Read Planet of Dread for Free Online Page B

proboscis like an elephant’s trunk, curled horribly. The eyes were multiple and mad.
    It looked in, drawn and hypnotized by the light shining out on this nightmare world from the control-room ports.
    Moran touched the button that closed the shutters.

III.
    When morning came, its arrival was the exact reversal of the coming of night. In the beginning there was darkness, and in the darkness there was horror.
    The creatures of the night untiringly filled the air with sound, and the sounds were discordant and gruesome and revolting. The creatures of this planet were gigantic. They should have adopted new customs appropriate to the dignity of their increased size. But they hadn’t. The manners and customs of insects are immutable. They feed upon specific prey—spiders are an exception, but they are not insects at all—and they lay their eggs in specific fashion in specific places, and they behave according to instincts which are so detailed as to leave them no choice at all in their actions. They move blindly about, reacting like automata of infinite complexity which are capable of nothing not built into them from the beginning. Centuries and millenia do not change them. Travel across star-clusters leaves them with exactly the capacities for reaction that their remotest ancestors had, before men lifted off ancient Earth’s green surface.
    The first sign of dawn was deep, deep, deepest red in the cloud-bank no more than fifteen hundred feet overhead. The red became brighter, and presently was as brilliant as dried blood. Again presently it was crimson over all the half-mile circle that human eyes could penetrate. Later still—but briefly—it was pink. Then the sky became gray. From that color it did not change again.
    Moran joined Burleigh in a survey of the landscape from the control-room. The battlefield was empty now. Of the thousands upon thousands of stinking combatants who’d rent and torn each other the evening before, there remained hardly a trace. Here and there, to be sure, a severed saw-toothed leg remained. There were perhaps as many as four relatively intact corpses not yet salvaged. But something was being done about them.
    There were tiny, brightly-banded beetles hardly a foot long which labored industriously over such frayed objects. They worked agitatedly in the yeasty stuff which on this world took the place of soil. They excavated, beneath the bodies of the dead ants, hollows into which those carcasses could descend. They pushed the yeasty, curdy stuff up and around the sides of those to-be-desired objects. The dead warriors sank little by little toward oblivion as the process went on. The up-thrust, dug-out material collapsed upon them as they descended. In a very little while they would be buried where no larger carrion-eater would discover them, and then the brightly-colored sexton beetles would begin a banquet to last until only fragments of chitinous armor remained.
----
    But Moran and Burleigh, in the Nadine’s control-room, could hardly note such details.
    “You saw the cargo,” said Burleigh, frowning. “How’s it packed? The bessendium, I mean.”
    “It’s in small boxes too heavy to be handled easily,” said Moran. “Anyhow the Malabar’s crew broke some of them open to load the stuff on their lifeboats.”
    “The lifeboats are all gone?”
    “Naturally,” said Moran. “At a guess they’d have used all of them even if they didn’t need them for the crew. They could carry extra food and weapons and such.”
    “How much bessendium is left?”
    “Probably twenty boxes unopened,” said Moran. “I can’t guess at the weight, but it’s a lot. They opened six boxes.” He paused. “I have a suggestion.”
    “What?”
    “When you’ve supplied yourselves,” said Moran, “leave some space-port somewhere with papers saying you’re going to hunt for minerals on some plausible planet. You can get such a clearance. Then you can return with bessendium coming out of the Nadine’s