vapor that had gathered over the whole range of hills as a thin, low cloud. It enveloped the ant, which seemed to be thrown into a strange convulsion, throwing itself about, legs moving aimlessly. If it had been an animal instead of an insect,

it would have choked and gasped. But ants breathed through air holes in their abdomens. It writhed helplessly on the spongy stuff across which it had been moving. Burl was conscious of a strange sensation. His body felt remarkably warm. It felt hot. It was an unparalleled sensation

because Burrell had no experience of fire or the heat of the sun. The only warmth he had ever known was when huddled together with his tribesmen in some hiding place to avoid the damp chill of the night. Then the heat of their breath and flesh helped to combat discomfort. But this was a fiercer heat. It was intolerable. Burl moved his body with a tremendous effort,

and for a moment the fungus soil was cool beneath him. Then the sensation of hotness began again and increased until Burrell's skin was reddened and inflamed. The tenuous vapor, too, seemed to swirl his way. It made his lungs smart and his eyes water. He still breathed in painful gasps, but even that short period of rest had done him some good. But it was the heat that heat that,

drove him to his feet again. He crawled painfully to the crest of the next hill. He looked back. This was the highest hill he had come upon, and he could see most of the purple range in the deep, deep dusk. Now he was more than halfway through the hills. He had barely a quarter a mile to go northward. But east and west, the range of purple hills was a ceaseless, undulating mass of lifts and hollows, of ridges and spurs of all imaginable colorings. At the tips of most of them were wisps of curling gray. From his position he could see a long stretch of the hills, not hidden by the surrounding darkness. Back along the way he had come, the army ants now swept up into the range of hills.

Scouts and advanced guard parties scurried here in the, there. They stopped to devour the creatures inhabiting the surface layers, but the main body moved on inexorably. The hills, though, were alive, not upheavals of the ground, but festering heaps of insanely growing fungus, hallowed out in many places by tunnels, hiding places, and lurking places. These the ants invaded. They swept on, devouring everything. burle leaned heavily upon his club and watched dully he could run no more the army ants were spreading everywhere they would reach him soon far to the right the vapor thickened a thin column of smoke arose in the dim half-light burl did not know smoke of course he could not conceivably guess that deep down in the interior of the insanely growing hills pressure had killed and oxidation had carbonized the once-living material.

By oxidation, the temperature down below had been raised. In the damp darkness of the bowels of the hills, spontaneous combustion had begun. The great mounds of tender-like mushroom had begun to burn very slowly, quite unseen. There had been no flames, because the hill's surface remained intact, and there was no air to feed the burning.

But when the army ants dug ferociously for fugitive small things, air was admitted to the tunnels, abandoned because of heat. Then slow combustion speeded up. Smouldering's became flames, sparks became coals. A dozen columns of fume-laden smoke rose into the heavens and gathered into a dense pall above the range of purple hills. And Burrell, apathetically, watched the seared ranks of army ants march on, toward the widening furnaces that awaited them. They had recoiled from the river instinctively, but their ancestors had never known fire.

In the Amazon basin on Earth, there had never been forest fires. On the forgotten planet, there had never been fires at all, unless the first forgotten colonists tried to make them. In any case, the army ants had no instinctive terror of flame. They marched into the blazing openings that appeared in the hills. They snapped with her mandibles at the leaping flames, and sprang the grapple with the burning coals. The blazing areas widened as the purple surface was consumed.

Burl watched without comprehension, even without thankfulness. he stood breathing more and more easily until the glow from the approaching flames reddened his skin and the acrid smoke made tears flow from his eyes then he retreated slowly leaning on his club and often looking back night had fallen but yet it was light to the army ants they marched on shrilling their defiance they poured devotedly and ferociously into the inferno of flame at last there were only small groups of stragglers from the great ant army scurrying here and there over the ground their comrades had stripped of all life the bodies of the main army made a vast mal-oadour burning in the furnace of the hills there had been pain in that burning agony such as no one would willing dwell upon but it came of the insane courage of the ants attacking the burning stuff with their horny jaws rolling over and over with flaming lumps of charcoal clutched in their mandibles burl heard them shrilling their war-cry even as they died Blinded, and Tanna singed off, legs shriveling, they yet went forward to attack their impossible enemy. Burl made his way slowly over the hills.

Twice he saw small bodies of the vanished army. They had passed between the widening furnaces and furiously devoured all that moved as they forged ahead. Once Burl was spied and a shrill cry sounded. He moved on, and only a single ant rushed after him. Earl brought down his club, and a writhing body remained to be eaten by its comrades when they came upon it. And now the last faint traces of light had vanished in the west. There was no real brightness anywhere,

except the flames of the burning hills. The slow, slow nightly rain that dripped down all through the dark hours began. It made a pattering noise upon the unburnt part of the hills. Burl found firm ground beneath his feet. He listened keenly for sounds of danger. Something rustled heavily in a thicket of tolled stools, a hundred feet away. There were sounds of preening,

and a feet delicately placed here and there upon the ground. Then a great body took to the air with a throbbing beat of mighty wings. A fierce down-current of air smote, Burl, and he looked upward in time to glimpse the outline of a huge moth passing overhead. He turned to watch the line of his flight and saw the fierce glow filling all the horizon.

The hills burned brighter as the flames widened. He crouched beneath the toad stool and waited for the dawn. The slow dripping rain kept on, falling with irregular drum-like beats upon the tough top of the toadstool. He did not sleep. He was not properly hidden, and there was always danger in the dark. But this was not the darkness Burl was used to. The great fires grew and spread in the masses of ready carbonized mushroom. The glare on the horizon grew brighter through the hour.

It also came nearer. Burl shivered a little as he watched. He had never even dreamed of fire before, and even the overhanging clouds were lighted by these flames. Over a stretch at least a dozen miles in length, and from half a mile to three miles across, the seething furnaces and columns of flame-lit smoke sent illumination over the world. It was like the glow that lights of a city can throw upon the sky, and like the flitting of aircraft above a city was the assembly of fascinated creatures of the night. Great moths and flying beetles, gigantic gnats and midges, grown huge upon this planet,

fluttered and danced above the flames. As the fire came nearer, Burl could see them, colossal, delicately formed creatures. sweeping above the white-hot expanse. There were moths with riotously colored wings of thirty-foot spread, beating the air with mighty strokes, their huge eyes glowing like garnets, as they stared intoxicatedly at the incandescence below them. Burrell saw a great peacock moth

soaring above the hills with wings all of forty feet across. they fluttered like sails of unbelievable magnificence and this was when all the separate flames had united to form a single sheet of white-hot burning stuff spread across the land for miles feathery antenna of the finest lace spread out before the head of the peacock moth its body was the softest velvet a ring of snow-white fur marked where its head began the glare from below smote the maroon of its body with a strange effect for one instant it was outlined clearly its eyes shone more red than any ruby's fire The great delicate wings were poised in flight. Burl caught the flash of flame upon the two great iridescent spots on the wings, shining purple and bright red all the glory of calcedony and of crystal praise was reflected in the glare of burning fungi. And then Burl saw it plunge downward, straight into the thickest and fiercest of the leaping flames.

it flung itself into the furnace as a willing drunken victim of their beauty flying beetles flew clumsily above the pyre also their horny wing cases stiffly outstretched in the light from below they shone like burnished metal their clumsy bodies with spurred and fierce-toothed limbs darted through the flameless smoke like so many grotesque meteors Burl saw strange collisions and still stranger meetings. Male and female flying creatures circled and spun in the glare, dancing their dance of love and death. They mounted higher than Burl could see, drunk with the ecstasy of living, and then descended to plunge headlong into the roaring flames below. From every side the creatures came, moths, of brightest yellow,

with furry bodies palpitant with life flew madly to destruction other moths of the deepest black with gruesome symbols on their wings swiftly came to dance above the glow like motes in sunlight and burl crouched beneath a toadstool watching while the perpetual slow raindrops fell and fell and a continuous hissing noise came from where the rain-splashed amid the flames End of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 of the Forgotten Planet by Murray Leicester. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. The killer of monsters. The night wore on, while the creatures above the firelight danced and died, their numbers ever reinforced by fresh arrivals.

Burl sat tensely still, his eyes watching everything, while his mind groped for an explanation of what he saw. At last, the sky grew dimly gray, then brighter, and after a long time it was day. The flames of the burning hill seemed to dim and die as all the world became bright. After a long while, Burl crawled from his hiding place and stood erect.

Not more than two hundred paces from where he stood, a straight wall of smoke rose from the still smouldering fungus range. Burle could see the smoke rising for miles on either hand. He turned to continue on his way and saw the remains of one of the tragedies of the night. A great moth had flown into the flames, been horribly scorched and floundered out again. Had it been able to fly, it would have returned to its devouring deity,

but now it lay upon the ground, its antenna hopelessly seared. One beautiful wing was nothing but gaping holes. The eyes had been dimmed by flame. The exquisitely tapering limbs lay broken and crushed by the violence of landing. The creature was helpless on the ground, only the stumps of its antenna, moving restlessly, and the abdomen pulsating slowly, as it drew. drew pain-racked breaths. Burl drew near.

He raised his club. When he moved on, there was a velvet cloak cast over his shoulders, gleaming with all the colors of the rainbow. A gorgeous mass of soft blue moth fur was about his middle,

and he had bound upon his forehead two yard-long fragments of the moths, magnificent antennae. He strode on slowly, clad as no man had been clad in all the ages before him. After a while, another victim of the Holocaust, similarly blundered, out to die,

yielded him a spear that was longer and sharper and much more deadly than his first. So he took up his journey to Sayah, looking like a prince of End upon a bridal journey, though surely no mere prince ever wore such raiment. For many miles, Burrell threaded his way through an extensive forest of thin-stock-told stools. They towered high over his head, colorful, parasitic molds and rusts all about their bases. Twice he came upon open glades were bubbling pools of green slime festered in corruption.

Once he hit himself as a monster, scarabias beetle, lumbered by three yards away, way, clanking like some mighty machine. Burl saw the heavy armor and inward curving jaws of the monster. He almost envied him his weapons. The time was not yet come, though, when Burl, in his kind, would hunt such giants for the juicy flesh within its armored limbs. Burl was still a savage, still ignorant, and still essentially timid.

His only significant advance had been. been, that where at first he had fled without reasoning, now he paused to see if he need flee. He was a strange sight, moving through the shadowed lanes of the forest in his cloak of velvet. The fierce toothed leg of a fighting beetle rested in a strip of sinew about his waist, ready for use. His new spear was taller than himself. He looked like a conqueror, but he was still a fearful and feeble creature, no match for the monstrous creatures about him. He was weak, and in that lay his greatest hope, because if he were strong, he would not need to think. Hundreds of thousands of years before his ancestors had been forced to develop brains as a penalty

for the lack of claws or fangs. Burrell was sunk as low as any of them, but he had the combat more horrifying enemies, more inexorable dangers, and many times more crafty antagonists. His ancestors had invented knives and spears and flying missiles, but the creatures about Burl had weapons a thousand times more deadly than the ones that had defended the first humans. The fact, however, simply put a premium on the one faculty. Burl had which the insect world had not. In mid-morning he heard a discordant, deep-based bellow, coming from a spot not twenty yards from where he moved. He hid in panic, waiting for an instant, listening.

The bellow came again, but this time, with a quarrelless note. Burl heard a crashing and plunging, as of some creature caught in a snare. A mushroom tumbled with a sponge-like sound, and the thud was followed. by a tremendous commotion. Something was fighting desperately against something else. Burl did not know what creatures were in combat. He waited, and the noise died gradually away. Presently his breath came more slowly, and his courage returned.

He stole from his hiding place and would have made away, but new curiosity held him back. Instead of creeping from the scene, he moved cautiously forward. toward the source of the noise. Peering between two cream-colored stalks, he saw a wide, funnel-shaped snare of silk spread out before him, some twenty yards across and as many deep. The individual threads could be plainly seen,

but in the mass it seemed the fabric of sheerest, finest texture. Held up by tall mushrooms, it was anchored to the ground below and drew away to a small point through which a hole led to some as yet unseen recess. All the space of the wide snare was hung with threads, fine twisted threads, no more than half the thickness of Burl's finger. This was the trap of a labyrinth spider. Not one of the interlacing strands was strong enough to hold any but the feeblest prey, but the threads were there by thousands.

The cricket had become entangled in the sticky maze. Its limbs thrashed out and broke threads with every stroke, but each time became entangled in a dozen more. It struggled mightily, emitting at intervals again its horrible, bass roar. Burl breathed more easily. He watched with fascinated eyes. Mere death among insects, even tragic death. death held no great interest for him. It was too common an occurrence, and there were few insects

which deliberately sought man. Most insects have their allotted prey and will seek no others. But this involved a spider, and spiders had a terrifying impartiality. A spider devouring some luckless insect was but an example of what might happen to burl. So he watched alertly, his eyes traveling from the enmeshed cricket to the strange opening at the back of the funnel-shaped labyrinth. That opening darkened. Two shining, glistening eyes had been watching from the tunnel in which the spider had been waiting. Now it swung out lightly, revealing itself as a gray spider with twin black ribbons upon its thorax and two stripes of curiously speckled brown and white upon its abdomen.

Burl saw also two curious appendages like a tail, as it came nimbly out of its hiding place and approached the trapped creature. The cricket was struggling weakly now, and the cries it uttered were but feeble, because of the cords that fettered its limbs. Burl saw the spider throw itself upon the cricket, which gave one final convulsive shudder as fangs pierced its armor. shortly after the spider fed with bestial enjoyment it sucked all the succulence all the fluid from its victim's carcass then the breath left burle in a peculiar frightened gasp it was not from anything he saw or heard it was something that he thought for a second his knees knocked together in his self-induced panic it occurred to him that he burrell had killed a hunting spider a tree tarantula upon the red clay cliffs. True, the killing had been an accident and had nearly cost him his own life in the webbed spider's snare. But he had killed a spider and of the most deadly kind.

Now it occurred the burrow that he could kill another. Spiders were the ogres of the human tribes on the forgotten planet. Knowledge of them was hard to come by because to study them was death. But all men knew that web spiders never left their traps, never, and Burl had imagined himself, making an impossibly splendid, incredibly daring use of that fact. Denying to himself that he intended any action so suicidal, he nevertheless drew back from the front of the snare and made his way to the back, where the spider's tunnel was no more than ten feet away.

There he found himself waiting. Presently, through the interstices of the silk, he saw the great bulk of the spider. It had left the drained and shrunken carcass of the cricket to return to its resting place, settling itself carefully upon the soft walls of the fabric tunnel. From the yielding globular nest at the tunnel's end, it fixed maniacal eyes once more upon the threads of its snake. seen down the length of the passageway. Burl's hair stood on end from sheer fright, but he was the slave of an idea.

The tunnel and the nest at its end did not rest on the ground, but were suspended in air by cables, like those that spread the gin itself. The gray labyrinth spider bulged the fabric. It lay in luxurious comfort, waiting for victims to approach. There was sweat on Burl's face as he raised his spear.

The bare idea of attacking a spider was horrifying, but actually he was in no danger, whatever, before the instant of the spear thrust, because web spiders never, never leave their webs to hunt. So Burl sweated and grasped his spear with agonized firmness and thrust it into the bulge that was the spider's body in its nest. He thrust with hysterical fury, and then he ran as if the devil were after him. It was a long time before he dared come back, his heart in his throat.

All was still. He had missed the horrid convulsions of the wounded spider. He had not heard the frightful gnashings of its fangs at the piercing weapon, nor seen the silken threads of the tunnel ripped and torn in the spider's death struggle. Burl came back to quietness. There was a great rent in the silken tunnel, and a puddle of ill-smelling stuff lay upon the ground. From time to time another droplet fell from the spear to join it, and the great spider had fallen halfway through its own enlargement of the rent,

made by the spear in the wall of the nest. Burl stared. Even when he saw it, the thing was not easy to believe. The dead eyes of the spider looked at him with bad, frozen malignity. The fangs were still raised to kill, the hairy legs, were still braced, as if to enlarge further the gaping hole, through which it had partly fallen. Then Burl felt exaltation. His tribe had been furtive vermin for almost forty generations,

fleeing from the mighty insects hiding from them, and when caught waiting helplessly for death, screaming shrilly in horror. But he, Burle, had turned the tables. He a man had killed a spider. His breast expanded. Always his tribesmen went quietly and fearfully, making no sound.

But a sudden, surprising, triumphant yell burst from Burl's lips. The first hunting cry of man upon the forgotten planet in two thousand years. Next second, of course, his pulse almost stopped in sheer terror because he had made such a noise.

He listened fearfully. The insect world was oblivious to him. Presently, shuddering, but infinitely proud, he drew near his prey. He carefully withdrew his spear, poised the flee if the spider stirred. It did not. It was dead.

The blood upon the spear was revolting. Burr wiped it off on a leathery-told stool. Then? He thought of Sayah and his tribesmen. Trembling, even as he gloated over his own remarkable self, he shifted the spider and worked it out of the nest. Presently he moved off with the belly of the spider upon his back and two of its hairy legs over his shoulders.

The other limbs of the monster hung limp. trailing on the ground behind him marching then he was the first such spectacle in history his velvet cloak shining with its iridescent spots the yard-long scraps of golden antennae bound to his forehead a spear in his hand and the hideous bulk of a gray spider for burden burle was a very strange sight indeed he believed that other creatures fled before him because of the thing he carried he tended to grow haughty but actually of course insects do not know fear they recognize their own specific enemies that is necessary but the history of the lowlands on the forgotten planet went on abstractly despite the splendid feet of one man burle marched he came upon a valley full of torn and tattered mushrooms there was not a single yellow top among them every one had been infested with maggots that had liquefied the tough meat of the mushroom tops causing it to drip to the ground below the liquid was gathered in a golden pool in the center of the small depression Burl heard a loud and deep tone humming before he saw the valley. Then he stopped and looked down.

He saw the golden pond at surface reflecting the gray sky and the darkened stumps of mushrooms on the hillside which looked as if they had been blackened by a running flame. A small brooklet of golden liquid trickled over a rocky ledge and all around the edges of the pond and brook in ranks and rows by hundreds and by thousands and it seemed by millions were the green gold bodies of great flies they were small compared to other insects the flesh-flies laid their eggs by the hundreds in decaying carcasses the others chose mushrooms to lay their eggs in to feed the maggots that would hatch a relatively great quantity of food was needed Therefore, the flies must remain comparatively small, or the body of a single grasshopper would furnish food for only a few maggots instead of the hundreds it must support.

There must also be a limit to the size of worms if hundreds were to feast upon a single fungus. But there was no limitation to the greediness of the adult creatures. There were blue bottles and green bottles and all the flies of metallic, a cluelet luster gathered at a luke-cullen feast of corruption. The buzzing of those swarming above the golden pool was a tremendous sound. The flying bodies flashed and glittered as they flew back and forth, seeking a place to alight and join in the orgy. The glittering bodies clustered in already found places were motionless as if carved from metal.

Burrell watched them. and then he saw motion overhead. A slender, brilliant shape appeared, darting swiftly through the air, enlarging into a needle-like body, with transparent shining wings and two huge eyes. It circled and enlarged again, becoming a shimmering dragonfly,

twenty feet and more in length. It poised itself abruptly above the pool, and then darted down, its jaws snapping viciously they snapped again and again burrow could not follow their slashings and with each snap the glittering body of a fly vanished the second dragon-fly appeared and a third they swooped above the golden pool snapping in mid-air making their abrupt and angular turns creatures of incredible ferocity and beauty in that mass of buzzing creatures even the most voracious appetite must soon have been sated but the slender creatures still darted about in frenzied destruction and all this while the loud contented deep bass humming went on as before their comrades were slaughtered by the hundreds not forty feet above their heads but still the glittering rows of red-eyed flies gorged themselves upon the fluid of the pond the dragon-flies feasted until they were unable to devour even a single one more of their chosen prey but even then they continued the sweet matter

above the pool, striking down the buzzing flies, though their bodies must perforce remain uneaten. Some of the dead flies crushed the pulp by the angry dragonflies dropped among their feasting brothers. Presently, one of them placed its disgusting proboscis upon the mangled creature. It sipped daintily from the contents of the broken armor. Another joined it and another. In a little while, a cluster of them pushed against each other for a chance to join them in a cannibalistic feast.

Burl turned aside and went on, leaving the dragonflies still at their massacre, and the flies absorbed and ecstatic at their feast. The feast indeed was improved by the reign of murdered brethren from overhead. Only a few miles farther on, Burl came upon a familiar landmower. mark. He knew it well, but it always kept at a safe distance from it. A massive rock had heaved itself up from the almost level plane over which he traveled to form an out-jutting cliff. At one point the rock overhung, forming an inverted ledge, a roof over nothingness, which had been preempted by a hairy monster and made into a fairy-like dwelling. A white hemisphere

clung to the rock, firmly anchored by long cables. Burl knew the place as one to be feared. A clotho spider had built itself a nest there, from which it emerged to hunt the unwary. Within the silken globe was a monstrosity, resting upon cushions of soft as silk. The exterior had been beautiful once, but if one went too near one of the little inverted arches,

seemingly closed by panels of silk it would open an outward rush a creature from a dream of hell surely burl knew this place hung upon the walls of the fairy palace or trophies they had a purpose of course Stone and boulders hung there, too, to hold the structure, firm against the storm winds that rarely blew. But amid the stones and fragments of insect armor, there was a very special decoration, the shrunken, desiccated skeleton of a man. The death of that man had saved Burl's life two years before. They had been together seeking a new source of edible mushroom. The Clotho spider was a hunter, not a spinner of webs. It had sprung suddenly from behind a great puffball as the two men froze in horror.

