Mad Planet | Page 7

had undergone, but Burl did not know that. He scraped frantically at it with the side of his spear, and it fell off, leaving a blotch of blood on his skin. It lay, writhing and pulsating, on the ground, and Burl fled.
He found himself in another toadstool forest, and finally paused. He recognized the type of fungus growths around him, and began eating voraciously. In Burl the sight of food always produced hunger--Nature's compensation for his lack of an instinct to store food.
Burl's heart was small within him. He was far from Saya and his tribe. Just 40 miles separated them, but Burl did not think of distances. He had come down the river. He was alone in a land he had never known or seen.
Food was plentiful. The mushrooms surrounding him were edible, a supply of sustenance Burl's whole tribe could not have eaten in many days, but that very fact made him think of Saya. He suddenly remembered the large oily fish he had caught for her, still hanging down his back from the sinew about his neck.
He took it and fingered it all over, getting his hands and himself thoroughly greasy in the process, but he could eat no more. The thought of Saya's pleasure at the sight of it gave him renewed determination.
With all the immediacy of a child or savage he set off. He had come along the bank of the stream. He would return along the bank of the stream.
Through the awkward aisles of the mushroom forest he moved, eyes and ears open for danger. Several times he heard the omnipresent clicking of ants on their multifarious businesses in the wood, but he ignored those shortsighted foragers. He feared only one kind of ant, the army ant, which sometimes travels in hordes of millions, eating all in its path. Ages ago, when they were tiny creatures not an inch long, even the largest animals fled from them. Now that they measured a foot long, not even the gorged spiders whose distended bellies were a yard thick dared challenge them.
The mushroom forest ended. A cheerful grasshopper (Ephigger) munched at some dainty it had found. Its hind legs were bunched beneath it in perpetual readiness for flight. But a monster wasp--as long as Burl himself--suddenly dropped from the sky and seized the luckless feaster.
The battle was brief. The wasp's flexible abdomen curved delicately. Precise as a surgeon's scalpel, its sting entered the jointed armor just beneath the head of its prey. All struggle ceased.
The wasp grasped the paralyzed--not dead--insect and flew away. Burl grunted, and passed on.
The ground grew rough, impeding Burl's progress. He clambered arduously up steep slopes and cautiously down their farther sides. Once he climbed through a mass of small mushrooms so densely tangled that he had to smash them with blows of his spear to clear a path. They shed torrents of a fiery red liquid that rolled off his greasy breast and sank into the ground (Lactarius deliciosus).
Overconfidence now possessed Burl. He walked less cautiously, more boldly. The fact that he had struck something and destroyed it lent him foolhardy courage.
He climbed to the top of a red clay cliff, 100 feet high. Erosion from the river had carved it ages ago, but now the riverbank came no nearer than a quarter-mile.
Shelf-fungi, large and small, white, yellow, orange, and green, in indescribable confusion and luxuriance, covered the cliffside. From a point halfway up the cliff the inch-thick cable of a spider's web stretched down to an anchorage on the ground. The geometrical pattern of the web glistened evilly.
Somewhere among the cliffside fungi the huge creature waited until some unfortunate prey should struggle helplessly in its monster snare. The spider waited motionless, implacably patient, invicibly certain of prey, utterly merciless to its victims.
Burl strutted at the cliff's edge, a silly little pink-skinned creature with an oily fish slung about his neck, a draggled fragment of moth's wing about his middle, and a minotaur beetle's nose in his hand. He looked scornfully down on the whitely shining trap. He had struck mushrooms, and they had fallen before him. He feared nothing.
60 paces before him, a shaft sank vertically in the sandy, clayey soil. Carefully rounded, lined with silk, it descended 30 feet, then enlarged into a chamber where the owner and digger of the shaft might rest. An inconspicuous trapdoor, camouflaged with mud and earth, sealed the top of the hole. Only a keen eye could have perceived the opening. But a keen eye now peered out from a tiny crack, the eye of the engineer of the underground dwelling.
Eight hairy legs surrounded the creature that hung motionless at the top of the shaft. Two pairs of ferocious mandibles stretched before its fierce mouthparts. Two eyes glittered evilly in the darkness of the