The Mad PlanetThe Mad Planet
            by Murray Leinster



      Editor's Notes by Blake Linton Wilfong
            This story from 1920 has everything: action-packed adventure set in 
      a distant future of giant insects and savage men, loads of science 
      (including evolutionary biology, entomology, and the greenhouse effect), 
      and passages of thought-provoking philosophy and haunting poetic majesty.
            It is also an example of the familiar story line mythologist Joseph 
      Campbell outlined in his bestseller The Hero with a Thousand Faces: "A 
      hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of 
      supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive 
      victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with 
      the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." This basic formula, Campbell 
      explained, has been used and reused with countless variations since the 
      dawn of storytelling. Yet it is as exciting today as it was millennia ago.
            Indeed, "The Mad Planet" was so popular with readers of Argosy 
      magazine that Leinster followed it the next year with a sequel called "The 
      Red Dust". A second sequel, "Nightmare Planet", appeared in 1953! Leinster 
      combined altered versions of the three stories into one book, The 
      Forgotten Planet (1954). 

In his lifetime of 20 years, Burl had never wondered what his grandfather had 
thought about his surroundings. The grandfather had suffered an untimely, 
unpleasant end, which Burl remembered vaguely as a fading succession of screams 
as he was carried away at his mother's top speed. 
Burl had rarely thought of the old man since. Surely he had never wondered what 
his great-grandfather thought, and there certainly never entered his head such a 
hypothetical question as what his many-times-great-grandfather--say of the year 
1920--would have thought of Burl's world. 
He was treading cautiously over a brownish carpet of fungus growth, creeping 
furtively toward the stream he generically called "water". Towering overhead, 
three man-heights high, great toadstools hid the grayish sky from sight. 
Clinging to their foot-thick stalks were other fungi, parasites on growths that 
had once been parasites themselves. 
Burl was a slender young man wearing a single garment twisted about his waist, 
made from the wing-fabric of a great moth his tribesmen had slain as it emerged 
from its cocoon. His fair skin showed no trace of sunburn. He had never seen the 
sun, though the sky was rarely hidden from view save by the giant fungi which, 
along with monster cabbages, were the only growing things he knew. Clouds 
usually spread overhead, and when they did not, perpetual haze made the sun but 
an indefinitely brighter part of the sky, never a sharply edged ball of fire. 
Fantastic mosses, misshapen fungi, colossal molds and yeasts, comprised the 
landscape about him. 
Once, as he dodged through the forest of huge toadstools, his shoulder touched a 
cream-colored stalk, giving the whole fungus a tiny shock. Instantly, from the 
umbrellalike mass of pulp overhead, a fine, impalpable powder fell on him like 
snow. It was the season when toadstools sent out their spores, dropping them at 
the first disturbance. 
Furtive as he was, he paused to brush them from his head and hair. He knew they 
were deadly poison. 
Burl would have been a curious sight to a 20th century man. His skin was pink, 
like a child's, and sported little hair. Even that atop his head was soft and 
downy. His chest was larger than his forefathers', and his ears were capable of 
independent movement, to catch threatening sounds from any direction. The pupils 
of his large, blue eyes could dilate to extreme size, allowing him to see in 
almost complete darkness. 
He was the result of 30,000 years of human adaptation to changes begun in the 
latter half of the 20th century. 

Then, civilization had been high and apparently secure. Mankind had reached 
permanent accord, and machinery performed all labor; men needed only supervise 
its operation. Everyone was well-fed and well-educated, and it seemed that until 
the end of time Earth would be home to a community of comfortable human beings, 
pursuing their studies and diversions, illusions and truths. Peace, privacy, and 
freedom were universal. 
But just when men were congratulating themselves on this new Golden Age, 
fissures opened slowly in the Earth's crust, and carbon dioxide began pouring 
out into the atmosphere. That gas had long been known to be present in the air, 
and necessary to plant life. Plants absorbed its carbon, releasing the oxygen 
for use again in a process called the "carbon cycle". 
Scientists noted the Earth's increased fertility, but discounted it as the 
effect of carbon dioxide released by man's burning of fossil fuels. For years 
the continuous exhalation from the world's interior went unnoticed. 
Constantly, however, the volume increased. New fissures opened, pouring into the 
already laden atmosphere more carbon dioxide--beneficial in small amounts, but 
as the world learned, deadly in quantity. 
The entire atmosphere grew heavy. It absorbed more moisture and became humid. 
Rainfall increased. Climates warmed. Vegetation became more luxuriant--but the 
air gradually became less exhilarating. 
Soon mankind's health was affected. Accustomed through long ages to breathing 
air rich in oxygen and poor in carbon dioxide, men suffered. Only those living 
on high plateaus or mountaintops remained unaffected. All the world's plants, 
though nourished and growing to unprecedented size, could not dispose of the 
continually increasing flood of carbon dioxide. 
By the middle of the 21st century it was generally recognized that a new 
carboniferous period was beginning, when Earth's atmosphere would be thick and 
humid, unbreathable by man, when giant grasses and ferns would form the only 
vegetation. 
As the 21st century closed, the human race began reverting to savagery. The 
lowlands were unbearable, the air depressing and enervating. Life there became a 
sickly, fever-ridden existence. All mankind desired the highlands, and men 
forgot their two centuries of peace. 
They fought destructively, each for a bit of land where he might live and 
breathe. Those forced to remain at sea level died in the poisonous air. 
Meanwhile, the danger zone crept up as the earth fissures tirelessly poured out 
steady streams of foul gas. Soon men could not live within 500 feet of sea 
level. The lowlands went uncultivated, becoming jungles unparalleled since the 
first carboniferous period. 
Then men died of sheer inanition at 1,000 feet. The plateaus and mountaintops 
were crowded with folk struggling for footholds and food beyond the invisible 
menace that crept up, and up-- 
These events occured over many years, several generations. Between the 
announcement of the International Geophysical Institute that carbon dioxide in 
the air had increased from .04% to .1% and the time when at sea level 6% of the 
atmosphere was the deadly gas, more than 200 years intervened. 
Coming gradually as it did, the poisonous effect of the deadly stuff increased 
insidiously. First lassitude, then heaviness of brain, then weakness of body. 
The human population of the entire world slowly declined to a fraction of its 
former size. At last there was room in plenty on the mountaintops--but the 
danger level continued to rise. 
There was but one solution. The human body would have to inure itself to the 
poison, or face extinction. It finally developed a toleration for the gas that 
had wiped out entire races and nations, but at a terrible cost. Lungs increased 
in size to secure the oxygen of life, but the poison, inhaled at every breath, 
left the few survivors sickly and perpetually weary. Their minds lacked energy 
to cope with new problems or communicate knowledge. 


So after 30,000 years, Burl crept through a forest of toadstools and fungus 
growths. He was ignorant of fire, metals, or the uses of stone and wood. A 
single garment covered him. His language was a meager group of a few hundred 
labial sounds, conveying no abstractions and few concrete things. 
There was no wood in the scanty territory his tribe furtively inhabited. With 
the increase in heat and humidity the trees had died out. Those of northern 
climes went first: oaks, cedars, and maples. Then pines, beeches, cypresses, and 
finally even jungle forests vanished. Only grasses and reeds, bamboos and their 
kin, flourished in the new, steaming atmosphere. The jungles gave place to dense 
thickets of grasses and ferns, now become treeferns again. 
Then fungi took their place. Flourishing as never before on a planet of torrid 
heat and perpetual miasma, on whose surface the sun never shone directly because 
of an ever-thickening bank of clouds hanging sullenly overhead, the fungi sprang 
up. About the dank pools festering over the earth's surface, fungus growths 
clustered. Of every imaginable shade and color, of all monstrous forms and 
malignant purposes, of huge size and flabby volume, they spread over the land. 
The grasses and ferns gave way to them. Squat footstools, flaking molds, 
evil-smelling yeasts, vast mounds of fungi inextricably mingled as to species, 
but growing, forever growing and exhaling an odor of dark places. 
The strange growths grouped themselves in forests, horrible travesties of the 
vegetation they had succeeded. They grew and grew with feverish intensity, while 
above them fluttered gigantic butterflies and huge moths, sipping daintily of 
their corruption. 
Of the animal world above water, insects alone endured the change. They 
multiplied, and enlarged in the thickened air. The sole surviving vegetation--as 
distinct from fungi--was a degenerate form of the cabbages that had once fed 
peasants. On those rank, colossal masses of foliage, stolid grubs and 
caterpillars ate themselves to maturity, then swung below in strong cocoons to 
sleep the sleep of metamorphosis from which they emerged to spread their wings 
and fly. 
The tiniest butterflies of former days grew until their gaily colored wings 
measured in terms of feet, while the larger emperor moths extended their purple 
sails to a breadth of yards upon yards. The overshadowing fabric of their wings 
would have dwarfed Burl. 
Fortunately, they, the largest flying creatures, were harmless. Burl's fellow 
tribesmen sometimes found a cocoon ready to open, and waited patiently until the 
beautiful creature within broke through its matted shell and emerged into the 
sunlight. 
Then, before it could gather energy from the air, or its wings swell to strength 
and firmness, the tribesmen attacked, tearing the filmy, delicate wings from its 
body and the limbs from its carcass. And when it lay helpless before them, they 
carried away the juicy, meat-filled limbs to be eaten, leaving the still living 
body to stare helplessly at this strange world through multifaceted eyes, and 
become prey to voracious ants who would soon clamber upon it and carry it in 
fragments to their underground city. 
Not all insects were so helpless or harmless. Burl knew of wasps, almost the 
length of his own body, with instantly fatal stings. To all wasps, however, some 
other insect is predestined prey. The sphex feeds solely on grasshoppers; other 
wasps eat flies only. Burl's furtive tribe feared them but little. 
Bees were similarly aloof. They were hard-pressed for survival, those bees. Few 
flowers bloomed, and they were reduced desperate expedients: bubbling yeasts and 
fouler things, occasionally the nectarless blooms of rank, giant cabbages. Burl 
knew the bees. They droned overhead nearly as large as he, bulging eyes gazing 
at him with abstracted preoccupation. And crickets, beetles, spiders-- 
Burl knew spiders! His grandfather had fallen prey to a hunting tarantula, which 
had leaped with incredible ferocity from its excavated tunnel in the earth. The 
vertical pit, two feet in diameter, went down 20 feet. At the bottom, the 
black-bellied monster waited for the tiny sounds that would warn it of 
approaching prey (Lycosa fasciata). 
Burl's grandfather had been careless, and his terrible shrieks as the horrible 
monster darted from the pit and seized him had lingered vaguely in Burl's mind 
ever since. Burl had seen, too, the monster webs of another species of spider, 
and watched from afar as the huge, misshapen creature sucked juices from a 
three-foot cricket entangled in its trap. 
Burl remembered the stripes of yellow, black, and silver crossing its abodomen 
(Epiera fasciata). He had been fascinated by the struggles of the imprisoned 
insect, coiled in a hopeless tangle of sticky, gummy ropes the thickness of 
Burl's finger, cast about its body before the spider attempted to approach. 
Burl knew these dangers. They were part of his life. It was his and his 
ancestors' accustomedness to them that made his existence possible. He evaded 
them, and survived. A moment of carelessness, an instant's relaxation of his 
habitual caution, and he would be one with his forebears, forgotten meals of 
long-dead, inhuman monsters. 
Three days before, Burl had crouched behind a bulky, shapeless fungus, watching 
a furious duel between two huge horned beetles. Their jaws, gaping wide, clicked 
and clashed on each other's armor. Their legs crashed like cymbals as their 
polished surfaces ground and struck each other. They fought over some 
particularly attractive bit of carrion. 
Burl had watched until a gaping orifice appeared in the armor of the smaller 
beetle. It uttered a shrill cry, or seemed to. The noise was, actually, the 
tearing of the horny stuff beneath the jaws of its victorious adversary. 
The wounded beetle's struggles weakened. At last it collapsed, and the conqueror 
placidly began to eat the conquered--alive. 
After the meal was finished, Burl approached the scene with caution. An ant, 
forerunner of many, was already inspecting the carcass. 
Burl usually ignored ants. They were stupid, shortsighted insects, not hunters. 
Save when attacked, they offered no injury. They were scavengers, seeking the 
dead and dying, but became dangerous, vicious opponents if their prey were 
questioned. They measured from three inches, for tiny black ants, to a foot for 
large termites. 
Burl heard the tiny clickings of their limbs as they approached. He hastily 
seized the detached, sharp-pointed snout of the victim, and fled. 
Later, he inspected his find curiosly. The victim had been a minotaur beetle, 
with a sharp-pointed horn like that of a rhinocerous to reinforce its offensive 
armament, already dangerous because of its wide jaws. A beetle's jaws work side 
to side, instead of up and down, making its protection complete in no less than 
three directions. 
Burl examined the sharp, daggerlike instrument. He pricked his finger on its 
point, and flung it aside as he crept to the hiding-place of his tribe. They 
numbered only 20: four men, six women, the rest adolescents and children. 