Then it had come forward and deliberately chosen its victim. It did not choose Burl. Now he looked with half-frightened speculation at the lair of his ancient enemy. Someday, perhaps. But now he passed on. He went past the thicket in which the great moths hid by day, past the slimy pool in which something unknown but terrible lurked. He penetrated the little forest of mushrooms that glowed at night

and the place where the trouble-hunting beetles chirped thunderously during the dark hours. And then he saw Sayya. He caught a flash of pink skin vanishing behind a squat-told stool, and he ran forward calling her name. She emerged and saw the figure with the horrible bulk of the spider on its back. She cried out in horror, and Burl understood. He let his burden fall, running swiftly to her. They met, Sayah waited timidly, until she saw who this man was,

and then she was astounded indeed, with golden plumes rising from his head, a velvet cloak about his shoulders, blue moth fur about his middle, and a spear in his hand, and a dead spider behind him. This was not the burl she had known. He took her hands, babbling proudly. She stared at him and at his victim. But the language of men had diminished sadly, struggling to comprehend. Presently her eyes glowed.

She pulled at his wrists. when they found the other tribesmen they were carrying the dead spider between them saya looked more proud than burl end of chapter four chapter five of the forgotten planet by murray leinster this librivox recording is in the public domain meat of man's killing in their climb up from savagery the principal handicap from which men have always suffered is the fact that the man's killing in their climb up from savagery the principal handicap from which men have always suffered is the fact that the fact that the man's they are human. Or it can be said that human beings always have to struggle against the obstacle, which is simply that they are men. To Burl, his splendid return to the tribe called for a suitable reaction. He expected them to take note that he was remarkable, unparalleled, and in all ways admirable. He expected them to look at him with awe. He rather hoped that the sight of him would involve something like ecstasy.

And as a matter of fact it did. For fully an hour they gathered around him while he used his and their scanty vocabulary to tell them of his unique achievements and adventures during the past two days and nights. They listened attentively and with appropriate admiration and vicarious pride. This in itself was a step upward,

mostly their talk was of where food might be found and where danger lurked. Strictly practical data connected with the pressing business of getting enough to eat and staying alive. The sheer pressure of existence was so great that the humans, Burl knew, had altogether abandoned such luxuries as boastful narrative. They had given up tradition. They did not think of art in even its most primitive form. and the only craft they knew was the craftiness which promoted simple survival. So for them to listen to a narrative which did not mean either food or even a lessening of danger to themselves

was a step upward on the cultural scale. But they were savages. They inspected the dead spider, shuddering. It was pure horror. They did not touch it. The adults not at all. And even Dick and Tet not. for a very long time. Nobody thought of spiders as food. Too many of them had been spider's food.

But presently even the horror aroused by the spider palled. The younger children quailed at the sight of it, of course, but the adults came to ignore it. Only the two gangling boys tried to break off a furry leg, with which to charge and terrify the younger one still further. They failed to get it loose because they did not think of cutting it, but they had nothing to cut it with anyhow. Old John went wheezing off foraging. He waved a hand to Burl as he went. Burrell was indignant, but it was true that he had brought back no food, and people must eat.

Tama went off, her tongue clacking, with Lona the half-grown girl to help her find and bring back something edible. Dorr, the strongest man in the tribe, went away to look where he thought there might be edible mushrooms full-grown again. Corey left with her children, very carefully, on watch for danger to them, to see what she could find. In a little more than an hour, Burle's audience had diminished to Sayah. Within two hours, ants found the spider where it had been placed for the tribe to admire. Within three hours, there was nothing left of it. During the fourth hour, as Burl struggled to dredge up some new splendid item to tell Sayah

for the tenth time or thereabouts, during the fourth hour, one of the tribeswoman beckoned to Sayah. She left with a flashing backwards smile for Burl. She went, actually, to help dig up underground fungi, much like truffles discovered by the older woman. she undoubtedly expected to share them with burl but in five hours it was night and burl was very indignant with his tribe's folk they had shifted the location of the hiding-place for the night and nobody had thought to tell him and if sya wished to come for burl to lead him to that place she did not dare for the simple reason that it was night for a long time after he found a hiding-place Burl fumed bitterly to himself. He was very much of a human being, differing from his fellows so far, mainly because he had been through experiences not shared by them.

He had resolved a subjective dilemma of sorts by determining to return to his tribe. He had discovered a weapon which at first had promised and secured foodstuff and later had saved him from a tarantula. His discovery that fish oil was useful when applied the spider's stairs and things sticking to the feet was of vast importance to the tribe. Most remarkable of all, he had deliberately killed a spider, and he had experienced triumph. Temporarily, he had even experienced admiration. The adulation was a thing which could never be forgotten. Human appetites are formed by human experiences.

one never had an appetite for a thing, one has not known in some fashion. But no human being, who has known triumph, is ever quite the same again, and anybody who has once been admired by his fellows is practically ruined for life, at least so far, as being independent of admiration as concerned. So during the dark hours, while the slow rain dripped in separate heavy drops from the guy, Burlferst coddled his anger, which was a very good thing for a member of a race grown timorous and furtive, and then began to make indignant plans, the forces tribesmen to yield him more of the delectable sensations he alone had begun to know. He was not especially comfortable

during the night. The hiding place he had chosen was not watertight. Water trickled over him for several hours, before he discovered that his cloak, though it would not keep him dry, which it would have done if properly disposed, would still keep the same water next to his skin, where his body could warm it. Then he slept. When morning came, he felt singularly refreshed. For a savage, he was unusually clean, too. He woke before dawn with vanglorious schemes in his head.

The sky grew gray and then almost. white. The overhanging cloud bank seemed almost to touch the earth, but gradually withdrew. The midst among the mushroom forests grew thinner, and the slow rains ceased reluctantly. When he peered from his hiding place, the mad world he knew, was, as far as he could see, quite mad as usual. The last of the night insects had vanished. The day creatures began to venture out. Not too far from the crevice where he'd hidden was an ant-hill, monstrous by standards, on other planets. It was piled up, not of sand, but gravel and small boulders.

Burl saw a stirring. At a certain spot the smooth, outer surface crumbled, and fell into an invisible opening. A spot of darkness appeared, too slender, thread-like antenna, popped out. They withdrew and pulled. popped out again. The spot enlarged until there was a sizable opening. An ant appeared, one of the warrior ants of this particular breed. It stood fiercely over the opening, waving its antenna, agitatedly,

as if striving to sense some danger to its metropolis. He was fourteen inches long, this warrior, and his mandibles were fierce and strong. After a moment, two other warriors thrusts, past him. They ran around the whole extent of the ant-hill, their legs clicking, antenna waving, restlessly. They returned, seeming to confer with the first, then went back down into the city with every appearance of satisfaction. As if they made a properly reassuring report, within minutes afterward the flood of black, ill-smelling workers, poured out of the opening and dispersed about their duties. The city of ants had begun its daily toil.

There were deep galleries underground here, granaries, storage vaults, refractories and nurseries, and even a royal apartment in which the queen aunt reposed. She was waited on by assiduous courtiers, fed by royal stewards and combed and caressed by the hands of her subjects and children. A dozen times larger than her loyal servants, she was no less industrious than they in her highly specialized fashion. From the time of waking to the time of rest, she was queen mother in the most literal, imaginable sense. At intervals to be measured only in minutes, she brought forth an egg, perhaps three inches in length, which was whisked away to the municipal nursery, and this constant, insensate increase in the population of the city made all

its frantic industry at once possible and necessary. Burrell came out and spread his cloak on the ground. In a little while, he felt it tugging at it. An ant was tearing off a bit of the hem. Burl slew the aunt angrily and retreated. Twice within the next half-hour he had to move swiftly to avoid foragers, who would not directly attack him because he was alive, unless he seemed to threaten danger, but who lusted after the fabric of his garments. This annoyance, and Burle would merely have taken it as a thing to be accepted a mere two days before. This annoyance added to Burrell's indignation with a world about him.

He was in a very bad temper indeed when he found old John. wheezing as he checked on the possibility of there being edible mushrooms in a thicket of poisonous pink and yellow ammonidas. Burl haughtily commanded John to follow him. John's untidy whiskers parted as his mouth dropped open in astonishment. Burrell's tribe was so far from really being a tribe that for anybody to give a command was astonishing. There was no social organization, absolutely no tradition of command. As a rule, life was too uncertain for anybody to establish authority. But John followed Burrell as he stamped out through the morning mist.

He saw a small movement and shouted imperatively. This was appalling. Men did not call attention to themselves. He gathered up door the strongest of the men. Later he found Jack, who someday would wear an expression of monkey-like wisdom. Then Tet and Dick, the half-grown boys, came trooping to see what was happening. Burl led onward, a quarter of a mile, and they came upon a great gutted shell, which had been a rhinoceros beetle the day before.

Today it was a disassembled mass of kite-niss armor. Burl stopped, frowning portentously. He showed his quaking followers how to arm themselves. Door picked up the horn hesitantly. Burl showed him how to use it. He stabbed out awkwardly with a sharp fragment of armor. Burl showed others how to use the leg sections for clubs. They tested them without conviction.

In any sort of danger, they would trust their legs and a frantically effective gift for hiding. Burl snarled at his tribesmen and led them on. It was unprecedented, but because of that fact, there was no precedent for rebellion. Burl led them in a curve. They glanced all about apprehensively. When they came to an unusually large and attractive clump

of golden edible mushrooms, there were murmurings. Old John was inclined to go, and load himself and retired to some hiding place for as long as the food lasted. But Burl snarled again. Numbly they followed on. Doran John and Jack and the two youngsters. The ground inclined upward. They came upon puffballs.

There was a new kind visible, colored a lurid red, that did not grow like the others. It seemed to begin and expand underground. then thrust away the soil above in its development. Its taunt, angry red parchment envelope seemed to swell from a reservoir of subterranean material. Burl and the others had never seen anything like it. They climbed higher. As other edible mushrooms came into view,

Burl's followers cheered visibly. This was a new tribal ground, and anyhow it had not been fully explored. burl was leading them to quantities of food they had never suspected before quaintly it was burle himself who began to feel an uncomfortable dryness in his throat he knew what he was about his followers did not suspect because to them what he intended was simply inconceivable they couldn't suspect it because they couldn't imagine anybody doing such a thing it simply couldn't be thought of at a very inconceivable they couldn't suspect it because they couldn't imagine anybody doing such a thing it simply couldn't be thought of at a all. It is rather likely that Burrell began the regret that he had thought of it. It had come to him first as an angry notion in the night. Then the idea had developed as a suitable punishment for his abandonment. By dawn, it was an ambition so terrifying that it fascinated

him. Now he was committed to it in his own mind, and the only way to keep his knees from knocking together was to keep moving. If his followers have protested now, he would have allowed himself to be persuaded. But he heard more pleased murmurs. There was more edible stuff in quantity, but there were no ant trails here, no sounds of foraging beetles. This was an area which Burles' tribesmen could clearly see was almost devoid of dangerous life. They seemed to brighten a little.

This, they seemed to think, would be a good place to move to. But Burl knew better. There were a few ground insects here because the area was hunted out, and Burl knew what had done the hunting. He expected the others to realize where they were when they dodged around a clump of the new red puff balls and saw bald rocks before them and a falling away to emptiness beyond. Even then, they could have retreated,

but it did not enter their heads that Burl could do anything like. like this. They didn't know where they were until Burl held up his hand for silence, almost at the edge of the rock knob, which rose a hundred feet sheer, curving out a little near its top. They looked out uncomprehendingly at the mist-filled air, and the nightmare landscape fading into its grayness. A tiny spider, the very youngest of hatchlings, and barely four inches across, stealthily stalked another vastly smaller mite. The other was the many-legged larva of the oil beetle. The larva itself had been called on other planets by other men the bee-louse.

It could easily hide in the thick fur of a giant bumblebee. But this one small creature never practiced that ability. The hatchling spider sprang, and the small midge died. When the spider had grown, and, being grown, spun a web, it would slay great crickets with the same insane ferocity. Burl's followers saw first this and then certain three-quarter-inch strands of dirty silk that came up over the edge of the precipice. As one man after another realized where he was, he trembled violently.

Door turned gray. John and Jack were paralyzed. with horror. They couldn't run. Seeing the others even more frightened than himself filled Burrell with a wholly unwarranted courage. When he opened his mouth, they cringed. If he shouted then, at least one, more likely several of them would die. And this was because some forty or fifty feet down,

the mold speckled precipice hung a drab white object, nearly hemispherical some six feet in its half diameter a number of little semicircular doors were fixed about its sides like arches though each one seemed to be a doorway only one would open the thing had been oddly beautiful at first glance it was held fast to the inward sloping stone by cables one or two of which stretched down toward the ground Others reached up over the precipice edge to hold it fast. It was a most unusual engineering feat, yet something more than that. This was also an ogre's castle. Gasly trophies were fastened to the outer walls and hung by silk cords below it. Here was the hind leg of one of the smaller beetles.

There, the wing case of a flying creature. Here a snail shell, the snails of earth, would hardly have recognized their descendant, and there a boulder, weighing forty pounds or more, the shrunken head armor of a beetle, the fierce jaws of a cricket, the pitiful shreds of dozens of creatures, all had once provided meals for the monster in the castle, and dangling, by the longest Court of all was the shrunken, shrivel body of a long-dead man. Burl glared at his tribesmen, clamping his jaws tight, least they chatter. He knew, as did the others, that any noise would bring the Clotho spider swinging up its anchor cable to the cliff-top. The men didn't

dare move, but every one of them, and Burl was among the foremost, knew that inside the half-dome of gruesome relics, the monster reposed in luxury and ease. It had eight furry, attenuated legs, and a face that was a mask of horror. The eyes glittered benevolently above needle-sharp mandibles. It was a hunting spider. At any moment it might leave the charnel house in which it lived to stalk and pursue prey. Earl motioned the others forward, he led one of them, to the end of a cable where it curled up over the edge for an anchorage.

He ripped the end free, and his flesh crawled as he did so. He found a boulder, and not at the end of a cable about it. In a whisper that imitated a spider's ferocity, Burl gave the man orders. He plucked the second quaking tribesman by the arm. With a jerky, uncontrolled movement of a robot, door allowed himself to be led to his second cable. Burl commanded in a frenzy.

He worked with stiff fingers and a dry throat, not knowing how he could do this thing. He had formed the plan in anger which he somehow was carrying out in a panic. Although his followers were as responsive as dead men, they obeyed him because they felt like dead men, unable to resist. After all, it was simple.

enough, there were boulders at the top of the precipice, and silken cables hung top over the edge. As Burrell fastened the heavy boulder to each cable, he could find, he loosened the silk strand until it hung tight, only at the very edge of the more than vertical fall. He took his post, and his followers gazed at him with the despairing eyes of zombies, and made a violent, urgent gesture. One man dumped his boulder over the precipice's edge. Burl cried out shrilly to the others, half mad, with his own terror. There was a ripping sound.

The other men dumped their boulders over, fleeing with the movement, the paralysis of horror relieved by that one bit of exertion. Burl could not flee. He panted and gasped, but he had the sea. He stared down the dizzy wall. boulders ripped and tore their way down the cliff wall pulling the cables loose from the face of the precipice they shot out into space and jerk violently at the half globular nest ripping it loose from its anchorage burl cried out exultantly and as he cried out the shout became a bubbling sound for although the ogre silken castle did swing clear it did not drop the sixty feet to the hard ground below there was one cable burl had missed hidden by a rock tripe and mold in the depressed part of the cliff-top the spider's house was dangling crazily by that one strand bobbing

erratically, to and fro in mid-air. And there was a convulsive struggle inside. One of the arched doors opened and the spider emerged. It was doubtless confused, but spiders simply do not know terror. Their one response to the unusual is ferocity. There was still one cable leading up the cliff face, the thing's normal climbing rope to its hunting ground above. The spider leaped for this single cable.

Its legs grasped the cord. It swarmed upward. Poisoned fangs unsheathed mandibles, clashing in rage. The shaggy hair of its body seemed the bristle with insane ferocity. The skinny articulated legs fairly twinkled as it rose. It made slavering noises, unspeakably horrifying. Burrell's followers were, were already in panic-stricken flight.

He could hear them crashing through obstacles as they ran, glassy-eyed, from the horror they only imagined, but which Burl could not but encounter. Burl shivered. His body poised for equally frenzied, but quite hopeless flight. But his first step was blocked. There was a boulder behind him, standing on end,

reaching up to his knee. He could not take the first step, without dodging it. It was not the Burrell of the terror-filled childhood who acted then. It was the throwback, the atavism, to a boulder ancestry. While Burl, who was a product of his environment, was able to know only the stunned sensations of purest panic, the other Burl acted on a sounder basis of desperation. The emerging normal human seized the upright boulder. He staggered to the rock face with it.

He dumped it down the line of the descending cable. Humans do have ancestral behavioral patterns built into their nervous systems. A frightened small child does not flee. It swarms up the nearest adult to be carried away from danger. At ten, the child does not climb but runs. And there is an age, when it is normal, for a man to stand at bay. This last instinct can be conditioned away, and Burl's fellows and his immediate forbearers it had been. But things had happened to Burl to break that conditioning.

He flung the pointed boulder down. For a fraction of a second he heard only the bubbling, gnashing sounds a spider made as it climbed toward him. Then there was a quite indescribable cushioned impact. After that, there were seconds in which Burl heard nothing, whatever, and then a noise, which could not be described either, but was the impact of the spider's body on the ground a hundred feet below, together with the pointed boulder it had fought insanely during all its fall, and the boulder was on top. The noise was sickening. Burl found himself shaking all over. His every muscle was tense and strained, but the spider did not crawl over the edge

of the precipice, and something had hit far below. A long minute later, he managed to look. The nest still dangled at the end of the single cable, festooned with its gruesome trophies. But Burl saw the spider. It was, of course, characteristically tenacious of life, its legs writhed and kicked, but the body was crushed and mangled. As Burl stared down, trying to breathe again, an ant drew near the shattered creature. It stridulated. Other ants came. They hovered restlessly at the edge of the death scene.

One loathsome leg did not quiver. An ant moved in on it. The ants began to tear the dead spider apart, carrying its fragments to their city a mile away. Up on the cliff-top, Burl got unsteadily to his feet and found that he could breathe. He was drenched in sweat, but the shock of triumph was as overwhelming as any of the terrors felt by ancestors on this planet. On no other planet in the galaxy could any human experience such triumph, as Burrell felt now, because never before had human beings been so completely subjugated by their environment.

On no other planet had such an environment existed, with humans flung so helplessly upon its mercy. Burl had been normal, among his fellows, when he was as frightened and furtive as they. Now he had been given, shocked treatment by fate. He was very close to normal for a human being newly come to the forgotten planet, save that he had had the detailed information which would enable a normal man to cope with a nightmare environment. What he lacked now was the habit, but it would be intolerable for him to return to his former state of mind. He walked almost thoughtfully after his fled followers, and he was still a savage in that he was remarkably matter of fact. He paused to break off a huge piece of the edible golden mushrooms as fellow men had noticed

on the way up. Lugging it easily, he went back down over the ground that had looked so astonishingly free of inimical life, which it was because of the spiked. that had used it as a hunting preserve. Burl began to see that it was not satisfactory to be one of a tribe of men who ran away all the time. If one man with a spear or stone could kill spiders, it was ridiculous for half a dozen men to run away

and leave that one man the job alone. It made the job harder. It occurred the Burrell that he had killed ants without thinking too much about it, but nobody else had. Individual ants could be killed. If he got his followers to kill foot-long ants, they might in time battle the smaller,

two-foot beetles. If they came to dare so much, they might attack greater creatures and ultimately attempt to resist the real predators. Not clearly, but very dimly, the burl who had been shocked back to the viewpoint, which was normal to the race of men, saw that human beings could be more than the fugitive vermin on which other creatures preyed. It was not easy to envision, but he found it impossible to

imagine sinking back to his former state. As a practical matter, if he was to remain as leader, his tribesmen would have to change. It was a long time before he reached the neighborhood of the hiding-place, of which he had not been told the night before. He sniffed and listened. Presently he heard faint, murmurous noises. He traced them, hearing clearly the sound of hushed weeping and excited, timid, chattering. He heard old Tammah shrilly bewailing fate

and the stupidity of Burrell in getting himself killed. He pushed boldly through the tolled stool growth, and found his tribe all gathered together and trembling. They were shaken. They chattered together, not discussing or planning, but nervously recalling the terrifying experience they had gone through. Burl stepped through the screen of fungi, and the men gaped at him. Then they leaped up to flee, thinking he might be pursued.

Tett and Dick babbled shrilly. Burl cuffed them. It was an excellent thing for him to do. No man had struck another man in Burrell's memory. Cuffings were reserved for children, but Burl cuffed the men who had fled from the cliff edge, and because they had not been through Burrell's experiences, they took the cuffings like children.

He took John and Jack by the ear and heaved them out of the hiding place. He followed them and drove them to where they could see the base of the cliff, from whose top they had tumbled the stones and then run away. He showed them the carcass of the spider, now being carted away piecemeal by ants. He told them angrily how it had been killed. They looked at him fearfully. He was exasperated.

He scowled at them, and then he saw them shifting uneasily. There were clippings, a single, foraging black ant rather large, quite sixteen inches long, moved into view. It seemed to be wandering purposelessly, but was actually seeking carrion to take back to its fellows. It moved toward the men. They were alive, therefore, it did not think of them as food, though it could regard them as enemies.

Burl moved forward and struck with his club. It was butchery. It was unprecedented. When the creature lay still, he commanded one of his typos for followers to take it up. Inside its armored legs there would be meat. He mentioned the fact pungently. Their faces expressed amazed wonderment.

There was another clicking, another solitary aunt. Burrow handed his club to Dorr, pushing him forward. Door hesitated. Though he was not afraid of one wandering aunt, He held back uneasily. Burl barked at him. Door struck clumsily and blotched the job. Burl had to use his spear to finish it,

but a second bit of prey lay before the men. Then quite suddenly, this completely unprecedented form of foraging became understandable to Burl's followers. Jack giggled nervously. An hour later, Burl led them back to the tribe's hiding place, The others had been terror-stricken, not knowing where the men had gone. But their terror changed the mute amazement when the men carried huge quantities of meat and edible mushroom into the hiding place. The tribe held what amounted to a banquet.

