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

visitors.
It was a pleasant savannah, and the stream ran as clear as crystal. But the Ecology Bureau ship had been grudgingly
loaned, and it had urgent business elsewhere. Its cargo ports opened and the Expedition's supplies went out to ground
hi a swiftly flowing stream. They piled up moun-tainously, so it seemed, and at that they weren't too complete. The
biggest crates were two atmosphere fliers and a short range rocket. The fuel for the rocket made a bigger heap than all
the rest of the equipment together. There were plastic tarpaulins to cover everything. There were houses
* Note: The survival of the crew of the exploring ship Durwent on Lundstrom IV for some years after their shipwreck was not known at this
time.
to be unfolded and braced back—but at least they weren't inflatable shelters!—and there was a spare beacon. But there
wasn't much else but food. The unloading took less than two hours.
Then the skipper of the Ecology Bureau ship asked politely if there were anything else. Minutes later the cargo ports
closed and the personnel lock shut, and the ship's repulsors began to drone. It heaved up slowly until it was a few
thousand feet up and then went into interplanetary drive and plummeted toward the sky. It would come back in six
months, most likely, or another ship would come in its stead. And the Expedition would have to be ready to leave.
That was when Brett Carstairs realized the silence on Thalassia. The Expedition's members set to work to make camp.
There was a breeze and the vegetation was reasonably familiar in smell, at least—chlorophyl and its associated
compounds are found on the oxygen planets of all sol-type stars—and the tree leaves rustled naturally enough. The
small stream at the landing place made pleasant liquid sounds. But that was all. No insect stirred or whirred or
stridulated. No bird sang. No squirrel barked. No reasonable facsimile of any noise made by any living creature came
to the ears of the Thalassia-Aspasia Expedition. The only noises were the voices of the Expedition members
themselves, and the bumpings they made with the boxes and crates, and the breeze and the dull booming of the
mountainous surf to the westward. Brett caught himself listening uneasily.
"I didn't realize," he said ruefully to Kent, on the other end of a crate that would be a chair presently, "that it was going
to sound so lonely."
"It's been lonely here for a good many thousand years," said Kent phlegmatically, "since the race on this planet and the
characters on the other one killed each other off."
He put down his end of the crate. He and Brett opened it. They began to assemble the furnishings of the Expedition's
housing. All about them was jungle. The clearing in which they worked had a ground cover like ivy running on the
ground. It was broad-leaved instead of narrow-leaved as grasses are, and Brett had a feeling that there should be
crawling things under it.
But there weren't. The report of the exploring ship was explicit. There had been a very high civilization here, once.
And another on the from-here-invisible twin planet As-pasia. Some eight thousand years ago they'd fought each other
terribly across the half million miles of space that separated them. Fission bombs with cobalt cases poisoned the air of
Thalassia, at the same time that fusion bombs from Thalassia blasted the oasis cities of its twin world to lakes of
molten glass. There wasn't a single, air-breathing creature left alive on Thalassia. Not any more.
The air was clean of radioactivity now, to be sure. Carbon-14 and Cobalt-60 determinations timed the deadly war at
very close to eight thousand years before. Now there was vegetation and the ocean swarmed with marine organisms
from plankton to fish. But there was no moving creature left on the land of the nearly Earth-sized world.
Brett labored on. The atmosphere on Thalassia was depressing. It was a dead world despite its forests and jungles.
Everything that had wings or a throat—even teeth to bite or stings to sting with—had died milennia ago with the
doomed creatures whose friable skeletons the exploring ship had found about the firing plaza. They'd died of the
bombs from the other planet, which was forever invisible from here. They'd been murdered. Butchered. The forests
had no purpose with no animals to live in them. There was a feeling of grief in the air, as if even the trees mourned.
Brett wanted to go over to the firing plaza and see where at least there had been living things, even if the only sure
knowledge about them was that they had died in the act of firing giant rockets to avenge the extermination of their
race. When they died, Thalassia was already a charnel house. Now—
There was quiet. A terrible quiet. The Expedition members braced their houses, moved the laboratory equipment
inside, uncrated their fliers and tied them down, ran their power lines, dug their refrigeration pits, put in sanitary
equipment and set their water recovery plant to work. It was safer to condense water from the air than to use the local
water supplies which might still carry undesirable trace elements. Brett began to worry that it would be too late to go