Burl had wondered at the strange feelings that came over him when he looked at 
one of the girls. She was younger--perhaps 18--and fleeter of foot than he. They 
talked, sometimes, and Burl occasionally shared with her an especially succulent 
find of foodstuffs. 
The next morning Burl found the horn where he had thrown it, sticking in the 
flabby side of a toadstool. He retrieved it, and gradually, far back in his 
mind, an idea began to form. He sat awhile with the thing in his hand, 
considering it with a faraway look in his eyes. From time to time he stabbed at 
a toadstool, awkwardly, but with gathering skill. His imagination began to work 
fitfully. He visualized himself stabbing food as the larger beetle had stabbed 
the former owner of the weapon he now possessed. 
Burl could not imagine attacking one of the fighting insects. He could only 
picture himself, dimly, stabbing something that was food with this death-dealing 
thing. It was no longer than his arm and though clumsy to the hand, an effective 
and terribly sharp implement. 
He thought: Where was there food, food that lived, that would not fight back? 
Presently he rose and made his way toward the tiny river. Yellow-bellied newts 
swam in its waters. Aquatic larvae of a thousand insects floated about its 
surface or crawled along its bottom. 
Death lived there, too. Giant crayfish snapped horny claws at the unwary. 
Mosquitos of four-inch wingspread sometimes hummed above the river. They were 
dying out for lack of the plant juices on which males of the species lived, but 
even so they were formidable. Burl had learned to crush them with fragments of 
fungus. 
He crept furtively through the forest of misshapen toadstools, brownish fungus 
underfoot. Strange orange, red, and purple molds clustered about the bases of 
the creamy toadstool stalks. Burl paused to run his sharp-pointed weapon through 
a fleshy stalk and reassure himself that his plan was practicable. 
He heard a tiny clicking, and froze into stillness. It was a troop of five 
heavily laden ants, each eight inches long, returning to their city. They moved 
swiftly along the route marked with black, odorous formic acid exuded from the 
bodies of their comrades. Burl waited until they passed, then went on. 
He came to the bank of the river. Green scum covered much of its surface, 
occasionally broken by a slowly enlarging gas bubble released from decomposing 
matter on the bottom. In the center of the placid stream the current ran faster, 
and the water itself was visible. 
Over the shining current, water-spiders ran swiftly. They had not shared in the 
general increase in size of the insect world. Depending on surface tension to 
support them, an increase in size and weight would have deprived them of the 
means of locomotion. 
From the spot where Burl peered at the water, green scum spread out many yards 
into the stream. He could not see what swam, wriggled, and crawled beneath the 
evil-smelling covering. He looked up and down the banks. 
150 yards downstream, an outcropping of rock made a steep descent to the river, 
from which shelf-fungi stretched out. Dark red and orange above, light yellow 
below, they formed a series of platforms above the smoothly flowing stream. Burl 
moved cautiously toward them. 
En route he saw one of the edible mushrooms that formed most of his diet, and 
paused to break from the flabby flesh an amount that would feed him for many 
days. Often, his people would find a store of food, carry it to their hiding 
place, then gorge themselves for days, eating, sleeping, eating, sleeping until 
all was gone. 
Burl was tempted to abandon his plan. He would give Saya of this food, and they 
would eat together. Saya was the maiden who roused unusual emotions in Burl when 
she was near, strange impulses to touch and caress her. He did not understand. 
He went on, after hesitating. If he brought her food, Saya would be pleased, but 
if he brought her of the things that swam in the stream, she would be more 
pleased. Degraded as his tribe had become, Burl was yet a little more 
intelligent. He was an atavism, a throwback to ancestors who had cultivated the 
earth and subjugated its animals. He had a vague remnant of pride, unformed but 
potent. 
Burl's people herded together in a leaderless group, coming to the same hiding 
place to share the finds of the lucky and gather comfort in numbers. They had no 
weapons. They bashed stones against the limbs of insects they found partly 
devoured, cracking them open for what scraps of sweet meat remained inside, but 
sought safety from enemies solely in flight and hiding. If Burl did what no man 
before had done, if he brought a whole carcass to his tribe, they would admire 
him. 
He reached the rocky outcropping and lay prostrate, staring into the water's 
shallow depths. A huge crayfish, as long as Burl, leisurely crossed his vision. 
Small fishes and even huge newts fled before the voracious creature. 
Eventually the tide of underwater life resumed its activity. The wriggling 
dragonfly grubs reappeared. Little flecks of silver swam into view--a school of 
tiny fish. A larger fish appeared, moving slowly. 
Burl's eyes glistened; his mouth watered. He reached down with his long weapon. 
It barely touched the water. Disappointment filled him, yet the nearness and 
apparent practicability of his scheme spurred him on. 
He considered the situation. The shelf-fungi were below him. He rose and moved 
to a point just above them, then thrust his spear down. They resisted its point. 
Burl tested them tentatively with his foot, then dared to trust his weight to 
them. They held firmly. He clambered onto them and lay flat, again peering over 
the edge. 
The large fish, as long as Burl's arm, swam slowly to and fro below. Burl had 
seen the former owner of his spear strive to thrust it into an opponent. So when 
the fish swam by, he thrust sharply downward. To Burl's astonishment, the spear 
seemed to bend where it entered the water, and missed its mark by inches. He 
tried again and again. 
He grew angry with the fish. Repeated strokes had left it untouched, and it was 
insultingly unwary, not even trying to flee. 
Finally, the big fish stopped directly beneath his eyes. Burl thrust straight 
down with all his strenth. This time the spear, entering vertically, did not 
seem to bend. Its point penetrated the scales of the swimmer below, transfixing 
that lazy fish completely. 
An uproar began. The fish, struggling to escape, and Burl, trying to draw it up 
to his perch, made a huge commotion. Excited, he failed to notice an ominous, 
approaching ripple on the water. 
The unequal combat continued. Burl clung desperately to the end of his spear. 
Then there was a tremor in Burl's support; it gave way, falling into the stream 
with a mighty splash. Burl submerged, eyes wide open, facing death. 

