Part 7 (1/2)

Hundreds of thousands of years before, his ancestors had been forced to develop brains as penalty for the lack of claws or fangs. Burl was sunk as low as any of them, but he had to 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 has not.

In mid-morning he heard a discordant, deep-ba.s.s 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 querulous note. Burl heard a cras.h.i.+ng and plunging as of some creature caught in a snare. A mushroom tumbled with a spongelike sound, and the thud was followed by a tremendous commotion. Something was fighting desperately against something else, but 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 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 ma.s.s it seemed a fabric of sheerest, finest texture. Held up by tall mushrooms, it was anch.o.r.ed to the ground below and drew away to a small point through which a hole led to some as yet unseen recess. All the s.p.a.ce 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. A 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 ba.s.s roar.

Burl breathed more easily. He watched with fascinated eyes. Mere death among insects--even tragic 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 have 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 s.h.i.+ning, 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 b.e.s.t.i.a.l enjoyment it sucked all the succulence, all the fluid, from its victim's carca.s.s.

Then the breath left Burl 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 self-induced panic. It occurred to him that he, Burl, had killed a hunting spider--a tarantula--upon the red-clay cliff. True, the killing had been an accident and had nearly cost him his own life in the web-spider's snare.

But--he had killed a spider and of the most deadly kind. Now it occurred to Burl 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.

Then he found himself waiting.

Presently, through the interstices of the silk, he saw the gray bulk of the spider. It had left the drained and shrunken carca.s.s 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 snare, seen down the length of the pa.s.sage-way.

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.