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

When the Ecology-Ship left, it had done a very painstaking job. It had treated the
planet to a sort of Russell's Mixture of life-forms. The real Russell's Mixture is that blend
of the simple elements in the proportions found in suns. This was a blend of life-forms in
which some should survive by consuming the now-habituated flora, others by preying on
the former. The planet was stocked, in effect, with everything that it could be hoped
would live there.
But only certain things could have that hope. Nothing which needed parental care had
any chance of survival. The creatures seeded at this time had to be those which could care
for themselves from the instant they burst their eggs. So there were no birds or mammals.
Trees and plants of many kinds, fish and crustaceans and tadpoles, and all kinds of
insects could be planted. But nothing else.
The Ludred swam away through emptiness.
There should have been another planting centuries later. There should have been a
ship from the Zoological Branch of the Ecological Service. It should have landed birds
and beasts and reptiles. It should have added pelagic mammals to the seas. There should
have been herbivorous animals to live on the grasses and plants which would have
thriven, and carnivorous animals to live on them in turn. There should have been careful
stocking of the planet with animal life, and repeated visits at intervals of a century or so
to make sure that a true ecological balance had been established. And then when the
balance was fixed men would come and destroy it for their own benefit.
But there was an accident.
Ships had improved again. Even small private spacecraft now journeyed tens of light-
years on holiday journeys. Personal cruisers traveled hundreds. Liners ran matter-of-
factly on ship-lines tens of thousands of light-years long. An exploring-ship was on its
way to a second island universe. (It did not come back.) The inhabited planets were all
members of a tenuous organization which limited itself to affairs of space, without
attempting to interfere in surface matters. That tenuous organization moved the
Ecological Preparation Service to Algol IV as a matter of convenience. In the moving,
one of the Ecological Service's records was destroyed.
So the planet which had no name was forgotten. No other ship came to prepare it for
ultimate human occupancy. It circled its sun, unheeded and unthought-of. Cloudbanks
covered it from pole to pole. There were hazy markings in some places, where high
plateaus penetrated its clouds. But that was all. From space the planet was essentially
featureless. Seen from afar it was merely a round white ball—white from its
cloudbanks—and nothing else.
But on its surface, on its lowlands, it was pure nightmare. But this fact did not matter
for a very long time.
Ultimately, it mattered a great deal—to the crew of the space-liner Icarus. The Icarus
was a splendid ship of its time. It bore passengers headed for one of the Galaxy's spiral
arms, and it cut across the normal lanes and headed through charted but unvisited parts of
the Galaxy toward its destination. And it had one of the very, very, very few accidents
known to happen to space-craft licensed for travel off the normal space-lanes. It suffered
shipwreck in space, and its passengers and crew were forced to take to the lifecraft.
The lifeboats' range was limited. They landed on the planet that the Tethys had first
examined, that the Orana and the Ludred had seeded, and of which there was no longer
any record in the Ecological Service. Their fuel was exhausted. They could not leave.
They could not signal for help. They had to stay there. And the planet was a place of
nightmares.
After a time the few people—some few thousands—who knew that there was a
space-liner named Icarus, gave it up for lost. They forgot about it. Everybody forgot.