As he sank, he saw waving before him the gaping claws of the huge crayfish, 
large enough to sever a limb with one stroke of their jagged jaws. Burl was sure 
he would die, for he could not swim. The only question was whether he would 
drown or be devoured first. 
But the section of the shelf fungus that had collapsed beneath him was lighter 
than water. It rapidly surfaced, with Burl still on top. The crayfish, deprived 
of its prey, wandered off. 
Burl's situation seemed scarely improved, however. He was floating downstream, 
perched--weaponless, alone, and frightened--on a soggy, degenerate fungus. In 
the water lurked death unseen, on the banks stalked peril, and above, danger 
fluttered on golden wings. 
He finally recovered his self-possession, and looked for his spear. It was 
floating in the water, still transfixing the fish whose capture had endangered 
Burl's life. The fish now floated lifelessly, belly upward. 
Burl forgot his predicament upon seeing his prey just out of reach. He gazed at 
it, mouth watering, while his cranky craft went downstream, spinning slowly in 
the current. He hastened to the edge of the raft. 
It tilted and nearly flung him overboard. Experimenting, Burl soon found that it 
remained stable if he lay flat across it. He wriggled into position, and waited 
until the slow revolution of his vessel brought the spear shaft near. He 
stretched his fingers and arm, and grasped it. 
A moment later he was tearing strips of flesh from the fish and cramming the 
oily mess into his mouth with gusto. He had lost his edible mushroom, yet Burl 
ate contentedly of what he possessed. He happily visualized the delight with 
which Saya would receive a gift of part of the fish he had caught. 
Burl suddenly realized he was being carried farther and farther from Saya. 
Stricken with dumb sorrow, he lifted his head and looked longingly at the 
riverbanks. 
A monotonous row of strangely colored fungus growths. No healthy green, but 
pallid, cream-colored toadstools, some bright orange, lavender, and purple 
molds, vivid carmine "rusts" and mildews, spreading up the banks from the turgid 
slime. 
In the faintly pinkish light filtering down through the ever-present clouds, 
myriad flying objects were visible. Now and then a giant cricket or grasshopper 
made its bulletlike flight from one spot to another. Huge butterflies fluttered 
gaily. Bees lumbered anxiously about, seeking the cross-shaped flowers of 
monster cabbages. Occasionally, a slender-waisted, man-sized wasp flew alertly 
past. And far above soared dragonflies, their spindlelike bodies thrice the 
length of his own. 
Burl ignored them all. He sat, an incongruous creature of pink skin and soft 
brown hair on an orange fungus floating in midstream, despondent because the 
current carried him forever farther from the slender-limbed maiden whose glance 
caused an odd commotion in his breast. 
The day wore on. Once, just beyond the riverbank, Burl saw a band of large, red 
Amazon ants, marching in orderly array, to raid a city of black ants, and steal 
their eggs. The eggs would be hatched, and the small black creatures enslaved by 
the brigands. Amazon ants live solely by the labor of their slaves; perforce 
they are mighty warriors in their world. 
Later, etched against the pervasive steaming mist, Burl saw strangely shaped, 
swollen branches rearing from the ground. They were a hard-rinded fungus that 
grew on itself in mockery of the vegetation that had vanished from the earth. 
He spied pear-shaped objects above some of which floated little clouds of smoke. 
They, too, were fungi, puffballs, which when touched emit what seems a puff of 
vapor. These would have towered above Burl's head had he stood beside them. 
As the day drew to an end, he saw in the distance what seemed a range of purple 
hills. Some 70 feet high, they were the agglomeration of a formless growth, 
multiplying its organisms upon itself until the whole became an irregular, 
cone-shaped mound. Burl watched them apathetically. 
Presently, he ate again of the oily fish. The taste pleased Burl, a rare break 
from his diet of insipid mushrooms. He stuffed himself, though the size of his 
prey left most uneaten. 
He kept his spear, despite the trouble it had caused. Burl, unusually stubborn 
for his tribe, still associated the weapon with the food it had secured rather 
than with his current difficulties. He examined it again; its sharpness was 
unimpaired. 
He next stripped a sinew from the garment about his middle and hung the fish 
from his neck with it. That left him both hands free. Then he sat cross-legged 
on the soggily floating fungus, like a pink-skinned Buddha, and watched the 
shores go by. 
Time passed, and sunset drew near. Burl, never having seen the sun, did not 
think of this as "sunset". To him it was the letting down of darkness from the 
sky. 
Far to the west, the thick mist turned gold, while the thicker clouds above 
became blurred masses of dull red. Their shadows seemed lavender, from the 
contrast of shades. The river's still surface reflected faithfully the myriad 
tints and shadings, and the shining tops of giant mushrooms aside the river 
glowed faintly pink. 
Dragonflies buzzed overhead in swift, angular flight, bodies glistening with 
metallic luster in the rosy light. Great yellow butterflies flew lightly above 
the stream. Here, there, everywhere on the water appeared the shell-formed boats 
of a thousand caddis flies. 
Burl could have thrust his hand down into their cavities and seized the white 
worms inhabiting the strange craft. The huge bulk of a tardy bee droned heavily 
overhead. He glanced upward and saw the long proboscis and hairy hinder legs 
with their scanty load of pollen, the compound eyes with their expression of 
stupid preoccupation, and the sting that would mean death alike for him and the 
giant insect, were it used. 
The crimson radiance at the edge of the world dimmed. The purple hills had long 
been left behind. Now the slender stalks of 10,000 round-domed mushrooms lined 
the riverbank and beneath them spread fungi of all colors, from rawest red to 
palest blue, fading slowly to a monochromatic background in the glowing dusk. 
The buzzing, fluttering, and flapping of diurnal insects died slowly down, while 
from a million hiding places there crept soft and furry bodies of great moths, 
who preened themselves and smoothed their feathery antennae before taking to the 
air. Strong-limbed crickets set up their thunderous noise--grown gravely bass 
with the increasing size of their sound organs--and there began to gather on the 
water those slender spirals of tenuous mist that would presently blanket the 
stream in a mantle of fog. 
Night fell. The clouds above seemed to lower and grow dark. Gradually, now a 
drop and then a drop, the languid fall of large, warm raindrops that would drip 
from the moisture-laden skies all night began. 
Great disks of coolly glowing flame appeared along the stream's edge. The 
mushrooms there were faintly phosphorescent (Pleurotus phosphoreus) and shone 
coldly on the "rusts" and fake-fungi beneath. Here and there a ball of lambent 
flame appeared, drifting idly above the steaming, festering earth. 
30,000 years before, men called them "will-o'-the-wisps" but Burl simply 
accepted them as he accepted all that passed. Only a man attempting to advance 
in the scale of civilization tries to explain everything. A savage or child is 
content to observe without comment, unless he repeats legends from wise folk 
possessed by the itch of knowledge. 
Burl watched a long time. The beacons of fireflies as long as his spear flashed 
intermittently, illuminating the stream for yards around. Softly fluttering 
wings, in great beats that poured torrents of air onto him, passed above. 
The sky was full of winged creatures. Their anguished cries, mating calls, and 
wing beats broke the night. Above and all around the intense life of the insect 
world went on ceaselessly, but Burl only rocked sadly back and forth on his 
frail mushroom boat because he was being carried from his tribe, and from 
Saya--Saya of swift feet and white teeth, of shy smile. This, after he had dared 
so greatly to bring her a gift of fresh meat, captured as never before! 
Homesick, he lay on his floating atom all night. At last the mushroom raft 
struck gently and remained grounded on a shallow in the stream. 
At daybreak, Burl gazed keenly about. He was 20 yards from shore, and the 
greenish scum surrounded his now disintegrating vessel. The river had widened 
until the other bank was barely visible through the haze above the surface, but 
the nearer shore seemed firm and no more dangerous than the territory his tribe 
inhabited. He tested the water's depth with his spear, then was struck with the 
multiple usefulness of that weapon. The water would come but slightly above his 
ankles. 

Burl timidly stepped down into the water, then made for the bank. A soft 
something clung to one of his bare feet. Terrified, he ran faster, and stumbled 
ashore. He stared down at his foot. A shapeless, flesh-colored pad clung to his 
heel, and as Burl watched, it swelled slowly, while the pink of its wrinkled 
folds deepened. 
It was simply a leech, sharing in the enlargement nearly all the lower world 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 burrow. Rough, mangy, brown fur 
covered the huge misshapen globe of its body. 
Implacably malignant, incredibly ferocious, was the brown hunting spider, the 
American tarantula (Mygale Hentzii). Its body was over two feet in diameter. Its 
hairy legs, outstretched, would cover a circle three yards across. Eyes 
glistening, jaws slavering, it watched Burl. 
And Burl strutted at the cliff's edge, puffed up with a sense of importance. The 
white snare of the spinning spider below amused him. He knew the spider would 
not leave its web to attack. Using his spear, he shoved a chunk of fungus 
growing at his feet down the cliffside into the colossal web. The black bulk of 
the hidden spider swung out to investigate. Burl kept pace with it, knocking 
more lumps of shelf-fungus loose, and laughing as they narrowly missed the 
confused, black-and-silver creature. Then-- 



