Red Dust

Murray Leinster

Description

Murray Leinster's science-fiction novella "The Red Dust" is a sequel to his previous story, "The Mad Planet." In the future, humans are no longer running things on Earth. Instead, a race of giant insects has taken over, forcing subservient humans to regress to a primitive state. But a new danger is on the horizon that could mean the end for everyone.

Sujets

• Science fiction

Informations

• Publié par: The Floating Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776591114
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE RED DUST
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MURRAY LEINSTER
 
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The Red Dust First published in 1927 Epub ISBN 978-1-77659-111-4 Also available: PDF ISBN 978-1-77659-112-1 © 2012 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
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Chapter I - Prey Chapter II - The Journey Chapter III - The Sexton-Beetles Chapter IV - The Forest of Death Chapter V - Out of Bondage Endnotes
Chapter I - Prey
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The sky grew gray and then almost white. The overhanging banks of cloudsseemed to withdraw a little from the steaming earth. Haze that hungalways among the mushroom forests and above the fungus hills grew moretenuous, and the slow and misty rain that dripped the whole night longceased reluctantly.
As far as the eye could see a mad world stretched out, a world ofinsensate cruelties and strange, fierce maternal solicitudes. Theinsects of the night—the great moths whose wings spread far and wide inthe dimness, and the huge fireflies, four feet in length, whose beaconsmade the earth glow in their pale, weird light—the insects of the nighthad sought their hiding-places.
Now the creatures of the day ventured forth. A great ant-hill towered ahundred feet in the air. Upon its gravel and boulder-strewn side acommotion became visible.
The earth crumbled, and fell into an invisible opening, then a darkchasm appeared, and two slender, threadlike antennæ peered out.
A warrior ant emerged, and stood for an instant in the daylight, lookingall about for signs of danger to the ant-city. He was all of ten incheslong, this ant, and his mandibles were fierce and strong. A second andthird warrior came from the inside of the ant-hill, and ran with tinyclickings about the hillock, waving their antennæ restlessly, searching,ever searching for a menace to their city.
They returned to the gateway from which they had made their appearance,evidently bearing reassuring messages, because shortly after they hadreëntered the gateway of the ant-city, a flood of black, ill-smellingworkers poured out of the opening and dispersed upon their business. Theclickings of their limbs and an occasional whining stridulation made anincessant sound as they scattered over the earth, foraging among themushrooms and giant cabbages, among the rubbish-heaps of the giganticbee-hives and wasp colonies, and among the remains of the tragedies ofthe night for food for their city.
The city of the ants had begun its daily toil, toil in which every oneshared without supervision or coercion. Deep in the recesses of thepyramid galleries were hollowed out and winding passages that led down afathomless distance into the earth below.
Somewhere in the maze of tunnels there was a royal apartment, in whichthe queen-ant reposed, waited upon by assiduous courtiers, fed by royalstewards, and combed and rubbed by the hands of her subjects andchildren.
But even the huge monarch of the city had her constant and pressing dutyof maternity. A dozen times the size of her largest loyal servant, shewas no less bound by the unwritten but imperative laws of the city thanthey. From the time of waking to the time of rest, she was ordained tobe the queen-mother in the strictest and most literal sense of the word,for at intervals to be measured only in terms of minutes she broughtforth a single egg, perhaps three inches in length, which was instantlyseized by one of her eager attendants and carried in haste to themunicipal nursery.
There it was placed in a tiny cell a foot or more in length until asac-shaped grub appeared, all soft, white body save for a tiny mouth.Then the nurses took it in charge and fed it with curious, tendergestures until it had waxed large and fat and slept the sleep ofmetamorphosis. When it emerged from its rudimentary cocoon it took theplaces of its nurses until its soft skin had hardened into the hornyarmor of the workers and soldiers, and then it joined the throng ofworkers that poured out from the city at dawn to forage for food, tobring back its finds and to share with the warriors and the nurses, thedrone males and the young queens, and all the other members of itscommunities, their duties in the city itself. That was the life of thesocial insect, absolute devotion to the cause of its city, utterabnegation of self-interest for the sake of its fellows—and death attheir hands when their usefulness was past. They neither knew norexpected more or less.
