Part 4 (1/2)

The great spider surveyed him and made ready to cast more of its silken stuff upon him. The spinnerets became active. A leg gathered it up--

The sticky stuff about Burl's feet gave way.

He shot out of the opening and fell heavily, sprawling upon the earth below and cras.h.i.+ng into the shrunken sh.e.l.l of a flying beetle that had blundered into the snare and not escaped as he had done.

Burl rolled over and over and then sat up. An angry, foot-long ant stood before him, its mandibles extended threateningly, while a shrill stridulation filled the air.

In ages past, back on Earth--where most ants were to be measured in fractions of an inch--the scientists had debated gravely whether their tribe possessed a cry. They believed that certain grooves upon the body of the insect, like those upon the great legs of the cricket, might be the means of making a sound too shrill for human ears to catch. It was greatly debated, but evidence was hard to obtain.

Burl did not need evidence. He knew that the stridulation was caused by the insect before him, though he had never wondered how it was produced.

The cry was emitted to summon other ants from its city to help it in difficulty or good fortune.

Harsh clickings sounded fifty or sixty feet away; comrades were coming.

And while only army ants were normally dangerous, any tribe of ants could be formidable when aroused. It was overwhelming enough to pull down and tear a man to shreds as a pack of infuriated fox-terriers might do on Earth.

Burl fled without further delay, nearly colliding with one of the web's anchor-cables. Then he heard the shrill outcry subside. The ant, short-sighted as all its kind, no longer felt threatened. It went peacefully about the business Burl had interrupted. Presently it found some edible carrion among the debris from the spider-web and started triumphantly back to its city.

Burl sped on for a few hundred yards and then stopped. He was shaken and dazed. For the moment, he was as timid and fearful as any other man in his tribe. Presently he would realize the full meaning of the unparalleled feat he had performed in escaping from the giant spider web while cloaked with folds of gummy silk. It was not only unheard-of; it was unimaginable! But Burl was too shaken to think of it now.

Rather quaintly, the first sensation that forced itself into his consciousness was that his feet hurt. The gluey stuff from the web still stuck to his soles, picking up small objects as he went along. Old, ant-gnawed fragments of insect armor p.r.i.c.ked him so persistently, even through his toughened foot-soles, that he paused to sc.r.a.pe them away, staring fearfully about all the while. After a dozen steps more he was forced to stop again.

It was this nagging discomfort, rather than vanity or an emergency which caused Burl to discover--imagine--blunder into a new activity as epoch-making as anything else he had done. His brain had been uncommonly stimulated in the past twenty-some hours. It had plunged him into at least one predicament because of his conceiving the idea of stabbing something, but it had also allowed him escape from another even more terrifying one just now. In between it had led to the devising of a purpose--the bringing of Saya here--though that decision was not so firmly fixed as it had been before the encounter with the web-spider.

Still, it had surely been reasoning of a sort that told him to grease his body with the fish. Otherwise he would now be following the tarantula as a second course for the occupant of the web.

Burl looked cautiously all about him. It seemed to be quite safe. Then, quite deliberately, he sat down to think. It was the first time in his life that he had ever deliberately contemplated a problem with the idea of finding an answer to it. And the notion of doing such a thing was epoch-making--on this planet!

He examined his foot. The sharp edges of pebbles and the remnants of insect-armor hurt his feet when he walked. They had done so ever since he had been born, but never before had his feet been sticky, so that the irritation from one object persisted for more than a step. He carefully picked away each sharp-pointed fragment, one by one. Partly coated with the half-liquid gum, they even tended to cling to his fingers, except where the oil was thick.

Burl's reasoning had been of the simplest sort. He had contemplated a situation--not deliberately but because he had to--and presently his mind showed him a way out of it. It was a way specifically suited to the situation. Here he faced something different. Presently he applied the answer of one problem to a second problem. Oil on his body had let him go free of things that would stick to him. Here things stuck to his feet; so he oiled them.

And it worked. Burl strode away, almost--but not completely--untroubled by the bothersome pebbles and bits of discarded armor. Then he halted to regard himself with astonished appreciation. He was still thirty-five miles from his tribe; he was naked and unarmed, utterly ignorant of wood and fire and weapons other than the one he had lost. But he paused to observe with some awe that he was very wonderful indeed.

He wanted to display himself. But his spear was gone. So Burl found it necessary to think again. And the remarkable thing about it was that he succeeded.

In a surprisingly brief time he had come up with a list of answers. He was naked, so he would find garments for himself. He was weaponless: he would find himself a spear. He was hungry and he would seek food. Since he was far from his tribe, he would go to them. And this was, in a fas.h.i.+on, quite obviously thought; but it was not oblivious on the forgotten planet because it had been futile--up to now. The importance of such thought in the scheme of things was that men had not been thinking even so simply as this, living only from minute to minute. Burl was fumbling his way into a habit of thinking from problem to problem.

And that was very important indeed.

Even in the advanced civilization of other planets, few men really used their minds. The great majority of people depended on machines not only for computations but decisions as well. Any decisions not made by machines most men left to their leaders. Burl's tribesfolk thought princ.i.p.ally with their stomachs, making few if any decisions on any other basis--though they did act, very often, under the spur of fear.

Fear-inspired actions, however, were not thought out. Burl was thinking out his actions.

There would be consequences.

He faced upstream and began to move again, slowly and warily, his eyes keenly searching out the way ahead, ears alert for the slightest sound of danger. Gigantic b.u.t.terflies, riotous in coloring, fluttered overhead through the hazy air. Sometimes a gra.s.shopper hurtled from one place to another like a projectile, its transparent wings beating frantically.

Now and then a wasp sped by, intent upon its hunting, or a bee droned heavily alone, anxious and worried, striving to gather pollen in a nearly flowerless world.

Burl marched on. From somewhere far behind him came a very faint sound.

It was a shrill noise, but very distant indeed. Absorbed in immediate and nearby matters, Burl took no heed. He had the limited local viewpoint of a child. What was near was important and what was distant could be ignored. Anything not imminent still seemed to him insignificant--and he was preoccupied.