The trap door clicked faintly, and Burl whirled. His laughter became a scream. 
Approaching with incredible speed, the monster tarantula opened its dripping 
jaws. Mandibles gaping wide, poison fangs unsheathed, the creature was 30 paces 
away, 20, 10. It leaped into the air, all eight legs extended to seize! 
Still screaming, Burl thrust out his arms to ward off the impact. In his terror, 
his grasp on his spear became agonized. The spear point shot out, and the 
tarantula fell on it. Nearly a quarter of the spear entered the body of the 
ferocious thing. 
Transfixed on the spear, the monster writhed nightmarishly, still struggling to 
reach Burl, who himself was transfixed with horror. Mandibles clashed, awful 
sounds came from the beast. One of the attenuated, hairy legs rasped across 
Burl's forearm. He instinctively stepped backward--off the edge of the cliff. 
Down through space, eyes glassy with panic, the two creatures--man and skewered 
tarantula--fell together. With a strangely elastic crash and crackling, they hit 
the web below. 
Burl could be no more fear-struck. Struggling madly in the gummy coils of an 
immense web, ever binding him more tightly, with a wounded creature still 
striving to reach him with poison fangs--Burl had reached the limit of panic. 
He fought madly to break the coils about him. His arms and breast were greasy 
from the oily fish; the sticky web did not adhere to them, but his legs and body 
were inextricably fastened by the elastic threads spread for just such prey as 
he. 
He paused, exhausted. Then he saw, five yards away, the silvery and black 
monster waiting patiently for him to tire. It judged the moment propitious. The 
tarantula and man were one in its eyes, one struggling thing that had fallen 
opportunely into its snare. They moved but feebly now. The spider advanced 
delicately, swinging its huge bulk nimbly along the web, paying out a cable 
after it, coming inexorably closer. 
Burl's arms were free because of the greasy coating they had received. He waved 
them wildly, shrieking at the approaching, pitiless monster. It paused. Those 
moving arms suggested mandibles that might wound or slap. 
Spiders take few hazards. This one was no exception. Its spinnerets became busy, 
and with one of its eight legs, it flung a sheet of gummy silk impartially over 
both tarantula and man. 
Burl fought the descending shroud, striving vainly to thrust it away. Within 
minutes he was covered in a silken cloth that hid even the light from his eyes. 
He and his enemy, the giant tarantula, were beneath the same covering, though 
the tarantula moved but weakly. 
The shower ceased. The web spider had decided they were helpless. Burl felt the 
cables of the web give slightly, as the spider approached to sting and suck the 
sweet juices from its prey. 
Burl froze in an ecstasy of terror, waiting for poison fangs to be thrust into 
him. He knew the process, having seen the leisurely way giant spiders delicately 
stung their prey, then withdrew to wait patiently for the venom to take effect. 
When their victim ceased to struggle, they drew near again, and sucked the sweet 
juices from the body until what was once a creature vibrant with life became a 
shrunken, withered husk--to be flung from the web at nightfall. Most spiders are 
tidy housekeepers, destroying their snares daily to spin anew. 
The bloated, evil creature moved meditatively about the shining sheet of silk it 
had cast over Burl and the giant tarantula. Now only the tarantula moved feebly. 
Its body, outlined by a bulge in the concealing shroud, throbbed faintly as it 
struggled with the spear in its vitals. The rounded protuberance offered an 
obvious target. The web spider moved quickly forward, and stung. 
Galvanized into fresh torment by this new agony, the tarantula writhed in a very 
hell of pain. Its legs struck out purposelessly, in horrible gestures of 
delirious suffering. Burl screamed as one touched him, and struggled himself. 
His arms and head were free beneath the silken sheet because of the grease and 
oil coating them. Striving to escape his deadly neighbor, Burl clutched at the 
threads about him. They did not break, but parted, and a tiny opening appeared. 
One of the tarantula's attenuated limbs touched him again. With the strength of 
utter panic he hauled himself away. The opening enlarged, Burl's head emerged 
into open air, and he stared down 20 feet on an open space carpeted with 
chitinous remains of his captor's former victims. 
Burl's head, breast, and arms were free. But his lower body was held firm by a 
gummy snare far more tenacious than any birdlime ever manufactured by man. 
He hung a moment in his tiny window, despairing. He saw, at a little distance, 
the monster spider, waiting patiently for its poison to take effect and the 
struggling of its prey to cease. And the tarantula was weakening, only 
shuddering now. 
Burl withdrew his head and thrust desperately at the sticky stuff about his 
loins and legs. The oil on his hands kept it from clinging to them, and it gave 
a little. In a flash of inspiration, Burl understood. He reached over his 
shoulder and grasped the greasy fish; tore it in a dozen places and smeared 
himself with the now rancid exudation, pushing the sticky threads from his limbs 
and oiling the surface from which he had thrust it. 
He felt the web tremble. To the spider, its poison seemed to have failed. 
Another sting seemed necessary. It would again inject its deadly venom where the 
disturbance was manifest--into Burl! 
He gasped, and drew himself toward his window. It felt as if he was pulling his 
legs from his body. His head emerged, his shoulders--half his body was outside 
the hole. 
The colossal spider surveyed him, and made ready to cast another silken sheet 
over him. The spinnerets became active, and the sticky stuff about Burl's feet 
gave way! He shot through the opening and fell sprawling to the earth below, 
crashing onto the shrunken shell of a flying beetle which had fallen into the 
snare and had not escaped. 
Burl rolled over and over, then sat up. An angry, foot-long ant stood before 
him, mandibles extended threateningly, antennae waving wildly. A shrill 
stridulation filled the air. 
In ages past, when ants were tiny creatures fractions of an inch long, 
scientists knew they possessed a cry. Grooves on the body of the insects, like 
those on the great legs of crickets, enabled them to generate sounds. 
Burl knew the stridulation emanated from the insect before him, though he had 
never wondered how it was produced. The cry was used to summon others of its 
city, to help it in difficulty or good fortune. 
Clickings sounded nearby. Reinforcements were coming. Normally harmless--except 
the army ant, that is--the whole ant tribe was formidable when provoked. Utterly 
fearless, they could pull down a man and slay him as so many infuriated fox 
terriers might have done 30,000 years before. 
Burl fled, without debate, and heard the shrill sound suddenly subside. The ant, 
shortsighted like all ants, no longer felt threatened and went peacefully about 
the business Burl had interrupted, that of finding among the gruesome relics 
beneath the spider's web some edible carrion to feed the inhabitants of its 
city. 
Burl ran a few hundred yards, and stopped. It behooved him to move carefully. 
Even the most familiar territory was full of unexpected dangers; unknown lands 
such as these were doubly perilous. 
Burl too found difficulty in moving. The glutinous stuff from the spider's snare 
still stuck to his feet, picking up small objects as he went. Old ant-gnawed 
fragments of insect armor pricked him even through his toughened soles. 
He removed them, took a dozen steps and had to stop again. Burl's brain had been 
uncommonly stimulated lately. It had gotten him into at least one 
predicament--due to his invention of a spear--but extricated him from another. 
Reason had led him to oil his body to escape the spider's snare. 
Cautiously, Burl looked about. He seemed safe. Then, deliberately, he sat down 
to think. Never in his life had he done such a thing; his tribesmen were not 
given to meditation. But a powerful idea had struck Burl--an abstract idea. 
When he was in difficulties, something within him seemed to suggest a solution. 
Would it do so now? He puzzled over the problem. Sharp pebbles, remnants of 
insect-armor, and other things hurt his feet when he walked. They always had, 
but never had his feet been sticky so that the irritation continued with him 
more than one step. 
He gazed at his foot, and awaited inspiration. Meanwhile, he slowly removed the 
sharp-pointed fragments, one by one. Partly coated with the half-liquid gum from 
his feet, they clung to his finger, except where the oil was thick. 
Burl's reasoning, before, had been simple and of primary order. Where oil 
covered him, the web did not. Therefore he would coat the rest of himself with 
oil. But to apply knowledge gained in one predicament to another difficulty was 
something he had never done. 
A dog may be taught to pull a latchstring to open a door, but the same dog 
coming to a high, close-barred gate with a latchstring will never think of 
pulling it. He associates a latchstring with opening the door. Opening a gate is 
another matter entirely. 
Imminent peril had stirred Burl to invention. That was extraordinary enough. But 
reasoning in cold blood, as he now did, that oil on his feet would nullify the 
glue there and enable him to walk in comfort--that was as much a triumph of 
intellect as any masterpiece of art in the ages before. He oiled his feet. 

