Murray Leinster - The Mad Planet

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The Mad PlanetThe Mad Planet

by Murray Leinster

Editor's Notes by Blake Linton Wilfong

This story from 1920 has everything: action-packed adventure set in

a distant future of giant insects and savage men, loads of science

(including evolutionary biology, entomology, and the greenhouse effect),

and passages of thought-provoking philosophy and haunting poetic majesty.

It is also an example of the familiar story line mythologist Joseph

Campbell outlined in his bestseller The Hero with a Thousand Faces: "A

hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of

supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive

victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with

the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." This basic formula, Campbell

explained, has been used and reused with countless variations since the

dawn of storytelling. Yet it is as exciting today as it was millennia ago.

Indeed, "The Mad Planet" was so popular with readers of Argosy

magazine that Leinster followed it the next year with a sequel called "The

Red Dust". A second sequel, "Nightmare Planet", appeared in 1953! Leinster

combined altered versions of the three stories into one book, The

Forgotten Planet (1954).

In his lifetime of 20 years, Burl had never wondered what his grandfather had

thought about his surroundings. The grandfather had suffered an untimely,

unpleasant end, which Burl remembered vaguely as a fading succession of screams

as he was carried away at his mother's top speed.

Burl had rarely thought of the old man since. Surely he had never wondered what

his great-grandfather thought, and there certainly never entered his head such a

hypothetical question as what his many-times-great-grandfather--say of the year

1920--would have thought of Burl's world.

He was treading cautiously over a brownish carpet of fungus growth, creeping

furtively toward the stream he generically called "water". Towering overhead,

three man-heights high, great toadstools hid the grayish sky from sight.

Clinging to their foot-thick stalks were other fungi, parasites on growths that

had once been parasites themselves.

Burl was a slender young man wearing a single garment twisted about his waist,

made from the wing-fabric of a great moth his tribesmen had slain as it emerged

from its cocoon. His fair skin showed no trace of sunburn. He had never seen the

sun, though the sky was rarely hidden from view save by the giant fungi which,

along with monster cabbages, were the only growing things he knew. Clouds

usually spread overhead, and when they did not, perpetual haze made the sun but

an indefinitely brighter part of the sky, never a sharply edged ball of fire.

Fantastic mosses, misshapen fungi, colossal molds and yeasts, comprised the

landscape about him.

Once, as he dodged through the forest of huge toadstools, his shoulder touched a

cream-colored stalk, giving the whole fungus a tiny shock. Instantly, from the

umbrellalike mass of pulp overhead, a fine, impalpable powder fell on him like

snow. It was the season when toadstools sent out their spores, dropping them at

the first disturbance.

Furtive as he was, he paused to brush them from his head and hair. He knew they

were deadly poison.

Burl would have been a curious sight to a 20th century man. His skin was pink,

like a child's, and sported little hair. Even that atop his head was soft and

downy. His chest was larger than his forefathers', and his ears were capable of

independent movement, to catch threatening sounds from any direction. The pupils

of his large, blue eyes could dilate to extreme size, allowing him to see in

almost complete darkness.

He was the result of 30,000 years of human adaptation to changes begun in the

latter half of the 20th century.

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Then, civilization had been high and apparently secure. Mankind had reached

permanent accord, and machinery performed all labor; men needed only supervise

its operation. Everyone was well-fed and well-educated, and it seemed that until

the end of time Earth would be home to a community of comfortable human beings,

pursuing their studies and diversions, illusions and truths. Peace, privacy, and

freedom were universal.

But just when men were congratulating themselves on this new Golden Age,

fissures opened slowly in the Earth's crust, and carbon dioxide began pouring

out into the atmosphere. That gas had long been known to be present in the air,

and necessary to plant life. Plants absorbed its carbon, releasing the oxygen

for use again in a process called the "carbon cycle".

Scientists noted the Earth's increased fertility, but discounted it as the

effect of carbon dioxide released by man's burning of fossil fuels. For years

the continuous exhalation from the world's interior went unnoticed.

Constantly, however, the volume increased. New fissures opened, pouring into the

already laden atmosphere more carbon dioxide--beneficial in small amounts, but

as the world learned, deadly in quantity.

The entire atmosphere grew heavy. It absorbed more moisture and became humid.

Rainfall increased. Climates warmed. Vegetation became more luxuriant--but the

air gradually became less exhilarating.

Soon mankind's health was affected. Accustomed through long ages to breathing

air rich in oxygen and poor in carbon dioxide, men suffered. Only those living

on high plateaus or mountaintops remained unaffected. All the world's plants,

though nourished and growing to unprecedented size, could not dispose of the

continually increasing flood of carbon dioxide.

By the middle of the 21st century it was generally recognized that a new

carboniferous period was beginning, when Earth's atmosphere would be thick and

humid, unbreathable by man, when giant grasses and ferns would form the only

vegetation.

As the 21st century closed, the human race began reverting to savagery. The

lowlands were unbearable, the air depressing and enervating. Life there became a

sickly, fever-ridden existence. All mankind desired the highlands, and men

forgot their two centuries of peace.

They fought destructively, each for a bit of land where he might live and

breathe. Those forced to remain at sea level died in the poisonous air.