Dick and Tett swaggered under a burden of ant carcass. This was not, of course, in any way revolting. Back on earth, even thousands of years before, or Arabs had eaten locusts cooked in butter and salted. All men had eaten crabs and other crustaceans whose feeding habits were similar to those of ants. If Burrow and his tribesmen had thought to be facetious, ants on the forgotten planet would still have been considered edible

since they had not lost the habits of extreme cleanliness, which made them notable on earth. This feast of all the tribe in which men had brought back not only mushroom to be eaten, but actually prey, small prey, of their hunting, was very probably the first such occasion in at least 30 generations of the 40-odd, since the planet's unintended colonization. Like the other events, which began with Burl, trying to spear a fish with a rhinoceros beetle's horn,

It was not only novel on that world, but would in time have almost incredibly far-reaching consequences. Perhaps the most significant thing about it was its timing. It came at very nearly the last instant at which it could have done any good. There was a reason which nobody in the tribe would ever remember to associate with the significance of this banquet. A long time before, months in terms of earth-time, there had been a strong breeze that blew for three days and nights.

It was an extremely unusual windstorm. It had seemed the stranger, then, because during all its duration, everyone in the tribe, had been sick, suffering continuously. When the windstorm had ended, the suffering ceased. A long time passed, and nobody remembered. it any longer. There was no reason why they should, yet, since that time, there had been a new kind of thing growing among the innumerable molds and rusts and toadstles of the lowlands.

Pearl had seen them on his travels, and the expeditionary force against the Clotho spider had seen them on the journey up to the cliff edge. Red puff balls, developing first underground, were now pushing the soil aside to expose tom crimson-parched spheres to the open air. The tribesmen left them alone because they were strange, and strange things were always dangerous. Puffballs they were familiar with, big, misshapen things which shot at a touch of powder into the air. The particles of powder were spores, the seeds from which they grew. Spores had remained infinitely. Spores had remained infinitely small, even on the forgotten planet, where fungi grew huge. Only their capacity for growth had increased.

The red growths were puffballs, but of a new and different kind. As the tribe ate and admired, the hunters boasting of their courage, one of the new red mushrooms reached maturity. This particular growing thing was perhaps two feet across. Its main part part spherical, almost eighteen inches of the thing rose above ground. A tawny and menacing red, the sphere was contained in a parchment-like skin that was pulled tot. There was internal tension, but the skin was tough and would not yield, yet the inexorable pressure of life within demanded that it stretched.

It was growing within, but the skin without had ceased to grow. This one happened to be on a low hillside, a good half-mile from the place where Burl and his fellows banqueted. Its tough and red parchment skin was tensed unendurably. Suddenly it ripped apart with an explosive tearing noise. The dry spores within billowed out and up like the smoke of a shell explosion, spurting skyward for twenty feet and more. At the top of their ascent they spread out and eddied like a cloud of reddish smoke. They hung in the air. They drifted in the sluggish breeze.

They spread as they floated, forming a gradually extending, descending dust cloud in the humid air. A bee, flying back toward its hive, droned into the thin mass of dust. It was preoccupied. The cloud was not opaque, but only a thick haze. The bee flew into it. For half a dozen wing beats, nothing happened. Then the bee veered sharply. Its deep-toned humming rose in pitch.

It made convulsive movements in mid-air. It lost balance and crashed heavily to the ground. There its legs kicked and heaved violently, but without purpose. The wings beat furrowinged. but without rhythm or effect. Its body bent in parosmic flexings. It stung blindly at nothing. After a little while the bee died. Like all insects, bees breathe through sphericals, breathing holes in their abdomens. This bee had flown into the cloud of red dust, which was the spore cloud of the new mushrooms. The cloud drifted slowly along over the surface of y'allel.

yeasts and molds, over tolled stools, and variegated fungus monstrosities. It moved steadily over a group of ants at work upon some bit of edible stuff. They were seized with an affliction like that of the bee. They writhed, moved convulsively. Their legs thrashed about. They died. The cloud of red dust settled as it moved. By the time it had traveled a quarter-mile, it had almost all settled to the ground. But a half-mile away, there was another skyward, spurting uprush of red dust,

which spread slowly with a breeze. A quarter-mile away, another plumed into the air. Farther on, two of them spouted their spores toward the clouds almost together. Living things that breathed the red dust writhed and died,

and the red dust, puff balls, were scattered everywhere. Burl and his tribesmen feasted, chattering in hushed tones of the remarkable fact that men ate meat of their own killing. End of Chapter 5. Chapter 6 of the Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Red Dust It was very fortunate indeed that the few.

feast took place when it did. Two days later it would probably have been impossible, and three days later it would have been too late to do any good. But coming when it did, it made the difference, which was all the difference in the world. Only 30 hours after the feasting, which followed the death of the Clotho spider, Burroughs Fellows, from John to Dorr to Tet, and Dirk and Sayah had come to know a numb despair, which the other creatures of his world were simply a bit too stupid to achieve. It was night. There was darkness all over the lowlands, and over all the area of perhaps a hundred square miles, which the humans of Burrell's acquaintance really knew. He alone of his tribe had been as much as forty miles from the foraging ground over which they

wandered. At any given time, the tribe clung together for comfort, venturing only as far as was necessary to find food. Although the planet possessed continents, they knew less than a good-sized county of it. The planet owned oceans, and they knew only small brooks in one river where they knew it was assuredly less than two hundred yards across, and they faced stark disaster that was not strictly a local one, but beyond their experience and hopelessly beyond their ability to face. They were superior to the insects about them, only in the fact they realized what was threatening them. The disaster was the red puffballs. But it was night. The soft, blanketing darkness of a cloud-wrapped world lay all about. Burrell sat awake, wrapped, in his magnificent velvet cloak,

his spear beside him and the yard-long golden plumes of the moth's antennae bound to his forehead for a head-dress about him and his tribesmen were the swollen shapes of fungi hiding the few things that could be seen in darkness from the low-hanging clouds the nightly rain dripped down now a drop and then another drop slowly deliberately persistently moisture fell from the skies there were other sounds things flew through the blackness overhead moths with mighty wing-beats that sometimes sent rhythmic winds stirring down to the tribe in its hiding-place there were deep pulsations of sound made by night beetles aloft there were the harsh noises of grasshoppers they were rare senselessly advertising their existence to nearby predators Not too far from where Burrell brooded came bright chirruppings, where relatively small beetles roamed among the mushroom forests, singing cheerfully in deep, bass voices. They were searching for the underground tidbits, which took the place of truffles their ancestors had lived on, back on Earth.

All seemed to be as it had been, since the first humans were cast away upon this planet, And at night, indeed, the new danger subsided. The red puff balls did not burst after sunset. Burl stayed awake, brooding, in a new sort of frustration. He and all his tribe were plainly doomed. Yet Burl had experienced too many satisfying sensations lately to be willing to accept the fact. The new red growths were everywhere.

Months ago, a storm wind blew, while somewhere, not too far distant, the other red puffballs were bursting and sending their spores into the air. Since it was only a windstorm, there was no rain to wash the air clean of the lethal dust. The new kind of puffball, but perhaps it was not new, it could have thriven for thousands of years, where it was first thrown as a spore from a genetically unstable parent, the new kind of kind of puffball would not normally be spread in this fashion, by chance it had. There were dozens of the things within a quarter mile, hundreds within a mile, and thousands upon thousands within the area the tribe normally foraged in. Burl had seen them even forty

miles away, as yet immature. They would be deadly at one period alone, the time of their bursting. But there were limitations even to the deadliness of the red puff balls, though Burrell had not yet discovered the fact, but as of now they doomed the tribe. One woman panted and moaned in her exhausted sleep, a little way away from where Burrell tried to solve the problem presented by the tribe. Nobody else attempted to think it out. The others accepted doom, with fatalistic hopelessness. Burl's leadership might mean extra food, but nothing could counter the doom awaiting them, so their thoughts seemed to run.

But Burl doggedly reviewed the facts in the darkness, while the humans about him slept the sleep of those without hope and even without rebellion. There had been many bursting of the crimson puffballs, as many as four or five of the deadly dust clouds had been seen. sprouting into the air at the same time. A small boy of the tribe had breathlessly told of seeing a hunting spider killed by the red dust. Lana, the half-grown girl,

had come upon one of the gigantic rhinoceros beetles belly up on the ground, already the prey of ants. She had snatched a huge meat-filled joint and run away faster than the ants could follow. A far-ranging man had seen a butterfly with wings ten yards across die in a dust cloud. Another woman, Corey, had been nearby when a red cloud settled slowly over long, solid lines of black worker ants bound on some unknown mission. Later, she saw other workers carrying the dead bodies back to the Ant City to be used for food.

Burl still sat wakeful and frustrated and enraged as the slow rain fell upon the told stools that formed the tribe's lurking place. He doggedly went over and over the problem. There were innumerable red puffballs. Some had burst. The others undoubtedly would burst. Anything that breathed the red dust died. With thousands of the puff balls around them, it was unthinkable that it was

any human in this place could escape breathing the red dust and dying. But it had not always been so. There had been a time when there were no red puff balls here. Burrell's eyes moved restlessly over the sleeping forms limned by a patch of foxfire. The feathery plumes rising from his head were outlined softly by the phosphorescence. His face was lined with a frown, as he tried to think his own and his fellows way out of the predicament. Without realizing it, Burl had taken it upon himself to think for his tribe. He had no reason to. It was simply a natural thing for him to do so,

now that he had learned to think, even though his efforts were crude and painful as yet. Sia woke with a start and stared about. There had been no alarm, merely, the usual noises of distant murders and the songs of singers in the night. Burl moved restlessly. Sia stood up quietly, her long hair flowing about her, sleepy-eyed. She moved to be near Burl. She sank to the ground beside him, sitting up,

because the hiding-place was crowded and small and dozed fitfully. Presently, her head drooped to one side. it rested against his shoulder. She slept again. This simple act may have been the catalyst, which gave Burl the solution to the problem. Some few days before, Burl had been in a faraway place

where there was much food. At that time, he thought vaguely of finding Sayah and bringing her to that place. He remembered now that the red puff balls flourished there as well as here. but there had been other dangers in between so the only half-formed purpose had been abandoned now though with silas head resting against his shoulder he remembered the plan and then the stroke of genius took place he formed the idea of a journey which was not a going after food this present dwelling-place of the tribe had been free of red puff balls until only recently There must be other places where there were no red puff balls.

He would take Sia and his tribesmen to such a place. It was really genius. The people of Burl's tribe had no purposes, only needs, for food and the like. Burl had achieved abstract thought, which previously had not been useful on the forgotten planet and therefore not practiced. But it was time for humankind to take a more. fitting place in the unbalanced ecological system of this nightmare world. Time to change that unbalance in favor of humans. When dawn came, Burl had not slept at all. He was all authority

and decision he had made plans. He spoke sternly, loudly, which frightened the people, conditioned to be furtive, holding up his spear as he issued commands. His timid tribe folk obeyed him meekly. They felt no loyalty to him or confidence in his decisions yet, but they were beginning to associate obedience to him with good things, food for one. Before the day fully came, they made loads of the remaining edible mushrooms and uneaten meat. It was remarkable for humans to leave their hiding-place while they still had food to eat, but Burl was implacable and scowling. three men bore spears at burles urging he brandished his long shaft confidently as he persuaded the other three to carry clubs

they did so reluctantly even though previously they had killed ants with clubs spears they felt would have been better they wouldn't be so close to the prey then the sky became gray over all its expanse the indefinite bright area which marked the position of the sun became established it was part way toward the center of the sky when the journey began burl had of course no determined course only a destination safety he had been carried south in his misadventure on the river there were red puff balls to the southward therefore he ruled out that direction he could have chosen the east and he had been carried south in his misadventure on the river there were red puff balls to the southward therefore he ruled out that direction he could have chosen the east and come upon an ocean but no safety from the red spore dust or he could have chosen the north it was pure chance that he headed west he walked confidently through the gruesome world of the lowlands holding his spear in a semblance of readiness clad as he was he made a figure at once valiant and rather pathetic it was not too sensible for one young man even one who had killed two spiders to assay leading a tiny tribe of fearful folk across a land of monstrous ferocity and incredible malignance armed only with a spear from a dead insect's armor it was absurd to dress up for the enterprise in a velvety cloak made from a moth swing blue moth fur for a loin cloth and merely beautiful golden plumes bobbing above his forehead probably though that gorgeousness had a good effect upon his followers they surely could not reassure each other by their numbers there was a woman with a baby in her arms

three children of nine or ten unable to resist the instinct to play even on so perilous a journey ate almost constantly of a lumps of food stuff they had been ordered to carry after them came dick a long-legged adolescence boy with eyes that roved anxiously about behind him were two men door with a short spear and jack heft in a club both of them badly frightened at the idea of fleeing from dangers they knew and were terrified by to other dangers unknown and consequently more to be feared The others trailed after them. Tett was rear-guard. Burl had separated the pair of boys to make them useful. Together, they were worthless. It was a pathetic caravan in a way.

In all the rest of the galaxy, man was the dominant creature. There was no other planet, from one rim to the other, where men did not build their cities or settlements with unconscious arrogance, completely disregarding the wishes of lesser things. Only on this planet did men hide from danger rather than destroy it. Only here could men be driven from their place by lower life forms. And only here would a migration be made on foot, with men's eyes fearful, their bodies poised to flee at sight of something stronger

and more deadly than themselves. They marched, straggling a little, with many waverings aside from a fixed line. Once Dick saw the trap-door of a trap-door spider's lair. They halted trembling, and went a long way out of their intended path to avoid it. Once they saw a great praying mantis, a good half-mile off, and again they deviated from their proper route. Near midday their way was blocked. As they moved onward, a great, high-pitched sound could be heard ahead of them. Burl stopped.

His face grew pinched. But it was only a stridulation, not the cries of creatures being devoured. It was a horde of ants by the thousands and hundreds of thousands and nothing else. Burl went ahead to scout, and he did it because he did not trust anybody else. to have the courage or intelligence to return with a report instead of simply running away if the news were bad. But it happened to be a sort of action which would help to establish his position as leader of his tribe.

Burrell moved forward cautiously and presently came to an elevation from which he could see the cause of the tremendous waves of sound that spread out in all directions from the level playing before him. He waved to his followers to join him, and stood, looking down, at the extraordinary sight. When they reached his side, and Sayah was first, the spectacle had not diminished. For quite half a mile in either direction, the earth was black with ants. It was a battle of opposing armies from rival ant cities. They snapped and bit at each other, locked in vice-like and braced they rolled over and over upon the ground, trampled underfoot by hordes of their fellows,

who surged over them to engage in equally suicidal combat. There was, of course, no thought of surrender or of quarter. They fought by thousands of pairs, their jaws, seeking to crush each other's armor, snapping at each other's antenna, biting at each other's eyes. The noise was not like, like that of army ants. This was the agonizing sound of ants being dismembered while still alive.

Some of the creatures had only one or two or three legs left, yet struggled fiercely to entangle another enemy before they died. They were mad cripples, fighting insanely with head and thorax only, their abdomens sheared away. The whining battle cry of the multitude made a deafening uproar. From either side of the battleground, a wide path led back toward separate ants cities, which were invisible from Burrell's position. These highways were marked by hurrying groups of ants, reinforcements rushing to the fight. Compared to the other creatures of this world, the ants were small, but no lumbering beetle dared to march insolently in their way,

nor did any carnivores try to prey upon them. They were dangerous. Burrell and his tribe folk were the only living things remaining near the battlefield, with one single exception. The exception was itself a tribe of ants, vastly lessen number than the fighting creatures, and greatly smaller in size as well. Where the combatants were from a foot to fourteen inches long, These gorilla ants were no more than the third of a foot in length.

They hovered industriously at the edge of the fighting, not as allies to either nation, but strictly on their own account. Scurrying among the larger fighting ants, with marvelous agility, they carried off piecemeal body of the dead and valiantly slew the more gravely wounded for the same purpose. They swarmed over the fighting ground, whenever the tide of battle receded, caring nothing for the origin of the quarrel

and espousing neither side. These opportunists busily salvaged the dead and still living debris of the battle for their own purposes. Burle and his followers were forced to make a two-mile detour to avoid the battle. The passage between bodies of scurrying reinforcements was a matter of some difficulty. Burl hurried the others passed a route to the front, reeking of formic acid, over which

endless regiments and companies of ants moved frantically to join in the fight. They were intensely excited, Antana waving wildly. They rushed to the front and instantly flung themselves into the fray, becoming lost and indistinguishable in the black mass of fighting creatures. The humans passed precariously between two hurrying battalions, Dick and Tet, pausing briefly to burden themselves with prey and hurried on to leave as many miles as possible behind them before nightfall. They never knew any more about the battle.

It could have started over anything at all. Two ants from different cities may have disputed some tiny bit of carrion and soon been reinforced by companions until the military might of both cities was engaged. Once it had started, of course, the fighters knew whom the fight, if not why they did so. The inhabitants of the two cities had different smells, which served them as uniforms. But the outcome of the war would hardly matter, not to the fighters, certainly. There were many red mushrooms in this area, if either, of the city survived at all, it would be because its nursery workers lived upon stored food,

as they tended the grubs until the time of sprouting red dust had ended. Burlesfolk saw many of the red puff balls burst during the day. More than once, they came upon empty, flaccid, parchment sacks. More often still, they came upon red puff balls, not yet quite ready to emit their murderous seed. that first night the tribe hid among the bases of giant puff balls of a more familiar sort when touched they would shoot out a puff of white powder resembling smoke the powder was harmless fortunately and the tribe knew that fact although not toxic the white powder was identical in every other way to the terrible red dust from which the tribe fled that night burl slept soundly he had been without rest for two days and a night and he was experienced in journeying to remote places he knew that there were no more dangerous than familiar ones but the rest of a tribe and even sya were fearful and terrified they waited timorously all through the dark hours for menacing sounds to crash suddenly through the steady dripping

of the nightly rain around them the second day's journey was not unlike the first the following day they came upon a full ten-acre patch of giant cabbages bigger than a family dwelling something in the soil perhaps favored vegetation over fungi the dozens of monstrous vegetables were the setting for riotous life great slugs ate endlessly of the huge green leaves and things preyed on them bees came droning to gather the pollen of the flowers and other things came to prey on the predators in their turn there was one great cabbage somewhat separate from the rest after a long examination of the scene burl daringly led quaking john and jack to the attack door splendidly attacked elsewhere alone when the tribe moved on there was much meat and everyone even the children wore lion-cloths of incredibly luxurious fur there were perils too on the fifth day of the tribe's journey burrow suddenly froze into stillness one of the hairy tarantulas which lived in burrows with a concealed trap-door at ground level had fallen upon a scuribus beetle and was devouring it only a hundred yards ahead the tribe folk trembled as burl led them silently back and around by a safe detour But all these experiences were beginning to have an effect.

It was becoming a matter of course that Burrell should give orders which others should obey. It was even becoming matter of fact that the possession of food was not a beautiful excuse to hide from all danger, eating and dozing until all the food was gone. Very gradually the tribe was developing the notion that the purpose of existence was not solely. to escape awareness of peril, but to foresee and avoid it. They had no clear-cut notion of purpose as yet. They were simply outgrowing purposelessness.

After a time, they even looked about them with dim, stirrings of an attitude other than a desperate alertness for danger. Humans from any other planet, surely, would have been astounded at the vistas of golden mushrooms stretching out in forests on either hand and the plains with flaking surfaces, given every imaginable color, by the molds and rusts and tiny flowering yeasts growing upon them. They would have been amazed by the turgid pools the journeying tribes came upon,

where the water was concealed by a thick layer of slime, through which enormous bubbles of foul-smelling gas, rose to enlarge two preposterous sighs before bursting abruptly had they been as ill-armed as burles folk though visitors from other planets would have been at least as timorous lacking highly specialized knowledge of the ways of insects on this world even well-armed visitors would have been in greater danger but the tribe went on without a single casualty they had fleeting glimpses of the white spokes of symmetrical spider webs whose least thread no member of the tribe could break their immunity from disaster though in the midst of danger gave them a certain all too human constant concentration upon discomfort. Lacking calamities, they noticed their discomforts and grew weary of continual traveling. A few of the men complained the burl. For answer, he pointed back along the way they had come. To the right, a reddish dust cloud was just settling, and to the rear rose another as they looked. And on this day a thing happened, which at once gave the complainers

the rest they asked for, and proved the fatality of remaining where they were. A child ran aside from the path its elders were following. The ground here had taken on a brownish hue. As the child stirred up the surface mold with his feet, dust that had settled was raised up again. It was far too thin to have any visible color. But the child suddenly screamed, strangling. The mother ran frantically to snatch him up. The red dust was no less deadly, merely because it had settled to the ground.

If a stormwind came now, but they were infrequent under the forgotten planets' heavy bank of clouds, the fallen red dust could be raised up again and scattered about until there would be no living thing anywhere which would not gasp and writhe and die. But the child would not die. He would suffer terribly and be weak for days. In the morning he could be carried. When night began to darken the sky, the tribe searched for a hiding place.

They came upon a shelf-like cliff, perhaps twenty or thirty feet high, slanting toward the line of the tribesman's travel. Burrough saw black spots in it, openings, burrows. He watched them as the tribe drew near. No bees or waffes. when in or out. He watched long enough to be sure. When they were close, he was certain. Ordering the others to wait, he went forward to make doubly sure. The appearance of the holes

reassured him. Doug months before by mining bees, gone or dead now, the entrance to the burrows were weathered and bedraggled. Burrell explored, first sniffing carefully at each opening. They were empty. This would be sheltered for the night. He called his followers, and they crawled into the three-foot tunnels to hide. Burrell stationed himself near the outer edge of one of them to watch for signs of danger. Night had not quite fallen. John and Dor, hungry, went off the forage a little way beyond the cliff. They would be cautious and timid, taking no risks whatever. Burl waited for the return of his explorers. Meanwhile, he fretted over the meaning of the stricken child. Sturred up red dust was dangerous. The only time

when there would be no peril from it would be at night when the dripping rainfall of the dark hours turned the surface of this world into thin shine. It occurred to Burrell that it would be safe to travel at night, so far as a red dust was concerned, he rejected the idea instantly. It was unthinkable to travel at night for innumerable other reasons. Frowning, he poked his spear idly at a tumbled mass of tiny parchment-cup-like things near the entrance of the cave. And instantly movement became visible. fifty, sixty, a hundred infinitesimal creatures, no more than half an inch in length, made haste to hide themselves among the thimble-sized paper-like cups.