It was an infinitesimal problem, but Burl's struggles with the mental process of 
reasoning were real. 30,000 years earlier, a wise man declared that education is 
simply training in thought, in efficient and effective thinking. Burl had 
received no such training, but now, sitting at the base of a squat toadstool, he 
reexemplified Rodin's Thinker for the first time in millennia. He was teaching 
himself how to think. 
He stood up, walked, and crowed in delight, then paused a moment in awe of his 
own intelligence. 35 miles from his tribe, naked, unarmed, ignorant of fire, 
wood, or any weapons save a spear he had experimented with the day before, 
abysmally uninformed concerning the very existence of art or science, Burl 
stopped to assure himself that he was very wonderful. 
With touching faith in this new pastime, Burl sat down again and knitted his 
brows. His questions were easily answered. He was naked. He would fashion 
garments. He was weaponless. He would find a spear. He was hungry. He would seek 
food. He was far from from Saya and his tribe. He would go to them. Puerile 
reasoning, of course, but valuable, because it was conscious reasoning, 
conscious appeal to his mind for guidance, deliberate metal progression from 
desire to resolution. 
Even in the high civilization of ages before, few men had really used their 
brains. The great majority had depended on machines and leaders to think for 
them. Burl, however, was developing the habit of thinking--a leadership quality, 
and an invaluable asset to his little tribe. 
He stood again and faced upstream. Gigantic butterflies, riotously colored, 
fluttered overhead through the misty haze. Sometimes a grasshopper hurtled 
through the air like a projectile, transparent wings beating frantically. 
Occasionally a wasp sped by, intent on its hunting, or a bee droned heavily 
along, anxious and worried, striving in a nearly flowerless world to gather 
pollen for the hive. 
Here and there Burl saw various flies, some no larger than his thumb, others the 
size of his whole hand. They fed on juices dripping from maggot-infested 
mushrooms, when filth more to their liking was unavailable. 
Far away a shrill roaring sounded faintly. It was like multitudinous clickings 
blended into a single sound, but was so distant that it did not gain Burl's 
attention. He had all the strictly localized vision of a child. What was near 
was important; what was distant could be ignored. 
Had Burl listened, he would have realized that army ants were abroad in 
countless millions, deploying themselves in a broad array and wreaking greater 
destruction than so many locusts. 
Locusts in past ages had eaten all green things. Only giant cabbages and a few 
such tenacious rank growths survived. The locusts had vanished along with 
civilization, knowledge, and most of mankind, but army ants remained as an 
invincible enemy to men, insects, and fungi alike. 
Burl did not notice the sound, however. Preoccupied, he moved forward, briskly 
though cautiously, searching for garments, food, and weapons. He confidently 
expected to find them all shortly. 
Surely enough he found a thicket of edible fungi just half a mile beyond the 
spot where he had sat down to think. Burl tugged at one and broke off a piece. 
Nibbling as he went, he entered a broad plain over a mile across, broken into 
odd little hillocks by gradually ripening and suddenly developing mushrooms with 
which he was unfamiliar. Their rounded, blood-red protuberances forced aside the 
earth as they grew. 
Burl passed among them without touching them. They were strange, and strange 
things meant danger. Besides, he was full of new purpose. He wished garments and 
weapons. 
Above the plain a wasp flew, a heavy object dangling beneath its black belly, 
ornamented by a single red band. It was a hairy sand wasp, carrying a paralyzed 
gray caterpillar. After depositing the caterpillar in a deep underground burrow, 
the wasp would lay an egg on it, then emerge and seal the entrance with dirt and 
stones. Later, the egg would hatch into a tiny grub, which would feed on the 
torpid caterpillar until it waxed large and fat. Then it would weave itself a 
chrysalis and sleep a long sleep, only to wake as a wasp and dig its way to open 
air. 
Uncomprehending, Burl watched the wasp go by, then trudged onward. Reaching the 
farther side of the plain, he found himself threading the aisles of a fungus 
forest where the growths were hideous, misshapen travesties of the trees they 
had supplanted. Bloated, yellow limbs branched off from rounded, swollen trunks. 
Here and there a pearshaped puffball, Burl's height and half as much again, 
waited craftily until a chance touch should cause it to shoot upward a curling 
puff of fine dust. 
There were dangers here, and Burl moved forward cautiously. He continued to eat 
from the mass of edible mushroom under his arm, while his large eyes scanned 
about for threats of harm. 
Behind, a high, shrill roaring grew slightly louder, but remained too far away 
to impress Burl. The army ants were working havoc in the distance. By millions, 
they were foraging the country, climbing every eminence, descending every 
depression, antennae waving restlessly, mandibles extended threateningly. The 
ground was black with them, each ten inches long. 
A single such creature would be formidable to an unarmed, naked man like Burl, 
whose wisest move would be flight, but in numbers they presented a menace from 
which escape seemed impossible. They advanced steadily and rapidly amid shrill 
stridulations and multitudinous clickings. 
The great helpless caterpillars on the cabbages heard them coming, but were too 
stupid to flee. Black multitudes covered the rank vegetables, and tiny but 
voracious jaws tore at the flaccid masses of flesh. 
Each creature had some futile means of struggling. Caterpillars writhed and 
contorted ineffectually. Bees fought their entrance to the gigantic hives with 
stings and wingbeats. Moths took to the air in helpless blindness when 
discovered by the relentless throngs of small black insects. 
There was a strange contrast between the ground before the advancing horde and 
that immediately behind it. Before, a busy world, teeming with life. Mushrooms 
and fungi fought with thinning numbers of giant cabbages for food. Behind the 
black multitude--nothing. Mushrooms, cabbages, bees, wasps, crickets, every 
creeping, crawling, or flying thing that did not get aloft before the black tide 
arrived was lost, torn to bits by tiny mandibles. Even spiders and tarantulas 
fell before the host of insects, killing many their final struggles, but 
ultimately overwhelmed by sheer numbers. And the wounded and dying army ants 
became food for their comrades. There is no mercy among insects. 
Surging onward, flowing like a monstrous, murky tide over the yellow, steaming 
earth, the army ants advanced. Their vanguard reached the river, and recoiled. 
Burl was five miles distant when they changed course, communicating the altered 
line of march to those behind with antenna gestures, stridulations, and formic 
acid trails. 
A million tragedies marked the insect army's progress. There was a tiny colony 
of mining bees--Zebra bees; a single mother, four feet long, had dug a huge 
gallery with ten cells, in which she laid her eggs and fed her grubs with 
hard-gathered pollen. The grubs had waxed fat and large, become bees, and laid 
eggs in turn, in the same gallery. 
Ten such bulky insects now foraged busily for grubs within the ancestral home, 
while the founder of the colony had grown draggled and wingless with passing 
time. Unable to forage herself, the old bee became hive guardian, as is 
customary among mining bees. She closed the opening of the hive with her head, 
making a living barrier at the entrance, withdrawing to give entrance and exit 
only to duly authenticated members of the colony. 
She was at her post when the wave of army ants swept over her. Tiny, 
evil-smelling feet trampled on her. She emerged to fight with mandible and sting 
for the sanctity of the hive. In a moment she was a shaggy mass of biting ants, 
rending and tearing her chitinous armor. The other bees emerged, fighting as 
they came, for the gallery leading down was a dark flood of small insects. 
An epic battle raged. Ten huge bees, each four feet long, fighting with leg and 
jaw, wing and mandible, with the ferocity of tigers. The tiny, vicious ants 
covered them, snapping at their multiple eyes, biting at the tender joints in 
their armor--sometimes releasing the larger prey to leap upon an injured comrade 
wounded by the huge creature they battled in common. 
The outcome, however, was inevitable. Struggle as the bees might, herculean as 
their efforts might be, they were powerless against the incredible numbers of 
their assailants, who tore them into tiny fragments and devoured them. Before 
the last shred of the hive's defenders had vanished, the hive itself was gutted 
alike of the grubs it contained and the food brought them by such weary effort 
of the mature bees. 
The army ants went on. Only an empty gallery remained, and a few fragments of 
tough armor, unappetizing even to the omniverous ants. 


Meanwhile, Burl was inspecting the rent and scraped remains of a great beetle's 
shiny casing lying on the ground. A greater beetle had met the first and slain 
it. 
A few minims, little ants barely six inches long, foraged industriously among 
the remains. A new ant city was to be formed and the queen ant lay hidden a 
half-mile away. These were the first hatchlings, who would feed larger ants on 
whom would fall the great work of the city. Burl ignored them--and the rising 
noise of the advancing army any horde behind him--as he searched with his eyes 
for a weapon. 
The best he could find was a fiercely toothed hind leg. He picked it up, and an 
angry whine rose from the ground. 
One of the black minims was busily detaching a fragment of flesh from the joint 
of the leg, and Burl had snatched the morsel away. The little creature advanced 
toward Burl, shrilling angrily. He struck it with the leg. Two of the other 
minims appeared, attracted by the noise the first had made. Discovering the 
crushed body of their fellow, they unceremoniously dismembered it and bore it 
away in triumph. 
Burl went on, swinging the toothed limb in his hand. Accustomed to using stones 
to crush the juicy legs of the giant crickets his tribe sometimes scavenged, he 
formed a half-defined idea of a club. The sharp teeth of the thing in his hand 
made him realize that a sidewise blow was better than a spearlike thrust. 

The sound behind had become a distant whispering, high-pitched and nearer. The 
army ants swept over a mushroom forest, and the yellow, branching, treelike 
growths swarmed with black creatures devouring the substance to which they 
clung. 
A great bluebottle fly, shining with metallic luster, reposed in an ecstasy of 
feasting, sipping through its long proboscis the dark-colored liquid that 
dripped slowly from a mushroom. Maggots filled the mushroom, and exuded a 
solvent pepsin that liquefied the white firm "meat". 
They fed on this soup, this gruel, and a surplus dripped to the ground below, 
where the bluebottle drank eagerly. Burl drew near, and struck. The fly 
collapsed into a writhing heap. Burl stood over it, pondering. 
The army ants came nearer, down into a tiny valley, swarming into and through a 
little brook over which Burl had leaped. Ants can remain underwater a long time 
without drowning, so the small stream was but a minor obstacle. The first wave 
of ants choked the brook bed, forming a living bridge for their comrades. 
A quarter mile to the left of Burl's line of march, and a mile behind the spot 
where he stood over the dead fly, was an acre-wide stretch where giant, rank 
cabbages had so far resisted the encroachments of the ever-present mushrooms. 
The pale, cross-shaped cabbage flowers fed many bees, while the leaves fed 
numberless grubs, worms, and loud-voiced crickets which crouched about on the 
ground, munching busily at the succulent green stuff. The army ants swept into 
the green area, ceaselessly devouring all they encountered. 
A terrific din arose. The crickets hurtled away in rocketlike flight, a dark 
cloud of wildly beating wings. They shot aimlessly in any direction; half fell 
into the black tide of devouring insects and were seized instantly. They uttered 
terrible cries as they were torn to bits. Horrible inhuman screams reached 
Burl's ears. 
Individual cries of such agony were too commonplace to attract Burl's 
attention--but the chorus of tormented creatures made him look up. This was no 
minor horror, but wholesale slaughter. He peered anxiously toward the sound. 
A wild stretch of sickly yellow fungus, interspersed with an occasional squat 
toadstool or splash of vivid color where one of the many "rusts" had found a 
foothold. To the left, a group of awkward misshapen fungoids clustered in silent 
mockery of a forest of trees. There a mass of faded green, where the giant 
cabbages stood. But as Burl watched, the green became slowly black. 
From where he stood, Burl could see three great grubs in lazy contentment, 
eating ceaselessly the cabbages on which they rested. Suddenly first one and 
then another began to jerk spasmodically. About each, a rim of black appeared. 
Tiny black motes milled over the cabbages' green surfaces. The grubs and 
cabbages became black. Horrible contortions of the writhing grubs bespoke their 
agonies. Then a black wave appeared at the further edge of the stretch of sickly 
yellow fungus, a glistening, living wave, moving forward rapidly with the roar 
of clickings and a persistent overtone of shrill stridulations. 
The hair rose on Burl's head. He knew all too well the meaning of that tide of 
shining bodies! With a gasp of terror, intellectual preoccupations forgotten, he 
turned and fled in ultimate panic. And the tide came inexorably on. 
Clinging desperately to his sharp-toothed club, Burl darted through the tangled 
aisles of the little mushroom forest with heedless disregard of the dangers that 
might await him there. Flies buzzed about him loudly, huge creatures, glittering 
with metallic luster. One struck him on the shoulder, tearing his skin with 
vibrating wings. 
Burl thrust it away and sped on. The oil covering him had turned rancid, and the 
odor attracted these connoisseurs of the fetid. 
A heavy weight settled onto his head, then doubled. Two of the creatures had 
dropped into his oily hair, to sip the rancid oil through disgusting 
proboscises. Burl shook them off with his hand and ran madly on. His ears were 
keenly attuned to the sound of the army ants behind him, and it grew little 
fainter. 
The clicking roar continued, but the buzzing of flies began to overshadow it. In 
Burl's time flies had no great heaps of putrid matter in which to lay eggs. 
Ants--those busy scavengers--carted all carrion away long before it acquired the 
gamy flavor beloved by fly maggots. Only in isolated spots were flies really 
numerous, but there they clustered in clouds that darkened the sky. 
Such a buzzing, turbulent cloud surrounded the madly running figure of Burl. It 
seemed as though a miniature whirwind of winged bodies and multifaceted eyes 
kept pace with the little pink-skinned man. He twirled his club before him, and 
almost every stroke connected with a thinly armored body which collapsed in a 
spurt of reddish liquid. 
Pain like a red-hot iron struck Burl's back. One of the stinging flies had 
thrust its sharp-tipped proboscis into his flesh to suck blood. 
Burl yelped--and ran full-tilt into the thick stalk of a blackened, draggled 
toadstool. There was a crackling as of wet punk or brittle rotten wood. The 
toadstool collapsed with a sickening splash. Many flies had laid eggs in the 
fungoid, and it was a teeming mass of corruption and ill-smelling liquid. 
As the toadstool's "head" crashed to the ground, it fell into a dozen pieces, 
and the earth for yards around was spattered with a stinking liquid in which 
tiny, headless maggots twitched convulsively. 
The buzzing of the flies took on a satisfied note, and they settled by hundreds 
about the edges of the foul pools, becoming lost in frenzied feasting while Burl 
staggered to his feet and darted off again. Now he was but a minor attraction to 
the flies, and but one or two pursued him. From every direction they hurried to 
the toadstool banquet. 


