"Murray Leinster - Planets of Adventure" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

New York, NY 10020
Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH
Printed in the United States of America
BAEN BOOKS by MURRAY LEINSTER
Med Ship
 THE
Forgotten Planet

Prologue
The Survey-Ship Tethys made the first landing on the planet, which had no name. It
was an admirable planet in many ways. It had an ample atmosphere and many seas,
which the nearby sun warmed so lavishly that a perpetual cloudbank hid them and most
of the solid ground from view. It had mountains and continents and islands and high
plateaus. It had day and night and wind and rain, and its mean temperature was within the
range to which human beings could readily accommodate. It was rather on the tropic side,
but not unpleasant.
But there was no life on it.
No animals roamed its continents. No vegetation grew from its rocks. Not even
bacteria struggled with its stones to turn them into soil. So there was no soil. Rock and
stones and gravel and even sand—yes. But no soil in which any vegetation could grow.
No living thing, however small, swam in its oceans, so there was not even mud on its
ocean bottoms. It was one of that disappointing vast majority of worlds which turned up
when the Galaxy was first explored. People couldn't live on it because nothing had lived
there before.
Its water was fresh and its oceans were harmless. Its air was germ-free and
breathable. But it was of no use whatever for men. The only possible purpose it could
serve would have been as a biological laboratory for experiments involving things
growing in a germ-free environment. But there were too many planets like that already.
When men first traveled to the stars they made the journey because it was starkly
necessary to find new worlds for men to live on. Earth was over-crowded—terribly so. So
men looked for new worlds to move to. They found plenty of new worlds, but presently
they were searching desperately for new worlds where life had preceded them. It didn't
matter whether the life was meek and harmless, or ferocious and deadly. If life of any sort
were present, human beings could move in. But highly organized beings like men could
not live where there was no other life.
So the Survey-Ship Tethys made sure that the world had no life upon it. Then it made
routine measurements of the gravitational constant and the magnetic field and the
temperature gradient; it took samples of the air and water. But that was all. The rocks
were familiar enough. No novelties there! But the planet was simply useless. The survey-
ship recorded its findings and went hastily on in search of something better. The ship did
not even open one of its ports while on the planet. There were no consequences of the
Tethys' visit except that record. None whatever.
No other ship came near the planet for eight hundred years.
Nearly a millennium later, however, the Seed-Ship Orana arrived. By that time
humanity had spread very widely and very far. There were colonies not less than a
quarter of the way to the Galaxy's rim, and Earth was no longer overcrowded. There was
still emigration, but it was now a trickle instead of the swarming flood of centuries
before. Some of the first colonized worlds had emigrants now. Mankind did not want to
crowd itself together again! Men now considered that there was no excuse for such
monstrous slums as overcrowding produced.