They moved with extraordinary clumsiness and immense effort, seemingly only by contortions of their greenish-black bodies. Burrell had never seen any creature progress in such a slow and ineffective fashion. He drew one of the small creatures back with the point of his spear and examined it from a safe distance. He picked it up on his spear and brought it close to his eyes. The thing redoubled its frenzied movements. It slipped off the spear and plopped upon the soft moth fur he wore about his middle. Instantly, as if it were a conjuring trick, the insect vanished.

Burl searched for minutes before he found it hidden deep. in the long soft hairs of his garment, resting motionless and seemingly at ease. It was the larval form of a beetle, fragments of whose armor could be seen near the base of the clay cliffside. Hidden in the remnants of its egg casings, the brood of minute things had waded near the opening of the mining bee tunnel. It was their gamble with destiny when mining bee grubs had slept. through metamorphoses and come uncertainly out of the tunnel for the first time that some or many of the larva might snatch the instance chance to fasten to the bee's legs and writhe upward to an anchorage in their fur it happened that this particular batch of eggs had been laid after the emergence of the grubs they had no possible chance of fulfilling their intended role as parasites on the insects of the order hymenoptera they were simply and matter-factly doomed by the blindness of instinct which had caused them to be placed where they could not possibly survive on the other hand if one or many of them

found a lurking place the offspring of their host would have been doomed. The place filled by oil beetle larvae in the schemes of things is the place, or one of the places, reserved for creatures that limit the number of mining bees. When a bee-louse-infested mining bee has made a new tunnel, stocked it with honey for its young, and then laid one egg to float on the pool of nourishment, and hatch and feed and ultimately grow to another mining beetle. At that moment of egg-laying, one small bee louse detaches itself. It remains zestfully in the provision cell to devour the egg

for which the provisions were accumulated. It happily consumes those provisions, and in time, an oil beetle crawls out of the tunnel, a mining bee so laboriously prepared. Burl had no difficulty in detaching the small insect and casting it away, but in doing so he discovered that others had hidden themselves in his fur without his knowledge. He plucked them away and found more. While savages can be highly tolerant of vermin, too small to be seen,

they feel a peculiar revolt against serving as host to creatures of sensible size. Burl reacted violently, as once he had reacted to the discovery of a leech clinging to his heel. He jerked off his loincloth and beat it savagely with his spear. When it was clean, he still felt a wholly unreasonable sense of humiliation. It was not clearly thought out, of course. Burl feared huge insects too much to hate them. But that small creatures should be able to be able to be. fastened upon him, produced a completely irrational feeling of outrage.

For the first time in very many years or centuries, a human being on the forgotten planet felt that he had been insulted. His dignity had been assailed. Burrell raged. But as he raged, the triumphant shout came from nearby. John and Dor were returning from their foraging, loaded down with edible mushrooms. They also had taken a step upward toward the natural dignity of men. They had so far forgotten their terror as the shout in exaltation at their find of food. Up till now, Burl had been the only man daring to shout. Now there were two others.

In his overwrought state this was also enraging. The result of hurt vanity on two counts was jealousy, and the result of jealousy was a crazy foolhardiness. Burrell ground his teeth and insanely resolved to do something so magnificent, so tremendous, so utterly breathtaking, that there could be no possible imitation by anybody else. His thinking was not especially clear. Part of his motivation had been provided by the oil beetle larvae.

He glared about him at the deepening dusk, seeking some exploit some glamorous feat to perform immediately even in the night he found one end of chapter six chapter seven of the forgotten planet by murray leinster this librovoc's recording is in the public domain journey through death part one it was late dusk and the redden clouds overhead were deepening steadily toward black Dark shadows hung everywhere. The clay cliff cut off all vision to one side. But elsewhere, Burl could see outward until the graying haze blotted out the horizon. Here and there, bees droned homeward to hive or burrow. Sometimes a slender, graceful wasp passed overhead its wings invisible by the swiftness of their vibration.

A few butterflies lingered hungrily in the distance, seeking the few things they could still feast upon. No moth had awakened yet to the night. The cloud bank grew more sombre. The haze seemed to close in and shrink the world that Burl could see. He watched, raging, for the sight that would provide him with a triumph to end all triumphs among his followers. The soft, down-reaching fingers of the night touched here and there, and the day ended at those spots. Then from the heart of the deep redness to the west, the flying creature came. It was a beautiful thing, a yellow emperor butterfly, flapping eastward with great sail-like velvet wings

that seemed black against the sunset. Burl saw it sweep across the incredible sky, a light delicately and disappear behind the massive tolled stools clustered so thickly they seemed nearly a hillock and not a mass of growing things the darkness closed in completely but burl still stared where the yellow emperor had landed there was that temporary utter quiet when day things were hidden and night things had not yet ventured out fox-fire glowed patches of pale phosphorescence luminous mushrooms shone faintly in the dark presently burl moved through the night he could imagine the yellow emperor in its hiding-place delicately preening slender limbs before it settled down to rest until the new day dawned he had noted landmarks to guide himself a week earlier and his blood would have run cold at the bare thought of doing what he did now. In mere cool-headed detachment, he would have known that what he did was close to madness,

but he was neither cool-headed nor detached. He crossed the clear ground before the low cliff, but for the foxfire beacons he would have been lost instantly. The slow drippings of rain began. The sky was dead black. Now was a time for night things to fall. fly, and mailed tarantulas to go seeking mates and prey. It was definitely no time for adventuring. But Burrell moved on. He found the close-packed toadstools by the process of running

into them in the total obscurity. He fumbled, trying to force his way between them. It could not be done. They grew too close and too low. He raged at this impediment. He climbed. This was insanity. Burl stood on spongy mushroom stuff, had quivered and yielded under his weight. Somewhere, something boomed upward, rising on fast beating wings into blackness. He heard the pulsing drone of four-inch mosquitoes close by. He moved forward, the fungus support swaying, so that he did not so much walk as stagger over the close-packed mushroom heads. He groped before him with spear and panted a little. There was a part of him which was bitterly afraid,

but he raged the more furiously, because if once he gave way even the caution, it would turn to panic. Burl would have made a strange spectacle, in daylight, godily clothed as he was, in soft blue fur and velvet cloak, staggering, overswaying insecurity, coddling ferocity in himself against the threat of fear.

Then his spear told him there was emptiness ahead. Something moved below. He heard and felt it stirring the toadstool stalks on which he stood. He raised his spear, grasping it in both hands. He plunged down with it, stabbing fiercely. The spear struck something vastly more resistant than any mushroom could be. It penetrated. Then the stab thing moved, as Burl landed upon it, flinging him off his feet,

but he clung to the firmly embedded weapon. And if his mouth had opened for a yell of victory as he plunged down, the nature of the surface on which he found himself, and the kind of movement he felt turned that yell into a gasp of horror. It wasn't the furry body of a butterfly, it landed on. his spear hadn't pierced such a creature's soft flesh. He had leaped upon the broad, hard back of a huge man-eating, nocturnal peal. His spear had pierced not the armor, but the leathery joint tissue between head and thorax.

The giant creature rocketed upward with burrow clinging to his spear. He held fast with an agonized strength. His mount rose from the blackness of a vicarious. the ground into the many times more terrifying blackness of the air. It rose up and up. If Burl could have screamed, he would have done so, but he could not cry out. He could only hold fast, glassy-eyed. Then he dropped. Wind roared past him. The great insect was clumsy at flying, all beetles are. Burl's weight and the pain it felt made its flying clumsier still. There was the semi-liquid crashing and an impact. Burl was torn loose and hurled away. He crashed into the

spongy top of a mushroom and came the rest with his naked shoulder hanging halfway over some invisible drop. He struggled. He heard the whining drone of his attempted prey. It rocketed aloft again, but there was something wrong with it. With his weight applied to the spear as he was torn free, Burl had twisted the weapon in the wound. It had driven deeper, multiplying the damage of the first stab. The beetle crashed to earth again nearby. As Burl struggled again, mushroom stalk split and led him gently to the ground. He heard the floundering of the great beetle in the darkness. It mounted skyward once more. Its wing beats no longer making a sustained note. it thrashed the air irregularly and wildly then it crashed again there was seeming silence save for the steady drip drip of the rain and burl came out of his half-mad fear

he suddenly realized that he had slain a victim even more magnificent than a spider because this creature was meat he found himself astonishingly running toward the spot where the beast beetle had last fallen. But he heard its struggle aloft once more. It was wounded to death. Burrell felt certain of it this time. It floundered in mid-air and crashed again. He was within yards of it before he checked himself. Now he was weaponless, and the gigantic insect flung itself about madly on the ground, striking out with colossal wings and limbs, fighting it knew not what. It struggled to fly, crashed, and fought its way off the ground, even more weakly, then smashed again into mushrooms. There, it floundered horribly in the darkness.

Burl drew near and waited. It was still, but the pain again drove it to a senseless spasm of activity. Then it struck against something. There was a ripping noise and instantly the close, peppery burning smell of the red dust was in the air. The beetle had floundered into one of the close-pack red puff balls, tightly filled with the deadly red spores. The red dust would not normally have been released at night. With the nightly rain, it would not travel so far or spread so widely. Burl fled, panting. Behind him, he heard his victim rise one last time, spurred to impossible final struggle

by the anguish caused by the breathed in red dust. It rose clumsily into the darkness in its death throes and crashed to the ground again for the last time. In time to come, Burl and his followers might learn to use the red dust puffballs as weapons, but not how to spread them beyond their normal range. But now Burl was frightened. He moved hastily sidewise.

The dust would travel down wind. He got out of its possible path. There could be no exaltation where the red dust was. Burl suddenly realized what had happened to him. He had been carried aloft for an unknown, though not great distance, in an unknown direction. He was separated from his tribe, with no faintest idea how to find them in the darkness, and it was night. He crouched under the nearest huge toadstool and waited for the dawn, listening dry-throated, for the sound of death coming toward him through the night.

But only the windbeats of night-flyers came to his ears, and the discordant notes of gray-bellied truffle beetles as they roamed the mushroom thickets, seeking the places beneath which, so their adapted instincts told them, fungoy dainties. not too much, unlike the truffles of her, awaited the industrious miner. And of course, there was that eternal, monotonous dripping of the raindrops, falling at irregular intervals from the sky. Red puff balls did not burst at night. They would not burst anyhow, except at one certain season of their growth. But Burrell and his folk had so far encountered the over-hasty ones, bursting earlier than most.

The time of ripeness was very nearly here, though. When day came, again, the chill dampness of the night was succeeded by the warmth of the morning. Almost the first thing Burrell saw in the gray light was a tall sprouting of brownish-red stuff leaping abruptly into the air from a burst red parchment-like sphere. He stood up and,

and looked anxiously all around. Here and there, all over the landscape, slowly and at intervals, the plumes of fatal red sprang into the air. There was nothing quite like it anywhere else. An ancient man inhabiting Earth might have likened the appearance to that of a scattered and leisurely bombardment, but Burrell had no analogy for them. He saw something hardly a hundred yards from where he had hit. hidden during the night. The dead beetle lay there, crumpled and limp. Burl eyed it speculatively.

Then he saw something that filled him with elation. The last crash of the beetle to the ground had driven his spear deeply between the joints of the corselet and neck. Even if the red dust had not finished the creature, the spear-point would have ended its life. He was thrilled once more by his superlative greatness. He made due note that he was a mighty slayer. He took the antenna as proof of his valor and hacked off a great barbed edge leg for meat. And then he remembered that he did not know how to find his fellow tribesmen. He had no idea which way to go. Even a civilized man would have been at a loss, though he would have hunted for an elevation from which to look for the cliff hiding place of the tribe.

But Burl had not yet progressed so far. His wild ride of the night before had been at random, and the chase after the wounded beetle, no less dictated by chance. There was no answer. He set off anxiously, searching everywhere, but he had to be alert for all the dangers of an inimical world,

while keeping at the same time an extremely sharp eye out for bursting red puffballs. At the end of an hour he thought he saw familiar things. Then he recognized the spot. He had come back to the dead beetle. It was already the center of a mass of small black bodies, which pulled and hacked at the tough armor, gnawing out great lumps of flesh to be carried to the nearest Aunt City. Burl set off again very carefully, avoiding any place that he recognized as having been seen that morning.

Sometimes he walked through mushroom thickets, dangerous places to be in, and sometimes over a relatively clear ground, colored exotically, with very colored fungi. More than once, he saw the clouds of red stuff spurting in the distance. Deep anxiety filled him. He had no idea that there was such things as points of the compass. He knew only that he needed desperately to find his tribesfolk again. They, of course, had given him up for dead. He had vanished in the night.

Old Tama complained of him shrilly. The night to them meant death. John quaked watchfully all through it. When Burrell did not come to the feast of mushroom, that John and Dorr had brought. back, they sought him. They even called timidly into the darkness. They heard the throbbing of huge wings, as a great creature rose desperately into the sky. But they did not associate that sound with Burl. If they had, they would have been instantly certain of his faith. As it was, the tribe's uneasiness

grew into terror, which rapidly turned to despair. They began to tremble, wondering what they would do with no bold chieftain to guide them. He was the first man to command allegiance from others in much too long a period on the forgotten planet. But the submission of his followers had been the more complete for its novelty. His loss was the more appalling.

Burl had mistaken the triumphant shout of the foragers. He'd thought it independence of him, rivalry, actually. The men dared to be. to shout only because they felt secure under his leadership. When they accepted the fact that he had vanished and to disappear in the night had always meant death, their old fears and timidity returned.

To them it was added despair. They huddled together and whispered to one another of their fright. They waited in trembling silence through all the long night. Had a hunting spider appeared, they would have fled in as many directions as there were people, and undoubtedly all would have perished. But day came again, and they looked into each other's eyes and saw the self-same fear. Sia was probably the most pitiful of the group. Her face was white and drawn beyond that of anyone else.

They did not move when the day brightened. They remained about the bee tunnels. speaking in hush tones huddled together searching all the horizon for enemies sya would not eat but sat still staring before her in numbed grief burrow was dead atop the low cliff a red puff-ball glistened in the morning light its tough skin was topped and bulging resisting the pressure of the spores within slowly as the morning wore on Some of the moisture that kept the skin stretchable dried. The parchment-like stuff contracted. The tauntness of the spore-packed envelope grew greater. It became insupportable.

With a ripping sound, the tough skin split across, and a rush of the compressed spores shot skyward. The tribesmen saw and cried out and fled. The red stuff drifted down past a cliff edge. It drifted toward the humans. They ran from it. John and Tama ran fastest. Jack and Corey and the others were not far behind.

Sia trailed in her despair. Had Burrell been there, matters would have been different. He had already such an ascendancy over the minds of the others that even in panic they would have looked to see what he did, and he would have dodged the slowly drifting death cloud by day, as he had during the night, but his followers ran blindly. Asiah fled after the others,

she heard shrieks of fright to the left, and ran faster. She passed by a thick mass of distorted fungi, in which there was a sudden stirring and panic lent wings to her feet. She fled blindly panting. A head was a great mass of stuff, red puff balls,

showing here and there among great fan-like growths, some twelve feet high that look like sponges. She fled past them and swerved to hide herself from anything that might be pursuing by sight. Her foot slipped on the slimy body of a shellless snail, and she fell heavily, her head striking a stone. She lay still. Almost as if at a signal, a red puff-bulk,

Ball burst among the fan-like crows. A thick, dirty red cloud of dust shot upward, spread and billowed, and began to settle slowly toward the ground again. It moved as it settled, flowing over the inequalities of die-ground, as a monstrous snail or leech, might have done, sucking from all breathing creatures the life they had within them. It was a hundred yards away, than fifty, Then thirty. Had any of the member of the tribe watched it, the red dust might have seemed benevolently

intelligent, but when the edges of the dust cloud were no more than twenty yards from Sayah's limp body, an opposing breeze sprang up. It was a vagrant, fitful little breeze that halted the red cloud and threw it into some confusion, sending it in a new direction. It passed Sia without hurting her. though one of its misty tendrils reached out as if to snatch at her in slow motion. But it passed her by. Sia lay motionless on the ground, only her breast rose and fell shallowly.

A tiny pool of red gathered near her head. Some thirty feet from where she lay there were three miniature tolled stools in a clump, bases so close together that they seemed but one. From between two of them, however, two tufts of reddish thread appeared. They twinkled back and forth and in and out. As if reassured, two slender antenna followed, then bulging eyes and a small black body with bright red scalloped markings upon it.

It was a tiny beetle, no more than eight inches long, a sexton or burying beetle. Drawing near Sayah's body, it scurried, onto her flesh. It went from end to end of her figure in a sort of feverish haste. Then it dived into the ground beneath her shoulder, casting back a little shower of hastily dug dirt as it disappeared. Ten minutes later, another small creature appeared, precisely like the first. Upon the heels of the second came a third. Each made the same hasty examination and dived under her unmoving form.

Presently, the ground seemed to billow at a spot along Sayah's side and then at another. Ten minutes after the arrival of the third beetle, a little rampart had reared itself all about Sayah's body, following her outlines precisely. Then her body moved slightly in little jerks, seeming to settle perhaps half an inch into the ground. The burying beetles were of that class of creature, which exploited the bodies of the fallen. Working from below, they excavated the earth. When there was a hollow space below, they turned on their backs and thrust up with their legs,

jerking at the body until it sank into the space they had made ready. The process would be repeated until, at last, all their dead treasures had settled down below the level of the surrounding ground. The loosened dirt then fell in at the sides, completing the inhumation. Then, in the underground darkness, it was the custom of the Beatles to feast magnificently, gorgeing themselves upon the food they had hidden

from other scavengers, and, of course, rearing their young also upon its substance. Ants and flies were rivals of the sea, these beetles, and not infrequently, the Saxon beetles came upon carrion after ants had taken their toll, and when it already swarmed with maggots. But in this case, Sia was not dead, the fact that she still lived, though unconscious, was the factor that had given the sexton beetles this splendid opportunity. She breathed gently and irregularly, her face drawn with the sorrow of the night before, while the desperately hurrying beetles

swarmed the bout beneath her body, channeling away the soil, so she would sink lower and lower into it. She descended slowly, a half inch by a half inch. The bright red tufts of thread appeared again, and a beetle made its way to the open air. It moved hastily about, inspecting the progress of the work. It dived below again, another inch, and after a long time, another, were excavated.

End of Chapter 7, Part 1. Chapter 7 of the Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Journey Through Death, Part 2. Matters still progressed when Burl stepped out from a group of overshadowing toadstools and halted. he cast his eyes over the landscape and was struck by its familiarity he was in fact very near the spot he had left the night before in that maniacal ride on the back of a flying beetle he moved back and forth trying to account for the feeling of recognition he saw the low cliff then and moved eagerly toward it passing within fifty feet of saya's body now more than half buried in the ground the looster around the outline of her figure was beginning to topple in little rivulets upon her

one of her shoulders was already half screened from view burl passed on unseeing he hurried a little in a moment he recognized his location exactly there were the mining bee burrows there was a thrown away lump of edible mushroom cast aside as the tribe's folk fled. His feet stirred up a fine dust, and he stopped short. A red puff ball had burst here. It fully accounted for the absence of the tribe, and Burrell sweated in sudden fear. He thought instantly of Sayah. He went carefully to make sure.

This was absolutely the hiding place of the tribe. There was another mushroom fragment. There was a spear thrown down by one of the men in his flight. Red dust had settled upon the spear and the mushroom fragments. Burl turned back, hurrying again, but taking care to disturb the dust no more than he could possibly help. The little excavation into which Sayah was sinking inch by inch was not in his path. Her body no longer lay above the ground but in. minute. Burrell went by, frantic with anxiety about the tribe, but about Salya, most of all.

Her body quivered and sank a fraction into the ground. Half a dozen small streams of earth were tumbling upon her. In minutes she would be wholly hidden from view. Burl went to beat among the mushroom thickets in quest of the bodies of his tribe's folk. They could have staggered out of the red dust and collapsed beyond. He would have shouted, but the deep sense of lowliness silenced him. His throat ached with grief. He searched on. There was a noise, from a huge clump of tolled stools, perhaps the very one he had climbed over in the night, there came the sound of crashings and the breaking of spongy stuff. Twin-tapering antenna appeared, and then a monster Bietel lurched into the open space, its ghastly mandibles gaping sideways.

It was all of eight feet long, and supported by six crooked, saw-toothed legs, huge, multiple eyes, stared with preoccupation at the world. It advanced deliberately, with clankings and clashings of a hideous machine. Burl fled, on the instant, running directly away from it. a little depression lay in the ground before him he did not swerve but made to jump over it as he leaped he saw the color of bare flesh Sayah, limp and helpless, sinking slowly into the ground, with tricklings of dirt falling down to cover her. It seemed the burrow, and she quivered a little. Instantly, there was a terrific struggle within Burrell.

Behind him was the giant meat-eating beetle, beneath him was Saya, whom he loved. There was certain death, lurching toward him on the evilly crooked legs, and the life he had hoped for lay in a shallow pit. Of course he thought, say, a dead. Perhaps it was rage or despair, or a simple human madness, which made him act otherwise than rationally. The things which raise humans above brute creation,

however, are only partly reasonable. Most human emotions, especially the creditable ones, cannot be justified by reason. and very few heroic actions are based on logical thought. Burl World as he landed, his puny spear held ready. In his left hand he held the haunch of a creature, much like the one which clanked and rattled toward him. With a yell of insane defiance,

completely beyond justification by reason, he flung the meat-filled leg at the monster. It hit, undoubtedly it hurt. the beetle seized it ferociously it crushed it there was meat in it sweet and juicy the beetle devoured it it forgot the man standing there waiting for death it crunched the leg-joint of a cousin or brother confusing the blow with a missile that had delivered it when the tidbit was finished it turned and lumbered off to investigate another mushroom thicket It seemed to consider then an enemy had been conquered and devoured, and that normal life could go on. Then Burrell stopped quickly and dragged Sayah from the grave the sextant beetles had labored so feverishly to provide for her. Crumbled soil fell from her shoulders, from her face, and from her body.