Burl ran on. He passed beneath the wide-spreading leaves of a giant cabbage. A 
great grasshopper crouched on the ground, tremendous jaws crunching the rank 
vegetation voraciously. Several huge worms ate steadily from their resting 
places among the leaves. One had slung itself beneath an overhanging leaf--which 
would have thatched a dozen huts for men--and was placidly anchoring itself in 
prepartion for the spinning of a cocoon in which to sleep the sleep of 
metamorphosis. All, even the mighty grasshopper, would soon be torn to myriad 
mouthfuls and devoured by the great black tide of relentlessly advancing army 
ants. 
The clicking roar of their advance overwhelmed all other sounds, now. Burl ran 
madly, breath coming in great gasps, eyes wide with panic. Alone of all the 
world about him, he knew the danger behind. The creatures he passed went about 
their business with the terrifying efficiency of the insect world. 
There is something strangely daunting in the actions of an insect. It moves so 
directly, with uncanny precision, utterly indifferent to anything but the end in 
view. Cannibalism is almost universal. The paralysis of prey, so it remains 
alive and fresh--though in agony--for weeks on end, is commonplace. The eating 
piecemeal of still-living victims is a matter of course. 
Absolute mercilessness, utter callousness, incredible inhumanity beyond anything 
in the animal world is the way of insects. And these vast cruelties are 
performed by armored, machinelike creatures with an abstraction and a routine 
air that suggests a horrible Nature behind them all. 
Indeed, Burl now passed within yards of a space where a female dung beetle was 
devouring the mate whose honeymoon had begun that same day. And behind a clump 
of mushrooms, a great yellow-banded spider coyly threatened a smaller male of 
her own species. He was discreetly ardent, but if he won the favor of the 
gruesome creature he wooed, he would also become her next meal. 
Burl's heart pounded madly. The breath whistled in his nostrils. Behind, the 
wave of army ants drew nearer. They met the feasting flies. Some took flight and 
escaped, but those too engrossed in their delicious meal were seized, and 
vanished into tiny maws. The twitching little maggots, stranded on the earth by 
the scattering of their soupy broth, were likewise torn to pieces. The serried 
ranks of black insects went on. 
Combined, the tiny clickings of their limbs, the stridulations of the creatures, 
the agonized cries of their victims, and the rending of fungi, cabbages, flesh, 
and chitin, produced a deafening din. 
Burl was putting forth his last ounce of strength. His limbs trembled, his 
breathing was agony, sweat dripped down his forehead. This little, naked man ran 
for his insignificant life, as if his continued survival among the million 
tragedies of that single day were the purpose for which the whole universe 
existed. 
He sped across an open space 100 yards long. A thicket of beautifully golden 
mushrooms (Agaricus caesareus) barred his way. Beyond them a range of strange 
hills began, purple, green, black and gold, melting into each other, branching 
off from each other, inextricably tangled. 
They rose to a height of 70 feet, and above them a little grayish haze had 
gathered. There was a layer of tenous vapor on their surfaces, which slowly rose 
and coiled, gathering into a tiny cloudlet above their tips. 
The hills themselves were actually masses of mushrooms, yeasts, "musts", and 
fungoids of every description, which had grown upon and about each other until 
these great piles of strangely colored, spongy stuff had gathered into one 
gigantic mass that undulated unevenly across the level earth for miles. Covered 
with purple mold, this mass seemed a range of purple hills, but here and there 
patches of other vivid colors showed through. 
Burl burst through the golden thicket and attacked the ascent. His feet sank 
into the spongy hillock. Panting, gasping, he staggered across the top. He 
plunged into a little valley on the farther side, up another slope. Ten minutes 
he forced himself on, then collapsed in a little hollow, still gripping his 
sharp-toothed club. 
He lay motionless, breathing in great gasps, limbs stubbornly refusing to move. 
Above, a bright yellow butterfly with a 30-foot wingspan fluttered lightly. The 
sound of the army ants grew nearer. 
Burl, lying in an exhausted, panting heap on the purple mass of fungus, was 
conscious of a strange sensation. His body felt warm. He knew nothing of fire or 
the sun's heat; the only sensation of warmth he had ever known occurred when his 
tribesmen huddled together in their hiding place to banish the damp chill of the 
night with the heat of their bodies. 
The heat Burl now felt was hotter, fiercer. He rolled over with tremendous 
effort, and for a moment the fungus was cool and soft beneath him. Then, slowly, 
the sensation of heat began again, and increased until Burl's skin was red and 
inflamed from the irritation. 
The tenuous vapor, too, made Burl's lungs smart and eyes water. He breathed in 
great, choking gasps, but the period of rest--short as it had been--enabled him 
to rise and stagger on. He crawled painfully to the top of the slope, and looked 
back. 
The hillcrest on which he stood was higher than those he had passed earlier, and 
he could see clearly the whole purple range. He had nearly reached the farther 
edge of the range, which was here half a mile wide. 
A thin, dark cloud had gathered overhead. To the right and left, Burl saw the 
hills fading into the distance, growing fainter in the haze. He saw, too, the 
advancing cohorts of army ants, creeping over the tangled mass of fungus 
growths. They fed as they went, on the fungus that had gathered into these 
incredible monstrosities. 
Burl leaned heavily on his club and watched resignedly. He could run no more. 
The army ants were spreading everywhere over the mass of fungus. They would 
reach him soon. 
Far to the right the vapor thickened. A column of smoke arose. What Burl did not 
know and would never know was that far down in the interior of that compressed 
mass of fungus, slow oxidation had been occurring. The temperature of the 
interior had risen. In the darkness and dampness deep inside the hills, 
spontaneous combustion had begun. 
Just as the vast piles of coal the railroad companies of 30,000 years before had 
gathered together sometimes began to burn fiercely in their interiors, just as 
the farmers' piles of damp straw suddenly burst into flames without cause, so 
these huge piles of tinderlike mushrooms had been burning slowly within 
themselves. 
There had been no flames, because the surface remained intact and nearly 
airtight. But when the army ants began tearing at the edible surfaces despite 
the heat they encountered, fresh air found its way to the smoldering masses of 
fungus. Slow combustion became rapid combustion. Dull heat became fierce flames. 
The slow trickle of thin smoke became a huge column of thick, choking, acrid 
stuff that set the army ants into spasms of convulsive writhing. 
Flames burst out from a dozen points. Columns of blinding smoke rose skyward. A 
pall of fume-laden smoke gathered above the range of purple hills, while Burl 
watched apathetically. And the serried ranks of army ants marched into the 
widening furnaces. 
They had recoiled from the river, because instinct had warned them. 30,000 years 
without danger from fire, however, had extinguished their racial fear of fire. 
They marched into the blazing orifices they had opened in the hills, snapping 
their mandibles at the leaping flames, springing at the glowing tinder. 
The blazing area widened, as the purple surface was undermined and fell in. 
Uncomprehending, Burl watched the phenomenon. He stood, panting more and more 
slowly, breathing more and more easily, until the glow from the approahing 
flames reddened his skin and the acrid smoke made tears flow from his eyes. 
He retreated slowly, leaning on his club and looking back. The black wave of 
army ants was sweeping into the fire, into the incredible heat of that 
carbonized material burning with an open flame. At last there were only the 
little bodies of stragglers from the great ant army, scurrying here and there 
over the ground their comrades had denuded of all living things. The entire main 
army had vanished--burnt to ashes in the furnace of the hills. 
There had been agony in that flame, dreadful agony such as no man would like to 
dwell on: the insanely courageous ants attacking with horny jaws the burning 
masses of fungus, rolling over and over with flaming missiles clutched in their 
mandibles, sounding shrill war cries between screams of agony--blinded, antennae 
burnt off, lidless eyes scorched by licking flames, yet going madly forward on 
flaming feet to attack, ever attack this unknown enemy. 
Burl limped over the hills. Twice he saw small groups of army ants. They had 
passed between the widening surfaces their comrades had opened, and were feeding 
voraciously on the hills they traversed. Once Burl was spied, and a shrill war 
cry sounded, but he moved on, and the ants were busy eating. A single ant 
charged. Burl brought down his club, and a writhing body remained to be eaten 
later by its comrades. 
Burl emerged from the range of mushroom hills as night fell. Utter blackness 
covered the whole mad land, save where luminous mushrooms shed pale light and 
fireflies the length of Burl's arm shed fitful gleams on a jungle of fungus 
growths and monstrous insects. From the sky, now a drop and then a drop, the 
nightly rain began. 
The ground was hard beneath Burl's feet. He picked his path with his large blue 
eyes, pupils expanded to great size, and listened keenly for sounds of danger. 
Something rustled heavily in a thicket of mushrooms 100 yards away. There were 
sounds of preening, and delicate feet padding on the ground. The throbbing beat 
of huge wings began suddenly, and a body lurched into flight. 
A fierce, downward air current smote Burl, and he looked up in time to catch the 
outline of a huge moth passing above. He turned to watch its line of flight, and 
saw a strange glow in the sky behind him. The mushroom hills still burned. 
He crouched beneath a squat toadstool to wait for dawn. 
Slowly, slowly, the sodden rainfall continued. Drop by drop, all night long, 
warm pellets of liquid fell from the sky. They boomed against the hollow heads 
of toadstools, and splashed into the steaming pools that lay festering all over 
the fungus-covered earth. 
And all night long the great fires grew and spread in the mass of already 
half-carbonized mushroom. The flare at the horizon intensified. Eyes wide and 
full of wonder, Burl watched it grow nearer. He had never seen flame before. 
The flames brightened the overhanging clouds. Over a stretch a dozen miles long 
and as much as three miles across, seething furnaces sent columns of dense smoke 
up to the roof of clouds, luminous from the glow below them, and spreading out 
to form an intermediate layer below the cloudbanks. 
It was like the glow of the many lights of a vast city thrown against the 
sky--but the last great city had molded into fungus-covered rubbish eons ago. 
Like the flitting of airplanes above a populous city, too, was the flitting of 
fascinated creatures above the glow. 
Moths and great flying beetles, gigantic gnats and midges grown huge with time's 
passing, they fluttered a dance of death above the flames. As the fire grew 
nearer, Burl could see them. 

