Mad Planet | Page 7

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,