Three little eight-inch beetles with black and red markings scurried for cover in terrified haste. burl carried saya to a resting-place of soft mould to mourn over her he was a completely ignorant savage save that he knew more of the ways of insects than anybody anywhere else the ecological service which had stocked this planet not being accepted the burrell the unconsciousness of sya was as death itself dumb misery smote him and he looked at his planet not being accepted the burrow the unconsciousness of sya was as death itself dumb misery smote him and he laid her down gently and quite literally wept he had been beautifully pleased with himself for having slain one flying beetle but for siya's seeming death he would have been almost unbearable with pride over having put another to flight but now he was merely a broken-hearted very human young man but a long time later seya opened her eyes and looked about bewilderedly they were inconsiderable danger for some time after that because they were oblivious to everything but each other seya rested in half in credulous happiness against burle's shoulder as he told her jerkily of his attempt on a night-bound butterfly which turned out to be a flying beetle that took him aloft He told of his search for the tribe, and then his discovery of her, apparently lifeless body.

When he spoke of the monster which had lurched from the mushroom thicket and of the desperation, with which he had faced it, Saya looked at him with warm, proud eyes. But Burl was abruptly struck with the remarkable convenience of that discovery. If his tribesmen could secure an ample supply of meat, they might defend themselves against the attack by throwing it to their attackers. In fact, insects were so stupid that almost any object thrown quickly enough and fast enough might be made to serve as sacrifices instead of themselves. A timid, frightened whisper roused them from their absorption. They looked up. The boy Dick stood some distance away, staring at them, wide-eyed, almost convinced that he looked upon the living

dead. The sudden movement on the part of either of them would have sent him bolting away. Two or three other bobbing heads gazed affrightedly from nearby hiding places. John was poised for flight. The tribe had come back to its former hiding place simply as a way to reassemble. They had believed both Burle and Sye had dead, and they accepted Burle's death as their own doom. But now they stared. burl spoke fortunately without arrogance and dick and tett came timorously from their hiding-places the others followed the tribe forming a frightened half-circle about the seated pair burles spoke again and presently one of the bravest cori dared to approach and touch him instantly a babel of crude labial language of the tribe broke out awed, exclamations, and questions filled the air.

But Burl, for once, showed some common sense. Instead of a vainglorious recital, he merely cast down the long tapering antenna of the fine beetle. They looked and recognized their origin. Then Burl currently ordered Doran Jack to make a chair of their hands for Sayya. She was weak from her fall in the long. loss of blood. The two men humbly advanced and obeyed. Then Burl curtly ordered the march

resumed. They went on more slowly than on previous days, but nonetheless steadily. Burl led them across country, marching in advance, with a matter-of-fact alertness for signs of danger. He felt more confidence than ever before. It was not fully justified, of course, John now retrieved the spear he had discarded, the small party fairly bristled with weapons. But Burl knew that they were liable to be cast away as impediments if flight seemed necessary. As he led the way, Burl began to think busily in the manner that only leaders find necessary. He had taught his followers to kill ants for food, though they were still uneasy about such adventures. He had led them to attack great yellow grubs upon giant cabbages,

but they had not yet faced any actual danger, as he had done. He must drive them to face something. The opportunity came the same day in the late afternoon. To the westward, the cloud bank was barely beginning to show the colors that presage nightfall, when a bumblebee droned heavily overhead, making for its home burrow. The little straggling group of marching people looked up and saw the scanty load of pollen

packed in the stiff bristles of the bee's hind legs. It sped onward heavily, its almost transparent wings, mere blurs in the air. It was barely fifty feet above the ground. Burl dropped his glance and tense. A slender-waisted wasp was shooting upward, from an ambush among the noisome fungi of this plain. The bee swerved and tried to escape.

The wasp overhauled it. The bee dodged frantically. It was a good four feet in length, as large as the wasp, certainly, but it was more heavily built and could not make the speed of which the wasp was capable. It dodged with less agility. Twice in desperation,

it did manage to evade the plunging dives of the wasp. But the third time, the two insects grappled in mid-air, almost over the heads of the humans. They tumbled downward in a clawing, biting tangle of bodies and legs. They hit the ground and rolled over and over. The bee struggled to insert her barbed sting into the more supple body of her adversary. She writhed and twisted desperately.

But there came an instant of infinite confusion, and the bee lay on her back. The wasp suddenly moved with that ghastly skilled precision of a creature, performing an incredible feat instinctively, apparently unaware that it is doing so. The dazed bee was swung upright in a peculiarly artificial pose. The waff's body curved, and its deadly, rapier, sharp, sting struck. The bee was dead, instantly.

As if struck dead by lightning. The wasp had stung in a certain place in the neck parts where all the nerve cords pass. To sting there, the wasp had to bring its victim to a particular pose. It was precisely the trick of a denucador, the butcher, who kills cattle by severing the spinal cord. for the wasp's purpose

The bee had to be killed in this fashion And no other Burl began to give low-tone commands to his followers He knew what was coming next And so did they When the sequel of the murder began He moved forward His tribesmen

Waivering after him This venture was actually one Of the least dangerous they could attempt But merely to attack a wass was a hair-raising idea. Only Burl's prestige, plus their knowledge, made them capable of it. The second act of the murder drama

was gruesomeness itself. The pirate wasp was a carnivore, but this was the season when the wasps raised young. Inevitably, there was sweet honey in the half-filled crop of the bee. Had she arrived safely at the hive,

the sweet and sticky lids, would have been disgorged for the benefit of bee grubs. The wasp avidly set to work to secure that honey. The bee carcass itself was destined for the pirate wasp's own offspring, and that squirming monstrosity is even more violently carniferous than its mother. The parent wasp set about abstracting the dead bees' honey before taking the carcass to its young one. because honey is poisonous to the pirate wasp's grub.

Yet insects cannot act from solicitude or anything but instinct. And instinct must be maintained by lavish rewards. So the pirate wasp sought its reward, an insane, insatiable, glutinous satisfaction in the honey that was poisoned to its young. The wasp foiled its murder victim upon its back again, and feverishly pressed on the limp body to force out the honey. And this was the reason for its precise manner of murder.

Only when killed by the destruction of all nerve currents, would the bee's body be left limp like this. Only a bee killed in this exact fashion would yield its honey to manipulation. The honey appeared, flowing from the dead bee's mouth, the wasp in trembling galleyish ecstasy devoured it as it appeared it was lost to all other sights or sensations but its feast and this was the moment when burl signalled for the attack the tribesman's prey was deaf and blind and raptured it was aware of nothing but the delight it savored but the men wavered nevertheless when they drew near burghur Burl was first to thrust his spear powerfully into the trembling body. When he was not instantly destroyed, the others took courage.

Dor's spear penetrated the very vitals of the ghoul. Jack's club fell with terrific force upon the wasps' slender waist. There was a crackling and the long spidery limbs quivered and writhed. Then Burl struck again. and the creature fell into two writhing halves. They butchered it rather messily, but Burrell noticed that even as it died, sundered and pierced with spears,

its long tongue licked out in one last rapturous taste of the honey that had been its undoing. Some time later, burdened with the pollen-laden legs of the great bee, the tribe resumed its journey. Now Burrell had men behind him. They were still timid and prone to flee at the least alarm, but they were vastly more dependable than they had been. They had attacked and slain a wasp whose sting would have killed any of them.

They had done battle under the leadership of Burl, whose spear had struck the first blow. They were sharers of his glory, and therefore, much more nearly like the followers of a chief often ought to be. Their new spirit was badly needed. The red puff balls were certainly no less numerous in the new territory. The tribe traversed than in the territory they had left. And the season of their ripening was further advanced. More and more of the ground showed the deadly rhyme of settled death dust. The stay alive was increasingly difficult. When the full-sporecasting season, arrived, it would be impossible, and that season could not be far away. The very next day after the killing of the wasp, survival, despite the red dust, had begun

to seem unimaginable. Where earlier one saw a red dust cloud bursting here and there at intervals, on this day, there was always a billowing mass of lethal vapor in the air. At no time was the landscape free of a moving mist of death. Usually there were three or four in sight at once. Often there were half a dozen, once there were eight. It could be guessed that in one day more they would ripen in such monstrous numbers that anything which walked or flew or crawled must breathe in the spores and perish.

In that day, just at sunset, the tribe came to the top of the small rise in the ground. For an hour they had been marching and counter-marching to avoid the suddenly billowing clouds of dust. Once they had been nearly hemmed in, when three of the dull red mists seemed to flow together, enclosing the three sides of a circle. They escaped then only by the most desperate of sprinting. But now they came to the little hillock and halted. Before them stretched a plain, all of four miles wide, colored brownish, brick-red red by the red puffballs.

The tribe had seen mushroom forests. They had lived in them, and knew of the dangers that lurked there. But the plane before them was not simply dangerous, it was fatal. To right and left it stretched as far as the eye-gall. could see. But away on its farther edge, Burl caught a glimpse of flowing water. Over the plain itself a thin red haze seemed to float. It was simply a cloud of the deadly spores, dispersed and indefinite, but constantly replenished by the freshly bursting puffballs. While the tribe's folk stood and watched, thick columns of dust rose here and there and at the

other place, too many to count. They settled again, but left behind enough of the fine powder, to keep a thin red haze over all the plain. This was a mass of literally millions of the deadly growths. Here was one place where no carnivorous beetles roamed, and were no spiders lurk. There was nothing here but the sullen columns of dust and the haze that they left behind.

And of course, it would be nothing less than suicide to try to go back. End of Chapter 7, Part 2. Chapter 8 of the Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. A flight continues. Burl kept his people alive until darkness fell. He assigned watchers for each direction, and when flight was necessary, the adults helped the children to avoid the red dust.

Four times they changed direction after shrill voiced warnings. When night settled over the plane, they were forced to come to a halt. But the puff balls were designed to burst by day, stumbled into they could split at any time, and the humans did hear some few of the tearing noises that denoted. a spore spout in the darkness. But after slow nightly rain began, they heard no more. Burrell led his people into the plain of red puffballs as soon as the rain had lasted long enough

to wash down the red haze, still hanging in the air, and turned the fallen spores to mud. It was an enterprise of such absolute desperation that very likely no civilized man would have tried it. There were no stars for guidance, no compasses to show the way. There were no lights to enable them to dodge the deadly things they strove to escape, and there were no possibility of their keeping a straight course in the darkness. They had to trust to luck in perhaps the longest, long shot

that humans ever accepted as a gamble. Quaintly, they used the long antenna of a dead-flying beetle, has sense organs for themselves. They entered the red plain in a long single file, Burrow leading the way, with one of the two feathery whips extended before him. Sia helped to check on what lay in the darkness ahead, but made sure not to leave his side.

Others trailed behind, hand in hand. Progress was slow. The sky was utter blackness, of course, but nowhere in the lowlands is there an absolute black. Where foxfire doesn't burn without consuming, there are mushrooms with glows of their own, rusts sometimes shone faintly. Naturally, there were no fireflies or glow-worms of any sort,

but neither were there any living things to hunt the tiny tribe as it moved half blindly in single file through the plain of red puff balls. Within half an hour even, Burl did not believe he had kept to his original line. An hour later, they realized despairingly that they were marching helplessly through puff balls, which would make the air unbreathable at dawn, but they marched on. Once they smelled the rank odor of cabbages.

They followed the scent and came upon them, glowing palely with parasitic molds on their leaves. and there were living things here huge caterpillars eating and eating even in the dark against a time of metamorphosis burl could have cried out infuriatedly at them because they were so he assumed immune to the death of the red dust But the red dust was all about, and the smell of cabbages was not the smell of life. It could have been, of course. Caterpillars breathe like all insects at every stage of their development, but furry caterpillars breathe through openings which are covered with matted fur. Here that matted fur acted to filter the air. The eggs of the caterpillars had been laid before the puffballs were ready to burst. The time of spore-bearing would be over

Before the grubs were butterflies or moths These creatures were safe Against all enemies, even men Men groped and blundered in the darkness Simply because they did not think To take fur garments they wore And hold them to their noses To serve as gas masks or air filters

The time for that would come But not yet With the docility of despair Burl's tribe followed him through all the night. When the sky began to pale in the east, they numbly resigned themselves to death, but still they followed. And in the very early gray light,

when only the very ripest of the red puff balls spouted toward a still dark sky, Burl looked harassedly about him and could have groaned. He was in a little circular clearing, the deadly red things all about him. There was not yet light enough for colors to appear. There was merely a vast stillness everywhere, and a monkeying hint of the hot and peppery scent of death dust

now turned the mud all about him. Burl dropped in bitter discouragement. Soon the misty dust clouds would begin to move about. The reddish haze would form above all this space. Then, quite suddenly, he lifted his head, and whooped. He had heard the sound of running water. His followers looked at him with dawning hope. Without a word to them, Burl began to run. They followed hastily and quickened their pace when his voice came back in a shout of triumph.

In a moment they had emerged from the tangle of fungus growths to stand upon the banks of a wide river, the same river whose gleam Burl had seen the day before, from the farthest of the far side of the red puffball plain. Once before, Burl had floated down a river upon a mushroom raft. A journey had been involuntary. He had been carried far from his tribe and Sayah. His heart filled with desolation.

But now he viewed the swiftly running current with delight. He cast his eyes up and down the bank. Here and there it rose in a low bluff and thick-shelf fungi stretched out above the water. They were adaptations of the fungi that had once grown on trees, and now fed upon the incredibly nourishing earthbanks formed of dead growing things. Burrow was busy in an instant, stabbing the relatively hard growths with his spear and striving to wrench them free.

The tribesmen stared blankly, but at a snapped order, they imitated him. Soon two dozen masses of firm light fungus lay upon the shore. Burrell began to explain what they were for, but Dor remonstrated.

They were afraid to part from him. If they might embark on the same fungus raft, it would be a different matter. Old Tama scolded him shrilly at the thought of separation.

John trembled at the mere idea. burl cast an apprehensive glance at the sky day was rapidly approaching soon the red puff balls would burst and shoot their dust clouds into the air there was no time to make stipulations then sya spoke softly burrow made the suggested great sacrifice he took the gorgeous velvet coat of mothwing from his shoulder and tore it into a dozen long irregular pieces along the lines of the sinews reinforcing it he planted his spear upright in the largest raft fastening the other cranky craft to it with the improvised lines in a matter of minutes the small flotilla of rafts bobbed in the stream one by the other cranky craft to it with the improvised lines in a matter of minutes the small flotilla of rafts bobbed in the stream one by by one. Burl settled the folk upon them with stern commands about movement. Then he shoved them out from the bank. The collection of uneasy floating things moved slowly out from shore to where the current caught them. Burle and Saya sat on the same section of fungus. The other, trustful but

frightened tribes people, clustered timorously about. As they began to move between the mushroom-lined banks of the river, and as the mist of nighttime lifted from its surface, columns of red dust spurred it sullenly upward on the plain. In the light of dawn, the deadly red haze was forming once more over the puffball plane. By that time, however, the unstable rafts were speeding down the river, bobbing and whirling in the stream, with wide-eyed people as their passengers gazing in one-eyed. at the shores. Five miles downstream the red growths became less numerous, and other forms of fungus took their places. Molds and rusts covered the ground as grass did on more favored

planets. Toldstools showed their creamy, rounded heads, and there were malformed things with swollen trunks and branches mocking the trees that were never seen in these lowlands. Once the tribesmen saw the grisly bulk of a hunting spider outlined on the river bank. All through the long day they rode the current, while the insect life that had been absent in the neighborhood of the death plain became abundant again. Bees once more droned overhead and wasps and dragonflies. Four-inch mosquitoes appeared to be driven off with blows. Glittering beetles made droning or booming noises as they flew. Flies of every imaginable metallic hue flew about. Huge butterflies danced above the steaming land and running river in seeming ecstasy at simply being alive.

All the thousand and one forms of insect life flew and crawled and swam and dived where the people of the rafts could see them. water beetles came lazily to the surface to snap at other insects on the surface the shell-covered boats of caddis flies floated in the eddies and backwaters the day wore on and the shores flowed by the tribesmen ate of their food and drank of the water when afternoon came the banks fell away and the current slackened the shores became indefinite the river merged itself into a vast swamp from which came a continual muttering the water seemed to grow dark when black mudddened the place of the clay that had formed its bed then there appeared floating green things which did not move with the flowing water they were the leaves of the water lilies that managed to survive along with cabbages and very few other plants in the midst of a fungus world twelve feet across any one of the green leaves might have supported the whole of burrell's tribe they became so numerous that only a relatively narrow uncovered stream flowed between the whole of burroughs tribe they became so numerous that only a relatively narrow uncovered stream flowed between tens of acres of the flat floating leaves here and there colossal wax blossoms could be seen three men could hide in those enormous flowers they exhaled an almost overpowering fragrance into the air and presently the muttering sound that had been heard far away grew in volume to an intermittent momentary to an intermittent

deep bass roar. It seemed to come from the banks on either side. It was a discordant croaking of frogs, eight feet in length, which lived and throve in this swamp. Presently, the tribesfolk saw them, green giants sitting immobile upon the banks, only opening their huge mouths to croak. Here in the swamps there was such luxuriance of insect life that a normal tribal hunting ground, in which tribesmen were not yet accustomed to hunt, would seem like a desert by comparison. Myriads of little mitches, no longer than three or four inches across their wings, danced above the water. Butterflies flew low, seemingly, and a mord of their reflection in the glassy water. The people watched as if their eyes would become engorged by the strange new things they saw.

Where the river split and split and divided again, there was nothing with which they were familiar. Mushrooms did not grow here, moles, yes, but there were cat-tails with stalks like trees, towering thirty feet above the waterways. After a long, long time, though, the streams began to rejoin each other. Then low hills loomed through the thicker haze that filled the air here. The river flowed toward and through them, and here a wall of high mountains rose toward the sky, but their height could not be guessed. They vanished in the midst, even before the cloud bank swallowed them.

The river flowed through a river gate, a water gap in the mountains. While day still held fully bright, the bobbing rafts went whirling through a narrow pass, with sheer walls that rose beyond all seeing in the mist. Here, there was even some white water. Above it, spanning a chasm of 500 feet across, a banded spider had flung its web. The rafts floated close enough to see the spider, a monster even of its kind.

Its belly swollen to a diameter of yards. It hung motionless in the center of the snare, as the humans swept beneath it then the mountains drew back and the tribe was in a valley where look as they might there was no single tawny red puff ball from whose spreading range the tribesmen were refugees the rafts grounded and they waited ashore while still the day held and there was food here in plenty but darkness fell before they could explore as a matter of precaution as a matter of precaution burl and his folk found a hiding-place in a mushroom thicket and hid until morning the night sounds were wholly familiar to them the noise of katydids was louder than usual the feminine sound of that name gives no hint of the sonorous deep-toned notes the enlarged creature uttered and that implied more vegetation as compared with straight fungoid flora a great many fireflies glowed in the darkness shrouding the hiding-place indicating that huge snails they fed on were plentiful the snails would make very suitable prey for the tribesmen also but men were not yet established in their own minds as predators they were though definitely no longer the furtive vermin they had been

They knew there were such things as weapons. They had killed ants for food, and a pirate wasp as an exercise in courage. To some degree, they were acquiring Burl's own qualities. But they were still behind him, and he still had some way to go. The next day they explored their new territory with a boldness which would have been unthinkable a few weeks before. The New Haven was a valley,

spreading out to a second swamp at its lower end. They could not know it, but beyond the swamp lay the sea. Exploring, because of strictly practical purposes, and not for the sake of knowledge, they found a great trap-door in the earth, sure sign of the layer of a spider. Burle considered that before many days the monster would have to be dealt with, but he did not yet know how it could be done.

his people were rapidly becoming a tribe of men but they still needed burl to think for them what he could not think of so far could not be done but a part of the proof that they needed burl to think for them lay in the fact that they did not realize it they gathered facts about their environment the nearest ant city was miles away that meant that they would encounter its scouting foragers rather than working parties The Anne City would be a source of small prey, a notion that would have been inconceivable a little while ago. There were numerous giant cabbages in the valley, and that meant that there were big, defenseless slugs, a spear whenever necessary. They saw praying mantises, the adults, were 18 feet tall and as big as giraffes, but much less desirable neighbors, and they knew they were.

that they would have to be avoided. But there were edible mushrooms on every hand, if one avoided spiders, and praying mantises, and the meat-eating beetles, if one were safely hidden at night against the amorous male spiders, who took time off from courtship

to devour any living creature that came their way, and if one lived at high-tension alertness, interpreting every sound as possible danger, and every unknown thing has certain persons. peril, then one could live quite comfortably in this valley. For three days the tribesmen felt that they had found a sort of paradise. John had his belly full to bursting all day long. Tet and Dick became skilled ant hunters.

Dora found the better spear and practiced thoughtfully with it. There were no red puff balls here. There was food. Burles folk could imagine no greater happen. even old thomas scolded only rarely they surely could not conceive of any place where a man might walk calmly about with no danger at all of being devoured this was paradise and it was a deplorable state of affairs it is not good for human beings to feel secure and experience contentment men achieve only by their wants or through their fears back at the their former foraging ground, the tribe would never have emulated Burrell with any passion so long as they could survive by traditional behavior.

Before the menace of the red puffballs developed, he had brought them to the point of killing ants with him present and ready to assist. They would have stayed at about that level. The red dust had forced their flight. During that flight, they had achieved what was, compared to their former timidity, prodigies of valor. But now they arrived at Paradise. There was food. They could survive here in the fashion of the good old days before they had learned the courage of desperation.