Colossal, delicately formed creatues swooped above the strange blaze. Moths with 
riotously colored wings of 30-foot spread beat the air with mighty strokes, huge 
eyes glowing like carbuncles as they stared with frenzied, intoxicated devotion 
into the flames below. 
Burl saw a great peacock moth soar above the burning mushroom hills. Its wings 
were 40 feet across, and fluttered like gigantic sails as the moth gazed down at 
the flaming furnace. The separate flames had united, now, and a single sheet of 
white-hot burning stuff spread across the country for miles, sending up clouds 
of smoke through which fascinated creatures flew. 
Feathery antennae of the finest lace spread before the head of the peacock moth, 
and its body was softest, richest velvet. A ring of snow-white down marked where 
its head began, and the red glow from below eerily illuminated its maroon body. 
For one instant it was outlined clearly. Its eyes glowed more redly than any 
ruby's fire, and the great, delicate wings were poised in flight. Burl caught 
the reflected flash of flames on two great iridescent spots on the widespread 
wings. Shining purple and vivid red, the glow of opal and sheen of pearl, all 
the glory of chalcedony and chrysoprase formed a single wonder in the glare of 
burning fungus. Then white smoke swirled about the great moth, dimming the 
radiance of its gorgeous dress. 
Burl saw it dive straight into the thickest and brightest of the licking flames, 
flying madly, eagerly, into the searing, hellish heat--a willing, drunken 
sacrifice to the god of fire. 
Monster flying beetles with horny wing cases stiffly stretched blundered above 
the reeking, smoking pyre. In the red light they shone like burnished metal, and 
their clumsy bodies with spurred and fierce-toothed limbs hurtled like meteors 
through the luminous haze of ascending smoke. 
Burl saw strange collisions and stranger meetings. Male and female flying 
creatures circled and spun dances of love and death in the wild radiance from 
the funeral pyre of the purple hills. They mounted higher than Burl could see, 
drunk with the ecstasy of life, then descended to plunge headlong to death in 
the roaring fires below. 
From everywhere they came. Moths of brightest yellow with soft, furry bodies 
palpitant with life flew madly into the column of light that reached to the 
overhanging clouds. Moths of deepest black, with gruesome symbols on their 
wings, danced, like motes in a bath of sunlight, above the glow. 
And Burl sat crouched beneath an overshadowing toadstool, watching--and 
listening. A continual faint hiss penetrated the sound of fire: raindrops 
turning to steam. From afar, Burl heard a strange, deep bass muttering. 
Unbeknownst to him, it was the chorus of insect-eating giant frogs, reaching his 
ears 15 miles from their vast swamp. 
The night wore on, while the flying creatures above the fire danced and died, 
ever replaced by fresh arrivals. Burl sat tensely still, awed yet 
uncomprehending. At last the sky grew dimly gray, then brighter, and day began. 
The flames of the burning hills grew faint as the fire died, and at last Burl 
crept from his hiding place and stood erect. 
He turned to continue his odyssey, and saw the remains of one of the tragedies 
of the night. 
A huge moth had flown into the flames, been horribly scorched, and floundered 
out again. Unable to return to its devouring deity, it now lay immovable, one 
beautiful, delicate wing burned in gaping holes, eyes dimmed by flame, and 
exquisitely tapering limbs crushed by the force with which it had struck the 
ground. It lay helpless, only its broken antennae moving restlessly, painfully. 
Burl approached, and picked up a stone. He moved on presently, a velvet cloak 
across his shoulders, gleaming with all the colors of the rainbow. A gorgeous 
mass of soft, blue moth fur covered his middle, and bound to his forehead were 
two yard-long, golden fragments of the moth's magnificent antennae. In a strip 
of sinew about his waist was thrust the fiercly toothed limb of a fighting 
beetle. He soon added to his inventory a sharp-pointed spear from another 
scorched victim of the flames. It was longer than he himself. 
So equipped, Burl resumed his trek to Saya, looking like a prince of Ind on a 
bridal journey--though no mere prince ever wore such raiment in days of greatest 
glory. 
For miles Burl threaded his way through a forest of towering toadstools, 
decorated with colorful rusts and molds. Twice he avoided huge bubbling pools of 
festering green slime, and once hid fearfully as a monster scarabeus beetle 
lumbered within three yards of him, moving heavily with a clanking of limbs like 
some great machine. 
Burl saw the creature's mighty armor and inward-curving jaws, and envied its 
weapons. The time was not yet come, however, when he would smile at the great 
insect and hunt it for the juicy flesh inside those armored limbs. 
Burl was still a savage, still ignorant, still timid. His principle advance had 
been that whereas he had fled without reasoning, he now paused to see if he need 
flee. 
He was a strange sight, moving cautiously through the shadowed lanes of the 
mushroom forest. Against the play of color from his borrowed plumage his pink 
skin showed in odd contrast. He looked like some proud knight walking slowly 
through the gardens of a goblin's castle. But he was still a fearful creature, 
superior to the monsters about him only in the possession of latent 
intelligence. He was weak--and therein lay his greatest promise. 100,000 years 
before, his ancestors had been forced by lack of claws and fangs to develop 
brains. 
Burl was sunk as low as they, but he had to combat more horrifying enemies and 
more inexorable threats. His ancestors had invented knives, spears, and flying 
missiles. The creatures about Burl had knives and spears a thousand times more 
deadly than the weapons that had made his ancestors masters of the woods and 
forests. 
Burl was in comparison vastly more weak than his forebears had been; that 
weakness that would someday lead him and those who followed him to heights his 
ancestors had never known. But now-- 
He heard a discordant, deep bass bellow, from a spot not 20 yards away. In a 
flash of panic he darted behind a clump of mushrooms and hid, panting in sheer 
terror. 
The bellow came again, this time with a querulous note. Burl heard a crashing 
and plunging as of a struggle. A mushroom broke with a brittle snapping, and the 
spongy thud as it fell was followed by a tremendous commotion. Something was 
desperately fighting something else, but Burl could not identify the combatants. 

