Humans from any other planet, surely, would have been astounded at the vistas of golden mushrooms stretching out in forests on either hand and the plains with flaking surfaces given every imaginable color by the moulds and rusts and tiny flowering yeasts growing upon them. They would have been amazed by the turgid pools the journeying tribe came upon, where the water was concealed by a thick layer of slime through which enormous bubbles of foul–smelling gas rose to enlarge to preposterous size before bursting abruptly.
Had they been as ill–armed as Burl's folk, though, visitors from other planets would have been at least as timorous. Lacking highly specialized knowledge of the ways of insects on this world even well–armed visitors would have been in greater danger.
But the tribe went on without a single casualty. They had fleeting glimpses of the white spokes of symmetrical spider–webs whose least thread no member of the tribe could break.
Their immunity from disaster—though in the midst of danger—gave them a certain all–too–human concentration upon discomfort. Lacking calamities, they noticed their discomforts and grew weary of continual traveling. A few of the men complained to Burl.
For answer, he pointed back along the way they had come. To the right a reddish dust–cloud was just settling, and to the rear rose another as they looked.
And on this day a thing happened which at once gave the complainers the rest they asked for, and proved the fatality of remaining where they were. A child ran aside from the path its elders were following. The ground here had taken on a brownish hue. As the child stirred up the surface mould with his feet, dust that had settled was raised up again. It was far too thin to have any visible color. But the child suddenly screamed, strangling. The mother ran frantically to snatch him up.
The red dust was no less deadly merely because it had settled to the ground. If a storm–wind came now—but they were infrequent under the forgotten planet's heavy bank of clouds—the fallen red dust could be raised up again and scattered about until there would be no living thing anywhere which would not gasp and writhe—and die.
But the child would not die. He would suffer terribly and be weak for days. In the morning he could be carried.
When night began to darken the sky, the tribe searched for a hiding–place. They came upon a shelf–like cliff, perhaps twenty or thirty feet high, slanting toward the line of the tribesmen's travel. Burl saw black spots in it—openings. Burrows. He watched them as the tribe drew near. No bees or wasps went in or out. He watched long enough to be sure.
When they were close, he was certain. Ordering the others to wait, he went forward to make doubly sure. The appearance of the holes reassured him. Dug months before by mining–bees, gone or dead now, the entrances to the burrows were weathered and bedraggled. Burl explored, first sniffing carefully at each opening. They were empty. This would be shelter for the night. He called his followers, and they crawled into the three–foot tunnels to hide.
Burl stationed himself near the outer edge of one of them to watch for signs of danger. Night had not quite fallen. Jon and Dor, hungry, went off to forage a little way beyond the cliff. They would be cautious and timid, taking no risks whatever.
Burl waited for the return of his explorers. Meanwhile he fretted over the meaning of the stricken child. Stirred–up red dust was dangerous. The only time when there would be no peril from it would be at night, when the dripping rainfall of the dark hours turned the surface of this world into thin shine. It occurred to Burl that it would be safe to travel at night, so far as the red dust was concerned. He rejected the idea instantly. It was unthinkable to travel at night for innumerable other reasons.
Frowning, he poked his spear idly at a tumbled mass of tiny parchment cup–like things near the entrance of a cave. And instantly movement became visible. Fifty, sixty, a hundred infinitesimal creatures, no more than half an inch in length, made haste to hide themselves among the thimble–sized paperlike cups. They moved with extraordinary clumsiness and immense effort, seemingly only by contortions of their greenish–black bodies. Burl had never seen any creature progress in such a slow and ineffective fashion. He drew one of the small creatures back with the point of his spear and examined it from a safe distance.
He picked it up on his spear and brought it close to his eyes. The thing redoubled its frenzied movements. It slipped off the spear and plopped upon the soft moth–fur he wore about his middle. Instantly, as if it were a conjuring–trick, the insect vanished. Burl searched for minutes before he found it hidden deep in the long, soft hairs of his garment, resting motionless and seemingly at ease.
It was the larval form of a beetle, fragments of whose armor could be seen near the base of the clayey cliffside. Hidden in the remnants of its egg–casings, the brood of minute things had waited near the opening of the mining–bee tunnel. It was their gamble with destiny when mining–bee grubs had slept through metamorphosis and come uncertainly out of the tunnel for the first time, that some or many of the larvae might snatch the instant's chance to fasten to the bees' legs and writhe upward to an anchorage in their fur. It happened that this particular batch of eggs had been laid after the emergence of the grubs. They had no possible chance of fulfilling their intended role as parasites on insects of the order hymenoptera. They were simply and matter–of–factly doomed by the blindness of instinct, which had caused them to be placed where they could not possibly survive.
On the other hand, if one or many of them had found a lurking–place, the offspring of their host would have been doomed. The place filled by oil–beetle larvae in the scheme of things is the place—or one of the places—reserved for creatures that limit the number of mining–bees. When a bee–louse–infested mining–bee has made a new tunnel, stocked it with honey for its young, and then laid one egg to float on that pool of nourishment and hatch and feed and ultimately grow to be another mining–bee—at that moment of egg–laying, one small bee–louse detaches itself. It remains zestfully in the provisioned cell to devour the egg for which the provisions were accumulated. It happily consumes those provisions and, in time, an oil–beetle crawls out of the tunnel a mining–bee so laboriously prepared.
Burl had no difficulty in detaching the small insect and casting it away, but in doing so he discovered that others had hidden themselves in his fur without his knowledge. He plucked them away and found more. While savages can be highly tolerant of vermin too small to be seen, they feel a peculiar revolt against serving as host to creatures of sensible size. Burl reacted violently—as once he had reacted to the discovery of a leech clinging to his heel. He jerked off his loin–cloth and beat it savagely with his spear.
When it was clean, he still felt a wholly unreasonable sense of humiliation. It was not clearly thought out, of course. Burl feared huge insects too much to hate them. But that small creatures should fasten upon him produced a completely irrational feeling of outrage. For the first time in very many years or centuries a human being upon the forgotten planet felt that he had been insulted. His dignity had been assailed. Burl raged.
But as he raged, a triumphant shout came from nearby. Jon and Dor were returning from their foraging, loaded down with edible mushroom. They, also, had taken a step upward toward the natural dignity of men. They had so far forgotten their terror as to shout in exultation at their find of food. Up to now, Burl had been the only man daring to shout. Now there were two others.