They did not need Burl to keep them alive or to feed them. They tended to disregard him, but they did not disperse. Social grouping is an instinct in human beings. as it is in cattle or in schools of fish also when burl was available there was a sense of pleasant confidence he had gotten them out of trouble before if more trouble came he would get them out of it again but why look for trouble burles tribesmen sank back into a contented lethargy they found food and hid themselves until it was all consumed the part of the valley was found where they were far enough from visible dangers to feel blissfully safe when they did move though still with elaborate caution it was only to forage for food and they did not need to go far because there was plenty of food they slipped back happier than they had ever been. The foragers finally began to forget to take their new spears or clubs with them. They referred to vermin in a particularly favorable environment. And Burl was infuriated. He had known

adulation. He was cherished to be sure, but adulation no longer came his way. Even Sayah. And ironically, natural change took place in sales. When Burl was a chieftain, she looked at him with worshipful eyes. Now that he was, says other men, she displayed cockatry, and Burl was of that peculiarly direct-thinking sort of human being who was capable of leadership but not of intrigue. He was vain, of course, but he could not engage in elaborate maneuvers to build up a romantic situation. When Saya archly remained with the women of the tribe, he considered that she avoided him. When she coyly avoided speech with him, he angrily believed that she did not want

his company. End of Chapter 8, Part 1. Chapter 8 of the Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. A flight continues. part two when they had been in the valley for a week burrow went off on a bitter journey by himself part of his motivation probably was a childish resentment he had been the great man of the tribe he was no longer so great because his particular qualities were not needed and perhaps with some unconscious intent to punish them for their lessened appreciation he went off in a pet he still carried spear and club but the grandeur of his costume had deteriorated his cloak was gone the moth antenna he had worn bound to his forehead were now so draggled that they were ridiculous he went off angrily to be rid of his fellows indifference He found the upward slopes, which were the valley's literal boundaries. They promised nothing.

He found a minor valley in which a labyrinth spider had built its shining snare. Burl almost scorned the creature. He could kill it if he chose, merely by stabbing it through the walls of its silken nest as it waited for unlucky insects to blunder into the intricate web. He saw praying mantises. Once, he came upon the extraordinary egg container of the mantis tribe, a gigantic leaf-shaped mass of solidified foam, whipped out of some special plastic compound which the mantis secretes and in which the eggs are laid. He found the caterpillar wrapped in its thick cocoon, and because he was not foraging and not particularly hungry,

he inspected it with care. With great difficulty, he even broke the strand of silk that formed it, unreeling several feet in curiosity. Had he meditated, Burrell would have seen that this was cord which could be used to build snares as spiders did. It can also be used to make defenses

in which, if built strongly and well, even hunting spiders might be tangled and dispatched. But again he was not knowingly looking for things to be of use. He coddled his sense of injury against the tribe. He punished them by leaving them. He encountered a four-foot-praining mantis that raised its saw-toothed forelimbs and waited immobile for him to come within reach.

He had trouble getting away without a fight. His spear would have been a clumsy weapon against so slender a target in the club, certainly not quick enough to counter the insect's lightning-like movements. He was bothered. That day he hunted ants. The difficulty was mainly

that of finding individual ants alone who could be slaughtered without drawing hordes of others into the fight. Before nightfall, he had three of them, foot-long carcasses slung at his belt, near sunset he came upon another fairly recent praying manthus hatchling it was almost an ambush the young monster stood completely mobile and waited for him to walk into its reach burl performed the deliberate experiment something that had not been done for a very long time on the forgotten planet the small grisly creature stood as high as burl's shoulders it would be a deadly antagonist burl tossed it a dead ant it struck so swiftly that the motion of its horrible forearms could not be seen then it ignored burle devouring the tidbit

it was a discovery that was immediately and urgently useful on the second day of his aimless journey burl saw something that would be even more deadly and appalling than the red dust had been for his kind it was a female black hunting spider the so-called american tarantula when he glimpsed the thing the blood drained from burle's face as the monster moved out of sight burle abandoning any other project he might have intended headed for the place his tribe had more or less settled in he had news which offered the satisfaction of making him much needed again but he would have traded that pleasure ten hundred times over for the simple absence of that one creature from this valley that female tarantula meant simply and specifically that the tribe must flee or die this place was not paradise The entry of the spider into the region had preceded the arrival of the people. A giant, even of its kind, it had come across some pass among the mountains, for reasons only it could know. But it was deadliness beyond compare.

Its legs spanned yards. The fangs were needle-sharp and feet in length and poisoned. Its eyes glittered with insatiable, insane bloodlust. Its coming was ten times more deadly to the humans, as to other living creatures of the valley, than a Bengal tiger loose in a human city would have been. It was bad enough in itself, but it brought more deadly disaster still behind it. Bumping and bouncing behind its abdomen as it moved, fastened to its body by dirty silken ropes, the creature dragged the burden, which was its own ferocity,

many times multiplied. It was dragging an egg bag larger than its body, which was feet in diameter. The female spider would carry this ghastly burden, cherishing it until the eggs hatched. And then there would be

four to five hundred small devils loose in the valley. From the instant of their hatching, they would be as deadly as their parent. Though the offspring would be small, with legs spanning no more than a foot, their bodies would be the size of a man's fist and able to leap two yards.

Their tiny fangs would be no less invomined than their mothers. In stark maniacal hatred of all other life, they would at least equal the hungry gray horror which had begot them. Burl told his tribesmen, they listened, eyes large with fright, but not quite afraid, the thing had not yet happened.

When Burrell insistently commanded that they follow him on a new journey, they nodded uneasily, but slipped the way. He could not gather the tribe together. Always there were members who hid from him, and when he went in search of them, the ones he had gathered vanished before he could return. There were days of bright light and murder, and nights of slow rain and death in the valley,

the great creatures under the cloud bank committed atrocities upon each other and blandly dined upon their victims unthinkingly solicitous parents paralyzed creatures to be left living and helpless for their young to feed on there were enormities of cruelty done in the matter-of-fact fashion of the insect world to these things the humans were indifferent they were uneasy But like other humans everywhere, they would not believe the worst until the worst arrived. Two weeks after their coming to the valley, the worst was there. When that day came, the first gray light of dawn, found the humans in a shivering, terrified group, in a completely suicidal position. They were out in the open, not hidden, but in plain view. They dared not hide anymore.

The furry gray monsters brood had hatched. The valley seemed to swarm with small gray demons, which killed and killed, even when they could not devour. When they had countered each other, they fought in slavering fury, and the victors, in such duels, dying upon their brethren, but always they hunted more things to kill. They were literally maniacs,

and they were too small and too quick, to fight with spears or clubs. So now at daybreak the humans looked about despairingly for death to come to them. They had spent the night in the open, least they be trapped in the very thickets that had formerly been their protection. They were in clear sight of the large gray murderer,

if it should pass that way, and they did not dare hide because of that orgarish creatures brood. The monster appeared. A young girl saw it and cried out, chokingly. It had not seen them. They watched it leap upon and murder, a vividly colored caterpillar,

near the limits of vision in the morning mist. It was in the tribe's part of the valley. Its young, swarmed everywhere. The valley could have been a paradise, but it was doomed to become a charnel house. And then Burl shook himself. He had been angry when he left his tribe. He had been more angry when he returned, and they would not obey him.

He had remained with them, petulantly silent, displaying the offended dignity he felt and elaborately, refusing to acknowledge any overtures even from Sayah. Burl had acted rather childishly, but his tribesmen were like children. It was the best way for him to act. they shivered too hopeless even to run away while the shaggy monster feasted a half mile away there were six men and seven women besides himself and the rest were children from gangling adolescence to one babe in arms they whimpered a little then saya looked imploringly at burl coquetry forgotten now the other whimpered more loudly they had reached the stage of despair now when they could draw the monster to them by blubbering in terror this was the psychological moment burle said dowerly come he took saya's hand and started away there was but one direction in which any human being could think the move in this valley at this moment it was the direction away from the grisly mother of horrors it happened to be the way up to the way up

the valley wall. Burl started up that slope. Saya went with him. Before they had gone ten yards, Dor spoke to his wife. They followed Burl with their three children. Five yards more, and Jack, agitatedly began to bustle his family into movement. Old John wheezing, frantically, scuttled after Burl, and Corey competently set out with the youngest of her children. in her arms and the others marching before her. Within seconds more, all the tribe was in motion. Burl moved on, aware of his following, but ignoring it. The procession continued in his wake, simply, because it had begun to do so.

Dick, his adolescent brashness, beaten down by terror, nevertheless, regarded Burrell's stained weapon, with the inevitable envy of the half-grown. for achievement. He saw something half buried in the soil, and after a fearful glance behind, he moved aside the tug at it. It was part of the armor of a former rhinoceros beetle. Tett joined him.

They made an act of great daring, of lingering to find themselves weapons, as near as possible, to burles. A quarter mile on the fugitives passed a struggling milkweed plant. no more than twenty feet high and already scabrous with scale and rusts upon its lower parts ants marched up and down its stalk in a steady single file placing aphids from their nearby ant's city unsuitable spots to feed and to multiply as only parthenogenic aphids can do but already on the far side of the milkweed an ant-lion climbed up to do murder among them the ant-lion of course was the larval form of the lace-wing fly the aphids were its predestined prey burl continued to march holding say his hand the reek of formic acid came to his nostrils he ignored it ants were as much prey to his tribesmen now as crabs and crayfish to other shore-dwelling tribesmen on long-forgotten earth

but burl was not concerned with food now he stalked on toward the mountain slopes dick and tett brandished their new weapons they looked fearfully behind them them, the monster from whom they fled, was lost in its gruesome feasting, and they were a long way from it now. There was a steady, single-file procession of ants, with occasional gaps in the line. The procession passed a line through one of those gaps. Beyond it, Ted and Dick conferred. They dared each other. They went scrambling back to the line of ants. Their weapons smote. The slaughtered ants died instantly and were quickly dragged from the formic acid-scented path. The remaining ants went placidly on their way. The weapons struck again. The two adolescents had to outdo each other, but they had as much food as they could carry, gloating,

each claiming to have been most daring and to have the largest bag of game, they ran panting after the tribe. They grandly distributed their take of game. It was a form of boasting, but the tribesfolk accepted the gifts automatically. It was, after all, food. The two gangling boys jabbering at each other raced back once more. Again they returned with dangling masses of food stuff, half scores of footlong creatures whose limbs at least contained firm meat. behind the ant-lion made his onslaught into the stupidly feasting aphids and warrior ants took alarm and thrust forward to offer battle tumult arose upon the milkweed burl led his followers toward the mountain side he reached a minor eminence and looked about him caution was the price of existence on this world two hundred feet away a small scurrying horror raged and searched among the rough-edged layers of what on other worlds was called paper-mold or rock tripe

here it was thick as quilting and infinitesimal creatures denned under it the sixteen-inch spider devoured them making glutinous sounds but it was busy and all spiders are relatively short-sighted burl turned the sigh and realized that all his tribe had followed him fearfully even to the small height he climbed only to look around from door had taken advantage of burl's paws there was an empty cricket shell partly overwhelmed by the fungoid soil he tore free now a hollow sickle-shaped jaw it was curved and sharp and deadly if properly wielded Dore had seen Burl kill things. He had even helped. Now, very grimly, he tried to imagine killing something all alone. Jack saw him working on the sickle-shaped weapon.

He tugged at the crickets' ransacked carcass for another weapon. Dick and Tet fangloriously pretended the fight between themselves with a recently acquired instruments for killing. John weezed and panted. old thomas complained to herself in whispers not daring to make sounds in the daylight the rest waited until burle should lead them further when burl turned angry eyes upon them he was beginning to do such things deliberately now they all regarded him humbly now they remembered that they had been hungry and he had gotten food for them and they had been paralyzed by terror and he dared to move they definitely had a feeling of dependence upon him for the present moment only later their feelings of humbleness would diminish in proportion as he met their needs for leadership they would tend to try to become independent of him his leadership would be successful in proportion as he taught them to lead themselves but burrow perceived this only dimly at the moment it was pleasing to have all his tribe regard him so worshipfully

even if not in quite the same fashion as say it he was suddenly aware now at any rate while they were so frightened they would obey him so he invented an order for them to obey i carry sharp things he said sternly some of you have gotten sharp things now everybody must carry sharp things to fight with humbly they scattered to obey sya would have gone with them but burle held her back he did not quite know why it could have been that the absolute equality of the sexes and cravenness was due to end and for his own vanity burle would undertake the defense of Sayah. He did not analyze so far. He did not want her to leave him, so he prevented it. The tribe's folk scattered, Dor, went with his wife to help her arm herself. Jack uneasily followed his. John went timorously, where the picked-over remnant of the cricket's carcass might still yield an instrument of defense. Corey laid her youngest child at Burrell's feet while she went fearfully to find some toothed instrument, meeting Burrell's specifications of sharpness.

There was a stifled scream. A ten-year-old boy, he was Dick's younger brother, stood paralyzed. He stared in an agony of horror at something that had stepped from behind a misshapen fungoyed object, fifty yards from Burrell, but less than ten yards from him. It was a pallidly green creature with a small head and enormous eyes. It stood upright like a man, and it was a few inches taller than a man. Its abdomen swelled gracefully into a leaf-like form. The boy faced it paralyzed by horror, and it stood stock still. Its great, hideously spined arms were spread out in a pose of hypocritical benediction.

it was a partly grown praying mantis not too long hatched it stood rigid waiting benignly for the boy to come closer or to try to flee if he had fled it would fling itself after him with a ferocity besides which the fury of a tiger would be kittenish if he approached its fanged arms would flash down pierce his body and hold him terribly fast by the needle-shshed shone by the needle-shed arms would flash down pierce his body and hold him terribly fast by the needle-sharp hooks that were so much worse than trap claws and of course it would not wait for him to die before it began its meal all the small party of humans stood frozen it may be questioned whether they were filled with horror for the boy or cast into a deeper abyss of despair by the sight of a half-grown mantis only burrell so far had any notion of actually leaving leaving the valley. To the rest, the discovery of one partly mature praying mantis meant that there would be hundreds of others. It would be impossible to evade the tiny, slavering demons, which were the brood of the great spider. It would be impossibility multiplied to live where a horde of small, yet vastly large fiends live, raising their arms in a semblance of

blessing before they did murder. Only Burl was capable of thought, and this was because vanity filled him. He had commanded and had been obeyed. Now obedience was forgotten, because there was this young mantis. If the men had dreamed of fighting it, it could have destroyed any number of them by sheer ferocity and its arsenal of knives and daggers. But Burl was at once furious and exquisite. experienced. He had encountered such a middle-sized monster when alone and deliberately had experimented

with it. In consequence, he could dare to rage. He ran toward the mantis. He swung the small corpse of an ant, killed by Tet only minutes since, and hurled it past the terror-facinated boy. He had hurled it at the mantis. It struck, and insects simply do not think. Something hurled at the ghastly young creature. Its arm struck ferociously to defend itself. The ant was heavy. Poised upright in its spectral attitude, the mantis was literally flung backward,

but it rolled over, fighting the dead ant, with that frenzy, which is not so much ferocity, as mania. The small boy fled hysterically, once the insect's attention was diverted. The human tribe gathered, around Burl many hundreds of yards away, again uphill. He was their rendezvous because of the example set by Corey. She had left her baby with Burl.

When Burl dashed from the spot, Sayya had quite automatically followed the instinct of any female for the young of its kind. She snatched up the baby before she fled, and of course she'd joined Burl when the immediate danger was over. the floor of the valley seemed a trifle indistinct from here the mist that always hung in the air partly veiled the details of its horrors it was less actual not quite as deadly as it once had seen burl said fiercely to his followers where are the sharp things the tribesfolk looked at one another numbly then john muttered rebelliously and old tama raised her voice in shrill complaint burl had led them to this there had been only the red dust in the place from which they had come but here was a hunting spider and its young and also a new hatching of mantises

they could dodge the red dust but how could they escape the deaths that waited them here ay ay burl had persuaded them to leave their home and brought them here to die burl glared about him it was neither courage nor resolution but he had come to realize that to be admired by one's fellows was a splendid sensation the more one was admired the better he was enraged that any one dared to despair instead of thinking admirably about his remarkableness i said burle haughtily am not going to stay here i go to a place where there are neither spiders nor mantises come he held out his hand to saya she gave the child to cori and confidently moved to follow him burl stalked grandly away and she went with him he went up hill naturally there were spiders and mantises in the valley so many that to stay there meant death so we moved to go somewhere else and this was the climatic event that changed the whole history of humanity upon the forgotten planet up to this point there may have been other individuals who had accomplished somewhat of burrell's kind of leadership a few may have learned courage it is possible that some even led their tribe folk upon migrations in search of safer lands to live in but until burl let his people out of a valley filled with food up a mountainside toward the unknown it was simply impossible for humans to rise permanently above the status of hunted vermin

at the mercy of monstrous mindless creatures whose forebearers had most ironically been brought to the planet to prepare it for humans to live on burl was the first man to lead his followers toward the heights end of chapter eight part two chapter nine of the forgotten planet by mary leinster this lebrovovoc's recording is in the public domain there is such a thing as sunshine the sun that shone upon the forgotten planet was actually very near it shone on the top of the cloud bank and the clouds glowed with the light is such a thing as sunshine. The sun that shone upon the forgotten planet was actually very near. It shone on the top of the cloud bank, and the clouds glowed with dazzling whiteness. It shone on the mountain peaks where they penetrated the mist, and the peaks were warmed, and there was no snow anywhere despite the height. There were winds, here, where the sun yielded sensible heat. The sky was very blue. At the edge of the plateau, from which the cloud banks were

down instead of up, the mountain sides seemed to descend into a sea of milk. Great undulations in the midst had the semblance of waves, which moved with great deliberation toward the shores. They seemed sometimes to break in slow motion against the mountain walls, where they were cliff-like, and sometimes they seemed to flow up gentler inclinations like water flowing up a beach but all of this was very deliberate indeed because the cloud waves were sometimes twenty miles from crest to crest the look of things was different on the highlands this part of the unnamed world no less than the lowlands had been seated with life on two separate occasions once the seedings was with bacteria and moulds and lichen to break up the rocks and make soil for them and once with seeds and insect eggs and such living things as might sustain themselves immediately they were hatched but here on the highlands the different climatic conditions had allowed other seedlings and creatures to survive together here molds and yeasts and rusts were stunted by the sunlight grasses and weeds, and trees survived instead.

This was an ideal environment for plants that needed sunlight to form chlorophyll, with which to make use of the soil that had been formed. So on the highlands the vegetation was almost earth-like, and there was a remarkable side effect on the fauna which had been introduced in the same manner and at the same time as the creatures down below. In coolness which amounted to a temperate climate, there developed no such frenzy of life as made the nightmare jungles under the clouds. Plants grew at a slower rate than fungi and less luxuriantly.

There was no vast supply of food for large-sized plant-eaters. Insects which were to survive here could not grow to be monsters. Moreover, the nights here were chill. Very many insects grow torpid in the cool of a temperate zone night, but warm up to activity soon after sunrise. But a large creature, made torpid by cold, will not revive so quickly. If large enough, it will not become fully active until close to dark. On the plateau, the lowland monsters would starve in any case,

but more, they would have only a fraction of each day, of full activity. So there was a necessary limit to the size of the creatures that lived above the clouds. To humans from other planets the life on the plateau would not have seemed horrifying at all, save for the absence of birds to sing and a lack of small mammals to hunt for merely to enjoy, the untouched sunlit plateau with its warm days and briskly chill nights would have impressed most civilized men, as an ideal habitation. But Burle and his followers were hardly prepared to see it that way at first glance.

If told about it in advance, they would have thought of it with despair. But they did not know beforehand. They toiled upward, their leader moved by such ridiculous motives of pride and vanity, as have caused men to achieve greatness throughout all history. Two great continents were discovered back on Earth by a man, trying to get spices to hide the gamey flavor of half-spoiled meat, and the power that drives mile-long spacecraft was first discovered and tamed by men making bombs to destroy their fellows. There were precedents for foolish motives, producing results far from foolishness.

The trudging, climbing folk crawled up the hillside. They reached the place high above the valley Burrell had led them to. The valley grew misty in appearance. Presently, it could no longer be seen at all. The mist they had taken for granted all their lives hid from them everything, but the slanting stony wall up which they climbed. The stone was mostly covered by bluish-green rock tripe in partly overlapping sheets. Such stuff is always close behind the bacteria,

which first attack a rock face on a slope it clings while soil is washed downward as fast as it is formed the people never ate rock tripe of course it produces frightening cramps in time they might learn that when thoroughly dried it can be cooked to pliability again and eaten with some satisfaction but so far they knew neither dryness nor fire nor had they ever known such surroundings as presently enveloped them a slanting rocky mountain-side which stretched up frighteningly to the very sky grayness overhead grayness also to one side the side away from the mountain an equal grayness below the valley from which they had come could no longer be seen even as a different shading of the mist And as they scrambled and trudged after Burl, his followers gradually became aware of the utter strangeness of all about them. For one result, they grew sick and dizzy. To them it seemed that all solidity was slowly tilting. Had they been superstitious, they might have thought of demons preparing to punish them for daring to come to such a place. But quaintly enough,

Burl's followers had developed no demonology. Your typical savage is resolved not to think, but he does have leisure to want. He makes gods and devils out of his nightmares and gambles on his own speculations to the extent of offering blackmail to demons if they will only let him alone, or preferably, give him more of the things he wants.

But the superstitions of savages involved the payment of blackmail in exact proportion to their prosperity. The Eskimos of Earth lived always on the brink of starvation. They could not afford the luxury of taboos and totem animals whose flesh must not be eaten and forbidden areas which might contain food. Religion there was among Burles people, but superstition was not. No humans anywhere can live without religion. but on earth Eskimos did with a minimum of superstitions.

They could afford no more, and the humans of the forgotten planet could not afford any at all. Therefore they climbed desperately, despite the unparalleled state of things about them. There was no horizon, but they had never seen a horizon. Their feeling was that what had been down was now partly behind, and they feared, least the toppling universe ultimately, let them fall toward that grayness they considered the sky. But all kept on to lag behind would be to be abandoned in this place where all known sensations were turned topsy-turvy.