The noise gradually faded. Presently Burl's breathing slowed, and his courage 
returned. He stole from his hiding place, and would have retreated, but 
something held him back. Instead of creeping from the scene, he crept cautiously 
toward the source of the noise. 
He peered between two cream-colored toadstool stalks and saw the cause of the 
noise. A wide, funnel-shaped snare of silk was spread before him, 20 yards 
across and equally deep. Individual threads were plainly visible, but in the 
mass it seemed a fabric of sheerest, finest texture. Supported by tall 
mushrooms, it was anchored to the ground below, and drew away to a tiny point 
through which a hole led to some unknown recess. And 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 threads was 
strong enough to hold the feeblest prey, but they numbered in the thousands. A 
great cricket had become entangled in the maze of sticky lines. Its limbs 
thrashed out, smashing the snare lines at every stroke, but at every stroke 
meeting and becoming entangled with a dozen more. It struggled mightily, 
emitting at intervals its horrible, deep bass cry. 
Burl watched, fascinated. Most insects have their allotted victims and touch no 
others. These posed no threat to him, so Burl had little interest in them. But 
spiders are terrifyingly impartial. A spider devouring some luckless insect was 
an example of what might happen to Burl. 
The opening at the rear of the funnel-shaped snare darkened. The snare drew 
itself into a tunnel there, in which the spider had waited and watched. Now it 
swung out lightly, advancing toward the cricket. It was a gray spider (Agelena 
labyrinthica), with twin black ribbons on its thorax, aside the head, and two 
stripes of speckled brown and white on its abdomen. Burl also saw two curious 
appendages like tails. 
The cricket struggled only feebly now, its cries muted by the confining threads 
fettering its limbs. Burl saw the spider throw itself at the cricket and 
witnessed the final, convulsive shudder of the insect as the spider's fangs 
pierced its tough armor. The sting lasted a long time, and finally Burl realized 
the spider was feeding, sucking the succulent juices from the now dead cricket. 
When at last the carcass was drained, the spider pawed the lifeless creature for 
a few moments and left it. 
A sudden thought came to Burl and took his breath away. For a second his knees 
knocked together in self-induced panic. He watched the gray spider carefully 
with growing determination. He, Burl, had killed a hunting spider at the 
red-clay cliff. True, the killing had been accidental, and had nearly cost him 
his own life, but he had killed a spider of the most deadly kind. 
Now great ambition grew in Burl's heart. His tribe had always feared spiders too 
much to study their habits, but they knew a few things. The most important: 
snare spiders never left their lairs to hunt--never! Burl hoped to make daring 
application of that knowledge. 
He drew back from the white, shining snare and crept softly to the rear. The 
fabric gathered itself into a point and continued 20 feet as a tunnel, in which 
the spider would dream of its last meal and await its next victim. Burl made his 
way to a point where the tunnel was just 10 feet away. Soon, through the threads 
of the tunnel, he saw the thick gray bulk of the spider return to its resting 
place. 
Burl's hair stood on end from sheer fright, but he was slave to an idea. He drew 
near and aimed his deadly, pointed spear at the bulge in the tunnel where the 
spider lay. He thrust it home with all his strength--and ran away at top speed, 
glassy-eyed from terror. 
Much later he ventured near again, heart still in his mouth, ready to flee at 
the slightest sound. All was still. Burl had missed the horrible convulsions of 
the wounded spider, had not heard the frightful gnashings of its fangs against 
the piercing weapon, had not seen the silken threads of the tunnel ripped as the 
mortally wounded spider struggled madly to free itself. 
He came back beneath the overshadowing toadstools, quietly and cautiously, to 
find a great rent in the silken tunnel, and the great gray bulk lifeless and 
still, half-fallen through the opening the spear had made. A little puddle of 
evil-smelling liquid lay on the ground below, and from time to time a droplet 
dripped from the spear into the puddle with a splash. 
Burl looked at what he had done, saw the dead body of the creature he had slain, 
saw the ferocious mandibles and keen, deadly fangs. The creature's dead eyes 
stared at him malignantly, and the hairy legs remained braced as if further to 
enlarge the gaping hole through which it had partly fallen. 
Exultation filled Burl's heart. His tribe had been furtive vermin for thousands 
of years, hiding or fleeing from mighty insects, and, if overtaken, screaming 
shrilly in terror while helplessly awaiting death. 
Burl had turned the tables. He had slain an enemy of his tribe. His breast 
expanded. Always his tribesmen went quietly and fearfully, but a sudden exultant 
yell burst from Burl's lips--the first hunting cry from the lips of a man in 300 
centuries! 
The next second his pulse nearly stopped in sheer panic at having made such a 
noise. He listened apprehensively but there was no sound. He approached his prey 
and carefully withdrew his spear. The viscid liquid made it slimy and slippery; 
he wiped it dry against a leathery toadstool. Then Burl had to conquer his 
illogical fear again before daring to touch the creature he had slain. 
He moved off presently, with the belly of the spider on his back and two hairy 
legs over his shoulders. The other limbs hung limp, trailing on the ground. Burl 
was now a still more curious sight wrapped in a shining cloak of iridescent 
colors, wearing a headdress of golden antennae, and hauling the hideous bulk of 
a gray spider. 
He moved through the mushroom forest, and, because of the thing he carried, all 
creatures fled before him. They did not fear man--their instinct was 
slow-moving--but during all the millions of years that insects have existed, 
spiders have preyed on them. 
Burl heard loud humming and buzzing as he topped a rise opening onto a valley of 
torn and blackened mushrooms. He stopped and looked down. 
There was not a single yellow top among the mushrooms. Each was infected with 
tiny maggots which had liquefied the tough meat of the mushroom and caused it to 
drip to the ground below. The liquid had gathered at the center of the 
depression to form a golden-red lake. And all about its edges, in ranks and 
rows, by thousands, by millions, were ranged the green-gold, shining bodies of 
great flies. 
They were small, compared to other insects. Their increase in size had been 
limited due to an imperative necessity of their race. 
The flesh flies laid their eggs by hundreds in decaying carcasses. The others 
laid their eggs by hundreds in mushrooms. To feed the maggots that would hatch, 
a relatively great quantity of food was needed, therefore the flies must remain 
small, or the body of a single grasshopper, say, would furnish food for but two 
or three grubs instead of the hundreds it must support. 
Burl stared down at the golden pool. Bluebottles, greenbottles, and all flies of 
metallic luster gathered at the Lucullan feast of corruption. Their buzzing as 
they darted above the odorous pool of golden liquid made the sound Burl had 
heard. Their bodies flashed and glittered as they darted about, seeking a place 
to alight and join the orgy. 
Those which clustered at the banks of the pool were still as if carved from 
metal. Their huge, red eyes glowed, and their bodies shone with obscene fatness. 
Flies are the most disgusting of all insects. Burl watched them, watched the 
interlacing streams of light as they buzzed eagerly above the pool, seeking a 
place at the festive board. 
A drumming roar sounded. A golden speck appeared in the sky, a slender, 
needlelike body with transparent, shining wings and two huge eyes. It grew 
nearer and became a dragonfly 20 feet long, its body shimmering, purest gold. It 
poised above the pool, then darted down. Its jaws snapped viciously and 
repeatedly; each time the glittering body of a fly vanished. 
A second dragonfly appeared, its body a vivid purple, and a third. They swooped 
and rushed above the golden pool, snapping in midair, making abrupt, angular 
turns, creatures of incredible ferocity and beauty. At the moment they were 
nothing more nor less than slaughtering machines. Their multifaceted eyes burned 
with bloodlust. In that mass of buzzing flies even the most voracious appetite 
must be sated, but the dragonflies kept on. Slender, graceful creatures, they 
dashed here and there above the pond like the mythical dragons for which they 
had been named. 
A few miles farther on Burl recognized a familiar landmark. He knew it well, but 
always from a safe distance. A mass of rock had heaved itself up from the nearly 
level plain he was traversing, and formed an outjutting cliff. At one point the 
rock overhung a sheer drop, making an inverted ledge--a roof over 
nothingness--which a hairy creature had transformed into a fairylike dwelling. A 
white hemisphere clung tenaciously to the rock above, and long cables anchored 
it firmly. 
A Clotho spider (Clotho Durandi, LATR) had built a nest there, from which it 
emerged to hunt the unwary. Within that half-globe was a monster, resting on a 
cushion of softest silk. If one went too near, one of the little inverted 
arches, seemingly firmly closed by a wall of silk, would open and a creature out 
of a dream of hell emerge, to run with fiendish agility toward its prey. 
Yes, Burl knew the place. Hung on the outer walls of the silken palace were 
stones and tiny boulders, discarded fragments of former meals, and gutted armor 
from limbs of ancient prey. And most terrible was another decoration that 
dangled from the castle of this insect ogre: the shrunken, desiccated figure of 
a man, all juices extracted, life gone. 
That man's death had saved Burl's life two years before. They had been together, 
seeking edible mushrooms. The Clotho spider sprang suddenly from behind a great 
puffball, and the two men froze in terror. It came swiftly forward and chose its 
victim. Burl had escaped when the other man was seized. Now he looked 
meditatively at the hiding place of his ancient enemy. Someday-- 
But now he passed on. He passed the thicket in which great moths hid during the 
day, and the turgid pool of slime and yeast where a monster water snake lurked. 
He penetrated the little wood of shining mushrooms that produced light at night, 
and the shadowed place where truffle-hunting beetles went chirping thunderously 
at dark hours. 
Then Burl saw Saya, a flash of pink skin vanishing behind the thick stalk of a 
squat toadstool. He ran forward, calling her name. She appeared, and saw the 
figure with the horrible bulk of the spider on its back. Horrified, she cried 
out, and Burl understood. He dropped his burden, then went swiftly toward her. 
They met. Saya waited timidly until she saw who this man was, and astonishment 
filled her face. Gorgeously attired, in an iridescent cloak from the whole wing 
of a great moth, with a strip of softest fur from a night-flying creature about 
his middle, with golden feathery antennae bound on his forehead, and a fierce 
spear in his hands--this was not the Burl she knew. 
But he moved slowly toward her, filled with fierce delight at seeing her again, 
thrilling with joy at her slender gracefulness and the dark richness of her 
tangled hair. He held out his hands and touched her shyly. Then, manlike, he 
babbled excitedly of his adventures, and dragged her toward his great victim, 
the gray-bellied spider. 
Saya trembled when she saw the furry bulk lying on the ground, and almost fled 
when Burl advanced and took it on his back. But something of the pride that 
filled him came vicariously to her. She smiled a flashing smile, and Burl 
stopped short in his explanation, tongue-tied. His eyes became pleading and 
soft. He laid the huge spider at her feet and spread out his hands imploringly. 
30,000 years of savagery had not lessened Saya's femininity. She became aware 
that Burl was her slave, that these wonderful things he wore and had done meant 
nothing if she did not approve. She drew away--saw the misery in Burl's 
face--and abruptly ran into his arms and clung to him, laughing happily. And 
suddenly Burl understood that all these things he had done, even the slaying of 
a great spider, were of no importance whatever beside this most wonderful thing 
that had just happened, and told Saya so quite humbly, but holding her very 
close to him as he did. 
And so Burl came back to his tribe. He had left nearly naked, with but a wisp of 
moth wing twisted about his middle, a timid, fearful, trembling creature. He 
returned triumphantly, walking slowly, fearlessly down a broad lane of golden 
mushrooms toward the hiding place of his people. 
On his shoulders was draped a great and many-colored cloak made from the whole 
of a moth's wing. Soft fur was about his middle. A spear was in his hand, a 
fierce club at his waist. He and Saya bore between them the dead body of a huge 
spider--aforetime the dread of the pink-skinned, naked men. But to Burl the most 
important thing of all was that Saya walked beside him openly, acknowledging him 
before all the tribe. 

        
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