The Radio Planet

by Ralph Milne Farley

The thirst was aggravated by the presence, almost at his feet, of the clear pool of water within the pit. He almost decided to slide down and try it, until he remembered what had happened to his leather hat.

So instead he began systematically to hack at the bushes with his knife and tear them up by the roots at one given spot. At the end of an hour he had progressed only about a yard, so he gave this up, too. He sat down, wrapped his arms around his knees, gazed at the silver sky, and thought of nothing for a while.

Then he thought of Lilla and the Baby Kew. Here he was, presumably in Cupia, perhaps within a few stads of them; and yet what good did it do him?

It seemed to him as though the nearer he got to his loved ones, the more effectually he was separated from them. On the Farley farm, in Edgartown, Massachusetts, when he had received the S O S message from the skies, it had appeared but a simple matter to step within the coordinate axes of his matter-transmitting apparatus, and throw a lever, in order to materialize on Poros.

In Vairkingi there had been the more difficult task of securing an ant plane, before essaying to cross the boiling seas. In the land of the Whoomangs, he had been confronted with the almost insuperable lack of swathing materials for such a flight. And now, in Cupia at last, he was hemmed in by an impenetrable wall of trees.

Yet, he reflected, he had surmounted in turn each of these successively more difficult difficulties; so why not this? With renewed determination he arose, and resumed his grubbing operations. Another hour passed and another yard of path had been completed. This was encouraging, and yet he had no means of knowing how much farther there still remained for him to go.

As he paused for breath, he heard a crashing noise almost directly across the pit. Concealing himself as well as he could in the recess which he had formed in the bushes, he watched expectantly. Presently the thick growth on the other side parted neatly, and the sharp edge of a wedge appeared. This wedge continued to divide the bushes until finally it came completely through. All curiosity to see what was pushing the wedge, Myles craned forward, but there was nothing behind it; it had been pushing itself.

As the bushes slowly closed together again, the wedge stood up on six sturdy legs and trotted around the top of the pit, until it came to a stop directly opposite the hiding place of the earth-man. This gave him a good opportunity to observe it.

Apparently it was some sort of insect. Its head came to a sharp cutting edge in the front about five feet high; and lateral projections extended diagonally backward from the edge, like the wings on a snow-plow, to a point well beyond the rear end of the animal.

These two sides were covered with stiff backward-pointing bristles, which evidently served to catch on the bushes through which the creature passed, and thus to hold whatever gains it made. Its eyes, like those of a crab, were located on long jointed arms, which it could raise whenever it wanted to look around. The lower edge of the sides of the wedge were serrated, and Myles soon learned what this was for. After wiggling its eyes about for a while, the creature walked to the edge of the bank, thus giving the watcher a good view of the body and legs within the projecting wedge, and slid off into the pit, where a splashing sound indicated that it was probably drinking.