The Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster (ebook reader for surface pro txt) 📕

too far beneath the clouds. There were the ants that Dik and Tet had distributed grandly, and not all of which had been used to secure escape from the ca�on of the millipede. Had they found other food immediately, they would have settled down comfortably in the fashion normal to creatures whose idea of bliss is a secure hiding-place and food on hand so they do not have to leave it. Somehow they believed that this high place of bright light and new colors was secure. But they had no hiding-place. And though they did accept with the unreasoning faith of children and savages that there were no enemies here, they still wanted one.

They found a cave. It was small, so that it would be crowded with all of them in it, but as it turned out, this was fortunate. At some time it had been occupied by some other creature, but the dirt which floored it had settled flat and showed no tracks. It retained faint traces of a smell which was unfamiliar but not unpleasing,—it held no connotation of danger. Ants stank of formic acid plus the musky odor of their particular city. One could identify not only the kind of ant, but its home city, by sniffing at an ant-trail. Spiders had their own hair-raising odor. The smell of a praying-mantis was acrid, and all beetles reeked of decay. And of course there were those bugs whose main defense was an effluvium which tended to strangle all but the smell's happy possessor. This faint smell in the cave was different. The humans thought vaguely that it might possibly be another kind of man.

Actually, it was the smell of a warm-blooded animal. But Burl and his fellows knew of no warm-blooded creature but themselves.

They had come above the clouds a bare two hours before sunset,—of which they knew nothing. For an hour they marveled, staying close together. They were especially astounded by the sun, since they could not bear to look at it. But presently, being savages, they accepted it matter-of-factly.

They could not cease to wonder at the vegetation about them. They were accustomed only to gigantic fungi and the few straggling plants which tried so desperately to bear seed before they were devoured. Here they saw many plants and no fungi,—and they did not see anything they recognized as insects. They looked only for large things.

They were astounded by the slenderness and toughness of the plants. Grass fascinated them, and weeds. A large part of their courage came from the absence of debris upon the ground. The hunting-grounds of spiders were marked by grisly remnants of finished meals, and where mantises roamed there were bits of transparent beetle-wings and sharp spiny bits of armor not tasty enough to be consumed. Here, in the first hour of their exploration, they saw no sign that an insect like the lowland ones had ever been in this place at all. But they could not believe the monsters never came. They correctly—and pessimistically—assumed that their coming was only rare.

The cave was a great relief. Trees did not grow close enough to give them a feeling of safety,—though they were ludicrously amazed at the invincible hardness of tree trunks. They had never known anything but insect-armour and stone which was as hard as the trunks of those growing things. They found nothing to eat, but they were not yet hungry. They did not worry about food while they still had remnants from their climb.

When the sun sank low and crimson colorings filled the west, they were less happy. They watched the glory of their first sunset with scared, incredulous eyes. Yellows and reds and purples reared toward the zenith. It became possible to look at the sun directly. They saw it descend behind something they could not guess at. Then there was darkness.

The fact stunned them. So night came like this!

Then they saw the stars for the first time, as they came singly into being. And the folk from the lowland crowded frantically into the cave with its faint odor of having once been occupied by something else. They filled the cave tightly. But Burl had some reluctance to admit his terror. He and Saya were the last to enter.

And nothing happened. Nothing. The sounds of sunset continued. They were strange but soothing and somehow—again ancestral memory spoke comfortingly—they were the way night-sounds ought to be. Burl and the others could not possibly know it, but for the first time in forty generations on the forgotten planet, human beings were in an environment really suited to them. It had a rightness and a goodness which was obvious in spite of its novelty. And because of Burl's own special experiences, he was a little bit better able to estimate novelties than the rest. He listened to the night-noises from close by the cave's small entrance. He heard the breathing of his tribesfolk. He felt the heat of their bodies, keeping the crowded enclosure warm enough for all. Saya held fast to his hand, for the reassurance of the contact. He was wakeful, and thinking very busily and painfully, but Saya was not thinking at all. She was simply proud of Burl.

She felt, to be sure, a tumult which was fear of the unknown and relief from much greater fear of the familiar. She felt warm, prideful memories of the sight of Burl leading and commanding the others. She had absorbing fresh memories of the look and feel of sunshine, and mental pictures of sky and grass and trees which she had never seen before. Confusedly she remembered that Burl had killed a spider, no less, and he had shown how to escape a praying-mantis by flinging it at an ant, and he had grandly led the others up a mountainside it had never occurred to anybody else to climb. And the giant millipede would have devoured them all, but that Burl gave commands and set the example, and he had marched magnificently up the mountainside when it seemed that all the cosmos twisted and prepared to drop them into an inverted sky....

Saya dozed. And Burl sat awake, listening, and presently with fast-beating heart he slipped out of the entrance to the cave and stared about him in the night.

