"Murray Leinster - Nightmare Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

There should have been another planting, centuries later still, but it was never made. When the
Ecological Preparation Service was moved to Algol IV, a file was upset. The cards in it were picked up
and replaced, but one was missed. So that planet was forgotten. It circled its sun in emptiness.
Cloud-banks covered it from pole to pole. There were hazy markings in certain places, where high
plateaus penetrated the clouds. But from space the planet was featureless. Seen from afar, it was merely
a round white ball—white from its cloud-banks and nothing else.
But on its surface, in its lowlands it was nightmare.
Especially was it nightmare—after some centuries —for the descendants of the human beings from
the space-liner Icarus, wrecked there some forty-odd generations ago. Naturally, nobody anywhere else
thought of the Icarus any more. It was not even remembered by the descendants of its human cargo,
who now inhabited the planet. The wreckage of the ship was long since hidden under the seething,
furiously striving fungi of the soil. The human beings on the planet had forgotten not only the ship but very
nearly everything—how they came to this world, the use of metals, the existence of fire, and even the fact
that there was such a thing as sunlight. They lived in the lowlands, deep under the cloud-bank, amid
surroundings which were riotous, swarming, frenzied horror. They had become savages. They were less
than savages. They had forgotten their high destiny as men.

DAWN CAME. Grayness appeared overhead and increased. That was all. The sky was a blank,
colorless pall, merely mottled where the clouds clustered a little thicker or a little thinner, as clouds do.
But the landscape was variegated enough! Where the little group of people huddled together, there was a
wide valley. Its walls rose up and up into the very clouds. The people had never climbed those hillsides.



They had not even traditions of what might lie above them, and their lives had been much too
occupied to allow of speculations on cosmology. By day they were utterly absorbed in two problems
which filled every waking minute. One was the securing of food to eat, under the conditions of the second
problem, which was that of merely staying alive.
There was only one of their number who sometimes thought of other matters, and he did so because
he had become lost from his group of humans once, and had found his way back to it. His name was
Burl, and his becoming lost was pure fantastic accident, and his utilization of a fully inherited power to
think was the result of extraordinary events. But he still had not the actual habit of thinking. This morning
he was like his fellows.
All of them were soaked with wetness. During the night—every night—the sky dripped slow,
spaced, solemn water-drops during the whole of the dark hours. This was customary. But normally the
humans hid in the mushroom-forests, sheltered by the toadstools which now grew to three man-heights.
They denned in small openings in the tangled mass of parasitic growths which flourished in such thickets.
But this last night they had camped in the open. They had no proper habitations of their own. Caves
would have been desirable, but insects made use of caves, and the descendants of insects introduced
untold centuries before had shared in the size-increase of paramecium and yeasts and the few true plants
which had been able to hold their own. Mining-wasps were two yards long, and bumble-bees were
nearly as huge, and there were other armored monstrosities which also preferred caves for their own
purposes. And of course the humans could not build habitations, because anything men built to serve the
purpose of a cave would instantly be preempted by creatures who would automatically destroy any
previous occupants.
The humans had no fixed dens at any time. Now they had not even shelter. They lacked other things,
also. They had no tools save salvaged scraps of insect armor—great sawtoothed mandibles or
razor-pointed leg-shells—which they used to pry apart the edible fungi on which they lived, or to get at
the morsels of meat left behind when the brainless lords of this planet devoured each other. They had not
even any useful knowledge, except desperately accurate special knowledge of the manners and customs