Spiders' War. S. Fowler Wright

ASSERTS ITS WILL

      Now they sat very still, while she thought: “If it takes all this time to say that by telepathy, I call it a slow game.”

      But, after that, she found that foreign thoughts were invading her own mind, which was soon protesting against them, though with consciousness of the futility of opposition to the force of a hundred thousand contending wills that gained each moment in volume and intensity. Then gradually they came to a unity of resolve as to what they would undertake, to overcome the famine conditions which threatened universal starvation before another season’s crop of nuts and fruits should be ripe—and which, even then, would be a meagre subsistence unless the epidemic which had already almost destroyed their swine should be arrested while there were still sufficient remaining alive to breed supplies for the coming year.

      The resolve which had now been brought to an apparent unanimity was that food should be sought by penetrating, with whatever violence might be necessary, to the resources of other lands. And, that being agreed, there was next a momentous question to be resolved—in what directions, one or more, should they set out?

      For those in Lemno’s part of the land, there was the choice of going down the river, below the falls; of going far west, leaving the river at their backs; or of going up the river, and crossing, if they could, above the rapids, to ravage Gleda’s people.

      Gleda realized that the first of these propositions was not seriously regarded. It was only slightly considered, so that its rejection might be clearly agreed upon. Below the falls there were great stretches of malarial swamps.

      To turn their backs on the river was a very different enterprise, for there, beyond the wide, well-wooded plain on which they dwelt, the land rose, not in sudden hills, but by gradual arid, treeless, and windswept slopes, where there was as little to sustain life as there was life to be sustained. But, beyond that, there were great nations in fertile lands, and there was a difference of opinion as to whether they should proceed by threats of violence or peaceful appeal.

      To go up the river was obviously the best course.

      Above the rapids, two rivers joined. To continue along the nearer bank would be to go far north through their own land, till they would come at last to the impregnable barrier of the great mountain range in which both rivers rose. There would be no profit in that.

      But to cross the two rivers, which were separately less formidable, and gentler in their currents, above the rapids, would mean that they must traverse the intervening peninsula, and come at last to Gleda’s own country, where no swine plague had raged, though the arboreal harvests had failed, and where the people themselves might furnish a cannibal banquet for starving men.

      But—to cross even the tip of the peninsula between? Gleda knew the doubtful peril of that, and wondered, till her mind was borne down by surrounding wills, that, in whatever extremity, it should be considered at all.

      The great mountain range was more than a hundred miles away. The two rivers rose about forty miles apart. The space between was a wooded triangle of about two thousand square miles, which, for almost a generation, had not been invaded by human feet.

      In the reason for this lay the explanation of much in the constitution of the life around her which had been puzzling to Marguerite Cranleigh, however commonplace, by familiarity, it might have become to Gleda’s mind.

      There had been, at a quite recent period, a complex civilization, in which the pursuits of science had been honoured and physical laws (as in the far-distant period which Lemno was now studying) had been exhaustively examined, with a view to their alteration and improvement for the benefit of mankind.

      There had been a minority who had been unfriendly to these pursuits, to which they attributed the collapse of previous civilizations, but they had been generally ridiculed. They had been called reactionaries, which was regarded as an obviously conclusive word.

      At this time there had been a research worker named Ragli, who, having reason to believe that he had discovered a process which would overcome the natural law restricting the size of insects, could not resist the temptation to prove his theory by experiment, from which he expected to gain the respectful publicity which scientists, being human, do not despise.

      That which he sought he gained, to a measure beyond his wildest hopes.

      He injected his preparation into a mature aphis of a bisexual species, but without producing the effect at which he had aimed. Being unwilling to accept the verdict of a single defeat, he experimented upon others, with equally negative results. But his disappointment was soon over, for these aphides laid eggs. In fact, they laid from 500 to 600 each, and as these eggs produced others, which grew to the size of an ox in less than two days, and as an aphis can eat its own weight at a single meal, it will be seen that it was not a matter which could pass without observation.

      Fortunately, the aphis is not formidable (except for its appetite), even when it is of the size of a large cow. There was a short period of liveliness, and then the stench of a great fire, into which many bodies were cast; and after that there was no remaining sign of what had occurred, except in the desolation of many miles of previously cultivated ground.

      The author of this mischief expressed no repentance. He said that the massacre should not have occurred. He argued that they would have proved to be useful cows in other respects than size. Were there not species of aphides which were milked by ants? And should men be less shrewd than they?

      But this dispute was interrupted by an unexpected and disconcerting event. Another insect, of more formidable character, the tiger beetle, developed to a similarly monstrous size, as did a species of spider.

      How these things occurred was hotly contested, and it is needless to debate the two theories which divided scientific support; but there could be no disposition to doubt the facts.

      The tiger beetle is much larger than any aphis, and, having a better start, it went further ahead.

      The incidence of the event was different. The tiger beetle does not lay 600 eggs at express speed, and those it does produce have a different process of development. These facts would have allowed more time for dealing with what was to prove a menace to the existence of men, had the danger been recognised at an early stage.

      As it was, the warfare that followed was of so desperate a character, and, for a time, so dubious of result, that the spiders, which otherwise would have aroused widespread loathing and fear, received literally no attention at all, except from those who felt the grip of their fatal claws.

      The beetles had ravaged half a continent before the last one had been turned on to its back, to kick impotent legs above the boughs of surrounding trees. But when this menace had met its end, people became aware that there was a part of the world where no man could rest in his own house without the fear that a green shadow might fall upon it. Then a door or window would be torn away to make entrance space for a huge, hairy, many-jointed arm to enter and grope about for such soft and succulent things as the sensitive hairs upon it would decide fit for the meal of a creature which fed too delicately to swallow more than the squeezed juice of its living prey. It was a menu on which men came to take a high place, and it was the spider’s unpleasant habit to scrape out a house very thoroughly before going on to the next.

      The war that followed was not, by this time, easy to win, but it was helped by the fact that spiders do not breed very quickly, and that many species (including that of which an enlarged edition had now appeared) have a frugal custom of eating their own offspring, to which they may consider that they have the first right.

      But, as their young do not approve of this prompt and equitable termination of separate life, some have a habit of climbing on to their mothers’ backs, where they will not be molested, until they have become sufficiently developed for rapid flight and independent life; at which stage some of them will escape, though, if the devil does not take the hindmost, their mother will.

      But this program required the presence of herbage high enough to screen their flight, or roots under which they could creep, and, in their enlarged form, cover was less easy to reach, so that the elder generation fattened more than the younger increased.

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