Argosy, Vol. 122, No. 1 — page 41: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE MAD PLANET. a foothold and food beyond the invisible menace that crept up, and up— These things did not take place in one year, or in ten. Not in one generation, but in several. Between the time when the chemists of the International Geophysical Institute announced that the proportion .of carbon dioxide in the air had increased from .o4 per cent to .1 per cent and the time when at sea-level six per cent of the at- mosphere was the deadly gas, more than two hundred years intervened. Coming gradually, as it did, the poison- ous effects of the deadly stuff increased with insidious slowness. First the lassitude, then the heaviness of brain, then the weakness of body. Mankind ceased to grow in numbers. After a long period, the race had fallen to a fraction of its former size. There was room in plenty on the mountain-tops—but the danger-level continued to creep up. There was but one solution. The human’ body would have to inure itself to the poison, or it was doomed to extinction. It finally developed a toleration for the gas that had wiped out race after race and nation after nation, but at a terrible cost. Lungs increased in size to secure the oxygen on which life depended, but the poison, in- haled at every breath, left the few survivors sickly and filled with a perpetual weariness. Their minds lacked the energy to cope with new problems or transmit the BROTIEUBE they possessed. And after thirty thousand years, Burl, a direct descendant of the first president of the Universal Republic, crept through a forest of toadstools and fungus growths. He was ignorant of fire, of metals, of the uses of stone and wood. A single garment covered him. His language was a scanty group of a few hundred labial sounds, con- veying no abstractions and few concrete things. ‘ He was ignorant of the uses of wood. There was no wood in the seanty territory furtively inhabited by his tribe. With the increase in heat and humidity the trees had -begun to die out. Those of northern climes went first, the oaks, the cedars, the maples. Then the pines—the beeches went early— the cypresses, and finally even the forests of the jungles vanished. Only grasses and ; ol reeds, bamboos and their kin, were able to flourish in the new, steaming atmosphere. The thick jungles gave place to dense thick- ets of grasses and ferns, now become tree- ferns again. And then the fungi took their place. Flourishing as never before, flourishing 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 that hung sullenly overhead, the fungi sprang up. About the dank pools that festered over the surface of the earth, fungus growths began to cluster. 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 place to them. Squat toodstools, flaking molds, evil-smell- ing yeasts, vast mounds of fungi inextric- ably mingled as to species, but growing, for- ever growing and exhaling an odor of dark places. The strange growths now grouped them- Selves in forests, horrible travesties on the vegetation they had succeeded. They grew and grew with feverish intensity beneath a clouded or a haze-obscured sky, while above them fluttered gigantic butterflies and huge moths, sipping daintily of their corruption. The insects alone of all the animal world above water, were able to endure the change. They multiplied exceedingly, and enlarged themselves. in the thickened air. The solitary vegetation—as distinct from fungus growths—that had survived was now a degenerate form of the cabbages that had once fed peasants. On those rank, colossal masses of foliage, the stolid grubs and cater- pillars ate themselves to maturity, then swung belew 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 had increased their span until-their gaily colored wings should be described in terfhs of feet, while the larger emperor moths extended their purple sails to a breadth of yards upon yards. Burl himself would have been dwarfed beneath the overshadowing fabric of their wings. It was fortunate that they, the largest cComiclbooks.com