Web by John Wyndham
“Because that happened once, it can happen again. There is rise, and there is fall. None of us is here forever. If that could happen to that little lemur-creature, it could happen to any creature.”
“But not, for heaven’s sake, not to spiders…!”
“And why not to spiders?” demanded Camilla. “Mind is only a phenomenon which distinguishes the present dominant species. The rest of creation gets along all right without it. But there are powers other than mind. Again I refer you to the termites and the bees, they build complicated structures and run complex societies without the use of mind, they co-operate for defence and attack without a directing mind. Mind, for all we know, is just a flash in the pan, interesting as a phenomenon, but unnecessary. Dominate today, gone tomorrow…”
“And then back to a world dominated by instincts?” I asked.
“Instinct – is such a treacherous word. It only means something ‘touched in’ – by God’s finger? It is a confession of failure to understand why a thing happens – a mere admission that it does happen that way. It explains nothing.
“It is just too easy to say that a bee builds a perfectly hexagonal cell by ‘instinct’, or that a spider constructs a mathematically sound orb web by ‘instinct” – and it flies in the face of all we know about the transmission of acquired characteristics.
“No, there is something else. And there is corporate sensitivity, too – the fact that the ant army knows when to defend or attack, that the worker bee knows its work and its place in the hive, even that a flock of birds knows when to wheel or dive as one. It is not mind at work – but it is transmission of some kind…
“Now, do you see what I’m getting at? Obviously these spiders have acquired this power of transmission – that is their plus. What remains to be discovered is the degree to which they have it. It could well be in excess of the degree normal in other species…Those we saw yesterday, when we were sitting on the headland looked remarkably efficiently organized.”
I crushed out the end of my cigarette.
“Look,” I said, “we came here to do a job, not to weave horrid fantasies. Isn’t it time we got on with it?”
“All right,” she agreed, unsheathing her machete.
I consulted the compass, and we went to work.
The path we cut was tortuous, but labour-saving. When we found ourselves faced by a dense thicket we went round it, or at least found a place where it was not so dense, and cut through there. We deviated similarly for clumps of trees and intimidating thorn-bushes, but we averaged the right direction. Progress was, however, slow and the making of it wearisome. Nor was it helped by Camilla’s tendency to forget work when something professionally interesting caught her attention. After an hour of hacking had taken us perhaps a hundred and fifty yards, we felt it was time for some refreshment, and cleared a space where we could sit in moderate comfort.
This time Camilla was not inclined to air her theories. She sat, evolving new ones, I suspected, while she munched her sandwiches with a contemplative air. As we sat I became aware of the intensity of the silence that surrounded us. Normally, in such a place one would be surrounded by sounds: the cries of birds, the rustle, scamperings, or slitherings of unseen small creatures, the constant hum of insects, a murmurous background pierced now and then by harsh calls, but here there was nothing more than the occasional drone of a rare winged insect, and the sound of our munching, to break it. After a time it began to get on my nerves. More to break it than for interest I said:
“This kind of thing must have a natural term. When they’ve wiped out every living thing here they must just come to an end, and die off.”
“Spiders are cannibals,” said Camilla.
“Even so – well, I mean a closed cannibal economy scarcely seems practicable.”
“Perhaps not, but it would work for a time – until, as I said, they learn to catch fish. Then the food supply will cease to be a problem, and there’ll be nothing to stop them.”
“But how on earth can they catch fish?”
She shrugged.
“Co-operation makes many things possible. Working together they could weave a strong net. I imagine they’ll start by laying it across a narrow inlet, anchored by stones. When the tide is up they could raise it, and wait for the tide to go down. It would trap shrimps and small fish. Success would make them more ambitious. They’ll go after bigger fish, and invent new methods of catching them.”
“You’re talking of them as if they were reasoning creatures.”
“That’s what troubles me. Clearly they cannot reason as we understand it – by a process of brain and mind. But there must, as I said before, be something akin to reason at work. Something that inspired them first with the idea of using the web to catch insects, and then went on to inspire them farther to build the complex, carefully designed webs that the higher forms do. Plenty of insects can produce kinds of silk. But only the spiders learnt to develop it in order to use it as a weapon and a means of livelihood. It wasn’t by the kind of intelligence we know, but there was a guiding force of some kind – there must have been.
“And that took place among individualists. Now we have them acting socially. Co-operation introduces a factor which is greater than the sum of its parts. What could a man become, alone?
“So, if this force guided individualists to develop a means of catching flying insects, it can certainly guide a co-operative group of them to develop a means of catching fish when the need arises. What’s troubling me is how far does this thing go – what else may it guide them to develop…?”
“Frankly,” I told her, “I think you’re magnifying the whole thing. What we have here is a freak development given, by pure chance, ideal conditions for survival and breeding. It will breed to the limit of its food supply, and then just peter out. It must have happened hundreds of times in the world’s history that a species has killed itself off by its own fecundity.”
“I hope you’re right…” she said, without conviction.
We resumed our hacking. For another twenty yards we made the same slow progress as before. Then with utter unexpectedness we emerged upon a track, and stopped, staring.
The track ran east and west, at right angles to our own. Furthermore, it was a track that had been well, and recently, used. We stood there looking right and left to where turns in it cut off our view.
“Robinson Crusoe and the footprint,” murmured Camilla. “Didn’t one of the children say something about – ?”
She broke off suddenly as the bushes facing us parted to reveal two dark faces, and two spears levelled at us.
For a moment we simply stared. Then I took a firmer grip of my machete. The spear that was trained on me quivered.
“Drop it,” said a voice.
I hesitated, and watched the spear quiver again.
I dropped it.
Camilla dropped hers, too.
There was a rustling behind us. Dark, shining arms reached forward and picked up the machetes. Hands patted us gently. One of them found Charles’s revolver in Camilla’s pocket, and removed it. The spears in front, though still levelled at us, became less tense. Their owners stepped out on to the track.
Both men were naked except for a loin-cloth and moccasin-like shoes, but they wore belts to support machetes in scabbards and a kind of harness which carried two or three more short spears. The most noticeable thing about them was the way their dark skins gleamed. From their shoes to the top of their fuzzy hair they shone as if they had been french-polished all over. Whatever they had used to anoint themselves gave off a sharp, powerful, though not altogether unpleasant odour.
One of them, without lowering his spear, held out his left hand. A shining brown arm reached forward from behind us and put the revolver in it. The man stepped back, stuck his spear into the harness, and examined the revolver with satisfaction. Having assured himself that all the chambers were loaded, he slipped off the safety-catch, pointed it at me, and motioned to my right.
&
Round the first bend a voice behind us ordered: “Stop”, and we stopped. Close beside as at the side of the track lay four bags, each the size of a small sack. They looked to me to be made of a fabric formed of closely woven strips of palm-leaf.
We waited while some kind of discussion went on behind us. I received a nudge from Camilla’s right elbow, and looked round to see her attention fixed on one of the bags. For a moment I wondered why; then I noticed that the bag was not quite inert. It seemed to be undulating slightly. Presently I was quite sure that there was a kind of seething movement going on inside it. I glanced at the other bags; they, too, showed signs of a slow stirring within.
“What – ?” I was beginning in a whisper, when the discussion behind us came to an end.
Our arms were seized and brought behind, and our wrists securely, though not painfully, tied together.
“Go on,” ordered the voice.
I glanced back as we left
One man was following a short distance behind us, revolver in hand. Beyond him the other three were raising bags on to their backs; the fourth bag remained where it lay.
I reckoned that the meeting with the Islanders must have been a piece of sheer bad luck for us. They, on their way along the track, would have heard the sounds of our hacking and crashing progress, and dumped their loads in order to investigate. Having contrived their simple ambush, and left one of their number to look after us, the rest had continued on their interrupted journey westwards. The most disquieting feature was that we were now being herded in the opposite direction, straight into spider country.
After a quarter of a mile or so we encountered our first band of them. It must have been lurking close beside the track for it emerged from cover a few yards ahead, making briskly towards us.
“Stop!” commanded the voice behind us.
We obeyed. The spiders came on charging at our feet and starting to climb our legs. As before, they reached knee-level and dropped off. The man behind us was evidently observing the encounter, for I heard him give a grunt. Then he said: “Go on.”
Camilla, however, turned round.
“My veil,” she said, nodding her head in an attempt to dislodge it from where it was rolled up on her hat brim.
The man stared uncomprehendingly for a moment, then he got the idea. He stepped forward, the pistol still in his right hand, and with his left hand freed the veil so that it fell in front of her face. As he did so I noticed that the spiders made no attempt to attack him. At a distance of four or five inches from his feet they stopped and sheered off. It was evident that the oil with which he was smeared was a more potent deterrent than our insecticide.
He turned to me, and twitched my veil so that the front of it fell loosely down, too. Then we went on.
Before long another band of spiders came scuttling to the attack, then another. Presently we were encountering them every few yards. Twice they dropped on us from overhanging bushes. Without the protection of the veils we should have had them swarming on our faces; even with the veils there were a few unpleasant moments before they let go and dropped off.
As we went on I realized that the track we were following was, like the track we had followed from the beach, an old path recently cleared. I could not use my compass to check the direction, but I judged it to run roughly a few degrees further to the north than the other. It had obviously been wider, too, and more used, which, in spite of the overgrowth, had made it easier to clear a passage.
Soon I began to notice strands of web among the bushes on either side. At first they were haphazard threads, but quite quickly we reached a part where they were woven into small sheets like irregularly shaped hammocks slung between the branches of a bush, or between one bush and the next. These hammocks occurred in clusters, each cluster apparently the communal property of a group of spiders who waited around them ready to pounce upon anything that fell into them. It seemed a poor prospect in a region almost entirely denuded of insects, and I did not see a single instance of anything trapped in them. The spiders seemed prepared to wait patiently, indefinitely.
When we passed close enough to them for them to see us, or in some other way to be aware of our movements, they ceased all of a sudden to be inactive, and came swarming out along branches or on the ground to intercept us. Usually they were too late. We had passed before they reached a strategic point for attack, but occasionally the leaders arrived in time to drop down on us, or to reach our feet.
As we went on the hammocks of web at our level grew infrequent. They gave way to heavier hammocks slung between branches ten or twelve feet from the ground which made the chances of anything falling into lower webs slender indeed.
Presently we entered a zone where even the larger web hammocks no longer stretched between trees. They hung in tatters from the branches, stirring slightly in the moving air. The whole forest seemed to drip with gently undulating rags of silk.
Camilla who was in the lead, stopped, and looked around.
“Ghostly,” she said. “Hung with graveclothes.”
Her voice sounded loud in the silence of the place.
It occurred to me that some of the ghostly effect was due to the poor light, and looked upwards. I couldn’t see the sky. The tree tops disappeared into a translucent whitish fog, and I realized that we must now be under the white pall we had seen in the distance.
It was as if the whole forest had been tented over. The web was spread in a continuous sheet from treetop to treetop, and the spiders were up there with it. There were none on the ground now, nor did I recollect seeing any for some little time.
All around us was the eerie silence of an utterly deserted place. Every creature, including the spiders themselves, had left it, only the plants, the bushes, and the trees lived on. Nothing moved save for the abandoned hanks of web with ragged fringes slowly swirling.
“Go on,” ordered the voice behind us.
The ground began to rise now, but for half a mile the scene round us remained the same.
Only once did I see anything move. Then it was a patch of shadow, crawling across our path. I looked up and saw a dark patch sliding slowly over the white tegument, a band of spiders prowling its airy territory.
The trees came to an end quite suddenly. We emerged from them on to open hillside covered with some close, knee-high, heather-like growth. On the fringe of it we encountered hunting bands of spiders again and the first few feet of it was thick with their webs, but beyond that they quickly grew fewer. Whether it was something in the nature of the ground, or some quality in the heather-like plants, or the altitude, or the poverty of the pickings that deterred them, one could not say, but whatever the reason we presently found ourselves free of them.
We went on climbing steadily up the flank of Monu, the more southern of the twin hills, until we reached the lip of the crater at the top. There our captor allowed us to sit down for a few minutes rest.
The situation gave us the best view of Tanakuatua we had yet had – and a very curious sight it was. The whole of the east coast round to where the northern summit cut off our view was spread with the slightly greyed sheet of web, and it continued to the south, with an arm of it reaching northward between the hill and the lagoon. It was as if it had come from the east and had flowed round the hill and now the northward arm had already covered nearly half the distance between the hill and the settlement. There it ended. The strip of clear country which separated it from the settlement was something like a mile and a half wide, and the whole west coast north of that was clear of it, too. How far it stretched inland from the northern part of the east coast, the other hill made it impossible for us to see, but it was clear that fully half of the whole island lay under it.
It lay as if it had been held taut and allowed to fall over the uneven surface, humped in places by the taller trees beneath, gleaming where the folds caught the light. Round the edge it was
Our captor, sitting beside us, caught our expressions as we gazed at it. He grinned, but said nothing.
In two or three places, as on the previous days, there were faint columns like attenuated steam rising skyward.
Camilla shook her head.
“Astronomical numbers. The mind boggles,” she said.
We turned our attention to the crater below us. It was rather wider and shallower than I had expected, surprising, too, to find grass and weeds and small bushes growing more than halfway down its inside slope. Beyond them was a zone of bare rock, and then, in the middle of the saucer, a pool of hot mud bubbling sluggishly.
I supposed that it was boiling, but it was the most leisurely boil I had ever seen. It seethed with a lazy, slow-motion quality as though making a reluctant effort. Every now and then it started to blow a larger bubble. While this was going on the rest seemed to subside somewhat, as though all the energy available were going into the bubble blowing. The dome-like bubble was disturbing. It was impossible to watch the thing grow without building up a sympathetic tension, waiting for the burst. And the burst, when it came, was an anti-climax: just a dull, tired plop, and a scatter of mud for a few feet around. After that it seethed gently for a while, blowing a few smaller bubbles for practice before starting on another big one.
“Curious,” said Camilla. “Like a lot of other natural processes it’s a bit disgusting, but I can suddenly see quite clearly how a thing like that can become sacred. To a simple mind it could easily seem to be alive – or sort of alive, in a different way from other things. It just lies there – and by the look of it it’s lain there for centuries – doing nothing but go glug-glug, yet somehow there’s an ominous feeling that it might do more at any moment. It’s not surprising people get the urge to propitiate them.”