Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/105

Rh Lane sat by the fire, waiting for the women to complete the cooking. He heard a faint scuffling behind. He turned slowly, and a cold fear of the unknown struck into him.

Gazing at him not three feet away was a face. A face belonging to a great white spider! Twenty feet those thin white limbs extended, that little round body poised upon the fragility, looking at him with a human face. The huge black eyes, hanging long hair, the straggly pale beard of ivory yellow, the body which was like a man's if a man had been stretched magically across a twenty-foot span and left to live on that way. Lane could only stare and lick his dry lips. He could not speak.

The long, so much too long, thin arm reached out, touched Lane's cheek cautiously, almost caressingly. The fingers, three times a normal man's finger length and three times a man's fingers in thinness, in fragility, felt slowly, carefully over his face, touched his hair, his shirt, his hand. Satisfied, the towering, thin height eased slowly to a squatting position.

Then, the great round eyes watching Lane, the long arm reached out fifteen feet away, dipped quickly into the cooking pot, snared a bit of boiled meat out of the hot liquid, burned its fingers. The mouth opened to a round pink O, then let out a shrill yip like a hurt puppy.

The incongruous life sat there, unnoticed by the others, sucking its long fingers and eyeing Lane speculatively. Lane spoke.

"You speak English? Who are you?"

The wide, too round eyes looked puzzled at Lane, clicked its tongue. "Tch tch." But it did not answer.

"Secumne! Come here!" Lane did not call loudly, his voice might startle the strange visitor.

HE old man rose from his place by the farther fire, come slowly through the dark. He stood, his stolid, lined old face looking at the visitor.

"Tch tch," said Secumne.

"Tch thcheeee. Chee tch tech. Tch."

"What do you have to say about this?" Lane asked.

"This is one of the lost of the caves. His people did not use the ancient rays to stay healthy, the conditions of the dark caverns have made his race, bit by bit, year by year and century by slow century, into what you see. He is to a man what a potato sprout in a dark cellar is to a potato plant in the hot sun. He is what is called a 'creep, a spider man.' He is not stupid, but he does not speak any real language.

The tongue has no more than a hundred meanings. 'Food, water, sleep, wakewell, ill'; such sounds are all you need to learn to talk to 'Tch Tch'."

Lane did not answer. He only looked at Tch Tch. So the ever-dark had made this out of man?

Far off, down in the dim cavern road, Lane could see other tall white spider shapes, standing still—or moving swiftly on their incredible stick-like limbs. It was hard to realize that their parents had been men like himself, some centuries before. Hard to realize how very greatly it is true that environment determines the organism and its shape and nature so definitely, so absolutely.

The soft old voice of Secumne murmured:

"This one, Tch Tch, is the leader. The leader is always named Tch Tch. Mostly they do not have names. They are really but a kind of intelligent animal entirely indigenous to the caverns."

Lane turned to Secumne a face on which was written the beginning of that awe that was going to claim him utterly before he had learned but a minute part of what the caves could teach. That awe of the infinite nature of energy and her products that is to surface man hidden by the everyday humdrum activity, by the limited number of the works of nature that modern man observes. The terrific majesty of the cavern works, built by the hands of a race so superior as to be not really men at all, but Gods, would dispel forever the limiting bonds his puny life-experience had placed upon Lane's mind. It is a potent alchemy for a healthy mind; the revelations the caverns have to offer.

Even as Lane turned to gaze again into the fire and try to quiet his throbbing thought into sanity in spite of the mighty truths his deduction was presenting to his trained, logical mind; even as he composed himself and strove to pull his mind back from the gulfs which it was leaping, from the gorging of its hunger upon the mighty meaning circumstance had laid before it...

...a soft shuffle of sandaled feet behind him brought with their sound an alien perfume, a rustle and a sensing that is to