Argosy, Vol. 122, No. 1 — page 49: what you’re looking at

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

THE MAD PLANET. was food, food in great quantities, and she -would be pleased. Burl had forgotten the large and oily fish that still hung down his back from the sinew about his neck, but now he rose, and its flapping against him reminded him again. He took it and fingered it all over, get- ting 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 that, too, reinforced his deter- mination. With all the immediacy of a child or a savage hhe set off at once. He had come along the bank of the stream. He would retrace his steps along the bank of the stream. Through the awkward aisles of the mush- room forest he made his way, eyes and ears open for possibilities of danger. Several times he heard the omnipresent clicking of © ants on their multifarious businesses in the wood, but he could afford to ignore them. They were short-sighted at best, and at worst they were foragers rather than hun- ters. He only feared one kind of ant, the army-ant, which sometimes travels in hordes of millions, eating all that it comes upon. In ages past, when they were tiny creatutes not an inch long, even the largest animals fled from them. Now that they measured a foot in length, not even the gorged spiders whose distended bellies were a yard in thick- ness, dared offer them battle. The mushroom-forest came to anend. A cheerful grasshopper (Ephigger) munched delicately at some dainty it had found. Its hind legs were bunched beneath it in perpet- ual readiness for flight. A monster wasp appeared above—as long as Burl himself— poised an instant, dropped, and seized the luckless feaster. There was a struggle, then the grasshop- per became helpless, and the wasp’s flexible abdomen curved delicately. Its sting en- tered the jointed armor of its prey, just be- neath the head. The sting entered with all the deliberate precision of a surgeon’s scalpel, and all struggle ceased. The wasp grasped the paralyzed, not dead, insect and flew away. Burl grunted, and passed on. He had hidden when the wasp darted down from above. _ He feared nothing. 39 The ground grew rough, and Burl’s prog- ress became painful. He clambered ardu- ously up steep slopes and made his way cautiously down their farther sides. Once he had to climb through a tangléd mass of mushroams so closely placed, and so small, that he had to break them apart with blows of his spear before he could pass, when they. shed upon him torrents of a fiery-red liquid that, rolled off his greasy breast and sank into the ground (Lactarius deliciosus ). A strange self-confidence now took pos- session of Burl. He walked less cautiously; and more boldly. The mere fact that he had struck something and destroyed it pro- vided him with a curious fictitious courage. He had climbed slowly to the top of a red-clay cliff, perhaps a hundred feet high, slowly. eaten away by the river when it overflowed. Burl could see the river. At some past flood-time it had lapped at the base of the cliff on whose edge he walked, though now it came no nearer than a quar- ter-mile, = The cliffsidé was almost covered with shelf-fungi, large and small, white, yellow, orange, and green, in indescribable confu- sion and luxuriance. From a point half- way up the cliff the inch-thick cable of a spider’s web stretched down to an anchor- age on the ground, and the strangely geome- trical pattern of the web glistened evilly. Somewhere among the fungi of the cliff- side the huge creature waited until some unfortunate prey should struggle helplessly in its monster snare. The spider waited in a motionless, implacable patience, in- vincibly certain of prey, utterly merciless to its victims. | Burl strutted on the edge of the cliff, a silly little pink-skinned creature with an oily fish slung about his neck and a drag- gled fragment of a moth’s wing about his middle. In his hand he bore the long spear of a minotaur beetle. He strutted, and looked scornfully down upon the whitely shining trap below him. He struck mush- rooms, and they had fallen before him. He strode fearlessly along. He would go to Saya and bring her to this land where food grew in abundance. Sixty paces before him, a shaft sank ver- tically in the sandy, clayey soil. It was a cComiclbooks.com