Meanwhile, the danger zone crept up as the earth fissures tirelessly poured out

steady streams of foul gas. Soon men could not live within 500 feet of sea

level. The lowlands went uncultivated, becoming jungles unparalleled since the

first carboniferous period.

Then men died of sheer inanition at 1,000 feet. The plateaus and mountaintops

were crowded with folk struggling for footholds and food beyond the invisible

menace that crept up, and up--

These events occured over many years, several generations. Between the

announcement of the International Geophysical Institute that carbon dioxide in

the air had increased from .04% to .1% and the time when at sea level 6% of the

atmosphere was the deadly gas, more than 200 years intervened.

Coming gradually as it did, the poisonous effect of the deadly stuff increased

insidiously. First lassitude, then heaviness of brain, then weakness of body.

The human population of the entire world slowly declined to a fraction of its

former size. At last there was room in plenty on the mountaintops--but the

danger level continued to rise.

There was but one solution. The human body would have to inure itself to the

poison, or face extinction. It finally developed a toleration for the gas that

had wiped out entire races and nations, but at a terrible cost. Lungs increased

in size to secure the oxygen of life, but the poison, inhaled at every breath,

left the few survivors sickly and perpetually weary. Their minds lacked energy

to cope with new problems or communicate knowledge.

So after 30,000 years, Burl crept through a forest of toadstools and fungus

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growths. He was ignorant of fire, metals, or the uses of stone and wood. A

single garment covered him. His language was a meager group of a few hundred

labial sounds, conveying no abstractions and few concrete things.

There was no wood in the scanty territory his tribe furtively inhabited. With

the increase in heat and humidity the trees had died out. Those of northern

climes went first: oaks, cedars, and maples. Then pines, beeches, cypresses, and

finally even jungle forests vanished. Only grasses and reeds, bamboos and their

kin, flourished in the new, steaming atmosphere. The jungles gave place to dense

thickets of grasses and ferns, now become treeferns again.

Then fungi took their place. Flourishing as never before on a planet of torrid

heat and perpetual miasma, on whose surface the sun never shone directly because

of an ever-thickening bank of clouds hanging sullenly overhead, the fungi sprang

up. About the dank pools festering over the earth's surface, fungus growths

clustered. Of every imaginable shade and color, of all monstrous forms and

malignant purposes, of huge size and flabby volume, they spread over the land.

The grasses and ferns gave way to them. Squat footstools, flaking molds,

evil-smelling yeasts, vast mounds of fungi inextricably mingled as to species,

but growing, forever growing and exhaling an odor of dark places.

The strange growths grouped themselves in forests, horrible travesties of the

vegetation they had succeeded. They grew and grew with feverish intensity, while

above them fluttered gigantic butterflies and huge moths, sipping daintily of

their corruption.

Of the animal world above water, insects alone endured the change. They

multiplied, and enlarged in the thickened air. The sole surviving vegetation--as

distinct from fungi--was a degenerate form of the cabbages that had once fed

peasants. On those rank, colossal masses of foliage, stolid grubs and

caterpillars ate themselves to maturity, then swung below in strong cocoons to

sleep the sleep of metamorphosis from which they emerged to spread their wings

and fly.

The tiniest butterflies of former days grew until their gaily colored wings

measured in terms of feet, while the larger emperor moths extended their purple

sails to a breadth of yards upon yards. The overshadowing fabric of their wings

would have dwarfed Burl.

Fortunately, they, the largest flying creatures, were harmless. Burl's fellow

tribesmen sometimes found a cocoon ready to open, and waited patiently until the

beautiful creature within broke through its matted shell and emerged into the

sunlight.

Then, before it could gather energy from the air, or its wings swell to strength

and firmness, the tribesmen attacked, tearing the filmy, delicate wings from its

body and the limbs from its carcass. And when it lay helpless before them, they

carried away the juicy, meat-filled limbs to be eaten, leaving the still living

body to stare helplessly at this strange world through multifaceted eyes, and

become prey to voracious ants who would soon clamber upon it and carry it in

fragments to their underground city.

Not all insects were so helpless or harmless. Burl knew of wasps, almost the

length of his own body, with instantly fatal stings. To all wasps, however, some

other insect is predestined prey. The sphex feeds solely on grasshoppers; other

wasps eat flies only. Burl's furtive tribe feared them but little.

Bees were similarly aloof. They were hard-pressed for survival, those bees. Few

flowers bloomed, and they were reduced desperate expedients: bubbling yeasts and

fouler things, occasionally the nectarless blooms of rank, giant cabbages. Burl

knew the bees. They droned overhead nearly as large as he, bulging eyes gazing

at him with abstracted preoccupation. And crickets, beetles, spiders--

Burl knew spiders! His grandfather had fallen prey to a hunting tarantula, which

had leaped with incredible ferocity from its excavated tunnel in the earth. The

vertical pit, two feet in diameter, went down 20 feet. At the bottom, the

black-bellied monster waited for the tiny sounds that would warn it of

approaching prey (Lycosa fasciata).

Burl's grandfather had been careless, and his terrible shrieks as the horrible

monster darted from the pit and seized him had lingered vaguely in Burl's mind

ever since. Burl had seen, too, the monster webs of another species of spider,

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