Мюррей Лейнстер - The Forgotten Planet

But the superstitions of savages involve the payment of blackmail in exact proportion to their prosperity. The Eskimos of Earth lived always on the brink of starvation. They could not afford the luxury of tabus and totem animals whose flesh must not be eaten, and forbidden areas which might contain food.

Religion there was, among Burl's people, but superstition was not. No humans, anywhere, can live without religion, but on Earth Eskimos did with a minimum of superstitions,—they could afford no more—and the humans of the forgotten planet could not afford any at all.

Therefore they climbed desperately despite the unparalleled state of things about them. There was no horizon, but they had never seen a horizon. Their feeling was that what had been "down" was now partly "behind" and they feared lest a toppling universe ultimately let them fall toward that grayness they considered the sky.

But all kept on. To lag behind would be to be abandoned in this place where all known sensations were turned topsy–turvy. None of them could imagine turning back. Even old Tama, whimpering in a whisper as she struggled to keep up, merely complained bitterly of her fate. She did not even think of revolt. If Burl had stopped, all his followers would have squatted down miserably to wait for death. They had no thought of adventure or any hope of safety. The only goodnesses they could imagine were food and the nearness of other humans. They had food—nobody had abandoned any of the dangling ant–bodies Tet and Dik had distributed before the climb began. They would not be separated from their fellows.

Burl's motivation was hardly more distinct. He had started uphill in a judicious mixture of fear and injured vanity and desperation. There was nothing to be gained by going back. The terrors at hand were no greater than those behind, so there was no reason not to go ahead.

They came to a place where the mountain–flank sank inward. There was a flat space, and behind it a winding cañon of sorts like a vast crack in the mountain's substance. Burl breasted the curving edge and found flatness beyond it. He stopped short.

The mouth of the cañon was perhaps fifty yards from the lip of the downward slope. So much space was practically level, and on it were toadstools and milkweed—two of them—and there was food. It was a small, isolated asylum for life such as they were used to. They could—it was possible that they could—have found a place of safety here.

But the possibility was not the fact. They saw the spider–web at once. It was slung between the opposite cañon–walls by cables all of two hundred feet long. The radiating cables reached down to anchorages on stone. The snare–threads, winding out and out in that logarithmic spiral whose properties men were so astonished to discover, were fully a yard apart. The web was for giant game. It was empty now, but Burl saw the telegraph–cord which ran from the very center of the web to the web–maker's lurking–place. There was a rocky shelf on the cañon–wall. On it rested the spider, almost invisible against the stone, with one furry leg touching the cable. The slightest touch on any part of the web would warn it instantly.

Burl's followers accumulated behind him. Old Jon's wheezing was audible. Tama ceased her complaints to survey this spot. It might be—it could be—a haven, and she would have to find new and different things to complain about in consequence. The spider–web itself, of course, was no reason for them to be alarmed. Web–spiders do not hunt. Their males do, but they are rarely in the neighborhood of a web save at mating–time. The web itself was no reason not to settle here. But there was a reason.

The ground before the web,—between the web and themselves—was a charnel–house of murdered creatures. Half–inch–thick wing–cases of dead beetles and the cleaned–out carapaces of other giants. The ovipositor of an ichneumon–fly,—see feet of springy, slender, deadly–pointed tube—and the abdomen–plates of bees and the draggled antennae of moths and butterflies.

Something very terrible lived in this small place. The mountainsides were barren of food for big flying things. Anything which did fly this high for any reason would never land on sloping foodless stone. It would land here. And very obviously it would die. Because something—Something—killed things as they came. It denned back in the cañon where they could not see it. It dined here.

The humans looked and shivered, all but Burl. He cast his eyes about for better weapons than he possessed. He chose for himself a magnificent lance grown by some dead thing for its own defense. He pulled it out of the ground.

It was utterly silent, here on the heights. No sounds from the valley rose so high. There was no noise except the small creakings made as Burl strove to free the new, splendid weapon for himself.

That was why he heard the gasp which somebody uttered in default of a scream that would not be uttered. It was a choked, a strangled, an inarticulate sobbing noise.

He saw its cause.

There was a thing moving toward the folk from the recesses of the cañon. It moved very swiftly. It moved upon stilt–like, impossibly attenuated legs of impossible length and inconceivable number. Its body was the thickness of Burl's own. And from it came a smell of such monstrous foetor that any man, smelling it, would gag and flee even without fear to urge him on. The creature was a monstrous millipede, forty feet in length, with features of purest, unadulterated horror.

It did not appear to plan to spring. Its speed of movement did not increase as it neared the tribesfolk. It was not rushing, like the furious charge of the murderers Burl's tribe knew. It simply flowed sinuously toward them with no appearance of haste, but at a rate of speed they could not conceivably outrun.

Sticklike legs twitched upward and caught the spinning body of an ant. The creature stopped, and turned its head about and seized the object its side–legs had grasped. It devoured it. Burl shouted again and again.

There was a rain of missiles upon the creature. But they were not to hurt it, but to divert its incredibly automaton–like attention. Its legs seized the things flung to it. It was not possible to miss. Ten, fifteen,—twenty of the items of small–game were grasped in mid–air, as if they were creatures in flight.

Burl's shoutings took effect. His people fled to the side of the level lip of ground. They climbed frantically past the opening of the valley. They fled toward the heights.

Burl was the last to retreat. The monstrous millipede stood immobile, trapped for the moment by the gratification of all its desires. It was absorbed by the multitude of tiny tidbits with which it had been provided.

It was a fact to Burl's honor that he debated a frantic attack upon the monster in its insane absorption. But the strangling stench was deterrent enough. He fled,—the last of his band of fugitives to leave the place where the monstrous creature lived and preyed. As he left it, it was still crunching the small meals, one by one, with which the folk had supplied it.

They went on up the mountain–flank. It was not to be supposed, of course, that the creature could not move above the slanting rock–surface. Unquestionably it roamed far and wide, upon occasion. But its own foetid reek would make impossible any idea of trailing the humans by scent. And, climbing desperately as the humans did, it would be unable to see them when they were past the first protuberance of the mountain.

In twenty minutes they slackened their pace. Exhaustion prompted it. Caution ordered it. Because here they saw another small island of flatness in the slanting universe which was all they could see save mist. It was simply a place where boulders had piled up, and soil had formed, and there was a miniature haven for life other than moulds which could grow on naked stone.