Part 16 (1/2)

At the moment it was pleasing to have all his tribe regard him so wors.h.i.+pfully, even if not in quite the same fas.h.i.+on as Saya. He was suddenly aware that 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. Saya would have gone with them, but Burl held her back. He did not quite know why. It could have been that the absolute equality of the s.e.xes in cravenness was due to end, and for his own vanity Burl would undertake the defense of Saya. He did not a.n.a.lyze so far. He did not want her to leave him, so he prevented it.

The tribesfolk scattered. Dor went with his wife, to help her arm herself. Jak uneasily followed his. Jon went timorously where the picked-over remnant of the cricket's carca.s.s might still yield an instrument of defense. Cori laid her youngest child at Burl's feet while she went fearfully to find some toothed instrument meeting Burl's specification of sharpness.

There was a stifled scream. A ten-year-old boy--he was Dik's younger brother--stood paralyzed. He stared in an agony of horror at something that had stepped from behind a misshapen fungoid object fifty yards from Burl, but less than ten yards from him.

It was a pallidly greenish 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 leaflike 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 try to flee. If he had fled, it would fling itself after him with a ferocity beside 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-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 Burl, so far, had any notion of actually 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 larger--fiends lived, 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 a.r.s.enal of knives and daggers. But Burl was at once furious and 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-fascinated boy. He had hurled it at the mantis.

It struck. And insects simply do not think. Something hurtled at the ghastly young creature. Its arms struck ferociously to defend itself.

The ant was heavy. Poised upright in its spectral att.i.tude, 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 Cori. She had left her baby with Burl. When Burl dashed from the spot, Saya had quite automatically followed the instinct of any female for the young of its kind. She'd s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 hung always in the air partly veiled the details of its horrors. It was less actual, not quite as deadly as it once had seemed.

Burl said fiercely to his followers:

”Where are the sharp things?”

The tribesfolk looked at one another, numbly. Then Jon 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? Ai! Ai! 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 anyone dared to despair instead of thinking admiringly about his remarkableness.

”I,” said Burl 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 uphill. Naturally! There were spiders and mantises in the valley,--so many that to stay there meant death. So he moved to go somewhere else.

And this was the climactic 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 Burl's kind of leaders.h.i.+p. A few may have learned courage. It is possible that some even led their tribesfolk upon migrations in search of safer lands to live in. But until Burl led 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 forbears had most ironically been brought to this planet to prepare it for humans to live on.

Burl was the first man to lead his fellows toward the heights.

_9. THERE IS SUCH A THING AS SUNs.h.i.+NE_

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 mountainsides seemed to descend into a sea of milk. Great undulations in the mist had the semblance of waves, which moved with great deliberation toward the sh.o.r.es. 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.