
appointed overseer of a contingent of slaves, whom he leads to the nearby city of the
bombardier beetles. The beetles, as intelligent as the spiders, love explosions, and Niall
has arrived in time for one of their great annual celebrations, Boomday, organized by
their chief explosives expert, Bill Doggins. But the festival culminates in disaster,
destroying the complete stock of explosives. Niall agrees to lead Doggins to a disused
barracks in the slave quarter, where they expect to find gunpowder.
They find more than that: Reapers, the deadliest weapon ever invented by man,
which fire a beam of atomic energy. They use these to shoot their way out of an ambush
by the spiders, and escape back to the city of the bombardier beetles in stolen spider
balloons.
The ruler of the beetles, the Master, is furious that they have broken an ancient
peace treaty, and is inclined to hand over Niall and Doggins to the spiders for
punishment. Only the treachery of the Spider Lord, who decides to preempt the decision
by trying to strangle Niall, leads the Master to decide to allow Niall to stay after all.
Nevertheless, Niall is dismayed by the Master's decision that all the Reapers
should be destroyed -- dashing all hopes of using them to free his fellow men. So Niall,
Doggins, and a group of young men decide to travel to the Delta, perhaps the most
dangerous place on Earth, because Niall has concluded that the Delta is the source of a
powerful living vibration that is responsible for the abnormal growth of simple life-
forms, including the spiders. His aim is to destroy this source, known to the spiders as the
goddess Nuada.
The Delta proves to be even more dangerous than they expected; its perils include
octopus-like plants that lurk just below the surface of the ground, and humanoid frogs
that can spit a stream of poison. Niall and Doggins are the only ones to reach the heart of
the Delta, and there they discover that the "goddess" is actually a gigantic plant that
forms the summit of a mountain.
Since Doggins has been blinded, Niall is forced to press on alone. In the night that
follows, in telepathic communion with the goddess, he learns that she is indeed the source
of the giant life-forms. She came from a distant galaxy, transported to our solar system in
the tail of the comet Opik, which came close to destroying the Earth.
Another long and dangerous journey brings Niall and Doggins back to the city of
the beetles. There the Master agrees to the Death Lord's demand to hand him over. In a
final confrontation, only the direct intervention of the goddess saves Niall from an
appalling fate. But the "miracle" also convinces the Spider Council that Niall is the
emissary of the goddess, and to his own bewilderment, he finds himself exalted to the
rank of ruler of the spider city.
The Spider Lord agrees that there should henceforth be peace between human
beings and spiders, and that they should regard one another as equals. However, many
spiders secretly regard this treaty as a betrayal. Among these is Skorbo, a captain of the
Spider Lord's guard, who -- with six accomplices -- continues to trap and eat human
beings.
One snowy morning, Niall finds the dying Skorbo in a corner of the main square;
he has been struck down by some tremendous blow. Following the trail of blood to the
garden of a deserted house, Niall discovers that Skorbo has been the victim of an
ingenious booby trap: a young palm tree had been bent to the ground and then released by
cutting the rope that held it. Human footprints indicate that three men were involved in