Part 16 (2/2)

The look of things was different on the highlands. This part of the unnamed world, no less than the lowlands, had been seeded with life on two separate occasions. Once the seedings was with bacteria and moulds and lichens to break up the rocks and make soil of 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 moulds and yeasts and rusts were stunted by the sunlight. Gra.s.ses and weeds and trees survived, instead. This was an ideal environment for plants that needed sunlight to form chlorophyl, with which to make use of the soil that had been formed. So on the highlands the vegetation was almost earthlike. 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 grow 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 or 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 Burl 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 s.p.a.ce-craft 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 a place high above the valley Burl had led them to. That 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 neither knew dryness nor fire.

Nor had they ever known such surroundings as presently enveloped them. A slanting rocky mountainside, which stretched up frighteningly to the very sky. Grayness overhead. Grayness also to one side,--the side away from the mountain. And 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 superst.i.tious, 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 G.o.ds 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 superst.i.tions of savages involve 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 tabus and totem animals whose flesh must not be eaten, and forbidden areas which might contain food.

Religion there was, among Burl's people, but superst.i.tion was not. No humans, anywhere, can live without religion, but on Earth Eskimos did with a minimum of superst.i.tions,--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 lest a 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 Burl 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--n.o.body had abandoned any of the dangling ant-bodies Tet and Dik 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 s.p.a.ce, and behind it a winding canon of sorts like a vast crack in the mountain's substance. Burl breasted the curving edge and found flatness beyond it. He stopped short.

The mouth of the canon was perhaps fifty yards from the lip of the downward slope. So much s.p.a.ce was practically level, and on it were toadstools 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 canon-walls by cables all of two hundred 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 astonished to discover, were fully a yard apart. The web was for giant game. It was empty now, but Burl saw the telegraph-cord which ran from the very center of the web to the web-maker's lurking-place. There was a rocky shelf on the canon-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 acc.u.mulated behind him. Old Jon'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 ichneumon-fly,--see feet of springy, slender, deadly-pointed tube--and the abdomen-plates of bees and the draggled antennae of moths and b.u.t.terflies.

Something very terrible lived in this small place. The mountainsides were barren of food for 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 denned back in the canon where they could not see it. It dined here.

The humans looked and s.h.i.+vered, all but Burl. 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 Burl strove to free the new, splendid weapon for himself.

That was why he heard the gasp which somebody uttered in default of a scream that would not be uttered. It was a choked, a strangled, an inarticulate sobbing noise.

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