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

Even the passengers and crew of the ship forgot it. Not immediately, of course. For the
first few generations their descendants cherished hopes of rescue. But the planet which
had no name—the forgotten planet—did not encourage the cherishing of hope.
After forty-odd generations, nobody remembered the Icarus anywhere. The wreckage
of the lifeboats was long since hidden under the seething, furiously striving fungi of the
soil. The human beings had forgotten not only their ancestors' ship, but very nearly
everything their ancestors had brought to this world: the use of metals, the existence of
fire, and even the fact that there was such a thing as sunshine. They lived in the lowlands,
deep under the cloudbank, amid surroundings which were riotous, swarming, frenzied
horror. They had become savages.
They were less than savages, because they had forgotten their destiny as men.
 1. Mad Planet
In all his lifetime of perhaps twenty years, it had never occurred to Burl to wonder
what his grandfather had thought about his surroundings. The grandfather had come to an
untimely end—in a fashion which Burl remembered as a succession of screams coming
more and more faintly to his ears, while he was being carried away at the topmost speed
of which his mother was capable.
Burl had rarely or never thought of his grandfather since. Surely he had never
wondered what his great-grandfather had thought, and most surely of all he never
speculated upon what his many-times-removed great-grandfather had thought when his
lifeboat landed from the Icarus. Burl had never heard of the Icarus. He had done very
little thinking of any sort. When he did think, it was mostly agonized effort to contrive a
way to escape some immediate and paralyzing danger. When horror did not press upon
him, it was better not to think, because there wasn't much but horror to think about.
At the moment, he was treading cautiously over a brownish carpet of fungus,
creeping furtively toward the stream which he knew only by the generic name of "water."
It was the only water he knew. Towering far above his head, three man-heights high,
great toadstools hid the gray sky from his sight. Clinging to the yard-thick stalks of the
toadstools were still other fungi, parasites upon the growths that once had been parasites
themselves.
Burl appeared a fairly representative specimen of the descendants of the long-
forgotten Icarus crew. He wore a single garment twisted about his middle, made from the
wing-fabric of a great moth which the members of his tribe had slain as it emerged from
its cocoon. His skin was fair without a trace of sunburn. In all his lifetime he had never
seen the sun, though he surely had seen the sky often enough. It was rarely hidden from
him save by giant fungi, like those about him now, and sometimes by the gigantic
cabbages which were nearly the only green growths he knew. To him normal landscape
contained only fantastic pallid mosses, and misshapen fungus growths, and colossal
molds and yeasts.
He moved onward. Despite his caution, his shoulder once touched a cream-colored
toadstool stalk, giving the whole fungus a tiny shock. Instantly a fine and impalpable
powder fell upon him from the umbrella-like top above. It was the season when the
toadstools sent out their spores. He paused to brush them from his head and shoulders.
They were, of course, deadly poison.
Burl knew such matters with an immediate and specific and detailed certainty. He
knew practically nothing else. He was ignorant of the use of fire, of metals, and even of
the uses of stone and wood. His language was a scanty group of a few hundred labial
sounds, conveying no abstractions and few concrete ideas. He knew nothing of wood,
because there was no wood in the territory furtively inhabited by his tribe. This was the
lowlands. Trees did not thrive here. Not even grasses and tree-ferns could compete with