It is a strange instinct that prompts these creatures to devote theirlives to their city, taking no smallest thought for their individualgood, without even the call of maternity or sex to guide them. Only thequeen knows motherhood. The others know nothing but toil, for purposesthey do not understand, and to an end of which they cannot dream. Atintervals all over the world of Burl's time these ant-cities rose abovethe surrounding ground, some small and barely begun, and others ancientcolonies which were truly the continuation of cities first built whenthe ants were insects to be crushed beneath the feet of men. Theseancient strongholds towered two, three, and even four hundred feet abovethe plains, and their inhabitants would have had to be numbered inmillions if not billions.
Not all the earth was subject to the ants, however. Bees and wasps andmore deadly creatures crawled over and flew above its surface. The beeswere four feet and more in length. And slender-waisted wasps darted hereand there, preying upon the colossal crickets that sang deep bass musicto their mates—and the length of the crickets was the length of a man,and more.
Spiders with bloated bellies waited, motionless, in their snares, whosethreads were the size of small cables, waiting for some luckless giantinsect to be entangled in the gummy traps. And butterflies flutteredover the festering plains of this new world, tremendous creatures whosewings could only be measured in terms of yards.
An outcropping of rock jutted up abruptly from a fungus-covered plain.Shelf-fungi and strangely colored molds stained the stone until theshining quartz was hidden almost completely from view, but the wholeglistened like tinted crystal from the dank wetness of the night. Littlewisps of vapor curled away from the slopes as the moisture was taken upby the already moisture-laden air.
Seen from a distance, the outcropping of rock looked innocent and still,but a nearer view showed many things.
Here a hunting wasp had come upon a gray worm, and was methodicallyinserting its sting into each of the twelve segments of the faintlywrithing creature. Presently the worm would be completely paralyzed, andwould be carried to the burrow of the wasp, where an egg would be laidupon it, from which a tiny maggot would presently hatch. Then weeks ofagony for the great gray worm, conscious, but unable to move, while themaggot fed upon its living flesh—
There the tiny spider, youngest of hatchlings, barely four inchesacross, stealthily stalked some other still tinier mite, the little,many-legged larva of the oil-beetle, known as the bee-louse. The almostinfinitely small bee-louse was barely two inches long, and could easilyhide in the thick fur of a great bumblebee.
This one small creature would never fulfill its destiny, however. Thehatchling spider sprang—it was a combat of midgets which was soon over.When the spider had grown and was feared as a huge, black-belliedtarantula, it would slay monster crickets with the same ease and thesame implacable ferocity.
The outcropping of rock looked still and innocent. There was one pointwhere it overhung, forming a shelf, beneath which the stone fell away ina sheer-drop. Many colored fungus growths covered the rock, making it ariot of tints and shades. But hanging from the rooflike projection ofthe stone there was a strange, drab-white object. It was in the shape ofhalf a globe, perhaps six feet by six feet at its largest. A number oflittle semicircular doors were fixed about its sides, like invertedarches, each closed by a blank wall. One of them would open, but onlyone.
The house was like the half of a pallid orange, fastened to the roof ofrock. Thick cables stretched in every direction for yards upon yards,anchoring the habitation firmly, but the most striking of the thingsabout the house—still and quiet and innocent, like all the rest of therock outcropping—were the ghastly trophies fastened to the outer wallsand hanging from long silken chains below.
Here was the hind leg of one of the smaller beetles. There was thewing-case of a flying creature. Here a snail-shell, two feet indiameter, hanging at the end of an inch-thick cable. There a boulderthat must have weighed thirty or forty pounds, dangling in similarfashion.
But fastened here and there, haphazard and irregularly, were other morerepulsive remnants. The shrunken head-armor of a beetle, the fierce jawsof a cricket—the pitiful shreds of a hundred creatures that had formedforgotten meals for the bloated insect within the home.
Comparatively small as was the nest of the clotho spider, it wasdecorated as no ogre's castle had ever been adorned—legs sucked dry oftheir contents, corselets of horny armor forever to be unused by anycreature, a wing of this insect, the head of that. And dangling by thelongest cord of all, with a silken cable wrapped carefully about it tokeep the parts together, was the shrunken, shriveled, dried-up body of along-dead man!
Outside, the nest was a place of gruesome relics. Within, it was a placeof luxury and ease. A cushion of softest