Leinster, Murray - Planets of Adventure

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Planets of Adventure

Edited and compiled by

Eric Flint &

Guy Gordon

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this

book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is

purely coincidental.

The Forgotten Planet was Leinster's rewrite and novelization of three

novellas published previously: "The Mad Planet" (Argosy, June 1920),

"The Red Dust" (Argosy, April 1921), and "Nightmare Planet" (Science

Fiction Plus, June 1953). In the original first two stories, the adventure

was set on a far future Earth. The rewritten novel version was first

published by Gnome Press in 1954. The stories collected as The Planet

Explorer were originally published as four independent tales: "Sand

Doom" (Astounding, December 1955), "Combat Team" (originally

published as "Exploration Team," Astounding, March 1956), "Critical

Difference"—later retitled "Solar Constant"—(Astounding, July 1956),

"The Swamp Was Upside Down" (Astounding, September 1956). Leinster

rewrote the four stories to give them all the same protagonist and reissued

the stories under the title Colonial Survey, published by Gnome Press in

1956. The book was reissued in 1957 by Avon Press under the title The

Planet Explorer. "Anthropological Note" was first published in The

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1957. "Scrimshaw" was

first published in Astounding, September 1955. "Assignment on Pasik"

was first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1949. The

author was listed as "William Fitzgerald," one of Leinster's pseudonyms.

"Regulations" was first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, August

1948. "The Skit-Tree Planet" was first published in Thrilling Wonder

Stories, April 1947.

thereof in any form.

A Baen Book

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-7162-8

Cover art by Bob Eggleton

First printing, October 2003

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

BAEN BOOKS by MURRAY LEINSTER

Med Ship

THE

Forgotten Planet

Prologue

The Survey-Ship Tethys made the first landing on the planet, which had no name. It

was an admirable planet in many ways. It had an ample atmosphere and many seas,

which the nearby sun warmed so lavishly that a perpetual cloudbank hid them and most

of the solid ground from view. It had mountains and continents and islands and high

plateaus. It had day and night and wind and rain, and its mean temperature was within the

range to which human beings could readily accommodate. It was rather on the tropic side,

but not unpleasant.

But there was no life on it.

No animals roamed its continents. No vegetation grew from its rocks. Not even

bacteria struggled with its stones to turn them into soil. So there was no soil. Rock and

stones and gravel and even sand—yes. But no soil in which any vegetation could grow.

No living thing, however small, swam in its oceans, so there was not even mud on its

ocean bottoms. It was one of that disappointing vast majority of worlds which turned up

when the Galaxy was first explored. People couldn't live on it because nothing had lived

there before.

Its water was fresh and its oceans were harmless. Its air was germ-free and

breathable. But it was of no use whatever for men. The only possible purpose it could

serve would have been as a biological laboratory for experiments involving things

growing in a germ-free environment. But there were too many planets like that already.

When men first traveled to the stars they made the journey because it was starkly

necessary to find new worlds for men to live on. Earth was over-crowded—terribly so. So

men looked for new worlds to move to. They found plenty of new worlds, but presently

they were searching desperately for new worlds where life had preceded them. It didn't

matter whether the life was meek and harmless, or ferocious and deadly. If life of any sort

were present, human beings could move in. But highly organized beings like men could

not live where there was no other life.

So the Survey-Ship Tethys made sure that the world had no life upon it. Then it made

routine measurements of the gravitational constant and the magnetic field and the

temperature gradient; it took samples of the air and water. But that was all. The rocks

were familiar enough. No novelties there! But the planet was simply useless. The survey-

ship recorded its findings and went hastily on in search of something better. The ship did

not even open one of its ports while on the planet. There were no consequences of the

Tethys' visit except that record. None whatever.

No other ship came near the planet for eight hundred years.

Nearly a millennium later, however, the Seed-Ship Orana arrived. By that time

humanity had spread very widely and very far. There were colonies not less than a

quarter of the way to the Galaxy's rim, and Earth was no longer overcrowded. There was

still emigration, but it was now a trickle instead of the swarming flood of centuries

before. Some of the first colonized worlds had emigrants now. Mankind did not want to

crowd itself together again! Men now considered that there was no excuse for such

monstrous slums as overcrowding produced.

Now, too, the star-ships were faster. A hundred light-years was a short journey. A

thousand was not impractical. Explorers had gone many times farther, and reported

worlds still waiting for mankind on beyond. But still the great majority of discovered

planets did not contain life. Whole solar systems floated in space with no single living

cell on any of their members.

So the Seed-Ships came into being. Theirs was not a glamorous service. They merely

methodically contaminated the sterile worlds with life. The Seed-Ship Orana landed on

this planet—which still had no name. It carefully infected it. It circled endlessly above

the clouds, dribbling out a fine dust—the spores of every conceivable microorganism

which could break down rock to powder, and turn that dust to soil. It was also a seeding

of molds and fungi and lichens, and everything which could turn powdery primitive soil

into stuff on which higher forms of life could grow. The Orana polluted the seas with

plankton. Then it, too, went away.

More centuries passed. Human ships again improved. A thousand light-years became

a short journey. Explorers reached the Galaxy's very edge, and looked estimatingly across

the emptiness toward other island universes. There were colonies in the Milky Way.

