"Murray Leinster - Planets of Adventure" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

mushrooms and toadstools and their kin. Here was a soil of rusts and yeasts. Here were
toadstool forests and fungus jungles. They grew with feverish intensity beneath a cloud-
hidden sky, while above them fluttered butterflies no less enlarged than they, moths as
much magnified, and other creatures which could thrive on their corruption.
The only creatures on the planet which crawled or ran or flew—save only Burl's
fugitive kind—were insects. They had been here before men came, and they had adapted
to the planet's extraordinary ways. With a world made ready before their first progenitors
arrived, insects had thriven incredibly. With unlimited food-supplies, they had grown
large. With increased size had come increased opportunity for survival, and enlargement
became hereditary. Other than fungoid growths, the solitary vegetables were the sports of
unstable varieties of the plants left behind by the Ludred. There were enormous cabbages,
with leaves the size of ship-sails, on which stolid grubs and caterpillars ate themselves to
maturity, and then swung below in strong cocoons to sleep the sleep of metamorphosis.
The tiniest butterflies of Earth had increased their size here until their wings spread feet
across, and some—like the emperor moths—stretched out purple wings which were yards
in span. Burl himself would have been dwarfed beneath a great moth's wing.
But he wore a gaudy fabric made of one. The moths and giant butterflies were
harmless to men. Burl's fellow tribesmen sometimes came upon a cocoon when it was
just about to open, and if they dared they waited timorously beside it until the creature
inside broke through its sleeping-shell and came out into the light.
Then, before it gathered energy from the air and before its wings swelled to strength
and firmness, the tribesmen fell upon it. They tore the delicate wings from its body and
the still-flaccid limbs from their places. And when it lay helpless before them they fled
away to feast on its juicy meat-filled limbs.
They dared not linger, of course. They left their prey helpless—staring strangely at
the world about it through its many-faceted eyes—before the scavengers came to contest
its ownership. If nothing more deadly appeared, surely the ants would come. Some of
them were only inches long, but others were the size of fox-terriers. All of them had to be
avoided by men. They would carry the moth-carcass away to their underground cities,
triumphantly, in shreds and morsels.
But most of the insect world was neither so helpless nor so unthreatening. Burl knew
of wasps almost the length of his own body, with stings that were instantly fatal. To every
species of wasp, however, some other insect is predestined prey. Wasps need not be
dreaded too much. And bees were similarly aloof. They were hard put to it for existence,
those bees. Since few flowers bloomed, they were reduced to expedients that once were
considered signs of degeneracy in their race: bubbling yeasts and fouler things, or
occasionally the nectarless blooms of the rank giant cabbages. Burl knew the bees. They
droned overhead, nearly as large as he was, their bulging eyes gazing at him and
everything else in abstracted preoccupation.
There were crickets, and beetles, and spiders. . . . Burl knew spiders! His grandfather
had been the prey of a hunting tarantula which had leaped with incredible ferocity from
its tunnel in the ground. A vertical pit, a yard in diameter, went down for twenty feet. At
the bottom of the lair the monster waited for the tiny sounds that would warn him of prey
approaching his hiding-place.
Burl's grandfather had been careless. The terrible shrieks he uttered as he was seized
still lingered vaguely in Burl's mind. And he had seen, too, the webs of another species of
spider—inch-thick cables of dirty silk—and watched from a safe distance as the
misshapen monster sucked the juices from a three-foot cricket its trap had caught. He
remembered the stripes of yellow and black and silver that crossed upon its abdomen. He
had been fascinated and horrified by the blind struggling of the cricket, tangled in