"Murray Leinster - The Mutant Weapon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

are always carrion eaters. At least some of them fly. There would be plain signs if the city was
full of corpses. There aren't anv. On the other hand, if the city was inhabited, and there was
sickness, they would welcome a Med Ship with open arms. But that dead man didn't come away from
the city in any ordinary course of events, and he didn't die in any conventional fashion. There's
an empty city and an improbable dead man and a still more improbable attempt at murder! What
gives, Murgatroyd?"
Murgatroyd took hold of Calhoun's hand and tugged at it. He was bored. Calhoun moved on slowly.
"Paradoxes don't turn up in nature," said Calhoun darkly. "Things that happen naturally never
contradict each other. You only get such things when men try to do things that don't fit together-
like having a plague and trying to destroy a Med Ship, if that's the case, and living in a city
and not showing on its streets, if that is occurring, and dying of starvation while one's
digestion is good and there's food within hand's reach. And that did happen! There was dirty work
at the spaceport, Murgatroyd. I suspect dirty work at every crossroad. Keep your eyes open."
"Chee," said Murgatroyd. Calhoun was fully in motion, now, and Murgatroyd let go of his hand and
went on ahead to look things over.
Calhoun crossed the top of a rounded hillcrest some three
miles from the shallow grave he'd made. He began to accept the idea that the dead man had stopped
eating for some reason, as the only possible explanation of his death. But that didn't make, it
plausible. He saw another ridge of hills ahead. x
In another hour he came to the crest of that farther range. It was the worn-down remnant of a very
ancient mountain chain, now eroded to a mere fifteen hundred or two thousand feet. He stopped at
the very top. Here was a time and place to look and take note of what he saw. The ground stretched
away in gently rolling fashion for very many miles, and there was the blue blink of sea at the
horizon. A little to the left he saw shining white. He grunted.
That was the city of Maris III, which had been built to receive colonists from Dettra and relieve


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the population pressure therer It had been planned as the nucleus of a splendid, spacious,
civilized world-nation to be added to the number of human-occupied worlds. From its beginning it
should have held a population in the hundreds of thousands. It was surrounded by cultivated
fields, and the air above it should have been a-shimmer with flying things belonging to its
inhabitants.
Calhoun stared at it through his binoculars. They could not make an image, even so near, to
compare with that which the electron telescope had made from space, but he could see much. The
city was perfect. It was intact. It was new.' But there was no sign of occupancy anywhere. It did
not look dead, so much as frozen. There were no fliers above it. There was no motion on the
highways. He saw one straight road which ran directly away along his line of sight. Had there been
vehicles on it, he would have seen at least shifting patches of color as clots of traffic moved
together. There were none.
He pressed his lips together and began to inspect the nearer terrain. He saw foreshortened areas
where square miles of ground had been cleared and planted with Earth vegetation. This was a
complicated process. First the ground had to be bulldozed clean, and then great sterilizers had to
lumber back and forth, killing every native seed and root
and even the native soil bacteria. Then the land had to be sprayed with cultures of the nitrogen-
fixing and phosphorous-releasing microscopic organisms which normally live in symbiosis with Earth
plants. These had to be tested beforehand for their ability to compete with indigenous bacterial
life. And then Earth plants could be sown.