Mad Planet | Page 2

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