None of them could imagine turning back, even Old Tama, whimpering in a whisper as she struggled to keep up, merely complained bitterly of her fate. She did not even think of revolt. If Burrell had stopped, all his followers would have squatted down miserably to wait for death. They had no thought of adventure or any hope of safety. The only goodnesses they could imagine were food and the nearness of other humans. They had food. Nobody had abandoned any of the dangling ant bodies.

Tent and Dick had distributed before the climb began. they would not be separated from their fellows. Burl's motivation was hardly more distinct. He had started uphill in a judicious mixture of fear and injured vanity and desperation. There was nothing to be gained by going back. The terrors at hand were no greater than those behind, so there was no reason not to go ahead.

They came to a place where the mountain flank sank inward. There was a flat space, and behind it a winding canyon of sorts like a vast crack in the mountain's substance. Burrell breasted the curving edge and found flatness beyond it. He stopped short. The mouth of the canyon was perhaps fifty yards from the lip of the downward slope. So much space was practically level, and on it were tolled stools and milkweed, two of them. and there was food. It was a small, isolated asylum for life

such as they were used to. They could, it was possible that they could, have found a place of safety here. But the possibility was not the fact. They saw the spider web at once. It was slung between the opposite canyon walls by cables all of 200 feet long. The radiating cables reached down

to anchorages on stone. The snare threads, winding out and out in that logarithmic spiral whose properties men were so astounded to discover, were fully a yard apart. The web was for giant game. It was empty now, but Burle saw the telegraph cord, which ran from the very center of the web, to the webmaker's lurking place. There was a rocky shelf on the canyon wall. On it rested the spider, almost invisible. against the stone, with one furry leg touching the cable. The slightest touch on any part of the web would warn it instantly.

Burl's followers accumulated behind him. Old John's wheezing was audible. Tama ceased her complaints to survey this spot. It might be, it could be, a haven, and she would have to find new and different things to complain about in consequence. The spider web itself, of course, was no reason for them to be alarmed. Web spiders do not hunt. Their males do, but they are rarely in the neighborhood of a web, save at mating time.

The web itself was no reason not to settle here, but there was a reason. The ground before the web between the web and themselves was a charnel house of murdered creatures, half-inch-thick wing-cases of dead beetles and the cleaned-out carapaces of other giants, the ovipositor of an egnumon fly, bee feet of springy slender, deadly-pointed tube, and the abdomen-place of bees, and the draggled antenna of moths and butterflies. Something very terrible lived in this small place. The mountainsides were barren of food for very. big flying things. Anything which did fly this high for any reason would never land on sloping,

foodless stone. It would land here, and very obviously it would die, because something, something killed things as they came. It dend back in the canyon where they could not see it. It dined here. The humans looked and shivered, all but burrow. He cast his eyes about, for better weapons than he possessed he chose for himself a magnificent lance grown by some dead thing for its own defense he pulled it out of the ground it was utterly silent here on the heights no sounds from the valley rose so high there was no noise except the small creakings made as burles strove to free the new splendid weapon for himself that was why he heard the gasp when somebody uttered in default of a scream that would not be uttered it was a choked a strangled and inarticulate sobbing noise he saw its cause there was a thing moving toward the folk from the recesses of the canyon it moved very swiftly It moved upon stilt-like, impossibly attenuated legs of impossible length and inconceivable number. Its body was the thickness of Burl's own,

and from it came a smell of such monstrous fetter that any man smelling it would gag and flee, even without fear, to urge him on. The creature was a monstrous millipede, forty feet in length, with features of purest, unadulterated horror. It did not appear to plan the spring. Its speed of movement did not increase as it neared the tribe's folk. It was not rushing, like the furious charge of the murderers, Burles Tribe knew. It simply flowed sinuously toward them with no appearance of haste, but at a rate of speed they could not conceivably outrun. Stick-like legs twitched upward and caught the spinning body of an ant. The creature stopped and turned its head about and seized the object its side

legs had grasped. It devoured it. Burl shouted again and again. There was a rain of missiles upon the creature, but they were not to hurt it, but to divert its incredibly automaton-like attention. Its legs seized the things flung to it. It was not possible to miss. Ten, fifteen, twenty of the items of small game were grasped in mid-air, as if they were creatures in flight. Burl's shouting took effect. His people fled to the side of the level lip of the ground. They climbed frantically past the opening of the valley. They fled toward the heights. Burl was the last to retreat. The monstrous millipede stood immobile, trapped from. for the moment, by the gratification of all its desires.

It was absorbed by the multitude of tiny tidbits with which it had been provided. It was a fact to Burrell's horror that he debated a frantic attack upon the monster in its insane absorption. But the strangling stench was deterrent enough. He fled, the last of his band of fugitives, to leave the place where the monstrous creature lived and prayed. As he left it, it was still crunching the small meals, one by one, with which the folk had supplied it. They went up on the mountain flank.

It was not to be supposed, of course, that the creature could not move above the slanting rock surface. Unquestionably, it roamed far and wide, upon occasion. But its own fetid reek would make impossible any idea of trailing the humans by scent. and climbing desperately as the humans did, it would be unable to see them when they were past the first protuberance of the mountain. In twenty minutes they slackened their pace. Exhaustion prompted it.

Caution ordered it. Because here they saw another small island of flatness in the slanting universe, which was all they could see save mist. It was simply a place where boulders had piled up, and soil had formed, and there was a miniature haven for life other than molds which could grow on naked stone. Actually, there was a space a hundred feet by fifty on which wholly familiar mushrooms grew.

It was a thicket like a detached section of the valley itself. Well-known edible fungi grew here. There were gray puffballs, and from it came the cheerful, loud chirping of some small beetle arrived at this spot nobody could possibly know how but happily ensconced in a separate bit of mushroom jungle remote from the dangers of the valley if it was small enough it would even be safe from the wreaking horror of the canyon just below it they broke off edible mushrooms here and ate and this could have been safety for them save for the giant millipede no more than half a mile below old john weased quarrelessly that here was food and there was no need for them to go further just now here was food burl regarded him with knitted brows john's reaction was natural enough the tribesfolk had never tended to think of the future because it was impossible to make use of such planning even burl could easily enough have accepted the fact that this was safety for the moment and food for the moment but it happened that the settled down here until driven out would and at this moment have deprived him of the authority he had so recently learned to enjoy you stay he said haughtily to john i go on to a better place where nothing is to be feared at all

he held at his hand to sire he assailed the slope again heading upward in the mist his tribe followed him dick and ted of course because they were boys and burrow led on to high adventures in which so far nobody had been killed Dore followed because he being the strongest man in the tribe, he had thoughtfully realized that his strength was not as useful as Burl's brains and other qualities. Corey followed because she had children, and they were safer where Burl led them than anywhere else. The others followed to avoid being left alone. The procession toiled on and up. Presently, Burl noticed that the air seemed clearer. here. It was not the misty only half-transparent stuff of the valley.

He could see for miles to right and left. He realized the curvature of the mountain face. But he could not see the valley. The mist hid that. Suddenly he realized that he saw the cloud bank overhead as an object. He had never thought of it specifically before. To him, it had been simply the sky. Now he saw an indefinite lower surface which yet definitely hid the heights toward which he moved.

He and his followers were less than a thousand feet below it. It appeared to Burrell that presently he would run into an obstacle which would simply keep him from going any further. The idea was disheartening, but until it happened, he obstinately climbed on. He observed that the thing which was the sky did not stay still. It moved, though slowly. A little higher, he could see that there were parts of it, which were actually lower than he was. They moved also, but they moved away from him as often as they moved toward him.

He had no experience of any dangerous things which did not leap at its victims, therefore he was not afraid. In fact, presently he noticed that the whiteness, which was the cloud-layer, seemed to retreat before it. him. He was pleased. Weak things like humans fled from enemies. Here was something which fled at his approach. His followers undoubtedly saw the same thing. Burl had killed spiders. He was a remarkable person. This unknown white stuff was afraid of him. Therefore, it was wise to stay close to Burrell. Burl found his vanity inflamed by the fact that always, even at its thickest, the white cloud stuff never came nearer than some dozens of feet. He swaggered as he led his people up. And presently there was brightness about them. It was a greater brightness than the tribesfolk had ever known. They knew daylight as a grayness in which one could see. Here was a brightness that shone. They were not accustomed. to such brightness.

They were not accustomed to silence either. The noises of the valley were like all the noises of the lowlands. They had been in the ears of every one of the human beings since they could hear at all. They had gradually diminished as the valley

dropped behind them. Now in the radiant white mist which was the cloud layer there were no sounds at all and the fact was suddenly startling. They blinked and the brightness. When they spoke to each other, they spoke in whispers. The stone underfoot was not even like and covered here. It was bare and bright and glistened with wetness. The light they

experienced took on a golden tint. All of these things were utterly unparalleled, but the stillness was a hush instead of a menacing silence. The golden light could not possibly be associated with fear. The people of the forgotten planet felt, most likely, that's sort of a promise in this shining tranquility which before they had known only in dreams, but this was no dream. They came up through the surface of a sea of mist, and they saw before them a shore of sunshine. They saw blue and sky and sunlight for the first time. The light smote their shins and brilliantly colored furry garments. It glittered in changing

ever more colorful flashes upon cloaks made of butterfly wings. It sparkled on the great lance carried by Burrell in the lead, and the quite preposterous weapons borne by his followers. A little

party of twenty humans waited ashore through the last of the thinning white stuff which was cloud. They gazed about them with wandering astonished eyes. The sky was blue. There was green grass.

And again there was sound. It was the sound of wind blowing among trees, and of things living in the sunshine. They heard insects, but they did not know what they heard. The shrill, small musical whirring, the high-pitched small cries, which made an elfin melody everywhere.

These were totally strange. all things were new to their eyes, and an enormous exaltation filled them. From deep-buried ancestral memories, they somehow knew that what they saw was right was normal, was appropriate and proper, and that this was the kind of world in which humans belonged, rather than the seething horror of the lowlands. They breathed clean air for the first time in many generations. burl shouted his triumph and his voice echoed among the trees and hillsides it was time for the plateau to ring with the shouting of a man in triumph end of chapter nine chapter ten of the forgotten planet by murray leinster this librivox recording is in the public domain men climb up to savagery

they had food for days they had brought mushrooms from the isolated thicket not too far beneath the clouds there were the ants that dick and tett had distributed granly and not all of which had been used to secure escape from the canyon of the millipede had they found other food immediately they would have settled down comfortably in the fashion normal to creatures whose idea of bliss is a secure hiding-place and food on hand, so they do not have to leave it. Somehow they believed that this high place of bright light and new colors was secure, but they had no hiding place, and though they did accept with the unreasoning faith of children and savages, that there were no enemies here, they still wanted one. They found a cave. It was small,

so that it would be crowded with all of them in it, but as it turned out, this was fortunate. at some time it had been occupied by some other creature but the dirt which floored it had settled flat and showed no tracks it retained faint traces of a smell which was unfamiliar but not unpleasing it held no connotation of danger ants stank of formic acid plus the musky odor of their particular city one could identify not only the kind of ant but its home city by sniffing at an ant trail spiders had their own hair-raising odor the smell of a praying mantis was acrid and all beetles reeked of decay and of course there were those bugs whose main defense was an effluvium which tended to strangle all but the smell's happy possessor this faint smell in the cave was different the humans thought vaguely that it might possibly be another kind of man actually it was the smell of a warm-blooded animal but burle and his fellows knew of no warm-blooded creatures but themselves they had come above the clouds a bare two hours before sunset of which they knew nothing for an hour they marveled staying close together they were especially astounded by the sun since they could not bear to look at it but presently being savages they accepted it matter-factly

they could not cease to wander at the vegetation about them they were accustomed only to gigantic fungi and the few straggling plants which tried so desperately to bear seed before they were devoured here they saw many plants and no fungi and they did not see anything they recognized as insects they looked only for large things they were astounded by the slenderness and toughness of the plants grass fascinated them and weeds a large part of their courage came from the absence of debris upon the ground the hunting ground of spiders were marked by grisly remnants of finished meals and where mantises roamed there were bits of transparent beetle wing and sharp spiny bits of armor not tasty enough to be consumed here in the first hour of their exploration they saw no sign that an insect like the lowland ones had ever been in this place at all but they could not believe the monsters never came they correctly and pessimistically assumed that their coming was only rare the cave was a great relief trees did not grow close enough to give them a feeling of safety though they were ludicrously amazed at the invincible hardness of tree trunks they had never known anything but insect armor and stone which was as hard as the trunks of those growing things they found nothing to eat but they were not yet hungry they did not worry about food while they still had remnants from their climb when the sun sank low and crimson coloring filled the west they were less happy

they watched the glory of their first sunset with scared incredulous eyes yellows and reds and purples reared toward the zenith it became possible to look at the sun directly they saw it descend behind something they could not guess at then there was darkness the fact stunned them so night came like this then they saw the stars for the first time as they came singly into being and the folk from the low land crowded frantically into the cave with its faint odor of having once been occupied by something else they filled the cave tightly burl had since the cave tightly burl had some sort of having once been occupied by something else they filled the cave tightly Burl had some reluctance to admit his terror. He and Sayah were the last to enter. And nothing happened, nothing. The sounds of sunset continued. They were strange but soothing,

and somehow, again ancestral memory, spoke comfortingly. They were the way night sounds ought to be. Burl and the others could not possibly know it, but for the first time in forty generations on the forgotten planet human beings were in an environment really suited to them it had a rightness and a goodness which was obvious in spite of its novelty and because of burrow's own special experience he was a little bit better able to estimate novelties than the rest he listened to the night noises from close by the cave's small entrance he heard the breathing of his tribes folk. He felt the heat of their bodies, keeping the crowded enclosure warm enough for all. Saya held fast to his hand for the reassurance of the contact. He was wakeful and thinking very busily and painfully, but Saya was not thinking at all. She was simply proud of Burl.

She felt to be sure a tumult which was fear of the unknown and relief from much greater fear of the familiar. She felt warm, prideful memories of the sight of Burrell leading and commanding the others. She had absorbing fresh memories of the look and feel of sunshine, and mental pictures of sky and grass and trees which she had never seen before. Confusedly, she remembered that Burl had killed a spider, no less, and he had shown how to escape a praying mantis by flinging at it an ant, and he had grandly led the others up a mountainside it had never occurred to anybody else to climb,

and the giant millipede would have devoured them all, but that Burl gave commands and set the example, and had marched magnificently up the mountainside when it seemed that all the cosmos twisted and prepared to drop them into an inverted sky. Sayah dozed, but Burrell sat awake, listening, and presently, with fast beating heart, he slipped out of the entrance to the cave and stared about him in the night. There was a coolness such as he had never known before, but nightfall was not long past.

There were smells in the air he had never before experienced, green things growing, and the peculiar, clean odor of wind that has been bathed in sunshine, and the oddly satisfying smell of resinous trees burl raised his eyes to the heavens he saw the stars in all their glory and he was the first human in two thousand years and more to look at them from this planet they were myriads upon myriads of them varying in brightness from stabbing lights to infinitesimal twinkling they were of every possible color they hung on the sky above him the mobile and unthreatening they had not descended they were very beautiful burl stared then he noticed that he was breathing deeply with a new zest he was filling his lungs with clean cool fragrant air such as men were intended to breathe from the beginning and of which burl and many others had been deprived it was almost intoxicating to feel so splendidly alive and unafraid there was a slight sound sya stood beside him trembling a little to leave the others had required great courage but she had come to realize that if burl was in danger she wished to share it they heard the night wind and the orchestra of night singers they wandered aside from the cave mouth and sya found completely primitive and satisfying pride in the courage of burl who was actually not afraid of the dark

Her own uneasiness became something which merely added savor to her pride in him. She followed him wherever he went, to examine this and consider that in the night-time. It gave her enormous satisfaction at once to think of danger and to feel so safe because of his nearness. Presently, they heard a new sound in the night. It was very far away, and not in the least like any sound they had ever heard. before. It changed in pitch as insect cries do not. It was a baying, yelping sound. It rose and held the higher note, and abruptly dropped in pitch before it ceased. Minutes later, it came again. Sia shivered, but Burle said thoughtfully, that is good sound. He didn't know why,

Saya shivered again, she said reluctantly. I am cold. It had been a rare sensation in the lowlands. It came only after one of the infrequent thunderstorms when wetting human bodies were exposed to the gusty winds that otherwise never blew. But here the nights grew cold after sundown. The heat of the ground would radiate to outer space

with no clouds to intercept it, and before dawn the temperature might drop nearly to freezing. on a planet so close to its sun however there would hardly be more than light or frost at any time the two of them went back to the cave it was warm there because of the close packing of bodies and many breaths burl and saya found places to rest and dozed off saya's hand again trustfully in burles he remained awake for a long time he thought of the stars but they were too strange to estimate he thought of the trees and grass but most of his impressions of this upper world were so remote from previous knowledge that he could only accept them as they were and defer reflecting upon them till later he did feel an enormous complacency and having led his followers here though but the last thing he actually thought about before his eyes blinked shut in sleep was that distant howling noise he had heard in the night it was totally novel and kind and yet there was something buried among the items of his racial heritage that told him it was good he was first awake of all the tribesmen and he looked out into the cold and passed out into the cold and packed out of his racial heritage that told him it was good he was first awake of all the tribesmen and he looked out into the cold and pallid grayness of before dawn he saw trees one side was brightly lighted by comparison and the other side was dark

he heard the tiny singing noises of the inhabitants of this place presently he crawled out of the cave again the air was biting in its chill it was an excellent reason why the giant insects could not live here but it was invigorating to burl as he breathed it in presently he looked curiously for the source of the peculiar one-sided light he saw the top of the sun as it peered above the eastern cloud bank the sky grew lighter he blinked and saw it rise more fully into view he thought to look upward and the stars that had bewildered him were nearly gone He ran to call Saya. The rest of the tribe waked as he roused her. One by one they followed to watch their first sunrise. The men gaped at the sun as it filled the east with colorings and rose and rose above the seemingly steaming layer of clouds

and then appeared to spring free of the horizon and swim on upward. The women stared with all their eyes. The children blinked and shivered and crept to the mothers for warmth. The women enclosed them in their cloaks, and they thawed and peered out once more at the glory of sunshine and the day. Very soon, too, they realized that warmth came from the great shining body in the sky. The children presently discovered a game.

It was the first game they had ever played. It consisted of running into a shaded place until they shivered, and then of a of running out into warm sunshine once more. Until this, dawning fear was the motive for such playing as they did. Now they gleefully made a game of sunshine. In this first morning of their life above the clouds, the tribesmen ate of the food they had brought from below.

But there was not an indefinite amount of food left. Burl ate and considered darkly and presently summoned his followers' attention. They were quite contented, and for the moment felt no need for his guidance. But he felt need of admiration. He spoke abruptly. We do not want to go back to the place we came from, he said sternly. We must look for food here, so we can stay for always.

Today we find food. It was a seizure of the initiative. It was the linking of the first. what the folks most craved with obedience to Burrell. It was a device by which dictators sees power, and it was the instinctive action of a leader. The eating men murmured agreement. There was a certain definite idea of goodness, not virtue, but of things desirable, associated with what Burrell did and what he commanded. His tribe was gradually forming a habit of obedience, though it was a very fragile habit up till now. He led them, exploring, as soon as they had eaten. All of them,

of course, they strangled irregularly behind him. They came to a brook and regarded it with amazement. There were no leeches, no greenish algae, no foaming masses of scum. It was clear, greatly daring. Burrell tasted it. He drank the first really potable water in a very long long time for his race on this planet. It was not fouled by drainage through molds or rusts. Dor drank after him, Jack. Corrie tasted and instantly bade her children drink. Even Otama drank suspiciously, and then raised her voice in shrill complaint that Burl had not led them to this place sooner. Tett and Dick became convinced that there were no deadly things lurking in it and splashed each other.

Dick slipped and sat down hard on white stuff that yielded and almost splashed. He got up and looked fearfully at what he thought might be a deadly slime. Then he yelped shrilly. He sat down on and crushed part of a bed of mushrooms, but they were tiny, clean and appetizing. They were miniatures of the edible mushrooms the tribe fed on. burl smelled and finally tasted one it was of course nothing more or less than a perfectly normal edible mushroom growing to the size that mushrooms originally grew on earth it grew on a shaded place in enormously rich soil it had been protected from direct sunlight by trees but it had not the means or the stimulus to become a monster he ate it he carefully composed his features they had been protected from direct sunlight by trees but it had not the means or the stimulus to become a monster

he ate it he carefully composed his features then he announced the find to his followers there was food here he told them sternly but in this splendid world which he had led them food was small there would be no great enemies here but the food would have to be sought in small objects instead of great ones they must look at this place and seek others like it in order to find food the tribesmen were doubtful but they plucked mushrooms whole ones instead of merely breaking off parts of their tops with deep astonishment they recognized the miniature objects as familiar things in small these mushrooms had the same savour but they were not coarse or stringy or tough like the giants they melted in the mouth life in this place to which burl had led them was delectable Truly, the doings of Burl were astonishing. When the oldest of Corey's children found the beetle on a leaf, and they recognized it, and instead of being bigger than a man and a thing to flee from,

it was less than an inch in size and helpless against them. They were entranced. From that moment onward, they would really follow Burl anywhere in the happy conviction that he could only bring good to everybody. The opinion could have driven, drawbacks and it need not always even be true but burrow did nothing to discourage it and then near midday they made a discovery even greater than that of familiar food in unfamiliar sizes they were struggling at the time through a vast patch of bushes with thorns on them they were not used to thorns which they deeply distrusted eventually they would find out that the glistening dark

fruit were blackberries and would rejoice in them. But at this first encounter, they were uneasy. In the midst of such an untouched berry patch, they heard noises in the distance. The sound was made up of cries of varying pitch, some of which were loud and abrupt, and others longer and less loud. The people did not understand them in the least. They could have been cries of human beings, perhaps, but they were not. not cries of pain. Also, they were not language. They seemed to express a tremendous, zestful excitement. They had no overtone of horror. And Burl and his folk had known no excitement among insects except frenzy. They could not imagine what sort of tumult this could be. But to Burrell, these sounds

had something of the timber of the yelping noises of the night before. He had felt drawn to that sound. He liked it. He liked this. He led the way boldly toward the agitated noises. Presently, after a mile or so, he and his people came out of breast-high weeds. Sia was immediately behind him. The others trailed, Tama, complaining bitterly that there was no need to track down sounds which could only mean danger. They emerged in a space of bare stone above a small and grassy amphitheater. The tumult came from its center. A pack of dogs was joyously

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

One of them cited the humans, he stopped stock-still and barked the others whirled and saw the humans as they came out into view the tumult ceased abruptly there was silence the tribesmen saw creatures with four legs only they had never before seen any living thing with fewer than six except men spiders had eight the dogs did not have mandibles they did not have wing cases they did not act like insects It was stupefying. And the dogs saw men, whom they had never seen before. Much more important, they smelled men. And the difference between man's smell and insect smell was so vast, because through hundreds of generations the dogs had not smelled anything with warm blood,

save their own kind. The difference in smell was so great and kind that the dogs did not react with suspicion, but with a fascinated curiosity. This was an unparalleled smell. It was, even in its novelty, an overwhelmingly satisfying smell. The dogs regarded the men with their heads on one side, sniffing in the deepest possible amazement, amazement so intense that they could not possibly feel hostility. One of them whined a little, because he did not understand.