There were freight-lines between star-clusters, and the commercial center of human

affairs shifted some hundreds of parsecs toward the Rim. There were many worlds where

the schools painstakingly taught the children what Earth was, and where, and that all

other worlds had been populated from it. And the schools repeated, too, the one lesson

that humankind seemed genuinely to have learned. That the secret of peace is freedom,

and the secret of freedom is to be able to move away from people with whom you do not

agree. There were no crowded worlds any more. But human beings love children, and

they have them. And children grow up and need room. So more worlds had to be looked

out for. They weren't urgently needed yet, but they would be.

Therefore, nearly a thousand years after the Orana, the Ecology-Ship Ludred swam to

the planet from space and landed on it. It was a gigantic ship of highly improbable

purpose. First of all, it checked on the consequences of the Orana's visit.

They were highly satisfactory, from a technical point of view. Now there was soil

which swarmed with minute living things. There were fungi which throve monstrously.

The seas stank of minuscule life-forms. There were even some novelties, developed by

the strictly local conditions. There were, for example, paramecia as big as grapes, and

yeasts had increased in size until they bore flowers visible to the naked eye. The life on

the planet was not aboriginal, though. All of it was descended and adapted and modified

from the microorganisms planted by the seed-ship whose hulk was long since rust, and

whose crew were merely names in genealogies—if that.

The Ludred stayed on the planet a considerably longer time than either of the ships

that had visited it before. It dropped the seeds of plants. It broadcast innumerable

varieties of things which should take root and grow. In some places it deliberately seeded

the stinking soil. It put marine plants in the oceans. It put alpine plants on the high

ground. And when all its stable varieties were set out it added plants which were

genetically unstable. For generations to come they would throw sports, some of which

should be especially suited to this planetary environment.

Before it left, the Ludred dumped finny fish into the seas. At first they would live on

the plankton which made the oceans almost broth. There were many varieties of fish.

Some would multiply swiftly while small; others would grow and feed on the smaller

varieties. And as a last activity, the Ludred set up refrigeration-units loaded with insect

eggs. Some would release their contents as soon as plants had grown enough to furnish

them with food. Others would allow their contents to hatch only after certain other

varieties had multiplied to be their food-supply.

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.

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

mushrooms and toadstools and their kin. Here was a soil of rusts and yeasts. Here were

toadstool forests and fungus jungles. They grew with feverish intensity beneath a cloud-

hidden sky, while above them fluttered butterflies no less enlarged than they, moths as

much magnified, and other creatures which could thrive on their corruption.

The only creatures on the planet which crawled or ran or flew—save only Burl's

fugitive kind—were insects. They had been here before men came, and they had adapted

to the planet's extraordinary ways. With a world made ready before their first progenitors

arrived, insects had thriven incredibly. With unlimited food-supplies, they had grown

large. With increased size had come increased opportunity for survival, and enlargement

became hereditary. Other than fungoid growths, the solitary vegetables were the sports of

unstable varieties of the plants left behind by the Ludred. There were enormous cabbages,

with leaves the size of ship-sails, on which stolid grubs and caterpillars ate themselves to

maturity, and then swung below in strong cocoons to sleep the sleep of metamorphosis.

The tiniest butterflies of Earth had increased their size here until their wings spread feet

across, and some—like the emperor moths—stretched out purple wings which were yards

in span. Burl himself would have been dwarfed beneath a great moth's wing.

But he wore a gaudy fabric made of one. The moths and giant butterflies were

harmless to men. Burl's fellow tribesmen sometimes came upon a cocoon when it was

just about to open, and if they dared they waited timorously beside it until the creature

inside broke through its sleeping-shell and came out into the light.

Then, before it gathered energy from the air and before its wings swelled to strength

and firmness, the tribesmen fell upon it. They tore the delicate wings from its body and

the still-flaccid limbs from their places. And when it lay helpless before them they fled

away to feast on its juicy meat-filled limbs.

They dared not linger, of course. They left their prey helpless—staring strangely at

the world about it through its many-faceted eyes—before the scavengers came to contest

its ownership. If nothing more deadly appeared, surely the ants would come. Some of

them were only inches long, but others were the size of fox-terriers. All of them had to be

avoided by men. They would carry the moth-carcass away to their underground cities,

triumphantly, in shreds and morsels.

But most of the insect world was neither so helpless nor so unthreatening. Burl knew

of wasps almost the length of his own body, with stings that were instantly fatal. To every

species of wasp, however, some other insect is predestined prey. Wasps need not be

dreaded too much. And bees were similarly aloof. They were hard put to it for existence,

those bees. Since few flowers bloomed, they were reduced to expedients that once were

considered signs of degeneracy in their race: bubbling yeasts and fouler things, or

occasionally the nectarless blooms of the rank giant cabbages. Burl knew the bees. They

droned overhead, nearly as large as he was, their bulging eyes gazing at him and

everything else in abstracted preoccupation.

There were crickets, and beetles, and spiders. . . . Burl knew spiders! His grandfather

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摘要：

PlanetsofAdventureEditedandcompiledbyEricFlint&GuyGordonThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedint\hisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.TheForgottenPlanetwasLeinster'srewriteandnovelizationofthreenovellaspublishedpreviously:"TheMadPlanet"(A...

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