There was coolness such as he had never known before, but nightfall was not long past. There were smells in the air he had never before experienced,—green things growing, and the peculiar clean odor of wind that has been bathed in sunshine, and the oddly satisfying smell of resinous trees.

But Burl raised his eyes to the heavens. He saw the stars in all their glory, and he was the first human in two thousand years and more to look at them from this planet. There were myriads upon myriads of them, varying in brightness from stabbing lights to infinitesimal twinklings. They were of every possible color. They hung in the sky above him, immobile and unthreatening. They had not descended. They were very beautiful.

Burl stared. And then he noticed that he was breathing deeply, with a new zest. He was filling his lungs with clean, cool, fragrant air such as men were intended to breathe from the beginning, and of which Burl and many others had been deprived. It was almost intoxicating to feel so splendidly alive and unafraid.

There was a slight sound. Saya stood beside him, trembling a little. To leave the others had required great courage, but she had come to realize that if Burl was in danger she wished to share it.

They heard the nightwind and the orchestra of night-singers. They wandered aside from the cave-mouth and Saya found completely primitive and satisfying pride in the courage of Burl, who was actually not afraid of the dark! Her own uneasiness became something which merely added savor to her pride in him. She followed him wherever he went, to examine this and consider that in the nighttime. It gave her enormous satisfaction at once to think of danger and to feel so safe because of his nearness.

Presently they heard a new sound in the night. It was very far away, and not in the least like any sound they had ever heard before. It changed in pitch as insect-cries do not. It was a baying, yelping sound. It rose, and held the higher note, and abruptly dropped in pitch before it ceased. Minutes later it came again.

Saya shivered, but Burl said thoughtfully:

"That is a good sound."

He didn't know why. Saya shivered again. She said reluctantly:

"I am cold."

It had been a rare sensation in the lowlands. It came only after one of the infrequent thunderstorms, when wetted human bodies were exposed to the gusty winds that otherwise never blew. But here the nights grew cold after sundown. The heat of the ground would radiate to outer space with no clouds to intercept it, and before dawn the temperature might drop nearly to freezing. On a planet so close to its sun, however, there would hardly be more than light hoar-frost at any time.

The two of them went back to the cave. It was warm there, because of the close packing of bodies and many breaths. Burl and Saya found places to rest and dozed off, Saya's hand again trustfully in Burl's.

He still remained awake for a long time. He thought of the stars, but they were too strange to estimate. He thought of the trees and grass. But most of his impressions of this upper world were so remote from previous knowledge that he could only accept them as they were and defer reflecting upon them until later. He did feel an enormous complacency at having led his followers here, though.

But the last thing he actually thought about, before his eyes blinked shut in sleep, was that distant howling noise he had heard in the night. It was totally novel in kind, and yet there was something buried among the items of his racial heritage that told him it was good.

He was first awake of all the tribesmen and he looked out into the cold and pallid grayness of before-dawn. He saw trees. One side was brightly lighted by comparison, and the other side was dark. He heard the tiny singing noises of the inhabitants of this place. Presently he crawled out of the cave again.

The air was biting in its chill. It was an excellent reason why the giant insects could not live here, but it was invigorating to Burl as he breathed it in. Presently he looked curiously for the source of the peculiar one-sided light.

He saw the top of the sun as it peered above the eastern cloud-bank. The sky grew lighter. He blinked and saw it rise more fully into view. He thought to look upward, and the stars that had bewildered him were nearly gone.

He ran to call Saya.

The rest of the tribe waked as he roused her. One by one, they followed to watch their first sunrise. The men gaped at the sun as it filled the east with colorings, and rose and rose above the seemingly steaming layer of clouds, and then appeared to spring free of the horizon and swim on upward.

The women stared with all their eyes. The children blinked, and shivered, and crept to their mothers for warmth. The women enclosed them in their cloaks, and they thawed and peered out once more at the glory of sunshine and the day. Very soon, too, they realized that warmth came from the great shining body in the sky. The children presently discovered a game. It was the first game they had ever played. It consisted of running into a shaded place until they shivered, and then of running out into warm sunshine once more. Until this, dawning fear was the motive for such playing as they did. Now they gleefully made a game of sunshine.

In this first morning of their life above the clouds, the tribesmen ate of the food they had brought from below. But there was not an indefinite amount of food left. Burl ate, and considered darkly, and presently summoned his followers' attention. They were quite contented and for the moment felt no need of his guidance. But he felt need of admiration.

He spoke abruptly:

"We do not want to go back to the place we came from," he said sternly. "We must look for food here, so we can stay for always. Today we find food."

It was a seizure of the initiative. It was the linking of what the folk most craved with obedience to Burl. It was the device by which dictators seize power, and it was the instinctive action of a leader.

The eating men murmured agreement. There was a certain definite idea of goodness—not virtue, but of things desirable—associated with what Burl did and what he commanded. His tribe was gradually forming a habit of obedience, though it was a very fragile habit up to now.

He