End of Chapter 10. Chapter 11 of the Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Warm blood is a bond. Peculiarly enough, it was a matter of topography. The plateau which reached above the clouds rose with a steep slope from the valley, from which a hunting spider's brood had driven the men. This was on the eastern edge of the plateau.

On the west, however, the highland was subject to an indentation, which almost severed it. Not more than twenty miles from where Burles Group had climbed the sunshine, there was a much more gradual slope downward. There, mushroom forests grew almost to the cloud layer. From there, giant insects strayed up and on to the plateau itself. They could not live above the clouds, of course. There was not food enough for their insatiable hunger, especially at night it was too cold to allow them to stay active. But they did stray from their normal environment, and some of them did reach the sunshine, and perhaps some of them blundered back down to their mushroom forests again.

But those which did not stumble back were chilled to toper during their first night underneath the stars. They were only partly active on the second day, if indeed they were active at all. Few or none recovered from their second night's coldness. None at all kept their full ferocity and deadliness. And this was how the dogs survived. They were certainly descended from dogs on the wrecked spaceship, the Icarus, whose crew had landed on this planet some forty-odd human generation since. The humans of today had no memories of the ship, and the dogs surely had no traditions.

But just because those early dogs had less intelligence, they had more useful instincts. Perhaps the first generation of castaways bred dogs in their first few desperate centuries, hoping that dogs could help them survive. But no human civilization could survive in the lowlands. the humans went back to the primitive state of their race and lived as furtive vermin among monsters. Dogs could not survive there, though humans did linger on, so somehow the dogs took to the heights.

Perhaps dogs survived their masters, perhaps some were abandoned or driven away, but dogs had reached the highlands, and they did survive because giant insects blundered up after them. and could not survive in a proper environment for dogs and men there was even reason for the dogs remaining limited in number and keenly intelligent the food supply was limited when there were too many dogs their attacks on stumbling insect giants were more desperate and made earlier before the monster's ferocity was lessened so more dogs died then there was an adjustment of the number of dogs to the food supply there was also a selection of those too intelligent to attack rashly yet those who had insufficient courage would not eat in short the dogs who now regarded men with bright interested eyes were very sound dogs they had the intelligence needed for survival they did not attack anything imprudently

but they also knew that it was not necessary to be more than reasonably wary of insects in general not even spiders unless they were very newly arrived from the steaming lowlands so the dogs regarded men with very much the same astonished interests with which the men regarded the dogs burle saw immediately that the dogs did not act with blind ferocity of insects but with an interested estimated of intelligence, strikingly like that of men. Insects never examined anything. They fled or they fought. Those who are not carnivorous had no interest in anything but food, and those who were meat-eaters lumbered insanely in the battle at the bare sight of possible prey. The dogs did neither. They sniffed and they considered. Burl said sharply to his followers, stay here. He walked slowly down into the amphitheater. Sia followed him instantly.

Dogs moved warily aside, but they raised their noses and sniffed. They were long, luxurious sniffs. The smell of humankind was a good smell. Dogs had lived hundreds of their generations without having it in their nostrils. But before that, there were thousands of generations to whom that smell was a necessity.

Earl reached the object the dogs had been attacking. It lay on the grass throbbing painfully. It was the larva of an azure blue moth, which spread ten-foot wings at nightfall. The time for its metamorphoses was near, and it had traveled blindly in search of a place where it could spin its cocoom, safely, and changed to its wing form.

It had come to another world, the world above the clouds. It could find no proper place. place. Its stores of fat had protected it somewhat from the chill, but the dogs had found it as it crawled blindly. Burrell considered it was the custom of wasps to sting creatures like this at a certain special spot, apparently marked for them by a tuft of dark fur. Burl thrust home with his lance. The point pierced that particular spot. The creature died quickly and with without agony. The thought to kill was an inspiration. Then instinct followed. Burl cut off meat

for his tribesmen. The dogs offered no objection. They were well fed enough. Burl and Saya together carried the meat back to their other tribesfolk. On the way, Burl passed within two yards of a dog which regarded him with extreme, intentness, and almost a wistful expression. Burl's smell did not mean game. It meant something the dog struggled helplessly to remember, but it was good. I have killed the things, said Burl to the dog, in the tone of one addressing an equal. You can go and eat it now. I took only part of it.

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

of canine nature. Presently, the dogs were close about the humans. They were fascinated, and the humans were fascinated in return. Each of the people had a little of the feeling that Burl had experienced as the tribal leader, In the intent, absorbed and wholly unhustile regard of the dogs, even children felt flattered and friendly.

And surely in a place where everything else was so novel and so satisfactory, it was possible to imagine friendliness with creatures which were not human, since assuredly they were not insects. A similar state of mind existed among the dogs. Saya had more meat than she desired. She glanced among the members of the tribe. All were supplied. She tossed it to a dog.

He jerked away alertly, and then sniffed at it where it had dropped. A dog can always eat. He ate it. I wish you would talk to us, Setsaya, hopefully. The dog wagged his tail. You do not look like us, Setsaya, interestedly, but you act like we do. Not like the monsters.

The dog looked significantly at the meat in Burl's hand. Burl tossed it. The dog caught it with a quick snap, swallowed it, wagged his tail briefly, and came closer. It was a completely incredible action. But dogs and men were blood-kin on this planet. Besides, there was racial memory, rightness, in the friendship between men and dogs.

It was not hindered by any past experience of either. they were the only warm-blooded creatures on this world it was a kinship felt by both presently burle stood up and spoke politely to the dog he addressed him with the same respect he would have given to another man in all his life he had never felt equal to an insect but he felt no arrogance toward this dog he felt superior only to other men we are going back to her cave he said politely maybe we will meet again he led his tribe back to the cave in which they had spent the previous night the dogs followed ranging on either side they were well fed with no memory of hostility to any creature which smelled of warm blood they had an instinct without experience to dull it the latter part of the journey back to the tribal cave was if anybody had been qualified to notice it remarkably like a group of dogs taking a walk with a group of people it was companionable it felt right. That night, Burl left the cave as before, to look at the stars. This time Sayya went with him, matter-of-factly. But as they came out of the cave entrance, there was a stirring.

A dog rose and stretched himself elaborately, yawning the while. When Burl and Sayah moved away, he trod it amiably with them. They talked to it, and the dog seemed pleased. It wagged its tail. when morning came the dogs were still waiting hopefully for the humans to come out they appeared to expect the people to take another nice long walk on which they would accompany them it was a brand-new satisfaction they did not want to miss after all from a dog's standpoint humans are made to take long walks with among other things the dogs greeted the people with tail waggings and cordiality the dogs made a great difference in the adjustment of the tribe to life upon the plateau their friendship assured the new status of human life burl and his fellows had ceased to be furtive game for any insect murderer they had hoped to become unpursued foragers because they could hardly imagine anything else but when the dogs joined them they were immediately raised to the estate of hunters the men did not domesticate the dogs they made friends with them the dogs did not subjugate themselves to the men they joined them at first tentatively and then with worshipful enthusiasm and the partnership was so inevitably a right one that within a month it was as if it had always been actually save for a mere two thousand years it had been

at the end of a month the tribe had a permanent encampment there were caves at a suitable distance from the slope up which most wanderers from the lowlands came cori's oldest child found the chry's grisalus of a giant butterfly whose caterpillar form had so offensive an odor that the dogs had not attacked it but when it emerged from the chrysalis men and dogs together assailed it before it it could take flight. They ended the enterprise with warm mutual approval. The humans had acquired great wings with which to make warm cloaks, very useful

against the evening chill. Dogs and men alike had feasted. Then, on dawning, the dogs made a vast outcry which awoke the tribesmen. Burrell led the rush to the spot. They did battle with a monster

nocturnal beetle, less chilled than most such invaders. In the gray dawnlight, Burl realized that the darting yapping dogs kept the creatures full attention. He crippled and then killed it with his spear. The feet appeared to earn him warm admiration from the dogs. Burl wore a moth's feathery antenna again, bound to his forehead like a knight's plumes. He looked very splendid. The entire pattern of human life changed swiftly, as if an entire revelation had been granted

to men. The ground was often thorny. One man pierced his foot, old Tama, scolding him for his carelessness, bound a strip of wing fabric about it so he could walk. The injured foot was more comfortable than the one still unhurt. Within a week the women were busily, contriving. diverse forms of foot gear to achieve greater comfort for everybody. One day, Sia admired glistening red berries and tried the pluck one, and they stained her

finger. She licked her fingers to clean them, and berries were added to the tribe's menu. A veritable orgy of experiment began, which is a state of things, which is extremely rare in human affairs. A race with an established culture and tradition does not abandon old ways of doing things without profound reason, but men who have abandoned their old ways can discover astonishingly useful new ones. Already the dogs were established as sentries and watchmen, and as friends to every member of the tribe. By now, mothers did not feel alarmed if a child wandered out of sight. There would be dogs along. No danger could approach a child without vociferous warnings from the dogs. Men went hunting now, with zestful tail-wagging dogs as companions in the chase.

Door-killed a torpid minotaur beetle alone, save for assisting dogs, and Burrell felt a twinge of jealousy. But then Burrell himself battled a black male spider in a lone duel, with dogs. to help. By the time the stray monster from the lowlands reached this area, it was dazed and half-numbed by one night of continuous chill. Even the black spider could not find the energy to leap. It fought like a fiend, yet sluggishly. Burrow killed this one while the dogs kept it busy, and the dogs were reproachful because he carried it back to the tribal headquarters before dividing it among his assistance. Afterward, he realized that though he could have avoided the fight,

he would have been ashamed to do so, while the dogs barked and snapped at its furry legs. It was while things were in this state that the way of life for human beings on the forgotten planet was settled for all time. Burl and Sayah went out early one morning with the dogs to hunt for meat for the village. Hunting was easiest in the early hours while creatures that strayed up the night before were still sluggish with cold.

Often, hunting was merely butchery of an enfeebled monster to whom any effort at all was terribly difficult. This morning they strode away briskly. The dogs roved exuberantly through the brush before them. They were some five miles from the village when the dogs bayed. game. And Burl and Saya ran to the spot with ready spears, which was something of a change from their former actions on notice of a carnivore abroad. They found the dogs dancing and barking around one of the most ferocious of the meat-eating beetles. It was not unduly large, to be sure, its body might have been four feet long or thereabouts, but its horrible gaping mandibles

added a good three feet more. Those sly-like weapons gaped wide, opening sideways, as insect jaws do, as the beetle snapped hideously at its attackers, swinging about as the dogs dashed at it. Its legs were spurred and spiked and armed with dagger-like spines. Burl plunged into the fight. The great mandibles clicked and clashed. They were capable of disembarked. and bowing a man or snapping a dog's body in half without effort.

There were whistling noises as the beetle breathed through its abdominal spiracles. It fought furiously, making ferocious charges at the dogs who tormented and bewildered it, but they created the most zestfully excited of Tommels. Burl and Say were, of course, at least as absorbed and excited as the dogs, or they They would have noticed a thing that was to make so much difference to every human being, not only on the plateau, but still down in the lowlands. This unnoticed thing was beyond their imagining. They had been nothing else like it on this world for many hundreds of years.

It was a half a dozen miles away and perhaps a thousand feet high when Burl and Sayah prepared to intervene professionally on the behalf of the dogs. It was a silvery needle, floating unsupported in the air. As they entered the battle, it swerved and moved swiftly in their direction. It was silent, and they did not notice. They knew of no reason to scan the sky in daytime, and there was business on hand, anyhow. Burle leaped in toward the beetle, with a lance thrust, at the tough into gooment, where an armored leg joined the creature's body.

He missed, and the beetle whirled. Sia flaster cloted before the monster, so that it seemed a larger and nearer antagonist. As the creature whirled again, burl stab and a hind leg crumpled. Instantly the thing was limping. A beetle does not use its legs like four-legged creatures. A beetle moving shifts the two end legs on one side and the central leg on the other.

so that it always stands on an adjustable tripod of limbs it cannot adjust readily to crippling a dog snatched at a spiny lower leg and crunched and darted away the machine-like monster uttered a formless deep bass cry and was spurred to unbelievable fierceness the fight became a thing of furious movement and joyous uproar with burl striking once at a multiple eyes so the pain would deflect it from a charge at Sayah, and Sayah again, deflecting it with her cloak, and once, breathlessly, trying to strike it with her shorter spear. They struck it again, and a third time, and it sank horribly to the ground. All three legs on one side crippled. The remaining three thrust and thrust and struggled senselessly, and suddenly it was on its back, still striking its job.

gigantic jaws, frantically, in the hope of murder. But then Burl struck home, between two armor plates, where a ganglion was almost exposed. The blow killed it instantly. Burl and Sayah were smiling at each other when there was a monstrous sound of crashing trees. They whirled. The dogs picked up their ears. One of them barked defiantly. Something huge, truly huge.

had settled to the ground a bear two hundred yards away it was metal and there were ports in its sides and it was quite beyond imagining because of course no spaceship had landed on this planet in forty odd human generations a port opened as they stared at it men came out burl and sya were barbarically attired but they had been fighting some sort of local monster the men on the spaceship could not quite grasp what they had seen, and they had been helped by dogs. Human beings and dogs together always meant some sort of civilization. The dogs gave an impression of a very high level indeed. They trotted confidently over to the ship, and they sniffed cautiously at the men who had landed. But their behavior was admirable. They greeted the newcom, men, with a self-confident cordiality of dogs

who were on the best possible terms with human beings, and there was no question of any suspicion by anybody. The attitude of a man toward a dog is a perfectly valid indication of his character, if not of his technical education, and the newcomers knew how to treat dogs. So Burrell and Sayah went forward, with a confident pleasure

with which well-raised children and other persons of innate dignity greet strangers. The ship was the Walpity, a private cruiser doing incidental exploration for the biological survey in the course of a trip after good hunting. It had touched on the forgotten planet and it would never be forgotten again.

End of Chapter 11. Epilogue of the Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. The survey ship Tethys made the first landing on the forgotten planet, and the Orana followed, and some centuries later the Ludrid. Then the planet was forgotten until the Wapiti arrived. The arrival of the Wapiti was as much an accident as the loss of the punched card which caused the planet to be overlooked for some thousands of years.

Somebody had noticed that the sun around which it circled was of a type of, which usually has useful planets. But there was no record that it had ever been visited. So a request to the sportsman on Owipiti had caused them to turn aside. They considered, anyhow, that it would be interesting to land on a brand-new world or two. They considered it fascinating to find human beings there before them. But they could not understand the use of such primitive weapons or garments of such barbaric splendor.

They had trouble, too, because in forty-odd generations the speech of the universe had changed, while Burrow and Saya spoke a very archaic language indeed. But there was an educator on the Wapiti. It was quite standard apparatus, simply basic education for a human child, so that one's school years could be begun

with a backlog of correct speech and reading. with the practical facts of mathematics, sanitation, and the general information that any human being anywhere needs to know. Children use it before they start school, and they absorb its information quite painlessly. It is rare that an adult needs it, but Burrell and Sia did. Burrell was politely invited to wear the headset, and he politely obliged. He found himself equipped with a new language and what seemed to him an astonishing amount of information. Among the information was the item that he was going to have as an adult a severe headache. Which he did, also included, was the fact that making of records for such educators was so laborious a process

that it took generations to compile one master record for the instruments. Burrow, with a splitting headache, nevertheless, urged Saya to join him in getting an education. And she did, and thereafter they were able to converse with a sportsman on the Wapiti, comfortably enough, except for their headaches. And all this led to extremely satisfactory arrangements. Sportsmen could not but be enthusiastic about the hunting of giant insects with dogs and spears. sportsmen on the Wapiti wanted some kind of sport. Burl's fellow tribesmen were delighted to oblige, though they had not quite the zest of Burrell. They had to acquire educations in their turn,

so they could talk to their new hunting companions, but the hunting was magnificent. The Wapidi abandoned its original plans and settled down for a stay. Presently, Burl's casual talk of the lowlands produced results. An atmosphere flyer came out of the ship's storage compartments, and, through the educator, Burrell was now a civilized man. He had not the specialized later information of his guests, but he had knowledge that they could not dream of, and which it would take much of a century to put in recordable form for an educator.

So an atmosphere flyer went down into lowlands through the cloud banks, There were three men on board. They had good hunting, magnificent hunting. Even more importantly, they found another cluster of human beings who lived as fugitives among the insect giants. They brought them to the plateau a few at a time. Sportsmen stayed in the lowlands with modern weapons, hunting enthusiastically while the transfer took place.

In all, the Wapidi stayed two months Earth's time. when it left its sportsmen had such trophies as would make them envied of all other hunters in the three-star clusters they left behind weapons and atmosphere flyers and their library and tools but they took with them enthusiasm for the sport on the once forgotten planet and rather warm feelings of friendship for burrow they sent their friends back the next ship to come in found a small series of the small series of the ship to come in found a small city on the plateau with a population of 300 souls, all civilized by educator. Naturally, they had no trouble building civilized dwellings or practicing sanitation or developing a neatly adapted culture pattern for their particular environment. This second ship brought more weapons and flyers and news from the first party about commercial demand for the incredibly luxurious moth fur.

to be found only on one planet in all the galaxy. The fourth ship to land on the plateau was a trading ship, anxious, to load such furs for recklessly bidding merchants in a dozen interplanetary marts. There were then nearly a thousand people living on the plateau. They had a natural monopoly, not of moth fur and butterfly wing fabric, and panels of iridescent chitin for luxurious decoration but of the strictly practical and detailed knowledge of insect habits which made it possible to obtain them off-planet visitors who tried to hunt without local knowledge did not come back from the lowlands in time burl firmly enacted a planetary law which forbade the inexperience to go below the cloud-layer because of course a government had to be formed for the planet but men with the basic education of citizens everywhere did not fumble it they had a job to do which was more important than anybody's vanity it was a job which gave deep an abiding satisfaction

when naked trembling folk were found in the mushroom jungles and brought to the plateau they had one instant feverish desire as soon as they got over the headache from the educator they wanted to go back to the lowlands it was profitable to be sure but it was even more of a satisfaction to hunt and kill the monsters that had hunted and killed men for so long it felt good too to find other humans and bring them out to sunshine so nowadays the forgotten planet has ceased to be forgotten it is hardly necessary to name it because its name is known throughout all the galaxy its population is not large so far but it is an interesting place to live in in the popular mind it is the most glamorous of all possible worlds and for easily understandable reasons The inhabitants of its capital city were moth-fur garments and butterfly wing cloaks for the benefit of their fellows in the lowlands. There is no day but flyers take off and dive down into the mists. When human hunters are in the lowlands, they dress as the lowlanders they used to be, so that lowlanders may spy them and will be sure that they are men and friends, and come to them

to be raised to proper dignity above the insects. It is not unusual for a man to be brought up to sunshine and have a session with the educator and be flying his own assigned atmosphere flyer within a week, diving back above what used to be the place where he was hunted, but where he has become the hunter. It was a very pleasant arrangement.

The search for more humans than the lowlands is a prosperous business, even when it is unsuccessful. The wings of the white morpho butterflies bring the highest prices, but even a common swallowtail as riches, and the fur of caterpillars, duly processed, goes into the holds of the planet-owned spaceline ships with the care given elsewhere to platinum and diamonds. And also, it is good sport.

The planet is a sportsman's paradise. There are not too many visitors. Nobody may go hunting without an experienced host. An off-planet sportsman tend to feel somewhat queasy after a session as guests of the folk who have made Burl their planet president. Visitors are not so much alarmed at fighting flying beetles in mid-air, even though the beetles may compare with a hunter's craft in size and are terrifically tenacious of life.

The thing that appalled strangers is the insistence of Burrell's fellow citizens, no longer only tribesmen, upon fighting spiders on the ground. With their memories, they like it that way. It is more satisfactory. Not long ago, the planet president of Sumer 11 was Burles' guest for a hunt. sumer eleven is a highly civilized planet and life there has become tame its president is an ardent hunter he liked burl who is still all hard muscle despite his graying hair he and saya have a very comfortable dwelling now that their children are grown they have room in it even for a planet president if he comes as a sportsman guest the planet president of sumer eleven even like the planet president of sumer eleven even like the the informal atmosphere of a house where pleasantly self-possessed dogs curl up comfortably

on rugs of Emperor Moth down that elsewhere are beyond price. But the President of Sumer Eleven was embarrassed on his visit. He and Burl are both hunters, and they are highly congenial. But the President of Sumer Eleven was upset on his last flight to the lowlands. Burl got out of the atmosphere flyer alone, and for pure deep personal satisfaction, he fought a mastodon-sized wolf spider with nothing but a spear. He killed the creature, of course, but the president of Sumer Eleven was embarrassed. He wouldn't have dared try it.

He felt that, however, sporting it might be it was too risky a thing for a planet president to do. But Zeya took it for granted. End of Epilogue. End of The Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster.