"Blish, James - Surface Tension" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

needed. Nothing was as bad as it seemed.
Venezuelos said: "What's the verdict, Dr. Chatvieux?"
"This place isn't dead," Chatvieux said. "There's life in the
sea and in the fresh water, both. On the animal side of the
ledger, evolution seems to have stopped with the Crustacea;
the most advanced form I've found is a tiny crayfish, from
one of the local rivulets, and it doesn't seem to be well dis-
tributed. The ponds and puddles are well-stocked with small
metazoans of lower orders, right up to the rotifersincluding
a castle-building genus like Earth's Floscularidae. In addi-
tion, there's a wonderfully variegated protozoan population,
with a dominant ciliate type much like Pammoecium, plus
various Sarcodines, the usual spread of phyto-flagellates, and
even a phosphorescent species I wouldn't have expected to see
anywhere but in salt water. As for the plants, they run from
simple blue-green algae to quite advanced thallus-producing
typesthough none of them, of course, can live out of the
water."
"The sea is about the same," Eunice said. "I've found some
of the larger simple metazoansjellyfish and so onand
some crayfish almost as big as lobsters. But it's normal to find
QI
salt-water species running larger than fresh-water. Ana there's
the usual plankton and nannoplankton population."
"In short," Chatvieux said, "we'll survive hereif we
fight."
"Wait a minute," la Ventura said. "You've just finished tell-
ing me that we wouldn't survive. And you were talking about
us, the seven of us here, not about the genus man, because we
don't have our germ-cells banks any more. What's"
"We don't have the banks. But we ourselves can contribute
germ-cells, Paul. I'll get to that in a moment." Chatvieux
turned to Saltonstall, "Martin, what would you think of our
taking to the sea? We came out of it once, long ago; maybe
we could come out of it again on Hydrot."
"No good," Saltonstall said immediately. "I like the idea, but
I don't think this planet ever heard of Swinburne, or Homer,
either. Looking at it as a colonization problem alone, as if we
weren't involved in it ourselves, I wouldn't give you an Oc
dollar for epi oinopa ponton. The evolutionary pressure there
is too high, the competition from other species is prohibitive;
seeding the sea should be the last thing we attempt, not the
first. The colonists wouldn't have a chance to learn a thing
before they'd be gobbled up."
"Why?" la Ventura said. Once more, the death in his
stomach was becoming hard to placate.
"Eunice, do your sea-going Coelenterates include anything
like the Portuguese man-of-war?"
The ecologist nodded.
"There's your answer, Paul," Saltonstall said. "The sea is