"Murray Leinster - Second Landing" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

SECOND LANDING

1
"The exploring ship Franklin made its first landing on a remarkable wide-beach on the western coast of Chios, the
largest land mass on Thalassia. Using the longest axis of the continent as a base, and the pointed end as seen from
space as O", this beach bears 246° from the median point of the base line. . . . The Franklin later berthed inland some
jour miles 360° from Firing Plaza One on the chart. There is a pleasant savannah here, with a stream of water
apparently safe for drinking . . ."
Astrographic Bureau Publication 11297, Appendix to Space Pilot Vol. 460, Pp. 58-59.
IT WAS NOT plausible that Brett Carstairs should find a picture of a girl, to all appearances human, in millenia-old ruins
on a planet some hundreds of light years from Earth. But the whole affair was unlikely, beginning with the report of
the exploring ship which caused the Thalassia-Asprasia Expedition in the first place. If it hadn't been for photographs
and the ceramic artifacts, nobody would have believed that report. It simply was not credible that another intelligent
race should ever have existed in the galaxy. In two centuries of exploration, no hint of extraterrestrial reasoning beings
had been found before. But the exploration ship's narrative didn't stop at one impossibility
about the twin worlds Thalassia and Aspasia, revolving perpetually about each other as they trailed the satellite sun
Rubra on its course. The report wasn't content to claim one intelligent race to have existed. It claimed two. And it
offered evidence that some thousands of years before they had fought each other bitterly and mercilessly, and that they
had exterminated each other in an interplanetary war which lasted only days or even hours—which was hard to
believe.
But the picture of the girl was more impossible than anything else. Brett didn't believe it, even when he held it in his
hand. He didn't dare mention it until the thing was all over. •
He didn't find it at the actual beginning, of course. There were preliminaries. The Thalassia-Aspasia, Expedition
worked under handicaps. It was based on the exploring ship's report and had to be organized by the Records Division
of the Astrographic Survey—which never has any money to spare—and there had to be much skimping in every way
and only volunteers could be afforded for the job. Even a ship couldn't be hired for it. The general public was much
more excited about the colonization of nearby planetary systems than hi research on a planet that wouldn't be needed
for colonization in a thousand years. So the Expedition was very small—no more than a dozen members altogether—
and it would be landed on Thalassia from an Ecology Bureau ship and left there. It would probably be called for in six
months or so. Probably. Even then, what it found out might not matter to anybody else.
Brett joined up because it was his only chance for adventure and because his hobby warranted his inclusion in the
staff. He could drive a flier of course—everybody could —but he'd specialized in paleotechnology, the study of
ancient industrial processes. If there really had been an intelligent race or races out in space, he could make better
guesses than most at how the alien machinery worked and how its factories produced. But his personal reason for
going was an odd, anticipatory feeling of excitement at the idea of being left with a small group of human beings on a
planet where not even the skies were familiar, from which Sol itself was invisible, and where they would be more ter-
ribly alone in a waste of emptiness than any similar group had ever been before.*
That excitement lasted during the long journey hi overdrive and during the almost-as-long approach to planetary
landing distance after the Ecology Bureau ship was back in normal space hi the Elektra system. When it went into
atmosphere on Thalassia and its repulsors droned above the illimitable waters of Thalassia's ocean, Brett watched with
fascinated eyes. Waves of this ocean had a twenty thousand mile reach in which to build up to mountainous heights.
At this season of the twin planets' year, they had the equivalent of trade winds to urge them on. When they reached the
shores of Chios, the planet's only continent, the waves were three hundred feet high, and they seemed to fling spray
and spume almost out to space itself. Brett watched the swirling maelstroms and dramatic tumult of the struggle
between sea and land. He remembered that at the very edge of the wave-washed area there were to be found the only
moving living things on the continent. They were marine forms like crabs, which scuttled out of the water to forage
and darted back to the monstrously tumultuous coastal foam.
Watching from the Ecology ship, Brett heard the report, that the radar beacon on Chios wasn't working, and he
watched as the ship found Firing Plaza Number One and the ruined refugee-settlement nearby, and hovered there to
make quite sure of its position before it descended gently at the landing place the exploring ship had advised for later